A woman moved out of the gloom, coarse shift barely covering a thin frame, a holy sheen in her eyes and an obsequious bow practically taking her forehead to the ground. Years before he thought he’d get over it. Thought he’d eventually take it for granted, or perhaps come to enjoy it. Finally prayed that he would at least forget about it. But it never seemed to happen. The guilt over what he’d slowly done to this, his inner cadre, always twisted like a rusty shiv. That it happened to this very woman… bile threatened; a quick snag at a white cloth, from an interior pocket, pressed to lips the only salve to kept his rebellious stomach under control.
“We serve, my lord.” Her voice, soulless as an automaton, raised the bile again until he coughed several times, dry heaving before he remembered the urgency propelling him here: the thought of another man with such intimate knowledge concerning Adrian; another magus with the ability to strike him with deadly force from afar. He glanced toward the walls, floor, and ceiling and noted the carefully tended ruins that marched like horrific hieroglyphs, twisting, fading and throbbing even as he watched. A faraday cage for magic, one might say. But much, much more. That power, that safety brought a small measure of respite.
“We’ve work to do,” he clipped after several more moments to assure his voice was back under his control. Without a further thought for Martinez -the man would stay behind, as he always did-he began to follow the winding path through the stacked goods. He immediately felt a shift in perception, as though a breeze he could not feel were ruffling his close-cropped hair, a fairy’s blown kiss caressing a cheek. After long years, the trail seemed natural, his feet automatically finding the proper runes. Here, in his inner sanctum, where the faith of his workers lay embedded in the walls so thick they actually appeared solid in astral space, flowing with that power like pulsating veins, he might manage the transfiguration by himself. Yet it would require a needless expenditure; instead, one of his workers always met him at the portal to allow an easier passage.
That soft, unfelt breeze became a tangible force as they continued the seemingly random twist and turn down strange corridors of crookedly stacked, mysterious boxes and crates, always following the unique path marked on the floor, a path only a select few even knew existed, much less could manipulate. An uninitiated mundane, if he managed to cross the initial threshold and live-highly unlikely-and then managed to trail him-almost beyond comprehension-would see him slowly fade from existence until they were left in a warehouse devoid of human life, simply piled with incomprehensible bits and bobs from around the world.
As Adrian neared the final gate and the end of the piercing of the veil by the path, the power built up along his chakra until his skin vibrated with pent-up energy. With a last step onto the final glyph, he opened both hands wide and released the energy, like the greatest static charge release imaginable. Unlike the viewing of astral space while still in the mundane-as accomplished in the subway tunnel-this didn’t bring pain. This brought ecstasy as he and his follower finished the transfiguration of flesh into pure energy that allowed them to occupy the astral plain.
Still shuddering from the echoes of that energy, which far outstripped any sexual experience of his life (even that he’d experienced with her), he stepped into the warehouse. Yet one unrecognizable from anything viewed by human eyes. Ghostly and ethereal, yet as solid as anything touched in the real world, every part of the warehouse shone with an inner light covering a rainbow of colors beyond imagining, luminosity varying depending upon the object. Bought, scavenged, and oftimes outright stolen by a network he’d spent years building, to the mundane each object was simply a rare artifact or beautiful, precious stone. But each was in reality an item imbued with astral force that he could manipulate, some naturally occurring, others created by ancient magus, some dropping back as far as the dawn of mankind when man first discovered the meta planes of astral space, the spirits and monsters that resided there and that, like gods, men could learn-albeit very painfully-to manipulate to their bidding.
“Master, we serve,” a half dozen men and woman intoned, their naked bodies translucent like crystals, energy pulsing in one rhythmic swell. While each beat to its own rhythm, all immediately fell into a single chorus shimmering with latent potentiality; he closed his eyes, felt the power mirrored in the thrum of his own heartbeat.
“Someone has cracked my inner sanctum,” he spoke, eyes opening. He took a step and crossed the entire distance of the warehouse to his worktable-after all this time he did not know if he instantaneously crossed that distance or whether that distance crossed to him.
“That is not possible,” the woman who met him at the portal said, appearing next to him, her shift gone, her luminous energy brightest of all.
His urgency wavered once more, knowing that he couldn’t even bring himself to use their names anymore. For one mind-numbing moment he thought he detected movement out of the corner of his eye, as though she were on the verge of touching his arm. No one touched him here, especially her. But he only imagined it. He knew she would never violate such a dictum. Yet he still jerked upright-now on the other side of the table-and forced his iron will to control his mind and force it back to the task at hand.
“It is possible,” he spoke, relieved at the same even tone as ever. “There is no other explanation for what’s occurred. There’s another magus.” Saying it aloud was still astonishing. “And that magus cannot possibly have obscured so much of an astral event from me, so much of his own print, without intimate knowledge of me. He’s good. He’s very good, or I would’ve noticed something wrong with the sanctum. Therefore, we will summon an unbound spirit to find that crack in the astral façade of the sanctum. And from that crack we will find the thread that binds the magus to the breach and follow it until we find him.”
While his followers rarely spoke without a direct query, their silence almost deafened. They would never gainsay his word, but an unbound spirit could be a thing of horror if even the smallest mistake in the summoning occurred.
He began thinking of the needed ritual objects and tapped the worktable, each appearing from their stored locations throughout the warehouse with each finger strike. Yet despite trying to focus on the work of constructing a perfect summoning, the itch that rode the back of his mind became a furious burn. Something wasn’t right? What wasn’t right?
An Olmec statue appeared on the table. Two thousand years old, its ornately carved jade a pulsing green of the living energy fused with the stone by the magus that crafted it millennia ago. Grasping the statue, he opened his mind and fed it energy, and his senses catapulted to new heights. The wrongness he knew to be in his inner sanctum abruptly spiked until he could sense it. His astral perception roved the walls and ceiling and floor as he flashed around the warehouse from one thought to the next, trying to find the breach.
In mid-thought-leap, he froze as he caught a hint of the wrong essence, as though a wolf passing through the scent trail left by prey. He unleashed more energy to focus his senses as much as possible, the force becoming painful as it hammered through the statue, on the verge of incinerating the irreplaceable item.
Zeroing in on the trail, it finally led back to Martinez. Confusion sundered his concentration, and the energy drained away, the dust of the vaporized statue drifting unnoticed. What was Martinez doing here?! The man followed him into his sanctum? How? He’d not allowed it. Not yet. That man needed another year, five years, before he could be trusted so much. Yet how… the slow, awful truth wormed past the confusion, setting the hair on his arms and legs to standing.