Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Kit
The near-full moon draped the sand-colored structures inside Bahla Fort in a blanket of pale light. The fort’s eerie aura of emptiness was even more chilling at night, the endless maze of boxy structures and connecting passageways coated in concealing shadows.
Lienna and I stood at the bottom of the same steps we’d rushed down that afternoon, the illumination of our phones’ flashlights doing little to push back the oppressive gloom.
“This is where the weirdness started,” I whispered, nodding toward the doorway on our right.
Lienna aimed her flashlight into the darkness beyond the threshold. “The fae-related weirdness.”
“Yeah. I’m pretty sure, anyway. Only one way to find out.”
I stepped through the doorway, and Lienna followed on my heels. Delicate beams of moonlight fell on a burbling water feature made of dark stone at the center of the room, vines creeping across it and palm trees rising toward the dark sky. No sign of mud brick or the fort’s high outer walls.
“Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Bahla anymore,” I muttered.
Lienna looked around. “What do you mean?”
“All of this.” I waved at the desert oasis. “Wait, what do you see?”
“Some kind of dry basin.” Her gaze darted from corner to corner as though she expected something to charge out of the shadows. “Walls with nooks in them. A wooden roof. That’s it.”
Goosebumps rippled up my arms. It was one thing to know I’d likely glimpsed another realm on my last visit. It was a whole other thing to stand here beside Lienna while she saw something completely different from what my eyeballs were registering.
“I see an adorable little wellspring with a shitload of greenery around it,” I told her. “There are plants all over the place.”
She turned her light toward me, making me squint. “So this is the crossroads, which you said Zak said is really dangerous. And now we’re going to find the powerful fae that lives here and talk to it, which you said Zak said was, and I quote, ‘suicide.’ Does that about sum it up?”
Maybe I should’ve paraphrased Zak instead. “We’re going to talk to the Sha’ir’s fae familiar. His best bud. He’ll probably be tickled to meet another archmythic a thousand years later.”
“Aren’t you forgetting that the Sha’ir’s familiar killed him?”
Wincing, I headed out of the oasis room.
She pretended to think as she paced beside me. “How did Dr. Sorensen put it? Oh, right. ‘His gruesome end.’”
Damn her attention to detail.
“That could be a historical inaccuracy,” I countered, turning to follow the shelf-lined corridor deeper into the guts of the fort. “It makes for a way better story than the great and powerful Sha’ir tripping on his palace stairs and breaking his neck.”
“He would’ve been able to levitate like you.”
“You know what I mean.”
The hall opened into a large room with stone pillars—another one I recognized from this morning. The shadows were deeper here, the moon’s glow blocked by a wooden ceiling, and my flashlight beam was oddly soft, diffusing into darkness only a few feet in front of us.
With no clear indication of which way to go next, I focused on my psychic senses.
Lienna’s brain frequency beside me was reassuring.
As anticipated, I also picked up vague pings from those strange mind-like sources.
I homed in on them, but the harder I tried to suss them out, the harder it got to detect anything except for a buzzing, crackling white noise.
It infiltrated my senses like a static charge crawling across my skin.
Giving up, I chose a doorway at random—exactly as I’d done this morning. It wasn’t an auspicious sign.
“I know we’re taking a risk,” I said as we walked down another narrow corridor. “Zak made that abundantly clear. But where else am I supposed to find someone who can tell me how archmythic power works?”
“What about the grimoire?” Lienna directed her light through an empty doorway as we passed it. “There could be more about Bodil’s techniques in her part of the grimoire—the part Teddy didn’t get to translate.”
“There’s no guarantee. Besides, it’s locked away in—”
I broke off as we stepped out of the corridor and onto uneven earth in the next room. Crumbled stone was half-buried in golden sand, wispy plants climbing over the rubble. A pale mist, infused with shafts of moonlight, drifted over everything.
Lienna stared, her mouth agape. “What the …?”
“You can see it this time?” I asked.
“I’m definitely seeing it.”
Specks of radiance—tiny insects—danced through the luminous mist, the faint hum of their wings breaking the silence. I took a cautious step into the room, Lienna close by my side with one hand in her satchel.
A scuffing sound came from somewhere nearby. I pointed my light toward it, but it refracted off the thickening fog. The wispy grass growing among the sand-dusted debris rustled as though disturbed by a nonexistent breeze.
Lienna and I pressed closer together as we shone our lights left and right. The room was small—maybe the size of a two-car garage—and didn’t appear to lead anywhere. No doors, no connected corridors.
Another scuffing sound, closer this time, was followed by an awful, spine-tingling clicking noise.
The grass rustled, and a swirl of fireflies rose from the trembling plant.
Then a scorpion the size of a dinner plate climbed up the side of a broken pillar, its body marked with fluorescent yellow and blue stripes. Its tail arched menacingly.
Nope.
Lienna and I stepped back in unison.
The scorpion opened and closed its pincers, creating that awful clicking sound—and more clicks answered it, coming from every direction and impossible to pinpoint in the mist.
A super-sized “nope” with an extra helping of “absolutely no way in hell.”
I didn’t say a word, and neither did Lienna. We made an immediate about-face and booked it out of there. Investigating a dead end wasn’t worth that nightmare fuel.
Lienna grimaced, her face washed of all color. “That scorpion is going to replace clowns as my worst—”
Her voice died as we sped out of the corridor and into a completely unfamiliar courtyard that swirled with the same mist. Arches were set at random angles as though placed there by a giant, careless hand, and tropical ferns and trees grew from the sandy earth, obscuring any sign of a pathway.
“Where’s the room we came through?” Lienna’s voice was sharp with urgency.
I lifted my phone above my head. The tiny bit of extra light didn’t help. “I think we’re lost.”
Lienna gripped my hand, her fingers squeezing hard.
“I found my way out before,” I assured her. “We just need to keep moving. When we find a good spot, I can levitate onto a roof to check where we are.”
She nodded. Keeping a tight hold of her hand, I ventured cautiously through the desert greenery, using clairsentience to check for nearby pings and telekinesis to shake the plant life before walking through it. I managed to dislodge many a firefly but, thankfully, no more scorpions.
We trekked across the courtyard, down another corridor, into a new room full of sand and mist, then through a gallery with the crumbled ruins of ancient architecture. There was no mud brick in sight, only time-worn stone and ever-thickening mist.
On the other end of the gallery, we found ourselves at the edge of the courtyard with scattered arches—the same one we’d just escaped.
“What the hell?” I swallowed down a surge of dread. We definitely hadn’t made a circle, but apparently the cardinal directions were just a suggestion in the fae demesne. Zak’s warning about getting lost replayed in the back of my mind.
You came back.
I jolted as the words filtered into my mind like a delicate, carillon chorus.
Lienna gripped my arm. “What’s wrong?”
“Voices. Same ones I heard this morning.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
We hoped you would return, the voices chimed in my head. Come here, friend.
Come where, exactly?
This way, the voices sang, and I pivoted toward one of the arches that stood amid the eddies of mist. Last time, I’d been pretty damn certain that following a disembodied voice’s instructions was a deeply unwise decision, but now it was the only semblance of direction I had.
“Come on,” I said, guiding Lienna toward the arch.
Yes, the voices said. Come to us.
With caution in every footfall, I approached. There was nothing in or around the arch but a leafy fern with weird, silver undersides to its leaves. I gave it a firm telekinetic shake, but nothing—not even a single firefly—burst from its fronds.
“Kit?” Lienna whispered.
Almost there, the voices beckoned.
I stepped through the arch, pulling Lienna with me. The mist roiled around us like a bone-chilling hug, and when it settled, the courtyard was gone. We stood in a much smaller space, with a sand-dusted floor and walls of variegated stone.
I looked over my shoulder. The freestanding arch we’d walked through was now a vaulted doorway leading into dark stone ruins.
You’re here, the voices sang.
Lienna shuddered. “I—I just heard fae talking.”
“Why don’t you come out where we can see you?” I called out to the unnatural fog.
A wordless ringing clamor swelled from the voices, followed by a scurrying of feet on the ground.
Lienna pulled out her Rubik’s cube.
From the mist came half a dozen silhouettes, evenly spaced in the room around us.
All of them were impish, toddler-sized creatures that looked as though they were constructed out of sand and scales.
Their unblinking eyes were gray, featureless marbles, and goatlike horns protruded from their hairless skulls.
One is a human. They continued to speak in perfect unison, but their mouths didn’t move, which upped the freaky factor by several points. But what are you?
“If I answer your question, you have to answer mine,” I told them, my head on a swivel, trying not to allow any of them to get behind me.
We do not agree. The voices came together in an incorporeal approximation of a giggle. We’ll have a taste instead.
One of the desert sprites launched itself toward me with the ferocity of a rabid chihuahua.
I stopped it in its tracks with a telekinetic grab, squeezing the top of its horned head.
Its stubby legs kicked helplessly in my psychic grip.
I tossed it backward and seized a second one before it could tackle me at the ankles.
On my other side, Lienna planted a solid kick in the face of a third one as it swiped at her legs.
Maybe an old-school Kit Morris play would be the best approach here.
Excluding Lienna’s mind, I created a widespread warp in which my body grew to twice its normal size.
As I stretched upward, I visualized a tornado of swirling sand carried on a violent wind.
A howling gust swept around me and Lienna, shoving the smallfae backward.
To really sell it, I stomped my gigantic foot and imagined the ground quivering from the impact.
The earth quaked, making the sand covering the stone floor dance.
The smallfae yelped in unison and cowered behind whatever shelter they could find. Have mercy, have mercy!
“I’ll spare you only if you answer my question,” Jumbo Kit roared. “Tell me, where is the fae who rules this place?”
Their slate-like eyes widened, and if they’d looked scared before, now they looked petrified. Instead of answering, they turned tail and dashed into the vaulted doorway we’d come through. I dropped my warp.
“What happened?” Lienna asked, having been spared the hallucinatory half of my power demonstration.
I opened my mouth to tell her, but the first syllable died on my tongue as the surrounding shadows all shuddered. The mist became so thick I could feel its cool, cloying presence in my lungs—and that fizzy, static energy intensified into a roar of white noise.
I spun in a circle, trying to pinpoint a direction. “Do you feel that?”
“Feel what?”
I didn’t know. I was unable to verbalize what I was sensing, only that it was making the earth shiver and my brain vibrate—that it felt like raw, unbridled power.
And it was getting closer.
I slipped my backpack off and handed it to Lienna. “Wait for me here.”
“What?” she snapped. “Kit—”
“Please, Lienna. I’ll have a better chance at talking to the fae one-on-one. Trust me, okay?”
Fury and fear warred in her expression, but she gave a jerky nod.
Turning away from her, I pocketed my phone, hid myself with an invisi-warp, and crossed to the doorway opposite the arch we’d arrived through. Tentacles of murky fog spilled out of the short, dark hall and clung to my skin as I strode through it to the other side.
Soft moonlight awaited me. High walls with silver variegation in the stone surrounded yet another courtyard, this one barren of life. Shapes jutted from the sand like bones from a disturbed grave, reduced to vague silhouettes in the vaporous air.
Clicking sounds pricked my ears, coming from all directions. Movement near my feet caught my eye. A brightly patterned scorpion, even larger than the first one, scuttled mere inches from my left shoe. It clacked its pincers, then burrowed into the sand, vanishing beneath the surface.
The clicking petered out. An unnatural silence fell, and all the while, the pressure making my bones shudder kept rising.
As though drawn there by some baser instinct my conscious mind couldn’t recognize, my gaze lifted to the top of the courtyard wall across from me. Hovering in the mist was a seething orange glow in the middle of a shadowy form—the profile of a monstrous, four-legged beast.
The creature leaped off the roof and landed in the courtyard, a plume of sand and haze billowing around it.
It was a hyena—if hyenas could grow to the approximate size and weight of a Sherman tank.
Its wide-set jaw hung open, revealing a mouth that burned white-hot inside, like its throat was a pyroduct into hell’s own furnace.
Coarse, spotted fur formed a ridge down its neck and muscular shoulders.
Even with its head hunched forward, I could look directly into its pitch-black eyes as they skimmed the courtyard in search of my invisible form.
The beast lifted its head—and the staticky white noise permeating my senses amplified.
A cacophonous laugh spewed from its scalding throat, sucker-punching my eardrums. A vicious dizzy spell seized my equilibrium, and my hold on the invisi-warp shattered.
The dissonance died, my stability returned, and I found the enormous hyena staring directly at me.