Authors: Scott V. Duff
“Major, please supervise the disarmament of your men,” I said. “Make sure someone goes out to the guards and gets their guns, too.”
“Yes, sir,” he said and got up slowly from the floor. He was confused about why he suddenly wanted to cooperate, even though he knew he’d surrendered. I released the shield inside the tent before he bounced off of it.
“Well, that was a fairly clean revolution,” Peter said. “Only two died.”
“Yeah,” I said, somberly. “Well, the night’s still young. Let’s go see what Kieran and Ethan are up to, shall we?”
There was no gray mist at the end of the road when we got there. I could see farther into the occlusion now, but not that far. I couldn’t see Kieran or Ethan through the mist, but I could sense them in there somewhere. The road ended with a whimper, branching off into three trails, each going in different directions and none looking heavily traveled.
Ethan, where are you guys?
I called, searching through the ether.
Take the straight path. Kieran’s at the table, studying it. I’m watching the cave
, he sent back across the anchor.
“Ethan says this way,” I said aloud, exhaling at the same time. “Let’s go meet Dieter and his friends.”
“Did Ethan say anything else?” Peter asked quietly as he stepped up behind me.
“Only that he was watching the cave,” I answered just as quietly. “There are a lot of them around here, weaving around for miles in the limestone. It’s very dangerous to go climbing through them, though some are fairly famous. There’s the Cathedral Caverns, Crystal Cavern…”
“And DeSoto Cavern and Russell Cave,” Jimmy added, taking the rear. “A lot more are locally famous for lost teenagers and as make-out places. Ghost stories, too.”
Maybe it was my imagination, but Jimmy’s language skills seemed to be improving. He was more articulate.
“I see Kieran, now,” I said, seeing his aura through the trees and brush. He knelt beside something I didn’t see. “I want to know what this crap blocking my sight is.” We were barely fifty yards away.
Kieran stood as we entered the clearing and saw the table he studied. We all gasped at it. Or retched, it was hard to tell. It was a giant stone slab on top of two more slabs slanted somewhat inward and capped into grooves. The stone was black, glossy and gleaming in the moonlight on the bottom, but the top and edges were marred with scratches and flaked something. And the thing reeked. Even looking at it made us all nauseous. I got the feeling worse from Jimmy. I almost made him wait in the woods because of that.
We passed behind Kieran with plenty of swinging room, just in case, but he knew we were there. We’d been purposefully loud enough. Surveying the table, the top was inscribed with some pretty mean looking glyphs from very old civilizations around the world. I recognized some of them from my schooling. Historically, these were some pretty vicious and nasty gods and goddesses. A deep groove ran the circumference of the table an inch inside and several channels connected to it from the interior, creating some sort of irrigation.
“This is a sacrificial table,” Kieran said, evenly. “The ruts in the center allow blood and other… fluids to run to the outside and down to this hole and out to be collected in something.” He tapped the table near him with a pocketknife, one of the many we’d bought recently.
“What binds the magic to the object, though?” I asked him. “There’s nothing here that would capture or hold any potential or kinetic energy.”
“I don’t know, Seth,” Kieran said. “That’s confusing me, too.”
“This isn’t something I thought I’d ever need to understand,” Peter mumbled, staring at the table and hating every second of it.
“It never occurred to me to think about it that much,” Jimmy said, watching the woods. I think he was the luckiest of the four of us.
Something is coming,
Ethan sent. Two seconds later, he ran into view up the path at the other end of the clearing. “A slow moving caravan is on its way here,” he called, skidding to a halt in front of Peter. “At the rate they were walking, they’ll be here in, like two minutes. First ones out of the cave were dressed in thick brown robes, like Marty’s, but with hoods. Couldn’t tell how many are down there.”
“Do we wait and watch or just take them apart now?” I asked.
“Mighty confident of you,” Kieran remarked, chuckling.
“If I’m not, then I’m dooming myself before I start,” I said. It’s not like I don’t have doubts about what I can and cannot do, but I couldn’t let anyone know that, either. Even now, my brothers depended on me to do what needed doing. Later, when we were away from people who wanted us dead, then I could talk about the “maybes” and the “mights.” Kieran did much the same thing. He just didn’t know I knew it.
“Let’s watch, then. See what we can learn about this,” he said, not particularly happy with the decision. As we ran for the bushes, he asked in a whisper, “How did your end go?”
“Better than I expected. Only two dead and I learned two new tricks,” I whispered back. “They’re disarming now and waiting for whatever authorities we drop on them.”
“A compulsion?” he whispered, one eyebrow raised. I wish I could do that.
“Yeah, one of the new tricks.”
We heard a drumbeat, low and heavy. Another followed a second later, continuing each second until the brown-robed acolytes appeared. The pace picked up then as they filed around the clearing until all twenty of them stood in a circle around the table. Their lips were visible under the cowls and we could see them chanting silently. When I looked a little deeper, I saw my mistake. These weren’t acolytes—they had no chance of moving upward in their ranks. Their tongues had been removed, cut out. These were either slaves or cannon fodder for other ceremonies.
I saw Peter cringing in the bushes over to my left. He’d seen the same thing. We were both approaching our maximum gross out mark rapidly.
The beat sped up as a new kind of whatever these were, priests perhaps, entered the clearing. These guys had tongues and chanted words as they entered, swinging censers reeking of burning tires and tennis shoes. Wearing deep red robes and chanting in a Slavic tongue—I wasn’t sure which one—something about “blood of the beloved” and “praise to the high one.” I wasn’t interested enough to dip into their minds. I’d have to be
really
interested. This group was just too disgusting.
Four of them paced out to the drumbeat, now timed out at seventy-six beats a minute. These split, evenly spacing themselves between the sides of the table and the outside circle. The drumbeat accelerated again, more noticeably this time, hitting a hundred beats per minute. Muscular men jogged out holding wooden posts between them. Attached to the posts were young men and women, boys and girls, four on each post. They were lashed there by leather thongs, and they were drugged out of their minds, like seeing kaleidoscopes of colors and everything you ever imagined LSD would be. I latched onto the eight of them, ready to yank them out to somewhere in a half a heartbeat.
Next out of the gate were three men in black robes with rich purple lapels. Dark skinned, skulls shaved, these men were excited from more than the tempo of the drum, wherever it was. Thick, too, all over, and squat. I couldn’t quite place their race.
Dieter came next, fast on their heels and lacking in any pageantry. Kind of a letdown, that way. He’d exchanged his plain white shorts for a purple and scarlet wrap-around with a long, sheathed black-handled knife at the left side. The moonlight glistened off his skin—he’d been anointed in some sort of oil, even his hair was matted down. If it had a smell, the burning tire censers overrode it.
Once he took the head of the table, all the priests threw open their robes, showing each other their bodies. We certainly didn’t care. The outer ring fell to both knees, bowing at the waist to the ground as one. The priests with censers went to one knee, throwing their robes to their backs, setting the tire-burner sensors on the ground. The three black robed priests circled the table and around Dieter like vultures.
We looked for anything unusual. Physically, twenty cutout tongues and sixteen druggies was all I saw. Some major piercing scars and a couple of jagged, presumably knife wounds were evident on the priests at all three levels. Outside of some cases of rather severe scarring between the joins of their souls and their emotions, there was nothing unusual about any of them.
Except Dieter.
Dieter had this Siamese twin thing going with his soul, except the second soul was… truncated, clipped, eaten… Yeah, that’s the word, eaten. The second soul was being eaten away, nibbled, bit by bite. And while the primary soul did look more vibrant than a normal human, it wasn’t strangely bright or off-color. He also seemed far healthier than his father did. That was either whatever was controlling him or Dieter himself, but there wasn’t a hint of the Loa on him. It wasn’t one of the Soul Riders, then. This was something else entirely, some other parasite. And his intellect looked… rewired? Fine tendrils of energy crossed from the soul onto the intellect at weird places that I couldn’t explain. It just looked wrong.
Dieter raised both fists high above his head when the tempo hit one-twenty. The chanting became one word that sounded like “va-du-seet.” The drumbeat skipped every other beat now, but there was another noise to take its place, faintly at first, but it gathered volume, nearing. The occlusion to my sight closed in as it neared, too. The cause of the gray mist was coming.
The Swords bristled at my sides and the Quarrel pinged on targets within the clearing, warning me of danger approaching. As if the circle of blood mages wasn’t dangerous enough. Something came into the clearing overhead. Several somethings, really, fairly large but hard to see, phasing in and out of reality between the astral plane and reality around one specific beast that stayed completely physical. It looked like a bat, sort of. A giant, man-sized, blue glowing bat-thing that I’d seen before, once.
You killed one of those in the warehouse in Arkansas,
Ethan sent through the anchor. He was squatting in the bushes on the other side of Kieran, invisible from my perspective, though his aura burned through the bushes.
Dieter slammed his fists down on the table as the bat-thing dropped something. The timing was superb: his fists hit, the drumbeat stopped, the chanting stopped and what dropped landed all at the same time. BAM!
I had to shift to the side an inch or two and up to see it. It was a claw, the talon of an animal. The bat-things overhead were fluttering in and out of reality like moths around a porch light above the table, the last one strobing fast enough to cause a seizure in a lot of people if they could see the light. That’s when I matched the claw on the table. It had a hole through it where the Bolt had held it in place to the steel girder that day in the warehouse.
Ethan, they’ve got a sample of your blood,
I sent through the anchor, panicking. What could they do to Ethan, to
Eth’anok’avel
? He wasn’t human, exactly, but even if all they did was capture the shell that was him right now, that contained a lot of information about us, about magic, about the universe. What would they do with that? Could I stop the connection from being made? How could he? Oh.
Grow,
I told him.
Change your blood in some way. Grow an inch, change your hair color, eyes, something that requires a change in your DNA.
It was an option not open to normal people, after all. I felt Ethan retreat through the anchor and explode next to me a half-second later, looking outwardly exactly the same. I had complete faith that
something
changed during that breezy feeling of his passage through me. I hoped it was enough.
Kieran noticed Ethan’s movement, turning to look at Ethan around me with confusion on his face. Either Ethan told him what was happening or he decided to ask later, because his attention went back to Dieter.
“Va-du-seet!” Dieter yelled once and all of the bat-things flashed suddenly into reality then faded just as suddenly back into the astral and started cycling again as they flew, gangly, like a bumblebee, totally illogical that it could fly at all. He grabbed the claw up and pulled the black-handled knife free of its sheath. More than the handle was black, though. The athame was one piece of metal, etched with every symbol of every evil death or blood god and goddess I know and more I didn’t. What kept the blade sharp or what blackened the blade was outside my ken.
The three black-robes shot out to the sides, each grabbing a naked, tongue-less, prostrate man and dragging him to the table. If any of them objected, none struggled or vocalized it as they were tossed onto the table in a row, chests up. Their mouths’ still moved in silent chant and their eyes were vacant. They didn’t have long to object to anything. Within seconds of all three being in place, the priests, moving in perfect unison, pulled silver athames from their sleeves and slit their throats, pulling their heads back. The three bodies shuddered as they died and bled out onto the table.
Ethan was holding me down, whispering, “It’s too late, Seth,” while pushing through the anchor at the same time,
It’s too late, Little Brother. It’s too late for them.
I realized I’d brought the helmet back and was trying to get up, to stop them from being killed. But Ethan was right. We were too late for those three. We were too late for the other seventeen, too.
Dieter scraped one of the talons with the black knife, chanting too quietly for us to hear. He tapped his scrapings into the collection pool of the table, holding the knife there as he watched the men bleed and die. His eyes were wild and excited, matching the emotions in his aura.
The four kneeling priests moved now. Skirting around the table and staying away from the other priests and Dieter, they huddled together, consolidating the stinking, burning oil into one censer. The tops of the remaining three censers were removed. One priest took the three tops and ran to Dieter to stand a step behind him on his right. The other three arranged the bottoms in a triangle, then set the operational censer onto the triangle, creating another base. A twist of the wrist and the top split like three petals of a flower and a flame grew up, throwing up black and noxious smoke. The priests knelt around it, chanting and swaying slightly, breathing in the disgusting smell without notice.