Magic Underground: The Complete Collection (Magic Underground Anthologies Book 4)

by Melinda Kucsera

  I felt pressed, compressed as if the dwarf Brokkr was forging me into a smaller, denser form like he forged Thor’s Mjölnir. I pushed back against the force to little avail and soon found myself on my hands and knees somehow smaller than I should have been. I remembered then how I had pushed the spirits away in the gully and the clearing, how it felt to have my aura expand and pushed back against the man’s attempt to crush me. I channeled my confusion, my rage, my love, out of myself and roared.

  The man fell with a hard thud against the wall next to the bedroom door, his arms and legs hilariously askew in odd angles, and laughed as he laid there. I felt my whole body expand like a deep breath in, the tightness stretched and pulled until I felt like I was my proper size again. I wanted to pant with effort, but I didn’t breathe anymore. The sensation disoriented me along with the feeling of being stretched and the exertion.

  “Oh, I’m so excited!” the old man laughed with glee while he untangled cloth and limbs to sit up in a crossed-legged position. “What is your name?”

  “Brandur Berkson,” I said hesitantly. I leaned myself back into a kneeling position to keep the man in my line of sight. “What is your name, old man?”

  “I am the great, wise, and powerful Heliodoro Delgado!” the old man said with a flourish as he waved his hands about in circles above his head. “This opportunity is so wonderful, my family and I homed in on this little village because it had a very high concentration of magic, and while our divinations in the past have proven untrue --divination can be such a fickle thing, especially in the hands of the unskilled, but they need to learn sometime--” He leaned in toward me and whispered behind his hand, as if he was sharing a secret with me, “This time it was my workings that lead us all the way to this far-out country to you! And all of the others that have proven useful.”

  “Others that have proven useful?” I growled with a glare.

  “Yes, yes, quite useful! I’m not sure what it is about this village, but there was a concentration of people like yourself, very powerful! Lots of magic!”

  Who?

  I leaped up and launched myself towards the door. I stopped at the door and struggled with the latch; my hand kept passing through it as I screamed in frustration. Wait, if my hand passes through and Heliodoro passed through me... I steeled myself and stepped through the door. My spirit felt pulled and overstretched, but I didn’t feel I needed to vomit like I did when Heliodoro walked through me.

  It was dark, the moon was high in the sky and framed by stars. Everything looked different, but the same. Trees and grass had their own energy, a gentle haze that surrounded each blade, leaf, and trunk. I halted three strides away from my door and stared at the moon. It was a waxing crescent before... before I died. Now it is full. I lost so much time! I started to run towards the next house. Young Hilda lived there, the frail of body but sharp of mind and steel of will, with her parents Reidun and Steinar. Childhood friends of mine. I went straight for the closest wall and ran through it. The lack of smoke coming from the roof outside told me what I would find inside.

  Cold and darkness.

  I continued to storm through the room in search of any clues that would help me and hit a wall. Or at least, what felt like a wall. In the middle of the hut I felt an unseen barrier, as solid as a stone wall was to me in life. My rage bubbled up again and I assaulted the wall in a blind fury with my axes, but the unseen wall held firm.

  Wait, how do I have my axes?

  My confusion gave me pause and helped to get my head back in the right place. For some reason, I was able to go into a berserker’s fury without the aid of the herbs that in life brought forth the blind frenzy, but the downside was having a hard time staying in control. How did I have my axes though? These aren’t my real, physical ones, but they are an exact replica. They were the weapon I had the most experience with, though I was almost as deadly with a sword, and I felt better with their heft in my hands.

  I ran my axes down barrier as far as I could reach, but from the floor to as high as I could reach to where I stopped at either wall inside the hut, the unseen barrier blocked me. I went through the physical wall with no effort and followed the one that blocked me until I found myself walking in a circle with my home and that madman as the center point. Each one of the homes I went through was either empty or the few that weren’t had one or two strangers in them. The strangers in the otherwise empty homes have a similar look to Heliodoro; lean, darker-toned wavy to wild hair, and angular features.

  Darlthveit was dead. Everyone that had breathed life into it was gone. I’m not sure if it was that realization or something else, but my axes started feeling very heavy and I felt a wave of exhaustion pour over me. The more I tried to keep the grasp of my axes the more I shook with the effort. With a sharp pang of regret mixed with the confusion I dropped my axes and watched them dissolve as soon as they left my hands. The exhaustion lifted and if I still breathed it felt as if I could take a deep breath again. That was almost comparable to when I was first in training with a sword and shield, I mused. Could I manage to pull them up again?

  A sharp tug started to pull my midsection before I could try, and I finally noticed a line that led from my stomach back towards the direction of my home. I could see the next thrum of energy pulse through the line and when it reached me, I was pulled a step forward towards my home. The next pulse yanked me five strides forward. Each pulse dragged me faster and further until I felt my... edges? Definition? Boundaries? Dissolve and blur until I found myself in my home again, in front of Heliodoro.

  The crazed grin seemed to be a permanent feature of his face. Would his face break if he stopped grinning? I felt my essence flowing and remodeling itself into my body’s form, gently oozing into place, similar in feel to blood oozing out of the flesh. It was a very disconcerting feeling, flesh doesn’t flow and if that much blood flowed out of the body, a person would be dead in an instant. The feeling neither hurt nor felt good, just... was. Being dissolved into a glob of essence felt much the same. In the length of a breath, I was again standing and saw the cord come out of my center and was attached to my valknut in Heliodoro’s hand. He panted and his thin, sticky yellow aura seemed even less than it was originally; it barely registered as a film over his skin. At his side was a middle-aged woman whose round face was pinched in concern.

  “You should not exhaust yourself like this, Master Heliodoro. Don’t use your own strength, pull from his soul through his patra, the strange interlaced triangle pendant he wore. If the ghost is unruly it will both exhaust them and rein them in,” she admonished the old man gently as she led him to my chair. “Oh, it’s this one! Please, as a gift and condolence for my husband, give this ghost to me! He killed my Quinto in life, your own grandson, and I wish to make this ghost regret his actions in his death.”

  Heliodoro ignored the dumpy woman’s pleas and maintained eye contact with me, then looked me up and down, his grin just grew and grew until I thought his face would split.

  “Brandur, answer me this,” he asked excitedly. “How did you don that bear pelt and armor?”

  All of my senses screamed to get out of this trap, yet I knew there was no escape. I didn’t even know what the old man meant. I looked at my arms and sure enough, the arms of my bear berserker pelt covered them and when I reached up, I could feel the bear’s head hooked into the notches on my helm designed to hold it into place. As I shifted, I could feel the chain mail slide over the padded undershirt, my boiled leather war skirt I traded for when I started to become successful in my vikings, and my greaves shift on my lower legs over my boots.

  “Earlier, when you first manifested, you wore a blue silk undershirt and an embroidered green tunic with brown trousers.” Heliodoro giggled maniacally and waved his arms at me. “Now you appear in full armor, and not even the armor you died in. Oh, this is so exciting! Dolores, you are much studied on ghosts! Almost as much as the most experienced blooded member of my family. Have you ever seen anything so exciting or wond
erful?

  “Yes, once, but never in a ghost that was created through a sambadda ritual.” Dolores glared at me and fingered the blue stone pendant whose aura was a tight, powerful blue glow through her own grassy green aura shimmering from her heart. “I don’t like this, I don’t like him, Master Heliodoro. He should be quiet, weak outside of his patra. Did the ritual that changed him from a living man into a ghost locked in a vessel fail in some way?”

  “Oh, don’t let your bias over your dead husband cloud your eyes! This is the single most powerful ghost we have ever captured! “

  “What does ‘ghost’ mean? And I have no idea how my clothes have changed.” Though I knew exactly the clothing he described me in. That was what I wore to my wedding to Torhild, and I currently wore the same armor that I had gone viking in so many times that it felt like a second skin. From what Heliodoro said, being able to change what I’m wearing is strange. I’ll keep my axes to myself, hopefully, no one noticed me when I was going through the houses earlier.

  “You! You are a ghost!” Heliodoro exclaimed. “You are the essence, the soul, of a dead man that still is on this level of existence. How this level of existence lines up with others, which faith is right or wrong, and where the dead go when they don’t stay here, no one knows! But why waste good, vibrant energy and let is pass on to wherever, if it even does? Why waste the lives of stupid and uneducated barbarians? We can use them; I can use them! You’re so uneducated, you don’t even know what ‘ghost’ means. I might have been born with egeospiritus, but I refuse to let that stop me from finding out how to better harness the world.”

  “Egeo—”

  “Dolores, isn’t it marvelous how he already communicates with his higher mind, not just limited to his living one, to be stuck with his living language? I have understood him, and he had understood me perfectly since he manifested, and I haven’t used a drop of his barbaric tongue!”

  “Yes, master. Whatever you say, master. Now, what shall you do with him?”

  “I think I’ll take your advice; I think I’ll replenish my vitality.”

  Heliodoro focused on my valknut in his hand and somehow pulled. It was different than before, he wasn’t pulling me physically closer, he was pulling on my essence, my aura. It was as if I was a water skin; Heliodoro opened the spout and drank up what drained out of me. The sensation felt like I was being ripped into pieces, shredded bit by bit for him to absorb. His aura grew, stretched, and became a brighter shade of yellow, even as I paled and thinned. I tried to run but found I had no legs to do so, I was back in the nebulous, shapeless form that I had entered the hut in. I tried to swim, I tried to flail, I tried everything I could think of, but I was stuck there only a few feet from this crazed man who was draining my spirit into himself. Finally, I thought away and I moved a few steps of space away, but it was too little too late.

  The day was bright and sunny when I finally came to myself again. Heliodoro wore my valknut as if he earned the right to as he rode along through the forest. He was in the middle of a long line of riders with travois and small carts, which I could see quite well from my height of midway up the pines that grew on either side of the rough road.

  How am I this high, I’m going to fall! Oh, I’m not falling, I’m just... Up here?

  I was still an unformed ball of aura, which concerned me. Last time I came to my senses, I had my shape, which I was partial to, and being without it made me very uneasy. I thought about the form of my hands, arms, feet, legs, torso, then my head, and ever so slowly I felt myself slide into my mental outline. It was much easier to see through my shape than it had been the first time I came to myself; I wasn’t sure if that was because I still felt like wrung out wet cloth or if it was because it was daylight.

  I was again wearing my embroidered green wedding tunic. Torhild did each bear, each rune, and each swirl with loving patience so long ago. She hated embroidering, had warned me that this would be the best and possibly the only detailed embroidered shirt she would ever sew me. My heart ached with longing.

  Once my body impacted with the edge of my boundary, it pushed me forward while I worked on my shape. It seemed that I was about the same distance away from Heliodoro as I was able to get away from my hut last night. All the rules of how the world existed had changed so vastly, I felt completely lost.

  Someone below me happened to look up and notice me above everyone and shouted in dismay. More of the traveling line looked up and pointed at me until Heliodoro noticed the commotion, and in turn me. He waved his hands down to quiet the others, then pointed at me and motioned down. I hesitated, not sure if I should or even how to do so. Then I remembered how I was able to move my unshaped form before, however long ago that was, and thought down then forward.

  Which shot me into and then through the earth.

  The earth had its own aura and pushing through it was no easy task. I felt like countless grains of sand pelted me all over my body. I tried to be gentler when I thought about my next motion commands, which got me above ground again with a scraping jolt. I kept up the effort until I managed to float next to Heliodoro on his little, shaggy brown horse.

  “That was the funniest thing I have had the pleasure to watch in ages! Maybe I should keep pet ghosts occasionally, just for the laughs,” Heliodoro remarked, then narrowed his eyes at me. “Why did you listen?”

  “I... No matter what, I’m stuck like this. Raging isn’t going to get me the answers that I want, or teach me how to live after death,” I said. “As much as I hate this, as much as I hate you, as much as I hate whatever you did to my family and friends, you have my valknut and you know how to use it against me. I can make this more difficult for myself and stay ignorant, or I can see what I can learn from you.”

  The old man studied me, and for once didn’t have a crazed, toothy smile. There was a dark intelligence behind those eyes, a calculating and controlled mind that scrutinized every aspect of me. I scratched my arm, only to realize that it didn’t help the nervous itch. Not having a physical body had some frustrating drawbacks.

  “I’ll be honest, Brandur, you’re the strongest ghost I’ve ever come across, definitely the strongest ghost from a sambadda ritual that I have ever seen. You are something of a legend. I wish to learn more about you, and about ghosts. Most of the ghosts as a result of the sambadda ritual are very weak, have a much more limited range from their patra, or have limited communication. Or all of those. You present an interesting opportunity.”

  “You said you almost did it right with me, what was, or I should say is, your goal?” I asked, not sure if I really wanted to know.

  “The energy of the soul, without the soul. Silence from my vessels. I really don’t want to keep your mind, your soul, I just need your energy.”

  “Does it have something to do with you being egeo...” My brows pinched together in concentration. “Egeospi...”

  “Egeospiritus. Yes, it does. Too bad you weren’t born in civilized lands; you are a rare barbarian. You have a mind that works beyond food, fornicating, and fighting. Must be your mixed blood!” The hint of his toothy grin peaked out. “You would have been an excellent scholar. I wish some of my brood was half as smart as you! We would have had much more progression in our work. Anyways, my mind wanders. Back on track!”

  A few of the people ahead and behind us in the caravan shake their heads slowly and eye the old man warily. They seem used to his antics but look at him as if he has lost his wits. Others pay no attention to the waiving arms and stare at me. The ones that act like Heliodoro has lost his wits must not be able to see me, while the others who ignore him must have Odin’s sight. Interesting...

  “I suffer from having the knowledge and the lack of ability to do anything with it,” Heliodoro continued, ignoring everyone but me. “I can see, touch, sense, almost everything that one would need to be able to fully experience the spirit world, except I was also born cursed. I lack the strength of spirit to do anything with what I know is there. I barely have enoug
h energy to just live. I have the curse of egeospiritus as my long-dead mentor called the condition. I need outside sources of energy to do anything more than be a useless lump. More if I wish to do anything with the essence of the world.”

  “That must have been hard,” I responded with a note of genuine feeling. I went most of my life with my abilities either buried within my spirit or I had used them unknowingly. I had about a day of truth before I died, but to have been able to see the truth of the world but not have been able to do anything with it? I at least didn’t know what I lacked in my ignorance.

  “I am up in this barbaric corner of the world to achieve a few things. You could help me.” the man gave me a sly grin.

  My hackles rose. “With what? And why would I help you? You destroyed my village, you killed me! You killed who knows how many of my family, my friends. You expect me to forget that so easily?” Thrum. Thrum. Thrum. I no longer had a heart that beat, but my anger tried to slip the iron grip I kept on it and it gave me a new beat to fight to.

  “Your village was mostly empty when I arrived with my descendants and acolytes. Someone warned them of our coming, we weren’t even able to get the few people we were watching for.”

  Grandmother. Magnhild. I kept my face stony, but inside I was leaping for joy.

  “This news makes you happy I see,” he said, and my head jerked to meet the old man’s eyes. “You forget, or were never taught, but your aura will give you away even if your face doesn’t!”

  He waggled an admonishing finger at me.

  “My brood has proven disappointing. Only some have truly received my gifts, a few of my curse, but at least all of them have my hunger for knowledge. The issue is, none of them are that bright. I’ll teach you Brandur, and in return, I want to know about the different settlements up here, the different people, your history, your stories, your legends.”