Troll Tunnels

by Erin M. Hartshorn

  I set her coffee down. “One eighty-five.”

  She pushed a five across the table but said, “Sit and talk.”

  Since no one else seemed to need my attention, I slid into the seat across from her, wishing I’d had the sense to get myself a cup of coffee too.

  “You’re not what I expected from the stories we’ve heard about you—”

  “Stories? From whom?” I was sure I could guess; Dorothy hadn’t been subtle.

  Her answer surprised me, although it shouldn’t have. “From Clay, mostly.” She fidgeted with her mug, staring at it. “That’s actually why I wanted to talk with you. I’m worried about Clay.”

  Our worries probably had nothing in common. Warily, I asked why she was worried.

  “A moment.” She held up one hand and rotated her wrist. Oily magic slid past and around me, the coils making me shiver in remembered fear, although this time, it didn’t appear to be seeking me. “A small privacy spell. The chaos interferes with the sound waves, breaking them up, ensuring no one listens to what we say.”

  A neat trick, but not one I thought I’d ever master. Had Anneke? She hadn’t used this privacy spell when she’d been in on Sunday. Was she not as adept as Svetlana with her magic, or had she just seen no need until I arrived? No way to tell, but I filed the questions in the back of my mind. I’d keep a better eye on Anneke and Svetlana together, see if I could deduce more of their relationship and perhaps their relative power.

  Svetlana continued, “If Anneke knew that I was telling you this, she would be most unhappy. I do not see any other way to know, however.” She sipped her coffee, and I could see her gathering her thoughts. “I don’t know how recruitment works for other patrons, and I’m not going to ask you about your own, but I need to explain how we do things so you will understand my worries.”

  Oh, good. Someone I didn’t have to convince that I didn’t have a patron because she didn’t care. That alone made me more inclined to listen. I nodded for her to continue.

  “When someone shows interest in Tiamat, they are contacted by another who has already pledged. We care for these people, drawing them into our circle. And when they are ready, there is a ritual.” She frowned at her cup, but I saw uncertainty mixed with sorrow in the lines of her face. “The followers of Tiamat are never alone, and the final pledge requires others, not just the person who is pledging.”

  “This sounds very organized for a goddess of chaos.”

  Her smile lightened her eyes momentarily. “Perhaps. But my point is that I know Clay. Have known him for years. He does not remember me. I want to know why.”

  This would be a good time for me to have my own drink to fidget with. “Why ask me?”

  “Because he was obsessed with you.” There was no mistaking the bitterness in her voice. Any softening, any trust, was gone. “I know he had some plan that focused on you, something he wouldn’t tell us about. Now you’re sitting here, unsurprised by the idea that he was pledged to Tiamat — while he has no memory of her at all.”

  “If he did have a plan that involved me, I don’t see why it would help me to give you any details.”

  “So you do know something.”

  “I said if.”

  “Is it so hard to admit you know something?”

  “Our class reunion was the first time I’d seen Clay in ten years. I’ve only seen him once since then.”

  Her mouth opened in surprise. “How can this be true? But it must be. The spell…”

  Not just a sound baffle but a circle of truth as well? That was powerful magic, layered with a simple twist of her wrist. I would have to be careful of accepting her spells in the future. What would have happened if I tried to lie? I remembered coils of smoke curling about me, choking me, crushing me. I was in no hurry to feel that again.

  “Is this why so many of you are in Boston now? Trying to discover what happened to Clay?”

  Svetlana drew back in her chair. “I will not discuss the business of Tiamat’s coven with you.”

  Not just Clay’s memory, then. Continuing the work to bring Tiamat through to this plane? From what I’d seen in Clay’s journals, it seemed likely, and likely to be tied to the underground shrine. I suppressed a shudder. I did not want to face Tiamat in all her strength. I could not stand against a goddess, of this I was certain.

  “Perhaps our conversation is over?”

  “Perhaps.” She drained her cup and stood. “But do not expect me to stop trying. I care about Clay.”

  I stood as well, grateful that we had finished talking before customers had entered or Trish’s break was done. Goodness only knows what Trish would think of seeing us talk but not hearing us. “I can respect that.”

  Respect, yes. Aid, not so much.

  Chapter 9

  Halfway through the afternoon, I popped into the kitchen to bake another couple trays of double chocolate cookies, which we’d gone through faster than usual. While they baked, I loaded up the dishwasher and made a note for Ximena to put together some cookie dough before close if it got quiet. No sooner were the cookies out and cooling on the wire racks, their heavy scent filling the air, than I was assaulted by a different feeling of heaviness, a rumbling along my nerves.

  I waited for the sensation to ease, diminish as such things sometimes did, an artifact of trolls moving through passages in the earth. Instead, it stopped and solidified, my muscles knotted into stone. The sense of presence had never been this strong before, not even face to face with Sverth the other day. After a quick glance out front to make sure Trish had things covered, I headed out to the alley.

  A tunnel to nowhere opened in the brick wall across the alley, where no tunnel had any right to exist. Iárn stood in front of the opening, arms crossed in front of him. “It’s time.”

  I had expected Sverth, if anyone, but not without warning. Not now. “My work!”

  “You knew this was coming.” His tone was flat. “I had expected you to be prepared.”

  Prepared to be called away at a moment’s notice, no matter what I was doing? No doubt abandoning my children if they were with me at the time. For a brief moment, I could almost see Matt’s point of view, understanding that my life could put the twins in danger. But … Iárn had come to me now, not when it would affect any of my family. I chose to trust him.

  “Very well. Let’s go.”

  He jerked his head toward the tunnel. “After you.” He noticed my hesitation. “I must close the entrance behind us.”

  Would he be offended if I turned on the flashlight on my phone? Unlike a troll, I couldn’t see in the dark. At least, I assumed they used vision. For all I knew, they used magnetic sensors or echolocation.

  I stepped into the tunnel and reached into my pocket.

  Iárn touched my arm. “Leave it. You don’t need to see.”

  “Excuse me?”

  His sigh rumbled through my bones, and the wall closed behind us as though it had never been open. “In the earth, the eyes are the least useful tool. Also, seeing how fast we’re moving might upset you.”

  I had unconsciously started walking to keep pace with his voice, and vertigo assailed me as my ears told me I was moving much faster than my feet were. He might have a point — seeing the motion might be worse.

  Time to focus on something besides not throwing up. “Sverth told me we were going to Canada. That’s going to play hell with my work schedule.”

  “Not so far, this first time.” His hum sounded happy, like he was smiling. I’d never seen him smile, wasn’t sure I wanted to. Trolls historically didn’t look friendly, and I imagined that was true of Iárn’s smile. “Across the water to the airplanes.”

  “Across—? You mean under.” Why did Logan have a magical gap that needed repair? Near Symphony Hall, I could understand, or one of the garages where I’d severed a ghost, disrupting one of the ties Tiamat had to this realm of existence. I was about to ask Iárn, but he spoke first.

  “Does it really matter whether you have hundred
s of feet of rock or hundreds of feet of water above you?”

  “Well. If you’re going to put it that way.” I tried for dry humor, but the thought of being crushed and suffocated wasn’t one I found amusing.

  “It is a short trip. We are here now.”

  I didn’t think I’d ever get used to how fast the trolls moved. Too bad the trolls only lived in the T, rather than keeping it running. The increased mobility for rush hour would be newsworthy.

  Light opened in front of me, and I blinked. When my eyes stopped watering, I stepped forward and tried to get my bearings. I had expected to be outside, on the tarmac, but instead I was inside, with luggage trundling past on conveyor belts and shouts from baggage handlers working in the distance. Despite my initial reaction to the lighting, it wasn’t that bright. Sverth leaned against a pile of nearby shipping crates. He nodded in greeting.

  Only after the wall behind me closed — with Iárn on the other side — did I remember I still hadn’t asked the troll why the airport. He was gone now, not just beyond the wall but beyond the feel of my magic, leaving even faster than he’d arrived. I looked to Sverth. “Why here?”

  His rumble of humor blended with the bumping of luggage over rollers. “I thought you would like to start small to understand what must be done.”

  Which made complete sense — and would make even more sense if I could tell what needed doing. “The gap is inside?”

  “Can you still not tell?” His surprise and disappointment were a bit much.

  “I’m not a troll. I don’t sense magic the way you do.”

  He moved closer and set a hand on the wall behind me. “Can you feel when I do this?”

  The sense of rock-solid stability increased briefly, then ebbed to its previous levels.

  “Maybe? But I don’t know how to do that myself.”

  “If that were sufficient to repair the gaps, we would not need you.”

  “Lucky me.” I shrugged when Sverth’s glower increased. “I can sense others’ magic — witches, sirens, trolls. That doesn’t mean I can feel any underlying connection between them, this bedrock of magic you talk about. I’d feel a lot better about this if Iárn had explained how I’m supposed to even find it, let alone repair it!”

  “Ha!” His bark of laughter silenced the chatter among the crew, then one of them dismissed it as a backfire of one of the pickups outside, and they returned to work. “You would wait a long time if you expect Iárn to explain.”

  “Which means I need you to explain.”

  “I do not know how witch magic works.”

  “I don’t know how troll magic works, so we’re even. But it would be great if you could give me some ideas, since you’re the one who told me it wouldn’t go well for you otherwise.”

  A rumble of disapproval rather than humor. “I asked you to forget that.”

  “I don’t forget if my friends tell me they might be in trouble.”

  “Friends?” He looked down at me, and I stared back up. In truth, he was somewhere between an acquaintance and a friend, someone I knew and sometimes enjoyed chatting with, but with the underlying conviction that we did not see the world the same way. Whatever he saw when he looked at me, he said, “Sit here on the floor. Better contact with the ground might help you.”

  The concrete floor wasn’t precisely “ground,” but if he considered it a reasonable proxy, I would as well. I sat down cross-legged with my back against the wall. He sat facing me and placed his palms flat on the ground between us.

  “Put your hands on mine.”

  His hands were surprisingly warm, as they had been the other day, warmer than mine, and smooth like polished stone.

  “I am going to reach for the bedrock, touch the edges of the gap. You must bind your magic to mine so it will follow.”

  I wasn’t sure whether he really meant that, but he had said to bind. I reached out with a tendril of my magic, as if seeking a ground for electricity, but I added a mental hook to tie to whatever I came across. He must have been satisfied with the result because I could feel the tendril reaching further, as it did when I worked with a ward, stretching to follow a guiding line, going deeper and beyond what I expected. Occasionally, my magic pulsed as it ran across something different — a vein of mineral? or something magic underground? I had no way of knowing.

  Abruptly, the motion stopped with the sensation of teetering over thin air, as though I was about to be blown off a tall building. I didn’t need Sverth’s nod of confirmation to know that this was the gap I was supposed to fix.

  Closing my eyes to focus on the path, I let the magic wander, feeling for the boundary between solid and air, trying to find the extent of the trouble before me. The hole was only about as long as a minivan, but it was two stories deep, and had uneven edges, so the width of the gap varied across its length. Now that I knew the extent of the problem, I needed to find a solution. Pouring my own power into the gap wasn’t going to work — I didn’t have enough to fill even a fraction of what was missing. I had to coax the gap to close itself.

  My shoulders began to tense at the prospect, and I rolled them to loosen back up.

  Slowly, I let my magic trickle out to follow the outline of the gap, splaying over the edges like electricity playing across the surface of a puddle of water when a live wire fell in. By the time my energy field was ready, only a tenuous line remained connected to me. I hoped I had the strength to finish the job.

  Beginning at one edge, I imagined the two sides of a net covered with hooks and loops, an illusory Velcro that I pressed close, working from bottom to top, then top to bottom, waves slowly pushing across the net to pull it together and latch it once more. My arms started shaking as more energy poured out of me, and I was glad I was sitting. Collapsing would have been undignified.

  Halfway across, my power faltered. I had no more reserves to draw on — I was going to fail.

  Sverth pulled his hands from beneath mine, and my eyes flew open in shock. Had he given up on me? But he set them back down on top of my hands, pressing my palms against the ground, fixing me in place. Warm solidity washed over me, and there was a sense of stones tumbling down the narrow path of my magic. I couldn’t grab the stones so much as I could nudge them to where they needed to go, thinking of my weak energy remnant as a magnet, repulsing Sverth’s power away from me to where it would do the most good.

  At length, I reached to push one more bit into place — and there was nowhere to push it. We were done. I collapsed onto my elbows with my head drooping and my hair fallen in front of my face.

  Sverth chuckled, the whirring and clicking of stones in a tumbler. “We have both learned something, I think.”

  “Yeah. I’ve learned there’s no way I can handle something you consider a chasm.”

  His humor cut off. “You must. You may have some time to recover, but this must be done.”

  I sighed and met his gaze through my hair. “You don’t ask much, do you?”

  “Only what I must.”

  What did he have riding on this? He would dodge my question if I asked again, but I hoped eventually he would trust me enough to say.

  “Give me a couple minutes to regroup, then take me back to my work.” Because as hard as this had been, my day wasn’t nearly over.

  I stepped through the backdoor of the coffee shop. The time clock said I had been gone for nearly an hour, and I grimaced. That was hardly fair to Trish. I headed for the front, planning to make a cup of Carole’s tea to replenish my energy enough to pick up the slack, but I pulled up short. The office door was open.

  “So good of you to come back to work,” Kendall said as I poked my head in. “I was a little concerned when I came by to find that you only had one person on shift besides yourself, and you weren’t here to provide any sort of supervision.”

  “Supervision like you provided?”

  She raised her brows. “Excuse me?”

  In for a penny, in for a pound. Or, in this case, since I’d been foolish enou
gh to challenge my boss, I needed to back it up with actual reasoning. And I was even more tired than I thought if I was going to push her like this. “You trusted me and Rich to run the place without you here. You have to understand if I trust Trish and Ximena and Freddy.”

  “Perhaps.” She looked skeptical, and I knew she was thinking of the fact that I had been left on my own as an assistant manager, not as a basic employee. “However, you need to get someone to replace Rich soon. That’s actually why I came by. I wanted to know what steps you’re taking, and whether he can cause any trouble for us.”

  “He can try.” I shrugged. “But his file is right there — customer comments and complaints, when he showed up early, when he showed up late, and how he quit five minutes before he was due on shift. As long as you feel solid in choosing me over him as manager in the first place, we should be fine.”

  “Which doesn’t answer what steps you’re taking. I gave you permission to hire two new people. I want to hear about your progress.”

  “As long as you’re in the office, I can show you.” I walked around to stand next to her behind the desk and logged in. I leaned on the desk, let it support me so I didn’t look as tired as I felt, and motioned to the screen. “As you can see, I’ve put the usual advertisement in the Help Wanted section of The Globe. I also added scrolling text on our website to alert people that we’re looking to hire, and I posted on all of our social media accounts. About the only thing I haven’t done is put up a flyer in the window.”

  “Do that.” She looked up at me, eyes narrowed. “You were definitely the right choice. You still don’t appear to be ambitious, but you are competent, and you’ve grown the business nicely in the months you’ve been in charge.” She sighed and looked away. “I wish you were more ambitious. I could use someone to act as a regional manager, overseeing more of my diverse businesses — a flooring store, a small stationery store, a couple other coffee shops.”

  Her description of her diverse interests frightened me; there was no way I could cope with that many different business models. Not that I wanted to try. I shook my head, although she wouldn’t see it. “It’s the personal involvement and the time I put in here that have made a difference.” Creating a ward with my magic counted as personal involvement, right? “I couldn’t do that if I was trying to oversee multiple shops.”