Tribulations

  Of all people, Elder Doolan was suddenly there, lunging at the creature, swinging a sword inexpertly. The nightwalker lashed out with his free hand, throwing out a wave of force, and the elder flew back, leaving a gap in the protective circle we’d formed around the kids. I swung and kicked and bashed, desperate to get to them, but the nightwalker was armored and I had no leverage. I frantically pried at the fingers around my throat, but it was like trying to bend steel. His claws only dug deeper. I called on my blood to bring the shadow dragon back around, but with the amulet now on the ground at my feet, it wouldn’t respond to me.

  The others were all locked in battles to the death. I was on my own.

  Going against every instinct, I dropped my weapon and stopped clawing at the nightwalker’s hands around my neck. Instead, I shot my hands toward those burning eyes, gouging with my thumbs, ignoring the squishy, horrible feel of his eyeballs giving way and the blistering acid of his blood. The creature howled and dropped me.

  Hitting the ground, I rolled for the bata and came up with it in both hands, shoving the bulbed end up under his chin, snapping his head back. Then, while he was vulnerable, I thrust the pointed tip straight into the soft, unprotected hollow at the base of his throat, hard enough to drive the tip an inch into his flesh. He made an awful sound. Worse when I yanked the bata free, twisting to the side to avoid his fountaining blood, but not quite fast enough.

  A spray of it burned across half of my face, caustic as acid. I screamed and clawed at it with my free hand, trying to wipe it away, but only rubbing it in. I reached for the ground, praying not all the snow had been trampled and came up with a handful of dirt more than anything, but I scrubbed it on my face regardless. The grit stung but cooled the burn to an almost bearable level.

  I blinked away the tears and dirt just in time to take out the legs and bash in the skull of a dragonet making a grab for me with needle-like fingers and then looked around for more danger. I found Liam dispatching a creature that looked like a spider-cricket mix, and Carrick bisecting a dragonet with a single massive swipe. When it was done, he strode to the nightwalker and delivered the coup-de-grace.

  It took me a moment to realize that the battlefield lay nearly still. Two of our own were dead. Whatever attack the nightwalker had thrown at Elder Doolan, he never got up from it. And Flynn, one of the two men in the family group, had fallen. I had to glance away or be sick. He’d been gnawed, with barely enough left behind to bury.

  Little Tom cried suddenly, “Mama!” and I turned, fearing the worst, but Katie was still standing, if only just, a great gash across her stomach and one arm hanging uselessly at her side. She dropped her butcher knife from the other hand and caught Tom with it as he ran to her, the Illumination spell dying just as he reached her, dropping the battlefield, mercifully, into darkness . . . at least until our eyes readjusted to the moonlight.

  The shadow dragon wheeling in the sky gave a shriek and faded away, as though it needed light for its shadow. I saw a thin trail of vapor being sucked toward a spot on the ground where I’d dropped the amulet in my fight with the nightwalker, the dragon’s essence returning to its prison. I swept the ground for the amulet, knowing I was close when I felt the burn. Burn this time, no gentle heat. I grabbed the spiritstone and pocketed it as quickly as I could. I didn’t dare leave it behind for the Dark.

  Carrick was watching me when I straightened. “Do you have healing?” I asked him.

  “I have amulets,” he said, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Kylen magic could be unreliable, but stored spells should be safe. We would be okay, those of us who remained.

  Carrick took the Healing amulets from inside his jacket—round, nearly translucent stones in braided silver settings. I wondered if they were moonstones as well, and if he had an affinity for them. But I didn’t ask. He handed the amulets to Liam to deal out and held me back as I’d have gone to help the wounded as well.

  “I’ll be confiscating your artifacts,” he said, holding my gaze. “You won’t make your delivery.”

  I forgot about my burns and injuries as a chill seized my heart. Did he blame me for the attack? If I was going to die, I wanted a moment to make my peace.

  “Is that all?” I asked, afraid of his answer.

  “You will accompany me on my mission and then back to the Enclave. You are wasted here.”

  “Enclave?” I said faintly, surprised to feel a small twinge of longing, not for the place so much as for my family. I hadn’t seen ma and da since leaving.

  “Whatever else you may be,” Carrick said, “you are a warrior. I think you should be properly trained.”

  Enclaves did have human soldiers: some champards, fighting side-by-side with mages, and others working as security. I’d never considered that life. Not if it meant staying. But if I could have another life—missions like Carrick, taking the fight to the Dark rather than waiting for it to come . . .

  “What is your mission?” I asked, not ready to accede to what was clearly more order than suggestion. Not yet ready to give in. To go back.

  I had avoided ties, restrictions, and servitude for so long. I’d wandered, but I’d never found my place. Never found my purpose. As much as I enjoyed tale-telling, I only knew peace when I was practicing with my bata, losing myself in the movement and the strength and the power. I was only truly at peace when I could step outside myself, stop thinking and do.

  “I was sent to hunt the monsters threatening travelers,” Carrick said, “to dispatch any nests.”

  “Alone?” I asked.

  “Will I be alone?” He looked deeply into my eyes and my heart tried to beat its way out of my chest.

  The question hung between us, needing an answer. When I’d left Enclave, I’d been running from something rather than running to, but it didn’t have to be that way. If the Dark was encroaching on us like glaciers on the Burren, if there was truly a war where I was needed . . . Maybe the reason I’d never found a place was that I was destined for wherever battle would take me. Maybe it was time to stop telling tales and start living them.

  The glimmer of pre-dawn started in the east, as though the sun rose with my new awareness.

  “No,” I said. “You won’t be alone.”

  The words didn’t even stick in my craw.

  LUCIENNE DIVER is the author of the Vamped young adult series (think Clueless meets Buffy) and the Latter-Day Olympians urban fantasy series from Samhain, which Long and Short Reviews called “a clever mix of Janet Evanovich and Rick Riordan.” Her short stories have appeared in the KICKING IT anthology edited by Faith Hunter and Kalayna Price (Roc Books), the STRIP-MAULED and FANGS FOR THE MAMMARIES anthologies edited by Esther Friesner (Baen Books) and her essay “Abuse” was published in DEAR BULLY: 70 Authors Tell Their Stories (HarperCollins). Her young adult thriller, FAULTLINES, is a new release from Bella Rosa Books.

  More information can be found on her website: http://www.luciennediver.com/

  Lions and Tigers and Monkeys, Oh My

  Mid-Summer 105 PA / 2117 AD

  Faith Hunter

  The train’s passage was slow, because some of the wheels were damaged when a landslide of snow-loosened scree hit the train broadside. We spent two days stranded, while my least favorite Steel mage tried to fix them. And even after Cheran Jones got them mostly straight, the train only moved at half speed to allow the still-warped wheels to roll.

  We were going to be late at the New Orleans Enclave. I figured that would irritate the priestess, but she wasn’t my best buddy, so I wasn’t too concerned by the political implications. In fact, by showing up on my own timetable, they might think I was making a statement about my independence.

  Claire, the mage who could provide us with a good excuse for tardiness—something along the lines of, “Thorn and her warriors spent two days fighting Darkness . . . underground . . . on the way”—wasn’t on the train with us. And she probably wouldn’t help anyway unless she found a way to make it benefit her. So, independence it was. Again. br />
  We’d left the mountains behind and reached the Gulf Coast, with its humidity and heat. I’d lived in the mountains so long that I’d forgotten the miserable heat. Even a mini-ice age couldn’t cool off a Louisiana summer. I’d also forgotten the animals down south, the original wildlife and the new ones—the zoo animals and farm animals set free after the end of the world and their descendants.

  In the mountains the wildlife was mostly the same as it’d always been. We had moose, elk, deer, wild cattle, bison, boars, wild horses, roving bands of dogs, wolves, snow leopards. Raptors of every kind. Trout, salmon, and small-mouth bass in the icy rivers. Bobcats and lynx were common. Probably more of all of them than there’d been in centuries, but that’s because there were fewer people to hunt them, fewer fences, fewer highways.

  In the temperate zone between the interior glaciers and the south coast, the critters were changing. Herds of animals—and predators with plenty to eat—were being seen on military overflights, and by trackers and deadminers who were willing to brave the Dark for the possibility of profit. Immediately after the Plagues and wars had killed so many people, domestic cattle had roamed free in huge herds. But as the weather turned harsher and winter took over more and more of the year, hardier plains bison, survivors of the last ice age, made a comeback. Now they numbered in the millions, were bigger, meaner, and took whatever grazing grounds they wanted. The wolves that hunted them were taller than me at the shoulder, looking like the dire wolves of the last ice age. But at least they were still normal animals.

  The Gulf Coast and the Deep South were something else. The ecology was so varied it hurt the eyes, ears, and nose—a kaleidoscope of sensory impressions. Rare animals were becoming more common. Monkeys were everywhere in the trees, fighting for space with multi-colored parrots. Gators had grown to amazing lengths, as had the pythons, boas, rattlers, water moccasins, and anacondas. Scientists had counted dozens of species of primates that now thrived in the wild, including mandrills, chimpanzees, gibbons, and over thirty species of African and American monkeys, if you included the new ones.

  With creation energy running rampant, and with so few of their own kind to choose from, some of the zoo animals had begun to mate outside of their own kind, creating new species. There were gorillas and chimps producing gorilpanzees, squirrel monkeys and spider monkeys making spiquerrls, lemurs and gibbons making lebons. And it wasn’t just the primates that were cross-breeding. Tigers, lions, tigons, and ligers were now at the top of the North American food chain. Below them were pumas, leopards, jaguars, cheetahs, and pumapards, pumuars, jagupards, cheepards, and every mixture in between. Rumor had it that you could find animal-spawn crossbreeds far south of the border.

  I stood in the space between the moving cars, watching the morning landscape unfold before me, trying to find a moment of peace before my bickering champards got up. The men were unused to the cramped quarters of the train and the forced inactivity and if I didn’t get some time away from them I was going to teach them all some sword play—with bare blades, mage speed, and a dose of pique.

  Outside, standing between the jostling cars, I could smell the salt of the Gulf of Mexico. I heard a family of howler monkeys miles before I caught sight of them between the hundred-year-old trees, screaming and cavorting, performing high-altitude gymnastics. As I watched, I could feel some of the tension leave my spine.

  The sounds and smells—and the monkeys—said “home” to me, a home I hadn’t seen since I was fourteen, a home that had gone on without me, changing and evolving and becoming different. It would never be the safe haven it had been for me before I lost my parents as a child; not even the safe haven it had been while Lolo, the Enclave priestess—and my grandmother, if only I’d known it at the time—raised me and my sister Rose. It would now be a political hotspot, a place of adult intrigue and mage power games.

  We’d be there soon, and I’d have to start acting like the new consul-general of Mineral City. Once in Enclave, they’d expect me to dress like a proper female mage, exposing my body in silks and gauze and tassels, because that’s the way things were done. I’d have to start speaking like a politically trained mage, as well as a battle-hardened warrior. I’d be wearing weapons every moment of every day, including some hidden ones, and I’d have to find a way not to draw my sword every time a New Orleans mage stared at my scars and judged my every movement and word. Self-control wasn’t my strongest character trait.

  I closed my eyes—and popped them open at a faint thump from above. A tiny Capuchin monkey was hanging from the train car roof by his back feet, swinging, his two-toned coat catching the sunlight, his white-ringed eyes watching me. Then he opened his mouth and howled, Just a little howl, but such a deep tone from such a small monkey; it reverberated through me. Not a Capuchin, then: a howlpuchin. I laughed and wished for a crust of bread or a piece of fruit to give him, if just to shut him up before he woke up the whole train.

  Even as I had the thought, the car door opened and Ciana slipped through, her mouth opened in an O of delight. She was holding a sliver of apple and staring at the monkey.

  “Can I give it to him?” she asked.

  “Sure. Be careful to hold only the tip and extend the apple itself out or he’ll grab your hand and won’t let go. I had that happen to me when I was about your age, I guess. It scared me to death!”

  Ciana pinched the apple slice between her fingertips and held it out. The monkey swung near and ripped it from her fingers, swung back, let go of the roof, and executed an amazing triple flip, to land on a tree limb flashing past. Ciana screamed, “Wow! Did you see that?”

  “Yeah,” I said, my face softening in a smile, “I saw.”

  Pan-Elemental

  Late Summer 105 PA / 2117 AD

  Faith Hunter

  Drayson braced his arms on the stone wall, unable to draw power from the cave itself and pass it into his tattoos. The conjure for resilience, drawn in swirls and lines like brecciated jasper across his shoulders and down his back—his oldest and most powerful ink—could stop the pain, but activating that spell now would interfere with his master’s current work. His muscles trembled as he leaned into the stone, and his master, the dragon Jesreael, stepped back, waiting until the spasm eased. Jesreael had cast a spell to keep Drayson alive while the dragon worked, but anything more than that use of power might interfere. And if Drayson survived, pain would forever be his companion.

  Jesreael had experimented in the past at tattooing River conjures onto Stone mages, Stone spells onto Air mages, Sea spells onto River mages, but even before the designs had been completed, the mages’ bodies had begun rejecting those foreign magics, causing their skin to painfully slough off within hours—sometimes fatally. The dragon could probably have found a use for such short-lived magic weapons, but he’d had something bigger in mind.

  These new spells were something different, a new working created by Jesreael solely for this unique Dark mage. Drayson’s mutated flesh—and only his flesh—could accept the workings, and that only with great pain. The spells were worked with the dragon’s blood and the inks blended with one of his scales, ground to powder. Between those and the mage’s special skin, these tattoos might just be permanent, despite being antithetical to the Stone mage’s element.

  His master had been putting the blood-ink in place for hours now, and soon the dragon’s strength would flow to all those spells crafted into Drayson’s body. Soon . . . so soon. Only a little more pain.

  Along with the conjures common to Stone mages, picked out in inks made from sapphire and agate, granite and schist, in mountain-scapes and faceted gems on his body, Drayson now had many other spells: a hawk in flight, created from feathers and pulverized sky-blue kyanite; a full moon shining on still water, made of silver and ground up moonstone that had lain exposed, charging for the three days of a full moon’s light; weapons, armor, and shields of all sorts, in inks of crushed bloodstone and raw iron ore.

  Now Jesreael’s needles, finer than th
e width of an incubus hair, flew across Drayson’s flesh, pounding steadily beneath his skin, completing the scene of a towering wave, the blues and greens of the powdered kyanite and labradorite (mixed with saltwater and dragon blood) crashing across his abdomen. Normally saltwater would drain a Stone mage of power, but this tattoo was designed to protect Drayson from this elemental allergen—and possibly allow him to draw on the ocean itself for power.

  The Sea conjure finished, the dragon barely paused before dipping a new blade into the last pot of pigment. The needles danced, creating a complicated network of vines and leaves, an Earth image, filling in spaces between the mage’s existing tattoos. This pigment was composed of fresh green ferns gathered by Dark Earth mages from above ground—another elemental allergen.

  The vine was the lynchpin, allowing his master’s blood to flow through him, his master’s power to flow through his tattoos, as vital fluids flowed through a plant’s stem, connecting and powering the conjure tattoos of all the foreign elements, making Drayson the first pan-elemental mage in history—if the elemental allergens didn’t rip him apart.

  Drayson took a breath as the torture became a hammering spike. Jesreael laughed. “You are strong, my son, stronger than I thought possible so soon in my breeding program. Unique now, but a precursor of what is to come.”

  “I am yours to command,” Drayson said through clenched teeth, “in all things.”

  “This, my children,” Jesreael said to the Dark mages sitting on the stone floor at his feet, “is the weapon that will allow us to begin the siege of the gilded cage built by the seraphs and the Light.”