"A squirrel that apparently knows a crap load more than he lets on. What's this?" I gestured to the log and its intricate carvings.
"This is about four millimeters of very hard work." He smiled and showed me his teeth, which were nearly worn back into the gums.
"And it does?"
"Absolutely nothing unless you two bond and get some magic mojo on."
Noise knelt to examine the carvings. "And then?"
"This here is one end of a druid's gate," Rudy said, his tail erect with pride.
I squinted at it. "Then why's it in Greek?"
"Cause the Greek magi hacked the hell out of the original spell! They used it all the time for getting around Europe. Like the internet but with people and stuff. After a bit, the Veil started attacking it and people didn't always come out. They stopped using it, but the spell is still out there, listening for doorways with the right inscriptions. Got it?"
"Since there's no Veil here, it should be safe. We could use it to get out of here and get the inquisitors!" I exclaimed.
"If you were particularly dumb. Sure, you could do that. But it would let the Veil back in."
I winced. "Where else do we go then?"
Rudy smiled smugly and pointed at the cellphone that illuminated his handy work.
I realized with a start it wasn't an iPhone! It was a Samsung Galaxy in a pink and ruby rhinestone case! Rudy wouldn't be caught dead with that phone. The bolt of recognition hit me like a slap. The phone belonged to Rinoa.
"You want us to rescue the Blackwings!" I exclaimed, disbelieving. "That would just be trading one group of ambitious magi for another. Will that fix anything?"
"You can set your own terms, though, Thomas," Noise said. "You'll be their only option, or they can sit there like hostages till the technomagi trade them away for favors." She chuckled. "Include a morality waiver."
"Not to mention you're going to need some friends once the Council finishes organizing itself," Rudy said. "House Morganna doesn't have the clout it boasted twenty years ago, but they're good in scrape."
What I wanted to do after this mess, after I allowed it to happen, was to heal O'Meara with my blood money and then run away into the woods and never deal with magi ever again.
Still, I could only live with so much misery in my future, and Jowl's taunt of death by vivisection echoed through my mind, jumpstarting the self-preservation engine. Even if we ran to the inquisitors, they'd get around to asking about the night I let the dragon out soon as they could. Especially with Jules and Jowls screaming about it to bargain for leniency on the damage to Veil charge. House Morganna might just be the protection I needed. And I could do it with a lot less blood on my paws if I played it right.
There were a lot of ifs in this plan. Notably how the hell I was supposed to use Rudy's gate to locate the Blackwings. I looked hard at the phone and there in the case was a faint glimmer of gold, the remnant of the ward she'd used to save my tail from Noise. A thought occurred to me, but I pushed it away, hoping it wasn't true. "What am I supposed to do with the phone? Scent her out between dimensions like an extraplanar blood hound?"
"Exactamundo! See!" Rudy turned to Noise. "He can be taught! There's hope for the universe." He rubbed his paws together. "Okay, make with the bondage! Those technochumps are gunna come after us as soon as they've got their wards up. If they're smart."
"You sure this will work, Rudy?" I asked.
"Nope! But I don't got a better idea. How bout you, big, tall and snarly?" He looked up at Noise.
Noise crossed her chest and indulged in a brief glower at the squirrel before turning back to me. "How deep in my head are you going to be?"
"Dunno until we try. Been different every time so far." Richard had been distant while O'Meara and I could become one person in two different bodies if we weren't careful about it. "This will be a new data point," I said, mentally prodding Mr. Bitey to get ready to do his thing.
The snake hissed aggressively in my head, not liking the idea of bonding without terms. It demanded I offer them to limit this bond. Yet, if this was going to work, Noise would need access to all my (very limited) understanding on how magic worked. Despite all she'd done to me, I couldn't help but trust Noise. Even if we couldn't work as a couple on account of the cats vs. dogs thing, I still wanted her in my corner.
I shook myself out from nose to tail and stretched. With great reluctance, Mr. Bitey uncoiled from his hiding space beyond three-dimensional space and into our world. His silver chain-link body snaked out from my neck and sinuously wavered in the space between Noise and me. Noise's eyes, glowing with the light of the cellphone, tracked him, but she didn't move. Only a subtle swallow betrayed her nervousness.
"You ready?" I asked.
"No. But go ahead and do it."
Mr. Bitey flashed across the gap, spun out around her neck and the world was bathed in a glare of pale silver light.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
I stood on a plane of nothing, facing her, a pale silver wolf; the moonlight illuminating her muddled the evidence of her heritage. She regarded me warily, yellow eyes casting a light entirely their own, her form still, tail erect but not moving. I took a step toward her and the ground pulsed beneath my paws. A wind blew out from her, carrying notes of thought with it that caught in my mouth and delivered a medley of emotions: anger, bitterness and fear, all rushing to the back of my mouth, screaming for attention. But they couldn't drown out the sweetness of her love for life, of running, of coding, of working, salted with hope and fortified with the savor of duty to fulfill. Duty to her family, her pack, and I stumbled after finding a flavor I didn't expect: duty to me.
We met nose to nose and pressed our foreheads together, allowing words to flow through us, along with our history and emotions. Affection passed between us easy as a river flowed downstream. Yet the path of our lives lay mixed turbulently. Her duty and my growing wanderlust formed unyielding stones that churned our future path into a raging river of snarling foam.
Faced with all of her, beautiful and conflicted, I did the only thing I could do and forgave her. Both for her hand in making me what I am and not becoming the stable anchor I'd built her up to be within my own mind. In turn she forgave me for my own ego and trespasses. We let it all flow out. Our fears mingled with our hopes. Our anger wrestled with our dreams. We watched it all, like two friends slumped together after a hard day. Here we could love each other without the entanglement of biology, culture and duty. No matter where our paths went we would have this moment and we savored this simple communion of laying out who we'd become and accepting the other. We kissed like lovers and pulled back as friends. Perhaps in the future world there'd be room enough for the both of us. But there were battles to be fought before that time.
We opened our eyes to find Rudy impatiently tapping his foot. "Are you guys quite done being nauseating? I think my appetite has run off for Florida to drown itself in guns and religion."
Quickly realizing just what our bodies had been doing while our minds had been occupied, Noise and I separated, my ears putting out so much heat that they probably raised the global temperature a few degrees that night. Noise, however, didn't seem bothered at all and smiled at Rudy with a grin that could have swallowed the squirrel whole.
I groomed myself for a few minutes as I waited for my ears to cool and my focus to return. "Okay Rudy, tell me how this is supposed to work."
Rudy frowned, looking between the phone and the gateway, tail twitching back and forth, pondering. "Uh, there's a certain tone associated with the gateway and you've got to match it with the tone on the phone? I dunno. The gate usually connects with another premade gateway. I've never made one without a destination before."
I winced, as that was entirely unhelpful. "We need a circle."
"Now that I can do." He punched the phone and it made a strange warble. He placed it between Noise and I. "Done! One circle of sound."
"Uh, Rudy, that’s not how it works, buddy. Noise and I have
to be outside the circle. How do we do that with a circle of sound? The boarders a little fuzzy."
Rudy opened his mouth to protest and paused, an objecting digit half raised in the air. He wobbled for a moment before deflating with sigh. "Nevermind." He leaped down to the ground and pulled a Swiss Army knife from under a patch of leaf litter, flicked open the blade and began to scratch a line in the dirt.
"Rudy, the chalk in my harness is going to work much better than a line in the dirt."
"Why didn't you say so?" Rudy threw up his paws and I had to dodge the twirling knife.
After a few minutes of clearing leaves, the three of us constructed a passible magic circle around Rudy's gateway, placing Rinoa's phone on an errant log. I had them pull out all the tass I'd been saving for O'Meara and place it in the circle. All fifty-two groat of it. Rudy whistled when the bag was placed in the center and opened to reveal the purified crystals of tass inside.
Noise kept her mouth shut, but she wasn't so good at keeping her thoughts to herself. So that's what the bitch needs, huh? Pretty rocks? Jealousy loomed in her like an angry serpent.
We just shut that door, Noise. Why you gotta be jealous? I scolded her.
Cause you're still mine until I find someone new. I can't help the feeling that O'Meara has beaten me. She's the one that's going to get to keep you.
That’s not true. I had plans now. I'd even showed them to Noise a moment ago.
If this works, you're even more entangled with the magi, not less. Waiting around for them to put you on trial. Going to Vegas will make it more likely!
I won't spend the remainder of my life hiding from the Council. Even if that makes the remainder of my life short. It's worth trying.
That doesn't mean I have to like it. We stared at each other, thoughts stewing before we both hrmpfed at each other. "Stubborn mule cat," she said.
"Overprotective cow-wolf," I muttered back.
Together we turned to the work and looked at the spells before us. Noise made a gurgling noise in her throat as I eased her perceptions into directions that should not be. Rudy's gate connected to a lattice of purple threads that shined with the wet light of the deep sea. The web work stretched into the sky, shifting around as we looked at it. There were holes in the weave, patches that pulsed, hungering for something. A destination perhaps? I tried to follow the spell, but it faded out as it exited the circle, beyond our perception.
We tried the phone, staring at the enchantments on it. They were simple spells consisting of a technomagical circuit that had once powered the shattered remains of the ward that had saved me from the furious hunger of Noise under the influence of the black plane. I scryed as deep as I could, peeling away layers of enchantment until the barest threads of magical essence remained. I found a thread, faint as a blonde hair resting on sheet of yellow construction paper. We followed it until it exited our circle and faded in the surrounding ether.
Noise growled. What are we doing? How do we begin to touch any of this? I see it but…Noise fruitlessly stuck her massive hand in to the circle, trying to grasp at the fragile strand, but her hand remained in our plane and didn't reach into space the magic resided. I can't touch any of it.
I couldn't say I was totally clear what to do either. Both O'Meara and the trio had been able to twist their soul cords into a sort of magical limb and use that to manipulate a spell. It was a trick they all learned during their apprenticeships. A basic lesson that no one had bothered to teach me. The cord itself was a muscle you usually weren't aware of. Richard had built that bowl of tass I'd used to ferry the Weaver back to our reality. Just how had he done that?
I concentrated on my soul thread, edging my consciousness into it but not so far I lost the sensation of my body. I felt along its length before it penetrated into another world, pushed myself into its surface, and gave it a flick. I shivered as I sent a wave into it, a twitch of power. When the trio had investigated Noise's entanglement the second time, they'd built a spell that appeared to be a small machine that crawled up her thread and brought our perceptions with it. It'd been fueled by two different planes. I needed to build something similar. I tried to remember the runes that made up the spell. In this space the runes had interlocked like gears and interacted seamlessly. I got my soul cord to slash into the tass, but nothing more. I didn't have the trick or the strength to pull the tass apart and build something with it. Despite what Rudy had said, I was no magus.
I growled with frustration as I hopelessly flailed at the fragile thread connected to the phone. It snapped. The thread started to float away. FUCK! Damn it, catch it! I thought and swore.
And something did. A thin silver chain swooped in from the darkness and caught the thread between its links.
Noise mooed in alarm and fell back from the circle, the magical ether flashing from existence. "What was that?"
"I dunno. Stop looking away so I can see it."
Grumbling, she resumed her rather uncomfortable looking lotus position and looked. The chain still held the thread, wrapped around it as a snake might coil around prey. Mr. Bitey, I thought.
"Who?" Noise thought back.
"Our bond. The snake." I looked carefully not at chain but inside ourselves, at the tunnel between our minds. It didn't matter how far we were apart in physical space. Our thoughts flowed along the dragon-made chain, so flexible that it slithered through the two worlds with ease. I'd been using the wrong ends of our minds. Mr. Bitey had the flexibility and movement we needed. He could be our hands.
And as I thought it, the chain coiled into a two-fingered hand in front of me. Noise's hand. I sensed a general frown as she concentrated and the two fingers split into four useable digits. I followed suit, producing my own hand. I tried to form a second one, but the first faded as soon as I moved my attention off it.
We had a pair of hands between the two of us. The thread seemed to want to slip from our fingers, but we coated them and the thread with tass, giving it girth we could work with. We still didn't know what we were doing and spent several hours attempting to reel in the thread from beyond the circle, but it always snapped, no matter how we strengthen it with tass. Climbing it didn't work either. Our perception ended outside the circle. Whatever trick the trio had used that allowed me to glimpse the space beyond their circle, we did not know it.
In preparation of taking a break, I tied the thread to the gateway spell as a way to hold it in place before we broke the circle to rest our eyes and to give Noise's nauseous stomach a break.
The gateway pulsed, and I realize I'd done something. The writing around the opening of the log had lit up like a Vegas casino's sign. Rudy eeed with pain, clamping his fists over his ears.
"What the hell did you did you do?" he shouted.
"Tied the spell to, uh, Rinoa I think."
"You tied it to a person? Oh man, this is gonna be messy." Rudy leaped onto the rim and began hewing several more letters into the ring. The glow faded to a less intense level. "Okay! Now it probably won't kill her."
"Now what?" I asked.
"You walk through the log. It’s a one-way trip!"
"I can't fit through that!" Noise said. "I can maybe get one arm through that log!"
Rudy shrugged. "This here's the biggest hollow log in this entire forest. You'll have to stay here. Uh, you probably should break your link now. Mental links and time dilations are never a good thing."
I winced, remembering readings on planar travel. If a plane is under stress, time there would speed up. Snagged in the dragon grinder, it would definitely speed up. And for that matter, were we already sped up compared to the real world? Could that be why the Inquisition hadn't broken in?
Noise's ears wilted. "What the hell am I supposed to do? Stand here and wait?"
Rudy crossed his arms. "That'd be silly. We won't come back this way. The Blackwings will need to build something to get back. Should be easy-peasy with this tass!"
The backs of my paws itched for a grooming. There were so many ways t
his could go terribly wrong. Yet I found myself still resolved to go through with it.
I took a step toward the log and I found myself hoisted into the air like a newborn kitten. Two furry arms quickly crushed me to Noise's chest followed by a wet kiss. Don't die. You hear me? Noise bellowed in my head.
I'll do my best with that, I promised and gave her the hint of a purr. Ready?
Noise grunted and squeezed me tighter. Yes, you can get out of my head now.
I broke the bond as gently as I could and she set me down on the ground.
"Come on! Before the damn thing burns out!" Rudy chittered with impatience and leapt on to my back.
"Wait!" Noise said. "I almost forgot." She reached into the pocket of her overalls and produced several slightly bullet-ridden packets of beef jerky. "The Technomagi never got the concept that I'm a vegetarian at the moment." She tucked the salty meat in my harness. My stomach grumbled in appreciation.
I circled around her legs in thanks then plunged through the log before Rudy blew a gasket. Darkness seized me. A crushing squeezing sensation forced pain to flow through every bone in my body. A sharpness, then I remember nothing more.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
"We're here to rescue you!" Rudy said, followed by desperate coughing and hacking of somebody else.
"Oh God! Blech! Muaa!" I reluctantly opened one of my eyes to see a haggard Rinoa retching and desperately spitting on the dusty ground. Tack looked between his mistress and me with an expression of utter bewilderment. Rinoa sat back on her heels, coughing and wiping at her mouth. "Tastes like I bit into a fucking fur coat! Bleh!"
"We could have come out the other end if you prefer," Rudy said, but I couldn't see where he was. Wrenching open the other eye didn't help either, so I lifted my head and immediately regretted it. My muscles felt like I'd been through a meat grinder.
I let out a groan of pain. Rudy was near my rump and had a bag slung over his shoulder, a crown royal logo on the side. Something weighed it down, but it wasn't full enough for me to see the shapes of the objects within. Rudy laughed. "I bet you feel like a fresh noodle out a nozzle because that’s sorta what happened. Safety mechanisms keep you safe, but they make sure you don't want to do it again. You'll be fine!" He turned back to Rinoa. "So toots, where's the rest of your peeps?" Rudy climbed up on said rump despite my wincing and spun around, scanning the horizon.
Marking Territory (Freelance Familiars Book 2) Page 23