The Fixer Of God's Ways (retail)

by Irina Syromyatnikova

  The magician guessed the timing of the ritual right. While it rained in Finkaun, Rofan couldn't carry out any rituals - college students weren't supplied with waterproof chalk for drawing pentagrams. So he would do it on the first clear day.

  This day's weather promised to be dry and cold. Nature assisted Fiberti: low clouds turned early afternoon to twilight ahead of time; gusty wind rustled with branches and fiddled with fallen leaves, discouraging the curiosity of passers-by. The park was empty; dogs and their owners preferred to stay home. Bare lilac bushes near the ruins of a once very decent house hid Fiberti and the student from Larkes. Larkes parted their branches with the top of his umbrella-cane and stood for a few minutes, watching how Rofan was finishing the pentagram. When the novice straightened up, Larkes indicated his presence.

  "What will be next?"

  Rofan wasn't scared, but his face reflected immense disappointment - a chance to earn an extra fifty crowns had vaporized. While Larkes was clearing his throat, the student silently retreated and disappeared in the bushes. The senior coordinator opened his suitcase and pulled out colored candles, mirrors, a thin silk rope, and brass balls sealed in ampoules.

  "You have no right!" Fiberti chirped.

  "To what?" Larkes continued putting candles at the points of the pentagram.

  "To do any of this!"

  "I do," the senior coordinator did not lie - he had the right to perform any divinations without notifying his higher-ups.

  "I'll complain!"

  "To whom?" Larkes was interested.

  "To the senior coordinator of the region!"

  "I'll give you my business card when I finish work," the mage promised.

  "The diary does not belong to you!" Fiberti began crying.

  "Neither does it belongs to you," Larkes lost patience. "Do not interrupt me, or I won't guarantee your safety!"

  The divination went on with difficulty; initially the coordinator attributed it to the drink he had taken, but when the pentagram began to gutter and split in two, he understood that the problem wasn't with his drink. Any less sensitive magician would begin dumping the excess energy into an amulet-accumulator to avoid a backlash from failure. But Larkes fixed the spell's stability problem by speeding up his work, instead. His acute sensitivity and virtuosity with magic flows were enormous advantages that balanced his weak Source. More than once mighty combat mages, who risked challenging him, paid with their lives for underestimating his other talents.

  After finishing his divination to revert the action of the Diamond Rune, Larkes channelled his excess power to the accumulator and quickly stepped aside - a black leather-covered notebook materialized about six feet above the ground and flopped down to exactly the place where the mage had stood before. Larkes began packing up his magical accessories, methodically destroying any traces of the ritual. Fiberti attempted to steal the diary, but the magician passionlessly put his foot on the notebook.

  "What did you plan to do with it?" the coordinator frowned.

  "Mail it to Thomas, of course!" the crook sobbed. "He gave me his address."

  "He is not at home now. Besides, why are you still in Finkaun?"

  "And why are you?" Fiberti was immediately roused.

  The senior coordinator could not refrain from bragging, even though his audience was very inappropriate: "Want to see the real Tangor's legacy?" he asked haughtily.

  "Yes!"

  "Have you ever heard about irremovable curses? They were banned about fifteen years ago. They are not difficult to revert, but almost impossible to find. They distort any magic at the most inopportune moment."

  Fiberti's eyes flashed, "That's why they couldn't cast spells here!"

  "Uh-huh. The mage who inspected this place after the fire should have been demoted to apprentice." Unfortunately for the coordinator, this magician had passed away a few years ago as a drunk.

  "Step aside now." Larkes was worried that this woman would steal Tangor's things unnoticeably, and wanted to keep her at a distance.

  Fiberti obediently moved aside. The coordinator took out of his pocket a pendant with a lock of hair that he secretly appropriated from the comb of his idol once. His painful affection bore fruit, after all!

  "Flesh to flesh!" he said solemnly and touched a featureless stone with the hair from the pendant.

  The seemingly solid rock suddenly began trembling and melting. It was a false panel hiding a tiny cache. Larkes fished out a small wooden box. "It's strange," he muttered. "There seems to be no magic inside, but something nips my fingers."

  "This box belongs to Thomas Tangor!" Fiberti announced pathetically.

  "Yes, it does, and I have more chances to deliver it to the owner than you."

  Having gathered his moral courage, Larkes opened the case and delicately examined its contents, struggling to control his facial expression. Colored bunnies started jumping before his eyes; the Tangors, father and son, suddenly merged into one supernatural being. The past twenty years shrank, and he felt as if Toder had talked to him just yesterday. He really needed one more drink now, Larkes thought.

  "What is it?" Fiberti asked, looking over the mage's shoulder.

  "A very important artifact," the coordinator quickly closed the case. "Thomas has to get it as soon as possible."

  Chapter 26

  Matthew Rayhan's amazing complaisance didn't mean that one could twist him round one's little finger - not even such cheeky creatures as dark magicians. He never turned his wards into members of his close circle. Matthew honestly did his best to keep Thomas Tangor at arm's length. The curator listened to the mage's jokes without batting an eye, calmly watched as the young man read dusty manuscripts for six hours a day - he genuinely read them, didn't just browse the pictures - and wondered what caused the unnatural thirst for knowledge in the boy. Matthew tried to lure the necromancer into visiting normal attractions, such as drinking or dice. When he managed to drag the mage to the pub, Thomas flipped through The Code of Witchcraft all the time between sips of beer. Not to mention the annoying habit of the darks to write memos to themselves…

  Matthew begged his boss for a day off - to celebrate his son's eighth birthday. Mr. Axel agreed. He still had to check with the ward, and the curator asked the young magician if he would be okay alone for a day. His ward nodded gravely, and even the touched zombie gave the curator its paw.

  And now the entire family strolled along the embankment, among booths for the winter fair. Usually, the fair's tents were set on the shallow spit, the use of which was free of charge. But this season people crowded on the embankment, further from the water, because the sea delivered to the cape dozens of drowned bodies. Luckily, tourists did not ask on which meat the blue crabs bred so well…

  The corpses did not belong to the imperial Marines, whom Ingernika recently defeated. These were women and children from Sa-Orio; twenty of them were washed up on the shore last month - winter winds facilitated their journey to Ingernika. Tanur's authorities wisely blocked passage to the shallow spit and put a policeman to guard the path from thrill-lookers. However, kids somehow infiltrated past the cop and wandered around the rocks in search of chilling findings.

  Suddenly the curator noticed young Tangor with a sack on his back. He walked along the pier with a terribly businesslike air, and he was COMPLETELY ALONE.

  "Honey, watch our children. I will be back in a moment!" Matthew kissed his wife on the cheek and ran across the mage's path.

  "Sir, please wait, sir!"

  Tangor came to a stop in the crowd, causing a little stir - no one wanted to push the dark.

  "Sir, may I ask where you are going?"

  The magician smiled sadly, "I am just walking."

  "Let's walk together!"

  A desire to send the curator far away and for a long time was written on Tangor's face; however, he refrained. Matthew's wife held their youngest offspring in her hands, but the older son, an eight-year-old tomboy, immediately joined his father, despite his mother's efforts t
o hold him back. Of course, the child wasn't as tactful as his father. "Are you a dark mage?" he immediately began to interrogate Tangor.

  "Yes. Are you afraid of me?"

  "Nope."

  "A good kid."

  "Well-brought-up boys should say a 'combat magician'," Matthew chided his offspring.

  "Nonsense," Tangor didn't agree. "Do you want him to call me a retrospective animator, too? I am a necromancer, and I am not ashamed of this word."

  Matthew began to sweat, though the day was quite cold.

  "Have you ever cursed a man?" the little smart aleck did not stop.

  Tangor drew himself up. "Kid, I am tough! I can even curse the moon, and it will become blue."

  "You lie!" the child resented.

  "Look," the mage picked up a plain yellowish stone from the ground. He subtly moved his hand, and the worthless pebble struck up iridescent blue tints.

  "Wow!" the kid started hopping.

  "It's a gift for you. Go back and show it to your mom."

  When the little boy ran away, Tangor asked Matthew, "Let's have lunch together? I invite you. In an hour."

  For an hour Tanur's small embankment could be walked along, across, and in zigzags. And that was exactly what Matthew's family did. Rayhan Junior talked non-stop: he couldn't miss an opportunity to be the first to tell the mage about the wonders of the Cape of Storms. The young dark, who was supposed to be intolerant of children, listened attentively.

  'What a strange personality. I should write a letter about him to the Bulletin of Thin Matters. Now the necromancers are of great interest,' Matthew thought to himself.

  "What's over there?" Tangor casually asked the curator.

  "Tanur's shallow spit."

  "I mean, why there is a policeman?"

  "Because of the corpses!" the son immediately intervened.

  "Some immigrants from Sa-Orio drown, trying to reach Ingernika," Matthew quickly explained. "Every storm brings a few bodies."

  It began to drizzle, and they had to quickly end their walk. The curator sent his wife and sons home and stayed with his ward, as a responsible employee. When the downpour began, they were in the cafe, having beef stew.

  "It's for your own good!" the curator tried to explain why he was shadowing his ward. "No one would be able to blame you for misconduct."

  Tangor agreed. "Great that you're here today - I need to check something, and it's risky to do it alone…"

  After lunch they went to the shallow spit. There Matthew's ward drew a sign for a runoff of energy that was typically used by magicians for self-salvation, and handed his bag and umbrella to the curator with the words, "Do not touch any signs and keep your hands off me. If rain starts, please shield me with the umbrella." And he fell into meditation with an active Source.

  The curator wasn't able to recognize whether it was a forbidden ritual or something innocent. Instrumental control sensors didn't record anything suspicious either, or else Matthew would have received a warning. The policeman on the spit idly scratched his belly and did not look in their direction; he couldn't imagine that someone would dare to break the law in a public place, for all to see. But the mage himself admitted that he was doing something dangerous…The curator pondered if he should rat on his ward. But a scandal for Tangor would be like water off a duck's back. Axel would stand up for him and strip Matthew of his bonus.

  The curator put a stiff-haughty expression on his face and pretended that he always stayed there. It was precisely the curator's job: to demonstrate to others that a situation was under their control.

  The mage's meditation lasted for an hour. Waking up, Tangor silently collected candle-ends in his bag and washed traces of chalk off the rocky ground, looking slightly moronic. Then he caught his curator by the shoulder. "Do you think it's a spit?" the boy's eyes shone feverishly. "No, brother, it's a grave. For thousands of people!"

  Matthew never heard before about burials on the shore. The rocky spit (absolutely natural, as researchers believed) provided Tanur with some protection from the most magnificent storms in the world.

  "No, under it," the magician explained a little confusedly. "I don't understand how the dark can live near this place!"

  "They can't," Matthew replied, recalling demographical statistics. "Only the senior coordinator, but it's his job. Tourists do not go so far, and 'cleaners' dwell in the old fortress, far away from here." Now Matthew realized why brash and cocky combat mages preferred to crowd in the barracks of the fortress, rather than to rent a place in Tanur.

  Tangor smirked and wearily rubbed his face, "Never again will I spell cast on the sepulchre! Let's have a drink to their souls."

  They went to the pub and ordered a bottle of vodka under the disgruntled looks of the pub's owner, who wanted to close early. Tangor drank like a typical dark: a lot, without having a bite, and not caring about the quality of the booze. The tension was gradually leaving him.

  "Do not worry about me," he said to his curator. "Necromancy is hard on your brain when you work with one deceased being. But when there are so many…all died at once…it's unutterable - I feel like I was hammered on the head!"

  "It was a forbidden ritual," the curator chided Tangor.

  "Nonsense!" the drunken magician rolled his finger in the salad plate. "I studied the astral feedback of the place."

  "Did you draw the energy runoff sign to study the astral feedback?"

  "Man, I draw this sign for self-protection even on my underwear. Especially after attempts on my life. Am I the first frightened necromancer you've seen?"

  "I don't believe in such a thing as a 'frightened dark'," Matthew disagreed. "Are you saying that you simply meditated?"

  "I did," the magician confirmed. "But I don't advise others to do the same. The dark do not stay here for long, because they sense something horrible in the air, though they don't know that they feel the vibes of thousands of sudden deaths."

  Matthew involuntarily glanced in a murky pub window, but Tanur's spit had already dissolved in the southern twilight. The curator estimated the condition of his ward and asked the pub owner for a cart. Then he dragged the dark into the improvised carriage, and the pub owner's son pulled the carriage along steep streets to the guesthouse. The concierge opened the door to the mage's room and Matthew unloaded the spineless body of his ward on the sofa. Tangor's pet brought a blanket - probably, the dog donated his own bedding. The dark magician said "mama" and started snoring. Matthew found his mission accomplished for the day.

  Tanur was a boring place in storm season, and gossip about the visiting dark spread through the town at the speed of a lightning squall. Next day, local tomboys hung in clusters on the fence of the senior coordinator's residence, welcoming Tangor by shouts: "Man, tell me my fortune!" The curator's hair stood on end.

  "Relax," the young mage told him. "My little brother is white. Kids can't embarrass me."

  He showed them a rude gesture, which was met with a storm of delight.

  Mr. Axel, who was watching this circus out of his window, didn't ask anything - his pride would not let him. Townsfolk buzzed that the necromancer came to Tanur to harvest corpses from Sa-Orio, and soon he would raise them up. Matthew didn't refute the rumors - it would have made them more believable.

  After that day, the magician and the curator became closer to each other. Before, Tangor refrained from some adventures because of his shadow, but now he took Matthew along everywhere he went.

  Once he decided to tour small rocky islands not far from Tanur's shore.

  "Why are we going there?" Matthew tried to make his ward see reason.

  "They look strange," Tangor answered irrelevantly. "Everywhere around I see brown rocks, except for the islands; they seem to be granite monoliths."

  "There was a massive landslide here," the curator decided to show his erudition.

  "A landslide, indeed," Tangor grinned. "If I tell you that I'm looking for proof of their artificial origin, will you stop asking questions?"

/>   The funny thing was that they did find this proof on a tiny island that was flooded by tides daily. Matthew was forced to admit that the two-meter transparent inclusion in the granite could not have a natural origin. Matthew was stunned: when, why, and how was it made?

  "It does not matter," Tangor dismissed Matthew's question. "You'd better look over there!"

  "Ripples on the rocks?"

  "You must be kidding - ripples! This is a Source. A dark one!"

  "How come? Without a human-carrier?! It cannot be!"

  "I, too, thought so before. Imagine what's going on here at night, when receding water bares the rock! Luckily, at dawn the rising tide washes the otherworldly away."

  Matthew looked back furtively: if the owner of the rented boat heard their chatter, he would throw them overboard. "Can the Source be removed or disabled?"

  "I wouldn't venture. Don't pee your pants. While sea level stays high enough to wash the rock with salty water, Tanur will be safe."

  Matthew shivered - the white houses on the town's outskirts were in line of sight from the island. To the left of the defenseless town he saw the contours of the old fortress with NZAMIPS flag on top of its central tower. "How could these parasites miss out on such a horrible thing?"

  "Did you expect to find this here?" the curator asked.

  "No," Tangor shook his head in denial. "I'm working on another problem. I'm unraveling a charade with a known end result, and I have to guess the question."

  Matthew didn't catch what the young mage implied. He started to miss the time when he dealt with plain and understandable "cleaners". 'Never again will I agree to work with such a wunderkind!'

  In the evening, after he had left his ward at the guesthouse, Matthew rushed to Tanur's chief "cleaner". The officer listened to the curator carefully and proposed to continue their conversation in the morning. By dawn the accursed island was already surrounded by warding buoys.