Inside Straight

by Mark Henwick

  Flint sat cross-legged on the floor, next to a coffee table he’d pulled closer to me. He began to brush the top of the table with one hand and slap in time with the palm of the other. Kane also hummed, moving around the room, so it felt as if his sound came and went, weaving itself with the others. They all blended together into a soothing, hypnotic sound.

  The room was very warm, reminding me of the heat of bonfires when we’d done the ritual at Bitter Hooks. Gwen drew the curtains closed, making it dark.

  I could sense Gwen, even when she was behind me, like she had a sort of gravity to her, pulling at me. She was strong.

  “Shut your eyes,” Gabrielle whispered.

  I did. I was so relaxed by now, I was finding it difficult to stay upright. It wasn’t that I felt heavy. Quite the opposite. I was light as a feather.

  Gabrielle worked my hair in a loose braid, out of the way, then her fingers traced patterns on my eyelids, across my cheeks, over and over, barely touching.

  My body pulsed to the rhythm that Flint and Kane made. The whole room did. I could feel the walls move in and out in time, like a heart beating.

  Gabrielle had gotten some paint from somewhere. I could feel it, slightly oily on my skin. She was drawing war paint on my face. Streaks of black fanning out from the bridge of my nose across my cheeks, my forehead, my eyelids, until it became a solid band.

  Crazy.

  I began to float. There was no room, no sensation, no rhythm that wasn’t part of me.

  “Open.” A whisper, lost in the chant. Like the wind’s murmur, high in the cold mountain passes. A wind that brought scents of distant meadows and a warmer, gentler place.

  “Open.”

  I strained forward, sensing a path through the darkness that lay across my eyes.

  It was as if I had to fight against a weight to raise my eyelids. Then they suddenly flew open and the world came rushing back at me.

  “Shit!” Someone swore.

  Chapter 43

  All Haven is a dream of ancient black veils that stir in a spirit wind. It’s populated by ghosts. Ghosts that drift through the translucent corridors and rooms, each one a little blood-red ember, like the scatterings of a dying fire. My heart does not beat now. My limbs are cold, bent and reaching for a sun that does not warm.

  ...can’t do it like this...

  ...spirit jumped into the trees again...

  ...have to bring her back...

  I can hear them. I pay no attention.

  The tree spirit is just a first step outside.

  I breathe in, a great rush of air, that lifts me up and shoots me outwards, dragging them with me, like ants on an eagle’s back.

  I can see. All the way past Golden, across the Boulder turnpike, to Erie, and Weaver’s house.

  I can reach...

  “Slowly!”

  That was a voice I couldn’t ignore like the others. That was my House calling to me.

  Kane and Flint. Working together. It was their skill I was using, boosted with the League’s power. Not the way Gwen and Gabrielle planned it. I laughed madly. Score one for the wild talent.

  Calm.

  I was impatient, but I let them catch up before I reached out. I hoped it wasn’t my real body, but it felt like it was. It felt like I’d just stepped out of a thick fog onto one of the patios at Weaver’s house.

  This is not a real body.

  I would be a ghost to anyone in the house, and they would be to me, but the house was empty of life. I could see right through it. None of the embers that showed living people to my tree-spirit senses.

  I reached out to the window, but my hand passed through and I felt the others calling me back.

  “Whoa,” Flint said. “Let’s check a little first.”

  “Yes, please,” Gwen said.

  Gabrielle was swearing colorfully under her breath.

  They all sounded as if they were talking just behind me, but I turned around and there were no other ghostly images there. Back facing the house, I could make out a hazy image of me in the patio window reflection. A ghost of a ghost, dressed in buckskin and a bead necklace, with war paint covering half my face.

  Cool.

  In my projected aura, I didn’t feel Flint’s magic; I saw it. His working to check the house floated like thin smoke from a wood fire, spread itself out against the window and then seeped in.

  Inside, it began to turn black in some places.

  “Booby traps,” Kane said. “Physical. Explosives triggered by opening the window, I think.”

  Not that I’d have actually opened a window. I was a ghost. But a good thing we hadn’t sent anyone to physically check.

  “And traps on the doors,” Flint added. “Also, alarms. Motion sensors and so on.”

  “Neat work, Flint,” Gabrielle said. She seemed to have gotten over having her projection torn out of her hands.

  Gwen did something and I watched shimmering black snakes slip through the walls of the house. They followed Flint’s smoke magic, then overtook it and spread out into every room.

  There was an electric spark, like a major short-circuit, and one of the snakes disappeared.

  “A trap designed for a spirit walker,” Gwen said.

  Good thing they made me wait.

  Another spark, that seemed to catch several snakes, and then nothing. The snakes drifted away and Flint’s smoke began to dissipate.

  “There’s no one alive inside,” Gwen said finally. “No traps left for spirit walkers.”

  “Alive?” I asked, hearing something in her voice.

  “There’s a dead body inside,” Gwen said. “In the living room.”

  “Weaver?”

  “We should be so lucky. More likely the old guy from last night,” Kane said. “To provide fuel for the spirit traps.”

  Even my aura projection could feel the chill that gave my body, back in Haven.

  “We can go see,” Flint said. “It’s difficult to be sure, but I think that’s all the traps and sensors marked out, and the magical traps sprung. You need to be aware, your projection is a working that touches the real world, okay? It can cause sound, change the temperature, even possibly even nudge something. A normal explosion won’t hurt you but...”

  “You don’t want emergency services coming into the house because we set an alarm off or there’s a report of an explosion,” Kane finished.

  I could feel the power stir beneath me. I could make sure there was nothing left for them to find. No traps. No building.

  Locked together like this, they could all feel what I was feeling and probably guess what I was thinking. No one spoke.

  “Okay,” I said. “Warn me if any alarms are about to go off.”

  Weaver and the Denver Adepts weren’t here, but I needed experience in this kind of magic, and I guessed this was a relatively safe way of gaining it.

  I drifted in through the glass of the windows, passing through my own image with a shudder. Given what I was doing, it was strange to find that affected me, but it was really spooky.

  Gabrielle murmured inaudibly.

  I made my way to the living room. The body was the elderly Adept who’d greeted us at the door last night. He was lying on his back, arms and legs spread out, throat slashed open.

  “It’s entirely possible Weaver knows that his magical traps have been sprung,” Gwen said. “We shouldn’t stay long, in case there’s something else lurking.”

  I nodded. I could tell she felt the motion, understood it.

  There wasn’t a great deal I could do; looking from this aura projection was like looking at an underwater scene. Everything waved slowly, pushed by currents I could half-sense.

  Still, nothing seemed to have changed from my visit last night other than Weaver had killed one of his community just to set a trap on the chance that we would spirit walk into this house.

  There was the same unused fireplace. The furniture. The Gold Rush artwork. The chandeliers.

  The place had felt empty before
, and in the eerie, drifting shapes around me, it felt even emptier.

  I went down the corridor to Weaver’s study.

  Some of the books were missing—there were gaps in the shelves that hadn’t been there. Everything else was the same, down to the bourbon bottle on the side table, and the glasses we’d left on his desk.

  I turned around, too quickly, and the image of the house I was seeing lurched and swayed to catch up. The artwork in the rest of the house was paintings; here in the study it was three-dimensional reliefs and my vision swaying somehow gave the illusion of life to the depiction of mining scenes. They moved. My heart stuttered. For a second it was as if the men and mules in the artwork were real, trapped in there...

  “Enough,” Gwen said.

  A flutter of panic, of things sliding away from me.

  “Temperature rising!” Kane.

  “Back. Now.” That was Gabrielle.

  But I couldn’t feel Gabrielle and Gwen.

  There was a pressure on me, like I’d dived into deep water. Darkness. Silence.

  I’m somewhere outside, far from the smells and sounds of cities, in twilight, with the weight and fragrance of pine trees surrounding me and the incredible splendour of the Milky Way wheeling overhead.

  Coyote and Raven stand there, watching me.

  We’re close. Linked by aura, just as if I were using eukori.

  Raven bound to Coyote, and Coyote to Raven. Raven bound to me.

  Coyote and me...

  Kane is guarded.

  “Swear you’ll never use that power like that again.”

  I hear him in my mind.

  “I can’t,” I reply in the same way. “The world isn’t like that.”

  They’re not happy.

  I sighed. “You know, I had this sort of conversation with Skylur about the limits of what he’d do. Came down to it, basically anything, if it delivers Emergence rather than the alternative. He’d sacrifice himself and his whole House, me included.”

  Neither of them said anything.

  “That’s what I’m signed up for. Now, I’m not the main cog in the machine, and I don’t expect to be able to tell whether something I do would have a significant effect on the whole of Emergence. I will do what Skylur tells me to, even if that includes using dark magic. Which sucks, because you’ve got to trust me, trusting someone else’s call.”

  There weren’t any happier. With auras meshed like this, there wasn’t any way I could lie and they knew it.

  “Best I can say is I’d never use it for personal gain or for something trivial. But give me the same kind of situation, where I have to pull that magic through you to save Alex or any other member of my House, and I’d do it. No question.”

  “Your House means us? You’d pull magic to save one of us?” Flint asks.

  “Yes, of course. And the reverse. That’s the way my House is.”

  Coyote blinks.

  Better, but not quite there yet.

  “I get the idea we’re going to need to use whatever we have to get Tullah back,” I say. “Including everything you might be able to do, or I might be able to do through you. I’ll be there for you. I need to know you’ll be there for me.”

  Coyote and Raven look at each other.

  I felt them slipping away, but I couldn’t go back yet. Something else called me, even as I felt them pulling me back to Haven.

  Something stronger. Something further away. Something...

  Dark.

  The cold, deep earth is all around me. Not the cold of Denver. Not the same... taste of rock. A place with wetness in the soil, filling my tree-spirit senses, filling my mouth, my nose, my eyes. Soaking into my roots.

  My roots. A great mass of tangling roots, like worms, deep, reaching into the darkness, stretching, feeding.

  Feeding on the rot of old deaths and decaying bodies. Gaining from it. Power.

  Power coming up through my body like lava rising in a volcano.

  I must scream, but all I can do is rise up from the dread, swell out and sense...

  A graveyard. My branches sway in the night sky above a graveyard.

  Moonlight etches the lines of an ancient church, its walls rising up as if to escape the horror in the earth. Every stone is covered in lichen, the plant grasping at the building, holding it, clawing at it, whispering the promise of ages: that every wall will fall, every stone will be brought down, all will return to the earth where the dead lie patient...

  A pressure is building in my chest, threatening to tear it open.

  I must scream.

  I could feel Gabrielle’s hands gripping my physical shoulders again. Pulling me. The wood of the chair I was sitting in pressed against my back. The room in Haven mingled with Weaver’s study and the ancient churchyard. Color crept in at the edges, pushed out the ghosts.

  Faces were moving around me. Mouths. Words.

  Back.

  A staggering rush. Air blasting in my lungs. Blood pumping. Everything fast and slow at the same time.

  I jerked in the chair as if I’d fallen into it, a gasp of shock ripped from my dry throat as fragments of the nightmare images scuttled away like bugs in daylight, to be replaced by the ice-cold blue of Gwen’s stare right in my face.

  “Frigging awesome!” Gabrielle said, apparently oblivious to the strange deviations in my return from the spirit walk.

  Chapter 44

  There was no war paint on my face. I was wearing a sweater, jeans and boots. My hair had been braided by Gabrielle as she soothed me into the right state of mind for a spirit walk, that much was real and physical. The rest was part of the interpretation I had made of it. Or...

  Bian’s face was very close, pushing Gwen aside. She was speaking to me. It took a moment before I could understand what she said. I seemed to be hearing through a kind of filter that changed her words into gibberish.

  “I’m okay,” I said, with a mouth that felt full of cotton wool. “Just disoriented.”

  I squeezed her hand, and let her help me to a sofa.

  Words flowed over me. Nothing about speaking with Coyote and Raven. Nothing about a graveyard. Nothing about a church in the moonlight.

  Flint and Kane wouldn’t want to speak in front of the others. Fair enough.

  The other...

  That church. Not to share with anyone. Mine. Only I was there. Only I saw that church.

  It was already fading, like dreams in the daylight. Yet I didn’t want to share it with them.

  In the meantime, someone really smart had requested that coffee be brought to us, and I managed to lift a mug without spilling any.

  “I would guess Weaver left within minutes of you.” Gwen was speaking to me, but it was Bian who answered.

  “As far as we know, Weaver thinks Kaothos is with Tullah. If he boosted his spell to kill Amber and left booby traps all over his house, I think it means he’s given up on any plans of using Amber as a way to get to Kaothos, and any plans that he might have had to cooperate with the Northern Adept League.”

  “Which means wherever he’s gone, he’s looking for Tullah,” Gwen said. “He’s going to his backup plan, to search with magic, but using someone from the Denver community instead of Amber.”

  “Will it work?” Bian asked.

  “Yes,” Gabrielle said. “It might be slower than with Amber, but it will work.”

  “And if we don’t get there first, what can he do, once he finds Tullah, and realizes she doesn’t have Kaothos?”

  “Use her as bait,” Gwen said. “That’s what you’d call dark magic and it would require a lot of power, but it could be done. It would need the whole Denver community, somewhere safe and well away from us, to stop us interfering.”

  Gabrielle looked as sick as I felt, but Bian pushed on: “Using Tullah as bait isn’t going to make Kaothos happy. What do you think Weaver could achieve with the dragon after doing something like that?”

  We were all watching Gwen. She took her time answering.

  “I susp
ect, whichever way he achieved it, his only intention has ever been to get hold of Kaothos. Which I think means he has a plan to bind the dragon. I don’t know how. There would be an order of magnitude more power required than we’ve talked about so far. But if he succeeds, what can he achieve with a captive dragon?” She sighed and proceeded with visible reluctance. “Spirit guides are raw power. It’s the host that constructs the purpose and function of a spell, which means the workings are limited, to an extent, by what the host believes can be done, and how they think the power might need to work to achieve it. The last time the world had a dragon spirit guide, military technology was at a level of armor and arrows, swords and spears, slingshots and maybe a bit of naptha or gunpowder. At that time, a host might accidentally have found a way to invoke lightning if there were the right type of clouds around, or a way to make the wind blow or mist to form.” She paused and let us see where her line of thought was headed. "Now we have the knowledge of atomic structures, light and electricity, the physical laws that govern the universe. It’s not as if the host and dragon are going to achieve this power without long effort and application, but in the end, I can’t imagine what the potential limitations might be.”

  All of us sat in stunned silence for a minute. That’s what the prize was.

  “No wonder the Empire was so committed to finding Kaothos,” Bian said eventually, and because I knew her, I sensed what her next words would be. “So what do the Northern Adept League think they’re going to do with a dragon?”

  “Get Tullah back here. Get Kaothos back where she belongs. Then protect and guide,” Gwen said.

  Well, there was a whole week of argument as to what ‘guide’ meant when the rubber met the road, but Gabrielle moved quickly to redirect us.

  “Let’s go through what we saw again in case we missed something,” she suggested. “Memories from spirit walking fade quickly, just like substantiations do.”