Authors: Margaret Ronald
What could you do to quench such a thirst? What would you sacrifice to keep your city from burning?
I took the Pike, got lost a few times, and eventually made it out to what had been the Swift River Valley. The road led me through woods gray with the oncoming
winter, and finally to a turnoff with gravel shoulders where hunters or hikers could park. I got out and followed a little dirt path down to a wire fence marked with
NO TRESPASSING
signs, and there I could see the water.
The Quabbin Reservoir reflected the heavy sky as if it were made of mercury. A flock of geese drifted overhead, honking mournfully.
This is what the people in Boston decided to sacrifice to the city’s thirst: a whole valley and the four towns within it. They’d bought up all the land, evacuated everyone—gave them plenty of time, though that doesn’t mean there wasn’t acrimony on both sides—and dammed one end of the valley. And drop by drop, the Swift River filled up the valley, turning pastures into wetland and then into lake bottom, becoming the Quabbin Reservoir.
When I was a kid, in spite of how carefully Mom had explained everything to me, I still had dreams about the rising water swallowing everything I knew. I’d be trying to put my stuffed animals on a high shelf out of the way of the flood, back in our house in Philly before Mom and Dad split and we moved out here. Doesn’t take a psychoanalyst to figure that one out.
But that wasn’t the way it had happened. The buildings had all been knocked down; the graveyards had been dug up and moved elsewhere, the remnants of the four towns—Enfield, Prescott, Dana, and Greenwich—had been razed so that they wouldn’t interfere with the flow of water. There were no drowned farms, no church towers ringing mournful bells three fathoms down, no sunken cities. Those had only been in my head.
To look at it from an undercurrent point of view, the engineers had gone about it mostly right. Water would carry away any traces of what had been there, and while it would, for a little while, bear some echoes of the towns, eventually any curses, any ill will or even blessings, would wear away under that slow flow.
From another point of view, it was also a good place to hide something. The Quabbin was too large to have a single guardian spirit, and far too young (certain quarries notwithstanding) to make its own, and so it was a sort of null space. In theory, anything tossed into the Quabbin was permanently gone, erased like a footprint in sand.
Unless you had someone like me around. Someone who didn’t follow the basic rules of magic in her hunt. Someone whose talent was based on something entirely separate from the run of usual magic, a bastardized hound’s power that was entirely misplaced in a human body. And even then, that person would have some difficulty getting to anything that was at the bottom of the Quabbin.
Venetia, when she heard “swimming,” had immediately dug out a fifties-era suit from somewhere and handed it to me, insisting that it’d keep me warmer than the “skimpy things they had nowadays.” I wasn’t entirely enthusiastic about it, but it was a step up from the navy one-piece left over from my college days that was the only suit I owned. Besides, that one rode up in the back. This one qualified more as a unitard than a suit, and honestly I didn’t much care. It fit well enough under my clothes, at least.
The sunstone had to be in the reservoir, though. It made sense: I’d only started scenting the water when I’d gotten my full senses back, and that was after the yacht fire. And Roger did say that he occasionally stopped by in Boston for his ally to “recharge.” If something had been in the Quabbin that long, it would have lost all individuality—unless it had been protected, or unless it only had any power when its original owner was nearby.
Much of magic is based on the tension of incompleteness. I’ve even heard a theory that the reason loci are actually useful is not that they’re part of someone’s soul, but that the person is still tied to them in some way. (Certainly that had been what got me, and what
I had had to sever … even if it had left me a little weak.) If the sunstone was here, it was a part of Dina, and that relationship would have been magnified when she was close to the city. Physical closeness would have increased the tension between Dina and her missing stone, in much the same way that magnetic force becomes tangible when you’re holding a magnet close to iron.
Hadn’t Kassia said that this sort of thing had happened before? I’d wager that Roger’s visits to the city matched up with the times she remembered. He might not have known the effects of bringing his ally to Boston, but that didn’t entirely excuse him. All the more reason for me to bring this back to Dina, even without my own motives: if by restoring her to wholeness I could stop the bad water and the paranoia, I’d happily do it.
I kicked a drift of fallen leaves out of the way and peered through the fence. The pattern of scents here was no less tangled than in Boston, but there was some differentiation: fewer human scents, more animals, the density increasing as I searched. The miasma of death rose off the water, so strong I could barely find the source. Surely this wasn’t all tainted by the stone—but no, it wouldn’t matter. It was the contiguous nature of the water, not the specific currents that touched the stone.
I put my hand over the bulge in my jacket, where the fingers rested. There—a trace of tar and salt, further along the shore. North. I opened my eyes, sighed, and got back in the car.
For the next few hours, I repeated the process: drive ten miles, get out, spend half an hour trying to get back in the pattern of the scents, locate the thief’s trail and a rough direction, then back into the car. It was the kind of interrupted hunting that I hated, but the Quabbin was large enough that I couldn’t just walk around it following my nose. And since the other option I had was to do the same, only swimming, the
car was the best bet, even if it meant that this was less a hunt than an act of assembling data points. There wasn’t one single road that went entirely around the Quabbin, and so I kept getting lost, turning around once I got to some form of civilization, winding my way down one side of the reservoir and back up the other. The one constant was the scent, and at least that part started to get easier as the day went on.
By the time late afternoon began to slide toward evening, I had it narrowed down to a little layby at the northwest end of the Quabbin, gazing across the road to where a chained-off driveway led down the hill. The closest shore that I could find was off the lawn of what looked like some mogul’s summer home: a big, empty mansion with an
ATHOL REALTY
sign out front. No cars in the drive, no scents of humans around the place (except for me, of course, and the lingering remnant of a few summer parties down the shore plus one or two traces of hunters in the hills). If I was going to do this, I couldn’t have picked a better spot.
I locked up the car, then swung my messenger bag over my shoulder and crossed the road. The drive split about twenty yards in, one fork winding about the mansion, one sinking down the hill to the shore of the Quabbin, flat and cold. A flock of starlings chattered overhead as I reached the edge of the water, where a little inlet had once been fenced off. The land here wasn’t so much a shore as a mud slick; time and water hadn’t yet turned hillside into beach, and wouldn’t for decades more. I eyed the sky—still gray, but with the heaviness of rain that would spite everyone by not falling, and unnaturally warm for the season—and tucked my pack under a bush, then stripped down to Venetia’s suit. At the very last I picked up Dina’s token, the fingers of a thief, and held them like a baton in my left hand.
The water on my toes was warmer than I expected, or maybe that was just the effect of cold air making everything else feel warm by comparison. Up to my
knees, now, and the ground underfoot was not just squishy but slimy, crawling with weeds and other underwater things. I shuddered and splashed forward a few more steps, in the hope that getting it over with quickly would help.
Nope. My teeth chattered, but not from the water’s temperature. Every time I closed my eyes, even for just a blink, the water shivered around me, becoming icy quarry water, runoff in a great pit, thick with ferns and magic … I shuddered as it closed around my calves, my legs, slopping up against the small of my back. My breath was coming in ragged gasps by the time the water reached my breasts. I took a deep breath, then submerged completely—
—and the water around me was only water, only the Quabbin, only the Swift River that had filled a valley. No longer anything to be afraid of. Like a soap bubble popping, like a leash snapping, the chill was gone. Only water.
It was still quite capable of giving me hypothermia, though. I surfaced, scraping hair out of my eyes, and sought for that scent again. Yes. Only a hunt now, and one that was challenging enough in these circumstances. I grinned, spat, and struck out away from shore.
The thief’s scent ebbed, but not because I’d gotten away from it. I was on top of it—but diving revealed nothing but a few stones about twenty feet down, and that was as much as I could tell before my lungs tried to escape out my ears. Not that I didn’t try several times, finally cursing and rolling onto my back while I rested my arms.
Something twitched against my left hand: the oilcloth, and the fingers in it. I paused a second, my teeth chattering—was this what they meant by the first stages of hypothermia involving bad judgment?—and shifted my grip. The fingers twitched again, then jerked down, a ghostly hand in mine, pulling me under. I caught my breath, kicking to stay afloat.
There were things that could travel outside worlds—the Gabriel Hounds and their silver road, the things that not even the Triplets would dare call up, magicians long severed from their bodies. I didn’t know how much I trusted these things, but Meda had found me before. Let her find me now, then. Let her lead me on, and where she was, I might find the sunstone.
The hand tugged again at mine, a gentle pull this time, encouraging. I clasped the hand tighter and dove—
Into clear air, and a town long forgotten.
My feet brushed tall dry grass, waving slightly in a wind that was no longer present. No more than a few feet away that grass turned to pondweed, waving in a current of a different sort. Above, the light fluctuated between the green-gold of dark water and a strange, attenuated glow like sick sunlight. Whatever spell this was, I was carrying it with me.
I let out my breath carefully, and no water rushed in to take its place. Good. Even better, my talent was still present, which put this situation well ahead of the flash in the wine cellar. Following the pattern of scents in this envelope of time was difficult, like reading a page that had most of the ink leached out of it. But there were patterns, nonetheless, and not just ones that my brain had cobbled together to make sense of this place. Hay, apples, cows … stone and mortar, freshly laid …
I drifted as I walked, the buoyancy of the water not quite gone, so that I skimmed over the ground. The shape of a building loomed out of the murk, first as nothing, then as a spectral, ruined husk, then, as I got right up close to it, as an intact stone wall. I looked from the wall to the edge of the water, where this space ended, and saw the rest of the building blurring in and out of reality. This barn had long been knocked down to make way for the water, but this remnant of magic still preserved it after a fashion.
The thief’s scent remained, stretched and faded, no longer tinged with tar but with cow shit, the heavy livestock scent like a skewed filter. I closed my eyes to get a better lead, then gasped as pressure thundered against my ears. When I opened my eyes, the space I walked in had shrunk by half. I yelped, and it bulged out again, restoring the wall to its memory and the sky to its unhealthy light.
Okay. So whatever magic was being done here, it was in some way dependent on attention. Nice to know. I wondered how long I could keep from blinking.
Ahead, past the cows—even they were here, ghostly against the field, memories of memories, and dull in this light. As I reached the edge of town—a few outbuildings, a steeple that flickered in and out of memory—I realized I’d seen light like this before: filtering through a grate set in a Boston street, into a smuggler’s tunnel.
“We thought it was the end of the world.”
I jumped back, skidding across what felt like both damp hay and lake-bottom muck. A shape flickered back and forth beside me, like a badly damaged film, and one shadow of an arm reached to my own hand. I started to pull away, but paused, trying to focus on him. As I did so, he became clearer, the pressure of attention bringing him forward more clearly.
He was dressed in an old peacoat fastened together with toggles, and the corner of his shirt was homespun, stained from years of use. A gold ring gleamed in his ear, and his hair was slicked back and twisted into a knob at the back of his head. While he wasn’t handsome, there was a certain look to the set of his jaw that I thought I recognized.
What was it Nate had once said? Wear the same expression on your own face long enough, you’ll learn to recognize it on others. Which meant that here was another stubborn son of a bitch.
“It wasn’t the end,” he said, his lips curling in remembered amusement. “Even the town council agreed, and they said that the Lord would have to wait for the day’s business to end. And Meda knew. For all that her master deemed her a talking dog, Meda knew.”
He paused at the edge of a drystone wall. To either side, it stretched out past the envelope of time—one of the few structures that hadn’t been knocked down. If I squinted, I could just see the pale line of the stones in the water of the Quabbin, mossy and slick. “Meda knew much.”
I followed him over the wall, bouncing a little as I came down. I was no longer cold. Was that a bad sign? Or was that part of this spell, this fragment of unreality that insulated me from the Quabbin?
The man—the thief whose fingers I’d carried—walked on, paying no attention to how I floated beside him. At his feet, the weeds and muck of the Quabbin gave way to flat stones, set in a gently arcing path that unrolled in the dry space below my feet. I squinted ahead to see only the barest ghost of a building. It must have been gone long before the towns were bought, before they were even official towns …