“No,” he finally managed.
“Oh, yes,” the man spoke, voice a complete octave lower then his normal range, the teenage-boy-in-a-man’s-skin mannerisms gone, sloughed off like so much dead skin.
“How? You were never initiated.”
A bellowing, mocking laugh ripped from the man’s large chest. Adrian started, another shock stabbing further into his ability to handle the situation as the astral plane nearest Martinez responded violently to the emotion. He can’t be a magus!
“Ah, you’ve finally figured it out. Watching you flit about like a mad fairy was most amusing. Almost made up for the shit I’ve had to eat at your hands for the last year.”
“But it’s not possible,” Adrian continued stoically, unable to get beyond the obviousness of the man’s presence in astral space, in Adrian ’s own sanctum. His mind worked furiously, and an idea emerged from a text read long ago. “You have to be bound by another magus. You’ve never revealed the slightest hint of potential. Nothing to convince those around you so you can draw power from their belief. These followers are mine, bound across most of a decade. You cannot draw anything from them. I would know it.”
Martinez shook his head, smile as condescending as any Adrian handed out. In another time, another place, Adrian would’ve bristled. But here it terrified. Where was the man drawing his power? Another, even more horrific, thought surfaced. Had the man managed to bind an unbound spirit? He’d read of such acts in only remnant pieces from ancient books filled with the art as black as the deepest cave. But to fail, to be dragged off to suffer torment for eternity? Not even a madman would risk such, despite the continuous flow of power that would render all the hated charades meaningless.
“You still don’t get it, Adrian. Your grasp of the arts is intuitive and even masterful. But the foundation of your art is mind-bogglingly limited. When I first met you, I did not believe it possible to construct such limitations and reach the height of your art. I certainly didn’t believe that you’d managed to craft an inner sanctum carved into a bubble of astral space. I thought I’d be able to convince you earlier, but your paranoia was simply too much to breach. So I had to do something that might send you scurrying to your sanctuary with such haste that I might finally follow.”
The pieces, despite the lunacy of the image they created, began falling into place. The strange astral print he couldn’t identify… the filth the man poured into his system. His mind simply refused to accept the possibility, despite it staring him in the face. “You murdered that man,” Adrian continued, unable to voice the painful truth of his own arrogant blindness. “After this much time you know me well enough to have crafted such a snarl that I couldn’t see anything.” As he spoke, he carefully began to channel energy, knowing that despite their silent words, his followers knew their lord and master would be triumphant. Knew that here, in his inner sanctum, nothing could touch him. That absolute knowledge, wedded to the years of unceasing faith directly crafted within astral space, gave him a reservoir to tap that he’d never come close to plumbing. “Why?”
“I already told you. I couldn’t believe you’d managed to gain such knowledge and power with the shackles you’ve given yourself. We’d heard of you and finally managed to track you down. But we had to be careful. Had to approach you in a way that wouldn’t endanger us.”
Despite the situation, Adrian couldn’t help the words as they slowly dragged out of him. “What… are… you… talking… about?”
Another giant belly laugh. “You think others must believe you are a magician for your power to work. The more powerful that belief, the greater magic you have; hence all your silly public rituals. It’s rubbish. All rubbish. Power is power, and you’ve shackled yourself with meaninglessness. If one of my pupils taught you in this fashion, I would have him killed for such stupidity. Who taught you, Adrian? That’s what I’ve wanted to know all along. What we must know. Why I’ve put up with your insufferable arrogance. Your teacher is twisting magic learning and twisting minds in the process. Who knows what effect that might have on the meta planes? I can already see what you’ve rendered here through actually using other human beings as part of your rituals. Do you have any idea of what you’ve done to them? Who knows what other damage you might be wreaking on the natural order of things?”
Adrian ’s mind worked feverishly, trying to figure the other man’s angle. Was he trying to distract me with such lies? Trying to delay my assault? Make me doubt my art? None of it made any sense. And of course he knew what he’d wrought on these people. Despite their devout belief that had become faith and then so much more; despite that natural progression that involved no coercion at all on his part, making it all the more difficult to bear; what he’d wrought twisted with pain continually.
“No one taught me.”
For the first time since dropping his disguise, Martinez seemed thunderstruck, out of his element. “What?”
“No one taught me. All I’ve learned I taught myself. I’ve spent my life hunting for other magus. And now, when I finally find one, he’s mad. Mad and possessed.” His skin began to tingle with the energy build-up as it neared the flash point, and Adrian prepared to unleash all its fury.
Martinez opened and closed his mouth several times before finding his voice again. “That’s just not possible. You can’t learn alone. You cannot stumble upon the art. It must be nurtured and drawn from you like a tree from fertile loam. It’s not possible. Someone self-taught doesn’t have the right control. Is a danger to everyone around him. Is-”
In mid-word Martinez struck, the hammer blow of argent energy flung off the man’s abruptly outstretched arms, double fists of energy to crush Adrian.
But this was his inner sanctum, crafted across long, long years. And he’d been slowly building energy for longer than Martinez. In a fiery cascade of force Martinez ’ attack fell against his own force screen, the blow easily diverted in a shower of sparkling energy. With the last of his confusion falling away, Adrian knew he did indeed look at a bound spirit in the shell of a man: a possessed magus. The only explanation for how the man wielded his art without a single soul that believed him to be a magus at hand.
The single greatest yoke that bore down a magus. The yoke that forced medicine men from time immemorial to be showmen; the same heritage that found its way down into snake oil salesmen and finally sleight-of-hand magicians of the modern age, with all the trappings of a true magus but with none of the spirit that such rituals allowed a user to invoke. A hollow shell, missing the true forms of power beneath.
With his true believers and their towering batteries of faith hyperactivating his power within his own inner sanctum and fortress, he drew in energy from the astral plane until he screamed out loud from the pain of it; he unleashed the gates of hell in a raging inferno that struck from all sides simultaneously. Martinez ’ life was cut from existence with such force that astral space itself trembled. The energy, with far too much power and inertia to be expended after the ease with which it killed the other man, cascaded back along time itself, withering the mundane world’s memory until Martinez ceased to ever exist.
Adrian collapsed into unconsciousness.
Adrian slowly woke, his twelve-hundred-thread Egyptian cotton sheets a balm to sweaty flesh. A cloth slowly sponged cool water across his forehead before a hand gently lifted his head to pour liquid ambrosia in the form of water onto parched lips and a throat scarred by what must surely be the fires of hell.