Mortal Fire

by Elizabeth Knox

  She pulled a face and told him to stop being so literal-minded.

  “I’m not. This house isn’t traveling through time like everything else. In this house every midnight is the same midnight. What belongs to the house is put back together and back in good order. The books even reshelve themselves. If I’m reading in bed I have to chase my book back to the library after midnight and retrieve it. The house is a house, and it’s a ‘Renew, Restore, Repair’ spell.”

  “But the house only resists wear and tear, not time itself,” Canny said, then freed one hand and leaned across to pluck a hair off his collar. “If you shed hair, you must grow it too. The house lets you do that.”

  “True,” he said. “It isn’t as minutely managing of me, but I’m not actually of the house. I wasn’t born here. And the only reason I’ve been able to build my Spell Cage is because the lead I’m using isn’t of the house either. My little cousin Felix left a battle set up here on the billiard table the week before—” Ghislain broke off.

  The week before the explosion at Bull Mine. A storm had been brewing, and the light was yellow, the light coming through the skylight over Uncle Talbot’s billiard table. The green baize had looked toxic, and Felix fiendish as he leaned over and moved his lead cannon and artillerymen with a billiard cue. It was a long campaign, and they had been playing it every evening when they came home from their shift in the mine.

  Ghislain had just said “my little cousin” because he was looking down the wrong end of the telescope at that day in 1929, so long ago, when they’d been there together, fourteen-year-old Felix, and him, Ghislain, seventeen years of age, and about to stop traveling in time, like everybody else did no matter what this girl thought.

  She seemed to be near to tears as she said, “It’s a desperate idea.” She was so troubled that her masklike face had managed to form a clear expression.

  Ghislain put up a finger and stroked the crease between her brows. “And you imagine I’m not desperate?”

  * * *

  CANNY WENT AROUND THE TABLE and edged Ghislain half out of his chair so she could share it. She put her arm around his waist. She wanted to comfort him, but she also wanted to bring him to his senses. Perhaps she should kiss him some more. Appeal to his senses by investigating his body. She did place a kiss on the soft skin under his ear. Then she slid one hand inside his shirt. Their mouths came together again, wide, lips moving against each other as if they were trying to trap air and eat it. His tongue touched hers and their mouths pressed and clung. His heart was banging against her palm.

  “Wait,” he said, breaking off. “Look. People don’t usually pet madmen to keep them calm.”

  “I didn’t call you a madman, I only said your plan was desperate.”

  “I think it was implied, Canny. Poor man—you were thinking—driven mad by being kept so long in his lonely prison.” He looked annoyed. But his mouth wouldn’t harden, it seemed to have a mind of its own.

  Fascinated, she touched it with her fingertips.

  “Aren’t you even interested in the magic?” He sounded pleased and indignant at once. Then he jerked his face away. “No, please stop. I’m getting a horrible feeling of having been here before, which probably means I’m in the room with myself and, believe me, once I’m gone I’m never coming back here, not even in spirit.”

  “What?” said Canny, startled.

  Ghislain then patiently explained to her how his contraption was meant to work, and what he hoped it would do for him.

  “The mistake you’re making is to think I mean to shut myself into the two cages, lower the crown into place, and then disappear. That’s not how it works. Nobody can travel through time, as far as we know. I mean no body can. So, what will travel will be my consciousness. Or maybe my spirit. The spell makes it impossible for my consciousness to go anywhere but back in time. It can’t float off and hover over, say, the marshes near Metternich or the Temple in Founderston. It can only go back in my own time, within my own life. That’s the plan.”

  Canny could see now that this made sense. That his spirit couldn’t leave the cage, leak out into the room, and fly free in space. It had to go the only place it could—where it had been before, its own past. But, to her, it still seemed that he was planning to abandon himself. “But your body,” she protested. She held him tight. “What about your body?”

  “The house won’t let me die.”

  “Your plan is suicidal. You must be able to see that.”

  He laughed. “Do you imagine I’ve been shut up here by myself for thirty years and not, at some time, tried to destroy myself? Sure I was scared—of the gas, the razor, the rope—but I did it. I did it over and over. After a while it was like a pastime. No one else I hated was within my reach. I had only myself to take it all out on. My body. And, come midnight, the house would repair me, like a broken plate. And it shouldn’t have. I’m not of the house. And the Great Spell doesn’t reform my cousin Felix’s soldiers when I melt them down. So why did it choose to put me together? To put me back together again and again?”

  He was furious. Canny found the only way she could be near him and not feel afraid of him was to cling even closer. She held on, and he held on, and he shouted at her, the house, the world, his fate. And then they were both quiet, holding on, holding hard, and trembling with effort.

  Canny came back to herself—her reasoning self—long before he did. She had to talk him out of it, but she didn’t want to argue with his pain, or his thirty years of captivity. “What can I do?” she thought. And then, for some reason, her mother came into her mind. Her mother in the outrigger with two feverish airmen. Sisema, in the hour when she lost her way because the whales went on ahead of her.

  “Let’s go sit somewhere comfortable,” Canny said. “Or even lie down.”

  “Canny.” He was tired. He was telling her off.

  “What?”

  “Stop caressing the madman hoping that’s going to fix him.”

  “You need to discuss this with someone. And it’s going to have to be me. Look, how long do you think you’d stay alive in the cage?”

  He shook his head.

  “Even with the Great Spell in place?”

  Again he shook his head.

  Canny thought for a bit, then said, “I just realized that that’s why you said you wondered whether you felt strange because you were in the room with yourself. Presumably once you get in the cage and go, then this is your past too—this moment—and your spirit might be here, with us, watching us.”

  “Yes. That is what I meant.”

  “But how do you know that’s what it feels like when your own spirit is in the room?”

  “This has been done before. People have reported back,” Ghislain said. Then, “Let’s lie down, like you say, and I’ll tell you more about the magic.”

  * * *

  GHISLAIN’S GREAT-AUNTS, Rowan and Joanne Zarene, were twins. They were adept very early, and imaginative too. And, because they were twins, they were able to push the boundaries of the magic much further than others in the family.

  “Before I talk about the great-aunts, there is stuff you have to know. For a start, this. There are four types of the Alphabet. The first is Basic, which doesn’t get anyone anywhere, but all Zarene kids have to learn it in order to go on to the Tabular.”

  Ghislain told Canny that, with the Tabular Alphabet, she should think of the periodic table of elements, and how each element had its place, its valence, and its atomic weight. “Tabular Alphabet is about the relationships between signs. A Zarene child who masters the tables will at least be able to recognize when they’re being worked on by someone else’s magic. They can see magic if it’s built into something, like the carvings in this house. They can’t exactly read it. They can get general impressions, sometimes quite the opposite of the spell-maker’s intentions. For example, imagine reading ‘deserving’ or ‘repentant’ or ‘possible,’ when what was meant was ‘undeserving, unrepentant, impossible.’ With those th
ree words there are two different prefixes that make the negative—‘un’ and ‘im.’ But there are hundreds of modifiers in the Alphabet. It’s very complicated. Kids who learn Tabular can’t necessarily do magic, but they can guess when magic is around and can get the gist of anything visible. A few Zarenes have the brains to study the Alphabet’s Ideogrammatic form. There are endless possibilities of combinations, and a spell that is made with Ideogrammatic sign is very hard to unravel. The carvings in this house are enormously complex. They’re not like words. They are like one long song made up of words that were never heard before. Which is where they came from, but I’ll get to that. Ideogrammatic magic has to be performed quickly and accurately if it isn’t made solid—like the wood carvings, or my lead latticework. Magic made quickly, in the moment, is what we call ‘warm sign.’ If sign isn’t made solid, or if it isn’t performed with physical contact—like when you drew the pain rune on the surface of the water in the rain barrel—then it almost always has to be magnified. Something has to carry it, and make it linger a little bit longer.”

  “Smoke,” said Canny. “Steam.”

  “Yes!” Ghislain laughed in delight. “How did you know?”

  “I was watching your uncle Cyrus at his beehives.” She didn’t mention Cyrus’s test—she guessed Ghislain would be worried if he knew that Cyrus was onto her.

  “Cyrus isn’t my uncle, he’s my cousin. And the kids you’ve met may call him uncle, but he’s their great-uncle, maybe even their great-great-uncle. He was twenty-five in 1929. I was seventeen.”

  Canny shivered. She put her face against his throat. “You’re a grownup,” she said.

  “Yes, and no.”

  “That’s why you’re not all over me like a rash,” she said.

  “Oh, you mean I’m showing mature restraint? Or perhaps you imagine I think it’s indecent to kiss you? You know, Canny, my body is seventeen as yours is sixteen. And I’ve been shut up here alone.”

  “Okay,” she said.

  “Stop shaking,” he growled. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “Or anything else me,” she said, which made him laugh.

  Canny found she was both relieved and disappointed.

  “You’re going to leave,” he said. “You come from Castlereagh, and you’re going back there. You’re on your summer break and summer will come to an end. That’s why I’m not all over you. Just because you’re an opportunity, that doesn’t mean I’m going to grab on to you. Carpe diem doesn’t mean a damn thing when it’s always the same day—the same Goddamn perfect day!” he finished, fierce.

  Canny let go of him and took a deep breath as if she were coming up for air. She sat up and did ferocious things to her pillow to get comfortable. The pillow bashing disguised her sad little sniffs.

  “Canny,” Ghislain said, uncertain.

  “Shut up!” she said. “You’re right—of course. And I’m not much of a girl anyway. I’m just here. Just being here doesn’t mean I’m an opportunity.”

  “For sex,” he said. “You’re talking about sex—you know that, don’t you?”

  “No I’m not! It doesn’t have to be—humping!” She used the rudest word she could imagine herself using. “I just—” She was about to tell him how much she liked him and how unused to her own feeling of liking someone she was, how she wasn’t in solitary confinement in paradise like he was, but she was alone, alone—

  —and then she remembered Marli. Marli’s fingertips making misty spots on the thick green glass of the portholes of her iron lung, wanting to touch something. She remembered Marli and realized that hours had gone by and she hadn’t once thought of her friend.

  And then she was really distressed.

  “What is it?” Ghislain was worried. “Canny?”

  What was wrong with her? Was she such a coward that she could only attach herself to people who couldn’t walk away from her?

  “You’re both trapped,” she said.

  He looked very puzzled. The single candle was on the dresser behind her so she could look at him, not he at her. He had to lean up on his elbow and roll her onto her back to peer into her face. “What do you mean ‘both’?”

  “My friend Marli is in an iron lung. I visit her. I walk onto the ward, and sit down, and talk to her, and listen to her, then I get up and I walk away.” She began to cry. “I was saying that I wasn’t an opportunity, but then I thought that maybe that is all you are to me—someone else I can walk up to and look at and then walk away from, like a tiger in the zoo.”

  “Grrrrr,” said Ghislain tenderly.

  “What’s wrong with me?” she cried.

  “Maybe you can only imagine someone wanting your company if they really, really need company,” Ghislain said.

  She thought about this for a moment. Then nodded.

  “But why?”

  “My mother says I’m not interested in the same things that interest normal people,” Canny explained.

  “And you’ve stumbled on a whole valley of magic-loving Zarenes.”

  “Yes,” she said. “But I don’t care about that now. It’s you I care about. Or it was, till I remembered Marli. Now I’m confused.”

  “Well, you can visit my body. You can push a grass stem through the Spell Cage and tickle me,” he said.

  She clenched her teeth. She wasn’t going to start crying again. After a moment she said, “Isn’t there some other way you can escape?”

  He flopped back down. “I haven’t finished explaining,” he said. “Becoming an incorporeal tourist in the scenes of my own life—that’s just the least I can expect, if my spell works at all. But I’m going looking for something. If I find what I’m looking for I might be able to solve the problem of how to get back to my body without an anchor.”

  Canny said, “You’re going to have to explain the anchor bit.”

  * * *

  GHISLAIN TOLD CANNY ABOUT HIS GREAT-AUNTIES, Joanne and Rowan. Because they were twins they served as anchors for each other. They made a spell, something like his lead filigree cages, but theirs was a wide sheet of handmade lace. A Spell Veil. Great-aunt Rowan had wrapped Great-aunt Jo in the lace and, after twenty hours in some kind of coma, Jo had stirred and talked again. Then she got up and spent the next months doing nothing but sleeping, eating, and sculpting a block of limestone into a certain, secret shape. The shape was that of her Master Rune, she said, which she had seen when she went back to the moment of her own conception. Or rather to that first moment of division when the fertilized ovum that became her and her twin split to grow into not one body, but two. Jo had also glimpsed a ghostly print of her sister’s Master Rune and had seen enough to recognize that Rowan’s was similar, but distinct. Jo told her sister—and other Zarenes—that having her rune, she now had the whole of the magic. So, of course, Rowan wrapped herself in the Spell Veil too and traveled back to find her own Master Rune.

  “Have you heard about photographic memories?” Ghislain said.

  Canny nodded. She didn’t say she suspected she might have one.

  “The great-aunties only ever had to get a glimpse. I mean, a soul can’t carry a camera, can’t carry anything, so the great-aunties had to be able to remember perfectly what it was they saw.”

  “What’s the difference between a soul and a Master Rune?”

  “A Master Rune is like a codex of all the possibilities of each person’s life, and their relationship to the magic.”

  Canny was irritated, tickled by the loose threads of his explanation. She understood this Master Rune business in principle, but every time he said “the magic” she felt confused. That was silly, because she’d witnessed the magic, and even practiced it a little. The Zarene magic was as real and solid as a stone, or as real and forceful as the wind. But any stone was once an infinitesimal fraction of the vortex of matter, fire, and gravity that became the planet Earth. A vortex that began as an eddy in a whirlpool of hydrogen atoms that, pressed together by a great gravity, began the aeons-long fusion reaction t
hat was the sun. Wind came from changes in air pressure, because sometimes the air was light and dry, and sometimes full of vapor from perpetually evaporating oceans. So, that was a stone. That was the wind. Things that had scientific causes, that came from somewhere. But where did the magic come from?

  Ghislain was listening to her busy silence. He asked her whether he should go on.

  “I’ll save my questions.”

  “Great-aunt Rowan found her own Master Rune. Her soul went wandering and was brought back to her body by the ballast of that other soul, Jo’s, so like her own, standing guard over her body. The great-aunts made foundation stones out of their runes—two of each. They never let anyone see them. The stones are buried at the four corners of the house. They made all the carving and stained glass to tell the house what they wanted it to do, which was look after itself, do its own maintenance, stay clean, and look after its own possessions. The house took about ten years to build, with my grandfather and great-uncles pit-sawing the timber and doing all the basic carpentry. When I was little I remember being fascinated—and revolted—by Rowan and Joanne’s hands. They were scarred and twisted, crippled by holding tools to do all this.” He gestured around at the paneled walls.

  His hand made a breeze and the candle flame fluttered, the candlelight flickered on the carvings.

  “People can do that?” Canny said. Ten years seemed nothing compared to what they had achieved. “What did you call the spell? The Midnight Mending—people can just do that?”

  “Hmmmm,” he said. “People.”

  “All right—Zarenes.”

  “The spell has gotten stronger,” Ghislain said. “When I was a kid you’d have to glue the broken plate back together and then leave it for a long time till the cracks were sealed. The house only resisted wear and tear, and helped its occupants stay healthy. It didn’t stop time, or resurrect the dead. The great-aunts both lived to see ninety, even if they couldn’t button their own clothes. But the spell wasn’t anything like it is now. The way it is now—that’s not actually possible.”