King Henry Short Pack One (The King Henry Tapes)

by Richard Raley

  Truman was grateful for that. He didn’t like the look. It was most of the reason he stayed behind the counter.

  “About the phone call . . .” he said, getting the conversation away from his life.

  “Very late in the year,” Ceinwyn commented, “Almost too late in the year.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Not your fault, Truman. I’m actually giving you a compliment for finding him in time.”

  “Ah . . .”

  She shrugged, blond eyebrows rising. “Well?”

  “Right . . .” Truman glanced at the clock. Shouldn’t be much longer. Detention would be out, then the gang would be in here and the boy would do his usual trick . . . Ceinwyn would see it for herself. “He’s . . . not your usual kid.”

  “Grown up for his age?”

  Truman couldn’t help but laugh and give a shake of his head. “He’s a . . . well, guess you’ll see . . .”

  “You’re not being very helpful, Truman.”

  “Trust me, you’ll see, Miss Dale. He’ll be in here in a moment—trust me, it’s like clockwork for them, in here all week after school and everyday he pulls his little trick.”

  “He’s conjuring anima?” Ceinwyn asked.

  “I’m sure of it—feels like all my skin is crawling the moment he walks through the door, has to be anima pooling going on, not sure the type though. I’d say aeromancer but you lot are all female from what I understand.”

  Ceinwyn’s smile twisted. “Thank the Mancy for small miracles.”

  The Mancy was weird when it came to its eccentricities. No male aeromancers, no female mentimancers. Pyromancers couldn’t stand hydromancers, sciomancers couldn’t stand spectromancers. Truman’s own corpusmancers were almost always universally loved while mentimancers were almost always universally loathed. Faunamancers often found floromancer lovers while cryomancers would never sexualize a geomancer under any circumstance. Aeromancers hated all other aeromancers, and electromancers couldn’t get enough of themselves. It went on and on, especially if you got into abilities and anima types, not just personality.

  Thank the Mancy for small miracles, Truman thought, because the Mancy runs our lives more than the almighty could ever manage. “So it’s impossible?”

  “He would be the first recorded male aeromancer in history,” Ceinwyn said, “so yes, I’d say it’s impossible. What exactly is he doing?”

  “Makes displays fall, shelves come off, machines tilt over, that type of stuff. Whatever it is, he’s after a distraction. The moment my head turns he’s packing his pockets full of snacks and hiding magazines in his jacket. The first time I caught him he was too bold and went after the cigarette packs.”

  Ceinwyn’s smile melted slightly. “Sounds like a handful.”

  You’ve got no idea, that’s why I didn’t call right away, Truman thought, but what Truman said was, “Sure, but he’s got to be strong to be doing it, right?”

  “It’s instinctual?”

  “Smart enough to know something is happening, but I don’t think he’s guiding the ship and pooling anima on his own.”

  Her smile came back as she sucked down more of her blue raspberry slushie. “I can’t wait to meet him,” she murmured.

  Truman glanced at the clock again. “Any minute now.”

  *

  Truman’s hand landed on King Henry’s wrist with a slap of skin on skin, the boy’s fingers a few inches away from the ShopsMart cigarette dispenser.

  Dirty brown eyes went wide in shock for only a second before he got them back under control, eyelids working their way down into glares. “You fucking baited me, didn’t you?” the boy accused.

  “Don’t seem fair to call it that, do it?” Truman asked. “Seeing as how I’ve given you plenty of chances to stop before . . .”

  King Henry tried to pull his arm away, but Truman held firm, the boy locked between falling and standing, one foot propped up on the counter, the other dangling behind him. Retired or not, Truman didn’t have any problem at all with the weight—there wasn’t much of it. Little King Henry all right. Kid was lucky if he weighed one-hundred pounds.

  “Let go, asshole,” he warned Truman, not at all fazed by the change in circumstance. His eyes weren’t wide, his breathing wasn’t fast, and there was no sign of adrenaline working its magic through his veins. Just the same glare: a silent warning.

  Truman met it. He’d faced bullets and bombs, kids’ glares weren’t high on his list of scary, even glares from other mancers. Maybe if Ceinwyn looked at me like that I’d back off . . . “You aren’t going anywhere, got it?”

  That’s when the strangest thing happened.

  Truman’s skin started to itch again.

  King Henry was building a pool back up. Didn’t realize it still, but there he was trying to get his lucky break a second time in a row. Kid has to be an Ultra to be this instinctive. Beyond the Powers. Ultra vires. Stronger than a normal mancer. Still doesn’t tell me the type, though. “Unless it’s a jail cell,” he added for the boy, to see if that got something out of him.

  Nothing, just the glare.

  “Yo!”

  The other ruffians finally noticed what was going on, all four standing in the doorway and letting September bleed its way into AC created May.

  “Yo! What the hell you doing, Gimp?” Jake asked, arms going wide.

  The other three huddled behind him, ready to run.

  “Your friend tried to steal some cigs, Jake, can’t let that go, can I?”

  “Shit . . .” Dynamite Donny muttered. “King be going to J-town.”

  “Think so?” Spence asked.

  “No way, man,” E-man said, “what going to happen is King going to kick Gimpy’s ass just like all the other guys we know he kicked.”

  “Gimp’s pretty big,” Jake added.

  “Yeah, true that,” E-man agreed, “but King beat up big all the time, that’s all he beat up at his size, ya know?”

  Truman glanced away from King Henry for just a second, long enough to take in the other four as they made themselves look like bigger idiots than usual.

  “Ethan Clarke,” he growled, “I go to church with your entire family, I dated your aunt in middle school, and if I ever hear you say ‘true that’ again, I’m telling your grandmother how you act away from home. You hear me?”

  E-man’s face looked like he’d been gutshot.

  Jake spoke for the group, “That’s cold, Gimpy, that’s cold!”

  In the split second it took Truman’s eyes to return back to the boy in his grasp, King Henry acted. Not with the Mancy, the itch on Truman’s skin growing with the boy’s pool of anima, but with his fists. King Henry’s free hand caught Truman right in the face, just beside his nose on his cheek.

  Truman was twice the kid’s weight, had more than a foot of height on him, but the shock of getting punched opened his fingers. King Henry didn’t waste time, butt hitting the counter, feet falling to the ShopsMart linoleum floor.

  There was a gasp of ‘oh shits!’ from the chorus. The other four boys didn’t waste time either, running out and leaving King Henry behind. Leaving King Henry behind because King Henry wasn’t running. Instead of moving for the door, the kid stepped away from the counter, staring down Truman and bringing up his fists. Given his stance, it was something the kid had practice at.

  You’ve got to be joking me, Truman thought, sizing up the five-foot, hundred-pound kid that if Truman didn’t know better, he would have thought was eleven instead of fourteen. I’ve fought black belts in more martial art disciplines than I thought could ever exist and now some teenager is standing up to me . . .

  If it wasn’t for the itch it might have been funny. Aren’t you getting a show, Ceinwyn . . .

  Truman took his time walking around the counter. King Henry just waited on him. Away from his hiding hole, Truman’s shorts showed both his muscled calf on the left side and his titanium leg on the right side. It was a nice prosthetic. Might not look real, but it worked
, and that’s what you really want. But it’s not real and the Mancy can’t stand it. At least not Truman’s piece of the Mancy . . .

  Corpusmancy. Body Mancy. Ultras like Truman were called Facechangers. Guess why? Too bad Ceinwyn wants the kid green to our world when she approaches him, or else I’d given him a hell of a shock . . .

  “This one time I’ll let you walk away,” Truman said, his whole body—flesh and metal—spread out wide to show off its size. “Don’t steal from me again . . . better yet, don’t come in here again, understand?

  Itch. Ninety-nine out of one-hundred kids run in this situation, but King Henry just stared, hands up, dirt brown eyes watching, feet quick as they bounced a tempo.

  “You not hear me?” Truman asked with a growl.

  “I’m not running from no crippled, man.”

  “That so?” Truman whispered.

  Crippled.

  “Don’t care how big you are. I got a rep. Got to walk out of here with a black eye, guess I got to walk out of here with a black eye.” King Henry shrugged, frowning. “Way it is. Not like you’ll be the first adult to beat on me, so don’t feel bad about it. If you can beat on me . . .”

  I’m not beating up a fourteen-year-old kid . . . Truman thought. He might have fallen far from the heights he’d reached, but he wasn’t going that low. Working at a ShopsMart, that’s plenty low. He’d already put on enough of a show for Ceinwyn to see the obvious. Scare him off, get this over with. Then she can take care of him.

  Truman started pooling his own anima.

  “Leave, kid, last chance,” Truman tried. “Leave or I lock you up in the bathroom and call the cops on you. I’m trying to be reasonable, boy!”

  The frown went away. Something especially dirty replaced it. “Boy . . . boy . . . I hate that fucking word. My dad uses it, know that?” King Henry asked. “Especially when he smacks me after I done something bad. Be good next time, boy. You’re better than this, I know you are! You know what, man? I ain’t ever been good my whole life. So why he think a slap or even a belt is going to change anything?”

  Truman’s pooling stopped. The idea of even a little faked fight to get the kid to run off stopped itself too. What the hell am I doing? Crap . . . really, Truman? That how desperate you are? Fight a kid just to feel the Mancy?

  I need to get my life together, he realized. Get back into the real world—doing something with the Mancy. Truman missed it . . . he’d been sulking for a year now, about being discharged, about the leg, about not being able to feel whole with the Mancy. He just kept trying to make himself sink . . . but he wasn’t sinking no more. Not if it meant fighting some poor screwed up kid, not even for Ceinwyn Dale. She’s seen enough . . . she complains then she can take her money and rot.

  Truman let out a sigh, his posture rising up and relaxing. “Get.”

  “No way,” King Henry muttered to himself.

  “I said get, King Henry—before I change my mind about it. You can even come in here again but no stealing, you hear?”

  But now it was King Henry not listening. Those dirt brown eyes went to glares once again. “Know what I hate more than ‘boy’? Fucking pity!”

  Truman saw the punch coming. Wasn’t anything special really. Not bad for some amateur. Sloppy compared to any professional. It was a haymaker, that all out punch. Punches that go for the homerun usually aren’t going to do anything but get you struck out. Leaves you open, takes a long time to throw. Truman liked a nice jab, followed by a tight hook, then you were into the body and could work the grapple.

  Truman had fought marines, rangers, insurgents, and even other corpusmancers. Fighting and grappling was the favorite pastime during his service. He’d done a lot of it. But he wasn’t going to do it now. He was going to take the punch, grab the kid, throw him out the ShopsMart, and that was going to be it.

  Truman watched the punch come at his face. It was hard to punch up like that. King Henry could just barely reach. There it came; it was going to hit Truman right on the chin. Amateur . . . but nice accuracy against an unmoving target. He’d go with it. Would hurt less that way. How much force could a one-hundred pound kid put on a punch anyway?

  That’s when he noticed that the itching had stopped . . .

  Oh hell . . .

  Truman watched the punch, felt it collide with his chin, then the whole world started crumbling.

  Blackness.

  *

  Stars.

  It took Truman a whole minute of fuzzy consciousness to realize he was face down on the floor.

  Thank God I mopped.

  He groaned. His jaw felt like mush . . . his neck was screaming. He was pretty sure that even his eyebrows hurt. Plus, there might have been some drooling going on.

  It took Truman another whole minute of semi-fuzzy consciousness to realize there was a pair of heels standing next to his head. “How long?” he grunted.

  “I find that time is only worth what we manage to accomplish during its passing,” Ceinwyn explained, making a lame attempt at fanning him in the face with her briefcase, “Which means that for you, Truman, no time has passed at all.”

  He made another noise that probably had some kind of meaning in one of Earth’s many languages.

  “For me?” Ceinwyn asked. “It was enough time to steal the disc out of your video recorder. Normally I wouldn’t care, since no one outside of our world would notice the Mancy being involved in a fourteen-year-old boy knocking out a twentyish-year-old Army veteran, they would simply claim it as a lucky punch, however . . . the Lady is really going to enjoy this one, Truman.”

  The language of his next noise was English, but perhaps an English of 800AD.

  “King Henry? He had enough time to gloat over your unconscious body and then steal a couple packs of cigarettes before running off.” Ceinwyn’s heels shifted, clicking around his body. “I thought it was considerate of him to not steal more. He really could have taken anything. There must be a heart somewhere in his angry exterior . . .”

  “What happened?” Truman finally reached the modern age.

  “Didn’t we already cover the part where you were knocked out by a fourteen-year-old boy?”

  He levered himself up, arms getting under his body. “How?”

  “Self conjuration on his fist right before it hit you. Pure anima to strengthen the blow. Very effective, don’t you think?”

  “Yeah . . .” Jaw’s not broke, brain’s still working. Could have been worse. Truman got his legs under him, but didn’t bother standing. Instead he crawled over to the counter and leaned his back against it.

  Much better.

  He looked up at Ceinwyn . . . who had a blue smile where the slushie had done its work. Her eyes stared down at him, weighing and measuring, curious to see how he would react to being knocked down and knocked out. Better than the last time.

  “I’ve decided that working retail has made me soft.”

  Ceinwyn’s blue smile twitched. “What gave you that idea?”

  “I’m quitting my job.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I’m going to take the money you’re paying me as finder’s fee,” Truman decided, “and I’m going on a road-trip of the United States.”

  “Lovely time of year for it. Be sure to visit New England in the fall; the foliage is very soothing.”

  “Then I’m going to look for another job suitable for a corpusmancer.”

  Ceinwyn’s hand reached down and Truman took it to get to his feet. She tilted her head, checking him up and down, from buzzed head to metal foot. “I’ll ask around for you.”

  He nodded. Sometimes you need to be knocked down the second time for it to stick, I guess. “Just no teaching . . . I can’t ever look that boy in the face again.”

  “Of course you can’t . . . you’re a foot taller than he is.”

  “Miss Dale . . . was that a joke?”

  “I believe so.”

  “From you?”

  “I joke, Truman, often actua
lly. It’s just so many fail to realize when I’ve joked.”

  He pulled his rag from behind the counter and used it to wet his neck. Might not be sanitary but it made him hurt less. “Like what?” he asked, dreading the answer.

  Instead of answering immediately, she put her briefcase on the counter next to him, popped it open, and filled out a check. When she was done, she handed it over. Ten-thousand dollars off of one chance encounter. Couldn’t say he hadn’t earned it though. Getting knocked out will earn you a lot.

  “Thanks.”

  “For example,” Ceinwyn said, “I recently happened to have a friend of mine get into a dangerous situation with a boy I already knew was an Ultra and a geomancer, just for the benefit of my amusement. Isn’t that funny, Truman?”

  Just for her amusement . . . and so I’d notice what an idiot I’m being, all depressed and working as a cashier in a ShopsMart. “Yeah, it’s funny.”

  “I thought so.”

  She moved to walk away, but he stopped her. “Geomancer?”

  Her smile got wider. “Yes.”

  “Ultra?”

  “That too.”

  Truman thought about it. “Don’t that make him an Artificer?”

  “Yes,” Ceinwyn agreed, “you’re very lucky King Henry didn’t hurt you more. I suppose I would have eventually saved you . . .”

  “I can always count on you, Miss Dale.”

  At the ShopsMart sliding doors her expression changed. The jokes faded, the ageless eyes returned. “Never forget that again, Truman.”

  I’m also lucky King Henry didn’t use the Mancy to break my prosthetic leg . . .

  Truman wouldn’t put it past the little shit.

  THE END

  Conquering Hero

  Following the school story in “The Foul Mouth and the Cat Killing Coyotes,” this short was released as an extra end-cap on the Camping Test for readers that just had to have more. It is the first use of Heinrich Welf’s POV, which would later get its own novelette in “Second Take.”

  “Do you have any questions, Miss Daniels, as to why this is the placement you’re receiving?”