Rough Magic Page 11

  Jarod hurriedly untied my rope.

  Rory climbed out behind me and discarded his rope. “I can’t see,” he said tersely.

  Despite Nils advising us to head speedily for the rendezvous point, he and Digger had waited for us. “Nils can’t hear,” Digger said.

  “Reality is turning inside out,” Rory warned in an odd voice.

  I nodded. My senses were my own, but reality was wavering, as if I’d ingested an hallucinogen. I looked at Jarod who shone with a purple light.

  “Digger and I aren’t affected,” he said. “It’s ordinary desert to us, although with an eerie wind. Rory, I’m going to grab your arm. We have to outrun this thing.”

  With an arm each, Jarod and I guided Rory westward. It took an immense amount of courage and agility for him to run blind. Each time he sagged or stumbled, he jerked straight.

  Digger kept an arm around Nils, half-supporting him.

  That a werewolf and elf were so dependent on humans told me that Rory and Nils were underplaying their distressed physical state. They were probably hiding all the symptoms of magic sickness while struggling with the loss of their senses.

  If the djinn affected the Faerene this badly, I was ready to panic about Istvan, whom we’d left alone.

  Abruptly, we emerged from the djinn’s field of concentrated, chaotic magic. Rory choked off an exclamation. That he could see again was obvious from his suddenly assured lope.

  “I can hear. Oh, thank the land,” Nils gasped.

  “And I see Istvan ahead,” Rory reported.

  Jarod released his arm. “I like werewolf eyesight.”

  Jogging, we fumbled for our canteens and drank.

  Soon, I could also see Istvan.

  He ran toward us, his voice reaching us, first. “Rory, Nils, we’ll need to form the portal together. Rory, base. Nils, location. Pontic Mountains campsite. I’ll open it.”

  The nape of my neck prickled. The djinn was so close.

  I don’t know how the three magicians managed the high magick of a portal while sprinting, but they did. Reality shimmered to the south of where our group met up. All we had to do was dart through the portal, and leave the djinn behind.

  If the chaotic magic allowed it.

  Chapter 8

  “Now!” Rory said.

  Nils dashed through the hastily formed portal. He’d support it from the far side.

  Istvan and I followed, with Jarod and Digger on our heels.

  The portal shuddered.

  Rory leapt through. The desert behind him vanished with a peal of thunder.

  Or maybe not thunder. The ground beneath my feet shook. Could there be such a thing as a reality-shake?

  But musings—and greetings for Nora, Quossa and Daud who came to meet us—had to wait. The swift change from the heat of the desert to the cold of night in the Pontic Mountains was the last straw for my bladder. I lit my oil lamp and ran for the toilet block. Surviving the apocalypse had taught me that while life as we know it might end, biological imperatives remained, and working bathrooms were a treasure that should be utilized.

  “Where are you running to?” Jarod kept pace with me.

  “Bathroom.”

  His pace slowed. Then matched mine. “Actually…”

  Everyone from the expedition joined us, although Istvan broke away in the direction of the griffin-friendly facilities.

  “It’s flipping cold,” Jarod said as he washed his hands afterwards. “Like ice cold.” He flicked water. “I think I prefer the desert.”

  “At least we’re aboveground,” Digger said.

  “Amen,” I agreed.

  Jarod shook his head at our enthusiastic relief. He’d enjoyed the adventure.

  Rory and Nils remained silent. It could have been for any number of reasons, but magic sickness, and hiding the symptoms, was part of it.

  As we walked as a group to the cookhouse I asked in a low voice, “The spindle hasn’t helped at all? With the magic sickness?”

  Rory put a hand at the small of my back. “We’re okay.” That meant no.

  We’d retrieved the spindle, but we had to work out how to activate it—something Nora was keen to start on.

  “Amy, Istvan said you have the spindle. Get it out.”

  We weren’t even at the cookhouse, yet.

  “Scientists.” The single word, rumbled with disgust, came from Thane standing in the doorway. Light spilled out around his big orc body. “They will eat, first.”

  Nora spun and snapped her beak at him. “They can eat while I study the spindle.”

  He was unimpressed by her posturing and attack. “You cannot even hold the spindle.” He moved out of the doorway. “Come in and eat. Be welcome, heroes.”

  “Whatever you’re cooking smells great.” Jarod inhaled loudly. “I’m Jarod.”

  “Thane. It is venison stew. Daud caught the buck.”

  There were quick introductions while Thane served our meal.

  I left my pack beside me, taking Thane’s advice to eat first and deal with the spindle in a few minutes. If his suggestion had been wrong, Rory or Istvan would have suggested getting the spindle out to pacify Nora who stood muttering fretfully.

  “I have a haunch of venison stashed in a tree.” Daud led Istvan outside.

  Quossa followed them.

  “Good stew. Sorry we’re eating your dinner,” Digger said to Thane as the rest of us sat around the table.

  “I made extra. Wasn’t sure when you’d return. If you hadn’t tonight, the scientists would have eaten it for breakfast. They’ll eat anything.”

  The scorn in his voice was as rich as the savory stew.

  “Scientists?” Digger prompted.

  My fork hesitated midair as I realized he was asking for information. In fact, that had motivated his compliment on the stew.

  Thane also recognized Digger’s pursuit of information, and approved it with a grunt. “Don’t fret about them. They had to vacate the bunker for the duration of the moratorium. Vila, she’s the one in charge of the bunker in a crisis, recognized that they couldn’t be trusted not to use ‘just a tiny bit of magic’ in pursuit of their individual research obsessions.”

  “My team knows better than that,” Nora snapped.

  Rory tensed beside me.

  I glanced across at Nils who’d been with Rory a few days ago when Nora’s scientists had been an ill-disciplined, self-absorbed rabble while hunting for bathumas. The truth was that Vila had been wise to lock them out of the bunker during the moratorium.

  “Daud and I wouldn’t let them in here either,” Thane rumbled. “They’d rush to put their sticky fingers on the orb.”

  “You barred them from the sole habitable structure.” Anger harshened Nora’s voice. “You won’t even let them use the bathrooms.” She glared from the imperturbable Thane to Rory. “He won’t let my people on the campsite.”

  “Daud and I agreed, and we were right, that Istvan would open a portal, possibly an unstable portal, to here and not adjacent to the bunker. We couldn’t have your crazies running around the campsite.”

  My eyebrows shot up. There was real animosity between the two of them.

  Thane stood. He strode to the stove, picked up the orc-sized coffeemaker, and poured us mugs of dark liquid.

  “Frost root,” I said to Jarod’s wildly curious look. “It’s like coffee with hot peppers.” It was an acquired taste. Orcs loved frost root. I’d learned that I could drink it. “Thank you, Thane.”

  Istvan returned as we cleared away the remains of our meal.

  Nora hovered by the table. It wasn’t literal hovering. There was neither the room nor the magic for that, but she rustled her feathers and flicked her tail and generally made a nagging nuisance of herself.

  And I was cranky with worry, just like her, and that meant I was easily irritated. I’d forgotten that she, like the rest of the Faerene, would be feeling ill from the rough magic. I ought to be more patient.

  I bent down to undo
my pack and retrieve the world spindle.

  Meantime, Rory took out the folded bathuma hide and spread it out on the table.

  Thane moved the orb basket aside to give him room.

  With the light from two oil lamps it was easy to pick out the details of the map. The outside, the grain side, of the bathuma hide was black. The inside, where the map was drawn, was a dark gray. Nils’s arrow had punched a neat hole in the hide, one that didn’t seem to have marred anything important.

  The ancients had sketched their message in a light brown ink. It was a very rudimentary map, but it served its purpose.

  “Crude, but effective,” Thane said.

  The map included various landmarks and obstacles between the world spindle in Monument Valley and the location in the Atlantic Ocean where the krakenling had found humanity’s orb. The ancients had kept things simple, preferring to add miles to the trip rather than complicate their directions. From the San Juan Mountains the party was directed to follow the Rio Grande River to the Gulf of Mexico, then travel around to Florida before jumping off, not literally, for The Bahamas and island hopping out past Antigua. It would have been an epic journey.

  Since we hadn’t had to make the journey, we zeroed in on the information at journey’s end.

  Clustered around the central image were fish and corn, deer and squash, and numerous small human stick figures. The message was clear. The map showed the way to the land of milk and honey. It promised paradise, thisaway.

  “They lied,” I said softly. With all the scarves wrapped around it, I couldn’t feel the shape of the spindle that I held on my lap.

  “Not in intent,” Nora said. “Magic would have given your pre-industrial ancestors a much easier life.”

  Digger met my gaze, briefly. By the somberness in his eyes, he also saw the map as a lie. It would have guided people to an orb that forever changed what it meant to be human, but that change wouldn’t necessarily have meant they’d live in paradise. The map exploited hope to achieve a goal that the people following it wouldn’t have understood.

  “I understand why the ancient mages did what they did,” I said. “They wanted to motivate whoever found the spindle to seek out the orb. It doesn’t really matter, now. We have to clean up the situation they caused.”

  Thane leaned toward me, frowning. Given his size, that meant he loomed over the table and me. “They caused? The Fae Council chose to activate the orb.”

  “Debate later,” Nora snapped. “The important message is indisputable.”

  Yes, it was. I looked back at the map. In the center of the circle of symbols that conveyed bountiful living stood a single human stick figure with its arms outstretched. Over one hand rested the world spindle. Over the other a circle that had to be the orb.

  “Amy should have activated the orb while holding onto the world spindle.” Nora’s phrasing made the rough magic sound like my fault. So much for not debating the issue. “Whilst I don’t consider hope to be a strategy, I believe we have to hope that it’s not too late for the spindle to stabilize this world’s magic. Amy should touch both.”

  “For how long?” Rory asked.

  “And if that doesn’t work?” Thane challenged.

  I unwound the scarves from the spindle. “It’s the obvious place to start. But I won’t be standing, like in the picture. The orb is too large and heavy to balance out on one hand. I’ll sit here.” I exposed the spindle but let it rest on its nest of scarves.

  Thane pushed the orb toward me.

  I unwrapped the cloth and left the orb sitting on its blue cushion.

  “So that’s the orb.” Jarod peered at it so closely that it was a wonder that Thane, as its guardian, didn’t pull him away.

  Perhaps Thane trusted Istvan’s judgment. Istvan had included Jarod in this expedition.

  “I’m ready to try,” I said.

  Istvan nudged Jarod aside. “Amy, don’t activate the orb. The ancients wouldn’t have expected their descendants to know how to do that initially. I suspect you—or whichever human held both the orb and the world spindle—to be the conduit for magic between them, releasing the quintessences holding Earth’s magic in its frozen latticework, while simultaneously steadying the magic flows that were freed. How the world spindle is meant to do that, I can’t guess. Nora? Quossa?”

  While he adhered to the moratorium on magic, the unicorn scientist and Fae Council member couldn’t speak to us either via telepathy or by magically shaping sound waves. Charades with a large horse body would be difficult, too.

  Quossa half-whinnied, half-snorted, and nudged my shoulder. The message to get on with things was clear.

  It also reminded me that the advice for me to trust the amorphous concept of acua and sense for the world spindle had come from him. I should trust my instincts now.

  I didn’t feel any compulsion to touch the orb and spindle, but nor did anything in me resist the idea.

  Between Istvan on one side of me, Rory on the other, and Quossa behind me, Nora couldn’t get close. She watched from the head of the table. “As Istvan said, don’t activate the orb. I’ll be watching in magic sight to monitor what happens. So will Istvan, due to the bond between you. This was agreed with Yngvar. If it affects your magic, it may affect Istvan. Everyone else will continue to respect the moratorium.”

  The simplicity of the initial test made sense to me. “I’ll give it an hour of just touching both, whether there’s an immediate reaction or not.”

  I touched the orb and the spindle, simultaneously. When nothing happened, I rested my hands more securely. I didn’t try to see with magic sight. In the bunker, when I’d activated the orb and the Fae Council had learned its initial communication of humanity’s forgotten magic history, I’d used blood to forge my link with it. But now that the link existed, I couldn’t guess whether merely using magic while touching it would be sufficient to activate it. I didn’t dare risk it.

  After three minutes of silence, Jarod couldn’t stand it any longer. He drank the last of his mug of frost root, sucked in a loud cooling breath, undoubtedly because his tongue was tingling from the drink’s pepper factor, and asked the question on everyone’s mind. “Is anything happening?”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t sense anything, and I was alert to the slightest change in myself, in the two ancient objects, and in the Faerene around me. If the rough magic stabilized, the Faerene ought to recover from their magic sickness.

  However, holding onto the two objects felt right.

  Rory and Istvan were carefully not touching me despite their close attendance to my slightest movement. We didn’t know how linking in a Faerene to my human interaction with the orb and spindle might affect whatever the ancient mages had intended the objects to do.

  “The magic flows haven’t changed,” Istvan said. “They’re streaming in and through the orb as I’ve seen them do other times when the orb is inactive, and they’re ignoring the spindle in the same way they’d ignore a mundane object. Nora?”

  “I see the same.”

  “It’s good news,” Rory said to Jarod, and perhaps to the concern that hid behind Digger’s warrior face across the table. He was battle ready even if this wasn’t his fight. “A positive reaction, winding in the feral magic, will take time. But if Amy connecting to the orb and spindle was going to cause trouble the risk was for an instant explosion.”

  I pulled a face. So that’s why he and Istvan had crowded me. They’d intended to try and shield me or break my contact with the orb and spindle.

  “So, can we talk while Amy does her thing?” Jarod asked.

  “Yes,” Istvan said. “I would like to hear of your cave journey.”

  And Jarod was happy to tell it.

  Even Nora became interested when he reached the description of the chamber and our first sight of the bathuma hide bundle high up on the ceiling. “The bag was in the center? Were there any marks on the ceiling? You said there weren’t any on the floor.”

  “No marks.” Jarod sp
read his arms in a shrug. “But with nothing else in the cave, just the bundle, it was plain that we needed to get it down. A ladder couldn’t have fitted through the winding passage to the cavern. An arrow was the only possible answer. Amy suggested it. A metal-tipped projectile that could prove capable of piercing bathuma hide. Nils attached cord to the arrow and pulled the bundle down. He made us wait in the passage, and I nearly died of curiosity.”

  “Humans are as curious as elves,” Thane rumbled. “And you know what curiosity did to the Far Mountain elves.”

  “No, what?” Jarod asked, bright-eyed and inquisitive.

  Rory laughed under his breath as Thane regarded Jarod blankly.

  The orc had uttered the aphorism in the same way an American would have said, curiosity killed the cat. Thane hadn’t expected the storyteller to break off from the story to ask questions.

  Nora clacked her beak. “Curiosity is all very well, however, the ancient mages wouldn’t have relied on someone stumbling over the world spindle. They would have left stories to guide them to it.”

  “But the stories twisted and changed, or were forgotten,” Istvan completed her thought.

  “Or someone wanted them forgotten,” Digger said. “Maybe some of the mages or their immediate descendants decided that life was better without magic.”

  The Faerene gawked at him.

  He smiled faintly, ruefully. “Imagine it. The bathumas had gone. People no longer died by attacks from giant grubs or fiery bats. Maybe life was harder, but if it had settled into a stable society and new ways of living evolved, maybe people decided they liked it.”

  Nora broke the Faerene’s stunned silence at the idea that anyone could embrace a life devoid of magic, and she did so with her own dismissive conclusion. “You’re still angry. You remember the lifestyle you lost when we brought our magic and sealed the Rift humans had opened in Earth’s shield.”

  “I’m not angry.” Digger whittled a stick he’d taken from the wood box. “My mom loved Ancient Greek myths. There were stories of Clotho. I remember her, one of the Fates, because her name was like clothes. Clotho spun the thread of life. The Navajo and other First Peoples of the Americas have their own stories about spinning. Maybe those stories were about spinning our own fates.”