Winter Tide Read online

  Audrey appeared beside me, clapped a hand over her mouth, and ran down toward them. Two of the guards and Chulzh’th also crested the dune.

  “No threat,” I told them, hoping it was true. I hurried down with the elders at my heels.

  “This is your doing,” said Jesse as I arrived. Then he caught sight of the elders and jerked back, almost dropping Sally.

  I darted forward and caught her side, her weight briefly on my wrists before he regained his balance. At the touch of my skin against hers I felt a warming, and she moaned softly. Startled, I touched her again, felt her senses flare against the cold. I scooped her from his arms, and she lolled against me.

  “I know,” I told him.

  “No, the blame is mine,” said Mary. I turned to look at her and she met my gaze. “Before she went unconscious, she told me to take her here. I thought I could fix this. I was wrong. I’m sorry. You said that your people would know what to do.”

  I bowed my head. “I was wrong too. They know a treatment, but they can’t use it on men of the air.”

  She closed her eyes, but only for a moment. “I’ll speak with them—perhaps together we can come up with something.” A humorless smile played on her face. “And if you really are working with Russia—or with demons—helping us would allay suspicion.”

  I let it pass; there was too much else going on and I couldn’t find the energy to argue. “You came. The others…?”

  “Will forgive me in the morning, I hope.” She nodded at Jesse. “Mr. Sadler, thank you for guiding us here. If you want to go back to Miskatonic or wait in the car, you’re more than welcome.”

  Recalling his smug explanation of why their ritual had caught me, I couldn’t help glaring in spite of my remorse. I wasn’t being entirely fair, and realized it even as I spoke. “Or you could come back to the beach with us, and tell my grandfather how after I rebuffed your advances, you decided that uncontrolled summoning spells would make a fine revenge.”

  “That had nothing to do with it—I was trying to protect Audrey.”

  “You didn’t,” said Audrey. “Go home and go to sleep.”

  He looked at the elders again.

  “I’ll come,” he said. “I’ll help how I can. But please don’t tell your grandfather. I said I was sorry.”

  “I know,” I said.

  I started up the dune, and discovered immediately that pushing someone away in anger was one thing, but carrying a girl nearly my own weight up a shifting slope was beyond my strength. Chulzh’th took Sally, lifting her easily as she climbed. Mary and Audrey followed, and Jesse scrambled after us.

  I led them back to the fire. “Archpriest Ngalthr,” I said, formally. “Allow me to introduce Mary … I’m afraid we’ve never met properly; I don’t know your family name.”

  “Of course you don’t.” She held out her hand and the archpriest took it, claws closing around her like a father holding the hand of a small child. “Mary Harris, FBI. I understand you have a method of curing Miss Ward that’s impractical in its current form.”

  “She would die. Both because she is a woman of the air, and because she is untrained.” Chulzh’th came close, and Ngalthr pressed the back of his hand to Sally’s brow. She whimpered quietly. “And because she is already gravely weakened. Thrice dead, and in pain more terrible than she suffers now. This is your doing.”

  “I know. I’m trying to fix it. Please tell me about the treatment.”

  Grandfather stalked over to join us, and I moved automatically to stand between him and Sally. “So you can attempt it yourself?” he growled. “The results would be far worse in untrained hands.”

  She looked at him coolly, but a hint of anger leaked into her voice. “So that I can try and determine whether there’s some less harmful principle that can be abstracted out. As I’m currently unable to so much as write out an equation, I will be dependent on you to implement any treatment I can suggest. I hope you’ll judge it on some basis other than whether it’s been tried before. Please tell me what you would have done, if you thought she could survive it.”

  “We don’t discuss these things with outsiders,” said Grandfather.

  “Please,” said Mary. “I’m trying to save a child’s life.”

  “Two,” said Audrey.

  Mary glanced at her and flushed. “Two lives. If there’s something I must do to make myself clean, or to avoid profaning sacred secrets by hearing them—”

  “Your profanity is beyond question,” said Grandfather, “but irrelevant. If there were ever any core of truth to the blood libels that destroyed our children, they came from misrepresentations of such desperate methods.”

  “If there’s a chance she could come up with something—” I said.

  “As she did with the summoning? First you risk yourself to preserve the illusion that you can save someone already lost; now you would risk all of us.”

  “The summoning may have been foolish, but she’s created new arts that do work.” I neglected to mention the specifics. “I’ve seen them.”

  “No,” said Grandfather.

  “Yringl’phtagn,” said Ngalthr warningly. “It is a small chance, but would you prefer rumors of killing children, or children dead in truth because of your fear?” He looked to the clouds, then to Mary. “You have entered a place of sacred ritual. Honesty and plain speech are sacraments of the Tide. I will answer your question, and you will listen.”

  For the first time, Mary looked nervous. “All right.”

  “Outsiders, such as the thing you summoned, cling to this world by taking the place of your own self. Their presence drains vital power from mind and body, destroying both. If they know what life is, or that they have displaced it, we have never been able to tell.

  “Detached from their host, they are unable to survive the laws of this universe. We have blades, enchanted to cut both body and mind. These we must use at the points where the outsider clings. The longer they have infected their host, the more such points there are.” Mary watched Ngalthr intently as he spoke. Grandfather looked away, though his glance stole sometimes in my direction. The archpriest laced sharp-clawed fingers together and went on:

  “To survive such a cleansing requires physical endurance and the ability to heal quickly. But it also requires mental training and focused will. The mind, when attacked, instinctively flees from the flesh—and in doing so carries a part of the outsider to safety. Only someone trained in the arts of mental travel can deliberately hold fast to their body, experiencing all that it suffers—and ensuring that the outsider remains present and vulnerable to be cut away. Fail, and the body dies while the mind drifts anchorless, still bound to the outsider, until both dissipate into the void.”

  I shivered, imagining it: staying with the pain, allowing it, knowing that I could stop it and must not. I might well have to, if I put off my separation from Sally much longer. Or if I had miscalculated our existing connection.

  I could understand why my grandfather was less willing than I to risk such a sacrifice.

  Mary waited a moment, still watching intently. “Is there more?” she asked.

  “That is all of the method,” said Ngalthr. “There is much ritual built around the essentials. It gives the person something to hold on to other than their own pain. There is a room in the catacombs of our temple designed for such purposes—not a necessity, though it saves time and the risk of error. But the core of it is the cutting, and the endurance.”

  She stood and paced. “Mind and body,” she said, half to herself. “That part’s easy enough, and you could reduce—what if you used anesthetics? And had a modern surgical theater to minimize bleeding, sterilize everything, and sew up the wounds afterward?”

  Chulzh’th looked thoughtful. “The medical techniques … would help, in part. But the harm to the body is what forces the outsider loose. And”—she flexed her fingers, careful not to let her claws pierce Sally’s side—“it would be hard to keep gloves whole.”

  “I can wield a
blade,” said Mary. “If I have guidance.”

  “Drugs to dull pain have been tried,” said Ngalthr. “But most by their nature loosen the mind from the body. If the mind is not there to feel the pain, the outsider remains untouched as well.”

  “Damn.” Mary continued pacing. “I don’t know that I could talk Kingsport Congregational into giving the lot of us a private surgery at 1 a.m., in any case. Damn.”

  “I’ll try it,” said Audrey abruptly.

  Ngalthr frowned at her. “Child, I said no.”

  “I don’t have Aphra’s strength, but I have more endurance than most people. I’m doing a lot better than Sally is, and that’s down to whatever this … thing … is, in my blood. It might help me survive. And I may not be trained in mental travel, but I learn fast. I’m already stubborn enough to hold on when people are trying to push me out.” Her eyes slid sideways to Trumbull, but with Mary present she didn’t specify. “And I’m dying, anyway. I’m not afraid of it hurting a bit more.”

  “I have done this before,” said Ngalthr. “And I will not do it to you.”

  “Audrey,” I said. “The thing in your blood—” Turning to Mary. “Audrey has something in her blood—we don’t know what it is, but it looks like—pieces of void that try to eat up the invader. It hurts her too, but it’s why she’s doing so much better than Sally. We were trying to find a way to share it, and get it under control, but we couldn’t figure it out.”

  “Really?” Mary turned on her. “How did you come by it? What do you know about how it works?”

  Audrey shrugged, beyond shame. “I had ancestors who were supernaturally crazy and liked running crazy supernatural experiments. But I don’t know anything about how it works, because their experiments were a few generations back and they didn’t leave any notes.”

  Mary raised her eyebrows. “You’re talking about the Mad Ones? Or some seventeenth-century enthusiast in Providence or Salem?”

  “The Mad Ones Under the Earth.” Audrey pronounced it with melodramatic relish. “You know about them?”

  “I may take the classics with a grain of salt, but I’ve read them.” She looked at the elders. “Possibly a larger grain than I should have. Tell me everything you can about this protection of yours.”

  Audrey, and those of us who’d seen her blood, did what we could to explain it—what it looked like to the inner eye, its effects, everything we’d tried to bridle it.

  Mary held her hands out, flexed them as if trying to grasp something. “I could … there are equations that describe the body and mind. The ones I used for the inventory spell were too general, obviously, but they could be made more specific—perhaps specific enough to summon and control a part of the body.”

  “Or the cold itself?” I asked.

  “If we knew more of its nature. A gift from the Mad Ones would be far easier, if only because they’re human. But I can’t work out the equations. I can’t do them in my head, and I can’t write them out.”

  Trumbull stepped forward. “Can you walk me through them?”

  “I can try.” The two of them fell into technical jargon.

  Ngalthr knelt to scratch a symbol in the sand. “Do not use this for summoning. It is the basic symbol for the K’n-yan—for the Mad Ones.”

  “That’s an equation?” asked Trumbull. “Wait, yes, I see…”

  I wondered what a mathematician might learn during a sojourn at the Archives, and how much might filter through the memory blocks, given impetus. I watched their work, hoping to better understand the logic that connected diagram and equation, formalized symbol and ever-changing reality. But the more I listened, the more it seemed to me that something was lacking.

  There’s a logic and a predictability to magic: things we know we can do, tools we’ve practiced well. But there are also—not limits, precisely, but knowledge more distant than we’ll reach before the sun goes dark. It’s likely, though beyond our ken and concern, that there’s knowledge too far for the Yith to reach before the universe itself fades. Beyond those limits are things that, if they even distinguish comprehension from chaos, see us as numinous, nameless horrors—as we do them.

  That humility is what allows us to work, when we must, at the edges of understanding. Define your work solely with equations, I suspected, and it would have no room for those edges. But my way, and the elders’ way, had already failed. And though Mary and Trumbull grew increasingly energetic in their discussion, I heard no hint of a breakthrough. Any hope of bringing us all through the Tide, whole, must draw on all our strengths.

  What did I have to offer, aside from childhood memory and two years’ study?

  Memories of survival. Stories told around fires, or under covers behind guards’ backs, shared across languages and cultures. Friends and family who’d reached across barriers of understanding. The confluence, water and rock and air flowing together in our mingled blood.

  I moved closer to Mary and Trumbull, and when they paused said, “We’re connected. Charlie and Audrey and Caleb and Miss Dawson and I through common practice, and Sally here.” I rolled up my sleeve so they could see what remained of that link. “All three kinds of humans. Can we do something with that?”

  “Maybe,” said Mary, and “Suppose—” And Trumbull said, “If you define—” and they were back to their jargon, of which I caught only the suggestion that our link might fill an otherwise indefinable gap in some larger structure with which they struggled.

  The cold in my spine began to spread once more. Chulzh’th sat by the fire, listening, Sally across her lap. I joined her, touched my skin again to Sally’s. I felt the pulse of warmth, as before, but weaker.

  “You’re going to lose her,” said Chulzh’th quietly.

  “I know.”

  “You should cut the link.”

  “Not yet.” I glanced at Mary and Trumbull, just as they rose from their consultation. They looked hopeful, and worried.

  “How quickly could you find one of those knives?” Mary asked Ngalthr.

  “There’s one in Y’ha-nthlei, beyond the reef. It would take almost two hours to retrieve. There used to be one in the temple, and it may be there still. But I’ve already said I won’t use it on them.”

  “You won’t need to, not directly. Miss Marsh is right—we can use the connections that already exist between her and the other two, work through her strength and probably Miss Winslow’s as well, to break the cold from all of them.”

  Grandfather understood a second before I did. “No! You won’t risk my granddaughter that way!”

  “If there’s a chance of saving them, I’ll do it,” I said.

  “You will not.” He paced toward me. I backed away, hand over my forearm—and he whirled to drag Sally from Chulzh’th’s grasp. Awkward under the girl’s weight, Chulzh’th tried to pull her away. But Grandfather held Sally’s arm long enough to scratch on it some sigil I could not see. I felt the last thread snap, the cold drain from my spine.

  “Grandfather!” I shouted, at the same time that Archpriest Ngalthr called his name and wrenched him back from Chulzh’th and Sally. One guard, looking extremely nervous, stepped between him and Audrey and raised her spear. I stored my gratitude; for now I dropped to my knees beside Sally. Chulzh’th passed her to me, stood and stalked to Grandfather.

  “Did you learn nothing from watching me lose my temper?” she demanded. “You’ll answer for her death.”

  “I know. But I only have two grandchildren.”

  I pressed Sally’s wrist, but my fingers were nearly numb and I couldn’t find her pulse. I held my hand near her nostrils, felt the warmth of her exhalation. A pause, then more warmth. Another pause, another breath. And then nothing.

  I kept my hand there for what seemed an aeon. More words passed between Grandfather and the others; I didn’t hear them. I laid Sally’s body on the sand, and looked up at him.

  “I’m still cold,” I said.

  I couldn’t tell whether it was actually true: whether the shivers t
hat flooded my body were remnants of the outsider, or the memory of those remnants, or simply anger—as much at my own traitorous gratitude as at him. In that moment, I didn’t care: it was enough to see his protective straining, held in check by Ngalthr’s claws around his arm, drain away.

  Jesse picked up Sally’s wrist, looked in horror at Grandfather. “You killed her.”

  “She was already dying. I was trying to save my granddaughter.”

  “He’ll answer for it in our courts,” said Ngalthr. “Right now we’ll do what we can for the living.”

  Audrey ducked under the guard’s still-raised spear, lowered herself beside us, touched Sally’s forehead. There were tears in her eyes; she ignored them. “Jesse, later. We have to deal with it later, we have to deal with this now.”

  “He killed her.”

  “He kept Aphra from saving her. We don’t know if that would even have worked. And there’s nothing to do about it. If you want to throw yourself at a giant fish-guy with three-inch talons, can you please do it tomorrow? By then I’ll either be dead, or better enough to deal with mourning you, too.”

  “I’m not going to hurt the boy,” said Grandfather. Ngalthr released him, and he too dropped to the sand beside us. Jesse inched back, but Grandfather simply touched Sally’s brow. “I’m sorry, Aphra. I wanted to keep you safe.”

  “I’m not safe.”

  “I know that. Do what you must; I’ll witness it in penance.”

  I sighed, and wiped away tears I would not ignore. Beyond penance, having him there would be a comfort, though I wouldn’t say so now. I turned to Mary. “What you were planning—will it work without a man of the air?”

  “No—we’ll still need someone to take the part Sally would have played,” Mary said. “One person for each type of human, each type of strength. I could do it.”

  “You couldn’t,” said Trumbull. “You need to be able to focus on the ritual, and on whether our design is doing what it’s supposed to.” I saw Jesse swallow and glance at Audrey—could see him trying to make himself say something before Trumbull continued, “Besides, it would be best to use someone already bound to her.”