Mulberry Wands (15 page)

Hastuur and Felia pushed aside the end cap on
top of the wall to reveal a dark hole.

“Get in,” Felia said.

“No way in hell am I going in there,” Susan
said. She backed up along the top of the wall, wondering if she’d
die if she jumped. It looked like a mile down.

“This is where you will stay while you await
your trial,” Felia said, pointing at the hole.

Hastuur grabbed her from behind (and how had
he gotten behind her? She hadn’t even heard him, and the top of the
wall was only a few inches wide.) He was intensely strong. She
flailed out with her legs, trying to kick something, anything to
keep him from shoving her in the hole. She was reminded of when Zoë
had to take her old cat to the vet. The cat had yowled and
scratched and bit and flailed to keep herself from going in the cat
carrier, but all for nothing. In the end she got her vaccinations
anyway.

Hastur shoved her into the hole, feet first.
She fell. If her hands had still been bound, she would have smashed
her face against the cinderblock, but she was able to roll with it
and only got scraped.

“You ungrateful bitch!” Susan screamed up at
Felia, who was peering into the hole. “I could have let you die! I
risked my life to save you!”

“I know,” Felia said. Then her face
disappeared from the hole as she and Hastuur pushed the cinderblock
cap back into place, plunging Susan into darkness.

The darkness appeared absolute, but after a
few minutes she found she could see a little. It was still darker
than anything she encountered when she was big, because even on
moonless nights there were streetlights somewhere. The floor was
rough and dirty under her, and when she felt around she realized
she had fallen down through two cinderblocks. The blocks were
mostly hollow, with vertical wells which had lined up perfectly. On
the floor here, the hole got partially blocked by a lump of
hardened mortar which had oozed between the cinderblocks when they
made the wall.

She climbed the wall easily; there were
plenty of nooks and crevices, and climbing at the rock gym was the
only thing she’d done for exercise since she had come to this
magical reality. Once she was at the top, she felt around for the
hole she had fallen through. The cinderblock end cap covered it
completely, and it was quite heavy. Without better leverage, there
was no way she would be able to push it aside.

She climbed back down. Her toes were aching,
since she usually wore climbing shoes when she did this, and they’d
already been cut from walking here. She’d ripped a toenail open,
and stubbed the second smallest toe so that a flap of skin hung
loose. It wasn’t bleeding badly, but it looked nasty. If she ever
got back, she’d treat herself to a pedicure.

Once she got back down to the place where
she’d fallen, she inched along the “floor” until she found the
second hole in the cinderblock. At first, it seemed that it too had
been plugged with mortar, but when she tugged on the cement it came
free, as though it had been broken off and then set back into place
as a kind of door. The hole underneath was quite small, and she had
to angle her hips before she could squeeze through it. Her legs
kicked free in the space underneath, which was the only thing that
kept her from panicking when she realized her chest had become
wedged tight in the hole. Even if you weren’t claustrophobic, it
wasn’t pleasant to be stuck in a tiny tunnel inside of a pitch
black wall with no exit.

As soon as she got her breasts adjusted, she
slipped free of the hole and fell one cinderblock’s height (about
her own height, now). This time, instead of landing on dirt and
mortar, she fell onto carpet.

A tiny chink in the wall, just large enough
to stick her arm through, let light into this chamber, which
appeared to be a storeroom. A stack of mesquite pods had been
stacked along one wall like firewood. A birthday candle had been
stuck to the floor with its own wax, and a skein of thread hung
from a protrusion on the wall. A line of what looked like gray
jackets hung behind her, and when she got closer she realized they
were dried lizards, skewered through the neck and hung for storage
like hams. There were a pile of insects next to the lizards, and
when she got closer, she realized from the stumps of wings and the
frilled feelers that they must be moths. The walls were covered
with fuzzy moth wings, like wallpaper. She placed her hand on one.
It was hard underneath, and smooth, as though they’d used melted
wax to adhere the wings to the wall. Her hand came away sticky from
the wing’s powder, and she wiped it on her thigh.

“Bienvenidos,” a high pitched voice said.

Susan looked around for the source, but she
didn’t see anyone until a child pushed aside the lizards to reveal
a neatly carved archway in the cinderblock behind it.

“Hola,” Susan replied, covering her breasts
and pubes as much as she could with just her arms. She didn’t speak
Spanish that well, but she could say that much.

“Ven,” the boy said, smiling and beckoning
with his hand.

He was young enough that he had the face of a
girl, and sounded like a girl, but he wasn’t wearing any clothes,
which made his gender clear. It made her feel better about being
naked herself. Maybe none of them wore clothes? That meant that the
dead gnosti she found had probably been naked when he died.

She followed him through the passage the
light grew brighter. Holes punched in the wall made spears of white
light in the dust. This chamber had a scrap of canvas on the floor,
and was lined with sewn sacks which bulged at the seams. The walls
had more moth wings, which was quite pretty and made her feel more
like she was in someone’s house rather than in a cinderblock
prison.

The boy turned back again at the end of the
passage, where another neat arch had been carved into the
cinderblock. Beyond him, more arches led the rest of the way down
the hall, ending perhaps ten or fifteen feet away. Holes in the
wall leaked light, keeping it illuminated enough that she saw what
appeared to be more translators, sitting on floor cushions. They
were chatting with one another, and even though she couldn’t
understand the language, the intonation sounded friendly and
intimate. The boy pointed down the hallway, smiling and nodding.
Was he leading her out, or was he leading her into a trap?

She decided to follow.

As she walked into the chamber, she smelled
food, and realized she was hungry. The room was long and narrow, as
it had to be since it was inside a wall. People lined the walls,
mostly children and young women, like partygoers spilling out into
the hallway to get some fresh air. Some of them stood, and others
sat with their backs to the wall, and the smaller children shrieked
and ran back and forth, causing the adults to trip over them and
scold ineffectively. A naked girl (they were all naked) handed
Susan a wooden cup, and she drank. It was warm and salty: lukewarm
tapwater. She drank it all and handed it back.

“May I have some more please?”

The boy cried something in Spanish.

A ripple of laughter went through the hall,
and a woman said, “Not everyone speaks the same language. And you
need to practice English.”

The girl handed her the wooden cup again, and
Susan drained it again. Tapwater had never tasted so good.

“Thank you,” she said.

“You’re welcome,” the girl said. She looked
at one of the women sitting on the floor, and when the woman
nodded, the girl beamed as though she’d just gotten praise from a
teacher.

A man ducked under the arch at the end of the
passageway. He couldn’t have been more than nine or ten inches
tall, though he seemed huge. He dominated the room, obviously a
leader of some sort, which was probably why he seemed so tall. He
looked older than the others, maybe in his mid forties. He had a
stern face, as though he rarely showed any emotion and when he did
it wasn’t anything like a smile. Her heart beat faster, and if she
could have run, she would have. Since she couldn’t run and probably
couldn’t fight, she settled for avoiding eye contact and pretending
not to be there.

The man stepped in front of her, which was
too close considering how narrow the inside of the cinderblock wall
was. He was nude too, which didn’t make it any better. She glanced
up at him and saw that he was actually smiling, though he didn’t
appear very good at it.

“You are welcome here, Susan Stillwater.”

“Thanks, but I’d really like to go home,” she
said. “Can you tell me how to get out of here?”

A flicker of annoyance crossed over his face,
very brief. “You must stay here until your trial.”

“You intend to keep me prisoner, then?” she
said.

He smiled, if you could call it that, pulling
up the corners of his mouth while his eyes still scowled. “No, you
are our guest.”

A woman came through the passageway, carrying
a leaf upon which rested some delicious smelling food. She glanced
at the man in a familiar way, not disrespectful but not cowed
either, and Susan got the impression that she was his wife or his
sister. It made Susan feel safer, that this guy wasn’t the alpha
tyrant that he seemed to be.

The woman handed the leaf to Susan. The food
on it looked like buttered crab meat, sprinkled with cayenne.
“Please, eat.”

Susan thanked her and began to eat. Her
fingers were dirty, so she folded the leaf and used it like a
burrito wrapper to keep the meat clean. It tasted as delicious as
it smelled, buttery and spicy and meaty all at once. It had an
aftertaste too, like something she’d had a couple times before but
couldn’t quite place.

The man said something reproachful to the
woman in that language of theirs.

“It’s the best food we have, Tuusit,” she
chided. She was gentle but firm, a practiced midway point between
calling him a doofus and calling him ‘Sir’. “And she is our
guest.”

Tuusit glared, looking fierce, but since the
woman didn’t appear afraid there probably wasn’t any malice in
him.

“Hmph. It’s on your head if it causes
problems.” He folded his arms and walked away.

“How’s the food, dear?” the woman asked.

“This is so delicious!” Susan had to keep
herself from scarfing it down. “What is it?”

“I believe you call it hexelmoth,” she said.
“But you may not have had it prepared this way. This is my own
recipe.”

Hexelmoth. Those were garden fey. Oh. That’s
what the aftertaste was. Hexelmoths ate spell remnants. They were
to partially-worked magic what bottom-feeders were to the gunk in
the bottom of the fishtank. That meat she ate probably had enough
manceogens to make her levitate.

“I’d better sit down then,” Susan said.

The woman set a large cushion on the ground,
and Susan sank down onto it before she got too dizzy to do so
gracefully.

Not all hallucinogens aided magic, but quite
a few of the substances that aided magic muddled your mind. You
couldn’t channel energy well enough to craft the spell without it,
but the more you used, the less rational you were able to think.
The stereotype that mages were brain-fried druggies had some truth
behind it; manceogenic substances worked so effectively at
increasing your power that some people used them often enough to
become addicted. Susan had only used them when absolutely
necessary, because she hated not being in control. Jess and
Christopher had been big fans, and had made a little money selling
their own personal manceogenic teas to people who either wanted to
craft difficult spells or just wanted to get fucked up for the
weekend.

Tuusit’s sister came through the passage
again, carrying more leaves with meat on them, which she handed to
others in the passageway. Susan noticed that except for Tuusit they
were all women and children. She wasn’t quite sure what to make of
this, but it made her think a little of a gorilla family,
especially given Tuusit’s scarred and muscular appearance.

The walls were shifting and blurred now, and
strange patterns flitted across her eyes, as though she were
looking through polarized glasses through a polarized car window.
People started getting trails behind them too, like they were
blurring as they moved.

Yeah, she was pretty messed up already.

How much time had passed? It felt like a few
moments, but it could have been hours. Her bottom was numb from
sitting on the cushion, and her back grew cold from where she’d
been leaning against the cinderblock wall. It was hard to breathe
too, the air close from all the people in such a narrow chamber. Or
maybe that was a hallucination too. She managed to lie down,
shifting the cushion so that it supported her head. Someone
laughed, not at her, she hoped. She’d have to escape later.

The funny thing was, Jess and Christopher
would have loved this. Getting high with a bunch of nudists, eating
strange but delicious food, sense of time all skewed. She didn’t
like it at all. She never felt safe when she was intoxicated,
especially with strangers. She would never do drugs around anyone
but her family, and she had a self-imposed one drink limit when she
was out on a date.

She was just glad that Tuusit wasn’t there.
She already didn’t like him. He reminded her of Julia’s dad, her
step-dad: patriarchal and arrogant.

She was too stoned to move, so she decided to
leave her body and go wandering around for a little while. If the
hexelmoth meat hadn’t addled her mind so much, she might have
realized that this would be a great way to get someone to help her,
tell Maggie she was captured and ask for help, or at least tell Zoë
and Darius so they wouldn’t worry. Instead, she just wandered
around, looking for someone she knew, floating above the city.

Paul was sitting in one of the branches of
the giant carob tree in Daley park. She knew that tree. The tree
had been the highlight of the park when she was a kid, as its
branches were thick and easy to climb, thornless and nearly
horizontal, making a leafy green jungle gym to crawl around in.
Later they’d trimmed some of the branches off, on account of
homeless people sleeping under there, she’d heard. It was still
easy to climb, and the branches were still smooth and thick, almost
as comfortable to sit on as a bench if you were child-like or
athletic enough to want to get on one. Paul had his back against
one branch and his legs swinging freely. There was a little dog
with big ears in front of him, like a Chihuahua but not as
bug-eyed, and he appeared to be talking to it.