Blood Rock s-2

by Anthony Francis

  Tully jerked back as the Streetscribe twitched and a silver sheen rippled up the web. Rumblings and light echoed through the cavern. Deep images seemed to move in the darkness beyond the surface of the walls. Then the walls glowed, brightened-and Zipperface exploded out of them and began sailing through the air on a skateboard propelled on a trail of fire.

  “Oh jeez, oh jeez, that’s his self portrait!” Tully screamed. “His spirit was consumed by his avatar! His spirit is in his avatar! ”

  Zipperface screamed along the outer edge of the wall, and I readied myself. Arcturus and I had gone over this. There was an immense amount of power in the master tag, more than we had ever anticipated, but it was all being channeled through one small mobile projectia.

  So this was it: mano a mano, face to face, me versus Zipperface.

  Could I cut Zipperface in half with my vines? Maybe, but he could burn them with fire. Use my Dragon’s fire against him? Zipperface had no real skin, the flames would dissipate. Use a hawk projection? He could use the baseball. Go hand to hand? He could use the bat.

  None of my standard tricks would work-so I had prepared new ones. I shimmied, drew an arm over my back, and plucked a newly-inked feather from the wings of the Dragon. Then I laid it down on a newly-inked mark on my forearm, clenched my fist, and brought both to life.

  Zipperface’s mouth peeled open into two glittering arcs of teeth. His ropy tongue snaked out as he hissed at me, and he pointed his bat at me and called me out. Then he looked down at his chest. Dead center, an arrow now protruded-though it had started life as the feather, before being shot out from the crossbow I had inked upon my arm.

  Bits of down fluttered away from the wound, the slightest of glows shined through the hole, and then the arrow sank in and his shirt rippled closed over it. Zipperface looked up at me, his white eyes gleamed beneath his floppy hat, and he smiled. Then he leaned in, the skateboard banked, and he screamed down upon me, baseball bat cocked back to take off my head.

  That mano-a-mano stuff? Two masters face off in an arena and fight for fifteen minutes? It only works in the movies, or when opponents are evenly matched. I knew I wasn’t an even match before I stepped up to the plate. So, I’d taken precautions-using his own tricks.

  Suddenly white light burst from every seam of Zipperface’s design. All the mana pouring in from the tags all around us had finally activated the self-replicating pattern Arcturus and I had woven into the feather. With a sudden pop, Zipperface exploded in a cloud of glowing down, the body of the Streetscribe jerked and flopped, and the spray can fell from his half-dead hand.

  The skateboard kept sailing forward, bounced off the ground a few times, and slowly rolled to a stop at my feet. I slowly lowered my hand, letting the crossbow merge back into my skin; a moment or two later, the skateboard itself dissipated.

  “Damn,” Tully said. “You don’t screws around.”

  “I haven’t spent weeks studying these things for nothing,” I said.

  “Fuck!” Cinnamon said, suddenly terrified. “Fuck, mom, something’s wrong… ”

  I turned to follow her gaze. Some of the filaments embedded in the Streetscribe’s skull were blackening, disintegrating, floating away. But instead of dying out, the giant tag on the wall was growing stronger. With each line that detached, the tag was more and more free.

  “I was wrong,” I said, as Cinnamon backed up into me. “Whatever discretion the Streetscribe had was the only thing that had been holding the tags back.”

  Suddenly five thick cables jutting from his skull were simultaneously broken, and the giant whorl on the wall began glowing, spinning, picking up speed. I remembered what Doug had said about reflections of the local environment in the image of the tag, and began to be very scared that the only ‘reflections of the local environment’ I could see were rivers of stars.

  Then the whole cavern shook. The perspective of the tags changed. The ring of vampiric matter began to glow, and the circuits of werewolf blood began to blaze. The massive, bus-sized tombstones surged and cracked like real stone. The huge hillside behind the whorl loomed closer, then moved through the whorl, shattering it, so the great knobbly dome with its waving strands of grass was seemingly barreling right down on us.

  Then the tombstones lifted up and doubled over, fat squirming worms blindly reaching forward, stretching out of the canvas, striking the ground one by one, their white chalky backs tipped by cracked wooden shields. No, not wood… nails. The tombstones were fingers .

  And then the huge hillock, waving with giant stalks of wheat, lifted itself up. The wheat was hair, the hill was a head, and the sodden misshapen thing surged forward out of the canvas and glared at us with the two blazing pinpricks of fire that were its eyes.

  Just as Revenance had warned us not to, we had awakened ‘it’.

  Then ‘it’ opened a mouth fifty feet wide and screamed graffiti fire down upon us.

  Vines of Fire

  I shrieked in pain as rainbow fire tore at my hastily erected shield. I seized Tully and Cinnamon and dragged them back towards the pool in the center of the chamber. Behind us we heard a deep rattling, like a dragon drawing its breath. Then all three of us dove into the water as a second wave of flame swept over us, boiling off the surface of the water with a metallic hiss.

  Multicolored flames danced above us, lighting the bottom of the pond with a shifting dancefloor light. I floundered, but Cinnamon dragged me forward with werekin strength, cutting through the water to the gazebo’s counterpart, an island of broken masonry and rebar jutting out of the pool. In the sudden shallows we half-swam, half crawled, lungs aching, until we surfaced behind a jagged triangle of masonry that provided a shield against the fire.

  Gasping, we planted ourselves against the wall. Another gut wrenching scream echoed through the cavern, and we all flinched back as a wave of heat bloomed from all around us, followed quick on the heels by another gout of multicolored graffiti flame.

  “There!” Tully said, pointing. “Make for that exit, the air was freshest-”

  “No!” I said, pulling him back. There was light in the tunnel he pointed at-and there hadn’t been before. “A trap tag is active, you can see it.”

  “That’s how it got Revy!” Cinnamon said, flinching as the monster belched forth another horrifying scream. “Forced him out into the tunnels, into the traps… ”

  “Of course,” I said, falling back as another wave of heat flooded over us. “He warned us about it-so he came here, awakened it somehow, and got caught when he fled.”

  “We can’t stay here,” Tully said, as intricate flames swept past. Flickering tongues of color began wrapping around the edges of the wall, and I started splashing water on it.

  “Wet the wall! Wet it before the pigment can take hold!” I shouted, and we all started splashing water up on it, desperately trying to prevent the tag from creeping around. Where the wildstyle flames had already crept, water boiled off with a screech; but where the water landed first, the tag’s outlines became limp and indistinct, a fizzling nothing. “Keep going!”

  “This won’t work,” Cinnamon said, leaning around the wall. “Everyone down!”

  There was a wave of heat, we hunched back against the wall, and another gout of graffiti flame tore around us in a kaleidoscope of brilliant color. The deadly curls and blazing twists of fire were artful, wonderful, even extraordinary, and inspiration struck me.

  I leaned around the corner, glaring at the potato-shaped monstrosity with starry eyes. It caught my gaze and glared back, misshapen mouth spreading into a wide grin, opening into a vast fissure lined with the cracked, grimy cobblestones that were its teeth. My eyes traced those ham-fisted lines, then compared them to the graceful barbs erupting from the Streetscribe.

  I leaned back as orange light built up inside the monster’s malformed maw. Moments later, flames tore past us, gracefully, painterly -and clearly, by the Streetscribe’s hand.

  “That thing isn’t the tagger’s creation,” I said
. “It’s something that he let in, something that possessed him-but it’s still using his mind to make the flames.”

  “Something that possessed him?” Cinnamon said. “Like a demon?”

  “Like a demon,” I said.

  “I thought you didn’t believe in demons,” Tully said.

  “I’m a scientist. I won’t deny evidence right before my eyes, even if it needs a little… interpretation.” Another hot flash, a gout of flame, followed by a terrible cracking noise. “Maybe it’s a projectia of an evil wizard, a Lovecraftian Great Old One or a genuine Christian demon. Who cares? It isn’t by the same hand as the flames, and we can use that to take it out.”

  “ Fuck that,” Tully said. “We can’t take that thing on.”

  “That thing is a vampire,” I said. “A cartoon of one, spirit of one, essence of one. I don’t care. It feeds on the life force of the living. And we’ve just let it in. We need to stop it here, or the bodycount will make the tagger’s vampire genocide look like a pretty little utopia.”

  “How the hell are we going to do that?” Tully said. “I never saw anything like that, and from the looks on your face neither have you.”

  I glanced over the wall, then ducked back down at another intestine-churning roar swept over us. We hunched down from the fire, and I concentrated on what I saw. Whatever was coming through wasn’t yet physical: it was still a construct, a projectia like Zipperface.

  “God help us if we see the source for that self-portrait,” I said, “but for now, it is just a portrait. Whatever that thing really is, it’s on its side of the door, what we’re dealing with right now is a projectia. A construct obeying the rules of magic, of graphomancy.”

  “How does that help us?” Cinnamon asked.

  “You have to do it, Cinnamon,” I said. “ You have to break the circuit.”

  “Me!” she said. “I’m not a graphomancer.”

  “Cinnamon, you’re a genius,” I said. “You’re the smartest mathematician I ever met.”

  “Fuck! How does that help us?” she asked.

  “Magic is mystical, magic is special, magic can break the walls of space open and let the bad ones in-but the logic of magic is just math, ” I said. “You studied tattoo magic under the Marquis and graffiti magic under the Streetscribe. If anyone can find a weakness, it’s you.”

  Cinnamon stared down at her hands. Then she pulled out the soaked copy of the tagger’s blackbook from her back pocket and began carefully flipping through its damp pages.

  “You knows,” Cinnamon said, “I listens to more books than anyone. Reading’s like slogging through someone’s garbage. Listening’s like, hahhh, like they’re talking to you.”

  “That’s… nice, Cinnamon,” I said; the flames had paused for the moment, but there was a slow crackling, splintering sound rippling through the cavern. “But how-”

  “I got to talk to Marcus Aurelius,” she said. “Emperor of Rome, and he gots the same problems in court I gots in the lunchroom. I wants to reach out and hug him, but he’s gone, two thousand years, eleven twos standing up, more or less, and all I gots left of him is one little bit of his soul, talking to me, telling me everything is all right. But it isn’t the listening that puts me in touch with him; that just makes it easier. It’s the book. Books holds bits of people’s souls.”

  We just stared at her, as she stared down at the tagger’s notebook.

  “The tagger isn’t gone,” Cinnamon said. “We gots one little piece of him left.” She looked up at us. “We gots to destroy the blackbook.”

  “Easy said, easy done,” Tully said, reaching forward, but Cinnamon hissed.

  “For the love, go slow,” she said, jerking it away. “There’s a plan.”

  The whole cavern shook, another deep cracking sound echoed above us, and a giant chunk of masonry fell, splattering water and debris a dozen yards out into the pool. “For the love, hurry,” I said. “Sounds like it’s breaking loose from the wall. We don’t have much time.”

  “Shreddin’ it won’t do it,” she said. “And we can’t really use its magic against the tag-he’s gone beyond the blackbook and the tag’s loose anyways. But the tag is all his ideas-and his book is filled with his ideas. One can link to the other, like sympathetic magic.” And then she stared right at me. “Mom, you’re gonna need to short out that link.”

  She explained her plan, and I nodded grimly. This was not going to be pleasant, but the hot flashes of the tagger’s fire had resumed, hotter now, and it was clear we had no more time.

  Cinnamon explained the designs to me as Tully tore out rebar from the piled masonry; then we divvied up Tully’s remaining markers. They took the spray cans; I took the oil chalk-just two, one to draw and a spare in case the first broke. Hopefully I would need only one.

  I reached up against the triangle of the wall and began drawing a row of unicursals, little hexagrams with X’s through their centers that began sparking magic almost as soon as I finished them, shorting out the creeping graffiti flames and leaving me room to work on the big design.

  “Ready?” I said, as Cinnamon muttered to herself and Tully tensed.

  Then the flames died, Cinnamon said, “It will work,” and we moved.

  I leapt up atop the pile of debris and screamed “Hey asshole!” The shapeless thing on the wall screamed and shot out a barbed tongue that cracked against the pavement just as I leapt back behind my triangular shield of stone. Then another gout of flame ripped past its edges.

  I was now alone behind the shield. Good. Cinnamon and Tully dove into the water in opposite directions when I leapt, and by now were each halfway to shore. I pulled out the oil chalk- God, I loved the tagger’s materials. This was going to be so much easier than the way I’d marked magic circles before-and began drawing on the rough surface of the brick.

  The geometry of magic at first seems simple. The circle I drew would act as a shield, keeping the magic of the flames off me for a few crucial moments. The five pentacles Cinnamon and Tully would spray would act as receivers, drawing more magic away.

  I began drawing the next arcs. Combining symbols is where simple turns deceptive. A circle around a pentacle acts like an insulator, shielding it from our world, turning it into a receiver for good and evil spirits from other planes. But draw the circle a shade smaller, so its circumference touches the tips of the pentacle, and you’ve created a magical diode that lets mana pass through only one way. The circle still protects whatever is inside it from your magic, but the intersecting points enable it to project its magic out upon you. And so the careers of your wannabe demonologists often end before they ever begin.

  But I wasn’t drawing a pentacle inside my circle. I was drawing a unicursal hexagram, a Star of David with the two horizontal lines crossed. It was a magical short circuit, a receiver that lets magic flow freely out of its center. The centers of the tiny versions I’d drawn to short out the graffiti flames creeping over the rock were going off like sparklers. With all the mana in this cavern, stepping to the center of my big unicursal would be suicide.

  A tremendous crash shook the vault, and I saw dust and water splash up from the impact of a foul, twisted hand that had torn free from the painting and slammed into the floor. The gripping mass of white, wrinkled flesh was bigger than the body of an elephant, attached to an arm thicker than ten trees; but there the resemblance to any plant or animal I knew ended.

  Arteries of neon and veins of mercury surged through flaccid, fungal flesh. Muscles bulged in frantic lumps like boiling water. A skin like tattered canvas frayed and reknitted as I watched. Jagged edges of its skeleton were briefly visible, more like thorny vines than bones. The great nasty thing surged forward in waves, pulling and stretching, ripping and reforming, tearing itself out of the painting, piece by painful piece.

  The monster screamed, rattling my teeth, and I briefly wondered what kind of thing it was. What kind of thing the Streetscribe had drawn on. What kind of thing led him to build magic that collected the inten
ts of tortured people, trapped and struggling to get free. Concentrated intents that it could use… for what? Perhaps, to break free itself?

  Whatever it was, we had to stop it.

  A gout of fire leapt through the air at the far wall, and I saw Cinnamon leap out of range of the flames, a high curving arc, tail flickering. Snapping tentacles whipped at her, but she dodged and dodged, ducking behind a pillar as another blast of flame swept over the area.

  When she moved again, gleaming arcs and lines of graffiti began wrapping around the pillar and rippling out over the floor, a self-replicating pattern of Cinnamon’s own design. I raised an eyebrow: the werekin moved fast. They’d already given me the five pentacles I needed, and had moved to the next stage of the plan: distraction.

  The new design began climbing the wall, leaping up into the vampiric matter, leeching its power. At first, the monster didn’t seem to notice, but as the tiled kites and darts began growing, they began interfering with its magic. Cinnamon had called them Penrose tiles: self-replicating, but never precisely repeating, disrupting the regular pattern needed for the monster’s design.

  Realizing the danger, the thing screamed at Cinnamon, but then turned its head to blast fire at the opposite wall, where Tully had started two more self-replicating Penrose tilings. Curling graffiti flames rippled over the growing tiles. They began to flicker and burn out under the Technicolor barrage, and the monster gathered itself, preparing to fire again.

  It had forgotten about me. Now was my moment.

  I closed my eyes.

  Deep beneath the water, the tattooed vine extending from my wrists snaked towards shore, guided by a tiny bird projectia gripping its branches in its beak. Through the bird’s eyes I saw the vine burst through the surface. Using the bird’s wings I guided the vine through the fallen stones, out of sight of the monster. With the bird’s tiny feet I landed upon the rotting body of the Streetscribe-and let myself merge with him.

  I shuddered. Long before whatever had happened, the Streetscribe had been corrupted by his own magic. He was neither alive nor dead, neither werewolf nor vampire. Arcturus was right: all of my classifications were useless. There was something mystically unwholesome about joining the bodies of the living and the undead with a magic tattoo, and I felt my soul being drained by the great void left where the Painter of Night had disintegrated.