The Long Past & Other Stories

by Ginn Hale

  He glanced to their bedrolls. He looked like he might say something, but he turned back to the fire to add another branch to the burning logs. Grover kept his peace as well, busying himself digging his iron pan out from a saddlebag and filling it with pemmican and cornmeal. He found a good spot to rest the pan, and he let the flickering tongues of flame begin to fry up the corn, fat and meat.

  Then he settled back on his heels next to Lawrence and set his rifle down on the other side. Lawrence left his own rifle with his saddlebags. Grover wondered if that was because he knew how little harm most gunshot could do a big dinosaur, or if it reflected a mage’s confidence in his own power. An earth mage on his home turf was supposed to be nigh invulnerable.

  “Supposing we come across a bigtooth,” Grover said. “You got a spell that can knock it on its ass or do we have to improvise?”

  It no longer surprised Grover that Lawrence didn’t answer at once. He picked up a dry pinecone, turned it over in his hand and tossed it into the fire where it popped and crackled.

  “I’ve recovered enough that I could probably put one down for good. But I’d only do that as a very last resort.”

  “Really?” Grover asked. “You got a fondness for the bastards?”

  “Not hardly. But I have my reasons.” After Lawrence met Grover’s gaze, he went on, “First, I have to conserve all the strength I can to deal with the rift. Second, Tucker’s equipment will pick up a burst of powerful magic. He’ll come running. That’s how he found us in England.”

  “So you went all the way from China to England. Why in all that time didn’t you send word? How could you let us go on thinking you were dead? You just about broke your daddy’s heart, you know.”

  “I wanted to contact you. I even wrote letters to you and him. But I never posted any of them. I couldn’t risk Tucker discovering that I was still alive, not before we’d closed the rifts.”

  “So it’s not just this one? You weren’t supposed to close any of the rifts?” Grover asked. “How’d you explain the other two?”

  “Officially troops weren’t ordered not to close the rifts but simply to wait until Tucker and his men had assessed the worth of them. But Gaston, Honora and I already knew they had to be shut down. We’d seen firsthand what they were doing.”

  “Gaston?” Grover asked. “French and married?”

  A slight flush colored Lawrence’s face. He tossed a twig into the fire.

  “That was him. Gaston Jacquard.” Lawrence glanced sidelong to Grover. “It wasn’t a great romance. We were both lonely for other people and kept each other company—”

  “Sure. I understand.” Grover didn’t think he wanted to hear too many of the details. Lawrence returned his gaze to the flames while Grover watched the shadows beyond the firelight. Betty and Lawrence’s stallion had both settled down to sleep.

  “He died closing the rift in England,” Lawrence said quietly. “I wasn’t near enough and Honora didn’t have the strength to pull him out.”

  The petty jealous thoughts winging around in Grover’s head turned all at once regretful. He wasn’t above rivalry but couldn’t bring himself to feel anything but sorrow at the thought of the man giving his life to stop the floods.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  Lawrence simply nodded then threw another pinecone into the flames.

  “Everything dies eventually,” Lawrence said. “At least Gaston didn’t die for nothing. I don’t know if any of us can hope for better than that, these days.”

  Now there was a bleak perspective, Grover thought. It didn’t suit him and he didn’t want it to suit Lawrence.

  “As far as I see it,” Grover answered. “Ain’t a man’s death that’s so important as how he lives. Dying is just once and not too many of us have much say about it, but every day we’re alive we choose what we do. How much joy we find and how we treat other folk, that’s all up to us while we’re living. That’s what we leave behind when we die.”

  Lawrence scowled, but when he glanced to Grover his expression softened.

  “God, Grove, you’re still so…decent.” He pulled a brief smile. “I’m glad, you know. It gives me hope for humanity.”

  “Yep, that’s what I am,” Grover said, laughing. “The hope for all humanity.” The savory perfume of fried corn and sizzling meat drifted from the fire.

  “Well, the only hope for my supper, at least.”

  “That’s more the size of it.” Grover used the sleeve of his coat as a mitt and pulled the pan out from the flames and set it down between himself and Lawrence.

  They’d both packed their own cutlery, but they shared the frying pan instead of bothering with separate servings. Lawrence’s spoon and fork gleamed like silver. Grover’s were cast tin. Between them they cleared every speck from the pan. Grover set it aside. He’d scrub it out in the morning when the light was better.

  Now he watched stars wink to life as the last of the sun’s light sank below the mountain horizon. The constellation of the big bear shone bright overhead, while the little bear edged up from the east and the swan soared above the ragged peaks in the northwest.

  “The stars are different in China. The spring sky is a blue dragon and winter is a black turtle.” Lawrence lifted his ivory hand up as if to blot out the shining North Star. “Though now the protective spells raised over the cities block it all out. It’s just black.”

  They were both silent for a few moments.

  “Will you tell me what really happened in China?” Grover asked. “When you were supposed to have died?”

  Lawrence studied him for a moment, and Grover half expected him to refuse but instead he reached out, pulled both their bedrolls over and leaned back on his own.

  “It’s a long story. You might as well get comfortable.”

  Chapter Five

  Grover took his bundled blankets and settled cross-legged. He gazed at Lawrence’s face as an old memory stirred—laying sated and sweaty against Lawrence’s bare body and realizing that the firelight lit his gray eyes to gold. But Grover resisted the lure of nostalgia.

  Lawrence didn’t return his gaze but instead stared up at the constellations overhead.

  “The problem started when we marched north towards the emperor’s palace in Beijing.” The hard English edge returned to Lawrence’s voice as he spoke. “In the south we’d raided whole quarries of alchemic stone and shipped tons back to England, France and the US. Our theurgist commanders assumed we’d continue exploiting local stores as we pushed north. But they ignored reconnaissance reports that hinted at how completely the Chinese emperor had hoarded his alchemic stone there. Soon enough we realized that there wasn’t a speck left in the ground. By the time we reached the Yellow River, our theurgists couldn’t power even the simplest spells and our forces were facing ice curses with nothing but prayers and Baker Rifles. Our infantry died on their feet, and their Wuxia tore through our cavalry like all those riders and horses were tissue paper…” Lawrence paused, glaring at the emptiness above him.

  Grover knew he couldn’t imagine what Lawrence must have seen—must have felt. He’d had no idea how badly the campaign had gone. What little the papers had reported had amounted to lists of unfamiliar city names claimed as victories. Though even that trickle of information had dried up in the first year.

  “We never heard much of anything back home,” Grover admitted.

  “No, you wouldn’t have.” Lawrence shook his head. “Nate Tucker sent reporters packing as soon as things started to look bad. Then he took, let’s say, liberties with his reports back to Washington.”

  “Just the one Tucker?” Grover asked.

  Lawrence got that uneasy expression.

  “David didn’t join us until August. God knows, Nate alone was bad enough. Ordering our infantry into villages to ransack shrines, temples even digging up graves searching for alchemic stone.
What the bastard should have done was let us fall back to the southern ports where we could’ve resupplied—” Lawrence cut himself off with a rueful laugh. “No. Honestly, we should have hauled our asses out of China. We had no damn right to be there in the first place. We sure as hell weren’t bringing them liberty and civilization with all that opium we forced on them.”

  “I thought that only the English were pushing opium.” Grover recalled George and Cora debating the matter a few years back.

  “Sure, we love to claim that we weren’t any part of it. But the bottom fact was that our country gladly sent men to fight and die to defend opium interests in exchange for a first pick of Chinese alchemic stone. We were up to our necks in it.”

  Lawrence lapsed into silence and Grover didn’t disturb him. Lawrence had always been so upstanding and righteous. Realizing what he’d really been fighting for in China must have cost him some pride.

  “Of course the generals were all happily housed down in the south and not about to order a retreat. But we had to have protective spells for our infantry and cavalry or we would have all been dead in days. So our theurgists turned to older techniques. They started tapping us in the mage corps to power the spells.” The muscles in Lawrence’s jaw flexed and twitched like he was grinding nails between his teeth. “They wired us up like we were alchemic rocks and let us burn.”

  “They what?” The alarm in Grover’s voice seemed to boom through the dark night. Shackling mages to spell forges and searing them to charred bones was supposed to have been outlawed hundreds of years back, along with sacrificing children to river gods and such.

  “It wasn’t—I’m making it sound dramatic, aren’t I?” Lawrence pulled a self-conscious smile. “Most of us actually volunteered—how could we not? And they obviously didn’t turn us to ash in the spell forges. They just wore us out. Most of us joked that we could disguise ourselves as bundles of firewood if we sat still.” He gave a dry laugh. But seeing how bone-lean Lawrence appeared even now, Grover couldn’t bring himself to laugh along.

  “How long did that go on?” Grover asked.

  “Only three months. August third we finally reached the outskirts of Beijing. Though by then only five of us could still report for active duty.” Lawrence frowned. “Then David Tucker appeared out of the blue, and Honora knew right away that something was badly wrong. She was sure Tucker had gone from wiring up spells that weren’t strictly by the book to building one that had been outrightly banned—”

  Grover frowned at that.

  “Doesn’t them having to ban certain theurgic spells cast a little shade on all the claims that theurgists couldn’t do wrong because they’re working from God’s word and with the Lord’s consent?” Grover couldn’t help make the comment.

  “You’d think, wouldn’t you?” Lawrence laughed but dryly. “It turns out to be a little different in practice than in theory. See, a mage like me might use his power to break a common law, but unless I trained in theurgy—which I haven’t—I couldn’t create a spell that draws on enough different sources of power to break any of the Laws of Divine Order. And I wouldn’t know enough about the workings of the Divine Order to even figure out how to undermine the laws.”

  “You mean doing things like pulling the stars out of the sky or something?” Grover asked.

  “Sort of. It’s less about exactly what they do than how they do it.” Lawrence looked thoughtful. “Suppose a theurgist wants to move a boulder. He’s allowed to create a spell that shatters it or even shoves it out of the way, but he’s not allowed to build a spell that makes it just float off, because that breaks the Divine Law of Gravity. And if gravity were to come undone then the whole world and all the stars could fall apart. It’s those kinds of laws they can’t break—the ones we imagine God set in place when he created the universe.”

  Grover hadn’t ever thought of gravity as a law that could be broken. He considered it.

  “So they can make spells to power the engines of an airship, but they aren’t allowed to just make the airship itself lighter than it ought to be?” Grover asked.

  “Yep. ” Lawrence replied. “I guess there’s a whole list of ways that theurgists aren’t supposed to cast spells. Lots of esoteric rules that you wouldn’t imagine would need making. In particular, they aren’t supposed to build a spell that manifests in a time before it was created.”

  Lawrence gazed at him meaningfully as Grover let the thought sink in.

  Time.

  Of course that would be a Divine Law.

  “So a spell cast now shouldn’t affect an age back when dinosaurs were alive and wandering the earth?” Grover raised his brows.

  “Exactly.” Lawrence nodded. “There’s more as well but I don’t know it all. Honora could tell you, of course. Before the war she received special dispensation to study under the Master Theurgist, Michael Faraday.”

  Grover vaguely recalled George mentioning the man. A wind mage who’d trained in theurgy and gone on to create cages that could trap lightning. George owned a bound transcript of some Christmas lecture he’d given off in England. More to the point, that meant Lady Astor wasn’t just a mage but like Faraday was also a theurgist.

  “Anyway most theurgists don’t break Divine Laws—not just because it’s illegal and dangerous, but because doing so requires vast amounts of power,” Lawrence went on. “But Tucker had concocted a pet spell that he figured could cheat Divine Law by creating a source of even more power than he expended.”

  “By creating alchemic stone?” Grover asked just to be certain.

  Lawrence nodded. “He’d worked out that the explosive energy released by breaking the Divine Law of Time would charge surrounding minerals. They’d become so alchemically potent that they’d actually radiate more power into the minerals around them and those in turn would do the same to minerals all around, creating a sort of chain of reactions. In theory entire mountains and valleys could be transformed into magic dust.”

  Grover frowned. Turning whole mountains to dust struck him as something along the lines of blotting out the sun or changing the ocean to blood. It was hard to imagine the mind of a man who would delight in the prospect, much less work towards it as a goal.

  “But it was you and Honora and Gaston who actually powered the spell and manifested it?” Grover asked.

  Lawrence turned away from Grover to pick up a stick and shift the wood in the fire. Red sparks flared up over the flames and burned out in the cool night air.

  “Yes. We knew it was dangerous and that it might not be strictly legal. But we’d spent three months burning in spell forges, and the prospect of being able to somehow create alchemic stone from thin air was so relieving of an idea. We—I—didn’t ask exactly how the spell worked or if there might be complications. I was so tired and I just wanted the war to be over.”

  Somewhere, out in the dark, one of them long-clawed, kicking dinosaurs gave a screech.

  “The idea was that Honora would disguise herself, Gaston and me so that we could slip into Beijing city—”

  “Neither of the Tuckers came along?” Grover asked.

  “No, and that alone should have told me something. But I was past thinking by then. Like I said, I just wanted it to be over. By then I knew what a mistake I’d made in running away to join the mage corps. I wanted to come back home so much…” Lawrence glanced to Grover with such a longing expression that Grover felt his chest sort of flutter. But then Lawrence shook his head and went on. “So I took my section of the spell and went with Gaston and Honora. We made it into the city by the skin of our teeth and positioned ourselves outside the emperor’s palace, near where the alchemic stone was stored—”

  Lawrence paused again to shift the wood and embers of the fire. His expression turned distant, and he seemed, for a long while, like he couldn’t bring himself to look up from the smoldering coals at the heart of the blaze. Then he sighed and lea
ned back again on his bedroll.

  “I know that Nate Tucker had attempted the spell himself and failed. Gaston thought it had been because he couldn’t endure the pain of it, but Honora thinks being a wind mage not an earth mage, he simply wasn’t anchored strongly enough to a single physical place to command the force and mass necessary to complete the spell.”

  “But you could since you’re an earth mage,” Grover said.

  “Yes, and so was Gaston. And so was the Imperial Consort Cixi. About halfway through the spell, she must have sensed us starting to power it. From inside the palace she began fighting us. She dug deep into the strength of her home ground, attempting to wrench the spell—and us—apart. In response Gaston and I reached out to our own strong grounds.”

  “And yours is Fire Springs,” Grover realized.

  Lawrence nodded slowly and with such sorrow in his expression that he could have been confessing to murder. In a way he was, Grover realized. Thousands of people had died. There wasn’t anything Grover could think of to ease the burden of that. He just let Lawrence finish.

  “Gaston grounded himself in the Îles d’la Manche—islands in the English Channel where is wife and daughter were living. I held firm to Fire Springs where you and I had spent so much time. Cixi kept pounding at us until it felt like I was being pulled in two. And then all of a sudden there was this godawful roar. Louder than anything I’ve ever heard—like the mountains were crumbling. The entire side of the palace collapsed down into the ground, and geysers of fire split up into the sky. It was the dead of night, but I saw sunlight shining up out from the rift we’d torn in the ground. The water came surging up over me, and I realized that my right arm was badly broken. Gaston’s ribs were shattered. I could hear him calling for help, but I couldn’t do anything to stop the water. I barely managed to reach him and keep both our heads above the waves.” Lawrence’s voice sounded rough. He cleared his throat. “Honora got us out and away somehow. She had contacts among the Taiping revolutionaries. I don’t remember much about the journey except that we were in the hills overlooking the Yellow River when they took most of my arm off. I remember the murky river cascading down to the clear floodwaters and pterosaurs soaring overhead while they sawed… I suppose I was glad enough for the opium then.”