“He is. So what do you think?”
The mutant looked almost as Nathaniel remembered it from the previous day. Flies had settled on the empty yellow eyes which had gone filmy and opaque. Decomposition would take time, and for that he was glad.
“I don’t know, Nate. I’ve only ever seen these things in paintings, but this one looks like what I’d expect. What say you?”
“I agree. When he’s not trying to pound my head into the earth, he seems like the others I’ve killed. But there’s the issue of his color.”
“His color?”
“His tone. That blue is darker than the others. I’d sign a warrant on it.”
“What does that mean?”
“I have a theory, but it’s insane.”
Achmis sat in a patch of grass. “Well, now I’m simply fascinated. Do tell.”
“Okay…the mutants I’ve seen before all shared the same faded blue. So in my mind that says all the mutants are related.”
“Aye,” Achmis agreed. “I’ve heard that theory plenty of times. So what are you…oh. Oh! You think this one is different. From a different family.”
“Maybe. Might not be a different family exactly, but there’s something to it. I just don’t know what it is. And he was so much stronger. He’s a different breed in some way. But that’s what doesn’t make sense to me.”
“Because how would a different breed of mutie never show up before?” Achmis pondered. “Was he hiding out? Maybe he’s one of the others’ distorted offspring. Maybe they looked at him and said ‘Hey, mutie, you’re too fucking ugly to be one of us!’” Achmis laughed heartily.
“Your horrendous humor aside,” Nathaniel said, “you may be right. He could be an evolved form of the muties we’ve always seen.”
“Well, yeah, obviously,” Achmis replied. “What the hell else could he be? Things don’t just pop up from nowhere.”
Nathaniel knelt down next to the mutant’s head. He grabbed it by the stringy black hair and lifted it off the ground. He heard the grinding of the broken neck and the angry buzz of the flies. At least they weren’t dealing with the skeeters.
“Have you ever wondered about the wall?” Nathaniel asked.
“What about it?”
“What’s on the other side of it.”
“There’s nothing on the other side of it but hellfire. What’s the use in wondering? Even if there was something there, and I could get there, I wouldn’t last long enough to even think about what I was seeing. Neither would you, for that matter.”
“I’m just thinking…this mutant. I don’t know.” He returned the head to the dirt. The flies circled, and one of them landed on the thing’s right eye.
“You think this mutie came from the other side of the wall?” Achmis asked. “Nate, I don’t mean to question your sanity but this has got to be one of the most far-fetched theories about anything I’ve ever heard. And I hang around the enclave inn after dark, so I’ve heard some crazy things.”
“But you’ve heard the stories. The rumors. It’s the reason we call them hellspawn and creatures of the hellfire. You know this!”
“I do. But those are just stories, Nate. Tales for the children. There is nothing out there. You know the true origin of everything. There was nothing but hellfire until the pantheon of gods created the world. The one safe space in all of existence. We’re all from this world, Nate. Even the muties.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
That night, Nathaniel tossed and turned in his sleep. He saw the fight with the mutant again, and saw himself standing with Achmis over the thing’s grotesque corpse. He woke soaked with sweat.
What was it about that mutant? Surely Achmis was right that nothing could exist on the other side of the wall. It was hell.
The thoughts stayed with him the rest of the night, and there would be no more sleep.
Come morning, he wandered the perimeter of the enclave. He heard the whispers, could see the glances, but he paid them no mind. He knew there were many who thought the old Great One had lost his wits, and if word were to get out about his concerns then surely the whole of the enclave would conclude that he had taken leave of his senses.
He worked his way back around to his home, and saw Achmis out front with another man. Gustavus, leader of the Authority. Achmis looked miserable. Nathaniel frowned.
“Nathaniel!” Gustavus called. “Come and sit with us.”
“I’d rather be about my walk, thanks,” he replied.
“Nate,” Gustavus said, “sit.”
Nathaniel walked over to the porch and leaned against the wall. “What does the Authority want with me today?”
“I want to discuss some things that Achmis says you’ve been talking about.”
Nathaniel whipped a dark look at his friend.
“Please, Nate!” Achmis said. “I didn’t report anything to the Authority. I simply was discussing our outing over some drink, and word spread around as word does, and—”
“What is there to discuss?” Nathaniel kept his focus on Gustavus, who stood to meet him. The Authority’s leader put out a hand, but Nathaniel didn’t shake it.
“Oh, plenty,” Gustavus said, returning his hand to his side. “When the one and only surviving Great One talks, people listen. And when he talks about things that cross into the territory of blasphemy…”
“What have I said that is blasphemous?” Nathaniel replied. “That the mutie I killed doesn’t appear to be the same as the others? These are facts. Check out the corpse yourself.”
Gustavus wrinkled his nose. “I’ll pass. Facts, Nathaniel, are flimsy things.”
“I don’t see how that could possibly be,” Nathaniel said.
“What I mean is you have your facts, and I have mine. The fact that the mutant appears different doesn’t mean it is different. And if there is a documentable difference, you want to believe that said difference implies a foreign origin. Yet the Authority has documented multiple cases of differences in births in everything from birds to people. Things change, Nathaniel. I would think that you of all people would know that. This world was once full of Great Ones, wasn’t it?”
Nathaniel met the man face to face. “You forget to whom you speak.”
“Not at all,” Gustavus said with the hint of a smile. “It’s because the Authority respects your status as the surviving Great One that I’m here and not Dante. This matter should have been handled by the enclave superior, but you got bumped up to speak with the most important man in the world. You should be flattered.”
Nathaniel said nothing.
“You need to stop talking to people about your ‘theories,’ Nate. Not even to your friend here. And I shouldn’t have to even mention it, but I will anyway, stay away from the wall. You know the penalty for those who try to take a peek into hell.”
Nathaniel tensed. “Are you threatening me?”
Now Gustavus’s smile grew until it nearly engulfed his face. “No! No threats here, Nate.” The smile faded instantly. “I’m simply stating facts.”
The Authority leader turned and walked off the porch. “Heed my words, Nate,” he said over his shoulder. “You have a good life here. You have the honor you deserve as the surviving Great One, and you’ll have it for as long as you live. Let that be enough.”
Nathaniel watched Gustavus walk down the road.
“Fuck him, am I right?” Achmis muttered at Nathaniel’s side.
“You weren’t so quick to speak in my defense when he was here,” Nathaniel remarked.
“Listen, when the Authority’s threatening the Great One, who the hell am I to interfere? Nate, I hope you’re going to take his words to heart. The fucking head of the Authority doesn’t come down to talk to just anyone.”
“They didn’t send him out of respect,” Nathaniel said. “They sent him out of fear.”
“Fear of what?”
“I don’t know. He knows something. He’s hiding something.”
“So you’re not going to let t
his go.”
Nathaniel shook his head. “I can’t. If the Authority is sending their top man, there’s something very big here. I need to know what it is.”
“You’re going to go to the wall, aren’t you?” Achmis frowned.
“Yes. Of course I am.”
“Because naturally when the leader of the world tells you to stay away from something, the immediate response is to run right to that thing.”
“Joke all you want,” Nathaniel said. “There is something wrong in this world and it involves the Authority and the wall.”
“But you heard Gustavus! You know what happens to people who try to scale the wall!”
“Indeed. But I’m a Great One. The only Great One. I can’t be so easily dispatched.”
“Fuck.” Achmis threw his hands in the air. “He’s really going to do it. By the prophet!”
Under cover of night, Nathaniel waited in the bushes. The wall was at least fifty feet away, but he could see it easily enough. The structure was taller than all the buildings nearby. Only the spire in the heart of the world was taller, but from that distance of miles, seeing over the wall was impossible. The more Nathaniel considered all of this, the more it seemed to be by design.
At least a hundred feet up, armed guards patrolled near the top of the wall. All of that surface area, and yet no blemishes or vandalism. The only way up the smooth surface was through the guard platforms, and those only rose to ten feet below the top of the wall. Even the guards couldn’t see or go over to the other side.
It had been two hours’ travel between the enclave and the nearest point of the wall. Nathaniel had to use his notoriety as the Great One to get the rides he needed, and he knew word would surely spread about his travels as soon as the drivers of the carriages returned home. He didn’t have long.
The patrolmen along the top brandished their weapons, strange devices larger and more powerful than those used by the guards at the enclave perimeter, but Nathaniel knew they were from the same forgotten time, when the Great Ones were plentiful.
Nathaniel cursed himself for having asked so little about the past and about the world. It hadn’t occurred to him as a child to ask his parents, and nobody ever talked about anything but the daily tasks. Even when the Great Ones had suddenly begun to die off, whether of old age, like his parents, or injuries sustained in battle, he had accepted the cruel world at face value.
He wondered though if his mother and father even knew anything more about the world than he did. The timeline of Great Ones was different than for the normal folk who comprised the rest of the world, but he had no reason to believe that his parents hadn’t themselves been children long before Nathaniel was conceived. He had known his grandparents, who at the time of his birth looked much younger than Nathaniel did now. He had known only one ancestor from a time before that; a great-grandmother. She was likely more than a thousand years old by the time he was born, considering how far apart Great One generations spread, but she looked no more than sixty.
Nathaniel felt certain that Grandma Elise, as he’d known her, possessed the same powerful dose of whatever made the Great Ones what they were that had been passed down to him. It was why she had remained when the others of her generation had died off. She remained the same, with one streak of grey in her otherwise black hair, for all of his childhood and a good while into his long adulthood. Then her power failed her, and with confusion and fear he witnessed her rapid decline and death. His grandparents followed within thirty years, despite having been hundreds of years younger than Grandma Elise, and within the next two decades he had lost his parents as well.
The other Great Ones were disappearing all around him, but it was probably a year after the last one other than him had died that he actually realized he was the last. At that point, after losing his family, Nathaniel had retreated to the woods. When he had been found by a representative of the Authority, he had debated staying on his own, but the Authority made such a strong pitch that being honored as the sole remaining Great One was for the benefit of everyone else, not just him.
All of that seemed so long ago. Was so long ago, he reminded himself as he studied the pattern of the guards as they paced back and forth along the scaffolding. He had always viewed the Authority as no concern, something that really only mattered to the normals in the world. Now…there was something about the way Gustavus had talked to him. Threatened him. He wondered if perhaps ignoring the Authority was just as foolish as never questioning the circumstances of the world or asking how things used to be. But again, he thought as he studied the smooth walls, maybe all of it was as carefully designed as the walls themselves.
He saw the guards turn away and he moved with the speed he had always been blessed with. There was no hesitation, no clumsiness. He took to the scaffolding in an instant and was halfway up before the first guard turned around.
“Hey!” the man called. “Who goes there?”
Nathaniel didn’t answer. He continued to scale the platforms, leaping from one to the next like an animal.
“I’m warning you!” the guard said.
Out of the corner of his eyes, Nathaniel could see multiple guards with their weapons trained on him. He hurled himself onto the top platform. The top of the wall was in view. He hunched down, powerful legs coiled, and after a moment to consider his actions he launched upward.
Nathaniel’s hands gripped the top of the wall. He expected to feel the heat of hellfire scorching his skin, but there was nothing. He heard several crackling sounds, and suddenly his torso exploded in pain. His clothing lit on fire and he could smell his own skin and hair burning. He fell from the wall and slammed into the platform below. The guards were on him, smoke trickling from the ends of their weapons.
Nathaniel grabbed one of the guards by the ankle and pulled the man down. He heard the guard’s bones crack. He spun around and swept out the legs of two more. He flipped back to his feet, ignoring the pain. The weapons crackled again and he went down in agony.
Nathaniel spasmed as the torturous energy moved through him. His thoughts were a blur. He barely registered the lead guard saying, “Put him out of his misery.” There was another of the crackling noises, and then there was nothing.
3
“Wake up,” a voice, unfriendly and hard, commanded him.
Nathaniel rolled over in his sleep and grunted.
“I said, wake up!” A powerful hand grabbed him by the shirt and tossed him to the floor.
“I’m up! I’m up! For the prophet’s sake!” Nathaniel scrambled to his feet. His nightshirt was stretched at the neck where the intruder had grabbed him.
“I see you are,” said Liam, eyeing Nathaniel’s exposed lower half with a disapproving sneer. “Don’t invoke Weber. The prophet has nothing to do with this.”
Nathaniel pulled the nightshirt down. “What is it you want?”
“What I want is for you not to sleep past your classes every fucking morning. How’s that for a start?”
“I slept past class?”
Liam slammed a meaty palm into Nathaniel’s face so hard it brought tears to his eyes. His skin split, and a single line of blood ran down his cheek. The wound healed itself before the blood could drip to the floor.
“You know fucking well you did! I won’t tolerate disobedience of any sort, Mansfield.”
“Sorry,” Nathaniel muttered.
“You youngins are always sorry,” Liam said. He sat on the bed, massive shoulders slumped. “It’s not that I want to be so hard on you. You know that. It’s my calling. I’ve been doing this shit for six hundred years and more, making sure the Great Ones are trained as well as can be.”
“I know,” Nathaniel said. He grabbed his clothes and walked behind a tall divider set to one side of the room. “Like I said, I’m sorry.”
“Hmph. Revelry got the better of you last night?”
“Aye. It won’t happen again.” Nathaniel pulled on his shirt and pants, and stepped back into the room.
&nbs
p; “No. It won’t. You’ll be eighteen soon enough, and your powers will be at their peak. Then alcohol won’t have any effect on you. I reckon you’ll be sorry to remove drunkenness from your life.”
Were it anyone else, Nathaniel would have smiled at such a comment. With Liam, it was better not to tempt fate. The teacher could grow angry without notice, and one slap was all Nathaniel needed for this morning.
“I will be better,” he said.
Liam nodded solemnly. “There is something I need to show you.”
“Me? What? Why me?”
“By the Klaus, I don’t know. Maybe I’ve lost my fucking mind. But I need to tell someone, and you’re different, Mansfield. Fucking impossible to get you to come to class on time, but there’s something…” He sat upright. “Come with me.”
“To where?”
The large man didn’t answer, but stood up and walked to the door.
“Where are we going?” Nathaniel asked as he followed Liam into the hallway.
The dormitory was buzzing with activity. The laughter of other young Great Ones echoed from the rooms along the hall. Liam plowed forward, and Nathaniel scrambled to keep up.
Liam led the way out of the dormitory and through the central enclave, stopping only to return the bows of the normals. Nathaniel did likewise, though he knew the bows weren’t meant for him. Not yet.
They left the enclave and wandered down the dirt path leading toward the woods.
“Why are we leaving?” Nathaniel asked. “We’re already away from anyone who might be listening. I don’t see what—”
“We’re almost there.”
Liam entered the woods and walked off the path. Nathaniel followed, brushing overgrown branches out of his way. Thorns poked at him, but they weren’t hard or sharp enough to cut his enhanced skin.
Finally, the tangle of trees opened into a clearing. Spotted with grass, it was empty, save for the stump of a dead tree in the center. Burn marks along the wood made Nathaniel think it was lightning that had killed the tree. Liam approached the stump.
The Magic Book Page 2
