MacTavish bent over, hands on his knees and panting with effort. Babaneko ran at them, not slowed by her bad paw. She pounced on Haig, knocking him over. He rolled with her, using the momentum to send her flying over Marene’s head.
She landed smartly on her feet and crouched low, teeth bared. On the other side, MacTavish advanced, knife in hand.
“He can’t have anything left after that, can he?” Marene said.
“I hope not,” Haig said. “Because I certainly don’t.”
MacTavish spat. “All right, then,” he said. “We’ll do it the auld fashioned way.”
From above, a piercing avian screech split the air. Babaneko hissed and flattened her ears.
A giant Roc was dive-bombing the roof, wings tucked tight for maximum speed. At the last moment it spread them wide, put its talons down and perched on the wall next to the squad. It clicked its giant, hooked beak and cast a beady eye on the Skipper.
“Sorry I’m late, chaps!” it said. “Shocking fog over the city.”
The bird’s voice was female, not unlike a governess Marene had known.
“Hop on, then. This place looks ready to keel over.” The Roc lowered her body to let them climb on. Strapped to her back were loops of rope, which they tied themselves onto.
MacTavish and Babaneko glared. His magic was exhausted, and claws were no match for the huge bird.
“Dinnae worry,” he said. “I’ll get ye’s all. Even you, lassie,” he pointed at Marene. “I’ll save ye for last.”
The Roc pushed away, breaking off a chunk of the wall and sending MacTavish and Babaneko sprawling in the downdraft. Marene clung to the ropes for dear life.
They wheeled round, climbing. Below, the destruction of the castle was underway. The south-east corner tumbled down the mountainside, and the bridge broke off completely, swinging loose from the far end.
Energy flared through the exposed walls, wide beams of red, orange and purple. Whole rooms were filled with the new magic, casting strange shadows.
“Quite powerful, aren’t they?” the Skipper said. “Still, MacTavish is a resourceful man. I’m sure his men can hold them off until the King’s finest arrive.”
Marene sat hugging her knees, looking straight ahead. “I can’t believe the King wanted this. It’s the most monstrous thing I can think of.”
The Skipper took out a pipe and lit it. “Well really, is it our fault he built his castle on a site of ancient evil? It was an accident waiting to happen.”
“But why? If the King hates him so much, why not just declare war?”
“Ah, the innocence of youth! MacNaven is a rich and powerful man. There’s not a noble family in the Empire who doesn’t owe him for one reason or another.”
The Skipper puffed at his pipe. “But, if the Empire is menaced by the Demonic horde, well, who would argue with sending a small force to deal with the danger? And once that’s done, a permanent presence will be needed to ensure the threat is contained. Everybody’s happy.”
“Except the people who lived there,” said Marene.
“It is a tad inconvenient for them, I admit,” said the Skipper. “Still, that’s politics! With great rewards come great risks.”
He spun the ring on his thumb. “Speaking of rewards, you’ll be due a rather large one when this is all over. I wasn’t born wearing this, you know.”
He leaned back, checking Alya’s bindings. The girl was asleep, the bolt still stuck in her shoulder. “Oh, yes. Who do you think they’ll need to close the portal, eh? And next time, you’ll know not to do it for free.”
Marene looked into the horizon, already used to the steady beat of the Roc’s wings. Of course, the idea was ridiculous. She was never having anything to do with these, these—was killers too strong? No, it wasn’t. She was going back to the University to live a nice, quiet life of research and teaching, safe and sound in the Great Library.
Of course, Lady Marene had a certain ring to it, and a title opened many doors. Mother and Father would be so proud, and the Library always needed more patrons. It would only be a matter of reading the right words…
Michael Aaron
Michael has been writing for most of his life, and boy his arms are tired. He has worked for BBC Radio, London theatre, Flash Fiction Online and less reputable places like SFFWorld. He currently lives in his native habitat, with his mate and young.
4. 13 Days
Tristis Ward
Lunicia stepped out into the cold predawn without shoes or a wrap for her shoulders. It felt good to be embraced by the wind, to feel the chilly stone beneath her toes. Her meditations had been long and the room quite warm. Her body tingled from the mixture of temperatures, hungry for the moisture and the wind.
Last night was the new moon, the healing moon. It was her time to be alone and care only about her own needs, rather than the needs of the Temple. She shook back her untied hair and gazed up at the last remnants of stars just in time to see an odd pattern that looked like the signet for Lir. “It’s a trick of my eyes,” she told herself. When she was much younger, Lunicia saw signs in everything. Patterns illuminated in response to her curiosity, lifting themselves in shimmering loops, strands and bulbs from every surface, and hanging like chandeliers among the stars in the night sky.
The Temple taught her better than to trust the first things that leapt out to her eyes. She learned to look for symbols and their meanings in the books of the masters. Patterns that struck her outside the protections of ritual were not to be trusted. They came far less often, now. This one was the first in months. She felt a shiver and decided it was best to dress for morning meal.
Her habit was to eat with the acolytes, just as her own master had done. It served to lessen their homesickness a little. It was the priests who went to the homes of the gifted and gathered them for Temple life. She had bonded to Master Fa despite her anger over being forced to leave her life and family behind. She could only assume the boys and girls she gathered might look for her face while they were trying to deal with their new life of dormitories and grueling studies, most of which had nothing at all to do with magic and the pageantry of rituals.
The Temple was more than its core building, the Tower. It was a stone complex surrounded by a high wall in the center of Mond, the Isle of Lalin’s only city. The allotment must have seemed large to the Temple founders, but these thousands of years later it had become a crowded cluster of buildings with few green spaces left for the young acolytes and busy novices to practice their search for peace.
Even so, it was beautiful, she decided, when the guards pulled open the double doors for her and she saw the wide, airy brightness of the pillared, terraced upper hall, its floor filled with scattered clusters of kneeling, robed acolytes and novices, and even several priests. Her smile widened to this new measurement of a glorious day.
By late evening, that glory had lost its shine to exhaustion. She sat in the huge cooling kitchen, overseeing the recording of births on the island. She felt herself slipping into a daze as Oni Ala, the island’s midwife, told of the baby that arrived in the still-dark of that morning.
“There was a birth mark on the babe’s right thigh.” Oni pursed her dark lips and sipped at the bitter herb tincture prepared for her by Novice Porcia to stave off the worst of her aging aches. Porcia was learning herbology and prepared Oni’s tincture whenever she came to bring news of new babes.
Tea for Oni had been Lunicia’s job once. Oni seemed immensely old even back then, shuffling her wide hips through the narrow lower hallways of the Temple, her hair a mass of twined curls in ropes marked by ribbons and tiny polished sticks. Oni had come on a ship so long ago that generations of acolytes speculated it might have been before the Temple was built. That was the standing dormitory rumor to explain why Oni was not part of the priesthood, but practiced her own strange magic.
Perhaps it was true, Lunicia mused sleepily. Oni felt ancient past the very stones she carried in her pockets to tie newborns to the outer worl
d. She held cunning secrets and practiced rituals alien to Temple teaching. Somewhere in the many layers of this woman’s jumbled brown robes, there was a little spell for nearly every possible thing to happen during childbirth.
The kitchen fire was out for the night, but its coals still warmed the trio as they sat at the long table while Oni drank, holding her swollen feet out toward the fireplace, and Porcia wrote what Oni reported for the record. This was never a straight forward or continuous discussion. Tonight, it lagged even further, and Porcia stifled yawns.
“This boy’s mark—a tiny thing, so small that my old eyes almost didn’t catch it—looked like the mark of the Sea God, Lir.” Oni made a gesture in the air, describing the mark she meant.
Lunicia felt blood sink to her feet. “Give Oni the ledger,” she said to Porcia.
“He bears a mark, but no gift, Priestess,” Oni said, huffing as she slid the heavy book onto her lap. “You do not need him. His family is poor and he is second born to live.”
Porcia hovered beside the old woman, balancing the book for her as she worked the quill and made a wobbly rough outline of the exact pattern Lunicia had seen in the stars that morning. Neither of them seemed to notice the flush on the High Priestess’ face.
“You’ll tell me what you see for this child, Priestess,” Oni said with a flatness that showed she already knew Lunicia was about to send her away without explanation. “It is my place to know. My word says who is to be gathered.”
That last was too much for Porcia to hear. “Hush, Oni.”
“Oh, fuss.” Oni’s voice deepened almost an octave. “This child is near enough to the blood vows to know how the gifted are found.” She turned to Porcia and her rheumy deep brown eyes sparkled in pride and indignation. “I found you. I called you at birth, like I call all the babes. And you answered. Them’s that hear the call are the gifted.”
Lunicia stood and turned to Porcia. She put a hand on her shoulder and caught the girl’s curious eyes with her own. “To bed with you, girl. Leave the book with me.”
“Bah!” Oni banged the book onto the table. “You hide truth from these young ones too long, Priestess. You hold them back—I’ll tell you, I know why—”
“Go to bed, Novice. Tomorrow approaches quickly.” Lunicia’s voice was loud and firm. It held Porcia’s attention through Oni’s shuffling and grumbling about Temple rules and children’s spirits.
As the kitchen door closed behind the girl, Oni lumbered to her feet. Her large presence was made even larger by her growing loudness in the quiet of the night. She seemed a goddess taking over the whole kitchen. “You waste their talents Priestess. Just like your master wasted yours, sitting them there, hunched over books and useless tasks like cooking tea! It’s a shame and you know it!”
“Oni, the Temple has its way. We have our reasons to temper youth—”
“It’s to keep the power in your own hands, isn’t it?” Oni’s eyes still sparkled, maybe brighter than ever. With a swoosh of fabric and a waft of lavender and jasmine, she swung her round form in a nearly complete circle. “Let them whittle you down to a bony old woman, and now you fear the next to come!”
“Oni, please. It’s late. We’re all tired.” Lunicia felt closer to tears than anger. This lovely old woman with her wondrous ways saw her as withered and weak. As many years as she could remember she had marveled at Oni’s gifts; reveled in her humor. But it was much more important that Oni leave, than that she win back her esteem. She hardened her features as best she could and stared down as a High Priestess might on a heathen craftworker.
When Oni gave, bending with a shrug over her voluminous robes to find her discarded shoes on the cooling kitchen floor, Lunicia could only stand rigid, willing the tears back and clasping the forgotten ledger with its portentous drawing.
The next day, an urgent message came to the Temple asking for prayers and charms against disease. A bull had fallen down a well. Somehow, on its way down, it had caught or thrashed so badly that it had bled completely out into the water below.
Lunicia, on hearing of the bull’s fate, asked to be taken to the field to see for herself. When she arrived, she was greeted with a horrific sight: the bull, broken and black with foul rot, the short stone wall of the well a chaos, and the smell of putrefaction all around. The miserable man who owned the bull was standing alone while his neighbors talked of what had to be done and what possessed the bull to do this.
Possessed, indeed. Lunicia covered her mouth as best she could and walked gingerly over to the unfortunate animal. It was hard to make out anything on the dark carcass.
“Madam?” asked Gwynn, who had accompanied her. The little blonde girl was Lunicia’s favorite among the novices. She was bright and insightful, and had not lost her sense of humor in the jarring change of being gathered to Temple. She often challenged Lunicia’s resolve not to laugh in the middle of public protection walks with her little jokes played on her sisters and brothers of the Novice Rite. And Gwynn’s intelligence put her far ahead of them in approaching the vows of priesthood.
Gwynn was a country girl, pulled from her family’s farm at thirteen after a short visit from Lunicia. She was well used to mud, animals and death. Perhaps she thought her mistress was frozen in fear because of a pampered upbringing in the city.
“Do you see it, Gwynn?”
“The bull, madam? I can cover it.”
“The pattern, girl, in the legs; in the twist…there…of the head.” Lunicia pointed at the carcass, tracing the symbol she saw in its contortion. She watched Gwynn squint to see it, finally failing at perceiving anything at all. Worse, before she could explain further, they were interrupted by the men around them who had seen the gestures made between them and stopped their own practical plans.
“High Priestess,” the bull’s owner begged, his voice high with hope. “Can you restore my beast?”
Lunicia quickly withdrew her hands into her heavy cloak. She turned to him, humbled by her careless misdirection. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That is not at all possible.”
“Cleanse my well,” the other farmer demanded.
“I—” She was not sure how to cleanse it. The sign might indicate dark intentions that required much stronger counter spells. “I cannot say.”
As he turned away, the eyes of the farmer said far more than his barely audible, “Was a day when the Temple High Priestess…” He assumed she was not able. Perhaps that was the case, too. She should know what this was, should know how to defend against it, but she had been caught unawares.
“We must return to the Temple.”
The return ride in the coach felt considerably longer than the ride out. Lunicia tried to overcome her worry and put on an air of confidence for Gwynn’s sake. The child was not the least bit fooled.
“My kin live over there by that mountain,” Gwynn said with her own feigned casualness as she stared out the window.
“I recall,” Lunicia said.
“It’s been four years. I wonder if either of my sisters have married.”
“I know it is hard to leave family.”
“There are lots of things said in the Novice Dorms these days.” Gwynn drew her eyes in from the horizon to look with piercing directness at Lunicia. “About the Temple stealing us from our families to drain us of our gifts.”
The coach lurched along the rutty road with a noisy bumping motion. The driver sang softly to himself high up in his seat outside in the cold sunshine. Lunicia contemplated the weightlessness of dust in the air between her and young Gwynn, highlighted by the sun as if vitally important. Dust, nonetheless.
“That is an unfortunate misunderstanding of the role the Temple plays in our little island kingdom.”
“Porcia says a magician told her.” Gwynn’s eyes never strayed from their assessing stare. “Somebody amazing and powerful that the Temple doesn’t control.”
Lunicia had to be careful. “Oni is a midwife, not a magician. She is powerfully gifted. And she is from another
land, so perhaps a little strange to sheltered eyes. It is true she was never bound by the Temple. I don’t know why, only that she was invited to work alongside us, rather than be sent away from the island. She can talk a little overmuch.”
“So the Temple doesn’t kidnap us?”
“No, dear. Do you not remember? I met with your parents. They agreed with me that you should come to Temple for your own good, to study and grow far beyond the dreams of your sisters.”
“My mother cried all day.”
“It is hard to let go a child, even for her own sake.” Lunicia leaned forward, putting her hand out to squeeze Gwynn’s. “I would miss you if you were taken from me, and I am merely your mistress. People know their children are safe at Temple. They know we do the right thing to teach you all we can. They know the Temple is the best place for you to be.”
Lunicia made her way along winding, interconnected cloisters to the far end of the Temple compound into the secluded dormitory behind the library. No youths were permitted here outside of their work shifts and even the priests had to receive permission from the Elder Dorm Administrator. She felt her mission was worth battling the petty bureaucrat to set up the meeting.
The man she needed to see was weak with age, glassy-eyed and far too small of late, far too frail for her comfort. Damon Fa had been a man of towering presence and sturdy confidence who had passed to her the mantle of High Priest. She was ready, of course—at least she felt so then—but not so ready to see him fade into the smaller, darker corridors, living out his remaining years in shorter and slower treks to the observatory, then only the library, and now to the small alcove the acolytes guided him to and filled with books he might still feel compelled to read.
It was in this candlelit space she found him, a short stack of books at his side and a silent, attentive boy who snapped upright before her second step into the long hallway.
Lucky or Unlucky? 13 Stories of Fate Page 8
