Marc Zicree - Magic Time

“Stay where you are,” snapped a voice from the top of the bank.

The man raised his head. Crazy , thought Shango, and something more.

It was Cadiz and his men, at the top of the bank.

Shango recognized them from the descriptions: No National guardsmen would have added all those leather jackets and extra weapons belts to their cammies. The burly dude with the Air Cav patch displayed so prominently on his shoulder would be Cadiz; the sour-faced, freckled, curiously wizened man riding at his side was probably the odd and offensive Mr. Brattle. Two of the dozen or so foot soldiers who surrounded the two riders were already making their way down the stream-bank toward the brightly garbed man, who was by this time backing away.

“Sorry,” he said, in a pleasant voice, “got to go. Wish I could stay.”

“I said stay put!” snapped Brattle, in a thin harsh voice like a cough. “Where’d you come from? Nobody comes through here without us checking them out.”

And Cadiz said, “Grab him.”

That was a mistake. The man flung up his hand and shouted, fireballs flashing in the air. Shango’s breath caught in his throat. Another of them , like the firestarter he’d met near Spotsylvania, the others he’d heard of.

At the top of the bank, Brattle said in his tight cold voice, “None of that!” and stretched out his hand toward the man.

The man cried out, clutched his head, doubled over in pain. The fireballs frizzled and died, the smell of smoke thick in the air. The man fell to his knees in the stream, raised his hand as if he feared he would be struck. Brattle said, “Bring him. We’ll need one like that.”

The foot soldiers seized the man by the arms.

And at that point, one of the group around Cadiz and Brattle shifted, and Shango saw what was slung on the cruppers of their horses. Sacks of food, big plastic bottles of water such as the National Guard had handed out, a bundle of bright red-and-blue blankets lashed together. Tools-a small hatchet, a saw and some screwdrivers-bulging from faded blue-and-white-striped sheets.

You bastards , thought Shango, recognizing the few pitiful objects that had stood between the Angels Rest oldsters and starvation. You fucking bastards.

Anger rose up in him, at all those faces, from that of the woman by the parkway to that child’s he had uncovered only an hour ago-rage at what men had done out of power and hunger and greed.

You have no right , he thought, to do what you are doing - and his hammer sprang as if of itself into his hand. Chill iron centered in him, terrible and hard, and no, this wasn’t his job, he thought, moving already, striding from the dusky vines and golden flowers, and no, he knew the way to take care of this problem was not to get himself killed by taking on twelve armed guys and a wizard who had the advantage of high ground and crossbows. But sometimes, thought Shango, perfectly cold, perfectly calm, sometimes your starry-eyed bleeding-heart Band-Aid-plastering liberals had a point.

And he struck like the hammer of Thor, like John Henry driving down the steel that killed him, and knocked the brains out of one man like mac’n’cheese from a broken dish and snapped the other thug’s spine on the backhand swing. He grabbed the Hawaiian-shirted man’s arm and pulled him clear as one of the men on top of the bank fired a crossbow.

And then fear hit him. Crippling, staggering terror that iced his stomach and dropped him to his knees.

Panic flooded him, screamed at him to drop everything and RUN-

And looking up at the top of the bank, he saw the sour, freckled face of Douglas Brattle smile.

That was his power, Shango understood.

He could throw Fear.

Shango raised his hammer in his hand.

Bellowing like thunder, he charged straight up the bank, swinging the weapon around his head. A man leveled a crossbow at him, and he scrambled up anyway, not ceasing to shout, not ceasing the gush of rage that the shout summoned from his pounding heart.

Anger poured out of him, hot as blood from a wound, the anger a weapon like the hammer, that nothing could disable or fuck up.

And then something gleaming flashed across the bowman’s weapon, and he heard the fiberglass crossbow snap and the sprang! of the breaking string, the scream of the bowman as the arrow leaped wildly back into his face. The man ran shrieking into the woods, spraying blood.

The gleaming thing had been a sword.

And amid the chaos and the screams and the blood rage pounding within him, Shango realized others had entered the fray alongside him.

Brattle’s horse reared, and Cadiz drove his mount forward, spear leveled. Shango smote the spear aside with his hammer, smote aside the sword the man drew.

He grabbed Cadiz’s wrist and hauled him from the horse and into the tangle of fern underfoot, drove his boot into the side of his ribs, felt bone break, as this man must have broken the bones of Mrs. Close and Mr. Dean and the others who had taken Shango in.

There was a cry behind him, and he spied another militiaman falling as a lean, muscular young woman smashed him down with a blow from her crossbow, arcing it wide like a club. Then, with a speed and agility he found impressive, the woman wheeled, loading the crossbow as a third rider drove down on her. She fired, falling back, her arrow lodging in the rider’s shoulder, flinging him backward off the horse to smash on the rocks.

And now all was confusion, a blur of bodies and blades, of crushing movement. Something slashed along his cheek, he drove the attacker back with his boot. Others tried to take him around the waist, bring him down, but he threw them off, battered them away.

Beyond this, as if lit by lightning, he glimpsed the young swordsman, forcing back two of the militiamen, who parried with big hunting knives, eager to gut him. The young man was no professional, that was clear. But he fought with a fire, a determination, that brought to Shango’s mind his own crazy-ass self as he’d gone screaming up the creek bank.

And there was another man, too, an older man, wielding a length of pipe against the bastards, shouting a torrent of curses in something that sounded like Russian.

Shango sought again for Cadiz, couldn’t find him. A man with three gold teeth lunged at him with a bayonet. Shango sidestepped it, drove the head of his hammer into the man’s solar plexus, sending him staggering back to collapse amid the rushes, choking.

Shango straightened, saw the girl with the crossbow firing off a shot into the thigh of one of the Russian’s adversaries, unaware that a spearman was running at her own undefended back.

“ No !” The word rang out over the clearing and-though it was high and musical-it took Shango an instant to realize it wasn’t his own thought.

Then in the green dusk, there was a brightness like a second sun.

He saw to his astonishment a glowing, beautiful child skimming in the air like a stone skipped over water. The creature overtook the spearman and settled near the woman, the light extending out to canopy her.

The spearman cried out in terror, but his momentum was carrying him, and his spear struck the glowing canopy, its wood fracturing as though the light were solid, sending the barbed metal tip of the spear shooting back and upward into the man’s own throat.

He made a gurgling, surprised sound and fell, gasping out his life.

The fear-caster wheeled his horse and pelted away into the trees.

Shango swung around, to find the surviving men gone. He was panting, trembling, the rush of anger that had lighted his whole body ebbing, leaving ash and shock and dizziness in its wake.

The ghostly, glimmering girl hovered over the dead man, staring down at her handiwork, and she looked sickened. She appeared to be twelve or thirteen years old, Shango’s niece Kitta’s age, and smaller than she should have been, were she human.