The Cost of Magic (The Ethan Cole Series Book 1) Read online

  What would her parents have done were they in her place? She knew fine – they’d be here, right where she was. They’d stood for what was right and died for it. Maybe they could see her now? It was a foolish thought, but the warmth seeping through her chest couldn’t be denied. Maybe they’d be proud. And maybe it would be the first time they’d been able to feel that way about their daughter?

  The party stopped after a short walk, and there were sounds of rattling and squealing metal ahead. The shuffling around her had relaxed.

  ‘Can I see yet?’ Did she want to see? Where the hell was this place? A blast of heat blew past her. The wind was sticky with moisture and stank like breath. Despite the warmth of it, she shuddered, her hackles rising. Something cold and malleable slithered from somewhere ahead: it was unmistakably dark power. Cole’s kind of power — and for her to feel it like this, it had to be crazy strong. Myriad mages weren’t usually able to feel black magic at all – the fact that she could seemed to be linked to her gift.

  ‘Mother, where is this place?’

  Her hand was grasped firmly as Millie Mouthpiece drew her on and talked empty comforts.

  ‘No, no, no, I’m not going any further till someone tells me where we are.’

  This was a pickle. She couldn’t let on about what she could sense; it would raise far too many questions. The next voice was the Mother’s.

  ‘You are uneasy, Natalia. I can show you very soon. We have nearly arrived.’

  The woman sounded like she was smiling, but there was definitely nothing to smile about. Black magic was corrupting by its mere presence, but the Mother and the wytches, as Myriad mages, might not know the danger they were in. Shit. She’d have to risk it.

  ‘Please, Mother, I …’ There would be questions she couldn’t answer, but she couldn’t allow the risk to stand. ‘Can you feel that? There’s black magic ahead.’ Natalia tried not to let the silent pause say things she didn’t want to hear.

  ‘Your value shows itself, Natalia.’

  The Mother’s voice was obstinately calm. ‘What you sense is the means to make a better world. You have to trust me; you will see very soon.’

  Would Cole say this had the whiff of standard bad-guy chat? He might. A gentle tug on the arm from Millie solidified her legs.

  ‘It’s not safe!’ No way she was carrying on.

  The Mother spoke, close to her. ‘Please Natalia! We need you. At least come and see what I propose. You are free to leave if you feel uncomfortable.’

  Eh? Was her freedom to leave up for debate at any point? Let them try and hold her. If Mouthpiece Millie’s power was anything to go by, she’d wipe the floor with them. The Mother could probably take her, but she got people to do her talking for her. No way she’d be doing her own dirty work.

  It would be a long and lonely way back to the city. And if there was black magic ahead, these women might need her, whether they knew about her secret or not. She had to go on.

  ‘Fine.’

  The guiding continued. The ground here had a rougher, more natural texture, after the city pavements. The corruption she sensed grew more potent as they moved ahead. Something oily quested out for her skin, born of the rank air that whistled past her, caressing her face.

  Maybe she should turn back? From behind came the distant sound of a metal screech followed by a solid boom, and she imagined the closing of some great, unseen doorway. She was locked in with the filthy black magic circulating around her. The Mother was offering her the chance she’d never dared wish for. She could be so much more. She held on to that, imagining how frightened her parents must have been, facing the Aztec god of war himself. All she was being asked to do was hear the wytches out. And she should. It really might be worth it. And if it wasn’t, the Council would need to hear about it.

  From the way their footsteps echoed, she guessed they were moving across a large space. A cave, perhaps. Finally, they stopped. Creaking ahead sounded like another door opening. The lyrical sound of Millie mumbling the key to cut the binding that had wrapped Natalia’s sight flooded her with relief. She filed the key away, just in case. Prod there, cut there – okay, she had it. Alteration magic was not something Natalia had access to, but if she knew where to cut, she could escape it.

  The first thing she saw was a pair of tall, flesh-pink doors, swinging inward. She stood before the doors inside a great hall, but as the doors opened, her brain rebelled. A riot of information shouted to be heard. The chamber ahead of her was a rough-hewn, high ellipse, its ceiling a dizzying distance above, and despite the crescendo of noise and light at ground level, her gaze was whipped upward.

  Near the apex of the ragged oval structure lurked the source of the dark power washing through this place. Its presence grasped her gaze with oily fingers and would not let go. Her entire existence shrunk to insignificant noise. The source of the corruption was shaped like a crude blacksmith’s anvil, spinning, suspended near the roof. It may have been forever that the anvil-shape held her, locked and helpless, while the weight of the passing aeons and the distances of the multiverse crashed over her. It had been there, through it all. The fiery hell of the universe’s birth. The first bacteria. The first ape to bash two rocks together. Natalia was so tiny next to it, lost in the flotsam of time and space.

  It would outlast everything, until darkness was all the sky held, and the last stars guttered out to an eternity of lifeless nothing. Even then, its cold metal would still spin, silent and uncaring as death, spewing its corruption into the sterility that would mark the grave of all life.

  Her body jolted, reporting a strike across her face. A hand gripped her chin drawing her eyes down. Light and sound returned; life resumed. Her eyes were damp and blurred with tears, her throat sore. Had she screamed? She tried to look up, unable to look away from its dreadful, glinting surface, but the fingers gripping her were firm. The Mother’s calm eyes held her.

  ‘It is called the Mournanvil.’ The naming seemed laughable.

  ‘Say it.’ The Mother’s tone was flat. ‘Mournanvil.’

  Her mouth struggled to make sound; nothing mattered now she knew the Anvil existed.

  ‘Try again.’ The irritation in the Mother’s perfect eyes sparked something. Who did she think she was scowling at?

  ‘Mournanvil.’ Somehow the word helped. ‘Mournanvil.’ It could be named. For all its rot and scorn, words could categorise it. That simple act diminished it. She wiped her eyes and turned her face. How embarrassing. In front of Her Unruffledness as well.

  Beneath the Anvil, the room ahead sparkled with the power of Myriad magic – Natalia’s kind of magic – being invoked on a scale she had never seen before. It was like the old stories, dizzying and breathtaking, but her brain cried a warning. There was no floor beyond the threshold of the doorway. A yawning abyss of unknowable darkness fell straight down, just beyond her feet. A ruler-straight bridge – thin as a plank – spanned the emptiness from the doorway to a circular central platform. The platform itself was encircled by ledges that looped around it like petals on a flower. Directly above the platform, the Anvil spun. Another thin bridge led from the platform to a door on the left-hand side of the chamber.

  The Wytches of the Order of the Light stood on the petal-ledges where they chanted, weaving power and casting it up into runes that were huge beyond anything she had ever heard of. She counted eight runes in all, suspended somehow above the centres of the petal-ledges, one rune for each ledge. There must have been a world-class runesmith somewhere in the chamber, but amidst the cacophony of magic she could not discern who the person was.

  Runes were especially useful for storing large amounts of magic and were not unlike the keys Myriad mages used to access magic. Each god of the Myriad had rituals, words, offerings or objects that allowed mages to invoke their power safely, without the numerous risks associated with trying to touch the hands of the gods.

  The wytches faced their runes, their combined chanting falling away into the abyssal darkness belo
w. From the black depths, their voices were returned, resonating and merging together with a boom of power, as the women invoked their magic. Their power was mostly creation. Elemental, healing and force magic, tinged with green, to her eyes. She thought she saw a flare of purple alteration magic and, possibly, red divination magic, but it was hard to be sure.

  She watched the wytches use their unique keys. Here, one wytch wore a cloak of feathers, the wind whipping around her face, her eyes up at the rune symbol for air. She sang in clipped inflections that mirrored the rune’s whistle of birdsong. There, another wytch cast fine dust across a piece of coral, standing before the rune for water. The smell of the ocean was buffeted around the room. With a roar of flame and hot destruction, the rune for fire shone like livid metal. A red-haired woman threw jets of flame on it, bathing it in molten heat. As the wytches invoked the magic of the gods, harnessing it through their keys, night warred with day and fire locked with earth in a bewildering lattice of power, stored by the giant runes.

  And through it all, the Mournanvil above creeped its corrosion. Its invisible hands caressed the wytches in violation. Natalia’s anger bubbled. It had to be stopped.

  ‘What the hell are you doing? These women can’t be around that thing.’

  The air turned greasy thick with oil around her. Somehow, she knew the Anvil had heard her. The Mother stood there like a serene doll. Bloody idiot.

  ‘That is why we brought you here, Natalia Torres. Your gift – your protection – will allow us to make a better world.’ So that was it. The Mother knew her secret. That knowledge threatened Natalia in ways she couldn’t stop to consider. But right then, there was no time to waste. These women might have been tainted already.

  ‘I’ll need to do the protection ritual right now. Get them all to stop.’

  The Mother shook her head. ‘Extend your gift around me; the others are contained within me.’

  Was the Mother claiming to have the same unique gift as her? She tried to keep her words neutral.

  ‘Are you sure? How can you do that?’

  The Mother just stood looking at her, waiting. There wasn’t time for this – the Anvil’s corruption was too strong – but the Mother had some explaining to do.

  ‘You and I will be having words later. Right now, the ritual will need ten minutes or so. They all still need to stop and get away from the Mournanvil. We all need to get away from that thing.’

  The Mother’s smile would earn her a punch in the face any moment. ‘Try your gift without the ritual.’

  Was she fucking stupid? Natalia’s protective gift wasn’t a cantrip to be thrown around in a moment’s invocation. Once the link was established, she could remove or resume her protection of anyone with a touch. But first, some serious magic had to bond her to the wytches. The heat she felt on her face was going to leak into her words pretty soon.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Natalia, there is much you do not know. Trust me.’ That was getting harder by the second, but there was no time for posturing and no danger in extending to the woman. Just as there was no chance, without a ritual, that her protection would actually stick. Natalia squinted at the Mother, but if she was affected by the Anvil’s corruption, Natalia could not see it, and her position as Cole’s watcher gave Natalia true sight. Black magic’s corruption made Myriad mages into devotees of the undergods. Nightstaffs. No one should muck about with Murk-spawned relics. And that was the truth.

  She reached out with her gift. It was a different kind of magic to her Myriad magic. It was laborious, lacking the keys she used to unlock her Myriad power. The colour of her gift was a shining metallic green, not unlike the colour surrounding the elemental magics that hurtled around the room, but different from the pure white of her war magic. As her gift extended, she could feel the shape of the Mother. It was bloated with power, years and majesty. She’d heard that the Mother had not been a single person over the long span of centuries, and now she could feel how many lives had been married into the woman’s form. The Mother was human, and yet she was so much more.

  As her gift sensed the Mother, the wytches appeared, contained within the Mother’s form, just as Natalia’s own form shielded those she protected. The Mother’s gift was an odd magic, coloured like silver and startlingly bright. The Mother’s shining magic seemed to offer little protection from the corruption of the Murk. Natalia could see the Mournanvil’s power swirling through it without pause. It was an effort to push all this strange information away – but if this insane situation was to improve, then the wytches needed her protection, right now. She felt the Mother’s magic reach out, grasping her own. The ritual Natalia used was usually spent amassing enough power to create the link and contain the people she sought to protect. But the Mother’s shining silver power found her, and within moments her gift – spectral armour – slid around the Mother’s form.

  The Mother was contained within Natalia’s form now, and without any of the proper casting ritual. Today’s new baseline normal was rapidly vanishing over the crazy horizon. Now, the pulse of the Anvil slid from the plates of Natalia’s protection, unable to reach the wytches anymore. Somewhere far off, she could sense Cole. He had her protection too. Thank the gods he wasn’t there; the Anvil would flip him to the darkness like a burger. A terrifying, toothy, world-ending burger. His parasite would burst from him, birthed and unstoppable, a monster with no weaknesses.

  ‘Mother, you have to stop this! What on earth are you trying to achieve here?’

  The Mother beckoned her to follow, out onto the precarious-looking bridge that crossed the room to the central platform.

  ‘Come and see what we will achieve, Natalia.’

  No way she’d let the Mother see her fazed as she crossed the abyss of the room. ‘Oselotl.’ Natalia invoked the aspect of the jaguar, the grace of the big cat lending her sure footing as they made their way, her war magic shining around her with its white aura.

  Her body shook as they crossed, but was it with fear or excitement? As they approached the platform, two figures came into focus. Vampires. The power of Mixcoatl, her bond god, flooded her as she reflexively invoked his name.

  ‘Relax, Natalia, they are here as guests.’ The Mother swept past the wytches on the petal-like ledges surrounding the base of the platform and up three shallow stairs to the platform itself. She indicated the vampires. ‘They are the gift we give the world.’

  Natalia’s power thrummed, dying to be unleashed. What was she on about? The Mother stepped toward the vampires. The older one wasn’t even bothering with a glamour to cover his revolting true form. He wore dated, velvet clothing and stood ramrod straight, watching as the other – a younger, wretched-looking creature with sunken eyes and a bent spine – stared in horror at the scene before him. The Mother reached out a hand to the wretched vampire and laid her palm on the creature’s chest.

  He was a strange-looking youth in late adolescence, wearing a shell suit and a haircut time had forgotten, flopping around his face from a middle parting, covering the shaved under-portion of his head. Curtains, she thought the style had been called in the nineties. He recoiled, but then straightened at a barked command from the older-looking one. It was hard to tell who was older among vampires as they didn’t age, but it was a fair bet the cowering one was a fledgling, brought here for whatever the Mother had planned. Poor thing.

  But what was going to be done here? They couldn’t kill the vampire – that was against the laws. The wytches had promised this plan of theirs was legal. If they’d lied, she’d be an accomplice to their crime. Killing a legitimate vampire was punishable by death, no less. She was about to go and get within arm’s reach of the vampire – just in case – when the Mother’s chanting began.

  The language was unfamiliar, but the effect drew the immense power gathered by the wytches out from the giant runes to the Mother. Drawing that much power would have been suicide for anyone else. The fledgling vampire was lifted into the air and suspended, floating above the middl
e of the platform, his eyes facing up toward the Anvil, as the Mother chanted. She drew a cup from her robe and held it up in both hands. It was a plain wooden thing, but to Natalia’s mage sight it had more dimensions than it should. She’d never seen a relic like it; most of them had been destroyed by the Council.

  The Mother poured energy into the cup until it shone and positioned it above the vampire’s chest. She unzipped his shell suit, a strangely intimate act amidst the noise and crashing waves of magic. The wytches invoked around the room, fuelling the Mother with a furnace of Myriad power. A faint lance of filthy white light stabbed down from the Anvil and struck the cup, which was already brimming with power. The power in the cup spilled and struck the vampire in his chest.

  White noise fizzed as primordial forces enveloped the vampire. The vampire’s chest sprung open, his ribs opening like doors. A tiny, black, sucking hole – it must have been the thing they called their soul – lifted from the creature’s chest, small and empty, before vanishing up into the grubby darkness of the Anvil above. The Mother sank to her knees. Suddenly, all the light and noise in the room stopped. Only the beam from the Anvil persisted, so faint she could hardly see it, stabbing down into the fledgling in the centre of the platform, its hissing barely audible.

  The fledgling now lay on the ground. The sudden silence smothered. The wytches had just made a criminal of her. And for what? There were easier ways to kill a vampire. Wytches moved to help the Mother, but she waved them away, watching the vampire a few feet from her.

  The vampire stirred, lying on the ground. She couldn’t detect a glamour around him. He wasn’t dead, and somehow, he looked healthier, as though touched with real life. The vampire’s chest rose and fell. He coughed.