Labyrinth, p.7
Labyrinth, page 7
Stewey had a pretty good idea how powerful she was. Didn’t mean nothin’ in this town.
She considered her words. Looked around. Considered the interior of the Five Star and the other clientele. Ground her teeth just a little bit as Stewey watched.
“That is not a story for such a public venue,” she finally said aloud. “I can hide us some, mostly because Koschei is not that great at divination, but his servant will search for you and the bronze.”
Just to be an ass, and to see if the woman would bite, Stewey tapped one of the pockets on his jacket like he had them wrapped up and on him for safe keeping.
Like a bloody amateur who was still wet behind the ears.
She blinked at him in surprise.
“You should have hidden them better,” she said. “Unless you can stop a creature like that.”
Stewey smiled enigmatically. Snub .38, hammerless and loaded with rock salt and silver dust, would do just exactly that. Might not kill the damned thing but would sure kick him in the balls pretty good if he came in here.
Dan knew the truth. Stewey felt him spin up a little something under the table, just in case the lady’s greed got the better of her right now.
So Stewey was surprised as hell when the woman pulled a small piece of jewelry from her jacket and put it on the table between them. Watched her focus a SERIOUS amount of power in the item, so much that it glowed for just a moment, which was a really frightening to watch.
She looked at him with hard, emerald eyes.
“That should hide you from Koschei, at least for a time,” she said. “And his servants, eldritch and physical. At some point, he will realize that you are hidden, and look for the shadow that it casts, and find you.“
“Does that mean he just found you, as soon as you walk outside of range?” Stewey asked.
“He’ll expect me to be here anyway,” she said. “Faucher was an ally, but not a friend. An ancient who thwarted him from time to time, but not an immortal. Not like Koschei and me.”
“So now what?” Stewey asked.
“You asked how you could trust me,” she countered in a harder voice than she had before. “That will let you contact me, even as it hides you.”
“And it lets you find us, lady,” Stewey said.
“I would like to be an ally,” she said.
“Are there secrets at the mansion yet to find?” Dan asked, kinda deflecting everything, like a good cop was supposed to do.
Maybe they’d played this game a time or two.
She shrugged. That much was honest. Maybe the first honesty from her. Time would tell.
“We can get you in, as long as you promise not to destroy the place,” Dan said. “How powerful was Faucher?”
“Not as great a magic-worker as I am, nor Koschei,” she said. “Better than either of you are.”
Stewey watched her and saw the hesitation.
“At least so far.”
“Then let’s go look at the place,” Stewey offered in a hard, smiling voice that caught the woman off guard.
“Now?” she asked.
“Truck’s right down the street and fueled up,” Stewey grinned at her. “About a three-hour drive from here, since we’ll be doing it the old-fashioned way. Stop for donuts at Cle Elum and then we’re in the neighborhood about the time it isn’t rude to call our friend, Kate.”
Lots of calculation in those eyes. One woman in a strange truck, in the middle of nowhere, with two men she barely knew. Sure, she could take both of them pretty easy, but she’d still be taking him and Dan as much on faith as they were supposed to take her.
He expected her to back out. Or need to call someone and check in several times, like any woman on a blind date with a relative stranger. Something.
Instead, she stared hard at him, like she was weighing his soul. Or his karma.
Did the same with Dan, maybe lingering a little longer.
“Okay,” she said.
Damn it, he hated it when someone called his bluff.
Chapter
Thirteen
Khulan had ended up in the middle of the vehicle, mostly due to the size of her current body, tiny compared to the two males.
1973 CE Pickup truck. Manufactured in Detroit, Michigan, by the Ford Motor Company. Bright red at one point. Faded and touched with gray primer now.
One fender missing. Gone so long ago that the essence of the vehicle had changed.
Bench seat across the middle. Manual transmission controlled by a stick from the side of the steering wheel. The colloquial three-on-the-tree that older memories than her current body understood.
The machine had howled in barely contained rage, climbing over the pass that separated Washington State into cultures, but it ran with smoother power than a machine manufactured more than twenty years before Khulan was born should have.
The bakery had been as good as the two men had promised, a delight in smells and an array of options that was staggering, until she realized the relative poverty of modern Siberia, even for the acolyte of the goddess.
Khulan remembered her own childhood, those days before the goddess chose her.
The mountain road they had wound along was quiet at this time of morning, as the sun occasionally peeked out from gaps in the trees.
Ogden drove. Holt rode on her right. The need to shift gears and not have Ogden slam his fist into her knee, even accidentally, had Khulan pressed to her right, where she was violating Holt’s personal space in ways that Americans were generally unused to.
It could not be helped. At least both men were polite, and Holt was rather attractive to look at, a good mix of European and southern Chinese in his features. She resisted the urge to flirt with the man, however innocent it might seem.
The situation was still utterly awkward.
She’d like to blame Ogden for that, but the man had called her bluff. Looked at her asking to be a friend and ally and challenged her to prove it by helping them with an investigation of the situation they had stumbled into.
Khulan would have done this more quietly herself, assuming that was possible.
Faucher dead should have undone most of the enchantments the man had created himself, knowing what an arrogant prick he could be. That would leave much weaker spectral defenses around the place, but nothing would be obvious, since these two men had gotten into the compound.
Unless Kai Damien Faucher had set up a trap exclusively for her. Probably her or Koschei, whoever arrived first to sniff at the ruins of the man’s dreams. She would have to move carefully.
They rolled to the front gate, a wrought iron monstrosity that perfectly reflected Faucher’s personal image. Holt had called the real estate agent who handled the transaction. Khulan had not been part of the conversation, but they had a code that would open the gate, as well as promises to let the person know if anything untoward happened.
Assuming that anyone survived one of Faucher’s postmortem traps.
But Ogden was able to open the gate. The truck carried them up the hill to a plateau with a mansion that encompassed what a prick Faucher had been in real life.
Even the acolyte of the goddess lived in a house with only nine rooms. Faucher probably had wings of this building he hadn’t visited since before Khulan’s birth.
Ogden parked the vehicle and turned to her with a serious look on his face.
“This punk expecting you to try his defenses?” the man asked perceptively.
Khulan shrugged.
“He was an occasional ally,” she said. “The War for Eternity has been going on for nearly five thousand years, and he was very much a late-comer.”
“The what?” Holt asked just after opening the door on his side.
“War for Eternity, Mr. Holt,” she repeated.
“Call me Dan,” he said. “What does that mean?”
Khulan gestured for him to exit the vehicle and then followed. Ogden met them at the front of the hood.
“Koschei the Deathless seeks to live forever, so that he can own all the magic in the world,” she said. “I and my predecessors have been fighting him for longer than you would imagine.”
“Predecessors,” Ogden said slowly, but it wasn’t posed as a question. “What, exactly, are you, Khulan Zima?”
“Are you sure you’d rather not know, Ogden?” she turned to the shorter man, still a head taller, but broader and heavier than Dan.
“Stewey,” he corrected her. “If you’re going in there with us, I think we should be prepared. For whatever your buddy might throw at us. Excuse me, buddies. Plural.”
Khulan didn’t correct Stewey. He was as right as a mortal could be.
“I am two people, Stewey,” she said carefully. “Khulan Zima was born twenty-six years ago, near Irkutsk in the Russian East.”
“And the other one?” Dan asked. “The thing that took her body, in trade for power?”
Khulan couldn’t tell if Dan was guessing or more perceptive than she had seen earlier. Neither of these men were what they appeared at first blush. She needed to remember that.
Both could turn into potent allies as their personal power grew.
Or terrible foes.
“An outsider would classify me as the Baba Yaga,” she told Dan, waiting for the man to flinch or argue.
He surprised her by nodding.
“Iliana was right,” he muttered instead.
“Who?” Khulan was shocked by the response.
“Our mentor is Cole Battersby,” Dan said. “His wife is a Russian duchess whose family escaped the revolution a century ago and made it to the West. She has a book in Russian she’s translating for me. I suspect you’ll recognize much of it when she does.”
Khulan felt her jaw drop open.
One of the old families has survived without her knowing? With the ancient lore? And brought it here?
A trip to meet the mentors would be next, assuming everything worked out here.
“I would like to meet them,” she managed.
Dan and Stewey both grinned and set out for the vast porch. There was a lockbox on the door that Dan opened, revealing a key that opened the front door.
She grasped both men by a sleeve as it opened.
“A moment,” she said carefully, studying the door frame.
Strange markings would look like an ornamental design to anyone without training or power. Neither Dan nor Stewey had triggered them, so Khulan wondered if they were tightly focused against certain targets or simply required a higher level of power to engage.
She already knew Kai Faucher was an asshole. How big of one was he?
Dan pulled a knife from his jacket and tapped it against the frame, eliciting sparks and causing runes in the spine to glow feebly.
“Stewey, this is up your alley,” Dan said, stepping back and drawing her with him.
She ended up clear across the porch, standing perhaps a shade too close to Dan Holt. He had a pleasant smell, in spite of all the insanity he had been through in the last eight hours.
Stewey did not bring out a wand or athame to focus his will, which surprised her, as he was in the middle of the pack for human magic-workers. Then he laid his bare hands on the doorframe, and Khulan watched him push his will and a spell directly into the wood.
Impressive. Stewey had a gift for enchantment far beyond most she knew in this generation. Khulan made a note to see what artifacts the man made. With the loss of so much magic over the centuries—Koschei never to be sufficiently damned—fewer were born each generation with the ability to tap the remainder.
Perhaps shattering some of Faucher’s remaining items would help.
Stewey turned to stare at her from across the distance.
“So there’s four names inscribed here,” he said. “Guessing one of them is you, because the whole thing’s reactive right now. Should I break it, like we did the circle?”
“Can you do that?” Khulan asked, surprised. “Safely?”
“Easy,” Stewey said. “This Faucher fellow had a penchant for false ley lines. No idea why he built here, except that he’s way the hell away from everybody else.”
“Are there any real lines around here?” she asked, reconsidering the entire situation.
“None,” Stewey said. “Some down on the coastal plain. Some well inland, heading into Canada. Nothing around here, which might have made it quiet enough that he could hide. Nobody would think to look for him here.”
“We’re already coming back for unicorns in the spring, Stewey,” Dan said, which made no sense to Khulan. “Go ahead and break it now. We’ll just have to bring a virgin when we come.”
That sounded like a story she would need to get from the men later. Right now, she heard Stewey grunt with effort, and the entire frame around the door lit up with blue fire, showing various runes that had been hidden.
The barrier failed like a burst balloon. Khulan had no way to capture all the power flowing towards her like a breeze. She could only hope that some of the locals had enough of the gift to make use of it, so that it didn’t just flow back into the depths of the earth and disappear, like so much magic had when the people forgot.
Still, she held out her hand and pulled a handful of power to her. It would last her for a while and save her having to use her own.
“Okay.” Stewey kind of slumped after the magical breeze failed. “Door’s open. Probably the other three folks just got woken up from whatever they were doing, so we should move quickly.”
Khulan agreed. She’d felt the pulse. Koschei would as well. She needed to ask Stewey who the others were, but that could wait.
The interior of the foyer was exactly what she would have expected Faucher to have. Dan led them up the overwrought stairs to a hallway and then down the length to a double door that was closed.
Looking back, Khulan wondered if this hallway alone, running along the spine of the second floor, had more square meters than her house did. A waste, doubly so when you considered how much power it would take to protect it from spells and summoned creatures.
Dan opened the door. Khulan followed him in. Stewey joined them.
The room was empty and immense. Indeed, the carpet had ended at the door and stone tile had been put here instead. Khulan had been in auditoriums that were smaller.
It took up the entire endcap of the building, with windows overlooking the front as well as the back and a view of trees out the side.
“This was his working library,” Dan said simply.
Looking around, Khulan had to agree. The walls had absorbed a fair share of power over a long stretch of time, like the background radiation left three generations after Soviet weapons testing had moved underground.
The room smelled of stale magic. If that could be a thing. Bound up and gone sour.
How much power could someone pull out of the walls, if they could store it? How much would simply bleed away into the earth, some of it never to return?
“They will remodel this, won’t they?” she asked Dan, referring to the new owners. “Lose it?”
“They will,” Stewey agreed. “Again, maybe we can refer them to someone. Hell, maybe we need to get into the interior decorating business. Certainly, there’s a feng shui element we could emphasize.”
“The Grimsbys couldn’t spell feng shui, Stewey,” Dan said, turning to her. “What happens to all the power when they do? Better, if you’re that old, where has it all gone to?”
She had hoped not to have this conversation with these two men. At least not yet. Perhaps later when they had built up some level of trust.
But then, how did you build trust except to give it?
“All magic wants to come to rest,” Khulan said, echoing some of her earliest lessons as a prospect for the goddess. “It will flow into nature and the settle in the earth. Magic-workers, warlocks such as yourself, can make use of it. Bind it. Enchant it into items.”
“Then where did it all go?” Dan asked again.
“Some of it has been bound up into powerful items that have been hidden,” she said. “Much has been lost simply because there are fewer who believe in it, so they do not draw it from depths of the earth and spread it out, like watering flowers from a well.”
“How much power does it take to keep a Deathless Immortal alive?” Stewey asked, studying her far closer than a man might stare at a pretty woman.
“I am not deathless, Stewey,” she admitted carefully. “As each body ages, a new acolyte is chosen from a crop of new students. Often, a candidate might be known soon after birth. Khulan was such, and she chose to embrace the binding.”
“You’re talking in the third person,” Dan said carefully.
They were speaking in English now. Had been since they left the restaurant in Seattle, although she wasn’t sure when they fully transitioned.
“I have memories that are five thousand years old, Dan Holt,” she said powerfully. “And I remember being offered the power of the goddess when I was still a child and the old acolyte was one hundred and forty years old. There is not an adequate vocabulary to describe being two people, except that Khulan is the person you see, and she remembers being hundreds of other women, stretching backwards in a chain millennia old.”
“Do you miss being human?” Dan asked, with almost a mournful tone to his voice.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like to be a goddess, Dan?” she countered, smiling with pure joy.
“So, you’re not an immortal permanently stealing magical energy?” Stewey grunted.
“Not much more than you use, Stewey Ogden,” Khulan turned to include the man in the conversation. “Faucher stole much more from the earth. I can sense that just from how much bleed is left in the walls here. Koschei seeks to bind it all, to keep himself alive forever, because each year it takes a little more to keep his flesh intact. That is why the Baba Yaga chose this form of immortality, originally. We are the memories and not the flesh.”
“Weird,” Dan acknowledged, but Khulan couldn’t really argue the point with the man.
She had met truly magical creatures, things left over from earlier epochs of humanity, long before the rise of metallurgical technology. Dan might joke about meeting a unicorn, but Khulan could introduce him to several if he chose to travel to Russia someday.
