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  "Yes, I am. Since the time of Babylon. Before that I wandered the waste, much like you."

  "I am relieved you are simply insane. At first, I thought you were an assassin."

  "But I am an assassin," he said and grinned. “And I want to tell you, that’s a fine horse you have. He’s strong, sure-footed and handsome... Will he run for office in your new democracy of Asia?”

  “He has bad teeth, and he's stubborn. No one would vote for him.”

  The old man cackled and slapped his knee. “I’m going to enjoy riding him through the mountains.”

  “He’s worn out and perhaps ready to die, much like me. But he’s my horse, and he’s going to take me to Samarkand.”

  “Oh, ho ho! You don’t need a horse, for you are not going anywhere.”

  Zolo laughed and shook his fist. “By Allah’s thumbs, you’re a bandit?”

  “You still don’t recognize me?”

  Zolo saw nothing familiar. “I am not Pericles, so I have never met you.”

  “Careful, you are wading in blood,” the old man said, his face darkening. “Maybe you remember these?” He reached inside the folds of his blanket and withdrew a bundle of smooth black sticks inscribed with Chinese-like symbols. He waved one of the sticks and a blinding white-hot pain exploded at the base of Zolo's brain.

  Yarrow sticks! The most powerful magic instruments on Earth.

  Zolo wanted to move, to run away, except he was frozen to the spot. His antagonist laughed and tapped his knuckles with the stick and the burning pain crawled down Zolo's spine to his tailbone. “Stop!” he screamed. The pain was so intense he wanted to throw up his lunch. He watched the old man skim his hand over the sticks and they glowed with an ominous, purple light. A hammering sound filled his ears, a thick strident beat that grew in volume.

  It was his heart and it wanted to explode!

  For the first time in many years, blind fear paralyzed Zolo. His head throbbed as he finally realized the truth: the decrepit ancient must be a twelfth-degree black warlock, for no one else could have mastered the yarrow sticks and accessed their power in such a way as to affect him so profoundly. Only three spell-crafters in the whole world had ever possessed that kind of knowledge. One in Wales, one in India, and...

  The old man spoke again, his eyes gleaming like hellish meteors. “And I can see from the pain in your face that you have been reminded of the Virgin Mary box where I put you at age 16. Do you remember? The scores of nails piercing your weeping flesh? DO YOU, ZOLO BOLD?”

  “Temujin Gur,” he gasped.

  “Yes, I am he,” said the old man. “In a moment, I will be on my way and your soul will be scattered on the winds of time. Even Catherine Romanova cannot save you. Indeed, she will be the last to fall, and you, Zolo Bold of the Kazakhs, will be in Hell to greet your beloved whore when she arrives!”

  Gur raised a gnarled fist that held aloft three yarrow sticks. He tossed them into the air where they floated in space, whirling slowly in a circle, slowed in time. In the center of the space between them, a blue light pulsed, casting a severe shadow across the room. The entire room began to vibrate with earthquake-like force, and shrill howls pierced the air, as if Gur were being cheered on by a chorus of hellish invisible demons. Terrified, the innkeeper ran for his life.

  With no magic left, Zolo drew his dagger to pounce on Gur's old body and bury the blade in his foul heart, but something stopped him in the way an upraised spear point stops a charging horse. Gur had opened his mouth, ever so slightly, and within, Zolo saw four gleaming black eyes, like those of an impossibly enormous spider. At that moment, Zolo’s knife dropped to the floor. The warlock raised a hand before his mouth, palm up, and a spider with four eyes strolled into the evil blue light. “Your old friend, this ancient god,” Gur said and cackled. "He knows how much you worship him."

  Zolo could not speak. He felt an odd tingling in his own hand. He smelled a scent like that of corrosive acid cooking flesh and glanced down to see his fingers blackening to a mummy-like husk, thinning and curling upward towards his wrist.

  This moved him.

  Whirling like a mad dervish, Zolo sprinted for the door, the vision of that hideous spider swelling in his brain. Gur mocked him as he fled with a voice thundering so loudly that even camel drivers a mile away heard it boom over the steppe:

  "THE MAGIC OF THE WORLD MAKERS WILL NOT SAVE YOU, ZOLO BOLD! TELL YOUR MOTHER AVIZEH I HAVE SENT HER SON HOME!"

  Outside in the bright sunlight, Zolo ran, first one way, then another, shoving aside two camel drivers in his way who cursed him vigorously. But as he sprang upward to mount his horse, he burst into a cloud of shiny powder, a glittering smoke that refracted the light into a rainbow of color as it wafted into the air and rushed away, higher and higher, as if lifted by a hand of hot wind into oblivion.

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  The War for Utopia – Hellish Magic Technology - Freddie and Zolo

  AS SHE KNELT AT THE ALTAR FOR HER CORONATION in the year 1762, Catherine Romanova, soon to become Czarina of All the Russias, she felt like starting a new war. She'd already endured two hours of a five hour ceremony while wearing twenty pounds of silk coronation dress and nine pounds of Great Imperial Crown, and the excessive pomp and boredom drained her of goodness. To distract herself from the seemingly endless drone of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch as he recited Old Testament scripture, as well as the oven of suffocating heat created by a hoop dress big enough to hide twenty dwarves, Catherine lifted the curtain on theater by replaying to herself memorable events in the war of all wars, the ultimate war to define the fate of human nature itself.

  Her old violin-playing mentor, Niccolo Paganini, called it "The War For Utopia."

  No matter the name, so it was, and would be again. How many utopias had been created as a result? How many fallen? She’d lost count. No doubt her future struggles would ceaselessly birth new utopias from the carnage. And speaking of carnage, people die in wars, of course. Even magical beings die. But it never ceased to strike her as curious and odd that despite her great powers she could not stop dying.

  Already, she’d grown tired of it, and it was never convenient or easy. Her first death as a young girl at the hands of Eréndira Marquez, the Wizard Goddess allied with her blood enemy, Edison B. Godfellow, was still the most painful because of the many serf families, even children, whose souls were sacrificed to restore her life. Such an act of sorcerous barbarity forced a guilt she carried all her days and sleepless nights; and what did "the white knights" of war have to show for the battle?

  Yet another crater on Mars?

  And of course, more needless deaths.

  For all she knew, she could be dead even now. The French philosopher Descartes, to prove his own existence in 1644, said to himself, "I think, therefore I am," and Freddie could do the same, but could she trust her "I" to be the real one? As she would later note in her memoirs begun many years before:

  Perhaps my own body and mind were grown from a pot by that damnable Godfellow and I existed at the royal coronation as a living copy of my original self. Though entertaining such thoughts might result in the onset of insanity, I must nevertheless admit that I live in a world of games within games. I am never completely sure of what I am, or the reality of where I am. I only know I must proceed as if all is real, and morality is within my grasp.

  Musing further on the insanity while the aged Orthodox Patriarch stumbled over a dull reading of Genesis inevitably took Catherine back even further, to the very beginning, a distant time at age fifteen in the Prussian castle of Bärenthoren when she was known to the world as Princess Fredericke von Anhalt (aka “Freddie”)—the name born by her until her coronation as Czarina of All the Russias.

  Did I really die at the hands of Master Paganini as the vision foretold?

  She wasn't sure. Not anymore.

  Regardless, it began that afternoon with a sound. Even now it gives me chills.

  A barely audible titter, like dis
tant footsteps on decayed leaves. At first, she did not understand and tried to ignore it, believing it to be the scraping sound of a mouse, or some other invading creature, for every now and then a cat bird or a dove flew in the study and fell to the floor, finally tiring itself out with fearful flutters. So truly, it could have been any number of things. Freddie vowed to forget the disturbance and return to her prior tasks: recreating the Greek mathematics of Eratosthenes in an attempt to determine Earth’s circum-ference while imagining herself Sir Francis Drake sailing the Azores in search of Spanish gold.

  Putting quill to paper, she sketched the hull of Drake's ship, The Golden Hind, before jotting down a few notes on the logic of Eratosthenes, and just as she measured the miles between the two cities in his equation, Syene and Alexandria, the strange tittering repeated. But louder this time. Enough to make her hand slip, the point of quill jaggedly defacing her work.

  What in Hell’s name?

  The disturbance became too curious and odd to allow any further progress on the circumference of Earth.

  Though Freddie hated breaking personal vows, she rose from her writing desk, her ears straining to understand. She soon realized the sound stirred from a corner of her study there in the Prussian castle of Bärenthoren, from a dark place in the shadows between a George III globe and a stand of antique books given her by her father, Prince Christian.

  The tittering again.

  Suddenly afraid to look—for she knew that nothing in her experience could have made such an eerie stir—she nevertheless felt overwhelmed by curiosity, and her own need to find courage in the face of a growing fear she found humiliating. Despite her instincts, she tried to explain it away once more. Could it be a mouse? A trapped bird of some kind?

  Or perhaps a trick of yours, mother? It wouldn’t be the first time you employed the spirits of Bärenthoren to frighten me.

  She sought courage in the newfound belief that Princess Johanna might well be to blame, and she resolved to face whatever it might be. A chance to defy “the witch of Prussia” should not be missed!

  She stepped closer to the sound. Her eyes peered into the shadows. At first, she saw nothing, but her fingers felt as if tiny needles suddenly pressed into them.

  By the pricking of my fingers, something wicked nearby lingers.

  She knew it to be a sign of supernatural evil lurking nearby, her fingers pricking on other occasions whenever demonic spirits wandered the halls of Bärenthoren Castle seeking redemption or revenge; but the only object demanding her attention near the George III globe was the painting her mother had purchased from Augustus of Poland two years before in 1741—a work by the Dutch painter Vermeer entitled, Girl Reading a Letter at an Open Window. But then, about to turn away from the painting and search further, Freddie noticed a frighteningly odd thing:

  The image of the girl in the painting had vanished.

  The princess blinked. Nothing changed.

  Only a dark silhouette remained, and she believed it a trick of light. Or was she going mad? She knew of elixirs that tortured the victim’s mind with apparitions before they died.

  Are you trying to poison me now mother?

  Before she could consider it further, she heard the titter once more, cold and low, poking out from that dark corner just below the painting… and something moved, I know something moved. Fight or flight, Freddie? She saw a roundness, a vague shape take form, and she imagined a head nearly a foot above the floor.

  But no, it wasn’t her imagination.

  It floated towards her out of the shadows, and what emerged into the light appeared like nothing she had ever seen: a thing so twisted, so out of place in her world, in any world dreamed by women or men or God that it made her doubt her own sanity even more. The upper body of the unholy thing hovered in the air above the floor without legs or support.

  The Vermeer girl!

  Freddie knew the muddy blond hair and high forehead, the thin coils of curl, the colors of the old dress, and that face now dour and smirking, as if it knew a dark secret or a wicked event that would soon harm her more than she could imagine. Freddie trembled like a cold little animal and moaned, and as she did so, the unholy thing from the painting spoke to her:

  Princess von Anhalt, do you know who I am?

  The voice was mousey and girlish, yet evil, an echo of black abyss and death in the tone. More words were then spoken by it, and in a coarse, alien language she did not understand, though with a spell-like cadence she would come to know in future years.

  And as the alien voice spoke, an even stranger thing happened.

  The huge George III globe snapped free of its wooden frame with a loud crack and rose into the air. Freddie shook so much she could barely stand. She wanted to scream at the horror of it all as the globe floated up, higher and higher until it covered the dark gaping hole in the Vermeer painting where the girl’s head had been. Then it began to spin on its axis, faster and faster. It spun to blur and brightened to a red sun, a fiery disk turning dark, blackening to full eclipse, far away and low above a range of snowy mountain peaks even taller and more rugged than the Alps she had visited when only a small child.

  The air before her dimmed to fire and shadow, and upon a smoking rock of earth beneath that sun-black alien sky, the future Czarina of All the Russias, more terrified than ever in her life, witnessed an apparition: no bigger than her outstretched thumb in the distance, a hovering ghost that grew legs and became a woman stumbling forward, her body sheathed in a torn white coat of fur, her breath coming heavily.

  Freddie recognized her.

  Her own dark chestnut hair flowed down to the woman’s waist, her own hazel-dark eyes flashed with fury and terror as the body shivered. The woman was her. An older version though, perhaps by ten years or more, and too, Freddie saw a clamoring mob of machines closing fast behind her. Clacking over the rock and whining like dogs, the machines appeared like gigantic Indian locusts, but each one frog-faced and glaring with the eyes of a hideous reptile. The nearest one opened its mouth and screamed like a saw cutting metal—the language that of the haunted Vermeer girl, coarse and alien, echoing to the distant mountains like a great beast in agony.

  Freddie gasped and called to her older self:

  “It’s me! COME TO ME! I WILL SAVE YOU!”

  The woman heard the shouts. She raised her head and stared back at Freddie, saw the younger version of herself looking anxious and fearful. She immediately recalled this same circumstance centuries before when at the age of 15 she’d watched herself stumbling forward like a pitiful drunken serf chased by whining hell-machines beneath a sky of black sun.

  As the woman recovered from her initial shock at the sight of her innocence and naivety from so long ago, her eyes hardened to desperation, and she shouted:

  “I am Catherine Romanova, the woman you will become! A war is coming and the time you know will be no more. The future of your world depends—.”

  Then nothing. The young girl vanished.

  Catherine Romanova’s vision from centuries past had evaporated, as if on cue, just as she had remembered—just enough glimpse to tease her, frighten her.

  Only fear mattered then. Now also.

  Catherine turned to see the murderous Fracas Machines of Kathmandu gaining on her, driven by beings of dark magic and relentless as hounds. She knew it was a race to the cliff with only moments remaining before she would be torn to pieces. Her bleeding feet must do what her own magic could not, for her voice and invincible aria were no more. She could not sing the mountains into cloud, or the terrible machines into the black oil from whence they came.

  She could do naught but seek her own death.

  .

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  THE AIR BEFORE FREDDIE VON ANHALT DIMMED AND SHARPENED once more to the familiar walls of her study in Bärenthoren Castle. The horrible screeching machines, the black sun above the snowy mountains, all dissolved. The George III globe back in place.

  Was it all over?

&
nbsp; Not quite. Once more she heard the tittering, that frightening voice crawling into her skin and reaching for her throat. Still trembling, she closed her eyes, steeling herself to run from the room. Then she heard a different sound—a clattering of dishes on the other side of her study door, and she could only scream one word in response, the loudest scream she’d ever made, for she realized this new sound signaled the arrival of her salvation:

  "FATHER!"

  The door to Freddie’s study flung open as if by a gust of giant’s breath, smashing into the wall with a force that shook the floor boards. Prince Christian burst through with a tray of his daughter’s lunch, for he took it upon himself to bring her food during times of study, and never shirked in this task. “What in Saint Dorothea’s name!” he yelled, bulling towards Freddie, his eyes the size of ostrich eggs, his white wig askew and gray waistcoat flapping as his body eclipsed the scene of horror. “What is it, my darling?”

  "PLEASE TAKE ME FROM THIS PLACE!"

  Without hesitation, he threw the clattering silver tray of food onto the night-table, scooped up Freddie in his robust arms as if she were a small child, turned and pounded furiously from the room. Stiff as stone in her father’s grip and weeping to herself, Freddie longed to erase the memory of the smirking demoness of Vermeer, to forget that horrid voice, that mousey voice of evil. Little did she know, the memory would never completely fade.

  For the moment though, only escape mattered.

  Prince Christian clutched his daughter in his arms and rushed down the narrow granite stairs. Yet still, as the distance from the room increased, Freddie swore she heard a sound of rushing air, as if the smirking girl closed on them from behind, still whispering her name. Or was it a thing from that nightmare world of black sun?

  Her father reached the base of the stairs, and without slowing, ran across the stone floor and straight through wide open doors into the Great Hall of Bärenthoren Castle. And as his battering-ram momentum carried them forward, Freddie glimpsed the fleeting face of a boy. Perhaps a servant in the castle? … Yes, it was Willie, her nanny’s nephew. What is he doing here? But no time to consider. She just saw him staring at her with eyes big and black as those of an owl, his face with the look of a crazed fox retreating into the shadows of the Great Hall.