Being able to tear the lifeforce out of a living creature and put it into a metal shell regardless of the wishes of said lifeforce's owner, was, in a word, not.
The former could be done the hard way if it meant expunging the ability to do the latter from existence. And that had been the reaction before anyone could ever manage it with people. Doing it to animals had been enough to spur a minor genocide, doing it to people would most likely have meant total extermination.
The very idea of true, animata-stealing mechamagery was horrifying, and Vimika sat back from her scrying implements slightly light-headed. Little tingles pricked at the backs of her eyes as she looked about her laboratory as if it was someone else's. What had it been like to be a mechamage? To be in a place not unlike this (actually, considerably not like this, as the entire reason one got into mechamaging was the money), a place of discovery and experimentation, and have the idea that 'I'm going to rip the life out of this puppy and stick it in a body that looks exactly the same except all the bones are made of gold.'
Perhaps the origins were as benign and altruistic as the apologists made them out to be. That it had only been done on the sick and dying in a last-ditch attempt to save the animals' lives, or some version of it, but more blood had been spilled than ink in the name of good intentions.
It was sick. A complete perversion of the magickers' gift. Though it was easy for Vimika to say with as much time as had passed since, there was a part of her that was glad someone had stood up to her people and said no. Much easier to do when backed up with a forest of swords and being able to fill every shadow with the world's best assassins than as a lowly apprentice seeing what their master was getting up to, raising a finger and getting out 'Um…' before being liquified and poured into a ditch.
But what was she to do now? She had every reason to track Oliver down, and just as many not to. Yes, she was being paid handsomely to do it, which was a handsome reason indeed, and how many had the chance to see a genuine mechamagical creature? As repugnant as the idea was, they were relics of a bygone age, little fuzzy miracles that shouldn't exist at all.
And had led to Vimika's people being nearly wiped out altogether.
Then there was the law, which, nicely in line with Vimika's cynicism on the subject, didn't seem to apply to Malivia Tarsebaum, since she was still (mostly) alive. She had to know what Oliver was. He would have been passed down through the family for over two centuries, since you couldn't acquire a new mechamagical creature once all their creators had been killed in gratuitous but symbolic ways. The market for them was so far past black it didn't even have a name. It was more like anti-light. A void.
Nearly impossible to get rid of without scrutiny, in a number that would only ever get smaller, they were literally priceless.
The gold sitting under Vimika's bed made a lot more sense now. The silence required on her part was such it hadn't even been spoken. Tarsebaum knew what Oliver was, and knew that if her house wizard was caught with him…
"Shit," Vimika said, hurling a wakasha nut across the room to plink off of a beaker. The clear fluid inside suddenly glowed bright pink in response to being awoken, but soon settled back to sleep.
She was expendable. A freelance nobody with a name that didn't mean anything in this part of the country. It would in the capitol though, which meant she could, at the very least, disgrace her entire family if she was caught transporting Oliver, or even keeping the knowledge of his existence secret. She could shut up or ruin her family. Or worse.
The gold was just to keep it from blowing back on Malivia and her family. If Oliver had been living in that house for hundreds of years, it would be impossible to hide from the most cursory magical probing, so a return to the status quo behooved (or beclawed) all of them.
It was the chance of a lifetime for a wizard, even if she would have to take the story of it with her to the grave. With the money she would make from taking that chance, however, she wouldn't have to talk to anyone again if she didn't want to. She could take her story and her shame, and disappear with both forever.
Odd how it was the last part that won out.
CHAPTER THREE
THERE WAS A strain of magickers far to the north and east of Maris that held with riding brooms as the preferred mode of transport, since they were widely available, simple, cheap, and were both portable and inconspicuous once you landed. If you didn't want to carry it, you just set down and propped it up against a wall with no worries anyone would look at it twice. No stables, no grooming, no oats, no poop, none of it.
But Vimika was quite aware of her own anatomy and the very idea of straddling a stick barely wider than her thumb and trusting her entire weight to it started a little noise in the back of her throat that she had to consciously stop by thinking of soft pillows and hot baths while crossing her legs several times.
Masochists, the lot.
It was the skill of the wizard, not the shape of the object that let wizards zip around through the sky unimpeded, and Vimika was of the school of thought that since the latter could be whatever the level of the former allowed, it should be practical and not at all painful.
Thus it was that Vimika was hurtling through the icy winter air perched atop the upper half of an old door. Faded blue, she had never actually seen the lower half, but knew it had been severed violently, with lots of jagged edges splintering the bottom that made it look faster. A broken door was practical, as far as flying refuse went. She could keep small items in the recesses without fear of them rolling off, sit in virtually any position she wanted, even lie down for small stretches if she was brave and not near any mountains, and the knob was perfect for hanging her worn, well-traveled satchel from. Today it contained a few magical implements and the gold coins she couldn't leave behind without at least a tiger guarding them.
Tightly cinched into her flying trousers below her flapping robe, her legs dangled over the side, fuzzy insulated boots kicking empty air as she sped along several hundred feet above the quiltwork patches of farms that stretched away in every direction from Durn. The further south Vimika sped, however, the sparser the farms grew, as south meant cold, and soon, mountains. Big ones.
She sat up.
Looming ahead, stretching the breadth of the horizon were the foreboding Dragonback Mountains. Strikingly beautiful in the clear, sharp air of a dry winter's afternoon, they rose up from the surrounding plains to scrape the clouds from the sky, weaving them into blankets of snow in which to drape themselves all year round.
There were nothing like them where Vimika grew up. Like many of the old (surviving) wizard families, the Malakandronons had lived within sight of the capitol city of Maris. Sight being relative as well, since the great spires of the palace were so tall that the curve of the world was less of a hindrance to concealing them than one would imagine.
Maris had what the locals called mountains, but having lived in Durn for a while now, Vimika could join the Southerners in laughing at how naive she'd been to label them as such. The brownish lumps that ringed Maris were hills. Here, if it didn't have snow on it year-round or hadn't exploded at some point, it wasn't a mountain. Locked into their winter finest, the Dragonbacks were simply more white than in the summer. Just like people, they wore fewer layers when it got warmer, but they still wore something.
At their feet lay the true end to Atvalian civilization, the Shadowbridge Forest. Tightly packed with Speartip Pines, which in most light appeared blacker than greener, Vimika had always found herself giving it a wider berth than the mountains, which were like a great, unknowable wall. Vast and old, they radiated indifference to lengths of time shorter than those she had to put a great deal of thought and humility into imagining properly.
Shadowbridge was different. The opposite, in fact.
It wanted you to come closer.
The section Vimika was slowing down to avoid entering did, anyway.
She set down in daylight amidst a field of unblemished white and immediately blemished it by
heaping snow atop her door before casting a spell of Weight on it. The winds blowing down from the mountains could be as strong as they were finicky (and so would any people be who were mad enough to live here), and she wanted to make sure she had a ready ride home should she need to flee in a hurry.
Satisfied her door wouldn't go anywhere, Vimika slung her satchel over her shoulder and Looked into the woods.
Blazing straight into the heart of the dark was Oliver's magical trail, vanishing less than a dozen yards into the shadows of the immense trees that seemed to somehow take a keen interest in the little creature staring up at them and trying not to use her imagination very much.
It was tough to get going, however. Everything about the place felt wrong. The woods could be scary, of course, it's why scary stories were set in them. But as Vimika stood in the snow, for the first time taking comfort in being near blinded by it, there was a sort of extra darkness to the trees that couldn't be accounted for by simple lack of light. Shadows had color, the darkness amidst the boughs above was just black. Little detail was visible to her naked eye, but through Sight, it was intensely green with mana, which wasn't surprising given its likely age and the fact it had achieved said age completely unmolested by people.
It was alive and thriving, just dark and ominous, not unlike what she imagined the inside of a snake looked like to an unwary mouse before its eyes were digested. Almost as if the Shadowbridge Forest had been named appropriately.
It had to be her imagination though, didn't it? A trick of light that happened so often when you were alone on the border of a dark place filled with unknowns but had no real choice but to enter.
That described the privy half the time, so with a spasm of sudden decision, she stepped forward. Her boots sank into snow softer than she'd thought it would be, a discouraging representation of her confidence as she left the warm embrace of the sun for the shadowy chill of the forest.
What made her stop short wasn't a sudden noise, it was the sudden lack of any. Utter silence, a sucking vacuum of noise that made her lean forward so she could listen harder to find some.
Jerking back ramrod straight, the feeling of 'nothing' ahead of her continued, as though she were standing on the edge of a cliff. She didn't want to look over. She knew she should back away, but was drawn by some inner compulsion to creep closer. To grab the watchman's truncheon, to stick her hand in the yawning dog's mouth, to say 'surely the soft wooshing sound coming from the depths of this cave is just a draft.'
People say cemeteries are eerie because they're so quiet. That fact only made them good neighbors, in Vimika's mind. But this, the complete anti-presence of noise, wasn't eerie either— it was terrifying, like she'd been entombed inside her own head.
The forest had stripped away every single sound save one: her own heartbeat. In a way, it was reassuring. She hadn't gone deaf and she was still alive. She tried shouting, but the only proof was the vibrations in her throat. She tried again, louder, but only succeeded in adding pain. Still her heart thudded in her ears, all the more noticeable for the lack of any meaningful competition.
That's what made her turn around.
Stumbling back into the light, sound returned in an overwhelming rush, the wind and the crash of her feet through the snow near deafening after total silence, and she threw her hands over her ears, breath coming in frantic, sucking wheezes until her hearing adjusted to the real world again.
She shot a withering gaze into the forest, which returned it somehow.
Vimika looked away first.
"BAAAAAAAAA!"
Anything to drown out the memory of the sound of her own heart.
No one ever understood when she told them. They called her strange and backwards, one of her old girlfriends had even been hurt by the fact that Vimika couldn't stand the sound of her heartbeat. That Vimika was cold. Weird. Wizard-y. But it had nothing to do with being a wizard, and everything to do with being alive.
Everyone else found the sound comforting, like a reminder of the womb, they said. To her it sounded like proof of mortality. Every beat, she feared the next one wouldn't come, that the rhythm would stop and that would be that. Every lover she'd lain with, Vimika'd put her head on their shoulder, not their chest. She didn't need a reminder of her final moments during her most contented.
The worst part was, she couldn't even explain why. If someone had died under her ear, or she'd seen some horrible variation of a heart outside its former owner's body beating its last, that might explain it, but no, it was just the simple fact of death. She didn't need anything more than that. Brains were silent and invisible when they were working, so were spleens and livers, they didn't mark every second on the march to oblivion out loud.
"Baablghghrmnphgrblgappbpbpbpbp!" She spat out more nonsense noises. There was enough nonsense in the forest, she needed some in her mind to distract her from that fact.
Once she had herself back under control, she took a deep breath, a thick plume of white roiling from her nostrils like a dragon who'd just discovered cigarettes.
Something had stolen her hearing and she had no idea what. Peering back into the forest, her eyes had nothing to tell her, light or magic, and neither did her ears, or her nose. There was nothing to indicate… whatever it was. She didn't even know what she was looking for. It had to be magical, didn't it?
She was a wizard, which meant she had extra senses, one of which should have told her what was lurking in that wood. But there was nothing, which would have driven her away if it hadn't made her wonder why. As a wizard, she couldn't abide the unknown if magic was afoot. Hidden magic? That was new.
And scary.
Yet all that was out of place was Oliver's trail. He was in there, a few hundred yards away, unmoving. And, something told her, waiting.
Vimika stared down at the edge of the snowfield in resentment. Whatever her misgivings, whatever else she may find on the other side, she had to keep telling herself that the only thing that mattered was the gold she would get for crossing into it.
Or, if she chose to downplay her own avarice, she could say that she found herself genuinely curious about just what kind of place a mechamagical fennec would choose to retreat to. Wild fennecs lived in dens, a fennec with gold bones animated by magic that had been holed up in a mansion for possibly ten times its natural lifespan lived in… what? A hole he'd found? The stomach of a bear who was in for quite the surprise when it came time to visit the little bears' room? As far as anyone knew there wasn't anything else in these woods beyond trees and the beginnings of the mountains. What drew him here and why did he stay? Why now?
All questions that should have consumed her before she'd left. Or taken the money. Or gotten her hopes up with what to do with said money.
Had she thought about just keeping Oliver for herself? Of course she had. But where would she fence something like a mechamagical animal anyway? She wouldn't even know who to ask other than the police, which was a bizarrely comforting thought. The reason she couldn't be a criminal was because she didn't know how. Her mother would be proud.
No, she would return him and he would be fine. If he had been up to this point, there was no reason to believe he would be anything other than more coddled than he already had been when she returned him. If she didn't, then he would be free forever, both of which suited her better than a slow execution.
All that mattered was getting paid.
Yes. That was it. Nothing more. No more moral quandaries to sort out.
In. Out. Done.
House. Solitude.
Go.
She didn't even brace herself this time, she just barreled into abject silence.
Raging, terrifying silence. Aggressive silence that felt like it was jamming itself into her ears in a bid to reach the bit responsible for balance so it could throw her down and laugh at her. She had to fight for each step she took, keeping her eyes straight down to make sure that her feet were still going in the right direction.
Without another
sound to mask the sound, it felt like her heart was trying to break into her head, pounding away at her brain to force it out through her eyeballs in order to make room.
Boom-doom. Boom-doom. Boom-doom.
How many more of these do you have in you?
Boom-doom. Boom-doom. Boom-doom.
Louder and louder it grew, the rhythmic march of the shadow she was born with, the one she couldn't shake, the one that looked exactly like her except it had no eyes and no mouth. And no mercy.
Waiting. Watching. Stalking.
Boom-doom. Boom-doom. Boom-doom.
But it was always behind, and could only catch her once.
Use it.
Eyes forward, she matched every other beat of her heart with an answering step.
Boom-doom.
Thud.
Or, there would have been, if she could have heard it. She was a wizard, she had a good imagination.
Boom-doom.
Imaginary thud.
Boom-doom.
Imaginary thud.
She braved a look behind her, but all there was to see was the progress she'd made. Two dozen footsteps, (mostly) forward, only one back. No shadow. No sign of impending mortality.
Wait, no shadow?
The world turned.
Upside-down or inside out, or both or neither, the trees began to spin and swirl like the forest was being rung out by some unseen giant. The ground rose up to meet the sky, white with snow, white with cloud, rushing like the foam of a river over rocks made of trees. With the silent thunder of a world come loose from its moorings, the ground reared up to meet her, smacking into her knees first, then the shock of her hands breaking the fall before her face could.
Her eyes were full of snow, her mouth with bile. She swallowed hard against the urge to throw up when all at once, her hearing returned, but all the sounds were wrong.
Midnight Magic Page 4
