who know, will not try. Those who try, do not know.”
I couldn’t tell if I was getting somewhere or just going in circles, and I only felt colder and more torn apart with each moment I stood so close to the pull of the ley weaver’s construction.
“Do you ever . . . travel from this place?” Could it even leave the hot springs? The ley weaver would never pass for human, so I doubted it could have walked around to the back of the hotel and bashed in Strother’s brains. But could it have been involved in the murders another way? “Or send your hands?”
“No. I am content here.” Not quite true, since I’d seen the harassed hand far from here, but it had the ring of truth in the moment. Perhaps “the moment” was all that existed or mattered for such a being.
“How long have you been here?” I asked, hoping I could figure out who’d come first, who had the biggest stake in keeping the lake as it was.
“A short time.”
What was a short time to this creature? A decade, a century? I’d have to try a different tack. “Who was already here when you came?”
“The old nexus has always been here, and the rogue just before the anchor was removed. The east was taken away and the puppeteer came soon when the flow grew wild. The child was last.”
Rogue and child . . . Which one was Willow? The east who was taken away might have been Jonah Leung. . . . But why “east”? I wasn’t gaining much clarity and I felt more wretched by the moment. I had to get what I could and leave before I lost my focus and was torn into fodder for Beauty.
“If the anchor were returned to its place, what would happen?”
“Beauty would dwindle.”
“What about the rest? Of them? Of you?”
The music whispered, “There must be one. There can be four. But starveling and squabbling. Perhaps the mountain will crush them again. . . .” Once more, the ley weaver frowned. “Beauty must not wither. . . .”
I started backing up, knowing I wasn’t going to get any more that was useful out of this . . . thing. And the longer I stayed, the smaller my chance to leave. I eased one booted foot away from the blue line at Beauty’s verge, then the next, putting a yard or two between myself and the ley weaver before I would turn and bolt.... The ley weaver put out its one attached hand and reached for me. I could hear the other hands skittering toward us. . . .
“Beauty sings when you are here. You must stay.”
Even the trees began creeping toward the center, tearing greenweeping trenches in the earth as they tried to trap me. I ducked a swinging branch and rolled away, gaining ground, but not fast enough.
One of the hands scrabbled toward me and grabbed! It wrenched me to the ground and tried to move me, but it had no traction so long as it held on. Once I was on the ground, however, I had all four paws to dig in and crawl with, dragging the surprisingly light weight of the hand with me. I rolled onto my back to dislodge it and get a look at the oncoming things. I didn’t like what I saw: The trees were slow moving, but the spiderlike hands were quick. They moved fast, but they stuck to the ground or scurried along lines of energy; none of them leapt the way a real spider would.
Because they weren’t spiders. I wrenched the one that held me around so I could look at it, peering hard through the Grey and looking past the inflated size and freakish shape. The thing squeezed and pushed the breath from my lungs, but it really was nothing but a hand: a rotting hand bound together with magic and illusion. I worked one of my own hands between the squeezing horror and my chest, then pushed my fingers into it.
The feeling was repulsive, but I’d done it before and I could stand to do it again. I didn’t have the pheasant feather that had been so useful the first time, but this time I wasn’t dismantling entire corpses, just a single disembodied hand. Once I had my fingers past the shell of flesh, the feel of the burning web of energy at its unnaturally animated core was familiar. I didn’t have to look to know which of the white-hot lines of magic to rip loose; I closed my hand on the one that hurt the most and yanked it free.
The hand-spider dissolved, leaving nothing but skeleton fingers clothed in tatters of rotten flesh that crumbled away as I watched. The voices of Beauty’s chorus shrieked and the harmonies shattered into noise.
The ley weaver and his minions stopped as I stood up, holding out the gruesome trophy. I felt sick and it was hard to talk, but it was the only thing I could think of. “He lied to you,” I yelled to make myself heard over the howling of the choir. “The puppeteer didn’t give you helpers; he gave you spies and weak sisters. He wants the power you’ve been using to make Beauty. The demons try to destroy your hands so they can stop you and the puppeteer, too. They’re all like that. They just want the power and they’ll do what they must to take it.” I didn’t know if it was true, but it seemed likely, given the way Jewel wanted to destroy them all—even her sister—to reclaim the lake for herself. I doubted any of the rest were different.
But now I got it: Jewel was the old nexus that the ley weaver had alluded to. The lake wasn’t meant for four quarters; it was supposed to be anchored—nailed down—by a single nexus. Willow, the child, hadn’t been around long enough to understand the original structure of the lake’s magic; she knew only the way it had been pushed and pulled and manipulated after the anchor—whatever it was—had been removed. Maybe there were four anchors, but there was only one center and Jewel wanted it back. If I was to fix the problem of the lake, I had to get rid of the sorcerers and magicians who were using it. And it would be easier if I could get them to turn on one another—at least until I could figure out something better.
The hands stopped where they were, quivering as if I had struck the truth, and maybe I had. Why would Costigan, who kept everyone away from his property with a patrol of zombies, help another magic user? I didn’t know the man, but if his colleagues were anything to judge by, he wouldn’t unless there was some advantage to be gained for himself.
I threw the skeletal hand to the ground and it crumbled away, raising new dissonance in the sound of the construction behind the ley weaver. Then I bent and grabbed onto the nearest energy thread that led to one of the other hands. It wasn’t a big power line or I’d never have been able to move it, but I hauled as hard as I could, bracing myself against the agony until it burst out of me in a shriek while I heaved and flicked the line. The spiderlike hand gripping the energy line was flung into the air and fell, diminishing as it did, losing its giant size and terrible shape.
Beauty screamed.
I staggered and barely kept my feet under me, nearly blind from the tears of pain flooding my eyes, pummeled and deafened by the construction’s disembodied blast of fury. “None of them are your friends,” I gasped. I turned away, risking my back, and hoping hard, and stepped through the unnatural bubble to the edge of the temporacline that led to the inferno of Sol Duc. I stepped across the barrier, into rain for a moment, then into the smoky, firelit memory of the burning resort. I kept going, pushing myself though I wanted to fall down and be sick, until I came to the rise at the top of the road’s memory where I stepped back out into February.
That was where I finally fell down.
TWENTY-THREE
This time the ground was normal gravel and mud, and it stuck to my jeans and the side of my coat where I fell into it. I lay for a moment in the rain, blinking, sucking in wet, cold air that tasted like winter fir and cedar. “Get up,” I muttered to myself, as much to test my ears as to reclaim normalcy. I didn’t need to be soaked again; I had a lot of discontent to sow and I couldn’t get it done if I had to waste time finding more dry clothes.
I picked myself up and leaned against an alder that gave a little under my weight. I turned and glanced at the tree, seeing a swirl of green energy around it and a pair of small hazel eyes that blinked between pale bark lids.
The shadow visage startled me. “I’m sorry,” I said, starting to step away.
A breeze without origin pushed a slim branch across me and twigs brushed against my chest and arms, dusting off the muck that had stuck to me. “Slaves yearn for freedom,” the breeze whispered and creaked on the tree boughs.
The rogue wind eased and the branches rose away, giving me a clear path back to the gatehouse where I’d left the Rover. I took a step out onto the road and turned back to look at the trees. In the mist and rain, shapes
