by Logan Jacobs
“Very poetic,” I said. “But I didn’t come here to argue about a girl.”
“No,” Gorander agreed. “You came here to kill me. Did you not?” From the way he said it, it wasn’t really a question.
“As any sane person would agree to be the most reasonable course of action, given your doings for the last half a year or thereabouts,” I replied. “Not to mention your plans for the future.”
“Lady Carlisle was wrong about you,” he remarked. “She said that you are strictly a killer for hire. Not a crusader. Not a hero. But no one hired you to kill me, did they?”
“I fully intend to collect my due payment for this job as for any other,” I said. “In fact, I expect the payment to be on a rather grander scale than usual. It may be quite unprecedented in my career. I suppose that depends on how much of your estate genuinely exists, and how much of it consists of pure illusion. Dear Vera is quite good at what she does. I suppose we can both appreciate that.”
“You require payment up front, she said,” Gorander persisted. He stared at me with a hawk-like, predatory gaze. His grip on his ridiculous bejeweled scepter turned his knuckles white. “No exceptions. And yet, you have made an exception for me. Or attempted to, at least. Why is that? What makes me special? I would have assumed that this was about the woman, except that I believe you were genuinely unaware of her presence here before you arrived. So, it’s something else.”
“Every decision I make is a business decision,” I said. “And you happen to be sitting on a remarkably large pile of treasure. Strange, miscellaneous, and bloodstained though it may be.”
And, you happen to be a particularly nasty bastard, I thought but didn’t say. Not out of fear of causing offense, but because I couldn’t admit to Gorander that I was affected by any such judgments. Now, I was far from being an ideological type. Very far from it. Killing and torturing each other, well I reckon those had been two of mankind’s favorite hobbies since the dawn of time, and hearing tell of any such didn’t really make me bat an eye. But using sorcery to steal people’s minds from them? So they never even had a chance to fight back, since they’d been hypnotized out of so much as realizing that they ought to? That was a different kind of evil that, in my view, shouldn’t exist on the face of this earth.
“I think maybe the reason you took my ambitions so personally,” Gorander said slowly, as he completely ignored my last words, “is that you’re outraged by the idea of a common-born man rising to become the Emperor of the West… Casifer of Delorne.”
Ah, not that again. Honestly, as long as I could get Theo to shut up about it for long enough, I forgot about it half the time myself… until inevitably someone else would take it upon themselves to remind me, with a smug smile, delighted by their own cleverness in nosing about and figuring it out, convinced that they had unlocked the secret of my true identity that would cause me to crumble emotionally. But the truth was that the people who hadn’t a clue about my royal past, who knew me solely as Halston Hale, the ruthlessly efficient mercenary, were the ones who better understood my nature.
“I don’t give a shit about your bloodlines,” I said. “But I do know that the West will never suffer an emperor of any kind.”
“You think you’re innately superior,” he growled at me. “Just because of the family you happened to be born into. For your father to terrorize and oppress a populace, that is right? That is divinely ordained? That is the world order as it should be? And for me to build an empire from scratch, out of the barren dust of a savage country, that is wrong and preposterous, and I deserve to be punished for my hubris?”
“Ah, so you have a grudge against royals,” I said. “Well, they’re not my favorite people either, as anyone who paid a lick of attention to my personal biography might have noticed. But like I said, I don’t give a shit if you want to be one. You can spend your life trying to be one if you want. But not here. Not in my territory. These towns are my clientele base, you understand? And if your fucking hairy wolf men run about gobbling down people’s grandmothers and stealing all the potencium, well, people will either pick up and leave altogether or they’ll stay and starve, but either way, they won’t be able to pay for my services. So I won’t tolerate it.”
“It has to be here,” Gorander said. “This is a young country, one where new ideas can flourish. In all the old countries, they are prejudiced against the idea of rule by sorcerers. They fear and distrust us.”
“Can’t fucking imagine why,” I muttered.
“It would have been a fine thing, if it could have been as Lady Carlisle suggested,” Gorander said thoughtfully. “If you could have stayed on as an honored advisor to my court. An ambassador of the Old World, to help provide guidance as I shape my new one. But I can see you are not amenable to that idea, and never will be.”
“Perhaps you should have gotten one of my sisters for the job,” I said. The idea made me smirk with amusement. “Some of them are dumb enough to do it. Although, of course, they’d insist on being Empress. And I suppose they all must be married by now, probably with dozens of children. All the ones that had been born by the time I left, anyway.”
“My Empress will bear me dozens of children, and they will colonize the world,” Gorander stated. “I regret that you will not be around to witness it.”
“That’s your plan, and yet you’re still pursuing Vera?” I chuckled. “Guess she hasn’t told you about that stomach rune of hers.”
“Stomach rune?” Gorander repeated.
“Of course not.” I laughed.
“Farewell, relic of the old world,” Gorander said to me as he raised his scepter. I felt Theo’s muscles tense beneath me and dug my heels in to signal him to charge the sorcerer.
He did, and I raised my sword to swipe off Gorander’s oddly shaped, long-bearded head, but then Theo skidded to a halt as we found ourselves crashing straight into a wall of greenery where there had been none a second before. It was as though the hedge itself had lunged forward to protect its master. I could see the branches still thrashing and growing before my eyes and weaving themselves into a denser barrier. Some of them weren’t hard branches, they were more like vines, and they started twining themselves around my limbs and Theo’s. At first I tried to chop my way through with my sword, but each branch or vine was so quickly replaced by the next that I realized how futile that would be.
The way the hedge was behaving gave me an idea, though. If it were made up of organic plants, then my power couldn’t affect it, since I couldn’t shrink or grow living things. However, organic plants were likewise immune to most other forms of magic, in a direct sense at least. You could summon water to quench them or fire to burn them, for instance, but it was very difficult to manipulate a plant into doing your bidding magically. More difficult, in fact, than manipulating humans, possibly because sorcerers, being human themselves, tended to understand the human psyche so much better. Although there were also those who specialized in plants, but as far as I knew, Gorander wasn’t one of them. Which meant that this hedge of his which was currently attempting to strangle Theo and me probably wasn’t a living thing at all, it was probably an artificial creation.
With my non-sword hand, I grabbed onto a vine that was wrapping itself around Theo’s throat and willed it to shrink.
Not only did that particular vine shrink, about half of the plant matter that was currently attacking us also withered away into miniaturized versions, branches becoming twigs, leaves the size of my palm shrinking to the size of my fingernail. That indicated firstly that the hedge was a fake, and secondly that it was composed of many fake plants, each of which was well within my ability to shrink. If the maze had been a single unit, then it would have been too massive for me to influence.
Shrinking half of our opponent’s leafy limbs like that relieved enough tension and created enough space for me to be able to swing my sword and hack through the brush again, and for Theo to be able to wrest his legs free and start angrily rearing up and stomping on w
hatever branches he could reach.
Of course, as soon as I let go with my hand, that particular bush started growing back to its former size, but less densely than before, due to all the branches and vines we had successfully damaged. And then all I had to do was grab another random branch to shrink the plant that it was attached to, and in this way I could keep the hedge manageable enough to be able to continue hacking through it.
Eventually, I was once again standing pretty much face to face with Gorander, through a sparse, faintly trembling screen of hacked-off branches. Before my eyes the severed limbs of the hedge, so to speak, started to withdraw sheepishly back into the original shape of the maze, as if they were retreating from a fight they knew they had lost.
The sorcerer glowered at me. His hooded eyes had narrowed to slits, and his mouth had tightened too.
“You know, you’re the one trying to bring the old world back into this new world,” I said. “You don’t dislike the old aristocratic ways. You just wanted to occupy a different role in that hierarchy.”
“What I want is to claim the place I have always rightfully deserved, that was denied to me in the old world,” Gorander hissed.
“Sorcery is just as much an accident of birth as hereditary aristocracy,” I said. “Very few are born with the capacity to manipulate matter and energy in that way. It’s a matter of sheer dumb luck.”
“Perhaps the ability for sorcery is a gift of birth,” Gorander conceded, “but most sorcerers are weak, pathetic creatures, like bipeds who never progressed beyond the crawling stage. The true scope of a sorcerer’s power can only be accessed through study, practice, dedication and sacrifice, profound ingenuity, and far-reaching vision. Just like an individual in any other career or capacity, a sorcerer is no more than what he makes of himself.”
“It’s like that with aristocrats too,” I pointed out. “Being one at all might seem impressive to people who aren’t. But some just sit around and eat desserts and have less of a significant impact on the world than a cabbage farmer, although they might consume more resources. Some are vain and stupid and become the puppets of cunning flatterers. To strengthen your rule, to expand your holdings, to influence the course of civilization, to make your mark on history, you have to have compelling ideas and the resolution and common sense to carry them out well.”
Gorander fingered his scepter thoughtfully. I guess he wasn’t in a rush to destroy me immediately. Where could I go, after all, from the middle of his enchanted fake hedge maze? So I could certainly buy time by talking, but I wasn’t sure yet how to use it.
“Is that why you ran away to the West then?” he asked. “Because you didn’t think you’d make a good ruler?”
“I would have made a great ruler,” I scoffed.
“Then why did you run away?” he persisted.
“That’s none of your damn business,” I replied. “But I can tell you one thing on that matter though.”
“What’s that?”
“You’d make a damned awful ruler,” I informed him sincerely.
“You have no inkling of the scope of my plans for this land,” Gorander snapped. “It is nothing now. A dusty wasteland filled with pecking vultures for citizens. But I will transform it. I will devise ways to irrigate it. To grow every kind of crop under the sun. And I will build roads to connect all these godforsaken outposts. And I will establish law and order and turn this wild land into a proper civilization. The people will recognize me as their salvation, they will erect statues of me, one day future generations will not be able to imagine how their ancestors survived in a time before I came and changed everything for them.”
“Is that the daydream that you jack off to?” I inquired. “The only people who will ever worship you that way are the people whose minds you enslaved through your magic, like the good folk of Fairhollow. And even you must know that that don’t count for a cow turd. You’re not welcome here, Gorander. Hell, I wouldn’t be welcome myself, not if I came knocking as Casifer of Delorne. But there’s a place here for Halston Hale all right.”
“Well, I have no use for a Halston Hale,” Gorander announced icily. “There is only a place at my court for Casifer of Delorne.”
“He’s long dead, and if he weren’t, he’d tell you to fuck right off like the peasant you are,” I replied. “Offering the crown prince an advisory post in your make-believe court on the far reaches of the frontier? That’s the kind of insult that you’d have to hope would produce enough of a laugh to distract him from chopping your loony head off.”
Gorander’s only response was to raise his scepter. I felt Theo’s muscles tense as he too observed the sign of an impending attack, so I jabbed my heels in to signal him to charge. We only had to cross about fifteen feet of distance to reach Gorander, and he’d have a hell of a time trying to cast any more spells while headless.
Theo charged. But after two steps he whinnied and reared up, and I almost lost my seat. Some kind of blur skimmed by us. As Theo’s front hooves hit the ground again, I twisted around to see what had alarmed him.
It looked like a hawk, except that it was made of shining silver and gleamed metallically in the sun. It spread its wings as it coasted past us, and its feathers glittered like hundreds of tiny, delicate knives. Then it let out a screeching caw as it wheeled back around in preparation for a second dive. The caw sounded sort of tinny, it didn’t have the full-throated timbre of a real hawk’s.
I swung my sword as it came within reach, and it clanged against the metallic silver hawk and knocked it out of the air. The creature was quite heavy and solid. I was impressed that it could even stay airborne at that weight. When it hit the ground, it twitched and made a frustrated whirring sound as it struggled to right itself. I didn’t have any time to examine the contraption more closely, though, because there were two more hawks flying at us from out of the greenery. So far they were just angry, cawing specks in the distance, but it wasn’t hard to guess what shape they would take on as they got closer and closer.
“Should I run?” Theo muttered. It wasn’t an unreasonable question. The hawks were fast. And they were made of metal. I could picture how their sharp beaks would rip right through our flesh, or even just the edges of their feathers could slice our throats. But we had nowhere to run, and in fact I didn’t think that even Theo was fast enough to outrun the unnatural birds.
“No, we’ll do this just like with the demons in the library,” I said. “I’ll knock em down, then you crush em.”
Theo looked down for the injured-- or I suppose I should say damaged, since it was a piece of machinery, not a living creature-- silver hawk in order to do my bidding, but it had already sorted itself out and taken to the air again while I was distracted by the other two incoming hawks.
The one saving grace about these flying, self-directed weapons was that they had to launch their attacks from a certain distance off in order to attain deadly speeds, so you had a bit of warning. If one just pecked you from the ground at your feet, like where the damaged hawk had been lying, then it would probably hurt, but it certainly wouldn’t kill you.
I shrank my sword down just a tad bit as the nearest of the hawks tucked its wings in for the final descent and hurtled straight at my face, because I could see the next hawk coming in hot close behind, and I liked to make my sword a little lighter in situations when speed and maneuverability were more important than power and reach.
This hawk was bronze instead of silver, and the other was a blaze of gold. A complete trio. I had to admit they were quite beautifully crafted. But I didn’t think they were simply clockwork devices, since no inventor could hope to manufacture anything so swift and graceful in flight-- miraculous as they were, hot air balloons and zeppelins were always bumbling and unwieldy. I was pretty sure the hawks were powered by Gorander’s magic, since the sorcerer, from his position about fifteen feet away, watched them swoop down on us with a slight smirk on his face. I fully intended to remove that smirk by force, but that would have to wait u
ntil after I had dealt with his little metal predators.
I lashed out at the bronze hawk. I didn’t connect solidly enough to knock it to the ground the way I had done with the silver one, but my sword seemed to clip its tail and send it into a bit of a spin. It had to open its wings and flap to keep itself in the air, and as I swung for a second time, it rose out of reach and wheeled away no doubt in preparation for another attack.
And then the golden hawk was diving. It seemed to be aiming not for my face, but Theo’s, and more specifically for his eyes.
“When I say turn your head, turn,” I told him urgently as I stood up in the stirrups. I estimated the number of seconds before the bird made contact and started counting down. When there were three seconds to spare I yelled, “Turn!”
Theo’s massive black head whipped sideways so fast that his mane billowed out. As soon as it was safely out of the way, I lunged forward and stabbed down with my sword as hard as I could.
The point smashed into the metal body, which for a second appeared to explode, but that was just the bird’s wings reflexively deploying as it started to tumble out of the air. It didn’t have enough altitude to be able to overcome the force of my blow and propel itself back up, though. Instead it hit the dirt at Theo’s feet and before he could stomp on it, it started doing a sort of clumsy cross between a somersault and a cartwheel which didn’t look voluntary at all.
“Wait,” I yelled to Theo before he could pursue the flash of erratically spinning gold, because now the first, silver hawk was coming into range again. I saw that its flight was no longer as smooth and swift as before. Whatever damage it had sustained in the first fall was causing it to list slightly to the left, and it had to keep correcting itself. That made it an easy target, so this time I enlarged my sword to make it into a better bludgeoning tool, and batted the silver hawk back down to earth. This time it sort of just thudded down like a rock. Maybe I’d broken some kind of more essential gears inside of it. But just to be sure, Theo eagerly stomped down with his iron-shod hooves, and the bird shattered into hundreds of gleaming components.