The Delusionist's Son

by Danny Macks

  Father stepped around a unicorn topiary, which no one else could see, and paused at the edge of the shield that was no longer there. “I wish Silva was here. No offense, doctor, but his power levels are considerably higher than yours.”

  “Silva was hurt,” Kate said. “And I’ve double-checked your calculations. Dr. Anguilla’s power levels are fine.”

  Dr. Anguilla stepped over the line of pottery tiles that had marked the edge of the shield. “If my power is needed. I’m still not convinced breaking protocol to bring you along, Tobias, was as necessary as you claim.”

  “You will be,” Kate said. She turned and headed toward the remaining tower, all that remained of the house. “While you two do mage things, I need to check on something over there.”

  “I’m right here, you know,” Silva said in the dream. But the other three ignored him. The dream didn’t seem to be pushing him one direction or another, so he followed the mages.

  Father closed his eyes, pushed, and stepped across the line of tiles inside the circle.

  At the very center of the circle of pottery, Silva heard a faint hissing noise above him. Below the source of the noise, the remnants of the house’s stone floor was shoved down nearly ten feet. This was the exact center of the explosion eight years ago.

  “What’s that sound?” Dr. Anguilla asked.

  “Air from another world,” Father replied as he climbed down into the hole below the noise. “The portal hole is far too small for Kate to return home. It is smaller than her finger, but it’s there.”

  Dr. Anguilla gestured several times. “I don’t see anything with any spell I know.”

  Father held up his hand and the downward breeze fluttered the sleeve of his robe. “The portal is easier to detect now that the shield is gone. Now that Kate has given me the final piece for the spell I have been refining for eight years, we’re going to, finally, close it.”

  “The yellow is still here? I thought all the diatoms were killed.” Fear flew across Dr. Anguilla’s face as he glanced up toward the invisible source of the breeze, but he squelched it. “What do you need me to do?”

  “When I cast the spell, I need every scrap of power you have. Don’t pull power from around you, but give me life energy, if you have to. If you fall unconscious, Kate is here to look after your welfare.”

  “What about you?”

  Father’s jaw unclenched and the scowl on his features smoothed. “I’m giving everything to this spell. I won’t be leaving Winterhaven.”

  No.

  Silva ran to find Kate. On the far side of the tower he found her. Workmen had constructed some type of semicircular berm and embedded huge stones into the dirt. She put on a helmet, buckled a harness around herself and attached the harness to a chain at the center of the bunker.

  “What are you doing?” Silva yelled.

  In the dream, Kate glanced up and smiled at Silva. “I’m cleaning up.”

  Silva yelled and jumped upright. Something tangled in his legs and he tripped, falling face down on a dirt road. The wagon he was riding on stopped and a black-robed mage helped him up.

  “I need to get to my father!” he yelled. “Where’s Mother? She can warn him.”

  Inquisitor Dwufin’s voice was calm and reassuring. “It was only a dream. Your mother died years ago.” The grip on Silva's arms was gentle, but strong.

  Silva shook his head. “I have prophetic dreams. I think Kate Janos just killed my father. Or will kill him after Dr. Anguilla meets the Delans at the inn. She knew what was happening in Winterhaven even though she’s days away. To Drudge and she’s headed here. Or there.”

  “You’re injured and you’re not making sense.” Dwufin frowned, then added, “Kate Janos is up near the capital, working on some kind of message relay system invented by Dr. Poincer. He calls it a ‘tele-graph’.”

  Silva wasn’t convinced. Dr. Anguilla had already benefitted from a trip to Winterhaven. The potential for a second discovery would be all it would take to entice him to release Father from the hospital into his own care.

  “I’ll have someone look into it,” Inquisitor Dwufin said, studying Silva’s face. “But I can’t detain somebody over what they might do. Plus, if you really did have a prophetic dream, rushing around won’t change anything. I remember that much from school. Something about shifting probabilities? If it was a prophetic dream, you can’t change it.”

  “I woke up before he actually died, so the dream could be telling me she’ll try to kill him.”

  The inquisitor sighed and nodded. “Fine. Get back in the wagon and I’ll check on it. Where did you see them?”

  “Winterhaven Estate. I don’t know what method they used to travel this way from the hospital, so I don’t know where they are now. But that’s where they were headed in the dream.”

  Silva was so tired he needed to be helped back into the wagon. As he lay down, he saw Inquisitor Dwufin gesturing before sleep claimed him.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  It was days before the explosion and eleven-year-old Silva was having trouble with one of his lessons and he went to town to see if someone could help him since his mother was busy with her experiments. The other children were no help and the lessons were even too advanced for their parents. One of the other children had called him and his lessons stupid and a fight broke out on the library steps.

  Father berated Silva the entire way home. “You’re a Vatic. You’re better than that, brawling in the dirt like a drudge.” From time to time, he punctuated his remarks with kicks to his son’s backside, more humiliating than painful.

  Mother was waiting when they arrived at the estate. She sent Father back to his work and walked her red-faced son through the gardens. She talked about flowers and vegetables and consulted with Mr. Pickerell, the gardener, about her plans for next season. Then she asked Silva what happened.

  “I know I’ve said it before,” she said after Silva explained, “but you don’t realize how special you are. Your lessons are far too advanced for anyone in town.”

  “But you were busy.”

  “That’s why you need to learn to trust yourself. To look out for yourself when I can’t be there. You got in a fight on the library steps instead of walking inside and using the books. I’m certain that if you had tried long enough, you could found the answer. In my work on alien microbes, your father and I found people like your Uncle Gallmon and Aunt Sibbiah after we accumulated the knowledge and degrees to impress people like them.”

  Mother paused to sniff a flower. “This garden is the same. I could easily have flowers and vegetables delivered from town, but I have a garden to show we don’t need the townspeople. We can do it ourselves.”

  Silva looked past Mother and saw Mr. Pickerell on his knees, working compost into the soil between the plants. He wasn’t looking their way, but he was smirking like Mother had said something funny.

  Silva woke and stars shone above him. He ached. Every muscle felt torn and abused. He was thirsty, but so nauseous he doubted he would keep water down. The wagon was still moving and every rut and bump was agony.

  Silva grew up around commoners, but before the explosion, Mr. Pickerell was the first actual drudge he had ever known. He had been with Silva near the estate’s outer wall when the explosion happened, and threw Silva down before stone shrapnel killed him and the wall collapsed, trapping Silva for days before he dug himself out.

  Shouldn't they be to Winterhaven by now?

  His muscles protesting from as slight an action as turning his head, Silva saw two bodies in the darkness beside him. Dwufin, driving the wagon and singing softly to himself, was little more than a deeper shadow in the darkness. Behind the open rear of the wagon, the moon slowly rose over the Capstocks. Dwufin had lied. They were going the wrong way.

  Silva slowly reached out and grasped the back edge of the wagon. Pulling his body onto its side felt like lifting a two-hundred pound bag of grain. Gritting his teeth and fighting to control his breathing, he pulled wi
th his arm and pushed with his legs until he fell out of the wagon, as silently as possible.

  His legs hit the ground first, muffling his fall, but he collapsed in the middle of the road. When Silva opened his eyes again, the wagon was little more than a noise, invisible in the dark. He needed to get to his father in Winterhaven. Silva allowed himself to breath deeply, trying to pump energy back into his body like it was air.

  No, he needed power first. The sun … the sun would give him power. If he could wait long enough for the sun, then he would be able to help his father. All he needed to do was sit up into a meditation position and wait. He pushed on the ground with both arms, lifted himself an inch and collapsed back on the dirt.

  No, he needed to hide first. The inquisitor would eventually notice he was missing and might come back for him. He saw a bush in the moonlight. That would do. He’d hide under the bush until the sun came. Push, push with the legs.

  Silva wasn’t sure how many times he passed in and out of consciousness. Push. Pull. Drag. He forgot why he needed to get under that bush, only that it was life or death if he was to rescue his father.

  Mr. Pickerell had loved that garden and loved taking care of it. The same way the nanny, Mrs. Meadowbrook, loved taking care of Silva and his parents, keeping them fed when life got hectic. When Silva’s unpolluted magical abilities had been discovered, it was Mrs. Meadowbrook who overrode Silva’s objections that his father needed him to stay in Winterhaven.

  Silva didn’t realize he'd been dreaming again until morning sunlight filtered through the branches of the bush. He called to mind the rote for the solar collection spell and fed power into it. Nothing happened. He had no energy to give it. His mother had told him he was special. His professors had fawned over a prodigy so gifted at such a young age. He wasn’t feeling very gifted now.

  Silva's head lolled to the side and he saw a beetle pushing a ball of dung across the dirt with its back legs. In the sunlight, the beetleback glowed with reflected light. It was only a bug. Killing it for its energy would be easy. Necromancy was just a reversal of a healing spell. Easy.

  He pictured the foundation sigils on his master scroll and tried to figure out how to reconfigure them so that the life energy released flowed into him. He didn’t need to kill piles of beetles. It should be easy. Any mage with any healing training at all should be able to make the modification.

  But Silva didn’t have any training in healing. His rejection of the first lesson — dream healing — cost him every lesson which followed. The foundation sigils didn't fit together properly in his mind. He wildly considered casting the lumpy mess in his imagination, but knew better. He’d kill himself if he tried. He was a failure. Dr. Wardic was right. Black robes couldn’t hide the fact that Silva wasn’t really a mage.

  The beetle left its dung ball and skittered over to Silva, paused a moment, then reached out slowly to brush Silva's face with a forefoot. When it pulled back the foot to its face, a teardrop rested on it. The beetle drank the tear and scuttled forward for more.

  Silva moved, more of a convulsion than purposeful, and the beetle ran away.

  His life. He still had some life energy left. Maybe enough that he could start the solar collection spell without killing himself. Silva called to mind the proper rote, reached deep inside himself and pushed.

  The evening sun cast long shadows in the west, in preparation for night. He didn’t feel better. If anything, he felt worse. How long had he been unconscious this time? Days? He heard footsteps on the road, approaching from the west. The inquisitor had found him. Silva struggled to quiet his labored breathing, to hold his breath.

  You dug yourself good and deep this time. You can’t even save yourself, Uncle Gallmon snarled in Silva's delirium. What makes you think you can save someone else?

  He had to save Father. There had to be something more he could do. Had to be some trick he hadn’t tried yet so that he ….

  Had he ever saved anybody? He hadn’t stopped Drudge. Silva had a successful business, but that was Doris’s doing. Doris juggled the finances and found the wealthy clients. He had land, but that was due to the townspeople’s trust in his father. Kate had saved herself. No, Kate had obtained the help she needed, had guided her rescue, but it had taken a crew of people to mount the actual rescue. It took Adeline and Silva and the inquisitor working together to shut down Drudge’s strip mine.

  Silva took a deep breath, pulled in as much air as he could, and gasped, “Help.”

  *****

  When Silva woke, he was in a bed on a straw mattress. Thick quilted comforters were piled on his body. A woman sat on the edge of the bed and rested a hand on his forehead.

  “Mother?”

  “Rest dear,” the woman said in a calm assured voice like his mother’s, but different at the same time. “We’ll have you sorted out by morning.”

  He felt weak, but better than he had since he was pulled from the Capstock Tunnel. “I need to get to Winterhaven. My father’s in danger.”

  The woman frowned and looked to someone Silva couldn’t see.

  “I’ll get the boys and go see,” a male voice replied. Where had Silva heard that voice before?

  “Be careful, Caleb,” the woman said without taking her hand from Silva’s forehead.

  “I will. Love you,” Caleb Henshaw replied. A door closed.

  Silva felt another spell grasp him and drowsiness took hold. “Why does everybody keep trying to put me to sleep?”

  “Because sleep is good for you. Now stop fighting the spell and heal up. I sent a bird to fetch a healer, but it may take a while for her to get here.”

  When Silva woke again, he felt good. Better than he had in a long time. Dr. Anguilla sat on the edge of the bed with a hand resting lightly on Silva's chest. He appeared wan, exhausted, like he was the one who had been attacked by a necromancer instead of Silva. “Welcome back among the living.”

  “My father,” Silva croaked.

  “Resting in the next room, along with the others who assisted in your recovery.”

  Silva tried to say more. To explain. To ask. He couldn’t get his brain or his mouth to work.

  Dr. Anguilla snapped his fingers to somebody out of Silva's field of vision. “A glass of water, please.”

  After bringing the water, Caleb Henshaw helped Dr. Anguilla set Silva upright, so he could drink it. His hand trembled, but he managed to get most of the water inside him, instead of on his dirty robes.

  “Your father was pretty incredible. He wove together some kind of net which allowed multiple people to pool their energy. He said it was a common spell in Alsayed, but I’ve never heard of it. I may have to schedule a trip overseas.”

  “How hard of a fight did you have, getting him to come here?”

  Dr. Anguilla frowned. “None. You’re his son. He dropped everything to be here.”

  Although technically healed, Silva still slept more than he was awake. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed before he saw his father, emaciated and thin, with leathery skin hardened by the sun.

  “Your illusion. It’s gone.”

  "I needed to concentrate on other things." Father waved aside his son’s concern. “I can start over. I’ve done it before.”

  “So you closed the rift?”

  “Not yet.”

  “How much time did I cost you?”

  “You let me worry about that. Sleep.”

  *****

  “Fifteen people drained of energy, at unhealthy levels, and you tell me this is not necromancy?” Adeline Presley snarled in barely checked fury.

  “As I told Dr. Anguilla,” Father replied, condescending calm dripping from his voice. “The difference between the spell I cast and necromancy is a matter of consent. The ley lines in this entire area have been contaminated and these good people gave me the energy necessary to heal my son. I have three doctorates, my dear. Don’t tell me how to do my job and I won’t tell you how to do yours.”

  Adeline stomped away from Father a
nd plopped down on the edge of the bed hard enough that Silva could no longer pretend to be asleep.

  “You think he’s hard to talk to after only five minutes,” Silva said with what he hoped was a self-deprecating smile. “You should try being his son.”

  Adeline smiled thinly back. “If what he said is true, a lot of people around here care about you.”

  Silva shrugged. “This is my home. We look out for each other.”

  *****

  Kate sat in the front of a carriage beside Doris, uncomprehending, while Father closed the portal back to Kate’s Earth. Father was certain the spell would work, but Silva and Dr. Anguilla had insisted on the presence of assistants not involved in the casting, a team of fast horses, a swift carriage, and what first aid equipment would work in Winterhaven.

  With Drudge dead from his wounds, enforcers tried to locate Kate for questioning. Who had taught Drudge magic? Who else knew he was a necromancer? Had she actually tried to engineer Tobias Vatic’s death? She was found in the mountains, mind-wiped with no memory of her years in Sparro. The Delan family, the remaining members of Drudge's company, and even the company's investors were questioned as thoroughly as the wealthy suspects' barristers allowed. After several weeks, a judge ordered the investigation closed for lack of evidence.

  With Silva, his father, and Dr. Anguilla working together, the spell to close the portal was rather anticlimactic. Well rested and fully charged before they began, Silva and Dr. Anguilla poured all of their energy into Father. Father waved his hands in what appeared to be a massively complex spell, there was an audible pop, and then the slight breeze at the center of the circle stilled.

  Dr. Anguilla blinked his eyes several times. “That was incredible. How did you do that?”

  Father shook his head. “That was a specific spell, for a specific situation that should never occur again. You don’t need to know.”