My Path to Magic

Chapter 16

Reading biographies of famous combat mages didn’t fascinate me, but I heard that all of them were motivated by external stimuli. Typically, we, dark magicians, find a compromise between our natural instincts and reasonable opportunities to satisfy them (if we can’t, we die) and reach a certain balance in our existence. Ordinary people get used to everything—even to ugly, pugnacious, vindictive, and heartless dark magicians, and life gets back to normal. But some dark have no such luck. Certain unavoidable circumstances don’t let them settle a warm nest, prompting painful and unnatural efforts such as a struggle for power, defense of the fatherland, or perfection of the art of dark magic. What’s the point? Instead of a simple desire to be at the top of their local hierarchy, they take responsibility for the future of the nation, the sovereignty of economics, or (god save me from such fate!) health and safety. Some quirk of the psyche fancifully changes the nature of the unfortunate guys; poetically speaking, they hear the Voice of Destiny. That’s the story people tell about the celebrities.

I need to confess: I didn’t hear any such voices. In my case, it all began quite casually, with a funeral.

I was notified of a telegram from home. It was strange, because I did not expect any correspondence: at the beginning of summer Joe wrote to me twice, asking to come home, but I excused myself, referring to the new job. Did he decide to try again?

The telegram was drafted without any attempt to save money on punctuation marks (most likely, my mother sent it); it briefly stated that Uncle Gordon had passed away, and the funeral would be in two days. Not that the message was incredible (we are all mortal). I just couldn’t understand why he died now. Last summer the old man looked quite cheerful—magicians generally live long. The dark mages cannot grieve keenly in principle; we all will meet out there sooner or later. But I had some plans for Uncle, and they would have to be changed now. And one more thing: will Chief Harlik agree to tell me what he promised to find out for the old man?

In this philosophical mood I came to work, barely responded to the greetings of my coworkers, and sat down to meditate over the bills. All of my drawings were finished a week ago, the calculations - checked and rechecked. Carl personally controlled the assembly of the modules; I was bored and wanted to follow Polak’s example: hide somewhere and take a nap. Perhaps I looked gloomily detached.

“Something isn’t working?” Johan began to worry.

“No,” I waved my hand dismissively, “my uncle passed away.”

I shouldn’t have said it to him. The white began clucking around me, and within a minute the whole office knew of my loss. They grieved over the death of a stranger more than me, who had known him all my life.

Mr. Polak decided that I must urgently take some time off and go to the funeral. I didn’t care about the obsequies, but didn’t mind a few days away. It was summer after all!

“Will you be okay without me?” I put on an act that I did not want to go.

“Family is your first priority!” the boss cut me short. “The model works--what’s left is the assembly—and we’ll sort it out.”

Excellent! And if they fail, I will be away—nobody could blame me.

To get to the funeral in time, I had to leave right away. It turned out that only one ticket was left for the Krauhard Express. It was in first class, for the outrageous sum of one hundred and twenty crowns, but dinner was included. I sighed with relief, and the cashier raised his eyebrow in surprise. He didn’t know that, given availability in economy class, greed would have forced me to buy the cheapest ticket. Then my zombie-dog would have to stay in Redstone, and the revivifying curses I imposed on it could fall off before my return. To come back to realize that the city was quarantined because of my dog would be… unpleasant.

For Max to get on the train was a piece of cake: under the guise of a bale of fur (it was incredible how tightly you could pack an animal when it did not resist). In order to get the dog off the railcar at the desired station, it was enough to just throw the bale out of the window. The next morning I sat on the express train, riding in the direction of Krauhard. I was going to arrive at the funeral just in time.

Krauhard met me with its usual fog and empty platform, but some things did change, yes. No one could say that a dark magician takes the death of a relative lightly! I adjusted the lapel of a deliberately fashionable, beige-plaid jacket without a single black thread, but with a bright red tie. Tribute to tradition! Black, as well as white, is not considered a mourning color in Krauhard. In the past, people didn’t think much about funeral colors, but they settled on purple-red in the end. It was elegant, practical and, on top of that, red was the symbol of “pure death”, death not defiled by a supernatural touch. (Anyone who saw ghouls would understand my point.) But Krauhardians don’t practice a parade of mourning colors. A tribute to passed away is paid by arranging a lavish funeral and taking custody of dependents of the deceased (especially young children); his or her pets (horse, dog, or cat) receive special treatment as well. Krauhardian funerals served as a favorite subject for jokes: newcomers often confused them with weddings. From a stranger’s viewpoint, they were almost the same, except that people sang different songs and had no cake on the table. To me, there is nothing wrong with the similarity of the events—both require some optimism from the family. I, for instance, never understood the popularity of mourning and grieving at the white funeral. Would a normal deceased want his or her relatives to weep and tear their hair? Only a pervert would like that, and what would be the point of crying about him at all then? Uncle Gordon didn’t have close relatives, especially underage; at least, we knew none of them. The village alchemist did not keep pets or cattle, so that simplified the entire list of things to do. Just the booze. In fact, I had hoped for that.

Touched by the moment, the gloved conductor passed onto the platform my large leather suitcase with small iron wheels. I gave him a crown.

“Oh, Thomas!” mother clasped her hands. “You look beautiful!”

“How are you,” I shyly welcomed them, hiding a smug smile.

Joe scratched his head, trying to decide where to put my luxurious case.

“Throw it in the back,” I solved his problem. “I’ll clean it by spell later.”

The main thing was to preserve my polished look for the occasion, while invited funeral guests were still coherent enough to notice anything—that would be until afternoon. The success of Uncle Gordon’s apprentice would honor his deceased mentor!

In his last journey Gordon Ferro was escorted by all of Krauhard. I managed to arrive at the time of the bearing out, walked to the cemetery in the morning chill, waited until the priest had performed all the rituals for the final rest, and threw a pinch of salt on the coffin. I looked like a walking advertisement of the benefits of education, and even threw off a speech to thank my first teacher Gordon. Those present nodded understandingly and embarked on a return trip to the tables, set in the machine yard in the open air. First songs and the rousing rhythm of a tambourine sounded; the most beautiful Krauhardian girl—the daughter of the village’s headman—raised a pennant symbolizing the funeral of a dark magician. The street festivity was also part of the tradition: whatever deity was in charge of the now deceased, it ought to take into account how many relatives the dead had done favors for.

Uncle Gordon’s funeral feast passed with enthusiasm: toasts and wishes of luck to the old man in hell or heaven were heard everywhere. Some recalled with especially acrimonious toasts that he left important stuff of theirs unrepaired (I took note of them; it would be a good dead on my part to fulfill the promises of the passed away). In general, people were optimistic regarding the destination of uncle’s soul and the prospects of their village (after all, someone was going to replace the deceased alchemist). They offered me to take his vacant place, but I pleaded that I was still studying. The tradition was observed at its best.

My neighbor across the table fascinatingly depicted the mischief and tricks that Uncle Gordon got into when he was young. I experienced difficulty meshing those adventures with the image of the bilious and pedantic alchemist.

“By the way, why was the coffin closed?” I wondered.

A neighbor hissed: “He passed away suddenly, on the street. Animals ate his body a little.”

It was strange. Around Uncle’s home there were always ward-off spells that turned small animals away—the alchemist did not like his furry neighbors.

“Where did he die?”

“He was found behind his garage.”

It was sounding stranger and stranger. What would he have been doing there?

The gathering was over before the darkness fell; the villagers used to spend their nights at home in Krauhard. That is another local exotic feature: all drink, but virtually without getting drunk. Or next day there would be a new funeral. Generally, thoughts about eternal rest are very sobering. Wives were slowly taking home their swaying husbands; my neighbor across the table was given a ride in a wheelbarrow. I managed to stay up until the end without falling under the bench and soiling myself with salad from head to toe; aside from me, the only two sober were Joe and the village elder, a very proper man for Krauhard. Of course, others started asking us for help. Catching that moment, I pretended that I was going to pee and quietly hid behind the outbuildings. I didn’t want to be covered with puke! Another half an hour to make sure that I escaped the dubious honor, I decided to spend on something useful. I took a walk to the place of Uncle’s sudden death to check the condition of his ward-off spells.

My head was pleasantly spinning. The houses on the other side of the valley were bathed in sunlight, but the northern slope was cold and quite dark. There were no bushes around; otherwise, I would have gotten lost in them. To find out where exactly Uncle died was impossible—all the rocks looked the same, and, indeed, I did not feel any spells. Why was that so? Perhaps, the disappearance of the spells was the reason the old man had climbed there; usually, he did not show any passion for mounting.

I decided to walk up the hill a bit further and look for seals, the round granite washers that usually serve as anchors for household magic. Guess why they are granite, but not lead, glass, or gold? I didn’t know until Mr. Rakshat explained: that way they won’t be stolen. Though the best materials to absorb a curse are silver and copper. The rough rock washers showed up almost immediately; each of them carried a ward-off rune meaning, in theory, that no any filthy animal, real or supernatural, could come close to the dwelling of the alchemist and desecrate his corpse. I had found the only explanation—the contour wasn’t closed. The seals were set quite frequently, so that the theft of one or two washers would not affect the performance of the runes. I felt an urge to check the entire perimeter, but common sense suggested choosing another day for the investigation.

For example, a day when there would be more time before sunset, because overly self-confident dark magicians do not last long in Krauhard. And I needed to be sober, too…

I sighed, pondering how fast city life had weaned me from cautiousness, and started slowly making way back. A warm bed was already dancing before my eyes; if I sang Joe a story about poor me, tired from the trip to Krauhard, he would surely agree to give me a ride home in his carriage. A wheelbarrow would suit me fine as well… Having almost reached Uncle’s home, I came across two strange guys, poking around some junk machinery under the awning. But the excess of food eaten and drink imbibed did not permit me to understand what they were doing and why their faces looked unfamiliar. A lot of people had gathered for the funeral—maybe these guys were the guests of some villagers? Muttering, “Excuse me, dudes,” I passed them, but as soon as the strangers got behind me, something stung my side. What the hell…? My legs gave way, weak-willed corpse collapsed—not on the ground, but into the clutching hands of that duo. I was quickly pulled behind the garage.

“Well?” one of them asked tensely.

“Nothing,” the other said, thoroughly searching my pockets.

“Damn! What was he looking for here?”

“F*ck knows. What should we do? Two corpses in the same place would be suspicious; we don’t want cops’ attention.”

The first one thought for a moment. “Drop him into a gully,” he made a decision. “They’ll think he was drunk.”

All my sensibilities howled in protest: the mountain’s slope was cleaved through by the gully right behind Uncle’s property, which was kind of a canyon in miniature, all in narrow cracks and wet boulders. If I fell into it, my bones would be broken, and people would find me by smell a few days later. Alas, despite the roaring power of my Source, my muscles were limp and motionless, and I wasn’t able to concentrate on spellcasting. Another mess I got myself into!

Max came to my aid: it raised voice. The growling of the zombie-dog was as music to me. I do not know what those two had managed to descry, but in a moment only a quickly subsiding sound of footsteps reminded of their existence. I lay there, slowly grasping the horror of my situation. I couldn’t send Max for help; anyone in Krauhard would immediately recognize the zombie in it. What the drunken bums were capable of doing with the dog, I was afraid to think of. My only option was to wait for the poison’s action to end. I hoped I would be all right. Dark magicians are surprisingly overconfident! I mentally ordered Max to watch for the two strangers and prepared to wait.

Minutes dragged on slowly. It was getting dark, or maybe darkness was just growing in my eyes. I was running out of breath; all the power of my Source was not enough to drive away the nasty, pulling cold that was getting closer and closer to my heart. And then I realized that Uncle Gordon died exactly like that—alone on the cold rocks, knowing that his murder would be declared death from senile weakness. The two strangers were the cause of his death. To kill them! But while I lay here, they would be far away, and Max seemed not to hear me.

The cold escalated into a dull ache, and fear of suffocation started pestering me. How soon would they notice that I was missing? Joe, perhaps, decided that I had gone home on foot. It would take a while until they figured out that I wasn’t there… Logic dictated that they would begin worrying only in the morning; a dark magician was more likely to survive at night than drunken rescuers.

I tried not to panic and think optimistically. To recall my job, focus on my plans for the future (I had so many of them!), focus on my eccentric family that couldn’t manage without the help of the pragmatic dark mage. The rustle of blood in my ears lulled so sweetly… but I needed to stay awake. Stop! Since when did blood rustle?!

I made an incredible effort to turn my eyes, dried out from not blinking, and noticed that something flickered on the edge of the cleft, vaguely resembling a pile of foliage whipped by the wind.

It couldn’t be worse.

Meeting a creature from the other world was the last thing that I needed now, precisely at this moment. Indeed, Rustle did not forget the heart it had heard. It came after me, but I was so young yet! On the other hand, to recall my life before dying wouldn’t take much time; I didn’t live long. First of all, I shouldn’t show the creature my fear. If my illegal practice had taught me anything, it was the conventional wisdom that the undead learned about its adversary’s power by how fearless the adversary was. Maybe it came after me to avenge its deceased comrades? What nonsense got into my head… I was not going to surrender without a fight, but my power, suppressed by the poison, would be enough for just a friendly slap. The monster would guzzle me, no question, and maybe choke as well. I would torture it with heartburn!

I needed to think about something cheerful. What was nice in my life? My motorcycle, short-term anonymous glory, my cute zombie-dog, Lyuchik who wanted to tell me something—all day long he had been bobbing around me. The two scoundrels searched for something, but what? Family honor required me to find and seize the treasure. By now every heartbeat in my chest caused sharp pain, my dried up eyes burned, and a string of pictures from the past day (so bright!) floated in my mind, mixing with episodes of the busy last year, events of the previous summer, recollections of the first meeting with Rustle.

I got scared only after realizing that I was staring at myself from outside, from the ruins, bottom-up.

Chapter 17

The auditors from the capitol did arrive, as Mr. Satal predicted, but Locomotive was not afraid of them. His office was like a storefront—transparent and shiny; it screamed, “Look, but don’t touch.” The rigorous auditors would see papers in ideal order, friendly clerks, guards in polished uniforms, and an almost complete absence of rank at the office: everyone was on an assigned task. NZAMIPS was snowed under with work!

Never before had so many operatives obtained vacations in early summer…

Locomotive did not deceive himself: had the auditors set a goal to get to him, they could have easily found or invented a case. Perhaps, that occasion wouldn’t be serious enough for a full internal investigation; in the worst case, it would lead to a reprimand or a record of “incomplete conformity”. Unpleasant, too, but he was used to that. No one could hang blame on him for the appearance of the banned potion on the market.

Judging by the displeasure with which the auditors examined the results of the police investigation, they were well aware of the situation. Yes, the case of dragon tears had already gone to court. Ms. Kevinahari had given the captain a tip, and the lab was quickly caught red-handed; however, the mastermind of that crime had fled and, by Locomotive’s estimation, was already quietly killed somewhere. Such failures could not be pardoned. In the hands of NZAMIPS investigators there were two haywire white mages and a few small fries who distributed the poison under the guise of a stimulant. Without regret, Captain Baer addressed capitol authorities on the question of how the criminals had gotten the recipe for the most dangerous venom—it was outside his jurisdiction. The villain, declared wanted, had moved to Redstone from the East Coast just a year ago, so let the central office find out what he was doing here.

For the auditing period, Mr. Satal, the senior coordinator of the region, defiantly left the city; upon returning, he was astonishingly well-informed about everything that had happened.

“We got off easy,” Mr. Satal briefly summarized the result. “Captain, I was told that they had a direct order to fire the higher-ups in Redstone’s division but could not find anybody wishing to take your post. So do not consider it a success. The Dark Knight still hangs over our heads, and no empath can predict what he is capable of.”

“It is unlikely that he will do anything crazy,” the captain said thoughtfully. “He has a new source of income now. Why would he run the risk?”

The dark mage glanced at the captain indignantly, and Locomotive regretted that he hadn’t put a protective suit on.

“Confess, you sleazebag, who is it?”

“Uh… a student, I think. I warn you, I have no evidence!”

“To hell with the evidence! Are you sure it’s him?”

The captain shrugged: “He has a non-standard channel of power. He was involved in illegal practices. For three years he lived in a dormitory, paying fifty dollars per semester; now he rents an apartment. He wears suits that cost my monthly salary, each! He is originally from Krauhard. Earlier this year he bought a black motorcycle in the ‘Plaza’.”

Locomotive did not mention the incident with the crystal, nor the fact that he had begun making inquiries only after he had seen a gentleman that the poor scruffy boy, ready to chase brownies for twenty crowns, had turned to.

“Hmm,” Mr. Satal blissfully squinted his eyes. “Introduce him to me!”

“Why?” Locomotive became tense.

“I want to look him in the eyes,” the senior coordinator fidgeted in his chair. “Don’t you understand? He’s a genius! A gold nugget. Forty-four episodes, with no insurance and not a single misfire. Ordinary mages are not capable of such things. Just Tangor the Second, you know!

“Tangor?” the captain stiffened.

“Yes! Tangor was a coordinator about twenty years ago; at the courses he drove our brains up the wall… He served here, too.”

That was why the student’s name seemed so familiar to him! Locomotive strained his memory: “Toder Tangor?”

“Exactly. How do you know?”

“We worked together. I was already a lieutenant then.”

Captain Baer belatedly realized that he was almost twice as old as his boss, and questions of seniority for the dark were a sore topic. But the danger had passed.

Mr. Satal pointedly raised his finger: “He was also a genius!”

“Sorry that he ended badly.”

“All because of his own people,” the coordinator’s face suddenly hardened. “But that will not happen to me!”

The captain politely stayed silent. Everyone has his own hang-ups! However, didn’t Baer himself rave about conspiracy of the elite? They were from the same office, and long service in NZAMIPS used to affect brains of its employees.

“By the way, the student’s name is Tangor. Do you think he is a relative?”

“All the Tangors are relatives, but it’s unlikely that our student is a close one. That coordinator lived in Finkaun.”

Locomotive breathed… and gasped: he did not have enough courage to tell the coordinator of the rewritten crystal.

“What?” Mr. Satal squinted suspiciously.

And people say that the dark mages cannot feel people!

“Aren’t you surprised with all this?” Locomotive blurted the first thing that came into his mind. “I mean the repulsive behavior of the “cleaners”, the ghouls, and dragon tears—all that in one place after ten years of quietness? Keep in mind, I had repeatedly reported about the doings of Grokk, but nobody reacted. As if nothing out of the ordinary was going on. F*ck with him, deceased! Nowadays our prison is overcrowded with dissidents. And what is interesting is that half of them are immigrants. They lived normally somewhere, and then about a year ago decided to move to Redstone. What was the reason? Some kind of festival? Maybe I missed the poster?”

The senior coordinator frowned thoughtfully and folded his palms as if making a house of cards.

“There is an opinion swirling around,” he began cautiously, “that some of the events bear traces of premeditation.”

Who would doubt that!

“Aliens?”

“No, our own people.”

“What do they hope to accomplish?” the captain got interested.

Mr. Satal shrugged: “Power. Wealth. Satisfaction of their brutish instincts. What else can they get by fishing in troubled waters? I don’t know whether you follow politics,” Locomotive chuckled knowingly, “but suggestions to ‘improve’ the social order of Ingernika come regularly.”

“Can’t we just bring these wiseacres to reason?”

“Unfortunately, the people who generate the ideas and the ones who implement them are not the same; so far we can’t prove a connection between them. And an attempt to ban debate would have violated the principles of democracy. Our options are education and prevention of violence and destruction.”

“Don’t you think that letting them stay on the loose is kind of… dumb?”

“Risk is inevitable, but our society must prove its historical sustainability continuously, whether it wants to or not.”

The dark spoke about the problem as if he were reading a piece of paper, quietly and impartially, perhaps exactly as he perceived it. Locomotive was an ordinary man, and he couldn’t detach himself the same way. He thought about casual witnesses, innocent victims, children whose lives would be crippled by their fanatical parents. How many of the forty thousand inhabitants of fallen Nintark really wanted to participate in the large-scale magic experiment?

The coordinator noticed a shadow on the face of his subordinate and nodded: “There will be victims. But that’s the distinguishing feature of our adversaries’ regimes—attempts to avoid casualties at all costs. You already know the results that come of their actions. We are required to limit the death toll to the members of the risk groups.”

Who would be in those groups? A few days ago Locomotive was visited by a relative, who promised to show her children the zoo during summer break. The cop’s little niece (his second or third cousin from the side of his mother’s sister’s husband) told him with excitement that the Dark Knight came to their town in winter, ousted a ghost from the town hall, and gave the children a ride on his motorcycle two times around the church. The captain checked reports regarding the incident and realized that he could never have met that relative of his again. And the one to blame would be Grokk and, through him, indirectly, the people who carefully planned and organized chaos in Redstone county to achieve their filthy goals. Therefore, whatever the dark mage had said about historical necessity, Locomotive hoped to find the villains and render them harmless, even if his actions would be excessive.

God knows, it will strongly improve the social order.

Chapter 18

Lyuchik saved me.

Our novice white mage and his buddies snuck their way into the funeral feast to watch the boozers. Please don’t think that Krauhardians often get dead drunk. He watched me going behind the garage, but did not see me come back. Despite the risk of being punished for lewdness, Lyuchik went to the elders and demanded to find me. When a group with charmed lamps (we take them everywhere in Krauhard) turned round the garage, Rustle disappeared without a trace. Thus, one brother saved another.

Then Joe gave me CPR and heart massage for forty minutes without a break until the headman’s truck reached the county hospital. (Anyone who has tried giving CPR even once would understand Joe’s heroism; I would have lasted for a maximum of fifteen minutes). I regained consciousness after two days in intensive care, and for the first five minutes I was convinced that I woke up in heaven: everything was white, luminous, and slightly hazy. I seemed to see angels even… Still not sure whether it was my imagination or something else.

Nobody was able to understand the depth of my problems there. I bent over backwards to convince the healers that I was healthy, but the attending doctor proved the opposite with perverse pleasure. And he called himself a white! By the end of the week I got sick to death of his saying “my friend”. In part, he was right: for a couple of days my eyesight occasionally weakened and sharp pain pierced muscles on any attempt to get up; but eventually all these symptoms were gone.

“Do not argue with me, my friend,” the doctor lisped good-naturedly, tapping me on the knee with his knocker. I was lucky that he didn’t use needles! He laughed, “The injection you received would have killed an ordinary man on the spot, but dark mages are exceptionally strong bastards.”

If the doctor said so, I had to believe him. As a result, he forbade me to cast spells at least for another two months; he even wrote a letter to the university to that end.

“Why are you in a hurry?” Chief Harlik asked when he came to interrogate me. “We called your boss, he reacted with understanding, and you are free until the beginning of the semester. I wish I had a boss like yours!”

Should I explain to the man that if I do not renew the revivifying spell, Max would bite half of Krauhard’s residents? I did not want to teach cannibalism to my dog.

“So, what happened then?”

He listened attentively to my story and confirmed with a nod the suspicion that Uncle was poisoned, but did not share the progress of the investigation: “We will find those two. It’s a pity that you did not descry them better. Do you know what they were looking for?”

“I have no idea. I thought Uncle had said something to you.”

He pursed his lips.

“We’ll return to that later. Two days before his death, Gordon had received a parcel, something small and light. Do you know from whom?” Perhaps he understood my answer by the expression on my face. “Okay, have a rest. Talk to you later.”

And then I decided to ask a very important question: “How do people die from an attack of Rustle? I’ve wanted to ask for a long time.”

He shrugged: “Hard to say—there used to be no witnesses. Typically, only bones and a puddle of brown foam remain on the spot.”

At that moment I recalled the caretaker on King’s Island. On the other hand, I doubted that he tore off his own jaw.

“How do you treat the victims?”

“We don’t! Just wait until they will recover on their own. The victims show a positive reaction to the presence of the supernatural in their bodies for life. Rustle, you know, does not forget the ones that it has marked. I hope that was a rhetorical question?”

I raised my eyebrow: “A professional one. We had a lecture about it at the university.”

“Yeah, I heard that story!” he perked up. “Some dude from the dark had fun there, didn’t he?”

I winced: “NZAMIPS shook up all the dark mages in the vicinity after that.”

“It’s only for the benefit of our kind!”

He went off, and I was left to ponder about the vanity of vanities. Had I told them about Rustle, they would have simply locked me up for forty days; by that time my zombie-dog would have gone berserk. On the other hand, no one else saw the monster; if I showed a positive reaction later, I could always say that was the result of my visit to the King’s Island. Go prove it! I just needed to be more careful and leave quicker: bones and brown foam were not my style.

The next day I was discharged from the hospital and found out that I couldn’t leave for Redstone right away.

My relatives all came together on the spacious headman’s truck to take me home. Lyuchik was as happy as if I had returned from the dead (which was almost true), and my mother cried on my chest. I am, of course, a dark mage and surely heartless, but I couldn’t leave them just by saying “ciao!”—my sudden departure would not fit the situation logically. I had to stay with my family for at least a week. And not go anywhere at night.

“What a terrible thing happened!” I did not know how many times my mother repeated those words. On the way home she calmed down, but clung to my hand as if I were about to be taken away. “Somebody tried to break into Gordon’s house: they broke the windows and left.”

I knew what had scared them off. They must have had fantastic cheekiness to appear twice in the place, guarded by the zombie-dog.

What were they looking for? Certainly they had not found it, or wouldn’t come for a second time. Small, lightweight, measuring just over the size of a notebook—that was how Chief Harlik seemed to describe the thing. My fantasy didn’t go further than a hundred thousand crowns in bonds or a confession from the Prime Minister’s wife, though hardly anyone would be killed over the latter. The poison still reared its ugly head in my weakness and difficulty in concentrating attention. I got tired on the short trip home, as though I were walking on foot through all of Krauhard from end-to-end. Joe even had to help me undress. I hadn’t experienced such weakness since I was seven years old! Yes, I was obviously sick, and home care would not hurt; perhaps it would be a good idea to rest for a week or two—home cooking, full relaxation, and no visits to the shit factory. As a typical dark, I couldn’t care less about the doctor’s ban on spellcasting; as to Rustle, I was inclined to think that it had missed its chance to reach out for me.

A man can hope for the best, can’t he?!

The last week of vacation was horrible—my own weakness angered me, and the thought of a valuable treasure being found by others led me into frenzy, as if I were going to give away something of my own. All my spare time was split between the hunt for a cache in Uncle’s house (under the pretext of sorting out his stuff) and the interrogation of witnesses. Not every police officer was capable of obtaining a simple answer to a specific question from a resident of Krauhard (whether dark or not), but I was relentless, like a runny nose. The fact that I was the only alchemist in the valley now was helping me in the investigation; with all their problems, the villagers were forced to go to me. The postman remembered that the parcel Uncle received two days before his death had Ho-Carg’s address. An old tippler who confided in me at the funeral feast said that Uncle had lived in the capital for some time and returned to the village about twenty years ago, without explaining his circumstances.

Mom was upset, saying, “You work too hard,” and Joe gently assented to her. I smiled sweetly and asked my stepfather to join me in doing everything that I could think of. It was my little revenge for the insects that were still flying around the garden. The little beasts could not bite me anymore because I prudently stocked up on an amulet that turned away bees, mosquitoes, bugs, and all other creatures that could attack the human body; even Quarters lost desire to pat me on the shoulder. That was the true power of magic!

Max had the best time of all; the zombie-dog felt blissfully happy in the tall grass, having fun studying rodent burrows and chasing butterflies.

The murderers did not show up anymore.

Uncle Gordon’s house was gradually emptied. First of all, I dragged his large oak table to our attic. I loved its beautiful design. In Uncle’s toolbox I found a chic set of lock picks; in the bedroom—cute cupronickel beads, the mandatory attribute of a dark magician: each bead could hold a couple of spells, easily capable of replacing a combat curse. Uncle must have been unable to manipulate the flow of Power. My booty was his workbooks, the last record in which was made twenty years ago. I hoped to find inside a recipe of the potion that inhibited magic power and pour it into Mr. Rakshat’s tea. To delve into Uncle’s stuff was not tedious, just a little sad. That kind of work reveals the true nature of death: you can change nothing after you have passed away; all that was dear to you is left at the mercy of the alive. I sorted out my findings into three piles: stuff that would go to the trash, commemorative things that I would keep in memory of Uncle, and the rest that could have a useful application. In the end, the house would become devoid of any individual touch; it was about to be occupied by a new alchemist in a week. I did not want to wait for the newcomer just out of precaution, because I did not know if my pernicious nature would accept an outsider. My huge suitcase was ready for the trip and the chic suit waited on the rack for its hour, but my conscience was burdened by a small, though urgent, task: fixing up the ward-off spells around Uncle’s home. Their absence was becoming noticeable—mice appeared in the garage. That would be the last thing I could do in honor of Uncle to observe his traditions.

On the day of my departure, I woke up very early from a sleep in which I was fixing some strange alchemical devices capable of flying without wings. I was awakened by the smell of fresh pancakes and by Lyuchik, of course. My grown-up brother was running around the garden with a problem, the gist of which could be grasped only by a white. Maybe he worried that the burrow had gotten too narrow for the mice? I should bring him a cat as a present next time…

I was not given a chance to stay in bed.

“Breakfast!” mother’s voice came from downstairs.

Squeals and clatter signaled that I would not be the first at the table. Not good! Having pulled on my pants hastily, I left my bedroom.

Despite the early hour, the entire family was at the table.

Joe was sipping milk from a beer mug with a satisfied air. Little Emmy used pancakes as an excuse—she licked jam off of them and asked to put more on. Hopefully Mom would be able to wash her off afterwards. Lyuchik, excited, did not see what he was eating—a surprisingly active child. Bees left the sugar bowl with a displeased buzz upon my appearance.

“Are we going to the station together?” I wanted to clarify, just in case.

“Yeah,” Joe nodded genially.

I needed to change plans. I wouldn’t dare load Max on the train for all my family to view. Joe was unlikely to poke his nose into my business, but little Emmy would want to flatter my “fur” pet for sure. I sensed my zombie-dog would have to run home on foot. It should be okay as Max was a clever beast (I sometimes wondered why he was so highly intelligent), and the dog could cope alone with the trip.

Lyuchik barely managed to finish his meal and started telling me a story about his new school, friends, and some white mage (or was it just beard of his teacher that was white?). That became almost a ritual at the table. I nodded with a straight face and enjoyed quickly decreasing hillock of pancakes. My little brother wasn’t embarrassed by the fact that he had told me all his stories about twenty times already. We had just approached the most disappointing part—his classmates did not believe that his brother was a dark magician, when a truck wearing the NZAMIPS logo raced with a terrible roar past the passage into the valley. All of us, without saying a word, fixed our eyes on the truck.

What was that? New clowns or Chief Harlik to visit us? And my zombie was running around out there…

“Good for you!” I habitually complimented Lyuchik (little white mages should be praised frequently). “I’ll drop in at Uncle Gordon’s; I forgot to fasten a padlock on his door.”

All nodded understandingly.

My first worry was Max, who had saved my life twice already. The dog met me at the edge of the village: it rustled in the grass, patrolling and snapping its jaw in an attempt to catch butterflies. I hobbled slowly down the path, enjoying the overall harmony of life. The truck that I had spotted in the morning shone with its emblems halfway to the passage to the valley. That was for better: I did not want a company of combat mages.

So, mice were on the agenda. Because of them I had to climb into the gully: the ward-off spells at the bottom of the slope were in order. I deliberately delayed the ascent, trying to catch if some kind of unhealthy interest in Rustle’s temporary lair would arise in me. It didn’t. That day was remarkably clear for Krauhard; at such an early hour the sun slightly touched the roof of the garage, slipping into a crack between rocks. After fastening the padlock on the barn, I whistled to Max and reluctantly plodded to the place where I had endangered my life so stupidly. A typical dark won’t let such things happen to him, even when he is drunk!

Now it was easy to find the place where they killed Uncle: yellow flags appeared on the rocks. The police tried to mark the pose in which the body had been found. I grasped why the two strangers were worried—the spot where they attacked me was a mere twenty steps away from the location of the murder. Everything seemed to suggest that the old man fell, climbing up the slope, coming back from the gully to the garage.

I glanced down, tensely aware that I might start feeling an involuntary urge to continue the walk. The gully was deep and dark; any place that the sun never reaches is definitely a dangerous one, by Krauhard’s standards. If the cause of the damaged ward-off curses was sitting there, I wouldn’t risk my life again—let the curses stay unrepaired!

But mice are the eternal enemy of alchemists. They gnaw the wiring, make their nests in the most important parts of machines, and leave their droppings in the fuel oil, thus spoiling it forever. I do not count their stamping and squeaking at night. I will never forget how I found a dead mouse in the milk—I have been unable to drink any white liquids since then.

All pests need to be exterminated!

I walked back and forth around the gully. The line of seals was well visible even from the top. One washer clearly stood out among the old stones for its newer look and different texture—clearly, someone was tempting me to climb down there. Who? Why did I decide that it was Uncle? One couldn’t accidentally get into a place like that—sane children do not play there, and the insane do not survive in Krauhard. Should I call Chief Harlik?

If I called him, I would lose the treasure. No!

I did everything possible to secure myself: I went back to Uncle’s house, explained the situation on a piece of paper, and shoved it into Max’s mouth with the instructions to deliver it to people if I didn’t return before noon. Perhaps my desire to check the washer was all Rustle’s call, and if it proved to be true… I habitually clenched the Source, and it nervously vibrated in response. If so, then the creature would regret touching me!

Cautiously descending the scree, I picked up the washer to examine it. The ward-off curse, rustling, closed around me.

I did not understand. Truly, I did not understand.

It seemed that Uncle climbed down there not to fix the spell, but to break it. That would be stupid! Why would anyone want to damage the rodent traps? I inspected the seal—on its underside somebody had scratched an arrow that pointed to a mountainside, where the gully converged into a narrow slit with a trickling stream of water. If it was a tip, who had made it? And for whom? I did not believe that some stranger, unfamiliar with the spell, could unlock it so cleverly to engrave the hint; that meant the strange message could be left only by the former owner of the house.

I pondered it for a while.

Couldn’t Uncle have been affected by Rustle when manipulated with the washer? The fact that he was a dark magician did not provide automatic protection from the supernatural. And why would some place in the rocks be a better cache than a compartment in the attic or in the basement? Perhaps, the reason was that the tip could be discovered only by another mage, and the two strangers were not magicians. I would have to climb there, no matter how reluctant I was. And if the mysterious seal was just a silly joke, I would spit on that comedian’s grave!

Repeating the previous order to Max, I cautiously stepped onto the slippery rocks. I managed to reach the bottom without hurting myself, figuring that I had totally lost my mind. It would be so stupid to get into that shithole, guess Uncle’s obtuse clues, and die on the way back! The treasure that he hid must be really valuable, or I must have completely misread Uncle. And his cache was the most disgusting place you could imagine—only a burial vault would be worse. No wonder that Rustle hid there.

At the bottom of the gully, two steps away from the slit, two boards lay on the rocks, and a rope hung from the top. I didn’t grab for it—it wasn’t clear what was fixing it in place. Getting wet and dirty, I finally reached the slit and stood stock-still in surprise.

What the hell!

Immediately after the narrow orifice, the slit expanded to the size of a small cave. Sunlight just barely passed through to the center, and eternal darkness swirled in the corners and behind rocks. A huge chest towered in the center of a bright spot on a water-washed rock. Judging by its size, the chest must have been assembled on the spot. The place reeked of dark magic in its most ancient and gloomy sense.

I cautiously entered the cave. The cache had been made a very, very long time ago, and not by Uncle. Certainly, there was some supernatural being nearby, because my hair stood on end the entire time I was there. The most superficial examination of the chest revealed three layers of magical protection: from the water, from the fire, and from all living things. On the top of the chest I found an amulet-key with an ornate monogram of the capital letter “T”.

Wow, that was the Tangors’ secret lair!

My mother and I lived apart from my father’s relatives; therefore, I did not know the Tangor’s legends. Who and when made the cache and how Uncle discovered it was unclear. My curiosity overcame common sense; I took the key and climbed into the chest.

Two-thirds of it was filled with strange stuff: unusually shaped knives, inlaid polished skulls, and flutes made from bones. Had I brought some of these things to the university, I would have been instantly apprehended for necromancy. In a separate niche I found books, entirely written on parchment, bound in suspiciously fine leather, with meaningful runes on the cover. Surely, those were the treasures of a dark magician, a necromancer, an ancient one. What the dark were doing in the past, I don’t have the right words to describe. But by today’s standards, the collection was of no use, except as antiques. A mail package, tied up with string, lay over the dubious treasures; I took it and left the lair, slowly and cautiously backing to the exit. I never thought that such a probably wrong word to use here place could be in our valley! And it was only mine now.

The zombie-dog watched with interest as its master clambered over the rocks, using one hand only. At some point my nerves could not take it anymore (I was still far up the slope from Uncle’s house); I aimed my find and threw it toward the barn wall. It wasn’t glass, after all! Having climbed down, I disemboweled the parcel, untying the string and unwrapping it. There was a return address! The postman was right; the parcel came from the capital. Inside, there were several sheets folded in half—a letter—and a small book, ancient in appearance; I immediately grabbed it, opened it, and…

And couldn’t understand anything.

Incredibly thin, translucent pages were protected by so much magic that they had become almost metallic—elastic and solid. Blue squiggles of handwriting ran over a yellowish background; no magic runes, circuits, or signs were there. Some letters looked familiar, but the meaning of the words remained a mystery. That must have been one of those ancient relics that Mrs. Clements had been looking for, the same one hundred thousand crowns—not in bonds, but in one piece. I did not think that Uncle was involved in business with rarities! An explanation had to be in the letter, but I didn’t have time to read it—while I was searching the cache, the NZAMIPS truck moved from the pass to the village. My family waited for me at home, and some of my kinsmen could drop by Uncle’s house at any time. I needed to go back.

But I had to protect the book: Uncle was murdered for it, somebody tried to kill me, and who knows what else they would do. I did not want to carry it in my luggage; there was another way… I put the letter and the address, torn from the wrapper, between the magically protected sheets of the book, and re-packaged it. Then I shoved the parcel into Max’s mouth with instructions to deliver it to my garage at Redstone. That method of transportation seemed to be the most secure to me: no one would notice the zombie among bushes and rocks and, even if someone did, he or she wouldn’t catch the dog. And the zombie didn’t have my name on it. I could always say it wasn’t mine.

Finally, I was ready to leave Krauhard. With calm soul and conscience, but with agitated nerves. All the way to the village my palms and shoulder blades were itching so much that I wanted to bob up and down like Lyuchik. The enthusiasm of the white is contagious. And I couldn’t tell anyone…

Returning home, I found Chief Harlik drinking tea on the veranda with the leftovers of cold pancakes (there were no bees). It was outrageous—in my absence my mother let another man in and fed him my meal! I was about to revile the NZAMIPS boss, but Mom deftly put scrambled eggs in front of me. My dark nature was pleased—my meal was bigger. Harlik gave a sour look toward my plate, but did not say anything; yes, he was older, but it was my home.

“I see you’ve recovered.”

I allowed myself to swallow a piece of egg and then replied: “I have!”

“We have found those murderers,” Harlik paused meaningfully. “It’s a pity that we couldn’t interrogate them.”

I felt like the scrambled egg got stuck in my throat. Hmm. I wondered what Max was doing yesterday. I had not watched the zombie at all.

“Wolves?”

“No, Rustle.”

So, that rascal hadn’t gone far away. Supposedly, it was waiting for me!

“Obviously, they weren’t local,” Harlik explained when I did not respond. “They came in the evening, hoping to get to the village at night. That’s when the otherworldly caught and killed them.”

Yes, only barbaric townsfolk could do business in Krauhard at night. Well, even if they saw my dog, they wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it now!”

“Bad luck,” I mumbled, returning to the food.

“You don’t look very upset,” Harlik noticed.

“I am not upset at all,” I agreed, chewing non-stop. Mother sighed softly, and I had to explain my point to her, “I know what Uncle had gone through before he died. Rustle is far too humane for them!”

I reminded myself not to blab out to the chief that I was now personally familiar with Rustle.

Joe cautiously approached the veranda: two dark magicians at a time were too much for his nerves.

“I am leaving,” Harlik stood up. “Call me, if anything.”

Mom gently nodded.

“What was he talking about?” I asked suspiciously when the back of the chief was out of sight.

“He is worried that the interest in Gordon would pass onto us,” she answered serenely.

That was unconvincing. Though why would Mother lie?

And I threw Harlik out of my head; I had far too many impressions today.

Locomotive wasn’t able to take the student to the coordinator: the enterprising kid had left town right before the authorities expressed interest in him. The captain flirted with the idea of contacting Krauhard’s department of NZAMIPS, but decided against it: fables of mutual cover-up and conspiracy among the local dark could be true. None of the dark magicians was ever caught in Krauhard for the entirety of NZAMIPS’ history. The captain had to wait until the guy returned to Redstone on his own.

Mr. Satal reacted to Locomotive’s misfortune quite emotionally: “What the hell! Next time I should be the first to know, got it?”

“Yes, sir,” Locomotive did not argue.

Morning briefs of NZAMIPS higher-ups became regular, and Captain Baer had to attend them alone—his subordinates were losing their operability after meetings with the senior coordinator.

It was difficult to say whether there was any benefit from the meetings. The coordinator wished to know everything that was happening in Redstone—Redstone alone and nowhere else. Sometimes Conrad Baer asked himself: was the situation in his town unique? Had anything similar happened before?

“A new informant let us approach the elder who acts in the southwestern part of the town. His name is Godovan Boberri; he has been detained for illegal practice of magic. Boberri is clearly a priest and had a few disciples, three of whom have been arrested.”

The coordinator nodded in satisfaction.

“The source of the rumors about a ‘rebirth’ has not been found yet. Our analyst emphasizes the high quality of the underlying theory; he is of the opinion that they will soon move from words to deeds. His recommendation is to pay attention to the corpses of young men, including the ones who died of putative suicide or accidents; they could attempt to hide the real cause of death.”

Mr. Satal frowned: “This topic had already been discussed in the ministry. We have been advised to stay calm and wait, meaning that we should use information resources only after finding three-four corpses. Try not to miss them!”

Captain Baer refrained himself from swearing, though he was confident that he didn’t need recommendations on how to do his job. The captain himself had complained that his superiors were not interested in his work, and he started regretting that now.

“All editions of the pamphlet ‘The New Way’ have been confiscated; the reason formulated was the ‘promotion of dangerous magic practices’. The publisher has been detained; the chief editor is under investigation. We are checking why they decided to print the editions without the visa of the NZAMIPS censor.”

The coordinator sighed: “Share responsibility. If your censors are choking, pass on part of the work to our department. Ms. Kevinahari has a group of six experts, and it would warm them up.”

“Thank you, sir!” Locomotive made note to contact the empath; his censor was truly overloaded.

His whole division was overwhelmed with work—their weekly load was higher than their monthly load a year ago.

“Now for the oddities.”

The coordinator put his elbows on the desk and folded his palms as if making a house of cards—the gesture meant he was extremely interested and attentive.

“There is a connection between Boberri and Fire Mage who was arrested two weeks ago: both used trusted aides of similar appearance—it seemed to be one and the same person. The aide uses different names and dress styles, and the two groups belong to different religious confessions, but a few white witnesses quite emotionally described a man with a piercing gaze who smelled strangely. What was interesting in case of Fire Mage is that the aide insisted on more serious sacrifices than a few candles.”

“Excellent!” the dark magician echoed. “It looks like we are nearing the center point.”

Locomotive grimly nodded: “All of these ‘elders’ are just protective fog around a group that is up for some really serious stuff. Minions are lost sooner than their leaders expected them to be, and now they have to risk the lives of higher-standing agents.”

A haze of meditation covered the dark magician’s eyes: “We need to find them, Conrad! Before they are ready. We must strengthen the work at the university. Tell your guys there. Freshmen from the province will be their first target.”

“We think about the same,” Baer stated grimly.

Mr. Satal’s voice broke out in a hissing whisper: “The artisans! Or a similar sect that just calls itself differently. They preach that the nature of man can be changed—that man can be turned into a different being. As soon as you eat and drink something special or say ‘yes’ in the right place, voila, your soul and body are purged. First, they invent some kind of threat, then they require sacrifices to fix it; and the greater the sacrifice, the more followers believe in the existence of threats. But in the end no one can remember for the sake of what it all began.”

“And reckless magical practices,” Locomotive couldn’t keep his concerns to himself.

“Naturally!” the coordinator agreed. “If they don’t respect the boundaries of their own nature, why would they limit themselves in the application of the elements? The insane cannot master the concept of responsibility. But we’ll get them, Conrad; I will prove that we can do that!”

“Are you going to declare the theological threat?” the captain clarified.

Mr. Satal could hardly get back to reality: “No. Then they will start all over with the same people, but in another place. And they will take into account the errors made in Redstone. Do we need that?”

Locomotive did not answer.

“Have you read Redstone’s artisans’ file?” the coordinator was curious.

Captain Baer nodded: “I took part in the preparation of those materials.”

“Then you know that the inquisitors couldn’t get the artisans’ higher-ups, five-six people that lay low after Nintark. Our job is to lure them out of their shelter.”

Locomotive applauded the idea, but he didn’t like that it was planned for Redstone.

“Will you let them frolic in freedom?”

“No!” Mr. Satal resentfully shook his head. “We will be beating them, but… awkwardly. We’ll win, demonstrating our helplessness, as if by accident. We’ll look ridiculous, as though all that separated them from success was the incompetence of their junior officers.”

“Do you think that normal people will buy such nonsense?”

“Do you think that the artisans are normal people?”

Locomotive shrugged: “Well, if we are going to beat them anyway, I am in!”

“I didn’t doubt for a second!” Mr. Satal chuckled. “By the way, you can call me Dan for short, but not before subordinates.”

Locomotive was always moved by the ceremoniousness of the dark, often demonstrated at the most inopportune times. “And I am just Conrad,” he suggested placidly.

Chapter 19

How much does a dark mage need in order to be happy? In fact, quite a lot, but there is some minimum which makes life bearable. That summer I regarded as successful.

I decorously parted with my family on the platform, three times pledged to Lyuchik to come to his school in winter, and encouragingly patted Joe on the back (“keep an eye on everything while I am away”). Then we barely pulled my suitcase into the railroad car.

The circumstances of the eventful morning were still settling in my head (to collect thoughts in the presence of Lyuchik was just impossible), so I had to act intuitively. I checked in the heavy suitcase with deliberate carelessness and took into the compartment only a basket—it was large, see-through, and allowed visual inspection from all sides. Everyone could see that I didn’t carry any ancient artifacts with me. The train’s buffers clanked, and we slowly sailed off through the starting drizzle—Krauhard’s summer was over. My family waved at me from the platform.

There is some benefit to having relatives, especially when they are compassionate.

I sat on the bench, plunging into meditation—not for the sake of spellcasting (it was forbidden for me), but simply to get my thoughts in order. Not often did I have such a need.

The passing summer was very special: it scared, surprised, angered, and delighted me. I would have never thought that a dark mage could experience such a diverse range of emotions! I almost died and was saved, suffered from helplessness and triumphed, was outraged and intrigued. But in the end I became bigger, wider, and longer. Something of that kind. For a magician it is very important to see and perceive the world in all its diversity, and for a dark magician it is also very difficult. We always impose our own view on reality and dislike accepting objections, so reality intrudes into our lives in one way only: by force and without asking.

In a burst of feelings, I promised myself that I would start a new life. I would pay greater attention to what happened around me, so that no more enemies could approach me from behind. I would start thinking not only about myself… One year left until graduation from the university, but I didn’t know any better entertainment than joining Quarters for his pub parties. It was shameful! Please understand, I had no desire to make this promise a major life turning point; it was momentary insanity, a second of weakness, born from thoughts about my white family. Thinking about spiritual perfection, I moved the basket closer to sort out the delicious grub that Mom had put in - there was too much food to finish it at once, anyway.

That night I didn’t dream about alchemical designs. I saw Redstone, not as always, but in some strange, very alien way. Everything was colored in dust and dirt; buildings had trembling outlines, as if drawn by a frightened hand, and they were almost indistinguishable from each other. Acrid smoke, hanging low over the pavement like a ghost, hot stuffiness, and lack of shades: that must be the way a completely feral white mage would perceive a city. It hurts to think of the white at night!

I liked the feeling I experienced during a night dream; it had a sort of gentle exotic touch. Funny what kind of brains one must have to imagine buildings with inclined side walls. Houses could not stand that way, after all. And strange orange stench… Fireplaces in residential areas were stocked with pressed briquettes, and they gave off a bluish, slightly tart smoke with scent of straw and manure. The closest things I had ever seen in real life were the yellowish acidic evaporations of smithy and leather workshops in the southeastern outskirts of Redstone. Only a white was capable of confusing the blue smoke with the red one. In a burst of rare complacency, I tried to make the image more realistic by running cars and trams along the streets of my dream. I spent the rest of the night doing just that.

And then the night dream continued in reality.

I stood silently on the platform, hugging my suitcase with the basket, and realizing that I did not recognize the station where I had been plenty of times. It was a completely strange place now. I didn’t forget the details; I just did not see them. Normal daily life seethed around me, but the crowd seemed to look strange now: people were replaced with some kind of blurred contours that flashed iridescently with unnamed colors (either shades of emotions or reflections of intents). No, the contours did not merge, did not lose individuality, but I couldn’t say what those people wore even under pain of death.

Did I eat something poisonous?

All moved and stirred, exchanged momentum, lit up, and faded. My eyes caught two almost monochromatic figures among the iridescent sea of ​​complex natures: one of them came off my train and another awaited the first one at the end of the platform. For some reason I thought it would be unwise to look at them.

What was going on, eh? I seemed to know which tricks those were. Too soon had I rejoiced that Rustle hadn’t touched me! I thought I dreamed those interesting dreams, but it was Rustle, picking up the key to me. Now I understood behavior of patients at the Trunk Bay hospital—things like that could really make you lose your mind. I shouldn’t panic—the train station itself did not change a bit, and where the exit was one could guess by the direction of the crowd’s traffic. I ought to stick together with all the people…

Then I noticed a vividly pulsating silhouette heading straight toward me. I did not have a lot of friends of such stature, to be precise—I knew just one.

“What’s up, lad!” the silhouette said with Captain Baer’s voice.

“Hello, sir,” the effort required to pronounce the words allowed me to focus and pull myself together.

It took a few seconds for the familiar shapes of buildings and platforms to stand out of the veil of strange beings. I felt better.

“I heard you had a problem,” the chief of Redstone’s NZAMIPS noted genially.

He came to the train station wearing his posh uniform.

“There were some,” I did not argue.

“Let me give you a lift!” he proposed generously.

Very well! I guessed I was about to get sent straight into a madhouse. With a dark mage who did not understand where he was, they would deal shortly.

He took my suitcase by the handle and went forward, pointing the way, and the crowd parted before him like waves before a ship. I stomped after, carefully freeing my consciousness of the stranger’s influence. I sensed that what was happening had something to do with my promise to think of others. Not without reason had I dreamt of white mages all night! If they saw the world halfway like that, then how they could survive at all? However, all that could just be an illusion, charmed by Rustle because of its mean nature.

I ought to keep myself in hand! Forty days had not passed yet; it seemed that the most interesting would be ahead.

When we left the station, only a slight tremor of my right eyelid reminded me of the strange visions.

Captain Baer ignored a line of cabs and headed to the parking lot. I expected to see a striped police car, but he brought his own auto.

I felt like I was kicked in the stomach, just thinking that he owned a car.

“Get in!” the chief of NZAMIPS clicked the lock and took my basket, not paying attention to the fact that I was morally destroyed.

Oh, that was a real car! Of course, not a black limo, but still quite impressive: big, bright, conservative blue, without a single scratch on the mirrored polished body. Captain Baer effortlessly lifted my suitcase and put it into a roomy trunk, onto some neat terry rug. Not wasting any time, I got inside. Leather seats! The back ones were like a sofa bed, with enough space to comfortably sleep; in the middle there was a little extra strap, probably for children. Subtle echoes of cleaning spells suggested that they were used here on a regular basis. Not a cheap thing, by the way. I was impressed; no, I was shocked. Someone else owned my dream. NZAMIPS wasn’t, of course, a poor institution, but I always felt that government officials were supposed to look and behave like humble gray mice. What a surprise…

I squirmed in my seat, trying to soak into my skin the flavor of the luxurious leather. Yes, my motorcycle was also quite stylish, but of incomparable comfort. And no one around was surprised that the chief of Redstone NZAMIPS loaded my luggage; probably, the townsfolk took his clothes for a certain type of driver’s uniform. For a moment, I imagined that was true: my own car, my private chauffeur—I felt good! The captain finished with the basket and took the driver’s seat.

“Do you know where to?”

“Yes, I do.”

Well, okay. It would be strange if the boss of NZAMIPS was not able to obtain my new address. The captain was driving out of the station square’s crowd to the boulevard, and I relished my new experience.

In such a car I could drive and drink champagne without risking knocking my teeth out and even without splashing a drop. There was definitely some magic in the car; I didn’t know of any suspension that could provide such soft movement over the pavement slabs, tram routes, and central alleys covered with cobblestones in imitation of the antique style. Nothing in common with Uncle’s clunkers. I would buy myself the same model! I would do anything to buy it.

I felt like my dream came true, but somewhere halfway down I realized that we were driving to the town’s junkyard.

Oops.

Yes, Thomas, you feared the wrong things…

Silly thoughts frantically rushed through my clever head. Maybe I should threaten him with disclosing the story about the crystal? No, it would not work. I thought about hitting him on the head and jumping out. Yeah, an attack on a NZAMIPS officer would look great on the list of my sins! Or maybe the situation was not so scary? He didn’t bring soldiers along; he came without fisticuffs; what if we would be able to come to an agreement? Maybe he just needed money.

Hopefully Max had not reached home yet…

When the car stopped at the rickety wooden gates, I decided not to step up with initiative and instead followed him in silence. If the captain wanted to make a show, I should help him with that.

The junkyard itself (the junkyard, not a dump!) was quite a remarkable place. On a space the size of a small field, there were long piles of incredible stuff that was sorted by a gang of idiotic personalities, though they were quite friendly. What exactly their business was like I didn’t know, but the junkyard owner shipped carts of various items daily and immediately filled the freed space with a new batch of stuff. Part of the territory was occupied by illegal housing—junkmen’s sheds, workshops of amateur alchemists, as well as garages of car enthusiasts, less wealthy than I was. Knowledgeable people found the place very convenient: in the junkyard one could get parts to almost any obsolete device, starting with a wall clock and ending with a locomotive (for the first time I came here for that very reason). The owner of the junkyard charged a few copper coins for the right to own a squalid tin can and watched that no one lived there seriously; despite the cheap dilapidated gates and fence, the junkyard was well guarded.

That day, the maze of rickety ruins was particularly quiet—the local old-timers sensed troubles well. The captain stood beside the familiar garage and looked at me expectantly.

“Have you been inside?” I asked.

“I looked through the crack.”

I sighed and opened the door. It was never locked. In the garage there was my huge black motorcycle; my merry dead dog sat right next to it. Well, of course! Why would it be somewhere else?

Max, wagging its tail, ran toward me and began to swirl around my legs (that’s right, the captain and I came together as friends, and the zombie did not have any reason to worry about the stranger). I patted Max on the back, routinely refreshing the revivifying spell. No point in hiding it! The chief of Redstone’s NZAMIPS calmly watched the spectacle. The man had iron nerves!

“Why did you make this zombie?”

I shrugged: “Not on purpose, it just happened so!” Max shoved its ears into my hand to stroke and looked at the stranger in a quite friendly manner. “The dog saved my life. And it was also a victim of the ghouls.”

By the way, the dog resisted death much longer than the afflicted people.

“Okay, what’s done is done,” somebody grimly announced behind me.

That was a mage. A dark. An adult. Something clicked in me, and to the very roots of my being I realized the truth: I’d better not start a fight with him—I would lose. Max pressed tightly to my knee, folding its ears as if making a house of cards.

“Calm the beast, hold it by the collar. I do not like dogs.”

I firmly grabbed Max by the skin, though I was sure that without my word it would not move from the spot. Scenes in which I had dealt with other dark magicians face-to-face flashed through my mind. There were not many of them: Uncle, Mr. Smith, and Mr. Rakshat, that was about all. None of them was really tough, but this guy was truly strong—no need to go to an empath. It wasn’t easy to assess his age, but I felt that the mage was no older than forty, and my imagination persistently pictured him in general’s epaulets. An abundance of power gives a dark mage’s face a specific expression… Who did Captain Baer bring along?

The magician stared at Max. “Are you interested in necromancy?” he asked calmly, without shuddering, as if someone’s interest in necromancy was nothing out of the ordinary!

“No way! I just felt sorry for the dog.”

It sounded silly. They would think that I was a nutcase and send me for treatment.

The magician raised his eyebrow: “Have you asked its opinion?”

Max and I exchanged bewildered looks: “The dog did not seem to be opposed.”

“What did you use?”

It was the hardest question. If I was not prepared in the necromantic ritual, then how did I manage to accomplish it? I had no other option but to shrug: “It happened somehow.”

Captain Baer expressively snorted.

The magician turned his attention from the zombie to me. In principle, it is difficult to find something that will scare a dark mage, but there were so many minor sins in my heart (starting with the same Rustle) that I couldn’t meet his gaze imperturbably. He enjoyed my embarrassment. What a bastard! I had to endure his sassy staring in silence, because all my skills were nothing against a real combat mage. Max would hold against him for about ten seconds; meanwhile, Captain Baer would attack me from behind and strangle to death—such a hulk could not be stopped by a curse. It was unbearable to stand like that knowing that you couldn’t even hit him in the face!

It must have been something like a test. Assured that I was not going to start a suicidal attack, the magician lost his interest in me and melancholically nodded to his accomplice.

“Well,” Captain Baer began, “by the end of the week you’ll report about your adventures in detail to me personally. Got it? If I see even one deviation from my own data, you’ll be arrested.”

“And then what?” I clarified cautiously.

“At this moment we… how do I put it… don’t want more sensations. We will watch for you, you son of a bitch!”

Why did they give no rest to my family? I made a valiant effort to conceal a sigh of relief. All turned out well! I did not feel myself guilty, but I was a little worried about Max.

“One more thing,” the magician added quietly and softly.

All my hair stood on end.

“If you come into the spotlight once again or some rumors will start, then blame yourself!”

A faint dark shadow gently touched my skin.

I quickly nodded and the mage, contented with the effect he produced, slowly went somewhere, dodging around piles of rusty scrap. Amazing that two dark magicians parted without a duel! The unnatural simplicity of the incident made me a little dizzy.

“Come on, I’ll give you a ride to your apartment,” Locomotive chuckled.

“Thank you, I’ll manage myself.”

“What, you’ll manage your suitcase as well?”

Yes, the suitcase was a problem. Very well then, he had brought me in, let him take me out of here. I slapped Max, sending the dog back inside the garage, pinned the door with a wooden leg, and returned to the car.

The meeting the captain promised to Mr. Satal didn’t go as planned. During the operation, Locomotive did not doubt his superior’s orders, but when they got back to the office he couldn’t preserve his composure: “We have to…”

“No.”

“Well, at least…”

“No.”

“Sir, necromancy is the most heinous of all the crimes that a dark magician is capable of doing. And to ignore it would be just… just…”

“Want me to give you a written order?”

Satal was the captain’s first superior, who suggested taking some responsibility off of Baer’s shoulders.

“No, Dan,” Locomotive was deeply moved, “I do not mean that! The guy went too far, seriously, and not for the first time. He cannot live like everyone else; we either ought to recruit him or apprehend—there are no other options.”

“Don’t fret!” the dark magician ordered calmly. “Everything is under control. As the senior coordinator of the region I can authorize the use of necromancy, in particular, for operational purposes, of course, if he signs a contract, albeit retroactively. He has nowhere to go but to us—a dark mage cannot change his nature. The kid exposed himself twice, and he will do it again—that’s when we’ll recruit him. He won’t feel pushed into the corner and will be thankful to us. And considering that even his zombie frolics like a sweet puppy, I am not afraid for the innocent people. Have you seen a frolicking zombie before?”

Captain Baer snorted: “It’s impossible! The degeneration into a zombie cannot be stopped in the middle. It does not matter how fresh the corpse is.”

“Let’s say it is feasible, but very difficult to accomplish; that’s why it is almost impossible. I will take him as my disciple! Why not? He has talent, the basics are excellently provided by the university; what remain are the details that I will help him to master. He will call me ‘Sensei’…”

Locomotive gazed at the dreaming magician and rolled his eyes. The dark! He needed to tell Ms. Kevinahari about their conversation and let her do her therapy.

Chapter 20

For the rest of my vacation I scribbled reports for NZAMIPS. For the first time in my life. I punctually expounded events, checking and rechecking my field notes. I dared not lie, but strongly suspected that the truth would seem like first-class taradiddle to most. And then what? Surely, I did not want to finish my days in the jail for especially dangerous magicians; according to rumors, it was an abominable institution. On the other hand, there was seemingly no reason to break into a run…

An ordinary man would have gained a myocardial infarction from such an experience (not to mention a white mage!), but I was just tormented by hopeless irritation. I felt angry that NZAMIPS so quickly got to the bottom of my case. I should have gone into denial mode! Confess nothing: that wasn’t me, the motorcycle was mine but the dog—no, no, though it could all take a turn for much worse than now. Now only my self-esteem suffered. I would survive. However, the strange pliancy of the unfamiliar mage suggested some kind of a trap.

Anyway, the captain received the folder with my report in time and did not even read me the moral code. The latter frightened me—the policeman knew the nature of the dark magician. The absence of a strong reaction confuses us, dark magicians, and produces a feeling of permissiveness—virtually guaranteeing a relapse. Did they want to provoke me to commit a crime? I decided to act out of spite and not succumb. I would be quiet, polite, and modest, at least until graduation—about a year was left to wait. I had a lot of money, nobody asked questions about my Empowerment, and nothing else kept me from fully focusing on alchemy. I wanted just that! As a bonus, I received four typewritten sheets with guidelines for “zombie upkeep”. The guide advised one to give a zombie a special mineral broth periodically. It was time to visit my favorite firm and ask Johan for the necessary chemicals.

Had I known how it would end, I would have surrendered the zombie to NZAMIPS for experiments, and let them feed it with what they wanted.

At BioKin’s office, I met a sobbing Bella (the blue-eyed brunette). What was going on now? The design seemed to be working. Carl and Johan danced with a tambourine around it, day and night, so that my presence wasn’t necessary. And I didn’t believe that she would be crying because of issues with the fermentation vat.

I decided to stay away from the secretary’s problems (I have little experience in dealing with weeping women), but no such luck. Her sobs reached me everywhere in the huge office and stabbed my brain like red-hot nails. I sensed that Rustle was having a blast, exacerbating my ill feelings, and for half an hour I meditated, trying to isolate myself from the alien’s influence. I wasn’t going to allow some otherworldly stinker to teach me how to live! Nothing positive came out of it: the place in my body that had been taken by Rustle was not available to my conscious mind yet (I became a real magician only a year ago, after all). The cry even intensified in my mind, overshadowing all other sounds.

I pondered if I should perhaps take some time off. Less than two weeks remained until the end of the conditional quarantine; if I locked myself up in the apartment and drank, I would hold out. But then some ominous purple glow came under my eyelids, and I understood that playing the fool because of some stupid chick did not make any sense. I sighed and went to show my consolation for others, the hell with them.

The girl carefully concealed the tear-reddened eyes with her palm.

“So, what happened?” I muttered, trying to sound friendly.

She did not answer, turning to the window.

“Maybe I can help.”

“No…”

“How do you know? Do the dark magicians often offer you help?”

It sounded convincing.

Soon she started talking. As it turned out, she was worried about her fiancé, a guy named Uther. I saw him a couple of times in the office; he worked part-time as a courier—a typical uninitiated dark mage, restless and boisterous, but with a sense of humor, a rare feature in people of our kind. Bella’s mother was against the guy; she requested that he get medical treatment with some doctor she knew—and who wasn’t even an empath—to “correct his character”. The fiancé was truly noisy and quarrelsome, but the girl liked him, and his excessive obstinacy wasn’t vicious. Uther agreed (I could not believe it); together they went to the clinic, and Bella watched him sleeping after the procedure, being so calm. Two days passed by. Yesterday he had to return home but could not be found anywhere, and the girl was no longer allowed in the clinic, and they didn’t answer her questions. What else could she do to help him?

“What did they mean by the ‘treatment’?” Something in her story alerted me.

The charming secretary did not know anything about magic. She tried to recall diligently the explanations given to her, using terms like “dissection of the contour” and “setting the axis”. I carefully listened, gradually realizing a nasty thing: she could say goodbye to Uther. When the poor girl, biting her lower lip from effort, drew on a piece of paper the sign used in the “procedural room”, my doubts were confirmed.

“They used the shackles of deliverance on the uninitiated magician,” I concluded. “Your boyfriend is already gone.”

Her eyes opened wide in indignation.

“There’s nothing you can do about it, dear, that’s life. You may think of him as passed away, and if he is still breathing, it is not an indication that he will live. Any mage will say the same thing to you.”

“No, they would not harm…”

“This is another issue: how they dared to perform that on him. What kind of a doctor was that, who didn’t know the basics? Have you seen his license?”

She visibly shivered and timidly shook her head: “No, I haven’t. It was Mrs. Melons’ Medical School…”

“I do not care about the school—the license of the healer is what is important. Magic is as much a part of the human being as is the liver or the heart. An initiated magician is taught how to separate the Source from himself; magic is like his third hand, so it can be cut off. That would be unpleasant, but not deadly. For an uninitiated mage, an attempt to remove the Source is equivalent to a strike by a hammerhead in the chest: the mind and personality get broken into debris and the body is still breathing, but the mind isn’t functioning. The body without the soul does not live long.”

Bella seemed to grasp the meaning of what had occurred.

“Yeah, dear, they killed him. I do not know purposefully or not. It was like hitting him with a knife, only there was no blood. If his relatives have not yet reported the case to NZAMIPS, being in your shoes, I would have done it immediately so that those charlatans won’t kill someone else.”

She became very pale and began to fuss, grabbing her purse, then her phone, then her purse again.

“Go, I’ll let Polak know,” my generosity knew no bounds. “NZAMIPS head office is on Park Road; tell their chief that I referred you.”

She sniffled, jumped up, and ran away.

Blessed silence!

I got back to my desk, habitually rubbed my cup to warm the coffee, and braced to familiarize myself with the shape the sewage tank had acquired in my absence. My enjoyment was spoiled by waves of approval from Rustle. Can you imagine—the revenant wight had demonstrated high ethics norms! Had I known how, I would have killed it. By the way, I should delve into the literature; perhaps there is a way to get rid of the monster.

It was mind-boggling how the brainless creature managed to find the only weak spot in the dark magician. If Rustle had dared to pester me with visions of burning cities and the walking dead, I would have laughed. But since childhood I have been told that helping people is a must! Normally, I more or less ignored the unnatural impulses, pretending not to see anything heartrending, but Rustle pitilessly poked me into a conflict between my white upbringing and my dark nature.

Too bad to be a dark raised in a white family.

I didn’t see Bella the next day—she picked up her stuff from the office and disappeared forever. Quarters said that the girl burst into asceticism and devoted her spare time to studying; she was going to be a doctor. A useful thing to do!

But my involuntary humanism resulted in some consequences.

Surprisingly, NZAMIPS reacted vigorously to the incoherently mumbling girl: when the assault squad broke into the dubious clinic, the ill-fated Uther had already been dead and prepared for cremation, and there were two other dark children waiting in line for “treatment”. NZAMIPS apprehended everyone from the director to the floor cleaner, but most of the staff were peaceful herbalists, unaware that the owner of the establishment was playing with forbidden divination. The tabloids came out with headlines like “Revival of the Inquisition” and “Police Lawlessness”; however, that did not stop the prosecution. Authorities announced that the clinic would be closed and demolished, as the building had been desecrated by the sacrifice.

“Can you imagine—I had been there,” the unusually serious Quarters twisted an almost full glass in his hands, “and saw that woman.”

“Wanted to get a treatment?” I was sarcastic.

“Bite your tongue!” Ron got angry. “You’re in a better position than me—your folks are far away, but mine see me every day. Mother was a girlfriend of Melons’; they’re now organizing a club of supporters.”

“Supporters of whom? Bella or Uther?”

“You won’t understand,” he brushed me off. “Melons was… well… a typical white!”

“White is not synonymous with good,” I said instructively.

“I know,” Quarters frowned, “I did not think that everything had gone that far.”

“Rent an apartment!” I advised sincerely. “There is nothing better than life without neighbors.”

Especially when you have the financial resources for that.

Uther was buried on the first day of the new school year, and not even one f*cking newspaper put a line in about him! It was outrageous!

We railed in unison with Rustle; the result was frightening. I did not know what Rustle was going to do, but I went to the university and personally asked every dark magician whose name I was able to recall (it turned out that I remembered quite a lot of them) whether he was aware that a white mage had killed a dark. And guess what? Everyone showed the liveliest interest to the case. That was when I first heard the strange word “Artisan”. The oldest teachers spoke the word through clenched teeth with such hatred that I was ready to believe in the reality of a war between the dark and white. By the end of the day, someone had painted on the walls of the central building the distinctive sign of a blood feud with the words, “Nintark is not forgotten!” I wondered where that was.

White mages whispered in the corners about their enchanted friends, kidnapped and enslaved; freshmen, eyes round with terror and delight, questioned each other about some priests, but I had no clue about the artisans whatsoever. It must have been something that I was supposed to learn through my family, but I never knew my father-dark, and Uncle did not condescend to enlighten me (though I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead).

I tried to shake my classmates; it didn’t pan out. Nobody wanted to elaborate on the topic. And then I recalled who owed me a favor.

Ironically, Captain Baer was not opposed to a chat.

“Remember, you promised me an answer to one question?”

“Yeah, you jackanapes!”

“I am what I am. So, is your boss aware of the crystal?”

“Not yet. What do you want to know?”

“About the artisans.”

“That is a banned topic.”

“Then lift the ban!”

For some time we looked into each other’s eyes, and I got suspicious whether Captain Baer was a veiled uninitiated Dark.

“Why do you want to know?” he sighed, conceding.

“They could be a threat to me.”

“I won’t show you any documents, of course, but I can tell you if you pledge your word of honor. Okay?”

“Fine!”

“Do you know the history of the First Period?”

I thoughtfully frowned.

“Okay, let’s get more to the point, what is Roland the Bright famous for?”

“Isn’t he a saint?” I ventured to suggest.

“Not only that,” the captain sighed. “Well, let’s try a different approach. Imagine that someone in Ingernika still believes that the source of the supernatural has been the dark magicians.”

“Ha-ha!”

“Have I answered your question?” he raised his eyebrows.

“No, of course not.”

“Then shut up and listen. Do you think NZAMIPS deals with the dark only? Hell, no! Our main contingent is white magicians. Don’t laugh. Try to picture for yourself what a white mage is. I don’t believe you can succeed, but try, at least! They put other people on a par with themselves—and not only people. They perceive both positive and negative emotions, without discrimination. Do you understand?”

I recalled my experience with my own family and involuntarily winced. The captain slightly brightened.

“It’s good if a white mage grew up in a village; they see how nature works and learn about real life. In a sense, they know that rabbits eat grass and people eat rabbits, and they do not put an equals sign between their family and the cows, for example. A city-grown mage cannot put a rabbit in a cage (the animal would feel bad). Their reactions are aggravated to hysteria, and they can do nothing with that—such is their nature. Of course, NZAMIPS does its job, and empaths help, but the issue cannot be fully resolved. Ordinary people laugh at the problems of the white; it’s the theme of jokes. And that is a mistake!”

The captain raised his finger: “A white takes on the entire pain of the world, and the desire to get rid of the pain is a very strong stimulus. For such an incentive they would give away their life. Most of them adapt somehow, especially the initiated ones—they can mute their Source. But some can’t or don’t want to, or were stressed too much in childhood. The latter becomes a problem: a request to ban eating meat, a fight for the rights of pets, a fight to take sewer rats under protection. Or worse: they bother people and want to teach them how to live ‘rightly’. Those latter are our clients.”

From his frequent repetition of the word “white”, Rustle’s tricks began to revive in my mind, and I decided that it was time to finish the verbiage: “What do the artisans have to do with that?”

“A lot! The artisans and the like are sects relying on mentally unstable people, mostly from the white mages. They exploit the legend of White Halak (read about it—this topic is not banned) and promise to build a world where everyone would be happy. An ordinary man cannot understand the danger they carry. The dark are almost impossible to manipulate; they’re too independent. But the white are trusting, suggestible, and industrious. Before you know it, you are already opposed to the crowd of fanatics who firmly believe that they are fighting for the happiness of all humankind. As a rule, they begin trying to ‘treat’ or simply exterminate all the dark within their reach.”

“Sweet.”

“And pointless. One could build a world without grief only by annihilating all who could feel compassion. These homegrown saviors are simply unable to grasp the simplest truth: life is suffering; life includes birth, disease, and ultimately death, and that is realistic.”

So, all my visions had some basis, but it remained unclear whether that was good or bad. However, I didn’t have deep sympathy for an abstract white—abstraction lacked personality. To Rustle with them!

“Are these idiots able to accomplish anything serious?”

The captain shrugged: “People don’t really care. In my youth, it was fashionable to believe in good intentions, and the artisans had become almost an official organization. The upshot was that they had covered a whole city by a spell, thinking to save its inhabitants from evil thoughts.”

“Is this possible?” I was shocked.

“It is possible, but for a very short time. The real White Halak had existed for around seventy years; Nintark hadn’t lasted over eight months. They had lost forty thousand ‘trial’ people and another eight hundred men from NZAMIPS, standing in the cordon.”

“I do not understand. Was that an effect of the white spell that killed them…?”

“No, it wasn’t. It was an unidentified supernatural phenomenon. White mages are absolutely helpless before the otherworldly—even more helpless than ordinary people. The revenant creatures tend to crash a party, and they do not require dark mages to spawn them. Therefore, we will fight these ‘activists’, no matter where they’ll show up and what they’ll call themselves. We’ll cry and sympathize, but beat them. Got it?”

I hesitantly nodded.

“Now answer me,” Captain Baer frowned, “was that you who blabbed about Uther?”

I straightened up shoulders and militantly jerked chin: “Yes, that was me!”

“Thanks.”

I was taken aback: “For what?”

He shrugged: “We could have missed the boat with that case, because Mrs. Melons was a doctor. And the capitol authorities advised us not to panic… So, thank you. You did well.”

“You are welcome!” I could offer plenty of such services to them.

At night I had a dream about White Halak; the fact that I had never seen the town, even in pictures, did not hinder me. People, no different from the ghouls except for their red blood, walked along its streets. They were as the blind—“see no evil, speak no evil”—because they could not even imagine that someone may (and had the right to) grieve, experience pain… die.

They weren’t compassionate; no, they wanted suffering to disappear, and these are two different things. All people should have been healthy and happy, or shouldn’t have been at all—the happy zombies did not tolerate the elderly and sick among themselves. In my dream I saw the mighty zombies that protected the borders of the fairy kingdom of White Halak by simply killing any creature that attempted to cross them. The same zombies worked at the factories and fields, because the residents of Halak weren’t able to put forth the effort needed for regular work; that is, work when it was necessary, but not when they wanted. Why work? The thirst for deeds could be satisfied in other ways. They walked, ate, and painted strange scrolls on canvas and felt touched by them; they multiplied useless things and sounds; they slept together and did not know what to do with the resulting children—often getting rid of them before their birth. I couldn’t picture how the upbringing of children was done in their world, unless they assigned that job to the zombies too: to raise a full-fledged person is hard work, impossible without the use of some coercion.

Later, the history books talked about the flourishing of arts and sciences but, in fact, the inhabitants of White Halak were not capable of doing anything that required the throes of creation, any somewhat serious effort, or complicated training. And they did not need it—they lived a pale imitation of life.

That strange perversion of human nature did not horrify me (by the way, the real undead did not frighten me either), but I felt disgusted. No, better let the white be what I had gotten used to: harmless nitwits. They are not so useless if you take the time to think about them. I would treat them cautiously (I succeeded with Lyuchik), protect and indulge them, and they wouldn’t create any extraordinary troubles for me.

That would be idyllic, wouldn’t it?

Chapter 21

Finally, the forty days of my quarantine were over. No, not like that. They had ended!!!

The last two days were especially difficult—the damned otherworldly settled in my head and enjoyed it as much as it could. I physically couldn’t stay at home days and nights: clocks had started ticking too loudly. But on the streets a glance at any living object caused in my mind a rapid string of images of his or her past, present and, at times, future. Why the hell did I need to know what the neighbor’s dog ate in the morning, why a kitten was hungry, or how a hangover pained Mr. Rakshat? And, as a final touch, I could not read a book about the eviction of Rustle—my vision was failing me.

I had never believed before that a dark mage could seriously think about suicide.

I barely managed to last until the end of the forty days, but after the magic date had passed, the problems with the monster abruptly went down. My mind became acclimated, maybe? Bleak hallucinations and moments of sharpened hearing made me shudder a few more times, but then I realized that the problems were gone. The only left over issue was that a thought of the white was giving me willies and reminder that the Rustle-inspired memories would stay with me forever.

Why did I need alien problems? I had plenty of my own.

I felt blissfully happy, gradually tying the broken threads of my former plans and events, pondered where to find a buyer for Uncle’s rarities, and fondly looked forward to the terrible revenge that I would strike upon the wretched creature. The encyclopedia said that Rustle was practically the only otherworldly phenomenon that a dark mage could summon at will (there were precedents). I wondered how many Rustles existed, and how would I choose the right one? I will challenge them one by one and torture, tantalize, crucify…

The people around me didn’t know the nature of my problems and guessed that I did not have enough sleep. I couldn’t care less; let them think what they wanted. I did not see or hear their thoughts anymore, and that made me feel immensely happy.

But the world had lost its familiar simplicity. The euphoria and temporary insanity that I was awarded by Rustle could not hide the unpleasant fact that people started gazing at me strangely. Did I carry some signs on my face? I asked Quarters straight out and received an unexpected response: “You’ve, sort of, crossed the road to the artisans.”

“When?!”

“Did you not get that?”

I fell deep in thought, sifting through the events of recent difficult days. Well, people with a fairly sick imagination could perceive my talks about Uther as a hostile attack. On the other hand, no malicious sect could surpass Rustle in its meanness; it wasn’t realistic. Anything that was less evil I didn’t care about, I declared to Quarters.

“Whatever you say, Tom,” he shook his head. “I can’t understand you, the dark.”

Brave bully Quarters… scared?

As it turned out, he was not alone in that. Outside the university, the white moved only in groups of three or four now; they had gone through some kind of “safety” training and became atypically anxious thereafter. Freshmen were counted twice a day, in the morning and in the evening. Students self-organized into patrol groups with men on duty, and these guards imposed the dormitory curfew. I wondered how they intended to make the dark mages observe all these rules. Especially the novice magicians, who were finishing regular classes well after midnight and by the end of the day were in such condition that no artisans were necessary.

Organizing the dark proved to be easy. They were offered a cab and a free dinner daily. With beer. Freebies! All the dark students appeared right on time, by 12 am, without fail. Even I felt the temptation to freeload in the dormitory and barely suppressed it. Are we, the dark, so predictable?

These extraordinary measures fostered a serious mood. For a while I honestly tried to scare myself, picturing that I was being hunted by freaks, but could not continue in that vein for long—it was boring. What could they do to me? Kill me? The most horrible thing I could imagine was a burnt out light bulb at the porch and Rustle waiting for me at the door, but that could not happen in the city (knock on wood)—too many ward-off spells were pinned around, and NZAMIPS was on standby. The maximum that I managed to achieve was to develop a habit of looking on both sides of the street and staying sober in unfamiliar places.

I was not allowed to attend dark magic classes—the doctor from Krauhard informed the university about my injury (what a pathetic snitch; one excuse - he was white). I spent spare time in the library, as a good student.

I had two topics of interest. The number one was Rustle. Certainly I wasn’t the first dark magician it infected; people must have tried to get rid of the creature before, and some reports on the progress made should exist somewhere. I couldn’t believe that one of my kind had successfully expelled Rustle and hadn’t bragged about it. However, material on the most dangerous otherworldly phenomenon was surprisingly scarce. The reasons for that could be twofold: either Rustle was of no interest to anyone but me (nonsense!), or the results achieved were “not for mere mortals”. I needed to ask the captain about Rustle, but instead I inquired about some white idiots.

Second, Uncle’s book burned in my hands. I asked Johan’s advice without going into detail and learned that the address on the parcel wasn’t even a building—it was a botanical garden. The name also seemed suspicious, for Pierrot Sohane was a character in a fairly well-known fable. Combined, the two facts pointed to a white magician who lived in solitude and kept neutrality. Clearly, he wasn’t a merchant, because a seller would not name a buyer “my precious friend” and wouldn’t complain, “I hadn’t hoped to find you alive”. Moreover, he would not persuade in his letter that he “solemnly kept without any selfish interest an ‘unnamed something’ just for the sake of continuity”. A rhythm of these phrases stuffed up my ears, and I wasn’t eager to meet the “insignificant master of mirrors”. Thus, I needed to figure out what I had in hand not to be strangled at the first attempt to sell the rarity. And what if the book was stolen?

To identify my treasure was no easier than to pin Rustle down. I couldn’t match the text with any known writing style and could not exclude the idea that the content was simply encrypted. The only recognizable elements were numbers at the beginning of each chapter, though there was a chance the numbers were dates, and they would be current in a couple thousand years. My research revealed a similar font in one place, in a copy of the legendary The Word about the King. These were the most ancient extant chronicles, and my treasure looked like a luxurious notebook in comparison. To focus my search, it wasn’t enough to just browse through its illustrations—I needed to attain a thorough grasp of the subject and honestly tried, but it was impossible to achieve.

Of all the historical nonsense discovered, I was pleased with one interesting fact: it turned out that Roland the Bright was a holy dark magician. Funny, Ronald the “Bright” was dark! Well, at least not “white”. How this man could stand such a moniker was mind-boggling.

The senior coordinator of the region sat in his office, happy and well-fed, like a big black tomcat. Shadows of thinning foliage fluttered on the walls, creating a feel of the jungle. Locomotive knew that he would never occupy that room again—associations would be too strong.

“One is apprehended,” Satal rumbled.

Captain Baer gently shook his head: “Why have you decided that Melons was one of the artisans? She is accused of illegal practices and a murder, but that is just one episode. We didn’t find any evidence that somebody was behind her. What if she is just another red herring?”

“She confessed to the murder too lightly,” the coordinator hemmed. “There was a chance that she managed to impose the shackles of deliverance on the first attempt, but why did the peaceful herbalist place the pump-sign on the table top?”

“The means of inorganic estrangement of the channel,” Locomotive corrected habitually.

“Forget about the terms!” Satal brushed him aside. “There is only one application for the Source that was detached from its managing will—the armory curse. Especially powerful. A peaceful herbalist? Ha!”

“You propose a special interrogation?”

“Wanna bet?” Satal snorted. “She will die in our hands under the interrogation, and all the newspapers will shout about the ‘police brutality’,” the coordinator obviously mimicked someone and was pleased with that. “Let everything go its normal way.”

“Unauthorized use of the shackles,” Locomotive stated, “and theft of the Source.”

“Death penalty,” the coordinator confirmed, “and I will not permit any advocate to find extenuating circumstances in this case. She was a certified magician and could not be unaware of what she was doing; the fact that the kid died before they managed to find an application for his Source was pure luck. Our luck.”

The dark magician enjoyed the hunt for invisible artisans amidst the stone jungle. The beast followed the trail of another beast—they were human beings only partially… Locomotive blinked, driving off an ugly image. The dark could not behave differently, but Baer was a regular human being—he had to take care of people instead of Satal.

“Our guy came into the spotlight in this case.”

The coordinator got a little distracted from his triumph: “Leave him. You won’t do anything.”

Locomotive frowned: “I do not understand what you mean, sir.”

“You do,” Satal dismissed. “He is dark; you can’t say to him, ‘Go here but don’t go there.’ If you start taking care of him, he will resist and become less manageable. Hopefully, the sect will be disoriented without Melons, and we will apprehend them before they get ready for some serious steps. Let’s go back to work, back to work!”

Captain Baer shook his head again.

He participated in the arrest of Mrs. Melons and watched the doctor at that very moment when all her plans were dashed. Her face, the face of a white magician who deliberately decided to kill, stuck in Locomotive’s memory, and one word swirled in his head: “witch”! The captain was accustomed to the intricate logic of the dark, to the delirious talks of the street preachers—but a normal-looking person, behaving as if she lived in another dimension, was something new for him. The relativity of good and evil was brought to absurdity when the good was measured not even by profit, but by some unattainable and unknown ideal that, for some reason, justified any crime. He was there at the moment when Melons made a decision that determined her future behavior and confessions, and he could swear that this story wouldn’t end well.

The armory curse. God save us…

Chapter 22

I was bored. I couldn’t get drunk, unless I did it at home - it was safe in there, but the pleasure wasn’t the same.

The biggest problem of any dark mage is what to do with his spare time, particularly if a reliable source of livelihood has been found already.

My work at BioKin had come to a halt: Polak negotiated the acceptance of the prototype of the gas generator with the client, and we all awaited the result. Johan, in his work time, scribbled an article about the new approach to the application of advanced micro-organisms and pestered me with questions about the alchemical part. Carl scoffed at the fermentation vat, throwing into it all sorts of rubbish to test. We both knew that a device with such parameters would thresh any sewage with the equanimity of a pinion, and all these “tests” for the machine were like spitting in the locomotive firebox. The red-haired cousin of Quarters went on maternity leave, the father was an alchemist’s assistant (also red-haired), and their child would probably have fire-red hair that one could only touch with mittens. The future father was present at work only as a piece of furniture; his thoughts hovered somewhere far away.

I brewed coffee for myself and counted days until the moment that I would join my magic classes again. I never thought I would miss them! Of course, I could quit and forget the entire shit business, but I was expecting triumph ahead, and it would be a disappointment not to share it.

My third wish was to find new sorts of fun; Rustle heard it but did not fulfill.

I decided to act rapidly; I bought a ticket to the theater for a play with the neutral name “The Road to Exile”. And I liked it. After the first three scenes I began quietly giggling, at the end of the first act I already roared with laughter, and in the middle of the second act the attendant requested that I be quieter.

“I do not know what you have found so funny about the drama, young man,” an elderly gentleman, sitting right next to me, noted after the performance.

Still twitching convulsively, I explained to him in what condition a dark mage must have been to start talking with his crosier. Again, a crosier! A purely phallic symbol. The idea of ​​its magic properties must have been introduced to the masses by combat mages, but I knew that the only real use of that thing was beating enemies on the head (which, probably, was widespread entertainment in the past). An ideal object to store spells has a round, at most cylindrical, shape; one object can’t hold more than one spell at the same time. So, a really mighty magician is a man, adorned with silver beads from head to toe, but on the stage he would be mistaken for a homo.

I could give a thumbs-up to the theater as my new entertainment, but the next play was called “The Rose of the Wind” and created an unwelcome association with the white. Well, to hell with them!

To visit the horse race, maybe? But I had no spare money to waste.

I decided to join a student club; it was kind of late - a year left till my graduation. They didn’t let me into the “Green World” club—pushed me out the door. Quarters suggested a yacht club, but I declined—I disliked moisture. I went to a meeting of fans of antique mechanics, and for two days I dreamed of gears. I even promised to find authentic weights for clocks. Surely, I could find something at the junkyard next time. The historic club offered a series of lectures on the origin of magic; I went there to ask about Roland (why he was nicknamed “the Bright”), got into a dispute about northern shamans—to prove my point I quoted an excerpt from the book “The Word About the King”—and made all feel jealous.

Captain Baer came to me and spoiled the mood: “I know that you do not care, but bear in mind: the Melons trial is over, but she has friends. Before, they wanted to appear good-natured, but now they will seek revenge. Watch out!”

And what am I supposed to think about the police after that?

I bought a ticket to the theater one more time, again for a tragedy—“King George XIV”, and guessed it would be as laughable as the previous one.

But Polak saved me from the bizarre escapades with unpredictable consequences: once, closer to the end of the day, the boss came into the office shining like a brass chandelier and said that BioKin had successfully handed over the gas generator to the client. The concept had been approved, the firm was commissioned to design two versions of industrial-scale devices and soon, as the finale of the two-year ordeal, the team would have a grand banquet. Well, finally!

Nothing warms the heart of a dark mage more than plenty of free food and drinks of the sort that he cannot afford, and a chance to strut before a gathering of cultured people, knowing that they won’t be rude or get into a fight. The only fee for participation in the event was the obligation to silently listen to the solemn forty-minute speech by the owner of the sewage factory and the invited mayor of Redstone. The floor was given to no one else; Quarters said that this way his uncle could emphasize that he had wiped the noses of all the skeptics. He had the right to!

Then all knocked back, and the party went on. I methodically tasted the contents of all bottles and decanters on the table, discovering how much I had missed of life. What could I taste in my Krauhard? Beer. Mead. Once-tried moonshine at the fair. Uncle told me a story: someone in our valley made homebrew once, but the drink had attracted chariks (a supernatural thing, plentiful as mosquitoes in Krauhard), and he no longer risked it. There was no demand for hard liquor in Krauhard! Even in Redstone, I acquired no taste for strong booze - did not like to lose consciousness. But there were white, red, fruity, wormwood drinks… Though, I must admit that after the third glass the difference between the drinks disappeared.

“Hey Tom, don’t drink anymore,” Quarters took the glass out of my hands.

I was stunned with surprise: “Why?”

“Because! I briefly saw one guy here. He used to hang out with Melons; I do not understand what he is doing at the party. He was not invited! You can get into trouble…”

Damn it, what bad timing! Why am I so unfortunate with banquets?

Quarters was already grogged; caring about me in his condition was surprisingly touching.

“No more!” I sincerely promised and switched exclusively to appetizers; they were also very good at the sewage tycoon’s soiree.

The party proved to be no worse than at home: snobbishness quickly evaporated, the guests danced to music and without it, loudly talked and laughed. Johan, who drank only apple juice the entire evening, entertained a group of white mages in deeply philosophical conversation; Polak danced around another sponsor. Some plump little man pestered me with the question of whether I got paid enough.

It was close to midnight when a waiter came over with the message that the requested carriage had arrived. It must have been Quarters who ordered it for me. Actually, I intended to spend the night at the party—they said that the hall was rented until noon the next day. But if the carriage had arrived, I had to go. In the end, a feather bed at home was softer than flooring. What if I caught a cold on the floor?

Sighing, I moved my extra few pounds into the carriage that was waiting at the entrance, was painfully stung by something in the darkness, cussed out the cab driver (who smelled like a fishing tacklebox), and sharply fell asleep.

I didn’t remember the moment I nodded off: there were neither twilight glimpses of consciousness, nor visions—nothing. I closed my eyes and then opened them under a high ceiling with a dome. The blue sky could be seen through broken fishnet windows without glass, and I felt cold. It was no longer summer.

Shivering, I realized first that I lay not at home, second that it was in an unknown place, and third that I was completely naked.

And then all the liquid I took imperiously demanded to be let out.

“Lie down quietly!” a voice commanded from the off-stage. “A horrible curse will not let you move.”

I gently patted myself, found nothing (no pants, either!), and sat down. I wondered whether they really expected me to fall for such a stupid joke.

Two (white mages, by all indications) stared at me in shock. They were kind of chewed up, and because the body’s physical health directly depends on the condition of the soul, I concluded that they were experiencing mental stress. Especially bad looking was the guy nearest to me with a spear in his hands. His eyes shone feverishly, his cheeks were sunken, and his hair tousled. The spear looked genuine and antique, though he held it as casually as a whisk.

“We do not fear thee, sorcerer! The teacher has killed your magic; now you cannot hurt anyone.”

What a clown.

They looked painfully familiar, and the zombies of White Halak suddenly surfaced in my memory. Of course! That meant he would easily jab a spear into my chest without thinking twice, if I let the situation slip into fisticuffs. On the other hand, maybe they wouldn’t dare. How could the captain say that they were “gullible, suggestible, and industrious”?

I had not known that the need to go to the bathroom could stimulate my thoughts that much.

“You betrayed your souls, miserable freaks!” I announced in a tragic voice. “You are the same as zombies, and the dead are at the mercy of dark magicians. Obey! I curse you on the first star, the sepulchral fog, and guts of a black cat! Ow-ow! Let you lose the true vision and skill to separate illusion from reality! Let it be!”

I said that and snapped my fingers, intending to cause a sheaf of colored sparks. Instead, I puffed up a huge ball of fire above my palm. I quickly shook it off under the table—it started smelling of smoke.

In short, it was time to get away.

As expected, the enchanted mages couldn’t critically think of the situation. While the white fools clapped their eyelids at me, wasting time, I gathered an armful of clothes and was gone. I didn’t care what was going to happen with them; it was their fault anyway.

I got out of the building into the junkyard, pulled on the crumpled clothes, and looked around. The place that I had left was a public use building, about to be demolished, but still quite sturdy (foliage on its marble steps, peeling colonnades, dome devoid of glass). A greenish-turbid river rolled its waters around: we were on the island in the middle of it. Now I understood why no one had noticed the hideout of those fools—water barriers greatly weaken magic background.

I felt surprisingly well: no trace of hangover, my head was fresh and body was energetic and pleasantly itching. I experienced an urge to start a fight or do some trick. If it was an effect of the white “killing magic”, then give me more of it. I strongly disbelieved that the white hobbyists were able to invent something fundamentally different from the centuries-old practices of the Inquisition. It remained to discover what their ritual was called in plain English to make sure it was nothing outstanding.

I had made a fireball instead of sparks. Before, I had revived a zombie, without any special effort. Something was wrong with me. We were lectured on what magicians’ “errors” could look like. It was scary even without pictures. Obviously, my troubles were related to the spontaneous Empowerment, and now, on top of it, the white had performed some rituals on me! My inflamed sense of responsibility required to find the culprits and explain their wrongdoings, to teach them a little with my feet.

But where to look for them?

Something crackled cozily inside the building, and a white streak of smoke stretched over the roof. Firemen and NZAMIPS would be here soon. Did I want to deal with NZAMIPS? A stupid question.

I hobbled along the chipped pavement, logically assuming that a bridge to the mainland should be somewhere close. There was a road, and it should lead somewhere, right? Soon I noticed the arch of a beautiful stone bridge with a double-crossed banner at the entrance: “The College of St. Johan Femm.” I had heard something about that place, but didn’t have time to think—I was almost running into the fire crews.

I thought I needed to check whether they had robbed my apartment and, if not, take some money from the cache. Redstone is a big town and I could not reach my home on foot, but cab drivers wouldn’t give me a ride on trust. Though the thought of a cab gave me a brilliant idea. What was the cab company that served the banquet yesterday? I recalled that on standby there were mainly the dark blue carriages of “Rimmis and Sons”; they would hardly allow an outsider to pick up a customer. I needed to inquire with them about the yesterday’s carriage! I decided to pay them a visit right away.

The first cab driver that caught my eye told where their stables were, and I got to the place on the steps of a tram, like I used to ride when being a freshman. The rest was “simple”—to find a man, whose face I had not seen, and learn from him what the name of the forbidden ritual was.

I could have begged and offered money for the information, but it was not my style. I undid a couple buttons on the shirt, pushed the belt to one side, uncombed my hair, and in that disheveled appearance walked into the office.

“Hello!” I began with aggressive pressure right from the door. “Where is your master?”

All of the people inside saw a dark mage in a militant mood, wearing expensive—albeit dusty—clothes and, obviously, suffering from a hangover. A walking nightmare.

“May I help you?” an office girl chirped.

I stared at the receptionist, trying to catch her gaze, but she stubbornly looked aside. Okay, apparently she had dealt with the dark mages as clients before.

“Help?” I asked mockingly. “Your guy left with my wallet! What else can you do for me?”

“What an unfortunate misunderstanding!” the girl sang in a high-pitched voice. “He did not do it on purpose. Are you sure you have not forgotten your things in a different place?”

“I’m not drunk!” my expressive objection raised knowing smiles on the faces of those present. “I do not like booze at all, and I had none of it yesterday. He picked me up at the restaurant ‘The Black Dole’, and I need my wallet back!”

“You will get it, sir, don’t doubt,” the noise and cries attracted the owner of the stables. “Who was on duty at the ‘Dole’ yesterday?”

The girl quickly checked her records: “Laurent, Mitchell, and Barto, sir.”

“Sir,” the owner turned to me, “can you describe the man who was driving your cab?”

I frowned and pretended to be carefully straining my memory: “Young. And looked… like a fish.”

“Laurent!” the girl could not refrain from commenting.

“When is his shift?” the owner frowned.

“In the morning, but he did not show up, sir. Pinot has replaced him.”

“The pilferer!” I said pathetically. “The damned thief. I demand that the police come to his house before he gets rid of my stuff.”

“There is no need for the police!” the owner hurried up. “I will go to him immediately and personally deliver your wallet to you. Perhaps directly to your home?”

He wasn’t making a fuss over anything—the main income of such stables was from the contracts with restaurants and pubs. Restaurateurs called certain cab companies in advance, depending on the number of customers, and kept the hired carriages on hold in the assigned parking spots. That was slightly more expensive than hiring independent cab drivers, but the restaurants relied on “their own” carriages’ safe and sound delivery of a drunken customer. And suddenly—a theft. The owner needed time to look into the situation - fine with me! The fact that I had learned the name of my enemy was already a big success. I barely remembered him, and they could have recognized no one based on such meager description..

“Okay, you may deliver it to my home,” I dictated the address to the girl (by the way, I live in a respectable area). I described the missing item—a wallet with keys. “If by this evening I don’t get my wallet back, the police will hear my complaint against you!”

After all, I liked that wallet, and my landlady would kill me for losing the keys.

I waited near the gate of the stables, as if looking for something in the pockets. My patience was rewarded: I caught the moment when the boss departed in one of his carriages to Laurent’s home.

“Quay Barco,” he growled the address to the cab driver.

Excellent! That’s how a real dark magician works! Just a couple of hours ago I had not known anything about my enemy, and now it remained only to clarify its house number.

I pondered if I should go and meet the guy in person. Had I gone home now, the concierge would’ve wrangled with me for the lost keys; then the landlord would’ve joined us and we would’ve argued the whole day. No, I wanted to know now what my enemy looked like!

I was ordered to get off the tram and threatened to be taken to the police (I hadn’t bought a ticket). Misers! Well, it wouldn’t seriously affect my plans—Laurent’s work was close to his home. I walked to the waterfront of Quay Barco, gazing with interest at the column of black smoke billowing over the river—the College of St. Johan Femm was still on fire.

The buildings with Quay Barco’s address formed the second line, hiding behind the hangars and warehouses of the North Creek, a relatively shallow harbor favored by owners of yachts and small boats and by amateur fishermen (imagine—people were fishing in that dirty river!). The blue carriage stood in front of a dull five-story building; I noted its number in my mind. To wait for Laurent outside could be waste of time. What if he doesn’t come back? What if he feigned sickness and went out for some business? The marina, the island, the boats gave me some ideas. The shortest way from Laurent’s place to the college was by boat. And he smelled of fish…

I turned to the docks. North Creek is not a commercial port: people in such places are kind of slow, know each other (even if they are not formally acquainted), and don’t interfere in each other’s business, but they always know who went with whom and where to.

Cozily nestling among the boxes and empty barrels, a group of fishermen was having breakfast on the dock. My stomach reminded loudly of itself at the sight of fresh bread and roach (yesterday’s feast had already left my body). I needed to end this manhunt!

“Where is Laurent?” I confidently asked them, not bothering with a salute.

“There!” they waved in the direction of the long sheds.

Luck was with me that day. Maybe I could get my money back—I desperately did not want to trudge home on foot. A small side door was open, and loud voices could be heard inside—Laurent was not alone.

“Hey, morons!” I started talking right from the door. “Haven’t expected me?”

Two athletic guys gazed at me in surprise. The third, a blond hunk in a white captain’s jacket, lightly pursed his lips. Apparently, he swore to himself.

“The same to you, Laurent!” I nodded to him. “What else can you say?”

He looked at me with a mixture of disgust and perplexity, and my dark character immediately took a fighting stance. I hated snobs and copycatting captains! If you want to walk on my roof, show me your claws.

“You have a lot of nerve to come here…” he started wearily.

“What choice do I have?” I shrugged. “Your half-baked morons can’t talk, and I need specifics. I had to drag myself here, teacher. On foot. By the way, I rubbed my feet sore!”

Who can tell me why I was in such a hurry? There were three artisans before me, the very same that had alarmed all of Redstone and stirred up the university. Moreover, one of them was certainly a magician, and not the last one in his gang. Wasn’t I in the position of a lapdog barking at an elephant?”

But it was too late to retreat. Where power doesn’t save, audacity will help!

“Confess what you have done, assholes!”

Laurent closed his eyes, as if demonstrating an abyss of patience, and tried to keep silence. He seemed to know little about the nature of the dark.

“Do not tell me that you are a magician-inventor. I won’t believe you—you don’t have the right physiognomy.”

“Of course, I used nothing out of ordinary,” the artisan refrained, “Only the shackles of deliverance! Is this term familiar to you?”

“Didn’t you mess something up?” I asked strictly and shocked him completely.

I felt no discomfort (neither cold, nor emptiness, nor loneliness) from the loss of my Source. It was strange. I hadn’t seriously considered magic as one of my limbs, but I thought that the infamous shackles should be sensed somewhat differently. Was that really the very same thing that dark magicians feared the most, to the point of hiccups? Enough to make a cat laugh!

“Do not doubt,” he assured me. “You must feel sad about ending your magician’s career so early?”

I wondered if he mistook me for someone else.

I shrugged. “Not really. Actually, I am going to be an alchemist. But I’ll report on you to NZAMIPS anyway, as a warning.”

They abruptly saddened.

“It looks,” Laurent sighed, “like you do not understand what favor we have done to you by releasing from the pernicious influence of the Evil…”

I replied to him with an obscene gesture.

“…Or has the vice too deeply rooted in your soul? You’re forcing us to resort to extreme measures!”

Did he threaten a dark mage? What a brazen white! Even if I did not have access to magic, I could still give him a fistfight, and I immediately told Laurent as much. Instead of a reply, the two muscles scowled and moved in my direction.

Look at them, half-baked goblins of the dwarf species!

In a good fight three adversaries at a time would be a guaranteed defeat. If these were wicked city teens before me, I would turn around and run—the dark are not afraid to retreat timely. But these were just musclemen—cultured boys who decided to become cool through weight training; their combat skills hadn’t been polished in dozens of minor skirmishes with broken noses and dark blue bruises. Against the ragamuffin from Krauhard’s backwoods, they were like well-groomed pets against a stray alley cat.

While Laurent’s friends clucked their beaks, I knocked off a barrel at their feet—they had to attack me one at a time now. The floor was swept very poorly, much to my advantage. Pretending to take a lower stand, I scraped a pinch of sand from the floor and threw it in the face of the approaching enemy. He was taken aback for a moment and recoiled, protecting his eyes, and immediately got a shoe kick on the knee from me—an inexpressible feeling, I knew for myself.

“Son of a bitch!”

They really had a bee in their bonnet about my relatives! I didn’t have time to respond to the insult—the second opponent rushed to attack. I did not know where they took their combat lessons from, but the money was spent in vain: a one-on-one fight, without weapons, is not a fight but a pub brawl. And the techniques should be appropriate for the brawl. I grabbed him by the clothes, pulled toward myself, and in a couple of seconds he glided down on one of the boxes. I could have applied more skill to make his head meet the corner, but then there would be a warm corpse on my hands, and I wasn’t accustomed to killing people.

I had underestimated Laurent; he had realistically assessed his chances against the dark—even if the latter wasn’t a magician anymore. While his comrades were getting their asses kicked, he ran into the back room and was now ready to show his skill: “It’s all over for you, accursed sorcerer!”

Laurent was holding an object, for the possession of which he could be jailed right on the spot for three years: a huge crossbow with an arrow, thick as a finger. Quite an exotic arsenal for a white magician. That thing hardly differed from the armory of a combat mage, except that the crossbow took more time to charge, and it did not leave aural imprints or require special abilities. The smooth arrowhead was stained with something greasy; I had no desire to test whether it was oil or poison.

Forgetting everything, I made the simplest ward-off weaving and threw it at my opponents.

A bright light ignited. I sensed a puff of heat and a rancid stench. When I was able to see again, it was very quiet around, and black flakes of soot were falling on the floor. My opponents could not be seen anywhere. I heard neither frightened screams, nor footsteps, nor creaking floorboards, nor slamming doors. Only black dust was powdered all around… When I understood what had happened, my blood drained from the brain, and the heart retreated to my heels. I rushed headlong from the hangar without looking to where I was running.

Yellowish smoke that scattered at the ceiling and flakes of soot were all that remained of a combat crossbow and three people who dared to argue with a dark magician.

The problem was not that I deprived someone of life (I wasn’t cognizant of that fact yet)—things just happened very quickly and without any conscious effort on my part. Uncle’s words about the armory curse surfaced in my memory. Was that a manifestation of my non-standard channel of power? But I had repeated that same curse many times in the classroom, and it only made balls bounce!

I rushed home like crazy: my apartment was at least six miles away, on the other side of the river. The concierge looked at me and silently gave a spare set of keys (she wasn’t suicidal, apparently). I was hungry but couldn’t eat. I was too emotional. Totally shocked.

I took a spoon of valerian and went to bed but didn’t sleep for long. The doorbell rang; it was the owner of the stables. Smiling, he handed me my wallet: “As I said, it was an unfortunate misunderstanding. My guy did not notice in the darkness the thing you had forgotten. He had gotten sick.”

By the time of their alleged conversation, Laurent was dead and could only be collected by shoveling. So the owner surely lied. I don’t know how the enterprising boss managed to get into the apartment of the dead artisan, but he took out the only thing that could point to my relationship with the victim.

“Thanks!” I was sincerely gratified.

“Any more questions for us?”

“No! I’m really thankful to you.”

I took more valerian and went to bed again. The doorbell rang; this time it was Captain Baer in black overalls, smelling horribly of smoke and breathing heavily. I said, “You stink,” and closed the door.

I went to bed again, the bell rang again, and Uncle was at the door, smiling, wanting to enter. I screamed and woke up. What an eerie dream!

Chapter 23

The infamous College of St. Johan Femm burned vigorously and for a long time.

Locomotive went there for the second time: two years ago, when Larkes was in charge, a few young scumbags castrated a kid—an uninitiated white—and were killed by the elemental curse, first and last in the short life of the white boy. Sixty-four students and attendants were slaughtered along with them, all of whom the dying wizard managed to douse with his rage. Who says that the white magic is harmless?

Firefighters poured nearly half of the river on the island, but if it had not been for the sake of the investigation, Conrad Baer would have let the fire frolic freely. It was a place nobody wanted to buy. Being a privileged school not long ago, the college was completely abandoned now. Sooner or later, the abandoned buildings always become infested with some yuck. Though Locomotive did not expect that it would be the warm-blooded yuck.

In the yard flooded with water and trampled by firefighters, healers calmed down a heavily burned white. He did not want to leave and assured everyone that he had lost his soul “here, exactly right here”, and begged to help him with the search.

“Another fool got hit by a beam,” the healer said to Locomotive with cynicism, typical for the police practitioners. “Perhaps, it will be better for him that way.”

“Dragon tears?” the captain pointed to the injured white.

“No, more like a lobotomy. I will give more details after the examination—if he stays alive until then.”

Locomotive nodded and went inside the building blackened by soot. It smelled disgustingly of smoke, water squelched under his feet and dripped on his head.

“Yours are there,” a firefighter stowing a tarpaulin sleeve waved in the direction of the hall.

He found the senior coordinator in the hall that had clearly been an epicenter of the fire. The floor boards were burned through to the rocky foundation there, and Locomotive moved via flimsy footbridges, thrown by the firefighters over the structures that survived the fire. Everybody’s attention was focused on the crumpled skeleton of a surgical table: around it, buried in black trash almost to the elbows, magician-experts and Mr. Satal personally crawled on their knees in search of evidence. All were unhealthily agitated.

Locomotive came up closer, expecting to see the charred remains.

“The same style as last week,” Satal sighed, straightening up. “But there is a difference.”

The captain looked at the ashes with understanding, but the dark magician smiled: “No, it’s not about them. The artisans performed the shackles ritual last night, likely successfully, because this time their victim was an initiated dark.”

Locomotive got a nasty sucking feeling in the pit of his stomach.

“The pump-sign stayed for eight hours, but then something happened,” Satal gestured around the walls, gnawed by fire. “This couldn’t be done by a human being. The channel is very different from the standard one; a magician with such a Source would not live through the Empowerment.

“A dark mage,” Locomotive stated.

“Rather, an otherworldly creature. A mature one, rich in energy, confidently orienting itself in the material world, affecting the environment with rare strokes, not wasting its power. Perhaps it has a material carrier.”

Captain Baer tried to picture such a horror walking along the streets of his city and failed.

“I don’t understand another thing: how did those two men survive? They were injured later and only because they didn’t get out of the fire in time,” Satal mentioned and nodded to an expert that had dug some crumpled round piece out of coal. “Send it to the lab and let me know the result!”

“Couldn’t that be the armory curse work?” the captain asked with an inner shudder.

Satal frowned. “I doubt it. The pump-sign broke up from an external impulse, but not due to the release of energy of the Source. The perturbation was extremely local, at least this time.”

Baer realized that he had not seen typical human remains in the mud: “Where is the victim?”

“Obviously, he or she woke up and ran off,” the dark shrugged indifferently. We haven’t seen any belts; the victim was held onsite only by the pump-sign. Rather thoughtlessly on their part.”

“Crazy psychos!” the captain could not resist shouting. “The third case. What do they want to accomplish?”

“Probably the same thing as Melons, had she not been arrested.”

“One more artisan?”

“Not likely,” the coordinator nearly spat on a pile of evidence, but managed to restrain himself. “That bitch seemed to coach a follower; he didn’t make the grade by just a bit. He knew what to do and how, but wasn’t sufficiently accurate, so the first two victims died during the ritual. And he was not explained how risky it was to put the pump-sign on an initiated mage. Here’s the result!”

The coordinator looked again at the blackened walls.

“And the white bastard is still at large,” Baer added gloomily.

“Then go back to work!” Satal soared. “Look for witnesses; he didn’t get here by air, did he? And I’m not done with evidence yet!”

Locomotive did not quarrel in response, although his patience was stretched to the limit. He was the head of Redstone’s NZAMIPS, there were four hundred men under his command, and he wasn’t going to lisp with a milksop—even if the latter was a dark magician. He wouldn’t be a scapegoat! None of the emotions raging in his soul reflected on Captain Baer’s face. He turned around and walked to the door in silence, habitually pondering whether he should immediately quit. Yes, five more years remained until his full pension, but he had already surpassed the length of service for an officer, and an old bachelor like him wouldn’t need a lot. Numerous relatives would welcome an uncle from the city; he wouldn’t be bored. Locomotive saw only one obstacle: if he left, he would completely lose the chance to influence events.

A young policeman in motorcycle goggles and gloves trampled on the steps of the college. He got agitated, seeing the captain, and started waving his hands. Not a moment of rest! Baer pushed his way through scurrying firefighters and approached the policeman. The guy’s face expressed embarrassment.

“Eh, sir…”

Locomotive looked down and cursed in a fit of anger.

“Damn, it’s all dirty here, too! What else do you have for me?”

The motorcyclist handed him a piece of mail, and Baer realized that shit was about to hit the fan. What could happen in the town that the chief of NZAMIPS had to be notified by courier? Locomotive pulled out of the dense envelope a letter, read it, and wished he carried a poison: in full compliance with the statute, the team of instrumental control informed the authorities about a powerful surge of magical activity around Quay Barco. Had they missed the alpha and omega?

“Pass it to Senior Coordinator Satal, okay?”

The policeman saluted and briskly splashed through the water on the sodden floor. He didn’t know what a mine he was carrying.

While a striped NZAMIPS car was making its way through the crowd of firefighters, Locomotive intensely pondered the situation; none of his subordinates would guess that behind his usual mask of calm was carefully suppressed panic. Not without reason the artisans hid on the river: the magic activity in Redstone was traditionally tracked well, mainly because of the presence of the university. Amulets scattered around the city were officially regarded as protection against the supernatural, but they could also fix any spike of magic background, regardless of its nature. On a daily basis the monitoring team recorded dozens of small flashes, but there were plenty of magic artifacts on the streets that could cause them; records of the place and time of the outbursts assisted in NZAMIPS investigations from time to time, and that was it. The magic surge was very serious, if the magicians on duty recalled the statute and decided to play it by the book.

The driver brought the captain to the Quay Barco in less than ten minutes. Locomotive expected to see signs of panic and destruction, but the street was quiet and sparsely populated. Still, that didn’t mean anything in the case of a magic attack. A policeman, meeting NZAMIPS cars, waved his hand, inviting them to turn toward the docks.

The situation at the docks was peaceful and sort of ordinary. A police officer questioned a company of drunken fishermen, and a criminal police van was parked to the side, meaning there were victims. The cops pulled a striped ribbon around a large boat hangar and chased the curious away. Locomotive went inside, not stopping for talk.

Well, the hangar consisted of nothing ordinary. There was neither blood on the walls, nor a cadaveric stench, nor traces of fire, nor damage, except for an overturned barrel. And piles of dust were all around. Magician-criminologists were rummaging there, too, but of a lower rank, local from Redstone. One of them habitually saluted: subordinates respected Locomotive.

“Amulets of instrumental control recorded an outburst of magic of level eight, no less, at 2:32 pm. There appear to be human remains—ashes. I cannot say yet how many people died. I’d like to show you something interesting.”

Carefully avoiding forensic specialists, rustling with their brushes, and stacks of boxes, the magician-criminologist took the captain into the back room. A seasoned professional, Locomotive whistled in surprise: against the wall there was a rank of crossbows, cocked and ready for firing; three or four more in the process of assembly were laid out on a long table; two uncovered boxes labeled “Hardware” predatorily gleamed with familiar parts. Boards on the far wall were pierced with bolts: the assembled weapon was tested in action.

“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 conducted 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.

And then the strange faded scrawls formed in my mind a clear sentence: “The perimeter leaks in three spots.”

A wave of panic swept over me. Throwing the book off, I retreated to the far end of the bed, but the mysterious squiggles still danced in my mind. The perimeter leaks in three spots. The perimeter of what?

Maybe I dreamt that because I was nervous? It happened to me sometimes, like a short circuit in the brain. I opened the book randomly and looked at another page.

“Salem assures us that there is no threat,” the anonymous author had written in haste. “His ability to anticipate the attack is scary, but it’s our only hope.”

It seemed that if I wanted, I could see the unknown author, look over his shoulder, admire his mysterious perimeter, and maybe even move there, becoming a hero of the past and living his life, again and again. I wrapped the book in three layers—with my shirt, a blanket, and a bed sheet—and shoved it in the darkest corner of the cabinet.

I felt reluctance to learn anything from the book.

Childish curiosity touched my consciousness, as if the monster wanted to understand why.

Because!

And I realized that stupid tricks weren’t all that Rustle was capable of.

I heard a kettle whistling in the kitchen. I had no habit of drinking tea and didn’t use the main gas (Quarters’ uncle’s business) at all. Hot drinks weren’t a tradition in Krauhard—our ancestors had no stoves to make them. Their meal was simple and artless. Surprised, I dragged my slippers to the kitchen and turned off the burner under the tinkling kettle. Pinch me, but I knew I was seeing that roundside copper kettle for the first time in my life.

And then, abruptly, without any transition, I found myself standing on the balcony. High railings saved me! Slowly, touching the walls, I got back into the room and began violently poking myself with the accumulator’s electrodes. My arm ached displeasingly—I needed to find a less self-destructive remedy. I imagined a huge, droning electric arc and suddenly realized that I was poking my arm with a fork, and the accumulator lay on the table. At lightning speed I corrected the error. Also, I understood why I ended up on the balcony—the kitchen and balcony doors had been reversed.

My God…

I could not even imagine that such things were possible. Let’s face it: the magic skills of the creature were impressive. And what would it do at night then? This thought made me freeze in my tracks. I couldn’t sleep under the electric current every night for God knows how long. I would die from the nervous tension alone!

My deceased Uncle advised to go to an empath with any problem, but they belonged to the white and didn’t know much about the otherworldly creatures. Now, when he passed away, nobody in my family would help me—even if I managed to reach Krauhard, refraining from sleep for two days. Chief Harlik was Uncle’s friend, not mine, and it didn’t make any sense to go that far to ask NZAMIPS for help. In any case, I would not dare to approach any people dear to me in that condition. God knows what the angry monster was capable of.

And the accumulator would be drained soon.

What did that beast want from me? The answer came instantly: its cold sticky tentacles greedily reached out to my mind, to the spot where memory is stored, where the source of my desires was, where the threads of my feelings converged. I plunged the electrode plates into the skin until it bled and kept it so until a chilling emptiness started reigning in my head. I’d rather die then yield to it!

I needed to hurry up.

I took Captain Baer’s card out of my desk. My hands shook—I couldn’t turn the door key on the first try. There was no sense regretting and repenting now. I wouldn’t have time to find any other help; I would be lucky if I reached NZAMIPS sane.

I did not dare to catch a tram—I was afraid that I would go in circles, but any cab driver in Redstone knew the building on Park Road. I had never thought that I would call that address of my own free will.

The entrance to the police headquarters looked impressive: its glass windows weren’t broken and the copper was not faded. There were surprisingly few people in the lobby. Last time I ran out of there so fast that the interior was not imprinted in my memory, and Captain Baer was taking me in through the service entrance. They were obviously well-funded! A beautiful blue-gray carpet lay on the floor. Why not? Redstone’s police headquarters is not a municipal police station; they don’t deal with drunken revelers there. But my imagination stubbornly put under the carpet a few protective pentagrams. I was practically sure that if I lifted up the rug’s corner, I would see them.

I approached the wall with the hanging office plan and realized that most of them belonged to the staff of the fiscal service. Oh, yes, besides NZAMIPS, there were also the criminal police, customs, the vice squad, and the alchemical control; all of them live their own very intense life, and bribe-takers and prostitutes are of no less concern to the society than the mages. That thought, for some reason, cheered me up. But I needed to find my captain.

“Are you looking for someone, sir?” the officer of the day asked.

I mutely put the captain’s card on the reception desk.

“Do you need particularly Captain Baer? He just left for an assignment.”

My resentment broke the bonds of depression for a second. It was outrageous! I came to report on myself, and he was absent. What were they doing here?

The officer on duty did not wait for my answer and dialed some internal number: “Sir, I have a visitor to the captain,” he said into the phone. “I don’t know; he doesn’t say. Will do, sir!” And to me: “Please take a seat! Mr. Satal will be with you in a moment.”

I hesitated, deciding whether the soft leather chair could be dangerous. In that condition I was afraid of everything…

A group of tough men in gray business suits walked by, politely moving me aside. Their leader should have carried colors of the Guard of Arak, if only his hands hadn’t been occupied by a plump leather bag. The strange detachment marched silently up the marble stairs to the second floor. Watching them, I did not notice right away that the same dark magician I saw in the junkyard, in a similar suit but of a darker tone, appeared in the foyer. Mr. Satal, yeah. He carefully gazed round me, stared without irony at the accumulator, and calmly nodded to the officer on duty: “Thank you, Officer Kennikor. Please find Captain Baer and ask him to contact me. I’ll be in the office. Come on, young man, we’ll wait for the captain in my office. Do not be afraid; I will not bite!”

I wasn’t afraid of him at all! Reluctantly dragging behind, I was figuring out once again how to start the conversation. Confessing right away about Laurent seemed undiplomatic. Some blurry silhouettes flickered on the border line of my vision, and on the suspicion that Rustle was ready to take its revenge, my hair began to stir with horror.

Perhaps one look at me was enough for the magician to draw conclusions. He searched in the drawers and pulled out an elaborate bottle with a blue label; not hiding it, he dipped the potion into a glass, splashed water from a carafe to top it off, and handed it to me. I emptied the glass. Why would I play the fool? The flickering in my eyes abruptly stopped.

“You are so upset because of Locomotive?” the magician asked gently. “He’s gone to you; have you met him?”

I shook my head: “Missed him.”

Hearing my reply, the magician visibly brightened: “That’s excellent! He is not a compassionate man: plays by the book. You’d better tell me what’s bothering you; maybe I can help.”

What was going on? A dark mage expressed sympathy to another dark, offering help and support?! I even shed a tear.

And then I confessed everything to him. About Rustle, about the book, about the black flakes in the boat hangar… everything. I only hoped my death would be painless.

Instead, he sighed and said, “Forget it!”

“What?”

“It would not be a bad idea to interrogate those morons, but it’s okay as it is now: for the attempted theft of the Source they would be sentenced to death anyway. Also, they tortured to death two more people before you. Let’s consider that the execution had been done onsite. Or you thought that the law worked only against the dark?”

“What are you talking about?! I have a monster sitting inside me. When I try to cast a spell, it throws them at people. And it seems to be trying to eat me, too.”

“That’s normal. It’s a standard response when contact between Rustle and a dark magician is reinforced with the shackles. Don’t panic! You’re not the first infected mage, nor the last one. With regard to the shackles: if the curse is not re-imposed at least three more times during the first month, its blocking effect will dissipate in three weeks. Then the behavior of your Source will be predictable again. As I remember, your doctor has forbidden you to conjure? Let’s say the ban is extended for another month, I will guarantee to you the absence of magic. As to Rustle, you will have to get used to it; it is impossible to completely shut down its access to your mind. You had coped with the Source; you will manage Rustle as well. Most importantly, do not play up to the monster.”

I expected a totally different reaction from the dark mage. My white upbringing skewed my perception of the world.

“That means you won’t penalize me?”

“Why not? We will,” he was surprised. “We’ll leave records in your file; when Locomotive returns, you’ll testify. Right after that we’ll prepare a contract—you will work for me.”

“No!” I was horrified. “I have one more year until graduating from the university and a contract with Roland the Bright’s Fund thereafter. I want to be an alchemist.”

“Who’s stopping you? You’ll serve as a magician-reservist—you’ll be set in motion when necessary; that way it’ll be easier for you, and NZAMIPS will save some money. I will settle the issue with the Roland’s Fund; I’m on close terms with the guys from there. Do you,” he frowned sternly, “seriously want me to institute criminal proceedings against you?”

I did not want to know what that meant!

In less than an hour I had become a NZAMIPS freelancer with the nickname “Dark Knight”, and Captain Baer, with a deep sense of satisfaction, glued my photo to the folder of the illegal combat magician. Had I been sentenced, I would have served three lifetimes or had two death penalties. I didn’t feel or observe the magic giving me shivers anymore. A very familiar looking lady earnestly congratulated me on a decent start of my career and tried to get details of the triple murder. She wondered whether I felt a little lonely. I dully replied, pondering what had been the turning point at which my fate took such a steep curve. Did it all start with Bella from BioKin? Or with Uncle’s book? Or with the record of the first crystal? Or maybe from the moment I was born?

How the hell could I become one of NZAMIPS people?!