Genia

Don't know whether we're precisely what you want, but we do have some of the requirements, up to the connection (loose) to the Midnight Squad.

Check my signature, and if it seems likely, drop me a tell or PM.

GMT +2. And aside from matching schedules to my mostly-American group, I can be found online during the evenings on occasion.

We (I posted in this thread with a not-quite-Victorian SG) are still around and have regular gatherings every other Thursday in the Midnighters' Club. If you want to see how your character might mesh in, you're welcome to try it out, or catch us at any other time via global or channel.

The above goes for other similarly themed types, as well.

We do both We even have designated weeks for it.

Fair warning, though, the banter can get..... banter-y, and the OOC discussions on the designated channel can be a little rough for new people to handle. We will and can debate anything and everything in an open forum, so if you're easily offended, this is probably not the place for you to linger in.

Epilogue

Excerpt from Days Bygone: The Myth and Legend of the Fertile Crescent, edited by E. Marks and D. J. Smith

Found in the ruins of Nippur, clay tablet and cuneiform from the tomb of Naram-Sin, last Akkadian king, trans. from late Akkadian, N. A. Grodskaya

(fine copy, from the study of Dr. Sofia Rabinovich, Berkeley, CA. Framed wall photograph)





FIN

DJK & EAL, Israel, 2010

Chapter LXXXVII
In Which What Has Began, Ends…

I am entirely uncertain as to how one should characterize this sort of occurrence. I would not presume to draw far-reaching conclusions, even now, holding all the pieces in my hands and looking back post-factum. I am, furthermore, disinclined to make accusations that cannot stand the test of verifiability, or would be otherwise fallacious. It is always my inclination, I believe, to see my own responsibility in the manner in which events evolve, and I do not see why, for this instance, I should change from my habitual view. So, let it be thus.

Some things, the good as well as the bad, happened because, in the end, we were all human.

We were all carrying our loves and hates, our burdens of fear and responsibility and the worms of selfishness. Some events in this chain could have occurred quite differently – I still hold, more badly than they did – if I were not subject to my own vanity, and were not there. I could pretend, for a while and without much trouble, that we were, nonetheless, masters of our own fate, and could have done, or not done, as we wished.

Until that letter.

Lorenzo folded away the crackling, thin papers, stuffing them in his coat pocket with a notion indicative of irreversible finality.

He had cause. The letter, presented to us as a rubbing taken off of a wall, was the harbinger of inevitability. It was the clear indication that our destinies, from the beginning, perhaps, were seized from us, and thrown into the loop of the cruelest taskmaster of them all; the linear nature of time.

We had to have been here because we were here before. We had to do all the things we did, because they, like us, were a part of history now. We found the ruins of a temple we ourselves destroyed, and, for us to have found it, we now had to destroy it. I was haunted by paradox.

Garent took the gem from my hands, appearing reluctant. Understandably; he wasn’t yet the slave to inevitability that we, the older, more fatalistic people, have become. He was still fighting it, and the assumption that things could be changed for the better if we only tried lurked in his eyes, just underneath the surface of pragmatic resolve.

“It already happened,” I said, putting into my voice as much conviction as I could. “Don’t think of it as your own voluntary act; the fact that we are here tells us that the deed is done. It helps…” I grimaced wryly. “Sometimes.”

“Sometimes.” He shrugged slightly, indicating a willingness that was altogether fake, but that he was utterly convinced was genuine. Ever the idealist hiding under a pragmatic façade. “It’s not like I have a lot of choice about the matter, it appears.”

“You don’t. Just think of it as my responsibility,” I advised dryly. “I would do it without involving anyone else it’s just that I… can’t. So you have to be my tool.”

“Oh, thanks.” He was riled now, and the hesitation left his face. Which was exactly as it should be. It was easy, sometimes, to force Garent into following a particular path. All you had to do was imply that he couldn’t walk it. I disliked manipulating him, but I could almost feel the time running away swiftly from us, and the future, just waiting to sweep in.

It was a future that I disliked, but it had to come about, after all.

The temple began shaking once again. Ripples ran out of the centre, in which Garent stood like a rock in the eye of the storm and about his forces came, swirling in a maelstrom of nightmarish proportions. The walls shuddered and groaned, the floors danced like rams, and the river outside, though I could not see it, fled with a terrible rush. The altar of the gem creaked like an old case of stairs and the gem itself burned with a light that did not require magical eyes to see.

The storm tugged at me. I could feel the wind gnawing at my skirt and pulling at my hair; a terrible, frantic wind that had no direction and disappeared into nowhere. It wreaked havoc on Lorenzo’s longcoat. He held on to his hat with one hand, driving his swordstick into the floor with the other as a sort of flimsy anchor, so that the wind almost seemed to roar around him, but not touch him at all. Victor covered his face with his hands – perhaps from the wind and perhaps to hide his tears – and hunched over.

I was lost in the havoc.

I could see – perhaps it was in my mind, and perhaps, just perhaps, it was real – the images of the shattering city. The Euphrates – that branch offshoot of it which provided water to the city and irrigated the valley – spilled forth. The water ran over fields and vineyards, drowning everything in its path. Where the water had gone there was… nothing. No new water came to replace it; the river had dried out.

The city was shaking with deep, brutal tremours. Houses toppled down shattered by the tectonic forces. These that resisted the ground’s heaving were torn apart by hurricanes. Trees flew, trunk over leaves, and landed in a shuddering crash. The clouds across the sky seemed to have no pattern at all; they were simply gathering, and gathering, and gathering. When the lightning strike came, it was like a nuclear explosion.

The temple of Anshar was in the epicenter of the destruction. I could hear, dimply, because of the roar of the storm, the sound of stones falling down. Walls were shattering explosively; ceilings caved in and smashed into floors that groaned and broke under the strain. Cracks slithered around the walls of the altar chamber, disconnecting the writing and cutting into the tracery of laylines. The violet glow that illuminated the room with the return of magic had gone out, leaving us all in darkness again. The floor danced a jig and as the tremours of the disintegrating temple grew greater and greater a pressure built inside the room that made the air feel as though it were made of liquid. Then, finally, everything gave with a silent concussive blow.

We were all sprawled on the floor, instinctively covering our heads from the explosion. Garent was on the floor as well, dazed, or perhaps still a little elsewhere. The ggem rolled away, dim and spent, perhaps forever.

The city was in ruins.

I got up slowly – the broken rib and slashed arm, not to mention a thousand bruises, protested abuse vociferously enough to make me want to fold back down again – and stared around in the almost impenetrable darkness. The 5th Column’s bulbs flickered out and died, presumably deprived of a power source when the generator was crashed, rattled or otherwise disabled. The makeshift torch which Lorenzo had used to keep the snakes (I shuddered briefly) away, had also burnt down long since.

There was a muttered word, and the room shone with a sudden burst of white, magical light. Lorenzo was pushing himself up, one hand on the altar of the gem, the other held palm-up to command the magic. Ascertaining that he was intact, I prodded Garent. He rolled over, groaned, and his eyes refocused, snapping out of the apparent concussion. “It’s all over now,” he said a little thickly, and sat up, clutching at his head.

“We saw,” I confirmed dryly, dusting off my hopeless skirt. “We also saw the gem’s backlash.”

“Where’s the gem?” He looked around, and saw the piece of dark, dim stone. “Oh.”

I picked it up, looking first at Garent’s and then Lorenzo’s faces. They both seemed to be just a touch disappointed. I smiled grimly. “Lead us not into temptation,” I quoted piously, and tossed the gem from my hand. Twin sighs of agreement issued from both directions. “I believe we are finished here, gentlemen.”

“But how do we go back home?” Victor was looking around resignedly, and pointing out the obvious fact that, despite the last hour, we were still, very clearly, in Shubat-Anshar of the past, rather than in the present. “I could try and rig together a time machine, but I don’t think I have enough coils and stuff, just in this room.”

“Perish the thought. “ Lorenzo and I spoke simultaneously, both, I was certain, haunted by a vision of days of a muttering Victor, stripping the walls bare in order to make a time machine cabin of rock. After a moment spent shaking my head in dismay, I continued.”We saw Auer put something onto the altar before the vortex swept us up, and I have good reason to believe that this same object might bring us back. It would be expedient, if a little too convenient, to do it this way.”

“Let’s find it and get out of here, then.” Garent stood up, and looked around. He picked up the piece of gem casually, and stuffed the now useless object into his sleeve. “A soubenir, Sofia,” he said at my raised eyebrow.

“I confess…” I mumbled, slightly embarrassed, “I didn’t see just what it was very clearly. Some object… but it was either dark, or so bright my eyes hurt. And there was a gunfight.”

“I’ve seen it before.” Lorenzo, too, bent to the task of looking for the ancient time machine.

“Where?” I blinked at him, confused.

“Actually, madam,” he smirked, “Heinrich Auer himself showed it to me. In Vienna. In a drawing. He attempted to radiate cooperation – successfully, I might add.“ he grimaced momentarily, then brightened again and his hands found something at the base of the altar, beneath the strange clutch of stone cables that held the Shield of Anshar. “And so I have the details of this quite well memorized.”

Of course he did.

“How ironic,” I stared at the key. It, too, had an odd, almost non-Euclidean shape, too confusing to readily follow. I didn’t know how it would fit into any peg, be it square or round. “And here is something even more ironic; we have no idea how to use it. Simply taking it out didn’t seem to work.”

“You could flip it!”

“Excuse me?” I looked down at Victor, who assumed something vaguely reminiscent of his usual, bouncy countenance.

“Flip it!” He gestured with a hand, pretending that he was flipping the oblong object end over end. “You know, everything always works the other way in reverse.”

I felt compelled to laugh. And immediately regretted it. The pain in my chest was almost enough to make me faint.

Lorenzo knelt in front of the altar, and reversed the key, holding out its back end to the front. Solemnly, he moved it forward until the key slid back into its position – now facing the other way around. I could feel the world begin to swim and rotate frantically as the vortex of time was activated again. I reached out, trying to seize Garent and Victor’s hands, but the current was already too strong, and I was drowning in it, all on my own.

I thought about the last few days, all of it from beginning to end: the frantic race across Europe, the worry and search and uncertainty, then the blazing terror of the world of the past. The pain of it swept over me with the pulsing, coming and receding tide of Time; an almost induced pain, oddly external. I could not distinguish between the physical hurts of too much abuse and the mental hurts of a psychological battering. Most especially, though, and most overwhelmingly, the hurt of inevitability covered me from head to toe. It was finished, and yet it would never end, and in a way it hadn’t even started.

Then the waves washed over me, taking me down, tossing me out, and there was nothing, nothing, nothing…

We could always use a strong presence redside. Though our SG is mostly directed at anti-villains and vigilantes, there is an associated VG (Black Onyx Dynasty) which, though new, managed to gather into its ranks quite a few exceptionally creepy characters.

If you're interested, do feel free to get in touch with me and I'll introduce you.

I think SCORPIO almost specializes in ex-military backstories. They are a solid, well-established SG. You should check them out.

Chapter LXXXV
In Which Consciousness Brings Unexpected Consequences, and Awareness Expands Outward

I have to tell the truth, I guess, and the beginning of this pretty embarrassing part is that I don’t remember much.

I remember hurting worse than I ever hurt in my life, which I guess makes sense because I never got a stomach wound before that was real. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t lose the pain sensation just because I can heal, but it’s not the same thing to feel a stab with a bullet and immediately fix it, and to spend a long time (felt like hours, Sofia says it was only about one hour, tops) losing blood and dying.

Dying is unpleasant. I think I won’t do it again anytime soon.

Anyway, everything was black and painful for a long time. Kind of makes me curious if that’s how people feel under anesthetics. I don’t think so, though, because the whole point of anesthetics is not to hurt, and I was hurting. I sometimes was mildly conscious, and I could feel that I was being moved about – it didn’t register then, only looking back – but I certainly couldn’t hear anyone, or had any idea what was going on, or cared.

Then something pulled me. First it pulled me back to consciousness. I became aware of myself, and of it, before anything else. I didn’t know what ‘it’ was but, as Sofia would say, ‘it’ was such a nice technical term that I pretty much stuck to it. I still couldn’t see or hear anything, and I still hurt a lot and I’m pretty sure that I was still dying, but I could tell something was very interested in me. I think that if I were actually not wounded and bleeding I would have figured out pretty quickly that something interested in me on a personal level that was so undefined was a magical item, and probably really dangerous but for once I can actually use being half-hallucinating as an excuse, so I’m definitely going to.

I reached out quietly, and felt around me until I found the whatever-it-was. It turned out to be big, round and cold. I am going to again get convenient mileage out of the whole dying thing, because otherwise I could have told right then it was the gem of Etnekhsa. After all, that’s all Sofia and Lorenzo could talk about.

I sort of lay there with my hand on it because I really had no strength to move any more. And that was when magic came back.

There was a surge of energy that I could feel down in my bones, and the gem turned from being cold to being icy. It was suddenly very intent on being picked up, and it was willing to provide the power to help me do it. I took it in my hands – I didn’t even notice when I went from not seeing anything to seeing the whole room, and even further out – and saw the incredible light of the gem. I was holding Power with a capital P between my hands.

Then the gem pulled my mind towards it, and Garent disappeared.

Not entirely. I-- We could still see around us and We felt a spark of interest to what was going on. There were other people in the room and We felt a little concerned for them because they didn’t look so good. But there were other things to occupy Our mind too; there was a storm in the Persian gulf, a small current of wind, really, that was not horribly significant, but wrecked a coastal village and tore down some rocks. There was a wind traveling inland, and We took it and made it go away, because it seemed like a good idea.

Then We focused on Shubat-Anshar, because We were both – all – interested in it. Shubat-Anshar was different, weather-wise, from anything around it, which was the way it was supposed to be. For example, We were supposed to make it rain. So I did.

Rain poured down in tremendous torrents, there was a part of my mind that suddenly realized that there was a lot of rain but We didn’t really mind it, even when the streets turned into rivers and people started sliding along them looking unhappy. Our business was the weather, not the way people felt about it.

You have to realize how it was. Everything was tremendous. The scope that I – that We – could see for was huge. I thought, at the time that I wasn’t just blind for the last few days; I have been blind all my life, and only now I was actually able to see. I could see for half the continent. We were powerful, We were indifferent, We were amoral like all the forces of nature, and We were mostly unconcerned.

We were also cramped. We could feel walls all over, closing in, and it felt like there was not enough air to breathe, though We didn’t need air to breathe and We were pretty sure that We could make more. It was a kind of Jewel-claustrophobia. We shrugged, trying to loosen the binds of stone on us, and a lot of rubble flew out. There were people in that rubble, but We had no idea what they were doing there, and anyway, that was people business.

Of course, some people were our business; the people in the room, for example. The people in the room were fighting a certain different kind of people… I decided to check and make sure nobody was sneaking in on us.

There! There were some of the types of people that We were interested in, and they were running away. That was no good. We figured We’d better take care of the matter. We moved a hand, and decided to sweep them off their feet with a gust of wind. A gust of wind did come out, and sent them tumbling head over heels in a way that was very funny, and very cartoonish; it was a little odd, though, because people aren’t supposed to go flying like that in reality. The city also turned out to be full of houses made of paper, like the Japanese had, because quite a few of the houses went flying after the people, too.

There were some more places where there were runners, and they were dealt with in a similar way. Once, I made the river toss out a nice tidal wave, and frowned in confusion, thinking that it was a little too tall. But then We decided that that was a foolish concern to have, and that the trees swimming in the wake of the wave were needing to be cut down anyway. Unsteady trees are a hazard!

The wind that We set out was coming back to us now, they were converging on the temple, and suddenly I could feel the ground shake. There was a lot of falling stones coming down around our head, and people were shouting and falling.

The part of me that was still Garent managed to catch the shouted conversation.

“He has gone mad with power! If we even approach him, I can’t say what he would do!”

“Are you scared?”

“I am always wary of a person with no sense of scale, madam.”

“Well, Garent is still there, and I am not worried of Garent. In fact, I have the perfect remedy for him.”

There were stumbling footsteps, and then someone was grabbing our shoulders and after a few minutes, someone was slapping me. Hard. I blinked, and the room around me refocused. There was a lot of stonework lying in a circle around my feet, and the walls and floor were shaking ominously. Sofia was forcefully slapping my face.

“Ow! Ow ow!” I dropped the gem from my numb hands, and it clattered to the floor. “It hurts! Enough already! I stopped. You’re always slapping me.”

“Just step away from that gem, if you don’t mind too much.” Sofia prodded it with a foot, and it rolled away. She picked it up, and glared at it sternly. The little voice in my head that was still very interested suddenly went silent. Even powerful magic items can be sensible occasionally, I guess. I certainly was being sensible; I rubbed my check and blushed. “I should have anticipated something like this; you are just too convenient.”

“It seems that Fate has once again conspired to make that slapping necessary.” Lorenzo was actually looking amused. He turned around, and helped Vic to stand and, very slowly, took him over to a big trench in the middle of the room. There was something living in the trench. Sofia, still holding the gem, moved back warily, eyeing the trench with a disgusted look.

The two of them stood by the trench, and there was a flash of green light. Lorenzo let Vic stand on his own, and both of them gave big sighs of relief. Even Sofia looked relieved. I figured that they were both hurt – Lorenzo had his bad knee – and whatever was in the trench was letting them heal. It wasn’t people. I peered towards the trench, and groaned; the entire thing was full of living – now not so living – snakes. I was actually surprised Sofia wasn’t perched on the ceiling, screaming.

Vic scurried out into the corridor and started poking at the rubble. I blinked, confused, but Sofia and Lorenzo didn’t say anything to stop him, so I figured that it made some kind of sense. The three of us looked at each other.

“What now?” Sofia leaned on the wall, and looked thoughtful.

“Don’t we go home?” I don’t think I sounded plaintive, but I can’t be entirely sure. “I really didn’t like it here.”

“Self-evidently, as soon as we’ve figured out the mechanics.” She tried to do something with her hair, which was really messy and flew every which way. “I was rather asking what we are to do about the city.”

Huh? I guess I missed a lot while I was out o it, because I had no idea what she was talking about.

Chapter LXXXIV
In Which Death Entraps and Belated Understanding Lights the Way

Rostov Kushan was dead.

Rostov was dead, buried under piles of rock and rubble, caught in an almost symbolic embrace with the Warwolf. Apt, perhaps, but not really comforting.

I felt a pang of grief – he was a friend, if such terms are acceptable, for people like us, in a world like ours – and I was sorry, perhaps even horrified, at his death. I tried, in the havoc of seconds, to sort through my emotions, and discovered little more than a sense of consternation; he was dead, and we were in here, dying. Why did all the decent people I know have to die when I had no time to grieve for them?

The corridor collapsed over Rostov’s head, leaving us sealed off in almost complete darkness. The only light remaining to us was the torch at Lorenzo’s feet, reflecting uncomfortably off black, sleek bodies. They hissed.

I shuddered.

The other sources of light were two lightbulbs, which had somehow, miraculously, survived the explosion tucked off in one of the corners. In the light flickered solid, odd shadows, and the air was filled with thick plaster dust, smell of gunpowder and blood. The blood reeked; Garent and Victor were covered in it. I glances at my hands and was amazed to discover, for myself, that small pinpricks of blood covered them, from palm to arm. When I wiped my face off, my hand came away smeared with red – a legacy of the blast. I didn’t even duck.

The light also revealed to me, in slow motion, Victor’s horrible face, set in a soundless howl. Then the world erupted with noise; stone creaked horribly, groaning as it broke, and screams filled the hallway, indicating those who were not quite dead enough. Victor’s cry turned from a soundless mime into a breathless, disbelieving moan. He would have been tearing holes in walls with the sound, and shattering glass, but for the punctured lung.

Lorenzo… I whipped around, to check on him. He was, even with this cacophony of sounds, preternaturally silent.

He was still standing by the altar, holding up his firebrand, and he had the look of Cassandra in the middle of her vision. Wherever he was – I had a pretty good guess where and when – it was certainly not here. He was caught in the middle of a full-blown flashback at the most inconvenient of times.

In a room full of hissing, coiling snakes, I was the most functional person present. I felt like laughing, and found myself clamping down on my hilarity before the hysteria spilled out of me in an unstoppable torrent.

I had to bring them to their senses, somehow. To break their sorrow and possibly funnel it into rage. To make them seethe and apply that anger, to make them think rationally. It was my job to do the worst thing possible, for them, for others, and drag them out from the natural course of grief into reality, tampering with what nature made, and man reinforced. I felt like a disgrace; not that it mattered in any way. Is it any wonder most people hate their jobs?

First, I had to tend to Lorenzo. I could find sufficient human compassion to allow Victor a few more seconds of grief.

I raced – all right, a harsh word, but I nonetheless moved fast – to the edge of the snake trench, where the long, venomous bodies presented a barrier that, as far as I was concerned, stood firmer than any forcefield, or steel reinforced concrete. Five seconds after the blast, and Lorenzo was staring out, unfocused, lost not only in the memory but, no doubt, in the impact of the shockwave. Dust rested, unmoved, on the shoulders of his coat. He stood frozen so still that the flame on the torch in his hand didn’t even flicker.

“Lorenzo!” I coughed, found it hard to project from a throat that was dry and constricted. “Wake up!”

It was no use; I was barely cutting through the noise that was there, much less the noise that wasn’t. I licked my lips and raised my voice as much as I could, wishing that I could simply teleport over the nightmare trench, eyeing it with desperate estimation. “Lorenzo! Snap out of it! Lorenzo!”

I was already getting ready to jump, thinking that if I jumped far enough, and moved fast enough, I could possibly make it through with only two or three bites (a sort of macabre variation on Superman mantras, you see; faster than a striking snake) when his eyes finally refocused, and he actually looked at me. I sighed in relief; whatever things were in his head, he was in the present, and he could take care of them. He knew perfectly well how ‘not helpful’ this was.

Victor was a different matter. He stopped screaming – well, moaning – a bit ago, and now lay, staring with a fixed, frightening expression at the ruins that swallowed his brother. I knelt next to him and shook his shoulder (not too roughly, for fear of the lung). “Victor. We need you to focus.”

“I’m gonna shoot them. Every one.” His voice quavered, but only a little.

“There is no one out there to shoot, Victor,” I pointed at the rubble, barely visible in the flickering shadows. It was, however, visible enough to see that there was nothing there. No corridor left, no place to go. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a nightmarish hand protruding theatrically out of the debris.

“I’m gonna see if bro is alive!”

“There is nothing more you can do, Victor. You are here because you are expected to stay alive. If he’d wanted you dead,” I had to stop and swallow. “He would have told you to come out to him.”

“Shut up!” He closed his eyes, and his lips quivered as though he were about to start crying. When he opened his eyes again, they were belligerent and dry. “Shut up, shutup! I’m gonna dig him out!”

There appeared only one way to respond. I sighed slightly. “Be my guest.”

He made a valiant effort of it. He pushed himself up with a hand, and started rolling over. Behind my back, Lorenzo took in a breath, ready to berate either Victor or, more likely, myself, but I raised a hand to silence him. Victor turned around, and was struggling to get up. He wavered, on arms and knees, and then fainted.

I caught him before he did any more damage, and propped him, sitting up, against the wall. “He'll wake up.”

“What about him?” Lorenzo tilted his head slightly at Garent, who was lying as still as the dead.

I shook my head, giving the only response I could. “It's beyond any doctor now. It's simply been too long. A little more, and even magic will be no use to us. Speaking of… I gather this is not what we need. What do we do now?”

I think this was the first time I'd seen genuine defeat in the man. I have to say; it did not suit him at all. His shoulders slumped from the rigid, trained posture he normally held, and he looked forlorn, guilty, and afflicted by failure. “I... I don't know. I suppose Mister Kushan has just bought us the time to investigate all the writings in this room, but... I don't know if we'll find it.”

I hated the snakes even more.

“Even if we were inclined to starve to death, we don't have all the time in the world.” I gestured at Garent and Victor abruptly, frowning in thought. “The transcription said that they removed the gem, and so took the protection with them. We have removed the gem…” I left the sentence hanging, looking about the room, trying to see the protection, and its disappearance.

“Heinie called it the magen Anshar,” piped Victor in a reedy voice, on the verge of tears, but distant.

“Magen Anshar?” my mouth fell open slightly, and I turned to Lorenzo, the glimmer of an immense idea in my mind. “Where is the text?”

He was, apparently, thinking the same thing, because his hand was already rummaging in his pockets, and then he was extracting a set of crumpled, bloody, dirty notes. He straightened them out in the light of the torch, frowning at the scribbled German handwriting. “’And they took out the gem…’ Yes, yes, we have done that…’…and the Protection of Anshar goes with them.’”

“My God,” I said, staring at the altar. “Here it is. All this time, right there before our eyes.”

“What? What is it? I don't get it...” Victor complained plaintively.

“A mistranslation,” I breathed. “All this time, we've been flummoxed by a mistranslation.”

The pieces clicked together suddenly, and I stared frantically about the room. The protection of Anshar, we had thought, was an immaterial thing, tied to the gem. Not so; the magen was a material thing. “A shield,” I said quietly, “we have to find a literal shield.”

I wanted to scream and hit something. I might have, if I were not being kept busy by peering around the room searching for a shield with one eye, and trying to keep an eye on both my patients with the other. I was almost, almost, tempted to sweat that this mistake was the result of a deliberate misdirection, though I could not, in all honesty, disregard honest stupidity.

Magen, or its near Akkadian equivalent, the root for protection. Change a vowel here, add a preposition there, and the meaning changes accordingly, though it remains related, bound together through the Semitic root morpheme. Magen was the protection, the shield, and the person who protects... if we'd spotted the original right away, we would have been looking at the room in an entirely different manner. The gem, I realized then, had nothing to do with it.

“But where...” Victor choked as he started coughing up blood, “is this shield?”

“Wait a moment.” Lorenzo was staring at the odd, intricate stonework of the altar. I looked as well. Now that my brain knew what it was seeing, I could spot that the internal part of the stonework and its insane, Esherian pattern, was hollow. Perhaps large enough to insert a hand in. Lorenzo struggled to pick it up, but the heavy stone object resisted. He frowned, then inserted his hand into the swirl of stone, looping his fingers about what turned out to be an invisible handle.

Cracks appeared in what seemed to be a solid structure, and the collection of non-Euclidean pipes lifted off its base. An arc of electricity went from the shield to its base and, when it dissipated, the air still felt charged.

Lorenzo and Victor gasped.

By their gasps, I was clear to me that whatever had been wrong with magic before, was wrong with it no longer. It was obvious, too, that they were looking at something startling. Their mage sight was automatic, mine was not, and so I was still simply looking at a room. It was evident to me, however, that their sight was back and so, for a while, I considered it unnecessary to apply mine as well. In the end, though, my curiousity got the better of my sense. I scrunched my eyes and looked.

The room pulsed with magical energy – strands of light purple beyond purple traced through the carvings on the wall, floor, ceiling. The air crackled with power. The lines Victor Kushan had recognized seemed to direct all of this energy into the center of the room, into the altar. The entire thing was some kind of magnifying chamber...

For a few minutes, we were all so busy contemplating this spectacle, that we forgot something vitally important. Snapping out of my light-induced hypnosis, though, I turned on the source of my greatest worry. Together with everybody else.

“Uh oh.”

Garent was on his feet, completely surrounded by the magical light that emanated from the walls. His hands were held out in front of him, and in them, the Gem of Etnekhsa.

Whom would my characters not save? Ask rather, whom would they save save.

My main, Sofia, is an anti-hero(ine) at her most moral and charming, and she is not particularly inclined to practice mercifulness in the face of the Zig's revolving door policy. The woman's philosophy is that the only way a villain does not come back to haunt you is if you'd put two bullets through their head, and have seen them buried. If they are magic, the requirements escalate to an additional silver bullet in the chest, and a stake through the heart.

Due to her rather amoral morality, though, she tends to be lenient towards what she considers petty criminals; Family, Crey, not to mention Skulls, Hellions and Outcasts.

On the other hand, she feels it her... familial, I suppose, duty to oblige the 5th Column and Council at every possible opportunity. I could swear the woman actually keeps count to six million as she goes. A disturbing sort of vendetta.

Despite the fact that she became active during the first Rikti invasion, and since then has been severely wounded in the second invasion, she bears no grudges. Obviously, when an army of Rikti is headed her way, she won't wave a white flag at them, but she's never gone out of her way to murder people (things?) who'd gone to war just because they thought humans were invading their homeworld.

She tends to de-possess Circle mages without thinking twice. And she also has a real and personal thing fro people who burn, steal or misuse books.

We had a setup that was supposed to work in a similar way, on another server. It didn't. In my experience it very seldom does.

Chapter LXXXI
In Which Reinforcements Arrive and Reason Slithers Away

First order of business, I got Victor and Lorenzo bandaged. That proved easy, albeit bandage consuming. The bullet had gone through victor's leg, leaving a small, almost neat hole with no visible fragments or shards. Blood was flowing freely, and he would hurt quite a bit, but, all in all, I was inclined to dismiss the wound as non-lethal with proper treatment and antibiotics. Lorenzo's shoulder had suffered a graze.

I wadded up my remaining bandages, tempted, for a moment, to redo the bandage on my own arm. I reconsidered, dropping the alarmingly small rolls back into my bag; what were some claw marks to what we were likely to take? I was almost out.

Finally, I turned to examine the room.

It was surprisingly large considering the smallness of most spaces in the Akkadian world and – just as atypically – covered with writing; every centimeter and tiny space of wall was covered in the wedges and tent pegs that constituted Sumerian cuneiform. Between the unending columns of writing snaked lines of intricate design, almost impossible to follow. They coiled and uncoiled, creating, in certain spots, optical illusions that made one's head spin. I tried not to look at them too hard. Indeed, as Victor pointed out, the room looked as though Escher – or perhaps Riemann – was permitted to implement his favourite projects in three-dimensional space.

There were also signs of modern – future, I corrected myself – invasion in the room. Crates and casks and boxes were scattered everywhere, scraps of metal and pieces of rubber dotted the floor. The combination was rather jarring, and made the room seem, somehow, juxtaposed between a museum and a poorly tended construction site. Vic darted toward them happily, managing to skip even on one foot.

And it was cold. The chill air rose from the floor and emanated from the walls, permeating to the bone. I imagined that, even in the height of summer, this place would be chilly, buried as it was under tons of rock. I divested myself of my woolen Akkadian poncho and skirt, and remained shivering in my old clothes. They were still the same ones I'd worn in Luxembourg, and they were in an altogether sorry state... but at this point I lacked the energy to care.

I peeked at Garent, peeling the thermal blanket away from his face and peering down. He seemed, after a few checks, to be more or less stable. The IV fluid has run out, but I did not renew it; a small precaution to prevent the exacerbation of blood loss. He was still deeply unconscious. A short time more, and it wouldn’t matter.

Biting my lip against the torture I was inflicting on my ribcage, I dragged Garent inside the room, using the wool as a sort of better camp bed than the thin, thermal blanket could provide. I dropped him to one side of the circular--

“Dodecahedron!” Vic declared vehemently. “I counted!”

--Dodecahedron room, as much in the corner as one could possibly get, and positioned some of the 5th Column's barricades in front of him.

“What are these doing here?”

I pointed at a circle of heavy barricades which surrounded a seemingly innocuous line on the floor like a police cordon signifying 'do not trespass!' In the middle, beyond a second circle, stood a raised altar and, in the middle of it, was the gem of Etnekhsa.

The gem of Etnekhsa was an oversized, unpolished sapphire, which seemed opaque and cloudy. Jewelers would, no doubt, find it defective; it lacked entirely the reflective glow of normal gemstones, instead appearing to swallow the light of the room. Anyone who had seem such things before- and we all have – could recognize the gem as a magical item.

“I have no idea!” Said Victor happily, hopping over on one foot and peering at the cordon. “Heinie didn't say. Betcha it's a trap; you pick up the gem and spikes shoot out of the floor!” He looked excited at the prospect.

“Actually,” Lorenzo said thoughtfully, “a trap would make a great deal of sense, con--”

The corridor gave off a faint, still distant, echo. A sort of tremor which reverberated across the floor. I could tell, more by assistance of deduction than by actually hearing, the sounds of clanking, steel-toed boots, and the sound of weapons being carried.

The pitter-patter of tiny feet.

“Quickly.” I started moving crates and boxes into the doorway, forming a barricade. After a moment, Victor joined me as well. Lorenzo, still staring at the gem of Etnekhsa- in a way that was almost hungry – called to both of us, and pointed to the 5trh Column barricades. I eyed them appreciatively; they were something similar to police barricades, and seemed fairly sturdy, although too thin in order to serve as protection very log. Either way, though, we didn’t need them surrounding the gem – not if we were going to get to the gem – and we did need them by the door.

“Lorenzo, go grab the rifle from the soldier you killed. Victor,” I put my hand onto the stone doors, “come here and help me.”

Together, we pushed the heavy doors as far as they would go. They would no longer close, of course, courtesy of Victor’s amateur lock picking, but they could provide cover from the sides. That left only a rather narrow tunnel in which two people could squeeze with difficulty, and three would not be able to stand at all. A bottleneck.

As soon as Lorenzo hobbled back inside I reached for the rifle he carried. “Both of you, get back to work.” He frowned, but tossed me the rifle underhand. I caught it clumsily. “Give me your cane, too.”

“But who’s gonna shoot the bad guys?” Vic stared at the door unhappily, imagining the potential for mayhem in the corridor, no doubt.

I stripped off the magazines from the other rifles, and laid them out in front of me in a neat line. The footsteps were a roaring crescendo now, turning a corner into our corridor. I put down the smaller pistol that Lorenzo carried last in line, and knelt, facing the corridor. “King Hamlet’s shadow.”

“But—“ And then the place erupted with gunfire.

Believe me when I say this; you need absolutely no skill for such a volley of gunfire, except the ability to pull a trigger, and the desperation born out of a subconscious deathwish. The corridor filled with bullets, and I rapidly lost count of where they hit, and who was shooting. I could not even quite estimate how many soldiers there were. In a situation such as this, my inability to aim was secondary to the simple fact that if they wished to come at us, the 5th Column soldiers needed to bunch up in a small space.

Someone screamed, then someone else fell. A hail of bullets tore into a wooden box next to me, and the box shattered, spilling supplies of scrap metal and nails and bolts. Then a soldier – braver, or perhaps better armoured than the rest – ventured forward. I sent out a neat, almost too lucky burst of three shots in his direction, and he fell, feet, then chest punctured. I ducked below the barricade to reload, tossing the used up magazine away, and peeking behind me to check on Lorenzo and Victor’s progress.

They didn’t appear to be making any significant progress that I could see. Victor was providing Lorenzo with explanations, between bursts of deafening noise, and they were both frowning at the trap. I hurried them mentally. My arms were getting tired… I could no longer feel my wounded left, and I had no idea how long my broken ribcage would oblige me, crouched and leaning forward as I was.

I slapped another magazine in, and opened fire. Then another.

I was shooting in bursts of three, American army style, scorning the full automatic hail of bullets in favour of conservation. Some of my rounds found their marks. Most, sad to say, did not. There was a satisfactory pile of men on the floor, I saw through a crack in the barricade, but two more boxes around me shattered into wooden splinters, and one of the barricades had holes in it now. I was about halfway down my pile of ammunition, and I realized – something which I already knew, intellectually – that this was a doomed endeavour. There was simply too great an inequality; one of me, and too many of them.

I reloaded once more, and stood, leaning on the top of the barricade, pretending I was in a shooting range, alone in the room.

Some soldiers grew wise to the notion of frontal assault, and slowly made their way to shoot at an angle. I realized this when a bullet tore through my hair, ricocheting off the corner, and another blast shredded the stone, sending dust and tiny fragments of rock tumbling down. The barricade which hid Garent from view groaned and bent in. I cried out in distress, torn between the need to continue holding the doorway and dragging Garent out of harm’s way when I found Vic crouching next to me, holding one of the empty rifles and peering out at the oncoming army.

Victor being a significantly better shot than I, I dove out and behind, struggling with Garent’s heavy, inert form.

I took the three seconds necessary to catch my breath before returning to the line of fire in order to examine him again, and felt my face draw in concern. His pulse was thready even before but now, what with the shooting and the noise and the footsteps and the running, I couldn’t feel it at all. For all I knew, he was already dead, and I wouldn’t catch it. Finally, after an agonizing minutes, I could – or thought I could – detect a slight flutter of breath; it could just be wishful thinking on my part, but if so, there was little I could do about it, just at present.

I didn’t want to think of what that meant.

I turned back to the barricade, and saw Victor putting a fistful of lead into a soldier who was leaning over the top of the piled crates, looming and pointing his rifle down. The soldier screamed and tumbled back, not before Victor darted up and snared the rifle out of his hand. A second soldier was angling from the side. I grabbed Lorenzo’s swordstick from the floor, and leapt up, slashing across his hand. The blade found the place below the cuff, and blood started pouring out of the man’s palm. I stood back, ready to thrust again, this time with more lethal intent… The man fell back from the barricade, shouting in surprise. I blinked, confused, before realizing that the ground itself has trembled.

I whirled. Lorenzo, face set in determination, was standing a little ways into the trap circle. The circle itself was slowly lowering, exposing a sunken expanse that surrounded the altar with the gem completely. All about it, the circle was dotted with small, circular holes surrounding its perimeter on the outside as well as on the inside. The round holes led into darkness. Lorenzo stood, one foot raised, looking perplexed.

My body’d caught on long before my brain had an opportunity to react, and my feet, of their own accord, were scrambling back.

I suppose, looking back, that there was a measure of absolute cosmic justice in that moment. Until then, I could pretend to be the unshatterable rock of emotional stability upon which everyone else – deprived of their own customary crutches and confidence – could lean. I was almost to the point of projecting an aura of invincibility. Until then, I could convince myself that I had been brave for everybody else’s sake.

I screamed like a little girl.

((Posting for Diellan due to a corrupt account))

Chapter LXXX
In Which the Lady Fortuna Brings Blessings and Curses in Equal Amounts

Mister Kushan did, indeed, know how to reach the inner chambers of the temple. He had been taken there a handful of times by the late Herr Auer, personally, in order to assist with whatever strange experiments they were conducting there. It appeared that while the Fifth Column knew exactly what was going on in terms of the Gem and the Key, they hadn't a single clue how it worked. Victor was able to discover some of its inner workings, but by that point, we had made our presence felt and Herr Auer was afraid of disabling the anti-magic field.

"The whole chamber is filled with weird stuff," our young companion elucidated in his usual manner of exact, scientific speech. "Statues and pillars and random arches and... god knows what... criss-crossing about in weird patterns. It looked like Escher threw up all over the building plans."

"How... descriptive." I glanced at Madam Rabinovich, who did a good job of hiding what little mirth was able to overcome her worry and her pain. Victor, for his part, seemed incapable of feeling the gravity of any situation.

"But a lot of it looked like the leytap stuff that Ros uses, so I tried to whip together a device to follow the lines of power." A grimace crossed his face. “I didn’t get very far, though.”

I raised an eyebrow. “There is only so much that can be expected of you with such limited materials, Mister Kushan.”

"That’s not it!" He groaned. "I had to cannibalize a stereo speaker and cross-wire some parts from my goggles, and they even had some paper clips and chewing gum for me to use, but nothing."

Madam Rabinovich groaned. Her husband was a card carrying mad scientist, like young Victor, and such things were commonplace in her household. She could tell stories.

“I must have built three different variations,” he continued, “and none of them worked at all. It’s almost like the laws of physics are different here. Less malleable, anyway.”

“Or less mad,” the linguist murmured in thought.

“Mad?” Victor Kushan laughed. “We’re all ma-“

"How well guarded is the room?" I inquired, quickly changing the subject. We were in no mood for his silly antics.

"Plenty. A few out front, a bunch inside; it's more secure than HQ or the lab." He shrugged. "Real tough lookin' guys, too, not like the regular mooks. These ones don't even speak English."

Now it was my turn to groan. They would be the late Auer's handpicked soldiers, then, German or Austrian and significantly more professional than the ones we had managed to ambush or trick our way past so far.

"They're right up here, on the right..." He nodded to the upcoming fork in the hallway. "They know me, though." He brightened. "I've got an idea... Follow me and get your rifle ready."

He rounded the corner, his gun hanging behind his back on a leather strap. He started to say something, but froze. My breath caught, momentarily, as I assumed the worst, but he scratched his head and shrugged. “Huh. Nobody here…”

I followed, looking down the empty hallway to the large stone door at the end. Suspicious of a trap, I turned and walked a few steps down the other junctions of the intersection, listening carefully for any signs of human – or WarWolf – life. Satisfied, I walked with Mister Kushan to the end of the hall.

“Damn… No guards means no key.” Mister Kushan gave the stone barrier a playful – or frustrated – kick. It was an imposing obstacle, as solid as the rest of the blocks that made up the construction of the temple, but significantly more smooth. The late Herr Auer must have had it added recently. My young companion sat Mister Ward on the ground, taking care to lean him against the wall, before drawing a knife from a pouch and addressing the door in a more aggressive fashion. “Just give me a few to pry out these bricks and I can open the door manually.”

“Be my guest.” I took a step back and turned around, contenting myself to standing lookout while the engineering genius went about his work. Perhaps the guards had gone to investigate the shootings above and would not return? Or perhaps they had simply gone for a restroom break, feeling at ease after months of boredom? I dared not hope for the former, and the latter made me worried. Not nearly as worried, admittedly, as the realization that once the Fifth Column found Herr Auer’s body, they would immediately send men down here to intercept us.

“There we go…” I looked back over my shoulder as Victor Kushan pried out a large, irregularly shaped brick and reached his hand into the empty socket. He flexed, twisted his limb, and pulled. “There!” He shouted as the door creaked into motion. “That should- oops.”

“Oops?” Madam Rabinovich and I asked in unison, as I whirled on him. “Why oops?”

He gave a sheepish look and held out an inefficient looking stone gear with some of the teeth missing. “I kind of broke it. We won’t be able to close it aga-“

My head threatened to explode from the sound of sudden gunfire in an enclosed place while the individual stones exploded small shards of rock where the bullets landed. I instinctively span towards the source of the gunfire and dropped to a crouching position and felt a lance of pain shoot through my shoulder. Victor Kushan had a similar idea and side-by-side we returned fire at a pair of 5th Column soldiers who had appeared at the end of the hallway.

One fell, the other turned and ran down the side hallway.

I rose to my feet and gave chase, or at least some passing resemblance to one, as my wounded knee was making it particularly difficult to do any kind of thrilling heroics beyond a hobble. By the time I made it to the intersection, my adversary was gone and I could hear the faint cries of “Alarm!” echoing in the distance. I winced, both from pain and irritation, and returned (though not before putting an extra bullet into the head of the downed 5th Columnist).

“We don’t have very long,” I announced, heroicly hobbling my way down the hall. “He’ll be getting reinforcements.”

“Oh, that’s just-ow!” Victor Kushan tumbled and tried picking himself up off the floor a second time. His leg blossomed with a welt of blood. “Bastards shot me in the leg!”

“We do not have time for another surgery.” I turned to Madam Rabinovich, who had been shielding Mister Ward with her body and was just now rising to her feet. “A field dressing will have to do.”

Her eyes met mine and flickered to my shoulder. “What about you?”

I glanced at an open wound from where a bullet had grazed me, leaving a long gash that bled disproportionately to the gravity of the wound as compared to Misters Kushan and Ward. The adrenaline was doing a good job of blocking the pain, but I knew that would crash any moment, threatening to take me down with it.

“Painkillers and a bandage would be sufficient,” I explained. “It’s just a graze.”

She grudgingly accepted this, though I could tell from her eyes that she wanted to do more to take care of our injuries than time would allow. Again, I changed the subject, and helped Mister Kushan up to his feet – er, foot – and gestured to the now open door.

“Come along, Mister Kushan, I need you to show me everything.”

Chapter LXXVIII
In Which Procedure Is Abandoned, and Necessity Is the Mother of Invention

For a moment, I thought the strength and variety of emotions in one small place would make me faint.

I refused to acknowledge the possibility that the true perpetrators of the loss of consciousness would be my broken ribs, wounded arm, and severe exhaustion. I was too exhilarated, and thrilled, and frightened enough to feel the bottom drop out of my stomach and the nausea climb up in waves. I was shaking hard enough to feel my teeth clatter a little, and realized I was probably feeling the mixed reaction of hysteria and minor shock. My mind, not too steady just at present, was doing cartwheels between giddy exclamations of ‘he really does care’ and loud sounds of alarm.

“You impaled Auer?” Lorenzo sounded just a little stunned.

“And then I shot him,” I told him dryly. “I didn’t like his manner of argument. Should I apologize for depriving you of your enemy?”

“That… won’t be necessary, I think,” he gave me the sort of look that I, years of familiarity aside, could not decipher.

“Where is Garent?” I reiterated, frowning uneasily, staring up at him. He wouldn’t meet my eyes. “Lorenzo! What’s wrong?” Instead of answering, he turned me slightly sideways, until the light from outside the temple helped colour the entryway, rather than conceal it.

I thought I’d been scared before. That the beatings, the uncertainty, the casual brutality, and the killing were as far into the reaches of fear as one could possibly get. That I took my share of pain and managed it quite well, and combated the greatest of my fears quite admirably.

I was wrong.

“Oh God,” I groaned, sagging in despair and, at the same time, trying to pull myself together. “Help me.”

It took both Lorenzo and Victor, each holding me by an arm, to get me through the few meters necessary but I was kneeling at Garent’s head in less time than it took me to give the instructions. My bag lay open by his side, and I reached for it. I reached inside while Lorenzo provided a terse description of the battle, the wounds, and the few measures he himself managed to take.

I reached into my bag, withdrawing the flashlight by touch, then thrust it up into Victor’s hands. Under the beam of spilling light, I examined Garent again, confirming, on the whole, Lorenzo’s initial diagnosis.

He was pale as a sheet, and shivering, occasionally kneading his fingers in midair as though he were grasping for something in a gesture of anxiety typical of severe shock and blood loss. Worst of all, though, under the pressure bandages Lorenzo applied, the blood seepage continued, relentless and unstopping. It was slow, did not show the gush typical of arterial blood, and was restrained by the pressure, but so long as it continued, things would only get worse for Garent. He might bleed to death before anything more could be done. I wished I could simply deposit a wound like that in the reliable hands of several trauma surgeons and a large amount of machinery but, alas, the nearest hospital was five millennia distant. There was only a pack of very upset soldiers, several wounded, tired people, and me. I reached for my bag again, and it slipped out of my hand.

“What can I hand you, madam?” Lorenzo hovered anxiously.

I bared my teeth in a snarl, and flipped the bag over impatiently. ”Several litres of blood.”

He looked stricken, and I felt immediate remorse. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“Madam—‘ He was beginning to say something – whether apologetic or reprimanding, I was not certain – but I cut him off with a slight wave of my fingers. I reached out to touch his arm consolingly, but my hand was now not only crusted with Auer’s drying blood, but with Garent’s fresh one.

Instead, I repeated more firmly, “It isn’t your fault.”

He shook his head, and I grimaced. ”Saline solution, one of the bags there; I’m going to get an IV in.”

I wiped my grubby hands on my skirt (which wasn’t much better, to be honest, but at least it was dryer) and fiddled with the needle and tube with slippery fingers until I found a vein. Then I reached out, and shook Garent, very gently, by the shoulders. “Garent, talk to me.”

“I don’t think he can hear you, madam,” Lorenzo informed me quietly. “It takes too much effort on his part.”

“He’ll get over it,” I slapped Garent’s face lightly on each cheek. “If he goes into a coma, we lose. Garent! Come on, I need you to focus.”

“Sofia…” his voice was thready and shaky, the tone plaintive. “You’re always slapping me.”

“Too bad,” I said mercilessly, the expression of fierce triumph on my face concealed from him but not from the others. I pulled out my much abused thermal blanket and made to unfold it, a significant effort with a mostly immobilized left and a chest that threatened to burst into flames if I moved too much. Lorenzo helped me. “Talk to me. Tell me a story or something.”

“I don’t want to tell you a story,” Garent gasped petulantly. “I’m dying here.”

“So long as it doesn’t require too much of your attention,” I turned to Victor. “Run outside. Get me some large rocks from a sunny spot.”

Victor darted out, and Lorenzo and I spread the thin foil blanket to its full size. Together, we got Garent tilted up long enough to slide the blanket over his shoulders, and then wrap him in it entirely (leaving the seam of the midsection in easy reach for my perusal). At least, I commented to myself dryly, I didn’t have spinal damage to worry about.

“I can’t feel my hands… or my feet…” Garent maintained his litany in a soft, agitated voice. It was the shock talking, I knew, and being acquainted with Garent, we were already at stage three. ”Sofia! Why can’t I feel my hands? Did you cut them off?”

“It’s the blood loss, dummy,” I told him gently.

“So you got rid of them to save on blood. I get it.”

Victor returned promptly, dashing in, in his usual not-quite-balanced rapid stride, holding several large, pale rocks to his chest that radiated collected heat onto my face and hands even from afar. I pulled the thermal blanket back from Garent’s feet, and divested him of his battered shoes. They were rapidly on their way to turning into ribbons in any case, and I chided myself for buying poor quality. The stones went inside, and the blanket closed over the warmth, conserving it. Not a licensed technique, surely, but I was growing desperate.

I prodded at the wounds again (Garent whimpered, I paid no attention), biting my lip. The one closer to the thigh – I shuddered inwardly, seeing just how close it had cut to the artery – was actually clotting slowly. The bullet itself, and the heat of the impact, served as blocking mechanisms. I was willing to bet, if I were inclined to pull the wound open, that I would notice it blocking capillaries and larger blood vessels as it slammed into the bone. The other wound – wounds, I corrected myself – were a much greater problem; the bullet went into the abdominal wall and sliced through the internal part of the cavity not like a knife through butter, but like a sledgehammer on top of the butter packet.

Lorenzo murmured. “How does it look?” over Garent’s head. I gave his a half a frown and narrowed my eyes, miming a not-insignificant amount of pained anger. His face flickered with dismay, then locked into stone. Garent sighed mournfully, apparently still locked into Lorenzo’s thoughts rather than my own. Rats.

I pulled out a pair of gloves with which I was not planning to bother, and some antiseptic sterile wipes, followed by hardened cotton balls, rolled into tampons, and a small scalpel. Strictly non-regulation, definitely never touched or used. Most likely it was not even there, and everything that follows is a simple figment of your and my imaginations. Luckily for me that it was. Because if it had been real, I would have had to use my left hand.

I gritted my teeth, and pulled the topmost bandage back as far as I dared without losing all benefit of the pressure with my left. My ribs complained loudly, and my left arm decided to go on strike. I ignored them (knowing that my body’s union would demand concessions later) and wished I could afford to simply knock Garent out with some morphine.

Actually, I wished I wouldn’t be performing a maneuver I’d only seen once. In a book.

Garent opened a bleary eye, and pretended to stare at the knife warily. “You don’t have a milk carton instead, do you?”

I swallowed a lump in my throat made of bile and blood and something salty. ”Sorry, milk cartons haven’t been invented yet.”

“I think you… lose your always-prepared badge.” He swallowed, shivering and added very softly. “I’m going to die, aren’t I?”

“You aren’t dead yet,” I said harshly, and lifted my head to catch Lorenzo’s eye. “Hold him.”

I only needed an incision a few millimeters long on each side. The blade in my hand slid in easily, creating a shallow nick hat filled with more blood immediately. It was, admittedly, a foolish sort of desperate measure that gets people killed, but that’s exactly why it’s a desperate measure. I pulled the flaps open cautiously with my left, and probed down gently. Now I could feel the torn tissues as much as see them. Dropping the scalpel, I clamped down on some of the larger, more visible bloodpaths delicately, and jammed a tampon roughly enough to make me wince. Then it was merely a matter of wrapping everything up again, as tightly as I could, and praying a lot. Garent, much to my and Lorenzo’s communal relief, passed out.

“It’s done.” I allowed my left to drop, biting my lips against the shafts of agony. Lorenzo lifted hands that were practically white from Garent’s shoulders. "Don't try this at home, children."

“Whew,” Victor, who was performing a sort of awkward dance between horrified fascination and the wish not to look, dropped the flashlight and stared at my bloodied hands and Garent’s bloodless face alternatively. “Is he gonna be okay now?”

“Are you joking?!” I gulped down on the recurring threads of hysteria, and switched out the empty IV bag with trembling fingers. “It’s a stopgap. It’s practically certifiably insane. If anybody finds out, I’ll get crucified.”

Lorenzo nodded slowly. “We must get to the gem.”

“If I could teleport there,” I said dryly. “I would in a heartbeat. It’s still our only chance.”

“Unfortunately, we have an entire temple to search for it, though we can make some educated guesses as to where it might be.”

“No, we don’t,” I said flatly, envisioning he insane race against time involved in looking through every nook, chamber and cranny of this blasted ziggurat. Including the subterranean levels, the middle floors, and the top. “Victor knows where it is.”

Lorenzo’s eyebrows lifted. “He is proving to be an invaluable asset. Soon I might even remember he is there.”

I snorted, and Victor writhed in discomfort. “But I wanna go help Ros!”

‘You can’t.”

“I can help him fight!” He glowered at me, raising his makeshift – crudimentary, I corrected myself – weapon up as demonstration.

“You can,” I informed him in a tone that I very seldom pulled out of my sleeve, and which brooked no argument, “but you won’t.” Both men looked at me, surprised each for his own different reasons. Victor opened his mouth to protest, and I silenced him with a glare. “What you will do is pick Garent up, and help us find the gem.”

Victor’s spirit was sufficiently undaunted for one more protest. “But Ros—“

“Rostov will be just as better off if we get to the gem, Victor, and you are the only one in any shape to bring Garent along.” I struggled to my feet, demonstrating the point aptly, supported by the wall. Lorenzo, grimacing, accepted my hand to get up after retrieving his cane. Victor leaned down dubiously, and picked Garent up. “And if you so much as jostle him wrong” I added gently, “I will have your ears for breakfast.”

I don’t know why he took a step back.

I know quite a few people who dual-box RP in order to let two of "their" characters meet. Mostly these people don't dual-box on teams. it takes too much effort.

Seems liek she might fit in with us. Which was the point of the question. Look the description up in my signature link.

Does Lasciel also share Butcher's character's personality?

The chest slider hurt this (female) player. Physically.

On a different note, I don't think my character - very much female - gets talked to because she is female. Rather, she gets talked to because she is ever the only dressed female in a room.

Chapter LXXV
In Which Some Sharp Truths Are Brought to Bear

The hammer of the pistol clicked hollowly on an empty chamber.

I tried again with, you may imagine, entirely identical results. Unharmed and completely complacent, Auer chuckled.

“I am not an idiot, Frau Rabinovich. You’re very ingenious,” he made a step toward me and grabbed the arm in which I held the pistol, “but I am hardly the sort of person not to take precautions. The magazine is quite empty.”

He squeezed and I choked out a small gasp of pain. The gun clattered to the floor. “In fact,” Auer rummaged with his other hand in a pocket, coming out with a full magazine and a bullet box, “I do have the ammunition right here, just for such circumstances.”

“It was a good attempt, madam,” he smiled at me. “But, alas, not good enough.”

“Then,” I said through clenched teeth, hammering the pain into my voice, “we must do with what we have.”

The umbrella, still clutched in my left, came up through the air. Then it arced to land on his stomach. I felt a tearing, burning pain in my arm as the wounds from earlier came open with an agonizing jolt, and the bandage became soaked with blood. I only noticed the detail in passing.

Auer, frantic with an understanding that was not quite complete, was pushing against my arm, trying to drive me back. I, on my end, pressed forward. The umbrella tip was now resting on Auer’s belly. It felt in my hands like the blade of a rapier. I let the tension in my right hand slacken, for just a second, and allowed Auer to push me back. The tension in his hand, too, slacked in reaction. He opened his mouth, beginning to say something.

I lunged with my arm at almost full extension, throwing my entire weight against the handle of the umbrella.

The spokes of the umbrella were, of course, light aluminium. But the handle was a good, wooden one, and the shaft of the umbrella, from base to tip, was a slender, almost needle-sharp cylindrical length of steel. I had made a significant number of enemies in my life, and though I was crippled and weak, I had no desire to meet them unarmed. I carried a light, strong poniard, wrapped in bits of useful material and fitted with a curved grip.

The steel tip hesitated momentarily against the resistance of cloth and skin, then drove inward. I could feel, under my arm, the tension as skin stretched and punctured, and the parting of fatty tissues and muscle. Blood welled, then spurted as the pressure increased. Auer, mouth open wide, reached out to clutch at his stomach. He opened and closed his mouth several times, but there was no breath in him to scream. The box of bullets and the magazine clattered to the floor. It was the only sound except for my laboured breathing, and the tearing, almost hypersonic moan Auer emitted. I pressed on, and he grasped the shaft of the umbrella with trembling hands, sliding down to the floor, with me following suit.

There was warm blood trickling down my face and splotches besmirched the front of my ridiculous Akkadian poncho. I didn’t have a hand to spare to wipe them. Auer and I, both faces set in a rictus of agony and effort, were struggling for control of the weapon embedded in Auer’s gut.

Let me tell you something; stabbing a person with an umbrella is devilishly hard. The human skin is resistance, supple and elastic. Penetrating it even with a single thrust is like breaking through a tough plastic sheet. Inside, everything is built to obstruct the most direct path to a person’s vitals, and so the damage I was doing was slow and non-lethal. I had both hands on the umbrella now, leaning down hard while Auer’s hands, with desperate strength, clawed for his freedom. He grabbed my fingers and I could practically hear one of them snap as he yanked a hand free.

There was a sudden rush of sounds sweeping through the flimsy door. A rattle of several automatic weapons, then the thunderclap of grenades.

Both Auer and I slackened our grips on the umbrella. I regained my equilibrium first, ad drove the spike upwards, jarring it against Auer’s ribcage with a rattling of teeth. Finally, he had found enough air in his lungs to scream with the pain. The cry was loud enough to overcome the chaos outside and, anyhow, the door was already bursting open on its own. One of the soldiers on guard – the soldier with the unpleasant leer and foolish mien – appeared in the doorway, a concerned look on his face.

“Sir, there’s some guy who’s shooting the heads off of everybody an’ their dog, sir! What are we gonna— Sir?” He did a double take as he finally noticed the prone Auer and me, leaning over him, my face grim. He groped for his rifle.

I grabbed the magazine and the gun from the floor, and jammed the one into the other. Then I rose onto a knee and shot him, smoothly, in the torso. One of the bullets hit his armoured shoulder and he too, screamed in pain. The second took him in the chest with a crunch of ribs. I imagined that I could almost hear the air whistle out of his punctured lung. He bubbled as he fell. I shot him once more, for comfort.

When I turned back to Auer, he was struggling to sit up, pulling at the umbrella protruding grotesquely from his chest. I whirled on him, feeling the panic- and perhaps a certain amount of bile – rise up in my throat, and threw my weight again onto the handle. The wood creaked under the strain and Auer screamed once more.

From outside, and along the corridors, gunfire exploded in a cloud of echoes. Rostov! I suddenly realized. It had to have been Rostov, making his last – or one before last, or at least one in a series – stand. That also meant my time was far, far beyond short.

Auer lay on the floor, panting, his breathing laboured and gurgling (the diaphragm must have been hit) clutching with numb fingers at the steel shaft still protruding out of his abdominal cavity. Pain lines made him look profoundly old. I dropped down heavily, and sat by his head, staring at him while he led.

After a minute or so, his eyes fluttered open and swiveled to stare at me.

“I am sorry, Herr Auer. We had a fascinating discussion but, alas, I have to go. Time is short.”

“Ah… Frau Rabinovich. It was a… pleasant acquaintance…” Auer mumbled, voice unsteady, but still managed a faint smile. I had to give the man at least the ability to die with grace. “How sad that you lied to me. Lied to a dying man…”

I stared at him, looking at the haggard face, which was now devoid of the light of fanaticism, and was tired of lying. Or maybe it is simply difficult to lie in front of a mirror. “Yes,” I said gently, lifting his head to my knee, ”I have.”

Then I pressed the muzzle of Auer’s pistol to the back of Auer’s head, and pulled the trigger one more time.

I peered shakily up and down the corridor leading to Auer’s office. To my astonishment, it was quite empty. Apparently, most of the guards decided to go see what could be done about Rostov. The guard who walked into Auer’s room and to his doom, I recalled, had come for instructions; the rest must have been waiting for such, then. Even if they didn’t hear the gunshots from the office in the tumult – a circumstance I couldn’t count on – they would send someone to ask for Auer’s directions if such failed to arrive.

They would, of course, see the body and know an enemy was on the loose. I wiped my bloody hands on my skirt distastefully, and hobbled as fast as I could along the corridor. Since the opening I recall seeing was on the eastern wall of the temple, and I was somewhere towards the middle, I tried to get my bearings and shamble in at least the approximately right direction.

The corridor split, and I hesitated, picking a branch and skulking along it , much too focused on listening for pursuit or footsteps to look ahead, and was unpleasantly surprised by the dead end into which the passage turned. I had to retrace my steps, and take the alternate turn.

The guards pounced me from behind the wall before I could even attempt to draw my gun.

The first one slammed a fist into my shoulder, and the hit was sufficient to send me staggering off into the nearest wall. If we were in a film, my outline would have been drawn on the wall. Sadly, perhaps, this was not a film, nor was the wall a chalk one. I bounced off the stone and fell to the floor. Again.

“I guess the boss is dead now,” said a voice over my head. “Wonder how that happened. I also guess he doesn't need to keep you as a pet anymore, so I also guess we can do what we want.”

“Maybe we can have some fun with her,” someone else offered, and yet another boot nudged my ribs. I grabbed it before it could retreat – since it was being slow and playful – and yanked. There was a surprised exclamation and a thump. I smiled satisfaction.

“You didn' get enough with them from town you want to try for this ugly weasel?” The first voice's inquiry was sarcastic. “I say we kill her now.”

“Much obliged,” said I, and sprang into action.

All right; limped into action while trying to pick myself off the floor. It wasn’t much of one, but I did give them the best fight I could, now that I no longer had to restrain myself. The gun I carried had tumbled out of my hand with the first blow, and in the melee it was impossible to pick it up, though I wished I could.

I was growing desperate. My part in the plan was key, and I might never be able to fulfill it, now. At least, I supposed, Auer – the organizing, driving force behind the great plan, as well as the little details – would be dead. Lorenzo and Rostov with a bit of help from Garent should have no trouble taking down the rest of the disorganized, not terribly bright soldiers. I had, after all, known what I was going to.

I kneed a soldier in the gut – a lucky hit, the man doubled over, swearing and crying out – and then a firm hand yanked at my hair; down, down, down, till I felt as though every strand would tear out of my scalp. I dropped to the floor, screaming more in anger than in agony.

Then things started happening too fast. There was just an overwhelming feeling of pain, and a crunch in my chest after a foot – the seven or eight today – found its mark in my ribs. Then I’m afraid I blacked out, more or less yearning to die already.

Chapter LXXIV
In Which Fanatics are Picturesque

“You knew?” Through the red haze, I heard my own voice speak softly. Too softly. It was a whisper, almost a hiss. I fought for control through blistering anger and surging hate, and prayed that Auer’s ability to figure me out had not gone that far yet.

“Oh, I anticipated, after a fashion,” said Auer blithely, eyes glinting amusement. “Not in detail, of course, otherwise I would not have brought poor Krueger.”

“Your Warwolf.” I gained control of my voice with a rather startling amount of difficulty, until it returned to something close to its usual timbre. Still it had an edge that I could not entirely remove. “Why, what is wrong with him?”

“The field leaves him shape-locked, unable to transform. I am afraid his mind is going.” Perhaps for the first time I detected a note of genuine feeling in the cultured, carefully voice. Everything about the man had been a show but he, too, had his weaknesses – or were they strengths? – of genuine emotion. It was ironic that even in weakness we were each other’s mirror image. The Warwolf clearly was his friend.

“I see.”

“I refused to take with me any of the nonsense our organization occasionally plays around with; none of these alien freaks, or manufactured vampires,” Auer’s lip drooped slightly in his disdain. “I had no notion of how they would react to the absence of all interference from above – but a Warwolf?”

I thought furiously, staring up at the elderly, somewhat haggard face. My time was running out. Soon, Lorenzo and Rostov – and Garent – would be approaching. I couldn’t tell just how soon; I had no watch on me, and my sense of time, such as it was, had been demolished by the repetitive beatings. So long as I was sitting here, in Auer’s little office, the passage into the temple would remain unopened.

On the other hand, such insight as I was gaining was significant. Furthermore, Auer’s face was growing somewhat abstracted as he spoke. His attention wandered from me, his desk and the pistol upon his desk occasionally in fits of scholarly contemplation. I was prone to such fits myself, but I was desperate. I decided to keep him talking, make suitable noises of encouragement, and wait.

“Unfortunately, in a way, this device has proven even more useful than even I anticipated,” Auer said offhandedly. “And, of course, the place and time provided a suitable preliminary experiment.”

“To observe the reactions and extrapolate for modern-day Earth,” I supplied the obvious conclusion. “But the radius of the action is surely limited…?”

“Oh, I have no doubt. But how limited? As small as a city; as wide as a country? Could I cover Germany with it? Or just your state of Rhode Island?”

I shivered, concealing the grimace my face was shifting into without volition under a mask of curious composure. It was difficult. I could help seeing Garent, the way he had been the first day, when the shock of events had not yet settled in, and his inherent stoicism and good common sense had not yet taken over. The look of terror and helplessness, and then of tired, depressed loneliness.

In the end, our lives didn’t matter. We had to stop this man. We had to stop him from wreaking havoc on history, and from manipulating the present to suit his dreams.

The situation was more ironic than Auer could possibly grasp.

“You see, Frau Rabinovich. The situation is turning distinctly to my advantage. If I did not think it too callous, I would, perhaps, point out to you that it is worthwhile for you to bet on the winning horse.”

“I dislike horseracing on principle,” I couldn’t altogether keep the distaste out of my voice.

‘Yet you clearly threw in your lot with Mondavi. I see no substantial difference aside from matters of personal loyalty, and, unlike your friend, I do not have a record of betraying allies.”

“Except in this specific case,” I pointed out.

“I consider it a measure for measure.”

“Why?” I felt my eyebrow shoot up and did not bother suppressing an ironic smile. “Because well over half a century ago, he had an idea vaguely reminiscent in mechanics of your own? Tempora mutantis, Herr Auer. And we, as they say, change with them.”

“Do we?” He rose abruptly, thrusting the chair behind his back with a forceful gesture. “Or are we, in essence, always the same? When Sargon swept across the Sumerian empire with conquest and the wrath of the gods at his back, bearing a new world order in his clutches, was he the last savage, the first civilized man, or merely the same as everybody else?”

He bore down on the shabby table with the open palms of his hands and the flimsy wood creaked menacingly under his weight. Involuntarily, I drew back from the nearing, red face, and the eyes so inconveniently lit with the fire of fanatical philosophy. I identified too much Nietzsche in the man’s diet. It told in the florid, overweight style, and combustive eruptions. “We never change as a species, madam. Why should we change as individuals?”

“At the least, when Lorenzo was pulling his personal stunt he wasn’t doing it for the benefit of an organization.”

“Does that make a difference? Your dear friend,” Auer’s tone dripped with enough sarcasm to drown the room, “was going on his holy war with a holocaust in mind. I don’t want a holocaust. Far from it…”

“So you’ve advanced considerably,” I parried dryly and saw him flush.

He threw up his hands, and started pacing, round and round the table and my chair, pausing at dramatic intervals.

“Everything you dislike so much in me,” Auer was saying, his voice shifting to match the cadence of his footsteps, “exists in the people you associate with, in greater quantities. After all, what is the difference between us? We both, madam, wanted a utopia to be shaped in our own image. Your friend wanted perfect liberation from the supernatural- ever the Enlightenment man – and I want liberation from the political – ever the nationalist.”

I watched the gun.

It sat there, alone, unattended, and incredibly inviting. Auer’s lecture was, in its own way, fascinating, if only in the sheer amount of logical fallacies and temerity it exhibited, but I was, let us say frankly, too well-read to swallow up so many villain clichés. Not to mention I was on a time limit.

I was just a little too far. The gun was almost within easy reach, but not quite. To get to it, I would have to stretch over the gap between my chair and the table, lean forward and take the pistol from where it lay. A matter of a few seconds to be sure, but Auer was not as slow as all that and, old and arthritic though he was, he was still stronger than I. He’d get the weapon first. Or, if not, he would simply clobber me over the head with something before I could aim and fire. In order to reach the gun easily, I would have to stand. And to stand without undue notice, I would have to appear angry.

“We both,” Auer continued his oration almost entirely carried away by his own logic, “realize that the key, ah-hah, to everything, is magic. Magic rules the world these days! These who have no part in it are forever deficient… Unlike Mondavi, I have no lifetime to spare to acquire such talents as he has for myself. So I have to be a little more direct and creative.”

I shot to my feet. Anger wouldn’t be difficult at all. At all.

“At least Lorenzo had the courtesy, even at his worst, to realize that what he did was evil. You, Herr Auer, I half-growled into his face, surprised myself by my own sincerity, “are a romantic of the worst sort; one who doesn’t realize how impeded his perception is by romanticism. He may very well have been a well-intentioned extremist with a knack for horrifying ends justify the means policies, but you… you aren’t even that. Your good intentions are an absolute fraud, that’s why you find it so necessary to be convincing, and command a goon squad.”

I fired off the tirade in one breath. Auer’s face worked furiously as I held his eyes and he bared his teeth in an expression of distinct hatred. He was working himself into a high fury, and he was staring daggers at me, his gaze unblinking.

That was the whole point.

“Your plans are dangerous,” I told him as my hand slid down slightly, grasping the umbrella next to my chair by the middle. Slowly, as my mouth was spitting words, I drew it up with trembling fingers, and slid it gently across the tabletop, the handle of my umbrella lining up with the body of the pistol. “But far more dangerous is your blindness to how frightening a monster you really are. At least I, and mine, are sufficiently self-aware to recognize what sort of people we are, deep inside. If Lorenzo were here, he would kill you without hesitation, though shooting you is like shooting a mirror.”

I pulled, and the pistol slid across the tabletop with a rattle. Auer whirled, gaping, as I reached as fast as I could and held the pistol up, I pointed the weapon directly at him.

“And so will I. I never was superstitious about mirrors.”

I braced, and pulled the trigger, aiming directly at Auer’s chest.

Приветствуем Вас,

Nice pictures.

Is there a specific reason for your Russian inclinations? Inquiring minds want to know.

Chapter LXXIII
In Which A Veneer of Civilization Is Conjured

The way to Auer’s office had been eventless. There were some shouts and insults from passing soldiers, of course, and from time to time, someone tried to trip me. Occasionally they also succeeded. But, really, there was nothing remarkable.

I hardly paid attention. I was too busy trying to think and memorizing my path through the convoluted, labyrinthine corridors of the temple. Mostly, I was trying to prevent my brain from dissolving into gray sludge. I was, I’m afraid, succeeding only mildly. With what little remained of my attention that had not been dragged down under layers of sleeplessness, tiredness and pain, I focused on smoothing out the traces of pain from my face. In this, I succeeded a little better, though I regretted my inability to raise an arm and wipe off the tracks of involuntary tears.

The office itself was downright Spartan, due to the presence of makeshift furniture and a rather large amount of bare stone. Auer didn’t exactly strike me as a bare bones sort of person, but rather the mahogany desk and priceless paintings type, but I suppose one has to change one’s tastes somewhat to compensate for a period in which antiques weren’t invented yet, much less prices.

Auer got there before I did. Blast. I had no time to look the office over, even if only by sight, before I was being observed. Now all I could do was cast a rapid, covert glance, and discover no obvious back doors, convenient windows or handily placed weapons in plain sight.

At least I could face him composed.

“Frau Rabinovich, I understand from Victor that I can expect a modicum of civilized behaviour from you.” Auer sat behind his overturned-crate desk, sliding open a sort of shelf – it was not a drawer and sat on creaking, rigid wooden rails – stacked with paper and a handgun. I grimaced with a measure of distaste. It was obvious that, simply being under Auer's influence, Victor would talk, not even realizing how much he tells Auer with the smallest details. Nevertheless, it was unpleasant, being anticipated.

“Barring additional scratches up my arm,” I looked at him coolly, not permitting the chagrin to show. I knew about him less than he knew about me; it rankled.

“Frankly, madam, my men are boors,” I shivered, hearing that honorific from his mouth. It was disconcerting, also, how similar to Lorenzo he was. The physically disparate men radiated the same aura of blithe confidence in their own intelligence, distant cool and fierce romanticism veiled thinly by a layer of manners. “But you and I are, by all accounts, well-educated people, and such things are beneath us.”

“Indeed,” I murmured silkily. “We both kill people with all due and proper form. “

There was a flash of momentary, rapidly suppressed anger that disappeared amid amused coughing, but I saw it nonetheless, like a jolt of electricity across the room.

The resemblance shattered like a soap bubble, disappearing and taking behind it the disorientation and discomfort. I suppressed a grim sort of glee – or perhaps relief – at his little slip-up. Auer was not us after all; people like him might claim kinship – as he already did – with the philosophy of necessity, but they would not acknowledge the evil they did. That made them different, that made them fanatical, and that made them dangerous.

All he said, however, was, “have a seat.”

I did, if only because the alternative was splaying on the floor in a most undignified manner. I perched on a chair made of an overturned crate, and decided to forego the insolence of crossing my legs at the ankle or something. Auer glanced at me with a brief, flickering assessment, and I suddenly had a vision of Victor’s dirty boots resting on Auer’s neatly stacked papers.

“Due procedure has much to recommend for itself,” Auer said, his tone studiously amused. I raised an eyebrow slightly, and rested my hands, palms down, on the tabletop. "Regardless of opinions and biases, I can assure you that I have done my utmost in ensuring the preservation of civilized behavior. My men are, perhaps, enthusiastic in their duties, but one must forgive them the stress inherent to the task, at hand. You, yourself, must be feeling the weight of the long months out of your proper time?"

I smiled at him, and lied through my teeth. “I enjoy the rustic.”

“But surely, the lack of magic,” he waved a hand in an expansive gesture, encompassing the room and the world beyond it. “Mondavi, as a mage, could not find this place comfortable, though this is not the case for you. Even my soldiers--” The door opened quietly, and a soldier came in carrying a large basin of water and a cloth. Auer held up his hand, forestalling any response that I was about to make. A moment of nicely calculated candour, I thought dourly.

The soldier disposed of the materials, and spent a moment glaring at me before Auer, timing his good cop persona with a little bit of threat, waved him off.

“Be my guest, please,” he gestured to the basin and cloth like a good host. “I would follow this with drinks, perhaps some refreshment, but, as you see, the environment precludes. As I was saying; even my own soldiers are quite uncomfortable with this mundane world.”

“I’ve never been uncomfortable with the mundane world.” I reached for the water and cloth eagerly. “It’s the non-mundane one that bothers me. All these seemingly random mana flows…”

“You can see them?” His eyebrows flew up in surprise; either a moment of genuinely excellent acting, or genuine astonishment.

“Anyone can, if they put a mind to it.” I wrung the cloth out, and started applying it to the long gashes on my arm. They were surprisingly deep towards the middle, and could use some stitches. I busied myself for a moment with the best way to clean out a wound in front of the examining eyes of a hostile presence without making a fool of myself. The pain in my arm had much to say for itself; I focused upon trying to calculate the benefits of maintaining a stony façade versus the benefits of showily wincing. “I generally find it immensely distracting, and don’t.”

“Well, if you would not concede the point of magic to me,” Auer said expansively, “”I would appeal to the medic and point out the abundance of disease!”

I grimaced in forced agreement. “This place is a pest-hole.”

“There, you see!” Auer looked excited and gratified. I’d finally given him the end of a thread to pull, and he was ready to yank on it will all his power. “We see eye to eye in this. And there is much I could offer you.” He leaned forward on his rickety tabletop, and the flimsy wood of the crate groaned under his significant weight. “You understand, I’m sure, that I need trained personnel, and that I am willing to make arrangements for them.”

“Unless your soldiers kill them in a moment of emotionality.”

“Victor Kushan is a testimony – a living testimony, I note! – that my men can do better. It is in their own interest to procure a medic, just as it is in your interest to procure a harbor, in these very dangerous times.”

I blinked in almost palpable shock, expecting any tactic but this. Surely the man could not believe… “Do you know what you’re asking?”

“For you to do what is clearly conscionable to you. Young Victor says you are a dedicated medic, and I would simply give you the opportunity to continue serving as one. Well protected. Safe. Why not?”

I smiled mildly. “You are an anti-Semite, Herr Auer.’

“Much less than you think and no more so than most. Really, madam, we both know that all Europeans are little anti-Semites. I hold no personal dislike, of course. As for the rest, even your friend, Mondavi… I am astounded that a man of his background would find himself in such company.“

I had to smile at that, a genuine emotion. “I’m as shocked as you are.”

"Perhaps he makes an exception for so unique an individual. And so, I assure you, can I." Auer's flattery was, at the least, not unctuous. I wondered he treated Victor the way. He must have done, though surely with the young man he must have been more overt. "Personally, I prefer to take nationalism to its positives, rather than observe its negatives. Surely, Frau Rabinovich, after working with Mondavi you cannot find work with me distasteful."

"What do you mean?" I rested my injured hand on the table, allowing some sensation to return, and grasped the head of my umbrella gently with the right.

"Surely, as close as Victor implies you are, you know of his past!"

"Victor," I said levelly, and tried not to lick my lips, "implies too much." What had the young man told Auer? What had he let slip through his silences? I was reacting, rather than acting, and that did not thrill me. I had a goal to accomplish. I should feign utter cooperation… no, surely Auer is not that stupid.

“Assuage my curiousity, then. Are you involved with Mondavi or did he shanghai you into lending him your expertise?”

“Lorenzo,” I said through clenched teeth, “is a fascinating personality with an equally fascinating history. I beg you, Mr. Auer, do treat me like an adult. Your implications of his inherent evilness bore me to tears.”

He grimaced. “I suppose it was worth a try. Consider the pragmatic aspects, then. Unlike our much esteemed friend,” the sneer in his voice was slight, but obvious, “I have prepared for the possibility that this reality may be considerably more distressful than you anticipated. As a result, I brought medications with me that rely on nothing more than human knowledge and ability. No supersciece. No magic.”

I gaped at him foolishly, and felt the world turn red.

Chapter LXXII
In Which The Way Into The Darkness Is Paved With Good Intentions

At first, while the soldiers and the Warwolf dragged me through the streets, things did not seem half-bad. I was hanging by the scruff of my torn shirt with my feet occasionally scraping the ground, and occasionally dangling several centimeters above it, in the grip of the large, clawed paw. If not for the choking and chafing of my collar, I would have found this method of transportation almost comfortable, as my feet by that point were so sore and bloated as to make walking at the rapid tempo the soldiers set almost completely impossible.

Of course, in actuality, the chafing and choking didn’t help. Nor did the soldiers’ occasional laughter. I loathe being laughed at.

Fifteen minutes later – indicative of the city’s surprisingly small size, given its bustling nature – we were traversing the square in front of the temple doors. The Warwolf dropped me, and I stood shakily, trembling and trying not to fall, the blood dripping from my arm onto the dirt. I glanced down my nose at my arm, mildly concerned. The bleeding was slowing down some, to a slow seepage, but I had better put pressure on these cuts, or at least find some cold water to constrict the blood vessels.

Thus deposited, I stood in front of the vast doors, staring blindly into the dim interior within. There were shapes moving inside, which I could not quite make out, and rustling noises of boots on stone.

“I’m gonna report.” The senior, sensible soldier divested himself of his rifle in front of the tall, swinging doors, and extracted the magazine, rapidly checking the rifle for safety before leaning it on the wall. Evidently, strolling inside with rifles, at last unannounced was not encouraged. “Wait here.”

He strode off into the darkness of the temple rapidly, leaving me with his younger comrade and the Warwolf. The latter crouched on his haunches, claws hanging limply between his knees, staring off into the distance, occasionally twitching an ear in my direction. He looked almost forlorn, and very much preoccupied, but I had no illusions that if I were to move from my place or attempt to run – a feat I couldn’t have achieved even if I were inclined – he would pursue, and subdue me in an instant.

The other soldier, casting a slightly uneasy (or so I liked to imagine) glance at the Warwolf, unslung his own rifle, and advanced into the temple, baring his teeth at me in a snarl. “Just try to run. I’ll die to see it… And so will you.”

I merely shrugged in return, tilting my head in slight acknowledgment. Bravado and mouthing off, I had long since decided, were for people who felt out of their depth. Defiant speeches were for those who were on the brink of losing. I made it a point to stand straight, and look the soldier in the face, instead, with the slight smile of an accommodating, slightly irritated guest. I made it a point, also, not to touch my wounded, throbbing arm. The soldier growled at me again through pursed lips and departed.

I remained, bracing myself for a prolonged wait on my unsteady feet.

I didn’t have long to wait until my escort showed up in the doorway. It was not the older soldier who’d taken me here, nor was it his young partner. This one had a shack of excruciatingly blond hair, and looked sunburnt like a lobster. He grabbed me by the arm – my right, not my bleeding left – and dragged me along. I followed, my heels leaving an artistic burrow in the dust, till I was inside the cool shade of the stone passages of the ziggurat.

Then I saw the others. A wide semicircle of eyes, looking at me from the shadows, the black uniforms only distinguishable by the sleekness and gloss, standing out against the matte walls. I did not, quite, manage to stop myself from heaving a heavy sigh at the obvious, oncoming episode.

Teeth gleaned maliciously in the darkness, and the room exploded.

Beatings are amazingly boring, to tell you the truth. The perpetrators and the victims alike quite lack originality, and seem to repeat the same actions over and over again. Boots are popular, as are blows to the face and head. Kidneys enjoy a sort of prestige and, in the case of both genders, clichés aside, kicks aimed somewhat below the kidneys prove satisfactory as well.

On the side of the victim, there is much cowering, burrowing in one’s hands, and cringing. Sometimes the more creative institute attempts to dodge or return the favour as best they can. Nails seem to be a favoured weapon, as well as fists – resulting in bloody knuckles and nothing more – and sometimes items in one’s hands. I was much too slow and clumsy to use my umbrella, though the steel frame served occasionally as a convenient blocking mechanism. I had to remind myself, firmly and unequivocally, not to attempt to tear out the soldiers’ eyeballs, or present them with a gender-specific experience they would not forget.

More than anything, I reminded myself as I assumed the standard position of sprawling face-first onto the stone and covering my head with my hands, I had to make them undervalue me. My plan, so far, was working perfectly; the soldiers did not even bother to tie my hands. This act of the play, intended as much to find the reserves, hidden and not, of the prisoner as to grant satisfaction and revenge, had to prove that my reserves were depleted after the first kick. I found pretending defeat to be amazingly easy. It was, in fact, no work at all.

I did refuse to give them the satisfaction of my screams.

It lasted for quite some time – at the least, it felt to me as though it had – though I could never say how long. Towards the end, I was simply lying limply on the floor, fading in and out of consciousness, and waiting for Auer to make his dramatic entrance.

“That would be quite enough of that.”

The kicking continued by inertia for a few more seconds, and some hapless hand delivered the last punch. There was a sharp, loud cough, and silence reigned. Auer did not fail me. I was momentarily considerably more frightened by the sheer gratitude I felt than I had been up until now at the brutality and pain. I sighed, reminding myself in a rather Shakespearian moment to hold on more firmly to my own philosophies, and reached out a hand (my right, not my left) to find my umbrella rolling in the dust by my head.

I used it to slowly lever myself up to my feet.

Auer was standing in front of me, nibbling on his lip thoughtfully, hands on hips. We gave each other the obligatory clinical examination that occurs between two people playing for power. I noticed the dark rings under his eyes, and the sagging skin as well as the slight, impatient tick of someone who’d been too long off his cigarettes. He, what with the bruises and blood, didn’t have to be so subtle.

He waited for a long moment, collecting the theatrical credit, no doubt. Despite his thespian inclination, however, Auer was not a cliché villain, so the first thing he said as not an explanation of his diabolical plans.

He flicked a finger at my umbrella. “Take that from her.”

The older soldier who had brought me in darted forward from where he stood hidden in the shadows behind his back. He didn’t kick the umbrella from my hand, but simply reached out and plucked it in an immensely strong grip.

I promptly sprawled.

There was nothing theatrical, graceful, or dramatic about it. My legs simply gave out and, after a second of trembling, refused to bear my weight. I went down like someone’d taken a scythe to my ankles, and saved my nose from being broken only by taking the hit on both my hands. The throbbing left made me exclaim in pain before I bit my lip again. I gathered myself into a more or less kneeling position, supported by one hand, and glanced up. “Oh, bother.”

“My men don’t seem to like you much, Frau Rabinovich,” Auer observed mildly.

I swallowed blood and tears. “I confess, the feeling is not unreciprocated.”

“Your party is guilty of seven murders to date, madam. Without counting the men you killed before arriving here. You cannot blame them entirely for… expressing their frustration.” There were quiet hisses from the fringes, which Auer quieted with a negligent wave of his hand. I watched his Good Cop ploy with appreciation.

“But frustration, though understandable, is a wholly unproductive emotion. For which reason we shall continue this in my office. I will have water brought for you.” He eyed my arm (and head, and hands) with dry calculation. “And a bandage.”

“Charmed,” I said, a little more drily than I intended. “Now if I may regain my walking stick…?”

“Your walking stick?” he arched an eyebrow. “Or perhaps a weapon?”

“Made of plastic and cloth,” I paused to shift on the floor uncomfortably. “A cunning ploy, no doubt.”

He hesitated, visibly uncomfortable but already wavering. I saw the speculation in his eyes, and the attempt to decide upon my threat level. Women with walking sticks ranked rather low on it. I indicated the umbrella with a small, vague wave of my hand. “An accident, resulting in some minor motor brain damage. As you see, I require it, unless you’d rather impose on your men the inconvenience of having to carry me.”

That decided it. Women with walking sticks and motor brain damage, pitted against a large amount of tall, burly men, presented no threat at all. He turned to his lieutenant, eyebrow raised. “Examine it.”

The umbrella was lifted and scrutinized at eye level for several moments, then flicked open and closed. As a final test of my veracity, the soldier popped a plastic cap, and took hold of a spoke, flexing his arm slightly. The spoke bent out at an almost right angle, then snapped. Auer nodded slightly, and the soldier tossed me the broken umbrella, underhand.

I didn’t even try to catch it. When it came to rest on the floor, I levered myself up, with significant difficulty, throwing all my weight against the long spike. It ground into the floor, and held.

Auer was already half turned away, prepared to sweep from the room, gesturing at the older lieutenant and another soldier, nondescript amid the ranks of uniformed men. “Escort her.”