The Effaced: Chapter Eight

“Hello, dearest sister,” I said, a hint of wry amusement in my voice. “Is locking me in an enchanted box with a thousand and one ways to kill me really the way you wanted to greet me.” 

“It depends,” Jessica said, no humor in her tone at all. I dropped my own quickly. 

“It depends on what?” I asked, frowning. 

“Are the rumors true?” Jessica asked. 

“What rumors? That I killed a senator?” I asked, frowning. She should know me better than that.

“No, the ones whe– Wait you did what?!” 

“I did not kill a senator,” I said, holding my hands up. 

“Explain,” Jessica snapped at me, sounding really quite annoyed. I supposed that I couldn’t blame her. If she’d ambushed me on The Gleam wanting to talk, then talked about killing someone, I’d have been cross as well. 

I explained everything, except for the fact that I was holding a knife and had an old combat shirt on under my clothes. When I finished, Jessica let out a sharp exhale from her nose, then shook her head. 

“Axel, I…” 

She trailed off, then started again. 

“That’s horrible. I’m sorry.” 

“I can’t exactly say I’m happy about it,” I said. “What are these rumors you’re talking about?” 

“They’re saying, at least the people who talk to me from the undercity, that Mist and the Arenamaster, are back.” 

I froze and stared at her. 

“What? Is the arena back? Is… No, she’s in prison.”

I stumbled in place, even though I wasn’t moving. 

“A hundred and twenty years, no parole, in maximum security mage prison.” 

Jessica let out a sharp bark of laughter. 

“You’ve had the same nightmares. We’ve talked about them. She can get out, we both know that.” 

Then her eyes began to glow red as she allowed her demon to speak through her. I was never sure of why, but Jessica had never summoned her demon’s vessel. Not when we’d both been under the Arenamaster, not during the duels she fought, not during the final battle, and not in all the years since. 

“Do you think that Alyphize would have allowed her contractor to languish in a simple prison? The Arenamaster fed the Throne of the Gambler more blood and power than it had seen since its sundering by the Throne of Pleasure,” her demon – Keliathri, if I recalled correctly – growled. His voice was rough and masculine, almost beast-like in quality. 

“I know that Alyphize was able to fight, but I don’t think she was that powerful,” I said, but even as the words came from my mouth, I wasn’t convinced of their own truthfulness. Or the fact that the Arenamaster would be unable to escape on her own, even without Alyphize.

“Then you are a fool,” Keliathri said. “One who has buried his head in the sand so as to not see the truth. Alyphize has not been seen in the Void since the battle.”

“They probably just did the same thing to her that they did to Odril,” I said, a hint of bitterness touching my voice, working through the mountains of doubt.  

“They did not,” Keliathri said, and he sounded absolutely convinced. 

“But you don’t know that,” I pointed out, still desperately clinging to the fraction of hope that I still had. The demon was silent for a moment before it responded. 

“No.” 

The light faded, and Jessica was looking at me then. 

“Axel, when you say you’re not working for her, I do believe you. But I do believe that she’s back. Maybe she escaped, maybe she was let out on good behavior or something stupid like that, maybe this was just another one of her schemes. But she’s back.” 

I slumped, leaning against the wall, since I didn’t have anything else to collapse on. Jessica didn’t keep a second chair in her office. 

“It is possible,” I said after a moment. “That she isn’t. They’re accusing me of treason, whoever ‘they’ are. Maybe they’re using illusions and stuff. That would explain why I was there with her. They’re framing me, trying to make it seem like I’m Mist, so that in court they can pin it on me.” 

A bit of tension seemed to leave Jessica’s face as she paused. 

“I suppose that’s possible,” she allowed. “I’m not convinced, not entirely, but it isn’t like a diviner or an archmage has seen her, and there are too many ways to fool rune spectacles. And I’m not even entirely convinced someone with rune spectacles has seen her. And the rumors only started a few days ago.”

“Exactly,” I said, letting out a breath of relief. 

It was probably misplaced. If someone had the power and planning to do that just to frame me, then there was a good chance that whatever District Attorney had considered the case shady enough to let me out on bail was going to be persuaded to revoke his clemency. 

But that would still be preferable to having the Arenamaster back for real. The very idea that she was back made me feel like a child again, or maybe like a teenager. When I’d been a child, I hadn’t been aware of just how terrible things were. It was only as I grew through my teens that I’d begun to pay her the respect and fear that she deserved. 

“Do you have a good lawyer?” Jessica asked after a moment of silence. “It sounds like they’ve already convinced the constables that you’re guilty, but a good attorney can turn around a panel if it’s done by a panel of peers.” 

“With how much he cost, he better be a good one,” I grumbled. “I do have an alibi, at least. I was on The Dancer when it happened, doing repairs.” 

“That’s something at least,” Jessica said. “What was the attorney’s name? I’ll see if I can dig up any of his old cases and check his track record.” 

“Aiden Swift,” I said. “Pine and Swift Law Firm, or something like that.” 

She nodded, and we slowly moved onto lighter topics. I asked after her husband, and she asked if I’d finally gotten one, then proceeded to mercilessly tease me about the fact that I hadn’t. 

“You know, if you don’t ever go out and meet people, and only report to work and then stay at home, you’re never goi–” she was in the middle of saying, when she was cut off by a knock at the door. 

I tensed, then relaxed. It was probably just one of her employees who needed to check a policy, or something of that sort.

“Who is it?” Jessica asked. She sounded relaxed, but I noticed the tiny spark of bright, lemon yellow aura that appeared over one of her fingers. 

“Open up,” a crisp, official-sounding woman said. “We believe that you are harboring a wanted man. If you hand over Mist, or Axel, whatever he’s going by these days… if you hand him over calmly, then the state won’t press charges against you.”

Jessica’s face turned into a smooth mask, and I had formed spells before I even knew what I was doing, the knife leaping out of my pocket and to my hand. In a single sentence, we weren’t Axel and Jessica, we were Mist and Zone. 

Zone’s aura flickered around her, and she looked at me. 

“Hold still, don’t move, don’t even think.” 

I nodded sharply, and then Zone rose from her chair, and walked loudly across the room before opening the door. As she walked, her yellow aura began to light the hidden spells in the room, and I felt the once-familiar feeling of an attention ward settling around me. Everyone had slightly different feelings when under a veil or attention ward. Some people felt cold, others felt like the world around them got slightly dimmer, and others yet felt completely numb and disjointed. I always felt pin pricks all over my body, like the sensation after a limb had fallen asleep, and was now mostly, but not quite, back to normal. 

On the other side of the door stood an entire squad of constables. Two at the front were wearing enchanted breastplates and carrying battle wands in one hand, and guns in the other. An irritated part of my brain noted that these people had the decency to keep their guns pointed at the floor, rather than shoved in Zone’s face. In the center of their squad was a pair of mages, each one holding a staff, which I had no doubt was either a complex artifact with spells all running through it, or a powerful booster to help contain some innate sorcery. At the back stood a pair in breastplates as well, but rather than a wand and gun, they held a pair of two handed guns. 

They were a new model, from a lab that I didn’t recognize. The work didn’t look like Elucidate Labs’ work – they always had a certain smooth elegance and cutting edge quality. These looked clunky and improperly assembled, like a child smashing bricks together. 

Even still, the heavily glowing runes on the weapon, combined with the absolutely massive belt of rounds that was fed into it, left me with no doubt that they could do some serious damage. 

Then I noticed something that I really, really should have noticed earlier. I’d gotten rusty.

Not a single one of the members of the squad was wearing an actual constable’s badge. Oh sure, their uniforms resembled the ones that constables wore, and they moved like a trained military squad, but there wasn’t an actual badge in sight, nor any sort of identifying marks at all. Even their faces looked plain and bland, like they’d been chosen to be inconspicuous. 

The woman who’d spoken was one of the ones in the front, with the wand and gun. She gave a constrained smile to Zone as she spoke. 

“I’m sorry. Alice, isn’t it?” 

“Jessica,” Zone said, sounding serious. “You knew that, though.” 

The smile slipped away as the woman frowned. 

“Yes, I did,” she said. “Where’s your brother?” 

“He’s not here,” Zone said, stepping out of the doorway to sweep her hand over the empty office. “He came in a bit ago, spoke to me about his situation, begged me for money, and then left when I didn’t give it to him.” 

I had to give it to her acting skills – she sounded genuinely annoyed, even though she’d constructed that in an instant.

The not-constable raised her wand and shot a spell off into the room. It exploded into a fine mist of tiny beads of force, which were supposed to sweep over everything before returning to the wand.

They didn’t. The spell fizzled out before it had moved more than fractionally past the threshold.

“If you can disable all of your wards, miss,” the woman said, frowning, and Zone studied her. 

“Of course,” Zone finally relented, and I had to stop the grin from spreading across my face. 

When a mage took on a creature as a familiar, it was impossible to guess the exact specifics of what kind of power they would be granted through the bond. But it wasn’t impossible to guess the type of power they’d be granted. If you bonded to a fire elemental, there was a good chance that you’d get fire or heat related abilities. If you bonded to a winter faerie, you’d probably get something related to cold or ice or death. 

And if you bonded to a demon, you’d probably get some sort of aura power, related to whatever Throne the demon had originally been spawned from. A demon spawned from the Throne of Pain might allow your aura to cause pain to anyone who touched it, for example.

Zone’s familiar had been spawned from the Throne of Lies, then shifted over to work under Alyphize and the Throne of Gambling. I was intimately familiar with what kind of aura power it granted her, even if it wasn’t what the official record that the squad no doubt had checked claimed it was.

Zone waved her hand, and the wards all turned off. 

At least, they appeared to turn off. She did turn off some of the more overt defenses, but she actually activated others, flicking on several layers of wards.

The aura that was running through them had become almost undetectable by spells, and as the woman fired off the bead spell, then several rapid detection spells. 

The beads struck me, and I saw the spirals of yellow aura around me flexing, as the attention diverting ward strained to compensate through whatever mental defenses the squad doubtless had, but thanks to Zone’s familiar power and Zone’s own excellent warding skills, nobody in the squad seemed to notice anything amiss. The other spells all turned up blank as well, and the not-constable lowered the wand.

“Do you know where your brother said he would go?” one of the mages asked. 

“No idea, sorry,” Zone said, sounding nervous. “What… Did he do something? He told me he was innocent and it was a misunderstanding.” 

She really did sound like someone who wasn’t capable of stopping the entire squad if they tried to force their way into her warded box, and I was forced to admit she was a good actress for the second time in short succession. 

“I’m afraid I’m not at liberty to say,” the woman who’d done most of the chatting thus far said. “Alright, thank you for your cooperation, Jessica.” 

She turned back to the squad, and they seemed to have a rapid, yet entirely silent, conversation, then marched away. 

Zone slumped back into the chair, waved her hand, and the door slammed shut.