Dandelion Fire

by N. D. Wilson

  “I apologize for not coming sooner,” Darius said. “I was in the loft rooms.”

  “I'm going to have to ask you to put down that sword,” Sergeant Simmons said. His gun was pointed directly at the big man's chest.

  “Ask? You may ask.”

  “Put it down,” Simmons said. “And stay back. I'll shoot.”

  Darius smiled. “If you hold nothing more than pistolry, my sword will be enough. My tongue and teeth should be enough.”

  Darius stepped forward. Sergeant Simmons lowered his gun toward the big man's legs and fired.

  A single pulse fired back, muffling and then swallowing the sound of the gun. Sergeant Simmons stumbled like he did when an elevator dropped too fast, but quickly spread his feet and braced himself.

  Darius put one hand on the stair rail, lifted his leg, and shook it gently. “Your powder is strong,” he said. “But it will not penestrate.”

  Lifting his sword slowly, Darius took another step.

  Sergeant Simmons pointed the gun directly at the man's broad forehead and squeezed off another round.

  Darius rocked slowly. A lump grew quickly beneath his pale skin.

  Zeke's mouth was suddenly free. “Shoot!” he yelled. “Keep shooting!”

  “I am afraid,” Darius said, lifting his right arm, “that I cannot allow you to do that again.”

  Another shot burst through the house, and Darius tottered, shut his eyes, then sat on the stairs. A final round in the chest knocked him flat.

  “Kill him,” Zeke said. “Quick. He'll wake back up.”

  Simmons lowered his gun. “Can't do that, Zeke. You know that.”

  Zeke staggered up and hurried over beside the thick officer.

  While they watched, the man's body changed. A mist around it faded, and the man thinned. His teeth were yellow, his legs were long bones loose inside his pants, his hair was thin and stringy, and his ears stuck out like handles. Strangest of all, he was wearing some sort of large white chin strap. Huge goose eggs stood out on his forehead.

  His eyes quivered and then opened.

  Sergeant Simmons filled them with pepper spray.

  “Dad?” Anastasia's voice came from the kitchen.

  Zeke hurried toward it.

  Simmons holstered his gun and grabbed the quivering Darius by the boot heel. He dragged him down the stairs and into the living room. The skinny, chin-strapped man moved, groaning, trying to sit up. Simmons flipped him onto his face, pulled his wrists together, and cuffed him, reciting Miranda rights as he did.

  He updated dispatch, and was told that lights and sirens were already on their way.

  Feeling much better, he moved toward Frank. Dotty and Zeke came out of the kitchen with Penny propped up between them. The skin on her face looked almost clear next to her dark hair. Anastasia, frightened, followed behind.

  Sergeant Simmons lifted Frank's arm away from his face.

  “Is he okay?” Dotty asked.

  “He's breathing,” Simmons said. “But I don't know about okay. It'll take doctors and blinking lights to figure that. He got himself scorched pretty good, but his arm was up. Good thing for his eyes and face.” He looked at Darius. “Who is that guy?”

  Dotty's eyes went wide, and she shook her head. “I have no idea. Some crazy wizard.” She lowered Penelope onto the couch, brushed the hair off of her face, and then slid down onto the floor beside Frank.

  Sergeant Simmons snorted. A wizard. He looked at Darius's back. A wizard. On the other hand, run-of-the-mill psychotics didn't deflect gunshots to the head and shape-change when unconscious.

  “I think I hear sirens,” Zeke said.

  Frank opened his eyes.

  So did Darius.

  * * *

  At birth, Darius had been given the name Fred. Not Frederick. Not Frederic. Not even Phred. Fred. His father had been a priest in a very small village and was the sort of man who wore corruption like a badge of honor. Darius had loathed his father, and through a long and complex process of hatred, he'd become surprisingly like him.

  But Darius was something different. He was the second son born to his mother by the priest. The first had died. But he was the seventh son born to the priest among the women of the village, though few knew it.

  He was a pauper son. He was prone to visions and dreams, and he was able to walk the dreams of others when close to them. He gained much information this way and made use of it as his father had made use of the villagers' confessions.

  The story he told his followers, the society he had invaded and taken over in Byzanthamum, was that when he turned twelve, he saw the mage of nature itself swirling around an enormous black oak in the heart of a wood. He had touched it and absorbed the mage into himself. The tree had crumbled in death, and he had wandered the woods blind and mad for three passages of the moon. A black oak was his symbol.

  But that was not the truth.

  When he was twelve, he had wandered into the woods and disappeared, driven mad by the swirling life he'd seen in a toadstool. Two years later, the whole village was flattened in the night by horrific downbursts of wind. Every soul was cut free from its flesh, and in the morning, the village green was crowded with mushrooms. So was the body of his father.

  Now, Darius was spitting and blinking into the carpet. He couldn't see anything, and he was having trouble remembering what had just happened. The thick policeman with the pistol crept into his head between the throbbing drumbeats of an aching skull. His arms were stuck. He twiddled his fingers around and found the chain of the handcuffs. Something began to boil inside of him. Something much louder and stronger than his headache. He was lying on his face, chained.

  Darius was strong. He had always been strong. But his strength was wild, untrained and unrefined. He compensated with silk capes, velvet hats, big words, and horrible but expensive wine. He was like a storm in his anger. Uncontrollable. He could light a fire like a small volcano, but he could never put one out. He could tear down walls and rip up trees; he could throw a wind that would shatter stone, but he couldn't calm a breeze. Not without starting a tornado.

  He spat again, cursed into the carpet, and jerked his wrists. His mind reached out, grasping for any strength he could find. He reached into the earth and around the house. The grass in the yard began to curl slowly, and hundreds of the closest insects died and dried. The water heater in the basement shorted, and its water went cold. Had anyone been listening, instead of trying to talk to Frank, they would have heard a slow sucking sound like a motorless vacuum, a great collecting of lives, of stories, of words emptying and being swallowed.

  The walls began to creak and pop, the floor trembled, and the lights went out. Dotty put her hands on her head and blinked. Sergeant Simmons stumbled and fell to his knees. Anastasia, dizzy, sat down hard. Upstairs, Richard started crying, and a low groan sputtered from the raggant by the door. Zeke put his hand on the wall and looked at Darius's twitching body.

  “I don't feel well,” Penelope said.

  With the strength Darius had gathered, he could have done any number of things most wizards could only imagine. He could have turned blood to water and water to blood. Outside, dead sticks twisted on the ground, approaching life, begging to be serpents. Blake felt the ground grow hot beneath his feet, and he ran, leaping through the curling grass.

  Darius just wanted the handcuffs off. On the dark floor of the living room, he arched his spine, threw back his head, and widened his blind and burning eyes. A word formed in his belly and burned in his mind. It coiled in his lungs, and his tongue tensed. He couldn't have held it in if he'd wanted. And he wanted it out.

  It roared through him, an ancient word, one of the first words of power he had ever learned, and it sounded like nothing in any modern tongue.

  It meant “open.” Or “shut.”

  Every window in the house exploded. Doors slammed. A dog half a mile away snapped his jaws shut on his own leg and couldn't let go. In the irrigation ditch behind the barn, a fish t
hat had swallowed a small safety pin out of curiosity suddenly blinked in surprise. All the frogs belched at once. But Darius had more strength left. He had collected it, and now it came rushing back out. Though his arms had sprung apart immediately, he screamed the word again, and again, three times. Four times. The house rocked with the sound of slamming, bursting, sliding, and shattering. Penelope bit her tongue, and Zeke's teeth cracked loudly. On the Willises' side of Henry, Kansas, every door went haywire. Ovens, safes, refrigerators, and microwaves jerked themselves around rooms, opening and slamming. In the front yard, the patrol car lost its doors. Sergeant Simmons managed to stand, but his gun fired and shot him in the foot while his teeth clattered.

  “Out,” he said, grabbing at Dotty and the girls while he hopped. “Get out of the house!”

  Dotty and Anastasia half carried, half dragged Penelope to the door while Zeke and Simmons managed to careen onto the porch with Frank. All of them tumbled into the yard.

  In his darkness, Darius picked up his exhausted body. His eyes were still streaming and still burning. He put his hand to his head and felt the lumps. His anger, though sated, had not completely vented itself.

  With a groan of irritation, he put one hand to his head and stamped his foot.

  Darius stood still in the living room, fuming, blinking away the pepper pain in his eyes. He wanted to smash the house, kill anything and everything within twenty miles, and tear the sky down. He was as mad as a wasp, but he was much larger and nastier than a wasp. He wanted to sting the world.

  The lives around him were no longer in the room, no longer in the house, except for the pink slave on the floor upstairs where he'd dropped him. They were outside the house now, and Darius could tell that the fat policeman was hurt. He would kill them. He could do it now, where they stood, thinking themselves safe.

  But he didn't. Something had changed. The earth beyond the house was different, and it held a different sort of life. Beyond the people in the yard, this new place was empty of everything but grass. He had closed the house off from its old place.

  Outside the house, he could feel only one song, and the words were emptiness and green. But inside, there was something more interesting, one clear taste, a flavor, a pull so attractive that he began to forget his anger. Frank had insulted him. The fat policeman had shot him in the head and chained him on the floor, but they were nothing to him now. Nothing to this.

  The pull was coming from upstairs.

  For the first time in many years, Darius felt afraid. He knew what was pulling him, he'd been dreaming of it since he'd first heard the legends of Endor from a mad medicine man behind his painted wagon, and later when he'd read the same stories scrawled on monk's vellum.

  He was feeling the presence of the undying, the life of the last daughter of the second sire, Nimiane, witch-queen of all that had been Endor. Even Merlinis had tumbled before her.

  This is what Darius wanted. This, when he first saw the small gateways in Henry's dreams, is what he knew could happen.

  But she was stronger than he was. Her life, a slow swirling, swallowing motion, was upstairs and through a doorway. And he was in its current.

  He climbed the stairs with all his senses straining, stepped over the snoring, whimpering body of Richard where he had dropped it on the landing, and climbed into the attic.

  He stood in front of the cupboards and released his breath. After a decade of searching, he had found three doorways such as these, and he'd paid for them with the lives of others. The wealth in the wall in front of him was unimaginable. But there were greater prizes beyond it.

  The cupboards were all open, thanks to his fit of commands, and the room was astir with chaos. There was a horse somewhere, and hateful faeren, bloodshed and murder and war, salt seas, stone, aging, rotting books, desert heat, and a strange southern zephyr. There was home, the sound of laughter, and through one, the unmistakable taste of love.

  Above it all, drowning it, drinking it, there was a dark emptiness, a hole into which it was all falling. Into which he was falling.

  He shook his head. When he went, when he submitted to the urge, it would be his choice. Ignoring what felt like a rope, tied taut around his insides and reeling him in, he sent his mind through another cupboard. There was a sack of flour, mouse droppings, and a woman sweeping a floor. He probed another and felt himself in a tower, standing in a low, arched doorway, and birds, hundreds of them. Through another, a snake was dying, an ancient serpent unlike any in his world. It was winged, but its wings were shattered, stripped of feathers, and its body had been pierced.

  When he sent his mind through the next, he stepped back in surprise. A wizard stood on the other side, probing with his mind, as he was. The wizard had sensed him as well, for he seemed nervous. Darius reached deeper inside the man, surprised that he could. The man was afraid, but beneath that, ashamed. He had some strength, but it seemed twisted inside of him, deformed even.

  On his palm, and coursing through him, he had a burning word, a word Darius knew and felt coursing through his own veins.

  Horror surged through him, and his head swam. One of the doors had turned him back on himself. Even alone, the humiliation, the terror that came with what he'd seen brought sweat to his face. His real face, the face with the weak chin and the thin hair and big ears.

  Quickly, to forget what he had seen, his mind groped for another door and wandered through into darkness. He knew that he felt Endor, the oldest of cities. Or he felt a tomb below Endor, where Nimiane had been imprisoned. But she was not there, and he could not feel beyond the walls and into the place he had only seen in his dreams, a place where the eldest of the undying had gone mad and been imprisoned by their offspring. But no one had been able to bind the young when their minds had shattered. He'd been told they still wandered the streets, drooling, molding light's reflection around themselves, holding whatever shape they desired in their confusion.

  He pulled himself back and then straightened, finally letting his eyes and his mind focus on the draw.

  A woman sat on a throne in a cold stone room. Rivers of life poured into her, poured into the stones beneath her feet, into the walls and pillars. A cat sat on her lap, the only pocket of quiet. His head spun with the rushing, with the hugeness of the power she had drawn to herself, with the hugeness of the death required to provide it.

  He stepped forward, relaxed, his mind no longer groping. It had been grasped, pulled, and his body had followed.

  He was standing on the stone floor crowded with the power and life she had poured into it. Rain fell through high windows and ran down his face. She saw him as he was, without any illusion. His illusions would have been pointless.

  She was beautiful.

  Her mind lashed out faster than he could feel, and it tore through him.

  “You seek the life of Nimroth,” she said. Her voice was flat and distracted.

  Darius was barely hanging on to his own existence, clutching at strength in his own life. He couldn't speak.

  “I am Nimiane. He is in me. He is my sire.” She looked directly at him, no longer distracted. The river quieted around him. “You are no wizard.”

  Darius stepped back, horrified that she was searching him, remembering what she would see.

  “You are like a man suckled by wolves, strong, hungry, but hunched on all fours, with a tongue twisted in confusion.”

  Suddenly, she laughed, and her laughter echoed through the room, rattling on stone, dying slowly. “Do not be afraid. You cannot be a man to me, but you will be my wolf. Is that what you have always dreamed? Have you not already named yourself witch-dog? You shall lead my pack.”

  “Against what land?” Darius managed to say. “In what warring?”

  “Against the world. Against all worlds. Together, we shall out-devour death. But first, you shall go out against the home of an old enemy, against his wife and sons, against the land that embraced his feet. There is a grudge-hunger that must be slaked.”

  He felt
her reach into him, and his already-twisted strength twisted further. He fell to the wet stones in pain, and his eyes rolled. He was being split, ripped open, and hollowed. The pain stopped, and something else began. He was being filled. The stones and the sky and even the rain were venting into him, and he could feel her hand guiding the flood. He filled beyond bursting, more than he could ever have grasped for himself. The strength was unbearable, but he was not angry. Anger would have released it all.

  She'd finished, and Darius felt too heavy to stand. The world around him was heavier. But he found his knees and then his feet. His hair clung to his shoulders.

  His queen was standing, more beautiful than the moon, than a graveyard, than spider's silk.

  “Sit,” she said, and gestured toward the throne. “Let us call your pack. They are but pups and curs. You shall make me wolves.”

  Frank was sitting with his back against the side of the patrol car. Penelope was asleep in the backseat with her head on Dotty's lap. Dazed, Anastasia was in the front with the raggant on hers. Frank's skin tingled all over like it was prepping for the worst sunburn of his life. Ashen hairs drifted down onto his nose whenever he turned his head.

  Old Ken Simmons had pulled him out of the house as soon as the earthquake, or whatever it had been, settled down. Zeke and Dotty had carried Penelope.

  He wasn't quite sure what had happened, or how. He only knew what was. And what was, was not Kansas. The town was gone. The crops and silos and trees were all gone. The barn and the irrigation ditch were gone. The front lawn, the cop car, and the shotgun he'd dropped by the broken ladder were still there. The rest was all tall, waving grass, without variation, to the horizon. And as far as the horizon was concerned, the sun was on the wrong side. Either it was morning where they were now, or the sun did its business in mirror image to the way it worked in Kansas.

  Ken Simmons was leaning on the front of the car, holding his own shotgun and watching the house. Zeke was beside him.