Liquid Fire

by Anthony Francis

  Then I shoved the hoop into the thicket of magic.

  The hoop was sucked in and churned up in an eyeblink, its ring twisted into a pretzel, its firesticks spinning around crazily, their arcing creating just the right twist of mana to disrupt Molokii’s shield. By itself, that wouldn’t have been enough to destroy the pattern, but after throwing two whole fireweaver’s sets of gear as impromptu monkey wrenches into Molokii’s magic gearworks . . . the whole outer shell of the basket blew apart.

  And then I ran in with a flying side kick.

  This wasn’t Taido, the martial art that I practiced now; this was taekwondo, the martial art I’d started with. Old reflexes kicked in when I ran forward, triggering a flash of memory of my college karate instructor, hearing his words, guiding my body into a devastating side kick.

  I bounced off Molokii’s still-solid inner shield and fell to the volcanic cinder.

  Molokii stumbled back a step, but recovered, reinforcing his shield. He laughed as he saw me fall to the rough volcanic cinder, thinking I’d failed. But a Taido student is as comfortable on the ground as they are in the air, and I lanced back with a back-leg shrimp kick, buffeting him.

  I’d known I wouldn’t be able to break his inner shield with one kick—but now I was too close for him to build up another wicker fire barrier or volcanic blast, and I planned to stay there, using the latex they’d coated my body with to protect me until I found an opening.

  At first, Molokii struggled to get his bearings as I danced around him using Taido’s distinctive lancing, acrobatic footwork, unsoku. He had plenty of tricks in his playbook, but so did I—his waves of fire, I dodged under, and his whips of flame, I cartwheeled over.

  But Molokii had the strength and speed to gather himself. He flicked one poi behind his head in a lazy figure eight, maintaining an umbrella-like shield while he drew the other poi’s chain in, whirling fast around his fist, building up an ersatz boxing glove made of flame.

  Then he began pummeling me with his blazing fist of fire.

  Molokii was strong, and with his magic behind it, the blows threatened to knock me off my feet. My protective latex coating was disintegrating, my tattoos were still shut down, and the burning pain began to wear at my will, making me stumble. Molokii grinned—and punched.

  The flaming fist screamed at me, and faster than thought, I threw myself to the ground. No; I didn’t throw myself; I did foo-koo-tekky, Taido’s gymnastic defense, dodging with my body, rather than blocking with my fists. I arced to the side, body coiling like a spring, catching myself on two hands and one foot, the other leg cocked back as I faced Molokii’s side, recalling Paj’s words, echoes of advice Molokii never heard: His form is sloppy. Never pass on free.

  I was beneath the edge of his shield. I saw the opening—and took his rib.

  My leg popped out in a perfect shaa-jo side kick, slamming into his torso. I felt the bone snap, heard the crack, saw a silent cry pass his lips. But I was already moving, retracting the foot, shooting it under me and whip-coiling back upright just as he was canting over.

  He staggered back, trying to recover his spinning rhythm, wincing as the movement required him to bend his side; and, in the open space between his flailing poi, I surged in, slamming both hands into his chest and hooking my forward foot behind his heel.

  Molokii flew back, head cracking against a rock, his poi falling to the earth.

  I stood upright and drew in a ragged breath; I was even more winded than before. Was it the altitude? Then I stepped up to Molokii’s splayed form and kicked gravelly sand over his poi. The surging blue flames of Molokii’s faux liquid fire fought against the volcanic cinder, sputtering, but in moments, the squarish burning wicks hissed and went out.

  Then I turned to Jewel.

  Jewel stood there before the cauldron, guarding it—a post from which she hadn’t moved almost since the start of the fight. Her morningstars were aflame, whirling around her, creating a shield at once far lighter and far more subtle than any of her companions. There was no way I was going to breach that—I’d seen what she could do at Union Square.

  But after what I’d done to her friends, why was she here, and not running? There was no profit in it—her spell was done. Or did she need to do something to complete it? Or . . . someone? Surely she didn’t need me to complete it! Yolanda said the circuit activated as soon as they’d brought me into it. Jewel couldn’t imagine she could force me into the casting point on her own, and even if she did, she couldn’t imagine I would participate—

  But then Jewel expanded her shield, slowly, a ring rippling out from around the first one, expanding around the cauldron. I tensed, preparing for an attack, but the ring slowed, stopped, intensified into a wall of flame, a dome of flame—protecting both Jewel and the cauldron.

  The fire reverberated against the curves of the infinity lens. My new dragon tattoo squirmed on my body as the lower focus of the infinity lens glowed brighter in my liquid-fire-enhanced eyes, echoing the flames of Jewel’s shield, becoming a true shield of its own.

  From overhead, the lens must’ve looked like the eye of Horus—a circular inner shield making the pupil, with an oval lens around it, trailing off into a curved tail that snaked up the slope. I was trapped between the iris and the corner of the eye, in a patch of volcanic cinder.

  Maybe she just meant to pin me until her friends regained her wits. But Jewel glanced aside, to my old Dragon curving through the sky, then set her feet a little more firmly, like she was bracing herself. What had she said? Pele didn’t need their help to hatch?

  Maybe she didn’t need my help to cast another spell; maybe she just needed to keep me in the lens until the hatching began. Because the first spell had already started, and she wasn’t trying to corral me. She was just protecting the cauldron—had been, from the start of the fight.

  Maybe, just maybe, all she had to do was keep me from overturning that cauldron.

  “Don’t make this difficult, Dakota,” she said. My mouth opened. I couldn’t believe she was doing this. I stepped up to her, but she intensified her inner bubble, raising her hand. “Stay back,” she said. “I mean it, Dakota! This will all be over soon. Till then, stay back—”

  “I loved you,” I said, staring at her. “I won’t hurt you.”

  “Well, good,” she said, a bit rattled. “The spell’s activating, I don’t know how—”

  “I do,” I said, very quietly.

  “—but the lens is charging. We planned to catch it on hatching, but before that, it must embody.” She cocked her head at the Dragon in the sky. “Daniel wins after all. The spirit of the dragon will tangle itself up in the control charm as it tries to reach the egg—”

  “Killing her,” I said. “I won’t let you do that.”

  “You can’t stop it,” she said.

  “It won’t work, you know,” I said, stepping closer. “This is not what you think—”

  “That’s bull. You told me how you lied your way out of that mess with Cinnamon—”

  “The girl who cried wolf, eh?” I said. My new Dragon squirmed on my skin, now almost burning me with surges of magic, making me almost forget the stings and pains from my recent fight. “Then we’re at an impasse, because no matter what you think, the spell won’t work.”

  “Let’s wait,” Jewel said, “and see.”

  The poi whirled around her in a vicious arc. The burning wicks passed near my face, the sound like oncoming traffic, the heat like flooding waves. Light flared sinister against her face, and I stared into that smile, that vicious smile, wondering how I had come again to this point.

  Jewel was just like Savannah. I’d fallen for her, I’d thought I loved her. And maybe she’d loved me. But in the end, Savannah had been more interested in her little project than what it had done to my heart. And Jewel? Like Savannah, on steroids. How
had I loved her? Yet I still did.

  “Jewel,” I said, my eyes flickering upward. For all her crazy villain talk, she’d still defended me against the fireweavers—at first against physical violence, and then later when Yolanda threatened to sacrifice me. Maybe . . . “I thought we really had something.”

  “We,” she began, and our eyes met. Her smile cracked a little. “We really did.”

  I stared at her in sadness and pain. “Then how did we go so wrong? I loved you, Jewel. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m not even going to fight you. But I’m going to the top of that mountain, and I’m going to stop this spell—and you will have to kill me to stop me.”

  And I stepped right up to the flaming wall of her magic, feeling its heat, hearing its rush. Somehow, I had to break down her determination, break down her defensive spell. I don’t really know what I intended to do—step into the flames? Disrupt its magic? Use harsh language?

  At that moment, all I knew is that I wanted her to see my face—and see how I hurt.

  Jewel met my gaze defiantly. Then her façade cracked, admitting a twinge of sadness. My own lip trembled as Jewel’s poi sizzled past my head. Jewel’s smile faded into pain. Then her poi slowed. Then they stalled. Then she let them drop into the cinder.

  “Oh, God,” Jewel said, falling to her knees beside her poi. “Oh, Dakota, I’m so sorry.”

  I closed my eyes. It was all over but the shouting. I reached out, tousled her hair briefly; she smiled up at me, then dropped her eyes once she saw what was in my face. I kicked volcanic cinder atop her poi, and she cried out, realizing it was too late to back out now.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “What have I done?”

  ———

  “The right thing, for a change,” I said. “Now help me save Pele.”

  59. The Ouroboros and the Cauldron

  “Save her?” Jewel said. Her eyes jerked aside to her extinguished poi. “I—I won’t fight you, Dakota,” she said, shifting her weight, maybe thinking she could nab the poi of one of her fallen fireweavers. “But you can’t save her. You’re—you’re going to have to kill her—”

  “I am not going to kill her,” I said, reaching down and seizing Jewel by the shoulders. She tried to shrug me off, then began hitting me, uselessly. “Stop it! If you go for those poi, I swear, Jewel, I will kick your ass.”

  “What did you say,” Jewel said, striking me again, “about not fighting me—”

  “What did you say,” I said, trying to hold her still, “about me lying—”

  Jewel smacked at me, uselessly, then landed a good one on my chin.

  “Not bad,” I said, leaning back, feeling my jaw. “Twist your fist a bit more—”

  “Damn it!” Jewel said, fists shaking in rage. “Don’t taunt me—”

  “Don’t tempt me,” I said, seizing both of her wrists and holding them firmly. I glared into those eyes, those eyes that I’d loved, and she stared back at me defiantly. “I’ve got a dragon about to die in the hatching. How do I save her?”

  “You can’t,” she said. “You mustn’t! If it hatches free, it’ll cause an extinction—”

  “It will cause?” I said. “You mean she will go on a rampage? Why, Jewel? She’s not an animal. She’s a sentient creature! Where can she go? What can she eat? She’s a creature of lava and fire, Jewel! There’s no place on Earth fit for humans that is a proper environment for her!”

  “You don’t know that,” Jewel said, glancing over her shoulder. “You can’t risk it—”

  But I wasn’t listening to her anymore. I stared after what she’d stared after—the cauldron. She was still thinking that the spell could work, without me in the circuit, without liquid fire. I thought it through carefully, then redirected my attention to her.

  “Turn around,” I said sharply. She stared at me blankly, and I poked her. “Now!”

  Jewel turned around, and I knelt and searched her. She laughed, halfheartedly, then shut up as I made her put her hands on her head. I felt her familiar body under my hands, cursing the context. I spun her around, then searched around me, kicking the fallen morningstars away.

  “Find what you were looking for?” she asked, hands still on her head.

  “Yes,” I said, patting her down once more. “This was just a precaution, but even when I searched you, you still looked at the cauldron. You claimed you had no liquid fire, that you needed me to make the spell work—yet you still expect something to happen. What?”

  “Go fuck yourself,” she said bitterly.

  “Jewel! You expect something to happen. The same thing Daniel expected to happen. If the egg explodes, there’s no way you could harvest liquid fire out of that—it would be burned up, buried underground, lost forever.” I shook her. “How is this supposed to work?”

  “Might makes right was bad for me,” she said. “But apparently good for you—”

  “Jewel! I am not the one trying to enslave a dragon! What will happen?”

  She tensed, hands still on her head. “If you’re so smart—”

  I spun her around and put my face into hers.

  “You’re right, Jewel. Pele is ready to be born,” I said. “But I didn’t guess that because I watched my old tattoo flying around. I can feel that from her. I have been living with her in my head, on my back for the last eight months—”

  “Buh,” Jewel said, eyes widening. She glanced aside at my flying dragon tattoo, curving less lazily, picking up speed as it approached the crater. “Not that tattoo—but the one on you? I guessed, the first time I saw it manifest, suspected it even on the plane—but how?”

  I grimaced, partly from the memory of the accident, and partly from the knowledge I now had of Jewel’s skill at deception. Her reactions looked so convincing—but even as surprise had spread across her face, the words she’d spoken meant she’d really known it all along.

  “I activated it before it was complete,” I said. “Four segments, connected to my body, using myself as the core element—an open magical circuit. Damn near tore me to pieces when Pele’s spirit embodied it, and dumb old me thought it was a magical back reaction—”

  “No wonder the Noose activated—it is true.” Jewel’s mouth opened, her eyes fixed on my skin. Her hand lifted off her head, as if she was going to reach out to touch, but I put my hand back atop hers and pressed it down. “Damn it, Dakota, it’s a dragon’s spirit. Let me touch—”

  “No,” I said. “I lived with her on my back—in my head—for almost nine months. That makes her my spiritual child—and you were going to enslave her. I’d die to protect Cinnamon, and I’d most definitely die to protect Pele. So do not fuck with me. What is going to happen?”

  She glared at me hotly.

  “All right,” I said. “You want me to Sherlock this. All right. Fine. I’ll do it.”

  I straightened up. I stared over her shoulder at the cauldron. Then I cocked my fist and pointed it at her face. She flinched, hands jerking out of my grasp to protect her face, but I gathered them with my free hand and put them back atop her head, pinning them there.

  “Everyone’s the same,” I said, staring at the cauldron, holding her hands beneath mine. “I wanted beauty, and love, and sex, and I fell for you. You want the same thing, so you indulged it, but that was never your real goal. You just want . . . I don’t know. To spin fire.”

  She tensed under my hand, and I realized I’d gotten it. “That’s it, isn’t it? It’s not just that everyone’s the same—we’re the same. Forget world domination. You’re just like me—you just want to practice your art. You want to spin fire—and you need fuel like I need ink.”

  Jewel clenched her jaw.

  “We are just the same,” I said. “You never cared about a telescope on a mountaintop or being a priestess of a cult or even about the promise of immortality. You just
wanted a source of liquid fire . . . but you didn’t want to hurt a living creature just to practice an art.”

  “It’s just an art,” Jewel said. “Dragons are rare and beautiful creatures—and the target of my obsessions, and the mystical totems of my order, and, maybe, just maybe, the embodiments of the gods of my people. I’d never kill a dragon to spin fire, not if I could avoid it—”

  “But seizing a dragon is a dangerous proposition,” I said, cocking my head. “People have tried enslaving drakes, but no one’s succeeded with a real dragon in recorded history, or we’d know from the devastation left not just in the historical but the geological record.”

  “Right,” Jewel said quietly. “But I wouldn’t risk destroying the world just to spin.”

  “So this . . . this is new,” I said. “Some dangerous permutation of the old magics that no one’s ever been crazy enough to try. Even you . . . you might be willing to try the spell, but you had to have a fallback plan. You even said you had a fallback plan. Daniel’s plan.”

  I stared at the six torches, then at the lines beneath them. A six pointed star. The Star of David? No. An alchemist’s symbol? One of the triangle bore symbols of fire. The other of water. Symbols of earth and air were woven into two rings. That was the symbol for . . .

  “The Philosopher’s Stone,” I said, and Jewel sagged under my hand. “The symbols of this setup are those of the Philosopher’s Stone. I read Harry Potter, I know that’s not just for transmutation, but that it’s the legendary key to immortality. But liquid fire is the real key—”

  “Like you said,” Jewel said quietly, “this is a very old spell.”

  I shut up.

  “Liquid fire is the key to immortality,” she said. “Not that I care. Everyone dies. But harvesting it from a real dragon isn’t practical—and not just because the dragon might object. It’s because the flames themselves may consume the fire before it’s harvested.