Free The Last Days of Magic by Mark Tompkins Page A

himself by hesitating. He did not pause long, sensing even back then that it would be dangerous to give her time to work a spell, a feeling reinforced by the sight of the carcass of an infant on the table, its tiny body stripped of fat. He slit her throat with enough force to feel his blade scrape her spine. Then, just to make sure she would not come back for him, he hacked off her head.
    After reading the powerful spells in her books, Jordan realized that he had been dangerously naïve. If he was going to hunt more of her kind, he needed to learn protective enchantments. He’d been very lucky to catch Marija unawares.
    Then again, he had always been lucky—he had never been wounded, not once, in all his battles and tavern brawls. And so often did his thoughts foretell events that he had begun to wonder if he had some special talent in this regard, or even whether he might influence events with his mind. These were things he did not dare talk about—he could not risk being suspected of witchcraft himself.
    His luck extended back as long as he could remember, back to when he was a child, if you could count it as lucky living through the almost daily ritual of tossing the bodies of friends onto the piles of rotting corpses lining the streets, piles that already contained the remains of his mother and brother. Too few men were left alive to bury all the dead; too little wood was left around his village to burn them. The Black Death stole his childhood, he once told a woman he thought he loved, though he did not really know what a traditional childhood was; he had never seen one that was not immersed in death.
    The plague, which first arrived shortly before Jordan was born, swept a wave of agonizing death across Europe. Afterwards, the risk of new outbreaks loomed over the populace like the hammer of a vengeful God poised to strike down a village or a province at the slightest provocation—a fate that frequently befell those in Jordan’sSicilian homeland, an island dependent on shipboard trade. He grew up unable to escape the cries of the afflicted: some pleading with God to save them, some pleading for anyone to end to their suffering with a quick death, and neither God nor man caring anymore.
    Jordan was fifteen when he became a condottiere and killed his first man for pay. If God did not care, why should he? His family’s meager fortune had never recovered from his uncle’s failure, and in the devastation of post-plague Sicily his choice was either to live as a mercenary or to watch his ancestral home deteriorate further while he worked on another man’s land for a wage that would barely keep him from starving. Jordan had decided long ago that avoiding starvation was not a high enough aim. He discovered he was good at killing, and that he liked it. One successful job led to another. Soon, with his reputation for swift action and discretion, his services were in demand across Europe and even in Britain.
    When the townspeople of Trier offered him three times his normal condottiere fee to hunt down the witch who had been stealing their children, he took the job. However, Marija’s stash of grimoires turned out to be a treasure far more valuable than the money. They provided him with his first direct experience working enchantments, an ability he had long admired from afar.
    The restored Roman Church had begun utilizing the condottieri to expand its territories, so Jordan had made sure the Vatican recruiters heard of his successes, though not of his grimoires—to be caught with even one such book would result in a quick sentence to a slow death. He was impressed that the Church had developed such an effective military-like strategy to convert new lands. First they would send disposable mercenaries to kill as many “unholy creatures” as they could—that is what the Vatican called Goblins, Trolls, and the like. Then a group of zealous exorcists, known as the VRS League, would arrive and drive out the rest. Finally they