An aircar with the loud lime-green markings of Kyrkarta City Law peels off from the roof-height emergency lanes and dives, sliding to a stop near the park with a high-pitched whine of protest from its ground brakes. I groan. Didn’t I just leave these jerks behind?
People pour from the surrounding buildings and streets, running in blatant defiance of every public safety advisory, because humanity sucks. Two officers climb out of the aircar, a techwitch and a spellweaver, judging by their rank patches. The tall, dark-haired one weaves a quick amplification spell, then presses the glowing tangle of threads to their throat.
“Please proceed calmly to the ward zone,” the low voice booms, echoing off the surrounding buildings. “If your building is reinforced, stay indoors and leave the ward zone open for others.”
Hah. Right. People are assholes, as the officers quickly discover when a shoving match breaks out between two men at a bottleneck between parked vehicles. They dive in to separate the instigators as another threatening rumble vibrates through the soles of my boots. I look toward home, my gaze magnetically drawn to the grimy window of my top-floor apartment.
At the end of the street, the hastily erected buildings that make up the Cliffs pulse with a deep reddish glow as their structural reinforcement spells activate. The sheer, featureless walls they’re named for flare bright for a single second, then immediately begin to fade as they burn through what little energy is left in the spells. The buildings were cobbled together from whatever crappy materials were on hand after the spellplague, sloppy constructions of wood and brick built without the aid of maz in the days when anti-maz paranoia was at its height. They won’t last much longer.
But two of my closest friends are in one of those buildings, in the tiny flat we share, making us food and getting ready to go out tonight. The fading red spells burn a permanent warning onto my eyelids.
I can’t help them. I can’t do anything at all.
“Diz!” Ania shouts, seizing my arm. “They’ll be fine, they know what to do. Come on!”
I wrench my gaze away from the blocky towers, so out of place among the unyielding steel buildings around them, and give in to Ania’s pull.
We reach the greenspace ahead of the crowds and head straight for the warded area in the center, large enough to hold maybe two hundred people. It’s marked off by small solar-powered lights that light up orange to guide people to safety. Ania and I set up at the outer edge, where she crouches down and touches one hand to a glowing line etched into the ground. The edge of the ward circle. A twitch of her fingers, a complicated movement, and she draws away with a threadbare piece of the woven spell, hanging from the tip of her finger like a ragged spiderweb. It casts a sickly sort of gray-blue pall over her skin as her eyes scan the pattern, no doubt identifying weaknesses and formulating a plan to reinforce it. Shielding and warding spells are her jam.
“I really hope your ware holds up,” I murmur under my breath, needing to say it but not wanting to distract her. She shakes her head.
“It’s only the magnaz that’s acting up. This’ll be almost entirely terraz. Watch my back?”
“Always.”
It’s a good thing she’s got terraz in today. She can only have five of the fourteen strains of maz loaded up at one time, max, and it would be a hella bad day if she had nothing but fire in all five chambers.
I shift from foot to foot with useless, nervous energy as more and more people, civilians and officers, arrive at the ward zone. The mundies like me stand helplessly in the center, while the techwitches and spellweavers gather around the edges to hold the wards together, pouring new energy into the complex system as the quake begins in earnest. Ania’s gestures are graceful and restrained as she loops tangled threads of linkaz, the maz for tying and binding, around the strand she holds pinched in her left hand. Each loop is precisely formed, providing the structure that holds the wards together.
Once she’s made twenty perfectly even loops, Ania taps the tip of her thumb to the pad of her middle finger, cutting off the linkaz and activating the flow of heavy shielding maz instead. The terraz flows out in thick bronze rivulets, slipping through each loop until, with a scooping gesture, Ania cuts off the strand and pulls the binder tight around it. It flares bright, then fades as the strands lock into the overall pattern, a shield between us and the threats outside.
Without even a second to admire her (honestly perfect) work, she pulls up another worn piece of the weave and begins again, repairing it like a thrift-shop blanket. The weave isn’t as tight as the threads that make up fabric, but it’s far more intricate, the patterns so much more than a simple grid. Each section of threads crystallizes as they’re tied off and finished, the energy slowly bleeding back into the system.
“Reloading,” a techwitch calls from down the row, holding up his hands and stepping back from the wards. He’s overly optimistic, though; trying to load new maz into his delicate hardware with the ground shaking is a near-impossible feat. A middle-aged woman takes his place, her ware old and grimy but the flow of her maz strong. Her clothes hang from her bones, ill-fitting and probably secondhand, and I press my lips together with sympathy. She probably can’t afford to replace the maz she’s using, but there she is, pitching in to help anyway. Around the circle, the natural spellweavers work their maz in a continuous flow, the threads drawn to their fingers like iron to a magnet. They’re limited too, now that maz isn’t ambient and abundant like it was before the plague, but at least they can burn straight through their entire stock all in one go.
Most of the time I’m glad I’m no good with maz. I’ve gotten used to being around it again, after the plague, but that doesn’t mean I want my hands all up in it. But times like now, I almost wish I could do . . . something. Anything.
The earthquake builds with more and more frequent tremors, and before long the ground is bucking and rumbling worse than it has in over a month. Every earthquake brings a special kind of terror to native Kyrkartians. It was an earthquake that unleashed the spellplague ten years ago, cracking open the ground and bleeding some kind of contaminated maz into the world. A building could fall on us and the wards would shrug it off like dust, but none of it would matter if a fissure opened up and leaked raw tainted maz into the air inside our bubble. Boom, Spellplague II, Revenge of the Plague, spellsickness for all. No thanks.
The ground gives a particularly hard kick, and Ania stumbles backward, losing her grasp on the complicated pattern of the weave. I catch her around the waist and ease her back down into a crouch while she snatches at the falling threads. A few slip through her grasp, but she draws a little more linkaz from her reserves and renews her focus, exchanging threads with her neighbors to weave their sections tightly together. The gauzy web of spell threads glimmers in the night like moonlight off a spiderweb, the color shifting slowly from desaturated gray to a healthier blue-bronze. It’s working.
I spit Ania’s textured curls out of my mouth and brace her with my shoulder as the quake tries again and again to topple her back. Jaesin and his recruitment-poster shoulders would be so much better at this, but my little five-foot-four ass is all she has right now. At least she smells good, like expensive sweet perfume and freshly cast maz. The people around us stumble and slam together like an accidental mosh pit, stinking of fear and trampled dirt instead. Gross.