Ashes and Flame

by Aiden Bates

  And bathe.

  The shower offered by the Starlight Motel was less of a shower in the conventional sense of the word, and more of a steady splash of hot water that I didn’t so much angle toward me as give it a bit of extra arc so that I could cram myself against the shower wall and get the water mostly on me. But, whatever. It was warm water and beggars really can’t be choosers, if you ever wondered.

  Gross motel soap had been cut in half and rewrapped, and left my skin vaguely sticky but at least no longer smelling of nearly two weeks of grime. I filled the bathtub once I was done and used the soap to wash my clothes, then rinsed them with cold water for at least an hour to get all the soap out of them before I hung them up to dry. I used one of the two towels to wrap around my waist and cranked up the heat in the room to help my clothes dry. In my experience, they wouldn’t be entirely dry by the time I had to leave, but they’d be close enough that I wouldn’t grow mildew.

  By the time all of that was done, the thing in the bag had begun to really pull at me. It’s a strange feeling, and one that I didn’t even recognize when it first started. Like there was a leash around the middle of my forehead behind my eyes. At first it was just a light tingle, the sort of annoying feeling you get if you close your eyes and slowly try to touch the point between your eyebrows with a foreign object like a pencil. It was persistent, but after a while I could ignore it.

  Then it turned into a pressure. That pressure built and built, and then turned a bit sharper and rougher around the edges. If I pushed past that when I had to, it turned into a fishhook. I felt it jerking at me, insistent and painful.

  I was at the intense, almost-painful-pressure stage that I once thought was just the onset of a migraine.

  “I fucking hear you,” I grumbled as I checked the coffee maker and found an expired packet of coffee. No sugar, no creamer. But it was caffeine and I was about to need it. Plus, I could fill the little Thermos I kept with what was left, and it would tide me over for a couple of days if I sipped it sparingly.

  Holding off on answering the call had become… not exactly a game, so much as a test. How long could I go without answering? I checked my watch, 9:00 p.m. The last time I’d sat down with it was written down in a small journal in my bag, but I thought it was about three days. I’d have to check the exact hour, but suspected that it would be a shorter window than the last time, and the time before that. At first, I could sit down and indulge the thing for an hour or so. These days, it would be an all-nighter. More concerning was that back then, I could go months without reading. Now, I was down to about three days, and that window was shrinking.

  Watching the old coffee brew didn’t help. Ever watched a pot of coffee brew? It’s the same principle as a watched pot that won’t boil out of shyness. The first drips take forever to start, and then the pot seems to fill one drip at a time in slow motion.

  By the time I had a mostly full pot, my temples had begun to throb. Still, I had to prove it to myself and to It. I poured coffee into one of the two paper cups and sat down on the bed again, holding it between both my hands until it felt cool enough to sip. The coffee was definitely worse here than the last place. Not just stale, but sour. Hopefully, anything that had been growing in the packet had been sterilized by the boiling water.

  I couldn’t ignore it any longer. Pounding temples were the last warning I’d be given before ‘fishhook’ stage started and that could be debilitating depending on what kind of mood It was in.

  “I’m coming,” I said, and sighed as I stood and went to the cheap little table. I sat in the fold-up chair, and steeled myself for the next part, my hands clasped just at the edge of the table. I took an old kitchen timer out of the front pocket of the bag and turned the knob all the way around to 120 minutes. “Two hours. That’s all I’ve got time for, all right?”

  Like I said, it isn’t intelligent. At least, not the way we think of intelligence. We think of a person’s mind, with thoughts and desires and needs, right? With language and dreams and ideas. Self-actualization or something. But it does have a will, and behind that there must be some kind of… awareness? Because sometimes, when I was close to it, and I said things like that, I felt a strange sense of response. The pressure eased just a little bit. Early on, when I first realized what was happening, I would try to bargain in bad faith just to get the pressure to ease up. I’d say that I would get to work in an hour, and I’d feel better—but when the hour was up and I wasn’t sitting down to work, it was straight to the fishhook, do not pass go, do not collect your sanity. But at least we’d reached some kind of accord, at least for now. I could still negotiate my time.

  With a long, slow exhale to steady myself, I opened the flap of the bag and pulled it out.

  To look at it, it’s nothing special. Just a book, bound in soft, ancient leather that showed little sign of degradation but was still worn and darkened here and there with ages of hands that had opened the cover and done what I was compelled to do now. The pages felt brittle to the touch, and the ink looked as if it was some prototype of ink; it was clear on the page, at least to me—now that we’d been doing this for almost ten years—but it was a rusty color.

  The language written on the pages is impossible to describe in words, ironically. And you wouldn’t want me to. When I was first handed the book by my old ‘teacher’, if you could call him that, I didn’t like looking at the figures. They made me sick. I threw up after a few minutes, and had to look away for a while before I could just glance at the first page again. I did get used to it, but it took weeks.

  Funny, in retrospect. It wasn’t like I hadn’t been warned.

  But I was curious, back then. Promises were made. If you can strengthen yourself against it, Ivan had said, it will unlock every secret of the universe. This book, Daniel—this is the manual of creation itself. If the gods had a handbook to follow when they crafted the heavens and earth and the underworld, this is what they referenced to do it. And creation has seen fit to gift you with the holy quest to follow in their footsteps.

  I had believed that, once upon a time. Believed Ivan. Before he’d disappeared. And before I decoded the first dozen or so glyphs. Or… before the book let me understand them, anyway.

  Now I knew better, but didn’t have much of a choice but to keep reading, keep understanding, keep letting it open up to me.

  There are 477 pages in the Book. For a decade, I had been translating it. Ten years and a few months, I had been painstakingly picking through each of the hundreds of thousands of glyphs that filled the pages around the arcane diagrams that described existence in detail that should never have even existed where people could see it. I knew the book’s history. I knew that there had been thousands of attempts over the millennia to do what I was doing. And I knew that I had lasted longer than any of the others.

  I was on page six.

  Why I had lasted so long, I didn’t know. Trick of genetics, maybe. Or my particular magic was just suited for it, though I can’t fathom why that would be. All I knew was that eventually my window would close. One day, I would sit down to do this work, and not get up again, and die of hunger or thirst or just… die. But not this time, and not next time.

  Like all the sessions before, I became absorbed in the work. One hand flipped through pages, the other hand scribbling furiously in one of about eight hundred notebooks I had filled. Each glyph in the book was unique—no symbol was repeated, as far as I could tell. But the parts of each glyph did repeat, and they told a kind of story in math. There were internal consistencies and patterns that could be discerned if the book allowed it. What it didn’t allow was skipping a glyph. It had to be translated in order from the first symbol on the first page. If I tried to skip one, the math stopped adding up. Also, I got sicker than I’d ever been in my life for about a week.

  So. One at a time, one piece at a time.

  I’d learned other rules as I worked with it, too. I could flip pages and look at the diagrams, which were a kind of internal refere
nce system that laid out the equations that made up the glyphs themselves, but until I figured out one of the diagrams, the next one wasn’t entirely visible. There were subtleties that couldn’t be observed until the previous diagram was understood. That was, comparatively, the easy part. Each glyph’s position on the page was a visual guide to which diagrams would unlock it, so if I encountered a diagram that was too far ahead, I had to start working on those until I reached it.

  How any of it made sense at all was mysterious. It was math, on the one hand—everything had to add up just right, or it wouldn’t balance. But when it did make sense, it wasn’t because I’d solved an equation and made it work, and that gives the answer. It was more like doing the math was what unlocked the glyphs themselves. I made my notes in notebooks, but those notes were useless to anyone else. I burned them when they were full, though. Just in case.

  Before the timer went off, the book pushed me away. I was working out a diagram in the next sequence, scribbling furiously in the notebook without even really looking, when suddenly my eyes slipped off the page. That never happened unless the book wanted it. Which meant it knew something was up.

  A second later I knew what it was, and my heart dropped into my bowels.

  All around me, the glyphs I had chalked out around the room had begun to flake away like ash scattering on a breeze. The marks were thick, and it would take time for them to degrade entirely, but the thing I had put them up to protect against had definitely found me, and was whittling away at the only defense I could manage against it.

  With a string of whispered curses, I snatched up the book and shoved it into the bag along with the notebook and my pencil. I ran to the rack where I’d hung my clothes. They were still wet, and the heat in the room hadn’t even managed to warm them up. I didn’t even care, though. I pulled them on, ignoring the icy touch of wet cloth.

  My heart pounded. Adrenaline washed through me. Not good.

  The air by my left ear popped like a kernel of popcorn. I flinched away, and the acrid scent of ozone filled my nose. Magic buzzed like a swarm of disturbed bees along my nerves, filling my limbs. I held a hand up and saw the telltale flashing of tiny sparks around my fingertips.

  Wasting time worrying about it would put people in danger. I finished zipping my jeans and struggled to get the button clasped through the wet denim, then went to the table to pick up my bag. Through the window, it was dark outside. The clock just blinked 12:00, but it had to be after eleven. That was a lot of hours left until daylight.

  I exhaled a slow breath to try and calm myself. Instead of helping, though, it just seemed to stir my magic up. There was another pop, and I jerked away from the noise as a spark of burning air leapt from somewhere behind me.

  The spark landed on the bed. Whatever synthetic fibers the bedding was made from didn’t stand a chance. With a whoosh, fire spread across the comforter, and I resisted the instinct to try and put it out. I’d tried that before. There was no point. The panic of trying to get it under control just made the problem worse.

  From the bag, I felt a sense of urgency. The Book, chastising me for wasting time. We had work, it seemed to say, and staying here risked putting an end to it.

  “Fuck,” I barked at the fire and the rising cloud of black smoke, before I grabbed my bag and slung it over my shoulder. At least my clothes weren’t likely to ignite. And the Book certainly wouldn’t burn—I knew, I’d tried. It seemed to protect the bag as well, as if it realized that its reader hauling around a big fuck-off book wherever they went was less than ideal.

  All I could do was give the most warning I could to the other people in the motel.

  I pulled the door open, checked the parking lot for any sign that my monster was close. It hadn’t yet managed to push through the magic around the room, although that was going to change very quickly. If I was lucky, I could slip away before the protections fell entirely. I followed the walkway down to the hallway, eyes searching until I found the fire alarm. I took a deep breath, winced as a spark leapt off my finger and tried to ignite the brick, then pulled the alarm… and ran.

  Just like I had every few days for the past five years.

  3

  Rez

  “Did you find it?” Basri asked.

  I surveyed the cordoned-off motel that had caught fire a day ago, late at night. Part of the building had been hollowed out, and the wall in the front had collapsed into two of the rooms that had taken most of the damage. Apparently, the fire department had arrived quickly enough to keep the whole place from going up. And from what I could gather someone had pulled the alarm, but none of the guests claimed to have done it. “Yeah,” I murmured. “But it’s crawling with police. No way I’m getting close enough to get a scent, and I’m not sure there would be anything left to pick up anyway.”

  “That’s all right,” Basri assured me. “It at least proves the model is mostly accurate.”

  The ‘model’ he was talking about was a work of genius. It had taken a few days for him to put it together, and then he and Liana had holed up in their respective offices to compile thousands of unexplained incidents of fire over the past five years. I’d be lying if I said that I understood half of what went into it, but what came out was a collection of about fifty incidents like this one that Basri claimed matched the profile of someone traveling largely by foot and stopping to rest about every three days. Why three days, we didn’t know. But what was clear from the pattern was that Daniel Stroud had been zig-zagging across the country for half a decade with no destination.

  I’d have thought that would make Daniel harder to find. No destination meant he could go wherever he wanted. Basri had just given me a long-suffering look as he presented me with a dossier on Daniel Stroud, age twenty-seven, who had been connected to an arson incident as a teenager—with one dead and two injured—before disappearing seemingly off the face of the world.

  I’d read the file. Well… I’d skimmed it, anyway… but Basri had pored over it for days and in his opinion, Daniel’s path wasn’t really random at all. I had been skeptical about that until I saw the burned motel.

  It was one of three Basri had identified as possible next stops for our fugitive mage.

  “He’ll be headed north,” Basri said. “Toward Illinois. He’s a day ahead, but these incidents only happen at night. I think he stays on the move during the day. Head north of the motel, and look for the scent of fire that’s too far to have spread from the building itself. Any sign of something burned as he passed. The way Mikhail described it, there’s a hot period when he goes off. If you can find evidence of where he left the property, you should have a direction and a scent.”

  Already, I was drawing some attention from officers at the scene. There was a whole team here, taking pictures and samples and probably trying to determine whether it was arson or an accident, magical or mundane. “Got it,” I murmured. “Call you if I get something.”

  I snapped a picture, hoping that I’d look like an interested bystander, and made my way down the sidewalk some distance before I swung around to the back of the motel. Hands tucked in my pockets, I strolled casually along the back end of the parking lot. There were officers here as well, but different ones than those in the front, and while they clearly glanced in my direction, they didn’t seem all that interested in me. Yet.

  Behind the motel was a mostly empty lot. Charleston, Missouri, didn’t have a whole lot else to offer. It was nestled in the midst of farmland that could have been a lot more damaged if the fire had spread. Given that no one had publicly claimed responsibility for pulling the fire alarm at the motel, I had to think that it was Daniel. That possibly confirmed some of Basri’s suspicions about the guy. A person who didn’t care who he hurt didn’t stop to make sure no one was injured because of him. Especially if he was trying to keep a low profile.

  Once Basri and Liana had a map put together that they believed tracked Daniel’s path from Northern California to where he had been recently, Basri had pointed
out that the elementalist tended to avoid big cities. The places he stopped, which frequently ended up on fire, were generally out of the way. Warehouses, barns, an occasional vacation cabin, even the cheap motels. Places with little traffic. Now, Liana thought that could just as easily be a matter of making sure he didn’t run into the FDPA, but Basri wasn’t so sure. Neither was I.

  Then again, Liana spent more time with humans. Maybe she knew better.

  Either way, I followed Basri’s advice and sniffed around the back lot, hunting for anything singed or burned. And sure enough, I found it. It was out in the middle of the lot, well away from where the police would think to look. A patch of weeds poking through the cracked asphalt was blackened down to the root. Just ahead of it was a shiny patch of asphalt that smelled burned as well, as if it had briefly caught fire.

  Burned weeds and asphalt didn’t exactly catch and hold a scent, of course. But I moved north, and found other signs of fire, and then walked along the edge of the north end of the lot to find clear evidence of a fire that someone had stopped to put out. Here, the grass and weeds were golden from the summer heat and would have gone up like so much kindling if the fire hadn’t been patted out. From there, it could easily have spread out into the farmland.

  Basri and Liana couldn’t agree on whether Daniel was alone or not. Liana seemed certain he was, while Basri said the evidence just didn’t say one way or another. It had gotten heated a couple of times. Heated enough to wonder if there wasn’t something more than just work going on, not that it was any of my business. Based on what I could see and smell here, though, I was guessing Liana had gotten it right. There was a scent present. Barely. Something like old leather that mixed together with the faint scent of cheap soap.

  I glanced back at the motel. That tracked. If, like Basri predicted, this guy stopped periodically to take shelter at roadside motels along his route, then part of that might just be to get a shower. The soap smell in particular was useful—it was distinct enough that if I could pick up traces of it here and there, it would be hard to confuse with someone else.