CHAPTER SIX
The Weenie Roast
V
“Wow…” Ez said. It was all she could think to say. The unenthusiastic manner in which Gramma had doled out these secrets of the universe amazed her. The older woman might have been explaining how to boil beets for all the interest she showed. She acted as if the whole subject were some tedious chore, but Ez couldn’t have felt stronger to the contrary. This is what science misses, she thought to herself. The continuum of mind… It might explain how magic happened in the first place, and why it was only real for some people. Something to do with overlapping dreams, all sorts of different kinds of dreams, and different kinds of minds… all interconnected, part of the same strange, wonderful thing. The notion rekindled a spark of her old epistemic optimism. Perhaps life wasn’t so incomprehensible after all. Perhaps it did make sense, in a drattedly complex, inside-out, backwards sort of way.
“I’m afraid there’s more,” Gramma said. “Wilburn is reading your mind passively, because, of course, his conscience would never allow him to invade or tamper with another person’s mind.” Gramma glared at Wilburn sternly. “But not all psychovates are so scrupulous. Given the chance, they can explore your memories and alter them, make you forget things that really happened and remember things that never did. They can influence your thoughts and feelings, and by doing so, manipulate your actions without you ever getting wise. Or, a psychovate could go the other direction and use brute strength to dominate your mind, lock you in a trance prison and take full possession of your body. It’s all strictly forbidden under the Secret Laws of Argylon, but who’s enforcing that? No one on the Astral side. So it’s down to psychovates to police themselves, and the rest of us are just supposed to trust them. Well, I don’t. They might all be in a vast conspiracy together. That’s why I trained myself to shield my mind against intrusion at all times—that and the entities.”
“The…?”
“Entities, yep. The Astral Plane is full of ‘em. Creatures of infinite diversity, some good, some not so good, some altogether evil, but most too inhuman to judge. The Astral Plane goes on forever… it’s a wilderness. No telling what, or whom, you might bump into. Well, Wilburn bumped into something all right. This vexpid queen, this Her Majesty… a powerful entity by the sound of it, possibly a lower god; there’s a gazillion of those. Wish I knew more. The library at Dukleth Hovel has a scroll a mile long where they keep track of all the entities psychovates have encountered. We can check it when we get to Frogswallow’s. But I reckon we’ll be adding Her Majesty to the list, rather than finding Her. And I suppose Wilburn will get credit for the discovery. There’s going to be a lot of academic interest in the boy, assuming he survives. He’ll be the key to unlocking the mystery of vexpids, a mystery none of us even knew existed until… ”
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Ez didn’t catch Gramma’s next words. Her ears were ringing. She had the strangest feeling that she was missing something… something of monumental significance. But she couldn’t think what it might be.
Misinterpreting Ez’s perplexity, Gramma said, “What I mean is: vexpids must have a collective consciousness, a hive mind, which manifests as the divine queen on the Astral Plane.”
“Hornets have queens,” Ez said, trying to wrench her attention back to the present conversation. “Makes sense that magic hornets would have a magic-hornet queen.”
“Well, it’s news to vivopathic scholars,” Gramma said. “We’re the ones who study magical flora and fauna. Not much effort has been put into researching vexpids up to this point, but that’s all about to change. My hypothesis yesterday was wrong—vexpids don’t sense kineturgy—they sense psychovatry. Look at the timeline. The first batch didn’t turn up until after Wilburn passed out.”
“Hours after,” Ez said, remembering.
“And then the second batch…”
“After he went to bed, not hours after, though.”
“That’s right. I’m working on a new theory, but it needs tinkering. Tell me again, boy, the first time you Astral projected—by gum! Are you planning to kill a moose with that thing, or what?”
Wilburn, who sat whittling a preposterously lethal spike, started. He looked down at the knife and stick as if surprised to find them in his hands.
“Were you Astral projecting again?” Gramma demanded.
“Er…” Wilburn said guiltily.
“Give me that.” Gramma took the knife from him and replaced it with a chain of sausages, which she extracted from a hollow at the base of the old sycamore. Craning her neck, Ez saw that the hollow contained a hodgepodge of foodstuff from the root cellar. It was clear that Wilburn must’ve gathered these provisions, for there was neither rhyme nor reason to the selection, which included brewers’ yeast, a pot of honey, a jar of pickled asparagus, and… a sack of coffee beans. At the sight of it, Ez’s tongue tingled.
“Mom would kill for a cup of coffee right now,” Wilburn said.
“Who wouldn’t?” Gramma said irritably. “But all your pots are busted, Ez. I checked. There’s a hole this big in the kettle. Where was I…? Ah yes—first time you Astral projected, boy, did you see Her Majesty then?”
Wilburn shook his head. “Just felt Her. She was far away, or… weaker, I guess. She chased me. But I got away, and I woke up.”
“She’s here,” Ez quoted.
“She was,” Wilburn said. “She’s all of them, only I didn’t figure that out until later.” He smiled as he skewered weenies on his spear. “Until I became one of them.”