Ignite the Fire: Incendiary by Karen Chance

 

Chapter Twenty-Two

 

 

You didn’t know he could do that?” Gertie asked, watching my face.

“No. But I didn’t know he could turn into a giant, either.”

And then I remembered something.

“Can you move this thing downward?” I asked, gesturing at the viewport.

“How far down?”

“To the river—over there.”

I guessed the answer was yes, because the image we were looking at slowly began to pan down. It took me a minute to get my bearings, because we were still pretty far away. But then, what I was looking for was pretty big.

“There. Right there.” I pointed at the river. “Can you zoom in?”

“Zoom?”

“Get us closer.”

“I can get us as close as you like,” Gertie said, and the next moment, we were standing on the riverbank.

The viewport followed us, drifting out of the sky to what, in this era, was just a river. There was wet sand, a dusting of snow over smooth, dark gray rocks, and the kind of trash that washes up beside any bit of flowing water. But in the seventeenth century, it had been a very different story.

Because, suddenly, we were looking at a graveyard.

There were so many bones scattered around that they’d developed clearly defined strata: the older, blackened ones were at the bottom, rotted by the river and laced with veins of green gunk; dark yellow resided above that, with a reddish patina, as if they’d been leeching something out of the surrounding soil; lighter yellow came next, in an almost buttery shade, the only normal looking ones there; and, finally, pure white, bleached by the sun, lay on top. It was a Mount Everest of bones, more than I’d realized when viewing them from the castle. And not all of them belonged to animals.

Because, from high above in the abattoir, I’d briefly seen—yes.

“There,” I caught sight of what looked like a huge boulder, off to the left. “Can you turn the view that way?”

Gertie turned it that way.

And then sucked in her breath, because that wasn’t a rock.

I stood on the riverbank, staring at what I’d briefly seen during the chase with Mircea. When we hit the abattoir, I’d landed over the refuse dump, where the parts of butchered animals that nobody wanted had been tossed down for the river to carry away. Only the river hadn’t carried all of them.

Because some were heavier than others—way heavier.

“Is that . . . what I think it is?” Gertie asked.

“If you think it’s the head of a dead giant, then yeah.”

I hadn’t been sure before, but there was no mistaking it now. It had acquired mossy growths across its heavy brow ridge, which almost gave it the appearance of eyebrows, and watery stains in green and brown that lent the bare bones hollows and color, almost like it lived again. The strands of lichen floating on the water added to the impression, with what, if you squinted, almost looked like hair.

There was no doubt about how he’d died. The side of the head had a hole in it big enough for me to have squeezed through, with cracks radiating outward that had yellowed and darkened with time. I didn’t see the rest of the body, although some of the bones scattered about were suspiciously large, but then, I didn’t need it.

The skull was plenty good enough.

Somebody had killed a giant, and tossed his remains down here, and I didn’t know why.

I found myself taking off a glove, before I even thought about it. “I need to touch it,” I told Gertie.

She didn’t ask why. Probably because half the court were touch clairvoyants, or touch telepaths as we were sometimes known, because we read the mental impressions that long dead minds had left. It wasn’t exactly a rare gift.

But she didn’t look happy, and a hand suddenly appeared on my arm, with a surprisingly strong grip.

“I’m not going back there,” I told her, because there was no freaking way. “I just need to reach through—”

“And get pulled in by a fey?”

“They’re all up at the castle. And that question means you can do it, right? You can widen that thing?” I gestured at the viewport.

“Not for long,” she said, her mouth pinched. She eyed the dead giant without favor. “What do you hope to learn?”

“I think that’s obvious—”

“Not to me.” It was flat, and I knew Gertie better than to argue.

“When I was here, Aeslinn in dragon form plucked me out of a window and flew off. My party had passed through some kind of portal when we came in—possibly to Faerie, because my power didn’t work. He could have lit me on fire or crushed me like those fey back at the castle and there would have been nothing I could do about it. So, why didn’t he? He didn’t seem to have a problem with killing me on the river.”

Gertie frowned. “He captured you?”

“And was taking me off somewhere, but Mircea and Pritkin attacked him, and he turned back toward the castle, I guess so his fey could help him. Only they didn’t seem to recognize him in that form and targeted him instead. The rest you saw.”

Gertie’s frown grew. “You lead an interesting life.”

That was one word for it.

“Do you think he planned to do to you whatever he did to that creature?”

I shrugged. “You said it yourself, Zeus wanted things from those he consumed, things he didn’t have. He absorbed Phanes for his reproductive abilities, and Metis for her wisdom—”

“And Zagreus, a son of Hades and Persephone, to acquire power in the underworld, according to some reports.”

I blinked. “You really know your mythology.”

“I looked it up last night. I couldn’t sleep.”

“Well, the reports are probably right. He told me he’d done the same to some little goddess of the byways, which is how he and Aeslinn managed to follow me into transition.”

Her brow wrinkled. “When did he tell you this?”

“When we were fighting—”

“He talked to you while he was trying to kill you?”

“I think he thought there was a chance it might not work, and he wanted to get to know me. The legends seemed to have gotten that much right—he likes knowledge. Something we could use a little more of, right now.”

I glanced at the head again and shivered. I’d already known that mingling souls could transfer abilities; it was one possible outcome when demons had sex, for example, that a skill or talent could pass over. And it was essentially what Pritkin, Mircea and I had been doing through the Lover’s Knot spell, which created a soul bond.

Except that we were borrowing each other’s powers, not carving them out of a bloody corpse!

Jonathan, on the other hand, had stripped Jo’s soul of her ability to channel the Pythian power, and somehow grafted it onto his own. I’d seen what was left when he finished with her: a screaming lump on his side with what looked like a small, vaguely human face trapped under the skin. I thought he’d been able to do that because of his necromancy, and maybe he had.

But where did he get the idea?

Gertie’s shrewd brown eyes captured mine.

“You think he attacked you to gain power over time?”

“It’s not exactly a new concept. Jonathan intended the same thing, since Jo was only an acolyte. I would have been an upgrade.”

“It is one ability that he lacks,” Gertie agreed. “But we are talking about Zeus, not the king. You believe he is somehow lending Aeslinn this power?”

“I don’t know. But I need to. Jonathan could do freaky things with souls because he was a nine-hundred-year-old necromancer. We thought he was one of a kind, but if Zeus is allowing Aeslinn to do the same . . . he could have all kinds of abilities by now.”

“Like transforming into a dragon.”

I nodded. “It would explain how he was able to manage it when he has no dark fey blood.”

Gertie sighed, looking frustrated. “That doesn’t explain why he went after you, instead of me or Agnes—or Rhea, for that matter. Any of us could have given him what he needs, we all have access to the Pythian power. Yet he focused on you.”

“That’s why I need to do this. I need to know what he’s up to.”

“And you think that . . . thing . . . is going to tell you? Something like this, dumped in the wild, weathered for who knows how long—”

“Gertie! We have no idea what Aeslinn is planning, and now that he has Zeus working with him . . . I have to try.”

“Try quickly,” she said, finally giving in, with the air of someone going against her better judgement.

It was going against mine, too, because I wasn’t great at this sort of thing. I’d tried to get inside the head of a recently deceased solder—as in, the blood was still warm—for the Senate once. He’d witnessed a murder—his own—and we’d needed to find out who had done it before more people died.

Only it had been a disaster, and that was with Billy helping me!

Of course, that had been using necromancy to try to peer into a dying brain, something I’d never done before. This was a lot more familiar—and even less likely to succeed, because Gertie was right. Old, weathered items rarely yielded good results.

The idea of touch clairvoyance was to pick up on imprints—the memories of traumatic events that could sometimes be preserved by surrounding items. It was sort of like a ghost, only instead of the spirit of a person being left behind, it was their memory and emotions, which trauma could sometimes stamp onto an item the way that carving channels in a record preserved sound. Some people could then come along and experience those recordings, if they handled the object.

I was one of those people, although I wasn’t the best at it. Ever since I was a child, I’d had to be careful about what I touched, but some seers had to spend their lives in padded gloves. I kind of wished I had one of those here now, because this . . . was a longshot.

Just like a record left out in the elements would eventually be unplayable, the skull—assuming it had even imprinted with something in the first place—was likely unreadable now. But I was desperate enough for information to give it a try. I nodded at Gertie, and approached the viewport, waiting.

It didn’t change much, at least on this side, other than for a bit more rippling. The tiny waves running over the surface made it look even more like that kiddie pool, if it had somehow been flipped onto its side. Or like a miniature stargate, ready to whisk a person off to another realm—one with literal monsters prowling around.

I’d time traveled more often than I could remember, but this one had me swallowing. I looked through the viewport into the dark, empty eye sockets of the fallen fey, and caught the glimmer and gleam of something moving in there. It was just water, captured in a crevasse of bone; I knew that. But I nonetheless jumped when Gertie spoke again.

“When I say you withdraw, you withdraw,” she said harshly. “Otherwise, you may lose an arm.”

I nodded again, feeling like a bobble head doll—and an idiot, for risking so much on such long odds. But at least I managed not to grip my arm protectively. I really hoped I wasn’t about to end up with body parts separated by several hundred years.

“Now!” she said, when the disk reached maximum agitation, and I didn’t hesitate, because I didn’t know how long she could do this.

I plunged an arm through the opening and felt nothing, not even the cold shock of water that I’d half expected. But I did get a shock of another kind, because my entire arm disappeared. And then partially reappeared—as a disembodied hand—on the other side.

It was connected to absolutely nothing, maybe because my arm was still inside Gertie’s little portal. Which was getting smaller all the time, I realized, as the edges began to shrink. That probably meant I was already running out of time, and that was my hand—I recognized the chipped nail polish.

And when I wiggled my fingers, the ones on the hand moved, too.

Okay. Don’t think about where your arm is, I thought. Don’t think at all. Just do this!

Which would have been easier if I’d been a little closer. I stretched and reached, but just managed to brush the giant’s head with a finger. And that wasn’t good enough.

“Can you get me any nearer?”

Gertie muttered something. But the viewport, which I guessed was now a proper portal, moved another few inches toward the head. Enough that I managed to get my palm onto the bone of what had been a protruding cheek.

I had an immediate flash of pitted, pockmarked skin, of a bulbous nose, and of tiny, beady eyes of an indeterminate color between mud and a bowel movement. He had a deep, long-healed slice on his cheek, which I could feel the faint echo of on the bone. Endearingly, he also had acne, because he wasn’t that old, was he? Despite his size, he was little more than a boy—

And then it was gone, the brief flicker of vision melting away like new fallen snow.

I pressed harder, moving my hand to different spots on the skull, ranging as far as I could reach. But nothing changed. That was it, like the roll credits scene on the world’s shortest movie.

Leaving me unsure what to do now.

This sort of thing usually worked or it didn’t, without a lot of middle ground. But the quick little flashes I picked up as I tried again and again, moving around to find the right spot, didn’t even show me what I’d already seen. They didn’t show me anything but brief strobes of light behind my eyelids.

“Cassie—”

“I need to go farther back,” I said. “You were right: there’s something here, but it’s too old. The memory has been lost.”

More muttering commenced, maybe because the kiddie pool was now hula hoop sized, and I finally got what she’d meant about losing an arm. I had until the aperture closed to finish this, or . . . I tried not to think about the or.

But it was working; the head was slowly changing as I watched. As was the landscape behind it. At first slowly, with winter melting into fall and then to summer, before picking up the pace and moving faster and faster. Until the seasons were retreating in a long, blurry line.

Under my hand, the head changed, too. The stains slowly faded, the mold retreated, the lichen shortened. And before I realized it, the bones were being covered over with flesh, hair was reappearing on the skull in tufts, brought and tucked into place by the nesting birds that had stolen it, as if the subject was receiving hair plugs. And, finally, the whole thing was clothed in skin, still warm to the touch.

The backward motion halted abruptly, but not before I felt blood, warm and red and sticky, cascade over my fingers.

“Do what you must,” Gertie gasped. “Quickly!”

That was good advice for more than one reason. I could hear fey voices calling to each other from above. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but the tone made it likely that my disembodied arm had been noticed by some eagle-eyed scout. Probably because they’d just thrown the head down here, with the splatter of mud across the dead features still as liquid as the blood.

And then an arrow took the dead creature between the eyes, and I was out of time.

I started to pull back, accepting defeat, when—

 

“Ah, I knew I smelled one somewhere.”

 

The language wasn’t English, wasn’t even close. I could hear the words, the real words, and they were alien to my ears. Yet my mind translated them anyway. I didn’t speak any fey language, if that was even what it was . . .

But Pritkin did.

I frowned. I thought we were only supposed to be borrowing magic, not knowledge. Or was Pritkin translating for me, via Mircea’s mental abilities?

“Pritkin?” I thought, but I heard nothing back.

 

Crell looked up, with honey dripping from his hand, and with a wild storm of bees buzzing around his head. The bees were angry. It was late in the season, and they did not want to be raided. They were worried that they would not have enough food for winter.

And now so was Crell.

“Mine!” he said, glaring at the newcomer, and pulled the hive away.

The creature laughed, the motion spangling the surrounding trees with light shadows. “Oh, you can keep the honey, monster. I’m after something else entirely.”

Pain, bursting behind his eyes, ripping, tearing, burning.

Crell threw up a burly arm, blocking another spell, and intended to melt into the shadows of the forest. His kind were big, but they could move silently when they wished, and the forest would help him. Already, the treetops were thrashing, the birds and animals crying out, creating enough of a ruckus to hide a dozen of his kin.

But then the forest was gone.

Crell had a moment to blink around at bright sun, a blue sky, gray stone, and dozens of tiny, blond heads, prowling towards him.

And then his body was falling into darkness, the taste of honey still sweet on his lips, as someone started eating him.

 

“Cassie! Now!” Someone was yelling, and for a moment, I didn’t know who. My mind was caught in the memory of a dead man, only no, that would have been better. My mind was caught in the memory of a dying man, as he was ripped apart—

Until I was abruptly jerked backwards. I hit the side of the hill, hard enough to send clods of dirty snow raining down onto my head, just as Gertie’s portal snapped shut. And then I just stayed there, looking blankly at the purple haired woman in front of me, because something was wrong.

Memories continued to crowd me, hard and fast and brighter, far brighter, than anything I’d received from the skull. I looked down and found an arrow clutched in my hand, but not shot through it this time. It was clasped in my palm, as if I’d somehow picked it up or pulled it out of the giant’s forehead, only I didn’t remember doing it. I didn’t remember—

 

“—where I left it!” Iver ransacked the small room, throwing even the lumpy straw mattress against the wall.

“Let it go—” Torben said, grabbing his arm. “We’re going to be late. They’re assembling now—"

“I’m not letting it go! Some thief must have taken it—”

“Or you left it on the battlements again, as always.” His roommate released him, but only so he could tie up his hair. He liked it in a ridiculous looking topknot when they hunted, so that it didn’t snag on any passing tree limbs. Odin’s beard, but he was vain as a girl—and completely useless!

“I did not leave it anywhere!” Iver snarled. He threw a pack of clothing after the mattress, and bent to go through the chest at the foot of his bed again, even though he’d already done that twice.

“We’ll be late for the hunt,” Torben said again, mildly.

Nothing bothered him, the big oaf!

“There’s always another hunt; this is my favorite quiver!”

“There’s not another hunt like this.”

 

“Cassie! Cassie, let it go,” someone was shaking me, but all it did was to throw my head around. The stream of images didn’t stop; if anything, they picked up speed. “You’ve gone too far in. Let the damned thing—”

 

Pelting through the forest, high in the trees, jumping from branch to branch, they made their own private highway. Torben was fast, but Iver was faster. Always had been, with the other’s bones as heavy as an ox’s—or a human’s—Iver thought, pulling ahead. He quickly left his cousin’s son behind, all but sprinting through the treetops after his prey.

Fast; this one was damned fast. He would be though, wouldn’t he? They had been warned.

Vidar, another cousin, gave a whooping cry just up ahead, in the peculiar ululation of his clan. It echoed through the forest like a bird’s cry, except that it included information on direction and speed. Iver adjusted his course slightly, then caught up with and surpassed his cousin.

“Remember what they told us,” Vidar breathed, as he flew by. “We’re not to take it ourselves. Run it to ground; the lord will finish it.”

And the lord will reward, Iver thought, and laughed.

 

“Cassie! Cassie!” I could hear Gertie’s voice, but I couldn’t respond. Because the pace of the images beating against my mind had just sped up again, as if frantic to tell me all they could while they could. But they came so fast, and were so jumbled up, that I barely knew what I was seeing anymore.

 

A blonde woman, young, lying among the green moss of a forest floor, a pale dress spread about her, with blood on her lips; a dark, satyr-like creature, cornered against a wall, fear on his face as a dozen shadows closed in; a snarling cat, huge and muscular, like a saber-toothed tiger, only black and beautiful, leaping with claws extended; a bewildered giant, with honeycomb in his hand, staring around at an alien world.

 

“Cassie!” I felt a slap across my face, harsh and stinging, but it brought me back. The fog of memory cleared, the intrusive thoughts leaving my mind as the arrow fell from my hand. “Can you hear me? Damn you, answer me!”

I looked up into Gertie’s worried face, from a half crouch by the hillside, and wordlessly shook my head.

“What did you see? Can you tell me?”

“They’re hunting us,” I whispered, focusing on the only through thread in all of that. “They’re hunting all of us.”

She looked confused. “Who? Pythias?”

“No. Demigods.”