8FOLD: Mancers # 11, "Red Teeth"

[Tom Russell]

Among us walk the MANCERS - humans gifted with mystical power by dread
Venus! Some serve the elder gods, and conspire to give them dominion
over mankind! Others fight in rebellion against Venus, seeking to end
magic itself! And in this midnight war - fought by spies and assassins
with secrets and mysteries - the fate of the Earth shall be decided!

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#     # NUMBER 11 - "RED TEETH" [8F-197][PW-42]

-------------DRAMATIS PERSONAE-------------

     MEMBERS OF THE SECRET CIRCLE
A band of mancers opposing the gods of Venus.

MAILE AKAKA, age 20. Aeromancer.
Once the top field agent of The Company, she was abducted and
memory-wiped by the circle. She knows that this is the case and is
serving as their leader, but does not know that she defected
intentionally.

LIEKE VAN RIJN, age 27. Doppelmancer.
Split into two autonomous bodies, madly in love with each other, now
separated and desperately alone. This Lieke is with the circle.

JUNE LASH, age 47. Ailuromancer.
Gourmet chef and spymaster, commanding dozens of feline agents around the globe.

TREVOR JEFFRIES, age 23? Robot head.
Thought to be a mekhanomancer, recently revealed to be a Company robot
constructed by Cradle Tech.

DAVID COLLINS, age 31. Mnemonomancer.
Married to Beth Collins, brother of Claire Belden. Recently finished a
deep undercover assignment - so deep that even he didn't realize it -
working for The Company. Presumed dead, he now has possession of the
ancient blade Thirteen, and has access to the memories of his
ancestors.

AZABETH "BETH" COLLINS, age 37. Oneiromancer.
Comatose wife of David Collins, communicating with the others only
through dreams and signs.

SARAH AVERY, age 25. Evocamancer.
Reluctantly allied with the secret circle, and even more reluctant to
use her demon-summoning magic, preferring to serve as an engineer.


     EMPLOYEES OF THE COMPANY
A shadow conglomerate in the service of dread Venus.

CLAIRE BELDEN, age 31. Metamancer.
Having framed and murdered her former boss and lover Lydia Black,
Claire is now the head of Human Resources for The Company. From
within, she pursues her own agenda, aiding the circle and The Company
in equal measure to maintain a mystical stalemate between the two
sides. Sister of David Collins, responsible for both his escape and
Maile's defection.

TRINITY "TRINI" TRAN, age 35. Haematomancer.
A fugitive, reluctantly working for The Company in return for their
protection, and allied with Claire. She carries David Collins's child,
and is now rooming with (and keeping an eye on) the mind-wiped
"Angel".

ANGEL, age 27. Doppelmancer.
The other Lieke van Rijn, amnesiac, depowered, and consumed by a
desperate emptiness. Held captive by The Company.

------------------------------------------


An hour or so after he came back from the dead, David remembered a
basement in Chicago. Inside the walk-in pantry, behind the shelf, a
series of false bricks hid a safe containing a substantial sum of
money that belonged to him. He didn't quite remember at the time how
it was that the money belonged to him - if it was really his, or if it
belonged to a relative, or if someone else had left it there for him -
but being that he had just come back from the dead and been given a
magic god-killing sword by apparently his sister, he didn't exactly
have a concrete plan and "maybe get some money" seemed like a good
place to start.
   Before he could get into the basement, he first had to get into the
house. He considered knocking on the door and asking if he could go
into their basement, please, but decided instead that it made more
sense to try and sneak in after dark. Huh, no spare key under the mat
or in the mailbox, which of course not, it never is, but suddenly he
remembered how to pick a lock. It's not his memory - the hands he saw
in his mind's eye were light, lithe, feminine - but clumsy as his
sausage fingers were, it did the trick. The only question he has is
where he got the hairpins from. Claire?
   He got into the basement, and the pantry, and past the false bricks
quickly enough. He paused for a moment with his fingers poised at the
tumbler, then remembered the combination: twist, twist, twist. It's
the fastest twenty thousand dollars he ever made.
   Also the heaviest, and he must've struggled with it as he lurched
back up the stairs, because there was a kid waiting for him at the
top. The kid was four? six?, David never can tell with kids. David
reached out with a finger, booped the kid's nose, and erased the last
ten minutes from his memory.
   He stayed the night at a cheap motel, and his sleep was dreamless.
That was heart-breaking; he had wanted to see Beth again. This
reminded him of Eloise - of the smell of her golden hair and his great
longing, and her wicked uncle and a midnight duel - only he didn't
know anyone named Eloise, had never sniffed her hair, had never fought
her wicked uncle. But he remembered it just the same, and he also
remembered losing the duel and dying in the moonlight. (That he found
more than a little disconcerting.)
   In the morning, he bought an ancient jalopy, and began to drive
toward Wyoming. Why Wyoming? "Because there's nothing there," he heard
his brother say, only he never had a brother. Of course, he didn't
remember having a sister, either, but he has one, and somehow she
brought him back to life.
   That brother, on the other hand - the one who thought so little of
Wyoming - he died in the war and was buried in France. No one brought
him back to life. The fifteenth of July, nineteen-eighteen. So, not
his brother, then, though the pain associated with the memory was
immediate enough.
   Other brothers, other sisters, wives, husbands, parents - every
once in a while a stray thought would lead David to the people he now
remembered losing. A single lifetime was grief enough, but his grief
could stretch back generations, centuries, millennia - and for a
moment, only a moment, he remembered the time of high magic, of
Lemuria and the walking gods, of the Queen of Cups and of the first
straining desperate notes of the Lullaby.
   But only a moment, thinking thoughts in a language he couldn't
understand, associated with emotions that human beings no longer have
words for and that David wasn't equipped to process. He nearly ran the
car into a wall.
   "Wyoming, because there's nothing there," he said to himself. He
would be no good to Beth or anybody else in this state of constant
agitation and distraction. He needed to sit somewhere, alone, and
process it all, for as long as it took or at least for as long as
eighteen thousand dollars would buy him room and board. Wyoming seemed
properly isolated.
   The first few days in the motel room passed in a kind of haze. His
sleep was dreamless but his days consumed with memories that moved
like dreams, with the same peculiar leaps from subject to subject. One
thing he noticed in particular was how intense the emotions were in
these other memories, and how closely the memory was tied to the
emotion, and prone to distortion. His own memories, of things he had
actually lived through, had always been perfectly accurate: a
dispassionate record of events as they had actually happened. These
new memories and the emotions that shaped them were something else
entirely.
   After a week or so of wandering in and out of these other lives,
David found he was able to direct and organize the flow of anecdotes
and scenes, in much the same way that Beth taught him the art of lucid
dreaming. Once he had some modicum of control, he began with the most
obvious point of inquiry: Claire.
   The first memories he went through were his own, both the ones that
he had retained all along and the ones that he had erased. These he
found singularly unhelpful and devoid of any clues, and there was
nothing in his childhood that resembled her, or any hint of a sister.
   He turned to his parents. While he had memories of his father, seen
both through his eyes and his mother's, he didn't seem to have any
memories from his father, which struck him as rather odd. As if to
prove a point, he decided to try to remember his own birth - from his
own point of view, from his mother's, and from his father's.
   His own memory there wasn't as sharp and crisp as usual, but that
would have to be expected given the sensory perception of a newborn.
There was an awful lot of light and of screaming - it was a
tremendously hard birth, and his mother was in an intense amount of
pain.
   His mother didn't remember any of that, though. She didn't scream
or bleed or feel anything other than a deep and overwhelming
happiness. Through his mother's eyes, David wasn't the squat ugly
little thing that all babies are, but something much softer, and in
his face she saw his future, all the memories that were to come piling
up on one another. Her husband leaned in and smiled broadly, proudly.
   But there were no other memories in that room - nothing from Dad at
all. David switched back to his mother's memories, and remembered his
birth again, only this time he didn't focus on himself, but on his
father. Now that smile wasn't as broad. There was a sadness there, in
his father's eyes, and in his mother's. That sadness was like a little
fissure, and David need only push at it to widen it into something
large enough to step through.
   And now - at the same moment that the two Liekes and their
respective handlers begin a desperate correspondence, tattoos at
midnight - David is remembering his conception, from his mother's
point of view, and also from his father's. His real father. Adam.
   Adam Belden. New memories, memories David didn't even know he had,
flood over him all at once. Any semblance of control or direction he
had over the proceedings is washed away by sensation and imagery and
arcane knowledge and secret loves and desperate hates and unholy
grace.
   At the corners of these memories, lurking and tangential, there is
a quiet sense of dread that feels like vomit in his mouth: unpleasant,
acidic, lingering, refusing to be washed down. At first David attempts
to avoid it, to shut it out, but attempting to do so only makes it
more intense, centering it, bringing it into focus. There is a name
for this thing. David knows it has a name because Adam knows it has a
name.
   Adam is fifteen and talking to a man (a father? a mentor? why is
everything so fuzzy here?) who is explaining that there is power in
names, and none more powerful than the name that cannot be spoken,
cannot be written, cannot be thought. Cannot be thought? Adam is
incredulous.
   Even thinking his name brings him forth, explains the man, and for
a moment, David can see he who cannot be named. The face reminds him
of a skeleton: the flesh tight and stretched against bone with no
muscle, the eye sockets empty and cavernous, the teeth rust-red like
blood, the hair long and full of snares and knots, the skin a sickly
yellow, stained like nicotine.
   Looking at the face, remembering the face, sends David reeling back
in a panic. His panic is Adam's panic: Adam is twenty (twenty-one?
twenty-two?) and has learned the forbidden name.
   Adam's mentor nods grimly. "We must seek the blue lady."
   The blue lady. The memory of her washes over David like some kind
of terrible and awesome salvation, a peace and a calm that is not to
be trifled with, or to be invoked lightly. There is an unearthly
beauty to her, a form made of blue light, and water, and salt. To be
in her presence is to be saved, and to burn.
   She is talking to Adam. Talking to David. Talking in a language
neither of them speak, in the tongue of old Lemuria. They don't know
the words and yet the meaning is clear. Adam is the only living person
that knows the name. She can trap the name in his memories, hide it
where even he cannot remember it. The name will die with Adam, and
when it dies, so will the one who is named. Trap his name, and you
trap the necromancer - enemy of all that lives, feared even by dread
Venus.
   Free, whispers a voice in the back of David's mind. Red teeth and
nicotine skin. Free.
   Almost as a reflex, David wrenches himself out of his father's
memories, seeking the safety of his own. He sees Beth on their wedding
day, her hands encircled by his. She is too beautiful, too loving, and
in his nervousness, however briefly, his eyes dart down to the ruby at
her throat.
   "Eyes up here, buddy," she whispers, and he looks up at her face again.
   The face is yellow like nicotine, the sockets black and eyeless,
the teeth red like rust.
   This of course is not how his wedding went down, not how he
remembers it, only now it is: the yellow thing is a part of the
memory.
   David remembers being a child, happy and stupid in the way that
children always are. He had a dog, a dog that he named David. A second
later, two decades later, he is explaining the name to a bemused Beth
and an entirely unconvinced pair of Liekes. It wasn't an act of
egotism, he explains. He just liked the name David, and would have
named the dog David even if his own name wasn't David.
   "I know a better name," says Lieke, and then she says the forbidden
name. Now David knows the name, the name that followed him from the
trap in his father's memories.
   Free, whispers the yellow thing. Free.
   David remembers his father and his sister (his daughter). Claire is
thirteen, and already she surpasses him. In magic, in intellect, in
cruelty. In all things. Once he told her that she will have a great
destiny. She snorted in derision: there is no such thing as destiny.
If anything was meant to happen, it would have happened a long time
ago.
   At this moment (at the last moment; this is where Adam dies), the
two of them are in a cathedral. Trapped and on the run. He is
bleeding; the blood is black like oil.
   "You'll need to look after your brother," he tells her.
   "He's older than I am," she says sourly.
   "Claire," he admonishes.
   "I'll keep tabs on him," she relents. "When I can. When it suits my
interests."
   "That'll have to do," he says. "Take the sword."
   She does, coolly admiring the blade. "Do I really have to give it to him?"
   "Only when you think he's ready."
   "And if he never is?"
   He frowns. Just like his daughter to look for a loophole. "Then
when there isn't any time left. He's the one that has to do it,
Claire. The blue lady was wrong."
   "Hmmph," she says, not at all convinced.
   It gets colder in the cathedral. Darker. "They're here," says Adam.
   "Obviously," says Claire. "I better be going."
   "I love you, daughter."
   "Yes. I know." She frowns at him as she starts to evaporate. "I'm
afraid that I'm rather disappointed in you."
   He smiles. "Yes. I know."
   Then she's gone. Shadows in the cathedral become thicker, blacker,
less like shadows and more like men and women. They wear black robes,
hoods and everything, and their teeth are painted red, bright like
fresh blood. Each holds a dagger, the blade curved and sharp like a
tooth, and as black as night.
   "You better run too, David," says Adam just before they are upon
him. "They're coming now."
   "Wyoming," smiles one of the assassins as she slices across Adam's
throat. "Because there's nothing there."
   David opens his eyes and sees the flash of the dagger before it
comes down. He rolls to the right and the blade narrowly misses his
neck. Thirteen materializes in his hand, and he cuts the black-robed
assassin in half right above the waist.
   He scrambles to the floor, stepping over the corpse. Three more
assassins in the hotel room. Black robes. Red teeth. The bed between
him and them.
   One of the three holds out his empty hand, fingers stretched, palm
exposed, and across the room David feels the hand at his neck,
squeezing. Crushing. His arms become weak, and it becomes hard to hold
onto the sword.
   Then he remembers a word, a blessing of old Lemuria that he half
understands, and sputtering, it passes over his lips. Immediately, the
pressure is gone from his neck. He can breathe again.
   The would-be strangler isn't so lucky. The invisible hand is now
about his own throat, and despite his best efforts, he can't make it
stop. It only takes a moment for his windpipe to pinch closed. He
falls on the floor, gently wheezing himself to death.
   The two remaining assassins hesitate. So does David. He still
remembers what one of those daggers felt like when it ripped through
his father's throat, and he doesn't want to risk getting into close
quarters with them. He's not entirely confident in his ability to use
the sword. They don't know that, though; they've seen him cut someone
clean in half.
  "Well?" says David. He doesn't say it to antagonize them, but
because he can't bear the silence.
   Before either of them can answer, a bullet rips through the back of
each of their heads. David winces as the bodies hit the floor.
"Claire?" he asks the empty room.
   "Not exactly." Something shimmers in the space just behind where
the assassins stood. It's a woman in her thirties. Blue hair, long
blue duster, a piercing above her left eye. In each hand she has a
pistol - like the kind of pistol a pirate might carry in a movie. She
pulls her arms back, hands in the air, pistols pointed at the ceiling.
"Friend," she says.
   "So you say."
   "I did just save your life, man."
   "That's debatable. I kinda had it handled."
   "Didn't look like it," she says.
   "I was halfway through. Two down, two to go."
   "There are a lot more than these to go. Which is why we need to go. Vamoose."
   "No," says David.
   "No, as in you don't want my help?"
   "No, not that no, but no, as in I'm not doing the whole throw in my
lot with a mysterious stranger thing. Tell me who you are, how you got
here, why I should trust you."
   "We don't really have that much time."
   "Then be concise. Are you, what, a sciomancer? Shadow magic?"
   "I'm not any kind of mancer," she says. "It's all amulets, baubles,
and gewgaws." She pulls open her duster. Weapons, scrolls, and relics
hang from an impossible number of inner pockets. David even remembers
some of them, even though he's never seen them with his own eyes. He
figures the coat is some kind of mystical artifact too. "Pilar Garcia.
Friends call me Pill. I came because you needed me. Because the sword
called out to me."
   "The sword," says David dumbly.
   "Well," says Pill, pocketing one of her pistols and reaching into
her coat, "it called to its little sister. The sword of Danalee." It's
of the same make as David's Thirteen, but smaller. It also lacks the
weird sort of gravity that David feels with Thirteen.
   Pill picks up on this. "It doesn't have nearly the same kind of
magic. It never tasted the blood of Venus. But before the time of
woman, before Lemuria, before even the time of darkness, these two
blades fought side-by-side. So they still keep in touch. Pen pals."
She returns the short sword to its place inside her coat. "Your sword
didn't tell my sword all that much, least not that it decided to pass
on to me, but it's enough to know I can trust you, David. (Also told
me your name, natch.)"
   "You're not with the Company?"
   "Those jerks? No," says Pill. "They got no time for anybody who
isn't a real mancer. Or anybody who keeps stealing from them. Like me.
Plus I'm not crazy about the world ending. Not by Venus, and not by,
you know, the other guy."
   "The other guy?"
   "The one you brought back, dummy," says Pill. "The one with the
name. And the schmucks in the robes. The necromancer." She kicks at
one of the corpses. "You're with the circle?"
   He hesitates, then answers. "Yeah."
   "You guys still hang out at Shallow House?"
   "How do you know that name?"
   She looks at him like he's the biggest idiot in the world. "I'm
literally walking around with dangerous and esoteric stuff that I've
tracked down that's thousands and millions of years old, and you're
asking me how I know about Shallow House?" She reaches into her coat,
pulling out a brooch on a chain the way someone might pull out a
pocket watch. The ruby at its center glimmers. "Look, when I said we
needed to get going, I meant that we needed to get going. Shallow
House should be super-duper safe, yeah? You can get us there, right?"
   "Yeah," he says. "Yeah, okay."
   "Let's hurry it up," says Pill, spinning her fingers through the
air. "We got minutes, not hours, and not that many of 'em."

They step through the door and into the common room. Maile Akaka is
there, and she immediately goes on the offensive.
   David throws up his hands, then remembers that he's carrying his
big weird magic sword and that this gesture might not defuse tension
in the way he had intended. "Maile, I'm a friend," he says. "I know
you don't remember me. Which is kinda my fault."
   "David?" says Maile. "Beth's husband?"
   "Yes," he says. "How is she?"
   "I mean, sleeping? I've never actually seen her awake."
   David nods. "I need to see her. I know you probably want an
exposition dump but I haven't seen my wife in, I don't actually know
how long it's been. I don't even know what the date is."
   "Fourteenth of February."
   "Twenty-fifteen?"
   "Yeah."
   "Great," says David. "Like I said, I'll explain things after I see
Beth. Uh. This is Pill, by the way."
   "Hi," waves Pill.
   "She's my friend, I guess? I don't know. I met her five minutes
ago. It's weird. Everything's kinda weird."
   "Yeah, I know the feeling," says Maile. "Trevor's a robot, by the way."
   "Huh," says David. "I don't know who that is. Catch me up on that
later, will you? Gonna see Beth now."
   "Sure, sure."
   "Hold this for me?" He hands her the sword.
   "Uh, okay."

Goliath is on the bed, curled up on Beth's pillow.
   "Hey, buddy," says David, reaching out with his hand. Goliath
sniffs it tentatively, licks the palm, then consents to a scratch
behind the ears. "Why don't you take a break?"
   Goliath saunters toward the edge of the bed, stopping twice to
stretch and yawn, then trots out of the room. David finds Beth's hands
and clasps them in his own. It reminds him, as it often does, of their
wedding, only now when he remembers the wedding, he also remembers the
teeth red as rust and the stretched skin as yellow as nicotine. His
memories - maybe all his memories, stretching back through all the
generations - are poisoned now. Dangerous.
   He feels so angry. Angry at his father, for learning the name in
the first place, digging around in things that shouldn't be dug around
in. Angry at Claire, for not warning him about it. (Also for killing
him. He wasn't super-fond of that.) Mostly angry at himself for
blundering into some fresh new disaster.
   "I screwed up," he says to her, squeezing her hands tighter. "I
screwed everything up, and I don't know if we can fix it. I need you,
Beth."
   He leans in and kisses her gently on the mouth. Her eyes flutter awake.
   "Took you long enough," she says.



COPYRIGHT (C) 2020 TOM RUSSELL.