I looked around quickly. Kieran and Ethan had dispatched their dervish impersonators. Kieran’s was… just gone. Ethan’s was on the ground in several pieces. Behind us, Peter and Jimmy moved further away from us, but had remained unaccosted so far. Jimmy was swinging the staff easily. Practicing the balance, it looked like to me. Getting comfortable with it. He was getting more graceful as he went, it seemed.
The ring of the naked tongue-less was no longer prostrate. They were up, now, and advancing on us slowly and cautiously. The four censer priests were huddled around their newest censer still and Dieter put his table between us.
“Everybody okay?” I called out. Knowing wasn’t the same as everyone knowing I gave a damn about knowing, and this gave all a chance to hear. I got four “All Clear” returns as the circle around us closed a little tighter.
“Dieter!” I yelled jovially. “Three down. What else ya got?” Fear was rising in him and there was only so much he could shunt off to that second soul he held. Whatever he was doing to it, it was already flowing back into him now, pushing energy across the linkages to the body. It was weakening him in ways.
“They served me well for years,” Dieter snarled, darting backward to the nearest advancing naked man. “And they shall serve once more. Now, die, damn you!”
He grabbed the naked man by the head and shoved the long black knife into his chest, sideways and slightly to the left, straight into the man’s heart. Ripping the blade free, he then slit his throat, cupped part of the now-slowly ebbing blood and dropped the meat. Shouting what sounded like nonsense at us, Dieter slung the dripping blood at us as we approached, swords up and ready. Then havoc began.
As soon as the first drop hit the ground, a wind started twisting around us and I swear it had the face of the Neanderthal I fought. A second later another followed, wearing the face of Ethan’s foe. It had to be my imagination. The two winds were forceful and gained speed with each revolution around the circle. On the third, debris from the ground was lifting. By the fifth, the winds were no longer discernible, separate forces. By the sixth, Dieter turned and ran to the outside of the circle of tongue-less.
The winds had taken seconds to turn into a cyclone within the clearing. My proto-dervishes turned into true dervishes, demons of wind and air. As Dieter ran, the winds picked up bits of dirt, stone, and other detritus from the ground and sped along with it, beating anything in its circular path. Two head winds swept in around us and picked up the scimitars from the ground. And the decapitated heads. Joining the cyclone, my only guess as to why they weren’t eaten away in the wind was that they were on the leading edge and missed the pummeling.
I got lifted off the ground, then. Damn it! I was hit forty-four times with the scissoring scimitars before I was able to throw an anchoring line of energy into the center of the clearing and reel myself down to safety. The PSA “Speed Kills” is taking on entirely new meaning for me today. Slamming a hemispherical shield around Peter, Jimmy and me, I shouted to Kieran and Ethan, “Go after him!”
They were still trying to get me out of the cyclone. Seconds later, finally recognizing I was out, they both disappeared from the eye of the storm, reappearing instantly on the trail outside and running down the path toward the caves. The blue bat-things still fluttered overhead, but stayed there, giving the winds a leery space to do their job. The tongue-less were—no longer there.
Skeletons and parts of skeletons whirled in the air around us as I realized exactly why the wind was so dangerous, especially desert winds. And these had just gained more power. By a factor of eleven. They howled and closed in faster. Gouts of flame hit the shield wall, making me turn. The censer priests had gotten into it, finally. They had a David versus Goliath complex going on with a ghastly assembly line approach. One priest lay bleeding out on the ground while another dipped cloths into his bleeding wrists, chanting something that invoked Marduk then passed it to another. That guy licked it then dipped it in the burning tire oil then passed it quickly to a third. He tossed the burning cloths at us and with a shouted word, the burning cloths changed into gouts of fire like the shot of a flame-thrower.
It was a desperation move on their part. They hoped to get to us before the winds got to them. They didn’t have the time or the energy to break down a magician’s most modest shielding that way before the wind blew out their flame. Right on cue the censer and its attending priest were picked up and thrown into the fray. And then there were three. Again, only seconds had passed. The bloody victim was the next to lift off.
The walls of the cyclone were taller now.
“Can we just leave?” Jimmy yelled over the huge vibrations.
I shook my head. “Don’t know if it’ll stay and go after everything else around.” Peter was kneeling, feeling the ground while watching the wind through the shield wall. I watched, too, as the winds twisted through space around us. I could see the spirits now, the wild and twisted souls of the dead men pushing through and driving the magic. The why behind it was bothering me, still. I’ve seen a lot of souls in my life, but they’ve always, always, been attached to living people. This was new to me. I was experiencing all sorts of wrong today.
“Seth! Cold!” Peter yelled over the noise. The circle tightened around us as one side of my shield started getting hammered by the wind. We weren’t exactly centered in the clearing. I thought for a moment that he was getting cold, but the temperature had risen about ten degrees around us. It was already hot. So he wanted me to make them cold. But cold didn’t make sense. The dervish was a Persian devil and the deserts got plenty cold at night. Freezing, even. Freezing cold at night, but dry. Alabama wasn’t a dry climate, though. It’s not the heat of summer that gets to you so much as the humidity.
“How about cold and wet?” I muttered to myself as I started siphons, two of them. One siphon added mass to the cyclone, stealing a little water from the Tennessee River not too terribly far from us here. The second siphon took energy, sucking away the heat from the excited gases. Within a second snow formed around me in the closing circle. Another second and I had dime-sized hail tossed around in the wind, but no reduction in speed or violence in the wind and the scimitars still scissored around the circle below the flying heads.
I waved Peter and Jimmy in closer to me and shrank the shield wall in closer. It was far too noisy for speech, even yelling. We’d have issues with hearing for a time after this. At four seconds, golf-ball-sized hail was landing on the ground hard, embedding and staying there. The noise died down appreciably next. I dropped the siphons when I saw the head crumble in a collision of ice. The shield wall was next and we were assaulted with subfreezing temperatures. And a wall of ice surrounded us.
“That was interesting,” Peter said, rubbing his arms briskly, trying to brace himself against the sudden cold. Jimmy started tapping on the wall with his staff, looking for way out, I imagined.
“Wasn’t it, though?” I responded, glancing up at the twelve-foot wall. “Does everything have to be this fast?”
“Why? You’d rather die slowly and painfully?” Jimmy asked, grinning back at me. “How are we gonna get out of here?”
I shrugged. “Over, through, around? Lots of ways,” I answered.
The second wave of attack hit then, choosing to strike at all three of us at once—the va-du-seet. Jimmy faced the right direction to see his attacker coming, but Peter didn’t.
“Peter! Get down!” I yelled, already swinging the Day as it twisted me down and away from the bat coming at my back. Peter fell straight back as the Day swung down right to left across his face, narrowly missing him but striking a clawed foot as it phased into reality to hit him. It shrieked in pain, phasing back into the astral and gushing blue gunk into reality like a paint trail as it passed. They phased through the ice wall with impunity in the astral plane, shifting into reality above it to arc over and dive bomb at us again. They swarmed at us.
I spotted the hurt one overhead as it howled and rapidly phased in and out of realit
y. That seemed to be stopping the flow of ichors from its rear “leg.” I pulled the Crossbow off my shoulders and, timing a few fluctuations, put Bolts through its brain and heart then put it away again. Jimmy was successfully fending them off in the physical plane, but they were swarming us. The numbers would play out soon. Peter threw volatile magicks into the astral. Several different tricks, fire and ice, explosions of energy, but the va-du-seet avoided everything. With a twisting of their wings, they could shoot away at unbelievable speed.
I needed to see what these things were doing to the atmosphere better and that meant magic and that was the Night’s purview. Sliding the Night free with my left hand, I tossed it straight up into the night sky. It hummed a satisfyingly deep and throaty bass as it rose thirty feet up. Once again, I felt that reptilian tongue flick out and taste the air around us. The va-du-seet recoiled from the Sword, pulling back well behind the perimeter of the ice wall and circling through the sky much like the Dervish before them. I sheathed the Day as the Night fell back to Earth, defying physics by staying perfectly perpendicular to the ground as it came back to my hand.
Then I had my answer. The air was clear now. The Twin of Magic knew the answer, knew the trick the va-du-seet used to live and to fly. These were definitely unnatural creations. Destroying the balance would be easy. Well, easy for me.
I pushed energy onto the energy plane, keeping it away from the astral and physical planes, just the energy plane. It was in crossing over the energy plane to the astral that the beasts got their power. I’d seen it earlier and not known that it meant anything, but it was the crux. A small, almost differential crux, the occlusion to my sight in the clearing. I pushed more energy onto that plane and several bat-things fell onto the top of the ice wall.
One toppled down to one side of us. I smiled at the thing on the ground. Jimmy approached it cautiously and prodded it with the staff. It was stiff and hard. The other va-du-seet above us moved more slowly through the air. A few more fell to the ice wall. Jimmy swung back hard and hit the creature in front of him, like a baseball, a hard drive to deep center field. His staff hit and sunk in, shattering its outer shell like a dried bug and sending cracks across it everywhere. He pulled the stick free and tapped it on the ground a few times to get the bits of dead bat-thing off.
“Well, that one’s dead,” he said as he turned around, a slight smile on his face.
“You seem to be taking all of this really well,” Peter said cheerfully as I pushed more energy onto the energy plane, increasing the volume of space around us I was encompassing. I didn’t want any of abominations getting away or getting us.
“I am First of Daybreak and First of Gilán,” Jimmy said, shrugging. “I’ve got a lot to get used to.” He said it as if he was saying, “I took my dog to the vet yesterday.” I rather liked that.
The bat-things were moving like they were trapped in molasses now, even in the astral. They weren’t attacking anymore, either, but they did exhibit some intelligence. They started to swarm together again, slowly, and rising higher. Not that rising would help them since I’d put the field pretty damn high up and out. Peter and I watched them for a moment. Jimmy was looking up, too.
“Can you see them, Jimmy?” I had to ask.
He glanced over at me briefly. “I can see a very pale outline of something fluttering up there. Almost like something clear catching the light of the stars every once in a while. Whoa! That, I see!” We looked up.
As he said that one of the bat-things rose quickly, far more quickly than any others were moving, straight up then turned down. Every other bat-thing froze in place and shifted onto the physical plane, making one final shift over the astral. Then gravity took over and they fell.
Unfortunately for us, we were directly underneath them. I threw an umbrella on top of us as the rain began, just as the first hit the ground to Jimmy’s rear left. A tenth of a second later, five more hit the clear umbrella above us. In twenty seconds we were knee-deep in dead, dried-up carcasses. I pushed my umbrella of shield energy up and away, throwing the four-feet of bat off the top of us.
“How did that work?” Peter asked, confused.
“Tell me and we’ll both know,” I said, looking around. “I’m lost. Which way is out of here?” The winds had torn the landscape up and now there was nothing but a huge wall of ice and two feet of dead bat-things on the ground.
“North is that way,” Jimmy said, pointing with his truncheon. He’d shrunk the staff when I wasn’t looking. He would have to show me how he did that. “The trail is that way and the house, that way.” Slipping a platform of the Stone’s energy underneath us, I lifted us up in the direction of the trail as Jimmy indicated. If I could complain about Jimmy being wrong, it would have been by a degree or two, but that could have been me.
Setting us down on the other side of the ice wall, I noticed the gray mist, the occlusion to my sight, dissipated as the energy plane bled the excess power I’d held there away into the astral plane and back into the leys. Except for one vapor trail leading back the way we were going. That one was more persistent. I cast my senses further down as we walked, the Night still in my left hand. The vapor trail led to the same cave this trail led to.
“Peter, do you see that?” I asked him, pointing at the trail using the Sword.
“Faintly, though most of that soup is gone,” he answered. “You think that last one got away?”
“The dive bomber?” Jimmy asked. He’d seen it too?
“Maybe,” I muttered and walked faster. I couldn’t see Kieran or Ethan anywhere outside and when I brushed the anchor lightly, Ethan was busy. I didn’t intrude. That could be dangerous to Kieran and him. “How far ahead are they, do ya think?” The cave entrance was another two hundred feet or so up.
“Five to seven minutes, maybe?” Peter offered.
“Too long,” Jimmy said, matter-of-factly. I believe he knew who Dieter was, too, not that I had tried too hard to hide it. Dieter certainly hadn’t.
“Damn, we need to hurry,” I said, worried. “They have a nasty habit of disappearing on me when they’re alone together.”
“And you don’t?” Peter muttered as he fell in beside me.
Chapter 14
Obviously every cave I have ever seen was a “commercial quality” endeavor, with lights and wooden walkways, guides and maps. I’d been to Mammoth Cave National Park with my parents at nine years old and we’d spent a few days touring through the Green River valley, taking various trips around the area. Mother had never been to that particular area before so we all enjoyed that time and we were all enthralled by the dark beauty in the caverns. It wasn’t until much later in my life that I realized how dangerous exploring and spelunking was and I could appreciate that beauty so much more. The Earth is a wondrous place in so many different ways.
Mammoth was far different from the hole in the ground I was looking at now.
“They’re down there?” I asked in disbelief, wondering how the va-du-seet fit through hole at all. “It barely looks wide enough for Kieran.”
“Well, when all roads point to Rome, you go to Rome,” Peter said and started through the hole. He was halfway in the hole before I could object.
“Damn it, Peter! I should go first. I’m better protected,” I said, nearly shouting.
Jimmy snorted. “You are Daybreak. You shouldn’t be going at all.”
“That’s not the way it works, Jimmy,” I snarled at him.
“And for that, I am eternally grateful, Lord,” Jimmy said, snapping the truncheon into its holster on his thigh. “But Peter managed to keep the va-du-seet at bay while your back was turned and he showed quite a mastery at the computer systems earlier. He has shown his value to you admirably. Trust him.” Then he dove into the hole, too.
“Damn it, Jimmy!” I did holler that time. I really needed to start paying attention. “Trust isn’t the issue,” I said in a whisper. “You’ve all come a hair’s breadth of dying on me.” I crawled in behind him, then got mil
dly aggravated. The hole opened up almost immediately, giving me enough room to crawl or duck-walk easily for a few feet then crouch another few feet then stoop slightly and then even Kieran could walk without hitting his head in the cavernous space.
Apparently we’d found Yaeger’s panic room, or some paramilitary-redneck blend of it. This was a storage room. On the right was a wooden wall with brackets screwed in at shoulder height, a coat rack. The left side was ammunition. Shelf after reinforced shelf of ammunition. This section of the cave was a single room dedicated to a coat rack and enough gun powder and brass casings to fill a semi-truck full and probably part of another. I didn’t stop to consider how many different weapons this might be for, but I doubted this would be all we found.
I followed Peter and Jimmy back into the cave. The next room was the living room and it was nicer than Yaeger’s house. Well, ‘nicer’ being a relative term. The walls were covered with framed pictures of Hans, Dieter, and Yaeger, Sr., in various poses, both alone and with groups around impressive hunting kills or displays of weapons. A huge flat-screen, high-definition television hung on the wall, the screen indicating a lost satellite connection on one feed but displaying newsfeeds on three other channels. This was not from your average, commercially available satellite companies. The furniture was three large recliners spaced evenly in front of the television with small tables between them.
“Ewww!” cried Jimmy, walking around the recliners. He reached down between a pair and pulled a magazine out from between the cushions with two fingers, barely touching it. The title read “Let Daddy Show You How” and showed a scantily clad woman looking over her shoulder at a mid-thirties man while her arm was draped over a mid-twenties man.
“You could have kept that image to yourself,” I said, clenching my eyes shut and moving for the door.
Sons (Book 2) Page 23
