Some things had happened to me here. A couple of hooded mystery types called Cowl and Kumori had come at me here once. I hadn’t heard from them in a good while, and I hadn’t written them off, either. I’d met the purely mental entity Lash here, though it had taken a bit to figure out that she was the reflection of a corruptive fallen angel’s personality. She’d died to protect me later on, evidently having been corrupted by basic humanity herself. That had been the last time I’d sighted Cowl, in fact.
That brought up the thought that perhaps the Coins of the Knights of the Blackened Denarius were connected with Cowl somehow, and one of my eyes started twitching.
I brooded over that thought while I soaked up the stillness, my own vision blurred and dimmed from behind the veil that would hide me from sight. The line of thought expanded into increasingly gloomy or ridiculous scenarios, and then people started showing up at the bookstore.
They came in threes, thrice. Nine, a power number for magical workings. They were wary about it, too, all with flashlights sweeping nervously everywhere. That didn’t bother me. I was posted up against a wall in front of a giant mound of uncollected trash and wouldn’t present any kind of silhouette identifiable as human, with the veil up. I extended my wizard’s senses, reaching out for the feel of magic in the air, and got the faintest whiff of malodorous intent coming from them.
Dammit. This was going to be difficult.
The practice of black magic is…intoxicating. Sometimes addictive. It’s also not fantastic for one’s sanity. Usually, low-powered practitioners couldn’t really drum up enough dark energy, acting on their own, to suffer particular effects from the use of black magic, so the world was pretty much full of small-time mischief and petty injuries so marginal that it was arguable whether the magic had any effect, or if its subject had simply gotten mildly unlucky.
When they started operating in teams, though, summoning up more serious effects of black magic, it started getting to them. That kind of situation, the genuine intent to harm, coupled with the belief that the practitioners in question could and should inflict that harm, coupled with the addictive nature of the magic and its effects at undermining reason, created…an extremely volatile situation, and one not easily or rationally dealt with.
The White Council’s Wardens’ operations, over the centuries, were primarily handling instances exactly like this one. Sometimes it was one person who had lost it, sometimes a few, sometimes a whole batch. A limited number of Wardens operating under the pressure of an increasing number of talented people being born into larger and larger populations could only afford one solution to the problem: Kill them all and then move on to the next emergency where people were suffering horribly at the hands of others like them. If the Wardens were to protectthe mortal populace in any meaningful way from warlocks, those who had given themselves over to the practice of black magic, they had no real alternative.
It was math.
Math can be brutal.
It hadn’t given the White Council a particularly kind image among the less powerful talents.
If I’d been operating as a Warden, the playbook would have called for me to blow holes in the walls at multiple points and go in with a dozen other Wardens behind shields, arresting them all and putting to an end by the sword anyone who resisted. Literal swords; it was how Wardens rolled.
But I wasn’t a Warden.
The White Council’s primary duty was to limit and contain harm and malicious influence from magical practitioners among the mortal population. That duty, arguably necessary, could at times get very, very ugly. And since there were people carrying that duty out, they could screw it up in a million other ways, too.
But I wasn’t on the White Council anymore, either.
I knew these people, at least to say hello in passing. I wasn’t writing anyone off without making every effort possible to pull them back from the edge.
They needed someone like that.
Or maybe I did.
I gave them a few minutes to chat, and then a few more to prepare for ritual magic. Folks at the low end needed a lot of props and symbols to accomplish curses like this. There might be an animal sacrifice involved, too, near the culmination. I wanted to wait until the curse had started before I disrupted it, and blow their group effort for the evening after they were too tired to go for a round two, but before much power had been built up. Less chance for bad accidents when it went kablooey, that way.
Then someone started using a drum, another common ceremonial feature, and its beats throbbed quietly from the store.
I gave it about five minutes, then dropped the veil and strode acrossthe street. I jammed the end of my staff against the wooden door’s deadbolt lock, focused my will through the staff into the shape of an axe’s head, and murmured,“Forzare!”
My will wasn’t as focused as I would have preferred. Force slammed through the door in an area the size of my fists together and smashed the lock completely out of the wood, but when I twisted the round doorknob, it opened, and I strode into Bock Ordered Books, my spell-armored leather duster rustling against my legs.
“The Wardens!” someone shouted, their voice high and frightened.
I swept my gaze around the store, getting all the information I could in the space of maybe a second. In the reading area, the secondhand sofa and easy chairs had been pushed back against the nearest shelves of books. A circle of salt (I suppose it could have been sugar, but salt is way easier to clean up and doesn’t draw bugs) had been poured around a circle of nine people I knew, at least to look at. Five of them were from the Ordo Lebes, middle-aged women (two of whom had been volunteering regularly in the castle). There were also a couple of the old guys who often smoked pipes at Mac’s, a morose-looking guy in his thirties beating on a drum beneath one arm, and Artemis Bock, holding a leather-bound journal open in one hand. There was a bloodstained makeshift altar made from an old end table sitting in a plastic tub in the middle of the circle, and a caged chicken sat beside it, looking nervous. A circle of lit votive candles surrounded the circle, every few degrees, probably five for each participant.
“Don’t stop! Don’t leave the circle!” Bock shouted.
Which went to show that he was an amateur. The ritual they were doing would take a quarter of an hour at least just to pull up the energy they’d need. I strode forward without stopping and kicked a foot through the circle of salt, knocking over a couple of candles as I did.
“No!” someone shouted.
I felt the power of the circle snap and disperse as my foot brushed through the salt. There was a swirl of wind that sent pages rattling all through the store, carrying with it a horrible stench of sulfur and old death. Flames exploded from the candles into twisted shapes and faces, darting in every direction and vanishing into sickly swirls of black,greasy-looking smoke while letting out faint, distant shrieks and wails. A pressure wave washed out from the altar, knocking over the chicken’s cage and half the people there, and knocking the cage open. It also sent the tall bookcases on either side slowly tumbling over into their neighbors in a great clatter of wood and falling books.
I mean, there’s a reason wizards have labs and libraries and they’re in different rooms.
The morose guy stumbled back, dropping the drum and reaching into his jacket pocket. He produced a short-barreled, heavy revolver, maybe a .44, and pointed it at me. I’d been watching for such a move and triggered a couple more charges from the staff. They hit him in the chest, slammed him back into the couch behind him, and knocked it over until it lay against the front of one of the fallen shelves.
