They looked proper that way, headless and twitching. A black mist of sulfur and brimstone filled the clearing, burning my delicate nasal passages and the pathways to my lungs. The breath caught in my throat.
“Yet now be strong . . . says the Lord,”
the bells said in my head, “
and fight: for I am with you, says the Lord of hosts.”
I cut off the head of the last one. Blood was everywhere. It had splattered the ground where I stood, my chest heaving with exertion. It had sprayed my clothes, which steamed with acid. Burns and sword wounds slashed my skin. I screamed a cry of victory, blades out-swept at my sides, head back, mouth to the sky. My cry echoed all along the hills. From high up, hidden in the rocks, the lynx screamed with me.
As the sound of victory died, another sound followed. From the hillsides all around came scream upon scream of challenge. I sucked in a breath and looked up. Dusk had fallen. Devil-spawn ringed the hills all around. Three-toed, clawed, scaled spawn with built-in blades in place of fingernails. I pulled a knife to replace the kris.
A snap sounded behind me. I whirled, bringing both blades up and across, a defensive move. It was Thaddeus. “You are one weird, crazy mage, you know that?” he said, a gun in each hand, eyes blazing chrysocolla, still angry. More than angry. Raging. “Do you know how many there are on the hillsides? Do you?”
I laughed, the sound ripping through my chest, full of despair and challenge, both. “A lot. Too many. Your bullets filled with holy water?”
“Yeah. From the Dead Sea. We all carried special ammo. Not that it helped much.”
“You're still alive, aren't you?” I said, chest heaving, lavender light blazing from my amulets. Beneath its palliative and strength was a growing, distant pain. “How many bullets?”
I followed Thadd's eyes around the hills, long shadows striping the ground, the sky a lovely shade of navy above. One star showed, hanging over the waning moon. All at once, the spawn's screaming stopped. An eerie silence fell on the clearing. Half a hundred of their eyes watched us, hungry. I counted the human and half-breed attackers. One walker was still alive, and fifteen Dark humans. Of the original posse sent to capture me, ten were left.
My fear, which had lightened for a moment, was a heavy stone of terror. Time, which had been so fluid, felt unyielding now, as ungiving as granite. As one, the spawn leaped down the mountain toward us. “Not enough,” Thadd said, slamming his back against mine. Three shots sounded. “Call a seraph.”
“I can't. Not yet,” I said. “
I'm
not in
danger dire
. The posse isn't innocent. They struck an unarmed mage. If I call, you'll all die too.”
“Gabriel's tears,” he hissed. “We'll die anyway.” Spawn reached us. Blades whirling, back-to-back with the Hand of the Law, I shifted into the move called the winged warrior. I drew blood and screamed a battle cry I hadn't remembered.
“Jehovah Sabaoth!”
echoed through the hillsides.
“Jehovah Sabaoth!”
For a single instant, the Darkness paused. And then they fell on us.
There were too many. Analytically, I knew I would die. On another level, I was quaking with fear. On a third level, the demented level of a maniac, I was raging with fury. I
would not
give up. Not to these
things
. Three went down as I took their heads. The ground beneath us was perilously slippery with demon-blood. My battle boots smoked with the acid.
“Over there,” Thadd said, pointing his blade south to the cairn of stones. “Up high.”
“Yeah. But step where I step,” I shouted as I ran toward the mound. “It's booby-trapped.”
“Of course it is,” he said, tone caustic. “Why not?”
Thadd raced at my left, shooting two spawn fast. As he changed clips, I took their heads, opening a path. As one unit, we raced to the cairn. Eli stood atop it, bleeding in a hundred places. I jumped up first, landed high, finding footing at the tracker's back. Thadd landed beside me and set his feet. His riding boots were smoking and made sticky sounds on the stones as he positioned himself. My battle boots instantly cooled and sealed against the acid of blood. I hadn't even noticed their protection until now.
Thadd fired three quick shots, dropping three. The horde was upon us. I stabbed the first that bounded up the cairn, sliced his head from his torso. When he fell, he landed on a booby trap and his body exploded. Blood flew. Spawn screamed. And we fought. From uphill, Durbarge and six others raced. As I cut, I saw one more of the posse fall.
Time seemed to drag, as if it had a weight and pressure all its own. My arms tired, muscles growing heavy, slowing with fatigue. I was weakened, and hungry; adrenaline could fuel me for only so long. Though I had been partially restored when Raziel saved me, partially healed when I called on the Mountain, that healing was long gone. And still the Darkness came, humans and half-breeds in the mix. The height of the cairn slowed them, forced them to move up one by one or in small groups. Two humans triggered a booby trap and pieces went flying, taking with them a dozen spawn. That helped. But it wasn't enough.
“Why don't they just shoot us?” Eli shouted.
“Don't give them ideas,” Thadd said.
“They have plans for us,” I said. “Really, really bad plans.”
“Well, crap,” Eli said, shooting a human.
The mild expletive seemed wildly funny. Laughing together, we fought the pawns of the Power of the Trine as my fear gathered and throbbed and the night deepened. Shots rang through the peaks nearby. Blades flashed in the gathering night. We cut, and hacked, and killed. The air was full of the stench of Darkness and death, of rotting spawn meat and sulfur. The mountainside pealed with the screams of the wounded and the dying and with the ring of steel. Four more booby traps exploded, scattering body parts.
“I can't see,” Eli shouted. “Where are they?”
Without answering, I thumbed on four light amulets and tossed them to the ground.
“Remind me I owe you a hot-oil massage and sex in a hot tub, mage,” he said. I felt Thadd's reaction but didn't look around. In a circle around us, six spawn attacked as one. Spawn were fast but stupid, easily dispatched. They won in battle through sheer numbers,
not
tactics. By one battle estimate, a thousand spawn died for every mage.
When a lull came in the combat, Durbarge and three others reached us, jumping up on the lower stones of the cairn. I dropped my arms, too tired to hold the blades at ready. My breath was an arrhythmic pain, my heart ached with each beat. My skin stung from splatters of acid blood. With my mage-vision, I estimated fifty bodies.
“Is it true that mages can call for seraphic help?” Eli shouted as rock shards fell.
“They hit her when she was unarmed,” Thadd shouted back, shooting two more, again changing magazines. “That makes us evil or something. And this is my last magazine.”
Durbarge looked around at that. He had taken a blade in his right eye. It was gone, his face engraved with agony, gore spilling down his face.
“What about me?” Eli said. “I let you go. Doesn't that make me innocent? 'Cause I'm bleeding like a stuck pig over here.”
“Yeah, and I put your things in easy reach,” Thadd said.
I laughed, the sound wheezing. Durbarge computed both comments. I could see an intent to shoot me form, and I spun my longsword. The thought entered his mind and passed on through. Any mage was a better warrior than he, and he knew it. Self-preservation saved him. I whipped the sword in an arc, back under my arm. Belatedly, his eye widened.
We would all die without seraphic help. I needed to call on them, even if this time it meant I'd die, but I couldn't. No innocent was near death. I had to wait until Thadd or Eli was mortally injured. Compulsion held my tongue.
“They will take you in a single rush this time. You must call on my wheels.”
The words belled in my mind.
“Your what?” I said, as spawn circled us.
“Call on them. Call on the navcone. Call on my wheels.”
“That helps a lot,” I muttered, raising my blades. “They're going to hit us all at once,” I said. No one refuted me. Eli sighed and drew a hunting knife. Its blade was nearly as long as my shortsword had been. “I have an idea, but I need to . . . meditate.” I had almost said conjure but caught myself at the last moment. I didn't think Durbarge would “suffer a witch to live” if he caught me at my gifts.
With a weary sigh, I folded my knees and sat on the cairn. A black opal was near my boot, but I was too tired to move. Blood and pain throbbed in my veins like vinegar and whiskey, dulling and enervating. I closed my eyes and opened a mind-skim on top of the mage-sight. The world ducked and spun around me. The hot taste of acid and chocolate rose in my throat, but I swallowed it down.
To my side, the mound pulsed once, here, not-here, a lavender energy I didn't understand but had used. Had made my own. In time with it, my amulets pulsed, and energy flowed into me. Guiding the tempo and rhythm, my blood beat at one with the mound. I breathed, and my breath blew out a lavender mist. Beside me, Thadd glowed all the shades of tourmaline, and I smelled the reek of kylen excitement and fear. He could suddenly see the amethyst too. I felt his lips press together to stop whatever he wanted to say.
The rest of the scripture that described the creature trapped in the bowels of the mountain emerged in my mind. She gave it to me, the words belling clear and ringing. “
And there appeared in the cherubim, the form of a man's hand under their wings. And when I looked, behold the four wheels by the cherubim, one wheel by one cherub, and another wheel by another cherub: and the appearance of the wheels was as the color of a gem stone. And as for their appearances, they four had one likeness, as if a wheel had been in the midst of a wheel. When they went, they went upon their four sides; they turned not as they went, but to the place whither the head looked they followed it . . .And their whole body, and their backs, and their hands, and their wings, and the wheels, were full of eyes round about, even the wheels that they four had. As for the wheels, it was cried
unto them in my hearing, âO wheel!' And every one had four faces: the first face was the face of a cherub, and the second face was the face of a human, and the third the face of a lion, and the fourth the face of an eagle.
“Use the otherness of the blended scan
,” she said. “
The otherness . . .”
And her voice fell silent.
My mind was still sluggish, my fatigue marrow deep. I was close to collapse. I struggled to find the moment in my memory when the sight had changed, to isolate the
otherness
I had experienced when I blended the mage-senses.
“Blasphemy
,” another voice tolled. “
Humans and mages cannot do this
.
Only the archseraph and his senior winged warriors can do this thing. And only after they are paired with a cherub.”
“She has bound herself to my wheels
,” the Mistress' voice rang.
“Foolish, she,”
came the answer.
The world fell away. Light, sound, smells, textures, blasted at me, smothered me, flailed me like barbed chains, rolled me like rapids, and trapped me there, dying. I fell, retching. My heart beat once.
And I fell and fell and fell and fell. My heart beat a second time.
On one level, in one place, I landed on the stone cairn. Felt the bones in my hand break, shatter, splinter, into hundreds of calcite shards. Purple light flared. The rocks beneath me shook, vibrated, and began to slide. One shifted and slid over my broken hand. My heart beat a third time.
In the other place, I glimpsed a river of lava, heat, energy, life, and death, and blood, and birth. It flowed to me, through me, and was gone.
What are wheels?
The boulder ground my shattered bones. Pain spiraled up, pulling me back. My heart beat twice more.
Below me, I saw a glimmer, a shine, a gold so pure, it was self-sustaining energy, trapped, hidden, shielded, beneath a layer of
otherness
. The
otherness
stood outside the world where my hand was broken, secluded, isolated in a sea of calm. A sea so black and textured it was like black velvet viewed on a moonless night. A place, but not a place. The next universe beyond this one? The space between universes? Between dimensions? The next dimension beyond where I existed? It wasn't within my understanding. My brain wasn't equipped with the necessary synapses to appreciate or comprehend it.
I threw up. Instantly I was back in the world I knew, my hand trapped beneath a boulder so massive, no mage could have moved it. Pain, a lissome agony, streaked up my arm, paralyzing me. My heart beat a sixth time. I gagged again as the pain reached new, unheard-of peaks of torture. I realized the earth was shaking.
Earthquake.
On the hillsides, Darkness raced at us, streaking blobs of reddish black. “Tears of Taharial,” I whispered, not caring that I was heard. I was trapped.
The cairn below me shifted again. The boulders slid and tumbled. The flesh of my hand was shredded, the bones ground to dust. I screamed. Time shifted. Thadd picked me up and threw me across the clearing. I landed in a tangle of spawn, sending them bowling away.
I cupped the remains of my hand against my chest and pulled the blade from my nape, whirling it once over my head, spitting stomach acid and partially digested chocolate. From beneath the cairn, navcone rose into the air. Navcone was gold, tons of gold, twisted and spiraled in perfect circles, hoops of energy that sparkled and spun and sang with joy. If pure energy could laugh, it roared with laughter. And I knew what it was. It was part of a machine.