Faith Hunter: Seraphs

While Audric busied himself making tea, I slid from the screen and approached on silent feet. “If you want a thorough drubbing,” he said without turning around, “you’ll strike when my back is turned. Otherwise, you’ll wait until I’m ready.”

“Snarky half-breed,” I said, sotto voce.

“Indeed I am,” he said, amused. Whipping bamboo staves from under his arm, he tossed a pair to me and slapped me twice before I could snatch them from the air. “You move with less grace than a ten-year-old, little mage,” he said dryly, “and you’re as slow as a human.”

Mage-fast, I whipped around him and pricked him three times. “Dead, dead, dead,” I said. “Now who’s slow?”

“Look down,” he said.

I flicked my eyes to see his left stave touching my side, angled to rip liver and kidney. Not so dead, dead, dead, after all. He slid into the swan and rapidly into the horse, almost as fast as a mage, bamboo staves slapping me rhythmically through the sequence. I leaped into the proper blocks and parries, warmth flowing into my chilled body as battle-lust wrestled with the cold of dreams and the touch of evil, as bloodlust replaced the mage-heat created by the incubus. Sweat glistened on my arms and trickled down my spine. I couldn’t help what the incubus made me feel, but I could choose what I did about it. Battle was better than sex with an incorporeal Darkness. In fact, almost anything was better than sex with an incorporeal Darkness.

When I was warmed up, Audric slapped me across my butt, hard, like he might a child. “Fight, little mage. You move like a human this morning.” I snarled at the affront. He chuckled. “You nearly let that thing seduce you, little girl. As if you were nothing more than a child.” He slapped my backside again, playfully.

Audric was deftly moving me from one passion to another, from desire to anger. The fact that he had such control of my emotions made me even more furious. “You let a minor Power lie with you, in your bed. You are slow and lazy as a human. And you are a fool.”

Insult piling on insult. But he was right. Evil had been in my loft. It had touched me. Moving as fast as my kind could, I cut, and cut, and cut, delivering deadly blows over his heart, over his left kidney, and over the artery feeding his liver. Three deadly strikes slid in under his guard. Audric knew it. “Better and better, little mage.” He danced away. “Someday, if you dedicate yourself to battle and battle alone, you may defeat me. It isn’t likely, but it is possible.”

“I’d rather have you at my back, killing off spawn,” I said. “And Dragons.”

Audric missed a beat. I speared him fast, a single heart thrust. “Dead,” I said.

“What do you know of Dragons?” he asked, closing on me, delivering a lung thrust.

I blocked and countered. “More than I want to,” I said, still striking fast.

“Here?” he asked. And he slammed me in the left side.

I fell to the floor and he hit me twice more, blows that would have decapitated me from both left and right. Air erupted from my throat with a sound like “Uueeerpt.” Audric laughed again, cruelly this time, finding humor in my pain. I skittered, reeling across the kitchen tile, seeing only a turquoise blur in the almost-dawn light. My teacher followed, lashing me. “You will tell me soon why this place on your left side causes you such pain.”

“There’s no pain,” I lied. I had thought myself healed, but I could use the old wound as a weapon. Feigning injury with a gasp, I dropped flat and separated my weapons as if in surrender. He reacted; a minuscule hesitation, a millisecond delay. I brought up both bamboo staves, the practice weapons nonlethal, rounded, and blunt. Crossing them at the tips, I hit him just below his breastbone—a lethal strike had I wished. Even using the bamboo rods, the move was capable of rupturing the descending aorta.

The staves indented his chest, the tips shoving up under his ribs. Air whooshed from his lungs in a pained grunt. His knees buckled. Mage-fast, I whipped from beneath him and watched him fall, tumbling in an avalanche of joints and long bones and torso to the floor. And I heard myself laugh. “Die, mule,” I said, insulting.

Audric looked up from the floor, his dark eyes meeting mine in horror. He splayed a hand over the spot where I’d struck him, fingers clenching. The bright glow of a deep bruise emanated from between his fingers. Fear snatched my breath. How hard had I hit him? Shock, sorrow, heartache, and disbelief bled from his eyes. Little mage, what have you done? I am done for, he seemed to say. Horrified, I fell to my knees. Audric bellowed, and lunged. “Gotcha!”

“Saints’ balls,” I cursed hoarsely, trying to block his practice staves from taking my heart. But the bamboo tips hit my chest, one digging in hard just below my sternum, the other below my left breast. The breath left my lungs. He rose from the floor and held me down, foot on my throat. I was finished.

“Never feel for the enemy,” Audric said, a lesson from Battle Mage 101. “Never! And stop cursing. Your Darkness might hear you and come back to visit.” His staves clacked together sharply. “Now get up. Try to do it right this time.”

Mages have better night vision than humans, a better sense of smell, and are faster. But our musculature and skeletal frames are lighter, more brittle, and mock battle with a stronger opponent tires us fast. In Enclave—the gilded prisons where my kind are kept, separated from humans who hate us—such tiring helps control mage-heat, an out-of-control sexual arousal when in the presence of seraphs. In Enclave, almost everyone dances and practices the savage arts just as Audric forced me to. I knew that, if I refused, I’d end up with broken bones. Easier to give in.

An hour later, I was exhausted, sweating, my scarlet hair sticking in oily strands, my dobok damp and chilly, even with the temperature rising in the loft. I had bruises on my bruises and my right ankle was sore where I had twisted it, trying to replicate a move he’d shown me, an advanced horse, rising, walking, and prancing in a half circle all at once. When he had me thoroughly whipped, he let me rest. Well, sort of. He sat me at the kitchen table with a strong cup of tea and gave me a pop quiz on the history of the swan, and of the neomage who had created the flashy move.

In the midst of the testing, he questioned me again about the weak place on my side. I tried to sidestep the answer with humor, but he refused to rise to the bait, straddling a chair across from me, face serene but determined.

Finally, elbows on the table, hands clasped in front of me on the papers, I said, “I nearly died on the Trine, sitting in a conjuring circle, scrying beneath the ground into the hellhole of Darkness. I was spying, okay?” Trying to find Lucas… trying to see what was down there.

“Thorn,” he sighed.

“I know. It was stupid,” I said, watching my scarred fingers flex. “And I don’t really even know if everything I saw in the vision was real. But I got trapped in this reddish stuff, some kind of conjure, an enormous structure deep underground. And this”—I paused, not knowing what to call it—“this thing —half insect, half reptile—speared me with a claw or a barb.” I touched my side, feeling the invisible bruise. “It wasn’t real. It was all in my mind. But it felt real.” It still feels real.

I didn’t mention the creature I had found down there, the being called Mistress Amethyst, trapped in the structure. I didn’t add that a seraph of the Most High had gone down there and hadn’t come back out. I didn’t know why I kept that part to myself, but I had. I also didn’t add that I hadn’t been able to get free from the trap by myself, and that if I hadn’t had help from the surface, I would have suffocated in the midst of an incantation I hadn’t been ready to try and should never have attempted alone. I had been lucky. Very lucky. And Audric didn’t believe in luck.