by Isaac Hooke
Hoodwink had stopped going to executions after that.
At least that man had had a chance at survival, though. Hoodwink wouldn't get the same chance—the cold steel of this machine that assembly-lined death made sure of that. Lift the blade. Flick the lever. Chop off the head. He felt sick to his stomach. Good thing he hadn't eaten all day. It wouldn't do to sick up in front of all these people.
For her, he did this for her.
But would it be enough?
"Behead! Behead! Behead!"
The executioner approached from the front. He was a fat gol, but not as stout as Briar. A black hood covered his face. Wouldn't want to splash head blood on his features now would he? A long black apron hung around his neck, secured at the waist, just like a butcher's. That's what he was after all. A man-butcher. The red sword of his profession was proudly stamped into the apron.
Hoodwink cursed the gol, but he couldn't hear his own voice above the crowd. He noted that the executioner carried the blunt-tipped, green-colored sword from the dungeon at his waist. A backup in case the guillotine failed? He had no idea. Hoodwink wished all of a sudden he hadn't stopped going to executions...
And then the gol sidled from view, moving off to where he could work the mechanisms of the guillotine. Hoodwink tried to crane his neck to look, but the head-prison held him firmly.
"Behead! Behead! Behead!"
The cries of the crowd crescendoed, only to abruptly cease as a collective breath was held.
Hoodwink heard nothing for long moments. Finally a distinct, malevolent CLICK sounded.
He felt the vibrations as the blade descended along the guides. The loud rasp of steel on steel consumed all else.
His life flashed before him. A childhood spent on the streets of Luckdown District. Puberty, and the years of swindling and wenching that had earned him his name. Then came the two weeks of power at fifteen years old, the two glorious weeks before the gols found and collared him. The collaring changed him, and he sobered up, attempted to earn an honest living. He almost succeeded.
But then the jewel that lit up his life was taken away.
She deserved so much better.
The blade struck.
CHAPTER THREE
The impact jolted his entire body. A dark veil descended over his vision. The basket rushing up to meet his head?
No.
He blinked a few times, clearing away the darkness. The collection basket remained where it was a pace below him.
The impossible had occurred.
His head was still attached to his body.
Beside him, the executioner grunted in surprise. A few gasps came from the audience.
Hoodwink felt his face grow hot. A weight like that of the entire world pressed on his neck. He felt vertebrae and tendons shift ever so slightly.
It was obvious the blade hadn't passed clean through the bronze bitch, but he couldn't tell if any part of his own neck was severed, because the entire area throbbed. He had the presence of mind to wiggle his toes, and that told him what he needed to know.
He heard the executioner straining beside him, and Hoodwink's neck jerked up and down within the head-prison as the executioner repeatedly yanked the pulley linked to the blade. There came a pause, and the executioner must have looked at the judge, because Hoodwink heard him say, "Well keep trying you fool."
Hoodwink's head jerked up and down more rapidly, and stars pocked his vision. The executioner set a heavy boot on Hoodwink's shoulder and pressed hard. It felt like Hoodwink's whole right side was caving in, while his neck bent the other way.
Finally the blade slid free with a loud rasp. Hoodwink heard the killing instrument slam into the top of the guillotine, and he felt the vibration as the blade began its second beheading attempt.
A tingle of power arose inside him, and time seemed to slow. It started as a spark, deep in his mind, a flicker of electricity that expanded outward and traveled down his neck, across his torso, into his arms and legs to the tips of his fingers and toes. The electricity pulsed through him in waves, a starving hound leashed before a helpless doe, waiting for its master to unleash its fury.
The bronze bitch had sprung a leak.
Hoodwink pushed against that leak and released the electrical energy held at bay for twenty years inside him.
The entire apparatus exploded away from him. Guillotine, shackles, collar, blade.
The courthouse erupted in screams as debris tore through the spectators. Hoodwink glanced at the nearest benches. The onlookers were bruised and bloodied. He tried not to look overly long. He'd already seen one man with a bloody stump in place of an arm, and another with a thick shard of wood protruding from his belly. Hoodwink didn't need to see more. He knew those images would haunt him enough. He hadn't meant to hurt anyone.
Beside him, the judge and nearby guards lay unmoving, bodies mangled and broken. The executioner himself was still standing, torso nailed gurgling to the judge's desk by the guillotine blade. Hoodwink felt no regret for these. They were gols. Not real people like the spectators.
The guards at the back of the courthouse—behind the wounded bystanders—were forcing their way forward through the mayhem. Hoodwink tried to draw more lightning, but couldn't. He was so out of practice, he'd mistakenly used all his charge in that opening gambit. It would be hours, maybe days, before he fully recharged.
He snatched up the judge's ermineskin cloak, grabbed the executioner's blunt-tipped sword, and made for the back door, the same door they'd carried the guillotine in from. The limp from this morning had worsened—a wooden fragment protruded from his leg, adding to the pain of his previously twisted ankle.
Hoodwink threw his weight into the door and burst into an all-out snowstorm.
The sudden cold took him aback but he forced himself onward. The frigid gale blinded him and brought tears to his eyes. He hardly recognized this for a city street. He could see maybe ten paces, no more. Snow drifts had buried everything, leaving only a blurry landscape of white mounds.
He had to find shelter, and soon. The wind clawed right through his jail-issue orange robe.
His limp actually improved out there. The cold numbed the pain, just as it numbed everything else. But he advanced no faster, because the snow swallowed his legs to the thighs.
He heard shouts behind him as guards emerged from the courthouse. Hoodwink ducked down an alleyway, visible as such only because of the concave notch the drifts made between houses, and he waded hurriedly through the snow.
He reached the alley's edge and peered around it. Through the whirling snow he saw the spectators fleeing from the front of the courthouse. Good.
He hid the sword in his robes and joined the crowd, just another spectator injured in what the criers would undoubtedly call a terrorist attack. He pulled the stolen ermineskin cloak tight, hoping it hid most of his jail-issue robes. There was a woman just ahead of him. She had a bloody stump for an arm.
"I'm sorry," he said quietly, though his voice wouldn't have carried above the wind.
He risked a backward glance. The guards had emerged from the alleyway, and were scanning the crowd through the snowstorm. One of them met his eye, and gave a shout.
Hoodwink cursed his luck, wondering how the gol could have possibly identified him at this distance. He shoved his way through the crowd, limping as fast as he was able.
"This way!" An old man grabbed his hand. "I can help you!"
Hoodwink had scarce few friends right about now, and he could definitely use all the help he could get, so he let the old man lead him through the blowing snow. He felt the electricity slowly seeping back, fanning that spark deep in his mind. But it was a gradual seeping. Too gradual. A snail crossed a city street faster. It'd be another day or two before he returned to full strength.
He glanced over his shoulder. The wind whipped the veil of falling snow aside, and he caught a glimpse of the guards. They were closing the gap, and fast. Worse, more had joined the chase from a nearby barracks.
The crowd thinned, and soon the only thing between the guards and Hoodwink were the snowdrifts, and the blizzard. He pushed on, letting the old man drag him forward. Hoodwink limped for all he was worth. He truly did. But it was useless. The crunch of those pursuing boots kept getting louder.
"Leave me, old man." Hoodwink pushed the old man away. He didn't want someone else to get hurt because of him.
He turned to face his pursuers and tried to tap into his powers, but he couldn't even muster a spark.
It looked like the entire city guard had joined in the chase. The street was full of them, four ranks thick. Most were gol, but there were a few collared among them. Every sword was drawn.
Hoodwink raised his palms in surrender, wondering if they'd execute him on the spot.
CHAPTER FOUR
The guards slowed as they neared, perhaps suspecting a trap.
Hoodwink smiled, standing there on that street where he'd probably die. He kept his arms raised in surrender.
The closest guard—their leader?—was a gol with nasty cuts on one eye. The broken guillotine had mangled his face pretty good. No man could function with a face like that, not without some serious healing. But this was a gol, not a man, Hoodwink had to remind himself.
The guard stopped a full three paces away, and lifted a hand to halt the others behind him. The snow whirled between Hoodwink and the gol as the storm raged on.
"Well, get on with it Bleeding Eye!" Hoodwink said into the silence that followed this unexpected standoff. "Kill me." In answer came only the howl of the wind.
Hoodwink noticed a glow coming from his own leg. When he glanced down, he saw that the light came from the drops of blood trickling into the snow from his lacerated calf.
Drops of blood that glowed blue.
Hoodwink swallowed a rising panic. He'd accessed powers he hadn't used in ages. Forbidden powers. Who knew what the side effects were? He was dying, that much was certain.
He looked at the men again, and saw the uncertainty written on those faces. Not quite fright. No, you couldn't frighten gols. But indecision, yes.
Perhaps he could use their indecision against them.
He was dead anyway.
He had nothing to lose.
Hoodwink took a menacing step forward. "The whole lot of you have five seconds before I explode you all. You think the guillotine was something? Just wait till I reduce you to cinders." That wasn't possible, of course, given how low his charge was. But the gols couldn't know. Nor even the human guards among them. Who could say what a murderous uncollared adult could do? They'd certainly heard the same stories as him. Stories about uncollared men ripping others apart with a look. Maybe they'd even faced some of those men. "Five seconds. Drop your swords and run. Five."
"Four."
"Three."
"Two."
They ran. All it took was Bleeding Eye turning his tail and the rest of them broke ranks. It was a complete route. Some slipped in their hurry to be away from there, and fell into the drifts. But they always got up again and, with a frantic looks back, ran on.
Hoodwink heard a strange sizzling.
He turned around, and realized it wasn't him who the gols were afraid of, but the banshee covered in writhing sparks of blue electricity behind him.
The banshee noticed his gaze and instantly the electricity went out, leaving the old man in its place.
"You have lightning too." Hoodwink stared at the old man for a moment, but then his weariness finally caught up with him and he collapsed.
The old man helped him to his feet and braced him with one shoulder. Hoodwink was too drained to protest. The loss of blood was getting to him. He felt numb all over, but mostly in his hands and feet. Frostbite, undoubtedly.
"Who are you?" Hoodwink said.
The old man smiled indulgently, revealing a mouth as toothless as a street brawler's. "You'll know everything soon enough." The old man raised a hand sparking with electricity. Hoodwink recoiled, but the man clasped his palm and Hoodwink felt a surge of energy pass between them. "Feel better?"
Hoodwink nodded. He felt a little refreshed, and his extremities seemed less numb, though the old man still had to brace him with one arm as he led Hoodwink through the snowstorm. The conditions were becoming near whiteout, and the visibility certainly wasn't helped by the late hour. He let the surprisingly strong old man carry him onward, and the moments passed in a blur of snow drifts and weariness.
Hoodwink's gaze was drawn by movement to his left. He saw a bumblebee in the blizzard. The snowflakes parted to either side of the insect as if there were some invisible force emanating from the bee. It buzzed right up to Hoodwink's face and hovered there, a handspan from his nose, the flakes falling umbrellalike around it. Then it buzzed away.
Hoodwink was hallucinating from the blood loss obviously. He had likely imagined all of this. The blue blood. The old man's turn as an electrical banshee. But how did he escape the guards then?
Finally the old man paused before a flimsy door set into a cabin three times larger than its neighbors. The snow had piled up past the roof, and it was only through the diligent shoveling of whoever lived here that the door was even accessible. Hoodwink wasn't sure exactly where he was, but he was in no condition to resist as the old man dragged him inside.
"Helluva storm," the old man said as he shut the door behind them. He had to throw his weight into the wood to get the thing to close completely. "The prophets promised it would be an age of ice. Damn them for being right."
Hoodwink stood hunched in a cozy lobby. He was immediately attracted to the fireplace with its set of four ladderback chairs, where he plunked himself down. He was too weak to warm his hands over the coals, and he surveyed the room through half-closed lids. The windows were all frosted up, of course. An unmanned service desk lay near the fireplace. On the other side, the room opened into a hallway where the rooms were numbered.
"What is—" Hoodwink said, fighting off the sleep. "Where are—"
"Just a simple inn, laddy." The old man grabbed a poker from beside the fireplace and stoked the flames. "Let me apply a healing shard."
"A shard." It was illegal to carry one, because to activate a shard required a User's power. Hoodwink smiled grimly. "Of course you have a shard."
The old man ripped open the hem of Hoodwink's jail-issue robe and slid the boot off. The pain roused Hoodwink somewhat. "Name's Alan. Alan Dooran. Friends call me Al."
Hoodwink glanced down to see a gory scene that nearly made him vomit. It hadn't looked so bad before, with the robe covering it, but now? A black sliver of bone jutted from the front of his calf alongside the wooden fragment, and the entire area had swollen the size of a melon. Blue blood drenched the entire lower leg. Blue. So he hadn't been hallucinating.
Well, the blood had stopped dripping, at least.
"Got yourself a nice piece of wood in your leg." Al grasped the wooden fragment and braced his boot on the top of Hoodwink's toes. "Better grip yourself tight."
"Wait," Hoodwink said. "Why is it blue?"
"Got no charge left," Al said nonchalantly.
The old man pulled the fragment.
Hoodwink struggled to stay in the chair as fresh spurts of pain flared in his calf. Stars exploded across his vision from the sheer agony of it, and when the wood broke free in a fountain of gore he cried out in pain.
The blood gushed from him in blue spurts.
"Looks like it hit a major artery." Al reached for the poker, and applied the sizzling end to Hoodwink's calf.
Teeth-grinding pain brought more stars to his vision, and Hoodwink felt his hold on consciousness grow tenuous. The burning didn't seem to do anything, and the blood gushed from him worse than ever.
He was barely aware as Al reached into his cloak and pulled out a crystalline creature that resembled a starfish.
The healing shard.
Al applied the creature to Hoodwink's calf. This thing, the shard, felt extremely cold against the hot pain
of the wound, and Hoodwink gasped. Al released electricity into the shard, and the creature began melting into Hoodwink's skin. As it did so the melon-sized lump shrunk until both wound and creature were gone.
Hoodwink blinked away the nausea, and bent over to examine the wound. Not a trace of the injury remained. Even his twisted ankle further down felt a little better—he could revolve the foot with less pain.
"Careful," Al said. "You've lost a lot of blood."
Hoodwink stared at the blue puddle on the floor. "You're a User." He shouldn't have spoken, because he felt a fresh wave of nausea. He sat himself back in the chair. It was like he'd just run a marathon. His face was flushed, and he was panting. He shook his head, tried to clear his mind. His fingers had begun to burn now that they were thawing out. His toes fared just as badly.
"I am," Al said.
Hoodwink's gaze fell to the man's neck. "But you wear a collar."
That smile widened. "Obviously ain't a real bronze bitch. Have to wear something to keep the gols at bay."
"Why did you save me, old man?"
Al straightened, as if offended. "The same reason I'd save any other innocent human being, of course. Because it's the right thing to do. And I ain't so old. Thirty-four, by my reckoning. Younger than you."
He looked closer to eighty-four, but Hoodwink didn't comment. Something else Al said had caught his attention. "You called me innocent."
"I did. I've something to show you." Al hoisted him to his feet, and helped him across the lobby. He led Hoodwink into the frigid hallway, where the candles burned low. Those carpets were grungy, the walls smeared in fingerprints. The rooms started at 2000, and increased sequentially. 2001. 2002. 2007. 2012.
Al stopped beside the one labeled 2013.
The old man lifted an eyebrow. "Ready?"