Magic Rises kd-6 Page 32

  We climbed the road, me and the enormous lion. It was decided that fur was preferable to no clothes, and although Astamur had offered some, they wouldn’t fit Curran and we both had a feeling the shepherd didn’t have that many clothes anyway. The castle loomed before us.

  I sighed.

  “I know,” Curran said, human words emerging perfectly from the leonine mouth. “We’re almost done.”

  “I’ll remind you of that the next time you see Hugh.”

  A low growl reverberated in Curran’s throat.

  “Temper, Your Majesty.”

  We both knew that picking a fight with Hugh was still out of the question. I still had no idea what his plan was. He’d gotten me into this castle. He wasn’t trying to actively murder me. He flattered me and called me special. If things kept going this way . . . I shuddered.

  Curran looked at me.

  “Just pondering what Hugh’s version of flowers and candy will look like.”

  “Like bloody mush,” Curran said. “Because I will crush his head and his brain will ooze out of his ears.”

  I just wanted to know what the final plan was.

  We walked through the gates. The cage had been moved from the inner courtyard. It now hung from a beam affixed to a guard tower, front and center in the courtyard. Hibla sat in it. I stopped. She stared at me with haunted feverish eyes, her desperation so obvious, I had to stop myself from walking over there and pulling her out.

  “There you are,” Hugh strode out of the opened doors of the main keep. “Safe and sound.”

  “Why is she in a cage?”

  “Cages need occupants. This one was empty and she seemed like the best candidate.”

  Hibla had failed one too many times. She’d let me out of the castle and lost me, and now he’d stuck her into the cage for everyone to see. “Please let her out.”

  Hugh sighed. “What is it about the cage? Is there anyone I could put in there you wouldn’t want to get out?”

  “You.”

  He shrugged his massive shoulder. “It wouldn’t hold me.”

  “Talk is cheap. Try it on, d’Ambray,” Curran said.

  “I’d love to, but as I’ve said, it’s occupied.” Hugh turned to me. “So where did you go?”

  I looked at the cage.

  Hugh shrugged. “Oh, fine. Someone get Hibla out!”

  A djigit left his post by the gate and ran down to the cage.

  “I went to some caves, fell in, swam around, and was rescued by an atsany and a local shepherd.”

  “Sounds eventful.”

  “I’m tired and hungry,” I said.

  Hugh smiled. “I’ll see you later, then.”

  And why did that sound ominous?

  Curran moved between him and me and we went into the castle.

  Ten minutes later, I was sitting on our bed eating food George brought for me from the kitchen. Curran changed shape and put on clothes.

  Mahon appeared at the doorway. “I’m glad you’re okay,” he told me.

  A moment later Barabas walked through the door. A man followed him into the room. A cloud of silky hair, completely white, framed his narrow face. His skin must’ve been naturally olive, but now it had a slightly ashen tint. He looked to be in his midthirties, not just lean, but so slight that clothes hung on him the way they would on a coatrack. The man saw me and smiled. His entire face lit up, suddenly young and blissful, his blue eyes luminescent, at once beautiful and impossibly distant.

  “Mistress,” he said.

  Whoa. “Hi, Christopher.”

  He came over and sat on the floor by my feet and sighed happily. “Beautiful mistress.”

  “How are you, Christopher?”

  He looked at me with a blank smile and stared at my shoes.

  “How is he?” I asked Barabas.

  “What you see is what you get. He’s here one minute, and then he isn’t. I think we finally settled on the fact that he isn’t dead. He insists that he used to know how to fly, but he forgot. He occasionally tries, so I have to watch him closely in high places.”

  Oh boy. “Christopher?”

  He looked up at me.

  “You’re free.”

  “I am.” He nodded. “I’ll serve you forever. To the end of time.”

  “No, you’re free. You don’t have to serve me. You’re welcome to stay, but you can go if you want.”

  He leaned over and touched my hand with long fingers. “Nobody is free in this world. Neither princes, nor wizards, nor beggars. I will serve you forever, my mistress.”

  Aha. “Let’s come back to that later, when you feel more like yourself.”

  “Great,” Curran said. “Another fine addition to your collection of uncanny misfits.”

  “I take offense to that,” Barabas said.

  “Don’t worry, I count myself in, too,” Curran told him.

  “What did you do for Hugh?” I asked.

  “I took care of his books.” Christopher’s fingers twitched as if stroking invisible pages. “He has the most interesting books. Do you have books, lady?”

  Great. I rescued Hugh’s librarian. “Some. Probably not as nice as Hugh’s.”

  “That’s alright.” Christopher offered me a smile. “I will help you get more and then I will take care of them for you.”

  “Christopher, about the orange beast,” I said. “The one who killed a guard, you remember?”

  “The lamassu,” Christopher said helpfully.

  “You know what they are?”

  “Yes.” He nodded with that same faraway smile.

  “Why didn’t you tell me when I talked to you?”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  I turned and bumped my forehead against the wooden post of the bed.

  “Okay, mistress needs a moment,” Barabas said. “Come on.”

  “Does that help?” Christopher asked with interest.

  Barabas took him by the arm and gently lifted him to his feet. “We should go eat.”

  “Real food?”

  “Real food. Come with me.”

  They left the room.

  “You know he’s crazy, right?” Curran asked.

  “Yep. He won’t survive on his own.”

  “As you wish,” Curran said.

  * * *

  I spent the day in bed, sleeping, eating, and then sleeping again. Curran stood guard over me, and any suggestion that I should go and guard Desandra was met with a stone Beast Lord face. He had a point. I was tired and my whole body hurt, as if I’d been through a meat grinder.

  Ten minutes before six I woke up because someone knocked on our door. Curran blocked it. Beast Lord in hover mode.

  “. . . information,” Hibla said.

  I rolled out of bed.

  Curran stepped aside. She walked into the room, holding herself very straight, her chin raised, her spine rigid. She couldn’t have looked more fragile if she were on the verge of crying. I’d warned her. Be careful who you serve.

  “What do you have for me?”

  “A large group of strangers came to the mountains. They didn’t use the pass or the sea. They came on the railroad tracks on foot. They passed a small village not too far from here.” Hibla passed me a photograph. The body of a young man lying on his back stared at me with empty eyes. A bright red hole gaped where his stomach used to be, his flesh gouged out by claws and teeth. They’d fed on him. The second picture showed a close-up of his face. Purple blisters marked his features. I’d seen them before on Ivanna’s face.

  I held up the photograph and showed it to Hibla.

  “The villagers said the bigger ones spit acid.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Hibla shrugged. “We don’t know. There were only six survivors. They had killed forty people and eaten most of them. I saw these marks on Ivanna.”

  “I saw them, too,” I said.

  “If she was attacked, why didn’t she say anything?”

  “Unless she was attacked by her own kind,�
� Curran said.

  I pulled a piece of paper out and began writing. “The first time I saw Ivanna was before dinner, when Radomil and Gerardo had a fight in the hallway. She saw Doolittle examining Desandra and she was upset.”

  I wrote it down and drew an arrow down. “Desandra was attacked.” I drew another arrow.

  “Meeting between the packs,” Curran said.

  I added it and drew another arrow. “Doolittle is attacked. Next morning Ivanna has purple blisters.”

  “If I were a lamassu, and assuming that one of Desandra’s babies is a lamassu,” Curran said, “knowing that a medic is examining her would make me nervous.”

  “One of Desandra’s children is one of those things?” Hibla’s eyes narrowed.

  “Probably,” Curran told her.

  “Suppose Ivanna is a lamassu,” I said. “She sees Doolittle take the blood. She knows that there is a chance he will discover that a child is a lamassu, and that will blow their pack’s cover. She panics and tries to have her killed. Except someone in her pack, either Radomil or more likely Vitaliy, takes exception to that. The attack failed, they’re down a shapeshifter, and they still want the child to be born, because they want the mountain pass.”

  “Of course they want the pass,” Curran said. “They glide. Mountains give them a huge advantage. Vitaliy spits on her as a punishment and then decides to destroy the evidence Doolittle had collected instead.”

  “Doolittle said they smashed his equipment.” It wasn’t bad reasoning: no need to kill Desandra when you can just destroy the blood. “They also were the only pack that reacted when I asked for the blood test. The Italians and Kral wouldn’t give me the time of day either, but the Volkodavi looked worried.”

  “But why do they eat people?” Hibla asked.

  “It lets them grow bigger and sprout wings,” Curran told her. I had brought him up to speed on the whole lamassu story. “There are likely a large number of them hiding out nearby. If the birth doesn’t work out in their favor, everyone can storm the castle. That’s how I would do it.”

  “I can arrest them,” Hibla said.

  “We don’t have any evidence,” I told her. “Besides, Desandra is still pregnant. Once a baby is born, it will be undeniable. We don’t know it’s them; we suspect. We have to watch them. Tonight at dinner, for example.”

  Hibla’s face turned solemn. “This is why I came. Lord Megobari asked me to find out about the medmage’s health and to ask if you would join him for dinner tonight outside the castle. Alone.”

  “No.” Curran said.

  Hibla took a step back.

  “Yes.”

  “No.”

  “Tell Lord Megobari I’ll be there.”

  Curran crossed his arms.

  “I will pass on your message.” Hibla turned and fled out of the room.

  “No,” Curran said. “You’re not going.”

  “Are you ordering me not to go?”

  “I can’t order you to do anything. Nor would I try. You want to go alone to have dinner with a guy who killed your stepfather, who serves your father, and who gets a hard-on when you beat the shit out of him. How is this a good idea?”

  That’s my psycho. Blunt but fair. “He brought us here. You and me and all of us. I want to know why. I think he will tell me, because he wants me to know how big, bad, and smart he is. We need to know what we’re up against.”

  “He puts people in cages and keeps undead in his walls.”

  “What is he going to do that he hasn’t had an opportunity to do already? Before you went to talk to Lorelei on the balcony, he told me that it was all for me. He made this entire meeting happen. Don’t you want to know how he managed to get all these packs together and orchestrate this? Aren’t you curious?”

  The muscles on his jaw stood out. I won.

  “Take Derek. Hugh will bring someone with him.”

  He took a step forward. I could take one, too. “No problem. I can even bring another person if you want.”

  “Derek is fine,” Curran said.

  “I’ll be back tonight,” I told him. “It will be okay. Don’t worry.”

  * * *

  At seven, Hibla came to get us. We followed her down the road to a narrow mountain path that led north, to a low mountain thrusting up like a dragon fang north of the castle. The western half of it had been blasted to make room for the railroad, and layers of rock thrust out of the sheer cliff. The path reached the mountain and turned into a paved sidewalk that dived into the mountain’s forested side.

  Trees rose on both sides of us, not wild growth but carefully cultivated greenery, cut back to please the eye. Every few feet there would be a stone step. Short feylantern torches glowed on both side of the path, with bright sparks of deluded fireflies dancing around them. Unlike the lavender feylanterns in the castle, these were yellow, a color mages in Atlanta fought for but couldn’t achieve. Magic wrapped around us. Hugh went all out.

  The path climbed up, turned, climbed up again, and turned again . . . We kept zigzagging up the mountain until finally we came to a small sitting area: a wooden bench with a table and some meat and bread under a wire hood.

  “You and I will wait here,” Hibla told Derek.

  “If anything happens to her, you’ll die first,” Derek told her.

  Well, that settled that.

  I climbed farther up the path. The greenery parted and I saw a large table set under the trees. The trees on the west side had been sheared and an evening sea stretched before me, azure and beautiful, as the sun slowly set into its cool waters.

  Hugh sat at the table. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt. Lord Death at his most casual.

  He rose and smiled at me. I sat across from him on the north side, while he sat on the south. My back was to the path. Argh.

  “Nobody will be coming up,” he said and raised a bottle. “Wine?”

  “Water.”

  “You don’t drink much,” he said.

  “I drank too much for a while.”

  “I did, too,” he said, and poured two glasses of water, one for himself, one for me.

  The table held three platters: fruit, meat, and cheese. Everything a growing warlord needs.

  “Please,” Hugh invited.

  I put some cheese and meat on my plate.

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” He nodded at the sea.

  It was. There was something ancient about it, something impossibly alluring. Thousands of years ago, people gazed at the sea just like we did now, mesmerized by the pattern of evening light on the waves. They had their own dreams and ambitions, but at the core they must’ve been just like us: they loved and hated, worried about their problems and celebrated their triumphs. Long after we were gone, the sea would still remain, and other people would watch it and be bewitched.

  “The Volkodavi are lamassu,” I said.

  “I know,” he said.

  “When did you find out?”

  “When I saw one fly out of your medmage’s room. The Volkodavi have a good reputation back in Ukraine, but I’ve heard some stories. People disappearing. Monsters eating human bodies. I put two and two together. They came out of nowhere a few years ago, took over the local pack, and then the strange shit started.” Hugh cut a piece of meat. “Your father hates the breed. He says they were badly made. I think they could be useful under the right circumstances, but they have very little discipline. Hammering them into usable soldiers would be difficult. You’d have to get them from childhood, and even then there is no guarantee.”

  “You’re talking about them like they are pit bull puppies.”

  “Not a bad analogy, actually. It would take a few generations to breed the crazy out of the lamassu. Why bother? A properly trained German shepherd can kill as well as an undisciplined pit bull, and it’s a lot easier to handle.”

  This conversation was getting under my skin. I drank my water.

  “I like it here,” Hugh said.

  “It is beautiful.”

&nb
sp; “You should stay,” he said. “After Desandra gives birth and the Beast Lord takes his pack home. Have a vacation. Live a little, swim in the sea, eat delicious food that’s bad for you.”

  “I’m sure it would be a glorious vacation right up to the point where you serve my head on a silver platter to Roland.”

  “For you, I’d spring for gold,” he said.

  “Somehow that doesn’t make me feel any better.”

  “Are you actually planning to fight him?” Hugh leaned forward.

  “If it comes to it.”

  Hugh put down his fork and walked to the edge. “See that rock down there?”

  I got up and stood at my edge of the table. He was pointing at a jagged boulder jutting from the side of the mountain.

  Hugh opened his mouth. Magic snapped like a striking whip. An invisible torrent of power crashed into the rock. The boulder broke into shards.

  A power word. Nice. When I used mine, it ripped me up with pain. Hugh didn’t seem any worse for wear.

  “I only have a tiny fraction of his power. You have no idea what it’s like to stand behind him when he lets it go. It’s like walking in the footsteps of a god.”

  I sat back in my spot. I’d heard that before.

  Hugh studied the boulder below. “You’ve been alive for twenty-six years. He’s been alive for over five thousand. He doesn’t just play with magic; he knows it, intimately. He can craft impossible things. If I were to stand against him, he would crush me like a gnat. Hell, he might not even notice I’m there at all. I serve him because there is no one stronger.”

  Hugh turned to me. “I’ve seen you fight. I’m a fan. But if you plan to fight the Builder of Towers, you will lose.”

  I realized he wasn’t bluffing. It hit home. If Roland came for me now, I would lose. Looking at it now seemed kind of absurd. I wasn’t even thirty. I didn’t know how to use my magic. What few tricks I had up my sleeve barely scratched the surface. In my head I always suspected that I wouldn’t be able to hold him off, but the way Hugh said it made me pause.

  “What makes you think he wants to kill you?” Hugh sat down.

  “He tried to murder me in the womb, he killed my mother, and he sent you to find and kill the man I called my father. What makes you think he doesn’t?”

  “He’s lonely,” Hugh said. “It eats at him. He can age himself. It takes a lot of effort, and usually he stays around forty. He says it’s a good age, mature enough to inspire confidence, young enough to not suggest frailty. He stayed at it for years, but now he is actively aging. Last time I saw him, four months ago, he looked closer to fifty. I asked him why. He said it made him appear more fatherly.”