An Aged Artifact

    The bullet that whizzed past Radcliffe struck home in the quartz eye of Dionysus and glittering fragments fell onto the floor. Radcliffe put his hands above his head and Ayres motioned to one of his henchmen to cover the adventurer.
    Ayres struck an intimidating figure. He wore a black great cloak and false face carved with images of death. It was said that he showed no pity to man nor beast and that he had strangled his own mother with his umbilical cord. These were just rumors, of course, but looking at the man in the flesh made one reconsider that.
“How did you catch up to us so quickly, Ayres? I thought for sure sending that old prospector south to visit his brother would have confounded you completely.”
    Ayres snorted at this, his contempt dripping from the plastistone that made up his false face and pooling on the floor. He lived for moments like this. His rival trounced, down and out and throughly defeated.
    “It was quite simple, really, Radcliffe, you should really look into improving the security around your good friend Doctor Godfrey. It was a trivial matter to bribe his research assistant to slip a tracking device into the invention that the good doctor intended to give you to go on this little ski holiday.”
    Radcliffe reeled at the idea that money had been used by his enemy to foil his plans. He briefly considered devising a system that would replace money with some sort of merit based aristocracy that would make adventurers the highest caste in his new system. He then tossed this plan as it would actually take money to implement and damn him for a fool if he was going to try that sort of thing again.
    “So, all this time you’ve been tracking me using some sort of gadget. That isn’t in the rules, I’m afraid. You’ll have to forfeit the treasure.”
    Jeremiah stifled a gasp. The rules did not mention tracking devices at all. It was an omission that the rules committee would soon have to rectify or else the competition would devolve into chaos.
“Nice try,” Ayres said, ” but I’m afraid that there are at least two things at flaw with that. One, there is no rule against them. In fact, I think the rules committee will find nice gift baskets to discourage them from putting the rule in there in the first place. Two, there is no one here to enforce the rules. No one at all.”
    Jeremiah searched his surroundings for something to help Radcliffe out of his predicament and spotted a stoppered test tube with some sort of liquid inside it on the workbench. A mysterious red glow emanated from it. He slowly crept over and grabbed it. Despite being abandoned for who knows how long, it emitted a strange warmth. Ignoring this, he got into position behind Ayres.
    “Really, Radcliffe,” Ayres said, ”Invoking the rules in your position? You surely didn’t think that would work did you?”
    Radcliffe’s eyes turned down to the floor as if the key to his predicament were there. He shook his head, slowly. Then he began to laugh.
    “I don’t suppose,” Ayres said, “you’d like to share what is so amusing that you can’t help but giggle?”
    “It is just,” Radcliffe said, “that you are so unbelievably stupid that you forgot to account for my sidekick.”
    At that moment Jeremiah eased behind Ayres and shoved the test tube into the back of the older man in the manner of a handgun. Ayres put his hands up and Jeremiah pulled the pistol from his hands. He quickly stowed the test tube in his pocket and replaced it with the handgun that he had just acquired.
    “Ah, Jeremiah,” Ayres said, “I’d wondered where you were. I had half expected to find you standing on that pressure switch waiting for the conquering hero to return. Instead I found someone quite clever had made something to slip past the first trap. So clever, in fact, that I knew it could not have been Reginald’s doing.”
    Radcliffe cringed at the Ayres mentioning his first name. Too much familiarity bred contempt and Ayres seemed to already have it in abundance. He also noticed at this point that he was on the winning side and motioned for the henchman to surrender the sidearm he was only pointing at him in token to the game being played.
    Radcliffe took the weapon and examined it. It was a standard beam weapon, nothing too fancy. Ever since the time travelers had started coming through, these weapons were becoming more and more common among the villains and henchmen of the world. The only trouble was that the more elaborate beam weapons were generally the less reliable ones. This was one of the factors that had led to the Faust Treaty of 1854. History was something that Radcliffe really enjoyed. It was too bad that it was becoming more unbelievable and less relevant year by year.
    Ayres slumped his shoulders with disbelief that he had been foiled so readily, then turned slightly. Jeremiah pushed the gun a little deeper into the man’s back and grunted his negative feeling to Ayres to try to get him to behave. Doing this put Jeremiah at a slight disadvantage as his weight was not distributed very well. Ayres took this opportunity to knock Jeremiah prone.
    Jeremiah fell. He fell hard. The test tube shattered in his pocket letting all the liquid run out into his pants and into the cuts the pieces of glass had dug into his leg. Jeremiah spasmed in pain. In doing so the gun fell from his limp fingers and clattered to the floor. Jeremiah cringed waiting for the pistol to report a fired shot, but nothing happened.
    Seeing what happened to Jeremiah, Radcliffe tried firing the beam weapon he had coerced from the henchman moments before, but nothing happened. The batteries were flat and it was as useful to him at that moment as a paper weight would have been. Slightly less useful, in fact, because a paper weight had real heft and he could have threatened the thug with it. As it was, the weapon he now held was a light weight novelty that could offer him no help at all.
    Ayres plucked his pistol from the floor and laughed in a mocking tone that he had been saving for just this moment.
    “Radcliffe,” Ayres said, “your methods are tired. I was always ten steps ahead. In fact, I could have just killed you and have done with it, but your are far too amusing alive. Now I will have my prize. I believe that you were just about to retrieve Marcurio’s mirror? Well, why don’t you go ahead and do that right now, but don’t get any strange ideas about using it against me. This gun held against your sidekick’s temple is quite real and I am just about at the end of my patience with you.”
    Ayres pulled Jeremiah’s collar and held the cold barrel of the gun against his temple in illustration. The warmth of his own blood and whatever solution was in the test tube served a stark contrast to the cold he felt from the villain. The icy hands that were just behind his back made him shiver more than the wind had. Jeremiah whimpered appropriately in response. This was all in the sidekick’s handbook, of course. The book outlined the rules of capture, ingenious ways to remove oneself from the same, and recipes for hot chocolate. Jeremiah wished that he were back at home enjoying one right at that moment.
    Radcliffe had stalled as much as he had dared. This might end badly, but it could be ten times as bad if Ayres got hold of the mirror especially if he knew the right way to activate it. Radcliffe walked up to the alcove, almost forgotten for the moment was his celebration of discovery. He picked up the mirror very gently and turned in place.
    Ayres looked at Radcliffe and motioned for him to hurry because he did not have all day to dicker around in a dead man’s old deserted fortress in the mountains. Radcliffe walked toward him and the mirror gleamed more than it should have in the torch light. Ayres pulled Jeremiah roughly to his feet and pushed him forward.
    “We make an even exchange. When you hand me the mirror, I will hand you your boy. No one has to die today,” Ayres said.
    Radcliffe nodded in agreement and stretched the mirror toward Ayres. As he was doing so, Ayres pushed Jeremiah in a vector slightly off course from Radcliffe and snatched the mirror into his clutches as if he had been waiting for this moment his entire life. The mirror reacted to his touch and glowed a dark menacing red over the chamber. Ayres’ henchmen were in awe of this spectacle. The one who had been covering Radcliffe started feeling quite ill and vomited loudly onto the dusty floor. The henchman who had stayed at Ayres’ side dropped to his knees and began to prostrate himself to the object. Never before had he felt as if he were in the presence of the divine. He now felt an all too real divinity pass over him and finding him lacking.
    “Boss! It’s reading my soul!”
    “Yes, Mister Hardigan, but it can’t be helped that you’re inferior. That’s just the way the world works. The inferior are always going to be that way. No matter how many fancy hats or suits one owns.”
    The henchman was getting his quite dirty lying on the floor as he was. The vomiting henchman seemed to regain himself and wandered over to where Ayres was standing triumphant holding his prize. Vomit man’s eyes went over all glazed and he rushed Ayres.
    “You must not have that, you monster! The world does not need—“
    The man never made it more than two steps. Ayres fired his pistol and a neat smoking hole appeared in the middle of the nameless henchman’s forehead. Henchman no longer, the man’s light was extinguished and he died in a heap.
    Hardigan looked up at Ayres with cowed and obedient eyes. He was the very definition of sniveling. He dried the tears from his eyes and worked to straighten himself. He dusted himself off and demurred away from the man.
    “What does it do, boss,” asked Hardigan.
    “Hmm? That’s actually a good question,” Ayres said, “I see I didn’t drag two wastes of molecules through this god forsaken wasteland. It is very simple, Mister Hardigan. It makes men into gods.”