Downpour

by Kat Richardson

  Strange noises, like a tarantula walking on a piano’s strings, played across the grid and moved closer to us while Jin strapped on his new watch. Then he snapped out his well-adorned hand and snatched me forward, onto the trail down to the resort. “We have to meet him before he can sneak up on us.”

  “You can’t call that sneaking,” I gasped, running behind his remarkable speed down the road. “He sounds like a whole convoy on the move.”

  “You can hear that?”

  “Better than you.”

  Jin giggled and dragged me onward for a few dozen yards before he stopped with a jerk and shoved me forward. “You have to go without me. He won’t like you if he thinks we’re together. Just go down the road and when the fire starts, keep going. Follow the lights.”

  I stumbled forward on my own and caught my breath, coughing on the memory of smoke. I let the mist-world rush in on me—not that it was giving me much choice. Ahead of me a silvery plane cut across the Grey: a single, shimmering temporacline from which the noise and heat rose. Surely Ridenour hadn’t come down here before? And to what was Jin sending me?

  I stepped into the temporacline and the world opened out into a vista of trees through which the light of a massive fire flickered. I walked forward into the slab of memory, down the road on which women in long, straight dresses and men in white trousers and striped jackets, all looking as though they predated the First World War, passed by me. The people—memories of people—ran from the flickering light, calling out in fear as they went toward the highway. I walked on toward the firelight until the trees opened up to expose a compound of wooden buildings engulfed in flame, facing a long, steaming body of water. The buildings had been elegant before they caught fire and, as I watched the loop of time replay itself, some of the smaller ones collapsed, sending sparks into the shivering air. The roaring of the flames was accompanied by the eerie, warped sound of an organ playing something funereal and grim while a handful of people tried to extinguish the flames with buckets of water. They were no match for the fire, and the inferno blazed while the organ played on.

  There was a whiff of sulfur in the air that wasn’t just a memory; nor was the smell of evergreens and soil that hadn’t frozen over but churned with some unnatural life just below the surface. Stripes of colored light shot through the scene—power lines drawn from the grid—veering into the trees to my left. Bright orbs and streamers of color danced along the lines, heading deeper into the trees. I followed them away from the memory of the burning resort and into the rain forest.

  Ahead, through the mist both real and not, I could see something rising and shining through the gloom. Echoing the mournful organ, a strange atonal song came from the brightness ahead, and I felt a frisson of cold fear run along my spine. Something was moving in the bracken nearby, something low to the ground and many-legged.

  I stepped through a screen of low-hanging branches, feeling a curious buzzing in my blood as I crossed out of the temporacline and into a huge bubble of Grey separated from the rest. The cacophony I’d heard off and on near the hot springs shifted suddenly into tune and swelled, the harmonies of grid and ghost voices roaring in a chorus of sound that slammed me to my knees.

  Where my hands and legs hit the ground, the mist and colored light rippled, adding a chime of silver bells to the uncanny choir and a wash of blue and gold lights to the weird construction ahead. Something scurried up to me and I raised my head. Then I recoiled from the thing that had paused beside me, making the song of the place waver and slide into a minor key as I stared in horror at what appeared to be a disembodied hand the size of a rottweiler with a sphere for a head where the stump of the wrist ended. The palm and back were a dark green color, fleshy, thick, and callused like the hand of a manual laborer, but the head was a round glob with only a pair of jabbed-in pits for eyes, as if they’d been made with the tip of a massive pencil; yet they moved together as if the thing were looking me over. The fingers were skeletally thin, knobby, and blackened, with short, pointed nails and rough skin covered in tiny hooks where the pads of fingertips should have been. It scuttled around me like a lopsided spider. The smell of sulfur and brackish water clung to the hand-spider-thing as it inspected me.

  It turned toward the gleaming tower of woven energy strands growing in the center of the Grey bubble, and the singing dropped away to a musical whisper. “Ah, it’s you,” a voice said, riding on the back of the music and shaping the chorus into its own words. “Come to the center.”

  The hand-spider lifted a freakishly jointed thumb toward me as if it meant to help me up, but I rolled away from it, gulping against the desire to scream or vomit. I wanted to clap my hands over my ears and cut out the singing voices that reminded me too much of the voice of the grid, even though I knew it wasn’t the same. But I fought my fear and disgust and scrambled to my feet.

  Reflexively, I reached to brush mud and leaves from my knees, but the ground around me, while it seemed normal—if unusually green and warm for this place and season—had left no trace on my clothes except a thin sheen of energy, like a cobweb clinging to the fabric of my jeans and coat. The hand-spider stood still until I moved, when it scuttled around me, herding me toward the tower of light. The energetic shine on my clothes fluttered with my movement and dragged tattered edges through the thin mist of the Grey, swirling tiny vertices and contrails of color. Puffs of silver and gold dust and pale green vapor rose from the ground with every step I took.

  My heart raced as I walked forward, casting my gaze around, looking for anything, any clue, any indication of what was happening or how to get out of it. A tree swayed near me, and I turned sharply to stare at it. The tree shifted its roots away from my plodding boots and gouged the soil as it moved aside, leaving a shimmering trickle of green light along its path. The boughs shook over my head, dropping laughter and a glitter of raindrops.

  The hand-spider herded me along, bumping against my legs and scratching at my calves with one of its pointed black nails. I kept walking.

  The area inside the bubble was misty, but not rainy, so it wasn’t quite the real world, but it wasn’t very far from it. The landscape was definitely the same as that around Lake Crescent and I could, if I strained my ears, still hear the crying of the burning organ in Sol Duc’s past-tense conflagration. The thread of sound had been woven into the music of whatever the ley weaver was making. The area was deep with magic, not only the thick bright lines pulled from the grid, but pools and eddies of other energy that welled up from the ground. Trees really did walk here and I had no doubt that if I looked for them, I’d see plenty of Indian ghosts lurking in the mists. I wondered if there were dragons—lightning fish—somewhere under my feet, weeping boiling tears.

  The hand-spider stopped at the edge of a circle of pale blue light that seemed to define the edge of the ley weaver’s construction zone. Then it bodychecked me, shoving me sideways along the line. I guessed I was supposed to go the rest of the way alone. I turned, but caught myself up short with a surprised gasp. Someone had stepped out of the circle a few feet ahead of me.

  Someone human shaped, but not human . . . Like the hand-spider’s head, it seemed roughly made with no fine details, just the raw shapes of a body formed from the dense cloud-stuff of the Grey. This one had more of a face, with a pinched little nose, a thin-cut mouth, and gleaming eye pits under a suggestion of hair. But it seemed androgynous and unfinished. And whereas it had two feet, it had only one hand, the other simply missing, as if it hadn’t been stuck on at all. I wondered if the hand-spider had sprung from the missing extremity, until I turned my head a bit farther and saw two more of the things scurrying up and down the scintillating, shifting construction in the center.

  The human-shaped thing made a curve of its mouth that should have been a smile and wasn’t. Then it opened its mouth and words came out on the whisper and song of the energy flowing nearby. “You have been playing on my instrument.”

  I clutched at the first conversational possibility
offered. “Instrument?” I asked.

  The ley weaver waved its only hand at the tower of light, and then at the lines that ran through the earth to feed it. “My art.”

  I looked toward the otherworldly construction. “What is it?”

  The ley weaver nodded. “It is beautiful,” it replied in the voice of the choir.

  “It is,” I agreed. The construction, woven of pure colors of energy that gleamed with magic, and singing in the voices of ghosts and nature and raw power tamed and trained into a living shape, was dazzling—breathtaking. I turned my gaze aside with effort, feeling my will and attention drawn toward it, into it, as more raw material. “But what does it do?”

  “It does nothing. It is Beauty. Art does not need a function.”

  So close to it, I could feel the insensible hunger of the thing, drawing what it needed from every source, drinking in energy and power as the hand-spiders spun and wove, shaped and built still more and more of the singing, changing form. My body seemed to vibrate with the thrumming of its harmonies; I felt cold and loosened, as if I might fall to pieces and be swept up as so much gleam and fairy dust—raw material for the ley weaver’s art. Then I saw a wisp slip by, a face elongated in a silent scream of terror as a ghost was drawn into the gyre. “But it does do something,” I said, thinking aloud, holding myself together by mind and word. “It devours magic. It drinks the remnants of memory.”

  The ley weaver shrugged its shapeless shoulders and its chorus replied, “It requires. It takes. The lake gives. It is bountiful.”

  “But it’s not unlimited. Others take from the lake, too.”

  “They are unimportant. Beauty is not harmed by what the puppeteer takes. He has even given me these hands to build with.”

  The hand-spiders stopped their work for a moment and turned as if looking toward us before returning to their tasks. The movement came from all around the shining shape of Beauty and I realized there were, perhaps, a dozen of the scuttling monsters at work. And each was different in color and size: some slim, some small, some large, some ghastly white or corpse gray, others mold green and rot brown. They were hands of the dead, crawling, reanimated, and enlarged to the size of dogs and men. That was what I’d seen creeping away from the dog-demons by the side of the road—one of the ley weaver’s hands.

  No wonder Jin hadn’t come with me; the guai weren’t his friends, but they were his party. I wanted to run, scream, puke . . . and my horror soured Beauty’s music, throwing sweat onto my skin and pulling me back into myself.

  The ley weaver made a furrow in its forehead and turned down its mouth. “You are hurting my song.”

  “I’m sorry,” I gulped, holding back my urges and emotions and calming myself with long breaths until the sound soared back into a more pleasing mode. “If the puppeteer has given you hands, what did the others give you?”

  “Nothing. They wish me gone.”

  “Do you fight?”

  “No longer. There was one who fought, who tried to stop the flow, but he did not understand. He was broken. His energy joined the flow.”

  I thought I understood, but I wanted confirmation. “That one was the . . . parent of two others?”

  “Of three.”

  Leung had three children, though one was dead, so he must have been the one who fought and was broken—killed—by someone so he wouldn’t dam up the flow of magic. But if the ley weaver thought there was no battle, it was mistaken—or didn’t recognize it.

  “How was he broken? Who broke him?” I asked.

  The ley weaver shrugged again and the music sighed blue and purple glissandi of light.

  “Do you know how he could have stopped the flow?”

  “He did not know to replace the anchor. He could not do it.”

  “Do you know?”

  The sound of Beauty laughed as the ley weaver opened its mouth. Then it said, “I will not tell you. Those who know, will not try. Those who try, do not know.”

  I couldn’t tell if I was getting somewhere or just going in circles, and I only felt colder and more torn apart with each moment I stood so close to the pull of the ley weaver’s construction.

  “Do you ever . . . travel from this place?” Could it even leave the hot springs? The ley weaver would never pass for human, so I doubted it could have walked around to the back of the hotel and bashed in Strother’s brains. But could it have been involved in the murders another way? “Or send your hands?”

  “No. I am content here.” Not quite true, since I’d seen the harassed hand far from here, but it had the ring of truth in the moment. Perhaps “the moment” was all that existed or mattered for such a being.

  “How long have you been here?” I asked, hoping I could figure out who’d come first, who had the biggest stake in keeping the lake as it was.

  “A short time.”

  What was a short time to this creature? A decade, a century? I’d have to try a different tack. “Who was already here when you came?”

  “The old nexus has always been here, and the rogue just before the anchor was removed. The east was taken away and the puppeteer came soon when the flow grew wild. The child was last.”

  Rogue and child . . . Which one was Willow? The east who was taken away might have been Jonah Leung. . . . But why “east”? I wasn’t gaining much clarity and I felt more wretched by the moment. I had to get what I could and leave before I lost my focus and was torn into fodder for Beauty.

  “If the anchor were returned to its place, what would happen?”

  “Beauty would dwindle.”

  “What about the rest? Of them? Of you?”

  The music whispered, “There must be one. There can be four. But starveling and squabbling. Perhaps the mountain will crush them again. . . .” Once more, the ley weaver frowned. “Beauty must not wither. . . .”

  I started backing up, knowing I wasn’t going to get any more that was useful out of this . . . thing. And the longer I stayed, the smaller my chance to leave. I eased one booted foot away from the blue line at Beauty’s verge, then the next, putting a yard or two between myself and the ley weaver before I would turn and bolt.... The ley weaver put out its one attached hand and reached for me. I could hear the other hands skittering toward us. . . .

  “Beauty sings when you are here. You must stay.”

  Even the trees began creeping toward the center, tearing greenweeping trenches in the earth as they tried to trap me. I ducked a swinging branch and rolled away, gaining ground, but not fast enough.

  One of the hands scrabbled toward me and grabbed! It wrenched me to the ground and tried to move me, but it had no traction so long as it held on. Once I was on the ground, however, I had all four paws to dig in and crawl with, dragging the surprisingly light weight of the hand with me. I rolled onto my back to dislodge it and get a look at the oncoming things. I didn’t like what I saw: The trees were slow moving, but the spiderlike hands were quick. They moved fast, but they stuck to the ground or scurried along lines of energy; none of them leapt the way a real spider would.

  Because they weren’t spiders. I wrenched the one that held me around so I could look at it, peering hard through the Grey and looking past the inflated size and freakish shape. The thing squeezed and pushed the breath from my lungs, but it really was nothing but a hand: a rotting hand bound together with magic and illusion. I worked one of my own hands between the squeezing horror and my chest, then pushed my fingers into it.

  The feeling was repulsive, but I’d done it before and I could stand to do it again. I didn’t have the pheasant feather that had been so useful the first time, but this time I wasn’t dismantling entire corpses, just a single disembodied hand. Once I had my fingers past the shell of flesh, the feel of the burning web of energy at its unnaturally animated core was familiar. I didn’t have to look to know which of the white-hot lines of magic to rip loose; I closed my hand on the one that hurt the most and yanked it free.

  The hand-spider dissolved, leaving nothing but skeleton
fingers clothed in tatters of rotten flesh that crumbled away as I watched. The voices of Beauty’s chorus shrieked and the harmonies shattered into noise.

  The ley weaver and his minions stopped as I stood up, holding out the gruesome trophy. I felt sick and it was hard to talk, but it was the only thing I could think of. “He lied to you,” I yelled to make myself heard over the howling of the choir. “The puppeteer didn’t give you helpers; he gave you spies and weak sisters. He wants the power you’ve been using to make Beauty. The demons try to destroy your hands so they can stop you and the puppeteer, too. They’re all like that. They just want the power and they’ll do what they must to take it.” I didn’t know if it was true, but it seemed likely, given the way Jewel wanted to destroy them all—even her sister—to reclaim the lake for herself. I doubted any of the rest were different.

  But now I got it: Jewel was the old nexus that the ley weaver had alluded to. The lake wasn’t meant for four quarters; it was supposed to be anchored—nailed down—by a single nexus. Willow, the child, hadn’t been around long enough to understand the original structure of the lake’s magic; she knew only the way it had been pushed and pulled and manipulated after the anchor—whatever it was—had been removed. Maybe there were four anchors, but there was only one center and Jewel wanted it back. If I was to fix the problem of the lake, I had to get rid of the sorcerers and magicians who were using it. And it would be easier if I could get them to turn on one another—at least until I could figure out something better.