White mages whispered in the corners about their enchanted friends, kidnapped and enslaved; freshmen, eyes round with terror and delight, questioned each other about some priests, but I had no clue about the artisans whatsoever. It must have been something that I was supposed to learn through my family, but I never knew my father-dark, and Uncle did not condescend to enlighten me (though I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead).
I tried to shake my classmates; it didn’t pan out. Nobody wanted to elaborate on the topic. And then I recalled who owed me a favor.
Ironically, Captain Baer was not opposed to a chat.
“Remember, you promised me an answer to one question?”
“Yeah, you jackanapes!”
“I am what I am. So, is your boss aware of the crystal?”
“Not yet. What do you want to know?”
“About the artisans.”
“That is a banned topic.”
“Then lift the ban!”
For some time we looked into each other’s eyes, and I got suspicious whether Captain Baer was a veiled uninitiated Dark.
“Why do you want to know?” he sighed, conceding.
“They could be a threat to me.”
“I won’t show you any documents, of course, but I can tell you if you pledge your word of honor. Okay?”
“Fine!”
“Do you know the history of the First Period?”
I thoughtfully frowned.
“Okay, let’s get more to the point, what is Roland the Bright famous for?”
“Isn’t he a saint?” I ventured to suggest.
“Not only that,” the captain sighed. “Well, let’s try a different approach. Imagine that someone in Ingernika still believes that the source of the supernatural has been the dark magicians.”
“Ha-ha!”
“Have I answered your question?” he raised his eyebrows.
“No, of course not.”
“Then shut up and listen. Do you think NZAMIPS deals with the dark only? Hell, no! Our main contingent is white magicians. Don’t laugh. Try to picture for yourself what a white mage is. I don’t believe you can succeed, but try, at least! They put other people on a par with themselves—and not only people. They perceive both positive and negative emotions, without discrimination. Do you understand?”
I recalled my experience with my own family and involuntarily winced. The captain slightly brightened.
“It’s good if a white mage grew up in a village; they see how nature works and learn about real life. In a sense, they know that rabbits eat grass and people eat rabbits, and they do not put an equals sign between their family and the cows, for example. A city-grown mage cannot put a rabbit in a cage (the animal would feel bad). Their reactions are aggravated to hysteria, and they can do nothing with that—such is their nature. Of course, NZAMIPS does its job, and empaths help, but the issue cannot be fully resolved. Ordinary people laugh at the problems of the white; it’s the theme of jokes. And that is a mistake!”
The captain raised his finger: “A white takes on the entire pain of the world, and the desire to get rid of the pain is a very strong stimulus. For such an incentive they would give away their life. Most of them adapt somehow, especially the initiated ones—they can mute their Source. But some can’t or don’t want to, or were stressed too much in childhood. The latter becomes a problem: a request to ban eating meat, a fight for the rights of pets, a fight to take sewer rats under protection. Or worse: they bother people and want to teach them how to live ‘rightly’. Those latter are our clients.”
From his frequent repetition of the word “white”, Rustle’s tricks began to revive in my mind, and I decided that it was time to finish the verbiage: “What do the artisans have to do with that?”
“A lot! The artisans and the like are sects relying on mentally unstable people, mostly from the white mages. They exploit the legend of White Halak (read about it—this topic is not banned) and promise to build a world where everyone would be happy. An ordinary man cannot understand the danger they carry. The dark are almost impossible to manipulate; they’re too independent. But the white are trusting, suggestible, and industrious. Before you know it, you are already opposed to the crowd of fanatics who firmly believe that they are fighting for the happiness of all humankind. As a rule, they begin trying to ‘treat’ or simply exterminate all the dark within their reach.”
“Sweet.”
“And pointless. One could build a world without grief only by annihilating all who could feel compassion. These homegrown saviors are simply unable to grasp the simplest truth: life is suffering; life includes birth, disease, and ultimately death, and that is realistic.”
So, all my visions had some basis, but it remained unclear whether that was good or bad. However, I didn’t have deep sympathy for an abstract white—abstraction lacked personality. To Rustle with them!
“Are these idiots able to accomplish anything serious?”
The captain shrugged: “People don’t really care. In my youth, it was fashionable to believe in good intentions, and the artisans had become almost an official organization. The upshot was that they had covered a whole city by a spell, thinking to save its inhabitants from evil thoughts.”
“Is this possible?” I was shocked.
“It is possible, but for a very short time. The real White Halak had existed for around seventy years; Nintark hadn’t lasted over eight months. They had lost forty thousand ‘trial’ people and another eight hundred men from NZAMIPS, standing in the cordon.”
“I do not understand. Was that an effect of the white spell that killed them…?”
“No, it wasn’t. It was an unidentified supernatural phenomenon. White mages are absolutely helpless before the otherworldly—even more helpless than ordinary people. The revenant creatures tend to crash a party, and they do not require dark mages to spawn them. Therefore, we will fight these ‘activists’, no matter where they’ll show up and what they’ll call themselves. We’ll cry and sympathize, but beat them. Got it?”
I hesitantly nodded.
“Now answer me,” Captain Baer frowned, “was that you who blabbed about Uther?”
I straightened up shoulders and militantly jerked chin: “Yes, that was me!”
“Thanks.”
I was taken aback: “For what?”
He shrugged: “We could have missed the boat with that case, because Mrs. Melons was a doctor. And the capitol authorities advised us not to panic… So, thank you. You did well.”
“You are welcome!” I could offer plenty of such services to them.
At night I had a dream about White Halak; the fact that I had never seen the town, even in pictures, did not hinder me. People, no different from the ghouls except for their red blood, walked along its streets. They were as the blind—“see no evil, speak no evil”—because they could not even imagine that someone may (and had the right to) grieve, experience pain… die.
They weren’t compassionate; no, they wanted suffering to disappear, and these are two different things. All people should have been healthy and happy, or shouldn’t have been at all—the happy zombies did not tolerate the elderly and sick among themselves. In my dream I saw the mighty zombies that protected the borders of the fairy kingdom of White Halak by simply killing any creature that attempted to cross them. The same zombies worked at the factories and fields, because the residents of Halak weren’t able to put forth the effort needed for regular work; that is, work when it was necessary, but not when they wanted. Why work? The thirst for deeds could be satisfied in other ways. They walked, ate, and painted strange scrolls on canvas and felt touched by them; they multiplied useless things and sounds; they slept together and did not know what to do with the resulting children—often getting rid of them before their birth. I couldn’t picture how the upbringing of children was done in their world, unless they assigned that job to the zombies too: to raise a full-fledged person is hard work, impossible without the use of some coercion.