The man shook his head. “Trapper, and I just dropped off a cartload of furs.”
“Ah, and you want to go home with even more. All right, let’s give it a go.”
Parker shifted the coins to the side of the crate and started the routine again. His hands flew, as did his mouth. Finally, he came to rest. The man inspected each of the shells. After a moment, he pointed. “This one.”
“Ah, close.” Parker flipped over a different shell showing the tiny pea. He swiped the man’s coins and stuffed them into his bag. He asked, “Try again?”
“Nah. That’s all. The wife said no gambling.”
“Perfect,” Parker cried. “This is a game of skill.” Sliding the pea under the middle shell, he flipped the empty ones over. “You saw it, right? Here, look again.” He tilted the shell back up. “Three moves on this one. No need to put money on it if you’re not sure.”
Parker slowly slid the shells around, shifting each of them one space. “Last chance for a bet. I’ll let you win it back.”
The man rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. “How about I win it back and more?”
Parker shrugged. “Guess I’ll give it a chance. Forty coins?”
The man laughed and pointed. “Stupid kid. It’s here.”
Parker grinned and flipped the shell. It was empty. “Sorry, mate. Thanks for playing, though.”
The crowd cheered as he grabbed the coins.
“You little cheat,” the trapper yelled.
“Sir, I resent your comment. I am an honest—” Without finishing, Parker kicked the crate into the man’s legs and shot through the thick crowd. He had to circle the whole quarter before he knew he was safe.
Collapsing on a bench at the edge of Queen Bitch Boulevard, Parker counted his coins and caught his breath. The shell game was always a risky con. It could only last so long before it was broken up by an angry tourist or the Governor’s Guard, but he had made enough for the day.
“You want to try again?”
The nobleman stood over him.
“Pretty far away from your quarter now, aren’t you sir?” Parker quipped, looking over his shoulder.
Glancing down Queen’s Boulevard, the man smiled. “Dunno, looks quainter here than I imagined. Maybe I’ll move in.”
Parker laughed and the man dropped onto the bench next to him, pulling on his collar. “Can’t wait to get out of this stiff cloak. Makes me feel stuffy, like those noble bastards. How’d we do today?”
“Not bad, Sam. About two-fifty. You did pretty good—almost believable as a man from the Noble Quarter. Always knew there was something wrong with you.” Parker dropped half the earnings into the man’s hand. While Parker knew he deserved more of the take, he split it evenly with Sam because that’s what he always did with Hannah. And most hustles needed a partner. “It was a good day.”
The man nodded, grabbed his share, and headed toward Queen’s Boulevard. He stopped and turned. “I know it’s usually you and Hannah running together, but if you need me, I’m happy for the work.”
“Sure thing, Sam. We’ll have to change it up tomorrow, but I might need you again.”
Parker hid half the coins in his shoes and made his way into the Boulevard. Stopping at the toll, he paid the cut to Jack, who would hand it over to Horace, the scumbag manager of their quarter. Life was hard enough in Queen’s Boulevard; it felt harder every time he handed over hard earned cash to the “civil servant.”
He was halfway down the Boulevard when he heard a hushed voice call his name. His face lightened when he saw it was William.
“Come with me,” he said.
“William?” Parker looked around quickly and hissed back, “Where the hell is Hannah?”
“Just come with me. I’ll tell you everything.”
Parker followed William as he wound his way through an alley and climbed over a broken-down fence. After crossing an empty lot littered with trash, the boy looked over his shoulder at Parker and around the edge of the lot before ducking through a hedge.
William stepped through a broken window into a building that appeared suited for demolition. While the outside was falling apart, the inside was neat and tidy. Pieces of discarded furniture lined the walls, and it looked as though someone had recently swept the worn-out floors. Condemned buildings were a dime a dozen in Queen’s Boulevard, but he’d never seen one cared for like this.
“What is this place?” Parker asked looking around.
“A clubhouse, I guess you could say. Hannah and I found it years ago. We’d come here whenever we got the chance. You know, kids’ stuff. We’d play house, or school, or magic. Called it our own. Two years ago, when Hannah started running the streets with you, we stopped coming, but I decided to keep it up. Only felt right. I come when I can.”
Parker walked the perimeter of the room and tried the knob on the only door. “The rest of the house like this?” he asked.
“Nah. Just this. I don’t know why, but we usually stayed in this one room. Only ventured into the rest of the house a few times. Smells like cat piss and death. Everything’s a mess. But, you know, when you carve out a little corner of the world, you find you can actually care for something. We started small. Thought that someday the place would be ours and we could do the rest. But you have to start however you can.”
William sat down on a chair in a corner arranged as a sitting area. He rubbed his hand on the arm of the chair and tilted his head back.
Parker dropped into a chair across from William. He noticed the color in the boy’s face and the steadiness of his hands. Hannah’s sick little brother looked like a different person.
He started to ask about it, but reconsidered. “Where is she, William? It’s been days. I don’t want to be the overbearing street partner, but I’m starting to worry. You know, with the thing in the alley.”
“Yeah, that’s why I came looking for you. I think she would want you to know she’s gone.”
“Gone?” Parker asked. “When? Where?”
His mind raced, but once it started to settle down, Parker realized he shouldn’t be all that surprised.
They all had it bad in the Boulevard, but some kids, like Hannah and William, had it worse. At least Parker had a mother he loved and who cared for him. He also had his health. But not them. They had a mother who was dead and buried, and a father they wished was.
Some people got the short end of the stick. Hannah and William got the short end up their asses. But he never thought she would leave William behind. He was all she ever talked about.
“I don’t know for how long, but she’s gone to study magic.”
Parker laughed. People from their quarter didn’t study magic. It was impossible. “Come on, where is she?” he pressed, his anxiousness diverted by the outlandishness of the answer.
William looked at Hannah’s partner. “Really. A powerful magician saw her potential. He was watching in the market square when I had my seizures. I have no idea what he saw, but he saw something.”
Parker thought about Hannah’s description of the attack. If the Hunters were after her, then maybe she could do magic.
“So she’s at the Academy?” Parker asked.
William fidgeted. Parker could tell that he wasn’t sure how much to share.
Finally, the boy looked up and spilled the beans. “The Founder, Parker, he came and healed me. And then he asked my sister to go with him, to train or something. He just kept talking about saving Arcadia—like he saved her life. Like he saved me.”
The boy filled in the gaps of the story. Parker smiled along, nodding at all the right times, but deep down he didn’t believe there was a Founder and neither did Hannah. He wondered how much trouble his friend was really in.
“Where’d they go?” he finally asked.
William shrugged. “To a tower outside the city. At least, that was where the Founder told her they were going.”
Hannah sat in the great hall thinking about the incident with the wild boar and Karl
. She cursed herself for needing his help. She needed to get stronger. Guts came naturally, and toughness had been honed over time, hustling in the streets of Arcadia. But she needed skill, so training would be necessary.
Ezekiel had brought her to the tower to teach her magic. Despite her reservations, she was willing to learn.
“Are we ready to begin?” The magician's voice echoed through the hall.
“I’ve been ready since you zapped us over here. You’re the one napping.” She gave him a slight smile and wondered if the old man had a sense of humor.
“When you’re my age, little girl, simple things like kicking ass and teleportation take a bit out of you.” He nodded to her. “You will see soon enough.”
“All right, old man. Teach me some magic, Zeke.”
“Call me Ezekiel. And the magic will come, but you need to learn some history for context. Walk with me.” He turned and headed towards the now-familiar door.
At the door he waited for her to catch up, then pointed ahead of him down the length of the building.
The teacher and his new student started the first lap around the tower. Hannah chose not to mention that she had already taken a self-guided tour outside. The man’s strides were long, and she had to move fast to keep up with him.
She was clueless as to his actual physical stature since much of what she had seen had either been a disguise that made him look weaker or an enhancement that made him appear massive and monstrous. The walk was the first clear indication of the man’s strength, which made sense if he’d spent a major portion of his life walking Irth.
“What do you know about the history of Arcadia?” he asked.
She thought about that. What did she know? The temptation was to either say too much or admit too little. If she was going to be trained, Ezekiel needed to know what he was working with.
A lot of good that was going to do him.
“Not much, I guess. As much as any other kid from QBB might know. I mean, I never really went to school or anything. More of an education on the streets. My mom told me some things before she…” Hannah paused.
“Died?”
Hannah’s throat got tight and a quick nod of agreement got her over the hump.
“Yes. Died. My mother’s parents had come to the city soon after the Age of Madness ended. Arcadia was new then, and opportunity was everywhere. My grandfather got a job working on the final stages of the walls. There were plenty of magic users at work, but he provided muscle. Magic doesn’t run in my family.”
The man nodded along with her story. It was a travesty that hunger and desperation drove a smart kid like her to the streets instead of a life of learning and exploration.
Ezekiel was fortunate to have found her.
When she concluded her story, he added, “Well, you know part of the tale, but you have made an assumption about magic that is only partially correct, like most truths. The old world—the world before the Age of Madness, and the Second Dark Ages before that—didn’t have magic as we know it today.
“But, in most senses, their society would have seemed incredibly advanced in comparison to ours, at least in the technologies they had available. For the people of the Early Age, science and technology were their magic, and many worshiped it like a god.”
Ezekiel pointed at the buildings they were passing. “They built huge edifices that reached to the heavens, and developed all kinds of machinery and technologies such as flying ships. Just before the coming of the Madness, the people had all but mastered communication technology. Just through their technologies, they could talk with anyone around the world.” The old man waved his hand toward the sky. “And even in the heavens.”
“Wait.” Hannah stopped walking and motioned toward the clouds. “People lived in the freaking sky?”
The old man turned, seeing her incredulous expression and laughed. “Eventually, yes. We had just started traveling there, but as the time went on it became home to some.”
“But what the hell powered it? Magitech?” she asked as she started walking again.
The old man shook his head and turned to continue his circuit. “Magitech is something Adrien has introduced into the world. In the old days, the humans would harness the energy from the sun and dig fuel out of the ground. It was really quite something. Just before the end of the Early Age, they had learned how to split an atom to make power beyond our imagination. Beyond what any magician can do.”
“Split a what?” she asked as she stepped over the same broken ground she had dealt with for the past seven laps.
“Mm, yes. An atom.” For some reason he didn’t seem bothered by the rough terrain. She tried to catch him cheating, but it didn’t seem like he was using any magic to float across.
He was just more agile than her, apparently.
“The technicalities aren’t that important. But you should know that this source of energy is what got us into a lot of trouble. Seemed the smarter people got, the more foolish they became. Eventually, the power in those atoms was used to destroy the world and most everything in it.
“Almost no one lived through the release of that energy, but those who did worked to rebuild Irth. They began making this place we now call home. But during the process, something even more terrible than their science emerged. Something even more deadly.”
Hannah answered as he paused in his story, “The Madness. It was the judgment of the gods upon the wicked.”
This made the man laugh. Apparently, children of Arcadia—at least those who had grown up in Queen’s Boulevard—had cobbled together pieces of the stories of their past, but they had filled in the cracks over the years with their own imaginations.
“Again, you understand only part of the truth. The Madness was also the result of technology gone awry, although this technology was quite different from the bombs and the planes. It attacked us from within.”
Hannah quietly took in the old man’s words. While some of it made no sense to her whatsoever, the idea of being attacked from within was perfectly clear.
Her words came out slowly. “You mean like a sickness…”
She could hear Ezekiel’s feet hit the ground, so he wasn’t floating. She would have to find out how he walked so easily on some of this terrain.
“Mmm, yes, exactly! It was a disease; one that could attack anyone at any time. But instead of giving people fevers or making them shake like your brother, this disease attacked the mind. It turned people, good and bad people, into monsters. One day someone living in your small village would be normal, the next they ate their own children alive.”
Her face, if Ezekiel could have seen it, would have made him chuckle. “Ugh. Now I know why it’s called the Age of Madness.”
“Yeah. It’s had several names throughout the decades, but that seems to be the one that has stuck. Probably because it was so fitting. At the beginning of the outbreak, people were spread out all over the world. Little communities fended for themselves and tried to protect their own from other groups. They were rather uncivilized societies. But when the outbreak happened, people realized that there was safety in numbers. The disease pushed the people to gather in concentrated areas, to work together. That is how the early cities were developed.”
“Are there, um, other inhabited places like home?”
“Oh yes. It is hard to fathom just how large the world is. There are places just like Arcadia, filled with cities and people. But there are huge swaths of Irth that are now left uninhabited—places the infection wiped completely clean of humans.”
They walked in silence for a lap. She had heard stories from the old days, but they had always seemed like children’s tales. Much like the gods and the Founder. But now, as Hannah walked side by side with a man powerful enough to heal her brother, she found it easier to accept that maybe some of the old stories were true.
She allowed just the smallest amount of hope to grow in the secret place we all protect.
Her innermost place where she had stopped allow
ing hope to enter so many, many years ago.
Ezekiel looked down at his new student, trying to assess how well she was taking all of this.
The girl was shocked, and rightfully so.
He had just dropped a serious bomb on her; the world she lived in was nothing like she had imagined. Her silence betrayed her skepticism, but that was fine.
Belief must be owned.
He had seen too many people swayed and manipulated by clever rhetoric before. The truth had to become hers. He considered letting their history lesson stand, but she pushed for more.
“And that’s when the Founder, I mean...you…stepped in. If you are the Founder, then you brought us magic. They say you were the one who ended it all and drove away the Madness. The Prophet even calls you a god, like the Matriarch and Patriarch. Should I bow down, Almighty Zeke?” she asked, looking at him with a smirk on her face.
Well, if she was starting to believe, it hadn’t made her any more reverent.
The man laughed. “It’s Ezekiel, and I’m no god. And from what I can tell, the Matriarch and the Patriarch weren’t gods either. But that’s a story for another time. What I can say is that I didn’t overcome the Age of Madness on my own. I had help. Some really powerful help,” he admitted.
She stopped walking again, her hands on her waist, lost in thought. He paused and gazed around as he waited for it to come, wondering how long the questions would bubble in her brain before she asked.
“But how did you do it? And if magic didn’t exist before, then where did it come from?”
Ezekiel nodded to himself. Her questions were getting to the heart of it. She was even more clever than he had realized.
“The answer to both of those questions is the same. But let me ask you, when you helped your brother that day on the street, how did you feel?”
Hannah cocked her head as she thought through her answer. Ezekiel waited patiently.
“I guess I felt like there was something inside of me trying to get out. All my fear and frustration, plus my concern for my brother; it was like they were feeding something. Something that was hungry for more.”
Welcome To The Age of Magic Page 11