Even first-rate sorcerers had trouble enchanting a woman’s whole body; they considered the spell a success if it charmed a meaningful subregion, like the face, torso, or legs. The Chameleon-bewitched girls at Feliss Academy almost all had this partial level of ensorcellment...and let me tell you, it had its drawbacks. I’m reminded of a warm lazy day outside the dorm when a blonde fifteen-year-old named Ilsa sunned herself in a meager bikini; it was most disconcerting to see the sharply marked “tan-line” at her waist where the pale Nordic skin of her upper body changed to the dark complexion of my cousin Hafsah, shapely brown down to the calves, then abruptly white again at the ankles. One boy who saw her ran screaming across the courtyard and vomited in the hollyhocks. Heaven knows what he saw.
But the woman in The Buxom Bull must have received her Chameleon from a stupendously powerful sorcerer—she was totally Hafsah from head to toe. And an exquisite head it was; a fine mouth-watering toe. Dark laughing eyes, demure yet kissable lips, softly rounded nose, chocolate brown hair that practically demanded you bury your face in it, and hips one could grab like a drowning man seizes a life preserver. She looked perfect and I knew she would feel perfect, whatever I kissed or nibbled.
That really pissed me off.
The falseness of her. Beneath her Chameleon glamour, she could be a scrawny twelve-year-old or a pock-marked crone of ninety; tall or short, dark or fair, and I’d never see the truth. I longed to ask the Caryatid what she saw—the Chameleon spell fooled only men, not women—but I couldn’t speak a word with the air still solidified around me.
One last thing about the woman entering the room: she was dressed in an outfit Hafsah once wore to a formal family dinner (gold silk trousers of the style foreigners call “harem pants,” a midriff-baring white shirt with a half-sleeved gold oveijacket, assorted bangle-jangles and gold-mounted pearls), but in addition she wore something that clashed glaringly with the Hafsah persona: a billowing knee-length cape of crimson. Sorcerer’s crimson. Hidden under the doppelganger of my cousin, there was indeed a sorceress.
The sorceress. Powerful enough to blast a hole through Death Hotel. Powerful enough to immobilize us all like bugs in a spider’s web.
“Hello,” she said with a baby-soft version of Hafsah’s voice. “I’m called Dreamsinger: Sorcery-Lord of Spark.”
Uh-oh. Even more powerful than I thought.
Dreamsinger continued a few more steps: TIP, TIP, TIP. She wasn’t actually walking on her toes, but each time she placed a foot, she did so with gingerly caution, as if fearful of making too much noise. Not the spit-in-your-eye brashness one expects from a Spark Lord. In fact, she stopped in the middle of the room and looked around as if she had no idea what to do next. Lost and dismayed. At last her gaze settled on the Caryatid; her face brightened.
“Sister!” she cooed. The Sorcery-Lord tip-tapped to the Caryatid and air-kissed her cheek. This wasn’t just an empty gesture, the way unctuous people pretend to kiss while avoiding actual contact—Dreamsinger’s lips pushed as close as possible to the Caryatid’s face, but a hand’s breadth of solidified atmosphere blocked the way. The Spark Lord kissed the invisible barrier fervently, once, twice, three times. “Sister! Dear comrade on the Burdensome Path. Please tell me what’s happening here.”
The Caryatid remained motionless. Dreamsinger waited a moment...then a moment longer...then raised her hand to her mouth in the embarrassed horror of a little girl realizing she’s done something rude. “You mean you can’t just...but it’s such a simple spell!” Dreamsinger leaned in close, her forehead pressed against the imprisoning air as she stared into the Caryatid’s face. “All you have to do is shrug it off. A tiny trivial shrug. Not the physical sort, but you know when you focus your mind, then flip the magic away?”
No response. The Caryatid looked as if she was straining to shrug/focus/flip, but the only result was a flush of effort turning her cheeks pink. Dreamsinger watched a moment more, then dropped her gaze. “Well, ah, it can sometimes be difficult...”
Eyes still averted, the Spark Lord made a twiddly gesture with the last three fingers of her left hand. The Caryatid lurched forward, as if she’d suddenly regained her momentum from a minute before and was continuing her run toward Impervia. Dreamsinger waited politely (keeping her gaze elsewhere, pretending she didn’t notice anything ungainly) until the Caryatid staggered to a halt. Then the Sorcery-Lord lifted her head and said, “So, dear sister, you were going to explain...?”
The Caryatid curtsied low. My grandma Khadija (who’d been governor of Sheba for twenty-three years) had told me the Sparks hated people bowing or scraping—”They don’t want deference, they want obedience.” But Dreamsinger waited placidly as the Caryatid held the curtsy for a full five seconds. Then the Caryatid rose and said, “Milady, we...we’re on a quest.”
Dreamsinger’s eyes grew wide. “Really? My brother says the only people who believe in quests are professors of literature. But he must have been teasing. My family likes to invent stories to see what I’ll believe. They call me ‘delightfully gullible.’ ”
She repeated the phrase in the singsong voice of a little girl who’s heard the words frequently but doesn’t quite understand them. Perhaps beneath her luscious exterior, Dreamsinger was far more child than woman. As I said, girls from affluent families often received Kaylan’s Chameleon as a “Welcome to puberty” gift; take away the sorcerous glamour, and the real Dreamsinger might only be eleven, with scrapes on her knees and a first-figure bra. One might ask why her family let her leave Spark Royal without an adult chaperon...but her freeze-the-room spell showed she could take care of herself. Perhaps it was standard practice for the High Lord to send his children on the prowl: Go YE INTO ALL THE WORLD, AND STILL THE FEAR OF THE LORDS.
“I regret,” Dreamsinger said, “I don’t know much about Life. I have paid a great price to follow the Burdensome Path. A grave and awful price.” She looked to the Caryatid for sympathy. “Studying day and night, learning to reprogram the world. This is the first time I’ve been outside Spark Royal since...dear me, I don’t remember. Sorcery has jumbled my brain.”
She laughed: the artificial type of laugh one gives when feeling awkward, but not half so forced as the laugh the Caryatid gave in response. It’s hard to sound jolly when a Spark has just confessed to being mentally unstable.
Dreamsinger let her laugh fade to an encouraging smile. “But you were talking about your quest. It must be lovely to see the world...meet people...make a difference instead of constantly performing horrid rituals. What is your quest about?”
“We don’t know, milady. There was just this, uhh, sort of a prophecy kind of thing. It said we’d go on a quest. No hint of what we should do.”
“Who gave you this sort of a prophecy kind of thing?”
The Caryatid cleared her throat. “A detached dog tongue, milady.”
Dreamsinger didn’t even blink. “And it didn’t give instructions?”
“No, milady. But we’re, uhh, we’ve run into things that demand attention. Earlier tonight, there was a haunting. At Feliss Academy. And a girl was killed with what my friend believes was an OldTech bioweapon.”
Something changed in the Spark Lord’s posture: a sudden stillness, an infusion of icy cold that wasn’t quite hidden by the warm Hafsah illusion. “You say your friend believes this?” She looked at me, then Impervia. “One of these people?”
The Caryatid lifted her hand in my direction and opened her mouth to speak; but before a single word came out, Dreamsinger spun toward me, made the same three-finger gesture that unfroze the Caryatid, and caught me by the lapels as I suddenly fell free of my imprisonment.
“Your name?” she said.
“Philemon Abu Dhubhai.” Short concise answers. Spark Lords like short concise answers.
“Clan Dhubhai, Sheba province?”
“Yes. The late Governor Khadija was my grandmother.”
“Can you prove it?”
I thought for a moment, then reached in
to my pocket and pulled out my purse. “Spark Royal gave her this; I inherited it.”
Dreamsinger examined the purse for a moment. Took it in her hand. Slapped it hard on a nearby table. Nothing but a jingle of coins from inside. She tossed the purse back to me. “All right. What’s your scientific background?”
“A doctorate from Collegium Ismaili. Phys-math.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly. My assessment of bioweapons would have been more credible if I’d had a degree in biology or medicine...but at least she realized I wasn’t a scientific illiterate. “Describe what you saw,” she said.
“A disease or parasite, like cottage cheese growing in the girl’s nose and throat. Death by suffocation. It developed very fast: at supper she showed no symptoms, by 1:00 a.m. she was dead. The girl was the daughter of Elizabeth Tzekich, leader of the Ring of Knives. We thought the mother’s enemies might have—”
Dreamsinger shook me so fiercely my teeth clacked together. If she was an eleven-year-old girl, she was a stunningly strong one. “I see the obvious,” she said. The Sorcery-Lord pulled me closer. “Are you certain the substance was like cottage cheese? It was white and wet, not dark and dry?”
“Very white and very wet.”
Silently, I wondered what kind of bioweapon created dark and dry deposits, but I knew better than to ask. Dreamsinger had moved her face so close to mine I could feel her breath on my nose: the smell of cinnamon and mint, just like my cousin Hafsah. “Now, Philemon Abu Dhubhai,” she said, “one last question and you must answer most truthfully. Is the disease contained?”
I swallowed hard. “To the best of my knowledge, yes. We believe the disease was planted in file girl’s room; she caught it there and died without ever going out. Those who found the body didn’t touch anything, and the room is now sealed. But, uhh...the girl had a boyfriend. He’s missing, and we don’t know if he visited her while she was contagious. We don’t think he did, but we aren’t sure. People are searching for him near the school, but we came down here because he might have—”
Dreamsinger tossed me aside. Literally. Not trying to hurt me, just removing me from her sight. Like a child who casts away a toy that bores her. She turned back to the Caryatid. “Dear sister, the dead girl’s body is still at Feliss Academy?”
“Yes, milady.”
The Sorcery-Lord reached up and tapped one of the pearl necklaces looped about her throat. At least that’s what it looked like to me—someone not befuddled by Kaylan’s Chameleon might have seen something different. The necklace made a soft whistle. “Spark Royal, attend,” Dreamsinger said. “Give me Rashid. It’s urgent.”
The necklace whistled again. Computer-controlled radio transmitter, I thought. Frustrating that I couldn’t see it because of the Hafsah illusion. Two seconds later, a male voice spoke from the same necklace. “Damn it, Dreamy, do you know what time it is?”
“No,” she said. “I don’t have a watch. My last one got broke.” Dreamsinger’s voice had acquired a layer of little-girl sulkiness. How old was she? “And even if I knew the time where I am, I wouldn’t know what it is where you are. You could be anyplace from Gdansk to the Galápagos.”
“You know where I hang out these days,” the man answered. “Right now, it’s three-thirty in the morning.”
“A Spark Lord is always on call.” Primly reciting a lesson. “We’ve got a potential outbreak, Rashid. Supposedly a bioweapon.”
“Says who?” asked Rashid—who had to be Lord Rashid, Science-Lord of Spark. He’d once visited Collegium Ismaili and spoken with several of my fellow students. (The promising ones. The ones with goals.)
Dreamsinger glanced at me. “The report comes from one of the Sheba Dhubhais. He claims he knows science.”
“Hmph,” Rashid said...as if he doubted the possibility of my knowing anything. “Which bioweapon is it?”
“Nothing I recognize. Cottage cheese in the nose and throat.”
“Hmm. Cottage cheese. Not dark and dry?”
“Not according to this Dhubhai fellow.”
Again, I wondered what threatening substance was dark and dry; but Rashid was speaking again. “All right, I’ll check it out. Where?”
“Feliss Academy.”
“Then I’m close already. Within a few hundred klicks. Meet you there?”
“No, I have other business.” Dreamsinger glanced at me. “Tracking down a boy who may be infected.”
“If there’s somebody sick wandering in public—” Rashid began.
“I know,” Dreamsinger interrupted. “First, you tell me if it’s really a bioweapon, and if it’s contagious. I’ll handle the sterilization.”
Rashid didn’t reply immediately. Finally, he sighed. “You’re first on the scene—it’s your call. I’ll radio back as soon as I check the academy.”
The pearl necklace whistled once more. Dreamsinger turned straight to the Caryatid. “Dear sister, this boy who’s missing...do you have some belonging of his so we can do a Seeking?”
The Caryatid shook her head, shame-faced. “I tried a Seeking but got nowhere. The boy’s a powerful psychic. At least,” she added hastily, “too powerful for me to find. So there was no point bringing his possessions with us. Besides, we thought Spark Royal would be annoyed if we removed anything of Sebastian’s from the premises. That might be seen as tampering with evidence.”
“True.” Dreamsinger smiled: a sweet dimpled Hafsah smile. “This Sebastian is a powerful psychic? That’s...” Her voice trailed off. Judging by the look on her face, I guessed some worrisome possibility had crossed her mind; but after a few seconds, she turned to the Caryatid and said, “Dear sister, you’d better tell me everything you know.”
It didn’t take long—we didn’t know much. Several times the Caryatid looked to me for help, but Dreamsinger glared me into silence: only the Sorceiy-Lord’s “dear sister” was allowed to speak.
The Caryatid went through the facts (the dog tongue, the harp, the missing sword) and wisely omitted conjectures (the possibility of a doppelganger Rosalind) until she reached the explosion at Death Hotel. I could see she was aching to ask if Dreamsinger had caused the kaboom, but didn’t want to seem insolent. Therefore, the Caryatid tried leading statements such as, “The thread was sorcerer’s crimson...like your cape,” in the hope Dreamsinger would say, “That was me.” No such luck. The Sorcery-Lord stayed silent to the very end of the tale.
And the silence continued long after the Caryatid said, “So that’s everything.” Five seconds. Ten. Thirty. Dreamsinger appeared lost in thought, eyes lowered, brow furrowed. The Caryatid met my gaze with a puzzled lift of her eyebrows, but one does not disturb a pensive Spark Lord...not even when she looks like a teenaged girl and a teacher’s instinct is to ask such girls, “Would you like to talk about it?”
But I longed to know what was churning in Dreamsinger’s brain. What did she know that we didn’t? After all, she’d arrived in the neighborhood before she learned about the bioweapon...so she’d come here for some other reason. If this was a woman who got out so rarely she couldn’t remember the last time she left Spark Royal, why had she suddenly left home to come to this turd of a village?
But I didn’t dare ask. Grandma Khadija had drilled into our family the only way to deal with Spark Lords: never question, always obey. Anything else was suicide...or worse. And if you can’t picture anything worse than dying, you don’t know much about the Sparks.
With time on my hands, I stole a glance at Impervia. She’d been trapped in solidified air for several minutes; how well was she breathing? I remembered the sensation, like sucking air through a blanket...and Impervia had built up an unhealthy oxygen debt in her exertions during the fight. Now her eyes had an unfocused look, not turning to meet my gaze. She might have passed out inside her invisible cocoon—either that, or she’d deliberately forced herself to slide into some semimystic martial arts trance.
I hoped that was it. I hoped she hadn’t completely suffocated.
Perhaps Dre
amsinger saw me staring in Impervia’s direction. With a sudden, “Aha!” the Sorcery-Lord snapped out of her reverie and strode toward the bar. Her goal, however, was not Impervia; she moved to the spike-armed Hump and clapped her hand in front of his mouth. “Speech only,” she murmured. “Neck up, release.”
Her words must have been a command to the nanites who held the enforcer in place. While Hump’s body remained frozen, a breath exploded from his mouth followed by a great and grateful inhalation. Apparently the spell had let go of his head, allowing him to breathe freely. Dreamsinger gave him five seconds to guzzle oxygen, then squatted beside his shoulder. “Now,” she said softly, “tell me about this town’s Smuggler Chief. Name. Headquarters. Any defenses I might encounter on a visit.”
Hump gave a snort he probably thought was a haughty laugh. “If you think I’ll tell you shit, you’re crazy.”
“Oh, sadly,” Dreamsinger said, “I am crazy. I walk the Burdensome Path.” She glanced at the Caryatid with a Dear sister, why must we suffer expression. Then she returned to the enforcer. “But I am also a Sorcery-Lord of Spark. If you are not my loyal subject, you are an enemy of the human race.”
“Ooo, I’m shivering,” the man said. “You might scare these other lollies, but to me you’re just a big-titty bitch. Someone taught you a pissy little trick, freezing the air...but as soon as I get loose, I’ll show you some real magic, whore. I’ll do you with my fist. Make you howl for mercy.”
Uh-oh. Thanks to Kaylan’s Chameleon, Hump must have seen Dreamsinger as some penny-a-poke prostitute...which told you something about the man, if that kind of woman most aroused his ardor. On seeing the image of his innermost lusts, his first inclination was to beat her up. What a world. Then again, maybe it was good the enforcer was an utter bastard—I wouldn’t feel so bad when Dreamsinger chopped him to sashimi.
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