Memory of Fire Page 12

  And that meant that one of their own had gone through the gate, set a spell with the rest of the Sentinels present—but so quickly and smoothly that none of them had noticed it—and had then taken his or her place in the circle, confident that his…or her…treachery would be masked by the misfiring reveal spells.

  All of the spells would have misfired. Eric's, however, was the only one that had done so in such a way that it had been obvious—and that childish obviousness he had shown in casting his spell had to have been the one variable that the traitor could not have planned for. He was certain that all of the reveals had failed, tampered with by the traitor—but only his had failed in such a big, sloppy, humiliating way that no one could overlook it or think that it had done what it was supposed to do.

  Had he not failed so spectacularly, June Bug would not have suspected the tampering. She might not have checked the circle for spell residue after they left. They would have thought all of their number had been cleared.

  Instead, Eric now knew the Sentinels were being betrayed by one of their own.

  But who?

  The only person he could trust was June Bug. And she had decided the only person she could trust was him. He supposed that made sense. Had he been the one to cast the subversion spell, he certainly wouldn't have also cast a reveal spell that would backfire so spectacularly, or that would leave him the humiliated public confessor of numerous secret sins.

  "I think," June Bug said, "that you and I ought to take a ride out to Rockingham. Maybe walk around a bit, see if we can figure out what caused those marks."

  "Anything you'll need me for?" Willie asked. He was leaning against the far wall of the room, his eyes half-closed and an expression of utter exhaustion etched into his face.

  "Get some rest," Eric said. "You look like you could use it, and we aren't going to need any gates for this reconnaissance. We'll get the lay of the land this time out. I want to see if we can track down some of these energy trails June Bug has found. When we do go in, I'm going to want more than you, me, and June Bug there."

  "Good enough." Willie sighed heavily. "I haven't had a good night's sleep in about a week. I think I'm going to go home and take a nap. You need me…you call me. Y'hear? Soon as you get anything."

  Eric said, "The second we know anything."

  "Then I'll see you all later." Willie left, and Debora left behind him. The other Sentinels hung around. Eric put Mayhem on the next watch with Deever Duncan as backup, sent everyone else back to what they'd been doing before with the admonishment that they were to stay close to their phones. Then he and June Bug headed out to his patrol car, ostensibly to drive to Rockingham.

  * * *

  Lauren was tapping on the walls in her mother's old sewing room—still done in the same pale cream wallpaper with the tiny cornflowers that she had helped her mother hang when she was a child—when Embar materialized out of the built-in shelving her father had made so that her mother would have a place for all of her cloth.

  "Found it," he said.

  "The notebook. Just like that?"

  "You'll still have to get it out. It's hidden in a secret compartment in the shelving."

  Jake sat on the floor, for the moment content to be crashing a big plastic car into the baseboard. The monotonous clack-clack-clack-thud, clack-clack-clack-thud was going to start getting under Lauren's skin pretty soon, she was sure—but as long as Jake wasn't running around trying to stick coat hangers into electrical outlets or to pull everything from above his head onto his head, she'd take Annoying Noises for $500, Alex, and count her blessings.

  "Can you see how to open the compartment?"

  "I can show you where it is. You're going to have to figure out how to open it yourself."

  He drifted to her left, fading part of the way into one shelf. "The notebook is right here," he said. "I'm standing on it."

  Lauren crouched by the shelf he indicated and—once he had moved out of her way—started pressing on the shelf and the backboard, and tapping on the fine old hardwood, listening for anything different that might indicate the manner in which she should get into the shelving. She tugged and thumped and looked for any unusual signs of wear. She could find nothing.

  Her father had loved woodworking. He'd spent hours out back in his workshop after he'd done his mail route each day, working with handsaws and planers and chisels and rasps and router bits, creating beautiful wooden rocking horses and bookcases and tables and cabinets. People all over the county owned work by him; each piece carefully signed on the bottom with his carved name and the date he'd finished the job. The little freestanding bookshelves that had been in Lauren's room when she was a child had been his work, as was the jewelry box she still owned.

  She tipped her head, thinking of the jewelry box. It was a puzzle box, a beautiful little piece of woodworking made to look like a row of books stacked between a base book and a top book. The trick to getting into it was to slide one of the "page" panels from the bottom out, then to slide the spine of the bottom book to the left as far as it would go, then to move the spines of the third and eighth books in the row down into the space created by the shifted spine. The titles on the two panels were The Black Stallion and Misty of Chincoteague—her two favorite books at the time he'd made the box for her. Moved, the little panels revealed a hidden key and a tiny keyhole.

  Nothing on the jewelry box wiggled or rattled, and it had been designed so that each sliding part would show no wear; after years of use, it was still impossible to tell when the box was closed that it was anything other than a charming wood carving of a stack of books.

  She studied the shelves, the design of that little box in her mind. The shelves ended at the window, and resumed on the other side. Her mother had kept a fern on a brass stand in the space between the shelves, and Lauren suddenly remembered that it was frequently out of place in the room. "It was getting too much light," her mother had said when Lauren asked about it once—but the window faced north.

  Her father had done decorative routing along the edge of each panel—a little groove half an inch from the edge than ran from ceiling to floor—and had given each shelf and side panel a thick bullnose. When she looked carefully at the design, she realized that those two elements—groove and bullnose—would give someone moving pieces a handhold while hiding any wear from sliding pieces, in the same fashion that the spines of her books had been designed to overlap and conceal their hidden workings.

  She slid her fingers along the groove of the vertical panel beside the window, gently tugging toward herself. Embar stood beside her, watching.

  "The books are in the middle section," he said.

  "I know. You showed me." Lauren kept sliding her fingers downward, kept applying pressure.

  Embar sighed.

  Her fingers crossed the line where the vertical panel joined the baseboard—and the baseboard moved. She pulled harder, and it slid smoothly toward her and pulled completely out.

  She nodded. Behind the removed baseboard was a solid panel of wood—but she'd expected that. She pressed her hands against the front baseboard, which had no grooves or other features to make it stand out, and tried to slide it to the left. After initial resistance, it moved smoothly about four feet to the left, then stopped. She nodded. The middle shelves now showed a gap in the baseboard. The carefully crafted bullnose shelving proved to have a lip; when she used the lip as a drawer pull, the entire shelf moved smoothly out.

  In the space beneath it lay a notebook—a simple leather-bound three-ring binder. It was stuffed full, its uneven, yellowed pages looked like they were ready to burst out of the binder and spill across the room like a snowdrift.

  "Good God," she murmured. "What a mess." She lifted the notebook from its hiding place and opened it at random. The page was a diagram of some sort of mechanical device—drawn in blue ballpoint pen by her mother, with her mother's neat, sharply angled script running out from arrows that indicated the names and purposes of various parts. The diagram
was titled Universal Speller, Version 4. Lauren started reading some of the notations.

  psychic equalizer—.999 silver, minimum three ounces for best damping, make sure the copper wiring harness is firmly attached to both the Quatting coupler and the blackbox

  thram—(4) connect in series—silver wire with rubber cladding. DON'T let the thrams touch the babbler

  Quatting coupler—…

  Lauren frowned and thumbed through other pages. More diagrams. More notes that made no sense, using words from a vocabulary drawn out of a discipline she knew nothing about. She couldn't figure out what the equipment was supposed to do, she couldn't figure out how any of it might be made to work, and she had the momentary, almost hysterical suspicion that someone was having a huge laugh at her expense. What sort of nonsense was all of this?

  There were pages upon pages of dated journal entries, too—these were less bizarre than the diagrams, and written both by her mother and her father, but they frequently referred to the Project, without defining, even in context, what the Project was.

  "This is supposed to mean something," she said to Embar.

  He nodded. "You can't make out what they were doing?"

  "They seem to have written the thing with the assumption that the people who would read it would already know what they were doing, and that anyone else didn't need to know and wouldn't find out by reading their notes."

  "Well…the Sentinels…I'm sure they didn't want to take the chance of their work falling into Sentinel hands after all the unpleasantness. It would explain why they were cryptic in their notes." Embar murmured. "You don't remember what their plan was?"

  "No. And even if I did, I don't know that any of this would make sense. Were they crazy, Embar? I'm beginning to realize that I never knew them—is it possible that they were both just completely out of their minds?"

  Embar sighed. "Anything is possible, I suppose. But I don't think it's likely. They seemed perfectly rational to me. What they did, worked. And…people rarely take the trouble to murder the harmlessly eccentric or the purely crazy. They only murder people who are a threat to them."

  Lauren bit her lip and nodded slowly. "There's always the possibility that I'm simply not bright enough to get this."

  Embar's forehead creased, and he gave her a nervous smile. "I'm sure you'll do just fine," he said, his whispery voice making it clear to her that he wasn't sure at all. "Just read through the notes. They're bound to stir memories of some sort. Your parents wouldn't have left you without some sort of key for unlocking what they worked on all those years." He turned away, and she heard him mutter, in a voice she was certainly not intended to hear, "They couldn't have."

  "Ma-aaa-ma-aaa," Jake said plaintively. "Biteys. Pleeeease, biteys?"

  Lauren looked at her son, now clearly done with cars and being patient. "Biteys in a minute," she said. She kept the notebook out, but put the shelf back together. "I'll look over this later," she told Embar.

  He nodded. "Take your time. Just start from the front and work your way through. I have to believe that at some point, you'll start recognizing things." He stood. "I'm going to go back home. The…the weight of this place gets to me after a while."

  "The house?"

  "The whole universe." Embar shrugged. "I'll hang around your parents' old place in Oria. When you're ready, just come through and call me. I'll hear you."

  Lauren rose, tucking the notebook under one arm. With the other, she lifted Jake and swung him onto her hip. "I'll do that. Give me a few days to see if I have any hope of figuring this stuff out."

  "I'll see you soon, then," Embar said. He faded into the floor and dropped out of sight.

  "Bye, doggie," Jake called.

  CHAPTER 7

  Copper House, Ballahara

  MOLLY YAWNED and stretched and burrowed out from beneath thick silk sheets. Morning sunlight streamed into the room, filling it from floor to ceiling with glorious warmth.

  It would be so easy to give in, to let herself think of all this luxury as hers. She had always been able to imagine something better for herself than the single-wide, which, though clean and adequate, could never have been mistaken for luxurious.

  She kicked her feet into a pair of beaded, cashmere-lined slippers and wrapped a robe around herself. She felt wonderful, and she had to think about the reasons for that; she hadn't had to suffer through anyone else's pain for days, and it became easy to forget that, when she got back home, the pain would be waiting. She didn't want to think about that, because for the first time in as long as she could remember, she felt as good around people as she felt alone.

  She started filling the ornate tub, and wondered as she did what such a thing would cost back home. More than she could afford, certainly. While the water thundered gently behind her, she walked to the window and stared down at this world that she could not yet believe. Not a fairy-tale world at all; from her vantage point, she could see both well-kept houses and run-down hovels in the village contained within high stone walls. But she found it picturesque; the cobblestone streets, the oddly rounded architecture that looked almost like mushroom houses carved of wood and sprung from ungiving ground. The people in the streets weren't human, but they were people. They loved their kids, they loved each other, they hoped and dreamed and worked hard, and eventually they ran to the end of their time and died.

  Palms flat on the cool copper sill, staring down through the thick copper grille, Molly tried to imagine fitting in this place where nothing hurt. She tried to imagine finding a reason to stay.

  Birra, the blue creature, had come to talk to her the night before. He told her that the veyâr, his people, were dying—that they had been cursed by the rrôn, and that all the sick she had cured were victims of the rrôn magic.

  She didn't know if she believed him, even though she had seen magic pouring through her own fingertips. The idea of a curse on an entire people seemed so terribly archaic and ludicrously paranoid. But the idea of touching a woman and sending green fire through her body that devoured her cancer seemed, on the surface, impossible as well.

  This was not Cat Creek. She could not judge the world of Oria based on what she knew.

  "You are very far away this morning."

  Birra again. Molly didn't jump at the sound of the veyâr's voice, though she hadn't heard him enter the suite. She needed to have something at the front door to tell her when anyone entered, however. Perhaps not the tiger trap she'd fashioned, though she would hold that in reserve. But something. "I'm here," she said. "Just wondering how long I'll be here."

  She turned away from the window. Birra came most often, though the seafoam-green one—Laath—stopped by almost every evening, just to see if she needed any more chocolate. She always offered him one piece; he always accepted. The rest varied from day to day, and none of them wore robes of the richness that Birra or Laath wore, and none of them sported facial tattoos as intricate or as beautiful.

  "Ah. A reasonable question. We had word from His Gloriousness after I spoke with you last night; his negotiations have taken an unexpected turn, and he will be yet another several days. He wishes you comfort and happiness, and says that on his return he will feast you and honor you." He moved to her side and looked out the window with her. And he asked her an odd question. "Have you felt anything calling to you? Urging you to come to the window?"

  She turned, crossed her arms over her chest, and stared up at him until he met her gaze. "I'm easily sixty feet above the ground in a smooth-sided tower. What exactly would call me to the window?"

  She couldn't read his face. His expression didn't change the tiniest bit. He said, "Well, Oria has a number of intelligent species that can fly."

  "Like the rrôn."

  Now he cringed. "Even here, you shouldn't say that name too loudly. We believe they come when summoned by the speaking of their name; you understand why that would be a bad thing."

  She nodded. "Is it them flapping around my window that you're worried about?"

/>   "Not so much as"—he closed his eyes and took a deep breath—"as others. I dare not even whisper about them—they never speak out loud, but they can speak straight to the soul. They are beautiful; they are evil; they can make all mortal creatures do as they bid, think what they would have us think. And they would want to own a Vodi, if they found out one was here."

  Molly turned back to the window. "Copper keeps them away?"

  "They cannot exercise their magic through copper. But their soul-speech is not hampered by physical barriers. Should they call to you, you would do anything within your power to obey. Well, perhaps you would not, because you are a Vodi. But be careful. Do not trust impulses that would lead you away from safety."

  "Right. I'll keep that in mind." Molly turned, stared pointedly at her tub, which had filled, and said, "I need to get my bath now."