Elemental Magic: All-New Tales of the Elemental Masters (24 page)

He put his hand to the wall. It made him feel better. He moved deeper into the cellar, thinking about the labor gone into it. Slaves? Neighbors? Free Indians? Had Tilly’s man dug this before going to fight the war? She was old enough. Could have lost her husband in Atlanta, or Antietam, or anywhere. Had her man fought to keep Nathaniel’s pa in chains?

The passageway opened into a chamber.

The air was damp here, cool enough to raise pimples. Light was just enough he could see shelves filled with bulbs and boxes and twisted roots wrapped around like balls of twine or like tentacles of sea monsters he once imagined on the boat to Cuba. Soft mold grew over a bag of something in one corner.

“See all the way back?” the old woman called.

He saw another doorway deeper into the cellar.

“Yes, ma’am,” he bellowed. “I’ll start there.”

Nathaniel stepped to the edge of the darkness, and put his hand to the doorway. A scream came inside his head, a pulse of pain that seemed to start at the base of his palm and stream through every part of his body. He pulled back as if his hand was burnt, but the screaming still echoed. Another shrill voice joined it, then another and another.

He heard the old woman grunt from above. Hinges strained as he turned. The door slammed and the darkness was complete. The
scritch
of lock on brace crawled over his spine. The click of the key was loud as a shotgun blast.

The voices faded to silence.

“No!” he yelled as he ran blindly back to the stairs. He crashed upwards and pounded on the wooden door above, pounding and pounding, but knowing no one could hear him.

This was no root cellar, he realized. This was a crypt.

He saw it clear then. The screaming voices were remnants of other men who had been caught up before him. He felt their spirits as distant vibrations in the soil, and he remembered Crazy Carl’s voice when he spoke of the old woman. Why hadn’t he listened to him? Why hadn’t he followed his instinct?

Nathaniel crashed his shoulder against the door until it bruised. Nothing. He ground his hand into the earthen wall and thought it might give, but it was too strong and would not budge. The sense of sound came back to him though, the music, the beat in the distance that had always been with him. It was far away now, muted as if muffled by the pillow he slept on the past two nights. But it was there and its presence made him feel better, even though he couldn’t quite make out its pattern.

As he strained to hear it, though, Nathaniel also realized he could “see” here—only outlines and vague details, but it was vision of sorts and it was coming better with each passing breath. Strange.

He pounded the door above one more time.

“I am a free man!” he yelled. He ran back down the stairs, through the chamber, and into the back room. He threw a moldy bag to the ground, and slime sluiced down in a messy glop. He kicked a shelf and it cracked with splintery echo. “I am a free man!” He hit the walls again and again and again. But as time passed his voice grew less and less firm, his commitment to the idea less and less real.

Finally, he fell back.

Thick air filled his lungs with its morbid stagnation as he sat alone with his defeat. His anger drew down then. Became focused. Became distilled to its purest form, a feeling as powerful and intense as he had ever allowed himself to feel. Calculating and cunning. It sat in the center of his being like a new creature made of only the most needful vengeance. It was bold. It was shrewd. It tasted powerful and sharp . . . and . . . and so bitterly delicious. It rose the hair on his arms and made his skin burn like a cleansing rain—hard, ragged, and clear. It pounded his skull.
I will break you
, it said.
I will destroy you
.

Hatred, he realized. That’s what this was.

It was a cool and determined hatred, a hatred he had earned. Hatred they all deserved. Nathaniel would have his revenge. He was done playing by the rules. No more. There were no rules. There was only making things right. And that could happen today or tomorrow or next month or next year or . . . time didn’t matter anymore. There was no such thing as rules or time. No such thing as healing. There was only this glorious, glorious thing burning inside him.

He opened his thoughts and felt the presences again, ghosts and spirits that hovered around him like buzzards on a field.

“Get me out . . . of here,” a reedy, almost-not-there voice said. It was a bird-thin man lying in the corner, a frail collection of bones and skin and little else.

Nathaniel’s hatred flickered. This was his cellar. What was this man doing in his cage?

“Who are you?”

“Name’s . . . Thomas.”

He saw the bones then—scatterings of ribs and hips and spines that lay in the corners as if they had been tossed together—a bone salad, Nathaniel thought.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“She collects . . .”

“She collects men, yeah, I get it.”

“No . . .” Thomas took a thin breath. “She collects . . . magicians.”

“I ain’t no witch.”

“I said . . .
magician
.” Thomas tried to move, then gave up. “A witch is . . . another thing.”

“I ain’t got no magic.”

“You must . . . she catches . . . only mag . . . icians.”

“Then she made a damned big mistake this time.”

His smile relaxed, and Thomas gazed with such pity Nathaniel felt stripped bare.

“Never you mind that, anyway,” he said. “I can’t get you outta here no more than I can get me outta here.”

“Yes, Gamba,” Thomas said. “You can.”

Nathaniel reacted.

“How’d you know that name?”

“You wear it . . . like a badge.” Thomas’s paper-thin lips curled in a grin of satisfaction so tight Nathaniel thought it might tear. “At least . . . I can still . . . read that.”

Silence grew awkward.

“I . . . can help,” Thomas said at last.

“Help what?”

“Call your . . . Elemental.”

Nathaniel stared at Thomas, realizing now that his vision here was as good as it might be out in the open. And realizing that this man, Thomas, was crazy as Carl. His eyes had that look about them, too, that piercing clarity he’d seen in other men as they lay dying on red-stained sheets or sweating with the pain of burns, lucid on morphine and smelling of rot and rum and reek.

“Don’t . . . let me . . . die here,” Thomas said.

“You’re the magician,” Nathaniel said. “You get us out.”

“I am Air . . . my magic . . . doesn’t work here . . . but you are Earth . . . do you feel . . . it? . . . I can aid . . . if you will . . . try.”

“What do I got to lose?” Nathaniel said.

“Need to . . . do . . . better than . . .” Thomas swallowed again. “That. Must accept . . . need . . . to
be
your magic . . . need to
be
Gamba.”

The name felt like a slap this time.

“What do you know about what I ought to be?”

Thomas moved a dismissive finger.

“What do you . . . want? I will get you . . . three tasks . . . three’s good to start . . . tell me what . . . you want.”

Nathaniel laughed.

What did he want? What did it matter what he wanted? The idea was crazy, the question laughable. He was locked in this root cellar by an insane old woman, and this man wanted him to make wishes like they were butterflies that might spring like gold coins out of the ground. Who was crazier—Carl, the old woman, this dying man, or himself for even bothering to listen?

But Thomas’ expression was serious as blood. Nathaniel felt his anger again. He felt both his hands, though he still knew only one was real, felt fear of the old woman and the sheriff and the country he had given that hand for. And he felt the venom of revenge boil in his gut.

“I want out of here,” he said in a firm tone. “That’s what I want. And I want the woman to pay.”

“And?”

He stopped and thought. He knew what else he wanted. It was big. Important. It could change everything.

“I want William McKinley dead.”

Could he do that? He was just one man. Could he actually kill King Billy? The idea flowed through him like a river of ice. He could. Yes. He felt it. Someone had to fix things. Might as well be him.

“Oh, no, Gamba . . . that’s . . . dangerous magic.”

“Don’t matter.”

“Magic minds . . . itself. Dark magic . . . will eat you up.”

Nathaniel said nothing.

“You will . . . lose yourself—”

“How about you quit telling me
what
to do, and start telling me
how
to do it? Else we ain’t never getting outta here.”

Thomas accepted that.

“Take . . . my hand.”

It was so light Nathaniel was afraid it might crumble like ash. He felt a connection at their touch, though. He knew it by the flavor of Thomas’s presence—a light taste of mustard.

“Feel . . . the voice . . . inside you? The voice . . . of Earth?”

“Yes,” Nathaniel said.

Thomas whispered words Nathaniel could not make out.

“You have . . . great will . . . great anger . . . use them . . . call the voice . . . tell it your . . . need . . . let the voice . . . rise . . . and tell it . . . what it must do.”

Through their connection, Nathaniel saw how Thomas matched his anger with the power of the rhythm he’d always had running through his mind. Nathaniel didn’t know what to do, but the essence around him—his magic itself—bade him further.

“Call him, Gamba,” Thomas said in a voice buoyed by magic. “Call him now. Bring your Elemental here.”

Nathaniel had no words, but he opened his mouth and he sang—sang his sadness, sang his need, and most of all, sang his anger. The ground under him rent. Fresh soil rose, and he smelled worms and bugs and roots and limestone and granite. It was a creature, a thing, a mound as thick and dense as the world was itself.

It radiated power.

He felt its presence burn against his mind.

“Get us out of here,” Nathaniel commanded through his song.

The Elemental gave a scream of complaint, but it ripped the ceiling away, opening the cellar like a jar and leaving a crater in the yard like an open scar.

The old woman cowered against his cord of wood.

He pointed at her.

“Make her pay for this.”

The Elemental plunged what might have been an arm into the ground, and from the soil rose the complete skeletons of ten, fifteen, maybe twenty men. They rose from the cellar floor. They rose from graves dug in the woods around the house. And they rose from patches of ground on the yard. Tilly was an Earth Magician, he realized. Just like him. She had buried these men with her magic, just as she would have buried him. Now her magic turned, and their bones rose to expose her crimes.

People came running from the distance, wanting to know what was happening. A woman screamed and covered her mouth with one hand at the sight of the rising skeletons. The sheriff came on his horse, his rifle flashing from its holster.

Tilly recovered, and spoke to the Earth Elemental.

Nathaniel felt the pull somewhere deep inside.

“No!” he yelled, feeding his anger to the creature. “It’s mine!”

He sang a deeper song.

Her flowerbed rose like a red wave and fell down upon her until she was wrapped like a caterpillar in a cocoon. She began to sink, then. Inch by inch she slid deeper into the soil. She cried and screamed and pleaded, but the Elemental had his way, and in a short while the woman and her mound of Georgia clay both disappeared completely, replaced with a silence that seemed to stretch forever.

*   *   *

By light of day, Nathaniel saw how bad off Thomas really was. His skin was gray, his arms no bigger around than a half-dollar. His shirt and pants were torn and half eaten by mold and slime. He gulped air, his jaws working like a fish out of water. His eyes blinked against the sudden Georgia sun.

“Gamba . . .” he whispered.

Nathaniel bent closer.

“Thank . . . you.”

“I suggest you be getting away from him, boy.” The sheriff stood at the lip of the cellar, rifle dangling from the crook of his arm. “You got some answering to do.”

Nathaniel’s Elemental made a moan of hunger. He held it in check as he gazed at the sheriff.

“Start talking, or you gonna dangle.”

Nathaniel’s power surged toward the sheriff, the strength of his will levered by the furious power of his anger. His Elemental was ready. The aura of power was the most incredible thing. He could kill this man. Could crush him. Could throw him over that elm tree he was so fond of.

He could. Yes, he could.

He looked at the Elemental and smiled.

“No, Gamba . . .”

Thomas’s grip crushed Nathaniel’s hand. He whispered magic. A breeze kicked up, growing to a wind, then a gale. A funnel reached down fast as lightning, ripping the rifle from the sheriff and throwing it into the woods. Wind buffeted the house. The sheriff’s horse raced off, as did the rest of the townspeople. The sheriff lost his hat before he ran too.

The gale died as quickly as it began, and Nathaniel was alone with just Thomas and the bones of dead magicians.

“Why did you do that?” Nathaniel said, standing over Thomas. His unsatisfied anger balled in his gut. “I do my own fighting.”

Thomas was a husk now. Each word came at immense cost.

“Dark . . . magic . . . you . . . don’t . . . understand . . .”

“What’s that?” Nathaniel pressed closer.

“Didn’t . . . want . . . you . . . to regret.”

And Nathaniel saw the truth.

Thomas had seen Nathaniel’s intent and stepped in with his hurricane. Damn him. Damn him to hell. What right did Thomas have to protect him? Nathaniel wanted to hit him, but he saw Thomas’s eyes carried that lack of fear comes when a man knows he’s in his last breaths, and it brought him back to his senses.

He put his hand on Thomas’s forehead.

“Promise . . . no . . . dark magic . . . until . . .” Thomas closed his eyes. “Until . . . you know.”

“You don’t owe me nothing,” he said.

“Promise . . . me.”

“All right,” he said because it felt like the right thing to say. “I promise.”