Blood Rock (58 page)

But I wasn’t drawing a pentacle inside my circle. I was drawing a unicursal hexagram, a Star of David with the two horizontal lines crossed. It was a magical short circuit, a receiver that lets magic flow freely out of its center. The centers of the tiny versions I’d drawn to short out the graffiti flames creeping over the rock were going off like sparklers. With all the mana in this cavern, stepping to the center of my big unicursal would be suicide.

A tremendous crash shook the vault, and I saw dust and water splash up from the impact of a foul, twisted hand that had torn free from the painting and slammed into the floor. The gripping mass of white, wrinkled flesh was bigger than the body of an elephant, attached to an arm thicker than ten trees; but there the resemblance to any plant or animal I knew ended.

Arteries of neon and veins of mercury surged through flaccid, fungal flesh. Muscles bulged in frantic lumps like boiling water. A skin like tattered canvas frayed and reknitted as I watched. Jagged edges of its skeleton were briefly visible, more like thorny vines than bones. The great nasty thing surged forward in waves, pulling and stretching, ripping and reforming, tearing itself out of the painting, piece by painful piece.

The monster screamed, rattling my teeth, and I briefly wondered what kind of thing it was. What kind of thing the Streetscribe had drawn on. What kind of thing led him to build magic that collected the intents of tortured people, trapped and struggling to get free. Concentrated intents that it could use … for what? Perhaps, to break free itself?

Whatever it was, we had to stop it.

A gout of fire leapt through the air at the far wall, and I saw Cinnamon leap out of range of the flames, a high curving arc, tail flickering. Snapping tentacles whipped at her, but she dodged and dodged, ducking behind a pillar as another blast of flame swept over the area.

When she moved again, gleaming arcs and lines of graffiti began wrapping around the pillar and rippling out over the floor, a self-replicating pattern of Cinnamon’s own design. I raised an eyebrow: the werekin moved fast. They’d already given me the five pentacles I needed, and had moved to the next stage of the plan: distraction.

The new design began climbing the wall, leaping up into the vampiric matter, leeching its power. At first, the monster didn’t seem to notice, but as the tiled kites and darts began growing, they began interfering with its magic. Cinnamon had called them Penrose tiles: self-replicating, but never precisely repeating, disrupting the regular pattern needed for the monster’s design.

Realizing the danger, the thing screamed at Cinnamon, but then turned its head to blast fire at the opposite wall, where Tully had started two more self-replicating Penrose tilings. Curling graffiti flames rippled over the growing tiles. They began to flicker and burn out under the Technicolor barrage, and the monster gathered itself, preparing to fire again.

It had forgotten about me. Now was my moment.

I closed my eyes.

Deep beneath the water, the tattooed vine extending from my wrists snaked towards shore, guided by a tiny bird projectia gripping its branches in its beak. Through the bird’s eyes I saw the vine burst through the surface. Using the bird’s wings I guided the vine through the fallen stones, out of sight of the monster. With the bird’s tiny feet I landed upon the rotting body of the Streetscribe—and let myself merge with him.

I shuddered. Long before whatever had happened, the Streetscribe had been corrupted by his own magic. He was neither alive nor dead, neither werewolf nor vampire. Arcturus was right: all of my classifications were useless. There was something mystically unwholesome about joining the bodies of the living and the undead with a magic tattoo, and I felt my soul being drained by the great void left where the Painter of Night had disintegrated.

I seized the book. I was cold. I detached the vine from my other wrist. I began to shiver. I let the vine coil around the book, then let it merge with the leather of the cover. Now I was freezing—merging with tanned hide was even
more
draining. I couldn’t keep this up long. I screamed and kicked the wall where Cinnamon and Tully had undermined it, and the jagged triangle of stone toppled forward. I leapt up onto its bottom edge as its point splashed down into the water, exposing me—and my unicursal magic circle—to the monster.

“Come on!” I shouted, teeth chattering. Actual frost was creeping back up the vines, tiny bits of ice dancing in the air around me like sparks. “
Heat me up, you bastard!
”

The thing refocused its will on me. Now I could see its misshapen pentagonal head, the metal sheen to its cobblestone teeth, the twin points of fire in its eyes, the roiling tongue. It was Zipperface, writ large. Zipperface may have been the Streetscribe’s
projectia
, but his magic was built after
this
model. Why? Who knew? Streetscribe was gone, his book all but destroyed. This
thing
was all that was left, and in a moment the answers would be gone forever.

Then the monster opened its mouth wide and belched fire at me.

I stepped right to the very edge of the magic circle, folded my arms, leaned forward, and merged with its shield. Then I unfolded my arms and spread them wide, expanding the circle as I expanded my arms, shielding myself with it just as the flames hit.

The magic bubble bent and bowed under the assault of graffiti fire, coiling around it, sweeping over me. But by the time the flames touched me, they were cool, just flickering light. Their power was being leeched into the circle, shorting out at the cross of the unicurse at its center in a blazing bonfire of raw magic.

The smell of ozone wafted into the air. Cracks spread across the stone. Mana buffeted my skin. A few more seconds and that power would blow the circuit, shattering the magic circle. The feedback would kill me—but I didn’t need more than a few more seconds.

“Spirit of life,”
I cried,
“bring this monster down!”

And I threw the blackbook through the shield into the heart of the unicurse, letting my vines flow off with the book like a green cable of life, freely detaching them from my body—but
not
from the Streetscribe’s.

The blackbook whacked against the heart of the twisted hexagram and blazed with power, a circuit of mana flowing from the monster to my magic circle, through the book, back along my vines to the tagger, rippling out through the spiderweb along the walls of the cave, and finally feeding back into the monster.

It screamed, its power draining out along the magical conduit of fire it had created, its essence beaten back by the destructive intent that it had projected. Then the feedback leapt onto that torrent of fire itself, a vicious circle that began ripping the monster apart.

I leaned back as far as I could, trying to hold myself at the rim of the shield, where the flames died but before the raging magic storm began. And for a moment it worked.

But when I released the vines on my arms, I had forgotten that
all
the vines on my body were connected. The vines I had extended bloomed and flourished along the vicious circle of the conduit, a lightning bolt made of leaves, sucking backward from the book to the tagger to the monster and back again—whipping past me, and taking the rest of my vines with it. I screamed as the torrent of vines followed the current, ripping off my body, spinning me like a top.

—

Then all the energy in the cave converged with a clap of thunder.

I stared up into blackness. I smelt acrid smoke. I felt incredible pain. Shimmering auroras of blue and red drifted before my eyes, like the churning Rorschach images you get if you squeeze your eyes far too tight.

Then Cinnamon’s worried face appeared against the red, upside down and staring at me, ears poking out of her wet headscarf, eyes wide and scared. “Mom?”

Tully’s face appeared too, at my left, tilted at an odd angle. “Miss Frost?”

I blinked. The shimmering redness was in the ceiling, glowing blue fungi and flickering red embers, shimmering in and out as smoke drifted across them. Cinnamon and Tully were quite real, and I sat up, wincing in pain.

The master tag was destroyed, a huge blackness of soot licked by a dying streamers of real flame. I couldn’t see the Streetscribe, only burnt embers of the spiderweb that had enmeshed him, half obscured by an oily column of smoke. Beyond the mound, a vast misshapen mass was sinking into the ground—the head of the monster, lopped off when the tag short-circuited.

I winced again in pain, and held up my hand: my hand, my forearm, my whole body was red, sore and burning—and my vines, my beautiful vines,
all of them
, were gone. I felt my hand, my skin, frantically. I was burned—but not badly. I rubbed my forearm with my thumb, then winced. Actually, that was a good sign: a really severe burn would have killed the nerves.

“Stupid!” Cinnamon said, biting her knuckle. Then she said, “I means, don’t pick at it.”

“I know, I know,” I said, feeling my other hand, more gently this time. Then I looked around. Most of the cavern ceiling was cracked and sooted, and plaster and masonry fragments were fluttering down like confetti everywhere I looked. “Give me your knife, Tully.”

“S-sure,” he said, fishing out the switchblade. “What … ”

“Both of you, walk the perimeter of the cave, make sure that none of the tag is left,” I said. “Spray over anything that’s left—but if you start to feel woozy, head for the exit. The fire may have eaten the oxygen. I don’t want to beat this thing only to die of asphyxiation.”

“W-what are you going to do?” Tully asked, staring at the knife.

I opened it with a
snikt
. “Make sure the Streetscribe is dead.”

Cinnamon and Tully both stared at me for a second, then ran off to the wall of the cave. I shook my head, and turned towards the wall that had held the tag. At its base, the decapitated head of the monster was disintegrating, fluttering away in giant leafy embers, like flakes of burnt newspaper drifting out of a fire. I then inspected the wall itself. After scanning it for a minute, I convinced myself that whatever had been there was well and truly gone.

Then I walked around the mound and made sure the same was true of the Streetscribe.

When I returned, Cinnamon and Tully were waiting at the shore of the little lake, near where they dove in to avoid the flames. Their eyes grew wide as I approached.

“Gaah,” I said, wringing my hands to try to rid them of the black grease. I spied an old piece of burlap atop the debris and picked it up. As it peeled away from a mound of white powder, it cracked and crumbled in my hands, but there was enough left to get the gunk off. I wiped off Tully’s switchblade, tossed the rag, snapped the blade closed, and extended it to him. “Thanks.”

“Y-you can keep it,” he said, horrified.

“Thanks,” I said, slipping the blade into my back pocket. “Let’s go.”

“Mom,” Cinnamon said. “Mom, your face. You’ve gone … hard.”

I stared at them both a moment, and they both backed up a little. I wanted to tell them it was a hard thing to cut off a man’s head and have it flop out onto the earth beside your feet—and it didn’t make it any easier that it was a blackened corpse. I wanted to chew them out, to list all the people who had died, to scream at them that this wasn’t over.

But there was no point. There was no way, even with a solid knowledge of magic, that they could have known that spraying a little graffiti could have led to all of this. The real sinner was the Streetscribe—and he’d paid for it in full.

“This was a hard day, Cinnamon,” I said. “And I had to do some hard things. But all that matters now is you’re all right. You too, Tully. We made it. Thank you.”

Cinnamon grabbed me suddenly. “I’m so sorry, Mom,” she said. “I’m so sorry … ”

“Don’t you be sorrying me, little Cinnamon,” I said, patting her head. “It’s all over but the shouting. There will be shouting. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”

We wove our way out of the cavern, found our way to the dark stone tunnel (after three tries) and tromped back through the sludge to the archway. Half the graffiti was scorched and blackened, but the other half was barely touched—some of it, disturbingly clean.

But when we got to the arch, my hopes fell. The gateway looked like it had been sprayed with a flamethrower, and in spots was actually still smoking. There was nothing left of the tag, which had burst with such force even the stones of the arch were cracked and splintered.

“Well,
fuck
,” Cinnamon said, kicking a fallen archstone away.

“Great,” Tully said. “A ten mile walk through the Underground.”

“I think we should have expected this,” I said, staring at the blackened arch. The stones were warm to the touch. “Tully, you know the tagger’s magic—do you think that all the tags will have been destroyed along with the master tag?”

His brow furrowed. “N-no,” he said. “Only the gateways, the ones plugged into the … the master circuit. All the freestanding tags will still live.”

“Do any of them have designs like the one we just destroyed?” I said, and at a glance to his face knew the answer. “Oh, damnit, you little fool.”

“I’m sorry, Miss Frost,” he said nervously. He glanced around. “But—but I knows these tunnels, I thinks. I wasn’t lying about that. We can get out if we follows this one.”

“No,” I said. “Actually, I think I know a shorter way out. If we backtrack a little and go one level up, there’s a passage that comes out at Cabbagetown, right near Grant Park.”

“That’s … that’s the lair of the lich,” Cinnamon said. “No, Mom … ”

“No way,” Tully said, jerking back. “No
way
am I going back there.”

“You’re right, no way,” I said. “Not after all we just went through to get you
out
of their hands. First, we get you safe. Then, I go deal with the lich.”

“Mom! You can’t go back there,” Cinnamon said. “Your-your vines are gone. Those were your shield! The vamps will be able to—”

“Darkrose is in a cage!” I said. “Delancaster and Saffron are prisoners. And no matter how tough Vlad the Destroyer is, I don’t think he’ll stick his neck out to save them.”

“Don’t you understands,” Tully said. “
They’re going to kill you.
”

I stared off into the distance a moment. Then I drew out my cell phone.