She joined him on the shoreline and tried to remember. There’d been the chain of mountains that both the sun and the moon rose over, and there they were again, blue with haze, off to her left. She remembered those from when she’d been catching fish in the estuary. Straight forward was the lake, and beyond that the bay, where the river they’d followed washed out to sea. Then to her far right was the sharp line of rock that eventually made the headland where they’d arrived.
Then she imagined herself there on the beach, looking towards the twin mountains where the geomancer was supposed to be waiting for them, where the river cut through and they were supposed to go around the steep gorge. When she’d run, she’d crossed the river and through the forest until the trees had started to thin and the lines of ridges began.
‘I think I’ve got this,’ she said, and tentatively pointed. ‘The river’s over there. The geomancer lives beyond the gorge, which is there.’ She turned. ‘The sun rises over those mountains, and between there and here are hills, which means your castle is at the edge of those in…’
She turned again, and decided that if she was going to be wrong, she was going to be definitely wrong. She jabbed her finger.
‘That direction. On the tallest ridge.’
Crows bowed low, his scarecrow body bent double. ‘You were paying attention after all. Could you draw a map?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mary. ‘I was never any good at drawing anything. I could give it a go, if that’s what you wanted.’
‘Here in Down, maps are power. They mark out the portals and the spaces in between. You can trade maps, barter them for whatever you want. Just make sure you hold them in your head, so that no one can take them from you. So, with that lesson over, are you ready for another?’
She nodded and he held up his hand to her.
‘What do you see?’
‘Your hand,’ she said.
‘Yes. What else?’
His palm was a little pinker than the jet black of his knuckles. The creases on his skin at the joints and across the width of his span were like hers and yet unique to him.
‘Am I supposed to be doing some sort of fortune telling?’
‘No,’ said Crows. ‘Look carefully.’
She did. She looked for patterns in the lines, scars or calluses. He had those, but they didn’t mean anything except a past and a present of hard work.
‘Have you looked?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know what I’m looking for.’
He turned his hand around to show her the back of it. ‘You are looking for the same thing as you were before.’
Crows had no hair there. His nails were pale and chipped, ridged like the land where he lived. His fingers were almost impossibly long, and she wondered how hard it had been for him to heave shovel after shovel of coal into the furnace, in the heat and the smoke of the engine room.
He turned his hand again, palm forward. ‘Do not look at the hand. Look at what the hand becomes.’
She wasn’t seeing it. A hand was a hand was a hand, however it was held. She held up her own, but she was facing into the sun, so she moved it to block it out. The light peeked through the spaces between her shorter, fatter fingers.
‘Shadow,’ she said. ‘I can see a shadow.’
‘Good. Now, this is the trick. When you move your hand, the shadow it casts follows it. Always. Unless you can persuade it not to.’
He stood next to her, held out his hand again, and wiped a line of darkness across the clear lake air.
‘Do I have to believe it’ll work before it does?’
‘It helps. There are three reasons to do something, anything. The most obvious is that you know that it will work. You have done it before, and the outcome every time is the same. Then there is a belief that it will work. You have seen it done, you have been shown how to do it, though you have never done it yourself. And then there is the third way.’
She waited. And waited. ‘Crows?’
‘Hope,’ he said. ‘You hope it will work. You have no idea how it might be accomplished, but you need it to work so very badly.’
‘So all I have to do is hope?’
‘It is all you ever have to do.’
‘A world can’t run on wishes. It can’t.’
‘Surprise yourself,’ he said. ‘Do you want it to be true?’
‘I do. Fuck, yes.’ A talent, once latent and now woken, was poised on the tip of her tongue and the tips of her fingers, ready for her to speak and shape it into being.
He laughed. ‘Then make it true.’
She looked at the black smear in front of Crows, the way it slowly crisped and crumbled at the edges, falling like soot but melting before it reached the ground. It was his shadow, dissolving in the sunshine.
Mary took a deep breath, stuck her tongue between her teeth and wiped her hand as if she was clearing condensation from a window pane. The image was so strong that she was on the top deck of a bus, night outside, and using her sleeve to scrub the sheen of water away so she could see out.
She pulled down mist, not darkness.
It swirled about her hand, tiny tornadoes of cold steam that floated off on the shore-side breeze.
‘Interesting,’ said Crows. ‘But ill-disciplined. Try again.’
She wreathed herself with fog, and whichever way she turned she just produced more of it. She ran along the shingle beach like she was laying down a smoke screen, then ran back through the fog bank she’d created, dragging it with her. She sprinted past Crows, dancing around him, then on up the beach to weave through the trees.
When she finally stopped, the air was thick. Tendrils of vapour curled and twisted, and the wind only slowly unpicked her impromptu, unexpected manifestation.
‘Crows?’
The fog was bright, a luminous cloud with no beginning or end. Without the sky, she didn’t know which way to go, but she could still listen for the movement of the waves on the shore. Perhaps that way. She took an uncertain step forward and called Crows’ name again.
He answered, distant and indistinct, and she sighed with relief. The mist, even though she’d created it out of nothing, was acquiring a solidity that unnerved her. She started to head towards where she thought Crows was, when she stumbled. She looked down, and a white rope of smoke was coiling around her ankle.
She jerked her foot through it. It unwound and reached forward again, its indistinct tip questing and probing. In her enthusiasm, she’d done something else other than summon fog.
‘Crows!’ She broke into a run again, and it was like a thousand little hands pulling her back. She twisted to shake them off, but they were insubstantial and momentary, forming and dissipating at will.
There was something building behind her. She could feel it growing and forming a shape, and she wasn’t going to outrun it. She’d made it. She’d have to confront it. No more running.
Mary stopped, clenched her fists, and closed her eyes. Then turned and opened them again. It was like staring up at a wall of albino squids, tentacles writhing without purpose or rhythm, moving ceaselessly and never resting.
She’d done this. She’d brought it into being from her own mind. It was her, though, her life manifested as a monster, inchoate and unreasoning. From birth, through life, nothing but thrashing and never anything solid to grip on to.
Until now, paradoxically when she had only the clothes she stood up in.
She held up her open palms. ‘I’m not you anymore.’
The tentacles continued to churn. They reached for her, recoiled from her, an endless dance.
‘You can go if you want. I’m different now.’
They faded, grew back, faded. The fog and her fear gave them permission to exist. And actually, she didn’t mind that much. Perhaps there’d always be a part of her that’d be wild and chaotic, formless and searching.