The Magic Book

by Fredric Shernoff

  “What is this place?” Nathaniel asked.

  “It’s a hiding spot. Known only to me.” Liam placed one of his large boots on the side of the stump and pushed. The stump slid smoothly over.

  “It’s on a track!” Nathaniel exclaimed.

  “Indeed.”

  “What’s in there? What was it hiding?”

  “By the prophet! Quiet your tongue, boy, and use your eyes!”

  Nathaniel watched as Liam squatted down and removed a cloth-wrapped bundle from a depression under where the stump had been.

  Nathaniel opened his mouth to ask what was in the package, but thought better of it. Liam placed the bundle on top of the stump and looked around nervously in every direction. Nathaniel had never seen his teacher nervous. He hadn’t known the man possessed such a characteristic.

  “You tell me immediately if you hear anything in the woods around us,” Liam said.

  “Okay. Sure.”

  Liam nodded. He unwrapped the bundle. Inside it was something Nathaniel had never seen before. It was maybe the size of a small plate, but thicker and rectangular. Its surface was black but appeared to be made of some kind of hide.

  “What is it?” Nathaniel asked.

  “I don’t know what it’s called.” He pinched the edge of the item and pulled it open. Inside were symbols. So many of them.

  Nathaniel stared at the strange object. “I don’t understand.”

  “Nor do I. I found this along the wall over a year ago. It appears like a kind of scroll, and those symbols seem to be some kind of written language, but they don’t mean anything to me.”

  “Why...why are you showing this to me?”

  Liam laughed. “I’m asking myself the same question.” He held out his muscular arm and rolled up his sleeve. There was a strange, large blemish along his forearm. “You are aware that the Great Ones are no longer immortal?”

  “Aye, but the word around says that it only afflicts certain bloodlines.”

  “Perhaps,” Liam said. “But mine has been impacted. This is what the normals call ‘cancer.’”

  “Cancer? So you’re dying?”

  “It seems likely. My healing ability ceased two months ago, and this disease developed shortly after. I don’t suspect I have very long.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Liam smiled. “I doubt that. But never mind. The important thing is that you guard this object when I’m gone. It’s from a different time. Maybe a different world. And that matters.”

  “A different world? How?”

  “I don’t know. But it means the Authority isn’t telling us everything we need to know. And I don’t have the strength or the time to investigate further.”

  “But why me?” Nathaniel pleaded.

  “I can’t say. A hunch, maybe. Promise me you will protect the object, and pursue its origin.”

  Nathaniel paused. There were so many questions. So many concerns.

  “Promise me!” Liam demanded.

  Nathaniel sighed. “I promise. I promise.”

  Liam survived close to a year after that. During that time, he never talked about the strange object in the woods with Nathaniel. For the most part, Liam simply returned to being the unpleasant, gruff teacher he had always been, until the sickness overtook him.

  When the teacher took to his deathbed, the students lined up in a procession to pay final respects. When Nathaniel reached the bedside, Liam took hold of his wrist in a grip that was still deceptively strong.

  “Keep your promise,” Liam whispered.

  Nathaniel nodded. “Yes, teacher. I will.”

  The object was never far from Nathaniel’s mind, but he waited for two entire weeks following Liam’s death before venturing back out into the woods.

  When the time finally came, he told nobody where he was going. He had thought it would be difficult to avoid the prying eyes of others in the dorm, but he found a sliver of opportunity when the hallway was empty. From there he simply proceeded with purpose, leading those who saw him to believe he was on an important mission. Which, in a way, he was.

  His skills and his training made it easy for him to remember his way through the woods, even with nearly no hint of a path. It took him very little time to find the clearing and the stump. He took hold of the stump with both hands and pushed. It took much more effort than he’d expected, but the stump slid along the invisible track, revealing the carefully wrapped mystery beneath.

  Nathaniel removed the bundle, and looked around just as he had seen Liam do. He unwrapped the object and stared at it. He hadn’t noticed it the first time, but the dark surface had gold symbols embossed in it. He guessed they were the same symbols found inside.

  Suddenly, a black mist surrounded him. He gagged on the foul-smelling substance as it worked its way into his lungs. He choked and clawed at his throat in vain. Darkness crept in from the edges of his vision and wiped away all thought.

  He awoke to find himself strapped to a chair at his arms, waist and legs. He struggled against his bindings.

  “Relax,” said a voice in the shadows.

  “Who are you?” Nathaniel called.

  “A friend.”

  “My friends don’t poison me, or keep me captive!”

  The voice laughed. “I had to get you here somehow. You know that poison won’t kill you. Any damage it did has already healed. That’s the benefit of being one of the Great Ones, isn’t it?”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to know how you found that item in the woods.”

  “What item?”

  “Don’t do that,” the voice said. “This doesn’t have to be so complicated, Nathaniel. Just tell me what you know.”

  “I don’t know anything!” Nathaniel said.

  “That item, it means nothing to you?”

  “Nothing! I swear! I don’t understand what it says.”

  There was silence for a long moment.

  “I believe you,” the voice said.

  “Then let me go!”

  “Soon enough.”

  A man appeared from the darkness. He held a mallet in one hand and a metal spike like Nathaniel had seen people use to support tents in the wilderness.

  “What are you doing?” Nathaniel cried.

  “Relax,” said the voice, which did not come from the man with the spike. “This will be over soon.”

  “No! Stop!”

  The man with the spike poked it against Nathaniel’s forehead. Nathaniel thrashed against his bindings. The man raised the mallet. The last thing Nathaniel saw was it swinging down with tremendous force.

  4

  Nathaniel woke with a start. His body hurt all over. He struggled to sit up and upon rising saw he was in a hospital gown. The skin on his exposed feet was pink and raw.

  He had been burnt, that much was clear. Whatever the guards at the wall had done to him with their strange weapons had been intended to kill him, but it hadn’t worked. He supposed he should be grateful that some of the Great Ones’ power remained within him, but at that moment all he could think of was the pain and the memory that had stirred in him while he was unconscious.

  Was it a memory? He had tremendous recall of so many things, but that experience surrounding the death of his teacher was new to him, as if it had happened to someone else. He hadn’t thought about Liam in decades, and if he’d been asked prior to the dreams, he probably wouldn’t have recalled the specifics of how the teacher died.

  He thought about the tent stake and the mallet coming down. Someone had captured him. They had taken the object, and then they drove a rod through his skull. Why? What did that mean?

  “I believe I warned you about scaling the wall,” a voice said.

  Nathaniel turned to his side, groaning in pain. Achmis was leaning against the far wall. His normal mischievous smile had been replaced with a grimace of genuine concern.

  “I’m fine,” Nathaniel said.

  “Are you now? Because to me it looks like you were shot
and burnt and I hate to tell you, friend, but you aren’t healing the way you once did.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “Good,” Achmis said. “Then maybe you’ll consider this the end of your folly. I don’t have to tell you that the only reason you aren’t rotting away in jail right now is that the Authority doesn’t want to have to explain to the world why they locked up the one and only Great One.”

  “The Authority knows much more than they are letting on,” Nathaniel said.

  “Ugh. Nate. Please stop this talk. If you don’t give me a heart attack, Esther’s gonna kill me for not talking you out of your insanity. You had your chance. You tried to scale the wall. It’s over.”

  “It’s more than that. I had a vision.”

  Achmis put his hand on his head. “Oh dear. While you were unconscious? You believe the prophet sent a vision to you?”

  “Not Weber. Not the Christ baby, either. Maybe not a vision. A memory…I think.”

  “You think? I can’t believe I’m saying this, but whatever was it about?”

  “I had a teacher, back long ago.”

  “Riiiight. A Great One assigned to teach the other Great Ones. I get how that worked. So what?”

  “So I think he showed me something before he died. Something filled with writing that I couldn’t comprehend. He asked me to protect it.”

  Achmis slumped in a seat in the corner of the room and sighed. “Go on.”

  “I was caught with it. Whoever kidnapped me, they did something. And that memory was lost until now.”

  “What did they do?”

  “They hammered a spike through my head.”

  Achmis cringed. “Fuck. That’s disgusting. But I guess it’s good strategy.”

  “What? How do you mean?”

  “Well,” Achmis started, “if I have a Great One and he knows something I don’t want him to know, it makes sense to do something fucking awful to his brain. Either I get lucky and he dies, or he heals but I’ve given him a nice case of amnesia.”

  “Amnesia? You think…”

  “I think that if you’re right, and hell, you just might be, that somebody fucked up your brain to make you forget about whatever it was you found. So what I want to know is, why?”

  Nathaniel sat up and screamed in pain.

  “Nate! Take it easy!” Achmis got up and went over to Nathaniel’s bed.

  Nathaniel put up a hand. “Relax. I’m okay. Just need to heal. As to why someone would do that...my teacher, Liam, in the memory he was under the impression that the object was proof there’s more to the world than the Authority tells us.”

  “Interesting. And this all came back to you now.”

  “Maybe because I’ve never been so close to death. Or maybe there’s a parallel between that experience and this. Who knows? It only serves to support my theory.”

  “Maybe it does,” Achmis said. “Maybe it does. But Nate, you’ve already tried to explore your theory and it landed you here. And Gustavus is not going to let you try again.”

  “I have to try. I can do better.”

  “You have to get better.”

  Nathaniel shook his head. “That isn’t the priority.”

  “I’m weary of these arguments, Nate. The Great Ones are gone. You’re all that’s left and you know damned well how quickly you could go downhill once you reach that tipping point. Look how slowly you’re healing from this! The next time the Authority takes you down, that might be the end of the whole thing.”

  Nathaniel stood up. He tried to suppress the wince of pain that spread on his face as his wounded skin rubbed against itself. “My time is limited, Ach. I get that. And that’s why I have to do what I can to set this right. Nobody else can. Please try to understand.”

  Achmis put a hand on Nathaniel’s shoulder, and to Nathaniel’s shock his friend had tears in his eyes.

  “I do understand,” Achmis said. “Of course I do. But I can’t…I just can’t support something that’s gonna take my friend away from me. I’m sorry. It’s fucking selfish but it is what it is.”

  Nathaniel gave himself one more day to heal before venturing out of his quarters and into the enclave proper. He knew there were rumors about his condition, but he was not about to give the Authority the satisfaction of letting the normals see him in a broken state.

  With the coming and going of the sun, he started to feel almost like himself. His healing ability was still a miraculous thing. It was simply not what it had once been, and it had been handed a massive challenge to overcome. He was healing, and he knew that if he left well enough alone he would be healthy within a week, if not sooner.

  He planned to return to the wall, despite Achmis’s pleas, but he wasn’t ready yet. The vision, or memory, or whatever it was that had come to him continued to haunt him. That he had lived so long with no recollection of those events with his teacher…it was so odd and deeply troubling.

  Prior to this recent revelation, he had recalled Liam as nothing more than a gruff instructor. It was a cloudy time in his past. The vision was anything but cloudy, yet it felt like events that had happened to someone else.

  There was only one thing to do. Nathaniel left the enclave the day after his conversation with Achmis. His first steps outside his building were tentative and shambling, but he quickly found his natural pace, masking any sign that his broken body was still in the process of mending.

  He waved to anyone he saw, trying to maintain as natural a demeanor as possible. The guards posted at the enclave entrance looked him up and down.

  “Going for a stroll, Nathaniel?” one said.

  “Aye. Seems like a nice enough day.”

  “Would have thought you’d bring your bow for some hunting, though rumor has it that went poorly on your last outing.”

  Nathaniel managed a thin smile and nodded. “Enjoy your day, gentlemen.”

  His patience with the guards was wearing out. He didn’t know for certain if either of the men at the gate had been assigned to the wall the night he was attacked, but he was beginning to feel that anyone who worked in an Authority-designated role was complicit.

  He walked away from the enclave. All he had to go on was the memory of the vision. In that dreamscape, he had traveled along an overgrown path deep into the woods. He followed that path as much as he could, though to call it a path would have been misleading. There was nothing to indicate that anyone had ever passed through in that direction. Was that by design as well? He thought there was a chance. He wondered how deep the machinations of the Authority might reach.

  He pushed through the woods long enough to consider that he may have been wrong about the whole thing, but then the forest took on a pattern he hadn’t expected. The trees there were grown in concentric rings. It took a moment before the discovery made sense; someone had planted the trees to hide the clearing he had seen in his vision.

  He moved to the center. Where he had expected the mechanical stump, there was simply another of those trees, the same height as all the others in what had been Liam’s clearing. Nathaniel placed his hands along the bark of the tree. He took a deep breath and pushed. There was nothing.

  He braced his feet and tried again. Still nothing. He worked his feet deeper in the soil and pushed with everything he had in him. He heard grinding, felt the slightest hint of motion. Nathaniel drove forward. Unlike the stump, which had been small enough that its few roots rested on the platform, the tree had established itself far beyond the confines of its initial space.

  Nathaniel kept pushing, and slowly the tree’s roots tore free. Despite the pain, it felt good to use the full limits of his power. As the roots came loose, the platform slid over. The tree fell to the side, crashing into the network of branches extending from two of its brethren.

  Nathaniel looked into the opening made by the tree’s relocation. It was just as it had appeared in his dream, despite the tremendous amount of time that had passed, but the space was empty.

  He looked around, remembering what h
ad seemingly happened the last time he’d visited the clearing. It did happen! he scolded himself. The space under the tree confirmed it. Someone had stolen the object and his memories. Whoever it had been was long gone, carried to Heaven by Klaus in his sled, if the normals and their myths held any truth. But still, the Authority carried on as it had eons earlier, and if it had been their representation that had violated his mind…he couldn’t let that injustice stand.

  Nathaniel planned to tell Achmis about his discovery. Maybe even take the bastard out to the clearing that was no longer clear, if it would help budge the man from his state of inaction. Yet Achmis wasn’t at dinner that night. Nathaniel found that strange. It wasn’t like his friend to miss a meal. He supposed it was possible Esther had decided to cook, a not altogether uncommon occurrence. Still, there was something that didn’t feel right.

  He finished his portion of dry chicken breast and was standing up from the table when he heard Achmis screaming.

  “Nate! Nate! For Weber’s sake, please be here!”

  “I’m here, Ach! Calm down.” He walked over to Achmis and was stunned to see tears flowing freely down the man’s cheeks and losing themselves in his beard. “What is it?”

  “It’s Esther!” Achmis bawled. “They took her!”

  “They…who?”

  “The Authority!”

  Nathaniel took Achmis by the shoulders and escorted him to the nearest bench. “Sit.” The big man did as requested, and Nathaniel sat next to him. All eyes in the dining hall were on them. “Tell me what happened.”

  “They knew. They knew what you told me about your dream. And that you’re planning to return to the—”

  “Enough. We don’t need to make this worse. Tell me what happened to Esther.”

  “The guards came. They took her as penalty for what they called ‘being an associate to treason.’ Took her! Like she was my fucking property. My wife!”

  Achmis’s words ended in a torrent of sobs. Nathaniel put his hand on Achmis’s arm. “Ach, where did they take her?”