The Left-Hand Path: Mentor

by T. S. Barnett

  The rocks beside Teresa blew backwards with so much speed that Nathan burst out laughing. “Well done, girl!” he said even as Teresa swore and got to her feet to rage at them.

  “I didn’t bring you here so that you could destroy this—”

  “It’s here,” Elton cut her off, crouching in the dirt and reaching a hand into the hole made by Cora’s spell. He retrieved a small, beaten wooden box with a crumbling lock and pried it open. The others approached and leaned over his shoulder to get a look at the contents. Inside sat a wooden fetish in the image of the spirit Cora had shown them—a black-masked ogre with ferocious teeth and bright yellow eyes.

  Elton seemed slightly hesitant to touch it, but Nathan bent down and plucked it from the box without care. He tested its weight in his hand and shook it next to his ear.

  “It’s hollow,” he said. “Probably blood inside. Pretty standard.” He put a hand over the gris gris under his shirt. “Let’s get it done, then; what do you say?”

  As he lifted the pouch from his neck, he was stopped by Cora’s sudden grip on his sleeve. He glanced down at her and saw her breath leave her mouth as steam, then felt the chill creep up his own arm. He had time to mutter, “Perfect,” before the figure appeared in front of them, but the creature that stood at the edge of the ruin was a man, not a skeleton. He stayed still and silent, watching them while they stared at him. His skin was a dark umber, and he stared at them through deep black eyes, his tattered blue cloak wrapped around his waist and draped over one thickly-muscled shoulder.

  “No deberías haber venido aquí,” it called out to them in a low voice. Nathan and Elton exchanged a brief glance.

  “Nathan,” Elton whispered without turning from the lich, “it seems to be human now. How is it human now?”

  “I may have forgotten to mention that it was at the restaurant in Wellton. It may have eaten Phillip. And possibly everyone else at the restaurant.”

  “What?” Elton hissed. “You forgot to mention?”

  “Well we were about to kill it, weren’t we? Didn’t seem important.”

  “Mi filacteria,” the lich said, holding out a hand to Nathan.

  “Oh, this?” Nathan lifted the phylactery in two fingers and stepped in front of the others, feeling Cora’s hand reluctantly release his arm. “I’m afraid this is accounted for.”

  “Será castigado, brujo,”the lich countered.

  “Punished?” Nathan snorted. “You with the Magistrate, are you? Escucha, cabrón. I’m not the one eating up souls like it’s open season on regs, tu sabes?”

  “Uh, Nathan, my Spanish isn’t great, but maybe you shouldn’t be calling the lich names?” Cora whispered from behind him.

  Nathan ignored her, idly turning the phylactery in his hand. “Can’t we be done with this yet, old friend?”

  “Aún no. Vengaré a mi gente.”

  “What people?” Nathan held out his arms to gesture in a wide circle around himself. “Where are these people? Nobody cares about you anymore!”

  “You,” the lich growled, taking a small step forward. “You stole my talisman. You trapped me. And you killed her.”

  “Who the hell did you kill now?” Elton snapped.

  “Nobody! I don’t know what—oh, no.” Nathan’s shoulders slumped and he let out a laugh. “Not the girl at the Food City. Not really. All this for one girl?”

  Teresa moved up behind him and thumped him in the arm. “Chakwaina is a Zuni kachina,” she snapped. “A guardian. Did you kill a Zuni girl?”

  “How would I know?” Nathan said. “She wasn’t wearing a tag.”

  “Did you have a piss-off-the-lich Bingo card in your pocket?” Elton asked, incredulous.

  The lich shrieked in fury, an unnatural, hissing sound, and Nathan tucked the phylactery into the pocket of his jeans. “Right. Those of you not accustomed to fighting undead abominations had best take a few steps back.”

  19

  Elton took his place beside Nathan and retrieved the wooden token from his pocket in preparation. “I’m half inclined to let him have you,” he muttered. He didn’t have to look to know there was a smirk on Nathan’s face.

  “Just try not to get eaten this time,” he replied as the lich raised a clawed hand against them.

  The air chilled all around them as mist formed at the creature’s feet, and Elton built a barrier around the two women, leaving them in an iridescent bubble. Neither of them looked particularly pleased about the situation—Teresa was likely bitter at being protected at all, but Cora put her hands flat against the inside of the barrier and kept her frightened eyes on Nathan’s back.

  Elton turned his attention back to the lich in time to see the ice shards shooting towards them, and he threw up a wall that shattered at the impact. He wasn’t prepared to deal with this. All of the spells he kept on hand were for restriction or protection, not outright battle. Battle was something he worked hard to avoid, in fact. He tried adrig in an attempt to force the lich to submit, but the creature stood fast, Elton’s spell flowing harmlessly across the faint shimmer surrounding it. Nathan cut the lich off with a word as it reached out for them, stopping the icy grip as soon as it brushed his throat.

  “Break that barrier, Chaser,” Nathan snapped.

  Elton’s ring heated against his skin while Nathan ran to avoid the sharp ice the lich aimed straight for him, but by the time he called out the word teinnid and heard the crack of the creature’s protective spell breaking, Nathan’s feet were caught in chunks of ice that pinned him to the spot so suddenly he almost hurtled face first into the dirt. Nathan spat out, “Sevre,” and the lich roared as a cut opened on its chest and seeped blood into its cloak.

  A quick word from Elton broke the ice at Nathan’s feet, allowing him to rush the creature and get both hands on its chest. Elton swore he felt a pulse in the air as Nathan growled the word san, drawing a shrill, echoing screech from the lich. Blood poured from the open wound and left muddy pools in the dust, and more followed as Nathan was knocked backwards by a cry from the creature, the gore drawn across the ruin as though attached to Nathan’s hands.

  Elton moved closer while Nathan skidded on the rocks, taking advantage of the lich’s distracting pain and setting a fire at its feet. It screamed and twisted, but a low hum spread from its body as the blue mist thickened around it, suffocating the flames before they could take hold. Elton barely avoided the shards of ice that sped toward him in response, taking one in the arm for his trouble.

  He looked across the way for Nathan, but the other man was already on his feet, shaking blood from his hands and shouting at the lich with a deadly scowl. He spoke words Elton didn’t recognize, and the very ground seemed to tremble underneath them at the sound of his voice. A crack appeared in the earth between the man and the lich, and the stones around them shifted at a movement of Nathan’s hands. The mist at the creature’s feet moved to fill the space between them, the air burning cold against Elton’s skin. He glanced back to check on Teresa and Cora and swore as he spotted a pickup truck driving down the road toward them.

  The sound of crashing rock forced his attention back to the lich, but by the time he looked, the creature’s body was already buried underneath dull orange stones that a few moments before had made up the crumbling wall behind Nathan.

  “Now would be a good time, Elton,” he called out in a hoarse voice, sweat running in rivulets from his brow and dripping from his chin as he panted.

  “Daig,” Elton said without further prompting, holding a hand toward the pile of rock and hearing the shriek from inside as flames licked around the stone cage.

  “What the hell is all this?” a man’s voice called from the road. “This is an archaeological site; you aren’t supposed to be here! It’s Zuni property!”

  Elton could faintly hear Cora and Teresa trying to explain through their magical barrier, but he kept his focus on his spell. The stone gave a menacing shake, and then the cage erupted, crashing rocks into the surrounding desert. One h
eavy stone wedged itself into the windshield of Teresa’s truck with a spiderweb of glass surrounding it. Nathan hit the ground with a shout as a boulder flew at him, smashing into his arm and pinning him to the rocks. Elton’s fire was doused with a cry and an icy crackling of blue mist, and the lich rose from its cage with skin charred black and only tattered cloth still hanging from its body.

  The men from the pickup truck cried out in alarm as the lich focused on them, but instead of attacking, it seemed to hesitate, looking between Elton and the strangers for a moment before letting out a shriek. The mist dissipated around it as it flickered in front of them, its image distorting and jerking forward too quickly to be seen. Elton called out to the men to get back in their truck, but the lich vanished, leaving only a thin blue trail in its wake as it raced silently across the desert toward the distant pueblo.

  “A little help?” Nathan called out, and Elton rushed over to pry the large stone away. Nathan sat up with a wince, his arm hanging useless and covered in blood at his side. He used Elton’s offered hand to get to his feet and looked past the trucks and panicking mundanes.

  “For fuck’s sake,” he cursed.

  “Nathan, your arm is broken—”

  “It’s getting away!” Nathan snapped, and with a quick click of the word “tsiks,” he vanished just as easily as the lich, a warm gust of air the only sign of his passing.

  “Oh, God—Nathan!” Elton called out, but he was long gone. The lich was headed for the town, and he knew that secrecy would be the last thing on Nathan’s mind. He broke the barrier surrounding Teresa and Cora and shouted at them on his way to the truck.

  “Keep an eye on the mundanes!” he said, pulling the rock that had broken Teresa’s windshield from the front seat of the truck and climbing into the cab. He started the truck without pausing to listen to their questions and sped down the rough road toward the pueblo, watching the horizon for any sign of magic.

  The smoke that began to rise from the outskirts of the town as he approached it wasn’t a good sign. He tried to will the truck into going faster, but his foot was already pressing the pedal against the floor. At the sound of an explosion, he let the truck skid to a stop near a building that rumbled from the shock wave. He dropped down from the cab, running full tilt through the empty street. The aging buildings shook around him, and he could hear distant screams. He caught up to Nathan at a dusty intersection and found him pouring fire from his one good hand, hiding the lich in dark orange flames. A sedan was on fire further down the street, but a shimmering blue wall fifty feet high separated the battle from the rest of the town.

  “Get over here, Elton!” Nathan called without looking at him, and with a single word, the barrier around them shattered, drawing a hateful scream from the lich as weightless shards of blue rained down onto the street and disappeared. “Keep him down,” Nathan shouted. “I have to destroy the phylactery!”

  Elton clutched his wooden token in his hand and spoke the word daig with as much conviction as he had, circling the lich in blue fire as Nathan collapsed beside him. Nathan lay on his back, panting, and he lifted his hips and twisted his unbroken arm around to tug the kachina doll from the pocket opposite. With a pained groan, he sat up with the phylactery in his hand and tugged the gris gris from around his neck.

  The lich screamed, but its broken and burned body was too weak to fight against the heat of Elton’s flames. He could feel the cold tendrils reaching out for him, but the icy touch on his neck was only a chill. Behind him, Nathan chanted the words he had inscribed on the inside of the bag as he dug a hole in the dirt just off the road. He tucked the phylactery and the gris gris into the small pit, covered them with desert sand, and lifted his broken arm over the mound to drip blood over it in a cross. As soon as the mark was complete, a crack sounded from inside the mound that shook the ground all around them, and the lich gave one final shriek and melted away in the fire, leaving only dark, sticky ash and tar.

  Elton dropped his token as he sunk to the floor, taking heavy breaths and leaning back on his hands to look at Nathan. The other man lay flat on his back in the street, his arm leaving a slow pool of blood on the asphalt as he shut his eyes. Elton shuffled over to him, momentarily ignoring the sound of timidly approaching mundanes, and he slapped Nathan’s dusty cheek to rouse him.

  “It’s over,” he said, lifting Nathan up and helping him to his feet. The man felt like dead weight beside him. His legs gave way immediately, and Elton had to lift the other man’s good arm over his shoulders and grip his waist to keep him upright. Elton looked out at the people at the edge of the street and was at a complete loss as to what to tell them. This was far beyond the scope of any covering up he had ever imagined he would have to do.

  He didn’t have long to weigh his options. Either he told the mundanes a story that they likely wouldn’t believe and hoped they didn’t tell too many people about what they saw, or he reported the incident to the Magistrate and had to explain all his actions leading up to this point. Neither choice seemed particularly attractive to him.

  The approaching roar of a truck engine saved him from having to speak to the crowd as the interrupting mundanes’ pickup sped down the road toward them. Teresa leaned out of the driver’s side window to wave Elton over while Cora practically fell from the cab of the truck to rush toward him.

  “Oh my God, Nathan,” she said, trying to help carry him without touching his injured arm. He didn’t even lift his head at her voice.

  “It’s done,” Elton said. “What happened to the mundanes?”

  “In the back,” Teresa called. “Come on already; we need to move.”

  Elton glanced over his shoulder at the people waiting in a ragged circle around them, a few voices shouting for answers. There wasn’t any story he could tell them that wouldn’t get back to the Magistrate, especially with Yuma’s assigned Chaser apparently dead along with an unknown number of mundanes in an interstate restaurant. His decision had been made for him.

  He carried Nathan to the back of the truck and loaded him into the bed with Cora’s help, then hastily tugged the two unconscious men out onto the street. What the two women had done to them to put them to sleep was the least of his concerns. The truck was moving before Cora could even shut the passenger side door, and Elton had to cling to the edge of the truck bed to keep from going over the side as Teresa sped away from the town with a grinding of tires and a cloud of dust.

  The mundanes would call the police, Elton knew. They had caused an explosion in the center of town, seemingly killed a man, and now were escaping in a stolen truck. He had no idea where Teresa was taking them, but even knowing all of the trouble he had brought on himself and his companions, he couldn’t fight his lightheadedness and exhaustion. His hands ached from exertion, and his chest felt tight. He wasn’t able keep himself awake very long in the rumbling bed of the truck as it raced through the desert.

  “What are we going to do?” Cora asked in a panic, half-turned in her seat to look at Elton’s and Nathan’s unconscious bodies in the back of the truck. “Where are we going?”

  “We need to lose this truck, for one thing,” Teresa said, “and I probably need to report my truck stolen. I’ll give them Nathan’s description.”

  “He needs a doctor.”

  “Sure, we’ll just go to a hospital down the road. That’ll work out great.” She glanced in the rear view mirror at the two men. “Besides, no great loss if he loses an arm. They’re hanging him anyway.”

  “Look,” Cora snapped, “I get you’re all bitter about your grandmother and you’ve got this whole ‘I don’t need anybody leave me alone’ thing going on, and that’s great—really—if that’s working for you, but Nathan’s the only friend I have in the world, and I am running on very little sleep here, so if you could just stop being an asshole for long enough to help him not die in the back of a truck in the middle of a desert, I would really fucking appreciate it.”

  Teresa glanced at her a moment, then looked back to
the road and let out a long sigh through her nose. “Well it’s not a great situation, is it? Fine. I know a healer back home, but I’m not taking him there. We’ll find a regular hospital. What you tell them is your problem.”

  Cora kept her eyes on the bed of the truck while they drove. She kept expecting someone to come after them—cops, a mob, someone—but the desert was empty. She hoped the people in town had been in too much shock to rush to the police. She hadn’t seen the second half of the fight, but the flaming car and the smear of black in the middle of the street gave a pretty clear picture of how conspicuously the whole thing had gone down. So much for secrecy and Concordats.

  She scooted in her seat to get a better view of the bed of the truck through the glass. Elton and Nathan lay amid coils of rope, a strapped-down water barrel, and a couple of metal toolboxes, none of which seemed to be bothering them. Elton’s head lolled against the cab of the truck with every dip in the road, but Nathan was nearly motionless, flat on his back with his arm seeping blood down the grooves in the bed toward the tailgate. Cora pictured the path of blood the truck was leaving behind, draining Nathan’s life with every mile they went.

  “Where’s a hospital?” she asked Teresa. She received only a shrug in return.

  “Wherever the next town is, probably. Relax. Zuni Pueblo isn’t that far away from civilization and the white man.”

  The drive seemed to last an eternity, and Cora got a crick in her neck from spending the entire ride turned backwards, but eventually she started spotting signs for a city. It wasn’t difficult to find the hospital in the small town. Teresa stopped the truck at the far end of the parking lot and tilted her head toward the back.

  “Wake up your Chaser friend and get Nathan inside. I’ll ditch the truck and come back. Maybe. Maybe I’ll just go home and forget I ever met any of you people.”

  Cora bit back a sarcastic response and instead dropped down from the cab of the truck and reached up to shake Elton by the shoulder. He stirred with only a bit of prodding, but she had to snap her fingers in front of his face to make him focus on the task at hand. She unlocked the tailgate so that he could slide out, and he pulled Nathan along with him as carefully as he could. He didn’t ask questions; she was sure those would come soon enough, but for now he seemed satisfied with carrying Nathan toward the hospital entrance while Teresa drove away without another word.