by Sharon Lee
The cat appeared to be considering this information. Then she blinked her eyes, and turned away, heading back to the food bowl.
“Now,” I said to Borgan, “where were we?”
Chapter Fifteen
Friday, July 7
“So,” Borgan said, settling into the corner of the couch. “Given any thought on how you’re gonna handle this?”
“In fact, I have.” After all, I’d had many hours to stare at the rain and think about how I was going to find all the happy surprises Prince Aesgyr had probably entangled in my power.
I put one knee on the cushion beside Borgan, and propped one hand on the back of the sofa, which gave me an excellent view down at his face—a pleasure I rarely enjoyed.
“I built a template and filter system,” I said.
He leaned his head back against the cushion and considered me out of narrowed eyes.
“A template and filter system,” he repeated.
“Right. I used to be a software engineer, remember? This is what comes of it.” I grinned. “Best you know the worst, right up front.”
Even to myself, I sounded cocky. Hell, I felt cocky—it was an elegant little widget I’d built, and I had a right to be proud of it.
Just, I’d better not be too proud of it, with a side order of, Remember, Kate, that the hacking metaphor is only a metaphor. Manipulating jikinap—or doing magic, if you like it that way—isn’t anything like slinging code.
For one thing, it’s a whole lot more dangerous.
Which was why Borgan was sitting on my sofa, patiently waiting for me to tell him what the plan was, and what his part in it would be.
“The plan is that you’ll be my anchor and my lifeline while I get up close and personal with my power and run it through the template and filter. The template will kick any nonmatch to the filter, which will isolate the nonmatches.”
“And your template is…?”
“My own magical signature.”
He frowned slightly, eyes half closed, and I resisted the urge to bend down and kiss him. Business before pleasure and all like that.
“Unless,” I said, when it seemed like he’d been thinking a little too long, “there’s a tried-and-true method that I should know about, but don’t, because I’m a dropout from Ozali University?”
He snorted a soft laugh.
“If there is, it never rose to my attention. It’s rare somebody shares power by…accident, let’s say.”
“Rub it in,” I said irritably.
“No intention to. It just seems you specialize in coming at things from a unique angle.” He gave me a smile that just about turned my knees to water. “So, I’m guessing that unique problems call for unique solutions. I’m ready when you are.”
“Right.”
I swallowed, because this was the oh-so-not-easy part, and walked out into the middle of the room. In theory, this was unnecessary. In theory, I could do what I needed to do while stretched out on the couch with my head on Borgan’s knee.
…which, delightful as it would be, was not the image I needed at the moment.
I closed my eyes, the better to feel the heat of my power, coiled but…interested, at the base of my spine.
In the usual way of things, an Ozali calls her power, and she maintains control in part by imposing the shape it will take and the area it will fill. On the other hand, since I didn’t know how “much” jikinap I possessed, I could never be sure of calling all of it, and I wanted to be very, very sure that I had filtered every single bit of sparkly magic stuff under my control.
Every single bit.
That meant, in a word, merging with my power.
Okay, Kate, I told myself, it’s going to be easy, just like merging with the land.
Except I wasn’t afraid of the land.
It is, of course, fatal for an Ozali to fear her power. And I didn’t fear my power, though there was a time not too long past when I’d held it in loathing. With Mr. Ignat’s assistance, and also with, I’m guessing, plain old familiarity, I’d moved on to respectful acceptance.
Very respectful acceptance.
I took another deep breath to center myself, focusing on the brightness, and the ferocity of my power.
Another breath. I felt my hand taken in a light grip in the instant before I fell headlong into my fires.
* * *
I was at sea, surrounded by sticky warmth. A voice that sounded very like my own was whispering in my ear, but too low for me to make out the words.
Butterscotch. I smelled and tasted butterscotch—and that was good. Butterscotch was my signature. I was in the right place. Go, me.
For a moment, it seemed as if I was shapeless, or possibly invisible.
My environment warmed slightly, and abruptly I could look down, and see a sort of colorless outline of myself, like the start of a pencil sketch. I felt something around my right wrist, raised it, and saw a strand of sea blue braceleting it.
Borgan’s anchor.
If smiles were possible in that place where I was a ghost of myself, I smiled.
Then, I got down to cases.
Carefully, I brought to mind the template and filter pair I’d spent all the rainy afternoon and evening building. I received an impression of curious attention from the roiling substance about me, no more substantial than the flick of a fond flame against my cheek. That was possibly unsettling, but this wasn’t the place or the time to be unsettled.
In an environment not so much saturated with magic, as an environment that was magic, it was no challenge at all to bring my little machine into being.
Whereupon—quickly, before I had time to overthink it—I threw it into, over, around and below the seething, curious powers.
Heat blasted, my center rocked, the smell of scorched butterscotch filled my nose, while smoke choked me in an innerscape suddenly black and cold.
I was alone. Empty.
Powerless.
My jikinap, capricious and dangerous as it was—had deserted me.
Deserted me where?
There was only I; in this place devoid of all power; an I who was again shapeless, and growing steadily colder inside a bleak, black emptiness.
I couldn’t feel my wrist, much less the anchor line wrapped around it. Swallowing panic, I reached into the blackness, seeking Borgan, seeking the land, seeking…
But there was nothing.
In case I had closed them, I tried to open my eyes.
Blackness was the answer. Maybe I no longer had eyes.
Panic tasted like butterscotch, then—
Light flickered. It grew warm.
I had shape, and feeling. For instance, I could feel the anchor cord tight around my wrist; tight enough to hurt even a ghost.
And then I forgot the small hurt as my power flowed back, filling me; buoying me.
Making me whole.
The whole universe tasted of butterscotch; flames embraced me; my voice whispered into my ear.
“The filter worked.”
* * *
I opened my eyes, saw the mantlepiece crowded with photographs and bric-a-brac. My fingers ached, in a grip so firm it was painful.
And on the floor before the cold fireplace, was a…device of strange design, made from what looked to be feathers and storm clouds, its outline slightly obscured, as if it were either very hot, or very cold.
There was the very faintest scent of peaches in the air.
“Kate?” Borgan’s voice was soft, counterpoint to the pressure of his fingers.
“Right here.” My voice was ragged, and I cleared my throat to get rid of the lingering taste of smoke. “Looks like the filter worked. The delivery system might need a little tweaking, though.”
“A little tweaking,” he said, his voice utterly flat.
I noticed he wasn’t letting go of my hand, and looked up into his face. His mouth was a hard line, his lips pale.
Borgan was frightened.
That…was not a normal state of affairs.
&nbs
p; “How scary was it from this side?” I asked, keeping my voice soft, and not mentioning that he was mangling my fingers.
A sigh shuddered through him, and his grip eased somewhat.
“Well, that’s a good question. I’d say—not quite as scary as the time you went all over sparkles and started to spread out on the breeze. I never thought I’d be glad to’ve seen that, but it stood me in good stead tonight.” He took a deliberate breath, the pressure of his fingers momentarily increasing.
“Your fires went out,” he said. “You were dead cold. I could see you; I was holding your hand, but the power linking us just…floated free, and you—you were gone.”
He sighed again, not quite as deep as the first.
“And then,” he said, “you were back.”
“Pretty much the way it played where I was, too,” I said, and squeezed his hand before painfully slipping mine free.
“I think I’d like that glass of wine now; then we can look at what we caught.”
* * *
We sat on the floor with the device between us. “We” being me, Borgan, and the cat, who was sitting very erect, ears alert; marvelous tail wrapped ’round her toes.
I sipped wine, savoring the fact that there had been only this one thing—this single invader—lodged inside of my magic. Now that it was out here for me to see, I could confess to myself that I’d been afraid that I’d secretly become the repository of dozens of such devices. And, as devices went, this one didn’t look so bad; in fact, now that it had stopped…steaming, it was kind of pretty.
Though that might have been relief speaking.
“Well,” I said, putting my wineglass on the floor at my side. “Let’s see what’s under the hood.”
I extended just a tiny bit of jikinap—say toothpick-sized—meaning to probe for a door, or a keyspell, but at the first touch of my magic, the device unfolded, all its secrets on display.
“You seeing this?” I asked Borgan.
“Mm. Some tight engineering here. Your Varothi knows his spellcraft.”
“My Varothi, as you continue to insultingly and inaccurately refer to him, is the biggest sneak in Six Worlds, and I include in that population, Mr. Ignat’. Who, by the way, said the prince is brilliant.”
“That’ll look good on the résumé,” Borgan said absently. He was leaning forward, studying the thing closely. “What d’you make of this, Kate?”
A portion of the internal workings flared briefly blue, and I also bent closer.
It looked for all the world like a flywheel, and I said so.
“But where the energy comes from and goes to, that’s not clear.”
“No, now here’s what I’m thinking,” said Borgan. “What if that flywheel is just there to speed something up? I’m not smelling any disappears or appears in this, or seeing any burnt-up cinders of power littered about. Damn’ clean little working, is what it is. Self-contained.”
I blinked down at the device, seeing the flywheel’s takeoff feed, which looked like a bit of loosely held string, drooping in the middle, and if the energy produced by the flywheel had to follow that droop, but it wouldn’t, would it? It would—
“It would arc,” I said, seeing it. I looked at Borgan, excited now. “It is a tesseract. The flywheel takes up my energy—my urgency—to be at a certain place quickly, increases the speed, kicks it across the gap. It uses the same energy I would use, by running; it just accelerates the process.”
Borgan was grinning.
“It’s so clean because it’s not consuming anything, and it’s not creating anything. It’s zero-sum.”
“I agree,” he said. “But what about range?”
That was a puzzler. I looked back into the machine, but didn’t see anything that…
“Wait, what’s this?” I pointed at a small glitter at the boundary of the device—
“Here’s another one…and two more,” I said.
“At prime points,” Borgan added. “If it was me doin’ it, I’d limit the range to, say, a place I knew real well. Less chance of running myself into a tree.”
“Right.” I reached for my glass and sipped wine, my eyes on the device.
“So, the guess is that this one’s good inside Archers Beach.”
“Be reasonable. Your Varothi seems a reasonable man.”
“Hm.” I leaned closer, extended a jikinap pick and touched the northern boundary mark. It gave a little under my probing.
“Some flex there, so maybe not strictly within town boundaries. Be worth checking out, under controlled conditions. But…we can test the base proposition right now!”
Borgan considered me. “Can we?”
“Well, I can.” I put my glass down and stood up, still grinning.
“Anchor me?” I asked, holding out my wrist.
“Not until you tell me what’s in your mind.”
“Sure. I’ll use the machine to go to Nerazi’s rock, then I’ll step across the line to Surfside, and try to use it to come back. If it doesn’t work, I’ll step back across to the Beach side of the line, and come back.”
“And if that don’t work?”
“Then I’ll do it the old-fashioned way, after I give you a call on the cell so you can walk out to meet me in the pouring-down rain.”
Borgan smiled slightly.
“Behind the news. It’s not raining.”
I blinked, and queried the land. The report came back, pronto: no rain, clear skies; the waxing moon riding high.
“I’ll anchor,” Borgan said. “Mind if I take a copy of that, before you put it away?”
“Why not?” I asked, waving a hand over the device, and glancing to the cat, who was still sitting at attention. She looked up, as if she felt me look at her, and I nodded.
“You can take a copy, too, if you want one. The more the merrier.”
The cat yawned.
“Got it,” Borgan murmured, and I felt the anchor cord wrap ’round my wrist again.
I looked down at the device, extended another little pick of jikinap, and watched it fold up.
Then, I breathed it in.
It accepted my will with a docility I wished my own magic displayed.
“Back in a sec,” I told Borgan—
—and smiled at the boundary stone, quietly glowing in the starlight. It was too early for Nerazi to be present, and there weren’t any tourists nearby—probably they’d all gone to bed early while the downpour was still pouring.
The ocean breeze tugged on my braid, the way I liked to tug on Borgan’s braid. I smiled, and took three steps forward.
I felt it, when I stepped over the line. Surfside wasn’t my land. Though I could feel the intelligence, the aliveness of it, I had no power to touch it or befriend it.
I stopped.
And willed myself back to my living room.
The breeze yanked harder on my braid. The stars glittered above the ocean and below the waves.
Nothing else happened.
Bingo.
Smiling, I stepped back across the line, laughing when my own dear land leapt up, barking to welcome me back after our long separation.
Without breaking stride, I willed myself into the living room.
…and threw my arms around Borgan in an exuberant hug.
Chapter Sixteen
Saturday, July 8
High Tide 9:33 A.M. EDT
Sunrise 5:08 A.M.
“Sisters,” she said to the goblins, “I would observe your enemy, the Borgan.”
The goblin Daphne looked grave.
“He’s very dangerous,” she said.
“If there’s more you need to know,” the goblin Olida added, “we’d be pleased to tell you, just ask. There’s no need for you to endanger yourself when everything we have is at your service.”
Now that, she thought, was very true, though she doubted the goblin meant it in the way it was heard. Goblins were not a truthful race, and these were too ignorant to fear her. Still, they were useful to her, so she set
herself to persuade them.
“Your care for me does you credit,” she said, “but see how it is, that all of your observations of the Borgan have not been sufficient to allow you to prevail. You held him, subdued and bound, and still he was able to elude you. He makes a mock of you, the first-made! It is not, as you say, to be borne. I would see you returned to your rightful place, but I think, sisters—I do most sincerely think—that this Borgan must bear some charm, or hold some other magic that he has made invisible to you, but which may be perfectly observable to one who is your guest in these waters. Only take me to him.”
There was a small silence before Olida spoke.
“A geas is on us, so we’re not able to come near him. We can’t guide you or guard you.”
A geas? If it had been placed by the Borgan, then he was formidable, indeed. Goblins were…difficult to bind.
“He dared to lay a geas upon you?” she demanded, allowing anger to be seen. “Sisters, this Borgan dares too much!”
“No,” said Daphne savagely, “that was Nerazi.”
“Who is Nerazi?” she asked.
“Seal Woman,” said Olida. “Borgan’s ally.”
This became very interesting, and what a tangled net the poor goblins sought to weave! Clearly, they had not thought beyond the time when all of their enemies were vanquished—or perhaps they planned to dispose of her, once she had done their work for them. That went beyond impertinence, into treachery. Her temper warmed—but she did not allow it to be seen, nor did she act upon it. The goblins were, for the moment, useful to her. Indeed, they were essential to her plans.
“It becomes urgent,” she said to the goblins, “that I observe this Borgan. If you are forbidden to go near him, then another guide must be found. If there is no one who will dare it, then I will ask you to take me as near as you might, and I will go forward alone. Also,” she said, slowly, “it might be well for me to observe this Nerazi.”
In order to learn whether Nerazi, too, would need to be put aside, or if she would yield to a greater power, she thought, but she did not say this to the goblins. It would be best, if as many as possible of this lovely sea’s creatures and processes were left undisturbed.
The goblins had traded a glance, from which she gathered that they feared Nerazi nearly as much as they loathed the Borgan.
