Frederick was in the corner sipping on his flask. Ever since the excitement began he had let up on the drinking some, but he still hardly ever went a night without at least a sip or five. Terrance motioned to him to walk out together.
When they got outside he asked, “What are you thinking?”
“I’m thinking it’s going to be chaos,” said Frederick. “So far we’ve been able to calculate a lot of things in advance, minimize our risk. It’s gonna be wild!”
“Why does it feel like you’re excited about that?”
“When you’re drunk, anything can happen. But then there’s a hangover. Lots of people can’t take the hangover. I can. It’s worth it. This project… we’ve been buzzed, tipsy, but soon we’re going to be flat out drunk. Anything can happen, Terrance.”
“Including us all dying.”
“Lots of people can’t take the hangover,” said Frederick. “For me, it’s worth it.”
It was as Terrance feared.
The Grand Inquisitor declared that the patrols not only were given license to use magic, but they were to start sending two Inquisitors instead of one. That immediately put a stop to any rescues; their numbers would forever be limited at eight rescues and Terrance. Nine commoners against twenty-one Inquisitors who had been bred for magic usage across centuries. Twenty-one Inquisitors with open societal backing versus nine with scattered, hidden support.
That day they got called out to a usage, a real usage. Terrance and John, just like in training.
Killing.
Cleansing.
It was a fourteen-year-old boy, who cried and screamed as John sliced off his limbs. Terrance intervened and took off the boy’s head so he wouldn’t suffer.
Terrance had thought he was done with this kind of thing.
John didn’t follow him back, said he had to stay for reasons only Master Inquisitors could know. “He was a strong one. There are other duties I must perform.”
There was more screaming as Terrance left, and a flash of magic.
Johanna came to check on him. “I heard about last night,” she said. “I’m glad it wasn’t you.”
Terrance held her close. The part of him that cared for her was like a completely different entity than that which was bringing down the Guild. He liked that person better, even though he knew he was loving a monster. A child of monsters, at the very least. What would his child be?
“It’s almost here,” said Johanna. “Our baby.”
“How soon?”
“Five weeks.”
“That’s… soon.”
“Not for one conceived with magic. It speeds things up. Magda says together we’re powerful enough to take four months off the timeline.”
He thought back to when they’d made love. They had both held magic, amplifying their natural senses into something overwhelming. While they held the magic but did not use it, their chances of pregnancy were almost none. Despite the vast temptation, the pleasure was astounding. But when they used the magic, after hours of buildup, the spams of pleasure that shot through their bodies were unlike anything they had ever experienced.
“This will make a strong, strong baby,” she had said.
They had only used the magic once, with advanced permission from the Guild, and it had indeed created a child.
Despite himself, Terrance couldn’t wait for the chance to do it again.
Despite himself, he cared for Johanna even more since then.
Probably some sort of magic.
22
The nightly magic practices were shut down until they figured out how to counter the Inquisitors’ new strategy, but they were able to keep up the harassment. They took turns going out, using magic in a way that mimicked the average illicit magic usage, and then cleansing themselves shortly after.
Since this was the only time they got to use magic any more, they stepped up the operation for the pure pleasure of it. Multiple times per shift and continuing sporadically through all three shifts.
It drove the Inquisitors crazy.
It easily tripled the number of times they had to leave each shift, sometimes sending out someone twice in one shift. Each new spike of magic was met with a groan, and in short order the Inquisitors stopped using magic to speed their approach — Resource Management was complaining about the expenditure.
Once the Inquisitors got used to that pattern of harassment the rescues changed tactics. Instead of mimicking an illicit magic user, they began practicing again. For five minutes only, sometimes less, always keeping an eye out for a quickly approaching Inquisitor. This annoyed the Inquisitors but drove Resource Management mad, and soon enough they were using magic to approach again.
These changes in tactics were dangerous for the rescues. The first day that the Inquisitors changed their pattern, before Terrance could tell the group, was when they had their closest calls. Their next closest calls where when the rescues themselves changed tactics; they weren’t quite sure how each shift of Inquisitors would react.
And yet each day the rescues became a little bit smoother at escape, a little bit better at magic, a little more attuned to detecting the approaching magical signatures. They even got a little cocky and started shaping the earth into rude symbols and anti-Mage slogans.
Their skills jumped when they were able to do an extended practice again- this time using the ongoing Great Works project as cover. The Mages were raising a building from the earth, drawing on large amounts of magic for hours per day, providing the perfect cover. The rescues put the Great Work between them and the Mages' Guild so that the watching Inquisitors wouldn’t be able to distinguish anything out of the ordinary; at a certain distance, things got blurry and you could only see the magnitude and rough spread, and the rescues’ practice only added a bit to the magnitude.
It wasn’t foolproof — the Great Works Mages could still notice something — but the Great Works Mages were not used to dealing in death, and the distance to the Mages' Guild meant that if the rescues limited their practice time, they could be fairly assured of safety.
They worked mostly on earth-shaping, given their new-found fondness for creating intricate messages in stone, only realizing later that this would ruin their chances of re-using the same spot and tactic. The last five minutes of the practice were spent trying to settle one of the stone messages back to its original formation, but the result was far too flat and perfect. A piece of newly built stone on a weathered building.
So they left the rest. Better a strong message than a confusing suspicion. Their other artworks had been generating whispers, and Frederick had reported that, at the Justice Guild at least, the whispers were cautiously supportive. Always couched in double-talk, for the Mages still had great power, and to openly oppose them was a great way to be passed over for promotion, but supportive nonetheless.
Wile’s shop was another source of whispers and they had the same tenor. The loudest ones, the ones that were not whispers, were denouncing whoever was writing these obscene things.
They were buoyed by the anonymous support, despite public condemnation.
“The Mages' Guild legend, you say it’s about a great lizard?” asked one of the rescues.
“A great lizard beast that rampages and kills magic users.”
And then they had a logo. A lizard with a stick figure in its mouth.
The result was predictable. It drove the whole Mages' Guild crazy, and the busybodies who spoke loudly in Wile’s shop criticized it as obscene, but many on the street laughed. The lizards themselves were, of course, smoothed over when the Inquisitor reached them- often only minutes after they were finished. Eventually every smooth patch in a wall was assumed to, at one time, have been a lizard.
This whole public relations thing hadn’t been part of the original plan and yet it soon became the obsession of several of the rescues. The number of times they went out to fake a new magic user went up even further, just so they could create more lizards- or Lizzies, as they started calling them.
The rest of the rescues were happy to focus on research, knowing that public support wouldn’t be enough to bring down the remaining Inquisitors and the rest of the Mages' Guild. Natalie led that group, giving up her turn using magic and drawing lizards in exchange for more time with the books. It wasn’t until a couple weeks later that she volunteered to go out again, and it was because she finally had something.
Something big.
Natalie’s new development didn’t work the first time. Whatever she was trying to create was complex, and only Terrance and a couple of the rescues even understood the diagrams. But the intent was clear.
Natalie’s buddy on the run would create a Lizzie — she hadn’t practiced it, and so could only do a rudimentary version — and then she would lay her new magic on top of it. A magic set to explode when approached or when someone tried to use magic on it.
They started putting the Lizzies on roofs or high up on walls, so that some innocent walking by wouldn’t accidentally trigger the explosion. That explosion was reserved for the Inquisitor who tried to smooth over the Lizzie.
It worked for the first time during Terrance’s shift. Terrance could tell it worked because John came back bruised, bleeding, cursing, and covered in some sticky substance. He had approached the Lizzie and smoothed it over from several feet away, but the explosion had caved in the roof, destroyed much of the equipment in the winery below, and landed him in a tiny river of wine and the splintered shards of broken casks.
Terrance thought Natalie would be concerned, but she shrugged off the collateral damage.
“It’s even better this way,” explained Frederick. “It will always be an Inquisitor who appears to cause the explosion. The common people won’t see that we set the traps- they’ll just see that Inquisitors would rather destroy a building than have a Lizzie stay up.”
Frederick had almost stopped drinking altogether. He wanted a set amount of instability in his life at one time, and this cat-and-mouse game with the Inquisitors was good enough for him.
The Inquisitors squabbled amongst themselves about whether it was best to leave the Lizzies up or destroy whatever wall they were placed on. The faction who wanted to wipe out the Lizzies at all costs had trouble advancing their cause, since it wasn’t always easy to trigger the trap at a far enough distance. An Inquisitor could get hurt.
Eventually the Grand Inquisitor went to a site himself, harrumphed, and set to work. Three hours later he had figured out a way to undo the explosion magic and smooth over the Lizzie without incident. A couple practice sessions later and the rest of the Inquisitors had figured it out as well.
It was time for a new tactic.
Terrance and Angelika kept trying to meet, but the demands on the Department of Resource Management had increased even more than those on the Inquisitors. She couldn’t tell him anything specific, simply that things were terrible and getting worse. Terrance thought it might have something to do with his rescues. He couldn’t be sure, but the timing was certainly suspicious.
What could be so important about the budget?
Of course, maybe it wasn’t about the budget at all. What if they were readying a weapon, something that would help them track down and fight his rescues? Natalie had better work fast, find out another trick. One that was more effective than simply making the populace unhappy with the Mages' Guild for a while. Despite all the panic within the Mages' Guild, they were as solid as ever, and his misfit group of rescues was still fragile. One wrong move and they could lose a fifth of their force- or worse.
And Terrance still had to kill people. People who would have made fantastic rescues.
“This one’s strong,” said John after their most recent cleansing. “I’m going to stay afterward for more procedures.”
The one killed had been a girl of fourteen, whose flashes of magic were indeed impressive. Not impressive for a Mage, but promising for a commoner, and better than most of Terrance’s rescues. She had even put up a fight, having figured out enough magic to be dangerous while the Inquisitors were on their way.
Terrance was walking away when he heard the screaming start back up again. It was from the girl’s mother.
He turned around, sneaking to where the noises were coming from. Peering in.
The mother was trying to fight back, but John was stronger, and trained. He tore off her clothing with a roughness he usually reserved for cleansings. She fought back, clawing at him, raking his face. He pinned her arms, but then she kicked him, tried to get up and tackle him.
“Fucking bitch,” he growled. “This is the greatest moment of your life! This is your chance for a legacy!”
The husband huddled in a corner, crying. His leg was broken, his face puffing up with a fresh bruise.
“If you keep struggling, I’ll kill him,” said John.
She went limp.
John pushed her back onto the mattress, then carefully rolled down his pants.
Began channeling magic.
Terrance snuck away to the sound of her screams, her moans, and the rhythmic scrape of the bed.
23
The next week went by in a blur of false alarms, cleansings, and meetings with the rescues.
The rape that John partook in… it wasn’t worse than the cleansings. The victim lived. And yet it stuck in Terrance’s mind. What would it be like to raise that child, knowing the circumstance of their birth? Would the mother hate their child? If so, would the child even know what it was missing?
Death, at the very least, ended things.
But that wasn’t quite true either. His brother’s death had rippled, destroyed his mother, completely changed Terrance’s life. He should be a shopkeeper by now, running a small store under Wile’s occasional tutelage. He should be married to Anne — poor Anne — and having children. Two children by now, from the same mother, not the hodge-podge set of bastards he was assembling. If he became a Master before the Guild was overthrown, would he be expected to rape his way to more bastard children?
No, death did not end things. Except for the one dying.
It was another cleansing. Terrance’s heart always sank when that was the case.
He was with Wanda this time. They pushed through the door past the parents and stood over their upcoming victim. There was no struggle, so they had time to converse. Casually.
Business-like, almost, except for the edge of anticipation in Wanda’s voice.
“This one’s strong. I guess we’ll have to send in John to…” Wanda remembered that Terrance wasn’t a Master yet, chose her words more carefully. “To clean up. He likes that part.”
This one was indeed strong. Stronger than any of the other rescues. He thought a moment, considered the risk. Thought of the talent going to waste. Thought of the boy’s mother being raped.
Wanda moved in with her sword against the cowering boy.
Terrance pulled out his own sword, channeled magic, made his body powerful, then leaped toward them. She turned around just in time to see Terrance’s sword sink deep into her stomach. Her own sword arm bounced uselessly against Terrance, the angles all wrong.
He plunged the sword completely through her and into the floor, knocking her over and pinning her impaled body. The angles were slightly better for her now, but Terrance was able to step on her sword arm quickly. She hadn’t yet thought to enhance her body as he had, so it gave a satisfying crunch.
He pulled out the sword, pushed it through her throat.
To her credit she didn’t scream once the entire time. Perhaps she was as tough as she flaunted. Perhaps the initial blow had punctured a lung.
There was no time to think about that, however.
He turned to the boy, gave him the usual spiel. Cleansed him and sent him to the nearest safe house.
Now he had to cover up his role in this. “There was a mob here, do you understand?”
“Did… did you just kill that woman?”
“Listen. There was a mob here. They took away your son. Me and
that dead woman fought them off, but were losing badly. Here, cut me a couple places.”
The man grabbed the sword, sliced Terrance’s skin like an expert even though his hands were shaking. The cuts would look as if they had been taken in heated battle, but would not compromise his movement significantly. Terrance added a few more for effect. He could heal later.
Then he stared sending small fireballs across the house, from different positions, mostly aimed at the place where Wanda lay. A couple even hit her, making the scene more realistic as her clothes caught and charred. Parts of the building caught fire- a table, a bookshelf. The floor and walls had been treated and did not burn long after lighting. It was lucky for these parents, but a shame for his own safety. A burned-out building was harder to investigate.
The parents were running around trying to douse the things that did catch on fire.
“Stop!” yelled Terrance. “It’s either those or your son. Which do you care for more?”
They stopped, although the mother’s eyes kept darting from their water to the fire.
“Listen carefully. The mob was a raucous, unshaven lot. All men in their late teens and early twenties. They had cloaks that had a lizard emblem on them, like this.” He carved it into the floor.
“Lizzie?”
“Yes. They marched in and fought me and that woman. I barely got away. They took your son. Do you understand?”
The man nodded. He was taking this extremely calmly — who was he?
Terrance made them repeat the story while he continued to bleed onto their floor.
Then he left. He had to make it look as if he was fleeing, so he channeled magic to increase his speed. But the rest of his story- would it make sense? The pattern of channeling- if they had been paying attention- had been of one person off and on, not of a battle. He hoped John and Lorenz had been distracted. The cuts on him should throw them off the scent well enough- he could say that there had been one or two magic users, and the rest used swords. They concentrated on Wanda first, and Terrance fled after he saw that she had fallen.
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