A bloody hand. Not what I expected. Truth be told, my money was on a severed head. In the movies, the bloody box in the center of a ritual circle always has someone’s head. It’s practically a rule. The hand throws me off a bit. I could have taken a head back to town and showed it to the guards, started an investigation, and gotten a formal proceeding underway with relative ease. But a hand… I can’t imagine anyone has figured out fingerprints yet. Though with a little ink and parchment, it probably wouldn’t be hard to teach them. But what good would it do? It’ll be easier to look for someone with a missing hand than it would be to match fingerprints. Either way, I get the feeling that the hand’s original owner is dead.
I nudge the open box in Vyre’s direction. “Any ideas?”
He takes one look and gags.
“I guess not. So… we need to figure out what your mom was doing smuggling a severed human hand. Any clues on the dead guys?”
After a few moments to regain his composure, Vyre finally shows me what appears to be some kind of cultist implement. It looks like a small metal cage with a metal star-shaped object inside that rattles from side to side. The whole thing is tiny, easily fitting in a pocket, and the craftsmanship required to produce it must have been high. Whatever the cultists were up to, the plan was certainly funded.
Vyre is happy to let me take the artifact. He doesn’t want anything to do with it, but… he quickly realizes that if his mother is mixed up in it all, he is too. “You really think she hid the… the hand in our boat?” he stammers.
I shrug. “It looks like it, but we don’t know for sure. You said it was hard to convince her to report the theft, right?” He nods and swallows hard. “Then she didn’t want anyone to know. And she didn’t want you to know. She might just be a mule, or she might be the one who procured the hand. We don’t know. But I’m betting she’s going to tell us.”
“A mule?” He scratches his head.
“You don’t have mules here? Like horses mixed with donkeys?” I forgot that not all of the animals here have names from back home. Just another oddity of Inktown that will take time to get used to.
Vyre shows some recognition. “I know what you mean, but how would my mother be a mule?”
“You know, they transport stuff. Haul cargo across long distances. Someone who trafficks contraband is called a mule where I’m from. Make sense?” His confused expression tells me I lost him. “Actually, never mind. I’m just saying your mom either transported the hand—and that was all she did—or else she was the one who got the hand, meaning she probably killed a guy.”
Slowly, Vyre nods. I can’t tell if the cultural barrier is causing problems or if his brain simply refuses to believe that his own mother would be involved in something so gruesome. I give him a firm pat on the shoulder. “Come on. She has some explaining to do.”
He glances over his shoulder at the carnage. “What about them?”
“Leave them. We’ll tell someone in town. Right now, we need some answers.”
The long hike back to Vyre’s cabin is a somber one. I feel sorry for the guy. It doesn’t look like he has a lot of friends out on the fringes of the city, and judging by his house, he hasn’t been a particularly successful merchant, either. If his mom turns out to be evil… he’ll lose everything.
“Hey!” I thought leaps into my head. “I have just the spell! How could I forget?” Without waiting for Vyre to give me the go-ahead, I cast Solace on him, and his mood elevates.
His expression softens, even if by only a little. “I… actually feel a little better. Thank you.”
My own attunement stat rises by two, much to my surprise. I don’t know exactly how it all works yet, but I have to guess that being at such a low level means that even basic stuff like using Solace on Vyre is worth a lot. I wonder if I can do it again…
“Solace.” Nothing happens on my second cast other than the reduction in total mana.
“It doesn’t work like that,” Vyre quickly tells me. “Once you affect someone with the spell, that’s it. The spell is done. You’d have to wait before it would be effective again.”
“Do you know how long?”
He shakes his head and runs a hand through his pale hair. “I think, for Solace, I would have to be sad about something new. But I’ve only known a couple wizards, so I’m not really sure. You don’t see that spell very often.”
“Speaking of spells, what kind of stuff does a merchant have?”
“Let me see your… staff-thing. Or whatever.” He holds out his hand toward my rifle.
I’m hesitant to give a rifle to a medieval peasant, so I drop the magazine first and then eject the round from the chamber before handing it over. “It’s called a rifle,” I tell him.
“And it lets you cast wizard spells?” he asks with a skeptical frown.
“Something like that.”
He turns it over in his hands, then lays it flat across both palms. “Appraise!” he casts with a smile. His smile quickly droops back into a frown. “That’s weird… it says value unknown.” He lets out a heavy sigh. “I guess I’m too low level. Figures.”
He’s sad again, and fortunately for both of us, I know just what to do. “Solace!”
Once more, Vyre perks up a bit, and I have to wonder if the constant emotional rollercoaster I’ve put him on is good for his mental health. Though, truth be told, the shrinks at the VA were paid quite a bit of money to do far worse to my own mind, so I figure cheering him up a little with magic can’t be that bad.
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We reach the cabin, and I cycle another round into the chamber before flicking on the safety. I don’t anticipate the woman giving me a lot of trouble, but I want to be prepared either way.
Vyre leads us inside, and his happy-sad-happy attitude quickly turns to anger and aggression, displaying a violent side that I wouldn’t have figured he was capable of producing. He tears into the old woman, accusing her of working with cultists, and I stand awkwardly in the corner. The woman backpedals at first, but I don’t buy it. Her excuses are too generic. She didn’t know about the hand. She didn’t know where the boat was taken. She didn’t see the people who took it. She doesn’t know what’s in the house where the thieves live…
Back in Tyre, before the bombs, I was camped with Jessica and a few others in a high outpost overlooking the harbor. We weren’t really looking for much, just quietly observing, taking notes, and reporting back to our superiors on the battleships in the harbor. It was a boring assignment. Then, after a few days, a teenage girl approached our outpost. She was quickly taken into custody, and as the marines were binding her hands behind her back with plastic zip ties, she hit a detonator. Her vest didn’t go off—I’d be dead if it had—and it turned out to be incorrectly wired but very much a dangerous bomb.
Most of us watched the girl’s interrogation that afternoon. She gave all the same excuses that Vyre’s mom gives right now. She didn’t know what the vest did, she didn’t know the man who gave it to her, she didn’t know where she was walking or who was in the outpost… Bad liars are always the same. They try to give nothing instead of sprinkling believable half-truths with their lies.
After a few minutes of watching the domestic dispute, I decide to take a more direct approach, one I learned from a three-letter spook on that same hill outside Tyre. I punch the old woman square in the face, hard enough to break bone. I hit her two more times, and she collapses to the ground in a heap of blood, snot, and broken teeth.
I stand over her, my feet planted on either side of her head, and cock back my first for a fourth strike. “Tell me what the fuck you know!”
Vyre practically jumps on my back, but his resistance doesn’t last long. The woman instantly cracks. Few people, especially untrained merchant women, have the mental fortitude to keep up their lies with a broken nose and half their teeth.
“Please, please,” she begs, spitting a glob of blood across the wooden floor. “I… I… I’ll tell you everything.”
And tell she does. The woman spills it all, much to her son’s horror. As I suspected, she’s just a mule. She made a deal with a cult—an honest to goodness satanic cult that worships some Inktown version of the devil called Malachar, the Abyssal Lord—and all she had to do was move the severed hand from one location to another. The cultists couldn’t do it themselves as, apparently, once a person is marked by Malachar, the town guards can sense them. If the cultists get too close to the city proper, they’re easy to catch. Cultists who get caught end up at the dead end of a rope. And for her role in the scheme, they promised the old woman riches beyond her wildest dreams… once Inktown was turned to ash beneath Malachar’s cloven hooves, of course.
The whole thing smacks of absurdity, but I know the woman isn’t lying. Not any more. Some people have spines made of steel. You can torture them for days, waterboard them within an inch of their miserable life, and they’ll still spout off names of retired soccer players instead of terror cell locations. Those people, the ones with real brass in their hearts, end up with a quick bullet or two to the back of their head after a few weeks. The others, the ones like Vyre’s mom who tell their life story after the first ounce of pain, live for years. Once you’ve seen a few dozen of each category, you learn how to discern between the two in a matter of moments.
I’ve been in enough black sites to make the call with perfect confidence. Vyre’s mother is in the second group. There’s no brass in her heart. No, just blood and meat. She’ll do whatever it takes to keep the rest of her blood inside her body, despite the fact that she’s lost relatively little to the floorboards.
When her story is finally exhausted, I help her up to a chair and let Vyre tend to her wounds. I even grant her the courtesy of a Solace cast, though her current grief is far beyond what the spell is designed to handle. Now I have a decision to make.
“So…” I pull their attention back to me. “Do I turn you in? Or do I let you go?”
Vyre’s mother tries to say something through the bloody rag pressed to her mouth, but nothing intelligible comes out. The Umbrasil has to speak up for her. “Please… she… she didn’t know what she was doing. It was a stupid idea, and it’s over now. If you turn her in, they’ll lock her up. She’ll never see the light of the suns again.”
“I know.” I let out a heavy sigh. I’ve been the executioner before, but never the judge. I don’t like the new responsibility. I rub my temples, hoping for an answer to simply eject itself from my fingertips directly into my brain. Unfortunately, it doesn’t happen. “Well… I’m tired. I need to go home and eat. And to sleep. And to think.”
Vyre seems to know what’s on my mind before I say it. “I’ll keep her here,” he quickly promises. “We won’t move an inch.”
In the back of my mind, I really don’t care if they both run away forever. It would make my decision for me, after all.
*****
I leave the cottage on nothing more than Vyre’s promise not to flee and begin the long trek back to Gnomeslayer Estate. It’ll be a few miles, at least, and my feet are tired. I also didn’t really make any progress toward becoming a better mage, but that doesn’t worry me too much. There will be plenty of time to develop my skills over the next few weeks and months.
When I finally make it back to Vasily’s palatial home, I’m greeted by the pleasant smells of roasted meat, abundant wine, and smoky cheese. The spread on the table is enough for an army, I eat far more than I ever would have at home. The food since the war ended has been pretty lackluster. Too much farmland was eradicated, so chemicals and protein printing had to step up to fill in the food gaps. Here, Sir Vasily serves the freshest real food imaginable. Being rich certainly has its perks no matter which world you walk.
I lay down on the opulent mattress, and I instantly know it is going to be one of those nights. Everything that happened today was too similar to the darkness lurking in the back of my mind.
*****
My eyes close, and I’m right back in Raqqa, 2028. My shoulder is pressed in hard to a crumbling wall. My XM7 only has a handful of rounds left in the magazine, and I haven’t kept track in my head. I’ve got two more mags on my back, but there’s no time. Rounds from the local militia are showering into the other side of the wall, and in a few seconds, the old stone is going to give way.
“We have to move!” I scream at Jessica. She’s hunched over another ranger who took at least three rounds to the chest before we hit cover. I don’t how much penetration the rounds achieved, but it didn’t look good. And there’s no time. Never enough time.
“Fuck!” She throws the packaging from a bandage over her shoulder. More rounds pummel the crumbling wall.
“Ten seconds max, Jess! We gotta go!” I grab a pair of grenades and pop the pins. The militia is too far to hit them, but the distraction is what we need. I toss them both over the wall, then sprint for Jessica and grab her by the collar of her uniform.
One… two… three… A pair of explosions rip through the air, and I drag Jessica away at full speed. She doesn’t resist. The downed ranger is lost. We take off away from the militia and up a hill covered with ancient ruins. Everywhere in the Middle East is littered with the skeletons of empires that couldn’t withstand the march of time. The steel and glass buildings of Raqqa’s modern downtown are about to join their millennials-old ancestors. Some of them already have.
A trio of coalition bombers shatters the sky overhead, and then a chorus of deep, ground-shaking explosions echoes up from the town. We reach the next hill and dive over a broken Roman or Byzantine pillar. I scramble to a knee and quickly rattle off a handful of shots, but none of them strike home. Some of the militia managed to follow us through the explosions, though most of them are still hammering away at the old wall thirty yards down the hill. I quickly cycle a new mag into the XM7 and then take my time. Just a second or two is all I need. Picking targets one by one, I eliminate a dozen a hostiles before the next coalition bomber run shakes the ground.
“Let’s go,” I yell over the din of battle. We need to get to higher ground. The grenades and the bombers bought us some time, but that window is rapidly closing. There’s an outpost higher up the hill with a helicopter LZ. If we want to make the last ride out, we have three minutes. I check my watch and curse. Two minutes and twenty seconds.
Jess follows, hot on my heels as we scramble farther up the hill, climbing over ancient ruins and brand new corpses alike. I can see the Black Hawk in the distance. Coalition fighters sweep a defensive pattern behind it, but there aren’t any MiGs left in the area for them to engage. Some of the militia spot us, and more rounds hammer into the hillside all around. Dirt and debris kicks up in a vertical pattern to my left, and I dive right, narrowly avoiding a fatal spray of bullets. I turn on my back and line up another shot, the XM7 more than lethal at such a close range.
We reach the LZ with maybe twenty seconds to spare. The helicopter, its blades deafening overhead, is almost on top of us. A soldier dressed in tan and brown tosses a rope from the side as they approach. Then the Black Hawk turns, and the M60 mounted on the opposite side lets loose a devastating torrent into the militia’s position.
I reach for the rope, Jessica only a few inches behind me.
“Please! Help me!” a man yells, standing up with his hands over his ears only a few feet away. He’s dirty, covered in filth, and wearing a long robe from his neck to his sandals.
Before I can react, Jess puts three in his chest from her sidearm, and the bedraggled man crumples to the dirt. There’s no time to think—just climb. I reach the top, and a pair of strong hands hauls me over the edge. Jessica follows only a second later, and the Black Hawk wheels away from the action just as another coalition bombing run shakes the world, and I wake up in Gnomeslayer Estate with cold sweat drenching my pillow.