The Native Star (4 page)

Stanton glanced up, and even though Emily wore her nicest clothes, he gave her the exact same look he had that first day, when her boots were muddy and her belt made of rope.

“Oh, it’s you,” he said. He returned to his rummaging. “I
do
hope I haven’t interrupted your hoeing-down.”

“These tools aren’t yours.” Stanton didn’t seem to notice how haughty and disapproving she was trying to sound. He straightened, a hammer in one hand and a crowbar in the other. He gave each a momentary appraisal, then threw back the hammer.

“I received an important shipment today.” He stepped over the tools and pushed past her. “From New York. And I have no means of opening the crate.”

For a moment, Emily considered whistling for Dag and his men and leaving Stanton to his fate. But she’d had enough of toying with men’s fates for one evening.

“Well, I don’t know how things are done in New York,” Emily said, “but in Lost Pine, it’s considered polite to ask before running off with someone else’s things.”

Stanton sighed, and even in the darkness she could see him rolling his eyes.

“Then will you be so kind as to direct me to the owner of this
excellent
and
valuable
crowbar, so that I might request the privilege of its usage?” His intonation was extravagant. “Formally, I mean.”

She showed him into the shed, and with a sharp motion, pointed a finger at Dag, who was towering among a group of friends, laughing in a huge voice.

Emily snuck a sideways glance at Stanton, hoping to revel in his discomfiture, but he was already halfway across the room, moving with long, purposeful strides. If only Dag would fly off in an uncharacteristic rage and send the pompous Warlock scurrying! But Dag was singularly unobliging. His men were clustered around him, clapping him on the back and yelling congratulations. Dag looked over at Emily, letting his eyes linger on her for a long time. Emily blushed furiously, heat rising up her throat. At the very least he could have gotten a yes before he started telling everyone!

In his transport of excitement and joviality, Dag didn’t even notice the Warlock standing behind him. Stanton’s throat-clearings went from quietly polite to aggressively cathartic, but were of no avail. He shifted idly from one foot to the other until he was distracted by the sight of women bringing in fresh platters of food. His nostrils twitched as he eyed the piles of fried chicken, the heaps of steaming biscuits, the mounded beef cutlets cloaked in cream gravy. Without another look at Dag, he tucked the crowbar under his arm and followed a steaming apple crisp over to the table. Emily watched with indignation as he took a plate and began to pile it high.

She was about to set the Warlock straight when someone raised a cry: “Besim!”

The call was taken up by dozens of voices: “Besim, Besim!” until finally a scrawny old man with scraggly black hair and skin the color of rawhide allowed himself to be pushed to the center of the dirt floor.

“It’s Besim!”

“Hey, Besim!”

“Do us a Cassandra!”

The request echoed, rippling in dozens of different voices: “A Cassandra, a Cassandra!”

Smiling toothlessly, Besim motioned to a young man standing nearby, who had obtained a pint bottle of whiskey and was holding it with eager anticipation. The young man leaped forward, proffering the bottle to Besim.

Besim drained it in one protracted guzzle.

The room exploded in congratulatory cheers. Coins rained down on Besim, thrown by the men in the crowd. Besim scrambled for these, thrusting them deep into his pockets.

“Regrettably, your lumberman is in no mood to discuss crowbars.” The voice came at Emily’s elbow. It was that insufferable Stanton, crowbar still under his arm and a brimming plate of food in his hand. He used a chicken leg to gesture at Besim. “So who’s this?”

“That’s Besim,” Emily said. She eyed the chicken leg meaningfully. “He’s one of those varmints who show up whenever there’s free food and liquor to be had.”

Stanton chewed thoughtfully as he watched Besim begin to spin. The old man gained speed as he rotated; bystanders pushed him back to the center whenever he threatened to topple over.

“What the devil is he
doing?”

“He’s doing a Cassandra,” Emily muttered. She hated Besim’s Cassandras. The old man had once been a charm maker in Dutch Flat, and in his better days he’d been Pap’s biggest rival for custom. But the rivalry had faded as Besim slid into drunkenness and its concomitant poverty. These days, the only money he got was from his impromptu liquor-lubricated prognostications. These were doubly embarrassing to one of her profession in that while they tended toward the ridiculous, they proved right about half of the time—which was about the same success Pap had with his scrying.

“Fascinating,” Stanton said. “He’s a dervish.”

“What are you talking about?” Emily asked. “Pap always said Besim did Indian magic.”

“Rubbish. That man’s no more an Indian than I am. He’s a Turk. He was a Sufi holy man once, or he studied with one.” Stanton pointed to Besim’s hands. “See how his right palm is turned upward and his left is turned down? Power comes down from Heaven into the right hand and returns down to the earth from the left. All that energy rushing through the dervish’s body supposedly endows him with supernaturally clear insight into the true nature of all existence—past, present, and future.” He took another bite of the chicken leg. “I must say, though, the addition of a pint of whiskey tends to undercut the rite’s spiritual element.”

At that moment, Besim fell with a great crash in the middle of the floor, and lay moaning and writhing, holding his gut. Words began slurring out of his mouth.

“Emily … Emily
Lyakhov”
Emily froze. Besim wasn’t going to Cassandra about her, was he? She didn’t recognize the name Lyakhov, but she didn’t have time to think about it before Besim spoke again. “Emily, you have been doing bad magic.”

A few people turned to look at Emily curiously. She wished she could sink through the floor, except there wasn’t any floor, just dirt.
Shut up, Besim
, she whispered to herself, clenching her hands tight.

“You have bewitched someone for your own good. Someone who has not asked for it.” Besim spoke with the slurry slyness of a very drunk man, waggling a finger. “You have woven a fine little net, Emily. But it will not catch you what you want …”

Dag stepped forward, his hands balled into fists.

“You quit talking about … You just
shut up
, Besim!” There was odd, hesitant anger in his voice—anger that didn’t know where it came from. “Miss Emily wouldn’t do anything like that, and you know it! That’s not the kind of Cassandra-in’ we want.”

“You get the Cassandra you get, you cow-eyed fool!” Besim flared back. But drunk as he was, he knew which side his bread was buttered on. He fell silent for a moment, staring into space, apparently searching for a more satisfactory message from the ether. When the next message came, however, it was worse than the first.

“The Corpse Switch!” Besim shrieked, his face contorting with sudden horror. “The Corpse Switch up at Old China has
failed!
The dead … the dead will rise from beneath the earth!”

There was a storm of muttering. Emily stared at him, confused and appalled. Besim’s Cassandras were usually light-hearted revelations about which young scapegrace had stolen a pie from which matron’s windowsill. They were never this dire. Corpse Switches controlled the zombie miners that the mine owners bought to work their most dangerous mines—the ones that live men wouldn’t work in for any money. The zombie workers had been paupers, criminals, and other dangerous and unsavory types. Certainly not the sorts one wanted roaming the mountains without the control of a properly sorcelled Corpse Switch.

As if that weren’t bad enough, Besim was crawling across the floor toward Emily. He stopped, kneeling in front of her, clutching the hem of her dress and pressing it to his tear-slicked face.

“The dead have been driven mad,
büyüleyici kadin
. Driven mad by a blue star.” He looked up at her, eyes glowing like embers. “You must stop them. It is not right … that the dead … should walk the earth …”

Each successive word dropped from Besim’s lips more slowly, and after the last one he slumped at her feet, still and silent. Emily snatched her skirt away and stepped back, aware of dozens of silent eyes appraising her. She flushed from throat to scalp.

“What a pile of nonsense,” Stanton said loudly. “A Corpse Switch can’t
fail
. They’re made with multiple redundancies at a licensed necromantic factory in Chicago. Which I’ve toured, by the way. They have an unblemished performance record.”

Even this pronouncement did not completely satisfy the unsettled crowd. Dozens of worried eyes turned toward Dag, waiting for his verdict on the matter.

“You think there’s anything in it, Dag?” someone shouted from the back of the room.

“Aw, hell no!” Dag nudged Besim with the toe of his boot. The dervish released a loud, muttering snore. “Besim’s thrown bunk Cassandras before, but that was the bunkest! A blue star in a mine? Not in a blue moon!”

There was uneasy laughter at this weak attempt at humor; Dag clapped the accordion player on the back.

“Let’s have a real cheerful one!” As the music resumed, Dag called over it: “You all heard Mr. Stanton. Corpse Switches don’t fail! So let’s get back to dancing. And for God’s sake, someone drag Besim someplace he can sleep it off!”

A couple of men stepped forward to oblige, and Dag came to Emily’s side, taking her arm and drawing her close. He’d had more than a few cups of apple brandy; she could smell it on his breath as he put his face close to hers.

“I don’t know what got into that old faker tonight,” he said. He wrapped his arms around her waist and gave her a squeeze. “Let’s get out of here. Let’s go have that walk we were talking about.”

“Listen, Dag …” Emily pushed back against his embrace. “What if he’s right? What if the Corpse Switch
has
failed?”

Dag grinned. “C’mon, Emily. Besim’s just never got used to the idea of zombies. He’s been jumpy as a cat since Old China brought ’em in. His imagination just ran away, that’s all.”

“But shouldn’t we go up and check?”

Dag blinked in astonishment.

“Go to Old China
now
? Five miles straight up? On
Besim’s
say-so? You must be kidding!”

“No, I’m not.” She tried to speak quietly, but the cheery tune had gotten everyone laughing and talking even louder than before. “If there’s any chance what he’s saying is true—”

“There isn’t.” Dag smiled indulgently. “I mean, he said you’d been doing bad magic, too. There wasn’t no truth in that, was there?”

“That’s not the same,” Emily whispered fiercely, pushing herself from his arms. Dag looked confused. He lifted his big hand in a gesture of dismissal.

“It’s all the same, all hooey.” Dag suddenly looked extremely tired, as if all the drink and dancing had caught up with him at once. “I wish some of these people would clear out so we could go for that walk.”

She chewed on her lip, nervousness making her stomach flutter. Finally, she took a deep breath and smiled.

“You’re right, Dag,” she said. “Listen, I’m going to go help wash up. I’ll come find you later, all right? And we’ll have a walk.”

“Yeah,” Dag said. And then, right there in the middle of everyone, he gave Emily a kiss on the cheek. She shivered, feeling eyes on them all around. She knew this should please her. If they weren’t engaged before, they were as good as now.

But she didn’t feel victorious. She felt nothing but dread, dark and sickening.

Retrieving Pap’s leather pouch from where she had stowed it, she slung it over her shoulder, clinging to the strap like a lifeline.

The fluttering nervousness in her stomach had congealed into sour apprehension. Besim hadn’t thrown a bunk Cassandra. She
had
been doing bad magic—or at least,
he’d
think it was bad magic. And if he was right about that …

She considered her options. She could tell Dag the truth, that she
had
bewitched someone, and that by “someone” she meant him. That’d be the end of her professional credibility. She and Pap could be horsewhipped out of Lost Pine, or Dag could bring law against her. Baugh’s Patent Magicks were bad for business, but a turn in the county jail would be an awful lot worse.

Or she could go up to Old China and sort the mess out for herself.

She walked away quickly, the cheerful notes of “Sweet, Sweet Spring” chasing her into the darkness.

CHAPTER TWO

The Corpse Switch

Emily walked briskly up to the Old China Mine, jumping from rock to rock along the narrow pony path that wound alongside the darkly rushing You Bet Creek. The night had grown bitterly cold, and patches of snow glowed blue in the moonlight. She pulled her buffalo coat tighter around herself, glad now that she hadn’t put her winter flannels away too soon.

Besim’s Cassandra puzzled her. How could the Corpse Switch have failed, and what was a blue star doing in a mine? But the part she kept coming back to was the part of least immediate interest: the name Lyakhov. The name seemed so familiar. Could Besim have stumbled across something useful? Something about her mother?

Of her mother, Emily remembered nothing. It was not that her memories were sketchy or vague—they simply did not exist. She remembered when she’d first come to Pap’s cabin. But before that, nothing. A clear demarcation—a horizon beyond which stretched only shadow.

All Emily’s efforts to find out more had been thwarted. Her mother had left so little behind. Emily reached up, feeling for her hair sticks, reassuring herself that they were still there.

She’d made Pap tell her the story a hundred times. How her mother had staggered into Lost Pine on an icy black night twenty years ago, just after the first snows had fallen in the highest passes, frostbit from her toes to her blue fingertips. Five-year-old Emily was clinging to her chest, a man’s woolen coat pulled tight around them both.

The timber camp workers had gotten her inside, bundled her up in front of a blazing fire. She had made only one impenetrable utterance before losing consciousness:

“We must get to the Cynic Mirror.”

Pap had been called. He’d piled counterpanes and quilts over the delirious woman, coaxed powerful herbal tisanes down her throat. He spoke spell-words over her, remonstrated with her departing spirit, but nothing was any use. She died within days.

Lyakhov. Could it have been her mother’s name? Then that would make her Emily Lyakhov, as Besim had called her. She’d heard names like that, names ending in -itch and -ov, among the thick-bearded Russians who drove cattle through the passes. They sometimes stopped to ask Pap for charms to ward against curses and the evil eye. They always asked for hot tea to drink, and jam to put in it.

Deep in thought, she hardly noticed when the moon slid behind the clouds and darkness fell like a blanket. Having roamed the mountains most of her life, she had no difficulty keeping to the path, and was not unnerved by the scrapings, squeaks, and hoots that surrounded her. But when there was a huge pop and a flash of dazzling white light, her heart stopped in her chest. She spun, balling her fists.

“Dag?” she called. “Is that you?”

“Of course it isn’t.” A man’s voice, irritable. A spare form held up a pine stick that glowed with magical incandescence. “He was asleep in a corner when I left. Your absence took the steam out of him. Make your love spells pretty harsh, don’t you?”

“Mr. Stanton?” Her voice was high with disbelief, then a ferocious whisper. “What are you talking about? Love spells?”

“Oh, please. I was riding back from Dutch Flat last night, and I saw—” He stopped abruptly, evidently reconsidering his words. “Well, it was obvious at the dance tonight. Your lumberman smelled like a French whorehouse just burned down. Ashes of Amour, I take it? You used far too much lavender.”

“You … 
saw
me?” Emily hissed. “Under the Hanging Oak?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

“But I was …” Emily choked on the words:
naked as a beggar’s toes
.

“All right, so I may have
glimpsed
you,” Stanton said. “Briefly. But with your hair all undone, I certainly couldn’t see …” He paused. “Anyway, I rode on immediately. I certainly had no wish to watch you lay a trap for some poor male to blunder into.”

“You dirty spy!” Emily was hot with embarrassment.

“I make no judgments.” Stanton’s tone implied that he didn’t have to, that judgment had already been passed by eons of respectability and decency. “Of course, it represents an egregious breach of professional ethics, but he
is
the richest man in Lost Pine, and not missing any limbs or digits, so I can understand—”

“Oh, yes, I’m sure you understand
completely,”
Emily snarled. “You’re so all-fired insightful. See if you can guess what I’m thinking right now.”

Stanton didn’t venture. Rather, he picked up another stick from the ground and said,
“Lux.”
The branch flared to light with a loud
pop
—the same sound that had startled her a few minutes earlier. He handed it to Emily. To her surprise (and slight regret, for her fingers were stiff with cold) she found it gave off no heat, and rather glowed as if illuminated from within.

“Thank you,” she said. “What are you doing here?”

“I guessed you’d take it upon yourself to check on things at the Old China Mine. And not knowing the way to get there, I decided that following you would be the best way for me to get there, too.”

“Why do you want to go up to Old China?”

“Isn’t it obvious? I can’t let a female with such dangerously antique notions about magic—not to mention such a questionable code of ethics—face a pack of zombie miners alone.” He paused. “Pap couldn’t go, and none of those drunken sots back there would be any help.”

“Then you believe Besim was telling the truth?”

“Of course,” he said. “Half of Besim’s Cassandra, the half about you casting spells on people without their knowledge and being a
büyüleyici kadin
—that translates as ‘bad Witch,’ in case your colloquial Turkish has gotten rusty—was entirely accurate. Knowing that, I have every reason to believe the other half. Or at least to believe that
he
believes the other half. I still maintain that Corpse Switches do not fail.”

“Well, I don’t want company,” she snapped, turning on her heel.
Especially not your company
.

“You may not want my company, but you need my help.” Stanton’s long legs easily matched even her most rapid strides on the rough path. “I have studied with professionals who have done years of necromantic research. You haven’t the least exposure to modern theories of revivification or devivification—subjects with which I have practical experience.”

“This is my job,” Emily said. “Besides, you’ve got a whole new crate from New York to open. Why dirty your hands with real magic?”

“And what would you know about
real
magic?” The scorn in his voice made her want to punch him. “Lives may be at stake. Perhaps you could curb your pride and think about that?”

Emily clenched her teeth. Insufferable.

“Suit yourself,” she hissed.

Emily and Stanton reached Old China two hours past midnight.

Shacks and mine gear glowed stark white in cold moonlight, and everything was graveyard-still. In a mining camp that used live labor, this would not be unusual at two in the morning. But zombies didn’t sleep. The whole point was their ability to work continuously, for months on end, until they literally fell apart.

And indeed, there were signs that work had just recently come to a halt. Flickering coal-oil lanterns still burned along the hundred-foot board sluice that stretched like a dark road up to the mouth of the mine. A thin trickle of black water ran off the sluice into a muddy pit that snaked down to rejoin You Bet Creek below.

The foreman’s cabin, crooked and leaning, shone silver-gray in the moonlight. Dark shadows under its eaves made it look angry. Stanton used his foot to carefully ease open the door.

“No one inside.” He disappeared through the door and Emily followed.

The cramped foreman’s cabin was packed with mining paraphernalia—crates marked “California Powder Works” spilling drifts of wood shavings, spools of timing fuse, rope and drills, and broken headlamps waiting to be mended. But it was an enormous machine, huge as the upright piano in Mrs. Bargett’s boarding house, that dominated the space.

It was a behemoth of gleaming brass and polished mahogany, ornamented with a great deal of machine-engraved scrollwork. Here and there, lights flickered under blown-glass buttons. Emily squinted to read the enameled plaque:

Vivification Control Switch, D. J. Conway and Company, Chicago, Ill., Pat. Pend. 1862
.

“This is the Corpse Switch?” Emily asked, but Stanton didn’t answer. He was twisting a dial and looking closely at one of the needle indicators.

“It seems to be working just fine.”

“You sure? Maybe touring the factory doesn’t make you as much of an expert as you’d like to think.”

He glared over his shoulder. “Corpse Switches are really very simple, even though they do a complex job. If one
were
to fail, it would be immediately apparent.”

“All right. If the Corpse Switch is working, then where are all the corpses?”

At that moment, a distant, piercing scream sliced the night air. It came from the entrance of the mine where iron tracks vanished into the blackness.

They rushed out of the shack and up the hill to the heavy-timbered mouth of the mine. From deep within they could hear the amplified echoes of an incoherent shriek of pain and terror. The sound was like a cold steel rod rubbed against Emily’s spine.

Stanton grabbed the satchel from Emily’s shoulder and threw it open, ignoring her cry of outrage. He pawed through bottles and leather pouches, peering at labels.

“Chelidonium majus, inula helenium, hyssopus officinalis, viscum album
 … house-magic basics. Oh, and black storax! That will help immensely. At least you’re well prepared.” He poured garlic and salt and cayenne onto a flat rock, then, using a smoothly rounded piece of granite as a pestle, he ground them together with a few of the other herbs, finally adding the storax. He muttered charms in low cadent Latin.

“You’re not rhyming,” she snapped. “You have to rhyme!”

“There isn’t time for that nonsense,” he said. “This is an extremely simple devivification powder, the kind a schoolboy might compound as an amusement on a rainy Sunday.” He scooped two handfuls and put them in his pockets. He gestured to Emily to do the same.

“Throw it at anything that moves,” he said. “It’s not strong enough to hold them off long, so don’t let your guard down.”

They crept into the mine, holding their brands before them. The bright white light cast harsh flickering shadows against the rough-hewn pine supports, made the mining-car tracks seem as sharp as if they’d been honed on a whetstone. A thin trickle of muddy cocoa-colored water ran down the middle of the tracks, smelling of iron or, perhaps, Emily thought as they got closer to the anguished screams, blood.

They followed the screams to the end of a shallow test tunnel off the main line. There, they found him—Mr. Hart, the foreman, the mine’s only live employee. He was buried under huge, mud-slick boulders and crumbling earth. Only his head and shoulders and arms protruded. His breathing was choked, constricted by the immense weight pressing down on his chest. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth, black in the half-light.

“Em Edwards, thank God you’ve come.” He raised a shaking arm to clutch at her hand. His skin was freezing cold, waxy and gritty with dirt. “Thank God …”

Emily brushed mud from his face. “I won’t leave you.”

“Light …” The man’s voice was small and terrified. “Don’t let the light go out …”

“How is he?” Stanton called. Emily came close to Stanton’s side, dropped her voice low.

“He’s still alive, but he’s under a ton of rock. I don’t know how we can get him out.”

“Do whatever you can … quickly.” Stanton was looking down into the frigid gloom of the main tunnel. Deep in the darkness, Emily could hear shuffling and grunts and small groans, and now and again she saw something glitter. Eyes.

“They’re holding off for the moment,” Stanton said. He threw one of the brands down the tunnel. In the sudden flare of light, Emily caught her first glimpse of the zombies. Crouching half bent, in filthy shredded rags, they pulled back from the light, but not far.

Emily hurried back to Hart’s side and looked at the rocks that covered him. They were far too big to move.

“They … they went crazy.” Hart’s voice was thin and distant. “The diggings were … Everything was normal. Until they found …”

The man’s leather-gloved hand fell open, and a warm glow filled the side tunnel. In his palm lay some kind of gemstone, rich blue threaded with glowing filaments of white. It shimmered from within, as if suffused with remembered sunlight. Emily brought her light down to examine it.