Amulet Rampant

by M. C. A. Hogarth

  Jahir was looking down, and said nothing immediately. He cleared his throat. “Merited, I judge.” Quieter, “I… am not sure I can do what you are asking of me.”

  Lisinthir trailed his fingertips up, just enough to set them on his cousin’s chin.

  “I know it seems ridiculous that I might have found it easier to lie beneath you, but… walking into a place like this…” Jahir lifted his eyes, and not all the frame of the elaborate mask could distract from the anxiety there. There was too much predator in him, Lisinthir thought regretfully, to fail to focus on distress. “It’s crowded. I now have a… a rogue talent. And…” A pained laugh. “I have seen how people dance in places like this, cousin. I don’t know that I can move with that much abandon.”

  “I am grateful that you trust me enough to reveal these things to me,” Lisinthir said, shading the words white and silver. He let his thumb brush lightly over the edge of his cousin’s lower lip. “Will you also trust me enough to bring you through this experience?”

  “Is it so important that I must?”

  Just like that, he knew. “When it was a dance, no. Even when it was intended as elaborate foreplay for what I intended for you later. But now… yes, I think it is.”

  “Because?” Jahir asked, quiet.

  “Because,” Lisinthir answered. “I want you to put that rogue talent to use in an entirely new fashion.”

  The conversation had driven the wounded look from his cousin’s eyes, at least. Once again, Jahir was thinking—and wary. “That being.”

  “Unlike you, I have no qualms about dancing in a crowd full of euphoric Pelted celebrants.” Lisinthir grinned, let that grin fade. “So borrow that from me.”

  “Borrow it.”

  “Yes,” Lisinthir said. “You can sense my emotions. You have used that knowledge to let me guide your hand on the reins of a horse—very well. We know now that you can evoke a physical communion through this ability of yours. Let us see if you can maintain an emotional one. Borrow my ability to enjoy the experience while we’re there.”

  “Your courage,” Jahir answered, quiet. “That is what I lack.”

  Lisinthir snorted. “My exhibitionist streak, more like.”

  “Your…!” Jahir stopped, laughed. “You are no exhibitionist, cousin.” He paused. “Are you?”

  Lisinthir grinned at him. “Let us find out, shall we? An hour or two of you siphoning off my responses should provide plenty of fodder for psychoanalysis. I shall expect a report of you later.”

  “As if I will not be busy with other distractions then.” Jahir paused. “You are serious. You are inviting me to spy on your emotional state.”

  “I am inviting you to use my emotional state to bolster your own. To see if it is possible.”

  “And if it’s not?”

  “Then,” Lisinthir said, “We return, and I proceed to find some new way to embarrass you into embracing your physical body.”

  Jahir frowned, looked down the corridor. “And if it is possible….”

  “Then you have a new weapon in your arsenal, do you not? Or at least, you’ll have spent some time profitably in practicing your new and unwanted talent, which is the only way you’ll be able to control it in the future.” Lisinthir let his fingers trail down until they rested flat over the notch at the base of his cousin’s throat, where the clawtips could prick through both layers of fabric. “Start now.”

  “Now?”

  “Yes, now. While we are in relative peace, and you can struggle with how headlong you want to fall into the current of my emotions. Once we arrive at our destination you may be too busy with other stimuli.”

  “And this bothers you not at all,” Jahir murmured.

  “It’s you, cousin. You are welcome. So. Reach for me.”

  Just like that: Reach for me. Had his cousin always been so open? Was it openness at all, or merely pragmatism? To Lisinthir’s thinking, their talents conveyed upon them advantages that were there to be used. One made the most of one’s strengths and minimized one’s flaws. Reach for it, as if what he asked was some feat of strength rather than an abomination before God and Goddess. Except that by Lisinthir’s thinking, it was no such thing. And Vasiht’h would have agreed with Lisinthir… not only agreed, but insisted it was a divine gift.

  And if the two people he trusted most disagreed with him, he surely owed them the courtesy of re-examining his premises.

  So, he reached. He was only dimly aware of the faculties that permitted it, but he could sense his cousin’s edges as if Lisinthir was sheathed in heat and smoke and something that tasted on his tongue like blood and smelled like ambergris. It was very little like the mindline, which bloomed in him as if Vasiht’h lived in his body with him. Lisinthir was outside of him, and exotic.

  He had not wanted to enjoy the communion that had flared between them during their afternoon ride. He didn’t want to enjoy this. But there was something heady about drinking from the well of Lisinthir’s confidence, knowing that it wasn’t his but that he could wrap it around himself like a robe against the cold.

  “And?” Lisinthir asked, gentle.

  “You have such distinct edges,” Jahir said, and didn’t know where the observation had come from.

  “Dull knives are useless for their purpose,” Lisinthir said, and having turned this talent on him, Jahir could sense that it had been intended twice: as true observation, and as titillation.

  “Still teasing,” Jahir said, cheeks too hot.

  “I promise, cousin,” Lisinthir said. “There will be a knife. I intend to take you with me to pick up the one I’ve had made for you.”

  Jahir stopped abruptly, lost the connection between them, lost everything to the inchoate needs that tangled in him.

  Lisinthir stopped as well. “Did you think I would tease you about this? When you need so badly?”

  “I didn’t think you’d…”

  “Be willing?”

  “I don’t know,” Jahir admitted, throat closed around his voice. “There are things that shouldn’t be encouraged.”

  For once his cousin remained at a remove, rather than closing the distance between them and addling Jahir’s head with his proximity, his touch. “It may be that this need is a manifestation of your need to mortify yourself. If it is, I will not indulge it. I am not here to help you unmake yourself. But if it is something else… then that, we should know.”

  “Should we?” Jahir asked, low.

  “You would live in ignorance?”

  “No,” Jahir admitted. “No. But you have observed I am… very good at compartmentalizing.”

  “If by that you mean you tend to trap your pain into very small boxes that you can shove into dark and unexamined corners… then yes. I agree that you are. The problem, cousin, is that you also trap your needs into those very small boxes… and until we open them, we won’t be able to tell which you’ve hidden.”

  “You make all these things sound so reasonable.” Jahir sighed and admitted, shadowing the words, “I don’t like being this conflicted, cousin. I would not have called myself your equal in decisiveness before, but this…”

  “Truly is a wound.” Lisinthir did come closer then, slid an arm around him, pulled him close. The hand that came to rest beneath the braid on the back of his neck was somehow more intimate than any kiss… perhaps because it had been set there with the obvious intent of guarding his spine. “Mine is a rough healing, I am afraid, but I think nothing less will serve you now.”

  “No.” Jahir smiled a little, thinking of the dormant mindline. “Vasiht’h has been at work on me for years now with a gentle hand. Sometimes one needs the surgeon’s touch, not the therapist’s.”

  “A bit of a muddle in the metaphor there, cousin.”

  “You have that effect on me.”

  Lisinthir chuckled softly. “Come. What we do is needed.”

  Jahir sighed and followed. But as they walked, he concentrated on borrowing the cloak of his cousin’s assurance and winding it ev
er more tightly around his anxious psyche.

  The club was called Exodus, the name emblazoned above the dark maw of its entrance in fluorescent blue. By the time they’d threaded the crowds still filling the Trenches, Jahir’s eyes had acclimated to the weirdling light that illumined this would-be underworld. Strands of dimly glowing bulbs shaped like stars or globes draped the galleria near its shops and restaurants, but the descent took them to places lit only by blacklights and their effect on pale clothes and fur. It was as if they’d dived into an abyssal cavern, one thronged by schools of luminescent fish, and every casual brush sent a shock through him: gossamers of emotions, broken thoughts, and a gestalt that seemed born of their desire to be here, in the club district.

  There was music. It pounded against his skin like a second heart from outside the doors; he could only imagine what it would be like inside. It was not the source of that unifying pressure, but a symptom of it, and the beat seemed to echo through every person he pushed past.

  Naturally his cousin remained sanguine, like a predator of the depths cutting past knots of people and trailing their sudden avaricious gazes. It was hard to blame them when Lisinthir wore his horns with the authority of a dragon. Jahir couldn’t imagine what it was like for strangers, but he knew how his cousin had won the right to that confidence and watching him reveal it was… affecting. Gathering Lisinthir’s emotions brought the taste of blood back into his mouth, a metallic tingle that stung his nostrils. He inhaled, hard, and caught his cousin’s hand before they could be separated as they passed into the club.

  The crowd outside had been nothing compared to the press within. There were arteries that allowed flow around the edges of the dance floor, carrying people to and from the bars and the restrooms. But the floor was everything, and it was three stories tall, staggered like the seating in a theater. There were so many people dancing he saw them first as a single writhing mass.

  He nearly shut down then. He might have, and not known it. But Lisinthir swept him off to one of the darkened corners and held him, and it was less embrace and more the hold of a healer immobilizing a panicked patient.

  “Breathe,” Lisinthir murmured.

  “There are so many people…!”

  “Stop thinking about them and breathe.”

  Jahir closed his eyes. The music was physically shaking him, up through the soles, in through his back.

  “Breathe,” Lisinthir said again, and because this time it was a command, Jahir obeyed, let his cousin protect him—ridiculously—from the terrors of a club.

  “Don’t,” Lisinthir added. “Keep breathing. And don’t fight the music. Let it have you.”

  The words sent a shudder through him that worked against the rhythm, like the ripples from separate pebbles dropped in a pond. “I can’t do—”

  “Stop talking,” Lisinthir said, and shook his head. “Always with the talking, cousin.” He rested his clawed fingertips on Jahir’s lips. “Stop.”

  He stopped, let the music thrash him, over and over. The relentlessness of it reminded him of more carnal things and his knees weakened.

  “Better,” his cousin murmured. “Now, fall further into me.”

  “Further?”

  “You are already in me, or you wouldn’t be able to hear me over all this noise so easily.” Lisinthir smiled, and the mask transformed mischief into wickedness. “So yes. Further forward. So I might teach you something.”

  He hesitated until a hand snaked to his back and pressed the claws against his thin shirts. He stiffened.

  “Relax,” Lisinthir said, and because it was a command, and because those claws were threatening, he gave in… and discovered, swamped in his cousin’s emotions, that the one thing Lisinthir didn’t feel was overwhelmed. He was holding all the people around him at bay effortlessly, and the ease of it nearly jerked him from the communion. The clawtip pressure forced him back.

  “I don’t understand how you do it!”

  Lisinthir sighed and used his free hand to touch Jahir’s lips. “It is because you live in your mind too much, cousin. If you lived in your body you would be able to tell the difference between the inside of your own head and the insides of others’.”

  “It can’t be that easy,” Jahir said.

  “It is simple,” Lisinthir corrected. “But easy? For you? No. And that is why we are going to dance and you are going to live in your body. Because I am going to make you.”

  Before Jahir could ask how, Lisinthir pulled him out of the shadows and into the dance, and it was that: one dance, a single thing made of hundreds of bodies… and his cousin guided him to its heart as if he was carving them a path because, Jahir realized through the communion, Lisinthir was: was testing his own new abilities by deflecting people just enough to keep them from jostling them. He wanted to say so—wanted to say that he understood that the dance club was important now for his cousin as well, as a way to test himself—but then he was in the middle of it and in Lisinthir’s arms.

  There was no stepping back. There was no room. And the hands on him were unyielding, and through them he fell into his cousin—into the confidence of dragons, and their hungers, and their pleasure at his submission. There was nothing shy about a dragon.

  Let go, all of it hissed in Chatcaavan.

  Let go, the pattern whispered, in their birth tongue.

  Lisinthir leaned into him and said into his ear, in the limitless potential of Universal: “Let go.”

  He was masked in his disguise. His cousin, unveiled by his. Power borrowed made him strong, and through it he sensed the control that kept the space around them clear. Lisinthir’s hands pet him into his body, and seated there he pushed away the thoughts and emotions of everyone around them, until all that remained was the music, his body, and power… and his body was not the least of those things. The sweat that made the mask cling to his cheeks. The pulse, so swift now it beat in time with the music, and so hard he could feel it in his neck and wrists. His answer to his cousin’s desire, painfully intense, and the pinprick promise of the clawtips on his hip, on his neck.

  The world spun away, and he danced.

  How long they spent there, in that cocoon of perfect synchronicity, he didn’t know. But his mouth was parched, and as always his cousin seemed to know and drew him through the mass of dancers to the bar, choosing its farthest corner at the wall. In that darkness, Lisinthir pulled him close by the back of his neck and didn’t kiss him—didn’t kiss him, which was frustration beyond bearing, and yet he savored the frustration, lived in it, felt a peace in surrendering to it.

  “Better,” Lisinthir murmured, and this time it was a comment that was also a question.

  “Better,” he agreed. And then, quieter, “You are testing your power.”

  “Not only that,” Lisinthir said, “I am using your power to aim mine.” Into Jahir’s silence, he ordered for them both, pitching his voice to be heard over the music... which they hadn’t needed to do amongst themselves. How was that possible? Were they communicating the words through skin? Through air? Lounging against the bar, one elbow on it and his palm propping up his cheek, Lisinthir smiled a dragon’s smile at him, too dangerous to be so seductive. “We are here to learn the limits of these new abilities, yes? And it is easy enough to use mine for obvious purposes. I do not have your view into the hearts of others, though. So I have been seeing if it is possible to ride your power the way you can ride mine.”

  “And can you?” Jahir asked, startled.

  Lisinthir nodded, just once, slowly.

  “God and Lady. How... how is that possible?”

  Their drinks arrived. He had water, which was all that he wanted; Lisinthir had eschewed alcohol in favor of tonic water, from the smell.

  “I couldn’t tell you. What theory the priests could teach us was scant, you’ll recall. Certainly nothing like this was in the catechism.”

  “Save as proof of sin and evil?”

  Lisinthir snorted.

  “But no,” Jahir agree
d. “What is it like, then? What do you do?”

  “If I am mindful,” Lisinthir said, “and you are already connected with me, it is as if there’s a field around you that paints everyone with their emotional state. I can look through it and see what you see. Imperfectly, and with effort. And with limitations I don’t quite understand. I can read the dancers on the mezzanine, though the ones nearer us but hidden behind other dancers are occluded... perhaps by one another, visually or metaphysically.”

  “And anyone you can see....”

  “So far, I can nudge. Not by controlling their bodies, oddly... it is almost as if I push the air between them. That makes it easier, which is in fact how I discovered it. I was straining for distance, and ceasing to afflict individual bodies allows for a significant increase in space covered.”

  The thought that this ability might reach near-magical levels of manipulation was so unbelievable that he found himself simply accepting it. How much more fantastic was it for them to be able to expand air as to control people’s limbs? And yet... “You are conducting an experiment on strangers. Without their consent.”

  Lisinthir had a sip of the tonic water. “Yes.” When he lifted his eyes, Jahir saw the reflection of that anger in them from the forest, the one that whispered of things he had never seen and had no desire to see. And because he couldn’t answer the challenge in Lisinthir’s eyes without submitting to the shattering of that ignorance—because he half-feared that if he saw the atrocities that had been visited on innocents, he would be even more committed to the use of their talents than his cousin—he let it go. “You are not tripping them, at least?”

  Lisinthir laughed. “In this crowd? If I did, they’d bounce off someone before they fell. But no, I was not trying to tangle their feet. Just to open spaces between them, the way I was doing with us.”

  “It worked,” Jahir said.

  Lisinthir sipped from his cup. “It worked. So are you appalled?”

  Was he? “I am parched near to hoarseness. I am exhausted. I am driven almost mad with frustration that you are sitting at arm’s length from me. But no, I am not appalled. I think... I am awed.”