Pacific Fire
Page 9
“That’s right.”
“And it’s not only the magic he deliberately consumes, is it? He can draw up osteomantic essences from the ground, and from the air. It’s like osmosis with him.”
“His father brought him up to do that. So?”
She hesitated, her face grave, as if she were breaking some bad news to him. “Sam, you should be one of the most powerful osteomancers on earth. Maybe stronger than Daniel. But you never really have been.”
Sam didn’t like where she was going.
“Did it ever occur to you,” she continued, drawing it out slowly, as if she was still deciding whether or not to say what was on her mind, “that Daniel’s been draining your magic?”
“No,” he said. “It never has.”
Which was a lie.
Daniel kept telling him how stuffed with osteomantic power he should be. He was grown from the Hierarch’s cells. So why wasn’t he as strong as the Hierarch? Why wasn’t he as strong as Daniel? And why was Daniel able to retain so much osteomancy when he’d eaten so little magic since leaving Los Angeles?
Daniel was a sponge. He’d told Sam so himself. When fighting the Hierarch, he’d drawn magic from the air the people of Los Angeles exhaled, and from the water vapor, and from the earth.
What if he’d been drawing magic from Sam?
Sam didn’t want to believe it. But now that the thought was out in the open, he knew he’d never be free of it.
“That’s bullshit,” he said.
The ground shivered. A dim moan rose up from great depths.
* * *
Sofía seemed to gain some strength as their long march in the Abyss wore on. It took more and more work to convince her to rest, and she asked Em for her shotgun back. Sam hung behind, indulging himself in angst and worry.
The canyon walls were still oppressively high. With the ground’s every jerk and shudder, he felt as if he’d stepped on a squeaky board and drawn attention.
Em kept up a steady conversation with Sofía, maybe to pass the time, but more likely to see how she was dealing with the effects of her head injury.
“He was a foot soldier in the Alejandro’s operation,” Sofía was saying. “Not high up. He never even met the man himself. But it was steady work, tax free.”
Em had asked how she met Fernando.
“I was a pilot for the Department of Water and Power. This was before Gabriel Argent, back when William Mulholland was running it. Mostly I just took up DWP engineers for inspections. Dams, aqueducts, the mandala, that kind of thing. One day I’m on the airstrip in Santa Monica, about to fly solo to Pyramid Lake, when I see a bunch of clowns in commando gear raiding the airport. They’re throwing grenades and shooting things up and all that sort of crap. The Alejandro was making a strike against the chief water mage, and how stupid is that, right? So, there I am, in my plane, and I figure my best bet is to buzz off and get in the air and ignore all the bullshit on the ground and just make my pickup in Pyramid Lake. Save my life, earn my paycheck.”
“Makes sense,” Em said.
“So I’m revving up, and then there’s this guy standing a couple yards in front of my nose. He’s all dressed up, helmet, goggles, body armor, and a gun bigger than he is, aimed right at my head. I figure, screw this idiot, I’m going to push my propeller at him and put him in the wood chipper. But just before I release the brake, he pulls down his goggles. He’s got a baby face, and a ridiculous mustache, and his eyes … He’s looking at me like I’m the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen. I swear, it was just like that. And he puts his gun on the ground. And he walks over to my passenger side and knocks on the door. Shave and a haircut.”
Sofía shook her head and laughed, a little sunlight in the valley.
“And I let him in. He says it was love at first sight. I say it was love at first year and a half. But, anyway, I haven’t been able to get rid of him since.”
Sam had heard enough to knock him out of his sullen funk. He jogged a few steps to catch up to Em and Sofía, and something below cracked like a redwood tree snapping in two. The ground jolted hard and threw him into the sand.
Fissures snaked up the canyon walls, dislodging huge slabs of rock that crashed down like bombs. Loose dirt boiled up through new scars in the earth. Sam struggled to his feet, blinded and choked by billowing clouds of dust. Blunt pillars of stone emerged from the earth, wide as oil barrels, orange as ingots in a furnace. Sam only glimpsed them before they were lost behind the dust, but they looked like colossal fingers, digging their way from a grave. The fingers broke though entirely in an explosion of dirt and rocks and uprooted creosote. An entire hand rose on a treelike wrist, soaring ten feet in the air. The fingers closed with the sound of stone grating against stone.
“Run,” Sam coughed.
Sam and Em and Sofía lurched and stumbled over the shaking, shifting terrain. Tremendous booms sounded behind them, maybe just boulders impacting the ground, but too much like the footfalls of some enormous creature.
Despite knowing better, Sam turned and looked behind him.
Swirling grit abraded his eyes, but through his tears, he saw towers of boulders and clots of earth, entwined in plant roots, and a skin of rock that crackled and steamed, and magmatic crust cooling in air. At the summit of the formation was a great potato-shaped lump of stone the size of a garden shed, with asymmetrical fissures where eyes might have been. It was only a glimpse before it faded behind the storming dust, but Sam knew what he’d seen.
He dropped to one knee and pawed through his duffel for Daniel’s osteomancy kit. Inside, he found the bone of the dead osteomancer Dolores Shenandoah. It was bitter as charcoal and crumbled easily between his teeth. He chased it with vials of oils and pinches of acrid powder, not even bothering to look at or smell what he was consuming. He was dimly aware of Em and Sofía calling his name, but he didn’t turn around. He stood and faced the thing from the abyss, even as its thundering footsteps came closer.
The magic he’d eaten wouldn’t be enough. He would have to combine it with the magic that lived submerged in his bones, that he’d never truly been able to draw out. But now, he better, because Daniel wasn’t around to fight his battles for him.
And neither was Daniel here to drain his magic.
He reached for sense memories, the smells and tastes and tactile sensations of the magic he knew was in him, deep in his cells and raging fresh from the magic he’d just eaten. But he felt no ancient energies flowing through his blood, no lightning crackling over his hands.
He should run.
Time slowed, shifting from biological to geological pace, and everything blurred with motion. Every stone and swirl of dust and sound blended into a high-pitched buzz, as if the world were constructed of hummingbirds.
Sam hurt. His skin felt agonizingly raw, exposed to thin, frigid air. The sunlight sneaking through the top of the Abyss burned. He was no longer a creature of the surface world. He belonged deep down, in the crushing, molten realm of the king of the center of the world: the axis mundi dragon.
“Fall,” he said.
The creature was undone. Its stone fingers plummeted to the ground, tossing up plumes of earth. A leg caved in, and its entire body tilted. The great head slid off its shoulders, slowly at first, hampered by friction and teetering on a nodule of stone, then breaking free and crashing to earth.
A mournful groan shook the ground, sending up storms of birds and insects.
When the dust settled, there was no creature, only the aftermath of an avalanche. Whatever it was, Sam had reduced it to split rocks and gravel. He stood in the center of his handiwork, truly an osteomancer.
If only Daniel could see him now.
And then his sense of triumph dampened. What if Em was right? What if this moment couldn’t have happened with Daniel present?
“Sam?”
Em’s voice. It was barely more than a squeak.
She was among a scattering of stones, some the size of bowling balls, some merely
pebbles. Her skin and clothes were coated in the light brown of desert earth. Tears traced muddy paths down her face.
She was disassembling a pile of rocks. At first, Sam didn’t understand what she was doing. Then he saw a bloody, mangled hand emerging from the rubble.
“Help me,” Em croaked.
Together, they excavated Sofía. Her face looked as if it had been slapped with a bloody rag mop. Her nose was smashed flat. Scents of blood and stress hormones and the last tinges of adrenaline wafted from her body. Sam blocked those scents out. Sofía didn’t need medicine, she needed magic. She needed him. Osteomancy meant forcing one’s will over nature, and what mattered was not the patient, but the osteomancer.
Sam dug for odors of healing, of renewal. He reached for green smells, starfish and newts and regeneration. The sense memories broke through like a flood-shattered dam and surged from the deepest places and filled his hands.
He sliced his wrist open and bled into Sofia’s open mouth, into her pores.
Em straddled Sofía’s motionless form and started CPR.
Sam lost track of time. He bled until a gray film covered his vision, and everything grew distant, until Em dragged him away and he was too weak to stop her. She bandaged his wrist and made him sit in the sand.
“We lost her,” she said.
Impossible. He’d performed a great feat of magic. He’d found the power in his bones. He’d found the connection between his cells and the center of the earth. It was magic worthy of Daniel. Worthy of the Hierarch.
And yet there Sofía lay.
He’d lost her.
Fernando had lost his wife. Mayra and Ana and Miguel had lost their mother.
Sam had performed a great feat of magic and lost.
EIGHT
Daniel was a boy of twelve, sitting in the passenger seat of a stolen car while his mother drove down a ribbon of asphalt. The dusty farm fields of Central California stretched into the distance. In the east, the hint of the cold Sierra mountains loomed behind clouds.
He watched his mother drive in silence for a while, the muscles in her forearms tensing as she gripped the wheel. Her squinting stare made a circuit of the rearview mirror, driver’s-side mirror, passenger-side mirror, view to the sides, view to the horizon. It never seemed to land on Daniel.
He wanted to put his head in her lap, like he used to do when he was small, and sleep away horrors. Only hours ago, the Hierarch’s men stormed into the house he shared with his father and murdered him on the living room floor. They cut him apart with their long knives, and then the Hierarch himself arrived to eat him. He brought his own fork.
“How much longer?” Daniel asked.
A truck passed them, towing an open trailer of tomatoes, and she kept her hand on the gun between the seats until the truck was half a mile away.
“Just a few more hours,” she said.
“No, I mean until I see you again.”
“Oh. We won’t see each other for another twenty years, Daniel.”
He understood he was sick and in pain and dreaming, and they passed the next several miles in silence.
“I still don’t understand why you didn’t take me with you to San Francisco.”
Now she did look at Daniel, and her face wasn’t as he remembered it, but older. Time had hardened her features, made her jaw stronger, ground away the softness of her youth to leave truer stone behind.
“Otis told you why,” she said.
“But Otis lies.”
“The border crossing was too dangerous. And I wasn’t sure my friends in the Northern Kingdom were still my friends. I knew you’d be safer with him.”
“But you took my brother.”
“As a decoy. If our enemies thought I’d left Los Angeles with you, they wouldn’t look for you as hard in LA. Doesn’t that make sense?”
Daniel didn’t have to think about it, because he’d already spent twenty years thinking about it. “Yes,” he said. “My brother … my golem … he died. He was shot at the border. He died in a strawberry field.”
He watched the way her throat moved when she swallowed, and when she spoke again, he heard a roughness that most people would have missed. Messalina Sigilo was good at hiding her emotions from most people, but not Daniel.
“He didn’t die,” she said. “I saved him. I helped make him great.”
“Why didn’t you save me?”
She didn’t answer, and he put his head in her lap. She took her hand off the gun and ran her fingers through his hair, and he closed his eyes and awoke.
He was in a strange place with a familiar face looking down on him.
He tried to speak, but his throat and mouth produced only a sound like air leaking from a hose.
He needed to know if Sam was okay.
“Sam brought you to our safe house outside Thermal after you were poisoned with tsuchigumo toxins. Which, of course, meant we had to discontinue that safe house. We’re in the Funeral Mountains now. You’ve been here for two days, mostly perspiring all over our sheets. I did a pretty good job knitting you back up, and your own osteomantic defenses helped, but you’re not recovered yet. A few more days, I think.”
He brought her face into focus. She was silver haired, with the gray eyes and long, graceful nose of an Emma. This one was the doctor, the leader of the Mojave cell.
He tried to sit up, but the old Emma gently pushed him back down, and he didn’t have the strength to resist her. She smelled his breath and hair and took his hands and smelled his fingernails. His hands seemed far off, like things that belonged to someone else.
“You almost didn’t make it this time,” the Emma said. “But there’s always tomorrow.”
Daniel licked his lips. They felt like fish scales.
“Where’s Sam?”
She hesitated, just a beat, long enough for Daniel to nurture a sense of dread.
“Where’s Sam?” he said again.
“Gone to slay a dragon.”
Daniel propped himself up on his elbows and saw dark spots. He took a breath and closed his eyes until the spots cleared, then swung his aching legs over the side of the bed and put his feet down on the hardwood floor. The floor was deliciously warm. Lying down and resting his cheek against it would feel great, he imagined.
“You really are in no shape for this,” Emma said.
“Better shape than Sam. If he makes it to Catalina, they’ll vivisect him.” He shot her an accusing glare. “Dammit, Emma, Otis is running Catalina. You know how badly he wants Sam. How could you let him go?”
“We did try to keep him. We locked away the documents you got from Gabriel Argent and posted guards at the motorpool and gate. But he had an accomplice. One of our own. The good news is at least he’s not alone.”
Daniel forced himself upright. He felt like he was standing on the ceiling and about to come crashing down. Emma put a steadying hand on his shoulder. After a moment, his gravity normalized. He found his clothes neatly folded on a chest of drawers.
“Who’s with him? Someone experienced?”
“She goes by Em.”
“Em. I’ve met her, right? She’s only…”
“She’s eighteen now.”
“Sam ran off with a girl. Great. Guess I have to give the kid points for style.” He stepped into his blue jeans.
“Em is a girl who is personally responsible for the liberation of three captive golems and has participated in the liberation of at least a dozen more. She’s had sniper training, experience with munitions, and has been shot three times. I don’t know why she went with Sam, but it’s lucky for him she did.”
“I need a car,” Daniel said. “And gas. And food and supplies.”
“You’ll have it. We know how to outfit a mission.”
“Will I have your help? A team of Emmas would—”
“As I told Sam, your firedrake is outside our interests.”
“Even though one of your own is with Sam?”
“Even so,” the Emma said.
He buttoned up his old chambray shirt. It comforted him and made him feel a tiny bit stronger, like cotton armor. “Where’s my jacket?”
“Try the coat closet,” Emma said. “What’s your plan?”
Daniel shrugged on his jacket. “My plan is hoping all the things I’m scared of haven’t happened yet.”
* * *
He entered the ranger station, fairly certain the cabin’s half-collapsed roof would elect to finish itself off when he was under a beam. Small things scurried in a wet mulch of pine needles and fallen shingles, and the odors of shit and piss and mildew contributed to the sense that the entire house-sized structure was a dark, humid forest.
He went over to a peeling desk. Ministry of Wilderness brochures and various papers formed a sodden pile amid more pine needles and splintered shingles. The Ministry was one of many institutions in the Hierarchy that faded into unfunded deaths after Daniel killed the Hierarch. He supposed the world was a better place without the bastard old wizard, but not as good as it ought to be.
He brushed mouse droppings aside with a wad of decomposing paper and picked up the receiver of the desk phone without much optimism. The Emmas didn’t have phone service in their new safe house yet, but they said they’d restored the phone line here. It seemed impossible that anything in the ranger station could withstand decay and rodent teeth for more than a few days. But, to his surprise, he got a dial tone. He punched a number and listened to rings, and was surprised for a second time when someone picked up.
“Hello?” said a male voice. It was Fernando Bautista.
“This is Daniel. You know me. We’ve worked together.”
“Is this a secure line?”
If the Emmas had set it up, it was a very secure line. Probably.
“Can’t be sure. I’m looking for my boy.”
“He’s not here.”