Faerie Apocalypse

by Franks, Jason;

  “Not all of it,” said the magus, with regret.

  The border station was garrisoned by a strange kind of folk that were better than halfway to being machines. Guns and blades grew from their hands and torsos; tubes and chips were embedded in their scarred and misshapen craniums. This was not any kind of science that the magus had witnessed before. It looked like mortal technology, but it set his occult senses haywire. The dog-man bristled and growled at them.

  The machine folk levelled their guns at the magus and the dog-man. “You will come with us,” they said, speaking in unison. Their voices were harsh and synthetic.

  The machine folk ushered the magus and the dog-man into the back of a half-track, which bore them slowly through the secure zone and up into the citadel. They passed through another checkpoint, and then were frog-marched through kilometres of circuitry-fouled corridors and hallways. There were no windows, but diffuse light shone from ceiling fixtures. Cool, stale air hissed into every room through vents in the ceilings. Pipes clanked inside the walls. In some rooms, electricity hummed.

  Eventually they came to a high-ceilinged laboratory. Glassware filled with bubbling liquids lined the bench-tops; cathode ray tubes hung, flickering, from wall brackets; rolls of insulated cabling looped all over the floor and walls. There were no chairs.

  The dog-man whined and growled. The magus sniffed and wiped his nose: the stink of acid was strong enough to leave his nasal membranes tender. There was definitely another human around.

  The machine folk shouldered their weapons and filed out of the room in lockstep, their rubber-soled feet thudding dully on the tiled floor.

  “Well, hello, there.” The voice was in the baritone register. The magus and the dog-man could not see the speaker until he walked around a low bench and presented himself to them.

  The speaker was a dwarf dressed in a white lab coat. His hair was clipped in a military style and his face was clean-shaven. One of his eye-sockets was empty, sealed over with smooth flesh.

  “G’day,” said the magus. “I’m looking for Douglas.”

  “I’m Douglas,” said the dwarf.

  The magus gave him a good, hard look, and noticed that the dwarf was wearing jeans and tennis shoes under his lab coat.

  “Yeah, I’m a human, just like you,” said the dwarf, angry at the magus’ unconcealed scrutiny. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Nobody important,” said the magus.

  “Fine,” said the dwarf. “In that case, I’ll call you Blondie.”

  The magus grinned. “Suits me.”

  The dwarf scowled. It had not intended that as a compliment. “What can I do for you, Blondie?”

  “Just come to say hello,” said the magus. “See what you’re up to. Fellow mortal, and all.”

  Douglas spread his arms grandly. “Well then, welcome to my humble home. The locals call it the Machine City, but I like to think of it as the Citadel of Reason.”

  The magus thought about that for a moment. “You built a Citadel of Reason…in Faerie Land?”

  “Where better?”

  “I’m not sure I understand the point,” said the magus.

  “If you’re going to re-imagine the laws of physics, you need to start in a reality where there aren’t many rules.”

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “Well,” said the dwarf, “Back in the old place, I was a scientist.” The dwarf looked away as he said it and the magus knew he was lying. “I was a scientist, but after a while I discovered that I didn’t much like science.”

  “Sounds like you had a bit of a problem.”

  “Well, I liked the idea of science. I liked the scientific method. Validation, verification, falsification—all of that hoo-ha. What I didn’t like was the actual physics. I didn’t like how the equations fit together. I didn’t like the math.”

  “Now that I can understand,” said the magus. “And so you came here?”

  “Sure did,” said the dwarf. “I came here and rewrote the whole thing. Cleaned it up, you might say. The constants are integers; the energy transformations are perfect…” He shrugged. “It may seem a bit whimsical, but, under the covers, this world is a lot more elegant than ours.”

  The magus cocked his head. His own experience had been the opposite: spells that had been perfectly sound in the mortal realm did not function properly in this inconstant environment. “Really?”

  “Really, truly, absolutely,” said the dwarf. “Fixing the math makes engineering a whole lot easier. How else could I have built all of this?” The dwarf gestured grandly. “Generators, refineries, factories… All of this, with only a rag-ass band of Tinker elves for labour?”

  “Wouldn’t know, mate,” said the magus. “I never finished high school.”

  The dwarf looked the magus over a second time. “What’s your interest, then?”

  “I want to know how all of this works.”

  “But you’re not a scientist.”

  “I’m a magician.”

  “A crazy-man, more like,” snorted the dwarf. “Everybody knows there’s no such a thing as magic.”

  The magus opened and shut his mouth three times before he found a reply. “We…we’re standing waist deep in Fairyland.”

  “Fairyland, shmairyland,” said the dwarf. “It’s just some other reality. The facts and rules of how things work together might be different than what you’re used to, but that doesn’t make it magical.”

  “You really believe that?”

  “Belief is for religious fruitcakes. I know it, because that’s how it is. Magic doesn’t exist in any possible world.”

  “This is one of the other kind, mate.”

  “Logic says otherwise.”

  “Logic says no such thing.”

  “I can’t believe we’re having this argument,” said the dwarf. “The only two rational beings in all of fairyland.”

  “I don’t reckon your powers of arithmetic are up to much,” said the magus. “But then, you did say you had a problem with math.”

  The dwarf stamped his foot. “There’s no such thing as magic. There wasn’t any such thing back home and there sure as hell ain’t any such a thing out here.”

  “You clearly don’t know very much about Hell, either.”

  “Magic is how science appears to the ignorant, Blondie,” said the dwarf. “Best case. Worst case? It’s plain old coincidence.”

  “Magic is deeper and stranger than just ‘coincidence’, Douglas,” said the magus. “Magic is not just the things we can’t explain. It’s the exception that proves every rule.”

  “Science built all this,” said the dwarf, waving his hand to indicate his kingdom. “What did your flim-flammery ever build?”

  The magus had no reply to that.

  “You say you can do magic, Blondie?” said the dwarf. “I say, show me proof.”

  “The burden of proof is on science,” said the magus. “Magic is magic, no matter what else it appears to be.”

  “Sophistry,” spat the dwarf. “Your magic is nothing but sophistry.”

  The magus turned his head from left to right, scanning the Citadel with his occult senses. He saw runes where the dwarf had laid diodes and transistors. He saw ley-lines where the dwarf had laid copper wires; rift-farms and spell-wheels where the dwarf had built reactors and dynamos. He bent down to the dwarf and said: “What if I told you that you’re a better magician than I am?”

  The dwarf took a step back. “What?”

  “What if I told you that everything you’ve built is magical? That you’ve solved all of the spell-crafting problems I have been unable to? What would you say to me then?” The magus folded his arms. “How could you prove otherwise?”

  “Abracadabra, sim sala bim,” said the dwarf. “Blondie, that’s not even sophistry; it’s just god-damned nonsense.�
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  “Alright then, Douglas,” said the magus. He jammed a rune into the spell-turbines that provided electricity to the citadel. The lights blinked out and the air-conditioning fell silent as the turbines seized up. The images on the CRT screens blinked away; the chemicals bubbling through the network of glassware cooled and stilled.

  The dog-man barked once in the sudden silence.

  “Let me demonstrate for you the power of sophistry.”

  The magus drew a symbol in the air, his fingertip marking a character that glowed with heat. The dwarf lurched away from it, but the rune leapt after him. It struck him directly in the chest.

  “Presto change-o,” said the magus.

  “Ah,” said the dwarf, as his bones began to shift. “Aaah.”

  The dwarf’s musculature rippled and stretched as his achondroplastic skeleton elongated to normal proportions. The skin that sealed his empty socket split open and the eye he had been born without formed in the cavity behind it, forcefully wiring itself back into his brain. The scientist who had until-recently been dwarf began to scream.

  “Get ‘im, boy,” said the magus. The dog-man silenced the former dwarf with a single stroke of its cutlass.

  The magus raised his hands and cast the citadel’s chromium spires to slag. The canals flooded; the trenches collapsed; the pillboxes and outposts puffed apart. Ground vehicles stopped in place. Ornithopters fell out of the sky. There were no explosions: without the dwarf’s magic none of the fuel could burn; none of the munitions were live. The Citadel of Reason fell ruin with sound that was closer to a fart than a sigh.

  The magus put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. The dog-man emerged from the rubble with a grin on its face. “C’mon, boy,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Together they negotiated their way through the debris on foot, for the magus was too weary to fly. He knew that he could not have managed such feats in the mortal realm. There was power to burn, here, but he was used to working with embers. It would burn him out if he could not learn to channel it properly.

  For all its flaws, the dwarf’s working had done exactly that.

  The dog-man assumed the form of a terrier, and it jumped and gambolled all the way down the mountain with its tail wagging.

  12. A Player of Guitars

  They made camp deep in the Ore-lands, near the rapid grey river whose waters cut a snaking line down towards the capitol. The sky was as black and empty as wet tar, but even in that starless, moonless night, the city of the Ore-lands somehow contrived to gleam.

  By the light of the campfire, the magus inscribed a transformer spell upon the brass oval of his belt buckle. This would serve to regulate the flow of the ambient energies of the faerie world into his sorcerous constructs. The magus was pleased with the spell, which was far simpler than he had expected. He had refactored the dwarf’s logic into four symbols and five connecting lines.

  The magus conjured a bucket of crushed ice and filled it with bottles of beer. Humming to himself, he dug out a record player and a box of his favourite LPs. While the beer cooled, he set about simulating an electrical current for the record player. Once he had the music cranking, the magus collapsed into a beanbag, popped a cold beer, and settled in to listen to some Hendrix and Sabbath and Zeppelin and Purple.

  When he was halfway through the bucket of beer, he asked the dog-man what he thought of the music.

  “I have never heard its like before,” said the dog-man, who lay curled up at his feet.

  “It’s not exactly hi-fi, but I’m doing me best,” said the magus. “Do you like it?”

  “I hear poetry in the words and emotion in the voices, and I feel the rhythms in my marrow,” said the dog-man.

  “Poetry,” spat the magus. “What would a dog know about poetry?”

  “I cannot make it, but I know it when I hear it.”

  “Yeah, you might be right,” conceded the magus. “But I listen to it anyway.” He raised his bottle to his lips, discovered it was empty. Flung it away and took another from the ice.

  The dog-man cocked its head. “What is that sound?” is said, when the music grew stranger and louder.

  “Guitars,” said the magus. “That sound comes from the guitars.”

  “I know what a guitar is,” said the dog-man, “but I have never heard one to cry and scream and growl so.”

  “We use electricity…power…to distort the sound,” said the magus. He mimed a solo on an imaginary instrument, screwing up his face, waggling the fingers of his left hand and strumming fiercely with his right.

  “It excites me,” said the dog-man. “But it frightens me, too.”

  The magus drained his bottle in three gulps and then sent it spinning off into the darkness. The sound of it smashing seemed to come from very far away. “I always wanted to learn the guitar. You know that, dog?”

  “Why didn’t you learn, master?”

  “I was too busy being a bad man,” said the magus. “And after that, I was too busy being a magician.”

  He scowled at the record player, and its arm slipped off the record. The music ended with an abrupt, liquid tearing noise.

  The dog-man started, but then calmed itself when it saw that the magus was not angry. He looked sad, if anything. “Where will we go next, master?”

  The magus plucked another beer from the ice; ran his thumb around the corrugated edge of the bottle-top. “We’re here in the Ore-Lands,” he said. “I thought we might visit the playwright.”

  “Will you tell him your story, after all?” asked the dog-man, panting with enthusiasm.

  “You will not,” said a voice from the darkness.

  The dog-man growled low in its throat and rose fluidly to its feet, its cutlass in hand. The magus lowered his beer bottle and looked over his shoulder.

  A dozen soldiers emerged from the darkness. They wore heavy plate armour as if it were ordinary clothing, and were armed with an assortment of beautifully forged swords, axes, and halberds.

  Their sergeant came forward with its weapon drawn. “Magus.”

  “G’day,” said the magus, trying—with limited success—to sit up in the beanbag. “There’s plenty more beer, but I’ve only got one left that’s cold.”

  The sergeant shook its head grimly. Metallic scrollwork pressed through the skin of its face in high relief, and its hair shone like an oiled rainbow. “Magus,” the sergeant said, “I bear a message from the Queen of the Ore-Lands.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “You have destroyed one of her Majesty’s allies and slain one of her own emissaries,” said the sergeant, “but you have also solved a problem of diplomacy for her. My liege would have you know that she considers the accounts balanced. She hopes that you will proceed on your way without visiting harm upon the people of the Ore-Lands.”

  “All I want is to visit me old mate, Nentril Revallo.”

  “And then? You think he will write some new skit about you?”

  “I just thought…” The magus had not actually thought any further ahead than that. He just wanted to tell his story to someone who would not judge him.

  “You thought he would turn your sordid life into some kind of a heroic adventure? Magus, have you seen any of Revallo’s works?”

  “Three,” replied the magus. “I liked the cartoon the best.”

  “Magus, you are a villain,” said the sergeant. “You bring wanton death and destruction wherever you go. Whatever your intentions, this is the only outcome that pleases you. My liege will not have you inflict yourself upon her people.”

  The magus knew that it was true. He was unsure how he felt about being turned into some character, to prance and stalk about a stage. Even if the playwright did not in some way displease him, the magus knew he would surely find some other excuse to bring the scenario to a violent end. He could envision it al
ready: the stage; the play; Revallo in his triumph…and then he himself, swooping down from the sky to rain vengeance and destruction upon the theatre.

  The magus rose to his feet. His hands were empty now, so were his eyes. “Are you threatening me?”

  “Her Majesty fears you,” replied the sergeant. “If you endanger her subjects she will not rest until your corpse has been cut into pieces too small for the finest blade to part.”

  The magus smiled. “Tell this queen of yours I like her,” he said. “No bullshit, I mean it. I swear, on my honour, that I won’t kill anything in her Realm that doesn’t try to kill me first.”

  The magus had never sworn any such a thing before. He had never considered that honour might be a virtue he possessed—for he certainly possessed no other. Yet he meant what he said.

  “Then we will trouble you no more.” The sergeant bowed its head and backed away.

  The magus watched them go. Once they were out of his sight he grunted and looked for the remaining beer.

  “Now what?” asked the dog-man.

  The magus stared at his bucket of melting ice for a long, long time. Finally, he looked up slowly and moistened his lips. “I believe it’s time I introduced meself to the Council of Magi,” he said.

  13. The Council of

  the Magi

  The Realm of the Magi was remarkable only for its plainness. Rolling hills, lush meadows, dense woods, rushing rivers, cloudy skies. It reminded the magus of drab Olde England, at first, but something about it felt unnatural. Even in the Land of the Faerie, this place seemed strange.

  The trees were too evenly spaced. The hills were too uniform of height. The river cut a near-perfect sine wave through the lowest of the valleys. Even the passage of time seemed oddly metered: the magus could feel the seconds tick by, as though a metronome had replaced his heart as the arbiter of his mortal lifespan.

  In the geographic centre of the realm stood the City of the Magi; a carefully planned metropolis that was more beautiful and more hideous as any place the magus had yet laid eyes upon. There was arcane significance in every curve and angle; there was power in every thoroughfare and intersection. The city had not been constructed from stone or wood or mud, or any material harvested from the land: its walls were panes of purest magic, and they glittered like a million television screens.