Illusion

Book 1 of Daughters of the Abyss

Dy Loveday

Published 2012

ISBN: 978-1-59578-968-6

Published by Liquid Silver Books, imprint of Atlantic Bridge Publishing, 10509 Sedgegrass Dr, Indianapolis, Indiana 46235. Copyright © Published 2012, Dy Loveday. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Liquid Silver Books

http://LSbooks.com

This is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents and dialogues in this book are of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is completely coincidental.

Maya McAdam has never quite fit in, even on Earth where the magical elite sells alchemy on the black market. She has wild visions of conveyer belts turning into snakes and draws surrealistic pictures of places she’s never been. Partying and tossing back spells seems like a good way of avoiding her problems.

A week before her twenty-fifth birthday, her surrealist paintings finally sell. When a scarred stranger watches her from behind one of her sketches, she knows life is going to hell.

Maya would never have imagined she’s the daughter of a cursed king, and a bargaining tool for magical guilds. Will she fight demons and give up a desire for spells so she can find love with a warlock? Or will she leave her friends and become the nightmare the magical elite fears?

Dedication

For Michael and Amelia

Acknowledgements

With gratitude to my readers.

To my editors Lynne and Christina, cover artist LW Perkins, and staff at LSB who helped polish the book. If there are any errors they are mine and mine alone.

To Lea, Josephine, Jen, and Sue. The best critique partners a writer could have.

To Jeanne Cavelos, a clever teacher, mentor and friend.

To Mum, Dad, Iris, and Mike. Thank you for believing.

May a violent wind rise against the king who breaks this binding, tearing him asunder, and dragging him into immortal darkness. His God will not accept his offerings; his flesh shall be fire, his children belong nowhere, his doctrine carry disease and murder. He shall eat off the table of the dead, marking five thousand years behind the Gates of Mithra.

The Curse of the False God,
3,200 BC

Cuneiform on clay stelae, Holy District, Balkaith.

All In a Day’s Work

All Maya had to do was get through her last shift without totally losing the plot. Spending the rest of her life in an asylum didn’t feature anywhere on her list of “Things To Do Before I Finally Croak It”.

She jiggled her leg restlessly on the loading dock as she scanned the facade of the
alchemagical
factory. It had probably always been a blunt monument to ugliness, but the Mage Wars of 2032 hadn’t done it any favors because now it stood alone in a row of rubble and ruin, giving off a faint bluish glow. The entire face of the building was covered in a thin layer of charcoal, except for the silhouette of a group of dockworkers, burned into the brick in one nanosecond when the fireball had swept over the city.

Chains rattled and a rusted door lifted with a groan, releasing the smell of licorice and death. Standing in the middle of the entrance was her boss, Jhara the mage. Behind him, pistons whooshed and cranked in the cavernous space. Men shouted at a crate swinging above their heads.

Jhara didn’t quite fit the image of a higher mage or the owner of a sweatshop, with his blond cropped hair, pointy teeth, and pressed business suits. But Maya hadn’t seen many higher caste magi involved in mundane matters. She could only guess he kept his ritual cloak and chalice set packed in mothballs for serious screwing-with-others-business. Why he had to meet her at the entrance every day was beyond her understanding. She kept expecting him to say, “Who goes there? What’s the magic word?” with the kind of mage preoccupation with paranoia that would have made her mouth quiver if he didn’t stare at her constantly.

“Evening,” she said over her shoulder as she checked the great white clock hanging on the wall and fast-trotted toward her workstation on the opposite side of the factory. She skirted a bin filled with twigs and branches and dodged a waist-high conveyer belt winding through the room.

The factory looked worse than usual. It was a monochromatic study of old Victorian workhouses, with long narrow windows, brick chimneys, and heavy beams. She'd been there a month, and if Jhara decided to strip and hose the females before they came in, she wouldn't be surprised. Tonight, humans with black hairnets used hand trolleys to move enchanted products into steel shipping containers.

Humans and magi were scrunched together in small cubicles around the walls, engineering magic for the black market. It was a volatile combination. Everyone knew the different races couldn’t stand the physical proximity. But it was Jhara’s new workplace strategy. Whether the pairs made for increased productivity she couldn’t say, but at a guess, the misery on their faces made Jhara all warm and tingly inside.

Out of the corner of her eye, a murky shadow crawled across the floor and scrabbled onto the conveyer belt. It hit the rubber with an awful sucking sound.

Jeezus.

She stumbled, recovered, and kept moving. The belt cranked, springing up like the pleated blinds of an accordion. It stretched and writhed, morphing into a long snake that lifted its head and watched her progress. Black interlocking plates covered its skin and steam and ash billowed from its mouth in puffs of gray.

She looked around at the workers inside their cubicles. No one reacted to the anomaly. Nausea hit and she swallowed hard. It felt loathsome, but she reached into the back pocket of her jeans for her spells. The snake slithered off the support cradle, exposing the flat pan beneath. Boxes of spells tipped onto the floor with light slapping sounds. The reptile glided between a white-coated mage and a drum of salt. There was no mistaking the hallucination. Workers stood at the end of the assembling line, handling now transparent boxes and packing them into crates as if nothing had happened.

“Wait.” Jhara clamped a hand on her shoulder and turned her around.

“Looks like a busy night. I’d best get on with it,” she said through gritted teeth. This shouldn’t be happening. She’d swallowed a spell to stop the visions a half hour ago, but the snake didn’t seem to care and was chugging closer—a creaking, billowing serpent—at least three feet high.

“Just a word.” His voice lowered to a rasp. “I’ve located amanita mushrooms. Trent is drying them out.” Trent was Jhara’s human foreman, and a more fawning idiot she’d never met.

“I’m happy for you. And it has something to do with me because?”

“Don’t play games.” Sweat slicked his forehead and a bead rolled down his hairline. “I know they’re your favorite.”

“Thanks, but no thanks.” She forced her lips into a tight smile.

The serpent flicked its tail and rattled. It whirled closer, spewing ash, heading straight for her, its head high and eyes shining with hidden circuits.

“I’ve got other active ingredients in my office. With your name on them.” Jhara gestured to a glass cage on the mezzanine level.

Her body itched as if spiders tried to burrow beneath her skin. She glanced at a corridor leading to the ladies’ bathroom.

“I don’t think so.” The snake blasted flame from its mouth and she ducked beneath a stream of sulfurous smoke. It hissed, its rattle shaping words that sounded like old Greek, or maybe Latin.

Trent sidled up to Jhara with a crystal pendulum in his hand and stared at Maya with a raised brow. “Sir, would you look at this?”

Jhara’s eyes narrowed. He turned and swung a cracking blow at the foreman’s head. The young man reeled and staggered, grabbing a bin for support.

“I said, don’t interrupt me when I’m talking to her,” Jhara roared.

Maya flicked a glance between the snake and Jhara’s red face. She backed away and hurried down the narrow corridor, pushing through a door marked “Bathroom.” Crouching, she checked beneath the stalls and found them empty.

Her back itched as if those damn spiders were holding a square dance on her spine. She tugged her spellbox from her back pocket and rifled through the contents with a trembling hand. She placed a blue paper-thin square on her tongue and swallowed the bitter spell. Her leg jittered like a hyperactive engine and she rubbed it reassuringly. Maybe she should skip out the back entrance? Getting paid in spells by a mage wasn’t her smartest idea.

A wash of relaxation hit her muscles. She exhaled and cracked her neck. She flipped her wrists and held them beneath the nano filter, let the cool water rush over her skin.

The door swung wide, banging off the wall. Jhara stalked into the bathroom.

There was a burst of air and a white flash. He was standing six feet away, and the next moment he was right beside her. He unbuttoned his jacket and she caught a whiff of ozone.

“Alone at last,” he said, in a guttural tone.

“Get out,” Maya snarled into the mirror.

Jhara’s face rippled, distorting into a surrealist caricature of his narrow features. Then his expression broke into a pasted-on smile while a steel gray flooded his irises. His teeth clicked, straightening into blunt squares.

Something was hiding beneath Jhara’s skin.

Come out, come out, wherever you are
. She shuddered.

“Not after we went to so much trouble finding you.” His body broadened and his features flexed, changing into a full face with eyes outlined in thick black kohl.

She straightened her spine. “You’re not Jhara. Who the hell are you?”

“Magister Oxyhiayal.” He bowed, revealing a shaved circle on the top of his head. “We don’t have much time.”

“What’s a high-ranking mage from the House of Horus want with me?” Maya reached behind her, backing up until her hand brushed the towel rack bolted to the wall. It would be her luck that a higher-powered mage had possessed her freakish boss. Possession was in violation of a mage rights, but she couldn’t see Jhara complaining and drawing attention to the factory.

Oxyhiayal tilted his head, surveying her from head to toe. He topped her by ten inches, and must outweigh her by a hundred pounds. He waved his hand, and a cloak covered him. A lead-colored headdress with an exposed metal hexahedron beaten into the crown appeared on his head. Pentagrams and shooting stars burned like hot coals on the black cloak. The mage smelled strongly of some type of smoky leaf—hawthorn maybe. She had a talent for scents and this one she’d remember.

“You’re not what I expected.” He surveyed her short frame. “Without much effort you’d fit in my pocket. I could take you out whenever I wanted to play.”

He clicked his fingers and his armband flashed as the overhead light struck the jewels. A roll of parchment floated between them. “You’re behaving badly. Sticking your nose in mage business.” He tsked and drifted closer, his silver-toed boots floating above the floor. An onyx ankh now hung from the platinum chain around his neck and heavy earrings dangled from his stretched lobes. “Why would a human want our attention?”

She flicked a glance at the door and he huffed, nodding at her fist.

A flash of blue fire twisted around her hand and danced up her arm. She yelped and dropped the spellbox. It clattered to the floor. She brushed her palm over the back of her painting hand and gripped it tight, scanning the skin for burns.

“I see you are a spell-user. Are you a mage-whore, addicted to something you’ll never create? If so, we can keep you well stocked. Horus has far greater formulae than anything Jhara could produce.” The spellbox collapsed with a loud crunch and the spells inside popped once and hissed before releasing a cloud of putrid yellow smoke.

She looked up into his eyes and her head whirled, as if she plummeted from a great height. His pupils glittered and she took a step back. For a moment it was alluring, a tempting trap. Her imagination flirted with images of a silver spellbox packed with high-grade charms. The madness was a stinking lodestone around her neck while the charms kept her going, kept her relaxed and fluid. New supplies would keep her light and floating forever, if she stayed in their good books.

He raised a brow. “This is yours.” He held up one of her handmade scrolls.

It unrolled to reveal a charcoal landscape she’d drawn from her visions: a city with tall spires, backlit by a huge moon. One of her crayons slid out of his cloak, along with the musty smell of mineral pigments.

“I’d have known if Horus purchased one of my pictures. Where did you get it?”

The scroll rolled together with a snap and tucked itself inside his cloak. “In Jhara’s safe. If the House of Anu is interested in art, then so are we. And what a surprise to find a scene no human should know about.” He clucked his tongue. “Where did you see this image? Did Jhara have a hand in it?”