Scorched Earth

by Randall Pine

  She broke open the buttons and pulled it open below his throat. The black blade seemed to have melted inside his chest; it spilled out of the infected cavity, coating his skin like oil, and it was the very poison that was pumping through his veins, turning them black.

  Abby shrank back in fear. “Oh, Llewyn,” she whispered, her voice breaking.

  He may have been alive, but he was just barely. He wouldn’t stay that way for long.

  Abby swallowed hard. She pulled off her gloves and set them aside. “Please let this be a good idea,” she said aloud.

  She hovered her hands over the wet, black wound in his chest. She closed her eyes, and she moved her lips, silently reciting a spell from memory. As the old words filled her mind, the magic took hold. Abby lowered her hands, placing them into the oily black mess. She cried out with pain as she absorbed the last, fading thoughts and feelings of the dying mage. They coated her mind with the thick veil of death, and the flavor of his emotions spread across her tongue, spoiled and sour, like rot.

  But his feelings weren’t all she was absorbing; she wouldn’t have needed a spell for that. The magic words that she silently mouthed gave her the power to draw out something far more potent, and far more sinister. Up into the skin of her hands, along with Llewyn’s thoughts and feelings, came Morilan’s dark poison itself.

  The thick black goo soaked into her palms and traveled up her wrists, moving up her arms like water soaking into paper. Abby gritted her teeth and tried not to scream. The black magic seared her skin from the inside. Her body immediately rejected it and tried to fight it off, but her immune system was instantly overwhelmed and overpowered, and she suddenly had chills, nausea, and fever. It was like getting the flu from the barrel of a shotgun.

  Her whole body felt like it had turned to water, and her eyes rolled back in her head. The black magic was up to her shoulders now, and it began to spread along the sides of her neck. The instant fever sent her into a delirium, and when her eyes fluttered open, she saw the slimy tentacles of a kraken slithering out of Llewyn’s empty eye, and suddenly they weren’t in the wizard’s hallway anymore, but in the water-wracked hull of a ship at sea, rolling on the angry waves of a mighty squall. The kraken pulled itself out through Llewyn’s eye as she watched in horror. It opened its jaws to swallow her whole.

  Then Morilan’s black magic spread to her heart, and Abby collapsed on the broken stones of Llewyn’s crumbling hallway.

  Chapter 15

  Llewyn was in a cold, dark place.

  He opened his eyes. The world around him was a landscape of dark grays and black, and his human eye was having a hard time adjusting.

  His sorcerer eye had been extinguished completely.

  He was vertical, but he wasn’t exactly standing. His toes were barely dragging the stone floor; he was being dangled by his wrists, which were tied together with a thick rope suspended from the ceiling.

  Llewyn cast a simple unbinding spell to free his hands, but he felt nothing in his wrists except the biting pain of the rope digging into his skin.

  Wherever he was, his magic was being dampened. Or perhaps it had been drained altogether.

  Llewyn cursed under his breath.

  Someone in the corner of the room clicked his tongue disapprovingly. “Language,” the voice in the shadows said.

  Llewyn would have known that voice anywhere. It sounded like airwave static, as if it were coming through the speakers of an old, hand-dialed radio that couldn’t quite home in on the radio tower. Each syllable popped and squeaked, and the air around the sounds seemed to warble in and out of reception. It was a voice that was being projected far across both space and time, from the deepest, darkest pits of the dynagogical plane.

  “Morilan,” Llewyn snarled.

  “Hello, old friend.”

  The dark mage stepped out from the shadows, and the chamber seemed to lighten a bit at his movement, so that Llewyn could just barely make out the all-too-familiar form of his nemesis. Morilan was tall and lean, with scarlet-purple skin. He wore a long, black robe that was cinched around his waist with a chain of jade crystal links. His fingers were three inches too long, and he kept his nails sharp. His white beard was neatly trimmed, and shaped into a narrow W from one ear to the other, with the middle point spiking sharply at his chin. His nose was slightly caved in, and his eyes were pure, milky white; he had no pupils to speak of, and no eyelids with which to blink.

  Morilan had once been a human, with proper human features. But he had made many sacrifices for his dark magic, and those sacrifices had changed him.

  The scar across Llewyn’s lips burned at the very sight of the evil wizard.

  “Welcome back,” Morilan continued, in his otherworldly radio-static voice.

  Llewyn snorted. “Back to where?”

  “Does it not feel familiar? We are in a cave, beneath the Carpathian Mountains. I thought it fitting that we begin your ending where your ending began.” Morilan glided slowly across the floor, moving without stepping, circling his dangling prisoner. His entire body flickered and shifted from time to time, a byproduct of the fact that he was not actually in the cave with Llewyn, but was projecting himself across dimensions.

  “Why don’t you face me in person?” Llewyn sneered. He spat at Morilan, and the mucous landed on the robe of the semi-solid projection.

  Morilan frowned down at the offending substance, and he passed for a moment into full transparency. The mucous fell to the floor, and then Morilan reappeared. He clicked his tongue again. “Manners, manners,” he reminded his foe, continuing his circumnavigation. “I admit, I’m surprised you managed to stave off my dark blade all these years. You must be weary, old friend.” Morilan reached out with a solidified finger and wiped a trail of sweat from the back of Llewyn’s neck. He brought the finger to his lips and tasted the wizard’s exhaustion. The corners of his lips curled up into a smile. “There are few things more delectable then the debilitation of your rival, don’t you think so?”

  “What do you want?” Llewyn grumbled.

  “What do I want?” Morilan laughed. “I want this! I want you, captive and drained of your powers,” he said gleefully. “I have what I want!” He flitted around the chamber and came face-to-face with Llewyn. “I could keep you alive down here for several hundred more years, you know. The dark blade spell, now that it has broken open and seeped into your blood, will preserve your body for centuries to come. As long as your heart beats, it will beat under the protection of my whim. And while your body slowly, agonizingly rots up there,” the dark mage said, pointing upward, indicating the surface world, “your spirit is here, in these mountains, released of its magic, for the pleasure of my torment.” Morilan’s purple skin rippled with excitement. “It does make me wonder: how did you let yourself come to this?”

  “It was the fastest way I could think to get a message to you,” Llewyn replied.

  Morilan tilted his head in curiosity. “Is that so?” he murmured. He took a step forward. “And what message is that, old friend?”

  Llewyn looked up, at last, and met his enemy’s blank, white stare with his one green eye. Then he pulled his head back and snapped it forward, smashing his forehead into Morilan’s nose.

  The dark wizard phased out of reality, but not quite quickly enough; Llewyn’s brow caught enough bone that he heard a satisfying crunch before Morilan managed to make his projection immaterial. The majority of Llewyn’s force passed straight through the image of Morilan’s head, but that small, painful crack was more than enough to bring a smile to Llewyn’s face.

  Morilan’s skin burned a deeper purple with anger. “Tricks and childishness!” he snapped, his voice wavering in and out of reception. Llewyn was gratified to see that even as a projection, Morilan’s nose was trickling blood from the contact. “I’ll tell you why you came to this,” the dark wizard sneered, wiping the blood with his sleeve
. “Because you wasted your magic on a pair of simpering mortal brats who make parlor games of the endless power of the universe. Because instead of saving your strength for the dark blade in your chest, you expended it on portals and visions and forest rooms and training-wheel magic. You let your heart get the better of your brain, and so your heart has paid its price.”

  Llewyn didn’t have a cutting response for that. It was true; he had sacrificed so much of his magic by focusing it on Simon and Virgil and their training that he hadn’t left himself enough strength to keep the dark blade at bay.

  “I promised to train them and protect them,” he said simply and quietly, his head hanging down, his long, white hair falling in tangled trestles.

  “I hope it was worth your life,” Morilan said, sounding pleased beneath the radio-static crackle of his voice. “Last I saw, your young apprentices were heading directly into certain death.”

  Llewyn’s cheeks flushed with anger. It had been centuries since he’d been without the comfort of powerful magic at his beck and call, and being unable to conjure it now, when he was filled with torment and rage, and when he needed it most, gave him the distinct feeling of having an endless pit open up in his stomach, a pit into which all hope sank, never to be seen again.

  He had never felt so powerless.

  “Leave them alone,” he said through clenched teeth.

  But Morlian laughed. “I plan to,” he assured his prisoner. “I won’t need to lift a finger against them. They’re bungling things up plenty on their own.” He approached Llewyn again, more cautiously this time. “I suspect it only serves to make matters worse, knowing that the training that has allowed you to die was carried out in vain.”

  Llewyn opened his mouth to respond, but just as he did, he felt an invisible thread tug at the inside of his brain. It wasn’t a painful sensation, but an odd and unexpected one…and then the tugging became stronger, and more frantic, and soon it wasn’t just one invisible thread, but dozens of them, hundreds of them, pulling at the inside of his mind. As the threads began to pull, Llewyn had the distinct impression of being peeled away from a spider web, of becoming unstuck. He looked up at Morlian, and he grinned. “Better luck next time,” he said.

  Morilan gave him a curious look. But before he could inquire as to his prisoner’s cryptic tidings, Llewyn disappeared from the cave beneath the mountains, and the air around him rushed to fill in the space he left behind, sucking together with a soft pop.

  The evil wizard screamed with such fury that the stones around him shuddered and began to fall. His projection blinked out of existence as the cave itself collapsed.

  Chapter 16

  “I don’t like this, I don’t like this, I don’t like this,” Virgil whispered as they plunged deeper and deeper into the forest.

  “Will you stop saying that?” Simon hissed. “We’re not exactly defenseless, you know.” He charged up his fist to prove it. It glowed a watery orange in the sunlight.

  “We’re not exactly experts, either,” Virgil replied, before walking straight into a thin branch that Simon had pushed through and then let go. “Ow!” He closed his eyes and rubbed the pain out of his nose. “See?”

  “Virgil. It’s fine. It’s daylight, we can see everything. If we get there and it looks dangerous, we’ll turn around.”

  Virgil pushed through the brush and caught back up with his friend. “First of all, I don’t believe that for a second,” he said. “And second of all, why do people always say things are going to be okay because it’s daylight? Daylight is terrifying! Chasing down a serial killer in the daylight is even worse than stumbling around with one in the pitch black, because if it’s daylight, they can see you perfectly, and they can track you perfectly, and they can murder you perfectly. I’ve never understood that about horror movies.”

  “You think about the dumbest things,” Simon muttered.

  They hustled down the hill, dodging roots and rocks where they could, and stumble-sliding down the dirt slope as quietly as they were able. They broke through a thicket of trees, and Simon threw out his arm. He caught Virgil by the shoulder and pulled him back behind one of the larger trunks. “Look,” he whispered, peering around the tree.

  About fifty yards in the distance, they could see the rear end of a huge, white van bouncing along over the uneven terrain. It was an oversized, fifteen-passenger vehicle, and it looked like an airport shuttle. The windows were tinted, so they couldn’t see how many people were sitting inside. There was no road for the van to drive along, just a wide path of dirt and beaten-down brush. It jounced along and made a broad, sweeping curve to the right. As it did, they could see bright blue letters painted on the side of the van that read FURTIVE HILLS.

  “What the…?” Virgil said, his voice trailing off with curiosity.

  Simon pulled out his phone, opened the camera, and zoomed in as far as the lens would go. He snapped a few pictures of the van as it disappeared between the trees, bumping down the mountain in the general direction of the valley road.

  He frowned down at the images. They were blurry, and not particularly revealing. He stuffed his phone back into his pocket and did a quick scan of the area. When he was satisfied that they were alone, he stepped out from behind the tree. “Why would you take a van off-road up here?” he murmured, more to himself than to Virgil.

  “And what is ‘Furtive Hills’?” Virgil added, scratching his head.

  “It looked like some sort of hotel shuttle,” Simon suggested.

  “Furtive Hills sounds like some sort of golf course for members of the Elks Club.”

  “Who even thinks of the Elks Club? What are you, a hundred years old?”

  “I pay attention,” Virgil said smugly.

  The clearing before them was roughly circular, and large enough that a few dozen people could easily fit inside the space. It had been cleared by hand; the circular shape of the area was proof enough of that, along with the sawed-off tree trunks that were just about flush with the ground. The entire space was covered with footprints pressed into the soft dirt, some that looked fresh and some that looked quite a bit older.

  “I don’t think we’re dealing with just the woman in the cloak,” Simon said gloomily. He peered into the clearing, looking for something, anything besides the footprints that could give them a clue to what had happened in the space. “Hey, do you see that?” he asked, pointing toward the center of the clearing.

  “What?” Virgil asked, squinting.

  “That. Look. There are holes in the ground.”

  There were five of them, to be exact. There was one large hole in the center, about the size of a half dollar, flanked by four evenly-spaced smaller holes, so that all together, they looked like the black marks on a five of spades playing card.

  “I don’t see them,” Virgil muttered, straining his eyes. He raised his foot, ready to step into the clearing to get a closer look, but Simon stopped him by throwing a hand against his chest.

  “Wait,” Simon whispered. He scanned the area once more, his entire body on high alert. “What if there are booby traps?”

  “Why would there be booby traps?”

  “The tunnel had a booby trap.”

  “The tunnel was dark. You just said everything was safer in the daylight. Do you see any tripwires?” Virgil asked, sweeping his arm toward the ground.

  “I don’t know, I just have this feeling…” Simon said, trailing off.

  Virgil rolled his eyes. “Simon, they weren’t expecting us. This is the middle of nowhere, it’s not like people come traipsing through here all the time. Trust me, there are no booby traps.”

  He stepped into the clearing. As soon as his foot touched the earth, the air around them crackled with the sound of shattering glass.

  Virgil looked down at his foot. Then he looked back up at Simon. “Okay, just to be clear—” he started. But he didn’t
bother finishing the statement, because Simon wasn’t listening anyway. His attention was focused on the ground in front of Virgil.

  The grass before him began to mound up, pushing up from beneath. Virgil stumbled backward out of the clearing as the mound became a hill, and the grass stretched and broke, giving way to soft dirt and mud that rose from the forest floor. The mound of earth grew huge, at least a full foot taller than Virgil, and it spread out to either side, until it was twice as wide as the thickest trees around them. Then the earth began to form itself into a shape, resolving into a man—a gigantic, brawny man made of mud. He had a huge, blocky jaw and burly, muscular arms. He wore a heavy pair of overalls and thick work boots, all made of mud, too. On his head, he wore an old-fashioned miner’s hard hat with a lamp affixed to the front; in his hand, he carried a massive pickaxe. It was almost the size of Virgil’s entire body, from end to end, and even though it was made of earth, there was no mistaking its lethal sharpness as the miner swung it around, and it whistled through the air.

  “Well, this can’t be good,” Virgil murmured.

  The miner swung the pickaxe at Simon’s head, and he ducked out of the way just in time; the pointed end caught the tree trunk next to where he was standing and struck it so hard, it ran all the way through and came out the far side, exploding through the bark. The miner yanked back on the pickaxe, ripping the tree in half. The tree tilted forward, then fell just off the clearing, crashing to the ground and sending tremors across the forest floor.

  “Yeah. Definitely not good,” Virgil decided.

  Simon scrambled away from the miner, who glowered down at him beneath the hard hat and rumbled forward, his wide shoulders scraping through the trees. He lifted the axe above his head and brought it down hard; the sharp end struck the earth just between Simon’s legs.