by John Booth
“We are shielded as best we can,” Esta said. “But we could not make ourselves disappear from the screen,”
Dren grinned, “Nobody can, but we can do our best to look harmless. If you use any quantity of magic they will know what and where we are.”
Lana put her hands on her hips. “You are saying we cannot use any magic at all?”
“Use it only when you have no other choice.”
Dren led us towards the safe house. He moved through the darkness like a cat. He was tall and gawky young man and I would have expected him to be a bit clumsy, but it seemed that moving stealthily was his thing.
As we cleared the woodland and emerged into pastures we heard the sound of hoof beats growing louder. Dren dived into the roadside ditch and we slid after him.
10. Fight
A frog jumped onto my nose and back off again. My feet were covered in a few inches of water while the rest of me pressed against tall wet grasses. Not the most pleasant place I’ve ever hidden.
The riders were coming fast and I confidently expected them to ride right past us. I should have known better.
“Slow down men, they are close.”
I risked a look over the edge of the ditch as the riders came to a ragged stop. Judging by the way the leaders face was lit up with a white glow I knew he was using one of their damned detectors.
“There are four of them in the ditch. Go and fetch them for me.”
The man raised himself up on his stirrups and addressed the night. “I am the Sheriff. There is no crime in having the small amount of magic you possess. You will be tested for aptitude to become Knights of Justice and if you fail to meet their tests you may return to your lives.”
I stood and raised my hands. The others took their cue from me and also revealed themselves. The Sheriff had four men with him. They dismounted and came towards us. They had not drawn their swords. There was one for each of us. That seemed fair.
Lana was closest and when her would-be captor reached her she punched him in the stomach. When he doubled over, she drew her gun and hit him over the head with it.
Esta was the next to make contact. She pulled a knife from her belt and the man coming at her stepped back and drew his sword.
I had to deal with my own man at this point, as he was almost upon me. He stopped and drew his sword. I smiled and beckoned him closer.
Being a wizard gives you feelings of supreme confidence. I’m not a sword fighter, but the knowledge I could turn his sword to jelly with just a thought buoyed me up. The trick in these kinds of fights was to win with the minimum use of magic.
“You’re unarmed,” the man said. “Don’t make me hurt you.”
I heard a yell off to the side and risked a quick look. Esta had disarmed her opponent, painfully by the look of it. He was holding the wrist that had held his sword. That was on the ground some feet from him.
Jumping to one side, I avoided a sword strike meant to knock me out. These men were not trying to kill us and it seemed a bit unsporting to hurt them. As my man rushed at me, a teeny-weensy bit of magic made him lose his footing. When he slid past, I gave him a good push to send him rolling down to the bottom of the ditch.
Lana was walking towards the Sheriff with her gun raised. His horse looked as though it was going to bolt.
“Sleep,” I told the Sheriff and he slid from the saddle. Mind control was the easiest and slimiest of all a wizard’s talents, but it was very effective.
My man was struggling to get out of the mud. A roundhouse punch to the jaw knocked him back down and a touch of magic sent him to sleep.
Dren stood next to a fallen man with a boot on the man’s back. The man was unconscious.
“You cheated,” Lana complained at me. “Now they will know we are wizards.”
“We can make them forget before we leave,” Dren told her. “Were you really going to shoot him with that?”
Lana put her gun away sheepishly. “At least it isn’t magic.”
“Might as well be on a medieval world,” I said.
“Is it safe to use mind control?” Esta asked.
Dren sighed wearily and shook his head. “Not really. They track mind control, but they get a lot of false positives. Some persuasive people are a little more than just persuasive. Jake has already used it, so a little more won’t do much more harm, unless they were already searching for us. If they are, we can expect a visit in the next few minutes.”
“What are we going to do with this lot?” I asked, looking at our victims.
Dren took charge of the situation and we were very busy for the next half hour. As I went to help move the Sheriff, I saw his detector on the ground and slipped it into my pocket.
By the time we had stripped them and tied them they were awake. Dren had given them false memories so they believed they had been set upon by thieves. They wore blindfolds so they couldn’t see us in the predawn light. The sun would rise in a few more minutes and we didn’t want them to have descriptions of us.
“We are leaving you in the middle of the road. Someone will find you soon enough, unless you are stupid enough to crawl away into a ditch.”
“Free us and we will say no more about this,” the Sheriff said. He sounded remarkably reasonable about the whole thing, as if it happened to him all the time.
“I think not,” Dren said and we walked away with their horses in tow.
Dren led us off the road and into a small copse where we were hidden from the road.
“You current clothes are unsuitable. Lana, you will have to wear men’s clothes until we get to the safe house. The rest of you need to select clothes to wear so you blend in.”
It was at this point I realized that he thought Esta was a man. I was going to put him right on the matter when I saw Esta shake her head. Fair enough, if that was what she wanted.
We all had to use a little magic to get the local clothes to fit us. The Sheriff was a wide man and I’m not. The girls had bigger issues. It amused me when they went behind some trees to change, away from Dren’s eyes.
“Esta is shy?” he asked in surprise.
“He likes to change with women. He and Lana are old friends.”
“I thought you and Lana were together,” Dren sounded confused.
“I have two wives and I would just as soon sleep with Esta as with Lana. Not that I’m into men, you understand.”
Dren half bowed to me. “I have been misinformed. The Lady Bronwyn had suggested…” He left his sentence unfinished.
“Bronwyn is a sixteen year old with a dirty mind.”
At this insult to his goddess he reached for the knife he carried. I put up my hands to calm him down.
“Are you boys fighting?” Lana asked as she came into sight.
“Wizard Morrissey has insulted the honor of the Goddess,” Dren said. He hadn’t put away the knife and I wondered for a moment if I had gone too far.
“If you killed him would the Goddess thank you?” Lana asked.
“She would skin me alive,” Dren admitted and put his knife away. He wasn’t joking. I have seen the remains of men Bronwyn has skinned alive, though to be fair to her, that was the old Bronwyn, she was a better person these days.
With that little scene over I had the time to admire Lana’s costume. The shirt was big enough, but tied as it was around her narrow waist, her femininity stuck out a mile, so to speak.
“You need to wear a jacket,” Dren said professionally. I though she needed tighter trousers, or none at all; but then my mind was on earthier things.
“What do you think?” Esta asked. I hadn’t heard her approach.
I turned to find that Esta’s disguise was better than usual, as she now wore long trousers instead of Lincoln green tights. A bit of dirt around the face and everybody would assume she was a man, though still a remarkably pretty one.
“We will leave the horses here,” Dren told us. “The place we are going to is less than a mile from here and their presence would cause us troub
le. We need to get a move on.”
As we trudged back onto the road the sun rose fully over the horizon. It was going to be a hot day. I felt in my jacket pocket for the sheriff’s detector and wondered when I would get the chance to figure out Merlin’s magic trick. Being invisible to these devices was looking increasingly important.
11. Mission
Someone rolled me out of bed and I landed with a jarring thump on the floor. I tasted dirt. For a few moments I was too dazed to do or say anything.
I felt my feet being kicked.
“Get up. We have work to do.”
That was Lana. I rolled onto my back.
“And don’t think showing me that is going to change my mind,” she continued, “I’ve seen it before and it’s got so much mileage on the clock, nobody’s interested in it anymore.”
The perils of sleeping naked; everyone is a critic.
“What time is it?”
Lana threw my clothes at me. The boots I’d stolen from the Sheriff knocked the wind out of me when they landed in my midriff.
“Almost dusk. You have slept the entire day.”
Getting dressed like a normal person took some time. I’d forgotten what it was like to live without magic. How people manage it, I’ll never know.
Esta sat on the bed with me as I struggled with the mystery of socks. They didn’t seem to fit my feet even though they had come off them earlier.
“Dren wants you to meet Ellis.”
“Huh?”
“Ellis is from Tydan. I think he runs this place.”
“He wasn’t around when we got here,” I grumbled. The house had been empty when we arrived. It sat on the edge of a nondescript town. The plumbing turned out to be two planks over a stinking hole. It may have been the best feature of the house. It was certainly the one I had needed the most urgently when we arrived.
“He was working and got back shortly after you fell asleep,” Lana said. I had a busy day, what did she expect?
“Come on, we don’t have much time.”
We didn’t? I used a surreptitious bit of magic to straighten my socks and pulled my boots on over them. “I’m ready.”
There were three rooms to the house, four if you counted the toilet, which lacked a roof. I suppose there was some logic to that; it kept the smell down and meant the planks got washed when it rained. Have I ever mentioned that I hate medieval worlds?
Lana and Esta led me through to a room that might be thought of as a lounge-diner, if you were in a generous mood and trying to sell the place.
Dren and a lad stood up when we entered the room. The lad might have been sixteen. He looked excited.
“You’re the Evil One,” he said enthusiastically. “The Goddess defeated you and saved Tydan.”
“Ellis,” Dren warned. “You know what the Goddess has ruled about Wizard Morrissey.”
Ellis looked abashed, but only a little. “But he’s a demon and I’ve never seen one up close and personal before.”
“He does seem to know you,” Lana observed.
I glared at Esta before she could utter whatever insult she had been planning. She stuck her tongue out at me. Dren saw it and gave her a strange look.
“Can we get down to business?” Dren asked.
I stuck out my hand to the lad. “I’m Jake Morrissey and you’re Ellis.”
“Ellis Land,” he said as he took my hand in the way you might handle a poisonous snake.
Dren summarized the situation. “Ellis is our field agent. He’s not a wizard so he’s safe from detection. This town provides Sanforino, with fresh vegetables via a chain bridge to the world of Kalman. The locals move goods across the bridge by horse and cart every evening, which means Ellis gets to visit the capitol city of the Diamond Worlds every night.”
“Nobody checks up on who is coming and going?” Lana asked.
Dren shrugged. “This is a world of vegetable farmers. Nobody cares what they do.”
“I go to the Temple of the Knights of Justice and note the people going in and coming out,” Ellis said proudly.
I nodded. It sounded like a boring job to me, but I guessed it was one someone had to do.
Dren frowned at me. “Intelligence is all in the details. We know the number of new Knights the Diamond Worlds have ordained and we know when Burder Slan and his high command visit them.”
“Who is Burder Slan?” Esta asked.
I fielded that one. “Supreme Emperor of the Diamond Worlds, controlled by a Krake.”
“Krake?” Eliss asked.
“Not something you need to worry about,” Dren said quickly. I could see Ellis didn’t like things being kept from him one bit.
“What is the plan?” Esta asked.
Dren smiled. “We go to Sanforino tonight and take a look at the enemy. Then you three formulate your plan and we bid you a fond farewell.”
“Bronwyn’s orders?” I asked.
“She wants you to be yourself,” Dren answered. “I can’t think why.”
“May the gods help us all,” Esta muttered.
We travelled towards the center of town and stopped at a yard brightly lit by torches, even though it was not yet fully dark. It was a warm evening and the air swirled with a strangely heady mixture of strong scents; horse dropping, rotting cabbage and human sweat being the most obvious. After Ellis exchanged words with a squat man with a bulbous nose, we found ourselves hauling wooden boxes of cabbages onto carts alongside a bunch of other men.
I couldn’t help but notice that some of the produce we were hauling looked well past its sell-by-date.
“Do you think these are still edible?” I whispered to Esta.
The man working beside me laughed. “Good enough for a Lord in Sanforino.”
“But it’s rotten.”
The man slapped me across the shoulders and I only just managed to stay on my feet. “That’s what I meant. It can take days to haul this lot from the furthest fields and we’ve had warm wet weather. If their Lordships can’t be bothered to provide more chain bridges this is the best they get.”
“I don’t pay you men to talk,” the man Ellis had spoken to shouted at us.
“You barely pay us enough to breathe,” the man next to me said. A ripple of appreciative laughter ran through the workers.
“I’m Therin,” the man said and offered his hand.
“Jake.” We shook hands and got back to work.
Ellis sidled over to us. “The man shouting at you was Trev Bort. He owns these carts.”
I hadn’t seen Ellis lift a single box of cabbages since we arrived.
“Won’t you blow your cover if you don’t do any work?”
“Foreman,” Ellis said, winking at me. “Perks of management.”
“Perk this,” Esta said, dropping her box of cabbages onto Ellis’s toes.
Ellis hopped about howling, and everybody stopped to laugh.
“Oops, sorry,” Esta said to more laughter.
Someone pushed through the men in a none too gentle manner. There was a certain amount of swearing that was quickly hushed as we saw men with pikes appear.
The Sheriff followed them into the yard, holding a role of parchment in his hands.
“Last night a band of robbers stole a fiendish device belonging to the Empire. The chain bridge has been closed until the device is recovered. There is a reward of 1000 gold pieces for its recovery. One hundred gold pieces will be given for every robber caught and hung.”
“Do you think they’re hiding in the cabbages?” One of the men asked, to general laughter.
The nearest pike-man jabbed him in the leg with the pointed end of the pike and he fell to the ground screaming in agony. Angry murmurs came from the men and I wondered if they might be about to take on the Sheriff’s men.
I felt a tap on my shoulder and turned to find Dren behind me. “You stole the Sheriff’s detector and didn’t tell me?” he whispered. I sensed a certain amount of animosity in his tone.
“It seemed l
ike a good idea at the time.”
12. The Lightest Touch
“Do you know what you have done?” Dren hissed at me. He pushed me back against a wall. We were behind a growing crowd of workers arguing with the Sheriff and his men about the closure of the bridge, so nobody paid any attention to us. Any more pushing on his part, however, and I was going to start pushing back.
“I took a detector, so what? Nobody got killed.”
Dren struggled to put his anger into words.
“There’s a reason we lost two men getting a device.”
“You’re incompetent?” I suggested.
He raised a fist and I got ready to block him. Then he let his arm fall.
“Loss of a detector will bring the Knights. If the Sheriff has told them about it we have already failed. Our only hope is that he was too embarrassed to tell them and is doing a search for it first. I should have warned you. I am an idiot.”
“You are only men, so it is to be expected,” Esta said sweetly. “If Jake has the detector, let us give it back to them.”
Dren pounded his hand against the wall. “If we do that it will reveal our presence to them.”
Lana had joined us.
“Why not make a copy?”
“Because that much magic will be seen in the Temple and a hundred Knights will be down upon us.”
“Break it then,” Esta suggested.
“As bad as giving it back. The Temple will send Knights with more of them.”
“Break it with magic, so it doesn’t look broken?” I chipped in. “That should take only the tiniest of energies.”
Dren’s frustration seemed to be boiling over. It took him several moments to compose himself enough to answer.
“Look at it with magic sight.”
It only took us a few moments to discover that the detector was shielded. Any of us could break through the shield, but it would take a lot of magic.
“Give up and hop home?” Lana offered. “We are up one detector.”