by Luke Arnold
“He’ll fuck up the world, then he’ll do it again.”
Hendricks’ shaking fingers dipped into the pouch and pulled out the glowing red globe of a Fire Sprite. I pulled the machine from its holster.
“Oh, what a lovely boy… You’re not really going to shoot me, are you?”
The red light pulsed in his hand. Fumes sizzled up from the floor where acid and desert dust begged to be ignited. I looked into Hendricks’ eyes and everything suddenly seemed so clear.
“Yeah, Eliah, I am. Unless you put that down. Carefully. Right now.”
I was waiting for him to laugh at me. Or to drop the orb. Or to say that I was bluffing.
He didn’t.
“Yes, boy. I believe you will.”
Those eyes. There had always been a hint of mischief in them. A hidden secret. But above all, they had always been full of compassion. For the woman asking for change. For the teenager who talked too much. For his enemies. For his students. For anyone. As much as Hendricks loved to talk, he rarely had to. You could learn about life just by seeing yourself reflected back in that deep, electric green.
Not anymore. Now, those eyes just looked lifeless and empty and dark.
Hendricks had gone cold.
“You have to walk away, Eliah. Linda’s not going to help you. Tippity is surrounded by cops. You’re on your own.”
“But you have all your friends, don’t you? The Sunder police. Everyone else on the Niles payroll.” He rolled the heart of the Fire Sprite between his fingertips. “I can’t let this happen again. This time, I have to stop it.”
“And I can’t let you.” My face was wet from steam and blood. “Eliah, I will take on the world with you. I will follow you anywhere. I will fight till every bone in my body is broken so that we can make things better. I will make things better. But we cannot force the people of this city to pay the price.”
He shook his head. I watched his hand, begging him not to let go.
“Eliah, please. Stop.”
“I was High Chancellor of the Opus, tasked with protecting all the magical creatures of this world. But I failed. I gave away our secrets, to you, and now it’s gone.” He sighed, and the firelight danced in the tears that formed in the bottom of those black eyes. “It was supposed to be forever.”
“It can be! Hendricks, please. We can fix this. Together. There has to be a way.”
He stopped. His shoulders relaxed and the tight grimace on his face melted away.
“You’re really going to do it?” he asked. It was a real question this time. Nothing snide or disbelieving about it. No lesson. He really wanted to know. “You’re actually going to try to fix it? Even after everything you’ve seen?”
I saw it. The chance to get through to him. He just needed to believe it.
“Yes. I am. I have to. So please, don’t make me do it alone.”
He smiled. Warm and a mile wide. Every part of Mr Deamar evaporated away and it was just my old friend, High Chancellor Eliah Hendricks, staring at me with those all-seeing green eyes.
“I told you,” he said. “We’re all alone.”
He lifted up his hand. He didn’t have to. He could have just let the orb tumble from his fingers. But he gave me one last chance to make the right choice.
So, I made it.
The machine bellowed out a crack that seemed louder than ever before. Full of triumph, as if its own desires had finally been fulfilled. I dropped it and ran.
Hendricks had a hole in his chest. He stumbled back and smeared a line of blood down the pillar. His fingers unwrapped from around the orb. I jumped to catch it, scraping my body across the floor and letting Hendricks crumple in a heap.
I caught the orb in both hands. Acid burned through my sleeves and I scrambled back, keeping the Faery power as far away from it as possible. I tucked it inside my coat pocket and turned back to Hendricks.
There was blood all down his shirt but it wasn’t flowing anymore. His fingers had stopped shaking. His mouth was hanging open. His tongue was lying motionless over his teeth.
I started wailing.
I grabbed his body and pulled it close. I held him, sobbing into his shoulder between painful, heaving breaths of hot air.
Why hadn’t I done that when he first came back? The moment I knew it was him, why didn’t I just wrap him in my arms and tell him that I missed him? That I’d missed him for every day he’d been gone. Why could I only do it now, when he wasn’t even here and it was all too late?
“Fetch!” It was Richie. His burned clothes were falling off him and he was all flushed and wheezing. “Are you okay?”
I wasn’t, but I nodded anyway.
“Shit,” he said, “is that…?”
I nodded again. Richie knelt down and examined the face of his old leader, perhaps looking for anything familiar in the near-Human face of the dead man on the floor. I searched for some way to explain.
“He was—”
Richie looked back over his shoulder. Under the roar of the fires, there were other sounds. Voices and footsteps.
“You gotta get out of here. Tippity is dead. All his men are down. Now Niles is taking the city. They want Deamar but they want you too.”
I looked down at my friend. To everyone else, he would just be Mr Deamar, the mad rebel who tried to kill them all.
“Richie, we can’t let them have him. We need to look after him and—”
He grabbed me by collar.
“I’ll handle it. I promise. But you have to go.” There was shouting now. Lights. “They’re all coming in from the tunnels under the stadium. We need to sneak you out.”
He was so worried. About me. I pushed his hand from my collar and hugged him.
“Thanks, Rich. Don’t worry. I know another way.”
82
I ran back to the elevator and used the crates as a staircase to climb up through the hole in the roof and past the broken wire. I went out through the room with the metal floors where I’d first looked down and seen the fires, and got into the other cage. I rode it up, went out past the decomposing body of the Dragon and through the newly built tunnel into the foreman’s office.
I had no lighter and the sky was full of clouds. I kicked my way out, guessed which way was south, and tried to plot a path from memory, bouncing off walls and tripping over my own toes.
There were screams in the distance. Excited conversations close by. People shouted out of windows and over fences. Radios were turned up loud so neighbors could follow along with the news. I crossed over Main Street with the faint intention of heading east.
There was so much commotion going on that I risked a trip home. Nobody was waiting for me so I packed a few belongings and kept moving. I went past the Steeme household and took anything that seemed valuable: gold cufflinks, an old clock and some expensive-looking silverware. I wanted to lie down so badly. I needed to close my eyes, but I knew that if I did, I’d never get up again. If I stopped moving, all of reality would come tumbling in.
Get out of town. Go east.
At the city limits, I found a cramped carriage that was loading up with travelers. The driver agreed to swap the silverware for a day’s ride. Then I went to sleep.
At noon, my spot on the carriage was handed over to someone paying proper fare in coin instead of cutlery. After that, continuing my journey on foot, I understood what Thurston had warned me about.
He was right. Sunder had been keeping me safe.
I’d ventured outside the city since the Coda, but not far. Not far enough to know how the rest of the world now worked.
Sunder had a Human mayor, Human business owners and a Human population who were stronger than most of the creatures around them. Other species avoided picking fights with us for fear that the rest of our kind would have something to say about it afterwards. I’d convinced myself that we were all just trying to move on. That the damage was done. But as soon as I left the local areas that were within Sunder’s influence, I found out that the rest o
f the world wasn’t quite so forgiving.
Out on the road, two Elven farmers took one look at me and started throwing stones. An hour later, I went into a Dwarven tavern by the side of the road. It only took ten minutes for the place to turn. Everyone had machetes and axes and I only escaped by running out the back, into the woods, and hiding under a tree trunk in a marsh until morning.
I stayed on my own after that, stealing food from storehouses or going without. I washed myself in muddy streams and slept as far from the road as I was brave enough to wander, always paranoid that someone might stumble upon my sleeping body and stop me from waking up.
Eventually, I made it to Lipha, but I didn’t know where Carissa was staying or if she was even there. I was too nervous to ask the locals for directions so I found a watchtower near the main square and spent a week hiding in the turret, peering out between the wooden boards till I finally spotted her walking through the market.
She took me in. I hadn’t given her much of a choice. We stayed in her cousin’s guest house and she patched up my clothes and my wounds. I was weak, starving, and still in shock. Carissa didn’t seem to mind having someone to care for. I did my best to be quiet and gracious and accept her generosity.
When I was healthy enough, I asked her to bring me some books from the library and as many newspapers as she could find. Then, I began my work.
The books were for history. The newspapers were for the present. I cut out any clippings in which a bold journalist dared to consider the possibility that some kind of magic had returned to the world. The juiciest snippets were contained in cheaper gossip rags or letters to the editor. Occasionally, a real news story would quote some civilian who thought they saw the magic of old, but the papers would always clarify that this was opinion rather than fact.
It kept my mind busy but, over time, I became increasingly restless. I didn’t like being cooped up in a bedroom, too afraid to step outside in case somebody spotted my species or the telltale tattoos on my arm.
As I got stronger, the old, rougher parts of my personality crawled back out. Carissa became frustrated with my obsessive fixation on my stories. I snapped when she tried to help me and I kept saying stupid things that rubbed her up the wrong way.
Then, one day, she brought me something special: a week-old edition of the Sunder Star. She thought I might be interested in seeing how life back home was progressing. She wasn’t wrong. The power wasn’t on yet but the Niles Company had been continuing their work. There was an interview with Eileen Tide about her plans for a new library and a half-page advertisement for the Succubae Surgery (I guess they’d decided to do away with discretion). The article that most caught my attention was an update on the construction of a new high-security prison to replace the Gullet, complete with a picture of the original damaged building.
Carissa couldn’t have known what seeing that image would do to me, but over the next week, I became even more irritable. The thing about self-loathing is that when it has you in its talons, you’d better be alone. If you’re with someone else, you might start to think those feelings have something to do with them, connecting your melancholy to whoever dares to be close to you at the time.
Carissa didn’t deserve that. If I was going to be a surly, hot-headed, drunken, two-bit man-child, then I needed to be somewhere that could take that kind of abuse. Somewhere that was just as full of black smoke and bad deeds as I was. A place made of fire where dreams came to die and nightmares weren’t afraid to face the day.
“You’re going back?” she asked, when she saw me packing my bag.
“I am.”
“I thought you said you were done with Sunder for good.”
“I know. But I need to get to work and I can’t do it from here.”
She tried her best not to look relieved.
“If you need anything, you can always write me.”
“Thanks. When I’m putting together a team of heroes to go and save the world, I’ll make sure to send you a telegram.”
I’d given Carissa a lot of bronze to get her out of Sunder. She used some to buy me a ticket back. I kept my head down the whole way. Throughout the entire journey from Lipha to Sunder, the driver was the only other soul who saw my face.
It was late afternoon when I walked up Main Street. Nobody sized me up. Nobody cared who I was or what I was. Nobody cared at all. When I passed a cop, she didn’t bat an eye, but I did notice the pistol swinging from her hip.
Niles had been busy.
Back at the office, I put down my bag and looked around. There were letters by the door: pamphlets, the telegram from Hildra, and one small blue envelope with a return address from the Isle of Mizunrum.
To the idiot who somehow convinced me not to kill him,
I’m guessing that you must have skipped town too, but if you ever read this, send a letter to Keats. The headmaster will make sure it gets to me. Unless you’re dead, which wouldn’t surprise me. If you’re not, you better hold up your end of the bargain or I’ll come looking for you. I’ve already got a couple of leads. Nothing solid, just a few interesting stories that might put some fire under your flabby ass. I won’t put them down in writing but come find me if you want to know more.
Don’t be a fuck-up.
Linda
PS Remember that Reptilian woman who came by my office? I found a way to help her. The mortician, Portemus, has some cream he uses on the stiffs that preserves their flesh. Worked wonders on her. Make sure you give some to Simms. I have a feeling you’ll need some help smoothing things over.
I put the letter back in the envelope and dropped it in the drawer. Then, I went over to the Angel door and opened it. Winter had almost moved on. I stood on the doorstep and felt the wind swim through my uncut hair and raggedy beard.
Then, I stepped out.
Finally.
But I didn’t fall.
“It’s called a fire escape,” said the voice behind me.
I spun around. Thurston Niles was standing in my office.
Under my feet there was a set of steel stairs that zigzagged all the way up the side of the building. There was even a little barricade to stop me from accidently stumbling off the edge.
I hated it.
“The Mayor wanted these staircases installed all along Main Street: partly as a safety precaution, but also so we can put those Angel doors back in use. Drive up business, raise real-estate prices, show the world that we still have a future.”
Thurston reached into his jacket and pulled a pistol out of its holster. It was Victor’s prototype. My machine.
“If you’re here to kill me, can you at least let me jump? It’s been my thing for a while.”
Thurston stepped forward.
“Why would I kill you? You did the job I asked you to do, right? You found my brother’s killer and stopped him from hurting anyone else. A job well done.”
There was that knowing smile again. I was sick of it, but I had a bad feeling it wasn’t going anywhere. He dumped the machine on the desk.
“A gift. We have plenty more. My factories have been working non-stop since you left. More pistols. More construction. For a hard-working man like yourself, I see prosperous times ahead.”
I was really, really sick of that smile.
“As long as I stay in line, right?”
He shrugged. “I’m not your enemy, Fetch. When you’ve got yourself settled back in, I know you’ll be able to see that. After all, a man can never have too many friends.”
He left, and I waited as long as I could before I picked up the pistol. I hated how good it felt to have it back in my hand.
The phone rang.
“Fetch Phillips.”
“Yes, are you the investigator? The man who looks for ways to bring back the magic?”
I turned and looked back out the barricaded Angel door.
“Yes, ma’am. That’s exactly who I am.”
She told me some story about a Giant who broke into her kitchen and ate all her
food. Nobody had seen Giants in this part of the world for over six years, so I made some notes and booked her in for an appointment the next day.
Then, I grabbed my coat and my hat and I went outside.
There was a festival exploding onto Main Street. It was going to be a special night and I’d arrived just in time to catch the excitement. Shiny topless automobiles beeped their horns happily as they weaved through a parade of dancers. Street-food vendors sold bottles of ale and bags of Swine-o’s. Musicians were up on the fire escapes singing in celebration as women threw paper petals from their windows.
I pushed my way through. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t stop the festive spirit from forcing its way into my soul. The drumming. The smell of the fryers. The laughter of the children who ran freely through the knees of the crowd. This was Sunder City, the way Hendricks had always seen it, but it had never been real until now. If he was beside me, I wouldn’t have been able to move. He would have brought us to a standstill every ten seconds as he tried some new delicacy or sparked up conversation with every person on the street.
But that wasn’t me. It never would be. I cut through them like running water and went all the way uptown.
There were no clouds overhead, and the freshly grown leaves went translucent when they caught the light of the sunset, turning every shade of green. The twisted branches were painted with fluffy patches of moss and wrapped in dainty loops of vine. Dewy pink flowers, white buds, and shoots of long grass sprouted from the stringy bark. The whole place shimmered with butterfly wings and buzzing bees.
The trunk of the tree had exploded out of the dirt and lifted up the concrete wall of the Gullet, cracking it into untold pieces. They could build here again, if they cut down the tree. But why bother? There were plenty of other silos, already built, that they could use to make another muddy dungeon.
I pressed the palm of my hand against her trunk. She was cool to the touch. Rough. There was a bend in one of the branches. When I put my hand around it, it felt like she was holding me too. I squeezed. She was strong. I put my forehead against her bark and closed my eyes. Under the bees and the wind and the hum of the factories, I swear I could hear her breathing.