“Where’d you go just now?” Olive asked.
“Ellie,” Will lied. “I need to find that padlock chantment, reverse the brainwashing so the children can come home.”
“Good idea.”
“I’ll start by becoming a better chanter,” he said.
“Do us a favor and sober up first.”
“You have me there,” he said. “Good night, Olive.”
She took the hint, leaving him to totter to bed, where he fell into a nightmare about the Roused, trapped in the frozen magic. He’d be betraying them too, not just Astrid and her volunteers. But they were asleep, peacefully asleep—safe. They could wait.
He saw Teoquan, black eyes burning with fury.
He awoke with a hangover, went to the bathroom to splash water on his face, and remembered anew that he had no running water. Instead of cursing, he croaked at the tuning fork hanging at his chest. “Pike, I need to start chanting things—toys.”
“Top of the mornin’ to you too,” came the reply. “Your workshop’s near the Chimney.”
“I have a workshop?”
“I make things happen, remember?”
“Thank you, Pike.”
He gated to the plaza, and stood for a moment blinking at Astrid’s bizarre little empire—the borrowed sunshine, people moving through Bramblegate, alchemized spiders spinning silkscreens to police the contaminated pollens, and everywhere the heavy flower-shop scent of liquid magic. People from every corner of the globe traveling to and fro, all of them giving him space because they knew his wife had died. They’d even shut down the plaza TV, going elsewhere for their fix of trial news.
Intolerable.
His “workshop” was on a new curl of fill on the other side of the Chimney, an open patio that overlooked the pooled vitagua in the ravine. A cluster of toys lay on its floor, and a huge glass punch bowl had been mounted on its edge. The bowl was filled with vitagua.
Will dipped a fist in the punch bowl, and the vitagua quailed away.
The ring. Easing it off, he was blindsided by memory: Caro, slipping it onto his finger at their wedding.
Caro, hat pulled low over a bad haircut.
Caro, burning.
Blinking hard, he began chanting toys.
He fell into a rhythm. Dip a finger, chant something, dip again. A shampoo bottle shaped like a TV cartoon character, a toy phone, a set of jacks, a stamp that made gold stars, a bracelet with bells on it, a toy gun, a plastic stove, a fake stethoscope, a pretend radio, a stuffed frog …
His hangover burned away. Clarity returned, intensifying his anguish over Caro, but giving him the strength to focus on his plan. Change the past. Get the old world back.
Volunteers turned up, bringing new toys, carting the chantments off.
Keep improving, Will told himself. Don’t let Astrid know you’re planning anything.
He should find her—reassure her that all was well.
Forcing himself to slip the ring back on, he went in search of her. She was conferring with her head scientist, Katarina, inside the town’s Anglican cathedral. The building had been buried under the mulch of vitagua-infected wood, but the interior was sealed. Astrid had chanted its pipe organ. It was this—and a round-the-clock shift of musicians, who ran the communications center—sending out messages to volunteers via tuning forks and penny whistles.
The women were deep in conversation with an orange-haired, mustached stranger of about forty years, with a slouched posture and a shabby coat. The only thing at all notable about him was a red knitted scarf around his neck. From somewhere wintry, then, Will thought, summoning enough curiosity to consult the personnel wiki.
No answer. Will frowned. He’d gotten used to knowing everyone’s bio at a glance.
“Hey,” Astrid said before he could greet the stranger. Her voice was gurgly.
Something was off here. Astrid’s eyes were a solid, glowing blue, flooded with vitagua, and she wasn’t wearing the healing bangle that fought off the sea-glass poisoning. He lay a hand on her arm. Her skin was cold as frozen steel.
“Astrid?” he said warily.
“How are you doing?” it—whatever it was—asked.
“My wife is dead, my kids are … How do you think?”
“I never knew, Will.” There was no tongue inside that mouth, nothing but a blue cavity. “Caroline’s portrait wasn’t in the ballroom.”
“She couldn’t be saved,” Katarina said.
He stepped back. “What is this?”
“Mouse magic,” the orange-haired stranger said. He took off the red scarf, handing it to Katarina, and just like that, turned into Astrid. The other Astrid, the vitagua … clone?… froze to statue-stillness.
“This is my true self.”
“Astrid prime,” Katarina said. “Touch her.”
It wasn’t necessary: he could see that this Astrid was sick, could see too the healing bangle on her arm and the letrico flowing through it, keeping her alive. “I don’t get it.”
Katarina spoke: “Sahara’s possessing people using contaminated blood. It makes me wonder: Perhaps vitagua can act as a storage medium for human consciousness? It makes sense, if you consider the grumbles in the unreal. Astrid is in constant contact with the well, so—”
“Sahara copies herself using other people, and you … This is a copy of you?”
“Yeah. I didn’t want to infect anyone with my blood—”
“Because … ewww,” Katarina said. She tapped the frozen Astrid, nudging open the collar of its shirt and revealing a frozen, alchemized mouse.
Like the Roused, Will thought with a pang of guilt. If he rewrote the past, they’d all be like that, as they had been for so many centuries already.
“Small chordates have skin cells, hair, brain cells, nerves, vocal cords,” Katarina said.
“Vocal cords. That’s why this copy of Astrid can talk?”
“Not just talk. I can see with this thing, Will. I can hear, and think.… It almost feels like me.”
His skin crawled. “Can it chant?”
“No.” Unexpectedly, she grinned. “But you can. You’ve made what? Twenty chantments today?”
“I wasn’t counting,” he lied. Each chantment took him closer to rolling back the calendar, restoring the world, saving Caro.…
Pike’s voice rang from the pipe organ: “Boss, they’re ready.”
“Be right there.”
“Ready?” repeated Will.
“The pipeline,” Katarina said. “Ribbon cutting’s today.”
“Right.” The Serbian mine engineer, Ilya, had used a tunneling chantment to sink a shaft down to a depth of forty feet. He’d beelined seventy miles northeast to a long-abandoned coal mine and flooded it with vitagua. There’d been no discernible effect on the already-contaminated forest.
Next they had eased a shaft outside the contaminated zone. They’d let five thousand gallons of vitagua seep into the rock, forty feet down. Again, there’d been no ill effects.
The underground dumping smacked of desperation to Will, but what did it matter if he was going to rewrite the past?
Pen.
The voice at his ear was so clear that he turned, looking for someone who wasn’t there. His stomach flipped; sweat broke out on his forehead. One of Astrid’s grumbles?
The time-travel chantment will be a pen, Will.
“You don’t have to come,” Astrid said. Her clone said it too, multiplying his sense of wrongness. “Everyone will understand if you need some time off.”
The sideways mention of Caro’s death brought grief to the surface again. “I’m fine.”
Both women nodded politely.
Let the Roused sleep, he thought. I didn’t trap them there.
He followed the women across Bigtop, crossing with them to a clearing at the edge of the lagoon. Here, a single tree had survived the race to the sky. A red-barked arbutus with glowing, vitagua-veined leaves, its tangled limbs stretched up, impossibly high, to the canopy of the magi
c forest.
Will had imagined oil pipelines when this project was initially conceived: miles of concrete or steel pipes, snaking around the country. But Ilya was just digging a channel for an underground river of vitagua. A serpentine irrigation ditch had been carved into the downward-sloping forest floor, a streambed for liquid magic to flow into the hillside. It vanished into a keyhole-shaped opening under the arbutus roots, a monster-mouth bordered in long grasses and leading down into the earth.
“Oh, this is going to be a lot of magic,” Astrid said, catching Will’s hand.
He returned the squeeze, feeling almost soiled. None of this was going to happen. And it would be better for Astrid. Her life since Albert died had been a disaster. Jacks would live, Ev would be sane.…
We’ll never meet, he thought, and was surprised by an upwelling of feeling, a sense of loss.
“What if this gets bombed?” a volunteer asked.
“We bury eventually.” Ilya, behind them, was surveying his work with satisfaction. “Dirt and stone from tunnels can become protective wall—we close up overtop. Nothing is wasted.”
Will examined the tunnel. The trench where the vitagua flowed was about two meters deep, and its banks were lined with sandbags. The banks themselves were wide enough to accommodate two adults walking side by side.
Ilya stepped into the dry irrigation channel and waved for silence. “One team dug west to sea,” he announced peremptorily. “Spirit blood now travels under ocean in coral pipe. Very brave crew calling itself Mermaids, led by Chakeesa, will build pipeline on ocean floor through coastal islands, up to Alaska, eventually to Siberia.”
The volunteers applauded the overalls-clad Chakeesa and her crew. Tunneling was claustrophobic enough, but working underwater, with all that pressure overhead … If something went wrong, if the letrico ran out before they could Bramblegate back, the Mermaids would be crushed before they could drown.
Ilya indicated the rest of the miners. “Land tunnel heads southeast, bound for Florida. We get more volunteers, more digging chantments, we start channels in other directions, try for Hudson Bay and South America.”
It was a simple enough plan. If magic could simply seep into the soil, it would free the Roused while—they hoped—changing the real less radically than would an open-air release.
Ilya looked expectantly at Astrid.
She bowed her head. “Concentrate, Will.”
Will closed his eyes. He felt the vitagua within the ravine shifting suddenly, flowing toward them in a trickle. A thin blue line of magic dribbled into the tunnel entrance.
“Now the tricky bit,” Astrid said. He sensed her attention moving to the Chimney, the break between the real and unreal, felt the vitagua melting around Jacks. All that ice …
“Think about warmth,” she murmured, squeezing his hand.
Will tried to pull, sucking his lips back against his teeth. Fire, he thought, and the image of Caro going up in flames surfaced again. There was a tremor.
“Nice and slow,” Astrid said. She was there with him, wherever there was, steadying him. Will imagined fishing, reeling in a line steadily, one turn of the crank after another.
That’s it, think heat, now you’re cooking with gas.…
He ignored the Teoquan-flavored grumble, reeling his imaginary fish. The trickle in the irrigation ditch doubled, trebled, and then became a steady stream.
“You did it!” Astrid said.
Will shrugged, feeling insulated from it all. He’d be setting all this to rights soon enough.
Solemnly, Ilya checked a gauge. “Rate of outflow is one thousand cubic gallons per mile of tunnel per hour. Every day we dig one more mile.”
The watching Springers burst into wild applause. What the hell, Will thought, and joined them, cheering this latest stage of the end of the world.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“THIS WAS ONCE A village.”
Eliza stood atop an outcropping of blue rock, a crescent-edged cliff that had defied the glacier, jutting above the ice that stretched to the horizon. It was a decent vantage point; Ev could see the Roused city and—looking the other way—the curved roof of the earth lodge at Pucker Hill.
Ten feet below the cliff’s edge, the glacier’s surface was particularly clear. Frozen within were trees, cedars by the look of them, caught in the frozen vitagua. They curled at the tips, hooked like the spines of leaping fish. A few branches had snapped and begun to fall in the split second, centuries ago, when the vitagua had frozen. They hung in the ice, suspended in midfall.
Here and there within their branches were people, caught in the attitudes of surprise that reminded Ev of Pompeii.
The witch-burners came with the missionaries,” Eliza said. “They started on the East Coast, bringing plagues that killed millions. They murdered medicine women and chiefs, shamans and leaders. They looted graves and stole our farmland. As they moved westward, banishing magic, people fled here, to the realm of the spirits. They had time to have babies, grandbabies. This was, for a time, a thriving town.”
“Thriving,” Ev echoed, wondering why she felt the need for a history lesson. They were here to free people who would see things Eliza’s way: patient, sensible folks who could oppose Teoquan’s plan to blast his way into the real.
Not that he was going to say that aloud. In her infinite wisdom, Eliza had brought more than fifty of the Roused with them. With their whiskers and fur, their forked tongues and other mutations, the rescuers resembled the cast of some animated kids’ show—bright-eyed critters awaiting the first round of some winter game. Ev had no doubt that at least one would be spying for Teoquan.
Maybe the speech was for them.
Eliza put her raccoon hands on her hips and huffed. “They’re elders, Ev. The Pit was the battlefield; the people there are warriors.”
Oh. Now he got it. Warriors equaled young hotheads, who tended to follow Teoquan. Here they’d find more mature and moderate minds. Ev didn’t know much about aboriginal culture, but he had seen that many of the People, as they mostly called themselves, had a deep respect for age and experience.
Eliza raised her old-fashioned skirt and began tapping her foot, like a square dancer.
Nothing happened at first. Then there was a shiver underfoot, a crackling sound. Ev clapped his hands over his ears. His skin buzzed with the vibration; his teeth locked. He had time to admit to a stab of fear.…
Quiet returned.
He opened one eye. The glacier had settled and become opaque—Eliza had ground it to powder. The hooked cedar treetops sprang free of confinement, spraying fine, cobalt snow. A suspended branch completed its centuries-delayed fall, landing with a puff of displaced blue crystal.
“Now what?” Ev said.
She laced her delicate fingers into a basket, raising them slowly. The snowpack shifted, and the trees quivered.
“La!” A frozen figure rose from the snow. He was caked in ice about an inch thick, and his hands were thrown out defensively. A woman with the face of a mountain sheep skipped down the cliffside, pulling him up the treacherous path, passing him to the others.
More people were rising to the surface of the still-settling snowbank. The Roused rushed to get them up the cliff.
“Will they waken?” asked a girl of maybe twelve years with penguin feet and feathers.
“We’re just chipping them out,” Eliza said. “They need to go to the Pit, where it’s warm, to thaw.”
A bone bridge had been erected at the cliff’s edge; the rescuers lifted each of the newfound people, carrying them over it and vanishing. Eliza, meanwhile, assigned others to shovel the pulverized vitagua into buckets, carrying it up to the clifftop, where a trio of seal-men and an alchemized penguin girl were molding it into bricks, starting a wall.
“What’s with that?” Ev asked.
“The snow has to come right off the glacier,” Eliza explained. “Otherwise we’re freeing some at the cost of burying others.”
“Of course.”
“So…,” Ev murmured. “Elders. Mellow elders?”
“Being older doesn’t mean they automatically oppose Teoquan. But I used Astrid’s chantment to shuffle a few radicals out. Stirred the snow around.”
“Will it be enough?”
“It’ll tip the balance. The wisdom of these villagers was legendary, Ev. The others approve of freeing them.”
“You can’t just rescue moderates. Teoquan’s not stupid.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be subtle.”
He felt a pang. Rationalize as he might, this was wrong. What had Astrid called it? Vote-rigging.
Eight hours of hard labor later, they had excavated the tops of the trees, exposing high platforms and blue-stained tools along with the village’s former inhabitants. Eliza was crumbling ice along the perimeter, making more snow, no doubt concealing the occasional would-be troublemaker in some other glacier. The crew tasked with making a snow fort had constructed a number of igloos near the cliff’s edge. Now they were laying the foundation of a bright blue tower.
They’d sent several hundred people to the Pit when a shaft of fiery gold light shot skyward.
Everyone stopped sweeping and cheered.
“They must’ve opened the pipelines,” Ev said. “The underground tunnel and that pipe on the seafloor.”
“Right on time,” Eliza said. “Want to see how it’s going?”
They returned to the city and found the rescue operation scrambling. The far edge of the Pit was melting so fast, it was a real waterfall now, not just a hint of one. The ice roof over Jacks had melted away. He glowed, too bright to look at.
The revived elders stood amid an emotional, cheering crowd.
Even by the standards of the unreal, they were impressive. Their bearing spoke of grace, confidence, wisdom. There was a woman with the teeth of a shark and flat, frightening eyes; two men, twins, with the talons and wings of eagles; a mountain lioness with her cubs.
A shaggy buffalo sought Ev’s eyes. Sensing one of his own, he crossed the throng. “Is there … Can I do anything for you?”
The other shook its great head, speaking the Roused tongue.
Blue Magic Page 18