The Paper Magician

by Charlie N. Holmberg

“No, no,” Ceony said, shooting up with a renewed vigor. Her clothes, sticky from the bloody valve, clung to her clammy skin. “Stop, stop. Please stop.”

  But the blood—thin blood, watery blood—continued to gush from the valve and overflow the rivers, inching closer and closer to Ceony’s feet.

  Ceony backstepped to the center of the chamber, the highest ground. The first tides of blood touched her shoe.

  Her skin turned to ice. Her lips numbed. “Thane!” she shouted, hugging her bag tightly to her. “Let me out of here!”

  She took another step, the blood up to her ankles. At this rate it would fill the entire chamber in minutes. Ceony couldn’t swim. She had nowhere to go.

  She really was going to drown.

  “Thane!” she screamed, trembling from chin to ankle. Even her cry shook.

  Anything but this. Anything but drowning.

  The blood continued to flow, the heart’s thumping deafening. She squeezed her eyes shut, released her bag, and pressed her palms to her ears. Too much.

  “Please, please, please . . .”

  The lapping blood around her feet vanished, leaving her socks dry, albeit stiff. Biting her lip, Ceony opened her eyes to shelves of familiar books and a ray of dust-filled light. She released a long breath and offered a silent thanks to both God and the paper magician.

  Images flickered around her: Thane in a gray coat instead of indigo, Folding on the floor, a blond man she didn’t know studying at the desk, another Thane in scarlet thumbing through books. The people flashed for half a second, sometimes a whole second, and then dissolved. Someone or something had pulled Ceony from the flooding chamber and stuck her here, but the heart itself seemed unsure as to what to show her.

  She spied over her shoulder, but the tight valve she had just passed through no longer throbbed behind her. It had been replaced by a tall shelf of books, all as they had been in Thane’s true library, though she noted these had been arranged by color across the entire wall, from shelf start to shelf end. She gaped at them. Red books, dark and light, lined the left shelf closest to the door, and following them sat a few orange books, then tawny and yellow books, and then white. On the right shelf the colors continued—green, blue, violet, gray, and black. Incredibly aesthetic, but entirely absurd. Thane’s library didn’t look like this at all. Was this a past arrangement, or a future one?

  Quick to her feet—which still wavered just a bit from her unpleasant traveling between chambers—Ceony took a moment to unfold and reanimate Fennel before picking through the titles, searching for something that might help her should Lira catch up to her. Something to fight with, to defend herself with. Even a heavy book for melee would do her better than nothing.

  Her index finger passed over Mating Habits of Crocodiles, A Living Paper Garden, and Frankenstein.

  “Ah,” she said, her hand pausing on a short, fawn-colored volume where the orange covers shifted to the yellow spectrum: Basic Chain Spells. To her relief, the book felt solid beneath her fingers. Perhaps in a heart, knowledge was more stable than memory or thought. Judging by the window in his office, it was clear Thane knew paper chains well.

  She opened Basic Chain Spells to the table of contents, the constant PUM-Pom-poom in the distance reminding her of the need for swiftness. Lira could have warped out of Thane’s heart and be throwing it into the ocean right now for all Ceony knew, and Thane’s time was ticking away besides.

  Skipping the table of contents, Ceony began thumbing through pages illustrated with black-and-white diagrams of different chains from basic to complex. She spied the vitality chain Thane had used on both the birthing woman and himself, but kept turning the pages.

  The word shield popped out at her, and she paused just past the book’s midway point. She read quickly.

  The three-fold shield chain is the most basic of the defense chains. The breadth of its links does not matter, so long as their length is enough to circumvent the item one wishes to protect.

  A link is created by taking a standard 8" x 11" sheet and slicing it in half longways, as seen in Figure 1—

  Ceony’s eyes scanned the figures and their captions, then she turned the page and scanned them again, committing them to memory. Setting the book down, she pulled sheets of paper out of her bag until she found pieces already cut as the diagram showed.

  She began Folding, her hands unsteady, but not shaking quite as badly as they had when she formed Thane’s pathetic heart. She prayed it still beat. If he died . . .

  Ceony didn’t want to think too hard on the idea.

  She matched up the edges and creased them. Another flash of Thane appeared behind her with his Folding board, this one in the correct shade of indigo. He phased in and out, Folding different things with his hands, his voice pealing and cutting short. Ceony could barely make out a word he said, but she thought she heard her name.

  She saw a flash of herself in her apprentice’s uniform before both apparitions vanished.

  Ceony refocused on her chain. “Do you want to keep teaching me?” she asked as she started her second link, working a little faster now that her fingers knew the Folds. The faint tingling sensation she felt when Folding now had almost become natural to her. “I don’t mind, if you do.”

  Ceony listened to the steady, distant beats of Thane’s heart as her fingers pressed paper and her nails set the Folds’ creases. When her chain reached just long enough, she hooked its ends together diagonally over her breast and pulled out another sheet of square paper, Folding something Thane had given her several days to practice—a paper fan.

  “Made well, it can give gusts that would embarrass a thunderstorm,” Thane had said. She had yet to test the spell’s true power, but she hoped the paper magician hadn’t been exaggerating.

  The library began to waver about her as she finished—her small sanctuary had begun to collapse. She’d change scenes any moment now.

  Stuffing her untested fan into her bag, she ran for the library door. Fennel loped behind her.

  Ceony passed through the library door and, for the second time since meeting Mg. Thane, stepped into a room thundering with applause.

  The Royal Albert Hall. She recognized the auditorium and the chandeliers, only these boasted electric bulbs. A spotlight blinded her, forcing her to shield her eyes with one hand. Unlike last time, she didn’t stand in the aisle, but on the stage.

  Fennel panted at the sight of so many people. Ceony felt faint.

  The glare of the spotlight diminished enough for her to take in her surroundings, the pale stain of the wooden stage, an older Tagis Praff standing at the podium stage left. Looking down, she saw herself dressed in a magician’s uniform, all its seams perfectly pressed. The white fabric fit her better than any clothes she had ever worn, and she noted she wore slacks, not a skirt. Didn’t all female magicians wear skirts with their uniforms?

  “Ceony Twill,” Tagis Praff said, and the audience continued to clap. Ceony spied Thane in the front row, donning his own uniform. Watching her with smiling, proud eyes. She drank that expression in, storing it in the deep wells of her memory.

  Tagis Praff waved for her. Fennel trotted up to the podium, and Ceony, hesitantly, followed suit. She reached out to accept the magician’s hand.

  The applause died and the spotlight vanished. Her sticky dress replaced the crisp white uniform of her dreams. The temperature dropped and Tagis Praff’s hand vanished, replaced by a long, stone hallway.

  Ceony blinked twice and realized she was in a prison.

  She gasped, having not expected a place so dreary to be within Thane’s heart. She stood at the end of the hallway, which was lined on either side by broad metal doors that bore the sheen of enchantment. Ceony had never been inside a real prison, but she had read books concerning them. And just like in those books, all the doors had locks, and the hallway had a gray, prestorm cast to it, made by thin trickle
s of sunlight that came through narrow windows between each cell. Windows that even a toddler could barely fit a hand through.

  Ceony snapped her fingers to beckon Fennel to follow her, as her voice had been startled from her throat and floated somewhere between her lungs and her stomach. She took a step forward, her skirt swishing about her calves, the fabric cold after its dampening in the tight, suffocating passageway that had led her to this chamber. She hoped she wouldn’t have to pass through another. The thought gave her goose bumps, but the prison gave her chills.

  A guard came around the corner, a brawny man with a mustache and a neck so muscled it looked as if he bore steel cords beneath the skin. He wore a pistol at one hip and a club at the other, and his face settled into the sort of look that guaranteed no criminal would dare sneeze on his watch, let alone escape. Ceony froze under that stare until she validated that, as with all the previous visions, this man could not see her. She waved a hand in front of his face as he passed to be sure. She didn’t play a role in this vision, then.

  “Sit up for breakfast!” the guard shouted, pulling his club from his belt and beating it along each prison door, lifting a small metal flap that revealed wrought-iron bars just wide enough to let a plate of food slip past. “Sit up or don’t get fed, your choice!”

  Ceony winced at the loud clamor of the club on iron, then dared to peek into one of the cells.

  She stumbled back from its bars until her shoulders touched the opposite stone wall.

  Lira.

  Lira lay in that cell, her hair long and frayed at the ends, her body draped in a brown prisoner’s uniform, her eyes downcast. She sat up before the guard’s club reached her cell, but that didn’t stop him from rattling her door all the same.

  Lira in prison. If only.

  Ceony tiptoed away from her and peered into the next cell, seeing a lanky, dark-skinned man with a long scar across his nose. She didn’t recognize him, but the face in the next cell sparked a memory—the thick chin, small eyes, and crinkled forehead looked just as they had on the WANTED poster she had spied at the post office two years ago:

  WANTED

  GRATH COBALT

  FOR CRIMES AGAINST THE STATE

  Ceony stepped back from the bars. She remembered what the poster had said. Remembered the way it had made her scalp itch. Excision. Grath Cobalt was an Excisioner—and the most dangerous Excisioner in all of Europe, so rumor told.

  Ceony’s back hit the cool stone behind her once more as she watched the powerful man now in chains and behind bars, jarring ever so slightly as the guard’s club passed over his door. Now that she studied him, she noticed he had lost weight from what the poster had depicted of him. Lost muscle. He looked . . . docile.

  “These are your hopes,” she whispered as another strong guard pushing a wheel-cart of food came down the forlorn hallway. “These are your hopes, aren’t they, Thane? You hope I’ll continue to learn paper magic, that I’ll study it like you have. You hope these Excisioners—the people you’ve been hunting down—will finally be arrested and pulled from society.”

  “But it won’t happen,” said a sickly sweet voice down the corridor.

  Ceony whirled around. Lira—the real Lira—stood at the end of the hallway clad in black, her long dagger cradled in her right hand. A heavy leather sack hung off her left shoulder. The vision of the prison began to shift and blur around them, as though Lira’s presence made the dream harder for Thane’s heart to grasp. Like a sleeper being woken from a dream.

  Ceony’s spine went rigid and she stepped back, ready to call for the bulky guard—but he had vanished. Both guards had, and the cells around her stood empty, leaving Ceony alone in the midst of a dripping, warping prison with only Lira and Fennel as company.

  Fennel growled, his paper lips almost rippling with the sound.

  “What do you want?” Ceony asked, her voice quivering almost as much as the rest of her did. She touched her shield chain, then reached shaking fingers into her bag.

  “Me?” Lira asked with a red-painted mouth, taking a broad, strong step forward, then another. The bag on her shoulder swayed stiffly with the movements. “I want Emery’s whore dead. I don’t like sharing.”

  “I’m not . . . his whore,” Ceony said, stepping back once, twice, three times. Gritting her teeth, she forced herself to hold her ground. She had come here knowing she’d have to face Lira. That, and Ceony would rather go down fighting than be crushed like a cockroach backed into a corner.

  Lira quirked a brow at Ceony’s stance—perhaps she was impressed. Or amused. Thane’s wife—hopefully ex-wife—wasn’t as easy to read as Thane himself.

  “I don’t care what you are,” Lira said, the words so light they chimed like laughter. “But Emery’s heart is mine—it always has been, my dear. Even if the rest of him defies everything I believe in . . .” She lifted a long-nailed hand and squeezed it into a fist. “His heart is still worth something to me. A heart that’s known love is stronger than one that hasn’t, did you know that?”

  Lira took another step forward, and her dark eyes dropped to Ceony’s chest. “You’d make an interesting pet. Have you known love? Hate? I wonder how strong your heart is. Why don’t we find out?”

  “No!” Ceony shouted, fingers clutching the first Folds they felt in her bag. At the same moment, Lira dropped the leather bag from her shoulder and, with a quick command, half a dozen severed hands rose from its mouth, bloodied and raw at the wrist, their fingers pale and violet, their nails jagged and blue. They floated on invisible wings, their stiff, foul fingers wriggling and reaching.

  Lira swiped her own hand forward, and her army of extremities sailed down the hallway toward Ceony like a wave of hornets.

  Ceony threw out her own spells and shouted, “Breathe!”

  The yellow fish and white bird she had Folded earlier sprang to life before her, the fish swimming through air as though it were water, the bird flapping its stiff wings and charging right for the palm of the darkest hand shooting toward her.

  But Lira had six hands, and Ceony only had two animals—paper animals. Two of the hands crushed Ceony’s delicate paper creations in their palms and dropped to the floor. The other four rushed for her.

  “Thane!” Ceony screamed, turning around and running down the hallway. She reached the door at its end, but its handle stuck. Locked.

  Ceony held her breath and fished into her bag for something, anything. She felt sheet after sheet of paper until she touched something Folded: the paper fan. She whirled around and raised it.

  The lead severed hand grabbed her by the throat just as she flapped the fan across her body.

  A gust of wind burst from the fan and filled the corridor, striking the remaining three hands just before they reached Ceony. The wind pushed them back, sending them spiraling through the air.

  The gale didn’t reach the hand around Ceony’s neck. It squeezed, cutting off her air. She choked, but flapped the fan again and again.

  New gusts pushed the hands farther back and lifted the fallen ones off the floor, the crumpled bodies of her bird and fish flying with them. The hands, paper, and gales collided into Lira—one hand knocked the dagger from her grasp. The second gust knocked her off her feet, and the third made her skid across the stone floor to the opposite wall.

  The prison walls began to melt as the vision held by Thane’s heart broke. Ceony dropped to her knees, red-faced, clawing at the fingers digging into her neck, gasping for air that wouldn’t come. Her face grew hot. Her eyes bulged. She pried off one finger, two—

  Fennel launched himself at the hand’s thumb and chomped down on it as hard as a paper jaw could chomp, and with a hard jerk he pulled the hand away from Ceony’s neck. Hot air carrying the scent of iron and rot rushed down Ceony’s throat. She coughed so hard she thought she would wretch, especially with the bloodied appendage flopping on the dissipating stone fl
oor before her.

  Staggering to her feet, Ceony stomped her shoe down on the hand twice before it stopped moving. She stomped it twice more for insurance.

  Sinking to her knees, Ceony rasped, “Good boy. Good . . . good boy.”

  Her hand clutched the paper chain that wrapped around her chest and over one shoulder. The shield. She had Folded it wrong. Gotten overconfident.

  But Lira—Lira was gone, for now. The pain in Ceony’s neck lessened as the Excisioner’s absence dawned on her. Lira had bested even Ceony’s pistol, but Ceony had won this round. Barely, but she had won. Thane would be proud of that.

  Ceony leaned against the heavy door behind her, cracking it open. Fennel’s paper tail wagged wildly behind him as wildflowers in fuchsia, marigold, and amethyst grew beneath his feet. The gray hues of the prison lightened to deep orange highlighted by salmon, and a warm summer breeze tousled Ceony’s hair.

  Slipping the fan—her fantastic, wonderful fan—back into her bag, Ceony rubbed her neck and stood once more.

  The same scenery from the flower-covered knoll in the first chamber surrounded her—the hill looked over a thick tree line at sunset, and the broad plum tree reached skyward just ahead of her. Thane lay beneath it, but he looked as she knew him, not younger, and the woman beside him wasn’t Lira.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, inhaling the sweet flavors of honeysuckle and earth, expanding her lungs and giving her heart a chance to calm down. She rubbed the lingering sensation of cold fingerprints from her neck before opening her eyes to the beauty once more and approaching the plum tree.

  Her heart twitched in her chest as she neared, and while she wanted to believe it twitched from her nearly fatal run-in with Lira, she knew that wasn’t the case. However, the more she tried to focus on this new woman beside Thane, the more her image blurred.

  Ceony paused just at the edge of the blanket. The woman . . . she wasn’t a woman, not really. She had no face, only the start of one, and her hair seemed to have no definite length or color. The lines of her body curved enough to show her womanhood, but not enough to define weight, height, or shape. Beside Thane—who watched the setting sun with such peace, with such light in his eyes—the “woman” seemed imaginary.