Newsgroups: alt.pub.dragons-inn From: hutch@ibeam.intel.com (Steve Hutchison) Subject: [MG] Kadrys: Blood Ties Message-ID: Keywords: And on the sidelines of another battle References: Date: Wed, 7 Jul 1993 23:05:01 GMT [ADMIN] This is posted for Andrea Evans. Sorry about the delay, Andrea. There was the faintest trace of a smile on Kadrys' lips as he walked away from the deserted alley, with its clothesline swaying empty in the wind. The sheer physical challenge of the tightrope walk had been a valuable exercise, had helped concentrate his mind, focus him on the essential nature of his struggle: to remain human and open to emotion without becoming lost in grief, to remain detached and calm without becoming a callous monster. The stilling of the rain as the afternoon mellowed toward evening, also returned some lightness to his step, made him look less like a drowned thing. But then a mood of unease, a dim and distant sensation of worry, suddenly dawned in him. Kadrys frowned, searching his own feelings. No. This was different from his own grief. Almost as if it was not his own feeling at all. As if it came from an outside source. His frown deepened. 'Strange. I'm not at all telepathic, not unless...' His eyes widened. 'Not unless I count the resonance...' The resonance: A residual link between himself and his most recent contact, the person whose blood flowed strongest in his veins, who was the source of his own life. While he was awake, he might feel in his own flesh an echo of events affecting the other body, or might sense their strongest emotions or thoughts in his own mind. He had known such bonds to lead to even stranger things during the times his body lay at rest in the earth... But this resonance was extremely rare. He only ever felt it when there had been exceptional mental and spiritual closeness during the taking of blood. Only with those he loved. He drew a deep breath, the worry he felt now plain in his face. _Kardia_. If it was true, if he was resonating to her, then she must be frantic about something. He paused, irresolute, and then it hit him. A thin pain in his side, faint but precise. Reflexively he glanced down, but of course he was not wounded. He gave a hiss of anxiety. She was hurt. He could feel it. He cast aside all doubt, his eyes glazing as he turned all his attention inward, searching for the source of the pain that throbbed in the veins between his ribs. There. He turned as surely as a compass needle, and vanished in a blur of unnatural speed. He slowed, staring up at a building that might have come out of M. C. Escher's most warped nightmare. The Mages' Guild. Oh shit. Ancient, inground caution brought him to a halt at the foot of the stairs. Who knew what sort of wards they'd have in place here. He'd probably start to burn as soon as he touched that damn revolving door. But the dull ache in his side had not faded. No time. He _had_ to try. He reached out and brushed his fingers against the doorhandle, his whole body tensed to leap backwards. Nothing. A youth pushed past him, grinning superciliously. "You work them like this!" he sniffed, pushing the revolving door and vanishing inside. Kadrys snarled and bombed through the door, the tension still screaming in his stance. Still nothing. No wards, not against undead anyway. Well, at least _one_ lucky break today... He drew a breath and the scent hit him in a hot wave. Instantly he sprinted across the hall to the small knot of people beside a counter. He slid through the bystanders, coming to a halt beside some woman he did not notice. He was utterly focused on Kardia. *** Earlier, Dasham had been looking daggers, swords and axes at Urcohea's back as he left the hall with Coral and the rest of his team. The next instant, Leonaco had appeared with a soft *pop* of displaced air and hurried straight over to the main reception desk, peering with interest at it and at the shawl someone had dropped on the floor nearby. He muttered to the receptionist, "Just reset the doors so they open onto the side entry hall, would you? We don't want any spectators, not until we've rebooted this thing..." He leaned over the desk and started to scan the readouts. Dasham cleared her throat, as pointedly as a dragon about to breathe fire. "Leonaco, there's a _person_ here who needs some attention. My cursebreaker. _Now_, if you please. The comms board can wait." Leonaco blinked over at the injured woman, apparently noticing her for the first time. "Well, can't you just heal her then?" he asked Dasham briskly. Kuso and Tomas watched in fascination, wondering just how much more Dasham would take before she exploded. She ignored both of them, fortunately, in her concentration on Leonaco. "_No_, not without unacceptable risk. She's cybered." Leonaco hurried over, his initial glance at Kardia intensifying into real interest as he examined her cybering, muttering down a handheld comlink to his chief journeyman. "Jaren. Mix up a fresh canister of biosynth C, soonest. 'Port it to the main hall, with a full set of applicators and skinseals. Yes, got a bulletscore and a cracked rib up here. Ohyes, and mix one of the ampoules Tero was working on into the batch, the contact paindampers." Dasham stood and watched impatiently as Leonaco and his journeyman started work on Kardia's unconscious body, gaining access to the site of her wound by pushing up the side of her blouse to her armpit. Dasham's eyes narrowed with speculative interest on seeing that all the skin visible was crisscrossed with dozens of deep and ugly weals, the familiar marks of a whip, wielded with the haphazard, careless brutality of a slaver. But the marks were old and long healed, dull whitish scar tissue without a trace of inflammation. The wound itself was a long shallow gouge in her skin just over the ribs. The shock of the bullet had cracked a rib right underneath the gouge and Leonaco's journeyman Jaren, a painfully thin man with bristling brown hair, was plastering the site thickly with a clear gel that halted the bleeding, before drying to rock hard opacity. Jaren spread the gel patiently round her ribs beyond the site of the wound, sealing it against infection and immobilising her entire side, so that the rib would be able to heal itself without being disturbed by undue movement. Just then the doors spun. She glanced over, drawing breath to spit more questions and accusations at Urcohea. When she saw it wasn't Urcohea, wasn't even a mage, just some powerless prole, she fired a stare at him that would have made a basilisk weep with envy. Unfortunately it was wasted. He wasn't even looking in Dasham's direction. His eyes were riveted on Kardia as if she were the only person in the room. Leonaco also looked up when he heard the doors. He frowned in surprise, wondering how the newcomer had managed to arrive here instead of in the backup reception hall. He sighed and shook his head as if resigned to having _all_ his artifacts fall victim at the same time to the whims of Murfee, the god of Technogadgetry. And the next instant the new arrival was hastening toward them. Too fast. Dasham stared at him, curious rather than worried, in view of his obvious lack of Talent. Then, he stopped, and spoke. *** Kadrys stood rockstill, insensible to everything around him but Kardia. The pallor of shock, the sheen of cold sweat, the distressed frown even as she lay unconscious. The shallow panting breaths. The accompanying creak of a fractured rib underneath some sort of plastering. He spun and faced the woman beside him, a hardfaced beauty with unlikely henna red hair who was staring at him through narrowed eyes. "What _happened_ here?" he hissed. Suddenly the woman blinked out of that assessing snare and snapped at the top of her voice, "_Move!_ Get away from her!" _Mages_. Damn them and their tinpot egos. Kadrys backed away, his arms held out placatingly. "All right, all right, this far enough?" he muttered distractedly, shifting his glance from the redhead to the others nearby, gesturing to where Kardia lay, "Now just please, _someone_, take care of her!" Dasham started to snap, "Why are _you_ so concer..." And then her cold green eyes widened, and she spat a curse that was dragged squealing into Kardia's shawl and grounded in a burst of black sparks. She gestured and menace crystallised out of the air, poised itself over Kadrys like an avalanche ready to burst. "You will not move. If you do attempt to escape, you will be _held_. I guarantee the experience will _not_ be pleasant." She glanced sideways at Leonaco, who was watching her closely, "...But I may as well save the mana. So I'm giving you a chance to speak first." "Dasham, what are you doing?" Leonaco muttered. "_Look_ at him!" Leonaco nodded tersely. "I can see he's a vampire. So? _You_ of all people should be used to mingling with undead, what with those researches of yours." "Not that!" Leonaco shrugged. "Well, yes, that age _did_ have me worried for a moment. I was afraid your cursebreaker had crashed the bioscanners on the doors as well as the comm-net. If anything, I'm relieved he really _is_ all that old. It means there's one less artifact gone down round here!" Leonaco frowned at her, a wonderful laconic stubbornness in his expression. Dasham went white to the lips. Her teeth ground almost audibly. Tomas and Kuso exchanged breathless glances. Jaren couldn't bear to look. Dasham drew a long, deep breath. "Look at him! Do it! Really _look_! Now look at her! Not at the godsdamn gadgetry, not at the wound, at _her_! NOW do you see it?" she howled. Leonaco's eyebrows lifted, and he stroked the side of his jaw, nonplussed. When he spoke, his voice was speculative. "Hmmm. Her blood. In him..." "YES! He's been draining her dry! This bloodsucking bastard OWNS her!" She whirled from Leonaco to Kadrys, took one step forward and stabbed a finger at the vampire in a single smooth motion, pure and practised. The sudden *CRASH* of lightning echoed in the hall, louder than the all-too-recent gunfire. The bolt leapt across the room and struck, twisting into Kadrys' guts. As he doubled over, Dasham watched with glee, one hand raised to release the containment spell she'd poised like a boulder over his head, in case he tried to retaliate, or run. "Now, I'd like to know _precisely_ what you and this little Trojan nag of yours had in mind. Just what were you planning on doing to me, under cover of _supposedly_ breaking my curse? I'd really like to know what it was," she purred, "because I'd like to do it to you. Tenfold." And then a blurry voice came up to them from the floor. "Whatthehell d'you think you're _doing_ to him?" Kardia had been jolted back to awareness by a sudden shattering bang. She had flinched, thinking at first that they were still firing at her. But the next instant she realised that someone had been tending to her instead. Her side was immobilised in some material as rigid as plaster, but as soft as flesh to the touch. She assumed the stuff included some contact anaesthetic, since her entire side was pleasantly numb. But her still-groggy attention was drawn by the sound of Dasham's voice, savage with delight. Kardia turned her head with a little effort, saw Dasham staring at Kadrys. Kardia switched to her othersight, saw the mass of compulsion looming over Kadrys like a tsunami about to break. Somehow, Kardia fought past the numbness and the stiffness of the plastering, found the breath for protest. Dasham glanced down, smiling at Kardia's words. "How very touching. The slave pleads for her master's life." Dasham's reply hit Kardia like another shot. She cried instantly, a raw edge of revulsion in her voice, "_Slave_? I am NOT a slave. Not to him, not to _anybody_! Never!" Never again. Dasham snickered. "Oh no? Well just how _did_ your blood get into his veins? You're not going to tell me you just offered it to him without his even having to _ask_ you for it. 'Oh, no, _I_ wasn't enslaved...'" She whirled back to face Kadrys, "And _you're_ not going to tell me you've never taken over her mind, never glutted yourself with her blood. You're _not_ going to insult my intelligence, either of you, I sincerely hope!" She shook her head, smiling with grim satisfaction. "No, you'd better not tell me that. What you _will_ tell me, sooner or later, is what you had planned, the two of you. I think I'll start with you," she said, flicking a hand negligently at Kadrys. "By the time I'm through with you, your puppet should be healed up enough to take some questioning on her own. By the look of those scars, she's the experienced type..." Leonaco snapped "Dasham! You overstep yourself! You have no proof. And you certainly do _not_ need to go to any extreme measures to gain it. You're Acting Supreme Archmage, these days, so it's high time you started to _act_ like an archmage! Or don't you _know_ how to apply a simple truth-detecting spell to two unwarded people?" he added, raising his bushy brows in elaborate irony. Dasham stared for a long, long moment at Leonaco. His expression remained stolid and unmoved, somehow, in the face of her disbelieving rage. At last she broke the silence by turning her back on Leonaco, holding out her hand, palm upmost. A soft rustle, and a plume of flame unfolded itself in her palm. It burned with a clear white radiance, pure and untinged by yellow. "This is a tiny tongue of the Flame of Truth. Since it's your truth we're interested in testing," she tipped her head toward Kardia and Kadrys, "the Flame will have to be attuned to you, take some of you into itself." She crossed over the room, knelt and lowered her hand to the floor by Kardia's side. She tilted her hand, and the flame spilled onto the floor, onto the centre of the small, still-wet pool of blood the bullet had shed. With a faint sizzle the last trace of blood was absorbed. Dasham scooped up the flame casually and turned toward Kadrys. She held out her hand. "From you, we need some flesh. We can't use blood," she added with an ironic smirk, "It's not _yours_." Kadrys stared expressionlessly at Dasham for a moment, then raised a fingertip to his mouth, shaved a thin slice of skin as precisely as with the stroke of a razor, held it over the flame, which leaped to consume his offering. Dasham half-turned to face both him and Kardia. "You won't have seen this before, so I suppose I'll have to explain how it works. It's really quite _simple_. Now that the Flame is attuned to you, it will respond to your every word. If you tell the truth, the Flame will remain white, and all will be well. If you lie, then the Flame will instantly burn black. And I assure you that things will not be so well." She glanced at Kardia, who gave her a hard, cold stare in return. Dasham shrugged. "Go on. Test it, if you like." "My name is Kardia Xvaramene, and I was born in Generica." Kardia's voice was perfectly casual and offhand throughout, but the moment she began to say the word 'Generica', the clear white light vanished and a forked sliver of darkness writhed and leaped in its place. Then, the next moment, the light dawned, scaling upward rapidly from red to orange to yellow to its original supernatural brilliance. Dasham smiled at them both, a smile as bright as the flame she held in her hand. A vivid, attractive expression, unless you happened to look at her eyes. "Good. Since it's working, let's begin, shall we?" she asked Kardia with a bright, insincere joviality, "My dear, just how long ago did he enslave you?" Kardia snarled. "I _told_ you. He has _not_ enslaved me. I am _nobody_'s slave. Not his, not anybody's." Dasham's eyes, fixed triumphantly on the flame, narrowed when it continued to burn white throughout Kardia's reply. But her smile did not, quite, falter. "Well proabably _enslave_ is too strong a word. He _persuaded_ you then, didn't he. Or you _chose_ to go along with his plans, because of his hold on you." "He didn't persuade me to do anything. He doesn't have any hold on me." "Oh? But he has been drinking your blood. Recently. How did _that_ happen?" "At the Founder's day party, we were attacked by a demon. He fought it, when he could've run and left me to it. After the fight, well, he was injured, and in need, and I felt as though I owed him _something_ for having defended me. So I just offered him a drink." she concluded, her voice pointedly casual, implying that Dasham was overreacting. The flame continued to burn tranquil and white. "And that's _all_?" Dasham asked disbelievingly. "You're leaving _something_ out. You offered him your blood, so you _did_ feel attached to him. You must feel attached now. You must love him, you must be willing to do as he says..." Kardia's fists clenched, and she strained against the solid mass of the splinting, wanting to shout at Dasham, but lacking the strength and the full use of her lungs. She snarled with contempt at Dasham's stubborn refusal to accept the obvious, and her voice was sharp with exasperation at the mage's paranoid persistence. "_You_ don't believe this? Well neither do _I_! Are you deaf? For the last time, he's got no claim on me! He's _just_ a FRIEND, goddammit!" Kardia was glaring at Dasham. Dasham was fixated on the flame in her hand, watching unsuccessfully for even the slightest trace of blackness. Neither of them saw the flicker of pain pass across Kadrys' face. The sound of Kardia's cry seemed to echo mockingly in his ears. The contempt in her voice, her scornful disbelief at the very idea that there could ever have been anything deeper between them. His anguish at that moment was too intense for his usually perfect control. Then, somehow, the mask of calm was dragged back in place. But that was all it was: no more than a mask. He had only just composed himself when Dasham spun, almost desperately, to face him. "Did you plan anything at all which would have been of any detriment to me?" "No." "Do you know anything about any such plans?" "No." "Did you know she was a cursebreaker before you defended her from this demon?" "Yes." "Did you have any ulterior motive for saving her?" "Yes." "Ah now we come to it! What was your motive?" A long, long pause. "Speak, or suffer!" Dasham gestured, and the air tightened around him, merciless as a vice. "What was your motive?" "...I love her." The words were forced from him in a hiss of air being crushed from his lungs. "I wanted her to love me." Dasham frowned skeptically, gesturing for the pressure to relax. "But why go through the trouble of that fight to win her over? Particularly since it's failed!" she sneered. "Why didn't you just use gaze, make certain she would love you?" "Because I wanted _her_ to love me. I wanted a lover. I have never been interested in slaves." His voice edged with sarcasm, he added, "Sorry to disappoint you." It was not until the end of that final sentence, that the flame flashed briefly black. Leonaco interrupted "Well, Dasham? I think we've heard more than enough to know that there _was_ no plot against you. You've wronged both these people." A pause while Dasham stared at the fire in her palm. Then she clapped her hands together with a sudden sharp crack, loud enough to make Kardia blink, trapping and extinguishing the flame. She nodded in slow, expressionless silence at Leonaco, before turning to face Kadrys and Kardia. She gave them both a soft, rueful smile. "Leonaco is right, and I was wrong. I misjudged you both. I can only ask you to forgive me. The life of an archmage is full of peril which often comes from the most unlikely sources. I am obliged to guard my safety ceaselessly. You will understand, this is always a strain, and if you were at the party, then you may know of - recent events - that have made my own personal stresses more acute. I apologise sincerely for any inconvenience my doubt caused either of you." She turned to face Kardia, knelt by her side, laid a gentle hand on her arm. "And in partial recompense, I will equal out of my own funds, whatever payment 'Raelf had settled on for the loan of your skills in breaking my curse." Kardia's expression, though it did not match Dasham's sad smile, at least lost its earlier hard, combative edge. The tension relaxed from her posture and she nodded in assent. "OK. Thanks for that. I'm glad you see it our way now." Kardia reclined back against the hard surface of the desk, suddenly exhausted, feeling the splint as an unyielding mass weighing down her body. Dasham peered concernedly at Kardia, sighed with sympathy. "You need some rest. I think that since it was Urcohea's staff who mistook you for a saboteur, then the least the Guild could do is provide a more comfortable place for you to recover than a cold marble floor." She looked up. "Jeril, go to the Infirmary and prepare the most comfortable bed for our guest." Jeril nodded and vanished. "Tomas, report to Urcohea and tell him we have remedied the effects of the -- overeagerness of his staff. Kuso, you shot this poor woman, the least _you_ can do is levitate her, _gently_, and personally take her to the Infirmary, since her cybering makes a 'port risky." Tomas left in haste, and Kuso summoned a standard levitapestry and helped Kardia to lie on it. He gestured and the tapestry rose gently off the floor, hovering by Kuso's side as he slowly left the room. Kardia rode comfortably, allowing her eyes to close in relief and weariness. Kadrys watched her out of sight, hearing her breathing deepen toward sleep, deciding not to follow just yet. Better to let her sleep. Dasham turned to Leonaco, her expression serious. "I think that since Urcohea's not back yet, he may need some skilled assistance. Anything that keeps our - combative - Security Archmage so fully occupied that he doesn't send messages, could be serious. Recon and see if some of your artifacts can help." Leonaco paused, then nodded. Hefting his scanner and scooping up some other pieces of arcane equipment from where he'd dumped them on the reception desk, he left the building. And then, only Dasham was left in the room. Dasham, and Kadrys. Kadrys nodded fractionally to her and moved to leave. Dasham flicked her hands, and the crushing pressure returned full-force, sealing his body in a grip harder than stone, immobilising him like a fly in amber. Instantly, he reached for the mistform, then his other shapes, but all of them were denied him. As Dasham drew near, his eyes blazed at her with the red flame of desperation, brighter than her hair. She only widened that damnable smile. Inside, he cursed. _Warded_. Why not? She'd had ample time while they were talking to prepare herself for this moment. Dasham reached up a hand, delicately traced the pounding line of a vein in his temple. "Now why were _you_ leaving in such a hurry? Surely we can get to know each other a little more - intimately?" She gestured, and both of them disappeared. The polished marble walls of the empty hall echoed to the miniature thunderclap of their departure, and then all was silent and still.