Shadow Mage

by Sarah McCarthy

  She grabbed the sack she’d stashed at the bottom and ran towards what remained of Finn.

  As she approached the body, she could see it was already knitting back together, the bones reforming, the wounds sealing themselves, the order of life reasserting itself. She dropped to her knees, whipping out her blade.

  It took nearly half an hour to get the body into pieces, and they kept edging their way back towards one another as soon as she set them down. She stuffed the heart in one copper box—stolen from the workshop of the earth mages—the lungs in another, wrapped the head in a scarf and tied it around her neck.

  This is the worst. The absolute worst, assignment ever, Jeremy, she thought to herself as her hands slipped in the blood.

  The torso she buried, the rest of the pieces she took with her, pausing every so often to bury one of the boxes here or there.

  She spent all day camped out at the base of the Table. Finn’s head was beginning to smell, and it kept jerking back towards the other, buried pieces of himself, but she had to wait until dark. Couldn’t go back into the Table covered in blood like this.

  When at long, long last, the sun sank and darkness fell, Sarai climbed back up her rope and took it with her inside. She hid in her room and locked the head in a copper-lined trunk.

  She was preparing to take a bath when a knock came at the door.

  I’m not here.

  “Sarai! I know you’re in there! Let me in!” Agnes.

  Sarai sighed, looked down at herself, covered in blood and dirt, and opened the door a crack.

  “Hey,” she said, trying to keep her voice low. “I’m really not feeling well. You’d better not come in; I don’t want to get you sick.”

  Agnes stared at her.

  “You took my rope.” She pushed into the room and gasped when she saw Sarai.

  “My god, Sarai, you’re—is that blood?”

  “No.”

  “It’s definitely blood. Oh my god.” She gasped and turned to the door. “I’ll get Kel.” Sarai grabbed her wrist.

  “It’s nothing. I’ve been… hunting.”

  Agnes yanked her wrist out of Sarai’s grasp and stared at her, her face white.

  “I’m fine. It’s just rabbit’s blood.”

  “What, did you go rabbit hunting with your bare hands? Your teeth?”

  The head Sarai had locked in the trunk thumped against the lid.

  Agnes’ eyes went to the trunk. “Sarai. What is that?”

  Sarai glanced at the trunk. “Umm… nothing.” The head thumped again. “I… I brought a… a pet.”

  “A pet?” Agnes choked out.

  The severed head in the trunk thumped again, loudly.

  “Why is it locked in the trunk?” Agnes straightened, grasping at some of her usual poise.

  “Because… because it… it eats…things.”

  Ropes shot out of Agnes’ hands, coiling themselves around Sarai’s wrists and legs. They cinched themselves tight, crushing her legs together so that she lost her balance and crashed painfully to the floor.

  She fishtailed around, trying to wiggle free. “What did you do that for?”

  “Just… making sure… Where’s the key to the trunk?”

  Sarai’s stomach clenched. “Look, you really don’t want to do that. He’s a … a nice… pet… but he’ll bite your face off. That’s why he’s locked up.”

  “I’m not going anywhere until you show me what’s in that trunk. Or maybe I should come back with Finn?”

  Sarai thought that would be more difficult than Agnes imagined. Actually, that wasn’t a terrible idea.

  “Yes. Come back with Finn. Good idea.”

  Agnes stared at her, her face red. Uncertainty crossed her face.

  “You are covered in blood. Absolutely drenched in it.” The head thumped again, rattling the lock. “You are being…extremely suspicious.”

  “I’m not the one who attacked another student,” Sarai said from her position on the floor, trying to put as much moral weight behind her words as she could muster. Meanwhile, she was working one of her daggers free from its sheath at the small of her back.

  Agnes waved a hand absently. “Finn’s never cared about things like that.”

  What is wrong with these people?

  “What, attacking people?”

  Agnes didn’t answer, she was looking from the trunk to Sarai. Her gaze swept the room, and she moved to the desk and started pulling open drawers.

  After a thorough search of the room, she stared at Sarai.

  “Give me the key.”

  “I melted it.”

  “You melted the key to the place you locked your pet? You are such a bad liar. Give it to me now.”

  “I told you, it’ll eat your face.”

  Agnes planted her hands on her hips.

  “And what, exactly, is this fearsome creature you have locked in your trunk?”

  Sarai cast about mentally, trying to think of something plausible yet terrifying enough.

  “I can see you thinking, you know.”

  The threads of Sarai’s tunic clenched around her, wriggling against her skin. Sarai jerked, and yelped as they tickled her.

  “Ow, stop, stop!”

  A thread emerged from her pocket, holding the key aloft. Untangling itself from her tunic, it carried it straight into Agnes’ waiting hand. Betrayed by my own clothes.

  Agnes bent over the trunk, fiddling with the lock. Sarai took advantage of her distraction, managed to grasp the handle of one of her blades, and sliced it through the ropes. Agnes turned, but Sarai lunged at her before she could react. She had the blade around the girl’s throat, pressing up against her larynx, but it was too late. The lid popped open and the head bounced out.

  Agnes shrieked. The head, dripping blood and grinning horrifically, sailed over their heads, dribbling blood across their faces. It landed on the floor and began rolling squelchily away.

  Gods damn it.

  The threads of the carpet lifted, began entangling themselves around Sarai’s legs, but she pressed the knife harder into Agnes’ throat.

  “You try one more thing with those threads of yours and I’ll cut your throat,” she said, keeping her voice as low and menacing as she could manage.

  But even as she said it, she felt uncertainty tugging at her. This wasn’t someone she’d been paid to kill. This wasn’t someone Jeremy had sent her after. Those were almost invariably bad people, as far as she could tell. I can’t let you go. I can’t let you… Well, maybe she could. She’d done what she’d come to do. Except who knew where that head was off to.

  “That was… that was Finn…” Agnes choked, gasping against the blade. It nicked the skin, drawing blood.

  “No, it wasn’t.”

  “Yes, it was.”

  “It was a magic… rabbit.”

  “Please stop trying to lie to me. You’re just… so bad at it.”

  Sarai released her and fell back.

  “All right. Look. He told me to. Except now the head’s getting away and it’s only a matter of time before it finds the rest of him.” Unless the copper worked.

  Agnes rubbed her hand across her throat and stared at Sarai.

  “Why would he…” She trailed off, staring at the bloody trail as if trying to wrap her mind around it.

  “That’s his business. And yes, you can go look for him if you want. I could have killed you, you know.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I’d rather not.”

  “I can see that.”

  A job has never gone this badly before.

  “I’m not a… a killer.”

  “You clearly are.”

  Sarai glared at her. “I don’t just kill random people. I’m an assassin.” She lifted herself up higher.

  “Did Finn hire you?”

  “No. But he wanted to be killed, and there is some… magic thing protecting him, so he asked for my help.”

  Agnes crossed her arms and sucked her teeth. She drummed
her fingers on her forearms.

  “Are you even a mage?”

  “No.”

  She dropped her arms. “All right, I believe you.”

  Sarai nearly dropped the dagger. “You what?”

  Agnes moved for the door. “We’d better go get that head before it joins up with the rest of him. And you didn’t really think that trunk was going to contain him, did you?”

  “Wait. What?” Sarai said, moving hesitantly to follow her. “You… you came in here… found me dripping in blood… found your favorite teacher’s head in my trunk… and… you’re just going to take my word for it that he asked me to kill him?” Is everyone here completely insane?

  Agnes shrugged. “It’s not the craziest thing I’ve heard today. And… honestly, it fits.”

  “Fits what? What possible evidence do you have?”

  “I mean, if you’d asked me to guess your profession, I would have said assassin. And… Finn was the one that introduced you. He was being really weird about it, too. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Finn is always weird, but… yeah, no this makes sense.”

  “It really, really, does not.”

  “You clearly haven’t been here long enough, then.”

  The trail of blood was now picking itself up off the floor, the little droplets inching towards the door. They didn’t have far to go, though, because Finn himself came bursting in.

  “Gods dammit,” Sarai said, slumping back to the floor.

  “Hello, Finn,” Agnes said brightly.

  Finn’s gaze was locked on Sarai, and little flames flickered along his arms and through his fingertips as the droplets of blood climbed up onto his boots, onto his legs, and soaked into his skin.

  “I told you to give me a few weeks!” he shouted. His whole left side was smeared with dirt where he’d landed. Sarai stared glumly at the limbs she’d so carefully dismembered and buried.

  “It’s been less than a week! That’s it! I thought we had a deal.”

  “I need to practice! I’m not going to just sit around doing nothing!”

  Finn’s face twisted in frustration and he took a deep breath, looking around and his eyes focused on Agnes. “Oh. Agnes. Hello.”

  “Hello,” she said, smiling brightly. “Look, you know what you two need? You need me.”

  They both turned to stare at her.

  “Clearly, you need to do more research,” she said to Sarai. “And you know nothing about magic, as is quite clear from the inane, murder-focused questions you’ve been asking.”

  Sarai folded her arms and glowered at her. “I would have had it if you hadn’t come in.”

  “There’s no way that head—sorry, your head, sir—was going to stay in that trunk.”

  “I wasn’t going to leave it in the trunk,” Sarai said, waving a hand. “I was going to take it with me!”

  Something small and wet came bouncing into the room, leapt up, attached itself to Finn’s neck, and slowly burrowed its way inside him. Finn grimaced.

  “Yes, Agnes. Great idea. And please, keep her from trying again for at least a week, all right? Then you can murder me all you want.”

  Agnes gave a quick, efficient nod. “Yes, sir. Don’t worry. We won’t bother you.”

  “Great. Wonderful,” he snapped, glaring at Sarai one final time before storming out.

  13

  Kel

  The air tugged at the eagle’s feathers as it skimmed lightly over the treetops. It cocked its head sharply this way and that, scanning the ground for the tiny flickers of movement that would tell it where a mouse or a chipmunk skittered. It didn’t mind Kel being there, looking out its eyes as it made lazy loops over the forest.

  Miles away, in the distance, the King’s Table rose, a red sandstone mesa with a black fortress on top, lifting out of the green tangle of forest that surrounded it.

  Kel slipped out of the eagle’s mind, dropped down and away, into a squirrel running along a branch. It leaped, plummeted a few feet, and landed squarely on a walnut tree heavily laden with nuts. It plucked a few, stuffed them into its cheeks, gave a few sharp glances around, then hurried on.

  Kel let it run away without her because she had found what she’d come for.

  Here the trees were turning brown, their leaves shriveling, the new shoots of spring dead and dry where they’d only just begun to sprout. She was the tree now, her roots drinking deeply far underground, her branches stretching up, fighting with her neighbors for the sunlight. But something was inside of her. Little wriggling things with sharp teeth had burrowed their way in through her thick protective bark.

  Kel bit back a gasp; for a moment her eyes fluttered open. Her head rested on the trunk of an apple tree in full fragrant bloom. The sun was warm on her face.

  She closed her eyes again, and was instantly back, that tree with the dark things chewing away at its insides.

  And the tree next to it as well, and the next. They were everywhere, burrowing in, chewing and eating the delicate structures of the trees’ insides, leaving their eggs, which soon hatched into larva which would eat still more.

  Kel could feel the trees’ pain, the horror of what was happening to them, the inevitability. They couldn’t escape, couldn’t run as thousands and thousands of little creatures ate them alive.

  And now Kel was one of these creatures. Hungry and eating, pregnant, searching for the perfect spot to lay its eggs. She expanded her awareness. There were more, hundreds, thousands, this whole side of the forest was being eaten away by them.

  It wasn’t their fault. They were only doing what they needed to survive, following their instincts.

  Please slow down, Kel thought to one in particular. But the little creature didn’t understand what she meant. It took another bite, chewing and swallowing, readying its den for the eggs that were near bursting inside of it.

  She applied some gentle pressure to its mind, to the minds of the millions of its brothers and sisters around it.

  Please, not so many of you.

  But what could she ask them to do? Have fewer children? Let their babies die? Starve themselves? Kel stayed with the beetle, felt it give birth to thirty translucent white eggs in a sticky pile. It felt nothing: no joy, no worry for its children, it only backed its way out of the tunnel, hungry now, in search of more leaves to eat.

  Kel left it, became the forest around it, became a hundred trees, withering, dying, some dead already, their bare branches like skeletons, red brown streaks among the green leaves. The forest floor carpeted with fallen needles around them.

  She reached out again to the beetles, could feel that bit of their minds that she could sway. She could slow them. She could stop them. She could make them crawl to the ground, stop eating until they died. But they were innocent. They hadn’t done anything more than be good at what they did. They were good at surviving. Mindless and focused on eating, but not evil. But the trees themselves were defenseless, and she could see that soon, if she did nothing, the acres and acres of forest around the Table that she had spent ten years gently cultivating would be gone. A dried-out cemetery.

  “Oh, I’m so sorry!”

  A voice brought Kel back to her body, the interruption saving her from having to make a decision.

  Two girls had just come around a corner. One of them carried a basket over one arm, the other had a blanket slung over a shoulder. They were both blushing furiously.

  “We’re so sorry to interrupt,” the one carrying the basket said, backing up. “We’ll go.”

  “Oh, no,” Kel said, trying to smile, her thoughts still slow and beetle-like. “No, it’s all right. I was just thinking.” She gestured to the grass. “Please, sit.”

  She stood, a little unsteady on her feet after the two hours she’d spent sitting, brushed the leaves off her long blue dress, and, nodding in an encouraging way, she left.

  She decided to wait. To think about the problem another day. She would have to think of something.

  14

  Sarai


  “So. An assassin,” Agnes said, flopping down on the netting. She and Sarai were back at Agnes’ secret lair. The rain was pouring down around them, dripping off the leaves into puddles on the forest floor below. A colorful tarp was draped over the platform, and a glass ball filled with warm purple flames balanced in the middle of the netting. Agnes’ one concession to the usefulness of other types of magic. Payl had moved off to a neighboring tree and was rapidly disappearing into a cocoon of yarn. “What’s that like?”

  Sarai considered this, then shrugged one shoulder. “Fine.” She moved closer to the hot purple flames, felt the steam starting to rise from her drenched tunic. She held her hands out to the heat, opening her palms and feeling the warmth wash over them.

  Agnes rolled over onto her stomach, propped her head up on her fists, and looked at her sharply. “How many people have you killed?”

  “Fifty maybe?”

  Agnes’ eyes widened. “Do you feel bad about it?”

  “It’s just a job.”

  “Do you just assassinate whomever?”

  “No.” Sarai decided to try changing the subject. “Is that the first suit you ever made?”

  Agnes rolled her eyes. “Don’t change the subject.” Her eyes lit up. “Oooh. Who hired you? Did they say why they want Finn dead?”

  Sarai sat down, crossing her legs and leaning her elbows on her knees. She sighed. I guess information is the price of Agnes’ help. She grimaced. I don’t need help. But, this time, she absolutely did. “I don’t know who hired me. Technically they didn’t hire me, anyway.”

  “What’s that mean?” Agnes’ brow furrowed.

  Sarai waved a hand. “They hired Jer—my friend. I work for him.”

  “Ah.” Agnes nodded sagely. She rolled onto her back and lay looking up at the canopy of leaves above them. For several seconds she said nothing.

  “Any ideas on how to kill Finn?” Sarai asked finally.

  “Not really. I read up on oath stones. Found plenty of stuff saying how they’re unbreakable, how the Ael made them for their dealings with humans. Nothing about how they actually work.” She sighed. “Nothing about anyone getting out of one. Ever.”