She Never Died
"Should I dump the baggage?"
Chris looked down. The great trees bristling up beneath them stood like spears.
"Don't say things like that. Not even as a joke."
But once the words were out, the idea didn't seem so terrible. The three elders were on their heels, and if they kept on like this the odds of being caught were high. Tom still had information worth squeezing out of him, so they would let him live. Chris had no such value. Falling here looked like the better chance of survival.
Slather every kind of mana over his body to blunt the impact, and Iron Body would do the rest. The elders wanted Tom. They would go after him.
Chris bit his lip.
"All right. Throw me."
"Throw what?"
"Me. Throw me."
"Why?"
"You called me dead weight. If you're going to do it, aim for where the trees grow thick."
The branches would serve as a mat and take some of the blow.
"We've built up a little affection, though. I can't just toss you out like garbage."
Tom winked, plainly expecting to be moved by his own generosity. Chris was not moved. He was biting his lip to keep the anger down.
And he has the nerve to think of nothing but how to use me.
Back when he was breaking the stairs, Chris had worried himself sick that Tom, once the jailbreak succeeded, would abandon him and leave. A man going in desperate is a different man coming out. From Tom's side of it, he had already taken everything there was to take. There was no reason to look after Chris.
When Tom had picked him up and taken to the air, Chris had thought, So he isn't that bad a man. He has at least a scrap of decency.
Talking to him made it plain that this was something else.
The bastard kept me so he could use me to the very end. Use me for what? What's he scheming?
The deeper he thought, the more his anger sank and his worry climbed.
What do I do? Attack him?
Tom wasn't paying him the slightest attention.
Smash his side, cave the ribs in, and the pain might make him drop me...
While he turned it over and over, the three mages closed to a distance any high-rank mage would have called point-blank.
Ah. It's over.
In the instant he despaired of being caught, lightning fell out of a clear sky.
A rumble, then a crack.
Three bolts hammered the three elders. The lightning was fierce, but not enough to put them down. It shook their barriers without breaking them. It did make them falter, and in that gap Tom opened the distance again.
They were just setting off once more when lightning poured down a second time.
"Was that you, Tom?"
"No."
"Then who...?"
Someone came in on the wind.
Chris saw her, and his face went as pale as a man's who has seen a ghost.
"Donna!"
She's dead. She was definitely dead...
Donna was alive, and moving. She hurled a rolled carpet at Tom. It flew, and unfurled wide.
Tom tossed Chris onto it. Chris screamed and clung. Tom swung in beside him and grabbed hold.
"Calm down, you idiot."
Chris stared, eyes bulging, at Donna flying alongside them. She was riding a broom — the same broom that had once tanned his backside.
"Keep that up and you'll split your eyes."
"Wh—wh—what!"
The shocks kept coming. The wrinkles were vanishing from Donna's face.
"You're getting younger!"
The creases smoothed away and her face drew taut. Hair white as snow darkened to black. Donna cackled and swung her staff, and lightning lanced out to scorch the three elders.
"We need more speed."
The moment she finished, fire blasted from the carpet's tail, and their speed more than doubled. The broom beneath Donna caught fire as well and surged to match. They were going so fast the skin of his face felt as if it were crumpling.
"You were alive?"
The air around them tore. The roar was so loud that talking meant shouting.
"You've got eyes, haven't you? Of course I'm alive."
"Why did you play dead?"
"I had to put a top-grade mana stone in your hands without anyone getting suspicious."
"Ah."
Chris understood. So this was the largesse Tom had claimed to heap on him.
The two of them knew each other.
"You know Tom?"
"I know him well."
"How?"
"He's my husband."
"Your husband!"
Chris was aghast.
"You said he was dead!"
"I never said that."
"You did."
"I have never lied to you."
"Yes, you did."
"I didn't. Think carefully."
He dragged at his memory, and she was right: she had never once said her husband was dead. She had only gone silent when he asked.
"You didn't say he was dead, but you acted as if you didn't have a husband."
"Was my husband beside me at the time?"
Her retort left him blank. She was right. Her husband hadn't been there. He had been locked in a prison for a hundred and fifty years.
"You opened a magic shop in the village under the tower to save him. You waited there? For a hundred and fifty years?"
God above.
Tom, who had planned a jailbreak and pulled it off, was impressive. Donna, who had waited a hundred and fifty years for her husband, was more impressive still.
"The two of you can't have put your heads together and made a plan a hundred and sixty years ago. How did you stay in contact?"
"We didn't."
"Then why go so far as playing dead just to give me a top-grade mana stone? That doesn't make any sense."
"I read the traces of Iron Body on you."
"From nothing more than that?"
"It wasn't nothing. It was enough."
The carpet was burning away, growing shorter by the moment. Their speed climbed with every inch lost, which was excellent for shaking the three elders completely and miserable for hanging on.
"The two of you really are brilliant!"
Time tore past. Carpet and broom shrank to less than a third of what they had been.
"We need to lose altitude."
They slanted down and knifed into the forest. Trees blocked the way, and they had to weave and dodge.
A moment later the carpet was nearly gone. It spat one last flame and collapsed into ash, and Chris, suddenly without anything under him, was flung forward and buried himself in a tree.
The impact boomed. He smashed the trunk and still flew on, snapping the tree behind it before he finally stopped. His bones throbbed as if they had broken, and his whole body ached.
Tom alighted with elegant help from his magic. Chris watched him do it and sighed.
You could have helped me a little, too.
His mouth tasted bitter.
Donna and Tom embraced, tender as a pair of lovers. Somewhere along the way Tom had grown young as well. Both of them looked about thirty.
"Darling, I missed you."
"Donna, I missed you too."
Chris thought they might linger over the reunion. They separated at once and came toward him.
Tom spoke.
"I got you out of the elders' hands. I've done my part."
Chris answered with a sneer.
"I'm sure you have."
Donna looked him over.
"That face of yours isn't happy."
"You're going to abandon me, aren't you?"
"Hard to say."
"Tom already cut me off. He said he has no intention of taking me as a disciple. What about you, Donna?"
Her lightning had been dreadful. Even allowing for the long ordeal in prison that had weakened Tom, Donna seemed the greater mage.
She shook her head.
"I don't have the leisure to teach a disciple."
Tom jerked his chin.
"Get up and run. Now."
"Do I have to run?"
"The three elders will catch you and try to kill you. Before that, of course, they'll run every sort of test they can think of on what a Grandmaster's body is like."
The words alone were ghastly.
"And the two of you?"
"We have to return to Laphunian. Once we're inside our tower's territory, those three won't dare chase us."
"Can't I flee with you?"
"You're of Mickclonia Magic Tower."
"Donna."
He called her with everything desperate he had in his face. She answered without giving an inch.
"No."
"You're really going to cast me off like this?"
A troubled look crossed her, and then she drew a die from her robes and threw it. It rolled across the ground and stopped, showing a four.
"Hmm."
The sound she made was low. Somehow it felt unlucky.
"Why? What is it?"
Donna closed her eyes and recited an incantation. A little later her lids rose, and only the whites showed.
God. That's revolting.
Chris swallowed and sniffed hard.
All at once she raised a finger. When the index finger pointed at him he jumped, certain something ill-omened was about to spring straight at him. Mercifully, the finger swung aside.
"There."
She lowered her hand. Her pupils returned to normal. The die on the ground rose of its own accord and slipped back into her robes.
"What do you mean, there?"
"There. Go northwest, and a way out will open."
"Truly?"
Tom answered for her.
"My wife's prophecy magic is famous. Trust it and follow. That'll be what saves you."
Tom and Donna turned their course north.
"There's no time. Leave now."
Donna added her own counsel.
"Run, and don't rest."
Then the two of them were gone from his sight.
"Damn it."
Chris ran in the direction Donna had given him. He ran like a madman, and he spat as he ran.
I never meant to follow the two of you.
Why?
Because he couldn't trust them. Wanting to go along had been an act.
Someone deceives me, and the one who did it is a bad man. That bastard deceives me again, and he's a truly bad man. He deceives me a third time, and the one who fell for it is the damn fool. Even an idiot wakes up after being taken twice.
Tom and Donna had lied to him and used him to break out of prison. Teaching him Iron Body had been the setup for the knife in the back.
If they had been decent people, they would have told him the whole of it, talked it through with him, and taken him as a disciple. They would not have used a method this one-sided.
Tom brought me this far because he still has a use for me.
Chris ran hard on mana and Iron Body, and he kept thinking.
Go northwest?
He didn't trust Donna either.
Skilled at prophecy magic? What a crock.
If he went northwest as she said, the odds were high he would be caught.
Consider the elders of Mickclonia Magic Tower. They were not fools. Had they been fools, imprisoning a man as thorough as Tom would have been impossible in the first place. They were the sinister sort who had sent people into that prison to pry information loose and driven them all the way to cannibalism.
Men that vicious simply lost Tom? Because Donna's appearance had been too far outside their expectations?
Chris shook his head.
"No."
A small pond appeared ahead. He jumped in, stripped in a hurry, and washed. Completing Iron Body had forced out every kind of dreg, waste, and filth, and he stank of it.
He rinsed his shirt and wrung it out, and he did not stop thinking.
The elders let Tom go.
They must have judged that releasing him gave them a better chance of getting the information. The thought didn't feel entirely free of a leap. One slip, and they might lose Tom for good. Even so, he put the odds that he was right at eight in ten.
Alex!
Alex was why the thought had come. Given the man's nature, he ought to have done Chris harm. Instead he had stayed quiet. For three entire years.
Chris understood now that Alex had been unable to lift a hand because the elders had been protecting him.
Why protect me? I'm nothing to them.
The answer was plain.
They were waiting for me to do the work and get Tom out.
They would have set a tracker on someone. At the very least.
Where?
He asked, and he answered himself.
On me, of course.
Tom would have suspected as much, at least in part. That was why he had gone out of his way to haul Chris off the stairs, bring him this far, and shove him toward a different direction.
Turn the pursuit onto me. And in the meantime, slip free himself.
They had been reading one another's moves. Cheating and being cheated, each of them trying to come away with something.
Whose read was the right one, there was no knowing yet.