Skykeepers

by Jessica Andersen

Strike crossed to the coffin and dropped to his knees, though she couldn’t have said whether the move was shock or obeisance. Leah moved up beside him, braced one hand on his shoulder, then passed another along a line of boxed text, something that looked partway like a cartouche, partway like Mayan glyphs. “It’s him, isn’t it? It’s the First Father’s tomb.”

  Strike nodded raggedly. “I think so. Anna will have to translate everything and confirm, but . . . yeah. It’s him. The First Father.” He reached out a shaking hand, let it hover for a moment, then touched the carved stone with deeply ingrained reverence. “Gods.”

  Of all of them, it made sense that the king would be hit hardest by the discovery, because he’d known all along that the Nightkeepers were real, the histories were real. According to those histories, a single adult mage had survived Akhenaton’s massacre to lead the Nightkeepers’ children and the newly made winikin out of Egypt to the Mayan territories. From there, the First Father had created the original writs. He’d shaped how their civilization was to proceed along the millennia until the end-time. He’d written down the thirteen original prophecies, and then the demon prophecies that Iago had used to destroy the skyroad. The First Father had been the beginning of so many things, the wellspring of so much of the history and culture of the Mayan-era Nightkeepers, that it seemed impossible to believe he was truly a historical figure. Yet Sasha was actually standing there, staring at the sarcophagus that had been wrought by the people who had known him, lived with him, and had fashioned his last resting place after those of the god-kings they had known in another land, half a world away. And now, it seemed, that coffin also held the answer to the Nightkeepers’ prayers: the library scroll.

  Michael took a long look at the carvings on one side of the sarcophagus: a stylized scorpion atop a pair of wavy lines, with row upon row of hieroglyphs below it. “Hey, Rabbit. Is this your scorpion?”

  The younger mage darted through the crowded chamber, glanced at the carving, and whipped out his cell phone to take a few snaps.

  “I’m guessing that’s a ‘yes,’ ” Michael said dryly. But then he glanced at Strike, making sure he and the others were wrapped up in their own explorations of the chamber. Lowering his voice, he said, “Ambrose said something about using the scorpion spell to break his connection to the barrier.” He paused. “What, exactly, did you ask the scrying spell right before you saw the carvings?”

  Rabbit hesitated only fractionally before he said, “I started by asking how to call a new nahwal, and how I’m supposed to help in the war, but I didn’t get shit. Last thing I asked was how to keep Myrinne.”

  Michael smiled grimly. Yeah, that was about what he’d figured. “So the answer was for you to get rid of the Xibalban’s mark?” He supposed it made sense that the Nightkeepers’ purest connection, that of the jun tan, would be unable to form in the presence of dark magic.

  Rabbit nodded, eyeing the hieroglyphs. “If it broke Ambrose’s connection to the barrier, d’ya think it’d break the hellmark connection, too?”

  “Your scrying spell seems to think so.” Which made Michael wonder what other connections it could break.

  “What have you two got?” Strike asked from the other side of the tomb.

  “Not sure,” Michael answered. “Maybe nothing.” But maybe everything.

  He’d almost killed Sasha. When she’d put herself between his machete and her father’s demi-nahwal, Michael had seen her, had known who she was, but he hadn’t registered it or cared; he’d been too damned caught up in the raging fury. In that moment he’d hated himself, hated the world. The sluice gates had held, but somehow the Other had been inside him regardless, urging him on, bringing the blood fury it had been taught to love, to feed on.

  Who the hell was he? Michael? The Other? Both? Neither?

  He didn’t know how he’d stopped himself from cutting her head off, and he couldn’t promise he’d be able to stop himself the next time. The muk hovered at the edges of his soul. The dam hadn’t cracked or broken; it had gone insubstantial, friable, like the barrier was becoming as the countdown to the end-time continued. And he knew, deep down inside, that if the Other broke through now, there would be no stopping it until everything—and everyone—around him was dead. Where the Other had once killed with all manner of human weapons, now his alter ego wielded the muk like a weapon, with deadly and precise command.

  More, Sasha had flat-out asked him about the “silver magic,” which he feared meant she was already too close to it. The Other’s power had been drawn to her from the very beginning; it wanted her goodness and life, wanted to corrupt her, use her, destroy her balance. And that absolutely, positively could not be allowed to happen.

  He’d die first, damn it.

  “Ambrose said the scroll is inside the coffin,” she said in answer to a question from Strike. “According to him, it’ll open during the solstice, and we’ll find the scroll, which will tell us how to summon something—or someone—called a Prophet. It all has to happen during the peak of the solstice.”

  “The solstice,” Strike murmured. He looked down at Leah, hope kindling in his eyes. “We could have the library a week from now.”

  “The timing will be tight,” she warned, but her eyes were alight with hope.

  Rabbit was practically bouncing on the balls of his feet, still taking pictures of the carved hieroglyphs. “We’ve gotta get these pictures to Anna, ASAP, but I’ve got zero signal.”

  Strike nodded. “You’re right, we need to get Jade and Anna on this, on all of it. We’ll have to head topside, though—there’s no way I can ’port from down here, either. Too much interference.”

  Cell phones were pressed into service to record the site for initial analysis, and then the magi formed a rough line and headed out. This time, Strike and Leah led the way, with Sasha near the end. Michael fell in behind her, forming the rear guard. As he did so, her sex magic slid along his skin. The darkness within him locked on the sway of her hips, the lethal grace of her movements, and the glitter of pure red-gold magic that sparked in the air around her. Like matter drawn to antimatter, he reached for her—no, the Other reached for her. Michael fought the monster back. Barely.

  When they came to the point where the spell-cast rubble had blocked the tunnel, Strike paused while the others caught up. “We need to guard the tomb entrance, or close it off or something.” There had been no sign of Iago, but that didn’t mean he was unaware of their success. Given the power of the tomb it seemed unlikely the Xibalban could ’port directly into the chamber itself, but he’d already proven able to zap himself into the tunnels. They had to believe he’d try it again, if he could.

  “I could collapse it for real,” Rabbit offered. He didn’t look like he was kidding.

  “Don’t you dare,” Leah said immediately. To Strike, she said, “I hate to split the manpower, but maybe we should post guards.”

  Michael prowled the area, partly to distance himself from Sasha, partly drawn by a tendril of power. He ran his hands along the tunnel walls, finally finding the point where it was strongest. “Gotcha.”

  “You see something?” Strike asked.

  “No, but I feel it. Some sort of variant shield magic . . . there it is. Got it. I don’t think this is Ambrose’s spell. I think it’s an older one, with an on/off switch of sorts.”

  He waved the others away. When they were clear of where he thought the shield would drop, he touched the magic, nudging a tendril of shield magic toward the spot he’d found. Moments later, the rubble reappeared.

  Sven blinked. “Whoa. Cool.”

  Michael touched one of the busted chunks of debris. It felt like rock. For all intents and purposes it was rock, though it was an illusion, too. Kind of like him. Quickly, he showed the others how to work the spell.

  Strike grinned and clapped him on the shoulder. “Good work.” He turned away and headed up the tunnel, calling, “Moving out.”

  Michael fell into his place at the back of the line, keeping an i
ron grip on the Other, which—for the moment, anyway—had slipped back behind the dam, laughing softly at Michael’s belief that it could be contained. Go ahead and laugh, Michael shot after it. One of these days . . .

  He trailed off, because he didn’t know what the hell to threaten the bastard with, given that the monster was part and parcel of himself.

  When they reached the end of the tunnel, he was surprised to find that it was still daylight. It felt like they’d been underground forever, but in reality it’d been only a couple of hours . . . albeit a couple of hours during which a great many things had changed. At the thought, he fixed his eyes on Sasha, walking a few steps ahead of him.

  As if aware of his gaze, Sasha glanced back as she stepped outside, into the orange-dappled sunlight. Her expression made him wonder what she saw in him in that moment, what she thought of him. “Sasha—” he began, then broke off when he saw movement beyond her, and his warrior’s talent sounded the alarm.

  “Get down!” He lunged for her, knocked her to the ground, and covered her body with his own.

  And all hell broke loose.

  The air split with gunfire and a fat fireball of silver-brown Xibalban magic, sending the Nightkeepers diving for cover. The ambush was perfectly timed and stupidly simple, with the Xibalbans dug into positions around the temple mouth, hidden in the thick underbrush, where they could—and did—fire at will. The tree line afforded them access and visibility, the slight downgrade to the temple mouth giving them the advantage of higher ground.

  Michael covered Sasha as the other Nightkeepers scattered in singles and pairs, taking cover and returning fire, using basic shield magic to block the incoming fusillade. Nate snapped orders on one side, Strike on the other. That was what the magi had trained for, what they were bred to do—fight the enemy rather than retreat. But something—instinct, maybe, or his warrior’s mark—told Michael that this time was different. This time they should get out while they still could.

  Putting a strong shield around him and Sasha, he stood and pulled her to her feet. “We’ve got to get to Strike. Can you run?”

  Strike and Leah were on the other side of the temple mouth, hidden behind a broken-off stela, in the shallow shelter offered by a niche in the green-covered temple wall. It was a distance of only fifty yards or so, but it looked like five times that when his shield wavered and a bullet pinged off the rock beside his head, warning that his magic wasn’t strong enough. Not for this. Blood wouldn’t help, he knew—her own shield magic was still too new to trust and he didn’t dare touch her for a sex magic boost. Gods, he thought in an almost-prayer he suspected would fall on deaf ears. Help me out here. I’m trying to do the right thing. I swear it.

  His shield settled fractionally. He figured that was as good as it was going to get. “Go!” he barked, sending her ahead of him and concentrating his shield around her, at the expense of his own protection. “Run!”

  They lunged from concealment and raced across the open ground. Bullets and fire magic splattered around them, bouncing off the shield. Strike rose from concealment, shouting something Michael couldn’t hear over the roar of magic and gunfire and the pounding of his own heart in his ears, his boots on the ground. Almost there. Twenty-five yards. Twenty.

  Out of nowhere, a harsh rattle of dark magic rose around them and a dozen red-robes materialized, surrounding him and Sasha, weapons pointing inward.

  Howling incoherent rage, Michael slammed to a stop and went for his pistols, but his hands wouldn’t move; his body wouldn’t move from the neck down. Sasha, too, was frozen in place, her eyes wide and scared. One of the red-robes—average height and weight, with a bloody tear tattooed on his cheek—stepped forward, his lips drawn back in a sneer. “A nice trick, don’t you think?” He flicked his eyes between them, as if checking to make sure he had the right targets, then nodded his satisfaction and hit a button on his weapons belt. “Our master has plans for the two of you.”

  Bullets and fireballs erupted along the perimeter of the red-robes’ circle as the other Nightkeepers let rip, but the attack spent itself on the Xibalbans’ shield. More teleport magic rattled, cycling up, no doubt called by whatever signal the red-robe had transmitted. Shit, they had a transporter who could move, not just things, but people.

  Michael felt the rattle latch on and take hold of him and Sasha, and in his mind he caught a glimpse of a mountainous destination and the words “Paxil Mountain.” They were about to be dragged to the Xibalbans’ home base, into the hands of a man who could foul Strike’s ’port lock with a thought. Once they left the temple clearing, the Nightkeepers would be unable to find them.

  If Michael had been alone, and in full control of his powers, Michael would’ve given himself for the chance to take out Iago’s army from within. But not with Sasha there. And not when he couldn’t be sure of himself. Because as the dark magic twined around him, the Other reappeared from wherever it had been hiding, drawn by the Xibalbans’ spell casting. A silvery fog covered Michael’s vision for a second. When it was gone, he was no longer himself. Or rather, he was both of his selves, Michael and the Other. Man and weapon. The violence within him hovered on a knife point, as though waiting for the last vestige of his self-control to snap, for him to give himself to the magic.

  You said you’d die for her, the temptation seemed to whisper. What else would you do?

  In that instant, the Xibalbans’ ’port magic grabbed onto them and yanked. With a roar, Michael slammed a shield around him and Sasha, cutting the ’port thread. Silver magic erupted, pouring through him, lighting him up. It was hot madness, pure temptation, and he gave in to it on a howl of mad fury and joy.

  He caught Sasha against his chest, dropped the shield, and let rip with his true magic, the power the nahwal had warned would cost him his soul. He became the Other and the Other became him, and the resulting power was that of death.

  Silver magic gushed from him, poured through him, became him. Ropy tendrils of the power spread out and curled around his enemies. Touched them. Took them.

  One by one, the Xibalbans stiffened and cried out in horrible agony. The red-robe with the tattooed tear was first, his skin going gray as the silver magic latched on and seemed to suck the life from him. He fell, turning to dust and char, the expression of absolute terror on his face crumbling as he disintegrated. Then the men on either side of him began to crumble, their screams twisting together in horrifying agony.

  With each kill, Michael felt his power increase, his soul shuddering with the terrible weight of the deaths, even as the Other exulted and grew stronger. The robed bodies fell, turned to dust. The force holding him and Sasha captive winked out of existence as the red-robes ceased to exist, and the revving ’port magic cut out as Iago aborted his plan from afar.

  But Michael didn’t stop. Couldn’t. The killing magic spread outward away from him, into the forest where their ambushers hid. Men screamed, then stopped abruptly.

  Within a minute, all Michael could hear was the howling inside his own skull. It’s done, he told himself, not sure anymore which parts of him were Michael and which were the Other. Pull back! But the silver magic was within him, taking him over, more so than ever before. Mad, murderous rage rampaged through him, lighting him up and making him shudder with terrible glee.

  Sasha put herself in front of him, grabbed him by his wrists. Her mouth worked, but he couldn’t hear her words over the roaring in his ears, one that sounded like drumbeats and screams, and the terrible song of war, of death. The death magic rose higher within him, focusing on her even as his soul howled denial. Her eyes went wide, her skin gray.

  He was killing her. Dear gods, he was killing her.

  “No!” Michael roared. Taking control with a desperate effort of will, he broke his grip and flung her aside, trying to get her as far away from him as he could, trying to get some distance, some room to . . . what? What could he do to stop the upward spiral, cut the feed before he unleashed death on the Nightkeepers themselves?
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  Sasha stumbled and fell, weakened by his magic. The Other regained the upper hand, and advanced on her. Michael was dimly aware that the others crowded around him, that he was forging through their shields. A bullet plowed into his shoulder but didn’t slow him for an instant.

  He was death. He was—

  Death, he thought. Yes. He saw Tomas’s face in his mind’s eye, felt the winikin’s guilt, grief, and failure as his own, hated that he’d be breaking the promise he’d made. But what other choice did he have? Suicide was far better than this.

  Lost in the thrill of slaughter, he tapped the death magic, let it spin up, spin through him. He fixed his eyes on Sasha, forced the words, his voice breaking with the effort of saying, “I’m sorry I couldn’t be the man who was meant to be yours.”

  Then he jerked back away from her and turned the killing magic inward. At the last moment he was aware of Rabbit darting forward and grabbing onto him, getting in his face and yelling something. He caught the words “Mictlan” and “makol” but wasn’t tracking anymore, wasn’t processing. The darkness rose up to claim him. As it did, he was aware of another gripping his other arm, knew it was Sasha from the cool wash of her presence, the heat of lust.

  Pure Xibalban magic came at him from one side, pure Nightkeeper from the other. They met in the middle of him, canceled each other out, and detonated to grayness. Then there was nothing. He was nothing. And that really sucked.

  When Michael finally dropped, nobody caught him. He went down hard, unconscious, sprawled in the dirt.

  A sob lodged in Sasha’s throat, but she didn’t go to him, didn’t touch him, because she didn’t want to ever again feel what she’d felt in him just now. The ugly, monstrous fury terrified her, made her want to puke. She hadn’t caught any of the images she suspected Rabbit had seen, but she’d felt the silver magic and heard the screams amidst the inner music he’d hidden from her, and that had been more than enough.

  Over Michael’s body, she caught Rabbit’s eyes and saw her own horror reflected. The young mage flexed the hand he’d touched Michael with, as if surprised it was still attached to his body.