“You’re kidding.” Laszlo’s mouth was suddenly dry. “This is a finals-week joke, Caz. You’re kidding.”
“No.” Casimir gestured at the glass focus. “It’s all here already, everything necessary. If you’d had any ambition at all you would have seen the hints in the introductory materials. The index enchantments are like a nervous system, in touch with everything, and they can be used to communicate with everything. I’m going to bend this place, Laz. Bend it around my finger and make it something new.”
“It’ll kill you!”
“It could win.” Casimir flashed his teeth, a grin as predatory as any worn by the vocabuvores that had tried to devour him less than an hour before. “But so what? I graduate with honors, I go back to my people, and what then? Fighting demons, writing books, advising ministers? To hell with it. In the long run I’m still a footnote. But if I can seize this, rule this, that’s more power than ten thousand lifetimes of dutiful slavery.”
“Aspirant Vrana,” said Astriza. She had come up behind Laszlo, so quietly that he hadn’t heard her approach. “Casimir. Is something the matter?”
“On the contrary, Librarian Mezaros. Everything is better than ever.”
“Casimir,” she said, “I’ve been listening. I strongly urge you to reconsider this course of action, before—”
“Before what? Before I do what you people should have done a thousand years ago when this place bucked the harness? Stay back, Librarian, or I’ll weave a death for you before your spells can touch me. Look on the bright side . . . anything is possible once this is done. The University and I will have to reach . . . an accommodation.”
“What about me, Caz?” Laszlo threw his tattered cloak aside and placed a hand on the hilt of his sword. “Would you slay me, too?”
“Interesting question, Laszlo. Would you really pull that thing on me?”
“Five years! I thought we were friends!” The sword came out in a silver blur, and Laszlo shook with fury.
“You could have gone on thinking that if you’d just left me alone for a few minutes. I already said I was sorry.”
“Step out of the circle, Casimir. Step out, or decide which one of us you have time to kill before we can reach you.”
“Laszlo, even for someone as mildly magical as yourself, you disappoint me. I said I checked your sword personally this morning, didn’t I?”
Casimir snapped his fingers, and Laszlo’s sword wrenched itself from his grasp so quickly that it scraped the skin from most of his knuckles. Animated by magical force, it whirled in the air and thrust itself firmly against Laszlo’s throat. He gasped—the razor-edge that had slashed vocabuvore flesh like wet parchment was pressed firmly against his windpipe, and a modicum of added pressure would drive it in.
“Now,” shouted Casimir, “Indexers, out! If anyone else comes in, if I am interfered with, or knocked unconscious or by any means further annoyed, my enchantment on that sword will slice this aspirant’s head off.”
The blue-robed Indexers withdrew from the room hastily, and the heavy door clanged shut behind them.
“Astriza,” said Casimir, “somewhere in this room is the master index book, the one updated by the enchantments. Bring it to me now.”
“Casimir,” said the Librarian, “It’s still not too late for you to—”
“How will you write up Laszlo’s death in your report? ‘Regretfully unavoidable?’ Bring me the damn book.”
“As you wish,” she said coldly. She moved to a nearby table, and returned with a thick volume, two feet high and nearly as wide.
“Simply hand it over,” said Casimir. “Don’t touch the warding paint.”
She complied, and Casimir ran his right hand over the cover of the awkwardly large volume, cradling it against his chest with his left arm.
“Well then, Laszlo,” he said, “This is it. All the information collected by the index enchantments is sorted in the master books like this one. My little alterations will reverse the process, making this a focus for me to reshape all this chaos to my own liking.”
“Casimir,” said Laszlo, “Please—”
“Hoist a few for me tonight if you live through whatever happens next. I’m moving past such things.”
He flipped the book open, and a pale silvery glow rippled up from the pages he selected. Casimir took a deep breath, raised his right hand, and began to intone the words of a spell.
Things happened very fast then. Astriza moved, but not against Casimir—instead she hit Laszlo, taking him completely by surprise with an elbow to the chest. As he toppled backward, she darted her right arm past his face, slamming her leather-armored limb against Laszlo’s blade before it could shift positions to follow him. The sword fought furiously, but Astriza caught the hilt in her other hand, and with all of her strength managed to lever it into a stack of encyclopedias, where it stuck quivering furiously.
At the same instant, Casimir started screaming.
Laszlo sat up, rubbing his chest, shocked to find his throat uncut, and he was just in time to see the thing that erupted out of the master index book, though it took his mind a moment to properly assemble the details. The silvery glow of the pages brightened and flickered, like a magical portal opening, for that was exactly what it was—a portal opening horizontally like a hatch rather than vertically like a door.
Through it came a gleaming, segmented black thing nearly as wide as the book itself, something like a man-sized centipede, and uncannily fast. In an instant it had sunk half-a-dozen hooked foreclaws into Casimir’s neck and cheeks, and then came the screams, the most horrible Laszlo had ever heard. Casimir lost his grip on the book, but it didn’t matter—the massive volume floated in midair of its own accord while the new arrival did its gruesome work.
With Casimir’s head gripped firmly in its larger claws, it extended dozens of narrower pink appendages from its underside, a writhing carpet of hollow, fleshy needles. These plunged into Casimir’s eyes, his face, his mouth and neck, and only bare trickles of blood slid from the holes they bored, for the thing began to pulse and buzz rhythmically, sucking fluid and soft tissue from the body of the once-handsome aspirant. The screams choked to a halt, for Casimir had nothing left to scream with.
Laszlo whirled away from this and lost what was left of his long-ago breakfast. By the time he managed to wipe his mouth and stumble to his feet at last, the affair was finished. The book creature released Casimir’s desiccated corpse, its features utterly destroyed, a weirdly sagging and empty thing that hung nearly hollow on its bones and crumpled to the ground. The segmented monster withdrew, and the book slammed shut with a sound like a thunderclap.
“Caz,” whispered Laszlo, astonished to find his eyes moistening. “Gods, Caz, why?”
“Master Molnar hoped he wouldn’t try it,” said Astriza. She scuffed the white circle with the tip of a boot and reached out to grab the master index book from where it floated in mid-air. “I said he showed all the classic signs. It’s not always pleasant being right.”
“The book was a trap,” said Laszlo.
“Well, the whole thing was a trap, Laszlo. We know perfectly well what sort of hints we drop in the introductory materials, and what a powerful sorcerer could theoretically attempt to do with the index enchantments.”
“I never even saw it,” muttered Laszlo.
“And you think that makes you some sort of failure? Grow up, Laszlo. It just makes you well adjusted. Not likely to spend weeks of your life planning a way to seize more power than any mortal will can sanely command. Look, every once in a while, a place like the High College is bound to get a student with excessive competence and no scruples, right?”
“I suppose it must,” said Laszlo. “I just . . . I never would have guessed my own chambers-mate . . . ”
“The most dangerous sort. The ones that make themselves obvious can be dealt with almost at leisure. It’s the ones that can disguise their true nature, get along socially, feign friendships . . . those are much, much
worse. The only real way to catch them is to leave rope lying around and let them knot their own nooses.”
“Merciful gods.” Laszlo retrieved his sword and slid it into the scabbard for what he hoped would be the last time that day. “What about the body?”
“Library property. Some of the grimoires in here are bound in human skin, and occasionally need repair.”
“Are you kidding?”
“Waste not, want not.”
“But his family—”
“Won’t get to know. Because he vanished in an unfortunate magical accident just after you turned and left him in here, didn’t he?”
“I . . . damn. I don’t know if I can—”
“The alternative is disgrace for him, disgrace for his family, and a major headache for everyone who knew him, especially his chambers-mate for the last five years.”
“The Indexers will just play along?”
“The Indexers see what they’re told to see. I sign their pay chits.”
“It just seems incredible,” said Laszlo. “To stand here and hide everything about his real fate, as casually as you’d shelve a book.”
“Who around here casually shelves a book?”
“Good point.” Laszlo sighed and held his hand out to Astriza. “I suppose, then, that Casimir vanished in a magical accident just after I turned and left him in here.”
“Rely on us to handle the details, Laszlo.” She gave his hand a firm, friendly shake. “After all, what better place than a library for keeping things hushed?”
Scott Lynch was born in Minnesota in 1978. His first novel, The Lies of Locke Lamora, was released in 2006 and was a finalist for the World Fantasy Award. His latest novel, The Republic of Thieves, hit the New York Times and USAToday bestseller lists. Scott moonlights as a volunteer firefighter and spends several months of each year in Massachusetts, the home of his partner, SF/F writer Elizabeth Bear.
The Cities: Sacramento and Bordertown.
The Magic: On the border between our human world and the elfin realm there’s a city runaways from both sides often seek out. They never find what they expect—neither magic nor technology work predictably there—but there is magic, and that’s what counts . . .
A VOICE LIKE A HOLE
Catherynne M. Valente
The trouble is, I ran away when I was fifteen. Everyone knows you run away when you are sixteen. That’s the proper age. At sixteen, a long golden road opens up before you, and at the end of it is this amazing life. A sixteen-year-old runaway walks with an invisible crown—boys want to rescue her and they don’t even know why. Girls want her to rescue them. She smells like peaches or strawberries or something. She’s got that skittish, panicky beauty that makes circuses spontaneously sprout in the tomato field outside of town, just to carry her off, just to be the thing she runs away to. Everyone knows: you run away at sixteen, and it all works itself out. But I couldn’t even get that right, which is more or less why I’m sitting here telling you all this, and more thanks to you for the ear.
My name is Fig. Not short for anything, just Fig. See, in eighth grade my school did A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and for some reason Billy Shakes didn’t write that thing for fifty overstimulated thirteen-year-olds, so once all the parts were cast, the talent-free got to be nonspeaking fairies. I’m not actually talent-free. I could do Hermia for you right now. But I was so shy back then. The idea of auditioning, even for Cobweb, who barely gets to say “Hail!” felt like volunteering to be shot. Auditioning meant you might get chosen or you might not, and some kids were always chosen and some weren’t, and I knew which one I was, so why bother?
I asked the drama teacher: “What can I be without trying out?”
She said: “You can be a fairy.”
So to pass the time while Oberon and Titania practiced their pentameters, the lot of us extraneous pixies made up fairy names for each other like the ones in the play: Peaseblossom and Mustardseed and Moth. I got Fig. It stuck. By the time I ran away, nobody called me by my real name anymore.
Talking to a runaway is a little like talking to a murderer. There was a time before you did it and a time after and between them there’s just this space, this monstrous thing, and it’s so heavy. It all could have gone so differently, if only. And there’s always the question haunting your talk, the rhinoceros in the room: Why did you do it?
Because having a wicked stepmother isn’t such a great gig, outside of fairy tales. She doesn’t lay elaborate traps involving apples or spindles. She’s just a big fist, and you’re just weak and small. In a story, if you have a stepmother, then you’re special. Hell, you’re the protagonist. A stepmother means you’re strong and beautiful and innocent, and you can survive her—just until shit gets real and candy houses and glass coffins start turning up in the margins. There’s no tale where the stepmother just crushes the girl to death and that’s the end. But I didn’t live in a story and I had to go or it was going to be over for me. I can’t tell you how I knew that. I just did. The instinctive way a kid knows she doesn’t really love you because she’s not really your mother—that’s how the kid knows she’ll never stop until you’re gone.
So I went. I hopped a ride with a friend across the causeway into the city. The thing I like best about Sacramento is that I don’t live there anymore, but I’ll tell you, crossing the floodplain in that Datsun with a guy whose name I don’t even remember now—it was beautiful. The slanty sun and the water and the FM stuck on mariachi. Just beautiful, that’s all.
My remaining belongings sat in a green backpack wedged between my knees: an all-in-one Lord of the Rings; the Complete Keats; a thrashed orange and white Edith Hamilton; a black skirt that hardly warranted the title, little more than a piece of fabric and a safety pin; two shirts, also black: $10.16; and a corn muffin.
Yes, this represented the sum total of what I believed necessary for survival on planet Earth.
I forgot my toothbrush.
So here’s Fig’s Comprehensive Guide for Runaways and Other Invisibles: during the day, sleep in libraries. If questioned, pretend to be a college student run ragged by midterms or finals or whatever. I’ve always looked older, and libraries have couches or at least an armchair to flop on. I flopped in shifts, so as not to arouse suspicion. Couple of hours asleep, an hour of reading, rinse, repeat. I got through Les Misérables, Madame Bovary, and Simulacra and Simulation before anyone even asked me what school I went to. Don’t just drop out—if you bag one life, you have to replace it with something. And when it comes to filling your head, those dead French guys usually have the good stuff: R-rated for nudity and adult concepts.
It’s best to stay off email and computers. They can find you that way. Just let it go, that whole world of tapping keys and instant updates: poof. Like dandelion seeds. I could say: Don’t do drugs; don’t do anything for money you wouldn’t have done before you ran away. But the truth is, drugs are expensive, and you kind of have to want to crack your head open with those things, to get in trouble. You have to set out to do it. Save your pennies, like for the ice cream man. And hell, I just didn’t have the discipline.
At night, I stayed up. All things considered, as a teen wastrel you could do worse than Sacramento, California: warm, lots of grass and trees and open spaces. But not if you run away in February, like I did. Then you’re stuck with cold and rain and nowhere to go.
So I went where everyone my age ends up: Denny’s.
See, Denny’s won’t kick you out, even if you’re obviously an undesirable—making it the beloved haunt of goths, theater kids, and truckers alike. You’re always welcome under the big, benevolent yellow sign—so long as you don’t fall asleep. If you nod off, you’re out. So I availed myself of their unlimited $1.10 coffee and stayed awake, listening to conversation rise and fall around me, writing on the backs of napkins and in the blank pages in the backs of Tolkien, Keats, Hamilton. I never understood those pages, why they left them blank. Seemed like such a waste. But I filled them up with line after line.
Songs. Poems. Anything.
I fit in; before I left home I had the means to dye my hair a pretty choice shade of deep red-purple, and nobody looks twice at a girl in black with Crayola hair scribbling in a Denny’s booth. But as time went by, my roots took over. My hair is naturally kind of a blah dark brown, and it kept on growing all dark and ugly on top of my head, like a stair back down to home, getting longer and longer, more and more impossible to take.
Around six a.m., the commuter light rails start running and back then you could get on without a ticket and dodge the hole-punch man from car to car. Or if you don’t give a shit and are a somewhat pretty girl who doesn’t look like trouble, just sleep by the heater and take the fine the man gives you. It’s not like I was ever going to pay it. He could write out all the tissuey pink violation tickets he wanted. The morning March light came shining through the windows, through the rose-colored paper, and the train chugged and rattled along, and even though I was always so hungry it took my breath, I thought that was beautiful, too. Just beautiful.
That’s all.
And so I went, day in and day out. Eventually my $10.16 ran out, and I was faced with the necessity of finding some other way to pick up that $1.10 for the bottomless coffee cup, sitting there like a ceramic grail night after night on my Formica diner table—drink of me and never sleep, never die. At sixteen, you can get a work permit. At fifteen, you’re out of luck.
I didn’t want to do it, but sometimes a girl doesn’t have any nice choices. Remember—I said I wasn’t talent-free.
I could always sing.
Not for a teacher, not in front of parents at talent night, not for Oberon and Titania. For a mirror, maybe. For an empty baseball diamond after school. For a forest. And when I say I could sing, I don’t mean I could sing like a Disney girl, or a church choir. No chipmunks and doves alighted at my feet when I sang. I mean I could sing like I was dying and if you got just close enough you could catch my soul as I fell. It’s not a perfect voice, maybe not even a pretty one. A voice like a hole. People just toppled in. I stood outside the Denny’s, and god, the first time it was so hard, it hurt so much, like a ripping and a tearing inside of me, like the hole would take me, too, my face so hot and ashamed, so afraid, still Fig the nonspeaking fairy, can’t even say hail, can’t even talk back, can’t even duck when she sees a fist coming down.
Magic City: Recent Spells Page 25