Chapter TWENTY
Rebecca
The ride was shorter than I expected, and it didn't make me happy to learn I could have jogged there in the time I had waited for Max to show up. According to the demon, the name of the ruins was Tambomachay. At least, the mortals who were there saw only ruins. He insisted that it was much more than that, and had been for nearly four thousand years.
Unless you were into archaeology or history, it didn't look like much; a few stone walls sticking out of the side of a hill, with a picturesque landscape surrounding it. At the top was a row of four square arches that had been filled in with stone to keep people from trying to get inside, and two more of these arches rested near the bottom right, looking like they should have been going somewhere.
According to Max, they were. What we were looking at was the newest version of an ancient home to the djinn, a complex that had been built by the Inca in order to both worship and serve the Divine. He couldn't say what had happened in its history to put it in its current state, but he was pretty sure somebody had done something to piss the djinn off.
"Glamoured?" Obi asked.
We were standing right in front of one of the arches, looking at the cement.
"Not a glamour you're used to," Max said. "Djinn are a little... different."
Obi knocked on the cement. It sounded solid enough. "'Ha-ha' different, or 'oh crap' different?"
"Just... different. It isn't the glamour that makes it, it's the power that keeps anyone out that the djinn don't want in, both mortal and Divine alike."
"We can't get in?" I asked.
Max laughed "Oh, we can get in." He reached into a pocket and withdrew a simple wooden ring. It wasn't one of mine. "I took this from that djinn the witch was controlling. Possessing something of the djinn's should be enough to bypass security."
When had he taken it, while the djinn had his knife to my throat? I found the stone in my pocket, and gripped it tight. It was easy enough to picture needing to call on the sword, and finding that Max had stolen it again.
He walked up to the cement and pushed the ring against it. There was no sound, no fancy glowing lights, or anything that would suggest the ring had done anything.
"Perfect," he said. He handed the ring back to Obi. "You can't see it until you touch it."
"Kind of lousy security," Obi said, taking the ring and pushing it against the cement. "A retina scanner would be more effective." He handed the ring to me.
"Trust me, muscles, only a fool walks into the home of a djinn uninvited."
I put the ring against the cement, and it vanished in front of my eyes, revealing a long corridor lined in marble and gold, with flaming sconces providing illumination.
"I guess that makes us fools," I said.
Max nodded. "Quite right. Let's go."
We walked in. There were no djinn here that we could see, but I was sure they couldn't be far away. They had to know we were coming, so I expected we were walking right into a trap.
On purpose.
Again.
The corridor split at the end. To the left, the floor sloped downwards, deeper into the earth. To the right, it stayed flat, but ended soon after at an ornately carved wooden door. From here, the carving seemed to depict two of the djinn's favorite things - alcohol, and sex.
"Not there," Max said. "This way."
We took the downward slope. It continued for a few hundred yards before evening out and branching to four corridors. These hallways were lined with simpler doors that gave no indication of their purpose. Somehow, Max knew where we were supposed to go.
"The gathering room should be riiiiggght... here." He stopped and made a right hook, leaving us staring at a smooth wall. "Of course, they don't want just anyone to get into their most important places. The ring?"
I pushed the ring against the wall, and passed it on. The smooth wall became a simple archway into a much grander room.
It explained the reason the floor had sloped, because the ceiling was a good two hundred feet away. The walls were mosaic, a menagerie of rainbow colored glass with an ethereal light behind it, casting bright shadows everywhere as though the room was encased in faceted gems. At the distant rear was a collection of fur carpets, large round beds, huge pillows, and a single golden throne, which sat empty. The Damned was clearly visible, hanging from the wall above the throne, a mottled and chipped chunk of iron with a midnight black hilt laced with gold.
Resting on one of the giant pillows was a woman, short and petite with long golden hair, dressed in a billowy purple velvet gown and covered in enough rings, chains, and bracelets to fill the display cases at Tiffany's.
"Hmm... this is unexpected," Max said.
I didn't have to ask him what he meant. In two rows running off-center of the room were cages, glass cages. Inside every single one of the cages was a djinn. They stood, sat, and floated, and looked generally unhappy with their predicament. A collective gasp rose up at the sight of us.
"Not a witch. A coven." It made sense. A single witch couldn't control a djinn, but a coven could combine power to do some pretty heavy lifting. "I take it the bitch on the bed is their leader?"
"I heard that," she said. She leaned forward onto her elbows and regarded us. She looked young, but I doubted she was. "You're fools to come here."
"That's what I said," Max replied.
The witch stared at us, amused. "You've come for the Damned. I'm sorry Samael, but you can't have it."
I looked over at Max. Was he Samael? Was that name supposed to mean something?
The djinn in the white suit stepped out from between the rows of other djinn. He had shed his top clothes, leaving himself bare chested, with two swords strapped to his back.
"Abaz," Max said under his breath, ignoring my questioning glance. He motioned with his head to the cage closest to the witch. Inside was a diminutive djinn in a green vest and black pants. His head hung against his chest, defeated.
She looked at Max. "Come, Samael. Don't pretend that you don't know me."
"You may know that name, but I don't know you." He didn't sound convinced.
She slid to her feet and put her hands together. "I wonder... You don't know me, you don't remember me, or you don't want to remember me? I was just a child when you brought the sword to Abaz, and asked him to keep it for your master. I was hiding in the shadows, watching. My name is Abalita."
"Abalita?" Max's eyes shifted back to Abaz, who had lifted his head to look at the woman. "I didn't think it was possible."
"For a djinn to have a child with a mortal? Neither did he, or my mother, but here I am."
"You threw your own dad in a cell?" Obi asked. "That is messed up."
Her eyes burned in green and gold. "Do you know how the djinn live, Obi-Wan Sampson? The alcohol, the gambling, the sexual gratification? They take on young girls like my mother, force them into a life of service in exchange for a thimble's worth of power, and don't even notice when they've died. They believe the world is for their pleasure, that all of life is for their pleasure. Did you know there are no female djinn? Not anymore. Where did they go, I wonder?" She looked over at Abaz. "I imagine they just got tired of it and left, and none of them even noticed."
"I loved your mother," Abaz said, getting to his feet and putting his hands to the glass bars.
"You did? How long ago did she die? Do you even know how old I am?"
Abalita seemed to forget about us, storming to the cage and pushing her hand against Abaz's chest. He cried out in pain and fell back.
"You can understand though, can't you Reyka?" She turned back to us, and approached me. She didn't seem at all afraid that we could harm her, and I doubted she was counting on the one free djinn to be her sole protection. "You killed your father for the things he did to your mother, and to you."
And would have done to Landon. "What's your point?"
"You understand the need to take care of yourself. To look out for yourself. To count on no one. You did what you had to do. You can't have the sword, because I need it. To protect myself, and to care for my family. The sword has more uses than to simply turn light to dark."
"Abalita, the sword is Cursed," Max said. "Whatever power you are pulling from it will darken your soul."
"More than growing up in this place, an afterthought to the whim of immortal children? I doubt that. The seraphim and the demons have a purpose for humanity, as despicable as it may be. The djinn use us as nothing more than toys, playthings easily forgotten and discarded. So I learned to harness the power of my birthright. I adopted the women brought in to worship them. I taught them how they were being deceived, and trained them to fight back. Now the djinn are our trophies. Samael, you know how strong the djinn are. The power of the Damned is the only thing that keeps them in their cages."
"We need the sword," I said. I understood her pain, and her desire to punish those who had caused it. In another time and place, I may have been more sympathetic. I may have even sided with her. Not today. Not when collecting the blades was the only way to get Landon out.
"I know."
She turned her back on us. I pulled the stone from my pocket and willed the obsidian spatha into my hand. The floor began to vibrate, and Abalita's sisters poured into the room. They were witches, all of them, their power that of the djinn. I didn't know if the blade could kill them without taking their heads. I didn't even know if I would get to find out.
Golems rose from between the cages, masses of stone pulled from the ground beneath the room.
"Rebecca, the sword," Max said. His face began to change, his body shifting into pure reaper.
The shirtless djinn appeared in front of me, sword in hand, ready to strike. I brought the blade around to block, and then heard the echo of a gunshot. He fell away from me as quickly as he had arrived, thrown to the ground by the force of the bullet pounding into his skull.
"Behind you," I shouted to Obi. He lowered the Eagle, a jagged Cursed blade appearing in his hand from somewhere on him. The golem threw a mountainous fist, but he jerked away and came back, the edge creating sparks along the stone shell.
"Man, why am I never prepared?" He slipped around another heavy punch.
"Rebecca!" Max had finished shifting, and his voice became deeper and more frightening. I put my eyes on the Damned, still hanging on the wall, though it looked like Abalita was going for it. I felt a wave of energy wash through me, a witch's power bouncing off Elyse's tattoos.
I started running at the same time I grabbed one of the knives from my boots. In one smooth motion I threw it at Abalita's back. I didn't know that much about djinn, and I knew even less about human-djinn hybrids, but I was sure she wouldn't have turned her back if it had left her defenseless. At the last moment, she ducked to the side, reached up and snatched the dagger from the air, then turned and fired it back. It was the move I'd anticipated, and I dove forward, rolling under it and back up. I'd forced her to slow, and gained a dozen feet.
I heard screaming behind me. I didn't know what Max was doing, but the witches weren't happy about it. Then I heard a grunt, and he tumbled past me, a golem wrapped up in his arms.
More gunfire echoed in the enormous room, and an unmistakeable cry rose from the back, proving bullets were effective after all. Two more shots, a thud, and then it stopped.
Abalita and I raced onto the pillows and beds, towards the back wall where the Damned sat. I almost caught up to her, lunging forward and getting a hand on the rear of her velvet dress, tearing it along the seam and finding myself with a handful of cloth. I almost caught up. She pulled the blade from the wall and leveled it at my face.
"You've lost, Reyka," she said. I didn't hear any fighting behind me, which wasn't a good sign. "Get up."
I took a deep breath and got to my feet. I dared a look to the back, to see Max being held by two of the stone golems, and Obi with the djinn's blade to his throat. Two of the witches lay in a growing pool of blood, and the others looked like they were ready to claw him apart.
"What about your sisters?" I asked. "The sword is darkening their souls, too. What did you save them from that the hatred and chaos of Hell is a better end?"
She looked back at them. "You have no idea."
"You know I do. They'll turn on you, and on each other in time. It may take hundreds of years, but it will happen. You've seen it happen already."
It was a guess, but the math added up. Abalita had to be nearly a thousand years old, if she had been alive when Max had brought the sword to Abaz.
"Only to those who are weak. Who don't truly believe."
"I'm not saying your father, or the djinn don't deserve to be punished, but at what cost to you? At what cost to these girls? How many have you had to bring in from the street to replenish your coven? How many lives have you ruined to continue your revenge?"
I understood it now. I understood why the witch had been out on the streets with the djinn. She hadn't been lounging, she'd been recruiting. It was the Damned, I knew. She had never been cut with it, but using its power had damned her all the same, only so slowly and subtly that she had never sensed the change. I also understood that once I would have done the same thing, and I wouldn't have needed the Damned to make it so. I had been born with that evil inside me.
Abalita looked past me, to the cage where her father sat watching the exchange. "It is my right."
"It is your undoing. Give me the sword, Abalita. Let it go, and there may be hope for you, and for your sisters."
She kept her eyes on Abaz. "They'll kill me. They'll kill us all as soon as they're free, and then they'll go right back to their misogynistic ways. You may be right that the sword has changed me, Reyka. Nothing will change them."
I followed her gaze back to Abaz and felt a cold shudder in my soul. His eyes weren't penitent, they were gleeful, anticipating that I would convince her to let the sword go.
"You see it," she said. "I can tell that you do. You know what it's like, because you have lived it the way I have."
I had, and I could. That didn't change what I had to do. My path was set, and God had put me on it. Wherever the djinn had come from, I wasn't going to let them stand in my way.
Abalita still held the Damned, the point aimed at my heart. I had the obsidian spatha in my hand. Who was faster?
I brought the blade up and lunged, feeling the pain of the flesh as the Damned bit into it, and the wrenching of my wrist as the spatha bit into her. My breath vanished with the piercing of Elyse's heart, and I felt the power of the weapon seeping towards her soul like a bottle of spilled ink. I pushed back against it, wrapping her up tight so it couldn't pierce me to reach her, at the same time I used my momentum to turn around and pull the blade from Abalita's grip.
I stumbled back towards the front of the room, impaled, gasping but lucent. The cages had been weakened by the death of the witches. They shattered at the loss of the sword.
Abaz's eyes were frightening joy. I used my free hand to pull the Damned from my chest, the skin on my hand ripped open by the blade.
It clattered on the ground.
"Daughter," Abaz said, practically dancing onto the pillows to stand in front of Abalita. The other djinn were free as well, and one grabbed the bare chested djinn from behind, taking his blade and running him through. The golems turned to sand beneath their power, and the other witches all fell prostrate to their will.
"Why?" Abalita whispered in accusation. I couldn't see her, but I knew the question was directed at me.
"She wants to die last," Abaz said. I heard the breaking of bones, and the soft drop of a body landing on a pillow.
I dropped the obsidian sword and fell to my knees, my hands grasping for the vial of blood around my neck. Elyse had said it would heal, and I could only hope she was right. I wasn't ready to lose her.
"Abaz." Max was at my side, and he picked up the Damned. "Heal her."
"And why should I?" he replied. "She just forced me to kill my own child."
Elyse was dying, her body faltering. I couldn't get her hands on the amulet.
Max snorted. "A child that you couldn't have cared less about. That much is plain. She saved your life, you owe her the same."
Abaz laughed, a childlike cackle. "I may be immature, but I'm not ungrateful."
I felt a hand on my head, a fountain of warmth, and my breath returned. I drank in gulps, refilling starved lungs.
"We're leaving with the Damned. Consider your debt to Malize paid."
"Of course. Now, Samael, take your toys and the sword, and hope we never meet again."