Blood Rock (40 page)

And then there was commotion in the background, a new voice talking. Nagli started to respond, but there was a sudden racket, as if the phone had been ripped from her grasp.

“Who is this?” said the new voice—Saffron. I didn’t respond, and she said, “Frost.”

“Yes,” I said.

“Darkrose is
gone
,” Saffron said, voice acid. “Went hunting for three other vampires gone missing—and never came back. You were too busy with your new friend apparently.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, but I couldn’t leave it at that. “Calaphase is … gone too.”

“I know,” Saffron said, some of the acid leaching away. “I’m sorry …
Dakota
. And I heard you were arrested.” She paused, then asked, “How are you holding up?”

“Fine,” I managed, “until I was attacked again.”

“When?” Saffron said.

“Just now,” I said, and told her. “I left the Candlesticks on fire. It happened less than twenty four hours after I got out of jail. And a fire started when I went back to Calaphase’s to pick up my car. I think the police are looking for me.”

“Almost certainly,” Saffron said. “Since you got out, fires have broken out all over the city. Dozens of people have been killed. The media’s talking about a
plague
of arson, which is bad enough … but I’m just waiting for someone to break out the
t
-word.”

“Terrorism,” I said. “Oh, flying fuck me. Saffron … I may need some help here.”

“Damnit,” Saffron said. “I can’t take you in. You’re not wearing the collar.”

“Can’t you—” I said, and then let the words hang there. “Forget it.”

“I … I took you off the roster,” she said, embarrassed. “The police can’t search the Consulate without a warrant, but if someone saw you, if they get even a whiff, they can get one. If you were a vampire, I could actually give you asylum, but for human ser—uh, don’t take this the wrong way, Dakota, but for human servants, there’s negotiation involved. If the police come knocking, unless you’re
already
on the roster, I’d have to give you up.”

“And they
will
come knocking,” I said—I knew how this worked. “You’re my ex.”

Saffron was quiet a moment. “Look, Dakota. I can’t aid you. I’m a public official. I
have
to follow the law. It will raise a stink if it even
sounds like
I told someone to help a fugitive. And I think you should expect the police will be watching all of your friends too.”

“Damnit,” I said. I needed to go
completely
off the radar. “All right. Look … I should go.”

“All right, Dakota,” Saffron said. “Well, then … good luck.”

She hung up.

“Yeah, it was pretty fucking horrific,” Doug said, his voice a bit shaken. “They’re making a huge deal of it. I expect they’ll interview anyone even remotely involved.”

Damnit, damnit, damnit!
“Well, Doug … thanks for the heads up.”

“No problem,” Doug said. He sighed with relief. “OK, I think it’s safe to talk.”

“Thank God.” I filled him in on the details of last night’s attack, and Calaphase’s death—how we fell through the graffiti, how Calaphase fell into it—and how his blood was sucked out by what should have been marks on the pavement. “Please tell me you found answers.”

“Oddly enough, I cracked it helping Cinnamon with her homework, though the answer ultimately involved loop quantum gravity,” he said. “But it’s easier to think of it like … like a magic door that shows distorted images of both its source and target.”

“Doug, don’t patronize me,” I said. “I know what it’s like, but I need to know how this thing works to fight it. I dug into the literature, and there’s no such thing as a magic door outside of a fairy tale. We’re dealing with deeply hidden magic that’s never surfaced in the Edgeworld.”

“And I think I know why,” Doug said. “Have you heard of the Bekenstein bound?”

“Doug, I read
Scientific American
more than
you
do,” I said. “It’s something to do with the holographic universe, right? Somehow, deep down, we’re really two-dimensional?”

“Right. Deep down,
you are your interface,
” he said. “In quantum mechanics, if a thing acts the exact same way as another thing, it
is
that thing. According to Bekenstein, you have no way of telling the ‘real me’ from a surface that absorbs and transmits the same particles.”

“So if you had a magic cave painting, there could be a whole world behind its surface,” I said. “
If
you could paint it. But no one could paint a whole world down to its particles.”

“But they do in the movies, armies of Wookies on alien worlds,” Doug said. I started to protest, but he said, “In the computer, procedurally generated—simple rules that can be applied over and over again to populate a whole crowd and forest. But it takes millions of steps—”

“He can do that, and he doesn’t even need a computer,” I said, with a tingly ‘aha’ feeling. “He’s created graffiti that can draw itself—a self propagating intent, we’d call it.” I explained I’d seen it first with fire at the tagger’s playground, then at the Candlesticks.

“I strongly suspected that,” Doug said. “Lines of graphomancy that use mana to make
more
lines, one idea leading to another, a recursive pattern, unfolding forever, an infinite conceptual field. There’s no
limit
to how far magic can build on magic—”

“If you have the mana,” I said. “But he’d never get enough to create a whole world.”

“That’s where I’m going,” Doug said. “To link space, I think he’s using magic to create a ‘spin network.’ But a magic cave painting that held a whole world would take as much mana as creating a small universe. But if the cave painting mapped between two spaces—”

“If it was a gateway,” I said. “It’s a magical gateway.”

“Exactly,” Doug said. “If the painting is mapping points in one space to another, then there’s no need to create a whole world. All the geometry of the painting would need to do is create the map. That spin network could be atomically thin,
magically
thin.”

“That sounds like surface-to-surface link,” I said, “but Calaphase and I seemed to travel through an actual space, if a distorted funhouse version of one.”

“You can create
arbitrary
geometry with a spin network,” Doug said. “He could create a twisted little pocket space propped up by several tags. In fact, I’m guessing
all
the tags are connected together, like a network—and it will get stronger the more that are plugged in.”

“Jeez, Doug, that’s heavy grade magic,” I said. “How am I going to fight this shit? This guy is a Michelangelo of the genre. According to Drive, he could make his tags look like anything if he wanted to. Any reasonably sized tag could be one of his traps.”

“No,” Doug said. “You
can
fight it, because I can tell you what to look for. Jinx and I think the spin network will show up as some repeated pattern, like a grid or a spiral.”

“There
is
a spiral that’s
like
a grid,” I said. “There are coiling vines and barbed wire that showed up in almost every tag, looping tightly at the center to make a grid like a sunflower’s. It’s the vines, Doug, the spiral of vines. That’s your spin network.”

“Maybe,” Doug said. “I thought of that, but they don’t seem to cover the whole tag.”

“No, they don’t,” I said. Damnit. Every time I thought I had figured out how the tags worked, I ran into a brick wall. We thought it was graphomancy, quantum physics, whatever, but there were always missing pieces to the magic, like something … hidden beneath the surface.

And then it hit me. “He’s using multiple layers! I thought it was oil chalk, but Officer Horscht found an aerosol spray can. Spray painted graffiti isn’t like tattoos. It’s layers of paint.”

“I thought tattoos had layers too,” Doug said. “I’ve seen you go over designs—”

“To build up colors, but it all ends up as plaques of pigment in the dermis—a single layer that’s magically active. But we already know the graffiti doesn’t work that way.” I explained what Keif had explained to me about whitewashing the tags and using induction. “He can use several layers of paint to build up a pattern as complex as needed and we’d never see the whole of it—except the spiral of vines, which
have
to reach outside the canvas to pull someone in.”

“Right. And look for echoes. If it
is
a gateway, you’ll see echoes of your environment in the tag, and maybe distorted pictures of the target on the other end.”

“Like ghost images in a two-way mirror,” I said.

“It’s more like a television. The idea is simple, but the implementation is
not
,” Doug said. “There is
too much
physics involved. There is
no way
a backwoods graphomancer cooked this up on his or her own. None whatsoever.”

I was silent for a moment. “Like I said, maybe it’s hidden knowledge. Some ancient wizarding trick, developed in secret, hidden for centuries—”

“Maaaybe,” Doug said. “But I looked, Jinx looked, even you looked, and the three of us found bupkis. Now, maybe you’re up against an ancient cult of wizards, with magic beyond anything that I could find at the Harris School of Magic, or maybe some modern wizard with access to a physics lab. Or maybe, just maybe, it isn’t even human knowledge at all.”

“Not … human,” I said. “You mean like … vampire? Werewolf? Fae?”

“No,” Doug said. “The answer to your question combined thousands of years of magic and decades of study of the output of two-mile-long particle accelerators. I strongly,
strongly
doubt anyone just stumbled onto this on their own just dicking around. It would be like finding the design of a solid state laser in da Vinci’s notebooks, centuries before quantum theory.”

“Go back to the
not human
part,” I said. “If it’s not human knowledge … ”

“The graffiti links two spaces,” Doug said, “but the other side doesn’t have to be
ours.
”

I spent the night in a box under a bridge halfway to Macon, Georgia. I had woven my way through the heart of Atlanta on surface streets, then risked exiting the Perimeter again on the highway, heading to Macon but intending to cut back towards Blood Rock.

The tingle as I went OTP was invigorating, but by the time I passed Stockbridge I was flagging. I turned off a few miles later, wound through smaller and smaller country roads until I found an industrial looking area with a small bridge running over a creek. I didn’t see any signs of trolls or other Edgeworld nasties, so I pushed the Vespa under the bridge, stole a box out of a nearby Dumpster, crept back under the bridge and into the box, and went to sleep.

Early, early the next morning, a truck running over the bridge woke me. I stretched, sore and cramped, and stood up. My neck hurt, my back hurt, and then both hurt more when I abruptly ducked down as I heard voices. After a moment the voices faded, and then I saw a couple of workmen walking down the road, turning in to the very place I’d stolen the box.

I leaned back against the bridge and took stock. I expected to feel sorry for myself, but I didn’t. Sleeping in a box had been cold and uncomfortable, but it had ended in a new day. Even the dingy, trash-strewn underbelly of the bridge was brightened by sun flickering off the burbling water. I saw a little scribble, near the abutment, stared at it curiously, and pegged it as a hobo sign—a graffiti precursor—that marked this place as a good rest stop. And it was indeed.

This too would pass, like the water slipping by in the stream.

“I can sleep in a box under a bridge,” I murmured to myself. “I can do anything.”

So my next step: get real help, and with all of my other contacts dry, that meant Arcturus. Of course, he didn’t answer, not after any number of rings, not after three calls. I don’t know why he even had a phone. And I certainly couldn’t call Zinaga.

I considered trying to slip in uninvited, but if my ‘banishment’ was real, the last thing I needed to do was show up at Arcturus’ door with a horde of vampires and vampire thugs on my heels. Heck, even if I did make it, the first thing Zinaga would do would be to sell me out.