by Faith Hunter
The stone sang, a single note of joy and hope and life. And it opened its eyes, eyes on every square inch of its lavender structure, dark purple eyes, hundreds of them, thousands of them, all looking at me. The song of the wheel changed key and hummed a softer tune, an audible caress.
“Crap,” a voice murmured nearby.
Instantly, I was back on the Trine. Smoke, fire, and a ghastly reek of death whipped in the icy wind. A golden rim of sun glanced over the mountains to the east and cast long rays onto the world below. Shadows still gripped the valleys, streambeds, and Mineral City. Below me was a ledge of rock; above me was another. I was still sandwiched between them. I blinked and remembered to breathe, surprised that I still could.
Eli held me, our bodies wedged beneath the boulder edge. In his fist shone the healing amulet I had given him. And in this reality too, hanging in the air before us, was Amethyst’s wheels. As one, the eyes blinked, crooning. “Saints’ balls,” Eli whispered. I laughed brokenly. His arms tightened about me.
In the dawn sky far overhead, lightning flashed, thunder rumbled. A battle was taking place there, in the upper layers of the earth’s atmosphere, in the here-not here. In the small, nearly level space, Raziel and Forcas were locked in combat, bodies writhing and straining as they wrestled. Below us, the earth shook. The big, bad Dragon was dangerously close.
Chapter 29
Two Flames zipped under the ledge and did their little dance along our bodies, whizzing and burning their way through us and back out. “That hurts like heck, but it’s better than being dead,” Eli growled. “Ouch, quit that.” The Flames obeyed and converged together, hovering before me, as if awaiting orders. It hurt my eyes to look at them.
“If I ask you questions, can you answer in English?” I asked them.
“Yessss,” they said, their voices a strange sound, as if bells were being rung by a current of electricity.
“Who fights overhead, and who’s winning?”
“Zzzadkiel and Holy Amethyssst battle the Dragon who wasss chained. Without her wheel, Darknessss winsss.” As they spoke, the sky darkened. Clouds boiled, huge thunderclouds reaching for the heavens.
“The same Dragon I feel coming up from the deeps?” I asked. I looked up at the wheels, and gripped the sapphire owl. Taking a chance that the owl allowed increased communication to the wheels, I said, “Save the Mistress.” And they were gone. The air concussed, rushing to fill the vacuum. A feeling like icicles bored into me. Eli tensed with shared pain. Careful not to look at the remaining Flames straight on, I said, “I don’t guess you could find some more of you guys?” Flames popped away. The icicles in my blood shattered and I shivered hard. Once could be coincidence. Not twice.
“Crap in a bucket,” Eli said into my ear, his voice hoarse with exhaustion and pain. “What the hell are you? Never mind. That can wait. This big evil sucker I can feel coming up from the pit—it can be in two places at once?”
Not knowing how to explain what I didn’t understand, and still dealing with my reactions to having the wheels and the Flames do what I wanted—at least I assumed they were doing it—I said, “I think so. Yeah.”
“Then let’s you and me just sit tight here under this rock until the war is over.” He pulled me closer to his body, jarring my side. I hissed with pain. “What?” he asked.
I eased his arm away from me and wriggled over, pulling up the edge of the dobok top and peering at my side. I expected to see scar tissue or a healing wound. Instead, I found a blackened puncture site, deep enough to bury my finger to the second knuckle. The edges around the cavity were raised and red, and pus trickled from a spot that had broken open.
“That’s gotta hurt,” Eli said. Master of understatement.
“Yeah. It does.” Not far from us, Forcas and Raziel rolled on the ground. I didn’t know what would happen if Forcas completed binding me to him. I looked at the miner, his face so close I was cross-eyed to focus. “Can you get his eyes with your flamethrower?”
Eli ducked his head to see under the ledge, watching the fight, considering. “And you’ll be doing what?”
“Slitting his throat to keep him from completing a binding.” That is, if I can find the energy. But I didn’t say it.
“Binding? You?” He glanced at my wound and I nodded. “How close is it to making you his?”
You are mine. “Three words.”
“Girl, is there any kind of trouble you can’t find?” Sighing, Eli said, “Let’s go then.” I forced my body into motion and together we crawled out from under the ledge. I was so tired, so drained, I had to pull on the Trine for the energy to move, for the energy to breathe. I had to. But I felt the pollution of its power. The mountain was changing. Using it could change me, as using the amethyst power had changed me. Or it could simply kill me. But I couldn’t make it on my own, and my seraph was too busy to help me right now.
Eli spun his flamethrower forward, checked the apparatus with a critical eye, cocked it, and made eye contact with me. “Come in behind me.” In concert, we ran, me barely able to keep up with the human. Eli moved like the wind through trees, like the Gulf over the beach when the tide came in, like sunlight over stone. I pulled my blades and stumbled behind.
Yet, even tired, we fought together as if it were a dance—move forward, spray with flame, back away, move forward, strike, back away—ganging up on the Darkness. Raziel was locked in combat with it; we hit it from behind and the side as the two Powers wrestled on the ground. In two feints, Eli had blinded Forcas, the Darkness roaring his fury and pain, his claws scoring Raziel’s sides, rocking back his head. I raced in mage-fast and slit the beast’s throat, silencing his screams. I’m safe. Tears flooded my eyes, leaving me limp with relief.
Overhead, the wheels reappeared with the same concussive force, the boom throwing Eli and me to the ground. For the first time in long hours, I felt a spark of hope, instantly shattered. Forcas threw off Raziel and rolled at me, demon-fast. Blind, he still knew where I was.
From the side, a hand gripped my leg, bowling me to safety. I landed hard against the sloped rock ground. Before me, my silver-hilted sword glittering in a two-handed grip, his wings partially healed, was Barak. Behind him, in the mouth of the hellhole, stood Joseph Barefoot, breathing hard, Tomas slung over his shoulder fireman-fashion. He eased his friend to the earth and joined the Allied One in hacking at Forcas. Raziel swept back into the fray from overhead, wings buffeting dust into abrading spirals, his blood sprinkling the ground.
Eli pulled me back to safety and left, to reappear pulling Durbarge by both arms. The assey was still breathing, fast and shallow. Blood trickled from his mouth to the ground.
Over the clearing, the wheels rocked gently, humming, its many eyes on me. In the center, the ship secured around her, sat the cherub, her four faces blazing with anger. She pointed at me with one demi-wing. “You have stolen my wheels. Return them to me!”
“You stole something from that big purple mama?” Eli asked.
I dragged myself to my knees, my blades clinking on the cold stone. An icy wind was blowing from the thunder-clouds, turbulent with battle and seraph wings. “I think I bound her wheels to me. And I don’t know how to unbind them.”
“Bound a cherub’s wheels?” he said incredulously. When I didn’t answer, Eli gripped my shoulders and shook me. “You know what that makes you?”
I met his amber eyes, too tired to read what I saw there. “It makes me dead, if I don’t figure out how to unbind them.”
Eli laughed, the sound coarse and disbelieving. “The EIH has been looking for a mage like you for decades. You’re an omega mage.”
“I’m not.” Not that I knew what an omega mage was.
“Tell the wheels to kill Forcas,” he said. “Tell them!”
I looked at the eyes overhead and said, “Kill Forcas.” When nothing happened, I pinched the owl, repeating the command. Again nothing. I looked at the owl, to find it totally drained, an inert, poor-quality semiprecious sto
ne. Despair stole over me. “I don’t know what I’m doing,” I whispered. I was a half-trained neomage with pretty baubles.
“The Flames did what you wanted.”
I shrugged. That was different. Wasn’t it? Fatigue caught up with me in a single moment and I collapsed to the ground in a boneless sprawl. Even with the Trine to draw on, I was worn out. On my waist, the amulets shone weakly, nearly depleted, wasting their last energies keeping me alive. From my side, pain radiated, Dark tendrils caressing my heart. Nearby, Forcas hid behind a small shield, its limbs exposed to the blades of attackers, but its throat healing. It met my eyes and… pulled… at me. My energies flagged again.
Suddenly I knew; if Forcas died, I would die too. He was draining my energies through the wound in my side, using my life force to fight Raziel. I chuckled softly at the irony. After all this, my life was forfeit to a Darkness. Knowing I had no choice, knowing I was about to die, I touched the citrine and the sapphire to the visa and my prime amulet, transferring power between the amulets.
Once again, I fell into the otherness. The world slid sidewise sickeningly. I rolled to the side and retched, throwing up the water I had drunk. In the otherness vision, the wheels overhead pulsed with life. I looked up at them, seeing Amethyst in the center, her lion face staring at me, her mouth wide with shock and fury. “Give me back my wheels,” she roared.
In the place of the otherness, the river of lava flowed beneath me, so close I could feel its heat. In the otherness, I saw the stream of energy flowing from me to the beast, draining me. I reached up with my finger and twisted. “Oh wheels,” I sang softly. “Kill Forcas,” I told them. “And seal the hellhole.”
“Yes,” the wheels sang. “We will drain him to nothingness until the Last Day.”
“No!” Amethyst shouted.
A shaft of rainbow light shot from the wheels. Only as it fired did I understand the cherub’s cry. She too was linked to the beast through a torrent of stolen energy. She too would be drained, following Forcas into nothingness unto the Last Day. “Stop!” I shouted to the wheels as purple light speared down. But the eyes were turned away and didn’t respond.
From the mouth of the lair came a bloodthirsty roar.
Chapter 30
The river of energy and Light flowed beneath me, through me, floating me along the current. In the world of humans, lightning hit the ground again, a huge burst. My body jerked as the power lashed through me. Eli yelped. Almost as an afterthought, I directed the energies passing through the stone beneath me into the amulets at my waist.
“You use the omega-sight.” Amethyst, her eagle face cold, watched me in the otherness. “I have done this. I showed you how. I will be punished.” She bowed her head.
Below her, swords clashed, seraph-steel and demon-iron. Forcas, blinded and bloodied, thrust up through the violet light of the wheels’ weapon and stabbed Raziel. Bright blood gushed. Raziel placed a hand over his wound. Slowly he dropped into the river, landing on his knees, the water-lava chest high. The weapon firing at Forcas ceased. The footsteps of the Dragon shook the ground with an earthquake. Dust rained down, pattering on me, and cracks opened in the earth. But beside me, the river flowed. The river of time? I didn’t care what he called it, Raziel was dying. “You can save them,” the wheels said plaintively. “You can save them all. Join with Raziel.”
Amethyst shrieked in fear. “Punished. I will be punished.”
“Blasphemy. Mages cannot do this,” Raziel said, his voice weak.
“Not blasphemy,” the wheels sang. “Hope. If a seraph and a mage join their prime amulets, they become one spirit, as the seraph and my cherub became one.”
“We mate, I die,” I said.
“Not mate body to body. That you may not do,” the wheels said. “But merge.”
From the entrance to the hellhole, from the rocks and the ground, emanated a suffocating yellow-orange light, the heart of the mountain itself, polluted, malevolent. Death and plagues. Whatever was coming was something big. Fear tightened my body.
“Throw off your amulets,” the wheels cajoled.
I looked at myself in the otherness. Every bone ached. Every muscle, every sinew, every half-healed wound. Even my blood ached, what there was of it. The wound in my side was a swarm of writhing worms and my life force flowed out through it to Forcas.
“We can try,” Raziel said. Floating in the river of time, he gripped an amulet, one that looked much like a prime, and tore it from a thong around his neck. I ripped my prime amulet off, flipped it around, and pressed it into his palm.
Both worlds fell away. Light, sound, smells, textures blasted at me, smothered me, flailed me like barbed chains, rolled me like water, and trapped me there, dying.
I fell. And fell. A thought flashed in my awareness. What had Forcas said when he held me in his claw? Something about the whole flower. Rose? My twin?
The otherness crashed around me. Raziel pulled me beneath his wing, against his side. Surprised, he murmured into my ear, “A third place, but not a place. A here-not here.”
I had no idea what he meant. I was too tired to care.
Raziel was a crimson flame in the lava of everything and nothing. Standing, he drew his sword, shouting a battle cry, a note of true sound, a gong of challenge in a language I couldn’t understand. I saw the tones as they left his throat, floated a moment, and entered the river. Turning my head, I saw Forcas in the real world. It bent its body in a violent arc, and buried its fangs in Raziel’s neck, clinging to him. In this third reality, a netting of conjure emanated from Forcas through the air to me, like the web of a spider. A vein of the web traveled up to the Mistress, holding the ship and cherub in a conjured snare. I understood what the new sight was revealing. I had called them all to me. I was killing them all.
In the otherness, flowing down the river toward me, came another Darkness. A monstrous thing, so huge it blotted out a third of the nothingness-sky. Around its neck was a glowing chain and, where the links touched, blue light flared, but instead of harming the beast, it gave the Darkness power, pulling power from Raziel, from Amethyst, from Zadkiel. From Barak. It drew power from me. The chain smelled of Lucas, of the blood of Mole Man. It smelled of Uncle Lem, my foster father, of Gramma, and of three seraphs.
Raziel hissed a breath and we understood together, mind-to-mind, knowing, what was happening. The Dragon wore the chain Forcas had forged, the chain made with the blood of Mole Man’s progeny and smeared with all of our blood. Forcas had given it to his Master, the antichain to the one that had bound the Dragon in Mole Man’s battle. With this weapon the Dragon was freeing itself.
From somewhere, I heard Eli whisper, “Oh, crap, crap, crap.”
The wild mage-stones on my chest vibrated, humming with the flowing energies. Before me, from the surface of the river, a finger of lavender energy rose from the water-lava-energy flow. A long, sinuous snake of power with purple eyes, many eyes, hundreds of them. A snake body composed of eyes. I understood. It was a vision of the life force of the wheels. Amethyst’s wheels. They were alive. Sentient. Separate from the cherub. “Yes. Your wheels,” it sang. “Yours. Call us.”
Around the wheels Flames whirled, flashing. Seraphs came toward us, moving fast through the river. Zadkiel and Cheriour. One—Barak? — was silver. Another was emerald green, one was golden, another was black as jet. Inside the wheels, Amethyst lay covered with her wings, her eyes all closed. Malashe-el lay on her chest, crying, his fists clenched in her feathers. In the place-no place of the otherness, I touched the snake with my sword and pointed at the mouth of the hellhole. From it a bright orange light issued, light filled with shadows and Dark things that writhed. “Seal it up,” I said.
“This beast has great power,” the wheels sang to me. “I cannot do this thing alone.” The seraphs all watched me, waiting.
“Seal it up,” I said to them, not really sure what I was asking.
As one, they all drew swords and flew into the hellhole.
�
�Breathe, Thorn,” I heard Eli say. “Saints’ balls. The seraph is dying too.”
In front of me, Minor Flames danced. I watched them from the aspect of death, lying on the stone of the Trine. Behind me, Forcas was dying, and he was taking Mistress Amethyst, Raziel, and me with him. I recognized the trap as a version of the one that had imprisoned the cherub for a century. I figured I had one chance in a thousand that it could be broken by Minor Flames. Maybe one in a million. Or the anticonjure might kill us. Or I could die before I got done. Or hell would freeze over and I’d do it right by chance.
“Can you see the conjure that binds the cherub, the wheels, the seraph, and me to Forcas?” I asked the Flames.
They bobbed up and down. “Yesss,” they hissed, the clean, pure hiss of fire.
“Can you…” I envisioned a saw composed of blue flames, diamond-bladed, cutting the threads of the Dark conjure. “Can you do this?”
“Yoursss to command,” they said together.
“Do it,” I said. The Flames divided into three batches of five—surely not an auspicious number—and attacked the incantation.
On Earth, Eli cradled me against his chest. Nearby, Durbarge rolled slowly to his knees, his face ashen with blood loss. I had meant to kill him, I remembered, to save Thaddeus Bartholomew. Too late. We were all dead anyway. He stumbled across the broken ground to the rocket launcher that Rickie had dropped what seemed eons ago.
To Joseph Barefoot the assey said, “If we can fire these shoulder-mounted rockets into the hellhole, the nuclear warheads might seal it up.”
“Nukes?” Joseph said. “Mighta been nice to know we were carrying some real firepower.”
“Yeah,” Durbarge said, his voice so tired it whistled on his breath. “Yeah. Well. Last-ditch weapons to stop that thing from getting free.”
