Julia Unbound

by Catherine Egan

  “Without her knowing—I made sure of that, believe me—I found out what she’s done with the little boy, Gennady’s son.”

  Still vanished, I go for her, but there is something between her and me—something in the air. I press against it frantically. It feels like nothing, and yet I can’t get closer to her. I try to vanish farther and reappear next to her, but that doesn’t work either. I hover two steps back from the world, heart thundering. I don’t know how to stop what is happening.

  “She took him to Ragg Rock,” says Lady Laroche.

  “How?”

  “By requesting it of Silver Moya. So simple! Ragg Rock gave her entry and takes care of the boy where you cannot reach him.”

  Again I press hard against the invisible barrier in the air around her. I push and push until it starts to give a little. Casimir sits back and strokes his beard.

  “Mrs. Och’s friend, the professor, told me a little bit, and the rest I took from Julia’s memories,” Lady Laroche continues eagerly. “You have two parts of the Book, but the other part Gennady put in his boy. If I give you the boy, you could reassemble it, and your power would be tremendous—like the old times when the Xianren ruled the world. Reassembling the Book would also pull Kahge back into the world. All the magic that has been draining out of the world since the Book was broken returned to it. A world disrupted. What would that look like?”

  Casimir smiles grimly. “Are you so sure you’d like that world?”

  The barrier around her feels like air and yet terribly dense, too thick to move through. I force my way into it and it presses around me, pouring into my lungs, stealing my breath.

  “You think we have been at cross-purposes, but we are not!” cries Lady Laroche. “The world is large enough for both of us, and we could wield our powers as we wished. A truce, and the world disrupted completely. No more question of magic being stamped out. Only the magical could rule in such a world. We have been playing for Frayne as if it mattered, but it would not matter if you held The Book of Disruption and Kahge came to earth. You could leave Frayne to witches—to me. Your power would be far greater than ours, after all.”

  “How will you give me the boy?”

  Oh, the awful flatness of his voice, his eyes, and I’m caught in this heavy, airless thing that surrounds her, trying to force my way through it, unable to touch either of them.

  “I will show you. But I want your promise that you will give me two things in return.”

  “Very well.”

  “I want Frayne and I want Horthy.”

  “If I reassemble The Book of Disruption due to your help, you can have Frayne,” he says. “But not Agoston Horthy.”

  “Why?” she cries. “What can he matter to you?”

  The pressure of the barrier around me is crushing, but I keep struggling, though it’s too late to stop what has already been said.

  “He does not matter to me,” says Casimir. “But you will let him live or you will suffer the consequences.”

  “He is a butcher of witches. I will not let him live.”

  “I do not like to repeat myself and will do so only once,” says Casimir. “You will let him live or you will suffer the consequences. This point is nonnegotiable.”

  I still have the picture, Shey with Agoston Horthy and the other little boy. The brother who drowned. That wailing, bloated creature under the parliament, playing with Horthy in the woods by night—the drowned child somehow reanimated. Casimir still fears Shey. He won’t give up her son to harm. My mind is racing, and all the pieces of this puzzle are before me, but I can’t yet assemble them, not quite. I keep inching farther into the barrier.

  “Very well,” says Lady Laroche, looking like she’s just swallowed broken glass. “Frayne, then. I’ll leave Horthy be. I have another gift for you. A gift that doubles as a favor to me. Princess Zara and a group of revolutionaries are meeting right now at your sister’s old house. Your brother Gennady is with them too. They have betrayed me and shut me out. I’ve lifted the spells around the house, so there is nothing to keep you out. I want them dead. All of them.”

  “Pia will see to it,” Casimir says, giving Pia a nod.

  For a moment, I think I’m through the barrier, and then I hit something scorching hot. I recoil fast, closing my teeth around a cry of pain and fear, struggling to stay vanished. The thick, invisible wall ejects me so quickly that I am staggering back into the room, everything blurred now by my tears as well as by my vanishing, but Lady Laroche shows no sign of having noticed anything and nor does Casimir. Still fixed on each other.

  “And?” he says to Lady Laroche. “How will you get me the boy?”

  “You can go to Ragg Rock,” she says. “With this.”

  She holds out a vial to him. “Julia’s blood. If you force Silver Moya to use it, Ragg Rock will let you pass.”

  He takes it with his long, pale fingers, and blast it all, I can’t touch him to get it back now. “Is it really hers? If you are lying, you will pay for it.”

  “It is hers.”

  “Go now,” says Casimir to Pia, pocketing the vial of my blood. “Bring the house down quickly, so those inside have no chance to get out.”

  She opens the door. He is rising from his chair. I’m going to have to move very fast if I’m to beat both of them to their destinations, but they still have to travel across the city, and I can do it in vanishing leaps. The Scola is closer, and Pia will be faster than he is, so I go to Mrs. Och’s house first.

  When I appear suddenly in Mrs. Och’s front parlor, crashing into the tea table, six people jump out of their seats: Dek, Zara, Professor Baranyi, Mrs. Freeley, Gennady, and Mr. Faruk.

  “Ah, here’s Julia,” says Mr. Faruk.

  “Pia is coming here to kill you all,” I say, thinking how just once it would be nice to turn up somewhere and ask what’s for lunch. “Casimir just met with Lady Laroche. We need to get out.”

  “And go where?” asks Zara, blanching.

  “The Marrow?” I suggest.

  “The university,” says Professor Baranyi. “Esme and I agreed on an emergency meeting place in the planetary studies building. A professor’s chambers—he is a friend.There are weapons if we need to defend ourselves.”

  “All right,” I agree. “It’ll be faster and safer if I take you vanished.” I remember how, when I rescued Lorka from Deadman’s Square, I also took the soldier hanging on to him. I’ve got two hands, and weight means nothing between the world and Kahge. “I can take you two at a time. How do I get there?”

  “Go to the Anderov Scole University clock tower, and I will show you the building,” says the professor.

  “Dek,” I say, reaching for him.

  “The professor and Zara first,” he says.

  His face is set, and I don’t want to waste time arguing. I take the professor by the hand. His dark eyes meet mine, owlish behind his spectacles. Zara scoops Strig up in one arm and grips my other hand firmly. I yank all three of us back, aiming out the window at the bit of blue summer sky I can see above the garden. Out over the city we go, out of our bodies and then narrowing back into ourselves, over the university, reappearing at the base of the clock tower.

  Professor Baranyi staggers away from me, looking sick. Zara has experienced this before, when I was not yet as good at it as I am now, and she is more composed. Strig is wriggling in her arms, hooting and meowing frantically. Luckily, the campus is quiet, nobody in sight. Everybody is either at Zey’s funeral or indoors.

  “Hurry up,” I hiss at the professor. “Which building?”

  “That row of windows, you see?” He points across the square. “On the fourth floor.”

  “I’ll get us inside,” I say, grabbing them both and vanishing us out of the world again. We reappear in a large study attached to a cozy room with a stove—Professor Baranyi’s friend’s ch
ambers. Now that I know where it is, I can get my brother safe.

  “Take Mr. Faruk and Mrs. Freeley next,” he says when I return.

  “Dek!” I shout, furious.

  “Go on, I know another way if it comes to that,” says Mrs. Freeley, and she pushes Dek into my arms. I pull him out of the world before he can struggle and deposit him in the room at the university with the professor and Zara.

  “Hurry,” he says to me. “Bring the others.”

  When I get back, Gennady, Mrs. Freeley, and Mr. Faruk are all sitting quite calmly in the parlor.

  “Do any of you want to be rescued?” I shout at them. I’m half inclined to leave them there and go straight to Silver Moya’s.

  At that moment, the front door is ripped off its hinges. Pia appears in the doorway of the parlor with a flaming metal canister in her hand. How did she get here so quickly? But then, I can think of two occasions when she’s crossed cities at terrible speeds carrying me on her back—I shouldn’t be so shocked.

  “This will bring the house down around us,” says Pia, holding up the canister. “Julia, hurry. I cannot hold out for long.”

  “Run,” I tell everybody.

  “Don’t run,” rasps Pia. She grips the doorframe with one hand. “I’ll catch you if you run. Go somewhere I can’t find you.”

  “Come,” says Mrs. Freeley briskly. We follow her into the basement. She tears up a panel in the floor of the wine cellar and steps back. “Down you all go.”

  We scramble down the ladder one at a time and then along a narrow tunnel. There is a tremendous sound, the world rocking, and I am knocked off my feet, pebbles raining down around me. We lie there in the tunnel, no sound but some crashing above and our panting, panicked breathing in the dark.

  The dust settles. Mr. Faruk strikes a match.

  “The tunnel is clear ahead,” he says.

  We stumble onward. The tunnel brings us up and out into a small toolshed in a neighboring garden. I can hear shouts from the street and houses nearby.

  “We should be all right here for a little bit,” says Mr. Faruk. “Long enough for you to get us to the university.”

  My blood is beating out the seconds. I can’t just leave them here, but I need to get to Ragg Rock, no time, no time, no time. Casimir won’t have made it yet to the clock shop, I tell myself, but I have no real sense of how many minutes have passed.

  “Mrs. Freeley and Gennady, please go ahead,” says Mr. Faruk politely, like he’s holding a carriage door for them. As I pull us up and over the street, I see that Mrs. Och’s house is a flaming mass of rubble, soldiers closing in on it. No sign of Pia, and my heart clenches. I’m surprised by how much I hope she is not buried underneath all of that.

  I leave Mrs. Freeley and Gennady with the others in the university chambers and go back to the toolshed, but Mr. Faruk is gone.

  The clock shop in the Twist has been torn to pieces—the windows broken, the door off its hinges, the street deserted. My heart plunges.

  I’m about to go through the doorway when someone steps out of it. Something. He is shaped like a man but white as ash. He stands before me naked, all twisted ropey muscles, symbols I don’t recognize tattooed across his body. He is holding a bloodstained blade in each hand. His white hair flows down his back, and there is blood in his hair too, blood on his arms, splashes on his chalky face. His eyes are depthless. I remember these creatures—they chased us from Casimir’s fortress half a year ago in ships, and I saw them in Lidari’s memory, before he plunged off the cliff.

  Casimir steps out of the shop, blood on his boots.

  “You,” he says, pointing a long, ringed finger at me. “You should be mine by now. Where is your brother?”

  I vanish away from him, landing hard in front of Liddy’s shop. I go straight through to the back without announcing myself. Liddy is alone. The room smells of coffee and bread. A strange oasis in a city about to erupt. Her eyes light up as the door opens, and then something in her expression falls a little when she sees me, like she’s disappointed.

  “Julia, are you all right?”

  “I’m really not. Maybe you guessed this, but I hid Theo in Ragg Rock. Now Casimir has my blood, and I think he tried to use it to get there. Silver Moya is dead. I didn’t see Theo, so I’m hoping she refused to help him. I need to get to Ragg Rock and warn them. I need to find another Silver Moya before he does.”

  “There are a few,” she says briskly. “There is one on the coast. It would take Casimir some time to get there. She is cagey, though I’m not sure she’d help you. You can travel quickly and so perhaps somewhere farther is better, out of his reach, where I have friends.”

  I don’t ask how she knows how fast I can travel. She takes out a map and pokes an ancient finger at it.

  “Brillimar, in Ingle. Go to this address.” She scribbles something down for me on the back of the map. “Ask for Ellis and tell him Liddy in Spira City sent you. He’ll remember me, and he’ll take you to the Inglese Silver Moya.”

  I go out into the street with the map, and I vanish. Farther and farther. Spira City tilts below me. I fix my sights on the northern horizon and return to my body, gasping on a hill. A startled goat trots away from me. Up and out again I go, fixing on the next horizon, and the next. A cowshed, scraggled forest, rocks and moor, and then the coastline, the gray, churning channel between Frayne and Ingle.

  With trembling hands I take out Liddy’s map and examine it, a group of seagulls eyeing me suspiciously. I vanish and pull my perspective high enough that I can see the shape of the Inglese coastline. I come down on the white cliffs, check the map again, shaking and sweating, and then away from my body once more, leaping out and across the world.

  It takes me half the day to reach Brillimar. Perhaps I could do it faster if I weren’t afraid of unhooking myself completely from the world, being unmoored in the sky, lost to myself. I run through the sleepy town, showing the address Liddy gave me to people I can’t talk to, asking for Ellis. Mostly people back away from me, pulling their children clear, frightened of this scarred girl lurching about in trousers like a mad thing. I should have thought to change into a dress. No doubt constables will be coming for me soon, but one woman with a basket of turnips points me to Ellis’s house. I bang on the door, and an old man opens it, gawping. He speaks Inglese, sounding worried.

  “Liddy sent me from Spira City,” I gabble at him. “I need Silver Moya.”

  “Great stars, a Fraynish girl!” he says, switching languages. His Fraynish is clumsy but easy enough to understand.

  “Silver Moya!” I shout. “There’s no time!”

  “Looks like, looks like,” he clucks. He pulls on a coat and boots and takes me to a little clock shop at the village center. I went right by it and did not notice it. I’d forgotten what Liddy said—they are all in clock shops. He knocks on the door and calls through it in Inglese. A woman wrapped in fur with a cloud of white hair around her puffy face opens the door.

  “Ragg Rock.” I am crying. “I need Ragg Rock.”

  They hustle me inside. I take my knife from my boot and draw it across my palm, making a thin line of blood that quickly spills over my hand. The woman mops it up, scolding, but she takes a bit for the inkpot too. Birds fly around the shop freely, cheeping and shitting. The man is binding my hand, talking to me in his unfamiliar Inglese. Silver Moya is writing, the world is darkening and slowing down, thank all the holies. The birds slow down too, suddenly moving like snails through the air, all but one, bright-eyed and alert, stopping in midair right in front of me.

  I try to say thank you. I try to say I’m sorry. The bird swoops out a bright new door, and I go after it.

  The archway on the hill to Ragg Rock lies in smoking ruins. The sometime-moat, sometime-forest is all ash now—a scorched ring around the blasted rock. The house at the top is smashed, a shambles. I run screamin
g up the path, calling them, but there is no answer. This despair is wider than all the world.

  I find the pieces of Ragg Rock scattered near the stone dial, which has been riven in two, steam pouring out of the place where it has split. First a leg. Then her shoulder and the top of her arm. A hand. Her head—the face a muddy mess. I pick it up. One pebble eye is missing, but the remaining eye fixes on me. The lips move but nothing comes out; her mouth is full of gravel and dirt. Horrified, I nearly drop the head. With shaking hands, I place it gently on the ground and scramble around, trying to find the rest of her. Once I have most of her laid out in one spot, I think I’ve figured out what her lips are trying to say: My. Pot.

  I run to the ruins of the hut, pulling aside the black beams. The smashed rabbit hutch, Frederick’s papers scattered and burnt. The pot is overturned but still in one piece, and when I turn it upright it pools with hot red mud again. It is too heavy to lift, so I have to go back to the broken dial and carry Ragg Rock in pieces up the hill. Slowly and painstakingly, I start to put her back together. Once I get her head on her body and one arm roughly reattached, she is able to help. She sculpts herself back into the shape of a woman with swift determination. She grabs a stone from the ground and shoves it into the empty mud eye socket to make a second eye, larger than the first.

  “Where are they?” I ask her over and over, until she pulls some of the gravel out of her mouth and works at her tongue with her fingers for a few seconds. Her throat moves, rippling, like she’s building herself on the inside.

  Then she says, in my voice: “I thought it was you.”

  “They stole my blood,” I sob. “I’m so sorry. Where is Theo?”

  “It was the second time. A request that felt like you. The first one was a witch, alone.”

  So Lady Laroche tried to come and snatch Theo herself, first. I shouldn’t be surprised.

  “The first one was not so strong,” says Ragg Rock, and now she is speaking in Frederick’s voice, with his accent and inflections. “When I saw it wasn’t you, I shut her out easily and sent her back. Then it happened again…a call from your blood. Frederick hid Theo. He promised they’d come back, and I agreed; I didn’t want my boy in danger. I thought if it still wasn’t you I would send the intruder back again, and we’d know you were dead. But this time it was her—the witch who gave the creatures in Kahge their body parts, senses, and feelings. I remembered her, though it was half a century ago. She was too strong for me. She pushed right through. She wanted to get to Kahge. She tore this place apart, tore me apart, trying to call the shadows from Kahge, but they would not come, of course. And the Xianren was with her—Lan Camshe. Looking for my Theo.”