Stunted

Prologue

Seven months of preparations. Before that, twenty years of planning, maneuvering, and waiting.

Finally, he’d make it pay off.

This kind of magic built empires. Got a spell named after you. When he commissioned his Imperial history, the first chapter–the first sentence–would memorialize this night.

The Coordinator took a deep breath, soaking in the moment.

The services of nine powerful mages did not come cheap. The orchestration necessary for the work of each to be hidden from the others did not happen easily. It required those months, and a healthy portion of his fortune, to gather all of the components that now sat near the stoked forge.

Tancritus busily fed the flames which melted together some of the rarest metals the world had seen. The wiry, limping crony was the only person the Coordinator trusted enough to have in the room, and even he didn’t have the entire picture.

The room flexed with magical energy, enough to make him turn to his master and give him a fearful look. Everything is ready. Can I get back?

One confident nod by the Coordinator was all the man needed to see. He scrabbled to a corner of the room as the energy built to a crescendo. The crucible first glowed orange in the heat from the forge, then flashed blue, then green, back to blue, the colored light emanating from it warbling in an ever faster succession.

Twenty more seconds, the man who would soon be Emperor thought. He ignored the pleading from every cell of his body, and strode into the epicenter of magical focus, taking care to avoid positioning himself directly between any of the nine mages and the crucible.

He would have preferred to have Tancritus perform this very dangerous step, but the metal had to be tuned to his own energies as it was cast. Grabbing a set of tongs fashioned from cherry wood–any metal would have been a lethal conductor of the energies being used–he lifted the crucible from its position atop the forge and tipped its contents into the waiting mold.

Now they give the final thrust of magical essence, and complete the—

Something ripped in a wave through the room, bullying its way from the northeast to the southwest corner. Both the master and his lackey fell to the floor, clutching at their heads. The Coordinator’s molars felt ready to explode. Tancritus’ screams of terror and agony were the last thing he heard before blacking out.

After a few minutes, the Coordinator moved one of his hands, followed by the rest of the arm. Eyes opened, squinted back shut, and opened again.

The disturbance, if such a mild word could be used for something that mauled the very fabric of reality, did not have a magical origin. It was some new, foreign form of energy that felt like it had no place in this world. The Coordinator suddenly felt a stab of queasiness; he had to see…

Slowly, his head throbbing in pain and his limbs weak and unwilling to function, he forced himself to stand and stagger toward the mold.

The fire in the forge had been extinguished, but the air still shimmered with heat. He ignored the burning in his hands as he grabbed the mold, and threw it against the floor.

It shattered with the explosive clink of unglazed terra-cotta. The metal inside should have glowed, writhed with an impossible-to-describe aura; instead, it was an ugly, mottled gray. It was as empty and dead as a handful of dust.

The Coordinator never allowed himself to show emotion, but in this one moment, with so much gone to waste, he grabbed the lifeless metal. With a bark of primal anger, he threw it against the far wall, where it clanged, stupidly, before clattering to the floor.

My lord– Tancritus had also awakened, and looked at his master with a combination of fear and sympathy.

That was no natural phenomenon, muttered his master, through a tightly clenched jaw. "Someone is responsible for this. I don’t care who, I don’t care how, but somebody caused it. And they’ll pay in the most wretched and drawn-out manner I can think of."

1

Maxwell Steiger completed a silent prayer to Les Stroud, the Canadian guy on Discovery Channel who went out in the wilderness and spent a week alone. Les had told his viewers how to set a snare with shoelaces, and, armed with that knowledge, he now held one of the rabbit-like creatures that had been skittering around.

He had to fight back a little drool as he envisioned putting meat in his mouth again.

Maxwell grabbed the rabbit-thing by the scruff of the neck and, after taking a few deep breaths to steady his fingers, began to loosen the slip-knot of his shoelace trap.

His eye caught movement to his right.

Snapping his head around, he sighted a dead log among clusters of waist-high grass. The plants undulated in the breeze, nothing more.

He returned to loosening the snare around the rabbit-thing, when a quiet hash made him swivel his head.

Something furry and dog-sized, with a fanged mouth, launched itself at him. The shoelace, still anchored on a sapling, yanked the rabbit-thing out of Maxwell’s hand as he reached up to protect himself.

He staggered as it plowed into him, catching it in a perversion his young son jumping into the pool. The creature’s muzzle came close enough for Maxwell to smell its rotten breath. It snapped its jaws twice. A splatter of foam-scummed slobber flicked onto his face. The animal scrabbled a paw across his chest, loosening his grip on it.

Maxwell dropped into a body-slam. The animal yelped as he drove it into the ground and immediately fought to right itself.

Twisting free of Maxwell’s hands, the creature snapped at his right wrist. Maxwell recoiled before the jaw could clamp down, too slow. Its sharp teeth raked along his lower forearm. With his left hand, he pinned the animal’s side to the ground, and moved a knee around to its ribs.

The animal snapped again. Maxwell jammed his freshly wounded forearm under its jaw. He flopped forward, using his weight advantage, twisted its head up and around, forcing it to look over its shoulder.

He didn’t remember how long he had the creature’s head bent back, but it seemed like all day. It struggled to work itself free, flailing impotently with its limbs, its breath coming in harsh gasps and escaping with whining and squeals. Maxwell wanted nothing more than to get off it, let it up so it could run away, but fear kept him jamming, mashing, heaving.

Eventually, its struggling slowed, and then stopped altogether.

Maxwell carefully stood and held his forearm up like he was checking the time. If those teeth had done their damage to his inner wrist, he’d be in trouble. Even so, more blood than he’d like to see leaked in little rivulets across his hairy skin. He stumbled to the nearby river and flopped on the bank to dunk his arm into the water, hoping that whatever the creature was, it had attacked him out of hunger and not because it was sick.

<+>

A fire waited back at his camp, still writhing and oozing from the wood like ropy, viscous orange goop. Though it looked like he could jam a stick into the flame and wrap it around like honey, it still gave off heat and would probably cook his catch to some level of edibility.

He sat and examined the kill, taking a moment to work up the nerve to use his pocketknife to remove the fur and start cleaning the animal. His stomach let him know he’d regret waiting too long to get on with it.

At least I’ll be losing weight.

Maxwell had kept himself reasonably trim by a daily run, but that ritual had lately dropped to, at best, three times a week. He’d been throwing himself at his work with increased intensity over the past few months, and it had taken its toll. Now that Shawna had left with the kids…

Maxwell said out loud: Knock it off.

The open air and strange vegetation that surrounded the fire ate the words and converted them into a stab of loneliness. Maxwell’s constant companions, despair and self-loathing, crept up from the back of his mind, eager for an opportunity after being shoved back by the odd situation.

Considering the downward spiral his life had started to take—something he hadn’t been able to see while mired in it—a complete removal of everything familiar to him threw a bucket of refreshing, ice-cold water on his existence.

Just how it had happened remained a black spot in his memory. Whatever had brought him from a research center in Westborough, a half-hour outside Boston, to a wilderness in a world with two suns had done so without leaving a trace. As much as he tried to remember what test he’d been running when it happened, all Maxwell’s brain cells would give him was a mushy three-day blur.

Something to do with the tachyons, he muttered to himself. Or maybe the words were in his thoughts, entirely enclosed in his head; apparently his near-term memory hadn’t made the transition in good working order, either.

He’d either go crazy or starve if he stayed here. As soon as he had a chance to rest, he needed to get moving and look for help.

2

Through an associate who published a gazette, The Coordinator obtained a stack of reports regarding the phenomenon of the prior evening. The gazetteer had reporters crawling through the mage community, interviewing anyone who would talk about the strange anomaly that had been felt all throughout Burkand. Any resident who wasn’t Stunted had at least been wracked by a throbbing headache, and the whole city of Burkand sizzled with nervous fidgeting.

He scanned through a few scraps of information before shaking his head, heaving himself up from his chair, and crossing his office to where a large tapestry hung on the wall. The weft formed a map of the known world, rendered through exquisite—and expensive—craftsmanship. The Coordinator liked to look at it from time to time, to imagine how long it took to ride a horse or march an army from one realm to another, to visualize what it would be like to rule all of the territory he saw.

With a sigh, he gripped the edge of the tapestry and pulled it until the stitching that held it in place ripped and brought the cloth flopping in a heap to the floor. Dragging it across the room, he heaved it up over a large table and spread it out. With a piece of charcoal, he began making marks on it.

Some of the Burkand mages interviewed for the gazette had been in telepathic communication from colleagues all over the land. The entire community, such as the loose-knit, individualistic nature of mages would allow, was abuzz with this strange phenomenon.

He scooped a hunk of charcoal from his fireplace and began marking the tapestry with locations and times, using a notational system he devised on the spot.

After he had plotted the first dozen reports, it became clear that the anomaly had come from the northeast. The Coordinator could also see that whatever disturbance his activities had caused was minor in comparison to the phenomenon. Few if any reports even made mention of magical activity at the time.

He smiled, relieved that damage control from the failure wouldn’t be necessary. He could devote a fair amount of his attention, and his network of informants and spies, into to tracking down the source of this disturbance. If some mage had been tampering with forces that had ruined his efforts, he’d make sure that they’d pay, dearly and painfully, until he finally granted their pleas for death.

<+>

It’s okay, Luume. One more time: concentrate.

Barton fought to suppress the exasperated sigh forcing its way up from his throat. Ardith knew he could get the blaze going faster than his older sister, and yet the kindly adult-friend insisted on sitting patiently, watching her struggle, while Luminal Major fully slid below the horizon.

I–

Ardith shot him a look, one that said don’t even think about it. Luume, concentrating on the pile of dry wood that sat in the hearth, must not have noticed.

Barton thought about sparking the fire anyway, but Ardith would know. Even if he held back and made a tiny flame, she would somehow be able to tell. And Luume, weak as she was magically, would probably know she hadn’t done it.

His impatience, coupled with a whiff of smoke from someone else’s hearth, caused him to turn away from his own and scan the rest of the commune. Wood-framed, mud-daubed huts sat in a ring around a central clearing. A few people sat on logs, or directly on the ground outside the huts, talking. Others continued late work on paintings, or sculpture, or whatever other projects their muses held them slave to. Having never possessed much of an aptitude for the arts, Barton couldn’t comprehend why they wouldn’t just put their work away for the evening and start relaxing.

A tiny flicker of magic from behind tickled at the back of his neck. It held promise, but died quickly, and a tongue-cluck from Ardith announced another failed attempt.

As badly as Barton wanted to get the stupid fire lit, he didn’t want to risk getting Ardith mad, an emotion so foreign to her that it looked like she died a tiny bit with every scolding she had to give him. Before his birth, she had been the most magically gifted of the group, and though the other residents of their commune preferred to work with their hands instead of with magic, she would occasionally offer scraps of instruction that he greedily devoured. Apparently magic was his muse, for all the good it did him; all of the other children in the commune displayed more artistic talent than he, and artistry was what the Adults lauded.

At eleven, he was already becoming aware that his fortune lay somewhere away from these mud-daubed huts, out among the common masses who shared his lack of artistic ability.

Behind Barton, Ardith clapped in excitement and patted Luume on the back as a pathetic tongue of flame started to weave around the dry sticks in the fireplace. At sixteen, she should be able to get a decent blaze going at night. Magic might not have the same cachet to their community that her skills with pen and brush did, but even artists held a mixture of pity and derision to someone whose magical skills were faint enough to be considered Stunted.

Their adult-friend clucked in disappointment as a huff of breeze extinguished the fire. Go ahead and try again. You almost—

She stopped in mid-sentence and whirled as the wood roared with a rich, saturated burst of flame. "Barton!"

Almost ready to claim it wasn’t him, the boy glanced at his sister. The look she gave him was one of anger, but turned inward, not toward him.

I’m sorry, Ardith. I didn’t mean to—

"You never mean to hurt her feelings! And yet, you’re so good at it!"

Ardith turned back to the fire, as petulant as Luume could be when faced with her brother’s power, and in a burst of concentration extinguished his flames.

Barton, I’d appreciate if you’d go gather some more kindling.

<+>

Maxwell slept in the tepid illumination of the smaller of this world’s two suns. He had improvised a mat by piling up some grass from the riverbank, and rested his head on a rot-softened piece of wood from a tree that had fallen by the ruins.

Something to do with the tachyons.

He dreamt, his shadow self walking through wind-rippled plains, with giant, pillowy cumulus clouds skating low across the sky. They made shapes, but not pleasant ones, and every effort Maxwell made to determine what one looked like filled him with dread. Strange, rabbit-like beasts and feral dogs the size of bison bounded through the grass on faraway hills.

After a long walk, he came to a cluster of trees, with wooden structures girdling the larger trunks. Each house held a small porch, giving the cluster of buildings the feel of a small one-horse town from the movies or TV. Maxwell scanned around for a general store with a couple of old-timers sitting out front on rockers.

Instead of folksy, down-home residents, the villagers in this place came straight out of a National Geographic feature on New Guinea. Except some wore white lab coats. The nearest villager’s was studded with rhinestones in a fountain pattern. He didn’t look like Elvis.

As he walked into the village, Maxwell noticed there was now a dirt road under his feet, and every step kicked up a little cloud of dust.

None of these villagers seemed to care that a complete stranger just walked into their midst. He waited until it became obvious nobody was going to talk to him, and he grabbed the arm of the nearest villager, the one with the Elvis-studded lab coat.

The man didn’t talk to him, but at least raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement.

I’m going to need some copper wire, and some really large magnets. Any idea where I can find some?

Shaking his head, the villager let loose a string of unintelligible syllables. Maxwell tried asking something else, and found that he, too, spoke in the strange, hubbledy-bubbledy dialect.

Elvis-coat turned and walked a few steps to a whitewashed clapboard garage wedged between two of their tree-buildings. He stooped over, grabbed the door at the bottom, and lifted. As it swung up, Maxwell could see some of his equipment inside. It had aged, barely recognizable under a shroud of dust and spider webs.

He bobbed his head at the man, eagerly, up and down.

In response, Elvis-coat only shook his head, and the whole garage burst into flames behind him. Not the soupy, otherworldly fire he’d been seeing, but good-old-fashioned, quick-burning, all consuming Earth fire.

He called for help, but Elvis-coat, hands clasped behind his back, walked away from the garage, still shaking his head. Maxwell whirled, calling to other people, but everyone had either gone or peered out from windows in the other buildings.

Except for one woman, who stood in the dust-choked intersection that marked the center of the town. With a headful of curly, ginger-blond hair and indigo eyes, she didn’t carry the same jungle-dwelling headhunter vibe as the others. She reminded Maxwell of a Haitian voodoo priestess. She turned her head, this way and that, sometimes cupping a hand to her ear, as if listening for something. Maxwell called out to her, and she looked startled, but she still couldn’t see him. And he was only twenty feet away!

He took a step toward the strange woman, but his foot found nothing but dusty air under it; he fell forward into a dark, yawning pit.

Instead of waking up, Maxwell momentarily flailed his arms and legs in his sleep before his breathing settled back into a steady rhythm.

3

South of the river, Burkand showed its uglier side.

Nasrin’s best hope in the dark, stench-soaked streets of this neighborhood was to go undetected, so he didn’t even bother to carry a torch. He wore his night-cloak, the black one, and kept a running inventory of nearby shadows to crouch in if he sensed the presence of someone else.

If that other person could be taken by surprise and overwhelmed, Nasrin might make a move. He wasn’t much to be admired in the arts of hand-to-hand combat, and he held his magical skills even more in contempt. If he could get away with a quick leap-and-stab, however, his shortcomings didn’t matter.

He found movement easy in the mostly deserted streets. Nasrin might have seen this as an invitation to break into a home, had he not had more pressing business for the evening: an important meeting with a man named Petros.

The previous night, Nasrin had bought a round of drinks for a group of friends.

Who’s our benefactor this evening? Virestal, a rough-and-tumbler the thief had known since childhood, had asked as he hoisted a complementary tankard.

You don’t want to know, my good man, he said with a grin, in case the Town Guard comes asking questions.

"Bah! They never come this side of the river at night anymore."

Oh, said Nasrin, they might, with enough provocation. If, for example, a certain resident from North of the river, who happened to have their house broken into and some very expensive missing, were high-profile enough.

Alright, Nasrin, Virestal had replied, I know too much already. Besides, who am I to question free drinks?

An older man, olive-skinned and hairy, with arm muscles and bulging stomach competing for attention, said: If it’s a round for the whole house, young man, might I trouble the keeper for some gort on your generosity?

Nasrin, already prepared to be flippantly magnanimous, suddenly straightened his posture upon identifying who had asked. Anything you’d like, Mister Houbros. Two, if it suits you.

Heh. I’m here on business tonight, so one will suit me fine. Please, call me Petros; even my enemies do.

After receiving the gort and making it disappear, the hairy man fixed Nasrin with a stare and said: The business I’m here on involves you. Quite a reputation you’ve acquired in such a short time.

All good, I’m certain, said Nasrin, parrying the man’s leaden, hazardous eyes with his easiest smile.

Of the kind to draw my attention. I understand you did some work for… an associate of mine. A single-objective job.

Nasrin, who had helped himself to more than the item that had been commissioned by a shadowy man who only identified himself as ‘Stone’, immediately grew cautious. I’ve done more than my share of single-

No need to be coy. I was most impressed when I heard who had possession of it. That must not have been an easy acquisition.

A better word might be ‘impossible’, for someone of lesser talents, said Nasrin, repeating a boast that he’d shared with Virestal when he explained his sudden generosity. Not only did I have to elude the Town Guard, but the Don had his own private security. I had to defeat an array of the best magical and non-magical wards and locks-

No need to convince me of your prowess, said Petros, holding his hand like a flipped-over crab to scratch at his stubbly chin. "I don’t care how a job is done, only that it’s done. But such things shouldn’t be discussed in public. If you’re interested, I have an address for you; meet me there tomorrow night."

Nasrin, aware of Petros’ reputation and the prospect of steady employment and protection from one of the most powerful syndicates south of the Armrend, eagerly accepted. And that’s how he found himself wandering the dangerous streets of Burkand on a night that was best spent behind stout locks and in front of a fire.

He found the building easily enough. No light leaked out of its windows, and he found the front and back doors barred. Instead of taking that as a sign that the meeting wouldn’t take place, Nasrin assumed his potential employer wanted the meeting to begin with an audition.

A battered old crate, added to some bricks whose mortar had rotted sufficiently to give him good hand and toe holds, was all Nasrin needed to enter an open upper-story window. Instead of hopping down from the sill, he slowly lowered his foot to the floor and tested his weight on the boards. They solidly supported his weight, so he lithely entered the darkened room. The smell of musty paper and wood gave him the impression that the chamber served as an office. He hovered in silence to listen, detecting voices from beyond the room’s door.

The thought of him sneaking up behind Petros, and how impressed the Capo would be at his ability, brought an easy grin to Nasrin’s face.

He put an ear to the door, and, quietly, slowly, opened it.

An aching buzz flashed through his body, and Nasrin found his grin frozen to his face and his limbs unable to move. The door opened all the way on its own as wall-sconces flared to life with guttering flame, and his eyes watched helplessly as he was lifted by an unseen force and carried, paralyzed, down a narrow hallway.

At the end of the passage, stairs descended to the first floor. He floated noiselessly to the landing and, without rotating, down the lower part of the staircase.

There was no lighting at the bottom; the blackness gave him a sense of being lowered into a pit, or the greedily hungry throat of some giant beast. A whimper tried to escape his mouth but remained frozen in place.

Someone snapped his fingers, and a split second later tongues of flame jumped to life from every candle and wall sconce in the room. Even