“Boy, I wouldn’t do—” Sebo began to say.
It was too late. Arram released his strongest spell of revealing. Yadeen had taught it to him so he might find particular stones far underground, but it also worked for finding objects and people in all environments. This time the shadows blazed with light and went dark; a giant fist punched Arram halfway across the river.
Fortunately, Sebo’s water-walking spell was proof against almost anything. Arram was only dazed, not drowned. He lay among the roots of reeds, wondering where he was and why he had chosen to take up fisticuffs.
Enzi descended and shoved him so hard that Arram fell forward onto his face in the opposite direction. Stop playing, and help Sebo! the crocodile ordered. I did not bring you here for your amusement!
“Odd,” Arram said, pushing himself upright with care. “I don’t feel amused.” Slowly, still dazed, he walked toward the source of that poisonous wrong.
This is taking forever, he heard the god say behind him. Immense jaws closed on his waist. Enzi swam forward with Arram clasped in his mouth.
To Arram’s wonder, the god’s teeth only dented his protective spell, rather than tearing it. “How do you do that?” he asked. Enzi did not reply. He dumped Arram next to Sebo.
The mage had her fibers loose in her hands. “If a little power doesn’t do what you want, think of something else before you try using a lot of it,” she told Arram. He nodded, struggling in the boggy silt as he tried to stand. “Protections this complex often have traps to ward off mages.” She swiftly wrote three signs in the air with a couple of her fibers, then dropped them. They burst into flame and vanished. Light flooded the water all around. “Now,” she said as Arram finally got to his feet, “stay here and anchor my spell with these.” She reached through their spells and handed him more fibers.
“Did I know we could pass through our protections?” he asked, touching her spells. His fingers did not go through.
“I am able to do so. And I suppose it is time you learned, but not today. Someone wanted this thing hidden; I want to know why. Stay here and anchor my spell. Clear your mind and concentrate on your Gift, understand?”
“Yes, Master Sebo,” Arram said, feeling dejected. Why did every good new lesson have to come later?
“Stop pouting and concentrate, or I’ll give you something to pout over,” she snapped.
She raised her remaining fibers and muttered. Her Gift spilled out and away from her. Sebo walked forward and around the poisonous thing, passing behind Arram as she shaped two complete circles. He barely noticed her movement, busy as he was anchoring her spells. Within his Gift his power shifted and surged, moving as it often did when it struck greater magic. One day, he promised, I will stop meeting Gifts that are greater than mine.
Even as he thought it, he knew that promise was an empty one. If they learned nothing else at the university, they learned there was always someone with more power. Arram only had to look at his teachers to know that much.
The circles that enclosed him quivered. He braced himself: Sebo was working the spells and signs that closed her spell. Instantly her circles enclosed the object like a cocoon. The water and the shadows flowed out into the river, exposing the thing they had kept hidden.
Arram gasped. His protective globe was gone! Still, he could breathe. “Sebo?”
“I combined our protections with the larger one,” she replied.
Arram inhaled and coughed. The stink that rose from the thing that had been hidden so well reminded him vividly of the corpse fires during the typhoid epidemic. The object fell backward with no water to hold it upright, splattering Arram’s clothes. He gulped down vomit that rose with the odor and walked around the thing Sebo had uncovered.
Without shadows to mask it, he saw a series of chains and knotted ropes bound tightly around a collection of burlap sacks. Sebo motioned for Arram to remove the topmost layer of burlap. Inspecting it, Arram realized he would have to cut: the rough cloth had been pulled over whatever was inside and secured by the bindings. He drew his belt knife and showed it to Sebo. She nodded and waited, her Gift sparkling around her hands in case anything went awry.
Arram always made certain his knife was razor sharp. He needed it as the wet strands fought his blade. He started at the upper end of the thing, where he would not fight chains and rope as well as sacking.
There was another layer of burlap under the first. His knife lost its edge there. He had to borrow Sebo’s for the final layer, which was spell-written silk. He could feel something rounded under his hands. Finished at last, he pulled the silk away from human hair, black, sodden, and limp. Shoving the layers of material down past slender shoulders, he revealed a half-rotted face that still managed to look familiar. The chin, the nose…
Puzzled and frightened, he looked at Sebo. “Master?” He was proud there was no wobble in his voice.
“It’s hard, when the rot’s been at her,” she murmured. “The wraps kept the fish away. I’d say she’s been here three weeks, perhaps? Around the time of the storm. Have you learned the spell for a true appearance?”
His brain was still stuck at three weeks. Now that the cloth was off the corpse’s face, Arram was positive that the dead woman was a mage. He knew it in his bones and had been trying to think if anyone had gone missing around that time. But there had been the mourning, and living on scant meals, and new classes to start….
Sebo rapped his head. “A spell for true appearances, boy!”
Arram winced. It wasn’t right that the master’s knuckles should be so hard.
He touched the corpse’s chin squeamishly and turned her chin toward him. That was when he spotted silver at her neck. Without thinking he reached for it and drew the necklace up. It was thin silver, delicate, with a double-loop clasp and a scratched piece of jade.
Numb, he took the chain with both hands and slowly turned it, trying not to tear the rotten flesh of the woman’s neck. On one loop of the clasp, broader than the other loop, the artisan had carved a lightning bolt.
Sebo looked at Faziy aHadi. “Girl, girl,” Sebo whispered, her voice sad. “Look at you now. What did you get yourself into? All that new money cost you more than you could afford….”
“You knew her, too?” Arram asked softly.
“Of course I did,” Sebo replied. “I’d take her the odd trinket from the river’s floor, and we’d work out what we had. And then all that good fortune just dropped into her lap.”
Arram showed Sebo the lightning bolt on the fastener. “I made this for her. Master, she knew lightning snakes.” His mouth trembled, but he refused to cry.
“What did you do, Faziy, that they took such care to sink your corpse? If not for Enzi, you would have rotted beyond anyone’s ability to know you. I never come down to this cesspit if I can help it.” The master sighed. “Arram, what does her placement here tell you?”
He didn’t realize she was talking to him until she poked him with her elbow. He flinched. He didn’t want to remember Faziy the way Ramasu made him think about the infirmary dead. “Um, as you said, they didn’t want her to be found.” He added, “And if she was found, they didn’t want her known. So whatever she was doing with them or found out about them, it was important. They went to a great deal of trouble to keep her on the bottom of the river, and to make sure people wouldn’t recognize her if they found her. These spells are hard—advanced work.”
Decide who did this later, after you take the thing away, cloths and all. Enzi’s voice made the globe of power that Sebo had placed around them shudder. The magic that killed it corrupts the river. Do not leave the meat. The vileness has spread into it.
“Then you must help us,” Sebo retorted. “We cannot tow it ourselves.”
“We can’t tow it at all,” Arram reminded her, pointing to the boulder. He grabbed a chain, trying to pull it away from the rock, and cried out as stabbing heat shot into his palm. A chain-shaped burn was seared into his skin.
“Hag’s pox, boy, wh
en will you learn to wait before leaping in?” Sebo demanded. She removed a small jar from her workbag and gave it to Arram. “Just a little on that burn. No need to be wasteful.” She took out a second vial and removed the wax, then the cork that kept its contents inside. Carefully, crouching so she saw exactly what she did, she poured the tiniest of drops on two sides of one heavy link. Arram watched, halting in the middle of rubbing her ointment into his palm, as frost formed where the liquid had fallen. It spread. Abruptly there was a loud crack; the link fell to pieces. When it did, a puff of magic flew to the top of their protections. Arram tried to seize it but missed.
“Idiot boy!” cried Sebo. “Never do that again, or I truly will beat you! You have no protection since I remade ours to include poor Faziy here. That wickedness would have sunk into your pores, poisons and all!”
Arram looked at the puff of gray magic. It sparkled with the different colors of Gift that must have gone into the making of it, only a foot over his head. It didn’t look dangerous, but he decided not to try Sebo’s temper again. Puff after puff rose to join the first until Arram was half ducking, trying to keep away from them. With a jingle, the chains fell away from the wrappings and Faziy’s body.
Sebo corked the liquid that had eaten through the chains and sealed it. “Yes, I will teach you how to make this,” she told him as she tucked the vial into her workbag. “You’re at the point when a potion to eat through metal might be useful.”
Arram gulped. He could think of all kinds of situations in which such a potion would be useful, but he planned never to be in any of them.
“Enzi, if you please,” Sebo called.
What do you want?
As Sebo explained her plan to the crocodile, Arram knelt so he didn’t have to worry about the magics at the top of their bubble. He stared at Faziy’s face, both the magicked living one and the rotting one beneath. Whoever had left her in this place had risked discovery, by fishers, garbage pickers, or boats. Even at night they would have needed concealment and avoidance spells.
They’d also needed a good-sized, strong boat to get that big rock all the way out here. They couldn’t take the chance that a stone heavy enough for their purposes would be on hand already. So there were a few of them who knew about this. Or just enough strong mages. It would have to be mages, to disable other mages who happened by.
Sebo patted his head. “Sit, Arram. We’re going up. I’ll need you to help me.”
“Whatever you say,” Arram replied. He sat gingerly as he tried to avoid lumps on the river’s bottom. Once he was settled, he crossed his legs. He wanted to be out of Sebo’s way and to touch as little as possible.
The woman looked down at him. “You shouldn’t be so accommodating about lending your Gift to others.”
“But you’re my teacher,” Arram replied. “If you meant to do something harmful with my magic, wouldn’t you have done it earlier, when I couldn’t defend myself?”
Sebo rested her free hand on his shoulder. In her other hand grew a ball of their mixed Gifts. Arram hadn’t even felt her draw the power from him. “I hope your ability to protect yourself is as strong as you seem to think it is,” she murmured. “The world is an unpleasant place. Only look at what we just found.”
Her ball floated to the top of their globe of protection. There it spread in a wide umbrella, trapping the poisoned magics against the globe’s ceiling. When the combined Gifts stopped spreading, Sebo wrote five signs in the air and touched each one with her finger. They vanished. The globe of power that enclosed them together with the dead woman trembled, lurched—Arram caught his teacher and helped her to sit—and began to tug itself out of the river’s muck. It shook free of the giant boulder and resealed itself with a mild pop! So quickly had it happened that only a palmful of water leaked in. Slowly the globe began to rise.
The bit of water rolled over to Sebo. “Get away from me, you nasty stuff!” Arram heard her whisper. “The Hag knows what kind of filth is in you!” She glanced at Arram, who pretended to stare at the unpleasant magics overhead. “Well, go on!” he heard his master say to the trapped liquid. “I’ll return you to the river when we must leave it. Go over there. Over…there.”
She was silent. When Arram glanced at her, he saw the handful was pooled in her lap without soaking into the skirt. How had it gotten there? She had talked to it as if it were alive. He looked at the place where he had last seen the water, in case there was more of it. No, the floor of their globe was dry, and the river bottom was receding into the murk.
Sebo had seen his glance. “When we return—when I have delivered our discovery—I will give you a book to read about a thing called wild magic,” she said drily. “I wouldn’t talk about it in the university. It’s supposed to be an old wives’ tale. Well, I am an old wife. You might be interested, that’s all.”
“I’ve heard about it,” Arram said quietly. “I don’t seem to have it, though. Except when it comes to lightning snakes.”
“Few of those with the Gift do. If you get Hulak or Yadeen alone, talk to him. Or ask Lindhall, but privately. No one likes to be laughed to scorn by his peers.” Looking up, Sebo said, “How long does it take to reach the surface? I don’t believe I can keep the air-giving spell going forever!”
The force that drove the large globe toward the surface quickened. The river’s power dragged at the bubble’s sides. The dead woman’s smell got thicker and thicker, until Sebo and Arram found handkerchiefs and held them over their noses.
“Whatever Enzi considers a proper favor in return, it had better be good,” Sebo complained, her voice muffled by the cloth. “I’m too old for this.”
Their globe popped free of the water, next to the boat. The two mortal crocodiles slapped the river with their tails until their many-times-great-grandfather bellowed for them to calm down. They braced the boat at his command, while he braced the far side of the globe, jamming it against the boat so it would not drift away.
Arram climbed out first, then gently took the dead woman’s bound feet. When he tugged, the body slid out of the globe. Arram’s gut clenched. He swallowed the sudden mouthful of saliva that warned he was about to vomit, and pulled again, lifting as he did. Hand over hand he drew in the corpse of his former teacher by fistfuls of burlap and chain, using all of his strength. As he worked, he prayed for the Black God to heal her wounds.
Once Faziy was aboard, Arram slid her onto the boat’s floor. He would have to remember the feet of the corpse would be near his own feet. Quickly he glanced at the far rail. The crocodile grandsons were clinging to it with their jaws and forepaws, weighing down the rail with the top halves of their bodies.
“Thank you,” he said, and hurriedly reached for Sebo. She held both bony hands out through the globe. Carefully Arram took them and lifted her aboard. Close overhead, thunder boomed. He cursed.
“Can’t be helped,” Sebo murmured.
Arram swore to himself. Rain meant that the master’s arthritis had burdened her for hours—it always came on when the skies were still clear. She had said nothing, had made no sign that she was in pain. “You should have told me you were hurting.”
“Quiet,” Sebo ordered. “Pull in the globe like fishermen pull in their nets. Leave enough room at the last for the vile magics that hid Faziy.”
“I can’t see them,” Arram said, puffing as he hauled on the globe. Handful by handful he forced the air out of it. What if he got a faceful of those ugly spells?
Light, bright and even, spread over everything. He looked back. Sebo held up a small crystal globe. Touching it with a whisper of his power, Arram felt Yadeen’s Gift, as plain as if his master shared the boat with them. Looking at Sebo, he noticed something else. “Where’s your puddle?”
“My what?”
“Your puddle, the one that was in your lap.”
Sebo grinned. “I let the puddle, as you call it, go free when I got into the boat.” She held the glowing ball up again. “If you would finish? I’m glad I borrowed it, but
it’s heavy.”
At last Arram held a bag the size of his head. All of it that he’d already rolled into his fists had dissolved, its purpose done.
“Now pinch what you have closed, firmly. Give it a rune of sealing with as much of your Gift as you can.”
Arram wanted to tell her that if he reached far enough, he could replenish his stores of power completely, but he decided not to. She looked weary, and the first splashes of rain were speckling the water within the light of the globe. She would want to know how he could tell, and when he had learned this. While he could answer the first question, the answer to the second was nebulous. He only knew that as he got older, as he developed hair in spots previously hairless, his awareness of how far he could reach for power had grown. He had tested it, and found his awareness was correct. He wasn’t sure what he could do with it, or what might happen to him if he did, so he used it only on special occasions, when no one was watching.
Instead of saying this to his loved and trusted master, he pinched the opening to the magical globe shut with one hand. With the other he made the sign requested, pouring enough of his Gift into it that the opening was secured. The shadowed magics within the globe whirled and pressed, but they could not get out.
As soon as it was closed, Preet flew up to his shoulder and began to scold. “Hush,” he told her softly. He looked at Sebo. “Are we still being quiet?” Rather than wait for her answer, he told Preet, “Hush, hush. All’s well and we are going back. Sebo, we’re going home, aren’t we? Preet is worried. So am I, a little. Only a little. I’m not questioning you, mind, only Preet wants to know. And me. I do, too. It’s raining.” He rubbed his face for a moment to freshen himself, then reached into the earth, feeling for the sense of water running off of rock. Once he had it, he drew it into his Gift and spread it over the boat.
While he worked, Enzi’s descendants gripped their ropes and took their places at the bow. As the rain rolled away the invisible shield over the boat, the young crocodiles towed and Enzi pushed it upstream. Their speed was far quicker than their journey downstream, even though they swam against the current. The waves parted at the bow, but they did not slop inside. Arram decided Sebo or Enzi must have done something about that—more likely Sebo, because what would a crocodile care about getting wet?