Page 11
Story: A City of Swords and Fangs
CHAPTER 11
W hen I met with Master Adolphus the following day for my magic lesson, I told him of the events I’d witnessed the night before.
“This bothers you,” he said when I finished.
“Yes. People dying in the streets? This isn’t the situation we had in Queen City. I hunted rogues who violated the Compact. This is different. We should be more civilized.”
“You consider the lycans and strigoi people?”
I shrugged. “They’re sentient. They think, they feel, they love, I guess. I mean, I’ve never really had a conversation with a strigoi, but I have with a few lycans. A lot of them didn’t ask to be infected. I kind of feel sorry for them.”
He nodded. “I’m glad you feel that way. Generally, the lycans—and especially the strigoi—are considered agents of chaos. But they are part of the way society balances. And in some ways, I think their disruption is better than the wars humans fight among themselves. More primitive. More savage, in a way. But there aren’t any carpet bombings, mass slaughters, or concentration camps.”
“And the perfect order the Knights Magica envision?” I asked.
“Religion is simply one of the ways humans have developed to wield power,” he responded. “Money, religion, race—all have been invoked by those who desire power over others. The Knights simply take the morality and beliefs of the Universal Church to an extreme. Convert or else. A very militaristic approach—like the Crusades carried into the twenty-first century. Humans are not, as a rule, a very disciplined species. No authoritarian system has ever been implemented perfectly, or lasted for long.”
“There are those within the Guild who believe we should use our power to control society. A hierarchical, almost feudal system where might makes right.”
“Yes, there are. And I believe they are attracted by the exercise of power, not because they truly think they might implement a more perfect world. They sometimes see themselves as allies of the Knights, but if they did manage to control or exterminate the strigoi and lycans, then we would soon have a Guild-Knight conflict over who should exercise dominion. Ten thousand years of recorded history, Kaitlyn, and humans don’t seem to have gotten any wiser. Be very careful of anyone who tells you they have the solution to human conflict.”
* * *
M aster Adolphus normally took his meals in his room—which I had never seen. He did have visitors around supper time occasionally, and Master Noah came every Wednesday. Siobhan always served them, and she said the two masters usually played chess and drank brandy and tea until almost midnight.
But Saturday morning, Master Adolphus came down and ate breakfast with me.
“We need to go out to Master Mikhail’s forge today,” he said, “and I also have to attend a session of the Zürich City Parliament this afternoon. I think it will prove instructive, as the issues under discussion have to do with our conversation yesterday.”
I knew practically nothing about government in Switzerland, but I did know that the Kantone—or states—seemed to have more independence than state governments in the U.S. I assumed that for a Guild Master to attend a government meeting, it had to be important.
We walked to the Guild Hall, where he requisitioned a car, then tossed me the keys.
“You know the way?” he asked.
I grinned. “I wouldn’t be much of a tracker if I needed directions a second time.”
Master Mikhail greeted us with a huge smile and offered us coffee, which I was happy to accept.
I expected to be led back to his forge, but instead, we sat on his back porch, with the wooded hills rising from the lake in our view. As much as I thought the old city of Zürich was striking, the sense of peace and the freshness of the air relaxed me.
The master pulled out a black leather box a bit over a foot long and set it on the table. When he opened it, a beautiful athame sat nestled in red velvet. The triangular blade shone like polished silver, and the black leather-wrapped hilt invited one to grasp it.
“What do you think?” Master Mikhail asked, a self-satisfied smile on his face.
“It’s beautiful,” I breathed. I passed my hand over it, feeling the magic radiating from the blade.
“Does it do what we hope?” Master Adolphus asked.
“Test it,” Mikhail said. “Kaitlyn, take the knife and lay it on that shelf over there.”
I did as he directed. It fit my hand as though made for me, its balance perfect. I couldn’t help but test the edge and was rewarded with a narrow slice in my thumb, like a paper cut.
I set it down, and Master Adolphus held his hand out in front of him. A white light shot from his palm to the knife. The wooden shelf disappeared, and the knife fell to the floor. I bent down to look, and it appeared unscathed.
I picked it up and discovered the leather wrapping the hilt had somehow fused into a smooth single piece of leather, no longer showing its winding. I carried it back and handed it to Master Adolphus.
“It appears to be impervious to magic,” he said, examining the blade. “Congratulations, Mikhail.”
“Not really my doing,” Master Mikhail said. Turning to me, he said, “This is for you, Frau Kaitlyn. And thank you for teaching a couple of old dogs a new trick.” He set a leather sheath with a belt loop next to the knife and box.
“I—I didn’t do anything,” I protested.
“You helped us to define the possible,” Master Adolphus said. “Never discount the value of an idea.”
On our way back to town, I asked, “What was the magic that you cast at the knife? Did it really vaporize that wooden shelf?”
“Pure energy,” the master replied. “The energy of the ley line compressed and redirected. And as for the question you really wanted to ask—yes, you will learn to do that in time.”
“I think I did that once,” I said, then told him about the time I killed several vampires using magic I’d pulled from a ley line.
He listened closely, then said, “Similar, but as with so much of what you’ve learned to do, it’s like driving a nail with a wrecking ball.” He chuckled. “I have a feeling that teaching you subtlety may be my greatest challenge.”
I drove to the Rathaus —the Zürich Town Hall—on the right bank of the Limmat and entered a nearby parking garage by showing a card on the dash. When we got out and walked to the Rathaus, I had to wonder why we hadn’t just taken the car back to the Guild Hall. It wasn’t much farther to walk.
When we arrived, I hesitated upon seeing the metal detectors. I was carrying enough lethally sharp metal to trigger every security device within a hundred meters. Master Adolphus didn’t seem to notice, breezing past all the security, avoiding the metal detectors, and waving at me.
“She’s with me.”
I trotted along behind him, casting nervous glances over my shoulder.
“They know who I am,” he said. “There’s a tale that I once turned a mayor into a toad. Totally false, of course. I just glamored his corpse to look like a large toad.” He winked.
“His corpse?”
“We had a disagreement.”
I wasn’t sure if any of that story was real, but after what I’d seen of his power that morning, I could believe it.
My next surprise was at the doors of the Parliament chamber when he identified me as his bodyguard. The security personnel looked me up and down skeptically.
Leaning close, in a stage whisper, I said, “I’m really his mistress, but he’s embarrassed about the difference in our ages.”
Both the security guards and Master Adolphus had trouble keeping their composure, but we were allowed to pass. He led me to seats in the front row of the semi-circular room, facing the officers at the head.
“I don’t expect anyone to break decorum,” he said to me, “but I fear we’re not too far from that. You’ll see that several members of this chamber do have bodyguards. When we leave, shield and be alert.”
Much of the proceedings were beyond boring, and even the participants seemed to be having trouble staying awake. But after a couple of hours, a woman stood at the front and gave a very impassioned speech denouncing the violence and lawlessness that had fallen on the city. She was a mundane—a person with no magic.
After her, a young man—I judged him to be in his early thirties, whose aura showed him to be a pyromancer with a secondary affinity for air—stood and made an equally passionate speech calling on “all right-thinking people” to stand against “the agents of chaos” that threatened to turn the city into an unlivable ruin.
The master leaned close to me and said, “That is why we are here. His name is Nikolas Müller.”
I had to admit, he was a very charismatic and effective speaker. Also very good-looking. The name Müller did catch my attention, though I couldn’t detect any real resemblance to my tormentor at the Guild.
When he finished speaking, two or three people wanted to speak next, but Master Adolphus stood and strode to the front. As he did that, everyone else asking to speak simply re-took their seats.
“I give my compliments to Herr Müller,” he started. His voice was quiet but carried to every corner of the chamber. “He speaks with great impact and has the enthusiasm of youth. I do agree with both of the previous speakers, but both seem to forget that there is a mechanism, more than three hundred years old, to deal with these problems. That is the Compact, stemming from the Treaty of Krakow. Normal humans, magicians, strigoi, and lycanthropes all agreed to abide by that, ending three hundred years of almost constant warfare.
“And now, in the supposedly enlightened twenty-first century, in what is widely considered the most civilized country in the world, we are descending back into barbarous savagery. As representative of the Guild, I call on the Universal Church, the Strigoi Council, and the alfas of the three major packs to meet with us and find a solution to this disgraceful state of conflict. For those who think we have no room for negotiation and compromise, I warn you that the Guild has been passive for too long. That passivity will not last.”
He stepped down and headed for the exit. I scrambled to follow him. As I reached the chamber doors, Nikolas Müller moved in front of me, holding what looked like a business card. He shoved it at me, and I took it, almost in self-defense.
“Call me,” he said. “I would like to get to know you, Frau.”
“That’s not going to happen,” I said, brushing past him and out through the door.
Table of Contents
- Page 1
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- Page 3
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- Page 5
- Page 6
- Page 7
- Page 8
- Page 9
- Page 10
- Page 11 (Reading here)
- Page 12
- Page 13
- Page 14
- Page 15
- Page 16
- Page 17
- Page 18
- Page 19
- Page 20
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- Page 22
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- Page 29
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- Page 41
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- Page 44