One Word Kill (Impossible Times Book 1) Read online

  ‘Your dad’s a mathematician?’ Mia turned my way.

  ‘Was. He died.’

  Mia pressed her lips together in a moment’s sympathy, then pushed on. ‘If you’re this wonder-boy, how come you’re not at university already?’

  ‘When they test him, he pretends he can’t do it.’ Simon looked at Elton. ‘So? What do I see from my treetop?’

  ‘Not a lot, man. It’s getting dark. The sun’s sinking in the treeline and everything’s black and crimson. But it looks as if the forest ends some miles to the north.’ Elton reached over to sketch an edge to the forest on our map.

  Back on the forest track we pressed on, taking the northward choice when the trail forked. We tried lighting lanterns.

  ‘The flame doesn’t want to take.’ Elton rolled some hidden dice. ‘Like the night just eats it.’

  ‘I’ll cast a light spell.’ My character, Nicodemus, studied the arcane; a trainee wizard, if you like.

  Another hidden roll. ‘You cast it and the trail lights up, but it’s not like it should be, not like daylight, but as if you had a ten-watt bulb instead of a hundred. And it flickers at the edges. You can feel the darkness pushing on your spell like a physical pressure. It’s slowly closing you down.’

  ‘So, I grit my teeth and concentrate on keeping the spell going.’

  ‘Okaaaaay . . . you can keep it at ten watts, but you’re hurting, man. It’s like a twisting in your guts. Pains shooting along your arms and legs.’ Elton rolled another die. ‘So you walk on. And on. It’s only about five miles, but the tracks keep petering out and the wood’s too thick to press through. You keep doubling back and trying new ways. It takes the whole night. Nicodemus is hurting bad by the time the trees start to thin, but you make it. The trail leads down to a brook. It’s still inky, but dawn isn’t far off.’

  ‘Any bridge?’ Simon asked.

  ‘A brook. A few yards wide. You could jump it. Not in armour, but your thief could jump it from a standing start.’ Elton rolled another die. ‘Wandering monster!’ Another roll and he gave a low whistle, eyes widening.

  ‘Shit.’ Wandering monsters are an unscripted part of the game – people, creatures, or even events that have a small chance of showing up each day and are selected at random from a big chart. I guess Ian Rust had been mine for the day. We never had any luck with them.

  ‘Nicodemus sees it first. Back on the trail among the trees. A dark figure. A human, or human shaped. Just the starlight gleaming on a bald skull.’

  ‘Wait . . .’ I held my hand up, looking at John and Mia. ‘You guys told him, right?’

  ‘Told me what?’ Elton looked up from his list of monsters. He seemed innocent enough, but then every game master has to be a bit of an actor.

  ‘A dark forest. I’m sick. A brook. Not a river, but a brook. And then this shit with the bald guy.’ I gave John a hard stare.

  ‘Hey!’ The realisation dawned on his face. ‘We did this!’

  I turned to Mia. ‘You told him then.’ Not a question.

  ‘It was a secret? Nobody said it was.’ She shrugged and examined her character sheet. ‘But no, actually. I didn’t.’

  ‘What the hell you all talking about?’ Elton’s brow furrowed in one of his famous frowns. I swear you could wedge pennies in those furrows and they’d stick.

  ‘This is like what happened to us last night,’ John said.

  ‘You met a damn vampire last night?’

  ‘Wait! What? This is a vampire? You’re shitting me.’ John sat up.

  ‘We’re dead.’ Simon sighed and turned his character sheet over.

  ‘You got a bad roll.’ Elton lifted his books to show the dice. Double zero. A one-in-a-hundred chance. ‘A very bad roll.’

  ‘Still,’ Mia said, ‘at least you accidentally gave away what it is.’

  Elton sniffed. ‘You’re a cleric. Priests can sense that sort of thing. It’s undead. Can’t hide that from a woman of the cloth.’ He looked around the table. ‘What do you do?’

  ‘Run, of course!’ I moved my wizard figure to the front of our group. ‘It can eat the guys in armour!’

  We all reached the same conclusion in short order and our brave band was soon pounding along the riverbank in terror.

  ‘You’re all strung out: Nicodemus in the lead, Fineous the thief just behind, the other two panting along some way back.’ Elton arranged the figures. ‘In the bend of the brook ahead of you—’

  ‘Meander,’ Simon interrupted.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When a river wriggles about like you’ve drawn . . . that’s a meander.’

  ‘OK, private school. In the meander ahead of you . . . the vampire is waiting. These guys can fly, you know.’

  ‘Damn. I . . . Uh.’ I looked down at my useless spells. ‘I prepare to die.’ Even if the vampire didn’t kill us, just its touch could suck away experience, taking memories from a person, leaving them reduced, a shadow of what they were.

  ‘Can’t I drive it off?’ Mia asked. ‘Priests can do that, right?’

  ‘Show him your cross!’ John urged.

  ‘I’m furious, but I don’t see how that will help.’ Mia grinned.

  ‘No, he means—’

  ‘She knows what he means, Simon.’ Sometimes Simon could be slow with jokes.

  Elton looked at the table in his rulebook. ‘Clerics can turn undead away, but at your level . . . with a vampire . . .’ He set two dice before her. ‘Roll. It’s going to take something extraordinary, though.’

  ‘I’m all about extraordinary.’ Mia tossed the dice with none of the puffing and agonising we always made over important rolls.

  ‘Ninety-nine!’

  ‘Holy crap.’

  ‘OK, so you arrive just as the vamp’s about to get a taste of Nicodemus here, and hold your cross up. It seems the Man Jesus is watching, and the crucifix starts to glow. Our bald friend staggers back before you, but . . . and this is the kicker, because you were never in any danger . . . the sucker can’t pass over running water, so he’s trapped. Of course, you guys could have waded over to safety at any time.’

  ‘I knew that,’ said Simon.

  ‘I know you did,’ said Elton. ‘But knowing a thing and employing that knowledge when it’s useful. Those aren’t the same things.’

  ‘He’s trapped?’ Mia asked.

  ‘For as long as you can hold that cross up.’

  ‘I think I can hold it until the sun rises.’ Mia grinned.

  ‘Damn, she’s right.’ John leaned back from the table. ‘You, Mia, just killed yourself a vampire!’

  ‘Well, sheeeiit . . .’ Elton shook his head. ‘He don’t plead or nothing. He just watches you all like you’re bits of tasty meat.’

  ‘Don’t look at his eyes,’ Simon said. ‘They can hypnotise.’

  Elton huffed. ‘At least you remembered that. So, you wait until the sun’s rays touch him and he screams and turns to dust, all in a moment; just his clothes falling down where he stood.’ He shook his head again. ‘Now tell me that happened last night! I dare you.’

  ‘Well, the running did.’ John grinned. ‘And he could have been a vampire . . .’

  ‘I check the remains. He’s got to have treasure. Right?’ Simon played a greedy thief pretty well when it came down to it.

  Elton returned to his charts. ‘I gotta roll that up. Take five.’

  I stood and stretched sore legs. I went to the window. It was only open half an inch, but the cold air had been playing on my neck, making my bones ache. I was reaching to close it when I saw him. ‘No. He wasn’t a vampire.’ None of them heard me. I knew that the bald man from the park wasn’t a vampire, though. He was standing there in the sunshine. Admittedly, weak January sunshine, but enough to dust a vampire. He looked up at me over the fence at the back of Simon’s garden, watching from the street.

  CHAPTER 4

  ‘You good for Saturday?’ Simon stopped me in the hall between maths and French. He always talked about our D&D sessions wi
th the intensity the first team rugby coach reserved for grudge matches. As if missing one would be a matter of life and death.

  ‘Yeah, I’ll be there.’

  ‘Will Elton be bringing . . . you know?’

  ‘Mia? You can say her name, Si. You won’t summon her.’

  Simon gave a nervous grin and glanced over his shoulder as if she might be there. ‘Yes. Her.’

  ‘She’s alright. Saved our bacon with the vamp.’ I wanted her to be there.

  ‘She’s with Elton? Right?’

  ‘Nah.’ I grinned. ‘They’re just mates. Fancy your chances, Si?’ Elton seemed to have a dozen girls who were friends, but girlfriends were never mentioned. Odd, because in school we talked about girls all the time. At least imaginary ones. Maybe it was only a boys’ school habit. Perhaps that went away when you had enough of the real thing around you. ‘Mia is cute, though. But I think John might just have the upper hand in that game, Simon, old boy.’

  Simon coloured. ‘How about your stalker? He going to show, too?’

  My sighting of the ‘stalker’ had ended our last session somewhat abruptly. He’d been walking away by the time I got the others to the window, and a hurried mass exit into the street hadn’t been hurried enough to catch him. Much of that was down to me having come over kind of spacey at the window, like I was drowning in déjà vu. Going down the stairs I got this weird vision of me coming up them that morning, and in the confusion managed to fall down the last dozen steps. So our prey made a clean escape. Not that I knew what we would have done if we had caught him.

  John had laughed after and said that he couldn’t have picked the park guy from a line-up at the gates while he was still sweating from running after Mia and me. So how I could be so sure it was the same man, he didn’t know. ‘It’s not like there aren’t a lot of bald guys around . . .’

  But Mia had been more pensive. She’d been first to join me at the window. She only saw him walking away, but even so . . . ‘There was something about him, though.’

  The hall was clearing as each classroom sucked in its allotted students. ‘We gotta go.’

  Simon and I joined the end of the queue shuffling into the French lesson. Not one of my strong subjects.

  ‘Were we supposed to be having a test today? Because I didn’t—’

  ‘You moulting, Hayes?’ Someone flicked the back of my head. ‘It’s all over your shoulders.’

  I turned to find Michael Devis behind me, a tuft of black hair between his finger and thumb, held out as if it were something distasteful.

  ‘Losing your hair at your age, Hayes? Is that what happens to nerds?’ He let the tuft drop.

  Michael Devis had a broad face, dark flinty eyes, and a remarkably clear complexion for a fifteen-year-old boy. He deserved acne. You want people’s badness to show. The poison inside him should be bursting out. Instead, he looked almost amiable when he wasn’t sneering. I was taller than him, but he filled his blazer out in that chunky sort of way that’s part muscle and part fat. ‘What?’ he asked, the sneer deepening into threat.

  But the falling hair had taken my attention. A thick dark tuft. The kind you should have to rip out. They said that if the chemo was going to take your hair it would do it somewhere between the second and third week. I wondered if eight days were a record.

  I came to Simon’s house the next day wearing a woollen hat. Not one of those colourful things with a bobble, but a thin black one my dad once took skiing before he realised he couldn’t ski and would never learn. It was the kind of cool hat New Order would wear . . . if they wore stupid woolly hats.

  ‘Vampires carry class H treasure.’ Simon opened the door practically as I reached for it and began talking. ‘With the right rolls, this could be a gold mine for us.’

  I followed him up the stairs.

  ‘Hey, Nicko! Nice hat!’ Simon’s mum, milk bottles chinking as she carried them to the front door.

  Even with that hint Simon remained oblivious. I could have come in wearing a full Mickey Mouse suit and I doubt he would have commented.

  ‘What’s with the hat?’ John walked in before I’d finished getting my books on the table.

  ‘Religious thing. I’ll tell you all about it at the end of the session.’

  ‘No, really. What’s with the hat? Is it lined with tinfoil?’

  ‘Seriously.’ I lifted my hands. ‘End of the session. All will be revealed!’

  ‘Bad haircut.’ John nodded to Simon, who was blinking at the offending item of clothing as if it had been a state secret up until this point.

  We went through the same process when Elton and Mia arrived, but Simon proved to be the driving force that moved us on past the sartorial issues, motivated by avarice. ‘I’ve been waiting a week to see what this pile of dust was carrying. I don’t care if Nick has grown horns. Tell me!’

  Elton settled to business. ‘Well, there’s a leather pouch with fifty gold ducats in it, and a ruby about the size of your thumbnail.’

  ‘Fifty gold. Medium ruby. Check.’ Simon wrote it down on his personal treasure list, ever the thief. ‘C’mon, there has to be more than that.’

  ‘And an iron tube, a foot long, two inches in diameter, worked like coiling ivy, capped at both ends.’

  ‘Scroll case. Check. What else?’

  ‘That’s it.’ Elton leaned back in his chair, hands behind his head.

  ‘Damnation!’ The closest Simon came to swearing, though his mum could make sailors blush.

  ‘What’s on the scroll?’ Mia asked. Her cleric could cast spells, and a scroll in a posh case was most often going to be an enchantment.

  ‘You open the case. There’s a hiss as the stopper comes loose, like someone sucking air over their teeth, and a smell . . . a kind of dry bones smell that makes you want to stop breathing. You fish out a scroll of thick, yellowed parchment. It looks suspiciously like human skin and you’re kinda glad you’re wearing gloves.’ Elton conjured the vision. ‘The letters have been branded into the parchment, maybe while it was still someone’s skin. It hurts your eyes to look at them and none of it makes any sense.’

  ‘Some bad juju here.’ John reached out to edge his warrior away from Mia’s cleric.

  ‘Give it to Nicodemus,’ Simon said. ‘Whatever it is, it’s not holy.’

  I nodded. ‘I’ll give it a try.’ I held up my hand before Elton could open his mouth. ‘I’ll put on some gloves.’

  Elton shrugged. ‘So you study it. The letters make a kind of sense to you. It’s the style of magic you practise, but way above your pay grade. It’s so difficult to understand that it starts to give you the headache from hell.’

  ‘I sit down and press on with it. The others can wait.’ My character had maximum intelligence. A kind of conceit since it rarely mattered beyond a certain level.

  ‘OK. Well, you can only just understand it.’ Elton reached out and gave me a folded piece of paper so I would know what the spell was and could choose to share the knowledge with the others or not. I read it and handed it back.

  ‘The lamest spell in the game,’ I said. ‘Power Word Kill.’

  John frowned, Mia looked blank, Simon inhaled. ‘In what universe is Power Word Kill lame? It’s a ninth-level spell! We could sell that scroll for thousands!’

  ‘What does it do?’ Mia asked.

  ‘You speak one word and point at someone,’ Simon said. ‘They die. Then the scroll turns to dust.’

  ‘See what I mean?’ I asked.

  ‘You can kill anyone?’ John’s frown deepened.

  ‘Well, any person or creature we’ve met in the game so far, yes.’

  ‘Just like that? No saving throw?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That is lame.’ John nodded.

  ‘It’s brilliant!’ Simon said.

  ‘Why don’t you like it, Nick?’ Mia tilted her head to one side, watching me. I found that I liked her attention.

  ‘Pretty much everything that happens in this game gives you a chance.
You get a saving throw, or some other roll of the dice, and if you get a good enough result you can wriggle out from under. It might be an impossible ask. One chance in twenty. One in a hundred. But you get a chance. Not a choice, but a chance. This, though? Nothing. The person with the spell says “die”, and you do. End of story.’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t like that.’

  Mia pursed her lips, then nodded. ‘I get it.’

  The game moved on, with the scroll tucked into Nicodemus’s backpack: too valuable to use and still a bone of contention around the table. Hours rolled past, as they do when you’re wholly occupied with something. The real world took a seat at the back and Elton’s imaginary one held centre stage.

  Mia proved to be funny, shockingly rude on occasion, and the sneaky kind of clever that gets things done. I found myself stealing glances at her. She threw herself into the game in a way that I still couldn’t, without reservation. I wanted to be more like her. If I was going to die young, I wanted to at least squeeze the juice out of life rather than pick at it. But you can’t change who you are. Not even with a gun to your head.

  ‘You OK, Nick?’ Mia, pausing with the dice ready to throw. ‘You look pale.’

  ‘All good.’ I waved her on. The pain in my leg eased for a moment.

  In hospital they ask you to rate your discomfort on a scale of ten. I guess it’s the best they can come up with, but it fails to capture the nature of the beast. Pain can stay the same while you change around it. And, like a thumb of constant size, what it blocks out depends on how close it gets to you. At arm’s length a thumb obscures a small fragment of the day. Held close enough to your eye it can blind you to everything that matters, relegating the world to a periphery. Playing the game kept my mind on something else. For most of the session, the pains in the long bones of my legs and the sickness in my stomach subsided to annoyance. At other times, they were a spike pinning me to the fact of my disease.

  ‘So . . .’ Elton closed his notebook and scooped up his dice. ‘That’s all got to keep for another day, ’cause I’m out of here.’ He started to pile rulebooks into his bag. ‘All we got to know now is, how come the hat, Nicky? How come the hat?’ A broad grin.