by Lee Hayton
Diane raised her hand and gave a cheery wave before turning back to the pot she was stirring over the old-fashioned stove. The smell of warm lamb rose into the air, enriched with the tang of sweet root vegetables: carrots, parsnips, sweet potatoes, onions. It even blocked out the acrid tang of sweat rising from soldiers exercising too much for too long inside armor heftier than the season demanded.
Nolan downed half his lager in one long swallow and stifled a backwash of gas against his hand, before turning to see if anyone else he knew was at the bar.
There were soldiers, but many fewer than he’d expected. Two over by the side window, chatting up a pair of women who looked like eights, whereas his men—bless ‘em—barely scraped above a four.
Another group of three soldiers played darts along another wall. A game that forced the surrounding crowd of onlookers to take their lives into their hands.
“Where is everybody?” Nolan asked, turning back to the bar. Even though Marvin had moved on to attend to the next patron, he heard and jerked his head toward the back room.
Nolan drank the remaining beer in another long swallow. He thumped the pint glass on the counter and nodded at Marvin for a refill before heading out the back. The door led to a packed wine cellar, redolent with rich smells. The walls were lined with dusty bottles from a vintage no connoisseur had ever noted down in his little black book.
One wall had a rack pulled slightly away, revealing a doorway through to another room. Walking inside, Nolan found it crowded with his men. All gathered in a circle, staring at something in their midst.
“What's happening?” Nolan asked, then shook the shoulder of the man stood next to him when no one bothered to give an answer.
The soldier turned with a frown, transforming into wide-eyed distress when he saw the initiator. Instead of answering, he danced around the circle and exited through a side door.
Concern mounting, Nolan turned a hefty shoulder to the circle and bulldozed his way through the crowd. In the center was a naked woman, sagging skin wrinkled like old elastic stretched too far for too long. An immosium infused yoke hung menacingly around her neck. Her bare back was covered with long thin cuts, and a whistling crack through the air soon let Nolan know why.
A cat of nine tails, leather ends hardened and rolled into spikes, landed on her wrinkled, pale skin. It gouged oozing crimson ridges, a dozen at a time, while the man holding the whip cried out from effort tainted with pleasure.
As the soldiers became aware of his presence, more of Nolan’s men started to scatter, rats abandoning the ship. Scuttling away as though he didn't know where they lived, hadn't memorized each and every face.
Nolan wrenched the weapon from private Masterton's hands. He sublimated the powerful urge to drag its sharpened leathers in a smack across the man's face. An urge he wouldn’t feel like sublimating for long.
He didn't speak, just glared at Masterton until the soldier began to tremble. “We found her… In one of the outlying farms…”
Nolan advanced one hulking step forward and laid a meaty paw on Masterton's shoulder.
“I don't care where you found her,” he said. His voice barely scraped above a whisper. “I care that you broke protocol. We’re killing cockroaches, we do not torture them.”
Shoving the whip handle into Masterton's stomach, Nolan turned to the beaten woman. He held his hand out toward her and turned an enraged face toward his men until they parted to form a path out of the bar door.
Ignoring his outstretched hand, the woman gathered her dignity around her as though she’d donned a shielding cloak. Turning, she walked out of the room with her chin high as if she was not drenched in blood and bereft of clothing.
Nolan trailed in her wake, a lowly courtier to a Queen.
#
As they reached the outdoor cobblestones, Nolan swept past her to lead. He escorted her along the row of shops that made up the high street and into the open fields, en route to the woods.
Although her feet were bare, she made no protest at the rough road, or hard fields, maintaining the same peaceful dignity with which she had left the bar.
Nolan sensed his men trailing behind them, some hanging their heads in shame. As well they should. If he could, he'd see Masterton drummed out of the corps tomorrow. “If he could,” being a question only his superior officer could answer.
The woods behind the town were sparse, much of their foliage pulled down over decades to form the buildings or warm their inhabitants. What was left, sheltered brightly dotted flowers more suited to a meadow. Without the tall trees that usually would block the sunlight, the growth of many different plants was encouraged.
Although he hadn't been there since he was a boy, Nolan led her straight to an old clearing. Whether his father Duncan had shown him, or more likely his mother on one of their spontaneous picnics out of town. He couldn't remember. Just that the fairy loops of mushrooms made the place feel magical. Whether any magic lingered here.
The woman settled into a relaxed stance, once again in the center of a cleared circle. This time without the jeers, without the stares, without the plunging daggers of leather ripping at her flesh. She knelt and ran her hands through the long grass. Already the night had closed in enough that dew clumped into fat drops along each blade of grass.
“Am I allowed to take off the collar?” she asked, turning her face up to Nolan. He looked around at his men, the ones who’d felt bad enough to follow him. Only when the last gave a small nod, did he step forward to unlock it and answer, “Yes.”
Against the rules, but he trusted his men’s silent communication.
She lifted the yoke above her head and placed it upon the glass. The magic began to glow, rushing up and outward from her heart.
Bright cyan, darts of tangerine, deepest violet shot through with buttercup yellow. The magic was a rainbow of light across her naked skin.
Each furrow in her skin healed, though blood still stained around the thin scar tissue. magic was good, but it couldn’t work miracles.
Nolan sensed his men began to shift, heard faint mutters as the light danced in front of them. After spending so many years to eradicate the magic from the world, its appearance in all its raw glory filled each soldier with unease.
Even Nolan, who knew better than most what it could do, felt a shiver up his spine as the stuff of nightmares danced and played.
“There’s no use me begging you for mercy,” the woman said, her voice as smooth as honey. Although the gentleness of it should have lulled him, Nolan felt the first piercing stab of fear.
“I'm not stupid enough to believe you'll let me go, and I remain bound to the covenant.”
A sigh of relief came from the man directly behind Nolan, though his own muscles didn't relax. The covenant was an oath that every magic man or woman agreed to abide by. To do no harm, to use magic for only good, able to initiate for self-defense, but not to the level where it could be used for preemptive attack.
In the early days, with their community reeling from underground whispers of what was happening, some magic men had broken the bond and attempted to fight, death against death.
Soldiers had been wounded, many died, but the men who wielded the magic blows didn't make it out alive. Instead of needing a sword to the stomach, or a gun to the head, the men were consumed by their own powers. The choice to break a sacred bond spelling their demise.
When that news spread, the trouble ceased. The men and woman who wielded magic growing as scared of its power as the army had always been.
The woman tossed a ball of periwinkle blue from hand to hand, performing something akin to group hypnosis. Although he felt the pull of the light, Nolan turned his head aside. The man off to his right stared in rapt attention, oblivious to his surroundings until Nolan shoved the hilt of his sword hard into the soldier’s shoulder. The man blinked in irritation and shook his head, passing the gesture on to the next in line. Provoking each one in turn until the spell was broken.
The woman smiled wit
hout joy and dropped the magic back into its normal energy flow.
“It's a pity to see you here, Helmond,” she said unexpectedly, looking up to stare him straight in the eye. “Are you still in thrall to your father?”
Anxiety constricted Nolan's chest so suddenly that a sad gasp emerged. His confused mind tossed through a thousand faces trying to place her in his history.
“Would you remember me like this?” the woman said, tilting her head to one side. Years fell away from her skin, wrinkles disappearing in a second. The wives of Nolan’s aging friends would kill to possess that liberating secret.
Before her transformation was complete, Nolan already knew the face he'd see. Really, the only female face he'd ever associated with magic. The woman who’d helped him when he was depressed, left him with a choice he'd failed. Invited him to years of guilt and despair.
“You can let me go,” she said. “No one even need come after me again. After all, I'm the last.”
Nolan bowed his head in recognition of her intelligence. No officer would be fooled by her statement, but the soldiers he commanded might fall under its optimistic spell. They’d react subconsciously and resent the difficult road ahead.
She wasn't the last. Maybe not even close to it. Simply the last of those that were easy to find.
With her words, she’d built a battle for Nolan next week, or next month, when the army called again upon his soldiers. An irritating fight would ensue to have them continue their paid tasks. A seed of completion growing like tangled weeds inside their heads.
Nolan drew his sword. Not for show this time, but for his innate sense of ceremony. The army had slapped guns together with devastating efficiency when the eradication of magic became its top priority. He’d never think of them as fondly as the first weapon he’d wielded.
“Do you have any last words?” Nolan asked. Not from chivalry but because he admired her tenacity. He was curious what other attempts she’d make to fight back against her fate.
The woman drew herself up to regal height. “You were born for magic, Helmond. You too, Mansfield.” She nodded to another man. “And you, Thompson. That emptiness hollowing out your insides won't be filled with anything else.”
Nolan opened his mouth to retort, but the words were dragged into the remorseless pit she spoke of. The one he’d felt grow from the first moment he could remember. His eyes widened as he looked across at the other named soldiers and saw the same recognition falling into place.
The woman tilted back her head, chin held high, and stared at them with steely pity.
“Remember, when you and your children are dying unfulfilled in whatever shithole you crawl into, this was your last chance to stand up and join your destiny.”
Jason's face flashed in front of Nolan's eyes. Not the bully boy, but the fallen healer. Contentment etched into the lines of his slaughtered face, an expression Nolan’s own features had never mastered.
He threw up—ropes of vomit thick with phlegm and pungent with hops. The beer he’d downed so easily, caused his tender stomach to rupture into bloody streaks as it violently came back up.
The woman stretched out one flowing hand, a healing bauble dancing above the palm. For a second, it seemed possible for him to accept the wavering light from her hand.
Then he jerked back in disapproval, and the glow died away. The magic slunk down her body into the earth. When he glanced up, her lips curled into a mocking sneer. “You made the wrong choice, Nolan.”
With a cry of anger surging up from his exposed sorrow, Nolan swung his sword in a wide circle. Gathering up the speed to decapitate her in one short gesture. The resistance of impact shuddered up to his shoulders.
An empty echo of her last words circled, an earworm boring into his head.
Chapter Seven
Nolan’s mother looked shrunken to doll’s size in the hospital bed. Her hair, a strong iron gray for years, had turned ghostly white in the space of a few short months. She shifted her legs and groaned at the pain. Nolan’s heart lurched in his chest. Battles had been fought and lost at the cost of less distress than this.
“I can get the nurse,” he said, looking wide-eyed over his shoulder for help. The dark shrouded women were otherwise engaged, gathered busily around a new arrival. Their hands were wringing together in unconscious mimicry of the relatives’ distress.
“Don’t worry.” His mother stretched out gentle fingers, marred with the gnarled misshapen knuckles of arthritis. “They can’t do much, anyway.”
Helplessness choked him into silence, and he ignored her gesture to ball his hands into tight fists. For a minute, he tried to hold her peaceful gaze, but soon Nolan’s eyes wandered away again to the floor.
Cheap tiles covered the room—black and white, looking as though they were constructed out of plastic. For all Nolan knew, they were. Tacky but easy to clean. A few drops of urine, spattered under the window ledge when a full container had been carelessly dropped earlier, glistened in the dull light. The janitor had swept his mop by them but the sodden strands didn’t quite reach far enough. If it had been the barracks, Nolan would have torn the man to shreds. In here, he was so far from his comfort zone that he didn’t even have the balls to whisper a comment.
A woman on the bed behind them began to moan in pain, and he stole a surreptitious glance in her direction. Her belly distended outward, bloated with gas or fluid, pregnant with some dread disease.
Six women in this room. Each direction he turned welcomed him into another level of low-grade horror. The clean hospitals of which his father once boasted, dirty shacks, full of disillusion.
You made the wrong choice, Nolan.
At nights, when he went home to toss and turn, sleepless until the early morning hours, Nolan cursed his father for escaping this. The dreadful world he’d influenced his gullible son to shape.
Once upon a time, he would have taken his mother for a trip into the village. After making a small donation, a magic man or woman would have placed their powerful hands upon her wizened body. Five minutes—ten tops—and her pain would be scared into submission.
Now, she waited an hour or two for the painkillers to take effect, dulling their target down rather than expelling it. A few hours more of inferior comfort and the cycle began again.
Anything stronger knocked her into garbled semi-consciousness. Joke medicine as it was, the pain relief had even begun to eat away her stomach. Gnawing holes where the remorseless teeth of ulcers bit deep and wouldn’t let go.
Welcome to the miracle of discovery that his father believed would replace magic. Frustration burned at Nolan’s soul, while regret burned behind his dry eyes.
As he crept away for the night, he accidentally bumped her bed. His mother’s whole body convulsed into a wince, and he saw the full extent of her pain. Lying awake that night, he considered she even welcomed it. Penance for the unsalvageable wrong she let her husband and her son commit.
Days went by, blending into one long nightmare until all Nolan could wish was for it to be over. For his beloved mother to loosen her intimately loved grip for the final time. To let the world and him slip away.
On the morning she did let go, regret and guilt piled on top of his burden of transgressions. The vacuum of losing his last relative no match for the emptiness that magic would never fill.
Rage and regret overwhelmed Nolan, and he grabbed his army knife from his boot. He stalked into the nearest bathroom and eyed his hollow guise with distaste in the mirror.
A hostile gash along his cheekbone where a kind lady once healed the skin without a scar. He dug the knife deep, flicking it down and away. The edge of the blade caught his lip, slicing it open and skidding on the unyielding hardness of his teeth. Blood spilled in a stream as he reversed the knife and bashed the handle into the top of his new wound. His cheek swelled like an inflating balloon.
He jammed the blade into his side, punching his fury through the indifferent skin until the point slid along his ribcage. In second
s, his lungs ignited into fire. Nolan clamped his elbow tight against his body so he could keep on breathing.
Last of all, he plunged the knife into his left leg, gouging out the strained tendons in the back of his knee. An inferior copy of the first wound he’d received in army training. The one he’d lifted the yoke of a prisoner to have healed. A prisoner he’d then followed orders to shoot.
He’d stripped the world of magic. Let the good it had done him also be gone.
Nolan lay in lonely isolation on the bathroom floor for hours. When the black-robed women attempted entry, he barked at them to stay away. Only when the pain numbed down to tolerable, did he limp from the cramped hospital out to the street. Passers-by looked at his blood-soaked clothing and wild eyes and wisely crossed the road to avoid him.
He called two men on the phone, rousing them into action with a few well-chosen syllables. When they came, they brought torches with them. Not for lightening the threatening night sky, but for setting the whole mess alight.
As the sun extinguished itself on the horizon at the end of the day on which his mother died, Nolan Helmond and his sorrowful brothers set fire to the town that also bore its share of shame.
Chapter Eight
Ciaran ran about the meadow, filled with joy. The sun warmed his back with its strong afternoon rays. When he wandered into the path of a skeleton, he’d bow respectfully before continuing with his game.
As he crossed the edge of the woods to chase a butterfly, the temperature dipped down ten degrees. Gooseflesh popped out, raising the hairs up on his arm, and Ciaran felt icy fingers play mournful notes on the vertebrae of his spine.
In a pretense of bravery, Ciaran ventured another few steps forward. Here, the darkness broke into dappled light where the treetop canopy stretched too far apart.
Another skeleton lay partly submerged in an ocean of wildflowers. Blue and violet, yellow and flaming orange, the petals formed a crashing spray, drops refracting a rainbow of delight. Although the skeleton’s shoulders stretched upward toward the sky, the skull hadn’t fallen near the earth-soaked bones. Instead, it lay yards away, its jaw stretched wide as though shouting in terror to an unhearing world.