by Shaun Barger
Nikolai collapsed on top of him, turning him over. The half-mage tried to swing at Nik, but Nik just bolted the offending hand down with an arch of hardened air, pinning it to the ground, then the other—bones crunching audibly as the wrists snapped.
“Please!” the half-mage blubbered, tears pouring down his pockmarked face. “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! Let me go, lemmegolemmegolemmego—”
“Shut up! Shut your fucking mouth!”
Nikolai jammed the knife between Fat Man’s teeth, viciously shooting jellied air down the half-mage’s throat to fill his lungs and belly.
He stopped, horrified as he realized what he was doing, and released the weaves.
The half-mage gasped a ragged breath, wheezing hideously as he passed out. Nearby, the skinny one gurgled, a smoking mass.
Nikolai stumbled out of the alley toward the invisible pulsing beacon of his baton. His blade Focal fell loosely from fingers; he could barely feel it as he collapsed onto the street. It was dark, even beyond the alley—a single streetlight burning dully a quarter of a block away.
“Help!” Nikolai screamed, the pool of blood growing around him. “HELP!”
The light began to swim in his vision, fingers going cold, numb, and soon he couldn’t hold onto his wound anymore—could feel the blood coursing hot down his side.
As the dark grew, and the cold began to deepen, he closed his eyes and remembered Astor’s little hand tightly gripping his own.
* * *
For matters of importance, Captain Jubal preferred holding meetings in the parlor of his lavish estate instead of his office in HQ.
Nikolai sat across from the captain, a graying moonfaced mage who looked to be in his sixties, even though he was quite nearly 125 years old. Though not quite able to completely halt the aging process, healers could slow the ravages of time well enough so that most magi lived well into their second century—the most powerful even into their third.
Beside the captain stood his second-in-command, First Lancer Thane, who led expeditions beyond the Veil. He was a towering, muscular man—bald and maggot pale. One of his ears was melted like wax at the center of a burn scar. His logic Focal was an ivory pocket watch hanging from the breast of his uniform by a milky white chain. His art Focal was a golden club covered in thorns of ruby.
Thane had always made Nikolai uneasy. There was a casual cruelty to the man, made evident to Nik the one time Thane had taken it upon himself to test Nikolai’s combat abilities as a cadet—which had been far more advanced than those of his fellow trainees.
Nikolai still bore a small scar on his back from the session where Thane had struck him with his thorned Focal as punishment for letting his guard down. The Lancer had forbidden Nikolai from healing the wound magically, so the mark would serve as a permanent reminder.
In some ways, Thane reminded Nikolai of his mother. Though unlike Thane, she’d never seemed to take pleasure in her abuse. Even at her worst.
Not even Captain Jubal seemed to like the Battle Mage, though he hid it well enough. Rumor had it that Jubal had quite nearly forced Thane to resign for wounding Nikolai—but the Lancer had been appointed by the king, and in the end he’d merely been made to apologize.
Captain Jubal sighed heavily, seeming to deflate as he stared at Nikolai, who kept his eyes downcast, his face a carefully calculated mask of contrition.
“It’s all a bit fuzzy,” Nikolai said. “The healer gave me a low dose of Tabula Rasa, so the . . . fight . . . feels more like a bad dream than anything. I can remember it, but only in flashes and patches.”
“Bested by a couple half-mage alley rats,” Thane hissed, wormy lips twisting into a sneer. “Pathetic.”
Captain Jubal regarded Nikolai silently, tapping the pommel of his candy-striped cane Focal propped beside him. Nikolai had never seen Jubal’s art Focal. He assumed it was a weapon, like Ilyana’s ruby blade, Albert’s rapier, or his own dagger. No one seemed to know, and it was something of a mystery among the Edge Guard. The low-ranking ones, at least.
“And why, might I ask,” Jubal finally said, “were you flying around the Noir in the middle of the night drunk out of your mind?”
Nikolai shrugged, at a loss. Jubal’s expression softened, and he opened his mouth to speak but was interrupted by a faint hum. He touched the crystal nestled in his ear with a sound of annoyance.
“Styx. Pardon me, Nikolai. I’ve got to take a call with the duchess-elect back on the crystal in my office. Thane, I need you on this call too. Disc-damned royalty—no respect for other magi’s time. There’s coffee in stasis in the kitchen down the hall. Help yourself.”
The parlor opened directly into the high-walled courtyards circling Jubal’s manor, the air fragrant with tropical fruit trees and great cascades of exotic flowers. An ornate door at the end of a garden path led to Captain Jubal’s office halfway across the city via extravagantly expensive folded space enchantments.
Nikolai was always struck by how silently Captain Jubal moved despite his middling stature and fleshy frame. “I’ll try to keep this short but it might take a while,” Jubal called back, passing through the door into the darkly wooded room.
Thane cast one final look of disgust at Nikolai before following the captain.
“Fucking asshole,” Nikolai muttered, once the Lancer was safely out of earshot.
Suddenly alone, he became acutely aware of the Moonwatch medallion in his pocket. A key to any door, given with the vague instructions to look to Jubal’s library.
He’d decided to hand over the medallion and tell Jubal the truth about what transpired with Hazeal. But now . . . with the captain’s estate all to himself . . .
Breathing deeply to slow his pounding heart, Nikolai rose.
Coffee. He was just getting coffee.
But as his sneakers moved noiselessly over marble so polished he could see his reflection, Nikolai found himself passing the kitchen and continuing deeper into Jubal’s home.
He began to sweat, his will diminishing with every step as he searched for the library. Twice he stopped, knowing that he should turn back, that what he was doing was stupid. Dangerous even.
But then he could hear Hazeal’s words.
Murderer. Butcher.
Pounding in his ears like a drumbeat. Pushing him forward.
Murderer. BUTCHER.
Lit with soft, honey-yellow glow bulbs, Jubal’s estate was a museum of exquisite furniture and eclectic human art. There, a painting marked as Vincent van Gogh’s The Red Vineyard. There, a print marked as Shepard Fairey’s Barack Obama “Hope” Poster.
Nikolai turned down a long, richly carpeted hallway—and there it was.
The library.
Three floors of old cloth- and leather-bound volumes—a hodgepodge of priceless magical tomes and old manuscripts. Two heavily enchanted display cases were the obvious centerpieces of his collection.
There were several translations of the Torah, Qur’an, Christian gospels and testaments, Buddhist Tripitaka, Hindu Bhagavad-Gita, and Bardo Thodol—the Tibetan Book of the Dead.
Other works Nikolai had never heard of: The Canaanite Book of Divination—noted on the label as one of the earliest works of necromancy. Beside it was The Binding of Thanatos—a famously illegal grimoire from ancient Greece.
Stomach in knots, Nikolai pulled his tracking spectacles from his breast pocket and began to poke around. Countless footprints crisscrossing the thick carpeting appeared as sparkling phantoms through the enchanted lenses, the older tracks glowing more faintly than the new.
He followed them one set at a time in dizzying spirals around the library until he finally found several leading directly into a bookshelf against the far wall.
There weren’t any lingering track marks on the books themselves, so he removed the spectacles and began brushing his fingers across the bindings. This shelf was primarily composed of human literature, classic through contemporary. Through his fingertips he detected simple preservation enchantmen
ts, but nothing out of the ordinary.
He wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his uniform and began again, more slowly this time.
“Come on . . . come on . . .”
There.
There was something different about the pristine white copy of Stephen King’s The Stand.
Nikolai removed it from the shelf and nothing happened, the unusual enchantments no longer detectable. Placing the novel back on the shelf, he twisted his fingers, following a subtle labyrinth of secret weaves, tracing them into a spiraling funnel at the base.
Taking a deep breath, he channeled a delicate thread of energy into the invisible circle.
Click.
The bookshelf came ajar, swinging silently on well-oiled hinges. The shelf revealed a staircase descending into darkness, echoing with a previously muted cacophony of men screaming with fear and pain that almost made him fall backward in shock.
A hand closed firmly on Nikolai’s shoulder.
He cried out in surprise, spinning around as he lashed out with his baton.
Captain Jubal deftly stepped back, effortlessly moving beyond his swing—though not quickly enough to save the steaming mug from being knocked from his grasp as Nikolai stood there, horrified.
Jubal’s lips pressed thin as he watched coffee drip down the ancient manuscripts. He returned his gaze to Nikolai, who stood with his Focals drawn, frozen.
Behind Nikolai, there came another scream. He winced, glancing over his shoulder, then back at Jubal.
“Lost?” Jubal said flatly.
Jubal looked at Nikolai’s drawn Focals. Hands trembling, Nikolai slid them back into their hilts and stood at attention.
“Sir. I’m sorry, I was just looking at your books, and that one caught my eye, and . . .”
He was interrupted by another scream and trailed off. Jubal looked past him, into the darkness.
“You want to know what’s down there, don’t you?”
“Sir,” Nikolai protested. “I didn’t mean to snoop, I was looking at the book and I thought the enchantments on the cover were weird, so—”
Jubal cut him off with a sharp gesture. “You’ve found my secret spot. My other . . . study. Don’t you want to see what’s inside?”
“Sir?”
Nikolai kept his hands pressed firmly at his sides, desperately wanting to grab for his Focals. But Jubal was a magus—a master in one or more spellcasting domains. At least one of which was battle magic, in the captain’s case. He wouldn’t even need to use his candy-striped Focal to turn Nikolai into cinder.
Jubal stepped closer, looming. He wasn’t a tall man, but he was imposing. Broad shouldered with thick, muscular arms. More than that, he carried himself with a demeanor held only by the most powerful magi.
He put his hand on Nikolai’s shoulder—gentle but firm—and turned him to face the stairwell. Light flickered at the bottom. The screams grew louder as they began to descend. Nikolai whimpered, helpless and numbly resigned to whatever fate awaited below.
An oddly dull roar of gunfire joined the screaming. And then . . . music?
They reached the bottom of the staircase, turned the corner, and—
It was a home theater. There was a war movie on, projected from an old film reel at the back of the room, a dusty beam of light cast over plush leather sofas.
The movie was brutal. Graphic. Human soldiers with bayonets storming trenches and butchering one another.
Nikolai let out a long breath, suddenly so weak that had Jubal not been holding his shoulder he’d have sunk down to his knees.
Jubal was making an odd noise behind Nikolai, who turned to find him laughing.
“Oh! Oh, ho, ho, oh! The look on your face! If you could see yourself—”
Nikolai moved to one of the couches and nearly collapsed into it. The movie was extremely loud—blaring from speakers strung up along the walls. Human tech—electrical.
“Disc, sir,” Nikolai said, still trembling. “I thought you had some sort of—”
“Torture laboratory? Some sort of evil Necromancer lair?” Jubal chuckled, and switched off the projector. The silence was a relief. “Nothing so interesting as that, I’m afraid. Just a fellow fan of human cinema. Before you arrived I was doing a little organizing in the library. Left the door open while I worked so I could listen from upstairs.”
Jubal led Nikolai to a minibar along the side of the cozy padded room. With a twist of his fingers he created two perfect spheres of ice and dropped them into a pair of glasses. He poured amber fluid over the spheres and gave one to the still-shaken Nikolai.
“Bourbon,” Jubal said. “I’m a southern mage, Nikolai. None of this honeybrew or dragon’s milk nonsense.”
Nikolai grimaced as he took a sip.
“Takes some getting used to,” Jubal said, swirling the alcohol in his glass. “Here, let me show you something.”
Jubal led Nikolai through a door into a long, white-walled gallery of old human machine parts, devices, and art of both human and magi origin. There were oil lamps and light bulbs, vacuum tubes and great green sheets of computer chips inlaid on silicon. Engines and motors of every shape and size were placed atop posts between great multipaneled paintings and sculptures and portraits dating from antiquity to 2020.
“I have to keep my old mechanical collection secure down here. The king’s a real stickler for tech regulation, even with his higher-ups. This is smaller than my collection in Blue Ridge. Can’t drive motorcycles or automobiles in New Damascus, so I left them back home.” Jubal sighed. “Flying’s a thrill, but there’s something about those old machines that’s just so wonderfully dangerous and inefficient. The human way, eh? But here, I think I’ve got something you might find more interesting.”
There was a heavy steel door at the far end of the gallery. Jubal pressed his hand against it, and it swung open with a faint glow.
As Nikolai entered the next room he was struck with an array of unfamiliar scents. Dusty concrete, mechanical oil, and an odd, acrid smoke that he didn’t recognize.
Long glow bulbs along the low wooden ceiling pulsed to life at their entrance, revealing a cement-walled armory and a shooting range with two long lanes and glowing, illusory targets at the end.
There was a workbench and worktable by the entrance, with neatly arranged tools, rags, and oils as well as shelves of various ammo in plain cardboard boxes. A rack of guns hung on display beside it, stacked with pistols, revolvers, shotguns, and rifles.
Nikolai gasped, taking a step back as he noticed Hazeal’s rune-etched revolver hanging in the air at the center of a fixed, translucent bubble. A single spotlight shone on it as the artifact slowly spun within the sphere.
“The gun . . .” Nikolai breathed. He couldn’t hear it. Couldn’t feel its call. But still . . .
Nikolai noticed Jubal discreetly watching him, and hoped that the almost rabid hunger he felt to hold the weapon in his hands again hadn’t been too apparent.
“Don’t worry,” Jubal said, tone soothing. “It’s completely sealed off. Locked up tight in the burn bubble—anyone but myself tries to reach inside and it’ll burn their hand right off.”
“Couldn’t someone just use a fire poker or something?” Nikolai asked, trying to sound casual. “Or grab it with a laborer’s glove Focal?”
Jubal smiled. “Only a mage’s bare hand can pass through the barrier. The enchantment can sense the millions of little flow channels in your palm and fingertips. Each mage’s channel pattern is different—like a fingerprint. My channel pattern passes right through. Someone else’s, however. . .”
“That . . . thing. It’s alive. The things it said to me . . . when Lieutenant Hazeal made me touch it,” Nikolai added hastily. “The things it showed me. They were . . .”
“Vicious little device,” Jubal said. “A sentient artifact of pure evil. And powerful, unlike anything I’ve ever seen before. Normal artifacts need an energy source to function. Whether from a Disc, a mage, or some form of powe
r storage. But the revolver doesn’t need any of that! It’s the source of its own magical energy, like a mage’s magic pools. In a way that should be impossible for anything but a living mage.”
“Where did it come from?” Nikolai asked. “How do you know it’s evil?”
“My research hasn’t turned up much. The gun itself is a Colt Single Action Army. First generation, late nineteenth century. Beautiful weapon—a classic. I’m searching the records on any arch magi powerful enough to create something like this, but honestly . . . I’m at a loss.”
Jubal shook his head.
“No luck deciphering the runes so far. They don’t look like anything we have on record. It’s sentient, capable of direct mental communication. Gets in your mind and magic like a parasite. Too dangerous to study, I’m afraid. Any mage powerful and knowledgeable enough to figure the damn thing out would put themselves at risk of parasitic takeover.”
He sighed, resigned. “Too bad, though. A bullet from this would pass right through those enchantments in your uniform like butter. It’d pass right through any sort of armor or shielding. Akro too. Hell, it’d go through a bit of rock before the magic finally wore out.”
“Are the bullets enchanted too?” Nikolai asked, eyes glued to the hypnotic glow of the spinning barrel.
“No,” Jubal said, clearing his throat and moving to stand between Nikolai and the bubble. With the weapon blocked from sight, Nikolai felt a sudden sense of relief, mingled with an even more powerful feeling of loss. “Bullets get temporarily enchanted as they pass through the barrel. Any ol’ ammo will do.” He put a hand on Nikolai’s shoulder. “How about another drink?”
Back in the theater, Jubal sat on the chair across from Nik, sipping his bourbon.
“When I met your mother, she was all piss and vinegar,” Jubal said, smiling wistfully. “You’re better at hiding it than she was, but you’ve got the same fire.”