by Cebelius
'Very well, let me put it this way: I am invoking our wager.'
Prada felt utter shock from Terry, but she remained resolute. She felt him probing her sincerity, then he thought, 'Take it back.'
'No. Find her, make her yours.'
'This was NOT what that wager was for! You said if you found a woman YOU wanted!'
'I want this one.'
Terry's frustration pressed hard at her as he thought, 'You have no idea what she's like. You don't even know what she is!'
'Husband, I don't care if she's a bloodthirsty ball of amorphous goop. She has skills I want to possess.'
It took him a long second, and Prada didn't bother to hide her amusement when he mentally conceded. 'That was ... Okay, I really didn't expect you to take this there, but I'll give it to you. But you KNOW me. What you're asking is ... what she's doing is evil, and you want me to SATISFY that?'
Prada remained firm. 'Adding a moral component to what she is doing without knowing anything else about her is lazy thinking.'
'Can you give me a SINGLE scenario wherein what she's doing isn't evil?'
Prada gave that some serious thought, then grudgingly admitted, 'Given your perspective? No.'
'But you still want me to-'
'Yes. I am not and have never been on a moral crusade, Husband. I tolerate this quest to kill Thomas because he poses a persistent, direct threat to us, and for no other reason. I want you. I have killed and will kill again to keep you, but in order to ensure your continued presence in my life I want you to increase, just as you have helped me increase. I did not save Isthil for sentiment; I saved her because you will soon fully consummate your relationship with her and add her power to yours."
She paused, then added, 'All of this is irrelevant; you owe me this.'
'I'll keep my word, but is it really just about power? When does it end?'
'When no one dares oppose us.'
Terry scowled, inwardly and outwardly. 'So never.'
'Husband, I make no apologies. I understand friendship and love. I FEEL those things, but I do not let them rule me, and there is no moral component to my affections. I will not pass up opportunities, just as I will kill this woman immediately should the threat she poses outweigh her potential uses. I believe her power can be harnessed. I believe you are up to the challenge, so that is what I want. Grow, Husband. Find her, but instead of killing her and taking her stuff, take HER. I am certain she will be the more valuable prize.'
Terry sighed, this time audibly, though he kept his words in his head.
'I presume you have a plan?'
'Of course not. That's YOUR job.'
Prada felt Terry's frustration well up within him. She understood his anger, knew that he felt that she was using him, again. She also knew better than to interject. She confidently waited while his emotions ran their course. He was no longer the man she had met in Volai's throne room. He understood the only path to freedom for him, and for the women he loved, was to increase his power. She also knew that he understood her, accepted her, and would honor his wager with her.
Just because their love was transactional did not mean it wasn't real. Her value to him was just as indisputable as his to her. She had just saved his life, and Isthil's.
'You'll never get me to bet you anything ever again,' he thought at last, his inner voice sour to the point of petulance.
She sweetly replied, 'You will. But when I win that future wager it will be because you let me.'
'Remind me again why I EVER agreed to marry you?'
'You saw potential in me ... and because I gave you the keys to your survival and eventual triumph.'
'I STILL see potential.'
'Ouch. That wasn't entirely fair.'
A hint of amusement flickered to life in him, just as she had hoped it would.
'You aren't fair with me either.'
She wrapped him up in her genuine affection for him as she thought, 'It's almost as if we were made for each other.'
He matched her affections, and though there was an element of wry surrender in his feeling, there was a bit of bite too as he thought, 'Almost.'
18
The Oathbreaker and the Coward
Terry didn't feel like sleep. He didn't feel capable, but Isthil solved that for him with a simple touch, and he was woken the next morning once the song had faded away.
His ears were repaired, and he spent the day learning what he could.
First, he spoke at length with Dascha, who told him little he did not already know. The song affected men, who invariably fled the fortress. They were tracked, but their footprints abruptly vanished at the entrance to a cavern about five miles away. The cavern itself had been searched, and seemed to dead-end. With no other exits and no trace of the men that had fled there, the tiger folk had no further leads.
He then spoke with the men imprisoned in the dungeon. They all said roughly the same thing. No matter what their feelings had been before hearing the song, they felt that their heart's desire was out there somewhere, and they'd gone to find her. No one could give him any hint of what she actually was, they'd only felt sure she would be the one for them, that once they reached her, their happiness was assured.
He also learned that those with strong emotional attachments before the spell took hold were also those most resistant to its enchantment. The two men who had taken an hour each had no one. One was a known coward, and the other had betrayed vows and only been allowed to stay in the village by agreeing to what amounted to prison labor. No affection was lost on either man.
Terry then asked to be led to the cave, and reached it just before noon. It was surprisingly picturesque, and reminded him a bit of the place where he'd first met Shy.
A small waterfall of glacial run-off from higher in the peaks fed a crystal clear pool rimmed in sand that in turn fed a small stream winding away among the tall trees that surrounded and shaded the entrance to the cave itself.
He sent Isthil into the cave. She could see in the dark and her ability to pass through solid objects would make it easier for her to thoroughly search the place. She confirmed for him both that there were no other exits, and that it was empty. It had been used in the past — perhaps often — as an encampment, but aside from evidence of ancient firepits, there was nothing to indicate the place had seen any recent use.
"Do you think whatever's here is only accessible at night?" he asked.
One of the tiger-kin scouts that had led them shook her head. "No. We chased a few of our men here only to see them vanish right about ... here."
The place she indicated was about twenty feet from the cave entrance.
"Was the music louder here?" Mila asked.
The scout shook her head. "It can be heard for miles in every direction, but its volume never changes."
"That makes no sense," Terry said. "Sound fades."
The tiger-woman simply shrugged, making no effort to answer.
"But it is sound," Terry insisted. "Once I was deaf, the enchantment could be broken. I may not be a scientist, but any high-schooler knows that all waveforms attenuate as they travel. If this was the source, it should have been louder here. Mila?"
He glanced her way, but Mila only shrugged and said, "I specialized my studies toward my affinities. I know very little about air magic."
Rolling his eyes, Terry muttered, "And of course, the one who does air magic is with Yuri. Fucking perfect."
"Koshei might know," Prada suggested. She was still infused within him, manifested only as a sash around his waist, but chose to speak aloud to spare confusion.
"I ..."
Terry stopped himself. He'd been about to dismiss getting anything more from Koschei, but the man's soul was his, as was his knowledge. He owed it to Yuri to use every resource in searching for a solution. Virtually everything he knew about ritual magic he'd learned from Koschei.
Steeling himself, Terry lowered the mental barrier between his mind and Koschei's, but the evil warlock said not
hing. His presence simply hung like a dark star in Terry's mind. He hesitated only a moment, then reached into that darkness and searched through memories not his own for what he wanted.
It was not a grueling process, nor was it even particularly unpleasant. It was just like reminiscing, except the images, impressions, and knowledge that came to mind were things he had never learned or experienced himself.
After a few minutes, he tried putting the barrier back up, and it was only then that he felt the difference. Separating his memories from Koschei's required more effort than it had when he'd first captured the other man's soul. He was forced to sort through what he'd seen again, and it felt like pulling weeds. None of the memories he'd examined wanted to go back, and when it was done he had the nagging feeling that he'd probably missed a few.
He buried his creeping dread at the prospect, and shook his head as he said, "Koschei didn't have any affinities. He was a sorcerer on Earth, and magic there didn't work like it does on Celestine. He didn't use any spells like what we're dealing with now."
Inwardly, he asked Prada to search his mind for foreign information, and she mentally replied, 'There's no way for me to separate what you wanted to learn from Koschei from what you didn't, Husband. If you missed anything ...'
She left the thought unfinished to express another. 'I agree with your concerns. I will not suggest tapping his knowledge again unless there is no other way.'
That'll have to be good enough, he thought.
Shy said, "The trees are telling me that there is someone living in this cave, but that they never see it clearly. The men came this way. Once here, they too became ... obscured somehow."
"I don't suppose there's another dryad like you anywhere around we could ask?" Terry said as he looked at her.
Shy frowned, her luminous green eyes seemed to dim for a moment, then sharpened again as she shook her head. "There might be, but if there is she doesn't want to talk. That's not unusual. My kind can and do fall dormant for years, sometimes decades at a time."
"Were you awake when I came around?" Terry asked. "Or dormant?"
Shy smirked and folded her arms under her breasts as she gave him a coy look. "Tee, you sat down and fell asleep in my lap."
"So I woke you up?"
"In the best possible way."
That made him grin, but only for a moment. As his gaze returned to the cave, he asked, "Prada, is there anything in Volai's library that might tell us what this is?"
"No, Husband. Her books were almost exclusively centered around ritual summoning magic, though there are a few dealing with fire affinity spells. Nothing that would help us here."
"Anyone else got a thought?" Terry asked. "I'm fresh out."
He was disappointed by the blank looks he got, but not surprised. Prada mentally told him, 'Anyone who did have an idea probably doesn't want to voice it HERE, Husband. Perhaps we should return to the fortress.'
"All right, let's head back," Terry said as he twirled his finger. "Pretty place, but yeah, the whole 'dudes disappearing without a trace' thing makes me a bit nervous. Some Bennington Triangle shit going on around here."
"What's a Bennington Triangle?" Halla asked, stepping up to walk next to him as he turned, her club slung over one shoulder.
"Place back home. Some old stories about people just disappearing in that area," Terry said.
"Did they ever reappear?" she asked.
"Just one, but she was long dead when she was found, and no one ever figured out how she died, or how she got so far from where she disappeared. Massive searches at the time — including in the area where she was eventually found — came up empty."
He looked over at her when she didn't reply, and saw her expression was a bit nervous as she glanced around.
"You're an oni. You'd hand anything that comes for you its ass. Relax," he said, grinning.
"I don't know why I'd give its ass back," she said, giving him an odd look. "That's usually good meat."
Taken aback, Terry grimaced and shook his head. "La?"
"Yeah?"
"You're fuckin' scary sometimes, you know that?"
She shrugged, as though what he'd said were obvious. "Yeah?"
Isthil laughed, slapping his shoulder good-naturedly as she walked on his other side. "Terry, everyone you know is scary."
He nodded thoughtfully as he glanced at Shy. She caught the look and crooked her hands as though she had claws and bared her teeth at him in a mock snarl that lacked anything even remotely intimidating about it.
He snerked, then started chuckling.
"Ah, dinnae let her fool ye," Isthil said, having caught the exchange. "She did just about blow ye apart last night."
"That doesn't make her scary," Terry said, smiling at Shy to reassure her as mention of what she'd done stole some of the good cheer from her expression. "Just dangerous."
"Aye, maybe. Of us all, though, I think ye're easily the most dangerous o' the lot," Isthil said.
"Yeah," he said, feeling a pang of regret along with the pride. "That's probably true."
As they returned to the ancient stone fortress, Terry wracked his brain for some way to catch whatever this thing was. For all he knew, there might not actually be a thing to catch, female or otherwise. It might just be some kind of fucked-up phenomenon.
Just as he had the thought, Prada dashed his hopes. 'It's a she, and she can be caught. We just need to discover means.'
Ugh, I really don't like this.
'I know, but as with so much else of what I have done, you will thank me later.'
Once back at the fortress, Terry summoned the flying eye he had used several times now to spy a route for them, and sent it to the location they'd explored, instructing it to look for anything out of the ordinary. If it saw anything, it was to relay the images to him directly. It agreed, and flew off, its sclera already blood red from past feedings.
Since he'd first summoned it, the little eye-demon hadn't gotten larger, but its pallor had darkened from dusky black to completely pitch, and its eye had gone from white to pink to ruby red. He knew enough to know that his blood was making the little demon much more powerful than normal, but its powers were all but harmless on their own, revolving as they did around observation and concealment. It's only real way to fight was an ability to mesmerize.
As he watched the eye-demon vanish into the distance, he couldn't escape the feeling that he was on the clock. The men they'd worked on had refused all food or drink until the enchantment was broken. If the same was true of those who had escaped, they were probably already dead. If they weren't, they were close.
That gave him an idea, and he spoke to Dascha about it. With her approval, he went back down into the dungeons with Mila in tow.
The ward he had placed still hung in the air, but it was not a physical barrier and he walked through it, checking the cells until he reached the last two. The one on his left contained the coward, the one on his right, the oathbreaker.
After a moment's consideration, he opened the coward's door and stepped into the space, blocking the way.
The tiger-man sitting on the floor with his back to the far wall was a fair representative of his race, at least physically. His orange and black-striped pelt faded to cream in front, and his fur hid the details but not the outline of a muscular frame.
His tail lay limp on the floor next to him though, and his ears barely twitched as he heard the cell door open.
After a moment of silence, the man seemed to realize he should look up, and did so. He had heterochromia: one eye was hazel, the other green. He met Terry's gaze only for the barest second before his ears twisted away and he returned his eyes to the floor.
"What do you want?" he asked, his voice desultory.
Terry crouched where he was, squatting on his heels as he said, "I want to give you a chance to prove you aren't a coward."
The tiger-man didn't even look up. "Fuck you."
"Telling me you like being seen as a whining little bitch
by everyone you meet?" Terry asked.
"Me being an Untouchable isn't something you can fix, and what I like is none of your business, outsider," he said, his voice tired rather than angry.
Terry blinked. He'd expected to get at least a little bit of a reaction, but this man was apparently so used to being verbally abused that it didn't bother him anymore.
"Not quite sure how you got that much muscle with no balls, but whatever," Terry said, not bothering to hide his distaste for the other man. "Don't you want a chance to prove you're not a coward?"
"What I like and what I want are both none of your business," the tiger-man replied, sounding bored now. "Go away."
Terry's fist clenched and he had a sudden urge to slap the shit out of the man in front of him, see if that got a reaction, but he restrained himself. He straightened, turned, left the room, and shut the door.
Crossing the hall, he opened the oathbreaker's cell and found the man already standing, arms folded across his chest. He too was a powerfully built specimen, a bit broader in the shoulders than the coward and with white-furred lines down one arm that Terry was pretty sure marked scars. His belt was old and worn, and the loincloth it supported was tattered and dirty, but there was fire in the man's golden eyes as he met Terry's gaze without flinching and said, "I could have told you he would be useless. Tell me what you need."
Terry didn't waste any words. "Bait."
The tiger-man's tail flicked once, then was still as he nodded slowly. "I can do that. In exchange, I want my name cleared, live or die."
"That's not my choice to make," Terry said. "That's between you and your people."
"I am not deaf, Terry. Mila Kolenko is your mate, which makes you one of my people. Fucked up as you may look, you are no outsider. Clear my name."
"What promise did you break?" Terry asked.
"My people hire our services out to caravans passing through the Eastern Steppe from time to time," the oathbreaker explained. "I was sent to guard a caravan, along with four others. Wanderers found us, and I accepted payment to abandon the traders to their fate, along with my brother. The other three turned on us, but we killed them, though my brother also died. The wanderers did not kill the traders as expected though, and word eventually got back to the village."
