CHAPTER 37 #2
Why was nothing ever simple in this damn city? Was the threat of Damaes and reading this incantation not challenging enough?
“There she is.” Darotha pointed to the bundle of old rags, thrown carelessly on the temple’s steps.
I walked toward it. Will and Lute came with me. Gort moved to the side, watching the temple. Shana hung back, watching Darotha and the street behind us.
My steps sounded too loud, each fall of my feet like the strike of a blasphemous bell, an insult to the temple’s forgotten god. The darkness within the temple watched me through the gap between its gates, waiting, deciding if it should crush the trespasser or allow me to approach.
My teeth chattered.
Remember why you’re here. You’re trying to keep Kair Toren from burning and Rellas from eating itself. You’re doing it so Ramond doesn’t have to fight a bloody war and Clover, Kaiden, and Matheo survive . . .
My pep talk wasn’t working. I wanted to run away screaming and keep running into the night, all the way home.
I reached the stairway and stepped on the first step.
A cold wind tore from inside the temple and fanned my face, flinging the stench of decay and wood rot at me. Cold sweat broke out at my hairline.
One step. Two. Three.
The bundle of rags was right there.
A flicker of blue light pulsed in front of me. I stopped. Another step and magic would electrocute me.
This was it. Do or die.
I cared way too much about these people to let their lives turn into a nightmare.
I pulled a piece of paper from my pocket and checked it again.
I had written the incantation down from memory.
Every other time I tried to reproduce something from the books, I was able to do it exactly, but the incantation in the books wasn’t in English.
It was in Sareso, spelled phonetically in English letters.
So it was basically two paragraphs of mystical-sounding nonsense.
I had tried my best, but I was only ninety-five percent sure I had recalled it correctly.
Right now five percent seemed like an enormous margin of error.
The paper in my fingers trembled. The longer I stood here, the more danger I invited. I just had to read it and get out.
“Osor dor mi Damaes!”
Magic clamped me. Each syllable was an effort, as if I were hitting a wall made of rubber as hard as I could, and the impact of it reverberated through my body.
Something stirred in the temple, deep in the primordial darkness.
“Re braste ca!”
The rags flew aside. A woman jerked upright, her body rigid, her mouth open, a filthy mass of red hair swirling around her head as if she were underwater. Her eyes rolled back into her head, the stark whites glaring at me, unseeing.
“Sonta mih perss, cro su geni . . .”
A blue glow gripped her, pulling her off the steps up into the air. The knot of power inside the temple slithered toward me. Every word hurt.
“Mimpro bo ullu taprin . . .”
My jaw locked open. I strained, trying to make my mouth move.
An enormous hand, each finger as tall as me, reached out through the gap and grasped the side of the stone door. It was translucent and black glyphs slid over it, like ghostly tattoos. My mind refused to process it.
A second hand stretched out of the darkness, then two more, another pair, another . . . They grasped the doors, sliding over each other.
My jaws still wouldn’t move. My heart hammered against my ribs, my blood pounding through my head and throbbing in my ears. An invisible cord of magic connected me and the woman in the air. I felt her through it, like a fish on the end of a line.
The phantom hands pushed. The stone slabs of the door slid a couple of inches. Something in me knew that if those doors opened all the way, an unimaginable horror would seize all of us and pull us into the darkness. I had to finish it. I had to do it now.
Something crunched in my mouth. The salty taste of blood washed over my tongue, wetting the words as they tore out.
“Galbir os re cuar!”
A column of bright neon blue light burst out of the woman, turning her mouth and eyes a pure, brilliant white.
A ring of light pulsed out of her and smashed into me in an explosion of heat and radiance, as if a star had burst into life in front of me.
Magic sizzled on my skin. The light hit the temple doors and slammed them shut.
The woman collapsed onto the steps, fell on her side, and rolled down to the street.
The night turned completely silent. Nothing moved.
I swallowed a mouthful of blood and ran down the stairs to her. She was on her back, her face to the sky. I dropped to my knees and checked the pulse in her neck. Alive. Oh good. Good, good, good.
“Grab her, and let’s get the fuck out of here,” Gort growled.
Will scooped her off the ground, slung her over his shoulder, and we ran for the carriage.
Washing an unconscious person was surprisingly difficult, especially since Shana and I were on our own.
Clover was in the kitchen, watching the vat containing my dress and the dye boiling slowly on the stove.
Her face looked haunted, and when I asked her if she was fine, she gave me a look that was pure zombie.
Will had brought the unconscious woman into the bathroom for us and departed.
We heated up water, filled the tub, stripped her, and lowered her in.
Shana shoved a rolled-up towel under her head to keep it above water and we started scrubbing.
She wasn’t just dirty. The grime was layered and thick. Her dirt had dirt.
Normally I would’ve waited to bathe someone until they came to, but in her case, there was no telling when that would be.
She could wake up in a minute, in a week, or not at all.
She’d been on that street for months, without any awareness of her own hygiene or injuries.
Her legs and arms had several cuts and scrapes, some of which were clearly infected, and her hair was full of lice.
Getting her clean was a medical necessity and spot cleaning wouldn’t do it. We had to let her soak.
Shana had mixed some sort of botanical powder with oil and rubbed it into the woman’s scalp and mane of red hair, and now we waited for it to work. Shana said it would take about half an hour, and it would kill both lice and their eggs.
I heated more water and carefully added it to the tub. In winter, we’d build a fire directly under it, but considering her condition, gentle and lukewarm was best.
Shana checked the hair and got a fine-toothed wooden comb out.
I picked up a small brush and started carefully washing her left hand, working the dirt from the cracked skin of her knuckles and from under her fingernails.
Between the soaking and the scrubbing, the filth was coming off. Our soap kicked ass.
“Who is she?” Shana asked.
“The best mage of her generation,” I said. It was kind of hard to tell with all the dirt, but she was only twenty-eight, barely three years older than me.
“I thought Archmage Damaes was the best mage of the current generation.”
“So did he.”
Shana made a face.
I’d worked my way up to her elbow. The stink was epic.
“Does Damaes know her?”
“Yes. He’s the reason she’s like this.”
Shana dropped the soap. “Maggie!”
“Yes?”
“Tell me we didn’t just cross the Archmage? Tell me you didn’t drag my kids into it?”
“It will be fine,” I told her.
“Nothing about this is fine. That man is not in his right mind, and he can blast rocks from the sky with a flick of his fingers.”
That fire beam took way more than a flick but now seemed like the wrong time to quibble about the details.
“He cares about her,” I said. “Her mind is too fragmented for her to have realized she needed to panhandle. She is dirty, but she isn’t thin. He sends someone to feed her every day and she isn’t in bad health.”
“Does that mean he’s going to come looking for her? Did we just kidnap someone who belongs to him?”
“The word you’re looking for is rescued.”
“Aspects preserve us!”
“If he decides to get upset about it, I will take the blame and let him kill me.”
“Maggie!”
“I’ll come back to life, and it will be fine. Besides, if she wakes up, she will handle Damaes herself.”
“Is she going to murder all of us when she comes to?”
“I hope not.”
Shana swore. “Just tell me that my children aren’t going to be turned into torches.”
“Again, if anyone is going to be set on fire, it’s me.”
Shana resumed scrubbing.
“I wonder about you.”
“Which part?”
“All the parts!” She sighed. “You need her for something. I understand. But even so, here you are washing a filthy stray you picked up in the Tangle and plucking lice out of her hair knowing that she might murder you when she wakes up.”
“We can’t leave her in this state. Clover is dying my dress, and I wouldn’t expect you to do it for me. This is not a one-woman job.”
“What if she refuses to help you?”
We would be screwed. “Then we did a good deed and saved her.”
Shana pointed her soapy comb at me. “That’s exactly what I mean. Ours isn’t a time for kindness. Too much compassion will get you killed. Sooner or later, you’re going to get yourself into trouble.”
“Shana, look at her. Would you leave her on the street?”
“In an instant.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Believe it.” Shana set the comb aside. “Pour the water for me.”
I scooped some water out of the bucket with a large ladle and gently poured it over the woman’s hair.
“What’s her name?”
“I don’t know the one she was born with. Her mage name is Isadau. It means Flame-bloom.”
Isadau jerked upright like a corpse popping out of a coffin in a cheesy horror flick. Shana shied back. I froze.
Isadau looked at me with eyes that were a deep, golden amber.
“Put down the ladle,” she said.
I dropped the ladle. It clattered as it fell to the floor.
“What date is it?”
It was after midnight. “Redberry 8 of the year 3044.”
“Two years,” she whispered. Her hands clenched the side of the tub, the freshly cleaned knuckles turning white. The water in the tub steamed.
“Easy,” I told her.
Her gaze fastened on me. “Do I know you?”
“No.”
“Do you belong to Damaes?”
“No.”
“Who are you?”
“I’m Maggie.”
She blinked. “Never heard of you.”
“I’m not important.”
“Are you a mage?”
“No.”
“Then how did you break the spell?”
I shook the water off my fingers, reached into the pocket of my dress, pulled out my incantation, and showed the paper to her.
“In the name of Damaes, be whole. Let that which was shattered be healed. That fucking bastard.” Isadau held up the paper. “There are three misspellings in this. It should’ve killed you. How are you alive?”
“I’m Maggie the Undying.”
Isadau stared at me and shook the paper. “Where did you get this?”
“I wrote it down from memory.”
“How?”
“She knows things. That’s what she does,” Shana told her.
“You’ll get used to it. Look, I understand you’ve been through a lot, but it’s past midnight and we have a full day tomorrow, so how about you shut up and let me finish washing the dead lice out of your hair?
You have lovely hair. It’d be a shame if the powder ate through it and turned you bald. ”
Isadau clamped her mouth shut. I got up, picked up a bucket, and emptied it over her head.