by Butcher, Jim
Justin DuMorne had shown me how it worked.
I plunged into the memory.
“I don’t understand,” I complained, rubbing at my aching temples. “It didn’t work the first fifty times. It isn’t going to work now.”
“Forty-six times,” Justin corrected me, his voice very precise, like always. He had an accent, but I couldn’t figure out which kind it was. I hadn’t heard one like it on TV. Not that Justin had a TV. I had to sneak out on Friday nights to watch it in the store at the mall, or else face the real risk that I’d miss Knight Rider altogether.
“Harry,” Justin said.
“Okay,” I sighed. “My head hurts.”
“It’s natural. You’re blazing new trails in your mind. Once more, please.”
“Couldn’t I blaze the trails somewhere else?”
Justin looked up at me from where he sat at his desk. We were in his office, which was what he called the spare bedroom in the little house about twenty miles outside Des Moines. He was dressed in black pants and a dark grey shirt, like on most days. His beard was short, precisely trimmed. He had very long, slender fingers, but his hands could make fists that were hard as rocks. He was taller than me, which most grownups were, and he never called me anything mean when he got mad, which most of the foster parents I’d been with did.
If I angered Justin, he just went from saying please to using his fists. He never swung at me while screaming or shook me, which other caretakers had done. When he hit me, it was really quick and precise, and then it was over. Like when Bruce Lee hit a guy. Only Justin never made the silly noises.
I ducked my head, looking away from him, and then stared at the empty fireplace. I was sitting in front of it with my legs crossed. There were logs and tinder ready to go. There was a faint smell of smoke, and a bit of wadded-up newspaper had turned black at one corner, but otherwise there was no evidence of a fire.
In my peripheral vision, I saw Justin turn back to his book. “Once more, if you please.”
I sighed. Then I closed my eyes and started focusing again. You started with steadying your breathing. Then once you were relaxed and ready, you gathered energy. Justin had told me to picture it as a ball of light at the center of my chest, slowly growing brighter and brighter, but that was a load of crap. When the Silver Surfer did it, energy gathered around his hands and his eyes. Green Lantern gathered it around his ring. Iron Fist had glowing fists, which was pretty much as cool as you could get. I guess Iron Man had the glowing thing in the middle of his chest, but he was, like, the only one, and he didn’t really have superpowers anyway.
I pictured gathering my energy together around my right hand. So there.
I pictured it glowing brighter and brighter, surrounded by a red aura like Iron Fist’s. I felt the power making tingling sensations up and down my arms, making my hairs stand up on end. And when I was ready, I leaned forward, thrusting my hand into the fireplace, released the energy, and said clearly, “Sedjet.”
And as I spoke, I flicked the starter on the Bic lighter I had palmed in my right hand. The little lighter immediately set the newspaper alight.
From right next to me, Justin said, “Put it out.”
I twitched and dropped the lighter in pure surprise. My heart started beating about a zillion times a minute.
His fingers closed into a fist. “I don’t like to repeat myself.”
I swallowed and reached into the fireplace to drag the burning paper out from under the wood. It singed me a little, but not enough to cry about or anything. I slapped the fire out with my hands, my cheeks turning bright red as I did.
“Give me the lighter,” Justin said, his voice calm.
I bit my lip and did.
He took the lighter and bounced it a couple of times in his palm. A faint smile was on his lips. “Harry, I believe you will find that such ingenuity may be of great service to you as an adult.” The smile vanished. “But you are not an adult, boy. You are a student. This sort of underhanded behavior will not do. At all.”
He closed his fist and hissed, “Sedjet.”
His hand exploded into a sphere of scarlet-and-blue flame—which pretty much made Iron Fist’s powers look a little bit pastel. I stared and swallowed. My heart beat even faster.
Justin rotated his hand a few times, contemplating it, and making sure that I saw his whole fist and arm—that I could see it wasn’t sleight of hand. It was completely surrounded in fire.
And it wasn’t burning.
Justin held his fist right next to my face, until the heat was beginning to make me uncomfortable, but he never flinched and his flesh remained unharmed.
“If you choose it, this is what you may one day manage,” he said calmly. “Mastery of the elements. And, more important, mastery of yourself.”
“Um,” I said. “What?”
“Humans are inherently weak, boy,” he continued in that same steady voice. “That weakness expresses itself in a great many ways. For instance, right now you wish to stop practicing and go outside. Even though you know that what you learn here is absolutely critical, still your impulse is to put play first, study later.” He opened his hand suddenly and dropped the lighter in my lap.
I flinched away as it struck my leg, and let out a little yell. But the red plastic lighter simply lay on the floor, unmarked by any heat. I touched it with a nervous fingertip, but the lighter was quite cool.
“Right now,” Justin said, “you are making a choice. It may not seem like a large and terrible choice, but in the long term, it may well be. You are choosing whether you will be the master of your own fate, with the power to create what you will from the world—or whether you will simply flick your Bic and get by. Unremarkable. Complacent.” His mouth twisted and his voice turned bitter. “Mediocre. Mediocrity is a terrible fate, Harry.”
My hand hovered over the lighter, but I didn’t pick it up. I thought about what he had said. Then I said, “What you mean is that if I can’t do it . . . you’ll send me back.”
“Success or failure of the spell is not the issue,” he said. “What matters is the success or failure of your will. Your will to overcome human weakness. Your will to work. To learn. I will have no shirkers here, boy.” He settled down onto the floor next to me and nodded toward the fireplace. “Again, if you please.”
I stared at him for a moment, then down at my hand, at the discarded lighter.
No one had ever told me I was special before. But Justin had. No one had ever taken so much time to do anything with me. Ever. Justin had.
I thought of going back into the state system—to the homes, the shelters, the orphanages. And suddenly, I truly wanted to succeed. I wanted it more than I wanted dinner, more even than I wanted to watch Knight Rider. I wanted Justin to be proud of me.
I left the lighter where it was and focused on my breathing.
I built up the spell again, slowly, slowly, focusing on it more intently than on anything I’d ever done in my life. And I was nearly thirteen, so that was really saying something.
The energy swelled until I felt like someone had started a trash fire in my belly, and then I willed it out, through my empty, outstretched right hand, and as I did, instead of using the Egyptian phrase, I said, “Flickum bicus!”
And the remaining tinder under the logs burst into bright little flames. I didn’t think I’d ever seen anything more beautiful.
I sagged and almost fell over, even though I was already sitting on the floor. My body suddenly ached with hunger and weariness, like this one time when all us orphans had gotten to go to a water park. I wanted to eat a bucket of macaroni and cheese and then go to sleep.
A strong, long-fingered hand caught my shoulder and steadied me. I looked up to see Justin regarding me, his dark eyes flickering with warmth that wasn’t wholly the reflection of the small but growing fire in the hearth.
“Flickum bicus?” he asked.
I nodded and felt myself blushing again. “You know. ’Cause . . . the mediocrity.”
He tilted his head back and let out a rolling laugh. He ruffled my hair with one hand and said, “Well-done, Harry. Well-done.”
My chest swelled up so much I thought I was going to bounce off the ceiling.
Justin held up a finger, went to his desk, and returned with a brown paper package. He offered it to me.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“Yours,” he said. “You’ve done the work after all.”
I blinked and then tore the package open. Inside was a Wilson baseball mitt.
I stared for several seconds. No one had ever given me a present before—not one that was meant for me, and not just some random, charity-donated Christmas package with a label that said: FOR: BOY. And it was an excellent glove. George Brett had one just like it. I’d been to two Kansas City Royals baseball games on field trips when I was little, and they were awesome. So was Brett.
“Thank you,” I said quietly. Oh, come on. Now I was gonna cry? Sometimes I thought I was kinda goofy.
Justin produced a baseball, a brand-new one that was still all white, and held it up, smiling. “If you’re up for it, we can go outside right now.”
I felt really tired and hungry, but I had a brand-new glove! I shoved my hand into it until I figured out where all my fingers were supposed to go. “Yes,” I said, pushing myself up. “Let’s do it.”
Justin bounced the ball up and down in his hand a couple of times and grinned at me. “Good. When all is done, I think you’ll find baseball a rewarding experience.”
I followed him outside. It didn’t matter that I was tired. I was practically floating.
I opened my eyes, standing on a random Chicago sidewalk, immaterial and unseen. I turned my right hand palm up and focused upon that sudden kindling of light and hope, crystallized by the memory of that moment of triumph and joy.
“Flickum bicus,” I whispered.
The fire was every bit as beautiful as I remembered.
Chapter Twenty-one
It took me a couple of hours to work out how to make my trusty tracking spell function. I easily found several memories that I could use to power the spell; it was figuring out how to create the link to Molly that was hard. Usually, I would use one of the trusty traditional methods for directing thaumaturgy—a lock of hair, a fresh drop of blood, fingernail clippings, et cetera. That wasn’t going to work, obviously. I couldn’t touch them, even if I had them.
So instead of tracking Molly with physical links, I tried using memories of her in their place. It worked—sort of. The first tracking spell led me to the hotel that had once hosted a horror convention known as SplatterCon! It was closed now, and deserted. I guess maybe all the deaths at SplatterCon! had taken a toll on the hotel in the civil-court cases that followed the phobophage attacks. I took a quick spin through the place, hardly even flinching before I stomped through one wall after another. Except for a few transients who had broken into the building and were squatting there, I found nothing.
I went back over my work. The memory I’d used was one that had stuck in my head for some reason, of Molly here in this building. That must have thrown off the spell. It had homed in on this place because it had been part of the memory I used to create the link.
I tried again, this time omitting the background and picturing only Molly against an empty field of black. This second attempt took me to a police station from which I had once posted bail for Molly’s boyfriend. I figured I’d bungled the spell somehow, but took a quick look around anyway, just in case. No Molly.
“Okay, smart guy,” I said to myself. “So what if the memory-image you’re using is too old? You’re tracking her memory-self to a memorylocation. Which means you have to think of her as she is now to find where she is now. Right?
“Theoretically,” I said to myself.
“Right. So test the theory.”
Well, obviously. Although discussing a problem with yourself is almost never a good way to secure a divergent viewpoint.
“In fact, talking to yourself is often considered a sign of impending insanity,” I noted aloud.
Which hardly seemed encouraging.
I shook off the unsettling thought and worked the tracking spell again. This time, instead of using one of my earlier memories of Molly, I used my most recent one. I pictured her in her cast-off clothing and rags, as she’d been at Murphy’s place.
Forming a memory into an image that would support the energy required for a spell isn’t as simple as closing your eyes and daydreaming. You have to produce it in exact, even fanatical, detail, until it is as real in your mind as any actual object. It takes a lot of practice and energy to do that—and it is why people use props when they set out to do magic. A prop can be used as an anchor, saving the spellcaster the effort of creating not just one, but multiple, mental constructs, and supporting them all in a state of perfect focus and concentration.
I had learned how to do magic the hard way first—all of it in my head. Only after I’d proved I could do it without the aid of props did Justin tell me that it was even possible to use them. Over the years, I’d practiced fairly complex thaumaturgic spells without props maybe once a season, keeping my concentration and imagination sharp. It was a damned good thing I had. Working magic as a ghost was all about doing it au naturel.
I reached into my memory to produce the construct I’d need to stand in for Molly in the tracking spell. At the time, I’d been handed a lot to process, and I hadn’t really taken stock of exactly what kind of shape Molly was in. I’d seen that she was under strain, but upon closely reviewing the memory, I was somewhat shocked at how gaunt and weary she looked. Molly had always been the sort of young person who almost glowed with good health. After six months on her own, she looked like an escapee from a gulag: scrawny, tough, and beaten down, if not broken.
I added more than that to the image. I imagined her cheery goodwill, the self-loathing she still sometimes felt for the pain she’d caused her friends in the days before I agreed to teach her. I thought of her precise, orderly approach to her studies, so much different from my own, her diligence, and the occasional arrogance that pretty much every young wizard has until they’ve walked into enough walls to know better. I thought of the most powerful force in her life, a deep and abiding love for her family, and added in the desolation she must be feeling to be separated from them. Eager, beautiful, dangerous Molly.
I held that image of my apprentice in mind, drew together my will, and tapped into the recollection of one of my more memorable tracking spells, all at the same time. I established the pattern of the modified version of the spell I’d had to cobble together, walked, chewed bubble gum, and released the spell with a murmured word.
The power surged out through me, and a precise, powerful force spun me into a pirouette. I extended my left arm, index finger pointing, and felt a sharp tug against it each time it passed an easterly point of the compass. Within a couple of seconds I stopped spinning, rotated a little past the point, and then settled back slightly in the opposite direction. My index finger pointed straight at the heart of the city.
“Crombie,” I said, “eat your heart out.”
I followed the spell to Molly.
I pulled my vanishing act and went zipping downtown a few hundred yards at a time. I paused to check the spell twice more and correct my course, though by the third check, I was starting to feel like a human weather vane. I had to stop more frequently as I got closer to make sure I was moving in the right direction, and the trail took me down into the great towers within the Loop, where the buildings rose high enough to form what felt like the walls of a deep ravine, a man-made canyon of glass, steel, and stone.
I wasn’t terribly surprised when the spell led me to the lower streets. Some of the streets downtown have two or even three levels. One is up on the surface, with the others stacked below it. A lot of the buildings have upper and lower entrances and parking as well, doubling the amount of access to the buildings within those blocks.
&nb
sp; There were also plenty of empty spaces, pseudo-alleyways, walkways, and crawl spaces. Here and there, abandoned chambers in the basements and subbasements of the buildings above sat in silent darkness, waiting to be remade into something new. The commuter tunnels could connect down there, and there were several entrances to the insane, deadly labyrinth beneath the city known as Undertown.
Chicago cops patrolled the lower streets on a regular basis. Things came slinking out of Undertown to prowl the darkness. Traffic would blaze through on the actual streets, which were occasionally only separated from the sidewalks by a stripe of faded paint.
All in all, it’s not the sort of place a sane person will casually wander through.
I found Molly standing in one of the narrow alleyways. Snow had fallen through a grate twenty feet overhead and covered the ground. She was dressed in the same rags I’d seen the night before, with her arms clenched around her stomach, shivering in the cold. There was a fresh, purpling bruise on her cheek. She was breathing heavily.
“Again,” said a cool, calm woman’s voice from farther down the alley, out of sight.
“I’m t-t-tired,” Molly said. “I haven’t e-eaten in a day and a half.”
“Poor darling. I’m sure Death will understand and agree to return another time.”
There was a sharp hissing sound, and Molly threw up her left hand, fingers spread. She spat out a word or two, and flickering sparkles of defensive energy spread from her fingertips into a flat plane.
Molly simply didn’t have a talent for defensive magic—but this was the best shield I’d ever seen the grasshopper pull off.
A hurtling white sphere hit the shield. It should have bounced off, but instead it zipped through the shield, its course barely bent. The sphere struck Molly in the left shoulder and exploded into diamond-glitter shards of ice. She let out a short, harsh grunt of pain and staggered.
“Focus,” said the calm woman’s voice. “Use the pain. Make the shield real with your will. Know that it will protect you. Again.”