“You wanna know what real magic is?” Roy says, lowering his voice in a conspiratorial way.
“Why don’t you tell me.”
“Real magic’s making someone do what you want them to. All the rest,” he says, waving his hand airily toward the tar pits, “is just recipe.”
Agnes signs her name on his clipboard. “That’s pretty profound.”
Roy nods profoundly. “I can’t take credit for it. Got it from a fortune cookie.”
“Profound fortune cookie.”
“Enh, the lottery numbers were bullshit. Have fun making magic, Aggie.”
She takes her station inside the complex. On the steel tray before her sits a wad of tar matrix the size of a piece of chewing gum. The paperwork says it’s from Pit 24, one of the smaller experimental pits on the edge of the grounds. The hours pass as she performs surgery on it with fine picks and needles, teasing out bone fragments smaller than grains of rice. From here, the bones will go to the workshops where osteomancers use their arcane skills to distill them to pure magic. The bones are from the skull of a Colombian firedrake, and each little sliver is packed with enough firepower to punch a hole in an aircraft carrier.
At the end of her shift, guards come to collect the trays. Agnes goes to the changing room, where more guards watch her and the other processors strip out of their coveralls. They shine colored lights on them, looking for bone dust on their skin, for bits of magic in their hair. Anything they find gets vacuumed off and sent to the osteomancers. Sometimes the workers get a full strip search. Today, they get the wolf.
The first time she laid eyes on him she thought he was terrifying but beautiful, his gray fur frosted with white, his black-rimmed yellow eyes flecked with orange. His long hands are a graceful blend of human and wolf. But that was a year ago, before he started growing his other heads.
A second head is forming out of his right cheek. It already has two eyes. Pink skin shows through a patchy fuzz on its still-rudimentary snout. But the nose is as fully formed as the one on its center head. The left-side head is still just fur and bumps, the eyes still closed, but the nose, again, fully formed.
From poking around, Agnes knows the wolf was just a regular human being once, but for whatever reason the ministry selected him for special treatment. They fed him Cerberus bone until the wolf magic changed his cells and he became a wolf.
In charge of security, the wolf has come around before, but only to watch. This is the first time he’s subjected the workers to his own inspection.
One by one, they come up to him. None of them manage to conceal their nerves. A few visibly shake as the wolf nudges them with his snouts, all three noses twitching and drawing in their scents. He smells their armpits, their crotches, their breath.
“You can go,” he grunts at the end of each inspection, and if anyone takes offense at these invasions, they’re too busy scurrying off to say so.
The wolf trains its stare on Agnes. She swallows the lump in her throat and keeps her fingers rigid so they don’t ball up into fists, and she steps up to take her turn.
She endures the soft pressure of his noses against her as he follows his pattern. Armpits. Crotch. Breath.
It’s the last that makes her most fearful. Her people told her the basilisk tooth they implanted in her gums produced no scent, but did they count on her being inspected by a wolf with three noses?
When he’s done sniffing he draws away, and she finds herself staring into those remarkable lupine eyes. She wants to hold his gaze, to show that she’s not afraid, to dare him to try something. But she remembers the role she’s playing, and she looks down at her feet.
“You can go.”
“Thank you,” she mutters, and just like the others, she gets away as fast as she can.
* * *
—
Agnes pilots her panga through the canals of Los Angeles, joining every single other gondola and dinghy and coracle and speedboat trying to navigate Southern California’s capital. It’s tedious and time-wasting, but she likes floating past the market barges, taking in the smells of peppers and onions and garlic from the stir-fry vendors. And she likes the sounds of the buskers.
The music is particularly nice because the Hierarch keeps the Los Angeles airwaves silent. Ashes of processed meretsegar bones drizzle from the smoky sky, their osteomantic essence drinking noise and blocking radio signals. Muting the broadcasts from the Nevada border makes a kind of sense, since the US signals are propaganda, but the Mexican stations just broadcast music. Why deprive people of music?
After work, Agnes handwrites a report in cipher: Type of bone, amount she processed, amount she estimates processed by her co-workers. She inserts the note into the coupon pages in the afternoon edition of the Herald Examiner and leaves it in the hollow of a tree in Culver City Veteran’s Park for her operator to collect.
And that’s a day’s work.
Given the firedrake and other munitions being processed from the Tar Pits, she’s pretty sure the Kingdom of Southern California is preparing for war against the north, but that’s for others to determine. Agnes isn’t an intelligence analyst. She’s just a spy.
* * *
—
The department manager approaches Agnes’s work station. “Ms. Santiago, may I see you in my office?”
Agnes answers to the name as easily as if it were her own. Before she came to the south, she’d spent three months responding to it in preparation.
The eyes of the other preparators track her as she follows the manager out. Working in the ministry means sometimes your coworkers get called away to a meeting and never return to their workstation, or to their home. The merest suspicion of wrongdoing can earn one a “transfer.” And there are abundant reasons to transfer Agnes.
Sebastian Blackland closes his office door and gestures her into the chair opposite his desk.
He’s twenty-seven, a tired-looking Anglo with eyes the color of roasted cashews, both the whites and the irises. It means even at his age he’s already eaten a lot of magic. If she has to kill him, it won’t be easy. She likes his face but she does not like him, because he’s very handsome and she doesn’t know if his good looks come naturally, from cosmetic surgery, or from cosmetic magic. This is Los Angeles, and with the magically privileged it’s hard to know.
A cardboard file box sits on the desk, and his bookshelves have been emptied.
She decides to delay any accusations of her being a foreign intelligence agent, not so much for any tactical reason, but because no matter how it ends, it’s going to be an unpleasant conversation, and not even spies like their mornings unpleasant.
“Are you leaving us?” she asks.
“Ah, yes. The box. You noticed. I’ve been transferred…I mean…a good transfer.”
She’s never had a conversation with Blackland, so she didn’t know he was awkward. She should have expected this. The reports have him pegged as more of a scholar than a bureaucrat. She knows he’s single, doesn’t go out much, spends most of his off time in the archives. He’s considered a talent and might be a star if he had better political inclinations.
“I’m going to the Ossuary,” he continues. “An R and D position.”
She congratulates him, wondering when he’s going to point his finger at her and scream, “J’accuse!” At which point she will use her tongue to push the ceramic first premolar from her upper jaw and spit it in Blackland’s face. The ceramic will shatter, releasing finely powdered basilisk fang with a street value of 95,000 Northern Kingdom dollars. Blackland’s face and skull will bubble and dissolve into a noxious, sticky goop.
“So, the reason why I…The thing I was wondering…” Blackland takes a breath, gathering himself. He seems apologetic. Embarrassed, even. He rubs the back of his neck. “Listen. I know you’re a spy.”
The tip of Agnes’s tongue rests against
her molar.
“I’m the only one who knows,” he says.
Agnes just keeps staring at him.
“The thing I was wondering…”
“Are you going to ask me to sleep with you?” she says through gritted teeth.
He winces and shakes his head. “No. No, I know that’s how this sounds. I’m not that kind of…”
She waits.
Agnes is patient.
To a point.
“Tell me what you want, please, Mr. Blackland.”
He lets out a breath. “I want to defect.”
* * *
—
Couples stroll the Pacific Ocean Pier. They hold hands and munch on floofs of cotton candy. Everyone’s wearing their nicest clothes, from the wine-colored velvet sportscoats and spangled dresses of the disco kids to the crisp blue uniforms of soldiers on leave from the Bakersfield territories. People are having fun. Agnes reminds herself how easy it can be to forget, or at least set aside, the ever-present loom of the Hierarch’s regime. Maybe that’s not a bad thing.
She rides with Sebastian Blackland in a steel-and-glass bubble suspended from a cable over the surf. They look like they’re out on a date. Agnes insisted they meet in a neutral location, one where they could speak in private, and the Ocean Skyway ride is perfect.
“How’d you know I’m a spy?”
Sebastian taps his nose. “I smelled you.”
Agnes makes a face. She still has the option of using her poison tooth.
“I mean, your workspace. You’ve left enough essence at your workspace for me to realize you don’t smell like anywhere in Southern California I know.”
“What do I smell like?”
He closes his eyes and inhales.
“Different earth. Different water. Different air. It’s all there in your bones. And I’ve smelled Northern Californians before.”
“Prisoners of war?”
She says it with venom, but he just nods matter-of-factly.
She looks down on the wriggling reflections of electric lights in the ocean.
“Who else knows about me?”
“Nobody,” he said. “I didn’t tell, and I’m the only osteomancer in the office. Or was. My replacement comes in on Monday.”
“What about the wolf?”
“He’s head of security, but it’s my department. He works for me. If he suspected anything, he’d report it to me.”
“You seem confident in his diligence and loyalty.”
“He’s dependent on me. I’m the one who prepares his Cerberus bone and authorizes its use. Without me, he doesn’t get to be a wolf.”
“That’s something I don’t get,” Agnes says. “Why does he want to change? What makes a person wake up one day and decide they want to be a three-headed wolf?”
“You mean beyond having the power of a three-headed wolf? I don’t know. Different people, different reasons. Sometimes magic transforms, turning you from one thing into something else. Sometimes it distills, making you the purest version of what you are.”
This is good, Agnes thinks. Getting into the head of a Southern California osteomancer without having to abduct and interrogate is a job well done.
“So, what do you get out of magic?” she asks.
He shrugs. “I’m an explorer, not a philosopher.”
He leaves it there.
“So, the wolf doesn’t know I’m a spy. You know, but you’re not going to narc on me because you need me. Which means my position is safe.”
“I’m afraid not. My replacement has a good nose, too. I instructed the night cleaners to bleach and vacuum your space, but if you’re still working there once she takes over, she’ll find you out.”
“How are you explaining the need to sterilize my workspace?”
“I cited concerns about your work hygiene.”
Agnes bristles. Her job is just for cover and access, but she takes pride in the quality of her work. When she had her first job as an ice cream scooper, her scoops were as close to the prescribed 3.5 ounces you could get without being a machine.
“Come Monday,” he continues, “you’ll start to leave traces again. You’re going to have to find somewhere else to work or risk discovery.”
“You said you want to defect. Why? You’re an osteomancer on his way up. The Ossuary. That’s an elite post. You’ll be set up financially, socially; you’ll get to play with the best bones. What’s the downside?”
She’s expecting a rehearsed answer, so she’s surprised when he begins haltingly: “What’s magic good for?”
“Weapons, obviously. Also, medicine, love potions, recreation, strengthening physical materials, social control…I could use up a lot of air going on. But the Hierarch’s top priority is weapons. That’s what we’re making in the lab you supervise. I presume that’s what you’ll be making in the Ossuary.”
“You’re thinking like a rational person,” Sebastian says. He’s looking down at the same wriggling lights Agnes is, but she wonders if he’s seeing something else. Maybe he can see the magic down there below the water, below the sand, way down past mud and rock to the fossils of the oldest osteomantic creatures, down to the flaming heart of the dragon in the center of the Earth. Osteomancers can be weird like that.
“Magic is coin,” he says. “It’s incredibly powerful, and beautiful, and transformative. But to people like the Hierarch, it’s just a chit. He’ll push down anyone—rival osteomancers, his own people, your people. He’ll kill anyone and destroy anything, just as long as he ends up with the most chits. And he’s really, really good at it.”
“So, you want out.”
“Yes,” he says, his face closing down. “I want out.”
Agnes stays silent a long time. She wants him to think she’s thinking about it. She wants him to think there’s a chance she might help him.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she says.
* * *
—
Agnes contacts her handler in the North, and they agree she should tender her resignation at the Tar Pits. She cites family reasons. Nobody tries to talk her out of leaving, and there’s no signed card or cake in the break room. Her empty chair at the workbench is filled almost before she lifts her butt off it. She doesn’t get to say goodbye to Roy the security guard.
A post preparing fossils at the Tar Pits is useful for gathering intel, but having a personal association with an osteomancer at the Ossuary is even better. So, for now, her job is Sebastian Blackland.
For the last several weeks she’s met him daily at the amusement pier. They eat cotton candy and do the Davy Jones Locker ride and compete at throwing things for midway prizes. Agnes always wins, always to Sebastian’s applause. To anyone looking, they appear to be a couple in the early days of courtship. Agnes’s had lovers but never dated before, and sometimes she gets confused if it’s dating if you do things people do on dates but for reasons other than romance.
“Here’s a new thing,” he says, taking her hand.
They stand, shoulders touching, at the end of the pier. The carousel lights reflect in his glasses.
His hand is soft and warm, his grip gentle. She feels the glass ampule tucked in his palm. She finds herself curiously reluctant to break contact with him, but she does so abruptly and pockets the ampule.
“It’s powdered sint holo skull,” he tells her. “It imparts essences of invisibility.”
“It really works?”
“I could have eaten a pinch, walked up to you and stolen your wallet, and you’d have never even known I was here.”
I’m glad you didn’t, because I like seeing you, she comes dangerously close to saying.
She’s not sure when this happened. Somewhere between the meeting when she told him she could help him defect and their third meeting, when she said it was contingent o
n him proving to her superiors he was worth the effort by smuggling bone out of the Ossuary.
“Sint holo is tricky to process,” he tells her, “but I assume your guys back home can reverse engineer it. I could write it down, but the magic’s not in the recipe. It’s in the smell. The feel.”
“They’ll work with what I give them,” Agnes says.
“The Ossuary’s got me moving on to other projects, but I plan to keep working with sint holo. It’s got some interesting properties just beyond my ability to smell. If there’s anything there, I’ll find it.” His eyes get big. He gets excited.
At first Agnes thought his enthusiasm was part of a pitch to convince her how valuable he could be to her government, but now she sees it’s just how he is. He loves being a wizard. He’s a magic nerd.
She wants to hold hands again, but now that he’s delivered the ampule, she’d have to contrive a new excuse.
“It sounds like they’re happy with you there.”
He smiles, bashful. “They’re afraid of me. When you get to the level of the Hierarch’s Ossuary, afraid is better than happy.”
“It’s that cutthroat?”
“Almost literally. To work with bone, you have to eat bone. After a while, the magic starts to collect in your system. Your body becomes a store of it. Which makes an osteomancer a resource that can be consumed.”
“That’s cannibalism,” she says, expecting him to deny it.
But he doesn’t.
Agnes turns to him and studies his face. She looks past his good looks, past his courage and willingness to take risks, and she sees his disgust. She sees his anger.
“Have you—?”
“Not yet,” he says. “But my work’s been noticed. There will be promotions. High-level osteomancers know about me. Maybe even the Hierarch himself.”
“And you’ll be expected to eat other osteomancers.”
He tries to hide what he’s feeling. He’s not bad at it. But Agnes is better at figuring people out from what they conceal than he is at concealment.
The Book of Magic Page 41
