me and I raised my head. Then I recoiled from the thing that had paused beside me, making the song of the place waver and slide into a minor key as I stared in horror at what appeared to be a disembodied hand the size of a rottweiler with a sphere for a head where the stump of the wrist ended. The palm and back were a dark green color, fleshy, thick, and callused like the hand of a manual laborer, but the head was a round glob with only a pair of jabbed-in pits for eyes, as if they’d been made with the tip of a massive pencil; yet they moved together as if the thing were looking me over. The fingers were skeletally thin, knobby, and blackened, with short, pointed nails and rough skin covered in tiny hooks where the pads of fingertips should have been. It scuttled around me like a lopsided spider. The smell of sulfur and brackish water clung to the hand-spider-thing as it inspected me.
It turned toward the gleaming tower of woven energy strands growing in the center of the Grey bubble, and the singing dropped away to a musical whisper. “Ah, it’s you,” a voice said, riding on the back of the music and shaping the chorus into its own words. “Come to the center.”
The hand-spider lifted a freakishly jointed thumb toward me as if it meant to help me up, but I rolled away from it, gulping against the desire to scream or vomit. I wanted to clap my hands over my ears and cut out the singing voices that reminded me too much of the voice of the grid, even though I knew it wasn’t the same. But I fought my fear and disgust and scrambled to my feet.
Reflexively, I reached to brush mud and leaves from my knees, but the ground around me, while it seemed normal—if unusually green and warm for this place and season—had left no trace on my clothes except a thin sheen of energy, like a cobweb clinging to the fabric of my jeans and coat. The hand-spider stood still until I moved, when it scuttled around me, herding me toward the tower of light. The energetic shine on my clothes fluttered with my movement and dragged tattered edges through the thin mist of the Grey, swirling tiny vertices and contrails of color. Puffs of silver and gold dust and pale green vapor rose from the ground with every step I took.
My heart raced as I walked forward, casting my gaze around, looking for anything, any clue, any indication of what was happening or how to get out of it. A tree swayed near me, and I turned sharply to stare at it. The tree shifted its roots away from my plodding boots and gouged the soil as it moved aside, leaving a shimmering trickle of green light along its path. The boughs shook over my head, dropping laughter and a glitter of raindrops.
The hand-spider herded me along, bumping against my legs and scratching at my calves with one of its pointed black nails. I kept walking.
The area inside the bubble was misty, but not rainy, so it wasn’t quite the real world, but it wasn’t very far from it. The landscape was definitely the same as that around Lake Crescent and I could, if I strained my ears, still hear the crying of the burning organ in Sol Duc’s past-tense conflagration. The thread of sound had been woven into the music of whatever the ley weaver was making. The area was deep with magic, not only the thick bright lines pulled from the grid, but pools and eddies of other energy that welled up from the ground. Trees really did walk here and I had no doubt that if I looked for them, I’d see plenty of Indian ghosts lurking in the mists. I wondered if there were dragons—lightning fish—somewhere under my feet, weeping boiling tears.
The hand-spider stopped at the edge of a circle of pale blue light that seemed to define the edge of the ley weaver’s construction zone. Then it bodychecked me, shoving me sideways along the line. I guessed I was supposed to go the rest of the way alone. I turned, but caught myself up short with a surprised gasp. Someone had stepped out of the circle a few feet ahead of me.
Someone human shaped, but not human . . . Like the hand-spider’s head, it seemed roughly made with no fine details, just the raw shapes of a body formed from the dense cloud-stuff of the Grey. This one had more of a face, with a pinched little nose, a thin-cut mouth, and gleaming eye pits under a suggestion of hair. But it seemed androgynous and unfinished. And whereas it had two feet, it had only one hand, the other simply missing, as if it hadn’t been stuck on at all. I wondered if the hand-spider had sprung from the missing extremity, until I turned my head a bit farther and saw two more of the things scurrying up and down the scintillating, shifting construction in the center.
The human-shaped thing made a curve of its mouth that should have been a smile and wasn’t. Then it opened its mouth and words came out on the whisper and song of the energy flowing nearby. “You have been playing on my instrument.”
I clutched at the first conversational possibility offered. “Instrument?” I asked.
The ley weaver waved its only hand at the tower of light, and then at the lines that ran through the earth to feed it. “My art.”
I looked toward the otherworldly construction. “What is it?”
The ley weaver nodded. “It is beautiful,” it replied in the voice of the choir.
“It is,” I agreed. The construction, woven of pure colors of energy that gleamed with magic, and singing in the voices of ghosts and nature and raw power tamed and trained into a living shape, was dazzling—breathtaking. I turned my gaze aside with effort, feeling my will and attention drawn toward it, into it, as more raw material. “But what does it do?”
“It does nothing. It is Beauty. Art does not need a function.”
So close to it, I could feel the insensible hunger of the thing, drawing what it needed from every source, drinking in energy and power as the hand-spiders spun and wove, shaped and built still more and more of the singing, changing form. My body seemed to vibrate with the thrumming of its harmonies; I felt cold and loosened, as if I might fall to pieces and be swept up as so much gleam and fairy dust—raw material for the ley weaver’s art. Then I saw a wisp slip by, a face elongated in a silent scream of terror as a ghost was drawn into the gyre. “But it does do something,” I said, thinking aloud, holding myself together by mind and word. “It devours magic. It drinks the remnants of memory.”
The ley weaver shrugged its shapeless shoulders and its chorus replied, “It requires. It takes. The lake gives. It is bountiful.”
“But it’s not unlimited. Others take from the lake, too.”
“They are unimportant. Beauty is not harmed by what the puppeteer takes. He has even given me these hands to build with.”
The hand-spiders stopped their work for a moment and turned as if looking toward us before returning to their tasks. The movement came from all around the shining shape of Beauty and I realized there were, perhaps, a dozen of the scuttling monsters at work. And each was different in color and size: some slim, some small, some large, some ghastly white or corpse gray, others mold green and rot brown. They were hands of the dead, crawling, reanimated, and enlarged to the size of dogs and men. That was what I’d seen creeping away from the dog-demons by the side of the road—one of the ley weaver’s hands.
No wonder Jin hadn’t come with me; the guai weren’t his friends, but they were his party. I wanted to run, scream, puke . . . and my horror soured Beauty’s music, throwing sweat onto my skin and pulling me back into myself.
The ley weaver made a furrow in its forehead and turned down its mouth. “You are hurting my song.”
“I’m sorry,” I gulped, holding back my urges and emotions and calming myself with long breaths until the sound soared back into a more pleasing mode. “If the puppeteer has given you hands, what did the others give you?”
“Nothing. They wish me gone.”
“Do you fight?”
“No longer. There was one who fought, who tried to stop the flow, but he did not understand. He was broken. His energy joined the flow.”
I thought I understood, but I wanted confirmation. “That one was the . . . parent of two others?”
“Of three.”
Leung had three children, though one was dead, so he must have been the one who fought and was broken—killed—by someone so he wouldn’t dam up the flow of magic. But if the ley weaver thought there was no battle, it was mistaken—or didn’t recognize it.
“How was he broken? Who broke him?” I asked.
The ley weaver shrugged again and the music sighed blue and purple glissandi of light.
“Do you know how he could have stopped the flow?”
“He did not know to replace the anchor. He could not do it.”
“Do you know?”
The sound of Beauty laughed as the ley weaver opened its mouth. Then it said, “I will not tell you. Those
