Guardian Glass

by Christopher Nuttall

  I wanted to talk to it, to try to reach the human under the warped flesh and bone, but somehow I was sure that it would be futile. The eyes showed nothing, but bloodlust and madness. The Faerie would have ensured that their pet no longer had any loyalties to humanity before they unleashed it, but it hardly mattered. He was their pet, bound to obey them in all regards, no matter what they asked him to do. He had probably eaten their food.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and lunged forward. Now I could see the creature clearly – I forced myself to stop thinking of it as human – I could avoid it…until it turned at lightning speed and cracked a backhander right into my arm. The pain made me scream aloud – the Faerie hooted and catcalled – as my arm bone broke down into powder. It felt as if I had cracked a few ribs as well. The damn creature was stronger than anything else I’d fought hand to hand, perhaps even stronger than a vampire! I ran through a set of healing exercises, using them to focus my mind even though there wasn't any magic to heal me, and felt some relief. I had to end it quickly.

  The creature howled and reached for me. I moved as quickly as I could and slammed a punch right into its throat. It felt as if I had punched a brick wall! The creature howled again and staggered back, but I felt worse, as if I had broken several fingers, perhaps even my wrist! I barely noticed the pain against the other pains, but I was nearly helpless. My other arm was completely useless. The Faerie were on their feet now, leaning forward to catch the moment when their creature tore my head right off, and I cursed them under my breath. It was all I could do to remain conscious. I looked up into the blue sky surrounding the arena and blinked. Was that Drak Bibliophile – or another dragon – hanging high in the air?

  I watched the creature shamble forward, one hand reaching forward for my neck, and I brought up both legs and kicked it as hard as I could in the groin. It screamed – the first truly human response I’d seen from it – and fell over backwards. I wanted to remain on the ground myself, but it wouldn’t take it long to recover from that blow, not if I knew the Faerie and how they warped their slaves. It took more effort than I would have believed I could put forward, but somehow I managed to crawl over to the creature, lying on the ground, and place my knee on its throat, pressing down with all my weight. There was an instant when its eyes were very human, silently thankful, and then its throat was crushed under my weight. A second later, I collapsed on top of its body.

  It wanted to die, I thought, vaguely. It had been bloody enough to satisfy the Ancient Romans – and perhaps even the Faerie – but the creature had left itself open for me. It had wanted me to kill it, to free it from its torment…it was so hard to think, but I was certain that that had been what had happened. I hadn’t won fairly at all. I wondered, through the pain, if that would delight the Faerie. They had probably enjoyed watching its torment as much as they had enjoyed the fight itself.

  “Drink this,” a Faerie said. It was holding out a small goblet. I recoiled until it – her – said the magic words. She didn’t even seem to be trying to trick me. “It is given freely and without obligation.”

  I sipped it and felt magic ripping through my body as it knitted itself back together. It hurt, but in a vague disconnected manner, as if it were happening to someone else. When I next looked up, the arena was gone and we were back in the Throne Room. It seemed somehow lesser somehow; the Queen, sitting on her throne, seemed far less imposing. She looked almost…intimidated. There were no other Faerie in the Throne Room, as if she had chosen to exclude them all from the meeting. What could intimidate a Faerie Queen? A dragon?

  I shook my head. I had to be imagining it.

  “You may ask Us your question,” the Queen said, when I pulled myself to my feet. It felt as if I had never been injured. There weren't even phantom pains running through my body. “What do you wish to know from Us? Ask and We shall answer.”

  Aylia stepped forward. “Your Majesty,” she said, “do the Faerie have my sister?”

  The Queen answered at once. “No.”

  A moment later, we were both lying outside the Mound.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The great question…which I have not been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is `What does a woman want?'

  -Sigmund Freud

  For a long moment, we just lay there on the ground.

  I was reeling inside, feeling dizzy. The Mound had been a whole different world. My eyes hurt with a dull ache that faded, slowly, as I concentrated on a set of healing mantras. The whole experience was already taking on a faded quality, as if it had been something I dreamed, perhaps after an overdose of hallucinogenic drugs. There are people who claim that using drugs gives them an insight into Faerie and the other realms away from Earth, but none of them have managed to bring back anything useful, despite considerable effort. The only good side is that drug use is much reduced. These days, drug addicts see real nightmares in their minds.

  “My dress,” Aylia said, suddenly. I had barely been aware of her. “My dress is clean!”

  I had to laugh, although it came out as more of a cough. She sounded as if she had just discovered her father, her mother and two lovers in a foursome. “My clothes are clean too,” I said, dryly. My body, where I should have been scarred after the battle with the warped human, wasn’t even sore. It was something that puzzled a lot of us after we discovered it; what happens in Faerie stays in Faerie. We don’t know why. The inhabitants have the power to clean us up and heal us, but why would they bother? “In fact, they’re too clean.”

  My coat had been stained with werewolf blood. It wasn't any longer. For some reason, that bothered me.

  “I was sick when you were wounded,” Aylia said, refusing to let it go so easily. “I threw up on my dress. The…the Queen laughed. She thought it was funny! What happened to it all?” She frowned. “Was any of that real?”

  I shrugged and picked myself up, looking in the direction of the Mound. We lay about a kilometre from its brooding presence, but I could still feel it in the distance. Mannington was as still and silent as ever, but I could see strange energies flickering over it, invisible creatures perched in the houses, sleeping during the day. I hadn’t even realised that I was still carrying the Faerie device – it was more than just a weapon – and I pulled the spectacles off my nose. They twisted as I removed them and became a very short rod, about the size of a pen. I pocketed it thoughtfully and turned back to Aylia.

  “I don’t know for sure,” I admitted. “The relationship between their world and ours is complex. Just be grateful that you’re clean and dry and not walking around in a disgusting condition.”

  Her mind went elsewhere. “They said they didn’t have her,” she said. “Where they lying or what?”

  I held up a hand, shushing her quickly. The Faerie are a prideful race and demand respect from those they think of as inferior to them. Personally, I think it’s a form of inferiority complex, perhaps developed after their encounter with the Forsaken, but it always seemed to be part of their nature. Insulting them so close to the Mound could have unpleasant repercussions. It was one of the reasons why the soldiers had been on the verge of breaking apart as a unit, or farmers were fleeing the land; they had to constantly watch what they were saying. Soldiers often develop insulting names for their enemies, but these enemies could hear them and strike them down, regardless of the distance between them. Out in the countryside, the human race was going neurotic. They were pushing us into a respectful frame of mind.

  “Leave it for now,” I said, shortly. “We have to leave this place before dark.”

  I glanced at my watch as we started to walk back down towards the checkpoint. It was a mechanical watch – they seem to work better near strong concentrations of magic – but time and space went a little strange inside the Mound. It still seemed like a dream, but it felt as if it had gone on for years, even though my watch suggested that it had barely been ten minutes. I knew better than to rely on it completely. It had been
in the Mound as well and might have been affected as well. If it went dark, we would be in the open, exposed to every magical predator out there. No one would open a door to invite us in.

  The checkpoint loomed up ahead of us and I allowed myself a sigh of relief. I didn’t know if it had been the device burning a hole in my pocket, or just a result of the supercharged magic in the Mound, but I had been far too aware of every lurking danger in the surrounding town and countryside. It occurred to me that we might not know just how far the supernatural had already blurred into our world, colonising us without us being truly aware of the danger. What we had known was devastating enough. I didn’t even want to think about how much worse it could be. Even if the Faerie vanished tomorrow, the world would be forever changed.

  But it had been like this once before. The Faerie themselves might look like images they pulled out of our minds, when they could be bothered to make allowances for mere humans, but the other supernatural creatures didn’t have that ability. They resembled creatures from myths and legends because they were creatures from myths and legends; at one point in the past, the human race had known them all. The stories had become garbled in the telling, but they contained nuggets of truth. It was possible that it was a natural process, as normal as the tides or the moon orbiting the Earth, but no one would know for sure. Perhaps we were tiny creatures in a pool, devastated when a passing fisherman steps in the pool for a single moment, uncaring of the results of his passage.

  “Hi, sir,” one of the soldiers called. They looked much less threatening from this side, even though two of them were staring at Aylia, wondering how she’d appeared. She would have slipped past them under her invisibility spell, although she probably didn’t know how lucky she’d been. Very few magic-users considered the possibility of motion sensors and night scopes. “Did you bring her out of Faerie?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” I said. I had already decided not to explain her presence if I could get away with it. It would only have upset people. The CO would demand strict new measures for the security checkpoints and would be completely unable to enforce any of them. On the other hand, if Aylia had sweet-talked one of the soldiers into allowing her through, the poor bastard would deserve the chewing out of his life. “How long was I in there?”

  The Sergeant glanced down at his notebook. “You passed through two hours ago, sir,” he said. I nodded in approval, checking my watch. It was only ten minutes late, which suggested that we had only been in the Mound, relatively speaking, for that long. I corrected it before doing anything else.

  “Thank you,” I said. “Anything to report?”

  “Just some of the hippies came up to the gate an hour ago and tried to talk us into letting them though,” the Sergeant said. “We refused them, of course, and they fucked off – if you’ll pardon my French, madam.”

  Aylia said nothing. I think she was a little uncomfortable. “Excellent work, Sergeant,” I said, approvingly. “Thank you for everything.”

  We walked off down the road. If Aylia hadn’t been with me, I would have found somewhere out of sight and teleported back home, or into the Circle. As it was, I led her further down the road until we encountered a small café that catered to the soldiers from the nearby base. It was almost unpopulated – the NO TREE-HUGGERS, HIPPIES, DOGS OR COMMUNISTS sign might have had something to do with it – and we had no problem getting a table. I ordered a milkshake – I’m something of a chocolate slut and I felt I deserved a treat – while Aylia ordered a glass of soda pop. It was almost a relief to see that she had some normal tastes. I found myself wondering, absently, if she had a boyfriend, or if her sister was the sole boy-lover in her family.

  “So,” Aylia said, after we’d taken a few sips. She’d eyed my milkshake with disbelief when it arrived. She probably felt that it was undignified. I didn’t care about my dignity. You can’t in the Guardians. “Were they telling the truth?”

  “Yes,” I said. “The Faerie Code is strict on that point. They have to give us their side of the bargain and we – you – bargained for an answer to a question. It wouldn’t have made them return her, if they had had her, but their answer would have been truthful. The Faerie don’t have your sister, Aylia.”

  She stared at me. “But…there are other Mounds,” she protested. “It might be another group of Faerie, or maybe even renegade Faerie…”

  “The Queen would know everything that happened in her domain,” I said. “There are actually no renegade Faerie as we understand the term. She’s their sovereign Queen as long as she remains in her position and nothing is hidden from her. As for other groups of Faerie…”

  I took another sip of my milkshake. It was very chocolaty and very cold. “There are other Mounds, but the one we just visited is the senior Mound, their regional capital – as we understand it,” I continued. “Even if they’d taken her to another Mound, the Queen would have known about it and…well, you phrased the question to encompass all the Faerie. She had to answer you truthfully, after all. The Faerie don’t have her at all.

  “Oh, even if we had had a different answer, we would have still had to ransom her back somehow, but at least we would have known what had happened to her. This way…we’re still in the dark.”

  The thought didn’t sit well with me. I had gone haring off to the Faerie Mound because Felincia’s ghost had suggested that it had been the Faerie who had killed her and taken the child. There were limits to necromancy, however, and while Felincia would have been bound to speak truthfully, she would have only been able to report what she had seen. If someone had wrapped their body in a seeming, she would only have seen the seeming, not the figure under the illusion. If it hadn’t been the Faerie, then who…?

  And then there were the wards. Breaking them down would be possible, but I couldn’t see how anyone could slip through them without being noticed. The Faerie would have the ability to do that, if someone invited them into the house, but they were now off the suspects list. That left the suspect list blank.

  I said as much to Aylia as we finished our drinks. “My family does have other enemies,” she said. I had been thinking along the same lines, although I doubted that any merely-human magic would have been able to slip through the wards. It almost had to be an inside job, yet anyone who could have done it would have known that they would be questioned under a truth spell. “Why don’t we look at them next?”

  “We?” I asked. I looked her in the eye. “I’m going to send you back home.”

  “No,” Aylia said, just as flatly, but there was a pleading note in her voice. “You can’t send me back home.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “Why not?” I asked. “Look, you’re clever and intelligent, but you don’t have the knowledge or experience to survive in my world, not yet. You put both of us in dreadful danger in that Mound. You’re damn lucky that the Faerie were in a good mood today. I’d love to have your company” – that was actually true – “but I cannot justify taking you along with me.”

  “I’m seventeen years old,” Aylia protested. At least she didn’t raise her voice. “I have a background as an experienced practical magician and researcher…”

  “Human magic,” I pointed out. One of the problems we faced was that it was difficult to grade a person’s ability. There was no grand school of magic, no standards that anyone could use to prove that a person was capable of doing a particular spell, which created another law-enforcement problem. Who could prove that a mind-controlling rapist was actually a mind-controller? “You’re not prepared for any other kind of magic. You have no background in actually going out and using your magic…”

  “My father wouldn’t let me,” Aylia said. “He’s always held me back and showered my sister with love and attention. He doesn’t believe how powerful I am. I had to learn most of my magic from his books, once I had picked my way through his security spells, and he still doesn’t want to teach me anything formally.”

  She leaned forward. “And he wouldn’t go after Cecelia,” s
he added. “I told him that I was going to find her myself and that I wouldn’t return until then. I can’t go back home!”

  I studied her for a long moment. If she had sworn a magical oath not to return home without her sister, she couldn’t return home, but I wasn't sure that I believed her. Very few magicians would know how to swear such an oath properly – although she could have worked out the technique if she had the background she claimed – and it was possible that her father had actually sent her after me to keep an eye on me - and my search for his daughter. If she was telling the truth…the last thing I needed was an untrained amateur blundering around and upsetting people.

  “That was a very stupid thing to do,” I said, finally. “You should know to watch your words carefully when magic is involved.”

  “I know,” Aylia said. I felt a twinge of sympathy. I’d rebelled against my parents too, although not so completely. I wasn't sure I believed that her father had held her back. Looking at Aylia, it was obvious that she had rare potential. Even if she didn’t become a Guardian, she would definitely become a senior figure in the magical world, assuming that someone didn’t kill her first. “It was just…I was just so angry.”