by Hondo Jinx
“That kindly makes my head hurt,” Brawley said.
“Mine, too, son. I figure it’s one of those things better left unquestioned. And before you go saying how you don’t reckon you can agree with me, I’ll remind you that I’ve been strutting my stuff a lot longer than you have.”
“Fair enough,” Brawley said. “But if we started over, how do we even know about the Lost Years at all?”
“Seekers,” Jamaal said. “The psi mages who hit the reset button and erased the Lost Years left some knowledge of their suffering available to truth mages. Not all but some. When I was young, I used to scratch my head over that one. I mean, why leave a window onto that lost past if what you really wanted to do was start from scratch?”
“A warning,” Brawley said.
Jamaal nodded. “Exactly. Which tells you just how important the framers of our reality felt this warning was. They confounded and potentially compromised their complete reset in order to leave this vital warning. And with it, a single rule.”
“The Prime Directive.”
“Yes, the Prime Directive. No two power mages shall ever again conceive a child.” Jamaal took a long drink before continuing. “So, there we were, twenty-three years ago, with our backs against the wall, desperate to catch the Tiger Mage, and we received word that two power mages had broken the Prime Directive. We were convinced that the Tiger Mage was the father. Who else would break the Prime Directive?”
Again, Jamaal paused, the horror of the past clear in his dark eyes. When he regained his mental footing, he said, “A young agent on the rise stepped forward with a sweeping, terrible, yet inarguably effective plan. The Culling. We couldn’t hope to subdue the power mages, but with one well-coordinated strike, we could eliminate them.
“The only way to fulfill our duty and eliminate the possibility of another true mage was to kill all power mages before the unknown mother could deliver and hide the child. We had to act swiftly and mercilessly to save the world. As a bonus, by killing all power mages, we would also destroy the Tiger Mage.”
Brawley raised an eyebrow. “You killed them all. Women and children, all of them?”
“Yes,” Jamaal said, looking him in the eyes. “Yes, we did.”
For several seconds, the men just looked at each other.
“For one night, we became monsters,” Jamaal said. “We killed all the power mages, even our Arch Mage, Yunfei Wu. Which left a vacancy at the top. A vacancy soon after filled by the architect of the Culling.”
“Janusian?”
“Yes,” Jamaal said. “After the Culling, people were terrified. But the Order pumped the Latticework full of soothing vibes, and our psi media mouthpieces told everybody how to think and feel, and soon, the community shrugged its shoulders and moved on. It was uncanny. Looking back, I suspect we elected Janusian because rejecting him would have forced us to examine our own acceptance of the Culling.”
“That’s some heavy shit,” Brawley said. “Guess people took the Prime Directive seriously.”
Jamaal laughed bitterly. “We never told them. The Prime Directive is a secret guarded by the Order. Telling the general public would spark global terror as Seekers spelled out the ramifications and opened doors onto the small matter of 11,784 years of missing history.
“See, I’m not the only one who thinks some things are better off forgotten. Of course, the sheer significance of the broken directive rocked the Latticework. Seekers everywhere lost their shit, terrified by an unidentifiable disturbance. It was the psychic equivalent of hearing an unknown predator roar in the darkness just beyond the firelight.
“The Order flooded the Latticework with apathetic calm that took the edge off, then dropped an atomic bomb with the Culling. After that, nobody gave a second thought to the mysterious disturbance. And we in the Order were relieved, even if we hated ourselves for what we had done. Because we had eliminated all power mages, including the Tiger Mage and the unborn true mage.”
Brawley nodded, taking another pull from his beer. It was a lot to take in.
“But we were wrong,” Jamaal said. “The Culling obviously did not kill the Tiger Mage, as you, personally, can attest. Nor, apparently, did the Culling eliminate the mother of the unborn true power mage.”
“How do you reckon?” Brawley asked.
Jamaal looked at him over his beer, taking a long sip, then lowered the empty can, crushed it, and tossed it over Brawley into the pickup bed. “Because you’re here, aren’t you?”
20
Out on the unbroken range, the sun beat down mercilessly, roasting the world.
Brawley placed the water jug atop a jagged pile of low talus at the base of a rocky slope and climbed back onto Redbone. It was a fair ride back to the water tank. Several hundred yards, he reckoned, maybe more.
He dismounted, willed the horse to wait in the shade of the equipment shed, and laid down atop the ridge.
Off to his right in the switchgrass arroyo, the longhorns grazed. They weren’t a spooky bunch, but he played it safe and hosed them down with reassurance, not wanting the bark of the rifle to panic them.
He lowered the rifle onto the sandy bank and worked it back and forth till it was seated properly. Then he leaned into the scope and found the jug.
He’d come out here to clear his head. Shooting was good for that. Everything tightened down and the world faded as he focused entirely on the shot.
But today, he was troubled by persistent questions.
Was he a true mage?
If so, what did that mean? Extreme power. Beyond that, Jamaal didn’t know.
True power mages had a bad track record. Was that because absolute power corrupted absolutely, or were true power mages twisted by nature?
He threw another burst of Seeker juice at these questions but came up empty again. Apparently, the answers were hidden away in the Lost Years.
Enough, he told himself. Push this shit out of your head. Focus on the shot.
The model 700 was a good long-range rifle and had a Jewell trigger set to eight ounces. He knew the drop of the 175 grain Berger OTM rounds in hundred-yard increments.
Judging distance was the trick. He drew back from the scope, spotted it with his naked eye, then eased back into position.
Call it eight hundred yards.
He walked the crosshairs slightly over the jug. Then he pushed off the safety, sighted again, and got his breathing right, sliding his finger gingerly into the curve of the trigger.
The rifle bucked, but not much in the hands of a Carnal, so he never lost sight of the jug as the long crack of the shot echoed across the open range.
The bullet skipped off the rocky scree beneath the jug, kicking up a plume of red dust that drifted lazily off into the shimmering waves of heat coming off the arroyo.
That’s aggravating, he thought.
Because he was distracted by the questions Jamaal had raised, he hadn’t even used the skills now available to him.
He’d misjudged the distance. And that, he realized in the wake of his failure, was no longer necessary.
Releasing a trickle of juice, he again gauged the distance to the target.
1089 yards.
He adjusted his calculations then double-checked windage and made a slight lateral adjustment to avoid making another dumbass mistake.
He ejected the spent cartridge, pocketed it, and settled in again, calling on his Carnal strand to still his pulse and breathing and to guarantee a perfectly even trigger pull.
The jug exploded, raining down water on the parched land.
He felt a spike of satisfaction. But by the time the rifle shot had finished echoing across the rocky land, that satisfaction wicked away, replaced by the same nagging questions.
Was the Tiger Mage his father?
No. He couldn’t be.
At least, it sure didn’t seem that way. The holographic clip he witnessed in the mausoleum had shown his parents. The man who had turned to face the loud roaring had been his father.
The Tiger Mage wasn’t his father. The Tiger Mage had killed his father.
Or so it seemed to him.
And what about his mother?
She had clearly survived the Culling long enough to carry him to term, or he wouldn’t even be here.
Was she still alive? Was she the only other power mage he knew by name, the so-called bogeywoman and queen of the Chaotics, Clarissa Lemay?
If so, what did that mean?
He didn’t know. Despite being handed a shit ton of information by Jamaal, Brawley felt like he knew less than ever.
To hell with it. Enough thinking. Shooting wasn’t going to clear his head today.
He needed something else. Something bigger. Something that would blast the questions from his mind. Something primal.
He walked back to the shed. Redbone, waiting in the shade beside Pa’s prize possession, the big D8 dozer crawler, nickered happily.
Brawley double-checked the safety and slid the .308 into its saddle scabbard and smoothed a hand over the horse’s shoulder, beaming calm. “Stay here.” Wordlessly, he qualified his command, letting Redbone know certain actions were okay. Self-preservation, getting a drink from the tank, taking a leak.
“I’ll be back,” Brawley said. He walked back to the water tank. Overhead, the ancient windmill squeaked tirelessly on, its metal slats and vane peppered with bullet holes. The old tin cup hanging there had been used by passing cowboys for a hundred years and more.
Brawley took down the cup and used it to scoop a drink from the tank. Then he hung it up again and pulled off his cap, his boots and socks, his jeans, and his shirt. He set his cap on the low adobe wall surrounding the water tank. He draped his socks over his boots and set these beside his cap. Then he folded his jeans and shirt, stacking one on top of the other, tucked the XDS between them, and set the pile and his skivvies next to the rest.
Naked as the day he was born, Brawley hardened the soles of his feet and walked off through the brush, his shadow long in the late afternoon sun. He walked for a while, not wanting to spook Redbone or the grazing longhorns.
“Time to clear my damn head for real,” he said, and opened his Bestial strand.
His breathing and heartbeat quickened. A spasm of pain rocked him, chased by excitement and a rush of white-hot energy that filled his body with both agony and euphoria.
He hunkered down in the pain, wallowed in it, grunting as fur armored his expanding body. His grunt deepened into a bellow as his bones thickened, wrapped in a swelling mass of dense muscle.
When it was over, Brawley blasted a snort from his nostrils, then drew his huge lungs full of hot, dry air. He shook his heavy shoulders and tossed his head, slashing the air with his sharp horns.
For several seconds he just stood there, intoxicated by the power surging in his huge muscles. His Bestial strand whispered to him, reporting on his domain, registering the beasts mostly hidden in the surrounding scrubland. He didn’t know how far his Bestial senses stretched and wasn’t certain if they were being fortified by his Seeker strand.
Ultimately, he didn’t really care.
Because shifting into a super bison changed more than his physical shape. It changed his mind, too. And those sorts of quibbling thoughts drifted away like dust from a hoof strike.
He was more interested in the beasts themselves. He sensed Redbone and the longhorns, of course, and blurrily detected humans far in his wake.
But this rugged patch of Chihuahuan Desert held other creatures as well. He sensed lizards and snakes; hawks and roadrunners and quail; coyotes and bobcats; a sleek, tawny puma and her young; mice and prairie dogs and ring-tailed cats; feral pigs; herds of pronghorns and whitetails and mule deer; and moving silently as a whispered secret along a trickling stream shaded by pecan trees, a pack of elusive Mexican wolves.
None was his equal.
Brawley was the dominant primordial beast, and this was his domain.
He wished his senses had detected one more animal: the tiger that killed Pa’s steer on Pink Bluff.
But he detected nothing of the sort.
What the hell was a tiger doing here, anyway? Was it a Beastie? One of Blanton Cherry’s men?
If so, Cherry’s apparent habit of cloaking his employees would explain why the tiger tracks had surrendered no information—and perhaps explain why Brawley wasn’t sensing the tiger now.
Was the murderous feline out there somewhere, stalking the ranch? Was the tiger perhaps hunting the land around Pink Bluff, looking to take another steer?
Brawley turned in that direction and thundered across the range, hooves striking the earth like lightning bolts.
For a long time, he charged across the open land, pushing his tremendous muscles, testing his limits with short sprints and occasionally blasting a low scrub tree to splinters or impulsively slashing low with a horn, scooping hundred-pound stones from the sandy ground and hurling them into the distance like catapult projectiles.
How long he ran, he did not know. Half an hour? An hour? These were human concerns. And though a portion of his humanity remained, he had all but surrendered to his inner beast.
But the shadows were elongating as the sun continued its descent into the western horizon. Nightfall was nigh. And the division of day and night held significance to all sentient beings, whether beast or human.
Soon, he must return to his horse and the vestiges of his humanity. In his current state of natural dominance, those folded clothes now seemed pitiful, almost shameful.
Far off in the distance, he saw a small herd of pronghorn antelopes. Apparently spooked by his pounding hooves, the pronghorns stiffened, lifted their long necks, and turned in his direction. Though he was still hundreds of yards off, the pronghorns broke as one, sprinting away, the fastest animals on earth over distance.
Dark laughter boomed within Brawley’s great skull, and he snorted with delight, watching the cowardly beasts flee.
To hell with his earlier concerns.
So what if he was a true power mage?
All the better to crush his enemies.
Who cared where the extra power came from? Power was power. Power justified power. And power would give him what he wanted, what he demanded.
A herd of beautiful females and countless children. Brawley would bring back the power mages and change the world forever.
The question of his parents’ identity weakened, shimmering like a mirage at the edge of his outermost concerns, all but disappearing into the vast beyond of his apathy, an endless sea of shit about which he did not care.
He would reshape his world. He didn’t need his parents. He only needed power and time. And his females, of course. He needed them. And wanted them.
But first, he would scale Pink Bluff, which stood directly before him now, to survey his domain and look for signs of the tiger.
He sprinted to the base of the formation and pounded up the steep, crumbling slope. As he climbed, he felt a strange sensation.
Fatigue.
He didn’t slow or gasp or struggle, but the excess energy supercharging his muscles drained rapidly away, and by the time he crested the rosy butte, he could feel a burn in his haunches.
He remembered experiencing a similar drain the previous day.
Right here on Pink Bluff. Something odd was happening. But what?
Standing atop the plateau, he released a trickle of juice.
Or at least he tried to.
His Seeker strand didn't respond.
What was going on here?
He tried to descend into his mind, meaning to access his yellow strand manually, but it was no good. Apparently, his psionic cave was closed for business.
Wondering if he might have better luck in human form, he tried to shift.
Nothing.
Brawley snorted, stamped a massive hoof into the stony ground, and tried again.
No luck.
He was stuck in bison form.
21
That wouldn't do
. For as much as he loved charging across the range, he had unfinished business in his human form.
A thought occurred to him, and after a quick and fruitless search for sign of the tiger, Brawley backtracked, descending the steep slope. As soon as he left Pink Bluff, energy once more flooded his huge frame.
As a test, he focused on a nearby stone and fired a telekinetic projectile. Dust kicked up, and the stone pitched into the air.
He turned his shaggy head toward the flat-topped hump of pink stone and snorted again. Something about this place was canceling his powers. The stone, perhaps. Or maybe some Cosmic had cast a spell over the location.
He pondered the possibilities, but his gut kept dragging him back to the stone itself. That pink granite was short-circuiting his psionics.
He would ask Sage and Hazel later. And speaking of his people, it was time to get back to the house. Coming out here to clear his head had been a good idea, but he didn't want Tammy and the others thinking he was a bad host.
As he trotted across the range, his thoughts returned to the pretty Bender and her kids. The little girl, Hannah, was cute and apparently resilient. By the time he had packed up his rifle and ammo, Hannah was singing and dancing in the kitchen. Tammy’s gritty little scrapper, Ty, stuck close to his mama, shielding her and watching Brawley with hard eyes.
Brawley had gotten Tammy’s family into one hell of a fix. But he would make it right. At least as right as he could. If nothing else, he would give them a place to stay, keep them safe, and make sure they didn't want for anything. If Tammy and her family wanted to live on the ranch, they were welcome. Mama would take them in for now, and once Brawley built his house, they could have his trailer.
If, on the other hand, Tammy wanted to ride off, he would do everything in his power to help them get where they were going. It wouldn’t make things right, but what else could he do?
Nothing, that’s what.
Reaching the pasture ridge, Brawley paused and stared down into the scrubby basin where the longhorns grazed.