The Haunting of Guaritori Diolco, Part 2
The Haunting of Guaritori Diolco, Part 2
Desert Sneak Attack
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“How is the headache?” asked Mateo. When I first met him, he often sounded stern, but these days he more often came across as grandfatherly. His voice was quiet enough that Urania and Lian, some distance away and busy with a tarot card reading, couldn’t hear him. Like a physician, he respected my privacy.
I made an attempt at chuckling, though I doubted it fooled Mateo. “It’s not bad. But after all this time in the desert, I feel as if I have sand under my eyelids.”
We were near the Valley of Kings in what had once been Egypt—but sand was the least of my worries.
Mateo frowned. His white hair seemed to glow in the moonlight. His brown skin looked even more like leather than usual, but no one could persuade him to use any of the available youth-restoring potions. He’d always mutter something about respecting the balance and try to shoo away whoever made such a suggestion.
“For someone so intimately involved with tricksters, you don’t lie very convincingly,” he said. “You’ve gotten much better at masking yourself, though. I can’t tell much about the state of your magic. I can’t even tell much about your body—like your pain level, for example. But your face always gives you away when you’re having a problem.”
“It’s not your problem,” I said. My tone was harsher than I intended. Not that it mattered. I could have been yelling at Mateo, and he still wouldn’t have been offended—or backed down.
“We’re like a family,” he replied. “That gives the rest of us the right to care about you. If there were a way to take the burden from you—”
“Well, there isn’t.” I looked nervously in the direction of Lian and Urania, but they still seemed occupied. The last thing I needed was to have them ganging up on me. Particularly Urania, though she looked much younger than Matteo, tended to assume a maternal role—or at least, a big sisterly one—whenever anyone had a problem. She, like Matteo, would have a lot to worry about if she managed to see through my magical privacy protections.
There was no sign of the people who should have met us when we arrived. Just in case we’d been lured into a trap of some kind, I’d maintained heavy concealment—for far too long. My head had been throbbing for at least three hours.
“It’s worth looking at suppressing that extra power—”
“And then what?” I asked as the pain spiked up. Mateo wasn’t really helping me. “You said yourself it can’t be removed without damaging my mind. What if suppressing it ends up creating other problems?”
“Could they possibly be worse than what is happening right now?” Mateo’s black outfit and crucifix made him look almost priestly, even though I knew he was a curandero rather than a priest.
The question made me pause for a moment. A few months ago, I hadn’t yet experienced this kind of chronic pain. Well, a few months ago from my point of view, anyway. But I was thinking about my old life and skipping over the twenty years I’d been in a coma. Like Rip Van Winkle in the Washington Irving story, I’d lost two decades. But in my case, the world had changed far more during that time than Rip’s world had.
I knew all too well now that there were things far worse than a headache, even a chronic one . . . even a migraine—
“Where we are going, we will encounter forms of magic with which we may be unfamiliar,” said Mateo, watching me closely. “Perhaps a fresh pair of eyes will come up with a solution that we have not yet thought of.”
My headache throbbed again to remind me that it was there. I was almost afraid to hope that my problem could be solved. I’d been disappointed so many times before.
“Thoth is said to be at least as skillful with magic as Hermes, perhaps more,” said Mateo. He spoke very quietly as if he wanted to avoid aggravating my headache.
Before the Catastrophe, I would have been surprised to hear a devout Catholic talking about Thoth and Hermes as if they were real. But now I knew they were real, beings who had been created by God for specific purposes but who had ultimately set themselves up as gods, instead. Their planes of existence had been mostly locked two thousand years ago, with a few concessions to human free will that allowed people to visit them under some circumstances.
After the Catastrophe, God had allowed these beings the opportunity to redeem themselves. Before, if someone in the mortal world had tried to summon one of them, the summoner would have conjured up a replica rather than the former god. Only now, the former god was permitted to take over the replica and work for the benefit of humanity—if the god could manage to find enough power. Initially, they had only what went into the summoning spell to work with.
That was how my current troubles began.
“You’re remembering, aren’t you?” asked Mateo. The man might as well have been a mind reader.
I nodded reluctantly. “I sometimes wonder what would have happened if we’d never crossed paths with Hermes.”
Mateo patted me on the shoulder. “We would likely all be dead right now. And we all appreciate the sacrifice you made on our behalf. That doesn’t mean you have to keep making it.”
“You’re not wrong,” I said. “But I’m not sure the old Egyptian gods will be much help. After all, the Greek ones weren’t.”
“Because your problem is unique. And to be fair, they kept trying to fix you when the situation was desperate, and they had little time.”
“True, but now the original problem is complicated by multiple layers of bad fixes.”
“I just had a vision,” said Urania as she and Lian rushed over to us. “We’re about to be attacked.”
Mateo looked around suspiciously. We’d deliberately camped on high ground, so we had a good view of the desert in all directions, and the moon was full, so we had plenty of light.
There was no sign of anyone—or anything.
“This was supposed to be a safe place,” I said.
“Look with your magic eyes,” said Mateo, as if I would have forgotten such an obvious point. Unfortunately, though I was technically the most powerful caster among the four of us, I was also the least experienced. That made me the most likely to miss some important detail.
But no matter how hard I pushed myself, I couldn’t see anything beyond the ambient magic—far higher than it would have been before the Catastrophe, but normal these days.
“This area is supposed to be clear,” said Mateo. “That’s why we thought it was safe to come without the others.”
“We were also supposed to be met by Medea’s contact from the Alexandrian government, and no one showed up,” I said. “How soon is this attack supposed to happen?”
“In my vision, the moon was at about the same point in the sky that it is right now,” Urania replied, looking worriedly upward as if the attackers were going to descend from the moon itself.
The sad part was that such a thing might actually be possible.
“No concealment is perfect unless it is crafted by God Himself,” said Mateo, a none-too-subtle reminder to me to check for anomalies.
A strong enough spell caster would normally also be sensitive enough to see through concealment or, at the very least, notice the presence of concealment nearby. In the case of concealment that worked by blocking magic, I should be able to see a blank spot if I looked with my magic sight. Use of shadow or mist might betray itself as a dark or blurred spot. A full-scale illusion could betray itself with small irregularities at the point where the illusion ended and reality began. And it was hard to sustain such illusionary concealment and move at the same time. Rapid shifts caused the image to degrade, if only momentarily.
I looked for all of these and other telltale signs. But again, I saw nothing.
“This raises the question of how an attacker could detect us,” said Mateo.
Was that a hint to recheck my concealment spells? Either way, I examined my handiwork, just to be sure. I’d made us invisible and inaudible. Both types of concealment were still active and powerful enough to make it unlikely anyone would detect us if they didn’t already know we were there. That was pretty much all I could do right now. I was afraid to add a sandstorm for fear of escalating my pain too quickly.
We shouldn’t have been that easy to see, anyway. Mateo’s black robe helped him blend into the darkness. The ladies and I wore garments designed to mimic the color of desert sand, providing effective camouflage, even without magic.
After I explained how we were concealed, Lian looked worried. “Then our attacker has to be someone powerful.”
“Or someone who hunts by smell,” said Mateo.
I should have remembered that precaution. I added a spell to mask our scent, even though it made my headache stabbed me like a nail, and I was acting too late to do us any good.
“We need to prepare defenses—quickly,” said Mateo. He cast what looked like a general protection spell, judging by its white glow. That was about all he could do without knowing exactly who—or what—would attack.
I had to think about what I could do that wouldn’t bring me to my knees. I could give myself some room to maneuver if I dropped all the concealment spells, but Urania’s visions often didn’t include context. Perhaps the attacker was only vaguely aware of our position, and my removing our concealment would be what triggered the attack.
Like me, Urania hesitated. Her ability to summon up the archetypes represented in the tarot cards was formidable magic, but it was hard to know which archetype would do the most good against an unknown enemy.
Her penetrating gray eyes looked out across the sand dunes as if she hoped to pierce whatever veil concealed our opponents from us. Given her Romani background, she might be able to do just that. At the moment, though, her stance and the way she gripped her staff reminded me more of an Amazon than a Traveler. She was ready for battle, whether magical or physical.
Her shoulder-length black hair rippled in a wind that had suddenly picked up. Could we be facing a sorcerer skilled in the use of air?
Using my own affinity for air, I raised the sandstorm I had earlier decided against. I had to bite my lip to keep from crying out in pain, but the effort was worth it. The storm limited visibility still further, as well as slowing any charge and deflecting most ranged weapons. I wouldn’t be able to sustain such a defense for long. But at least I felt no opposing magic trying to overcome mine.
For Lian, whose magic was rooted in harnessing astrological forces through their echoes in the human body, her choice was much easier than Urania’s in our current situation. Lian drew on the moonlight, surrounding us with it, ready to raise it to blinding levels. If that didn’t work, she had a lot of other tricks she could do with lunar power.
Her short, dark hair glittered silver, and her brown eyes had a silver glint in them. She moved around almost as if she were dancing as she continued to draw more power to her. The movements emphasized her short, slender form and her natural agility, greater than that of any of the rest of us. Watching her, I could believe the rumors that she was a distant descendant of a Chinese Xian—whatever that was.
We were mostly ready, but still, no threat appeared.
“Perhaps another vision,” suggested Mateo.
“I usually need to do a tarot reading to get one,” said Urania. “And if I get immersed in that, I won’t be in the right frame of mind if an attack comes.”
The enhanced moonlight was making my migraine worse. It was possible for me to work through the pain, as the old saying went. I’d done it before. But I always worried that my concentration might slip just long enough to disrupt my magic, making me worse than useless in combat.
“Perhaps—” I began. The sand just to the west of us exploded upward, and out of the resulting hole leaped tall humanoid figures. Sand fell from their wildly twisted, colorless hair. Tattered robes hung from their emaciated bodies. Gray-skinned, dead-eyed, with sharp claws and fangs, they leaped again much faster than something that looked so dead should have been able to.
They slowed but didn’t stop as they struck my sandstorm. Their momentum was enough to carry them through it. But when they hit the protection spell Mateo had put up, they fell back in a shower of white sparks.
“Ghouls!” yelled Mateo. “Use sunlight or spells against evil!”
The glow of Lian’s magic began to change color as she invoked sunlight, but she couldn’t make that switch immediately.
The ghouls began to pound on the invisible boundary of Mateo’s spell, raising more sparks. Their howls, reminiscent of wolves, filled the night air and made my blood run cold.
Urania, now with a clear purpose, invoked the tarot sun card, and a golden orb appeared over her head, but instead of being just a miniature sun, it had a smiling face on it, just as it did on the card. As its rays hit the sand, sunflowers sprouted from the sand as if from soil. A golden-haired child mounted on a white horse and carrying a red flag also appeared, though they seemed to come down from the sky instead of up from the earth.
Mateo refocused his protection spell, which became even a purer white. The ghouls screamed and fell back—but not very far.
“Creatures like that should panic and flee,” said Urania. “I’ve never seen Mateo’s blend of faith in God and curanderismo fail before.”
“It hasn’t failed,” said Mateo tightly. “It will keep them away as long as I can maintain it. But it’s clear they want us too badly to give up easily.”
The child conjured by Urania urged the horse forward, pulling sunlight along with him as he moved. The ghouls backed up—but only as far as they absolutely had to.
“Stubborn!” said Lian. By now, she projected pure sunlight in their direction, reinforcing Urania’s magic. They backed away a little further. They still moved grudgingly, yielding not an inch more than necessary. Judging from the way they stared and blinked, the light had blinded them, but even that was not enough to get them running scared.
As the ghouls thrust unaimed claws at the horse and the child, I had to keep reminding myself that they were magical constructs, not flesh and blood. I still winced at each claw swing.
The child’s advance forced the ghouls further and further from us, reducing the immediate threat. But they still refused to flee.
My tactical choice became clear. The magic of Hermes was much more neutral morally than what Mateo could produce, but the power of the Philosopher’s Stone, also entangled within me in ways no one could quite explain, was far less ambiguous. Its use also caused me no pain—a good thing given how much discomfort I’d already inflicted on myself.
I raised my right hand, and out of it poured white light that wasn’t quite as pure as Mateo’s but might suffice.
Less fragile than vampires, the ghouls weren’t destroyed by my addition to the light barrage, though they did fall back faster than before.
“What now?” asked Lian. “If they remain here, they will eventually wear us down.
“They will leave before sunrise, but that’s several hours away,” said Mateo.
“They . . . I don’t think they were what I saw in my vision,” said Urania. “At least, they weren’t all I saw.”
“Be more specific!” said Mateo. “Should we expect a second group of attackers?”
Before she could answer, another sandstorm struck the outer edge of mine. It was far more powerful, so it cut through mine easily. Mateo’s protection spell slowed it but didn’t stop it. He had crafted the defense against evil creatures like ghouls and against evil spells. It wasn’t designed to stop a storm, however magically motivated it might be.
Though the sandstorm swept across a wide area, it struck with particular force against the horse and child, ripping away at the underlying magic until it disintegrated, causing them the two constructs to fade away. With them went their ability to push sunlight toward the ghouls. As the storm intensified, it blocked part of the remaining light. The ghouls surged forward, eager to take whatever advantage they could get.
To prevent ourselves from being sandblasted, we had no choice but to drop to the ground and cover our heads as well as we could with the hoods of our robes. The ghouls charged us, but Mateo’s protective spell still held. I could feel it all around us. I could also sense Mateo struggling to adjust it to shield us against the sandstorm, so far with little success. He was no weather worker. Neither were Urania and Lian, though perhaps Urania could find a tarot archetype that might be able to do something.
My magic was versatile enough to counter the storm, and I had the power to do it. But could I endure the pain? I had to try.
I dropped the concealment spells and my original sandstorm, but I couldn’t give myself the time to let the strain they’d created diminish much. Instead, I immediately poured everything I had into wresting control of the sandstorm away from whoever started it. I had to bite my lip again so hard that I tasted blood.
For a moment, the sandstorm shuddered and paused. But I could feel the caster striving to take back control. His power was considerable. I needed to exert myself to the breaking point to stop him.
“I need you to do what you did before,” I said to the Philosopher’s Stone within me. “I know you can’t block the pain, but give me the strength to endure it.”
I felt the power of the stone surging within me. I took a moment to engulf just my head in an inaudibility spell so that I wouldn’t break the others’ concentration. Then I dug as deeply into myself as I could and poured every ounce of magic I found into beating back the sandstorm.
As I had expected, my mental muscles couldn’t stand the strain of manipulating so much magic at once. Only the power of the stone kept me from losing focus. But because I could still feel every agonizing jab the magic cost me, I started screaming. The wind howled as if in response. The enemy caster lost control for a moment, and the sandstorm turned upon whoever it was. For a short time, he would not be a threat.
Mateo raised his head long enough to look at me. “You can’t keep doing that!” he said, his voice quiet but intense. With the pressure relieved for a moment, I managed to stop screaming, but I couldn’t make myself speak. My head felt as if a metal spike had been plunged right into the middle of it. That sensation would fade—but only in the unlikely event I didn’t have to face more hostile magic in the next few minutes.
We needed some kind of physical shield from the sandstorm in case its caster could regain control of it. I drew a little on Hermetic magic to blow the nearby sand into a mound. That made my head feel as if the metal spike was twisting, but just a little. Then I drew upon the transforming power of the Philosopher’s Stone to begin making the sand into steel.
By now, Lian had raised the brown energy of Saturn in an effort to constrain any incoming magic, including whatever drove the sandstorm. The Saturnine energy was much more congenial to the ghouls than the earlier sunlight had been, but that couldn’t be helped. Mateo’s barrier should still keep them back.
In the same way that Lian couldn’t easily manifest two astrological forces at once, Urania had trouble manifesting more than one archetype at a time. She let go of the sun and used instead the magician. I’d seen him before, but this time Urania seemed to have poured more power into him than she could normally manage. His white robe gleamed. His red robe burned like fire. His wand sparkled with magic. His other instruments—the cup, the sword, the pentacle, the staff—glittered on his table. Beneath it, roses and lilies sprouted from the sand, even as more blossomed in the air above him.
Strangest of all, instead of mirroring the image on the card, the magician resembled me, something I had never seen before. His hair was brown and neatly trimmed instead of being black and longer. His eye color, impossible to determine on the card, was now brown, like mine. His skin reflected my tan. His more tightly fitting robe mirrored my more muscular physique.
As soon as he and the tableaux around him had stabilized, he waved his wand in an elaborate pattern, and I felt air magic pouring from him toward the sandstorm in an effort to reinforce my control.
The intervention came none too soon. I could also feel the enemy caster exerting to regain control of the sandstorm. I did what I could—short of causing my head to explode—to hold onto the sandstorm. Thanks to the magician, I didn’t have to scream as a result. But depending on how strong the rival caster was, I might be only a couple minutes from sheer torture.
Magical multitasking was seldom a good idea, but since I had two different sources of magic, I tried to keep the stone focused on creating that steel wall. The process was slower than I’d hoped.
The ghouls chanced another attack on Mateo’s barrier, only to fall back, screeching and surrounded by white sparks. But Mateo’s faith wasn’t infinite. If they kept battering at the barrier, they might eventually breach it—and the other three of us were too preoccupied to do much about it.
To my surprise, the sandstorm faded into nothingness. The magician’s normally emotionless face looked surprised as well. We hadn’t felt the storm collapse. Instead, the caster had withdrawn energy from it on purpose.
That could only mean one thing—a shift in strategy.
We didn’t have long to wait. We both felt the distant flare of magic and saw a wall of fire approaching us at impossible speeds.
Mateo strengthened his barrier as much as he could, and Lian strengthened the aura of Saturn around us. Whether either or even both could stop the fire as it flew at us, hot enough to melt the sand over which it traveled into glass, was another question.
I jumped in surprise when the sand right next to me exploded. A ghoul had found a way to bypass Mateo’s defenses. It leaped up from its newly made tunnel, ready to tear us to pieces.
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