"Why don't we try your idea," she said. "See if you can draw up magical energy from wherever you're getting it, and pass it to me."
Kate nodded. She closed her eyes and inhaled, then exhaled, then inhaled again. Rhythmic breathing, that expression of intense concentration, silence except for the ticking and whirring of various devices in the house.
Again she saw the other woman fill herself with magic. The air grew bright around her and Rhiana reminded herself that Kate saw and felt nothing of the radiant nimbus that suffused the air around them.
Kate opened her eyes and looked at Rhiana.
Without warning, magic wrapped itself in a tight cocoon around Rhiana, shattering the frail shield she'd drawn up around herself and assaulting her senses. She panicked and flailed out at it instead of absorbing it the way she would have absorbed the magic from a natural ley line; this was the worst possible thing she could have done. The energy arced and ignited into a fireball that enveloped everything in a roar of thunder and a searing flash of light.
Chapter Nine
Kate didn't have time to react. Out of nowhere, out of nothing, Rhiana disappeared in a firebomb, and the searing blue-white flames exploded outward and enveloped Kate, the table and the chairs they sat on, the ground beneath their feet, the air they breathed. Kate threw her hands over her face as a shock wave hit her. She felt herself lift into the air; a thunderous explosion deafened her and she pulled herself into a little ball and screamed and wrapped her arms over her ears and squeezed her eyes shut and—Shit! Shit! Shit! I don't want to die! I don't want to die!—tried to breathe, flew for what felt like a thousand years, tumbled weightless and frantically tried to protect herself as her weight came back and her body slammed into something hard and icy wind flayed her skin and the thunder pounded her and battered her and drove through her brain like nails and the fire burned beneath her eyelids and pain ate her and chewed her up and spat her out and left her washed up in a huddled ball in utter silence and total darkness alone and lost and freezing cold.
She lay on her side, knees drawn up to her chest. She opened her eyes and saw only blackness. She could hear nothing. She could feel, but all she felt was pain. Her every joint screamed, her head pounded, and she was cold. Cold. What sort of fire burned and left you cold? she wondered. She wasn't just cold; she was freezing. Freezing in silence and darkness. Maybe she was dead. Maybe she was lost in some bitter Nordic hell.
Or maybe not. Better to think she was still alive. She might have a chance to stay that way if she acted on that assumption.
Her pains began to sort themselves out, and she discovered that some were worse than others. Something hard dug into her ribs, and she rolled to one side enough that she could reach it with one hand and move it. It was a rock. She was lying in sand.
Sand?
Blind, deaf, lying in sand. Cold. Cold.
She rubbed her arms and discovered her sleeves were gone. She touched her legs, her belly, her breasts, her back. She was naked. She'd been fully dressed an instant before. Her skin was intact, but every bit of her clothing was gone. Shoes, socks, underwear. Her favorite Rangers sweatshirt.
Dammit! Her favorite Rangers sweatshirt!
Blind, deaf, naked, lying in sand, and getting angry.
The lying-in-sand part she could fix. She rolled her knees under her and sat up and slammed her head into something so hard white light flashed along the backs of her eyeballs and she howled and fell forward again holding her head. Rocked back and forth, swearing a blue streak, clutching her head, feeling the lump rise.
"Kate?"
The voice belonged to Rhiana.
Kate groaned and turned toward the sound. "What?"
"You aren't dead?"
"Unfortunately not."
"Where are we?"
Kate snarled, "I don't know. We blew up and everything went black. Why are you asking me?"
"I'm so cold," Rhiana said. "And all my clothes are gone."
"Mine, too." Kate opened her eyes again. The darkness began to recede from the very center of her field of vision, and gradually she realized a circle of light lay above her and a few feet away. "But I can see now," she whispered.
Rhiana said, "My vision is coming back, too."
"Are you hurt?"
"I hurt, but I don't think I'm injured."
"Except for hitting my head on whatever is right above me, I think I'm okay, too. Don't sit up," Kate warned.
"I won't. Do you think we should crawl toward the light?"
"I don't think so. Not until we have some idea what happened to us and where we are. Has anything like this ever happened to you?"
"No. You?"
Kate's short laugh this time sounded harsh to her own ears. "No. But I could say the same thing about everything these last two days."
Kate rolled cautiously onto her belly. Her eyes were adjusting to the darkness, and she began to make out a geometric pattern of pillars standing blacker in the darkness. They were extraordinarily low pillars—the ceiling couldn't be more than three feet above her head, and she tried to imagine who would build such a place. Sand floor with rocks left lying around, broad squat pillars, areas of total blackness to her right and left.
To her left, something began to roar. She jumped, fearing the worst. Then she smelled oil.
And suddenly she knew where she was. She began to laugh. She'd been under her house half a dozen times to manually light her furnace during the year when she couldn't afford to have anyone come in to service it. Now she was under her house again.
"Crawl toward the light," she said. "Keep your head down, though, and watch your knees. There's all sorts of junk down here."
"You know where we are?"
"Oh, yeah."
They reached the circle of light. The light came through a hole in her floor easily six feet in diameter, that cut through wood flooring and subfloor and support beams and part of the air duct so smoothly the edges of the cuts looked polished. Kate crawled out first, and found the remains of her chairs and a small sliver of one side of the table that had evidently been just outside of the circle she had cast. Except for the furniture fragments, there was no mess. Nothing shattered. Nothing disturbed. The explosion hadn't even left dust.
Kate crawled up out of the hole into her dining room and stared down at what had once been a beautifully refinished old hardwood floor. Rhiana crawled out beside her and looked, too. "Perhaps we shouldn't do that again," she said.
"You might be right." Kate shook her head slowly. Two chairs had survived the blast intact. They were the two Kate had kept against the wall on either side of the picture window. The others all looked like they'd been bait in a shark feeding frenzy. Dammit. Her floor—hours of back-breaking labor, stripping and drum-sanding and staining and varnishing. Her table. Her chairs. She'd gone to so much trouble finding them. Had worked for weeks on her days off, turning them into beautiful hand-rubbed tung-oil-finished artworks. She'd been so proud of them when she was done. But the work on the furniture and the floor had been more than simple work. The floors and the furniture had been some of the ways she dealt with her pain after Craig's death. Work and more work; the conscious and deliberate avoidance of anything alluringly self-destructive; the constant reminder to make something good and something beautiful of her time; the utter adamant refusal to let herself give in to her despair.
And nights when she fell exhausted into bed and passed into undreaming sleep, and mornings when she woke to darkness and the alarm clock's steady bleating, she knew the bleakness in her soul and felt the call of the abyss into which Craig had flung himself, and she spurred herself harder. She could think back to those days and the only moments of silent reflection she recalled were the ones when she rode Rocky through the pine woods. And Rocky was gone, too. She wondered if everything she still cared about was fated for destruction.
Then she stood straighter. How easy, how very easy, to fall into self-pity. Her world was fated for destruction if she didn't find a wa
y to stop it, and in the face of that, things could not be allowed to matter. So her floor was damaged. She would repair it. So her table and chairs were gone. She would replace them. And Rocky was gone. She would miss him. And that was all she would, could, allow herself to feel.
She turned to Rhiana. "I have some clothes in the dryer. Why don't we get dressed and then see if we can figure out what went wrong."
"Is it safe to come out there?" Val called from the living room.
Both women shouted at the same time, "NO!" and hurried to the downstairs bathroom to find clothes and get dressed.
When they returned to the kitchen, Kate got the Fodor's Guide to Glenraven. She came back out, got a good look at her guest, and barely kept herself from laughing. Kate guessed Rhiana couldn't have weighed more than ninety pounds, and she might have been five feet tall if she rose up on her toes a bit. Kate was five ten and weighed one-forty. Rhiana looked like a starving waif dressed in a pair of her jeans with the legs rolled up four times and a belt pulled to the tightest notch to hold them up and a T-shirt that hung down past her knees. The two of them settled onto the barstools at the bar that separated the kitchen from the dining room and Kate opened the guide. "What did we do wrong?" Kate asked.
You have the right idea, but you're drawing too much power when you get ready to pass it to Rhiana. When you tap your source, I felt you visualize the tides of an ocean, the crashing surf, the unstoppable forces of the sea. Think smaller. Try visualizing a slow, steady stream from a water tap. Maybe just a thread of water. Maybe just a faucet dripping occasionally.
Rhiana snorted. "That won't do much." Then, sounding annoyed, she asked the book, "Why didn't you tell us that Kate was magic-blind and that I wouldn't be able to touch the source of magic in this world?"
I did not know she was magic-blind, nor did I know that you would be unable to locate her source of power. I had never seen either of you work; you seem to assume that I know you better than I do. You assume a prescience on my part that, sadly, does not exist. I can follow the individual threads of some events through the weft and warp of reality, seeing where they go in and where they go out, but I can no more see the steps that form the greater pattern of the weave than you can. The "how" of any specific event is as much a mystery to me as it is to you.
Kate stared down at the words and frowned. The comparison of weaving with reality wasn't new to her, but the comment about seeing the greater pattern of the weave…that left her puzzled.
The pattern is this…I foresee that by bringing the five of you together and informing you of the danger to your worlds and the fabric of reality, you may be able to alter what is an otherwise unstoppable fall to destruction for Glenraven and Earth. The steps that will create that pattern…I do not know those. If the knowledge were mine to give, I would share it. It is not.
Rhiana gave Kate a look of purest disbelief. "So the book is going to tell us what we need to accomplish, but we have to figure out how to do it? What good is that?"
Until I brought you together, you didn't know there was a problem.
Kate said, "And I preferred it that way."
Rhiana laughed. Kate realized it was the first time she had seen any sign of humor from the woman at all. "As did I," she agreed.
Ignorance is rarely bliss. Ignorance is cancer untreated and growing.
"We were joking," Kate muttered. "Nobody was seriously suggesting that we would be better off letting our worlds die." She turned to Rhiana, her hand resting on the page, and said, "I guess we ought to get back to work. We need to find a way to do magic together without atomizing things." She caught a flicker from the book, and turned to stare at the page again.
Before you go, here is the pattern you must weave. You must locate Callion and the Watchers, go to them, find out what they have been doing in this world since they arrived in the Machine World, and nullify any damage they have done. You must create a gate back to Glenraven and take Callion and the Watchers through it. Then you must return them to the Rift and force Callion to release the Watchers back to their own world and when they are gone, you must force him to close the Rift. Finally, you must make some provision that will prevent him from reopening the Rift.
"Oh, is that all?" Rhiana said.
Kate glanced at her sidelong. She could see the faintest hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth. More evidence of a sense of humor. Kate said, "We ought to be able to take care of that by tomorrow, don't you think?"
"But of course. I suspect we could do it tonight if we cared to, though I don't want to work that hard."
And even though nothing about the situation was funny, both of them began to laugh hysterically.
Five hours later, after two more large explosions, perhaps thirty small explosions, and the accidental summoning of a spirit from the spaces between the worlds, with both Kate and Rhiana dressed only in brown Glad lawn bags with holes punched through for their heads and arms so that they wouldn't vaporize any more of Kate's rapidly dwindling wardrobe, Kate successfully passed to Rhiana a flow of magic small enough that Rhiana could transform it without destroying anything. Rhiana created a sunflower, which she made to grow up out of the hole in the center of the dining room floor. The plant burst out of the ground and unfurled rapidly; Kate thought the process looked like stop-motion photography and found the fact that it was real delightful.
Still, she would have preferred Rhiana to materialize some new Wrangler jeans to replace the ones all their experimentation had destroyed.
They sat on the edge of the dining room hole with their bare legs dangling down into the cold darkness of the crawl space. Both of them were sweaty and filthy. Their ropy hair stuck to their foreheads and the backs of their necks, and the plastic bags they wore clung to their skin. They cheered softly when the sunflower bloomed.
"Enough for tonight," Kate said.
Rhiana looked over at her, eyes heavy-lidded. "Enough for the rest of my life. I'm exhausted."
"I know. I've never done anything so wearing."
"Do you know the worst part of this?" Rhiana asked.
Kate didn't, but didn't know that she wanted to, either. "No."
"When we wake, after we've practiced with small energies until we're sure we can use them accurately, we have to start increasing power again."
"What? No."
"Oh, yes." Rhiana let herself sag forward until her torso rested on her thighs and her arms draped down into the crawl space. "That I've learned to catch your sort of magic doesn't mean I can catch enough of it to blast a gate from here to Glenraven. So tomorrow it shall be more explosions and more flashing lights and more flames and booms and crashes and more of these stinking sticky hot bags…" She sighed heavily. "And we don't even know where the bastard is, or where to start looking for him."
"We'll find him," Kate said. "We're going to succeed, Rhiana."
"We shall at least die trying."
Chapter Ten
Callion tapped his finger on the desk and stared out the window, holding the phone pressed to one ear.
"Sun-Sentinel," an efficient female voice said.
"Classifieds, please."
"One moment."
The voice that came on the line a moment later was also female. "Sun-Sentinel classifieds, Shelby Barnott speaking. How may I help you?"
"I'd like to place two advertisements," Callion said. "Can you write them down, please?"
"Certainly."
"The first must read: 'Career opportunity: The successful candidate will be an intelligent, well-educated single female between the ages of 18 and 30 who is willing to move to advance her career, and who is a voracious reader. Should enjoy SF/F and occult literature and have a working knowledge of magic. Starting salary can range from $40,000 to $70,000 dollars per annum, commensurate with education and ability. Job includes company house and company car and all benefits. Apply in writing, describing yourself, your interests, and your qualifications, and give a contact number.' "
He gave her t
he address of the post office box he'd rented.
"Wow," she said. "I'd love to have a job like that. I'd be perfect."
"You're welcome to apply," he said. "In writing."
She said nothing for half a beat. Then she said, "And your second advertisement."
"Identical, except that all references to a female must be changed to a male. And the address is different." He gave her the second post office box number, then insisted that she read both ads back to him.
"Anything special you would like to do with these? We can outline with a black box, use a larger typeface—"
He made a face over the phone. The female candidate he was looking for would read the small print. The other, though…
"On the ad for the male candidate, give me a fourteen-point sans-serif typeface, with the first two words in bold print. I'd like a one-point solid border around the ad, and if you can arrange to narrow the ad to less than a column in width so that I can get a bit of additional white space all the way around it, I'd like that, too."
He heard her clicking away at the keyboard. After a moment, she said, "Done. And the same treatment for the other ad?"
"No. Nothing special for it at all. I've discovered that women read the small print, while men frequently need to be thumped over the head."
She laughed. "I always thought the same thing."
He made another face at the phone. He wondered if the woman to whom he was speaking was capable of independent thought.
"How long do you want to run it?"
"Six weeks to start with."
A silence. Then an uncertain, "Six weeks?"
"The company has more than one opening to fill, and suitable candidates are extremely difficult to locate. I imagine the ad will run considerably longer than six weeks."
"Right. I have you down for six weeks." She went over the details of each ad for him, then said, "How would you like to pay?"
"Will my gold card suffice?"
Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 02] Page 7