Anthony Francis - Blood Rock

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.

I stared up into blackness. I smelt acrid smoke. I felt incredible pain. Shimmering auroras of blue and red drifted before my eyes, like the churning Rorschach images you get if you squeeze your eyes far too tight.

Then Cinnamon’s worried face appeared against the red, upside down and staring at me, ears poking out of her wet headscarf, eyes wide and scared. “Mom?”

Tully’s face appeared too, at my left, tilted at an odd angle. “Miss Frost?”

I blinked. The shimmering redness was in the ceiling, glowing blue fungi and flickering red embers, shimmering in and out as smoke drifted across them. Cinnamon and Tully were quite real, and I sat up, wincing in pain.

The master tag was destroyed, a huge blackness of soot licked by a dying streamers of real flame. I couldn’t see the Streetscribe, only burnt embers of the spiderweb that had enmeshed him, half obscured by an oily column of smoke. Beyond the mound, a vast misshapen mass was sinking into the ground-the head of the monster, lopped off when the tag short-circuited.

I winced again in pain, and held up my hand: my hand, my forearm, my whole body was red, sore and burning-and my vines, my beautiful vines, all of them, were gone. I felt my hand, my skin, frantically. I was burned-but not badly. I rubbed my forearm with my thumb, then winced. Actually, that was a good sign: a really severe burn would have killed the nerves.

“Stupid!” Cinnamon said, biting her knuckle. Then she said, “I means, don’t pick at it.”

“I know, I know,” I said, feeling my other hand, more gently this time. Then I looked around. Most of the cavern ceiling was cracked and sooted, and plaster and masonry fragments were fluttering down like confetti everywhere I looked. “Give me your knife, Tully.”

“S-sure,” he said, fishing out the switchblade. “What… ”

“Both of you, walk the perimeter of the cave, make sure that none of the tag is left,” I said. “Spray over anything that’s left-but if you start to feel woozy, head for the exit. The fire may have eaten the oxygen. I don’t want to beat this thing only to die of asphyxiation.”