Ludo stopped the car at the curb in front of a derelict building site. A broken retaining wall, rubble and a skeletal framework of metal beams was all that remained of whatever building had once stood on this spot.
Yasha looked around. A group of greys huddled in the shadow of the scorched wall, watching him. They were a sorry sight, like a group of shrouded mourners, their red eyes blinking from the depths of naked dome-like heads. They were illuminated from within by the radiance of their souls.
The gravel and burnt debris crackled underfoot as Yasha tromped toward the greys, the bag swinging from his left hand. The air stung with the prickly, almost antiseptic tingle of purifying magic. Yasha didn’t know what had happened here but whatever it was had been bad enough that someone had torched the whole place in magic fire, leaving nothing left but the dead.
The greys watched his approach, huddling together until the contours of their bodies merged into one. They blinked in unison, quivering.
‘I’m not going to hurt you,’ he said stopping about five feet from the huddle.
One of the greys, whose bald high domed head rose above the others, oozed to the front of the group, detaching like mist pulling apart. His long spindly arms tapered into shovel hands and trailing claws. His torso was bent, spine bowed, lower body devolving into a loose column of vapour. The grey’s soul lit his torso from within, a captive star in a cloudy night sky.
The grey’s form was almost entirely androgynous but something about the width of its shoulders and torso hinted that in life the grey had been male.
‘What do you want?’ The grey asked. His voice sounded like a scream underwater, distorted almost beyond comprehension.
‘I’m about to perform a bit of magic,’ Yasha answered raising the bag. ‘Need some eyes to play look out for me. I’ll pay.’
‘What will you pay?’ A second grey peeled away from the huddle and floated over the blackened ground toward him. This grey was shorter, moving like a stray breeze. Its voice was clearer than the first, retaining a faintly feminine lilt.
Instead of answering Yasha squinted into the gloom at the rest of the huddle. ‘How many of you are there? Four, five?’
‘There are five of us,’ the male grey intoned.
‘Alright,’ Yasha nodded. ‘If you keep watch and stay out of my way while I open my bag, I guarantee you a meal to keep you all fed for a week.’
A little ripple ran through the trio of huddled greys. ‘Oh,’ they cooed with one voice. ‘Please, we’re so hungry.’
The male grey didn’t exactly glare them into silence because he lacked the facial features to pull it off. He did swing his torso around, red eyes flashing warning even through the back of his head.
The female grey appeared to be looking at his bag. ‘What sort of magic?’ She asked suspiciously.
Yasha was impressed. Looking the way she did he’d have thought she’d been on the bag in an instant, she looked starving. That the grey was suspicious meant she wasn’t as far gone as she looked.
He smiled. ‘I’ve got a familiar in here,’ he lied, because what he had in the bag was a bit more complicated than that. ‘The bit of magic I need to do to…liberate her will leave quite a bit of magic in the atmosphere. It’s yours.’
The female grey’s eyes flashed. ‘Will you hurt anyone?’ she asked surprising him. Greys were not cruel but it was rare to find one who cared about the living all that much. Most of them were too hungry and desperate to have compassion to spare.
‘No one,’ he promised.
The female drifted toward him. The motion looked almost accidental, as if she’d just been pushed by an errant breeze but Yasha knew better. ‘Stay back or the deals off,’ he warned, holding the bag behind his back.
The grey came to an immediately halt. ‘I am sorry,’ she said sounding like she meant it. ‘Your word that there will be enough for us all?’ she asked.
Yasha cocked his head. There were occasions in magic when giving ones word mattered. This wasn’t one of them. The grey couldn’t do anything to him if he betrayed them. All five of them were too weak. They’d be no match for Yasha once he’d freed Mati. Still Yasha wasn’t planning to welch on his own bargain.
‘My word,’ he intoned with all due solemnity and then, because these greys seemed like a decent sort he added. ‘You’d be doing me a favour actually. It’s not safe for a lot of magic to be free floating in the air. Better that it go to good use, right?’
The female grey seemed to be studying him. ‘Most breathers don’t think like that,’ she said.
Yasha shrugged. ‘I’m going over there.’ He pointed to a large patch of ground covered in scorched and ash stained concrete bracketed by steel columns. The concrete had probably been part of the buildings floor. ‘Stay back when I get started. Get too close and I can’t guarantee your safety.’
The moon was out, yellow bellied and satisfied it resided over the dying embers of the sunset. Yasha stood for a moment, just listening. The breeze carried the echo of traffic, the occasional wail of a distant siren, and the hum of life going on around him. The distance made the noise soothing, instead of the assault to his senses everything else about the city had been since his release.
For the first time since leaving Meznow Yasha breathed easy. He took a moment to simply fill his lungs with the crisp, magic rich air. Then it was time to get down to business.
Yanking open the inner drawstring on the bag, Yasha held his palms over the opening, feeling the tingle of magic rise up to meet him. It was his own magic and did him no harm as he shoved his hand in to retrieve the knife he’d dumped on top of the mounds of ashy soil filling the bag.
He rolled up his sleeve and ran the blade in a swift horizontal line across his forearm. He hated bloodletting. It wasn’t that he was squeamish, although like any sensible person he preferred to avoid cutting himself up on general principle. What bothered him was that it was awkward. A hypodermic syringe and an ampoule would work better for drawing blood, but the problem was, he needed to maintain the connection between his physical blood and his soul and that worked best at the site of the wound.
So risking all manner of nasty infections he scooped up handfuls of dirt and rubbed the granules into the oozing cut on his arm, stopping occasionally to palpitate the wound and squeeze out a few more drops. The bite of pain helped strength the magic as it built.
Five minutes later fingers bloody and nails caked in dirt, he was ready. There was nowhere near enough blood to saturate all the dirt in the bag, but he didn’t need it to. The dirt in the bag wasn’t ordinary mud. Or rather, it was ordinary mud from an extraordinary place and that made the difference. He could feel the magic innate in the dirt quicken in his hands, warming under his fingers.
Yasha closed his eyes and concentrated, picturing a clearing in a dark forest in his mind’s eye. An ancient statue of a hawk, weather worn almost beyond recognition dominated the clearing, which was studied by old bones and toadstools. Thick tendrils of hanging moss dangled from low, moss slicked branches that threw odd, banded shadows over the clearing. The whole scene discoloured by the light of a lurid orange sky.
Magic sizzled between his fingers, the dirt clinging, as if magnetized. Opening his eyes Yasha rose smoothly to his feet and threw the dirt at the empty air in front of him. Some grains clung to his fingers but most hit the air like hitting a solid wall and stuck. Ribbons of light spread outward from the dirt, flashing through the air in rainbow colours. The air rippled like a curtain, warping before his eyes.
‘Matrezda,’ Yasha called. ‘It’s time to come home.’
A breeze picked up around his feet, spinning debris up around his ankles in tiny eddies. Yasha took in a shallow breath and felt his soul expand, magic coursing through his body. He held out his arms, palms up and fingers open. In front of him the air continued to shift in colours the magic growing stronger until he could feel it heat the air in front of his face.
This part was always the hardest to explain. The invocation, the use of illicit, magic rich Other Side soil, even picturing the location he wanted to reach in his mind, all of that was easy enough to explain. It was rudimentary magic; simple stuff. The part where he knew from the very bottom of his soul that he could open a tear in the veil to the Other Side without invoking a single god or Pit Lord, or writing out a single sigil? That was the part he couldn’t (wouldn’t) explain.
Like an arrow loosed from a bow he felt some part of his consciousness wing free of his body and hit the magic coalescing in front of him, passing through with the ease of a bird cutting through the air.
He stood there, strung taut, stretched between this world and the Other Side and waited for his call to be answered.
He didn’t have to wait long. The echo of a hunting bird’s screech ripped through his brain and he felt the beat of wings against the ripple of his thoughts. Saw miles pass underneath him, his spirit buoyed up by thermal currents as a landscape nothing like Djisi’s towers and tenements rolled below.
‘Mati,’ Yasha whispered, part invocation and part unadulterated relief. ‘I’m here, come to me.’
Another shattered-glass shriek echoed in his mind, rocking him back on his heels. The dirt in the bag exploded upward in a geyser of dust and muck. The air in front of him bowed outward, like glass before an explosion. The air was torn from his lungs, his skin scorched by the sudden vacuum of magic as the veil ripped and like picking through a hole in a screen Yasha could see the Other Side.
His familiar perched on a low branch in the clearing he had envisioned. A proud raptor Mati resembled a hawk, but her plumage was not that of any bird of prey found in nature. Her feathers were an unnatural green-black, glistening wetly in the light that brightened to copper-flame green at wing tips and breast. Her sharp, affronted gaze blazed a lurid phosphor emerald. She stretched her wings and shrieked at him.
‘I know, I know,’ he soothed. ‘I had to, Mati. They’d’ve destroyed you when we reached prison. And anyway,’ he added a little sharply. ‘The Green Man’s territory is a fine hunting ground.’
Disgusted Mati made a show of preening her breast feathers with her hooked beak, ignoring him.
‘Come on baby girl,’ he crooned, because Mati always responded well to fawning. ‘I missed you and I need you. Come home.’
Mati stilled, a single baleful green eye glaring at him as she bent over her feathered breast. She’d always been high maintenance. He felt the question she posed like a jab to his brain.
‘Of course I mean it,’ he said stung. ‘I’ve only been out of prison a few hours. The first thing I did was come for you.’
Sending Mati away had hurt, like saying goodbye to family when you’re not sure if or when you’ll see them again, but you know that parting is the best thing for them. Choosing to send her to the Green Man’s domain had been a calculated risk. He was sure the Lord of the Wild Hunt would make him pay later, but he’d also known that he'd watch over his familiar better than anyone else. Mati was too precious to risk leaving her alone in the mortal realm, not even Ludo could be trusted with her care.
Mati shrieked again, triumphant and smug this time. She was born of his soul. She could hear his thoughts. She knew what she meant to him but she was a conceited creature and loved to make him say it, or at least think it where she could hear.
‘Now your satisfied, hop to it,’ he sighed holding out his left arm.
Mati launched into the air. There was a sharp snap of magic, like someone had just snapped out crisp linen sheets to hang on the line then Mati was through the portal and alighting on his hand.
It was like a hole being filled, the soul connection between the two of them reforming in the time it took Mati to settle her feathers. Yasha took a deep, cleansing breath. Mati was a weight not just on his arm but settling in his soul. He hadn’t realised how disconnected he’d felt until he suddenly wasn’t.
He reached out with his free hand and dragged his thumb over the crown of Mati’s proud head. ‘I glad you’re back,’ he said softly.
Mati turned her head one way and then the other, to give him the full impact of her permanent glare. She was still disgruntled. She hadn’t liked the separation and her time in the Green Lands had been exceedingly dull. She was glad to be back as well but was going to make him sorry for leaving her alone so long. Yasha received all of that from her as she started to fade, giving up her physical form so she could merge again with his soul.
He watched her form dissipate into glittering motes of light that converged above his wrist, spreading out over his arm up past his shoulder, before seeping into his skin. His flesh tingled as Mati rebranded his forearm with her mark, an intricate pattern of feathers that chased up his wrist to his shoulder where a set of bright green eyes observed the world from under his clothes like a living tattoo.
Yasha turned back to the hole in the air. Rifts in the veil were inherently unstable, but for some reason the holes and fissures Yasha poked in the veil never seemed to rupture or spread. His portals, big or small, always did what he wanted them to do, remaining nothing more than smashed windows set within solid foundations. He didn’t question why that was, he didn’t dare. He’d learned long ago to not ask questions when he feared the answers.
He reached down and started to gather up dirt and rubble from the ground at his feet, collecting it in handfuls before throwing the muck at the portal. It took him about ten minutes to throw enough native detritus and a bit more spilled blood at the hole before he felt the veil beginning to close around the plug, magic forming a glowing seal like a freshly formed scab.
By the time he was done, wiping his filthy hands off on his trouser legs, the greys had seeped closer, pointing and marvelling at the air, which still shimmered with specks of light and magic. They stared at him with huge, glittering eyes as he slung the empty backpack over one shoulder.
Yasha threw them a lazy salute and smirked. ‘Go on, have at it.’
The greys surged forward, plastering their amorphous bodies to the thin fracture in the veil, slurping up the stray magic and cleaning out the wound until not one misplaced speck of dirt remained to indicate anything had happened.