Hinn Ch. 28-31

The unexpected dawn of light in each bubble was shocking in the absolute darkness. He realized he hadn't seen the other points, the other people, by his missing eyes, but rather by some different sense, some new form of perception. Perhaps this was some or all of Baba Yaga's "gift."

Ray tried to reach out to Tauriz but ran into a gap in his new perceptions where Hinn should be. He perceived a small number of very faint black images suddenly turn their attention to him, and many of them seemed to make either negative gestures or calming ones. None were very tall, at most equal to his height, several standing under five feet. These images seemed almost to come to him, surrounded him. Via a tenuous, almost dream-like Hinn, they offered whatever thin comfort they could.

These clearly were more Hinn, but there was something wrong, something drastically reducing their affinity via the Hinn. What... Oh. Time. They were from the far ancient past before the Jinn slaughtered them. These were among the most ancient mortals ever to walk the globe.

He felt their approval and agreement with his assessment. It seemed he was much more an open book to them than the other way around. They said something to each other, communicating in a language no human had ever heard.

The faintest stirrings of Hinn drew images before him. A Torah, ornately decorated with decades of care and loving detailing. An ancient fortress-city in the night with a gate facing the desert wind, low and tight to make both human invaders and the invading dust and wind struggle to make it through, so small that camels all but crawled their way through it. A sketch of camel and its detailed, almost breathing offspring. Baba Yaga shown standing in a large metal vat or pot.

There was a pause, then images with greater urgency, a stronger impact appeared in Ray's perception. Blue ink on the back of his hand, a sign that the sand had started flowing down the glass. A handful of Jinn appeared out of the darkness, each with three shadows instead of the one that everyone else was showing. Jessica faded into and out of view, injured either slightly or gravely, and the world pivoting on the degree of the injury. Tauriz shattering her sheathe, and the world again shifting to fit the freshly changed reality. A different image of Tauriz, laying unmoving save for her regular, shallow breathing, her eyes empty of their glorious warmth. She either will return to her natural warmth or fade into an eternal, bitterly cold darkness, and yet again, reality will alter itself based on the result.

The flood of images trickled out, leaving frustrating traces of their presence behind. Questions remained - how could Hinn, who lived and died long before camels became what they were in the present, know what a camel was? How could they have seen the nighttime gates he recognized from ancient Jerusalem, or the images drawn of it in the Ninth Century AD showing camels entering through a portcullis almost too small for them?

Ray felt his perception change, extending now beyond the present and slightly into the future. He knew the first point was coming soon. Very soon. He had to return. He had to help prevent Jessica's injury from being fatal. Many people had need of him, and he needed Jessica's assistance to satisfy their needs.

With a great heave, Ray peeled his rwh free of the dream-world of the Oracles and felt it drawn back to his body. He felt the ancient Hinn calling to him, beckoning him to return, but he had more to do.

Chapter 31

Ray's eyes opened. He was on his back on the couch, his head resting in Tauriz' lap as she gently stroked his hair. Monica was writing on the back of his left hand with a blue sharpie marker. That was one sign, the beginning of the countdown.

Opening to the Hinn, Ray shared the images and his understanding of their meanings with Tauriz. She understood the urgency. "He has returned from a journey, friends," she told the group. "We need to prepare. Tomaz - do you folk carry silver rounds?"

"We do have a magazine for our primary weapons with an absurdly high silver content, yes," the lead trooper stated.

"Load those rounds. One in the chamber, immediately. Incendiaries would also work but be EXTREMELY careful with those; the building could go up easily. Amber, Monica, you two need to create a defensive ring big enough for everyone here except for Ray and I. Mind control is the primary risk, illusion secondary, with elemental and physical forces a far third."

Monica waved the blue sharpie in her hand at Amber, who pulled out a green sharpie and waved it back before telling her sister, "Green outside, an inch gap, go!"

"Jessica, your folks are at risk. Too late to run. You'll need to be at the center of whatever your ladies can get set up quickly — Skepsi around them, with Amber and Monica at the edge. If there's gunfire, everyone goes prone. Skepsi, your job is to keep a grip on the ladies at the front edge and bring them down as quickly as you can without significant bruising as needed. Be careful with fire discipline - they'll likely look like us. If you're not certain you know where Tauriz and I are, you are NOT cleared to shoot, understood?"

Tomaz nodded, "Understood."

"We can break those illusions if we have time, but they can also try to cloak us - so keep it cautious, please."

"Less than five minutes," Ray rasped out. "Grab bottles of water. They know about rings and will spill stuff over them to break them - use the water to wash whatever they use away. Don't be gentle about it, either - strong jets as much as you can."

A busy minute later, Ray continued, "I count four at ground level right now. That implies there's a dozen out there, total. Tauriz and I'll keep a count; you folks do the same. One's coming up the outside for the windows. The others are in the building now. Two-minute warning."

Amber and Monica finished ringing the floor of the room with their markers. They chanted something briefly together in what sounded a lot like Swedish and just might have been before closing the loops. Monica started writing runes to the left of the closure in the gap, and Amber began to move right. There was a tightness in the air after they wrote their talismans.

Tomaz slapped two of his troopers on the shoulder and pointed each of them at one of the sisters. Another two faced the window, weapons leveled. Tomaz and the last of the Skepsi confronted the door, as ready for a fight as possible. The two assigned to the sisters walked close behind them, not quite touching them but ready to take whatever steps were necessary to protect them.

Antoine spoke through the troopers' earpieces, "Level two authorized." All six Skepsi slapped at their left chest, just below the collar bone. He continued, "more teams on standby, inform prime and sec."

Ray spoke up, "Tomaz, we heard. External units stay on standby please and do NOT engage due to mind control and illusion threats. Once we're through this, we'll see what mitigations we can take."

Tomaz agreed and whispered the response to Antoine over the radio. Antoine acknowledged the orders.

The sisters had half the ring covered in runes when the window shattered, and a horrific monster dragged its enormous amorphous blob of a body into the room. The assigned troopers flopped onto the sisters, dropping them flat as everyone else in the ring went flat as well. Tauriz waited near the door as Ray went to deal with the thing.

As he approached, he saw that the beast was a swarm of jawhar being held by a humanoid cautiously clambering in the window. Dodging under a bone-edged tentacle swinging at him and over a scaled tail sweeping at his legs, he grabbed the creature in the window. The Jinn, for that was what it was, clearly expected any defenders to engage its illusionary creation, not to come for itself. Ray locked up the creator's neck in a chokehold and applied significant force, twisting to keep the creator between his body and the creation. His actions caused the incoming strikes to stop long enough for Ray to knock out the creator. Feeling the body in his arms go limp, Ray scanned it, looking for weak points. As the monstrosity evaporated from its creator's loss of consciousness, he had a split-second vision of his hitting the body just so at the base of the neck. Following the vision's guidance, Ray drove the target further into unconsciousness until it healed from the strike. "One, unconscious," he shared with Tauriz.

Ray repaired the window as the door blew in. What SWAT was unable to accomplish, the Jinn attackers second action accomplished. Two very different monsters stormed into the room only to evaporate under Tauriz' disapproving stare and blazing jawhar. She lunged into the doorway where she could see the two attackers in the hall. Both immediately ignited, screaming briefly as they almost instantly burned to small piles of ash.

A jagged blade of rock-hard ice flew at Tauriz, the crack as it broke the sound barrier painful to all in the condo. She casually batted it out of the air before pulling all the heat out of the attacker, instantly freeze-drying the body and leaving a gnarled corpse with frost starting to form on its ravaged skin. She shared "Three, fatal" with Ray.

Ray felt paired energies aimed at him a second or so before they manifested. He pulled the forces' creators into the line of fire; their attacks took out these two attackers. Ray then reversed the remaining energies, neutralizing them before they so much as touched the building. "Two, fatal. Six remaining"

Via Hinn, Ray wished to know the current location of all six attacking Jinn or as many as Tauriz could show. Two appeared to either end of the corridor Tauriz guarded. She immediately burned the four down using the heat extracted from her last kill. "Four fatal, two remaining."

The last two came up through the floor in the middle of the rings. Ray made a superhuman lunge from across the room and grabbed them as they appeared. Violently he drove them together, crashing skull against skull. Both were rendered unconscious and then dead from the continuous battering.

"Clear - anyone hurt from those last two?" asked Ray

Several people had splinters, the worst being one of the Skepsi troopers with a finger-length fragment driven through the side of their armor and into their abdomen. Tauriz extracted the splinter from the trooper, encouraging the flesh to heal as she cleansed it. The wound trickled a few drops of blood, then closed, to the amazement of the trooper.

Others had lesser injuries, including Hina, Jessica, and another trooper that got between the explosion and Monica. When Ray saw Jessica bleeding, he cursed. "Sorry about that, Jessica - I should have thought about that. "

"Can't help what an opponent does - and Tauriz' healing is more than an adequate response, Ray. Emily will be disappointed at the lack of combat pay when she hears about this, though."

Ray tried to share his understanding of his forced dream with Tauriz but was unable to share the concepts cleanly. Hinn wasn't able to easily handle the thoughts his Oracle aspect brought to the fore. Working around the problems as they came up, it took several seconds to share that the composite images of Jessica's different degrees of getting wounded and how the degree changed the events that could come afterward. The second event that he'd learned would significantly alter things would be Tauriz shattering her sheathe, but it wasn't clear if that would be a positive or negative result. Finally, the image of Tauriz with her eyes dull and staring.

"So. We've got one left alive. Is there anything on these corpses?"

The troopers stepped up and searched the bodies. Tauriz stared at the piles of dust which dissipated in a not-so-gentle gust of wind. The frozen body had some paper on it, which Tauriz retrieved before immolating the corpse and blowing the ash remains away.

The paper turned out to be a hand-drawn map from a nearby subway exit to the condo, along with sketches depicting where Ray's condo was in the building. Someone had prepared these attackers well enough. The others had no such information, save that the unconscious one had a copy of the same map drawn by a different hand. They had no documentation, no money, no communications devices, no runescript, no tattoos, no visible scarring - it was as if they were fresh from some mortal-creation process. As perhaps they were.

Tauriz concentrated on the unconscious being and felt through its rwh. Finding the tools to sense and create jawhar, she broke the links connecting them to its - her, for it was female - will. She could still defend herself to a degree, but this drew the snake's fangs unless or until she regained her control over her abilities.

Ray wished her clothing into confinements and tied them into the floor even as he reinforced both clothing and flooring, trapping her and precluding physical attacks or escape. He also placed a woven wall of immaterial jawhar around her, cutting off external information from reaching her - you'd have to be next to her to communicate; one step back, she'd be unable to perceive you.

Tauriz told the team, "This one feels older, perhaps a few centuries. If any of them have answers, it will likely be this one. We are lucky that Ray caught her."

Tauriz healed the damage Ray's strike had caused, letting her regain consciousness. "Welcome, captive. Thank you for joining us," Tauriz said in ancient Arabic

"The Lady will have your eyes for this, infidel!"

"And which lady is that, young one?"

With that, the captive realized what her subconscious had been trying to tell her - before her stood Hinn, who had been alive for more millennia than the count of centuries of her own life. "Hinn? How?"

Ray stepped forward. "Answer her. Which. Lady."

The captive sneered, this young stripling was also Hinn! New Hinn were being born! The Lord needed to know this!

"Lady 'Asnan Lamiea, of course."

"Not Lord Nadmaan? You wouldn't be trying to lie to us, would you?"

"Of course not, stripling!"

Ray squatted down and put a finger about six inches in front of her face. Summoning raw samum, he created an incredibly bright spark at the tip of his finger. "You are lying. The next lie you tell shall bring this closer. If you try to deceive us too many times, you will encounter pain such as you have never experienced before. How do we know that? Simple, you're still alive. You will not survive this pain.

"Now then. Who sent you?"

"As I told you, Lady 'Asnan Lamiea."

Ray moved his finger an inch closer to her face. "Again. Who sent you."

"You're just going to kill me."

"You tell the truth, and I will not kill you."

"Yet, you must."

"You have my word. I will not kill you. I have never broken my word, nor will I break it now."

Making this deal would let the Lord know. She had to gamble on the stripling's word being true.

"Then yes, on your word, it was Lord Nadmaan."

"And what were you told to do?"

"To capture the Hinn that unwisely broke its hiding."

"I see. And how did this Lord Nadmaan know of me?"

"I heard that he has three gems from antiquity. When all three glow, Hinn walk the planet."

Ray immediately wished that he no longer appeared to be Hinn to the gems or any other system capable of discerning the presence of Hinn. Tauriz pointed out the most straightforward solution - to make him no longer Hinn - and denied the wish as being ambiguous. Ray tried again, wishing that he remain fundamentally unchanged except that he no longer appeared to be Hinn to the gems or any other system capable of discerning either himself, Hinn, samum, or other aspects that could lead one to reasonably assume that he was Hinn. This one was applied.

"Tell us more of your Lord."

"What is there to tell? He's insanely powerful, having prevented each attempt at overwhelming his position on the council of Lords for millennia now. He's acknowledged as one of the best plotters amongst the Jinn Lords when he can be bothered to plot with them against some external threat. The Jann hate and fear him; his actions alone kept them at each others' throats for centuries before a traitor revealed the truth. In truth, I'm not certain he doesn't maintain chaos for the Jann just by breathing. He is skilled in negotiation, in discovering secrets, and in deception. All in all, perhaps currently the living exemplar of all that's essential to being a Jinn Lord."

"What does his normal day look like?"

"I do not know - I only see him rarely, during the culling of his guard, or when I am called upon for a mission."

"Culling of the guard? Explain," Ray commanded.

"Every so often, he tests his guard. He might try to slip unannounced through his guards or have them guard him while he tries to lose them, have them retrieve objects from other Jinn Lords' homes, it could be almost anything. The least effective members of the guard are culled and replaced with new members. He takes particular glee in destroying those who do not assist their fellow guards."

Tauriz shook her head. "Lovely. An inspiration, to be sure."

"Indeed, he is very effective."

"I was sarcastic, not serious. Nadmaan's actions are wasteful of his people's talents. These actions will degrade the effectiveness of his guards over time."

"As you say, Lady. Should I report your words to him?"

Ray shook off the speck of samum as he and Tauriz bounced ideas back and forth. It wasn't that bad an idea. It would put Nadmaan back on his heels, as it would be evident his target was aware of his attempts and effective at protecting themselves.

"I'll have your word that you'll leave here and seek him as fast as you practically can. Tell me exactly what you will tell him, no more and no less."

"I would tell him, "My Lord, we have failed you. I am the last survivor of the group attempting to capture the new Hinn. He is potent, Lord, and his companion is worse. I was knocked unconscious and captured myself. When I returned to consciousness, I saw remnants of the rest of the team, apparently all dead. They used samum and physical force to overwhelm us. They asked about you, your position, your normal day, and the culling of your guard. The companion derided the culling as a waste of talent, claiming it would degrade the effectiveness of your guard. They somehow knew I was lying about Lady 'Asnan Lamiea. I have failed you, Lord, and accept your punishment."

"What do you expect the punishment to be?" asked Ray

"Death? Honor? Degrading labor? Rewards? It is impossible to say how the Lord will react."

"Then, I'll have your word that you'll give your Lord the previous message as you stated it, word for word, no more, no less, and that you'll seek out your Lord at your best speed and best effort to deliver the message. Your word that you'll never address what happened here except as to that message. And you'll swear it by your smokeless flame."

"By my manij min mar, I swear to your terms."

"Leave. Do not return, for you would not survive a return trip."

The Jinn stood to her feet, bowed separately to Ray and Tauriz, then walked out the door. Tauriz repaired the door, letting everyone caught a deep breath.

Ray wished that the floor be seamlessly repaired and as clean as it had been before the Jinn had broken it, and of course, it was. He called and left a message on the condo manager's line that there had been strange crashing noises coming from the empty condo downstairs.

"So. Enough fun for the night, everyone?"

"Ray, I'm not sure if you're sadistic or masochistic, calling that 'fun,'" said Jessica.

"Bit of both, Jessica, bit of both. Also a wee bit ironic, I'd say."

"Fair enough. Shall we plan on meeting at the University at eight? Catering has planned a continental breakfast for delivery at that time."