CHAPTER SIX

The Weenie Roast

VI

Gramma nodded thoughtfully. “The number of vexpids in Real Life corresponds to Her Majesty’s strength on the Astral Plane,” she said. “I wonder… Can you feel Her right now Wilburn? Is She… connected to you?"

Wilburn nodded, waving the stick of weenies over the flames without paying much attention to it. “The whole hive is connected," he said. "We all serve together.”

Gramma sat back against the tree, rubbing her chin and looking very old. “We’ve got to get that boy to Frogswallow’s,” she told Ez. “He needs help. This Queen, this Astral entity, attached herself to him. I don’t know what it means, exactly, but it’s bad. Wilburn needs black hat psychovates to fix him, before it’s too late. I’d take him right now if I wasn’t so wrecked.”

“How do we get there?” Ez asked.

“Magic, obviously. Only I can’t do magic, on account of being up to my ears in the worst foysen dump of my life... that’s a magic burnout, like kineturgic exhaustion. Foysen’s just a fancy word for energy, the kind you get from eating and sleeping. The only art that doesn’t drain foysen from your body is psychovatry, and that’s the only one I didn’t use last night. I think it’s worse when you combine them. The harder the dump, the longer it takes to recover, and if you try to do magic while you’re recovering, you get dumped all over again even harder than before. If I owned a wizidex like a sane person, I suppose I’d swallow my pride and scry that wretched yak again. But no, I have to do things the old fashioned way. Well, darn the old fashioned way! First chance I get, I’m buying me a wizidex, and ten-pounds worth of hongos. I’ll never leave home without a pocketful again as long as I live.”

It was more madness than Ez could bear to hear uncaffeinated. Leaning over, she seized the sack of coffee beans, untied the drawstring and crammed a fistful in her mouth. Then, chewing crunchily, she let her head flop back against the tree and closed her eyes. It irked her, Gramma spouting foreign terms without defining them. True, she had divulged much in the course of the conversation, and true also that her worry for Wilburn was sincere. And yet Ez couldn’t shake the feeling that on some level, Gramma was relishing this opportunity to emphasize the depth of Ez’s ignorance. Waiting to be asked what all that gibberish meant was perhaps a subtle way of asserting dominance, forcing Ez to acknowledge her inferiority once again... but wasn’t it a moot point anyway? The years-long rivalry between the two of them had been a farce, based—in Ez’s mind—on the false premise that they both were ordinary women, relatively equally matched. Of course, that had never been the case; Gramma had known it all along, and now Ez finally knew it too. Could Gramma really feel there was something left to prove…? No, Ez thought bitterly, she just enjoys being an asshole. Then she remembered. Her private thoughts no longer were. Her resentment turned into regret in an instant. Poor Wilburn! He had probably never realized how little she and Gramma cared for one another, that they only pretended to be friends for his sake, him being the sole cause of their alliance.

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Ez cracked an eyelid, thinking to find Wilburn shocked, or at least disappointed. But he just grinned a little crookedly and winked at her. “What’s all that gibberish mean, Gramma?” he asked.

Gramma cast a suspicious glance in Ez’s direction that seemed to say, You don’t fool me. But she went on to answer anyway. “Hongos are tiny purple mushrooms that taste like cinnamon, and they’re chock-full of foysen. You dry ‘em out and crunch on ‘em like popcorn, and they perk you up like nothing else. If I’d had some last night, them vexpids would never have made it past the door. Forget titanium—I could’ve turned the whole cottage into steel… Problem is hongos are too good. Addictive. Used to think I could do without ‘em… but I’d swap my cane for a handful right this minute.”

“And a wizidex?” Ez asked. She felt she recognized the term from somewhere, but once again, she couldn’t put her finger on it.

“Oh, they’re these stupid gadgets. They scry for you, see? Lazy. The old-fashioned way is better, though it does require foysen. But I guess you don’t know what scrying is… It’s a hybrid spell that uses luximetry—but I guess you don’t know what luximetry is either—it’s light magic—to swap the images between two reflective surfaces, and it uses kineturgy to do the same thing with sound waves, so you can view remote locations and communicate with people.”

“You were doing that last night,” Ez said, sitting up a little straighter. “You were shouting at a teacup… you must’ve been using the liquid as a reflective surface. I thought you’d lost your marbles. Does the old-fashioned way always include smashing my teacups?”

Gramma grunted. “No, that had more to do with who I was scrying.”

“Who?”

Gramma grunted again. “He’s a philosopher, the very worst of them. Name of Iddolorious Bungflower. But everybody calls him Iddo. I dare say he’s the most cussed person I’ve ever had the misfortune to meet.”

“Why did you scry him then, if you hate him so much?”

“Because,” Gramma said grudgingly, “he’s the most powerful magician in the world. Iddo can alter spacetime in ways no one else understands. He was the only person I could think of who could have arrived in time to help us last night. Of course, all he wanted to do was write an essay about the unbeing of nothingness, or some such malarky. That’s the trouble with him. Utterly insane. And with a deeply flawed sense of morality, I might add.” Gramma ran a hand through her gray curls. She said, seemingly as an afterthought, “He’s a yak.”

And then a very odd thing happened. Ez started to ask, “What’s a yyyyyyyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa…” Her voice slowed down, becoming guttural as the moment stretched unnaturally long, all movement grinding to a halt. And there it was again, the feeling—closer than her own heart—of a vast, invisible machine, shifting—the sync.

A very large, extremely shaggy creature walked into existence.

“—k?” Ez said.