Unbinding (11 page)

“Agreed,” Nathan said, and stood. “We’ll go outside, I think.”

K
AI,
Nathan, and Cullen went out back for the big reveal. Nathan led them to the middle of the upper deck, where he stopped, glanced around absently, then moved slightly to his left. Kai knew what that meant. Nathan had taught her a spell to do what he did instinctively: find true north, a necessity for casting a circle.

“The two of you stand still for a moment, please.” He then walked around them, humming. He circled them three times, nodded once, and stepped inside the circle he’d set. He gave Cullen a quick, amused look. “That’s to keep anyone from accidentally overhearing us.”

The sorcerer was staring at what, to Kai’s eyes, was empty air. “That is a very handy type of ward. How does it work? What would you take to teach me how to do that? I’ve got a couple spells—original ones, so you won’t know them—that are pretty useful. You might want to consider a trade.”

“We can discuss such things later. Please drop your shields.”

Cullen grimaced, but an instant later Kai saw his colors for the first time. The orange was no surprise. Cullen Seabourne was confident enough for five normal men. The mossy green lacing it seemed to be common to his people; she’d never seen that exact shade in the thoughts of anyone who wasn’t lupi. The annoyed red-orange wasn’t unexpected, either. But those purple threads were.

Surely that couldn’t be what it looked like? Lupi were of the Blood, after all, so she expected to see purple in their thoughts. But not that shade of purple.

Nathan spoke formally. “The promise I need from you, Cullen Seabourne, is that you will zealously guard and protect from revelation the information I am about to give you; that you will not reveal or attempt to reveal it to anyone save your Rho; that you will only reveal it to your Rho if you are convinced the need to do so is profound; and that such revelation will place your clan under debt burden to the Queen of Winter, with that burden inversely proportional to the level of need.”

Cullen’s scowl didn’t abate as he repeated, word for word, the promise Nathan asked, ending with, “I so swear.” His colors held no trace of the pus green of a deliberate lie. In fact, the purple threads flared briefly—a clear sign of deeply felt conviction. And those threads sure as hell looked like the same amethyst she often saw in Nathan’s thoughts, or in others of the Wild Sidhe. Or in those descended from one of the Wild Sidhe. Such descendants were rare, and how one could have ended up on Earth . . .

She looked from Cullen to Nathan, drawing more strongly on her Gift as she compared their colors. Well. Now she knew why Cullen was the only Gifted lupus. Did he know? “He considers himself fully bound by his vow,” she told Nathan.

“Thank you,” Nathan said gravely. “I apologize for any perceived insult, Cullen. If my Queen were here to safeguard the loan of her information, she could have verified your integrity in ways I can’t. Since she isn’t, I must in all honor do what I’m able to.”

Cullen’s shields must have come back up, because his colors winked out. He leaned forward. “
Her
information?”

“Winter wanted to be sure I understood who and what I’d be dealing with when she sent me to kill the artifact Nam Anthessa, so she explained some things in depth. Some of it I already knew, but . . . eh.” He rubbed his nose. “I’m starting this backward. Best begin with what you know. Where does magic come from?”

“There are a dozen theories about that, but none that I—wait a minute.” His eyes narrowed. “That’s what this is about? It can’t be. The source of magic has been debated for centuries, but from what I can tell, even the adepts gave up on finding real proof for any of the theories.”

“Are you not prepared to believe what I tell you, then?”

Cullen stared at him intently. “It truly comes from the Queen of Winter?”

“It truly does.”

“Then . . .” Cullen took a deep breath, as if readying himself to leap from a very high place. “I will believe you.”

Nathan nodded once. “Magic is the product of the friction between chaos and order. Specifically, it is the friction between the realms, which are ordered, and that which lies between the realms, which is chaos.”

Cullen stood absolutely still. She wasn’t altogether certain he was breathing.

Kai looked at Nathan. “I don’t get it. That’s the big secret?”

His mouth quirked. “I should have asked for your silence, too.”

“Okay. But why?”

“There are those who would torture you for that information if they so much as suspected you possessed it.”

“That’s a great reason for me to keep quiet, but I still don’t get why it’s such a big deal.”

“Because the information comes from Winter. As Cullen said, there are myriad theories about the source of magic, yet only a very small number of beings in all the realms suspect the full truth. Even fewer are certain. You don’t see what it means. I’m not sure I do, either. But he does.”

“Son of a bitch,” Cullen breathed.

“I’m afraid he’s precisely the sort of person my Queen would prefer to keep that information away from,” Nathan went on. “Seeing that—”

“Addler’s Theorem of Two Spaces,” Cullen muttered. “And gates. By God, gates must be a way of dodging the chaos altogether, not just bridging it, which means—”

“—he can grasp the ramifications and put them to use.”

“—they
can’t
be a product of temporal displacement, the way Perez insisted. Son of a bitch!” Cullen repeated with great satisfaction. “
That’s
what happened when the realms shifted!”

Nathan nodded. “Yes, that’s why you’ve more magic here now. Chaos is once more pressing against the order in your realm. The point I want you to think about is what this says about Dyffaya. A god of chaos, you see, has a great deal of power available to him.”

Cullen’s eyebrows snapped down. “He ought to be bloody unstoppable.”

“He very nearly was, I understand, before he was killed.”

“Wait a minute,” Kai said. “I’m not following. Why does being the god of chaos mean he’s got mega-oomphs of power?”

Cullen looked at her as if just then remembering she existed. “Because a god of chaos must have some
access
to chaos. If he can bring even the smallest mote of it through to our realm—” He looked at Nathan. “Is there any way to quantify what would happen then?”

“There may be, but I don’t know it.” Nathan met Kai’s puzzled eyes. “Likely friction doesn’t sound very powerful to you. Think of bringing order and chaos together as similar to what happens when matter and antimatter touch.”

Kai did think about that for a couple scary seconds. “That would be mega-oomphs, all right.”

“However, Dyffaya has a problem bringing in that mote of chaos because he can’t enter a realm himself. His body was killed and he can’t enter any of the realms without a body.”

Cullen’s eyebrows climbed. “And yet he planned to do just that.”

“Not exactly. He was trying to disrupt the time-stream so severely it would allow him to pull his original body into the present.”

“You’re joking,” Kai said. Only clearly he wasn’t. “But if he yanked his still-living body out of the past, wouldn’t he be bringing his former self along with it? And then his body wouldn’t have been around when whoever-it-was killed him, so he wouldn’t have died after all, so—”

“I don’t pretend to understand it. I’m telling you what Winter told me. He needed Nam Anthessa to do that. Without the knife, he’s limited to acting from outside this realm. Cullen? Are you listening?”

With a visible effort, Cullen dragged himself back from whatever fresh thought had held him enraptured. “Sure. Go ahead.”

“Just as chaos disrupts order, so order destroys chaos. This is why the chaos energy set loose by Nam Anthessa’s death is not pure chaos, but an amalgam of chaos,
arguai
, and magic. When the knife was whole, it held chaos bound up in spirit to protect it from the order in our realms. When the knife shattered, that chaos came into greater contact with order, which means—“

“Of course. Of course. Freshly minted magic, and tons of it.” Cullen paced three quick steps, stopped, and turned. “Think of what this tells us about nodes! Node magic is the most powerful because it’s freshly created, and so is the least ordered. Do you see what that means?” That was more demand than question.

“Not as clearly as you, I suspect, but—”

“That’s why it’s so much harder to work with node energy, slightly easier to work with ley lines—not that you can’t blow yourself up that way, too. It’s why plant-based magic is the safest and the weakest. Living things are complex, which means they’re highly ordered, so their magic is, too. Although that doesn’t explain why living things like you and me can possess a great deal of magic—”

“Because of our
kiths,
” Kai put in, getting into the spirit of discovery. “Somehow our grounds filter the magic in a way that doesn’t order it as completely as a plant would.”

“That makes sense. And the ramifications go on and on. Intent is a key component to every spell and the hardest to master, but I think . . . yes, by all the gods, that’s why Gifts are so much stronger than spells! It must be! A Gift lets us impose intent on magic without any other components, which means no power is lost through the additional ordering those other components impose. My God, this is huge!” Cullen’s eyes glowed with a zealot’s joy. “Then there’s the so-called lunar limit on charms—not that I see how exactly that ties in, but it must. When I think of—”

“Don’t,” Nathan said firmly. “Not right now.”

“—the implications for the way we classify magic—”

“Cullen.”

“Take mind magic, for one. That has to be highly ordered, doesn’t it? While fire is closer to chaos, so it—”

“Cullen! There’s a god who wants to dabble in your realm, and while he’s at it, he’d like very much to kill Rule Turner and harm or kill Lily Yu. I’d like you to pay attention to that particular ramification for a moment.”

“Right.” Cullen drew in a slow breath. “I see that this Dyffaya has beaucoup power to sling around because the chaos energy creates it for him. He didn’t before because that power was bound up in Nam Anthessa, but he does now. Yet he can’t enter our realm, so he’s limited to the power generated by the bits of chaos energy set free by the knife’s destruction. Or so we think.” He frowned thoughtfully. “Eventually those bits will be used up, won’t they?”

“I’d think so, but how long is ‘eventually’? A week, a century, several centuries? I have no idea, and no idea how we could find out. Then there’s the
arguai
, the spiritual energy. Dyffaya is a god. He can use that.”

Kai said, “But no one here worships him.”

“Not him, no, but chaos is important here as it is everywhere. Anarchists celebrate it, the mad are trapped in it, and artists and creators of all sorts draw upon it. As does everyone who works with magic.”

Cullen blinked. “Shit.”

“None of those ties to chaos means that those people actively worship Dyffaya, but their connection to chaos matters to the spiritual side of things.” Nathan paused and frowned. “Not that I know how, exactly.”

They all fell silent, contemplating the possible resources of a god tied to magic in such a fundamental way. After a moment, Kai spoke slowly. “There’s something I don’t understand.”

Cullen’s eyebrows lifted again. “Only one thing?”

She ignored that. “He’s the god of chaos, so that’s what he draws on. But if intention supplies order, then isn’t he acting antichaos every time he uses his power intentionally?”

Nathan beamed at her. “That is very much what Winter told me. Yes, he is, and that’s an important limitation. Every time he acts toward a goal it imposes order, which drains some of his spiritual power. He’s done a lot of that, so I think he must be spiritually depleted. He’s more likely to use magic against us than spiritual attacks. Kai and I can’t be compelled, but—”

Cullen broke in. “Listen, I need to get a look at chaos energy.”

“We can try to arrange that,” Nathan said. “But first I have to stress that you are not to try to touch it or use it yourself.”

“I’m not an idiot. It would be as hard to control as node energy, so only as a last resort—”

“Not as a last resort. Not under any circumstances. Three components to chaos energy, Cullen: magic, spirit, and chaos. And basically, the spiritual part
is
Dyffaya.”

“You think he would take over my mind if I tried to handle chaos energy.”

“You can’t use it without touching it, can you? And if you touch it, he’d have you. Your shields won’t work against a spiritual assault. Unless you’ve the sort of soul-deep faith that might allow you to resist . . ? I didn’t think so. Then there’s that kernel of chaos at the core. Try to bring it under your control and you expose it to order.”

“And—boom.” Cullen huffed out an impatient breath. “I get it, okay? No messing with the chaos energy.”

“Good. Now that we’re clear on that, I’d like you to figure out how to destroy it without destroying half the state.”

Cullen stared at him. “You just finished explaining why I can’t. Pretty damn convincingly, too.”

“Destroying it wouldn’t be the same as trying to use it, now, would it?”