I pondered if I should perhaps take some time off. Less than two weeks remained until the end of the conditional quarantine; if I locked myself up in the apartment and drank, I would hold out. But then some ominous purple glow came under my eyelids, and I understood that playing the fool because of some stupid chick did not make any sense. I sighed and went to show my consolation for others, the hell with them.
The girl carefully concealed the tear-reddened eyes with her palm.
“So, what happened?” I muttered, trying to sound friendly.
She did not answer, turning to the window.
“Maybe I can help.”
“No…”
“How do you know? Do the dark magicians often offer you help?”
It sounded convincing.
Soon she started talking. As it turned out, she was worried about her fiancé, a guy named Uther. I saw him a couple of times in the office; he worked part-time as a courier—a typical uninitiated dark mage, restless and boisterous, but with a sense of humor, a rare feature in people of our kind. Bella’s mother was against the guy; she requested that he get medical treatment with some doctor she knew—and who wasn’t even an empath—to “correct his character”. The fiancé was truly noisy and quarrelsome, but the girl liked him, and his excessive obstinacy wasn’t vicious. Uther agreed (I could not believe it); together they went to the clinic, and Bella watched him sleeping after the procedure, being so calm. Two days passed by. Yesterday he had to return home but could not be found anywhere, and the girl was no longer allowed in the clinic, and they didn’t answer her questions. What else could she do to help him?
“What did they mean by the ‘treatment’?” Something in her story alerted me.
The charming secretary did not know anything about magic. She tried to recall diligently the explanations given to her, using terms like “dissection of the contour” and “setting the axis”. I carefully listened, gradually realizing a nasty thing: she could say goodbye to Uther. When the poor girl, biting her lower lip from effort, drew on a piece of paper the sign used in the “procedural room”, my doubts were confirmed.
“They used the shackles of deliverance on the uninitiated magician,” I concluded. “Your boyfriend is already gone.”
Her eyes opened wide in indignation.
“There’s nothing you can do about it, dear, that’s life. You may think of him as passed away, and if he is still breathing, it is not an indication that he will live. Any mage will say the same thing to you.”
“No, they would not harm…”
“This is another issue: how they dared to perform that on him. What kind of a doctor was that, who didn’t know the basics? Have you seen his license?”
She visibly shivered and timidly shook her head: “No, I haven’t. It was Mrs. Melons’ Medical School…”
“I do not care about the school—the license of the healer is what is important. Magic is as much a part of the human being as is the liver or the heart. An initiated magician is taught how to separate the Source from himself; magic is like his third hand, so it can be cut off. That would be unpleasant, but not deadly. For an uninitiated mage, an attempt to remove the Source is equivalent to a strike by a hammerhead in the chest: the mind and personality get broken into debris and the body is still breathing, but the mind isn’t functioning. The body without the soul does not live long.”
Bella seemed to grasp the meaning of what had occurred.
“Yeah, dear, they killed him. I do not know purposefully or not. It was like hitting him with a knife, only there was no blood. If his relatives have not yet reported the case to NZAMIPS, being in your shoes, I would have done it immediately so that those charlatans won’t kill someone else.”
She became very pale and began to fuss, grabbing her purse, then her phone, then her purse again.
“Go, I’ll let Polak know,” my generosity knew no bounds. “NZAMIPS head office is on Park Road; tell their chief that I referred you.”
She sniffled, jumped up, and ran away.
Blessed silence!
I got back to my desk, habitually rubbed my cup to warm the coffee, and braced to familiarize myself with the shape the sewage tank had acquired in my absence. My enjoyment was spoiled by waves of approval from Rustle. Can you imagine—the revenant wight had demonstrated high ethics norms! Had I known how, I would have killed it. By the way, I should delve into the literature; perhaps there is a way to get rid of the monster.
It was mind-boggling how the brainless creature managed to find the only weak spot in the dark magician. If Rustle had dared to pester me with visions of burning cities and the walking dead, I would have laughed. But since childhood I have been told that helping people is a must! Normally, I more or less ignored the unnatural impulses, pretending not to see anything heartrending, but Rustle pitilessly poked me into a conflict between my white upbringing and my dark nature.
Too bad to be a dark raised in a white family.
I didn’t see Bella the next day—she picked up her stuff from the office and disappeared forever. Quarters said that the girl burst into asceticism and devoted her spare time to studying; she was going to be a doctor. A useful thing to do!
But my involuntary humanism resulted in some consequences.
Surprisingly, NZAMIPS reacted vigorously to the incoherently mumbling girclass="underline" when the assault squad broke into the dubious clinic, the ill-fated Uther had already been dead and prepared for cremation, and there were two other dark children waiting in line for “treatment”. NZAMIPS apprehended everyone from the director to the floor cleaner, but most of the staff were peaceful herbalists, unaware that the owner of the establishment was playing with forbidden divination. The tabloids came out with headlines like “Revival of the Inquisition” and “Police Lawlessness”; however, that did not stop the prosecution. Authorities announced that the clinic would be closed and demolished, as the building had been desecrated by the sacrifice.
“Can you imagine—I had been there,” the unusually serious Quarters twisted an almost full glass in his hands, “and saw that woman.”
“Wanted to get a treatment?” I was sarcastic.
“Bite your tongue!” Ron got angry. “You’re in a better position than me—your folks are far away, but mine see me every day. Mother was a girlfriend of Melons’; they’re now organizing a club of supporters.”
“Supporters of whom? Bella or Uther?”
“You won’t understand,” he brushed me off. “Melons was… well… a typical white!”
“White is not synonymous with good,” I said instructively.
“I know,” Quarters frowned, “I did not think that everything had gone that far.”
“Rent an apartment!” I advised sincerely. “There is nothing better than life without neighbors.”
Especially when you have the financial resources for that.
Uther was buried on the first day of the new school year, and not even one f*cking newspaper put a line in about him! It was outrageous!
We railed in unison with Rustle; the result was frightening. I did not know what Rustle was going to do, but I went to the university and personally asked every dark magician whose name I was able to recall (it turned out that I remembered quite a lot of them) whether he was aware that a white mage had killed a dark. And guess what? Everyone showed the liveliest interest to the case. That was when I first heard the strange word “Artisan”. The oldest teachers spoke the word through clenched teeth with such hatred that I was ready to believe in the reality of a war between the dark and white. By the end of the day, someone had painted on the walls of the central building the distinctive sign of a blood feud with the words, “Nintark is not forgotten!” I wondered where that was.