“If I’m lucky, I’ll be eating some wizards,” he says.
“And if you’re unlucky?”
He smiles. She can tell he finds the attempt painful.
“Unlucky is what happens to other people.”
* * *
—
Agnes was six years old when the Southern Hierarch burned down her neighborhood.
Fresno wasn’t a small town, but it was nothing compared to San Francisco, the Northern Kingdom’s capital. Her father worked in a stationery shop in the Tower District. He didn’t own it, didn’t even manage it, just worked there. But it meant every September Agnes got to pick out a new three-ring binder and a plastic zipper-bag to fill with new pencils and blunt scissors.
Her mother was a waitress at the chicken pie shop on Olive. It was done up in a chicken-themed décor, and the milk came out of a big stainless-steel refrigerated dispenser. Even now, Agnes can’t articulate what was magical about the binders and the milk dispenser, but they were important to her.
One day, way down in the Southern Kingdom, the Hierarch climbed to the top of Mount Whitney, more than fourteen thousand feet up, and from there, he breathed dragon fire.
Most of the flames landed in San Francisco. Chinatown, the Haight, the Mission, all lost. The Golden Gate Bridge turned to slag and slipped into the sea in piles of steam. More than twenty thousand people died.
Not all the Hierarch’s flames met their intended targets. Some fell short. Maybe those were just him warming up.
Agnes was at school when two bursts hit Fresno. The one that incinerated the Tower District took both the stationery shop and the chicken pie shop. It took both her parents.
Agnes remembers clutching a three-ring binder to her chest as chickens ran, their feathers on fire. In this memory, the flames rose from the pyre of her mother’s and father’s corpses. The flames didn’t touch her, but she screamed as if burned. She understands that this is probably not a true memory, but a cruel amalgamation cooked up in a waking nightmare.
In any case, her parents were dead, and she was alive and alone.
Unlike San Francisco’s losses, Fresno’s weren’t overwhelming enough to create a housing crisis. They didn’t have to erect tent cities and deploy rusting tanker holds as refugee camps. But there was still the matter of what to do with a six-year-old orphan.
The answer was the girls’ school. In a manor house tucked away among Napa Valley vineyards, she found a second home. They gave her clean white shirts and plaid skirts and a blue blazer bearing the crest of the Northern California wizard-queen.
At first there were lessons in math and reading and lots of play and music. Mostly what she learned that first year was to feel safe in the care of her teachers, and to find comfort in the company of her classmates.
In her second year they started on foreign languages and the dialects of the Southern Kingdom.
In the third year, physical training began in earnest.
In the fourth year they added martial arts, drama, and deportment.
First aid and poisons came in the fifth year.
In the sixth year, there were munitions and sabotage.
Defense against magic began in the seventh year.
Shooting and knife skills were added in the eighth.
In the ninth year, driving lessons.
In the tenth year, the manticore came to visit.
Agnes and all the girls who’d been with her since her arrival at the school lined up in the gymnasium, chins high, backs straight, all of them strong and smart and sharpened to brilliance.
The manticore entered, and it took all of Agnes’s training not to wither. The creature—her name was Lady Olympia Tillmon, Agnes would later learn—stood nearly seven feet tall. She gleamed in a coat of golden fur. Her face was more lioness than human, and trailing behind her on the parquet basketball court floor was a segmented tail of hard, black shell. At its tip was a sickle-shaped barb.
Compared to the other osteomantically enhanced people Agnes had seen, with their subtle reptilian or avian or piscine qualities, Lady Olympia was a true expression of what magic could do. Of what a person could become if transformed into something else or distilled down to their essence.
The manticore had two functionaries with her. They wore the wizard-queen’s crest and followed the manticore with clipboards as she made her way down the line of girls. Some girls, the manticore barely looked at. Others, she loomed over for endless minutes, eyes narrowed in some kind of silent examination. She gave each girl a designation, which her functionaries marked on their clipboards.
Two girls were designated “Enhancement.”
The next three were “Queen’s Guard.”
Another was “Intelligence,” which by now Agnes thought they’d all been training for.
It went on like that, each girl assigned one of those three categories, until the manticore got to Agnes.
Up close, right in front of her, Lady Olympia was glorious. Her smallest movements triggered tectonic shifts of muscle beneath her glowing fur. She was a top predator with human intelligence and a position of influence in the government. No one could threaten her. No one could dream of doing her harm. A calm certainty descended on Agnes. The manticore was what she wanted for herself, and she knew she would be selected for Enhancement, and she’d be fed magic and be transformed into something that couldn’t be hurt by the flames.
The manticore examined Agnes longer than she had any of the other girls.
“This one comes with me,” she said. The functionaries marked their clipboards, and the manticore moved on to the next girl.
* * *
—
Agnes stands across the canal from Cupid’s Hot Dogs in Van Nuys. She waits for the pedestrian drawbridge to lower and beats the blinking WALK sign to the other side of the canal. There, she stands on the pavement and waits until she feels no one’s paying any attention to her. She drops the ampule of sint holo serpent bones Sebastian Blackland gave her into the canal. She has no clear idea what happens to it from here. Maybe her masters have cracked the code of the Southern water mages’ canal system and know how to bring the vial to them. Maybe they’ve got some aquatic creature down there that collects the bones and swims it all the way to Northern California. All she knows is that the Southern canal system forms a labyrinth that sprawls over the entire Southern Kingdom, generating massive amounts of elemental water magic. William Mulholland built it almost a century ago, and his command of it makes him the Hierarch’s rival. Maybe Mulholland’s secretly working with the North to topple the Hierarch from his throne.
Agnes doesn’t have to know. Her job remains Sebastian Blackland.
* * *
—
She sits beside Sebastian in his newly acquired boat, docked in the shadow of a 405 flumeway overpass. They’re sharing messy burritos and chips and salsa from Tito’s Tacos, and Agnes has to concentrate to avoid spilling beans and cheese on the leather seats of Sebastian’s vintage 1946 mahogany-hulled Speedliner. He claims he bought it to keep up appearances, as Ossuary osteomancers are expected to maintain a certain lifestyle. Agnes thinks he bought the boat because it’s expensive, and after four months at the Ossuary, he can afford it. His clothes are tailored now, too. She wonders how much he’ll change as she keeps stringing him along.
“Here,” he says, passing her a paper packet as casually as though handing her the salsa.
“What’s this?” She tucks the packet in her bag.
“Something happened at work today.” He looks out over the Speedliner’s bow. Usually he looks at her when he talks. “There’s this osteomancer, Todd Taylor. I swear, that’s really his name. A wizard named Todd Taylor. He’s my age, been at the Ossuary for about a year. Not much longer than me. I wouldn’t call him a nice guy, because that’s not the kind of person who works at the Ossuary. Or if you
are a nice guy, you hide it.”
She wants to ask Sebastian if he’s been hiding it, but she decides to let him talk. He’s still not looking at her, and the words are coming out with difficulty, as if he’s trying to read a script but the lines are blurry.
“This morning, we get called into a meeting. It’s in the claw chamber. Have I told you about the claw chamber?”
Agnes nods, but Sebastian doesn’t see it, because he’s not looking.
“They call it that because of the table. It’s a slab of granite the size of a Ping-Pong table, resting on four serrated claws. The claws have got to be three feet long each. They’re from a Pacific firedrake. Do you see what I’m saying? All that magic, all that wealth, just to hold up a table.”
Agnes can’t maintain her silence any longer. “Why are you telling me about a table?” What she meant to say was, “Sebastian, are you okay?”
“Right. It’s just a table. Anyway. Todd Taylor. Todd’s at the meeting. His tie’s on crooked, like he was in a rush putting it on for the meeting. I straightened Todd Taylor’s tie.”
She waits.
“They threw him down on the table, cut him from throat to groin, and we had lunch. I’m the new guy, so I only got a distal phalanx. That’s a finger bone.”
“I know what a goddamn distal phalanx is,” she says. Then she rests a hand on his shoulder. He’s shivering.
“I’m going to get you out of there,” she says.
* * *
—
She walks to her one-bedroom apartment with a bag of Cupid’s chili cheese dogs in hand. In the two years since infiltrating LA, she’s managed to make this place home. Her furniture is all thrift shop finds, but in good condition. Throw pillows and blankets make things soft and comfortable, a shabby chic for lounging and for stashing her arsenal of bladed weapons.
In the space that’s neither kitchen nor living room but not separate enough to be called a dining room, she sits down at her only table with her Cupid’s and a glass of wine. She would almost literally kill for a sip of a Napa Valley vintage, because the wine in Southern California is pretty awful. At least it’s cheap, and it goes well with chili and cheese and airy white hot dog buns.
She opens her makeup compact. The case is just plastic, but the powder is ground eocorn bone. The eocorn was a deeply osteomantic creature before it was hunted to extinction sometime toward the end of the Pleistocene, and a few ounces of its remains can command a street value greater than the worth of all the apartments and houses and commercial buildings in the square mile surrounding her.
The manticore looks back at her from the little mirror. Her mane has grown even more luxuriant since Agnes last saw her, and there’s a sense of power straining to expand, like a plugged volcano. Agnes has caught her drinking tea in some lush solarium. Tall Chinese vases and potted ferns loom behind her.
“Agnes,” she says.
Her voice sounds like something escaped from a fissure in the earth.
“Lady Olympia. I’m sorry to disturb you. I felt it necessary.”
“Of course you did. I trust your judgment at all times. What is it, dear?”
“The situation with Blackland has become critical. If we don’t extract him, I think we’ll lose him as an asset.”
“I see.” The manticore sips tea. “Agnes, we want you to kill him. Kill him and drop his corpse in the canals. He’ll be conducted to us.”
Agnes wants to slap herself. She’s been slow. She’s invested too much in Sebastian Blackland the person and has lost sight of Sebastian Blackland the resource.
The small quantities of bone he’s been smuggling out of the Ossuary are nice. But there’s a limit to how much he can sneak out of the Hierarch’s stronghold without being caught. Those little magics aren’t his main value. He works with precious bones, processing them, teasing potent magic out of osteomantic materials. Part of the osteomancer’s craft involves ingesting the magic. They use their own bodies as cauldrons, and some of that magic stays within them. She’s seen how Sebastian’s changed as his own skeleton becomes an ossuary of magic. His body is more valuable to Northern California than dozens of tiny vials of powdered fossil.
The manticore sets her tea down. Even through the compact, Agnes hears the sharp ring of the cup against the saucer. “Do you understand?”
“Yes,” Agnes says.
Snapping the compact shut, she makes her decision.
* * *
—
Sebastian lives in a box.
It’s an expensive box, one of those concrete-and-glass constructions with fifty-foot ceilings and big walls that require big paintings so they don’t look too warehouse-y. It’s underfurnished because he bought it just a few weeks ago, and his job has him too busy to buy things to sit upon and put your feet upon and set drinks upon. The bedroom is vast and empty except for a small bureau and the bed.
The kitchen, though, is fully stocked, and Sebastian knows how to use it. Agnes has spent the last hour watching him chop and slice and throw things in ice baths and seasoning. He tastes as he works and sniffs a lot.
She dices up the carrots he’s given her so she won’t feel idle. “Are all osteomancers good chefs?”
“The good ones are. Deep magic requires art.”
He sounds only a little arrogant. The depth of his magic is becoming clear just by looking at him. The whites of his eyes are darkening to the rich coffee brown of bones soaked in La Brea tar for ten thousand years. And there’s something in the way he moves now. Something feline in the way he walks. In the way his gaze snaps on what he’s looking at, like a bird of prey. He’s been working with griffin bones at the Ossuary.
They dine on the rooftop deck, currently outfitted with cheap lawn furniture bought for this occasion. A price tag dangles from Agnes’s folding chair.
And yet it’s magical.
The lights of the canals and sky trolleys are a rectilinear galaxy stretching from the sea to the mountains east of the city. The span encompasses millions of people, short on freedom but still alive. She can almost feel them straining, building pressure, never far away from flaring bright and hot like a brushfire.
Sebastian takes a sip of wine. It’s red and expensive and has a French name she’s already forgotten.
She looks at his hands.
“I’m supposed to kill you,” she says.
He closes his eyes, nods sadly, and puts down his wineglass. When he opens his eyes again, his pupils have changed. They’re narrower.
“The basilisk venom in your tooth?”
“Dammit. How’d you know?”
He taps the bridge of his nose and sniffs.
“That’s annoying,” she says.
“Maybe. But also useful. Why kill me?”
“You’ve made your body too valuable.”
“Why, thank you.” He gives her a rare smirk.
“Don’t preen. You know what I mean. My masters feel they get more from dissecting you than by taking the little samples you sneak out of the Ossuary.”
“What about putting me to work in a Northern ossuary? Again, it’s not just recipe.”
Agnes shakes her head emphatically. She doesn’t want this to be a negotiation. “They still get more from chopping you up.”
Sebastian looks at her hands. “Okay. I hope you know you have no chance of killing me,” he says at last.
“What are you talking about? Of course I can kill you.”
“I’ve known about the basilisk for a while. I’ve made myself immune.”
“Are you immune to knives? Are you immune to me breaking your neck? Are you immune to me fixing the gas line on your boat? Are you immune to me throwing you off the roof right now?”
“So you’re resourceful, is what you’re saying.”
“I can kick your ass, is what I’m saying.”
>
“You seem more piqued than murderous right now.”
“I’m a spy,” she says, exasperated. “You don’t know what I’m thinking, what I’m feeling, or what I’m going to do.”
“So tell me,” he says. There’s a little bit of pleading in his bizarre eyes. “What are you going to do?”
“Mexico,” she says. She has to gather herself before saying more, because she’s about to take a great risk. But he waits. “I know people…or know of them…who can get us to Mexico.”
The “us” in that sentence is the risky part. She can tell it’s not lost on Sebastian. It’ll be okay if he doesn’t like the idea. Not great, but okay.
But when he says, “What’s waiting for us in Mexico?” she lets herself breathe a little now that he’s used the word, too.
“Not a lot,” she admits. “But it’s beyond the reach of both our governments. Your people won’t be trying to eat you there, and mine won’t be trying to punish me for not following my orders. From there, we can go wherever we want. South America. Asia. Maybe even Europe. We have marketable skills. We could do all right.”
He looks like he’s carefully weighing something on a balance.
“These people you know…What do they take as payment? I’m cash poor.”
She doesn’t hesitate. “Two fingers.”
He pales a little, but she doesn’t have to tell him it’s better to surrender two fingers of magically charged bones than his whole carcass.
“They don’t care which hand, which fingers,” she adds, trying to be reassuring. She forces herself to look at his hands again and feels light-headed.
He agrees to letting her save him without saying it out loud. She takes his hand and leads him to the bedroom.
* * *
—
Agnes sits propped up on pillows next to Sebastian. He snores softly as she stares out the wall-sized window. She can hear predawn traffic at the bottom of the hill, boat horns and barge bells and the susurrus of churning water. Every convoluted mile of canal between Hollywood and Tijuana is an opportunity for failure. Her, they’ll probably just torture and interrogate before a summary execution. As for Sebastian…She has no idea how long they can part out an osteomancer without killing him.
The Book of Magic Page 42
