Blue Magic
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For my sister Michelle Millar, with my love
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Blue Magic
is about physical, social, and magical ecosystems, and I could not have written it without my own serendipitous web of support. Always at its heart, and in mine, is my wife, Kelly Robson. I owe much to my parents—Barb Millar, William and Sandra Robson, and Brian and Lily-Anne Millar—my grandmother Joan Huffman, and my wonderful siblings: Michelle, Sherelyn, Susan, and Bill. My friends do everything from reading drafts to explaining tricky research concepts and providing moral support when I am flailing. Some of the most stalwart are Lisa Cohen, Ming Dinh, Denise Garzón, Nicki Hamilton, Liz Hughes, Benjamin Lewis, Elaine Mari, and Ginger Mullen.
I am deeply grateful to my agent, Linn Prentis; my editor, Jim Frenkel; and a host of editors, writers, and mentors who’ve guided me over the years, especially: Wayne Arthurson, Ellen Datlow, Gardner Dozois, Mary Hobson, Nalo Hopkinson, Doug Lain, Louise Marley, Bridget McKenna, Jessica Reisman, Nancy Richler, Harry Turtledove, and Peter Watts.
Even a book about magic needs the occasional fact. The hardworking environmental scientists of ESSA Technologies have inspired me, time and again, with their expertise and passion for developing solutions to humanity’s climate change problems. Jason Tuell provided specific advice about meteorology and storms, while Ramona Roberts provided legal advice. My excellent copy editor, Eliani Torres, corrected my many mistakes, particularly with Spanish grammar. Any errors in what passes for science, language, or courtroom procedure within this book are mine.
You made it possible for me to write
Indigo Springs
and
Blue Magic,
and I will always be thankful.
CONTENTS
Tor Books by A. M. Dellamonica
CHAPTER ONE
THE GATE HAD BEEN
stalking Will Forest ever since he arrested his wife. It grew into bare patches of wall in his various hotel rooms and his quarters at Wendover Air Force Base; it had taken over a discreet corner of the kitchen of the Oregon home he so rarely returned to. It turned up in his peripheral vision in restaurants, TV stations, and shops. An archway of brambles, seven feet high, it pushed through drywall and hardwood with apparent ease. Its slats were a blue-tinged wood; its handle was a carved ram’s horn.
He touched it once, and his hand vanished into nothingness. Blue light bled from the boundary between his wrist and the absent wall. When he pulled back, his skin was chilly to the touch, like meat from a fridge.
He would go into restroom stalls and find the gate on the side wall, exhaling a cold draft that fluttered the toilet paper. He had seen it in the temporary courthouse the air force had erected at Wendover. It waited in the prisoner interview room, an unobtrusive witness to his attempts to get information out of captured Alchemite terrorists.
None of his colleagues noticed the thing. One of the prisoners tried throwing herself at it … and bounced. As far as anyone at Wendover was concerned, she had flung herself against an impenetrable wall. The suspects had done crazier things: shouting prayers through the pretrial hearings, faking seizures, pulling out their hair during jury selection.
“Daydreaming, Forest?”
Startled out of his contemplation of the gate, Will found General Arthur Roche neatly turned out in full dress uniform, his hair so newly cut that every salt and pepper strand lay in perfect, bristling formation. Even the hearing aid tucked into his left ear gleamed.
It wasn’t a reprimand. In fact, Roche served up one of his carefully rationed smiles, a rigid upturn of the lips that froze as he took in Will’s wrinkled shirt and unshaven chin.
“It’s Monday morning,” Will said. “My son and daughter should be getting ready for school.”
Another man might have clapped Will on the shoulder. Roche, though they’d been friends since college, barely nodded. “Take another run at your wife today. Maybe when the trial starts, it’ll sink in that this is serious.”
“Yes, I’ll try Caro again,” Will said without much hope.
“Now Sahara’s on trial before the whole world, the Alchemite movement will crumble like dried-out cake.”
“Cake,” Will agreed. He didn’t point out that getting this far had taken a tremendous toll on both the government and the military.
“Today’s the beginning of the end for the witches, you’ll see.” With that, Roche hustled Will into a glorified storage closet furnished with a cheap table and chairs, a space designated for witness interviews and small meetings.
One of Roche’s tame journalists waited inside, dictating copy into her phone: “… opening arguments in the trial of Sahara Knax, head of the fanatical cult that sank the aircraft carrier USS
Vigilant
last fall. Knax and nine followers face charges of attempted murder, committing terrorist acts, and treason in connection with the attack on the carrier.
“Today I am talking to the two men responsible for bringing Knax and her so-called mystics to trial. Will Forest insists that he is an ordinary person, doing his best in extraordinary circumstances.… Listen, they’re here. Call you back?”
Will stifled a sigh. Sahara’s show trial was little more than a diversion from the magical catastrophe enveloping the country. The real power lay beyond the gate of brambles even now embroidering itself on the wall. It lay within a reservoir of spilled magical energy in the Oregon forest and with the woman who controlled it, Astrid Lethewood.
Officially, Astrid was a bit player in this mess. Sahara had embarrassed the navy when she sank its carrier, so quashing the Alchemites was the government’s first priority. Oh, the air force was firebombing the magical well, and they were fighting to stop the alchemized forest from spreading. But as for recapturing Astrid? She would keep, Roche said.
Would she? Will hadn’t pushed: Astrid was probably beyond their reach. And he’d liked her, more than was wise … which might be why he hadn’t mentioned the gate.
The reporter snapped her phone shut. “I appreciate your talking to me, Mr. Forest.”
“Call me Will.” He shook the hand she offered.
“Minimal pleasantries, okay?” Roche glanced at his watch. “Trial starts soon.”
“Okay, Will: We’ll start with an easy one. Everyone remembers where they were when they learned that magic exists. How about you?”
“Home, watching the same news broadcast as everyone else.” It had begun with a police standoff: Some guy with a shotgun, holding his girlfriend and her roommates in an old house in Oregon. A local fireman had blundered in and been killed. The gunman was holding off the sheriff’s department. Sad stuff, but nothing peculiar.
Then …
“You saw the lawn and trees growing to giant size, the alchemized bees and songbirds attacking police?”
“Yes, from the comfort of my living room. I saw Sahara Knax escape on a flying carpet. Then the house collapsed.”
Sahara had fled to California with a pillowcase full of magical objects, now known as chantments. She used them to set herself up as a goddess, scamming thousands of believers.
“Your wife was with you?” the reporter asked.
“My whole family saw it,” Will said. “Afterward, Caroline became one of Sahara’s followers.”
“She left you and kidnapped your children?”
“That’s right.”
“And it was Caroline’s departure that led to your capture of Sahara Knax?”
“Indirectly,” Will said. “I got involved in the effort to contain the alchemical spill in Indigo Springs. My job included interviewing the survivors of the initial standoff—”
“Including the gunman, Mark Clumber?”
“Mark had been contaminated. He couldn’t speak.” Clumber, a supposed bad guy, had arrived in Indigo Springs to find Sahara Knax locked in a power struggle with Astrid Lethewood. Their house was sitting on a source of immense magical power Sahara wanted to control.
“He’d been in contact with this magical fluid?”
“Vitagua—that’s right. Sahara had broken into a wellspring of the magical liquid. Astrid, Sahara, and their roommate, Jackson Glade, were trying to contain the spill when Mark Clumber showed up. He was something of a last straw.”
“Things went from bad to disastrous?”
“Catastrophic. Sahara used a chantment to force Mark to shoot at police. They were trying to buy time, but the ploy failed. The magical spill triggered an earthquake. Vitagua contaminated the entire region.”
“What happened to everyone in the house?”
“Clumber and one of the neighbors, Patience Skye, were doused in magic. The army took them and Lethewood into custody. Lee and Jackson Glade were killed.” The press still didn’t know that Jacks Glade had been shot by police. “Knax, of course, got away.”
“And you caught her, three months later.”
“That’s right. I was interviewing Astrid Lethewood, and Alchemites attacked the facility where she was being held. Lethewood and Clumber escaped, and I arrested Sahara Knax.”
The reporter leaned in. “Since then, you’ve helped arrest several key Alchemites, including your wife. But you haven’t recovered your children?”
“No. If anyone knows where my children are, please contact the authorities. There is a reward.”
The worried father stuff played well with the public; Roche was using him and the kids, but what could Will do about that?
Not
search for Ellie and Carson?
It wasn’t working. A sense of pointlessness, time wasted, assailed him with the force of a riptide. The confidence he’d had in his old friend and the might of the army was fading.