was gone, his book all but destroyed. This thing was all that was left, and in a moment the answers would be gone forever.
Then the monster opened its mouth wide and belched fire at me.
I stepped right to the very edge of the magic circle, folded my arms, leaned forward, and merged with its shield. Then I unfolded my arms and spread them wide, expanding the circle as I expanded my arms, shielding myself with it just as the flames hit.
The magic bubble bent and bowed under the assault of graffiti fire, coiling around it, sweeping over me. But by the time the flames touched me, they were cool, just flickering light. Their power was being leeched into the circle, shorting out at the cross of the unicurse at its center in a blazing bonfire of raw magic.
The smell of ozone wafted into the air. Cracks spread across the stone. Mana buffeted my skin. A few more seconds and that power would blow the circuit, shattering the magic circle. The feedback would kill me-but I didn’t need more than a few more seconds.
“Spirit of life,” I cried, “bring this monster down!”
And I threw the blackbook through the shield into the heart of the unicurse, letting my vines flow off with the book like a green cable of life, freely detaching them from my body-but not from the Streetscribe’s.
The blackbook whacked against the heart of the twisted hexagram and blazed with power, a circuit of mana flowing from the monster to my magic circle, through the book, back along my vines to the tagger, rippling out through the spiderweb along the walls of the cave, and finally feeding back into the monster.
It screamed, its power draining out along the magical conduit of fire it had created, its essence beaten back by the destructive intent that it had projected. Then the feedback leapt onto that torrent of fire itself, a vicious circle that began ripping the monster apart.
I leaned back as far as I could, trying to hold myself at the rim of the shield, where the flames died but before the raging magic storm began. And for a moment it worked.
But when I released the vines on my arms, I had forgotten that all the vines on my body were connected. The vines I had extended bloomed and flourished along the vicious circle of the conduit, a lightning bolt made of leaves, sucking backward from the book to the tagger to the monster and back again-whipping past me, and taking the rest of my vines with it. I screamed as the torrent of vines followed the current, ripping off my body, spinning me like a top.
Then all the energy in the cave converged with a clap of thunder.
Postmortem
I stared up into blackness. I smelt acrid smoke. I felt incredible pain. Shimmering auroras of blue and red drifted before my eyes, like the churning Rorschach images you get if you squeeze your eyes far too tight.
Then Cinnamon’s worried face appeared against the red, upside down and staring at me, ears poking out of her wet headscarf, eyes wide and scared. “Mom?”
Tully’s face appeared too, at my left, tilted at an odd angle. “Miss Frost?”
I blinked. The shimmering redness was in the ceiling, glowing blue fungi and flickering red embers, shimmering in and out as smoke drifted across them. Cinnamon and Tully were quite real, and I sat up, wincing in pain.
The master tag was destroyed, a huge blackness of soot licked by a dying streamers of real flame. I couldn’t see the Streetscribe, only burnt embers of the spiderweb that had enmeshed him, half obscured by an oily column of smoke. Beyond the mound, a vast misshapen mass was sinking into the ground-the head of the monster, lopped off when the tag short-circuited.
I winced again in pain, and held up my hand: my hand, my forearm, my whole body was red, sore and burning-and my vines, my beautiful vines, all of them, were gone. I felt my hand, my skin, frantically. I was burned- but not badly. I rubbed my forearm with my thumb, then winced. Actually, that was a good sign: a really severe burn would have killed the nerves.
“Stupid!” Cinnamon said, biting her knuckle. Then she said, “I means, don’t pick at it.”
“I know, I know,” I said, feeling my other hand, more gently this time. Then I looked around. Most of the cavern ceiling was cracked and sooted, and plaster and masonry fragments were fluttering down like confetti everywhere I looked. “Give me your knife, Tully.”
“S-sure,” he said, fishing out the switchblade. “What… ”
“Both of you, walk the perimeter of the cave, make sure that none of the tag is left,” I said. “Spray over anything that’s left-but if you start to feel woozy, head for the exit. The fire may have eaten the oxygen. I don’t want to beat this thing only to die of asphyxiation.”
“W-what are you going to do?” Tully asked, staring at the knife.
I opened it with a snikt. “Make sure the Streetscribe is dead.”
Cinnamon and Tully both stared at me for a second, then ran off to the wall of the cave. I shook my head, and turned towards the wall that had held the tag. At its base, the decapitated head of the monster was disintegrating, fluttering away in giant leafy embers, like flakes of burnt newspaper drifting out of a fire. I then inspected the wall itself. After scanning it for a minute, I convinced myself that whatever had been there was well and truly gone.
Then I walked around the mound and made sure the same was true of the Streetscribe.
When I returned, Cinnamon and Tully were waiting at the shore of the little lake, near where they dove in to avoid the flames. Their eyes grew wide as I approached.
“Gaah,” I said, wringing my hands to try to rid them of the black grease. I spied an old piece of burlap atop the debris and picked it up. As it peeled away from a mound of white powder, it cracked and crumbled in my hands, but there was enough left to get the gunk off. I wiped off Tully’s switchblade, tossed the rag, snapped the blade closed, and extended it to him. “Thanks.”
“Y-you can keep it,” he said, horrified.
“Thanks,” I said, slipping the blade into my back pocket. “Let’s go.”
“Mom,” Cinnamon said. “Mom, your face. You’ve gone… hard.”
I stared at them both a moment, and they both backed up a little. I wanted to tell them it was a hard thing to cut off a man’s head and have it flop out onto the earth beside your feet-and it didn’t make it any easier that it was a blackened corpse. I wanted to chew them out, to list all the people who had died, to scream at them that this wasn’t over.
But there was no point. There was no way, even with a solid knowledge of magic, that they could have known that spraying a little graffiti could have led to all of this. The real sinner was the Streetscribe-and he’d paid for it in full.
“This was a hard day, Cinnamon,” I said. “And I had to do some hard things. But all that matters now is you’re all right. You too, Tully. We made it. Thank you.”
Cinnamon grabbed me suddenly. “I’m so sorry, Mom,” she said. “I’m so sorry… ”
“Don’t you be sorrying me, little Cinnamon,” I said, patting her head. “It’s all over but the shouting. There will be shouting. Now let’s get the hell out of here.”
We wove our way out of the cavern, found our way to the dark stone tunnel (after three tries) and tromped back through the sludge to the archway. Half the graffiti was scorched and blackened, but the other half was barely touched-some of it, disturbingly clean.
But when we got to the arch, my hopes fell. The gateway looked like it had been sprayed with a flamethrower, and in spots was actually still smoking. There was nothing left of the tag, which had burst with such force even the stones of the arch were cracked and splintered.
“Well, fuck,” Cinnamon said, kicking a fallen archstone away.
“Great,” Tully said. “A ten mile walk through the Underground.”
“I think we should have expected this,” I said, staring at the blackened arch. The stones were warm to the touch. “Tully, you know the tagger’s magic-do you think that all the tags will have been destroyed along with the master tag?”
His brow furrowed. “N-no,” he said. “Only the gateways, the ones plugged into the… the master circuit. All
