“They don’t think that ancient humans renouncing their magic is important?” Istvan repeated, dumbfounded.
“Other than to antiquarians, is it?”
Sand flew as Istvan flicked his tail. “Those antiquarians on Elysium called Earth an arcadia. They never questioned why its magic maintained perfect stability.”
Ever so slowly, Dorotta blinked at him. From his long friendship with Piros he recognized it as a sign of draconic stupefaction. “You’re proposing that humans locked the flows of magic on Earth and the pattern has lasted for millennia?”
“And contributed to wearing through Earth’s shield.”
That won him a second slow blink. “Why didn’t you tell—” She broke off. Smoke mixed with her surprised laughter. “The Fae Council will have less trouble accepting the theory if it comes from the bunkers, not you. Istvan, Istvan, and you said you needed my help navigating the politics of the Council.”
“I do.”
She angled around and gave him a playful shoulder nudge.
Unlike Piros, she wasn’t much larger than him. He stood his ground. Until her tail flicked him. Unlike the soft fur of his, hers had a barbed tip. She was careful, but the tap of it still startled.
“I like you, boss.” She grinned toothily at him.
“Don’t call me ‘boss’.”
Chapter 13
The sofa in the clerks’ room was as uncomfortable as it looked. Nonetheless, I curled up at one end of it, sharing a blanket with Tineke who’d claimed the other end. She’d eaten dinner at the hall with us, and stayed. All the chairs in the room were occupied, though not all by clerks. Yana, Berre and Dorotta had joined us. Not that Dorotta required a chair. She stood by the back wall.
The left side wall held three wall slates. The first showed Rory’s campsite on the slopes of Mount Redoubt. The second was an aerial view of the volcano and surrounding area. The third slate linked to the bunker, and tracked Nora, since she’d been the last scientist to speak to us.
Emil was coordinating our observations. It wasn’t that we could provide much—if any—support, but we wanted to watch what happened. Rory and Nils, our people, would bear the brunt of any attack. Once again, Rory acted as bait for the thaumivorous grub.
We expected the attack to happen on the ground, but it was the night sky above the volcano that lit up. Slate number two.
“What’s happening?”
“What is it?”
The questions came from the bunker. Here in the clerks’ room we were deathly silent. We needed information; not to hear our own voices.
I pushed the blanket aside.
“It doesn’t have a magical signature.”
“Twenty foot wingspan. Nine foot body.”
Nora’s voice, whiplash harsh. “Recalibrate Detector One. Continue scanning with Two. That thing is flying and on fire, and it’s not a damn dragon. It has to have a magical signature.”
A male voice. “It must be shrouding.”
Nora snapped back. “So prove it.”
On the first slate, Rory looked up briefly at the flying whatever, but it was safely distant and circling away from him. He kept his attention for his immediate surroundings.
“Get me a barbed teazle mesh,” Nora ordered.
“You can’t—”
On the third slate Nora clacked her beak in a goblin’s face. “They need aerial support.”
“Dorotta, here. I could go.”
“Appreciated, but this is my mission. Chad, you’re bunker team leader in my absence. Rory has field command.”
“Copy that.” Rory’s voice sounded clear. “And that includes you, Nora. If I say you’re out, you retreat.”
Her beak clacked. “Fine.”
Two minutes can be a very long time. Then Nora translocated into the sky above Mount Redoubt.
The fiery creature flared larger and brighter as it spotted her and changed course.
“Do we have sound? Did anyone put a mike on Nora?” Presumably that was Chad.
“Only for personal comms.”
Dorotta put her head level with mine. “She’s hovering, making herself the target. Griffins aren’t designed to hover. This’ll be hurting her.”
If this was the grub’s aerial adult form, it was fast. It tucked its wings in like an arrow and dived at Nora.
I couldn’t see the teazle mesh on the slate, but suddenly Nora was launching upward even as the unknown creature’s fiery presence contracted and began tumbling.
Nora swooped in a tight circle. “Air target temporarily contained. Preparing to lower it to Rory’s campsite. Get ready to secure it inside the containment cage, draconic setting.”
The creature’s tumble turned into a controlled levitation down to the ground.
Fortunately, Rory had chosen a clearing that was large enough for the creature, Nora, himself and the rest of the team that rushed out to help.
I noticed that Nils remained concealed.
By Rory’s impatient, frustrated body language, the research team had broken mission protocol. He kept watch as the clearing lit up with an orange glow from the creature’s flames. The glow subsided from inferno to smoldering coals as they shoved it into the containment cage.
If a grub intended to attack, then this chaos would be its opportunity. Depending on what its relationship was to the flying creature, the grub—or multiple grubs—could attempt a rescue. Even if the grubs were dumb and operating on instinct, Nora’s research team rushing in represented a plethora of magic-rich targets.
After six minutes of the research team dancing around the cage waving instruments and shouting, Rory’s tolerance for the scientific methodology on display fractured. “Nora, is the mission done or are you still after a grub?”
“Huh?”
Chad spoke up from the bunker. “Yes. We can match tissue from the dead grub to the live capture, but a live grub remains important.”
Nora looked around the clearing. She seemed to come to her senses, or rather, come down from an adrenaline rush. “Have we mucked up your hunt, Rory? Should we cancel? After all of us trampling your site, the grub—”
“Might turn up because of that thing’s scent being here. We don’t know enough about the grub to predict its actions. But with the creature contained, I want it gone, and everyone back to their places if the mission is to continue.”
The research team members began to protest and defend their actions.
“Civilians,” Rory said in disgust.
He silenced them. Utter scorn will do that.
“I think I can translocate with the containment cage,” Nora said. “We’ll try for the grub.”
Rory shrugged.
Nora launched herself awkwardly, hooking her claws into the roof of the containment cage as she did so. Her wings flapped mightily as she labored upward, then vanished.
In a count of tens of seconds, Chad reported that she’d returned safely to a landing space outside the bunker.
“What are you all still doing here?” Rory roared.
The researchers retreated back into the forest, but they did so while continuing to complain, justify and exclaim over Nora’s successful hunt.
“Undisciplined,” Berre said.
In the clerks’ room, we nodded agreement. I slumped against the back of the sofa. Nora wasn’t the only one feeling an adrenaline rush fade.
“That was exciting,” Tineke said wryly. “Tea and cookies.” A hot drink and a sugar rush would aid our recovery. She caught Yana, who was pacing, and dragged her out to the kitchen.
Emil stood preternaturally immobile in front of the third slate, the one that connected us to the bunker . “Yana’s right to be worried. I’ve got us muted, so we can talk. The scientists have a problem. I hope the Fae Council is watching.”
“Piros and Quossa,” Dorotta said.
Our vampire clerk nodded at the information. “Good. If the flying fire creature is what the grub turns into then…” He broke off and started again. “The
orc shaman wasn’t the first person to go missing near a volcano.”
“There must have been other flying creatures,” Urwin said. Although in charge of the day clerks in Radka’s absence, the centaur had stayed on after his shift to watch events with us. “But wouldn’t the bunkers have registered them?” He answered himself. “Not if they were scanning for magic and it shrouded itself.”
“They should have been running a visual scan.” Dorotta puffed smoke. I coughed. “Sorry. But yeah, should-haves don’t count against habit and a default focus on magic, which to be fair to Nora’s team, is their primary monitoring responsibility.”
“Do you know how many volcanoes there are in the world?” I asked, dismayed. The question wasn’t for anyone in particular. I was trying to come to terms with what the fire creature’s existence meant. The grubs were bad, but a magic-eating creature that flew added a whole new dimension to the problem. Of course, that assumed that the fire creature ate magic.
“Fifteen hundred active volcanoes,” Emil said. “But the disappearances have occurred at inactive volcanoes as well.” He coughed. “There are millions of those. However, many are underwater, which might rule them out as habitats for the flying fire creature.”
Berre swore under his breath.
Feeling cold, I tugged the blanket up to my chin. “With so many sites, why did Nora insist on trying to capture a grub at Mount Redoubt? Just to get Rory to lead the hunt?”
“The orcs,” Dorotta said. “Other people will be running around panicking and mourning those they’ve lost, the grubs’ victims. In those places, some won’t listen to the Fae Council’s edict for mid-level magic users to stay clear of volcanoes. But the orcs respect a mission, especially one led by a respected warrior.”
“Rory,” I said.
Tineke and Yana returned with mugs of tea and ginger spice cookies.
I freed my arms from the blanket to accept a mug. Cradling the warmth of it felt good. “How bad can this get?”
“Piros and Quossa will be asking Nora that now,” Tineke said. “The allocation of resources might need to be adjusted.”
Resources. “Would that include magicians?”
Her smile was small. “Rory will stay with Istvan. Members of the Reclamation Team, however, might be reassigned.” Magicians like her.
I lifted a corner of the blanket so that she could curl up on the sofa again.
“Should I unmute our connection to the bunker?” Emil phrased his decision as a question.
“Go ahead,” Yana said.
It was our cue to fall silent.
However, the bunker was also censoring what they let us hear. They were trying to manage a highly volatile situation.
“Everything is conjecture at the moment, Quossa,” Nora said. “We need to test what the bathuma eats.”
“Bathuma?” Emil queried.
Nora turned toward the camera. “It’s what we’re calling the creature. On a cursory genetic test, the grub and flying fire bat are the same species. And I shouldn’t call it a bat, but its leathery wings resemble that more than a moth.”
“It’s not just what the adult stage of the bathuma eats that matters. If it lays its eggs in a magic user’s corpse…” Chad added a new repulsive idea to the swirling speculation.
“But humans aren’t magic users. Apart from a few like Amy. How could this…why would the eggs hatch, now?” Yana asked. “How could the cycle suddenly kick off? Are the bathumas aliens?”
“Not aliens,” Chad replied instantly. “Earth was monitored for millennia for intrusions. Somehow the bathumas have always been here, evolved here. The trigger for them hatching could be changes in magic flows. Our arrival through the Rift and actions since have caused minor fluctuations in Earth’s magical system.”
On the first slate I watched Rory feed the campfire fallen branches, cracking them over his knee before adding them. The bathuma’s containment cage had almost smothered the fire, but the pine branches caught quickly.
At least it wasn’t raining or snowing.
Rory wrapped himself in a blanket and stretched out by the fire.
Everything in me rebelled at witnessing him playing bait after the drama of the bathuma in its fiery form. He was trusting his life to his instincts and training, and to Nils. How he could lie still was beyond me. He had to have as many questions and concerns as us, yet exposed on an Alaskan volcanic slope, he feigned sleep.
I felt cold and I was in a warm room.
Half an hour passed with nothing happening. I rubbed at my eyes which were dry from staring at the slates.
On the third slate, a technician monitored an array of equipment. Every so often her head turned to look at something, or someone, out of camera view. The bunker scientists had to be talking among themselves, but they’d muted their conversation from us.
Faced with a threat, everyone went tribal. We withdrew into our little circles of safety—except that the scientists were risking our people, Rory and Nils. We had a right to know what they faced, even if it was based on guesswork at the moment.
“Do you still intend to write your book?” Tineke asked me. And when I looked at her blankly. “About us, the Faerene.”
On the first slate, Rory continued to feign sleep. The second slate showed a sky and landscape where the only fire was the dwindling campfire he lay beside.
Tineke wanted to distract me, and perhaps, herself. She’d mentioned the possibility of reassignment from the Reclamation Team to fighting the bathumas.
I hoped that whoever decided such things recognized that her gentle nature had reached its limits. The guilt she felt over humanity’s suffering and loss of life during the apocalypse hurt her. She shouldn’t be forced to hunt creatures. I was worried for Rory and Nils, but they were both warriors. Tineke wasn’t.
“Emil, Urwin and everyone,” by everyone, I meant the clerks, “have been great. I have a stack of books they’ve lent me to read up on the different peoples of the Faerene. I could have made a lot more personal observations if I hadn’t been obsessed with Rory at our wedding.”
Tineke smiled, as I’d intended.
“Everyone and their pet pigeon was there,” Dorotta agreed.
I shrugged a shoulder. “I’m going to visit Istvan on a few of his court circuit stops.” Originally, I’d intended to travel with him for the full two months of his south eastern circuit, but circumstances changed. “Manhattan, for sure.” The Faerene had reclaimed the island as wilderness and built a settlement there, hidden from the humans who lived among the ruins of New York on the other side of the river. “The court cases are revealing.”
Urwin snorted softly. “People don’t realize how much of themselves and their plans and fears they reveal in fighting their side.”
“I will write the book,” I summed up. “My dad’s attitude alone showed me how much ignorance is allowing space for fear to grow.” And hatred. “I’ve been distracted by a few things.”
Emil cast a sympathetic look in my direction. “If life were fair, you’d be on your honeymoon.”
“And enjoying Rory’s distractions.” Yana waggled her eyebrows.
But mention of my husband inevitably dragged my attention back to the three slates. Conversation died off. I was aware of Dorotta leaving. When she returned, she settled near Emil as he operated the slates. They talked confidentially together, undoubtedly muting their connection to the bunker.
“Holy hells!”
My eyes snapped open at Berre’s exclamation. I stared at the first slate. It was empty. The campsite was there and the extinguished fire. But Rory was missing.
The second slate showed the action. The aerial view zoomed in on action among the trees. Screams, muttered spells, and panting breaths filled the audio feed.
“Two grubs,” the technician in the bunker reported tersely as Chad took her seat and took over manipulating the feeds and scans.
The grubs charged into a narrowing teardrop-shaped clearing where the team of scientists h
ad gathered to wait in hiding for Rory to be attacked. Assumptions are dangerous. The scientists had framed the ongoing night mission as Rory continuing in the role of bait. They hadn’t considered that he was far from being the sole magic user on the volcano, and that some of them had no doubt employed mid-level magic in the containment of the adult bathuma.
Nils hacked the head off the first grub and flung an expanding metal net at the second. The net caught the grub in the face, then tangled in its front feet, flipping it into a roll which the net completed by winding around it and sealing it in a ball.
A third grub came in at right angles, and Rory appeared, levitated the grub and secured it in a containment cage.
Two more grubs burst up from underground, and Rory and Nils each hauled one out and sealed them in what appeared to be lead balloons. Hopefully, they remembered to include air holes. Then again, if the grubs had hatched underground, maybe they didn’t breathe as we did.
The action was over almost before I’d struggled free of my blanket and stumbled to stand in front of the wall slates.
“Everyone together, center of the clearing,” Rory shouted.
A third of the scientists made a half-hearted attempt to obey. Another third of them were injured. The grubs hadn’t gotten to them. They had crashed and bashed into one another and into the trees at the edge of the clearing. An elf had set a pine tree blazingly aflame. The best that could be said for the scientists’ panic-stricken response was that none of them had run off blindly.
Rory swirled his hand and the scientists were whooshed, heedless of injuries, to the center of the clearing.
Nils shook his head in obvious and inappropriate amusement as he stalked around, alert for additional grubs.
The four captured grubs and the corpse of the fifth lay in the narrow base of the clearing.
“I’ll open a portal,” Rory said. “Nora—”
She translocated in, shrieking. “They came after my people. They came out of the ground after my people and what were you doing?!” A good leader cared about her people, but a responsible leader didn’t start an argument when a scene was yet to be secured.
First Magic Page 17
