Blood from Stone

by Laura Anne Gilman

  “It is merely a rumor,” the Frenchman was saying. He rubbed his hands around the clunky ceramic mug as though warming himself on the liquid inside, chilled despite the warmth of his wool suit jacket. “One sighting is not confirmation, no matter how plausible the report. There have been too many frauds, too many disappointments. We have no proof that this time it is for real….”

  “There is never proof. We have spent years chasing after sightings. We arrive after the fact, and it has already moved on, become legend. We arrive too soon and the reports are merely rumor, vapor spun by those with their own agenda. Waiting for proof has gotten us nowhere.” The woman wore her dark red hair in a severe knot at the base of her neck, as though to counteract the lushness of her features. She looked younger than her companions by at least a handful of years, but her mind was as sharp for all that she lacked their experience—and patience.

  “Legends and rumors are not truth,” the other man said in the tone of a lecturer. Slightly older than the other two, his dark hair was only now beginning to silver, but his skin showed the tracings of lines and wrinkles beginning to cut into his sharp features. Offsetting that, he had dark eyes that had the alert look and inner glow of a fanatic held in check only by practical considerations. “Truth is physical. Truth is verifiable. The tool we found was useless, its limited brain unable to respond, and its information must therefore be considered suspect. It knew the same things we knew—that demons have gathered there, in numbers unheard of since our great-grandfather’s time. It is highly likely that the tool extrapolated from that, saying what it thought we wanted to hear before it died. We cannot afford to waste our resources chasing every wisp of news, every sworn-on-Bible lead. The funds we have are limited enough, and must be carefully husbanded.”

  The woman was scornful of such caution, resting her hands on the table as though she were about to push away from the other two in disgust. “To win all, sometimes we must risk all. That is as we were taught. Is not the prize worth it?”

  “If it even exists,” the Frenchman said, clearly annoyed at her grandiose language, and then looked up defensively at the stares the other two gave him. “After all these years, all the dead ends and the failures…You have never doubted? Never once wondered if we were not chasing down the wrong road? If the legends were merely that? If the experiments were dead ends after all, the trials destroyed and scattered for a reason?”

  The other two looked at him as though he had just suggested that the sun, and not the moon, were made of green cheese.

  “Never,” the woman declared, and the older man nodded his head once, firmly. In this matter they were in total agreement. “Our great-grandfathers were men of courage and intelligence,” he said. “Their legacy is still in the world, and it is our responsibility—our destiny—to recover it.”

  “And use it.” The Frenchman’s blond hair and fair skin were touched by the shadow of a cloud overhead, making it seem as though he paled slightly. The whites of his eyes were slightly pinked, as though he had a cold, or had not been sleeping well.

  “Of course,” the woman said. “Are we not their inheritors? That magic belongs to us! Else what was the research they risked their lives to complete, if not to put to use?”

  Risked their lives, and lost them. They all knew the cost. Every member of that circle of magicians and scholars generations ago had been hunted down and killed over the years, their libraries burned and their experiments destroyed. The entire Magischer Kreis, wiped clean off the face of the earth by fearful minds and lesser, weaker souls, their lives’ work reviled and forbidden, punishable by death even to speak of it. And yet, the stories persisted over the later generations, among the children of the children who had been left behind. Stories of experiments that had succeeded, of papers that had been preserved, of legacies waiting to be reclaimed. Of magic that waited for the inheritors: magic, and power.

  There were seven of them now, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the Kreis, gathered together cautiously through friend-of-a-friend-of-the-family, drawn together by that long-ago connection, held together by a fascination and reverence for those stories, for the promise of something greater in that knowledge, of the hint of wisdom and power their forefathers had accumulated.

  It was their legacy and their goal, a holy grail of a more scientific sort, almost two decades old in the searching. It could not be a dead end. They would not accept it.

  “And the newest information says that the legacy is in the United States?” the darker man said, asking for confirmation rather than responding further to his companion’s doubts.

  “Yes. In New York. The tool assured us that it was spotted there a few months back.” The woman had a small PDA on the table next to her coffee cup, but she did not reach for it to check her notes; there was no need. She had been one of the three who had questioned the creature, and was confident in her facts. Facts, not rumor, this time. The tool had been an older one, identifiable by its appearance and low intellect, and no match for them in wile or determination.

  “Did it have a chance to warn anyone?” A reminder, that despite their stronger will, the tool had still managed, in the end, to escape them for a short time.

  “No. It died alone. Who would aid such a thing as that?” Her scorn was both clear and understandable. Even its own kind chose not to remain in each other’s presence. “Without our guidance, it was a lost, helpless thing.”

  “But you trust the information it gave you?”

  “It was unable to lie to us.” That had been the first thing they had verified. They had no true training, and limited power because of it, but some old spells still worked, with the right ingredients, sacrifices, and chants. She was confident of their results.

  He sighed, the oldest of the seven and as such, the one who made the final decision. “It is folly to leap—and more folly to hold back. The power must be reclaimed, before we forget what we once were, entirely. We will go.”

  Air seemed to be let out of the other two, even though they had not been aware of holding their breath. “Who is closest?” he asked. “Dara? No, Rog. He holds a U.S. passport, so he will be able to travel without incident. Call him today. I want him on the scene as quickly as possible. We cannot wait for others to arrive. If this is truth…” He looked down into his coffee, and the years suddenly seemed to weigh more heavily on him. “If it is true, we cannot let it slip from us. We cannot—will not—allow someone else to take what is ours.”

  “Breathe. Breathe, damn you!”

  Despite the shouted command, the pile of dark brown fur on the wooden table lay still, inanimate. The eyes were closed, the muscles slack, the organs nonfunctional.

  “Damn.” A world of frustration was packed into that one word, frustration, and anger directed both outward, and in. The temptation to respond was too great for the third figure in the small, lamp-lit room.

  “This would be a bad time to say I told you so?”

  “Yes.”

  The word was snarled, and the third figure flinched, but kept his tone even, almost light. “I shall refrain from saying anything, then.”

  Despite his irritation, there might have been a faint smile flickering on the man’s face. Or perhaps not. “You are a pestilence and a plague and dare too much,” he told his assistant, his ire fading back under the civilized tone of an educated man, even as he moved away to allow his assistant to deal with the remains of the experiment.

  “As you say, Master.” The dirty white head bowed in acceptance, but his clawed paws flexed and released in tension he could not otherwise show. Moving forward out of the shadows where he had been waiting, the assistant reached down and drew a sheet over the motionless form, all the while keeping his back to the human. If Master saw his expression, there would be punishment for certain. Insolence might be permitted, occasionally even encouraged as amusing, depending on Master’s mood; doubt or hesitation was forbidden.

  “Dispose of it,” his master ordered, as expected. “We�
�ll try again tomorrow, after I’ve had a full night’s sleep. Ensure that the blood is fresh, this time.”

  His assistant looked down at the dark splatters on the leather apron wrapped around his squat body. This time, his claws did not flex, and his voice was no longer daring, but resigned. The blood was always fresh. The failure was not the blood, but the flesh. It would not end. It would never end, but badly. “Yes, Master.”

  After a dream—a nightmare—like that, you either lay in bed staring at the ceiling until dawn came, or you got up and got busy. Wren was the sort to get busy.

  The windows were open throughout the apartment, letting in the 4:00 a.m. sounds of a city that did, occasionally, sleep. She could identify an off-key car horn now and again, the distant wail of a siren waxing or waning, and a steady white noise that Wren had never been able to identify as a specific source, but merely accepted as the city’s contented heartbeat. Occasional random thumps and the sound of water running through pipes suggested that others in the building were also awake.

  If they were, they were probably doing the same thing she was doing: studying financial records, shuffling papers and running numbers. Unlike her, they were probably using a computer, not an old solar-powered calculator, and sheets of scratch paper. The stronger a Talent, the closer to “Pure” they were, the more trouble they had using electronics—every time you accessed your core, even involuntarily, you sent out sparks that looked for similar sparks to play with. And current didn’t always make the distinction between other current, and electricity. Wren had destroyed half-a-dozen of Sergei’s cell phones and PDAs back before she overrushed; now, unless she was careful, she could wipe out even her backed-up-seven-ways-from-Sunday home computer just by turning it on. And forget about ever getting a cell phone of her own.

  Sometimes, she really hated being her.

  The dream had woken her sometime around 1:00 a.m. Although she would have loved to have written it off to general anxiety, she knew better. A quick pajama-clad prowl through the apartment had told her that she was alone, P.B. having indeed gone home. She had thought about reaching out to him, but decided against it. The dream was already fading, leaving behind a bad taste in her mind and a deep sadness in her soul. How much worse must it be for P.B.? The bond they had formed to protect her life and sanity had been a gift between friends. There was no need to let him know that it had also cost him the privacy of his innermost, obviously deeply painful memories. And they had to be memories, they had too much of a concrete, solid feel to be anything else.

  If he spoke of it, she would tell him. But not otherwise.

  Unable to get back to sleep with so many things knocking around in her head, she had decided to make use of the relative quiet. She started with the basics—sorting and clearing out the desk in her office. The third bedroom, a library/storeroom, was in more need of organizing, but she had thought the desk would be an easier thing to accomplish. Bad idea—she had been avoiding the computer desk for months, and the debris was breeding at a scary rate. She had made it through two drawers into the old laminate-top desk when her hand closed on a small hardbound notebook that had been tossed in there, probably the week she had moved in. She pulled it out and looked at it, trying to remember what it was. The cover was a thick green suedelike fabric, and the spine was sturdy, but the corners were battered, as though it had been carried around for a long time. She stared at it without opening it, then placed it carefully on the corner of her desk and slid the drawer shut.

  “Avoidance never got you anything good,” she said, echoing one of her mother’s favorite sayings. When she had been a sulky teenager, that phrase had annoyed the hell out of her, as she suspected it was meant to. Now, it had the ring of depressing truth to it.

  So she turned to the thing that should have been number one on her hit list anyway: her bank statements.

  Two hours later her head ached even worse, her ass was sore from sitting, and she was sick unto death of her own financial health. The picture she had put together was reassuring, though. Sergei had trained her well, and she’d been making a nice, if careful living for a bunch of years now. If she wanted to, if the asking price wasn’t too insane, she could buy out her apartment when the new owner made the offer. Or she could move somewhere else, if she decided not to buy.

  She could even afford to move somewhere else. Another city, another part of the country. A different region, where Wren Valere might still be a name for the Cosa to conjure with, but they might treat her with wariness because of it. Might give her the space to breathe she so desperately needed.

  Space without memories. Space without reminders. Space without guilt.

  Space without Sergei?

  She wasn’t quite ready to poke at that thought yet. If ever. Maybe he would come with her. He had been talking recently about expanding, maybe handing the day-to-day gallery stuff over to Lowell and spending more time hunting down new artists instead of drowning in the paperwork. It would be good for him, too, to get out of the city, away from the memories. Maybe they’d buy a place together, somewhere large enough that they wouldn’t be living in each other’s pockets and getting on each other’s nerves. She tried to imagine a place—a house—the two of them might each like, and failed, utterly.

  Cart, horse, she reminded herself. And making plans for someone else was always a bad idea.

  Getting up to stretch her legs, she walked out of the office and down the hallway, the new pale brown carpeting rough on her bare feet. Her apartment, like all the others in the building, was laid out along a T: three small, shoe-box-shaped bedrooms were lined up next to each other—her bedroom, her office, and the library/storage room/closet along the top crossline, with the bathroom, tiny kitchen and main room arrayed along the downward stroke. It wasn’t what the Realtors called an open floor plan—in fact, it was downright crowded and crappy. But that had been what allowed her to afford it in the first place, and since she didn’t like to entertain, and the long, carpeted hallway was good for pacing, she was fine with the layout.

  And, even better, the building had over the years apparently built up a sort of current-signature of its own, current enough to resist a psi-bomb set outside her window during the early days of the Troubles. She had known the vibes were good the moment she walked into the place, she just hadn’t realized how good. Now, if she paused and concentrated, she could almost feel the building’s quietude, its grounded sensibility.

  Like P.B.’s mental scent, in concrete and brick. Solid, comforting. Familiar.

  “You really think you could leave this?” she asked herself.

  Still. If there was a building in Manhattan like this, odds were good there were other buildings in other cities that felt the same, had the same protections, the same safety. She just had to follow her instincts to find them. Considering how much more she knew now than back then, it should be a simple matter to find a new refuge.

  Buildings where ghosts of friends dead-and-gone didn’t haunt her, waking or sleeping. Cities where whispers didn’t follow her, where she could go on a job and not worry about anything except the job.

  The Cosa was everywhere, yeah. The Mage Council, the organized branch of the Talent, was set up in localized groups, each major metropolitan area in North America—and major cities around the world—having their own mostly independent leadership. But a lonejack like herself, a freelancer without ties or obligations, should be able to slip by them without comment. Not every Council was run by someone like the late, unlamented KimAnn Howe of the New York Metro Council, on a power-mad membership drive.

  Most Councils would leave her alone.

  Other cities didn’t have a Tri-Com, still thinking of her like some kind of last-ditch hero or savior. The dryad’s parting words still echoed: “Anytime, you’d be welcomed back.”

  Thinking hard, her brain let her feet take her down the hallway and into the main room, doing a circuit. She used to keep this room empty save for a chair and the stereo. That had worked fine for her,
when she thought of it. Now there was a sofa, a coffee table and an ottoman in addition to those things. When friends came over, they could make themselves comfortable. She had a folding table she could use to serve dinner on, and chairs that went with it, stored in the library.

  She had fresh paint, courtesy of Bonnie and her coworkers—not the gothy purple sparkle P.B. had warned her of, but a lovely, neutral cream—and a scattering of artwork on the walls, and a new carpet underfoot, chosen for how it felt under her bare feet, exactly the way it did now. There were three handprints in dark blue paint on the wall just inside the front door: one large, male; one smaller, hers; and…well, there were two handprints and one paw print. She had staked ownership in this space, damn it.

  She had…

  Fortune cookies, sitting on the table where they had eaten dinner.

  Oh. She had forgotten about them. But not so forgotten that the damn things had been thrown out; when they cleared the dishes from dinner, each of them had avoided even touching the cookies, as though denying they were there.

  “Damn. Also, damn.”

  They sat on the table, wrapped in twists of waxed paper. She should throw them out. Just scoop them into her hand and toss them in the trash with the rest of the debris.

  Most people treated fortune cookies like stale jokes, hoping maybe to get something rude or particularly funny, playing the “in bed” game with the fortunes found on the little slips of paper. Her? Hers came straight from an actual Seer, nine times out of ten, and like all Seers’ pronouncements, were usually less than models of clarity and straightforwardness.

  But trying to avoid them never worked. Maybe embracing Fate would bring a better result.

  It couldn’t hurt, anyway. She hoped.