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

by Melinda Kucsera

  “What will you do with this knowledge?” I glared.

  “Why, keep it of course! Write it down. Store it. Immortalize it! I might be using The Golden Cup Society for my own means, but they are sponsoring this trip and do expect their archives to be added to for the expense. I may also have my own sweet spot for knowledge, which is what attracted me to the society, to begin with, but I’m specifically looking for two things. A true berserker, one that reshapes into their animal when they rage, and I dream of an exsuspiritus!”

  “You want a myth,” I barked with laughter. “And you want what?”

  “An exsuspiritus! Someone with the opposite condition that I have, they overflow with spirit, energy, power! Beautiful, wonderful power! I also have read multiple accounts of soldiers fighting men and women that turned into bears, wolves, and boars when they fought, then when either exhausted or there were no more enemies to kill turn back into people.”

  “I’ve had a few enemies and allies ask me if I’m a bjorn after a battle, but you saw my armor. In the heat and dust, my bear pelt and bulk would make it very easy to confuse me for a bear warrior, especially with me in a fighting frenzy from the berserker’s drink.”

  “A drink is involved? Oh, who is near that has decent handwriting on horseback? Esma, Esma my girl! Trot up to me. I’m going to have to relay because you hear like a rock to flesh and blood, and worse to the spirits!”

  And so, it continued. Heliodoro proved to be a competent and thorough teacher, I absorbed the knowledge that he offered, and I told him all I could remember of the different sagas, our deities, and of our frightening children stories used to keep rowdy children in line. He wrote everything I told him down or had someone else write it. Relaying what I said to his scribes annoyed him very early on in our travels, so one of the first things he taught me was how to show myself to those without Odin’s sight.

  I was... very inappropriate with what I learned from that lesson. I learned who could and couldn’t see me, then would appear at unexpected times to who couldn’t see my ghost. That was brushed off as part of the nature of the work that they did, but when I started interrupting their rituals was when people took issue.

  Finally, enough people complained to Heliodoro, and he taught me my next lesson.

  The Box.

  “Brandur, I can’t have you wandering and harassing my family and my students! It distracts them, and therefore me, from our studies!” Heliodoro yelled at me and waved his arms in exasperation.

  The dam broke.

  “Their study on how to better kill and subjugate my people? What if you find my family? My friends? I saw what you did to the ones you had found, what you did to me!” I no longer could be a good pupil. I played nice and got what I needed from this crazy old man, now to use it!

  “They are no longer your family, you’re dead! Dead to them, dead to the world! Your mind was locked with your energy, but don’t you see? I’m going to fix that! Then you will be free!”

  “Free?” That made me pause. “What do you mean by ‘free?’“

  “I set your mind free while keeping your soul’s power. You have seen how useful it is to us, to me! These have been some of my healthiest, most productive, and most enjoyable years. That’s because of you! I’ll admit teaching you has brought its own joy, but at the end of the day, you are a distraction. You need to move on, but I need to keep your power. Besides, the people that are here are stupid! Uneducated! You were an angry barbarian before I took you in-”

  “I was angry because you threatened my home, killed me, and murdered the people I care about! “ I flowed at him in my nebulous form and concentrated at the front, the same that I did with those who weren’t gifted so they could see me and slammed into the Heliodoro like a battering ram.

  We had taken over another village and as usual, Heliodoro set himself up in the nicest home. It was a sturdy longhouse with thick wooden walls and beams, a towering roof that looked like a boat flipped upside down, and a smoke hole at the top. The old man...

  Fell back a step.

  I swore up a storm that would have made Thor himself proud. I had been practicing whenever I was alone and had been able to focus and move small objects with effort, but I had put everything into that. Heliodoro should have bounced onto the thick logs and crumpled like an old leaf. Wait, I’ve been able to move objects. I never practiced on living creatures. His aura! It must have protected him from my assault.

  Heliodoro stumbled back another step and clutched the left side of his chest. I stayed formless and slowly backed away as I studied the effect I had. My Odin’s sight showed that my blue aura glowed like a whip welt across the thin man’s front above his sternum and it slowly bled into his sickly yellow aura, but it didn’t mix. Strange, he can pull and use my spirit’s power when he likes but when I attack him, it does not blend and mix with his. Is that because I’m dead and he isn’t? Or do auras not mix? His breath came in ragged gasps and his whole body trembled.

  Then his eyes met mine.

  No more was there the jovial old man, the crazed genius that took everything in stride. If I wasn’t already dead, I was sure that he would have killed me then and there. His sticky and thin yellow aura was being sucked into the blue aura whip wound I left him with, to either push out my spirit’s power, to heal the wound in his spirit, or to absorb my deposited spirit into his. With his other hand, he reached up and pulled my valknut out of his simple brown robes, but I was prepared for this.

  I should have held my temper until he took off my valknut! Stupid, stupid, my temper is going to be the death of my spirit.

  I manifested my hands from my cloud, gripped the cord that attached my Damascus steel valknut, the symbol that should have called the Valkyries down to bring my soul to Valhalla, and tried to break the cord. I had easily broken that tie for others who were like me, imperfectly attached to their objects, at Heliodoro’s direction. The other ghost always screamed, the object usually became useless for their purposes, but there was always a strange distortion about it. I didn’t care what happened, I didn’t care if it ripped my spirit in half as Heliodoro thought happened to the others. I’m done being in your power.

  I pulled and pulled, but nothing happened. My spirit felt bruised, but it was as if my tether was made from steel links, whereas the other ghosts’ ties to their objects were dried out grass stalks.

  Heliodoro pulled on me through my valknut. Not the gentle sips that he has used over these past few years, not the deep drekka of my power like the first time he drained me, but a deep soul-tearing pull that had me screaming in pain. It felt like he was trying to pull me through a tunnel of swords, axes, maces, and spears. Everything I felt like it was being beaten and torn. I resisted; I imagined my spirit as a tight ball and more of it was being pulled back to me, but I could resist Heliodoro’s pull no more than I could have resisted the current while floating in the ocean when I was alive.

  Finally, my will broke and with it, my spirit shattered into the darkness.

  Darkness.

  All there was.

  Nothing more than.

  I don’t know how long I was confined in that darkness. I was alone, I couldn’t expand myself, my senses, or move. When I tried to manifest my living shape, I found that where I was had no space for me to do so. My valknut was with me though, I could sense the cord that attached me to it and it was almost nonexistent, it was so short. My senses could feel the triangular edges as the three overlapped each other. I spent a lot of time flowing through, around, and over my pendant. I quickly memorized every detail, every flaw, every perfection.

  Then I did it all over again.

  I thought about my life, the joys I had while out viking with my best friend Orm and my wife Torhild. Imagined what my child would look like. I hope they had my hair, but their mother’s sky-blue eyes. Whether it was a boy, or a girl, dark hair and pale eyes would be a fierce combination.

  I poured over every lesson, every observation, I had while dead. With a st
art, I realized I didn’t know exactly how long I had been dead. I know seasons have passed and come again, to only leave and welcome the cycle of another year, but I couldn’t count how many summers it had been since I last held my Torhild in my arms. I had lost all sense of time, and I hadn’t even realized it.

  Now I was stuck in this gods’ cursed box, with its corners and its velvet-lined interior.

  And its darkness.

  I raged. I screamed. I begged.

  Nothing changed.

  I was still alone, still locked away in this tiny place.

  I talked to myself, recited the sagas, retold my life story. I almost thought that Torhild was there with me but knew she couldn’t be. She was alive, raising our child somewhere. Our fierce, stubborn völva. Fierce and stubborn like their mother, gifted with Odin’s sight and the ability to see and interact with the spirit world like me.

  Finally, I didn’t have any more words to speak or think. I just drifted through the darkness of my mind.

  “Brandur, I command that you wake up!”

  The voice was feeble, weak, and warbled with age, yet it was so familiar. I cringed away from the voice, from the light. Where was my familiar darkness? The silence? I could move away, and that made me more upset. Too much space. No safe corner to hide in the darkness.

  “Easy Brandur, easy. Remember your form? Your shape when you were alive?” The voice coughed a deep, chest-rattling series of hacks.

  Alive. I was alive? Slowly the memories came back. My childhood, a boy that ran around the village as fearless as could be who cowered from his grandfather. Orm, my friend who fought by my side when we went viking in our youth, who helped bring me back from my berserker rages on the field of battle, who witnessed my marriage to... Torhild. My love. My shieldmaiden. My wife. The mother of the child that I never had a chance to be a father too because of...

  “Heliodoro,” I rasped weakly.

  “You sound so weak, but I can feel the vibrancy of your soul through your pendant. Come here, please.”

  I slowly stretched into myself, the effort took a huge amount of effort on my part. I would get a foot manifested and then work on a leg, only to have the foot slip away and flow back into me. My sight was the last thing to come back to me, my normal sight and my Odin’s sight. Once I was whole again it took another bit of time to be able to move and stay whole.

  The room had a high domed ceiling, the doorway and windows were stone arches, and the windows were filled with detailed, multicolored mosaics that would have been absolutely captivating if I were in any other situation. In the middle of all the extravagance was a shrunken Heliodoro on a bed of cream and gold silks with his crazed hair, all white and sparse now, and sunken in cheeks with a shaggy brown fur on him. A bearskin blanket. Heliodoro had always been lean, but he had been healthy-looking. Now lines of his face looked like they were carved into his skin, his ruddy tone had bleached, and his pallor made the age spots that had appeared since I last saw him stand out.

  What shocked me the most was his aura.

  His aura has always been thin, weak, nut now it was barely a yellow film over him, with a black stain which webbed out from the center of his chest.

  “I’ve missed you, Brandur,” Heliodoro said with a hand outstretched toward me. “I’ve missed our talks, our teaching to each other. My children and grandchildren don’t know that I secreted you out, but I needed to see my favorite student!”

  “What happened to you?” I asked quietly, my hands balled into fists.

  “Your attack, which I always understood, and I forgave long ago, caused me a severely damaged sanguine humor. The family forced me to return to al-Andalus to see what could be done, but other than rest and tonics for the pain there is no help. My comfort can be maintained, but I never ventured again.

  “Brandur, I read through my journals regarding you over and over! I did not want you locked away for these past two and a half decades, I needed to put you in a box to recover myself, but my soul has always been too weak to shield myself properly. Please, stay with me, your presence comforts me. We can talk like old times!”

  I felt the red-hot coals of my anger slowly burning within me, but that’s how they staid. The rage didn’t consume me, but I still was stronger for it. It was slow, deliberate, and the ability to control it was delicious.

  “Of course, Heliodoro,” I walked towards the old man and smiled down at him. “I shall stay with you until you take your last breath.”

  Then I drove my fist into his chest.

  I almost welcomed going back into my box. It was on a table a few feet away from the bed among books and other patras. I could feel the various ghosts from them, though if any could help it they weren’t in this room and the ones that couldn’t leave stayed buried within their vessels. A ring and a pendant felt different, each of their gems blazed with aura as any patra did, but there were no cords that came out to attach them to a ghost. I used my Odin’s sight like a hand and pierced the two pieces with my senses, only to back out of them quickly.

  Heliodoro did it. Not exactly the way he wanted to, the soul was still attached to its energy, but these ghosts were locked inside of their patras. And they screamed.

  Sickened, weary of the world all over again, I let go of my living outline and condensed myself back into my box. I knew eventually one of Heliodoro’s descendants would find his dead body, take my valknut off his neck, and lock me away. Maybe for good this time.

  I couldn’t find it within me to care.

  “Martillo, this is the worst idea you have had yet!”

  “You’re just chicken, you’ve been cowed by the elders, Efi! We’ve been trained our entire lives to capture the ghost when it leaves a person’s body, how to deal with disgruntled ghosts, and different ways to protect ourselves from magical assaults. Don’t you want to go to the new world with the best you can have?”

  “But... Martillo, this one killed the Delgado Patriarch!”

  “The old coot deserved to die, didn’t you read his accounts? By his own hand and by others? He was a genius, but he was as crazed as the worst of the family put together, then doubled. Probably more!”

  I stayed buried within my valknut in case either of these two could see if I left, but while I could hear I couldn’t see. How am I hearing them? Maybe... Can I use just my Odin’s sight? It’s worth a try.

  The one who was holding me, the voice that I took to be Martillo’s bright, confident tones, had a bright, glowing green aura. The spot above his eyes had a faint lavender hint to it, and his throat had a gentle blue glow. Interesting... Maybe I should just use my Odin’s sight more often. The other voice, Efi, had a gentle orange smolder to his aura, and it didn’t radiate out as Martillo’s did. Efi’s aura was more like Heliodoro was, just not as severe. He also had a dark, sticky mud red-colored splotch in his aura just to the right of the center of his upper stomach, below the ribs, but the spot on his forehead positively glowed with a purple light. Is that because his aura is so thin, or is that because he is stronger with that point?

  “Patriarch Heliodoro may have had his issues, but he is the reason why we even have the opportunities that we do!” Efi argued. “We should respect the wishes of the elders that locked the Viking away. He has proven to be a problem, uncontrollable, and unpredictable. He murdered multiple members of our family and set back Patriarch Heliodoro’s research by decades between his pranks and his attacks on Patriarch Heliodoro himself.”

  “You don’t have to be so obnoxiously formal, Efi,” Martillo teased. “There is no one here to smack your knuckles with a switch for not using proper titles! Besides, Heliodoro was funded by The Golden Cup Society. It’s because of them that our family has become the power that it is today. Not that most of the people within the society even have a clue as to what one of its most influential and supportive families does with the society’s history and wealth of knowledge.”

  Were they talking about Iceland? I visited there in my youth; it was hardly a new
world. Maybe they were talking about the other land that a few of the expert navigators said they had evidence of existing, even though they had never seen it or stepped foot upon its shores. My curiosity piqued so I listened further to the two bickering back and forth.

  “You never know who’s listening!” Efi countered, and the comment made me laugh. “This is an extremely rare and powerful ghost that has been locked away for almost six hundred years. We have read the results of ghosts being locked into the lead boxes for long...”

  Six. Hundred. Years. I’ve been locked in that box for nearly six centuries?! Too much, everything was just too much. Too much information, too much stimulus after being in the darkness for so long, too many people.

  I withdrew into my mind, into the place I built for myself mentally after I knew I was going to be placed in the box again. It was my knörr, Silver Storm, with her full sails and her dragon-headed bow, and the sea rocked her gently as she sailed through the vast open waters that were matched by the clear sky above. Each detail in my mind was as precise and perfect as if I was standing on her myself. On her center mast, I hung my valknut next to Torhild’s. Mine glowed a gentle blue and hers had a seafoam green glow to it. I took a valknut in each hand, pressed them to my forehead, and wept.

  I watched the two from my valknut, which the daring one, Martillo, had taken to wearing. He always hid it under his strange clothing, so many layers upon layers to create a square billow of a silhouette. Martillo and Efi both had the dominating features that marked them members of the Delgado family; sparse frames, impossible to tame dark hair, and sharp facial structures. None of these were the desirable physical traits of this place or era from what I observed of other people while Martillo and Efi were on their outings, though the two young men handled the discrepancy differently. Martillo’s fashion choices were as light-hearted and flamboyant as he was; all gold embroidery, lace, and bright colors. Efi wore more somber colors, less lace, and little gold. Martillo topped his look with strangely pointed felt hats with large, billowing capes, where Efi often would forgo a hat altogether and wear a simple cloak.