To Answer Need

The house is a small, single-storey affair so drab it almost vanishes into the homes around it. The picket fence is black rather than white, the lawn immaculate in its plainness. Nothing about it jumps out as strange, but even so I’m not surprised when the wandering magician opens the front gate and walks in. I follow carefully. I’m no magician, but we’ve travelled together off and on for almost five years. I feel the wards he pulls up around us, my own power responding to the energy.

Being a god eater doesn’t mean many things, not these days. But it does mean I can eat other energy; I’ve never been foolish enough to test my power against his magic. There are limits, no matter who or what you are. Even he has limits, though sometimes it’s hard to realize that. We’re both human, for all we’ve been and done. He’s bound to a creature from far Outside the universe; there is a god inside me that stirs even now. I feel fur about, claws nothing human can see. A threat, somewhere.

The woman who comes out of the front door of the home is almost as wide as she is tall. She comes up to my shoulder and a long black dress both hugs her and flows about her. Her eyes are dark pits, hollows of rage and despair and the promise of death in her clenched fists. Her teeth are sharp and distressingly white as she bares her teeth. She moves down the stairs with the certainty of an avalanche, her voice inhumanly cold and controlled.

“You are the wandering magician.” The magician nods. “And the god eater; I have heard of you.” Her gaze flicks over me, and back to the magician. “I enter the universe under the auspices of the Cone and the Grave. I am a graduate of the Deep School, part of this world and universe for all that I am from Outside it.” Her voice is low and rolling, waves mingled with thunder.

There is no storm above us. I can’t shake the feeling that there should be one.

“You are bound against acting in the universe,” the magician says softly. “Yet you wish to: your need called me here.”

“That was a day ago.” There is death in those words, naked fury in her eyes. She holds her human form with obvious effort. Her right hand jerks up, and she gestures. Short, sharp. There is energy here, and power, but it is too alien for me to try and eat – even if I was fool enough to try. An image. A human girl. Short, also. Large, but not as large as her mother. Pale, and then – other things, as well. Wounds. Holes. The image vanishes, snaps out of existence.

“My daughter is dead, magician. I demand a response. This is not a matter for human justice.”

“There are other justices. You know who I am. And what?” the magician asks gently.

“I have heard stories.”

“Some are true. This truth I offer to your grief: I am bound to Jayseltosche, who is also from Outside the universe. Jay is, at present, visiting those responsible for the death of your daughter. They will never hurt anyone else again, not in word or deed.”

“That is not enough. They must suffer,” the woman says, and I swear the world buckles around us at the word. For a moment her will imposes some place Other. Some alien wildness that I feel rather than see, know rather than sense as my brain goes blank rather than try to explain it.

“Jay is eleven, for all that he is also from Outside.” The magician lets out a sigh. “There are many things he does not understand. They are trying to explain why they broke so many bindings to him. He is explaining that they were not jaysome at all.”

The woman pauses. Some of the fury settles within her. “That term I know.”

“Jay does get around,” the magician says dryly.

The woman’s laugh surprises her. “You think that will be enough?” she asks. No demand, no bluster to cover for the laugh. She knows herself, and hides nothing.

“What do you know of Jay?” I ask.

The woman turns her gaze back to me. Part of me wishes she wouldn’t, that she’d forget I was here. I hold her gaze despite that, holding the god inside me as tightly. Power always wants to test power; this isn’t the time for that. If there ever is one, this isn’t it at all.

“I have heard of him. That he makes friends with anyone. That he is a force of nature without knowing he is one. That he can bind anything, but would never dream of abusing that. That no power in the universe is as deep as he is, though he is unaware of this. I know you are his friends, and I do not envy you the burden of that. But it changes nothing.”

“Jay won’t make friends with them. For what they did, to your daughter and the others. That will –.” I pause, trying to find words. “There are places Outside the universe that are as real as the universe, as solid as it. You know of them?”

“You should not know of the Far Reaches,” the woman says. There is a fear in her voice at even mentioning them.

“You’ve seen them?”

“Once.”

Which says more than enough about how scary she is. “Imagine being on them. Part of them. Knowing you could be part of them, and then being denied it. Losing friendship with Jay, losing all chances of being jaysome: that is worse than that by far.”

The woman holds my gaze for a moment, then turns back to the wandering magician. “You impress me with your choice of friends.”

“Charlie has her talents. Sometimes,” he adds, after a pause I’ll make him pay for later. “But she does speak truth.”

“They will kill themselves.”

“They won’t. Because then Jay would be very sad. They are going to spend their entire lives trying to be jaysome, to become friends with him, to explain and make amends. And they never will, but I doubt Jay is aware of that. He will hold out a promise they can never have, not understanding he is hurting them. You cannot make them suffer more than this, not by killing them or by keeping them alive.”

“Magician.” There is grudging respect in the word.

“I am sorry I could not be earlier. And Jay – wanted to help, not understand he couldn’t at all. This is not the first time I have done this,” the magician adds, softer still, not hiding what it costs him.

“Another burden,” the woman says, as softly.

“Not as great as your own.”

The woman nods. “I will abide. By rules and law, I hold to my pact.”

“I had hoped you would.” And the wandering magician smiles, his own smile a flash of ice. “You will have another child, and the rules and laws will not apply when you protect them.”

The woman goes still. The dress – not a dress at all – as frozen as her expression. “... who are you, to promise that? What are you, to change my arrangement?”

“Someone who can borrow power to change bindings,” the magician says mildly.

“Not only that.”

“Only that for now,” he says. He doesn’t move, but there are depths here I am not certain I understand at all. Not a secret, nothing so small as that.

The woman nods to the both of us, her movements slow and stiff. “I thank you for your aid.”

“I am sorry for your loss,” the magician says.

We turn, and are at the gate when Jay comes bounding up to us, stepping through the world from some other place. No one notices, because he is jaysome.

“Honcho honcho honcho!”

“Yes?” the wandering magician says.

“I tried making friends with the people who broke bindings but! it didn’t work and everything went weirdy,” Jay flings out. “I think maybe I didn’t want to, even if being jaysome is important for everyone so I was figuring you could fix it!”

“Ah. I can try, at least.”

“Okay. Hi,” Jay adds, waving to the woman.

She waves back, her expression dazed under the force of a jaysome grin of innocent pride and unbridled joy.

The magician asks Jay to take him to the people so he can talk with them, and they vanish between moments.

The woman walks over toward me. Slow, but beside the gate before I move. She opens them for me.

“Jaysome.”

I nod. “He is that.”

“To lose that – it will be enough, I think,” she says, finally understanding. “I am in the debt of the wandering magician.”

“No. There are no debts, not against grief.”

The woman stares into me for a long moment. And nods. She says nothing else.

I walk away. Jay texts me before I’ve gone half a block, saying Honcho is confusled too and they probably need KFC. I have a feeling this is going to be a very long night, but not as long as it could have been.