Tommy Black and the Coat of Invincibility

by Jake Kerr

  Naomi’s comment gave me pause. I hadn’t told her that when I was close to the Coat that the staff was exerting a strong influence on my behavior. It was dangerously close to controlling me. Did I want to let Zahhak know that I was aware of his presence in the staff?

  “No,” I finally replied. I actually didn’t know the answer, but I couldn’t live not knowing if I could talk to Zahhak and perhaps work with him in new ways to help other enslaved creatures or even free himself.

  I closed my eyes and focused on the staff. As always it wasn’t really a staff or a cane; it was part of myself. I was Tommy, and the staff was me. Zahhak, I know you are there. I will be the one to free you. I felt the faintest stirring deep within the Staff, but nothing else.

  Zahhak, I free you from your slavery. The moment I said the words I knew they were a mistake. I couldn’t just free a mighty dragon on a moving train. Plus, I didn’t even know if the poor dragon would be grateful. Maybe it would blame us and kill Naomi and me. Luckily, nothing happened.

  I opened my eyes. “Nothing,” I stated. “But I have a pretty good idea what we need to do.” I thought over the flow of energy I felt when close to the Coat. It was obvious what was happening now. As the artifacts were brought together, their power increased but so did the consciousness and will of Zahhak.

  “What is that?” Naomi asked.

  “I can’t free Zahhak until I am wielding all three artifacts. It’s like the train. I can’t free the Marid unless I’m the engineer.”

  “So what do we do?” She asked, but I was sure she already knew and was excited about the prospect.

  “We get the Coat. And then we travel to Germany and get the Cup.”

  PART III

  PARIS

  27

  ARRIVAL

  The knowledge of Zahhak led me to act exactly the way Naomi had predicted: I was committed to freeing the mighty creature from his enslavement in the artifacts. I know that the loss of the artifacts concerned her on some level, but it renewed my own sense of purpose, and Naomi seemed to understand and support that.

  She had changed over the past two years. She was more powerful, of course, but she also seemed to have a better understanding of the role magical creatures played in the world. I think she agreed with me that it was wrong that a mighty magician was so thirsty for power that he would enslave an ancient dragon.

  The speeding train also made me angry. Even though I knew the Marid was no longer a slave, its route made it clear that all it wanted was to be in Paris as quickly as possible and be free. At times I could see the train hovering over treetops as it sped west. I had no doubt that we’d be in Paris in little more than a few hours.

  Knowing what I did of the history of magic and slavery, I found that the only magic I could appreciate any more was that performed by skilled magicians like Naomi and even Cain. It was personal and pure. You could see it in Naomi’s eyes as she focused on the light in her hand or cast a spell—it was an art.

  It was beautiful in its own way and entirely different from the train. The train’s joining of technology and magic wasn’t a artistic collaborative thing but rather magic being channeled by a creature forced into service. I couldn’t wait for the trip to end in Paris and to watch the Marid explode from the rear of the engine in a violent leap to freedom.

  There was a screech and I was nearly thrown to the floor as the train ground to a quick halt. Naomi was thrown forward into the metal controls. As she rubbed her side, she looked outside. “Well, we’re somewhere.”

  “It’s Paris.” I knew the Marid did as I requested.

  “This doesn’t look like Paris.” I looked outside, and it was a small wooded area with a tiny station. In the distance was a village.

  “It’s probably just outside Paris.”

  Before Naomi could say anything, a low growl gained in volume until an ear-piercing scream filled the air. I had heard that sound many times before. “We need to get off this engine now!”

  I slid the door open and climbed down the short ladder. As I hit the bottom rung the engine lurched again. I jumped and rolled up to my feet. Naomi was barely clinging to the ladder as the horrific high pitched sound of metal being ripped and torn filled the air. “Naomi, just jump! The Marid is freeing itself. You have to get off the train!”

  Naomi leapt and landed awkwardly. I ran over and pulled her out of the way just when a slab of iron landed where she had been lying on the ground. She was limping as we ran along the train tracks, away from the engine. A resounding crash shook the ground.

  “It just tossed the engine up in the air like it was a toy!” Naomi said. I didn’t look back. I had seen the same thing dozens of times. The magical creatures always completely destroyed the engines that had imprisoned them. The only thing I could do was make sure no one was nearby.

  “Keep going, Naomi. It’s dangerous!”

  Another cry pierced the air. This one was of pure triumph, however. I had also heard this cry many times before. I stopped and looked back. A swirling mass of flame and light coalesced into a creature of pure energy. As the Marid returned to its form, it launched itself into the air, leaving behind molten iron and twisted chunks of metal.

  Naomi looked awestruck as she watched the Marid shoot into the sky and then head south. They always headed south, and I had no idea why. “What a magnificent being!”

  I nodded. It was. The scene had never failed to move me—a creature that had been enslaved for years was finally free. A large group of people exited the passenger cars and looked at the wreckage, hands covering their mouths. A few of them looked around confused.

  “I imagine the Russians are wondering why they aren’t in Leningrad!”

  I had to smile. While the Marid had taken us to Paris, he had also stranded a large group of Russians far from their home. A few looked in our direction, so I put my arm around Naomi’s waist. She squinted at me. “We need to get moving, and your leg is hurt!”

  “Actually, it’s my ankle.” Naomi put her arm on my shoulder and limped along beside me. “And my hip, too. Actually, I’m pretty much bruised all over.”

  “Well, I’m pretty much burned all over, so I hope we’re in France, as we really need to recover before Ana makes it here.”

  Naomi pointed to a sign. It said Chelle. “That certainly looks like French.”

  “Well, thank you unnamed Marid. I’m going to assume that this is close enough.” I looked up a road but couldn’t see many buildings. We appeared to be in some distant suburb of Paris.

  “We need to get to Paris, contact the English military, get some new supplies and support, and then set up a base from where we can plan our attack on Ana.” Naomi rattled off a plan even as I was considering our options.

  “There’s only one problem. We don’t speak French. We don’t have a way to Paris. We don’t know where the English military bases are, and we don’t even know if the English military will help us.”

  Naomi smiled. “That’s more than one problem.”

  “Thank you, Miss Optimism.” I looked for signs of life on the street but couldn’t find any. “So let’s tackle the second problem since I doubt either of us will learn French any time soon.” We couldn’t even hire a taxi, as the remaining money we had was all Russian.

  “Any ideas?” Naomi asked, as we rather slowly made our way out to a road that ran alongside the rail line.

  “Well, we could walk,” I said, not very enthusiastically.

  “You mean limp.”

  “Ugh. I hope we’re not too far from Paris.”

  Naomi laughed, and I turned to look at her. “Well, we’re farther than I had hoped.” She was pointing to a sign that said “Paris 18 km.”

  “That doesn’t sound good. How far is that in miles?” I was horrible with the metric numbers.

  “About eleven miles.”

  “Why would the Marid leave us so far from Paris?” I asked rhetorically.

  We turned down the road with the sign, and we had our answer.r />
  “Is that a British flag?” Naomi asked.

  “That is not only a British flag, that is an English army base.”

  “Well, that’s convenient. I’m guessing you told the Marid that we were heading to a military base?” I thought back to what I said to the Marid, and I couldn’t think that I gave any guidance other than we needed to go to Paris.

  “Maybe.” I shrugged.

  “Well, let’s get some help and then come up with a plan.”

  I nodded. Could the Marid have helped us this much, taking us to the doorstop of where we needed to be? And how did it know? Did it read my mind? It seemed amazing if it did. That was just one of the many questions swirling in my head. The biggest one was how was I to get the Coat off the back of someone I couldn’t harm.

  28

  A TELEGRAM FROM CAIN

  Telegram

  From: Black, Thomas, Paris T53X7 base

  To: Cain, Fort Belvedere

  Followed artifact to Paris STOP Need supplies and money STOP

  Telegram

  From: Cain, Fort Belvedere

  To: Black, Thomas, Paris T53X7 base

  I know STOP You were supposed to destroy the German trains not the trains of our allies STOP Sending a chaperone STOP He’ll have money and supplies STOP

  I read the telegram to Naomi for the third time. She clenched her fist and the ever-present ball of light snuffed out. “A chaperone?” She was getting angrier with each time I read it. “I swear I’ll learn Ariadne’s Net just to tie up the chaperone and then ship him back to Cain.” I opened my mouth to say something, but Naomi held up her index finger with a forcefulness that told me just to go with the flow. “He’s treating us like children! A chaperone, not an escort. It’s insulting! You’re the Archmage, and I’m the most powerful magician in the world.”

  “Yeah,” I snuck in before she continued her vent.

  “I mean, he may be a better illusionist than me, but he’s no match for me overall.”

  Naomi had never really compared herself to other magicians. Mister Ali had told me that she was a stronger illusionist than Cain, but she appeared too humble to accept that. So hearing her actually say it was kind of shocking. “My great grandfather said that illusionism wasn’t real magic.”

  “He did?” I hadn’t seen her smile so widely in a long time. “I always liked him. Is he okay? Still at Balmoral?”

  I lowered my head. “He’s not doing well. He’s retired and, well, just enjoying his garden.” I didn’t say that there was every chance he was already dead, and that I didn’t have a chance to give him a real goodbye or attend his funeral. There was so much that I wanted to say about him.

  Naomi must have noticed my change in mood as she walked over and touched my arm. “He is very proud of you. You know that?”

  I nodded my head and then cleared my throat. “So what do we do now?” I leaned back on a desk chair. The troops had taken over a local elementary school, and we were in what must have been an office off of the teacher’s lounge. I lived with the regular troops, which wasn’t so bad, while Naomi was given a cot and a small room in the far corner of the building. We called it “the closet,” as that was probably what it was, with no windows, one door, and shelves with stains on them.

  She threw herself onto the sofa. “I’m tired of waiting.” We had been at the base for two weeks. The Colonel, a man named William Lexington, was nice enough and left us alone. I had originally talked to him about plans to look for Ana, but he dismissed them all. He waved a telegram and said that we were just to await for assistance. I didn’t know what he meant then, but he clearly meant Cain’s chaperone.

  “What we really need are spies who can dig around the Russian community for information about Ana,” I noted as I worked on turning Cain’s telegram into a paper airplane. “I don’t think she’s here yet, but that doesn’t mean we should just sit on our hands.”

  “Perhaps we should think about how to get the coat first,” Naomi replied.

  I threw the paper airplane at her, but it flew nose first to the floor about three feet from my hand. We had discussed plans over and over again, and they all ended with Naomi angry that she couldn’t just blow Ana up, and me wondering why the staff, which seemed to increase in power near the Coat, had no effect on Ana, who was actually wearing it. We seemed powerless against her and that just left us both irritable.

  Rather than answer Naomi I used the staff to create a light show on the wall next to her. She loved my little shows, and I was getting more and more proficient at them. The key was the manipulation of color. Light contained all colors, and as I worked through what I wanted to see, the staff filled in all of the detail on its own.

  Thinking of Zahhak, I created a scene on the wall of a giant dragon swirling around in the air and then landing on rocky ground in front of a robed Persian man. The man held up his hand, and I made the dragon melt into a cup, a staff, and a coat.

  “Oh, do that again!” Naomi said standing up and moving closer to the wall.

  “What?”

  “When you made the cup, the light shimmered and it looked like I could actually touch it.” She turned and looked at me. “It had depth.”

  “Hrm. That was an accident. Let me try to do it on purpose.”

  I pictured what I wanted to do in my mind, but just like every other time I used the staff, I didn’t so much tell it what to do as think of what I wanted. My personal connection to the staff made it happen.

  In this case, I thought about making the colorful images extend out like a model train display or a diorama. I didn’t even really put much thought into the details. I just knew I wanted to see a light image that looked like you could touch it, even if I didn’t know what it was that I actually wanted to see.

  “Wow!” Naomi’s voice shook me out of a kind of daze. I looked up and the image of Zahhak had changed completely. He was a mighty dragon that was swooping through the air of the room, while the wall had somehow transformed into the mountainside I had pictured for Jamshid. “He looks so real,” Naomi said, staring at the dragon.

  The only time the dragon looked like he wasn’t actually real was when he flew in front of a light source, and I could see through him. In dim light he looked like a real dragon. Tiny, but real.

  “This is like an illusion, Tommy,” Naomi said. “I mean, it’s not like a Cain illusion where you actually can touch and experience it in your mind, but it looks as good as his illusions are.”

  “Nah. You can see through it in bright light or if there is light behind it.” I snuffed out the dragon. “It’s neat, though.”

  Naomi turned toward me looking angry, which was something I was used to by then. “You know, you are maddening.”

  “I—”

  “No! You listen to me.” I couldn’t help but smile. Like I had a choice. “I love what you did over the past two years, but you’ve fallen into a very dangerous belief.”

  “What is that?” I had to admit that I was intrigued by her comment.

  “You think that you are powerful because you can do whatever you want when you stop time. That’s it. You think all your other powers are useless.” The light formed in her hand, and she held it in place. “But even your ability to make light is extraordinary!”

  “Kind of as extraordinary as a streetlight.”

  Naomi looked up with a start. “You know I just say that to tease you. Your light saved us from Shadows. Your absence of light saved the Shadows.” She held up two fingers. “Those are two things that no one in the history of the world has been able to do. So don’t tell me you’re just a streetlight.”

  I sighed. “I get it. I can do more than stop time, and I shouldn’t be disappointed that I can’t stop time anymore. But there is nothing I have left that will be able to stop Germans or Ana’s allies or—” I waved my arms around. “—Anything!”

  Shaking her head, Naomi replied, “You’re more powerful than you think. Just remember that what you just did with the dragon is no
t something to take lightly. That was powerful, and it may save our lives someday.”

  I tapped the cane on the floor while Naomi went back to casting her tiny balls of light. We each had our own way of calming ourselves. “Didn’t you hear? We don’t have to worry about saving each others’ lives any more. We have a chaperone coming!”

  Naomi rolled her eyes. “Yeah. I give him one day before he runs screaming after I’m done with him.”

  “You won’t,” I said, feigning shock.

  “Oh, I can’t wait.” She switched her spell and cast one that looked like an ugly green, black, and brown ball. “When do you think he’ll get here?”

  “I don’t know, but you’re making me think that whenever he shows up he’ll regret it.”

  Naomi smiled. “That’s the idea.” She snapped her fingers, and the nasty looking ball disappeared into a noxious smoke that drifted up to the ceiling and faded into nothingness.

  29

  IGGY

  Two weeks later Naomi and I returned from lunch to a young man sitting on the couch in our impromptu home base. He wore an English military uniform with the rank of corporal, yet he looked Indian, with black hair and dark skin. As we walked in he stood up with an exaggerated formality.

  I glanced at Naomi, who rolled her eyes. We both had a good idea as to who this was. He was about my height, thin but not frail. He was just what I’d expect from a Cain lackey—Not a soldier, but a desk jockey who was so formal and by-the-book that his very movements seemed robotic.

  As I got closer, I got a clear look at his face and was drawn to his eyes, which were so blue that they appeared almost white. The contrast with his dark hair and skin was striking. He was average looking, but his eyes gave him the kind of look that would draw attention from everyone in the room.

  “Hello?” I said as we approached. “Can I help you?”

  My voice seemed to relax him, as he smiled and replied, “No. Nope. Not at all.” He didn’t have an Indian accent, so I considered whether his ancestors had immigrated to England generations earlier.