To identify my treasure was no easier than to pin Rustle down. I couldn’t match the text with any known writing style and could not exclude the idea that the content was simply encrypted. The only recognizable elements were numbers at the beginning of each chapter, though there was a chance the numbers were dates, and they would be current in a couple thousand years. My research revealed a similar font in one place, in a copy of the legendary The Word about the King. These were the most ancient extant chronicles, and my treasure looked like a luxurious notebook in comparison. To focus my search, it wasn’t enough to just browse through its illustrations—I needed to attain a thorough grasp of the subject and honestly tried, but it was impossible to achieve.
Of all the historical nonsense discovered, I was pleased with one interesting fact: it turned out that Roland the Bright was a holy dark magician. Funny, Ronald the “Bright” was dark! Well, at least not “white”. How this man could stand such a moniker was mind-boggling.
The senior coordinator of the region sat in his office, happy and well-fed, like a big black tomcat. Shadows of thinning foliage fluttered on the walls, creating a feel of the jungle. Locomotive knew that he would never occupy that room again—associations would be too strong.
“One is apprehended,” Satal rumbled.
Captain Baer gently shook his head: “Why have you decided that Melons was one of the artisans? She is accused of illegal practices and a murder, but that is just one episode. We didn’t find any evidence that somebody was behind her. What if she is just another red herring?”
“She confessed to the murder too lightly,” the coordinator hemmed. “There was a chance that she managed to impose the shackles of deliverance on the first attempt, but why did the peaceful herbalist place the pump-sign on the table top?”
“The means of inorganic estrangement of the channel,” Locomotive corrected habitually.
“Forget about the terms!” Satal brushed him aside. “There is only one application for the Source that was detached from its managing will—the armory curse. Especially powerful. A peaceful herbalist? Ha!”
“You propose a special interrogation?”
“Wanna bet?” Satal snorted. “She will die in our hands under the interrogation, and all the newspapers will shout about the ‘police brutality’,” the coordinator obviously mimicked someone and was pleased with that. “Let everything go its normal way.”
“Unauthorized use of the shackles,” Locomotive stated, “and theft of the Source.”
“Death penalty,” the coordinator confirmed, “and I will not permit any advocate to find extenuating circumstances in this case. She was a certified magician and could not be unaware of what she was doing; the fact that the kid died before they managed to find an application for his Source was pure luck. Our luck.”
The dark magician enjoyed the hunt for invisible artisans amidst the stone jungle. The beast followed the trail of another beast—they were human beings only partially… Locomotive blinked, driving off an ugly image. The dark could not behave differently, but Baer was a regular human being—he had to take care of people instead of Satal.
“Our guy came into the spotlight in this case.”
The coordinator got a little distracted from his triumph: “Leave him. You won’t do anything.”
Locomotive frowned: “I do not understand what you mean, sir.”
“You do,” Satal dismissed. “He is dark; you can’t say to him, ‘Go here but don’t go there.’ If you start taking care of him, he will resist and become less manageable. Hopefully, the sect will be disoriented without Melons, and we will apprehend them before they get ready for some serious steps. Let’s go back to work, back to work!”
Captain Baer shook his head again.
He participated in the arrest of Mrs. Melons and watched the doctor at that very moment when all her plans were dashed. Her face, the face of a white magician who deliberately decided to kill, stuck in Locomotive’s memory, and one word swirled in his head: “witch”! The captain was accustomed to the intricate logic of the dark, to the delirious talks of the street preachers—but a normal-looking person, behaving as if she lived in another dimension, was something new for him. The relativity of good and evil was brought to absurdity when the good was measured not even by profit, but by some unattainable and unknown ideal that, for some reason, justified any crime. He was there at the moment when Melons made a decision that determined her future behavior and confessions, and he could swear that this story wouldn’t end well.
The armory curse. God save us…
Chapter 22
I was bored. I couldn’t get drunk, unless I did it at home - it was safe in there, but the pleasure wasn’t the same.
The biggest problem of any dark mage is what to do with his spare time, particularly if a reliable source of livelihood has been found already.
My work at BioKin had come to a halt: Polak negotiated the acceptance of the prototype of the gas generator with the client, and we all awaited the result. Johan, in his work time, scribbled an article about the new approach to the application of advanced micro-organisms and pestered me with questions about the alchemical part. Carl scoffed at the fermentation vat, throwing into it all sorts of rubbish to test. We both knew that a device with such parameters would thresh any sewage with the equanimity of a pinion, and all these “tests” for the machine were like spitting in the locomotive firebox. The red-haired cousin of Quarters went on maternity leave, the father was an alchemist’s assistant (also red-haired), and their child would probably have fire-red hair that one could only touch with mittens. The future father was present at work only as a piece of furniture; his thoughts hovered somewhere far away.
I brewed coffee for myself and counted days until the moment that I would join my magic classes again. I never thought I would miss them! Of course, I could quit and forget the entire shit business, but I was expecting triumph ahead, and it would be a disappointment not to share it.
My third wish was to find new sorts of fun; Rustle heard it but did not fulfill.
I decided to act rapidly; I bought a ticket to the theater for a play with the neutral name “The Road to Exile”. And I liked it. After the first three scenes I began quietly giggling, at the end of the first act I already roared with laughter, and in the middle of the second act the attendant requested that I be quieter.
“I do not know what you have found so funny about the drama, young man,” an elderly gentleman, sitting right next to me, noted after the performance.
Still twitching convulsively, I explained to him in what condition a dark mage must have been to start talking with his crosier. Again, a crosier! A purely phallic symbol. The idea of its magic properties must have been introduced to the masses by combat mages, but I knew that the only real use of that thing was beating enemies on the head (which, probably, was widespread entertainment in the past). An ideal object to store spells has a round, at most cylindrical, shape; one object can’t hold more than one spell at the same time. So, a really mighty magician is a man, adorned with silver beads from head to toe, but on the stage he would be mistaken for a homo.
I could give a thumbs-up to the theater as my new entertainment, but the next play was called “The Rose of the Wind” and created an unwelcome association with the white. Well, to hell with them!