Van Bender and the Burning Emblems (The Van Bender Archives #1)

by S. James Nelson

I was joking, but she grunted and shook her head. “I would be if they would let me advance that quickly. I have the skills and knowledge. But I’m only technically a copper.”

  “The lowest level. Ouch.”

  “Exactly.”

  She watched as another limo pulled up. It held two men in some of the crazy, Shakespearean costumes I’d seen earlier. She rolled her eyes.

  “This waiting is fun,” she said. “I wish it was close enough to walk.”

  Over the announcing of the men, I said, “What are we going to do?”

  “We’re going to do as the Council instructed, and teach you the basics of using brink.”

  Mentally, I pumped my fist, and thought, “Yes!”

  After a quick yet harrowing ride in a limo, my tune quickly changed to, “What the freak?”

  Chapter 37: You’ll burn your eyes out

  It’s good to keep Richie guessing.

  -Marti Walker

  I’d expected a room with unusual equipment and all manner of magical objects. I’d half hoped for mystical creatures—little elves with pointy ears, or a Pegasus or something—and for some kind of gear reminiscent of medieval armor.

  Instead I got what looked like a training room for pro-wrestlers. Two dozen elevated boxing rings scattered throughout an expansive warehouse-like room with a concrete floor, concrete walls, and a ceiling of thin metal beams and sheet metal.

  It did not exactly summon warm fuzzies.

  “What’s the problem?” Marti said.

  She headed to a set of metal cabinets along the wall. The spacious room consumed her voice, so it didn’t even echo.

  I waved at the rings and followed her. “No problem at all. I’d just expected—”

  “Something that didn’t put the fear of a pile driver in you?”

  I nodded. She’d hit the nail right on the head.

  “Well,” she said, “these rings aren’t what you think. They’re designed to help you learn without hurting anyone else.”

  “Will they help me not hurt myself?”

  “Probably not, but that’s why I’m here.”

  The cabinet contained several books, a row of generic lighters, and dozens of vials of blue brink. She withdrew two of the vials, a lighter, and put her purse inside. Nodding toward the rings, she led me deeper into the room.

  “So Grant Bradly brought you here?” I said. “He taught you how to use brink here?”

  “No, he taught me in my rodeo arena.”

  “Why haven’t we seen him around?”

  She shrugged. “He’s been absent for about a week. I haven’t had a chance to check in on him. But that reminds me—you can’t just go talking about Intersoc and brink with any rock star you meet.”

  “Right. Because I meet so many, you know.”

  “Not everyone is involved. Only a relatively small portion of the music industry knows about this. It’s a very exclusive club.”

  “I’m so honored to be a part of it.”

  “You should be. So, what have you gathered about brink, tonight?” she said. “Tell me what you know. Or think you know.”

  “It seems pretty simple. Draw an emblem then light it.”

  “Wow, you figured out all of that all by yourself?”

  I started to respond, pleased with myself, then realized she was teasing me. So, instead I jabbed her with an elbow.

  She laughed. “There are a lot of nuances, but you’ll have to learn them gradually. We don’t have the time to cover them all right now.”

  As we continued to walk past the rings, she handed me a vial.

  “Take the lid off, dip a finger in the brink, then hold the finger out to the side.”

  As we walked, I obeyed. The brink felt warm against my skin, and more like goo than liquid. After I pulled my finger out, the cinnamon-smelling brink trailed through the air where my finger passed. It tinkled in a blue squiggly line behind me.

  “Whenever brink is touching skin,” she said, “it will smear in the air where it passes.”

  “That’s why,” I said, “you pour the brink into the palm of your hand—so you can close it off from the air.”

  “That’s right. Very impressive—you’re not as dumb as you look.”

  I sneered, and she laughed again. That—and the way she tossed her head back—actually reminded me of Sandra.

  She stopped at a boxing ring, ascended a set of stairs, and bent between a pair of ropes into the ring’s center. I followed her. The surface of the ring, hard with a thin carpet over it, was springy.

  “Of course,” she said, “air still gets into your closed hand, but it’s not enough to make the brink leave a trail in the air. So, that’s why you end up drawing your shape with the palm of your hand, and not your finger.”

  “Although you could, right? I mean, if you lifted the vial up to where you want to begin drawing, then pull your finger out and immediately start drawing, it would work, right?”

  “Sure, as long as once you’ve got the shape drawn, you move the vial over to the end, then put your finger right in it. But it looks ridiculous.”

  “I would hate to look ridiculous.”

  “Too late. Plus, for more complex shapes, it’s sometimes hard to get the container to your finger. Anyway, when casting a spell, it’s the shape and proportion that’s important. You can draw the shape any size you want, but it must be proportionate. Any kind of variation from the prescribed shape could cause the spell to simply not work, or could affect how the spell works.”

  “If I draw the shape bigger, is the spell more powerful?”

  “Nope. The power of the spell is mostly affected by the accuracy of the shape and the temperature of the brink. Blue is the coldest brink, the least powerful. Let’s start with some basic shapes. Pour some brink into your hand, and draw a circle.”

  It turns out that drawing circles in mid-air is not as easy as it should be. It almost seemed like when I’d cast the spell before, in my room, I’d lucked out. Or maybe it was that Marti watched me now, making me self-conscious. Whatever the case, my circles tended to droop to the left, as Marti pointed out. By about the eighth try, my circles looked much better.

  Excited that I’d finally gotten it right, I forgot to close my hand and turned to smile at her. As I did, the brink smeared across the air in front of me, in a wide arc.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Good. Except for that tail.”

  I closed the palm of my hand and smiled sheepishly.

  She took the vial from me, handed me the lighter, and motioned at my row of sad circles. The first one had started to slide down toward the ground and fade in intensity. The sparkles had already disappeared.

  “As you can see,” she said, “the brink won’t hold its shape forever. It only takes a few minutes for it get floppy, and only a few more for it to fade completely. If you try to light a spell that has changed shape or faded too much, it won’t light. Go ahead and light them, starting with the oldest.”

  I gave her a wary expression. At that point, I was no more interested in dying than I had been back in the hospital, during the cancer. Just that night, Dad had warned me that spells misfire. Other people had disintegrated.

  “Is this a trick?” I said. “What will this spell do?”

  She shrugged. “Just try it and see.”

  “Is it going to misfire and blow my eyeballs out? Because I rather like having eyeballs.”

  “Just do it.”

  She retreated to the far corner, as far away from my first circle as she could while staying in the ring. Standing as far back as I could, I reached out to the first lopsided circle with the lighter, and flicked the mechanism. Fire sprouted up from the lighter, and touched the bottom of the shape.

  Nothing happened.

  “It’s too faded,” I said.

  “You’re very observant.”

  I moved to the second circle, a little less cautious—and nearly paid for it with singed eyebrows, because this time the circle took flame. The fire spread in b
oth directions around the shape, and once the fire closed into a ring, the space inside the circle turned brilliant white.

  I jerked back and away, closing my eyes.

  The flare lasted only a second before fading. The fire turned to ashes and settled onto the mat.

  “Keep going,” she instructed. “Light the others.”

  As I did, the flash became progressively brighter—because the shape of the circles become rounder. The last shape—the one with the line I’d inadvertently drawn afterward—was the brightest, and this time it didn’t simply flash. It stayed bright for several seconds.

  “Your tail,” Marti said, “caused it to stay lit. The longer the tail, the longer it would have stayed lit.”

  “That’s kind of like at Nick’s cabin,” I said. “When you triggered that first trap, you made that rainbow shape, then gave it a tail. The shield around us, protecting us from the flame, extended out as long as the tail.”

  “Right. Tails can serve two functions—as directional arrows, or as timers. You can use a tail to either lengthen the duration of a spell, or project its effect in a certain direction, depending on the spell. You can also create a fuse that delays the ignition of a spell.”

  “How many spells do you know?”

  She shrugged. “Dozens. Maybe more than a hundred.”

  Despite our plan to retrieve the multiplier right away, I couldn’t help but enjoy the next thirty minutes as we played around with brink. She had me practice and light various shapes, most of which didn’t actually cast a spell, but that she promised I would use later on in other spells.

  I didn’t really suck at drawing shapes, but things got difficult when I started on three-dimensional emblems—not just shapes on a single plane. Drawing a shape on paper with a pencil is hard enough. Doing it in mid-air proved almost maddening. Straight lines are difficult to make. Connecting those lines in multiple planes becomes even more difficult when you can’t pass your arm or hand through what you’ve already drawn.

  Eventually Marti pointed at a spiral I’d drawn. “Pass your hand through that brink.”

  I did as she said, and the brink smeared where I passed my hand.

  “So, you see,” she said, “you can mess up your spell by touching your brink.” She drew a straight line in front of her. “Touch that.”

  I reached out, expecting my hand to smear the brink, but instead, as my palm touched the light, an electric shock ran up my wrist and into my arm. I jumped back with a yelp.

  She chuckled, and ran a hand along the line, gathering it back up in her palm. “You can only smear your own brink. If you touch the brink someone else has drawn, you get a shock. The stronger the brink, the bigger the shock.”

  I rubbed my hand and glared at her. “You couldn’t just tell me that?”

  “The lesson wouldn’t have been as effective,” she said. “Or as amusing.”

  I gave her a sarcastic laugh.

  “If you could smear others’ emblems,” she said, “it would be way too easy to disrupt their spells—just walk into it. Wave your arm through it. Aside from a diffuser, the only way to mess up someone’s spell is to draw your own spell nearby.”

  She instructed me to draw a a circle with eight squiggly rays of sunlight extending out from it—one at each major and minor compass point. It reminded me of Kurt’s dad’s music shop, Sunburst Music. It was where I’d learned how to play the guitar. I pictured that logo—a circle with eight squiggly rays of light coming out of it—as I drew the spell. Marti stood about a dozen feet in front of my shape and drew her own sunburst, facing mine.

  “Light it,” she said.

  I obeyed. Once the spell had finished burning—culminated being the technical term, as Marti had explained during my lesson—the center of the emblem began to glow. At the same time, the fluorescent lights immediately above our boxing ring went dark.

  “This spell gathers light,” Marti said. “Simple, right? Well, look at what happens when I draw the same emblem nearby—it changes the effect of the spell.”

  She lit her emblem. Once it had culminated, a cylinder of thick white light appeared between the two circles. It extended in a straight line past her shape and struck some kind of invisible barrier at the edge of the ring, as if it had hit a solid wall. It hurt my eyes to look at the beam.

  “Why is it stopping?” I said.

  “The ring,” she said. “It contain spell effects. It’s to protect others from your spells.”

  The beam of light lasted several seconds, as if it took that long for the glow of my emblem to shoot through her emblem. Then both emblems turned to ash.

  “So you see,” she said, “that I can modify the effects of your spells by drawing other shapes nearby.”

  “That could get nasty.”

  “Yes, it could. That’s what duels are all about. That’s what you saw earlier on the beach. Two entertainers draw shapes to try and modify the net effect of the spells in order to defeat the other entertainer.”

  “How do you know how a shape will affect another spell?”

  She shrugged. “Experience and learning.”

  “The combinations seem endless.”

  “The more spells you have, the more complicated it gets. Two spells have one effect. Add a third, and everything changes—each spell changes in relation to the other. So not only do you have to know how each spell affects another spell on an individual basis, but how they affect other spells in relation to other spells. The complications are exponential.”

  I wasn’t certain I knew what that meant, but it sounded huge.

  She gestured at where her sunburst spell had burned. “Take this spell, for example. Alone, without any other spells nearby, it absorbs light. With another of the same spell next to it, it shoots the absorbed light out and away.”

  The sound of a door opening in the distance made us turn to look at the training room entrance. A handful of people filed into the room and headed past the first ring, toward us. They wore the Renaissance outfits I’d seen at the pool.

  Marti sighed, shook her head, and placed her fists on her hips.

  “Oh, dandy. Just what I’ve been hoping for. This isn’t going to be pleasant.”

  “Who are they?”

  “Fundamentalist rappers.”

  Chapter 38: A band mate gives me a chance

  When he held up the Cask at the concert, I knew that soon he’d show up at Intersoc. Naturally, I wanted him to be a fundamentalist. All the coolest rock stars are.

  -Brock Webster

  The three men and three women didn’t particularly look like rappers. More like actors in a Shakespearian play. In fact, I had to rub my eyes to make sure I wasn’t seeing an illusion.

  The men wore colorful doublets, vests, and puffy striped pants that buckled just below their knees. They had long white socks that looked like women’s nylons, and bulbous hats with large feathers in them. The women looked no less absurd in their extravagant dresses with beaded necklaces, laced bodices, and shawls.

  They walked toward us with chins high.

  Marti moved to the edge of the ring. I followed.

  “Don’t say anything,” she said. “Let me do the talking.”

  “I’m a little tired of you saying that.”

  “It’s just the way it is.”

  “They’re rappers?” I whispered, pointing at them with my chin. “They look like idiots.”

  “No, they’re musicians like everyone else around here—but snotty ones. They’re fundamentalists. They believe that we should dress and act the way they did back in the 1500s, back when magic was discovered.”

  “They look like a costume closet vomited on them.”

  Though the fundamentalist rappers stood three feet lower, they seemed to look down their noses at me as they approached and greeted us with frowns. The clothes and makeup—even on the men—almost distracted me, so I nearly missed seeing the same round-faced, feather-hatted man as I’d seen back at the patio. Who the heck was he?

/>   We faced each other in silence for several seconds, until a woman in the front spoke with a sneer.

  “You see, my friends,” the woman said, “when those Bamboozlers let a rat in off the street, other rats come.”

  Marti snorted. “Lovely to see you, too, Louise.”

  I stared at the woman more closely. It was Louise Rhode, the venerable star who’d had number-one pop albums in four consecutive decades. She had blonde hair, a sharp nose, and unusually young-looking skin.

  “We just came to warn you and invite you,” Louise said, looking at me. “And only you.”

  I looked at Marti, unsure if I should speak. Her expression gave me no hint.

  Louise continued. “You’re not welcome at the Intersociety of Magical, Honorable Offerings unless you’re a true veteran of the entertainment industry—which you aren’t. So don’t get any ideas. Don’t think that just because you’re here you’ve arrived. You haven’t. Like so many others, you’ll probably be gone and forgotten by the end of the year.”

  I blinked back my shock, but couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I have that problem often, as Mom loves to point out. For good effect, I clapped quietly, as if applauding a fine play.

  “Oh, very nice—excellent performance. Was that Shakespeare?” I looked at Marti and nodded. “I think that was Shakespeare. King Lear, maybe?”

  Emotions passed through Marti’s face. Worry, fear, anger, then pleasure. She smirked. “No. Hamlet, I think.”

  “Ah,” I said, still clapping. “Hamlet! How delightful!”

  The fundamentalists glared at me.

  “How offensive he is,” said one of the men in tights. He glanced at the round-faced man I recognized. “I think you must have mistaken his character.”

  I looked at the man again, and it hit me who he was. Brock Webster. The guitarist in my band. Shock rippled through me—first that he was in Intersoc, second that he was dressed so ridiculously, and third that I hadn’t recognized him before. Blame it on his outfit and the fact that Mom had never let me say more than two words to him.

  “Brock!” I said.

  His face brightened. “Good to have you at Intersoc, Richie! Outstanding concert tonight.”