Soul Hunt

by Margaret Ronald

  Maryam took a deep breath and shook her head back and forth like a child in a tantrum, then sank her hands into the spilled sand. Slowly, ridges rose in the sand, first shapeless, then twisting into patterns. Even from here, I could see what she was building: the bay, the harbor, Boston with the Wheel of Taranis surrounding it in the shape of Route 128—and a knot in the harbor, slowly spiraling out into the surrounding waters, a spiral twisting everything awry. “The lines,” she called, her voice raw. “The lines are shifting. Genevieve, the stone—”

  “Babe?” Alison reached past me and tapped Sarah’s shoulder. “I think you need to see this.”

  I glanced at her, but Alison wasn’t looking at the harbor fire. Instead, she was looking up, to where the dim white disk of the sun filtered through the fog.

  Where it had filtered a moment ago. The fog hadn’t gotten heavier, and there weren’t any obvious clouds, but the sun’s light had dimmed. Just a little. Just enough to turn the air brittle and strange, the color of light glimpsed through a grating, the color of a dark day.

  I stretched out my hands and looked at them, at the water past them, at the blank white wall rapidly dimming to gray that was the harbor. They thought it was the world ending, Colin had said. I knew it wasn’t, but I wasn’t sure that knowing what it was made it any better.

  Sixteen

  Sam refused to let Maryam out of his sight until she’d claimed to be all right at least five times and, for some reason, recited the preamble to the Constitution. Of all the tests for lucidity there were, I’d never considered that one, but then again, there were a lot of things I seemed to have missed lately. “Sarah,” I said just as Maryam got to the part about ‘protect the general welfare,’”can you take Maryam home, or even just ashore someplace safe—”

  “Oh no.” Sarah shook her head and planted her feet as if I’d threatened to throw her off the boat. “No, I’m not staying behind to guard the hearthfire this time. Domestic empress I might be”—Alison smiled at what I suspected was an inside joke—“but that’s irrelevant right now. You say something’s hurting the city. Fine. Then I’m coming with you.”

  I gaped at her for a moment. “With me? Christ on a cracker, Sarah, you have no idea what sort of thing we might be up against—”

  “Do you?” I hesitated, and she nodded. “Didn’t think so. This isn’t your city to protect, Evie—it’s not just yours, it wasn’t just the Fiana’s, and it’s not any one person’s or organization’s city. You can go off all lone wolf if you like—”

  “Wrong canine.”

  “Whatever. You can do that, and you can get your ass shot off, and the rest of us can each do the same, and we’ll still end up with the same problem. I didn’t knit together this goddamn neighborhood watch so I could cower inside while you ride the storm.”

  I was silent a moment. Sarah had me dead to rights. Still, this would be dangerous—Roger alone was not someone to fall afoul of, and Dina—

  “First word that something’s gone wrong, you head back. Okay?”

  “No. But I’ll say yes if it’ll make you feel better.”

  I gritted my teeth and nodded. Sarah could be just as stubborn as I am, sometimes. I crouched next to Katie. “You’ll have to go with Alison, though. I’ll call Nate as soon as we’re back.” I hesitated a moment. “He’ll be okay, right?”

  Katie hugged me tight, the top of her head banging into my chin. “Yes,” she said, punctuating it with a sharp nod. Still holding on to me with one arm, she unslung my bag and dropped it at my feet. “He said not to worry about him.”

  Yeah, that wasn’t encouraging. But I had to trust him—trust that he knew what he was doing. I gave her a quick kiss on the forehead and stood back up. “Then you make sure you’re okay too, all right?”

  Alison helped Maryam across the walkway and stood there, one arm around Katie, as Sarah rummaged through the pockets of her coat. “You’ll be fine?” Sarah asked. “I don’t like leaving you like this—”

  “I will,” Alison said, and leaned over to give her a peck on the cheek. “Just be back in time for dinner. You know how I get when you’re late.”

  Sarah hugged her, then paused, glancing down at Katie. “Evie,” she said over her shoulder, “and you—what’s your name again?”

  Rena gritted her teeth. “Llerena,” she said. “Llerena Santesteban.”

  “Yeah, you—” Sarah stopped, staring hard at Rena, then started again. “Give us a moment, okay?”

  I thumped Rena on the back. “Come on. Sam might need our help.” She shook her head, but made her way toward the helm, where Sam was already running through the first checks. I glanced back for a moment, then away, only partly out of a concern for privacy. I still couldn’t stop thinking about Nate, headed God knows where—and to rescue me? From what? He didn’t know about Roger, or Dina, not enough to worry …

  Sam didn’t need any help, so Rena and I ended up at the back of the boat. (I knew there was a special word for it, but I’d spent too little time around Tessie.) “I owe you thanks,” she muttered, not looking at me.

  I glanced at her. “For what? Getting you involved in this?”

  “I got myself involved, thank you very much. Not everything is because of you, girl.” She sighed, the line between her eyebrows reasserting itself, as if bits of the old Rena were only just coming back to the surface. “No. For pulling me out of the burning building, you dumb shit. I owe you thanks—but that’s all I owe you, understand?”

  “Yeah, I understand.” At least she was talking to me. “Thanks.”

  Rena shot a glance sideways at me, then slouched a little, one hand going to the stained spot on her coat where her blood hadn’t quite washed out. “Goddammit, Evie. What is it about me? Why can’t I get away from this shit?”

  I shrugged. “Hell if I know. I thought—I honestly thought you were doing the right thing, before. At least if you wanted to stay out of all this. And I thought I could keep too much of it from getting to you … maybe it’s my fault.”

  “You have no idea how much I’d like to say it was.” She closed her jacket and zipped it up. “Foster’s going to give me seven kinds of hell if I come in tomorrow like this. And I’ll deserve it.”

  We slid out of the marina, passing warehouses and docks that ranged from grubby to slightly less grubby. I glanced back at the city as we pulled away. The dull sunlight was barely adequate for January, let alone what had been a relatively bright day in November, and the fog washed everything into forgetfulness. I rarely saw the city as a landscape—well, you don’t see it when you’re in it, do you? And this was so different from the brilliant, hard view of it I’d seen on the way out here with Deke, different enough that it might have been another city. Or—and a new billow of cloud sank a little lower, obscuring the top of the Customs House—a dream city entirely.

  We passed the still smoldering remnants of the bridge house. A few pilings stuck up out of the water like grasping, blackened fingers. A couple of fire trucks were still there, and I could see figures moving, probably trying to figure out what had destroyed it. Rena too watched it as we passed, and though I couldn’t read the expression on her face, the cold shell she’d worn in that house had been burned away.

  Sarah had joined Sam, muttering on her cell phone, and she wasn’t looking at me. In fact, she was being careful not to, seeing as I had moved directly in front of her. “Who were you calling?” I finally asked.

  She flicked a glance toward me, and for a moment I could actually see her deciding not to be snarky. “Call tree. You think the watch was just for show?”

  “Well, we are talking magicians here,” I said.

  Rena glanced around. “Watch?”

  “Neighborhood watch. Of sorts.”

  Sam laughed, not taking his eyes from the water. “Good luck with that.”

  “That’s what I told her,” I said.

  “You interested in joining?” Sarah asked, ignoring me. “You obviously know enough to be part of the under
current.”

  She didn’t know the half of it, and I saw Sam’s grin turn hard. “No. Swore off it. Too long with other work burned me out.” He spun the wheel, bringing us out into the open harbor. “No, I just help a few friends these days.”

  “That’s what we try to do too.” She gave Rena a long, hard look, then shrugged. “What I just did was start up the call tree, let everyone know that there’s a general threat to the city. Defensive measures, in other words.”

  “You got them to agree on defensive measures?” In theory, getting adepts to collaborate on a single spell could be incredibly powerful, but in practice it was about as likely as getting a hundred cats to perform a trick.

  Sarah laughed, short and derisive. “Hell no! I got them to agree that there ought to be defensive measures, though. So when a general alarm goes out, everyone contacts everyone else. Probably ten percent of them will just hole up entirely, ward themselves off until it’s clear that everything’s safe; the rest will do whatever they think is necessary to guard what they think is important. Which, if I’m right, ought to cover a good deal of the city.”

  “Sounds pretty piecemeal to me,” I muttered.

  “It is. But a patchwork quilt can be as warm as a plain coverlet. Although,” she added, “a crazy quilt might be a better metaphor.”

  We were well out in the harbor now. “Okay,” Sarah said, visibly pulling herself together. “Tell me everything about what we’re up against.”

  So I did, starting with Deke’s plea for aid, moving on through my trip out to Georges and the darkened room, the thief’s hand and the Quabbin. Sarah stirred when I mentioned Meda’s ghost-trap, but didn’t ask any questions, which was good since I couldn’t really answer most of them. I glossed over as much of the bridge house as I dared, given that Rena was still smarting from it, and ended up with how Roger scammed me. “Dina’s the scary one, but I don’t know how much of that is his influence and how much is just her nature.” I thought of the Morrigan, of the Gabriel Hounds, how their freedom had changed them both. Could I hope that it would do the same for her? “Either way, I’d watch out for both of them. If we’re lucky, she’ll still be bound by the bargain I made with her.”

  “You said Dina was his ally?” Sarah sucked breath through her teeth. “That’s not good.”

  “No,” Sam agreed. “There are some things that can’t be dealt with on an even basis. They’re too strong in some ways, we’re too strong in others … bring them together and it gets nasty.”

  “And the stone … Evie, what were you thinking?”

  “Look, call me stupid if you like—”

  Rena, who’d kept a stoic though not disbelieving silence through most of it, finally stirred. “I don’t think you’re stupid.”

  “I do,” Sarah snapped. “Jesus, Evie, did you really believe that crap about a pregnancy? Did you miss out on all the sex-ed classes or did they switch over to the abstinence-only crap—”

  “I didn’t say it was reasonable,” Rena said. “But she wasn’t stupid. I think—look, did your parents give you the talk?”

  Sarah looked blank. “Yeah, when I was eight. And every year after that.”

  “But I’m betting you didn’t have any object lessons demonstrating the downsides. There’s a sort of … of scare about it when you’ve seen one too many friends get screamed at on the way in to the clinic, or end up washed out and married too young. I had the same goddamn paranoia every time I had a boyfriend up till I was thirty, and I’d bet Evie still gets it.” I shrugged; guilty. “That’s what this thing played on. The fears that we don’t even know we have.”

  “Thanks,” I murmured, and Rena nodded. “And that’s what worries me,” I went on. “It’s a lot of talk to say that you should face your fears, but what about the ones you don’t know about? I don’t even know what Dina will do.”

  “I have a guess,” Sam said after a moment, and switched gears. The sound of the motor faded to a purr.

  I glanced at him. “Something wrong?”

  “You tell me.” He pointed ahead. “Is it getting lighter out here?”

  I squinted. Well, no, it wasn’t, not in the sense of actual lights in the distance or anything like that … but the fog no longer had any sense of depth to it, and there was no longer a breeze coming off the ocean, nothing to brush away the clinging damp that seemed to ooze up from our feet and swirled around our lights.

  Rena leaned forward, and her questing fingers encountered only grayness. The lights of the boat splintered and fragmented, coming up flat. “That’s not supposed to happen, is it?” Sarah asked. I couldn’t see the skyline anymore when I looked back, or even any trace of the city.

  “No idea.” The boat rocked a moment.

  I don’t know how to explain what makes fog so much worse than darkness. For me, I didn’t really have too much experience with it—the fog only really rolls in once or twice a year, and where I am, it’s usually cleared enough that it’s only a little extra dampness in the air. Not out here. Staring at that wall of blankness, your mind starts to react to the total lack of sight, creating images that you can’t quite tell are fake, and every now and then the fog will recede just a little, so that what seemed to be just a flicker on your retina is actually a light, farther off, but then the wall rolls back into place and you’re left wondering if it was ever there at all …

  Darkness might be fine for freaking people out, but for wondering what can come next, what’s real and what’s just your brain inventing fears, there’s nothing like fog.

  “Can we go around?” Rena asked after a moment.

  Sam shook his head. “Around how? I can navigate a little of the harbor, but get away from the main channels and I’m in trouble. And we’re not the only ones out here—I don’t just mean your pyro friend, I mean the other ships. They’ll be running into the same trouble, and if they run into us as well, we’ll have problems. And no Mar-bird to warn us out of them,” he added, scratching at the back of his head.

  Screw that. I wasn’t going to let what I couldn’t see keep me from what I could scent. I scrambled over the front of the boat, toward the very tip of it, then closed my eyes and inhaled. “Okay. There’s land ahead of us … that way.”

  Sam glanced at me. “You’re sure?”

  “I can smell grass and scrub trees. Steer the way I’m pointing and keep … yes, keep away from that heading,” I added, pointing with my left hand to about two o’clock. “Ship that way, leaking diesel. I think that’s the only one …”

  Gradually, moving so slowly the boat’s engine groaned, we edged into the fog. I couldn’t spare attention for anything beyond the scents, the traces that barely made any sense this far from land. But so long as there weren’t too many submerged rocks, far enough from the surface that I couldn’t scent them but close enough to drag at the overweighted boat … “Steer right here. Starboard. Whatever. There’s something close by on our left … no greenery, but enough bird shit for twenty statues …”

  “Evie,” Sarah said quietly, “don’t stop what you’re doing, but would you happen to have any iron on you?”

  “Got a pocketknife.” I stopped and, foolishly, opened my eyes. The patterns of scent receded, not out of reach—but that wasn’t the problem.

  I’d been right about the little island, barely a shoulder of land sticking out of the ocean and yes, covered in gull crap. Someone had thoughtfully put a beacon out here, warning ships away, but the light at the top flickered like a guttering green flame. Around it, a scaffold like a shaved-down wooden henge stood. Six dead bodies hung from it, swinging gently in a breeze that had nothing to do with this time and place.

  “Nix’s Mate,” Sam said softly. “Where smugglers were once hanged.”

  No more dead men lingering at Nix’s Mate. Colin had hoped, had maybe lost a friend or two here, and now their—ghosts? imprints?—had been called back. Thieves and smugglers.

  Be not thief but murderer. The old women of my past and present, and Meda’s p
lea unmet. I tried to look away from the hanged men and could not.

  “They’re not real, are they?” Rena asked, and though it’d take a lot to make her actually sound nervous, I thought I heard an edge to it, like an engine starting to overheat. “Tell me they’re not real.”

  “They’re illusions,” I said. “Nothing more.”

  One of the dead men creaked around on its rope to face us, mist pouring from its mouth like rain from a gargoyle. I couldn’t quite see its face, but something about the dark shadow where eyes had once been made me a little less certain. “Not quite,” Sarah said. “Which is why I’m asking about the iron.”

  I started to shake my head, unable to take my eyes off the dead thing, then stopped. “Yes,” I said, fumbling in the bag by my feet. “If I didn’t lose it—yes.” Rough metal snagged on my fingers, and my shoulder twinged at the touch. “Here,” I said, holding out the rough iron hook that Meda had jabbed into my shoulder. I backed up, still watching the men on the gibbet, hoping Sarah could reach me.

  She took it without looking—none of us could look away now, and the creaking grew as one by one the hanged men turned to face us. The hull of the boat slapped against the waves, quieter now, drawn unceasingly closer to the rocks. “By iron I charge you,” Sarah said, and held up the hook. “By what you were I charge you. By the speech of ravens I charge you. Let us pass.”

  “That’s really going to work?” Rena asked. “Just because we ask nicely?”

  “It’s all in how you do it,” Sarah said, still holding the hook up as if it were a passport.

  For a moment the dead men, or their illusions, held still. Then one raised a hand, pointing to the hook, and again the wound in my shoulder twinged. Iron, it said, or I am, or something that Colin might have understood but I did not. And it closed its mouth and turned away, the motion shifting its fellows enough so that their gaze was broken.

  “Now,” Sam murmured, able to look away at last, and gunned the engine. We shot across the flat water, back into the fog. I sat back hard on the deck, sliding on the damp planks, and just remembered in time to point away from the nearest scent of land.