by GM Gambrell
Thirty
The Magistrates were back for them just as the sun peaked over the horizon. The men were not like the ones back in New Dallas. They were simply performing a job and showed as much emotion as a Golem about it. A small crowd had gathered outside the inn, though, and as they exited, the Magicians conjured rotten tomatoes and other fruits and threw them at Duncan and Jessica. They hooted and hollered and Duncan heard the word human being used like an insult.
He stuck his chest out and kept his head up despite the anger boiling inside him. He wasn’t going to give into these peoples’ taunts. Jessica, however, cried, and he held her hand tightly.
“Don’t let them get to you.”
They could see the main spire of the city as they walked down the gold brick streets. It was the tallest structure in all of New Atlantis, and supposedly the tallest in the entire world. The spire reached up into the clouds. Made of red brick, there was not a single window in it anywhere he could see. He didn’t know how the tall, thin building kept from falling over in the winds up high and he really didn’t want to find out. The base of the tower was surrounded by a grand courtyard and patrolled by dozens of Magistrates. There were plants of every variety that he recognized as well as many that he didn’t. Unlike the plants in most Magician gardens, none of these appeared sentient, though, and none spoke to them as they passed. There was one small door at the base of the tower and a Magistrate opened it for them as they approached.
“He is awaiting you.”
“We have to walk up stairs that far?” Jessica asked.
Duncan shook his head no. “They don’t put stairs in their buildings. Either they transport us up or…”
He didn’t get a chance to follow through with his thought as the old familiar sensation of being teleported set in. He vaguely heard Jessica scream just before they reappeared on the top floor of the spire. The room was humongous and lush, with couches and plush chairs scattered about. Marble pillars held up the ceiling, which was a massive glass dome. There were water fountains and pools, along with hundreds of paintings dotting the walls. There were statues throughout the palace room, some of stone, others of bronze, along with hundreds of pre-war antiques.
He then noticed he was alone. Jessica was nowhere to be seen.
A tall, thin man stood staring at one of the paintings. It depicted a simple woman with an odd smile on her face.
“One of your kind painted this,” the mysterious man said. “He did it many hundreds of years before the war. It’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s hard to imagine the hand of a savage could be guided so without magic. And trust me, there’s magic in these brush strokes. It’s a different kind of magic, of course, but still magic. It’s a magic to speak to the mind without moving the lips, to stir emotion.”
“Who are you?” Duncan asked, not interested in games. “Where is my friend?”
The man spun around, his red robe flowing around him like the wind. His face was very narrow and his nose was hooked like a parrot’s. His bright red hair drooped down, nearly covering his eyes. “I’m sorry, I thought the Lord Probate told you. I am Jeremiah Fredrick. And as for your friend, well, let’s just say she isn’t needed at the moment. You will see her again. You have my promise on that.”
“That’s impossible,” Duncan spat. “Jeremiah Fredrick died during the naval bombarding of New Atlantis a thousand years ago.”
“That was a horrible night, my little friend,” the man proclaiming to be Fredrick began. “I didn’t know if I could hold it together that night. I didn’t then have enough faith in the magic, but when I did survive…when the magic survived, I knew that the world was mine.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Well, then perhaps I should show you.”
Duncan felt like he was being transported again, but this time instead of his body appearing somewhere else, his mind did. He floated next to the man claiming to be Fredrick high above a rock-strewn wasteland. There was nothing but rock as far as he looked, no definition to the land that he could discern. The ocean lapped at the rocky shore, and there, near the water’s edge, was a small encampment. It was a collection of brightly colored tents and small trailers, all apparently from an ancient circus.
“This is where New Atlantis started. This is all it was, back then. I managed to raise a rocky outcropping and then had the audacity to call it our kind’s motherland. A few came, but most avoided my shores as the plague ran through the very rock.”
In the distance, at sea, Duncan could see many hundreds of warships of all sizes. It was the armada that had surrounded New Atlantis soon after its creation. Fredrick, if the man was really Fredrick, had taken his mind back in time to show him those events. The people in the camp were visibly nervous, but there was Fredrick, just as he’d appeared to Duncan, calming them and showing them how to use their newfound magical abilities.
“We knew so little, then. Can you imagine that we were even eating food we’d brought from the mainland? No one had figured out yet that we could simply conjure whatever we wanted out of thin air. No one understood that we turned the natural energy of the world around us into whatever we desired. We were so stupid then, and until that night, we didn’t truly understand the threat your kind posed to us.”
The guns of the warships lit up at once, showering New Atlantis with an unrelenting artillery barrage. The island exploded in a shower of burning rock and fire, but the small encampment was safe beneath a shield created by Jeremiah Fredrick.
“I don’t know why we didn’t understand what you people were. We were, at the time, like you. We’d seen you raping this planet for generations, destroying everything there was in the name of progress, but for some silly reason none of us thought you would come for us. We should have known, though. We should have suspected when your churches labeled us as witches and your scientists explained away our new power. You see, Duncan, you people started the war, not I. I merely finished it.”
A massive lightning bolt, miles across, lashed out from the angry clouds above and struck the ocean, instantly electrifying everything within a thousand miles. The steel ships caught fire and the metal burned away, dripping into the steaming ocean. The men burned as well, screaming as they jumped into the ocean to put out the flames only to be boiled to death there.
“I destroyed them, that day, and then I went on to destroy your world,” Fredrick said as the image in Duncan’s mind faded and he returned to the head Magician’s quarters. “And it really doesn’t matter if you believe who I am or not. All that matters is that you tell me what plans Diamond Jim has for the Source.”
“So there is a Source?”
“Of course there is a Source. You don’t believe that I just woke up one day with the ability to not only do magic, but to pass my ability onto others?”
“Where is it from?”
“Ah, indeed, that is the correct question, is it not? Your ancestors constantly asked where it was instead of where it is from. That, my young friend, is the same question I’ve wondered for a thousand years and I still do not have an answer. I just do not know. I do know that this is not the first time we have been blessed with its magic on this world. You only have to look back to the ancient legends of Atlantis and the dragons and a myriad of other tales to see its influence tens of thousands of years ago. Its disappearance is marked by the rise of science, because the two are incompatible. Your ancestors found some way to beat it, then, but things will not be the same this time. This empire will not fall into the ocean.”
Fredrick paused, rubbing his chin and considering.
“But what does the Source matter? It’s what the Source has given us that’s the main thing. Look at the glorious world around you, Duncan Cade. This world would never be without the magic that the Source has seen fit to grant us, and without the magic, we would have never been able to construct our homeland, New Atlantis. You’ve seen it with your own eyes, have you not? It is the most glorious thing in the world.”
“But
at the cost of the rest of the world,” Duncan said. “Your magic is eating the rest of the world.”
“A small side effect of the magic, yes,” Fredrick admitted. “It needs energy to form things, to do things, and that energy has to come from somewhere. It turns out that your life force and the life force of everything on this planet it the perfect energy source for the Source.” He giggled. “That was funny, wasn’t it? Source for the Source?”
“That’s what the pipes are for, aren’t they? You are literally sucking the life of the planet out and pumping it here, to power the Source and maintain this city.”
“The Lord Probate was right about you, Duncan Cade. You are quite clever. Yes, the Magician cities are merely collection points. The planet’s life force flows in there and then travels here, to New Atlantis. The magic is stronger there, around the collection points where life force is pooled, but away from them it fades.”
“It’s fading in the cities as well.”
“Of course it is,” Fredrick said knowingly. “How could it not? The life force in those areas is almost gone. They are feeding off less and less energy there. It took a lot of energy to build this place, even more to maintain it. One day, in the not too distant future, only New Atlantis will survive.”
“And what will you do for energy then?” Duncan demanded, enraged. Fredrick knew exactly what was going on. The Creeping Death wasn’t some sort of plague besetting the land; it was magic sucking the life out of everything.
“I will devour the Magicians, and once they are gone, I will devour the very earth itself. New Atlantis will live on.”
“You’re mad.”
“That’s exactly what your ancestors said about me, and you want to know something? They were right. They were absolutely right. They should have tried harder to rid the world of the scourge that I am.”
He waited for Duncan to respond, but Duncan didn’t have anything to say. There wasn’t any point in talking to this insane man. There would be no convincing him to have mercy on his people, no way to talk him into stopping the magic. That wasn’t the kind of reasoning that Jeremiah Fredrick understood.
“No matter. Just tell me, Duncan, what does Diamond Jim plan? Our sources in Shreveport said he’s on a quest to destroy the Source, yet it’s you we’ve found in his place. Does your father send a boy to do his dirty work?”
“He didn’t know I followed him. He doesn’t know where I am. I don’t know what he’s doing.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“As I do you.”
“Touché. Though there is no reason to doubt me. Why would I lie about something as trivial as my identity?”
Duncan shrugged but didn’t answer.
“I could torture you, you know? We have means passed down from the Last War that are downright inhuman. I never thought they actually produced any worthwhile results, but they sure were fun. Would you like that, Duncan? Would you like to be tortured until you tell me what your father is up to?”
“It doesn’t matter. It won’t change the fact that I don’t know anything that I could tell you, even if I wanted to.”
“I didn’t think the stick approach was going to work. No, that’s why I haven’t even bothered. I think I might offer you something else to sway you.”
Duncan was firm, trying not to show any expression, but he wondered what the madman could possibly offer him to betray his own people. There was nothing that he could think of that would sway him. Had he the ability, he’d destroy New Atlantis and its life-sucking network of pipes. He’d bring every bit of it down, along with every Magician in the world. “There is nothing you can offer me.”
“Really? Do you not remember why I told you your ancestors hated me? It wasn’t simply because I could do the magic. It was because I could pass the ability onto others of my choosing.”
His heart sank as he began to understand what Fredrick was offering. If he really was Jeremiah Fredrick, he could impart magical abilities on Duncan. Duncan could then return home, return to his parents, and leave the madness of the Wastes behind.
“Ah, I see that there is something I can give you. I thought it might be so.”
“No,” Duncan said firmly without hesitation. “I don’t want your powers.”
“You despise us that much, we who raised you from a baby?”
“I despise what you’ve done to this planet and what you’ve done to the people who are not like you. I despise what you plan on doing to the planet and my people. I despise everything about you and your so-called magic—magic that is sucking the life out of the world.” The anger rained out of Duncan like a river through a broken dam. “Had I the power, I would strike you from this planet. You and your powers are abominations to the natural order of things, a natural order that you started destroying a thousand years ago and continue to do to this day. Once I might have jumped at the opportunity to have magic. But I’ve seen too much. I know what you are.”
Instead of reacting in anger, as Duncan had expected, Jeremiah burst out in laughter. “Oh, that is rich. The poor little boy who grew up with the Magicians doesn’t want magic. Well, suffer then, little man, and learn what real power is.” Fredrick snapped his fingers and Duncan felt an uncomfortable sensation running through his body, making his fingers and toes tingle. It felt like a small amount of electricity coursing through his veins, a sensational power that he just wasn’t used to. He sank to his knees in tears.
“No, I don’t want it. Take it away from me. I don’t want to be like you. I don’t.”
Fredrick’s laughter was deafening. “I’ll tell you what. I’ll remove it, if you still want me to, after you tell me about your father and his plans. Are you ready to do that?”
“No,” Duncan said, looking down at his palm and trying to imagine a fireball there. That’s how Marissa had described how the magic worked. You imagined it and it was. He saw a sparkle there, nothing more than a shift in the light, and felt heat.
“Let me help you,” Jeremiah offered, nodding his head.
A full-fledged fireball formed in Duncan’s hand, the heat burning at his skin.
“You won’t use it, Duncan. You know what I offer you. You are particularly brilliant for a non-magical, and from what the Lord Probate tells me, you crave knowledge. I can give it all to you, Duncan. All you have to do is give up your father.”
Duncan considered it. If Jeremiah really was that man, the first Magician, then he could very well do what he offered. He could give Duncan the proverbial keys to the kingdom. He could even save the world from the inside of the Magician’s world. He quickly dismissed those thoughts. He knew what they were about and he’d seen, firsthand, the damage they’d wrought on the world.
“I’d rather die,” he said as he flung the fireball at Fredrick’s head. The master Magician easily stopped it in midair, where it faded away.
Jeremiah Fredrick didn’t laugh that time. He looked at Duncan with a cold, hard stare and said, “You might very well do just that, but for now you can cool your heels in the dungeon with your pathetic friend.”
Fredrick blinked and Duncan was gone.
