Liquid Fire

by Anthony Francis

  Nyissa motioned to me, and, gasping, I levered off the wall, joining her. Jewel just stared back at us from inside the bubble, smirking, the shield gleaming before her while the spinning ring sang behind her, shimmering and hypnotic.

  “She’s really good at this,” I said, “but her fuel can’t last forever—”

  “Dakota, fetch my poker from my luggage,” Nyissa said. “Now—”

  “That’s right, go on,” Jewel said, twirling the ring behind her. “Fetch, Dakota.”

  “What’s the ring for?” Nyissa said, leaning in with her wand. “You will tell me—”

  “You’ll find out soon enough,” Jewel said—and the front door exploded.

  I turned, expecting fire ninjas—and saw Molokii and the Fireweavers instead.

  Nyissa whirled, wand whipping out, but it was too late. Molokii’s blast hurled her body into the kitchen. The backwash of the impact knocked me off my feet again, leaving me dazed. In moments, two Fireweavers had seized my arms, and a third raised a stinking white cloth.

  “Jewel,” I said, struggling, trying to gather my forces, “you don’t have to do this—”

  ———

  “I’m sorry, Dakota,” Jewel said, waving to the guard with chloroform. “Put her out.”

  55. High Priestess of Pele

  Something foul and pungent was shoved under my nostrils, jolting me to awareness. My body bucked instinctively, struggling against something before I was even fully conscious. I was all too familiar with this scene. I’d been knocked out, I’d been captured—and I’d been bound.

  “Welcome back, Skindancer,” Jewel said. “I’m sorry it came to this.”

  I jerked fully awake. My arms were bound behind me, some kind of rope harness, and I was covered with some sticky, icky goo. I was kneeling on a towel, and a pair of fireweavers stepped forward to take my arms, not roughly, but almost kindly, helping me to my feet.

  “The plan was so simple,” Jewel said, her voice echoing in my ears as the world spun around me. “Fake Molokii’s kidnapping, get my butch biker babe to ride to the rescue, then convince her she just had to perform her part of the spell to win his freedom.”

  “What?” I asked, dizzy and blinking. Torches and flame swam around me, illuminating the sweaty bodies of the fireweavers, bone and metal decorations, and a gleaming cauldron, but the real star was the scenery—a stark landscape of red and black rock, piled volcanic cinder, rising above us in a conical peak. Now we really were on the surface of Mars. “What—”

  “We’d even bought dark robes and masks from Maxi’s for all the celebrants,” Jewel said, waving her arms, “but then you had to speed dial Philip before I could even say, ‘let’s not tell the police.’ I mean, seriously? Who calls in an airship in response to a ransom demand?”

  “What,” I repeated, twisted in the arms of my guards, half struggling against them, half leaning on them. I looked left and right, disorientingly seeing the same spiky-haired fireweaver boy twice—my guards were twins. I looked down at the web of beige ropes crisscrossing the sticky black goo smeared over my body, and finally marshaled myself. “What the hell—”

  “It’s liquid latex,” Jewel said, as I squirmed uncomfortably beneath the ropes. Actually, I have to admit the ropes weren’t uncomfortable—the coating of goop was. “Piled on thick, on top of all your tattoos. Sorry, Skindancer, but it was necessary to shut you down—and thanks for giving me the idea in your shop as you pulled on the gloves.”

  I struggled, but the hemp quite artfully kept my arms pinned behind my back without putting too much pressure at any one point—karada, Jewel’s favorite fetish, the Japanese art of bondage that carefully used ropes to limit the motion of the joints.

  The latex, on the other hand, clung to my body, stinging like it was magically active. Mercifully, they’d left me in shorts and a T-shirt, but they’d smeared the goop everywhere—including places where no one, not even Jewel, had the right to touch me without asking.

  “You—you put this shit on me—”

  Jewel nodded. “Of course. Underneath the latex is a layer of henna, inscribed in a way to short-circuit your designs. Only I know your tattoos well enough to do that. And besides”—she smirked—“I didn’t want anyone else groping that beautiful body.”

  “You bitch!” I felt violated, even though we’d been intimate. “How could you?”

  “Never underestimate a man’s ability to underestimate a woman,” Jewel said, with that wry smile I’d loved—until now. Before, I’d read it as inviting and delightful; now, I realized, it was just a scornful and vicious smirk. “Apparently that holds true for butch lesbians as well.”

  I looked away. I’d love to say that I was angry with her, but survival instinct had already pushed me past that. There were half a dozen fireweavers around me, and we stood within concentric rings of torches. The crescent moon glinted off the hood of a Range Rover.

  But it was the totem-guarded cauldron that worried me the most. It was squat, six-sided, with complex runes covering its silver panels. Beaded threads stretching from its six corners connected it to six feathered totem poles set with crystals and elaborate magical glyphs.

  The spell wasn’t fully active yet, but the liquid fire in my eyes revealed faint traces. Lines of magic arced between totems, a gleaming bubble pulsed around the cauldron, and a cylinder of power rose from a casting point set before it—all sparkling with magic symbols.

  This wasn’t Wicca or skindancing or even graffiti magic, all of which depended on a magical practitioner or a magical substrate to make it work. This was technical magic, a complex configuration of graphomantic lines designed to channel enormous power.

  This was magic as a necromancer would have wrought it, trying to squeeze every last bit out of the surge of a death—but the fireweavers had power. They had a source of liquid fire, so either they were running out, or this spell required simply staggering amounts of mana.

  My eyes traced the beaded threads hanging from the totems around the cauldron, out into the rings of torches. Soon, I saw the torches weren’t concentric rings—they were one spiral, the threads winding out from the cauldron, braiding together, in widening circles.

  My eyes followed the spiral as it straightened out, snaking lazily up the reddish-grey, sloping conical hill. At first it was hard to see, given the distance and the nearer flames around us . . . but soon I was certain that the torches spiraled back around the crown of the summit.

  I’d seen this in Devenger’s lab—an infinity lens, a figure eight made of two spirals, one bigger than the other, focusing magic from a source onto a target. Magic as Archimedes would have wrought—give me a lever and a place to stand, and I can move the world sort of shit.

  “What are you doing, Jewel?” I said.

  “You’ll see soon enough,” she said, smirk fading ever so slightly. “You know, at one point, I’d hoped to tell you directly, to let you in on the secret and bring you in, but you always were so damn sure of yourself. Not once did you ever show sympathy for our cause—”

  “Damn it, make it easy on yourself,” I said, studying the totems. The largest held a silver disc, stamped with a crescent moon split by a dagger, over a burning house wrapped in a braided chain. “The dragon doesn’t need all this crap. Jewel, talk. You know me. I will figure it out.”

  Jewel stared off into the distance. Then she sighed.

  “Behind us is Pu’u o Maui,” Jewel said. “Largest cinder cone in Haleakala, one of the sacred places of the Order. And inside it, a dragon is hatching—the spirit of our people, made manifest. But you know all that, dragon herald. You can feel it. I can see it in your face—”

  “You’re seeing what you want to see,” I said, scowling; but I did feel . . . something, some connection, some echo in my core, strangely interrupted, that made my skin crawl and my tattoos
itch. Still . . . “But if it is the ‘spirit of your people made manifest’ why all this mumbo jumbo? You seem to be pretty well stocked with liquid fire,” I said. “Enough for performances—”

  “No. That’s what we call faux fire,” Jewel said. “Even that’s too precious to use in its pure form. For performances, we use filtered white gas mixed with the tiniest drop of faux fire. Faux fire itself is regenerated, continuously, in braziers that burn gold—”

  “Shh, Jewel,” Zi warned. “She doesn’t need to know our secrets.”

  “Thanks, Zi, I wouldn’t have picked out that detail,” I said, smirking at him. “Burning gold in liquid fire to make more fire—a reverse philosopher’s stone. Neat—but it can’t possibly sustain itself forever. That’s why you wanted my firecap ink. That’s why you need me. You don’t have anything to trigger this spell with—”

  “You don’t know anything,” Zi snapped.

  “I know you can’t escape the second law of thermodynamics: a closed system always runs down,” I said. “No matter what tricks you use to stretch your supply, if you have no living source, no input, the magic will run out. And while you traveled the world trying to provoke a hatching, Daniel looked ahead at what you needed and gathered it all up to spike your plan.”

  “You always were too smart for anyone’s good,” Jewel said. “Yes, you’re right. Over time, faux fire becomes useless for the ancient spells, worthless for the deeper magicks. I never quite understood what the keepers of the secret flame were yapping about.”

  “Gold isn’t magical,” I said. “Burning gold in magic fire may yield magical byproducts, but they’ll be less magical than the source. It’s like fission—the radiation from decaying atoms may create radioactive byproducts, but always with less potential energy than the source.

  “But a dragon’s heart is a living philosopher’s stone, transforming energy into enormous magical complexity, like fusing atoms with magic. From there, the magic will run downhill, becoming simpler and simpler. It’s entropy—the loss of order is . . . inevitable.

  “It’s Nuclear Magic 101,” I said. “I hope you’re taking notes. There will be a test—”

  Zi slugged me in the stomach, hard enough to stagger me. Thunder rippled from the caldera, the ground shook, and I stumbled as my dragon twisted against the henna. My guards grabbed for my arms as I fell, making me cry out as my arm twisted under the sudden strain.

  “Enough,” Jewel said—but the other fireweavers looked approving. Behind her, Molokii signed something to another fireweaver, Yolanda, who walked off to a crèche of equipment near the Range Rover. Jewel said, “She’s tied up tight. You do not need to hit her.”

  “Have you gone soft?” Zi glared at her, then me. He shook his head. “Don’t tell me you’ve fallen for this woman, not after all that scheming! I don’t care if she is the herald, we can’t just spill our secrets to her! Daniel’s right, you’re endangering the Order, princess—”

  “I said, enough,” Jewel said, striking the ground with her foot—and, incredibly, the ground echoed it, shuddering under our feet. The fireweavers murmured, looking between Zi and Jewel. “And here, it’s not princess, it’s priestess. Unless you think Pele will come for you?”

  Zi drew a breath. “No, of course not,” he said. “Only you can summon Pele.”

  “Pele?” I said. There was “spirit of their people made manifest,” and then there was the plainly ridiculous. “Surely you don’t think the dragon is literally the reincarnation of Pele—”

  “Maybe,” Jewel said defiantly. “No one understands a dragon’s life cycle. There’s a spirit, and an egg, and the one precedes the other, before both are joined in the birth of the dragon. Who knows where that spirit comes from?”

  “Not Hawaiian myth,” I said, squirming in my bonds, staring at the cauldron. This spell needed liquid fire—and if Daniel took my inks, the next best place to get it was my blood. “Dragons date back to the Hadean, when stones fell like rain into oceans of molten rock.”

  “How poetic,” Jewel said. “But that just shows how little you understand. Whether she’s really Pele doesn’t matter. Even whether we believe she’s Pele doesn’t matter. All that matters is the role that the symbol plays in our ritual—”

  “This isn’t just technical magic,” I said, my suspicion confirmed. “It’s ceremonial magic. A ritual designed to harvest the collective intents of a congregation. But you still need enormous magical power to catalyze it—a ley line crossing, a bloodline mashiach—or a blood sacrifice.”

  The words hung there in the air, ugly and true.

  “No one’s going to get sacrificed, Dakota.” The ground shook, and then Jewel scowled as Yolanda returned from the crèche with an athame, a blessed dagger that was used as a magical weapon in ceremonial magic. “Yolanda, I was serious earlier. I forbid human sacrifice—”

  “I heard you, princess,” Yolanda said, quickly glancing at me, then back at Jewel, “and killing your girlfriend is not Plan A. But we’re running out of time. If the anointing fails, we have to have a fallback plan ready before Pele hatches!”

  Again, a silence stretched, broken only by the guttering of torches in the wind.

  “Yolanda,” Jewel said—and now she quickly glanced at me, then back at Yolanda. I scowled. Jewel had known that sacrificing me was a possibility all along. I wondered if she was merely acting when she said, “We have to be better than Daniel. Tell me you’re not serious.”

  “I am. I don’t want that dragon to fly free to ravage Hawai`i—or to die, blowing the top of the mountain off. That would leave none of us alive, much less no liquid fire. But, I hope we don’t have to . . . uh, you know.” She glanced at me. “The ceremonial anointing will—”

  “You don’t want it to fly free or die?” I asked. “What are you trying to do?”

  “The hatchsign has been flying too long,” Jewel said. “If we could have called it down earlier, perhaps—no matter. At this point, with the physical egg this mature, Pele doesn’t really need our help to hatch. At this point, we have two choices: thwart the hatching—”

  “You’re going to abort her,” I said, with growing horror. “A dragon, stillborn—”

  “No, Daniel wanted to thwart the hatching,” Jewel said angrily. “To take a rare, beautiful, and independent creature and harvest it for its blood. That is what humans have done throughout the ages. But there’s a better option, a more humane option—to seize control of it.”

  “To seize control . . . of the hatching?” I said. “You mean of the hatchling?”

  ———

  “We can’t let Pele fly free,” Jewel said. “But she will live . . . under our command.”

  56. To Enslave a God

  “You want to . . . command the hatchling?” I stared again at the torches, the totems, and at last saw it—this was a control charm, writ large. More properly, a geas, a spell to steal a living thing’s will. The Dragon on my back convulsed. “You’re planning to enslave Pele?”

  “Dakota—” Jewel began.

  “You’re going to take a rare, beautiful, and independent creature and make it a slave,” I said, bile growing. “You have the hubris to capture a small-g god, and the cruelty to doom something meant to fly to a life in captivity. You’re going to enslave a dragon—”

  “Enslave her or kill her,” Jewel said flatly. “Those are our choices. No matter how much empathy you or I feel toward Pele, she’ll become a monster the size of a mountain. She could destroy a city with a flick of her wing. She must be tamed, or destroyed—”

  “She’s not an animal. She’s communicating,” I said. “Communicating with me—”

  “Yes, and I’m sorry, dragon herald,” Jewel said, “but that’s why the spell will work. We haven’t tried it, but we’re confident we’ll tame her—as confident as we can be given this is a three-hun
dred-year-old spell from our spotty old records—”

  “You don’t need old records, you need the latest knowledge,” I said. “For example, if you think baptizing me in that cauldron will let you collect the spiritual essence of the liquid fire in my tattoos by some kind of magical osmosis, you’re out of luck—”

  “She’s . . . she’s just trying to throw us off,” Zi said.

  “Skin acts as an essence filter,” I said. “Higher fractions of mana don’t penetrate. That’s why tattoos need graphomantic designs rather than directly projecting a caster’s intent. If you want the essence of magic in my blood . . . you’re going to need to bleed me out.”

  “We add sandalwood oil and hyssop in the act of anointing,” Yolanda said. “And the cauldron is steeped with a mix of jasmine and cinquefoil for projection. A minor cut to start the bleed, amplify that through the infinity lens, and—what? What’s wrong with that, Frost?”

  “That’s . . . that’s really good,” I said, staring at the lens and totems. “But an infinity lens tops out at a thirteen-to-one gearing. The most you can concentrate in that cauldron is a twelfth of the power within my skin. For what it looks like you need . . . it would still kill me.”

  “We won’t have to,” Yolanda said, looking at the blade uncertainly in her hands. “The circuit started to activate as soon as we brought you into it, even with you covered with that goop. I think the spirit of the dragon has bonded with you—”

  My eyes went wide. Maybe they’d realized about my new dragon tattoo what I’d long suspected. But Yolanda immediately showed she was off target—and hopefully, her misunderstanding was something I could use to my advantage.

  “The spirit of the dragon was summoned to you every time you cast your dragon tattoo. Sometimes even when you don’t cast it,” Yolanda said. “If you stand at the casting point, the infinity lens will amplify the emanations of your tattoo—”