Blue Magic

by A. M. Dellamonica

  The marshal threw an arm around them, and the wheelchair rolled faster.

  “Ev!” Olive was up ahead, at the Gate.

  “He’s hurt!” Patience shouted.

  Olive tapped Ev with a tongue depressor, hitting his shoulders as though he were being knighted. Ev’s hands stopped bleeding and his mind cleared, at least temporarily. He was still hairy as a goat, but for now he knew who he was.

  “I can’t do more—Juanita needs what’s left of the letrico to get people out of here.”

  “Does that mean we’re not winning?” Ev asked.

  “Wind gets much worse, even they may have to stop fighting.” Olive pointed at the combatants. “That’s about the best-case scenario.”

  “Oh, the well’s blown; the wind’ll get worse,” Patience said.

  “You need to get out of here,” Ev said.

  “Me?” Olive smiled grimly. “I’m on the Big Picture.”

  “Tell them that.”

  “I doubt the Fyremen will last much longer,” Patience said. “The Roused will outnumber them soon, and Teo—” An ear-shattering sigh heralded another Fyreman death, finishing her statement for her.

  “What about Astrid?” Ev asked. “Is she okay?”

  “Ev, look around. Nobody’s okay.”

  Dodging the question. His heart punched at his chest. He rubbed his clubbed hand over the horns on his forehead. “Where’s my daughter, Olive?”

  Olive’s eyes flooded. Her gaze flicked past him, to a pit of burnt branches and blue embers. “Gone, Ev.”

  “No.” He shook off their hands, holding himself upright against the wind.

  Gone.

  “It was—”

  He cut Olive off before she could torture him with details. “Teo said he could make you a goddess, Patience. He offered you power over life and death—”

  “Oh, you’re gonna pimp me off?” Teoquan was just then shattering another Fyreman, a kid with a buzz cut. “To that?”

  He slumped. “I’m sorry.”

  “Listen to me. If that power ever existed, it’s Teo who’d wield it—and he’s not your daughter’s biggest fan.”

  “I know it’s hard, Ev—,” Olive began.

  He ran from their kindess and sympathy, fleeing to the edge of the fire.

  There were two bodies.

  One was pinned upright, in a standing position. It slumped forward, arms extended so its crisped hands hung downward, its elongated fingers seeming to reach for the slumped form at its feet. Burnt skeletal wings grew from its back: little Sahara Knax, Leona’s granddaughter.

  The other body was facedown, but its tangled orange curls were unmistakable.

  “Oh, baby girl.” Ev edged closer, into the heat, and pulled, yanking awkwardly until he had what was left of her cradled in his arms. “Albert, you bastard, this wasn’t supposed to happen.”

  “Mr. Lethewood!” Juanita had come after him.

  “Magic took everything I had,” Ev said. The marshal’s arm braced him against the wind. He got moving, carrying the weight of his child away from their hometown.

  Just another murder victim, the Everett Burke voice said. Some girl, not Petey.

  His hands, on the girl’s burned skin, told Ev things he’d rather not know. The dead girl—she looked like her grandpa at that age—had her throat cut by someone she’d once cared for. Cremation was postmortem.

  It had been fast, no suffering, not like Albert …

  Albert who? Everett Burke said, and the pain eased.

  Supported by Juanita, Everett bore the murdered girl to the glowing pillars. Nobody special, just another crime victim. She must have been someone to his love interest, the beauty waiting in the wind. She was sobbing through her hand.

  “The pillars are crumbling,” Olive said. “We gotta go.”

  “Yes, let’s get out of here,” he said.

  “Where, Ev?” Patience asked.

  “You decide,” he said, used up now, and she put a hand on his shoulder and led him past Juanita, through the gate.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  DYING, ASTRID REALIZED, WAS weirdly freeing.

  She raised the magical fog bank to the heights of the world, beyond Fyreman reach, and climbed until the sky turned from blue to black. Her mouse brains registered the sight with wonder and terror.

  She extended a tendril, far from Indigo Springs, touching down at the edge of Tacoma, Washington, and swirling eastward. She had to avoid the oceans, to stay away from the destructive salt water. She seeped into trees, lawns, buildings. People inhaled her in cool wafts.

  The volume of escaping mist grew huge, harder to manage. She poured herself over sick cats and dogs, over half-dead rats. Each new ringer increased her control.

  Forming bodies from iced vitagua, she went out into the streets to calm people, to help find those trapped in crashed cars, in earthquake-tumbled buildings. She joined rescues and ran messages.

  Mostly, though, she simply expanded, pushing the magical fog bank east and south, gliding across the United States and Canada. Up north, down south … people infected by the vitagua were showing signs of Befoulment, but Astrid couldn’t worry about that anymore. Either the curse could be broken, or it couldn’t. At least Will was freeing the Roused. Rousing the Roused?

  Soon she had eyes extended into night and daytime at once. She expanded to the edges of the North American coast, to the northern frill of the Alaskan border, up to James and Hudson Bay, down the edge of California and into Mexico. Forests and jungles drank her eagerly.

  As she approached the southern cities, she found them shuttered up, the people hidden indoors.

  That was fine; she wouldn’t force contamination on them.

  Magic continued to pour out of the unreal. Astrid arced high, riding the jet stream, and swept across China, infecting livestock and wildlife alike on the steppes. She seeped into moss, dripped into meadows and crops. She drenched the Gobi, moving west into Europe, south into Africa. She sent ringers into towns and cities, saw TV broadcasts tracking her advance in a hundred different languages. Blue light and storms heralded her approach. Volcanoes erupted. The ground shook. People brawled in grocery stores and rushed home to put on oxygen masks.

  She made mistakes, of course. The earthquakes caused tidal waves, and more than one ringer got swamped in seawater. People shot at her. She ran into open flames: fires and lit cigarettes. She was flammable, so she had to smother the flare-ups with ice storms, burying the flames in frozen clumps of vitagua, smothering out the air—and occasionally freezing people too.

  She stretched out, into lakes, jungles, and grasslands, contaminating animals, leaving tons of iced magic atop mountains to mingle with the snowpack.

  And finally, finally, she was as stretched as she was ever going to get. She was out, all of her in the real; she’d kept her promise, and the Roused were free. She felt an elastic ping, imagined a bungee cord snapping. The unreal was empty, and she was shrinking at last, her volume diminishing as she seeped into the biomass of the living earth.

  Will Forest was calling her name.

  She groped after his voice, finding him in a crater of blasted, blue-stained earth. A few yards from its lip lay a wounded squirrel; she built a ringer around the creature and stumbled down the side of the hole, throwing her vitagua arms around him.

  “How long have we been at this?” The night sky above them was black and full of stars.

  “Less than a week, I think.” He pulled free, running a finger over his chin—to gauge the length of his beard, she realized. “How much damage did I do?”

  “Did we do?” She quashed an urge to lie. “There were quakes, floods, storms. People died…”

  His face went slack.

  She spoke fast. “Practically everywhere I went there was someone with a chantment, Lifeguarding. We saved a lot.”

  “The more, the merrier,” he said, voice thready.

  “We can check the Big Picture.” She didn’t want to see the faces of the d
ead, but if Will needed …

  “I think it’s been pulverized along with everything else.”

  Suddenly it sank in. This hole they were in was the magical well. The ravine was gone. The town was gone.

  “You said it would be okay,” Will said, stunned.

  “It is,” she said. “Will, it’s over.”

  A shaky laugh. “And what do we do now?”

  “Let’s start by seeing what’s left of the unreal.”

  He nodded, taking her hand with a slight flinch. She felt him—not her—make the shift, and suddenly they were there, in the remains of something that might have been the land of the fairies, centuries ago.

  The white grit was gone. In its place was the piled-up wreckage of Pucker Hill: turbines and stone and the remains of the earth lodge, all Ev’s work tumbled and sunk in bluish mud flats that smelled of gingerbread. The wind had been too much for it.

  It was all but dark. Of course, Astrid thought, without that glow from the glaciers, it would be.

  “Nobody left?” Will said.

  “Some of the Roused come back,” Astrid said. “And…”

  He tilted his head, listening. “We end up living here, don’t we?”

  “You want to settle down, remember? And there’s plenty to do yet: chanters to initiate, a whole world to rebuild.”

  “You’re suggesting we get back to work this second?”

  “You’re the well wizard now. You get some say.”

  “I’m the well wizard? What are you?”

  “The dregs of the well?” She wanted to kiss him, but they both knew she was a mouse inside all that vitagua.

  He broke the awkward moment by taking her hand. “We’ll figure something out.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Happy After, right?”

  “Right,” he said, and then: “I love you.”

  She met his eyes, showing him certainty. “I love you too.”

  They walked uphill, out of the muck and onto drier land.

  “I’ve seen this,” Astrid said. “We live here. With your … Will, where are your children?”

  “Still in dreams.” He pulled out the padlock. “Igme got the key, but Bramblegate’s pulverized. I can’t get to him.”

  “I hid our gatemaking chantment in Prague. Katarina has an oncologist friend there. Any idea where Igme went?”

  “Back home? He’s from San Fernando, right?”

  “I’ll look.” She took a ringer to the Philippines, seeking out Igme’s neighborhood and knocking on his mother’s door with as much strength as her small muscles could manage. A cry, a scramble, and he opened the door, enveloping her in a gleeful hug. Aquino was there—they were watching the news and spinning a pebble of letrico from the ambient heat.

  “Any idea how many of us made it?” Aquino asked.

  She shook her head. “Pike will get communications up soon.”

  If Pike survived. Nobody said it aloud.

  By now she had also found Katarina. She and her doctor friend were arguing with a big grizzly bear—one of the Roused.

  “Astrid.” Katarina was clearly relieved to see her. “He says gates belong to these ‘the People.’”

  “Okay,” Astrid said, and then, to the bear: “We need to be able to get around. We’ll negotiate fares at some point, but can we get free rides for … oh, a while?”

  “One moon.” He dipped his shaggy head.

  “Astrid…”

  “We can’t be in charge of everything, Katarina.”

  Katarina fished her old passport out of a drawer, radiating disapproval as she handed it over. The bear examined it, then vanished into the nearest wall. A minute later, gates—of stone this time, rather than thorns—began forming.

  Across the world, one gate took shape within Igme’s house.

  “Where’s Will, Astrid?” he asked.

  “Pucker Hill,” she said. Igme stepped through without hesitating, emerging a moment later beside her and Will.

  “Your children.” He held out the key.

  “Thank you.” Hands trembling, Will took the key from Igme, sliding it into the padlock. There was a scrape; then the lock popped, showering rust flakes into the mud.

  Nothing happened.

  “You’ll need to go to sleep. Talk to Carson and Ellie, lead them out of dreams.” Astrid looked around the mud flats dubiously. “It’s pretty mucky here.”

  “I’ve been up for a week, it’s not going to be hard to pass out.” He hitched himself onto a relatively dry outcropping of stone, shifting uncomfortably, then closing his eyes.

  Rather than watch him doze off, Astrid walked away. Her foot hit something solid sunk in the slime—a stone footlocker full of chantments. The infrastructure stuff for Pucker Hill, she guessed, straining her squirrel muscles to lift its lid. Yes, there was the turbine builder, the cottage maker, food spinners.

  “Igme, look!” Then she saw dawn, glimmering on the horizon.

  Jacks.

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  EVERETT BURKE AND PATIENCE bore the murdered woman’s burnt body to the Atlantic Ocean, to Assateague Island.

  They weren’t alone, of course—about fifty volunteers and several dozen Roused followed them, some carrying wounded Fyremen and Alchemites.

  Mutated gulls swam on the surface of the sea, big and hungry looking. On the beach, the kelp beds had grown mattress thick, buzzing with massive sand fleas. Animal carcasses littered the beach, emitting the lilac-scent of the contaminated dead.

  The girl’s body smelled of it too.

  Everett laid the scorched corpse on a flipped-over rowboat. Rain washed soot off her face, and he couldn’t pretend anymore that it wasn’t Astrid.

  This was it: magic had taken everything he had.

  He stared at her body, counting his dead. If he had known what Albert was up to, all those years ago. Messing with magic, training their kid … how could he not have known?

  He’d have sat there forever if Patience hadn’t screamed.

  Teoquan had come out of the mist with a pair of knife-wielding fox-men. Patience was protecting an unconscious Fyreman, standing between them with her arms out.

  Her eyes met his, pleading for help.

  “What do you expect me to do? Teo doesn’t listen to me.”

  “Ev Lethewood, get over here right now.”

  “You’re the one kept saying Teo had a point,” he said. “That the real world owed the People a debt too big to pay. What’s another slaughter now?”

  “Ev—”

  “They killed my child.” He covered Astrid’s face, then crossed the space between them. “Give me one of those machetes.”

  “Please,” Teoquan said contemptuously, but Ev walked up to one of the fox-furred changelings, a youngster who didn’t look too happy to be standing, knife raised, over a helpless man. He wrestled the weapon out of its paw.

  “What are you trying to prove?” Teoquan said, sneering.

  “What are you? You’re out; you said you wanted out. You want to chop up a helpless Burning Man, shouldn’t I help?”

  “Cry me a river, Ev, you and your crispy-fried baby, you think that’s a fraction of the blood spilled, the pain caused, the debt—”

  “Now who’s whining?” Patience demanded. “Teoquan, you gonna just wipe out the Fyremen? As for you, Ev—”

  “They’ve killed Albert and murdered my child.”

  “Sort of murdered, anyway,” Teo said.

  “Sort of?” Ev pointed at her corpse.

  “What, suddenly you’re stupid? That magical fog bank is moving. Who could do that but Astrid Lethewood?”

  “Will Forest?”

  “You honestly think the cop’s that good?”

  Ev’s voice was thick. “You will not get my hopes up!”

  “Have faith, old man,” Teo said. “Call her.”

  Call her. As simple as that? He opened his mouth … and found himself afraid to try.

  Patience whirled on Teoquan. “You want to play at being a lea
der of men, how about getting your people out of the bloody rain?”

  Teo scowled. “Plenty of time for that.”

  “How would you know? Have you even looked? Eliza would have had them sheltered by now. You killed her, so that makes it your job. People! Let’s spin up a little letrico.… Anyone have a chantment we can use to make food?” She stomped off, leaving Ev and Teo to murder the Fyreman, or not, as they chose.

  Ev sighed. He dropped the machete into the sea.

  Teo slumped. “It pisses me off that it’s you she’s in love with.”

  “Far as I can tell, everything pisses you off,” Ev said.

  He snorted. “I’d blame the curse, but—”

  “But you’re a fundamentally testy old bastard.”

  “Takes one to know one,” Teo said. “Gonna talk to your kid, or what?”

  Ev walked to the edge of a vitagua puddle, finding a mutated otter gasping for breath. “Petey? Astrid?”

  Vitagua bled out of the air, obscuring its body … then forming the figure of his daughter. “Pop—you’re okay?”

  “Dammit, kid,” he said, and the strength went out of his legs. He sat on the beach in the rising storm.

  Astrid put her cold arms around him. “I’m sorry, Pop, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

  Rain lashed over them until one of the Roused came and said they had set up camp, and would they like to come in out of the wind?

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  THE SLOW FOULING OF the earth had come to an end, all right, Juanita thought, remembering the prophecy Gilead had shown her. Too bad for the Brigade they’d never wondered if that might mean the contamination would speed up.

  As for the Fyremen making peace with their enemies … well, it didn’t look like there’d be any of them left to try.

  Most were already dead, overwhelmed despite their potions by the sheer number of contaminated people darting across the widening chasm. A few were merely wounded, and Juanita got to dragging those across the remains of the plaza. Astrid’s people—Lifeguards, they called themselves—were searching them for potions and then evacuating them to safety.