I locked up the car, then swung my messenger bag over my shoulder and crossed the road. The drive split about twenty yards in, one fork winding about the mansion, one sinking down the hill to the shore of the Quabbin, flat and cold. A flock of starlings chattered overhead as I reached the edge of the water, where a little inlet had once been fenced off. The land here wasn’t so much a shore as a mud slick; time and water hadn’t yet turned hillside into beach, and wouldn’t for decades more. I eyed the sky—still gray, but with the heaviness of rain that would spite everyone by not falling, and unnaturally warm for the season—and tucked my pack under a bush, then stripped down to Venetia’s suit. At the very last I picked up Dina’s token, the fingers of a thief, and held them like a baton in my left hand.
The water on my toes was warmer than I expected, or maybe that was just the effect of cold air making everything else feel warm by comparison. Up to my knees, now, and the ground underfoot was not just squishy but slimy, crawling with weeds and other underwater things. I shuddered and splashed forward a few more steps, in the hope that getting it over with quickly would help.
Nope. My teeth chattered, but not from the water’s temperature. Every time I closed my eyes, even for just a blink, the water shivered around me, becoming icy quarry water, runoff in a great pit, thick with ferns and magic … I shuddered as it closed around my calves, my legs, slopping up against the small of my back. My breath was coming in ragged gasps by the time the water reached my breasts. I took a deep breath, then submerged completely—
—and the water around me was only water, only the Quabbin, only the Swift River that had filled a valley. No longer anything to be afraid of. Like a soap bubble popping, like a leash snapping, the chill was gone. Only water.
It was still quite capable of giving me hypothermia, though. I surfaced, scraping hair out of my eyes, and sought for that scent again. Yes. Only a hunt now, and one that was challenging enough in these circumstances. I grinned, spat, and struck out away from shore.
The thief’s scent ebbed, but not because I’d gotten away from it. I was on top of it—but diving revealed nothing but a few stones about twenty feet down, and that was as much as I could tell before my lungs tried to escape out my ears. Not that I didn’t try several times, finally cursing and rolling onto my back while I rested my arms.
Something twitched against my left hand: the oilcloth, and the fingers in it. I paused a second, my teeth chattering—was this what they meant by the first stages of hypothermia involving bad judgment?—and shifted my grip. The fingers twitched again, then jerked down, a ghostly hand in mine, pulling me under. I caught my breath, kicking to stay afloat.
There were things that could travel outside worlds—the Gabriel Hounds and their silver road, the things that not even the Triplets would dare call up, magicians long severed from their bodies. I didn’t know how much I trusted these things, but Meda had found me before. Let her find me now, then. Let her lead me on, and where she was, I might find the sunstone.
The hand tugged again at mine, a gentle pull this time, encouraging. I clasped the hand tighter and dove—
Into clear air, and a town long forgotten.
My feet brushed tall dry grass, waving slightly in a wind that was no longer present. No more than a few feet away that grass turned to pondweed, waving in a current of a different sort. Above, the light fluctuated between the green-gold of dark water and a strange, attenuated glow like sick sunlight. Whatever spell this was, I was carrying it with me.
I let out my breath carefully, and no water rushed in to take its place. Good. Even better, my talent was still present, which put this situation well ahead of the flash in the wine cellar. Following the pattern of scents in this envelope of time was difficult, like reading a page that had most of the ink leached out of it. But there were patterns, nonetheless, and not just ones that my brain had cobbled together to make sense of this place. Hay, apples, cows … stone and mortar, freshly laid …
I drifted as I walked, the buoyancy of the water not quite gone, so that I skimmed over the ground. The shape of a building loomed out of the murk, first as nothing, then as a spectral, ruined husk, then, as I got right up close to it, as an intact stone wall. I looked from the wall to the edge of the water, where this space ended, and saw the rest of the building blurring in and out of reality. This barn had long been knocked down to make way for the water, but this remnant of magic still preserved it after a fashion.
The thief’s scent remained, stretched and faded, no longer tinged with tar but with cow shit, the heavy livestock scent like a skewed filter. I closed my eyes to get a better lead, then gasped as pressure thundered against my ears. When I opened my eyes, the space I walked in had shrunk by half. I yelped, and it bulged out again, restoring the wall to its memory and the sky to its unhealthy light.
Okay. So whatever magic was being done here, it was in some way dependent on attention. Nice to know. I wondered how long I could keep from blinking.
Ahead, past the cows—even they were here, ghostly against the field, memories of memories, and dull in this light. As I reached the edge of town—a few outbuildings, a steeple that flickered in and out of memory—I realized I’d seen light like this before: filtering through a grate set in a Boston street, into a smuggler’s tunnel.
“We thought it was the end of the world.”
I jumped back, skidding across what felt like both damp hay and lake-bottom muck. A shape flickered back and forth beside me, like a badly damaged film, and one shadow of an arm reached to my own hand. I started to pull away, but paused, trying to focus on him. As I did so, he became clearer, the pressure of attention bringing him forward more clearly.
He was dressed in an old peacoat fastened together with toggles, and the corner of his shirt was homespun, stained from years of use. A gold ring gleamed in his ear, and his hair was slicked back and twisted into a knob at the back of his head. While he wasn’t handsome, there was a certain look to the set of his jaw that I thought I recognized.
What was it Nate had once said? Wear the same expression on your own face long enough, you’ll learn to recognize it on others. Which meant that here was another stubborn son of a bitch.
“It wasn’t the end,” he said, his lips curling in remembered amusement. “Even the town council agreed, and they said that the Lord would have to wait for the day’s business to end. And Meda knew. For all that her master deemed her a talking dog, Meda knew.”
He paused at the edge of a drystone wall. To either side, it stretched out past the envelope of time—one of the few structures that hadn’t been knocked down. If I squinted, I could just see the pale line of the stones in the water of the Quabbin, mossy and slick. “Meda knew much.”
I followed him over the wall, bouncing a little as I came down. I was no longer cold. Was that a bad sign? Or was that part of this spell, this fragment of unreality that insulated me from the Quabbin?
The man—the thief whose fingers I’d carried—walked on, paying no attention to how I floated beside him. At his feet, the weeds and muck of the Quabbin gave way to flat stones, set in a gently arcing path that unrolled in the dry space below my feet. I squinted ahead to see only the barest ghost of a building. It must have been gone long before the towns were bought, before they were even official towns …
“She knew I’d failed,” the thief said, and I remembered in time to keep my attention on him. “If I’d brought her with me, maybe … but I wouldn’t risk her. Not if it meant I’d lose her.”
He paused on the path. My feet didn’t quite touch the flagstones, but his did, and he scuffed one against the edge of a stone. “I’d never say these things to another were I alive. So I must be dead.” He glanced back at me, the first notice he’d really taken of me, and smiled again.
And now I recognized some of what was going on. I was haunted, to put it shortly. This was an imprint, like the ghost rooms left in houses or the emotional remnants left by some great event. But unlike those, this was a pu
rposeful, driven imprint. A skilled magician had constructed this imprint, this haunting, to latch on to whoever came looking.
Meda knew much, all right.
A shadow in the water flexed, then configured itself into a tiny house, its shutters stained red. Someone had painted a set of symbols over the door as well: Greek, I thought, but not the kind that either a modern or ancient Greek would decipher. I took a step closer to the door, then paused. Somewhere within, a woman’s voice recited, quiet and steady, without the watery echo that followed every other sound down here.
Careful, Evie, I thought. You might not have enough breath to get back to the surface if someone yanks the spell away.
With that in mind—and with a worried glance at the roof of the house; would it disappear in time for me to get out?—I stepped inside.
The house was small, only two rooms, with a swept-dirt floor and furniture dark with age and use. A low fire burned in the hearth, pale against the brightness of the day (and, beyond it, the darkness of the Quabbin loomed), and a rack above it held a small pot that made bubbling noises as it slid further into reality. The smell from it was thin and unappetizing: chicken broth, spiced with onion. Strange fare for this temporary summer day, and stranger for it to be unattended. The whole thing looked a little like an illustration out of my fifth-grade history textbook, or one of the photos our teacher had taken from the class trip out to Old Sturbridge Village. (I’d missed the trip—detention for making Jimmy Parkinson eat the dead caterpillar he’d tried to put in my lunch.)
I turned away from the kitchen (and parlor, and living room, it looked like) to the only other room, from which the woman’s voice continued. “Each saw by turns,” she read as I entered, her speech broad with an accent I didn’t recognize. “And each by turns was blind.”
She was in a rocking chair by the window, a book on her lap that was so well-worn it could easily have been mistaken for the Bible in other households. I was pretty sure it wasn’t, even though the language sounded about right. And she was definitely the same woman I’d seen under the North End, holding aloft a lantern at the end of a smuggler’s tunnel, her dark skin a contrast to the faded pink cotton of her smock. Years had softened the proud line of her chin and bleached her hair to a salt-and-pepper frizz, bound back under a sagging kerchief. For the first time I caught her scent, muted in this envelope of the past: sparks of fireworks, wound about with sage and baking bread. The two latter scents seemed to neutralize the mark of magic on her, not because they were domestic but because they were uncorrupted, benign.
For a moment I thought of Katie, of what I’d told her about inviting magic into one’s home. This woman could prove me wrong, I thought, and felt a pang for how much I’d scared Katie. I owed her an apology.
Ignoring the woman, the thief slid his hand out of my grasp. For a second I groped after it, fumbling through air and water both. But he had faded, and a second later I saw why.
Now the man I knew as the thief lay on the bed, tucked under a quilt of faded red cloth. But that epithet no longer quite applied to him: here was a farmer, a worker, a husband or father maybe. He was very old; his hair was gone entirely, the dome of his skull spotted by age, and the collar of his nightshirt revealed a tuft of white hair at his throat. His hands lay folded on his lap, one whole, the other long twisted into a broken, three-fingered claw.
And he was looking straight at me.
I halted in the door, losing my footing slightly and hovering a moment between steps. Hesitantly, I looked behind me on the off chance that I’d timed my visit to coincide with another’s. Nothing. I turned back, and he met my eyes, and nodded, smiling. “Eh,” he said, his voice creaking but not unhappy, “it’s been forty-odd years, and I expected long before now that someone would come looking for it.”
The woman glanced up, and her gaze passed over me without the slightest hitch. “Colin?”
“Peace, Meda. It’s naught but sight.” He smiled at me, and I could see that a cataract glazed one of his eyes. “Go back to your reading, and see it through for me. You will do that, at least?”
She smiled at him, a fond and regretful smile, and leaned over so that she could reach across the counterpane and pat his leg. She had her own pains, though; she grimaced and pressed one hand against the small of her back as she sat up. “That I will,” she whispered, and turned the page.
It was a short exchange, but something about it felt terribly private. But the two of them seemed not to care that I watched, and the only effect was to make me supremely uncomfortable about appearing in front of them in a—I checked; the past might hold me, but it had changed nothing about me—red-striped monstrosity of a swimsuit. I started to cover myself, realized how little that would help, and made myself stand like the ghost he thought I was.
Colin saw the movement, and his smile widened briefly, became for a second both wicked and joyous. “Sit,” he said, raising one hand to gesture to the bed. “I’ve visited with angels enough in these last few days, ‘twill do me good to know if one has substance more than what’s in my mind.”
I smiled and shook my head, but came to stand between him and Meda. Meda, not seeing me, kept reading, and continued even when he began to speak over her, perhaps used to it. “We knew,” he said slowly, his piebald gaze coming to rest on me, “that it wasn’t gone. After the shipwrecks on Lovells, the lovers frozen by the stones, I knew—but I did cripple it, and I did hurt it, and that was enough for these on forty years. No more dead men lingering on Nix’s Mate. No more that claimed more dead. That, at least, we accomplished.” He sighed, long and slow. “There was naught we could do but hide, and hide we did, out away from the ocean, where the sun would not go dim and the eyes not find us.”
I opened my mouth to try to speak, but for just that fraction of a second the air I tasted was heavy with water and weeds. Meda’s magic was weakening under the pressure of water and time.
Colin looked at me, still smiling, then at the woman. “Eh, Meda, and we did have a good run of it, didn’t we?” She, either used to these outbursts from him or patiently tolerant, turned the page and didn’t look up. “I once thought it could be hidden forever,” he went on, not much louder than her recitation. “But Meda knew better, and I’d bled on the eye, after all I’d seen.” He brought his mutilated hand up to his face, pointing to his cataract-white eye. “Such sight doesn’t go from me, even when I’d have it gone. Meda wove this mantle of dreams for who came seeking, that only one strong enough to do what must be done would find it. And you, now, you know some of that, don’t you?”
Not really, I thought. But he was an old man, and dying, and sometimes it was better to comfort than to cajole. “I do,” I said, and though the sound never made it past my lips, he understood.
“Then you know as I that some things stay unhidden, if their owners want them back.” I nodded, touching the flat, shiny scar at my throat where the Horn had been. “It’d have to come out in time, though we buried it deep. Even if we’d hidden it beneath water—” I looked up involuntarily at that, at where the low roof of their house faded into blackness. “Water, then? How long?”
Another question I couldn’t quite answer, partly since I didn’t know when this had taken place. “Two centuries,” I said, but had to swallow as water trickled in between my lips. I didn’t have much time left.
“Hundred years,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he was repeating me, or if he’d misheard, or just guessed from reading my lips. “That’s worth this loss, then,” and he raised his maimed hand. “Worth it and more. Ay, Meda, the world will last another hundred-ought years and more, and we did our part to keep it living. Not what the town council thought, when the sun went out, was it?” He chuckled, and I caught the last flicker of a smile on Meda’s face when I glanced over my shoulder.
For a long moment Colin lay silent, slumped back into the pillow. Meda kept reading, and tranquil as the scene was, I still lacked any scent of the sunstone. Was there a trace of Dina in this roo
m, maybe? An echo of its former owner? I’d need to seek it more diligently, and I didn’t dare if taking my attention away meant that the water would come back—
“The hearth,” Colin said without opening his eyes. “We thought that fire would keep it hidden, and it did, and if you are no phantom then water too has kept it hidden. And now you come seeking it, and if Meda has brought you this far, then she has seen that you are capable of the last step.” His eyes flickered open, and he stared unmoving at the ceiling. “Have no fear. It—the gray ones, they love fear, and it is not enough to be a thief. It is not enough.”
Valuable advice, maybe, but I was already at the other end of the room, scrabbling at the hearth. This one had no fire, maybe since the quilt kept him already too warm, but when my fingers touched it they didn’t touch stone. They sank into muck and weeds, silt drifting up past my face in the negative, grimy twin to fairy dust. The room warped around me, Colin fading and reforming as memory held him in place, but Meda’s voice never ceased. “And stole their mutual light,” she read, her words holding me in this one place, keeping me in the space where I could breathe.
I dug deeper, yanking fronds out of the way, tearing my nails across stone. The flat stone of the hearth was still intact under water, though slick with slime and lake-bottom muck. I scrabbled around till I found an edge, and pried, my fingernails giving way with a twinge and the muscles of my back echoing them. The hearth-stone—still to my eyes dry and clean, chiseled around the edges with more of the bastard Greek that lined the lintel—creaked and shifted, finally sliding away from me and sinking edge-first into the mud.
Soul Hunt Page 17
