The Wizard in Black Read online

  The old man was holding a revolver in trembling hands, but he didn’t point it anywhere. “You two the ones I’m expecting?”

  Adelyn shook her head at the stupidity of the question. “Lords take me, do you have a basement?”

  He twitched his head to the side. “Got a cellar.”

  “Is it big enough for three?”

  A second passed while he thought about it, and before he had an answer Adelyn was pushing towards the area he’d indicated. A small rug was thrown on the floor, but she kicked it to the side and revealed a trap door that was easy to lift.

  “Get in,” she said, in case it wasn’t obvious enough.

  The old man tottered to the wall to get a lamp, stuffing his revolver into his belt, and Adelyn scowled impatiently. “Hurry!”

  “Can’t go down there with no light,” the man mumbled, but he shuffled across the floor with more haste.

  David had to modulate his shield to bring it in to the building, and he was spinning his arms quickly as he waited for the man to get to cover. Finally the old man tottered down the stairs, and Adelyn rushed in behind him.

  “What’s going on?” The man demanded. “You looked like you were tryin’ to outrun judgement!”

  “Sharpshooter on our tail,” Adelyn said, backing up against a cupboard stacked with sacks of dry beans. There wasn’t much room, but the three of them would fit if they stood. “A wizard sharpshooter.”

  The old man swore. “Well what in damnation are we doing down here?”

  David slammed the trap door behind them, leaving them lit only by the flickering lamp as he came down the cellar stairs.

  Adelyn shrugged. “Waiting.”

  Chapter 2

  I found the victims in a house on the south end of the city. Clear homicide. Bullet wounds to the head for both, they’d clearly been there a couple days before anyone noticed the smell and came in to ask about it.

  Figured it for a robbery gone wrong, but some things didn’t stand right with that. Nothing seemed to be missing. Victims both had a coin pouch on their bodies, and nothing in the house had been touched.

  Plus, there’s the fact both of them were witches. Who ever heard of two witches getting robbed for pins?

  Did some digging, asked the doc to check out their wounds. Turns out, it was a couple silver balls they were shot with, not your standard lead work at all. Plus, the pair of them were researchers in the army, had all sorts of ties to big military projects.

  At this point, I turned over the case to the local military base, told them to handle it. Clearly, whatever was going on was way above my pay grade.

  • Peace officer report, filed in Shin, a mid-sized city some two hundred miles south of Triom. This is the first known attack by what would eventually be called the “Wizard in Black”. The killer would go on to kill ten more victims before being stopped

  David’s chest heaved as he recovered in the cellar. It was dark and crowded, but even Jay couldn’t have made a trick shot into a basement he couldn’t see. They were safe down here, unless the sniper came inside the shack.

  Or unless he blows up the whole cabin, David considered. That seemed unlikely, but just in case, he started mentally planning out a more efficient shield that would protect them from the worst of the shrapnel and fallout.

  He turned over the silver bullet in his gloved fingers, feeling the runes that were cast into it. It was distorted, flattened on one end from where it had smacked into the shield. It felt familiar.

  David hadn’t seen Eldrin Jay in years, but he recognized the style of magic almost reflexively. Jay was the Red Shot, after all, and David had been one of his closest fighting companions. The sniper wizard, one of only two members of the Thirteen who had killed more people than David himself. Perhaps one of the two people in history who had killed more, for that matter.

  Even on a battlefield, nobody expected to be shot from two or three camps away, and not even the most tenacious wizards could keep up a shield constantly.

  It occurred to David that if they hadn’t been caught by bushwhackers looking to make a quick buck, Adelyn would be dead.

  He tried not to think about that too much.

  Adelyn tried to say something to him, and he had to think back on what she’d just said, repeating her words in his head.

  “What was that?”

  ‘A copycat,’ he explained, once he’d parsed her question. ‘Someone is mimicking the Red Shot.’

  Her expression was almost unreasonable in the dim lamplight, but he tried to glean from it anyways. She was surprised, and… concerned? Definitely concerned.

  “Do you think they’re the same person who killed Sarah?” Adelyn asked, shuffling uncomfortably, unable to pace in their cramped hiding spot.

  David bit down on his lip as he thought about it. As a release from the pressures and senses of confinement, it wasn’t half the relief that tapping out a rhythm with his fingers could be, but his hands were occupied in signing. ‘If it is the same person, we have a very serious problem. They should not know we are here.’

  “Gods be, will someone tell me what’s going on?” The old man demanded. His hand was shaking, which made the lamp tremble and flicker more in response.

  A second passed before Adelyn picked up the thread. “Could you hear that echo a few minutes ago?”

  He nodded. “You get in a shootout?”

  “Someone tried to kill me on the road,” Adelyn explained, pointing to the bloody stain that took up most of her shirt. “A sorcerer, with a rifle. I’m lucky it didn’t kill me.”

  “How’d you survive a sorcerer?” he asked, putting a second hand on the lamp, an unconscious gesture.

  “I’m one too.” Adelyn tried to shrug in what she probably meant to be a casual gesture, but rotating her shoulder stretched the wound on her chest, and she reacted in pain.

  “Gods,” the old man mumbled, looking back and forth between her and David.

  David was staring at the ceiling, only listening to the conversation because they were talking with significant volume and he couldn’t keep from hearing them. Reaching out, he took the lamp from the old man’s hands and hung it on a hook that’d been screwed into the ceiling of the cellar, probably for that very purpose. In his fear, the old man wasn’t thinking clearly.

  ‘We cannot hide here for long,’ David signed. ‘We have to protect our boat.’

  “When does our transportation get here?” Adelyn asked, first facing David, then turning to the old man. “The next boat. Do you know how close it is?”

  He scratched at the back of his neck uncertainly. “An hour or so. Wind’s running with a temper today, so they might see their way up here early.”

  Assume half an hour, then.

  “If that sharpshooter’s still out there, waiting for them, then we’ll be stranded here and they’ll be dead,” Adelyn said. “Any chance they’re going to cut and run now that we got away?”

  David shook his head. ‘I do not think so.’

  “Then what do we do?” Adelyn asked.

  ‘We need a shield,’ David signed, ‘But it has to be bigger, and it has to be more efficient. I can’t keep up something like I had before, not if I have to shield a whole boat.’

  “Memory?” Adelyn asked. “Did you get much of your book memorized?”

  David pursed his lips and shook his head. Memory was a potent source of spirit, and he had a book of jokes that he could memorize and use as a compartmentalized pool of energy for magic, but he hadn’t had much time since regaining his power to memorize those jokes, and he had used what he had to shield them during their flight to the cabin.

  He could use other memories, but that was a quick path to insanity. Without memories that were segregated and kept apart from the rest of his mind, it was too easy to burn out important things he didn’t want to forget.

  “I still know a few passages from the book of the Divine, I think,” Adelyn said. “That will keep us going for a while, if we need it, but not long
enough.”

  David took a heavy breath, thinking about it. With more practice using signs and more precise runes, he could create a strong, efficient shield, but he had neither the time nor the supplies for that.

  “Leave early?” The old man suggested. “I got a canoe. Shove off in that.”

  “That’d be slower, wouldn’t it?” Adelyn asked, raising an eyebrow. “It wouldn’t do any good to leave early if it just makes us a target for longer,”

  ‘And we would have to fight the river, or go away from our destination,’ David added. ‘Triom is upstream.’

  “Cover it.” The old man licked his lips, working out his plan. “Put a tarp over the canoe, lie down. He won’t see you’re inside, it’s just an empty boat floating down the river.”

  “I don’t think the sharpshooter’s that much a fool,” Adelyn said. “He’d just fill the canoe with holes for target practice if we don’t raise a shield, and if we do raise a shield, he’ll feel it and know we’re in there, then it’s a simple matter to trail us until we can’t keep it up any longer.”

  David pinched the brow of his nose, frustrated at how easily they were being quarried. For all their magic, one sniper with a couple basic spells had them licked.

  “Hold on a tick,” Adelyn said. “David, how long can a shield stay up if you aren’t there to recharge it?”

  ‘Over the river?’ David signed. ‘That’s hard. Nothing to recharge the shield at all?’

  “You’d be raising the shield and leaving it alone,” Adelyn said.

  David did allow himself to tap his hands away at the side of his leg, working out the process in his head. With something to store power in, an insulated battery, he could set up the magic to draw power from it. The spell would fray and fall apart before too long, with spray from the river dissolving it no matter how much power was there, but…

  ‘Twenty minutes. I can leave a shield up for twenty minutes before it is too frayed to be useful.’

  Adelyn grinned. “What do you need to do it? I have a plan.”

  ...

  David kept his shield up as they crept out towards the canoe. If the sniper was watching, he didn’t want to get caught with his pants down, and if he kept up the shield, they would be easy to spot. Adelyn wanted them to be easy to spot.

  She was confident in her plan, but David wasn’t so certain. It relied too much on the sniper thinking that they were stupid. If the sniper saw through the ploy, there’d be no way for David to know until the bullets started flying again.

  The river was deep and ran quickly, but the small dock that was built out over the water was sturdy enough to resist the current. The canoe that was tied to it barely seemed sturdy enough to stay upright, bucking and rocking with the river. Despite its apparent fragility, though, it remained afloat, shifting but never giving in to the rapids.

  David had needed to take a dozen silver dagger coins and Adelyn’s silver bracelet to get enough mass to power the shield, and had placed both inside a wooden box that would keep out the elements. It wasn’t a lot of mass, but the silver would make a better battery than anything else they had on hand.

  A few feet behind him, Adelyn was crawling on her belly with slow, deliberate movements. David wanted to ask her to go faster, but he knew the limiting factor on her speed was the scabbed over hole in her chest and the silver ball lodged just over her heart, so it seemed unfair to demand more from her.

  Still, the longer they took to crawl, the longer he had to maintain the shield, and he still needed enough spirit to keep it running for twenty minutes without him.

  “Do you think he’s watching?” Adelyn whispered.

  David couldn’t easily shrug in a prone position, so he didn’t respond at all. The sharpshooter would stay far enough away that the spirit in their veil wouldn’t be noticeable. The distance it would take to keep their magic hidden would depend heavily on how efficient the sharpshooter was with illusions, and David couldn’t guess how far away that would need to be.

  The bank turned down sharply into a muddy slope, and David swung out his legs so he wouldn’t go down headfirst, shouldering the tarp he’d been given and sliding down into the river.

  He started paddling out to the canoe with one arm as water soaked his clothing and filled his pockets, staying under the dock so it’d look like they were trying to be stealthy. His other arm was occupied in holding up their box full of silver, keeping it above water level so that it wouldn’t get soaked.

  Tossing the box in first, he clamped his hand down on the side of the boat, his brass thumb locking into place. For a moment, it seemed like he might pull it under, but the little boat stayed upright, so he tossed the tarp inside the boat as well and then clambered in, reaching out to Adelyn and helping her up after him.

  His shield was momentarily gone, washed away by the river that sapped away all the spirit in the air, and so once Adelyn was halfway into the boat he focused on drawing it back up. The sniper had been given a brief window to strike, but either missed it or didn’t want to give away that he was watching.

  Unfurling the tarp, David stayed low and spun around, tying it in place on the corners of the canoe, leaving both him and Adelyn stuck in a hunched position in near perfect darkness.

  This proved challenging. To sign the rune for a shield, David had to move his hands in a wide circle, and that was rather difficult when his arms were crammed into a small space in front of his chest.

  Rolling onto his back provided a little more freedom for his arms, but was awkward and uncomfortable and made him feel queasy as the canoe shook and rocked.

  He wasn’t going to get a better chance to do this. Tightening his fingers and signing out the right words, he built up the spell and channeled it into being. It wasn’t his strongest barrier, but it would resist the elements as well as he could manage.

  Pouring power into the silver, he motioned to Adelyn and let her do the same, charging up the silver with as much power as it would hold and unleashing the spell.

  Now was the tricky part. Reaching out from under the tarp, he felt for the rope that held the boat to the dock. They had to release the boat and let it float down naturally without it capsizing or giving away the trick.

  The rope was waterlogged and swollen, but he pulled at it and managed to release the little canoe. Immediately they rocked, the canoe spinning and starting its trip down the river.

  “Now?” Adelyn asked.

  David nodded, raising up the tarp and holding open a tiny gap for her to slip through, leaning back so the boat wouldn’t get too imbalanced. Adelyn sucked in a breath, held it for a moment, and then rolled forward over the side of the boat.

  They only had a couple seconds before they floated past the dock, after which they’d be sitting ducks, so he didn’t wait for even a moment. Sucking in his own breath, closed his eyes, and dove forward after her.

  The water was clear enough, at least to let him squint and tell dark from light. He had to stay under long enough to sell the trick, and when he came up it would have to be under the dock, someplace shady and hidden, somewhere he could breathe without being seen.

  Lunging forward against the pull of the current, David grabbed at one of the poles holding up the dock, clinging to it and pulling himself close. Even hidden, he waited as long as he could, lungs burning at the lack of oxygen.

  Finally, when his vision started to go red, David pulled himself up, gasping for air as quietly as he could manage. Looking around, he saw Adelyn a few feet away, mouth gaping to suck in air without taking in too much river water.

  Neither of them spoke, David because he had to cling to the dock, Adelyn because she was worried about being heard. It was unlikely that their voices would carry over the sound of the water, but they didn’t want to take chances.

  All they had left to do was wait.

  They couldn’t come out of hiding under the dock until they were certain the sniper was gone, which meant waiting until their boat arrived. Adjusting his grip on the po
le, David settled in to wait.

  …

  By the time they saw their ship approach, David felt frozen to the core, and Adelyn looked ready to pass out.

  “Hmm,” David said, one of the few noises he could vocalize besides whistling.

  “What?” Adelyn asked, following his eyeline and spotting the boat a second later.

  It was a medium sized passenger ship, barely more than a barge with additional rooms and storage built on top and a large wheel spinning at the back for propulsion. An oddity by David’s standards because it was powered not by spirit, but by steam. There was a boiler somewhere inside, burning coal and boiling water, which turned the stern wheel.

  As an alternative energy source, David understood the benefits of coal. It could be stored indefinitely, unlike blood which would lose its luster quickly, and that was necessary for the boats making days-long trips across the realm’s many rivers. Still, it seemed crude and inelegant, and David didn’t like it. A boiler engine took up ten times as much space as a spirit machine of equivalent strength, and the heat and steam was far more dangerous than efficient, clean magical power.

  Plus, the billowing clouds of smoke and steam coming off the boat were just plain ugly.

  Still, as it came closer, David was less concerned with the clunkiness of the ship and more concerned with whether their unseen sniper was still out there. There was no more waiting, though. They had to get up and be ready to get onto the boat just as soon as it made port.

  Pushing off from the beam they were clinging to, David dog-paddled over to the ladder, hesitating long enough to make sure Adelyn was following. Water clung to his clothing and he felt heavy as he first started to climb, but it quickly drained and he was able to climb without encumbrance.

  Rolling onto the warm deck, David waited for a second, to see if any sniper fire would come. None did.

  Sighing in relief, David got to his knees, offering Adelyn his arm as she came up the last couple rungs and tugging her up to the deck as well.