by Kaye, Rainy
“Louvel and the cockatrice already existed,” Otilia said. She slid her plate back and leaned back against the counter, head turned to look at me. “There are, and will continue to be, new creatures though, shaped by the dark mages’ magic.”
“Like Frank,” I said. “And Winston.”
She drummed her fingers on the underside of the edge of the shelf. “Dear lord, tell me you didn’t name the creatures.”
“It was a different time,” Sasmita said, and I burst out laughing.
“Hey, you’re funny,” I said. My legs ached, so I folded myself down to sit on a spot on the floor, behind the passenger seat. It would have been too crowded to sit sideways in it at the same time as Sasmita on the driver side. “Yeah, Sasmita and her friends named Winston the Wall, but Frank…”
“Yuto,” Otilia concluded with a frown. “His magic is already out of control.”
“He made a house sprout spider legs,” I added and then winced with regret. Otilia didn’t benefit from knowing how far Yuto had already gone. “Anyway, so the naga and Frank and the spider-house are all the same, made from magic, and that makes sense, I guess—because Yuto is out of control. We know Winston was Sasmita’s magic corrupted by the mage of New Orleans. But what about fish-face? The necromancer seemed pretty in control of his magic, so unless someone else’s spell got corrupted, or…”
I trailed off because none of the options added up.
“They’re just magic,” Otilia said. “The ones that are hanging around with the witches and mages, like this one you say in the lake? The necromancer isn’t just that, remember? He’s a mage. He probably crafted a monster or two. They often did.”
“But…why?”
She shrugged. “Why do they do anything? They can. They want to. Maybe they had a plan for them.”
“You’re telling me fish head was an illusion?” I shivered as I remembered plunging into the cold lake to rescue Fiona from the bone-and-scale beast. “That can’t be right.”
“Because it isn’t.” Otilia retrieved a wastebasket bag from a tote and held it out for everyone to drop their plates into it.
I stretched up to add mine before sinking back to the floor. “I don’t think I understand magic.”
My cheeks warmed at the admission, and I was glad I was tucked back in a corner so I didn’t have to look at anyone directly.
I hated the facts, but that didn’t change them. Somehow, magic could warm a cup of coffee, explode a chair, and create a fish beast in the bottom of a lake—and I had no idea how any of that was possible, even though I did at least some of those to varying degrees.
I hadn’t created a pet, but the future loomed with possibilities.
“Magic is a resource from the earth,” Otilia said, her tone calm but firm, and I perked up. “Don’t think of it like energy or vibrations. Think of it as something malleable. Like iron.”
“So the witches and mages are, what, miners?” I swallowed a giggle at the visual that conjured up.
Perhaps I had slept too much.
“More or less,” Otilia said, not at all phased by my silliness.
She had mentioned mentees, hunters in training while the current one served the consortium. Maybe when she had been the exalted huntress, she had taught others. She carried the tone, the mannerism of someone who had explained abstract concepts once or twice before.
Had Joseph Stone been one of her mentees, before she had been exiled from the quorum? Had her own student backfilled her position when she was stripped of her magic?
That would have been a kick in the gonads if ever.
“The witches and mages mine up magic from the earth,” I said, back to the topic at hand. “Then what happens?”
“First, they mine it, then they forge it,” she said. “Steel can make a nail or a pot, but they’re both very different from each other.”
I sort of followed what she was saying. The witches and mages pulled magic from the earth—I’d felt the tremble more than once—then shaped it like a blacksmith into their desires, be it a plague or a parade. They were miner and forge, blacksmith and master.
That meant, so was I.
My magic came from the same source, even if I wasn’t particularly adept with the hammer and anvil yet. I recalled the little glowing embers I used to create on whim. They were the purest form of what Otilia had told me—magic, shaped into a trinket, a practice example from a starting apprentice.
“So I forge a cup of hot coffee?” I asked absently.
“You could,” she said brightly, “but with your lack of comfort with your magic, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess you forge a heat that will then warm your coffee.”
“There’s another way?”
“Here.” She opened the ice chest lid, dug out a bottle of water from the half-melted ice, and placed the dripping container on the table in front of Bhaskar. “Show her.”
Bhaskar tensed, his expression tight. “I haven’t done magic in this world in a very long time. I’m a bit rusty.”
Otilia wagged her head a little in frustration then turned back to me. “The point remains, regardless. You could skip the middle step and just have hot coffee, instead of creating heat and waiting for the coffee to come to temperature.”
“I’m not sure I can wrap my head entirely around this yet,” I said, poking one finger at the thin carpet next to me. “How did the mage of New Orleans enchant the townspeople?”
“He forged a spell to enchant them, like the necromancer can forge a plague to kill, or Eliza Brown forged mass hysteria,” she said. “Don’t think small, Safiya. Magic is the most versatile substance in the world.”
“So the portals…?”
“Forged from magic,” she said.
“And the pocket worlds?”
“Erected like a bridge,” she said. “Beam by beam, trestle by trestle.”
“A sufficiently skilled witch or mage can build worlds,” I said, trying on the idea to see how it fit.
It made me itchy.
“They can, and they do,” Otilia said.
“All that…mining…of magic destroys the earth,” I said, piecing together the broken shards I had been handed. “Isn’t it possible to just put a system in place to stop that?”
“You know what they say about sufficiently talented witches, mages, and fools.” She gave a sharp-edged smile that flattened into a line as Bhaskar spoke up.
“The consortium tried,” he said, pushing through a slight hesitation in his voice. This was where he and Otilia diverged in opinions—brutally. “They went after the witches and mages who were doing too much damage. They looked at the big picture.”
Otilia yanked up the water bottle. “Good intentions don’t absolve accountability.”
I could see on Bhaskar’s face that he was about to point out the hypocrisy of her statement.
We were in a far too small space for these two to fight.
“Does anyone still live at the property with Ruediger’s shrine?” I asked, hoping to distract them from the brewing argument. “Do we need to notify anyone that we’re coming?”
“It’s vacant,” Otilia said to me, but delayed turning her stare from Bhaskar.
“Great.” Sasmita threw me a knowing look and slid around to position behind the steering wheel. “Let’s get back on the road, then.”
Before anyone could reply, she cranked the key in the ignition and then pulled the motorhome off the shoulder of the road.
No one really spoke as we straightened up the motorhome in the area within our reach. There wasn’t much to do about the bags of supplies and belongings, or the three enormous portraits that watched us so intently, I had to remind myself that Yuto had said they couldn’t see the outside world from inside the paintings.
Regardless, I could feel Uwe’s loathing of me, his disgust. The moment he stepped back out of that portrait, I was toast.
Hopefully, we would figure out a way to get him back into the vault before the seal faded. That meant
finding the other key, and that required confronting the consortium.
But I couldn’t do anything with them until we saved Yuto.
I rearranged the bags near me and then leaned back on them, closing my eyes. I dozed as Sasmita drove, and silence fell over the increasingly cool air.
Much too soon, the motorhome slowed to a crawl.
From the driver seat, Sasmita said, “Looks like we’re here.”
21
I stood behind Randall in the open doorway of the motorhome, peering around him and over his shoulder, trying to get a good view of where Otilia’s directions had led us. From the glimpses of trees and possibly water, it at least seemed a notch up from the Dark Lands.
Randall stepped down onto the ground and I nearly tripped over myself joining him. Everyone else followed out behind us, and we spread out into a loose group.
The main road was no longer in view, as we had wound our way down a long thin driveway leading up near a Queen Anne style home, the dusty pistachio colored paint faded and weathered under a slate roof. The round towers and monumental chimney reminded of a time when the house had been beautiful and coveted, but no one seemed to be around to agree.
Pine trees rose up around the structure, and they appeared to color coordinate with the house instead of the other way around, as if the forest existed as a backdrop, finishing strokes on canvas art.
“So, where’s the dead guy?” I asked, and Otilia cut a look at me.
“His shrine is behind the house,” she said, setting forward.
I followed her as the others trailed behind, and we huddled into ourselves against a gust of cold wind that pushed back. Part of me wanted to head up the porch steps and detour through the house to take in the interior—how much had been left behind like a museum?—but never once since starting this adventure had wandering around an old house led to anything that didn’t want to at least maim me.
Instead, I trudged after Otilia, my group’s footsteps out of sync as we crunched over frozen pine needles. As we rounded the goliath sized house, a smaller, simpler structure came into view, glimpsed through the pine trees. Otilia headed toward it, and my heart sank. After seeing the house, I had expected the mausoleum to be a work of art itself, a fact I didn’t realize until we approached the heap of red brick that vaguely resembled a building in front of us.
The mausoleum looked as if it had been built by hand, and not by the same geniuses who had erected the house for the living. The dead family member had received far less care for his abode, though the longer I stood staring at the slightly malformed, vaguely dusty structure, I had to wonder if there had been a reason; perhaps the resting place of his casket had been kept intentionally secretive, left only to the family members to piece together a shelter to protect him from the weather and from what others would do upon discovery.
Otilia had said his casket—and the hidden medallion within—had been a source of disruption in their small village in Germany. At least, I couldn’t imagine the situation being anything other than unpleasant, most of all to those who had been forced to part with their magic.
I shuddered a little, and not just from the cold. It occurred to me then, I would have to be careful handling anything about the casket, and more pointedly, the medallion. Even as I thought it, I could imagine the twisted scenario in which my attempt to help Yuto remain free of the consortium and their painted prison ended with me being stripped of my own magic, the only saving grace we had against the remaining dark witches and mages.
No touching the casket for me.
A slab of slightly bowed wood in the front wall of the mausoleum served as a door. Otilia pressed on it, and when it didn’t budge, she searched for a handle. There wasn’t one. On second pass, it seemed as if the doorway had been a gaped opening, and wood had been attached over it to close it off, but from the inside.
The thought wasn’t the least bit unsettling.
Otilia turned to the group.
“One of you three, knock it open,” she said, gesturing between Sasmita, Bhaskar, and me. “It’s sealed up much tighter than it looks. Nothing short of a sledgehammer—magical or otherwise—is getting through this.”
I hadn’t taken out a door before, but I had taken out a window on the steamboat in New Orleans to rescue Fiona. Since then, I had performed quite a few more elaborate feats with my magic, and now between the developments realized in Haven Rock and the short-lived comfort with my skills I had experienced in the Dark Lands and the pocket island, I was confident this door was going to be fluffy moist cake.
Unfortunately, the tingle was gone. My magic had disappeared.
Damn you, Jada.
Sasmita stood with her hands in her pockets, her shoulders hunched against the wind that picked up, blowing around her hair.
“I can try,” she said, hesitantly, and shuffled toward the mausoleum. She grimaced, her hands remaining firmly in her pocket. “What’s the chances it will take my magic, and if it does, can I get it back?”
“No, to answer the last question first,” Otilia said, reverting to teacher mode. “It doesn’t matter, though, because you would have to place your hands on the casket, or the medallion directly. When you do, you have to tell it whose magic to strip. You all will be fine.”
Her features softened with helpless sadness that did not fit the once world’s greatest huntress.
“The medallion was employed by non-magic users to strip powers from witches and mages, so the shrine posed no risk to them,” she said. “The consortium must have known this was happening, must have recognized it as one of Sahir’s masterpieces, but they sent no one to help to stop the involuntary pilgrimage of our people. A moment of Kurash’s time would have ended the violation of so many innocent witches and mages forced to touch the casket. The moral code the consortium subscribed to might have always been arbitrary at best.”
Silence fell over us, as if Otilia’s confessions had quieted the wind too. I had no opinion to add to her statements, not even a half-formed one. Deep down, I had hoped the consortium would save us, that they would compel the quorum to rise up against the dark witches and mages.
Now, more and more, I had to wonder if we were all on the same side.
I shook off the thought. They had sent Joseph Stone after Eliza Brown, and then Nikandros Remis, and he would have continued on after the rest too if he hadn’t been caught by surprise—trying to save Randall and me—so the consortium couldn’t be the sum of all of Otilia’s terrible feelings toward them. Granted, they had imprisoned Yuto, so it was only fair she had a sore spot concerning them, but that didn’t mean I was giving up hope yet. We needed the consortium.
I refused to believe they would let us down, in the end.
At length, Sasmita tugged one hand from her pant pocket and hovered her palm over the door before finally touching the wood with a grimace. When nothing happened, she closed her eyes. Blue magic swirled up from the earth under her feet, around her calves and upward until it funneled down her arm, into the door covering.
The wood rattled like a heavy wind, but it didn’t so much as crack, despite how twisted and weathered it appeared.
Had the damn thing been enchanted somehow?
Otilia had said magic was nothing more than a substance, one that could be melded and hammered and crafted into damn near anything, physical or abstract.
It just took time.
Sasmita gave Otilia a concerned look, and Otilia waved her back with the air of a patient teacher who was also ready to wrap up the lesson.
“Bhaskar,” Otilia said, “the door, please.”
Her tone was measured. Too much so. It had to pain her in some ways still that her magic was no longer accessible, and worse yet, she had to defer to the person she’d held a grudge against for the span of several lifetimes.
Bhaskar hesitated. “Like I said, my magic, it’s really rusty.”
Apparently, he didn’t seem to pick up on the enormity of her request.
“Well, mine
is…I’m not going to be able to,” I said, hoping to spur along this situation before Otilia morphed from pensive and melancholic to her fierce, fiery alter ego.
While Bhaskar must have witnessed her precision with a sword at least once many years ago, he must have recovered from that point as he held back from the doorway to the mausoleum.
“What happened to your magic?” Otilia asked, tone sharp.
My breath caught. Of everyone in this group, only Randall and Fiona knew I shared my magic with my sister, which meant—I glanced at Fiona, who stared up at the birds in the trees like a not yet fat housecat—only Randall was aware of the truth.
I had no reason to keep this detail from everyone else. At one point, it had seemed trivial, or even secretive, but now I couldn’t remember where those feelings had come from in the first place.
“I’m a twin,” I said. “My sister and I share magic.”
It occurred to me then that I had no way of knowing if sibling divided magic was as common as green on St. Patrick’s Day, or if I had just revealed a sizable flaw in my nature.
Otilia gazed at me as calculating, but not as predatory, as Fiona did the birds in the high tree branches. Sasmita opened her mouth as if to comment, but Bhaskar stepped around her, to the door, and she relinquished her spot.
Puckering his lips, Bhaskar raised his palm toward the door. Blue magic erupted from him.
The door exploded.
I ducked, covering my head as wood shards pelted against my arms and side and nearby tree trunks.
When the friendly fire ended, I peered up as everyone around me rose from their protective crouches.
Where the door had been stood a gaping hole leading inside the simplistic mausoleum. Blue magic pulsed in the entrance before dissipating.
A strange shift happened in my mind, but it had the distinct sensation of the world moving, locking into a new reality.
When I had met Sasmita, her magic had seemed infinitely more powerful than mine, and with that, she may as well have won the award for best witch in the world, if such an award existed.