The lips of Wisdom are closed, except to the ears of Understanding.
—The Kybalion
I could feel the sun. Its brightness cut through my lids, its warmth pierced my skin. And before I opened my eyes, I could feel the tears build in them. I had failed. For the first time in my life, I had failed—failed at ending it.
Ah dammit. It wasn’t so much that I’d wanted to die as I wanted…to question, to protest, to understand why.
“Don’t open your eyes just yet,” Uncle Cort’s voice cautioned softly from somewhere to my left, “you’ve been out a while—they’ll sting.”
Resigned to living for the moment, I sat up and opened them anyway, only to shut them again against the white glare that greeted me.
My arm…my left forearm burned and throbbed, and I felt the scratch of linen wrapped firmly along its length as I heard my uncle draw the curtains.
“That should be much better,” he said, and I opened my eyes again, carefully this time. I blinked and found his large form seated in a chair by my bed, his dark eyes somber as they rested on me. He handed me a glass of water. “Here. Do you know where you are?”
He waited while I sipped, the glass thick and heavy in my hands, the water sliding like ice needles past my throat.
My uncle’s eyes, set under a broad forehead and a thick shock of deep brown hair that even tied severely back could not be straightened of its natural curl, were eyes I always imagined better suited to a tiger than to a man, and he held them steady on me. My father’s eyes, despite their different color, had held a similar glow, though I knew that in fact he and Uncle Cort were not blood-kin, but somehow foster-related.
Although I had faint remembrance of Cort in my childhood, he’d become a permanent fixture in my life, my legal guardian in fact, since my father, a New York City fireman, had been killed in the line of duty when I was fifteen, orphaning me. My mother had died when I was two.
I nodded in answer as the spasm in my throat eased. “Leeds,” I managed to croak out past the painful weight that had lodged in my neck—we were in Leeds, England, in the house Cort hadn’t seen more than a handful of times since I’d become his responsibility, the house I’d been told my father had summered in as a boy. He’d wanted me to get to know it before we returned to the States.
“Do you know where you were?” he asked, and the air seemed to thicken as he waited for my answer.
I stared at the glass in my hand, at the water that swirled and sloshed, the whirlpool made reality that I’d created. I knew what he asked, knew what he meant.
“Yes,” I said and squared my shoulders as I gazed back at him. I knew, with that deep knowing that comes from the very cells of the body, that I had just taken a step in a new direction; my next words would seal that fate. “The Mid-Astral.”
“What do you remember?”
I remembered…everything. It left me feeling curiously blank. I sipped some more, destroying the pattern I’d formed, then took a deep breath. How appropriate, I mused, erase one thing to form another. There could be no more stalling.
“I…I made a promise,” I said, shocked to hear the airy tone that came from my mouth.
Something flared in his eyes, a lightning strike of power or tears. When he spoke, his voice was gruff, choked, but strong.
“You’re ready.”
*
“There are tests, dear heart,” Cort explained, “tests for every level, and each with its subsets. Fail in any one and there you must stay—but you cannot be allowed to stay in any level that leaves you—or the Circle of Light Bearers—exposed and unprotected. And so you must resolve to pass all of them. Do you understand this?”
She nodded. She was, as he’d said earlier, ready. It was ironic, she reflected, that in attempting to end her life she’d found a new one, a new path, a new way, even a new name. Ann. That’s what she’d decided. It retained the heart of ‘Samantha,’ but since those whom she’d wanted to hear call her name were no longer alive, it hurt her to hear it spoken by others.
But this…this new path…it felt like her whole life prior to this, including her walk to the Bridge, had led her here. All things considered, perhaps it had.
“Good,” Cort continued, unaware of her thoughts as he continued to monitor her with another part of his mind. She would learn how to do that too. “First, there is the Light. Do you remember?”
It was automatic, the correlation in her mind of the Light to Nina, the friend she’d allowed herself to feel so much more for. Light…it had shone out from Nina’s eyes in steady blue and silver waves, had eddied from her body and back to Samantha’s with every glancing touch, it had enveloped her when they embraced. She had even tasted it in one, perfect, kiss.
Did she remember? How could she forget? She shivered involuntarily in her seat. To think in that direction meant pain, because remembering that loss, the tearing, wrenching knowledge that Nina had returned to the Light that sourced life, had moved beyond this world…it was enough to make her want to follow—and she’d already tried once. She’d honor her promise and not try again. She forcibly shut the memories away. It was not what Cort meant, anyway.
“Yes. Yes, I do,” she answered instead. She once more closed her eyes and took another deep, perfectly controlled breath. She focused on the mental image of the perfect white light, a sphere that hung in space, until she could see it without focused concentration. She let the light mass drift, envelop her; then she absorbed it, letting it crawl up from toes to crown until she herself was not only contained in the nimbus, but also made of it. It tingled, a warm and sharp prickle under her skin.
“Are you ready?” Cort’s voice sounded gentle, and to her physical ears, slightly faint.
“Um…how will I know?” she asked, uncertain in this new—and yet familiar—space.
Cort chuckled softly. “Because you’ll look like a soft white lightbulb.”
She felt herself smile even as she drifted further from the physical. “Guess I’m ready, then.”
“Good.”
Suddenly her awareness, her environment, changed. She stood on the same high plains she’d stood before, Cort beside her. He seemed…different…somehow, his hair longer, even darker, if that were possible, his features sharper.
“You must be able to bridge—walk and balance—between worlds,” he told her as she found herself reflexively performing defensive and attack postures, the katas her father had taught her, with her guardian.
“I don’t understand,” she said as the forms changed, flowed, to push-hand techniques.
“As above, so below, dear heart,” her uncle said gravely as push-hands gave way to sparring. “What happens here will manifest in the flesh, the material world. Beings, what you’ve known before as monsters, demons, and angels, all appear on the Astral in true form, the soul represented and revealed, but they seem as ordinary people on the Material, the Mundane. Events on the Astral, on any of the many Plains, are followed by events in your daily, physical life. This,” he warned her as he swept her leg and she stumbled to avoid it, “is one of the many reasons you must learn to see every level, even when you’re fully on the Material—this is one small part of how you’ll be tested.”
She nodded from the ground. So far, she understood. The Aethyr was the energy, the soul or spirit level as some called it, of the Material, the place most minds drifted to in dreams, where haunts “lived.” The Astral…was something altogether different, and yet not, since it too had its ties to the physical. But while there was only one Aethyr, the levels of Astral, the Plains of existence, were infinite.
A message from the Aethyr could be delivered to the Material as a vivid dream, the sudden and unexpected fall of a cup from a counter, the coincidental meeting, the unexplained “lucky accident”; but one from the Astral took such energy to send, it might manifest as a flare of flame in a fire, the sudden flight of a bird, or a feeling, a mere sense, of possibility.
“You cannot be forced to battle, not yet,” he said, holding a hand out to her, “not before you’re ready. Of course,” he grinned as he circled her, “they’ll try to trick you into it, and they’ll try to turn you.” He feinted and she successfully dodged.
“Who do you mean, ‘they’? What do you mean, ‘turn’?” She almost missed the side kick and blocked just in time.
“The Dark, love. They’ll want you to be one of them—you’ve ability, power, and you’re linked to the Circle, the perfect entrance to destroy it. That…they want more than anything. To devour, to destroy the Light.”
The volley he levied at her was sudden and fast and while she retreated, she held her stance and blocked effectively. “I would never do something like that,” she said, horrified at the thought that anything of that nature existed.
She managed it, finally, the first blow that got past his guard.
“Nice,” he told her, admiration evident in his tone. “Maybe you’ll be ready for your weapon sooner, rather than later.”
*
Dizzy. I felt dizzy and nauseous as I opened my eyes on the floor of the study. Oh…this…sucks! I thought as I tried to roll over. One moment, I’d been on the Astral, the next—
“Here.” Cort handed me a glass of milk and a nut-studded brioche. “Shut the systems down.”
At the first sip, I instantly cleared and after a few ravenous bites, I felt human again.
“Did you say a weapon?” I asked with real curiosity. I’d thought this was all head stuff, ethics and intentions, a new way, almost, of reading the environment.
“Yes,” Cort said slowly, “one that will carry, cut, as it were, through worlds.” He sighed heavily. “For now, its function is mostly ceremonial, but there have been times…well, not before you’re ready, anyway.”
I laughed at that. Less than three weeks ago I had tried to kill myself, had found myself in the strangest, most familiar place I’d ever known, then had woken back to my body to find that the cuts on my wrist had been overlaid with a brand, an ankh melted into my skin. That had been part of the net, the spell Cort had literally cast to keep me alive, because it was the physical proof of my promise and my choice. That ankh now hung from my neck, above the sword pendant I wore.
“Try me,” I said, now fully revived after eating. “Let’s find out.”
*
It had been almost a week since our discussion about a sword, and had my plans not changed within the first few days of our arrival, I would have already been back home, back in the States, packing for freshman orientation at Princeton University.
Instead, in addition to the new world my uncle carefully and meticulously guided me through, there was the one we actually lived in: Whitkirk, a suburb of Leeds. Everything was strange, from the brick house that seemed older than the country I’d come from, to the way the town was laid out—groups of houses clustered together, their backs facing rolling greens, highways that suddenly became winding roads that ended in small squares, the pub that seemed to be an old factory in the middle of nowhere, then the sudden heavy bustle of Leeds proper as soon as you crossed into it…
I explored the house itself. The entire first floor was split into three parts: the front half was divided between a sitting room and the kitchen—that took up the front quarter, and while the building was old, the amenities in there were not. I only knew that because Uncle Cort had told me, not because I spent any real time in there. The back half, with a ceiling that rose to the second floor, was filled with carefully placed and arranged items of craft, of large sheets of metal pressed together between huge vises, delicately curved gold wires held with the tiniest of clamps, workbenches with weapons and armor covered in flaking dirt and rust, with brushes, oils, and whatever other mysterious tools would be used to examine and reclaim them.
The walls themselves were mostly exposed stone painted over in the palest apple green with furring strips fitted and wedged to their height to support the sturdy wooden shelves built onto them. These too were filled with more artifacts and weapons in various states of construction or recovery.
My uncle’s work had obviously backlogged while he was in the States, taking care of me.
There was a small, perhaps six foot by six foot black iron oven that sat in the back corner, mounded over the top and sides with brick. I never saw it fired up, but Uncle Cort said he had a bigger one in his shop in town and preferred to use that.
When I wasn’t watching him and the focused attention he spent on each ancient piece he rescued and carefully restored, I mostly spent time in the study, which took up the entire second floor—books lined every wall except for the one that held the fireplace, and I had a favorite spot, almost a corner really, where the sun would pop in and spend the day over my head. Occasionally, I’d walk up the stairs from the third floor, where all the bedrooms—including mine—were, to exit onto the flat roof and smoke the occasional cigarette while gazing around, either over the town or just up into the sky, watching the clouds or the stars.
Mostly, though, I played my guitar—or, rather, guitars, one acoustic the other electric, but this was an exercise largely in skill maintenance rather than joy; it reminded me of things and people I didn’t want to think about—or read any of what seemed like a thousand texts on history, lore, religion. I had On A History of Symbols in my hands when Uncle Cort found me in the study.
“You know…there’s a bit of work I’ve got at the shop in town that I need to get to so I thought, well, I’d like you to work with a tutor during the day while I’m out,” he said, wasting no time when he walked into the room.
I stared at him in surprise as he set down the small box he’d carried under his arm. “Is this the very nice, polite, British way of telling me I need a babysitter?” I asked and gestured with my arm, revealing the healing lines and brand.
“If I thought you needed that, you’d have a nurse and wouldn’t need a scholar, now would you?” he asked dryly.
“I suppose,” I agreed reluctantly.
He took a slow and heavy breath. “Annie, can you tell me exactly what went through your head that day?” He studied me carefully as he waited for my answer.
I tried to remember well enough to answer honestly,
“After the…after the phone call,” I began, then hesitated. I was unprepared for the rush of pure hurt that raced through me as the preceding events played through my mind.
“After that,” he prompted softly, “what happened?”
Anger, disbelief, sorrow, rage had all flowed through me before they turned into something…cold…a disconnect…a chill with a voice that made me want to argue with God, Fate, whatever it was that had ordered my life in this way.
I didn’t know, couldn’t really say, what had led me to go from cutting myself to digging deeper, only that it had made sense, in that same, frozen, logical way, to do so. It had become an imperative that I obeyed. The hurt was…hot, but the anger…was cold. I tried to explain all of that to him as best I could.
“Thank you for sharing that with me,” he said and laid a warm hand on my shoulder.
When I blinked up at him through the tears I hadn’t realized had formed, it was to see an echo of them in his eyes as he crouched before me.
“I don’t want you to think I don’t trust you—I do, I trust you, trust your word. I’d rather you thought of it as a birthday present—a bit late, but a present nonetheless.” He gave me a smile.
I rubbed my eyes quickly. “What, no fast-moving convertible?” I asked, trying to joke. Other than the roof or the occasional walk around town with Uncle Cort, who shared the history of the area with me, I barely went outside. I wasn’t really interested in wandering about, and I had to keep remembering stupid things, like looking right before left to cross the street. Driving seemed a bit out of reach for the moment, which was too bad, because that was my favorite way to explore as well as to relax.
Besides, my car, a ’74 Nova, nestled shiny and safe in a garage three thousand miles away.
“Uh, no. Sorry.” He chuckled. “Would you like roller skates?”
“I’m being demoted?”
“Nah,” he laughed with me, “but they’re great for balance, and speaking of…” He reached into the box he’d set next to him. “This will help.”
He handed me four black-canvas-covered rectangles, each about two and a half inches wide and six in length. A cotton band sewn firmly along their central lengths extended another few inches beyond the edge on one end, with two d-rings on the other. They weren’t heavy per se, but they had a discernable heft.
“Sand?” I asked as I curiously shook one.
“Yes,” he answered as he took it from me, “and you wear it like this.” He wrapped it about my wrist, then showed me how to tie the band through the d-ring.
“What’s it for?”
“Strength. Endurance. Speed,” he said simply. “You’ll need to build all of those before we move on to the next phase.”
“And this will help how?” I asked, as I moved my arm about. The weight was barely noticeable.
“You’ll wear them, wrists and ankles, starting tomorrow. Take them off to play guitar and to bathe,” he said with a grin. “You don’t have to sleep with them.”
I shook my head as I carefully removed the weight from my wrist. “I can’t see where such a small weight will do anything.” I couldn’t. I was used to swimming pools and weight rooms, not little things like this that felt like nothing in comparison.
“You will,” he assured me with another wide smile, “you definitely will.”
*
“I’ve someone I’d like you to meet,” Cort said later that afternoon when he reentered the study, and he’d brought someone with him. This, I supposed, was the tutor he’d mentioned, my “birthday present.”
I marked my page and carefully put the book down to stand as they walked in.
“This is Elizabeth. Elizabeth MacRae. Elizabeth? This…is our Annie. I’ll leave you to it, then?” he said and excused himself with a small bow. He closed the study doors as he left.
I stared at the woman before me who stood about five foot three inches, straight steel gray hair pulled back from her face, but loose across her shoulders. Her face seemed familiar as we shook hands, an echo of a memory I couldn’t quite place as her palm met mine, and her eyes, a kindly soft amber, seemed to glow with the sincerest of intentions.
“You do know, of course, that Cray is a form of MacRae, don’t you?” she said, pronouncing the two vowels of her name discretely and distinctly, as if to illustrate the connection between them. “And that makes us, in fact, distantly related.”
I shook my head. “I’m sorry, no. I didn’t.”
“You know nothing about the MacRae?”
“No.” I eyed her regretfully.
“Oh, I can see we’ve got a lot to cover,” she said and smiled again. “Let’s begin with the Clan crest, shall we?”
*
There was much more to Elizabeth than was obvious to the first-meeting eye, and there was even more to get used to. The first was that she lived with us.
“I live with Cort when I’m in England,” she told me with a smile as I helped my uncle bring her things in from the car, “but when I’m running away,” and they shared a grin over my head at that, “I’m fond of Aberdeen.”
“Where’s that?” I asked. I really didn’t know.
And that was apparently the perfect question with which to open my lessons. The next two weeks found my days filled by Elizabeth teaching me things that ranged wildly—and we did indeed start with the Clan crest and motto: Fortitude.
I needed fortitude because both Elizabeth’s daily lectures and the now nightly work with Cort focused on the arcane and esoteric, levels of meaning precisely and finely layered. And Cort had been right: the weights, as slight as they may have seemed, did add to the exertion of the physical exercise, but once I got used to wearing them, my body felt light, almost airy, when I removed them.
Still, I had so much work to do that my guitars received little more than friendly tunings and some quick scale exercises. The good thing about this was that it left me little room for emotional transports of any kind—and for the time being, I preferred it that way.
I didn’t really know why I had to learn all of these disparate-seeming subjects, but I went along with it—it was all fascinating and it kept my mind busy.
But there were things I was a bit curious about. The more I worked with Cort, the more…sensitive…I seemed to become to the environment, to people, or at least, to Cort and Elizabeth. There were times it seemed like I could almost physically see a nimbus, the energy field that both of them assured me was a very real thing. It surrounded each of them and there were times it seemed as if faint threads of that nimbus connected them to one another. That was one part of it. The other was…
“How long have you known my uncle?” I asked Elizabeth one afternoon that had been reserved for free study, time where I picked a specific topic I either liked or wanted to work harder on.
She glanced up at me from her papers. “We’ve been friends since before you were born. Sometimes, it seems almost before we were born, well, before I was, anyway,” she corrected herself. “He’s a bit older than I am.” She gave me a smile and returned her attention to the work before her.
I gathered the books and papers I’d scattered on the rug and came to sit next to the desk. Uncle Cort could be funny, and he could be caring and warm, but other than the fact that I was legally his ward until I was twenty-one, as the court-stamped papers signed by my parents said, and my own sketchy childhood memories, I knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about Cort Peal besides his name, his work, and his seemingly complete knowledge of the Astral. I knew as much of his personality as he let me see, but none of his history, other than he’d known my family forever, it seemed, and was a British national.
He and Elizabeth had been friends for more than two decades…what would it be like to say something like that? To know someone that long? How well did someone get to know a person after ten years, fifteen, twenty? There was one person I could say had been a really good friend since I was about ten, but I was barely nineteen, and of the friends I’d thought would be lifelong…Nina had been seventeen, wouldn’t get to see—
“Have you called your friends back in the States since you’ve been here? Your classmates?” she asked and waited patiently for an answer.
“No.” It came out sharper than I’d intended it, partially due to the surprise that she followed my thoughts so clearly—I wasn’t used to that yet—and I glanced up at her quickly to see if there was more to what she asked. I sensed a friend and could feel there was intent behind her words, nothing malicious or unkind, but a purpose to her question, deeper than idle curiosity or small talk. “There’s no need,” I added, tempering my tone. “There’s only one person I’d speak with and I’m sure she’s…” Triggered automatically by thought, by memory, my heart tightened within me and I couldn’t help it, couldn’t help but reach out with my mind for—
“Annie, stop,” Elizabeth said quietly and laid her hand over mine. “You mustn’t reach for her, for any of them, like that.”
I shook my head to in an attempt to clear it and the tears that had started to form. “It’s just that I can’t, I can’t—” I grasped the sword charm that hung from my neck. I took a deep breath, then another while Elizabeth kindly busied herself with the papers and books on the desk, pretending not to see when I reached for a tissue and dabbed at eyes that insisted on filling anyway. “I can’t find her anywhere, not the slightest trace. But when I touch this,” and I showed her the pendant, “when it’s on my skin, it’s as if she were next to me. Nina.”
Elizabeth gave me a sharp look. “Did she give that to you?”
I nodded, unable to speak as she leaned over to examine the metal between my fingers. She even held her fingers above it, hovering not more than half an inch away. Her brow creased with her focus. “What a beautiful innocence,” she murmured as she straightened. “You shouldn’t take that off, you know,” she said matter-of-factly and put on her glasses. She began to once more organize the books on the desk.
My hand clenched tighter around the miniature claymore and I could feel the crosspiece of the hilt dig into my fingers.
“I don’t intend to,” I told her as I tucked it under my shirt so it could warm in its customary spot against my skin.
“Good.” Her voice was brisk. She peered at me over her half-lenses. “It was a gift given in and with love,” she said gently. “You feel her, because her presence, her intent, is in it. The energy she put into finding and choosing it, the feelings and thoughts she had as she handled it interacts with the molecular structure that forms the metal’s lattice and—” She stopped as she narrowed her focus and examined me.
I felt like I was about to snap in two because as Elizabeth said the words, I could see it so clearly in my head, could see Nina as if through her own eyes, wandering around with her younger brother during her search, feel the pleased wonder when she finally found it and held it between her fingers, knowing she’d give it to me, considering it the perfect gift. I felt the tremor that had run through her hand when she’d carefully placed it in the box she’d finally wrapped it in, the happy-nervous anticipation when she gave it to me, and that brought a very real memory with it, the memory of the brush of my lips on hers as we stood in the sand by the bay…the kiss in my car after—
“Go,” Elizabeth said, her voice still kind as I sat there and struggled against the grief that threatened to overflow. “Enough lecture for one day. I do expect to see you for dinner.”
I nodded my thanks as I exited the room, then used all the discipline I had to force myself to move properly dry-eyed through the hall and up the stairs, down the corridor and into my room. Once the door was closed, I sat on my bed. I couldn’t look at the guitar that stood forlornly in its rack—it made me think of afternoon jam sessions—and I felt like my knees would bend, my back break, my head implode under the black wave of empty that roared above it, threatening to crush me beneath it.
I paced for a few moments, an agitated circuit around the wood floor before I walked magnetically, inevitably, over to the nightstand and opened the drawer.
They were in there, the little box of blades, sharp, fresh, deadly if used the right way and I curled my fingers around them.
“I trust you,” Cort had said, “and even if I didn’t, this is not my decision—it’s yours,” he’d said when we’d finally discussed more about the what and how and why of my first remembered journey to the Mid-Astral.
“I suspect,” he said somberly, “that while your feelings were your own, you may have been…pushed.”
“What do you mean?” I’d asked. That didn’t sound right to me—there had been such a frozen edge to the fire that had blazed through me, a cold fury that acted with what felt like total logic, the words in my head, the dare to the Universe to stop me, to answer me. I hadn’t expected It would, and especially not in the way It had.
“Hounds,” Cort answered simply. “They knew who you were before you did.”
I may not have completely understood at the time, but it wasn’t hounds that chased me when the wave crashed down, was a swirling force that knocked me off balance, crushed my chest, raced higher with its promise to drown me beneath it.
I don’t want to die, I promised whatever might listen as the first cut halted the upward rise, I have to live, I told myself as the slice stilled the whirlpool, reddened unmarked skin, and I felt the flood waters recede. I just…wanted…the hurt…to stop. And once the outside bled the way the inside tore, for a single moment? It did.
*
We were well into August, and while I still rarely left the three-story brick building we lived in, I now hardly saw Uncle Cort at all, except for our evening sessions. “Shop’s got me hopping,” he’d say, “and we’ll get even busier when we get back to London. I’ve a lot to catch up on and this is my window of time to ‘create.’”
He’d then unroll the document tube he carried and show me his designs, sketches made for custom orders. In addition to dealing with verifiably ancient weapons and artifacts, Uncle Cort was an artisan and made custom blades himself, with the metal fired in such a way that it took on multicolored hues, swords with the metal folded so finely that rivers seemed to flow down the edge. Replicas. Originals. Works of art and fancy, works of deadly utility. “I’ve a very special client who needs something…unique,” he added one night, and the smile he gave when he said it matched the great-cat flame of his eyes and made me wonder what exact sort of clients he had. I asked.
“You’ll know soon enough, dear heart, and truly, it’s not nearly as interesting as an old man makes it sound.”
He always said that, but I couldn’t really understand why—my father, a rangy fireman who’d lost his life on the job, had been only forty years old when…well, I’d lost him. Cort appeared no older than he had, yet he always spoke as if he’d been around since dirt had been invented. Elizabeth did say he was a bit older than he seemed.
But then he’d ask about my lessons and I knew, whenever he did that, that whatever he hadn’t told me yet would probably be interesting at least and more than likely hair-curling and perhaps even slightly terrifying.
“Shall we?” he asked as he got up from the table, and excusing myself to Elizabeth, I exited with him.
“How are your studies?” he asked as we rounded the landing.
I thought about that as I followed him up the stairs. “I’m learning a fair bit, I think. Lizzie”—Cort shot me a grin over his shoulder, because we both knew neither one of us would ever call her that to her face directly—“is giving my Latin a daily workout. She pronounced my French atrocious and said my Spanish is barely tolerable.”
Cort chuckled as he opened the sliding pocket doors. “You must sound like a native, then. I understand why you’re studying French, given that you’ve decided to become a European.” He smiled at me. “Any particular reason for the Spanish?” he asked, his tiger eyes glinting at me as we moved the furniture to clear a center area.
I shrugged with a casualness I tried to feel. “Studied it in high school.” He knew that. He also knew that it was the language—
“Your friend, right?”
I shrugged again.
“It’s a nice way to remember her,” he said mildly as together we moved the settee. “You may want to take a moment to perhaps remember a few others, as well.” I could feel his appraising glance as we set the legs down carefully. “How is everything else coming along?”
“Everything else” covered quite a lot of territory. Elizabeth quizzed me endlessly on each item we read and discussed, from literature to history, including Clan history. Since we were in Leeds, we were far from Scotland, though close enough, in Elizabeth’s eyes, to oblige me to learn all about it, from the Jacobite Rebellion (including the death of Duncan MacRae, whose claymore was exhibited for years in the Tower of London as “The Great Highlander’s sword”) to the dispersion of the MacRaes through the United States. This was accompanied by the promise to visit Eilean Donan Castle—bought and rebuilt by yet another MacRae after it had been in ruins for two hundred years.
Elizabeth herself held two doctorates, one in philosophy and the other in physics, and since I’d already covered more than the mere basics of science and math in high school from taking college-credit classes my senior year, she fed me quantum theory and asked me to hypothesize about ethical evolution as well as to define moral laziness versus cowardice. She also taught me how to recognize different species of what seemed to be entire forests of trees and plants, as well as how to properly care for a sword—not that Uncle Cort hadn’t already beaten her to that particular skill.
There were also lessons in manners, always manners, and not the sort that were the simple “please” and “thank you” that everyone was supposed to use, but instead a careful study, an awareness of language and tone, of posture and the messages subconsciously sent that I could in turn consciously decode, things such as observing how a person sat, whether or not they bit their nails and how far down if they did, a sign of passive-aggressiveness, anger not fully resolved, the stark fear that hid behind the most aggressive posturing, the directional shift of eyes that revealed a truth…or a lie.
With Uncle Cort, though, I learned something else entirely.
I shrugged in answer again as I moved into the cleared circle. “I’m not certain. I’ve not really done anything yet.”
“No, not today,” he said, shaking his head as I took my accustomed stance and place.
I schooled my face to impassivity and reined in my curiosity.
He walked around me once, inspecting me with a critical eye, checking to see if my stance, my body language, or even the energy field that surrounded my body betrayed any of what I felt or thought. I was almost certain it didn’t.
“Nicely done.” He smiled, then put a fist on his hip and considered me, deep dark tiger eyes probing mine. “Do you trust me?” he asked finally.
“Yes.”
He nodded, satisfied. “Good. Annie, I want you to kneel, straight up, and hold your arms straight out. Close your eyes when you do.”
I did as he asked. “Palms up,” he directed, and I did that as well. I automatically reached for the Aethyr, the level of essence that was pure energy, and in less than half a second, I was already made of the Light, within and without.
The flat weight in my hands was cool, solid under leather, two and a half, perhaps three inches wide as it covered my palms. It felt very, very familiar.
“This is yours,” Cort’s voice was low and solemn. “It will carry and cut between worlds. Use it only in the coolness of your mind, never in rage. There is a difference between rage and righteous anger—and that difference will burn you.”
I swallowed and nodded. It wasn’t heavy, yet, but I could feel the beginning, the very start of the pull in my shoulders.
“Your lesson today, and for the days that remain until your initiation, will start and end here. Hold that position as you move between levels. Get used to the weight, Wielder, it’s yours by right, by blood, by the promise made before you were born and the one you’ll make again in short time. This has a history older than you know, but more importantly, it was once your grandmother’s,” and his voice thickened, grew hoarse, “before it was Logan’s—your father’s.”
*
During their initial sessions on the Astral, she had been encouraged, after becoming familiar with certain landmarks, to explore, either with Cort or on her own, the valleys and plains, to meet the beings that inhabited them. Some she recognized, recognitions that came from dreams she’d had since she was a child, others from a life different than the Material one she led. Some were people she had yet to meet, and more than a few were beings who hadn’t been incarnate in ages as humans measured time and wouldn’t be for ages more to come.
There was a flexibility there that simply did not, could not, exist in the Material world. The fixed form was traded for function—wings that beat with power and strained the muscles of a very physically felt chest, arms that became legs and hands, paws beneath which the ground sped by with satisfying solid thumps, making her eyes sting.
While there were occasions when the actual physical body would be represented, the rigid structures of the flesh could be changed—male, female, human, non, at will. She enjoyed that, the freedom of it, because her body was whatever she wanted it to be, whenever she wanted it, and most of the time all she was aware of was its strength, its capabilities and potential.
Today, tonight, whatever time it was in the eternal twilight, she walked through a grassy field beside Cort. When they had first started working together, if she could have described herself, she would have said that she was slender but strong, not quite finely featured but discernable as female because of the curves that rose on her chest, the hair that flowed halfway down her back, not much different at all than her physical self.
Now, though, as her abilities had progressed, she had lost some of that definition, color; she walked in a body composed of light that became more and more featureless as she grew in her command of craft, in her comfort level outside of the Material.
“Every bit of matter has a frequency, a vibration,” Cort told her as they approached a place she’d not seen before. “Flesh, blood, rock, water…they all have energy.”
She nodded. She had learned some of this already.
“The higher the vibration, the less muted by interference, static if you will, the purer the energy,” he continued as they crossed a ridge. “That higher level of vibration will allow you to cross to other levels of the Astral.” He stopped and gazed before him and she followed suit.
They had come to a valley of mixed woods and plains, where even the wind in the twilight carried the scent of near spring.
“Except for Star Bridge?” she asked, remembering her first visit.
He put a hand on her shoulder. “When you are free, completely free of the Material, of the lower vibrations emanating from the flesh, then and only then can you cross that bridge.”
Affection flowed from him to her, an affection she returned as she stared down at the valley with him and considered what staying halfway across the span would have meant.
“Are we going there?” she asked, pointing below.
“You are,” he told her, “if you can.”
She took a few steps forward, then stopped when she realized he didn’t walk with her and she looked back at him.
“Go. And if you can enter, remember what you find. I’ll come for you when it’s time.”
She mentally girded herself and strode forward, down through the waist-high grass that tickled under her hands, down until the ground leveled, the first clearing before the stand of trees, and there…she discovered the wolf pack.
They were huge, noble-looking animals, perhaps twenty or so, a range of sizes and musculatures, with fur ranging from the purest white to gold to the inkiest velvet black, and they welcomed her among them in gestures, in sendings, told her she was one of them, a familiar friend, if she chose.
When the cry had risen among them, a joyful cry that called them to chase, the tide rose in her own blood, a heady wilding surge, and, one with her brothers, her sisters, the silken glide of their fur, of skin, of earth and wind and leaves against her, they ran.
“Now,” Cort said next to her and—
“Does it always have to be this uncomfortable?” I asked him, my eyes still closed. My head was filled with a wringing nausea that racked through me, while the dull beginning of what felt like a bruise in my lower back spread through my stomach into the top of my thighs.
He already had crouched beside me, glass of water in hand. “That should ease, eventually,” he said as I set the sword down and took the glass from him. “Do you want to continue or call it a night?” he asked while I sipped.
I circled one shoulder around and then the other to ease any potential stiffness. The nausea had slipped back to a level I could ignore, and as for the pain that dozed fitfully in my lower back, well, I’d hurt myself worse. “Keep going,” I told him and gave him a small grin. I could handle it.
“Good,” he said, “this time, bring it with you,” he told me, nodding at the sword in my hands as once again I raised my arms, closed my eyes, and was
back to the level of Astral she was familiar with, she stood alone in a circle drawn on the grass, and a glow of light was all that stood between her and them. They were shadows, misshapen humans with wolven heads, vultures with human faces, other similarly repulsive beings she didn’t recognize. Membranous wings and skeletal bodies, shapes she’d known previously only in nightmares. They shrieked and cawed at her, called curses and made rending gestures.
The sword was Light in her hand, glowed so brightly she could barely make out its internal structure through the white blaze. Light. White light. That was the energy she worked with, had been taught to seek.
“The energy that comes from the Light is pure, undiluted if you will,” Elizabeth had explained, “and the source of energy matters because when you receive it, use it, it filters through your own body, flowing along nerve and muscle channels—and impurities can block those, build within you and cause actual physical harm.”
In the exercises she ran through with Cort, she’d learned even more. “It is the stuff of pure potential,” he told her as they moved through the same katas and forms they had before, only this time she’d been asked to “carry” the sword through. She had, successfully, and she couldn’t resist the sense of satisfaction that filled her even as she blocked and feinted.
“It is what makes you and me, the Aethyr and the Astral, the Material manifest…all of it, and all of it perfect,” he said as his weapon hissed in an arc over her head and she countered. “It is not to be used improperly. And here,” he signaled to her that they were to stop sparring for the moment, “here is the first place that you will meet those that would do that. Draw the Circle around you,” he said and watched as she did.
It was a simple line she drew in the grass with the tip of the blade, a line that glowed with the Light that made it, defined it.
“No matter what you see, no matter what you hear,” he began, and gestured about them as she stood within it. A shiver ran through her, setting her teeth on edge even as she controlled it, composed her face, her stance. “Don’t engage, and don’t leave the Circle.”
And then…they came, came as if called. They threw images at her, taunted her, called her by a name she didn’t recognize, threatened her, and still she stood in the bright band that surrounded her, guarded her, kept her safe. “You cannot be forced out,” Cort’s voice sounded in her head, “and you must not allow yourself to be drawn—unless they violate your guard—and that must not happen. This is your first test.”
She knew he guarded her body, monitored it with his sense, a floating of hands above her to check her pulse, to ensure the clarity of channels. He heard and watched her heart beat, her blood flow, and if the need arose, he had the ability to envision and affect the very cells of her body. And he’d promised that she’d learn that too. Once she was sworn.
But to get there, she had to pass through the gauntlet, the testing, and this was her first challenge: to maintain her stance in the circle, to resist the temptation to fight. She instinctively understood the necessity of this first basic test. To master fear was to control anger, to allow the higher function of the mind to rule. This was the foundation of discipline, of law and order, of civilization. She could be of no use to the Light if she couldn’t first master her own darkness.
Then came the sendings: visions, images, tactile, visceral, filled with smoke and blood and fire and pain…images of lives already lived, of possibilities that could yet become realities, threatened promises. The first image was another life, a mountain, a woman, herself, Nina, older, different…there was a sound like thunder and it ripped through Ann’s chest, and cordite stung her nose and eyes even as she felt the hard smack of a wood floor on her back. There was a child taken, another tear of pain that dug deeper than the bullet had. There were men and women in furs with spears, exotic figures with eyes that glowed, emeralds, opals, flashes of nickel silver, beautiful mouths that drank human blood, sucked on human feeling, and she watched it move through their bodies in sluggish eddies of gray light…energy…force…and she recognized them for what they were: soul eaters.
There was more, snatches of bits through time: she was male, female, shifting from one life to another, different times, different bodies, different lives and all of them hers.
She watched her father die, and die again, a blaze of angry orange and billowing black, the smoke choking her with hands that wrapped around her throat, the blistering heat blinding. She heard the raw laughter that followed his death, and it felt like her own body would melt with tears.
The death of her mother: the heart that had stopped, the lungs blocked by blood, her father’s heartbreak. And what they, the carrion and the life eaters, wanted her to do was to fail her test, turn her back on the Light, and join them. All it would take was her intent. And they showed her what they would do, should she not fail.
They promised her a violent, painful death, a life that would make her beg to die should she continue through to her sealing.
It wasn’t real, it wasn’t real, they were just images of a past already done, unchangeable, of a future unknowable, she assured herself, she was in the circle and—
Yes, they howled back, that was true, it wasn’t real, at least not for the moment, but as above, so below, they mocked, a high-pitched and windy whine, the scrape of stone on stone, and the muddy, sucking sound of sludge.
These sendings, these images on the Astral weren’t just a history of the Material, they promised, they were the future, her future.
More scenes immersed her in their fully dimensioned play, battered at her mind, ripped at her heart. She saw her best friend, Frankie, blue, bloated, dead, her hair shorn and the despairing reek of suicide in the air. Nina, alive again only to walk into school with that beautiful face bruised, and again, Ann watched images of her being beaten, drowned, cutting herself, the same way Ann had.
Cort’s robust form broken, lifeless at the bottom of the stairs, Elizabeth, torn, bloody, her eyes, those beautiful eyes—
And then she saw it, no him, no…naked, humanoid, genderless, with black slits for eyes and…were those ears, or horns? She couldn’t tell, made as they were of the same gray, almost rubbery-seeming skin, and his voice spoke above the din.
“You can fight, you know—they’re no match for you, or the Sword—step forward, and you can banish them,” he promised. He held out a hand, no, it was a cleft hoof. “One step, Child of Light, and you’ll be free, free of the cycle, the horror, and the pain.”
His eyes glittered beetle-black back at her. A tiny pink tongue played about the hole that was his lipless mouth. He, more than any of the other creatures she’d seen, repulsed her. His skin reminded her of a dead rat she’d once seen at the beach near the home she’d grown up in: hairless, bloated, ready to explode into a shower of stinking rot at the slightest touch.
She leveled her gaze on him, refused to answer, refused to move except to hold herself in readiness. She did not know that it was her will, and her will alone, that maintained the barrier that kept her safe.
“Oh, you’re scrumptious,” he answered her silence, even as the other shapes quieted and drew back. She could feel the avid hunger in their gazes as they watched the exchange. “You have my word.” He smiled, and in that moment his mouth yawned impossibly huge with the brief flash of fangs before they were hidden again by the almost ridiculously small opening he spoke through. “I only promise that which can be delivered.”
He gestured to the horde that surrounded them. “Look at them—delicate, weak, armed only with their taunts and threats…certainly, what they show you may be true, but what match are they for you, young and strong, armed with a relic of true power on the many worlds?”
It was tempting, tempting to do exactly what he said: she more than likely could defeat them if she were to respond, to step out from the shield she’d surrounded herself with, to strike with the strength that fear and anger granted—and forfeit her place forever, leaving her to become one of them, which is what they really wanted.
She shuddered and almost felt the body she’d left behind twitch in response. It was a certainty that bled from her very core. They would destroy her.
“You lie,” she said simply as she faced him.
He held up a hand. “I tried,” he told her, shaking his head in seeming resignation. “Have at it,” he said to the beasts that surrounded them and dropped his hand, the signal that set them off again.
Creatures made of shadow and darkness, apparitions that stood more than twice her height that she knew to be hounds, circled and hunted in and through the howling, the curses, the threats, and the sendings. Still, she resisted and stood her ground, let the images wash and play before her as she remained, unmoved.
*
It was one thing to willingly place oneself on the Astral.
It was another to visit it like everyone else did, in dreams.
My first test was followed by a series of nightmares, dreams of wolves—not the elegant, noble animals I’d run with on the Astral, had joined and become, but haggard beasts that slavered and snapped with a viciousness that forcibly reminded me that there was such a thing as true, undiluted malice. They shifted and simmered, became what I finally knew were hounds, shadow hounds, ten, twelve feet tall, made of a smoky and oily blackness.
They sniffed and pawed at the doors of my dreams, followed me when I woke, a dark cloud approaching from the periphery when I went out onto the roof to sit by myself and gaze over the town or just stare up into the starry sky, until I realized that I could create in the Material the same ring that guarded me on the Astral.
I centered, focused, walked the Aethyr and cast the warding around the house, the Light manifest within and without until the hounds could only paw and circle the boundary of the yard, track me through Aethyr and Astral in my dreams until there too the barrier I created became reflex, automatic, and their frustrated ululating yowl would wake me in the early morning darkness, the echo ringing between worlds.
I told Cort about it over breakfast the first time I’d done it, to ask if I’d done it right.
“And that’s another you’ve passed,” he said with a smile. “You’re coming along nicely.”
Surprised, I put my fork back down in my eggs. “That was a test?”
“Yes, dear heart,” he said as he sugared his tea and Elizabeth smiled at me from her seat.
“Everything you’ll ever do from now on is,” she said.
“Everything from now on—as in forever?” I asked, and looked to each of them. I was daunted by the prospect—it sounded like a lot and I remembered quite clearly what he’d said: I couldn’t fail any of them.
Uncle Cort’s teeth gleamed at me as he put his cup down. “Everyone’s life is like that—just not everyone knows it.”
Okay, I could go with that, but, “What about all the Astral stuff? Is that different?”
He laughed lightly. “Yes…and no. But you’ll know when you’ve passed those particular tests.” He rested his gaze on me as I struggled to understand.
“How will I know when I’ve passed those?” I asked finally.
“You’ll know,” he said and picked up his cup again, “because you’ll feel it, and you’ll know for certain,” he grinned at me again, “because I’ll tell you.”
Elizabeth nodded her chin toward my plate to remind me to eat. “You’re not going to like those cold.”
She was right, and I allowed myself to be pleased with my progress as I speared my eggs.
*
It happened almost exactly as I’d been taught: as above, so below. I saw them, haggard and human, lounging in front of Uncle Cort’s shop when he finally took me there for the first time. They took off running as we approached the gates that covered the door. But I recognized them for what they were.
“Hounds, right? Human hounds?” I asked him as he passed me a key to unsnap a set of locks.
“Yes,” he answered shortly. “They’re looking for you. If you can be turned before you’re sealed—well, you’d be a very powerful ally. But if they can’t turn you,” and he faced me, his gaze focused, intense, “they’ll try to stop you—any way they can. That’s why,” he pointed to the ankh that hung from my throat, then motioned for me to precede him through the door, “you wear that. It’s older than you think, and it’s been charged with more than just your life binding.”
“I don’t understand.” I fingered the charm and its chain and wondered how old it really was as I stopped to put my books down on a clear space on the front counter.
His hand was gentle on my shoulder. “You’re marked, dear heart, and for now, until you are safely sealed, you carry a powerful shield with you. It’s an announcement, yes, not only of who you are, but also of the Circle you belong to and the energy being focused to protect you. It’s safest for you that way.”
I still wasn’t certain I completely understood, and I let that rattle around in my head as I inspected the display that spread in an arch on the surface. The counter bore athames, ceremonial daggers that were used in ritual that ranged from pure utility—the traditional simple double-edged blade approximately a hand-span in length, the hilt not quite two-thirds that and narrower than the blade—to the downright fantastical—handles wrapped in soft leather, or carved of malachite and onyx and inlaid with opal moons and stars or some of the various symbols I’d learned, blades mirror bright or black with fine filigree patterns, male and female figures, flowers on intricate vines. They were beautiful.
“Damascene,” Cort said nonchalantly over my shoulder, noticing which ones I stared at with fascination.
I must have worn a strange expression and he gave me a friendly pat.
“C’mon, let’s show you some real history,” he said jauntily. “I’ve some things in the back I think you’ll enjoy.”
*
Night had fallen on the Astral, and she stood at the edge of the Tanglewoods beside Cort, her aethyric body thrumming with excitement and anxiety. “This time, Ann, we have a target,” he told her and pointed down the slope toward the center of the plain where mist rose. It carried a shimmer, a reflection of the starlight above and the river beyond.
In the world of the flesh, the wolf moon, the hunting moon had arrived and in the Aethyr, the Astral tide had changed as the Dark, the hungry nothing, built and swelled to its greatest moment of power in the waning of days. As above, so below: the days grew shorter while the nights became longer, and tied as a particular level of the Astral was to specific regions of the Material world, the changes happened here first.
While she couldn’t see all of them clearly through the shifting of forms and function, she could feel the host that surrounded and supported them, some of them beings she knew well. Familiar scents and sensations, here the distinct rub of fur against her arm, the warm press of a flank against her shoulder as another passed, an unmeaning but friendly shove in the jostle and jockeying for position that was more about the relieving of anticipatory tension than anything else. She felt it too, and the jangle of metal on metal sounded through her ears along with the growing mutter, the excited buzz of impatience as she loosened her shoulders, flexed and stretched her back, her legs, in the impatient pound of hooves, the slight brush of her elbows, the backs of her calves as others fought to contain themselves until the time was—
“There!”
The call rang out, the wolf-pack howl, the roar of the great hunting cats that ran with them, the commanding keen of hawks that flew above, and through the center of the mist, a boiling black space that swirled, coalesced, took on form…became a horde, a mass of claws and wings and teeth that charged.
Cort threw her a toothy smile in the half second before thought became action, before the challenge was answered and they were off, the hunt purposeful now: to rout the invading dark force, human adepts and nonincarnate beings who attempted to invade, to twist and remake, this level of the Astral that reflected the Material.
If they could do so, then the Law would be followed: as above, so below, and that part of the Material world would pay the price of their failure to defend now and the Dark would grow, would find it that much easier to further invade other parts of the Astral when the rotation of the planet brought other sections of it to the same vulnerable point.
Ann already knew her position here, Cort had told her clearly. “Don’t engage—track, hunt, seek—announce what you find.”
“What if I don’t know what to do?” she asked. “What if I don’t do it right?” What if we’re overrun? was the question she didn’t ask.
“Once we’ve started, follow the hawks—watch where the lines break, spot for sneak attacks. Learn to see, to fight with your sight. If…” He hesitated. “If the line falls, then you do what you must—but that won’t happen,” he said and gave her a sharp grin.
“How do you know?”
He looked at her a long moment. “Because it can’t,” he said, his voice strong, determined. “It simply can’t.”