Magic for Nothing

by Seanan McGuire

  The room was dark. When did that happen? I blinked several times, trying to make the light come back. The light did not come back. I sat up. Doing so revealed that I’d been lying down before, still fully clothed, atop the sheets of my cheap motel room bed. Well, that probably cut down on the bedbug risk. I glanced at the clock next to the bed. Three AM. I’d been asleep for eleven hours.

  “Did someone get the number of that truck?” I asked, of no one in particular.

  “There was no truck, Priestess,” said Mindy solemnly. “You were Asleep. Exceedingly and utterly Asleep. We attempted, in the traditional manner, inserting pencils in your nose, but you did not wake. You merely threw the pencils across the room and muttered.”

  I would have been mad, but that particular tradition was my fault, triggered during Alex’s “fall asleep doing his homework” phase in high school. I should have known the mice would be watching when I started jamming pencils in my brother’s nose, and more, I should have known they would promptly make a holy ritual out of it, because that was what the mice did.

  “Right,” I said, muffling a yawn before I asked, “Did you find anything? I’m assuming no, because you’re talking to me.”

  “We found one device for the listening,” said Mindy. “We moved it to the room next door. The woman there is sleeping. We will move it back before she wakes. We have further examined the telephone you were given. It contains no devices for listening.”

  “Good thinking.” There could still be spyware on the phone, but as I wasn’t planning to use it for anything the Covenant didn’t want me to, that wasn’t going to be a problem for me. Bugs that could catch me talking to the mice were a much bigger concern.

  Mindy preened. So did Mork, but more shyly. He was still trying to get accustomed to living in a world where his holy figures talked to him, rather than shouting “eek, a mouse” and throwing things in his direction.

  I yawned again, stretching this time, and wrinkled my nose as I got a whiff of what all that travel had done. “Okay, I’m disgusting, I’m going to go take a shower. Did you check my bags?”

  “There are no unfamiliar devices in your personal possessions; they are not monitoring you in that manner,” said Mindy.

  “I would bet you my entire checking account that this,” I held up the phone Robert had given me, “is equipped to track my every move, even if it doesn’t have any listening devices in it. Luckily for me, I’m planning to go where they want me. Got anything else to report?”

  “We have stolen half the cheese intended for the continental breakfast,” said Mindy.

  I shrugged. “Cool by me. Okay, go get their listening device so I can ‘wake up’ and take a shower. I smell like road kill.”

  “HAIL THE SHOWER!” proclaimed the two mice, as loudly as their tiny rodent lungs could manage. Then they scurried away, leaving me sitting in the bed and contemplating a future that contained too many variables.

  At least it also contained a shower. The mice returned, and I got out of bed. Time to see what was going to happen next.

  Eleven

  “People can be awfully confusing sometimes. Knives are easier, but knives won’t ever love you.”

  —Alice Healy

  Walking across a field, because that’s a great thing to be doing at eight o’clock in the morning

  CHECKING OUT OF THE MOTEL was as easy as checking in: again, they didn’t want to see ID, they just wanted to know if they were gonna get their money. Since I was using a card provided by the Covenant, I had no issues with that. (The tip I’d left for the maid was my own money, but I felt a little bad about how much cheese the mice had stolen from the kitchen. I had to do something to assuage my conscience. It turns out redemption costs twenty dollars left on your pillow. Learn something new every day.)

  According to the briefing I’d received from Margaret before we boarded our respective flights, I’d find the Spenser and Smith Family Carnival in a local farmer’s field. They’d rented the place through to the end of the month, either because business was good or because they were enjoying the rare spectacle of Wisconsin during its brief “humans can live here without suffering overly much” season. My family lived in Michigan before we moved to Oregon, and I firmly believe there’s a reason we chose to leave. Anyplace that gets more than three feet of snow during an average winter is not a place where people should be. Unless they are Yeti, and then they can live wherever they like, but I’m not coming over.

  There was a bus from the motel back to the airport, and another from the airport to the middle of goddamn nowhere, which was naturally my stop. It roared away as soon as I stepped off onto the hard-packed shoulder of the road. I barely noticed. I was too busy staring at the tents across the field, as brightly colored as a promise, pennants fluttering in the wind like beckoning fingers trying to lure the indecisive. I started toward them, properly lured. Walking along the road to the front entrance would have been the simplest thing, but all it would get me was a locked gate and maybe some suspicious carnies wanting to know why I was sniffing around. Sure, my suitcase made me look like your classic case of “running away to join the circus,” but this wasn’t a circus. It was a carnival. The rules were a little different.

  Fortunately, I didn’t need a rulebook, because I already knew them. I’ve been running away to join the carnival over and over again since I was six years old and my parents dropped me at the Campbell Family Carnival to learn how to fall. (Nobody teaches you how to fall like a carnie.) It was the first place where I’d felt like I was me, Antimony, not just the annoying youngest Price kid. I was defined by more than my place in the family, and it was amazing. If I were ever going to do something other than live the life I have, I would probably go home to the carnival and never leave.

  For example, what distinguishes a carnival from a circus? One word: rides. Carnivals have rides. Circuses do not. There’s always the rogue rule breaker of a show that decides to have a pony ride or something to entertain the little ones while the clowns get their greasepaint on, but that’s about it. Most carnivals don’t have a big tent or a tradition of headline acts these days; that went away when people realized it was cheaper and easier to license a Ferris wheel than it was to license a lion. At the same time, everyone loves a good trapeze, and a carnival with a big tent is a carnival that’s making extra cash.

  (On the whole, smaller, family-owned carnivals will have big tents, while larger, franchise carnivals that get State Fair gigs will not. But nothing’s universal. That’s something people learn fast when they start trying to put labels on the wide, weird, wonderful world of the traveling show. Nothing is ever universal.)

  The field had been harvested recently. Stubble crunched under my feet, providing a constant, irregular accompaniment to my footsteps. The farmer would burn it after the carnival moved on, forcing the nutrients back into the soil to wait for another growing season. It was all very pastoral and organic, and it made me yearn for my customary world of smooth tracks and spinning wheels, where nothing was green but everything was suitable for bleeding on. Bleed here, you’d probably summon something.

  Summon something. Now there was an idea. I was in North America: I might not have a safe way to phone home, but I could call for Aunt Mary, and if she heard me, she’d come. She always comes. Aunt Rose was also an option, although her limitations meant it might take her longer to get the message to my folks. Mary is a crossroads ghost; she doesn’t have to follow the roads. Rose, on the other hand, is and will always be tied to the kindness of strangers, at least when it comes to getting where she wants to go.

  The carnival’s bone yard was coming into focus ahead of me, more details appearing with every step I took. As with most of the bone yards I’d known, the edges were defined by cars and pickup trucks, parked to block as much real estate as possible from prying townie eyes. After that came the honey buckets, placed to be convenient for the camp without reminding
everyone that they were there. The only people who’d choose to lay camp right next to a honey bucket were the ones with small children who didn’t yet understand the need to hold it; everyone else would be deeper in.

  (Before the lingo gets too thick and turns confusing: the bone yard is the space behind the show where the carnies sleep. Some bone yards are sterile and orderly, indistinguishable from an RV lot. Others are a tangled welter of tents, and look a lot like a campground or a Renaissance Faire. Something that’s true of one bone yard may not be true for any others. Most don’t have running water, since they tend to be thrown up in vacant lots and farmer’s fields, appearing in an hour and disappearing like smoke. Chemical showers and honey buckets—porta-potties—are common, and finding a spot with access to both while not needing to smell either is a common challenge. The older the show, the more tatterdemalion the bone yard. Here endeth the first of what will surely be many vocabulary lessons.)

  It was early enough that I didn’t see anyone moving around. Carnival folks tend to be nocturnal, and not just because a surprising number of them are bogeymen. Shows happen at night; the tents look best at night; the games seem the least rigged at night. If someone isn’t a night person before they join the carnival, they are afterward, once they’ve learned to sleep when the rubes aren’t present. I was getting close enough to pick out the bumper stickers on the cars, close enough to see the colors of the camp tents. This was a good-sized show. I could see six RVs, and at least three times as many tents and portable huts. They probably had a hundred people working for them, maybe more, depending on how many acts appeared nightly in that big tent of theirs.

  The air held the delicate mixture of sweat and tears and diesel and hay that haunted my childhood, back when I spent my summers traveling with the Campbells, when I’d thought a life spent on the road was something to aspire to. Maybe it still was, on some level. When you never woke up in the same place for more than a few weeks at a time, you never had to worry about making friends or fitting in with anyone outside the show. You could just relax, and let people take you at face value.

  I stepped past the bumper of the first truck. I was no longer in the open field: I was on carnival ground now, with all the responsibilities and rules that came with it.

  And someone was watching me.

  It was a subtle feeling, a prickling in the hairs on the back of my neck and a tightening in my skin as the part of my brain that was older than civilization and had never really come down from the trees tried to alert the rest of me to danger. My fingertips grew hot. I balled my hands into fists, muffling the incipient flames against my palms. I wasn’t here to burn the place down. I was here to convince them to take me on as a member of their family, no more, no less. It was already a tall order without adding arson to the mix. I took a breath, damping down both panic and pyromania, and kept walking.

  The air in the bone yard was silent and still, shielded from the wind by the way the vehicles were parked. A faint breeze still whispered through, but it was nothing near as strong as what was blowing outside. Someone was awake enough to be smoking an early morning joint, or else someone had smoked themselves recently to sleep; the sweet, almost medicinal smell of pot hung around a green nylon tent, thick enough to be noted, thin enough that it wasn’t a surprise when the smoker failed to put in an appearance.

  I passed the honey buckets. A flicker of motion caught my attention. I turned, and there was no one there: just the green vinyl side of a portable toilet, complete with helpful, obscene graffiti suggesting I do something anatomically impossible to start my day off right. I frowned and resumed walking.

  I didn’t know who I was looking for: my briefing from the Covenant hadn’t come with anything as useful as a top-down org chart to tell me who was in charge of hiring and firing. I just knew that if I kept going, eventually someone would stop me to ask what I was doing.

  “Stop.”

  Like that, for example. I stopped. I turned. I offered the speaker what I hoped would look like a timid smile—although given how tired and jet lagged I was, it could have looked like a baby-eating grin and I wouldn’t have known. Travel really screws with the body.

  “Hi,” I said. “I, um, was hoping to find someone who’s in charge?” Always make it a question. Questions are harmless. Questions say, “I don’t know what I’m doing, ergo I cannot be planning to do you harm.” Questions say, “No one would find my body for at least a week.” Questions rock.

  The man behind me frowned suspiciously. He was Asian, taller than me by at least three inches, and wearing a gray sweatshirt with holes in the hem, like it should have gone to the rag bag months ago. He might have been cute if he hadn’t been looking at me like I was a new species of bug; as it stood, I sort of wanted to punch him until he stopped. His hair was cut in a short, practical style, a little floppy at the front, close-shaven where it tapered toward the nape of his neck, like he had better things to worry about than grooming. Really, the oddest thing about him was that he was barefoot. I’ve done my share of barefoot running around in bone yards, and it’s generally pretty safe—carnies don’t go in for breaking bottles where they sleep any more than the next person. But that was in summer. This was late September in Wisconsin, and there was definitely a nip in the air.

  “Why?” he asked. “Who are you?”

  “Um, why would be because I don’t feel like explaining who I am eleven times while I work my way toward the boss conversation, and who would be Timpani Brown, late of the Black Family Carnival. I’m looking for work.”

  His face underwent a remarkable series of transformations, from suspicious to familiar to sympathetic and finally back to suspicious again. “Last I’d heard, the Blacks were camped in Vancouver,” he said. “It’s a long way from Vancouver to here.”

  “Then the last you heard is pretty damn out of date, because the Blacks are dead.” The irritation in my tone was aimed more at myself than at him. Even if Timpani Brown had never existed, I was still claiming acquaintance with the dead—something long exposure to Aunt Mary and Aunt Rose told me wasn’t to be done lightly. If I kept telling lies, I was going to wind up haunted. “They picked the wrong place to lay the bone yard, and they paid for it. I was away at school; I lived. Now I’m homeless and don’t have a family to vouch for me. So if you could point me to someone who’d like to listen to a sob story, I’d really appreciate it, Mister . . . ?”

  “It’s not even noon yet,” he said, ignoring my request for his name. “I’m sorry about the Blacks, but honestly, how many shows do you know that get up and running this early?”

  “Pretty much none,” I said. “Try telling that to the bus routes. I got here when I got here, and I figured worst case scenario, I’d crawl under a truck and sleep until somebody woke me up.”

  “That’s a good way to get yourself run over.”

  “Better than sleeping in a townie shelter. People there don’t have any respect for a girl’s personal space.”

  He took a step closer, like that had been a dare. Jerk. “They’re probably also less likely to throw you in the dunk tank for disturbing them.”

  “Probably,” I agreed. I didn’t give any ground. Going by his build, he was either a performer or a manual laborer; going by his hands, which were callused but clean, he was a performer. Weight lifter, maybe, or acrobat. Either way, I knew his type. Territorial, suspicious, endemic to carnival bone yards. He probably thought he was a lady-killer and wondered why I wasn’t swooning. Double jerk. “Look, I walked a long way to get here. Can you either show me someplace I can crash for a few hours, or tell me who I should talk to about earning a bunk on a long-term basis?”

  “How about you come back when we’re open and buy a ticket like all the other rubes?”

  “I don’t have any money, and I don’t have anywhere to go. I’ll wait.”

  He frowned. Whatever script I was supposed to be following, I wasn’t doing a ve
ry good job of it. “Come on, shoo,” he said. “I have shit to do.”

  “Like what?” I asked, injecting a challenge into my tone. If he wanted to flex his belonging at me, I was going to refuse to back down. It was a little “no, you move” of me, but that attitude had served me well as the youngest child in my family, and I couldn’t imagine it failing now.

  “Like working out,” he said. “It’s easier in the morning, when there’s no one around to need the ropes.”

  “Ropes? You do trapeze?”

  He nodded, jaw tight.

  Great: here was a chance to show I could be useful, even if it was in a small way. “I’m trapeze trained,” I said. “I’ll spot you.”

  “Why would I trust someone I just met to spot me?” he asked with a sneer. “That doesn’t seem very smart.”

  “Since you were on your way to work out without a spotter, familiar or otherwise, I’m not expecting ‘smart’ from you,” I said. “Come on. It’ll let you decide whether I’m a scary stranger or not. And you’ll have a spotter, which believe me, is better than the alternative.”

  He waffled for a moment, looking like he couldn’t decide one way or the other. Finally, reluctantly, he said, “All right. But the moment you do something I don’t like, you’re not only done helping me, you’re getting kicked off the grounds. I can’t stop you from coming back tonight. I can make sure everyone with the authority to hire you knows you’re a bad idea.”

  “I’ve been a bad idea for most of my life; I think I’ll take the chance,” I said, smiling. He frowned and started walking again, his shoulder bumping mine as he made his way out of the bone yard and toward the big tent. I didn’t protest—it was a small gesture of territorial dominance, perfectly normal—just chased after him, leaving the slumbering carnival behind.

  As with most shows, this one had taken steps to split the bone yard from the midway. We had to pass through three layers of heavy tarp tied shut with pieces of rope before we emerged into the shadow of the Scrambler, lights dim and control panel unattended. The stranger hurried past it, and I hurried after him, letting his sense of direction provide me with the time to check out the show.