by Andy Hyland
“Five in all, including that guy we took out already,” Arabella muttered. “Still doesn’t seem that many.”
“Probably enough if they think nobody knows to look,” Zack suggested.
“Or if they’ve got other means of keeping people out,” Julie added, looking round at us. “Come on, you’re all thinking it. This is too easy.”
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth,” I told her. She was, of course, absolutely correct. But focusing on dangers we couldn’t possibly be aware of would only slow us down. We were already being careful. Better to be quick and thorough than painstakingly intense, and slow because of it. Speed is your friend. That’s what I kept telling myself, anyway.
I pictured where the mages on the other side of the door were likely to be, and sent a limited shock wave through the air from our side. As soon as we heard them hit the floor we burst through and finished the job with some nimble moves that involved our boots and their heads. The mages at the bottom of the stairs reacted quickly. Luckily they’d been trained to throw casts before calling in the problem. Witchfire sprang up the stairs towards us but bounced harmlessly off the ward I threw up. I kept it there while we jogged down the steps. They had far too much faith in their own abilities, and kept casting hexes rather than requesting backup. By the time they thought about drawing weapons, I’d slammed them up against the ceiling and then down again to the floor.
“Job done,” I noted with more than a hint of satisfaction. “Anyone getting anything on the other side? It’s foggy.”
“I hear you,” said Arabella. “The whole place is clouded up. But someone’s in there. Over to the left.”
I carefully opened the door. We were definitely in the right place. The first clue was the computer and medical equipment - banks of monitors and drip feeds lining the wall straight ahead of us, and something half-way between an operating table and a dentist’s chair over to the right. The second clue - the biggie - was the guy tied to the pole over to the left. He was stripped to the waist, arms raised above his head, held there by thin metal chains that dropped from the ceiling. They’d gone to town on his ribs. You’d struggle to find any unbruised flesh north of his belt, and from the look of it someone had been systematically cutting him across the nipples with a sharp blade.
“Shit, Ollie man, what have they done?” Zack’s voice was a whisper as he ran over, lifting the guy’s head and forcing his eyes open. “He’s alive, but…shit. Who did this?”
“We know who did this,” I pointed out. “And they’re upstairs in force. Can we move him?”
“Give me a minute. Arabella, give me a hand.”
There wasn’t room for four people to work on freeing him, so I checked out the equipment. Ollie and I had never been close, but he’d always been a stand-up guy. If something needed doing, and particularly if it was boring as hell and nobody else was interested, Ollie would get the job done. That might not sound like much, but in the world we live in, if you can be depended on, that counts. “Does this mean anything to you?” I asked, running my hand along the work surface, checking out monitor displays.
“I run a comic shop,” she pointed out, looking as confused as I was.
“Ivy league education not making a difference?”
“Not when I majored in philosophy and creative writing, no. What’s this?” She pointed to a glass bowl, empty apart from a small cracked sphere. It looked like it was made of mother of pearl. I prodded it. Felt for all the world like an egg.
“Take it,” I told her.
“Malachi, over here,” Arabella called. They’d got Ollie out of the chains and now he slumped down against the wall. “He needs a boost.”
I nodded and put my palm on his chest, over his heart, letting a trickle of power run through me into his blood. I instantly knew it was bad. Charlie’s mom, back in the hospital, had been in a rough state, but that was down to shock and drugs. Ollie, he was damaged. Physically, mentally, psychically. Beaten down and broken up. I looked up at Zack. “How badly do we need to talk to him?” I asked. “Best I can do is a jolt. Get him awake. But it’s not going to keep him with us for long, and I’m not sure we should be doing anything other than pushing him deeper into sleep.”
Nobody spoke, until Arabella crouched down next to me and ran her hand down his cheek. “It’s not just about saving our skins,” she said quietly. “We have to stop a war, or people are going to get hurt. Lots of them. I think if Ollie knew that, he’d tell us what had to be done.”
I already knew this. Deep down, I was just looking for permission. Zack reached over and took Ollie’s shoulder, and Julie placed her hands on mine. Slowly, steadily, but insistently, I poured the magic into him, sparking his blood, pumping his heart, dragging his mind up from whatever black pit he’d retreated into. Two minutes passed. Three. Still I kept working. Five minutes in, and his eyes finally flickered, opened, and focused on me.
I was prepared for pain. For shock. For surrender and fear. I wasn’t expecting the anger. His lips moved, forming words that, at first, he didn’t have the air or the energy to push out. Finally, it came together. “You bastard,” he told me.
“We had to bring you round,” I told him. “You’re in trouble here - we all are. I won’t keep you awake for long - I know you’re hurt - but we have to -”
“You bastard,” he said again, the word dripping from his lips like venom. “You did this to me. To us. You power-hungry bastard.”
I opened my mouth to speak, and nothing came. Zack moved me gently aside and cupped Ollie’s face, turning it towards him. “Ollie, it’s me, Zack. What’s your problem with Malachi, dude? He pisses me off every day, but what’s he done to you?”
Ollie licked his lips, pulling everything he had left into getting the words out. “He killed that Mage-born guy. Max. The big cheese. He was okay, Zack. He liked us. But Malachi…killed him. Did something to that car. I saw it. I was there in the alley. I saw it all.”
“What -” I began, but Zack silenced me with a flick of his finger.
“He laughed, Zack,” said Ollie. “Malachi laughed, and he ran. You’ve got to stop him, Zack. He’s going to kill us all. Look what…what they did to…” He didn’t quite reach the end of the sentence, the final word becoming a long breath. His heavy eyes closed, and he sank back into the void.
Zack closed his eyes and ran his fingers over Ollie’s head while I paced the room, nearly pulling my hair out, wondering what the hell was going on. “He’s not charmed,” said Zack.
“You sure?” I asked, but Zack knew enough to tell. With any kind of memory charm or mesmer, there’s a haze that lingers. Sometimes so faint it’s barely there, but we’d all seen enough to know what we were looking for.
“Figures,” said Arabella. “If he’s examined in public by anyone even slightly curious or suspicious, they’d spot the cast. This is something else.”
“As if the world wasn’t full enough of people that think I’m a bastard,” I muttered. “Let’s get him up. Zack, we’re carrying him between us. Arabella, you’re on point. Julie, stay close behind.” I’d gone in there fully prepared to kill someone to stop them testifying against me. But not Ollie. Ollie wasn’t just Aware, he was one of us. One of mine. It’d be like kicking a puppy. Except significantly more brutal.
Getting Ollie to his feet was a slow process, because we didn’t want to hurt him any more than absolutely necessary. Eventually we were ready to leave the room behind us. We were near the door when something crackled down the back of my neck, sending my hairs standing to attention. “Hold it,” I snapped. “Something’s wrong.”
“What do you see?” Asked Arabella, her hand on the door.
“Nothing. Gut feeling.”
When a mage gets a gut feeling, you learn to pay attention to it or you die very, very quickly. Most of the time, you control the magic. But sometimes, every now and then, the magic speaks to you. Maybe it’s just heightened intuition, senses and mind working together to piece together what yo
ur conscious mind hasn’t had time to notice or grasp. Me though, I like to think that the magic speaks. Call me an old romantic.
“There,” I said, pointing to a shimmering green line just to the left of the doorframe. We put Ollie gently on the floor and moved in for a closer look. I ran my hand across the surface of the wall, watching the lines of the rune erupt into life, streaking through the doorway and up the stairs beyond. Nothing I recognized. Zack, who is to runes what I am to wards, which means that he’s pretty good but thinks he’s much better, shouldered me out of the way, closed his eyes, and got to work.
Three minutes later his eyes opened again. Sweat poured from his forehead, creating interesting lines from all the hair dye, which apparently hadn’t been an entirely professional job after all. “You’re not going to believe this.” When one of us says that, you can be assured that you’re in for something both entertaining and hazardous. He took a breath, looked at us, and couldn’t stop himself from smiling. “It’s a banshee.”
I punched the wall. The blood drained from Arabella’s face. Julie looked confused. “Banshee. Old, wailing ghost? They’ve got one of them in the walls?”
I shook my head. “The ghost thing is just a legend. Understandable, given what it actually is. Which is a security rune, permanently fixed into buildings.”
“And when you set it off, it wails. Kind of an alarm,” said Julie. “I’ve got it. So we walk out the door without deactivating it, and everyone knows we’re here. Why didn’t they have it going the other way – to stop people getting in?”
“Why keep them out when it’s much better to trap them?” muttered Zack, his attention back to the job in hand, probing the rune gently with his fingers, letting sparks of magic drift out of him into the wall. “You set the guards outside, and they’re fine, because it’s only if someone manages to enter, and then leaves the room, that it all kicks off. Unless they can switch it off. Which, trust me on this, we can’t.”
“It’s worse than you think,” I told Julie. “It’s an alarm, yes…but the kind that reaches into your head, grabs your brain and squeezes until the blood drips from your ears. At close quarters, anyway. If you’re further away it just tells you someone’s there that shouldn’t be. You either back off - back to where the owner wants you to go - or you die. In agony.”
“Can we deactivate it?” asked Julie.
“I wish,” Zack whispered. “You don’t see them around anymore because they’re obscenely complicated. Go wrong at any point during the installation, and you’re the victim of your own work. And the time…for a rune of this size, I’d say it took four months to get right. Four months of full-time work. This is possibly the safest room in the city. Anyone can get in. Getting out…more of a problem.”
Arabella had stomped over to the other side of the room, where to relieve stress and aid clear thinking she’d started throwing the computer and medical equipment onto the floor. Julie stepped over to calm her down, giving me a minute alone with Zack. “What’s on your mind?”
His eyes flicked over to the girls, then back to me. “There’s four of us that need shielding. Julie’s immune to the brain damage it’ll cause, but she’ll still set the alarm off if she runs alone. You’re good with wards, and your magic reserves dwarf mine and Arabella’s. Even so, we could help. But it’s a ward around four people, in the face of a banshee rune. And we don’t know how far the rune continues.”
“But if we don’t try, then we sit here and wait for someone to find us. Which is,” I checked my watch, “going to happen soon. It’s a bottle-neck. We could defend it for a while, but they’d win eventually. All they’d have to do is starve us out.”
“I’ve still got half a sandwich,” observed Zack, but he took the point. “So we do it. You want to give everyone the run-down?”
“Sure. Gather round, people.” Julie dragged Arabella back over. “We can’t stop the rune being set off. It’s going to be loud and people are going to know we’re here. The best shot is to move quickly. I can throw up a ward around everyone except Julie. Arabella, Zack - you’re carrying Ollie. We move fast and we don’t stop till we’re out of this place.”
“You sure you can handle this?” asked Arabella, panic in her eyes.
I stared straight at her. “No problem. You worry about Ollie. I’ll get you out.”
She smiled, and my heart broke a little.
“You want me to help you with the ward?” whispered Zack while we got ready.
“No, save it. By the time we’re at ground level I could be completely out. It’ll be up to you and Arabella to get us through anyone who’s come to check on the alarm.”
And then we were ready. Julie looked concerned but understood enough to keep her mouth shut. “Okay,” I said, clearing my mind and preparing to cast the ward of my life. “On three.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The air shimmered in front of us as the ward fell, starting low over our heads and drifting outwards and down, forming an irregular bubble that expanded and contracted as we moved and shifted. Nobody would be outside of its influence as long as they stuck close to me and didn’t run off.
The banshee wailed when Julie took the first step outside of the door. Her lips moved, swearing and screaming at the sound, and she clamped her hands over her ears. But she was only facing the sheer noise of the thing. The hex that would leave her twitching and dying on the ground had no power as far as she was concerned. Not for the first time I wondered whether I’d willingly trade my magical awareness and ability for the benefit of not being able to be touched by it anymore. But only for a second, because it was time to move.
As soon as my foot crossed the threshold the force of the hex hit, and the ward moved inches back towards us, driven and attacked by the violent swirling energy that now filled the air. Nobody could talk, nobody could hear above the noise. Julie reached back and touched my arm. I nodded and pointed forward. Our only hope was speed. And luck. Always luck.
Every step, every movement up the stairs, was a struggle. Every meter cost us dearly, but you only had to look around to get your motivation levels back up. The four mages that we’d knocked out on our way down were unable to throw up any defense, or move back to safety. Three of them were already dead, eyes open, blood streaming like tears down their face and joining the flow from their ears, creating slick pools on the floor under their heads. The fourth was close to the end, convulsing, back arched and strained. He passed over as we watched. A twinge of regret hit me as we stepped over him, but only a twinge. He’d chosen his path, and got paid well for it. His call. Hope he had a great time.
Half way up the steps I started to stumble. Zack reached over but I shoved his hand away. I’d meant what I said. If I got us through this, I was finished. Wiped out. If I could stand and move I’d be lucky. We needed his magic to get us out of the building. But that seemed an awfully long way from where we were.
One more step, I told myself. And then another. Only another five. Another five and then you can stop. The old lies, but they worked, and we reached the top. But the banshee didn’t stop. The green runic lines ran along the walls of the next room, only seeming to end at the next doorway. My heart sank. I knew for a fact, for an absolute certainty, that I couldn’t hold up that far. My legs were like jelly and black stars danced across my line of vision. I stepped behind Zack and Arabella, and got ready for one final push.
I’m not one of life’s noble souls. I have no illusions about that, and no problem with it either. And I know for sure which way I’ll be flying when my time with this body draws to an end. But I value loyalty. And I’ll let you call me a bastard and a git and a shitty piece of shit all day long if you want. But you don’t question my loyalty. We were halfway across the room, staggering and picking up speed, but not enough. I placed one of my hands on Zack’s back and one on Arabella’s, transferred the ward, for as long as it would hold, to them. Poured everything I had left into it, and shoved them on, even as my knees buckled and I fell to the f
loor.
The pain was intense. Unimaginable. Exquisite. A red sheen fell over my eyes. Any control I had over my limbs went completely. My bladder started emptying itself over my stolen uniform, but I was past shame, past caring. All there ever was, all there ever could be, was the pain. Biting, gouging, tearing at my mind. Was the blood coming from my ears yet? I couldn’t be sure. All I wanted to know was if the others had made it to the doorway, to that point where the noise would still be brutal, but beyond which the hex would not pass. But I couldn’t see anymore. And with what final moments of consciousness remained to me, I couldn’t even begin to pray. And then I was gone.
Something was different. But I was swimming in blackness, and it was hard to tell what had changed. Something about the way things felt - it was lighter now; there was less… pain. The pain had gone. I wasn’t awake, wasn’t moving, but the pain was gone and blessed relief washed over me like a cool breaking wave in the hot summer sun.
Something cracked across me. Across my… face. But now it was gone. Crack. Again. I struggled, got closer, closer. And then my eyes opened. Julie, above me. Angry. Frightened. Hand drawn back for another swing.
“He’s awake,” she shouted. Well, her lips moved, but the sound was still carried away by the screaming around us. She leant close, lips to my ear so I could hear. “Get up, you idiot. I’d carry you, but I’ve just dragged you halfway across that room and I’m done. So I need you to get up. And walk. Come on, they’ll be here any minute.”
