That afternoon was quite an education. Even though I’d been brought up at a vampire’s court, my knowledge of magic wasn’t great. Clairvoyants are viewed as the dregs of the magical world, people with little real talent who make a living telling norms what they want to hear. You know the type: “Your soul mate’s name begins with
M
”— or
S
or
R
or any of the more common letters of the alphabet— but the clairvoyant needs subsequent sessions to figure out exactly who it is. Expensive sessions. I’d never done that, even when money had been more than tight. I might cheat casinos out of desperation, but I never mocked my gift. Most of the mages at Tony’s, however, had put down any of my Seeings that came true to coincidence, and wanted little to do with me.
Vamps, of course, have an innate magic of their own, and I don’t mean just the power that animates them. Most gain useful abilities if they survive long enough, and some of those can be pretty spectacular. I’d seen vamps levitate themselves and others, strip the skin off a body from across a room, and rip a beating heart out of a chest with little more than a thought. But the kind of magic the mages do is beyond them, and magic workers lose their ability if turned, so there are no vamp mages.
I think I learned more that afternoon about magic than ten years at Tony’s had taught me. It started when Pritkin stripped back down to let Mac finish the tattoo, and I asked why he was bothering with that now. I was mainly asking to focus my attention on something other than his body, which was suddenly a lot more attractive than it should have been. I really hoped the side effects from encountering incubi were going to wear off soon.
“Like yours, my magic will not be reliable in Faerie,” Pritkin said. He sounded like he’d rather tell me to go to hell, but since we’d just agreed to be allies, he had to play nice. I decided to press the advantage while it lasted, which I suspected wouldn’t be long.
“What, you’re going to flash your manly tattoo at the Fey?”
Mac laughed, but even though Pritkin’s head was turned away from me, I could tell he was scowling. His shoulders tensed, and that tightened things further down in an interesting way. I got up to get another Coke.
“It’s a special tattoo,” Mac told me cheerfully, picking up something that looked like an electric toothbrush without the bristles. “If I do this right, it should imprint his aura— his magical skin—as well as the physical. When he throws his shields up, it’ll manifest as a real weapon. And, as we learned the technique from the Fey, it should work in Faerie even better than here.” He put the head of the toothbrush thing to the top of the sword and started to ink it in. Pritkin didn’t flinch, but the muscles in his arms stood out a bit more. I sipped Coke and gave up trying not to watch him.
“I’m not getting it,” I said after a minute. “You have weapons”—a serious understatement—“why not rely on them?”
Mac answered, although his attention remained on his victim’s back, where he paused to wipe away some blood.
“Regular weapons won’t do much against the Fey. You need magical stuff to hold up against the sort of thing they can dish out, but like John said, our magic doesn’t work in Faerie.” He went back to inking, and this time Pritkin did flinch slightly. “At least, most of it won’t, and the sort of stuff that will, we don’t have access to.”
“What sort of stuff?”
“Oh, different things,” Mac said, his little tool humming as it tore through Pritkin’s skin. He paused to consult the large grimoire he’d propped on the stool next to him, then muttered something over the partly finished tattoo. The image gleamed for a moment, then died back down. Mac grunted and went back to work. “What would really help would be some null bombs. Only they’re hard to come by, and it’s a death sentence to use them without authorization. And even were we willing to risk it, for some reason the Black Market doesn’t trust us—too many years putting them out of business, I guess.”
“What are null bombs?”
“Wicked things, but good to have anywhere there’s magic you don’t know how to counter. No one knows who invented them, but they’ve been around for centuries. Dark mages take a null—a mage born with the ability to disrupt magic— and drain his life force into the sphere. It kills the mage but traps his lifetime’s ability in one extremely potent package. If it’s exploded, including in Faerie, all magic ceases or goes haywire for a while. How long depends on the strength of the null, and how many years of life he had left when he was drained.”
“Interesting.” I felt vaguely sick. “What do they look like?” I carefully did not glance at my duffle, which was sitting innocently on the floor near the fridge.
I thought I’d kept my voice casual, but Pritkin must have heard something in my tone, because his head whipped around to face me. “Why?” His eyes were narrowed, whether in pain or suspicion, to the point that only a thin green line showed through his pale lashes.
I shrugged. “I was just wondering. Tony used to have weapons lying around all the time. Maybe I’ve seen one.”
Mac shook his head, his face intent on Pritkin’s back. “Not likely, love. They cost a fortune, because nulls strong enough to make one are rare and well protected. Most of the ones floating about these days are left over from past centuries. The vamps used to hunt nulls before the truce, which is why there’s hardly any left now. Most were wiped out, whole family lines destroyed to build up the vamp arsenals.”
“You’ve never seen one of the bombs, then?”
“Oh, I’ve encountered a few through the years. The Circle buys any they come across, to keep them out of the vamps’ hands. Donovan’s auction house acquired one in London, back in sixty-three. The Circle wasn’t happy when they refused our initial offer and put it up for public bidding, but old man Donovan told them it was perfectly legal. The thing was old—I examined it and it had to date from at least the twelfth century—and of course there were no laws against making them back then.” He paused to wipe down the tattoo again and grimaced at the amount of blood on his rag. “You want to take a break?” he asked Pritkin.
“No. Finish it.” Pritkin’s jaw was clenched, but his eyes were on me. I didn’t like the suspicion in them.
“What happened at the auction?” I asked, hoping Mac would get around to giving me a description sooner or later.
“Oh, we bought it,” he said, going back to work. “No choice, really. Cost a fortune, though, I can tell you. I kept calling in for authorization to go higher until the council told me to quit bothering them and just get the damn thing, no matter the cost. I don’t think they planned on spending a quarter million on a little silver ball, though, considering the complaints I heard when I got back. But there was nothing they could do to me—I was following orders.”
The phrase “little silver ball” rattled around in my head while I tried to keep my expression vague. I must not have done too well. “You’ve seen one,” Pritkin accused.
I wanted to say, “Yeah, there’s two in that duffle over there,” but I didn’t know how much I could trust my new “allies. ” Pritkin needed my help, so I doubted he’d grab the bag and run, but what about Mac? A quarter million pounds in the 1960s would be worth what today? I didn’t know, but the answer might be enough to make good old Mac’s loyalty waver. His business didn’t exactly look prosperous, and even mages could be tempted by an early retirement.
“Maybe. It’s been a while.”
I glanced at Mac, and Pritkin looked disgusted. “He is risking his life in this endeavor. You can trust him as you do me,” he said impatiently.
I raised an eyebrow, and Pritkin exploded. His face had been reddening as the tattoo was inked in, inch by agonizing inch, and I think he wanted someone to yell at. “If you do not trust me, this will never work! There are going to be times, very soon, when our lives will depend on whether we can work together! If you cannot put faith in me, say so now. I would rather do this alone than get killed because you assume I am false!”
I drank Coke and remained calm. “If I didn’t think I could trust you, to a point, I’d have left by now. Your hour was up a few minutes ago.” I looked between him and Mac.
“Hypothetically, say I know where some weapons might be found. I’ll describe them, and you tell me what they do. If we decide they could be useful, maybe I’ll tell you where to locate them.”
Pritkin looked outraged, but Mac shrugged. “Sounds fair.” He paused to change ink colors, having finished all the gold areas on the sword. “Have at it.”
“Okay.” I didn’t have to think about it, since the only thing I’d taken from the Senate besides the traps and the null bombs was a small velvet bag. Inside were a handful of yellowed bone disks imprinted with crude runes. They had holes carved in the top and leather thongs threaded through them like they were usually worn rather than cast. I described them to Mac, who stopped working to stare at me, openmouthed.
“That’s impossible,” he said. Pritkin didn’t say anything, but it felt like his eyes might bore a hole through me at any minute. “I’m not calling you a liar, Cassie, but if a two-bit gangster like that Antonio has the Runes of Langgarn, I’ll—”
“He doesn’t.” Pritkin cut him off. “Where did you see them?”
“This is hypothetical.”
“Miss Palmer!”
“You can call me Cassie.” Considering that he was probably planning to kill me eventually, formality seemed a little odd.
“Answer the question,” Pritkin forced out through clenched teeth. Since Mac hadn’t resumed digging in his back, I supposed I was the cause.
“I’ll tell you what I know,” Mac put in, “but it isn’t much. Legend has it that they were enchanted by Egil Skallagrimsson in the late tenth century.” At my blank look, he elaborated. “He was a Viking poet and general hell-raiser—took his first life at age six when he killed another boy over the outcome of a ball game—but he was one of the best rune-masters to ever live. Of course, some stories say that he stole the runes from Gunnhild, the witch queen of Erik Bloodaxe, king of Norway and northern England. And since Gunnhild was said to have Fey blood, it’s possible the runes were enchanted long before in Faerie by someone else entirely—”
“Mac,” Pritkin broke in when it sounded like his friend was about to go off on a tangent.
“Oh, right. Well, there are a lot of stories about Egil, most of which were recorded in his own poetry. He depicted himself as a larger-than-life figure who did impossible things—took on huge numbers of opponents and slew them single-handedly, set barns ablaze with a look, brought kings under his sway with only the power of his words and survived numerous attempts on his life. He made an enemy of Gunnhild, either by stealing her runes or by killing her son—stories differ—yet he lived to age eighty in a time when most men died in their forties. Interesting bloke, I always thought.”
“So what do the runes do?” I tried not to sound impatient, but I needed useful facts, not a history lesson.
“It’s rumored that there was a full set at one point, but it was broken up centuries ago. It doesn’t matter, since they’re used separately. Each has a different power associated with it, and their only limitation is that they have to recharge for a month after use. Those that remain are highly valued weapons. It’s said that they can’t be warded against and that even null bombs don’t have much effect on them.”
I shot Mac a skeptical look. I’d never heard of any magic that couldn’t be countered. Casanova had tried to sell me that idea about my
geis
, but even Pritkin had admitted that there was almost certainly a way out of it. I just didn’t know what it was yet.
Mac shook his head. “It sounds fantastic, doesn’t it? But the Circle owns two of the set, and I was there twenty years ago when they used one to test a new ward they’d developed. This thing was a bear—nothing got through it, and I mean nothing. Twenty of our best mages hammered at it for the better part of a morning, hit it with everything they had, but it didn’t so much as waver. Then old Marsden—he used to lead the council—brought out the runes. He decided to cast Thurisaz. I’ll never forget that, not long as I live.”
“What happened?” I prompted.
“If you didn’t know Marsden, it may be hard for you to get a visual on this, but picture the oldest, scrawniest, least threatening man you’ve ever seen. His magic was still strong at that point—he didn’t step down until a few years ago— but he was
old
. His hands shook and he almost always had food spilled down the front of him because he couldn’t see worth a damn. He kept running into things but he wouldn’t wear his glasses or use charms to enhance his vision. He kept saying he didn’t need them; then he’d try to shake hands with coat racks. He looked like he ought to be in a retirement home, unless you crossed him. Then you found out why he led the council for seven decades.”
“Mac!”
“Right, right. Well, Marsden cast Thurisaz on himself, and the next thing any of us knew, he was gone and there was this huge—and I mean
huge
—ogre standing in his place. It was so tall it had to hunch over to fit in the room, and the council chamber has ceilings almost twenty feet tall! It snatched up the council table, which was made of old oak and weighed God knows what, and hurled it the length of the chamber. When it bounced off the ward without doing any damage, the thing let out a bellow that deafened me for a good ten minutes, then charged. The ward had been set up to protect a small vase, and so far, not so much as a petal of any of the flowers had been disturbed. Less than a minute after Thurisaz was cast, the ward was down and the vase was dust.”
“How . . . amazing.” I had raided the Senate hoping for weapons; it looked like I’d finally lucked out and found some. Knowing Tony’s penchant for nasty surprises, I was going to need them.
“Yes, well, that part was all right, but then we had a rampaging ogre on our hands, didn’t we? And we couldn’t kill it without also killing the head of the council. Not that any of us was keen to take on that thing. We ran over each other getting out the door, then hied away like frightened rabbits. We reassembled outside and argued for almost an hour over what to do once it destroyed the wards guarding the chamber and got loose. Then old Marsden came wandering out and finally bothered to mention that the spell only lasts an hour.”