A Tapestry of Fire (Applied Topology Book 4)

by Margaret Ball

  Chayyaputra moved right back up to the bucket, polished shoes crunching on the lightly graveled pathway, so close that I could smell his lilac-scented hair oil. “That was not part of the agreement. I have brought your friend; you must come with me.”

  “How do I know that’s Ben and not something you randomly pulled out of your aquarium?”

  “You will see soon enough. But I’m not fool enough to free your friend before you yield yourself to me.”

  I shook my head. “Nuh-uh. Verification first, or no deal.”

  “You will just have to take it on faith!” The rings on Chayyaputra’s outflung hand flashed in the sunlight, and his gesture loosed a three-pronged spear of blue fire that crackled harmlessly against my shield.

  “What? What is this? You dare try to cheat me!” he shouted. He waved again to summon his grackles. They fluttered and clawed against the shield but could not reach me.

  “You… fool,” Chayyaputra said. “I brought what you demanded, and you could have had him safe if you had not tried to cheat me. Now see if you can find your friend before the larger fish eat him!” He kicked the bucket; it fell on its side right at the edge of the pool. Water and a smallish pink fish poured out of the bucket and into the murky pond. My last sight of Ben – if that was Ben – was of his salmon-pink tail flicking him beneath a lily pad.

  “And now I’ll have you!” He swept his arm through the air again and then again, bringing fresh waves of grackles to surround my shield. Maintaining the shield became more difficult than I’d anticipated under the simultaneous attack of so many beaks and claws. I couldn’t do anything for Ben now; I could barely protect myself. I opened my hand and tried to funnel even more stars into the algorithm that defined the shield, but it was a fool’s errand: as I knew perfectly well, the constant flow of stars couldn’t be increased beyond my ability to guide and control them.

  The park seemed to be in deep shadow now. An effect of the dueling magics, or did the place itself react poorly to our flailing attempts at control? In the corners of my eyes I could just see streaks of bright light beyond the grackles, driving some of them away. A moment later there were loud noises on either side of my shield, accompanied by flashes of blinding light, and more of the grackles fled. Mr. M.? I made the mistake of glancing behind me, and in that moment of distraction I lost my visualization of the shield manifold and a grackle clawed my face. As the trident of blue fire lanced towards me again I threw myself to one side and hit the ground awkwardly. A sharp pain lanced through my ankle, but I didn’t have time to nurse it. I brought up camouflage, scrambled to my feet, and ran.

  But just running wasn’t good enough; he could track me easily by the moving blur. And I really didn’t want to keep running on that ankle. I reached into the dark place at the back of my head where I do math problems and visualized the construct Ingrid had used for flight. Move the planes closer, closer… there! In six-dimensional space I danced between the glowing planes whose energy supported me and shifted with me. In three-dimensional space I was flying, rising above where Chayyaputra would think to look for me.

  But I was no longer shielded, merely camouflaged – we still can’t handle three applications at once – and the black birds were swooping all around me. The air was thick with black wings and sharp claws and beaks, and the grackles’ raucous cries drowned out all other sounds. Oh, hell. Like peacocks, grackles were unaffected by camouflage’s masking of me with images of the background. And that had been my second bad miscalculation; the first had been thinking that my applications of topology were enough to hold off a god and the creatures who served him as long as necessary.

  Flapping wings and pecking beaks and scratching claws all assailed me at once, and I couldn’t maintain the image of planes intersecting in six-space. The air around me chilled to freezing and I felt myself on the verge of free fall. It would be a long way down now, much too long. I tried to swoop down to earth before I lost my visualization of the flight construct, but I was still too far above ground when gravity seized me. I landed awkwardly on my right knee and elbow. The knee had banged into a rock; the elbow was only skinned. Probably. I didn’t really have time to assess the injuries.

  A hand gripped my wrist, pulling me upwards, and I smelled Chayyaputra’s sickly-sweet lilac-scented hair oil again. Who’d have guessed that a god would have bad taste? He probably had who knew how many worshippers willing to give him garlands of fresh flowers, and here he chose an artificial “lilac” scent that had never seen the outside of a chemistry lab.

  The grackles were forming around us. As soon as we were totally surrounded, he would try to force me back to his building. I screamed, “Brouwer!” and the familiar keyword called up our own teleportation algorithm in my mind automatically, faster than I could have built it from scratch. I pictured the far side of the pond and said “Brouwer” again as the flapping black wings closed in all around me.

  Absolutely nothing happened.

  I wasn’t on the far side of the pond. But I wasn’t in Chayyaputra’s office either. Nor in his aquarium. My feet – and my butt — were still planted solidly on the yellowish dirt and scattered gravel of that path in Mayfield Park.

  With my topology counterbalancing his magic, we were reduced to a physical struggle. I kicked out, landed a foot on his shin more by luck than planning, but didn’t do much damage. I should have worn boots. He hauled me upright and I tried unsuccessfully to butt him in the face with my head. I wasn’t tall enough, and I didn’t have the strength to break his grip. Could I try what Annelise’s self-defense instructor had taught her, beginning with a hard palm to the nose?

  I never found out, because right then a fist came through the black wings that surrounded us and landed on the side of Chayyaputra’s head, rocking it to the right. The grackles squawked and a number of them fluttered upward, allowing normal light and sounds to reach me again. Chayyaputra dropped me and Lensky put another fist into his ribs, then hit the god’s chin so hard I was surprised his neck didn’t snap. Chayyaputra sank to his knees, waved one arm feebly and was covered in grackles.

  A moment later neither the grackles nor their master were there.

  And once again, a man’s hand dragged me to my feet.

  “We,” said Lensky, “have some talking to do.”

  Breathing hard, I looked around our little corner of the park. Ingrid and Mr. M. were visible, but a six-foot blurred image of wavery palm tree trunks beside them suggested that somebody else was still camouflaged. On the far side of that blur Prakash was frozen in place, looking as he’d recently donated way too much blood. As for Colton, he was making a doomed attempt to hide behind the others. He would have done better to use camouflage; he was so large that bits of him stuck out behind Prakash and Ingrid.

  “First I have to – have to find out—”

  I limped towards Ingrid.

  “Ben is all right,” she said quickly. “He swam right toward us and let me pick him up to cut the tag off.”

  Figured. Even in fish form, Ben’s intelligence shone.

  And I guessed he wasn’t a fish any longer. That wave of cold I’d felt hadn’t had anything to do with my flight application failing; it must have been Ben, drawing energy out of the surroundings to rebuild his mass. He was probably inside that blurred image of tree trunks.

  Prakash was staring at his shoes. He looked mortified. “I was not fighting for you, Thalia. Even the snake was fighting in its way, but I could not move – against – the god.”

  I suspected that Prakash, primed from childhood to see Shani as a literal god, had experienced the avatar differently from us. Later I learned that was true. Where we Americans had seen only a rather short man with oily hair, Prakash had seen a many-armed black figure draped in gold and mounted on a giant black bird. Where I had seen an insubstantial crackle of blue fire, he had seen the god stabbing at me with an actual three-pointed blade.

  I didn’t have time to question him now, though. “It’s all right,” I said a
wkwardly. “I mean – we all do what we can, isn’t it?” He had this annoying ability to make me start talking like him. “I’d never have survived if you hadn’t figured out how we could hold two applications of topology at the same time; think about that, why don’t you?”

  I turned to glare at Colton. “As for you – what part of ‘keep Lensky out of this’ did you not understand?”

  “By the time he got out of his car you were already in trouble,” Colton said. “I couldn’t think of anything but running back here to help you. I was too rattled to teleport, and it wasn’t like it was that far. But he got to you way ahead of me. I’ve never seen anybody move that fast.”

  “Shall we go home now?” Ingrid asked. “Ben’s getting cold.”

  Oh. Right. Jimmy had said something about people’s clothes not transforming with them, hadn’t he? Behind that six-foot blur there was probably a naked, dripping-wet Ben. Again! This would be the second time in less than a year that an adventure had ended with Ben soaking wet and missing some or all of his clothes. I wondered if he had an unsuspected affinity for water.

  “Right, let’s go. Shani might come back.” Being inside our own shielded space suddenly seemed very attractive.

  Ingrid and the tall blur beside her blinked out of sight.

  “See you back at the office?” Colton asked me.

  “No.” That was Lensky, and he sounded royally pissed off. “Thalia and I want some privacy.”

  He should speak for himself. I would have been happy to put off this conversation until he’d had time to calm down a bit.

  “And we’re not going by magic carpet, either. I,” he said pointedly, “had to drive here. And now I’m going to drive back. Thalia, if you’d be so good as to accompany me?”

  It was a challenge, not a request. His blue eyes sparkled with something that was almost certainly not love, and the vein at his temple was jumping again. He handed me into the car with a care that might have been confused with courtesy—unless, as I did, you felt the tension in his body. I slid in, buckled my seat belt, and stared straight ahead as he walked around the car and sat behind the wheel.

  He managed to clash the gears coming out onto 35th. That’s not easy to do with a modern car.

  “I can explain,” I said into the icy silence that followed.

  “Can you, now? This should be interesting. How many times have you promised me to stop throwing yourself into danger?” His fingers drummed on the steering wheel.

  “Yes, but—”

  “This time was different?” he interrupted. “How many times have you said that?”

  “Well, it was. It wouldn’t make sense for you to go up against the Master of Ravens. I have ways to defend myself against magical attacks—”

  “And yet, you needed a bit of crude physical help at the end, didn’t you? And it was just blind luck that I got there in time to slug the s.o.b., wasn’t it?” He stopped at a red light and slewed round to face me. “This is the kind of thing we should face as a team, Thalia. I should have been with you from the beginning.”

  An impatient honking behind us; the light was green. Lensky stomped on the gas and we lurched forward, then he braked so hard I was flung against the seat belt. That pedestrian was really perfectly safe; he didn’t have to give us the finger when he reached the curb.

  “I’m not going to argue while you’re driving like a maniac,” I said.

  “Fine! We’ll finish this at home!”

  “Fine!” I folded my arms, suppressing a slight wince. The scrape along my elbow where I’d made that emergency two-point landing was beginning to hurt, now that the terror and the adrenaline were wearing off.

  The rest of the drive was finished in a silence so oppressive that I felt as if a storm was going to burst over me out of the cloudless May sky.

  Not necessarily inaccurate, that. My internal barometer was predicting cloudy with a chance of tornados.

  I didn’t want to tell him why I'd had to leave him out of the loop on this latest debacle, and he probably wouldn’t have accepted my reasoning anyway. I figured I’d just keep my head down and let him yell at me until he got tired of yelling — same strategy I used with my family. Only Lensky, the rat, tunneled under all my defenses, first by terrifying me and then by being nice to me.

  It started in the living room. On the short way from the parking space to his condo I had concentrated, with mixed results, on not limping. By the time we got inside my knee was complaining fiercely. So was my ankle. But I didn’t want to sit down because that would have facilitated his looming over me. That – the looming, I mean — was bad enough when we were both on our feet.

  I sat anyway, and before I was ready. When Lensky sank onto his deep, squashy sofa I stayed on my feet, opting for speed and mobility in case I needed to throw things. But he reached up, put an arm around me, and pulled me down beside him. It was almost impossible to move away… and after just a few moments I thought, why bother? Being close enough to feel his body against mine was already diverting my thoughts from the epic fight we hadn’t quite had in the car. With any luck, he was feeling the same way. Maybe we could go directly to cuddling without passing through the battle zone. I kissed the side of his neck, nibbled gently on his shoulder, wondered if it was too soon to try and get his shirt off.

  “Thalia. Talk to me."

  "Mmm?"

  He put his hands on my waist and scooted me a couple of inches away from him. "You have to stop rushing off by yourself to save the world. We’re supposed to be getting married in a few weeks, and you're still treating me like the retarded child who can't understand adult business. If having paranormal abilities makes you feel that superior to me, maybe…" He sighed deeply and ran a hand through his hair. "I don’t know. Maybe we should call the whole thing off."

  I felt very cold. Sure, I was dreading the circus of the wedding; what sane person wouldn't? But it would be bearable because on the far side of all the foofaraw of dresses and cakes and invitations and place settings there would be Brad. Loving me. Forever.

  Now, with just a few words, he'd shown me a bleak alternative: Brad. Walking out of my life. Forever.

  Because there was no way we could go back to what we'd had, that fragile balance of love and sex and words unspoken and (on my part, anyway) refusal to think about the future. Not now. Too many of those words had been spoken.

  “Brad, I love you. And I don’t feel superior to you. Like you said, we’re a team. You can do some things I can't and I can do some things you can't and we should definitely work together.”

  "And yet, you keep doing things like this. First you went off to Wimberley by yourself—"

  "I had to be there by Sunday night!” I interrupted him. “Before Jimmy got that crazy idea of having me impersonate Chayyaputra’s nonexistent fiancée, I was going in there as a temporary waitress hired to help Margo out for just that week. We couldn't wait for you to get back; it would have looked too suspicious if I turned up there in mid-week. And I’d have lost valuable snooping time."

  "I joined you in mid-week."

  "Yes, and look how that went! Webster was immediately suspicious of you."

  "Only,” Lensky said, “because he associated me with you, thinking the two strangers had to be connected. The man’s a raging paranoiac.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Is it paranoia if people really are spying on you?”

  That would have made a nice philosophical distraction. Sadly, Lensky didn’t take the bait. “And what about today? What exactly was so secret about this rescue trip that you couldn’t share it with me?”

  I thought of an analogy that might get it across to him. “You told me once not to get in the way when people were shooting, that I’d be a distraction you couldn’t afford. Remember?”

  "Oh, I remember telling you that. And I'm struggling to remember when you ever actually respected that request."

  “There haven't been a lot of bullets flying around lately,” I said. “How can I demonstrate complian
ce with your request if you don’t provide any people to shoot at me?”

  He was shaking his head slowly. “Thalia, how do you manage to twist things around like that? Now it’s my fault you haven’t been shot?”

  “That’s not exactly what I meant… My point is that it's the same thing when I'm trying to ward off actual magic with applied topology. You can't help, and you're a distraction I can't afford."

  "Because that kind of battle never gets physical," he said with heavy sarcasm. He inspected his knuckles and blew on them. “I'm no more at risk than any other non-magical staff member, and I'm a hell of a lot more useful in a fight than Jimmy or Annelise."

  "Or Meadow?" I wasn’t even going to mention Annelise’s Krav Maga training; I was pretty sure that Mossad instruction or not, Lensky could take her with one hand tied behind his back.

  Lensky laughed. "Meadow? With or without flash-bangs and sonic weapons? Okay, I'm not entirely sure about her. That is a formidable young woman." He looked at me and his eyes softened. “In your own way… you’re pretty formidable too.” He bent his head and drew me close for a long kiss that made my head swim. I put my arms around his neck and returned it. He demonstrated his newly acquired interest in one-handed bra unfastening. We might have made it into the bedroom without any more discussion if I hadn't squeaked when his other hand brushed against my sore elbow.

  "What's the matter?"

  “Skinned my elbow in the park. It's not important.”

  “Show me."

  "It’s nothing really, just a little graze…"

  "Show me.”

  I couldn’t see much of it myself, but Lensky sucked in his breath when he saw the back of my elbow in the light. “Love, that’s bad. Why didn’t you tell me? Want me to take you to the emergency room to get it taken care of?”

  “It’s not that bad!" I squinted. Okay, what I could see of it looked worse than I'd expected. "Just help me wash it and put something over my arm so I don’t get blood on the furniture.”