The Fire Bringers: An I Bring the Fire Short Story (IBF Part 6.5), Page 2

  Pushing the dark thought aside, Bohdi takes a deep breath. “I did give him the ‘don’t wander off in boot camp and die’ part of the lecture,” Bohdi says.

  Steve snorts, “Thanks for that.”

  “Have you seen Amy and Durga?” Bohdi asks, patting his back pocket. “I’ve lost my phone.”

  Steve drops his hand. “No … let me look.” His bionic eye glows faintly purple, and his hand drops idly to his hip and the pommel of Laevithin. Bohdi’s eyes drop to the sword. After the old order had been torn down and the new order had been established, Amy and Bohdi gave the sword to Steve. Steve’s nature is to keep things safe and the same and boring—there have been no tsunamis in Lake Michigan since Steve’s had the sword, no strange new viruses or volcanoes. After a few unsteady centuries, it’s what people need. But he does miss it.

  Steve raises an eyebrow and looks sharply up at Bohdi. “Wait, you’re not fighting, are you?”

  Holding up his hands, Bohdi blinks. “No … it’s just a misunderstanding.”

  Steve’s eyes narrow. “If you are fighting, you can’t be making up tonight. Chicago is hosting a peace delegation for the Light Elves and Dark Elves, I can’t have earthquakes tonight.”

  Bohdi’s lip purse. Earthquakes, World Gates spontaneously forming, and magic-eating trees going crazy don’t happen every time Amy and he have marital relations … but when things are emotionally intense, like after a fight …

  “Go to Niflheim,” Steve says. “That place is flat as a pancake, it could use a good earthquake!”

  “I have a kid, Steve!” Bohdi snaps.

  “Get a babysitter!” says Steve.

  “You have Laevithin, you have enough power to counter our magic!” Bohdi protests.

  Steve’s lips twitch. “I don’t want to risk it.”

  “My wife is missing. Help me find her,” Bohdi says.

  Steve stares at him for a long moment, but closes his eyes and then opens them, the bionic eye glowing bright purple. “She’s not answering her phone … Accessing data on her last known whereabouts … They went to Amy’s lab, right now they’re not on any of the security cameras—”

  But Bohdi’s already running through Steve’s projection.

  “Uncle Bohdi?” he hears Henry say, and then Steve’s voice in the bathroom. “What were you thinking!”

  He passes through the living room, and Loki shouts from the television set. “Did you lose Amy?”

  Bohdi doesn’t even pause to flick him off. He practically flies into the kitchen. Opening a cabinet, he reaches for a high shelf and grabs a handful of magically-charged marbles from a fishbowl they keep out of Durga’s still flightless reach. He jams all but one into his pocket. Clasping the one in his palm, he dashes to the foyer. Through the panes of glass beside the door he sees a beautiful Chicago day. The magic carpet on the floor lifts itself expectantly as he slips on his sneakers.

  “Take Henry home,” Bohdi says, and the carpet waves its tassels in acknowledgement.

  Dread coiling in his stomach, Bohdi grasps the magic marble tighter, focuses, and slips into the In Between.

  x x x x

  Durga loves Amy’s “office”. On the banks of the South Pond in Lincoln Park, the building was built in 1908. It is one of the most beautiful surviving examples of Prairie School architecture and has been declared a Midgardia monument. The Light Elves scoff, but Amy thinks it’s very pretty.

  During the years after Cera, the Lokean Age, and then after the Technomagical Renaissance, nine separate World Gates sprang up in the quarter acre around the building, and a tenth even sprang up in the building itself. Lost bakus, unicorns, baby dragons, and others have a habit of stumbling through the gates. The building has been closed to the public, in part to rehabilitate those lost souls. Amy and her staff tend to their injuries before sending them home.

  Right now Amy and Durga are in a “dragon recovery room”. There is a tiny faux cave made out of poured concrete for little dragons to sleep in, comfortably scrunched the way they like. Inside it there is a red heat lamp. The ceiling of the room itself is high, allowing for limited flight, and there are cement boulders arranged for perching. Right now, their Labrador-sized dragon guest is sitting on a boulder, a big toothy smile on his emerald, green-scaled face. He’s kneading his inch long nails in the boulder, basking in Amy’s and Durga’s company. The little guy isn’t injured—he’s just lost, and too young to say where he came from. Inquiries are being made in Alfheim, Nornheim, Svarthlheimr, and Niflheim—but it’s difficult to track down dragon parents. They’re extremely loving toward their children, and reward their progeny’s rescuers with treasure and friendship. However, visit the wrong dragon den, or fail to speak your business quickly enough, and they’ll try to eat you.

  “He has a tail and wings like yours, Durga,” Amy says. “And just like you he can’t fly yet, either.” Which is why all the perches are no higher than eight feet, and all have little steps to the top.

  Durga is silent for a long moment. And then, stroking the dragon’s tail, she says softly, “I want to see the blue people.”

  Amy stops scratching the scales behind the dragon’s ears and looks at her daughter. Durga’s wearing a shirt specially designed to accommodate her wings. Its pale pink color contrasts sharply with her sapphire-hued skin, as does the white of her anklet socks and the light gray of her skirt. Skirts are easier when you have a tail.

  Right now, her daughter’s tail is swishing agitatedly. She blinks. Durga’s eyes are on hers. Durga’s eyes are such a dark blue they’re almost black, and right now they’re wide and pleading. Her tiny bow lips press together, and her little nose sniffs. Durga is beautiful even when she’s sad. It’s not motherly pride, it’s true. Her features are perfect and her blue skin is magical.

  But Durga is six years old and beginning to think she’s not beautiful. There are no blue princesses in cartoons, or princesses with tails or bat wings.

  “I want to see the blue people,” Durga says again. The voice actually comes from a little pendant around her neck. Durga speaks at frequencies normally inaudible to humans. Fortunately, her “aunt” Harding’s hearing isn’t normal. The Marine communications specialist had detected the cries of Bohdi’s and Amy’s child when Durga was a baby. Brett and Bryant were able to create devices that lowered the pitch. At first the two “Gods of Electronics and Small Engines” crammed the devices into baby monitors. But as Durga has gotten older and mobile, they’ve concealed the devices in costume jewelry. This “Durga Translator” they’ve put in an ornate “Magical Princess Pendant” for their “little blue princess.” When they’d presented it to Durga she’d thought it would grant wishes. Her first words after getting the gift were, “Magic pendant, make me not blue.”

  Amy’s brow furrows. “Durga,” she whispers. “We can’t go see the blue people. Only special doctors and scientists are supposed to see them.” The reason the building has been closed to the public, and turned into a magical rehabilitation center, is that the World Gate within goes to a tenth, formerly unknown realm.

  Technically, Durga isn’t even supposed to know that the “blue people” or the Tenth Realm exist, but she has magical bat hearing.

  Durga swishes her tail. “You’re a doctor-scientist and I’ll be with you.”

  Amy bites her lip. Bohdi told Amy that Durga was becoming obsessed with seeing the “blue people.” To dissuade her, Amy has broken down and told Durga secret information: the blue people aren’t like her, they don’t have wings, and their tails are furred. They look like upright, blue, mostly hairless lemurs. Their DNA shows they diverged from Earth primates about 60 million years ago. How the ancestor of Earth primates and lemurs got to the Tenth Realm is anyone’s guess.

  Bending down so that her eyes are level with her daughter’s, Amy says, “Durga, the blue people … they are a new people … when hominids from the Nine Realms go there, they have to be careful not to be seen. We don’t want to disrupt their evolution.”


  “So use your magic and hide us.”

  Amy straightens. She also doesn’t want her daughter to see how violent the “Lemurlikes”, as they’ve come to be known, are. “Perhaps when you’re older,” she says.

  Durga’s brow crinkles, her shoulders slump, and she bends even further at her waist. The weight of Durga’s wings always makes her lean forward a little, like a child carrying a backpack. Now her back is nearly parallel to the ground. Amy’s heart constricts. People have asked why Amy hasn’t surgically removed the wings, commenting that Durga is flightless. But Amy is sure that one day Durga will be able to fly; do you remove a weight today that one day may give your child the gift of flight? She’s so glad that Bohdi’s never once argued with her on that, or Durga’s blue skin or tail. Other parents, with magical statuesque-non-typicals, have divorced over whether to surgically alter their children.

  From behind her comes a voice. “Amy, you’re here! I have a problem.” Amy turns to find Hoenir, now a fellow veterinarian in the rehabilitation center, waving a digital tablet. Hoenir is still youthful, even though he doesn’t eat apples. They wonder if it is a carryover from living as Creation for so long.

  Amy sighs. “Is Senator Fellman insisting that his daughter be allowed to work in our facility?”

  Hoenir nods. “I keep telling him that no matter how magically capable his daughter is, if she doesn’t have a doctorate of veterinary medicine, or at least a certificate to be a veterinary technician, she isn’t allowed to join our staff.”

  Amy grumbles. “Kids these days—”

  Hoenir shakes his head. “Thinking they can skip the science and go straight to the magic.” He huffs.

  Amy walks over and takes the tablet. Reading it, her skin heats. It’s even worse than she expected. The senator’s precious child hasn’t had a day of college-level biology or chemistry. But she did mend a broken bone, and that makes her an expert, to the senator’s mind.

  Pulling out her phone, Amy dials the senator’s number. She almost presses the connect button, but then stops herself. If she makes this call, she will explode—she will shout at the senator, and it will become an “incident.” This is a job for Steve, he will chuckle and be charming and convince the senator that his daughter should take an internship elsewhere … or else. He’ll do it by … well, Amy doesn’t know precisely how he does it—if she did, she’d do it herself. Hitting the button for text, she clicks on the Darth Vader icon she uses for Steve and starts to type out a message, but then Hoenir says, “Hmmm … where did Durga go?”

  Amy lifts her head. Durga and the dragon are gone. Amy sees shadows playing on the walls in the cave. “She’s in the cave, don’t worry,” she says.

  Hoenir’s phone beeps with a text. Glancing down, his eyebrows rise. “Oh, a totoro … I’d better get on it. Talk to you later.”

  “Sure thing,” says Amy, heading into the cave. “Durga, you know if the baby dragon has found some pennies you shouldn’t …”

  She stops. The baby dragon is curled up in a ball at the tiny area at the cave’s end. But there is no Durga.

  Amy crawls out of the cave. “Durga?” She peers behind rocks, and even goes up to the perches to see if Durga’s pressed herself against the rocks to hide.

  She doesn’t see her anywhere. She must have snuck out of the room while Amy was talking to Hoenir. Feeling frightened and angry at herself, or Durga, or both, Amy pulls out her phone. “Show security cameras in the rehabilitation center.” All the camera views flash on Amy’s phone in a neat grid pattern. Amy sees Durga in the former ballroom that houses the World Gate to the Tenth Realm. Amy clicks on the feed to enlarge it. The guards are talking to Durga jovially as she walks to the circle of tiles that demark the World Gate location. Amy breathes a sigh of relief. During the Magical Renaissance, computerized, technomagical World Gates were invented, but the gate to the Tenth Realm is only accessible to those who can World Walk without technological intervention. Durga’s in no danger, she’ll just walk over to the Gate and—

  Durga vanishes.

  For a moment, Amy thinks the feed is dying. She taps her phone repeatedly, and then she sees the guards running over to the gate. Amy bolts through the door, down the hallway, and up to the former ballroom that houses the gate to the Tenth Realm. Gripping her phone tightly, she siphons all of the magic off of it, and before the guards can ask her questions, she leaps up onto the platform. Rainbow light envelopes her, and she is in the Tenth Realm.

  She blinks down at her feet. The forest floor beneath her is rich black hummus. She lifts her head—the mountainous forest around her is unusually dry, and the smell of rotting vegetation is not as strong as usual. On every side, enormous fernlike trees with wilted pastel blue leaves obscure a yellow sun. Magic tickles her senses, and a hum comes from about four feet in front of her. There, on the ground, is a copper and gold circular device, about six inches high. Concentric circles of glowing pink mark its face. It is a magical “blind generator.” It makes the people within a ten foot radius invisible to the Lemurlikes and other animals of the Tenth Realm.

  “Dr. Lewis, don’t worry, we’ve got her!” says a voice. Amy spins in place. A Fire Giant woman dressed in human field gear is balancing Durga on one arm.

  The woman smiles. “Did she World Walk without you?”

  “Yes,” Amy says, running over to the woman and taking Durga from her arms. The team of two human scientists and a Light Elf mage chuckle. The Light Elf says, “When my children started to do that, it was worse than when they learned to walk.”

  Amy can’t laugh. Bohdi told her that Durga was exhibiting World-Walk readiness, and he had gone on what Amy had thought was a paranoia-fueled mission to close even the smallest World Gates within a mile of their home—even a public one to Alfheim. The local alderman thinks it broke of its own accord. Only Steve, Bohdi, and Amy know otherwise.

  Amy bites her lip and clutches Durga close, overwhelmed by relief, guilt and shame. “Never do that again.” Of course Bohdi would know better than she does; Bohdi spends more time with Durga.

  The destructive side of Chaos is great when the odds are against you. Steve’s new administration was happy to have Bohdi on their side in the beginning—even encouraged him to hold onto Laevithin when they had enemies that needed slain. That had changed as Steve had restored order. Suddenly, Bohdi’s ability to break things without even trying was not as welcome.

  Bohdi had eventually gotten tired of the hostility toward him in the administration. He remained friends and an advisor to Steve, but he’d gone on to independent career paths. He cleaned up in the stock markets—until he was banned from every stock exchange in the Nine Realms for eternity. And he is barred, by law, from coming within three hundred meters of any gambling establishment. He still occasionally takes jobs in security consulting, but professionally, he isn’t as busy as Amy. He’s been Durga’s primary caregiver ... and it’s worked. She thinks Bohdi’s magic, and the natural childhood inclination toward chaotic death and dismemberment cancel each other out.

  Amy presses her nose to Durga’s pigtails. Maybe for a little girl who is blue, and has wings and a tail, having a father who has long since accepted Chaos and change … Well, Durga couldn’t have a better Dad. Her face flushes. She wanted to give him a break today—to let him sleep in, but she should have trusted him …

  Completely oblivious to Amy’s pain, Durga leans over her shoulder and pipes up excitedly, “I see blue people!”

  Instead of following Durga’s gaze, Amy quickly scans the ground beyond the survey site. All she sees is dense blue foliage that looks drier than normal, and none of the husks of the red nut fruit that are the Lemurlikes primary food stuff. Looking to the sky, she sees none of the small pteranodon-like creatures that normally flit through the trees, either. The Lemurlikes are gatherers first, but they hunt as well—cooperatively in small bands with stones—especially when the red nuts have all been eaten. Since she sees no nuts, and no small animals, it is a lean season, and a
lean season means …

  “The ceremony hasn’t begun yet,” the Fire Giant says. “It will soon. I’m excited to watch it.”

  One of the Light Elfs snorts. “Fire Giants.”

  Amy gulps, and a human says, “There are no other kiddie-inappropriate scenes today, either.”

  Amy scowls; it’s a reference to rape and murder—the Lemurlikes engage in both in normal times.

  The other human says, “It will be a few hours before the ceremony.” He nods toward Durga.

  “She can stay for a moment.”

  “I want to stay, Mommy!” Durga cries.

  Amy peers through the strand of trees to where the Lemurlikes are stomping out a patch of bare black earth among the foliage. The Lemurlikes have hairless stomachs, limbs, and backs. The female breasts are slightly more prominent than the male Lemurlikes. Like other hominids, the females’ faces are mostly hairless—or rather furless—the men sport beards of soft fuzz. Aside from those differences, the sexes are nearly identical. Both sexes have triangular ears, covered with fur, close to the tops of their heads. Long sharp, black nails tip their hands and feet, and they have pronounced canines. Males and females alike have manes of longer fur on their heads that go halfway down their backs. They have similar manes of longer fur that cover their genitalia and buttocks. Over their tails the fur becomes short, fine and velvety looking.

  “They’re pretty,” says Durga, as other Lemurlikes begin pushing sticks into the ground around the packed earth. Purplish bark strips have been tied around the tops of the sticks. “They’re demarking the edge of the ceremonial area,” the Fire Giant woman says. “How interesting!”

  Amy’s jaw tightens. Using flagged sticks to demarcate their “ceremony” areas are about as far as Lemurlike tool use goes. They were already doing it when this realm was first discovered, about two hundred years ago. Amy had accidentally-on-purpose introduced a gene for opposable thumbs into their population shortly after their discovery—sometimes when she wishes for such things, they happen. The creatures did not go on to develop new tools. Nor did opposable thumbs give them any interest in leaving the several hundred square miles of their forest home.