Sons (Book 2) (26 page)

Dieter reached out behind him without a word and the priest placed one lid in his hand.  He upturned it and shoved it under the table, catching the stream of blood as it started flowing from the hole in the table.  The black knife stayed in the collection pool.  The black-robed priests picked that moment to let go of their men and step back, eyes fastened on Dieter and the knife.  The bodies slid to the ground with a nasty thud, spraying blood and gore everywhere as they fell.  Six of the tongue-less rushed forward to haul the bodies away down the path they’d come up.  They didn’t come back and I chose not to wonder where they went, turning back to the gruesome ceremony in front of me.

The stream of blood slowed far too soon to have been all that came out of those three men.  I had no idea where the rest of it went, though, or even where it could have gone.  I wasn’t watching for any conversion though and I didn’t see any evidence of evaporation.  There wasn’t a residue, really, but there was some drying and flaking already.

Dieter raised the cup, letting the final few drops fall to the ground.  “Va-du-seet,” he said, softly at first, then gaining in volume.  “Va-du-seet, va-du-seet, va-du-seet!”  Then he took a big swig from the cup, blood running down the sides of his face.

I nearly vomited.

Ethan started squirming uncomfortably.  Dieter yelled again, “Va-du-seet!” Triumphantly, he held up the cup of blood high in the air and spun around in a circle, smiling and ecstatic.  The remaining blood in the cup sloshed out indiscriminately.  The bat-things shot out of the clearing suddenly, outward in all directions.

“You were right.  They could get at me that way,” Ethan whispered to me, calming me down.  The bat-things came back almost immediately, flying in confused circles around the occluded area.  I could see them better here.  It was curious how they attained lift from the transfer over the energy plane from shifting through the physical plane to the astral.  The occlusion grew to encompass them as I watched.  The bat-things started returning to the fold.

Dieter apparently didn’t like that.  He shouted words I couldn’t translate but assumed to be curses then threw the cup at the ring of prostrate men.  That started a flurry of activity within the ring.  The priests at the censer rose suddenly, picking the censer up by the base and ran sideways to the table.  They tilted the oil vessel on its side, letting the oil spill out onto the table, still aflame, then ran back.  The tabletop burned the oil up fast and hard, and far more than the spilt oil accounted for.  I was fairly certain that blood wasn’t flammable.  There was much that wasn’t adding up here.

The three black-robed priests walked purposefully to the muscle men guarding the drugged-out people while Dieter basked his knife in the flaming table as the fire died, still shouting curses in some foreign tongue.  I was on my way to objecting to what was about to happen when Kieran broke into my mind.

Little Brother, move the drugged ones to the field with the soldiers.  We’re going in now. 
And he was moving.  I could get behind this.

The priests went for a man, woman, and a young girl.  I let them get a few feet before I sent the drugged victims to the field and vaulted over the heads of the tongue-less.  Twisting gracefully through the air in a somersault, I landed in their stead, hands on hips, with both Swords bristling to come out and play with the abominations around me.

“I believe you are looking for us, Dieter,” I called.  Kieran crouched on one side of me and Ethan on the other.  Behind me stood Peter and Jimmy in similar stances of self-defense.  Peter suddenly had two throwing knives splaying in his right hand and two more shoved into sheathes in his shoes—he’d lost two in Faery fighting the elves.  Jimmy’s weapon was extremely interesting: a white quarter-staff, coated in sigils of Daybreak and Gilán and glowing with Gilán’s energy.  The truncheon he carried must have… grown.

Dieter’s mood changed instantly.  He smiled wide, “It worked!”

“No,” I said, shaking my head.  “We were watching from the bushes.”  I pointed vaguely from a direction we hadn’t come. 

He shrugged it off with, “You are here now, though.  Is that Morgan behind you?  It is!  Little Jimmy Morgan!  Haven’t missed the parents enough to visit home yet, little boy?”

“No, Dieter, I’ve been home,” Jimmy called.  His voice held none of the pain and anguish that Dieter looked for, yearned to hear.

“I stopped you there, too, Dieter,” I said calmly.  “Or should I thank Hans for that one?  Would you prefer any one of your previous names, perhaps?”

Dieter laughed maniacally at me.  He did it for affect; he found nothing here funny.  “Like you could know anything about me.”

“Yes, Sevigny, I’m certain that I know very little of what you did as Et-Che Yun or Sung Ti Yung or Sondre.  That was your first, wasn’t it?  Sondre?”

Dieter’s face was a stone mask but behind that, his mind was tumultuous.

“I would congratulate you for a such long and established career for a woman, but so much of it was spent as a man, I’m not sure your original gender counts anymore,” I said, watching his aura spike into anger.  I got a small amount of satisfaction out of that taunt, but not much. 

His mask broke as he screamed, red-faced with anger and frustration, “Kill them!”

The three black-robed priests threw off their robes finally, revealing strong, muscled torsos and long, curved scimitars at their waists.  The priests yanked the long knives free and sliced at the air in front of them, lunging forward experimentally, threateningly.  Then they began a frighteningly fast dance in front of us, advancing and falling back quickly, expecting us to fall back to avoid them, but they edged up on me first and I was armored.  I stood my ground.  At first, anyway.

I pulled the Day free of its scabbard and held it aloft, waiting.  Kieran and Ethan both took one step forward, coming even with me, and their swords blossomed in their hands.  Kieran’s was just as before, terribly hard to look at directly, a dark disruption of space that said SWORD.  Ethan’s sword was tempered metal of some kind, balanced specifically for him, and sharp enough to shear diamonds.  It carried no markings on its guarded hilt or haft and its tan leather grip looked formed to his hand.  These were ideal weapons for them and the Day and Night were making themselves ideal for me.

We moved forward together slowly, spaced apart far enough to be clear of one another.  Then I let the Sword and the Stone have their fun.  Still keeping track of Dieter, I advanced to meet the center swordsman.  The Sword placed this style as a sort of proto-Dervish.  Odd since none of these men appeared particularly Persian in background.  The Day showed the simplest way to defeat them was to first throw them off balance.  The assumption of language was mine, though, and not the Sword’s.  It actually gave me a sense of what it knew of the style.

Since gaining Daybreak, I was a whole lot faster than I was before and it seemed that the Day knew a few things about the flow of Dervish weapons.  Specifically, it knew why they weren’t so prevalent now.  I sliced the air in front of me in quick circles and advanced, gaining in speed until I arrived.  Then I changed directions while keeping his left foot six inches off the ground.  And two seconds later he was dead.

The man was a simplistic fool if he thought I would play by his rules.  I began the match with, for him, a classic acceptance to duel, swinging the Day in progressively faster circles until I could deflect his blades and enter his guard for the kill.  He thought he had the advantage in the speed and syncopation.  All I did was reach out six inches further and cut off his head.  Two seconds.  His scimitars embedded into the ground, his body fell between them, noisily and squishy.

I looked around quickly.  Kieran and Ethan had dispatched their dervish impersonators.  Kieran’s was… just gone.  Ethan’s was on the ground in several pieces.  Behind us, Peter and Jimmy moved further away from us, but had remained unaccosted so far.  Jimmy was swinging the staff easily.  Practicing the balance, it looked like to me.  Getting comfortable with it.  He was getting more graceful as he went, it seemed.

The ring of the naked tongue-less was no longer prostrate.  They were up, now, and advancing on us slowly and cautiously.  The four censer priests were huddled around their newest censer still and Dieter put his table between us.

“Everybody okay?” I called out.  Knowing wasn’t the same as everyone knowing I gave a damn about knowing, and this gave all a chance to hear.  I got four “All Clear” returns as the circle around us closed a little tighter.

“Dieter!” I yelled jovially.  “Three down.  What else ya got?”  Fear was rising in him and there was only so much he could shunt off to that second soul he held.  Whatever he was doing to it, it was already flowing back into him now, pushing energy across the linkages to the body.  It was weakening him in ways.

“They served me well for years,” Dieter snarled, darting backward to the nearest advancing naked man.  “And they shall serve once more.  Now, die, damn you!”

He grabbed the naked man by the head and shoved the long black knife into his chest, sideways and slightly to the left, straight into the man’s heart.  Ripping the blade free, he then slit his throat, cupped part of the now-slowly ebbing blood and dropped the meat.  Shouting what sounded like nonsense at us, Dieter slung the dripping blood at us as we approached, swords up and ready.  Then havoc began.

As soon as the first drop hit the ground, a wind started twisting around us and I swear it had the face of the Neanderthal I fought.  A second later another followed, wearing the face of Ethan’s foe.  It had to be my imagination.  The two winds were forceful and gained speed with each revolution around the circle.  On the third, debris from the ground was lifting.  By the fifth, the winds were no longer discernible, separate forces.  By the sixth, Dieter turned and ran to the outside of the circle of tongue-less.

The winds had taken seconds to turn into a cyclone within the clearing.  My proto-dervishes turned into true dervishes, demons of wind and air.  As Dieter ran, the winds picked up bits of dirt, stone, and other detritus from the ground and sped along with it, beating anything in its circular path.  Two head winds swept in around us and picked up the scimitars from the ground.  And the decapitated heads.  Joining the cyclone, my only guess as to why they weren’t eaten away in the wind was that they were on the leading edge and missed the pummeling.

I got lifted off the ground, then.  Damn it!  I was hit forty-four times with the scissoring scimitars before I was able to throw an anchoring line of energy into the center of the clearing and reel myself down to safety.  The PSA “Speed Kills” is taking on entirely new meaning for me today.  Slamming a hemispherical shield around Peter, Jimmy and me, I shouted to Kieran and Ethan, “Go after him!”

They were still trying to get me out of the cyclone.  Seconds later, finally recognizing I was out, they both disappeared from the eye of the storm, reappearing instantly on the trail outside and running down the path toward the caves.  The blue bat-things still fluttered overhead, but stayed there, giving the winds a leery space to do their job.  The tongue-less were—no longer there.

Skeletons and parts of skeletons whirled in the air around us as I realized exactly why the wind was so dangerous, especially desert winds.  And these had just gained more power.  By a factor of eleven.  They howled and closed in faster.  Gouts of flame hit the shield wall, making me turn.  The censer priests had gotten into it, finally.  They had a David versus Goliath complex going on with a ghastly assembly line approach.  One priest lay bleeding out on the ground while another dipped cloths into his bleeding wrists, chanting something that invoked Marduk then passed it to another.  That guy licked it then dipped it in the burning tire oil then passed it quickly to a third.  He tossed the burning cloths at us and with a shouted word, the burning cloths changed into gouts of fire like the shot of a flame-thrower.

It was a desperation move on their part.  They hoped to get to us before the winds got to them.  They didn’t have the time or the energy to break down a magician’s most modest shielding that way before the wind blew out their flame.  Right on cue the censer and its attending priest were picked up and thrown into the fray.  And then there were three.  Again, only seconds had passed.  The bloody victim was the next to lift off.

The walls of the cyclone were taller now.

“Can we just leave?” Jimmy yelled over the huge vibrations. 

I shook my head.  “Don’t know if it’ll stay and go after everything else around.”  Peter was kneeling, feeling the ground while watching the wind through the shield wall.  I watched, too, as the winds twisted through space around us.  I could see the spirits now, the wild and twisted souls of the dead men pushing through and driving the magic.  The why behind it was bothering me, still.  I’ve seen a lot of souls in my life, but they’ve always,
always
, been attached to living people.  This was new to me.  I was experiencing all sorts of
wrong
today.

“Seth!  Cold!”  Peter yelled over the noise.  The circle tightened around us as one side of my shield started getting hammered by the wind.  We weren’t exactly centered in the clearing.  I thought for a moment that he was getting cold, but the temperature had risen about ten degrees around us.  It was already hot.  So he wanted me to make them cold.  But cold didn’t make sense.  The dervish was a Persian devil and the deserts got plenty cold at night.  Freezing, even.  Freezing cold at night, but dry.  Alabama wasn’t a dry climate, though.  It’s not the heat of summer that gets to you so much as the humidity.