Chapter 16 The Golden Church
The Golden Church
Caelum stumbled into a rubbish bin someone had left too close to the brick wall, and banged his shin. Cursing under his breath, he managed to get around the rest of it without making too much noise, and immediately looked up and down the dark alleyway, making sure he was alone.
He’d forgotten how early it was still. The short winter days still confused him, making his sense of time feel skewed. It likely wasn’t helped by the fact that he and Leda had gone to bed early, right around when he would normally have eaten dinner.
The thought made him tense briefly, as he thought through the implications.
There could be more people around, given the hour.
Assuming this was even where they were conducting the rituals still.
For all Caelum knew, they’d moved everything somewhere else, or, more depressingly, only moved the rituals while leaving the human captives behind. They might have simply murdered the remaining humans and dumped them in a mass grave somewhere, depending on how worried they were about the Praecuri.
It was extremely likely the remaining leaders in Dark Cathedral would have panicked with Malefic caught, especially once the raids began.
Caelum considered an invisibility spell.
It would make him physically blind.
He could see relatively well with his magic, so the problem wasn’t insurmountable, but he’d have less of his magic free for other purposes, and there were places where his magical vision worked less well.
Usually that didn’t matter so much for him, but he was definitely feeling more paranoid than usual, and not only because his leg was still bothering him.
Weakening himself any further, physically or magically, made him nervous.
In the end, he decided to go with the invisibility spell, anyway. With the cane, he had to be realistic. He wasn’t here to take anyone on directly. If he was in danger of being caught, he needed to leave. If things got too dicey, he’d phase.
If he needed magic for anything other than chimaeras to hide, minor diversions, and other shielding and concealment spells, something had gone horribly wrong already. This wasn’t one of his father’s errands where he came into it knowing he’d be fighting.
This would be reconnaissance only.
He paused near the end of the alleyway and looked out onto the square.
Seeing and sensing no one, he bent down while his body remained in shadow. Finding the hilt of a dagger he’d had specially built into a boot, he yanked it out.
He carefully cut into the side of his palm, where it wouldn’t interfere with his grip.
Once the blood flowed over his fingers, he murmured the invisibility spell in Sanskrit, and slid his hands together so that they lightly touched, right before he twisted the bleeding hand, his right, into an akasha mudra, followed by another flowing twist into a shunya mudra with his left.
He felt his magic filter slowly over his skin, bones, hair, blood, muscle.
To do invisibility right, a chimaera wasn’t enough.
The spell he used actually changed the physical composition of his cells. It saturated every particle of his skin, in particular, with metal-infused light, altering the trajectory of any external beams until his person faded.
There was that moment of panic where everything went dark…
…right before the instant his magic instinctively filled the gap.
The world reemerged around him, only with the colors distorted and dramatically bright.
The walls of the alleyway turned purple, the stones under his feet dark blue, with both surfaces splattered with color that showed him everything from urine, insects, fingerprints, paw prints, bird tracks, rotting plant matter left from garbage that had been thrown there prior to pick-up, and the faint outlines of Magicals where they’d leaned or brushed against the walls.
He knew he could only make out so many distinctive imprints because the alley was relatively untraveled. In the square itself, the glows all blended together, creating splotches of color that brightened or dimmed in areas, but tended to be more uniform.
Moreover, once he was under the stars and gas street lamps, it grew bright as day.
Ripples of magic illuminated the air, flowing past him like water pushed along by invisible currents and wind.
Some of the strands seemed to flow upwards, towards the sky.
But a particular flavor he recognized, a dark, blood-red river of fine threads, flowed just above the cobblestone street, and all in the same direction.
He wasn’t surprised to see that particular resonance being sucked steadily towards the building he’d come here to investigate.
The vibration was so slight, most Magicals wouldn’t be able to see it at all, even if they were looking for it. Most in the Praecuri wouldn’t see it, and they had the best tracking and resonance-tracing skills of any group of Magicals in the world, outside of the Obeah.
Despite his own advantage in magical sight, Caelum was aware of how little that whisper of resonance actually told him, in terms of specifics.
He felt blind here, even apart from the invisibility spell.
He knew next to nothing about this building, nor the magic conducted within.
He hadn’t been lying to Leda and the others: the rituals were one aspect of Dark Cathedral business his father had kept him from entirely.
He’d been forbidden from even witnessing the vast majority of them, much less participating.
Malefic refused to answer any questions about them, and Caelum rarely wanted to ask, mostly because he knew it would only anger his capricious and difficult to predict father, and it wouldn’t do him any good anyway.
If Malefic wanted him to know, he would have told him, and nothing Caelum said would make a difference if he didn’t.
He’d only ever visited this place once that he knew of.
Even then, his father hadn’t let him inside. They’d met by the large fountain, here in the square, and Caelum had given his report to Malefic alone.
Which meant Caelum had no idea if the building was currently in use.
The existence of the magical flows might not mean anything.
Caelum did know a few things about the building, things his father didn’t know he knew.
He knew Malefic hadn’t cast the first dark rituals at this particular site.
Other wizards and sorcerers loyal to “The Great Cause” worked their dark magics inside that church for at least a century before Malefic came to power.
There would be echoes of those rituals still, resonances and pulls and concentrations of certain forces, likely for centuries after the last rituals got cast, particularly given the strength of the magics accumulated over that time.
Caelum knew something else. The rituals took place in the crypts, somewhere below ground, and not on any of the structure’s original plans.
But he’d never been inside.
This definitely wasn’t the place his father had done magic on him.
Caelum grimaced at the memory, and pushed it away.
It was never a good idea to think about Malefic, particularly not in a way that evoked strong emotion. That remained true even now, with his father’s magic restrained in the bowels of the Pyramid.
Caelum learned a long time ago to think about his father as little as possible.
Anything that risked calling Malefic’s attention to him was, without exception, a bad idea. Even before the blackouts, even before he first went away to school, he’d instinctively known to keep his father out of his mind as much as possible.
Even so, Malefic always knew too much about what was going on in Caelum’s head. Keeping his surface thoughts blank wasn’t always enough. The connection Malefic had forced between them gave his father an advantage over his mind and magic that had been nearly impossible to overcome, even as an adult.
Caelum kept his steps light on the wet stone.
While December was the most bearable time of year to be in this part of the world, especially at night, Caelum still felt overdressed.
It had to be at least eleven o’clock in the evening here, but even outside under the stars, he still felt ten degrees warmer than he had inside his rooms at Malcroix, even with the blazing fire he’d left high to keep his witch warm.
But he couldn’t think about her, either.
Not outside of his room, and his protective wards and chimaeras.
Just remembering that last glimpse of her on his bed made his chest hurt.
Thoh’s beak, he needed a month, maybe two or three, to get past where he reacted to every passing thought of her. Particularly now, with certain images burned exceedingly clear in his mind, like watching her mouth take him in while he thrust lightly against her lips and tongue.
Fuck. He was getting hard, just thinking about it.
She’d been a lot more enthusiastic about sucking him off than he’d dared to hope.
And unlike most of the royals he’d brought back to his room, with her, it hadn’t felt like an act.
She’d been so slick and wet afterwards, he’d nearly lost control, and when he wouldn’t give her what she wanted, she fucking whimpered at him.
Gods. Damn. It.
He shoved the memory out of his mind with an effort as he approached the front of the church.
The tall structure shone a darker gold under the streetlights.
He could see brighter lights up in the eaves with his magic that had to be the fox-sized dragons called wyrmloc.
They looked too large to be birds, and their wings stretched too narrow and too long.
Knowing wyrmoloc, they’d likely eaten all the birds that once roosted there.
Statues over the arches that led to the main entrance held out stone hands as Caelum passed underneath. The church was massive, one of the landmarks on the main square, and picturesque for its harmonious mixture of gothic and moorish styles.
It was probably the most distinctive building in all of Tunis.