Titan's Day

by Dan Stout

  From a hidden pocket in her cloak, Guyer drew a glass vial no larger than my thumb. Like the shards we’d found near Jane, the liquid it contained had an ephemeral sheen, the telltale shimmer of manna. The raw fuel of magic, manna was wonder and darkness conjoined, like a glistening film of oil concealing waters of unknown depth.

  Andrews let out a trill of dismay. I shared his sentiment. This is what divination officers did, of course: use magic to communicate with the recently departed. But manna was so precious it was only rolled out for the most pressing of cases. To use it on a dead animal seemed almost sacrilegious. What could they possibly hope to learn? But both the doctor and sorcerer ignored the patrol officer’s objection.

  Removing the cap of the vial, Guyer pressed the tiny spray button, spritzing the animal bodies with the valuable liquid and allowing some overspray to mist the air on the side opposite the lamp. Then she did the same to her hands, applying the faintest possible coat to her flesh. The precious liquid glistened, and she muttered words of power, focusing her energy and binding the manna-touched objects. As she spoke, the runes on her cloak danced with sparks, lit with the power as she crafted the manna bond.

  Guyer positioned herself behind the lamp, hands between it and the animal carcasses. For several long moments, we all stood in silence. On the other side of the pool of light I caught Hemingway staring at me. She looked away the second I made eye contact.

  Taking a deep breath, Guyer said, “This isn’t easy.”

  “Indeed.” Baelen stretched the final syllable. “That’s why you’re here and not someone of lesser talents.”

  The corners of Guyer’s lips curled upward. Either she liked the flattery or enjoyed the challenge. Maybe both.

  Slowly, Guyer raised her hands, their shadows falling against the animal hides. Then higher, creeping upward, until her shadow hands touched the far wall, supplanting and blending with the carcass shadows. The shadows still edged upward, but were now no longer recognizable as hands. As they passed the shadows of the animal corpses, the absence of light seemed to trail in their wake, strands of darkness that quivered and tore, fighting to be free before collapsing, re-forming into the dark outlines of a hare and leamu. I thought of the shadow puppets I’d thrown on the wall of Talena’s bedroom when she was still afraid of the dark. But these shapes were something more than crude imitations. They were perfectly realized beyond the skills of any performer, their forms carrying weight and their edges as distinct as crisply chiseled lines in stone.

  Guyer stood behind the lamp, hands unmoving in its beam while their unnatural shadows took tentative steps, leamu on the right, the hare on the left, moving like the souls of the still and silent animals on the table. On the wall, the animals re-created their last living moments in two dimensions. The hare hopped forward while the leamu shifted up and down, grasping limbs pulled tight to its core as it studied the hare, its long body coiled below the snow, ready to propel it forward. No one in the room spoke. Even our breathing was hushed. It was eerie, watching the dark shapes, reading their movement and layering each beat with a life of its own.

  When the predator sprang it was almost too fast to comprehend. I’ve heard stories of starving leamu attacking riggers or long-haul truckers who wandered onto the ice plains, but I’d never witnessed one in action. Even in stark, featureless black and white, it was astonishing. Its long body snapped true with a whip-crack speed, and it hurtled into the hare faster than my eye could follow.

  But instead of the expected result, the ice hare flipped onto its back, rolling with the leamu’s attack and diverting its course upward. The leamu overshot its intended victim, using its powerful limbs to turn and refocus rather than gripping its prey. It pushed itself off and landed on its target. Still on its back, the hare kicked and kicked with its powerful back legs, one paw hooking in the leamu’s tiny eye horns, pulling the attacker’s head back and exposing its throat and underbelly. The ice hare’s claws raked along the leamu’s vulnerable underside until it ripped open, kept kicking even as shadow viscera rained down the wall.

  But the leamu had managed to grab the hare’s neck, compressing and twisting. The predator’s greater bulk gave added pressure, even as its grip slackened. Even in death, it managed to take one more life out of the world.

  Beyond our circle, Baelen had crept back into the light. She ignored every moment of the struggle, her eyes fixed firmly on us. She wasn’t testing the new manna, she was testing our reaction to the scenario. As if she wanted to see if we had a connection to either the leamu or the rabbit. I set my face, determined to give her nothing to work with.

  Their story told, the shadows on the wall stilled. Guyer exhaled loudly, then allowed her hands to drop, merging the animated shadows into the natural darkness of the carcasses. One more deep breath and once again she cast only a normal shadow, two hands with ten shadow fingers. I kept my eight fingers of flesh and bones firmly in my pockets.

  The lights came on and our examiner stared at her clipboard and muttered to herself. The sound of her pen as she made notes grew in volume, the swoop of each checkmark more prominent. I got the distinct impression we weren’t up to Dr. Baelen’s standards.

  “That was adequate,” she announced. “Take a short break and we’ll regroup.”

  The collected lab rats began filing out. I stayed a moment longer, staring at the bodies on the table. The ice hare’s eyes were closed, almost restful. As if it had found a victory in making its last moments ones of resistance. The leamu’s eyes were wide and glassy, and held an expression that I couldn’t help but identify as shock at the sudden reversal of the natural order.

  There was movement to my left. Jax stood by, waiting, the cloth that had covered the animals in one hand. I took it and gently draped it back over them.

  “Let’s go find Guyer,” I said. We needed to talk with our sorcerer in residence.

  6

  MOST OF THE OTHER LAB rats hung close to the vending machines, calling out friendly insults to Jax, and regular insults to myself. The two of us passed them by, strolling down the hall and peering in side rooms until we found DO Guyer. She was sitting in a small meeting room, fingers drumming the linoleum tabletop as she stared into space. She’d pulled the dark fabric of her cloak around her shoulders, wrapping herself in its near solid black, while iridescent symbols danced along the contours of her arms and shoulders, strange runes that disappeared when I focused directly on them. I wondered if those symbols would stick to my fingers if I touched them, and pull painfully taut when I tried to escape, a fly in a sorcerer’s web?

  I figured I’d be better off saying something charming, to break the ice. “You putting in some serious hours? You look terrible.”

  She gave me a befuddled smile. “Seriously?”

  Jax slipped into one of the open seats and propped his chin on his hands. “I think he means that you look like someone who’s so far gone past exhaustion that you’ve come back round the other side.”

  Her smile grew more steady, and I decided to push my luck.

  “You know,” I said, “we’ve got this Jane Doe case that could really use some of your expertise.”

  “Ask me later.” Her eyes tracked the fall of my shoulders and she conceded slightly. “Look, I’ll review the murder book, but you know I can’t do any kind of divination without authorization.”

  I decided to drop the matter and ask about something where I knew we’d find common ground. Workload.

  “You want to tell me what you’re dealing with that’s got you so worn down?”

  Guyer hesitated, as if not certain she wanted to talk about it, but ultimately plunged ahead. “Black market manna. Snake oil, specifically.”

  That matched up with Bryyh’s command that we fill out a controlled substance report for Jane’s case. “Is that why Vice pulled you over to an ARC team?”

  Another organizational change spurred by the mann
a strike, the Arcane Regulation and Containment teams had been cobbled together and assigned to help deal with the ongoing influx of sorcerers into Titanshade. All three of Homicide’s divination officers had been temporarily transferred to Vice, helping deal with irate sorcerers.

  “It is,” she agreed. “But somewhere there’s a factory or angel’s roost where they’re diluting manna. If that goes wrong, or if the wrong people get wind of it . . .” She spread her hands, indicating how things would go for the innocent people living in the surrounding buildings.

  Jax flexed a mandible far enough to scratch his cheek. “Why are they taking the risk? Demand for black market manna is so high that whoever’s got the material could sell it for tens of thousands of taels. Maybe hundreds of thousands.”

  Guyer managed a weary chuckle. “They could. Or they could cut it, dilute it . . . and sell it for millions.”

  “And that’s snake oil,” I said.

  She pointed her index finger and forced a cheesy, game show host smile. “We’ve got a winner!” Her shoulders slumped after the exertion. “That’s snake oil. It’s usually cut into angel tears, which will make people see anything from visions of the Path to waking nightmares about the dead coming back to life. Worse, they think they’re using magic, which means that they start thinking they can fly, or some other BS. You wouldn’t believe what people think manna will let them do.”

  “They don’t understand its rules,” said Jax.

  “Magic doesn’t have rules,” she said. “It has probabilities. When you’re using a lot of it, the more likely it is to have a predictable outcome. Back in the industrial revolution, when people were pouring gallons of manna into trucks, it was workaday stuff. But when the whales died out—”

  “Hunted,” said Jax. “They were hunted out of existence.”

  “Right,” said Guyer, evidently not thinking the distinction was worth a response. “After that, people had to get by with much less manna. That requires more skill, and carries more risk.”

  “That it’ll fail?” I asked.

  “That it will veer off in an unexpected direction.” Guyer glanced toward the examination room, where some soldier who’d drawn the short straw was carting away the hare and leamu.

  I thought back to Sherri, the woman we’d tussled with earlier, her strange strength, the smell of roses and honey. I tried to keep Guyer talking, hoping to work my way around to the topics I needed to discuss. “The military’s got the strike area secured like a national treasure. Any manna on the street’s gotta be tied back to them.”

  She laughed in my face.

  “I wish it were that easy! Hells, when they found you at the strike scene, you were practically floating in a puddle of the stuff. Think of all the medics and cops who were on that site before it was contained. Even if the military isn’t swiping a drop—which I doubt—there’s more than enough manna floating around to start pumping out snake oil.”

  It made sense. I’d heard the EMS crews and roughnecks who’d been on-site were being tested and monitored like we were, though on different days and in different facilities. Most of the rig workers exposed to the maddening gas hadn’t fully recovered. At least not mentally.

  Guyer swirled her mug, and stared into the resultant coffee vortex. “We’ve gotten pretty good cooperation from Colonel Marbury and her staff, all things considered. But if that changes, things could get bad real fast.”

  I thought on that for a moment, as Guyer pulled her cloak even tighter. “Manna means big money, and big money makes people act crazy. Like blowing manna on talking to dead animals.”

  “So does snake oil have any real magic?” I asked.

  “No.” She rubbed her eyes, blinking rapidly like someone forcing herself to wake up. “It’s a minuscule amount of manna in a psychotropic drug. Users get high, they see things, they think they’re sorcerers, they keep doing it until they overdose.”

  “There’s no chance they’ll actually make something happen? Or make themselves change?”

  “Change?”

  “Get strong,” I said. “Just for instance.”

  Guyer rubbed her eyes. “Carter, do us both a favor and ask me what you want to know. Enough with the for instances, okay?”

  “There was this woman,” I said. “When we were door knocking. She was strong. Really strong. Right?” I pointed to Jax, hoping for backup, but he showed a sudden interest in a torn thumbnail. “She broke out of my hold like it was nothing.”

  “How’d you subdue her?” said Guyer.

  Jax coughed. “I took her to the floor.”

  “So was she strong?” she said.

  “Well . . .” He ran a hand along one mandible, looking embarrassed. “She did break Carter’s hold, but she was obviously on something, and—” His gaze shifted to me. “It was your left-hand grip.”

  He didn’t need to say that my mangled hand was weaker than it’d once been.

  Guyer nodded. “Crazy beats strong every time.”

  It was a platitude taught in the academy, a warning to recruits to not tangle with addled minds. And it only made me more frustrated. I wanted to talk about the tingling, about the cobwebs, but Baelen was in the next room, and now Guyer was working for the doctor. She wouldn’t sell me out, but she also might let something slip.

  “I believe that she was strong, Carter. I do. But what you’re describing is a brush with a junkie having an adrenaline rush, nothing magical.”

  “Even if she’s on snake oil?”

  “Even then,” she said. “Manna’s like thread. It doesn’t do anything on its own, it’s what binds objects together to make a whole, which can do the impossible. As long as that fabric is bound by a trained seamstress.”

  “Like you.”

  Guyer gave me a weary grin, then opened up the cloak to reach into the back pocket of her khakis, revealing the well-worn spot where her belt holster had thinned the fabric of her pants. Odd that she wasn’t wearing a gun. She pulled out a business card, dropped it on the table and tapped it with an expensively manicured nail badly in need of a touch-up. After her name was the title, AMd.

  “Those three letters cost me twelve years of training and enough student debt to last a lifetime.” She straightened her finger, pushing the card in my direction. “So yeah, it takes someone like me to use manna professionally.”

  “Okay,” I said, “that’s professionally. What happens if someone untrained and hallucinating got ahold of manna?”

  “Come on, Carter,” she said. “There’s a million variables to factor in before—”

  “Humor me.”

  “Fine! If someone is hallucinating . . .” She exhaled loudly as she considered the question. “It’s possible to tether two items without training, if there’s enough manna or the motivation is strong enough. Back when you could get manna by the bucketful, it’s what powered the first industrial revolution.”

  “But what if it’s not items? What if it’s something like shadows or an emotion or—”

  “I’m getting there!” She frowned, and muttered, “Shortcuts!” before continuing. “It’s possible to tether abstract concepts, but that’s . . . look, even skilled, highly educated sorcerers struggle with that.”

  “It’s what you do every day,” I said. “What all the divination officers do.”

  “And you think that’s easy?” She pointed toward the room where shadows had danced to her will. “It takes serious sideways thinking to make those bonds.”

  “Sideways thinking,” I said. “Like the kind caused by hallucinogens? Maybe angel tears?”

  Guyer blinked. She thought on it, gumming her lips.

  “Maybe it’d veer off,” I quoted her own words back to her, “in an unexpected direction?”

  She leaned to the side, as though intrigued with the idea. When she did, her rune-marked cloak drooped over the back of her chair.
I stared at it, wondering about the electric sensation that had danced over my hand and arm in the alley. If it wasn’t in my head, could it be magic that I’d somehow sensed?

  Shifting in my seat to cover my action, I edged my left hand forward. Bracing for a tingle, even a shock, I grazed the cloak and its manna-laced runes. But I felt nothing beyond the velvety softness of fine fabric.

  “There’s still a lot we don’t know about manna.” Guyer shoved her wallet back into her pocket, pulling the magical fabric out of my reach. “It’s been rare and precious for so long that no one’s been willing to experiment with it. And the new supply? Hells, half the world is terrified of it, and the other half wants to use it in everything from factories to toaster ovens.”

  Shuffling feet in the hallway told us that the rats were being called back to the lab.

  Guyer ran a hand over her face, pulling her flesh tight, adding a white highlight along the curve of her lip. “I don’t know how the new manna functions, because no one does. This new doctor of yours,” she dropped her hand into her lap and glanced in Baelen’s direction, “she’s doing some pretty brave stuff, even if it is a waste of money.”

  I responded with a noncommittal grunt. The way Baelen had watched us was unsettling. Like an alien in one of Hanford’s UFO stories, toying with Eyjan-bound beings for amusement or to satisfy some inscrutable design. Baelen might be interested in something, but it wasn’t our health. And that made me wonder what she was really looking for.

  * * *

  The rest of the examination was the standard fluid samples and psych evaluations. After we were done, Jax and I drove the Hasam back to the Bunker’s central garage. As we got out of the car a sudden banging came from the loading bay, where a trio of techs were wrestling a washing machine out of a crime scene van, each bump and clang accompanied by a string of obscenities. Cetus St. Beisht’s metal shroud was headed for the evidence locker.