My Path to Magic 2: A Combat Alchemist (33 page)

"
Maybe. I'll just seal the mine. And you don't dare gossip about them! Who knows what the public reaction will be."

I could predict this reaction: h
alf of Suesson's folks would be readying for the war with the army of golems, and another half would rush into the mines searching for treasures, guarded by the constructs.

As
Reich promised, he quietly sealed the ill-fated mine. His people dumped sand into the shaft and melted it with assault curses. The "cleaners" also put more warding amulets on the mouth of the mine in Palovy Grabny, just in case.

Rustle
was very proud of my victory over the golem. When I cut the invincible construct into pieces, the monster was euphoric. But he refused to explain the reasons for being so emotional.

A
column of painted wagons drawn by huge melancholy cart horses raised dust on the road to Septonville under a dashing, bravura march. Elephants stepped majestically; tigers pushed their striped muzzles through the grating of their open cells; a conductor sportily waved his wand before his orchestra on the platform. The column was headed by the circus' owner (or, rather, a chieftain of the crowd of cheerful actors) in a bright yellow open-top car; seeing townsfolk rushing from all sides to his circus, he waved his black lacquered hat at the excited crowd and twirled his brilliantine mustache. Music thundered; jugglers and acrobats, jumping out of the wagons, threw torches into the air and walked the wheel. The town jubilantly welcomed its guests.

No, Larkes
didn't hire the whole troupe. He knew people who would welcome a chance to avenge the artisans, and Maestro Balsamo was one of them.

Mr. Balsamo happened to visit
a town where a branch of the sect existed almost legally. The urban community treated the frolicking artisans good-naturedly; no one expected trouble from them. And one playful "genius" came up with the idea that circus animals were being oppressed. One night noble fighters for animal rights unlocked all cells and by chance set the hated "animal prison" on fire. The fire quickly spread to all wooden wagons. Small animals hid in the corners and were burned at once, and the stars of the arena - four huge Kashtadarian lions, horses, and half-dressed people screeching from fear rushed along the narrow aisles of the wagons. Elephants, frightened by the smell of the predators, trampled one lion; two others were shot dead by the police that came to rescue people, and the heart of the last huge cat broke from stress. Two days later the troupe forsook the town in one wagon miraculously spared by fire; they left eight modest obelisks at the cemetery for the poor.

Now
the wagons of the Balsamo Circus had top-of-the-line fire safety equipment!

Derik
watched the arrival of the circus with irritation: he would have to screen a hundred new people for the presence of people that could jeopardize his plan. The group of devoted followers he had gathered in Septonville was too small and inexperienced for this job. "The circus will leave in a few days, and anyone left behind would be like an eyesore in town," he consoled himself.

The circus stayed in town for two weeks,
and when the colorful wagons moved on again, they carried an old maid of sixty (she was lured to Redstone with an offer to change her quiet lonely life in Septonville for a place in a nursing home), and a cemetery watchman - a stutterer and drunkard disliked by the townsfolk (Balsamo hired him to care for the circus animals).

But
Septonville did not notice the loss of its two residents: they were replaced by doppelgangers.

Larkes borrowed
the masters of transformation from Army Intelligence. General Zertak, in vindictive zeal for the incident in Arango, dispatched for the job the cream of the crop. Colonel Lavender Kilozo was the senior of the two and a unique white mage: she adored ventures. The enchantress with the face of a seventeen-year-old girl recently entered her fifth decade, by character remaining a restless teenager. She lied as easily as she breathed; she could easily reincarnate into another person without any magic. Counterweight to the adventurous Lavender Kilozo was her partner, Sergeant Peter Breno, a man without a trace of magic, but with a photographic memory and a rare skill to mimic voices, as well as brutal physical force. They both accepted their new assignment to combat the internal enemy with understanding; in some ways, this job was more dangerous than their covert operations abroad, on the islands of the Sa-Orio Empire.

"A s
hitty little town," Pete summarized his impression of Septonville, sitting in a shed at the cemetery along with Lavender; she was refreshing his make-up, trying to turn a young, energetic man into a drunkard. Gravedigger Hugo, his new image for the next month or two, looked back at Pete from a mirror. "Thieves are everywhere, locks on doors, gratings on windows, beggars on every corner, and it's the provinces!"

"You
haven't seen its western suburbs - they are much worse."

"What'
s there?"

"
The migrants from Krauhard that Coordinator Larkes warned us about. They live in the barracks of a textile factory."

"I'll go and
hang about there," Pete decided.

Lavender smoothed her brown wo
ol dress, which she inherited from her prototype - Ms. Tabret - and examined herself from head to toe in a tiny mirror. "And I'll start with the flea market," she decided.

T
heir task to find a covert group of sectarians in an unfamiliar town would seem hopeless to an average layman. But not once in her career as a scout had Colonel Kilozo discovered the innermost human secrets from just tiny bits of information: hearing snatches of conversations, reading the expression of eyes, watching postures and gestures. Under the guise of Ms. Tabret she walked around the town and listened to the conversations with no one paying attention to the "gray mouse". This method of getting results was time-consuming. Lavender enjoyed it.

Outwardly prosperous
, Septonville was a troubled place, in fact. The textile factory, which provided jobs to the whole town, was recently closed (supposedly for renovations), and crowds of people, not used to poverty and idleness, were thrown onto the streets. Migrants from Krauhard were a separate issue: these were people who settled in the foothills of Krauhard in years of a relatively low frequency of supernatural phenomena, but as soon as the twilight region began to justify its reputation, they fled in panic. The migrants lived in the barracks of the factory, accumulating unaddressed resentment and the bitterness of unfulfilled hopes.

"
Half of them have to be jailed," Pete said of the inhabitants of the barracks when they met next time. "They either steal, or brew moonshine, or do some other shit."

T
he scouts weren't interested in criminal activities per se; their task was the forbidden ritual and the artisans performing them.

"
Did you pay attention to whether children live in the barracks? How many of them are dark? Krauhard is close, after all. The coordinator said the ritual would include sacrifices of the dark, perhaps dark kids," Lavender noted. "What a shame that NZAMIPS has a mole! We could have asked the local branch for help. Too much work for two of us."

And
they continued walking the streets.

The
buddies held the next meeting in an acacia bush, where the real Gravedigger Hugo used to take a nap. Lavender looked worried: "You know, Pete, I am afraid this time we'll lay an egg."

Pete
shook off his sleepiness: crafty Kilozo never panicked before. "Go on, what have you dug up there?"

"There is
a private orphanage in the suburbs; about fifty children, eight of them are dark, boys of twelve-thirteen years old."

"
And what's so suspicious about it?"

"
Have you heard of any benefactor willing to voluntarily take care of so many dark kids, especially boys of the same age? They can make your life hell! And I saw an aggressive white there," Lavender became gloomy. "He was beating up a boy. True, dark children need disciplining, but he kicked the kid, when the boy fell down, in front of other children…Such humiliation generates hatred, Pete. I mean, the orphanage staff isn't going to foster these children. They want to secure their submission for a very short time."

Lavender
's worry passed on to her teammate; they both knew how high the stakes were in this game.

"
Then these bastards are ready to start any moment now," Pete concluded. "Neither you, nor I would cope with their combat mage. It's time to request reinforcement."

* * *

"Is he crazy?" a well-dressed gentleman expressed his indignation at the table of a rather expensive restaurant. "To drive my child to crying, break his toys! I won't leave it like that!"

Derik
was having lunch at the same restaurant, not far from the perturbed townsman. As the decisive moment was nearing, some brothers began to lose their self-control, attracting too much attention at the most inopportune time. The second-most influential artisan after the patriarch was thinking how to reshuffle his scarce human resources to mitigate the conflict in the orphanage. Derik had no doubt that the ritual conceived by his leadership would be upheld successfully. Though, in the records of the founding fathers it said that the artifact for the ritual was carried by hand, and what they were building now was barely housed in the local textile factory.

I fulfill
ed my promise to Johan and developed a new approach to the problem of ore bacteria. One day I gathered them all to listen to my presentation.

"That's it!"
I put a poster on the wall and proudly glanced at the audience. There was no understanding in their eyes. Perhaps, I wasn't good at drawing pictures; I would have to explain my concept in words.

"
It is a schematic diagram," I made a sweeping gesture encircling a homemade poster. "I listed the main issues of our project. First, ore microbes do not eat deep - they have no teeth. Hence, the output of metals is proportional to the surface of the contact area. To increase productivity, we will put the microbe in a container with teeth."

Johan
's face brightened for a moment, but then disappointment shadowed it again. "This container will be the worm. They will gnaw rocks, and the ore microbes inside of them will feed on thinly-ground ore and leached-out metals into the worms and irrigation water."

"The
worm will chew ore!?" Quarters exclaimed incredulously.

"
It's possible," Johan sighed. "Ore minerals are not the hardest, but…"

I did not let
him distract us: "Another problem of biomining is getting metal ions out of solution. The irrigation water will be fed to the clam colonies, and the clam will be extracting and building metallic shells for themselves."

I stopped for
a minute, checking if my companions were still with me.

"
And the last participant of the ore cycle, the fish. It will be floating around, eating worms and clams, and shitting money, figuratively speaking. The finished product should be coarse enough to separate it from water and other organics in a simple cyclone."

Johan
pondered on something, even closing his eyes with zeal.

"
I am ready for your objections."

If
someone had started laughing, I would have kicked him out of my house right away.

I waited patiently until Johan
would catch a small subtlety, not obvious at first sight. The white raised his hands: "Something does not fit into the design, but what…"

"It's the e
nergy balance," I graciously suggested.  "The worms will have to be fed up for better rock chewing. Well, we could throw manure, oilcake, or some other trash in the pool with rocks as fuel…"

T
he meeting was over for the white. Johan became withdrawn, totally disconnected from reality. Our further discussion was held in his absence.

"
I guess you've managed to offer something original," Polak smiled. "Though I think people already tried an ecosystem approach to biomining. How do you plan to remove waste rock and carry out water exchange? How will you treat ores of complex composition?"

"
No idea!" I admitted. "We will address the issues as they come. You'd better tell me whether Johan can cope with the task."

Polak smiled indulgently:
"He holds a master's degree in natural magic."

It was really cool.
I heard a rumor that in addition to a magic seal, each master upon graduation received a chic ring with a personal coat of arms, made of pure gold.

T
he white got up and left, just by miracle not bumping into the door jamb. Polak hurried after him.

"
I'll let you know when there will be some progress!" he yelled from the yard.

"
Don't you dare blab about this," I threatened Quarters. "I'll break your neck."

"I'll be
dumb as a corpse!" Ron swore.

Well,
I could have argued about the dumbness of corpses!

Since that day
Johan stayed in the lab day and night and didn't respond to our attempts to lure him out.

Chief
Brian came out of the quarantine, and NZAMIPS left me alone. By day, I worked as a district alchemist; by night, I played with the golem's material in the garage.

Unexpected g
uests chose to visit me that rare morning when I was alone at home (not counting Johan). Ron had a sort of all-hands-on-deck job with cotton growers, Polak went to the post office, and I to my regular job.  An inspection trip was scheduled for the afternoon (I love my job!). The perimeter signaled an approaching car, but no one rang the bell on the gate door, and my zombie behaved calmly. I went out to have a look.

They stood outside the gate and waited patiently for
permission to enter. Laudable politeness! Staying on the porch, I saw only one visitor. I did not go down the steps; I just waved him in. And the oddest couple I ever saw squeezed through the gate into my yard. One was thin - a guy of my age, skinny as a pole, and the other - a genuine dwarf (I didn't see him behind the gate). Both were dressed in business suits that looked ridiculous on them. When they came nearer, I noticed that the skinny guy's ears stuck out like a monkey, and his lush hair could not conceal this unfortunate peculiarity. As to their facial expressions…I saw similar moronic looks on the faces of my curators in Ho-Carg.

They looked like
circus actors.

The guests
stopped at a ten-foot distance from my porch and began bowing to me like Sa-Orio's dolls, shouting nonsense in mournful voices.

"
We apologize, Mr. Tangor!"

"
It was an incident."

"
We're sorry."

"
We pray for mercy…"

T
hey sang in chorus until I exhausted my patience. Not that I did not like their apology - I just prefer clarity in everything.

"
What's your fault?"

The guests looked at each
other, and the dwarf ventured to squeak: "We blew the old mine."

The s
kinny nodded frantically, agreeing.

T
hey called it an "incident"?! Two men on duty were killed, one disappeared, and a dark magician was seriously hurt!

"
Did you do it with your own hands?" I was curious and wanted to use a chance to ask them while they could still talk. I planned to punish them severely.

They shook their heads:
one signifying "yes," another "no".

"
It was done by our friends."

"
Companions."

"
Brothers!"

"
I see. You are from Salem's Brotherhood!" I grinned sinisterly. While my enemies remained a faceless abstraction, I didn't think about vengeance (five other "cleaners" would take care of it), but now…I threw a fierce glance at the future invalids.

T
he longhaired with horrible ears looked just like Bandit when he pissed in my shoes. Combat with the dwarf was aesthetically disgusting to me. Yeah, behind the backs of these two clowns there were evil masterminds who planned and organized the explosion in the mine and the murders of kids; but the sinister Salem Brotherhood became forever tied up in my mind with the two funnymen. "May we reimburse you for a moral injury?" the longhaired squeaked with hope.

"We'll cover
the suffering damage."

"We'll pay
for harm done to you!"

"
Stop it! Am I correct that you are willing to compensate me?"

"
Yes!"

W
hat should I ask them for? I went into the house to pick up my diary and started turning pages. Seeing a notebook in my hands, the guests became noticeably sad.

I found
what I wanted. "I'll agree on an authentic bone from the City of Bekmark!"

"It won't
work," the skinny giggled in a very silly manner, then caught my gloomy gaze and got scared (hopefully he didn't shit his pants).

"
It's not in our power!" the dwarf jabbered. "The bones were kept in museum storerooms without special protection, even without warding spells…"

Of course,
they weren't artifacts and had no practical use. Apparently, someone had found value in them.

"
Stolen?"

"
Yes," the skinny confirmed in low voice.

I could have asked them to
dig out new ones. But the place of their excavation was outside of Ingernika.

"
Another option: the same from Capetower."

The
dwarf's eyes started running. "This we can do," he raised his head, met my eyes for a second, and then pointed his gaze to the ground again. "But since your participation in Capetower's ritual is almost decided, such payback would seem like…"

"
Trickery!" the skinny finished for him.

Why
did strangers always know more about my future than I did?

To
let them go without retribution would mean to lose my self-respect. Perhaps there was a small thing they could do for me, after all…

"My last
choice. Find all (I really mean ALL) available information about my father."

They
became a little confused. "Why do you not ask your family about this?" the skinny inquired cautiously.

He was determined
to lose his teeth today! And ears! When the skinny saw my face, he became pale and rushed to hide behind his less stalwart companion.

"
We'll do, Mr. Tangor!" the dwarf began jumping like a ball. "Do not doubt. Give us a month. Just a month!"

"
Okay," I generously allowed.

And they quickly disappeared,
without losing their teeth and ears.

I tried to pull myself together.

How dare they remind me about my family! I had no desire to explain to everyone that my Mom lied to me. It was so humiliating!

D
uring my last visit to Krauhard I heard from my Mom a beautiful tale of a noble NZAMIPS officer who died in the line of duty. I would have believed such a story right off, if not for the shadow of Messina Fowler in my mind. With her aid, I could confidently recognize signs of deceit - mother's glance running off to the side, her fiddling hands, her smile that was out of place. That's when I decided to collect information about my dad by myself.

I
made a record in my diary to check for a package from the Salem Brothers in a month. Nothing would save them from my wrath if they didn't deliver on their promise.