14.07
“He’s not ours?” Rose asked. “Corvidae?”
“No,” I said. “If ‘shoot him’ didn’t make it clear.”
“In the interest of good faith, I’ll assist you, as you requested earlier,” Corvidae said. “You’ll need to be stronger, miss Rose, if you’re going to face Mara Angnakak. This is the best way I know how.”
“No!” Rose said, her voice joined by Alexis’, too late.
He’d thrown the thing. Hurled it at the nearest collection of trees.
A fair part of my introduction to this new reality, to the community, to the dynamic, the expectations, had come from Laird. He’d described what diabolists did as tampering with nukes. Radiation.
Conquest wasn’t a nuke. He was a volatile element in a very fragile container.
The mirror wrapped in paper, bound in place with hair, lazily arcing through the air, might as well have been a bomb.
The white of the paper around the mirror momentarily caught some of the light from the gray-black clouds overhead. As if Conquest was reaching through. Exulting.
The mirror changed course, curving in the air. It landed in soft snow, handle sticking up.
I wasn’t the only one to turn to look at Rose, a distance away from Corvidae, fist held out to one side, expression grim.
Her expression broke, head bowing a bit, eyes closing, hand going to the side of her head.
“Wow,” one Behaim commented. The girl that had been with Alister. “Wow. I don’t think I could have done that, and I have more hair to get a grip on.”
“Yeah. Ow,” Rose said. “That hurt more than I thought it would.”
It was too dark to make out, but she’d pulled out her own hair, and used sympathetic magic to connect to the hair that bound the paper to the mirror, also hers.
She’d probably pulled out a fair amount, in her haste.
“Why interfere?” Corvidae spoke. “I was helping,”
“You are the worst helper!” Evan said.
“As you were summoned,” Tiff intoned, “We bind you. Bow down, take no action, speak no words, until you are asked.”
Corvidae stopped, smiled, and bowed.
He dropped to a sitting position in the snow, back to a tree, one leg propped up.
Leaving just us and Mara.
She stared at us, and at the guns.
How would this have looked, to an outside observer? A mob, including several monsters, several guns, all mustered against a single young woman, almost a child.
“Man,” Alister’s relative said. “Mara’s place. Growing up, we were warned about it. Scary stories, cautionary tales. Don’t go into the woods, or you might never come out. If you get caught in those woods, stay put, wait until you hear the bell in the woods and then follow it home.”
“Take the wrong path,” the other Behaim said. “Or you’ll get turned aside.”
“I know these Behaim children,” Mara said. “But the ones pointing guns at me? Who are you?”
“No names,” Nick, otherwise known as ‘shotgun’ in my internal narrative, told his Knights. To Mara, he said, “We’re help.”
The Knights paid little attention to appearances. Most had long hair, one or two had mullets, their facial hair was either too short to matter or mountain man style. Their clothes that looked like the sort one wore to work in a gas station or do outside labor. Farmer clothes, handyman clothes. Coats and jackets made to be durable, jeans, and work boots stained with oil and who knew what else. Several had toolbelts on, but the tools they had in the belts weren’t for construction or repair. Practitioner tools.
I didn’t like that they were here as Rose’s, but if I could put that aside, damn, were they ever beautiful people. I respected them, I even trusted them.
“The cavalry,” I said.
He smiled. “I like that.”
“We’ve met before,” I said. “You probably don’t remember.”
“Nope.”
“I wasn’t a monster, then, but… Ur just about got me. I got away.”
His eyebrows went up.
“Not to give you false hope,” I said. “There were extenuating circumstances.”
He frowned, then nodded. “Right. Too bad.”
Mara stared.
“How are we doing this, Mara?” Rose called out. “If Corvidae agrees to share the information we need, you can expect us to disappear post-haste. We have no reason to stay, and no reason to fight. You shouldn’t expect any visits from us in the near future. I don’t know about you, but it sounds awfully nice to me.”
“No, you got it all wrong,” Peter said. He adopted a tone, “Nice is a construct, a human invention. Humans are not, when you strip it all away, ‘nice’.”
Mara narrowed her eyes.
“Can we not upset her?” Tiff asked. “Pretty please?”
“She’s the type that’s pissed off by nature,” Peter said. “Remember what I said about patterns? Right here, we have quiet rage, stewing rage, insanely patient rage. Then when she hits her limit, bam. Black out the sun with carrion birds. Doesn’t matter what I say. She hates me anyway, I promise.”
“Benefit of being a Thorburn, I guess,” Alister’s peer remarked, “Used to being hated.”
Peter smirked at her.
“I do hate you,” Mara said. “I would rather your summoning didn’t divulge any information, Kàgàgi.”
Corvidae didn’t make a movement or sound in response, but I knew he’d heard.
“We have to reach a resolution of some sort,” Rose said. Her gun leveled at Mara, Rose moved slowly through snow, waiting until one foot was firmly in place atop the heaping snow before she moved the other. “Compromise, even.”
“No compromise. I intend to kill each of you in turn,” Mara spoke. “One by one. I can ward off the spirits and powers that would carry your companion’s souls to their eternal rest. Bind soul to dying body, so that their self can endure the moment of death for centuries. The act of rotting and being ripped apart by carrion birds, a dim, broken awareness.”
I joined Rose in pacing around Mara. Part of the reason was to keep Mara roughly between us, though I was closer to the two o’clock position, while Rose was nearer to six. The other reason was to keep at a distance from Rose. The reason I wasn’t slowing or picking up my pace to be exactly opposite was that I didn’t want to have that accurate gun of Rose’s pointed at me.
I didn’t think Rose would shoot me, but I could trust her common sense while respecting the gun.
In a way, we were balancing the scale, each of us maintaining an equivalent distance from Mara. If the scale was slightly askew, well, that was the way things were.
Our movement meant that we alternated between being in light and shadow, where ‘light’ was purely subjective. In the gloom, ‘light’ wasn’t even moonlight. Only the lights of the city bouncing down off the clouds, helped just a bit by the moonlight that could seep through.