Liquid Fire

by Anthony Francis

  “Old man?” I said. Professor Devenger looked at me curiously; I gauged him coolly in return. There was more pepper than salt in his beard, and his tan skin was a smooth canvas, but he was the perfect caricature of a old-school computer wizard—beard, belly, sandals—even down to the upside-down V symbol on his shirt, which I now saw as an AND sign.

  No, not a caricature. Devenger wasn’t a portrayal of an old-school computer wizard—he was a snapshot of one. And while Devenger’s name might be on his door, he was definitely the Professor—and the Professor, the Warlock, and the Commissioner all looked like castaways from That ’70s Show. And, now that I felt for it, Devenger gave off the same magical vibe.

  Three men—three powerful wizards—all primarily known by simple, revealing titles, all enduring, “legendary” figures in whatever organization they were a part of, all giving off, when I felt for it, the same whiff of old magic . . . and all curiously frozen in time.

  Had they done something to increase their power . . . or extend their lives?

  “Enjoying your stay in San Francisco? Having productive meetings?” Devenger asked, glancing at his computer. Huh—he’d basically hidden his face, switched to small talk and asked who I’d met with. Maybe he’d guessed I’d guessed the truth. “Seen any interesting sights?

  “Actually, three of them: the Professor, the Commissioner, and the Warlock,” I said, and Devenger tensed. I said, “You’re not the first wizards I’ve seen who extended their lives—and not the first to fuck with me. I mean, what gives? Does immortality erode the social graces?”

  “What an interesting question, Ms. Frost,” Devenger said, tilting his head. “I’d expect that someone with forever to practice a skill would get better at it—”

  “You don’t expect, you know,” I said. “With the Warlock or the Commish, I dismissed it as a quirk. Seeing all three of you in the space of as many days, I started to suspect something. But the moment you ducked your head under your coat and changed the subject—”

  “Yes, yes,” Devenger said, waving his hands and turning back to me, looking both irritated and embarrassed. “You’ve made your point and it isn’t really that deep a secret anyway. By the way, don’t call the Commish the Commish. He really hates that.”

  I blinked. “Fair enough. Now . . . my question stands. What gives? Why the hassle?”

  “Nothing ‘gives,’ ” Devenger said, eyes tightening slightly, picking over my tattoos, lingering on my left arm. “Yes, there are spells to extend life, but I’m sure it’s merely coincidence that a few old wizards who know them have ‘hassled’ you—”

  “For a wise old wizard,” I said, “you need a lot of work on your poker face.”

  “Asperger’s,” he said, embarrassed, though he had zero, zip trace of the mannerisms I’d expect from someone on the autism spectrum. “A hundred and twenty years wears off the burrs, but it’s still work to control the nuances—or to see them. What did you see in my face?”

  “You checked out my tattoos,” I responded.

  He sighed. “Which made you target of the Archmage, according to Carnes.” He shook his head, his eyes still focused on my arms, now zeroing in on my upper left shoulder. “Entirely understandable. I don’t think you even know what you have there, do you?”

  “My masterwork, reloaded?” He kept staring at my arm, and I looked at it closely. There, the varied elements of the Dragon were most visible. You could see her claw, a bit of her tail, even a trailing spark of fire—but no special logic. “I mean, it’s a magic tattoo—”

  “Yes, yes, of course, that’s what a skindancer would see. A wizard—an alchemist—sees something else.” Devenger’s eyes glinted behind his glasses. “Evidence . . . of liquid fire.”

  My eyebrows raised. The Commissioner had used those words. Jewel used those words.

  Devenger smiled. “For a player,” he said, “you need work on your poker face.”

  “I’ve heard ‘liquid fire’ too much recently. I take it it’s not just a metaphor.”

  “No,” he said, staring at me, considering. “And while it is a liquid, it’s not just fire.”

  ———

  Then he stood. “Come, Ms. Frost,” he said. “Let me show you the fountain of youth.”

  29. The Fountain of Youth

  We stood in the precise opposite corner of Ligotti Hall from Devenger’s office, on the bottom floor of the windowless tower that was the first thing I’d really noticed when Devenger’s escheromancy had worn off. The way my skin was tingling, I doubted that was coincidence.

  This room was the same size as Devenger’s office, but where Devenger’s chair sat at the center of an arc of bright windows, here, a hollow glass tube stood at the center of an arc of dark sound baffles. Above us, two floors had been cut away, leaving a narrow catwalk around the tube, which must have been three stories tall. Barely visible at top was the glowing bulb of a spinning whirligig, ringed with metal sheets—a mana generator.

  I knew about mana generators. Georgia Tech had one of the largest in the country, sitting atop the largest magical circle in the country, engraved in a massive single-cut slab of marble that was as wide as the floor of the whole tower in which we now stood.

  But the Stanford Department of Alchemy had something different.

  The hollow glass tube that dominated the room did not stand in a magic circle. Instead, it rested in a disc of polished marble raised to knee height, engraved with two connected spirals in an asymmetric figure eight. Lazy lines looped out from the base of the larger tube, then tightly wound around a second tube with a rounded top, like a man-sized bell jar. Suspended within this second glass tube was a stack of metal rings, almost tall as a person, and pulsing with power.

  Written on the glass, in plain letters, were the words MANA FOUNTAIN.

  I stared in fascination at the stack of gleaming rings, which had a vaguely Coke-bottle outline, with a second, rounded bulge near the very top. Near the bottom, at the center of a bulge where the rings grew larger, hovered an amber sphere of glowing liquid. Near the top, in the rounded bulge of the rings that were set provocatively at eye level, hovered . . . nothing.

  “Still calibrating?” Devenger asked, his hand falling on the shoulder of a young Korean technician wearing spiky hair, black gloves, and a nose ring—fetching, even though I couldn’t tell if he or she was male or female. “Run me one, would you?”

  The technician nodded, and Devenger stepped back to the wall, beyond the edge of an auxiliary magic circle painted onto the floor. The outline of my dragon tattoo seemed to raise up on my skin as the bulb above began to glow with power, and I quickly stepped outside the magic circle before the gathering mana brought the damn thing to life. The tingling faded, leaving only a tickling at the back of my mind that drew my eyes to that empty space in the rings.

  “I’ll wager you’ve realized why San Francisco’s vampires wanted you out here—feeling Atlanta out for territory and power,” Devenger said, handing me a dark pair of glasses. Actually, I hadn’t realized that, though I’d been unconsciously on guard against it during our meeting with the Vampire Court. “And from Carnes, I learned the fae told you outright—they’re hungry for a visit from a small-G god, and wanted to exploit your connection to the Lord of the Hunt.”

  “Of course,” I said, as the machine’s whine increased. I’m so naïve. In my universe, you don’t need an ulterior motive to meet someone when you’re facing a mutual catastrophe. I forget everyone else lives in a universe where people won’t get up to help you with the lifeboats for fear that they’ll lose their seat on the deck chairs of the Titanic. “And the werekin?”

  “The werekindred? Well, they’re always desperate for allies who treat them like people rather than animals—and you adopted one,” Devenger said, sliding on his glasses. He chuckled. “I think they’re your best friends forever
. But you must have wondered about the wizards.”

  “Yes,” I said, slipping on my glasses too. “So . . . what do the wizards want?”

  “Access,” Devenger said, as the machine whine hit a fever pitch, “to liquid fire.”

  The magical capacitor discharged with a bang. Violet lightning shot down the glass collector tube and slammed into the marble. Magic rippled out across it, crackling through the figure-eight in its surface, getting brighter as it wound its way around the second tube. The first discharge hit like a dull blow, but as mana converged on the second tube, I felt an electric tingle as energy concentrated at the base of the giant bell jar, then discharged again.

  Even through two layers of magic circles, I flinched from the cattle-prod jolt as mana leapt up into the bell jar, striking the hovering sphere of liquid, knocking a single gleaming droplet up into the shaft. The glittering point of light shot up through the narrow neck of the coke bottle, setting off colored flares of light as it passed each stacked ring, getting brighter and brighter but slower and slower, until it came to a stop at eye level, hovering dead center at the top bulge, blazing like a miniature sparkler shimmering through each color of the rainbow.

  I stared at the tiny spark in the fountain, mesmerized. Even through dark lenses, it hurt your eyes—it burned as fierce as a welding arc, as bright as a glint from the sun. But the sparks that came off it were not straight: they curved and twisted, branched and forked like the tracks in a particle chamber—or drawings in one of Jinx’s graphomantic designs. The brightness dimmed rapidly, and I took my glasses off in unison with Devenger; then we both stepped forward.

  The assistant stepped up with a thick-walled test tube, reaching for a glass panel that allowed access to the inside of the fountain. Then she—he? It?—touched his or her forehead. “Let me get the key,” s/he said in an androgynous voice, handing the test tube to Devenger.

  “No, I got it,” Devenger said, slipping something that looked like a bulky pen out of his pocket. He pointed it at the lock on the fountain, and the tiny glass access panel popped open in a flicker of red, grainy laser light. My tattoos prickled as Devenger shone the device again, pinioning the blazing sparkler of mana in a gritty, shimmering beam, and maneuvering it out of the tube, like using a pair of tongs made of light to grab a glowing coal made of magic.

  As it hovered between us, I could now see that the dying spark wasn’t a spark at all, but a tiny droplet, glowing with a brightness that still stung the eye. Devenger let it hang there in the air between us, staring at it, then he turned off the device, letting the droplet fall into the tube.

  “Aqua incendia: liquid fire,” Devenger said, raising the tube between us, his kindly Santa face lit amber by the glow—and transformed thereby from something genial to something a little more sinister. “At least, a synthetic variant. Half-life, two weeks.”

  “Half-life,” I said, taking the tube when it was offered. “Like . . . radioactivity?”

  “The magical kind,” Devenger said. “Magic is life, and life is fire—chemical reactions, whose logic tweaks the rules of the universe. But liquid fire is something more, magic all the way down to the core of its atoms, active with nuclear reactions that produce magical effects. The liquid form of the Philosopher’s Stone—the goal of all alchemy.”

  “A magical version of a radioactive substance,” I said, struggling to form my thoughts. “Oh my God. Like the Philosopher’s Stone, but real.” My brow furrowed as I looked at the tube. “But . . . nuclear reactions are thousands of times more powerful than chemical ones.”

  Devenger’s eyes gleamed. “You’re starting to see,” he said. “With liquid fire, you can do spells that are impossible by any other means—life extension spells, for example, delivering to every cell powerful magical effects beyond the reach of the best magical generators.”

  My mouth hung open. I had been a chemist before I was a magician; I could see that, see the power of a compound delivering a targeted magical effect right where it was needed, when the same flux of magic flowing in from the outside would kill a man.

  “The fountain of youth in a bottle,” I said. “And you can synthesize it—”

  “No. From your tattoos, I take it you know about the colors of magic—”

  “Colors are an approximation,” I said, shimmying my shoulders, making my tattoos spark with the magical “spectrum” of black, white, red, green, and blue. “It’s just different fractions of magic, broken down by the ‘colors’ the human eye can perceive.”

  “But complex magical effects need complex combinations of magic,” Devenger said. “Whether it’s a tattoo on your skin, a spell in my mind, or a circuit in a necromancer’s dagger, each new color of magic you try to combine makes the mana you need shoot up quickly, like Fermat numbers—all possible combinations of all possible combinations, save one for entropy. Just transforming one kind of magic requires a five-to-one gearing of power—”

  “And two, seventeen,” I said. I did know this—it was an obscure trick of the graphomantic arts, something that never normally came up in practice—because combining even three kinds of magic took a gearing of almost two hundred sixty to one, nearly impossible. “And liquid fire?”

  “At least Fermat number five,” Devenger said. “Something like four billion to one.”

  “Jesus,” I said. “You . . . you could do anything with that. And you make it, here—”

  “Nothing over F4. And synthetics are short-lived. The fountain’s infinity lens focuses more magic than the Georgia Tech array, but its gearing tops out at thirteen-to-one—there’s only so much magic we can concentrate into each atom. Already, the high-fraction manatopes in that sample are gone,” Devenger said, pointing at the test tube; the spark was visibly fading. “In a couple of months, that will decay to mundanity. But true liquid fire can burn for centuries.”

  “That’s why they’re after Jewel,” I said. “She’s got liquid fire. Real liquid fire.”

  “Yes,” Devenger said. “That performance at the Crucible gave her away. For her finale, she spun poi for seventeen minutes without refueling—I’ve seen the YouTube video. Almost certainly, she doped her fuel with liquid fire. The fire warriors who attacked Union Square did too.”

  “You saw her performance,” I said. “And the Battle at Union Square?”

  “Yes,” Devenger said, tugging at his ear. “That was . . . quite spectacular.”

  “I’m guessing you’re not talking about Jewel’s performance,” I said, and Devenger nodded. A thousand questions ran through my mind. “Professor, did you see the aftermath? The giant symbol plastered all over Macy’s? My daughter thinks it’s some kind of code—”

  “Almost certainly, but it’s not the standard alchemical Zodiac cipher. I’m guessing it’s a secret alphabet used by the Order of the Woven Flame—you probably know them better as the Fireweavers. That’s just the stage name of performers in a Kanaka Maoli magician’s guild—Hawai`ian nativists, historically secretive. Most of their communications are encoded.”

  “Secret fireweaving codes,” I said. “So we just need to find the mapping—”

  “It won’t be that easy,” Devenger said. “There wasn’t any obvious pattern in the repeated symbols. Could be polyalphabetic, or perhaps a transposition cipher, scrambling the letters based on the rules of fireweaving magic—but I haven’t cracked it yet. Too many possibilities—”

  “That’s what Cinnamon said.” I scowled. “She says it’s a code because the magic that lights the tag doesn’t connect to the words of the message. I love my baby girl, she’s a genius, but I don’t believe someone would create a symbol of that size just to send a message.”

  “Yet people do,” Devenger said. “Billboards. And they don’t have to be corporate logos—Osama Bin Laden would take out a full page ad in the New York Times if they’d let him. A magical sign plastered
over the façade of Macy’s? Hell of a calling card for a terrorist.”

  “Fuck me,” I said. Of course. An attack on a crowd, followed by a huge symbol slapped over Macy’s, would look like the act of a magical terrorist. “Let’s avoid the t-word. They haven’t blown anything up to make a point, though it’d be nice if it was as benign as a calling card—”

  “A terrorist calling card, benign? You think it’s something darker?”

  “Jewel thinks,” I said tightly, “it’s a curse.”

  Devenger frowned. “Cinnamon’s right about the tag—it’s hermetic magic. The logic of the sign isn’t connected to the logic of the message—but that doesn’t mean the message itself isn’t a spell. It could be vicious magic, bottled up—and ready to spring on whomever decodes it.”

  I squirmed uncomfortably as my Dragon shifted on my skin.

  “So it could be a curse,” I said. “In her performances, Jewel is burning up a substance that can be used to extend human life, and I can see that explains the attacks on her. But you said that the wizards wanted a piece of me, too. Why? I don’t have a supply of liquid fire.”

  Devenger just looked at me. Finally he smiled.

  ———

  “You may not know it, but you do,” he said. “It’s inked into all of your tattoos.”

  30. You’re All Over the Internets

  “The legendary source of liquid fire was the blood of dragons,” Devenger said, settling back into his office chair. It creaked a little. “As best as we can determine, while manactive compounds were in their blood, the pure form was an extract from their flame glands.”