Cursed av-2

by Benedict Jacka

  There was a flat-topped cloud the size of an aircraft carrier drifting over Crouch End. Starbreeze swung towards it, soared vertically up its bumpy sides, then levelled off over the top, her wake brushing the cloud’s surface as she cruised over it. “Oh!” she said suddenly. “Someone’s asking about you.”

  “Asking about me?” I said. My voice sounds weird when I’m in air form; a sort of buzzy whisper, though Starbreeze seems to understand it easily enough. “Who?”

  Starbreeze brought us up onto a tower reaching up out of the top of the cloud. It gave a panoramic view of London, the city stretching away in all directions. “You!” Starbreeze said. “Cirrus told me a nightwing told him a man asked the nightwing.”

  “About me?”

  “Mm-hm.” Starbreeze frowned. “Wait, the nightwing told me. Maybe a man told Cirrus.” Her frown cleared. “Where are we going?”

  “Just a second. What were they asking about me?”

  “Who?”

  “The men talking to Cirrus.”

  “No, to the nightwing.”

  “And they were talking about me?”

  “They were?”

  I sighed. “Let’s go to Arachne’s lair.”

  “Okay!” Starbreeze whirled me up, did a somersault, and dived straight down into the cloud. There was a second of icy chill as near-freezing vapour rushed past us, then we were diving towards the Heath at what felt like a thousand miles an hour. I had one lightning-fast glimpse of rushing grass, people, and flashing trees, then Starbreeze turned me solid again, dropped me in the ravine, and darted off before I could even say good-bye.

  I checked that no one was watching, found the right spot in the oak roots, waited for Arachne to recognise my voice, and entered the tunnel, my mind focused on what Starbreeze had just told me. Starbreeze hears everything and she probably learns as much of what happens in the mage world as the highest members of the Council-it’s just that she forgets it as fast as she learns it. But the fragment she’d repeated was enough to worry me.

  I’m not ranked amongst the movers and shakers of magical society, and all in all, I like it that way. I’ve found my life is much easier if no one thinks I’m important enough to mess with. Having someone asking about me was disturbing. When mages take a sudden interest in a guy it usually means one of two things: they’re considering an alliance, or they’re planning to get rid of him.

  Luna was waiting for me in Arachne’s living room, twirling a ribbon between her fingers. Arachne was perched over a table to one side, sewing away at something and apparently paying no attention at all. I felt awkward talking to Luna and it seemed she felt awkward too; I think both of us kind of wanted to apologise but didn’t want to raise the subject. It was a relief to focus on training.

  Mages normally take an apprentice who specialises in the same type of magic that they do. The branches of magic are very different; trying to teach a type of magic you can’t use is a lot like trying to teach an instrument you can’t play. But sometimes you just have to live with it, especially if you happen to be landed with one of the more uncommon kinds: If some kid’s just discovered a talent for shapechanging, it’s not exactly practical to wait five or ten years for one of the handful of master shifters to free up his schedule to teach him. In Luna’s case, I wasn’t sure if there even was a mage with her exact talent, and she wasn’t a true mage either, meaning it was me or nobody.

  Unfortunately, I was just as new to the master business as Luna was to being an apprentice, and the teaching methods I’d tried out over the last five months had been kind of hit-and-miss. Most had been ineffective, a few had turned out promising, and two or three had led to really spectacular disasters. But while sweeping up the mess from the last one, it had occurred to me that there might be a way of making use of how Luna’s curse worked on objects. Her curse affects inanimate things as well as living ones; it’s just that it’s a lot weaker against dead material. But as we’d found out the hard way, the more vulnerable an item was to random chance, the more easily the curse seemed able to destroy it. After a bit of research, I tracked down the most unreliable and fragile brand of lightbulb on the market and bought a case of them.

  Which was why Luna was standing in the middle of Arachne’s living room with a lamp in either hand. We’d cleared a section of the room of fabric and furniture, and the brilliant white light cast a rainbow of colour from the clothes hanging all around, the fluorescent bulbs making a faint, persistent buzz. “Do I have to do this?” Luna asked.

  “The better you learn to control your curse, the less likely you’ll hit someone you don’t want to.”

  “I get that part. Why do I have to dance?”

  Luna was perched with her weight on her right foot, the left foot resting lightly with the leg straight, her right-hand lamp held at chest level in front of her and the other down by her side. This was her third session on Latin-the last two weeks had been ballroom-and it had taken me a good hour to get her stance right. It’s a lot harder to correct someone’s posture when you can’t touch them.

  To my mage’s sight, the silver mist of Luna’s curse swirled around her like a malevolent cloud. At her hands, though, the mist was reduced to a thin layer. The two lamps had a few strands of mist clinging to them, but not many. Luna was holding her curse back, keeping it from reaching the items in her hands. The bulbs were fragile and I’d learnt from experience that a single brush from her curse at full power was enough to burn them out. “Again,” I said. “From the top.”

  Luna rolled her eyes but did as I said. I’d been teaching her a routine, and as I watched she ran through each move in the sequence. The silver mist flickered and swirled, but it stayed clear of her hands and the lamps shone steady and bright. “Good,” I said once she’d stopped. “Now start doing basics and I’ll give you instructions.”

  Luna settled into the basic rhythm, soft-soled shoes quiet on the stone floor. “Wouldn’t it be more useful if I learnt martial arts or something?” she asked after a while.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  It was something I’d already thought about and decided against. Given the kind of situations I tend to get into, it would be a useful skill for Luna to know … except she’d be far more likely to end up hurting a friend than an enemy, and quite honestly, her curse is lethal enough already. “What you practice, you use without thinking. The last thing I want is to teach you to hit someone by reflex. Flares.”

  Luna hesitated an instant, then stepped into left and right stretches, one arm holding a lamp low, the other lifted high to the ceiling. “I can’t even dance.”

  “New Yorks,” I said. Luna obeyed reluctantly, turning on the spot in place of the backwards step. “I know dance, so you get to dance. Be grateful it’s Latin and not Morris dancing.”

  “Might as well be,” Luna said under her breath.

  Ballroom dancing was one of the odder skills I picked up as apprentice to Richard. Light and Dark mages are quite traditional at the upper levels and a proper apprentice is supposed to be able to fight a duel, dance a waltz, and know which fork to eat dinner with afterwards. “Fan and hockey stick.”

  Luna hesitated again, trying to remember the complex figure, and this time the silver mist around her hands pressed outward. For just a second the lights flickered, then she stepped into the move and they steadied. She finished with a basic and started the next. “See? It’s not-”

  “Alemanas.”

  This time Luna managed without any hesitation. “Outer balance helps with inner balance,” I said. “Your routine again.”

  Luna stopped talking for a few minutes as she worked through the pattern. The first time she got it wrong, but her concentration didn’t waver and the lights shone steady. The second time was perfect. “Good,” I said. “Now backwards.”

  “Oh come on!”

  “And keep doing it till I tell you to stop.”

  Luna rolled her eyes again. I noticed, though, that even when she was struggling
over the transitions, the silver aura around her didn’t flicker. I’d started to suspect over the past week that Luna’s control over her curse was tied more to her emotions than her thoughts: There didn’t seem to be any connection between the difficulty of what she was doing and how likely it was that she’d slip. “There,” Luna said after she’d done the reverse sequence three times in a row.

  “Not bad. Now freestyle. Basic rhythm, any moves you like.”

  “How much longer are we going to stick with this?” Luna said as she stepped smoothly into the figures. Her technique was still pretty bad, but she was moving with more grace. Luna’s never done much sport but she’s not naturally clumsy and she was learning fast.

  “Until you can dance with someone without killing them.”

  Luna stumbled, and the silver mist around her flared. The lights buzzed and flickered but she recovered control just in time, clawing the mist away from where it had been reaching for the lights. For a few seconds she stayed on basic steps, recovering her equilibrium. “That’s not easy,” she said at last, her voice quiet.

  “Didn’t say it was. But if you can dance body to body with someone without letting your curse touch them, that’s when you’ll be ready.”

  Luna returned to her routine, though with a little more caution in her steps than before. “How long?”

  “However long it takes.”

  “It’ll take forever.” Luna’s curse flickered, but only slightly.

  I smiled slightly. “There’s a story that Napoleon once told his advisors he wanted to plant trees by the sides of every road in France, so that his soldiers could march in the shade. His advisors said, ‘But sir, that will take twenty years!’ And Napoleon said, ‘Yes, so we must start at once!’”

  Luna was silent.

  “You see, if something is going to take a long time-”

  “I get it.”

  “How did things go last night with Martin?”

  The silver mist around Luna surged. There was a blue-white flash and a ringing sound, and both bulbs blew out.

  Luna rounded on me, glaring, and with my mage’s sight, I saw tendrils of silver mist reaching towards me. They were ten feet away, five, and I tensed … then the tendrils halted and slowly pulled back, thinning as they withdrew. Only once they had merged back into the aura around her did Luna speak. “That wasn’t fair.”

  “Wasn’t meant to be,” I said quietly. I didn’t think Luna understood what she had just nearly done. But she understood what the lights burning out meant.

  “It doesn’t even-” Luna started to say in frustration, then caught herself. She turned and walked to the corner, unscrewing the bulbs from the lights, and dropped them into the bin. There was a clinking sound as they joined the pile.

  I waited for Luna to cross the room and come back, giving things time to settle. “We’re done for the day,” I said. “I need to speak with Arachne. Wait outside and I’ll catch you up.”

  Luna obeyed silently. I watched her go with a frown, then turned to see that Arachne had stopped work. Her eight eyes studied me, unreadable. “Okay, so that could have gone better.”

  Arachne didn’t answer and I looked at her. “What’s wrong?”

  “I see why you were unsure about training her.”

  I winced. “That bad?”

  “She isn’t acting like your apprentice. And you’re not acting like her master.” Arachne crossed the cavern and settled down with her front legs brushing my sides, her head and fangs looming over me. “But that’s a matter for the two of you. What did you learn?”

  I hesitated, then put Luna out of my mind. “A friend of mine had the barghest’s corpse looked at. He’s not a hundred percent sure but best guess is that the thing was killed from having its magic drained out of it.”

  Arachne went still.

  I waited but she didn’t speak. “Arachne?” I said after a moment.

  “I … see.” The clicking sound under Arachne’s voice was stronger.

  “All right.” I put one of my hands on Arachne’s front leg and looked up at her. “What’s going on? Something’s bothering you about this.”

  Arachne turned and started walking slowly across the room. I followed her closely, keeping pace by her side and skirting around sofas and chairs. “You’re worried this thing might be coming after you, aren’t you?” I said. Arachne didn’t react and my eyes narrowed. “No, that’s not it. You’re worried you might die the same way.”

  Arachne’s mandibles rustled. “You see clearly in such matters.”

  “You mean when it doesn’t involve Luna?” I shrugged. “If you tell me what you know, I might be able to help.”

  Arachne halted at the north end of her chamber. Arachne’s living room/workroom is huge and roughly circular. The south end is the exit out to the Heath, to the northwest are a few small changing booths, and to the east are some spare rooms in which Arachne keeps supplies and facilities for her few guests.

  At the north end, though, just next to where we were standing, was a tunnel sloping down into darkness. It wasn’t lit, but from what light was reflected, I could see that it led into a T junction, forking away and down. Arachne’s never told me what she keeps down there and I’ve never asked. But from what I’ve seen, I’ve gotten the impression that the tunnels keep on going down … maybe a long way down. For all the time I’ve spent with Arachne, she keeps a lot of secrets, and there’s enough space under the Heath for those tunnels to spread a very long way.

  I had to resist the urge to poke my head in and look. It wouldn’t be polite, but it would really satisfy my curiosity. “Do you know of the Transcendence movement?” Arachne asked.

  I frowned. “Vaguely. They were that group of rationalist mages who thought magic was the next stage in human evolution. They were trying to find ways of boosting magical potential, turn everyone into a mage.”

  “And what happened?

  I shrugged. “They never got anywhere. People decided it couldn’t be done, they started losing members, and then the Gate Rune War kicked off and everyone had other stuff to worry about. Why?”

  “Most of your account is true but there is one fact you leave out. There was a way to increase magical power and the Transcendents were well aware of it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know it as Harvesting.”

  I flinched. Harvesting is the act of ripping a mage’s magic from his body and taking it for yourself. It’s always fatal for the victim, often fatal for the harvester, and usually comes with a variety of horrible consequences. It’s the blackest of black magic, even forbidden by Dark mages, and that should really tell you something. “Are you serious? There’s a reason that ritual’s banned. Besides, it doesn’t make any sense-the Transcendents wanted to make more mages, and anyone with half a brain can tell you that if you go in for Harvesting, you end up with fewer mages.”

  “Yes,” Arachne said. “They could not draw the magic from humans. So they drew it from magical creatures instead.”

  I stopped. I’d never thought of that. “What happened?”

  “They were successful,” Arachne said. “The recipients gained the power and strength of the creature they harvested. The process also drove them insane. After enough deaths, the project was abandoned.”

  I frowned. It was the first I’d heard of the story; thinking about it, though, it made sense. Mages have a few (not many) compunctions about killing other mages but treating nonhuman creatures as living battery packs would suit them just fine. And mages don’t like to publish failure. If experiments go disastrously wrong, they usually cover it up. “What are you getting at?”

  “There are rumours that a mage-perhaps more than one-has returned to the Transcendents’ research. I did not know whether they were true.” Arachne turned her eight opaque eyes on me. “It seems they were. I believe this will be our last meeting for some time.”

  I nodded, resigned. Arachne hasn’t lived however many hundreds of years by being careless, a
nd I’ve seen her do this before. When danger comes, she vanishes. I’ve never known where she goes but I suspect the answer’s somewhere down in those tunnels. “Well, I’ll tell you if anything happens.”

  “I will be contactable for another two or three days,” Arachne said. “After that …” She gave an odd rippling motion that I’ve come to recognise as a shrug.

  Walking up out of Arachne’s lair, I wondered just how many times she had done this over her long life, and how it worked. I’ve never heard of any other creatures like Arachne-giant intelligent magical spiders aren’t a known type in the way that, say, elementals are. I’ve wondered sometimes if Arachne is unique … but then where did she come from? Are there others of her kind, out there somewhere? Or was she once something else?

  I watched the earthen bank rumble back into place, the roots writhing and retwining themselves to lock the door closed, and knew I wouldn’t be going back there for a while. It made me a little sad. There aren’t many places where I feel comfortable, and Arachne’s lair is near the top of a very short list.

  Luna was standing nearby. I started walking out of the ravine and she fell in by my side. With my mage’s sight I could see that the silver mist around her was muted. “What were you about to say back there?”

  The sun shone down out of a blue sky, white clouds drifting with a brisk east wind. It was September and there was a chill in the air, but even so there was a scattering of people around the park, most wearing greatcoats or ski jackets. “When?” Luna said.

  “You were about to say that trying to control your magic doesn’t matter.” I looked at Luna. “What’s up with you? I thought you wanted this.”

  Luna walked silently for a few seconds. She was wearing her green coat, and the wind whipped at its sleeves and ruffled her hair. We reached a path that would lead us southeast and turned onto it. “What if there’s another way?” she said without looking up.

  “What do you mean?”