Font of Fertility Ch. 20

I got the sense, as different Seats began bringing up new items, that there was a bit of jockeying for position. No one wanted to bring up their own important things first, but they also didn't want to let others build up momentum that could swing a later conversation in their favour. So the 'new business' part of the meeting started, once again, with the petty little shit that probably could have been handled privately instead of in front of the entire council. Marcel was the first to bring up something vaguely interesting, asking Esmerelda for permission for some of his organizations to make 'mortal dealings' with some of those in her territory. I quickly put together that he wanted some of the warlords in his part of Africa to make a deal with the Cartels of South America. Esmerelda shut him down, citing a necessary balance of power that the African warlords would disrupt.

Then Uwe asked Ndia if she would be willing to cede a small portion of land on the border of Egypt and Libya for an industrial park he wanted to build, which seemedutterly mundane but the two of them went into a very fast-paced negotiation that involved a dozen other factors like the treatment of African migrants in certain countries in Europe, a mine in Mali, shipping rights across the Mediterranean, Somali pirates, and I think ended up actually being about which of them would hold Jerusalem within their territory.

And that was when I realized that Ndia and Uwe were both more than old enough to have possibly been behind the Crusades and any number of other wars as part of their political games.

Hell, it was entirely likely that Uwe had secretly caused both World Wars purely for his own benefit since they had both started in his own territory.

Ndia ended up keeping Jerusalem, which I thought was probably a good thing if it meant fewer catastrophic world events to go along with a switch in ownership, but made several other concessions to Uwe. The whole thing came across as a game between the two of them.

That was when Esmerelda cleared her throat and the space went quiet.

"I will take Mexico," she said, looking across the ring at me pointedly.

The quiet lingered as everyone looked to me for a response.

I frowned. Esmerelda had made it sound like she would ask me for something, but this wasn't that. She was demanding. And also, she was demanding anentire country from me. A country I didn't even realize I had in my 'territory.' I mean, I was the only Seat in the US, and Canada was right there and sort of isolated, and I read somewhere that like 80% of their population lived right along the border anyways. But Mexico?All of Mexico was my responsibility?

"Why?" I asked.

That sort of made Esmerelda hesitate. "We don't need to explain ourselves here," she said. "I'll take Mexico."

"And before I say yes or no to anything, I still want to know why," I shot back.

She grimaced. This definitely wasn't what she'd asked of me. "I. Will take. Mexico," she said sternly.

"If you don't want to explain why, then no," I said. That got some varied expressions across the group.

"Mexico rightfully fits within the cultural boundaries of my territory," Esmerelda said. "And the only reason Ezekiel ever had it was because of an old mortal war with the place called Texas."

I leaned over to Lauren. "Didn't the US almost conquer Mexico in the 1800s?" I asked quietly.

Lauren smiled and leaned in to whisper back, but her tone betrayed her face. "Jerry, are you seriously asking me that? I don't fucking know, I've never been a history person."

That was true. She leaned more into the sciences like Lindsey.

"Sorry, the answer is still no," I said.

Esmerelda narrowed her eyes at me and took in a deep breath. "Iwill take Mexico," she said. "And in exchange, I offer you the Caribbean in its entirety, and will throw in the Rod of Ash and Hew."

That got some surprised muttering from several of the others. The thing was, I obviously had no fucking clue what 'the Rod of Ash and Hew' was. I looked back and up at Adama, and she leaned forward. "It's a magical artefact dating back to the first Seats," she said, her eyes wide. "It was used as a focus to reshape the world. The last time it was used was the eruption of the volcano at Pompeii, though Ezekiel guessed that Esemerlda used it to hide many of the remains of the former civilizations across Central and South America."

"Holy shit," Lauren muttered under her breath.

So Esmerelda was offering me abig magical thingamajig. The thing was,why? What was I supposed to do with it? And would having it help me, or make me a target?

The way I saw it, I didn't care so much about 'land' within my metaphorical territory as I did people. Mexico was a big country with a major population. If I traded them over to Esemerelda, what would happen to them?

Then again, what was happening to them now? I didn't know all that much about the situation, but 'Mexican drug cartels' weren't so off my radar that I didn't understand that the country was pretty corrupt and messed up and I had no idea where to even start with it.

I sighed and looked across the space at Esmerelda - the makeup still made it difficult to read her at all, and I just couldn't be sure if I trusted her or not. The warning words of the weird flying book that had hit my window a couple of weeks ago echoed through my head - that I shouldn't trust anyone.

One of the Seats had attacked me. Had circumvented my Judgement and Proclamation. That had to be my main problem at the moment, so even a temporary alliance with Esmerelda made sense because she seemed to be somewhat of an enigma to the rest of the Seats. And more importantly, my attacker had said, 'He, me.'

He.

Nine seats, with one empty and me, left seven. If I could rule out Esmerelda and Ndia based on that two-word sentence, then I had five people to be suspicious of instead of seven.

I leaned over to Lauren. "Go over there and tell her I have another condition, and then ask her to dinner."

Lauren raised her eyebrows at me, and then dropped them and smiled. "Dinner to make the ask, or dinner is the ask?"

"Is the ask," I said. "If we're going to be neighbours, we should really sit down and talk without all the Seat pageantry."

"OK," Lauren nodded, squeezed my hand and then stood and walked across the space. All of the Seats and Primes watched her, and that weird perception thing of Esmerelda's throne sitting at the top of an ancient, bloody stepped pyramid made the walk for Lauren seem like she was climbing the steps up to the summit. When she got there she leaned in and spoke quietly to Esmerelda, who listened and then raised one eyebrow behind her skull makeup and looked across the space at me. She said something to Lauren, who offered the Seat a hand to shake. They did, and Lauren turned and came back to me.

"Agreed," Esmerelda said.

"Great," I said. "Nice doing business with you."

Esmerelda just sat back, still staring at me.

A couple more of the Seats brought up other issues. Uwe asked me if I was willing to hand over Greenland, which was also apparently part of my Territory, but didn't seem too eager for it and didn't offer me anything. I just chalked it up as another place I needed to go visit sooner than later and held onto it.

There was almost a blowup between Genghis Khan and several of the others when he brought up the idea of 'going on campaign' again and dealing with the strife and tension across the Middle East by starting a larger war. Uwe and Marcel were in, though Marcel backed out when Ndia reminded him he was now bound from any activity in East Africa making me wonder if Ndia had known this was coming and had pre-empted the argument. It was Xi Zuang who ended up being the pivotal voice on the issue, promising that if Genghis Khan created a war in South and Central Asia, it would be Xi who finished it.

After the idea of a new war died down, the chamber was quiet for a long moment as we all waited for the next issue, but none seemed forthcoming.

"It seems-" Ndia started, but I interrupted her by standing and she cut off, looking at me.

"This isn't so much a petition, or a direct request," I said. "And it happened recently, so I am still deciding how to respond. I just thought it would be important to let the council know about this. You should all be aware of my first Judgement, and the Proclamation to go with it about the mage George Stoker. He broke with my Proclamation, and in the process of my tracking him down, I discovered that not only was he being aided by someone in this circle, but that Seat also attacked me. I don't know which one of you it was yet, but I will."

That long pause before I spoke was nothing like the long, pregnant silence after I finished speaking and sat.

Uwe was frowning deeply and muttering something to his daughter. Marcel was smirking at me openly, though I couldn't tell if that was because it had been him, or he was just a thuggish prick who thought I was making myself look weak by admitting I didn't know who attacked me. Ndia was also frowning and staring at Genghis Khan, their eyes locked as I had a feeling they were having a silent conversation. Yaro was just leaning back in his seat with one eyebrow raised high, while his Prime Anna was watching everyone like a hawk. Xi Zuang sat as formally and stiff as he had the rest of the council meeting, both he and his twin.

Esmerelda just kept staring at me.

"Jeremiah," Ndia said slowly. "You are... new to our world and the capabilities of a Seat. It is likely that whoever attacked you-"

"See, I've been thinking about this," I said, cutting off the Eldest a second time. "My Patron said something similar - if I didn't see a face, how do I know it was a Seat? Well, I don't know how many of you are a fan of modern sports, but I've got thisgreat concept of throwing it back to the replay camera."

And with that, I focused and summoned up a flatscreen in front of me and dug into my memories to replay everything I had seen from the moment George Stoker attacked me in his lab. The thing was, I also made the metaphysical big-ass flatscreen TV translucent from mine and Lauren's side so we could watch the other's reaction. Doing little magic shit like this took almost no power whatsoever in the council space. It was awesome.

Marcel and Genghis Khan were both clearly unimpressed with my fighting, or the fact that I seemed to be in a panic - I wish I could have said everything I did in the lab was calculated and I was like some parkour god who could flip over tables and dodge a dozen ivy whips with ease, but that would have been a lie. Maybe, with enough instinctual spells and training to use them, I could be. But in that room, I'd been scrambling and knocking over shit and my shields had taken a beating.

Then I grabbed the heart out of the plant-person voodoo doll and the first round of the fight was over as I slammed the shield in place.

Several members of the council leaned forward at Stoker's reaction to the shield, but it wasn't a physical thing that I could see, so it wasn't clear exactly what I was doing. It sounded like I was plucking his eyeballs out or something, the way he was screaming.

Then came the brief talk with George, and then the ambush, and the city bus, and getting blown out the wall, and finally breathing fire and destroying the entire warehouse. I let the memory keep playing until I revealed the runes on the ground where I was pretty sure the teleportation had happened, then stopped it.

"Again, please," Ndia said.

I mentally reset the memory and the entire council watched it all again.

"I can't believe you actually saidhadouken," Lauren murmured to me. "It's a good story, but you need better one-liners."

"Who am I, Spider-man?" I asked back quietly.

"Stop here," Uwe called. Stoker's screams had just started, and I stopped the playback. "What are you doing here?"

I glanced at Lauren to steel myself, then lifted the 'screen' up in the air so I could speak directly to the others. "I had a lot of questions for George, so I captured him instead of just trying to kill him," I said.

"Yes, but what specifically are you doing here?" Xi Zuang asked.

"I've put a block on his magic," I said.

Several of the Seats around the room muttered and most shifted uncomfortably. Esmerelda didn't.

"Jeremiah Grant, that is-" Ndia began, but I held up a hand and stopped her. It was the third time I was interrupting her.

"I had to question him, and he had proven himself pretty much incapable of being anything other than insane while he had access to his magic. I don't know if I would have left him like that because I never got the chance to ask my questions," I said.

"Still, Jeremiah," Uwe said. "This is... barbaric."

I raised an eyebrow. "Really? Barbaric?"

"Yes," Xi Zuang said. "To deny an Ascended their connection to their magic, it is..."

"Humane," I said firmly.

Ndia was frowning deeply. Yaro was chewing on the inside of his lip uncomfortably. Esmerelda stared.

"Between my choices of killing him right there and getting no answers, or letting him keep his magic and continue assaulting me, I decided the most expedient, and bloodless, route made sense."

"Where is he now?" Xi Zuang asked. "Do you still have this block in place?"

"Did you stop watching or something?" I countered. "I don't know, one of you took him."

"This is a filthy business," Marcel growled from his throne. "The worst kind of heresy. You are a degenerate dog for-"

"I'm sorry," I interrupted him. "I was under the impression that I had free reign to handle my affairs as I see fit, especially within my own territory. How about we stay on topic here? If you have a problem with how I apprehend a Judgement Breaker, then bring it up in another conversation."

Marcel sneered at me, but I glared right back at him. To be honest, it helped that I was so far around the circle from him otherwise I'd probably be shitting myself. The dude was fucking scary. There were mutters from some of the others, but no one else put up a fuss.

"Move the memory forward," Ndia commanded me. I looked over at her and didn't do anything until she met my eye, not liking that she'd gotten so imperious with me all of a sudden. Only once she met my gaze, I started the memory playing again and played it through to the runes.

"Old Arabic in origin, if my memory serves me," Uwe said. "Third cycle?"

"Second," Ndia said.

"It's tied to shadows," Genghis Khan said. "This could be any shadow walker."

"And the bus?" I asked. "How does that line up? Or the experiments that Stoker was doing - he had control over plants, but some of what he was doing would have required more than that."

"Show us the bus again," Xi Zuang requested, and I reversed to the best shot I had of it as it came barreling towards me out of the ether. "Unmarked, no distinct make," Xi said. "It could be a city bus from almost any continent."

"It could still be made from shadows," Genghis Khan said. "Shadow walkers are often moody, uppity bastards to match their powers. Think they should be more powerful than they are. I've had to put down more than a few, and they can be clever."

"Or maybe it was you, and you're trying to throw everything else into confusion on the issue," Uwe said, but then held up a hand. "Not that I'm actually accusing you, Temüjin. I simply seek to illuminate the discussion - this is likely to be a fruitless endeavour, as even with the events before us, young Jeremiah did not take in enough information for us to identify his attacker. So, unless someone would like to make an admission to the council?"

Everyone looked around briefly, but no one said anything. I almost wanted to say something more, call the person a coward or something, but I realized that I was making impressions. I'd lost my cool already, and what would that tell the other Seats? That I was emotional? That I could be manipulated?

Was even revealing that I'd been attacked actually a bad idea, and just asking for more?

Fuck, maybe there was another, deeper level of politics I should have been playing this at.

"Unless you have any other information, Jeremiah Grant, I agree with Uwe. We should move on," Ndia said.

I lifted my hands and gestured that I was done, then dismissed the metaphysical flatscreen and sat back down.

"Are there any other matters?" Ndia asked the council and glanced over at Marcel. The golden-suited black man was glaring at me with narrowed eyes like he was trying to stab me with his sight, but he shook his head. "Then I call this meeting of the Council of Threes to a close. May you all return to your lives and continue in peace, and all conflicts be brought to the next meeting on the coming Equinox."

***---***---***

We woke up. It wasn't like going into the Council space where webecame. Really, I wasn't even sure if 'waking up' was right because one moment Lauren and I were experiencing the Council chamber and the next we were simply in the car, in the parking lot of the strip mall.

I blinked. We were holding hands, and the sudden bright light of the sun felt like a weird glare.

"Whoa," Lauren said, blinking and looking around.

"Yeah, that's a weird feeling," I said.

"How long were we gone?" Lauren asked.

I looked at my phone since the car was off. "Uh... zero minutes," I said.

Lauren looked at me, then looked at the phone screen to double-check. "Are you fucking... what? We were there for hours."

It really had been, as best as I could tell, no time in between us going and us coming back. "I think that place is outside of time, just like it's outside of space," I said. "So our consciousnesses just sort of touched it, everything happened, and we came back.

Lauren rubbed at her forehead. "Jerry, I love you, but I'm mentally exhausted after that and I think I've had enough magic shit for today."

"I don't blame you," I said. "But, uh, we told everyone we had to be gone for a while so we can't really go back without some sort of a story."

Lauren took a breath, looking outside the car, and then blew it out slowly. "I feel bad not going back to help," she said. "But I really do feel fucking exhausted. Do you want to just... go somewhere and decompress?"

"I'd love to," I said. "Where do you want to go?"

"Maybe let's just go for a drive?" Lauren suggested.

"Sure," I said and lifted up her hand to kiss the back of it.

We hit the road and soon we were headed out of town on a backroad highway.

"I still can't believe none of them had anything helpful to say," Lauren finally said.

"I thought you had enough of magic shit?" I asked.

"Well, it's on my mind!" Lauren said. "I mean, not a single one of them actually denied it was them or offered their concern or anything."

"I don't know what I was expecting," I said. "It wasn't that, but I sort of see why it happened. They don't want to piss off whoever did it but also don't want to rub me the wrong way. Well, except for Marcel I guess. They don't know if it was someone they have important deals with."

"Fucking politics," Lauren grunted.

"No,fucking politics are a lot more fun," I said with a little smirk. "Like last night."

"Thatwas fun," Lauren smiled back. "It wasn't weird seeing me get fucked with a strap-on, was it?"

"Sort of, but it was way hotter than weird," I said. "And the way you looked at me that first time Angie got you to suck on it was reassuring."

"Good," Lauren said. "I wanted to make sure you would like it - sucking on a rubber dick isn't exactly this big wow experience. I mean, a dildo is a dildo so getting fucked with it is one thing, but I feel like a blowjob is almost more intimate considering the eye contact so I wanted that with you."