Mages Must Fall

by Jeffrey Biles

  When he hit the outer wall, he decided it was time for his first turn. He took a sharp left so that he was heading, in one sense, towards Wile’s shop. It was north-west, and he was going north.

  The pursuers paused for a moment and then split. One kept tracing his route, exactly as he had gone, while the other two were now running in parallel to him. They were trying to corner him.

  He kept on running.

  Anne should have reached Wile’s by now. Had she gone to Wile’s? She had said she “wouldn’t forgive him”.

  Or maybe they would see the massive magical spikes and come investigate. They hadn’t done that before, as far as he knew, but this was a truly massive spike. He had to hope.

  He reached the point where another left turn would send him to Wile’s, but he kept on going for a couple blocks before turning left. No need to give them hints about where the hideout was, and going so close to the river and then the inner core was probably a bad idea anyways. The two that were going parallel to him split again.

  Then something new emerged. A spike of magical power that split into two, with each signature heading off in a different direction.

  Then one of them split again.

  Had three new mages really emerged on the scene? They came from near Wile’s shop, so it wasn’t out of the question that they were friendly. But why would they go in seemingly random directions?

  Well, not all random. One of those magical signatures was heading towards him.

  Luckily his three pursuers all stopped briefly to think and consider their options, giving him time to think as well. He couldn’t keep running forever, and if the chase continued, then likely more pursuers would join from the Mages' Guild. His best shot was whoever carried that new magical signature.

  They approached each other, and Terrance breathed a sigh of relief. It was Natalie.

  She had a cleansing device.

  “Hurry up,” she said. “They’re getting closer.”

  Terrance didn’t need the encouragement.

  She pressed the cleansing device against his skin. A sudden exhaustion overtook him, but he didn’t let the exhaustion control him.

  He briefly made contact with the magical field, then grabbed the cleansing device. Natalie motioned for him to wait. She concentrated and then another magical signature appeared and started moving away from them. “Now,” she said.

  He cleansed her and watched the magical signature go.

  “Is that your new trick?”

  “Yep.”

  “How long will it keep going?”

  “That one? A couple minutes if I did it right. Let’s go.”

  He briefly watched the pursuers chase phantoms, then trekked — without enhancement — back to Wile’s.

  Terrance didn’t dare go back to the Mages’ Guild. They knew it was him.

  Hopefully his friends wouldn’t get hurt too badly in the fallout.

  But he had more immediate things to worry about. Anne was sulking in the next room, refusing to talk to anyone. This confused the rest of the rescues to no end. Wile calmed them down with a tale that made Terrance look good to the rescues, all about how he heroically sacrificed his old life in order to save all of them, but it made his skin crawl.

  A hero sacrifices themselves. A villain sacrifices strangers. What kind of person sacrifices the ones they love?

  “This is great news!” said Frederick, eager to lighten the morose mood. “We have two cleansing devices at headquarters, so we can start doubling up on harassment runs. Combined with Natalie’s new invention we can send them scrambling all over the city, wearing them down — maybe even opening up opportunities to grab new rescues!”

  The mood started to lift.

  “We can get new recruits,” Frederick continued. “And we have our most powerful mage here with us, not tired out from sitting in his Inquisitor room all day maintaining appearances.”

  “We’ve also lost our inside view on what they’re planning and the mood of the Mages' Guild,” said Terrance.

  “Doesn’t matter now. We know what bends them. We keep pushing until they break.”

  “Not that simple,” said Terrance. “The Department of Resource Management has been freaking out even more than the Department of Inquisition. I think they may be rushing production on a weapon, or something else to halt us.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Frederick. “It just means we need to push harder, faster. We have the tools. If we run this right, our force can start growing more quickly than ever before: run the Inquisitors ragged, make them split their forces, snatch up as many trainees as we can. We have safe houses that are willing to take more recruits once this basement gets even more cramped.”

  “Even then we have not exhausted our advantages,” added Bertrand. “With this new… disturbance… propagated by Terrance, the furor around my family should be somewhat dispersed. We could likely send one of the unknown members of our crew to communicate with them and bring at least part of the Warriors' Guild to our side.”

  “I’ll go,” said Natalie. “We can’t send Bertrand or Terrance, who are known. Wile would be conspicuous, easily remembered. Frederick is known among the Justice Guild, who may still have a few investigating. The rest are young, and may not be able to handle delicate negotiations.”

  Hans harrumphed at that idea and walked away in exaggerated anger, but everyone else nodded in agreement.

  “I predict that my father would receive you positively,” stated Bertrand.

  “How will this interact with the current plan?” asked Terrance.

  “That all depends on which forces can align with us,” said Frederick. “And what those forces are willing to do.”

  “Willing to do?”

  “If we come out of the shadows, engage in open warfare in the streets — and don’t delude yourself, that is the only way the Warriors' Guild can help us — then lots of people will die. Us, them, innocents.”

  “Innocents are already dying,” said Terrance.

  “I agree. But does the Warriors' Guild?”

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  26

  The Warriors' Guild, or at least the section Bertrand’s father represented, was non-committal.

  “Our interests seem to align” was the vague message that Natalie brought back. No offer of support. No indication of how much force they could expect if support did materialize.

  “That is the best that could be expected,” said Bertrand. “The Warriors' Guild looks after the Warriors' Guild. We can’t expect them to risk what power they have on an untried alliance against a powerful force.”

  They thought about trying the Justice Guild, but there was too much risk for too little reward. What would they be able to do against a mage? It might have been worth it if Terrance still had access to records of who had been killed by the Inquisitors, find an officer whose family had been affected, but as it was, they couldn’t risk exposing Frederick.

  So they focused on what they could control: the expansion of their own force.

  They went out now with more resources- three of them, each with a dagger (a sword would be too conspicuous), a cleansing device, a solid grasp of grappling, and the two new magical techniques that Natalie had cooked up. They were to sow as much discord as possible, run the Inquisitors to exhaustion, and try to grab any new recruits that popped up.

  Here’s how it happened each time.

  First, place a Lizzie symbol. Cover it and parts of the surrounding area with explosive magics- including the places an Inquisitor might stand, but a civilian probably wouldn’t. Probably. Then put a couple phantom signatures on the spot, behind corners, or maybe moving slowly away. The placement couldn’t be predictable, and they had fun thinking of patterns that were tricky but not obviously phantoms. A phantom moving through a building or at a lightning-fast speed was a dead giveaway. They could also place phantoms around the traps, and occasionally they would watch as Inquisitors rushed in and got injured by the e
xplosives. Never enough to kill, alas, or even seriously injure once they started enhancing themselves when they arrived on a scene, but a scrape and a shock.

  When the Inquisitors retreated, going back to the Mages' Guild (handily traceable, now that they had to enhance themselves with magic every time they stepped onto a scene), the rescues would strike again.

  Over the next few days, response times from the Inquisitors increased by fifty percent. That extra time let them finally nab their first rescue.

  It was a close one. When they saw the flash of magic usage, they calculated the distance and decided to enact the plan.

  Choose four different directions, then set three phantom signatures going off in each of them. Then they themselves ran towards the flash using enhanced speed. If they were lucky, their group would look just like a fifth direction and not attract much attention.

  When they got to the house, that was the trickiest part. How to convince the parents they weren’t just kidnapping their child? Luckily in the first case the parents already knew what the child had done, saw them as saviors.

  They all cleansed each other and walked away just minutes before Inquisitors arrived on the scene.

  They had a new recruit.

  The excitement of everything that had happened couldn’t shield Terrance from Anne forever. In fact, the longer he delayed the more he confirmed her fears: she would always be a far distant second to his crusade.

  It was true, of course — one life against many — but it wouldn’t do to have her feeling that way.

  Then again, what other explanation did he have?

  Many of the rescues were out on missions. The baby was sleeping in the makeshift crib that Wile and Natalie had constructed. Terrance sat on the bed beside Anne, a rare moment of privacy. “I’m sorry for all that happened to you.”

  She got up, set herself to organizing a shelf. “You’ve really let this place become a mess,” she said.

  “Lots of people living here now.”

  “I see that.” She lifted up a book, facing away from him, dusted under it even though there was no dust. “You saved all of them?”

  “Yea.”

  She kept on dusting under the same book. Her face was hidden but her voice cracked. “Am I just another person to save?”

  “You’re more than that.”

  “And less.”

  “You’re different.”

  “I don’t see you abandoning them.”

  “I’ve left them alone for days at a time, with no explanation. Longer than I ever left you when we were together.”

  “Longer than your body ever left me. Your mind, your spirit…”

  “I’ll take care of you,” he said. “It’s almost over.”

  She started crying.

  “Come over here.”

  She came to the bed and crumpled into him. “I kept our baby safe,” she said. “I kept him safe as best as I could.”

  Two weeks brought in five more rescues.

  They’d done it by getting better at the phantom techniques, working all the shifts, and slowly wearing away at the Inquisitors’ will to investigate new spikes quickly. Not everyone could be saved — in fact, twelve people were cleansed during that time — but the increase in their little gang was substantial.

  A nearby safehouse had to be opened up in addition to Wile’s basement so that everyone could have a comfortable place to sleep.

  Their veterans were eager to share the knowledge and skills they had gained, both magical and non-magical, and the new recruits only hampered operations a little bit. A couple rescue attempts sent the new recruits back early in order to reduce risk, but they were able to assist with the phantom-creation and trap-setting, and constant practice made their skill grow even faster than the veterans’ had. When they weren’t part of the mission crew, they practiced grappling and the other non-magical arts.

  “I think Norman shows some real talent with grappling,” said Natalie. “Can we bump him up to practice with the trainer instead of just the veterans?”

  Terrance racked his brain trying to remember which rescue was Norman, but Wile saved him with an affirmative grunt.

  Another two weeks, seven more rescues, another safehouse opened up for their crew to stay at. More positive but noncommittal messages from the Warriors' Guild. An even more demoralized Inquisitor corps.

  Terrance wondered if his baby with Johanna had arrived yet. The second child whose birth had passed him by.

  The limit now was on the number of cleansing devices. Terrance couldn’t sneak in and grab another, recreating the technology was beyond the skill of anyone in their crew, and the only other known methods of cleansing were death and time.

  Then Frederick proposed a new plan. Something daring.

  Something to finally get the Warriors' Guild’s attention.

  27

  Eight of them — Terrance and seven rescues — spaced around the traps they had set. Phantoms at odd places, explosive traps placed even more heavily than usual.

  They awaited the arrival of the Inquisitors.

  Tense minutes, especially for the newer rescues who had less training and hadn’t seen combat. Terrance, five veterans, and two recruits that had come in three weeks before.

  Two Inquisitors stepped onto the scene: Hewitt and Sherman.

  They were already enhancing their bodies; Terrance wished the rescues hadn’t already trained them to do that. But the rest of the training — to expect to defuse some simple traps and then trudge back to the Guild — that was handy.

  Hewitt hit one of the traps, fell back and started coughing.

  “Fuck. Those fuckers have started putting them on the ground now? I thought this was a roofs-and-walls-only thing.”

  “I keep telling you, they’re savages. They can’t kill us without killing other people, so they stop caring. That explosion would have maimed a commoner.”

  Terrance gritted his teeth. This talk couldn’t be good for morale. Easily countered, if he could respond to it, but any rebuttal would give away his position.

  “At least that might change how the commoners think about these fucking criminals. You know what would happen if we lost control.” The Inquisitor unwound an explosive magic and started work on the phantom signature that was nearby.

  “Yea,” Sherman said. “And we’re awfully fucking close to—”

  He was cut off by a dagger to the throat, delivered by a cackling Hans who had been hiding behind a corner. Terrance wished he had been able to hear more of what they were close to, but he couldn’t complain about how well the operation was going so far.

  Hewitt turned around, rushed to where Hans continued to stab his compatriot, but was stopped by several unexpected fireballs. The enhancement let him survive the volley- singed, coughing, dizzied, but still alive.

  Terrance leaped down and kicked the man’s sword away. Drew his own dagger and pushed it up the man’s gut.

  “Yes,” he said. “We are very fucking close.”

  “The beast… you have to stop using magic.”

  Terrance laughed, twisted the knife. “Good try. Your hold on this city is done.”

  Hewitt coughed up blood. “Along with everything else, if you don’t stop this madness.”

  Terrance pulled out the knife, placed it into the man’s arm socket. The man screamed. “How about, instead, I cleanse you.”

  “That’s enough.” Natalie stepped in and sliced the man’s throat. “We’re cleansing you — with the device — and getting out of here.”

  They cleansed Terrance and pulled Hans away from the shredded corpse he was still playing with. After turning their shirts inside out to hide the blood they walked away calmly, careful not to draw attention.

  It was a job well done.

  Rescuing new recruits got even easier after that. Inquisitors were more reticent, and slowed down by an accompanying mage or two from the Department of War.

  What each group of Inquisitors lost in speed, however, they made up
for in power. A second ambush, against three or four Mages with their guards up, would not be nearly as smooth as their first ambush. And their newly expanded numbers wouldn’t help them as much as they might hope, not until the new recruits had more training.

  So the rescues pursued that training, kept safe by the newfound slowness of the Mages. They could sometimes practice twenty minutes on the outskirts before they had to pack up. They felt safer at the outskirts not just because of the increased distance from the Mages' Guild, but also because the magic was weaker there — decreasing the large power advantage that Inquisitors and War Mages had over them.

  Their rapidly growing skills, rapidly growing numbers… it was only a week after the first ambush that Frederick started planning their next, and ten days after that he determined they were strong enough to pull it off safely.

  They brought sixteen. Overkill, no doubt, but better to be safe than sorry.

  Eight would be part of the initial assault, so they didn’t get in each other’s way, with four ready to step in and provide backup, and another four posted to stop any Inquisitors who might try to escape and to look out for any others that might come to help.

  They also brought another trick, another variation on the explosive magic that Natalie had cooked up.

  The Mages were four in number — a bit more of a challenge than they had been hoping for, but they were prepared. They had tracked the new standard procedures, prepared a strategy to counter them, and this time they hadn’t blown the surprise of their new tricks until they were ready.

  The two War Mages posted themselves on the perimeter, watching while the two Inquisitors — Steiner and Kulbert — began dismantling the phantoms and the explosives. When they were both busy with an explosive- that was the time to act.

  Terrance gave the signal by originating another phantom, one that progressed across the field and caused all of the Mages to turn their heads. Fireballs rained down on the War Mages, four on one and two on another, while Terrance and Hans took advantage of the confusion and rushed them with knives.