by J. M. Frey
Oh, god, I’m contemplating smashing one of my own fictional creations in the face with a lamp, Elgar thinks a little wildly. His hands start to shake, and he redoubles his grip. And then, while his courage is up, he throws back his door, thunders down the hall, and kicks open Lucy and Forsyth’s with a roar of rage. He hefts the lamp over his head, ready to swing at their attacker and . . . freezes.
Lucy is on the bed, arched on her shoulders and heels, howling in agony. Forsyth is beside her on his knees, hands reaching out to press on Lucy’s arms. There is no one else in the room. Just Forsyth, and Lucy, and . . . and a room filled with a sinister green glow. The source of which is—
“Jesus fucking Christ,” Elgar hisses, sleep-muddled and still thrumming with adrenaline.
“Fetch a glass of water,” Forsyth shouts over Pip’s wails, and even knowing that it’s make-work, that it isn’t actually important, Elgar is eager for the excuse to get out of there. To not have to watch. To not be forced to witness.
More than that, Elgar doesn’t know Lucy as well as he knows Forsyth, or even Juan. She plays it close to her vest, doesn’t like to be emotional in public, and is almost ridiculously desperate to distance herself from anything feminine or “weak” looking. Elgar has a feeling that she won’t appreciate her deepest and most personal pain being goggled at. He drops the lamp, spins on his bare heel, and goes.
“Pip, bao bei,” Elgar hears Forsyth shout as he stumbles over to the galley kitchen.
His feet are unsteady. His vision swims, and he leans down over the counter, rests his forehead on the cool rim of the stainless-steel sink for a minute, squeezing his eyes shut and willing his head to stop spinning.
The screams peter out, replaced by a mewling whimper.
“Wake now. It’s just a nightmare, my darling. Wake up,” Forsyth commands from the other room, his voice a soothing cadence. Elgar feels his heart rate settling, the flush draining from his cheeks, his whole body trembling from the unspent adrenaline.
There’s a choking gasp, another small yelp, and then the sound of what is probably soft sobs muffled by the presence of clothing, or a pillow. Mortified by the thought of Lucy—strong Lucy; no-nonsense Lucy—weeping against her husband’s chest, Elgar straightens and turns the tap on full-blast. He pulls down a cup, clattering the cupboard door, and fills it.
By the time he goes back to the room, Elgar is feeling a bit calmer. The sounds of crying have faded. He peeks around the threshold. Forsyth is still crouched over Lucy, sitting upright, her hands fisted into his pajama top. Lucy sucks in air through her teeth, hard, hissing inhales that make her nostrils flare and suck closed, sweat painting her hair along her forehead like ink-strokes. Her exhale is reedy and mumbled.
“Lucy?” Elgar gasps. Her head jerks to the side. She blinks hard, eyes coming into focus.
“E’gar?” she mumbles, and all at once, her body goes lax. Instead of tensing upon waking, this seems more like wakefulness-induced freedom.
“Is it-t-t . . . is h-he . . . ?” Forsyth tries to ask, hands shaking, teeth clattering and blocking whatever it is he actually wants to say, and Elgar realizes that his soothing and commanding act was just that—an act.
Lucy turns her head a little further and kisses one of Forsyth’s palms. “No,” she says. “No, I promise. He can’t get back in.”
“B-uh-but he’s tra-try-trying?”
“I don’t think so,” she whispers, and her voice crackles. She licks her lips, and Elgar’s glad Forsyth sent him on his silly errand. Lucy must be parched after all that screaming. “Don’t even think he knows we’re here. I don’t know where he is. It’s just . . . thanks,” she says as Elgar steps around the lamp on the floor to hand her the glass of water, careful not to let go until he is sure she won’t drop it.
“Ma-ma-magic r-ru-runoff,” Forsyth finishes for her, when she seems more concerned about draining the glass than completing her thought. She sets the empty glass down on the side table, and Forsyth leans down, scrunching unattractively to press a reassuring kiss against her mouth.
“Is that what that was?” Elgar asks.
“Yeah,” Pip croaks, and struggles to sit up properly. Forsyth helps her prop herself against the headboard. She scrubs her forehead, making her fringe stand askew, and Forsyth pets it back and away from her face.
“So, that’s what magic looks like,” Elgar hears himself say, echoey and hollow and feeling a bit like the words haven’t really come from himself. He assumes his expression must have some sort of stunned, smashed-in-the-back-of-the-head-by-a-branch look to it. ’Cause that’s definitely how he feels.
Lucy lets out an exhausted huff of laughter. Her eyes crinkle, and her mouth quirks up. Elgar’s not sure why she’s feeling so warmly toward him right this moment. Hysterical fatigue, maybe? “Yeah. Is it what you imagined?”
“Of course it is,” Elgar says, blinking and trying to get his head back into the present, to stop floating along on a current of shock, of . . . traumatism and consternance. “Exactly like it. Even with the . . . the watercolor brush-stroke swirls around the outside of the aura that—” Forsyth flashes a glare over Lucy’s head at him, and Elgar stumbles to a halt mid-sentence. “Right, sorry. I should maybe be less excited about this than I am.”
Lucy huffs again, then plants her head in her husband’s lap. “Can I get you an-anything?” Forsyth asks, voice tremulous and small.
“Not yet,” Lucy whispers, fingernails digging into his thigh as if she fears he’ll jump up and run out the door. “Just . . . not yet.”
“Very well,” Forsyth says. Elgar is not entirely sure what he’s doing, but Forsyth makes a show of breathing in tandem with Lucy, slowing his own cycle of in-and-out imperceptibly, so that she follows along. Elgar, desperate to get his heart jammed back down where it belongs, copies them. Eventually, Lucy’s pained panting evens out to a light wheeze.
Lucy turns her head just enough to grin wearily up at Forsyth. “You think you’re so subtle.”
“I am subtle,” he protests.
“Are not.”
“It worked, didn’t it?”
Lucy grumbles and resumes her careful breathing. But Elgar isn’t following this time. He stares unashamedly at her back, hungrily fascinated and intrigued, all wrapped up in awe and wonder and . . . trepidation. Alarm. Dread.
The green in the deepest part of her scars is still fading, slowly, just visible through her thin tank top. And on her exposed shoulders, the filigree webwork of her scarring forms a delicate, realistic, artistic interpretation of ivy leaves, the result of days of agony under the knife of a talented but psychotic sadist, magical healing, and a vicious spell.
And Elgar is seeing them for the first time.
He’s entranced. He can’t look away. He can barely blink. And at the same time, horror roils in his gut. Horror of what was done to Lucy. Horror that it was done by someone spawned from his imagination. Horror that the next person tortured by the Viceroy might possibly be himself.
“So, what do we . . . do now?” Elgar asks. “With the, you know, the trap and the bait and stuff?” He gestures vaguely to himself.
“We wait until tomorrow,” Forsyth says.
“That’s it? Just wait?” Elgar asks, aghast. “But this has to change something, right?”
Lucy closes her eyes and shakes her head a little.
“No,” Forsyth says. “This is, unfortunately, meaningless.”
“But the Stations. What about that plot map you told me about?” Elgar asks. “The one you made for the other two adventures?”
“I’m not sure there’s a point this time,” Lucy says quietly, opening her pain-deep eyes to meet his. “Stories in the real world, do they follow your pattern? Not usually. Will this one? I think relying on the Excel to tell us what to expect will do us a disservice. We can . . . miss things. Like with Lanaea . . .” she finishes softly.
Lanaea. A woman Elgar has never known, has never written, and yet had lived in the land of Hain,
had been born in Milliway Chipping, and raised in Sherwilde, and been murdered in the Lost Library. She had been loved, and mourned, and Elgar’d had no idea she’d even existed. Like so many people who populate his world, she had just been there for the convenience of plot, one in a crowd he would have killed to make the bad guy look badder, someone he would have thrown at Kintyre as a reward, would have endangered and threatened, or dismissed, just for the sake of conflict, of narrative tension.
It’s not like you knew, Elgar tells himself. It’s not like you were aware that these people were, well, people.
“Still not your fault,” Forsyth tells Lucy gently, wrapping an arm over her shoulders.
No, Elgar thinks grimly. It’s mine. But what he says out loud is: “So we just wait. Go back to bed, sweet dreams, all that bullshit?”
“All that bullshit,” Forsyth agrees lightly.
“I have to say, I’m not feeling all that confident here,” Elgar confesses. “Maybe I should have stayed in the safe house.”
“With personnel who have no idea what the Viceroy is capable of and no way of guarding against him?” Forsyth asks archly.
“Well, do you? Really?” Elgar challenges.
Lucy looks up at him, eyes wide, and a bit hurt, but mostly resigned.
“We all agree that the plan is limpid and relies too much on hoping that whatever the Viceroy does, we’ll be able to spot it coming and stop it,” Forsyth says slowly, trying to make this conversation cease to be anything but an acknowledgment of an utter losing situation. “I will be honest myself and admit that I highly dislike being on the back foot, as we are. But this is not like a quest, Elgar. We cannot formulate a plan, nor mark a map. This is a siege. The best we can do is eat well, sleep while we can, and prepare ourselves for whatever we think might come our way.”
Elgar’s mouth twists sourly. “While parading me around with a target on my back. He has magic,” Elgar blurts, all patience with this attempt at reason lost. “He’s the son of a Deal-Maker, you say. Maybe he doesn’t have all his magic, but he got here somehow! He can compel people! He put illusions in my house, and he . . . he killed . . .” Elgar chokes on the name of his cat, eyes welling.
Elgar turns his body away, angling so Forsyth and Lucy can’t see his face as he mops at his cheeks with the back of his hand, desperate to be a man in front of them.
“He has magic,” Elgar repeats at length, when he’s gotten himself back under control. “And we’ve got nothing.”
Forsyth sits straight upright, as if he’s been hit by lightning all of a sudden. “Maybe . . . maybe not. Pip, you bound the magic of his blood within him with your Deal, correct?”
“Yeah,” Lucy says. “But that left out the magic that he’d learned, the magic that doesn’t have anything to do with his heritage. And that’s where I made my mistake.”
Forsyth snaps his fingers and points straight at her nose, like Elgar’s seen Lucy do when she has a revelation. “The Viceroy punched a hole through the veil of the skies, and those magics he has learned came with him. Magic, I believe, sits upon him like a mantel. Perhaps even leaks through from the other world.”
Something inside Elgar, some half-remembered concept of world-building that he has filed away in the back of his brain, flares to life. Leaking, yes, leaking and flowing and—
“And magic is a fluid!” Elgar says suddenly, jolting up and turning so swiftly to face the bed that he forgets for a second that he’s still recovering from a neck injury. There’s a hot pop, a sear of pain crackles up his back, and the air punches out of him in a wincing gasp.
“It’s a what?” Lucy asks, startled. “That isn’t in your books.”
“No,” Elgar agrees, massaging his neck to try to get his body to relax and the seized muscles to cooperate. “Only in my head. I could never find a good place to put it. But the way I conceptualized it, it’s like . . . it flows, right? It lives in your cells and in your breath. Magic glows because it’s steam rising from a hand. Words are born in moisture, formed in damp mouths, are exhaled like fog on a cold day. So it can pool, too. It can rush. It can follow a riverbed, the path of least resistance.”
“So it’s flowing around the Viceroy right now,” Lucy says, shifting closer to Elgar. “So what? That doesn’t help us much.”
“But . . . okay, but hear me out here,” Elgar says, brain ticking over like a stalled engine just about to catch. “What if . . . I mean, you think it’s magical runoff, right? The reason your back is . . . and your nightmares? The magic is flowing into previously dampened channels, or trying to.”
“If we’re going with this analogy, then the dam is closed,” Lucy replies slowly. “I slammed it shut. To keep him out of my head.”
“But you can always open another, er . . . tap?” Elgar asks, then frowns. “No, listen, so the Viceroy is doing magic. He’s doing magic, just now. We don’t know what, or why, but he is, and that’s why you’re . . . glowing. The, uh, the waste-water of the sorcery nuclear plant.”
“Yeah?”
“Okay, I’m no hard science fiction writer, so correct me if I’m wrong, but . . . that water is still radioactive, isn’t it? Isn’t the by-product of nuclear fusion still nuclear, in and of itself? Isn’t that water still . . . wet? God, this analogy is really being stretched here. But can’t it . . . pool? Around you? In you? Can’t the evaporated atoms of it still . . . re-coalesce?”
Pip frowns at Elgar, working through what he’s trying to say.
“I wonder,” Forsyth adds, following along probably only marginally better than Lucy. He jumps up and crosses to the small table by the armchair. Forsyth tears one of the leaves off the pad of hotel stationery, and turns to face his rapt audience, the paper pinned between two fingers like a magician.
Then he takes a deep breath, and says a Word.
Elgar’s never heard Word magic before. He’s imagined what it might sound like—a gong in the deep, or high whistle on the wind. And that’s what he hears: a deep, resonating sound that vibrates in his bones. He gasps—he can’t help it. He’s moved near to tears almost immediately. The Word has no syllables, not really. No vowels; no consonants. No form. But he can hear it. Clear and easy. He feels like if he just purses his lips right, he could even repeat it. Close. It’s so close. It’s sitting there, just on the tip of his tongue.
He closes his eyes, inhales, sways, but he cannot echo what Forsyth has Said.
Because it’s not a word, not really.
Well, of course not. You never wrote down what the Words are. That’s the point of them. They aren’t silly spells in pseudo-Latin. They are Words of Power that you never tried to transcribe.
Silence rings heavy in the room. Elgar opens his eyes and looks at the paper expectantly. Nothing’s happened.
“Forsyth?” Lucy asks, but he shushes her gently, and then, carefully, reaches out and places a hand on her shoulder. Quietly, in the breathless, anticipatory hush, Forsyth says the Word again.
Elgar sucks down a sob, covering his mouth with his hand, stunned by the beauty of it, the deep buzz and whistle, the bells and the tinkle and the rushing roar that vibrates between his ears.
And then a small curl of smoke wafts in the gentle breeze of the air-conditioning. One edge of the page glows coal-red for a brief second, before curling in on itself, black and brittle. Forsyth’s startled gasp puts out the ember before it’s really caught, but it’s enough.
“Magic is leaking into the Overrealm around the Viceroy,” Forsyth says, setting the burnt paper carefully inside the otherwise empty wastebasket. “But it’s pooling around Pip, as well; a familiar, once-flowing river. And while Pip may never have learned any spells, cannot wield the magic that is beginning to pool within her, it appears that, as long as I am in contact with her, I can.”
“That’s beautiful,” Elgar whispers, reverent and feeling like he has just had, for the first time in his life, a religious experience.
Lucy jerks her head around, narrowing her eyes at him. “What?
”
“The Word. It’s gorgeous. I never . . . I mean, I imagined, but . . . the magic looks just the way it should, but the Words—”
“You can hear them?” Lucy challenges, sounding hurt and envious.
“Well, yes?” Elgar says, scratching his palm. “Can’t you?”
CHAPTER 10
FORSYTH
Once showered, caffeinated, and dressed, we eschew room service in favor of the hotel’s breakfast buffet, where—I hope—a villain might be less inclined to poison the food meant to be consumed by several hundred people. Once more, Elgar is difficult to disguise, but we find a table in the corner, where he can have two walls at his back, and I fetch a plate for him rather than sending him out into the masses.
“Juan would be pleased with you,” he complains when he sees said plate piled with fruit, avocado, scrambled egg-whites, and brown toast. To be fair, I’ve fetched the same for myself. Pip’s plate, when she takes her turn at the buffet (neither of us wanting to leave Elgar alone, a tempting target for either the Viceroy or Elgar’s fans), looks very similar, but includes bacon. I snatch away a slice and Elgar sighs wistfully.
“This is the worst,” Elgar says, as he picks at the avocado, mashing it with the tines of his fork like my toddler daughter. “Waiting sucks.”
“What do you mean?” I ask, my own toast partway to my mouth.
“I just wish the . . . wish he . . . son of a bitch, I am not treating my own damn villain like Jo’s—I wish the Viceroy would stop fucking around and just show himself.”
Pip snorts. “Your fault for writing the Viceroy as a Trickster Figure Gone Wrong.”
“Well,” Elgar says, straightening, “the next time I think up a villain who might slip his pages to try to assassinate me, I promise to make him more predictable.”
The joke isn’t quite as funny as he hoped. We let it lie, anyway.
