Light in the Darkness

by CJ Brightley

  A heavy fist cuffed the back of her head. “Shut up and hold still!” Carden ordered.

  She lashed out with power, unfocused, uncontrolled. Another hard blow to her head nearly made the world go dark again. “That’s just a taste of what’ll happen to you if you try that again, girl. You think you can take me on with magic?”

  Lainie went limp. If that explosion was a sample of what Carden could do, she didn’t stand a chance if he decided to use magic against her.

  “Good,” Carden said. “You be a good girl, and you might just make it through this. Ride out!” he called out. “You fellas with the wagons, if you fall behind, meet us by sunrise at the place we talked about. Move!” He jerked the reins, and with a motion that jolted every muscle in Lainie’s battered body, the horse shot forward.

  SILAS’S HEAD FINALLY started to clear. A painful tingling was traveling up and down his numbed limbs. He still felt as though a mountain had dropped on him, but at least he could move. Cautiously, he opened his eyes. Though the room was dark – the explosion must have blown out all the lamps – at least he could see. He hadn’t been permanently blinded by the explosion.

  That was one hell of a shield that sheep-knocking son of a bitch Carden had thrown, stronger even than the powerful attack Silas had fed into his gun. Carden had been maintaining that impenetrable shield over his power for days; how could he still have enough power to throw a defensive shield strong enough to repel that attack with so much force? Especially without using a mage ring; Silas couldn’t recall ever seeing a ring on Carden’s hand. The man must possess massive amounts of power, or else he was constantly regenerating it – which might explain, at least in part, why he was always in the company of a house lady or two. Could he also be using power-replenishing drugs? Silas thought about it and decided not. Carden seemed far too in possession of his wits to be in the grip of those drugs.

  The people lying heaped on the floor of the saloon were starting to move, a few of them managing to get to their knees. Most had bloodied noses and other injuries. Silas wiped a hand across his face; it came away thickly smeared with blood. A probe with his half-numb fingers revealed that his nose was bleeding and a lump had come up on the back of his head where he had hit the floor.

  His body sluggish and aching, his head spinning, he pushed himself to his knees. His gun lay nearby; he picked it up and holstered it. Not far from him, Banfrey was also struggling to sit up. “Lainie,” the rancher mumbled. He spat blood onto the floor, along with a broken tooth. “Where’s my girl? Where’d they take her?”

  Silas vaguely remembered hearing, through the roar that had filled his ears after the explosion, Carden ordering his men to take Lainie with them. He had not been happy to note her presence in the saloon in the first place; with good reason, it now appeared. He looked around again, trying to spot her. She had been over by the swinging door; he saw a hat he thought might be hers, but she was nowhere in sight.

  Carden had taken her – Silas didn’t even want to think about what might befall her in Carden’s and Gobby’s hands – and not only that, he had as good as told everyone in the saloon that she was a mage. Her hometown was no longer safe for her. He should have sent her packing to Granadaia the moment he met her, Silas thought, feeling sick. He never should have let things get to this point.

  “Where’s my girl?” Banfrey repeated, his voice rising and edged with fear.

  “Is it true, Banfrey?” Holus the dealer challenged him. “What Carden said about your girl?”

  “He said he’s taking her. She’s gone!”

  “He said she’s got power,” a woman said. “Did he mean magic power?”

  “Is your girl a wizard, Banfrey?” the barkeep from the Bootjack demanded. With each question, the hostility in the room grew thicker.

  “Well, Banfrey? You been hiding a wizard from us?”

  “She’s a good girl!” Banfrey cried, his voice breaking. “She don’t mean no harm to anyone. My wife’s dead, my son’s dead, I didn’t want no one to take my little girl from me too!”

  Lainie’s wide hazel eyes and shy smile filled Silas’s mind, and burning resolve swelled in his chest. He would stop Carden and rescue her, reunite her with her father, then see her safely sent off to school in Granadaia. Maybe he could get some of the members of the Hidden Council to mentor her through her training, to try to help her avoid suffering too much damage. It was better than letting her stay here to be hanged.

  His resolve gave him the strength to force himself to his feet. “I’ll find her for you, Banfrey. Turns out Carden’s the man I’ve been hunting, anyway, so now I’ve got twice the reason to catch him.”

  “An’ what about you, Vendine?” Holus asked. “You’re a wizard too, ain’t you?”

  Dead silence fell over the saloon at Holus’s accusation. Silas realized that his hat was missing. He looked around for it, and spotted it behind him. He stooped stiffly, fighting to keep his balance, picked it up, and jammed it onto his head. He really wasn’t in the mood for this. He looked straight at Holus. “I am. What are you going to do about it?”

  Holus opened his mouth, then closed it again. No one moved. Of course, Silas thought. It was one thing to string up some poor untrained, unlucky soul, and something else altogether to take on a fully trained mage. And one who was armed, at that. “Nothing?” he asked Holus and the crowd at large. “Good. It seems to me that you folks ought to be more concerned about Carden. He’s the one behind all the trouble in town lately. He’s rejected even the few rules and laws that mages are expected to obey. You want a target for your fear and hatred of mages, take it out on Carden. Or on me, after I catch him and stop him from provoking the blueskins and bring Miss Banfrey safely back to her Pa. But don’t take it out on a young woman who can’t help what she was born as and who hasn’t done you any harm.”

  The silence stretched on after his speech. The saloon continued rocking and wavering around him, and his head pounded and spun. He strode towards the door, and nearly made it before the world tipped out from under him and everything went dark again.

  8

  SOMETIME DURING THE ride across the valley, Lainie lost consciousness again. When she came to, she found herself lying on rocky ground in the midst of a circle of seated and standing men. A quick glance told her there were well more than a dozen of them; maybe as many as twenty. Canyon walls blocked part of the night sky, and clouds obscured most of the rest. In the distance, thunder rumbled, and the fresh, wet scent of rain drifted past her nose. Every part of her body hurt, from her pounding head to her tingling toes. Her hands and feet were still tightly bound, the ropes chafing her wrists and bruising her ankles. It was just as well that she couldn’t move, though; drawing the men’s attention to herself was the last thing she wanted to do.

  “Why can’t we have a fire, boss?” a man asked.

  “Yeah, it’s awful dark out here,” another man whined.

  “You want the people from town to find us? Or the blueskins?” That was Gobby.

  “Hey, boss, is it true you’re a wizard?” the first man asked.

  “If I am,” Carden said, “I’m a wizard who’s going to make you fellows richer than you ever imagined. Got any complaints about that?”

  “Well, no,” the miners answered, and, “I don’t see no problem with it.”

  “Do we get to take turns with the girl?” someone else asked.

  “If anyone touches her before she’s done what I need her to do, I’ll geld him. After that, well, I promised her to Gobby, so I reckon it’s up to him if he feels like sharing.”

  Grumbling met this answer. “Hey, Gobby, we’re pals, right?” someone called out. “Just like brothers!”

  Lainie struggled to collect her thoughts. Pa and Mr. Vendine had been standing closest to Carden, with no one else between him and them; they would have taken the full force of the explosion. Most likely they were in no shape to come after her. Were they even still alive? She swallowed a cry at a sudden rush of grief at
the thought. And now that everyone knew she was a wizard, no one else would bother to help her. They would be just as happy to leave her to the mercies of Carden and Gobby, to save themselves the trouble of hanging her.

  Even if Pa and Mr. Vendine had survived the blast in the saloon, how would they find her in the mountain canyons? There were five large canyons opening up from the Great Sky range into the Bitterbush Valley, and a number of smaller ones. No one knew how far back into the mountains those canyons went or how many smaller canyons fed into them. The mountains were blueskin territory and had never been mapped.

  They would never find her, and she didn’t even have her gun. Carden would use her for his evil scheme, the blueskins would get mad and attack the settlers in the valley, and Gobby and the other miners would have their way with her. She closed her eyes again and tried to hold as still as if she were still asleep, and not think about Pa and Mr. Vendine being dead and what was going to happen to her, but a sharp, sobbing intake of breath escaped from her.

  “Hey, boss, I think she’s awake,” one of the miners said.

  “Ah, good,” Carden said. “I was afraid she would be out much longer than that.” Footsteps treaded across the gravelly earth, then stopped next to her. Lainie felt Carden’s presence as he squatted down beside her. He shook her shoulder, not as roughly as she had been expecting but none too gently, either. “All right, girl, come on. It’s time to start earning your keep. So long as you do what you’re told, you’ll stay alive and unmolested. You hear me, girl?”

  She didn’t respond. He shook her harder, then dragged her up into a sitting position. She glared at him. “If you think you’re such a great wizard that you don’t have to obey the wizard laws, what do you need me for?”

  Carden chuckled. “Is that what Vendine told you about rogue mages? Try looking at it this way, Miss Lainie. You Wildings settlers came out here because you got tired of living under the rule of the Mage Council and all their high and mighty friends. Well, it isn’t just Plain people who don’t care to live that way. There’s some of us mages who don’t like it either. We refuse to live under the bootheel of a handful of men who think they’re better than anyone else and that they have the right to tell the rest of us what we can and can’t do. Surely you fellas know what I mean?” he asked the miners.

  “Put that way, Mr. Carden, sir, you sound a lot like us, even if you is a wizard,” Gobby said.

  “So, Miss Lainie, to answer your question, yes, I am a mage of great power and I don’t have to bow down to anyone else. But I wasn’t born in the Wildings. You see, a person’s power takes on a lot of the magical qualities of the land where they were born. You were born out here in the Wildings, right here in this valley if I’m not mistaken, therefore you are attuned to the powers of the earth around here. In other words, it should be much easier for you to discover more deposits of the ore than it is for me. Studying the patterns of where my miners found the ore in the valley has led me to believe that there are rich veins of ore coming out from these mountains. Locating deposits just beneath the ground is one thing, but in order to find the biggest, deepest lodes I will need to make use of your particular sensitivity to the magic of this place. Does that answer your question, Miss Lainie?”

  “What are you doing with the ore?” she asked.

  “Well, now.” He smiled, showing strong, white, even teeth. His smile didn’t extend to the hard look in his eyes. “I don’t know that that’s something you need to trouble your pretty head about. All you need to worry about is what will happen to you if you don’t cooperate.” He took a small, heavy pouch out of the pocket of his suitcoat and tossed it carelessly in his right hand, again and again. The first finger of that hand now bore a wide gold ring set with a deep orange gemstone.

  “If I’m going to have a part in whatever evil thing you’re doing with that ore, I want to know what it is.”

  “Now, what makes you think it’s something evil? Why, Miss Lainie, I could be using it to make a cure for the worst diseases known to mankind.”

  “If that’s what you’re doing, then why did you lie about foreign scientists wanting the ore? And don’t say you didn’t lie, because Mr. Vendine told me that scientists won’t have nothing to do with mages and magic.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Do you believe everything Vendine told you? Because I could tell you a thing or two about mage-hunters like him that would curl your toes and make you decide I’m the safer bet.”

  Lainie met his stare. “Why should I believe you? I know Mr. Vendine’s a good man.” And he was, she knew deep inside of her, no matter what her Pa or anyone else said. He had stood up to protect her Pa and the whole town. “And I’ve touched that ore. I know nothing good can come of it.”

  Carden leaned forward, his eyes lighting up. “So, you’ve handled it. You’ve felt the power in it. You should indeed be of great help to me. Gobby, untie her hands, but hold on to her. Don’t let her try anything.”

  Gobby moved behind her and started untying the rope around her wrists. She twisted and tried to jerk her arms away. “Grab her, Dinch!” Gobby ordered.

  Another miner seized her left elbow, wrenching her shoulder, and Gobby loosed the rope from around her wrists. As soon as the rope fell away, he threw his arm around her neck, trapping her in a headlock. Carden captured her right arm in an iron grip. The pressure forced her hand open, and Carden upended the pouch of ore into her palm.

  At the touch of the ore in her hand, a shock of sharp, painful cold shot up her arm to her chest. Her lungs froze; she couldn’t breathe. A thick, dark blanket of terror blinded her and smothered all thought from her mind. They were there, the beings who lived in the ore, they were inside her, and they wanted her. The sheer weight of their greed and malice pressed down on her, crushing her, as their cold fingers probed and violated every part of her body and tore into her mind.

  They wanted to go home, and they wanted her to go with them. Her life-force would replenish them and in turn they would make her stronger. Her living body, able to walk beneath the light, and her power, greatly increased by theirs, would do their work, would eradicate the infestation of foul beings that swarmed upon their world –

  No! Frantically, she scraped at the cold, dark, incorporeal fingers that probed and tore and grabbed, trying to drag her down with them to their home deep beneath the surface of the world. Let go of me! I won’t go with you! Leave me alone! With every shred of her strength, she fought to push them away and drag herself out of their grasp. There was no familiar voice calling her back, no glow of light to show her the way; all she had to guide her was the instinct to get away. Let me go! I don’t want this!

  Finally she pulled herself free of the last scrabbling tendrils of cold. Someone was roughly shaking her. “I said, tell me where there’s more power!”

  “They want to take me into the dark with them,” she wept in terror. “They want to use me to destroy everyone who lives in the light, they hate us…”

  A hard blow struck her face. “Shut up! You won’t fool me with these female hysterics!”

  The world around Lainie slipped back into place. She was huddled on the ground, Carden still squatting in front of her; Gobby sat beside him. Her face stung from the blow.

  “Now, answer my question,” Carden demanded. “Where can I find more of that ore?”

  She had dropped the chunks of ore. Was that what had allowed her to pull herself free? She stared down at the black lumps as she spoke. “It’s their life-force. Their spirit. All of their mind and thoughts, together.”

  Carden picked up the pieces of ore and tossed them lightly in his hand, with no apparent ill effects. “Don’t be ridiculous. It’s power. It isn’t alive.”

  Lainie stared at him, stunned by his blindness to the danger he was toying with. “They hate humans,” she said slowly, emphasizing each word. “They hate everyone and everything that lives in the sunlight. They want to destroy us. They want to make me into their weapon.”

  “If you’r
e trying to tell me it’s an incredibly strong power, I already know that. I can handle it. What I want to know is, where can I find more of it?”

  There was no getting through to him; all he cared about was his greed for the ore. If she couldn’t convince him that what he was doing was dangerous, she would have to find another way to stop him and to get away. Not that that looked likely the way things were now. Even if she managed to untie the ropes that bound her feet, she would have to contend with a powerful and lawless mage and twenty miners, all much larger and stronger than she was, and all armed.

  Maybe, just maybe, Pa and Mr. Vendine were alive after all. Maybe they could follow her into the maze of canyons and take on Carden and his gang of miners –

  No, she told herself. She couldn’t afford to depend on them to stop Carden and rescue her, not when she didn’t even know if they were alive. She was going to have to deal with Carden on her own and save herself. In the meantime, till she figured out how to do that, she had to keep herself alive and unhurt. Which meant giving Carden what he wanted, at least for now. She recalled the tug of the dark beings, the direction they had tried to pull her in. “We have to go farther back into the canyon,” she said. “That’s all I know right now.”

  “All right, then. Gobby, tie her up again.”

  Carden stood and mounted his horse. Gobby tied Lainie’s hands behind her and hauled her to her feet. “Can’t wait till you’re riding me instead of that horse, girl,” he said as he dragged her to Carden’s horse and tossed her up onto it, across Carden’s lap.

  Lainie knew what was what; she knew what Gobby meant. The thought made her want to throw up. Just the words made her feel filthy. “You’re gonna have to stick with knocking sheep, Gobby. Or yourself, since the sheep won’t have you.”