“Are we doing anymore hemisphere changes soon?”
“Not that I’m aware of, Sunny honey.”
They sat for a moment on a bench outside the travel plaza. In Obeluang, the circle transport pads had two “layers” of building. The inner was some kind of thick rock composite that blocked the escape of ambient magical energy into the surrounding area. The outer facade was made to perfectly match the local architecture. It made it difficult to find if a person didn’t already know where it was.
Sunny pawed through his bag, opening a compression sack. He decided his sweater was enough and rezipped it.
“I keep thinking I’m going to send a few things back home to clear space. Then it gets colder, and I change my mind.” He placed his hand on the vacuum valve and drew the air out of the compression bag until it was flat again. Then he tucked it back into the side of his rucksack.
From leaving home base on Latolan the last time, they had planned a more meandering journey from location to location. Food was easy. In the travel cities, at least, every market had a section for easy, ready-to-eat food.
Clothing was usually the hitch. Stopping to launder once a week was about the highest frequency a person could reasonably manage. More often that had to stretch out to ten days or two weeks. Maybe even three. This was still something that could be planned around without having to sit in sweaty clothes.
Until you started traversing latitudes and the climate changes that came with it. Instead of packing for both extremes, most travelers fell back on layering hot-weather clothes for cold-weather climates.
They were moving slowly between locations, though, making little detours between anchor obligations. Sunny had the last one with the Jyantaur and the next one at an artificery convention he refused to give Lidea details on. That did leave enough time, though, for Lidea to meet with an old friend.
“Is he meeting us here?” Sunny asked.
Lidea had already re-packed eir bag and set off, moving up the road away from the plaza, and he hurried a little to catch up. He grabbed eir around the hand. Ey hadn’t heard what he asked, but he didn’t repeat it. Lidea had been distracted. Focused on meeting this old friend to the point of agitation. He didn’t know why, and, knowing what he did of Lidea’s temperament, ey probably didn’t know why ey was feeling uneasy either. They’d find out when they got there.
There was a strange, pressing feel about all of Obeluang that was difficult to compare to anywhere else. It was the only nation where Sylvan had sat down, collectively, and said “let’s be a country in the way everyone else understands it.” Not a collectivist commune. Not a loose tribal coalition. But a country. Practically a colonial empire, a vague notion of legislative responsibility that extended beyond the official political borders that didn’t offer any kind of tangible citizenship. The pherax on the coast didn’t call themselves Obelungans or pay taxes into the governmental coffers, but when it came to interworld matters, they were quicker to align themselves with the local sylvan than to attempt to stand on their own.
There was safety in numbers.
But it was also those exact numbers that made sunny’s skin crawl in a place like this. Too many sylvan on top of each other in a tighter density and for farther around that sylvan were ever meant to live.
And they had architecture. Syvlan weren’t meant to have that. Buildings: yes of course, but not architecture. That was the purview of species that understood the idea of permanence. Of legacies that could pass from generation to generation.
Sunny hated it here. It was like being in a bath that was just one degree too cold.
They rolled up into something that had the pattern of a planned, residential neighborhood more akin to something elves or humans would put together. The buildings were raised a little off the ground. White walls stretched between red wood uprights, roofs pitched to throw off the yearly snow. The door opened before Lidea even knocked.
“Lidea! Come in! Also, hold the baby for a moment.” The sylvan on the other side, Tranna, was round and pale with ash brown hair and hooded eyes. He, at least, was dressed like a sylvan. Simple top and skirt that both wrapped to close. The house inside was also something Sunny was familiar with. Plain and square with large open spaces vaguely separated into something akin to rooms by large paper frames that could be moved around as needed. Sunny had grown up with folding screens made of wooden slats, but the concept was the same.
Thre sounds were all familiar, as well, the raucous chatter of kids vastly outnumbering the response of the adults.
“Everyone,” shouted Tranna through the room,”this is my friend Lidea from The Academy.”
Sunny found himself stalling in the front area of the house. A friend from The Interworld Academy of Science and Language was an old friend, indeed. Teen years.
“I didn’t know you went to The Academy,” Sunny whispered at Lidea’s back.
“Oh? Yeah. The Correlan branch.” Ey shifted the baby around on eir hip, not really accustomed to this sort of thing. “Have we really never talked about it?”
“I wouldn’t be asking if we had.”
Tranna had done whatever it was that he needed his hands for and took the baby back. He held it for only a few more moments before another sylvan of roughly the same age took it from him in turn. Tranna fluttered some hands around to do introductions.
“Lidea, this is my partner, Iora.” He waved at the sylvan woman who was now moving to sit, positioning the baby across her lap. She gave a tired wave, then started unwrapping her top to breastfeed. Tranna dragged them through the open house a little, peeking around screens for people.
“Iora’s mother, of course.” He waved all the way across the house, through a large window, toward a wraparound porch. There were a number of older sylvan women deep in consultation on some important matter. “Father’s stoking the wood for the heater. He wants to meet the man who’s suddenly taking up so much of your time.” Tranna swiveled a little, trying to put his thoughts together then settled with his hands on his hips. “The kids! Right!”
They were introduced to another pair of adults, (Iora’s sister and her male partner) and a flurry of children from baby to pre-teen who’s provenance was not immediately provided. There were three more adult brothers mentioned in passing, but they, of course, had moved in to the familial homes of their female partners.
They found themselves, eventually, standing on another section of wraparound porch, huddled up around where the underground heater outlet steam into to environs around the house, leeching heat from the exhaust. Tranna pulled a pre-rolled herbal cigarette from an interior pocket and held it out vaguely.
“Forgot to bring a light,” he said with a sigh. Lidea tilted eir staff down, and Tranna lit up off the little spark of heat. “You smoke at all, still?”
“Nah, but I think about it sometimes.”
“When did you smoke?” Sunny asked softly.
“I was in the process of stopping literally right when we met the first time.”
“I didn’t realize…” Sunny trailed off.
“So, this is supposed to be a little friend get together,” Tranna sais, “but I might have volunteered you for something since I knew you were coming in today.”
“Oh?” Lidea shifted eir weight around in uncertainty.
“The constables came calling this morning. They found something…weird…and they’re checking in with anyone who works with magic in a fifty miles radius.”
“I’m not exactly a magicologist.”
“And I’m a pharmacologist who just happens to have a specialty in magic aurality. The fact that they came all the way down to me suggests they really don’t know what they’re looking at. You want to check it out?” Tranna held a conspiratorial glint in his eye.
“Depends. Where is this ‘weird’ thing?”
“The necropolis.”
#####
Iads suffered the most from having labels forced on them by other languages. Not that they were the only ones who bore the weight of the phenomenon, they just seemed to be uniquely burdened.
The word “necropolis,” though, they had incorporated with gusto. There was an ancient human language from Areylan that sounded suspiciously similar to High Elven, so the elven scholars who went around naming things pulled from it with some frequency. “Necropolis” meant “dead city” or “city of the dead.”
Lunariads, collectively, loved that.
It was tantalizingly close to the truth. The lunariads who left home to work in the “wider world” tried to divorce themselves from the lunariad tradition of keeping and caring for the dead and dying. Funerary and palliative care, though, was a niche that guaranteed economic independence and solvency.
They reached the bone gate by the afternoon, a moderate trip by heated, covered-cart from Tranna’s house. Lunariads tended to sleep in the middle of the day, so the inset town had only a thin trail of traffic. In the distance, on the far edge of town, the crematorium billowed powdery smoke up into the cold blue sky. The wind blew toward their backs, so it was taking the smoke and ash away into a more populated area. Lidea shuddered a little at the idea, but the sylvan part of a Sunny kept a more subdued reaction. Life began, life ended, and there was nothing to be done.
Beyond the symbolic walls of the necropolis, beneath the shadow of the smoke, was a traditional sylvan open-air orchard graveyard. Each tree had been grown from a bundle of seeds planted in the chest of the recently departed. Then each subsequent generation was delivered to their final resting place by being laid to rest among the roots.
“Tranna, who’re these two?” A lunariad pulled up alongside the cart on a motorized trike, downing brown liquid that was probably coffee from a mug. She shouted over the sound of the murder to be heard through the canvas walls of the cart. Tranna opened the large window flap to talk through easier.
“Lidea, this is Shio. She’s a forensic magicologist.” Lidea gave a little wave from one of the back seats of the cart. Tranna turned back to Shio. “This is Lidea. Friend from my Academy days and eir partner. Ey’s got one of those big fancy mage titles, so I thought ey’d find whatever our little mystery is interesting.”
Lidea flicked Sunny’s knee to get him to switch places. This let em lean over the side of the cart closer to Shio.
“What exactly is this thing that we’re going to see?” ey asked. “Tranna’s being purposefully vague to annoy me.”
“Am not,” Tranna objected. “Just giving you the chance to look at the scene objectively.”
“I only know what came in the telegram this morning,” Shio replied. “Constabulary took pictures, but those take time to develop. That’s why everyone’s just going by to see it themselves now that they’ve cleared the scene.”
“And?” Lideo prompted. “What is it?”
Shio paused like she was alwos considering whether she was going to keep it a secret. A drop in her face suggested she decided against it.
“Sounds to me like someone tried to do a ritual circle, but didn’t know what they were doing.”
“Ritual circle? Really? That’s so…vintage…” Lidea dropped back down into the cart. Shio shrugged, then pulled up ahead of them on her motorbike.
“You alright, honey?” Lidea asked. Sunny was tense as ey sidled into eir new seat.
“Don’t like ritual magic,” he grumbled. “There’s a reason we don’t do it anymore.”
“Yeah, because we have artificery that does the same thing but better, now.”
“More complicated than that,” Sunny grumbled, unconvinced. “It was the way to hold magic artificially when you couldn’t have a magician around all the time.”
“I’m generally aware,” Lidea replied.
“Okay, well, then you know that ritual magic kills people.” Sunny was always serious, of course, but an intensely dark pall came over his body. “When it was just the occasional maiming, it was fine. But we kept trying to go bigger. More complex. And people suffered. We invented artificery because the price became too high.”
“Feel like you’re leaning into a point but not quite getting there.” Lidea rubbed eir hand over his knee.
“If someone is still doing ritual magic, it’s something we don’t have artificery for. And I don’t know what that could possibly be.”
“And you don’t like that you don’t know some magical thing?” Lidea asked.
Obviously, said his face with a grimace.
“Well, guess that’s why everyone’s convening huh?” Ey patted his leg again, then got situated better in eir seat.
Professional “magic folk” had a way about them, something that exponentially multiplied when they were all gathered up together. There was one of these such congregations as the cart stopped on a corner. This section of the necropolis had been hit by a fire. The brick structures survived, avoiding total devastation of the quarter, but with the wood beams and insulation burned away. Shio had gotten there ahead of the cart, and was hopping between little groups of two and three, an intense face creasing her brow with every new thing she heard. She flapped her hands a little at them as the cart pulled closer. Tranna gave a twitch of his hands in response, dropping down from the cart with creaky knees and stiff back. They convened quickly in Luanga, the local language. Tranna turned to Lidea and Sunny as they got out of the cart themselves.
“How do you feel about a building that might fall down on top of us at any moment?” he asked.
“It’s more stable than it looks,” Sunny said sharply. Both Tranna and Shio looked at him, cocking their heads in tandem. Sunny shook his head, sparking up the metal and stone inlays along his gauntlets.
He had been spiking little shards of magic into the ground the instant they came through the bone gate into the necropolis. Iads shared a common bio-magical inclination, a hybrid heritage from the primordial groups of elf and sylvan who had collapsed their evolutionary lines on each other to create them. Iads could “sense death.”
In theory, this shouldn’t be such a unique skill. Anyone who could sense bi0-magical auras should be able to glean the absence of one when it was supposed to be there. But then that was the hitch. It was one thing to see an animal in the grass and know at a distance whether it was dead or alive. A lot of people had a hard time with cut flower bouquets, unable to tolerate the feeling of something slowly dying nearby. Death could be read in the absence.
But so could many things.
That was where the iads excelled. Because the absence of life was merely that. Death was an entirely different sort of void. The sucking beauty of decay was a sub-energy all its own. And that’s what the iads could sense.
And Sunny didn’t understand it. Couldn’t grasp that below the Nothing there was more Nothing. So he did the thing he always did when he was upset by magic beyond his scope: he fell into the magic that wasn’t.
It was an impulse he didn’t even know he was doing as they trundled down the road, raking into the ground with tines of rounded magic. It was how he knew the building was sound, though. How he was sure using magic he understood. Proper, sensible magic.
So as they approached the building, it popped and glowed, run through with the bloodless veins of dead electrical wiring and hollow water pipes. From Sunny’s cursory assessment, it was safe. Safe enough at least. It wouldn’t fold in on them in the immediate future.
Shio and Tranna took the declaration for accurate, shrugged in tandem, then moved toward the burned-out building. Lidea crested the edge of the cart through the front flap, landing on the other side with a crunch on the dirt road, then waited for Sunny to climb down over the back tailgate. He was just ahead of em when they reached the edge of the paved pedestrian walk that ringed the buildings. Then ey stopped.
A curtain of ice-cold air dropped down over eir body, then vanished with a white-hot, burning flash of energy. When ey looked down at eir hands, eir fingernails were piercing bloody little marks into the fleshy parts of eir palms. Eir fists were literally vibrating, tension pulling all the way up to eir elbows.
Sunny noticed ey wasn’t in step with him and dropped back. He touched eir trembling hand, and ey yanked it away.
“The last time you said a structure was safe, it collapsed on top of us,” Lidea said sharply.
“The cave?” Sunny asked. “That was a fluke. We knew the risk going down there.”
“You knew the risk,” Lidea snapped. “And I trusted that you had done the calculus. Then I watched you get covered in rocks.”
“Are you actually mad about that?”
Lidea rolled eir wrists. Yes. Ey was mad. Ey hadn’t been mad while climbing out of the cart. But now, fury had bloomed in eir ribcage and grown up through eir throat. Broiling at a low heat that threatened to overcome em if ey breathed wrong.
“Hai, you feel it, too?” One of the locals broke away from their group, huddled up around the side of the building. Lidea blinked up at them.
“Trace atmospheric magic,” Lidea said to emself. Assigning a name to it took some of the power away but didn’t render it completely inert.
“It’s not stay-away magic,” Lidea tried to logic out loud. “That would be a broader range. Everyone would feel it.”
“That’s what I was saying,” said the local. “But no one else could feel it.” They wandered off again, skipping past the chance to engage in a longer conversation.
Sunny stood on the pedestrian path. Hands out. Placating. Lidea shook eir head, then moved forward toward the building. Ey had always been more sensitive than him. Than almost everyone ey ever met.
The pressure on eir chest got stronger as ey walked through the crumbling entryway. So much so it overwhelmed the cognitive notion that ey was under the influence of magic. Ey knew that these weren’t entirely eir feelings. It was the implicit “entirely” in this kind of mood-altering magic that bothered Lidea, though. Magic couldn’t make you feel things you didn’t already feel. So some part of em was angry with Sunny. Angry that he had failed em so terribly when it mattered most.
Which, of course, wasn’t fair.
Sunny had been the one buried under the rocks and had to dig his way out. Ey didn’t have a right to be so deliriously angry with him. The magic made em relive that moment in eir head, though. That instant when everything collapsed in front of em, and ey didn’t know if Sunny was alive or dead. How could he do that to em? How dare he put em in that position?
Ey blinked hard and shifted eir focus back to the situation.
The building had been a grocery store before the fire. The interior was completely burned out, walls splattered with scorch marks and smoke stains. Whatever was left on the shelves had either been cleared away or burned completely to cinders. The shelves were turned in on themselves, changing the aisles into a half-circle shield around the center of the floor. The constabulary had tried to block off the area with tape, but it had been broken through multiple times already.
The ambient trace magic gave a dying pulse as they reached the center, and Lidea breathed out through a body that was able to expand again. Lidea rubbed Sunny’s back in apology, and he nodded that he accepted it.
In front of them was a giant diagram outlined in wet paint chalk. They had run out of the traditional yellow-white about halfway through and switched to pink.
The center of the diagram started with an eerily perfect circle big enough to circumscribe a typical adult human. The next circle out, maybe a foot between lines, was flatter on the sides, creating something that was more oblong in shape. Stakes stuck out of the stone floor at regular intervals around the pair of rings. Some of the stakes still had gemstones at the top, but a number of them had cracked and broken.
From stake to stake, lines criss-crossed the central circle and around the outside, snaking in once-intricate patterns that had been partially wiped away by moving bodies. Whatever magic this was supposed to be was created by the combination of lines and stakes. Once initiated, the magic would spark in a specific pattern, shifting amplitudes and frequencies to create the desired effect.
“What kind of magic could this possibly be?” Lidea muttered, tracing the chalk lines with eir eyes. Sunny’s hands were already hovering close, looking for whatever magic was left in the lines.
“It’s gypsum,” he said quietly. “The chalk lines. Gypsum chalk, not limestone.”
“Is that something that matters?” Tranna asked from across the ring.
“Don’t know, yet,” Sunny responded, but Lidea knew he was avoiding the question. Like its evolved form in artificery, the material used in ritual magic was essential to its functioning. The problem was “how?” Even with Sunny’s comparatively massive knowledge in the matter, he didn’t carry these specific details in his head. He needed a textual reference.
“There’s a third layer,” Shio pointed out. Her toe tapped another circle on the stones and both Lidea and Sunny bent down to get a closer look, squatting awkwardly. This last line had maybe started as chalk, but now it was newer compacted ash hidden among the burn-out.
“Get an Azelan-specific magicologist,” Sunny said quickly, standing up straight. He had worked through the data at lightning speed, jumping through to a final conclusion that seemed too weird to be possible.
“I don’t…I don’t know that there are any local.” Tranna wrinkled his nose. “What are you thinking?”
“Third ring is body transfiguration,” Lidea said instead. “How we used to make people magic void.” Ey might not know as much as Sunny, but ey knew that. “And the old way to activate the retrovirus to make someone a trans-hemaphage.”
“Alright, but that’s not how we make vampires anymore,” Tranna countered.
“Right, but if someone was using the traditional fashion, it would be someone from Azelan,” Lidea noted. Out of the corner of eir eye, Shio was nodding emphatically in agreement and looking for something in her bag.
“They’ve both got a point,” she said. “The nearest Azelan gate is only half a day out and there are a lot of transplants up in the human territories. It’s not an unreasonable jump.” She finally found a notbeook of telephone exchange numbers in her bag. “I know a guy.” She scurried out on that enigmatic parting. Tranna kept circling the diagram, stopping on the far side.
Lidea pulled a little closer to Sunny to speak in a low voice.
“I’ve never seen a circle with these patterns before,” ey said.
“Me neither,” Sunny replied. “Which means it’s not an of the rituals I’m familiar with.”
“So through process of elimination,” ey tested, “you know what this is.”
“Maybe. And if I’m right, it’s even weirder than we thought.”
#####
The “guy” Shio knew was apparently on his way after a call from the nearest booth. Shio had gone down the street to wait for him. Lidea and Sunny wanted to wait, and Tranna was going to stay with them. Then the clouds started rolling in, threatening some kind of late wintery precipitation. It had been a snow-less season so far, and he wanted to get back and make sure everything was sound. That’s what he said, at least. There was something off about his flustering excuse.
“Liddy, are you actually mad at me about the cave-in?” They had perched up on a coffee shop across the way, lounging on a couch that looked through the front window toward the grocers. The outside of this building had been licked by fire, but the rest of it was perfectly fine. Over the last hour, they had watched the rest of the small groups leave, a few with the same heavy suspicion on their shoulders.
Sunny grasped Lidea’s hand desperately. Like ey would slip away if he let go. Lidea broke eir hand from his and slid eir arm over his shoulder. Ey pulled him in until his head was resting on the inside edge of eir shoulder. Ey flicked eir other hand through the top of his hair.
“Yes,” ey said curtly. Sunny tried to pull away, and ey grasped him tighter. “But I’m also mad at myself. And Thresh and Beni and whoever it was who built that cave to begin with. We shouldn’t have been down there. And I felt it in my gut, but I trusted that you would keep me safe. And you did, in the end. You made sure I got out of the cave first. But I’m mad that I didn’t push back harder. I guess. I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m mad about.”
“You’re usually much better with your words than this.”
“Yeah, I know. I’m sorry.” Ey rubbed eir hand over the outside edge of Sunny’s shoulder.
“Sometimes,” Sunny hedged, then paused, thinking. “Sometimes you make me feel like…like I’m in trouble.”
“Can you elaborate?” Lidea asked after another pause.
“Like with the mountain or at my townhouse,” Sunny replied. The frame of his body settled into the exact posture that suggested he wanted to shut down the conversation. That he already regretted saying anything. Lidea didn’t need him too. Ey knew what he meant.
Yes, ey had argued with him. Been the first to pick a fight. Ey felt justified in doing so, at the time. Ey wasn’t inclined to shut down or ignore eir emotions when something was bothering em. Ey didn’t like things to fester. But maybe ey was being too sensitive. Maybe ey needed to give Sunny more space to exist.
Maybe ey needed to give emself more space to exist.
Both of them had been “single” for so long, beholden just to themselves, that even at their ages they were really only just learning how to exist as a “couple.”
Which is what they were, at this point. Lidea had been avoiding thinking about it too hard, but here they were.
“I was nervous about seeing Tranna again,” Lidea said, falling into the the thought, gliding past what maybe should have been an apology. If Sunny didn’t want to continue that conversation, at the moment, Lidea didn’t want to open it up again.
“Why?” Sunny asked, holding up his side of the conversation in his usual monosyllabic fashion.
“It’s stupid,” Lidea replied.
“So you bring it up but you don’t elaborate. That’s rude.”
“I was just warning you,” Lidea chuffed. “I wasn’t popular like you in school,” Lidea said.
“Echo vastly over-stated my promiscuity.”
“Just saying…anyway. I had maybe three friends: Tranna, Gaurdenai, and Leon. Leon is who knows where, at this point, but Guardenai lives in Eifanei, now. I see her all the time when I’m back home on Latolan. I met up with her before we left last and mentioned I might try to swing through and see Tranna. That’s when she told me something…happened…to her back when we were in school. At a party.” Lidea felt emself skimming around it. It had taken Guardenai this long to tell em, herself. She deserved to have the details of the information held in trust until she was ready to share to a broader audience.
“She thinks, though,” Lidea continued, “that Tranna might have known something about it. Maybe knew it happened to other people before her but never said anything. Maybe even happened to him. But she’s too afraid to just ask outright. She was hoping I could…I’m not actually sure what exactly she wants me to do. Just get a sense if he knows anything.”
“Would that help with anything?” Sunny asked.
“I don’t know,” Lidea admitted. “There’s a theoretical version of events that would fundamentally change my perception of Tranna as a person. But we were also maybe seventeen? Eighteen? Can I really hold him to the same standard anymore? Either way, I’m afraid to talk to him about it. I don’t want things to change. Not after all these years.”
“Then don’t,” Sunny said brusquley. “It’s Guardenai’s business. Let her sort it.”
“It’s more complicated than that,” Lidea objected.
“Doesn’t have to be.” Sunny patted em on the knee. “You have a friend in Eifanei that you haven’t introduced me to?”
“You’ve never asked.”
“Yeah, it’s around this way, Greg.” Shio’s voice was loud enough to sound through the walls of the building, coming down an alley that clipped into a major thoroughfare. They hadn’t heard her motorbike pull-up, but then maybe she came by other means. Lidea surged up from the couch, Sunny right behind, and emerged from the shop onto the pedestrian path. Shio gave a little start when she saw them.
“You’re still here,” she said.
“Yeah,” Lidea said. “You can’t drag me all the way out here to see something ‘weird,’ and me not want to see it through. Or, I guess, Tranna can’t. Tranna can’t bring me out here and expect me to not stick it through.”
“I like the spirit,” Shio nodded. She moved away enough that Greg could emerge out of the alley behind her. He was an engot, a human subspecies of natural vampire. Stretched out and colorless and hollow around the angles of his features. Presumably, engots could put on weight and muscle, but there weren’t any pictures of bulky engots. But then very few pictures left Azelan to begin with. Very little anything left Azelan, as a whole.
Greg gave a weird little wave, unsure.
“I’m not a mage or a magicologist or anything,” he explained, accent less thick than expected. “I’m a press operator at the newspaper. Shio just said she needed ‘someone from Azelan,’ though, so here I am. I guess.” He looked up at the burnt out building and made a concerned face. Shio nodded toward it, and he ventured inside alone.
“For someone who was here to visit Tranna, you’re not really spending time with him,” Shio noted.
“Like I said, I had to see this through,” Lidea responded.
All of three minutes passed before Greg was hustling back out of the building, looking shaken.
“What is it?” Shio asked.
“Are there really no constabulary standing guard?” he asked breathily. “We need to talk to them. Now.”
“What is it?” Lidea demanded.
“It’s not important,” Greg snapped. “We just need to talk to the police.” The heels of his hands pressed into his temples like he was trying to hold too many things in his brain at once.
“It’s a demon-binding, isn’t it?” Sunny said quietly. Greg stilled, looked all the way down at him, then realized both of them were mages who could kick his ass if they wanted to.
“Maybe,” Greg said. “I’ve only ever seen them in books, but yes. I think so. But someone doing that in an abandoned building instead of the family ritual room feels like a really bad sign. I think…I think you might need to check the hospital.”
#####
“I don’t think I understand it,” Iora said as they lounged on pillows in an area of the house set away from the rest of the family. Sunny and the baby were playing with wooden blocks, seeing how high they could stack then before they fell. Tranna had been in the phone room for half an hour, now, working through various hospital phone exchange systems.
“You have this beautiful little baby. You love them. Nurture them. Then four years in, you pin them down, force open a portal to some other plane of existence, and invite some kind of alien energy being to live inside them. It’s horrendous.”
“Humans in Massolact have been doing it as long as they’ve had recorded history,” Lidea said.
Ey didn’t know why ey was defending the practice of demon-binding all of a sudden. Everyone outside Azelan agreed it was one of the more questionable closed practices. But it wasn’t going to go to away. People liked the honor of being chosen to be a demon-borne, for the most part, even if it looked exploitative and abusive from the outside. So what was the point of rehashing objections to things that no one in the room could do anything to change?
“Yeah, and those same humans leave the planet just to get away from it,” Iora scoffed then turned her attention back to the baby. That was, of course, probably more complicated. Immigration near a gate always was, and anything involving Azelan came with a dozen additional layers of political clusterfuckery.
“We don’t really know what the Other Place is,” Sunny said, looking up at Lidea. “Just that it’s where The Others come from, and we can’t exactly interrogate them about it. They don’t talk.”
“I’m not defending demon-binding, specifically,” Lidea said sharply. “I’m just saying we’ve all got scandalous cultural shit we have to pretend isn’t fundamentally kind of messed up. I think the more interesting question is why someone was trying to do it here.”
“That one I might have an answer for.” Tranna came from around the corner where the house phone was hooked up and flopped down next to Lidea. The baby immediately moved to crawl into his lap.
“I might not be a mage or a magicologist, but I have hospital contacts,” he said. “The person who made the circle wasn’t trying to bind an Other, she was trying to get rid of hers.”
I told you so, said Iora’s face.
“I’m fairly certain that’s not possible,” Sunny said, staring down at a block in his hand. “I guess it doesn’t stop someone from trying.”
“Apparently there’s some kind of rumor coming from Areylan that it might be possible. I don’t know. Just what the Head Nurse was willing to tell me. The girl’s an inter-world student up toward the peninsula. Came all the way down to the necropolis because quote-unquote ‘the hospitals are the best.’ So mystery solved, I guess.”
“That really just opens up about a hundred other questions,” Lidea said.
“Mm,” Sunny thought out loud. “It’s a magic dead-zone up there. Probably turned down the volume on whatever it is Others actually do. Realized she preferred it…” Sunny shrugged through the rest of the explanation, knowing the conclusion revealed itself.
“Either way, nothing we can do,” Tranna said, running his hand over the back of the baby’s head. He turned a little toward Lidea. “So now you can stop avoiding me because of whatever Guardenai told you. I mean, really, you came all this way to visit.”
“You’re the one who sucked me into this ritual circle thing. Makes me think you were also avoiding me because of Gaurdenai.” Lidea flicked past the fact that he already knew. Of course he did. There was no way this was going to be that easy. Tranna brought the baby up closer, and settled it against his chest, rocking back.
“I didn’t know about the assualt,” Tranna said. “Let’s start there. Yes, I was on the handball team with him, but were very much not friends. And I think, in retrospect, I should have been more vocal about how much of an asshole he was, but I didn’t think he was capable of…well…I only learned what he did to Guardenai. And that’s because he did the same to Leon, apparently. At least that’s what he said when he called.”
“You’ve talked to Leon?”
“Yeah, for the first time since we graduated. Because the guy who assaulted them both died. Stabbed to death.”
“Holy crap,” Lidea hissed. “In a barfight or something?”
“I don’t know,” Tranna said. “I keep meaning to go look it up, and I just…I don’t know what I would do with the information. But Leon found out, and had some feelings about it. Called. Asked if I knew anything. Then I just had this…feeling…You know how Guardenai was really weird those few months during first term of our last year? Put the pieces together. Called her. Left a message. She never called back. Got a weird feeling. Then you said you were visiting. I don’t know. I think I was just trying to avoid talking about it.”
“Yeah…me too…See?” Ey gave him a pat on the arm with the back of eir hand. “This is why we were such good friends. Same neurosis.”
“Hm, and yet, none of us have met your…fiance…” Tranna raised his eyebrows dangerously at Lidea.
“Well, you’re meeting him now?” she offered.
“Good enough, I guess.”