Instrument of Chaos

by Rebecca Hall

“This place is weird,” he said, trudging after Amelie. She’d had better marks than him at Cryptobotany, she had a better idea of which trees were carnivorous and which would explode if you looked at them funny.

  “Yeah,” Amelie agreed, keeping a careful distance from the trees. “The stories don’t really do it justice do they?”

  Mitch shrugged, he hadn’t grown up hearing the same stories she had. They probably weren’t told outside of Faerie. His stories had told him that if he entered Faerie without an invitation he wouldn’t come back. He hoped that that story wasn’t true.

  “Which way are we heading?” he asked. He’d brought a compass but the needle was spinning hopelessly. Faerie didn’t have a magnetic pole, he wasn’t even sure it was spherical.

  “Summer past,” Amelie said after a moment.

  Something flickered in the corner of his eye and Mitch yelped, spinning just in time to see a woody vine latch onto some small furry thing that had been feeding itself up for winter. It spasmed once and fell still. Mitch inched a little closer to Amelie, he did not want to fall prey to a whipwood tree and its paralytic acid.

  “So how many of the things down here are likely to inhume us if given half a chance?” Mitch asked as the afternoon wore on. He’d seen a number of small and not so small creatures slipping through the woods and while several had watched them until they were out of view none had fled. Mitch was beginning to suspect that he was the least dangerous thing here.

  “Some of them are herbivores,” Amelie said, giving voice to his least favourite reassurance ever. Herbivore was not the same as safe. It just meant that it wouldn’t eat him once it mashed him into the ground. Mitch trudged on in silence lest she try to reassure him some more.

  “Hey look,” she said some time later, pointing through the woods to a stream where a pack of Awarewolves were drinking. “It’s Fluffball the First, all grown up.”

  Mitch smiled. They didn’t look as cute and fluffy as the cub had been but he could still see the intelligence in their eyes.

  “Do you think we’ll see her?”

  “Probably not,” Amelie said. “The Seelie Court is a long way from here. I don’t think they range that far.”

  “I hope she told her friends not to eat us then.”

  Amelie made an exasperated noise. “We’re in Deep Faerie Mitchell, you should try and enjoy it. If we’re lucky we might even get to see a dragon.”

  “Why would I want to see a dragon?” Mitch asked. In the abstract they might be cool but a flying, fire-breathing lizard was not high on his list of would be acquaintances. The telepathic, lake dwelling one had been bad enough.

  “Relax,” Amelie said. “They hardly ever eat people.”

  “I’m so glad that we’re a sometimes food,” Mitch muttered, casting one last look at the Awarewolves before hurrying after her. At least he’d be a decent meal for them, he probably wouldn’t even count as a snack for a dragon.

  They stopped as the sun began to set and made camp as far as they could get from any of the trees. To Mitch’s mind it wasn’t nearly far enough. Not all of them were dangerous, Amelie had even picked fruit off some, but they were safer in the open. Mitch had never been so grateful for his lessons on Cryptobotany, or wished so passionately that he’d paid more attention in class, and one of his classes had been taught by a vampire.

  “Try one,” Amelie said, tossing him a pseudo-apple. The shape and the colour were both almost right, even the way it felt in his hand was close. If there was an uncanny valley for apples this was it and he eyed it dubiously before taking a bite. Again there was that sense of uncanny valley, it almost tasted like an apple but it was distinctly different in some way that he couldn’t quite put his finger on.

  “Well?”

  “It’s a little hard,” Mitch said. Vampires might need to eat normal food but their hypodermic fangs weren’t really designed for it.

  “I’ll find you something softer tomorrow,” Amelie promised. “I wouldn’t want you to crack a fang.”

  Mitch pulled a face and rummaged through his pack until he unearthed the coolie bag full of blood. He used magic to refreeze the ice packs and then pulled out the blood-pack that felt the warmest. It was all still within the proper temperature range at least. It wasn’t like they could forage for fresh blood.

  Mitch sank his teeth into it and looked summer-wards, wondering what Nikola would think of this. Mitch hadn’t mentioned it in his letters. He’d just said that they were going camping and he wouldn’t be able to write for a few days though he had brought a pen and paper. He finished his blood and pulled them out. Amelie rolled her eyes.

  “I’m sure he’ll be happy once this is over,” she said. “He’ll be able to come back to the other world without worrying about the war or you dying when we have grandchildren.”

  “I bet you already have their names picked out,” Mitch teased though his heart wasn’t really in it. He just couldn’t picture having children with Amelie, let alone grandchildren. He couldn’t even imagine marrying her.

  “Billy, Bob and Eugene.”

  “Eugene?”

  “What’s wrong with Eugene?”

  “Nothing,” Mitch said hastily, wondering why he’d want to name any child Eugene Bartholomew. Or Leiser he supposed; Amelie did use her mother’s name. At least it wasn’t Archibald, he had no intention of upholding that family tradition, not after his father had disowned him.

  “Here,” Amelie picked through the fruit that she’d collected and tossed him one that looked vaguely lemony. “It should be softer.”

  “Thanks.” Mitch squeezed it gently and then bit into it. There was an instant of resistance and then instinct took over as his fangs sank into it, vacuum fangs opening to suck the juice straight into his bloodstream.

  He gagged and tossed it aside, his mouth tingling as he doubled over. He coughed and spluttered, discovering that vampires did have a gag reflex, it just wasn’t tied to his stomach. His heart pounded in his ears and blood trickled from his fangs and dripped off his chin.

  “Are you ok?” Amelie asked, rushing over and patting him on the back.

  “I think so,” Mitch said, pulling out the packet of tissues that he still carried for Nikola out of habit. “But I’m not eating that again.”

  “Noted,” Amelie said.

  “Ugh.” He still felt nauseous and light-headed even though it hadn’t been that much blood. That was one experience that he hoped never to repeat. “Do you think it’s possible to scrub the inside of my teeth?” he asked. His mouth still felt funny.

  “Not without specialised equipment,” Amelie replied. “Do you want to try something else?”

  Mitch shook his head.

  “Blood?” she suggested.

  “No, we still don’t know how far it is,” he replied. He thought that they were closer but the Heart thrummed with so much power it was hard to be sure. The one thing that they could be sure of was that they couldn’t just hop between realms. There was so much magic here that Amelie couldn’t reliably bring them back to the same spot. Even the spot where they’d entered had looked nothing like the window she’d opened earlier.

  “Look on the bright side,” she said, pointing to the sky. “We have new stars here.”

  For what felt like the first time that day Mitch smiled.

  #

  “Are we actually getting any closer?” Mitch asked several days later. He’d thought that they were, the first couple of days, but now he wasn’t so sure. All of the carnivorous trees were forcing them to take a somewhat circuitous path and what he devoutly hoped was the Heart of Faerie didn’t feel as if it were any closer.

  “Damned if I know,” Amelie said. “We should have brought Nikola, he would have known…”

  “Known what?” Mitch asked, keeping a watchful eye on the nearby thicket of Whipwood. He’d found out the hard way that it had a much longer range than their textbooks said and while he’d been able to heal the damage to his arm he hadn’t been able to heal t
he damage to his jacket.

  “There are stories that say that really high concentrations of magic distort space,” Amelie said. “I thought that they were just stories but…”

  “What if it’s not actually possible to walk there?” Mitch asked. If Nikola could create spatial discontinuities then angels could probably do it to hide their damned curse.

  “Don’t be so pessimistic,” Amelie said. “Nothing terrible has happened to us yet.”

  “Tell that to my jacket,” Mitch replied, fingering the hole in it. It wasn’t a big hole but it had been more than big enough when the skies opened the day before. He’d never imagined that such a small hole would let in so much water.

  “I’ll get you a new one later,” Amelie promised. She halted and looked for the broadest path through the trees. “Which way do you think?”

  Mitch shrugged, there were two pseudo paths before them heading in roughly the right direction and neither was as wide as he would have liked.

  “That one,” he said after a moment. It looked as if it had less Whipwood than the other and so far those damned trees were the most dangerous thing that they had encountered down here. Maybe they’d eaten all the other carnivores.

  Amelie shook her head. “I think I’d rather take my chances with the Whipwood,” Amelie said, pointing towards a tree that had compressed its seasonal growth into a few minutes. As they watched, it blossomed and the leaves turned and fell, and it grew ten centimetres.

  “Is it growing really fast or is there some sort of time magic going on?” Mitch asked.

  Amelie shrugged and tossed a not apple in its direction. It accelerated suddenly, rapidly decomposing, and then decelerated when it reached the far side and escaped the time field.

  “Whipwood it is,” Mitch said. He did not want to deal with temporal trees. He didn’t even know how to deal with temporal trees. At least he could duck whipwood.

  Amelie nodded and they set off, both keeping a sharp eye out for hungry trees or a large enough patch of clear ground to sleep on. It would be dark in a couple of hours and if they hadn’t found somewhere to sleep by then, they would have to stumble around until they did. He didn’t want to wake up to find that he’d become tree food. Somehow that was worse than waking up to find that he’d become dragon food or Awarewolf food.

  They did find a clearing just as the sun began to dip below the horizon and Mitch set about clearing the ground for them to sleep on while Amelie telekinetically gathered fruit from the nearby trees. She even gathered whipwood berries. He’d been taught that they were safe to eat and Amelie said that they made good wine, but he couldn’t bring himself to eat something from a tree that secreted paralytic acid.

  Mitch stuck to the other offerings, carefully avoiding the not-lemons and going for the harder or softer fruit. Things that wouldn’t have the same resistance as human skin. He didn’t want to get juice in his fangs again, the experience had been thoroughly unpleasant the first time.

  “We’re having steak for dinner when we get home,” Amelie said, pulling a face at their meal. At least she could eat everything.

  “Sounds good,” Mitch rummaged through his pack and pulled out their last packet of jerky and a bag of scroggin. They had some of those ‘one square meal’ bars as well and while they were nutritious they weren’t the most exciting food in the world. Particularly not three times a day.

  “We’ll have to go back in a couple of days,” he added. “We don’t have that much food left.”

  “We could try hunting,” Amelie said. “Guin taught me.”

  “Ugh,” Mitch pulled a face. Gutting and skinning a small fluffy thing was not a life skill he had ever wanted to acquire. “I need blood as well remember,” he said. His system could handle the different blood types, it could even handle Teratos blood, but he’d been told in no uncertain terms that drinking animal blood was a bad idea.

  “How much do you have left?” Amelie asked.

  “Two days,” Mitch said. “Though I suppose I could stretch it to four.

  “The temporal trees are a good sign right?” They’d seen a few more and made sure to steer clear of them even if it meant using Amelie’s magic to protect themselves from the other trees. “There must be a lot of background magic to produce something like that, and we haven’t seen them before.”

  “Probably,” Amelie said. “I just hope it was the trees and not the location, can you imagine what will happen to us if we walk through something like that, or if we wave a hand through it? I doubt our bodies could compensate for our circulation suddenly going nuts.”

  Mitch winced, that wasn’t something that he wanted to imagine, particularly not over dinner.

  “Maybe we’ll find the Heart surrounded by an impenetrable wall of trees,” he said, half joking.

  “They’ll be firewood by the time I’m through with them,” Amelie said.

  Mitch smiled. “Then all that’s left is actually breaking the curse,” he said. “I don’t suppose curse breaking is just another part of growing up in Faerie?”

  “No,” Amelie replied. “I was hoping you might know, you have had two and a half years to research it.”

  Mitch grunted, once he’d discovered that the family curse was in fact the Twisted Curse he’d more or less given up on breaking it and resigned himself to becoming a lonely old hermit. Not that Nikola would let him of course but Nikola didn’t want children anyway.

  Unspoken Words

  “Do you smell smoke?” Mitch asked.

  Amelie sniffed. “Yes.”

  “That’s probably a bad thing right?” Mitch said. He’d encountered exploding plants before but they preferred colder climates and there hadn’t been any thunder storms either.

  Amelie nodded, “If it was a dragon we would have seen it,” she said.

  “I thought people didn’t come here,” Mitch said, trying to recall any other fire breathing monsters that it could be.

  “We’re here,” Amelie pointed out.

  “We’re not setting hungry trees on fire,” Mitch replied. Whipwood was toxic when burned and god only knew what some of the other trees would do. Perhaps whoever had lit the fire was better at recognising fallen bits of tree than him, it wouldn’t be hard.

  “Maybe it’s some sort of initiation rite?” Amelie shrugged.

  “A trap?” Mitch asked, looking up at the sky in search of a tell-tale plume of smoke.

  “For what though?” Amelie asked. Mitch shrugged.

  “Do we investigate or try to go around?” Mitch asked. He wasn’t even sure what they were supposed to be going around, he couldn’t see smoke anywhere.

  Amelie shrugged again. “I guess we’ll just wait and see what happens,” she said. “It’s not like we’re following a straight path.”

  “I guess,” Mitch said, looking at the windy path before them. There were whipwood trees growing along either side; there was no way they’d be able to stay out of range of them.

  “Come on,” Amelie held out a hand and Mitch latched on, feeling the soft flow of magic spread out around them in a telekinetic bubble. Mitch stayed as close to Amelie as he could without tripping. This sort of continuous shield was draining but Amelie didn’t have the reflexes to fend off the vines one by one.

  They weren’t the only things moving through the trees, just the brightest, and Mitch heard the undergrowth rustling as the more timid of Faerie’s creatures fled the fire. Mitch was willing to bet that anything creeping towards it would not be of the cute and cuddly variety.

  Mitch sniffed again. “Is that steak?” he asked.

  “Smells like it,” Amelie replied.

  “And you’re sure it’s not a dragon trying to draw in its daily allotment of sometimes food?” Mitch asked.

  “Positive,” Amelie laughed. “Dragons don’t hunt like that, it would barbecue us from above and then eat us, not patiently set a trap.”

  “So instead we have an idiot having a barbecue in the forest,” Mitch said. The dragon seemed more plausi
ble, he didn’t see how anyone that stupid could survive out here.

  “Maybe we can relieve him of his dinner,” Amelie said.

  “Maybe,” Mitch said. It was getting dark and in the gloom he could make out the flicker of red in the distance. It was probably the only viable camping spot nearby too.

  They crept closer. Amelie ghosted across the ground; if he hadn’t known better he would have sworn that she was levitating. She needn’t have bothered, Mitch felt as if he was making enough noise to wake the dead, every step seeming to snap twigs and sticks and rustle fallen leaves. Silent hunter he was not.

  A shadow moved by the fire and Mitch strained his eyes, trying to make it out. He tapped Amelie on the shoulder and she shrugged in response, she didn’t know what it was either.

  “What do we do now?” Mitch whispered.

  The shadow twisted around to look at them.

  “I suggest you join me for dinner,” Nikola said, rising to greet them.

  “Nikola,” Mitch rushed around the large tree that he and Amelie had been circum-creeping and seized his friend in a tight hug. He heard a loud snap that for once he was certain wasn’t caused by his progress through the forest and looked over his shoulder. A tendril of whipwood hung frozen in the air a half metre from where they stood. As he watched it withdrew and then there was a sharp crack as it snapped out again and stopped.

  “Spatial discontinuity,” Nikola said with a small smile. “Nothing can get to us.”

  “We got to you,” Amelie said, walking over to them.

  “I left a path,” Nikola said. “It’s gone now.”

  “We couldn’t have avoided you if we wanted to, could we?” Mitch asked.

  “Why would you want to?” Nikola asked. He was still wrapped in Mitch’s arms, a bright smile plastered across his face. “Come on, I don’t want everything to burn.”

  “That’s it?” Amelie asked. “You ambush us in Deep Faerie, twist our path and now you’re worried that dinner will burn?”

  “I–” Nikola began, turning to face her. Amelie slapped him and he recoiled, stepping on Mitch’s foot and almost falling before Mitch caught him.