Alaskan Fury (31 page)

‘Aqrab scowled.  “I will not be
paid
for my services, mon Dhi’b.  I’m the son of a sheik.  I have more dignity than
that.”

She shrugged.  “Your loss.”  Then
she glanced at the sky.  “Actually, I wonder if Thunderbird would do it…  The
fool seems vain enough to accept.”

His mouth fell open.  Sputtering,
‘Aqrab said, “You would choose
Thunderbird
? 
That
pompous ass?” 
He felt his rage rising unchecked.  “Whose every word is a comment towards your
station?”

She was glaring at him, now.  “He
doesn’t have to open his damned mouth to pose for me, ‘Aqrab.  I’m sure he’d
love
to see himself in clay.  What is
wrong
with you?”

To…pose…for her?  In…clay. 
Hastily, ‘Aqrab rewound the conversation in his mind.  When he found where
their paths had diverged, ‘Aqrab choked.

The Fury frowned at him.  “What?”

His head burning as if he’d stuck
it into a pit of lava, he said, “You were speaking of sculpting my
figure
. 
In
art
.”

“Of course I was,” she said, her
scowl deepening.  “What did you
think
I was talking about?”

The idea of a Fury doing
art
had been so utterly foreign to him that he had not even noticed the twist in
the words.  ‘Aqrab found he could only stare at her.  “You…are an
artist
,
mon Dhi’b?” he managed.

It was her turn to flush and duck
her head.  “Don’t sound so surprised, you wretched creature,” she muttered.

“You have reset your seven
days—But when?  How?  I’ve never even seen you pick up a
pen
.”

“It’s
been awhile
, all
right?!” she snapped, anger flashing in her face.  “Needless to say, yes, I’d
rather draw
your
figure, but if you’re going to be petty about it, I’ll
just find someone else!”  She bit off the last, her brown eyes livid.  Reaching
for her clothes, she growled, “And, since it’s obvious I’m not getting a damned
meal this evening, I’m going to go settle in for the night.”

‘Aqrab caught her hand, and she
hesitated.  When she slowly looked up at him, he saw vulnerability there.  “Mon
Dhi’b,” he said softly, squeezing her hand, “I would be honored to pose for
you.  I’ll amend our bargain, if you would agree to it.”

She looked away, obviously embarrassed. 
“I don’t have any supplies.”

He made a dismissive wave, so
enthralled at the idea of watching this Fury
draw
.  “Such can be
remedied.”

Her words cracked as she said,
“And I have not practiced in some time.”  When she looked up at him again, he
thought he saw a flash of fear in her eyes.  Fear…and hope.  “And never on a
male.”  She almost made it sound as if she were convincing herself against it.

“I’ve already proven I won’t
bite,” he said,
desperate
, now, to see his Fury do something as pure and
soulful as creating art.  It seemed such an antithesis to what she was.  He
had
to see it.  It would change
everything
.

His magus bit her lip, peering
down at her hands.  “I’m not even sure if I am still any good.  It’s been a
long
time.”

“One doesn’t forget one’s
passion,” ‘Aqrab offered, watching her, “once it is found.”

She met his eyes again, and he
saw her decision form with what almost looked like gratitude.  “Do it,” she
whispered.  “Amend the bargain.”

Before she could have a chance to
change her mind, ‘Aqrab grabbed his tendril connected to Law and yanked it into
him.  “I, Yad al-‘Aqrab, sand-singer of the Scorpion clan, firstborn son of Bakr
al-Shihab, eleventh djinni Lord of the Fourth Lands, hereby offer a revision of
our last bargain to you, Kaashifah the Fury, Handmaiden to Ares,
Warrior-Priestess of Horus, Angel of Vengeance, and Justice of the
Battlefields:  I will provide you with food and supplies so that you may use my
body as a model for your art, after which, I will provide you a meal fit for a
king.  Do you accept?”

His magus frowned at him.  “Food
and
supplies?”

He winked at her.  “Artists can’t
work their magic on an empty stomach, can they?  Do you accept?”

Then she realized what he was
doing, for her mouth fell open.  “You’re
cheating
.”

“I assure you, mon Dhi’b,” he
said, still grinning, “a djinni cannot cheat.  All of it is well-worked into
Law.  Each side will get its rewards of the aforementioned bargain.  Do you
accept?”

She stared at him so long he
thought she’d decline.  Finally, she whispered, “You’re being
nice
to
me.”  As if it were completely unbelievable to her.

‘Aqrab sighed at the blatant
suspicion in her face.  “I assure you my motivations are not sinister. 
Further, I can’t feed you until you accept my revisions.  Do you accept?”

“Yes.”  It was a whisper, but it
was audible enough for the Law to grasp it and draw it into the weave.

‘Aqrab felt the rush as the Law
boomed through him, “As agreed, so decreed, the bargain has been made.”  Then,
with the full power of the Fourth Lands at his disposal, he made her a good—yet
clean, bite-sized, and non-greasy—meal of fruits, jerky, and nuts, and then
filled the camp area with every item used in the creation of art that he could
think of.

When he finished, the Fury was
staring at the supplies, not even having touched her food.

Wincing at the look she was
giving the easel, ‘Aqrab said, “You are unsatisfied?”  The thought of her being
dissatisfied, ridiculously, made his heart ache.

She just shook her head in
silence and continued to stare at the mounds of tools around her.

“Is there something I missed?” he
offered.

But when she looked at him, there
were tears in her eyes.  “Thank you.”

Her utter gratitude left ‘Aqrab
flabbergasted.  “Ah…you are welcome…any time you wish…just ask.”

The Fury swallowed hard and he
saw her lip trembling.  “I might do that.”  She took a deep, shuddering breath,
her gaze sliding back to the piles of supplies.  She bit her lip, seeming to
hold her breath.  “It’s been a long time.”

He squatted beside her, curious
at the emotion he saw in her face.  It took him a moment to place her mixed
gratitude and anxiety.  “You weren’t allowed to draw, were you?” he asked.

Her sudden sob, quickly hidden,
confirmed it.

As she ducked her head and tried
to conceal her grief from him, ‘Aqrab gently put a hand on her shoulder and
squeezed.  Softly, he said, “for better or worse, mon Dhi’b, you are one of the
last.  You make your own decisions, now, and if you decide to use my body for
your art, I will be happy to oblige.  If you do not, we can forego tonight’s
bargain for another later.”

She just nodded and sniffled,
refusing to look up at him.  Gingerly, after obvious deliberation, she picked
up a fine stick of charcoal and a pad of paper.  “Go sit by the fire?” she
whispered.  “One knee up.  Arm over knee.”  Her face reddened.  “Legs…splayed.”

Curious and oddly thrilled,
‘Aqrab did as he was bidden.  Once he was situated, he watched her fingers
hesitate over the pad, trembling.  Her entire hand shook, and he saw the
mingling of emotions cross her face as she struggled against some inner
turmoil.  Then, after staring at the paper beneath her charcoal for several
minutes, his Fury looked up at him and began to draw.

Imelda stood before the row of
screens, frowning.  “That’s it?”

The technician winced.  “Then it
hit turbulence, Inquisidora.”

“Turbulence.”  Imelda frowned at
the fuzzy silver-gray image that had slid in from the corner of the screen,
only a split second before the drone fell from the sky.  A cloud?  Or something
else…?  “And the rest?” she demanded.  “They were lost to turbulence, as well?”

The head technician reddened and
lowered her face to fiddle with a pencil upon her workdesk.  Her partner, a
much younger man in his thirties, cleared his throat.  “One appears to have
been hacked and re-routed by the government, Inquisidora, while the other hit
bad weather and ran into a mountainside.”

“You lost one to hackers.”  Now
that was not pleasant news.  Doubtless, the United States government thought
they were trying to spy on Eielson Air Force Base or Fort Wainwright, up near
Fairbanks.  Now
that
was a political shitstorm she didn’t particularly
want to be involved in, if the Americans managed to trace the origins of the
craft.

Then she frowned.  “Wait.  One
ran into a
mountain
?  I told you to keep it above thirty thousand
feet.”  Denali, in the Alaska Range, the largest mountain in North America, was
only a little over twenty thousand.

Now both of her technicians went
silent, and it was the graying—and thankfully almost sober—Herr Drescher, who
had been standing in the doorway with his arms crossed, who said, “It made a
rapid descent into the clouds, Inquisitorin.”

“On whose orders?” Imelda
growled.

The technicians glanced at each
other and the woman in her fifties looked up at Imelda with mixed fear and
irritation.  “Yours, Inquisidora.”

Imelda froze.  “
Mine
?”

The male technician reached out
and hit a key on his computer.  Immediately, Imelda heard
her
voice say,
“We’re not getting anything up here.  Take it down through the clouds.”

Herr Drescher chuckled.  “And yet
the Inquistorin was with me all day, holding my beard for me while I puked up
my guts in my bathroom.”

“Don’t forget the whiskey,”
Imelda growled.  He still owed penance, for that.

“That too,” Herr Drescher agreed.

The technicians frowned at each
other.  “Another government hacker, then?”

Imelda considered that.  “Show me
the route that the compromised craft took once our control was lost.”

Nodding, it only took the woman a
moment to bring up a map with a neon red line suddenly diverting from the
Brooks Range towards Fairbanks, in a direct line with Eielson AFB.  Seeing
that, she had a momentary tingle of unease.  Either their clandestine
operations were being monitored by the American military…

…Or they were playing a game of
chess with a creature whose mental capacity, by historical accounts of skull
measurements, was vastly superior to their own.

Frowning, she said, “Send another
drone.  Strip it of its magic.  Keep the sensors and power sources
mundane—nothing that the military would not be using.  Seek out the three areas
where the other three drones disappeared and do full thermal scans.  Our
targets will already be hiding their traces from government satellites, so you
probably won’t find much.  I’m actually thinking we’ll find them by monitoring
their prey.  There are large caribou herds up there, are there not?”

The technicians gave each other a
wary glance.  “You truly believe we’re going to find
dragons
,
Inquisidora?” the older one asked.

She gave the woman a long look. 
“You truly believe we lost three drones, in one night, to accidents?”

The woman went silent.

Imelda shook her head.  “Get that
drone back out there, and let me know what you find.  Herr Drescher, you’re
coming with me to the library.”

He gave her a look of trepidation
as he followed her out of the technicians’ control room.  “The
library
,
Inquisitorin?”  As if she had just told him they would be visiting a
whorehouse.

Imelda sighed.  “I need to do
some research on angels, and I will not have Zenaida catching you with whiskey
on your breath.”

The older German breathed into
his hand and sniffed.  Grimacing, he said, “Why are we looking up angels,
Inquisidora?”

“Because I think we may be
dealing with one,” Imelda said, then paused, seeing Zenaida step from the
basement with a group of her thugs.  Imelda felt a tingle of unease trace down
her spine as she saw Jacquot amongst the group.  As the woman walked away down
the main hall, flanked by her faithful, she heard herself say, “Possibly more.”

The German caught her look, then
frowned.  “What is the fucking Frenchman—”

She cut him off with a quick
gesture of her hand.  Giving Herr Drescher a warning look, she continued toward
the Order’s library.

The library itself was actually a
row of cubicles in a side-corner of the compound, with every book that the
Order had bought, found, or confiscated scanned and entered into a searchable
database that was updated monthly via a diplomatic courier.

“So,” Imelda said, sitting down
in a cubicle.  She pulled a seat out for Drescher, who eyed with all the unease
Imelda would give a horse.  “Any ideas where to start?”

“I’m, uh, not a scholar,
Inquisitorin.”  Still not having sat down, he glanced back out the door.  “I
think maybe I’ll just go lie down—”

“Sit,” Imelda said.  “Jacquot is
preoccupied and Giuseppe is dead.  I’m going to figure out what killed him.”

Herr Drescher winced.  “I, uh…” 
He swallowed and glanced at the chair again, still not sitting.  “I just barely
passed my exams, Inquisitorin.  I had to cheat on my papers.  I’m not really—”

“
Sit
.”

Reluctantly, the graying German
sat down in the chair, looking stiff and uncomfortable.  “I fly helicopters,”
he muttered.

“And now you help me research
angels,” Imelda said distractedly.  She started entering her information into
the terminal.

“Why do you think the wolf is an
angel?” Herr Drescher said, giving the computer terminal a wary look.

“Hunch,” Imelda said, beginning
her search.  “What do you know about angels, Drescher?  What are they?  Where
did they come from?”

Herr Drescher was peering at her
like he was wondering if he was fully over his drink.  “God.”

“Yet the Bible never says God
created the angels,” Imelda says.  “So where did they come from?” 

The older pilot did not reply,
and she saw the beginnings of suspicion cross his Nordic face.

Imelda sighed.  “You can be frank
with me.  Neither of us truly believes the world is only a few thousand years
old.  We’ve both
killed
things older than that, have we not?”

Drescher gave the entrance to the
library an uncomfortable look.  “I believe what the Church believes,
Inquisitorin.”

“I’m not questioning your damn
loyalty, man,” Imelda growled, frustrated that her station as an Inquisidora
was once again getting in the way of an honest conversation.  “I just spent a
couple hours helping you vomit.  Indulge me a moment.”

Herr Drescher leveled nervous
blue eyes on her.  He hesitated before he said, “I think that there are things
that the Bible has not fully explained, Imelda.”

“Or has addressed…imperfectly?”
she suggested.  “Like the civilizations we know to have thrived and fallen
before our own?”

He looked down at his hands. 
When he looked up at her, there was anxiety in his eyes.  And fear.  “This is
not an Inquisition?”  When she blinked at him, he went on, “I mean, I know I am
crass and I drink overly much at times, but my heart is in the right place,
Inquisitorin, and I can fly a helicopter through the tornadoes of Hell if I
have to.”

She frowned at him, irritated. 
“Of course this is not an Inquisition.  Why do you think it would be an
Inquisition?”

Warily, fidgeting with his
sleeve, Herr Drescher said.  “Zenaida has a…history.”

Imelda’s eyes narrowed.  “What
kind of history?”

Still giving her a look of
distrust, Herr Drescher coughed.  “Since I came to Alaska, there have been
twelve men who have…not met her standards.”

Imelda thought of the graves in
the yard outside, in the Eklutna Cimitero di Eroe.  “What happened to them?”

Herr Drescher licked his lips. 
“You can hide bodies in a glacier.  Bodies that will never be found.”

Killing their own.  A new low. 
She thought again of her Padre’s prophecy for her ascent to the Holy Matron and
felt another surge of frustration that she wasn’t
there
yet.  The power
to fix so many problems was just two steps out of reach.  First Grande
Inquisidora, then Holy Matron of the Order.  Once she was the Matron, she was
going to make
changes
. 

With so much passion behind her
words that they came out a mere whisper, she said, “I am not Zenaida.  I do not
murder
my comrades.” 

Herr Drescher’s face continued to
hold uneasiness.  “But you are an Inquisitorin.”

“The office of the Inquisidora
exists so that we can continue to fight the plague of outsider demons that have
invaded our Realm,” she said in that low, near-whisper she gained whenever she
found herself truly upset.  “Without our knowledge and skills, passed from one
to the next, we would have failed many centuries ago, and the flood of outside
powers would have overwhelmed us. 
Never
has it been said we are to turn
our office against our own people.  Against humans.  That is not in our vows,
and never has been.”

Herr Drescher gave her a long,
considering look, before he said, “If you want my opinion, the Fotze needs one
more trip out to a pretty crevasse.  She has been a cancer on the Order since
its inception.  Some of my favorite comrades have died because of
her…concerns.” 

And, in that moment, Drescher had
shown he trusted her. 

“My gut tells me Zenaida’s time
here is limited,” Imelda said.  “Whether that be she moves on, or gets
excommunicated, or takes my bullet to her head, she’s not going to work her
evil here much longer.”

The German cleared his throat and
glanced at his rough, callused hands.  “While that is…a good thought…it is
rumored Zenaida is…old…Inquisitorin.”

“How old?” Imelda demanded.  “And
call me Imelda.”

The German cleared his throat. 
He glanced again at the door, then his blue eyes found her and he swallowed
nervously.  “Like she has Bibles written in the fourth century after Christ on
her shelves in her room.”

Imelda frowned.  “Bibles were
being written back then.”

“Commissioned by
her
.”

Imelda froze, remembering the
deathly visage of the wolf, half-buried under moss.  “You must be mistaken.”

Drescher shook his head.  “She
took me to her room once, when I complained to the Grand Inquisitor about my
last friend she had made ‘disappear.’  She took down one of the Bibles and
showed it to me.  The Book had been commissioned in her name and scribes had
drawn her portrait inside the front cover.  She showed me three of those—I
don’t know if they were as old as she said they were, but they were
old
,
Inquisitorin—then slapped them shut and smiled and told me that those who made
the laws did answer to a ‘fuckwad in a pretty cape.’  Then she showed me her
collection of hearts, and after that, her trapped souls.”

Imelda fought a growing tremor of
dread in her gut.  “She was trying to scare you.”

Drescher laughed.  “She did a
good job.”  The German looked almost ashamed as he said, “I’ve said no more
about her dealings to the Grand Inquisitor, and I fly her wherever she wants me
to go.”  Then he gave Imelda a weak grin.  “Well, until she assigned me to
you.  That was about the best thing that’s ever happened to me, Inquisitorin. 
I spent twenty years wondering when she was going to put me on the rack.”

Guilt washed over her then and
Imelda immediately had the horrible thought of,
Don’t get your hopes up. 
She’s not dead yet, and I’m not an immortal.
  She knew all-too-well who
would leave the scene alive, if she and Zenaida ever came to blows.  Or, for
that matter, if Zenaida decided to kill her.  Swallowing, Imelda glanced back at
the computer, for a brief moment considering dropping the search for wolves and
angels and request a transfer for both herself and Drescher.  “I think,” she
said slowly, looking at the little query area on the search engine before her,
“I just put you in a lot more danger.” 

The German shrugged.  “I’m used
to it, by now.”

“Still…”  Imelda considered
sending him back to his room, but didn’t want to take the chance that Zenaida
would catch him on the way, and find a reason to be ‘displeased’ with him, if
only to get back at Imelda for her impertinence in the basement.  “What I’m
about to do is going to be dangerous, should Zenaida find out about it.  I
think I’m going to unearth some information she’d rather stayed buried.”