The Light-Field (14 page)

‘You're … like me,' Zeven squeezed the words out and gulped down the rest of the water in the bottle in his hand, so he could get out the rest of what he wanted to say. ‘You're royalty.'

‘There are two royal ancient Sermetic lines, the House of “Anselm”, which means protector, and the House of “Vidor”, meaning warrior … I was born into the latter,' Mythric began.

‘So, your real name is not Mythric Zeon?' Zeven concluded and Mythric shook his head.

‘That's the name I took when I joined the MSS.'

Zeven was confused. ‘If you're Sermetic, then why would you want to join the
Maladaan
Secret Service?'

‘To get away from Sermetica,' Mythric said matter-of-factly.

‘That's why you were so pissed when the boss asked you to come here.' Mythric again nodded and gulped down a shot. Zeven sensed that Mythric's confession was building to a crescendo, as the pertinent question begged to be asked. ‘Why did you want to escape —'

A knock on the front door startled both of them to a state of high alert.

‘It's probably Anselm,' Mythric suggested as he moved to investigate. ‘Or your girlfriend.'

The locks on the front and back door clicked open at once, and the apartment was flooded with agents.

Mythric raised his hands and backed up to join Zeven.

‘Who are these guys?' They didn't look to be secret service or government guards — maybe they where Khalid's men?

‘Which one of you is Zeven Gudrun?' The man in command asked and as Zeven moved to identify himself, Mythric did the same — to confuse the issue.

‘What are you doing?' Zeven scowled at Mythric.

‘Look, I know you are just trying to protect me, because that's your assignment, that you've almost failed once today already.' Mythric confused the guard further, but Zeven understood well enough.

‘Bag them both,' the commander decided, whereupon Zeven was zapped in the neck, and the shock sent his consciousness into the land of nod.

 

As Zeven awoke in a very comfortable armchair, in a spacious, elegant sitting room, he could not imagine how he'd come to be there. It was a relief to spy Mythric standing over by the large windows, gazing outside. His partner was appearing more serene than Zeven had ever seen him. ‘Are we in trouble?'

Mythric looked to Zeven and grinned. ‘Hard to say really.'

‘Do you know where we are?' Zeven stood and approached the windows to gaze outside, although one great view in Sermetica was much like another — desert. Below them on ground level, before the drop-off, was a huge domed garden to rival those at Heavens-Gardens.

‘We're in the Royal House of Vidor,' Mythric replied. ‘I know; I grew up here.'

Zeven gasped, realising why they had been dragged there. ‘This is about that royal summons from the Dowager Duchess!'

‘What summons?' Mythric went white.

‘When I refused her royal invitation, the old bat —'

‘Shh, she'll hear you,' Mythric warned.

Zeven frowned and dropped his voice to a whisper. ‘She issued a royal summons, which I thought Anselm had explained I could not attend, as I was testing the Hunzo —'

‘She issued a royal summons?' Mythric went into a daze. ‘She hasn't done that for twenty years,' he said to explain his shock. ‘Did she say why she wants to see you so badly?'

‘I never read the summons.' Zeven shrugged. ‘I told you, I don't care about my family, I just want to get back to serving the boss.'

‘So your Powers have returned, have they?'

Both men froze in fear when they heard the old woman's voice coming from inside the room. Mythric headed for the source — it seemed to be coming from a high back chair facing away from them — and there he found the dowager duchess had been sitting and listening in. ‘Lady Maiara Vidor.' He announced her presence to Zeven, who cringed.

‘Come, come, Spyridon,' she replied, ‘you used to call me, grand-mai.'

‘Spyridon?' Zeven assumed this was Mythric's true name.

Mythric nodded as the duchess rose in order to see Zeven and address him directly. ‘That's right, Spyridon Vidor. It means “Spirit Warrior”, which rather suits him, don't you think?'

‘Considering what I have learnt of him today, yeah,' Zeven conceded.

‘You didn't answer my question.' The stately woman looked to Zeven and he was stumped a moment.

She didn't look at all old and frail, as he'd imagined. Her hair was as dark as his, and although she carried a little weight around her middle and her tall stature was diminished, she appeared healthy and as sharp as a razor.

‘Have your Powers returned?' The duchess jogged his memory.

Zeven attempted to will himself back to his apartment and was not surprised to be disappointed.

‘I didn't think so, nor will they for some time, if ever,' she told him.

‘How do you know?' Zeven challenged her premonition, before he realised. ‘Actually, how do you know I have Powers to lose in the first place?'

‘Because I know who you really are.' Her eyes darted over to her grandson, who was looking as bemused as Zeven was.

‘No, Maiara,' Mythric's voice broke over his words, ‘don't tell me you betrayed me?'

‘A person's light-body is as individual as their fingerprint,' she explained to him gently, before turning her sights back to Zeven. ‘And I can see, plain as day, that this is indeed Zaman Vidor — your son.'

Both men near choked on the shocking emotion of the moment.

Mythric found his voice first, and it was tempered with anger. ‘You told me —'

‘You would have searched,' she defended.

‘This can't be?' Zeven protested. ‘Mythric — I mean, Spyridon … is a good guy, he would not have abandoned me as a kid.' He felt he knew his partner better than that.

‘I —' Mythric tried to speak but the duchess intervened on his behalf.

‘You are completely right about that.' Maiara approached to speak with Zeven more intimately. ‘He and your mother fought
gallantly to keep you with them, as a family. Satomi, your mother, was the older sister of the Qusay-Sabah Clarona, who died attempting to keep you safe. But an attempt on your life forced me to arrange for you to be raised in secret, far away from your true parents and family.'

Zeven was welling with mixed emotions and looked to his partner to see if this tale was ringing true for him — the tears streaming down Mythric's face said it all.

He turned and left the room before his feelings could overwhelm him.

‘Hey, wait,' Zeven called, but the duchess grabbed his arm to waylay him.

‘Give him a moment, Zaman,' she appealed. ‘He has just relived the worse night of his life, where he believed he'd lost both his wife and child.'

‘He thought I was dead?' Zeven was suddenly regretting bad-mouthing his biological parents so often around Mythric.

‘It was my doing,' the duchess admitted, sounding as if she both regretted and stood by her decision. ‘If I had not convinced him you'd perished, Spyridon would have tracked you to the end of the universe, and we couldn't risk exposing you; you're too important.'

‘Why?' Zeven was wary.

‘Because the night you were born, I brought forth a prophecy that foretold that you would be the one to rid the universe of the abomination that wears the guise of Khalid Mansur.'

Shocking pangs of fear, inner recognition and adrenaline shot through Zeven. ‘Thanks so much, Great Gran-mai, couldn't you have kept that to yourself? Then I could have kept my family and still killed Mansur!'

‘You can't control prophecy any more than you can control a precognitive fit — and you should know how difficult that is from your association with Anselm's daughter.'

Zeven was shocked yet again; this old bat was a surprise a minute!

‘Yes, I know about her.' She nodded firmly. ‘Don't look so surprised — before your new wave of Zagriata came into being, I was the most powerful psychic alive!'

‘I don't doubt it.' Zeven gave a nervous smile. ‘But I always thought the Zagriata was a single entity?'

‘It is, and it isn't,' Maiara replied. ‘It is many working as one to serve the many, to bring light and love back into balance.'

‘So I am one of the souls that the legend is referring to?' Zeven was thrilled beyond belief to discover that the legend wasn't just about Taren — it was about them all! Taren had tried to tell him this many times, in different terms, but finally he believed it.

‘Actually your participation is currently under debate.' The duchess was sorry to put a dampener on his aspirations. ‘The loss of your Power is evidence of that.'

‘Who is debating, the Grigori?' Zeven needed to know, so he knew who to appeal to.

‘You know of the Grigori?' The duchess raised both brows, impressed, and then shook her head in answer to his question. ‘Your Power comes from your soul source, which is far beyond the Grigori's realm of influence … they can only guide. Your Grigori stepped over that line, Zaman, in order to salvage an already precarious situation.'

‘How do you know so much?' Zeven didn't like that Maiara seemed to see through him like a pane of glass.

‘I have gone to great lengths to listen and know my higher self, and through it I get reports from the Grigori, very regularly.'

‘Oh shit,' Zeven mumbled, sensing that for some reason, he was in trouble. ‘All I did was hesitate when Sammael told me to get out, is that really so awful?'

The duchess seemed rather amused by his words and chuckled down deep in her throat. ‘Come, Zaman, do you really think that is the reason that your place among the Zagriata is in question?' She looked at Zeven as if to warn him that she knew otherwise.

‘No.' He swallowed hard on his realisation. ‘I've been a show-off and a smartarse, and my actions have risked exposing the Zagriata.' In this instance he was using the term to refer to Taren Lennox and the private army she was building.

‘Top marks.' The duchess awarded him his due. ‘That is precisely the reason.'

‘So what is to be done about it?' Zeven appealed.

‘The only thing to be done, is for you to go live in a quiet isolated place, where no one will find you and you will not be tempted to show off. Live in humility and service to others, until your soul source feels you are truly worthy to once again carry the sword of the universal cause,' the duchess informed him bluntly, much to Zeven's horror. ‘And you had better hope your Powers do return, because the Zagriata are going to need you.'

Zeven was tempted to burst into a fit of rage.

‘This is about learning to put the good of others before your own needs, Zaman,' Maiara stressed. ‘And if you don't comprehend that, you may as well go back to the desert and die there!'

The one thing having Power had taught Zeven was how to control his emotions and after a few deep breaths he'd reeled them in. ‘Is Zaman my name, or do you just have a strange accent?' He wondered if she was trying to say Starman.

The duchess burst into laughter. ‘No, no, child,' she quelled her merriment to explain, ‘Zaman
is
your birth name, it means “time” in ancient Sermetic.'

‘So, my name, Zaman Vidor, actually means —' Zeven tried out his real name for size, rather proud of it now that he knew what it meant.

‘— Time Warrior,' his great grandmother concluded, raising both brows to empathise with Zeven's wonder. ‘Appropriate, don't you think?'

He had to agree that it was.

 

For twenty long years Mythric had been running from the night that was now playing out over and over in his mind …

 

He stirs to the sound of his child screaming, as never before — an attack from behind had left him unconscious. The knowledge causes a panicked feeling in the pit of his stomach. They have been in hiding for over a year — have one of their enemies finally found them?

Upstairs, laying defiled and murdered in a pool of her own blood, is the Princess Satomi — his charge and lover. Grief, like an avalanche of rocks, bombards his emotional being and he is tempted to collapse beside her, yet his son's cries compel him to the nursery in the room beyond and he is there in a thought.

A masked assailant looms over the crib and, upon the intrusion, thrusts a dagger into the crying infant and his screams cease.

Grief turns to rage, and he overpowers the attacker before he can withdraw the dagger. Under threat of being unmasked, the offender vanishes into thin air and he is left astonished to discover that there is another with his ability to teleport.

His sight turns to his son's crib and loath to view the desecration, he finds that only bloodied covers remain — the tiny body of Zaman Vidor is gone!

 

Mythric teleported the dead body of his beloved to the House of Vidor, where he recounted the night's events to the head of the house, and asked why his all-seeing grandmother did not foresee this tragedy.

‘Only as the sad events unfolded were they made known to me … the evil intent was somehow shielded from my sight until the time of their execution. But once events are brought into play in the physical world there is no shielding them,' Maiara explained. ‘It was I who retrieved the child and spirited him to a healer. However,' the dowager duchess was sad to advise, ‘my action did not prove swift enough to save the child's life.' Maiara was no longer a young woman,
even then, and the effort to teleport had clearly drained her dry of energy and physical strength, but that fact did not detract from Mythric's anger.

‘Am I supposed to thank you? You and your bloody prophecy!' He blamed her for bringing the curse of Khalid upon his family. ‘You know as well as I, that there are a precious few in any of the ancient royal lines who possess my talent.' He cut to the heart of the matter. ‘And even fewer who can hide their intent from you! Admit it, that monster you raised is more powerful than you imagined!'