The Paper Magician

by Charlie N. Holmberg

  But she couldn’t will the scene away. Its chill looped under her fingers and snuck up her clothes, burned the inside of her nose. The whistles grew louder, followed by the heavy stampede of standard-regulation military boots.

  Ceony ran.

  She ran with Fennel yapping behind her, and she stopped only long enough to scoop up the dog to protect his paper feet from the wet ground. She dodged through the brick arch to another street, its cobbles split and sparse. Her foot came down in a murky puddle that splashed ice water up her skirt, soaking her stockings. The whistles multiplied between buildings—a bank with dark windows, a restaurant with shutters drawn—and attacked her from all directions. They drowned out the quiet PUM-Pom-poom that should have filled the silence between her misty breaths.

  Taking a sharp turn at the next intersection, Ceony ran into two police officers and phased through them. She stumbled on the slick stone and fell, twisting midair to keep Fennel from the wet street—an action that slammed her hip into the road and sent a crunching pain through her tailbone and leg. Ceony yelped.

  Fennel squirmed in her arms and whined a papery whine, then chomped onto some of Ceony’s matted hair and tugged on it like he would a rope toy.

  Ceony winced, but picked herself up, swiping away mud that clung to her side. She ground her teeth and blinked in an effort not to cry. More policemen—and now two soldiers from the army—ran down the road toward her. She closed her eyes and squeezed Fennel in her arms as they phased through her.

  None of this was real. Not real to her. But she didn’t feel it that way. No matter how much she reminded herself that these were Thane’s memories, she couldn’t feel the unrealness of any of it.

  Blowing hair from her face, Ceony watched the policemen run up the street, shouting to one another in incoherent words, blowing their whistles with pursed lips and puffed cheeks. Hounds chasing down a fox. But who was the fox?

  “Emery,” she whispered. She broke into a run, her right hip protesting with every other step. It promised her a good bruise in the morning, if it wasn’t morning already.

  Her bag tugged on her, seeming to weigh five times what it should. She switched shoulders awkwardly as she ran, still balancing Fennel in her arms. Her legs moved swifter than they would have if this were the real world. Dark buildings, sleeping beggars, and half-melted snow piles passed her in blurs of dull colors.

  She reached the policemen as their chief—a man with a thick mustache—directed them with sweeping motions of his arm. The band split into three and took different paths deeper into the city.

  A small paper glider, similar in style to the one Ceony had ridden to the coast on, sailed through the air, passed her nose, and prodded the police chief once in the arm before flopping to the ground.

  Ceony stared at it wide-eyed and reached for it, but the chief snatched it first. Standing on her toes, she read it over his shoulder, instantly recognizing the perfectly spaced letters of Emery’s handwriting, though his name didn’t sign the page.

  They’re hiding in the packing warehouse. Send your men around to the north. I’ll meet you there.

  “This is what you did. What you do,” Ceony said, looking up at the police chief’s haggard face, though she didn’t address the words to him. He looked scared, confirming what Ceony had deducted. “You’re hunting them down. The Excisioners. Lira. But when? When is this? When am I?” Are you safe?

  The police chief blew his whistle, making Ceony’s ears ring. He ran northeast, two new officers joining him at the next crossroads.

  Ceony took a step forward, then stopped, turning to the path the glider had taken to reach them. Emery would be in that direction.

  Body hurting and lungs dry, Ceony sprinted.

  She didn’t know where the factory was, but she didn’t need to—the city unfolded itself before her just as every other vision had, directing her toward Emery Thane, for she ran through the secrets of his heart. She passed over the bridge of a sluggish canal with olive-colored water, around a bakery with a faded sign and boards nailed over the windows. She climbed another snowbank where the road narrowed, adjusting Fennel carefully in the crook of her elbow as she went. Above her, over an apartment building and a tavern, she saw the expanse of a large square building with a flat roof and a single cylinder chimney. It was a tan-brick warehouse with dark broken windows. An abandoned bird’s nest hung off its southern ledge.

  She saw him before a heavy sliding door rusted on its handle and around its edges—he wore all gray that matched the city and sky. Dirt smudged his face and he looked haggard, his hair longer and more unkempt than in past visions. Ceony saw him, but only for a moment before he, armed with a strangely complex paper sphere and a belt filled with tightly Folded paper stars, pulled open the heavy, creaking door and vanished into the shadows within.

  She realized the police bells had ceased. But not just the bells—everything around her had fallen into silence. No footsteps, no birds, no chatter or buggies or wind. Fennel felt heavy in her arms. Her bag felt heavy on her shoulder.

  Ceony didn’t call Emery’s name or run after him. It seemed somehow wrong to break the perfect hush that enveloped her. Instead she walked, each short step especially deliberate and soundless against the wet cobblestone. The rusted door seemed too far away, and yet impossibly close. When she reached it, the door opened of its own accord.

  The smell of sodden meat—fresh and spoiled—wafted like a cold song over her. She shivered, the warehouse temperature even cooler than the wintry outside. Her feet crunched on rock salt spilled across the cement floor. Setting Fennel down, Ceony whispered “Stay close” between chattering teeth.

  Dull, slate-colored light filtered through high windows, many cracked and patched with cardboard or wooden slabs. They illuminated metal walkways protruding from the walls overhead. Ceony gripped her paper fan in her right hand and the strap of her bag in her left. This place would be a perfect setting for Lira—the real Lira—to exact her revenge. Ceony only hoped that she would not be added to the odor of meat that grew more pungent the deeper into the warehouse she traversed.

  She stepped into a second, larger room, the metal walkways winding above her. Here the dimming light illuminated dozens of steel racks bearing meat hooks. Every third hook held half a pig’s carcass or the long side of a cow. The bodies hardly looked like animals anymore, save for an occasional snout or de-hoofed foot. The white- and scarlet-marbled hunks of muscle dangled over foul-smelling grates and drains in the floor.

  Fennel sniffed about the carcasses with a wagging tail. A rat scurried past. Ceony hissed at him and waved her hand to draw the dog’s attention back to her. Unfortunately, she did so with her right hand, which still clutched the paper fan. A gust of stale, stinking wind burst from the fan’s tips, moaning as it sailed over Fennel’s head and filled the room. Ceony closed the fan quickly in her left palm and bit down on a shriek as a slab of beef nudged her in the back, creaking as it swayed on its hook.

  All the meat swung now, back and forth, squeaking on the metal beams that suspended them. The movement made them look alive. Forlorn.

  Blowing out a foggy breath, Ceony moved forward, squinting into the darkness until she spotted a door left ajar across the massive room, just past the hanging loops of entrails and sausages. She hurried for it, the steps of her shoes horribly loud. Dusky taupe light filled the small room the door had guarded—a storage room—and Ceony found Emery turned away from her. His drooping shoulders heaved with every breath. The police chief stood beside him, rubbing his mustache and grimacing. Like a switch flicked on, the warehouse behind Ceony filled with officers carrying lanterns, as though Emery’s heart had waited for this specific moment to include them in the vision. None blew whistles—none even spoke. They walked around, investigating, some seeming unsure what to do with themselves.

  Fennel growled with his head between Emery’s legs. Stepping around the chief
and the paper magician, Ceony looked out onto the scene.

  Her body tensed all at once, and so much bile filled her throat she couldn’t keep it down. She barely managed to turn her head before vomiting over the cement floor. It stung her throat and sinuses. Her stomach pressed in and up, in and up, over and over until not a single drop more could be squeezed from it.

  Even if the others had been able to see her, her retching wasn’t enough to get their attention away from what lay before them:

  Bodies.

  Pieces and halves of bodies, human bodies, just like the pieces and halves of the animals in the next room. Ceony couldn’t look twice, but her memory—curse her memory!—had seen enough. To know that image . . . the image of headless men, women sawed in half, and children missing their hearts, their chests filled with maggots . . . to know that image would never, never leave her mind . . . Ceony would have wept had she not felt so dry, sore, and sandy inside.

  They smelled no different. They smelled no different than the animals, and Ceony found herself grateful to have the scent of her own sickness on her tongue instead of tasting those poor, dead, and ruined people in her mouth.

  “So close,” the police chief murmured. “So close. They’re gone now. This one’s fresh, and this one. So close.”

  Shuddering, Ceony looked up to Emery’s face, his eyes wide and sunken, his skin pale, his chapped lips parted. Though he did not speak, she could hear his thoughts. Because of me, they said. Because I let her go. They died because my heart was too weak.

  She could see it ripping him from the inside: the creased layers in his forehead, the tautness of his neck, the wet gloss of his eyes. She breathed, spat, wiped her mouth. Emery’s guilt pressed into her like the hot throbbing walls of the valves, suffocating her. It made the air thick and tart, and she knew that this room was something he still carried with him. Even without a perfect memory, no one could forget this. No one could ever forget how this felt.

  Steam billowed in the corners of Ceony’s vision and the damp smell of iron clung to her sinuses. Despite the horror before her and Thane’s obvious pain, this caught her attention.

  Streams of crimson whipped around her, bubbling and broiling. They sailed for her like snakes before taking sharp turns in their paths, instead colliding into the carnage of the storage room. They evaporated the corpses, the shelves, and the boxes—everything but the walls, the police chief, and Emery himself, who still gaped at where the bodies had been, his eyes wide and sunken, his dry lips parted in disbelief and self-hate. He didn’t see Ceony, nor did he see Lira—the true, present, and very real Lira—who approached Ceony with wild eyes from the room’s only door, bubbling blood dripping from her fingers. The very reincarnation of the devil from hell, the villain of every fairy tale cut into pieces and sewn into a patchwork that had once been beautiful.

  Ceony paled at the sight of Lira’s dripping hands, at the thought of just how Lira’s magic worked, at what sort of horrid thing—like ripping the heart from a child—an Excisioner would have to do to make blood boil. Blood that hadn’t touched Ceony, despite it being aimed at her.

  Ceony touched the paper shield chain around her and staggered to her feet, backing away from the raven-haired woman who seemed more than a touch upset that her spell hadn’t taken effect.

  But Lira hadn’t touched her. Thank God, she hadn’t touched her. Not yet. Ceony didn’t want to think—

  Lira pulled that same dagger from her belt and raked it across her palm, spilling her own dark blood into her hands. She mumbled something hard and foul and shot the droplets forward. Each crimson bead steamed and warped with invisible fire, but before they struck Ceony, the paper chain crossing her chest pulsed, deflecting them into the surrounding walls. The blood dulled the details of the vision, sucking mortar from between bricks and specks of color from the cement floor. Emery began to fade.

  A door appeared to Ceony’s right, beside the dissipating paper magician. Not a white door rimmed with scarlet, but a red door edged with shadow.

  “No!” Lira shouted, blood raining onto the floor. She ran for Ceony, red hands outstretched.

  Ceony bolted through the door before Lira could grab her, Fennel at her ankles. But instead of the red walls of Emery’s heart, she found herself once more in the dark office lit with a single starry window. Back to where she had started. Shadows moved before her, predatory. Ceony’s own heart ebbed within her chest.

  She had been trapped.

  CHAPTER 13

  EMERY RUSHED HER, HIS forearm across her collar, and shoved her into the wall where the red door had just been. She squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for herself to phase, for the scene to replay itself, but it didn’t. Emery’s forearm pressed down onto her, and when she dared to look, Emery’s eyes flared with green fire.

  Cold sweat kissed her skin. Fennel barked his whispery bark beside Ceony, biting at Emery’s leg with paper teeth. Ceony struggled, but the paper magician didn’t move.

  “You have no business here,” he hissed, his voice too low, too rough. Not like Emery Thane at all. Even the Emery Thane from this very scene, enraptured in rage and heartbreak, hadn’t sounded so cold. Ceony would have trembled had she not been pinned so securely against the wall.

  “I’m sorry,” she cried. “I didn’t mean—”

  Shadow-Emery pulled back far enough to grab her shoulder. With little effort, Shadow-Emery hurled Ceony into a stack of boxes and books meticulously piled in the corner. Cardboard corners dug into her ribs and spine; paperback novels rained onto her head.

  “I’m trying to save you!” she shouted.

  Shadow-Emery laughed—cackled—a noise like broken organ pipes that sent cold chills up Ceony’s arms. “No one can save me. You’ve swum into dangerous waters, Miss Twill.”

  Fennel hunched on his legs and barked wildly, but Shadow-Emery didn’t see him, didn’t hear him. His molten eyes fixated on Ceony, an owl watching the desperate run of a mouse before swooping down and nabbing it in thin-tipped talons.

  Ceony tried to steady her voice, but it quivered in her throat. “Please, just let me go. I can help you if you let me go.”

  “Help me?” Shadow-Emery repeated with a sneer, as if the words on his tongue were laced with vinegar. “And who will help them?”

  The vision faded by half, leaving the dark wooden walls of the office in place, but the furniture, shelves, and floor disappeared, replaced with the floor of the warehouse storage room and the ripped and torn bodies strewn across it.

  Ceony averted her eyes and pressed a hand to her mouth, willing her stomach to stay calm. “I don’t need to see it again!” she shouted between fingers.

  “Don’t you?” Shadow-Emery asked with a raised voice. “How good is your memory, Ceony Twill? You seem to have forgotten about them already. I killed them.”

  “No!” Ceony yelled, tears wetting her eyelashes. Still, she did not look. “The Excisioners killed them, not you!”

  “But I didn’t stop them.”

  “You tried to, didn’t you?” Ceony asked, almost more to herself than to him. “I saw you try. I saw you try to save them.”

  “Not save them,” Shadow-Emery said as the vision of death faded back into the office, to the silhouette of a littered desk and the dark splotches of literary debris across the floor. “Save myself. I was only after the Excisioners.”

  She looked up at him, the spilled boxes and books still hugging her. “You didn’t know about them, did you? Not personally. They were victims, but not yours. Did you even know their names?”

  Shadow-Emery looked away.

  “That’s why, don’t you see?” she pleaded. “You hunt the Excisioners because they hurt people, even people you don’t know. How is that evil?”

  Shadow-Emery laughed. “I’m just like her. Just like Lira.”

  Ceony flew to her feet. “She manipulated you, Emery Thane. Yo
u loved her once. I saw that you loved her.” She folded her arms and rubbed their skin, fighting off a chill creeping into the vision. “I’ve never loved like you have, so I know I don’t understand completely, but if I were in love and there was a chance I could save it, I would take it.”

  Just like I’m trying to save you . . .

  Shadow-Emery faded and reappeared behind her, grabbing a fistful of her hair. Ceony gasped as he wrenched her head to one side.

  “There is no love here,” Shadow-Emery growled.

  “Maybe not here,” Ceony whispered, “not in this room, but this is only one part of you, isn’t it? Just one piece of the whole—”

  Shadow-Emery released her, vanishing and reappearing again several paces away. Fennel yapped loudly, jumping on all four legs. Scowling, Shadow-Emery snatched Fennel up, crushed the dog’s paper skull in his hands, and tore the creature in half.

  Ceony screamed and lunged for Fennel, but the spell on the dog’s carefully crafted body had already been destroyed. The paper pieces that had comprised her companion pattered softly against the floorboards as Emery released them.

  Ceony stared in shock. She dropped to her knees. Tears streamed down her face.

  Emery had made Fennel for her. Because she missed Bizzy. Because he cared. Fennel, her only real tie to the world outside Emery’s heart. Her one companion in this dark place, her one constant in a world that wouldn’t stop changing.

  She touched the broken paper pieces, feeling as crumpled as Fennel’s lifeless, misshapen head.

  “This isn’t you,” Ceony whispered, pulling a cold finger back from her dog’s lifeless form. “This isn’t who you are!”

  “Ha!” Shadow-Emery barked. “Do you even know who I am?”

  His fingers seized her hair once more and hauled her to her feet. “Dark and dangerous waters . . . ,” he repeated.

  A new laughter—Lira’s laughter—filled the room, and Ceony felt herself crack like a hot glass pan set in snow. She didn’t see the woman, however, and Shadow-Emery didn’t seem to hear her. At least, he didn’t react.