by Jake Kerr
Ana breathed out. “Oh, I’m so glad you understand. I was afraid you would demand the Coat. As the heir to the Russian throne, it is obvious that I am the rightful heir of Jamshid. I should wield the artifacts.”
At a certain level I knew that bringing the artifacts together was the important thing, and it didn’t matter who had them, but another part of me knew that I should be the one to wield the artifacts. A very small part of me—perhaps the only part that was still me—screamed out that every option was full of unknown danger.
In my mind the battle for the artifacts had begun. To that end I knew I needed the Coat. What had Ana done? She had fought and killed Russians. What had I done? I had saved the Shadows, freed Marids and Ifrit. Perhaps I was simply providing reasons to support the urge I had to control the artifacts, but that didn’t mean the reasons weren’t real.
I looked over at Naomi, and it was then that I realized she was only being quiet on my behalf. I had not expected that from her. It was a humbling surprise that she was letting me handle this important conversation without interrupting. But it was clearly tough on her—her jaw was clenched, and I could see that her palms were ready to launch an attack on Ana at any moment. But for what purpose? We couldn’t hurt her. It was then that I knew I had to somehow do two things: Get more information out of Ana and stall while finding a way to get the Coat.
“What about the third Artifact?” I asked.
Ana stared at me for a bit and then took a sip of her tea. “The Cup of Jamshid is in the hands of the Germans. That is going to be a real challenge for us, Tommy.” Ana continued to talk as if we were on the same side, which made me relax. I knew it was inevitable that we would fight over the artifacts at some point, but I wanted that fight to be on my terms.
“How so?”
Ana laughed. “Well, beyond the fact that it is in Germany, the bearer of the Cup can see all. All he has to do is look into the Cup and he would know when we were approaching.”
“If it sees all, why haven’t the Germans found you yet?” Naomi finally spoke, and her question seemed to stun Ana. It looked as though she had never thought of that possibility before.
“Because—” she stammered. Before she could say anything else, she was interrupted by a shout and the sound of men running through gravel. With the front of the house blown open, it was easy to hear.
Ana looked toward the front of the house, which was visible from her seat at the head of the table. A man ran through the hole. He was panting as he ran up to Ana and bowed. He stammered some words in Russian. Ana rubbed her chin thoughtfully, not seeming concerned.
“The Germans are approaching,” Arkady whispered to me and Naomi. I immediately thought of the spy.
Ana overheard Arkady and frowned. “You appear to have led the Germans to me.”
“More like the Germans led us to you,” I replied without explanation.
Ana stood up. “Hand me the staff. I’ll take care of this.” I had never been closer to having no control over my actions than at that point. Nearly every part of my body compelled me to hand her the staff. My eyes rolled up in my head as I clung to the few things that meant so much to me—the pride of my grandfather, the confidence and trust of my great grandfather, and the faith that Mister Ali had in me, a faith he betrayed and made up for with his life.
“Tommy, are you okay?” I opened my eyes to Naomi shaking my shoulder.
I took a deep breath and looked at Ana. “You will not be able to master it so quickly. I will wield it to fight the Germans.” And at that moment I had an inspiration. “Give me the Coat. I will be able to handle them easily with the Coat protecting me.”
At that moment I knew with certainty that the Coat and Staff didn’t care who bore them. They just wanted to be together. As I looked at Ana, I saw her stumble back a bit as her hands reached for the front of the Coat. Her eyes fluttered, and her hands shook. I thought I heard the lightly whispered word “no” come from her mouth.
There was an explosion, followed by the sound of machine guns ringing out. Everything sounded much closer than I had expected. I stood up quickly, and Naomi did the same, drawing a detonation into her hand. By then Ana had recovered and was yelling out in Russian.
In a scene that reminded me of the assault on the Persian Garden restaurant two years earlier, men that I hadn’t seen emerged from the rear of the house, carrying rifles. One of them ran up and handed Ana a wicked looking machine gun. She looked at me and Naomi.
“One of the things you will learn, Tommy, is that with technology eradicating magic, the difference will be those magical artifacts that technology cannot replicate. Nothing else matters in the face of cannons and bullets.”
She marched toward the front of the house, paused, and looked back at us. There was a grin on her face that reminded me of my grandfather—as if the violence she was about to embrace was the only thing she enjoyed in life. Without saying a word, she turned and strode out of the house.
I looked at Naomi, but she had already started after Ana, bouncing on the balls of her feet like some kind of predator approaching its prey.
I followed her outside to a scene that boggled the mind. Far in the distance along the same road we used to approach the farm, numerous trucks approached. There must have been about a dozen of them. The first few had already pulled to the side of the road, and small groups of men approached, none of whom were in uniform. They bore machine guns and the first few had already started shooting in our direction.
Men in grey emerged from the second truck, and I knew instinctively that they were magicians. The Germans definitely considered magic a valuable tool, but a quick glance at the first truck and the rat-a-tat of the machine guns made it clear that it wasn’t their only tool.
“We don’t have much time, Tommy, my shields cannot withstand a constant barrage of bullets for long.” Naomi was standing on the porch watching the Angel’s men firing on the Germans from entrenched positions. The Germans were clearly protected by magical shields, while the Russians were protected by things I hadn’t noticed before—trenches and tractors that were there as cover and not for plowing fields.
“I don’t think we’ll need to worry about bullets being aimed at us,” I replied as I pointed toward Ana. She simply strode toward the Germans, firing her large machine gun at them. It was an absurd and frightening scene. Her brown hair blew out behind her in the face of a slight breeze, while the entire might of the German weaponry focused on her.
The power of the artifact was clear. Bullets simply stopped as they approached and fell to the ground. I walked forward, and Naomi grabbed my arm. “What are you doing? We should just wait and let her take care of things.”
“We don’t know what the Germans have in mind. We may have a chance to grab the Coat. We should stay close.” I couldn’t bear to tell Naomi how weak I truly was. The truth was that the staff was telling me to stay close to Ana. It had nothing to do with me at all.
Naomi nodded. “Dangerous, but opportunistic. I like it.” She let go of my arm, and we started toward Ana. “I’ll let you know if my shield starts to give out. At that point it will be a good idea to get away from the force of the attack.”
I nodded, but I wasn’t really paying attention to Naomi. All of my energy was focused on the Coat.
We were about twenty yards behind Ana, who walked toward the Germans as if she was having her morning stroll. She was spraying the trucks with gunfire, and she looked like she wanted to do nothing more than to kill every single German, but she did it with a slow and steady determination.
There was a whizzing sound and then a huge explosion blew Ana, Naomi, and me backward. Naomi’s shield saved us, but while it absorbed the bulk of the impact a whistle of shrapnel past my ear told me that it was shredded by the percussion of what I assumed was a mortar.
I pulled myself to my feet and ran over to Naomi, who was lying on her side. She was dazed but unhurt as I gently pulled her up. As I lifted her to a sitting position, she opene
d her eyes wide and pushed me away.
“I’m fine,” Naomi grumbled as she looked back toward the Germans. Ana had been tossed off to the side, but she appeared annoyed and not harmed. There was a crater where she was standing.
“It did nothing,” I said, impressed.
“No, Tommy. Can’t you see? It may not have hurt her but it knocked her off her feet. Perhaps if someone were close enough they could take the Coat from her when she is off balance.” Naomi stood up and grabbed my arm again. “We need to get to safety. My shields are a one shot deal against something as powerful as mortars, and I can’t just keep casting them and have energy for anything else.”
Ana had tossed away her weapon, which appeared to have been damaged by the explosion. She was much closer to the Germans but had turned around and was marching toward us, calling out something in Russian.
There was another whizzing sound, and Naomi threw her arm out while spreading her fingers. The whizzing snuffed out, and somewhere between us and the Germans there was an explosion.
“Wow,” I said. She had somehow redirected a mortar.
“Let’s go,” she replied, running back toward the farmhouse.
I couldn’t move. The staff refused to let me leave the Coat. “What are you doing?!” Naomi exclaimed. “Come on!” She ran back to me and grabbed my arm.
“I— Can’t,” I said.
“The Staff.” Naomi spoke the words as a statement of fact, not a question. She seemed to know exactly what was happening. She grabbed my arm and pulled hard. I held my ground.
“I will be okay,” I said. “I’ll stay near Ana. The Coat will protect me.”
Naomi turned me around to face her and put her hands on the upper part of my arms, holding me as she stared in my eyes. “No, Tommy. The staff will kill you, and then Ana will take it.” She pulled me hard, and I stumbled toward her.
She continued to pull, and her willpower must have affected me, as I became more like myself and started to walk and then run with her. There was another explosion behind us. I felt the impact, but it was far enough away that Naomi and I remained unharmed.
I glanced over my shoulder and Princess Anastasia, the Angel of St. Petersburg, was armed with a machine gun in each hand, walking toward the Germans once again, laughing as impotent destruction rained down upon her.
21
IMPLOSIONS & BOMBS
The Germans had absolutely no interest in us. They unleashed machine guns, mortars, and offensive magic spells at Ana, which did nothing but slow her down. We watched from the front of the barn. While she drew the brunt of the attack, the rest of her small force inched forward and attacked the German troops at the trucks. The topography gave the Germans very little cover, so they split their forces and sent some to deal with the Russians fighting alongside Ana.
Naomi shook her head. “This is getting boring.”
“What do you mean?”
“This!” she replied, holding out her palm with an iridescent mass of energy that indicated yet another spell I had never seen. She closed her eyes, made some motions, brought her hands together, and then opened her eyes again. She tossed her hands out toward the row of trucks.
A shimmery light skimmed across the grass until it hit one of the rear trucks. A light flashed, and then I saw one of the oddest things in my life. The truck expanded out as if it was a balloon and then imploded into a pile of dust. Everything within a thirty to fifty yard circle of the truck had been pulled into the implosion and ended up as part of the pile of dust.
Naomi turned to me and smiled. “I figure if I do that to Ana, she’ll be knocked to the ground and perhaps even lose her breath. We could then swoop in and take the coat.”
“That’s a good plan!”
“Let me take care of the Germans, and then we can focus on her.”
At that moment, an odd kind of screeching filled the air. At first I thought that we were about to see a sky full of Djinn, just as Naomi and I had experienced in that horrible day when her mom had died, but as I looked up I saw that it was an airplane. Right behind it was another one
“This can’t be good,” I said. As if in response, an entire row of German trucks were obliterated in a row of explosions. I looked up to see even more bombers screaming through the air. They were turning around and heading back.
“Do you think they’re just here for the Germans?” I asked.
As if in reply, the bombers came through again, dropping bombs in the fields around the farmhouse. We sprinted toward the barn, but that gave precious little cover. As we ran, Naomi moved with a series of pauses and sprints. I was about to grab her arm and pull her toward me when a flash burned my eyes.
I felt like someone had punched me in the chest and then, after knocking me to the ground, knelt down on my ribs, pushing all the air out of my lungs. The light faded and I gasped for breath.
As I sat up, Naomi was already on her feet looking around. Her hair was wild, and, as she spun, I could see her face she. She looked more frightened than I had ever seen her.
“They’re flattening the farm, Tommy!” I struggled to my feet. “That was a really powerful shield, and it barely protected us.”
“I don’t know. I feel pretty good,” I replied, trying to lighten her mood.
She spun around and marched over to me. She grabbed my shirt in her fists and practically yelled in my face. “We’re dead, Tommy. Dead! The bombers are coming around, and I won’t be able to shield us next time. I spent a long time on that spell while we were talking. That wasn’t even a direct hit and it obliterated my shield.” She let go of my shirt, and in a whisper added, “I hate technology.”
I looked to the horizon and saw three bombers approaching. I glanced around, and it suddenly hit me. They had already destroyed the farm house. The barn was half gone, and there were craters in the fields. Naomi was right—they were planning on flattening everything in their attempt to get to Ana.
“It’s the Soviets,” I said, and Naomi nodded.
“They want Ana. They may not even realize the Germans are here.”
“Oh, they know. I’m guessing that we pushed our little spy into upsetting a house of cards that had been hiding her from the Germans and the Russians.”
Naomi looked off at the approaching bombers. “I don’t think they realize that she can withstand this.” The planes were getting closer. “I wonder if I could shoot them out of the air,” Naomi added. She bent her knees and brought forth a detonation. She sent it toward the planes.
As the spell flew, I squeezed my staff. I was so helpless! I had gone from the Archmage back to a streetlight. It was killing me. As I thought about the staff, I was once again drawn to moving closer to Ana and getting the coat.
I closed my eyes as I heard Naomi curse and say, “It is so hard judging distance with something so far in the sky.” I tuned her out and let the staff speak to me. It’s voice was clear even though no words were spoken: Unite me with the Coat.
The urgency to do it was impossible to resist, and as I started to walk in the direction the Staff told me to go, I felt Naomi’s hand on my arm. A voice, barely a whisper, said, “I guess I’ll die next to you after all.”
The words were like an early morning dive into a cold lake. No. I cannot let this happen. As I turned my attention to stopping the bombs from killing us, I realized that my power with the staff had returned. Perhaps it was the proximity of the Coat. Perhaps it was my being so perilously close to being a slave to the staff itself, but whatever it was I knew that I had healed.
I opened my eyes, and looked at Naomi. As she glanced at me with utter defeat in her eyes, I lifted the staff, smiled, and stopped time.
22
THE PARTING OF THE ARCHMAGES
I looked up to see a bomber frozen in the air, its dull grey framed by the most beautiful blue. It looked like a photograph from Life Magazine. As with everything when I stopped time, however, its lack of motion while I moved made it look unreal.
The still scene
, however, wasn’t as unsettling as the hunk of metal that was hovering high above our heads. It was a bomb that would have destroyed everything in the area, including Naomi and me. In the distance another bomb was in the midst of exploding in a field. Dirt sprayed out from a forming crater. It was held in place by the stoppage of time and looked like a crown.
“You did it!” Naomi ran over and hugged me. I wrapped my arms around her and hugged her back, the top of the cane rapping the back of her head.
“Sorry!” I said, letting her go and backing away. I didn’t think I’d ever be able to get within a few feet of her without doing something stupid.
Smiling, Naomi said, “Hey, if that’s the price I have to pay for a celebratory hug over our lives being saved, I’m okay with that.” She glanced around. “This is spooky.”
It suddenly hit me—Naomi had never experienced me stopping time. She was unconscious when I had first learned of it and used the staff to stop time to save her, and we parted soon after. She walked over and ran her hand through a cloud of smoke that was suspended in the air. The smoke didn’t move, and she left a clearly defined hand-shaped tunnel through it.
“What next?” I asked.
Naomi couldn’t stop smiling. “Does it matter?” She ran her hands through her hair and then tucked it behind her ears.
“What about Ana?” At the mention of the Angel’s name, Naomi’s eyes went wide.
“Tommy! You stopped time. We can just go over and grab the coat right off her back.” She looked off to where we had last seen Ana.
As I looked around, all I could see was dirt, smoke, and the devastation of the initial bombing. “She was over there,” I said, pointing toward the field that was between us and where the German trucks had parked.
Naomi nodded, and started jogging in that direction. I followed.
We hadn’t gone more than twenty yards when Ana appeared from a crater. It looked like the Russians had scored a bullseye, dropping a bomb right on her head. She was, of course, unharmed. Her biggest struggle was climbing over the shattered ground.
