Chapter Fourteen

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I didn’t let myself sleep for fear of what I would see. I remained on the cold concrete of the basement unmoving, unable to tell how much time had passed. The discomfort eventually morphed into pain, and I was glad for it. I shouldn’t have come here, at least not the way that I had. The pain helped me to focus on what had happened up until this point and thinking and considering would make slipping into unconsciousness less likely. There was magic at work here, no question. The Abbot had to be responsible for my fatigued state, and not just the initial blow that knocked me into a trance. His proximity was a part of it; I’d hardly been able to stand when he got too close. But was it a conscious effort or something passive once he had his hooks into me? The latter would make sense with the people in his home. Focusing on so many people at once might become too much of a strain and his cult already grown too big for that.

But that wasn’t the only thing at work here. It shouldn’t matter how distracted I was, I should have noticed those people before they attacked, and a lot sooner. Either they were magically concealed from my vision, or I really had no business adventuring ever again. The cloaking was well done, too. I’ve learned to spot the subtle changes in the air when something like that was nearby, though I could attribute my mind being otherwise occupied with painful memories and worrying about my friend to not spotting the illusionary magic. Between the various magic tricks at play and his recruitment of a Battle Born, it would track then that the Abbot would have recruited one or two others who might have their own measure of talent.

That would also explain Wendy Sinclair.

None of this did me any good at the moment, of course, but if I was going to survive this hornet’s nest, piecing it all together could make all the difference in the world. The Gardeners, even a milquetoast little scab like Skip, presumably wouldn’t have hired the Abbot if they had any indication about what he was up to, which meant that he’d managed to keep a lot of things secret from a lot of dangerous people and for a very long time.

I was thinking about what Skip would send after the Abbot for his betrayal when the basement door opened, and the sudden noise in the otherwise still room caused me to flinch. Heavy footfalls, and more than one set of feet coming down the stairs. I didn’t need to see the Abbot to know that he was among them. I could feel his approach like a magnet with an opposing pole pressing down on me. Having a better idea of what was happening may do me some good in getting out of here, but at the moment I didn’t see how.

“Go on, get her up.” The Abbot’s voice was hard and charmless. I didn’t look up to see his face. The door to my cell swung wide, and the rough hands of unseen assailants gripped my arms, pulling me limply to my feet faster than my mind was ready to process.

As we exited the basement, my eyes adjusted to the sudden light and I got a look around. It looked as if everyone in the cult had gathered outside in pale pink robes, creating a circle around two of their members whose more colorful garb and that they were standing in the center of the circle led me to believe they were possibly lieutenants of the Abbot, for lack of a better word. Where everyone else had been looking down, these two stared at me intently. Each of them held a crystal roughly the size of a bowling ball with the care one might show a newborn. On the left was a tall, rail-thin man with bronze skin and a shaved head, his gaunt facial features reminded me of someone very sick and in their final days, but his imposing body language suggested otherwise. And on the right was a woman, shorter, but not by much. Hawk-nosed with cropped, wiry jet-black hair save a small streak of white, and thin lips that curled up at the edges just shy of a grin. The more I watched them, the more I sensed they were hungry.

The Abbot dropped me into the center of the circle. Not forcefully, but then, he didn’t have to. With my body in a heap, he stepped back to address the crowd. “Friends, I address you today as those who have been found. Among you are many who had been teetering on the edge of destruction before fate delivered you unto me. And now, you have been given life anew. You drink deeply of my power, and I give it freely. Those who have been attuned to the way of the crystal know peace and contentment. You see life as the song that it is. Your days make notes, your weeks make lyrics, your years make up chorus and verse! But even now, I share beyond my limits. I do so without complaint and would do so until my end. For you. All of you. My children. But do not cry for me, but rather rejoice! Today is a grand day indeed for today my power shall be replenished with the sacrifice of one who is generous beyond measure.”

The Abbot turned back to me then, looking at me with the gaze one might give a calf before slaughter. “Chalsarda is no mere human; she is an elf. She has been gifted with energy no human has ever seen, blessed with years we can only measure in generations. And rather than hoard these years to her own selfish ends, she gives them to us. And for this, we give our thanks. We bow our heads in reverence, for to give your life for another is the greatest gift of all, and one not received lightly, nor is it to be squandered. My disciples, will you begin?”

There was a nod from the gaunt man as he stepped toward me. “Exalted Chalsarda, I offer Seraphinite to honor the wholeness your sacrifice will instill in us all and to aid in your journey into the earth so that your spirit may rise to us all. What has been is what shall be and what shall be will show us the light.”

There was a sense of awe in his voice as he said this. He knelt with great care and placed the crystal near my chest before backtracking to his original position, his head bowed. The woman then approached me much as he had, though her voice carried something closer in it to amusement. “Exalted Chalsarda, I offer Carnelian to honor the courage you show in your sacrifice to us and to signify the confidence we have in your life essence as it leaves you and flows through us. May the fires burn away all that is not pure. What has been is what shall be and what shall be will show us the light.”

The woman left the gemstone at my feet and returned in the same manner as The Abbot nodded his appreciation to them both. “I thank you both for your gifts. If any among my children feel these gifts are not adequate, come forward and speak now and you may give yourself in their place, you may add your energy to us all.”

The group remained quiet for several moments, proving that blind followers or no, there was still a shred of self-preservation among them. Or from a more disturbing perspective, it was possible they didn’t actually care one way or another about their own lives, but genuinely thought the fancy rocks were fancy enough to kill me.

“It is settled then,” the Abbot continued. “And lastly, my brave elf, my precious child. Exalted Chalsarda, I offer Iolite to...”

He trailed off at that, his ears perking up for a moment. I heard it too. The screech of tires heard faintly from the street, the foreboding sound of a car wildly thumping against a curb before a thunderous crash served as the peak of a hideous crescendo to the music of Ann’s blue Nissan finding its way into the living room. The sudden noise and dust seemed to shake everyone, some more visibly startled than others.

Ann, the triumphant warrior princess that she had earlier insisted she was, nearly lost her balance on shaky legs as she got out of the car, coughing into her forearm.

“Grab her!” the Abbot shrieked to no one in particular. His composure was gone, but to be fair, so was the front of his house.

Ann threw a tiny bottle at the staircase with her remaining strength, and an instant later there was a sound like a half a ton of bacon being dropped into a lake of boiling oil. Small fires rose up as a section of the house seemed to disintegrate before our eyes, giving everyone more pause than even the car crash had.

“Stop right there!” she commanded. It was meant to convey authority, but her voice cracked ever just so near the end. “That bottle was marked ‘Melty’. Let my friend go right now, or we get to find out what happens when I throw the one marked ‘Boom Boom’ and just saying, I’m pretty curious what that one will sound like!”

Ann held the mini liquor bottle over her head as if to emphasize her point. The Abbot held up a hand to keep the crowd in the backyard at bay as he took a couple of steps towards the house. “You can’t possibly think you can win, can you?” he asked with a sneer. “Look around you! How many of our number do you expect to destroy before we overtake you? And how much worse for you both do you think it will be if you force us to?”

Ann took a challenging step forward of her own, standing on the remains of a coffee table and straightening her posture to make herself as tall as possible. “Oh, but I don’t have to, now do I? I just drove my car into your house and if you’re not careful that fire is going to spread quicker than not, right? I think someone’s going to notice, don’t you? So you can let us be on our merry way, or we can sit here and explain this all to the police when—!”

Ann collapsed suddenly with a brief, but unnerving, cry of pain as thick black veins spread from her chest to her face momentarily before receding. Dead Lines. And I still couldn’t make a move to help her. Internally my body ached with fury and wrath, but none of it would translate into action. At that moment I hated myself, but I hated the Abbot a whole hell of a lot more.

The Abbot for his part sighed in frustration. “Bring her to me. Throw her into the circle with the elf,” he commanded. Then, remembering himself, he added, “And will someone tend to those damned fires before our entire home goes up like a tinderbox?”

Several of his followers jumped into action immediately, removing their robes to pat down the fires, even as the robes themselves seemed to slowly dissolve after making contact with the acidic liquid remnants from the bottle. The man from the circle left us to go into the house towards Ann.

“Stop this!” I finally managed, weakly enough that I wasn’t sure the Abbot would hear me.

He looked down at me then, and asked, “Whatever would I do that for?”

I managed to prop myself up onto an elbow, but only just barely. “Can’t you see? She’s dying; she needs help!”

“And what of it?” the Abbot asked. “Who told you that you were allowed to live forever?”

A shout came from inside the house. “Master! The young woman had these in the car with her!”

He held my bow and quiver up over his head for the Abbot to see. “Bring them along with the girl. They can all burn together for all I care. Quickly now, we haven’t much time!”

The gaunt man smiled in agreement, slamming the car door shut before grabbing Ann by ankle and dragging her roughly over the debris and through the house with his free hand. Ann was awake now and protesting, though still too weak to do much about it. Both she and my bow and arrows were dropped roughly near my worthless body as he returned to his spot, trading a look with the woman. The Abbot then knelt down beside me with a look of barely contained murderous intent. “Enough with the formalities, elf. You are proving to be more trouble than you are worth. But before I incinerate you and your wayward friend here, I will let you in on a secret. You see, you pretend that what you do is important, or more accurately, you pretend that what you have come to do is justified. Perhaps even heroic. But here’s the trick. You, specifically you, are worthless. Your actions are meaningless. The world, in fact, the whole universe, is indifferent to your pain, your sacrifice. What you think of as right and wrong, good and evil, that sort of thing comes from a belief that there is some grand overseer. Maybe even a whole bunch of them, a pantheon of sorts. But there are no gods, at least not in the way that you think of them. There is no cosmic lawmaker who cares what you eat or how you dress or even who you kill. That god never existed. I am God. Myself and the enlightened few who understand that this is all there is and have the courage act on it. God is what everyone is afraid to be because once you know what you are, what is there to stop you? The past, present, and future are meaningless to the likes of you, because you see, in a moment when I reduce the two of you to ash, none of them will have mattered. Your works, your dreams, will have mattered for naught. And in what I expect will be a very short period of time, none will even mourn you.”

The Abbot stroked my hair at that, almost lovingly and reiterated. “No one. Just like Wendy... whatever her name was.”

He stood then, addressing the crowd. “Fantastic news, friends! We now have a second volunteer! Today shall be bountiful for us all! As the gift of everlasting life will be—!”

Everything that happened next went by in a terrifying split second. Hot blood sprayed for just a moment, some of it smearing across my face as I was too slow to prevent it from striking me. A sound like a tarp flapping in the wind grew in intensity above us, with cacophonic laughter like dying chickens filling the air in concert with it. The unsettling noise of a zipper retracting from all too close to me. And then there was screaming. Enough to wake the dead.

A headless corpse collapsed in front of me, an enormous pool of blood already staining the ground as the Abbot leaked and twitched. The woman in the circle was screaming an order to retrieve the Battle Born, though who was rushing to obey the command and who were fleeing for their lives was utterly unknown. With a considerable thump and the sound of talons digging into roof tiles, the unseen attacker perched to admire their handiwork.

But throughout all of this? Life!

In an instant my strength was restored in its entirety, the hold the Abbot had over me was now lifted, and I sprang to my feet, bow in hand as I did. Ann felt something too; her face a portrait of shock as she gasped deeply. I knew what this was. Magic does not die easily; it always goes somewhere—either the world or the nearest possible host. It would not be a permanent boost, but for at least a few moments Ann would be filled to bursting with the pure and unfiltered good stuff before it would dissipate back into the universe. There would be no time to check on her though, in the middle of this madness. I needed to assess this situation immediately.

“My, but that was incredible!” a familiar, horrible voice called down to us. Ann was getting on her feet now, looking up in disbelief at what we were both seeing. “Hello, Ann. I did promise to give you a show, did I not? You and your friend. And I always keep my word. Come to think of it I also promised to show you what was in my birdcage, didn’t I?” As she said this, the bottom of her birdcage, which was connected to a rope and had the outline of a sharp and menacing saw blade, opened suddenly to drop the blood drained head of the Abbot of Kinney to the ground near my feet.

We could see it now, it was the homeless woman from before, though I was kicking myself for not recognizing it at the time. It wasn’t a feather coat at all; those were wings. And the smell of blood and rot and all of it, those weren’t the smells of someone derelict. That was the stench of kills long past but never washed clean. And with her wings now open, we had a full hideous view of the creature underneath. Calling this person a woman might have been correct only in the most technical sense. Depending on your point of view, this was at least half a person.

“What the hell am I looking at?” Ann breathed in disbelief.

“I’m pretty sure this is bounty hunter number two. Birdie,” I said, not taking my eyes off of her. “And Birdie, it would seem, is a harpy.”

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