Phantom Pains

by Mishell Baker

  “Arcadia is in serious danger,” said Caryl. “There is no telling how much time we have left to avert it. We need to speak to the manticore that has been harassing Skyhollow, because we believe it may have information that can help us.”

  “If your business is legitimate,” said Phil, “then call Alvin and get clearance.”

  I snarled in frustration. “Even if he was answering his phone, you know he’d never let Caryl out of there! He thinks she killed Tamika!”

  Phil gave a little shrug.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Do you think Caryl killed Tamika?”

  “I just work here. I’m doing what I was told, because if I fuck up, I don’t have much hope of another job. If you want to cause trouble, do it on your own time and don’t involve me.” His tone was unambiguously final.

  I turned to Caryl. She seemed remarkably calm.

  “I understand the position you are in,” she said calmly. “I will do you a favor by taking the decision out of your hands.”

  Phil had just enough time to realize how ominous that sentence was before Caryl muttered a few Unseelie words and sent him collapsing to the floor.

  “Oh my God!” I said. “Caryl, what did you do?”

  “A sort of spinal anesthesia,” she said. “He’ll be fine until we return, but he won’t be able to make it down the spiral staircase.”

  “Caryl, what the fuck! What if the manticore eats you while we’re over there?”

  “Then I’ll be dead, and my enchantment will be broken.”

  Phil swore and tried to use his elbows to drag himself across the room toward the desk, which only drew our attention to the phone sitting on it. On the edge of hysteria, I nabbed it and stuffed it into the pocket that didn’t already have my phone in it.

  “We’ll be back soon,” said Caryl. “Try to relax.”

  Then she stepped through the Gate, and the void swallowed her.

  “Oh boy,” I said, hugging myself and twisting back and forth in the way I’d started to do when freaking out, now that pacing required way too much front-of-brain thought.

  “She’s crazy,” whimpered Phil. “Alvin was right. She’s going to kill us all.”

  “She’s not going to kill anyone!” I said. “Relax, I can fix you I think.” I moved to him and bent, slowly and painfully, to touch him on the shoulder. “Better?”

  “No!” he grunted.

  “Oh shit, right, because—changeling. Iron immunity. Shit. Look, I’ll go get her back, right now. I’ll bring her back and she’ll undo this.”

  I stepped toward the Gate. And stopped.

  I couldn’t even look into it. It was like going blind, like falling, like being punched repeatedly in the brain. I was supposed to walk into that?

  No. There was no way.

  But there was no choice, either.

  “Here I go,” I said. Maybe to Phil, maybe to me. But I still didn’t go.

  It was like standing on the highest high dive of all time, with a line of people waiting behind you, and suddenly realizing you had no idea how to swim. I let out a high, keening sound of terror. Someone was going to have to push me, but the only other guy in the room couldn’t even sit up. So I let Dr. Davis push me. Be effective.

  The sensation could best be described as a painless explosion that vaporized my entire being, then said “just kidding” and casually put me back together in the same arrangement I started with. I imagine dying must feel similar.

  My first impression of Arcadia was that it was impossibly bright. Not painful like sunlight on sidewalks, though. The radiance had a hyper-real, blooming quality that reminded me of my most vivid dreams.

  The sky there was the shade of a ripe peach. The Gate was the only thing that looked the same; I stood next to it on a great craggy golden promontory in the middle of a desert. Nothing about the landscape was bleak or barren, though; the shimmering golden sands were littered with rock formations and alive with palms, succulents, and cacti whose huge bright blooms swarmed with butterflies.

  Wait, not butterflies. One fluttered by my head; its diaphanous wings were attached to a tiny childlike body, moving too fast for me to catch any details.

  “Holy shit,” I said.

  “I wasn’t certain you were coming,” said Caryl’s voice.

  She was standing on the rock some distance off to my left. Even she looked different, like an oil painting of herself. She pointed behind me, and I turned and looked down at the landscape to see a shimmering river of distorted light, moving like water over the sand.

  “That is the path to Skyhollow Estate,” Caryl said. “But you cannot take it without destroying it, and we are not looking for civilization just now at any rate.”

  “Right,” I said. I took a deep breath and immediately regretted it; the air hit me like laughing gas.

  Caryl stepped to the very edge of the high rock, turning slowly around to survey the area. “We should stay near the Gate in case we need to escape.”

  “What’s to stop the thing from just leaping through the Gate after us?”

  “There is a powerful ward drawn about this rock; only humans and those with facade enchantments may pass through it.”

  Caryl led me carefully down a steep path to the sand below. I’d had a little practice using my prosthetics on sand, but this felt all wrong; the ground was strangely spongy under my feet.

  “Ugh, this place.” Carefully correcting my balance, I turned around to look at the promontory behind us, but it was gone. I cringed back from what looked like a hundred foot sheer drop to an emerald sea.

  “Uh, Caryl? Where did the rock go?”

  “It is still there. The illusion keeps most fey from wandering too near the ward and becoming curious about it.”

  “So . . . to get back home, I have to convince myself to jump off a cliff?” I laughed out loud. And then I kept laughing and couldn’t stop. My lack of control over it scared me more than the cliff did.

  Unfazed by my hysterical mirth, Caryl turned to look out over the desert, and I followed her gaze. On the far distant horizon, in the direction that the mirage-road seemed to travel, I thought I could make out walls and towers, but they were cloaked in a scintillating apricot haze. The warm, dry wind brought a strange smell, somewhere between smoke and cinnamon.

  “How large is this territory?” I asked Caryl when I had calmed my giggle fit enough that I could speak. “How are we supposed to find the manticore?”

  “I shall lure him to us,” said Caryl.

  22

  I looked over at Caryl. Somehow in the blushing golden glare she had gone from nondescript to heartbreakingly beautiful.

  “You’re sure you want to bring it this close to the Gate?” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, and then began a droning incantation in the Unseelie tongue, gazing at the upturned palm of her hand.

  “Is it safe to cast Unseelie spells around me? King Winterglass told me they’re poisonous or something.”

  She halted her incantation. “My spells are not as strong as his,” she assured me, “but even so I take care not to cast too often in one spot. It can create a sort of . . . psychic aura around a place that depresses and demoralizes those nearby.”

  “Lovely.”

  She restarted her incantation. When she was finished, she said, “I doubt you recognize the words, but this is the same construct I used to find Vivian at Regazo de Lujo.”

  Without fey glasses, I couldn’t see anything, since a construct was pure spellwork bound only to itself. “And you’re going to follow it?”

  Caryl shook her head. “We will wait here. The construct is a sort of calling card. When it arrives at its destination it will allow the recipient to retrace its path and find us. That was the danger I spoke of when I sent it after Vivian.”

  “Did you dissolve Elliott to make it this time?” I said, studying her face for signs of distress.

  She shook her head, then gave her hand a graceful upward motion as though releasing a bird. �
�When I summoned it at the resort, my reserves had run out after hiding the car. I had to reappropriate Elliott’s energy in order to cast.”

  I watched Caryl turn sharply to the left as though watching the thing speed away. “And you’re . . . fully charged now?”

  “ ‘Charge’ doesn’t even matter here,” she said. “I can draw arcane energy from the very air. Every spell I cast here is more potent, more precise, and costs me nothing.”

  “So you could cast a thousand of those.”

  “I cannot cast duplicates of a spell. The first word of each spell is unique, and if I speak it again it simply starts the spell over. I could, however, cast one copy of each spell in my repertoire. I do not hold enough arcane energy within me to do that at home.”

  “It must be almost disappointing to go back.”

  Caryl turned and gave me a slow appraisal that carried a tinge of disapproval despite her expressionless face. “Perhaps it would be,” she said, “if power were something that concerned me. But I am no tyrant. And whatever I am, I was born human. I need a world where things are what they seem, where no amount of wishing can make them anything other.”

  “Wishes come true here?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” said Caryl. “You could not wish for a rain of gold and have it suddenly appear. But Arcadia reflects the aggregate of its citizens’ desires and expectations. Reality here exists largely by consensus.”

  “So . . . basically Arcadia is what my college friends thought the world was like when they’d smoked enough weed.”

  “If you say so.”

  Caryl gazed out across the rippling sand, and I watched her profile. I realized that part of what made her so difficult to describe was that her every facial feature was the definition of “average.” Her mixed ancestry made her a blend of India and Africa and eastern Europe, a visual mean of humanity. She was indistinct, forgettable, and yet somehow in this light, perfect. I couldn’t stop staring at her.

  “Caryl,” I said. “About what you said, at the soundstage.”

  She held up a silk-gloved hand to forestall me, not having to ask what I meant. “I consider the matter concluded,” she said. “You were correct, and if I’d had Elliott I’d have understood that immediately.”

  Something in me twisted a little. “You’re saying I was right about not being relationship material.”

  “That’s a harsh way of putting it,” said Caryl. “But you and I are both very ill in different ways, and my prefrontal cortex is underdeveloped even for a nineteen-year-old.”

  “But you can be grown-up temporarily. For long stretches of time.”

  She shook her head. “Absence of emotion is not maturity,” she said, “though it’s easy to mistake. Part of maturity is learning to deprioritize emotion, prevent it from taking the reins. But a large part is perspective, long-term decision making. While my duties over the last four years have helped develop my decision-making faculties, there are no shortcuts to perspective. Even without my emotions, I often make poor decisions, simply because I lack the life experience to inform them, and because I am more intelligent than most people I stubbornly resist outside advice.”

  I only partially heard what she was saying, because the entire time, I was staring at her profile and teetering on the precipice of touching her, turning her toward me, shutting her up with a kiss. There was no thought behind the impulse, no decision; it was driven by that sense of reckless impunity you feel in a dream.

  I might have done it, if not for the noise.

  We both heard it at once, coming from the direction where Caryl’s construct had disappeared. It was somewhere between the deep, coughing roar of a lion and the blast of a brass band. If sudden panic had a sound, that would be it.

  The hairs stood up on the back of my neck. I crowded close to Caryl. “Was that . . . ?”

  “I believe so.”

  And then we saw the thing loping across the sand. My Wikipedia research had in no way prepared me.

  It moved like a lion, muscles shifting under its bloodred hide, but its approach was faster than physics could account for. Its batlike wings were half unfolded, and its tail bristled with glasslike quills (venomous, and launchable, if the legends had it right). Its face was the worst part: big as a café table and human enough to plunge deeply into the uncanny valley, with a mouth that stretched from ear to ear. Its mane was matted and wild, the color of a dried wound.

  “I think I might be sick,” I said.

  “This is a predator,” said Caryl. “Show no weakness.”

  “Maybe I should wait on the other side of the Gate,” I squeaked. “You can report back.” Even if the cliff behind me had been real, I would have seriously considered jumping off it to get away from that thing.

  “I need you here if it tries to enchant me,” said Caryl.

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “Right,” I said. I started shivering convulsively. “I want to say for the record that I don’t think a thing should be allowed to have venomous tail spines and magic.”

  Caryl hadn’t taken her eyes off the beast. When it drew close enough, Caryl called out to it in the Unseelie tongue. It halted its approach and began to pace back and forth at shouting distance, its baleful crimson eyes fixed on us.

  “I told it we’ve come to submit to its demands,” Caryl said quietly. “Though that’s only a rough translation; fey languages do not work the way that human languages do. A conversation is rather like grappling; each utterance is an attempt to secure a position.”

  I was still crowding her, but she hadn’t drawn away. She probably had worse emotions for Elliott to carry just now than claustrophobia.

  The breeze carried a rank, leonine scent as the creature slowly began stalking toward us. Its paws were velvety red, each the size of a tea tray, with claws like meat hooks. The sheer weight of the creature turned my joints to jelly; I could feel the impact of each foot vibrating through the ground.

  It stopped about fifteen feet away, braced its feet against the sand, and let out the same horrific roar, this time at close enough range that it rattled my rib cage.

  When the air calmed, Caryl released a few more sibilant, bone-chilling syllables in the Unseelie tongue. For a moment the manticore stood very still, only its tail lashing back and forth. The whiplike motion was so sharp that I expected quills to fly off in every direction. Then the manticore spoke to us in a deep, brassy voice.

  “Talk,” it said. “I’m listening.”

  Caryl and I both stood there in absolute silence for a full seven seconds, then turned to stare at each other. The manticore was surprisingly patient during this little display of idiocy, which is to say it didn’t eat either of us.

  “Greetings,” Caryl said, always first to find her composure. “I—did not expect that a manticore would speak English.”

  “I’d say I didn’t expect a human to be ignorant,” said the manticore, “but I don’t have your gift for lies.”

  Spells, venomous spines, and sarcasm. Great.

  “I shall not tax you for an explanation,” said Caryl. “I came here as a translator, but I see my services are not required. Allow me to introduce Baroness Millicent Roper.”

  “Save it,” said the manticore. “The only reason I haven’t already eaten you both is the stench of iron. I don’t answer to the ones who play at king and queen, so why would I give a damn who calls herself a baroness?”

  “Just as we thought,” Caryl murmured to me. “It does not recognize the king’s authority.”

  “I’m not an ‘it,’ ” the manticore snapped, and then reared up briefly on his hind legs to show us.

  I made an exaggerated display of being cowed by the magnificence of the monster’s genitals, and then he did the last thing I could possibly have expected. He laughed, a great rumbling sound that sent me into a fit of nervous giggles. Slowly he lowered himself back to all fours.

  “I like your pet,” he said to Caryl.

  “I’m Millie,” I said. “What
should we call you?”

  “I haven’t been named by your little ‘Project,’ if that’s what you mean.”

  “But you must have a name. How do fey address you?”

  Without warning, I found myself plunged into a waking nightmare.

  Red-hot cords wrapped around me; my entire body spasmed in agony, leaving twisting burn marks where the cords inched over my thrashing limbs. No sooner had a scream ripped out of me than the image was gone. Breathless and filmed with cold sweat, I looked down at my arms and found them unmarked.

  Caryl looked vaguely disoriented, which suggested that she had been subjected to the image as well.

  “I should have warned you not to ask that,” she said. “This is how fey are named here. A fey mother adds a word to the language to describe something for which there was formerly no word. Others are allowed to know the definition, but not the word itself.”

  “Because the word would give them power over the person.”

  “Yes. And so the Project approximates an English translation. Rivenholt, for example—a small, close-growing group of trees bisected by a seismic fissure in the earth. Without such a word, we can only address fey as the fey do, via the image or experience the word denotes. That can be . . . impractical.”

  I rubbed at my arms. “You are the Grand Duchess of Understatement.”

  “It isn’t often that I find myself in the position to name a fey,” Caryl said to the manticore, “but may we call you Throebrand?”

  “I couldn’t care less.”

  “You must consent, or the name will not function as truth.”

  The manticore rolled his great red eyes heavenward, then exhaled a weary-sounding stream of Unseelie words. The neglected-refrigerator smell of dark magic wafted through the air.

  “The naming ceremony is usually more formal,” said Caryl, “but that will suffice.”

  The manticore’s tail curled up and over his back in a way that was equal parts curious cat and angry scorpion. “What are you after?” he asked us. “You don’t expect me to believe you’re really here to help me.”