I must have looked awful on the outside; nobody requested that I buy a tram ticket, and that says a lot. Judge for yourself: I hissed, spat, and cursed myself, and looked like a mage at that. No wonder I scared people. I broke into the garage and grabbed the saddle bag taken off the motorcycle after the “death” of the Dark Knight. In the bag I kept my combat mage’s kit, including a powerful enchanted lamp—quite harmless to Rustle when it was inside me. But the lamp had a source of energy… I began violently plucking out the accumulator from the case, trying not to focus my thoughts on what I was doing. The zombie-dog skeptically watched my efforts.
There it was!
A painful touch stabbed my tongue, and my mouth became sour. Yes! Now I could think. In addition to the blue light, Rustle disliked electricity, so its victims were treated by… hmm… there was no point going into detail.
Cold and resounding emptiness reigned in my head. Perhaps, that’s how life looks like after the imposition of the shackles: the apotheosis of solitude. Given the alternative, I felt incredible relief. As they say, everything is relative.
The first round was on me. Nodding to a puzzled Max (“alright, ciao!”), I took the battery and got back to the apartment. It didn’t make sense to return to classes; tomorrow I would claim illness.
* * *
To get to the central NZAMIPS lab, wisely located in a separate outhouse, the captain had to cross diagonally the entire police building. When Locomotive reached the place, he understood how fortunate he was: waiting in his office for the expiration of the twenty-four hour timeline, he had a good night’s sleep, unlike all the others.
Gray from fatigue and looking ten years older, Satal sat in his chair, relaxing, and sipped something that resembled poorly made tea.
“How are you?” Locomotive called to him cautiously.
The coordinator did not waste energy on the greeting.
“We pulled out of the pump-sign the imprint of the aura, selected fifty candidates from the database, and are examining them now.”
“What if he is a visitor?” Baer asked practically. The dark are usually quite mobile people; they do not like sitting in their gardens as the white do.
“That would mean no luck,” Satal dropped indifferently.
“I’ve sent officers to the university and local services to inquire whether they saw a new mage. It is unlikely that the initiated magician is a tramp.”
“Watch,” the coordinator put the cup up to his head, “if there are any eccentrics on the streets. The time has come for that.”
“What do you mean?”
“Did you get at all what had happened?”
Locomotive shrugged uncertainly—he had never dealt with such exotic cases of supernatural encounter, and the experts’ report had not been provided yet. Actually, that was the purpose of his visit to the coordinator.
Satal majestically waved his cup (fortunately, it was nearly empty): “In conjunction with the pump-sign, the shackles do not inhibit the Source, just tear it from the controlling willpower. The energy channels are left open-loop, and the initiated magician in such condition may try to get energy from the outside.”
Baer nodded: that he knew, but the burned-to-ashes corpses didn’t look like they had been sucked by a vampire.
“If at this moment some otherworldly creature offers itself as the Source, the monster will have access to the etheric body of the mage, bypassing all his natural defense mechanisms. Like manure directly into the vein! In that case, the infection cannot be stopped; the body resists for some time, but then the otherworldly wight totally subdues the subordinate’s shell and destroys its host. If we don’t find the carrier before his willpower has failed, we would have to deal directly with the thing that played in the hangar, so to speak. Got it?”
Locomotive did get it—his protective suit was not designed for that level of defense. With the risks so high, the dark was delaying the quarantine?! He had to start notifying the services immediately: plain soldiers from the barracks wouldn’t be enough to collect a really strong combat group; the “cleaners” would need time.
“Sir, there is a match!” a junior magician put his nose into the room.
The coordinator rushed from the place so quickly that he got into the lab before the captain. A pile of recorded crystals and cartons lay on the table; hopefully, they wouldn’t confuse the records afterwards. The dark mage was already comparing two muddy balls.
“I have two pieces of news for you: good and bad,” Satal began.
“F*ck you!” Locomotive could not refrain. “What’s there?”
“It looks like it’s our friend. That would be logical. What a strange crystal…”
“It cannot be! I checked on him last night!”
Satal snapped: “What was he doing?”
“He seemed to be asleep.”
The coordinator froze for a second: “Okay. Take a group, go to him. I am exhausted now, but he knows you. Try to make him drink an inhibitor: that is his only hope. I’ll call Fatun—let him bring his guys to town.”
Locomotive trotted to the garage, where the operative group was waiting for his orders. Let’s hope Satal would manage to get a call through to the “cleaners”. Baer had not had a chance yet to work with the magician that replaced Colonel Grokk, but they said he was an intelligent man.
* * *
I accurately paid for a tram ticket, politely shook hands with the concierge, and tried to compensate everyone for my crazy look with good behavior. No need to test human patience beyond what was necessary! My fingers trembled unpleasantly. Passing the mirrored windows and seeing my reflection, I even started: a real psycho looked back at me. The body’s physical health directly affects the condition of a magician’s soul, and I was getting into scrapes, one after another, one after another! Even a dark with a very strong spirit has a limit to what he can stand. I ordered myself to look more cheerful and decided not to drink coffee: chemical stimulants in my condition would only hurt.
What a bobble came out with Laurent! Even if I had roasted him slowly, enjoying his cries and stretching his agony, he couldn’t play a meaner trick on me in reply. Why did all this happen to me? Because one fool, rather than going to professionals, got engaged in self-treatment, as if the problem would go away by itself. Yeah, indeed! Out and back.
But my decision was firm: I would exterminate Rustle.
At first I was full of optimism. Why not? There were plenty of people kissed by the monster! If I did not touch the Source, it wouldn’t climb out of there, would it? True, the day after tomorrow I was supposed to resume my classes in magic. How my spellcasting would look in that situation, I didn’t dare to picture. Hence, I would need to withdraw from the class; it would be shameful, but necessary. Next I would need to find a specialist in Rustle, perhaps even pay some combat mage. I was not crazy and understood that I wouldn’t get out of such trouble alone. What if the lesion started progressing?
Nothing happened for a few hours, and I finally relaxed; after all, the entire morning had passed on without any problems.
There was no entertainment in my rented suite; all class assignments had already been done. I could go take a nap, but sleeping at noon was a clear sign of sickness. Bored, I took from the bedside table a book wrapped in yellowish newspaper—it was that very same rarity of Uncle’s (I hid it in the most visible place, according to the ancient spy methods), and began reading. Its pages breathed antiquity and magic; they must have been hiding something very important. It was a pity that I could not decipher what secrets they kept.
And then the strange faded scrawls formed in my mind a clear sentence: “The perimeter leaks in three spots.”
A wave of panic swept over me. Throwing the book off, I retreated to the far end of the bed, but the mysterious squiggles still danced in my mind. The perimeter leaks in three spots. The perimeter of what?
Maybe I dreamt that because I was nervous? It happened to me sometimes, like a short circuit in the brain. I opene
d the book randomly and looked at another page.
“Salem assures us that there is no threat,” the anonymous author had written in haste. “His ability to anticipate the attack is scary, but it’s our only hope.”
It seemed that if I wanted, I could see the unknown author, look over his shoulder, admire his mysterious perimeter, and maybe even move there, becoming a hero of the past and living his life, again and again. I wrapped the book in three layers—with my shirt, a blanket, and a bed sheet—and shoved it in the darkest corner of the cabinet.
I felt reluctance to learn anything from the book.
Childish curiosity touched my consciousness, as if the monster wanted to understand why.
Because!
And I realized that stupid tricks weren’t all that Rustle was capable of.
I heard a kettle whistling in the kitchen. I had no habit of drinking tea and didn’t use the main gas (Quarters’ uncle’s business) at all. Hot drinks weren’t a tradition in Krauhard—our ancestors had no stoves to make them. Their meal was simple and artless. Surprised, I dragged my slippers to the kitchen and turned off the burner under the tinkling kettle. Pinch me, but I knew I was seeing that roundside copper kettle for the first time in my life.
And then, abruptly, without any transition, I found myself standing on the balcony. High railings saved me! Slowly, touching the walls, I got back into the room and began violently poking myself with the accumulator’s electrodes. My arm ached displeasingly—I needed to find a less self-destructive remedy. I imagined a huge, droning electric arc and suddenly realized that I was poking my arm with a fork, and the accumulator lay on the table. At lightning speed I corrected the error. Also, I understood why I ended up on the balcony—the kitchen and balcony doors had been reversed.
My God…
I could not even imagine that such things were possible. Let’s face it: the magic skills of the creature were impressive. And what would it do at night then? This thought made me freeze in my tracks. I couldn’t sleep under the electric current every night for God knows how long. I would die from the nervous tension alone!
My deceased Uncle advised to go to an empath with any problem, but they belonged to the white and didn’t know much about the otherworldly creatures. Now, when he passed away, nobody in my family would help me—even if I managed to reach Krauhard, refraining from sleep for two days. Chief Harlik was Uncle’s friend, not mine, and it didn’t make any sense to go that far to ask NZAMIPS for help. In any case, I would not dare to approach any people dear to me in that condition. God knows what the angry monster was capable of.
And the accumulator would be drained soon.
What did that beast want from me? The answer came instantly: its cold sticky tentacles greedily reached out to my mind, to the spot where memory is stored, where the source of my desires was, where the threads of my feelings converged. I plunged the electrode plates into the skin until it bled and kept it so until a chilling emptiness started reigning in my head. I’d rather die then yield to it!
I needed to hurry up.
I took Captain Baer’s card out of my desk. My hands shook—I couldn’t turn the door key on the first try. There was no sense regretting and repenting now. I wouldn’t have time to find any other help; I would be lucky if I reached NZAMIPS sane.
I did not dare to catch a tram—I was afraid that I would go in circles, but any cab driver in Redstone knew the building on Park Road. I had never thought that I would call that address of my own free will.
The entrance to the police headquarters looked impressive: its glass windows weren’t broken and the copper was not faded. There were surprisingly few people in the lobby. Last time I ran out of there so fast that the interior was not imprinted in my memory, and Captain Baer was taking me in through the service entrance. They were obviously well-funded! A beautiful blue-gray carpet lay on the floor. Why not? Redstone’s police headquarters is not a municipal police station; they don’t deal with drunken revelers there. But my imagination stubbornly put under the carpet a few protective pentagrams. I was practically sure that if I lifted up the rug’s corner, I would see them.
I approached the wall with the hanging office plan and realized that most of them belonged to the staff of the fiscal service. Oh, yes, besides NZAMIPS, there were also the criminal police, customs, the vice squad, and the alchemical control; all of them live their own very intense life, and bribe-takers and prostitutes are of no less concern to the society than the mages. That thought, for some reason, cheered me up. But I needed to find my captain.
“Are you looking for someone, sir?” the officer of the day asked.
I mutely put the captain’s card on the reception desk.
“Do you need particularly Captain Baer? He just left for an assignment.”
My resentment broke the bonds of depression for a second. It was outrageous! I came to report on myself, and he was absent. What were they doing here?
The officer on duty did not wait for my answer and dialed some internal number: “Sir, I have a visitor to the captain,” he said into the phone. “I don’t know; he doesn’t say. Will do, sir!” And to me: “Please take a seat! Mr. Satal will be with you in a moment.”
I hesitated, deciding whether the soft leather chair could be dangerous. In that condition I was afraid of everything…
A group of tough men in gray business suits walked by, politely moving me aside. Their leader should have carried colors of the Guard of Arak, if only his hands hadn’t been occupied by a plump leather bag. The strange detachment marched silently up the marble stairs to the second floor. Watching them, I did not notice right away that the same dark magician I saw in the junkyard, in a similar suit but of a darker tone, appeared in the foyer. Mr. Satal, yeah. He carefully gazed round me, stared without irony at the accumulator, and calmly nodded to the officer on duty: “Thank you, Officer Kennikor. Please find Captain Baer and ask him to contact me. I’ll be in the office. Come on, young man, we’ll wait for the captain in my office. Do not be afraid; I will not bite!”
I wasn’t afraid of him at all! Reluctantly dragging behind, I was figuring out once again how to start the conversation. Confessing right away about Laurent seemed undiplomatic. Some blurry silhouettes flickered on the border line of my vision, and on the suspicion that Rustle was ready to take its revenge, my hair began to stir with horror.
Perhaps one look at me was enough for the magician to draw conclusions. He searched in the drawers and pulled out an elaborate bottle with a blue label; not hiding it, he dipped the potion into a glass, splashed water from a carafe to top it off, and handed it to me. I emptied the glass. Why would I play the fool? The flickering in my eyes abruptly stopped.
“You are so upset because of Locomotive?” the magician asked gently. “He’s gone to you; have you met him?”
I shook my head: “Missed him.”
Hearing my reply, the magician visibly brightened: “That’s excellent! He is not a compassionate man: plays by the book. You’d better tell me what’s bothering you; maybe I can help.”
What was going on? A dark mage expressed sympathy to another dark, offering help and support?! I even shed a tear.
And then I confessed everything to him. About Rustle, about the book, about the black flakes in the boat hangar… everything. I only hoped my death would be painless.
Instead, he sighed and said, “Forget it!”
“What?”
“It would not be a bad idea to interrogate those morons, but it’s okay as it is now: for the attempted theft of the Source they would be sentenced to death anyway. Also, they tortured to death two more people before you. Let’s consider that the execution had been done onsite. Or you thought that the law worked only against the dark?”
“What are you talking about?! I have a monster sitting inside me. When I try to cast a spell, it throws them at people. And it seems to be trying to eat me, too.”
“That’s normal. It’s a standard response when contact between Rust
le and a dark magician is reinforced with the shackles. Don’t panic! You’re not the first infected mage, nor the last one. With regard to the shackles: if the curse is not re-imposed at least three more times during the first month, its blocking effect will dissipate in three weeks. Then the behavior of your Source will be predictable again. As I remember, your doctor has forbidden you to conjure? Let’s say the ban is extended for another month, I will guarantee to you the absence of magic. As to Rustle, you will have to get used to it; it is impossible to completely shut down its access to your mind. You had coped with the Source; you will manage Rustle as well. Most importantly, do not play up to the monster.”
I expected a totally different reaction from the dark mage. My white upbringing skewed my perception of the world.
“That means you won’t penalize me?”
“Why not? We will,” he was surprised. “We’ll leave records in your file; when Locomotive returns, you’ll testify. Right after that we’ll prepare a contract—you will work for me.”
“No!” I was horrified. “I have one more year until graduating from the university and a contract with Roland the Bright’s Fund thereafter. I want to be an alchemist.”
“Who’s stopping you? You’ll serve as a magician-reservist—you’ll be set in motion when necessary; that way it’ll be easier for you, and NZAMIPS will save some money. I will settle the issue with the Roland’s Fund; I’m on close terms with the guys from there. Do you,” he frowned sternly, “seriously want me to institute criminal proceedings against you?”
I did not want to know what that meant!
In less than an hour I had become a NZAMIPS freelancer with the nickname “Dark Knight”, and Captain Baer, with a deep sense of satisfaction, glued my photo to the folder of the illegal combat magician. Had I been sentenced, I would have served three lifetimes or had two death penalties. I didn’t feel or observe the magic giving me shivers anymore. A very familiar looking lady earnestly congratulated me on a decent start of my career and tried to get details of the triple murder. She wondered whether I felt a little lonely. I dully replied, pondering what had been the turning point at which my fate took such a steep curve. Did it all start with Bella from BioKin? Or with Uncle’s book? Or with the record of the first crystal? Or maybe from the moment I was born?
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