CHAPTER 3

The Voice in the Teacup

“Impossible,” Gramma whispered. She and Ez stood frozen in the darkness, unable to see each other’s faces. All around them, the night air vibrated with the faint but unmistakable sound of flying insects. This hum was not identical to that of the three vexpids from before: it had a fuller, more monotonous timbre, and Ez thought she knew why—although she prayed she was mistaken—for it seemed to her to be the difference between a trio of singers and a choir. “You can kill them all with magic,” she said, “...right?”

Gramma did not reply. Just then, a gibbous moon peeked through a gap in the clouds, spilling its glow over the rolling hillsides and revealing a hideous sight: a host of vexpids flying fast in a dense, arrow-shaped formation aimed directly at the cottage. The distance was too great and the light too dim to distinguish individuals or count them, but the sheer enormity of the formation was enough. The women ran for it, with Thoralf right behind them. Already the gap between the clouds was closing, plunging the world back into impenetrable darkness.

Ez burst through the cottage door followed by Gramma and the horse, whose size was such that his hindquarters only barely cleared the lintel. The moment his tail swished inside, Ez slammed the door. There was no point locking it. “Wilburn! Get down here!” she called. Sprinting to the closet, she snatched her bow and quiver off their hooks, then strung the bow with fumbling fingers.

Gramma paced back and forth, raking a hand through her gray curls. “We’re in deep doo-doo,” she said. “I can’t kill that many with magic—I’m exhausted. Even fresh, it would be tricky. And I’m out of hongos! Damn me—Why didn’t I stock up?”

Ez was too busy arming herself to care what hongos were. The splitting axe, with which she had already slain one vexpid, would be her primary close-range weapon, and she shoved her hunting knife in her belt as a backup. Ransacking the closet, Ez came up with a hatchet and a carving knife for Wilburn. She turned around to hand them to him—but he wasn’t there. He hadn’t come down from the loft. “Wilburn!” Ez called. No answer came. How could he possibly be sleeping through this uproar? Ez raced up the stairs. The moment her head crested the horizon of the loft, she knew something was wrong—horribly wrong.

Wilburn was frothing at the mouth. His spine was arched, his head thrown back into the pillow, his hands clenching, T-Rex fashion, at his chest. Toukie, the stuffed bird, lay discarded by the mattress. Wilburn's tendons strained. Every muscle was as taut as Ez’s bowstring. The lamplight curved over his half-open eyelids, revealing two bloodshot crescents of white. If Ez had been terrified before, it was as nothing to the panic that now gripped her like an iron fist. She forgot all about vexpids and weapons and Gramma Fark and magic as her world constricted to one devastating fact: her son was dying.

Skidding to her knees beside his mattress, Ez swept him into a tight embrace, trying in vain to quell his shaking. As she pressed his tiny body to her own, the distant hum suddenly jumped in volume, so much so that it was resonating through her. It took her a moment to understand why. The boy’s convulsions were exactly synchronized with the vibrations of the inbound vexpids. The hairs on the back of Ez’s neck prickled. Magic. Somehow, the hornets were causing Wilburn to have this seizure, even though they must still be a good mile away. A feeling of utter, devastating helplessness threatened to smother her. She could do nothing—nothing—for her son.

Dimly, as if from the far end of a tunnel, Ez heard Gramma yelling. What she was saying, and to whom, Ez didn’t know, but her voice punctured the fog of despair that was holding Ez inactive. She lurched to her feet. Gramma would know what to do. Ez dashed down the stairs with Wilburn in her arms—and found the older woman shouting at a teacup.

The world had gone mad. Ez had gone mad. Gramma had certainly gone mad. She was holding the cup an inch below her nose and peering into it slightly cross-eyedly. “But you’re the only person who can possibly get here in time to save us!” she was shouting. And the maddest part of all was that the cup actually answered. Or at least, a voice from within it did, a masculine voice, deep and supercilious.

“In the hypothetical universe of your imagination,” it said—Ez nearly stumbled at the bottom of the stairs—“perhaps. But here in reality, a rescue mission is completely out of the question. I am drafting a rather nuanced dissertation on the non-being of un-being tonight—a subject I wouldn’t expect you to appreciate—which, I believe, will come to be regarded as one of the finer theses in contemporary meta-metaphysical theory, and I must get back to work. I regret answering the wizidex. Your scry has disrupted the flow of my creative genius.”

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“So you’re just going to sit there?” Gramma demanded of the teacup. “Scribbling that hogwash, while we fight for our lives?”

“Precisely,” the cup said. “The Path is the Path. I don’t decide what happens. If tonight’s your night to die, so be it. Try to reincarnate as something less annoying next life—a cabbage, for instance. And if not, I suppose I’ll see you at the equinox party.”

“WELL, THANKS FOR NOTHING!” Gramma screamed.

“Anytime,” the cup said, and that was the last thing it said, for Gramma hurled it across the room with all her might and it shattered against the far wall in a spray of tea and porcelain. Her face was brick red as she spun around, but it went white as chalk when her gaze fell on Wilburn.

“Do something,” Ez pleaded.

Gramma didn’t. She stood rooted to the spot. Behind her glasses, her eyes stretched wider and wider as she stared at the convulsing boy in Ez’s arms. With deepening horror, Ez realized that Gramma was as powerless as she against whatever force was attacking him.

“Psychovatry,” Gramma whispered. “Oh god… Oh god…” she was breathing very fast and gripping her cane for support. Ez had no clue what the word meant, but the way Gramma had said it, as if it were some foul blasphemy, told her enough. Gramma appeared to be on the verge of a breakdown. Meanwhile, the humming had grown so loud that dishes rattled in the cupboards. There was precious little time.

Oddly, Gramma’s loss of composure corresponded to a restrengthening of Ez’s. We can’t both panic, she thought. So she stopped doing so. An icy pragmatism took over, and when she next spoke, her tone was determinedly calm. “Come on,” she said, striding past Thoralf to the trapdoor that led down to the root cellar. She kicked it open and descended the short staircase into the shadows. Gramma followed. The long, narrow cellar was cramped with stored goods. Ez lay the still-vibrating Wilburn gently on the hard dirt between two heavy sacks of flour, turning him onto his side in case he vomited, and shifted the sacks to prop him in that position. Then she pointed out the flimsy posts and beams that held the floor up overhead. “Can you turn these into steel?”

“It would take all the magic I’ve got left,” Gramma said, “and it would only slow them down. They’d break through before long, then we’d be trapped.”

“We’re trapped anyway,” Ez said. “But you and I aren’t staying down here. We’re going back up there to kill as many vexpids as we can.”

There was a pause in which Ez knew they were both thinking the same thing.

“It’s much easier to transmogrify organic materials into elemental metals than alloys,” Gramma said. “I can save a little magic for the fight that way. How about iron?”

“Titanium has a better strength-to-weight ratio,” Ez said.

Gramma nodded. She picked her way around the room, rapping her cane against each post and beam and plank, murmuring all the while words that wouldn’t stick in Ez’s mind. And there it was again—the sync—that strange sensation of a vast, invisible wheel turning, stronger, more vivid than Ez had yet experienced. When Gramma finished, the cellar had become a solid metal cube, save for the floor, on which Gramma sat heavily, then lay. “Food,” she gasped, “and water. Quick.”

Ez seized a bag of walnuts off a nearby shelf and tossed it into Gramma’s lap. “I’d have to go get water from the rain barrel,” she said, “but here—” she thrust an earthenware jug into Gramma’s hand. “That’s cider. You can turn it into water.”

Gramma groaned. “No more transmogrify…” Propping herself up on an elbow, she slammed a fistful of walnuts in her mouth, then, before Ez could stop her, yanked the cork out of the jug and gulped down the entire quart of cider.

“That was hard…” Ez said weakly.

Gramma smacked her lips. “You told me there was nothing but cooking sherry,” she said, sounding alarmingly cheerful. She belched.

“I lied.” It was too late to take it back. Ez went to Wilburn and planted a kiss on his quivering brow. “I love you,” she said. Then she marched up the stairs, with Gramma sagging after her. As they emerged into the light, Ez saw that Gramma looked not merely older, but old, truly old—haggard, spent. Ez felt a pang of gratitude. Gramma could probably have escaped on Thoralf if she’d chosen to abandon them. It was Wilburn the vexpids were after, not her—and besides, Gramma had magic. But she’d used it to forge Wilburn’s bunker, rather than to save herself, and now, weakened and exhausted, she was preparing to fight, and probably get killed, at Ez’s side. “Thank you,” Ez said, raising her voice to be heard over the oppressive hum. She had never meant it more.

“Just to be clear,” Gramma said, “I’m doing this for Wilburn, not you.”

“I know,” Ez said. “Thank you.”

Gramma grunted. Then she clucked her tongue and shook her head and said, “Well, at least I get to die drunk.”

It took both of them working together to flip the titanium trapdoor, which fell shut with an earsplitting clang. Ez drew the bolt. She couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d just sealed Wilburn in a tomb. “Will he be able to get out of there?” she asked. “I mean, if we’re not…?”

“If we’re not in a condition to assist him?” Gramma finished grimly. “Yeah. One good kineturgic shove will do it.” She was patting Thoralf’s shoulder in an all-too-obvious gesture of farewell.

“Let’s set him free,” Ez said suddenly. Why hadn’t she thought of it before? “Without a rider, I bet Thoralf can outrun vexpids. He could get away! There’s no need for him to—”

Thoralf chuffed and tossed his shiny black head. And damned if it didn’t look as if the one eye Ez could see was glaring at her.

“Thoralf has always been free,” Gramma said. “I’m not his master. We’re partners. He chooses to stay and fight with us, because he has a warrior’s honor.”

Thoralf stamped his hoof once as if to confirm these words.

“You understand?” Ez asked him, more bemused than surprised at this point.

Thoralf stamped his hoof again—but the thump came half a second late, and much too loudly—and from overhead. And then there was a second thump, though Thoralf hadn’t stamped, and then a third thump, and a fourth, and then a fifth and sixth and seventh—and then all hell broke loose.