Blue Magic (37 page)

“No,” he said at last. “Knax and Lethewood die, the well falls into our hands. Then we transform.”

“That what it says? First one, then the other? Show me this so-called faith of yours, Gilead, and I’ll take Sahara to Lethewood.”

“That’s nonsense.”

“How do you know? It’s all euphemisms and symbols and what did some guy who died three centuries ago mean by ‘transformed’? Or Lady of, what was it? Masks?”

“Lady of Lies. And you don’t believe any of it.”

She crossed her arms. “You need Sahara Knax to go home.”

They touched down, bounced, touched down again.

“I’ll think it over,” he said.

“Think fast.” The plane juddered to an abrupt stop. “If I see one more person hit the barbecue, Gilead, this offer expires.”

His jaw worked for a second. Finally, after he’d failed to stare her down, he went up front.

“All the damn pyres!” she shouted up the plane. “I don’t care if they’re in Timbuktu.”

A cracking noise drowned her out; a second later, tendrils of plant root pushed in, breaking the windows. They were growing fast, winding themselves around the rosarite in the fuselage—and burning in the process. Glass shivered and broke; a smell of burnt candles filled the air.

The catlike urge to knead returned.

Juanita pressed her hands against her lap, waiting while Gilead argued on the radio in Latin. She couldn’t fool him for long; she had to get out of here, get Sahara away.…

Finally Gilead cracked the airplane door open, letting in a rush of moist, humid air.

“Lethewood’s people have attacked one of our bases in Europe. You expect us to lie down and take it?”

She cocked an eyebrow. “Do you think I can’t distinguish between self-defense and executing helpless people? What about the bonfires?”

“We’ve suspended the cleansings,” he said. “Tell me how you’re going to hold up your end.”

“Okay,” she said, peering out at the runway. Something had happened to the rosarite all around the compound—the ground was churned up, the chains broken by willow roots. Men scrambled to and fro, stowing gear and humping weapons—it had the look of an evacuation.

The bramble archway had grown in about twenty feet from the runway. “Uncuff Sahara and bring her here.”

“Are you kidding?”

“I’m blessed, right? I’m in the gang?”

“There’s a loyalty oath.”

“Yeah? All those marines of yours take it yet?”

“It can wait.” With a half smile, he handed her three glass flasks. “Welcome to the … Brotherhood.”

She pocketed them quickly, before he could see them burning her hand. “Sahara, Gilead.”

He gestured, and the guards brought Sahara. On the plane, she had reverted to a more or less normal appearance—the rosarite had arrested her transformation. Now it was broken, she was shifting back into a bird-woman.

“You can’t save her, you know,” Gilead murmured.

“My prisoner, my problem. Why don’t you focus on offering peace to your enemies? Of all the crap you’ve predicted, that’s the part I actually like.”

Taking Sahara by the arm, she coaxed her down the boarding steps. Camouflage-dressed soldiers stared as they passed. Torches raised, they radiated hatred.

“You don’t really believe they’ll start beating their flaming swords into plowshares, do you?” Sahara whispered.

“At least I’ve given him a chance. Would you prefer to stick around and see how long it takes them to torch you?”

“When Gilead figures out you’re bluffing—when he figures out you’re contaminated—”

“Who says I’m bluffing?” They had reached the arch. Juanita walked through, clutching Sahara’s upper arm as if her life depended on it. What if Lethewood had lied? What if she was as crazy as the others and didn’t care what happened to Sahara?

Please,
Juanita prayed,
let me be right, let Lethewood be okay with this.

The light changed … and she still had Sahara.

Instead of the train terminal she’d arrived in before, they were in a blue-lit tangle of brambles, a dim and apparently endless thicket that stretched in every direction.

“What the—what in the name of the Blessed Earth is this?” Sahara demanded, shaking brambles from her growing wings.

“It’s your big escape,” Juanita said, and as Sahara turned, talons raised, bird eyes black with rage, she added weakly: “Tah dah.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

ASTRID’S EARLIEST MEMORY OF
Mark Clumber went back to first grade, to her first fire drill. She had evacuated with her classmates, but Sahara had dragged her off somewhere—she couldn’t remember why—and somehow they got mixed in with the kindergarten kids waiting, by the swings, to go back indoors.

She had been worrying they’d bring down the wrath of Teacher when Sahara said, “You have funny eyes.”

She’d turned to see Mark watching them.

If Mark had been hurt by the comment, it hadn’t shown. Instead he had held out one pale hand, opening it to reveal a bit of found treasure—a glittering crystal prism, the sort of thing that fell off hotel chandeliers. He’d raised it to the sun, letting rainbows splash out on the sidewalk.

That same hand lay before her now, half-buried, tawny desert sand whisking over its palm in the wind. Its fingers and wrist were unmarked, as they had been that day in the playground, but the rest was burned flesh, a charred skeleton with a pair of glasses fused to its skull. The smoking remains of the shovel chantment lay beyond its grasp.

“Is he there?” That was Pike. “Should we send medics?”

“No,” she said. “The Fyremen got him.”

“I’m sorry, lass,” Pike said.

We weren’t friends.
Her mouth formed the words, but she didn’t say them aloud.

“Katarina says it should be about a hundred and nine degrees where you are.”

She held out an arm, testing the air. “I’d say it’s thirty below.”

They had never done this before. She’d done a couple big heat draws when she first built Bramblegate, but she’d gone to Antarctica and the far North for the power, places where it was already cold, where climate change—according to the scientists—had damaged the permafrost and melted icebergs, where cold was the normal state and the animals had thick fur. They got less letrico in subzero temperatures, of course, but the idea had been to minimize their impact.

“Thirty’s survivable, and the desert’s not exactly teeming with people,” Pike said. “Maybe all Mark’s killed is bugs and plants.”

“Maybe.” She bent, laying a hand on the burnt remnants of the skull. “I’m sorry, Mark. I can’t begin to…”

Information was pouring through the news center and the Octagon: rosarite destruction had unveiled Fyreman bases in Rome, Kiev, Juneau, Hawaii, and Rio de Janeiro. The sites were being evacuated, but the curse was still in effect. The Fyremen were concentrating in California and Hawaii, and there were hundreds of them now reciting the Befoulment.…

“Any sign of the bad guys there in the desert?” That was Jupiter, in the Octagon, speaking to her ringer there.

“I have the place to myself.” She looked around the ocean of sand. It was cold, but the air rushing down from above was hot. The chill Mark had put on the desert would not last long.

Spying a shape on the horizon, she trotted after it, loping up and down the dunes with the wind.

One of her other ringers caught a whiff of baking beans, and nostalgia overtook her. Sahara was such a meat-and-potatoes kid, she remembered.

An Astrid doppelgänger was in the hospital too, watching as the medics worked on the volunteers who’d fought in Crete. Tragedy had struck there too: Janet, an ex-marine named Jimmy Dean, and a couple other volunteers were dead. The doctors were sober and busy, using work to keep grief at bay.

“Jupiter,” she said, speaking through the ringer in the Octagon, “it looks like all the Fyremen are reciting that Befoulment now.”

“They’re massing in one place,” Jupiter said. “We might get another chance to shut them up.”

“Mark won’t forgive us if his death doesn’t matter.”

“Gilead Landon’s been located in Hawaii.”

Back in Emergency, she said to Will: “Landon’s at a Fyreman base in Hawaii—should we go after him there?”

“Damn right,” Igme said. “Press the advantage.”

“Excuse me, what advantage?” That was Thunder—he was sitting with Janet’s body.

“Igme’s right,” Will said. “We should go immediately.”

“You nuts? At best, Crete was a draw.”

Bad morale,
Mark would’ve said.
Poor Mark,
Astrid thought,
always so big on the armyspeak.…

“You don’t want to come, Thunder, don’t come,” Will said.

“We aren’t soldiers, Forest—”

“They’re on the move,” Jupiter said.

He was right—the bamboo screen showed the Fyremen standing around a willow-strewn plane, downing potions in a grim parody of a drinking binge. They turned to bright, white-hot figures, whirling in place until each man became a column of smoke. Merging, they swirled into the bamboo.

Aquino said: “Oh, there’s a lot of them, isn’t there?”

“They’re all together now,” Jupiter said. “They’re merging with the group in California.”

By now, Astrid’s ringer in the desert had nearly reached the speck, which turned out to be an acacia tree with a camel tethered to it.

“If it lets us get them all at once…,” Jupiter said.

“Thunder’s not wrong about us getting our asses kicked in Crete. They’re fighters—we’re just not,” she replied.

The camel wasn’t quite dead—it was hunched over, head bowed, and it was frostbitten, shivering. Astrid reached for the animal and it flinched.

“Shhh,” she said, fumbling with her mouse muscles to untether it. If she could coax it through Bramblegate, one of the healers might—

She wasn’t strong enough to undo the knot.

The camel wheezed, seeming to plead with her.

Astrid reached out again, bleeding herself of everything but a bubble of vitagua around the mouse. She flowed into the camel, contaminating it, and brought down the temperature of the liquid, chilling the last of its body heat. Its pulse slowed. The great body shuddered; the animal died.

Astrid, toddler-sized now, was left staring up at the ice blue corpse, wondering whose camel it was, whether they could survive without it.

Are you sure?
people kept asking her, and she said yes every time. This was the right path. But the bright certainty she had felt in the beginning had dulled, worn threadbare by the doubts of others, by setbacks and losses. She’d been sure she could prevent Mark and Janet’s deaths. She’d been sure she could save Will’s kids, Sahara, even herself.

Had all this been about saving her own life?

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” she told the dead camel. “And I don’t … I don’t want to die.”

Give in,
a grumble said.
It’s the only way.

“Right,” she said aloud. “Like I’m gonna fall for that.”

She was so far down this road now. And the good outcome was still in there, audible despite all the other voices: her and Will and the kids together, a future of teaching children how to chant, an ongoing set of talks, politics, and negotiations—

“But how? If I die, how?”

No answer.

Let it unfold,
she thought.
Stop pretending you’re in control of the flood.

Wind-hurled sand bit into the corpse of the camel, carrying away minuscule bits of magic, embedding some into the tree, which was already starting to grow.

Something was scratching underfoot.

Astrid pressed her ear to the sand. The dune was hard here—not frozen, just a solid wall. Inside, barely audible voices were speaking—she assumed—Arabic.

“Jupiter,” she said, “did Mark take any chantments with him besides the shovel?”

“A rubber gas mask, I think.”

“I never made anything like that.”

“Will did,” Aquino said. “It shelters people. It weaves a … a life pod, I guess … with water, some food…”

“So Mark protected the people in the freeze zone?”

“That’s the way we do things, right?”

Down in her cave, she felt tears on her face. “Yeah.”

Jupiter stiffened. “Fyremen are in the forest.”

“Where?”

“Edge of the Big Blue Reservoir.”

“So the good news is we’ve found ’em,” Aquino said. Their bamboo screen showed a blue-black funnel cloud twisting at the edge of the reservoir, that spot Roche was always bombing. The funnel had ignited the contaminated trees.

“It’s feeding off the burnt magic—what did they call it?”

“Purificado.” There were faces in the funnel, dark masks whose lips were all moving in unison.

“They’re making for the Alchemite refugee camp.”

“Can you use the rainstorm chantment to fight them, Jupe? It’ll take a lot of letrico.”

“That’s what we have power reserves for, right?” His laugh was edgy.

“Hurry,” she said, and there was a rumble of thunder. Her outdoor ringers turned their faces up into a downpour.

“It’s slowing them down,” Jupiter reported.

“They’re too close to the Alchemites,” Aquino said.

“We could arm them,” Jupiter suggested.

“They’ve done enough fighting for us,” Astrid sighed. “Evacuate them. Give ’em chantments, send them out to save lives.”

“What if they object?”

“I’ll talk to them,” she said.

Jupiter frowned. “We get the Alchemites out of harm’s way, the Fyremen’ll come straight here.”

“There’s time yet to deal with that,” Astrid said, hoping it was true.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

THE ALCHEMITES WERE PRAYING
as the hedge around their village burned.

Will and Astrid’s ringer found Sahara’s followers, thousands of them, sitting cross-legged on the grass, arranged in a rain-soaked spiral and holding hands as they sang praises.