“What do you mean, Master?” he finally replied.
“Sleep,” the Shadow Mage said soothingly, “I’ll need you at peak strength for the morning.”
It sounded like a request, but with the push of his shadow magic, the Shadow Mage commanded it and the Weather Mage fell screaming into the darkness of his dreams. In the meantime, the Shadow Mage got to work as night fell and the lights in the village winked on one by one. He ordered his shadows to prepare the pyre.
*****
The next morning, the Weather Mage woke to the sound of a young girl’s scream. He scrambled up from where he lay on the floor. The Shadow Mage hadn’t bothered to make sure he was lying on the cot when he’d commanded him to sleep. Groaning he tried to ignore the soreness that came from laying on a hard, wooden floor all night. Without pause he went for the door to get outside. It was locked from the other side. Frustrated he banged on the door, “Open this door! I’m a Mage of the Emperor.”
Suddenly one of the people running by stopped in the hallway with a jangle of metal. “You’re out of luck mate. No one can open the door but the person with the key and that would be the other man you’re with.” The Weather Mage cursed and backed away. The door was solid oak – there was no way he was going through it. Turning around he looked for another way out of the room and spotted the small, dirty window.
“That’ll do,” said the Weather Mage. He grabbed a stool, stood on it and proceeded to squeeze his way out of the small frame after pushing the window pane out in the open air. Luckily they weren’t very far up from the ground. He called up his winds and dropped out of the window. The winds caught him in a soft landing on the ground behind the inn. For a moment he hesitated. He was free. No one knew he’d escaped. He could get away. But then the screaming started again and he couldn’t run away.
Looking around he spotted an alley going back towards the front of the inn. Hustling between the leaning walls of the homes surrounding the alley, he ignored the shit on the ground and made his way to the main road. Once there he paused to get his bearings. He didn’t see anything strange at first look.
Across the way a mother stood over a young girl while holding her firmly by the shoulders.
He could hear the mother saying, “Hush Beth! I told you not to listen to your brother’s tales again.”
The mother looked up at the Shadow Mage with the embarrassed look of a parent, “Forgive her, Sir. Her brother has been spinning long tales of the Necromancer again.” Giving her little girl a little shake she said tightly, “Isn’t that right Beth?”
The girl refused to look at the Shadow Mage. She turned to bury her head in her mother’s skirts but then she spotted him. The Weather Mage gave her what he thought was a reassuring smile as he said, “Now lass. What could be amiss? You’ve seen the Necromancer now?”
He was joking. She wasn’t. With a shaky finger and a tear tracked face she pointed at the Shadow Mage’s shadow. It was moving and walking around while the man stood still. The Weather Mage gulped and looked at his riding companion and jailer. Her mother tried to hush Beth again but this time she saw what had made the little girl scream. She clasped her hand to her face to halt her own scream as she, too, saw the moving shadow.
The butcher, whom the Weather Mage was beginning to see was never idle, said, “What’s going on here?” He had walked out of his shop with nothing but a pair of pants on. He looked like a battle-hardened warrior with skin gleaming in the morning as sweat and blood trickled down his muscled abdomen from a pig that he’d recently skinned. A man who could tear the Shadow Mage into pieces at the slightest provocation.
Grimacing when he saw who it was, the butcher said, “Timmoris, you and your weird childhood tricks. They’ve no place here. You’re a man now, as much as anyone like you could be.”
He looked over his shoulder at the gathered village men with a grin. They laughed in response. The Shadow Mage stood unmoving, still as a statue in the middle of the road.
“Now, get your dark creature away from the woman and apologize to the girl,” the butcher said with authority in his voice. As the little girl backed into her mother’s leg and the mother denied that an apology was needed, desperate just to go home, the butcher swaggered forward.
“Timmoris, don’t go all silent on me. We can’t have you scaring children, now,” the butcher said as he stepped in front of the Shadow Mage. With a smirk on his face he continued to taunt the Shadow Mage openly. Baiting him.
“Do we need to go somewhere, Timmy?” the butcher said in a whisper for Timmoris’s ears alone. “Are you going to wet yourself again?”
The Weather Mage watched in sick fascination. The Shadow Mage wasn’t like other mages. As far as he could tell, his magic levels didn’t spike when he was angry and his powers didn’t get away from him when he was threatened. A possible reason why these villagers didn’t know he was a mage.
The Shadow Mage lifted his head up from where he’d been staring at the ground with a deep intensity. Whatever was in his eyes had the mother pick up her daughter and hurry quickly from the village square. Fear does that. The stupid butcher didn’t notice, and in the next second the shadows had converged. The first one went directly for the butcher. It was the Shadow Mage’s own shadow, and it molded the hand of its human shape into a spear. The butcher never knew it was behind him. It thrust its dark spear into his back and through his heart, and the butcher arched back in surprise.
He was dead in an instant, but in the moment just before the light left his eyes, the true Timmoris was standing before him. As the villagers ran away screaming, many were attacked by the shadows and hacked to pieces. Those were the lucky ones. The Shadow Mage continued killing indiscriminately, ordering his shadow legion to kill and dispose of the bodies into the large funeral pyre of stacked logs in the village center.
The Weather Mage watched silently as raging men, defiant women, and crying children fell under the mage’s advance until it stopped. Proudly, the Shadow Mage strode around in front of his new creation. On top of the stacked wood with the hacked limbs of victims blood dripped down in the harsh sunlight. The Weather Mage fought to keep his food in his stomach and turned away in the disgust.
“Now, now, my pet,” said the Shadow Mage, seeing the Weather Mage turn away. “That was only the beginning.”
The Weather Mage flinched, wondering what could possibly be worse. And then the shadows started converging. Each one pushing a human in front of them, all of the remaining villagers who had hidden wherever they could. There weren’t many. The Weather Mage heard screams as they were dragged from their hiding places in lofts, cellars, behind buildings, and the surrounding fields. Finally they stood in a huddled mass before the dripping, unlit pyre.
The innkeeper from the night before was among them. Her face was streaked with blood, her hair disheveled, and she had two young children clinging to her skirts.
Fear must have consumed her, and yet she didn’t hesitate to step forward with her chin proudly raised. She would not beg.
The Shadow Mage watched her walk toward him impassively.
“You’ve done something so horrible, child,” she said, her voice dipping in pain. “How could you destroy your home? Your community?”
“This was never my home.”
He turned away from her and began to count off how many villagers stood before him.
“Ninety-five,” he said.
Looking back at the older woman, he continued, “Do you remember how many lashes I got for stealing that bread? How many days I was locked in that dank hole in the ground while the butcher boys stood over the grate at the top and pissed down on me?”
The carpenter stepped forward, dragging his leg. “I remember, Timmoris.” If he hoped for leniency the Weather Mage knew he looked at the wrong person.