Ordinary Miracles, page 9
“Do you need to…?” Nadia asked.
Bev nodded. “Now. Both of them.” I felt myself falling and grabbed for the table, but somehow failed to connect. My vision went grey and wavery and the room swung around me. It took me several seconds to realise that I’d actually been lowered to the floor.
I had a vague impression of being wafted out of the room and wondering why so many people were even interested in the fact that I wasn’t very well. I saw lights and a lift, then a corridor that smelt of antiseptic, alcohol hand rub and fear that just had to be on the medical floor. At some point in that part of the journey, I passed out.
*
I don’t remember the next day, not really. I remember a room, and I remember being in bed, but other than that it’s all a bit vague. I know Sam was there for at least part of the time, and Bev seemed to be a permanent fixture. I’m sure there were other people but they were mostly drifting, insubstantial shapes. Nadia was there for a bit, and I think that Richard Slater turned up at one point, but it could equally well have been the Queen of Sheba and the Jeddak of Barsoom.
I do remember the pain, the terrible sapping confusion and the pictures in my mind that I didn’t want to see but couldn’t look away from. I was also very hot, burning up, my mind doing pinwheels in the roaring darkness. In the centre of it was my gogoan. That’s the word for the special magical part of the brain, which sounds a lot more metaphysical than it really is. Brains have sight centres and hearing centres – this is just the magical centre. It gives you the extra set of mental dimensions that only mages have, a part of the mutation. It’s an interesting place to visit, but you really wouldn’t want to live there.
Mine is a landscape of jagged stone and disturbed black sand. In the middle of it were three stable points, like pimples on the arse of the universe. There was a burning swirl, like a fire tornado, that didn’t interact with them; they were just places of stillness that it caught on and dragged at as it went past.
I knew one of the points was me, my core magical self. You get shown this early in your training so you know what you have to protect. If somebody or something gets hold of that, it’s over. Previously mine had been a non-specific dark colour, which is normal for an earth Talent, but now it was tinged with an unstable red. Fire. I was gaining control over fire.
Another was Sam, the pure white of an air Talent. Erdikide are always present in each other’s minds. Water Talents show blue, kemen is yellow and Healing is silver. Like mine, hers was also tinged with red, although less strongly, and both were ragged around the edges, like stars being sucked into a black hole.
The third was an alien thing. It was trying to steal power from both of us, and didn’t care about how much damage it did in the process. No possibility of symbiosis here – this was a parasite, pure and simple.
The power of the thing had an odd… flavour, but it wasn’t overwhelming. Nevertheless, I knew that while I might be able to resist it, I couldn’t defeat it, and I certainly couldn’t remove it. So I built walls and shields around us, including Sam behind every layer. Although she couldn’t build any defences in here herself, she certainly could feed power into mine.
My attention wavered as a grinding pain arrived, smothering the clear stars of my personal universe. I’m sure I cried out, and I may have wept. I know I moved, thrashed even, and I felt hands gentle me to a stillness. Then a Healer took the pain away and the space was filled with something I had never experienced, even when I was deep in contact with Professor Gowan or Professor Weaver back in Nottingham.
It was clouds gathering over the starscape, and soon it was raining golden dust. Where it touched, it stuck. Soon the intruder, the parasite, was coated in a fine layer of the dust and its light was dimming, or being smothered, by this auric coating. Sam and I had a sprinkling too, and some of the gold had got through where the skin was ragged from the turbulence. The parasite started to shrink, to diminish from my mind, as if the weight of it all was simply too much for it to bear.
Then – which could have been seconds or days later, I had no idea – the rain changed colour to a lustrous metallic green, not unlike our Ikasberri bracelets. The parasite was further coated, and more of the rain entered me, but Sam seemed immune to this beneficent precipitation.
Beneficent precipitation? That’s how far out of it I was. I’ll start going on about the Ur-Spirit, the Paradigm of Relevance and the Immutable Power of the fucking Universe in a minute. Shoot me now.
The green rain became purple and unfamiliar – I hadn’t realised that the gold and the green were familiar – and the parasite stopped moving, stopped fighting. It started to fold in on itself. It didn’t diminish in power, but it shrank until it was tiny. There’s no point in giving you a size comparison, because all of this was taking place in a part of my brain about the size of a walnut.
Sam was also immune to the purple shimmer, but I was filled with them all until I looked like a glitter ball. I heard voices, out in the real world, and a hum which seemed familiar, even though I couldn’t quite place it.
“Are you sure he can take another? Won’t it be too much for him?” I think that was Nadia.
“He’ll be fine. There’s far more going on than we originally thought. He’s got plenty of capacity and having that one there should steady him.” Even though it sounded like someone shouting under water, I’m fairly certain that was Bev – she has a quite distinctive way of talking, like she’s about to start chuckling at any moment.
Then a fourth existence appeared in my mind. It didn’t give me power, sprinkle us with fairy dust or attack the parasite on a white charger; blue for water, it just being there connected me to me in a way I hadn’t realised was missing. I felt grounded and, because I was drawing power from the earth, stronger – but strong like a mountain, not like a lightning bolt. Does that make sense? It does to me. I heard a voice impose itself on my mind.
“Now”.
I have no idea what I did. That’s not actually true – I know what I did, I just haven’t the vaguest idea of how I did it. I gathered up a stream of energy – the people who do the special effects for movies like Stargate would have loved it – and sent it spiralling away from my shield and straight at the parasite. There was a lot of anger and the need to hurt in there too. The fourth power watched, supportive but otherwise uninvolved. I briefly wondered how it could be so immune, then noticed it was contained within a faint but shiny silver sphere.
My energy beam – my phaser if you like – hit the parasite and splashed, like a hose aimed at a wall. The outer shell of resistance didn’t last long, and it started to erode, layers ablating like onion skins peeling off. Remembering my sprites, I made little darts from the gold and the green and fired them at the parasite, which by now was a pale and sickly lemon–grey, wrinkled like fingers that have been in water too long.
Each impact caused a crack in the shell, a flaw, a weakness. I used my anger to drill a hole into the heart of it and filled it with fire. It started to scream. The noise was a keening, high-pitched and windblown, and then the parasite exploded. Its shield fragmented and vanished, and the tiny core, corroded by the fire and the falling dust and the fury, quickly vanished.
I heard a voice in the outside world say, “I think he’s done it”, the warmth of a hand in mine, and then everything went black.
*
It was just after dawn when I woke. I didn’t ask, ‘where am I?’ because I knew I was still on the medical floor at Central. I knew perfectly well who I was, especially all the stupid and embarrassing bits that stick in your memory even when the good stuff doesn’t. The questions pressing on my mind at that point were ‘when am I?’ and ‘can I get a cup of coffee?’.
I wasn’t surprised when a Healer came into the room a few moments later.
“I bet you could do with a drink.” She held up a small cup of water with a straw in it. I took a shivery mouthful and swallowed gratefully. It was like drinking sandpaper and razor blades, and as I didn’t have a cold I guessed I’d been doing quite a lot of shouting. I think she started to ask me how I was feeling, but a great weight landed on my chest and the darkness took me.
*
When I surfaced again the room was empty and so was I. I felt like a sere reed with the pith out. Still, at peace, with all the ground-in turbulence of the Paddington crash finally gone, my mind was almost blank. Sam would say that was its normal state and I smiled at the thought, at the recollection of her and her kindness; of Amy, and Ambrose and Jerry and even that twit Brian. I was still grinning inanely when the door opened.
“Hello, Mike.” It was Beverley of the Amazing Kisses.
“Hello. How am I today?”
“You are well, for the most part.” That meant there must be another part which wasn’t, but I didn’t care. “You need to rest and gather your strength,” she went on. “The last little while has taken more out of you than you can possibly imagine. If you do this right, and are sensible about it, you’ll be absolutely fine. You should be able to get up in a couple of days.”
“Why?”
“Don’t you want to get up?”
I blinked – this was such an alien concept that I was having trouble processing it. I was in bed, so that was what I did. Someone else would have to do the ‘getting up’ thing. “Um…”
“Not to worry,” said Bev gently. “You can get up when you want to. Is there anything you need?”
“Tea, Earl Grey, hot.” She smiled. “And I would like to kiss you.”
“Why? The kissing I mean.”
“You did it before and it made me feel great.” My thinking was bizarrely linear at this point, so that made perfect sense to me.
“Would you like to feel like that again?”
The muscles in my face moved, and it took me a moment to realise that they were trying to form a smile. “Yes.”
“Then you’ll have to come here.” She was standing by the window.
I looked at the floor. I didn’t want to stand on it. It looked indefinably dangerous. I wanted to stay here, where I was safe.
“Later then,” said Bev. She walked back to the bedside, touched my head gently and I fell into a dream–wracked sleep that lasted for longer than I could guess.
*
I was much more myself when I woke again – confused, grumpy, bogging for a drink and severely in need of a piss. I was walking back to my bed when I realised I had walked on that floor, without a thought.
The door opened. This time it was Sam, and I was surprised to see that she was in pyjamas too, even though it was just after ten o’clock in the morning.
“Hello, you,” she said and sat on the bed.
“Hello, you. How’s things?”
“Thing are good. You did very good. Not surprised you sleep so long.”
“Long?”
“You been asleep two days.”
“Two days? Fuck.”
“OK.” She started to unbutton her top but stopped just when I’d got a glimpse of her underwear – red silk again – and grinned impishly. “I think you too tired for that.” Sometimes she’s more like the older sister that I never wanted.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I replied, making a playful grab for her. It’s something we do occasionally, but we’re not even vaguely serious about it. It would be like wanting to have sex with your maiden aunt.
She held up a magisterial hand. “You rest now. You fight big fight, lots to integrate. Lots to… forget.”
Then she did the most extraordinary thing. She reached out one soft hand and laid it on my stubbly cheek. She ran a thumb over the bristles, making a tiny rasping noise. Her eyes were big and bright with tears. “I thought I lose you,” she said softly.
I put my hand over hers, for a moment utterly lost in the surge of concern and affection that I was feeling from her. The idea that I might not survive had never occurred to me. “Was it that bad? You thought I’d die?”
“You did,” said a voice from the doorway. “Twice. Nearly gave me a bloody heart attack, you selfish git.”
It was, to my astonishment, Amy. Disappointingly, she wasn’t wearing pyjamas. Sam lifted her hand away, offered a wan smile and settled on the end of the bed.
“Died?”
“Yup,” said Amy, wheeling up beside me. “I know they tinkered with your brain – after they finally located it – and that sent your taste buds screwy, but one cup of coffee just about did it for you. They told me you collapsed in the canteen and the Healers had to put you in stasis to stop you spilling bodily fluids all over the floor. I don’t blame them – I mean, the amount of paperwork is appalling and it takes ages to get rid of the smell.”
I laughed. I laughed until it hurt, until Sam had to get Bev to calm me down. I took both of them by the hand. “I don’t know which one of you I love the most,” I said.
“He’s delirious,” said Amy, shaking her head sadly. “He’s a lovely bloke, usually, but I think it’s time you put him back to sleep.”
Bev chuckled. “I think it’s time for you to leave before he says something else he later regrets.”
Sam looked at her oddly. “I don’t think he regret
saying that.”
“Go on, push off,” said Bev.
They did, Sam giggling moistly while Amy swooped around the corridor outside making noises like a Tie Fighter defending the Death Star.
Bev handed me a cup. “Tea, Earl Grey, hot.” I drank. It was horrible. She gave me another one. Coffee, cheap but delicious. “That’s good,” she said. “It shows that we’ve managed to untangle and release those neural circuits. There are some others that need a bit more work.”
“There are others? How badly did you mangle my synapses? I feel fine.”
“Mike, you died.” She perched on the edge of my bed, suddenly very serious. “In fact you died twice. The first time, in the canteen, you were clinically dead for over a minute before we could get a stasis spell onto you. It’s only thanks to Sam pumping you full of Indar that you made it at all.” She paused, as if looking for a way to express something that I might not be able to grasp.
“She spent more than twelve hours in recovery, profoundly unconscious, because she gave you so much. If we hadn’t stopped her, she would probably have given you so much that she would have died herself.” There was a tableau moment while I absorbed that.
“She’s too kind to me.” That, of course, was not what I was thinking. We aren’t talking about intimations of mortality here, just being really, really frightened. Stasis spells like Oraindik don’t always work, and the best of them only last a couple of minutes anyway. I was more than a little concerned that, despite being in the Central College and within the purlieu of some of the most powerful Healers in the country, it was only Sam and her supercharged Indar that had saved me. There needs to be a word other than gratitude, or indebtedness, to describe what had happened there. The only one I could think of was ‘love’.
“She cares for you as much as you care for her,” said Bev.
“Hardly.”
She clicked her tongue. “After the locator spell with Professor Weaver back in Nottingham, she was so weak that she almost passed out before she’d even left the workroom. If you hadn’t been there, I suspect she would have needed to be hospitalised; what the bloody hell Weaver thought he was doing draining her like that I have no idea. Bo Hinxman was very angry and rightly so.” Bo is one of the senior Healers at the college.
“You brought her back to full strength in less than five minutes, with surprisingly little ill effect to yourself.” She shook her head. “I have no idea how you managed that – there’s a huge amount of power in you somewhere. How did you feel when you did that?”
“Hot mostly, and very concerned for her. It’s rare that any form of spell work takes that much out of her.”
“My point exactly – you two are very strongly connected, unusually strongly in fact. I suspect that you’ll spend the rest of your lives saving each other, in one way or another. Then you died again, about twenty-four hours later, but you were here, so we were able to bring you back quite easily. We don’t know why you died that time, and the neural traces we got back when you recovered were very… odd.”
“Odd?”
“Atypical for a Dual Talent,” she said after a moment.
“So what were they typical of?”
“Nothing I’ve ever seen before.” I had the feeling she wasn’t being completely truthful. “I don’t know what it was, but something caused a big change in your brain Mike, and I’m still trying to work out what it did. Now go to sleep.”
“But I’m not tired,” I protested unconvincingly.
Bev smiled. “You sound like my son at bedtime. He’s six and is never sleepy until the moment he starts snoring.” She touched my head. “Loaren.”
The sleep spell landed like a bus that’s been dropped from orbit. My eyelids drooped and my feet started to feel warm. Bev shut the curtains with a gesture, and I drifted off, wondering why it had never occurred to me for one second that she might be married with children.
*
By Monday – day eight in the Big House – I was able to go back to my room. Sam was in hers, to the left of mine and, I was surprised to find, Amy was on the other side. Every time I heard the whirr of her wheelchair I would go to the door, hoping she’d knock. Sometimes she did, and then Sam would be there too and I would be happy.
Sam is a part of me, just as I am a part of her, but I was beginning to think that it was happening with Amy too. Which is supposed to be impossible, at least in a magical sense. I strongly suspect I wouldn’t have been so torn, so confused, if Sam had been a bloke. Being so close to Sam may have helped me to understand my feminine side, but I have to tell you that phantom period pains are no fun. God knows what real ones are like. During that time I also developed a recipe for waterproof custard creams. No idea where that came from.
