Rough Magic

by Jenny Schwartz

  “Ready,” Rory said.

  Istvan moved the rocks, an entire fallen mesa.

  Shock silenced Jarod. By the widening of his eyes and his suddenly pale face, the show of magical power impressed the heck out of him.

  The rest of us remained focused on our goal, even Digger who shared Jarod’s lesser experience with magic bent to the task of scanning the ground for a cave entrance. The fear was that the force of the initial rockslide might have blocked it. Istvan, alone, stood guard. Or rather, he crouched. The magic required to move the rock hadn’t exhausted him as much as creating the portal, but the tension in his muscles revealed the amount of effort it took for him to appear okay.

  None of us questioned him. Regardless of magic sickness, the expedition had to continue. If the djinn threatened Istvan, he was to retreat. If he wasn’t using magic—and none of us would—we hoped it wouldn’t pursue him.

  “Here!” Nils pointed at a shadow in the ground.

  A gap about a shoulders’ width wide yawned in the dirt.

  Jarod focused, all professionalism now.

  Hastily, we roped up, securing ourselves to our buddies to enter the cave. Sorcha’s harnesses became a reassuring restriction.

  Rory double-checked my harness and the knots on the rope that linked us.

  Digger braced himself. He was tied to Jarod, and Nils to him. Nils used the slack of rope between them to loop around a boulder. Jarod took in the preparations, grinned at me, and crawled forward.

  The ground held his weight. As it should. It had supported the weight of the rocks Istvan had swept aside. But Jarod’s brief instructions to me on caving had included the reiteration to “Never assume. Check, doublecheck, and always secure your route back.”

  He lowered an oil lamp through the gap on a rope, his own head and shoulders vanishing after it.

  My nerves chewed at me.

  Jarod popped back up. “Tie off the entrance rope.” He and Nils had strategized our spelunking. An instruction to secure the entrance rope meant the cave was safe to enter.

  Nils already had the rope freed from his pack.

  “There’s a sort of ramp, a scramble, to the floor of the cave.” Jarod knelt up and caught the end of the rope Nils threw him. He dropped it down the hole. Then he followed it out of sight.

  “He’s down,” Digger said a couple of minutes later. That meant Jarod had given the rope tying them together three tugs, meaning safe ground.

  I had to watch him, then Nils, vanish after Jarod. I kept a hand on the escape rope. At three tugs, I followed them into the darkness.

  My miner’s lamp had three hours of light, and I carried an oil jar that could refill it, plus two candles. Water would be a bigger consideration if we had to spend an extended time underground. I hoped there’d be a water source, but on the other hand, I feared having to deal with a water hazard or barrier like a river.

  The earth swallowed me. I concentrated on scrambling down. Jarod and Digger watched my descent. Neither called out directions to handholds or how to find my footing. They let me pick my own slow path.

  Digger caught me as soon as I was in reach.

  I needed his hug more than I would have believed.

  Jarod gave the rope to the surface three tugs and Rory joined us in a couple of minutes, making an easy matter of what had set my muscles shaking.

  I was definitely the expedition’s weak link.

  “I found a symbol,” Nils said. “It’s west.” In the direction of the spindle.

  I bit my tongue as I realized that some of my trembling wasn’t actually weakness, but a sense of something sucking at me—pulling me west. “I think I can feel the spindle.”

  “Good,” Rory said briefly. “If you sense anything else, tell us.”

  The symbol Nils had found proved to be a wriggly line about as long as his palm on the cave wall.

  “Did they not have arrows?” Jarod asked. “Like, arrow this way?”

  I didn’t know enough about human prehistory to answer him. The mages had been around at the very beginning of the bronze age when their mundane counterparts had been working out smelting copper. Our ancestors had locked away magic until metal projectiles or some such technology had been developed that was capable of killing bathumas.

  Digger ignored Jarod’s question. “There’s a spring. This would have been an important water source, a known place. So the ancients started with a place they believed their descendants would go.”

  “There are other marks on the walls. Handprints,” Nils said. “People gathered here, a long time ago.” Before the rockfall.

  We were the first humans to stand here in millennia, and we’d brought a werewolf and an elf with us. Or more accurately, a griffin had brought all of us.

  Neither Rory nor Nils showed signs of magic sickness, but that was possibly more a tribute to their harsh training than to their true condition.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  “As my lady commands.” Jarod bowed outrageously. But he also advanced eagerly into the western tunnel. He slid himself and his pack through the narrow, vertical entrance.

  Once through the crack, the tunnel widened enough to walk with some degree of ease. Being taller than me, the men had to watch not to bump their heads. I could keep my attention on my feet and the treacherously uneven footing. Shadows danced and lied with the movement of our lamps. Avoiding one seeming obstacle could throw you into another.

  Rory stayed close behind me. We held coils of the rope that joined us. When I stumbled I’d knock against the rough cave walls, but he hadn’t had to catch me yet. It wasn’t a tunnel really, but a series of interlinked small caves that we generally walked, but sometimes crawled, through.

  My lungs started to burn with the effort of matching the pace Jarod set.

  “Snack time.” He called a break when we reached a cave big enough to contain the five of us.

  I drank thirstily and ate the pemmican Peggy had supplied. The jerky, fat and dried berries was, surprisingly, exactly what I craved. I chewed enthusiastically.

  “I don’t reckon the earlier cavers got further than this,” Jarod said. “I haven’t seen any soot marks on walls and ceilings since the toothy cave.” It was easy to guess that he meant the cave where we’d had to pick a cautious path through jagged rock formations. Fabric had torn, but we hadn’t suffered any significant injuries. “I counted five more wriggly lines. I’m guessing those were meant to be encouraging.” He shrugged.

  I had an answer for his doubt about whether people would have bothered to push as far as the toothy cave when their technology had been torches and rope. “What if the ancients left a gift with each wriggly line?” Everyone straightened. “A treasure hunt would motivate people.”

  “Yes, it would,” Rory said. He nodded, and shoved his last bite of pemmican into his mouth. He mumbled around it. “If the mages did put in a barrier as a test for their descendants, it should be soon.”

  Two caves later, we proved the accuracy of his prediction. A significant chasm loomed in front of us. There was no way around it, and at its narrowest point it was fifteen feet. On the far side were jagged rocks similar to those from the toothy cave.

  “Earth magic,” Nils said peering into its depths. “Clever earth magic since nothing before this showed signs of being shaped by magic. They kept their working confined.”

  “There’s something glittering on the far side.” While the rest of us were distracted by the immediate challenge, Rory had been looking ahead. It helped that his eyesight was superior to humans’. He’d trekked through the caves with his lamp unlit, using the light from mine. Now, he guided my lamp to shine across the chasm.

  “It’s a dark blur to me beyond the first row of teeth rocks,” I admitted.

  “But if you were curious about what was there and threw a torch, even just a length of oil-soaked rope set on fire, you’d see what was there.” Digger spared the far side of the chasm an assessing look before returning to watching our backs.r />
  Jarod had his grappling hook out. He threw it across the chasm and tugged hard. The rope held. He tied the other end off on a rock near me, then he untied the rope that linked him to Digger and replaced it with another rope, one that he tied around a different rock. He started across the chasm, moving fast and hanging by hands and ankles with his back to the depths.

  He crossed fast, which was good because I think I held my breath the entire time.

  The only thing worse than worrying about Jarod’s safety was knowing that I’d have to emulate him. We’d discussed the high probability of having to cross something like the chasm, and I’d insisted I’d do it myself, and not require a makeshift flying fox.

  Nils followed Jarod across and with them there to catch me, and Rory and Digger on this side, I set out.

  Dangling over an abyss was one of the most terrifying things I had ever done—and I’d have to do it again to return.

  Rory and Digger joined us. We left the ropes in place. No wonder Jarod had insisted we carry so many. They were heavy, too.

  It wasn’t till we were safely together again that I could concentrate on what Rory had seen glittering.

  Nils shone his lamp on the source of the glitter. “Gold.”

  The ancients had piled rocks veined with gold in a cairn that stood knee high. Both the gold and the quartz it was embedded in glittered as they caught the light.

  Stars, I thought. The orb had mentioned stars on the path to the spindle. The ancients had thought to lure us on with sparkly rocks.

  However, what caught our attention were the stick figures of two humans who looked as if they were holding hands. A circle above them might have been meant to represent the sun. To the left of the drawing and closer to another passageway a wriggly line dared us to keep searching.

  “Clever,” Digger said. “They couldn’t use language, if they even had a written language, because they couldn’t be sure whoever came this far would understand it. But human figures and gold? Mysteries and treasure are irresistible to the sort of people who’d make it this far.”

  People like us.

  Jarod laughed. “Humans can’t resist the shinies.”

  But none of us reached for a quartz rock.

  Instead, we sucked in our guts, angled our packs, and squeezed single-file into the passage; linked again by rope to our safety buddies.

  The passage held another surprise. It was smooth. The floor slanted gently down without trip hazards, and no wickedly sharp stones protruded from the walls.

  “More earth magic?” Jarod asked from the lead.

  His voice drifted back to me, as did Nils’s response.

  “Yes, and I think I should go first.”

  “Fine by me. If you can squeeze past.”

  Presumably he could because a few seconds later we were moving again. My view was blocked by Digger’s back.

  I consciously pushed aside claustrophobic thoughts. We had to be nearing the spindle. I didn’t feel it pulling at me anymore. I wondered about that. Had my acua, whatever it was, shut down? Or was it satisfied that I was following the sole possible path to the spindle? Or was it more terrifying than that and I’d been deluded and this location was a false trail?

  But then, what did the squiggly lines mean?

  Jarod’s exclamation shook me out of my dangerous abstraction. His voice echoed strangely.

  “Well, geez.”

  The passage spat us out into a vast chamber, or one that seemed vast after the narrow spaces we’d wriggled through. It was definitely high. The sense of space had me tipping my head back to look up.

  In fact, that seemed to be a general reaction, and with the combined illumination from our lamps, it was possible to discern a shadowed lump hanging from the roof of the chamber about twenty feet above us.

  “Sit,” Rory said to me.

  Given how physically tiring spelunking was proving, I readily took his advice. I slid off my backpack, and leaned back on my hands to continue staring at the lump. Conspicuously, it was the sole item in the empty chamber. For due diligence, the men searched the floor and walls anyway. But only for ten minutes, and they ate and drank as they did so.

  “The ancients locked away their magic till mundane technology developed the capacity to kill bathumas,” I said. “Want to bet that bundle is wrapped in bathuma hide?”

  Judging by the sharp looks in my direction and the lack of response, what I’d thought to be obvious, wasn’t.

  “So we’re meant to shoot it down?” Nils asked warily. He had a crossbow and a quiver of arrows with steel heads in case we ran across trouble in the desert. “I don’t see how that would work.”

  Rory returned to stand beside me, frowning. “Like bowfishing. Attach a cord to your arrow. It’s worth a try. There’s nothing else in the chamber. And getting here was easy. This has to be the test.”

  “All right.” Nils got his crossbow and shoved his pack against a wall. “Everyone back in the tunnel.”

  That was a sensible precaution.

  Jarod thought otherwise. “Maybe I should stay here? What if it needs a human to fire the arrow?”

  No one argued with him. Digger just shoved him into the tunnel.

  “Ow.”

  Rory helped me up and back into the tunnel far more gently. Then he stood in the mouth of it, blocking it with his body.

  “Shooting,” Nils said.

  It was so quiet that I heard everyone breathing, the arrow releasing, and the soft thwack of it hitting something.

  “The arrow hit and it stuck,” Nils said. “I’m going to try pulling the cord.”

  I leaned into Rory. Jarod rested both hands on my shoulders.

  This time there was no mistaking the noise. Something large hit the ground.

  Jarod pressed forward, before suddenly retreating. I imagine that Digger hauled him back. The ex-army sergeant knew to hold his ground till orders released us.

  “Leather around a finely knotted net with a well-padded cloth bundle inside that. I think Amy should be the one to undo it. The leather is still supple. The steel head pierced it cleanly. Maybe a tiny dab of magic kept it in stasis?” Nils paused. “It seems safe.”

  Rory re-entered the chamber.

  Jarod peered eagerly over my shoulder, but didn’t push forward.

  The hide could have been from any animal. Rory joined Nils in stretching it out, pushing aside the net to study it. “Come and look,” he said. “Don’t touch anything.”

  I stood beside him, quickly kneeling as I saw what had caught his attention. There were lines and images on the inside of the leather.

  “We’ll take all of this back with us,” Rory said. “Amy, can you undo the bundle and check the spindle is in it? I can’t sense any magic.” His head tipped back to study the ceiling. “But with what’s above us, I can’t sense anything but chaos.”

  Digger stood across from us. He jerked at Rory’s statement. “The djinn’s back?”

  “Feels that way.”

  We had to move. I reached for the bundle. Someone had knotted a scarf around it. The scarf was woolen, and like the leather hide, didn’t feel millennia-old. I unknotted it, unwound it, and found additional layers of fabric wound around and around, protecting a small, hard object.

  The world spindle had been carved from stone. The weight and shape of it felt comfortable in my hand. I smoothed my thumb along a curve.

  “Wrap it back up,” Rory said.

  I blinked.

  The hide and net were gone, stowed away in someone’s pack. I’d lost time while absorbed in the discovery and reality of the world spindle. My distraction bothered me.

  A quick glance at the others showed that they shared my concern. But concern about me being fascinated by the spindle was something to address when we were out of the caves and away from the djinn. I rewrapped all of the layers and shoved the spindle into my pack.

  The first stretch was easy, but crossing the chasm, dangling over it, was even scarier the second time. I wou
ldn’t be spelunking for fun after this. Digger caught me as I reached the far side, and held me as Jarod dealt with ropes and knots.

  “What does it feel like, the djinn?” Jarod asked. “How does it feel to a magic user?”

  “I don’t sense it.” I turned to watch Rory’s progress.

  He caught the rope Jarod threw him.

  Nils handed me a canteen. “We’re not in the heart of it yet. Even so, the djinn feels like standing out in a hurricane while you’re shivering with the flu. Like magic sickness, but worse.”

  And while Rory felt like that, he was crossing the chasm.

  I drank resolutely. Nils had survived crossing the chasm. Rory would, too.

  He was across in a few minutes. I passed him the canteen, and he drained it. We would refill our canteens at the spring in the cave we’d entered by. Not that we required any additional incentive to travel as fast as possible. If the djinn was above us, it had left Istvan. He’d never have led it to us. Was my black griffin partner safe?

  At the spring we drank and refilled the canteens.

  Nils exited first reconnoiter the surface.

  Rory outlined what we faced. “The djinn is close. We need to outrun it. At minimum we need to be on its outskirts before Istvan risks opening a portal. Trying to do so while enveloped in chaotic magic would tear the portal and us apart. If Istvan isn’t waiting above, we’re rendezvousing with him at the spring two miles away.”

  Nils returned. “Istvan isn’t there. The djinn is, and it affected my perception. We seem to be sheltered from it in here.” But we weren’t staying in the cave. “When you reach the surface, leave the ropes. Head west fast for the spring.”

  “Our priority is Amy,” Rory added. “She has the world spindle.”

  World spindle or no world spindle, I wasn’t leaving any of them behind.

  I scrambled out of the cave to a darkness that smelled of rain and thunderstorms. The air, though, tasted dry. We were inside the djinn, more truly than when we’d arrived in the desert. It was all around us, saturating reality.