Blackest Spells

by Phipps, C. T.

  Murmandimus shook his head in mock sadness, his hair ruffled by some unseen wind, flowing as if he were a man underwater. One could have almost believed it as a living thing unto itself. He fixed his hypnotic stare on me and said, more seriously, “Why are you doing this?”

  “Because it must be done,” I told him, “and no one else is going to dirty their hands to set things aright.”

  I rose and walked to the fire, busied myself by poking at it, stirring it to life again. I welcomed the rush of warmth from it on my face and arms, the memory of Cheri’s death still close in my mind.

  “Is it an issue of morality for you?” he asked.

  His question irked me. “Morality is for philosophers and weak minded fools.”

  “And yet you choose to put yourself at great risk, for no obvious gain.”

  “Killing a rogue is good for everyone, including me,” I told him. “He’s killing people for free, after all. That could well be money out of my pocket.”

  “Now you are grasping at straws,” Murmandimus said with a wry smile. “Why is it so difficult for you to admit that you want to destroy him for his evil?”

  “He’s not evil,” I snapped. “What I do is evil, if you want to use those silly terms. What he does is monstrous.” I paused, looking him in the eye. “It’s inhuman.”

  Murmandimus nodded as if I had confirmed something he had long suspected. “How many men have you killed, Lucian?”

  I returned to my seat and stared into the fire again, watching the shadows skitter over the bricks. The hand of darkness reached for the burning flame, recoiled at the heat, then, like a stupid child, tried again. But the darkness is not foolish, merely tenacious. It always wins in the end.

  “More than you,” I muttered.

  “How many mages?”

  “None,” I said, nodding in understanding. The familiarity of the Soothsayer’s speech made sense, now. The bastard really was a sorcerer. “If I had never met you, I’d not even believe such things were real.”

  “And you are one of perhaps five men in the world who know of me. We are few, and reclusive. One becomes….” He considered a moment, then continued. “Distant. The Soothsayer is a classic case of what we can become. We are all, even I, vulnerable to obsession, even monomania.” He shrugged, as if somewhat embarrassed. “It’s a self inflicted wound, a necessary evil in the all important search for truth.”

  “I need specifics: motivations, patterns, projections. Do you know why he’s doing this?”

  Murmandimus shrugged. “It is his field. He is interested in the truth of life, as I am in mind.” He shook his head sadly, sighed, then continued. “He was once a brilliant man, you know. The work he has done with tiny machines is simply amazing. He claimed, given time, he could create a sort of artificial life with them, self replicating devices that could repair living creatures, even remake them.” Murmandimus turned to stare at the fire, his eyes glowing orange from reflected flame. “Heal wounds, fight diseases, even turn back time for a man. Imagine, an immortality serum of tiny, living machines. What a pity that all his work will be lost.”

  I stared at Murmandimus in disgust, cold anger rising within me. “You know him?” I asked, appalled. “And you have stood by and done nothing?”

  The mage turned emotionless eyes of quicksilver upon me, and in that moment I understood just how little remained of his own humanity.

  “Most of us know one another. And what better example of aberrant psychology to study?” he asked, without a hint of guilt.

  “Is that what this is about? Fraternal loyalty? Protecting your ‘specimen’? I should kill you where you stand.”

  “Bah.” He dismissed my threat with a wave of his hand. “He was once an interesting subject, but there is little more to learn from him. I merely regret the loss of his capabilities. In any event, I am hardly alone in doing nothing when the opportunity presented itself.”

  I clenched my jaw, accepting his rebuke. He was right. I was in no position to judge him. “Tell me what I need to know to kill him.”

  “Oh, he’ll die as any other man will,” said the mage. “But the issue is getting yourself into a position to strike. Of all the rumors about him, one is certainly true: he can see the future, to a limited degree.”

  “What else is he capable of? Can he call down lightning? Can he command spirits to kill me?”

  “Of course not,” Murmandimus said, waving his hand in derision. “It’s not his field. You could easily defeat him in single combat, but don’t imagine he would be foolish enough to confront you on anything approaching fair terms.”

  I sighed, feeling suddenly very powerless and alone. “How do I fight such a man, who knows my every move?”

  “He can’t know every move. He has to look for specific events, and even then, he can only see so far into the future,” Murmandimus reassured me. “Still, it will only be a matter of time before he finds you in a moment of weakness. Fortunately, there is now a period, a brief one, during which he won’t know what you’re doing.”

  “How can you know that?”

  “Because he no doubt cast for his future in the entrails of the woman he killed tonight, and finds you hunting him. But he will question the result.”

  “That’s absurd,” I said. “I assure you, the man has a high degree of confidence in his work.”

  “Yes,” said the mage with a patient nod. “But now he will have reason to distrust his craft, because this will be the first time he has received a contradictory result. You see, there is a reason I am interested in your rationale for all of this.”

  I stared at him, uncomprehending, and he positively grinned. “You have changed, Lucian,” he said at last. “Don’t you understand the significance?”

  “Could you damned well please just spell it out for the ignorant savage, you smug bastard?” I shouted.

  “Of course,” he agreed, smiling at my frustration, but perhaps a bit embarrassed, too. “Understanding is as much a weapon as a sword, man hunter. Understand your enemy.” Murmandimus rose and clasped his hands behind his back, pacing in front of the fire as he spoke, a professor lecturing a student.

  “For a man to perform such loathsome acts as he commits, he must acquire a mindset that permits any action, no matter how depraved,” he told me. “This manifests itself as a conviction that men are nothing more than complicated machines, their behavior merely appropriate, automatic response to various stimuli.” He stopped pacing and stared intently at me as he drove home his point. “That there is, in point of fact, no such thing as free will.”

  “‘Just parts,’ as he put it,” I said with a nod. “‘We are all dust blown in the wind of merciless fate.’”

  Murmandimus nodded. “With such a world view, the deviant is free to rationalize all things as not merely permissible, but inevitable. A machine cannot change its destiny, cannot suddenly choose to be something other than what it was yesterday, or the day before. It must behave according to its function.

  “Now, consider. You only just tonight made your decision to stop him. You have had a change of heart. Something in you has awakened that was not there before, and you have made a choice. You have changed the future, Lucian, by your free will. By now, surely, he’s made use of that girl’s innards, and is seeing a very different fate than he saw previously. He can’t accept that they are both true without admitting free will, and that would force him into direct confrontation with his madness. His mind will reject that explanation. But he will be highly confused and agitated.”

  “Then time is of the essence,” I said, rising.

  “Oh, it certainly is,” Murmandimus agreed, features hardening, eyes darkening to blood red as he stared intently at me. He raised an eyebrow, and the door to the street opened at his silent command. “He is confronting an assault on his reality. He will not rest until he resolves this, and that requires confirmation. A great deal of it.”

  I nodded, understanding him all too well. I turned and bolted for the door.r />
  “You mentioned friends who followed the Soothsayer.”

  Sal fidgeted with the sole button that remained on his worn coat, struggling with himself. I knew what he was thinking. It was the custom of street people to answer no questions regarding others of their kind, an unwritten code of ethics among people who, by necessity, occasionally resorted to crime as a means of survival.

  “Well, there’s a couple of guys I know what said they follered him one night,” he confessed at last. “I don’t know if they was telling the truth, but I wouldn’t put it past em. They ain’t got no sense about things.” He paused and looked about the alley where we stood, as close to home as it came for him. Satisfied that we were truly alone, he continued in a conspiratorial, near-whisper, “They said they figured out where he lived, and was trying to get some of us to go burn him out, but we warn’t fixing to get mixed up in that. No telling if it was even the right place, and if it warn’t, there’d be hell to pay. And then, well….” Sal paused briefly, looking embarrassed. “Well, you know there’s folks what say he’s a demon. Some of em said that fire, it’d just make him smile a little bigger when he was rippin our guts out.”

  “Take me to them.”

  Sal gaped at my words. “I can’t do that! I gotta live with these folks. I can’t go putting the touch on em, or they’ll fix me up!”

  “The Soothsayer is coming after you one by one. If I don’t end this tonight, he’s going to kill a lot more people, Sal. He knows I’m coming, and he needs to know what will happen, and that means dead people, a lot of them. I’ll bet you what you like that he knows about those two who followed him, as well. He’ll try to cut that link before I get to them, if he can. Those two are dead men if I don’t find them, and quickly.”

  Sal began to sway and hum, looking back and forth and trembling. He chewed his lip hard enough to draw blood as he tried to come to a decision.

  “It has to be now, Sal.”

  He looked at me with undisguised terror, his whole body quivering. “Can you take him, Lucian? You’re real good at that stuff, ain’t ya? Killin’ a man, I mean? You done took down a lot worse than him before, right?”

  I considered lying, but he deserved better. “It depends on how quickly I move.”

  He looked at me a moment, then gave me a curt nod, and as he did so, he seemed to find some inner reserve of strength. He stopped trembling, stood up straight, and looked me in the eye as an equal, as a man rather than a wretch.

  “Alicia told me about what you said. I don’t know much about money or figures, but I know a man like you don’t even notice if he loses what she’s paying you. You’re puttin’ your ass on the line, and this ain’t even your fight. I’ll put my ass on the line with you.”

  He reached out a hand, and I shook it, surprised that, despite his frail appearance, his grip was strong and sure.

  “Let’s go then,” I told him.

  Tubbs spat on the ground and stared daggers at Sal, refusing to make eye contact with me.

  “I don’t know nothing.”

  I pulled some coins from my pocket and tossed them to the ground in front of him.

  “What does that jar loose?” I asked.

  “I said I don’t know nothing,” he said, more belligerent now.

  I turned to look at Sal, who shook his head to indicate that the man was lying. From the corner of my eye, I saw Tubbs draw his finger across his throat at Sal.

  There are two universal languages. Tubbs, it appeared, spoke only one of them.

  “You should have taken the money,” I told him.

  I lashed out, a striking snake, to grab him around the neck, squeezing like a vise. With my other hand, I seized one wildly flailing arm by the wrist and turned his elbow near to the point of breaking. He writhed in pain, unable to scream, hammering at me as best he could with his free hand, but he could only reach my shoulder. He had no leverage to actually injure me. As his face began to turn a dark purple, he shifted to attempt prying my hand loose from his throat. It was almost amusing, watching him try to break a grip I had trained for years against unyielding stone. He might as well have been trying to bend iron bars.

  Sal watched, growing more agitated with each passing second, as Tubb’s struggles grew weaker. “You’re gonna kill him!” he yelped. “Look, he ain’t my friend or nothin, but he’s all we got. I don’t know where to find Billy Boy! The Soothsayer might’ve already got him for all we know!”

  I said nothing. I knew what it took to strangle a man, and Tubbs still had a few minutes. I held on long enough to let him feel consciousness slipping away, then released him, shoving him hard. He fell to the ground with a thud, where he remained, cradling his arm and sobbing between gasps.

  I walked over and stood above him. “The Soothsayer is killing people even as we speak. I have no time for games,” I said, punctuating the statement by slamming my boot into his stomach. He gave a heavy wheeze and curled into a fetal position for a moment, then rolled over onto his hands and knees, retching, trying to recover the wind I had knocked out of him.

  I grabbed a handful of his hair and hauled him to his feet from behind, pulled his head toward me so that his ear was at my mouth. With my free hand, I drew a dagger from my belt and put the point against his throat.

  “Let’s try again,” I whispered. “Where does the Soothsayer live?”

  It wasn’t what I had expected. Somehow, I had prepared myself for a charnel house, but the location Tubbs had given me turned out to be a nicely appointed country estate, discreetly nestled in a grove of gnarled trees, very private. I wondered if Tubbs had been foolish enough to lie to me, but dismissed the thought. He knew full well I would be back to kill him if he had sent me on a fool’s errand. No, this was the right place, just far enough from town, in fact, so that no one would hear any screams that might come from the place at odd hours of the night. The Soothsayer had chosen his lair well. This was fine with me. For what I had in mind, there would be screaming aplenty.

  I did things by the book, checking my few weapons. The bandoleer of shuriken I wore across my chest seemed secure enough, as did the pair of daggers at my waist. My hair tied in a bun, black on my face and hands, tools of the trade wrapped in muffling cloth and hooked on my belt, I set out for the house. I crawled on my belly like a snake, creeping ever so slowly from the edge of the property toward the house, looking for tripwires, listening for dogs. Nothing. He had no traps of that kind laid, I decided. No doubt, he would have considered them a waste of his time. I rose to my hands and knees to move a little faster, still low and quiet.

  It took me ten minutes to reach the back door. It felt more like centuries, but this is how it must be done. Speed kills in a situation like this. After a quick check to ensure that all of my equipment had arrived with me, I rose and peeked through a window in the door. It opened into a kitchen, a fairly large one at that, with various pots and pans hanging from hooks. I lowered myself to a crouch again and tried the door. It was locked, of course, but this was no problem. I pulled a lock pick from my belt and set to work. Within moments, I was on the other side, easing the door closed with perfect silence.

  I waited for long minutes, listening in the dark for sounds of breathing, or the skittering of claws on hardwood, anything that would indicate someone or something nearby. From elsewhere in the house, I could hear a man’s voice, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  It appeared I had the kitchen to myself. On my belly again, I went, snaking along past the inner doorway and into a sitting room. I could hear the voice more clearly now, coming from somewhere upstairs. Though I still could not make out the individual words, I could tell that the speaker was not actually having a conversation. He was singing, chanting.

  I made my way up the stairs, low, alert, and quiet. At the top, I paused and listened again, at last able to make out the words.

  “Snake a slipping ‘bout my house,

  Come in here to catch the mouse.

  Thinks he’s clever, he don�
�t know,

  We saw him coming hours ago.”

  The bastard was mocking me again! He had known all along! Boiling rage swept over me, but I held it in check, refusing to act on impulse. The last time, he had led me right into a trap. He would have expected me to find any he had laid outside, but if he could nettle me into carelessness, I might miss one here.

  I inched forward, searching, and indeed, there was a tripwire across the floor. I followed its path with my eyes, the Soothsayer all the while continuing his mad little ditty, over and over.

  “Snake a slipping ‘bout my house—”

  The wire ran through the banister, up, and to the ceiling, where it attached to an enormous, scythe-like blade. The device appeared to be hinged so as to swing down in front of the entrance. It would indeed have been the end of me if I had rushed the door.

  “Come in here to catch the mouse—”

  I moved cautiously toward the wire and removed a set of clippers from my belt, then took a long second look at the blade before I brought it down. Miscalculating its path could prove disastrous.

  “Thinks he’s clever, he don’t know—”

  Satisfied, I clipped the wire and drew my arm back as quickly as I could, standing as I did so. The blade swung through its deadly trajectory, and I watched it carefully, timing its impact as best I could.

  “We saw him coming—”

  Just as the blade hit the floor, I let go with a scream fit not merely to wake the dead, but to kill them with fright a second time.

  The singing stopped. For several moments, there was complete silence, and then I heard him begin to move, a slow, nonchalant sort of gait, stopping, as near as I could tell, directly in front of the door.

  “Let’s have a look at our present, shall we?” I heard him say.

  Let’s do just that, I agreed.

  I hurled myself at the door and slammed a foot into it. It burst from its hinges, splinters flying in all directions. The Soothsayer screamed as the wall of wood exploded inward upon him and sent him crashing to the floor beneath it.

  I followed and leapt forward, landing atop the door with my full weight where I presumed his head to be. I was on the mark, save for one crucial detail. My feet hit farther apart than I had intended. As the Soothsayer howled in new misery, the door, already damaged when I had kicked it, was simply levered too well atop the fulcrum of his skull. It snapped in two, and the pieces rapped my ankles sharply as they flipped to the sides. I staggered forward, gasping at the shooting pains in my legs, my arms pinwheeling, struggling to regain my balance.