by Garon Whited
I recalled some of the things I had read about; specifically, influencing another’s thoughts.
I had been under a spell. A powerful spell. Someone had wanted me to love Sasha.
Now, don’t get me wrong; I loved her. She was a really great lady. The grief I felt at knowing she was dead was still there. But the overwhelming, heart-wrenching, soul-rending agony of it was blunted by the fact I had to doubt my own feelings, to a degree.
That, and the fact that I was seriously pissed off. A man’s mind is the last place of privacy in a world wired for sound. I can find out someone’s name, phone number, address, favorite food, type of pets, and sexual fantasies if I just know where to look in the electronic environment of the Internet. Even physical violation, whether it’s from a sharp object or a simple beating isn’t an invasion of Who You Are.
This was.
Someone had influenced my mind. Someone had messed with my head, and twisted my emotions like a child would twist taffy.
The question thought: cui bono? Who benefits? Sasha? She had all the magical expertise of a century of learning, but all the capability of a garden-variety houseplant. She could drain away an emotion, a thought, a concept, because that’s in almost any vampire’s capacity. To implant one took more than just the spirit-tendrils and a hunger. It had to be magical. So, who could want me to love her? And why?
No answers. I thought about it for hours, but there simply wasn’t anyone or anything I could think of. That just made me more angry.
I didn’t fly into a rage. I don’t, usually. It’s normal for me to just simmer—at least, it used to be. This tendency to kill people was new, but so was the idea of people trying to kill me. But the anger helped to balance out the grief and got me moving again, brought me back to an awareness of the world around me.
I went to my old apartment—yes, I still have it. It occurred to me that having a backup address might be a good thing. Sasha had agreed. For the first time in days, I got a change of clothes and a shower before the sun went down… and noticed I was hungry.
So I went out as soon as it was dark. Feeding time would wait; there was something more important.
I went back to the house to say goodbye.
It was an ugly sight, now that I could look at it and see it. The house was cold, not even wisps of smoke. A lot of it was still standing, the charred skeleton of a house. I went around it, found the blackened and melted place where she died. I stood there for a while.
I did love her. Maybe not with the all-consuming passion the spell had caused, but forget the spell. This was remembering her, not some faceless person with an unknown motive.
Yes, I loved her. Maybe I would have married her without the influence of the spell. Maybe it would have grown into that huge, all-encompassing emotion on its own. Maybe I would have truly loved her anyway; perhaps this just hastened the process. Maybe. Did it matter? She made me a dayblood, loved me, and died. We had a very limited time together and we loved all we could—more, I think, with the spell than without it. Forget the fact my head was messed with—and my heart.
There was more to it. She wasn’t just someone who did this, did that, and isn’t here. She was Sasha. She was a lovely lady, old beyond her appearance perhaps, and always smiling at me. Forget the occasional frown; forget the sudden smack of a wooden sword. Remember instead waking up to her touch and soft whisper. Remember her laughter. Remember how she held me so tightly and never wanted to let go.
“I remember,” I said, crouched there by the glassy earth. “Oh, yes. I remember.”
I reached down and touched the smooth-and-crazed glassiness. It was cold, even to my fingertips.
“And I will remember.”
What is it worth, I wonder, to have such a promise? Do the spirits of the dead look on at the funeral and wonder who will remember them, and for how long? If so, is the promise of an immortal’s remembrance worth anything extra? I hope so. And I hope Sasha was watching.
I got up and went back toward the car, but I couldn’t help curiosity about the house. Maybe it’s just the kid in me, but I had to wander around in the burned-out wreckage and see if anything survived. I knew the manuscripts were gone with the library; the center section of the house was nearly completely ash. But there were memories still in the wrack and ruin.
I poked around a bit, finding all sorts of things. Melted glasses, for example, and some lumps of what were probably kitchen utensils. Large sections of bathroom tile, too; the wall behind it had burned away, and the tile fell almost as a piece. The claw-footed bathtub was almost all intact, too—not bad, considering it had been on the second floor.
The wings were in slightly better shape; not at all salvageable, but more recognizable. A wall used to be here; I can tell by the steel members that reinforced it. Little things.
Something flickered, a small flame. I looked sharply that direction, wondering irrationally if it might be a gas leak. I couldn’t spot it. Sniffing, I went to look.
The moonlight glinted on it, and I lifted it from the ashes; a sword.
His sword. Now my sword. Or, at least… maybe it will be…
It looked unhurt. I was completely unsurprised, because I could feel the magic in there. Even the red leather winding on the grip was intact. There was fire magic shifting in the blade like a live thing, looking at me.
“Good evening,” I said, more out of reflex than anything else.
I could feel a… a sort of… an acknowledgement, and contentment. A quiet subsiding into slumber.
I shivered. This thing was alive. A moment ago, it had been awake.
Maybe it’s silly, but it creeped me out worse than anything I’ve ever known. It’s one thing to have a wild animal look at you and then roll over and go back to sleep—even if it’s a lion and it doesn’t feel like eating you just this second. But this was a piece of metal. Someone slagged down a chunk of rock, skimmed the crap off, blasted it with fire and water while hammering it into shape. Even without any trace of eyes, it looked at me, sized me up, decided it would be okay for me to hold it—and then went from dozing to snoozing again. But something about it seemed more awake than before. Like it rolled over and went back to sleep, but it wasn’t hibernating any more.
Creepy doesn’t begin to describe that!
I didn’t put it down, though.
The scabbard for the sword had suffered badly; I found a buckle. I poked around a bit more, sword in hand, but didn’t find anything worth looking at, really. Some of the windows made some interesting melted-glass sculpture, though. Pity about being blackened and cracked. They might have been quite pretty.
At last, I headed back to my apartment, sword lying in the back seat. I made a note to get something to keep it in—there are a lot of people who make nice weapon accessories in the SCA. Tomorrow, I decided; tomorrow.
I got home, cleaned a lot of soot and ashes off of me and then cleaned the sword. It was easier to clean the sword; nothing seemed to stick to it. I also discovered the blade was far sharper than it should be. Normally, a sword-blade—especially a big, heavy sword—has a fairly dull edge; this helps keep it from chipping when it strikes armor. Smaller swords, like a saber or rapier, generally have sharper edges. They aren’t supposed to encounter armor—just flesh. This big monster was just made for knocking an armored man out of the saddle. I’d expected an edge like a woodaxe.
I realized my mistake when my cleaning rag started to fall to the floor in pieces. I ran it down the flat of the blade to wipe the soot off, and two pieces of rag hit the floor.
I was a lot more careful after that.
The soot came right off; not a trace of it tried to stick. The metal wasn’t even faintly marked by being in a house fire. Not that I was really surprised, after its initial greeting, but it was still amazing to see. I looked at it more closely and wondered how it was enchanted and what went into its making.
And I had a revelation.
I was drifting.
What was I doing, rea
lly? Sitting around, not doing anything. Drifting. I was cleaning a sword, remembering the dead, and not thinking about my situation or my life.
Maybe that’s typical when things go really wrong, but I don’t like it. Maybe it has something to do with the aftereffects of a mind-affecting spell—in which case, I hated it. Either way, I had the sudden urge to do something, not just sit around.
So I did.
SUNDAY, AUGUST 28TH
Travis I trust enough for this secret. I don’t feel like being too public with my current status, so he gets to be Igor to my Mad Wizard. We spent most of the day rounding up the cattle on the estate property and herding them in toward the fenced-in pasture area nearer where the house had been. It was a dirty, nasty, smelly job and I don’t think Travis has ever had that much fun. I may have noted he’s a bit weird at times—at least, to me he is.
Oh, and I got a scabbard, belt, and baldric for the sword. It wasn’t a perfect fit, but it was the best Dave had on hand when I dropped in on him. It worked. I wore it and the blade all day, getting used to it and adjusting the straps to fit comfortably.
MONDAY, AUGUST 29TH
We spent today refreshing and elaborating on the symbols in the rock garden. Most of them were still there—Sasha’s crater was nowhere near that section. I explained to Travis what I believed to have happened; he wisely asked no questions nor offered sympathy. He just nodded when I told him I was going to kill something that didn’t want to die—and I wanted his help. He agreed and we worked to make it happen. I taught him his part of the upcoming spell so he could help me, and some of the underlying magical principles just because he wanted to know.
I added some symbols from memory to the rim of the reflecting pool—not just from the grimoires I had been studying, but also one or two I saw on the floor of the other place. I hadn’t had a good look at them but a couple stood out in memory. By the law of correspondences, if nothing else, I figured they would help. They seemed to fit, somehow; something down deep inside me seemed to think they belonged exactly where they were.
Maybe wizards get that feeling when they know they have it right. Or when they think they do. If something fiery, ugly, and wielding a pitchfork showed up, I’d know I hadn’t.
Then we drained the pool.
Travis eyed the sacrificial rock and the brown sludge slowly gurgling out of the hose we were using to siphon the pool out.
“Do I want to know?”
“Probably not.”
“I’m guessing that there are no human lives involved?”
“That’s right. At least, not directly.”
“Fine. Is it okay to take home some steaks, afterward?”
I laughed.
“You can take a whole cow, if you can figure out how to butcher it. I won’t have any use for it.”
“Fair. I’ll see what I can manage.”
I didn’t doubt him for a second. We watched the level of the pool continue to drop.
“Eric?”
“Yes?”
“This isn’t part of the original plan, is it?”
“No.”
“Can I have some details? What I know of the big picture is still pretty sketchy.”
I shrugged. “My picture isn’t much better. I’m not going to meet them at our little rendezvous. I wasn’t intending to keep the deal; obviously, they weren’t either. So it’s all off, along with the gloves. I’m going to kick open their door and kill anything that moves on my way to the person in charge.”
“Ah?”
“Yes. I made a sort of contact, you’ll recall?”
“You mentioned it.”
“It was tough. It was hard to reach them at all and I wouldn’t have if they hadn’t been reaching out at the same time. I get the feeling we sort of met in the middle. Like their spell was a lightning bolt that hadn’t decided where to ground—and I stuck up a flagpole. I think they were aiming for someplace else entirely.”
“If you say so. So?”
“That was a lot of personal power along with the sacrifice of a cow. I’m going to up the power factor a bit.”
Travis eyed the corral of cattle.
“So I see. How much is ‘a bit’?”
“The way I figure it—and this is purely subjective; there’s no mathematics for magic—”
“—yet,” he interrupted.
“Yet,” I agreed, smiling. He and I chuckled over that. “But I have the feeling, by way of gross observation—”
Travis eyed the brown sludge again, then looked at me.
“All right, all right,” I said, “No pun intended! Happy?”
“Close enough. Go on.”
“There’s about a three-to-one efficiency difference between something I ‘eat’ and then use, versus a sacrifice for a spell. I’m willing to bet there are a lot of factors—several are mentioned, or were mentioned, in the magician’s notes. My own ability to concentrate and focus, the precision of the ritual diagrams, the materials involved—and the nature of the spell itself, of course.”
“So if you, for example, devoured the entire herd of cattle, you could only really use about a third of the energy for a spell?”
“That’s what I think,” I agreed. “If I spent the energy, it would be to gather more ambient magical energy. With that method, I’d be a lot more exhausted afterward.”
“Whereas if you just cut a lot of throats?” he pressed.
“My arm might be tired, but I’ll have almost all that life energy stuffed into the spell directly. Magic and vital force seem closely related, but don’t quote me. Still, the throat-cutting is much more efficient than gathering power.”
He glanced at the lines of power on the ground. “Any chance this is going to overload? I mean, do I wear rubber underwear or what?”
“Sure, if you’re into that,” I replied. “Don’t worry. Even if I do screw it up, you should be okay; you won’t be chanting or anything—just leading a new cow over while I work with the one on the block.”
“So what will you do with the bodies once you—oh, wait. Down the hillside?”
I nodded. “I’ll just shove it off the rock fairly hard; the natural slope of the hill back here should be enough to get it to slide or tumble down.”
“I’m sure you’re strong enough. Let’s mow it and pour oil on it, just to be sure. I’m not sure a dead cow would roll down that slope.” I looked down the hill with him and thought about it.
“Um. Okay.”
So we mowed it and made a trip to the store for a couple of buckets of oil—motor oil, cooking oil, you name it, as long as it was slick. Then we sat around for a while, watching the afternoon wane.
“You know, you could die,” Travis observed.
“You know, you’ve mentioned this before.”
“Yep. And you mentioned hiding out for a thousand years or so didn’t have a whole lot of appeal.”
“I’ve had occasional second thoughts.”
“And?”
“I then have third and fourth and fifth.”
Travis chuckled and sipped at a beer; he’d brought an ice chest. “So what’re you up to?”
“A few billion. But inertia is a wonderful thing; it keeps me going when I have doubts about the plan.”
“It slams you into bridge abutments in the rain, too.”
“You win some, you lose some.” I shrugged. I wasn’t nearly as lighthearted as I sounded. I was actually scared enough for three men; throwing out a bit of bravado helped a lot. Act brave, sound brave, feel brave. I also tried not to think about how scared I was. If I did, I would have to think about how angry I was, and being that angry at the world is a bad thing; I had a lot to be angry about. True, these people, whoever they were, didn’t deserve all of my frustration and rage, but they were going to get a lot of it.
Such thoughts also kept me from thinking about how stupid this idea was. It kept me from thinking how impulsive, rash, and basically foolish I can be. It also kept me from thinking about any innocent Joe Av
erage types I might be about to slaughter—clerks and secretaries and whatever else might be around in Fist Fanatics HQ. If I thought about that, I wouldn’t do it.
“True enough,” Travis agreed. “What do I tell the guys? You know they wonder what’s become of you.”
“I married a wealthy wench and am living comfortably in Acapulco?”
“You hate the beach.”
“Oh. London?”
“Too cold.”
“Damn. How about Hong Kong?”
“You hate Asian food.”
“Got a suggestion?” I asked. “I’m out.”
“Australia.”
“Sydney? Melbourne?”
“They speak English, and the food’s not bad. That could work.”
I nodded. “We’ll go with that. So what do they think now?”
“That you’re simply shacked up with her and lost in sexual bliss. Hutch is firmly of the opinion that you landed on your feet—well, landed on something, and landed well—when Terri dropped you,” he said. I must have looked hurt because he apologized immediately. “I’m sorry; I didn’t mean to say that like it sounded.”
“No problem,” I replied, trying to sit on a bunch of emotions that were suddenly clamoring for attention. “I’m not over it, of course. But I’m coping with it.”
“By doing something half-crazy and certainly dangerous?”
“It works.”
Travis opened his mouth and then closed it a couple of times. I could see him start to say something, hear a few sentences into the future, then decide not to go there.
“Okay,” he said, finally.
“Come on,” I said, rising. “We need to rope some steers. Then you need to shut me in the basement.”
Travis burst into laughter. I stared at him for a long moment.
“What is it?” I finally asked. “The entombment? The subterranean lair? What?”
Travis shook his head, grinning and chuckling. “No, not at all. I just thought most people have a skeleton in the closet. Not a vampire in the basement.”