The Artifact of Foex

by James L. Wolf

  Fenimore was distracted, walking over the spot where Rory’s body had been. Heartened by his apparent discord, Chet told Journey about his feverish dreams and his conversation with Doyen Quor, though he skipped the part about the girls. It was his private shame, to be shared later or not at all.

  She frowned. “Fenimore called you by a name—Zang. He was one of the more famous Magicians, wasn’t he? He wrote a ton of stuff, anyway.”

  Chet felt his face grow warm. “I am Zang. I just didn’t know for certain until I was going under in the lucid mud.”

  “Zang wasn’t famous,” Fen said over his shoulder. “He was a timid little nothing.”

  “What’s it to you, Fenimore?” Journey said.

  “I’m not Fenimore LaDaven. I am—”

  “The Magician Tene,” said Chet and Fenimore at the same time. Chet continued, “No wonder you killed Aureate. You hated her. You always did. But what I don’t get is why you killed Professor Tibbets.”

  Fen shrugged, nonchalant. “It was an accident. I was going around the corner with my knife held outwards from my chest like this,” he demonstrated with his bare fist held to his chest, staring at the blade on the ground. “The old man ran into me.”

  Chet met Journey’s eye. He didn’t know what she was thinking, but to his mind the evidence matched what Fenimore was saying. The murder scene had looked reckless and accidental.

  Journey turned back to Fen. “But that doesn’t explain how you knew Chet was the Magician Zang in his past lives.”

  “What’s the information worth to you?” Fen wandered about the cavern as if aimlessly.

  Journey glared at him. “You’ve murdered my friends, and raped and tortured me. I’m not negotiating, especially if you want some kind of clemency from the law.”

  “Then you can stick your head under a water pump, Flame.”

  Chet blinked, taken by a new thought. “You knew me back in the ambulance. You said something like, ‘Pantheon, it’s you again.’ That’s when you started talking to me like a person, not a disposable servant. So it wasn’t when we were bound by the Raptus.”

  “So smart, Chet? You can guess forever and still not know the answer,” Fenimore said in a sing-song tone. He was standing right beside the Raptus and knife. “Except you don’t have forever, do you?”

  “Oh, please.” Chet rolled his eyes. “That’s an empty threat if I’ve ever heard one. You’re not going to touch those things. The geas was no bluff.”

  Fenimore smiled and picked up the Raptus. He tossed it in the air once and caught it. “A little dicey, sure, but... loopholes, my friend. Loopholes.”

  Journey’s mouth dropped open. “What? How did you—I heard Chet. I heard him. He bound you by your name.”

  “Ah, see, if you’re the inventor of a powerful relic like the Raptus, you build in layers of personal exemptions. Especially if, say, other Magicians come to you and insist upon locking your creation, lead by none other than Zang himself.” Fenimore’s smile twisted, growing bitter. “I’ve been fighting to regain the Raptus too many years, especially against you.”

  Chet drooped. All his hopes were shattered just like that. But he couldn’t help protesting, “I helped create the Raptus, too. I shed the blood to make it a reality. All those girls murdered by my hand. And for what? To help you rule the world? Some reward.”

  Journey gazed at him, her eyes round with horror.

  Fen laughed. “Scut work. You were always good at such things, Zang. Now, to business. Journey, you are to pick up my knife and stab Chet in the belly. Stab him ever so slowly, as please you. The geas shouldn’t hurt me, as you will do the dirty work. I’m going to have you play with him a long time before I allow you to kill him. We’re going to measure out his entrails length by length, you and I. Maybe I’ll insert various parts of his body into your twat. Then, when you’re so sick you’ll want to die, we’ll see if you’ll sing for me. If you don’t, I’m sure I can imagine worse things for you to do with his corpse. We can play games for weeks.”

  “Oh, Pantheon. Chet! Chet, do something," Journey cried out as she walked toward the knife.

  Chet began backing up, but Fenimore nailed him with a look. “I order you, Magician Zang, by all the names you’ve ever known, to stand fast. Don’t move. Just stay.”

  Chet stood, distraught as Journey picked up the curved blade and approached him one step at a time. He tried to think of a loophole—any loophole. “Um. Will, I hail thee, lend me the strength to...”

  “You may not speak a word in your own defense.”

  “Chet, I can’t stop.” Journey was nearly within arm's reach, the knife held in her trembling hand.

  Chet opened his mouth but couldn’t speak. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t do anything. He had failed and would die for his failure.

  Chapter 28

  Lost Souls

  Journey reached him, and Chet held his breath. Journey wasn’t fully under the influence of the Raptus. Would she really slide the blade into his abdomen? He’d been threatened repeatedly by this same weapon since Fenimore had woken in the ambulance. Was he to die—gradually—on its edge?

  Journey was visibly sweating through the drying mud. She slowly drew back, her eyes closed; Chet could see her shaking from the tension in her body, her clenched teeth. He closed his own eyes, waiting to be impaled.

  Noises erupted all around them. Journey yelped, and Chet opened his eyes. They were surrounded by people in long grey robes, hoods covering their faces. One stood so close to Chet they were almost touching, chest to chest. Then he realized the strange person—the Shadow Dancer—was between him and Journey, effectively blocking Fenimore’s order.

  The person drew back the hood. It was Rory. She smiled at Chet and kissed his cheek.

  He touched his face in awe, then he reached over and caressed her, making sure she was real. “B-but you were stabbed in the back. I saw it.”

  She grinned without answer and drew away. Journey had been disarmed by the Shadow Dancers on either side of her. She was slumped over, apparently with abject relief. Fenimore was fenced in by Shadow Dancers. He was yelling—trying to give orders—but no one was listening. Chet would bet everyone had bracelets on under those voluptuous robes. Fenimore was moved swiftly... then he stopped and screamed, disappearing from view.

  What had happened? Chet traded looks with Journey and stepped closer, even as the Shadow Dancers around Fenimore drew back. He was lying on the ground, eyes open, staring into nothing. Dead. There was no blood or sign of injury. Some kind of dagger lay in his curled hand, the Raptus in the crook of his other arm.

  “He tried to fight and the geas got him. Finally,” a Shadow Dancer said, letting down her hood. She looked awfully familiar... Chet blinked as he realized he knew exactly who she was. Rory’s mom.

  “Zamie, why didn’t you appear sooner?” Journey said—or whined, rather. Her tone was one of deep complaint.

  Zamie raised an eyebrow. “Hello, Zamie, nice to see you, Zamie,” she prompted sarcastically.

  “Mom, stop it. They’ve had a long day," Rory put in.

  “But Rory, what are you doing up and about?” Chet asked, feeling like he’d missed a beat. “Even if you’re alive, you should be headed for the emergency room!”

  Everyone around them snorted. Chet wasn’t sure how fifty hooded and robed people could convey sarcasm with body language, but they did.

  Journey glared at them, frowning. “Give the guy a break. Look, it isn’t that well known that you're able to heal in your own space," she said defensively. She turned to him and murmured, “Clusters are walled-off portions of the God Plain. The spaces have healing properties, like fire does for Flame.”

  “Oh.” Chet realized he was hungry, tired and emotionally overdrawn. It was high time to go upstairs and get cleaned up... except there was still a major threat at hand: the Raptus itself. He wasn't the only one gazing at it, either.

  “Right,” Zamie said. “Well, time to make some decisions. Knife b
egged us to hold off doing anything about the Raptus until she’d figured out how your cord things work. We know now that nothing seems to happen to the others when one of you is killed. And apparently you can travel far away from the Raptus without injury. I think it’s best that we take it into our Cluster to avoid further power grabs.”

  “Sounds good to me," Journey said wearily.

  “Journey, go ahead and complete the unlocking process, then it’ll go into our storage area. We can only hope Aiena responds to our request sometime in the next decade. She tends to not answer our call when she doesn’t want to.”

  What? Chet stared at Zamie, then at Rory. “You mean the Raptus isn’t going to be destroyed any time soon?”

  Rory spread her hands. “We don’t command the goddess. In fact, it’s the exact inverse.”

  “But what if someone else grabs the Raptus while you’re waiting! Like whatever happened before, when the Tache royal cousins got it. Your Cluster didn’t do so great back then, did it?”

  Again, he wasn't sure how a bunch of hooded people could thoroughly communicate wincing and glaring, but they did. Rory shrugged as if to say, “What do you want from us?” Both her expression and Zamie's expression were sardonic, bitter. Neither of them liked the idea of holding onto the Raptus so long, he could tell. But what choice did they have?

  Journey took hold of the Raptus. “Abyss, it feels awful.”

  “Is it really that bad?” Rory looked anxious. So did her mother, actually. Chet blinked; it hadn’t felt painful to him.

  “I'm afraid so. Fenimore already made me bleed,” Journey said, frowning at the memory. Then she looked around at her audience, and sighed. “This is going to sound terrible.”

  Chet frowned. “Just spit it out. What’s so bad about a children’s poem? I mean, you act and dance in front of audiences all the time.”

  “Yeah. Okay, here goes nothing:

  “A rake went cavorting with a Flame

  Until she said ‘You are too tame

  I’ll make you scream

  You’ll provide me with cream’

  Now the rake has gone quite lame.”

  People snickered as the Raptus flashed bright green in Journey’s hands. She hastily dropped it, hissing with—fear? Pain? It lay on the cave floor, inert as ever.

  Chet frowned at Journey. “What kind of a children’s poem was that?”

  “An easily remembered one.”

  “But—but—a children’s poem, Journey!”

  “Hey, that ditty was popular among street urchins and school boys for centuries. I should know. I’ve been a street urchin and school boy, respectively.”

  Zamie reached for the Raptus—then yelped, drawing back and shaking her hands. “It bit me.”

  One Shadow Dancer after another attempted to pick up or even touch the Raptus with similar results. Tools were brought out from the pulsing black hole of the Cluster, which had apparently been hiding in the tunnel. Tongs, leather gloves, even a rubber-insulated box. It was like an engineering exercise with a live power line: ten people groused and yelped as they attempted the task of containing it.

  When they finally managed to get the Raptus into the box, Chet felt as if his guts had been ripped from his belly. He squeaked, his hands automatically gripping his navel. Journey made a similar gesture. They looked at one another with much the same expression. The bonds that bound them to the Raptus had tightened exponentially. It hurt.

  “I don’t think the Raptus wants to go into the Cluster, somehow," Journey said.

  “What’s the alternative?” Rory shrugged. But she—and every visible Shadow Dancer in the cave—groaned when the box was popped into the Cluster itself.

  “Oh, Pantheon,” Zamie hissed. “That’s horrible.”

  Others were swearing, even collapsing to the ground. Chet wasn’t surprised when the box was shoved out of the Cluster so hard it bounced a few times before coming to a stop. Luckily not in lucid mud—someone in the Cluster must have been thinking, even through the... pain?

  “We can’t have that in our Cluster. It felt like a collective kidney stone,” Zamie said shakily.

  “So what do we do? Toss it in the lucid-mud river and let someone else deal with it, years down the road?” a Shadow Dancer asked.

  “No!” several others protested.

  People threw back their hoods to argue with one another, gesturing and raising their voices. Chet was fascinated to find that Rory’s family was amazingly diverse, racial wise. Did people marry into a Shadow Dancer Cluster? How many members existed in their little pocket of the God Plain? What was it really like inside the Cluster? Chet smiled at Rory and took her hand, squeezing it.

  Rory responded by resting her head on his shoulder. She felt fantastic there, but Rory clearly wasn’t happy. “Here we fought and shed blood for the thing, and it’s still causing trouble. We’re stuck with the Raptus for years to come, one way or another.”

  “Not necessarily,” Journey said, her mouth set at a decisive angle.

  Zamie was close enough to have heard her. “What do you mean?”

  Journey pointed at Chet. “We are not using all of our available resources. We have a real, live, reincarnating Magician who is still with us despite the death of Foex.”

  Chet blinked, singled out. Journey had pitched her voice to carry—her thespian abilities had certainly survived the abuse she’d experienced. People in the cave quieted down, listening attentively.

  “We had another real, live, reincarnating Magician here just a few minutes ago, and look at the destruction he was about to unleash on Uos,” Zamie shot back, glaring at Fenimore’s sprawled body.

  “Chet isn’t like that.” To Chet’s shock, it was Rory who’d spoken up. She faced down her mother, her spine straight as a board. “Chet doesn’t want power, and he never has. Fenimore regarded him as a long-time enemy. If Chet was the Magician Zang in his past lives, then he has always been a thoughtful, philosophical soul with a keen mind for history. He has—or used to have—an intricate understanding of blood magic if his writings and epic poetry are any indication. That kind of knowledge isn’t something any of us here possess.”

  Chet stared at Rory, taken aback. He felt absurdly pleased and embarrassed at her regard, yet he’d just found his old name. Now it was being bandied about the room with dozens of strangers looking on. Could he destroy the Raptus? Chet remembered the odd feeling when he’d taken it away from Fen. The Raptus had felt... alive. How many children had died in the making of it? How many people had been tortured, raped and slaughtered under its aegis? Abyss, he’d almost become a member of that endless list minutes ago. He honestly didn’t know whether he could do anything about it.

  Zamie looked skeptical. “What guarantee do we have that he won’t just grab the Raptus and use it to his full advantage?”

  Rory rolled her eyes. “Mooom,” she groaned, sounding half her age. “The family far outnumbers Chet, and everyone out here has a bracelet on. How on Uos could he run, let alone use the abysmal thing?”

  “I’m sure he’d figure out something,” Zamie muttered, but around her people were whispering amongst themselves, eyeing Chet thoughtfully. Zamie raised her voice to be heard. “Magicians were clever, murderous bastards who killed children for their rituals. They were never trustworthy.”

  Journey snorted. “You know, horrible things have been whispered about Flame, too. We’re said to kidnap children and molest them. And, of course, there is a drop of truth to the old stories: young people have always run away with us to be initiated in fire, while older adolescents sometimes fall in love with us. You Shadow Dancers don’t have the best reputations on Uos, either.”

  Chet cleared his throat and everyone in the cave went abruptly silent. “It is true. When I was a Magician, I did kill children. When I found out what my past held, I could barely believe it. I feel sick and guilty as Abyss—probably always will. We did horrible things back in those days.”

  “You aren’t helping,” Journ
ey whispered out of the corner of her mouth.

  A Shadow Dancer stepped forward. “Look, these claims are pretty incredible. You don’t look special.”

  “I’m not,” Chet agreed readily. He wasn’t sure where he was going with this, but he needed to rise to the occasion, if only to be the person his friends believed he was and to validate their trust in him. “I was an archeology graduate student at Semaphore University before the Raptus turned my life on its head last week. I was deeply in love with the past, with history and antiquities of old. But you know something? No matter how beautiful the past might have been with its mysteries and secrets, the present is far more important.” He reached out and took Rory’s hand, emboldened. “This is what the Raptus takes away from us. It doesn’t just remove our free will, no, not at all. Its power is divisive. It’s easy to split a family, to split friend from friend, when people are hypnotized to hurt one another.”

  “Do you want to destroy the Raptus, Chet?” Rory said, pitching her voice to carry. A public question.

  “Yes. To have it used upon you is a terrible experience. No one—not now, nor future generations—should suffer because of our pride and false notions of progress. I don’t know if I can destroy it, but I vow to try. If it swallows me whole, if I try to use it to hurt anyone... you can kill me.” He looked Zamie in the eye.

  Her eyebrows rose, her expression a tad less skeptical. Maybe she’d noticed Rory hadn’t let go of his hand. “That’s unbelievably brave of you.”

  “Ma’am, I’ve had two friends and a mentor recently murdered—and an ally flung into lucid mud—because of this thing. The fate of the world is at stake if we fail. Our lives, our futures, our children... all endangered by the Raptus.”

  “But no pressure or anything,” Journey murmured, grinning.

  Zamie nodded, arms crossed over her chest. “All right, you have one shot. Guys, bring the box over here.”

  Rory drew close to Chet and kissed him on the cheek. “Good luck,” she whispered. She let go of his hand and stepped back.

  Chet gazed down at the unlocked Raptus. It was glowing a deeper green but seemed otherwise unchanged. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, then lifted it out of the box and into his lap. He still didn’t feel any pain—indeed, the thing seemed to be at home in his lap. The Raptus, as if sensing his readiness, pulsed at him through the bond. The bond. It had grabbed him first thing, it had wanted him. Why?