Vines of Fire

I shrieked in pain as rainbow fire tore at my hastily erected shield. I seized Tully and Cinnamon and dragged them back towards the pool in the center of the chamber. Behind us we heard a deep rattling, like a dragon drawing its breath. Then all three of us dove into the water as a second wave of flame swept over us, boiling off the surface of the water with a metallic hiss.

Multicolored flames danced above us, lighting the bottom of the pond with a shifting dancefloor light. I floundered, but Cinnamon dragged me forward with werekin strength, cutting through the water to the gazebo’s counterpart, an island of broken masonry and rebar jutting out of the pool. In the sudden shallows we half-swam, half crawled, lungs aching, until we surfaced behind a jagged triangle of masonry that provided a shield against the fire.

Gasping, we planted ourselves against the wall. Another gut wrenching scream echoed through the cavern, and we all flinched back as a wave of heat bloomed from all around us, followed quick on the heels by another gout of multicolored graffiti flame.

“There!” Tully said, pointing. “Make for that exit, the air was freshest—”

“No!” I said, pulling him back. There was light in the tunnel he pointed at—and there hadn’t been before. “A trap tag is active, you can see it.”

“That’s how it got Revy!” Cinnamon said, flinching as the monster belched forth another horrifying scream. “Forced him out into the tunnels, into the traps … ”

“Of course,” I said, falling back as another wave of heat flooded over us. “He warned us about it—so he came here, awakened it somehow, and got caught when he fled.”

“We can’t stay here,” Tully said, as intricate flames swept past. Flickering tongues of color began wrapping around the edges of the wall, and I started splashing water on it.

“Wet the wall! Wet it before the pigment can take hold!” I shouted, and we all started splashing water up on it, desperately trying to prevent the tag from creeping around. Where the wildstyle flames had already crept, water boiled off with a screech; but where the water landed first, the tag’s outlines became limp and indistinct, a fizzling nothing. “Keep going!”

“This won’t work,” Cinnamon said, leaning around the wall. “Everyone down!”

There was a wave of heat, we hunched back against the wall, and another gout of graffiti flame tore around us in a kaleidoscope of brilliant color. The deadly curls and blazing twists of fire were artful, wonderful, even extraordinary, and inspiration struck me.

I leaned around the corner, glaring at the potato-shaped monstrosity with starry eyes. It caught my gaze and glared back, misshapen mouth spreading into a wide grin, opening into a vast fissure lined with the cracked, grimy cobblestones that were its teeth. My eyes traced those ham-fisted lines, then compared them to the graceful barbs erupting from the Streetscribe.

I leaned back as orange light built up inside the monster’s malformed maw. Moments later, flames tore past us, gracefully, painterly—and clearly, by the Streetscribe’s hand.

“That thing isn’t the tagger’s creation,” I said. “It’s something that he let in, something that possessed him—but it’s still using his mind to make the flames.”

“Something that possessed him?” Cinnamon said. “Like a demon?”

“Like a demon,” I said.

“I thought you didn’t believe in demons,” Tully said.

“I’m a scientist. I won’t deny evidence right before my eyes, even if it needs a little … interpretation.” Another hot flash, a gout of flame, followed by a terrible cracking noise. “Maybe it’s a projectia of an evil wizard, a Lovecraftian Great Old One or a genuine Christian demon. Who cares? It isn’t by the same hand as the flames, and we can use that to take it out.”

“Fuck that,” Tully said. “We can’t take that thing on.”

“That thing is a vampire,” I said. “A cartoon of one, spirit of one, essence of one. I don’t care. It feeds on the life force of the living. And we’ve just let it in. We need to stop it here, or the bodycount will make the tagger’s vampire genocide look like a pretty little utopia.”

“How the hell are we going to do that?” Tully said. “I never saw anything like that, and from the looks on your face neither have you.”

I glanced over the wall, then ducked back down at another intestine-churning roar swept over us. We hunched down from the fire, and I concentrated on what I saw. Whatever was coming through wasn’t yet physical: it was still a construct, a projectia like Zipperface.

“God help us if we see the source for that self-portrait,” I said, “but for now, it is just a portrait. Whatever that thing really is, it’s on its side of the door, what we’re dealing with right now is a projectia. A construct obeying the rules of magic, of graphomancy.”

“How does that help us?” Cinnamon asked.

“You have to do it, Cinnamon,” I said. “You have to break the circuit.”

“Me!” she said. “I’m not a graphomancer.”

“Cinnamon, you’re a genius,” I said. “You’re the smartest mathematician I ever met.”

“Fuck! How does that help us?” she asked.

“Magic is mystical, magic is special, magic can break the walls of space open and let the bad ones in—but the logic of magic is just math,” I said. “You studied tattoo magic under the Marquis and graffiti magic under the Streetscribe. If anyone can find a weakness, it’s you.”

Cinnamon stared down at her hands. Then she pulled out the soaked copy of the tagger’s blackbook from her back pocket and began carefully flipping through its damp pages.

“You knows,” Cinnamon said, “I listens to more books than anyone. Reading’s like slogging through someone’s garbage. Listening’s like, hahhh, like they’re talking to you.”

“That’s … nice, Cinnamon,” I said; the flames had paused for the moment, but there was a slow crackling, splintering sound rippling through the cavern. “But how—”

“I got to talk to Marcus Aurelius,” she said. “Emperor of Rome, and he gots the same problems in court I gots in the lunchroom. I wants to reach out and hug him, but he’s gone, two thousand years, eleven twos standing up, more or less, and all I gots left of him is one little bit of his soul, talking to me, telling me everything is all right. But it isn’t the listening that puts me in touch with him; that just makes it easier. It’s the book. Books holds bits of people’s souls.”

We just stared at her, as she stared down at the tagger’s notebook.

“The tagger isn’t gone,” Cinnamon said. “We gots one little piece of him left.” She looked up at us. “We gots to destroy the blackbook.”

“Easy said, easy done,” Tully said, reaching forward, but Cinnamon hissed.

“For the love, go slow,” she said, jerking it away. “There’s a plan.”

The whole cavern shook, another deep cracking sound echoed above us, and a giant chunk of masonry fell, splattering water and debris a dozen yards out into the pool. “For the love, hurry,” I said. “Sounds like it’s breaking loose from the wall. We don’t have much time.”

“Shreddin’ it won’t do it,” she said. “And we can’t really use its magic against the tag—he’s gone beyond the blackbook and the tag’s loose anyways. But the tag is all his ideas—and his book is filled with his ideas. One can link to the other, like sympathetic magic.” And then she stared right at me. “Mom, you’re gonna need to short out that link.”

She explained her plan, and I nodded grimly. This was not going to be pleasant, but the hot flashes of the tagger’s fire had resumed, hotter now, and it was clear we had no more time.

Cinnamon explained the designs to me as Tully tore out rebar from the piled masonry; then we divvied up Tully’s remaining markers. They took the spray cans; I took the oil chalk—just two, one to draw and a spare in case the first broke. Hopefully I would need only one.

I reached up against the triangle of the wall and began drawing a row of unicursals, little hexagrams with X’s through their centers that began sparking magic almost as soon as I finished them, shorting out the creeping graffiti flames and leaving me room to work on the big design.

“Ready?” I said, as Cinnamon muttered to herself and Tully tensed.

Then the flames died, Cinnamon said, “It will work,” and we moved.

I leapt up atop the pile of debris and screamed “Hey asshole!” The shapeless thing on the wall screamed and shot out a barbed tongue that cracked against the pavement just as I leapt back behind my triangular shield of stone. Then another gout of flame ripped past its edges.

I was now alone behind the shield. Good. Cinnamon and Tully dove into the water in opposite directions when I leapt, and by now were each halfway to shore. I pulled out the oil chalk—God, I loved the tagger’s materials. This was going to be so much easier than the way I’d marked magic circles before—and began drawing on the rough surface of the brick.

The geometry of magic at first seems simple. The circle I drew would act as a shield, keeping the magic of the flames off me for a few crucial moments. The five pentacles Cinnamon and Tully would spray would act as receivers, drawing more magic away.

I began drawing the next arcs. Combining symbols is where simple turns deceptive. A circle around a pentacle acts like an insulator, shielding it from our world, turning it into a receiver for good and evil spirits from other planes. But draw the circle a shade smaller, so its circumference touches the tips of the pentacle, and you’ve created a magical diode that lets mana pass through only one way. The circle still protects whatever is inside it from your magic, but the intersecting points enable it to project its magic out upon you. And so the careers of your wannabe demonologists often end before they ever begin.

But I wasn’t drawing a pentacle inside my circle. I was drawing a unicursal hexagram, a Star of David with the two horizontal lines crossed. It was a magical short circuit, a receiver that lets magic flow freely out of its center. The centers of the tiny versions I’d drawn to short out the graffiti flames creeping over the rock were going off like sparklers. With all the mana in this cavern, stepping to the center of my big unicursal would be suicide.

A tremendous crash shook the vault, and I saw dust and water splash up from the impact of a foul, twisted hand that had torn free from the painting and slammed into the floor. The gripping mass of white, wrinkled flesh was bigger than the body of an elephant, attached to an arm thicker than ten trees; but there the resemblance to any plant or animal I knew ended.

Arteries of neon and veins of mercury surged through flaccid, fungal flesh. Muscles bulged in frantic lumps like boiling water. A skin like tattered canvas frayed and reknitted as I watched. Jagged edges of its skeleton were briefly visible, more like thorny vines than bones. The great nasty thing surged forward in waves, pulling and stretching, ripping and reforming, tearing itself out of the painting, piece by painful piece.

The monster screamed, rattling my teeth, and I briefly wondered what kind of thing it was. What kind of thing the Streetscribe had drawn on. What kind of thing led him to build magic that collected the intents of tortured people, trapped and struggling to get free. Concentrated intents that it could use … for what? Perhaps, to break free itself?

Whatever it was, we had to stop it.

A gout of fire leapt through the air at the far wall, and I saw Cinnamon leap out of range of the flames, a high curving arc, tail flickering. Snapping tentacles whipped at her, but she dodged and dodged, ducking behind a pillar as another blast of flame swept over the area.

When she moved again, gleaming arcs and lines of graffiti began wrapping around the pillar and rippling out over the floor, a self-replicating pattern of Cinnamon’s own design. I raised an eyebrow: the werekin moved fast. They’d already given me the five pentacles I needed, and had moved to the next stage of the plan: distraction.

The new design began climbing the wall, leaping up into the vampiric matter, leeching its power. At first, the monster didn’t seem to notice, but as the tiled kites and darts began growing, they began interfering with its magic. Cinnamon had called them Penrose tiles: self-replicating, but never precisely repeating, disrupting the regular pattern needed for the monster’s design.

Realizing the danger, the thing screamed at Cinnamon, but then turned its head to blast fire at the opposite wall, where Tully had started two more self-replicating Penrose tilings. Curling graffiti flames rippled over the growing tiles. They began to flicker and burn out under the Technicolor barrage, and the monster gathered itself, preparing to fire again.

It had forgotten about me. Now was my moment.

I closed my eyes.

Deep beneath the water, the tattooed vine extending from my wrists snaked towards shore, guided by a tiny bird projectia gripping its branches in its beak. Through the bird’s eyes I saw the vine burst through the surface. Using the bird’s wings I guided the vine through the fallen stones, out of sight of the monster. With the bird’s tiny feet I landed upon the rotting body of the Streetscribe—and let myself merge with him.

I shuddered. Long before whatever had happened, the Streetscribe had been corrupted by his own magic. He was neither alive nor dead, neither werewolf nor vampire. Arcturus was right: all of my classifications were useless. There was something mystically unwholesome about joining the bodies of the living and the undead with a magic tattoo, and I felt my soul being drained by the great void left where the Painter of Night had disintegrated.

I seized the book. I was cold. I detached the vine from my other wrist. I began to shiver. I let the vine coil around the book, then let it merge with the leather of the cover. Now I was freezing—merging with tanned hide was even more draining. I couldn’t keep this up long. I screamed and kicked the wall where Cinnamon and Tully had undermined it, and the jagged triangle of stone toppled forward. I leapt up onto its bottom edge as its point splashed down into the water, exposing me—and my unicursal magic circle—to the monster.

“Come on!” I shouted, teeth chattering. Actual frost was creeping back up the vines, tiny bits of ice dancing in the air around me like sparks. “Heat me up, you bastard!”

The thing refocused its will on me. Now I could see its misshapen pentagonal head, the metal sheen to its cobblestone teeth, the twin points of fire in its eyes, the roiling tongue. It was Zipperface, writ large. Zipperface may have been the Streetscribe’s projectia, but his magic was built after this model. Why? Who knew? Streetscribe 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.