Digital Magic

by Philippa Ballantine

  They both stepped into the interior of the bubble and Penny began giggling again, but did not let Bakari share in the joke. Trying his best to ignore her, he concentrated on his control cube once again. A finger danced on the top and the bubble resealed itself. They were left staring at the construct through the curved wall of water. It made everything seem splayed and distorted, like some sort of Dali painting.

  The urge to get out washed over him and he sent the commands through the cube as quickly as possible—before common sense could kick in.

  The bubble shot up like it was really under water. Bakari was pressed back against the curve of the inside. It was so sudden that for a moment he blacked out.

  No. Bakari blinked. He hadn’t. It was just there was sudden and complete darkness. Waving his hand in front of his eyes didn’t produce anything, and only by pinching himself could he be sure that his body was still there.

  “I am black but comely, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, as the tents of Kedar, as the curtains of Solomon.” Penny’s voice came eerily out of the emptiness and it sent shivers up Bakari’s back. He recognized the Song of Solomon from the Bible and somehow in this inky nothing it didn’t feel like inane babble. It almost felt like memory.

  “Where are we?” he whispered, though he wasn’t quite sure why.

  “Beyond the construct.”

  That might have been true, but this was no Line he’d ever ridden. Nothing could be felt by his questing fingertips and he was beginning to crave light with an intensity that bordered on hysteria.

  Somehow Penny had found his hand; hers was small, yet comforting.

  “If we’re really out of Greer’s world, then we should be somewhere at least. This feels like nothing at all.” In here, his voice sounded young, and hers seemed to be the elder.

  “Greer did not use just her Line.”

  Bakari knew she was right. Greer had used some sort of magic, or Art as Ronan called it, as well as technology. Could it be that magic and the Line were similar? If that was so, then anything might be possible.

  Penny squeezed his hand surprisingly hard. “Ronan knows, Greer has found out, and now you have too, Bakari.”

  He couldn’t be sure of what he’d found. Could it be that all this time he’d been looking for magic, when he was already a wizard himself?

  “Humans have always had a kind of magic,” Penny said calmly. “They lost it for a while, but then they found it again, just in a different shape.”

  Bakari said a very bad word without thinking of the child next to him—indeed he was no longer convinced she was a child. He felt such an idiot; looking all of his life for some sign of magic, and yet here it was. But the question still remained. “Then where are we, if we’re not on the Line?”

  The child was silent. Bakari’s mind, though, was working overtime. Surely, if the Line was a kind of human magic, then perhaps the rules it obeyed could be used to do far more than he’d ever imagined.

  His fingers sought out the control cube and with a quick prayer to whatever deity was watching over them at the moment, he sketched out the command for light. The sudden influx of information to his brain was a real shock. He blinked and blinked, trying to understand what he could now see through the curve of their protective bubble. They were hovering at almost cloud level above a pitted and scarred landscape that stretched beyond the limits of vision. Bakari frowned. It reminded him of a kind of Line landscape, but as he got the numbers to blur and dance before his eyes, he realized that they were fundamentally different. This was the landscape of Greer’s mind.

  Hidden within each slope and crater were her memories, her desires and her fears. The possibilities opened up before Bakari. He let out a long breath and leaned back in the bubble, trying not to get too excited.

  Penny was smiling at him, almost as if she knew what was below her.

  Having refocused, Bakari slid his hand over the cube once more and tried to comprehend what he had here. But the numbers didn’t add up, there was more landscape here than there ever could have been for one human lifetime; he was able to locate memories and thoughts that must have been at least two hundred years old. Even the Infinity Virus had not been discovered back then, it was something from only the last fifty years.

  “It’s impossible,” he muttered. What was even more confusing was he could begin to see and feel what Greer had been forced to live with all her life; the voices from the past, the great weight of sorrow and despair the ghosts carried with them. They scuttled over the landscape, narrow flashes of white that carried no weight but plenty of horror.

  “What the Hell is she?” he finally asked Penny, sure now that the girl too was more than she seemed.

  “She is like Ella, the hope of a power, but a plant too long grown under the darkness. She has lost her way…”

  Her small voice managed to convey a great weight of sadness, more than any child could have ever known. Bakari frowned, certain that he was going to get nothing more educational out of Penny. The girl might as well have been one of those sibyls, or chattering on in tongues like some preacher.

  “Well—whatever she is, if I play her like a subroutine, I might just be able to help Ella. It’ll take some doing, but if I can just find the right connections and the right memories…”

  Bakari grinned at the implications. There was certainly something very right about using the woman who had tortured him to help his best friend out of trouble. And she wouldn’t even know that she’d done it.

  It was a good thing that Nana was much loved by the other villagers, for when Aroha went banging on their doors, demanding they come up to the house, if she had been anyone else she would have been sent on her way. All she could stammer out was that there was a terrible threat to the village and her Nana needed everyone to gather her at her home. The recent war meant that anything was possible, and there must have been certain urgency about a wide-eyed, very much awake child appearing at their homes. Perhaps they too sensed something drifting down from the hills, a hint of the danger coming down on them. So all thirty villagers wrapped themselves up in blankets and what woolens came to hand, and followed Aroha back to her house; even Daniel, whom she hadn’t spoken to since their return, nodded and obeyed.

  When the rag-tag bunch arrived at the house on the low rise, it was to a totally different scene than Aroha had left. Nana had turned on all the lights, powering them with the remaining oil into the small generator, making the night thud with noise. The house was blazing, like a beacon against the dark night, and Nana stood there. Aroha gasped, and beside her the others also stood open-mouthed.

  Nana was waiting for them, but she was no longer the normal old woman with her stained apron and knurled hands, now she was a vision of what her old glory might have been. The long hair, so often hidden in a tight bun, was freed and cast about her shoulders in magnificent silver and dark waves. It moved in unseen winds. She wore a midnight blue cloak, though where that had come from Aroha could not say. The wrinkled face, which had so often seemed careworn, now was cast in beautiful relief like that of a benevolent goddess, ancient but not diminished by its age.

  Aroha thought her heart would break. It was as if all the everyday worries and concerns had been washed away to show the awe inspiring person beneath.

  Her voice when she finally spoke to the shocked villagers was full of kindness and love. “My dearest friends—don’t be afraid.” There was magic in that voice, a kind that reminded all that heard it of the women who had loved them in their life; mothers, sisters, wives or daughters.

  “Come into the circle,” Nana said. And looking down they could see it, the thinnest line of silver somehow woven into the earth itself. “Step over and join me.”

  Unquestioningly they did so, instinctively stepping high over the circle, not breaking the endless coil that Nana had woven.

  “What is it, Mrs. Bennetts?” Jan asked, her voice hushed. Even before Nana had thrown off her disguise, the villagers had always held her in a special sort o
f awe, never calling her by anything but her last name and never coming up to the house unless invited.

  “We’ve all seen a lot recently,” Nana stepped down among them, showing that she was still part of the village, even if they were too scared to touch her.“The war, drones, death—but there is something else coming to these hills that is even more terrible; another world, with deadly creatures.”

  Aroha looked up and around her. They should have laughed and trooped back to their houses annoyed and grumpy, but the night wouldn’t let them. A primitive human instinct told them that something was coming, even if they didn’t acknowledge it in their modern consciences. They could feel it at the back of their necks and in the dreadful clenching of their bowels. The group swayed slightly, but no one said anything.

  Sally broke free of her crowd of siblings and squeezed her way to Aroha’s side. Her eyes were very wide and her face so pale that her freckles stood out like a giraffe's spots. Aroha knew the reason; in the light of her Nana’s transformation, her own was revealed. Reflected in Sally’s look was the knowledge of how she herself appeared, her skin the same dark brown, but her eyes were all iris and the colour of the deep night, blue-black. It was all too obvious she wasn’t human.

  Sally’s throat bobbed but she said nothing, just snuggled in close to her friend. Aroha could only wish that she was able to understand the human fear she should be feeling. But she had seen what was coming down from the hills and her fear was more than just some ill defined mass.

  Some part of her understood the fell creatures.

  The humans about her were talking in hushed voices, recalling myths and legends and trying to find a way to put this night into some sort of context. But none of them doubted the silver lit figure of Aroha’s Nana.

  She stood calmly among them, but they avoided her touch, not out of fear but reverence. Her narrow frame was somehow more than it had ever been, thinness and frailty transformed into a type of concentrated strength. Now Aroha could almost see the Fey creature she once had been shining through the mortal shell. It made her afraid that she had lost the woman she loved.

  Then Nana looked down and her eyes were not those of a distant goddess, but rather the pools of kindness they had always been. She reached out and took her granddaughter’s hand.

  “Are we going to die, Mrs. Bennetts?” Although Sally’s body trembled her voice did not waver.

  “Not if the circle stays strong, dear,” Nana pulled the children closer, wrapping her other arm around Sally, “and the protection of the earth mother is within it—it shall not break.”

  In an instant the night changed from threatening to terrifying. The Unmaker’s creatures appeared suddenly out of the darkness, sliding their knife-like bodies from the shadow to stand in the light of the house, the better to strike fear. Every human sense was repelled by them; the odd angular set of their razor limbs, the scent of death which rolled out from them, and the faintest of hums that annoyed the ear. Everything about them combined to drive the humans into hysteria.

  Their sub vocal screams knocked Aroha in the chest and left her breathless, yet her grandmother was not touched by it. The silver light of her presence pushed out, encompassing all the gasping, shivering humans within its nimbus.

  “Hold, my friends,” she said in a voice which rose above the noise of the monsters, and every face turned to her. “Stay strong and they cannot touch us.”

  Though the evil beyond had power, no one doubted when they looked upon her that she spoke the truth. In the dark she glowed, holding onto Aroha and Sally and appearing to be a statue of feminine strength and determination. The villagers turned to her, filling their vision with her hope, rather than with the terror beyond the circle. As long as she kept talking, they would not panic and break the circle.

  She told them of the Fey, her own world, wrapping them in words of beauty and majesty. The rolling hills beneath which they made their homes, the glittering joy of the Court of the Queen of Fey, the endless woods and bush where creatures of legend played. Each detail glowed in their minds like jewels. They were carried away beyond the danger and wrapped in her memories.

  However not quite all of them were transported. Aroha could hear the words that fell from her Nana’s lips, could comprehend their beauty, but it did not weave its spell around her completely, for that Art was hers as well. So she could look about her, into the astonished faces that she’d known all her life, and even beyond, if she dared.

  Despite the horror, she wanted to see the face of her enemies. Those soulless eyes were ever fixed on the villagers, but they made no attempt to breach the circle. They swayed lightly on their feet, as if to say they could strike at any instant. The very shape they wore was designed to make the skin crawl, like fell spiders made of bone and poison.

  Sally caught sight of their outline and clutched Aroha with a terrified whimper.

  “We’re safe,” Aroha whispered. “Nana won’t let anything happen to us.”

  Out of the side of her vision, it was obvious that not everyone was stricken with fear. Daniel was standing a little apart from the villagers, staring out at the monsters beyond the circle. He had his hands in his pockets and was swaying slightly from side to side.

  Aroha frowned. He seemed untouched by fear at all.

  Untangling Sally’s hands from around her and reattaching them around Nana, she slipped away to get a closer look.

  Her steps were cautious, sliding through the wet grass slowly while the weight of the greenstone mere inside her grew with each footfall. And there was heat, too, as she got towards the edge of Nana’s circle, so it felt like she was drawing closer to an open oven; her skin balked at it.

  She stood hesitantly a few feet from her friend. “Daniel?”

  He didn’t seem to hear, but all the sensations around Aroha intensified, the mere, the heat and now a faint hiss in the air from the creatures. Aroha chewed the inside of her cheek and tried not to notice that now they were congregating around the section of the circle where Daniel stood.

  “I’ve got to thank you Aroha,” Daniel was suddenly holding her by the shoulders. “You opened my eyes. I would never have guessed there was magic in the world.”

  She mumbled something, unsure what to say to something so unexpected.

  Daniel was grinning. “But I’ve seen a Taniwha, and seen magic done. The world seems… bigger somehow.”

  “Come back to the middle,” Aroha begged, feeling the heat increase and the approach of her own growing panic.

  He didn’t notice her. “I mean, you can do so much more with magic in your life.” His eyes trailed towards the monsters beyond. “Anything is possible.”

  She could barely breathe now, and the hisses had changed, becoming more like whispers. Their meaning eluded her, but the threat and hunger in them was plain to feel.

  “Please, Daniel,” she was almost screaming now, tugging on his shirt sleeve though it felt as hot as a piece of glowing metal. Somewhere back amongst the crowd she heard Nana call her name.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he replied softly. “It’ll all be OK.” Then he broke the circle.

  The world dissolved into a series of horror-filled flashes. Daniel’s foot kicked aside the precious powder the circle was made of. It flew out of place in an arch of silver dust.

  It was the moment the monsters had been waiting for. Daniel went forward to meet them and Aroha spun away, back towards all she loved.

  Nana’s face was folded in fear and anger. None of the villagers had seen or felt what he’d done, but she had. Now clutching Sally to her, she raced to reach Aroha. She was quick, but not as quick as the Seeds which came pouring through the broken gap.

  Daniel was standing there. Aroha caught his moment of death like a snapshot on her retina. His arms were open and he greeted the monsters with a laugh of sheer joy, as if they were his long lost brothers. That cry of happiness was cut short. He had let them in, but they held no gratitude. A long leg flashed out, and the man who had become
her friend was gone in a spray of scarlet.

  Aroha didn’t have enough time to cry out before Nana’s arms were around her and the chaos was flowing towards them. It had been terrifying to see the monsters destroying the Folk—but they had not been creatures of blood and flesh, and what the Seeds brought to the villagers was a new kind of horror.

  Aroha could not close her eyes; she wanted to, but they would not obey. She, unlike Sally, saw the villagers try to flee from the broken circle. Jan was pinioned many times by dagger-like claws. She writhed under them like a terrible science dissection. Dan Flinders, who had seemed all muscle and towering strength, was cut down from behind. Even poor old Mrs. Mayhew, who had produced marvelous toffee and shown Aroha how to make hokey pokey, was in an instant turned into something unrecognizable. Sally’s family was gone in a blur of whirling blades.

  The monsters were efficient. However, around Nana, they paused. She clutched the children to her and glared back at them. The silver light was still about her. Sally was thrashing and screaming into her side while Aroha wished she could do the same.

  “Old woman,” the creatures had voices, which was somehow even more horrific. One spoke with an airy hiss, as orifices down its sides pumped, “You are far from home.”

  Nana’s heart was beating fast, but she spoke without apparent fear. “As are you, Seed of the Unmaker.”

  “We heard. We awoke. We answered when the power stirred.” They shuffled fractionally closer, trailing the debris of the villagers, like they didn’t matter. “Give us the girl.”

  Nana laughed shortly and tightened her arms around the children, but she too was moving fractionally, turning the three of them away from the house. “You have a sense of humour, enemy mine.”

  The lead monster’s head cocked, swiveling on its white hard neck, and the eyes which were as black as unbeing fixed on Aroha with deadly intensity. “The Child is nothing. She woke us. When she is gone, then we too will go.”