by J. M. Frey
Bevel goes over to a mother holding her sniffling baby tight to her chest—they are both extremely dark-complected, their hair in matching tight braids along their scalps, their eyes both wide, white, fearful circles in their faces. The side of the mother’s face and the backs of her hands are covered with fine cuts from protecting her child.
“Here,” Bevel says, and takes the babe from its dazed mother. The child, like all children around Bevel Dom, immediately ceases to fuss and stares up at his face in fascinated, charmed awe. “There now. Much better, isn’t it? You’re all right now, wee thing. Look at you. Regular Queen of the Pirates, you are. Follow us.”
The mother, as charmed as her child, stoops for the always present diaper bag and shoulders it. I know the weight of such bags intimately, and watching my brother-in-law cradling someone else’s baby, I find I miss mine fiercely. But again, I am glad she is not here. Others emerge from the shadows in the corners, from under gaming tables. Everyone sports defensive cuts and bruises, everyone is covered liberally with dust, but it seems as if no one save the skinny volunteer is deeply, dangerously wounded. Good.
Kintyre leads the caravan, shuffling and limping, to the ballroom. A dozen more people emerge from the side rooms, about a third of them in volunteer shirts, and another third in cosplay. Several are thankfully carrying plastic first aid kits.
When we reach the ballroom doors, we see that there are about a hundred people altogether. Several of the able-bodied men and women help Kintyre yank the main doors closed behind us. They mostly fit, even if they cannot close all the way.
Bevel leads his ragtag refugees to the corner of overturned and trampled chairs to the left of the stage. The stage itself is empty, Elgar’s club chair overturned. The projector screen is crumpled on the stage floor, the fly gallery above it a ragged mess of hanging wires and ropes.
“Best nobody goes up there,” he says, peering up at the rigging from the lip of the stage. “Is there an exit at the back?”
“Yeah, into the corridors,” one of the volunteers says, and Bevel nods.
“Right, take some folks and block it up best you can with chairs or whatever you find. Anything to make it so that if someone comes in that way, we’ll hear it, and they’ll have to go slow.”
“Yeah, but . . . I mean, who are you trying to keep out?”
Bevel just stares at her evenly, until she swallows hard, nods, and does as she’s asked, fear and curiosity on her face. Kintyre would have shouted to get it done. But Bevel has always been more subtle than his trothed.
Kintyre, done with the doors, crosses the room to Bevel. He scoops the child out of his trothed’s hands, placing her back in her mother’s embrace, then wraps his arms around Bevel’s shoulders and pulls the shorter man tight against his chest. He lowers his face to Bevel’s neck, whispering something in his ear, or simply taking in the scent. Then Kintyre pulls back, just enough for me to hear: “We’ve just vanished, and they’ll never know . . .”
Kintyre says it in a long, hitching rush, and suddenly, I feel horrid for intruding on what is clearly a deeply personal moment.
“I know. It’s torture,” Bevel soothes back, his hands sweeping down my brother’s spine. “It’s awful. But you have to keep moving. These people need us.”
“Yes. Yes, of course.”
We join Pip, Ahbni, and Elgar where they are seated in a small clump, looking shaken and anxious. Ahbni, especially, looks as if she is about to vomit. Shock can be vicious, and I cast around for a blanket and some water. I find the latter, and take the Shadow’s Cloak from Bevel for the former.
“Thanks,” Ahbni says, but it is hollow, automatic. She is staring at the wall, seeing nothing, teeth chattering. Her fingers curl into the layers of fine cloth.
“Right,” Pip says, and nods to herself, firm, shaking herself from her own shocked funk. “Right. Okay. Okay. So, now what? What’s the plan, my brawny boys?”
“You need to rest,” I tell her, and she shakes her head, then winces. She looks feverish, and is still shaking slightly, sweat beading on her forehead and upper lip as she tries to hide how difficult even walking to the ballroom had been. “Don’t argue. That is our first priority.”
“Rest, and then what?” Pip asks, mulish. “Forsyth, we can’t just . . . it’s not working. Everything we’re doing, it’s just endangering people, it’s just making things worse. We don’t know where he is, and if we keep blundering around, then who else is going to get hurt?”
“Do you know of any other way to draw out the Viceroy?” Kintyre says, impatient.
“Maybe . . . I don’t know . . .” Pip says and looks over at Elgar. “Maybe if you Wrote—”
“Absolutely not!” I shout. “Pip, this is killing you. You think you are fine, but you are not. You grow weaker with each fit, with each use of magic, and I cannot allow—”
“It’s my choice to make!” Pip shouts right back. “And if it’s between me and all these people—”
“What of Alis?”
“You think I’m not thinking of our daughter, too?” Pip counters.
Ahbni makes a strangled, pained keening noise and screws her eyes shut. “Oh my god, you have a kid. I forgot you had a kid. I just . . . I didn’t. . . . It’s real, and you have a kid, and real people are getting hurt, and I just . . .” she trails off, choking on her own realization.
“It’s ‘real’?” Bevel says, bemusement evaporating into concern. “Are you well?”
Ahbni trembles, her voice shaking as she turns to him. “You’re actually him, aren’t you? You’re not just cosplaying Bevel Dom and Kintyre Turn. You’re not just a family member he based the character on. You’re actually him.”
Silence hangs between us as we share glances, debating, wordlessly, what truths to tell, and which to keep hidden.
“Yes,” I say finally, because I do not see the point in lying to her. Not if she is to be our ally in this. Not if we must trust her.
“Oh god,” she breathes, and staggers back a step. Her chair falls sideways behind her and she climbs backwards over it, as if she fears that the moment she stops looking at us, we’ll vanish. Or attack. “Oh, god . . . I can’t . . .”
And before anyone can ask her what it is that she cannot do, she spins on her heel, the cloak and her scarf flaring out behind her, and runs out of the ballroom.
CHAPTER 13
ELGAR
“Son of a bitch!” Lucy snarls, turning in circles just outside the ballroom like a bloodhound seeking a lost scent. “It’s like she walked across the threshold of the door and just . . . ceased to exist.”
Kintyre, already taller than everyone else, rocks up onto his toes, as if the extra height will reveal Ahbni and her violently pink scarf between the forest of tumbled concrete and furniture.
“He’s taken her,” Lucy says, with absolute finality. Elgar’s scalp crawls. “He’s taken her to get to us. Fuck. Fuck.”
“Maybe she’s just ducked into the washroom, or . . . ?” Elgar offers, hoping. “Someone must have seen—”
“Ahbni,” Lucy says, grabbing the arm of a passing blue-shirted volunteer. “Where’d she go?”
“Who?” the volunteer asks.
“The guest liaison—dark hair, very pretty? Pink scarf?” Forsyth urges.
“Ichiro’s the guest liaison,” the volunteer says, and looks at them like the stress of what is happening has snapped their minds. “I can get him for you.”
“The other liaison, the girl,” Lucy insists. “Where has she gone?”
The volunteer shakes off Lucy’s hold. “I don’t know who you mean.”
The pronouncement should have been more ominous than that, Elgar thinks. If he’d been writing it, there would have been a clap of thunder, or a flicker of lights, or something more than just the volunteer’s bland truth and distrustful expression.
“Look, some of the ConComm are looking for you,” the volunteer says when everyone has finished glancing at each other to check that, yes, the rest
of the heroes had heard that, too, and yes, they’re all equally surprised. “You guys seem to know what’s going on.”
“Slightly,” Forsyth dissembles.
“More than slightly,” Kintyre corrects, trotting up behind him with a grin. Forsyth rolls his eyes and sighs hard.
“Well, you’re in costume, too, so maybe you already know, but we think that . . .” The volunteer stops and shuffles, hunches in, suddenly mortified by what they have to confess. “We sort of . . . um . . . think that the . . . the costumes are coming to . . . life?”
“They what?” Lucy asks, eyes going wide.
Forsyth makes a thoughtful sound. “Yes, that makes sense.”
“It makes sense?” Elgar can’t help but repeat.
“Pip is still here, still shedding magic.”
Lucy grimaces. “Like fleas, awesome. Make me sound like a plague carrier. No, go on. I love this analogy.”
“Bao bei,” Forsyth chides her, and Lucy huffs.
“In what way are the costumes—?” Lucy begins to ask, but the approach of someone else cuts her off.
“Hey! Something’s wrong with my prop!” a cosplayer shouts.
“Has everyone but me forgotten the girl in the pink scarf?” Kintyre groans. “I think we have more to worry about than—”
“It’s not a prop anymore!” the cosplayer says, and Elgar turns to get a better look at the woman in the costume. She is dressed as some sort of spaceship crew member, though he doesn’t know from what franchise.
“What do you mean, it’s not a—?” Lucy starts, but is interrupted by a bright flash of blue streaking across the ballroom, accompanied by a sizzling zing! The blue light slams into a bit of empty wall, juddering the entire structure, and leaves a scorch mark as wide as a man’s chest smoking in the wallpaper. There’s already a second scorch mark right beside it.
“What in the seven hells is that?” Bevel yelps, stumbling back a step and colliding with Kintyre’s chest. Kintyre just steadies him there, his own eyes wide and on the wall.
“Holy shit,” Lucy breathes. “Can you—can I see that?” She barely waits for the cosplayer to hand it over before she snatches it away and is aiming across the same empty stretch of ballroom to fire her own bolt of energy at the wall. Her aim isn’t as good as the cosplayer’s, though, mostly because her hand is shaking. “Holy shit.”
“Pip,” Forsyth says urgently. “Ahbni.”
“I know, I know. Just . . . the magic is pooling again. That has to be it. The cards, now this?”
“This is good?” Kintyre asks. “Instead of Players’ props, these people will be armed with real weapons. They can defend themselves. Let’s go find the girl!”
Elgar wonders idly if Kintyre will want to sleep with her if he saves her. And then he wonders what Bevel would have to say about that. Well, commitment doesn’t always mean monogamy. Maybe—
“No, this is definitely not good!” Lucy replies. “Anything can go off by accident! We should ask them to put all their weapons away somewhere.”
“And when the Viceroy comes, and they’re separated from them?” Bevel challenges, and Lucy dithers.
“What’s going on?” the cosplayer breaks in, her chin wobbling and her eyes filling up with tears. “Why is this happening?”
“Oh, god. Someone needs to give a speech,” Lucy says. “One of those Inspirational General ones.”
“We-well, it wo-won’t be m-m-me!” Forsyth stutters, alarmed.
Elgar realizes that four sets of eyes—five, including the cosplayer—have fallen on him.
“Me?” he asks, mouth suddenly dry with apprehension.
“We owe them the truth, I think,” Lucy says. “Don’t we?”
“That the land of fairy tale and story books has come to life?” Kintyre asks.
“They deserve to know what we’re facing. Who we’re facing,” Lucy adds quietly. “They deserve to be prepared. So what’s happened to Ahbni won’t—” She cuts herself off, eyes still darting around the room, as if she can find the girl if she just looks hard enough, looks again.
“We kinda are,” the cosplayer replies, and gestures behind her, at the small knot of people who are also dressed up. Elgar stares at them for a moment, trying to decipher what she’s trying to get them to understand. In the end, it’s the two card players—Kora and Turtle—who make the jigsaw puzzle pieces of understanding slot into place. As the crowd in the room huddles together, it’s those two, who’ve had longer to come to grips with the idea of magic suddenly becoming real, who have collected together the group of costumed folks.
“Right, who’s got weapons’ experience?” Kora asks the group, and a few raise their hands. “Even if it’s just stage combat?” A few more hands go up.
“Weapons’ experience,” Bevel repeats, sounding bemused. “This is a rare thing?”
“Is there no militia? No standing army? No knights in the Overrealm?” Kintyre adds.
“Sort of,” Lucy says. “But it’s different. Civilians don’t need to defend their crops from raiding barbarians, or their daughters from untrustworthy lordlings. If any study a kind of martial art, like, um, shooting or grappling, then it’s a hobby, not a necessity.”
“If we have no army, then at least that one’s a natural general,” Kintyre says, pointing to Kora.
“Good thing, too,” Bevel agrees. “We can’t be everywhere at once.”
A very young boy dressed as a Magical Girl is looking up, seriously, into Kora’s face, gripping a wand that is sparking and spitting out a slowly falling stream of gold glitter that vanishes before it can accumulate on the hideous carpet. Turtle is marshaling everyone wearing any sort of uniform, checking their ray-guns and phasers and staff-weapons and rifles. Blue-shirted volunteers surround those who seem to have no protection, those not in costume.
“Who’s got magic?” Turtle calls, and several people put up their hands. “Anyone with cards or spellbooks?” A few more people make themselves known, including Ichiro. The Frenchman with the cane confers seriously with him, both of them pulling hard-bound game books from their bags to look something up.
“What are they doing?” Elgar asks, watching order form out of terrified chaos.
“What geeks do best,” Forsyth says, hand on Elgar’s shoulder, squeezing once. The spark of creative connection jumps between them, but it’s welcome this time. “Acting as a community. Come, shall we see what we can do to edify them?”
“You don’t think Kintyre and Bevel can . . . get him?” Elgar says slowly.
“This magical earthquake? This is just the Viceroy’s first foray. He’s trying to cause a panic. And people suddenly realizing that magic is actually a thing will definitely do that,” Lucy says with a firm head nod. “We’re all experienced enough to know that this can’t possibly be his endgame. Not yet. And we gotta make sure they know what might come after them if they need to defend themselves. Elgar, that speech?”
Elgar balks. “So, what, I just stand up on a chair, tell them that magic is real, and that we’re canceling the apocalypse? That wrath and ruin descend, but today will not be that day, and also, lend me your ears?” Lucy, at least, snorts at his lame attempt at a joke. “It takes days to craft a speech that good.”
“It’s not a speech speech. It’s an explanation. It’s a . . . a call to arms, perhaps,” Forsyth says.
“What, this crowd against the Viceroy?” Elgar asks, and it finally hits home what is happening with the group of cosplayers. They’re marshaling for war. “Oh, my god, no. He’ll tear through them like tissue paper.”
“And would you rather they sit here, ignorant and afraid?” Kintyre challenges.
“Better armed and aware, than not, even if they don’t believe us,” Lucy adds.
Elgar looks out over the crowd. One of the blue-shirted volunteers had taken over organizing the food and water, making sure that everyone is hydrated and fed. Most of the people who needed first aid are now bandaged. The wailing baby has stopped, preoccupied
by a couple of cosplayers in skimpy metal bikinis shivering under coats lent to them by other people not so affected by the intense amount of air-conditioning the building is still apparently pumping out, despite being on the emergency generators.
As for Elgar, a day full of running, falling, tumbling, stress, more running, sneaking, and yet more running, is catching up to him all at once. He slumps into a chair. Everything aches, from his shoulder blades upward, and his scars itch.
“I wish I hadn’t left my pain meds upstairs,” Elgar moans.
“I’m sure someone has something,” Lucy dismisses. “Come on. Talk to them.”
“Why me?”
“Because they know who you are,” Forsyth presses. “Because they will listen to you.”
“I’m not sure what I should say to—” An explosion, followed by a loud, monstrous, echoing, bone-shaking roar interrupts Elgar. “Thank god.”
“Thank god?” Lucy screeches. “For an explosion?”
Elgar tries to be cheeky with his answer, even as he grabs hard onto the seat of the chair to keep from being rocked off his feet by the resulting tremors. “No speech necessary now!”
“Unbelievable,” Lucy groans.
“’S how I would have written it,” Elgar offers. “Best way to write yourself out of corners is to make something explo—”
A second blast rocks the room.
The crowd screams.
“Stop talking!” Lucy shouts, slapping her hand over Elgar’s mouth. “Oh my god, stop talking!”
“Get those people away from the walls,” Kintyre shouts over the building roar coming from outside the room. Foesmiter is already in his hands, and Elgar allows himself one moment, just one small one, to be dazzled by the vision of the Great Hero of Hain, his proudest creation, standing before him in all his battle-ready glory. Forsyth, clever enough to know when his brother’s orders are best followed and when they should be ignored, obeys.
Bevel and Kintyre make a dash for the main doors of the ballroom, waving off those few members of the security team who had taken it upon themselves to investigate. The civilians look relieved to be told to hang back.