The Artifact of Foex (42 page)

“Oh, please.” Chet rolled his eyes. “That’s
an empty threat if I’ve ever heard one. You’re not going to touch
those things. The geas was no bluff.”

Fenimore smiled and picked up the Raptus. He
tossed it in the air once and caught it. “A little dicey, sure,
but... loopholes, my friend. Loopholes.”

Journey’s mouth dropped open. “What? How did
you—I heard Chet. I
heard
him. He bound you by your
name.”

“Ah, see, if you’re the
inventor
of
a powerful relic like the Raptus, you build in layers of personal
exemptions. Especially if, say, other Magicians come to you and
insist upon locking your creation, lead by none other than Zang
himself.” Fenimore’s smile twisted, growing bitter. “I’ve been
fighting to regain the Raptus too many years, especially against
you
.”

Chet drooped. All his hopes were shattered
just like that. But he couldn’t help protesting, “I helped create
the Raptus, too. I shed the blood to make it a reality. All those
girls murdered by my hand. And for what? To help you rule the
world? Some reward.”

Journey gazed at him, her eyes round with
horror.

Fen laughed. “Scut work. You were always good
at such things, Zang. Now, to business. Journey, you are to pick up
my knife and stab Chet in the belly. Stab him ever so slowly, as
please you. The geas shouldn’t hurt me, as
you
will do the
dirty work. I’m going to have you play with him a long time before
I allow you to kill him. We’re going to measure out his entrails
length by length, you and I. Maybe I’ll insert various parts of his
body into your twat. Then, when you’re so sick you’ll want to die,
we’ll see if you’ll sing for me. If you don’t, I’m sure I can
imagine worse things for you to do with his corpse. We can play
games for
weeks
.”

“Oh, Pantheon. Chet! Chet, do something,"
Journey cried out as she walked toward the knife.

Chet began backing up, but Fenimore nailed
him with a look. “I order you, Magician Zang, by all the names
you’ve ever known, to stand fast. Don’t move. Just
stay
.”

Chet stood, distraught as Journey picked up
the curved blade and approached him one step at a time. He tried to
think of a loophole—any loophole. “Um. Will, I hail thee, lend me
the strength to...”

“You may not speak a word in your own
defense.”

“Chet, I can’t stop.” Journey was nearly
within arm's reach, the knife held in her trembling hand.

Chet opened his mouth but couldn’t speak. He
couldn’t move. He couldn’t do anything. He had failed and would die
for his failure.

Journey reached him, and Chet held his
breath. Journey wasn’t fully under the influence of the Raptus.
Would she really slide the blade into his abdomen? He’d been
threatened repeatedly by this same weapon since Fenimore had woken
in the ambulance. Was he to die—gradually—on its edge?

Journey was visibly sweating through the
drying mud. She slowly drew back, her eyes closed; Chet could see
her shaking from the tension in her body, her clenched teeth. He
closed his own eyes, waiting to be impaled.

Noises erupted all around them. Journey
yelped, and Chet opened his eyes. They were surrounded by people in
long grey robes, hoods covering their faces. One stood so close to
Chet they were almost touching, chest to chest. Then he realized
the strange person—the Shadow Dancer—was between him and Journey,
effectively blocking Fenimore’s order.

The person drew back the hood. It was Rory.
She smiled at Chet and kissed his cheek.

He touched his face in awe, then he reached
over and caressed her, making sure she was real. “B-but you were
stabbed in the back. I
saw
it.”

She grinned without answer and drew away.
Journey had been disarmed by the Shadow Dancers on either side of
her. She was slumped over, apparently with abject relief. Fenimore
was fenced in by Shadow Dancers. He was yelling—trying to give
orders—but no one was listening. Chet would bet everyone had
bracelets on under those voluptuous robes. Fenimore was moved
swiftly... then he stopped and screamed, disappearing from
view.

What had happened? Chet traded looks with
Journey and stepped closer, even as the Shadow Dancers around
Fenimore drew back. He was lying on the ground, eyes open, staring
into nothing. Dead. There was no blood or sign of injury. Some kind
of dagger lay in his curled hand, the Raptus in the crook of his
other arm.

“He tried to fight and the geas got him.
Finally
,” a Shadow Dancer said, letting down her hood. She
looked awfully familiar... Chet blinked as he realized he knew
exactly who she was. Rory’s mom.

“Zamie, why didn’t you appear sooner?”
Journey said—or whined, rather. Her tone was one of deep
complaint.

Zamie raised an eyebrow. “Hello, Zamie, nice
to see you, Zamie,” she prompted sarcastically.

“Mom, stop it. They’ve had a long day," Rory
put in.

“But Rory, what are you doing up and about?”
Chet asked, feeling like he’d missed a beat. “Even if you’re alive,
you should be headed for the emergency room!”

Everyone around them snorted. Chet wasn’t
sure how fifty hooded and robed people could convey sarcasm with
body language, but they did.

Journey glared at them, frowning. “Give the
guy a break. Look, it isn’t
that
well known that you're
able to heal in your own space," she said defensively. She turned
to him and murmured, “Clusters are walled-off portions of the God
Plain. The spaces have healing properties, like fire does for
Flame.”

“Oh.” Chet realized he was hungry, tired and
emotionally overdrawn. It was high time to go upstairs and get
cleaned up... except there was still a major threat at hand: the
Raptus itself. He wasn't the only one gazing at it, either.

“Right,” Zamie said. “Well, time to make some
decisions. Knife begged us to hold off doing anything about the
Raptus until she’d figured out how your cord things work. We know
now that nothing seems to happen to the others when one of you is
killed. And apparently you can travel far away from the Raptus
without injury. I think it’s best that we take it into our Cluster
to avoid further power grabs.”

“Sounds good to me," Journey said
wearily.

“Journey, go ahead and complete the unlocking
process, then it’ll go into our storage area. We can only hope
Aiena responds to our request sometime in the next decade. She
tends to not answer our call when she doesn’t want to.”

What?
Chet stared at Zamie, then at
Rory. “You mean the Raptus isn’t going to be destroyed any time
soon?”

Rory spread her hands. “We don’t command the
goddess. In fact, it’s the exact inverse.”

“But what if someone else grabs the Raptus
while you’re waiting! Like whatever happened before, when the Tache
royal cousins got it. Your Cluster didn’t do so great back then,
did it?”

Again, he wasn't sure how a bunch of hooded
people could thoroughly communicate wincing and glaring, but they
did. Rory shrugged as if to say, “What do you want from us?” Both
her expression and Zamie's expression were sardonic, bitter.
Neither of them liked the idea of holding onto the Raptus so long,
he could tell. But what choice did they have?

Journey took hold of the Raptus. “Abyss, it
feels
awful
.”

“Is it really that bad?” Rory looked anxious.
So did her mother, actually. Chet blinked; it hadn’t felt painful
to
him
.

“I'm afraid so. Fenimore already made me
bleed,” Journey said, frowning at the memory. Then she looked
around at her audience, and sighed. “This is going to sound
terrible.”

Chet frowned. “Just spit it out. What’s so
bad about a children’s poem? I mean, you act and dance in front of
audiences all the time.”

“Yeah. Okay, here goes nothing:

“A rake went cavorting with a Flame
Until she said ‘You are too tame
I’ll make you scream
You’ll provide me with cream’
Now the rake has gone quite lame.”

People snickered as the Raptus flashed bright
green in Journey’s hands. She hastily dropped it, hissing
with—fear? Pain? It lay on the cave floor, inert as ever.

Chet frowned at Journey. “What kind of a
children’s poem was
that?
”

“An easily remembered one.”

“But—but—a
children’s
poem,
Journey!”

“Hey, that ditty was popular among street
urchins and school boys for centuries. I should know. I’ve
been
a street urchin and school boy, respectively.”

Zamie reached for the Raptus—then yelped,
drawing back and shaking her hands. “It
bit
me.”

One Shadow Dancer after another attempted to
pick up or even touch the Raptus with similar results. Tools were
brought out from the pulsing black hole of the Cluster, which had
apparently been hiding in the tunnel. Tongs, leather gloves, even a
rubber-insulated box. It was like an engineering exercise with a
live power line: ten people groused and yelped as they attempted
the task of containing it.

When they finally managed to get the Raptus
into the box, Chet felt as if his guts had been ripped from his
belly. He squeaked, his hands automatically gripping his navel.
Journey made a similar gesture. They looked at one another with
much the same expression. The bonds that bound them to the Raptus
had tightened exponentially. It
hurt
.

“I don’t think the Raptus wants to go into
the Cluster, somehow," Journey said.

“What’s the alternative?” Rory shrugged. But
she—and every visible Shadow Dancer in the cave—groaned when the
box was popped into the Cluster itself.

“Oh, Pantheon,” Zamie hissed. “That’s
horrible
.”

Others were swearing, even collapsing to the
ground. Chet wasn’t surprised when the box was shoved out of the
Cluster so hard it bounced a few times before coming to a stop.
Luckily not in lucid mud—someone in the Cluster must have been
thinking, even through the... pain?

“We can’t have
that
in our Cluster.
It felt like a collective kidney stone,” Zamie said shakily.

“So what do we do? Toss it in the lucid-mud
river and let someone else deal with it, years down the road?” a
Shadow Dancer asked.

“No!” several others protested.

People threw back their hoods to argue with
one another, gesturing and raising their voices. Chet was
fascinated to find that Rory’s family was amazingly diverse, racial
wise. Did people marry into a Shadow Dancer Cluster? How many
members existed in their little pocket of the God Plain? What was
it really like inside the Cluster? Chet smiled at Rory and took her
hand, squeezing it.

Rory responded by resting her head on his
shoulder. She felt
fantastic
there, but Rory clearly
wasn’t happy. “Here we fought and shed blood for the thing, and
it’s
still
causing trouble. We’re stuck with the Raptus
for years to come, one way or another.”

“Not necessarily,” Journey said, her mouth
set at a decisive angle.

Zamie was close enough to have heard her.
“What do you mean?”

Journey pointed at Chet. “We are not using
all of our available resources. We have a real, live, reincarnating
Magician who is still with us despite the death of Foex.”

Chet blinked, singled out. Journey had
pitched her voice to carry—her thespian abilities had certainly
survived the abuse she’d experienced. People in the cave quieted
down, listening attentively.

“We
had
another real, live,
reincarnating Magician here just a few minutes ago, and look at the
destruction he was about to unleash on Uos,” Zamie shot back,
glaring at Fenimore’s sprawled body.

“Chet isn’t like that.” To Chet’s shock, it
was Rory who’d spoken up. She faced down her mother, her spine
straight as a board. “Chet doesn’t want power, and he never has.
Fenimore regarded him as a long-time enemy. If Chet
was
the Magician Zang in his past lives, then he has always been a
thoughtful, philosophical soul with a keen mind for history. He
has—or used to have—an intricate understanding of blood magic if
his writings and epic poetry are any indication. That kind of
knowledge isn’t something any of us here possess.”

Chet stared at Rory, taken aback. He felt
absurdly pleased and embarrassed at her regard, yet he’d just found
his old name. Now it was being bandied about the room with dozens
of strangers looking on.
Could
he destroy the Raptus? Chet
remembered the odd feeling when he’d taken it away from Fen. The
Raptus had felt... alive. How many children had died in the making
of it? How many people had been tortured, raped and slaughtered
under its aegis? Abyss, he’d almost become a member of that endless
list minutes ago. He honestly didn’t know whether he could do
anything about it.

Zamie looked skeptical. “What guarantee do we
have that he won’t just grab the Raptus and use it to his full
advantage?”

Rory rolled her eyes. “Mooom,” she groaned,
sounding half her age. “The family far outnumbers Chet, and
everyone out here has a bracelet on. How on Uos could he run, let
alone use the abysmal thing?”

“I’m sure he’d figure out something,” Zamie
muttered, but around her people were whispering amongst themselves,
eyeing Chet thoughtfully. Zamie raised her voice to be heard.
“Magicians were clever, murderous bastards who killed children for
their rituals. They were never trustworthy.”

Journey snorted. “You know, horrible things
have been whispered about Flame, too. We’re said to kidnap children
and molest them. And, of course, there is a drop of truth to the
old stories: young people have always run away with us to be
initiated in fire, while older adolescents sometimes fall in love
with us. You Shadow Dancers don’t have the best reputations on Uos,
either.”