Talisman

by Krystyne Price

  He was now the High Wizard. A shroud of despair settled around him as he pushed himself to his feet. Rubbing his palms together in a circular motion, friction built exponentially until a softly glowing white-blue sphere of light rose from his palm, no taller or wider than the width of his hand. In five strides he was out of the forest, standing once more upon the path leading to the rock face.

  Tuning his ears to the environment, he closed his eyes and tried to make out anything that would tell him something or someone was nearby. But the night was typically silent. There were no more insects or animals left alive on the dying planet thanks to the Vlovek invasion that had happened so many years before his birth. But there were no sounds of those invading demons, either.

  The spot where the portal had so briefly appeared was burned into Bijan’s brain. He approached the area cautiously, and while he could feel the faintest of static waves lingering in the air, there was no way for him to re-open it. Time and space, Kana had taught, were not as linear when dealing with other dimensions as they were upon the surface of Shinzar. There were rules that seemed strange and often made no logical sense, yet existed all the same.

  “Rule Number One,” Bijan whispered. “A portal may not be opened to the same dimension within thirty-nine hours of a previous portal opening to the same dimension.” Lifting both hands to his head, he raked them over shoulder-length wavy black hair before stomping his feet in frustration and letting out a string of curses his mentor would most likely have chastised him for. Beloved Kana.

  Bijan felt the shroud lift and straightened his back. His shoulders squared and his chin rose in defiance. Kana had given him his power. He had granted him the title of High Wizard. Above all, he had trusted him with Shinzar, and with the fate of his only child. Bijan took a deep breath and quickly found a familiar path. He needed to get to the cave where they’d been hiding out before the Vlovek attack. There was one thing Bijan was certain Mulmak hadn’t found within Kana’s abandoned cave, and it was something he needed before he did anything else.

  * * *

  The interview had gone well, Kaia thought. As well as could be expected in the face of a man who seemed to want to do his best to make her look inferior to the other candidates by asking obscure questions about Macedonia or the pre-Roman Hellenics. She had met and exceeded every challenge, however, and knew there was no way the new dean could give anyone else the job.

  Thus having convinced herself of her success, Kaia decided to walk home the long way. The late afternoon buzzed with the sounds of insects and traffic and snatches of conversation from people walking by or the odd one talking on their cell phone with windows down as they drove past. Her mind turned to what in the world she was going to do this evening. Without having to hit the books every night, without her parents there to put her through the paces like they had during her college years, nights were increasingly empty and lonely in the big, quiet house.

  She heard the strains of her familiar drumbeat ringtone and pulled her cell phone from the outer pocket of her purse. She grinned when she saw who it was, and tapped her thumb to the screen.

  “Hi, Lou!”

  “Hey yourself, sweetheart, how’d your interview go?”

  “Awesome,” Kaia replied. “How’s the job?”

  “It’s a job, what can I say?”

  Kaia laughed.

  “Hey, what’re you doing tonight?”

  “I was just wondering that myself,” she grinned.

  “How about we catch a movie?”

  “And exactly how does your boyfriend feel about that, young man?” she asked in mock sternness.

  “He’s got a family thing tonight and I’m lonely. Pick you up in an hour?”

  “That depends,” she teased. “What movie are you dragging me to this time, because I wasn’t exactly fond of Four Strikes, you know.”

  “Oh, no, no slasher movie tonight, babe. We’re going to hit the fantasy genre this time.”

  “Fantasy? What movie?”

  “That new one, The Demon Within. Have you seen the ads?”

  “Demons, Lou? Really?” she asked as she rounded the corner and her house halfway along the block came into view. “Really?” she repeated with a short laugh.

  “What, no good?”

  With a long-suffering sigh, Kaia replied, “Oh, I suppose I could humor you for a night.”

  “What, you have something against demons?”

  She snorted. “No, I just don’t believe in them, you goof!”

  “All right, all right, I’ll be there in a bit. Make yourself presentable, will you?”

  “Go to hell, Lou,” she said, blowing a raspberry into the phone and then ending the call.

  Kaia couldn’t erase the smile from her face. She loved spending time with her best friend on the rare occasions when his better half let him out to play. And this gave her something to do tonight. A way to stave off loneliness for one more evening.

  Stuffing the phone absentmindedly back into its purse pocket, she twisted around to look behind her, sure she’d heard footfalls. No one was there, though, on either side of the street, so she just kept ambling along, mentally going through her closet and deciding what she’d wear to the movie.

  Demons, indeed. She chuckled and shook her head. Lou was forever dragging her to the types of movies she’d never pay to see herself. Which was why, she knew, he always paid. They’d been friends since the second grade when he and his family had moved to Iowa City from Nebraska. She’d gone through everything with him from his first kiss with a girl, to realizing he was gay, to his first kiss with a boy, to the coming out to his parents which had ended in a fistfight between him and his father. His dad had one. Kaia had gone to the Emergency Room with Lou so he could get a few stitches. He’d stayed with her family for a few weeks until getting his own place.

  Lou’s mother had been accepting of the whole thing, but his jock father had simply banished his son from his life forever, preferring instead to turn to his younger two sons who were, as far as anyone knew, straight arrows. It had been a really hard thing for Lou to take and Kaia had been there for him every step of the way. Up to and including letting Lou and his mom Mary use her house to meet without Lou, Sr.’s knowledge.

  It was a totally messed up situation, and something Kaia was grateful to not have to deal with in her own life. Her parents had been her parents since before she could remember. Never mind that they’d adopted her when she was just three-and-a-half. As far as she was concerned, Mom and Dad were Mom and Dad. And now, she thought as her face fell and she yanked her keys out of her purse, they were gone.

  She was startled by a sound behind her and dropped her keys as she whirled to face whatever had made it. There before her stood a man wearing dark sunglasses. She couldn’t tell if he was blind or just plain lost.

  “Can I help you?” she asked, stooping to pick up her keys. That’s when a strange light caught her eye. Looking down at the necklace she wore, which was now dangling in mid-air thanks to having bent for the keys, she gasped as it began to glow and pulsate. It had never done that before.

  She looked up as she rose to her full height, but the man with the dark glasses was gone. Eyes wide, she brought her hand up to cradle the one and only thing left from before the Lehmans had made her theirs. The jagged, pale pink crystal was nestled into a silver setting. Zarther than being on a matching silver chain, however, it hung from a strange twine type of material woven in a very fine crochet pattern.

  And it was no longer glowing. She studied it and shook it, wondering now if it had just been her imagination. After all, the necklace was never away from her neck. Not once in her twenty-two years had it been removed, not even for showers or the occasional fling with a guy in the sack. She would’ve noticed if it had ever shown signs of lighting up before.

  But once again it was nothing more than the rose quartz she knew. Kaia looked up and down the street, craning her head around one of the large pillars to the side of the front steps. But t
here wasn’t a soul in sight. Frowning, she turned and unlocked both the deadbolt and the doorknob and entered her home. Just to be on the safe side, Kaia locked them as soon as the door was closed.

  She reached down and picked the mail up off the floor, shuffling through it quickly to find that most of it was still for her parents. People just didn’t seem to get it when people died that they didn’t need vacuum cleaners or jewellers for their busted earrings and wouldn’t be voting for the local council anymore, she thought bitterly as it all went into the living room waste basket.

  Slamming her purse down on the hall table, Kaia shook her head. Just a few minutes ago she’d been happy. She looked down the hall, to her left into the living room. Up the staircase as she laid a hand on the railing and began to ascend. It was the house. It was just too hard, too damn hard to deal with them being gone. Thanking Lou silently for taking her away from here tonight, Kaia jogged up the rest of the steps quickly and disappeared into her bedroom at the end of the hall to get changed before Lou arrived.

  Even stupid nonexistent demons would be a welcome distraction tonight.

  * * *

  He stood looking down respectfully at the body he’d covered with the only blanket that hadn’t been shredded in the attack. The white-blue sphere of light rested on a small outcropping of rock in the cave and cast a bright but eerie glow all around the massive single room. There was dried blood everywhere, Sinloa was dead and Kana may as well have been. And the baby was gone.

  Bijan half-smiled. They’d always called Kana and Sinloa’s child ‘the baby.’ She’d been the first child born on the planet in over one hundred years, and as such had been even more precious to her people than most children might have been. Shaking his head sadly, he got down on his belly and shoved his torso under the double wide bed that had belonged to the husband and wife.

  His hand reached around blindly until his index finger felt a ridge in the floor just a few inches out from the cave wall against which the bed was shoved. He pried at the ridge until a thin slice of rock popped away and skittered across the uneven floor. Reaching two fingers into the long, thin crack, he found what he was looking for, grasped it and pushed his way back out from under the bed.

  The thin scroll he held had a piece of tree bark twine wrapped around it to keep it closed. This was the one piece of information he had to keep safe and away from the Vloveks at all costs. He knew exactly what was written on the ancient parchment; he could see the Shinzarn words before him as surely as he could see the orb of light he’d created.

  The paper contained the one thing that kept Vloveks from being able to go to any of the dimensions accessible from Shinzar. And while he didn’t need it to know the information, the paper had to continue to exist or the magical spell used to keep that roadblock in place would cease to work. Besides the Nake, this single innocent-looking scroll was the most important thing not only to Shinzar, but to the other four dimensions Shinzarn wizards had been visiting for many lifetimes.

  Including the one, Bijan thought, where Kana’s daughter now lived. He sighed and shook his head, tucking the scroll into an inside pocket of the black vest he wore. Bijan knew he had to get out of the cave; there was no telling if or when the Kana/Mulmak combination would return here. Whether Mulmak now knew all the secrets Kana had known was something Bijan didn’t yet have a handle on, but he wasn’t about to take the chance. First he needed to regroup with the Zar and Shin he and Kana had left behind when they’d hidden in this cave.

  The Shin were particularly helpless and needed him, especially now. All of Shinzar needed him now. How was he going to tell them that the High Wizard Zar was now the High Wizard because their beloved Kana was just...gone? And yet, not.

  As he made his way out of the cave entrance, orb of light in hand, he mentally ticked off what he had to do. First, get back to his people and break the news to them. Second, find a way to expel Mulmak from Kana. Maybe the elder Zar that were left among his group would know, would have stories passed down from their history.

  But even as he tried to be hopeful, he felt the despair settle in around him again. The truth was that as powerful and practiced as Bijan was, he simply wasn’t Kana, and never would be.

  And then there was Kana’s daughter.

  Chapter Three

  It had been three Shinzarn years since Kana had been taken from them. Bijan thought he’d done all right, as far as keeping the few Zar and Shin still left on their forsaken planet alive. But everything he’d tried to separate Kana from Mulmak had failed. Miserably, in some cases. It was just that he wasn’t powerful enough to overcome a former High Wizard and the leader of demonic creatures who could turn into puffs of smoke and possess Shinzarns at will without so much as blinking their large, sickly black and often-glowing eyes.

  Five variations of the Master Separation Spell hadn’t even made a dent. The hold Mulmak had on Kana was much, much stronger than Bijan had anticipated. Although, he reasoned, even Kana hadn’t ever been able to separate Mulmak’s legions from the Shinzarns they’d joined with to create the sycophants. And it didn’t make it any easier that coming face-to-face with the man he’d devoted his life to always left him feeling as hollow as Kana’s eyes had become.

  So Bijan decided to change tactics. The one thing separating the Vloveks from completely dominating Shinzar’s dimension was the Nake, and that was safe in the Earth dimension. Safe. Bijan’s mouth curled into a small smile. He’d been popping into the Earth dimension every few months since Kana’s death, for truly, he was dead to Bijan and all Shinzarns. One thing he still hadn’t gotten used to was how time behaved in his dimension as compared to Earth’s.

  He’d watched Kaia go through nightmares as a young girl, ones he wished he could take away. He’d seen her as a teenager, and then gone back to the moment she’d been found which, he knew, must have been shortly after Kana had pushed her through the portal. Bijan had seen her at parties with friends, and poring over books. Animated discussions with her parents, and the day of the funeral when tears streamed down her face. Through it all, the one constant no matter which point in her life he found himself at, was the Nake she still wore around her neck.

  He wondered why she still wore it. There could be a multitude of reasons, not the least of which were Kana’s final words to her what seemed like a lifetime ago. But from what Bijan had been able to gather she had no idea she was anyone other than Kaia Lehman, and for now that suited Bijan’s purposes just fine. At least, he thought, she still had the name Kana and Sinloa had given her. That had to count for something.

  Now, a moment of respite within a very deep cave below the surface of what was left of their world, where he and his fellow Zar could try to get some rest before the next Vlovek attack. Or their own next attempt to somehow in some unfathomable way actually rescue Kana. Bijan found his thoughts wandering to the last time he’d seen Kaia, only two of his own days ago.

  He still hadn’t quite wrapped his head around how Kana always knew specifically when he would arrive on Earth in Dimension Three. Time there not only seemed to work nothing at all like time on Shinzar, it was not something that even after three years Bijan could even begin to form hypotheses about. It had been a part of his training that had not yet been completed, and as such he felt woefully inadequate each time he appeared near her, only to be startled by whatever age she happened to be at the time. Pinpointing her was easy, because she felt like her father in every way, and he only had to think of Kana as he hummed a portal into life.

  Bijan’s invisibility spell, which was really nothing more than deflecting attention off him even if someone chanced a look his way, kept him well enough hidden that she’d never seen him. This last time she’d been in a large room filled with many chairs, and large moving pictures on a big white screen. He knew from the few lessons he’d had about Earth with Kana that this was a movie. He liked it because it meant he could remove the sunglasses and allow his natural, uncovered eyes to locate her in the third row back.r />
  She’d been sitting with a tall, thin man, and they had been laughing. Bijan’s face fell as he wondered when the last time was he’d actually laughed like that. He’d made his way to the row behind them, sitting directly behind Kaia and listening to their conversation. It fascinated him above all else, because there was no way he’d ever be able to tell Kaia was not of Earth the way she looked and talked. A stab of pain drove through his heart because after all, she was someone so special to the world that had borne her. Yet she had no idea and, unless something changed in his own dimension, never would.

  But the thing that had really driven home to him how much Kaia wasn’t Shinzarn was when she explained to her friend, whose name he’d discovered was Lou, precisely why she didn’t believe in demons and how there couldn’t possibly be anything like them in existence. He remembered leaning back in the chair and fighting the urge to just grab her shoulder and scream that yes, there were demons, that her father had been commandeered by one, that she was only here in this weird world of hers because her father wanted to keep her safe from those demons she didn’t believe in.

  As always, however, he simply got up and went to a dark corner of the theater, opened a portal and waited for a few minutes until it grew large enough to accommodate his six-foot-four frame. He would always chance a look back at her, and he could even see the Nake glowing dully in the darkness. It brought a smile to his face, but it was a smile full of sadness and regret.

  Riveted back to the here and now, he shot to his feet, eyes wide. The Nake. The five talismans. That was it. That was the answer! There was only one way to make sure the Vloveks never got control of Shinzar no matter how much war they waged. And if he was successful, Kaia would never have to know she was somewhere she didn’t belong. She would have a full, long, happy life as a human and would never have to learn that not only were demons real, they were more deadly than anything Earth could offer.

  Kaia would be safe. The Kana/Mulmak combination would never win. And maybe once they realized that, the Vloveks would leave Shinzar alone. There was also a chance, albeit a slim one, that Mulmak would decide he no longer had any use for the former High Wizard, and would separate from him on his own. It was the one shred of hope Bijan had to cling to.