Best earthly way to get an otherwise smart person to do somethin’ stupid under pressure that I ever have tripped across, inside jail or out of it, hands damn down.
“I’m listening,” was all she said in return, though. Which was more’n good enough.
I walked her through what I knew about M-vale’s various pitfalls, as gleaned from tales of other past break-out schemes (sadly truncated in their execution, most often), then sat there while Samaire walked me in return through what she’d decided on when she first heard the verdict read out on her and Dionne, and why it wasn’t quite coming together the way she’d thought it would.
“I usually practice hierarchical magic,” she said. “But that’s pretty tool-heavy for in here – not least since they took all my supplies away, before we even went to trial…”
“Uh huh. Good luck gettin’ hold of ‘a hazel-wood wand new-peeled’ on the black market, not to mention the steel caps, lodestone and virgin cock’s blood you’d need to consecrate it.” Adding, as she stared: “What? You think just ‘cause I ain’t been to university, I don’t know my basics?”
She kept on staring a second, then shook it off. “Okay,” she said, finally, pointing to a sinuous double line of text snaking up around her right-side humerus. “If you’re really up on your rituale magiciae componentum, then – what’s that?”
I just grinned: Man, far too easy.
“Why, that there’d be protection against demons if you read it one way and a binding on your own demon blood if you read it the other, written in the language known as Crossing the River – Transitus Fluvii, as the dead Roman tongue would have it. Y’all don’t know everything just ‘cause you read a book or two got written before Gutenberg made up his first Bible, Princess.”
Dionne, impatiently: “Look, so you know some shit, and she obviously knows some of the exact same shit…was there gonna be a plan in here somewhere, or what?”
“Like you say, wizardly workings tend to take the sort of accoutrements our current position renders pretty much inaccessible,” I told Samaire, ignoring the unsolicited commentary from the peanut gallery. “So why not go the opposite route?”
“Such as?”
“Holler magic. Y’all might have heard of it.”
“Sure. That’s the tradition where every spell involves wearing your materiel in your crotch for a day or so.”
I nodded, unoffended: “Ain’t fancy, I’ll grant you, but it’s simple, cheap—”
“If you don’t count the boiled-down human body parts you usually build it from,” Dionne muttered.
“—and it does work…’specially so when you got two qualified people doin’ it, ‘stead of just the one. And that’s my main point, Princess: You ain’t ever gonna get where you want to by exactly when you want to, not without help from another worker. But if you was to lay your high-class hexation next to my gutter witchery and let ‘em cross-pollinate – feel on each other awhile, or such – might be they’d both end up movin’ a tad faster, to our mutual improvement.”
“Like a sort of a…really skanky…feedback loop.”
“Well, I never did go too far through school…but metaphorically, sure. Why not?”
The Cornishes exchanged another glance. “Look, Sami, you already know what I think,” Dionne said, at last. “Witches are witches. Plus, word on the yard is, banking A-Cat here’ll do anything more’n lie right to your face, then kick you down and fuck you ain’t gonna get you anything but kicked down and fucked even harder. But we both already know you’re gonna do what you want, just like always.”
Samaire nodded. To me: “So, assuming everything she’s said is true – how could I ever trust you to hold up your end of the bargain? What do you want to get out of here for, anyhow?”
Never you mind, kin-killer, I almost snapped back. But said instead, out loud—
“You kiddin’ me? I want to be out of here to be out of here, Princess, same’s anyone else. ‘Cause it’s cramped, your options for fun are substantially limited, and I been here more’n long enough already. ’Sides which, you sure don’t have to trust a person to work with ‘em. That’s half the fun, ain’t it?”
She looked at me then, long and level, eyes hard.
“Tell you what,” she said, at last. “If if turns out I do find I need you for – anything – I’ll go ahead and have Dionne let you know.”
I nodded, thinking: That’s all I ask.
««—»»
That night, in the slice of space between count and lights-out, Maybelle’d already laid there pouting for quite a bit before I finally wised up enough to look over and notice. She’d seen me getting what looked like up close and personal with Dee and Samaire, and that made her nervous; guess she was a bit too well-used, at this stage of the game, to think goin’ back on the market was a good idea, particularly if she wanted to trade up (rather than down) from where she was right now. So she wanted some token show of reassurance she really wasn’t in immediate danger of bein’ being thrown over for a newer model, which I – truth be told – was more’n happy to provide.
“Them Cornishes got each other, darlin’; they ain’t plannin’ to be in here long enough to need anybody else, even if they either of ‘em swung that way. Not like I need you, anyhow.”
“You need me, A-Cat?”
“Let me demonstrate.”
After, while she dozed – all replete, with dreamy dreams of how the two of us were both gonna squeeze, hand in hand, through whatever magickal escape hatch Samaire and I ended up cobbling together dancing in her empty blonde head – I studied the darkened ceiling and thought yet once more about that no-contact buzz I’d gotten just from standing next to (not-so-) little miss Princess; how she couldn’t helped but’ve felt it too, rippling up and down those carefully tattooed limbs of hers, the shiver before the quake. And how it’d probably only get stronger yet, the longer we stayed in proximity – ratcheting up unstoppably as we drew ever closer, like the static charge hum just before a flashbulb’s flare, or the filament whine as a lightbulb bloomed to full incandescence…
Dee might not be able to feel it, bein’ what she was, but she’d sure made certain I knew she didn’t like what she almost thought she saw going on: Protective, like some five-foot nothing Mama Bear with her claws out, ready to fight to the bitter end. Which I guessed I could understand, though only in principle. ‘Cause me, I never did know what it was to have a sister, not even half of one…but then again, the pull I felt towards Samaire wasn’t entirely familial, as Dionne could no doubt tell; things always were a whole lot slipperier down in Hell than they were here up top, ‘specially in the bonds-of-kinship department.
I did need to know what-all they were planning to do next, though – about me, as much as anything else – and the surest way to find out was to send something to listen at their keyhole. Which I could certainly do, for all I hadn’t in quite some time – and like any other muscle, a witch’s craft does tend to get a mite…tight, if she doesn’t let it out for exercise on the regular.
So I shut my eyes, said a few choice words under my breath, bit my own lip ‘til it bled and took a deep old swallow. And a few moments later, I coughed out a little red glob of sickness onto the cell floor… dirt from my insides, stuck together with Hell-juice and ill-will. A fetch, just like my Momma taught me to make way back, long before I ever saw any Dark Man on top of any hill.
A beat more, and it opened two tiny black jewels to look my way, stretched out its spun-glass wings (still tinged pink with spray) and rubbed its delicate stinger-legs together in greeting. Its voice rose up drily, echoing off the concrete walls – a thin, companionable, whispering vibration.
Let me do thy will, Lady? the fetch asked, eager, inside my skull.
Gladly, I replied.
««—»»
Over in their own cell, meanwhile, Samaire sat cross-legged on one bed with her eyes all rolled back like she was meditating, while Dionne paced the floor, one hand on her shank. Announcing, as
she did—
“Look, this is just a bad idea, Sami, twenty years or not – that bitch is everything we ever fought, all wrapped up in a hag-ridin’, Devil-worshippin’ bow. Even layin’ aside what we already hear about how she conducts herself on the strictly human tip, she’s the sort of witch who probably takes names and steals babies – and we’re gonna let her back out, where she can get at the next given normal comes along, just to serve our interests? That ain’t buddies.”
I never stole a baby in all my life, I thought to myself, huffily, as the fetch hovered inside a vent above them, watching their debate through dim, colorblind eyes. Then added: ‘Course, I never really HAD to, just ‘cause I needed the parts. There’s abortion parlors all over the great state of Alabama, after all…and they dump out their trash like clockwork, twice a day.
(Ah, the conveniences of modern living.)
Samaire, unmoving: “Not helpful, Dee.”
“Right. ‘Kay.” A beat. “Seriously, though, Chatwin’s Hell-bait; we’ve killed enough like her to fertilize a car-park. A witch is a witch is a—”
“—witch, yeah, I got it.” A pause. “So what’s that make me?”
Dionne stopped, mid-stride. “Not her. You get that, right?”
“Except…I am.”
“But you use this shit, Sami. You don’t let it use you. That’s the difference.”
Samaire opened her eyes at that, and raised a doubtful brow; she looked down at her hand, studying that wrap-around ribbon of Transitus Fluvii circling the arm it attached to, like she could see things movin’ underneath it.
“Six of one,” she said, half to herself. Then: “You hear that?”
“What?”
“That…buzzing.”
Okay, time to go.
They both turned towards “me”, then, and I knew the fetch had almost reached its expiry date. So I peeled my consciousness back from it in long, sticky strings, letting its sight grow ever fuzzier, bleeding away pixel by pixel. ‘Til the bond between us finally grew so tenuous I barely even felt a thing when Guard Curzon swatted it from the air as it flew from vent to vent, and crushed it messily beneath one boot. I could hear Brenmer through the wall, muffled, as he blurted out—
“Damn. How those things get in here, anyways?”
Curzon, stomping on: “Fuck if I know. Maybe they can smell all the pussy.”
Which was crude, as ever. Yet not entirely inaccurate.
I turned over, wondering if Samaire would bother sending a fetch of her own to watch me sleep – or if she even knew how to make a fetch, considering who’d raised her. One way or the other, I wasn’t about to lose a good night’s shut-eye over it.
Things learned so far: Cornishes don’t want to work with me, but too bad, ‘cause they ain’t exactly got another choice to switch to, I thought. So let ‘em sweat on that a while; hell, I got time.
Nothin’ but.
««—»»
That was Friday. And a day or so later, I come ‘round a corner in the library – mail-cart in hand – to find Dionne waiting on me between the stacks, arms crossed and scowling, with Samaire looming right behind.
“…we might need your help, after all,” was all Samaire had to say, after a moment.
And: “Oh, Princess,” I said, “tell it to me again, will ya? Slower.”
««—»»
“What do you know about Abramelin the Mage?” Samaire asked, as she pumped a thirty-pound barbell in the southmost corner of the weight-pile, with Dionne spotting. I sat down nearby, took up a pair of ten-pounders and started doing curls, to cover my reply:
“Abramelin? He thought all worldly phenomena were produced by demons working under the direction of angels; we all come with a guardian angel and a demon attached, the one liftin’ us up, the other suckin’ us back down, like gravity. Thought initiates could make ‘emselves into angels, for as long as it took to control the demons…”
“…by using spell-squares. Five-line palindromes that read the same up and down, forward and back. The most famous of which being…”
“…the SATOR box? ‘SATOR, AREPO, TENET, OPERA, ROTAS: Hold this in thy right hand, ask what thou wilt, and it shall be delivered.’ No tools nescessary, ‘sides from pen, ink and willpower. But the thing also repels witches somethin’ fierce, so too damn bad we can’t either of us use that…”
“That’s right, we can’t.” She pumped up one more time, shelved it, and lay there a moment, sweating. Before adding—
“But Dionne can.”
We both shot Dionne a glance, like we’d been choreographed that way; Dionne – who’d been watching this little back ‘n’ forth of magickal esoterica like it was a Satanic tennis game – flushed deep, looking uneasy for maybe the very first time since I’d made her acquaintance.
“Hey, man,” she said, “I don’t…do magic. Ain’t my style. I just don’t got it in me.”
Samaire nodded. “You’re not trained, no – but seriously, Dee, once it’s made, this item’s pretty much idiot-proof.” A beat. “No offense.”
“None taken. If it repels witches, though, then how are you guys supposed to make it?”
“Take turns. A-Cat does a character, I do a character, out of order. You hold the paper, so we don’t even have to pass it back and forth. Easy.”
Dubious: “Oh yeah, sounds it.”
For once, I had to agree. “Yeah, it’s a neat little concept – ‘cept we’d have to shield ourselves, somehow, just to stay in the same damn room while Lady Di here worked her will on the thing. You got any bright ideas about that?”
“…not yet. I thought, though, with both of us going full-bore—”
“Princess, I can’t shield myself from the SATOR box, let alone you too.”
And there it sat, for a minute; I could see her thinking on the problem – hard, straight white teeth just denting her lower lip – which was a sort of pleasure in itself, for all it went on just a shade too long for comfort.
“We’d need a jolt, then,” she said, at last. “Some sudden extra burst of power, like jump-starting a…car battery, or whatever – “
“Sacrifice, sure. So kill somebody.”
Dionne, without even thinking twice, like she’d just remembered she was the big sister here: “We’re not gonna do that.”
I looked right on past her, straight to Samaire, the more innately practical of the two. “Let me, then; you know I’d do it. Do it in a damn minute, I thought it’d get us outta here…”
“Well, demonstrably, Alleycat!” she snapped back. “But we won’t.”
“Okay, then: Fuck someone, that’d work almost as well. Or are you too damn good to do that, either?”
Now it was her turn to blush. “Not with you,” she said, shortly. Adding, as I looked back at Dionne, cocking one eyebrow: “And not with her, either – I mean, Jesus! Just what the Hell is wrong will you, anyways?”
Quantifying that one’d’ve probably took us all night, so I just shrugged. “Does sort of limit our options, then don’t it?” I pointed out, instead.
“I can still figure something, given time,” Samaire muttered.
Time. Which we had, again, and didn’t have, in justabout equal measures – but I knew enough not to push.
“Well, okay; you just go on ahead and do that, then. I need a couple of days to myself, anyhow.”
“Why?” Dionne asked, suspiciously.
I shot her a smile. “Oh, nothin’ too strenuous. Just gotta wrap up some…unfinished business.”
««—»»
Obviously, it had already occurred to me that trying to tote Maybelle on top of everything else would be a tad – difficult, at best. So while the Princess dicked around trying to figure out some slightly less morally suspect way to render her otherwise brilliant escape plan’s kicker fully functional, I went ahead and got my pretty May to help lay the seeds of its other components – conceal Abramelin’s SINAH box (SINAH, IRATA, NANIR, AXIRO, HAROQ) somewhere in her regular haunt, the laundry, so’
s it could buy us the sort of violent yet short-term distraction we needed to slip the rest of our business past the C.O.s, while they were a bit too conveniently caught up in something else to notice.
According to Abramelin, SINAH meant “hatred”. The SINAH box was thus most often used “to create a general war” – a riot, say – which, because the square wasn’t perfect, wouldn’t go on forever. It’d start slow, working on whatever threads of conflict were already there, ‘til the conflagration finally bloomed into full effect…and really, M-vale was (by definition) just chock full’a people who couldn’t keep it in their pants for long, literally or figuratively, on both sides of the uniformed divide.
“Like yourself,” Dionne supplied, when I suggested this tack. To which I simply smiled, freely admitting—
“My impulse control can be somewhat inconsistent, dependin’ on circumstances.”
“Yeah, I hear that happens a lot, with people who end up in jail.”
“It does. Welcome to the curve, ladies.”
Naturally, though, there was a second element to trusting Maybelle with the SINAH square – mainly, that it got her out of my hair long enough for me to go through her stuff, and get some of her hair. Then get naked and take a steamy trip through the shower-room, where I rifled the discarded brush of the next long-haired woman I saw: In this case, a hot little Latina Queens baller named Felicia Suarez who saw me hovering near her stuff and scowled like she would’ve happily thrown down with me right there and then, if only the floor hadn’t’ve been so damn wet.
“Stay on your own side, mami,” she told me. “I ain’t lookin’ to switch teams.”
I shrugged, thinking: Hmmm. Too bad for you, then, darlin’ – ‘cause you may be in for somewhat of a surprise.
By chow-time, when Maybelle drifted back my way, I’d already had more’n enough opportunity to tie the two of ‘em together by those two locks of hair in a classic holler lust-knot. And sure, she was just as attentive as ever, ‘till she glanced up to see Felicia comin’. A stammered excuse later, Maybelle went off to get “another chocolate milk”, and didn’t come back ‘til count; the two of ‘em disappeared under the stairs for maybe half an hour, re-emerging with disordered hair and their shirts tucked back in wrong only to head in opposite directions, fast, and blushing; sort of cute, when you thought about it. Though probably a bit offputting for them.
Mighty Unclean Page 11