"The Gathering" - Chapter 9

Tension

 

Prime Mentalist and Elder Andra Marushka is a woman who disliked mysteries. Mysteries, puzzles and conundrums were vexing to her. She liked her surroundings to be definite and quantifiable. Not much of a stretch for a Prime telepath who now heads her own division of operatives. However, today found Prime Andra faced with the mystery of three unaccounted operatives. All of them of highly skilled and with level of security clearances normally reserved for those belonging to the Council of Elders and those of Prime ranks. The fact that the three truants were among the best of her operatives left her somewhat irritated, and not without a small dose of fear.

And Andra Marushka is not the type of woman who scares easily.

Andra Marushka was one of the gifted few mentalists who were blessed with several psychic abilities, namely telepathy and psychometry. Her telepathy is one of the highest order—ranking a rare grading of Class 10, making her psychometry almost superflous—and she herself was a veteran of several combats, both mortal and mental. She had been guest speaker at the Academy often enough to warrant a suite of rooms reserved for her and even the Head of the Academy—a formidable Class 9 himself—regarded her with an almost reverent awe.

It had gotten to the point that she usually conducted her lectures through a viewing crystal, while she was comfortably ensconced in her office or as the case may be now, her private residence. She is due for another lecture on usages of power in the Ethics class and she intended to make it a quick one so she could return to the mystery at hand. Andra moved from her bedroom to her office. She had now blurred the lines between her working place and her own residence. The palatial ten-room mansion she owned is inhabited only by her and two servants who come in fortnightly to clean.

As it was, her informants—an extensive and clandestine network of her own devising—had all reverted with the same report: Eden Bennet, Vincent  Somerfeld and Nikolai Pedersen were missing. Their residences, their usual safe-houses and bolt-holes and even their acquaintances did not turn up a shred of clue as to their whereabouts. That left only one answer …

The three errant operatives had gone worldwalking.

Andra pursed her lips at the conclusion her line of thought brought her. It was not a surprise the three operatives had pierced the dimensional wall separating her world and what native Zaredians called the Prime Plane, what surprised her was that she wasn’t informed.

She had informed Eden of her readings several weeks before of the immensely powerful empath they had found five years ago. The rogue psychic had expanded—sloppily in Andra’s opinion—so much energy that any psychic doing any tracings could have picked up the telltale signature of his energy spike. The fact that the empath had registered as off the charts was not the main point of worry. There were two other energy spikes of psychic power unleashed in his immediate vicinity, one a Class 6, the other too sudden to trace or capture for proper classification. Vincent had reported two weeks ago that he was tailing the rogue. That was the last report she had received. She trusted Somerfeld enough that his silence means just that there was nothing worthwhile to report, unlike Nikolai who could simply disappear for months on end.

Andra sighed softly. She trusted the three operatives, she just hated the fact that they usually operated independently despite her efforts to nail them down to procedure. In hindsight, she thought it best that way. Not everyone works well within a rigid structure. If the rogue and his display of power is any indication, he is probably what the denizens—Andra snickered despite herself at the term—of the Prime Plane would call a ‘loose cannon.’

Andra mused at the vagaries of the other alien world that held so many similarities yet so many differences. Being a mentalist, she was born on this dimension and so was tied to its native rules. She had heard and read from numerous myths, legends and even supposed academic texts of those the esoteric scholars had named ‘world-walkers’: individuals who could travel between the Prime dimension and Zared, amassing great powers and knowledge.

Vermillion Lorien had been one of them, she thought darkly.

An almost imperceptible shift in the air alerted her to a presence in her office. The hairs on the nape of her neck rose, and she knew the nature of her uninvited guest.

This is not a friend dropping by unannounced.

She turned, facing the room. It was empty. Twenty by twenty feet with her as the sole occupant. The one window was shut, not even a breeze escaped through to ruffle the lacy curtains. She did a quick scan of the room. There was a definite read of a thought pattern besides hers, faint but telling. She edged towards the back until she felt the press of books against her skin. Her back was against the eastern section of the wall-to-wall bookshelves lining her office. Her eyes narrowed. Invisibility? she wondered, but discarded it as she couldn’t get a read on any actual sentient mind. She lashed out with her telepathy, sending her thought out and forming it into several barbed chains that lashed one end of the wall to the opposite end, sweeping everything in its path. The fury of her psychic attack rippled the air and she realized that she was expanding too much energy. A slight resistance ten feet away to her right pinpointed a possible target and she formed her attack into a harpoon, shooting it out towards her target.

Nothing.

She paused, dumbfounded. A thick leather-bound book flew from her side, clipping her on the forehead. In her surprise, she had not the time to evade it. She hissed in fury and lashed out again with her barbed-chain attack, scouring the office from one end to another. Another slight resistance met her attack, this time five feet to her left. She refocused the lashings and formed it into a barbed net around the resistance she felt. In her mind, it felt amorphous—almost goo-like—and it was slowly but surely evading capture. In her intense focus at halting the amorphous resistance she failed to see the candlestick flying behind her.

The heavy brass ornament connected solidly at the back of her head. Andra grunted in a mixture of disbelief, pain shooting out of her as she now felt the amorphous presence coalescing around her throat. It’s a spell! she thought. An air construct.

She knew about the spell attacking her. She had seen Eden cast a similar spell several times before.

She also knew that such spell requires the spellcaster to be in close vicinity, and within line of sight.

She turned and sent her thought out, knowing that even as the amorphous presence exerted an increasing grip on her throat she will have only one chance to win this.

There! her thought latched onto three intruders. In her mind’s eye she saw three men, one hefting a crossbow to position. She sent her barbed-chain to scour his mind … and encountered nothing. She wailed weakly in fury, even as she felt the amorphous construct seeping through her nostrils and mouth. The crossbowman had been mind-blanked—hypnotized deeply enough that his normal thoughts were temporarily suspended while obeying a pre-imposed command—and even a telepath couldn’t override the hypnosis. She sent another scouring attack to the other two, realizing that one of them had to be the spellcaster and was rewarded when she mentally heard the shriek of pain, and the magical hold over the construct’s attack waver.

She couldn’t rest, she decided. Even now she could feel the spellcaster resisting her attack. She wasn’t surprised; magic users have always honed their minds to understand the proper workings of magical power and that itself lent them a workable structure to resist psychic intrusions. She redoubled her efforts, now easier as she didn’t have the construct’s attack to worry about. She tightened her mental chains, feeling the serrated edges of her psychic attacks biting and cutting cruelly into the spellcaster’s mind. As she tightened the mental noose, the image of an apple pulped within the grip of a powerful fist briefly appeared in her head even as she felt the spellcaster’s mind riven and broken by her attack.

She dropped to the floor, in a temporary weakness from being deprived of air that the metallic thunk of the crossbow bolt punching through the enspelled windowpane passed her by. The sharp thud as the bolt embedded itself into one thick leather-bound volume registered vaguely with her.

Swift patters of footsteps approached her office, with the loud slamming of the door as it was wrenched of its hinges by a swift kick. The familiar mind patterns registered and her fading gaze met Nikolai’s unusually panicked one.

She managed to point out weakly towards the window before she passed out, darkness claiming her.

 * * * * *

Three weeks later

Eden Bennet tied her long blond waves into a long braid. Her cerulean blue eyes were unfocused, not concentrating on a task she had grown so accustomed to performing that the movements were ingrained already in her subconscious. Her braiding completed, the tall willowy witch stood up from her seat before her vanity mirror and moved languidly to the damask-covered windows dominating the northern wall of her room. She placed herself behind the heavy curtains and edged them gently to look outside, looking over the small training arena.

Calling it small, Eden reflected, would be misleading. The square space was fifty by fifty feet of soft grass. Lines were marked out by oil tracings that the gardener religiously retraced every three weeks. In the centre of the square was a circle of twenty feet radius with five lines radiating from the epicentre, forming an axis for casting spells should a ritual casting be required. The witch noted with approval at the perfection of the design. Prime Andra it seemed, was a woman who believed in being fully prepared.

Eden had left her coven six years ago to join Prime Andra’s cadre of operatives at the urging of her clan’s matriarch. The venerable spellweaver female had apparently known the mentalist Elder from way back. The actual years of their acquaintance had been a mystery, as mentalists and spellweavers normally do not have much in common and each often hold the other as an affront to each their way of life: mentalists are naturally gifted with powers of the mind, and harness such forces to affect their reality while spellweavers combined their inborn psychic gifts—while paltry compared to the mentalists’ own—with magic. The resulting spells are usually more potent and harder to resist.

Eden’s flawless features furrowed in a slight expression of puzzlement. She could not see the significance of the outsider humans. She was willing to admit that six years prior to meeting Nikolai, Vincent and Prime Andra she had only met two other mentalists. The experience had done little to recommend mentalists to her. She was naturally resistant to psychic intrusion, and had always prepared several mind-cloaking spells ahead of time. Besides the three mentalists, she had always held a private belief that magical power far supersedes any mental abilities.

She looked down at the three figures occupying the arena. Nikolai was running through several basic self-defense manoeuvres with the human female, Wanda. She sniffed delicately as the young woman was unsuccessful in blocking one of Nikolai’s kicks and ended up on her bottom from the force of the kick.

Eden smirked.

Perhaps it’s time to show the woman how it is done …

 * * * * *

“Oof!” Wanda huffed as she ended up on her rear. “I think I just bruised my butt.”

Jasper looked up from studying the blades of grass before him where he was sitting cross-legged on the ground. He had joined Wanda to keep an eye on her, his semi-dormant brotherly instincts urged on by the disturbingly cloying rapport he had sensed growing between his sister and Vincent. While he suspected Nikki’s interest in Wanda to be purely academic—he had long ago pegged the blond powerhouse as asexual—he decided to impose his physical presence just to rattle Nikki.

“Try not to kill her, will you?” he chided Nikki laconically. “She ain’t much, but she’s the only sister I’ve got.”

“Such solicitude for your only sister,” Nikki remarked sardonically.

“Yes,” Wanda rejoined while glancing up at the six-feet-five Nikki, dusting her rear as she got up. “It was quite underwhelming, wasn’t it?”

“Ready to go again?” Nikki asked her, getting back in ready position.

“Damn straight,” Wanda answered, a steely note in her voice. “What happened to your boss could just as easily happen to me.”

“Still no clues?” Jasper asked Nikki, referring to the identity of the dead spellweaver who had led the attack on Prime Andra three weeks ago.

He winced as he watched Nikki throwing a roundhouse towards Wanda. Wanda wisely chose not to block the attack, nimbly ducking under the blond giant’s reach and executing a low leg hook at Nikki’s leading foot. Nikki withdrew the foot with the lightning reflex of one who is accustomed to hand-to-hand combat and brought his other foot in a swipe towards Wanda’s head. The foot never connected. It stopped five inches away from Wanda’s face and Nikki’s spinning momentum in turning his body left him overbalanced for a split-second before he recovered.

He took a step back and calmly appraised the brunette. “Good,” he noted, his gray eyes expressionless. "You're getting a knack for blocking and shielding now." He turned to Jasper and shrugged. “No identifying marks or badge of allegiance that we could tell.”

Jasper snorted. “Highly unlikely they’ll parade their identifiers in plain sight, wouldn’t you say?”

Nikki bristled slightly at Jasper’s barbed rhetoric. “Prime Andra’s not the only ones with operatives,” he huffed.

Wanda went to the sidelines, taking a sip from the glass of water Jasper had ready on a small table nearby. Jasper had gotten up from his seat on the grass, ambling to and fro several feet before returning and topping up the glass Wanda had emptied.

“Is there a reason we’re not allowed to leave?” she asked. The hand not holding the glass motioned vaguely at the immense grounds surrounding the Prime’s private residence. “I mean, this place is nice enough and all but seriously? House arrest?”

“That is actually a very good point,” Jasper agreed.

Nikki hesitated before answering them. “It’s not quite safe.”

“Meaning?” Wanda pressed, her dark eyes glinting with a slight touch of annoyance at Nikki’s prevarication.

Nikki looked at her several moments, his rugged craggy face inscrutable. He took a deep breath. “Meaning,” Nikki answered, pausing a moment before continuing, “That you’re not yet ready to defend yourself.”

“Defend myself?” Wanda echoed. Her look of impatience twisted her lips into a moue of disgust.

Jasper joined her in glaring at Nikki, waves of incredulity rolling from both siblings. His temper, never placid, rose. “Is there a point you’re trying to make?” he snapped.

“Watch it, Jasper,” Nikki warned, his left fingers curling into a fist.

Jasper’s lips twisted into a sneer. “Threats, Nikki?” he said, his dark brown eyes narrowed at having read the blond powerhouse’s surface thoughts. “Yeah, you broke my arm once when we were sparring,” he admitted. “I also mind-blanked you … twice.”

Wanda looked at her brother in surprise. In the past ten days of being cooped up in Prime Andra’s private residence while they were chaperoned in turns by Nikki, Eden or Vincent, Wanda had learned the true potential of her brother’s prodigious mental powers. She turned to look at Nikki, looking for his reaction to Jasper’s verbally thrown gauntlet.

“Lucky shots,” Nikki dismissed.

“Shall we go for a third, then?” Jasper’s reply came smoothly. His sneer had disappeared, only the flat unfeeling mien Wanda recognised as him having already decided on a course of action.

Wanda stepped in the middle of the space between them. She flashed a quick glare at her brother—Zip it! she flashed the thought at him, not knowing if he was actually listening in—and held up a palm at Nikki.

“Maybe we need a break,” she suggested.

The two men glared at each other. Nikki gave first, looking away and glanced towards the house.

“Fine,” he grunted. “But we’ll have to go over certain items before you get to do so.”

“That’s reasonable enough,” Wanda commented. “Don’t you think so?” she asked her brother.

Jasper ignored her, having caught sight of Eden gliding towards them. The willowy blond was garbed in a form-fitting outfit of tight leather. A rather prosaic inventory of such outfit—namely jerkin, leggings and knee-high boots—sounded rather masculine, but there was no mistaking the obviously female form the heretofore usually ethereal witch now presented. 

He eyed the blond speculatively. “You’ve been holding out on me, Ms Bennett,” he drawled mildly.

Eden spared him an unexpectedly flirtatious smile and a rejoinder, “You don’t expect a girl to tip her hand now, do you?”

Wanda spared the witch a look. The one an attractive woman usually reserves for perceived competition. “What’s with the slut mode?”

A loud guffaw came from Nikki. His normally austere countenance was found to be in a state of mirth, his eyes crinkling at the corners from laugh lines. He looked at Wanda, then to Eden and continued into mischievous bouts of laughter. “Oh, this is going to be interesting,” was all he offered to Wanda.

It was only several seconds later that Jasper managed to lift certain thoughts from both blonds before he rolled his eyes skywards. “Man the lifeboats, people,” he muttered.

Nikki was right. It was certainly an interesting day.