Irina Syromyatnikova - My Path to Magic

By the time I arrived, the atmosphere at NZAMIPS had reached a fever pitch. Lieutenant Clarence was nowhere to be seen: he had either fled or gone to work with the townsfolk. It was twilight already: they could kill me and secretly throw in the lake.

“So, the press conference, you said?” the sergeant roared in place of a greeting.

It was my turn to stand awkwardly and look askance—I wasn’t going to fight with him over nothing!

“I did not want to bypass the senior officer.”

He pondered it and decided to forgive me. “Judging by the imprint of the aura, that corpse was Fox’s work,” the sergeant magnanimously told me. “Why we don’t record imprints of the white magicians, too?!”

He was very cheerful; hence, they found a reason to flee from here.

“It’s unfair,” I agreed.

“Let’s drink to this!”

Bottles of fresh beer and a bag of lovingly-packed snacks appeared from under the table, and my account of events gradually melded into the booze on the occasion of the successful completion of the case. It was the first time I shared a table with a company of combat mages, and their nasty reputation was not confirmed. Normal men, not any worse than Quarters! We knocked back, sang a few songs from the army’s repertoire; Rispin told a few fresh anecdotes, Gorchik started to squint with both eyes, the beer was over, and we parted peacefully. They went to their hotel, and I - to Mrs. Parker’s mansion. The naive sergeant could afford to sleep tight, but I had to get up at dawn tomorrow: a brain-twisting intrigue, spun by me with an eye on the coordinator, entered its final stage.

An encoded telegram bearing the name of Satal came at the last moment; the senior coordinator intended to leave Redstone for the capital and was nervous and swore all morning. Sparing the nerves of his subordinates, Captain Baer personally delivered the telegram to the boss—a half-sheet of text; obviously, the sender didn’t try to save money on the letters. As soon as the coordinator read it through, his face brightened, and lips twisted in an arrogant smirk.

“That’s another story! A priest that was making human sacrifices got caught and decimated in Mihandrov. The central database identified him as Sigismund Salaris, an artisan; he was wanted for fifteen years.”

The captain gasped: “The same Salaris? Nintark’s confessor?”

“Yeah,” Satal good-naturedly allowed his subordinate to read the telegram. “By the way, your Larkes swore that he saw him dead.”

“Why is he mine ?” Locomotive was offended.

“He ruled here all this time, the talentless parasite let business slide!” the dark mage became a bit gloomy. “They will say that it’s Axel who caught the artisan.”

“Not a big deal,” Locomotive comforted his boss, “you have caught two artisans.”

“True, but no one believes that they were the artisans,” Satal objected reasonably. “However, I am sure that the center of their interest is not Polisant. The death of the living legend of the cult will make them more active,” the senior coordinator rubbed his palms in anticipation, “now they’ll come to us in flocks!”

Locomotive pictured artisans thronging to Redstone and shivered. God save us, no!

The rambling holidays were finally over; my ill-fated trip had come to an end. I could stay for a couple more days (nobody would kill me for that), but then I would have to attend the funeral of Mr. Fox. That was Mrs. Hemul’s idea—the deceased assistant principal should not remain in the memory of the children as an evil person.

“Anyway, he was their teacher; they learned a lot from him. You cannot say to a child, ‘Remember this and do not remember that.’ The children must realize the ambiguity of his personality themselves, separate in their minds the right and the wrong. I know you see this as over-complacency, but his death closes all accounts, and we need forgiveness for ourselves in order to live on.”

Well, maybe for the white it is so, but I could not picture myself grieving about artisans—even after a liter of beer.

And yet, Mrs. Hemul wanted to know the results of the investigation, because the achievement of clarity is a fundamental feature of the white; they physically cannot disregard or forget something important. The wise directrix chose the easiest way to reach her goal; she invited all interested parties to dinner at that same pub, at her own expense. Claymore’s eagles came in full strength. I did not want to go, honestly; I was too proud for that. But I was asked by Clarence to be there. Max came with me: I had already introduced it to the “cleaners”, and an extra set of teeth during the meeting would be helpful.

The sergeant expounded readily and in detail the results of the investigation, half of which was done by someone else. The main achievement of the “cleaner” was identification of Fox—the nice nelly—which provided an objective basis for my fanatical ravings about the artisans (I was very grateful to him for that). “By joining the artisans’ cult, he took the alias Sigismund Salaris, under which he became famous, in some way. He was the mastermind behind the branch of the cult that decided to openly challenge the authorities and establish a community in Nintark. Of course, later he was considered dead and was searched for without passion, but all the time he was hiding here.”

Mrs. Hemul took the news of the artisans with amazing composure, having practiced for years approaching horrific news with a stone face. I wondered what she was before she came to Mihandrov.

“I confess I always perceived the artisans as mentally ill, but now I see that my ideas were too primitive. Fox talked sensibly and consistently, but he was able to do absolutely unthinkable things at the same time. And most importantly: why? For what purpose?”

“‘Why’ is clear,” I could not refrain, “he wanted to protect bigger things by sacrificing the smaller ones, so to speak.”

“To protect them from whom?”

I had my thoughts on this topic, though to voice them in their entirety meant to reveal my sources. Did I need it? In abbreviated form, my speculation looked like this: “Do you know that Petros’ father - Fox’s relative - was killed during an armed bank robbery?”

Clarence slightly frowned.

“Yeah, yeah, that same robbery! Three months before the birth of his first and last child, among other things. The first victim had gone missing a few days after the incident. You can rummage through the archives—a lot of strange things happened at that time. I do not know what Fox was trying to fight off with that shield, but he obviously liked the effect and, grieving and weeping, began to let his pupils die under the knife. Of course, he selected those whose death would affect as few people as possible. Orphans, in short.”

The sergeant nodded: “A typical artisan’s logic.”

“But the children! Why did he try to poison them?”

“That is clear, too. What the otherworldly phenomenon was Fox knew well, I suppose, from his experience in Nintark. He lost control of the situation: his followers were killing themselves, but the shield did not hold for long, human sacrifices were required more and more frequently, but the school’s leadership had changed, control had tightened. The white tolerate stress poorly! Eventually I showed up and started spoiling his flock, planting a bit of common sense into the children, and I helped Petros in a way he could not. Where you saw hope, he saw only depravity and degradation. Mourning and weeping again, he decided to save everyone from a collision with the real world—to put them to sleep like terminally ill pets, purely out of compassion.”