by Faith Hunter
"Just trying to figure out how many focal stones I could get out of this if it was cut free-form, and how much more profit we could make if we sent it off to be faceted." I stroked the stone, warm against my palm. "We'd lose carat weight but gain value if we sent it off."
"If it's gem quality," Jacey said.
"It's gem quality. I know it." I held a rock from another box up to the light. Their pulsing energies had achieved a harmony once the stones were close together again. They whispered and sang. I held the stone to my nose and sniffed, but the fragrance wasn't physical, not something my nose could sense. Not something humans could detect.
"Here's a letter," Audric said, "in with these papers." His voice was the mellow tone of an ancient brass church gong. He handed a slim packet to Rupert. My best friend brushed off the sawdust, and the motion of his hand was lissome, exquisite beyond bearing. His grace moved me to tears; they gathered in my eyes, dazzled in the gleam of the rocks.
My mind again retreated, hiding. I watched as Rupert tore an envelope, his fingers strong, dirty with the smut of solder and fire, Stanhope indexes longer than the middle ones. When I dragged my eyes to his face, I saw that his flesh glowed with heat and vivacity, as if I saw the cadence of his lifeblood beneath. His mouth moved, speaking, and I fastened on it as his sculpted lips shifted, poetry made flesh. "Thorn?" The word was drawn out, the last note in a plaintive song. As it fell on my ear, I heard beneath it the call of Lolo singing a nursery rhyme, her voice a cross cadence to the beat of the life force in Rupert. The drums and flute of her acolytes were penetrating rhythm in the childhood ditty. "Break dat call of siren song. Ring dat bell and right dat wrong. Blood and bone and seraph fire, drag her back from dangerous mire."
Deep in my skull I heard a crack, another, again and again, the sound of stone being split, broken, battered into dust. Suddenly I was free. The world spun and I swayed, catching myself before I fell. I was sitting on the workbench. Crack the Stone of Ages! What happened? I placed the rock on the table and jumped down, landing hard. My bones rattled, my joints stiff. My face burned.
Words bubbled out from that logical, protected, liberated part of me. "It'll cost us more than fifteen thousand dollars to have them cut and faceted, without a guarantee the resultant stones will have a value commensurate with the expenditure. And while we won't make as much if we work them as focals following the stone's natural contours, we'll retain a larger total carat value from each fist. As nuggets and free-form, we can work them into our existing lines, creating an upscale, high-end product that I think will sell well in today's market. I already have some ideas on designs." My babble clipped off abruptly. "What?"
"That's where you've been?" Jacey asked, her tone incredulous. "Doing math and cost-profit analyses? Designing a high-end line?"
I looked at her, my mind locked firmly away from the overpowering stones, buried in Lolo's sweet harmonies, the music of her distant mind balanced and bolstering. "What?" What have I been doing? How long? Between the mage-heat and the stone—
"I've been calling—" She spluttered, starting again. "For five minutes, you've been—were." She gnashed her teeth and ground to a stop. I was certain I had never seen anyone gnash her teeth. "I slapped your face," she said. "Hard." I touched my cheek. It stung.
"You were gone," Rupert said, his face normal again, without the otherworldly life it had possessed earlier. But he was worried. Over his shoulder Audric watched me, not falling for the innocent expression I forced onto my face. I didn't know what had happened, but now wasn't the time to consider it. Now I had to cover, guard, and protect them from what I was. I knew my comments about the value of the stones were dead-on.
Audric handed me a letter marked with Lucas' distinctive, crabbed handwriting. While I couldn't read it all, I did make out a few lines and read them aloud. " 'I found this in Grampa's something I can't make out. 'It was marked with a plat-map of the Trine. Ask Thorn what it is. I think it's…" something, something, something… 'valuable. Two lines of gibberish are followed by 'If I disappear… and more gibberish. Farther down the page are the words, 'Don't go… something, something… 'police and elders. There's a new Power in the hills… some more gibberish, then 'and I think some went over to it. All the Stanhopes are in danger. Keep… something… 'safe. " L followed by a slash was Lucas' hurried signature.
"The Trine. That's where Ciana saw her daywalker," Audric said.
"Daywalker?" Jacey said, alarmed.
"Tell you later," Audric said.
"Cops I can see, but elders involved with a Minor Power?" Rupert said. "No way."
"You saw the video," I said. "Something happened to him, just like this letter warns."
I set the sheet down and wiped my fingers as if it had left an oily residue. Audric lifted the page. "Does this say he's called for a seraphic investigation?" he pointed to a line.
I couldn't see words in the squiggled text, except for a single s. "Maybe."
"Why would the Stanhopes be in danger?" Jacey asked, tucking a strand of sweat-damp hair behind her ear. She was no longer watching me, but I wasn't fooled that she had forgotten my fugue state. I'd hear about it later. My face smarted where she had struck it.
"The Mole Man," Rupert said, taking back the letter and tracing two new words. "Something here about the Mole Man."
"And?"
"The Mole Man was our great-grandfather, Benaiah."
"For real? You got a warrior in your family line?" Jacey seemed to comprehend the term, drawing conclusions I didn't understand.
"Mole Man?" I asked. It wasn't a heroic-sounding name.
"The name they gave Benaiah Stanhope after a not-so-small mopping-up operation in the hills at the end of the Last War. He went with a group of winged warriors underground, into the earth, in the dark," he emphasized, "and the Cherokee named him that. He went in after a Major Power and its human helpers and half-human offspring, the Dark humans. Some say the Power was holed up beneath the Gunthor's place in a cavern. Others say it was beneath the Trine." Rupert shrugged and quoted, his voice acquiring the singsong of scripture. "Bright light shone from the earth, three days and three nights. And the mountains cracked open, and Light and Darkness spilled out over the land in battle dire. The townspeople prayed. Seraphs came back out. Mole Man never did."
"They left him?" I couldn't keep the horror from my voice. "Underground?" With the exception of salt mines and three shielded mines in North America protected by seraphic decree, including Henderson Shielded Mine, no one went beneath the ground. Not ever.
All minerals except for salt, which Darkness hated, were strip-mined, the only way to keep the miners safe. Darkness ruled underground, just as Light ruled above. It wasn't hell and heaven, but parallels for places the seraphs insisted existed elsewhere, or elsewhen.
"I remember that from grade school," Jacey said, her brown eyes bright. "A warrior of the Host claimed that Benaiah died to save the High Host's second in command, offering himself in human sacrifice to bind the Major Power." Jacey reached out and took a fist-sized slab of amethyst in her hand. "The demon was supposed to be a massive being with the head of a lion and the body of a lizard, with human hands. And the usual stink of sulfur and rot. Legend says the town reeked of it for weeks. The beast—a dragon—was given to the Host, bound in chains that were drenched with Benaiah's blood. So they say."
"But it was reported that several lesser Powers got away, vowing vengeance on the Mole Man and his progeny, unto the everlasting," Rupert said softly.
"Yeah. I remember that too," Jacey said.
"And seraphs were seen entering the earth for weeks after," Rupert finished the story. "No one knows why. Or so they say."
"Or so they say" was one of the usual disclaimers after any war story, because at the time no one wrote anything down. Only those things captured and recorded by the film media had been preserved, broadcast across the world via satellites and stored with crystal digital technology. At the time, seraphs didn't bother with public rel
ations. They didn't explain what was happening or what they were doing. Explanations were the guesswork of witnesses. To the current day, no one knew what had happened in many parts of the earth. No one had bothered to keep a written, linear record of the end of the world. Supposedly, it was the end of time.
Except it hadn't been the end of the world. Time still dragged on, and much history had been lost. Earlier technologies hadn't survived, leaving only newer CDS recordings. Rock and roll, soul, R & B, some rap and hip-hop, and religious and gospel music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries had been kept in storage, along with many films and old TV shows. And of course, the video of the Apocalypse, plagues, and battles of the Last War, which were still replayed every year on the anniversary.
"The Trine still belongs to your family, right?" I asked. "When Rupert nodded, I said, "Your great-great-grandfather bought a lot of land after the Last Battle, paying pennies on the dollar. And Ciana saw something on the Trine that might have been a daywalker."
"Or might not," Audric cautioned.
"And these stones came from the Trine."
"Maybe," Audric said, the voice of reason, the devil's advocate, though that phrase was fraught with meaning.
I ignored him. "So the Trine may be the glue in all that's happening, including Lucas' attack. Does anything else about the Trine come to mind?" I asked, proud that I sounded reasonable and calm, though I was still half aware of Lolo's chant just below my normal hearing, an insulation from the stone.
Rupert thought a moment. "I remember mining companies offered to buy land or mineral rights, back when Grampa was young, before the ice made it all inaccessible. Far as I know, he turned them down and we never heard anything else about it."
He tapped an ear, sending a silver earring swinging, and met my eyes. "The Trine didn't always look like it does now," he explained. "Once it was a single rounded hill with a lower elevation. Its trees were harvested to build the railroad in the early nineteen hundreds. It was farmed, stripped bare, and left fallow several times. At the first plague, it was a residential area. In Mole Man's war, the peaks blasted up from the earth, raised by the battles underground. With the ice cap so thick, it would be dangerous to try to get up there."
I had seen ice caps up close on the trek home from the swap meet, miniglaciers, sheets of ice hundreds of feet thick. Gaps had formed on all the highest peaks of the Appalachians, and recently, one had caused a disaster. Midsummer, unexpected temperatures in the sixties had undermined the caps. One had shifted and slid, burying an entire town, killing everyone. No one had even attempted to dig the town out from the thousands of tons of ice and debris.
Now there was talk of solutions. So far, there were three possibilities. The first two involved getting seraph help or neo-mage help to melt ice caps that threatened towns. The third method was evacuation. Acquiring seraph assistance might be impossible, due to their current lack of interest in human affairs. Contracting with mages was going to be expensive. Very expensive. One town, upon hearing the cost of neomage help, had simply packed up and moved, abandoning everything. Evacuating had left its well-off citizens nearly penniless refugees. Saving Mineral City could leave us equally broke.
The elders had held several town meetings but a course of action hadn't been decided upon. If accord was reached to get mage help, I was hoping I had time to get away before anyone came. An extended vacation to a tropical isle sounded a lot better than almost certain death.
"Lucas wants to buy neomage help," Rupert said, "using our inheritance to pay for it. He wants to offer the town a loan they can pay back over twenty years. Jason wants to sell it to the highest bidder and run, and let the new town owners worry about the ice. He needs money, as usual, and sees saving the town as wasting his nest egg. And then there's this one town leader who wants to buy the town at pennies on the dollar."
"What about you?" Jacey asked, settling into a cushioned chair with needle and thread. She began beading a patterned, punctured strip of leather with glass seed beads.
"I sided with Lucas in paying for mages."
Unable to help myself, I picked up a lavender stone, one side almost fuzzy with crystalline shavings. Light from bulbs and from the high alley windows seemed to be trapped in the stone. Power called to me from within it, pulsing with something close to life. That something was almost creation power, but wasn't, not quite. Lolo's block insulated me from it, but still, the might stored in the stone pulled at me, singing a haunting melody.
"Mineral rights, huh?" Audric said. "Bet a mining company would love to have the rights to this. For that matter, I'd like them, but I'm tapped out for the next five years with the salvage of Sugar Grove. If a big mining company knew about this much stone, they'd strip the mountain bare to get it. And they could pay for neomage help to do it too."
A spurt of possessiveness wrenched through me at his words. This is mine! I turned the stone again to the light, one palm cupping it tenderly. This piece was larger than my two hands, a flame-shaped rock, its light spilling out between my fingers. Warmth ran down my arms like honey.
"There's only one question that really gets me about all this," Rupert said, "and that's why, if Grampa knew the stone was on the Trine, he didn't mine it himself. And why is it in lead-lined boxes, soldered shut? Lucas had to open them, and then had to figure out how to solder them shut again, and my brother isn't the most handy man. And where did Lucas find them? I've been over that house with a fine-tooth comb several times since Grampa died."
"That's more than one question," Jacey said complacently.
"Maybe you should call your gramma and ask her all that," Audric suggested.
Rupert shivered dramatically at the thought. "Over my cold, dead, and decaying body."
"Okay. I see that point." Audric grinned. "So start with your grampa."
"He's dead," Rupert said, being deliberately difficult.
"Start with his papers," I said. "He never threw anything away. You could try to get all of them and search them first."
The three glanced at one another, a shared look of warning and worry that concerned and excluded me. Jacey's eyes were positively accusing, and way too speculative. She stabbed the piece of leather with special force. "What?" I asked.
Audric tapped one of the metal ammo boxes on the workbench. "That's what's in this one. Rupert's grandfather's estate papers. Lots of them. We were talking about them while you were… elsewhere."
Oops.
"We could call for a seraphic investigation," Rupert said. "If enough of us make the call, like Lucas' new wife did, then they'd have to come. And then we can ask about the peaks and the ice caps too."
No seraphs. Not in Mineral City.
"You think he really married her?" Jacey asked, redirecting the flow of conversation.
"No. Jane's a head case. Lucas knew that."
"We have an alternative," Audric said. "A state cop." The two men shared a glance.
"Thaddeus Bartholomew," Rupert said. "We met yesterday. I didn't particularly like him, but of the cops who stopped in after Lucas' attack, he was the least obnoxious. He's a Hand of the Law, which gives him more contacts than the local cops have, so maybe…"
I overlooked the hesitation in Rupert's voice, set down the stone, and took a deep breath, the first breath I remembered for hours. Calling in the kylen was dangerous for me, but the alternative was a death sentence. "Call him. He's staying at the hotel, he isn't seraphic, and he can help."
"And why don't you want to call in a seraph?" The look of suspicion on Jacey's face was unwavering.
"Because if a seraph makes a proclamation, we're stuck with it even if we don't like it. And because a seraph, if one comes, might decide that Mineral City deserves punishment," I said. When a seraph pulled a sword in punishment, people died. Lots of people, nearly half of them, all of them over the age of six. And a seraph would recognize me in a heartbeat. But I kept that part to myself. I had given something away today, something about me, about my heritage.
/>
"No seraphs. Not yet." Audric sided with me, but he too had a certain speculative look about him.
I pulled the jumpsuit back on. "You may want to wrap that rock up and put it in the storeroom," I said, casual words and casual tone, giving away none of the discord I felt at the thought of the lovely rock being put away in the cold and dark. "It's valuable enough that it shouldn't be left lying around."
From a bag of rough, I pulled a hunk of moss agate in soft shades of green. I had last worked the rough six months ago, but now held it to the light and turned on the wet saw. The roaring whine shut out my friends. I settled safety glasses on my face and chose a triangular segment to crop free. Securing the rock in clamps, I maneuvered the whirring blade and began the tedious drudgery of cutting small beads.
I was aware the moment the others wrapped up my amethyst and put it away. Pretending I was free of its call was a fool's lie. I longed for the stone. Hungered.
Chapter 7
When I opened my Book of Workings, I was upstairs, eating a bowl of thawed, sliced peaches. The stone downstairs and rising mage-heat had me feeling distinctly uncomfortable, which was ridiculous. There had to be a way to control it, to put a lid on heat, or Enclave would become an orgy every time a seraph flew within a hundred miles.
For the first time, I read the warnings and explanations in the front of the book and discovered something I must have been taught in the early years of training but had forgotten. Only in warfare should I use scripture in incantations. That explained why none of my conjures worked exactly as planned. Clearly, I should have studied the book as Lolo demanded. There was some neat stuff in it. I could almost hear the witchy-woman scold me.
I was halfway through when the cop arrived. Even a story up, even with snow blanketing every stone for miles around, I knew the moment Thaddeus Bartholomew walked onto the premises. Instantly I understood that asking him here had been a big, big mistake. His first footstep below was like a gong of flaming need, resonating through me.
