Chapter 21
The wayhouse had an outhouse and a river nearby as well as some essentials like the blankets.
I cleaned up in the river as best as I could, then pulled my clothes back on.
Vergis had hung them over a branch to dry in the sun alongside his own.
The brooch Nokim had given me was still there, but the scarf was filthy with orange spider brains.
Its blood was blue, like monster blood usually was.
My boots hadn’t quite dried. The soles were still soggy, and I hoped the cat socks would be enough to keep me from getting blisters.
I kept casting wide-eyed stares at everything around me. The trees weren’t as alien as the ones in the other place—much more recognizable as trees, although smaller. Only a few reached up high toward the sky above.
What perfumed the air around here was an ocean of flowers that grew close to the ground, five-petaled and creamy white but fading to blue closer to the center.
I bent low to sniff one, my hair still wet from washing in the river.
I’d never had to wash in a river before, and I hoped I wouldn’t ever have to do it again.
“You can chew them. Makes you high.” Vergis had walked up to me silently, and his sudden presence right in front of me made me fall backward onto my ass.
“Ouch! I’m not here to get high!”
He shrugged. “Suit yourself.” He bent down and picked one of the pretty flowers, put it in his mouth, and started chewing.
“For real?”
He shrugged. “No coffee. I get cranky if I don’t get my caffeine hit. I put the wayhouse back in order. If you’re finally done splashing around in the river, we should go.”
“Oh, just the lack of caffeine that makes you cranky, huh?” I scrambled back to my feet. I wasn’t at all looking forward to doing any kind of walking, but I wanted to make sure Inkiri was okay. “We can go.”
Vergis grunted, turned around, and started walking. I grabbed my jacket off the branch nearby, pushed the soiled scarf into its pocket, and hurried along.
As it turned out, this forest wasn’t completely wild. From the wayhouse, we followed a path that was at least somewhat maintained, and that in turn led to a road that was even paved.
“What’s this place like?” I teased one of the neatly fitted stones that made up the road that cut through the forest with the tip of my boot. “I mean, is the civilization here like the Middle Ages?”
I left the stone alone since it didn’t look like it was going to budge and caught up to Vergis so we were walking side by side. He turned to me, and I saw his massive horns shimmer in the sunlight. For once, he didn’t look as if my very presence was offensive to him.
“Some steam and water power. Magic doing stuff here and there still.” He smirked. “By the way, you have a blood worm stuck to your throat, human.”
My hand flew up to the side of my neck and landed on something soft and squishy. I screamed.
“What the heck! Get it off me!”
Vergis laughed and crossed his arms to watch me.
I pulled on the thing, and that was when I felt it. It was sticking to the side of my neck, pulling the skin with it. That fucking hurt.
“Get it off! Please?” I looked up at Vergis.
He was still chuckling when he grabbed my hand and pulled out his knife with his other.
“No! Oh, no no no. You’re not cutting into me with that thing!” I tried pulling back, but he had fierce grip strength.
“Hmm. I hadn’t thought about that. Might work. Stop being such a wuss and wish for nice weather.”
My heart hammered in my chest. Vergis had told me to wash in the fucking river without warning me about bloodworms. I wasn’t sure he hadn’t planned all of this, but that mattered less than getting that thing off me right then. He was a game of roulette in the trust department, at best.
I briefly considered wishing for him to get hemorrhoids, and I’d have done that too if I didn’t think he’d manage to turn that around and make it my problem somehow. Instead, I said, “I wish that we have nice weather for our trip.”
The blade in Vergis’s hand glowed. A second later, I saw black ash scatter in front of my face as the hand Vergis held heated.
When he released me and put the knife back into its sheath, I felt along my neck, but the blood worm was gone. There was just a small wound where it had been. My fingers came away smeared with a few drops of blood.
I rubbed the little stain between my fingers. “Magic takes a sacrifice. A life. You said it couldn’t do that. You said the Koa Esher can’t use magic to hurt our guys.”
“They can’t, at least not like this. It requires preparation, just like those sacrifice jars they use are prepared before use.
You’re a conduit though, and conduits can pull anything into the sacrifice.
Makes it fast. Normally, you have to mark a sacrifice or set up a ko-circle—a magic circle.
But you can pull magical energy through a conduit, like back in the lake.
When you wished for Nokim’s arrows to hit, you pulled the sacrificial force from whatever fish or eels it took to let us pass through the veils. ”
Vergis started walking again. The sun was climbing the horizon still, but it was a nice, warm spring day, nothing like it had been in that other place my magic had apparently taken us to. I followed.
“Oh. Does that mean I murdered fish? Unknowingly? Wait. You need to kill something every time you do magic?”
He shrugged. “Pretty much. At least when you want to do stuff like jumping the veils. I don’t need a sacrifice when I just feel along where other magic is. That’s like another sense, like something only I know is there.”
“Wait.” I stopped in the middle of the road. “What if the cola ash—I mean, the Koa Esher—have a conduit and use our guys? What if they lure them into a magic circle? You just pulled power into your knife thingy, didn’t you? What if they do that with our guys?”
He stopped and looked over his shoulder.
“You need to mark a sacrifice. For vertebrates, it’s generally advised that you make the kill yourself in the proper setting with the proper preparation.
Unless you have a conduit, who can use whatever they have contact with, but conduits are extremely rare. ”
“Let me get this straight. You can do magic with magic circles. And those jars…”
He shrugged and resumed walking. I followed.
“There were ko markings in the lids and at the bottoms. It’s what you use for training and small stuff, but you shouldn’t use it with vertebrates.
Maybe you could get away with it with a mouse or a hamster, but nothing much bigger.
No direct touch that way, but also not as much magic.
It’s convenient for carrying a small sacrifice around with you.
Think of it as a ko-circle you keep in your pocket. ”
I jogged after him, but that had me wheezing in short order. “You said you’d want to keep me.”
“I said I’d want to keep a conduit. I personally don’t have enough ambition to have a use for you. Plus, your mate is a pretty badass fighter. He might take issue.”
I nodded. Vergis went silent, staring into the distance. It looked like he really was jealous. That explained why he’d acted the way he had toward me. Maybe, without the jealousy, he wasn’t so bad.
He picked another of those white flowers and started chewing it.
I had to concentrate on walking and not asking when we’d get there like a little kid.
I thought about magic, what it was and what it wasn’t.
I’d have preferred wands and spells, maybe a cute familiar.
This whole sacrifice business was all pretty dark.
The trees soon grew thinner, and the road ahead wound between two green hills, a clear blue sky with fluffy clouds above. The heavy scent of the little white flowers dissipated as the scenery changed.
After maybe another hour, the roofs of a distant city farther down in the valley came into view, and my heart jumped. If we went there, I’d get to see other bagua. They would see me too though. Maybe they’d want to eat me. Or barb me. I was pretty sure I only wanted one specific bagu to do that.
As it turned out though, the city wasn’t our destination. Vergis led the way off the path, and we stopped in a grassy meadow where large purple insects flew from flower to flower; maybe Aer’s version of bumblebees.
“Okay, we’re going through the veil here. There’s another fusing point about an hour away, but this should get us closer to the Hill of Tara,” Vergis said.
“Fusing point?”
“Yeah. Fusing points can be traversed without magic since they first appeared two years ago. I’ll need you so we can pass from here.
It’ll require magic.” He pulled his knife free and held it out to me, much like he had done before, handle first. “You wish for clear skies and don’t let go of my hand. ”
This time, I didn’t mind doing magic. On the other side of this trip, Inkiri would be waiting for me. I reached for the knife handle, and like before, Vergis kept hold of the blade. He held out his other hand, and I took it.
I looked up at him. “Now?”
“Sure.”
“I wish that the skies are clear when we get home.”
I felt the magic instantly. Heat from the knife and his hand radiated strongly, and everything turned blindingly bright for about three seconds. Vertigo came next, but eased quickly, and when the light returned to normal, I saw that we had moved through time and space and right to the Hill of Tara.
“Well, that worked like a charm.” Vergis released my hand.
I didn’t wait, just turned to look around. We were close to the Mound of the Hostages, and just a short walk behind that was the Stone of Destiny.
“Ink! Inkiri!” I screamed at the top of my lungs. “Inkiri!”
I strained my ears and narrowed my eyes to scan the churchyard at my back and the open fields beyond the Mound, but there was nothing. Our guys were nowhere to be seen.
I’d started walking toward the Mound when the angry creaking of metal that urgently needed some WD-40 from behind me made me stop and turn. Back by the churchyard, I spotted sky blue horns and someone dressed in taupe.
My heart lifted, and my feet seemed to grow weightless.
I broke into a run, zipped past an unimpressed Vergis, and toward Nokim.
Nokim smiled at me and waved. Just before I could wave back, my feet remembered what an ordeal the last day had been, and I stumbled.
For a second, I was weightless in the air, and then I faceplanted spectacularly right there on the Hill of Tara.
Go me.