The Delusionist's Son

by Danny Macks

  Doris nodded and stood. “Sounds like you’ve already done what you can, regarding the Delan family. In that case, how about we both head home and get some sleep? Tomorrow, we’ll start bright and early to figure out how to help our patients, as well.”

  “And if you can’t make it back in the morning?” Silva wouldn’t blame Doris for packing a bag and leaving town during the cover of night. He had said, ‘our treatments,’ but he alone was really to blame.

  “I’ll be here. Bright and early,” Doris said as he retrieved his top coat and hat from the coat stand. “We’ll tackle this together.”

  *****

  The next morning, Silva slept a little later than he’d planned, but found Kate waiting for him at the door instead of Doris. She was dressed in her field-hand-style shirt and trousers instead of a proper corseted dress, and leaning beside the outside door with her arms crossed.

  “Vagrancy is frowned on in this neighborhood,” he jested as he found the door locked and pulled out his key. “Care to step inside?”

  Kate glowered at him but held her tongue until they were through the waiting room and into his office.

  “What do you have against Drudge Delan?” she asked as soon as he closed the office door. “Your name is on an injunction shutting down all of his businesses. I had enforcers waiting for me. They confiscated everything.”

  “Everything?” Silva asked.

  Some of the indignation bled out of her. “No. I took your advice, day before yesterday. The notes with the action sigils on them were all destroyed. Thank you for that.”

  “And I’m sorry I … surprised you, yesterday. I should have consulted you before making ill received grand gestures.”

  “Is that why you contacted the enforcers? Jealousy?”

  “No. Another mage spoke to an inquisitor. I only corroborated her story. An inquisitor, I might add, who was already investigating Drudge before I got involved, well before I saw you, two days ago.”

  “Well, don’t get any more involved, okay? Drudge assured me the mines were using the water drill as a short term thing … generating some quick capital for a much bigger project we are working on. A locomotive that uses steam for power. It will change your world.”

  “I don’t trust Drudge.”

  “That’s my problem, not yours. His lawyers have partially removed the injunction, on things which don’t use a water drill, but I need you to stay out of his other projects, for my sake if not yours.”

  For all of his distrust of Drudge Delan, Silva didn't have anything against drudges as a group. Before the disaster, the family gardener had been an actual drudge, instead of a low-power commoner. “In Winterhaven, the ley energy–”

  “Don’t you dare get involved in the Capstock Tunnel,” Kate interrupted.

  "Huh?" What’s a Capstock Tunnel? As in the Capstock Mountains, near Winterhaven?

  The office door flew open and Doris stepped in. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  Kate started, then shouldered her way past Doris, out the door. “Just stay away from Drudge and Winterhaven.”

  After Kate left, Silva stood stunned. “What just happened?”

  “It appears,” Doris said, “that your Kate is a trifle less innocent than you believe. I overslept, but arrived in time to hear enough. I barged in before she committed you to anything.”

  “She said Drudge is in Winterhaven. I need to find out what he’s doing there.”

  Doris hung his head. “Obviously, I was too late.” He took a long, drawn-out breath, then nodded. “Go. Do what you have to do. I’ll hold down the fort, until you return.” He pulled a money pouch out of his pocket and handed the entire thing to Silva. “Return as quickly as you can. We have other problems to deal with.”

  Silva nodded. “Together.”

  *****

  Silva arrived at the Sixty Mile Inn while the sun was still high in the sky. He hadn’t received any prophetic dreams, but a vague sense of dread pushed him to cover forty miles the first day and only hunger made him stop midway through the second day of his trip home.

  He thanked the innkeeper for his stew, tasted a few bites, then asked, “Excuse me, have you heard of something called the Capstock Tunnel?”

  “Sure I have. That was big news a few years back,” the innkeeper replied. “Some engineers had the idea of digging a tunnel through the Capstock mountains with a dry reservoir at the end. Ley energy ran downhill out of the mountains into the reservoir, but the reservoir was built high enough it could feed into the ley line on the road, from here all the way to the capitol.

  “Some say the plan to extend the tunnel made Vatic’s mages in Winterhaven rush whatever they were doing. They cut corners and caused the disaster, eight years back, because of the tunnel.”

  The first few bites of stew turned to stones in Silva's gut. “The tunnel was supposed to reach all the way through the Capstocks into Winterhaven?”

  The innkeeper nodded. “Yep. You don’t notice it going up and down through the pass, but the land in Winterhaven is higher than here.”

  Silva burned his mouth bolting down the remainder of the stew, threw some silver coins on the table and strode out the door without waiting for change.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The greatest obstacle to the collection of ley energy is flowing water. It was one of the reasons the most prosperous nations, like Sparro, were also among the driest. But even in Sparro the rain occasionally fell, eroding ley lines and reducing available energy the same way it eroded dirt.

  Ley bending changed that relationship. Streams of ley energy could be bent away from the ditches on either side of the road and coaxed into traveling down the high center. But ley bending required hundreds of people to regularly maintain all the roads in Sparro, and only blunted the damaging effects of rainfall. To meet the needs of the populace after the rain, roofed reservoirs had been constructed.

  With his ability to see ley lines, finding and following the thickest branch of energy upstream to the reservoir should have been simplicity itself. Silva had to stop multiple times to ask for directions.

  Although familiar with the design, when he eventually found it, the Capstock Reservoir was the largest Silva had ever seen. Rectangular and surrounded by a grassy berm over twenty feet high, it easily occupied a dozen acres with the entire expanse covered in multiple red tile roofs, held up by thick stone columns. The gates on the uphill side — closed during rainfall — were wide open, but the airtight exit gates were fully closed with no energy trickling out. Despite its grandeur to his physical eyes, as he stood on the top of the berm, the amount of energy in the dry reservoir to Silva's adjusted vision was still quite low, well below its capacity.

  Just uphill from the reservoir’s entrance gates, Silva found the single trickle of energy feeding into the reservoir. It emerged from a tunnel in the hillside. A cool breeze blew out of the hole from somewhere. Despite the direction, the ley line was too small to have originated in Winterhaven.

  Taking a chance on the purity of the ley stream, Silva lit a mage light and followed the line into the tunnel. He passed the remnants of side branches, filled with rubble, confirming the tunnel had originally been a mine. He expected to see wheeled carts passing by, but the tunnel was silent.

  How much rock pressed down over his head? Although the tomb-like hole sloped gently upward, the Capstock mountains rose much faster. There could be thousands of tons of rock above him. Silva tried to concentrate on his breathing and continuing to move forward.

  Several hours later, he saw light at the end of the tunnel and breathed a sigh of relief.

  He stepped out into a valley and paused a moment to let the sunlight hit his face. The valley was small and surrounded on all sides by steep slopes. Rocks the size of his head littered the entire area: debris from the mine. A wall had been constructed to keep the rocks from falling back across the tunnel and, in several places, formed arches. Doorways remained in the wall for miners to add more debris, but Silva could tell they seale
d like the reservoir gates.

  This was the source of the tiny ley stream. Sunlight hit the walls of the mountains and the energy flowed down to this point, then down the tunnel. Cold air from the mountains fell, encouraging air movement. It was a bit like one of Kate’s water pipes.

  Across the small valley in a straight line, another hole continued at the same even slope. No air moved in that tunnel and no ley energy passed through it. As he watched, a commoner exited and dropped several rocks on the debris pile, out of a large framed backpack. He stretched, waved to Silva and headed back. Silva lit a mage light and followed.

  “You might want to put that out,” the miner said. “Not a lot of ley energy in here. You’ll run out before you get to the end. Rest a hand on the side wall. You won’t lose your way in the dark.”

  “You aren’t surprised to see me?” Silva asked. He wasn’t in a hurry to douse his light and plunge himself into darkness with a stranger.

  The miner shrugged. “Most of the big names are waiting in the short tunnel, on the Winterhaven side, but that crew’s been having lots of troubles. I figured somebody would eventually come around to this side.”

  As they hiked up the slope, additional miners passed with full backpacks down the other side. Most grinned at Silva when they stepped into his light, as if aware of his fear. He gritted his teeth and doused his mage light.

  With the loss of light, the miner’s voice also fell silent. Silva world became darkness, the soft scrapes of booted feet and his own labored breathing.

  He was certain he had traveled for miles when he heard a boom like falling rock followed by a loud cheer. Moments later, a strong breeze rushed past him and slowly built in intensity. Adjusted vision showed the breeze was full of ley energy. The tunnel had reached Winterhaven.

  The amount of energy was huge. He could easily imagine it filling the reservoir to overflowing, spilling invisible pollution over the downhill wall and onto the line which ran down to the Sixty Mile Inn. From there, it would flow down the main line all the way to the capital.

  Pushing off from the wall, Silva stepped into the center of the tunnel and threw up an absorption shield around himself, keyed to block air. When the soft glow of his magic filled the tunnel, miners on both sides ran away, yelling.

  Now what? He couldn’t tap into the ley energy around him. It was certainly polluted. Use his remaining personal energy to pull down the rock above him? No, the miners would simply dig it out again. With a sinking feeling Silva realized he hadn't thought things through. He’d been in such a hurry to get here he hadn't thought out what he would do when he arrived. He needed to think of something before he suffocated.

  A light slowly approached. Candle light instead of a ley lamp. Drudge Delan.

  “Why did I know it was you?” Drudge said, as he set down a candle in a shuttered metal holder next to Silva's shield. “You can’t let me succeed at anything, can you?”

  “I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. The ley energy in Winterhaven is still polluted. This tunnel will flood the whole countryside.”

  “Bull.” Drudge pulled off his jacket, folded it neatly, and set it aside, then rolled up his shirt sleeves. “You’re a thief and a liar. First you convince Kate to vandalize Muriel’s Sigil so no one else can use it. Then you steal my scroll away from my father and use the sigil to cast it yourself. Now you’re trying to steal this from me too. What’s the plan? Use the ley energy in the pipe to bolster your shield, then delay the project until an overpriced barrister finds a trumped up excuse to shut us down? I heard how much land your family purchased in Winterhaven. Was that the plan? Claim since the land was yours so is the energy in my reservoir?”

  “You bought a whole reservoir? Wait, did you say your scroll?” It made a weird kind of sense. Drudge’s entire family was powerful and highly educated. He could have schooled himself and received enough education to craft the scroll, but … “You’re a drudge. How would you use it?”

  Drudge laid his hands on Silva's shield. Energy flowed out of it, like air out of a popped balloon. Drudge knew necromancy?

  “That’s the funny thing about nicknames,” Drudge said conversationally. “They often aren’t literally true.”

  Drudge wasn’t pulling energy from the polluted line. He didn’t need to. He was pulling all the power he needed from Silva directly.

  Silva dropped his shield and rolled to the side. Air once again rushed through the tunnel, extinguishing Drudge’s candle. A stun bolt lit the tunnel briefly, scoring the stones where Silva had been a moment before. The wind built, gaining in intensity until it howled like a gale.

  When the stun bolt’s light faded, Silva dodged again, right before another stun bolt hit his second location. He threw a stun bolt of his own. Drudge blocked with a glowing blue shield, then expanded it to fill the tunnel.

  “You’re really bad at this.” Drudge’s voice was still maddeningly calm as the wind died again. “All of the energy from Winterhaven is at my back. You should have tried to get uphill.”

  Silva adjusted his vision. Most of the river of energy traveling down the tunnel was being stopped by Drudge’s shield. As Silva watched, Drudge adjusted and the small trickle of energy leaking past the shield trickled down to nothing.

  Why had he never actually looked at Drudge to gauge his power levels? Drudge’s personal power was likely very low, compared to Silva, but he’d been absorbing power beyond his capacity. To Silva's vision, blue pulses of stolen energy leaked off Drudge, impacted the shield and were absorbed.

  Silva put his hand near Drudge’s shield and felt it pull at him. Drudge had woven a necromantic sigil into the shield.

  Returning his vision to normal, Silva spotted a miner’s backpack nearby. He grabbed a sharp rock in both hands.

  The shield around Drudge disappeared and Silva dodged, but too slow. A new necromantic shield sprung up around him, then shrank in size. “Really? A rock?” Drudge yelled over the wind which once again began to build in force. “Don’t swing that too hard or you’ll burn up all your air.” As the life-stealing wall contracted, more air rushed down the tunnel.

  He only had one choice left: create a necromancy spell of his own, starting a tug of war, and trick Drudge into pulling from the line until his healthy energy was replaced by pollution. Then keep pulling until Drudge was dead.

  He couldn’t do it, couldn’t even try to imagine the sigils in his mind. Killing a man wasn’t the same as killing a microscopic bug. Silva was dying. His life literally depended on crossing that line and he couldn’t. He wasn’t that kind of man.

  Against his will, Silva's vision returned to normal as the energy needed to power the spell left him. While he’d hesitated, Drudge had drained the last of his reserve energy. All he had left was his life, and that was slipping away. He fell to the ground and Drudge’s dome contracted tighter around him. As consciousness slipped away, he heard the crack of a firearm and the light of Drudge’s shield disappeared, plunging the tunnel in darkness.

  When Silva woke, he was in a white room with tile walls. Sunlight filtered through high windows below the ceiling, and his mother waited on a chair beside the bed.

  “Am I dead?” he asked hoarsely. His throat was dry as if he hadn’t drank anything for days.

  “No, you’re on a wagon headed away from Winterhaven toward the Home for the Misshapen.” Mother smiled and gestured to the tile walls. “You’re also dreaming you’re already there. They tried to heal you at Winterhaven, but all the mages visiting the groundbreaking had a ‘mysterious’ problem drawing energy from the ley lake.”

  “And Drudge? What happened to him?”

  “The story, as told to your father by Kate, is Drudge ran into the tunnel when the wind entering it died down. The miners ran out, said a mage was in there and Dr. Delan grabbed a rifle to follow. He insists he was justified shooting his own son, but refuses to explain further until he can consult with a barrister. Drudge is alive, for now, but is unconscious with a brain in
jury, next to your body on the cart.

  "Dr. Delan is also here. After healing his son, he claimed he lost the ability to cast magic, but the inquisitor visiting the site after the incident knocked him out anyway." She smiled secretly again. “His aura looks fine. His lost magic may be psychosomatic.”

  Silva struggled to rise, but he still felt impossibly weak. “Drudge was using necromancy. I need to wake up and tell somebody.”

  Mother laid a hand on Silva and gently pushed him down to the bed. “You need to rest. Drudge Delan isn’t going anywhere.” Her face appeared calm. Serene. Just as he remembered. She never looked worried. He’d always admired her facial control.

  Silva rested in his dream, laying back down on his bed and falling asleep.

  *****

  “The problem with prophetic dreams,” Kate said in Dr. Delan’s voice, “is they are only useful when the future is already known.”

  Kate and Silva followed Father and Dr. Anguilla across the front lawn of the Winterhaven Estate. The grounds were the same as when Silva had first arrived back home: run down and derelict. A breeze brought the scent of rotten apples drifting from the orchard.

  “It was very kind of you to let Dr. Vatic visit his old home after treating Drudge and his father at the inn,” Kate said in her own voice to the pair in front of her. “I’m certain he can figure out the problem with the tunnel.”

  As the foursome cleared the hill, they saw a wooden tower erected in the lake with a thirty-five foot long tube descending from it, like a giant inverted test tube, down into the water.

  “What’s that?” Dr. Anguilla asked.

  “You know how, when you swim deep underwater the water presses harder on you the deeper you go?” Kate explained. “The air above the water exerts pressure too. The height of the water in the tube measures that pressure. I have another device like that in the capital. The air pressure is lower there. That’s why the wind coming out the tunnel is so strong.”