No Witnesses
When the mage left the carriage and came toward them, the mercenary captain recoiled in sheer terror. Hammonds tried to fall back with him, but the mage would not allow it. A hand of earth thrust up from the ground and clamped both of Hammonds’s legs. He could not move an inch.
“Do you want to die?”
The mage’s tone was ice.
“Please spare me, sir.”
The mage bore down on him.
“There is no treasure!”
“The carriage… beneath the floor… there’s a special compartment…”
“You should have said so from the start.”
The mage swung his staff and struck Hammonds in the temple.
Crack.
The skull caved, and brain matter sprayed. Without pausing, the mage leveled his staff at the carriage. The railing tore free, the floor peeled back, and the pieces shot into the empty air. He advanced while taking the carriage apart, and found the hidden space beneath it. A smile touched his mouth.
Whoosh.
He rose like a bird, alighted on the carriage, and drew out the box stored in the secret compartment. It was a handsome casket of silver.
The three mages still alive craned their necks like cranes, desperate to see what was inside. Chris craned his with them.
“What is this!”
The newcomer exploded in fury and hurled the contents of the silver box away. Every eye followed the thing as it tumbled. A turtle wrought of gold rolled across the ground.
Treasure. To an ordinary eye, it was treasure enough. To a mage, it was nothing but precious metal.
“Is this what you were looking for!”
His rage came down like a thunderbolt on Wolfgang and Jefferson.
“No, sir.”
“The unit leader was clear. He said it was a treasure of great use to mages.”
The newcomer stepped closer.
“The unit leader?”
“We kidnapped him…”
“You kidnapped him?”
“Yes.”
“And what did you learn? Tell me all of it.”
“He said even he didn’t know what the goods were. Five boxes were loaded onto the carriages of five transport units, and only the guild master knows which unit is carrying the real treasure.”
“So this one’s a dud.”
“Yes.”
“You’re certain the real treasure exists?”
“He was certain of that. He said they were paid a fortune in transport fees.”
“A fortune?”
“Yes. No madman pays a fortune to move a single turtle, so it has to be with one of the other units.”
“I see. Kill them.”
“Sir?”
“Do you mean to tell the world we turned bandit?”
“Sir?”
“Are you an idiot?”
His finger swept a full circle — north, east, south, west.
“They’ve seen our faces. They know your name. They’ve heard about the treasure. We have to clean this up.”
“Ah.”
Draine, who had caught the exchange, seized a horse, swung into the saddle, and shouted.
“Run!”
The newcomer warned Wolfgang and Jefferson.
“If even one of them gets away, you die in their place.”
Then he went after the fleeing Draine. The guild clerks and porters, stunned for a heartbeat, scrambled onto the carriages and lashed the horses across the back.
Wolfgang and Jefferson split and ran in opposite directions, scattering mana bolts as they went. Set beside the mana bombs once used by Julien, the Five-Ring mage of Touleno Magic Tower, the bolts of these two were the difference between a campfire and a firefly. They were more than enough, however, to slaughter commoners. Mercenaries and guards died in heaps, and the porters with them.
The bolts fell on horses as well as men. When a horse dropped dead, the carriage overturned, and the porters pinned beneath it screamed.
Chris found the death of the horses more painful than the death of the people, and that realization made his heart lurch. People were dying in droves, and he was not sad. All he felt was a faint stir of distaste.
I haven’t even eaten anyone else’s Klpandi… so why am I like this?
Thwip.
A hole opened in the head of the porter standing beside Art, and blood sprayed. Art wiped at the blood on his face with his fingers. They came away red. He stared at his crimson fingers and was about to scream.
Chris clamped a hand over the boy’s mouth, dragged him to the ground, and lay over him, covering the boy with his own body.
“Art. Not a sound.”
“Hyung.”
The voice shook like an aspen leaf.
“I told you not to talk. Play dead.”
From the corner of his eye, Chris watched the mages chase the fleeing survivors down to kill them. He mimicked a sleep spell, shaping a mana close to what he had felt then, wrapping it around Art’s head, and pouring his will into a whisper.
“Your heart grows calm, and your eyes grow heavy. Worry fades, and sleep comes. Sleep.”
The strength left Art’s shoulders, and his neck went slack and easy. Chris waited in silence. The newcomer was the first to return to the scene. He rose high into the air and scanned the ground, loosing wind-blades and mana bolts at anyone Wolfgang and Jefferson had missed. Those who had fled farther, he hunted down and killed himself.
Did anyone get away?
His heart leaned toward pessimism rather than hope.
No. No one.
He bit his lip and thought it through.
What do I do about Art? Best if the mage overlooks him and passes on. But if he realizes the boy is alive? Do I help? Or do I look the other way, the way I did when they took the unit leader?
Fighting a mage stood squarely against his resolve to do no more than a porter’s share.
What do I do?
In the domain where Chris had grown up, and everywhere else he knew, a boy of fifteen was treated as a man and forced to do a man’s work. Art was fifteen. By that measure, he was grown enough. Like the other porters sprawled with holes in their heads, he ought to look after his own life.
But Chris could not treat Art as a man and leave him there. In the boy, he saw himself — the hard, wretched years of his own childhood.
From the age of five, Chris had watched every face around him simply to stay alive. Long before fifteen, from the time he was ten, he had been forced to work as hard as a grown man. Fail to finish a day’s labor, and the whip found him.
Every night he cried himself to sleep and prayed heaven to send him a protector. He longed for someone who would give his anxious, flinching self a life in which he did not have to read the room. He hoped for a friend. He waited for some being beyond ordinary men to pull him out of that cesspit.
When a mage came to the domain, Chris clung to him with everything he had. At fifteen, he stepped into the world of mages.
Entering the magic tower had been entirely his own choice. Every hardship that followed, then, was the fruit of his decision. He had no one else to blame.
Even so, once he had rubbed shoulders with the mages of the tower and come to loathe them, it was a cruel thing for anyone to sneer and ask who had held a knife to his throat and ordered him into a magic tower.
Life in the tower had been nothing like what Chris imagined. It had leapt far past the limit of his resolve. Remembering those days still hurt. He felt pity for the self who had spent his boyhood in a prison, and for the self who had clenched his teeth through the agony of learning Iron Body.
How good it would have been to have a steadfast protector at five. How good it would have been, at ten, when he worked himself half to death, to have someone lend a hand. How good it would have been, at fifteen, to have a master he could trust and lean on.
Chris decided he would be that protector for Art.
For this one day, at least.
A short while later, all the mages returned. Wolfgang and Jefferson bowed and scraped, watching the newcomer’s face.
“We carried out every order.”
“Search.”
“Sir?”
He clicked his tongue.
“What use is a mage with a head that empty?”
He pointed at the carriage he had already torn apart.
“He said the goods were in that carriage’s hidden compartment, but it could be another one, couldn’t it? So search them all.”
“Yes, sir.”
The two moved at once, rifling the cargo and ripping up carriage floors to check beneath. The newcomer did not merely watch; he joined the work. The search went on for two hours.
“Nothing, it seems.”
He looked as though he had searched on the off chance, and he was not particularly disappointed.
Wolfgang and Jefferson edged closer, hesitant.
“We’ll be going, then.”
The newcomer nodded.
“My name is…”
Jefferson cut him off.
“Mages as lowly as we are could never presume to the honor of learning a great mage’s name.”
Wolfgang looked baffled.
“What are you suddenly on about?”
Jefferson drove an elbow into Wolfgang’s side — a silent order to shut up. Seeing it, the newcomer laughed.
“Jefferson, at least, has a brain that turns.”
Wolfgang still did not understand.
“What do you mean?”
“Why did we kill even the innocent porters, every last one of them?”
“To shut their mouths.”
“Exactly. That’s it.”
“That’s… what?”
“Your friend is worried I might shut your mouths the way I shut theirs, so he doesn’t want to know my name. The more you know, the likelier you are to die.”
At last Wolfgang understood.
“We know nothing. We don’t know where you’re from, or your name…”
The mage cut him off, cold.
“But you know my face.”
In that instant Jefferson ran north. As he ran, he layered a strength-enhancing spell and a speed-enhancing spell over his body at once.
When the newcomer chased Jefferson, Wolfgang bolted the other way.
They’re Jenyeom, at least. They won’t die that quickly.
Chris meant to take Art and slip away from the spot. Then a scream reached him, and he felt mana coming this way.
He grumbled inwardly.
Mages, and they go down this easily. You ought to study harder.
The newcomer passed near Chris and went after Wolfgang. Not many minutes later, an explosion sounded.
That one’s finished too.
If the newcomer simply left, the matter would be over. But events did not go as Chris hoped.
The mage came back and began gathering anything among the cargo that might be worth money. Watching him fastidiously retrieve even the golden turtle he had flung aside in a fit of temper and tuck it into a spatial pouch, Chris clicked his tongue.
Greedy bastard.
He even stripped the mercenaries and the guards of everything they carried.
A mage, stooping to this… a hyena.
Chris waited, patient and still, for the man to leave. At last the looting ended. Unfortunately, the mage did not go.
“You there. The one playing dead. Get up.”
Chris did not so much as twitch.
“This isn’t a wild guess — a just in case, a maybe, a what if. I know. So get up.”
The mage clicked his tongue.
“Forcing me to move. How tiresome.”
Step. Step.
Footsteps. They drew near Chris, then passed him on the left.
“Hey!”
A nudge of the foot, and only then did Supervisor Lapin rise, his face drained white.
“Heh heh. So you knew.”
Lapin stuck up a thumb.
“A great mage indeed! Eyes and ears you simply can’t hide from.”
“I was going to kill you without pain, but I’ve changed my mind. You ought to be punished for inconveniencing me, shouldn’t you?”
Lapin’s face twisted with terror.
“Please spare me.”
“No.”
“If you let me live, I’ll give you information.”
“What information?”
The mage looked interested.
“Do you know what treasure the guild is moving? If not that, do you know which transport unit has it?”
“No, not that. Over there — besides me, there’s another one playing dead.”
His finger pointed at Chris. Inwardly, Chris cursed.
You son of a bitch. If you’re going to die, die alone. Why drag me in with you?
The mage, it seemed, had not known Chris was playing dead. He studied the prone figure with a puzzled look, then swept his staff. A mana bolt shot toward Chris’s head.
Chris snatched a stone from the ground and threw it.
Smack.
The mana bolt struck the stone.
“Oh ho.”
A note of admiration escaped the mage.
“You really are alive. You even blocked a mana bolt with a rock. Not bad.”
Chris got to his feet and rolled his neck once to loosen it.
“You’ve killed as many as you meant to kill today, and taken as much as you meant to take. Please, just go.”
The mage’s expression hardened.
“And if I won’t simply leave?”
Chris flicked a stone at his feet up with his toe and caught it in his right hand.
“Then I’ll have to look for a way to live.”