However, she was too far away and couldn’t get at it.

  “Sunny! Nyarly’s makin’ his move!”

  She whipped around, and saw the snow-queen approach the pillar and reach out to touch it with both hands. Thundar took out a simulacrum attacking from behind as she spun on her heels, grasped her singlestick, pulled it free and hurled it at the avatar in one move. It struck the god square in the side of the chest—

  —and bounced off, doing no harm.

  “No!” Sunny bulled her way through the ring of golems surrounding her and flew at the snow-queen, but it paused just long enough to throw out an arm, presenting its palm towards her. Sunny slammed to a halt as if hitting a brick wall, bounced back, and fell on her butt. Thundar took out another golem that made for her, but the snow-queen turned towards her and pointed at her. Sunny arched her back and screamed.

  Eile didn’t think; she body-slammed a golem, knocked another aside with her shield, and threw her sword. Except, she threw it at the pillar of icy flame. She instantly regretted doing so, but it was too late. The blade spun tip over hilt, and hit the pillar with the pommel. It ricocheted sharply to one side instead of passed through, but the impact site showed a spider web of cracks, which grew larger and spread as the flame flickered. In moments the pillar was nearly cocooned in cracks, and she wondered what was holding it together.

  Then it exploded. Thundar threw himself over Sunny’s head as Eile ducked behind her shield, but when she heard nothing impact on it, she lowered it. Aeul lay in a heap on the now empty base, while the snow-queen stood nearby. It was still intact, but its body, crown, and gown were riven with deep splits. It turned, slowly, ponderously, in an awkward, almost drunken manner as the chunks of its body ground against each other, to stare at her, as if it couldn’t believe she had managed to hurt it.

  Thundar leapt off Sunny, who pointed at the avatar. “Zap!”

  The snow-queen became surrounded by an actinic cloud as sparks like tiny bolts of lightning danced over its frame. It threw back its head and raised its arms as it convulsed, and the splits merged as the chunks of its body churned like masonry caught in an earthquake. The affect faded in moments, and the god slumped, but even as it tried to lift its head, it fell apart as the pieces of its body collapsed into a heap of rubble. The golems had been motionless while the avatar was being assaulted by the magical electrical discharge, but as soon as the snow-queen fell apart they all shattered in a maelstrom of splinters and shards.

  Eile jogged over to what was left of the snow-queen, and found its intact face looking up at her. The mouth frowned in cold anger as the black-ice eyes sparkled with malignant threat.

  “Sayonara, sucker.” And she crushed the porcelain-like mask under the sole of her boot. The opal-like eyes rolled away and disappeared in the debris.

  She heard Sunny groan, and when she glanced in her direction she saw her sit up and hold her head.

  “You alright?”

  Her partner glanced up at her, looking like death on a cracker. “Yeah. I just feel like I’ve been put through a wood chipper.” Then she whipped her towards the pillar’s base. “Aeul!”

  Sunny crawled over to her as she and Thundar followed. Sunny turned her over onto her back, but Eile noticed she looked different even before her partner completed the maneuver.

  She now looked no older than sixteen, seventeen tops, and her body had the smoothness and vitality of youth.

  She was also breathing, indicating she was unconscious, not dead.

  Sunny shook her gently. “Wake up. Can you hear me? Wake up.”

  She didn’t stir at first, but then her eyes flew open. She just stared into space for some moments, then she grinned and pushed herself up on her elbows as she focused on the sky above them.

  “The purge is complete!” She sounded both ecstatic and relieved.

  Sunny helped her sit up. “Are you okay? Do you remember who you are?”

  She glanced at Sunny, then up at Eile, and finally at Thundar, going so far as to scratch him behind the ears. “I am Aeul, shaman of the Tiger Clan.” She then turned her attention to them. “And you have saved my life and my soul, all of you. For that you have my eternal gratitude, and that of my clan.”

  Sunny grinned at Eile and crinkled her eyes, and she returned it with a chuckle. “Heh, I can’t think of anything we’d rather have than that.” And Sunny giggled as Thundar purred.

  Save a Prayer

  A Secret World Chronicle Prequel Story

  Mercedes Lackey

  Mercedes Lackey’s first fiction sales were to Sword and Sorceress 3 and Sword and Sorceress 4, and both sales were made on the same day. She came to visit Marion, bringing two stories with her. She and I were in the office while Marion was in the music room reading them. After a while her voice floated back the length of the house, “Damn you, Misty!” While Misty understandably cringed at that, I started laughing and explained it just meant that Marion liked both stories too much to part with either of them. So Marion bought them both, and those were the first of many stories about Tarma and Kethry. By the time Marion died, there were two novels and a Tarma/Kethry anthology. So for this volume Misty decided to turn to urban fantasy, with a story about Vickie, one of her Secret World Chronicle characters as a young girl. Misty tells me that she can write more stories about Vickie, and I hope to see them in future volumes of Sword and Sorceress.

  Mercedes Lackey was born in Chicago Illinois on June 24, 1950. The very next day, the Korean War was declared. It is hoped that there is no connection between the two events. Her first novel was published in 1987. In 1990 she met artist Larry Dixon at a small Science Fiction convention in Meridian, Mississippi, on a television interview organized by the convention.

  They moved to their current home, the “second weirdest house in Oklahoma” also in 1992. She has many pet parrots and “the house is never quiet.” She has over eighty books in print, with four being published in 2014 alone, and some of her foreign editions can be found in Russian, German, Czech, Polish, French, Italian, Turkish, and Japanese.

  From a collaboration with Dennis Lee, Cody Martin and Veronica Giguere came the Secret World Chronicle, www.secretworldchronicle, a five book series of which the first four: Invasion!, World Divided, Revolution!, and Collision! are available from Baen.

  Mercedes Lackey has written and published 125 books in many series, including the Hunter, Valdemar, Elemental Masters, SERRAted Edge, Elvenbane, and Obsidian Mountain series from Hyperion, DAW, Baen, Tor and many others.

  When Josh opened his eyes, he was terrified; terrified that he didn’t know where he was, and terrified that he’d gone blind. The only time he’d ever been in a place this dark was in a subway during a power failure. When you’re living on the streets, nighttime is never really dark. Whether you’re sleeping under a bridge, in an abandoned building, or in a shelter, there’s always light you can’t block out; from street-lamps, from neon-signs, from the lights in the shelter they keep on all night to keep kids from getting out of bed and “wandering.”

  So he wasn’t in any of those places; if he was…he’d gone blind.

  He felt around himself in a panic, trying to pull up his last memory before waking up here. He was lying on cold cement…and it was just as quiet as it was dark.

  Just as it was never completely dark when you lived on the street, it was never silent either. So…either he’d gone deaf and blind, or…

  Now he remembered. Or rather, didn’t because he didn’t remember being brought here, wherever “here” was. The last thing he remembered was some people in a white van passing out bags of fast food. He was the last to get one. He remembered his hand taking the bag, and feeling the warmth of the food inside…and then, nothing.

  He thought he heard a sound behind him, sat up and turned, and that was when he saw a thin, dim line of light at floor level. Was it under a door?

  But the relief he felt made him light-headed. At least he wasn’t blind and deaf!

  His relief only lasted as long as it took for the door to open, and see what was standing there. The silhouettes, at least, because the dim light was behind them, and they were black. Not “African-American” black. Not even tribal African black. They were a black that had no other color in it, and even seemed to swallow up light.

  And they were…monstrous. Like something out of a horror movie. Bald heads, long, pointed noses, ears, and chins, eyes burning in those black faces, red as hot coals. Arms and legs too long, torsos too short, hunched backs. Joints that were…wrong. Limbs that could have been rebroken and set to heal badly. Something about them hit him in the gut with an atavistic wave of paralyzing fear, fear that said his ancestors had faced these things in the dim, collective past, and it had not gone well.

  Before he could move, they surged into the room and seized him, one and two to a limb, heaved them over their heads and carried him out like some sort of trophy. He got a glimpse of what could have been a subway platform, long deserted, before they carried him into a tunnel. Then, he could only see, dimly, the roof of the tunnel going by.

  Frozen with fear, he did not even try to fight them.

  Then they came into the light, and before he could think, he was thrown against a pair of metal beams and shackled there, hand and foot, spread-eagled between the two.

  He could not see what was behind him, but in front of him was a ring of camping lanterns, half of a circle painted on the ground inscribed with things he could not read, and four people in those all-over-suits of white Tyvek that industrial painters or people who worked in clean-rooms wore. The people had the white hoods up and tied around their faces, and respirators.

  And long knives in their hands.

  They were talking.

  “…you should have seen his face. Stevenson has never lost a case like this. He couldn’t believe it when he heard the jury verdict. He’s already filed a motion to look into jury tampering.” The man laughed.

  Another laughed with him. “We know how that’s going to go. Well, we need to get this one done in a hurry. My jury is going to adjourn to deliberate tomorrow. I want the spell to have time to settle into their brains before they do.”

  The other three nodded, and the first man stepped up to Josh. Only now did he actually look at Josh. Finally Josh broke through his own paralysis to—well he wanted to scream, but all he managed was a whimper. “Please…let me go.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that,” the man said, raising his knife. “He likes screaming.”

  ~o0o~

  Vickie Nagy sat patiently outside the office of the new Director of the FBI’s Metahuman Division. Specifically, he was assigning Department 39 a case and did not like what two of the three members of 39 were telling him. She wondered if he realized that she could hear everything that was being said in there. Would it be too smart-ass of me to just walk in there and…yeah, yeah it would.

  He was objecting to the fact that her parents were including 16-year-old her on the assignment they were supposed to be leaving on…scratch that, they were now a half hour late. Missed our flight. Which means we get the jet. Cool. She had absolutely no doubt whatsoever that she was going on this assignment, despite the fact that she was a high-school junior and not an actual agent, just the offspring of two of the only three magic-using agents the FBI had. The new Director wasn’t getting any choice. Just like the last Director hadn’t had any choice. And from the sound of things, Mom was about to go into full demonstration mode.

  The new Director’s voice rose. “Agent Nagy, what are you—”

  Her mother’s voice was perfectly even. But Vickie could read the fury just under the surface. The Director should have known better than to mess with an Irish redhead. “Demonstrating.”

  Vickie braced herself, and from behind the door there came the utterly predictable sounds of a computer hard-drive doing a hard, hard crash, and a number of electrical arcs, and—it was a good thing that the Director’s computer had a nice expensive LCD monitor instead of a CRT. At least this time there wasn’t an implosion, the way there had been the last time Mom had “demonstrated.”

  Good gods, I hope that hard drive didn’t spit shrapnel. Wonder if the fire alarm is going to go off this time?

  There was the sound of windows being hastily opened, and the smell of burning plastic seeped under the door. But this time, no fire alarm.

  Guess not.

  The Director’s secretary, who clearly had expected this as well, was already on the phone to IT.

  “She warned, you sir. Repeatedly.” That was Dad. “This is why, if you are going to insist that we use the tech gear, Victoria has to go along. She’s the only one of us that can handle tech without it blowing up in her face. She’s the only one that can insulate the tech gear so we don’t blow up what we need to use, and she’ll need to renew that protection fairly frequently.”

  “We told you,” Mom said, biting off each word. “We kept telling you. We’re not metahumans. Our abilities don’t work like a metahuman’s. That’s all in our bloody files.”

  Mom hadn’t added, you cretinous, bureaucratic prat, but she didn’t have to.

  There was a long pause. “Send her in.”

  Vickie took that as the cue for her entrance. She gauged the new Director at a glance. He looked like the original Great Stone Face. There was no sign of a sense of humor in him. No, this was not a guy to be smart-assed with. She took a respectful “parade rest” stance just beside her father, Alexander Nagy, and said nothing.

  He looked her up and down while the geeks arrived and began installing his new computer and putting the old one on the cart to be taken away. At least that hard drive is quite thoroughly destroyed. Ain’t nobody getting nothin’ off that baby.

  The computer her mother had just fried with a touch was impressively, visibly damaged. Looked like the hard drive had thrown shrapnel; the case had contained it, barely.

  “So. Your parents think they need you on this assignment.” The way he was eyeing her suggested he was waiting for a response.

  “They’ve needed me on assignments since I was twelve, sir.” She kept her face completely expressionless. She considered adding “That’s in my file,” but…no. “I’m a mathemagician, a techno-shaman, and a geomancer. I am good at self-defense. I have black-belts in staff, aikido and tae kwan do. I regularly score the same as my father on the indoor and outdoor ranges with a 9 mil. And I’m a traceur in parkour. I can defend myself at need, but more importantly for the purposes of the team, I know not only when to run, and I run very fast, but I can just about run up the side of a building if I have to.” She lifted her chin a little. “My mother didn’t raise any hostages.”

  The Director just gave her a long, unreadable look. “Explain mathemagician, techno-shaman and geomancer.”

  “Instead of needing to memorize spell-castings or use components, I understand spell-casting in mathematical terms. My mother uses diagrams, chants and physical objects to impose her will on the physical world. I can do that, too, and sometimes do, but mostly I visualize equations, then work through them to the answer to impose my will on the physical world. I can also read someone else’s work as an equation and duplicate it, without knowing how they themselves achieved the result. That’s a mathemagician. I’m one of three that I know of.” She took a deep breath. “As for being a techno-shaman, I also am able to interface with technology on an intuitive level, and unlike virtually every other magician that I know of, I don’t blow the stuff up just by touching it. I can use it like a normal person, and I can interface with it with my magical abilities.”

  “Magicians do that,” said Moira Nagy, frowning. “Blow tech things up, that is. As I explained.”

  “Some are more reactive than others,” Vickie put in. “My mother and Agent Stormdance can drive, use electrical appliances and household gear, and don’t burn down the house every time they touch a light-switch—but I know people who do burn down the house just by touching a light-switch. But the more circuit-boards that are in something, the more likely it is that my mother and Agent Stormdance will fry them. I am able to insulate things like their communications headsets from them in such a way that they still work, but the spell has to fight against them and their innate hostility to tech and wears off after a while, and I have to renew it.”

  “We’re not metahumans,” Moira repeated. “We’re something else. We’re magicians. And that’s why we are in our own Department in the FBI, because there are people—and things—out there that are criminal and also magical, and the Metahuman Division can’t handle them.”

  Ye-ah. The Metahuman Division has gotten their lunch eaten by those things again, or you wouldn’t have been told to bring in Department 39.

  But the Director was still focusing on something Vickie had said. “You say there are people who can burn down a house by just touching something in contact with the electrical circuits?” His eyes narrowed speculatively. “Can we recruit—”

  “How would you get them to assignments?” Moira demanded. “Walk? Ride horses? Borrow an Amish buggy? They make airplanes crash. They stop cars. They literally live as if they were in the 1850s because every time they touch something modern it destroys itself.”

  “I can only do so much,” Vickie admitted. “I’ve tried insulating one of them long enough to take a ride into town. It didn’t end well, in an extremely expensive fashion.” When the Director looked blank, she added, “To be specific, the engine threw not one, not two, but three tie-rods, and the transmission ate half its gears, and it’s a good thing that the thing was rolling to a stop at the time because the last thing that happened was that the power brakes and steering both went in spectacular fashion.”

  “Oh.” The Director frowned. Another one that doesn’t like hearing the word “no,” I see.

  “And the last, geomancer, I can ‘read’ the ground and tell you what’s on it and under it to about a hundred feet, and I can make the earth do what I want.” She explained. “Like open it up under someone, or bury them. But that’s very costly in terms of me. Magic operates by the rules of physics and math. It’s moving energy, and sometimes matter around. Matter is harder to move than energy. So when I do something that has a physical effect, it wears me out. Sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, just like my mother and Agent Stormdance.”