My Path to Magic (19 page)

Well, becoming a killjoy for the staff was not complicated, and no one would cope with the task better than a dark magician.  It remained unclear whether the firm's goal was feasible at all; people from the academy like to work on the undoable!  I feared the work would be such that I wouldn't want to put it in my resume, but two hundred crowns from Quarters were guaranteed to me anyway. 

Better to take the money up front...

* * *

Captain Baer was busy creating a network of agents, a task that would take years, not months, and certainly not days.  Locomotive believed that he was the only one in the office engaged in real work.

The whole of Redstone's NZAMIPS searched for the mysterious sorcerer by the sweat of their brows.  For heaven's sake, who did he do harm to?  The chief of the division saw the heart of the problem and pondered: if a mean trick on the "cleaners" and the capitol's raid on the regional NZAMIPS were cover-up operations, what would be the next move of the enemies?  What would have to occur after the media stirred up the townsfolk with chilling stories of the supernatural frenzy in the neighborhood?  Half of NZAMIPS higher-ups would immediately lose their jobs, but that would happen on the surface.  Following the onset of panic, a muddy wave of forgotten customs and strange superstitions—superstitions that the state had been eradicating since the time of the Inquisition—would flow from the cracks.  And somebody hoped to ride that wave.

Mysticism!  The word that decent people do not say.  An echo of primitive times, when people were ruled by Fear with a capital "F", great and comprehensive Fear, Fear consisting of many small fears: fear of the elements, crop failures, animals and neighbors, and most importantly, fear of creatures from the other world.  A multitude of false gods awaited unwary minds on the back streets of memory, captivating them by the beauty of rituals and enticing by promises of love; but, whatever their adherents alleged, they brought only more fear into the world.  It didn't matter what people asked of ancient magic; they could get what they wanted just by chance, if they were fortunate, but the beggars always paid for the asking.  It seemed that by now people had become more reasonable and forgotten their silly belief in fairy tales.  But logical magic was inaccessible to all and was not omnipotent, and, therefore, again and again under different pretexts people returned to a naive belief in miracles.

That is, the belief is naive in the beginning.  Captain Baer caught one such wave that coincided with the abolition of the Inquisition: under sweet moans about love and goodness, latter-day priests reveled in the power, demanded offerings, and then
dragon tears
, unbridled orgies and human sacrifices took their turn.  The troops hesitated to enter the city, whose residents declared the foundation of Heaven on Earth; a couple months later, the same troops were engaged in the removal of forty thousand corpses, fighting off the few surviving monsters (who, typically, ate only human flesh).  The ruins of Nintark remained inhabitable...

Knock on wood!  Why scare yourself ahead of time?

Locomotive gained enough experience and decisiveness in dealing with "non-formals" (a vague term used in reports for any non-normal humans), and the bylaw mandating "gatherings of no more than three people" hadn't been canceled yet.  The authorities had not forgotten how badly such gatherings could end.  It was enough to reinstate the licensing of public events, and NZAMIPS chambers would be full of the homegrown gurus.  Someone worked hard feeding those psychos with appropriate information, motivating them, taking them under his control, but so far all his efforts came to naught.  The inopportunely-appearing dark magician tamed the supernatural in the region, turning the bloody drama into a comic scene—an occasion for jokes.  With perverted pleasure, Captain Baer crushed the results of someone's long-term work with a steamroller of police forces. 

A big prize wasn't long in coming.

In the blue light of the balls mounted on portable tripods NZAMIPS experts dismantled the ruins of a brick outhouse.  Soldiers in protective suits and masks cautiously stacked clear glass vials with glowing contents into sealed containers.  Locomotive's hair stood on end just from looking at them.

The
dragon tears
!  The first batch in seven years.  But experts claimed that the recipe for the cursed potion had been lost.  Was the source an archeological excavation?  Foreign intervention?  Even the scent of this potion resulted in a state of euphoria for a commoner and summoned a desire to trust and obey, not thinking about the consequences and repenting for one's deeds.  Booze for killers!  In the white mages the potion caused irreversible addiction; the dark reacted to its action much more simply—they just puked.

All the residents of that house would have to be investigated regarding their involvement in the sales of that stuff.  The distributor of the poison escaped the interrogation: upon seeing the police, the psycho maniac blew himself up in the boiler room that had been converted into a warehouse.  The poor fellow did not know the specifics of the building code.  The main apartment building only lost its glass windows; in the outhouse, the roof got blown off and one of the outside walls destroyed.  There were no casualties among the NZAMIPS team; two were wounded by fragments of the roof, but the suicidal maniac died on site.

The poison served him right!  Surely, he was hooked on his own potion, and they wouldn't get anything coherent out of him in the interrogation anyway.

"You are to be congratulated."

Before turning around, Locomotive drove a smug grin off his face.

"Yes, sir!  The operation went off almost flawlessly."

Mr. Satal nodded gravely, looking over the luminous scattering: "This will make the capitol authorities fuss around.  But they will start asking difficult questions."

Locomotive shrugged indifferently: "I have requested forty-four times an increase in funding over the last ten years; I can show you a copy of each of them."

The coordinator angrily shook his head: "I don't give a shit about your papers!  What will we do when inspectors arrive here?  They can stick their noses anywhere, and I don't even know what you and Larkes have done."

For some reason, Locomotive didn't think of that.  It isn't enough to be honest, you must look honest.  Any normal organization inevitably accumulates a couple of episodes that appear ambiguously untrustworthy.  As soon as the auditors dug out something like this, he could kiss his captaincy goodbye!

"I ... will do the cleanup."

Mr. Satal nodded with satisfaction: "I'm glad we understand each other!"

Captain Baer worked with superiors of a dark nature for years, but it was the first time that he was so frankly offered to commit fraud.  He was almost ordered to...

"And one more thing," the coordinator stopped halfway to his limousine, "I didn't have time to go into the details of our main investigation."

Locomotive snorted mentally.  Indeed, he didn't have time!

"There is an opinion that our mage developed an unconventional power channel.  We are not talking about a wild Empowerment, but, perhaps, university instructors remember an unusual student.  Let's say, over the past seven years.  I think it will be easier if you talk to them," Mr. Satal concluded.

Naturally!  All university instructors of dark magic were traditionally salaried NZAMIPS part-timers.  An unconventional channel... And then Captain Baer thanked all the gods that the empath wasn't anywhere near the coordinator.  He knew one magician whose power channel was guaranteed to be nonstandard, and he knew him very closely...

"Clean up the tail, Mr. Satal?  We will do that, sir!" Tail? What does that mean?

Chapter 14

For my next work day at BioKin I arrived ten minutes early just to watch the others coming.  Bummer!  All employees were already at their workstations (as far as I knew, because I wasn't officially introduced), but they weren't doing any work.  They all were in a mourning mood, suffering in silence.

I wondered if someone died there.

Upon closer examination, I was the only one who dressed more or less decently, in the sense that I had neither trousers that were stretched at the knees with fringe around the lapels, nor pseudo-artistic patches on my shirt, nor a hairstyle as if I had run across a stray camel.  Naturally, that put me in opposition to the team, and they immediately attempted to humiliate me: the red-haired secretary (Quarters' relative) brought me utterly cold coffee.  When I tossed a warming spell into the cup almost without looking, nobody else showed a desire to joke.

No one tried to make me a closer acquaintance, either.  Well, I easily figured out who Johan was—the guy Quarters mentioned, because there was only one white mage among them.  A guy in leather pants could pass for the alchemist Carl (with the last name of either Fartsing or Ferting) and a younger lad with bright red hair - for his assistant; a chubby little man, sitting closer to the coffeemaker, resembled an accountant.  Boss Polak and his secretaries needed no introduction.

I could easily picture a white mage in depression here, but it remained a mystery what or who could have driven seven people into a stupor.  If all my future employers are like these, I'd rather go back to the garage business to fix motorcycles.  I'm sure that will be a very profitable business!  But since I took money (and twice for the same job), decorum demanded that I help them.  The Tangor are proud, and reputation can be lost only once.

Pretending to be an emotionally dull dark jerk, I went to the boss to find out if my previous day's work was done correctly.  They paid me for something, right?  Mr. Polak looked at me painfully, but I was deaf to his suffering.  I myself had to invent the next assignment: "Maybe I'd better learn design of a particular node and focus on it?  Or work on the gas generator system as a whole?"

"I'm not sure if you will understand the scheme..."

I smiled politely: "Coupling alchemy with magic is my strong point!"  It was true, at least for dark magic. 

Once more he looked around the tables in confusion, and I finally grasped it: "Perhaps, your drawings are not systematized?  I could do it.  Orderliness helps a lot in work!"

He perked up a bit, nodded, and asked me to organize the documents in chronological order.  Unfortunately, most of them had no dates, and, armed with archaeological methods, I had to arrange the papers in layers.  Periodically, I tried to obtain advice from Polak, then from Carl, and soon they got fed up with me.  Polak deserted first, followed by the rest; by lunch time, I was left alone in the office (except for the secretaries).  Finally, that got me.

"Girls, what happened?  Or have you been like this the whole time?"

Ron's relative rolled her eyes, enjoying an opportunity to show her awareness: "They are in depression since yesterday!"

"Do not keep me in suspense!  What happened yesterday?"

"A test at the sewage factory," the brunette stepped in and sniffed.  "Another one!"

It explained a bit of the situation.

"And how did it end?"

"As always!"

That meant they failed it.  I could have guessed that.

By the end of the day I managed to go through almost a third of the documents and get acquainted with the subject of the work.  Polak was wrong when he said that I wouldn't understand the scheme.  Drawings are typically made according to the same set of standards; otherwise, manufacturers wouldn't be able to use them.  And it doesn't matter what you put in the fermentation vat—beer or sewage; from the alchemical point of view, it is all the same, as soon as it is organic.  As well as I understood it, they tried to design a complex nonlinear control mechanism as a set of perforated drums, to which the device was supposed to turn under a specific combination of input parameters (like through a set of locks).  The idea was beautiful, but it did not work for some reason.  I wasn't sure that I could figure out why the design was failing.  Two variants of different complexity were presented in the piles of papers, and, judging by the contents of the documents, both schemes of perforation were developed by the local white mage, Johan.  I don't mean that his schemes were wrong, but he was guided by the logic of the magical process, and the limitations of such an approach were seen very well in the design of my motorcycle.  That gave me some hope that the problem could be solved...

Coming to work the next day, I caught Johan stiff drunk.

My coworkers pretended that it was nothing out of the ordinary.  I tried not to pay attention to Johan, blend with the team, but it was beyond me.  I decided they didn't understand what was happening. Okay, as to the dark mages, there are few of us in Redstone, and the dark from the university do not talk much to the townsfolk.  So the latter do not know what is normal for a dark.  But the white ones are a different story.  There ought to be as many of them as dirt here!  Was I the only one who knew how Johan's drinking would end?!

A white magician who goes on a drinking bout will usually not come out of it alive.  Well, maybe he will, if you resort to involuntary hospitalization.  Their psyche is considered to be fragile and not adapted to the ills of life.  Once unable to cope with the nervous shock and falling into a chemical relaxant, a white will drown his mental anguish in wine again and again, and he will have less and less willpower to get out of it.  But the physical condition of a white is directly related to the mental one...

Perhaps, the firm just wanted one of its developers to die?  No, that was a bad joke on my part...

But I needed to save the man, no kidding!

Driving off the secretaries, I made killingly strong coffee and went to bring the guy, with a runny nose, to his senses; I took his hand and put the cup in.  Regretfully, I had no egg yolks and pepper handy, but I threw so much lemon in the coffee that my eyes started watering. 

"Have a sip, please!  You have to drink it out."

White mages respond to physical contact differently—a touch sets them on an intimate footing and makes willing to trust.  Given that alcohol intoxication increases suggestibility, I hoped that he would do as I said.