The Hidden Illusionist

by Deck Davis

  “Tellin’ you, I’d be shittin’ my pants if I weren’t a guard.”

  “Know what I’d do if I caught whoever’s doing it?”

  “What?”

  “Run like a girl.”

  Both guards laughed. They stopped outside Dantis’s cell. “C’mon, you ugly git, get out of bed. Time for your date with the judge.”

  The other guard banged on the cell bars with a wooden club. “Get up, dipshit,” he said.

  As illusions tended to do, the image of Dantis ignored the guards. The taller guard sighed. “You better be dead, sunshine. If not, you’re gonna get a hell of an awakening.”

  The guard stepped into the cell. “Be careful. Judge Jones said they’re a pair of tricky bastards,” he said.

  Dantis held his breath, praying the mana wouldn’t leak out of his illusions. The guards were close to his illusory wall. If one of them touched it, they’d hit thin air, since his illusionist level wasn’t high enough to add smells, sensations, or sounds. He’d be rumbled.

  He stepped away from his illusory wall. The guards leaned over his bed with their backs to him.

  “Get up, you lazy-arsed thief!” said the taller one.

  Dantis crouched. Remembering what Ethan taught him about pickpocketing, he focused on the guard’s keys, which hung from his belt. Screaming with tension in his head, he unhooked the keyring from the guard’s belt. His heart thumped enough it was a wonder the guards didn’t hear it.

  With the keys in his hand, he exited the cell and crossed the cellblock, looking for his brother. He found him in the end cell, sat against the wall with his knees against his chest. His eyes had a faraway look.

  “Ethan,” he hissed. “Get up.”

  Ethan waved him away. “What’s the point?”

  “That’s the soulstone talking. Come on.”

  He unlocked the cell and grabbed his brothers arm, forcing him to his feet.

  Ethan was taller and wider than Dantis, but he was inexplicably more agile. While Dantis cut his hair short using whatever knife he could find, Ethan’s thick, golden-brown locks ran to his shoulders.

  It was annoying. When Dantis tried growing his hair out, it became one big lump of greasy tresses. Ethan also had the gift of being able to tan no matter how little sun there was, while calling Dantis pale was underselling it.

  “Go back to your cell,” said Ethan. “We can’t escape, so why bother trying?”

  “You’ll feel differently when you leave the cell. Trust me.”

  A door lay at the end of the cell block, with a window next to it. Ethan went to open the door.

  “Not that way,” said Dantis.

  He opened the door leading out of the cellblock. A staircase lay beyond it. Ethan went to walk through the door when Dantis stopped him.

  “I said we’re not going that way.”

  “There’s no other way out.”

  “Here.”

  “It’s a trick! He’s not here!” shouted a voice back in Dantis’s cell.

  The game was up. His illusion fooled them as long as he’d expected it to, but there was no time for more trickery. Speed was their only way out.

  Leaving the cell block door open, Dantis opened the window on the wall beside it. A rush of morning air chilled him. The faint smell of freshly-baked bread blew in from a nearby town bakery.

  He would have killed for fresh bread. Hell, fresh anything would have been nice. Prison food was bad, but it was a delight compared to some of the things he and Ethan had been forced to eat on the streets. Coming from a semi-affluent home, he’d never known what bad cuisine really was until he’d eaten roasted squirrel with a side of vegetables stolen from the grocer’s trash.

  “Looks like a tight fit,” said Ethan. “Let’s just hand ourselves in.”

  “Shut up, and suck in your gut,” said Dantis.

  They climbed out of the window, Dantis first, and then Ethan, who made it out as the guards left the cell.

  In the fresh open air, Ethan changed. His posture straightened, and he took in a lungful of air. “Woah. What got into me?”

  “Soulstone. They must have built the cells with it. It doesn’t affect you once you leave it.”

  “What was all that about with the door?” asked Ethan. “Why did you leave it open?”

  “I want them to think we took the stairs. They won’t guess we climbed out here.”

  His satisfaction with his ruse lasted a second, until reality set in. He was standing forty feet above the ground, with the town of Wolfpine spread out wide below. The town was covered in red banners with the words ‘Remembrance Night’ printed on them.

  Remembrance Night was the name given to the anniversary of the Cataclysm. Or, the anniversary scholars had guessed at, anyway. Truth was, little was known about the cataclysm, but Dantis had read as much as he could about it.

  It was said that in Oakherald, way beyond the seas that washed around the Fire Isles, humans were the minority. They were seen as troublemakers, as warmongers who drained resources from the land and put nothing back in return. They were cast out of Grand Councils by the other races, and hostilities increased until war broke out, with humans on the losing side.

  After an explorer named Dillan Danser discovered the Fire Isles, humans fled Oakherald to settle on this undisturbed island. They found it unoccupied and barren, and it wasn’t even listed on maps.

  Even so, they quickly found evidence of life on the Fire Isles. Rock formations that resembled cities, and the dried-remains of long-dead giants. Scholars studied them for years, before concluding that there had been an extinction event on the Fire Isles. The Cataclysm.

  People said that time heals all wounds, and that was what happened. Races from Oakherald began to visit the Fire Isles, and some settled here. Together, they formed towns like Wolfpine, and out of respect for the giants who lived on the island before them, they held Remembrance Day.

  Remembrance Day meant something else for Dantis and Ethan. It was on Remembrance Day, five years earlier, that their parents were murdered. When he looked at the banners draped around the town below, all he could think about was what had happened. He wanted to tear the banners down and set fire to them.

  He looked beyond Wolfpine, where the famous Wolfpine Blackrock sat; it was a dagger shaped rock that stuck out of the ground, blacker than Ethan’s wrist scar and older than the town itself. Tributes rested around it; flowers and lanterns that people left there, after the Blackrock had somehow become a symbol for lost loved-ones.

  “Now what?” said Ethan. “We’re in the middle of Wolfpine, we’re weaponless, we’re surrounded by guards, we’ve got no money…and every girl in a ten-mile-radius knows our names and our faces.”

  “Your name and your face,” said Dantis. “They didn’t notice me. Maybe I can leave you behind.”

  “Like you’d ever do that.”

  “I might.”

  “And whose sword is going to get you out of shit?”

  Ethan was right. Dantis never bothered learning swordplay. It didn’t click with him like it did with his brother. Ethan was a natural. He must have inherited it from their mother, who fought in sword tournaments when she was younger. He was left-handed, but he spent hours training with his right, trying to become ambidextrous. Swordplay flowed in his blood.

  Not so for Dantis. Violence turned his stomach to bile. Ever since that night, five years ago, when his parents…no. Don’t think about it. Swords, blood, wounds; they made him want to pass out.

  “Swords aren’t gonna help us here,” he said, “even if you had one. Half the guard will be after us now.”

  “Pah. We’ve faced worse odds. Remember in Unchurch? The three-armed juggler scam? We got out of that one, didn’t we?”

  “Yeah, smuggled out of town on the back of a wagon, buried in three tons of shit. Let’s go. My vertigo’s making my stomach wobble.”

  “I saved you this,” said Ethan. “I know how much you love them.”

  He tossed a plum to
Dantis. Dantis caught it with one hand, almost losing his grip on the wall behind him. He loved plums so much his vertigo couldn’t stand in the way. His mouth filled with spit when he looked at the juicy fruit.

  “What a coincidence,” he said. “Because I saved you this.”

  Dantis handed Ethan an oat and raisin biscuit he’d kept aside from his evening meal.

  “Great place for a picnic,” said Ethan.

  They moved along the ledge, sticking as close to the wall behind them as possible. The strength of the wind threatened to sweep him off the roof. As they went further along, his stomach sank.

  “I thought there’d be ledges leading to the ground,” he said. “We’re outta luck.”

  “Story of our lives,” said Ethan.

  Behind them, the window at the furthest end of the ledge opened, and a guard stuck his head out.

  “There you are, you little bastards!”

  The guard climbed out.

  “Get your arse moving,” said Ethan.

  They crossed to the end of the ledge. “There’s another roof. It’s only about ten feet high,” said Dantis.

  Behind them, one of the guards squeezed his portly frame out of the window. Using the last of his mana, Dantis cast an illusion. The ledge was a foot wide, but Dantis crafted an illusion that halved its length, and making it look too thin for the guard to risk walking on. Seeing this, the guard paused.

  “They’re from the bloody circus, these two,” he told someone behind him. “No way I’m going out there.”

  No time to tie this illusion off. It would fade the second he broke concentration, but it gained them a few seconds.

  They climbed off the ledge and dropped onto the roof below them. The edge of this roof sloped toward yet another one, and to a turret. From the turret, it was fifteen feet to the ground. Phew. They had a way out.

  “What the hell happened back there?” said Ethan.

  He was talking about the illusion. Dantis had never told Ethan about his ability. He never cast them around him, but he had no choice today.

  “There’s something I need to tell you. I’m sorry I hid it for so long…but I can do things.”

  “Things?”

  “Spells, Ethan. I don’t know why I hid it from you, but…”

  Ethan grinned.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “You dope. Think I didn’t notice? I was gonna pay for you to go to mage school. Y’know, if we hadn’t fucked up the robbery and been accused of treason.”

  “Oh. I didn’t think you…”

  “Why’d you hide it from me?”

  “Let’s get off this roof and out of town, and we’ll talk,” said Dantis.

  The truth was, he hid it because he was scared. He and Ethan only had each other, and he worried that his ability would drive them apart. As if, somehow, it would make them too different from each other, and – it sounded stupid to even think it – they wouldn’t be as close.

  But Ethan had known all along, and he hadn’t cared. He should have had more faith in his big brother. If he had, maybe things would have been easier for them. Dantis could use his illusions in their robberies, for distraction, or something. Maybe soon. First, they had to escape.

  “Listen, Dan. I need to say something. You know that none of this was down to you, right?”

  “We need to go.”

  Ethan squeezed his shoulder. “I’m serious. I know what you’re like, and I don’t want you to be thinking I’m mad or that I blame you.”

  Ethan’s word meant more than he would ever realize. Dantis couldn’t say anything back. He just smiled.

  “Let’s go,” said Ethan.

  As they crossed the sloping roof, a soft noise from behind got his attention. Four men wearing guard uniforms were standing on the ledge behind him. The cell guards had let their bellies swell through years of inactivity, but these guys were the opposite.

  Their light leather armor showed off their athletic bodies. Two of them carried daggers, and two had bows slung across their backs, which didn’t hinder them when they ran along the ledge behind Dantis. Their agility reminded him of acrobats. He was jealous about their obliviousness to the height.

  “It’s some kind of ultra-guard unit,” said Ethan, backing away.

  “Is that their technical name?”

  “Who cares? We need to leave, unless you plan on giving yourself up.”

  One of the guards leapt off the ledge, somersaulted in midair, and landed on the same roof as Ethan and Dantis. He held a dagger in each hand, and faint wisps of blue light swirled from the blades. Swirling light meant enchantment, likely a stun effect.

  “The somersault was unnecessary,” said Ethan.

  Ethan ran to the spire of the roof to his right where a weather vane twirled in the wind. He bent a metal spike back and forth, straining until it snapped off. He held it in his hand. It was long, thin, and sharp.

  “Not a sword, but it’ll do,” he said.

  The other three guards dropped onto the roof. Ethan faced them, makeshift sword in hand. He adopted a fighting stance.

  “What are you doing?” said Dantis.

  “Getting us out of this.”

  The guards circled Ethan. One moved forward, dagger in hand, and swiped. Ethan avoided it. He lashed out with his metal, scratching the guard’s arm. The other two closed in one him now.

  Ethan struck at one of them, ducked to his left to avoid a blow, then countered. Metal clanged on metal.

  There are too many of them, you idiot. You’re gonna get yourself killed.

  As Ethan dodged the strike from one guard, another punched him in the gut. Ethan grunted, and the guard kicked his legs, swiping his feet away.

  Dantis fought the paralyzing fear in his legs. He hated violence, but concern for his brother overrode the feeling. He charged over, hitting one guard with his shoulder and knocking him away.

  He reached for Ethan’s hand. A splitting agony seared across his shoulders. A guard faced him, his dagger bloodied from slicing Dantis’s back.

  Ethan got to his feet. He dragged Dantis away from the guards.

  “Remember what I was saying about worse odds?” said Ethan. “I’d like to retract that statement.”

  Dantis breathed through the pain. “Run. It’s our only chance.”

  “They’re fast as hell, and they outnumber us.”

  Ethan was right; they’d never outrun them. He needed something else.

  He checked his mana. Good; it had regenerated. What illusion could he use? What would stop the guards?

  He pictured a wall in his mind, one he could cast in front of him. It wouldn’t take the guards long to realize it wasn’t real, that it’d appeared from nowhere, but it would stop them for an instant.

  Sweat dampened his forehead as he concentrated. The illusory brick wall formed on the roof in front of him, but it was hazy.

  Need to pump more mana into it.

  He let his mana drain out from him and lash over the wall. As the magical energy left him, something rumbled. The wall became clearer, but sparks of light spat from it. Tiny firework explosions popped over the surface and onto the roof, spreading across the tiles.

  The rumbling grew until it vibrated up his legs. He realized what he had done.

  Too much mana. I pumped too much mana into it, too quickly.

  A cracking noise came from below him. It sounded like ice breaking. The roof timbers split apart. Tremor lines spread out, and the cracking sound grew.

  “It’s gonna cave!” said Ethan.

  Dantis held his breath. He didn’t dare blink. “It’s gonna hold our weight. We have to be careful.”

  Why didn’t I read the book more carefully? It said something about mana, didn’t it? If you used it when you were anxious, if you used too much at once, it became unstable…

  The cracks spread out. The guards behind them edged closer. On the ground, outside the judiciary building, more guards watched.

  “Now what?” asked Ethan.


  They couldn’t get off the roof, and if they did, more guards waited for them. Yep, these were the worst odds they’d ever seen.

  “When I count,” said Dantis, “Focus on the turret and run like hell. I’d rather chance it than give up.”

  “That’s the spirit!”

  “One…”

  “Two…”