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"You've got everything we need?"
The cultist leaning at the door took another moment to blow smoke into the air between them, spit derisively at the floor.
"Just about."
They didn't like him here: too uptight, too educated a wizard, complete with the robes and the grey beard. Not a scrappy little zealot like the rest of them here — they called themselves magicians, just the same, but they were all un- or barely-trained, the unfortunate and resentful. Leander, for his part, found them narrow-minded and petty, exasperating. But he would only have to deal with them for a few hours more.
He wait a few seconds longer for the cultist – a makeshift guard, he supposed – to stamp out his cigarette and step aside, hip aching and hand beginning to tremble upon his cane, and when it seemed the man had no intention of doing so, he could hold it in no longer.
"Are you going to let me enter or not?" he snapped.
Reluctantly, the guard shoved himself off the doorframe, made just enough room for Leander to pass, peering suspiciously at him all the while. Merlin's sake, I'm not going to steal anything of yours, he wanted to snarl; they had nothing of value to steal. What they had, which he needed, was power. Pathetic as they were, twenty cultists chanting all together could still generate far more raw magical force than one skilled mage chanting alone. And so he had made a deal with them: he would provide them a spell of safety, to conceal them and their horrible little cult from the law, and in exchange they would help him teleport away. His bad knee – mauled twenty years ago by wyvern talons, hastily and badly healed in the heat of the moment, too complex, old, and magical a wound for any fixing now – wasn't strong enough to allow him any chance of running as far as needed without a nice, strong teleport. Which meant he needed them, for now.
It was his own fault, really, for running out on his last job. A legal, official job, which would have paid him in real gold, for once, not just in grateful words or glamoured copper. But he so despised working with magistrates anyway, and even more so being asked to 'clear out' a local werewolf pack that was doing absolutely no harm to anybody. And if he'd refused the offer they would have just found another wizard willing to actually vaporise the poor wolves, so naturally instead he had taken the contract, warned off the pack, and fled into the night under a disguise. He just hadn't been able to get very far.
So for now he was a fugitive, with nothing but grubby cultists for allies. He'd given them a week to gather the materials needed for both spells, and spent that time hiding in an inn and avoiding them – both for the sake of avoiding any undue suspicion, and because he found them so distasteful. Mostly he had just sat around in an attic making potions to sell on the road and fund his travel, after he'd teleported far away enough to be safe calling attention to himself as a wizard: some genuinely useful minor potions of healing, light, or luck, some just glittery concoctions to entice bored children and fishwives. The week was up, his bag was full of clinking little vials, and the cult said they just about had all he needed. Very well: he'd check, consult with their leader, and then they could begin with the rituals. If nothing was amiss, that was.
"Where do you keep your spell components?"
It was a narrow row house, all but identical to the hundreds around it in the industrial district. Leander had to hand it to them: he would not have suspected it was a den of magical iniquity, with even the guard they posted outside plausibly just a grouchy indigent smoking on his front step. They conducted their rituals in the cellar, he took it, by the near-visible aura of enchantment floating up from below the floorboards. Presumably that meant that they had converted one or two of the bedrooms into storerooms; he began up the stairs in that direction.
Like a cat determined to get underfoot, the guard ducked around him, hurried up past him on the narrow staircase. There was an expression of confusion and alarm on his grizzled face.
"I don't know that Mrs Chambers wants you alone up here -"
Leander huffed, didn't bother to try to muscle by. One more bad fall on his bad leg might truly take him out of commission. He hated to admit it, but he couldn't afford to take any risks. He raised his chin, tried to keep his dignity despite it all.
"Go find Mrs Chambers, then."
Chambers was their leader: a stern, cunning old woman, a widow several times over, whom Leander rather suspected had done away with most of her husbands. The guard took a step down away, then hesitated, glancing between Leander and the door at the top of the landing, revealing inadvertently that it was most certainly the storeroom in question.
"Listen," Leander began lightly, trying for avuncular and likely landing on patronising. "All I wish to do is to help you. By all means, have Mrs Chambers look in on me; all she will find me doing is checking the ritual materials against my spellbook."
He didn't really need the spellbook, of course. He had been made to memorise the recipes for both safety and teleportation spells all the way back in his first year of apprenticeship: his old master had been strict like that. But amateurs such as these liked to see a great big leatherbound tome being waved about.
The guard scowled at him, chewed over his suggestion. Sighing, Leander made the motions for a truth spell, added in a few sparkles for good effect as the magic tangibly settled over both of them.
"I swear. I only mean to ensure the rituals can proceed."
Sceptically, the man backed down, seemed to just about accept his words. Not entirely comfortable — but then, nobody liked truth spells. People tended to clam right up when he cast them. As a young academic magician, before he'd… gone freelance, as it were, Leander had developed a habit of casting one every time he entered a room, which everybody had always hated. Their own fault, in his opinion, for not learning how to talk in circles without outright lying, as he had long since done.
Still, he wasn't stopped from coming into the storeroom. The door wasn't even locked; he supposed it wouldn't need to be, with a guard out front and cultists in every other room. If the law found them here, they'd be incriminated – and likely also incinerated – long before anybody actually found their contraband.
It was dusty and cramped in there, but in the way of a room that was still very-often used. The bare wooden boards down the narrow path of floor not covered by boxes or bottles or jars had been worn thin by a great many years of busy feet searching for this or that, and there was clearly a vague sense of order to the chaos: ordinary potion ingredients by the door, dragon-hide and mermaid scales and powered unicorn horn all set out on the windowsill to dry, roots and leaves and flowers cluttering a low chipped table where they could be chopped. The newest and most expensive components, those Leander had asked for, were all stacked haphazardly there too.
All of that took Leander a few minutes to make sense of, though.
The first thing he noticed was not a spell component at all — or, not solely one, anyway. It was a boy, bound at the wrists to the table.
He was slumped akimbo on the floor, tied so tight to one of the table legs that he scarcely could have sat up straight if he tried, a rough cloth gag stopping his mouth. His eyes flickered up to Leander, anxious and bleary with sick dread — not surprise. Only when Leander stepped forward and let the door close behind him did he twitch away, chin to his chest, scruffy hair falling in his face, fear making him draw his legs back, curl his helpless hands.
It was obvious what the boy was for. He hadn't anticipated that they would… but it wasn't entirely shocking, he supposed. The protection ritual required rather a lot of blood. It wouldn't have been an issue – a cult of this size would be frothing at the mouth to bleed for their cause – except that the blood needed to be non-magical in nature, free entirely of curses or enchantments. There was too much risk of cross-contamination, otherwise; use the blood of someone who's been shapeshifting, for example, in a protection spell, and you might end up with only a very safe flock of birds.
He just didn't realise that things were dire enough for the cult that they would feel the need to resort to kidnapping. A brother, a wife, a grown child, a bloodbag used to working for a fussy vampire — anybody's blood would have sufficed. The amount needed was significant, yes, but survivable; the sacrifice wouldn't need to be killed.
Unless, of course, the mages conducting the ritual were a hostile, ugly, illegal cult: too paranoid to ask for volunteers, not willing to allow a survivor the chance to go running their mouth to the city guard.
Leander sighed. What a mess he'd gotten himself into.
He lowered himself painfully down into a crouch before the wretched little captive, leaning heavily on his cane, did his best to inspect him. The boy didn't look physically damaged, other than the sore back and shoulders holding such a position would give him, and the reddened, bruising skin around his wrists from pulling at the ropes. There were old bruises on his neck and around his sharp collarbones, though, where the too-large scrap he had for a shirt was falling open, but – oh, oh no, nevermind. Not bruises, for the most part: hickeys, bite-marks, perhaps a few fading finger-marks.
He suspected he knew where the cult had got their sacrifice from, then.
The boy didn't put up a fuss when Leander used his cane to lift his chin – probably couldn't get away any further – though tears pricked in his eyes, and a horribly helpless look came into them. The skin around the gag truly looked very painful up close; there was no need for it, really, as far as Leander could see. Perhaps the boy had been screaming up a storm, but if so, he'd long since given up and been cowed into quiet.
Usually Leander would just use a snap of magic to cut all the bindings — but if he meant to use the boy for a ritual, he'd better not. Awkwardly tugging the cloth out from his mouth it was.
The boy made no attempt to bite Leander, thank Merlin; he worked his jaw sorely for a moment, screwed his eyes shut against pain — and then, still without opening them, managed to croak out,
"Are you gonna kill me?"
It was horrible thing to be asked. Leander liked nothing about this situation, least of all the way that the boy had said it: not are you gonna kill me, it seemed, but are you gonna kill me? He was quite resigned to it already. Not a question of if: only who.
Frowning, Leander opened his mouth to say no, of course I won't kill you in his most soothing tones — but found that what came out instead was,
"I don't believe there'll be any need for that."
Truth spell was still in effect, then. Damn. And rather stronger than he thought it'd be. He allowed himself to consider that perhaps he ought to stop casting them so carelessly, and crossed his fingers, too, that it wasn't strong enough to spoil the blood and ruin his spells.
"Listen," he began, trying to take advantage of it rather than fretting. "What's your name, lad?"
The boy glanced at him hesitantly from beneath his lashes.
"…Jack."
He blinked, tried to swallow the word the moment he said it, clearly shocked that he hadn't been able to lie. Leander eased himself back up to his feet with a painful creak, pretended not to notice.
"How old are you, Jack?"
"I'm — I'm not — I'm nineteen, I think. Harry likes it when they think I'm younger." Leander winced; nineteen was already basically an infant. "Doesn't matter, though, does it?"
This last part was blurted out all at once, bitter red-rimmed eyes turned despairingly up to Leander.
"Not gonna let me get any older," insisted the boy, a deflated mumble.
"Nonsense."
"The others, they said they were gonna -"
His exasperation with the boy evaporated; the miscommunication was almost certainly the cult's fault, of course.
"Didn't the others tell you what they wanted with you? Or did they just pull in off a street corner without a word?"
Once again, he'd said too much, and far more harshly than he'd meant to. If the boy took the reference to street corners as a barb, though, he gave no sign of it — meaning that Leander was more or less correct in his assumptions.
"Walked in of my own free will," said the boy miserably. "Didn't realise what they were doing 'til…"
He tugged at his bound wrists in futile punctuation. Leander tutted disapprovingly.
"Even when they grabbed me - I mean, they was being weird, but I thought they just wanted me roughed up a little." The boy shrugged tiredly, tried abortively to shift himself into a more comfortable sitting position. "Harry always sends me with the rough customers. I'm used to it."
"Harry's your… pimp?"
He pronounced it with distaste; Jack didn't even flinch for a moment.
"Uh huh. But then - the fuckin' freaks downstairs, they said they needed my blood, they're gonna bleed me, and I - I couldn't just let them -"
So he'd fought, Leander took it. And the cult had responded. He allowed himself to make a vaguely sympathetic noise, even knowing he was no good at being sympathetic.
"The bleeding shouldn't be enough to kill you, lad." Not unless he had some kind of bleeding disorder, anyhow.
"What?"
Oops. Damn truth spell — he hadn't realised he had said that last part aloud. Still, Leander waved it off; a young man who spent all his time being bitten and fucked would already have known of such an affliction, he was sure.
"It’s not happening yet, in any case. Look, Merlin's sake, I was only here to check on the ingredients. There’s no ritual planned for at least another few hours.”
The boy was giving him another unreadable look, too suspicious to even feel anything he might wish to — and perhaps becoming too cautious of the truth spell to try to speak, too.
“Only a few more hours, then,” Leander went on steadily, turning his gaze to the ingredients again, trying to count them. “A little bloodletting. You might feel dizzy. And then you can go, of course, and enjoy whatever you get for rough customers, well-earned.”
A blink, almost confused — and Leander felt his bad knee seize briefly as a very nasty suspicion appeared in his mind.
“…You are paid, I hope?”
For the first time, something close to shame passed across Jack’s expression: a vestigial thing that soon buried itself in resignation. He was silent a little too long, and then croaked reluctantly,
“…I got a debt.”
Not paid, then.
Leander allowed himself a few moments to curse vehemently in his head, chewing back the words. Damn the pimp, and damn the city that had let it happen, damn the cult, damn the whole damn rotten mess -
What to do with the poor creature, though? Leander could damn them as much as he liked — maybe even properly hex them later; give that awful pimp some embarrassing warts, perhaps – but that didn’t undo any of the fact that it had all happened, and he now had to reckon with it. He couldn’t just leave the boy here.
But he had been quiet, stroking his beard and staring furiously into the middle distance, for a bit too long, and evidently Jack had taken his silence for something it was not. He leaned his head back against the table leg to bare the long bruised column of his throat, exhaled slowly, and regarded Leander in disappointment.
“You gonna fuck me now?”
Leander’s bushy eyebrows shot up; Jack swallowed, said blankly, resignedly,
“I can, I can make it good for you, sir. Won't take long, I’m good with my mouth. They all say so."
They were still under a truth spell, Leander reminded himself grimly. The boy meant his words. But that also meant -
"The others here have been fucking you?"
A timid nod. Leander cursed again in his head.
"I'll have them stop."
"Please no, don't," burst Jack, to his surprise. "S'the only time they give me water."
Leander heaved a great sigh, starting fumbling for the flask of water at his belt.
"You don't need to - they shouldn't be - oh, damn it, are you going to run if I untie you? I can't hunch over with this, not with my knee."
Jack hesitated again, chewed the inside of his mouth for a moment, then admitted,
"I want to. But they got guards posted, don't they?"
"Smart lad."
He shrugged, slumped a little.
"I won't run. Where could I go if I did? They'd catch me. Or Harry would, and he'd drag me back here."
The boy looked a little more like a young man and less like a wretched child, once Leander had cut his bonds and he'd unfolded himself to his feet, stretching and shaking off the discomfort of having sat so long. He was leaning on a crate of wolfsbane now, eating a little of the emergency, mostly-visible, hardtack Leander kept with his invisibility powder. But he looked exhausted, too, and harder-worn than anybody his age ought ever to be.
"Could I really live?" he asked, fragile as a soap bubble, once Leander had turned away and gone back to his ritual preparations, trying to give him a little privacy.
"Hm? Yes, yes. Get some black pudding in you afterwards, balance out your humours a little, lie down. You'll be fine, probably."
A snort.
"Probably."
He sounded somewhat reassured, though. Around them, there was the creak of activity in the house, footsteps on the stairs: Leander began to suspect that Mrs Chambers had come home, and very soon he was going to have to talk to her.
Most likely she would not be very happy that he had let her captive go.
"Do you know how to take care of a wound, lad?"
"'Course."
The answer came far too sure, even by the standards of a truth spell — Leander took it that Jack had done so before, perhaps even many times.
"Alright. Listen to me, then: this is how we'll do it."
*
He stepped out to come face to face with the cult leader, face set in an expression of disapproving thunder, quite prepared to be loud enough to distract from the fact that he'd retied the boy in a far more comfortable position and left the gag loose enough around his neck to be torn off and pressed against an injury.
"Mage."
"Madam."
Her face was a mean, bitter pinch to begin with; it only got worse when he refused to offer her the same title she had offered him. He had nothing against self-taught magicians, usually – stars only knew that skipping the usual torments of a wizard's apprenticeship was likely the smarter path – but he had had quite enough of dealing with these particular zealots, and could no longer be bothered to conceal it.
He could appreciate, at least, that she didn't bother with any further niceties.
"You're satisfied with the components provided, I trust?"
"The components are not the problem, madam. The sacrifice, on the other hand -"
Her expression sharpened with exasperated fury. Behind her on the narrow stairs, the handful of cult members following her – the door guard, and one or two others, all in the garb of completely ordinary workers – perked up in alarm and outrage.
"What, there's something wrong with the blood?"
She shouldered past him into the storeroom; sensing that he had put his foot wrong, and possibly Jack in considerable danger, he hobbled after her at once.
"Nothing wrong with the blood! Only with the way it's been treated!"
His cane in her path stopped from marching right up to Jack, now huddled as far back as he could get in the corner, eyes wide.
"Did you know," Leander began in his most officious, annoying tones, certain that she already did. "That your men have been assaulting your poor guest?"
The sneer on her face said that she did not care at all, that in fact it had possibly been her intention, and that she despised Leander for his sentimentality. But she paused in her charge, at least, and folded her arms over her chest.
"Regrettable, I suppose."
"And what's worse," he barrelled on. "The lad seems to be under the inexplicable impression that he is to be killed!"
She seemed to decide that Leander was either very stupid or very naive.
"You swore an oath of secrecy for us, Mage. The whore can't — no magic for him."
He gestured so emphatically that his robes swirled around him.
"And the only way you can think to accomplish this is with murder?!"
"The only way to guarantee it," put in one of the other cultists, casual as anything. "It's not like anybody'll be looking for the likes of him, anyway."
Leander glanced from face to face, searching for a hint of pity or reticence on any one of them. There was none. Just as well the truth spell's probably corrupted the ritual blood by now. I hope you're all ratted out by the magistrate tomorrow, you awful little charlatans.
After a long moment, he pursed his lips, sighed, ground out,
"Listen - do as you like, as soon as the deal is over. But I won't have any part of it. Don't you try to kill him in my ritual."
Distrust and hurt in the boy's eyes, when he glanced briefly over, but not completely consuming him; there was still a tiny sliver of trust there, hope that the wizard was lying to the cult and not the poor prostitute.
Leander was no more prepared to allow him to come to harm than he was the innocent werewolves who'd landed him in this situation in the first place. And perhaps his soft heart would be the end of him, but he had no desire, at that moment, to do anything to rectify it. One day, he told himself. One day, he’d stop burning bridges wherever he went. Not today, of course, but one day.
They hauled all the ingredients and the sacrifice down to the basement eagerly enough, followed his exacting instructions as they drew the spells in chalk and charcoal, lit the candles, set out the components, leaving Jack cowered, shivering, on the cold stone floor. They had even memorised the required chants, and stared with an appropriate amount of awe at his spellbook as he checked the recipes. It would have all been quite gratifying, if not for the man stood over Jack with a knife the whole while.
The rush of power as they all began the spell together was exhilarating – always was, working with other people, especially for somebody so accustomed to conducting his wizardry alone. The only problem was that it also involved working with other people, which always disappointed in the end.
The blade flashed when Leander raised his hand for blood; the boy cried out; the ritual circle flared with light as it splashed out of his veins and began to run into the lines and runes. But when the cultist tossed him down like so much used trash and stepped back to join the others, it was his arm Jack slumped down over, fumbling the rag around his neck into his other hand to lean down hard over the cut. Still a more reckless slash than was needed, still intended to bleed the poor lad dry — but survivable, for the moment.
In their moment of triumph and satisfaction, even Chambers' face momentarily brightening in the eerie spell-light, the cult didn't seem to notice anything amiss as Leander altered the wording of his final few teleportation chants. Not send this one afar, but send these two afar. He would've quite enjoyed watching her expression change as she realised, but, alas, no such luck: there was a bright flash, the stomach-wrenching sensation of being transplanted in space, and suddenly Leander was squinting against evening sunshine, while Jack collapsed and bled out onto a dirt road instead of cold stone.
He hadn't moved as fast in years as he moved then, running over to kneel by the boy's side, the chant for a quick, brutal sort of healing spell already on his lips. It was the last of his magic for the day; a worthy thing to spend it on, he thought, watching with relief as the split flesh of Jack's wrist knitted itself back together into a long, silvery scar.
For a long few minutes, they both sat in the dust and fought to get their breath back, alone among the echoing quiet of cricket-song. He had no idea where they were, if he was being honest – altering a teleport at the last moment would do that – but they were well away from the cult and the city, which seemed enough for now.
Although, he hadn't actually ascertained if that was what Jack wanted. Sitting up and brushing off his robes as best he could, Leander asked tentatively,
"…Do you need to go back, lad?"
Jack's head shot up, appalled, hand falling away from where it had been tracing the healed-over wound that would have killed him.
"Back?"
No need to say it like he had lost his mind. Leander made an indistinct gesture, not really wanting to describe the circumstances he meant to refer to, far more embarrassed than Jack.
"To… Harry, was it? Don't you have any things there?"
The boy scoffed, hugged his knees to his chest. He seemed unfamiliar with the countryside around them; Leander wondered whether he'd ever been out of the city in his life.
"Fuck, no. I don't have hardly anything. And I'd get such a thrashing — he'd say I owe him whatever the cult was gonna pay him, too." A shudder — perhaps the evening chill on the empty road, perhaps just the thought of the man who'd had such control of his life until now. "He don't let you run out on the customers, no matter what."
"Even if they're trying to kill you?"
Jack gave him such an empty-eyed look for that, that Leander understood at once that he shouldn't have even bothered to ask. If the poor thing's pimp would sell him to the cult for the night, would work him so cruelly at a debt, then, yes, he also would be willing to send him off to death.
While Leander struggled for words, impotently angry again at the state of the world, Jack managed to stumble to his feet, retrieve Leander's cane, and pull him with a great effort up into standing too.
"Thank you." He squinted around them; he had interfered with the spell, but it had worked well enough to leave them both in one piece, so they shouldn't have strayed too far. Was that a citadel in the distance? It was, he was fairly certain — which meant that other dark shape was the ruins of the ancient hill fortress, and above it the north star. "Oh, we're only a mile from where I wanted! That's better than usual."
"And where's that, then?"
Leander inclined his head tiredly.
"Another city. Kinder, I would say. Can't recall the name, though, I'm afraid."
Jack nodded, pressed his lips in resolve.
"Reckon I'll make my way there."
"What on earth will you do?"
Jack shrugged. "I can scrape by, sir."
Leander had no intention of letting him scrape by. What on earth would be the point of saving him, just for that? He had been the only thing of any value in that place, anyway; the only thing worthwhile Leander would take from his travels in the cruel old city.
“You know your letters, lad?"
"…More or less?"
The truth spell had worn off, then. Oh well. Leander tried to take a step forward, staggered on his bad knee, just about caught himself with his cane. Keeping as much of his meagre dignity as he could, he offered,
"You can do a little work for me, if you like. Some chores, some training. No sex, and none of that debt nonsense, either; I’ll pay you properly.”
Jack was staring at him, stunned: in wonderment, at first, and then, as his experience with the world caught up to him, suspicious. Leander adjusted his shabby robe around him, sniffed pridefully.
"Only in bread and cheese, for now, but as soon as I've any money, then I'll be able to pay you."
The boy snorted, finally cracked a smile. It made him look a little less fragile and tragic, a little more animated and alive.
"Sounds alright. You'll need me to carry you there, anyway.”
Leander stuck his nose in the air and couldn't quite refute it, letting the boy come to duck under his arm and support his weak side.
The boy would hardly the most ordinary sort of wizard’s apprentice — but then, Leander was hardly an ordinary wizard.
It seemed better that way.
*