The Native Star

by M. K. Hobson

  With a furious cry, Stanton sprang to his feet, fists clenched. He made it only two steps toward Caul before the hulking sangrimancer stopped him with a dismissive gesture. “I told you to sit down.”

  Stumbling as if Caul had thrown a rope around his ankles, Stanton fell to the floor, next to Mirabilis’ butchered body. He buried his face in his hands, still smeared with Zeno’s blood.

  “Now,” Caul said, “we finish this.”

  Caul lifted Mirabilis’ heart before him. Making bold, angular swipes through the air, he used the bloody organ to trace a large rectangle. When he’d completed this action, he barked three loud commands, and the rectangle began to glow faintly. A dark room could be seen through it.

  Go through, carissima mia.

  The compulsion was irresistible. Emily walked toward the portal.

  As her feet moved of their own accord, a sudden flurry of activity caught Emily’s eye. Stanton had risen to kneel by Mirabilis’ body. He smeared his already-bloody hands through the ocean of Mirabilis’ thickening blood with quick, sinuous movements, muttering low bitter words as he did. Radiance grew around his fingertips. He cupped it in his hands as he rose to his feet. His presence seemed to expand to fill the entire room, though he was no taller than he’d been before. With a loud sound, he clapped his hands together, and the magic arced and sizzled between them.

  Then, through clenched teeth, he uttered words that made the earth shudder:

  “By the blood of my Sophos and the Sophos before him, I reclaim.”

  Caul whirled—too late. It was as if the words themselves attacked him. They collapsed him inward and pinned his arms, wrenched his head back, and forced him to his knees. His massive form struggled mightily against them; he screamed with pain and frustration. Stanton braced his feet, gritted his teeth, holding Caul like a fisherman fighting a whale.

  Emily didn’t want to go through the portal. But the command had been given.

  Go through, carissima mia.

  And so Emily went through.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Blood and Bile

  It was like stepping off a cliff into a churning ocean of blood and screaming. After tossing nauseatingly for what seemed a very long time, Emily landed hard in another room.

  The room was well lit—an abrupt change from the gloom of the Great Trine Room.

  Carissima mia, the call echoed to her, but it was growing fainter and fainter, until it was hardly there at all. She blinked, the ache in her head subsiding.

  She looked up, her eyes adjusting to the brightness. She was in a business office, small and rather cramped; there was a calendar on the wall that was out of date. There was a desk. And behind the desk, watching her, sat an elderly man with a crisp Vandyke beard, white threaded with black. He was sitting perfectly still. When he saw that she had finally noticed him, he smiled slightly.

  She stared at him. While his face was normal, almost kindly, his staring eyes were totally black from lid to lid.

  He wore a strange machine on his body. His arms and hands were encased to just above the elbow in metal plating that was ingeniously crafted to fit together as precisely as the scales of a snake. Flexible rubber tubes ran backward from the wrists of the gauntlets to two glass bottles that were fastened to his back by thick leather straps. Emily could not see what was in the bottles, but whatever it was glowed, illuminating the back of the chair in which he sat.

  The man sat forward slowly. His chair creaked, and the armoring around his hands and arms clanked faintly. He looked Emily up and down.

  “Where am I?” Emily’s voice caught on the words.

  “You’re in Charleston, South Carolina,” the man answered, his words lightly accented in French. “And you are in the offices of a company called Baugh’s Patent Magicks.”

  Baugh’s Patent Magicks? The establishment that had almost run her and Pap out of business in Lost Pine? Emily’s apprehension was buried momentarily under astonishment.

  “Are you Baugh?”

  The old man looked at her quizzically. Then comprehension dawned on his face and he chuckled.

  “Oh, yes. Baugh. I’m afraid there never really was a Baugh. Or rather, there was, but I only had the pleasure of his acquaintance for a very short time. He met with an accident. He bled to death.” The old man’s black eyes narrowed. “I am Rene, Comte d’Artaud.”

  “All right, that’s who you are,” she breathed, “but what are you? A sangrimancer, like Caul?”

  Artaud made a face.

  “No, I am not a Warlock,” he said. “I am a consultant. An expert. I happen to have a large contract with the United States Government.” He gestured toward her arm. “The stone in your hand is going to help me fulfill it.”

  “What kind of expert are you?”

  “I am an expert in power,” Artaud said. “The finding of it, the refinement of it, and the extraction of it. The stone has so very much power locked inside it, and Captain Caul felt I was just the man to get it out.” He cocked his head. “Where is Captain Caul, anyway?”

  The question seemed easy, but Emily had to think about it, sorting through her jumbled memories one by one. They were horrible images, edged with steel …

  The Great Trine Room. A black-handled knife. Blood.

  Caul and Stanton, battling for ownership of the Great Trine over Mirabilis’ gory corpse. The memory made Emily breathe in sharply. Stanton had to win, she thought. He had to. She looked up at Artaud, teeth clenched.

  “Caul is dead,” Emily spat, putting all the force of her belief into the words.

  “Oh, I doubt that,” Artaud said. “But I was counting on him to retrieve that Otherwhere Marble device.”

  “Well, he didn’t.” Emily lifted her ghost hand and waved it in his face spitefully. “That means you’ll never get the stone.”

  Artaud shook his head and sighed extravagantly. Lifting a hand, he leveled one of his metal-scaled fingers at her. Light massed around his metal-clad hand, nacreous and pale, and flashed in a bright bolt toward her. Flames engulfed her body, scalding along every nerve ending with brilliant agony. Emily shrieked and writhed, her fists clenching involuntarily, her muscles spasming in torturous unison.

  The pain subsided after an eternity. Emily lay on the floor, breathing hard, her muscles twitching. She moaned, fighting the humiliating urge to sob like a child.

  “You see, ma petite, that’s where you’re wrong.” Artaud was standing over her, looking down at her, his black eyes flat as scuffed obsidian. “It just means it will take longer and hurt more.”

  Artaud pushed her down a hall that was hung with advertising posters for Baugh products. His metal-sheathed hand was clamped around the back of her neck, its strength obviously reinforced by whatever strange power the gauntlets possessed. The little shoves he gave her were made painfully insistent by the shocking jolts he delivered with them. Every time his cold metallic hand pressed against her flesh, she winced, cringing.

  “It’s really too annoying, leaving me in the lurch like this,” Artaud muttered as they walked, punctuating angry words with twinging shocks. “All this dirty business simply isn’t in my scope of work. Well, if I must, I must. Warlocks!”

  They passed rooms where hundreds of women in shapeless brown dresses worked at long low tables, assembling brightly colored patent magic charms. Fingers flying, heads down, they were monitored by strolling, sour-faced supervisors. The air hummed with tedium and exhaustion.

  “The late shift,” Artaud said when he saw Emily looking. “Lazy sluts, all of them. Paid by the piece, and they still won’t apply themselves.” His fingers flexed. “Perhaps I just haven’t found the right means of motivating them.”

  “I suspect you’re doing quite well for yourself regardless,” Emily growled.

  “Oh, yes, quite well,” Artaud said. “The mail-order operation is simply a front, you understand. But one must never pass up an opportunity to make a profit, n’est-ce pas?”

  They paused before a large
iron door. A sign on the door showed an engraving of a rampant eagle, sheaves of spears clutched in its claws; black block letters read: Restricted. No Trespassing for Any Reason Whatsoever. By Order of the United States Army, President Ulysses S. Grant, Commander in Chief.

  As Artaud fiddled with a ring of keys, Emily had a sudden urge to make a break for it. As if intuiting this, Artaud took an even firmer grasp on her neck.

  “Don’t be foolish,” he said. “You’re about to see something amazing.”

  The doors opened on a cavernous factory space. From wall to far-distant wall were hundreds of giant silver and black machines, thumping and clattering. Pistons pounded, flywheels whizzed, canvas drive-belts stuttered. Emily stared, the thunderous din of it all pounding in her ears.

  “This is the Extraction Room.” Even though the words were spoken close to her head, Artaud had to yell to be heard.

  “What is this?” she murmured, assuming that he could not hear her. But he answered nonetheless, as he shoved her toward a set of stairs; she had to catch herself on the railing to keep from falling down them.

  “These machines extract pure raw power from the Mantic Anastomosis,” Artaud cried, spreading his gauntleted hands. “Chrysohaeme, the ancients called it. The golden blood of the earth. You are standing inside the first successful terramantic extraction plant ever built on such a large scale.”

  Emily said nothing, her eyes darting from side to side. There had to be some avenue of escape. Artaud had the gauntlets, but if she was quick enough …

  Artaud’s face fell in a frown. He’d obviously been expecting some expression of awe. With a small hiss of annoyance, he grabbed her upper arm and held it tight. Fiery pain seized her, drove her almost to her knees.

  “What do you think, Miss Edwards?” he hissed, bringing his face close to hers again. “Is it not phenomenal?”

  She nodded quickly, flinching away from him.

  Artaud grunted satisfaction as he pushed her forward again, down a broad walkway between two lines of machines. The floor was constructed of heavy metal grating, underneath which a viscous black fluid swirled and bubbled. Emily recognized the foul smell of rot and decay. Black Exunge.

  “Those machines over there are called needle borers.” Artaud gestured to a bank of tall machines with large pistonlike attachments that drove slender silver poles up and down in metal-ringed holes in the floor. “The pistons you see aboveground aren’t the actual drills; the drills themselves are sunk deep underground.”

  “Fascinating,” Emily said quickly, hoping to avoid another painful rebuke. But even as she spoke, she was remembering something even more painful … the feeling of needles plunging into her, sucking at her … The memory that had been Ososolyeh’s.

  This was what Ososolyeh had shown her.

  “The needle borers extract the power in its raw form, which then goes through those machines for processing …” Artaud pointed to another bank of machines, squat and dome shaped, which rattled as they worked. “Then, it is processed further, distilled and refined until it reaches this state.” He pointed toward a large area built up high with heavy wood shelves. On the shelves rested row upon gleaming row of bottles, filled with a glowing golden fluid—the same glowing fluid that Artaud carried in the bottles on his back.

  Chrysohaeme.

  Earth’s blood.

  “It is the pure extraction of magical power,” Artaud said, watching Emily as she stared at the bottles. There were thousands of them. “Of course, this isn’t one hundredth of what we’ve extracted over the past two decades. The rest is in military storage facilities in Virginia, I believe. Caul says they’re storing it up to defend against some kind of foreign threat.” Artaud’s voice was scornful. “If Caul wasn’t always so busy worrying about foreigners in woodpiles, he would see the incredible potential of the applications I have developed. He wants to protect America just as it is—but with my devices, America could rule the world!” Artaud lifted his hands, wiggled his fingers. “These gauntlets, for example. I’ve designed them to give an untrained individual the ability to exercise powers greater even than a fully trained Warlock. Warlocks are limited in the amount of magic they can channel. But with these gauntlets there is no such limitation.”

  Artaud paused, regarding his metal-sheathed fingers.

  “Of course, I still have to work on the rate at which they use the chrysohaeme … they drain the tanks far too quickly. Haven’t quite figured out how to regulate the flow properly …”

  “What’s the Black Exunge for?” Emily lifted a hand, pointing in the direction of a group of men who were using a steel chute to pour the stinking tarlike fluid into a large tank. They were wearing protective suits of spun silver and glass—the same suits the Aberrancy hunters had worn.

  “Very good, Miss Edwards.” Artaud sounded genuinely pleased. “That is indeed geochole—or Black Exunge, as you call it. You see, when we started this operation over ten years ago, we had no trouble finding large chrysohaeme pockets to extract. Over the years, however, they became harder to find—in fact, they began to move from day to day. Very frustrating. So we adopted what we’ve come to call the Exunge extraction method.”

  Artaud pointed to another row of racks, on which rested a different kind of container—bullet-shaped steel containers stenciled with a skull-and-crossbone design. The exact kind of containers she’d seen the Aberrancy hunters putting Black Exunge into.

  “In the early days, geochole was difficult to obtain,” Artaud said. “Now it is wonderfully plentiful, making our job that much easier.”

  A goose-pimply chill chased over Emily’s flesh. More magic being used … more Black Exunge being created, overwhelming the Mantic Anastomosis’ natural ability to process and purify it …

  “What is the Exunge extraction method?” she asked, but something in the back of her mind told her she knew already.

  “Black Exunge is heavier than chrysohaeme, just as water is heavier than oil. We pump Black Exunge deep into the Mantic Anastomosis to get at fragmented pockets of chrysohaeme. It’s quite an effective technique.”

  The back of Emily’s throat went dry and tight.

  This was what Ososolyeh had shown her.

  A lake drained, leaving nothing but foulness behind. But these fools weren’t just sucking the sweet water from the lake, they were pumping poison back into it, container upon container, clogging it with filth and venom.

  A world engulfed by roiling blackness.

  The Mantic Anastomosis was a living thing.

  A living thing that could become an Aberrancy.

  The Mantic Anastomosis purges itself of Black Exunge for a reason, Emily realized. Black Exunge is as toxic to the Mantic Anastomosis as it is to any living thing. If Ososolyeh’s ability to purge itself is overwhelmed, it will become an Aberrancy. Everything that lives on earth will be consumed. Everything—everything—will die.

  Emily held her hand over her mouth, not trusting herself even to breathe. Artaud watched her, and when he spoke he sounded even more pleased than before.

  “You really are taking an interest!” he said, wonderingly. Then he shook his head. “What a shame.”

  Artaud brought her to a room on the far side of the Extraction Room, which was small and cold and dark. As Artaud pushed her over the threshold, Emily realized that he did not intend that she would ever come back over it. Not on her own two feet, anyway.

  As Artaud moved around the room, raising the gas jets, Emily could see white enameled medical implements. In the middle of the room there was a large, flat dissecting table, with deep channels designed to direct the runoff of blood into a bucket. The dominant feature of the room, however, was another of Artaud’s machines. This one was a girdered archway of steel, surrounded by smaller tubelike chambers, haloed by an intricately wired nest of cloth-wrapped cords.

  “Sit.” Artaud gestured to a wooden chair in the middle of the room as he moved toward the machine. Emily stood stock-still.

  Anything would
be better than being locked in this room with this man, she realized, gut trembling. Anything.

  She sprang for the door, her fingers wrapping around the knob just long enough to feel that it was already locked.

  Teeth bared, Artaud spread all five gauntleted fingers at her, driving her to her knees. She bent over double, one arm flying up protectively over her head, the other frozen on the locked doorknob. Involuntary tears flooded her eyes.

  “Haven’t we already discussed motivation,” he said, “or did I not ask politely enough? My apologies. I will try again. Will you please sit?”

  Slowly, Emily dragged herself to the chair, breath coming in whimpers. She pulled herself onto it, wrapping her arms around her body, bending double to ease the lingering, cramping aches.

  Artaud nodded with satisfaction as he went back to his machine. He flipped switches one by one, and a universe of little lights began to glow like bugs on a summer night. Emily watched him, teeth clenched.

  Now what?

  Suddenly, Emily noticed that there was something warm touching her. She flinched away, wondering if it was another of Artaud’s attacks—but then she realized that the warmth was coming from her own hand. From the Jefferson Chair ring around her thumb, where it was resting against the bare skin of her upper arm … it was warm. Warm as the hand of a friend.

  Stanton was looking for her.

  Sudden hope sang in her sore, twitching body. She pressed the ring against her lips, closed her eyes. He was looking for her. It was something, at least.

  “After Caul retrieved Grimaldi from the custody of the Philadelphia Police, I had them search your unconscious mind for information about the Otherwhere Marble.” Artaud did not look at her as he went to a metal rack on which dozens of bottles of chrysohaeme sat arranged like colossal, glowing ant eggs. “Thus, I know that it’s a transdimensional portational device of some kind. Mirabilis must have believed that no one could possibly gain access to the dimension in which your hand was stored. But with enough power, it’s possible to open a gateway to any dimension necessary.” Artaud began loading the bottles into the huge machine, like bullets in the chamber of a revolver.