Dark Sun: Ch 2

I breathed in deeply, scanning the greasy walls, and focused my will into a sharp point of intent. The faint dizziness from the climb helped me dissociate my vision, splitting it between the Material and the Metaphysical. On one level, I saw nothing but stained concrete and peeling metal railings. On the other, my vision swam with fine blue glowing lines that danced and glimmered like gossamer in sunlight. The threads formed a web over the landing and pulled back toward the door, bound to a single square foot of wall right beside the exit. A recently enchanted sigil, crawling with energy. Physically, it was invisible. The mage had drawn it in a mixture of lemon juice, Oil of Abramelin, and salt water.

"Go back down and watch the stairwell. Stop anyone from coming up," I said. "Magic draws attention. People might feel the surge and come out to gawk."

Moni stuffed his pistol back down his pants - he WAS going to shoot himself in the dick - and glared at me reproachfully. To his credit, he obeyed. The man could follow orders. That was good.

I reached into my coat for one of my oldest tools: a knapped obsidian knife with a small, leaf-shaped blade. Calmly, I rolled my sleeve back with two precise turns of the cuff to expose my forearm. The hum of magic built another octave and spilled out, reacting to the stirring energy that built in the knife and my blood. Wards fed off ambient energy, and this one sent out little tendrils toward me and the knife, reacting like a plasma globe. Moni couldn't see it, but he could feel the creeping weirdness from the bottom of the stairs. He looked back - that was not good. He was too jumpy, and it made the energy wobbly and shift slippery around us.

"Bi-en bol baltoh." The words bubbled up as I face the sigil, eyes closed. I brought the knife up and around, drawing it through the soapy film of energy to find its flow and patter. The words themselves were fragments of Enochian, a language which had to be spoken slowly, each letter intoned at a specific pitch. "Coimselha cilna nor-molor."

Enochian was invented by John Dee, the court wizard of Queen Elizabeth I. He'd believed he'd discovered the language of the angels; I suspected he'd actually done a lot of psilocybin and made it up, but it was the ideal magical language for someone with synesthesia. Every sound had a unique color and texture, and I could taste both with every well-shaped word. They tripped sweet and syrupy from my tongue, rolling, weaving into the ward, and my senses began to expand. I felt Moni twitching and flinching from ten feet away. This wasn't especially intense magic, all things considered, but magical disturbance was unnerving for men like him. Blanks, we called them on the street. People with no ability for the Art.

I carefully pricked the skin of my wrist and watched the dark venous blood rise. The first drop twisted upwards and vanished, then the next, and a giddy rush of energy flooded my body. I tipped my head back and closed my eyes, using the link to feel out the pattern of the ward as it greedily fed on the blood now winnowing rapidly off into the air. It didn't take long to find what I was looking for: the delicate error where the mage's drying finger had not quite connected the final circle. I explored the edges of the design at the molecular level, prying at it with my mind. And once I found the weak spot, I braced myself and shoved.

The small cut on my arm split, blood pulsing as the ward itself swelled with power. My grip on it turned from caress to assault as I shunted hot energy through the fine filaments of magic. The air of the stairwell blackened and fuzzed like television snow around us. The lights flickered, one fluorescent tube bursting in a shower of sparks and glass.

"Jesus have mercy!" Moni's voice echoed up and down the stairs.

The magical net snapped one last time, flickering into mundane view as a web of pearly light that burnt itself out and collapsed. The ripples slowed. The one remaining light evened out, though it was dulled. Meanwhile, the big Bulgarian, a veteran of dozens of smuggling runs and G-d-knew-how-many murders cringed against the wall at the base of the stairs, white and bunched with fear. He watched me warily in the swelling silence.

"That was what we colloquially refer to as a 'snatcher' ward." Scanning the wall for anything I might have missed, I tugged my gloves up and adjusted the cuffs of shirt and jacket. "That particular kind of ward is designed to extract intention and memory. In other words, if we'd passed through it and into the hallway, we'd have forgotten what we were here to do. In all likelihood, it would have also encoded new memories."

"New memories? Of what?"

"Of killing Semyon, probably. That way we'd troop back downstairs, and as far as we were concerned, the job was done."

Moni's eyes bugged. Slowly, he climbed back up to join me. "How can it just... make a new memory?"

"It's complicated, but nothing you need to worry about. Spell's gone. Now, we move on. Come."

I led the way into the sixth floor hallway, and for a time, we heard nothing but the rasp of our shoes on the faded gaudy carpet. I counted the doors out of habit, but even if I hadn’t known which was Semyon’s, the entry to his apartment blazed like a lighthouse to anyone with the ability to see magic. The ward inscribed onto his door was a delight, thrumming through the astral with a deep basso hum. The hairs on the back of my neck thrilled as we approached it, and I paused a moment to admire such a beautifully wrought piece of work. The ward on the landing had been a quick and dirty trap, a first-stop defense against Blanks like Moni. But this one... this one was a masterwork, and it had been crafted for me.

The ward throbbed with power and malevolent, bated heat. It was written to connect with the energy of Mars, which meant it was wired for physical force. Explosion, implosion, kinetic burst. No wonder he had bunkered down. Moni couldn't see what I saw, but even he could sense the forces at play as the ward rippled warily in our presence. His finger tightened on the trigger of his pistol. "Fuck this place. Gives me the creeps."

"I’m sure it does." I held a hand up toward the door, and the ward thrummed sensuously in response. Who on Earth had this kind of ability? I could only dream of creating something charged with this much power. It was impossible to suppress a twinge of envy, but given what had happened to Surzi and Boris, I'd expected Semyon to be packing heat.

"What is it? What do you see?" Moni had gone from hostile and disrespectful to awestruck and compliant after watching me dispel the first ward.

"The same kind of magic that killed those men earlier today. Masterful work, the product of a great talent. Very dangerous." It was an exercise of will to keep the tone of my voice right at this point in the game Moni and I were playing. Not a game he was aware of. "It's powerful enough that I'm not sure I can disperse it alone. I will need your help."

Moni turned to face me, a gleam of avarice finally kindling in his eyes. No doubt he enjoyed my admission of weakness, the loss of face and the boost to his own. His mind was already stoked on whatever he planned to do with the money from this hit - twenty thousand bucks, minus Nic's cut. But even after greasing Nic's palm, Moni would have more cash from one job than he'd gotten in his entire life. "Me? The fuck do you think I can do about this shit?"

"You're a religious man, aren't you?"

His eyes narrowed warily. "Yeah."

"I need you to stand in front of the door with me and pray while I speak an incantation. Belief in the divine is the most powerful form of magic in the world, so if we're to breach this door, I need your help - and your faith." I had to almost, but not quite, beg for his aid. I pitched my voice low, gentle, a little reverent. Made him feel like the big man.

Moni jerked his shoulders, sniffed, and looked from me to the door. "Sure. Any special prayer?"

"The Lord's Prayer is ideal. Get as close as you can, but don't touch the wood."

Moni nodded, licked his chapped lips, and moved in. The energy of the ward bunched like expectant cobra, poised to strike - but to my great relief, Moni did what he was told. He put his hands up and began to half chant, half sing the prayer in his native tongue, the Eastern Orthodox way.

While Moni mumbled earnestly at the sigil, I drew the Wardbreaker from inside my coat. It was a plain-looking, silver Colt Commander: six round magazine, no special mechanical alterations. Both stock and barrel were etched with a complex of tightly inscribed sigils. It didn’t need a suppressor. I leveled the weapon at the back of Moni’s head.

"IAL!" The word of power burst from my lips as I fired.

The enchanted pistol went off with a small toy-gun 'click' - an anticlimactic sound that launched the 9mm round at a fraction of the speed of a normal firearm of its type. But the friction inside of the barrel lit the sigils up along its length, energy that fueled the magic encoded into each gold-jacketed round. The bullet struck Moni's skull, and for a moment, brought reality around it to a standstill as a molten point of light lit the hall like a tiny star. Then the man’s face exploded in a wet spray against the door, body jerking as it tumbled bonelessly into the ward. The air around him buckled and warped, screeching against itself.

The sacrifice flooded the ward with so much energy, so suddenly, that the magic spent itself before the man's soul snapped its link and closed the Gate. I helped it along with another round, shoving as much of my own will into the spell's weave as I could. Moni's corpse didn't even hit the floor: the ward sucked the remaining life out of him as it overloaded and compressed his flesh into a dry sphere the size of a baseball, which landed with the full weight of a two-hundred and fifty pound man and shattered into chunks of super dense, molten charcoal. The door itself slagged, the wood burning so hot it didn't even have time to properly ignite. The job could begin.