by Adam Dreece
“Just a bit light-headed,” I tell her. “That’s all. I like this one. Can you modify it to have a longer barrel? I like more control. Also, no flowery stuff on the grip… if you don’t mind. It’d like it sleek and flat.”
“Flat?”
“In case I need to strap it against the bottom of something. Flat doesn’t stick out as much.”
“Strapped to something like, I don’t know, a levi-car?” She straightens up. “You’re aiming to pass through a checkpoint, get to the under-city.” She narrows her eyes at me. “You don’t have a permit to leave, do you?”
I stare at the ground and shrug, then look back up at her. “You don’t want to know, do you?”
“No, I don’t,” she replies. The black steel disappears, likely into a holster on the back of her leg. Her expression’s steely, but her eyes show concern. She grabs my head with both hands before I can react. “Did you get slammed on the way in?”
“Slammed?” I ask, squinting. It feels like my thoughts are traipsing through molasses. “I can’t… I know that word, don’t I?” Suddenly I’m struck with a sense of panic. My eyes dart about, her grip firm on my head. “Where’s Randmon?”
“Who? There’s been no one else here but you and me since you got here.” She rubs her thumbs along my cheeks and then lets my head go.
Scratching my beard, I’m not sure either.
She inspects her thumbs. “No mana residue. Hmm…” She strokes her forehead with an index finger; her eyes locked on mine. “Do the words slammed, bolted, spelled… any of this ringing a bell?”
I shrug, lowering my gaze. “It’s getting harder to think.”
“They’re common Banareali slang.” She gives me an unsettling stare, the type that threatens to peel the stain off wood. “I need to check something.” Putting a hand in the air, she murmurs, her eyes glowing bright green for a moment. “Nothing, that’s… disappointing. Why are you frowning?”
“I didn’t hear you do that in my head.”
She glares at me while she straightens her jerkin. “Well, you’re no Wizard. And unless you’re secretly a weslek, in which case I’d have to shoot you right here and now, because there’s no way I’m letting a Scourge come in here and destroy my life, the only reason you’d expect to hear voices in your head would be because you’re extra special crazy. I’m not keen on that, no matter the money I got paid upfront.”
I drop my gaze to the floor, wondering what she knows. I’m tempted to ask. There’s no sense of memories lingering around in my mind, as if the lake that was me has dried up, or I’m simply in the wrong place. I massage my chest, right over my heart, wincing in unexpected pain. Then my legs give out. She catches me, sliding me down to the ground. Her expression is three different flavors of frustrated. I’m running out of time, and she’s running out of patience.
She pulls a stool out from a closet I didn’t even realize was there, and helps me up. “I don’t talk to people on the floor, not in my shop.”
After perching me on it, I watch as her shoulders rise and her head moves back. “You should go.” She points to the grand door. It’s intricately carved, six feet wide, and only a few feet away. Oddly, it takes me two attempts to see it. Weird.
“No, I’m okay.” I lean against the wall, hanging my head. “I came to ask you about making a pistol, right?”
Her nostrils flare, and she snatches the pistol out of my hands.
I stare down at my hand that was holding it. Flexing my fingers, I can’t understand why my hand feels full, why my arm still feels heavy.
“It’s hard to think. I’m just making sure that I’m saying everything, not leaving any bits in my head.”
She pulls up her sleeve and glances at the ebony rectangle again. “You’ve got five minutes before I have to throw you out.”
“I like that one.” I point to the pistol in her hands.
“Really? Buying it for a Wizard or someone?”
I raise an eyebrow.
She closes her eyes and shakes her head, withdrawing the question. “It gives you the best of both worlds.”
My face contorts as I fight to concentrate. There’s an excruciating pain in my stomach. “The… the both part… where?” I’m blinking hard. Yig, it’s like I’m fighting for every single thought. “Where?”
Keeping her sharp eyes trained on me, she turns the pistol over. “Right here at the bottom of the grip, this switch flips it. You reload the gunpowder bullets by—”
I start to fall forward.
“Woo! Hey, stay with me. Stay…”
Everything’s black. There’s nothing, just a familiar, twisting sensation somewhere… My thoughts are like a cloud being dispersed by a ferocious wind.
There’s a moment of heat. It comes again, but this time, I recognize it. My thoughts coalesce around it. It’s pain. The third time, I realize that I exist. I’m a thing, and someone’s hitting me. “Grrr…” I force my eyes open to the thinnest of slits.
The blazing light of day is raw agony. I’m face down in the muck… I fight to move; my muscles consider but then refuse my demand. In the distance, I see orange and red, and a blurry mass. I blink again and again, trying to focus. The glint of the sun on steel catches my eye, and I see my hand’s still clasping the pistol, my pistol.
There’s a shadow over top of me, moving. It strikes me again, screaming, “GIVE ME THE REST OF IT!”
Randmon’s head pokes out of a hole, and a single, clear thought takes hold of my mind: I've got seconds before I'm dead.
Spotting a stone embedded in the mud, I rally every scrap of my being and smack the pistol’s handle on it. I quickly point the pistol behind me and fumble my numb fingers until I hear the deafening boom. As I’m sprayed with wetness, my wrist, elbow and shoulder erupt in such horrific anguish that the world vanishes from me.
episode eighteen
A deep rumble, like distant thunder, rouses me out of my dreamless sleep. I lay there, skipping off the oblivion of unconsciousness. Wood creaks nearby, getting my attention. I open my bleary eyes the thinnest of slits to investigate.
The room’s agonizingly bright. There’s a figure moving about near me. After blinking a few times to clear up my vision, I let my eyes wander. The rafters look like the type I’d find in a house. For some reason, I can’t turn my head. At the edge of my vision it seems like there’s a window with ratty curtains. I’m guessing it’s afternoon.
I can’t feel anything, it’s weird. I can’t even tell if I’ve got a body beyond my chest. My arms, legs, fingers… it’s like they don’t exist. Whoever or whatever the silhouette is, it didn’t kill me for a reason. I just have to figure out what that reason is.
I close my eyes and think. For ages, I concentrate on moving one finger. There’s something… it’s rough and worn. It’s exhausting but I keep at it. It’s wood. The floor must be wood, not dirt. I’m lying on a wooden floor. A fragile little smile cracks free.
Glancing at the silhouette, I decide to take a leap of faith and let myself fall asleep.
When I wake up, every muscle hurts and feels tight like I haven’t moved in ages. Taking a full breath, I open my eyes, willing myself to accept my new state over the last one. I’m relieved to find my head willing to move about on command.
The silhouette’s a cloaked figure, standing near one of the three windows. The place is barren, except for a large wooden table several feet away and what looks like wooden kitchen cabinets without the doors. It’s hard to tell from here, but they look empty.
The cloaked figure walks from one window to the next. A sheath’s poking out from under the cloak… no, two. Okay, so this person’s pretty serious.
“Hey…” I whisper, my tongue flopping about in my mouth like a fat piece of meat.
The shadowy form doesn’t turn, instead moves to the next window. “You’re awake, good. Can you move? We won’t be safe here for much longer.” The voice is definitively female, but her tempo is strange, stilted.
“Barel
y…” I reply.
The figure comes over and crouches down beside me. Her cloak’s dark grey, and she’s got black leather boots, both of which are caked with beige dust and blood. The hand closest to me is gloved in dark leather. Her face is hidden beneath the hood, almost as if she were a figment.
“Who are you? Why did you save me?” I ask.
She pulls back the hood. At first I notice her shoulder-length, black hair but then my heart skips a beat as I see her eyes; they’re white. Just what type of twisted mess have I gotten myself into? “You’re the oner from the bar.”
She glances away, and after a few seconds, nods.
“Why did you save me?”
Pulling her glove off, she puts a hand on my forehead. I try to resist but I’m barely able to squirm before she’s pulled her hand back and put the glove back on.
“There’s nothing to fear. I’m glad to see that you have recovered. Our… healer said you should recover. We used their knowledge until they died… the carn…” She stands up and looks away.
“I’m sorry,” I say, this time my tongue cooperating better. “So you lose knowledge when one of you die?”
“Elements of them remain, but most of what they know fades.”
I roll my head around, enjoying the cracking it makes. “I thought when someone became an oner, the hive—”
Shivering at the term, she walks back to the first window. “We are an aggregate, a commune. There is no hive.”
Clumsily, I move my arm, trying to get my hand to my face. It reminds me of when I’ve slept on it. I can barely feel that it’s there, just barely. “Why am I still breathing? Why are you protecting me? Or are you?”
This time, I notice the bizarre way she nods. It’s like my question hangs there in the air while she considers it, and then she moves her head back and waits, before committing to the nod. It sends a shiver down my spine. In that off-tempo voice of hers, she says, “You had a choice to shoot the carn or this One, and you chose the carn.”
“It didn’t do any good,” I reply.
She frowns. “You made the choice, and it got our attention. Then you…” she stiffens, then bows her head slightly. “You freed us by killing the Second.”
I force myself to roll over onto my forearms, a satisfied smile on my face afterwards. Bit by bit, my body’s waking up but everything’s dragging. Resting my head on the floor, I ask, “What’s a Second? Never heard of that. Does it have to do with the bartender? The leecher?”
“Yes…” I hear her step back and forth before continuing. “She came with another woman weeks ago. We allowed them to stay, preferring to work on the land as long as they did not interfere with our colony. The village was deserted before us, so there wasn’t an issue with space.”
Stifling a laugh, I shake my head at just how wrong all the academics in the world are. My memories were still a mess, but I knew enough to know that no one had any idea that oners could work peacefully in groups. Then, as I lift my head up, a suspicious thought dawns on me. What if she’s playing me? I glance about for Randmon, curious what his take on everything is. Squinting, I’m pretty sure I see his little nose peeking out from behind one of the table legs. Little guy’s probably hungry. That’s when I realize just how starved and parched I am.
“Hey, do you have anything to eat?”
“Your inner body likely isn’t functioning properly yet, you should wait.”
Raising an eyebrow, I nod. “I hadn’t thought about that. So what’s this Second business?”
“The second woman grabbed an oner, trying to get our blessing and when denied, revealed she and the other were leechers. She started draining that One. The other woman then drained the first, and in doing so, gained a connection to our colony. When she exerted her magic, she could overwhelm our will, and became the second voice. Thus she is called the Second.”
Shaking my head, I fumble my hand to my face and scratch it. I notice my beard’s gone, but ignore it. “Wow. I’ve never heard of that.”
“Neither had we,” she says, shrugging, a hint of sadness in her voice.
Pushing myself backwards onto my legs, I take a moment to breathe and go through what she’s said. “When she drained the carn, what did that do? Boost her?”
“We’ve only ever had a colony of up to a dozen, but with her, she could pull others in. With the carn’s mana, she was able to pull in the surrounding colonies. It was overwhelming for some of the others, their minds couldn’t take it.”
“They died?”
She nods, her fists clenched.
“Why didn’t you?”
“This One was an adept before receiving the blessing. It was painful, but we managed to resist it.”
I rub my stubbly chin. “So it was her that I shot behind me?”
“Yes,” she replies quickly.
“And when I killed her… you got your own mind back?”
She stares at me, with those unnerving white eyes. “Yes.”
“What happened to the carn?” I ask.
Lowering her gaze to the floor, another shiver runs down my spine. “It is the reason we aren’t safe. It has been hunting for you.”
My blood runs cold. “Are there any of you outside?”
“A few.”
“There were hundreds, and now there are only a few?”
She raises a finger, her head moving about as if trying to hear the others. “There are only four of us now.”
“Yig me,” I say, wiping my face with both hands. “How the yig could the carn survive? How did you survive?”
“This One helped kill the other carn, but the scarred one… it wouldn’t stop. We might have won, if we hadn’t kept losing our way.”
I squint as I try to make sense of it all. “Losing your way… do you mean when magic stops?”
She nods.
My eyebrows go up as my mind runs through the likely scene. “That must have been a slaughter.”
Her face is eerily expressionless. She gazes at the floor, just blinking. “There were hundreds of us at first. Many colonies, fighting as one.”
I pause for a second, something not making sense. Unable to place my finger on it, I decide to try and stand. Planting one foot and pushing off my knee, I stumble about like a drunk idiot. She watches as I slam into a wall and fall back to the floor. “I’m okay.”
Her brow furrows for a moment. “I know,” she replies, unconcerned. “We are one less now… The carn is heading in our direction. Hopefully the other two can lead it away.”
“Where are we?”
“This is our southern feeding house. When we work these fields, we bring our food here to prepare and eat together.”
I look down at the floor and notice how there’s a well-worn path from the front door and around the table. I can only imagine a dozen oners walking in with baskets and whatever, preparing and eating a meal in silence together. It’s unnerving, and yet another thing no one’s going to believe if I ever get the chance to tell them.
Closing my eyes, I rack my brain for what could be going on, and then it hits me. “You think I can do something to help you; that’s why I’m here, isn’t it?”
For a split second, her face isn’t dispassionate or detached. It’s difficult for me to tell if it’s fear or what, but there’s something. I wait patiently for her to answer me.
She blinks for a few seconds, her face once again passive. “The leecher’s attack should have killed you, but didn’t. You’re incredibly strong, useful. There’s very little left for us here now. Our neighbors are damaged too. We need to leave. We need your help.” Her expression’s subtle, but there’s truth to what she’s saying.
I sit up and shake my head. “I don’t know what to tell you, but I can’t do much. I’m not a Wizard, or even an adept… I can fight, somewhat, but that’s about all I can do.” Eyeing her carefully, I watch for… something. Something that can explain why my gut’s telling me there’s something more to the story. Part of me thinks this is all in my
head, and that the strange vibe I’m getting from her is just because she’s a oner. All the weird pauses and moments where she looks like a statue for a few seconds really throws me off.
“You can help us get to safety. We need to get moving.”
With a big breath, I stand and spread my arms out like a kid walking on a log. Glancing at her, I’d swear I see the very edge of her mouth turn up. “Okay, if I’m going to help, I’m going to need my short sword and pistol.”
She stares at me, her fists clenching for a moment before replying, her speech extra-stilted this time for some reason, “They are in a sack, slung on this One’s back under the cloak. Given your condition, we believe it best that we hold on to them for now.”
“Fair enough,” I lie. Nothing says you don’t trust a man more than not giving him his weapons back. But I don’t have any choice, so I smile.
She drops her gaze to the floor, her eyes close.
“What happened?”
“They are gone,” she replies.
I rub my forehead, trying to make sense of her clenched fists and blank face. “You mean the other oners?”
She nods. “We must move, the carn is coming.”
My eyes dart about, my fingers twitching as I think up a plan. “Is there a stable around here? Maybe some animals we could ride or something?”
The oner shakes her head. “The only thing is an old levi-car, but it won’t work. We had a mechanic One once, he said it lacked life.”
“Life? Yig, get me to it. Take me there, now!”
She grabs my arm and puts it around her neck. Opening the front door, my heart sinks as we see a golden field of wheat ablaze on the opposite side of the road. I don’t remember the wheat being so high, but it doesn’t matter. I swallow hard and put everything I can into moving.
episode nineteen
Sticking to the southern edge of the road, we hurry as the inferno on the other side roars. After a few minutes, I dare to let go and start jogging on my own. There’s nothing like fear to boost one’s eagerness to get the body moving properly. My mind keeps ignoring the wheat field on the southern side that’s just waiting to burst into flame, I’m sure. I stare in fear at each and every fiery ember that dances on the breeze.