“There!” they waved in the direction of the long sheds.
Luck was with me that day. Maybe I could get my money back—I desperately did not want to trudge home on foot. A small side door was open, and loud voices could be heard inside—Laurent was not alone.
“Hey, morons!” I started talking right from the door. “Haven’t expected me?”
Two athletic guys gazed at me in surprise. The third, a blond hunk in a white captain’s jacket, lightly pursed his lips. Apparently, he swore to himself.
“The same to you, Laurent!” I nodded to him. “What else can you say?”
He looked at me with a mixture of disgust and perplexity, and my dark character immediately took a fighting stance. I hated snobs and copycatting captains! If you want to walk on my roof, show me your claws.
“You have a lot of nerve to come here…” he started wearily.
“What choice do I have?” I shrugged. “Your half-baked morons can’t talk, and I need specifics. I had to drag myself here, teacher. On foot. By the way, I rubbed my feet sore!”
Who can tell me why I was in such a hurry? There were three artisans before me, the very same that had alarmed all of Redstone and stirred up the university. Moreover, one of them was certainly a magician, and not the last one in his gang. Wasn’t I in the position of a lapdog barking at an elephant?”
But it was too late to retreat. Where power doesn’t save, audacity will help!
“Confess what you have done, assholes!”
Laurent closed his eyes, as if demonstrating an abyss of patience, and tried to keep silence. He seemed to know little about the nature of the dark.
“Do not tell me that you are a magician-inventor. I won’t believe you—you don’t have the right physiognomy.”
“Of course, I used nothing out of ordinary,” the artisan refrained, “Only the shackles of deliverance! Is this term familiar to you?”
“Didn’t you mess something up?” I asked strictly and shocked him completely.
I felt no discomfort (neither cold, nor emptiness, nor loneliness) from the loss of my Source. It was strange. I hadn’t seriously considered magic as one of my limbs, but I thought that the infamous shackles should be sensed somewhat differently. Was that really the very same thing that dark magicians feared the most, to the point of hiccups? Enough to make a cat laugh!
“Do not doubt,” he assured me. “You must feel sad about ending your magician’s career so early?”
I wondered if he mistook me for someone else.
I shrugged. “Not really. Actually, I am going to be an alchemist. But I’ll report on you to NZAMIPS anyway, as a warning.”
They abruptly saddened.
“It looks,” Laurent sighed, “like you do not understand what favor we have done to you by releasing from the pernicious influence of the Evil…”
I replied to him with an obscene gesture.
“…Or has the vice too deeply rooted in your soul? You’re forcing us to resort to extreme measures!”
Did he threaten a dark mage? What a brazen white! Even if I did not have access to magic, I could still give him a fistfight, and I immediately told Laurent as much. Instead of a reply, the two muscles scowled and moved in my direction.
Look at them, half-baked goblins of the dwarf species!
In a good fight three adversaries at a time would be a guaranteed defeat. If these were wicked city teens before me, I would turn around and run—the dark are not afraid to retreat timely. But these were just musclemen—cultured boys who decided to become cool through weight training; their combat skills hadn’t been polished in dozens of minor skirmishes with broken noses and dark blue bruises. Against the ragamuffin from Krauhard’s backwoods, they were like well-groomed pets against a stray alley cat.
While Laurent’s friends clucked their beaks, I knocked off a barrel at their feet—they had to attack me one at a time now. The floor was swept very poorly, much to my advantage. Pretending to take a lower stand, I scraped a pinch of sand from the floor and threw it in the face of the approaching enemy. He was taken aback for a moment and recoiled, protecting his eyes, and immediately got a shoe kick on the knee from me—an inexpressible feeling, I knew for myself.
“Son of a bitch!”
They really had a bee in their bonnet about my relatives! I didn’t have time to respond to the insult—the second opponent rushed to attack. I did not know where they took their combat lessons from, but the money was spent in vain: a one-on-one fight, without weapons, is not a fight but a pub brawl. And the techniques should be appropriate for the brawl. I grabbed him by the clothes, pulled toward myself, and in a couple of seconds he glided down on one of the boxes. I could have applied more skill to make his head meet the corner, but then there would be a warm corpse on my hands, and I wasn’t accustomed to killing people.
I had underestimated Laurent; he had realistically assessed his chances against the dark—even if the latter wasn’t a magician anymore. While his comrades were getting their asses kicked, he ran into the back room and was now ready to show his skilclass="underline" “It’s all over for you, accursed sorcerer!”
Laurent was holding an object, for the possession of which he could be jailed right on the spot for three years: a huge crossbow with an arrow, thick as a finger. Quite an exotic arsenal for a white magician. That thing hardly differed from the armory of a combat mage, except that the crossbow took more time to charge, and it did not leave aural imprints or require special abilities. The smooth arrowhead was stained with something greasy; I had no desire to test whether it was oil or poison.
Forgetting everything, I made the simplest ward-off weaving and threw it at my opponents.
A bright light ignited. I sensed a puff of heat and a rancid stench. When I was able to see again, it was very quiet around, and black flakes of soot were falling on the floor. My opponents could not be seen anywhere. I heard neither frightened screams, nor footsteps, nor creaking floorboards, nor slamming doors. Only black dust was powdered all around… When I understood what had happened, my blood drained from the brain, and the heart retreated to my heels. I rushed headlong from the hangar without looking to where I was running.
Yellowish smoke that scattered at the ceiling and flakes of soot were all that remained of a combat crossbow and three people who dared to argue with a dark magician.
The problem was not that I deprived someone of life (I wasn’t cognizant of that fact yet)—things just happened very quickly and without any conscious effort on my part. Uncle’s words about the armory curse surfaced in my memory. Was that a manifestation of my non-standard channel of power? But I had repeated that same curse many times in the classroom, and it only made balls bounce!
I rushed home like crazy: my apartment was at least six miles away, on the other side of the river. The concierge looked at me and silently gave a spare set of keys (she wasn’t suicidal, apparently). I was hungry but couldn’t eat. I was too emotional. Totally shocked.
I took a spoon of valerian and went to bed but didn’t sleep for long. The doorbell rang; it was the owner of the stables. Smiling, he handed me my wallet: “As I said, it was an unfortunate misunderstanding. My guy did not notice in the darkness the thing you had forgotten. He had gotten sick.”
By the time of their alleged conversation, Laurent was dead and could only be collected by shoveling. So the owner surely lied. I don’t know how the enterprising boss managed to get into the apartment of the dead artisan, but he took out the only thing that could point to my relationship with the victim.
“Thanks!” I was sincerely gratified.
“Any more questions for us?”
“No! I’m really thankful to you.”