by Marion Deeds
Her shoes were strange, but their thick rippled soles looked like they would provide enough protection.
In the faint light, they walked between two of the folded hills. She followed him closely. The morning breeze came up, hissing faintly, crackling like a distant fire. Erin wheeled about. He turned too, hand on his knife hilt.
On the folded hill near her frontera, one of the creatures paced, its head snapping from side to side. Erin stepped back, walking into him. “It’s not charging.” She stared around, right and left. “Where’s the other one?”
The creature shook its head and paced like an ungentled caballo on a halter. It didn’t leave its place on the hill.
He pushed Erin behind him. She had drawn the loomin stake. “Walk. Don’t run, but don’t tarry either. And keep your eyes wide for the other one. It’s less than a mile to the river.” He thought a moment. “A mile is a unit—”
“I know what a mile is.”
The creature did not follow, and they did not see the second one.
When they reached the roughly paved path that paralleled the river on the way to Lily Bend, she paused, staring out at the broken tower that spouted out of the water. Its upper half was still studded with spines of iron, bright orange with streaks of sky-green, and enterprising prospectors had risked their lives to lash their boats to the base and cut free the iron pieces that were closer to the water.
“Is that what you’re carrying as a weapon?”
He nodded.
“Rebar,” she said. “That’s what those rods are called. Was that part of a bridge?”
“We think so.”
She was silent until the sun showed itself over the edges of the mountains. Clusters of sprites flitted over the water.
“What are those insects?” she said.
“Sprites.”
“Are they related to dragonflies?”
“I don’t know.”
“Dragonflies,” she said. “Bugs?”
“Sprites are not insects, like flies or bees,” he said. “They are elementals. Don’t you have them?”
“We don’t have elementals.”
“Those two creatures,” he said.
“Didn’t come from my world.”
Her world must be from a time before the world turned. “What is the object you carry?” he said.
“When we’re away from here, I’ll show you.”
Her heart raced. If the hunter hound wasn’t following, it was probably acting as a distraction. Did the creatures think? She didn’t know. The thing’s behavior had been strange though, the pacing, the shaking head, like a stubborn dog. One had been injured; maybe both of them were. Maybe it needed to rest. She tried to slow her pace.
She didn’t want to believe that this was somehow her Earth, but it was hard to argue with sidewalks, rebar, and cell phones. It was hard to argue with elementals and sprites too, though, and her world had never had those things. And charms that used copper? She had never heard of that beyond the artifacts.
The stake felt slick in her hand. “The four artifacts, the tools.” She scanned the horizon. “One is a collar of gold and opals. One is a lantern. One is a compass, and one is a book.”
Trevian said, “I’ve heard of those. Two of them at least. The collar allows the wearer to control the elementals, some say even air and fire itself. The lantern is a dire thing, and I don’t understand what it does.”
“It directs the, the energy of living beings. That’s what my grandmother told me.” She walked a few more paces. “And now you know that I don’t have it.”
“I can’t imagine a lantern like a sprite lamp, that holds the spirits of people.”
“A sprite lamp? Is that what your friend had at her camp last night? Like fireflies in a bottle?”
“Dragonflies. Fireflies. Your world sounds dangerous.”
Erin snorted at the thought of fireflies being dangerous. “Dragonflies are dangerous to other insects, but fireflies are tiny, I think.”
“Sprites can illuminate for a full night, longer if you feed them,” he said. “And they provide motive power. They are drawn to water and copper. The Dosmanos family, one of the daughters, invented a way to distill their energy, even store it, so that they can move a boat or a cart.”
“Like a battery?”
“I do not know what that is.”
“A battery stores energy. The lantern isn’t one. It amplifies energy, helps it become stronger by gathering it and directing it one way.”
“Like water through a pipe.”
“Yes.”
The way grew broader and smoother. She watched sunlight sheen the placid green water. Sprites began to dwindle until only a pinprick of light shone here and there. There was no sign of either of the hounds. Eventually Trevian came alongside her, putting her closer to the water. She studied him as they walked. The sun, hovering above the edge of the mountains, glanced off his cheekbone and high, narrow nose. He had straight brown hair, lighter than hers, clubbed at the neck, and that battered brown hat with its wide rim. She didn’t doubt his copper magic. The hounds had rebounded off that invisible barrier. However it functioned, it was a real thing.
“There’s Lily Bend,” he said, raising an arm. “For sen and cinco we can rent a boat. Can you row?”
Sen and cinco. That must be money. Cinco meant five. “Sen” didn’t sound like anything she recognized. “Sure,” she said, remembering six years at summer camp, four of them as a counselor. She could canoe, kayak, and row a boat, and swim, if she had to. She could build a shelter and a fire. Camp had seemed normal, but it had all been about survival skills.
Lily Bend held a dozen buildings stretched along the broken road. A collection of piers reached out into the water. The largest building was built of golden-yellow stone, two floors high, with a slightly domed roof. Picked out in darker stone above the wide door were the words BANCO DE DULOC. Out past the string of buildings she could see houses and smaller shacks scattered across the plain. Several areas had curved rows of plants growing beyond the houses.
Trevian led them into the bank. Erin waited while he talked to a woman behind the counter. She put a number of coins into a bag and handed it across to him. Trevian signed three pieces of paper and returned to her side. “Are you hungry?”
To her surprise, she was. She worried about what the food here might do to her digestive system, but she needed to keep her strength up. They walked across the street to a long, low building. Inside, it was one open room with a hearth and a stovetop that ran the rest of the length of the wall. Trevian ordered two of something, and a few minutes later handed her a warm, savory-smelling bundle. She unwrapped the coarse paper around it; chunks of meat and what looked like onions, wrapped in a thick dough. Just like a burrito. She took a small bite. The meat was tender and sweet, probably pork.
“Lick for you two?” the woman behind the counter asked. Before Erin could glance her question at Trevian, he answered with a headshake.
“None for us,” he said. He left a couple of copper-colored coins on the bar.
Erin followed him out, still chewing. “What’s lick?”
“Liquor. I should have asked you, but I didn’t think it was what we needed.”
“You were right,” she said. She took another bite. Farther in, there were potatoes. “Can we get a boat now?”
“Yes, and provisions.”
There were two provisioners flanking the food shop, and Trevian stopped at one where he was known by name. He bought a bedroll, a knapsack that he handed to her, dried fruit, dried meat, and some other food she didn’t recognize. Then, at the pier, he rented a skiff big enough to hold them and their belongings comfortably. Erin looked behind her but saw no sign of the elementals. Were they tied to the frontera in some way? That would make going home a problem…if she lived long enough to go home.
South of Lily Bend, the river grew deeper and narrower, and they rowed more to steer than to propel. Her shoulders ached a little, but it wasn’t t
oo unpleasant, and she enjoyed the silent rowing, the landscape sliding past on either side. She saw a few more houses, a few more fields, and then the hills rose to cliffs, their bare sides layered with orange, black, white, and red. When the sun was nearly straight overhead, they entered a narrow gorge, whose walls looked like a checkerboard. She studied the squares of orange and white rock. Some sort of oxidation had happened. Natural striation could look uniform, she knew. She’d seen the Franciscan Complex back home often enough. She did not remember seeing squares. Were the cliffs natural? Her geology books, like the rock collection she had started when she was six, were gone now, and she had no real way of determining what types of rock formations she was seeing. “Was this waterway built? Like a canal?”
Without turning, he shook his head. “No. As far as I know, as far as I ever heard, it was always here,” he said.
Their course broadened out again. They passed a larger boat with a set of sails headed upriver. Trevian raised a hand in greeting, and the boat’s pilot did the same. Erin wondered how it would navigate the bridge pylon in the center of the waterway. Along stretches of beach, people waded in the shallows, pulling long nets. Small fish flexed, their scales bright blue in the sun.
“Look.” Trevian pointed with his left hand, at a long ripple of water that ran on a diagonal. As she stared, a streamlined white head broke the surface, a dark eye the size of her fist coming into view. The thing was as long as their skiff, but if didn’t approach, just submerged. As its wake reached them, the skiff rocked gently. Trevian turned again. “Anguila,” he said. “It’s headed west. Mating season for them, but it’s early this year.”
She wondered if she would be here forever.
Her home, her books, her future, gone. It had already been gone, really. The sound she heard, when Chip enlisted and then deployed, was the slam and lock of her jail-cell door because she was the only Dosmanos left. Like every generation before her, she would avoid school, jobs, or relationships that took her attention away from the book. She would live where the Four Families decided it was safest to live. She would study the book.
She had been trapped. And now she was trapped here.
Trevian said, “Soon the river begins its descent. We will need to tie up before we reach the rapids and the cataracts.”
It was hard to imagine either of those things. Erin’s fatigue and the monotony of rowing crept up on her, and she drifted into a half-doze, her arms growing heavier with each stroke. Coming awake again, she saw that Trevian was guiding them toward shore. She looked around. She saw no piers and no buildings. “Why are we stopping?”
“Water and food,” he said. “A few minutes to walk. And I want to see what it is you carry, far from any unfriendly eyes.”
She pressed the bag against her side. They were far from any help for her, too, if he decided to take what she had. Still, she had said she would show him, and at this point, she had to trust him. She was trusting him. There was no other choice.
They beached the skiff. Trevian took out a canteen. Erin drank from her water bottle and then drew out one of the energy bars. She unwrapped it, broke it in half, and offered it to him. He watched her bite into it before trying it, and his face rotated through expressions: surprise, caution, pleasure. She hadn’t noticed how mobile his features were. “Strange,” he said, “but good.”
“Nuts, grain, and chocolate,” she said. She shifted so that she was between the skiff and him. “Here’s what I’m carrying,” she said. She opened the bag and took out the book with both hands.
She’d seen it first when she was seven. That was the age she’d been told about the Families and their charge. Since then, at Grandmother’s insistence, she had seen it many, many times. Instead of studying geology, she studied it, even if nearly all of it seemed like poetry and incomplete fairy tales. The book was familiar now, like an old jacket or the family car.
Trevian stopped breathing. His eyes got wide.
She saw it then the way he did, its copper covers green with patina. Two metal rings held the aluminum pages in place. It was about the size of a hardback book, and it held maybe thirty pages, but the metal made it bulky and thick.
“This was ours to guard,” she said. “It’s very old, my grandmother told me, maybe the oldest of the tools. We’ve protected it for a long time, a couple hundred years.”
Carefully, Trevian held out both hands, palms up, like a supplicant.
Erin’s sense of reluctance faded. Feeling like she was participating in a ritual, she placed the book in his hands.
Chapter Five
The book overhung his two hands just slightly. Wellbeing filled him as the copper covers warmed his skin. The loops that formed the hinges contained copper too. The book was as thick as his four fingers. He set it on the ground and opened the cover.
The first page was loomin, pitted where it had fought with copper. All the pages were loomin. Page one was nearly blank, a wide decorative border, swirls, spirals, and geometric shapes reaching into the center of the page. “Can you read this?”
“Parts of it,” she said. “Farther back it gets easier because it’s in English,” she said, as if it weren’t English they spoke now but some quaint tongue. “And there’s some in Spanish. There are spells, or charms. I studied them, but I don’t understand them.”
The hinges whined as he turned the first page. The back of the page was blank, the impressions of the stamped letters bumping up through the metal. The page on the right had the same swirling border, like a sailor’s chart of currents in a lake or a river. The lines of print on this page ran like the lines in any book he might pick up in White Bluffs or Lily Bend. He could read them. For a moment he felt as if he were floating. The pointy gravel beneath his thighs, the light off the river, the woman opposite him, all receded, and he bobbed, poised at the threshold of a memory, a knowing. Then the feeling faded.
“I know someone who might help us with this,” he said.
“Who?”
“My Uncle Oshane. He studies charms, he has as long as I’ve known him.”
“Is he in White Bluffs?”
“No. I believe he is in Merrylake Landing.”
“The same town you said the Dosmanos family came from? The abandoned one?”
He nodded.
“Well, isn’t that…” she said. “Do you know what a coincidence is?”
“Of course.”
“That’s quite a coincidence.”
“Why?”
“That you would have an uncle who just happens to know how to read a magic book, and he’s in the town the Dosmanos family came from.”
He blinked, momentarily wordless. “When my father and my uncle were boys, they were dragged around the Crescent by their father, a prospector. As my father tells it, my grandfather had luck so poor it was almost a charm itself. He could find nothing. He would stake a claim six paces away from a rich vein of metal and Ancient. They would work a claim for months and barely find enough to buy food, then move on, only to hear that a prospector a sennight later dug in their very spot and found loomin. Grandfather was fascinated with the old stories and theories of charms, and of the Ancient. Uncle Oshane took up that study. My father prospected for black rock instead, and made a comfortable fortune from it. Oshane never stopped reading and searching for the old charms.”
“Does he know anything of the other linked worlds?”
Trevian moved his shoulders. “He’s never written to me about them. I heard of the fronteras and the linked worlds from my mother’s mother, but I believe my grandfather’s notebooks may have some mention of them.”
“Since the book’s made of metal and you use metal for magic, I’m guessing it was made here.”
“So the stories say,” he said.
“I was taught that the four tools were made in different worlds than mine.” She touched the edge of the book. “There are five elemental worlds, linked by more than fronteras, and each, except for mine, has elemental creatures.”
/> “Vianovelle must be from one of those worlds then, since you say he’s not from yours.”
She shrugged. “He wasn’t in the Families’ history or lore. There were always warnings about keeping the book safe from rash or greedy people, or warlords, but there wasn’t any specific warning about a magician with elementals. The Wing family talked to him. It was clear he was not from our world and that he had come through a frontera. At first, he talked like he had an artifact, or a tool, as well. He had some crazy idea of uniting the five elemental worlds. They warned us about him. Then they were killed. I hope that Wing Mei got through her frontera. The Carews, they held the collar, and they were murdered too. And then Remedios and Daniel, the Augustos, they just disappeared. So, we think he has the collar and the lantern. I’m praying he doesn’t have the compass.”
He nodded. These objects had lived for him in fireside stories and wonder tales. Only, he held one right now.
She said, “When he came after us, he had the hounds with him.”
“Vianovelle is not a name that I’ve ever heard.”
Erin shrugged again. “That’s the name he gave. He wants to control the frontera, and all elementals, I guess, and travel back and forth across them, but I don’t know why.”
“I thought only the Families could traverse the frontera.”
“We thought that too,” she said, “but he came through and the hounds with him. And he’s sent them here.”
Trevian turned a page. The creatures that had killed Cosigan were clearly related to fire elementals in some way. But they weren’t pure elementals. They were wrong somehow.
Each page was bordered in those swirling designs. The more he saw, the more he thought each border was part of a greater whole. He could not imagine what. Light stabbed his eyes and he blinked. A bright, watery stone, now blue, now yellow, formed the center of a flower design. The surface of the stone glimmered like water. “I’ve never seen a stone like this.” He reached for it.
She grabbed his wrist. “Careful! Oh that one’s alright.”