Chapter 6
When Marci brought her knuckles down on the plain, seemingly wooden door of the Merlin Gate, the sound that reverberated through the dark wasn’t a knock. It was a gong. An enormous ringing, golden tone that shook the entire swirling sea. If she’d still had a physical body, it would have shaken her to pieces, but whatever Marci was right now—ghost, soul, or some other not-yet-named type of human leftover—at least she didn’t have to worry about that. The sound passed right through her, echoing off into the endless expanse until, at last, it faded back to nothing.
And the door did not open.
“Maybe no one’s home?” Amelia whispered. “It has been a thousand years.”
That was a good point. “I could try opening it myself,” Marci suggested, bending down to study the door more closely. “There’s no handle or hinges, but if I—”
The door rattled. Marci jerked in surprise, moving closer to Ghost as the something on the other side of the heavy wood clattered, and then light shot through the darkness like a spear as the wooden slab opened inward to reveal a man silhouetted against a wall of warm, glowing light.
Oddly enough, Marci’s first thought was that he looked way too young. She wasn’t sure what she’d been expecting, but it had definitely been closer to Gandalf or Mad Madame Mim than the elegant twenty-something Asian man standing in the glowing doorway. He was wearing a simple white-and-black robe with an elegantly folded silk fan tucked into his sash. Other than that, though, he had nothing. No sword or weapon, not even a rope that could have served as a casting circle. Marci wasn’t stupid enough to assume that meant he was defenseless, though. Even standing on the other side of the door, she could feel magic flowing off of him like water. A sensation that only grew stronger when his mouth began to move.
She frowned in confusion. The man was clearly talking, but nothing was coming out. She was wondering if there was still some kind of barrier between them when the magic rolling off the young man shifted slightly, and a voice suddenly sounded in her ears.
“Welcome,” it said, “she who would be Merlin.”
The words were clear with no trace of an accent, but though they were obviously said by the man in front of her, the sounds didn’t match the movements of his mouth at all. They weren’t coming from his mouth, either. The voice was inside her ear, as if she were listening to it through headphones, and Marci’s jaw dropped.
“Is that a translation spell?”
The man raised a dubious eyebrow, but Marci was thinking too fast to care. Translation magic was one of the hottest fields in Thaumaturgical spellwork. She’d actually tried her hand at a few versions herself, but like everyone else, she’d never been able to crack the problem of how to make the translated words sound natural. Just as with its computer-based counterparts, magically translated speech lost its intonation and inflection, emerging emotionless and wooden, but not this one. Other than the short delay between when the man spoke and when the words were whispered into Marci’s ear, it really did sound as though he were speaking native English, which was incredible. If she could figure out how it worked, a patent on a translation spell like this would be enough to set her up for life!
Assuming, of course, she ever got back to being alive.
That realization knocked the dollar signs out of her eyes, and Marci pulled herself back together. “Sorry,” she said, standing up straight to dazzle him with her most professional smile. “I’m Marci Caroline Novalli, PhD candidate in Socratic Thaumaturgy at the University of Nevada Las Vegas and partner to the Empty Wind, Spirit of the Forgotten Dead. I’m here to pass through the gate and join you as a Merlin.”
“Humans do not come here for any other reason,” the man said dryly. “But I am not a Merlin.”
She blinked. “What?”
“Merlins are human,” he explained. “Humans are mortal, and there is no mortal who could wait out the centuries it would take before this door opened again. Knowing this, Abe no Seimei, Onmyōji to the Emperor and head of the Last Circle of the Merlins, and his partner, Inari Okami, God of Prosperity, bound me here to serve as guardian for their greatest work and guide to any who came after.”
Marci nodded slowly, eyes going wide. Abe no Seimei was a Japanese sorcerer and one of the world’s most famous ancient mages. Finding out he’d also been a Merlin wasn’t actually surprising, but the rest of it…
“What do you mean ‘bound you?’” she asked in a rush. “Are you a spirit or—”
“Of course not,” the man said, insulted. “No spirit may enter this place without a Merlin. I am a shikigami.”
“What’s a shikigami?”
“A crafted servant,” Amelia whispered in her ear. “A spell so complicated, it develops a personality and decision-making abilities of its own.”
“They could do that?!” Marci cried. “Because you just described magical AI, and no one’s done that yet!”
Amelia shrugged. “I keep telling you, modern mages haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of the magical knowledge you lost during the drought. Shikigami summoning used to be an entire school of Taoist magic, and Abe no Seimei was the grand master.” She grinned at the young man. “What did he name you?”
“I am bound by the characters White, Iron, and Truth,” the shikigami said politely. “But you may call me Shiro.”
Amelia turned back to Marci with a there you go smirk. Marci grinned back maniacally, bouncing on her toes in excitement. After so long scratching at the edges of lost knowledge, she was about to walk right into the Shangri La of lost magical secrets. “Well then, Shiro,” she said happily, stepping forward. “Let’s get this—”
She cut off with a gasp. The moment she’d tried to cross the threshold from the dark, chaotic sea into the light, something hit her with enough force to send Marci tumbling backward. If Ghost hadn’t still been holding on to her hand, she would have been blown right out into the void.
“What was that?” she cried as her spirit set her back on her feet.
“What you may not cross,” Shiro replied, his voice no longer polite. “You have made it to the gate, but only those souls who are deemed worthy may enter.”
“Deemed worthy by whom?” Marci demanded. “You? Do you know what I went through to get here?”
“No more than any other Merlin,” he said. “But I do not make the decision. I am but a servant. The judgment of your worth lies with the Heart of the World.”
“Okay,” she said, crossing her arms over her chest. “What’s that?”
“You will find out when you become a Merlin.”
Marci felt like punching something. “I already died for this! What more do I have to do?”
“Anyone can die,” Shiro said dismissively. “But becoming a Merlin is not as easy as falling into a grave. It is a privilege reserved for those whose dedication stretches beyond the boundaries of their lives. Mages are no strangers to power, but Merlins make decisions that affect all magic, not just their own. That much authority can only be entrusted to someone who keeps in mind the needs of all. Only a true champion of humanity may rise to claim the title of Merlin. Until you prove yourself as one such to the Heart of the World, you may not enter.”
Marci supposed that was fair. Merlins were supposed to be the greatest mages in existence. That kind of power couldn’t go to just anyone.
“Fine,” she said, lifting her chin. “You want us to prove ourselves again? Give us your best shot. Ghost and I will ace any test you can think of.”
“Undoubtedly,” the shikigami said, peering into the void that was the Empty Wind’s face. “You’ve certainly chosen a grim spirit, but you seem well bonded despite that. Ordinarily, I’d say you have a very good chance, but I’m afraid I cannot permit you to attempt the trials.”
“Why not?” Marci demanded.
The shikigami’s emotionless eyes slid to Amelia, who was still clinging to Marci’s shoulder. “Because, as I said, Merlins are champions of humanity, and no true champion of humanity would arrive at the Merlin Gate on a predator’s string.”
“What?” Marci said, glancing at Amelia, who cringed. “No, no, you’ve got this all wrong. Amelia’s not like that. She likes humans.”
“Love them,” Amelia said eagerly. “Seriously, I’ve never even eaten one.”
“She’s one of the good dragons,” Marci said at the same time. “She sacrificed her life to help me get here.”
“All the more reason to deny you,” Shiro said, putting a hand on the door. “I met many dragons with my master before he died, enough to know that they never act without benefit to themselves. If a dragon gave up her immortal life to help you reach this place, she must have something very great to gain by you becoming a Merlin. Since you are clearly beholden to her, that makes you a servant of the enemy, and thus unworthy of this place.”
“So you’re not even going to let us try?” Marci said angrily. “Because of Amelia?”
“Because you belong to her, yes,” he said coldly. “The Heart of the World is too important to risk exposing to a dragon’s tool. If you abandon her to the magic and sever all ties, you may attempt to step through this door again. Until then, we have nothing left to discuss.”
“But that’s crazy!” Marci cried. “Amelia’s my friend, not my puppet master. I’m not going to throw her away for a shot at getting in. What kind of cheap, backstabbing villain of a Merlin would that make me?”
“That is not my concern,” Shiro replied. “You asked what you needed to do. I told you. If you will not do it, that is your decision.”
“But—”
“The matter is closed,” he said, stepping back. “Good luck, young lady. If you change your mind and come back without your dragon, we will talk again.”
And then the door slammed shut.
Marci slammed her fists down on the boards, but there was no gong this time. Just the ineffective slap of human skin on unyielding hardwood. She pulled her hands back with a pained curse, sucking on her smarting fingers as she glared furiously at the sealed door. “Can you believe this?”
“That a dragon caused a problem?” Ghost sneered. “Yes.”
Amelia sighed. “I wish I could say Shikigami-Face was just being a racist jerk, but historically speaking, he’s more right that wrong. Dragons haven’t exactly been good neighbors since we arrived on this plane.” She shook her head, looking up at Marci with her smoldering wings tucked meekly against her body. “Thank you for not throwing me over, by the way.”
Marci snorted. “Like I’d ever. You’re the only one who explains anything to me, but I don’t know what we’re going to do.” She glared at the closed door. “This is the only way in, right?”
“The only one I’ve seen,” the Empty Wind said.
She’d thought as much. “How serious do you think he was about the no-dragon thing?”
“Pretty serious,” Amelia said. “He’s got the teeth to back it up, too. His master, Abe no Seimei, was one of the most powerful sorcerers in history, and he was particularly famous for his shikigami. His constructs were all no joke, but I remember Shiro specifically as being one of his big guns. I’ve actually encountered him once before, back when Seimei was still alive.”
Marci gaped at her. “You knew him? Why didn’t you say something?!”
“Because he was trying to slay me at the time,” Amelia said with a shrug. “To be fair, I was robbing his library.”
“Amelia!”
“What?” she cried. “I was young! I needed the books! Thankfully, I don’t think he recognized me. I do look pretty different now. But I don’t think we’re going to be able to talk him around on this. Book theft notwithstanding, I was hardly the most dangerous dragon back when Seimei and his shikigami were active, nor the worst behaved. He comes by his prejudice honestly, is what I’m saying.”
Ghost snorted. “Most do.”
Amelia could only shrug at that, and Marci dragged her hands over her face with a groan. “So what do we do if we can’t change his mind? Becoming a Merlin was plan A, B, and C. We can’t stay out here.” She threw out her hands at the chaotic black morass of magic that surrounded them.
“We’re not beaten yet,” Ghost said angrily. “A shikigami is neither human nor spirit. Who is worthy of being Merlin is not his to say.” He turned his glowing eyes on the pillar above them. “I say we make our own way in.”
“I’m not entirely against it,” Marci admitted. “But I don’t think force is the right answer here. Shiro’s just doing his job, and that barrier of his is no joke. I barely took one step into the light, and the stupid thing hit me like a—”
She stopped, grabbing her spirit’s freezing arm for balance as the stone rumbled under her feet. “What was that?”
“Not sure,” the Empty Wind said, his glowing eyes darting through the dark as the swells of magic began to churn. “I’ve never felt anything like it before.”
“We are deep inside the tectonic magic,” Amelia said, tilting her head to listen to the rumble. “Could be a manaquake.”
“Quakes don’t go on this long,” the Empty Wind said, his deep voice starting to sound nervous. “And it looks wrong. See?”
He pointed up, and Marci lifted her head dutifully. As always, though, she couldn’t see anything in this place except the pillar, the rocky sea floor, and the swirling, nausea-inducing movement of the dark magic that surrounded them.
“Can you describe it?” she asked, looking down again before she got sick.
There was a long pause as Ghost searched for the words. “It’s bulging,” he said at last. “Like something’s trying to push through.”
“You mean like I pushed out of my death?”
“No,” he said, his cold voice worried. “This comes from the outside, like a mountain growing down.” He shook his head. “I can’t explain.”
“That’s okay,” Amelia said, cowering in the crook of Marci’s neck. “I think we’re about to find out.”
Even without looking, Marci knew the dragon was right. Just like when she’d felt it pushing on Ghost’s winds before, she could feel the magic expanding now, bulging like an over-inflated balloon as the chaos above them started to groan.
***
Back in the DFZ, Myron’s task was nearly complete.
He’d spent the entire morning taking Emily Jackson apart piece by piece. Under any other circumstances, the disassembly of a system as complex as Raven’s Construct would have been the work of weeks, but Sir Myron had been the governing architect of the Phoenix’s spellwork matrix for the last five years running. He’d taken her apart countless times before, and today, with no quality control office watching over his shoulder or deconstruction paperwork to fill out, he’d done it in record time.
The longest part had been physically pulling out the almost quarter mile of spellworked metal ribbon that controlled the regulation of her magic and arranging it back into a proper casting circle, the result of which was now sitting on the bed of a military transport truck under the watchful eyes of Algonquin’s corporate mages.
Myron himself was seated in the truck’s cab, squeezed uncomfortably between two armed soldiers dressed in the navy-blue body armor of Algonquin Corp’s Anti-Dragon Taskforce. It wasn’t the guards who made him uncomfortable, though. As the de facto head of magic for the UN, Myron was used to riding in armed convoys, and no mage worth the name was afraid of guns. But it was quite upsetting to sit between two fellow humans who didn’t bat an eye over the fact that he had a woman’s head cradled in his lap.
This was his least favorite part of working on Emily. He wasn’t sure if it was security concerns or the spirit’s macabre flare for the dramatic that had inspired Raven to hardwire his construct’s buffer matrix to the inside of her reinforced skull, but its presence meant that no matter what they did to the rest of her, Emily’s head always remained disturbingly intact. Even worse, her eyes stayed open, glaring at him accusingly. Normally, Myron liked to tie something over them to prevent this exact scenario, but there’d been no time. The moment he’d finished hauling out her spellwork and getting the metal into the right shape, Algonquin had ordered everyone into the trucks. They’d been driving ever since, pushing farther into the bowels of the DFZ Underground than he’d ever been until they reached a place so dark and deep, it didn’t even show up on the GPS.
“Where are we?” Myron asked as the truck rolled to a stop.
The guard beside him grabbed the door handle with a grim look. “Old Grosse Point.”
Old Grosse Point was what the maps called it, but like anyone else familiar with the thousands of films, TV shows, games, and books set in the DFZ sprawl, Myron knew the buried suburb where Algonquin’s wave had first crashed down by its colloquial name: the Pit.
It looked just as it did in the movies, too. The Skyways above them held up some of the most expensive real estate in the DFZ, but down here, it was all just black. Black above, where not even a crack of daylight broke through the grime-stained underbelly of the Skyways. Black below, where the streets and houses were still covered in a foot-thick layer of silt from the flood. Even the horizon was black thanks to the cement wall Algonquin had built between this section of the Underground and her lake, cutting it off from the air and sun like the stone seal on a tomb.
The oppressive darkness was more than enough to justify calling this place a pit, but it wasn’t until the guards opened the doors, breaking the truck’s protective ward, that Myron realized just how fitting the name truly was. One breath of the deathly, oily, oppressive magic that filled the air here was all it took to make him feel as if he really had fallen into one of the colder, dirtier hells.
“A warning would have been appreciated,” he said angrily, activating the labyrinth of spellwork woven into the lining of his coat to bring up his personal ward. “This is a class-five magical pollutant zone.”
The soldier shrugged as though exposing the world’s premier mage to potentially toxic ambient magic was no big deal and put on his helmet, activating his own ward with a button before offering Myron his hand. “This way, sir. Lady Algonquin is waiting for you.”
Tucking Emily’s head under his arm, Myron allowed the soldier to help him down the three-foot drop to the ground. The oily reek of polluted magic only got worse when he landed, his leather shoes sinking up to their laces into the slimy layer of old lake mud covering what had once been a road. Myron pried his feet free with a muttered curse, cinching his ward tight as he made his way through the muck toward his hostess.
The Lady of the Lakes was harder to spot than she should have been. This was partially because of the Pit’s magic. Even with the truck’s headlights at his back, Myron couldn’t see more than a few feet down the ruined street before the shadows took it back, the thick magic diffusing the light like murky water. Mostly, though, it was because of the Leviathan.
Just like when he’d loomed over them in Reclamation Land, the giant monster was semitransparent, his shadowy body blending into the Pit’s black miasma. The only reason Myron knew he was, in fact, looking at the Leviathan and not some trick of the dark was because the monster was holding Algonquin suspended ten feet up in the air on a pillar of black tentacles.
As always when she was forced to be around her human troops, the Lady of the Lakes was in her public form: an old Native American woman with a wise, wrinkled face and a thick braid of silver hair that went all the way down to the belt of her navy pants suit. From the way bits of her clothes kept rippling and changing, though, it was clearly a minimum effort. One that collapsed completely when she spotted Myron.
“Right on time,” she said, her human face dissolving as the Leviathan lowered her to the ground. “Is it ready?”
Rather than state the obvious, Myron just pointed at the truck, where a team of Algonquin’s corporate mages was levitating the silver casting circle that had once been Emily Jackson off the flatbed.
Algonquin’s water rippled in happiness, and then she whipped her water down at the street between them. “Place it here.”
With an irritated breath, Myron nodded, turning to walk back through the mud toward the mages to oversee the relocation.
Even with his help and the hover spell, moving the circle was hair-raising work. Since Algonquin had refused to tell him where they were going, Myron had been forced to fill the circle ahead of time, loading it up with the spirits’ magic before they’d left Reclamation Land. Moving a full circle was never a good idea, but he’d thought he could get away with it thanks to Emily’s enormous capacity. But while the ride over had been uneventful, now that they were at the final stage, Myron was starting to realize just how grossly he’d underestimated the amount of magic Algonquin had squeezed out of the spirits who’d sacrificed themselves to her cause. Even rearranged into a circle—a much more efficient shape than a human body—Emily’s spellwork was barely able to hold all the magic Algonquin had forced it to absorb, leaving it packed like a spring-loaded snake-in-a-can. One wrong move, and the whole thing would blow up in their faces. But while that was par for the course for most of Myron’s projects, it didn’t make him any less anxious as he helped the corp mages float the loaded circle off the truck and down the silted road.
Finally, after what felt like years, everything was in place. Myron was on his knees, making the final adjustments, when he felt water drip onto his neck. When he looked up, Algonquin was looming over him with his own face.
“This had better work, mage,” she whispered, glaring down at him with his own exacting scowl. “I’ll spill dragon blood all day for the joy of it, but the sacrifices of my brothers and sisters must be honored.”
“They will be,” he promised, covertly wiping the water from his neck. “There’s enough magic here to raise you three times over.” It was more power than Myron had ever worked with before, perhaps the most magic any human had ever gathered in a single circle. If any of his former colleagues had been present, it would have been a circle for the history books. His history, specifically. The core spellwork might have been Raven’s, but Myron was the one who’d arranged it into a masterpiece of magical engineering. The repurposed circle in front of them was some of the finest work he’d ever done, and the knowledge that no one but Algonquin’s troops was ever likely to see it was physically painful. Though not as painful as what he had to do next.
He stood with a bracing breath, turning to glare at the lake, who was still wearing his face. “I’ve done my part. The control circle is complete and filled to the brim, precisely as promised. Now it’s your turn, Algonquin. Tell me what Mortal Spirit we are raising to make me Merlin.”
This was the question that had been plaguing him from the moment he switched sides. Algonquin had always spoken of gathering magic to raise her own Mortal Spirit, but she’d never actually said which spirit she was working to fill. Myron had caught a glimpse of its shape in the dragon blood when he’d been on his belly under the Leviathan during the disaster with Novalli, but not enough to determine its nature or domain or even how big it would ultimately be. He’d asked Algonquin for specifics countless times after joining her, but she’d always put his questions off, promising to tell him when, and only when, the time came.
Given how he’d come to his position, Myron had assumed she was just being cautious. He had no illusions about her opinion of his trustworthiness, and he did not take offense. Keeping mission-critical information hidden from a questionable ally was only logical. Now that he’d seen the location she’d chosen for the summoning, though, Myron was beginning to worry that Algonquin’s reasons for keeping her spirit secret had nothing to do with security.
“Why are we doing this here?” he demanded, looking nervously around at the unnatural darkness of the Pit. “I told you when I joined, I’m not summoning any more death spirits.” It had been his only stipulation. He’d seen where Novalli’s deal with that devil had led, and he wanted no part of it. Not even to fulfill his dream of being Merlin. Fortunately, Algonquin was shaking her head.
“I’m well aware of the qualities of this place,” she said, looking at the blackness as though she expected something to come charging out of it. “But as much as I’d prefer to do this somewhere that didn’t reek of mortal fear and death, it must be here, because here is where it began.”
She waved her water at the surrounding land, which Myron only now noticed wasn’t flat like the rest of the city. It was sloping, the grid roads and destroyed yards of the crushed houses around them all tilting down at the same angle to form the bowl of a shallow, city-block-sized crater, which they were currently standing at the bottom of.
“This is where it started,” Algonquin said, staring at the sloping land. “Six decades ago, this was the exact spot where the wave of my anger first crashed down. The echo of that rage mixed with the terror of those it killed to form the magic you feel now. The combination was so virulent and tenacious, I was forced to seal it off to prevent it from seeping back into my water. But sad as the loss of any land is, it’s not all bad. The magic of the Pit may be vile, but it’s thicker than anywhere else in the city, because this is where she was born.”
A chill went through Myron’s body. “She who?”
“My city,” Algonquin said, tilting her head to stare up at the black underbelly of the Skyways above them. “Did you never wonder why I would conquer the very city that had abused me most? Why I chose to rebuild Detroit instead of washing it clean off the map?”
“Of course I wondered,” Myron said, fighting to keep the excitement out of his voice. “Everyone’s wondered. They’ve even got a name for it in the Spirit Affairs Office: ‘the Paradox of the DFZ.’ It’s quite famous.”
That was criminal understatement. The question of why Algonquin, who famously cared more for fish than people, would pour herself into rebuilding a human city from a flooded wasteland into one of the biggest, densest, richest cities in the world was the most hotly contested mystery of the post-magical era.
The leading theory was that she needed the DFZ to get a foot in the door for spirits on the international stage, but other than a handful of sweeping statements like the announcement she’d made after killing the Three Sisters, Algonquin had never bothered with politics. All she seemed to care about was growing the DFZ itself, reinvesting all the earnings from her multiple patents, technology companies, financial institutions, security contracts, and entertainment studios back into the city itself. The result was the fastest-growing metropolis in human history, and still, no one understood…
“Why?” he asked, looking her straight in his own reflected eyes. “Why the DFZ? Did you just want your own piece on the political board, or—”
Algonquin scoffed. “What you call politics is nothing but apes dancing in front of fires, marveling at the shadows they cast. But foolish and shortsighted as all human power structures are, your magic is real. The damage you do, the harm you cause, the monsters you create from your fear: these are humanity’s powers, and they are what I built this city to stop.”
“That makes no sense,” Myron argued. “If humanity’s evils are what you hate, then creating the Detroit Free Zone was the absolute worst thing you could have done. You made a place where vice runs rampant. Where drugs and guns are sold in vending machines, and murder is punished with a fine. The only reason this city isn’t the most crime ridden in the world is because you also made nothing illegal. The only laws you’ve ever passed are anti-water pollution, fishing ordinances, and the ban on dragons. If you think we’re all just ignorant dancing apes, why would you create a city that does nothing to restrain us?”
“Because you cannot be restrained,” she said angrily, her watery voice sharp as cracked ice. “I’ve lived with your kind since you began. I’ve seen human nature in all its guises, and I can say without doubt that you are selfish, brutish creatures. You consume everything, including each other, in your relentless drive to rise to the top of your own sweaty heap.”
“But we’re not all like that,” Myron argued.
“Aren’t you?” she said coldly. “My city says otherwise.”
“Because you made no laws!”
“If you were really good, you wouldn’t need laws,” she shot back. “That’s my point. I’ve seen how you behave over generations. It would be easier to stop the sun from rising than to make humanity act in a responsible fashion, so I didn’t try. Instead, I built you a place where you could be as awful, selfish, and self-destructive as you liked. No rules or restrictions, just desires and the freedom to pursue them. I gave you a blank slate, a Detroit Free Zone. You were the ones who turned it into this.”
She lifted her hands up to the Skyways overhead. “The DFZ was your making, not mine. I built the elevated ramps because I needed conduits to channel magic into the proper forms for my Reclamation Land projects, but you were the ones who turned them into a division where the rich live literally on top of the poor. You’re absolutely right when you say the DFZ is a terrible city, but I’m not to blame. I merely gave you the shovel and let you dig, and now that the hole is wide and deep, all I have to do is step back and let it bury you.”
His reflection shot him a cruel smile as she finished, but Myron barely noticed. He’d thrown his lot in with Algonquin because that was the price of becoming the first Merlin, but whatever Emily thought, he wasn’t a traitor. Sometimes you had to do the wrong thing to get the right end, up to and including working with a walking, talking natural disaster. It wasn’t until this moment, though, that Myron realized the true depth of the contempt the Lady of the Lakes held for their kind, and the more she insulted him, the clearer her purpose in bringing him here became.
“That’s it,” he whispered at last, voice shaking. “The DFZ is ours, not yours. Humanity made it.” He looked down at the silted ground in horrified wonder. “The city is the spirit.”
Algonquin chuckled. “You are a clever human.”
It wasn’t a compliment, but Myron had no time to waste being insulted. Now that she’d put the pieces together for him, he felt like a fool for not realizing the truth sooner. The DFZ was Algonquin’s Mortal Spirit. Not just the physical city, but the idea of it, the addictive promise of a city of absolute freedom that had been hammered down through countless movies, shows, novels, and video games over the past sixty years. The concept of the DFZ as a place where anything could happen and anyone could go to start a new life was so common, it was its own family of clichés, and that was the entire point. Algonquin hadn’t built a city. She’d created a hook for people to hang their dreams on, a place to pin their hopes and ambitions and greed. The DFZ wasn’t just a dot on the map. It was a concept, a collection of discrete ideas and hopes, fears and feelings. A Mortal Spirit, and he was standing right on top of it.
“Now you understand,” Algonquin said, reaching out to pat Myron’s graying hair with a watery tendril. “You were right, Myron. I had no need for a human city. What I needed was a vessel. A concept for you to cling to and fill with your own ideas, because that’s how human magic works. You take something innocent, like a city, and you give it power by projecting your fears and desires on top of it. On a person-by-person level, it doesn’t add up to much. But sell a dream to the world—combine the ambition of thousands, millions, billions of humans—and you end up with monsters no one can control, including yourselves.” She tilted the reflection of his head. “Now do you understand why we were willing to die to stop the rising magic from bringing them to life?”
Myron had understood from the moment he’d first seen Marci Novalli’s death spirit. All Algonquin’s explanation had done, besides satisfy his curiosity, was add even more weight to his resolve and a new, broader target for his end game. “I understand you perfectly, madame,” he said, stepping away from her touch. “These spirits are terrifying, and it is in all of our best interests to stop them.” He moved to the edge of the circle. “Ready to begin when you are.”
“Oh,” Algonquin said, clearly surprised by his sudden and unequivocal agreement. “Well, glad to know there are humans who can grasp the larger picture.”
“I have always had a clear vision of what must be done,” Myron replied, flashing her his famous smile, the one he normally saved for photo shoots. But while his outside was perfectly collected, his mind was boiling with a terrified anger that could no longer be contained.
Sir Myron Rollins had always prided himself on being a man who got things done. He’d built his career doing what other, lesser mages claimed to be impossible. But while many did not agree with his methods, Myron had always found that no one complained after the battle was won. Today would be no different. Emily could call him a traitor all she liked, but when this was over, the world would know him as the Merlin who saved humanity from the spirits.
Starting with Algonquin herself.
Clutching Emily’s head under his arm, Myron smiled one last time at the Lady of the Lakes and stepped into the circle. The moment he crossed the silver line, the loops of carefully arranged metal ribbon that had once been Emily Jackson’s body lit up like phosphorus, filling even the inky dark of the Pit with blinding light. There was so much power, simply stepping into the circle should have burned out every mage in a ten-mile radius—including him—for months, possibly forever.
As always, though, Emily protected him. So long as he held on to the general’s head, the spellwork Raven had carved inside it all those years ago shielded him as it had once shielded Emily’s humanity from the relentless onslaught of spirit-level magic. But unlike his former partner, Myron was no mere pilot. He was a mage, the best alive, and his name now replaced Raven’s at the spellwork’s crux. With it, the blinding magic was his to control, to press and beat and mold like clay into the form he’d caught a glimpse of in the blood pool back in Reclamation land. The shape that, as he formed it, he realized he could now see mirrored beneath him.
It was a marvelous thing to witness a new spirit’s birth. Normally, human eyes couldn’t see magic the way spirits, dragons, or even magical animals could. With so much power in his hands, though, Myron didn’t need to see. He could feel the DFZ spreading out below him like a bottomless pit.
Like most modern mages, Myron had spent years studying the Spirits of the Land. He’d even bound a few in an attempt to learn how their magic functioned. But while every spirit’s structure was famously and frustratingly unique, the one characteristic they all shared was that they were measurable. The magic contained in the spirit of a lake or a mountain always mirrored their physical forms. Animal spirits were trickier since you were working with the combined volume of an animal population’s magical potential rather than landmasses, but the general idea was the same. When it came to the magic of land and animal spirits, what you saw was what you got.
The spirit he stood on now was something else entirely.
It was unfathomably massive. How massive, he couldn’t yet say, but the record-breaking mass of magic he’d crammed into Emily’s circle barely registered beside it. Whatever was below him, it was far, far bigger than the city that had spawned it. Bigger than the Lady of the Great Lakes. Bigger than any spirit he’d encountered before. It was almost too big to comprehend, and to his amazement, it was already nearly full.
As he stood in the backwash of so much power, all Myron could think was that at least this solved the riddle of why the DFZ’s ambient magic was always so much higher than the rest of the world’s. It was sitting on this, a magical vein deeper and richer than all the spirits around it combined. He wasn’t sure yet how much of that was the product of the Algonquin’s magic-siphoning efforts in Reclamation Land and how much was the natural result of humans attaching their hopes to the city, but wherever its power had come from, the nascent spirit was on the cusp. It stirred as he watched, throwing off a mess of emotions every bit as wild, violent, and desperate as the city that had created it. One more drop, and it would wake completely.
Fortunately, a drop was what he had. Next to the thing below, the magic contained in Raven’s Construct—the combined power of dozens of spirits, more magic than any human had ever gathered in one circle—was nothing, not even a percent, but it was enough. When Myron let the power go, it hit the sleeping spirit like a catalyst, spidering down through the seemingly bottomless magic like lightning. It was still going when an alarm began to sound from the phone in Myron’s pocket.
A smile spread over his face. He didn’t even have to bring up his AR to know what the alarm was for. It was the sensors at his New York lab, the ones he’d rigged to monitor the deep magic. Two weeks ago, that same alarm had tipped him off to Marci Novalli. This time, Myron knew it was ringing for him. Down below, the enormous magic was coalescing into a form. It was still chaotic, but within that chaos, structure was emerging, and structure meant rules. Rules Myron now set out to enforce as he took hold of Emily’s spellwork and pushed his magic through it, closing the silver circle like a noose at the exact moment the newborn spirit breached the physical world for the first time.
Even though he’d worked out all the theory himself, seeing it in action was still miraculous. In the middle of his circle, magic was being forced into solid form before his eyes. It rippled and shifted several times before finally stabilizing into the shape of a person. An emaciated young woman wearing a long-sleeved black hoodie, black leggings, and sneakers.
Aside from her thinness, she looked shockingly normal. Even her clothes were remarkably nondescript, super generic, one-size-fits-all throwaways they sold in vending machines. She was the sort of person you saw everywhere in the DFZ, one of the millions of hungry, possibly homeless, definitely impoverished hopefuls who filled the Underground in droves. If he didn’t know what she was, Myron could have walked past her on the street without so much as noticing, which he supposed was the point. In a city this big, anyone could disappear into the crowd. Looking unremarkable was a good defense in the DFZ, and defense was clearly what the spirit wanted given the fear rolling off her in waves as she looked around at the silver prison Myron had made.
What is this? Her voice was a panicked gasp in his mind. She pressed against the glowing wall cast by the spellwork next, beating on the barrier when it wouldn’t let her through. Let me go!
“No,” Myron said, gripping Emily’s head, and the mastery it granted, firmly in his hands. “Allow me to explain what is happening. You are the spirit of the DFZ.”
She spun around, looking at him in wonder through round eyes that glowed the same orange as the city streetlights. That’s my name!
“It is,” he said smugly. “And I know it. I am Sir Myron Rollins, and now, by your name and this circle, you are bound to me.”
The spirit recoiled. No, she said, shaking her head. I am free. I—
“You are a dangerous spirit born of humanity’s chaos, ambition, and greed,” he said over her. “It is my duty as a mage to chain you for all of our protection. I will not be a cruel master, but I will not tolerate disobedience. Is this understood?”
No! she cried again, her thin lips curling in hate. I have no master. I am the DFZ. I am freedom! I—
Myron yanked on the magic running through the spellwork that bore his name, and a collar appeared around the spirit’s throat. It was made from the same silver metal ribbon as the rest of the circle, but unlike the spellwork on the ground, these ribbons followed the movements of Myron’s hand as he gripped down, squeezing the spirit in a binding as hard and unforgiving as steel.
“Is this understood?” he repeated as she fell to her knees.
The DFZ fought him frantically. She hissed and bared her teeth, scraping her bony fingers frantically at the noose around her neck. Powerful as she was, though, she was also new. A baby, uncertain of her strength and terrified of the pain Myron was inflicting. It was terribly unfair, but ruthlessness was the only edge he had over a power so much greater than himself. If he was going to make this work, he had to be in control, so he ignored her pain and dug in deeper, binding the spirit until she was gasping at his feet. He’d almost cut her magic in half before she finally gave in, her head dropping in a limp nod as she finally acknowledged his control.
“Excellent,” Myron said, easing up just a fraction. “Now, take me where I need to go.”
The DFZ looked up from the ground in confusion. Where you need to go?
“The Merlin Gate.”
When that failed to elicit an immediate reaction, he yanked the spirit to her knees. “I know you know where it is. Unlike Marci Novalli’s premature horror, you were born of fully formed magic. You should know instinctively how to find the Heart of the World. Take me there now, or suffer again.”
The ultimatum was a gamble. Myron knew better than to let his doubt show, but the truth was he’d only read mentions of the Heart of the World in stories. From what he could gather, it seemed to be some kind of Merlin headquarters, a safe haven built into the deep magic of the world. He knew it was real thanks to Algonquin, but the actual mechanics of getting there and entering the gate were complete guesswork. Marci Novalli’s cat hadn’t known anything, but he was hardly representative. His entire existence was a mistake, a premature Mortal Spirit born of death and the spillover from Algonquin’s attempts to raise this one, but the DFZ was different. She’d been born properly, and since the Heart of the World was located in the spirit’s side of things, and every Merlin had a Mortal Spirit by definition, it only made sense that she would be the key.
At least, that was Myron’s hope. A hope that paid off when, after several seconds of confused staring followed by defiant glaring, the DFZ turned around and began to dig.
It was the strangest thing he’d ever seen. Hunched on the ground like a gremlin, the spirit attacked the silt-covered road with her bony fingers, flinging the dirt over her head and onto her back. But though she was moving an impressive amount of material, the hole beneath her never seemed to get any deeper. Instead, the DFZ herself began to change, her shape twisting beneath the piled, sludgy dirt of the Pit until she didn’t even look human anymore. She looked like a rat. Not a normal rat, either, but one of the giant, magically awakened sewer rats that infested the pipes of old Detroit. The ones that ate large dogs and small children.
A few minutes later, it was no longer just a matter of looks. She was a rat. A huge, black, obviously unearthly one with beady eyes that flashed orange like water under a streetlight. It was absolutely terrifying, which, from the evil looks she kept shooting him, was undoubtedly the point. But no matter how much the DFZ changed shape, the collar around her throat never budged. So long as that was true, Myron was still in control, a fact he was tempted to remind her of when the spirit suddenly found whatever she’d been digging for.
She stopped at once, lifting up her paws to show Myron a wide, filthy disk. Between the dirt and the dark, it took him several seconds to realize it was a manhole cover. But while it made sense that there would still be sewers here—Grosse Point had been an affluent suburb before its destruction—the tunnel she’d unveiled didn’t look like any sewer maintenance shaft Myron had ever seen. It didn’t even have a ladder, just a round hole going straight down into blackness.
“Are you sure that’s it?”
You told me to show you the way, the rat reminded him. This is mine. If you’re too chicken to jump, that’s your problem.
Myron glowered. Another time, he would have stopped everything and dealt with her rudeness right there. If things went the way he hoped, though, theirs would not be a long relationship, so he didn’t bother. He just held out his hand and said, “After you.”
With a final dirty look, the spirit scurried down the hole, her massive body sliding through the much smaller opening like a garden slug going down a straw. With a deep breath and a final look over his shoulder at the blinding wall of magic that hid Algonquin, Myron jumped after her. It wasn’t until he started falling, though, that he realized he’d left his body behind. He could actually see it falling over at the edge of the shrinking hole with Emily’s head still clutched in his hands. That was all Myron was able to catch before the DFZ’s tail wrapped around him, dragging him down into the churning magical dark.