Jasper finished conferring with Lyyll and cleared his throat. “So, folks, here’s the plan. If you’re in agreement?” He raised an eyebrow at Silas.
Silas raised his hands. “I defer to the guy with the ideas. For now.” Jasper might be the one with the math and runes skills, but powering a portal? That was a necromancer’s gift, and he was going to make sure he was happy before he put his power or Darien’s into this thing.
“First order of business is to redo the runes. There are two fixes, and we need to paint over the runes in the target field and leave it blank. If we’re aiming for Home, we’ll have to hope Kii can give us a target to shoot for. And we need to repaint all the damaged areas.”
Lyyll said, “I top.” She tapped the highest arch, which Silas could maybe reach, if he stood on tiptoe.
Darien muttered at Silas’s elbow, “And to my surprise, you also top.”
Silas couldn’t hold back a snort. When Jasper glanced at him, he waved his hand, sure his face was red. “Just an errant thought.” Under his breath, he added, “Brat.”
“Right.” Jasper rummaged in his pack. “Everyone should have tubes of paint in next to the chalk. Follow the old marks. I’ll do the changes first, so you don’t have to do anything but follow. Just be careful, precise, even though the circumstances are difficult. Remember our lives are riding on this working right the first time.”
“Teach your grandmother to suck eggs,” Magda muttered, setting her purse on the ground. “I’ve built a complex circle while artillery was shelling the next block.” She pulled out a tube of paint and a brush. “Right side low. On it.”
Silas eyed the structure, finding the most familiar runes for opening a gate to a hell, or in this case a heaven, or wherever it was familiars came from. The left side held the majority of those. “I’ve got high left.”
Chapter 6
Darien rubbed his paintbrush as clean as he could, wrapped it in the leaf of some plant, and stowed it carefully in his pack. After a second’s thought, he added little bits of several other odd-colored plants as well. They might not have photos, but any proof of where they’d been might be useful.
On the flat cliffside, the new runes of the world gate glowed white in the setting sun. He wasn’t sure if they’d been at it longer than he’d realized, or if a day passed quicker here. Wherever here was.
Inside the archway, the rock face looked as solid as ever, but there was a shimmer of potential chasing around the runes of the frame. If he focused his Othersight on it, he could see threads of blue and green and gold and orange and silver, twining through the runes. Right now, the powers played tag, scuttling away from each other, except for gold and green that twined together as they met. He pushed more magic into the runes he’d painted and sent them out to hug Jasper’s blue and make nice, then to meet Magda’s orange.
When he eased his power close to Lyyll’s silver, the intersection sparked a little, prickly and defensive. He stroked at the runes with his mind, comforting them, pushing acceptance and cooperation in there. Gold and silver met and fused, running in a new liquid sheen through the structure.
Silas broke off speaking to Grim. “Darien? What did you just do?”
“Um. Put a little ‘play nicely, children’ into that mash-up?”
Lyyll hurried over to peer closely at the gate. “Good magic.” She craned around to look at Darien. He realized her pupils were slits, and her eyelids blinked horizontally, like Kii’s. “Strong magic.”
“Yes,” Grim said. “Darien’s a powerhouse, and we may need that, since this place seems to dampen magic like a pillow over the face.”
Silas hefted his pack up over one shoulder. “I think we’re as set as we’re going to be. As long as Kii can actually open her portal Home right where the gate’s target field should be. That’s going to be some tricky flying. Tricky timing.”
Kii, sitting on Jasper’s shielded shoulder, preened one wing. “I feel the call, strong and bright. Home’s right… there. Diving into the call at the right moment should be child’s play.”
“Hardly,” Jasper told her. “It’s going to be a display of skill, to save us all.”
Kii cawed a harsh sound Darien couldn’t pin down as scorn or appreciation. “You can sing my praises after I’ve done it. I’m not worried. I’ve followed the pull Home twice before and all it takes is embracing the call and letting my Earth body go.” She lofted into the air, one wingtip brushing Jasper’s cheek as she took off, and spiraled high into the sky.
Darien watched her until Silas pulled his attention back down by saying, “Then the only question is who powers this thing, me or Lyyll?”
“Darien can give you a boost,” Magda said before Darien could. “And since we know Lyyll wasn’t strong enough before, I vote for you.”
Lyyll burbled something and gestured Silas toward the gate.
Everyone picked up bags and the jackets they’d shucked off earlier in the warm sunshine. Grim said to Lyyll, “Are you sure there’s nothing you want to bring along?”
“No.” She waved at the runes. “Go now.”
Silas raised a hand, and magic leaped from his fingertips to the runes he’d inscribed on the left side of the frame. Darien moved up close and set a hand on Silas’s elbow, adding a thread of power that he slid along Silas’s skin to the base of his thumb, waiting. Slowly, the green of Silas’s power worked its way around the gate, rune to rune, dancing through the mathematical symbols. Darien’s Othersight saw a little resistance, a spark, and he slipped along the path of the magic, guiding Silas’s green into Jasper’s blue, blending and melding.
Lyyll’s power was different, slippery and bright. It felt like mercury from high school science class, clinging to itself, repelled by all the rest. Darien pushed more of his own power into the mix, surrounding the silver, coaxing it to soften and fuzz those slick borders. Overhead, Kii circled, banking lower, wings angled to catch the updrafts, barely flapping.
Silas’s power reached the end of the rune path, paused, and then leaped across the bottom gap to close the circle. The gate stirred to life. Its power built sluggishly, a little haze blurring the rock face at the center of the spell. Silas said, “That’s not right.”
“Why not?”
“Doesn’t feel… deep enough.”
“Is power different.” Lyyll held out a hand and her silver danced through the runes.
Darien caught the silver with Silas’s power, pushed them together in a glacier-green meld.
“Ah. That’s got it.” Silas sent a bigger pulse of his power leaping out, running the now well-known path. The rift on the stone darkened, spread wider. “Yes, looks better. It’s her gate; it might take both of us to make this work. Darien, can you coordinate?”
“Doing that.” The blend of power felt and tasted different from any he’d worked with before, but he had the hang of it now. He added his own magic as back-up and focused on balancing Silas’s strength and Lyyll’s intricacy, assisting the way that silver reached into the gate and grasped, and pulled… The center of the rift turned deep and dark.