Owl and the Electric Samurai

by Kristi Charish

  Not having an exact location for the grave was a significant problem, but there was another, bigger concern consuming my thoughts now that I’d had a chance to rummage through Jebe’s thoughts as the suit had consumed him. “There’s no report on how he died,” I said, once again holding up the last page of the journal and indicating the files I’d stolen from the IAA research cache.

  Rynn sipped his own coffee and frowned at the screen. “Arrow to the heart, axe to the head, festering wound,” he offered. “There were a lot of ways to die on a battlefield in the 1200s.”

  “That’s just it.” I gestured with my coffee at the screen. “I mean, battles, spoils, even the numbers of civilians killed and enslaved—hell, they balanced the ones they used as human shields in the margins.” The Mongolians had been awfully well managed for a horde of murderous barbarians; they’d even calculated how many of the conquered civilians they needed to kill versus enslave depending on how much grain they had for horses and supplies.

  “So they were conscientious of their murderous activities and kept good records,” Rynn said.

  “Exactly. Injuries sustained by a general—and not just any general, but one in charge of a quarter of an empire’s forces—is like a king dying. Someone somewhere should have recorded what happened. If not in here,” I said, holding up the journal, “then somewhere.”

  “If there is a battle missing—” Rynn tried.

  I held up my hands. “That’s just it! A lost batch of documents I could understand, but this reads as if it was intentionally left out. Not something removed by the elves after the fact, but never recorded.”

  Rynn stared at the screen, a thoughtful expression on his face.

  I rested my forehead in my hands then rubbed my eyes. I was cranky and frustrated. “No offense, but unless you happened to be awake during the Middle Ages and remember hearing something about a general dying after destroying most of eastern Europe?”

  Rynn made a face at me. “I think I would have remembered a marauding Mongolian horde passing through. And I already told you, unlike Artemis, I did not enjoy sitting back and watching civilizations burn. After Rome fell and the Christians took power, I spent a few hundred years up north with the Celts until their civilization started to fall under the heel of the Christians. I slept for a few hundred years and woke to find the Christians were well entrenched and out to hunt supernaturals as much as before.” As Rynn had pointed out, it had been only five hundred years or so since supernaturals had changed their rules.

  “After that?”

  Rynn shrugged. “I moved farther north into the lands the Vikings, Danes, and their ilk still held. They didn’t care so much about supernaturals as long as they proved useful in winning raids and new kingdoms from the Christians, which I did so no one ever bothered confirming any suspicions.”

  “You helped the Vikings raid cities?” Somehow I had trouble imagining Rynn as a raider; it didn’t quite fit with his persona.

  He swayed his head, considering his answer. “I suppose, though, I was more concerned with finding the people who were hunting down and burning supernaturals during their medieval witch hunts.”

  “I always thought they just used those as an excuse to kill women who tried to think for themselves.”

  “Eventually they did, but in the early years, especially in the smaller villages and towns, they were terrified of supernaturals. Not without reason, the ones running the cities were dangerous, but like most movements, they didn’t go after the dangerous ones that were eating humans and their children, which, for the record, I would have been fine with. They went after the harmless ones, the odd wood nymph or brownie they stumbled across. Even had to pull a young succubus out of a cloister of monks. They found her hibernating in the old ruins of the church and were convinced they held the key to power.” He snorted with distaste. “Sorcery. The monks were the ones guilty of sorcery, yet they called her evil.”

  “What happened to them?”

  Rynn actually looked at me this time and held my gaze. “Nothing nice,” he said. “She was fine; she recovered. They didn’t.” His lips curled up, exposing his teeth, not unlike Lady Siyu did, though his were perfectly human.

  I turned my attention back to my coffee, lost in my own thoughts. On the one hand, the idea of Rynn beating up and very likely killing humans sometime during the Middle Ages wasn’t exactly comforting despite the fact that at the time killing and raiding was kind of like going to the mall for a movie. And I couldn’t say I blamed him. It’d be like my finding a bunch of vampires with old classmates tied up and drugged out beneath one of their hidey-hole clubs as snacks. Probably wouldn’t want anything nice to happen to them either. I know I wouldn’t think twice or have any regrets about doing something awful.

  And yet half a year ago—four months ago, even—if you’d asked me, I would have sided with the humans. No questions asked, the monsters must have done something to deserve it.

  And though many of the supernaturals I’d met were complete fucking assholes who tried to kill me, the majority, like the turnip demons and nymphs, were harmless. God help me, I was starting to agree with Rynn in that they were the ones who needed protecting from the humans.

  Seriously universe, do you just sit there waiting to completely fuck with my belief systems?

  “Alix?”

  I glanced up from where I’d been staring thoughtfully into the depths of my coffee.

  “Just thinking to myself.”

  Rynn looked back at the screen. “I heard about the Mongolians at the time, even heard about the destruction in Kiev, but it was years after the fact. The tales were always too far removed to be accurate by the time they reached me. And the Vikings were only interested in writing down financial transactions and trade.” He shook his head. “I’ve got nothing useful. What is in there?” he said, nodding at the journal.

  I flipped back through to the very last few entries. My grasp of the Mongolian script used was suspect, but it was close enough to some of the ancient Chinese scripts that I could follow. I was glad for the translation that had accompanied it. “Details, mostly his suspicions about the suit after Kiev, and a few entries after that where he sounds like he’s fighting to get a word on the page. Ah, there are a couple of lines, dialect I don’t follow, but here he talks about the suit corrupting his heart and mind until all he could see was death and darkness. It goes like that until near the very end.” I flipped the page to the very last passage. “ ‘I’m trying to control thoughts that I know are not my own, and I fear this is one battle I cannot win and come out alive.’ ”

  “And after that?”

  “That’s it. That was the last one. No pages missing. The only other useful thing I’ve found is a mention of what happened when someone else tried the armor on. Here it is. Jebe talks about finding the armor—ah, don’t understand that word, or that one. He mentions a soldier who decided to test the armor before he got to the room—burned skin, screams, charred remains. Not a pretty way to go.”

  “It does confirm the suit wanted Jebe,” Rynn said. “Either by choice or some necessity.”

  “Yeah, and after that things got really interesting, in the magical sense,” I said, the details of which had me worried.

  Rynn frowned. “We knew the suit was magic. For that matter, so did they.”

  “Yeah but I don’t think anyone realized to what extent until it was much too late.” I flipped through the pages until I found the entry I had read three times last night before finally letting myself drift into a restless sleep. “Jebe puts the suit on, it decides not to fry him, and pretty fast they figure out it is more than happy to fry enemies with electricity—hence the Lightning, or Storm, Armor. We know from the scribe that Jebe got progressively more violent as they moved into Russia.” I count off on my fingers. “Quickness to anger, impatience, arguing with his officers, recklessly going into battle without intel
ligence. All of that alone could be written off as bad days—which he did, considering what the armor offered.”

  “The armor was manipulating him,” Rynn mused.

  I inclined my head in agreement. “Listen to this,” I said, and started to read a passage from their invasion of the walled city outside Kiev. “ ‘It was a stupid military move, and one that has cost me valuable men even though we won. But I fear it is a sign of worse things to come. I suspected it before, but now I am certain—the suit, though powerful, is affecting my judgment. The more I use it, the more powerful it grows. I am reluctant to continue the campaign and unleash its power so freely, but I see no other choice. The armies here are not as weak as we’d hoped, and not so easy to die on our blades and arrows. I fear we are in too deep to turn back, and I must persevere. In hindsight there were subtle signs the armor did more than grant me powers. I was foolish not to question the cost.’ ”

  “So why not take the armor off?”

  “Because he couldn’t: ‘I know now that the armor is possessed by a malevolent demon that feeds off death and despair. The more my army wins, the deeper and more desperate that thirst goes, so much so that I fear the suit now lusts so much for death that it no longer cares whether I live or die, pushing me into battle and caring little whether I survive with an army, so long as there is blood. I fear its reckless influence will be the death of us all. It would be a simple thing to remove the armor and rid myself of it; in my more lucid moments I have tried, but it will no longer relinquish me, bonded to my flesh like a second skin. Or maybe it is my new skin, wearing my body like the prize I thought it was. There is an irony in that.’ ” I glanced up at Rynn from the pages.

  “When was that entry?” Rynn asked.

  “About a month before this one.” I skipped to one of the last entries of the journal I’d bookmarked. “Listen to this: ‘I write this in a moment of lucidity, as they are so few and far between now, and I am certain I will forget myself once again in the coming days. I both wake and dream its blood lust—there is no escape and even in my bloodiest moments I am no longer able to satiate it. I am now the source of its frustration, and I think it has ceased to care whether I am the source of its victims, or the next.’ ” I glanced up at Rynn again. “It’s like the armor is an addiction—or has an addiction. The more it feeds, the worse it becomes.”

  “ ‘The priests and sorcerers have been unable to dampen the armor’s hold over me. Nevertheless, once these lands are conquered and we are on the road home, the suit will be retired one way or the other, until greater, wise men may learn to tame it.’ And that was the last one,” I added, and closed the journal. “No mention of his death, not even a footnote from a scribe marking the occasion.”

  “You think the suit killed him? Forced him into battle?”

  I shook my head. That was the part that had kept me up in bed, worrying until I’d finally fallen asleep. “No, I think it wanted to. I think it tried, but ultimately Jebe dug in the last knife. Remember, he was a genius of a general, maybe one of the best the world has ever seen.” I held up the journal again. “However much control the suit had, Jebe knew he was at war with it and that he couldn’t win by conventional means. What do you do when you know you’re going to die fighting a battle you can’t win?”

  “You make certain your opponent’s victory is a hollow one.”

  I nodded. Which, considering the Mongolians were known to scuttle entire civilizations to prove a point . . . “I think the suit had used up Jebe and was ready to move on to another host. I think Jebe figured out a way to make that impossible, which is why no one has seen the armor in eight hundred years.”

  Rynn’s face grew pensive. “Not suicide, not unless he was certain he could control the resting place. And somehow I doubt a suit of armor that survived that many centuries would let him. He couldn’t have been the first host to try. Maybe poison, but again, he would need to keep it hidden from the armor.” He glanced up at me.

  “Perhaps,” he said, his voice not argumentative but distant. “The elves don’t go after items like this. Not in the entire time I worked for them. Why this, why now?”

  “Maybe they’ve changed. I mean, you worked for them, what—over a few hundred years ago?”

  Rynn made a face. “They don’t change, Alix. Not like that.” He gathered both our mugs and headed into the kitchen.

  There was another possibility. “Rynn, bear with me. What if they want to use it?” I said.

  Rynn shook his head from the sink. “They don’t get involved.”

  “I know, I know. They love their neutrality more than life itself. But what if? What if they decided the benefits outweighed the costs? A powerful weapon that drives its user mad in a relatively quick time frame, more so if they’re supernatural. Wouldn’t you want to keep that information under wraps from the potential next wearer?” Or the suckers you want to have steal it for you?

  Rynn paused, but only for a moment. “Anyone else I’d consider it, but not them.”

  I clenched my teeth and thought about my next words carefully. On the one hand, I got it—Rynn hated the elves. But on the other hand, I was getting the distinct feeling it was blinding him from looking at any of the other angles. “Rynn, you know more about the supernatural world than I do—”

  He shook his head to stop me, the dark look still on his face. “Leave this one alone, Alix,” he said, his voice cold, disinviting any argument.

  I stopped. I don’t think Rynn had ever used that tone with me before. It wasn’t cruel or mean, just . . . icy. And unlike him.

  His expression softened and he added, “I know you’re trying, and normally I wouldn’t dismiss it, but you don’t know them. I do.” He disappeared back into the kitchen, shaking his head as if a dark cloud had descended on him.

  I turned back to the computer and the files. Captain decided now was as good a time as any to hop on my lap. As much as I balked at Rynn’s insistence on what the elves would and wouldn’t do, I had to admit he was right about one thing. Even if we knew what the suit did, we had no idea why they wanted it now. Unless . . .

  “Shit.” Captain jumped off my lap with an indignant mew as I pulled up my message screen. Oh man, if that spell book was behind all this . . . but what were the odds?

  You already know the answer to that, Owl. Highly probable, considering your track record.

  The World Quest message box flickered open. Surprise, surprise—there was already a message from Carpe waiting.

  Call me. We should talk. And you owe me game time.

  Yeah, sure. Right after he told me what the hell the book had to do with anything. “Rynn, I think I know what changed the elves’ mind. Remember the spell book Carpe had me find?”

  It didn’t take Rynn long to return, looking colder and more contained than he had a moment ago. “Explain,” he said.

  “What if they found a spell that they thought would control the armor? Even you have to admit the time line works.”

  Rynn didn’t say anything as he stared at the screen where my empty message window with Carpe was now open.

  “Well?”

  His eyes didn’t move from the open screen; his expression only turned darker and more inward. He nodded at it. “What is that about?”

  “Getting Carpe on the line. With any luck, I can get him to answer some questions without getting myself roped into a World Quest game.”

  Rynn turned his dark expression on me. “So let me get this straight—the elves go out of their way to deceive us, you think they are planning to resurrect a possessed suit of armor, and your first instinct is to run to that elf?” His voice was civil, but the contempt was there. Bad moods were one thing, those I could understand, but this went beyond that.

  “I know Carpe. I’ll get the information out of him. I’ll have to think about how to word it . . .”

  Rynn said something u
nder his breath in supernatural.

  “What?” I said.

  “Lady Siyu and Mr. Kurosawa I can understand striking a deal with the elves. They’re arrogant. But you? After all I’ve told you?”

  I couldn’t believe he was pissed at me. Over Carpe of all people.

  “What I think is that he can get me information we need,” I said, letting some of my own frustration into my voice.

  Rynn made a derisive sound. “I like that even less. Why bother listening to me? I’m just the incubus, what do I know about complex politics and elves?” He headed back into the kitchen.

  “That’s not what I said.”

  I heard the dishes in the sink rattle. “Even you, Alix. You barely listen to any of my warnings, especially when it comes to that elf. Look where it got you last time! Now you want to ask him questions? All you’ll do is let him know what we’ve found out.”

  “I’m not an idiot. I’ll be careful. If you’re worried about Carpe and what information he might feed me . . . I don’t know, you can sit behind the computer and watch.”

  He returned from the kitchen, the storm still apparent on his face. “Close the screen.”

  “What?”

  “Now.”

  I drew in a breath and held it before I said something I might regret. This was not the first fight Rynn and I had ever had about my methods and work. I had a track record for shooting my mouth off in ways I regretted later, but this was the first fight Rynn had ever started.

  What alternate universe had I stepped into?

  “No,” I said just as forcefully, refusing to break eye contact. I didn’t let any supernatural push me around—not even Rynn.