Bonus snippet -- the Agent and the Eye

The agent strode into the room and looked the prisoner up and down. The man was small and tired-looking, his clothing ragged, but only a little roughed up – he must have surrendered quickly. He was tied to the only piece of furniture in the small room, a sturdy chair, with his hands bound in front where the agent could see them. He squinted up at the agent without any apparent fear.

“Solomon the Fisher,” the agent said, glaring down at him. “Where are the children?”

“If you were faster, you might have been able to catch them,” Solomon grinned. “I honestly expected you to catch me a lot faster. Rest assured, they’re not hurt. They agreed to come, and they’ll be looked after.”

“You have been stealing children from their beds. Children under our protection, who – ”

“And I got more than I expected, really. It’s hard to believe that it really took you nine months to catch up with me; I wasn’t exactly hiding. I should’ve been in the hangman’s noose within two weeks!”

“And now you will be. But perhaps your soul can be saved if you tell us – ”

“Or were you just not looking until two weeks ago? Did you consider it a boon when the poor children, the strange children with rotten apples in their hands and unpleasant truths on their tongues and with parents who couldn’t buy a lawman’s ear, were no longer a problem? You only started looking after the merchant girl went missing, didn’t you?”

The agent punched Solomon hard enough that the chair rocked. Solomon, with a pained little whine, spat out a fragment of tooth and glared up at the agent through fresh tears.

“We are not here to listen to you gloat or accuse. We are here to ascertain the location of the children you have stolen and the identities of your comrades and master, and to shut this thing down once and for all. I’m not sure why you’d go for such a random assortment of victims, but – ”

“You know perfectly well why. If you want to talk, I’m happy to talk – why do you think I let your men catch me? But I see no reason in wasting time explaining to you things that you already know just so that we can both pretend you didn’t already know them.” Solomon leaned forward as far as his bonds would allow to whisper conspirationally, “I already know who you are, Reginald.”

The agent froze.

“I know that you’re not what you say you are. Oh, one of the King’s lawmen, certainly, but a very special kind of lawman, aren’t you? You know perfectly well that those children were all cursed. I’m sure they were all noted by your kind well in advance. It did seem a little off to me that we keep finding them in clusters; is that your doing? Easier to keep an eye on them if they’re all in groups, are they?”

The agent recovered quickly. “No matter the stains upon their souls, those witches are still under our protection. None of those you have taken has of yet committed any crime.”

“You probably would have killed them already if they had, right? No such thing as a minor offense from somebody who is a home for sin. But as I said, Reginald, the children are in absolutely no danger, and weren’t taken anywhere against their will. I am not a kidnapper. I am a messenger.”

“Where are they?”

“Well on their way to Duniyasar.”

The agent frowned. That was very unexpected. “Your master is the desert witch.”

“Yes.”

“Are we being watched now?”

“Of course.” Solomon grinned. The agent fancied that the spark of sinful magic glinted in his eyes, betraying the malevolent presence of the desert witch, but that was only fancy – truly sinister magic was rarely visible.

“The Eye watches and speaks. I am playing mouthpiece today. Or did you think I let your boys catch me just for fun? I have a message for you, Reginald.”

“Why is some foreign witch stealing children?”

“Oh, we’re making the offer to witches of any age, not just children. I work with children, but the age isn’t important. The curse is. We are saving the world.”

“… What?”

“There’s a war coming. Not some skirmish between neighbour nations threatening to leave a stretch of land fallow for a few generations; a war of proportions previously unimagined, a great war that will consume the entire world. Men will travel the length of the world to kill each other, they will bring to bear technologies you have not yet imagined and drop explosives from the sky. And the witches – your witches and your enemy’s – will be brought forward and have their relatively harmless curses turned to war. Poisoned by years and years of dreams of tense conflict, magic will be married with new technologies and turned to destructive purposes never seen before. Entire countries will be destroyed – not conquered by neighbouring kings but obliterated, their people and animals and even chunks of their land physically wiped from existence. The surviving dregs of humanity will struggle for generations in a world torn apart by fire and blood, they will breathe poisoned air and drink contaminated water as they fight to survive the decades or centuries necessary to wait out the lingering effects of curses cast in anger and science used in malice. Not a single culture or nation or people emerging from the ruin would be recogniseable to you as anything from a society that you know. A war is coming, and our world is ending.”

“And you’re, what? Building a magical army?”

Solomon barked a laugh. “We aim to save the world, not destroy it faster. No, Reginald, Duniyasar will not be participating in any war. And neither will its witches. We cannot create world peace, but we can remove the vast majority of magic from the equation. We can let the world have its grand and devastating war, and it will be terrible, and it will be remembered, but it will not bring the world to the brink of destruction – not if we do not let it be dominated by magic. We are not building an army, we are building a haven. A place where mages and witches, magic’s masters and sin’s slaves, can stay out of everybody’s way. Your job, essentially, but on a much larger scale.”

“It sounds to me like you’re depriving England of much needed soldiers in the biggest war it’s ever been involved in.”

“Did you hear nothing I just said? England will not exist if we don’t address this. And no, Reginald, we are not targeting England. We are all over the world. Your King’s rivals are being defanged at the same rate, don’t worry. Tell me, Reginald… would you like to save the world?”

The agent raised an eyebrow. “I’m no witch.”

“But you know them. Your organisation has files on them, does it not? Any of them you can find. I’m sure you’d simply kill them if that solved the problem of their existence, but you know very well it doesn’t; the curses simply crop up again in somebody else. But we can solve that. We can take them away for you. We just need to know where they are. We’ve been perfectly fine finding them ourselves, of course, but think how much faster we could move if we worked together. A much cleaner England, and a much safer one. A winning scenario for everyone involved, don’t you think?”

“Let’s say I believe you. How long do we have until this war?”

“We estimate about two hundred years.”

The agent burst into laughter. “Two hundred years? You’re stealing children for some far-off fantasy war in two centuries?”

“It could be as few as one hundred and fifty.”

“You justify the theft of England’s children with a prediction of a doomsday that our great-grandchildren will not live to see.”

“And what of their great-grandchildren? You condemn the future so easily, Reginald.”

“And you are a liar.”

“You know perfectly well that I’m not. Your soul may be uncorrupted, but you’ve been too unquestioning to be moving without guidance. You have some sort of device, don’t you? For truth telling. Something with a curse trapped in it.”

“That’s none of your business. We’re done here.”

Solomon cocked his head and stared off into the distance, as if he was listening to something that the agent couldn’t hear. Then he said, “Ah. It seems that we may have twenty five years before great and terrible war.”

“There’s a big difference between twenty five years and two hundred!”

“Indeed. Are you interested now?”

“Are you threatening me?”

“Holding an entire world hostage over you? You flatter yourself. But you must understand, our sole interest is saving the world. The best way to do that is by removing as much magic from the equation as possible. But if that proves impossible, the second best method would be triggering the war early, before the dreams have properly soured and before technology, magical or mundane, is capable of such devastation. You should take heart, Reginald – a war triggered early is one that England has a chance of surviving, and you’ll be too old to fight, anyway. Although… you have, what, two sons? And a new baby grandson…”

“You’ll hang for this.”

“I’m just a messenger. You know this. You can have me convicted and hanged and there’s nothing I could do to stop you. You could beat me to death in this very room, as you so clearly want to do, and very few people would even know it happened. But if you do that, the war will still be coming. Duniyasar will still need to act. And if you have any interest in making sure this war happens in two hundred years rather than twenty five, killing the person here to give you information is going to make your job a fair bit harder. So.” Solomon spat out another mouthful of blood, leaned forward, and grinned up at his captor. “Are you going to save the world, Agent?”