Magic Time
( Magic Time - 1 )
Marc Scott Zicree
Barbara Hambly
Marc Scott Zicree, Barbara Hambly
Magic Time
Prologue
Resonance
Cal Griffin dreamed chaos.
Darkness, blacker than anything he’d ever conceived of, center-of-the-earth black, no-universe-yet-made black, dead-a-thousand-years black. Voices shouting, so clear that he could distinguish not only male and female, but each separate human soul screaming. He could tell rage from pain from terror. In the darkness of the dream he could hear his own blood hammering in his ears.
The sound of blows, metal on metal-metal tearing flesh. The stink of blood and of earth soaked with blood, of smoke and of charring.
He stood at the black heart of the tumult as they cried their anguish, their despair, demanded and pleaded-
That he act.
The darkness flailed him, whipped his breath away. He should rise to their call, should help them.
But how?
A shard of light split the blackness like a razor stroke. It glanced across an immense, irregular mound that might have been the bodies of men or merely the things they had used.
An object gleamed atop it, brilliant in the light, and Cal saw that it was a sword. Not opulent and bejeweled but plain, the leather of the hilt palm-worn. This weapon had seen use.
He reached out, seized it. The grooves and creases worn into the hilt by sweaty usage fit his palm. It was his palm that had made them.
As he drew it out, the light danced liquid on the blade, flashed a Rorschach of half-glimpsed living things in its silver-gold. Around him, the cries rose and blended to a single keening of raw need and pain. Holding the sword high, he knew what he must do.
But still he hesitated.
The cry was drowned in thunder that rent the universe apart.
Cal jolted awake.
The silence was shocking after the clamor of his dream. He felt a terrible regret; guilt washed over him. Though the summer night was warm, his body was clammy and he trembled.
He looked at his hand, hoping that. .
That what?
He sat up in bed, rubbing his forehead. The dream fell back into the invisible river of night and was gone.
A murmur sounded from the other room, and he thought, Tina. The Marvin the Martian clock she had given him on his birthday last August displayed the time. 3:10 A.M.
Cal threw back the covers, made his way to the door by the yellow glare of street lamps, the bulbs ringing the sign on Patel’s Grocery, the Amoco billboard on the corner. After three years the ambient light of New York nights still impressed him. So different from Hurley, where all illumination-even the mercury vapors along Main Street-was damped by midnight and the only glow came from the cold, indifferent stars.
Barefoot, he padded across the hall to Tina’s room, not so much concerned that his sister might be locked in a dream as disturbing as his-the nightmares about their mother, the endless, heightened replays of the loss of her, had long since eased back-but mainly to assure himself of the reality of this moment, this place, to jettison the last vestige of dream and accusation.
He slid open Tina’s door, stood watching her. Asleep, curled on her side, her dark hair an anonymous tangle on the pillow, she looked fragile, younger than twelve, and troubled even in repose. Her textbooks-so many! — lay stacked and open about the bed, mingled with myriad dog-eared copies of Dance Magazine and programs from the Met, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center, their covers ablaze with pas de deux and arabesque. The posters and clipped pictures taped to her walls gazed down, guardian angels. Anna Pavlova, Fonteyn, Makarova, Buffy. .
On the nightstand, he could discern the framed snapshot Luz Herrera had taken of her at the March recital (the one he’d missed thanks to the damn Iverson deposition). In toe shoes and tights, Tina hung weightless in midleap, enraptured. Beside it lay open a volume from Nijinsky’s diaries. Nijinsky had slid hopelessly into madness, Tina had explained intently to Cal the other day as he’d gulped granola and coffee, and no one could save him. But he had been glorious in his moment.
Under Cal’s bare toes, the shag carpet was worn to the weave: New York wasn’t the place to live if you didn’t have major money; it was a miracle they’d scored this barely affordable sublet as it was. But Hurley, Minnesota, wouldn’t have provided them with even minor money. Not the kind of money that a good college demands, or private schooling, or the array of courses in technique and variations, character and pointe that Tina had been inhaling whole at the School of American Ballet. The kind of money that will buy chances for the future.
And he’d had to make a choice.
We’re doing all right here.
Even if midnight in Manhattan meant the time he usually bid the night-shift paralegals adieu after pulling his fifteen hours of research, memoranda, and every other dreary chore that might fall to a third-year associate drub.
Even if, more often than not, Tina was asleep when he arrived home, and he’d hear of her life secondhand from nannies and hired companions and neighbors charmed and wheedled into keeping an eye on her. They would sing her praises, in awe of some new movement she had mastered, some miracle of expressiveness. Or they’d cluck in disapproval at how she pushed herself endlessly for greater perfection, as though she were pursued.
Her teachers at the SAB had spoken of her promise, that college might not be the path for her, but rather a future with one of the preeminent companies, perhaps their own New York City Ballet. Time would tell, and chance. But there were occasions when she seemed to glow with discipline and joy.
Glorious in her moment.
But, lately, he had learned from her watchers that she had withdrawn, vanishing into herself, into her drive to forge something pure and keen. It worried him, left him with a pang of culpability. And yet. .
They had put that gray town with its gray people behind them, its derelict factory and sky that stretched forever and went nowhere. To have remained there and seen the light in her eyes die, have her old at twenty-five, working at the poultry plant. .
No. Whatever it cost him, no matter how he might have to compress himself to a tight core or sheathe himself in steel, because at Stern, Ledding and Bowen you did what you were bid and never, ever said no. .
He would keep the machine going.
Tina gave a soft moan of protest, turned in her sleep. Stilling his thoughts, Cal backed out, eased the door shut.
Turning, he caught a flash of his tense face in the large practice mirror in the living room, saw the unsettling resemblance to the father who had abandoned them so long ago. In the night-washed hallway, he looked forty rather than twenty-seven. And felt it.
He returned to bed, willed himself to drowsiness. The paperwork on the Schenk suit had to be filed by noon. He put the dream of the sword away from him, as he’d put aside other dreams in the past.
What would I do with a weapon?
His palm remembered the smooth worn leather that fit so perfectly, the way he remembered the smell of rain sweeping across the Minnesota prairies, the summer nights on the front porch listening through the open window to their mother’s voice, all melody, lulling Tina to sleep.
Just before he fell into sleep, he thought: it wasn’t a weapon.
It was a soul.
As he slipped over the edge into dreams again he understood whose.
Chapter One
NEAR GROUND ZERO-BEFORE DAWN
Randy Waller had heard all the stories about Medicine Water Creek.
It was a load of bullshit, as far as he was concerned, dreamed up by some drunk sad-sack Sioux to make up for the fact that they’d got
their asses kicked by the U.S. cavalry and hadn’t done a damn thing since.
He drew rein at the top of the draw and lit up, scanning the fence line in the glimmer of first light. Fuckin’ miles to cover today, and they were saying it’d rain tonight. That meant Black Hat Coulee would flood by tomorrow and he’d have to dick around with wire and fence posts and nails while standing knee-deep in muddy water, oh joy. Better to get up early and get the whole thing done today and talk the foreman into letting him take the truck into town tonight.
Under him his horse snorted, rubbed a cheek on the fence post. Randy nudged the animal forward along the fence, down into the long dip of bottomlands where the clay-colored stream appeared and disappeared among twisted hummocks of rock. The city kids who came up here in vans, with their long hair and their two-hundred-dollar hiking boots, to “find communion with the Earth”- which, by all Randy could see, meant smoking pot and humping in the bushes-talked about old Indian legends and ate up stories about how horses would spook here in broad daylight and even the coyotes would avoid the place at night.
Of course, they didn’t come here at night. Randy blew a double line of smoke from his nostrils and scouted the matte-blue shadows among the rocks, the waving thickness of grass that grew everywhere on the level ground. They were all over at the ranch house, raiding the garbage.
And as for “Medicine Water”-which Randy’s dad had called Piss Creek. .
It was low this time of year, midsummer. A glistening thread among the dark convolutions of eroded rock, course echoed by the pale bands that marked the water-chewed banks. Mounds and turrets of gray-black lava lifted like sleeping buffalo from the deep grass. This time of the morning, before the prairie winds started up, the place was deathly silent, filled with the hard cold of the night.
That’d wear off goddam soon. Randy stubbed the butt on his boot heel, flicked it away into the creek. “Let’s go, Bean,” he said and twitched the reins. Whole place’d get hot as the inside of a cow by. .
Movement caught his eye. The horse flung up its head, reared and veered sidelong, and Randy hauled savagely on the bit. Just a goddam cow for Chrissake.
Only it wasn’t a cow, he saw, when he’d dragged his mount around to a trembling standstill. It was a buffalo.
Shit, where’d that come from? Government herd taking up good grassland over in the national fuckin’monument…
The smell of blood hit him, metallic and savage. He saw it glisten darkly on the buffalo’s muzzle, long strings dripping down to the grass. The buffalo shook its horns warningly and lowed; Randy saw the nasty glitter of a small black eye. More blood smell; ol’ Bean jittered and tried to run again, and Randy saw there was another buffalo close to the first. Holy shit, must be them ritual mutilators like in the newspaper! Because this one, a huge curly-haired bull, had been hacked savagely, the whole hump cut off its back, raw meat gleaming where the skin had been pulled back.
Like the old buffalo hunters used to do, he thought suddenly, the ones the city kids talk about-the ones that killed a hundred animals for their tongues or humps or hides and left the rest to rot.
The world all around him seemed suddenly to breathe.
Where the hell the buffalo came from Randy couldn’t imagine. Hell, he’d looked down this way not ten minutes ago from the top of the draw, and there hadn’t been so much as a chipmunk, let alone six-ten-twelve-full-grown buffalo. And why hadn’t he smelled the blood?
It stank to Christ now. In the thin gloom of the place he shouldn’t have been able to see, but he could. Some of them had had their humps torn away, others, it seemed, only their tongues. Something came around the corner of a rock pinnacle, and Randy screamed, for this buffalo had been skinned, meat gleaming naked and pearly and rubied with dots and runnels of oozing blood-it worked its jaws, ruminatively chewing, and it looked at Randy with deep-set black eyes.
Bean reared, fighting the brutal drag of the bit, humped his back and fishtailed, throwing Randy to the ground. Randy cursed, scrambled to his feet, made a futile snatch at the reins as the horse pelted wildly away, and the buffalo- how the fuck many of them WERE there? — let it pass.
Bloodied mouths. Bloodied fur. The hot smell of them, like thunder in the ground. A glimmer of blue lightning crept half-seen among the rocks before sinking into the dust. The earth quivered, and voices seemed to cry out-chants, maybe-endlessly far away.
Randy screamed again and ran for the nearest hummock of rock. But something tore at his leg, what felt like huge broken tusks ripping through the leather of his boot, and looking down he saw the white bones of an old skeleton rising up through the grass and the earth. Ribs snapped shut on his leg like the bony fingers of a giant hand. He wrenched his leg free and stumbled two more feet, and then another skeleton speared through the topsoil, ribs closing around his ankle again. The ground shook a second time and there was a sound, and he looked up to see them-hundreds of them now, robbed of humps and tongues and skins-all lower their heads and charge.
THE SOURCE-BEFORE DAWN
“Dr. Wishart?”
A fast staccato at the office door, though he’d turned out the light. Opening his eyes, Fred Wishart saw the red gleam of the clock-4:58. For a moment he couldn’t remember whether it was morning or evening. He was tired, tired to his bones.
“Dr. Wishart?” Whoever was in the hall-it sounded like Yeoh, one of the assistants in the particle-trace lab-tried the doorknob.
Wishart was glad he’d locked it. A day, a night, however long it had been, calculating and recalibrating the accelerators, trying to pin down, once and for all, the mathematical model for resonance alignment so it wouldn’t set up a feedback loop. . He took off his thick black-framed glasses, closed his eyes again, shutting out the dim shapes of the monitors all around him. Hating them. Hating this place. Hating even the screen savers that played across their square flat faces now: peaceful scenes. The paradise beauty of the Allegheny Mountains in high summer. Two Sisters Rock with a day moon standing above it in an opal sky. The old shaft-head buildings on Green Mountain, robed in shaggy honeysuckle and ivy, deep grass covering the ruin man’s greediness had left. Bob had taken that picture and had been tickled when Fred had scanned it and made a screen saver of it, to remember home by.
Home.
Home and the family he loved.
The home he had fled.
He was so tired. They were all tired, he knew, exhausted. Everybody on the project had been working sixteen- and twenty-hour days for weeks. He’d locked the door and turned out his light when he’d made the fourth error in his input-not good. He wondered if the others would be sensible enough to steal a little downtime as well. His hand twitched toward the nearest of the regiment of white foam coffee cups that littered the hollow square of his workspace, among the keyboards and printouts. But he gave it up. The stuff would be dead cold, and there wasn’t a soul in the place, from Dr. Sanrio down to the humblest clerk or security officer, who could get decent coffee out of those godless little machines.
Yet they had to have something to show the Senate committee if there was a hearing. And Sanrio seemed to think that new woman with the cleaning crew had been asking an awful lot of questions, though her clearances seemed okay. But spies or no spies, if they continued to push this way, they’d only make more errors.
And errors were something they could not afford. Knocking.
Go away.
A rattle of the doorknob.
I’m asleep. I’m dead. I’ve decided to work at home today.
“Dr. Wishart? Are you in there?”
No.
“Dr. Wishart, there’s been a leak.”
Chapter Two
OUTSIDE KANSAS CITY-DAYBREAK
Tickets.
I.D.
Rental car papers-the proper rental car papers. She’d used, and abandoned, at least three vehicles between Pierre and Kansas City.
Jerri Bilmer’s hands shook as she sorted the pink and yellow forms for the red Prizm she’d be dri
ving back to the airport. She told herself to get a grip and tucked the papers concerning the blue Cherokee she’d driven in from Pierre to Omaha, the red Ford pickup that had taken her from Omaha to the outskirts of K.C., and that sorry old rent-a-wreck Chevy she’d had in Pierre itself into a manilla envelope addressed to Selena Martin at a P.O. box in East Falls Church, Virginia. The real Selena Martin had died of SIDS in 1974, and Bilmer had kept the alias-and the birth certificate-as one of the “cold” ones in her private repertoire: a just-incase identity and rented drop box that, as far as she could tell, nobody knew about. A lot of people in the service had such identities.
She crossed to the window of the motel room, moved aside the rope of garlic hanging half-hidden by the drapes and angled her head to see into the courtyard without opening the blinds. Still cinder dark, iron dark. The street lamps in the parking lot showed curtained windows all around, shut-in stillness, silence, anonymity. Bilmer hadn’t had much sleep last night, partly because of the smell of the garlic- she’d kept dreaming she was in an Italian restaurant. Like a vampire movie, she thought. If only it were that simple.
She had no idea if garlic was supposed to work against things other than vampires. It hung on both sides of the windows, knotted carefully on strings with a variety of seemingly random objects: old keys (she’d read legends that said iron was supposed to help), forks bought from a local antiques shop and warranted to be sterling silver, aconite and wild roses. Glass shards sparkled on the dresser, the carpet, in the bathroom, because she had carefully broken every mirror and anything that could serve as a mirror. She had no idea what the management of the Crystal Suite Inn was going to say when the maids reported what they found in the room.
Not that it mattered. The woman whose name was on the register didn’t exist, either.
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