Unbinding (16 page)

Cynna cast a dubious glance at the dead chameleon lying about a foot from his left hand—where, he assumed, she’d left it after heaving it off him after stopping the chameleon’s heart with a spell that she could use, which he, frustratingly, could not. “You don’t think she might object to—”

“He attacked us,” Cullen said firmly, knowing Dell could hear them. Best if the chameleon thought he’d done the killing until they knew how she’d react. “I’m sure she’ll understand why I had to—”

“What do you mean, why you—”

“Ah, there you are,” he said to Dell, who’d paused when she reached the relatively flat area that held the node. “Kai’s right behind her,” he added in an aside to Cynna, whose ears wouldn’t tell her that yet. Kai, but not Nettie—he knew from the sound of the footfalls. Nettie couldn’t possibly run up that slope. Anxiety threw another loop around his gut and tightened.

Dell’s smoky gray head tilted as she took in the scene, her nostrils flaring. She looked from the body to Cullen to Cynna and gave a little grunt. It sounded more like aggravation than any furious need for revenge, which he found heartening. “He jumped us,” Cullen told her, “and at the worst moment possible, which was either a happy coincidence for him or—”

“Not so happy,” Kai said as she loped into view. “Considering he’s dead and you aren’t. Which I’m very glad to see, by the way. What happened?”

“Where’s Nettie?”

“She’s okay. She’ll be here soon, but she had to come at a slower pace.”

The tight clutch of fear eased. “Good. That’s good. Clearly you guys won, but how?”

“Dell, mostly. We were jumped by three of that fellow’s buddies. At first Dell tried to discourage them without killing them, but that didn’t work because they were under someone’s control. The obvious suspect is Dyffaya, who nearly grabbed me—well, he did grab me, but Nettie’s drumming made him let go. Or summoned Someone who made him let go.” She shook her head. “I get tangled up when I talk about it. The upshot is that Dell killed one of the male chameleons and the other two winked out when whoever answered Nettie made Dyffaya go away. I heard you yell just before they attacked. You were hurt?”

“That was me who yelled,” Cynna said. “Like Cullen said, the chameleons picked the worst time possible to leap out of the node.”

“They gated in?”

“Yep. What I was doing to prepare the node . . . shit, it’s hard to say this in English. You might say I was patterning the node in a way that has elements of a gate, but isn’t one. This patterning is inherently unstable until you reach the end, and I was nearly there—”

“Marblypouth,” Cullen said, or something like that, only with more consonants.

Cynna nodded grimly. “The
marbligpot’th
configuration is the most unstable point of the progression, and that’s when someone nudged the node and it flickered into being a gate. Give him credit—he did it smoothly, with minimum power, and didn’t make it blow up, which by all rights it should have. Four chameleons came through and the node immediately flickered back to the unstable pattern I’d left it in. I had to keep going, finish the patterning, or the node damn sure would have exploded. Two of the chameleons took off. The other two sighted in on me. Did you ever see a cat just before it pounces on a bird? Like that. Then one of them leaped at me, but this guy”—she nodded at Cullen—“has really fast reflexes. Not much sense, trying to wrestle with a chameleon, but great reflexes.”

Cullen snorted. “Like I had a choice. I couldn’t throw fire, not with the two of them almost on top of a seriously unstable node. And I don’t Change as fast as Rule does, so that was out.”

“You don’t look nearly badly enough hurt,” Kai observed.

He sighed. “Probably because the damn chameleon didn’t want to waste any blood by slashing me up. Once they fasten that mouth on you, you can’t break ’em loose. Got one hell of a suction. I kept hitting it until I passed out, but it didn’t seem to notice.”

“Chameleons are very single-minded about feeding. What about the other one? You said two took off—those would be the first two who attacked us, I imagine—and two stayed. You killed one. The other one?”

Cynna answered. “Instead of attacking me, it—he—decided he needed a turn at Cullen’s blood. He was growling at his buddy, trying to get at Cullen, so I got the node into a stable array as fast as I could. Then I flung a spell that . . . actually, that spell is really illegal, so I’d rather not say what I did.”

Kai cocked her head, looking down at the sprawled body. “Did you touch him?”

“Uh . . . no.”

“I doubt you know Sudden Death, so . . . a heart-stopper spell?”

“You know it?”

Kai shook her head. “I’ve heard of it, but it’s demon magic, right? Not true body magic. Elves can’t work demon magic. None of the sidhe can.”

Cynna’s grin woke. “Neither can lupi, from what I can see.”

Cullen frowned at her. “I can make it work sometimes.”

“Half the time. Maybe.”

“Gloating is not attractive.”

“That’s never stopped you.”

“What does that have to do with . . .” The expression on Kai’s face got Cullen’s attention. She looked like someone who was trying not to say something. Naturally he wanted her to go ahead and say it. “You know something.”

“Umm. Yes, but this is the wrong time and place. Ask me again later. I take it from the way we’re chatting all relaxed that the node is still stable. How about you? I know you heal well, but—” She stopped, frowning at Dell. “He won’t do that. Yes, of course a wolf might, but—oh, all right. I’ll ask.” She looked at Cullen. “Dell wants to be sure you don’t eat the chameleon you killed. It would be a terrible insult to treat him as meat, and she thinks he doesn’t deserve that, since he wasn’t making his own choices when he attacked you.”

Cullen looked at Dell, who was watching him steadily. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to turn furry and chow down, though God knows he did just that with me.” He switched his attention to the corpse, adding a scowl, “Got plenty of my blood, too. And I suppose I’d better quit putting this off. Not that knowing is going to help.” He sighed once, then quickly ran through the preparatory sequence. He’d used this spell so often it had well-worn grooves in his mind, and there were no external components, so it only took a moment. He held out both hands, thumbs and forefingers touching to shape a rough square.

“What are you doing?” Kai asked.

“That’s his magnify spell,” Cynna explained. “I don’t know why—wait, shit, yes, I do! I wasn’t thinking. That beastie blooded him, which means it could have inserted a hook into his blood, just like the butterflies did with you.”

“Not that it’ll do me any good if I do spot something,” Cullen muttered, staring through the square his fingers and thumbs formed as he inspected one leg. “I can’t tell my healing to ignore the blood loss for now and focus on getting rid of some intrusive little hook the chameleon left behind, so unless it decides to prioritize that on its own, I don’t—”

“Son of a bitch,” Kai breathed.

That surprised him enough to make him look up at her. She was staring off into space, her face transforming from revelation to fury. “Son of a bitch!
That’s
what he was oh-so-carefully not saying! That’s what he’s up to!
You
may not be able to control your healing,” she said as she grabbed her phone from a pocket, “but Nathan can, and if that son of a bitch doesn’t answer I’m going to kill him!”

N
AUSEA
faded to a faint queasiness. Nathan swallowed and looked around.

He saw trees.

He stood in the center of a small clearing. All around him were trees. Not redwoods, though they were massive, towering up and up the way those giants did. But these trees bore leaves, not needles. The branching was more like an oak, he thought as he tilted his head back, trying to make out the tops, but they weren’t oaks, either. The leaves were cupped like saucers and the bark was smooth, peeling away in patches like an earthly crape myrtle or the moonbeech of Faerie. No, these weren’t any kind of tree he’d ever seen before, though they did remind him of the pushpulls in Angorai. Larger, and with more symmetry in the boughs . . . and that was a surprise. Wouldn’t the godhead of chaos tend toward asymmetry?

The color was different from other trees, of course. These were black. Black in root, trunk, branch, and leaf. As black as the empty sky overhead, which made it hard to see exactly how tall the trees were, especially with most of the light coming from the dry, pebbly ground. That ground was as warm as if it had baked in the sun during the day and was now releasing that heat to the air . . . air utterly still and so heavy with magic it seemed to have substance, pressing in on his lungs with every breath.

He heard nothing. Not a squirrel in those impossibly tall trees. Not a rodent or a roach scurrying along the ground, where there was no litter of fallen leaves. Not the tiniest susurration of a breeze. All he heard was the faint seashell sound of his own blood pulsing in his ears. All he smelled was magic. Magic and dust.

He did not like this place.

Nathan sucked in a ragged breath. His hand tightened on the hilt still in his hand. Reminded, he looked down at Claw. At least he’d killed the monster vine before being snatched here.

But he’d been snatched much more quickly than he’d expected. Only a few minutes had passed between his getting stuck by the thorn and the god yanking him here. A much shorter time than he’d expected, based on. . . . well, a sample of two, which wasn’t enough to count on, clearly. Could be Dyffaya had gotten better at his snatches. Could be other factors affected the interval between the god’s creatures sampling your blood and the god snatching you up.

Now that he thought about it, he felt foolish for assuming the interval was fixed. Several of the realms weren’t time-congruent. Why had he thought the godhead would be fixed in time relative to Earth?

Experimentally he tried sheathing his blade without releasing the hilt. Claw slid into the pocket of elsewhere
just as it should—and, more importantly, slid back out again.

Might as well find out, he told himself. This time he let go of the hilt after sheathing the blade—and drew it out again just as easily. He sheathed it again and left it there. Very few could take Claw from his hands, but a god might manage it. No one but him could draw Claw from its pocket of elsewhere. Not even a god.

That was half of what he’d needed to go right for this to work. Or a third, maybe, depending on how he divided things, but still, a huge relief. His heartbeat was racing; he told it firmly to slow down. But the back of his neck still bristled, trying to raise hackles he hadn’t had for over four hundred years. His lips wanted to pull back from his teeth.

Someone was watching. He could feel it. He began to turn in a slow circle.

“Are we where I think we are?”

At the very edge of the clearing, Benedict stood in a half-crouch, poised for attack or defense. Nathan headed for him. “If you think we’re in the godhead, I’d say yes. It fits Lily Yu’s description.” A pang of regret squeezed his chest. “I’m sorry you were grabbed, too.”

“Don’t be an ass. How is it your fault?” Benedict straightened, rolled his shoulders, and looked at Nathan. “I don’t feel dead.”

“We’re here physically. I’m experiencing breath, a heartbeat, and normal sensory input—although the smells are odd. There’s so much magic that at first I thought it was masking all the other scents, but it seems more as if scent itself is diminished. I couldn’t smell you until I got close.”

“Same here.” Benedict wrinkled his nose. “It’s like I stuffed cotton up my nose. Sucks.”

“I wonder if this is how humans feel with a cold.”

“Something like this, though with a cold you usually get aches, cough, and fever, too.”

That’s right. Lupi didn’t acquire their healing until they went through the Change, and that didn’t happen until puberty. “I’d forgotten. Your people are like enough to me in some ways that I fall into assumption sometimes.” He frowned. “The way smells are dampened here reminds me. I think we’d best not eat or drink anything here unless we’re sure it smells right.”

“What do you mean, smells right?”

“I’m thinking that if something lacks scent—” Nathan cut off as the big man’s skin suddenly turned ashy. “What is it?”

“I reached and—there isn’t—I can’t—” His voice broke. He stopped. When he spoke again, his voice was entirely dispassionate. “There’s no moon here.”

Nathan didn’t know what to say. The moon was integral to the lupi’s power. What did its loss mean to Benedict? How much did he lose when there was no moon? “You won’t be able to Change.”

“No, but that’s not . . . I’ve never been where I couldn’t hear Her. Not since First Change.” Benedict shook his head as if trying to clear it. “Do you feel like we’re being watched?”

“Oh, yes.”

“I know a cue when I hear one,” a pleasant tenor voice said.

The god who stepped out from between two trees looked human, though he moved with the grace of an elf. He was shaped like a half-grown boy, a beautiful boy on the edge of adolescence, his limbs pure and perfect, his hair a tousled black cap. His eyes were black, too—as black as the trees around them. He wore a short pleated skirt similar to a schenti. His feet were bare.

And that was another part of what Nathan had needed to happen. Two-thirds down. Dyffaya had taken a body to deal with them. He had done that when he spoke to Lily, but Nathan hadn’t known if that was his usual practice, and he needed Dyffaya embodied. Not that killing this body would hurt the god, but being in a body concentrated Dyffaya. Pulled more of him into one spot.

Or so Nathan hoped. The only noncorporal being he knew much about was the Alath. If a god was much like that odd trinity, this would work. Which was maybe a large assumption, and there was still that third element . . . the beautiful boy was too far away. The twenty feet between him and Nathan would give Dyffaya time to do all sorts of things before Nathan could strike.

The god grinned like a mischievous urchin well aware of his dimples. “Shall I introduce myself?”

Nathan offered a small, polite bow. “If you’ve a name you prefer to Dyffaya, I’d be happy to use it. I’m guessing you know who we are?”

“Dyffaya will do. And of course I know who you are. A good host always knows his guests—though ’tis true only one of you was invited.”

“Which one?”

“Oh, come, Nathan—I believe that’s the name you use these days?—you know the answer to that. But perhaps what you meant to ask was why I took both of you, if only one was invited?”

“I would like to know that, if you’ve no objection.”

“Not at all. The answer is: because that’s how it works. You must arrive in pairs. I choose one. Chaos determines the other. There, you see how helpful I can be?”

“That’s quite helpful. Thank you. You returned the toddler. If you didn’t invite Benedict, why not send him back?”

“The poor little mite needed her mum, of course. Besides, I didn’t want her. I do want him. I was hoping for Isen Turner, but his son will do. But I’m forgetting my manners.” He clasped his hands together and bowed. “You’re welcome in my domain, Benedict Jones.”

Be polite,
Rule urged the lupus silently.
Be very polite.

Unfortunately, Benedict was no more telepathic than Nathan. “Where’s the woman?” he demanded. “The one you grabbed. Britta something.”

“Sweet Britta.” This time the smile was lascivious, startling on such a young face. “She’s sleeping, poor dear. All worn out by her exciting day and all that fucking we did. Why do you ask?”

Benedict didn’t cry out. He simply fell as the ground opened beneath him in a hole perfectly sized to swallow the lupus and leave Nathan standing on its edge.

Nathan dropped to his knees to peer into the hole—which glowed all the way down, so he could see Benedict’s furious, upturned face some twenty feet below. He could also see how the hole narrowed. Benedict was pinned in placed by smooth walls of glowing dirt. “Please,” Nathan said very, very softly to the angry man below, “do not speak yet. Let me deal with him.”

Dyffaya sauntered up to the other side of the hole and cocked his head to one side. He clucked his tongue. “Nathan, Nathan. You really should have explained civilized behavior to Benedict instead of comparing your childhood—or puppyhood?—experiences of illness.”

Nathan murmured a phrase in High Elfin which, in English, meant something along the lines of, “Who would doubt what you say?” He used the third form of the phrase, which conceded nothing while implying that the person addressed was of such high state that only the crudest of souls could find fault with his words, never mind what their relationship to reality might be. High Elfin did have its uses. It was so curlicued with courtesy that it took real determination to use it rudely—or to convey much of anything in less than a couple thousand words, which was why it was seldom used outside of court. Even the elves found it cumbersome; most Low Sidhe never learned it. He switched back to English. “I wonder if you will bring him back up here so I may amend my omission.”

“It has been a long time,” Dyffaya said wistfully, “since I heard the beautiful tongue. But there’s time, isn’t there? Time and time and more time we’ll have for that.” He flashed Nathan a brilliant smile. “And of course I shall bring him back up. He’ll do me little good in a hole. The question is: when? Perhaps . . .” He stopped, his expression smoothing out to a blankness as complete as a doll’s. “How disappointing.” The face he turned toward Nathan remained eerily blank, though his voice was light and chipper. “You’ll be pleased to learn that your lover won’t be joining us here, after all.”

Nathan gave another little half-bow, that seeming the safest response. His heart sang. Kai was safe, safe, safe . . .

Between one second and the next, Dell was crouched in the exact spot where Nathan had first appeared, and Cullen Seabourne lay prone on the ground at the far side of the clearing. He blinked, winced, and said, “Aw, shit.” The chameleon’s ears flattened. Her lips drew back in a snarl as she looked around, her tail lashing. And she launched herself at Dyffaya.

“No!” Nathan threw himself at Dell. She dodged, but he managed to snag one foot, jerking her around. She hissed and nearly got him with one clawed foot before he danced back. “He’ll kill you. You can’t kill him. You can’t hurt him. He’ll kill you before you even draw blood.”

She glared at him, tail lashing—but after a moment she put her back to him so she could glare at Dyffaya.

Nathan fought not to sound desperate as he turned to face the god. Three thousand years ago, most elves had still held stubbornly to the old understanding of sentience. It had caused trouble back then, but now—if the god thought that way, if he took Dell for a beast . . . Nathan offered a deep bow. “I apologize on Dell’s behalf. She isn’t capable of understanding the need for courtesy.”

“Of course not. No one capable of creating a familiar bond could be stupid enough to impose it on a sentient—who might have a different notion of who is to be master, and who servant, in the relationship.”

Nathan didn’t know what Dell’s relationship had been with the mage who created the bond, but Dell was no servant, nor did she wish to be master. She and Kai had a partnership, satisfying to them both. Dyffaya would not understand that.

“Or perhaps you thought I didn’t know what a chameleon is.” The boy’s lip curled in regal scorn. “Are you among those of your kind who believe any kind of thinking qualifies as sentience? You may rest easy. I know better. Chameleons lack the capacity for language. Clearly, they are not sentient.”

“Hey!” Cullen’s voice was weak, yet full of indignation. “Dell knows lots of words!”

Dyffaya turned to face the sorcerer. “How interesting. He chooses to challenge my statement.”

“I haven’t had a chance to instruct Cullen about courtesy yet,” Nathan said quickly. Was Cullen being really smart or really dumb?

The black eyes narrowed to slits. “He should know better. Even without instruction, he should know better than to contradict Me.”

“Shit. You’re right.” Cullen’s voice dripped with contrition. “I’ve lost a lot of blood, but that’s no excuse. I apologize, sir, uh . . . I’m afraid I don’t know the proper way to address you. Or even if it’s okay to address you, but I’m really sorry I spoke so disrespectfully.”

Okay, he was being smart. Horribly reckless, but smart, encouraging Dyffaya’s conviction that Dell was nonsentient by claiming to think the opposite. Though he was laying on the humility pretty thick.