Blue Magic (7 page)

“Operation?” Janet suggested, needling.

“Maybe we can leave the semantics for later,” Will said. “According to the seers, the kids are in St. Louis, Missouri.”

“Igme?” Astrid said. “You’ve been studying up on St. Louis?”

“You bet I have,” the young man said. “They’re okay for food and water. There’s been power brownouts, looting. It’s too hot, especially in the refugee camps. We could draw some heat—”

“Windstorms,” Janet objected.

“Might keep people indoors.”

“When you make things in a hot region very cold all of a sudden, Will, there’s side effects,” Astrid explained.

He had seen this when the army clashed with the Alchemites. Cold air took up less space than hot. When chantments drew heat, the air pressure dropped, causing the wind to rise.

“Katarina has a fancy weather model in Europe,” Aquino said. “In Bern.”

“Bern?”

“I’ll make chantments for the locals.” Astrid interrupted—hastily, he thought. “Will, I’d like to get you briefed on Alchemite activity in St. Louis.”

“Temples, Primas, missing persons, that kind of thing?”

“Yes. We’ll home in on the kids using magic, but preparation—”

“Knowledge is power,” he agreed. “How do I get briefed?”

“Igme will take you to meet the seers. I—”

The tuning fork at her neck piped: “Astrid, are you still going with Ev and Patience?”

“Yes, Pike. Tell ’em I’m coming, please. Will, are you okay if I go?”

He nodded.

She reached out, as if to touch him. Then, instead, she turned, vanishing through a gate of thorns on the nearby wall.

Clancy clapped him on the arm. “We’ll have your family back soon, sonny.”

“St. Louis,” Will said under his breath. It had been a long time since he had felt this much hope.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE UNREAL WAS A
sunless expanse, lit by the glow cast by the glaciers of vitagua that lay atop most of its land mass. Its nature was poorly understood. Astrid, when explaining it to new volunteers, said that throughout human history there had been tales of other worlds—spirit realms, Hades, Asgard—and that the unreal was one or possibly all of those realms.

Albert had called it the land of the fairies.

The explanation satisfied many of the new volunteers, Ev knew. But it wasn’t that simple: the fairies were long gone. In fact, the unreal’s inhabitants were all aboriginal people, Native Americans who’d fled the European conquest. But Fairyland was a simpler concept to grasp, and a less thorny one.

The three of them—Ev, his daughter, and Patience—had stepped through Bramblegate and now stood on the gritty steppes of the unreal, next to a tumbled-down pile of concrete and steel beams commingled with bits of tree. A sharp breeze blew from within the wreckage, along with a wisp of steam—humidity, from the real, condensing in the cooler air.

“If I hear you’re driving yourself into the ground working, kid, I’m coming back to the real.”

“I feel great, Pop. As long as I’m chanting, I’ve got energy to burn.”

“Don’t think we won’t find out if you’re fibbing,” Patience said. She was wearing a copper-colored silk dress, and its skirt snapped in a gust of breeze, billowing like a sail. “None of us can afford for you to collapse from exhaustion.”

“I’m not gonna die of burnout, promise.”

“I hate you shoving me out of harm’s way like this,” Ev said.

“It might not be as safe as you think, Pop. The Roused know you’re my—” She paused, snagging on his gender. “—parent.”

“Just take decent care of yourself,” he said before things could get awkward.

“I don’t remember there being a breeze here,” Patience said, deftly changing the subject. She turned into the wind, which pressed the dress snug against her figure.

Ev looked away. “Vitagua’s flowing into the real through the Chimney,” he said. “Katarina figured something had to come into the unreal. Otherwise the whole place would collapse.”

“Magic flows out, so air comes in?” Astrid said.

“A little water too, from the look of it. See the steam?” Patience pointed.

Astrid’s expression became dreamy. “Thunder’s going to put a wind turbine here. Cottages, a letrico mill.”

“Let me check with the locals before you go putting up a suburb on their turf.” Patience’s father had been Native—Umpqua Nation, Ev thought, or Chinook?

“Good idea,” Astrid said, missing her sharp tone. “Will you guys be okay if I get going?”

“Of course,” Ev said.

“If everything goes well in St. Louis, they’ll be in a good mood. We’re going to release a lot of magic tonight.”

“Beyond finding Jacks, what do you need me to do?” Patience asked.

“When I first came here, there were these ice statues,” Astrid said. “One of Dad, and his granny. They had all the chanters, I think, going back to Elizabeth Walks-in-Shadow. I’m wondering if they’re still around.”

“Fine. The Roused will want to know how long it’s going to take to get the magic thawed.”

Astrid frowned. “I know it all goes—the grumbles say so.”

“In five years time, or fifty?” Patience pressed.

“What if I ask Katarina about finding a … would it be a hydrologist?” Astrid said. “Someone who can measure how many gallons of magic there are and how fast we’re moving it.”

“It’s a start,” Patience said.

“Okay.” Astrid’s attention was elsewhere: Bramblegate had flowered amid the ruined pile of concrete. She stepped through and was gone, moving on to her next task.

Patience jerked her suitcase, trying to make it roll on the soft sand. “Here I am playing ambassador, and what do I get? No limo, no entourage—”

“Let me get that.” Scooping it up, Ev began to march, glad to have an excuse not to look at her.

“I wasn’t fishing for help.”

“I don’t mind.” His transformation had given him the body of a fifty-five-year-old man and the libido of a thirteen-year-old boy. Around Patience, he felt desire that was nigh unbearable.

Knowing it was magic that made her sexy didn’t help.

She has twenty years on you, Ev. Remember when she was just the dotty old crank on your Mascer Avenue mail route?
“I doubt we rate an escort. It’s not far, and we’re no threat.”

“I’d appreciate some VIP treatment. I liked being on TV—”

Ev said: “Having a million fans. What’s not to like?”

“And you, you’re the mother of their best shot at freedom. Definitely a red carpet visitor.”

“I’m not the red carpet type. Do you think it’ll be hard to find Jacks?”

“They’ll know where he is,” Patience said. Something must’ve shown in Ev’s face, because she added, “You don’t look happy about that.”

“Astrid killed the Chief,” Ev said. “And the Chief wanted Jacks to be a witch-burner.”

“The Chief wasn’t the best of fathers, maybe, but I wouldn’t worry—Olive raised Jacks to be a peacenik. Besides, Ev, the boy is mad in love with your daughter.”

“Look what contamination did to Sahara,” Ev said.

“Sahara was a self-centered half-crazy brat before she got anywhere near magic.”

“It warps you, Patience. I thought I was someone else, remember? Near took Astrid’s head off once, for trying to set me straight.” Ev shuddered, remembering the rages that had overtaken him after he’d been exposed to raw vitagua.

It started on his mail route; he had suddenly
known
that the envelope in his hands was a vicious attack on the woman receiving it. Hate had boiled through the paper … and he had been unable to cope. Such things didn’t happen, he had rationalized, and something in his mind gave.

Scared and grasping at straws, he’d decided he wasn’t psychic—he’d just deduced what was in that envelope. An ex-husband, a bitter breakup. It was a small town, and he knew all the local gossip.

But the insights kept coming, intimate details of strangers’ lives. To cope, Ev had adopted the persona of his favorite fictional detective.

Since Astrid had learned to treat vitagua sickness, Ev felt sane again. Now that his body was male, he felt more sound than he’d ever been during his early life. Daughter, mother, wife—all those Evs had been costumes. All of them fit wrong.

But even now, he wasn’t quite himself. Traces of the detective persona remained: a fondness for hats, hokey chivalry.

Patience didn’t get this. She had been exposed to vitagua, but Astrid treated her within minutes, before her sense of self could fracture.

“Say for the sake of argument we find Jacks alive,” she said now. “Say he’s insane and looking for revenge.”

“You think he died?”

Patience shrugged. “No. Astrid promised the Roused that if they saved Jacks, she’d thaw the unreal. There’s a lot of magic here: they can pull it off.”

“Can we afford to turn him loose?”

“Not our call, Ev.”

“Sahara broke Astrid’s heart. If Jacks was nuts too…”

“Astrid is going to risk it.”

He found that it was a relief just to have given voice to the fear. “You don’t think Jacks is a danger?”

“Nope. If you want something to worry about…”

“What?”

She sighed. “We are all of us, especially Astrid, inventing a very dangerous wheel here, Ev. We could destroy both worlds—”

“Her grumbles say it doesn’t happen that way.”

“And you believe— Hey!” She stopped. “Where’s the city?”

On their previous visit to the unreal, the Roused had been living beneath the ridge the two of them had just climbed. Their settlement had been a sprawling bundle of giant seedpods, each as big as a room, stitched together by translucent stems big enough to walk through.

Now the gritty white plains below the ridge were empty, a bare expanse stretching to the edge of a vast frozen sea.

“There, on the horizon!” He could just make out structures rising from the surface of the ice.

“That is a hell of a lot farther to walk,” Patience said.

Bubbling erupted from the bleached grit at their feet; a pair of human hands scrabbled up through the dust. They were suspended from the ends of the two slender antennae, and followed by an enormous cricket.

“Hi, guys!” he chirped. “Enjoying the stroll?”

“You uprooted the whole city?”

“The People move as we must. Action’s out on the glacier, so we are too. But I got a shortcut, if you want.”

Patience’s relief was obvious. “We definitely want.”

“Okay!” The cricket spat a stream of green juice onto the white grit. It clumped together, forming a line of ivory stalagmites that curved inward as they reached a height of seven feet. The cricket spat again, forming a second, parallel line about a yard away. Laid thusly, they formed a structure that resembled a giant rib cage. Its floor curved like a bridge, a low arch on the sandy soil.

“You have gates here in the unreal?” Patience said.

“Gates are ours, always were,” the cricket said. “Spirit realm’s everywhere. You step through Astrid’s blackberry arches in the real, you slide over us on your way elsewhere.”

Does Astrid know this?
Ev would have to ask.

“Gonna take the bridge?” the cricket asked.

“Yes, thank you,” Ev said.

Stepping through, they emerged on the surface of the massive glacier. The cluster of seedpods that had formed the city rose above them, organized into a freestanding honeycomb, skyscraper high, with roots sunk deep into the ice. Human–animal hybrids moved along its walkways.

The scent of cooked food—roasted vegetables, refried beans, and something eggy—rose from a long dugout canoe parked at the base of the honeycomb. Remembering his first visit to the unreal, Ev inhaled slowly. Sure enough, his belly filled.

At the foot of the honeycomb was a pit, a melted chasm that yawned within the frozen vitagua.

Ev stared into the hole. Magic had mutated from its original, relatively benign form about seven hundred years earlier. That was when the witch-burners of Europe launched their effort to corner the market on enchantment. In the process, they had driven magic into Fairyland—to use Albert’s term—where pressure compressed the magical particles into vitagua.

In their last battle with the Fyremen, the people of the unreal had frozen it all. They had saved themselves, but they’d also been trapped by their own defensive move—the ice had formed instantly, capturing everyone on both sides.

Vitagua was naturally luminescent; staring into the pit was like being underwater on a sunny day, seeing the sun shining down at you through several feet of ocean. Half-transformed people were frozen in the ice, a profusion of animal and human faces, all with aboriginal features, most caught in attitudes of surprise or terror. Here and there, a body part stuck out; in one case, a girl’s head had melted free. She keened at Ev with the voice of a Siamese cat.

“She has been freeing about ten people a day.”

Ev turned. The speaker was a raccoon with long black braids, dressed in a nineteenth-century dress and glasses that made her look like something from a kid’s book, a raccoon granny.

“Hello,” Patience said. “I’m Patience Skye. This is Ev.”

“I’m Eliza,” the raccoon replied.

Ev was about to ask if Eliza was in charge, but Patience cut in smoothly. “You were saying something about Astrid?”

A man with dragonfly wings flew over the lip of the chasm. He had someone in his arms, a coughing, blue-slimed bullfrog from the pit. He passed the frog to a waiting quartet of Roused, who sponged off the new arrival, their movements as tender as if they were nurses attending a birth.

“You spoke of measuring the ocean in gallons,” Eliza said, indicating the bullfrog. “What matters to us is how many of our people remain trapped.”

“Astrid has melted more of you folk loose than any chanter since the freeze,” Ev said.

The raccoon eyed him. “Promises have been made.”

“They’re being kept,” Patience insisted. “She’s picking up the pace.”

“Each person freed is a gift. But the more of us there are, the more impatience we feel.” Eliza smoothed her apron. “Asking us to have faith in your daughter’s commitment—”