Shifting Stars, page 17
“When?” Mandalee demanded. “I haven’t seen you since! You’ve been here all the time.”
“You could have contacted me sympathically,” Cat suggested.
“No, Cat, she couldn’t,” Dreya spoke up. “The shields around my Tower block incoming mental communications. Telepathy or anything similar. Some wizards favour mental attacks over physical ones. Had you but mentioned you had this sympathic link, I could have adjusted the shield, just as I did today.”
“So, what happened?” Cat asked Mandalee.
“I got lucky is what happened!”
It had taken pretty much everything Mandalee and Shyleen had to kill the demon, but the wizard was linked to it, so he knew instantly and came for her. Shyleen got between Mandalee and his first blast of magic, which nearly split the leopard in two. All the time, Mandalee was mentally screaming for Catriona who, as far as she was concerned, had promised to be there. Mandalee thought she was dead, for sure, when two figures whooshed overhead.
“It happened too fast for me to see properly, but it was most likely Daelen StormTiger fighting another of his great battles with Kullos or the dark clone – as if we don’t have enough problems without them!”
“Couldn’t agree more,” Dreya affirmed.
Mandalee blinked in surprise, then dismissed it as unimportant.
“Yes, well, in this case, I suppose it was just as well because it distracted the wizard – only for a moment, but it was long enough for me to run him through. Then, just as I’ve found a druid temple to take care of Shyleen, I get a sympathic message from you, Catriona, asking me to come and help you, after you singularly failed to be there for me!”
Cat opened her mouth, but she didn’t know what to say, except, “I’m so sorry, Mandalee.”
“And would ‘sorry’ have brought Shyleen back if that wizard’s magic had been just a bit stronger and killed her?”
Cat shook her head, tears welling up in her eyes. “Thank the gods it wasn’t,” she whispered.
“You should thank them,” Mandalee insisted, “because that’s the only reason I’m even talking to you rather than killing you.”
Cat offered to fly to Shyleen immediately and make sure they were doing the healing right, but Mandalee was scathing.
“No! As I said, you don’t get to undo this. Besides, I don’t trust you not to get distracted by something on the way. The only reason I came here was to make sure you were OK, and this one,” she pointed at Dreya, “hadn’t hurt you yet.”
“Hurt me?” Cat said. “What do you mean ‘yet’?”
“She’s Dreya the Dark. Give her time.”
Dreya raised her eyebrows but did not deign to comment.
“Come on, Mandalee, that’s not fa—”
“—Not fair?” Mandalee snapped. “You seriously don’t want to talk to me about fair right now!” Before Cat could say anything else, Mandalee rushed headlong to ask, “I don’t suppose you’ve found a way to do anything about this,” she indicated her body, “amid all your research?”
“About what?” Dreya asked, not understanding.
As delicately as possible, Catriona explained about Mandalee’s gender identity issues.
“Oh, is that all?” Dreya said.
“What do you mean, ‘Is that all’?” Mandalee demanded.
Dreya held up her hands. “My apologies, I didn’t intend to belittle how important this must be for you. To me, flesh is fleeting – the magic is all. I just meant, do people seriously give you grief over this?”
Mandalee nodded. “Oh yes, prejudice is still very much alive and well out there.”
Dreya shook her head, her usual calm demeanour slipping to display anger. “When is the world going to actually move forward?”
With a facial shrug, the cleric replied, “I’ve often wondered the same thing.” She paused, then, before admitting, “You know, I don’t dislike you as much as I expected.”
Dreya gave her a wry smile. “Well, that’s progress, at least, and in return, I must say, you’re the least disagreeable White cleric I’ve ever met.”
Mandalee acknowledged that with a nod. “But you still haven’t answered my question,” she reminded Catriona.
Taking a deep breath and cursing herself for letting her friend down twice in one day, she had to admit that she had so far been unable to find a way to affect a permanent change. Shapeshifting wasn’t the answer – not by itself. Cat couldn’t hold another shape for more than a few hours. She tried to waffle about temporal magic, to turn back time for Mandalee’s body to a point before puberty when it was easier for it to switch tracks and develop along the biological female line before returning it to Mandalee’s current age. But she had to admit she had no idea how to do that.
“In that case,” Mandalee said, “it seems to me, there’s only one more thing to do before I go: this stupid experiment of yours.”
“Go? Where? Why?” Cat began, then realised, “Oh, of course, to stay with Shyleen until she’s better. But then you’ll come back, right?” There was no immediate response. “Right?” she prompted, panic rising. She couldn’t lose Mandalee. Obviously, she’d made a terrible mistake, but surely, they could work it out. Couldn’t they?
Rather than answer, she just asked, “Are we doing this experiment or not?”
“Screw the experiment!” Cat insisted. “Just tell me you’re coming back as soon as Shyleen’s OK! Please tell me that!”
“No!” Mandalee yelled. “I’ve always been there for you, Catriona,” she still couldn’t bring herself to use her nickname. “No matter what ridiculous radical notion you got in your head, even when you said you were going to fight Dreya the Dark, I was there for you. Then the one time I asked for your help, when I needed you, you couldn’t even be bothered to listen! That’s not something I can get over just like that. I’m offering to help you this one last time; then I’m done.”
“Not forever, though?” Catriona’s tears flowed once more. “Please, Mandalee! I’m not asking you to forgive me, and I’ll give you all the time you need. Please just say you’ll come back when you’re ready.”
Mandalee shook her head. “I can’t promise that. I hope so. That’s all I can say.” Cat opened her mouth, but the cleric cut her off. “Don’t push me on this, Catriona,” she warned. “There’s nothing you can say right now that won’t make it worse. Now, this experiment?”
Cat was floundering, her mind spinning, emotions in turmoil. She was grateful when Dreya came to her rescue, all business-like and professional. The sorceress explained how the Crystal Mage Staff had reacted to both of them individually, and the question was how it would respond to both, simultaneously. Mandalee agreed to try it, so Dreya led her two guests upstairs to her training room. Catriona said nothing. She was too terrified to even look at her friend. Former friend? It broke her heart to imagine that might be true.
In addition to the three young women, Dreya’s death knight guards were also in the training room. Mandalee did not like them one bit and demanded to know what they were doing there. Dreya explained that they were a precaution, in case the staff’s reaction was even more violent than before.
“If we fly apart, they are swift enough to catch us and break our fall. Frankly, it’s either that or concussion.”
“Concussion has never sounded more attractive,” Mandalee grumbled.
“I could always tell them not to stop your head from going splat against my wall,” Dreya offered.
Mandalee sighed, deeply and relented. “OK, let them catch me. I’m not going to risk dying. Shyleen needs me, and I won’t let her down.”
Cat flinched at the barbs that flew her way but accepted the punishment without comment. Seeing that all was ready, she took her staff out of her pocket dimension and held it in a trembling hand. Then on the count of three, Mandalee and Dreya gripped the staff at the same time.
The violent reaction they had feared did not happen. There was a kind of pull, but it seemed somehow more balanced than before. Light flared from the crystal, painting a pattern on Dreya’s ceiling that looked not unlike the void storms in the Tempestrian sky. For a moment, the light began to form symbols, but they flickered and died before achieving full resolution. The staff seemed to indicate to Catriona that something was missing, but frankly, at the moment, she didn’t care.
*****
The accepted historical view of this event, gentle reader, is that it was a truly momentous occasion: the first time the Original Three came together – the Three who would one day become the first Guardians of Time and Magic, and save the world many times. That’s all very well for those of us who merely observe, detached, from a distance. For the three who were involved at the time, far from the beginning of something, it felt like an ending, and I’m sure the whole thing seemed utterly pointless.
Still, all relationships have their ups and downs. Even a friendship for the ages. Especially a friendship for the ages.
Chapter 20
Mandalee didn’t stay long after that. Stepping outside into Dreya’s grounds, she immediately called for her giant albatross to give her a lift back to Shyleen.
Cat couldn’t let her go, though. Not without risking saying something more.
“Mandalee, wait, please,” she pleaded. “Just for a minute. I want you to do one last thing for me.”
“You can’t be serious,” Mandalee scowled.
“No, not like that. Please, hear me out.”
Mandalee folded her arms.
“One minute.”
“Our sympathic link. Please don’t sever it. You know it’s not a tracker. It won’t tell me where you are or what you’re doing, and I promise I won’t use it to contact you. Just keep it there. Just in case. I know you have no reason to believe me, but I swear in the name of friendship if you ever need me, or want to talk, I will be there.”
“For what it’s worth,” Dreya put in, “I have adjusted my shields so they will permanently allow full communication between you, should you wish it.”
Mandalee considered for a moment and finally nodded her assent. “OK, as you say, in the name of friendship.”
Catriona’s relief was plain for all to see, as she grabbed hold of that lifeline of hope.
“Also, in the name of friendship,” Mandalee said, “some advice. I know you won’t listen to me, but I’m saying it anyway.” She glared at Dreya the Dark as she said, “This one might be acting all reasonable at the moment because you’ve got something she’s interested in, but never forget what she is. She’s a Dark sorceress with a lust for power, and she would betray you in a heartbeat if it were to her advantage.”
Far from being offended, Dreya agreed, “You’re right, I would,” she said, then with a smile at Catriona, she qualified the admission, saying, “but it would have to be the advantage of a lifetime.”
Cat stared at Dreya with an open-mouthed expression, as if she’d just heard a declaration of love.
“Ugh!” Mandalee grunted, shaking her head in bewilderment. “Unbelievable!” she spat in disgust.
The gigantic bird landed, and Mandalee mounted up.
Cat leapt forward, trying to explain, but Mandalee was done and with a simple telepathic request, the giant albatross took to the sky, winging away.
Catriona wept for her lost friendship, burying herself in Dreya’s soft black robes as the sorceress helped her inside and closed the door. To Cat, that felt symbolic, as if a door had just closed on a huge, important part of her life. She could only pray that one day, it might just open again.
*****
It took several days for the druid healers to restore Shyleen to full health and vitality, but soon she was ready once again to take on the demons of the world by her human friend’s side. Mandalee, however, had other ideas. Although the leopard was out of immediate danger, the demon hunter’s fear had morphed into a seething anger. These feelings drove her to move south to new hunting grounds, many leagues from the Black Tower and any memory of her old friend, Catriona. She also began to rethink her whole approach to demon hunting.
She'd been doing it professionally for a few years, now, and it wasn't exactly a niche profession. Thousands of demon hunters were out working every day, all across the world and stretching back an unfathomable distance into the past. All that time, effort and risk by an uncountable number of people, and what did they have to show for it? Were there fewer demons now than ever before? No. Were people now any safer from demon attack than their ancestors? No. OK, there might be no way to stop demons from coming up through the planes of reality any more than they could stop Daelen StormTiger and his kind from wreaking their brand of havoc upon Tempestria. But demons didn’t just appear – not all of them, anyway. Wizards were responsible for summoning many of them.
It wasn’t just Black robes, either, despite what some might say, but White robes, too. They usually claimed to be acting in the name of some imagined ‘greater good,’ but that was just an excuse. Red robes tended to do it only for purposes of study, but although that information had proved valuable to demon hunters, despite their best intentions, sometimes the demons got free. Then once again, people were put in unnecessary danger. If a demon killed someone, were they any less dead if it was released accidentally rather than deliberately? No.
It had to stop.
Demon hunting was futile by itself, Mandalee concluded. It was treating the symptom while ignoring the cause. Demon summoning had to stop, and since nobody else seemed to want to make that happen, Mandalee would have to do it herself.
This was the moment, gentle reader, that Mandalee the demon hunter became Mandalee the White Assassin, although the title would not come into common usage for some time. She sought out training to hone her fighting skills, as well as her unique, synergistic relationship with nature, generally, and Shyleen, specifically. Together, the pair became a force to be reckoned with.
Before long, she added a new weapon to her arsenal: a Pureblade. A sword blessed and sanctified by White clerics. It was a gift from the clerics of a temple whom she had saved from a demon attack. She loved her Pureblade. It was a thing of beauty, her most prized possession.
The first time she put it to use wasn’t a contract from a human, but something Mandalee heard about from animals that were fleeing the scene. As a Cleric of Nature, Mandalee could freely converse in most of the primary animal languages and quickly learned about a ‘bad man’ who seemed to think it was fun to let his ‘pet demon’ loose on the village. It had already killed and injured many people and animals, and the wizard showed no signs of growing bored.
The demon hunter’s response was to get very drunk, armed to the teeth and rush to the scene. Mandalee and Shyleen tore into the demon first because the wizard had it on a tight magical leash. If they killed the wizard first, the demon would be free and only become that much more dangerous. Mandalee’s White cleric magic was physically painful to a Dark wizard, so she was able to keep him at bay until the demon was no more. Then she turned on him. He assailed her with spells, but he wasn’t quick enough to track her movements. The wizard didn’t seem to think it was quite so funny when he was the one about to be hurt and killed.
He begged for mercy, but Mandalee was unmoved by pity. She resolved to grant as much mercy as he had shown the innocent people of his village. For a moment, though, she did hesitate to deliver the killing blow, and the wizard lashed out, thinking to escape. The firebolt that flew from his panicked fingers was not well-directed, however, and did nothing more than singe a small patch of Shyleen’s fur. But it was enough. Enough to trigger the memory of the last time, when that magical blast had almost split the leopard in two. The vision flashed through Mandalee’s mind, along with her memory of screaming for help from a ‘friend’ who would never come.
Never again. From now on, she vowed, it would be Shyleen and Mandalee against the world, and the world didn’t stand a chance as long as it tolerated people with power endangering those with none. That was the last time she would hesitate to kill in defence of those innocents. Never again.
The wizard’s last few breaths were agony until that blade skewered his heart. He would summon no more demons. He would harm no-one else ever again, and if she could repeat this action enough times, then maybe one day there would be fewer demons.
Chapter 21
When Dreya came home one day, several months later, her chief death knight handed her a note from Catriona. The sorceress smiled to herself. She could guess the gist of what was written even before reading it. No doubt Cat had found an interesting nugget of information either in the Black Tower library, or even just a rumour, and she was off to investigate. She did this, from time-to-time.
Catriona wasn’t big on waiting around, even to tell her where she was going or what she was planning. In fact, she wasn’t big on planning at all. The plans she did have were always ridiculous and radical, and like her Nature’s Mirror magic, seemed to have a way of forming on the spot precisely when she needed them. Then, as soon as she got one of these ridiculous radical ideas in her head, she would act on them. It was impulsive and reckless, but that was her nature. It was exactly that nature that had brought Catriona into her life on Midsummer’s Day, and for that, Dreya was grateful beyond words.
The sorceress dismissed her guard, saying, “Looks like it’s dinner for one, then.”
He bowed once and left.
“What are you up to this time, Cat?” the sorceress pondered, as she headed up the stairs to read the note in her study.
No doubt it would turn into some grand adventure with which Cat would delight in regaling her, upon her return.
‘What was it last time?’ Dreya tried to recall. ‘Of course,’ she realised, ‘the photography incident.’
