by Rabia Gale
Chapter Five
Rafe
THE PROBLEM WAS TENTACLED, armored, and huge. Very huge.
“A squid,” said Rafe, awed, as the creature glided by the portholes. Its fluid appendages whipped from window to window with dizzying speed. An eye, huge and round as a face, glistened through the thick glass, then disappeared. Suckers scraped against the Felicity’s metal sides, and the submersible rocked with every nudge from the huge head.
Coop had piloted the submersible to the sandy sea floor, where it lay quiescent, powered down. Only the life support systems wheezed, filtering air, cooling the inside.
Pretend to be a rock, and maybe the squid will go away, was the unspoken thought.
No one believed it. Not Coop, hunched and tense and unhappy over the controls, long body folded into the chair. Not Isabella, carefully blank, hand at the hilt of her light dagger, watching the creature’s progress out of narrowed eyes. Not Mirados, muttering to himself in the corner, hands upon what looked like rose quartz paperweights.
Not Rafe, examining the beauty of ka-systems rippling across and over and within the squid. Machine parts melded with living systems till he could not tell where one left off and the other began. Metal undulated in overlapping scales over flesh and quartz crystals flecked and glistened in muscle. Fine wires extended throughout all of the creature’s insides.
“Well, Rafael?” said Mirados. “What do you see?”
“It’s beautiful,” said Rafe explosively. “The colors… the patterns…” Ka bloomed and trailed, bunched and spread, in a dance. This was more than the magic he’d laboriously, meticulously learned and tried to duplicate.
This was art.
Mirados made a disgusted sound, tossed the rocks onto a console with a clatter. “Sel save me from blithering idiots,” he growled. “What a waste of the gift of ka-sight. Describe to me, young kayan, what you see!”
His words came as if from far away, from under water. Rafe was amidst the best ka working he’d seen in his life—better than anything even the shahkayan of the Light Fields had ever made. It slid past his hands, danced in front of him in glowing, hypnotic colors. He—
Rafe. Isabella was there, a weight dragging at him, tugging him away from the ka. Rafe. Get out of there. You’re needed back on the ship.
Just a minute, Isabella!
No. You’re losing yourself. There is no just a minute. Mirados needs you.
In exasperation, he turned and looked at her. Looked at her with his ka-sight, saw the faint touch of ka that ran in all living things. It traced her skin and lips, curled into delicate knotworks at her sides—her daggers—and sketched thin patterns around her internal organs.
Except for that one place. That one dark place. A blot of darkness, clenched and still, but alive with a different kind of life. A kind of hunger. It starved.
He recognized it. Shock went through him. Isabella, you have a…
She slammed the door shut, so hard that Rafe rocked back. Kyra and ka were both lost to him and darkness swam in his head. His cheek stung, and he smelled stale sweat and mildew. He found he was lying on the floor, heat thick against his skin, rivets digging into his back and side. Voices came to him from far away.
“… Rafe? Rafe! Wake up…”
“Lost in a ka-trance, the fool…”
“Why’d you hit him like that?”
“Because he needed it.” Isabella, calm as always. “He was, as Mirados said, getting lost in the ka.”
Hands pulled at him. Rafe swatted them aside and sat up. The side of his head smacked against something.
“Are you all right, Rafe?” Coop crouched over him, reeking of worry, suffocating him with warm breath. Mirados and Isabella crowded behind him, mere shadows in his kyra-sight. Their interest raked his very soul.
“Yes, yes.” Rafe pushed up against the wall. “Just space. I need—space.”
They all retreated, Coop so far away that he was pressed against the other side of the chamber. That made Rafe even crosser than before. He drew up his knees and put his head down upon them. His hand reached for his walking stick, closed around the knob of it. The familiar feeling brought him some semblance of normalcy. He breathed deep and tried to think.
The squid brushed against the Felicity yet again. No doubt it was attracted to the ka. Yes, the ka. He could talk about the ka, not as art, but as science. He could talk about it unemotionally and he could ignore the pain in his cheek where Isabella had struck him.
Because he had seen and she wanted to shock him into not remembering. He’d felt her kyra slithering, grasping away that memory.
But he remembered. He would still remember. He clutched the memory close to him, and said, detached, clinical. “There are three Dariinal pyramids set inside a sphere within the squid. One is… well? Aren’t you writing this down, Mirados?”
A gasp from the man, a scrambling and rustling, then the furious scratching of pen on paper. Rafe continued in his dry, distant way, describing what he saw in the poor vocabulary that he had. He had no names for most of the systems he’d seen, and though Mirados could supply labels for many of them, there were a lot more that were outside the Preceptor’s experience.
“Yes, yes,” muttered Mirados, finally. “Yes, I think a quick ka strike right here, at the joining of the apexes of the pyramids will disrupt the systems long enough for us to escape out of here. This looks like Claudius’ work—subtle, pretty, but not very stable. Go on, Cooper.”
“Right,” said Coop, voice tight. There was a buried note of violence in it that Rafe, remembering his conversation with Furin, could not like. “Launching projectile… now!”
Machinery clanked and the vessel jolted. Ka systems changed.
Rafe realized that in his fog he had missed some important components of the discussion.
“Wait!” he cried, then winced as ka shot out of the submersible on a sharp-tipped bolt. Ka honed and aimed as finely as one of Isabella’s daggers.
It wouldn’t work—and he could see why not. But it was too late to do anything about it.
He tried. He reached out with his mental fingers, but the ka, wrapped in speed, sparking yellow, whipped by so fast that it burned. Rafe pulled back from the pain, then lunged back after it.
No!
The bolt struck the squid between the eyes, biting deep into soft flesh. Ka swarmed off the head in bullets, burrowing into the creature’s head and aiming for its brain.
Dormant channels within the squid lit up. It changed color, going a deep angry red as it sucked wisps of ka from the surrounding water. Ka from every color on the spectrum flashed through the creature.
It attacked. Suckered arms lashed at the submersible. Metal groaned. Glass cracked. Steam hissed.
Ka fluctuated. Rafe grabbed as much of it as he could—from his walking stick, from Mirados’ devices, even the stray strands rubbing against the walls. The squid wrapped its arms around the Felicity. It was engorged as well as enraged. Its eye shone balefully at them, head pressed against the glass.
It squeezed.
There was a cracking and a popping. The floor tilted, Mirados stumbled, Coop was thrown forward. His forehead made violent contact with the controls and came away bloody. Isabella kept her balance, and so did Rafe, wrapped in green, using the walking stick for support.
His ka slid all over the outer skin of the submersible. There was not enough to make a full shield—all he could do was a net. Energy crackled through it, zinged a million pinpricks through the squid.
The arms loosened, and Rafe pulled more ka from the stored quartz on the vessel. Hurriedly, he added another two layers over his net. Then he separated the ka—green went in the bottom layer to hold the vessel’s shape, and yellow and red to the top to cause stinging pain to the attacker. Purple he sent to the most damaged parts of the ship, helping the metal remember the shape it had been just a moment ago. Calculating blue to help the purple, along with sparks of fiery colors to provide the necessary energy…
Voices pin-pricked his consciousness: Coop snapping, Mirados bellowing. Isabella was gone from the room, but he felt her moving in the innards of the submersible. It was hard to make anything else out, with ka patterns still burned into his brain. Stiffly, he moved until he stumbled into a warm wall, creakily he collapsed to the floor.The walking stick fell into his lap. His head thunked back against the metal.
He slept.
When Rafe awoke, he was flat on his back, in something narrow and confining, with bands of cloth pinning his hands to his sides.
Panic erupted inside him, and the ka at his fingertips responded, flaring with heat.
A singed smell came to his nose.
Oh.
He was in his bunk and he’d just attacked his bed linens.
Great.
Rafe wrestled himself out of the sheets and off the uncomfortably-coffin like bunk. He probed the room with his kyra. Empty of people, save himself. Furniture in pretty much the exact place as it always had been. His walking stick had been thoughtfully thrust through a leather loop on the bedframe to hold it in place.
Rafe grabbed it and limped to the corridor. Every muscle protested its ill-usage. It hurt to let his kyra wander far afield, so he kept his shadow sight at his feet, as far ahead as his armspan.
The first thing he noticed was how quiet it was—the constant chattering and clanking and whirring all stopped. In the distance, he heard intermittent banging, a terse, hollow voice.
The second thing he noticed was that it was hot and climbing. He grazed the wall with his finger-tips and pulled back from the heat.
The air-cooling system was off.
But the floor of the submersible was stable, though oddly sloped. At least they were still in one piece. And he no longer felt the squid outside.
He sensed her long before he heard her footsteps. “How bad is it?” he asked.
Isabella came along beside him, slowing her steps to his shambling. She didn’t offer to share her vision and he didn’t ask. “Your ka-shield kept the squid from attacking us directly and saved us from being squashed like a metal can. It didn’t keep the creature from pushing us into a trench, though. On our nose.”
“That explains the slope,” said Rafe.
“We tried to wake you, but you were completely passed out. Mirados was all ready to jab you into consciousness, but Coop and I held him off. Coop carried you to the bunk, and we’ve been tinkering around with mechanical and ka systems, pretending we’re making repairs when really we were waiting for you to wake up.”
Rafe snorted at that. “How bad’s the damage?”
“Well, let’s see. Your ka-shields failed about half a stage ago. Mirados was grumbling about your shoddy workmanship—apparently you could’ve created a self-sustaining system if you’d put your mind to it. Whatever repairs you’d started on stopped at that point, though judging from Furin’s expression at the metal blobs he found in his systems, that might’ve been all for the best.”
Rafe grimaced. “The spells relying on memory and calculation are tricky. Even when one is not being attacked by a giant ka-altered squid.”
“I’ll accept your word on that,” said Isabella dryly. “Thought you might want to come up with a better excuse for Furin and Mirados. Groveling might help. The engines won’t work. Half the quartz cracked in the fall. Ka escaped everywhere, most noticeably through the walls and into the water. You should’ve heard Mirados then. I thought he’d yank his beard out.”
“Sel!” breathed Rafe. He wanted to yank his own hair out. Some kayan hero I turned out to be. Took out all our systems as well. “So, we’re stuck here in the heat and the dark, then?”
“Not quite dark.” Isabella took his arm and guided him several steps. He stumbled over his own feet. “Open up your kyra-sight. Wider.”
He did. And flinched.
White washed out his kyra-vision. His eyes smarted in sympathy, though they were not involved in the seeing. Light stabbed in from the portholes. No surface, no crevice was safe from its brutal dissection.
After living in shadows for so long, Rafe didn’t know what to do with the light. He was as blind in it as he was in the dark.
He drew his kyra back into him, though the fierce rays still seared his cheeks. And under all the light, he sensed…
“It’s a quartz field,” said Isabella. “A big one, and it’s full of—”
“Ka,” breathed Rafe. Wild ka, similar to the one in the Tower.
“Which only a kayan can use.” Was Isabella’s tone smug? “All this ka, and Mirados can’t get to it on his own. He’s nearly chewed off his own arm in frustration.”
“Then let’s get going” said Rafe, hot and cold running down his spine. He made himself not think about the wildness of the ka, the Tower, and what had happened there two years ago. “Time to get that ka.”
With the submersible squashed onto her nose, the tilt of the floor nagged at Rafe. He felt his thoughts rolling down the slope of his mind, tumbling to the bottom, scattering his focus.
Enough, he told himself. You’ve gathered ka before—while being attacked by sucker eels, half-drowned in a waterfall, and hanging from your arms with flames licking your toes. Heck, you did it before you even knew what to do with the stuff. This is hardly any different.
But it was. This was wild ka and he knew what it could do to him, to the Felicity, if he didn’t handle it right. And it wasn’t just about him—he had four other people’s lives in his hands.
Rafe sat in the nose of the submersible, in the control seat that still held the indentation of Coop’s body. Five crystals of cut and polished blue quartz embedded in a circular bronze disc sat atop the display. Mirados’ ka-storage device. He wanted to probe it, see how it worked, figure out if he could duplicate or improve it…
“Any time you’re ready, kayan,” said Mirados, irony heavy in his tone.
Isabella positioned herself behind him and put her hand on his shoulder. Her job was to pull him back should things go horribly wrong. Hopefully she wouldn’t need to.
Rafe took a deep breath and instantly wished he hadn’t. The reek had gotten worse, and sweat dribbled down his face and soaked his shirt under his arms. The seat was too hot. Maybe he should’ve stood for this.
Isabella’s hand tightened, just a squeeze. Not in an impatient way, but reassuring, encouraging.
Well, if you’re going to trust me… Rafe closed his eyes and plunged into the darkness.
It didn’t last. Light, an oozing, sickly kind of light, came into view. He couldn’t see the quartz nor the visible light it emanated, but the ka glowered in his mage-sight. It was a heaving mass, not like the waves of the sea, but swampier, thicker. Not quite wild and electric like the currents in the Tower, but murky and sinister, a lake of poison.
Ka fumes escaped into the surrounding environs, but Rafe ignored the vapor. He knelt at the edge of the swamp of tainted magic. Green and yellow ka predominated, like radioactive vomit. Dark clots lay on the viscous surface.
Clumps of ka? He’d never seen ka so dark that it was almost black. He wanted to study it, but the nearest clot was beyond his mental reach and he didn’t want to go wading.
He rather thought it would eat him alive if he did so.
Rafe lifted his hand—he persisted in thinking of it as his hand, even though his shahkayan teachers had told him he could be anything he wanted in this strange non-corporeal world of magic. His own stored, safe ka wound around it in a protective glove. For a moment, he admired its healthy, vibrant colors, then dangled his hand into the poisoned ka.
It ate away at his glove immediately, burning the phantom limb. Rafe jerked his hand out of the swamp.
Ouch! Potent stuff. Granted, his experience was limited, but he’d never seen such tainted ka. It was as if
it had pooled here for centuries, slowly gathering power and malevolence.
Gritting his teeth, Rafe wound more clean ka around his hand, until his fingers were grass-green and thick with it. He reached back into the swamp, grabbed a wiggling strand of yellow. It slithered out of his reach like a snake.
A fast, venomous snake.
This stuff is not just tainted, it’s almost alive.
He bent, though escaping ka scraped like a dull razor against his face, and examined the swamp. The dark clumps were blots of the deepest purple and blue. When he looked closer at the tangle of one, he noticed that there was structure to it. As if these clots were the remnants of some bigger construction, and that, blindly, they still did their job.
Memory and senses and calculation. Imbuing the rest of the ka with an animation that mimicked life.
Right. If ka was going to start behaving like an animal, he’d better start stalking and trapping it as if it were.
He made a magical net and held it in his left hand. He put his right hand back into the pond, and ka fled from it. He maneuvered the magic toward the net and when one particularly fat strand was in position, he… There!
He scooped it up with the ka-net, reached in, and grabbed behind what he thought of as a head. It writhed like a landed eel, only much more flexible, tying into a knot around his hand, chittering as it tried to gnaw into him.
Well, it needed a lesson obviously.
He shook it free, till it flopped, tail waving. He wound his own ka around it, to hold it into place, then proceeded to tear out the purple and blue wound into it, letting them escape. It was rather like gutting a fish with teeth and nails.
Now that’s a disgusting image, thought Rafe, as he stuffed his catch—er, ka—into the smoky quartz inside his walking stick. Fortunately, he didn’t have to ingest the ka this time; the crystal was all set up to filter it.
Tiredness suffused him. Heat weighed him down. The tainted ka pierced his sight, ran its fingernails down the chalkboard of his nerves, gibbered at him.