Just Cause Universe 2: The Archmage (2 page)

“You must swear an oath to us,” urged Kanayo. “Here and now, or we shall bar you from this place. Certain things must never come to pass so long as you live.”

“Anything you like.” Will’s skin prickled. He spun all his tone and volume pots to maximum and was rewarded with a gentle whine of feedback from the air around him. His guitar produced amplified sound even though it wasn’t connected to anything, as if the very air itself became his speaker.

“Swear that you will not let him take our power. If our defeat is inevitable, you
must
take our power for yourself. It is your only chance to survive.”

“What?” Will couldn’t believe his ears. “Come on, you can’t be serious.”

Hotaka set his cricket cage on a high shelf so it would be out of danger. His ancient paper-thin skin took on a hardened, shiny appearance. The fabric of Kanayo’s clothing moved to reshape itself around her as if it were alive.

“Swear, or I shall banish you from this place forever. You know I have the power to do so, Wiru-san.” Hotaka raised a hand surrounded by a glowing nimbus of energy.

“Okay, I swear,” Will grumbled.

He had never before seen the Saitos use their magic in great quantities. Hotaka stood straighter, and somehow taller and more massive than before, as if his legs and body had lengthened. His skin transformed to shiny, black chitin, and horny blades pushed out of his arms and legs.
He looks like a
cricket
, thought Will as he noticed the long antennae sprouting from Hotaka’s forehead.

Meanwhile, the layers of her clothing had reshaped around Kanayo to form an approximation of ancient samurai armor. A sash whipped out, straight and hard, and she grasped it like a
katana
sword. Magic crackled off both of them like static electricity. They seemed almost young and vibrant as the power flowed through them.

Lightning flared outside the windows, and thunder boomed instantly along with it. Will saw a dark figure floating in the air, backlit by the storm. He had just opened his mouth to shout a warning when all the windows facing east shattered inward. Razor-sharp slivers of glass whirled through the apartment. The shards deflected off Hotaka’s insectile armor and only cut a few threads on Kanayo’s fabric. Will barely managed to strum a chord in time to create a screen of force in front of him to keep from getting shredded.

Will squinted through the rain that blew into the room. The figure drifted closer to the building face, illuminated by the room lighting. He was in his mid-thirties, with a slender frame and gaunt face. Male-pattern baldness had begun to show through his short black hair and gray hairs streaked his neatly-trimmed beard. Although he floated in the rain, not a drop reached his skin or his fashionable clothing. No costumes for this fellow; he wore designer jeans, a white Oxford shirt, black leather jacket, and alligator skin boots. He gazed into the Saitos’ apartment with interest.

“How nice,” he said. “You have company. Saves me a trip. I’m Wolfgang
Frazier
and I’ll be killing you all this evening.” His voice was husky, as if he smoked a couple packs a day, but carried subsonic power in it that made Will’s stomach churn.

Kanayo raised her hands and a mass of sashes and ribbons shot forth like serpentine missiles. They raced through the air toward the man as if they were alive. The man countered with a spell of his own that caused the fabric to blacken and crumble into ash as it touched him.

He stepped out of the air through a broken pane of glass, and Will let him have it with a massive, crunchy power chord. The blast of sound turned the remaining glass shards in the room into powder.
Frazier
flew backwards from the impact and tumbled out of the window.

Will turned to face the Saitos with a smile and a shrug. “That didn’t seem so hard.”

Eldritch flames spurted into the sky as
Frazier
rose again, borne on a column of flame. “Simpleton,” he hissed through magical amplification that parroted Will’s. “Did you really think I would be so easily defeated?”

“I was sort of hoping, yeah.”

Kanayo and Hotaka stepped in front of him and assumed fighting stances. “You shall not have him, monster,” rasped Hotaka through jaws better-suited to tearing steel than starting conversations.

Will’s jaw dropped. “What are you doing?”

“Oh, please,”
Frazier
snarled. “You think a couple of fossils like you can stop me?”

Hotaka rasped his forearms together with a sound like swords being sharpened. Fabric flowed around Kanayo like living water. “Coward.” Kanayo’s voice sounded like that of a young woman, smooth and silky.

“Fancy a melee, do you? Fine. It should be quite amusing.”
Frazier
extended his hands and a pair of glowing swords grew out of them. Each blade sparked and spat flames. He held one in front of him vertically, and lifted the other over his head in a mock salute. “Come on, then. I haven’t got all night.” Smoky Western-style armor appeared around his body and glowed dim purple in the gathering darkness.

Will started to play his best speed metal attack riff. The steel girders of the high-rise vibrated in sympathetic harmony. A single word of power passed from
Frazier
’s lips and suddenly Will couldn’t feel his fingers. The sounds of his guitar changed from mellifluous to jarring and dissonant, and his magic became erratic and uncontrolled.

Hotaka and Kanayo rushed the intruder.
Frazier
moved in a blur and used his magic to counter theirs. Hotaka’s chitin blades flashed as
Frazier
deflected them with his own swords. Kanayo used her magic to make her curtains constrict him. He struggled to move against fabric as unyielding as steel. As Hotaka closed in on him, a cloud of pitch darkness filled the room.
Frazier
’s swords flared orange in the unnatural darkness.

Will closed his eyes against the black and concentrated on finding his fingers again. He knew they were still there; his body had the memory. He just needed to reestablish the paths of his nerves. Magic coursed down his arms and overcame the spell which held his fingers fast. He began to play once more. A pinched harmonic on the high E string dissipated the darkness as quickly as
Frazier
had created it.

Hotaka and Kanayo fought on full defense, hard-pressed by
Frazier
’s attacks. Fresh gouges in Hotaka’s armor smoked where the would-be Archmage’s flaming blades had cut it. What seemed like several acres of cloth swatches were strewn across the floor, their edges charred. A deep cut in Kanayo’s side stained her fabric armor with her blood.
Frazier
appeared unharmed, and even seemed to be enjoying himself.

Will swore that if nothing else, he would wipe that stupid grin off
Frazier
’s face.

His fingers danced over the frets as he wove magical energies in a storm to compete with nature’s own pyrotechnics outside. His force interposed itself between
Frazier
and the Saitos to protect them from his flaming swords. Then it gently lifted them over and behind him. They might not be out of harm’s reach, but at least he’d moved them out of melee range.

Frazier
’s smile fell as his kills were robbed from him. He snarled and his swords vanished. He drew power into him in preparation for the incantation which would destroy Will. Will could feel it draining from the very air around him.

Will compressed as much of the magical force around
Frazier
as he could and shoved him once again out into the rainstorm outside. He pulled off a difficult two-handed arpeggio up and down the neck of his guitar and built up to a climax which should crush
Frazier
into powder.

A sparkling shield emerged from within the enemy mage and pushed back against Will’s energies. Even though he worked hard to defend himself,
Frazier
still found enough power to go on the offensive. He released a glowing yellow cloud that drifted through the air, unaffected by wind or rain. Will changed tactics from technical prowess to sheer balls-to-the-wall speed metal. The cloud broke apart and flowed past him in thin yellow streamers.

The Saitos!
Will realized.

He whirled around just in time to see the yellow cloud envelop the two elder mages.

“No!” screamed Will as he tried to find the right chord to fling the poison away from them.

Hotaka took his wife’s hand in his own and smiled even as blood began to trickle from the corner of his mouth. She in turn nodded at Will before she closed her eyes. They both pitched forward to crumple into heaps which decomposed into dust.

And their energies poured into Will.

“No, it was supposed to be mine! Mine!” shrieked
Frazier
.

Between them, the Saitos had nearly two hundred years to absorb magic, and those energies flowed out of their remains like water from a fire hose. If the power had been lightning, it would have sought the ground. But this was magic, and it sought the nearest conduit of eldritch ability.

It sought Will.

Brilliant white light surrounded him. He stopped playing; he couldn’t have continued even had he wanted to. His body went completely numb. The concentrated power protected him from
Frazier
’s sneak attack, a bolt of power which rebounded away to dissolve a large hole in the apartment’s wall.

The landlord’s gonna be pissed
, thought Will, drunk on the power as it coursed through his body. He immediately understood the appeal of becoming an Archmage, if it felt like this all the time. He turned, only dimly aware that his feet hovered several inches over the floor.

“No matter,” grumbled
Frazier
. “I’ll get their power when I kill you.”

Options poured through Will’s mind like sand through a sieve. There were so many new things he knew he could do with the fresh influx of pure power: invocations, evocations, transformations. Choices overwhelmed him and he floated, helpless, unable to decide on one. Another of
Frazier
’s power bolts blasted against Will and shattered the magical shield between them.

At last, Will understood discretion was the better part of valor. His mind latched onto a spell he hadn’t known before. His fingers flexed on the guitar to form the chord to unlock the power.
Might as well look good doing it
, he laughed to himself. “You’ll have to find me first,” he mocked.

He pointed the neck of the guitar straight up in the best stadium rock tradition and struck the chord.

When the swirling purple energies around him dissipated, he found himself back in his studio in the Lucky Seven’s Chicago headquarters.
Frazier
’s scream of fury still echoed in his ears. The incantation seemed to have worked properly, since Will had been transported to a place of safety. Furthermore, he was masked from
Frazier
’s magic, and effectively invisible to magical detection.

So many new ideas ran through his head that his legs grew wobbly and he had to sit down. Maybe there really
was
something to all the book learning that most mages followed.
Nah
, he decided. Studying was for the birds. Satisfied with that rationale for now, and secure and comfortable in his studio, Will began to play again. This time he played not for the magic, but for the music.

The magic simply happened anyway.

Chapter One

“One of the myths about superhero teams that perpetuates is that we’re always busy fighting the so-called Forces of Evil. The truth is that there is far more down time than action. It can actually be pretty boring.”

-Jack “Crackerjack” Raymond, appearing on
The Late Show With David Letterman
, August 28, 1998

May, 2004

Denver, Colorado

Just Cause Headquarters

Jason’s alarm chirped. Sally groaned, rolled over, and felt around for the clock as she tried to avoid opening her eyes. After a minute or so, she still hadn’t found the elusive alarm, so she cracked open one eyelid and tried to resolve the blurry images into something familiar. He’d moved his clock again, the sneaky jerk. It mocked her, just far enough out of her reach that she’d have to get out of bed to shut it off. He knew her proclivity for sleeping in, and had moved it before he’d left for his shift in the control center.

“Dammit, Jason.” She grumbled as she got to her feet and trudged across the room to shut it off. Shenanigans like this would irritate her to no end if it had been anyone else but Jason doing them. She wouldn’t let something this trivial get her all riled up, especially now they were sort of living together. Sally stripped off Jason’s oversized t-shirt which served her as a nightgown and headed for the bathroom.

A splash of red and yellow made her glance toward his computer. His screensaver showed the picture they’d had taken together the day she’d been inducted into Just Cause. He mugged for the camera in his brown and gray costume, blond hair flopped over his face, chin unshaven, while she smiled from behind her goggles. Her slender form, wrapped in her bright red and yellow speed suit, contrasted with his thick muscles and earth tones, like a hummingbird beside a bear. She rarely noticed how much smaller she was than him except when she saw that picture. She was a third of his weight, and only reached up to his shoulder if she stood on tiptoes.

He treated her as gently as if she were made of delicate porcelain. When they made love, he took great care not to crush her. To that end, they’d started to experiment with some different positions they’d found on a website. A couple of them made Sally blush just thinking about them, although she liked the one called the
cowgirl
. It made her think she ought to get a special hat to complete the experience.

She decided she’d better wash her hair since it had been a couple days. Conventional wisdom for super-speedsters was to keep hair short. She rejected that trope, and kept hers long enough to touch the small of her back, in spite of the hassle. Super speed presented its own unique hair-care concerns: split ends to give beauticians nightmares, thatched tangles like birds’ nests, and the ever-present danger of catching it on something and turning her head into a five-hundred-mile-per-hour tetherball. She went through conditioner as fast as she did tread on her boots. More than once she’d considered cutting it all off and going with something short, cute, and sexy. But Jason loved her long hair, and when he ran his fingers through it, it gave her the best kind of shivers.