The Native Star (5 page)

“The blue star,” she murmured.

“They were afraid of it. I picked it up to look … and they went crazy. Turned on me. Not supposed to do that, not with the Switch. They … wanted to bury me, bury it forever …”

The effort of the last word made the man splutter and choke. An agonized cough racked him, and with it came a bubbling gush of black blood.

“Miss Edwards …” Stanton’s voice was tense.

“He’s dead,” Emily said softly. The sudden presence of real death among all the half-death suddenly made everything seem heavier and slower. “There’s nothing we can—”

But her words were lost. As if by some silent signal, the zombie miners swept forward in a wave of rags and rot, trampling Stanton and the light as they crowded down the side tunnel.

Emily shrieked, scrambling backward until her back was against cold rock. She felt for the devivification powder in her pocket, but it was too late. The miners were upon her, reeking of mud and rust and decay. In the flickering half-light she saw the face of a man, swollen and brutish and slack with the stupidity of death, his cheek a mass of black mold.

The thing got a slimy icy hand around her throat. The bones of the skeletal fingers dug into her windpipe, pressing hard against the wall. The close blackness of the tunnel spun around her. She struggled for breath as the corpse pushed her back …

“Mort statim!”

The words made the rocks and earth around them shudder. Stanton’s lanky form was outlined in blue flame, and there was a colossal flash. The zombies were harshly outlined in sudden daylight brilliance, then dissolved into sparking clouds that glittered like gold dust.

Darkness fell abruptly as the magical brightness faded.

“Lux,”
Stanton snapped, and his pine brand flared once again, weak and wavering. The radiance of the attack had seared vibrating black spots onto Emily’s eyeballs. She tried to blink them away, but they stubbornly refused to vanish, and in a moment, Emily realized that they were not black spots at all, but two corpses that had not fallen in Stanton’s attack. They were lumbering toward her. One had a pick in his crumbling hand, and was looking at Emily as if she had a vein of gold in her forehead.

“Don’t just stand there!” Stanton was slumped against the rock, breathing hard. She reached out, trying to squeeze past her zombie attackers, but the one with the pick clutched at the loose end of one of her long braids. It yanked her back hard, forcing her to her knees. The pick gleamed above her.

Desperately, she grasped for anything she could strike out with. A gleam caught her eye. She lunged for it, and her hand fell upon the blue gemstone.

The moment her fingers touched it, everything changed. She could perceive everything with complete clarity. The texture of the walls. The sound of Stanton’s breathing. The bright metal head of the pick soaring down to split her skull. Faster than thought, she rolled to one side as the pick struck sparks on the rock by her ear. Dumb and dizzy, she grabbed one of the zombie’s leather-dry legs. If she could just knock it off balance …

… and in an instant, the thing collapsed to the ground, the pick clattering against rock, the end of her braid still clenched in its bony fist. She struggled to free herself, but the second corpse gave her no chance; it clawed at her arm, but the moment its dead flesh touched hers, it shuddered and stilled, falling across her in a slimy heap.

Then, all was silent but for the sound of Emily’s tattered breath and the roaring of her heart in her ears. The next thing she knew, Stanton had shoved aside the no-longer undead and was slapping her cheeks, even though she thought it perfectly obvious that she was completely awake.

“Stop it,” she snapped, pushing him away. “I’m … I’m fine. What happened?”

“I couldn’t get them all.” Stanton’s voice was distant and hollow. “How did you manage to …”

“I don’t know,” Emily said. “They just … fell down.”

She felt funny, drifting and warm and oddly light. She lifted a hand to brush a dirty lock of hair from her face and noticed that the strange blue stone seemed to have become stuck to her palm.

No, Emily thought, “stuck to” wasn’t right. “Embedded in” was a more precise description. The stone had somehow worked its way entirely through her hand, a roundish lump protruding from her palm. She looked at it quizzically, turning her hand over slowly; the gem protruded from the back of her hand as well. She held her hand up to Stanton’s torch. The light glowed through the stone as if it were a piece of cobalt glass. The thin threads of white shimmered.

“My word!” Stanton’s brow wrinkled. He put down the torch and took Emily’s hand, touching the stone with both thumbs. “Does it hurt?”

“It does with you pawing at it like that!” Emily jerked her hand away. Then she noticed Stanton staring at her face.

“What?” she asked.

“Your eyes,” Stanton murmured. “They’ve gone all black.”

But there was no time for further discussion of Emily’s eyes, for there was a skin-crawling shriek from the mine’s depths, and then another—long protracted shrieks that were coming closer with alarming rapidity.

“There are more of them down there?” Stanton said.

“Last I heard, Old China had well over a hundred zombies,” Emily said.

“Let’s not stay to count.”

In a sudden flash of panic, Emily reached to feel the back of her head. Her mother’s hair sticks were gone. Scrabbling on her hands and knees, she ran her hands over the dark mine floor, pushing aside corpses, groping around underneath them.

“What are you
doing?”

“My hair sticks!”

Stanton reached down and grabbed her arm. He tried to pull her to her feet, but she jerked away from him, and in that instant she saw the sticks glimmer in the light of his torch. Grabbing them, she caught Stanton’s sleeve and they raced up the tunnel. The shrieks of the undead were louder now. The corpses were moving fast, but she could smell fresh, cold air up ahead.

“We have to block the entrance!” Emily said as they emerged into icy moonlight. She pointed at the rocks over the mine entrance. “Magic those rocks down!”

Stanton stumbled to a stop, his eyebrows knit mournfully.

“Miss Edwards, I just mortified two dozen rampaging zombies. I am in no position to magic anything right at the moment.”

“If we don’t get this opening blocked, there’ll be dozens more in Lost Pine before dawn!” But even as Emily said it, she knew what to do. Running to the foreman’s cabin, she threw open the door. In an open crate, sticks of dynamite lay buried in wood shavings. She grabbed a stick and reached for the spool of fuse cord.

Running back up the hill, she heard the shrieks of the undead echoing against the black forested hillside; they had reached the mine entrance. Stanton had picked up a heavy mossy branch and was holding them back as best he could, swinging the branch wildly at a clot of zombies that seemed to find this action extremely annoying.

The man could even annoy the undead! Despite herself, Emily found this rather impressive.

Digging into her pockets, Emily came up with two handfuls of devivification powder. She flung it at the zombies, but they continued to shriek and scrabble, unaffected. Emily drew back behind Stanton.

“See, I told you you needed to rhyme.” She held up the dynamite. “Can you light this?”

“Flamma.”
Stanton glanced back, snapping his fingers.

Nothing happened. He looked confused as he snapped his fingers again.

“Oh, forget it!” Emily threw the stick of dynamite to the ground. She was about to rummage around in Pap’s satchel for the flint and steel he always kept there, but the instant she dropped the stick of dynamite, the fuse exploded in a shower of brilliant sparks.

“Ten seconds of fuse!” Emily yelled, kicking the dynamite against the timber brace that framed the mine’s opening. Then she dove under the board sluice, clasping her hands over her head. Stanton, however, remained at the mine opening, apparently determined to keep the corpses at bay.

“Get clear!” she screamed at him.

At that very moment, Stanton threw down the branch and gave an exceptional leap—a leap given far greater distance by the energy from the flash and roar of the explosion at his heels.

After the roar subsided and the last chunks of muddy rock and splintered timber had clattered to still silence on the ground around her, Emily rolled out from under the board sluice.

The mine entrance was gone, replaced by a sundered wreckage of tumbled rock and twisted trees. Emily listened for the sound of the undead shrieks, but all she heard was her own breathing, heavy and irregular.

“Mr. Stanton, are you alive?” she called.

Her answer was a groan from a clump of blackberries a good fifteen feet distant from where the mine entrance had once been.

“Showing off like that, you deserved to get blown to kingdom come.” She scraped heavy handfuls of red-clay mud from the back of her skirt as she spoke.

“I’m fine, thank you for inquiring.” Stanton straightened unsteadily. “And yes, I did do quite a fine job of keeping the undead from escaping before the dynamite blew. Thank you for mentioning that, too.”

Emily leaned against the rough wood of the board sluice as he limped up beside her. One side of his hair stood up like an exclamation point, and his broad forehead was streaked with soot.

“How are my eyes?” she asked. He squinted at her face in the moonlight.

“Still black,” he said. “And your hand?”

“Still got a rock in it.” Emily lifted her hand with fingers spread, then flexed them experimentally. It didn’t hurt, precisely; her fingers felt clumsy and stiff, but her hand felt warm. She held the stone up to the moonlight; it glowed clear through. She could see no bones, no muscles, no tendons …

She closed her hand over the stone. “So, you’re the great Warlock. Explain what this is.”

Stanton rubbed the back of his head.

“Well,” he averred finally, “I’d hate to jump to any hasty conclusions.”

“Mr. Hart said that the zombies were afraid of it.” Emily said. “They were trying to rebury it and he got in the way.”

“Horrible,” Stanton said.

“Will it hurt me, do you think?” She struggled to keep fear out of her voice.

Stanton shrugged with his customary dismissiveness. “Well, you’re not dead yet,” he said.

Here
, she thought,
is where I treat this tactless lout to a snappy retort
. But suddenly, she didn’t feel like doing much of anything snappy at all. Instead, she looked back over her shoulder toward the mouth of the mine. She thought of the man who would remain buried there forever. She clenched her fist around the stone, as tightly as she could.

“I’m going home,” she said.

CHAPTER THREE

The Rule of Three

By the time Emily got home and was able to get a look at herself in the mirror, her eyes had returned to normal. Her hand … now, that was a different story. Nothing would shift the glimmering blue stone from where it was embedded in her right palm. No amount of distracted fiddling, pressing, or pushing helped in the least. The gem remained firmly and stubbornly imposed.

She and Stanton had parted at the bottom of Moody Ridge. Emily, turning up the path that led to Pap’s cabin, had been more than willing to forgo the niceties of a good night, but Stanton had stopped her.

“Listen, the crate that came for me today is a shipment of periodicals and collected journals. I’ve been waiting for them all winter. I’ll look through them and see if I can find reference to such a singular occurrence.”

Early morning sunlight, pale and peach-colored, peeked through the back windows as Emily went to kindle the stove. While the water was heating, she climbed to the attic loft and changed out of her mud-caked calico dress. She frowned at the stains. They’d never come out. Spoiling her best dress would have seemed an utter tragedy twenty-four hours ago, but now it seemed a pretty trifling thing.

When the water boiled, she made a pot of fresh coffee (clumsily, for she wasn’t used to working with a hand half crippled) and set out some of the cornbread that Mrs. Lyman had left. Then, as she waited for Pap to wake up, she sat staring quietly at the stone, watching the shifting light of morning cast smoky blue shadows through it onto the white tablecloth. When Pap finally stirred, scattering cats, she said simply: “You’ll never guess what happened to me last night.”

After pouring him a strong cup of coffee, Emily told Pap about her trip to the Old China Mine. She kept the story simple, leaving out the more distressing elements. No need to alarm Pap about trivialities when the main issue was sure to trouble him enough.

When she came to the part about the stone, she laid her hand on the table, palm up, as if inviting him to read her fortune. He felt the stone in her hand with his rough thumbs, his sightless eyes straining to remember how to see.

“Well, if that don’t beat all … It’s a stone, you say? A blue-colored stone?”

“Yes.” Emily leaned forward. “You know something about it?”

“Nope.” Pap shook his head. “But it feels powerful, whatever it is. It’s got something in it, I can’t quite feel what. It doesn’t really feel like magic or power, or anything, really. More like … I don’t know, like something that isn’t yet, but might be. Like light from a star.”

Emily was slightly surprised. Pap was rarely given to such poetic abstraction. She shook her head with impatience.

“Well, anyway, can you get it
out?”

Pap was silent for a long time, his thumbs stroking Emily’s palm.

“I can’t see as there’s any way to medicine it out without cutting,” Pap said. The thought made Emily cringe. “And no way I can see that you wouldn’t lose all the use of that hand.”

“That’s my writing hand,” she said. “I couldn’t do charms or anything without that hand.”

“Your other hand would learn, in time,” Pap said distantly. “But, Em, I don’t know if we should make any decision too quick. It’s not doing any harm where it is … none we know of anyway. And we know taking it out would do harm. So maybe leaving it in—”

“Leave a rock in my hand?” Emily said. “It’s not natural!”

Pap chuckled. The sparkle in his eyes made Emily almost think that he could see her.

“Ain’t much that’s more natural than a piece of rock,” he said.

“Not a piece of rock that’s stuck in my hand!” Emily wailed. “There’s got to be more to it.”

“I’m sure there is,” he soothed. “But, Em, there are bigger magics in this world than I know about. An old Kentucky goomer doctor like me don’t have any call to meddle with things like that, so I never set myself to learn about them.” Pap stroked his grizzled chin. “But maybe that educated young Warlock feller, Mr. Stanton—”

Emily snatched her hand away. She was about to give Pap a piece of her mind about Dreadnought Stanton (who had cashed in his small store of goodwill by lecturing her all the way down the mountain about how a woman her age should know better than to grab willy-nilly at mysteriously glowing objects) when a knock came at the door. Emily threw the door open and was not pleased to see that it was the very Mr. Stanton of whom they had been speaking. One of his pair of fine black horses was hitched to a nearby tree. He carried a saddlebag over his shoulder and sported a richly variegated black eye.

“Good morning, Mr. Stanton.” She stared at him coolly. “What happened to you?”

“Well, someone had to alert the town about what happened up at the mine. I explained the situation to Mr. Cunningham at the general store—I thought he might be able to get word to the mine’s owner. Mr. Hansen happened by, heard that we’d gone up to Old China together. One thing led to another.”

Dag! Emily put her hand over her mouth, as if to hold in a groan. She’d forgotten all about Dag.

Stanton took a seat at the table across from Pap. Absently, he filched a piece of Pap’s cornbread and devoured it in three large bites.

“What’s wrong with Dag?” Pap asked.

Stanton dusted cornmeal from his hands. “Your girl makes her love spells too strong,” he said. “Too much lavender.”

“Love spells?” Pap’s brow knit. “Em, what’s he talking about?”

“Ashes of Amour,” Emily murmured hesitantly. Then she pressed her lips together and was silent for a long time—a silence Pap interpreted with terrible accuracy. His face fell.

“Oh, Em … you didn’t.”

“I thought if …” She paused. “It’s been so hard. He would have … helped.”

Pap sighed. “Emily, I’m ashamed. Sore ashamed.” These five words were the entirety of Pap’s remonstration, but Pap’s remonstrations didn’t get much harder than that. The deep disappointment in his voice and the tired slump of his shoulders made hot tears sting her eyes.

She turned abruptly and went into the screened cooking area. Pap wasn’t able to see her tears, but she’d be hanged if she would embarrass herself in front of Stanton. Angrily, she dashed a drop from her cheek.

Poor Dag! She’d promised to meet him for a walk and instead ended up going off with another man. That it was to battle a pack of rampaging zombies wouldn’t make a bit of difference. He’d be hurt and furious.

She got out herbs from earthenware pots on the windowsill, thinking absently of Stanton’s bruised eye, wanting mostly to give her hands something to do. She put a clean piece of white cheesecloth into a blue-enameled bowl, and on the cloth she sprinkled willow bark, nettle, thistle, and a good deal of black tea. Then she poured warm water into the bowl and let it all steep, watching the herbs swirl in the water. They were turning widdershins. A bad sign.

“Perhaps this is a punishment,” Emily said, softly. “Besim called me a bad Witch. Bad magic always gets its comeuppance.”

“Ever mind the Rule of Three … Three times what thou givest returns to thee.”
Emily heard the ruefulness in Pap’s voice as he quoted the old rede to her. He did not elaborate—he did not need to.

“Can we please take one problem at a time?” Stanton said. “Your lumberman is the least of our worries. I told you I’d look in my journals and see if I could discover anything about the stone. Well, discover something I did.”

Emily lifted the cloth from the bowl, wringing out the extra water, then she turned in the corners of the cloth so they enfolded the dampened herbs. She handed the poultice to Stanton. She tried to conceal the fact that the hand offering it—the hand with the stone in it—was trembling slightly.

“That will take down the swelling,” she said. He placed it over his eye, gingerly. “What did you find out?”

“Something I began to suspect last night. The Corpse Switch didn’t fail. The miners did.”

“How, exactly, does a zombie fail?”

“Let me tell you what a Corpse Switch actually does.” Stanton leaned back in his chair, and assumed an infuriatingly pedantic air. “Zombies are soulless creatures, and being soulless has been empirically proven to result in an unpleasant disposition. The Corpse Switch provides them with an artificial soul.”

“You don’t say?” Pap leaned forward, fascinated. “How does it do that?”

“The Corpse Switch stands in for the traditional control of a
bokor
or voodoo sorcerer.” Stanton also leaned forward, obviously pleased to find a receptive audience. “It generates a very large magical aura—a signal which penetrates the minds of the undead. It gives them memories. Not real memories, of course—the mine owners make them up whole cloth. Happy memories featuring picks and shovels and holes in the ground.”

“My, my!” Pap’s milky eyes glistened. “What will they think of next?”

“The Switch pushes the terror of their half-life into abeyance. It comforts them, makes them placid and tractable.”

“But you’ve already said the Switch didn’t fail,” Emily said.

“It didn’t. It was producing the aura just fine. It was the stone that interfered with the zombies receiving it.”

With a dramatic flourish, Stanton reached down to open the flap of his saddlebag. He pulled out a huge leather-bound book, very new looking, with the words
Journal of Recent Thaumaturgical Advancements—Volume CDLXXVI
pressed upon it in gold. He opened the book to a slender bookmark of carved ivory, then gestured to Emily. “Read that.”

Emily read the rather grandiose title of the article, which was “Prominent Mysteries in the Occult Sciences: Frontiers That Remain Unexplored, Presenting Various Intriguing Fields of Study for the Warlocks of Future Decades.”

She followed Stanton’s finger down past a paragraph subtitled “Can the Mantic Anastomosis Be Cleansed Through Human Intervention?” and another subtitled “Geochole—A Resource for Future Exploitation?” When Stanton’s finger came to rest, she began to read aloud, for Pap’s benefit:

“What Is the Native Star?

“This blue-white mineral of unknown properties is a preternatural mystery of the first water. The only known specimen, hardly the size of a lady’s shoe button, currently resides in the British Museum, returned there after discovery in 1820 in a Canadian gold mine by native laborers, who claimed it was a piece of the evening star
.

“The stone shows every evidence of possessing a great quantity of inchoate energy, which is exceptional in that it refutes the common understanding that only organic materials are capable of storing and holding magical power
.

“The gemlike mineral has the appearance of the clearest cobalt glass threaded with filaments of crystalline white. The stone immediately absorbs and nullifies any magical energy that is exerted in its vicinity. It is theorized that examples of Native Star may represent actual fragments of the Mantic Anastomosis. Further study is warranted to completely understand the properties of this singular mineral.”

That was all. Emily looked up at Stanton.

“Native Star?”

“Found in a gold mine,” he said. “Cobalt blue, crystalline white filaments. Absorbs magical energy.”

Emily contemplated the stone in her hand as Stanton continued.

“When you touched those zombies they fell down instantly. The stone in your hand must have absorbed all the magical force animating them.”

“That’s all well and good,” Pap said, “but none of it answers why the stone worked its way into Em’s palm in the first place.”

“Or how to get it out,” Emily added.

“That will require further research. Research which cannot be performed in Lost Pine.” Stanton closed the book. “Miss Edwards must consent to be examined by professionals.”

“What?” Emily didn’t like the word “examined,” or even “professionals” for that matter.

“I have no doubt that the professors at the Mirabilis Institute would be extremely eager to study this case,” Stanton said.

“I most certainly am not a
case!”

“The Mirabilis Institute—that fancy institute you studied at?” Pap frowned. “You can’t mean she’d have to go all the way to New York?”

“Not at all,” Stanton said. “There’s an extension office in San Francisco—that’s less than a week’s ride. The Institute would assume all expenses of the journey, of course—”

“San Francisco?” Emily said. “Are you kidding? I can’t go to San Francisco!”

“With that stone in your hand, you can’t do anything else.” Stanton looked at her. “You certainly can’t do magic.”