“Can’t we just bring these wiseacres to reason?”
“Unfortunately, the people who generate the ideas and the ones who implement them are not the same; so far we can’t prove a connection between them. And an attempt to ban debate would have violated the principles of democracy. Our options are education and prevention of violence and destruction.”
“Don’t you think that letting them stay on the loose is kind of… dumb?”
“Risk is inevitable, but our society must prove its historical sustainability continuously, whether it wants to or not.”
The dark spoke about the problem as if he were reading a piece of paper, quietly and impartially, perhaps exactly as he perceived it. Locomotive was an ordinary man, and he couldn’t detach himself the same way. He thought about casual witnesses, innocent victims, children whose lives would be crippled by their fanatical parents. How many of the forty thousand inhabitants of fallen Nintark really wanted to participate in the large-scale magic experiment?
The coordinator noticed a shadow on the face of his subordinate and nodded: “There will be victims. But that’s the distinguishing feature of our adversaries’ regimes—attempts to avoid casualties at all costs. You already know the results that come of their actions. We are required to limit the death toll to the members of the risk groups.”
Who would be in those groups? A few days ago Locomotive was visited by a relative, who promised to show her children the zoo during summer break. The cop’s little niece (his second or third cousin from the side of his mother’s sister’s husband) told him with excitement that the Dark Knight came to their town in winter, ousted a ghost from the town hall, and gave the children a ride on his motorcycle two times around the church. The captain checked reports regarding the incident and realized that he could never have met that relative of his again. And the one to blame would be Grokk and, through him, indirectly, the people who carefully planned and organized chaos in Redstone county to achieve their filthy goals. Therefore, whatever the dark mage had said about historical necessity, Locomotive hoped to find the villains and render them harmless, even if his actions would be excessive.
God knows, it will strongly improve the social order.
Chapter 18
Lyuchik saved me.
Our novice white mage and his buddies snuck their way into the funeral feast to watch the boozers. Please don’t think that Krauhardians often get dead drunk. He watched me going behind the garage, but did not see me come back. Despite the risk of being punished for lewdness, Lyuchik went to the elders and demanded to find me. When a group with charmed lamps (we take them everywhere in Krauhard) turned round the garage, Rustle disappeared without a trace. Thus, one brother saved another.
Then Joe gave me CPR and heart massage for forty minutes without a break until the headman’s truck reached the county hospital. (Anyone who has tried giving CPR even once would understand Joe’s heroism; I would have lasted for a maximum of fifteen minutes). I regained consciousness after two days in intensive care, and for the first five minutes I was convinced that I woke up in heaven: everything was white, luminous, and slightly hazy. I seemed to see angels even… Still not sure whether it was my imagination or something else.
Nobody was able to understand the depth of my problems there. I bent over backwards to convince the healers that I was healthy, but the attending doctor proved the opposite with perverse pleasure. And he called himself a white! By the end of the week I got sick to death of his saying “my friend”. In part, he was right: for a couple of days my eyesight occasionally weakened and sharp pain pierced muscles on any attempt to get up; but eventually all these symptoms were gone.
“Do not argue with me, my friend,” the doctor lisped good-naturedly, tapping me on the knee with his knocker. I was lucky that he didn’t use needles! He laughed, “The injection you received would have killed an ordinary man on the spot, but dark mages are exceptionally strong bastards.”
If the doctor said so, I had to believe him. As a result, he forbade me to cast spells at least for another two months; he even wrote a letter to the university to that end.
“Why are you in a hurry?” Chief Harlik asked when he came to interrogate me. “We called your boss, he reacted with understanding, and you are free until the beginning of the semester. I wish I had a boss like yours!”
Should I explain to the man that if I do not renew the revivifying spell, Max would bite half of Krauhard’s residents? I did not want to teach cannibalism to my dog.
“So, what happened then?”
He listened attentively to my story and confirmed with a nod the suspicion that Uncle was poisoned, but did not share the progress of the investigation: “We will find those two. It’s a pity that you did not descry them better. Do you know what they were looking for?”
“I have no idea. I thought Uncle had said something to you.”
He pursed his lips.
“We’ll return to that later. Two days before his death, Gordon had received a parcel, something small and light. Do you know from whom?” Perhaps he understood my answer by the expression on my face. “Okay, have a rest. Talk to you later.”
And then I decided to ask a very important question: “How do people die from an attack of Rustle? I’ve wanted to ask for a long time.”
He shrugged: “Hard to say—there used to be no witnesses. Typically, only bones and a puddle of brown foam remain on the spot.”
At that moment I recalled the caretaker on King’s Island. On the other hand, I doubted that he tore off his own jaw.
“How do you treat the victims?”
“We don’t! Just wait until they will recover on their own. The victims show a positive reaction to the presence of the supernatural in their bodies for life. Rustle, you know, does not forget the ones that it has marked. I hope that was a rhetorical question?”
I raised my eyebrow: “A professional one. We had a lecture about it at the university.”
“Yeah, I heard that story!” he perked up. “Some dude from the dark had fun there, didn’t he?”
I winced: “NZAMIPS shook up all the dark mages in the vicinity after that.”
“It’s only for the benefit of our kind!”
He went off, and I was left to ponder about the vanity of vanities. Had I told them about Rustle, they would have simply locked me up for forty days; by that time my zombie-dog would have gone berserk. On the other hand, no one else saw the monster; if I showed a positive reaction later, I could always say that was the result of my visit to the King’s Island. Go prove it! I just needed to be more careful and leave quicker: bones and brown foam were not my style.
The next day I was discharged from the hospital and found out that I couldn’t leave for Redstone right away.
My relatives all came together on the spacious headman’s truck to take me home. Lyuchik was as happy as if I had returned from the dead (which was almost true), and my mother cried on my chest. I am, of course, a dark mage and surely heartless, but I couldn’t leave them just by saying “ciao!”—my sudden departure would not fit the situation logically. I had to stay with my family for at least a week. And not go anywhere at night.
“What a terrible thing happened!” I did not know how many times my mother repeated those words. On the way home she calmed down, but clung to my hand as if I were about to be taken away. “Somebody tried to break into Gordon’s house: they broke the windows and left.”
I knew what had scared them off. They must have had fantastic cheekiness to appear twice in the place, guarded by the zombie-dog.