The Fixer Of God's Ways (retail) (5 page)

"…
this fiend from the Tangors!" the old man snarled.

"He's gone for bus
iness," Satal shrugged calmly. "With my consent and Larkes' approval."

"What?" the old mage
was close to having a stroke. "How dare you let him go!"

Satal watched with interest as the guest'
s face acquired a crimson hue.

Having noticed
that his anger didn't produce the desired effect, Axel took a seat in a chair for visitors, as if nothing happened.

"
Your young man is loony - he proved it yesterday. I am afraid sectarians won't stop the attempts on his life."

T
he old magician no longer grimaced or frowned. Satal always suspected that these grimaces were nothing more than a mask, hiding an attentive and flexible mind.

The former senior coordinator
fished from the bottom drawer a curvaceous porcelain teapot. "Green tea?"

Axel
sighed, "Thank you; I'd love to."

Five minutes later the tea was
poured, and their conversation acquired a business-like character.

"
My agents followed him to the station. Artisans didn't shadow him."

"Shallow thinking
! In Ho-Carg they went so far that they even faked the railroad timetable, and a military train collided with a passenger express," Axel retorted.

Satal whistled:
"How many army mages died?"

"They weren't
even hurt. Only a fireball hit to the head could kill these badasses. The oncoming passenger train was a different story: three hundred people were killed and twice as many wounded."

"I haven't heard about this,
" Satal frowned.

"
Luckily, Coordinator Gremani has the talent of an inquisitor," the old mage brightened up. "He shook out of the suspects the names of involved artisans in just two days. I thought he was a humanist. He's not."

The dark magicians
pointedly looked at each other. Satal glanced into the empty kettle and reluctantly returned to the conversation. "No, they won't touch him. They think he is dangerous to others in his current condition, and this plays into their hands."

The old magician c
ould not refrain from grimacing: "Are you really so confident in the sanity of your student?"

"Trust me. O
f all the people I know he will lose his mind last. It's a verified fact."

"Ok
ay, I'll leave it up to you," the old man gave up. "I don't know much about necromancers - they're weird."

I left
my motorcycle and Max in Finkaun - didn't want to waste time on worries unrelated to my survival. The after-effects of the failed ritual became more apparent by now: I ceased to experience strong feelings and emotions and began forgetting who I was and what I wanted.

The way
to Krauhard took two days. Twenty years ago my mother and I used the same route to flee from Finkaun. I thought it was a sign of Fate.

The
twilight region welcomed me with an infernal spectacle: the crimson leaves of shrubs, grass of a faded color, and drops of rain amidst layered fog. Joe met me at the station. I didn't bother sending my family a telegram. Perhaps, Joe learned about my arrival from chief Harlik. The chief came to the station, too. I guessed Satal made him shadow me, just in case. Whatever, I did not care.

We got home i
n the chief's pickup truck.

Joe
and mom didn't move out of Krauhard; they just sent Emmy off to school. My stepfather stayed put because of his sense of responsibility - where else would Krauhardians find a good teacher? My mother became prettier, released from worries about her little ones. I pretended that nothing happened - didn't want to scare them. Periods of memory loss shortened at home: familiar things raised shadows of the past and stirred something inside me, forcing my indifference to retreat. As a result, even Harlik, suspicious at first, found me sane and freed me from his custody.

"
Our horse has gone lame," Joe explained confusedly why Harlik was giving us a ride. "Mr. Beers wrapped her leg and told us to give her a break to recover."

The
gelding was sixteen years old - time to go to the knackers' yard! I cleverly kept my mouth shut; if I said this to Joe, the poor fellow would cry from my cruelty. They needed to buy a car, and I could afford to squander money on a new truck for them.

At home
my mother set a table for dinner. Chief Harlik was in no hurry to leave us. He seemed to be trying to convince Mom of something. He dined with us, and it didn't annoy me, as before. I wondered what they were up to.

When Joe
took an empty tureen to the kitchen and didn't return, and my mother moved over closer to me, I understood - she was about to uncover some treasured family secrets to me.

"Thomas, last summer y
ou asked me about your father. I am sorry, I wasn't quite honest with you before," my mother began from afar.

I firmly decided not to
tease her - my sense of humor was very strange at the moment.

"I need to tell you a lot,
" she continued.

I hoped
she wasn't going to cover the contents of the entire Salem Brothers' box; I didn't have that much patience.

"
Your father was born to a very prominent family. Several generations of your ancestors dedicated their lives to the control of magic."

She found a
n interesting formulation for the Inquisition.

"I know you're not very fond
of guardians of law…"

When did
Chief Harlik manage to notice this?

"…
but I hope you'll understand your father's motives. Toder chose a career as law enforcement officer not by the dictates of his soul. His parents sent him to a church school…"

M
y mother tried to explain that my dad could not find a better job because of his very special - theological - education.

"It was
the College of the Holy Inquisition," I corrected her absent-mindedly. Before the Reformation, this school provided the same education as the modern Academy of Law.

"
How did you know that?" she gasped in shock.

I shrugged.
"I read his dossier."

Her lips
began trembling. "I'm sorry, son! I thought it wasn't important to you."

"Ma!
Don't start. Treat me as an adult. I have grown up already. Why did a stranger have to open my eyes to the truth? You know, it was humiliating. You should have talked to me long ago!"

She
was embarrassed and kept silence.

"
A tough guy, huh?" Harlik said calmly.

"Rather
, I am preoccupied. No, not with this old story. I have a lot on my plate to worry about." I didn't want to go into detail and scare my mom with my soon-to-come death.

"Then why did you come
home?"

The chief's question was s
traight to the point, as always. He didn't believe that the dark could suffer from nostalgia.

"To restore my peace of mind.
My workload has been outrageous as of late!" I wasn't lying. I hoped to regain emotional balance.

Harlik
stood up and haughtily bowed. My utterly confused mother began nervously clearing the table of dishes. It was hard for her to accept that her confession was long overdue. It was she who constantly persuaded Harlik not to "disturb the boy" with stories about his daddy. However, her feeling of guilt was opportune now - Mom and Joe wouldn't watch me closely. I could pass for a dark magician on vacation, if Harlik didn't pay attention to the fact that my Source was always on.

That same night I went to
Uncle Gordon's cache. Krauhard wasn't dark at night -
chariks
(the most innocuous of the otherworldly) danced above the bushes, fog shone in the lowlands, and even mountain tops exuded a distinct green halo. Naturally, for non-natives of Krauhard it looked like a nightmarish tale. The house of the alchemist that replaced Uncle Gordon was illuminated, and a dog barked in his machine-yard.

I
waded by touch into the cleft, fearing nothing. Under a susurration of rain I lit a candle brought from home and prepared to delve into the ancient wisdom.

I
t did not happen.

B
ooks from the cache were written relatively recently (judged by their condition), but their language was totally alien to me. Suddenly I grasped why my forefathers collected skulls. Well-decorated and inscribed bones that lay before me in the cache were a precious treasure, a real library for a necromancer. Not like the books storing words or squiggles which no one would understand centuries later, the bones preserved human experience in its purest form.

Feeling depressed that I could die before I would have a chance to convene a Circle to talk to the bones, I left them in the cache
. Instead, I picked up the books, thinking that NZAMIPS could translate the texts for me. Of course, there was a significant risk that I wouldn't get them back. Could I ask Hemalis to translate them?  An image of a goose feather slowly scribbling on a sheet of parchment touched my mind -
Rustle
knew the people who wrote these books. The monster was willing to help me.

I
promised myself that I would never again harass
Rustle
, honestly!

I
brought the folios from the cache to my room, wrapped them in newspapers, and read all day, posing them as alchemical treatises. My frugal ancestors recorded the secrets of their profession on expensive parchment, without wasting ink on names and dates. I found their methods of detection, control of the otherworldly, structures of weavings, and even white magic practices present, too. I was torn between a desire to read the whole collection successively and a need to search for a means to save my life.

I was sure that Satal's officers would
sacrifice their lives for these books.

I gathered
all my willpower and focused only on necromantic rituals and the restrictions associated with them. The necromantic part of reading was most poetic and metaphorical, and devoted to awakening the spirits of the deceased. Sadly, there was nothing about the involvement of
Rustle
in the ritual. I hadn't finish browsing through the books, when one morning I found myself fully dressed, packed and halfway to the door.

My
time ran out.

M
om and my stepfather were surprised by my sudden decision to leave, but they did not argue. I gave Joe a list of my bank accounts and other assets - I did not want to leave my family with no money as had happened to me after my father's death. Anxious Joe drove me to the station. The passengers on the train looked askance at me and tried to find a seat further away.

I
finally came up with an idea for how to save myself, but almost no time remained to implement it. My only hope was Larkes. I intended to ask his permission for something so unthinkable that I could be jailed for it. Would the senior coordinator of the region take such a risk? He had already lost his position once, and it took him a few years to return to power. If I were him, I probably wouldn't jeopardize my future.

At least
he didn't make me wait in his office.

"In short…
Do you know that a leader of the Circle is doomed if the ritual is broken?"

Larkes
gave me an affirmative nod.

"Did they explain why?"

His answer was no.

"
Any necromancer can raise a mindless corpse without help from other mages. But in order to restore and retain control over the consciousness of a deceased, I need a Circle of necromancers. If I worked alone, I would have to absorb the entire awakened consciousness, and could become helpless against my creation - the alien mind could oust me. The Circle assures that the raised personality will have no chance to take possession of the caster. Unfortunately, during Finkaun's ritual we managed to restore the alien psyche. And now it's here - in my mind. He does not want to die, like any living being. There is no other way to get rid of him except to provide him with a suitable alternative. I need a corpse, relatively fresh and intact, to complete the ritual. The body should belong to a dark".

I
was sure I had gotten in such a mess because the bones we worked with belonged to an uninitiated dark. He clung to life too hard for an ordinary man.

"
Are you asking me to help you make a zombie with the Source?!"

"
We'll be able to move him only into the corpse of a dark - due to the particular configuration of the vital meridians of the dark. You'll decide what to do with him later. Or soon you'll have to take actions against me."

And I surely had an
active Source.

Larkes fixed his wistful gaze on
the wall behind my back, then reached for the phone. I hardly believed my ears: in a familiar, velvety, slightly bored voice the senior coordinator requested a fresh dark corpse for the forbidden ritual. It was the biggest thing that one dark could do for another. I was touched.

In just two hours, a truck with a special team of "cleaners" picked me up
at the main entrance of NZAMIPS headquarters. We drove for two days with one overnight stop in an unpopulated area. We ate dry army rations while in motion. Our destination was a tiny military settlement, squeezed from all sides by lifeless hills. It was either an ancient quarry or a place for the supernatural's outburst. The settlement was covered with protective perimeters of such power that even a golem would be vaporized if it attempted to break through. Two rickety barns disguised an entrance to the underground complex – the most secure of all the magic labs I had ever seen. I was afraid to ask what the army mages did there.

We were met by
a platoon of combat mages. For me alone! Not bad!

A
corpse with some burns waited for me in a spacious hall with silver panels. I carefully palpated the body - previously frozen flesh was not suitable for my purposes. After the corpse, I examined steel chains, stationary accumulators, and protective and scattering signs to ensure there wouldn't be any surprises. All was ready for the ritual.

I took off
everything that could hinder the flow of energy - belt, wrist chronometer, boots - and turned to the magicians, who were attentively watching my actions.

"Before you release me from here, tur
n off the lights for a moment. If nothing strange happens, you may let me go." If the ritual failed,
Rustle
would help me die decently.

What I
conceived was simple: I would have to convince the alien mind to move into a new dwelling, chained to the floor. I invited my "roommate" to check the high quality of the corpse. But the raised consciousness didn't feel the need to move out.
Rustle
saved me by sending such abominable images that I nearly jumped out of my skin, and then a blissful feeling of spaciousness came in.

The new zombie that I created suddenly
discovered that his body was experiencing pain from burns and started writhing and rattling with his chains.
Rustle
disappeared, being very pleased with himself. Crowds of magicians and healers bustled around me, and I looked at their fuss with the indifference of a castrated cat: no desires, no dreams, no plans. One thing I knew for sure - I was done with necromancy.