Angie smiled sadly. "No worries. What an odd thought." She glanced through the handbook, looking at the full-color photos of the company housing complexes in Colorado, California, Arizona, and Oregon in the United States and worldwide in Italy, Austria, and England, and the plans for similar complexes in Australia, Finland, and Costa Rica. "I would move to one of these places?"
"For the first three years, we prefer our employees to move someplace they haven't lived before. We feel this gives them an opportunity to experience new things and to break out of any ruts they might have developed—"
"And of course it eliminates any strong ties they might have maintained by remaining near their homes." She sighed again. "As for your list of impressive achievements, I rather imagine the percentage of achievers is low compared to your general population. On the order of ten percent, perhaps?"
Eight point five, he thought, but he didn't say anything.
She continued. "They don't have to work for anything, so most of them won't. They'll have their babies, make their money, and let the system take care of them. They've found a way to whore with benefits and without the mess or bother of sex with strangers—how much neater could anything be? And I imagine since the babies are the real interest of the foundation, you have some way of hanging on to them if the mothers decide they want out."
He began figuring out how to get rid of her. He'd been certain she would take the deal—the ones who came so far had already screened themselves out by answering the ad and talking to him in his Mr. Aregeni guise…and they always took the deal. But he'd always known if one of them turned him down, he'd have to kill her.
The question was, how?
But when he said, "Then you won't be joining the foundation," preparatory to getting her out of his office so that he could come up with a death for her that wouldn't be linked to him through the nurse, her mother, or any other inconvenient connection, she said, "Don't be ridiculous. Of course I'll take the deal. I'm not stupid. I have things I want to do with my life that I can only do with money. And I'm sure when your mothers aren't in the process of having your babies for you, you make sure they have excellent birth control measures available to them, so that I won't be joining a nunnery and giving up on men forever. Right?"
He nodded.
"If I get a choice of assignments, I'd like to go to Tucson. I hear the area has excellent art colonies and marvelous light."
"It does," he said. "And I'm not certain, but I believe the Tucson community, which is named Arawah, has an opening."
When she was gone, he leaned against the wall and let the human seeming crumble to the floor around him. She'd seen more than he ever intended. Most of the young women didn't ask so many questions or push so hard, taking risks of offending their golden goose. Most of them had been happy to just sign on the dotted line, content to move to a life of ambitionless ease. Angie had been correct—the young women were, by definition, brilliant, but almost none of them took the opportunities available to them to further educations, to travel, to create. The defining characteristic of women who were willing to make a living by selling their bodies in any form was laziness, and these clever young women were as lazy as the whores and the society wives who had chosen the same "career path." Almost all of them settled into bovine lassitude and let their minds rot because they could.
Angie might be one of the ones who succeeded in spite of the system. She probably wouldn't, though. She'd proved she could be bought, so she would probably coast. If she turned out to be one of the few who challenged herself, she might also be one of the few young women who, once in the Aregeni Foundation, decided they wanted to leave. No one left the Aregeni Foundation. Callion didn't intend to let one of his young wizards slip through his fingers. If she turned out to be too much trouble, Callion hoped that at least he could get a child or two out of her before she had to be eliminated. She truly was the most perfect candidate he'd ever found.
Chapter Thirty-Two
At ten-thirty on Wednesday morning, Kate found a friendly widow who was disposing of her late husband's collections—including his gun collection—and who was only too happy to sell her a nice Glock .9mm semiautomatic pistol, two spare clips, a shoulder holster, and six cases of ammunition for a remarkably low price.
Kate spent the rest of her morning and some of her afternoon at an indoor shooting range, running through ammo and getting familiar with the weapon.
She didn't bother to ask herself why she was helping the Glenraveners. She no longer could satisfy herself that she was doing it for logical reasons. Logic declared that she remove herself from South Florida as quickly as possible, go home, put her house on the market, and move to a place far from the coming troubles. And far from Peters. She didn't owe the rest of the world anything. She didn't owe humanity anything. That was the voice of logic, and she kept wishing that it would speak up, kept thinking that it ought to carry more weight with her than it did.
The voice she did listen to was the one that said she had spent her entire life taking for granted the luxuries of civilization. She had been permitted to choose her own occupation, and the one she had chosen dealt in luxuries, not necessities. In her world, no one actually needed a hand-tooled silver-trimmed Western show saddle. Not one life depended on what she did. Not one human being would have been adversely affected if she had ceased to work. Yet she not only found work—she thrived. She had been able to buy herself a home; she owned her car; she never went to bed hungry; she did not toil in life-threatening conditions for wages that could never set her free. She worked hard, but she worked at something she loved. She spent her hours surrounded by the rich scents of leather and wood, feeling beautiful patterns rising up beneath her fingertips, watching her hands creating artifacts other people admired and valued. She got frequent calls and letters from her customers, telling her that they had won this or that show riding on a Silverado Premium, that they had gone on a month-long ride on a Mountaineer or a Suede Daisy and that they and their mounts traveled in comfort, that their daughter or son or wife or husband had been thrilled by the gift of an English Huntsman or Stonybrook.
She wanted at that moment to go back to her life among the leather and the steel. She wanted the comfortable sounds and smells, the feel of handstitching with heavy, waxed thread, the sense of timelessness and kinship with the craftsmen who had gone before her. She wanted the sunlight slanting long across her worktable, while she fit and shaped leather across a saddle tree and stopped from time to time to watch the dust motes dance like the smoke from a spirit fire.
She knew that she might never feel any of those things again. But no one else could fight against Callion and the terrifying Watchers; no one else could stop the evil that had already arrived. Maybe she couldn't either, but she knew that she was the only one who had a chance.
Every dream achieved someday demanded a reckoning, just as every choice came at a price. That was life: that nothing worth having could ever come easily, that nothing loved would last forever without care, attention, and sacrifice. Her dream—to work for herself, creating beautiful things—now demanded its reckoning. And if the price it asked of her was high, so too were the rewards she had already received, and the rewards she might hope to receive again.
She knew all of that. So she did what she had to do. She would continue to do what she had to do, until she won or she died.
Something else kept her going, too. A twenty-eight-year-old friend of hers, a boy with whom she'd gone to high school, ran into a burning building on his way home from work. He pulled out two children who were trapped in an upstairs bedroom. They weren't his children. He had only seen their faces in the window, he didn't know their parents—who had died in the fire—he knew nothing except that at that moment no one could do what he could do. He told her afterwards, lying in a burn unit bed with second- and third-degree burns on his face and hands and legs, "I was scared. I think the only people who aren't afraid some of the time, maybe even most of the time, are crazy. But cowa
rds are the people who let fear make them quit."
Heroes, she decided, were the people who didn't. She promised herself after she left his hospital room that she would never let fear make her quit. Never.
By the time she got back to the hotel room, with the Glock concealed in her purse—counter to Florida gun law, since she didn't have a carry-concealed permit—Rhiana was awake. She'd waved Kate off early in the morning, saying something about having just gotten to bed.
Kate wondered where she'd been and what she'd been doing, but didn't ask. After all, like Kate, Rhiana had secrets she had to keep, at least until the two of them managed to uncover the traitor in their midst and somehow render his treachery impotent.
"I'm glad you're back," Rhiana said. "I'm ready to go out with you for a little while. I think we're almost ready to take on Callion."
Kate raised an eyebrow, but said, "Then you want to take another look at the location?"
"Exactly."
Rhiana wanted to do nothing of the sort. In the car, she said, "I need several lengths of rope, salt water, a glass globe about so big—" she curled her index finger and thumb to describe a circle an inch and a half or two inches in diameter "—and quicksilver."
"Does the globe have to be entirely of glass?"
"No. It only has to break when I throw it, and keep in the water and quicksilver."
Quicksilver, Kate thought, had always been another name for mercury. Mercury was fairly easy to come by in small amounts, but if Rhiana needed a lot, she wasn't sure what she could do. "How much quicksilver do you need?"
"Just a drop."
Kate drove them to a Publix, and took Rhiana inside. She went straight to the baby-needs aisle and pointed out the tiny jars of baby food. "Would those do?"
Rhiana grinned. "They would be perfect. Maybe I could even make more than one."
Kate shrugged. "They're cheap. We can buy a dozen or two if you would like."
"Yes."
She bought an equal number of old-fashioned glass thermometers. And because the Glenravener told her the jars would be dangerous when they were completed, and would have to be carried in something that would protect them from breaking, Kate bought a little cooler and, from a K-Mart, a roll of bubble wrap and twenty yards of yellow nylon sportsman's rope, a hunting knife, and a cigarette lighter. Then she told Rhiana, "Now we go to the beach. There are easier ways to get salt water, but I think water from the ocean might give your spells a little extra 'zing.'"
Kate wished she'd brought Rhiana to the beach earlier. The Glenravener got out of the car and gaped at the ocean, and suddenly, with the brilliant smile of a child confronted by a puppy on her birthday, said, "It's real." After a minute of silent, happy, contemplation, Rhiana said, "As Glenraven lost its magic and its people, its borders moved inward, toward the core of our world—we have stories of vast bodies of salt water, but no one has seen them or been able to reach them for more than a thousand years. I never imagined there could be this much water. But as Glenraven gets stronger and healthier, her borders will expand. Maybe I'll get to see the Infinite Lakes before I die." Then she shook her head. "Assuming I live to get home." She straightened her shoulders and this time her smile was rueful. "Let's get to work."
Kate and Rhiana dumped the contents of the baby food jars into a trash can at the edge of the public access area, then wandered down to the coarse sand at the water's edge. A few tourists moved along the white sand or skated past on in-line skates; an old couple walked barefoot through the surf, holding hands and staring out to sea. The white prow of a cruise liner sat at the horizon, seemingly frozen in time, while smaller ships crawled up into view or sailed down out of sight constantly. Plovers ran just beyond the water's edge, darting after waves; overhead, gulls cried.
"There's power here," Rhiana said. "The sea is bright with magic."
"Then this water will work?"
"Better than I could have imagined."
They squatted at the edge of the ocean and rinsed the jars out. Rhiana then filled each one to the top with seawater and lined the dozen jars up behind her. When she finished, she said, "Now the quicksilver."
Kate produced the thermometers and handed them to Rhiana. "Break them in half and let the mercury drop into the water. By the way, you know that stuff is poisonous, don't you?"
Rhiana arced an eyebrow. "Of course. It can cause sickness if it even touches the skin."
"I just wanted to be sure you knew."
Rhiana nodded. "I'll need you to draw up magic and hold it, then pass it to me when I tell you to."
Kate nodded. "How much energy will you need?"
"Power? As much as you can draw."
"You're sure?"
"Yes."
"And we aren't going to end up sitting in a hole in the sand with no clothes on, are we?"
Rhiana laughed. "I won't explode us."
"Good." Kate closed her eyes and felt the rhythm of the tide. She smelled the sea air and breathed in slowly, visualizing the shifting currents of the Atlantic Ocean, moving air in and out of her lungs in time to the crashing of the surf. She forged the link between herself and the source of her magic, this time not doing anything to dampen the power that she imagined flowing into her. She pictured all of it perfectly—but as always, with her eyes closed she saw nothing. No light. No magic. She could imagine feeling it, but she couldn't feel it. It didn't touch any of her outer senses.
"I'm ready," Rhiana said. Her voice, soft anyway, almost disappeared into the sounds of the wind and the surf, the passing cars, the dopplered laughter of passing strangers.
Kate built the path between the two of them and imagined the magic moving. Imagined it. Visualized it. Felt nothing.
"Stop, please," Rhiana said.
Kate opened her eyes and saw only a baby food jar with seawater and a drop of mercury in it. "Well," she said. "That doesn't look like anything."
"It won't look like anything, either. Until I smash it on the floor. I separated part of the spell into the salt water, part into the quicksilver, and triggered the spell to the breaking of glass. When the glass breaks, though, all of the energy you drew, which is forced into the quicksilver, will escape into the salt water and release the explosive spirits of the salt. And while it looks frightening and makes a lot of noise, it should also create such a disturbance in the magical fabric of the area that no one will be able to do any sort of magic at all."
Kate remembered something about the element sodium being explosive when combined with water, and wondered if what Rhiana had done through magic was create the equivalent of a sodium bomb with a magical twist in the middle. If the baby food jars were going to be actual bombs, they could be physically as well as magically dangerous to both sides—flying glass would explode in all directions, not just in the direction of Rhiana's intended target.
They spelled the other eleven jars. Then they wrapped each one in bubble wrap and eased them into the cooler.
"Do you need to try one…I mean, just to make sure it works?" Kate asked.
"As much as I would like to, I don't dare." Rhiana frowned. "The flash should be visible to anyone magically sighted within this city. It might be brighter than that. It would probably alert Callion. It would almost certainly warn our traitor. And for at least a while after it goes off, I'll have some difficulty working magic. I can't risk any of that."
"So you're going into battle with a weapon you've never tried."
"I'm doing what I have to do."
Kate nodded and looked at the little red-and-white Igloo cooler. "I know how that feels. God. I know exactly how that feels."
They did the rope next. Rhiana said she wanted spelled bindings to tie and hold Callion and the traitor. So Rhiana cut the rope into five-foot lengths, folded them in half, tied a square knot halfway between the fold and the ends to form a loop, and then spliced the cut ends together to form another loop. When it was finished, it looked like Rhiana was trying to create handcuffs…except she hadn't given herself any
way to control the size of the cuffs, or to tighten or loosen them. Kate couldn't see how the rope would serve any purpose at all.
"Make one of these," she said, and while Kate tied one, she finished the other two.
"Now," Rhiana said, "give me as much magic as you did when we were spelling the jars."
Puzzled, Kate complied. Rhiana held one of the rope bindings and closed her eyes tightly. When Kate passed the energy to her, she murmured, "K-Mart, K-Mart, K-Mart," until the rope began to glow.
"What in the world are you doing?" Kate asked.
"You heard the release word, right? The name of the store where we got this rope?"
"K-Mart," Kate said.
"Yes. Put this around your wrists."
Kate slipped the yellow rope loops around her wrists. No sooner were both her hands through the loops than the rope shrank until it fit snugly against her skin. It didn't bind or chafe. She thought she would try to get free until she realized that her hands weren't moving. Her arms wouldn't obey her, either. She could feel perfectly, but suddenly her arms acted like they belonged to someone else.
"K-Mart," Rhiana said. The loops expanded to their original size.
"I'm impressed."
"They should hold even Callion," Rhiana said. "In order to undo them, he would have to unravel my spell all the way back to your magic source, and since I can't even figure out what your magic source is, I don't think that will happen."
"Then we're done."
"Except for capturing Callion and the Watchers, yes."
Kate wasn't ready to think about that. She knew she would have to face it, but until she did, she wanted as much blissful unawareness as she could manage. She forced the coming confrontation from her mind; she let the steady pounding of the surf and the slow progress of the waves as they crept toward her on the incoming tide lull her into a state of peaceful relaxation.
Marion Zimmer Bradley & Holly Lisle - [Glenraven 02] Page 21
