A Tapestry of Fire (Applied Topology Book 4)

by Margaret Ball

  “Yes, of course that’s all that matters to me, protecting the furniture.”

  “Well, I already burnt a hole in your bedroom carpet back in January. I don’t want you to start thinking of me as a destructive force of nature.”

  “Oh, you’re a force of nature, all right," he breathed into my hair.

  "So, no ER?"

  "Only if you tell me honestly about all your injuries. Because when we came in you weren't walking like the only problem was a skinned elbow."

  "Oh, my jeans protected the rest of me pretty well."

  But he had them off me, and my T-shirt too. Instead of proceeding to the kind of shenanigans that usually followed disrobing, he checked me all over for bumps and sprains and bruises. I yelped when his fingers dug into my right knee, and again when he flexed my ankle.

  He picked me up and carried me to the bed, setting me down very gently. "That knee is going to be the size of a cantaloupe if we don’t get some ice on it," he said, leaving me and going to the kitchen. He offered me the classic remedy, a bag of frozen peas for my knee, and then he crushed ice cubes in a zip lock bag for the ankle. Then he rinsed the dirt and grit out of the raw patch on my elbow, very gently, while I clutched the frozen peas and tried to think about something else. He wrapped some gauze around my arm, eased me into a comfortable position on the bed, and said, "Stay there and keep those ice packs on. I'll be back in a few minutes."

  I actually started to fall asleep. The whole right side of me hurt, and the attention given the knee had only encouraged it to start up a nasty throbbing, but I was so tired. I probably needed to eat after applying all that topology in the park, but finding food seemed like more effort than it was worth. Breathing seemed like too much effort; good thing that function ran on automatic…

  I startled awake at the sound of his key in the door. He’d come back with cold packs, more gauze, and antibiotic in a spray can. “Just washing that skinned place hurt you so much,” he said, “and all I had here was a tube of antibiotic ointment. I didn’t want to hurt you again by rubbing it on.”

  The antibiotic spray was cool and only stung slightly on my raw flesh. After that he produced another spray bottle that covered the scrape with some kind of thin, flexible film. I picked up the bottle when he set it down. “Wound dressing spray for cats, dogs, and parrots?”

  “You’re not big enough to need the one for horses."

  "Oh, in that case it makes perfect sense."

  The frozen peas were getting mushy by now and the plastic bag of ice chips was mostly ice water, and leaking at that. Lensky took them away. “Once the cold packs freeze, we’ll do another ice treatment. For now, you should take a couple of aspirin and rest.”

  “It doesn’t hurt that much.” Maybe it did, actually, but I didn’t like what a big deal this was getting to be.

  Ignoring me, Lensky shook a couple of white pills out of a bottle and handed me a glass of water. “Just take them and quit arguing, okay? It’ll help reduce the inflammation.”

  “You’re sure it’s just aspirin, nothing else?” A few months earlier — right after the scorched carpet incident, actually, in which I’d been burned as well as the rug — he’d slipped me a Tylenol with codeine. I don’t like opiates; they make me too stupid to do applied topology. Tonight, with no idea where the Master of Ravens had gone or what his next move would be, I really didn’t want to be that helpless.

  This was straight aspirin, and it did mute the throbbing in my knee. The improvised ice packs had also helped.

  But what helped most of all was Lensky, lying down beside me and curving one arm over my midriff. Warm and solid and steady.

  I fell asleep while wondering how to explain that this time he actually had been more at risk than anyone else. He wasn’t going to be pleased when he learned about the bargain I’d made. But I had to warn him. I had to make him understand the danger he was in.

  14. The jewel in the forehead of the idol

  Austin, Friday

  When I woke up, sunlight was pouring through the windows, and I seemed to be wearing one of Lensky’s T-shirts. It made a more than adequate nightgown.

  “We forgot to do the ice packs again.” I stretched. Despite that, I was feeling much better.

  Lensky looked amused. “No, we didn’t. I put them on you at midnight.”

  “And I slept through that?”

  He grinned. “Not exactly. First you complained about being cold – that’s why you’re wearing one of my shirts now. Then you demanded something sweet, so I brought you that pint of horrible mixed flavors ice cream you put in the freezer last week.”

  “The maple crunch praline caramel fudge? How much of it did I eat?”

  “All of it.”

  Now that was sad. Not only had I consumed an entire pint of maple crunch praline caramel fudge ice cream without being wide awake enough to enjoy it, but now we were down to Lensky’s choices – plain chocolate or plainer vanilla – until I went shopping again.

  “After that you said, ‘Mmurfl,’ and then, ‘Homeomorphism,’ and buried yourself in the pillows. I don’t know whether that counts as being awake. How’s the knee?”

  I gave it an experimental flex. “Much better. Hardly hurts at all. See, I told you it wasn’t that bad.”

  “That’s good,” he said, “because I’ve been having interesting thoughts while waiting for you to wake up, and I wouldn’t want to hurt your knee by being too enthusiastic.”

  That sounded promising.

  Unfortunately, he went on to say, “But we’ve got to settle this other thing first.”

  I had been kind of hoping we could brush it under the carpet and get on with his ‘interesting thoughts.’ But his intense blue stare caught and pinned me, and I couldn’t look away. “Thalia… I hate it when you lie to me.”

  “I didn’t! I didn’t say anything at all to you about Mayfield Park!”

  “Asking Annelise to do it for you amounts to the same thing!”

  “Considering we hired her to lie our way out of trouble, I’m seriously disappointed in Annelise. She should have been able to detain you much longer.”

  “And I,” Lensky said, “am seriously disappointed in you.”

  Time to come clean. “Brad, just give me a minute to explain… I had a very good reason to keep you out of this. Chayyaputra saw pictures of us on Ginny’s phone, and now he is going after the two of us specifically, rather than the Center in general. You need to be very, very careful. In fact, I’d really like it if you’d stay inside shielded areas until this is settled.”

  “You expect me to cower under your magical shields while you go out and risk yourself against him?”

  “I have some ways to protect myself that you don’t.”

  “All the same. Throwing you to Chayyaputra while I hide behind you… Not going to happen, Thalia. And what happened yesterday proves that it won’t work. Your magical protections weren’t good enough to save you. And even though I don’t have paranormal abilities, Chayyaputra didn’t harm me.”

  “Not this time.”

  “That sounds as if you’re going to have exactly the same attitude next time the Master of Ravens threatens us. That’s not acceptable, Thalia. I want you to promise me that you won’t go off on your own against him.”

  I saw a way to retrieve something out of the situation. “I will promise that… if you will promise me to stay inside shielded areas until this is resolved.”

  “Unless we – we, Thalia – need to leave those areas in order to deal with an emergency. In which case, you stay with me, understand?”

  Probably as good an offer as I was going to get. At least I wouldn’t have to worry about Lensky when he wasn’t with me; he’d be in the office or the condo, both seriously shielded against strangers teleporting in. “Deal.”

  He wanted to seal our agreement with a kiss. Fine by me. Come to think of it, there hadn’t been nearly enough cuddling and kissing in the last twenty-four hours. I felt I was due. And as that ki
ss developed into considerably more than a token of our deal, I eschewed thinking altogether in favor of feeling and doing.

  When we finally got to the office everybody else was there already, and worse, they’d eaten all the doughnuts. I glowered at Will, who was waving the end of a sour cream cruller while having what seemed to be an intense conversation with Colton. “He doesn’t even work here,” I muttered under my breath.

  Annelise caught that. “Give him a break, Thalia. He’s lost his best friend, and now he doesn’t even have a job.”

  “He can’t go back to work for Logan?”

  Jimmy and Ingrid joined us. “Logan is even more depressed than he was before we found Will,” Jimmy said. “He blames himself for Eli’s death and he says he’s not going to set up anybody else as a target. In any case,” he added, “I’m not sure it would be possible to resurrect Protect Your Privacy. Logan made a lot of bad business decisions on the way down.”

  I guessed we were going to be stuck with Will until he found his feet. He did seem to be bonding with Colton over, of all things, movies. They were hashing over all the historical errors in Dunkirk and Darkest Hour. “Take that speech of Churchill’s that supposedly got so much applause in Parliament,” Will said, waving the last two inches of his cruller. “The ‘fight them on the beaches’ speech. In actual fact, he didn’t get that kind of applause in the House until later.”

  “Two weeks later? His ‘finest hour’ speech after France surrendered?” Colton suggested tentatively.

  “Not even then,” Will said in triumph. “The House didn’t stand up and cheer for him until July, when he reported that the British navy had sunk the French fleet.”

  “They’re very detail-oriented, aren’t they?” I commented to Ingrid.

  “Will’s an R programmer,” Ingrid said. “I think being detail-oriented is a necessary though not sufficient condition. And remember when Colton wouldn’t stop going on about the exact details of the 1954 Buick Skylark?”

  I shuddered. “I do indeed. That seems to have been the thing that most impressed him about time travel. I think we’re lucky he never figured out how to bring one of those cars back to our time.”

  “I think even a mint-condition Buick Skylark wouldn’t tempt him into time traveling again. That experience certainly put me off it. Permanently.”

  “Yes, they would have seen Spitfires, but not with the Merlin engines – those were new!” Will was almost shouting.

  “I thought their current obsession wasn’t as boring as vintage cars. I may have been wrong.” Ingrid’s lips twitched as she listened to the discussion, which had now moved on to whether there had been enough Spitfires in the sky before Dunkirk for one of the characters in the movie to have recognized them. Or was it the Spitfire engines they were arguing about, the Merlins or Arthurs or whatever? Hard to tell. Especially if you found the topic as monumentally boring as Ingrid and I did.

  “How’s Ben?”

  “In his office working on something, thank God. He bent my ear about the experience of being a fish for way too long; then he stopped, snapped his fingers, said ‘That reminds me of something,’ and went off to commune with his whiteboard.”

  “I guess he’s okay, then.”

  “Unless the fish fixation means that he’s not recovered from the shock. How was he last night, Annelise?”

  “Definitely not in a state of shock,” she said with a reminiscent – and reassuring – grin. “Trust me, he re-transformed with all his faculties intact.”

  I was about ready for some alone time in my office to strengthen my six-dimensional flight visualization, which clearly wasn’t as strong as it should be. But I would have liked a doughnut to take back there with me. I had, after all, had an energetic morning even before teleporting Lensky and me from the safety of his condo to the safety of the office.

  While I was still lingering wistfully over the empty doughnut tray in the break room, our wandering intern came up the stairs with a little old man in a white tunic over baggy white pants. When Prakash saw me, he looked away for a moment, then squared his shoulders and met my eyes. For once he didn’t look snotty and superior.

  “Are you going to introduce us to your friend?” Annelise asked.

  Jimmy cleared his throat. “I believe we’ve met. This would be Pandit Navin… um…”

  “Navinchandra Balakrishnan,” the old guy said. “You may be addressing me as ‘Panditji,’ easier for Americans, isn’t it?”

  “I went to Hindu Temple first thing this morning,” Prakash said, “asking for help and protection of colleagues here from Shani dev. Panditji offered to come back with me to explain true situation to us all.”

  “I am in debt to Center for Applied Topology for my return to this form,” the Pandit said, “and hoping that truth of our Hindu gods will be helpful in dealing with impostor Shani.”

  I’d been dubious about the usefulness of a lecture on Hindu theology, but the mention of Shani as an impostor certainly grabbed my attention. I followed Prakash and his companion into the break room, as did almost everybody else. Ingrid stepped through the wall to the private side for Ben.

  We actually had people standing around the walls. When Dr. Verrick first established the Center, I’d thought that a room with eight whole chairs was more than we would ever need for meetings. Now that room overflowed.

  Even Meadow showed up, though in her role as engineering support for Mr. M.’s prosthetic body she had little connection to the Shani problem. Mr. M. himself, of course, was riding in my belt loops. He mentioned that people often came into the coffee room to get coffee and I shushed him. A singing, flying turtle-snake mage hopped up on caffeine was the last thing this meeting needed.

  Last to enter was Lensky. He gave me a friendly nod and closed the break room door so that he could lean against it.

  Panditji turned out to be a font of information, some of which might actually be useful. His main point was that, theologically speaking, the man we knew as the Master of Ravens was not the god Shani; he was, if anything, a flawed copy of the real god, having taken on only the dark aspect of the god Shani.

  “What should we call him, then?” Jimmy asked.

  Panditji directed a spate of Hindi towards Prakash, who responded in kind. After a few moments’ agitated debate, Prakash said, “He suggests you refer to him as Shani avatar rather than Shani dev.”

  The pandit burst into Hindi again. This time Prakash said hardly anything; he just nodded and patted the air until the little man ran out of steam.

  “Panditji says that even calling him avatar of Shani is theologically improper, because true avatar would represent god in all aspects. However, he understands that Americans are being confused by details of theology, so you may use ‘Shani avatar’ to refer to him if you like.”

  “Mighty generous of him,” muttered Colton, beside me.

  I too felt let down. It seemed that this meeting was likely to degenerate into a theoretical discussion of the more esoteric aspects of Hindu theology. Maybe it was time to try redirecting the Pandit.

  “Panditji, what are Shani avatar’s weaknesses? How can we defend ourselves against him?” For instance, how could we avoid being turned into fish?

  This question unleashed a torrent of miscellaneous information, mostly translated by Prakash because the little pandit was too excited to stick with English. To placate Shani dev, it seemed, we should wear black clothing, especially on Saturdays, and make offerings of oil and black sesame to him; we should wear blue sapphires and some kind of bead called rudraksha. Shani’s metal was iron and his jewel was the sapphire. His weapons were the trident and the bow and arrow…

  “Prakash. I don’t think Panditji quite gets the idea. Look, if Shani avatar is such a flawed version of the true god, how much help can it be to get on the good side of Shani dev?”

  Prakash translated the question to the pandit, who sagged in on himself as if some vital bits of his bone structure had suddenly collapsed.

  Ma
ybe we should get more specific. “Panditji. How was Shani avatar able to turn you into a fish? And is there any way to stop him doing that to people?”

  The pandit managed to shrug, shake his head, and nod all at the same time. “This avatar should not have so much power, unless…” He switched back to Hindi and addressed Prakash very earnestly, tapping him repeatedly with his index finger.

  “He can only have become so strong if he was possessing authentic property of the god,” Prakash translated.

  Jimmy groaned. “Oh, no. Tell me we’re not trapped in a story about stealing the giant jewel from the forehead of the idol.”

  “Since he has so much power to hurt and wound ordinary human beings,” Prakash went on, ignoring Jimmy’s plaint, “he may have stolen one of the weapons of Shani.”

  The bow and the trident. An image of blue fire flickered in the back of my head. Shani’s hand had crackled with fire aimed at me; then I’d thrown myself sideways as it stabbed again. And why was I suddenly having flashbacks to the battle with Shani yesterday?

  Because he had flung that blue fire at me.

  Blue fire in the shape of a three-headed spear.

  Aka a trident.

  “Panditji, is this weapon real?” No, that was the wrong way to put it; clearly a lot of things we’d classify as supernatural were perfectly real to Panditji. “I mean, can you touch it? Does it weigh anything? Does he have to pick it up physically to attack with it?”

  More back-and-forth in Hindi, culminating in a consensus between Prakash and the pandit that once in possession of the weapon, Shani avatar could invoke it without having it actually in his hand – but that there had to be, somewhere, an actual physical weapon taken from a shrine of Shani dev. And Shani avatar would probably keep that object close to him and guard it carefully.

  Colton, Ben and Ingrid exchanged so many meaningful glances that a blind man would have realized this information meant more to them than to the rest of us. But in a rare display of caution – or maybe sadism – they refused to say anything until our friendly pandit left with Prakash, having told us a lot more about Hindu theology than we really cared to know.