The Collected Christopher Connery

by L. EE

  “Well, not me,” she corrected. “I turned on the radio, but there was nothing worth listening to, so I switched it off. Sorry if I woke you.”

  “No, no, it’s all right.” Nia rubbed her eyes. “How long have I been asleep?”

  “About ten hours,” Arthur answered.

  Nia stared at him. “Ten hours?”

  He nodded. “We got back to the rooms at noon –”

  “We were wandering around in Connery’s illusion for about a day,” Gail added. She held up the paper. “I checked the date on here to be sure.”

  “And now it’s about ten at night.”

  Nia sat back against the headboard. “Why didn’t anyone wake me?”

  “You needed the rest. Anyway, nothing’s happened. We’ve just been sitting here, taking turns napping, and waiting for you to wake up.”

  “Hm.” Nia’s eyes closed again in spite of her. Even after sleeping for almost half a day, she felt groggy. Too much magic she supposed. It had worn her out. Then something else occurred to her and her eyes flew open. “Connery’s arms, did you –”

  “Under the bed,” Gail answered. “With his head.”

  “So we did it!” Despite her exhaustion, Nia couldn’t help beaming.

  Gail nodded, returning the smile with some reluctance. “We did it, but it sure as hell wasn’t easy. We need to get some rest before we do anything else.”

  “Oh, of course, of course.” Nia waved a hand agreeably, but she was flushed with success. “We obviously need to wait until morning at least, but we’ve found two parts in three days! That’s a remarkable success rate. If this continues, we will be done by the end of the week!”

  26

  Gail Lin

  They were not done by the end of the week.

  By the time Saturday rolled around, Nia had yet to locate any more pieces of Connery, and not for lack of trying. Every morning, she would come to breakfast beaming and declare that she had finally determined Connery’s location, but then they would drive out to the place she had marked on her map and find an empty lot, a narrow alley, or one of the magically protected groves of Academy trees. But they never found a single disembodied limb or even a whiff of magic.

  Sure, the meant Gail had lots of free evenings to share drinks with Xavier at the bar while Nia scribbled out spell after spell in her room, but that wasn’t exactly what she was getting paid to do. Even so, she’d invited the magicians to join her more than once, figuring they could use a break now and then too, but Nia always wanted to stay in with her spells, and Arthur seemed reluctant to leave her alone. Or maybe he wasn’t allowed to leave her alone. It was hard to tell.

  Either way, it’d been nice to see Xavier again. He was one of those rare people she could go for months without seeing and still hold a conversation with when they met up again. There had been just one uncomfortable moment when Xavier’s shirtsleeve had pulled back while he reached for his glass, revealing the stippling of scars on the inside of his arm. Needle marks.

  “Goddamn, Xavier, you’re not –”

  Xavier blinked at her in confusion then looked down at his arm. “No! Hell, Gail, I’ve been getting sick a lot this year, that’s all. Last time I went whining to him, Doc Simmons gave me some medicine to help me stay better. And unfortunately this is the best way of taking the stuff. You can’t think I’d –”

  “No, no.” Gail held up her hands in apology. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I just – I know life isn’t always easy in Gracetown. You can’t blame me for worrying.”

  Xavier smiled at that. “No, guess I can’t. But you don’t have to worry about me. Anyway, if I was shooting that much vernix, do you think I’d be upright talking sense to you now?”

  Gail chuckled as she picked up her own drink. “No, probably not. You’re pretty much done talking sense after two whiskies.”

  Probably to prove her wrong, Xavier bought himself a third and was stumbling up to bed by nine, much to Gail’s amusement.

  Anyway, nice as it was to catch up with Xavier – it sounded like his little Gracetown school was finally getting a trickle of city funding though he still had to play with the band a few weeks a year to keep it afloat – Gail had a feeling this wasn’t how the Academy wanted her spending her time. It sure as hell wasn’t getting her any closer to finding Connery.

  “It must be moving!” Nia wailed when the fourth attempt to pin down the next bit of Connery ended exactly the same way as the first three.

  “How can it be moving?” Arthur demanded. Apparently waking up at the crack of dawn four days in a row to drive aimlessly around the city didn’t suit him. The thermos of coffee in his hand wasn’t having any noticeable effect on his mood.

  Gail didn’t much care for the early starts either, but she hadn’t been sleeping well lately anyway. She kept having strange dreams that jolted her awake with her heart trying to escape through her throat, dreams she could only remember fractured pieces of. A bloody floor. The shrieks of a terrified animal. A pile of chalk-stained books. A child screaming as something froze inside his chest.

  Well, that’s what she got for sleeping away from home, she guessed. Regardless, by the time Nia knocked on her door each morning, she was usually wide awake and glad to have something to occupy her.

  “Maybe they strapped part of him to a rat,” she suggested to Nia with a sidelong grin as they stood in another empty lot. Rats were pretty much the only animals that could survive in large numbers on the streets of New Crossbridge. They hid in their holes whenever the rain came down and made their nests near the underground water treatment tanks, which meant they got more good water than the average Gracetowner.

  “Don’t be silly,” Nia snapped. “No rat is big enough to carry a human body part. And even if they were someone would have noticed.”

  “Sarcasm, Nia.” Arthur took a long swallow of coffee. “Or joke, I suppose, in this case, but the point still stands.”

  “Oh.” Then, “Well, it wasn’t funny.”

  Gail grinned. “It was a little funny.”

  Nia’s scowl deepened. “I thought you were the one who wanted to be finished with this as soon as possible.”

  “No, I’m the one who didn’t want to do this at all, but was tempted by the irresistible call of money.”

  Shooting her another dark look, Nia went back to combing over that day’s abandoned lot. While Arthur was preoccupied fussing with the lid on his thermos, Gail stole a glance at the sky. So far it had been a dry day, but the slate gray sky and the chilly breeze promised rain and soon. The trash that littered the alley – abandoned bikes, piles of old magazines wrapped in twine, and one forgotten car – was already suffering the wrath of the rainy season. Some of the bikes had been eaten away to almost nothing. Their rusted skeletons made Gail shiver.

  Nia made a sharp frustrated sound and actually threw her hat on to the ground. After a moment, she reconsidered the dramatic gesture and picked it up again, fretfully brushing dirt from the brim. “This doesn’t make any sense.” She kicked at a bit of rotten tire. “How could the hiding place change so drastically from day to day?”

  “Are you sure you’re doing the spell right?” Gail held up her hands before Nia could actually set her on fire with that glare. “I’m just asking.”

  “Yes, I am absolutely, completely, unquestionably certain. I double-checked the spell three times this morning and got the same result each time. It should be here.”

  “But it’s not.”

  Nia sighed. “But it’s not. It absolutely, completely, unquestionably is not.”

  “How much longer do we have to stay here?” Arthur called. He had moved to the entrance of the lot as an unsubtle hint. “I don’t want my car to get rained on.”

  “Why do you care?” Gail called back. “It’s just an Academy car, right?”

  Arthur crossed his arms and glowered. “While we’re out here, it’s my car.”

  Gail had a feeling the Academy wouldn’t see it that way, but she guess
ed she understood the sentiment. She looked to Nia for an answer to Arthur’s question, but she had already moved a few steps away to stare sadly at a wall.

  The wind picked up a little, catching stray strands of Gail’s braided hair and blowing them into her eyes. She slipped her hand under her coat, which she had gotten laundered by the hotel at the Academy’s expense, and nervously gripped the handle of her umbrella. She had left her stiff cumbersome poncho in the car, figuring this would be another quick look around, but Nia didn’t seem like she was going anywhere fast. Sighing heavily, Gail went to wait with Arthur.

  Arthur looked sideways at her as she leaned back against the wall beside him. “We’re going to die here, aren’t we?”

  Gail forced a smile. “I hope not.” She watched as Nia removed her tan coat, folded it over the cleanest bit of trash she could find, then rolled back the sleeves of her dress to dig around under the hood of the abandoned car.

  “Is she always like this?”

  Arthur laughed. “Worse. I’ve known her to stay in the Academy labs for so long that when she comes out she has to ask what day it is. She’s always giving people fits with her experiments. They’re always loud, messy, and unpredictable. Once she turned her hair magenta for a week. I don’t even know what she was trying to do, but she must have succeeded because she was happy even with the hair.”

  The image wrung a true smile out of Gail. “That had to be a sight.”

  “Her work is brilliant, though, very innovative.” Arthur suddenly stiffened, looking at Gail narrowly from the corner of his eye. “But also entirely in line with Academy regulations and moral constraints, of course.”

  Gail raised an eyebrow. “Sure, I wouldn’t have doubted it. Anyway, that’s the Academy’s business, not mine.”

  “I wasn’t telling you for the Academy,” Arthur replied seriously. “I was telling you for her.” It must have been clear from Gail’s face that she wasn’t following, because he sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “She likes to do things by the book. It’s important to her.”

  “The Academy has a book?” From what Gail had seen Academy magicians seemed to follow extremely loose procedure. In fact, as far as she could see, the only rule seemed to be, ‘try not to kill or mangle any innocent bystanders, but we understand that sometimes these things can’t be helped.’

  “A very thick one,” said Arthur. “There are so many rules that not even Nia could recite them all by heart, but there are really just two main principles every Academy magician is supposed to live by.”

  Gail waited, curious despite the impending rain. Though she’d lived in the city her whole life, she, like most laymen, was still kept mostly in the dark about the magicians who ran it.

  “One,” said Arthur, sounding like a school kid reading in front of the class, “protect those weaker than you and never abuse them.”

  “Guess no one told Connery that one.” Another gust of wind ruffled Gail’s hair and she pulled out her umbrella.

  “Two, never use unbound magic. Ever.”

  Gail stopped fiddling with her umbrella – cheap piece of shit; she really needed to invest in a better one – and looked over at him. “Unbound magic?” Something Nia had said to her when they had first met floated back into her mind: “He’s a bound ward of the Academy.”

  Arthur’s eyes darted toward Nia, but she was still digging around in the corpse of the car. “You don’t know the difference between bound and unbound magic?”

  “Nope, I’m just a stupid layman.” Gail failed to keep the irritation out of her voice, though if she were honest, she hadn’t tried very hard. If the Academy wanted her to stand around in the rain being patient with condescending magicians, they should pay her more.

  Arthur opened his mouth then closed it again to scowl at her. “I didn’t call you stupid. I was just surprised they don’t teach you about it in school since it’s foundational to the Academy’s philosophy.”

  Gail didn’t feel like admitting that the two schools she had attended before the police academy had been a one-room charity school run by a half-deaf woman in Gracetown and an overcrowded classroom in the children’s home where the poor teachers who tried couldn’t make up for the ones didn’t. So all she did was shrug and say, “Well, I’ve never heard of it. I can recognize a few spells from chasing after Connery for all these years, but I don’t know which ones were bound or not.”

  “No, no, that was all –” Arthur chewed pensively on his bottom lip for a moment, then said, “All right, you’ve seen Nia do plenty of magic. How does she do it?”

  Was that a trick question? “She draws it. What else would she do?”

  But Arthur was shaking his head. “The circles aren’t the magic, they’re simply the medium.”

  “What?”

  “They make it easier to get the effect you want. Magic can be unpredictable, but if you give it a specific path to follow, you can predict the outcome. You can also control the power of the magic, increasing or limiting its strength based on the size and complexity of the circle.” He still sounded like he was quoting from a book, but there was something bitter at the back of his words.

  “So that’s… bound magic then?”

  Arthur nodded.

  “And there’s another kind?” Gail had never seen any magic done that didn’t involve drawing pictures. Even Connery always had his magic scratched out everywhere in chalk and ink.

  “Like I said, the circles aren’t the magic, they just make it easier to do. Any magician can do magic without them. It’s more powerful and creative that way, not to mention faster, but it’s also much more dangerous.”

  “Dangerous how?”

  “The circles tell the magic what you want it to do. Even a stupid or weak magician knows what they’re getting when they use one. While a spell might fail if the magician isn’t strong enough to power it, it won’t go wrong. But unbound magic requires great strength of mind and if the magician loses control for even a moment, things – well, things can go very wrong.”

  Gail tried to imagine magic going wrong and quickly decided she didn’t care for the idea at all. Hell, she usually didn’t like it when magic went right. “So doing unbound magic is illegal?”

  “Yes.”

  “I guess that’s a good thing. Better safe than sorry, right?”

  “Sure.”

  Gail glanced at Arthur, but he just kept glaring straight ahead.

  “So,” she tried, “what – oh, hell!” She started violently as the first raindrop touched her hand. Logically, she knew that short-term exposure couldn’t hurt her, but she swore she could feel her skin burning even after she wiped the drop away. Snapping her umbrella open, she squeezed herself underneath it. “Please tell me she’ll be done soon.”

  Arthur studied her curiously as he opened his own umbrella. “You don’t like the rain.”

  “Does anyone like the rain?” Gail muttered, hunching her shoulders against the wind that sprayed water against her face and neck.

  For a moment there was silence, then something prodded her elbow. Looking over, she found Arthur holding out a folded poncho. “I don’t need it,” he explained. “I’m fine with just my umbrella.”

  “You sure?” When Arthur nodded, Gail took it gratefully and managed to slide it over her head without putting down her umbrella. “Next time I won’t leave mine in the car.”

  Arthur watched Nia poke and prod at something on the ground for a minute then turned back to Gail. “You’re right, no one likes the rain, but you really don’t like it.”

  “Yeah, well, you try living in an unprotected dwelling for a while and see how much you care for it.”

  “You lived in an unprotected dwelling?” Arthur looked at her with honest surprise. “But I thought all residential districts were protected now. The only place that isn’t it – oh.”

  “Yeah.” Gracetown. That was the only place in the city that wasn’t regularly waterproofed. The Academy’s excuse was that there were so many hovel
s being put up and torn down every day that it would be a waste of manpower to weather-proof every single one, but of course, there wouldn’t be such a dramatic turnover if people could actually trust their houses to keep the rain out. But Gail guessed that would actually require doing something, which was way harder than making excuses.

  Another tap on her elbow. This time Arthur offered her the thermos.

  “It’s going to get cold before I finish it all myself,” he said and Gail got the feeling he meant it as an apology.

  “Thanks,” said Gail, accepting both the coffee and the apology. She took a long swallow, not minding the slightly burned tongue as heat spread through her chest and belly, driving off a bit of the cold the rain had put there. Handing the thermos back, she said, “So do you think there’s any way of tempting her away from here?”

  “No.” Then Arthur’s brow wrinkled as he rolled his thermos between his hands. “Well, maybe if we gave her something else to do. I mean, she is very devoted to her work, but if she had something she wanted to get back to…”

  “Something fun, you mean? Are Academy magicians allowed to have fun on the job? I mean, neither of you would come drinking with me and Xavier.”

  Arthur smiled at her. “I wanted too, but… you know, Nia had to work. But after today, maybe even she’ll want a break. It would be good for her.”

  “And for us,” Gail added. “I’ll go ask. She’s less likely to say no to me.”

  Up went the old Arthur eyebrow. “Why’s that?”

  “Because you’re her brother. Who can’t say no to their brother?” Leaving Arthur waiting by the wall, Gail headed over to Nia, making sure to keep a grip on her poncho hood so it didn’t get blown back by the wind. “Hey, Nia,” she said when she reached the Illuminator, who was now wearing her own poncho and peering under the decaying car. “I’ve got a proposition for you.”

  “Hm?” Nia looked up and Gail winced when a raindrop splattered against her cheek.

  “Careful, you’ll get water in your eye.” She took Nia by the arm and helped her to her feet.

  “Well, we wouldn’t want that,” Nia laughed. “I might have to blink a few times.”