Liquid Fire

by Anthony Francis

  At first, Arcturus and Zinaga ran me through a set of skindancing moves—but it wasn’t much of a test. I had been practicing what Arcturus taught me, and I could perform all the basics on cue. Soon we were practicing together—no, dancing together—close, collegial, so natural I regretted not practicing together from the beginning. But the reason we hadn’t was my own impatience to get on with tattooing without building a proper foundation for skindancing.

  After almost two hours, Arcturus grunted, and we went inside.

  Then came the grilling.

  We sat in the studio for what felt like hours, drinking a strange, spiced tea while Arcturus and Zinaga asked pointed questions—ostensibly, about my masterwork, the Dragon, but soon I realized the tattoo was just an excuse to probe my knowledge of skindancing, top to bottom.

  At first, I was almost insulted when Arcturus and Zinaga began asking about my tattooing setup—how I drew my magic circles, how I prepared my needles, how I kept my inks pristine—but I was able to convince them that yes, I did know how to prevent magical infections.

  Then they asked about the logic of magic. At first I thought I had them—I thought I lived graphomancy nowadays—but that bravado cracked as they drilled deeper. I didn’t remember half of what Arcturus had taught me, and I stumbled, more than once.

  Fortunately, what I did remember . . . I knew better than them.

  “The scales aren’t what makes my new dragon tattoo powerful, it’s their pattern,” I said. “Whether you call it the mystical complexity of the beating heart, or high Fermat number mana emanations, it’s the Euler matrix of the scales that routes the possibilities of magic—”

  “Fine, you know the mechanics. Let’s come back to your question.” Arcturus’s said, eyes boring into me. “Your old dragon tattoo, still flying around. We’ve established it’s a projectia. But how is that possible? Magic doesn’t just happen. What are its sources of power?”

  “Ah, hell, let’s see . . . first and foremost, the beating heart,” I said, feeling like I was back, not at the studio, but at Emory University, in my Physics of Magic class. “Source of the life force, generated by the action of muscles and transmitted by the pumping of blood—”

  “Reducing it to mechanics again,” he said.

  “Yes, but not just mechanics, I know that you can’t reduce magic to components, but the components we do know help me remember,” I said. “Mana also comes from moving muscles, generating it in the fire of contraction. It comes from stretching skin, releasing pent-up mana.”

  “Good,” Arcturus said. “Now—”

  “There’s also the mind, the firing of neurons,” I said. “And almost all tissues generate mana, even bone and teeth, in lesser and lesser amounts. Then there’s the life force of the Earth itself, conducted through ley lines; and the mana in ‘spirits,’ loose graphomantic designs.”

  “So why isn’t the Dragon just a spirit?”

  “It was glowing, and it damaged a roof. So-called ‘spirits’ are usually spell remnants—graphomantic kinks left in the fabric of mana when a spell collapses. Like a knot on a loop of string, they can’t come undone by themselves, but they get so weak they’re normally invisible, untouchable. Unless some yahoo inks a tattoo outside a magic circle, or forgets to close a tattoo circuit, only ley lines or psychic disturbances can charge them enough to radiate.”

  Arcturus began to speak, but Zinaga raised her hand.

  “Nice recital,” Zinaga said. “Any other possibilities for its power source?”

  I racked my brain. “Well, there’s liquid fire,” I said. Zinaga smirked, while Arcturus just looked uncomfortable. “Liquid mana, the magical version of radioactivity. Derived from dragon’s blood, it can now be made in the lab, in tiny amounts—”

  “But neither one’s a real practical source,” Zinaga said quietly.

  I stared at her. “Oh, hell. And you’ve got one. That’s a secret worth keeping.”

  Arcturus nodded. “Maybe us backwoods hicks aren’t as dumb as we let on.”

  “Maybe not,” I said.

  “And maybe all the pieces are out there,” Zinaga said, glaring at Arcturus. “You see how close she got, me just asking a few questions? You saw the videos I showed you. She’s approaching your power level. You couldn’t ask for a better defender.”

  “You had me at ‘she’s ready,’ ” Arcturus said, standing. He let out a half laugh. “It’s part of the ritual, but the whole idea of quizzing you is ridiculous. Except for those things we haven’t told you yet, we’d be better off asking you what to ask an initiate. Zinaga’s right. It is time.”

  Zinaga and I looked at each other.

  “All right, apprentice,” Zinaga said. “Time for the next step. Don’t screw this up.”

  Then we rose together, and followed Arcturus out of the house into the woods.

  Behind Arcturus’s split-level is the hexagonal sandpit we used just for skindancing practice. Beyond that is a vegetable patch, oh-so-familiar from harvest time as an apprentice. Beyond that are the grapevines Arcturus let go fallow after he developed a bee allergy.

  And beyond that . . . is the deep green forest. Kudzu and underbrush so thick the woods beyond are dark as velvet. My eyes widened—the kudzu was kept from engulfing this place, how? Fighting kudzu could be a daily struggle—Arcturus’s garden must be magically warded.

  Zinaga drew the kudzu aside with her hand, and the vines I had never before noticed seemed to shimmer, their branches rearranging between the movements of my eyes, like magic tattoos do. A spiritual ward—you didn’t want to go past this point unless you’d already been.

  Arcturus stepped into the verdant tunnel. Reluctantly, I ducked and followed, stepping out of Arcturus’s oasis of relative modernity into an ancient path, one carved by the footfalls of men and animals, a deeper part of the South than even the most committed Southerners ever see.

  Shifting rays of light cut through the tunnel like angled shafts of gold. Highlights danced off wide glossy leaves and moss-covered trunks. Worn stream stones dotted the path like fallen diamonds. Columns of gnats sparkled at the edge of the light, like ghosts made of static.

  Arcturus passed an ornate wooden bowl, varnished and nailed into a tree. Similar work hung in the Curio Shop in town; here, it marked a barely visible fork off the path. We passed more forks—this was a backwoods alley, connecting Blood Rock’s most reclusive artisans.

  The path switchbacked down a steep, shadowed hill. Fallen trees bridged rippling streams, with only a rope handhold as a sign of habitation. The trees loomed oppressively now, the pine needles and dense kudzu letting in only the barest slivers of sunlight. Frequently, I had to duck my head, as Arcturus and Zinaga strode under branches which would have klonked me.

  But the path was more than just overgrown. All of Georgia’s trees were represented: spruce pine and red maple, black walnut and water oak. The kudzu faded, replaced by gray beards of Spanish moss and vivid fringes of resurrection fern, though you rarely saw either in Blood Rock. Fruit trees and edible fungi wedged in between medicinal shrubs. I hadn’t had the knowledge or experience to see it before, but I could see it now—this forest was cultivated.

  ———

  Then we emerged into a place that I knew—the Stonegrinder’s Grove.

  43. The Stonegrinder’s Grove

  The Stonegrinder’s Grove was sparkling and fey, shafts of light mixed with flowers and butterflies. A ring of giant live oaks guarded a cluster of rounded stone huts. A low fire sparkled within a ring of stones, but its smoke dissipated into the leaves of the trees. The air was rich, scented like a spice rack’s or a butcher’s, reminding me of turned earth . . . or turned stomachs.

  The last time I’d visited the Grove, for my induction, I’d been led here blindfolded—and that after an hour in the back of Arcturus’s old Ford Eco
noline. But this was within walking distance—he must have driven to Stone Mountain Village and back just to throw me off.

  And last time, the Grove had been practically deserted. Now? A small tribe of rough men and fit women worked the village in furs and exposed midriffs, tight jeans and tattooed chests. An Asian girl in male Native American leathers and paint spoke with a shirtless Native American man in black designer slacks, jeans jacket over one shoulder. Both saw me and went silent. A young girl who reminded me of Cinnamon hopped up onto an oak limb.

  All of them were barefoot, buff, covered in bangles. Dreadlocks and hair beads were common; red necks and beer bellies were not. The grove was as far from the dueling banjos of Deliverance as I could imagine. I felt like I’d stumbled into a commune in California.

  But there was more to it, things I hadn’t been able to see the first time I was here, an antsy college dropout so eager to start tattooing that I’d barely looked around while Arcturus pressed my thumb to the Sanctuary Stone that marked me as a magician of Blood Rock.

  Now the Sanctuary Stone once again hung in the throne room of its maker, Nyissa. I had spent years in the Edgeworld—five in Little Five Points tattooing the magical, four in the orbit of vampires, and a solid year dealing with the fae—and living with a werekin.

  But something more than glitter sparkled on the too-pale skin of a girl; something less than human lurked in the too-wide eyes of a boy. The whole community felt touched by the fae. These were real Edgeworlders, living on the knife edge where the two worlds met.

  A hot, bald, intense young man sitting beneath the girl’s oak limb saw us and rose. Like the Native American man, he wore dark jeans beneath a bare chest rippling with muscle and angular, tribal tattoos—Zinaga’s work, with some of Arcturus’s smaller pieces thrown in.

  “Master Inker,” he said, staring at Arcturus. “This the new candidate for initiation?”

  “I am,” I said.

  His head didn’t turn, just stayed fixed on Arcturus. “I wasn’t speaking to you.”

  Arcturus chuckled. “Oh, I hadn’t yet seen the humor in this collision,” he said, shaking his head. “Dakota, this is Gabriel Finch, head of the Stonegrinder’s Guild. Gabriel, this is Dakota Frost. She’s in charge of preventing the abuse of magic in the southeast.”

  “Self-appointed,” Zinaga said, “meet self-appointed.”

  Finch shot her a glare. “I wasn’t talking to you either—”

  “That’s Master Zinaga to you, Finch,” she said.

  Finch now glared at Arcturus. “You elevated her without asking us?”

  “I told you,” Arcturus said, “I decide when my students are ready to leave the nest.”

  I cleared my throat. “I’m honored that Arcturus and Zinaga have chosen me to take this next step . . . but I don’t understand why the Stonegrinder Guild would care who was initiated or elevated in the Skindancers’ Guild. What exactly am I getting initiated into?”

  “Initiates are the children of a symbiosis between skindancers and stonegrinders,” called a strong female voice, and I turned to see a dreadlocked woman standing at the entrance of the largest hut. She parted a bead curtain and stepped out. “A symbiosis to guard our secrets.”

  The Grinder was a pale, fit woman with blazing blue eyes and red dreadlocks woven through with a thousand extensions and beads. A headdress of feathers and bones sprayed back over her dreads; a staff with antlers hung loose in the fingers of one outstretched arm.

  The woman’s bare midriff rippled with muscles even I envied; her bracers and bangles and beads and bows would have been the envy of anyone at Burning Man. But the flared bell bottoms on her low-rider pants tickled a reminding, and my eyes drew over her closely.

  She wasn’t a modern primitive. She was an aging hippie—scratch that, a NON-aging hippie. She had already been weathered when I saw her at my initiation—but she hadn’t aged another second in nearly ten years. She was hiding it under layers of modern adornment, but there was something distinctly . . . seventies about this strangely ageless woman. She had the same look, and, if I felt for it, even the same magical resonance as the Warlock, the Commissioner, and Devenger—a powerful wizard, stuck in cultural time, reeking of ancient magic.

  Which meant she had a source of liquid fire.

  But rural Georgia wasn’t the West Coast. Drakes hadn’t been seen here for millennia, hadn’t been common here since the Ice Age, so there was no native source of the faux liquid fire Jewel called magifouaille. And dragons themselves, or Saurian Drakes, or whatever they really were, never ranged north of Mexico—so I had a hard time believing there was some secret crèche of dragon eggs or deposit of dragon amber the Grinder was mining for liquid fire.

  Which meant there was more to this little backwoods village than met the eye.

  “I am the Master Grinder,” she said.

  “I remember,” I said. “You pricked my thumb.”

  She raised a painted eyebrow. “You’re not the same child I remember.”

  I laughed. “I wasn’t a child,” I said, “but I did have a lot to learn.”

  “And still do,” the Grinder said. There was something oddly . . . addled about her eyes, like she wasn’t looking directly at you, not ever. “Skindancing can be practiced by anyone. But creating a skindancer requires both ink, and inking—a grinder, and an inker. Each are difficult skills, easily abused. We guard ourselves by showing our secrets only to chosen initiates—”

  “And by entrusting our deepest secrets to different branches of the Guild,” Arcturus said. “I am not a really a ‘master skindancer,’ I’m a Master Inker of the Skindancing Guild. The Grinder is a Master Grinder of the Guild. The Grinders and the Inkers train their own—”

  “But we vet all Initiates to the Guild together,” Finch said pointedly—and I realized that he might have an actual point. He looked at Arcturus, then me. “Two branches, but one tree. We must all accept you, Frost, before any of us can share with you our deeper secrets.”

  “We will test your knowledge,” the Grinder said, and Arcturus snorted. She arched an eyebrow, then extended her hand to the firepit and the stone seats around it. “We will challenge your wisdom. We will question your loyalty. If you pass, you will become one of us.”

  I smiled tightly at her. “Well,” I said. “I’m game.”

  Once again, I found myself in a circle, sipping spiced tea while being grilled about magic. This time the questions were lathered with a bit more woo-hooery (I hate that phrase, but there’s no other polite way to describe that New Age nonsense) but it was nothing I couldn’t handle.

  And nothing Arcturus and Zinaga hadn’t just prepared me for. They just leaned back, quiet, sharing smiles with the Grinder, who grew similarly reticent, sitting to the side with her chin propped up on her fist, head and headdress tilted askance while Finch kept grilling me.

  At first, he grilled me about my tattooing setup: how I prepared my needles, how I stored my inks, how I drew my magic circles—asking subtle questions designed to see if I knew how to prevent magical infections. Next, he tried to crack my knowledge of graphomancy. Good luck.

  Finally, he switched to pigment grinding—something I’d learned even less of from Arcturus than skindancing. But I’d spent three years in chemistry before dropping out, and now Arcturus leaned forward, hands steepled together, as interested in my answers as Finch.

  These questions were hard. Finch drilled me mercilessly on the five colors of magic, their relationship to human perception, and how that could be realized in chemical structures. I had to use everything I’d learned, even the newest alchemy knowledge I’d picked up from Devenger and his books, and I wasn’t sure I would get the answers right. But, again and again . . . I did.

  “Fractions of magic are more interesting than spectra of light,” I said. “Less like a line, more like a frac
tal tree, with complex, interwoven possibilities. The higher up the tree, the farther out you can fall, like a Pachinko machine. That’s why we use Fermat numbers—”

  But Finch was only half listening to the answer to his own question about why firecap ink could create such amazing magical colors. Instead, almost the moment I began talking, his eyes started flicking over my shoulder, in the direction of the sun, setting behind the trees.

  I relaxed. We kept talking, shifting from my knowledge to the lore of the Skindancer Guild, and Finch kept trying to trip me up, standard job interview stuff with a little mysticism thrown in, but I wasn’t fazed, or fooled. I just sat cross-legged, at the ready for the real test.

  When the last rays of the sun faded, Finch stood up.

  ———

  “Enough talk,” he said. “Show us how you dance.”

  44. Skindancers, Duel

  Oh, had I been waiting for this.

  I stood in one fluid move, uncoiling my crossed legs in a corkscrewing motion which made the tails of my newest vestcoat whip around me as I whirled to standing. I raised my right hand in the traditional skindancer bow, then began the Dance of Five and Two.

  Skindancing isn’t like traditional dance, or even ballet—the moves aren’t designed to look pretty, but to build power, stretching the skin over exercising muscles to generate mana. Worse, if one move builds mana, its mirror takes it away, so even the basic footwork is complicated.

  The Five and Two draws out a pentagram, a quick, light-footed sketch in one direction, then repeating it again, switching right for left, always building power. It can look awkward, but I’ve practiced until it’s perfect, feet flickering through the J-steps.