Burn Artist

Chapter 20

I could see why my father had screamed. The pain was excruciating, nerve pain that ripped through my torso and shoulder as the anchoring sigil manifested on my body. I reeled: my muscles cramped like I'd been shot. The air was suddenly too hot to breathe.

“Hah!” Kovacs, sweating and pale, gestured at me with his staff. His eyes were bright with gloating avarice. “I'll give you one chance to live. You said you want to deal? Get on your knee, and swear your money for your life.”

“Go shove your staff up your ass.” A fresh wave of heat passed through my body. I struggled through it, palm throbbing against the grip of the Wardbreaker as I fought to bring it up and aim at the mage's chest.

“Suit yourself.” He drew himself up. “You think this is an Indiana Jones movie, do you? That you're just going to be able to shoot me?”

I sighted down the barrel and fired off a round in reply. It hit an invisible barrier at the edge of the circle. The powdered chalk danced on the ground with the mage's effort to hold it intact, but it still held.

“Have it your way.” Kovacs laughed. He raised his arms. “Adre, addron, galvah…”

I braced a second time, closed my eyes, and focused on the link he was expanding between the two of us. He wielded his magic like a harpoon, a spear on a chain linked back to his own body. As he continued the incantation, I felt my heart race as my muscles heated, but the river flowed both ways. My teeth began to chatter as I searched for the rhythm and pattern and found it in a flash of tactile inspiration. As soon as I understood his magic, I could direct it to my own magical circle: a hidden transmutation sigil carved into my skin over my heart, where I’d known the sigil would manifest.

“Galvarah, YOD!” He finished his chant, and enacted the curse.

“IAL!” I roared my command word at the same time.

The column of magic looped through my body and then slung back into the circle carved into my flesh, following the path of least resistance as I rejected Kovacs intent and subverted his force into my own. The charge flashed through the channel of crusted blood winding from left pectoral to right hand, and slammed into the weapon I was holding. The Commander became painfully hot as the glyphs etched into the barrel flooded with brilliant red light, and I had, had to shoot. “ALLAR VOD!”

The shot was nearly soundless: an anticlimactic ‘blip', the sound that hitmen's guns make in Hollywood movies, but the blastwave that followed the little 9mm round ruffled my smoking hair and blew the dust up off the ground below, white-hot and propelled by the full weight of Kovacs' curse. I glimpsed his expression drop with shock as the round struck the circle and shattered it like a glass house around him. He shouted with mingled confusion and rage in the split second before the next round struck him in the center mass and blew out through his back. He dropped his staff and staggered away, falling to his knees on the dirt.

Shivering and sweating, I stalked through the damaged circle, stepping over the charred chalk line with the pistol extended. Kovacs' chest wound was smoking, cauterized all the way through. He tried to crawl backwards, his face a red so dark that I knew he was boiling from the inside out. “I curse you! I curse you with—”

His guttural snarl and his last flickers of power were lost as he coughed fire from nose and mouth. His eyes widened as the curse, unable to find a foothold on me, turned back and consumed the caster. Like Slava, Kovacs went strangely quiet and still as the fire roiled up out of his flesh. I watched in mystified, disgusted silence as his clothing ashed and his skin ruptured, belching gouts of flame so hot that they began to melt the ground underneath him. There was no screaming, because no one was trying to put him out. He died in roaring silence.

I looked at the gun in my hand. The Wardbreaker was still unnaturally warm, flickers of red flashing and glancing through the sigils. They were feeding greedily on the blood oozing from my palm, pulling it out of my body and channeling it up through the grooves that led to the first symbolic invocation to Mercury in Mars, the opener of locks and all things sealed and secret.

“Geburah to Gedula,” I murmured. I reached with my mind and found the gateway between the weapon and my life's blood. It took a moment of intent to shut it down. The connection severed easily enough, and the weapon stopped feeding, and went still. The same small extension of will was enough to activate it again, and I smiled despite myself. The Wardbreaker now work on time, every time, but perhaps not for me alone. It hummed with hot, seething power, but the power itself felt… impersonal. It was not the distinct color-scent of my own magical energy, which was dark, cold, blue-black and smelled like fresh rain. That was why I had not been able to create it myself, perhaps. The pistol's only function was to harm, much like a curse, and its fundamental purpose was not energetically compatible with anything still living.

I holstered the Wardbreaker, and watched as Kovacs' body turned to scattered chunks of charcoal. Only his hands and shoes and staff were left. Fussy as ever, I used the gravel and rubble around us to cover up all physical traces of the circle, and then picked up the charcoal, still seamed with embers, and threw it in the burning barrels. I wasn’t sure what to do with the rest. The mage had a chunky gold and star sapphire ring on his middle finger that I hadn’t noticed before. The fire – which only consumed the core of the body and left peripheral limbs intact – had not destroyed it.

I broke the finger off, brittle from the heat, and after several moments of deliberation, stripped down to my undershirt and wrapped the rest of the waste in my vest. I could take it to Bozya Akra, the Organizatsiya’s unofficial graveyard, or even just throw them out to sea. I was so hot and so exhausted that rational planning was almost out of the question. Dried blood had crusted on my upper lip. I’d gotten a nosebleed from the effort of battling Kovacs’ impressive will, and I felt like my brain was leaking out my ears.

A deep bodied caw broke me out of my momentary fugue: a raven's cry. It was too resonant to have been a crow. Wearily, I squinted up at it.

The animal was perched up on the edge of one of the bales, looking down at me from high above. Its eyes glowed white in the light of the fire, as it cocked its head from side to side.

“What do you want?” I frowned, wiping my face with my shirt. My eyes throbbed and twitched whenever I accidentally looked into the light.

The bird wiped its beak against the edge of the compressed metal, and then resumed staring at me. A vague haunting sense of recognition caused my stomach, already weak, to lurch with nausea.

I frowned and pointed the gun at it. “Go on. I’m not dead yet, you stupid thing.”

“Roorck!” The raven bounded back, and launched itself into the air.

“Same to you. Asshole.” Now that I was recovering, the site of Kovacs’ death was beginning to creep along my skin. The site of a mage’s death – especially when the death was by magic – was weirded in a way that made it uncomfortable for the living. There would be a cold spot here tomorrow, and forever after that. Or maybe a hot spot, given the mage’s predilection for fire.

Slowly, I rose to my feet, and wended my way back toward the gate leading to the road. I usually felt something like satisfaction after a victory of this magnitude. Kovacs was easily the toughest spook I’d faced in a duel, but I felt like I had heatstroke; I was tired, and heavy with the knowledge that even though Mariya and Vassily were safe – for now – I was not. If my father was now free of the curse, I knew better than to expect gratitude for saving his life.