The Inner Circle: Holy Spirit (24 page)

‘
Sounds easy,’ Ilgrin
said sarcastically.

‘
We know that New
World has formed alliances between various countries therein and
are planning an attack on Hades,’ Noah replied. ‘I’ll find a way to
steal my father’s key the night before he goes into battle. He’ll
have so much on his mind I doubt he’ll notice its absence. While
the Devil is gone, along with half the legion, it shouldn’t be too
difficult to sneak down to the treasury unnoticed. The advantage we
have is that no one really knows what you look like, and if we get
you some decent clothing everything should go smoothly.’

‘
That’s your plan?’
Ilgrin stared in wide-eyed astonishment. ‘Jakob recognised me
immediately.’

‘
It wasn’t hard to
figure out.’ Jakob shrugged. ‘I’d heard you were still alive and
heading our way. You wore human clothing and had a foreign
accent.’

‘
So if we get you
something decent to wear, and you keep your mouth shut, you should
get by unnoticed,’ Noah added.

‘
There’s more,’ May
spoke up. ‘We know the Devil’s routine: when he bathes, when he
sleeps, when he’s most likely to be drunk. Korah has grown somewhat
complacent in his old age and retrieving the key will be difficult,
but not impossible.’

‘
All right,’ Ilgrin
agreed, inwardly laughed at the irony of using Far-a-mael as a
distraction.

‘
If there are no more
questions, I should be on my way.’ Noah stood up. ‘The rain has
stopped and Father will be suspicious if I’m out much later.
Goodnight.’ The silt stood regally in his fine clothing, took May’s
hand, and headed for the exit.

‘
Goodnight,’ Jakob
echoed tiredly as he got up and made his way down a narrow passage
at the back of the cave.

‘
What?’ Ilgrin asked
Teah after she’d stared at him continuously for the better part of
a minute.

‘
This must all be
very strange to you.’ The woman smiled warmly and Ilgrin realised
for the first time how beautiful she was beneath all that
makeup.

‘
It is.’ Ilgrin
frowned.

‘
Not quite what you’d
expected?’ Teah asked.

‘
I don’t know,’
Ilgrin replied. ‘You live in trees, for Maker’s sake.’

‘
What were you
expecting?’ Teah laughed. ‘That we’d behave like humans with
wings?’

‘
Maybe.’ Ilgrin felt
himself going blue with embarrassment. ‘Why do demons hate your
kind so much?’

‘
People always hate
those who’re different.’ Teah smiled sadly. ‘And I guess they
didn’t take kindly to being controlled.’

‘
What do you
mean?’

‘
Up until a hundred
or so years ago, the Devil could make whatever orders he wanted,
but they had to be approved by the governing body,’ Teah began.
‘It’d been that way since the fall from Hae’Evun. But something
happened.’

‘
What?’

‘
The Elglair,’ Teah
said despondently. ‘Affiliates came to Hades, having made a deal
with the devil. They possessed countless angels and turned them
against their own kind. That’s how the angel hunts began. Once
they’d destroyed most of us, catching and burning the rest became
increasingly easy.’

‘
No.’ Ilgrin turned
away in disgust. ‘Affiliation to the point of possession is
uncommon among the Elglair. How could there have been enough gils
so qualified as to overthrow that many angels?’

‘
Maybe that’s why
it’s uncommon,’ Teah mused. ‘They all came here. Some of them
remain to this day: dedicated Sa’Tanists in the service of the
devil. They have angel hostages and force them to do all kinds of
evil. It’s a fate worse than death.’

‘
We’ll free them,’
Ilgrin said empathetically. ‘We’ll free them together.’

‘
Thank you,’ Teah
reached across the table and took his hand, her eyes filling with
tears. ‘I knew the true son of Sa’Tan would have to be a good man.
I just knew it.’

Ma-a-rk 56

18. And in those days a great
wickedness would abound, and blasphemous things. Maker’s sacred
arrangement was defiled, and those He’d blessed as guardians became
slaves.

Scriptures of the Holy Tome

CHAPTER
Seventeen

Tension

To her left, the black-stoned cliffs of
Olgarnda pierced the eternal darkness. To her right was nothing but
endless miles of grassy plains. El-i-miir stroked her horse’s mane
and squinted through the shadows of Old World. She glanced over her
shoulder and saw daylight on the distant horizon, but El-i-miir had
been travelling so long beneath the black veil that the idea of
proper light had all but faded from memory.

While keeping close to the cliff face
offered some protection, El-i-miir made sure to keep a keen eye on
the sky nevertheless. She paid close attention to every bit of
insignificant shimmering Way, determined not to leave anything to
chance. Should she be attacked by silts, El-i-miir intended to know
about it well in advance.

Slender tendrils of birds in flight
grew brighter, telling of what was to come. Other strings slowly
faded: events that’d already transpired. A thicker, more
complicated strand dipped about the sky in a squiggly pattern
composed of several colours that intertwined to form a complicated
mix. A silt had flown over the area recently. It had been looking
for something. El-i-miir slid around a large boulder, dismissing
its dull grey history as she went. It’d tumbled down from much
higher up the cliff several months earlier.

An uncomfortable grumbling sound
in El-i-miir’s stomach drew her attention and she paused to take a
swig of water. Her flask of gin had run out the day before. She
wasn’t happy about that. She’d have to find more of both soon, for
the sake of herself and her weary horse. The animal’s aura was
becoming lethargic and its mind less focused. El-i-miir hadn’t been
able to find or steal any food the day before and the little
Elglair money she had was worthless in the border lands.

El-i-miir choked back a scream and
affiliated her horse to an immediate stop when she spotted a large
whisp wafting lazily through the air several strides ahead. She
cursed the Ways--not for the first time--for their inability to
reveal anything about whisp destiny. The dark mist reached out
sluggishly, before dissipating anticlimactically as older whisps
tended to do. El-i-miir surged onward.

She was being a fool. El-i-miir knew
that. Here she was following a childish dream, in pursuit of an
individual silt in a land containing millions. Ilgrin could have
been anywhere and the likelihood of finding him seemed very slim.
She regretted not having found where he’d left from to be able to
follow his Way path.

Lights snaked down from the sky
and surrounded El-i-miir. A moment later she heard beating wings
and kicked her horse into a gallop. The lights became shorter and
shorter, refusing to budge from their position surrounding
El-i-miir, telling her that she would not be able to outrun what
was coming. After stopping her horse and sliding from her saddle,
she turned around in time to see several silts dipping toward her.
El-i-miir drew on her aura and forced strings of it to mingle with
the Ways as she sought out the auras of others. The tendrils
whipped and lashed about El-i-miir like serpents threatening to
lunge. As the silts approached they drew their weapons and
El-i-miir readied hers.

A translucent cord of affiliation
sliced into one of the creature’s auras, causing El-i-miir to feel
the disorientation she’d come to expect from possession. She was
standing beside her horse, but she was also beating her mighty
wings. She was watching the silts descend, feet raking forward. She
was a silt, raking his feet toward her prey. El-i-miir swished
variously coloured tendrils into the silt’s aura and at once he
became her puppet. El-i-miir spun around in the air and flared his
wings, readying herself to attack his kin.

A second silt landed behind
El-i-miir, just as she thrust out a second line of affiliation and
made him step back several paces. She made him close his wings
passively and screamed in fear as she fell through the sky. She
flared her wings, but to no avail. She was already standing on the
ground. She was getting her lines of possession confused. El-i-miir
squeezed her human eyes shut and focused on what the others were
seeing. She backed her grounded silt up another step and then
flared her aerial silt’s wings to regain control of his
flight.

For now El-i-miir controlled the
situation, but affiliating any more than these two would become
very difficult very quickly. She was already splitting her senses
across three bodies. El-i-miir put a hand to her forehead and so
too did the silts under her command. She held the grounded silt
stationary and turned the majority of her concentration to her
demon in the sky. A third silt landed and drew his weapon.
El-i-miir moaned in frustration, releasing yet another cord to
affirm yet another possession.

El-i-miir squeezed her sword and flared
her wings in frustration as she stood staring penetratingly at the
pale human woman with long black hair swishing in the breeze. Her
eyes were squeezed shut so tight. She wanted to attack the human
but couldn’t. She was the human. She flew about in dazed circles,
half-heartedly attaching her kin. She stood behind herself, staring
at the back of her head. She wanted to restrain the woman but
couldn’t move. El-i-miir stood gritting her teeth as the number of
silts increased. She took a deep breath and threw strands out
wildly.

‘
Enough,’ El-i-miir
sobbed through the mouth of a silt several hundred strides away.
‘Please.’ The silt started spiralling toward the ground. ‘There are
so many of them,’ El-i-miir whispered from fifteen different
mouths. They watched the human from fourteen different angles as
she fell to her knees.

She was dizzy. A particularly strong
silt broke free and leapt forward. The tendril recoiled, slapping
back into El-i-miir’s aura so forcefully that she fell onto her
backside. ‘No!’ she cried, throwing up her hands to fling
translucent strands in every direction, now just hoping that they’d
catch.

There was a ringing sound in her
ears . . . in someone’s ears anyway. The El-i-miirs all watched as
El-i-miir got to her feet. She swallowed and watched herself turn
in a circle. She had them all. The silts were squirming irritably,
wrestling against the foreign entity within. She couldn’t move . .
. couldn’t escape. There were too many, leaving El-i-miir stretched
too thin to do anything but squirm along with them. She kept
forgetting who the real her was. Was she the woman or one of the
silts under her control? Her perspective snapped and writhed
between her victims, continually dancing and flashing. El-i-miir
tried to take a step away from the group, but instead one of the
silts took a step forward.

‘
Just breathe.’ A
silt spoke words that’d had their inception in El-i-miir’s
mind.

‘
No . . . please no.’
A tear trickled down another of the silt’s cheeks as El-i-miir
caught a glimpse of something in the sky. There approached another
of the creatures. She couldn’t control another. But what was this?
A horse was galloping toward them. There was an old man mounted on
top. He rode below the silt and yet it paid him no
attention.

When the old man got closer El-i-miir
was able to make out his face, or somewhat more importantly, his
eyes. With bright white pupils, there was no mistaking the stranger
for anything other than Elglair.

El-i-miir’s heart leapt with relief, as
she and each of the silts surrounding her smiled broadly. The old
man threw a hand into the air. As if in response to his gesture the
silt above dove, threw out her arms and snatched El-i-miir up into
the sky.

Fourteen tendrils snapped. The silts
snarled furiously, but the Elglair man shouted at them to remain
where they were and remarkably they did. El-i-miir breathed a sigh
of relief, once again alone in her own head. Her captor landed and
stepped back as the old man approached.

‘
What is this?’
El-i-miir choked out. ‘Who are you?’ She glared at the silt, only
to gape in surprise when a disk of light flashed momentarily into
existence above her head. ‘What is the meaning of this?’ She turned
back to the Elglair man. ‘You’re an affiliate.’

‘
You didn’t think you
were the only one, did you?’ The man opened his arms and laughed.
Upon doing so his sleeve fell open to reveal a demon wing tattoo on
his forearm.

‘
You’re a Sa’Tanist,’
El-i-miir whispered, taking a step back. ‘But you’re
Elglair.’