Seeker of the Four Winds: A Galatia Novel (35 page)

How heavily was Uncle Bryce involved in Dad’s
imprisonment? Isaiah had the urge to shake him awake by the neck,
demanding some answers. But no, he was on a mission for the camera.
He aimed his light around the room.

Furnishings were sparse—a table for two, a
long park bench with removable cushions, some kitchen cabinets,
soapstone counters, and a big dresser. The wood floor creaked with
every step, making Isaiah wince. Everybody in the family knew that
Uncle Bryce kept his video collection in the top dresser drawer.
Slowly opening it, he scanned the contents with his pen light.

There was the green camera Grandma told him
about.

Isaiah slid it in his jacket pocket.

Now for the SD cards.

He scooped up the small plastic box meant for
3 x 5 recipe cards where Uncle Bryce stored his SD cards and
tiptoed out of the cottage and back into the night.

..............................

(Isaiah Wakeland)

In the past, Isaiah had caught Gizmo rolling
his eyes behind Uncle Barrett’s back. It wasn’t a lot to base such
an important decision upon, but he decided to chance it. When
Isaiah showed up at Gizmo’s apartment building, not a soul was in
sight. He knocked several times before the door swung open. There
was Gizmo in a plain white T-shirt and pair of Spiderman boxer
shorts. He wiped his glasses off with the hem, then readjusted them
on his nose.

“Isaiah Wakeland?” He squinted, no doubt
surprised by the unexpected visit. The two men barely knew each
other.

Isaiah stepped inside the apartment without
being invited. Glancing left, and then right, at the shelves of
electronic equipment, blinking lights, and books—stuff that had
come off the convoy of trucks that escaped the bunker.

“Did your father send for me? I assume this
means he’s been released from jail.”

“No,” Isaiah’s voice broke slightly. “But I’m
hoping you can help him out.”

“Uh, okay.”

Gizmo offered him a seat at his bistro style
table as he flitted through the kitchen cupboards.

“Would you like some Razzle Dazzle Punch or
Mellow Melon Fizz?” Gizmo offered. “If I don’t use it up soon,
it’ll probably go bad.”

“Razzle Dazzle, please.”

Isaiah watched him scoop purple powder from a
jar and mix it with water. A minute later, Gizmo handed him a mug
marked with the words
How about a nice warm cup of shut the fuck
up?
filled with purple punch that used to be a bunker
staple.

“Tell me what’s so pressing that it brought
the mayor’s son to my door in the middle of the night?” Gizmo
inquired as he settled in with his own mug of Razzle Dazzle.

Stories he hadn’t intended to share were
tumbling out of Isaiah’s mouth—the doctor removing Grandma’s
feeding tube on Barrett’s orders, the animosity between his father
and Barrett, how he had walked in on the threesome and was attacked
by Feenie, the Mind Wander with Grandma and more.

Gizmo had remained quiet and attentive
through every word.

“Sorry to burden you with my troubles,”
Isaiah said, glancing sheepishly around the studio apartment. “But
I didn’t know where to turn, who I could trust, so I took a chance
with you.”

Gizmo got up to pace around the apartment,
hands clasped behind his back, muttering to himself, leaving Isaiah
to wonder if he had made a mistake in bringing him in on the plan.
Finally, Gizmo sat down at the table again to share a story of his
own.

“When I was about ten, I overheard Barrett
call my parents sand niggers behind their backs. Other people might
be fooled by his charms, but not me. Whatever you want me to do to
stop him, count me in.”

Relieved at having made a good choice in
Gizmo, Isaiah handed over Uncle Bryce’s camera and SD cards.

The two of them spent the rest of the night
sifting through video files. The earlier ones were kind of
amusing—videos Uncle Bryce had taken of women’s butts and chests as
they walked through the entertainment district back in the bunker.
Seeing their old home brought sighs of nostalgia, but the videos
grew more disturbing— high school girls back in the bunker,
including some in the locker room. Holy crap! Bryce had hidden a
camera in there?

Gizmo flicked off the video in disgust. “And
the mayor is the one in jail?”

“Grandma said we’re looking for something
that took place on Future Earth, maybe five or six years ago. These
appear to be filed in date order. Let’s try the ones in the
middle.”

They found tons of videos from the old Fade
Brothers settlement outside of Regala D’Nora. At first, it was
mostly just scenery, and images of the Regalan archers on the hunt.
In typical Bryce fashion, the camera eventually zoomed in on the
female Regalans’ body parts. Isaiah could relate to the breast and
butt infatuation, but Uncle Bryce bordered on obsessive
stalker.

As they went through the videos, Gizmo fast
forwarded through most of it, stopping only when something unusual
came onto the screen. As soon as Magus Mull began to appear in the
videos, the subject matter took on a different flavor. Instead of
focusing on women, Uncle Bryce began to film the magician and his
tricks. Some of the stunts were amazing—levitations, fireballs
produced at will, and brewing potions. Then the videos became
instructional, showing Magus as he taught Uncle Barrett and Aunt
Feenie incantations. Many of the spells involved draining the blood
from animals. Some required the magic user to eat raw innards and
even bugs. One showed a young couple having intercourse on the
table in front of the classroom, while the rest of the students
used the sexual energy to coax flower buds to open up before their
eyes.

There was even a video of Uncle Barrett
pulling the wings off a struggling bird in front of the classroom.
The animal’s fear enabled the other students to combine their
powers and float a delighted and squealing Feenie up to the
ceiling.

“Off the Creep-O-Meter,” Isaiah
commented.

“Your uncles and aunt are three depraved
sons-of-bitches.”

“And Magus Mull is the devil,” Isaiah
replied.

“We have to stop them from taking control of
Galatia.”

“But how? All of the people who supported my
father have vanished.”

“I have an idea.”

“Yeah?”

“I’ve been putting together the equipment for
a public radio station...”

Both went silent when the images of Sam and
Nora Harvey came onto the screen. The couple had been beaten and
were being dragged through through a forest by figures in hooded
cloaks, not stopping until they came to a clearing lit by tiki
torches. Thrown to the top of a stone altar like slabs of meat,
both Sam and Nora were tied down with their limbs splayed out upon
the stone. Their eyes were already blackened. Their swollen and
bruised bodies moved Isaiah to tears. The camera zoomed around
hooded figures circling the altar. Most of their faces were too
shadowed to identify, but not all. Magus Mull raised his knife over
Nora’s heart. As Sam screamed his wife’s name, the cloaked figures
tore into him like a pack of hyenas, eating him alive.

Gizmo couldn’t shut the video off fast
enough.

After a long stunned silence, Gizmo found his
voice.

“H-h-how could they do that to other human
beings?” He shook his head, trying to make sense of it. “Sam was a
friend of mine back in high school.”

“They’re animals,” Isaiah said. “We have to
do something.”

“Where there’s a will,” Gizmo held up an
index finger, “there’s an engineer with a plan.”

The two young men spent the next couple of
hours bouncing strategies off of each other as they schemed to
bring down the Fades. And their nasty little warlock, too.

(Isaiah Wakeland)

Isaiah waited for nightfall before climbing
to the roof of Zena City’s jail. The world looked kinder and
gentler from up high with stars flickering against a velvety black
sky and silvery clouds floating over a winking yellow moon. On the
streets below the buildings cozied together like a colony of gentle
chinchillas. Out in the distance, torches were blazing in Moore
Park—strange, but there was no time to investigate.

It had taken him and Gizmo several trips up
and down the rope to bring up all the electronic equipment. Isaiah
slid down the rope to make one final trip. Just as his feet touched
the ground of the back alley, someone tore around the corner of the
building and crashed into him. Heart thumping wildly, he whipped
out his dagger, but the figure had frozen.

“Is that you, Isaiah?”

Isaiah knew his father’s voice, saw his
familiar blue and black checkered flannel shirt as he stepped into
the moonlight. He flung himself at his father with arms wide open.
His father reciprocated. The hug felt so solid and real beneath
him, it was difficult to stop. When they mutually let go, Isaiah
asked hopefully, “Uncle Barrett has finally come to his senses and
let you go?”

“No, I escaped.”

“How?”

“No time to explain. I want you to go home
and...”

“I can’t.” He shook his head. “Dad, you need
to get out of town.”

“It’s the evening before the Summer Solstice.
Leaving Galatia now would be like the captain leaving the Titanic
right before it hit the iceberg.”

“You do know that the Titanic sunk and the
captain drowned with it.”

“I’m just saying come hell, high water,
iceberg, or a thousand armies—I plan to fight for Galatia until my
dying breath.”

“If Feenie and her coven have their way, your
last breath will come soon. They want to crown Barrett king over
your dead body. But, Dad, I’m working on a plan to stop them.
Please, just give me a few hours and let me do this for you.”

“You must follow your conscience, son. As I
must follow mine.”

Worried that he might be seeing his father
for the last time, he tried to find the words to express all the
gratitude and love he had failed to show over the years, but the
old-fashioned school bell began to toll in the distance, signaling
that time had run out.

Isaiah choked out, “Be careful, Dad.”

His father kissed him on both cheeks and ran
off down the alley. Isaiah tried to follow, but lost sight of him
among the two and three-story shops lining the street. It looked
like half the town had gathered in Moore Park. Hundreds of poles
had been shoved into the ground to support glass oil lamps. The
smell of kerosene and a sickening sweet musk filled the air, making
his head swim. Thousands of people, many of them still in their
pajamas, had come out to the park for the meeting

On the platform where Phoenix Rising had put
on a free rock concert a month ago, two huge steaming pots, like
witches’ cauldrons from a gruesome fairy tale, were hissing and
boiling. Mull and Feenie stood nearby as the shapes of faces,
animals, stars and arcane symbols appeared in the steam.

Magus Mull stood on the stage, hands raised,
a green light arcing between his palms. Hypnotizing, Isaiah
thought, unable to pull his eyes away as the light turned into a
black cloud spinning higher over the stage. A thin tornado, its
height impossible to determine as its top portion disappeared into
the dark sky, rotated on the platform. It made a high-pitched
whistling sound as it bent one way, and then the other, like a hula
dancer.

“Magus Mull has the power of the wind at his
fingertips,” Feenie told the crowd. “Unlike the charisma, magic is
an ancient art, disciplined and dependable. And our dear friend is
willing to use it to help the Galatians defeat their enemies.”

“Releseyu!” Magus cried out.

The sickening sweet odor became stronger.
Isaiah tasted it at the back of his throat. His worries of the day
seemed less important now. As the magic tornado left the platform
to tear the leaves off a copse of trees, Feenie’s words began to
make sense. If the Galatians had that kind of power, the Western
Alliance would think twice about attacking them. Oil lamps
flickered, then extinguished as the funnel whirled past them,
pulling poles out of the ground. Imagine what something like that
could do if it ripped through an army. A surge of hope went through
him.

“This is true magic, my friends,” Barrett
told the crowd. “We can make a tornado a hundred times the size of
this one. And this is only a glimpse of the power at our disposal,
if only you will open yourselves to the magic.”

“I’m open to anything that will help us win
the war,” a man called out in the crowd. People clapped their
approval.

“That is the reply I expected from such an
intelligent people,” Feenie said. “Recall the law of the
conservation of energy: that nothing can be created or destroyed;
it can only be changed from one form into another. And so it is
with magic. In order to cast a spell capable of crushing an army,
energy must be transferred from one form to another.” She paused
for effect as the crowd murmured in hopeful expectation. “Which
means that in order for my husband to save Galatia, you must offer
him a sacrifice.”

“Tell us, Barrett?” a voice called from the
crowd. “How will you save us?”

“On my command, the magic users among us will
cast a spell to melt the flesh from the bones of our enemies. But
there are a lot of soldiers out there, which means we need to
transfer a large amount of energy.”

“We need a very special kind of energy that
only your humanity can provide us,” Mull chimed in. “But anything
to save your families—right?”

“Right! Right! Right!” the crowd chanted.

“But first we must inoculate ourselves
against the flesh melting spell.” Feenie ladled the contents of one
of the cauldrons into a golden goblet. “So, come one, come all, and
drink in the Ambrosia of Glonare!”