The Wizard Killer - Season One: A Post-Apocalyptic Fantasy Serial (12 page)

“Oh, I’m sure it did.” I follow the webbing and tubes all the way back to the engine panel, which pops open easily. “These models…” I tap my fingers together and smile as a memory comes forward. “I worked one of these once. This engine’s about twice the size than what the model came with. Someone’s done this themselves. This panel’s probably from a levi-car a generation or two later.”

“Do you think you can charge it?” she asks, the stiltedness more pronounced than before.

“Yeah.”

“Then get to work. We need that working immediately. The carn will be here shortly.”

“Right.” I get up close to the panel. "You're sure this thing should be working? It's just the charge that's missing?"

“Yes.”

Her certainty throws me off a bit, but we don’t have time. The engine pieces remind me of the one I’d looked at a few days ago when I’d first met the carn. Instead of three discs, it has two, but these ones are a healthy silver. “The cloth webbing and tubes look great. Weird… I’d have expected the charging crystal to be visible, looks like they’re behind everything. Weird design.”

“The mechanic One… we had… mentioned it was efficient. He considered modifying it.”

“Huh, I wish he would have. No way to know what’s really behind all of this. It could be a waste of time.”

“It’s not, get it done,” she commands, a hint of impatient irritation in her otherwise flat voice.

Scratching my cheek, I talk myself through how I think it works. Flashes of working with the Old Man on one in a barn similar to this one keep popping into my mind. “What did he say? The song… find the song.” I stick my finger in my mouth to clean it, spitting out the gross remnants with extreme prejudice.
 

Cautiously, I touch the cloth webbing and follow it up to the first silver disc, and then the tubes from it to the second, and then, now up to my elbow, I finally feel something cool and flat. My face lights up as I hear the faint, sweet sound of the heart of the machine. “I found its song. That means there’s no broken connections. The river of energy can flow around it and come back to the heart.” The smile hurts it’s so big. Pausing for a moment, I think of the Old Man. Insecurity makes me tap the short sword on my side. “You always said to bring your own end to the party, but we’re not ending today. I’m coming to Banareal, and I’m going to find out what happened to you, Old Man.” Something dawns on me. “Hey, do you have my map?”

The oner turns to me, her eyebrows up in a moment of surprise. She hesitates and then nods.

“Okay, good. I’m going to charge it. If it explodes and kills me, send my remains to Banareal, will you?”

She stares at me, a weird expression on her usually expressionless face. After several seconds she nods, and I start.

Closing my eyes and taking a long, steady breath, I imagine a river flowing from my core, through my arm, into the machine’s heart. Sweat starts beading down my forehead and my breathing gets more intense. “Either this heart’s resisting… or it’s got ten hearts that all need to be awakened. Yig this is hard… Hey! Hey! The song’s getting louder!”

I hear the barn door creak open. “Hurry, the carn’s almost here. Give it everything you have.” There’s a weird finality to her voice, but I don’t care. Her two serrated swords make a distinctive zing as they come out of their sheaths.

“GAH! I need more time!” I yell through gritted teeth. What was once a raging river inside me is quickly draining down to an annoyed stream. Maybe this is pointless. It’s like I’m trying to lift a boulder.

“What’s that deep hum?” she asks.

I open my eyes and turn my head about. “That’s the engine. It’s starting!” Shutting my eyes tight, I grunt and push harder. “Come on! Come on!” The deep hum grows and the engine starts vibrating.

The oner peeks out the barn door and then closes it. “The carn’s coming up the path, there’s fire everywhere. We’re out of time.”

I stop. “I thought you already said the carn was almost here.” Glancing around at the barn, I shake my head. “Wait, something doesn’t make sense. Why would it be coming here? You said it was pushing us towards here, but—”

She glares at me. “You need to get the levi-car up in the air! Focus!”

Nodding and with a deep breath, I give a final push.

episode twenty

Closing my eyes, I imagine pushing every last drop of energy out of me as hard as I can. The engine’s hum grows until one corner of the levi-car lifts up with a clunk, then another. I hold on tight as each of the six levitation points kicks in and the levi-car and its flatbed stabilize. “Haha!” I yell, withdrawing my hand from the engine carefully. I stare at the silver discs as they start to pulse, heat now radiating from them. Carefully I close the panel and hop down to the ground. “We need to turn the levi around if we’re going to have any chance of driving past the carn. And forget about trying to hit it with this, we don’t have enough room to get up to speed.” She stares at me, unflinching. I stare back, something’s off. “Will you help me push?”

The oner nods.

“You push on the far end of the flatbed, while I push on the opposite front end. It’s not going to want to move, remember, we’ve got to overcome that. Once it starts to move, it’ll be easy, just like getting a cart out of a rut. Got it?”

It bothers me how she’s standing there again, blinking at me. I can tell she’s thinking. What’s there to think about? Just when I’m about to ask her what’s going on, she replies.
 

“Yes.” She moves into position.

I search my shirt for a clean spot to wipe my face and give up. Planting my hands right beside the front levitation point, I dig my feet into the dirt floor. “Ready? Three, two, one, now! Grrr! Move! Move you yigging piece of… that’s it… Come on!” Finally, with a metallic groan, the levi-car gives up its desire to stay still and lets us spin it around.
 

Laughing, I bend over and put my hands on my knees, letting the muddy sweat drip off my head and face. “Give me a minute and then we’ll get going. With a bit of luck, we’ll get passed the carn and outrun whatever freak storm that is.”

The oner’s lips are pulled tight, her brow hinting at something I can’t pick up. “You seem tired. Will you be up for a fight?” she asks, giving me a sideways glance.

I wave her off. “Don’t worry about me, I’m exhausted, but I always have a little extra in the tank for emergencies. I have to say though, that levi-car felt like it had ten hearts, not one. Maybe someone over-engineered it? It was like it was made to empty me out.” Taking a deep breath and straightening up, I point at door. “Speaking of fights…” I look about, shaking my head, “shouldn’t the carn be here by now? Not that I want to die but… what’s going on?”

She stares at me, blinking. There’s that eerie delay again fragmenting her reaction. Her head moving back then stopping, her mini-expression then changing, and so on.
 

Squinting at her, I lick my lips. “There’s no carn, is there?” Scanning about, I spy my bag on the flatbed. Keeping an eye on her out of the corner of my eye, I decide to go for my short sword.

She taps the flat sides of her swords together and points them at me. “Drop your sword.”

My shoulders slump and I sigh as I let it fall and put my hands up. “Randmon, you around? You should have told me I was being an idiot.” I glance up at her, surprised she’s not telling me to shut up.

The barn doors are thrown open, drawing my attention but not hers. A thunder of footsteps flood in as the leecher walks in, leaning on a long staff, a stream of oners behind her walking in pairs. Each of them is perfectly synchronized to her steps, until she stops a few feet in front of me. The barn falls silent, at first, then the rumble from the distant storm fills the room.

“I thought I killed you,” I say to the leecher. I put my hands down and tilt my head down too, but I keep my gaze up. Given that leechers are usually poor, desperate people, I’m hoping my posture will feed her need to feel powerful.
 

She’s dressed in a long black dress, wrapped in an old, knitted shawl that’s fraying. Her darker side looks less withered than last time, and there’s no sign of any wounds from my pistol. Maybe I shot her where she’s covered? Her face looks almost pained with concentration, a look echoed by the oners, except for the woman oner who’s been keeping me company.

The leecher smiles at the levi-car and then turns her attention to me. “While you wounded me, you killed one of them. Close though. Now it’s time for me to return the favor.” Her speech is distracted, similar to the woman oner. I glance at the others, no one’s moving a muscle. I can’t imagine how much mana it’s taking for her to control them all.

“You can’t kill me, not yet. You need me to drive. Where you’re going, you need to be able to outrun that fire storm.” I put my hands up, again keeping my head bowed.

She sighs and thinks.

I figure back at the bar when I met her, everyone there was probably a oner, maybe special ones like the woman. But the leecher wasn’t concentrating like this then… maybe something’s changed or maybe she can’t afford to exert full control the whole time. Peeking at the woman oner, I wonder if she’d managed to say anything to me that didn’t come from the leecher. No way to know.

“I have to thank you. If you hadn’t wounded me, I’d never have thought of keeping you alive and feeding off you. I would have ended you then, like I did the carnu. That was a feast on power like I’ve never had before. But sadly, unlike you weslek, I can’t keep the mana I don’t use quickly. It fades so fast. I sipped the mana from you as I got better, but you kept getting weaker. That was, until my oners told me of the mana pond. Imagine how delighted I was to learn that you could be rejuvenated without having to be conscious. All it cost me was some mana to keep you asleep while they coated you in mud, then they’d clean you up, and I’d get back ten times the mana in return. I hope you didn’t mind the shave, but it was disgusting. It was a fun few months. A shame my spies spotted the—”

“Months?” I run my hand through my muddy hair. “No way.” It makes sense though. I knew the wheat wasn’t that tall before. I’m not even sure it was planted yet.

She laughs. “What, did you believe this One?” she says pointing at the woman. “She’s a good liar, the best of the group. She’s also the most stubborn of the all my oners. There’s even part of the original person there, deep underneath the blessing. But despite her best, there’s no fighting the blessing and me.”

A shadow falls over the barn and I see panic flash on the face of the leecher. “Time to drive.”

“I’m not moving until you tell me what the yig’s going on.”

The leecher glares at me, but she knows I’m holding at least one decent card in our game.

“That’s not a fiery storm, that’s the floating city of Ashleek. The storm is ripping up every ounce of mana and life force it can find. The city’s set on a column of raging flame to charge itself.”

“What are you talking about?”

She laughs at me. “How do you think the wasteland was made? The rim exists because magic’s stronger there. They chain wesleks like you to the bottom of their cities and connect you to some monstrous machine. The entire city feeds on them and uses them, like I did you.”

My heart’s pounding like crazy. “What are you talking about? That’s…” Words fail me. A memory flashes of seeing a machine… There was an adept there… and… the Old Man, too. I must have been trying to stop it, but it happened anyway. Who was I? “They can’t do that.”

“Can’t? I lived in the under-city of Nashamere, it was the first. You’re a weslek, you know what it’s like to be part of the servant class, and what it means to be one of the rodents. People like me were the rodents, suddenly found to have a purpose, to feed the needs of the regime as fuel.”

I’ve got to find the Old Man. We need to stop this… Wait, I remember trying. Killing… who was it? Shaking off the memory, I focus. “It looks like we’re out of time. I can see the column of fire. They’re pulling the life force from the fields,” I say pointing at the barn door.

The woman oner head turns and she takes a step, then freezes.
 

The leecher’s face twists and contorts. Her hands jittering as the oners twitch, small groups of them moving in synch. Right before my eyes, the leecher’s face wrinkles and parts go dark, then patches start to change to ashy black, the skin looking like sun-beaten leather. She cradles an arm up against her chest as her fingers go black and the nails fall off, one by one.
 

Licking my lips first, I snatch my short sword and bury it deep into the leecher’s chest. Knocking her backwards, I scramble to my feet and on to the flatbed of the levi-car and dive for my bag.
 

Chaos erupts as the oners’ unified mind shatters. Some start reaching out for me, some turn to the leecher, and some run outside into the fire storm.
 

I pull my pistol out of my bag and slap the switch so it’s powered by my mana. As oners grab at me, I reach as deep into my core as I can to blow holes in as many of them as I can, but it’s pointless. In a heart-beat, I’m pulled down, my pistol lost, and I find myself being kicked and stomped on from every angle.