The Lost Colony (6 page)

Rawley pulled his blade from the bench and winked at N
^o
1. This was not a friendly you-and-I-share-a-secret wink; it was a let’s-see-what-color-your-insides-are wink.

N
^o
1 sloped reluctantly to the head of the class, passing the smoldering embers of last night’s fire. Wooden meat skewers jutted from the coals. N
^o
1 paused for a beat, gazing at the sharp skewers and thinking that if he had the guts, one of those would probably do the trick.

Abbot followed his gaze. “What? You think a meat skewer is going to help you?” The demon snorted. “I was buried in molten lava once, Runt, and I’m still here. Bring one up. Do your worst.”

“Do your worst,” echoed several of N
^o
1’s classmates, their loyalties obvious.

N
^o
1 reluctantly selected a wooden needle from the fire. The handle was solid enough, but the tip was black and flaky. N
^o
1 tapped the skewer against his leg to dislodge loose ash.

Abbot grabbed the meat skewer from N
^o
1’s hand and held it aloft.

“This is your chosen weapon,” he said mockingly. “The Runt thinks he’s hunting rabbits.”

The jeers and hoots broke over N
^o
1’s furrowed brow like a wave. He could feel one of his headaches coming on. He could always count on one to show up just when it was least wanted.

“This is probably a bad idea,” he admitted. “I should just pound on your armored plates like those other morons . . . I mean my classmates.”

“No, no,” said Abbot, handing back the skewer. “You go ahead, little bee, prick me with your sting.”

Prick me with your sting
, warbled N
^o
1 in a highly insulting imitation of the pride leader. Of course he didn’t warble this aloud. N
^o
1 was rarely confrontational outside his head.

Aloud he said, “I’ll do my best, Master Abbot.”

“I’ll do my best, Master Abbot,” warbled Abbot in a highly insulting imitation of imp N
^o
1, as loudly as he could.

N
^o
1 felt beads of sweat spiral down his stumpy tail. There really was no good way out of this situation. If he failed, then he was in for another bout of jeering and mild personal injury. But if he won, then he
really
lost.

Abbot knocked on the crown of his head. “Hello, Runt. Let’s get moving. There are imps here waiting to warp.”

N
^o
1 stared at the tip of the skewer and allowed the problem to take over. He placed the flat of his right hand on Abbot’s chest. Then, wrapping his fingers tightly around the thick end, he twisted the skewer upward into one of Abbot’s armored scales.

He twisted slowly, concentrating on the point of contact. The scale grayed slightly with ash, but no penetration. Acrid smoke twirled around the skewer.

Abbot chuckled, delighted. “Trying to start a fire there, Runt? Should I summon the water brigade?”

One of the imps threw his lunch at N
^o
1. It slid down the back of his head. A lump of fat, bone, and gristle.

N
^o
1 persisted, rolling the skewer between thumb and forefinger. He rolled faster now, feeling the skewer take hold, burning a slight indent.

N
^o
1 felt an excitement build in him. He tried to contain it, to think about consequences, but he couldn’t. He was on the point of success, here. He was just about to accomplish with brains something all these other idiots couldn’t do with brawn. Of course they would pummel him, and Abbot would invent some excuse to undermine his achievement, but N
^o
1 would know. And so would Abbot.

The skewer penetrated just a fraction. N
^o
1 felt the plate give way, perhaps a single layer. The little imp felt something he had never felt before. Triumph. The feeling built inside him, irresistible, unquenchable. It became more than a feeling. It transformed into a force, rebuilding some forgotten neural pathways, releasing an ancient energy inside N
^o
1.

What’s happening? wondered N
^o
1. Should I stop? Can I stop?

Yes
and
no
were the answers to those questions. Yes, he should stop, but no, he couldn’t. The force flowed through his limbs, raising his temperature. He heard voices chanting inside his mind. N
^o
1 realized that he was chanting with them. Chanting what? He had no idea, but somehow his memory knew.

The strange force throbbed in N
^o
1’s fingers in time with his heartbeat, then pulsed out of his body into the skewer. The pin turned to stone. Wood morphed to granite before his eyes. The rock virus spread along the shaft, rippling like water. In the flash of a spark, the skewer was completely made of stone. It expanded slightly into the breach in Abbot’s armored plate.

The expansion cracked the plate open half an inch.

Abbot heard the noise, so did everybody else. The demon pride leader flicked his eyes downward and realized instantly what was going on.

“Magic,” he hissed. The word was out before he could stop it. With a vicious swipe, he swatted the skewer away from his torso into the fire.

N
^o
1 stared at his throbbing hand. Power still shimmered around his fingertips, a tiny heat haze.

“Magic?” he repeated. “That means I must be a—”

“Shut your stupid mouth,” snapped Abbot, covering the cracked scale with his cloak. “Obviously I don’t mean actual magic. I mean trickery. You twist the handle on that skewer to make it crack, then you
ooh
and
aah
as though you have actually achieved something.”

N
^o
1 pulled at Abbot’s cloak. “But your scale?”

Abbot drew the cloak tighter. “What about my scale? There’s not a mark on it. Not so much as a smear. You believe me, don’t you?”

N
^o
1 sighed. This was Leon Abbot; the truth meant nothing. “Yes, Master Abbot. I believe you.”

“I can tell by your insolent tone that you do not. Very well, proof, then.” Abbot whipped back his cloak, revealing an unblemished scale. For a moment, N
^o
1 thought he saw a blue spark playing about where the mark had definitely been, but then the spark winked itself out. Blue sparks. Could it be magic?

Abbot jabbed the imp’s chest with a rigid finger. “We’ve talked about this, N
^o
1. I know you think you’re a warlock. But there are no warlocks; there haven’t been since we lifted out of time. You are not a warlock. Forget that idiotic notion and concentrate on warping. You’re a disgrace to your race.”

N
^o
1 was about to risk a protest when he was grabbed roughly by the arm.

“You slippery little snail,” shouted Rawley, spittle spattering N
^o
1’s face. “Trying to trick the pride leader. Get back to your place. I’ll deal with you later.”

N
^o
1 could do nothing but return to the bench and bear the insults of his classmates. And there were plenty of those, usually accompanied by a missile or blow. But somehow N
^o
1 ignored these latest humiliations, staring instead at his own hand. The one that had turned wood to stone. Could it be true? Could he actually be a warlock? And if he was, would that make him feel better or worse?

A toothpick bounced off his forehead onto the bench. There was a sliver of gray meat stuck to the end. N
^o
1 glanced up to find Rawley grinning at him.

“Been trying to get that out for weeks. Wild boar, I think. Now, pay attention, Runt, Master Abbot is trying to educate you.”

Oh yes, the history lesson. It was amazing how much Leon Abbot managed to insert himself into demon history. To hear him tell it, you would think that he had single-handedly saved the 8th Family, in spite of the meddling warlocks.

Abbot studied the hooked talons on his fingertips. Each one could gut a large pig. If Abbot’s own stories were true, he had warped at age eight while wrestling one of the island’s wild dogs. His fingernails had actually changed into talons during the fight, lacerating the dog’s side.

N
^o
1 found this story highly unlikely. It took hours to warp fully, sometimes days, but Abbot expected them to believe that
his
warp was instantaneous. Hogwash. And yet all the other imps lapped up these self-glorifying legends.

“Of all the demons who fought in the last battle at Taillte,” droned Abbot in what he probably thought was a good voice for history lessons, but in what N
^o
1 thought was a boring enough voice to turn soft cheese hard, “I, Leon Abbot, am the last.”

Convenient, thought N
^o
1. Nobody left around to argue. He also thought: You look your age, Leon. Too many barrels of pork fat.

N
^o
1 was an uncharitable imp when in a bad mood.

It is the nature of out-of-time spells that the aging process is drastically slowed. Abbot had been a young buck when the warlocks had lifted Hybras out of time, and so the spell, combined with good genes, had kept him and his huge ego alive ever since. Possibly a thousand years. Of course, that was a thousand years in normal time. In Hybras time a millennium meant very little. A couple of centuries could skip by in the blink of an eye on the island. An imp could wake up one morning to find that he’d evolved. A while back, every demon and imp in Hybras got up one morning with a stubby tail where his magnificent long one used to be. For a considerable time after that, the most common noises on the island were the sounds of demons falling down, or swearing as they got up again.

“After that great battle in which the demon battalions were the bravest and fiercest in the People’s army,” continued Abbot to hoots of approval from the imps, “we were defeated by treachery and cowardice. The elves would not fight, and the dwarfs would not dig traps. We had no choice but to cast our spell and regroup until the time was right to return.”

More hooting, plus stamping of feet.

Every time, thought N
^o
1. Do we have to go through this every time? These imps act like they’d never heard this story before. When is someone going to stand up and say: “Excuse me. Old news. Move on.”

“And so we breed. We breed and grow strong. Now our army has more than five thousand warriors, surely enough to defeat the humans. I know this because I, Leon Abbot, have been to the world and returned to Hybras alive.”

This was Abbot’s golden nugget. This was where anyone who stood against him withered and blew away. Abbot had not come directly to Limbo with the rest of Hybras. For some reason he had been diverted to the human future, then sucked across to Hybras. He had seen the human camps and actually brought his knowledge home. How all this happened was a bit hazy. According to Abbot, there had been a great battle, he’d defeated fifty or so men, then a mysterious warlock had lifted him out of time again. But not before he’d grabbed a couple of things to bring back.

Since the warlocks had been explosively removed from the 8th Family, nobody had much of a clue about magic anymore. Normal demons had no magic of their own. It had been thought that all the warlocks had been sucked into space during the transferal of Hybras from Earth to Limbo, but according to Abbot, one had survived. This warlock was in league with the humans and had only helped the demon leader under threat of grievous injury.

N
^o
1 was highly skeptical of this version of events. First of all, because it came from Abbot, and secondly, because warlocks were being cast, once more, in a bad light. Demons seemed to forget that if it hadn’t been for the warlocks, Hybras would have been overrun by humans.

On this particular day, N
^o
1 was feeling a special attachment to the warlocks, and he did not appreciate their memory being sullied by this loudmouth braggart. Hardly a day went by where N
^o
1 did not spend a moment praying for the return of the mysterious warlock who had helped Abbot. And now that he was certain of magic in his own blood, N
^o
1 would pray all the harder.

“The moon separated me from the rest of the island during the great journey,” continued Abbot, his eyes half closed as if the memory had him in a swoon. “I was powerless to resist her charms. And so I traveled through space and time until I came to rest in the new world. Which is now the world of men. The humans clamped silver on my ankles, tried to make me submit, but I would not.” Abbot hunched his massive shoulders and roared at the roof. “For I am demonkind! And we will never submit!”

Needless to say, the imps went into overdrive. The entire room heaved with their exertions. In N
^o
1’s opinion, Abbot’s entire performance was wooden to say the least. The
we will never submit
speech was the oldest page in Abbot’s book. N
^o
1 rubbed his temples, trying to ease the headache. There was worse to come, he knew. First the book, then the crossbow, if Abbot didn’t deviate from the script. And why would he? He hadn’t in all the years since his return from the new world.

“And so I fought!” shouted Abbot. “I kicked off their shackles and Hybras called me home, but before I took my leave of the hated humans, I fought my way to their altar and stole away with two of their blessed objects.”

“The book and the bow,” muttered N
^o
1, rolling his orange eyes.

“Tell us what you stole!” begged the others on cue, as if they didn’t know.

“The book and the bow!” proclaimed Leon Abbot, pulling the objects from beneath his robe as if by magic.

As if by magic, thought N
^o
1. But not actual magic, because then Abbot would be a warlock, and he couldn’t possibly be a warlock, as he had already warped, and warlocks did not warp.

“Now we know how the humans think,” said Abbot, waving the book. “And how they fight,” he proclaimed, brandishing the crossbow.

I don’t believe any of this for a minute, thought N
^o
1. Or I wouldn’t, if we had “minutes” in Limbo. Oh, how I wish I were on Earth with the last warlock. Then there would be two of us, and I would find out what really happened when Leon Abbot came calling.