by C L Walker
I threw him by his arm at the man who’d already fired. I missed and he crumpled against the wall, but it was enough of a distraction that I was able to locate and grab the remaining man behind the desk. He had his rifle up and aimed at me but I was moving too quickly for him to react in time. I snatched his rifle by the barrel and immediately rammed it into his face. Blood erupted from his mouth and he fell back.
A bullet hit me in the leg and my attention snapped back to the man who had first fired on me. He had wasted no time seeing to the man I had tossed his way but at least my distraction had kept him from focusing on me enough to deliver a killing shot.
I ran at him, reversing my grip on the stolen rifle and beginning to fire without aiming. The floor exploded, my finger hard on the trigger as I raised the weapon and got a bead on my enemy.
Another bullet hit me, this time low in my side and from the man directly behind me. I felt a flash of pain before the blood-tattoos activated; they fed off my building rage and the fear of those around me to weave their magic and keep me from distraction. Healing would only begin later but for now I remained free to act.
The rifle ran dry before I was able to aim it at the soldier, but he was backing away in fear and failed to take advantage of my vulnerability. He saw me closing the distance and turned to run. I was on him a moment later.
I drove my fist into his kidney as I grabbed his neck with my other hand. He spun away from the attack with a cry but I pulled him close and cut off his breathing with a squeeze. His eyes sought me out in the seconds before he died and his terror helped fuel my strength.
I crushed his throat and turned to face the remaining man only to find that he had done what his squad mate had wanted to. He was gone, and I was alone in the large reception room.
I surveyed the scene, checking whether the soldiers I had taken down could pose a threat if I left them alive. They were unconscious or dead, though, and I knew I was free to continue.
I surmised that the soldier who’d managed to run would be heading for his owner’s hiding place so I began to jog in that direction. My own master would soon follow me up the building and I had to make sure nobody stood in his way.
I rounded a corner in time to see the soldier run into an office down the hall. He slammed it shut behind him as I picked up speed. I felt for the reaction of my tattoos to the situation – they fed on the emotions of the battle and reacted to it, and they could sense people far better than I could – and discovered that the only people I had to worry about were in that room.
They would be setting up for a siege, preparing for a measured onslaught or a negotiation. They didn’t know what was coming their way.
I prepared the tattoos, willing them to do as I ordered. They fed on my rage and violence and in exchange they did as they were told. Most of the time, anyway. I would be walking into the line of fire of at least two men – Fleming and his soldier – and probably more, and I wouldn’t last long without a little help.
I entered the room beside Fleming’s. It was an office, barely furnished, with only a desk and a bland painting on the wall. The lights were off, and the designs on the skin of my arms lit the space with a dull red light.
I focused on what was coming, sharing with the tattoos what I imagined would soon happen. They reacted, their glow increasing as a barely visible shield appeared before me. It wouldn’t last long and it wouldn’t stop much damage from coming my way, but it would be enough to give me an edge.
I ran at the wall separating me from my master’s enemy, lowering my shoulder a moment before colliding with the flimsy barrier and smashing through.
The soldiers were firing in surprise, their control gone in an instant. But I was behind them and they weren’t ready for me. They’d been focused on the door and it would take them a moment to adjust to the unexpected threat. A moment was all I needed.
There were five men in the room. I grabbed the nearest man’s head and swung his body in an arc before letting him fly into one of his squad mates. They went down together as I moved onto the next.
The man nearest the door – the one who had run away from the reception area – got a shot off. It would have hit me square in the chest but instead it deflected harmlessly from the shield. I grabbed a chair as I ran and flung it at him, then directed my attention to the remaining man. He had a pistol and it was ready, but in the confusion of my entrance he hadn’t fired. It was his last mistake.
I smashed his head into the wall and turned to the final soldier, still wrestling with the shattered chair. I kicked him in the chest and sent him into the door. He crumpled to the ground with a groan and didn’t move.
Fleming was the final man in the room, an old guy in a suit like Phil’s. He had a revolver clutched tight in his shaking hands, a look of resignation on his face.
“I can pay you more than he can,” he tried, though I could see he knew it wouldn’t work.
“He isn’t paying me.” I took a step toward him and he fired. It was little more than a reflex and the bullet stopped in the ceiling. “Don’t shoot at me,” I said.
“Then don’t do this. Please.”
His eyes followed the tattoos covering my skin as they flared in response to my emotions. There was recognition there, I thought. Fleming knew what he was seeing.
“Do you know who I am?” I asked.
His terrified expression told me all I needed to know but he managed to nod his head slowly.
“What is my name?”
“I…it’s…” He didn’t want to utter the word, which was the right choice in most situations. People who knew who I was were wise not to call on me. I let him mumble and waited for him to pluck up the courage. “Agmundr,” he finally said.
“You sent armed men to kill my master.”
He fired again. The bullet flew closer to the mark but still missed. I was almost in reaching distance.
“He sent them after me,” Fleming said. There was madness in his voice. “I turned his men against him. I didn’t start this.”
I didn’t care about the events that had led up to this moment. I didn’t care that Phil had started it or what had made them fight in the first place. I didn’t care what happened to Fleming now that I had destroyed his defenses.
I did care about Phil though; I wanted my master dead before he ordered me to do something I would care about. I heard his words in my head, the orders that had sent me through the soldiers and now left me looking down on a scared old man.
Nothing in the orders forced me to disarm the old man.
“I am going to stand aside and you are going to aim at that door,” I said quickly. “Phil will walk in and you will fire.”
“What?” Fleming said.
“I am giving you a way out of this situation, but you must act.”
His revolver was still aimed at me, and he was now close enough that he couldn’t miss. If he pulled the trigger I would have to react.
“Why?”
“Because you will know better than to call on me when I become yours,” I said. I stepped aside and turned my back on the room. Fleming’s office had enormous windows that looked out over the miraculous city beyond, and I focused on the buildings outside in the hope that I could delay my reactions enough to give the old man time.
“I don’t know if I can.”
“When you fire, don’t miss.”
I had killed many of my masters over the centuries; some I could kill myself, when their orders could be interpreted to allow me to do so, but most had died the way Phil was about to die. I had become adept at following my orders only as far as I had to, as my new master was about to discover.
I felt Phil’s approach as an itch between my shoulder blades. He stopped when he left the elevator, to admire the carnage his orders had wrought, and then again before he put his hand on Fleming’s office door.
“Don’t miss,” Fleming said under his breath.
I closed my eyes as the door opened. Fleming fired and Phil screamed.
>
I spun around, ready to ransack Phil’s body for my locket.
“What are you waiting for?” Phil said. He held his shoulder to stop the bleeding but he remained on his feet. Alive. “Kill him.”
My hands moved to snuff Fleming’s life before I could think.
Alive, but wounded. My master was shot and bleeding. He could die.
“Kill him!”
I had a choice. I had the option to not follow orders. My master might die and I could save him, even it meant I had to disobey.
I rushed to Phil and threw him over my shoulder before running for the elevators.
“Stop it,” he said.
I let him bounce on my shoulder as I ran. The pain this caused was enough to render him unconscious without killing him. It was a fine line but within the bounds of my orders: being unconscious would keep him still and prevent him from hurting himself further.
The odd music played as we descended to the ground again, and when I stepped out of the elevator into the brightly lit lobby I noticed that it was playing there too. I’d missed it on the way in.
I smiled at the guards as I left. They didn’t react. I didn’t think they appreciated my happiness, for some reason.
I put Phil in the back of the car and got behind the wheel. Knowledge of the rules of the road and the ability to operate the vehicle appeared in my mind and I pulled away, heading for the hospital.
Chapter 7
As I drove I went over the information I had at my disposal. I knew that Phil would eventually find a way to control me again and when he did I needed a plan.
The sleeping city flew by as I sped along the nearly empty streets. I was heading for a hospital on the other side of town, trying to delay the moment when my master would be well enough to command me. My excuse for not taking him to the hospital nearby came to me with all the other knowledge I needed; Phil knew that there was a doctor at the far hospital who was better at treating gunshot wounds, and my master would be more likely to survive there.
Phil wasn’t a magic user; of that I was certain. When he summoned me it was without grace or artistry, as though he had followed a script without understanding what he was doing. He said the words properly and ensured I was bound to him, but he didn’t know what the words meant or what he was committing to.
Fleming seemed different; he knew who I was, for one thing. He knew to be scared. It didn’t prove he understood magic any better than Phil but it meant he had at least studied the subject. I hadn’t been a secret any other time I was summoned but I hadn’t been famous either. If Fleming could follow the blood-tattoos on my skin to work out who I was then he had some knowledge.
What this meant for my plans to kill Phil escaped me, but it did mean I could control what happened afterward. If I could get the locket into Fleming’s hands then I could be sure I wouldn’t be summoned for stupid reasons again; for a short while, anyway. It would mean a few hundred years of safety for the world: the blink of an eye for a creature like me.
I sped through a red light in front of a parked police car but they didn’t notice, or didn’t care.
Phil began to stir on the back seat. He groaned and instinctively went back to clutching his shoulder, though the bleeding had mostly stopped and his pressure was probably making it worse now.
“I gave you an order,” he croaked. He managed to find the strength and push himself upright. He glared at me in the rear-view mirror.
“I have some leeway over how I interpret the situation,” I replied. “You would know that if you were prepared.”
He looked at his shoulder and back at me. “This won’t kill me.”
“It could,” I said. “Depending on how it is treated.”
He let it go, sensing the futility of fighting with me. He was worked up, and my calm demeanor was aggravating him, which almost made me smile.
“You don’t know why I called on you,” he said after a few minutes of silence. “You’ve decided I’m the bad guy but you can’t know why Fleming has to die.”
I sighed and shook my head, tired of the endless masters and the incessant scheming. I’d been tired of it for thousands of years and Phil wasn’t going to change that.
“Are you listening to me?” he said, gripping my seat. “You’re passing judgement on a situation you don’t understand.”
“I never know why you people want what you want,” I said. We were nearing the hospital and I slowed down to drag it out a little longer. “I don’t care.”
“You must.” He was pleading with me, showing me another sign that he had no idea what he had done when he said the words and brought me back.
“I always arrive in the middle of somebody else’s story. The story doesn’t matter though; it is always earnest and important, crucial to the future of the world. You people think everything you do is the most important thing that has ever happened, and you couldn’t be less right if you tried.”
“He started this.”
“I don’t care,” I said, raising my voice enough to shut him up. “When this is done I will return to my prison and you will die. Everyone you know will die and none of this will have mattered. The world will turn and another crop of misguided people will rise and think they’ve arrived in the special place in history where their actions matter. Your cities will crumble and you will be forgotten and I will have to have this conversation with another despicable example of your kind’s endless mad scramble for momentary power.”
I pulled up outside the hospital and parked the car. It didn’t seem like he needed to be rushed into emergency, so I could add more time onto this fleeting diversion.
“We could do such great things,” he whispered. “If you’d only try to understand.”
“I don’t care.”
People were like flowers to me; they bloomed in a moment and showed the world the greatest sight they were capable of before fading away and dying, forgotten and trampled by the creatures feeding on them. And the worst part was that they would never be able to understand this simple truth. Understanding like that required perspective, and perspective took a long time to achieve.
“I have a private doctor,” he said. He’d made a decision, perhaps thinking he’d worked out how to get something out of the night after all. “Take me there.”
The address appeared in my mind, an apartment building a short drive away. It didn’t look like a clinic but it didn’t have to. He’d said there was a doctor there and that was enough to force me to obey.
I pulled away and headed for my master’s destination. I didn’t waste my time looking at the marvelous city around me as I drove; it would be gone in a moment, along with the rest of this civilization, and I would be the only one left to remember it.
Chapter 8
I helped my master up three flights of stairs in a plain brick building and to a battered metal door covered in incomprehensible graffiti. He pushed away from me and tried to stand up straight before knocking.
“You are not to speak once we go inside,” he said while we waited for his doctor to answer. “Do you understand?”
“I’ve told you about the dangers of keeping me silent.”
“I’ll take the risk.”
His confidence had returned and his words had the tone of a man who thought he was in control. He’d come up with a plan and was forging ahead, and there was nothing I could do to stop him. Not yet, anyway.
The young man who answered the door didn’t look like the doctor I had seen in my head when I was searching my new knowledge for help with Phil’s gunshot wound. Instead, he looked like the kind of doctor I was familiar with from the past; he wore tattered clothes and had adorned himself with trinkets, feathers and claws, totems and talismans for controlling the spirit world.
“I need help,” Phil said, barging past the surprised little man and entering the apartment. I waited at the door for the man to finish examining me with fearful eyes. When he was done he turned and I followed him inside.
“Are you ble
eding?” the man asked. His tone suggested he was simply curious, rather than concerned.
“I’ve been shot,” Phil said as he collapsed on a ratty but comfortable-looking chair. “I need you to fix me, quickly.”
“I’m not that kind of doctor, man,” he replied, even as he hurried to a cabinet against the wall and tore a drawer open. He pulled out a rolled up leather kit and dragged a table and small stool over to Phil.
I took up a position against the door, watching the room for any sign of danger. The trinkets affixed to the doctor were continued throughout his apartment and I spotted several that were more than simple superstition: the skull of a lamb with an ancient symbol carved into its forehead; a spear of a design I recognized from Athens, with dried blood ingrained in the wooden shaft; a stuffed mouse-like creature with enormous feet that I couldn’t identify but that my tattoos responded to.
This was a witch doctor or shaman, re-imagined for this future world. In a different time he would have been a tribal elder or local ruler, but in this city he was relegated to a small room in a rundown building, and he had to deal with people like Phil.
“Who’s the muscle?” the doctor said, shooting a look over his shoulder at me. I smiled and he looked away quickly. “He’s a creepy guy. And what’s with the robe?”
“He isn’t important.” Phil grunted as the doctor pushed something organic – a moss of some kind – into the bullet wound. “Can you be a little more careful, please?”
“You want this done right? Then shut up.”
Judging by the world outside I didn’t think magic was a large part of this civilization, if it was even well known at all. I’d lived through times where rational people ignored the true world around them, so I could piece together how the society worked. They’d perfected their technology and allowed it to replace their reliance on faith and witchcraft. That left people like Phil with the opportunity to get ahead by applying a little arcane knowledge, but kept it under wraps for most people.