The interior of the dingy pub was generally somewhat dozy at this hour; most pubs in Raglan closed long before midnight, but the Ark Arms was known as a place where one could, if in dire straits, find a reasonable facsimile of a decent lager if one happened to be in need of such in the wee hours of the morning. Perhaps they didn't have the fancier trappings of other pubs in town, such as "a kitchen" or "more than four tables", but the proprietors knew what their niche was and served it accordingly.
Orton opened the door somewhat ungently, his mind on other things; the two people inside (the barman and a heavily inebriated regular in a threadbare cardigan) looked up, took note of his existence, and went back to their respective engagements. Enna followed him in; Jiann had elected to remain outside, reasoning correctly that absent the ability to eat, drink, or feel cold, a pub held little to entice him. He stood as if rooted to the concrete outside, staring up at the stars and sorting through his thoughts and feelings about what had just occurred. They were not easily untangled.
"A beer, please," Orton groaned as he sat down in a rickety chair at the bar. The bartender muttered something back in Welsh; Orton, who did not count Welsh among his prodigious list of spoken languages, shrugged and mimed tipping back a bottle. The bartender nodded and sent one sliding down the bar, where it slapped into Orton's outstretched hand. "Now that's service," he muttered, twisting the cap off and taking a swig; the beer was cheap and skunky, but contained alcohol and vague psychosomatic traces of the local water table, which Orton could use to extract a trickle of entropic differential. Being fourth-tier had many perks.
Enna sat next to Orton, receiving a beer of her own; after a brief struggle to get the cap off, she took a swig of her own and sighed. "Ugh. Still, better than the Merlin Hooch."
"Keep your voice down, if you don't mind," murmured Orton. "It's very late for regular people here." He felt vaguely distracted; there was something off about the local aether, and he couldn't quite place it. His mind kept drifting, trying to isolate the source of the dissonance. Enna huffed, but acquiesced.
The bartender muttered a few words she couldn't understand to the thoroughly-potted regular, who chuckled wetly in response; Enna frowned, feeling self-conscious and vaguely attacked (as she usually did when someone spoke in a foreign language around her). Probably talking about debauched foreigners, she thought to herself. Guys, if you only knew.
The minutes ticked by; the bartender began polishing a glass and marking something on a clipboard, while the regular took a few more sips of beer and dozed a little bit more obviously. She kept glancing at Orton, but his mind seemed to be elsewhere. She did her best to hold her peace, and succeeded quite valiantly for (she thought) a very respectable five minutes, at which point her patience gave out and she drained the rest of her beer. Orton, sensing the flash in her aura, winced.
"So, we're really not gonna talk about what just happened." Her green eyes flashed as she glared at Orton. "Not even gonna hit the highlights? Just like a boy, I swear."
Orton frowned. "Not that this is really the place or the time, but --" he took in a breath, intending to explain to the best of his ability, but never got the chance.
Enna, triggered as usual by what she saw as Orton's typical stalling, did not remotely have enough self-control to wait for him to finish his sentence. "That's the problem with you, Orton! Nothing's ever the right place or the time!" He winced as she pointed her beer bottle at him accusingly. "Every time, you're always rushing me from one thing to another, never taking the time to answer my questions! 'I'M HERE FROM THE FUTURE, THERE'S NO TIME TO EXPLAIN!'" She swilled a sip of her beer angrily, then expertly cut him off just as he was about to respond. "We can't just ignore what happened! What's all this about Jiann being your apprentice, and not me? What, am I supposed to just nod and smile?"
The drunken regular, apparently somewhat put off his beer by the incipient row, got unsteadily to his feet and went to the gents. The bartender winced, but knew better than to get involved. Orton threw up his hands. "What do you want me to say? You think I planned any of that? I just wanted to ask a guy about some stuff, so that we could get what we needed."
"No, Orton, you did not ask a guy about some stuff." Enna pushed her hair angrily out of her eyes. "You bet our lives against a seven-foot-tall kung-fu skeleton -- who, I'm pretty sure, was you from another future or something -- in a Hell dimension! And that's not even the weirdest part!" She took another swallow of her beer, winding up for her next point.
Orton scowled. "Seriously, don't --"
Enna jumped to her feet. "Don't you tell me --" So angry she couldn't even get her words out, she gestured wildly with the bottle, but it slipped out of her fingers; her eyes widened as she realized it was going to hit Orton in the face.
Suddenly, with a flash of prismatic light, Orton's aura illuminated; he slipped into a martial trance in a tiny fraction of an instant and brought his hand up, catching the bottle smoothly directly in front of his face. His expression completely neutral, he began to set it down on the bar very, very slowly.
Enna looked up at him, her face frozen in shock. Her mind spun through a series of memories: Orton teaching her vaticinophrasty. Orton, explaining the nature of magic. Orton, ever patient, ever frustrating.
Orton, showing her floating coins in Curbside Burgers.
Orton took in a breath to start, very deliberately, and noticed that Enna was not looking at him. She was looking behind him.
Pretty much the biggest mistake you can make is alerting another magic-user to your presence and ability; a lot of them are what you'd call 'hostile'.
Orton turned around.
The drunken regular in the cardigan stood behind him, smiling and swaying slightly. He was middle-aged, probably in his early fifties; shabby brown pants, a shabby shirt under the cardigan, a shabby black tie, mended spectacles. Orton's eyes widened; at last, he knew what was wrong about the local entropy fields. The bartender muttered a warning in Welsh; the man in the cardigan gestured, and Orton heard a quiet squishing sound followed by silence. He didn't bother to look.
The weight that had been insidiously cozying up to his psychic senses abruptly fell upon him full-force, crashing into his divinatory envelope with an impact like a meteor; his immediate attempt to visualize the battlespace was squelched before he could even begin, and he flinched backwards as the man in the cardigan brought his other hand up in a proffering gesture. "Get down!" Orton roared, leaping backwards.
From the other man's palm, a violent black rainbow erupted; it scythed across the pub's interior like a lashing organic crack in the surface of reality. Inimical, dire somethings boiled behind it, savaging anything that the line crossed; Orton watched it pass an inch above his nose as he fell over backwards, pushing Enna to the ground under him. Around them, the pub exploded into black flames.
"Bad wizard. Kill him." he grunted in Enna's ear, then leapt to his feet. He reached for a Form to destroy the other magus, but found his access blocked before he could even touch the spiritual realm; black shadows crowded around him in the astral space, reaching stygian excrudescences into his holistic aggregate, and he had to lash a flare of astral incandescence to drive them off (which looked, to Enna, like Orton had jumped to his feet and then been bowled over by something invisible). Cursing, he struggled to regain his footing, but found himself held down by ochre fingers, independent of hands, which seemed to have sprouted from the floor.
The man in the cardigan, still smiling genially, turned towards Enna; his teeth, she noticed uneasily, were all perfectly straight and white, in dramatic contrast to the stereotypical dental integrity of British people. Shaking herself, she gathered her power and lashed out, launching a crimson lightning bolt towards her foe; infused with the power of her muladhara chakra, the bolt would strike with the force of both the ground and the earth, a dyad of puissance sufficient to sunder a building.
This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it
The other magus caught her bolt in his hand as gently as he might a badminton shuttlecock; curiously, he turned the mote of surging vermillion power over and peered at it, as though holding a rare insect, then stuck his nose close to it and inhaled deeply. Ribbons of red light twisted up from the flare into his nostrils, withering the orb of her lightning bolt until it was gone; he smacked his lips, then belched quietly.
Orton finally managed to fight his way free from the grip of the reified cthonic todestrieb the other magus had summoned, reassuming his martial trance and launching a spiraling kick into the other man's face; nonplussed, the wizard stumbled backwards before steadying himself on a barstool.
"Use physicals!" shouted Orton, surging forward; the other magus gestured, and Orton had to rapidly summon the crystalline shield of the Immovable Object to protect him from the torrent of horror which nearly blasted him off his feet. It was like he was being attacked by an endless, infinite stream of carnivorous eels; ravenous, toothsome shapes of sinuous form and ill intent cascaded towards and into him, and only his shield protected him from being instantly torn apart. Roaring with the effort, he redoubled his power and fought to keep his footing, but his right foot wouldn't move for some reason; glancing down, he discovered that a barstool had warped and slumped, waxlike, to ensnare him. We're in trouble, he thought grimly.
Enna, somewhat at a loss and very intimidated by all the hideous energies flying around, gamely picked up a broken beer bottle, but found herself stumbling to a halt when the man turned to look at her; playfully, he began to raise his hand towards his throat, and Enna screamed with horror as she realized her own hand was mirroring the movement. She grasped her own wrist with her other hand and fought to push it down, but the jagged edge of the glass inched upwards towards her frenziedly-pulsing jugular with inexorable force.
Suddenly, the other man's eye exploded; crazily, she realized she could see completely through his head, and caught sight of Jiann at the door with a smoking revolver. The other mage turned, horribly, to peer at him; Enna screamed again as she saw the bloodless, splintered interior of the man's head, looking more like red-painted wood than anything that had a right to be inside another human being.
Furiously, Orton dumped as much power as he could into his aura and flared it; the fingers in the floor, the creeping chairs, and the torrent of etheric serpents all disintegrated in a burst of prismatic power. Leaping forwards, he pummeled the other man's midriff with a series of lightning-fast blows that left divots the size of soda cans in his ribs and stomach, but he seemed to completely ignore them.
Jiann cursed, fumbling for something in his pockets; behind him, Enna screamed a third time as the edge of the bottle pricked her skin. Think! Orton castigated himself furiously. Then, abruptly, he saw it; disguised, minimal, nonmagical, but essential nonetheless. Surging as much power as he dared into his speed and precision, he reached out and snatched the other man's rumpled black tie off his neck. The resulting explosion of force knocked all three of them off their feet; when they recovered, all that remained of the other magus was a bloody stain on the floor.
Enna coughed. "What happened? Where'd he go?"
"Dead," Orton groaned, shaking his head. "Who knows how many years of wounds and injuries came home to roost when I separated him from his sustaining abstraction. The longer you ignore the bills, the bigger they are when they come due." Disgusted, he tossed away the tie.
"Somebody wanna tell me exactly what I missed?" asked Jiann, reloading his revolver. "Guessin' that weren't no ordinary pub denizen."
"Like I said, bad wizard." Orton pointed at the tie, where it had fallen on the floor. "These guys are called the Order of the Black Curtain, and I've run into them before." Jiann started visibly, and Orton did not miss it, but pretended that he had. "They're basically a cabal of Shades who pop up anywhere you go; they hang out in towns or travel all over the world, living whatever lives they want, and they share all their lore so all of them are strong-ass spellcasters."
Jiann grunted. "Guess it would be a mighty powerful sales pitch."
Orton sighed, ignoring him, and bent to pick through the rubble for a moment; eventually, he straightened his shoulders and turned back to Jiann. "The best lead you'll have for the fruits is in Iraq, but it's going to be slow going. You two had better get moving."
Enna, still somewhat shaken by the recent events, took a moment to catch up to the current thread of the conversation; but when she did, her eyes bulged with disbelief. "Orton, what the fuck?! Don't think you can skip out on me that easily!"
Orton shook his head. "I've got my own legwork to do in South America. And it'll be harder for Gentry to track us if we split up."
Enna threw up her hands furiously. "Seriously?! You're gonna ditch me again?! I should --"
"I never ditched you."
Surprised, Enna flinched; Orton didn't look at her, but stared resolutely at a wall across the room. Slowly, understanding penetrated her mind.
Fuck. That's right. I left him. Oh, shit.
She winced. "Sorry. I didn't mean it like that."
"Of course you didn't." Orton turned, still looking away from her, towards Jiann. "You know what to do?"
Jiann pondered. "Sleepwalker sort o' stuff while we keep movin', I reckon; give her a good chance to get better at th' basics. Her semioturgy's comin' along, but her noephrasty still needs a lotta work."
"Good enough. Try to keep a low profile." Orton turned back to the wreckage covering most of the floor, poking at it some more. "And good luck."
"You're joking," protested Enna, albeit half-heartedly. "You... really want us to split up?"
Orton sighed. "'Want' is probably not the right word. But it's apparently what's best for all of us right now."
Confused and frustrated, Enna started towards Orton, determined to... well, she wasn't quite sure what she would do, but she was definitely going to get her hands on him and wring some answers out that made sense. Suddenly, Jiann was beside her, a cautioning hand on her wrist. His milky eyes stared into hers, and he shook his head slowly. Then he turned back to look at Orton, and Enna followed his gaze.
He was carefully moving burnt and slashed pieces of wood and concrete aside, sifting with his typical patience through the debris. Finally, after nearly a minute, he found what he was looking for with another sigh; the squashed, boneless remains of the bartender, which he lifted gently out and placed on a clear part of the floor. Rubbing his fingers together, he made the sign of the Cleansing Flame; the bucket-sized wad of twisted flesh and organs began to flicker with multicolored flames, but emitted no smoke and left no ash behind. He dropped to his knees, bowed his head, and was silent.
After a minute, Jiann tugged Enna gently towards the door, and they departed without intruding further. Orton remained bowed for quite a while afterwards, long after they were gone. Eventually, however, duty intruded; he sighed again, then clambered wearily to his feet. Moving to stand next to the discarded black tie on the floor, he pulled his trenchcoat tight around his body and gestured.
In the air above the tie, a black slit unfolded in the air; at first, it was a simple line, like a seam in reality. After a moment, it widened, and its true nature became clear.
The great, lidless ebon eye stared coolly out at Orton, waiting for him to speak. Despite all his vast and wide-ranging knowledge, he still had no idea what the being on the other end of this spell really was; it answered to no name that he knew, had its own inscrutable plans and strictures, and there had been very little that he could identify about it even with truly dedicated efforts. The one thing he did know was that all the members of the Order of the Black Curtain knew the spell to summon it.
Orton raised his right hand in a fist. "The bearer of this ebonshroud has perished."
The alien eye gazed back at him imperturbably. State the circumstances of the death of Acain Bhocu.
Orton grimaced. "I killed him."
The eye was silent for a few heartbeats. Conflict between bearers of the ebonshroud is forbidden.
Spreading his fingers, Orton conjured a misty shadow; within, an illusion took form, showing the contents of the bar a few minutes earlier -- in particular, the part where Orton had ducked under an attack from the man in the cardigan. Orton let his hand drop, and the illusion dissolved. "As you can see, he attacked me first. My rights under the Covenant are clear."
The eye stared back at him for a few moments, but Orton did not waver; he knew that it would be a very, very bad idea to display weakness to whatever this thing was. Eventually, the eye sent forth soundless words again. It is acknowledged. You will not be marked for Condemnation.
Orton nodded, trying not to let his relief show, and made the sign for the dismissal of the eye. However, it did not dissipate, but instead continued to watch him. Your presence here is curious. This is not the same world in which you last summoned us.
Orton froze. Shit. Crap fuck oh God. He sucked in a deep breath, trying not to shake, and racked his brain for an appropriate response. Eventually, he straightened and let his fist drop to his side. "I follow my own path." Praying internally, he shut up, hoping whatever the eldritch horror before him really was wouldn't choose this moment to push the topic. The pause that followed was so long that he started to sweat.
Then, abruptly, the eye was gone; Orton sagged with relief and let himself collapse into a chair, panting and gasping for breath. Teach me to get cocky, he chastised himself.
It took him a long time to collect himself; when he did, he noticed that the black necktie on the floor was gone, and shuddered. Picking his way to the door, he opened it with care, stepped quietly out into the night, and closed it behind him as softly as possible. He walked slowly at first, but his steps eventually quickened into longer and faster strides; then, when he could contain his terror no longer, he began to run.