My Path to Magic

by Irina Syromyatnikova

  "Search from floor to ceiling," the captain ordered. "Do you have enough people?"

  "The office has sent all people who haven't been taken by Mr. Satal," the expert shrugged.

  "Okay, I will get you some of the coordinator's people!"

  "One more thing, sir," the expert stopped him. "The imprint of the aura at the crime scene is very unusual. I have not been able to identify it, but it's nothing like I've ever met."

  Locomotive nodded and went out into the fresh air, the smell of smoke and ashes followed him closely. It seemed inconceivable that the otherworldly, even with a carrier, managed to get from the College of St. Johan to North Creek unnoticed, but two cases with fire and strange aura in one day... The timing of both events was appropriate. The frightening word "quarantine" slowly appeared in the captain's mind. Redstone was much bigger than Nintark; in order to put a cordon around it, one would need a lot more than four thousand people. Rumors would start panic and result in victims. Soldiers would have to shoot into a mob mad from fear.

  On the waterfront a young officer reported to the senior coordinator; troopers jumped out of a truck with NZAMIPS logo. Locomotive quickly approached them; he wasn't going to let the dark magician terrorize his subordinates.

  "I know what you think," Satal quickly said, "let's step aside."

  The word "quarantine" was left unsaid.

  "Please, wait!" the coordinator muttered quietly. "I know I cannot order you in this case. But the situation is not so obvious."

  "The creature walks around the city."

  "Listen, witnesses say the suspect had talked to them. Do you understand what that means? The supernatural cannot talk! The otherworldly are capable of thinking in their own way, but they cannot articulate words: it's a known fact."

  "What do you suggest?" the captain interrupted him coldly.

  "Give me a day! The quarantine will sow panic in the city; the artisans want exactly that. We would play right into their hands!"

  "What will change in a day?"

  "The carrier is likely the very same victim; there were no more people on the spot. We'll find him before he reaches the point of breakage, I promise. The pump-sign retained the imprint of the original Source; we'll find the name through the crystals and catch the carrier before the monster will completely suppress his will. Trust me!"

  Trust the dark mage? Again?

  "Probably, the last victims are somehow related to the sect," Locomotive noticed, trying to gather his thoughts. "There is a large batch of illegal arms in the hangar."

  "We need to search the hangar!" the coordinator came to life.

  Captain Baer frowned: did Satal doubt his professionalism?

  "Twenty-four hours. You have exactly twenty-four hours. After that, I will inform the center that we have lost control of the situation."

  Chapter 24

  The artisans could burn half of Redstone and conduct long-lasting battles with NZAMIPS, but my lecture on alchemy began at 9 a.m., and I was on time for it—albeit battered and not fully awake.

  The dim fall sun filled the world with moderate contrasts of heat and cold; golden leaves in the University Park established a lyrical mood. What should be done to the dark to draw him to the lyrics? A silly question! A couple of insignificant things would do the job: fleeing through the city on an empty stomach for a whole day, being enchanted (so that all of my magic turned inside out) and almost killed twice—nothing special, in short.

  Quarters met me at the door (was he waiting?) and immediately began to dump on me the accumulated news. Where had he managed to learn so much?! By the time I took a seat in the auditorium, I already knew how intense the last weekend happened to be in Redstone. The police banned the rally in support of Melons, and nothing terrible occurred. Someone set fire to the abandoned huts on the island at the northern end, and the mayor had lost around a million crowns worth of burned real estate. Though nobody would pay him so much money anyway—the place was thought to be cursed. There were persistent rumors that NZAMIPS had ruined the artisan's nest (NZAMIPS, indeed!) and found such nasty things that battered cops refused even to whisper about them. Two mutilated bodies, found in the river, were certainly the work of the same gang, and now the townspeople wondered if there would be a third corpse. I nodded melancholically and pondered how many attempts the sect needed to make things right. And they were called "artisans", those idiots?! If they always acted like that, no wonder that so many people were killed in Nintark.

  "...and the mayor's horse gave birth to a three-legged calf."

  "What?!"

  "I thought you weren't listening to me."

  Entering the classroom lecture stopped me from beating the tar out of Quarters. Yes, that day I was in no mood for humor!

  The lecture went awfully. I couldn't catch the meaning of the subject and had to scribble stupidly word for word. Even in the hospital I hadn't felt like that—I was weak, but not stupid. My mind was like jelly: the professor's speech was heard as if through cotton wool in the ears, and my eyelids needed matches to keep them open. If I found that those bunglers messed up my brain, I would devote my life to the extermination of their kind! You couldn't do things like that with dark mages! In the end, I managed to pull myself together to focus on principles of building electric machinery, and the lethargy receded.

  To get rid of Quarters was more difficult. With unusual tediousness, Ron followed me right up to the university canteen; after yesterday's fasting I was tormented by a brutal hunger.

  "Why do you stick around with me?"

  My patience was running out. I wanted hundreds of unnatural things, but learning wasn't one of them. I was dying from the obligation to spend two more hours studying the theory of tension, but I couldn't leave. If I missed something important, I would be angered with myself. Though desire to visit a pub never left me for a second. I was cursed, probably!

  "Tom, you're not sick, are you?"

  "No, it's just a hangover."

  "But the party took place two days ago!" Quarters was taken aback.

  "I ate something bad. I had food poisoning—got it? Vomited all day yesterday."

  "Sorry... you... left so unexpectedly then... Usually you stay until morning."

  I suddenly realized that Quarters must have been plagued by anxiety. Sweet of him, but I didn't have the time.

  "You are strange! You yourself told me to stop drinking. What else was I supposed to do there until morning?"

  Quarters smiled (as if getting food poisoning was funny) and soon left me for some business of his own. Okay, I shook off one, but there were still two more left: the artisans and NZAMIPS. Whom did I fear most?

  No one!

  I began violently cutting a steak, imagining Laurent in its place. I couldn't care less about all the discontented (even more so if they were corpses), but the number of problems they awarded me defied comprehension.

  First, how soon would NZAMIPS find out about those three? Unlikely that the owner of the stables would mourn the runaway carriage driver; that is, he would simply cross him out of the payroll, and that would be it. The two beefs were in no way connected with me at all. How much would NZAMIPS find out if they got to the hangar? True, the fishermen had gotten a glimpse of me, and the boss of the carriage drivers had my address… Who had pulled my tongue yesterday? I wondered whether the police would be able to connect the island, the hangar, and the dead artisans, but this was out of my hands, and I decided not to worry about repercussions.

  Second, I needed to figure out whether I was under the influence of the shackles of deliverance. It was simple: if the shackles were imposed, I wouldn't be able to use the Source, and all that happened yesterday would be the consequence of the homebrew ritual. NZAMIPS could not hold me responsible, even if it discovered my involvement. But if I had something on me, and it wasn't the shackles, well, that would be the "third" problem.

  During the break between classes, I went to Rakshat and asked him to let me in the basement where they co
nducted the ritual of Empowerment, saying that I wanted to test myself again before resuming the studies. He didn't mind and gave me a frame and a whirligig to check my concentration. After five minutes of testing, I discovered a funny thing: the Source manifested itself, but only at times. It was not quite the Source, and it wasn't mine. Out of five attempts, it resonated twice, at best. The power sluggishly fluctuated somewhere around zero, but as soon as I focused on a simple spell, it burst with such strength that I barely managed to plug the channel. To continue casting spells would be folly.

  That test supported the only conclusion: those half-baked macaques did mess me up. Seriously. They had not "killed" the magic, just broken it, the meager charlatans. What could I do with the Source now? Maimed magic is much worse than none at all. Disappointed, I habitually kicked the Source and, surprisingly, received a kick back, wrapped in a sort of anger—someone really expected me to be grateful and gave a hint that it had become bored. What the hell...?

  The familiar feeling of the presence of another being set my hair on end. Holy priests, was Rustle sitting inside of me instead of the Source? Was that possible at all?

  Hello, skeleton with brown foam...

  I wanted to hang myself, fearing that forty days of quarantine would start anew.

  Quietly, quietly, no panic! I read a book about Rustle, did I? To get rid of it was quite simple—I only needed to get to the garage... I rushed out of the basement bunker as if pursued by a hundred ghouls, ignoring Rakshat's surprised exclamations and the bewilderment of the oncoming students.

  I wanted to run non-stop and not think why and where I was going! Otherwise, this time more than just vision would fail me. I needed to get to the junkyard where my motorcycle was.

  It was like a bet not to "think about the white monkey"; an ordinary man would have lost it, but not a dark magician. Two thoughts dominated my conscience: the need to get to the garage, and absolute, all-consuming rage.

  How had the monster dared to play its trick on me, me?! Okay, no one had managed to exterminate Rustle in the last one thousand years, but I was ready to fix that. Even without the Source. Indeed, I didn't need magic to kill the ghouls before! The complexity of the mission wouldn't scare the dark off. I would bring down on it the entire power of technomagic! I would find what the technomagic was about and use its might on the monster. Rustle seemed to become impressed.

  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.