***
Fenghuang, Consort to the last Qilin, the Empress Mother, kept the look of relief off her face only through untold centuries of practice. “So he’s chased the meddling Heartstriker out?”
The bowing red dragon—one of the twins, she’d never been able to tell them apart—nodded. “Yes, Empress. Lao is with him now.”
“And the Heartstrikers?”
“Vanished through one of the secret passages.”
That was vexing, but they would turn up again. Bethesda’s children could always be counted on to pop up like weeds. Even so. “Search the lower levels,” she ordered. “If you see a chance to kill him, take it, but don’t do anything that might upset the Qilin further. This place is dangerous enough as it is. I don’t want any more unnecessary stress placed on my son.”
The red dragon nodded obediently and backed out of the enormous empty cave that had once been the Broodmare’s gold wallow. When he’d closed the vault door behind him, the empress turned her attention back to her own unexpected problem. “You were wrong.”
“I was nothing of the sort,” Brohomir replied, his face irritatingly smug even through the terrible, grainy connection of the public AR terminal he’d insisted on calling her from. “I told you this would happen.”
“You told me that if the Golden Emperor spoke to Julius Heartstriker, I would lose my position as empress,” she said, scowling through the projected screen thrown up by her own, far superior, personal phone. “But your whelp is long gone, and here I sit still.” She lifted her chin proudly. “You were wrong, seer, but I knew you would be. I raised Xian to be dutiful above all else. We are nothing like you barbarians.”
“No one implied you were,” Bob said, leaning against the wall of the grubby public booth he’d crammed himself into. “But you’re thinking too short term. I’m afraid your precious golden treasure has already fallen into the well-meaning clutches of my youngest brother, and those are very hard to escape.”
“Then I will kill him,” the empress said.
“Such is the common refrain of Heartstriker Mountain,” the seer replied with a chuckle. “But Julius is harder to kill than he looks. Even if you did succeed, I’m afraid it wouldn’t do much good. You lost your son years ago, Fenghuang. It’s only the duty you value so highly that’s kept you from feeling it sooner.”
“What do you know of duty?” the empress said haughtily. “You are a traitor, a seer who sold out his mother and his clan.”
“That I am,” Brohomir said cheerfully. “Funny how you find that so offensive now, yet you had no problem accepting my traitorous ways when I was serving Heartstriker up to you on a platter. No Amelia, no White Witch, no annoying siblings. Just my mother and sister, hobbled and bound, as promised.”
The empress sneered. “Hobbled and bound, indeed. Bethesda was bound, but she was never the problem, was she? That honor goes to her shameless daughter, and yet I arrived to find her still running around loose.” She leaned into the projected screen with a scowl. “You told me you had the little whore in check.”
“I’d thank you not to talk about my sister that way,” Brohomir said, his normally lilting voice sharp. “And I pulled off a miracle with Chelsie. Even with your son’s luck coming down on us like a sledgehammer, she and the Qilin have yet to cross paths. It’s coming, though, and soon, but you knew that was inevitable when you came here.”
“I had no choice,” the Empress Mother said bitterly. “Xian had been considering conquering Heartstriker for years. Algonquin’s foolish war was just the final straw. After that, there was no reasoning with him. Even I cannot defy the will of the Golden Emperor.”
“But you manipulate it just fine.”
“I used to,” she said sadly, looking down at her withered hands. “He is my only son. My treasure, bought with everything I had. I made his luck greater than even his father’s at its prime, a blessing that fell on all of us without fault, without fail. With one exception, he has always been a perfect emperor. A perfect son, respectful and obedient and utterly above reproach. The only thing that could ever break him was her.” She clenched her bony fingers into fists. “I will not let her take him from me. You must have seen the mountain quake just now. You know what is at stake. She already ruined him once. I can’t allow that to happen again. Not after all I sacrificed.”
“That’s the trouble with sacrifice,” Brohomir said. “You paid for a Qilin, but you still hatched a dragon. You can’t be shocked he has ambitions of his own.”
The empress’s lip curled in disgust. “Love is not an ambition.”
“It is when you love a Heartstriker.”
“I didn’t call you so you could make jokes at my expense,” she snapped. “You play the careless seer well, Brohomir, but you’ve worked too hard on your precious Heartstrikers for me to believe you’re throwing them away now. I know this is all part of some greater plan in your twisted mind, but even your machinations cannot stand before the will of the Qilin. His luck moves the future of all our clans. It will smash your schemes to pieces if you presume to play games with the Golden Empire.”
“A fair threat,” the seer admitted. “Even I am powerless before the Golden Wrecking Ball.”
“I’m glad you understand,” the empress said, nodding. “But just because you are lower doesn’t mean we can’t still come to a mutually beneficial arrangement. Tell me how to save my son, and I will promise to spare your hateful relations.”
“Such a benevolent offer,” Bob replied, pressing a hand dramatically to his chest as he flopped against the booth’s graffitied wall. “I think I might faint.”
She gave him a cutting look, and the seer sat back up with a grin. “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do. I came to your aid six centuries ago when I wrote you that letter explaining how to corner my fleeing sister, but while this saved your empire from the worst ravages of a broken-hearted young Qilin, it fixed nothing. The damage was only put off, not prevented. Your son came to our mountain with pure intentions. He has not deceived you in the least. He really did plan to return home the moment he put Chelsie under his luck without seeing her at all. But while sterling duty guides his actions, his luck has always followed his emotions. From the moment he arrived, the Qilin’s desperate, repressed longing to see the dragon he loves has been warping the future like taffy. It pulled Julius to him despite your best efforts, and now, as is his habit, the Nice Dragon of Heartstriker has made things infinitely more complicated. I’ve done all I can, but at this point I’m afraid there’s not a single path of possibility remaining where your emperor and my sister do not meet, and where he does not learn the truth.”
The empress closed her eyes with a shudder. “Then it is finished,” she whispered, pressing a shaking hand to her eyes. “We are all finished.”
“Not quite.”
She lowered her fingers to see the seer leaning into the camera, his face filling the screen with a predatory grin the empress was not accustomed to seeing aimed at her. “Delightful as this has been, I didn’t risk calling you just to rub your face in bad news. It’s true there’s no future left where your son remains only yours, but there’s still a way to make sure he’s not hers.”
“Why would you betray your sister for me?”
“Because I’m not doing it for you,” Brohomir said. “I’m doing it for me. The fact that you also benefit is merely a happy coincidence, but the choice still has to be yours.”
The empress scoffed. “What choice? You said it was inevitable.”
“It is,” he assured her. “Nothing can stop the hammer now, but if you’re quick, you can still choose where it lands. That’s power, Empress. The only power you have left.”
Fenghuang looked down at her red-lacquered nails, making a show of thinking it over, but only a show. In truth, her mind was already made up, because the seer was telling the truth. She’d fed Xian enough of her fire to make him the greatest Qilin ever born, and for twenty-one years, he had been. Then, just as he’d come
of age and entered what should have been his full potential, the Heartstriker girl had ruined him.
Not immediately. The first year they were together, Xian’s magic had been even more magnificent than she’d dreamed. His happiness brought more good fortune to their empire than his father’s last two centuries combined. So much that even she had willingly turned a blind eye to the mud he was rolling in. A shortsighted, foolish mistake. Breeding always told, and when the Heartstriker girl showed her true colors at last, they had all suffered for it.
It had taken centuries to recover from the catastrophes the Qilin’s misery brought down that year. Even after she’d patched things up, convincing her son that he had been betrayed, that it was all the Heartstriker’s fault, his luck was never again what it should have been. No matter how many lovelier, better dragonesses she’d found for him, he’d always remained distant, and while his luck never truly faltered again after that first, horrible year, neither had it blossomed. He was simply diminished, her great work squandered. But then, just when the loss grew painful enough to make her actually consider summoning Chelsie back, the rumors arrived, and Fenghuang finally realized why the girl had run.
That was the final stroke. She had no proof, nothing but hearsay, but if any of it was true, then the Heartstriker truly had taken everything from them. Worst of all, she hadn’t even done it on purpose. A calculated attack would have at least been something she could respect, but Bethesda’s daughter had destroyed their clan out of foolish, selfish ignorance, which was as unforgivable as it was irreparable. Nothing could fix what the stupid girl had broken, so Fenghuang had done the only thing she could. She’d buried everything, walling off her son and her empire from the rest of the world. And for six hundred years, it had worked. Now, though, everything was unraveling.
From the moment they’d embarked on this cursed journey across the sea, this end had been inevitable, but like any proper dragon, Fenghuang could not accept defeat. So when the Seer of the Heartstrikers offered her a chance, any chance, to mitigate the damage, for all her hatred of his family and his smug green eyes, she found that she could not refuse.
“What must I do?”
The seer’s smile grew sharp. “Exactly what I say.”
Fenghuang had never hated anything as much as those words. But an empress did her duty even in defeat, so she swallowed her anger and nodded.
“Excellent,” Bob said, reaching off camera to grab something waiting outside of the booth. “I have detailed instructions, multiple stipulations, and one ironclad rule you must never break, all of which I will explain in exhaustive detail. Before we go down that rabbit hole, though, there’s someone you need to meet.”
The Empress Mother had no idea whom he could be talking about. She wasn’t even sure where Brohomir was, other than somewhere filthy. Certainly not the sort of place where any dragon worthy of her interest would be found. When he came back into view, though, there was indeed a dragoness with him.
She was a hatchling, a young one. How Brohomir had gotten a whelp that young into human form, she’d never know, but whatever he’d done to her, the child was obviously a Heartstriker. She looked like a mini-Bethesda with her thick, dark hair and high, haughty cheekbones, but her eyes were the wrong color. Even through the terrible camera, Fenghuang could see no green in them at all. Just gold. The pure, rich, glittering, metallic color she’d seen only twice in her life looking out at her from the little dragon’s face.
And that was when Fenghuang knew to her bones that all was truly lost.
Chapter 8
The Sea of Magic was roiling.
“What is going on?” Marci cried, clinging to the Empty Wind, the only thing in the entire place that wasn’t violently shaking.
“It’s the magic,” Ghost said, his glowing eyes round as he stared up into the dark. “It’s being forced apart. Something’s coming through.”
That didn’t sound good, but before Marci could ask what, where, why, or how big, something new appeared at the edge of her vision.
She jumped with a yelp, whirling around so she could face…whatever it was. When she stopped, though, there was nothing. Just the churning magic, twisty and nauseating as always. She was about to write the whole thing off as nerves when it happened again.
There was no missing the change this time. She was looking right at the floor of the Sea of Magic when the ground rippled like water, the rough, uneven, seemingly stone surface smoothing and rounding before her eyes into what looked like a manhole cover. It couldn’t be, of course, but that was what Marci saw: an iron manhole cover complete with air holes, tire scuffs, and the logo for the DFZ’s private sewer contractors conglomerate.
“Do you see that?”
“I see it,” Amelia said, squinting. “I don’t understand it, but—”
An echoing bang cut off whatever she’d been about to say as the manhole cover shot off the ground like a bullet. It landed a few seconds later, crashing to the right of the pillar with a deafening clatter of thick iron hitting stone. The sound was still going when a man’s hand reached out to grab the lip of the tunnel the blasted-open manhole had revealed, followed immediately by the man himself as Sir Myron Rollins hauled himself out of the ground and onto the floor of the Sea of Magic.
He collapsed immediately after, flopping over to heave on his back like a landed fish. The whole thing was so unexpected, so incredibly out of place, that Marci couldn’t speak a word until Sir Myron rolled over to push himself up, and his eyes found hers.
“You!” he cried, eyes flying wide. “How are you—What are you doing here? You’re dead. I saw your body. I—”
He stopped there, eyes going even wider as he finally spotted the Empty Wind standing behind her.
If things had been less dire, Marci would have relished watching Sir Myron Rollins have a mental breakdown over the abyss that was her spirit’s true face. But as entertaining as it was to watch him break beneath the crippling truth of his ultimate insignificance, they didn’t have time.
“Ghost,” she said quietly. “Would you mind?”
He sighed and turned around, putting his back to Myron, who fell gasping back to the floor. “I suppose that explains how you’re here,” he said when he could speak again. “You sold your soul to a death god.”
Since she’d made a deal with Ghost to escape her death and come to the Merlin Gate, that was technically accurate, but Marci didn’t appreciate the way he said it. She was about to tell him as much when Myron sat up, moving his hand at the same time as if he were yanking on something.
When his fist stopped, she saw it was a string. A silver ribbon, specifically, covered in spellwork and wrapped multiple times around his hand. She was trying to read what the spells did when ribbon suddenly became a minor concern compared to what was at the end of it.
Something was climbing out of the manhole beside Myron. It looked vaguely human in the dark, but it moved like a rodent, skittering behind Myron like a rat running for cover. The combination reminded her of the megarats she and Julius had hunted in the DFZ back alleys when money really got tight, but despite the urban legends, Marci had never personally seen one bigger than a Doberman. By contrast, the thing cowering behind Myron now was the size of a car, with eyes that glowed like orange streetlights and the gleam of silver wrapped around its neck.
“That’s a spirit, isn’t it?” she said, her voice quiet and angry as she fixed the older mage with a deadly glare. “What did you do, Myron?”
“Nothing worse than you,” he replied, clutching the silver line in his fist as he stood up. “Every Merlin needs a Mortal Spirit.”
The creature on the chain hissed and scurried away, its teeth flashing like knives in the dark as it gnawed at its bindings. When the silver didn’t give, it made a pitiful sound, and Marci’s fists clenched. “That is not how this goes,” she growled. “A Merlin works with her spirit. You have that thing chained up like a dog. What’s it even a spirit of? Terror?”
“That is
none of your concern,” Myron said, looking down at her, which was rich given the circumstances.
“And you had the nerve to criticize Ghost.”
“Judge me all you like,” he replied haughtily. “But unlike you, I have no illusions about what I’m doing. You tried to make friends with oblivion, to reason with death, but I understand that these are forces that cannot be controlled. Mortal Spirits are not our allies. They’re our shadows, the imprints left by humanity’s lowest common denominator, and they’ll be the end of everything if we do not strike first.”
Marci stared at him in disbelief. “You sound like Algonquin.”
“She would know, wouldn’t she,” he snapped. “Algonquin has always been our enemy, but that doesn’t make her wrong. She understands better than any living thing that Mortal Spirits are monsters. Our monsters, made by our flaws, and like any other evil of humanity, they must be curtailed.”
Marci crossed her arms over her chest. So that’s what this was about. “I see Algonquin found someone willing to take the job I turned down. Let me guess: you’re here to clamp down the magic and shut off the Mortal Spirits before they can rise, and in return, you get to be the first Merlin.”
“Almost,” he said, pulling the silver leash tight. “But I’m not just here to be the first Merlin. I also mean to be the last.”
He turned on his heel and walked to the pillar, dragging his spirit behind him like a disobedient dog. When he reached the wooden door, he wrapped the silver lead tight around his palm, raising his fist to knock.
Just as when Marci had done it, the knock rang like a gong through the swirling magic. The door opened immediately, sending light flooding into the dark again as Shiro, Abe no Seimei’s shikigami, the same bound guardian who’d shut the door in Marci’s face, lowered his head in greeting just as he had for her.