The Delusionist's Son

by Danny Macks

  Officer Neran shook her head and relaxed, from her expression believing the junior enforcer's 'modification' was the source of Silva's unease. “We enforcers call that a kata: rote maneuvers which can be performed smoothly in series. He actually knows six shield rotes and can quickly transition between any of them and several attack spells.”

  Silva scoffed. “How would you know what real spell weaving looks like?”

  Neran’s eyebrows drew together at the intentional derision in Silva's tone. “I did four years in the Royal Academy before dropping out and becoming an enforcer.”

  “Healing?”

  “How did you know?" Neran asked. "My father is a doctoral surgeon. He was disappointed when I didn't follow in his footsteps.”

  “One last question. Was anyone inside your shield with you?”

  Suspicion flew back onto the enforcer’s face. “Why?”

  “Someone pulled life energy out of all the grass inside the shield, a directional modification of a healing spell …” Silva paused while Neran absorbed the information. “… and very, very illegal.”

  “Necromancy.”

  Silva couldn’t meet the enforcer’s accusing stare. It was as if she blamed him for casting a necromancy spell, instead of herself.

  “And you are certain the spell was cast inside my shield?”

  Silva nodded. “It affected all the grass inside the shield and none of it outside.”

  “What did Enthus do?”

  “Nothing. He’s willing to bend the rules because he admires you.”

  Neran’s eyes sparkled with unshed tears, but her jaw was set in a hard line. “And you?”

  “I’m from Winterhaven. ‘I didn't know this would happen’ is really no excuse.”

  The tears finally flowed, but she nodded. “I agree.”

  Silva reached under his chair, pulled out the rope and threw it over the rafter above. Leaving the rope dangling, he walked to Neran’s bedside. “Would you like me to help you stand?”

  “Now?”

  “Would you prefer I sent for Enthus to help?”

  Silva preferred her hateful glares to self-pity, but she let him help her to the chair.

  “Is there anything else I can do?”

  Neran tied one end of the rope into a noose. The tears had stopped, but her eyes still glistened. “Go away.”

  “I can …”

  She interrupted him with another glare and Silva headed for the door. Closing it behind him quietly, he decided he needed a drink.

  In the bar below, Silva found Junior-enforcer Enthus at the end of the bar and grabbed the stool immediately left of him.

  The ginger headed lad continued staring at his cup when Silva sat down. He sighed, took a long pull from his cup, and started to rise. Silva laid a hand on the young man’s wrist.

  “Give her some time. I gave her a lot to think about.”

  Quicker than expected, dust fell from the rafters as if a weight had been thrown against them followed by the sound of a falling chair.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Silva still held the enforcer’s wrist when Enthus's other hand punched him in the nose.

  Once he tracked her down, Adeline Presley refused to expend any ley energy toward healing Silva's broken nose, blaming him — he was certain — for Officer Neran’s suicide. She grabbed his nose between both palms, made a eye-wateringly painful motion which also emitted a loud crack, and sent Silva on his way.

  He passed the ley benders well before noon. Horses are faster for short distances, but city people tended to forget humans were built for endurance. At a steady three miles an hour, he reached the Sixty Mile Inn well after dark, confident the inexperienced city mages covered half that distance.

  At the inn, he gave up on the hair grease and switched to a plain hair ribbon to keep the bulk of his thick brunette curls out of his face. The grease attracted dust like a magnet and he had to use a wire brush — borrowed from a farrier — to get it off his boots. Washing his robe in his bathwater, he regretted not spending the last of his money on a change of clothing while he was still in the city. This would be his last bath for several days.

  Near sunset, three days east of the main road, Silva paused by three rusting metal rods in a line along the roadside. The first rod was twenty feet from its neighbor, the third rod ten feet further away. He walked back the way he had come fifty feet and adjusted his vision.

  To his altered vision, the ley line running up the center of the road was clear, but five feet away a greasy yellowish film rested atop the glowing line like oil on water, turning the blue stream green. Winterhaven multiplaner yellow diatoms. A creature which couldn't be seen with the naked eye no matter how powerful the microscope. A creature immune to every poison known.

  He noted the edge of the film with his eyes, returned his vision to normal and embedded a fourth metal rod at the side of the road, marking the new border. Forty-five feet this year. More than double the spread of the year before. This would be the place where the ley benders would stop and conduct whatever experiments they planned. This was the place where, year after year, while other students were visiting their families, he would stop and go no further.

  Legend had it Silva’s mother, Muriel Vatic, had studied the yellow before her death, a few days after the Winterhaven disaster, and knew more than mages who had studied the phenomenon for years. The rote she had invented to see the yellow was, for Silva, proof the legend was true.

  Silva pulled a tiny ley stone out of his pocket, the fingernail sized blue oval so drained of energy it was almost white, and tossed it onto the yellowed line. Larger stones took longer to recharge, but this stone was tiny. The stone quickly turned a deep royal blue with no hint of green or yellow.

  The stone appeared harmless. For that matter, to his normal vision the entire road looked harmless. Every study said simply touching a polluted ley stone was harmless and only harmed the caster when he pulled power from it. But because the yellow buried itself in the center, no one had yet figured out a way to tell a polluted stone from a pure one, other than ruining the delicate crystal structure by cracking the stone in half and waiting a few days for the yellow to appear.

  The lower edge of the sun was more than a finger-width above the horizon. The last several days he had walked past sunset until full darkness forced him to stop. Leaving the stone in the dirt, he decided to set up camp early. He was almost to Winterhaven. After five years away, it would be better to arrive home well rested.

  As he set up camp, his gaze kept drifting toward the bright blue stone in the middle of the road, as if his eyes had a will of their own.

  Picking up the stone doesn’t prove you aren't afraid. Neither does leaving it there. The sun is still up. I’m letting it recharge fully.

  *****

  Silva dreamed of the University.

  “The key to healing,” Dr. Eston said in Silva's dream, “is to enhance and encourage systems which already exist in every living being.” Outside of the dream, Silva remembered wondering how a man whose specialty was healing could be portly. Not at all like Adeline,0 the beast speaker at the Twenty Mile Inn. In response to Silva's wandering thoughts, bald head, bristly muttonchops, and aged chubbiness were replaced by long hair and sun-touched, lithesome, feminine muscles. The words spoken in the dream were unchanged.

  While Dr. Eston’s voice droned on from Adeline’s body, Silva noted the beast speaker’s robes were rather shapeless and unflattering. His mind wandered again and the robe was replaced by an indecently short, corseted dress which showed off her figure and exposed her shapely calves.

  “You are a Vatic," Adeline scolded in her own voice. “Have you forgotten your family legacy?”

  Prophetic dreams. With an audible snap, Silva lost control of the dream and Dr. Eston waddled back to his blackboard.

  “Many of you, particularly those who grew up near ley lines, may have already experienced intermittent dream healing. It is one of the main signs the uninitiated use to recogni
ze potential University candidates and commonly accompanies other changes induced by puberty.”

  Silva remembered this class. Dr. Eston wrote the sigils on the board and Silva had covered his ears and stared at his desk until the Master of Surgery confronted him. Words were exchanged. Silva had lost his temper and stormed from the room.

  “Don't draw from the line.” Father’s voice echoed in the dream. “Never draw from the line.”

  Silva moved to cover his ears. To force the dream to match history and never learn the one basic healing spell every other first-year student in the University was eager to learn. But he couldn't move his hands from their resting place on the wooden table before him. With growing horror, he realized he couldn’t turn his head. Couldn't close his eyes. He vainly tried to seize back control of the dream, but control was lost.

  As clearly as if they’d been awake, Dr. Eston drew the first sigil, his chalk striking the board with a muffled clop clop sound. The sigil for permanency. He erased the first sigil and touched the chalk to the board for the second. Silva thrashed and fought and, with a loud cry, sat up … awake and gasping for breath at his campsite.

  The sun was starting to peek over the horizon and a passing farmer with a horse-drawn wagon pulled up short. “You okay, son?”

  “Yes. Sorry, just a bad dream.” Silva pulled down his robe — left to air in the night on a bush — and threw it on under his blanket. From the back of the wagon, perched atop a ten foot tall mound of amber hay, two boys stared down at him owlishly.

  “Would you like a ride?” The farmer pointed back the way Silva had come. “I can take you as far as the next town.”

  Dressed in his black robes, Silva stood and pulled back his hair to tie it. “Thank you for the kindness, but I’m headed the other way, toward Winterhaven.”

  The stranger hesitated as if uncertain what to say.

  Silva pulled on his socks and boots and considered his nightmare. Prophetic dreams weren't new, but they'd been minor things like advance warning of a surprise exam. He’d never had a dream actually tell him it was a prophetic dream. His last prophetic dream had been before graduation. He received an official copy of his birth certificate and several other papers in the mail, along with a note from his father to stop using the fake family name by which he'd been admitted to the university. Silva feared he would be expelled when the ruse was exposed. The night before the commencement ceremony, he received a dream telling him he would still graduate. He was glad he didn't ignore that dream. He couldn't afford to ignore today’s dream either.

  The farmer coughed politely, recapturing Silva's attention. “Begging your pardon, sir. But we don’t get your type out this way very often and my two boys are almost to the age of testing …” His voice trailed off uncertainly.

  Silva dusted off his hands. “Of course. Bring then down so I can see them.”

  Dressed to blend in with the dirt from which their parents earned their living, instead of the bright colors his mother preferred for her son, the boys looked like most of the children Silva played with as a child. Dusty brown from the tops of their bare feet to their unbleached homespun flax trousers to dusty brown hair and dusty brown eyes. They only differed by a handspan of height.

  Silva gestured and his vision altered. Every living thing from people to grass contained small amounts of ley energy and the spell Silva usually cast was designed to filter out that low level background energy. Detection spells varied; many people far from Winterhaven didn't know the modern rote to see yellow energy. But this time Silva left the usual filter off. He wanted to see if the boys contained any speck of power.

  Instead of a field of black interspersed with rivers of blue, each blade of grass sparkled with its own light. Dust mites turned the air to a lightly sparkling fog and a beetle glowed bright blue as it crawled across the relative blackness of the dirt road.

  To Silva's altered vision, the boys couldn't be more different. One contained a steady blue glow, bright enough — with intensive training — to possibly earn him a position as a low level technician. The other boy, the smaller of the two, blazed in a glowing swirl of yellow and green.

  Squinting in the bright light, Silva wove a filter sigil back into his spell. The blue light from the grass and insects faded to black. The taller brother’s light disappeared almost entirely from view, but enough remained to verify Silva’s original assessment. A commoner, but not a drudge.

  The younger’s bright light dimmed and the bits of green were replaced entirely by yellow. Any blue ley energy left after the yellow's pollution was needed for the act of simply staying alive.

  Silva pulled a coin from his pocket and rolled it across the back of his fingers as he released the spell, restoring unaltered sight. Dream healing: the unconscious drawing of ley energy from the surrounding environment in order to heal wounds. This was what the vision had tried to warn him about.

  “Have you ever noticed,” Silva asked the father slowly, still trying to find a way to say what needed to be said diplomatically, “when the boys got scraped up or sick, one recovered faster than the other?”

  The farmer’s face brightened. “I have! The boys like to wrestle and one time they both fell into a briar. They were both pretty scratched up. Next morning, Eman was still hurtin’, but Farley didn’t have a mark on him. Was that dream healing? So my Farley’s a mage?”

  Silva shook his head and stared east, toward the ley stone and Winterhaven. How was he supposed to bring magic back to Winterhaven when he was afraid to get within fifteen miles of the place?

  The farmer followed the direction of Silva's gaze. “We live east of the Capstock Pass, but not in Winterhaven. Our place is back a ways, on this side of the county line.”

  “Do you live in a valley?” From the farmer’s expression Silva could tell he did. “The yellow doesn’t respect lines drawn by men.”

  Silva rolled up his blanket and shoved it in his pack, refusing to meet the farmer’s eyes.

  “What should we do?”

  Silva strode away, fighting to betray no fear as he walked past the boundary marker he erected only the day before. “Pack up and move.”

  Silva was almost out of earshot when the farmer said, “Get in the wagon boys.”

  He stopped, turned, and called out. “Wait.”

  The farmer paused, but directed his boys to continue climbing up the haystack while Silva jogged back over to him.

  “A day or two behind me are a team of ley benders, headed here to study the yellow. Have them take a look at your boys and tell them about the briar. I’m not saying they can do anything, but one of them is a master …” Silva let the sentence trail off when he saw false hope on the farmer’s face. “Anyway, if you or your boys could show them those iron stakes in the side of the road, I’d appreciate it. Tell them they’re annual markers.”

  “Markers.” The farmer nodded. “I can do that.”

  “Annual markers. The time frame is important.”

  The farmer nodded again and held out his hand. “I’ll pass along the message. And thank you. I’m Caleb Henshaw.”

  Silva didn’t return the handshake. “Silva Vatic. I didn't do anything.” It was true. The thread of hope he handed the farmer was false, and he felt a little ill accepting thanks for it.

  Caleb pulled back his hand and shoved it in a pocket. “Vatic? The Delusionist?”

  “No. That's my father.“ That was a title he hadn't heard in a few years. Silva turned and walked away before the conversation got even more uncomfortable.

  *****

  East of the Capstock mountains, most of the land around Winterhaven Lake saw little rain and lots of sunshine: ideal conditions for the accumulation of ley energy. Seventy-five years ago, these conditions were further enhanced by a ring of dams surrounding the long valley. The dams provided plenty of water for irrigation and reduced Winterhaven lake to little more than a pond. People flooded into the area for the plentiful energy and the fertile farmland uncovered by the receding
lake. On either side of the lake at the center of the valley, a large estate and a thriving town blossomed.

  Silva left the road well before it curved south to town and walked northeast, cross-country, around the lake to the estate on the far side.

  When it was built, the owner of Vatic Estate was the sponsor and leader of the dam project, Thomas Vatic. It was said anything Tom Vatic touched made money. In Silva's youth, the wall surrounding his great grandfather’s thirty-acre estate had stood twenty feet tall with impressive decorative ironwork topping its entire length. A ten foot wide path of white crushed marble led from the gate over a low hill to the palatial house at the center of the property.

  The explosion which destroyed the bulk of the house, three years before Silva was sent away, had knocked large holes in the estate’s outer wall, but had left the bulk of the white marble drive intact. Five years after his sudden departure, wild mulberries and briars grew in the gaps of the wall. The bulk of the white gravel drive was hidden by weeds.

  The scrollwork of the black iron eastern gate was pitted by rust and hung half open. Silva stepped through and pulled the gate closed with both hands. The unoiled metal protested loudly.

  The front grounds was a meadow, overgrown and waist high. The scent of over-ripe apples drifted on the wind from the untended orchard to the north of the drive. Clearing the hill, Silva spied his childhood home and the lake beyond.

  To the left sparkled the light blue dome which encased what had once been the family vegetable gardens and the southern portion of the house. The largest and longest lasting absorption shield known.

  Eight years after the disaster, the three-acre semicircular transparent dome appeared as solid as ever, with great piles of collapsed stone littering the northern portion of the area inside it. Outside of the translucent dome, only the remnants of the northeastern tower still stood. The other three towers which gave the estate house its distinctive fairytale castle appearance were long gone.