Twenty Eight
More Golems followed them through the tunnels, coming from chutes, side entrances, and the dozens of other cavern entrances. They formed a human wall behind them, separating them from the Warbots. Duncan cringed every time he heard a bullet strike flesh, and every time he had to wipe the blood spray from his face. The tunnel sloped steadily upward, to the surface and hopefully freedom. It finally narrowed enough that the Warbots couldn’t follow. They kept shooting anyway until they finally ran out of ammunition, and Duncan couldn’t help but wonder how many Golems had fallen to save him and Jessica. Why had they done it, he wondered, and then wondered if he could ever forget the sound of bullets striking flesh.
“There’s light ahead!” Jessica exclaimed. “We’re almost out of here.”
Duncan had to shield his eyes from the bright sunlight as they stepped out of the cavern into the daylight. Everything was a blur, but he heard the distinct sound of a helicopter’s blades whirling, and for a moment, at least, he hoped Jim had come to find them. The hope didn’t last long as more machine guns barked and, once again, he steeled himself for the strike of bullets. When none came, he opened his eyes and gasped.
“Lord Probate.”
“Duncan Cade,” the Lord Probate began, “we meet again. I suspected we would, of course, but not here. Tell me, son, what are you doing at the Golem summoning grounds?”
The Lord Probate was surrounded by a dozen red-armored Magistrates. Each was carrying an ancient battle rifle that looked as if they were brand new. The helicopter behind them was not like Jim’s small, two-person model. It was a massive black troop carrier that Duncan recognized from the Magician Histories as a Blackhawk. The dozen or so Golems that had pushed them out of the tunnel system lay dead at their feet.
“Tell me, Duncan Cade, convicted traitor to the State, what do you seek in the Golem summoning grounds? What have you done to motivate un-charmed Golems to assist you? You see, that isn’t a good thing, Duncan. Golems cannot be controlled without Magic. Therefore, you cannot, by your very nature, control them.”
“You killed them,” Duncan said, looking at the bodies around them. “You killed them for absolutely no reason.”
“You’ve killed them, Duncan, by contaminating them. We had no choice but to put the inferior stock down.”
Duncan didn’t know how much the Lord Probate knew about the ancient town sunk in the rock below, and he didn’t know if he knew what Duncan knew about the origins of the Golems, so he had to be careful with his words. “Do you know where they come from?”
“Of course we know, heathen. Jeremiah Fredrick set them here for our use. He created them for our use and stored them here, in these caves, until a time when we needed them. You, Duncan, were actually born a Golem. You just did not know it.”
Duncan tried to hide his relief. He was sure the Golems were the citizens of Center, Texas, and that the Creeping Death had somehow affected their Stasis Level Three, freeing their bodies from their thousand-year slumber, but trapping their souls in the Void. He was sure the interaction of the Creeping Death with whatever force his ancestors had created in the last days of the Last War to protect them would have been the subject of intense scientific debate a thousand years ago; now it was a secret he had to protect at all costs. If the Lord Probate knew about Center, Texas, he would stop at nothing to destroy it.
“Where is your father, Duncan Cade?”
“You know he’s my father?”
“I’ve always known about Diamond Jim’s arrangement with Albert Cade. I condoned it all those many years ago, hoping one day that our fair city would be rid of you. Now, though, I regret that decision. You should have been thrown out with all the defectives at birth. I should have never listened to your mother beg, and never have listened to my own daughter, the other traitor, as she pleaded for your life all those times. You have been more problem to the State than even your father, especially now that you’ve contaminated the Golem stock.”
“I’ve done nothing of the sort. I’ve done nothing to the State. Nor has Diamond Jim done anything to the state but try and make you see reason.”
“Is that what you call terrorism? Reason?”
“Your magic is eating away at the world. The Creeping Death is sucking the life out of everything, and eventually it will suck out your life as well. It’s already happening,” Duncan said. “Your magic is fading. Maybe not tomorrow, maybe not next month, but eventually it will happen. You’ll lose everything you know. You’ll be like you are now, away from the city and powerless, resorting to thousand-year-old weapons to enforce your rule.”
“Your weeks in the Wastes have sharpened your tongue, Duncan Cade!” The Lord Probate was on the verge of screaming. He raised his hand as if he were going to summon a fireball to strike Duncan down, but nothing happened.
“You see. You have no power here in the Wastes. You, Lord Probate, are just like me.”
One of the Magistrates stepped up, raised his rifle, barrel backwards, and struck Duncan in the head. The last thing he remembered, as he began to fade, was them putting handcuffs on Jessica.
He awoke to the steady vibration of the helicopter’s rotors. It was a constant thump, thump, thump in his head. His brain screamed in pain and the first thing he felt was the massive welt on his forehead where the Magistrate had struck him. Duncan then noticed he was lying across Jessica’s lap and she was stroking his head in steady rhythm with the helicopter’s blades. He sat up, holding his aching head.
“Where are we?” he asked and heard the weakness in his own voice.
“Oh, Duncan,” Jessica began, and he could hear the amazement in her voice. The fear was gone, at least a bit. “We’re flying. We’re really doing it, without magic.”
Duncan turned and stared out the small round portal behind him. He could see the ground rush by below. It was almost entirely black and rotted. The Creeping Death had spread as far as he could see, in the ruined and destroyed cities, in the countryside…everywhere. There were occasional spots of green, like around Shreveport and the old state of Louisiana, but they were few and far between. He thought he could see the Creeping Death overtaking one green area, somewhere past Louisiana to the east, but then dismissed it as a trick of the eye. It didn’t move that quick, did it?
“How long?” he croaked, his voice still weak.
“Only an hour or so,” the Lord Probate answered for Jessica from across the cabin. “Long enough for us to enter Mississippi. If you look to the right, you’ll see the grand city of New Biloxi. I know the Lord Probate there. Good man.” His earlier rage was gone, which bothered Duncan even more than the Magistrate striking him. He thought the Lord Probate might very well be insane.
Duncan stared at the grand Magician city. Like New Dallas, it floated hundreds of feet above the ground and hundreds of pipes ran down from it to the ground level. From their elevation, he could see more of the great pipes glowing blue and running through the countryside. The pipes from New Biloxi all ran east and combined into even larger pipes.
“Where are you taking us?” he asked.
“To where every Magician wants to be, to our homeland, to New Atlantis.”
Jessica paled visibly and Duncan took her hand. “We can’t go there. We aren’t Magical.”
The Lord Probate burst out in laughter. “You will step foot on the continent, the first of your kind to do so, because Jeremiah Fredrick deems it so. Just as he deems the sun to rise in the east and set in the west. Everything that is, on this world, is because of Jeremiah Fredrick.”
“Fredrick has been dead for a thousand years,” Duncan said. “He doesn’t exist anymore, and even if he does, he doesn’t have the power to make the sun rise and set. That’s crazy.”
The Lord Probate laughed aloud. “Of course he is. Tell him that when you meet him. He will so enjoy that. I will tell you one thing, though, that might make that meeting go easier on you. Tell me where your father is and what he’s up to. We had reports that he
left Shreveport a few days before you. What’s he doing this time?”
“I have no idea. I was hoping you could tell me,” Duncan lied. He was just glad that the Lord Probate didn’t have magic to force him to spill the beans.
He laughed again. “Somehow I doubt that. Your father is a miserable man who has killed Magicians. He is wanted, Duncan, as you are, and if you tell us where he is, I could possibly put a good word in for you with the Master.”
“My father didn’t kill anyone. You did. You killed your own people so you and your Magistrates could stay in power.” He turned to Jessica. “You see, they aren’t needed anymore. They haven’t been needed since the Last War. There was no more threat after they beat us. What did they need a standing army and a band of dictators for after the last human plane crashed into the ground? They aren’t needed, but the power was too enticing. You see, Jessica, they want to stay in power simply to stay in power, and they use fear to keep that power.”
The Lord Probate began clapping. “Bravo, Duncan Cade, bravo. I feared you were absolutely stupid, but I am happily wrong. Not that it matters, of course.”
“You admit this?” Jessica asked in shock. “You’d really sit here and admit this to us?”
He laughed again. “Why wouldn’t I? You will never, ever step foot from New Atlantis again. You will never meet anyone who would believe you. You’re right. The Magistrate hasn’t been needed in a thousand years. We grew stagnant and weak, useless, preying on our own people to make ourselves feel useful. Your father was one of us, though he was never happy.”
“Jim was a Magistrate?” Jessica asked.
“Not Jim,” Duncan told her. “My adoptive father, Albert Cade.”
“Correct. He was always so high and mighty, thinking we should disband the Magistrates and the Lord Probate. Your other father, though, he was the real help. You see, he was a true anomaly. The first man born in a Magician city without magic in nine hundred years. We thought we’d bred out the non-magicals after the war, but you just keep popping up.”
“The cafeteria in the school…”
“Oh, yes. We didn’t eradicate the human race. We were too few to start again. We needed you, at least in the beginning, until we built our own numbers up enough to sustain ourselves. We would always pair a non-magical with a Magician and, eventually, we’d imparted everyone with magic. It was Jeremiah Fredrick’s great work. But without the threat of humankind just around the corner, without that fear of retribution for what we’d done to you, we became weak. Diamond Jim changed that for us. He gave us an excuse to instill the fear, the control needed to keep an ordered society from chaos.”
“You won’t get away with this,” Duncan promised. “We will find a way to stop you.”
“You, along with who, exactly? Your kind is already making preparations to go back underground. How you managed to survive that long out there in the first place amazes me, but back you will go. And we know this time. We know where you’re hiding, and once we reestablish magic in the Wastes, we will come and finally eradicate humans from the earth. Of course, we won’t tell our citizens that. Fear of you is just too handy. Since your escape, we have been showing them pictures of your settlements and your weapons of war. The drumbeats of war are sounding again, Duncan, for the first time in a thousand years, louder and louder every day, and I must say it feels good.”
Duncan tuned the rest of the madman’s ravings out of his mind, instead turning and watching as the pre-war helicopter sped over a ruined land. As they got closer to the coast, the cities grew thicker and Duncan cried openly at the wanton destruction. There were the graves of millions upon millions of people, people who were flawed like he was, and who had, as a whole, done very bad things. No matter what they’d done, though, they hadn’t deserved to be knocked out of existence by power mad Magicians. Jessica held his hand tightly.
“It’s going to be all right, Duncan,” she whispered.
He tried agreeing but felt like slime for lying. He didn’t agree. He didn’t think any of it was going to be all right ever again.