The magic flowed at a purple on the far end of the visible spectrum, lighting the floor to such near-invisible intensity that it brought tears to her eyes. The high ceiling absorbed most of that light, so it stayed cloaked in shifting shadows. Heat spilled out of the room, flushing her to fever hot, and seconds later, the sense of lightness seeped up her legs, slowly filling her until she felt like she would float away.
“What?” Wojo asked.
“It’s a very strong ley line,” Tinker said.
Wojo made a slight surprised hrumpf to this.
She considered what she was wearing. An active spell with this much force behind it, snarled by something metal on her, could be deadly. She wasn’t sure how dangerous this much latent magic might pose. “You might want to empty your pockets.”
She pulled off her boots, emptied her pockets into them, and took off her gun belt. Since the sekasha caste couldn’t sense magic, she told Pony and Stormsong, “This ley seems almost as strong as the Spell Stones.”
“The shrine indicates a fiutana,” Pony explained. “Like the one that the spell stones are built on.”
“What’s that?” Tinker asked.
Pony explained, “A single point where magic is much stronger than normal, welling up, like spring waters.”
“If you’re coming in,” she told the two warriors, “Strip off all metal. And I mean all.”
The sekasha started paper, scissors, stone to see which was going in, and which would stay behind with the weapons.
There was a light switch by the door; Tinker cautiously flipped it on, but nothing happened.
“Light bulbs pop as soon as you carry them into the room,” Wojo explained, “so we stopped installing them.”
“We needed a light source shielded from magic.” Tinker flipped the switch back to off. “I don’t think even a plastic flashlight would work.”
“No, they pop too.” Wojo took out two spell lights and held out one to her. “These are safe, but you’ll want to watch — they’re really bright.”
With this much magic around, that wasn’t surprising.
She wrapped her hand tight around the cool glass orb before activating it. Her fingers gleamed dull red, her bones lines of darkness inside her skin. Carefully, she uncovered a fraction of the orb, and light shafted out a painfully brilliant white.
Stormsong won paper, scissors, stone and opted for coming inside. She ghosted into the room ahead of Tinker, her shields outlining her in blue brilliance, her wooden sword ready. Tinker waiting for Stormsong to flash the ‘all clear’ signal before entering the warehouse.
The cement floor was rough and warm under her stocking feet. She walked into the room, feeling like she should be wading. It lacked the resistance of water, but she could sense a current, a slow circular flow, and a depth.
Wojo followed, oblivious to magic. “This is the space. Is it big enough? If we can get the refrigerator unit to work?”
Tinker considered the loading dock, the wide door and the large room. They would have to transfer the tree from the flatbed to something that wheeled, then shift both back onto the flatbed to get the tree up to the loading dock height and still able to shift it back into the cooler. Given that they’d have to fit a forklift in to help with the transfer, it would be a tight fit, but certainly doable.
“Yeah, this will do.” Of course they would have to drain off the massive excess of magic. Strong magic and heavy machinery did not mix well. “You had the cooling unit running for, what, ten years? I’m surprised you managed to keep it running that long.”
“More like fourteen.” Wojo said. “Your grandfather, actually, came over just after Startup and set us up so it worked fine for years. It didn’t break down until after he died.”
The machine room was off the back of the refrigerated room, through a normal sized door in the insulated wall. The compressor itself was normal. The cement around it, however, had been inscribed with a spell. A section had overloaded, burning out a section of the spell. She’d never seen anything like it.
“My grandfather did this?” Tinker asked.
“Yes.” Wojo nodded. “He heard about the trouble we were having and volunteered to fix it. We were a little skeptical. Back then, no one knew anything about working magic. People are picking magic up, but still, no one had a clue how to fix what he did when it broke.”
Tinker’s family had the edge that they were descendent from an elf trapped on Earth. Her father, Leonardo Dufae, developed his hyperphase gate based off the quantum nature of magic after studying the family’s codex. It was main reason Tinker had been able to build a gate when no one on Earth had yet figured out how to copy her father’s work.
“Define whacky.” Tinker asked.
“What?” Wojo said.
“You said that it went whacky after the first startup.”
“Ah, well, the compressor seemed to work like a pump. The magic was so thick that you could see it. It blew every lightbulb on the block. The forklifts kept burning out but then they’d skitter across the room, just inches off the floor. Loose paper would crawl up your leg like a kitten. It was just weird.”
Yes, that fell under whacky. She knew that the electric forklifts had engines that could short to form a crude anti-gravity spell — it was what gave her the idea for hoverbikes. The loose paper was new. Perhaps they had something printed on them that had animated them.
“We finally just shut it down and gave all the ice cream to the Queen’s army.” Wojo wave his hand to illustrate emptying out the vast storage area. “Kind of an ice breaker — pardon the pun. A thousand gallons of the cookie batter, chocolate fudge, and peanut butter. Luckily, the Chinese paid for the inventory loss and it hooked the elves on our ice cream.”
Tinker sighed, combing her fingers back through her short hair. “Well, no matter what, I’ll have to drain off the magic; basically set up a siphon that funnels magic to a storage unit. I have one set up for my electromagnet since a ley line runs through my scrapyard.” She used to think of it as a strong ley line, but it was just a meandering stream compared to this flood. “But that won’t handle a flood like you’re talking about.”
“Whatever your grandfather did worked for years.”
The question was — what had her grandfather done? To start from scratch would take time she didn’t have, not with the black willow warming in the sun. Luckily, he kept meticulous records on anything he ever worked on. “I’ll go through his things and see if I can find a copy of the spell.”
Chapter 7: Things Better Left Buried
The treaty between the elves and humans banned certain humans from Pittsburgh as it traveled back and forth between the worlds: criminals, mentally insane, and orphans. When her grandfather died, her cousin Oilcan had been seventeen and Tinker had just turned thirteen. Facing possible deportation, dealing with her grandfather’s things had been the last thing on Tinker’s mind. Truth be told, she’d run a little mad at the time, resisting Lain and Oilcan’s attempts to have her move in with them. She roamed the city, hiding from her grief, and sleeping wherever night found her. Terrified that she was going to lose the only world she’d ever known, she drank it down in huge swallows.
Only when Oilcan turned eighteen, able to be her legal guardian, did they settle back into a normal life. With money from licensing her hoverbike design, she set up her scrap yard business, moved into a loft, and laid claim to a sprawling garage between the two. Her grief, however, had been too fresh to deal with her grandfather’s things; Oilcan and Nathan Czernowski packed up them up and stored them away in a room at the back of the garage.
Even now — looking at the small mountain of boxes, draped in plastic, smelling of age — it was tempting to just shut the door on the emotional landmines that the boxes might hold.