Julia

  There are no more breaks after we quit the burning house; our overwhelming imperative is simply to put as much distance between it and ourselves as possible.

  The first part of the journey isn’t so bad. Géraldine, as it turns out, had come down from Petawawa on a snowmobile, and there’s room enough on its saddle for all of us, albeit with Mr. Elsevier standing perched on the very back to literally cover our trail behind us with some kind of magic. The engine is loud, but, under the circumstances, this is a bonus: I don’t know that any of us are in a mood to talk right now.

  After a couple of hours, though, the snowmobile runs out of gas, and so we have to resume our journey on snowshoes (or tennis rackets, in my case). Elsevier—somewhat to Géraldine’s protest—sinks the snowmobile behind us after we’ve gathered our things from it, unwilling to leave even that small amount of evidence behind. I can feel his anger even as I watch him walk on in front of me. Since we left the mansion, he has spoken only enough words to instruct Géraldine on what direction to drive (north) and then to overwhelm her protests by saying “North!” more forcefully.

  We are presently heading north.

  *

  I have never before exerted myself continuously over such a sustained period. By the time that the sun starts to decline in the sky, every joint and sinew in my legs feels like it’s burning. How many steps have I taken today? If my phone still had any power, I’m sure my app would congratulate me. But my steps are becoming more and more pained, more and more uncertain. And, finally, I’m unable to take the next without flopping over into the snow.

  For what feels like several minutes, I lie there panting, fighting for the energy to get up. And then I feel Géraldine’s arms around me, hoisting me up into a standing position.

  “Thanks,” I say with a nod. She must be twice my age, but, apparently, she lives a more active lifestyle.

  She pulls her scarf down from her nose and mouth. “Guess it don’t snow much in Vancouver, hein?”

  I shake my head. “No. Mostly rain.”

  As I speak, I wonder whether that’s still true. Did the Winter Queen impose the typical conditions of winter for each climate, or did she just inflict a deep-freeze everywhere? If it’s the former, Vancouver’s probably doing alright, relatively speaking. If it’s the latter—well. I wonder how many of my childhood friends are dead…

  Probably best if I don’t think about it.

  “You’ll get the hang o’ the snowshoes,” says Géraldine, shattering my reverie. “But you should get yerself some real ones; you look fuckin’ goofy on those tennis rackets.”

  In spite of myself, I chuckle under my breath. “Duly noted.”

  She smirks at that and we resume walking.

  “Can I ask you something, Julia?”

  “Go right ahead.”

  She gestures vaguely at Elsevier’s form in the distance. “What the fuck business you have with this guy?”

  I sigh and let out a puff of air, trying to figure out how best to put it. “He’s my…sponsor, I guess.”

  “Your sponsor,” she echoes.

  “Prospectively, I should say.”

  “Sponsor for what?”

  “Magic,” I reply. “Nuclear magic. Like I assume he did back at the house. And I wasn’t lying when I said he could turn things to gold—or, at least, to barium. Apparently, his guild has a position open—if I can impress him.” At that point, I begin relating the terms of our contract to her: the ten questions (one already wasted); the voyage to Faerie; the consequences if I fail to impress him—especially now that he may kind of, sort of, technically have saved my life.

  Through it all, Géraldine listens impassively. Finally, once I’ve finished, she says: “So, uh…this apprenticeship he’s dangling out for you…you ever actually done any magic?”

  I pause, remembering my embarrassment back at the shelter as practically everyone else around me learned the art of setting fires with their mind.

  “No,” I admit.

  “Hm.”

  For a moment, all that can be heard is the low crackling of the snow beneath our shoes with each step. Then, at last, she says: “I think you been had.”

  I make a soft clicking sound with my tongue and then draw in a breath. “I mean—I don’t think it’s a good deal. But I do think the apprenticeship is real.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “He had me at his mercy,” I say. “He could have taken anything he wanted from me. But he offered me a deal instead. One wonders why.”

  Géraldine shrugs her rounded shoulders. “I dunno how magic works. Maybe there’s things he can only take if you agree to it.”

  The thought hadn’t occurred to me. For an instant, I find it troubling. But then: “No, but he can make gold! Surely, he could just buy off some other poor sap using trinkets! He doesn’t need to go through this charade with me!”

  “Maybe everyone else was too fixed on staying alive to give a fuck about trinkets.”

  I detect her implicit rebuke: that my priorities are out of order. But I don’t buy her logic. “No,” I say. “No, if I were just some mark, he wouldn’t have bothered saving me. Certainly not at the risk of his life. I think he needs me. Specifically.”

  “He offered an apprenticeship in magic without even seeing you do magic, Julia.”

  I pause. That was a point. “Well, maybe the selection criterion is something else,” I equivocate. “Like, he knows I’m a physicist. Maybe…” My voice trails off.

  Géraldine stops with a sigh. “Look. You know what, maybe you’re right. Maybe he does need you. I dunno. All I know is, my son-in-law, Alex—”

  “Paul’s dad,” I recall. “The soldier.”

  “Yeah, he’s a soldier,” she says. “He also has a bad habit of, uh…buying into scams. You know: supplements. Boner pills. All that shit.”

  “I can’t say I love that comparison…”

  “Well, my point is: you can’t talk him outta it. ’Cuz once he’s bought in—he don’t want to be wrong, yeah? He don’t want to be the guy who wasted money on, uh, snake oil.”

  “That’s called the sunk-cost fallacy,” I recite from memory. “You’re saying that’s me.”

  “Me, I dunno,” she replies. “All I’m saying is—maybe he does need you. But you better make goddamn sure he needs you for what you think he does.”

  *

  We continue on in silence for another hour or so until sunset, when—at last—Mr. Elsevier stops in his tracks. As we come up to him, he simply points at a small, abandoned boathouse on the frozen river’s right bank, and, abruptly, its main door rolls upwards just as if electricity still existed.

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  “We breaking for the night?” asks Géraldine.

  Elsevier doesn’t bother to answer but instead just walks off into the building.

  “I guess so,” I mutter.

  There are no words for just how exhausted I feel, and yet there’s still work to be done: wood to be gathered, a fire to be built. At first, I’m concerned that Elsevier might object to revealing our position in such a fashion, but he makes no complaint. Maybe he figures we’re far enough away from the scene of the crime that any other knights won’t be looking for us here, or maybe he just needs to weigh that concern against the possibility of us freezing to death. In any case, I don’t have time to worry about it; there are minutes to spare before the sun finally dips below the horizon, and I don’t care to go hunting for kindling in the post-Shift woods by the light of a four-day-old moon.

  Once we get a small bonfire going, Géraldine produces a tin of beans and a hunk of now-frozen raccoon meat from her personal stash. Under the circumstances, it’s the most delicious-looking thing I’ve ever seen. I offer to top it up with some of the beef jerky I found in my department secretary’s desk, but Géraldine shakes her head.

  “Nah,” she says. “You should save it for that quest of yours. You don’t know how far away that ‘portal’ is.”

  “It doesn’t matter. We won’t be going there after all.”

  My head snaps up in surprise. The words—spoken with an uncharacteristic matter-of-factness—issue from the mouth of the long-silent Mr. Elsevier, who sits in the lotus position in a darkened corner of the boathouse. His eyes lock in upon me.

  I clear my throat. “One wonders why not.”

  Elsevier puts a hand to his pointed ear and looks at Géraldine. “Did you happen to hear anything just now, my dear? A faint and annoying insectile buzzing, perhaps?”

  Géraldine rolls her eyes. “Why won’t you be going to the portal?” she asks on my behalf.

  “Ah. An excellent question, dear Géraldine,” he replies, snapping to his feet and sauntering toward us. “And the answer is that we will not be going to the portal because the portal will be in lockdown on this end. ‘And why will the portal be in lockdown’, I hear you ask? Well. Because your idiot friend Julia went and got two servants of the Winter Queen killed through her pathetic inability to make basic inferences!”

  I leap into a standing position, finding a fresh, combative energy on the far side of exhaustion. “Well, just how the hell am I supposed—”

  “Julia!” Géraldine interrupts.

  I break off the question just in time. Elsevier smirks.

  For a long moment, I just stand there; then I limber up my stance a little and crane my head up at the ceiling rafters.

  “I assumed,” I say, looking back at him, “that you were pretending to be…I don’t know. Some kind of a door-to-door gold maker.”

  Elsevier squeezes his eyes. “Why in the name of the Spirits of Land and Sea would I be offering you jewels if I planned to turn them into gold!?”

  “You offered me my own rations!” I retort. “I was confused. I thought they were supposed to be…‘fine curiosities from Faerie’, or whatever.”

  “Indeed!” he replies. “Hence why I cast the glamour to make them look like jewels!”

  “Well, they didn’t look like jewels to me,” I exclaim, turning away from him. “Not after that knight changed them back. Apparently, your ‘glamour’ wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

  “…They looked like jewels to me,” pipes up Géraldine after a moment.

  “You stay out of this!” snaps Elsevier.

  Géraldine grunts indifferently.

  “In any case,” I say as I round on him, “it wouldn’t have occurred to me that ore-spinning was illegal! Maybe you might have volunteered that information! It seems like it might be kind of useful for, you know, avoiding run-ins with the law!”

  “Well, if you hadn’t felt the need to rest so often—”

  “Or maybe,” I interject, “you might have told me to you were trying to initiate me into some kind of magical crime syndicate when you raised the possibility of an internship!”

  Elsevier crosses his arms over his chest and huffs. I spend a long moment waiting for him to make some kind of retort, but instead a strange smile passes over his face. “You…have absolutely no idea what an ore-spinner is, do you?”

  I roll my eyes. “You ‘spin straw into gold and caesium into barium’. Yes, I’ve read your business card, thank you.”

  He issues a single, mocking laugh.

  “Okay then,” I reply. “One wonders—”

  “No.” Elsevier raises a hand. “None of that.”

  I keep my gaze fixed on him. He looks expressionlessly back at me.

  “Fine.” I sigh. “What, exactly, is an ore-spinner?”

  He grins and then extends a hand as if inviting me to dance. “Let me show you.”

  I only hesitate an instant before accepting.

  *

  “Welcome to the bottom of the universe.”

  I look around, at first seeing nothing but darkness. Only then do I notice them—small, indistinct shapes appearing and vanishing at random. I strain to extend my hand to one of them, but I can’t; there’s a crushing weight on all sides, like nothing I’ve felt since my childhood bouts of sleep paralysis.

  “Do you recognize this place?” Elsevier’s voice booms from nowhere in particular. “You may not have been so…intimately acquainted with it.”

  With herculean effort, I manage to lift my left hand in front of my face, where it glows with unearthly light. Its motion appears strangely discontinuous, like bad claymation—moving directly from one position to another without occupying the points between. An instant later, I recognize it as discrete…quantized.

  Elsevier confirms what I already suspect: “I believe that the human term for where you are now is ‘atomic nucleus’—the very soul of the thing. And it is with souls, dear Julia, that magic concerns itself.”

  The void lights up with a phantasmagoria, not just of images, but shapes, smells, colours, concepts…things I don’t even have names for. Some, almost recognisable—a snatch of music, the texture of a book cover. But there are so many, piling up so rapidly that I feel only sensory overload. I long to cover my head with my hands, to make it all stop, but the crushing pressure renders that impossible; in the end, it’s all that I can do to pray that it will be over soon.

  “Everything has a soul, Julia,” Elsevier’s voice comes in over the din. “Humans included. The mage’s role is to find these souls—and make them change. Lesser mages concern themselves with trivial surface-level changes—human to spider, for example.”

  I feel my body rearranging itself as he speaks and, for the briefest of seconds, become conscious of having eight legs and a great many more eyes. I barely have time to register shock before the feeling passes, reverting me to human, give or take a nigh-overwhelming phantom-limb sensation across my whole body.

  “The ore-spinner, however, wastes not their time with parlour tricks. We are a nobler breed.”

  The phantasmagoria abruptly ceases, leaving a stillness so absolute I’ve only very rarely encountered anything like it. And yet, I’m not alone. A small figure—a child, swathed in black—sits somewhere out there as well, holding still as if deeply meditating.

  “We have a much more subtle sense,” Elsevier whispers, coming up behind the child. “Like lesser mages, we seek the essence of a thing. But while they content themselves with rearranging the elements of matter, we change the elements themselves. And what this entails…is ripping them apart.”

  Suddenly, I feel a terrible force pressing around my waist. I scrunch my eyes shut in a childish reflex, but neither it, nor my attempts to scream, do anything to dull the agony of being pinched in half.

  And then the pain is gone. I open my eyes and find myself looking into my own face from a distance of several metres. The other Julia looks back at me with a confusion mirroring my own.

  “Or merging them together.”

  I—both of us—scream as we are accelerated into collision. For an instant, I have two heads and limbs all over the place before I finally resolve into a human form. I cry out, my voice straining against the pressure: “Enough!”

  The pressure abates and I collapse onto my knees, gasping for breath. The void is gone, replaced by a lush green plain.

  “Enough…”

  “Our ministrations granted us a power far in excess of that of other mages,” says Elsevier. “In tapping the fundaments of matter, we could unleash primal energies—the merest shadow of which even you mortals are aware of. Power enough to refine our craft still further, to pick at the very threads of reality. Power enough to build an empire—”

  Around us, spires rise quickly and silently from the ground, a magnificent, gleaming city spiralling upwards into the blue sky. A cheering throng stretch off forever into the distance as Elsevier sets a crown atop the head of an imperious Fairy queen.

  “—Or to lay one to waste.”

  The city, as suddenly and silently as it arose, crumbles into dust, queen and people and all. We stand now on a desolate plain, alone against a bloodred sky.

  Elsevier picks up a handful of ash. “Power enough…to make enemies.” He looks at me and smiles faintly. “Too many enemies, without and within. They spurned us. They turned against us. In their envy, they hunted us. And now—now, we hide from them. A proud and noble and ancient order of magicians…reduced to criminals, and recluses, and refugees.”

  He lets the ash slip from his hand, forming a long, dusty plume against the sky. I rise to my feet, trying to decide whether I should feel sorry for him.

  “You asked what, exactly, an ore-spinner is, dear Julia,” Elsevier says. “And it’s this. A magician of refined sensitivity. A master of unfathomable power. A creature, even so, of the margins. But above all”—I suddenly find myself directly in front of him, the distance between us disappearing—“an ore-spinner is someone who can turn things into gold. Like so.”

  I feel a faint tap against the back of my hand—and then nothing at all. There is numbness, yes, but beyond that…a horrid tingling sensation, climbing like an army of ants up my arm. I’m just in time to see my shoulder turn to gold when the infection spreads to my torso; my lungs have become a rigid mass before I even get a chance to scream.

  “Atom by atom,” Mr. Elsevier says softly, eyes fixed mercilessly on my own. “Carbon to gold. Thus, the ore-spinner plies his trade.”

  He keeps speaking, but I can no longer hear him, my eardrums having turned to metal. My sight goes in similar fashion. It must be in my brain now! I try to—

  I try—

  I—

  *

  “And now you know what an ore-spinner is!”

  I can hear again! I can see! I can feel! I can think! I find myself curled up into the fetal position, my face pressed against the planks of the boathouse dock. I blink up at Géraldine.

  “What did you do to her?” she demands.

  “Answered her question,” he replies. He leans toward me: “Two down, eight to go.”