She didn’t think she could have startled Jaime any more, but—no doubt expecting to be corrected at any time by this friend who eschewed meats and strong seasonings—Jaime contacted the kitchen and ordered Buffalo chicken wings. Jess ate two servings.
And then she left, cantering out of the stable on worn black hooves, the canister no longer bumping at her shoulder.
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Arlen hefted a rock into the distorted area before him. It landed with a hollow, mildly reverberating thonk—the wrong kind of noise altogether for a rock hitting soft spring ground—and rolled until it hit a jagged protrusion that Arlen didn’t even try to identify.
Maybe it had once been a tree; maybe a rabbit. For all he knew, maybe a chunk of cloud; there was no telling how high the damage rose.
The rest of the landscape looked perfectly normal. A flock of steel grey birds fluttered in the brush to his left, the males flashing the brilliant orange of their underwing in an attempt to impress the world in general. The air was still, the sun warm, and there were even sections of the muddy trail holding firm beneath his feet.
The woods around him had grown into a familiar feel these past days of travel, with recognizable bud-studded branches and bark patterns as well as the varying but generally easy to navigate terrain—gulches he could easily avoid, shallow creeks, glittering miniature rapids over water-rounded stones.
Anfeald woods, or coming close.
But such normality was harder and harder to find. Only this morning he’d realized he could stop at any random point along the trail and scan the woods to find distortion. Small spots, barely discernible against the cheerful disorder of the woods... but they were there. And the large areas were harder and harder to circumvent, forcing him to take Grunt far out of their way.
More than once he’d wondered if he’d reach Anfeald at all. Not because of the hardship—he was tougher and leaner than he’d ever been—or because he’d been accosted by more men of the same ilk as the ill-fated fellow who’d found him so many small towns ago.
No, it was as he pondered the distressed pockets of landscape, as he skirted the expanding edges of them, that he wondered if he’d find a way.
I want to go home, burn it!
Home to Jaime if she still somehow waited for him, home to his familiar workshop, where he could throw himself into solving this problem. Home to his frequent and good-natured arguments with Carey over matters between landers and wizards, home to Jess’s natural ebullience, her touchingly open nature, the amusing sly looks she cast at Arlen whenever she meant to tease Carey.
Damn whoever’s behind this. “Damn them all to the lowest Hell!” he said with such abrupt vehemence that Grunt stopped chewing altogether and Arlen realized how loud he’d been in the otherwise pleasant activity of the woods. He gave the gelding a pat, and thus reassured, Grunt again wrapped his lips around the stubby sprouting greens.
Arlen reached through his open coat-front and dug through the deep baggy pockets of the horrible orange tunic he’d acquired way back near Amses, pulling out a handful of cheap spellstones.
He already knew that raw magic incited the disturbances, even once they seemed to have solidified and gone extinct. He couldn’t use his own magic to experiment with small spells, but...
He picked out a spellstone designed to enhance one’s sexuality—utter nonsense, since those kinds of spells had to be customized for the recipient, but people did ever hope—and triggered it.
The stone produced a small wash of token magic—thin stuff, with a tinny one-note feel that grated against the senses of a man accustomed to producing orchestral magic.
The disturbed area didn’t so much as ripple.
“Not that anything else has made sense lately,” he said, ignoring the frequency with which he’d been offering asides to the gelding. Wizards were supposed to be eccentric, especially theoretical specialists like himself. Everyone said so.
Choosing a hokey greeting spellstone, he tossed it at the disturbed area and invoked it in mid-flight. An image appeared above its travel arc, glowing with oddly distorted words—purples for congratulations and gold for luck. The struggling spellstone landed while still active, and melted reality spasmed in reaction... reaching for the stone, enfolding it, warping the colors into the swirl of mixed landscape hues.
Arlen took a few tense steps back, ready to run—but once the spellstone had been engulfed the warping activity ceased, leaving the distortion with globs of bright color that should have faded as soon as the spellstone discharged... and didn’t.
Arlen frowned, rubbed a finger down the mustache he didn’t have, and muttered, “Well, that wasn’t right.”
He searched the spellstones, poking them aside until he found a similar greeting. He triggered it in hand, this time giving all his attention to the spell itself.
Words hung in the air, incomplete and sagging, the colors uneven and the pithy message hard to read. He moved careful a step closer to the disturbance, and the cheery greeting fell apart completely, scattering into illegible lumps of quickly fading color.
No wonder the new Council hadn’t been able to get anything but the most basic of services up and running again.
He already knew the distortion gobbled up raw magic like candy; now he saw it would grab up conventional magic only with direct contact. But even so, it clearly interfered with all magic, breaking down spell structures and distorting the results. He simply hadn’t known it because he’d been unable to use magic for so long—and hadn’t intended to experiment at all until he was closer to home.
And what if I trigger these stones in an actively warping area?
He wasn’t sure he wanted to find out.
Arlen dumped the spellstones back into his unpleasantly orange pocket and closed the coat around himself, fastening the toggles in the cooling afternoon. It was past time to find his way around this injured spot of land.
Home.
“I’m trying,” he said to Jaime. But only Grunt heard him.
~~~~~
“I’m trying,” Dayna said, fighting an overwhelming load of guilt and pressure as she faced the impatience of her friends in Jaime’s farmhouse den. “I’m trying,” she repeated, with less vehemence and more despair. “If you’d ever tried to deconstruct a spellstone—”
How many days had passed, and still they sat here in Ohio? Gifferd was the only one who seemed at ease with it, seemed to think it was the best course. Safest for them.
Not that they’d ever know what Gifferd was feeling. They might know his intent, they might know his truthfulness... they never knew his feelings.
Dayna pulled her legs up to sit cross-legged in the half-open recliner and buried her face in her hands, momentarily overwhelmed. Inexplicably, she wished Mark was here with his irreverent insouciance, and not catching up on hours at the hotel.
Carey eyed her. As Marion General’s doctors promised, he’d stopped coughing up blood; the concussive hemoptysis was healing on its own.
But never quite all the way.
Even now he gave his little undertone of a cough. “Why are you deconstructing Jaime’s spare travel spellstone at all?”
“Bootin’ good question,” Suliya said, casting Dayna a resentful glance. “And I know you’ve made new storage stones. Those egg-things glow enough to keep me up at night.”
“The fiber optic stones. They’re great—they hold a hell of a lot more magic than the crystal-cut stones,” Dayna said, lifting her head with brief enthusiasm at that accidental find. The problem was what she’d learned along the way.
The increasing static.
Her increasing doubt about spelling them into unknown territory.
“Great,” Carey said flatly. “Then we have the magic to boost the spells we came with.”
“I—” Dayna looked at them all—the impatience, the sulk, and the cool distraction, and finally said it out loud. “I’m not sure it’s safe to use those spells. Whatever’
s happening in Camolen is getting worse. I think we need to use a more refined spell—and the only way I know to do that is to pick apart the spell Arlen gave Jaime.”
Suliya gave her a narrow-eyed look. “Ay,” she said, “you saying we might be stuck here?”
Gifferd let his crossed ankle fall to the ground, leaning forward a little to join the conversation. “What’s spelling in Camolen will pass.”
“You believe,” Carey said, his voice pointed.
Gifferd shrugged. “Yes. I believe.”
“I don’t want to end up stuck here because you believe wrong,” Suliya said. She pushed herself out of the couch, quite obviously distancing herself from Gifferd, and paced the living room to frown at the black fireplace insert, even giving it a little kick. “If things are getting worse, we should try to go back now.” She turned around to glare at Dayna. “I want to go back now.”
“Before it’s too late,” Carey said, but his words didn’t hold the conviction they might have. He exchanged a glance with Dayna, gauging her reaction, and then looked away. He’d seen it.
She thought it might already be too late.
Suliya read the exchange and her sepia-toned skin flushed darker. “You burnin’ well ought to have said something before things got this bad!”
Miserably, Dayna said, “I only filled the last of the stones yesterday—it’s terrifying work, in case you hadn’t noticed. As soon as I realized how bad it’s gotten, I started working on the deconstruction. And I wanted to have an idea of how that was going!”
“I still believe you should go slow,” Gifferd said. “But now... I won’t stop you if you try to go back. It’s been long enough.”
The others hardly paid any attention to him. Suliya crossed her arms and kept her glare on Dayna. “If it’s so rootin’ hard to deconstruct this thing, make up your own!”
Gifferd gave her a look that might have been impressed... or it might have been disapproving. Hard to tell. “I’m really surprised your father let that mouth come out of his household.”
“Burn off,” Suliya told him, sparing him only the merest of glances. “I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t such a disappointment to him. Then again, he’s turned out to be a real rootin’ disappointment to me, too, so I guess we’re even.”
Dayna was glad for the respite of their exchange; it gave her a moment to get over her initial gape-mouthed astonishment and anger at Suliya’s demand.
Make up a spell. Right.
“Suliya,” she said, unable to stop the words from coming out between clenched teeth, “Arlen is—was—Camolen’s best theoretical wizard. I can cast a spell I’ve learned and I can put it into a spellstone, but I damn sure can’t come up with a world travel spell on my own. And I’m not counting on raw magic—we might get there, but we’d probably look like Gifferd’s ex-partner.”
“Raw magic,” Gifferd said, looking distinctly uncomfortable. A first.
“That’s it, then,” Suliya said, her resentment turning to dismay; she sank back against the counter. “Here’s where we stay.”
“Unless I’m right about the interference passing,” Gifferd said.
But Carey just looked at Dayna. Full of understanding, of comprehension about the race they ran. “If there’s anyone in this room more stubborn than I am, it’s you. You’ll get us there.”
Dayna said, “I’m trying.”
~~~~~
Jaime finished crosshatching an area of her Camolen map and cast a glance back at Linton. He consulted his list of new sightings.
“North of Kymmet,” he said, standing on the other side of Carey’s desk to keep an eye out for incoming riders. “Where the Kymmet-Dryden road splits to loop around Dryden Lake. The whole intersection is out. The report is two days old.”
Jaime made careful notations, marking the area in a red grease pencil and noting the date along its border. “That does it for Dryden,” she said, all too familiar with the hard knot of dread in her stomach. “Anyone who knows the territory can still get in or out, but the roads are gone.”
Natt’s voice held the slightest tremble of despair. “That does it for a lot of communities. Look west to Gioncanna—it’s been surrounded for days. For all we know, it’s been engulfed.”
Jaime took a step back, taking in the mapped patchwork of red. Suddenly overwhelmed, she tossed the pencil away; it missed the desk and landed on the floor. “For all we know, most of Camolen is engulfed. None of these reports is more recent than two days, and the dispatch is useless.” She hadn’t even attempted to return the recent static-filled missive from Suliya’s family. Plenty of people wondered about their families right now, and Jaime had no answers to offer—not even if the message wording had left her with an uneasy feeling that it had actually been a threat. “The only reason Phia hasn’t been here to yell at me again is because she can’t get here.”
“Jaime—”
“No.” Jaime cut Natt off with a slash of her hand through the air. “That’s enough. I’m not sending our people out there anymore.” God, she didn’t want Jess-as-Lady out there, either, running at liberty with the furthest fallow pasture as home base. But Lady knew to avoid the mangles, and that was the best any of them could do right now.
“The couriers know not to use magic on the road,” Linton started—but subsided at the sharp shake of Jaime’s head.
“Everyone knows not to use magic near the mangles,” she said. “But they keep cropping up, and they keep growing. I don’t want our couriers caught out there, away from home and circled by mangles. Everyone who’s in Anfeald stays in Anfeald.”
Linton’s long features, recently set in perpetual grimness, only looked grimmer. And Natt—eating under the stress and plumper than he’d been even a handful of days earlier—rubbed a hand over the balding area of his head and said tentatively, “If I may suggest—”
“Please,” she said.
“We’re taking for granted that because we know not to use magic next to a mangle, and that we know only the simplest spells are reliable anymore, everyone does. Let’s use our people within Anfeald for as long as we can, and spread information.”
Linton looked at Jaime, his interest piqued. “All the couriers know Anfeald well enough to have a good fallback if they find their way blocked.”
Jaime knuckled her lip. “Okay,” she said finally. “No one goes out without at least a day’s worth of food and water—and we revisit the decision twice a day.” She rubbed a hand over her hair, scrubbing it into complete disarray and not caring; the edge of Carey’s desk seemed to come up and meet her rump. “I don’t know who we’re kidding,” she said. “No one knows what’s happening. No one knows how to stop it. No one knows how many people have died... or whether we’ll all die before this is over. We’re only keeping ourselves busy until there aren’t any options at all.”
From somewhere, Natt mustered a reassuring firmness. “We have to trust that the Council has made breakthroughs since our last contact,” he said. “Even now, they may be spelling a solution... they may have started to clean up the damage. This is their job, not ours. We have to trust them to do it.”
Jaime bent, scooping up the pencil without lifting her weight from the desk. “The thing is,” she said heavily, “I don’t.”
Not without Arlen.
“It’s all we have left,” Linton said. “We do our best to get the people through. We do what we can do. And we trust the Council to do the rest.”
Jaime said, “I’ll try.”
~~~~~~~~~~
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Lady ran the far pasture with Ramble. She had no messages to deliver, no responsibilities other than to herself and the still tiny being growing within her... no need to give way to the Jess thoughts murmuring at the edges of her thoughts.
Ramble ran by her side—content with his herd of one, unimpeded by human rules. But where Ramble had learned fewer rules and learned them badly, Lady woke from naps with the phantom feel of Carey’s hand on her withers, hi
s whispered good job in her ear. She flashed on her Jess memories of his white-faced astonishment, staring at his own bloody hand, his mouth smeared with it.
Only then Jess would come to the fore, worrying and wanting to do. To fix. To change, and let the human side of herself somehow make things better.
But Carey was nowhere in Camolen, and Lady knew it.
She left the Jess part behind by charging over the rolling hills, inciting Ramble to bucking spurts that carried them away from Anfeald. When they visited the pasture, they had food—early grass, hay, and daily grain. When they left, no one tried to stop them. Everyone seemed too busy, too distracted, to care about two loose horses. Lady watched the couriers come and go, and knew she could be part of it if she wanted.
She didn’t.
But their freedom shrank anyway. The mangles had settled in for good, and spread themselves so thickly over the land that she and Ramble were forced into ever more circuitous routes to reach their favorite places
And now, as Lady led Ramble in a brisk trot down the trail, her mind on the smell of rain in the air and the shifting shadows of late afternoon, she rounded a curve and nearly ran head-on into an active mangle.
She reared up, scrabbling backward, and Ramble collided with her hindquarters to whirl away—more alarmed at her potential ire than the mangle he hadn’t quite noticed yet.
Lady jigged a tight circle and raised her head high to give the mangle a blasting snort, one that got Ramble’s riveted attention as he saw what she already knew.
Their only way home was blocked.
It got someone else’s attention as well—a crouching figure tucked in by the edge of the mangle, one which stirred at the great fuss they’d made and startled Ramble so much he took off down the trail at gallop speed, leaving only the sound of his hoof falls behind him.
And Arlen said, “I’m hungry, but not that hungry.”
Arlen.
Lady stood stock still, with only the quiver of shock to give her away.
The Changespell Saga Page 82
