by Shaun Barger
Slowly Nikolai stood and began to back away from the ominous red figure. The mind within the revolver.
“I don’t want your help,” he said. “I don’t want anything from you.”
Vicious little device, Jubal had said. A sentient artifact of pure evil.
“Atticus Jubal warned you about me,” she said, responding to his thoughts. Of course she could hear his thoughts; she was in his mind, in his soul. “He knew that if I were to fall into your possession, he would lose you. Just like he lost your mother.”
Nikolai shook his head in disbelief. “I saw what you did to Hazeal. I remember all the horrible shit you showed me when he made me touch the gun. It was like looking into hell.”
“And yet you allowed me into your mind once again, of your own volition. If my malevolence was so obvious, so absolute, why seek my aid?”
He stared at her. “What are you? And what do want with me?”
“I am neither good nor evil,” she said. “I am a balancing force. A gift, created for the humans to serve as a countermeasure against the tyranny of your kind. A gift, stolen by one of your kind, and bound—hidden away in such forgotten depths that centuries passed before your mother found me. Your mother, who chose to defy your king’s orders to allow humanity to wither and die while your kind enjoyed the fruits of paradise. To that end, I offered my assistance. “
“And Hazeal?”
“A weak man, now twice a traitor. Redemption was to be his reward for delivery of the weapon and key. But Armand was blinded by his hatred of your mother, and his loyalty to the crown. Even knowing what misery the humans endured. Even having witnessed the cruelty of Atticus Jubal’s decades-long experimentation on living test subjects. Experiments which, though Atticus never knew, your mother discovered, and used as a tool for recruitment—showing it to potential allies to illustrate the brutal corruption of the Mage King’s regime.
“No,” she intoned. “I’ll not apologize for my treatment of Armand Hazeal.”
The forest suddenly faded to pitch darkness around him, and when the light returned they stood at the foot of the staircase adjacent to the dining room of Nikolai’s childhood home.
At the center of the room, Nikolai’s father and mother were screaming at each other, Eric’s face flushed an ugly red as he shouted down the distorted image of Ashley Strauss. At the top of the stairs, seven-year-old Nikolai hid, wide-eyed as he listened in on their argument.
When Nikolai was seven, their secret training sessions had started as a game. Had started off easy. Nikolai had been incredibly bright for his age and initially embraced the challenge. But then, day-by-day, week by week, the lessons became brutal. Became torture.
His mother had forbidden Nikolai from telling his father, and Nikolai—terrified of her—had complied. A few months after the training had begun, however, his father had come home early from the Watchman station one morning. Had caught Nikolai’s mother healing his bloody feet—a cool towel over his eyes as she whispered comforting nothings.
“—the same shit your father used to do to you!” Eric Strauss roared at his wife. It was the first time Nikolai had ever heard the man lose his temper.
“This is different,” she insisted. “My father was a farmer. And he was sick in the head. He had no reason to treat me and Red the way he did. But we know! We know what the king is doing! What’s going to happen out there! And if you think I’ll let my boy—”
“OUR boy!”
“—If you think I’ll let our boy grow up weak and defenseless because the king is too much of a coward to—”
Ashley stopped, held up a hand for silence, and the scene faded to darkness once more.
“You did not sleep that night,” came the woman’s voice from the darkness. “You lay awake until dawn, praying for respite from your mother’s brutality. Praying with such hope and desperation as only a child can. But when you awoke . . .”
The darkness faded and they were standing in Nikolai’s childhood bedroom. The little boy laid there, dark circles under eyes puffy and sore from crying as he stared at the ceiling. But then Ashley’s heavy footsteps approached from down the hall as she came to wake him the same way she always did, by whistling that horrible tune and ordering him to stand at attention.
Nikolai found it hard to breathe as he followed them downstairs. His father sat at the breakfast table, hollow-eyed. Defeated. Nikolai had always worshipped his father. Always loved him most of all. Always wanted to be like him. To be him.
But as Eric Strauss watched Nikolai go, ignoring the child’s pleading look as he followed his mother out into the dark for another hellish morning, Nikolai realized that his father wasn’t going to save him.
“Your father bowed to your mother’s will. Allowed your suffering to continue. Why?”
“He loved her,” Nikolai said, tears welling in his eyes. “It wasn’t his fault. Nobody could say no to my mother. If he’d tried, she’d probably have taken me away from him. He was just a Watchman. She was an Edge Guard, favored by the king. So he did what he could. He loved us. He wanted us to be happy. He’d make my mother laugh—he was the only one who could make my mother laugh. And then she’d go easier on me . . . for a little while . . .”
The red woman stared at him through the veil. Impassive.
Then they were back in the forest, in another clearing. His mother and the child were sparring. Years had passed since the argument, and the young Nikolai was ten now. No longer weak as he’d been when his mother had begun training him. No longer collapsed at the end of their daily sessions into a weeping, exhausted mess.
The child wielded his mother’s sword with little hands. He attacked with a ferocious flurry of graceful swings she fended off with an akro sword she’d created for practice. He was featherweighted, and fast, leaping and running and bouncing off of tree trunks with graceful ease as he fought to get past her defenses.
She feinted, and Nikolai fell for it. She struck him, hard, knocking him back. He stumbled away, but caught himself, keeping his feet. Nikolai rubbed his shoulder where she’d hit him, tears of pain beaded at the corner of his eyes, but he was grinning.
“You left yourself open,” she scolded.
“Yes ma’am,” he said, still smiling. “Sorry ma’am.”
“Otherwise, though . . . wonderful. You’ve come so far, and I am so, so proud of you.”
Nikolai began to tremble, sickened as he watched the ten-year-old version of himself preen at her rare praise. He remembered this. Remembered what was coming.
“But now . . . there’s something I need to show you.”
“Yes, Mom?” young Nikolai said, his eyes gleaming with eager curiosity.
“I won’t always be around to protect you,” she said, and all of a sudden she started crying—her monstrous distorted voice cracked with emotion. “Won’t always be here to teach you and make you strong. But there’s one thing. One final lesson you need to learn before I’m gone.”
She whimpered, muttering to herself. He stood there, awkward. His resolve fading.
“Mom?”
“Vasano,” she whispered, firing off a net of crackling red light.
The light enveloped the child. His cry sounded like the agonized squeal of a dying animal, but with another quick gesture Ashley silenced him with a muting spell cast upon his lips as he writhed, his body wracked with pain.
Nikolai found himself unable to pull his eyes away as she cast it onto the boy again and again. The break between each casting shorter than the last as he silently screamed.
“Here you go, Nicky,” she cooed after an eternity of suffering, the child’s head resting on the nothingness of the memory of her lap as she lifted a Tabula Rasa potion to his lips. “Just a sip. To help you forget a little. Enough to keep you from going mad. I’ll give you less tomorrow. And less after that. Soon, you won’t even need it. Pain will be nothing to you.”
“I don’t want to see this,” Nikolai hissed through clenched teeth. He turned to the s
ilent red woman, resisting the violent urge to grab her arm. “Take me away from here. I said I don’t want to see this!”
She nodded, the wide brim of her hat dipping and rising ever so slightly. The forest faded and was replaced by his father’s office at the Watchman station.
His father sat at his big oaken desk, brow furrowed as he scratched away at a stack of paperwork with an ornate golden pen. As Nikolai watched, his ten-year-old self nervously stopped at the threshold of the open door, seemingly afraid to fully enter.
“Dad?” he said, tentative.
Eric Strauss looked up sharply, surprised. “Nik? What are you doing here? Why aren’t you in school?”
“I-I left,” the boy said. “I need to talk to you. It’s important.”
His father opened his mouth to say something, but then seemed to think better of it. He nodded, and gestured at a chair for Nikolai to take a seat. “Close the door behind you.”
The boy struggled to speak, muttering and then trailing off into silence.
“Hey . . .” his father said, then stood to come around the desk and take the seat beside him. “It’s okay. What’s going on, kiddo?”
“It’s . . . it’s Mom,” he finally said. Then, in a desperate, tearful rush: “She hurt me this morning, Dad, she hurt me worse than ever!”
Eric stiffened, going pale as the concerned warmth drained from his face.
“She said she’ll do it again, said that she’s going to keep doing it, and I can’t take it anymore, Dad, I can’t do it, you have to stop her, PLEASE, Dad you’ve got to help me. If you don’t, I’ll kill her, or I’ll kill myself, I’ll—”
Eric grabbed him by the shoulders, horrified. “Don’t you ever talk like that. Do you hear me? Don’t you ever say something so horrible!”
“Please, Dad,” Nikolai begged. “Please!”
Eric pulled Nikolai into a tight embrace, looking as if he’d aged a decade in those moments.
“Shhhh, it’s okay. I’ll talk to her. I won’t let her hurt you again, you’re going to be okay, shhhh . . .”
But nothing changed. Nikolai’s mother tortured him again the next day. Then again, the day after that. Then finally, she and Nikolai’s father went away to New Damascus for “a business trip,” leaving him in Astor’s family’s care. And when news of the skycraft crash came shortly after, the relief Nikolai had felt that she was dead was indescribable—though he’d never admitted it to anyone.
Eric and the child disappeared, leaving Nikolai and the red woman alone in the now-silent office.
“I hate him,” Nikolai whimpered. “I hate him, I hate them both. Why didn’t he help me? Why didn’t he stop her?”
Nikolai sank to the floor and began to weep. He couldn’t help it; he pressed his face into his hands, ashamed, and cried helpless, hysterical sobs. Hating himself. Hating his father, his mother, Jubal, Red, even Astor—all the people he’d loved, all the people who were supposed to love him, supposed to keep him safe, but instead had done nothing but hurt or abandon him.
The red woman placed a comforting gloved hand on Nikolai’s shoulder, and a sense of soothing calm washed through him. His sadness remained, but its sting was lessened. The ache in his chest made bearable.
“Your father was a good man,” she said. “But was he right to let you suffer? Your mother’s cruelty had purpose. But your father? His compliance stemmed from weakness. What use was his goodness to you? What use was his love?”
Her grip on Nikolai’s shoulder tightened.
“Good. Evil. These are useless terms. Your mother was not a good woman. But now here you are. On the verge of succeeding where she failed. On the verge of singlehandedly setting the course of destiny for both man and mage by revealing the greatest genocide in the history of this world to your kind. But only if you can escape.”
Nikolai wiped away tears with the sleeve of his uniform and opened his eyes to find his father standing before him, looking down at Nikolai with that helpless expression. With that pathetic, impotent sadness.
“Joseph Eaglesmith is a good man,” she continued. “A great man, potentially. But his goodness rings hollow—untested by sorrow, pain, or loss. He and so many of your kind are blinded by the privilege they’ve enjoyed while the masses toiled out of sight. He will do nothing to prevent the suffering and extinction of terrestrial humankind. So you have a choice. An ugly choice.”
She drew the rune-etched revolver from the folds of her robe and took his hand, closing it around the pommel.
“Kill one good man and live to fan the flames of revolution,” the red woman said, “or do nothing and allow billions to die.”
Terrible things, Jubal had once promised. He said that Nikolai would have to do terrible things if he ever became an important mage. All for the greater good.
Nikolai’s father said that there was always a choice. And he was right: Nikolai could stop here. Could keep it from going any further than this.
He’d loved his father. But his father had been weak—had let Ashley torture Nikolai. Let her turn him into a weapon. Let her drill him till his soul was as sick and dirty as hers and the Disc had no choice but to manifest an instrument for murder as his art Focal.
It was then that Nikolai realized he really was nothing like his father.
He was his mother’s son. And he knew what he had to do.
The trembling in Nikolai’s hands ceased as he raised the gun.
“I’m sorry, Joseph,” he said.
Nikolai pulled the trigger.
The office tore away, gone in an instant, and Nikolai was back in the Disc chamber. The revolver smoked in his hand.
A line of blood trickled down from a hole at the center of Joseph’s forehead. He stood there, staring at Nikolai with dead eyes as the scepter dissolved to foam through his fingers, his flyball boots melting from his feet into a puddle of gold and evaporating as the Focals rejoined his fleeing soul.
Beyond where Joseph had been standing, Nikolai’s unfinished sphere of Veil fell away in a spiraling pattern of dust. The Disc began to churn—radiant light forming on its surface like perspiration before streaking inward, into the vortex of crimson where it had been struck by the bullet Nikolai had fired to kill Joseph.
The woman in the revolver had tricked him into shooting the Disc.
After a moment of stunned silence, Nikolai flung the revolver away.
“No . . .”
He looked at his hand. Looked at Joseph, lying there. Empty. A corpse.
“No. No, no, no, no . . .”
The crimson dot trembled, shrinking and growing like a bloody orifice on the flickering Disc.
He brought trembling fingers bent like claws to press against his face. Fingers digging into his forehead, his cheeks.
“Fuck. Oh fuck, what did I do? What did I do?”
Nikolai pulled his knees up against his chest, his eyes squeezed shut but he could still see Joseph. Could still see the Disc, shuddering in its death throes before him. Nikolai was a murderer, a mass murderer, a—
Strong arms pulled him into an embrace, and he thrashed, pulling away, but the arms just pulled tighter, and distantly he could hear Jem’s voice.
Finally, he stopped struggling.
“I didn’t mean to do it!” he sobbed. “I had to stop Joseph. But the revolver—it tricked me! Fooled me into shooting the Disc!”
“I know,” Jem said, holding Nikolai. “I know you didn’t mean to.”
He pulled away. “We’ve got to get out there. Got to help somehow.”
“I know.” Jem looked him in the eyes and squeezed his hand. “I’m so sorry, Nik. I’ll help you any way I can.”
He nodded. “Okay. Okay.”
The Disc grew dull—the gentle electric wind of magical energy that normally flooded every inch of Marblewood dwindled to a trickle as the chamber grew dim. The pool of water below churned and thrashed like a living thing as the clear waters went opaque—then murky—then, with a long, terrible sigh, changed into thick
black sludge.
The ground quaked, the air reverberated with something like a thunderclap from down the hall, up the stairs, deadened by the floors and stone between them and the surface, but still impossibly loud.
The Disc flickered back to life, once again filling the chamber with silver light. The pool below, however, remained sludge.
Nikolai drew a filthy handkerchief from his pocket and reached for the revolver, but Jem grabbed his wrist, shaking her head. He nodded, and she took the revolver instead, jamming it into her pocket.
Covering Jem and himself with a sheet of invisibility—praying that, amid the chaos, it would prove sufficient, even though the Watchmen would anticipate him using the spell—Nikolai carefully cracked open one of the great double doors of city hall to find the Watchmen in terrified disarray. Screaming and pointing at the sky. Oblivious to their presence.
Taking deep gasping breaths, Nikolai pulled Jem through the distracted Watchmen, beyond the blockade, and out into the crowds of wailing, horrified magi.
Jem was shouting something, but he couldn’t hear her over the howling of the wind. He turned around and there was Thane, framed by the doors to city hall, his burn-scarred face pulled back into a snarl. But even he froze when he saw what Nikolai had done.
Gray skies had replaced the blue, the cold snap of autumn rushing in to replace the balmy warmth of their artificial summer. The air was thick with shreds of ash like the disembodied wings of a billion black butterflies.
In the distance, Nikolai could hear the wail of sirens—hear the buzzing, thumping hum of a thousand Synth drones descending on Marblewood.
As Thane stood there, frozen with the horror of what was happening, their eyes met across the plaza. Nikolai stared back with grim defiance, unashamed of the tears streaming freely down his face as he wept for Joseph and Astor and all the magi who were going to die today—all the magi and all the humans who were going to die because of the atrocity he’d so foolishly been manipulated into committing.
Jem seized Nikolai’s wrist, pulling him into the frantic mob to flee the pale Lancer, who was screaming his name. But Nikolai wasn’t worried—Thane would never catch them now.