Johnny said, “No. It’s not done.” She closed her eyes and slumped back on the bench.
Mom, the kids. The kids, Mom, the house. Our little neighbourhood, safe and quiet under the protecting trees. Rutger back in Edinburgh, spelling everything out in his precise, methodical way, probably drawing diagrams. The encircling rings of FBI, UN, CIA, whoever, God only knew, closing in on us, us specifically, no one but us. The Society doing the same. Flanking us, looping tight, pulling till we had no air. Putting two and two together and coming up with four: the Dimensional Anomaly, and now this, days after flipping the switch on the reactor. The dragon and the king that rode it, the humans around us not even human, stone no longer stone, metal no longer metal. Monsters coming for the only people I loved. The only people who would notice if I died in this war.
The only thing we could do was to keep moving so that we could fight.
I rubbed my eyes, itchy and red from the smoke. “How are we going to get to Prague?”
“None of my business,” said Huxley.
“Come with us,” I said. “What’ve you got here? With everything burned, everything gone. You could go somewhere else, start over. Wait for the problem to solve itself. Or you can help us find some answers. And get Johnny out of here.”
Huxley glared at me, her crimson eyes streaming with tears. “Jesus bloody drooling fuck. There are thousands of people whose sole reason for existing is to fight this fight. And they certainly do not need a couple of bloody children running about the place, crying for their mamas and getting underfoot. What do they need her for?”
“They don’t. We do. Why? For whatever reason the Ancient Ones are trying to take her,” I said, dragging up each word from the pit of my frozen stomach. “For whatever reason They want her alive. That’s why. We can’t let Them have her. And we can’t let the Society have her either.” And the Society can kill her, I almost added. The Ancient Ones can’t. Not part of the deal.
Huxley watched me, breathing hard. With a barely-audible pop, the concrete garbage can next to her changed to something dark-red and polygonal, like the shell of some huge insect. Legs began to grow from its circumference, rustling quietly. She glanced at it, back at me.
I said, “For what it’s worth, and I know it’s a bullshit thing to say, I’m sorry. This is absolutely our fault. And we’ll never be able to make it up to you. What was in there… I know it can’t be replaced, not ever, no matter what happens in this fight. I know this is a disaster on a million levels. And it was your home.”
“It wasn’t my home,” she said. “It was just a place where I lived.”
“You have to at least pretend you heard the rest of that.”
“She’s not apologizing,” Huxley said stubbornly. “Notice that?”
“I can probably make her,” I said, “if that’s what it takes to get you to come with us.”
“I’m not dead, you know,” Johnny said, without opening her eyes.
“Yeah, and you’re not sorry, either,” Huxley said. “Do you know the difference between guilt and shame? Hmm? Jesus. This is why I never had kids. Up. Get up. If we’re going, we’re going now, and we’re going my way.”
We got up, avoiding the trashcan creature, which had started to shuffle clumsily along the path, and stood facing one another. “The Adversaries,” Huxley said, her voice oddly cadenced, as if she were reciting something or teaching something, “obey inhuman laws. By inhuman, I mean not laws as we understand them: ours are formalized, created, and disseminated for broader obedience. Their laws are limited and proscribed by magic, and so they can be broken or bent in many ways. Perhaps it’s better if you think of them as scientific laws, like gravity or thermodynamics. The only catch is that to break one of their laws, you must discover how. It cannot happen by accident.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Johnny said. “A broken scientific law happens by accident all the time. It just means we didn’t understand it well enough to know where the failure was in the theory. You make it sound like magic has to give consent for the law to be broken.”
“That’s a good way to think about it,” Huxley agreed. “But as it happens, that’s the only law They cannot break.”
“…Are we about to break one now?” I said.
“Ah, paranoia,” Huxley said approvingly. “Very good.”
“It’s not paranoia if someone’s actually out to get you.”
“Also true. Anyway, yes, in some respects. We’re going to do something that only They can do. Or let’s say, that They have been known to do, in the past. Ride the leys.”
This meant nothing to me, although the word ‘leys’ sounded vaguely familiar… not from my training, but from something else. And not in the context of ‘riding.’ Johnny, though, visibly started.
“But people can’t… oh.”
“There, that’s genius for you,” Huxley said. “Come on. You got some paper, a pen? You’re the one who memorized it, you said, so I hope your memory’s as good as you say it is.”
I opened my mouth and closed it again as Johnny got a notepad and pen out of her bag: a blue ballpoint. “The books told me how to do it and I wrote it down, didn’t I?” I said.
“Yep,” Huxley said, watching Johnny meticulously draw out a small but wildly complicated sigil, so dense that as she worked, it looked as if she were colouring in a circle. “One good thing about the leys, they’re like rivers. Magic’s often like that: flows downhill, to the lowest point. Prague is real low. So in theory we wouldn’t be travelin’ against the current.”
“You said only They could use this?”
“Mm. Historically.”
“Anyone who’s tried it has died,” Johnny said, still drawing. “Sometimes bits of them wash up in the low spots after a couple of weeks.”
“Uh,” I said.
“But this is a new sigil. I’ve never seen this before, these components. I suppose the books put it together from one another. This could work.”
“Could.”
“Won’t know till we try,” she said. “The ol’ spirit of scientific investigation. Here. I hope you copied it down right and I hope I remembered right and I hope I copied it down right too. On the other hand, my will and business plans are all drawn up in case I die unexpectedly, so there’s that.”
“I don’t have a will,” I said, gripping the notebook when she held it out.
“Well, you don’t have any stuff, either,” she said. “I’ll do the spell, Dr. Huxley.”
“I wasn’t gonna volunteer.”
THIS TIME THE motion was less wrenching, and much slower than I thought it would be. I unclenched everything and cautiously cracked my eyes to see lights flickering on all sides, curiously familiar from a hundred sci-fi movies, reassuring even though I knew we were traveling by magic and would probably fly apart at some point, if it had really killed everybody else who had tried.
The light was cool, streaky white, with glimpses of colour behind it. I wondered what they were. Something real, or something from space? Warp drive, FTL engines, dilithium crystals. Punch it, Chewie! “My God,” I said. “It’s full of stars.”
“Why does she keep you around?” Huxley said crossly, then reached out to get an arm around Johnny, who had begun to sag. “Oh no you don’t, Chambers. We’re nowhere near yet.”
I got a good handful of coat, keeping her upright. Huxley let go and glanced around interestedly; for the first time I noticed that her white, dandelion-like hair was spotted with ashes, and burned away in several spots to reveal pink scalp. “Bloody hell, there is a lot of magic about.”
“Where does it... come from?”
“Magic? Who knows. Folks’ve been trying to figure that out for a while now.” She raised her voice over a low, deep hum that had begun under our feet, as if we were standing on train tracks. “Some folks thought it was generated by the turning of the Earth, or maybe the orbit; but it waxes and wanes, and nobody’s ever been able to reck the pattern of it. It’s always been pretty mi
nimal, except when the Adversaries are about, wrecking the place. It’s like we’re... walled off from it. And only a little ever seeps through.”
I looked down at Johnny, and flinched: her eyes were shut, mouth open, a thick dark liquid that shimmered like mercury draining from both, and her nose, and her ears, soaking into her scarf and running over my hand where it was locked onto her coat. I pulled her to full vertical, a flood of the stuff darkening her chin like ink and running over my wrist. “Um, Dr. Huxley...”
“It’s fine. It’ll empty out.”
“What is it?”
“Dunno. You’re the one who wrote down this would happen.”
“The books… oh, forget it.” It was terrible to watch, but I didn’t think I could stop watching either, just in case her thick, bubbling breath suddenly stopped. Like sitting with the twins when they were babies, if one of them caught something the other inevitably did too, and they would lie there, feverish, staring at each other in the crib, so that you felt like you couldn’t leave the room, leave them there with nothing but each other.
“Ignorant folks destroyed records about Them for years,” Huxley said quietly. “Said they were evil merely to keep around, and would spread evil by existing. Even the Society, sometimes, took things to ashes… believin’ that just having the words writ down would attract Them back. Even if no one spoke them out loud. Even if no one drew the circles. Even if there was no magic around, just the little bit of background magic. They were wrong, they were fools. I don’t mind sayin’ it. We needed all that knowledge, all of it, and the reason we needed it is ’cause we didn’t know when we would need it again. And it’s gone forever.”
I nodded. Just in case, Johnny kept saying. Because you never know. What she’d meant to say, and couldn’t, in her arrogance, was Even I don’t know, and that’s why. I had suspected her of… what? Having predicted that it would happen? But maybe she really didn’t know.
THE LIGHT FADED to reveal that we were in an alleyway; it was night, or still night, clear white streetlights shining in the distance. And it was snowing, very lightly, slow fat flakes the size of golfballs. Keeping one hand on Johnny, I let go of the notebook with the other and held my sleeve out, seeing if it would accumulate. If we weren’t on Earth, I thought, at least we were somewhere Earth-ish enough to snow.
“Can’t believe she managed it,” Huxley said around her chattering teeth, looking around. “Honestly, thought we were being had. Hey. Hey, Chambers. Snap out of it! No, she’s blacked out. Jesus. Lightweight.”
I sighed. “I can probably carry her. Do you want my coat?”
“Don’t patronize me. This way.”
“I’m not! It’s cold, and you’re in pajamas... Man, girls always think you’re talking down to them,” I muttered.
“Watch it,” Huxley said. “Girls are one thing. But you’re not gonna live long enough to see one naked unless you realize that old women know things no one else can know. And most of us have killed a man.”
“...What makes you think I’ve never seen a naked girl?”
“I can tell.”
I awkwardly got Johnny over my shoulder, liquid splattering to the cobbles behind me, and followed Huxley. Outside the alley were more streetlights—dozens maybe, small and very bright on decorative black-painted posts, like stars. A huge church, illuminated with deep amber spotlights, loomed across a bridge from us, spiked and toothy against the low skyline.
We were alone. I looked up leerily at the sky, half-expecting to see that oval tear again, like an eye watching us. Just a thin layer of cloud, faintly orange from the streetlights bouncing back up. Perfectly normal, but silent, still.
“Are we in the right place? Is it under alert, do you think?”
“I’d expect so,” Huxley said. “And they’ll have a curfew. And that means fines, and we don’t have any money. Not that I’d pay. Come on.”
“How do you know where we’re going if you’ve never been to Prague?”
“I read.”
I couldn’t really argue with that, and we crossed the empty square, then a bridge, lined with big statues that looked down at us interestedly the entire way. I thought again of the lightshow at the castle, the beams visible in the fog. Honor guard. Meant to say: I protect and condone this endeavour. Whatever it is. Royal wedding. Ribbon-cutting. End of the world.
On the far side we walked for another half-hour, no sound but our breath, far-distant traffic, the hum of drones. The snow was too light to accumulate, and blew around us like poplar fluff. We moved from cement sidewalk to cobblestones, asphalt, cobbles again. I felt slightly unreal from disorientation, or whatever it was inside my barely-evolved lizard body that knew it wasn’t ideal to fall asleep on a log or something and wake up five thousand miles across the ocean on a whole new beach. My cells, maybe my genes, cried out against it, and wanted to know when we would all go home again. Knock it off, I told them. I don’t care if you used to be a lizard, we’re on a mission.
“How do you know Johnny?” I whispered as we walked. “Or how does she know you? Is it just, what do you call it. Her usual thing?”
Huxley chuckled, surprising me. “You mean by reputation? No, we’ve met. Maybe... a half-dozen times. She’d remember the exact number, no doubt. What, she didn’t tell you? Thought you were s’posed to tell your boyfriend everything.”
“We’re not dating.”
“That’s the only good news I’ve heard all day.”
She went on, keeping her voice so low I could barely hear. The first time, in Lagos, Huxley had been introduced to an improbable new member of her project team: a blonde child who had apparently memorized every scrap of parchment, every clay tablet, every lead sheet, in fact every codex, scroll, book, half-glimpsed business card, and conversation she’d been allowed to encounter. Though skeptical, the doctor had heard stories of this particular below-the-table assistance—of the prodigy scientist who, strictly owing to an eagerness to help and a belief in the shared goal, had initially done translations for the Society, and begun to help them acquire rare manuscripts and artifacts, track down experts, and, unbelievably, and rapidly, and apparently effortlessly, connect all the dots between primary sources hundreds or even thousands of years apart. Dazzling new constellations of research opened up to the Society, doors opened that had been shut for thousands of years, scholars from every country and every era beating their heads uselessly against it until she had opened it for them.
I nodded listlessly as Huxley described the impossibilities she’d seen Johnny perform, like the miracles leading to the declaration of a saint. A fragment of brick from a long-buried temple, a single torn page of a codex from an Italian monastery, a Roman curse written on a sheet of lead and buried under a tree in Egypt, a painting in a mausoleum in Singapore, sixteen pictograms tattooed onto the wing of a mummified bat in Uruguay: from these, no more than a handful of legible words on each, had been assembled the only extant copy, now locked in the Society’s vaults, of the most powerful known spell for resurrecting the dead.
“She’s good at that,” I said dully. “Like assembling a puzzle.”
Huxley shrugged. Her own research, she went on, was primarily lithothaumatological—magical stones, both naturally occurring and manufactured artifacts. And in this respect Johnny had proven to be literally invaluable: the Society’s resources were shadowy but vast, but even they could not, without revealing themselves, acquire the physical material and access to dig sites, quarries, and mines that Huxley needed to buy or steal the stones for the Society’s archives.
At this she paused again, and looked at me. “You don’t seem shocked.”
“She told me stories. And anyway that’s what she said the mandate of the Society is.”
“Mandate. Mm. I like that. We never used that term. Go on: what did she say?”
“Well, basically the... the safeguarding of knowledge. Right? So the collection and, um, centralization of... of everything that’s historically been known about Them. Kee
ping it all together with the people who... who know. So they can keep up the wards and stuff.”
“And you never asked yourself: why the secrecy? Why not let it out into the open?”
“None of my business. I’m not involved with them.”
She sighed. “When the Incursion happened... I thought of her at once. That little girl. And I couldn’t imagine why. I hadn’t seen her, heard much about her, for three or four years. It wasn’t till later that I saw that she had gone missing just then. ‘Ditched her minder and run off with a boy.’ All right, a tad scandalous, but nothing worse than the heiresses and nouveaux-riche do all the time; little brats scampering about on Greek islands and their silly parents, the baronets and minor dukes, pretending to be appalled, announcing they’ll write them out of the wills for the tabloids... kind of impressed, really. You know, except for all those accidents, she’d always seemed to keep her nose clean.
“Nothing, you understand, would have linked the two events in my mind except that they happened at the same time. But afterwards, it seemed like everyone in the Society had thought the same thing I had, and come to a lot of different conclusions. Everyone who knew anything about the history of the Ancient Ones. Everyone who knew anything about the Society; and everyone who knew anything about her.”
“Mm.”
“So. When that happened. What were the two of you doing? Sitting at the beach, no doubt, drinking a beer? Getting a suntan?”
I inhaled, exhaled. Johnny was unconscious: was she unconscious enough? Was Huxley really not with the Society any more? She still seemed to be connected with them, at least with the whisper network, the unofficial gossip body. It would be like them, I thought bitterly, to ask someone to fake it to get information... look at how easily they had gone along with what I had thought was my brilliant, original idea to spy on Johnny. They’d probably been waiting for me to suggest it, as a step (not an early one, either) in some much longer checklist. Chessboards, pieces.
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