Dark Tidings: Ancient Magic Meets the Internet Book 1 (8 page)

Michael was escorted by his own personal security guard to the third floor which was to be his new working home. The guard shepherded him to Mr Toner’s secretary; apparently she’d been tasked with settling him in and getting him started. Toner was the Chief Technical Officer and Melissa was his secretary; although the little plaque on her desk said ‘Personal Assistant to the CTO’.

Michael was glad when Mr Scary Uniform headed back to the lift and left him alone with Melissa. Something about that security man was quite threatening. He was definitely from a military background and he looked as if killing people was just a normal part of his day. The man reminded him of the immortal line from one of his favourite films, ‘City Slickers’. Billy Crystal asked Jack Palance ‘have you killed anyone today?’ Jack replied in his gravelly voice, ‘day ain’t over yet.’ That security guard was definitely a ‘day ain’t over yet’ kind of guy.

It starts now, he thought, as the guard walked away. He wanted to impress everyone he met on his first day. It was an old cliché, but ‘you never get a second chance to make a first impression’ was definitely true. He had to become one of IIBE’s most treasured people assets, so step one was to make sure people liked, admired and respected him from day one.

By working ostentatiously hard he would make IIBE view him as the oil which kept their applications lubricated, the glue which held everything together and the trusted custodian of their precious systems. These great digital programs enabled the bank to screw enormous profits out of each and every one of their clients so they were effectively the beating heart of the beast… and he wanted to be thought of as the trusted cardiologist. He wanted to be their technology superhero until, that is, he became their ultimate nightmare.

“Hi Michael, I’m Melissa and Mr Toner has asked me to get you settled in. He’s got back-to-back meetings up until about two o’clock and he said he’d see you after that. In the meantime, I’ll show you around and get you acclimatised. First, we’ll meet a few of the people you’ll be working with. Follow me.”

Before he had a chance to exchange any pleasantries she was off, so he just tagged along behind her like an obedient puppy as they started to wend their way round the enormous open-plan office. He wouldn’t remember all the names of the folk he was about to meet, however he’d try and make them remember his.

Every introduction was much the same.

“Hi John, this is Michael Phillips. He’s joining the computer support team so he’s the man to ask if you have any problems with the system. You’ll be talking to him a lot if past performance is anything to go by.”

She had the same dig at ‘the system’, as she called it, over and over again. She was clearly not a fan.

“Michael, this is John Kerr. He looks after the wages so he’s an important man.”

After an hour’s worth of introductions, handshakes and small talk he eventually ended up at his new place of work. The oak veneer desk and large faux leather chair were quite impressive, however they weren’t important in his great scheme of things, what mattered to him was the PC. It was his window into the heart of the banking beast. As it turned out, they’d given him an ultra-high specification computer with three 32 inch monitors. That gave him plenty of desktop real estate to play with, although ‘play with’ was the wrong term because this was no game.

“Let the games begin,” he whispered silently to himself thinking about the Roman games. They were brutal affairs - Christians and lions; gladiators and slaves. This was going to be brutal too, but in a completely different way.

Melissa left him with a pile of chunky manuals which documented the main systems for which he was going to be responsible. Nice. He was looking forward to getting stuck into them because technical reading had always been his passion and these manuals would hold all the information he needed to get right inside the bank’s systems. They were his guide books, but he wasn’t going on holiday.

He settled into his new chair and tried to give the impression that he was casually surveying his surroundings. Lots of people were clicking away at their keyboards, talking on fancy phones and furiously scribbling notes on their IIBE notepads… not one of them was looking at him. Not one of them suspected that he was the man who was going to destroy their cosy world.

He was in and he was ready to infect.

He started reading the manuals and was surprised to find how badly written they were. Not much time had been spent on them and it showed. They were over simplistic and clearly hadn’t been updated for some time. He knew from his Noviru days that the bank had some complicated and complex systems. These manuals described the systems as simple and easy to maintain. Maybe they were originally, but it was the lack of simplicity which kept computer specialists like him in jobs. The true computer professional created complex systems which didn’t work to replace simple systems which worked just fine… that way, they kept their buddies busy and well paid.

Shortly after two o’clock Malcolm Toner returned from his rounds of meetings. He called Michael into his office and introduced himself. Toner ran through his standard welcome and motivational speech, and then made it crystal clear who was in charge.

“If you play ball with me then I’ll play ball with you. But always remember… it’s my ball.”

Michael was motivated. He returned to his desk more determined than ever to destroy this place, and he was going to have a ball doing it.

The more Tung drank, the louder he became. The louder he became, the more people noticed him. The more people who noticed him, the more nervous Madrick became. He tried to shut Tung up, but he was at least two tankards too late.

It was about to get a whole lot worse. Soon Tung was engaging with the groups of revellers around them. It wasn’t long before they’d been joined by a ragged bunch of fellow drinkers and Tung seemed determined to become the centre of attention. There must have been forty boozers in the immediate party when Tung pulled out the Scroll and made an announcement.

“I am going to show you the best trick you’ve ever seen in your miserable lives.”

Madrick had to stop him. This was heading for a Vesuvius scale disaster. Unfortunately, the more he tried to get close to Tung, the farther he got pushed out to the edge of the crowd. He was powerless to stop what was unfolding, so all he could do was watch helplessly from the back of the ever growing throng of spectators.

Tung was now on the table and he had the unrolled Scroll in his hands. He was staring at the parchment, he was saying the spell. The crowd was baying.

Madrick had one last chance to stop him. With all his might he hurled his tankard full force at Tung’s head. He missed by a gnat’s whisker, but he missed nonetheless. The last chance was gone as the tankard smashed against the head of an unsuspecting bystander. He crashed unconscious to the ground. At least, now there was one less pair of eyes watching the spectacle.

That was it, all his options were exhausted. He had nothing left to try. He resigned himself to accepting that this was going to end in whatever disastrous conclusion the fates decided. And it was undoubtedly going to be disastrous.

Tung finished the Scroll words, crashed off the table and landed squarely on the back of his head. The hard floor, combined with falling from a height, would definitely conspire together to give Tung, yet again, the monster of all headaches.

“Not my fault this time,” said Madrick to no one in particular, “and it serves him right. I did try and stop him. What a stupid idiot.”

The crowd was still laughing when Tung came to. Apparently the ‘best trick ever’ was this fool staring hard at an old parchment and then falling off the table onto his head. Not the best trick ever, although it was certainly funny enough to keep everyone entertained for a while.

Tung regained his senses, tucked the Scroll safely into his jacket and climbed back onto the table. The crowd cheered in the expectation of seeing him fall off again, but Tung had other plans.

“I’m back, people. That was just a slip of the Tung.”

He guffawed at his own joke. It got no response from the audience because it wasn’t a particularly funny joke and anyway, virtually no one knew his name was Tung.

He ignored the lack of laughter because he really didn’t care. He was here for the money, not the laughs. He believed this was going to be a big pay day so he tried to focus on the new spell image in his head. If he could work out what it was then he could construct some sort of bet around it. On top of that, if he could work it out without Madrick, then he could dump the old man and make his own way in the world.

His befuddled brain imagined making a fortune in taverns all across the land. The drink had definitely clouded his judgement; he’d completely forgotten how powerful some of the spells could be. Some of them clearly had the potential to make him rich beyond his wildest dreams, but in his booze fuelled state, he was happy to gamble it all away for the sake of a handful of coppers and a few free drinks.

He concentrated on the image in his head. It was taking longer than usual; maybe it was a lazy spell. Maybe the ale was the culprit. The haze cleared long enough for him to see something; it was a chicken. He was sure it was a chicken; nice brown feathers and a bright red comb on the top of its head. A hand touched its back. The hand didn’t make sense, so he just ignored it. How important could such a small detail be?

“I,” he declared at the top of his voice, “will create a chicken out of the thinnest of thin air. If I perform this fantastic, magical feat all you watchers must buy me a tankard of the house’s finest ale. Hands in the air if you agree.”

He swayed a bit as he watched all the hands around him rise into the air. Only Madrick kept his hands firmly by his side. Only Madrick had a terrified look on his face. Only Madrick knew the inherent dangers of an amateur trying to interpret the purpose of a spell, never mind a totally inebriated amateur. Madrick could only hope that Tung’s head would smack the stupid out of itself before the disaster erupted. No chance, there was just too much stupid in there.

Pleased with the audience buy-in, he said the spell. He fell backwards off the table and landed squarely on the giant bump which the previous fall had caused. No problem though, he had enough beer in his belly to dull the pain. He climbed back on the table while the crowd howled with laughter. He looked around for the chicken. There was no chicken to be seen anywhere. All he could see was the crowd in hysterics and, at the back, Madrick jumping up and down mouthing the word ‘NO’ over and over again.

He couldn’t understand why the spell had failed. Had he used up all the power? Perhaps he was now flat-lining spell-wise. That was disappointing, no fortune to be made today after all.

He started to climb off the table, with a little more care than his previous two dismounts. He gingerly leaned forward and, for balance, placed his hand on a nearby shoulder. The man he touched immediately turned into a chicken. The little feathery animal no longer supported his descent from the table, so he immediately crashed to his knees, bringing him face to beak with the newly-created hen. Sadness gripped his heart as soon as he realised what he’d done. He grabbed the nearest coat tails in an attempt to haul himself up and get away from the pleading, human eyes of the bewildered man-fowl.

At first the crowd cheered and clapped, although this exuberance quickly turned to terror as Tung touched more of them and they too turned into chickens. Mayhem engulfed the room. Tables and chairs were sent flying as the crowd fled frantically. Panicking patrons trampled over each other in the mad scramble for the exit. In the blink of an eye there was virtually nobody left in the tavern, apart from Madrick who was trying to keep a healthy distance from Tung’s tainted touch. As he backed away, he had to avoid tripping over about ten plump, inebriated hens which were doing excellent impersonations of headless chickens… but with heads.

Madrick counted the chickens and found there were in fact eleven.

“Touch that sleeping drunk in the corner,” he screamed. “You need to make a dozen chickens to complete the spell.”

Tung wobbled unsteadily over to where the unsuspecting drunk slept. He touched the top of his head and the sleeping man immediately turned into a sleeping hen.

“And they say you shouldn’t count your chickens,” said Madrick as he grabbed Tung by the arm and dragged him out of the tavern.

They fled up the dark entry which ran alongside the old inn. They ran and ran until the noises of men shouting and women screaming died away.

“I need to stop,” said Madrick, gasping in lungfuls of air. “That barn over there, it looks like a good place to hide.”

It only took a quick peek round the door to show the place had been abandoned years earlier. They slipped in and collapsed onto the hard clay floor. Almost immediately they both fell into a troubled sleep, Madrick from the exhaustion and Tung from too much booze.

Back in town, the excitement was frenzied as the assembled crowd animatedly exchanged stories and experiences of the unbelievable happening. Everyone who actually saw the event grossly exaggerated their own part in the incident; claiming to have been a mere whisker from the poisoned touch. Many who didn’t see it pretended they’d been right in the midst of the action. And everyone was desperate to find out who the chickens had actually been.

The town’s grapevine was buzzing and soon some of the more fantastic stories reached the ears of henchmen of the rich and powerful. From them, word went out in three different directions; to Mifal, to the Order of White Wizards and to the Order of Black Wizards. Soon all these powerful entities would be searching for the pair of strangers who had, like one of the chickens, flown the coop.

Meanwhile, the barkeeper was feeling pretty pleased about the night’s events. He may have lost twelve of his regular customers, but he’d been able to round up eleven of the hens so now he wouldn’t have to buy any meat for tomorrow’s stew. Also, ale sales had risen dramatically since the incident because everyone wanted to lubricate their throats as they shared their individual adventures with anyone who’d listen.

So everyone in the tavern was happy except, of course, the chickens.