“You say it’s fairly common,” Barb said. “Why not send someone with Sight on the investigation?”
“Sight is a tricky power,” Sharice said. “All of them are. People, even very good mystics, tend to suppress them. To repeat: Gifts are not easy. Most of the operatives we have with Sight can see auras well enough but have a hard time with demons. Admittedly, as deeply as Remolus was possessing Krake, it should have shown up in his aura. But we didn’t know that at the time. But you’re backwards, as is usually the case with Christians. You can’t suppress the sight of demons yet, but you can suppress auras. You’d have spotted him almost automatically. And when you do get to reading auras? Fully possessed individuals, their auras will be almost black.”
“Nice to know,” Barbara said. “Not. The Ear?”
“The only drakni you’re going to see are those that have attached,” Sharice said, carefully. “There are far more that are not.”
“I’m hearing demons?” Barbara asked.
“Demons, ghosts, which are often associated with demons, psychic echoes,” Sharice said, shrugging. “You’re hearing mystic voices. The good news is that if you learn to tune it, The Ear can do many things for you. You can find out what a demon’s True Name is. There is an undercurrent to the voices, like data in a router packet that tells the system what the origin of the packet is. It repeats the True Name of the demons. It’s also sometimes an audible channel to your God and his servants. You might just be able to hear angels, although they rarely have anything more complicated to say than ‘Wheeeee! Look what I can do!’ We’re going to have to do some serious work on you, girl. I’ll be fascinated to see the limits of your Gifts. If you have them.”
CHAPTER TWO
“I see a light purple,” Barbara said, looking at the monk who was bent over a scroll. “Tinges of orange, but that might be from his robe.”
It had taken two days of very careful practice for Barb to learn to open up her ability to see auras. It wasn’t a matter of concentration, quite the opposite. It was more a matter of opening up a part of her mind. She had to obtain a nearly Zen state to see one consistently. They had also practiced closing off her Sight with small, inoffensive neutral entities that Sharice conjured. Today was the day of practicing on the real thing.
They’d gone to the Foundation’s extensive library to find some subjects for aura reading.
“And I’m seeing a coral color,” Sharice said, sighing. “Very pure. And there we go with the fun of aura reading. Different people see different auras…differently.”
“What’s purple mean?” Barb asked, flipping through the tome on her lap. “Vanity? That doesn’t seem right. Chun Chao is one of the least vain people I know.”
“Which is the problem with reading auras,” Sharice said. “Most people see them one way, but others see a completely different spectrum, if you will. Demons are the same way. I might see a spider. You see a snake. Chun Chao might see a snarling traditional Tibetan demon. Nobody sees these things the same.”
“Why?” Barb asked.
“Isn’t it your Holy Book that says the mind of God is ineffable?” Sharice asked back. “Ask Him. The guesses are all over the map. My favorite theory is that it has to do with the mind of the viewer. What your Sight is Seeing gets translated by your brain into something that you can recognize, the same way that a hallucination converts images into something your brain can recognize.”
“So if the book’s useless,” Barb said, tossing it lightly onto the side table, “how do I figure out what auras mean?”
“By watching them,” Sharice said. “You just watch auras and deduce from what you know about people and their actions what the auras truly represent. What do you know about Chun Chao?”
“Studious,” Barbara said. “Meticulous. Intelligent. A serious researcher…”
“Cowardly,” Sharice added. “Afraid of his own shadow. Unwilling to leave guarded premises unless he’s in the company of someone like, well, you. He came here with a group of more powerful monks and hasn’t left the grounds to so much as take a walk.”
“So…purple…” Barb said carefully. “That’s probably related to his studiousness and intelligence. And the flashes of orange…are nervousness?”
“Very well hidden, mind you,” Sharice said. “And that’s just for you. Me, I see mostly coral. You don’t, by the way, See with your actual eyeballs. Once you become accustomed to it, you can See with your eyes closed. It’s one of the really advanced techniques in martial arts, when the Master puts on a blindfold and still wipes the floor with all the rookies.”
“Seen that,” Barb said, nodding. “I figured he was just hearing them.”
“Nah,” Sharice replied, grinning. “It’s cheating, really. He can still see their auras. And when you get good enough, auras can tell you what a person’s actions are going to be much better than body language. So not only can he See them right through the blindfold, he can tell what they’re going to do before they know.”
“ That would be a useful skill,” Barb said, nodding thoughtfully.
“And you develop it the same way you get to Carnegie Hall,” Sharice said. “Practice, practice, practice.”
“See this box?” Sharice asked, pulling an elaborately carved wooden box out of a niche.
They’d moved from the library to a building Barb had previously never even seen. If she’d been asked, she would have said that the path to the building looped back to the main path to the rear of the grounds. But there was a small side branch that led to the heavy stone building. Thinking about its position, she realized it was very close to the center of the compound and flanked by the prayer houses of four major gods. The doors of the building were heavy wood and steel with mystic symbols inscribed all over them and a massive lock.
The interior was simply one large room lined with niches. Boxes filled most of them, and above each niche were more mystic symbols. There were four tables set at the cardinal points of the compass, and in the center of the room was a large pentacle, the sort of symbol that always made Barb very uncomfortable.
“Okay, I don’t need to look in it,” Barb said, backing up. “I can feel the evil radiating off of it. Don’t let the EPA know about this place.”
“We have a permit,” Sharice said, setting the box on a table. “The feeling of evil comes from buildup more than anything This is, in fact, a very unpleasant but minor drakni. It’s a gluttony demon, a demon that is, alas, common in the United States. They’re damned hard to catch, by the way. You have to have someone who is willing to be exorcised, and pull the thing out in this plane, then capture it. Much, much easier to dispel them back to their own. Now, I’m going to open the box. Even with the lid open, the drakni cannot escape. It’s in a different sort of box. However, you’ll be able to See it. A person without Sight would just see an empty box. Ready?”
“Ready,” Barb said, raising her hands into a panther position. She wasn’t particularly worried about the demon attacking her. Gluttony had never been one of her weaknesses. But if it got out, she wasn’t planning on it just going back in the box, tough to collect or not.
What was in the box…wasn’t really a snake. She hadn’t spent much time staring at the demons before, she simply tried to avoid looking at them. But this time she could examine the thing.
It was about four feet in length including the coiled tail. Scaly like a snake but with a humanoid body, stubby arms and long fingers. The abdomen was vastly swollen, taking up most of the interior of the box, but the head was the strangest. There were no horns, but it had enormous, whorling red-and-black eyes with pupils nearly the size of her fist. The mouth that the thing opened to hiss at her was lined with back-curved teeth like an anaconda’s and had four long fangs.
“Once that thing bites down…” Barb said.
“It’s very hard to remove, yes,” Sharice replied. “I’m seeing something like a small dog with very nasty teeth. You?”
“More snaky,” Barb said. That was about as simple as you could put it. “Or an Indian naga.”
“One of the traditions of the myth, I’m sure,” Sharice said as the thing hissed and tried to rear up out of the box. “Back, you,” the witch added, flicking her finger at it. Barb saw a very brief flash through the air, like a flicker of static electricity, and the thing sank back down. Lazarus had flared up into full Halloween cat mode and hissed back, but as the thing settled down, so did the familiar.
“Now, here’s the trick,” Sharice said, setting the box on a table. “Make it disappear.”
