Arlen stopped short in front of Grunt, who promptly ran up against his back, jamming his heavy shoulder into Arlen's kidney. Arlen gave an oof of both pain and surprise, and snapped, "Pay attention, Grunt."
Grunt whuffled the bemused noise of a horse who's been woken from a nap and nibbled absently at Arlen's uppermost arm. Even affectionately, one might say.
But Arlen was in no mood to notice, not with the landscape before him warped so sickeningly. He shook Grunt off and draped the lead rope around a tree branch, automatically taking the opportunity to scrape the mud from the sides and bottoms—and sometimes the tops—of his boots, using the nearest handy rock.
As an afterthought, he picked up the rock and hefted it into the distorted area before him. It landed with a hollow, mildly reverberating thonk—the wrong kind of noise altogether for a rock hitting soft spring ground—and rolled until it hit a jagged protrusion that Arlen didn't even try to identify. Maybe it had once been a tree; maybe a rabbit. For all he knew, maybe a chunk of cloud; there was no telling how high the damage rose.
Around him, the rest of the landscape didn't seem to notice anything amiss at all. A small flock of steel-grey birds fluttered in the brush to his left, the males flashing the brilliant orange of their underwing display in an attempt to impress the world in general. The air was still, the sun warm, and there were even sections of the trail—the edges and high points—that held firm beneath his feet. The woods around him had a familiar feel, with bud-studded branches in accustomed silhouettes and the bark patterns he was used to, as well as the varying but generally easy to navigate terrain—gulches he could easily avoid, shallow creeks that cut mild beds through soft soil and stopped at hard bedrock, glittering in miniature rapids over a profusion of water-rounded stones.
Anfeald Woods, or coming close.
But such normality was becoming harder and harder to find. The damage before him loomed large and impressive, but he'd realized only this morning that it was possible to stop at any random point along the trail, scan the woods, and find a spot of distortion. Small ones, barely discernible against the cheerful disorder of the woods . . . but they were there. And the large areas were becoming harder and harder to circumvent, forcing him to take Grunt far out of their way . . . although if he'd had a better sense of direction, he might well have wasted less time finding the trail again.
More than once he'd wondered if he'd be able to reach Anfeald at all. Not because of the hardship—he was tougher and leaner than he'd ever been, and if the oft-mucky footing of early spring slowed him, the warming days made up for the annoyance—or because he'd been accosted by many more men of the same ilk as the ill-fated fellow who'd found him so many small towns ago.
No, it was as he pondered the distressed pockets of landscape, as he skirted the edges of them, now sometimes running into two or three obviously separate occurrences with overlapping borders, that he wondered if he'd make it home. Sooner or later, he'd find himself trapped. And sooner or later, upon finding an actively distorting area, he'd have to try to follow the instigating energy to its source . . . thus giving himself away to whoever wanted him out of the way.
Supposing they were still looking at all.
Were they smart, they'd be turning their attention to the distortions, as was all of Camolen. But somehow he doubted they'd see it that way. "Too convenient for me," he said to Grunt, who paused from his browsing to give Arlen a doubtful look. Arlen turned his attention back to this latest roadblock and felt common sense give way before a sudden surge of anger. I want to go home, burn it! Home to Jaime if she still somehow waited for him, home to his familiar workshop and his defenses, where he could throw himself into solving this problem whose solution so obviously eluded whoever now ran the Council. Home to his frequent and good-natured arguments with Carey over matters between landers and wizards, home to Jess's natural ebullience, her touchingly open nature, the amusing sly looks she cast at Arlen whenever she meant to tease Carey.
Home to the familiar—which none of this was. Not the travel, the vulnerability, the inability to use the magic that had long ago become second nature—
Damn whoever's behind this. "Damn them all to the lowest hell!" he said with such abrupt vehemence that Grunt stopped chewing altogether and Arlen realized how loud he'd been in the otherwise pleasant activity of the woods. He gave the gelding a pat, and thus reassured, Grunt went back to wrapping his flexible lips around the stubbiest of sprouting greens. Ruefully, Arlen told him, "If I do enough shouting, I won't have to use magic for them to find us. Whoever they are in the first place."
He knew the look of an enforcement agent when he saw one. He just didn't know who'd sent his. Too bad Grunt had trampled the man so thoroughly.
Or, remembering the helplessness of being drugged—over drugged—and the intent in the big man's eye, maybe not too bad at all. Maybe . . . just right.
It still left him in this mess. It left Camolen in this mess, with only Arlen remaining as a Council-level wizard, and unable to use his skills to help either himself or his people. Although . . .
He reached through his open coat front and dug around in the deep baggy pockets of the horrible orange tunic he'd acquired way back near Amses—he fervently hoped to wear the thing to shreds before anyone he knew actually saw him in it—and pulled out a handful of cheap spellstones. He'd intended to get closer to home—perhaps to be at home—when he experimented with these, but now he thought perhaps he had a better chance of getting there if he did a little poking around on the spot.
He already knew that raw magic incited the disturbances, even once they seemed to have solidified and gone dormant. He couldn't use his own signature-ridden magic to experiment with small spells, but . . .
He picked out a spellstone he thought he recalled as being designed to enhance one's sexuality—utter nonsense, since those kinds of spells had to be customized for the recipient, but people did ever hope—and triggered it.
The stone produced a small wash of token magic—thin magic to Arlen's magical sense, with a tinny one-note feel to a man accustomed to producing orchestral magic himself. Grunt, too, felt it, and regarded Arlen with a sudden hopeful interest that alarmed Arlen enough so he took a few steps aside. "One of the reasons I like cats," he said pointedly to Grunt, "is that they seldom hump your leg."
But he didn't lose track of the purpose of the experiment, even as Grunt briefly pawed the ground in his frustration, gave up, and returned to his favorite pastime of pulling food into his mouth.
Arlen could have pawed the ground in frustration, too, for as the spellstone went dark, the disturbed area didn't so much as ripple. "Not that anything else has made sense lately," he said, ignoring the frequency with which he'd been offering asides to the gelding. Wizards were supposed to be eccentric, especially theoretical specialists like himself. Everyone said so.
Then again, only a theoretical wizard was likely to have the ability to do what he tried next. Choosing a spellstone he believed was meant to offer a hokey greeting appropriate to new parents, he tossed it at the disturbed area and invoked it in mid-flight.
An image appeared above its travel arc, glowing with purples for congratulations and gold for luck but looking subtly wrong somehow; he couldn't read the words against the backdrop of melted reality, and then when the active spellstone landed, he didn't have the chance to try—for the melted reality spasmed in reaction, reaching for the stone, enfolding it, warping the colors into the swirl of mixed landscape hues.
Arlen tensed, taking a few steps back and ready to run, but once the spellstone had been engulfed, the warping activity ceased, leaving the distortion with new splots and globs of bright color that should have faded as soon as the spellstone discharged . . . and didn't.
Arlen frowned at the mess, rubbed a finger down the mustache he didn't have, and muttered, "Well, that wasn't right." He searched the spellstones piled in his hand, poking them aside with his finger until he found a similar one—meant for the newly partnered, but close enough. Same gaudy colors, same bright message . . . he triggered it, this time knowing it wouldn't affect the disturbed area from here and giving all his attention to the spell itself.
Words hung in the air, incomplete and sagging, the colors uneven and the pithy message hard to read. On a quick hunch—this was his strength, this troubleshooting process—he moved a step closer to the disturbed area, and watched the cheery greeting fall apart completely, scattering into illegible lumps of quickly fading color.
No wonder the new Council hadn't been able to get anything but the most basic of services up and running again. Whatever this effect was, wherever it came from, it gobbled up raw magic like candy, thriving on it; it grabbed conventional magic only with the most direct of contact. But even in disdaining conventional magic, it interfered with it, breaking down spell structures and distorting the results. Arlen looked askance at Grunt, realizing he was perhaps luckier than he'd first suspected at the benign results of that sexual enhancement spell.
And then the questions crowded in. What if he ran all these experiments on an actively warping area, what then? That, too, was something he could try without revealing himself to those who watched for his magical signature; following the activity to its source was not, and would have to wait as long as possible—although initiating either experiment depended on finding an area of actively warping reality.
Arlen dumped the spellstones back into his unpleasantly orange pocket and closed the coat around himself, fastening the toggles in the cooling afternoon. Ahead of him lay the huge area of disturbance, one he wanted to skirt before sundown. A glance behind showed two other easily identified areas of nastiness, small enough to wrap his arms around if he'd had any such desire. To the side he found a fist-sized spot, a blackish blot on which one of the male birds perched, flashing his underwings for all to see.
He came to the grim realization that he'd have much less trouble finding an active warp than he liked to admit.
Home.
"I'm trying," he said to Jaime. But only Grunt heard him.
"I'm trying," Dayna said, fighting an overwhelming load of guilt and pressure as she faced the impatience of her friends. Well, minus Mark, who was at work, and plus Wheeler, whom she'd come to appreciate more and more in a visual sense—not quite so bland as he'd seemed upon first glance—but whom she would never call a friend.
At least they always knew just where he stood. Repeated friend-or-foe spells yielded just the same results as the first, convincing her that while he was hardly on their side, when he intended to work against them, they'd know it.
"I'm trying," she repeated, with less vehemence and more despair. "If you'd ever tried to deconstruct a spellstone—"
How many days had passed, and still they sat here in Ohio? Wheeler was the only one who seemed at ease with it, seemed to think it was the best course. Safest for them. He'd pitched in as they opened up the end of the barn after Ramble's departure, standing by with Carey and the hose while Mark charred the remains of his partner with a propane torch and then passed the otherwise inexplicable mess off as fire damage.
Watching them had given Dayna the cold grue; Mark's face had been pasty and tense, displaying all his awareness that the inexplicable mess itself had once been a human being. Carey had been in grim and determined mode, and Wheeler . . .
It was impossible to tell what Wheeler was feeling. They might know his intent, they might know his truthfulness . . . they never knew his feelings.
Even now, with Carey chafing to go home on one side and Suliya in a distinctly resentful mood on the other, Wheeler sat on the couch with his ankle crossed over his knee, his hands laced together over his belt, as serene as if they discussed plans for a trip into Columbus and not across worlds to their Camolen home.
Home. For she was homesick as she'd never been upon leaving her snug little house between Waldo and Marion, the musty, buttoned-up house that was still in her name but which she knew she'd soon sell. Unlike Jaime—who had a life she loved here and a man she loved there—Dayna had no great conflict, nothing pulling her back to the life with which she'd started.
And now she wanted to go home.
She pulled her legs up to sit cross-legged in the half-open recliner, the only one of them small enough to do so without overlapping the confines of the chair, and buried her face in her hands, momentarily overwhelmed with the situation. The things she'd have to accomplish . . . the odds against her ability to do so. The people counting on her . . .
Especially the people counting on her.
"I don't understand," Carey said. Of all of them, he needed to get back to Camolen—back where Anfeald's healers understood his needs and could deal with the new problem. As Marion General's doctors had promised, he'd stopped coughing up blood; the concussive hemoptysis was healing on its own . . . but never quite all the way. Even now Carey gave his little undertone of a cough before continuing. "Why are you deconstructing Jaime's spare travel spellstone at all?"
"Bootin' good question," Suliya said, casting Dayna a resentful glance. "I've had about enough of this—you won't let me go exploring, you won't let me go home—and I know you've made new storage stones. Those egg things glow enough to keep me up at night."
"The fiber-optic stones. They're great—they hold a hell of a lot more magic than the crystal-cut stones," Dayna said, lifting her head with brief enthusiasm at that accidental find. If she thought they could get back into the New Age shop without being chased out with brooms and fire extinguishers, she'd grab up half a dozen more of the things. But then again . . . storage space wasn't the problem. She had enough stones. She had enough magic siphoned into them, and no wish to struggle through the process again.
The problem was what she'd learned as she was doing it.
The increasing static.
Her increasing concern about spelling them into unknown territory.
"Great," Carey said flatly, echoing Dayna's word. "Then we have the magic to boost the spells we came with."
"I—" Dayna looked at them all—the impatience, the sulk, and the cool distraction, and finally said it out loud. "I'm not sure it's safe to use those spells. Whatever's happening in Camolen . . . it's getting worse. It took me three sessions to fill the storage stones, and I could feel the difference each time. I really think we should try to arrive at Anfeald. And the only way I know to do that is to pick apart the spell Arlen gave Jaime that would take her there."
Suliya gave her a narrow-eyed look. "Ay," she said, "you saying we might be stuck here?"
Unexpectedly, Wheeler let his crossed ankle fall to the ground, leaning forward a little to join the conversation. "What's spelling in Camolen will pass."
"You believe," Carey said, his voice pointed.
Wheeler shrugged. "Yes. I believe."
"I don't want to end up stuck here because you believe wrong," Suliya said. She pushed herself out of the couch, quite obviously distancing herself from Wheeler, and paced the living room to frown at the black fireplace insert, even giving it a little kick. "If things are getting worse, we should try to go back now." She turned around to glare at Dayna. "I want to go back now."
"Before it's too late," Carey said, but his words didn't hold the conviction they might have. He exchanged a glance with Dayna, gauging her reaction, and then looked away. He'd seen it—she didn't know if it might already be too late.
Suliya knew them both well enough by now; she read the exchange and her sepia-toned skin flushed darker. "You burnin' well ought to have said something before things got this bad!"
Miserably, defensively, Dayna said, "I only filled the last of the stones yesterday—it's terrifying work, in case you hadn't noticed. And our friend Wheeler has made plenty of noise about taking it slow. As soon as I realized how bad it'd gotten, I started working on the deconstruction. And I wanted to have an idea of how it was going before I talked to you all!"
"I still believe you should go slow," Wheeler said. "But now . . . I won't stop you if you try to go back. It's been long enough."
The others hardly paid any attention to him. Suliya crossed her arms and kept her glare on Dayna. "If it's so rootin' hard to deconstruct this thing, make up your own!"
Wheeler gave her a look that might have been impressed . . . or it might have been disapproving. Hard to tell. He said, "I'm really surprised your father let that mouth come out of his household."
"Burn off," Suliya told him, sparing him only the merest of glances. "I wouldn't be here if I wasn't a disappointment to him in more ways than you can count. Then again, he's turned out to be a real rootin' disappointment to me, too, so I guess we're even."
Dayna was glad for the respite of their exchange; it gave her the chance to come up with words in response to Suliya's demand instead of her initial gape-mouthed astonishment and anger, although Carey's brow was still slightly raised from his own reaction. Make up a spell. Right. "Suliya," she said, unable to stop the words from coming out between clenched teeth, "Arlen is Camolen's best theoretical wizard. I can cast a spell I've learned from his work, I can put it into a spellstone, but I damn sure can't come up with the same thing on my own. And raw magic—that's sure not something I want to count on for world travel. We'd probably get there—and we'd probably look like Wheeler's ex-partner."
"Raw magic," Wheeler said, looking distinctly uncomfortable. A first. But whatever was on his mind, he didn't say it.
Probably just as scared as everyone else on Camolen when it came to using the spell technique. Dayna made a little face at him, too distracted to do it right, too aware of Suliya's anger turning to true dismay and fear.
"That's it, then," Suliya said, her voice hardly more than a whisper; she sank back onto the stove. "Here's where we stay."
"Unless I'm right about the interference passing," Wheeler said.
But Carey just looked at Dayna. Full of understanding, of comprehension about the race they ran—to deconstruct the spell and reconfigure Dayna's spells to land them within Anfeald Hold before the magical static grew so bad it was foolish to try even that much. He said, "If there's anyone in this room more stubborn than I am, it's you. You'll get us there."
Dayna said, "I'm trying."
Jaime finished crosshatching an area of her Camolen map and cast a glance back at Linton, who consulted his list. "North of Kymmet," he said, standing on the other side of Carey's desk where he could keep an eye out for incoming riders in the job room. "Where the Kymmet-Dryden Road splits to loop around Dryden Lake. The whole intersection is out, and it takes in that little jut of the lake, plus seven acres south and ten east. The report is two days old."
Jaime made careful notations in erasable pencil, then picked up the red penstick and marked in the area, noting the date of the sighting along its border. "That does it for Dryden," she said, all too familiar with the hard knot of dread in her stomach. "Anyone who knows the territory can still get in or out, but the roads are gone."
Natt's voice held the slightest tremble of despair. "That does it for a lot of communities. Look west to Gioncanna—it's been surrounded for days. For all we know, it's been engulfed."
Jaime took a step back, taking in the patchwork of red overlaying the map, seeing the results of this session . . . the steadily shrinking clear areas. The detailed map of Anfeald in the job room looked no better. Suddenly overwhelmed, she gave the pencil a flippant toss into the air; it landed on the floor and broke with a snap. "For all we know, most of Camolen is engulfed. None of these reports is more recent than two days, and the dispatch is useless." She hadn't even attempted to return the static-filled missive from Suliya's family, a peremptory demand for a response on their wayward daughter's status. Plenty of people were wondering about their families right now, and Jaime had no answers to offer, not even if the wording of the message had left her with an uneasy feeling that it had actually been a threat. It didn't matter; even their considerable influence couldn't overcome a magical natural disaster. "The only reason Chandrai hasn't been here to yell at me recently is because she can't get here."
"Jaime—"
"No." Jaime cut Natt off with a slash of her hand through the air. "That's enough. I'm not sending any more of our people out there." God, she didn't want Jess-as-Lady out there, either, running at liberty with the furthest fallow pasture as home base. But Lady knew to avoid the meltdowns . . . and from the state she'd been in when she'd delivered the notes from Ohio, the worst thing Jaime could do would be to close her in that pasture.
Besides, who knew. That pasture might be the very next place to be hit.
"They know not to use magic on the road," Linton started, bringing her attention back to their couriers—but subsided at the sharp shake of Jaime's head.
"Everyone knows not to use magic near the meltdowns by now," she said. "But they keep cropping up, and they keep growing. I don't want any of our couriers caught out there, away from home and circled by meltdowns. Everyone who's in Anfeald stays in Anfeald." She gave the two men a look—a challenge, really—to check for resistance, for signs they'd fight this turning-point decision.
There were none.
Linton's long features, recently set in perpetual grimness, looked only grimmer. And Natt—eating under the stress and plumper than he'd been even a handful of days earlier—rubbed a hand over the balding area of his head and said tentatively, "If I may suggest—"
"Please," she said, and meant it. The more ideas other people offered her, the less she had to come up with on her own.
Not that any of her own ideas had done them any good. Not really. Made things easier, in a way—kept them informed, kept them feeling like they were doing something right up until this point when it became clear that nothing they'd done or could do would make any difference at all—but in the end, had not a whit of effect on the end results.
He said, "We're taking for granted that because we know not to use magic next to a meltdown, and that we know only the simplest spells are reliable anymore, everyone does. But not everyone uses magic as often as those of us here, or couriers who routinely rely on map lights and night glows. If we're going to draw our people back, then I think we should use them within Anfeald for as long as we can. Spread the word to people who lost dispatch access and never regained it, and who might never have heard any of the warnings at all."
Linton looked at Jaime, his interest piqued. "That's a good one, Jaime. All the couriers know Anfeald well enough to have a good fallback if they find their way blocked."
Jaime knuckled her lip, and wondered in a strangely remote aside when on earth she'd picked up that habit. Natt was right. They'd made assumptions; they'd been forced to make assumptions, with all their manpower committed to carrying information on the large scale, dealing with Camolen's macrostructure.
Camolen didn't have a macrostructure. Not anymore.
"Good call," she said finally. "No one goes out without at least a day's worth of food and water, though. And we'll revisit the decision twice a day." She rubbed a hand over her hair, scrubbing it into complete disarray and not caring; the edge of Carey's desk seemed to come up and meet her rump. "I don't know who we're kidding," she said. "No one knows what's happening. No one knows how to stop it. No one knows how many people have died . . . or whether we'll all die before this is over. We're not doing anything but keeping ourselves busy until then."
From somewhere, Natt mustered a reassuring firmness . . . or what was meant to be one. The newly habitual uncertainty in his voice diluted his own effectiveness. "We have to trust that the Council has made breakthroughs since the last time we had contact," he said. "Even now, they may be spelling a solution . . . they may have even started clearing up some of the damage. This is their job, not ours. We have to trust them to do it."
Jaime bent from the waist, scooping up the broken pencil without lifting her weight from the desk. "The thing is," she said heavily, "I don't." Not without Arlen.
"It's all we have left," Linton said. "We do our best to get the people through. We do what we can do. And we trust the Council to do the rest."
Jaime said, "I'll try."