Blue Magic (32 page)

There was no talk of cremation; fire was the enemy.

In the end, after sky burial and sending her to the real for interment had been rejected as possibilities, they’d laid stones over her in a waist-high pile. They’d watered the white grit around the cairn, and anemic grass sprouted around it. Eliza’s broken granny glasses, resting atop the cairn, were left as a wordless memorial.

Since her death, the mood of the Roused had been uneasy. Teoquan and his followers were down in the Pit, trying to force a route through to the real. The glaciers were melting fast, freeing more people every day.

At Pucker Hill, the gendermorphed Roused kept weaving letrico and making food. At the cedar village, the stream continued to bring forth salmon; a careful harvest was under way. The snow fort kept rising on the drylands. The elders were scraping ice from the bodies of the trapped; with Eliza gone, it was a slower process, but the work continued.

Ev had been keeping to himself, spending his days in consultation with the scientists Astrid and Katarina were sending to the unreal, trying to catch up on everything they were learning about magic. The discovery of the fire hall had led to a flood of information about the magic the old witch-burners had wielded, about the nature of the curse.

Pike had sent some wooden coins—dogtags, they called them—to the unreal, and the bulletins from the news center caught him up with world news and Astrid’s various projects. Everything was in motion: The population of the Alchemite refugee village in the ghost town, Tishvale, was burgeoning. Gilead Landon had “disenchanted” the White House and Congress with rosarite. The Danish government had confirmed vitagua contamination in two separate lakes. All the grandparents in attendance at a recent Irish wake had been transformed, overnight, into newborn infants. Fyreman and National Guardsmen working together had raided a house in Tulsa but failed to find Passion.…

“You’re avoiding me, Ev Lethewood.”

Startled, Ev looked up from a list of Fyreman potions they’d found in the Indigo Springs fire hall.

Patience had retained control over her shape-shifting since Eliza’s death. She was her true self—a Native woman in her late sixties, in other words—a coiffed and healthy version of the run-down old beauty queen who’d lived on Ev’s first mail route. Even now, even angry, she was heart-stoppingly beautiful.

“I’ve been…” He waved the bundle of science stuff, but she wasn’t fooled, and he’d resolved to tell her the truth anyway. With a gesture, he invited her to sit.

“Ev, what is it?”

Taking her hand, he murmured: “I knew what Eliza was up to.… It was my idea.”

Her lip curled. However much he might deserve it, the contempt on her face cut right to Ev’s heart.

“I can’t make up for it, but I’ll admit it to Teoquan.”

“Don’t be idiotic. He’d kill you. Oh, Ev—what possessed you?”

“I thought—”

“Don’t tell me. You were scared for Astrid.” A hint of compassion now. Not forgiveness, but he’d take it.

“What should I do?”

“Do you know where Eliza stashed Teo’s … allies? Finding them’s the first step to making it right.”

“I might work it out,” he said. If the radicals got melted, Teoquan and his buddies would bust into the real that much faster.…

“Work it out how?”

“Everett Burke. The hyperobservant mailman.”

“That was a delusion.”

“Yes, but it worked.”

She frowned. “Explain.”

“I did solve puzzles as Burke, Patience.”

“Puzzles—you mean mysteries?”

“Minor crimes, anyway. It wasn’t just knowing what was in letters. I found a couple stolen dogs, caught Len Stiger cheating on his wife, talked one of the local girls out of suicide when nobody could’ve guessed she was thinking it.”

“Becoming Burke again … it’d be dangerous?”

“If I don’t, I owe some kind of blood debt to the unreal. Isn’t that how it works?”

“Teo would say so.”

“See, that sounds dangerous too.”

She scowled. “Ev, your gift for understatement was never one of the things that attracted me to you.”

“I love you too,” he managed, and she kissed him. “Still mad?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “But it’ll pass.”

“Can you get me into Eliza’s place?”

“You get your own self in. You’re not persona non grata, you stupid man.”

“You’re sexy when you speak Latin.”

“I’m always sexy. So … it’s only me who knows this?”

“I think Teo has a pretty good idea.”

“Be glad what he knows and what he can prove are two different things. How’ll you do it, become Burke?”

He flexed his hand. “The dime that lets me gendermorph people—”

“The one keeping you sane?”

“It’s embedded here.”

“You’re not going to cut that hand off?”

“Definitely not.”

“Then how?”

“It’ll be easier to show you.” He pulled his tool kit off a salvaged shelf and led her toward the bone bridge. He felt electrified, nervy—and more than a little relieved. She’d forgive him. Not today, maybe, but she would.

Eliza’s chambers were at the base of the honeycomb, close to the Pit and the rescue effort there. Her beeswax walls glowed with vitagua; she had carved animal masks around the perimeter. Their stylized eyes seemed to stare at Ev in accusation.

“Now what?” Patience asked.

Ev opened his kit, revealing a brittle glassine rope—rosarite.

“What the hell?”

“According to the Fyreman notes, it negates magic—chantment magic, anyway,” Ev said, pulling on a pair of work gloves. “Katrina’s had her brainy types investigating how it interacts with magic and the Roused.”

“You filched it?”

“I asked for some,” he said, irritated.

“Pardon me for impugning your honor.”

He laid the beads on his forearm, wrapping the rope around until there were three coils on his wrist. “They put this around buildings they want to protect from magic—they call it disenchanting. If my hand’s encircled, it might affect the magic dime in my hand, stop it from working.”

“Sounds like you’re playing lab rat.”

“Someone has to.” He gestured at a spool of copper wire in the kit. “Tie it off?”

“Okay.” She wound the wire, cinching the improvised bracelet shut. “Does it hurt?”

“Tingles,” he said. “Like my arm’s asleep.”

He felt a rush of feverish heat, a stretching sensation in his forehead. For an instant he was afraid he was reverting to a female body, but then his beard tickled, the way it had the first time it broke through the skin.

That’s right,
Ev thought,
I was turning into a goat.

Mumbles assailed him:
She’s dead, baby girl’s toast.

And another …
It’ll work out, Ev, I promise.

“Jacks? Tha-at you?”

Patience rubbed the sore spots on his head. “You’re growing horns. Happy now?”

He met her angry gaze. “Ma’am, if you are happy—”

“Cut that out and get to looking for the hotheads.”

“Right. Things to do, mysteries to solve.” Everett turned to the mess that was the murdered woman’s lair, taking it in. Answers … the answer would be here. He started poking through things. Paper was his forte, but Eliza wouldn’t have written anything down. He sorted through her possessions.

A twinge of paranoia. His—or Eliza’s? She’d wanted the hotheads sunk deep, to be the last to escape when the unreal, as Astrid so frequently put it—

Popped.
And … was that Astrid’s voice? Was she one of the grumbles? Did that mean she was already gone?

Ghost me’s been here all along, Pop. In the future, looking back, in the past, looking forward.

Whatever that meant.

Time’s funny here.

Fingering a thumb-sized chunk of rebar, of all things, that Eliza had hung on a rusty scrap of chain like a pendant, he thought of building foundations, building blocks, and then the blocks of ice forming the snow tower above the elders’ village. The spires were meant to be solid ice, silos of vitagua, a means of maximizing the number of people rescued at the Pit. They were huge. They were meant to melt last.

Hard to get to too, all those people stuck in the center of an expanding structure …

“Got it,” he murmured

“You’re sure?” Patience said.

“There’s a chamber inside the ice towers.”

“Let’s get that thing off you.” She had found a pair of snips in his kit; he extended his arm, and she cut the copper wire.

Ev dropped his hand, but the glass beads declined to fall. They clung to his wrist as if stuck there. His skin pulled, like it had been glued. Heads bowed, they examined the intersection between the flesh and glass.

Crystal teeth, dozens of them, had grown from the beads and sunk into his skin.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

WILL HAD RUN OFF.

He’d come back, Astrid knew, and forcing the issue would be a mistake. She still heard the four of them up ahead in the future—her, him, and the kids. Chattering, getting along. Happy.

It didn’t help the hurt she was feeling now. He’d dumped her. Walked away, like Sahara. And she should’ve seen it coming—he dumped Roche, didn’t he? He was a dumper.

Maybe I should seduce that marshal.
It was an entertaining thought: Why restrict herself to one lover, after all?
I’ll get a harem.
The idea provoked a halfhearted giggle.

Her true self, Astrid Prime, was aboveground for the first time in weeks. Since recovering from the sea-glass poisoning, she’d let Mark bully her into remaining within her cave of wonders. They’d expanded her chanting operation there, and she’d kept making objects that could save lives. Olive and the Lifeguards were recruiting more and more volunteers to forestall disasters when the unreal popped. The pile of portraits in Limbo was shrinking by the day; everything seemed to be going well.

But Will had left her.

It wasn’t working out anyway, was it? His wife dead, one disaster after another … and now Teoquan knows about my stupid conspiracy with Pop and Eliza.

Time was running out. Soon Teoquan would lead the Roused into the real, worsening an already-messy situation.

She had been working round the clock, chanting everything the scavengers could find, everything the volunteers could buy or steal. Her ringers roamed the world beyond the protected cave, meeting with experts, slipping contamination into remote woodlands, checking on their many dispersal projects. The newshounds’ contamination map showed more and more blue spots, slowly spreading pinpricks of blue, scattered worldwide.

Right now, Astrid Prime was testing her scarf chantment, the one that hid her identity. Disguised as a scruffy middle-aged guy, she was heading into the Alchemite refugee camp with a basket of fruit and vegetables.

She found a prayer circle on the lawn, a bunch of petitioners begging Sahara to forgive them for accepting the protection of the Filthwitch. Everyone not praying was improving the camp: building sleeping quarters, a dining area, planting a garden. A cluster of Alchemites around the waterwheel Thunder had erected were weaving letrico for the few chantments the Springers had allowed them.

It was impossible not to feel a kinship with them. This was what Astrid had done in those early days with Mark and Ma and Patience: figure out how to live among the giant trees.

“Nobody’s recognized you so far.” Mark was speaking to a ringer back in the Octagon.

“One of the women has burn scars on her face.”

“She got them in a clash with the army. Medics offered to restore her, but she refused. Says they’re relics of the holy war.” He touched the ringer’s arm. “Astrid, we did the right thing.”

“Using them as cannon fodder?”

“What were we going to do, fight the U.S. Army? Stop beating yourself up. Sahara isn’t, I guarantee you.”

“True, she wouldn’t.”

“Go on, talk to someone,” Mark said.

Astrid mingled with a crowd of refugees, angling for the pregnant woman, Mary, who was waiting to use a chantment.

“Bored?” she asked.

Mary shrugged. “Hoping that when I get up there, I don’t just get to make a sandbag or wood-chip a dead tree. Is that fruit?”

“Help yourself. Can I ask—?”

“Go ahead.”

“Why line up at all? Why not organize work crews, and let everyone else do their own thing?”

Mary selected a peach, touching it reverently. “Alchemy is worship. It’s prayer. Working miracles is touching the Goddess.”

Astrid frowned. “Using magic is part of your religious practice? Like a Communion ceremony?”

Mary nodded. “So we take turns using the chantments.”

“But you’d rather not make sandbags. It doesn’t feel holy?”

A struggle worked itself out on the woman’s face. “All Works are holy.”

“What if you had something more inspiring to do?”

A smile. “I’d meant to go cure AIDS patients in Kenya.…”

“Would you still?”

“Pardon?”

“If someone turned you loose in Africa with a curing chantment, would you do it?”

The woman blushed. “There are others ahead of me for that honor. Besides, the Fil—Lethewood would never permit it.”

Astrid shrugged. “She’s always looking for—well, you’d call them miracle workers.”

Mistrust shaded Mary’s face. She put her hands over her belly. “I can’t leave here.”

“Astrid, you can’t recruit these guys as Lifeguards,” Mark said.

“It’s okay, Mary, nobody’s kicking you out.” To Mark, she said: “Why not? Give them beneficial magic, scatter them, get more people out of Limbo and onto the Big Picture?”

“They’d run off and do whatever Sahara told them. Or the Fyremen would pounce on ’em.”

“Still…”

“Why don’t you come on back?” Mark said. “It’s obvious none of them recognizes you. Successful experiment.”

“You don’t like my idea, so it’s back to my cave?”

“Are you invulnerable? Are you a god?”