“Yeah, well, that’s the other-other part of the deal,” Augustus said. “She ne-needs you all on a hunt. She’s left it to-to me to pick what we’re hunting and to get us to the hunting grounds.”
Aba’s already broad nostrils flared further as she snorted, both in response to Augustus’s pronouncement and to the exertion it took to drive the two-inch spikes lining the soles of her sandals like the bristles of a hair brush into an Orc’s face; without the sandals, none of them would have had sufficient traction in the mud and rain to avoid slipping.
She understood how the Fenquin queen had infiltrated Augustus’s mind more readily than the huntresses. He stank of fear. The tremulousness of his voice was no small clue, even if the alien queen’s senses weren’t as keen as the blind huntress’s. Already Aba was regretting soliciting his aid on this adventure. He might yet be their downfall. He would always be the most easily compromised of them all. The more fear in his heart, the easier he would be to manipulate and the easier it would be to get inside his head—despite the warding magic shared by them all to get this far into the Fenquin queen’s head without being entirely taken over already.
Augustus, finished painting his canvas with the glowing lights from his hands, shouted “Now!” You could bet he was the first one to jump through that portal and that if the huntresses didn’t follow him quickly enough, he’d be only too happy to close the exit on them before the Orcs and other vile creatures could get anywhere near him.
“Now!” Aba reprised the shriek, as they all retreated, back toward the portal, until it sucked them in of its own accord.
***
“This makes no sense,” Aba protested, taking in her new surroundings. The other huntresses had already fanned out to cover their flanks, their front, and their rear. Augustus, predictably was huddled with their backs to him; they were his eyes, ears, and weapons, leaving him with little to do but beat a path away from them if they couldn’t hold the perimeter—through another one of his portals.
“Why would the Fenquin queen keep us together?” Aba mused aloud. “Surely if we are to reclaim more of our psychic energy trapped in the past, we must heal our wounds, each in our own way.”
She grabbed a squirrel—or this world’s closest equivalent—scampering past her in the woods, bit off its head, and poured the blood over her palm. Most of the animal’s life essence spilled between her fingers to be reclaimed by the earth. What remained, she blew on, hastening the stain. The dried shape looked remarkably like Soren—the way he looked when he was one with the beast—fierce, eyes glowing a fiery orange; the “pretty tattoos” morphed back into nanite swarms dotting his surface with an entirely different aura. “Now I get it,” Aba said, wiping her hand dry by passing it over her leg. “We’re hunting Soren,” she announced to the other girls.
They grunted. “I don’t know about you, but that feels highly therapeutic to me,” Makya said. Her Native American headdress-feathering was already in a ruffle with excitement as she lost her ability to restrain her movements. She sniffed the air in hopes of alighting on his trail.
“I’ve got a lock on him,” Makya announced, taking the lead. They proceeded in an arrow-shape formation, with Augustus running alongside them within the tip of the arrow. The two huntresses in the rear were keeping an eye on anything that might be sneaking up behind them, pulling an eye out each and allowing it to watch their backs while their remaining eye kept them abreast of what was happening in front of them. The detached eyes levitated behind the huntresses’ heads like a movie camera, caught up in Heshima’s and Savita’s magic. The same magic was available to them all, but one of many forms of magic imbibed in the potion they drank before coming here; the blend of magics a merger of each of their spell casting skills.
The forest on the alien world gave way to a metropolis—vast and futuristic—more so than anything they were aware of even in Swank Town, Syracuse, not too far from their stomping ground back home.
“It makes sense,” Aba said. “Soren had the better of us in the city, so it is in the city where we must turn the tables on him to prove to ourselves once again that we haven’t lost a step.”
“I tell you what doesn’t make sense,” Tomoe was shaving her fingernails, making them more pointed with the aid of her small sword; “Why the Fenquin queen would enable us every step of the way to come into ourselves so we could unleash our full powers against her.”
Aba glanced back at Tomoe. “Yes, that problem has been vexing me for some time.” Aba’s nostrils flared rushing more air to her lungs to help her think.
“Could she be so far beyond us that all we could do is make her stronger by becoming more powerful, without ever becoming a real threat to her?” Asim asked.
Aba let the worried look on her face answer for her. She sighed. “There’s another possible explanation, a more hopeful one. She can’t help herself. It’s just how she’s hard-wired. You win more bees with honey, remember? She had to have a way of seducing so many lifeforms on so many worlds for so long without fear of them revolting. Maybe it is the fear of surrendering her trump card that keeps her to her old ways.”
The other huntresses exchanged glances, considering the viewpoint, looking for assurances in one another’s eyes that Aba was right—as always. It was why she was their leader. Her blood magic, unlike Heshima’s, portended the future.
Akima didn’t share in their moment of shared solace. She was too busy blazing the trail, determined to get to Soren first. He was somewhere out there in that city, waiting for them, looking forward to the showdown. United with the beast, he certainly wouldn’t make this trial easy on them. They would win this battle fair and square or die trying.
That’s what troubled Aba. How was it Soren was managing to carry out his project of uplifting his disciples and any who got caught up in their wake, like the blind huntresses and Augustus—while within the Fenquin queen’s hive mind reality? How did he solicit such cooperation from her and such powers, even while flying against the Fenquin queen’s best interests? The Fenquin queen wanted to uplift all her subjects too—so they could be better neurons in her brain, boosting her mind power—not so they could be free agents; the latter was the Soren-beast dyad’s agenda. The two parties were clearly at cross purposes.
Could it be that Soren and the beast together were managing to do what the rest of the constellation of lesser wizards around them couldn’t? Or was it that the blind huntresses and Augustus, as much as his own people, were part of his solution to freeing everyone? If so, how? It bothered her that he might be toying with her every bit as much as the Fenquin queen.
Especially since Soren, mated with the beast, would have no trouble killing the huntresses if he and the beast thought it was for the greater good. He had to protect the planet as a whole, and ultimately the entire universe. The latter he couldn’t do if he couldn’t learn to get past predatory master races like the Fenquin. And perhaps trouncing the blind huntresses—despite the Fenquin queen’s protests—was how he planned to develop his craft en route to tackling even bigger foes.
This was but the first staging ground for him, of many to come in preparing to go head to head with the cosmos’s most powerful players, with Victor by his side; they were the pole and anti-pole of a driving force that would bring order to the cosmos and an end to an era of warring wizards—no matter what—or die trying.
And then Aba realized her fears were misplaced. The Fenquin queen might well be enabling Soren and the beast’s fantasies, as surely she had been all along. She couldn’t help herself. How many worlds had she absorbed, how many players, all with revolution on their minds? She would have had to learn how to contain even the malcontents a long, long time ago.
Aba charged ahead, closing the gap on Akima with a roar, for no better reason than if she continued to ruminate on the holes in her own reasoning, she’d drive herself mad. Better to kill something.
***
“Split up,” Aba said. “You too, wizard.” She was curious
to see how much access to his powers Soren had. Fighting with the beast before, he could battle on numerous stages at once. But could he do it inside the Fenquin queen’s head—without his cabbalistic magic alerting her to a sense of danger rising beyond her toleration threshold? The Natura Cabbala magic would be new to him—he might not have had time to wrap it around all aspects of his cabbalistic magic, such as the ability to fight on numerous stages at once. It was interesting that the beast had permitted his telepathic abilities to be used by Soren to make the huntresses aware of the new Natura Cabbala magic in play; together, they were becoming as enabling of their enemies as the Fenquin queen.
Another thought occurred to Aba: maybe Soren was setting up this whole confrontation with the huntresses to force himself to take his abilities to the next level. He wasn’t just tutoring his disciples in order to uplift them; he had to figure out how to uplift himself to battle the Fenquin queen on her return to Earth. The planet would be trampled to dust under the weight of so many orcs, trolls, gargoyles, and gremlins alone, even with an army of earth’s best wizard to stand against them.
Maybe challenging the blind huntresses was the self-serving section of the menu of offerings before his entourage.
Considering the rage the huntresses had to vent his way, Aba and the others would be only too happy to comply, whatever his involvement in this scenario.
“About splitting off,” Augustus protested, his tone like a whining child.
“He’ll be weaker this way, wizard, having to fight us each with a different version of himself. He won’t be able to concentrate all of his power in one place. Get it, or not yet?”
Augustus groaned, but it was a groan of exasperation as much as of acknowledgment.
The group split up, moving like the hounds of hell were on their heels; even the wizard Augustus, who didn’t have their huntress’s stamina, moved with surprising swiftness. How much magic was involved versus how much fear pumping adrenaline through his veins was anybody’s guess.
***
Aba tracked Soren to the top of the space needle. He was standing on the roof, at its outermost perimeter, spinning with the rotating restaurant overlooking the city. The shuttles that came and went overhead—they were not coming from other points on this planet but from other worlds. A quick glance at the passengers inside conveyed as much; to say nothing of the one-of-a-kind spacecraft designs and the fact that they were descending from space, breaching the outer atmosphere; their air-breaking causing their exteriors to flame briefly, or to shower Soren with sparks, depending on the angle of re-entry.
If only Aba had time to get her mind around the more mind-blowing aspects of being off-world, of being the first of her kind to get this up close and personal with alien lifeforms; but she was not a tourist here. And all those happy faces visible on the viewports of all those alien aircraft were just more proof of the Fenquin queen’s psychic subjugation—so advanced, her subjects didn’t even know they were being played.
Aba had run up the spike of the space needle as if gravity meant nothing. The magic-infused potion they’d all drank before coming here had a few surprises in store for Soren, abilities he would not have been exposed to before, and so not had a chance to prepare for.
She sprang onto the roof of the spinning restaurant, tempted to fire an arrow at his back. But she knew him well enough to know the arrow would never have gotten close enough to do any harm, no matter how distracted he was.
She was about to raise her voice instead to him, when her dragon descended, like another alien aircraft using the roof as a landing bay.
The dragon held up its wings and ejected needles the size of walrus teeth from the ridges running along the bottommost edges at Soren. Each “needle” lodged inside him. Soren turned to face his foe, whereupon the dragon ejected the last of its horny daggers. Soren was covered now, like a human-sea urchin hybrid. He merely stood, curious, at the dragon before him. The creature shrieked and out of its mouth pouring lightning—not fire—and each of those strands of lightning found each of the needles along Soren’s person.
Soren grimaced, clearly feeling the pain. But then he took a deep breath, and smiled; enjoying the pain, not suppressing it. When he finally let out a scream it was an acoustic weapon, not a sign of distress, and, directed straight at the dragon, it had an immediate impact.
The dragon morphed—not all the way back to human form, just part way, shrinking in size, looking more now like a winged angel whose frail human body was exposed, but whose wings were armored bronze. Aba gasped. Her dragon had been a dragon morph all this time; they’d had a spy in their midst. But why? And why expose himself in a move most unlike his kind, showing self-sacrifice and bravery when they were known for their self-serving nature and their eagerness to retreat in the face of a superior enemy? None of it made any sense.
The dragon-human hybrid kept up the onslaught, firing the lightning threads now from both hands and all his fingers, making contact with the needles about Soren’s body—all of them, including the ones behind him; the lightning strands merely arced up and over or around Soren to get to the needles they were meant for.
Soren shook violently, as if trembling in the cold, before emitting another shriek. This time the acoustic blast tore the rest of the way through the dragon morph, eviscerating him.
The dragon morph fell to the ground. Landing on his back, he twisted and moaned as he surveyed his own vivisection, then he tried impotently to push his insides back in.
Aba rushed to his side, dropping her bow and her guard, forgetting about Soren. “Why?” she beseeched the dragon morph.
“Because I love you.” He used his wings to bring her closer to him, folding them about both of them.
She didn’t resist, kissed him, the severity of his wounds doing nothing to deter from the romance of the moment in her mind; but then she was a huntress. It wouldn’t be the first man she loved and said her goodbyes to in such a manner on the battlefield.
As the lights went out of the dragon morph’s eyes and his wings collapsed back at his side, she stood, bow in hand, her face set in stone, the muscles twisted and hardened in fury.
The dragon morph’s kiss… She had granted it to be kind; she was not in love with him because she was entirely unaware of him the entire time he was with her, cloaked as a dragon. And her love for her beasts was of an entirely different nature. But the dragon morph’s kiss had been something else; it was a parting gift of power.
His magic suffusing her now, she observed with some fear and consternation that she was continuing to turn to stone. When she had been completely immobilized and so was helpless, Soren’s eyes fired up. He and the beast seemed curious to see what would happen upon dispatching her as they had the dragon morph. Always with those two, curiosity and scientific experimentation eclipsed everything.
The lasers shooting out of Soren’s eyes, upon impacting her, exploded the statue that she had become to dust. A dust that was entirely conscious—a hive mind. The dragon morph had bequeathed her the Fenquin queen’s magic—at least this one spell. The dragon morphs were known for understanding more about her and how to repel her than any other humanoids alive. Even if she could figure out exactly how to turn this into a weapon to use against the Fenquin queen, she had no idea how to use it as a weapon against Soren and the beast. And she had to survive him to get to her.
The nanite mounds along Soren’s surface were mobilizing, heading for the dust cloud, determined to investigate its nature. Aba had no desire to share this new magic with Soren or the beast, not after seeing what he just did.
But the distributed consciousness, it was new to her, wore like a drug. She struggled to shrug off the soporific. It only gradually became clear to her that what she was mistaking as an inability to hold focus on Soren was in fact the price she paid for being grand central station for every fleeting thought on the planet passing through her—everyone in the Fenquin queen’s head, under her control… Well, not everyone; Aba didn’t have e
nough bandwidth, her comparatively lower number of nanites were doing their best to carry out their job, the algorithms aggregating, grouping the many voices whose protests and beseechings were of a kind, whose forms of resistance, whose prayers gone unanswered, were of a kind.
The beast was inside her hive mind, already apprehending the nature of the magic, making more sense of it in less time than she could.
And then the nanites invading her space, retreated, like one air armada pulling away from another in a cosmic scale battle happening on a microscopic scale.
As Aba felt her focus sharpening, she found herself back in solid form again—her old, familiar body.
She glared at Soren with the face of an angel and the glowing eyes of the beast. His nanites returning to him, landed along his person, able to tunnel through his robe through the weave of the fabric without damaging it, the same way they’d left.
“You’ve played your part well, Aba. And you should be rewarded.” Soren kneeled down and put his hand inside the open chest cavity of the fallen dragon morph, healing him, restoring life to the lifeless. The Natura Caballa magic! My God, seeing it up close like this… When he finally pulled his hand out, the dragon morph gasped air anew, stared up at Soren leerily.
Soren rose. “Just because you survived my test, doesn’t mean you or any of us will survive the Fenquin queen. Only your higher selves and your various magics can take you from here to the next hurdle to be cleared toward our own self-empowerment. I suggest you don’t waste time.”
Soren turned his back to them, his robe swirling behind him, and sailed off the roof. They followed him to the perimeter, where they observed his robe had morphed yet again into wings, more specifically, a control descent chute, shaped like a bat’s wings. “The guy watches too much Batman,” Aba squawked.
Reawakened Page 22
