Magic Lessons

by Justine Larbalestier

  She followed the trail to where the elf and Reason were standing by one of the biggest monuments. On top of it was a grumpy-looking stone angel with huge wings, holding a sword and a book. Jay-Tee just bet the book had instructions on how to behead people who piss off angels.

  “Are you okay, Reason?” she asked. She’d been aiming for a shout, but she was out of breath and couldn’t raise her voice above a whisper.

  Reason appeared not to hear. Jay-Tee dragged herself closer. Reason was still wearing all her New York winter gear. She must be broiling.

  “You okay?”

  Reason turned, gave Jay-Tee a half smile, and put her fingers to her lips. The elf was running his fingers along all the names on the monument. Jay-Tee read them over his shoulder, keeping her feet, although her legs were still wobbly. They were almost all Cansinos and almost all women. She saw lots of Esmeraldas and Sarafinas, Milagros, and Marias. The elf man only touched the women’s names. She and Reason followed him around all four sides. She became aware that he was humming softly. A tune she’d never heard before.

  He stopped in front of a man’s name right at the top of the monument: Raul Emilio Jesús Cansino, died 1823. He ran his fingers over it and then brought a finger to his chest.

  “That’s you,” Reason said.

  He inclined his head slightly. Jay-Tee figured it was a nod. She had an urge to say, “Hi, Raul. How you doing?” But she was too tired to say anything. Anyways, she didn’t think she’d get much of a laugh out of him or Reason.

  Then he ran his fingers over the name immediately below his own: Esmeralda Milagros Luz Cansino, 1823-1841. He was humming. He was smiling.

  “Your daughter?” Reason asked. Well, duh, thought Jay-Tee.

  The same slight movement of his head. Then he pointed from the name to Reason, to her stomach. His smile grew.

  He pressed harder on Esmeralda Milagros Luz Cansino until his hand started to sink into the stone. He put his other hand on Reason’s belly. Reason’s eyes grew wide, but she made no move away from him. His fingers sank into her belly.

  “No!” Jay-Tee shouted.

  29

  Golden Spiral

  I couldn’t move. The old man’s hand was in my belly. I could feel his fingers twisting, pulling, tweaking. His magic scorched through every part of me, was centred there, below my bellybutton. His fingers were finer than wire, manipulating my cells, I was sure. I wished I could turn my gaze inward. See inside myself the way I could see inside everyone else.

  Jay-Tee started shouting, then threw a punch at the old man. Her fist sailed through him, through air. Cansino’s hand inside me felt fainter, as if he wasn’t solid anymore. Jay-Tee stumbled, fell to the ground, struggled to get up. Her breath sounded frayed, unravelling like loose thread. Cansino moved his left hand slightly, like a ghost waving. Jay-Tee froze. Cansino pulled himself together, became solid.

  I sent my magic at his hands twisting inside my belly. But it didn’t send him screaming out of me; it nibbled at his edges, playful as a small dog. He pulled the magic into his hands, made it his.

  I was suddenly sure that this was what Raul Emilio Jesús Cansino wanted: to become me. Inhabit my body. Be human again.

  Even if it meant killing me.

  Then the old man pulled his hand from my belly and held it in front of my eyes insistently, as if he was trying to tell me something. I stared at it, even blurred my eyes, though I didn’t think I had much magic left, but I had no idea what I was looking at.

  What did he want me to see?

  Cansino pushed his hand into his own belly, made his fingers into long, thin wires, thinner than hair. I could see better now what he was doing. He reached inside his cells, forcing my vision to narrow, to see the components of each cell, the strings of DNA that were so like my own, even though there was so little humanity left in him. He stared at me as he did it, nodding at me at each stage. As if to say, This is how you do it.

  Through my blurred vision I saw old man Cansino altering the cells of his body with his wire-thin fingers, performing minute surgery on himself. As he worked, his legs began to turn into bubbling brown stuff. The same stuff that I had seen emerge out of the steps in front of Esmeralda’s door. The stuff that had turned into Raul Cansino.

  Then he pulled his hand out. His legs rippled, changing from bubbling mass to a kind of flesh. He nodded at me. Gently waved, setting me free.

  I stumbled forward, turned to Jay-Tee, opened my mouth to speak. The old man froze me again, shook his head, and took my hand in his, plunged it into his belly.

  If my mouth had worked, I would have screamed.

  He pushed my hand past his skin, into the muscle below, but there was no sinew, no blood. It didn’t feel like flesh; it felt like the piece of him he had thrown inside me. More like plasticine than flesh.

  We were so close that I could see his skin had no pores. It was in constant motion, as if tiny worms flowed underneath. I could smell his breath. It was faintly sweet, like homemade lemonade.

  Raul let go of my hand. I could move it but nothing else, not even my eyelids.

  He nodded, his face centimetres from my own. His eyes stared at mine, unblinking. Like a croc’s, only they were the same brown throughout, no variation. His irises were as uniform as his black pupils, as if they were made of glass.

  He nodded again, almost impatient with me. What did he want me to do?

  Cansino waved his wire fingers almost close enough to cut me. He shifted his body so that my hand moved through his dense but yielding flesh. Fine hair stood up all over my body.

  I understood.

  He wanted me to tinker with his cells. Just as he had done.

  Raul Emilio Jesús Cansino was teaching me to do magic the way he did it.

  Jason Blake was right. Raul had chosen me—to be his student, to learn how to be like him. Nausea rose in me, but with a gesture he made it go away. I tried to pull my hand out, but it would not respond to my commands. I wanted to run to the other end of the earth. I did not want to become like him: to have flesh without blood, to no longer speak, to no longer be human.

  But my brain already accepted that I had no choice. He was stronger than me. If I didn’t learn his lessons, he wouldn’t let me go. And if I did learn his lessons, my mind whispered, maybe they would help me save Sarafina and Jay-Tee and Tom.

  I did what he had done, but it was impossible with my clumsy, round-tipped fingers. I slid past clusters of cells, crudely breaking his flesh. I had to make my fingers long and less than a micron wide. But how?

  I concentrated my magic, drew it through the brooch pinned to my jacket, the ammonite in my pocket, thought about changing my fingers just as Esmeralda had taught me to make light, as Sarafina had taught me to use the golden spiral to detect anything living nearby. I concentrated. Sweat ran down my face, past the backs of my knees.

  Nothing happened. My fingers remained fingers.

  Raul plunged his hand back into me, moving his fingers. But slowly this time, so I could follow what he was doing. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it. The changes made my fingers inside him start to stretch, to elongate, to grow harder, to become fine metal cell-manipulating instruments.

  I set about altering his cells. Or rather, shearing them in half. He smiled and drew the cells back together again. I tried again, flailing about, as uncoordinated as a newborn foal. But Raul was patient, repairing my wreckage, nodding for me to try again. I was a puddle of sweat. It was so hard.

  And then I did it—I minutely shifted the sequence of DNA in one of his cells. Feathers sprouted across his forehead.

  Raul smiled, and the feathers above his eyes shifted. If I’d been able to move anything other than my hand, I would have giggled. He was pleased with me, I was sure: his strange skin and eyes glowed. He drew his hand out of me and took a step away. Gradually, the feathers disappeared.

  He unfroze me. This time I stood where I was and ignored Jay-Tee. He had another lesson for me.

  R
aul Cansino began to dissolve again, as he had when Jay-Tee attacked him, but he was showing me how to do it. How to shrink the cells into near nothingness and then how to bring them back together again. He did it by concentrating on the size of each cell.

  He took a step back, the signal for me to try. There were so many cells inside me, and I couldn’t see them the way I saw them inside everyone else. I had to go by feel. I thought about them being smaller, and slowly, they shrank.

  It didn’t hurt, but it filled my body with dizzy nausea. I felt light and strange and awful—the world shrank to a million kilometres away, as if I were on another planet looking at Earth through a telescope. Raul Cansino brought his palms together, drew them apart, and then put them together again. It took me a moment to realise that he was clapping, applauding my success. He was almost grinning.

  I made my cells big again, felt myself pulling together, solidifying, sickeningly fast. It was like being in the back seat of a car going way too fast along winding roads.

  But I was whole. Raul nodded again. And thrust both his hands into me. He started dissolving, unravelling the connections between his cells, pulling them apart until all I could see were particles of what had been him in air, particles drifting into the ground to join his dead relatives, particles still inside me.

  The lesson was over. He was unravelling. I felt him sigh, almost as if he were happy.

  Jay-Tee stumbled forward and into me.

  “Sorry, Reason,” she panted. “Where’d he go?” Jay-Tee wavered on her feet.

  In front of my eyes the old man continued to dissolve into a mass of spirals. They radiated downwards, growing bigger and bigger. Algorithmic spirals, Fibonacci spirals, golden spirals. They consumed our family monument, dispersing into the ground, into the remains of his family underground, into me. All those magic Cansino bones. Spirals sped up through the ground to meet him. Together they faded back into the soil. I wondered what they were. The remnants of my ancestors speeding to meet the remnants of Raul Cansino?

  But they were dead. They couldn’t come back to life like that.

  Raul Cansino was gone, but I felt him even more strongly within me, like a bonfire in my stomach. I couldn’t see the cemetery anymore—not Jay-Tee, not the monument, not the gum trees or overgrown grasses. Everything flattened out and stretched forever, became a map dotted with points of light. A map of magic.

  I could see the monument and Jay-Tee, but now they were faint dots of light. The biggest light was not far off: Esmeralda’s house, I was sure: Tom, Esmeralda, the door, all those magical objects. There were others. Further away, Sarafina glowed. I knew it was my mother, not from the shape or size of the light, but because I recognised the feel of her. Some part of me had recognised the magic in her my whole life.

  I looked farther out, across Sydney, saw other lights. I wondered if they were people, doors, or magic objects. I pushed further, across Australia. Clusters of brightness—I imagined they were cities, where people were, where magic was, but none of it was as blindingly brilliant as Esmeralda’s house.

  I couldn’t count the lights; there were too many stretched out too far. It was like trying to count all the grains of sand at the beach. There weren’t hundreds of magic people, places, objects: there were thousands and thousands of them.

  I was seeing what Raul Cansino saw, not people or houses or doors, but patterns of magic. He had replaced my sight with his. Was he going to take me over completely?

  I turned my thoughts to Danny, to Sarafina, to Tom and Jay-Tee. My last thoughts weren’t going to be of Raul Cansino. I said goodbye. I thought about the munga-munga who had created the valleys and the hills and mountains but not the people or their cities or their magic. I wished I’d had a chance to go back to Jilkminggan and stay, tell them my name was Reason, not Rain, and ask them for more stories. I wished my mother hadn’t gone mad. I wished I’d never killed anyone. I—

  “Reason? Reason? Are you okay?” I felt Jay-Tee’s hands on my shoulders, though I couldn’t see her, only the fading, tenuous light of her magic. “Reason! Reason! Wake up!” She slapped me.

  I blinked, half fell forward, flashing back and forth between the old man’s vision and my own. A stuttering fall between dots of light and the cemetery. Glimpses of me falling against Jay-Tee, pushing her back against the Cansino family monument—glimpses of an expanse of dark punctuated by light, by magic. Jay-Tee managed to stop my fall, and we slid to the ground.

  “You’re okay, Reason,” she told me.

  “Am I?” I could still feel him inside me. The heat was there. I saw black ants crawling along a fallen piece of bark; I saw Jay-Tee looking down at me, tired and worried. I blinked again. Briefly, the world became points of light, magic stretching out as far as I wished to follow it. Eyes open, I saw sunlight, grave-stones, gum trees, overgrown grass.

  But when I blinked…

  “Well, thank God for that.” Jay-Tee made her strange gesture across her forehead, chest, and shoulders. Her face was drawn. I closed my eyes. Her magic was the faintest glow. “’Cause I don’t know how I’m going to be able to walk back to the house, let alone carry you.”

  I stood up, dusted myself off. I felt strong. I held out a hand for Jay-Tee, who took it and stood shakily. I put my hand on Raul’s name engraved in marble and then on his daughter’s below. There were a few specks of grey-brown dust. As I touched them they sank into my skin. The heat in my belly shifted. I blinked, and for an instant I saw his map of magic.

  “What is it?” Jay-Tee asked. “That dust?”

  “Raul.”

  “Is he dead?”

  I nodded, though it felt like he was still alive inside me. “He was tired. He wanted to come home and die.”

  “That’s what he wanted? Banging at the door?”

  “I think so.”

  “Then what did he need you for? Why did he fill you and Mere with his magic?”

  I opened my mouth and then shut it, shrugging instead. What could I say to her? Either my ancestor had invaded my body or he’d turned me into the same kind of monster he was. Or something else I hadn’t even thought of. I couldn’t begin to talk about it until I understood. And even then…What would Esmeralda make of it? Would she want to become like me? Would she try to take it from me if she knew? I blinked again, saw the world transformed into magic light. How could I explain that?

  “But you’re sure he’s dead?”

  I wasn’t sure of anything. I hadn’t been sure of anything for days and days, not since I opened a door that led to another world. Everything since then had led me to this moment, standing here dazed in a cemetery with my ancestor’s magic pulsing in me, turning me into something else, something that could see like a dead man. What was I supposed to say?

  “The old man is dead, right?” Jay-Tee asked again, staring at me anxiously.

  If I told Jay-Tee, she might tell Esmeralda. I couldn’t be sure, so I made myself nod. “He’s in the ground with the rest of the Cansinos.” At least, some of him was. “It’s where he wanted to be.”

  Two sulphur-crested cockatoos landed in the tall gum tree. “Wow,” Jay-Tee said, pointing. “Check out those birds! They’re gorgeous.” The birds let out their raucous cry and Jay-Tee jumped. “Jesus! They sound like someone being strangled. That is deeply messed up.”

  Not compared to how messed up I was. What had Raul’s magic lesson turned me into?

  What was I now?

  30

  Triangles and Diamonds

  Tom woke up to a loud noise. He opened his eyes as someone jumped over him. He was lying on the kitchen floor, which made no sense. Then he remembered. He sat up, blinked.

  Esmeralda was still standing at the door, gripping its handle tightly, but she wasn’t shaking anymore. The door was open. Tom was staring at the other side of the world. He was sitting in daylight, looking at night; sitting in warmth, feeling a freezing wind blow across him. He shivered. He was sitting in Sydney watching Jason Blake trying to force his way
in from New York City.

  Tom stood up—he felt wobbly but not too bad. The back of his head hurt. He wondered where Jay-Tee was. Where Reason was.

  Jason Blake’s hand reached into the kitchen, into Sydney.

  Tom picked up one of the bones from the box on the table, pushed magic into it, and hurled it at Blake’s hand. Reason’s grandfather flinched, pulled his hand back into New York. Tom reached for another bone, magicked it as well, and stepped closer to the door, ready to hurl it at Blake’s face. That’s when he saw that Blake’s other hand had hold of Esmeralda, was dragging her into winter. She clung to the door. Blake was as powerful as she was, he realised. He must have the old man’s magic, too.

  Esmeralda wasn’t how Tom had thought she was. She didn’t know everything about magic, and she wasn’t as brave or honest as he’d imagined. She’d kept so many secrets from him. He hadn’t known about her daughter, Sarafina, or her granddaughter, Reason. She’d failed to teach him to protect himself from magic-wielders, to protect himself from her.

  But even so, she’d rescued him from insanity, from turning into his mother. And she was a much, much better person than Jason Blake.

  Tom magicked three more bones, flung them at Blake, who screamed and lunged forward at Tom with his right hand. Tom felt something sharp across his face, like a cat’s claws. It stung, the cold air from New York digging in, making it filthy painful.

  “Bloody mongrel,” Tom said, putting his hand on Esmeralda, adding his lesser magic to hers.

  Everything dissolved into true shapes, crystal dodecahedrons floating through the air. Jason Blake became sharp diamonds, moving in and out, swiping at Tom, slashing at his eyes. Esmeralda was an ocean of triangles, tinkling up against the cold dodecahedrons, flinging herself amongst Jason Blake’s diamonds, trying to break him open.

  “Let me through,” Blake roared. “This new magic doesn’t last. You have to let me through.” His words turned into more diamonds that shot across the blurring, rumbling edge between Sydney and New York, the exact spot where night met day, cold met summer. Tom swatted at one, then another, then another, but one diamond buried itself in his cheek, and another hit his chest. He kept swatting at the rest, his hand sliding back and forth through icy cold and balmy warmth.