Archive of Our Own

Antryg turned over the last card in the layout and sighed. "I'm sorry, my dear."

The woman across the table from him burst into tears.

Antryg handed her the box of disposable tissues. Mrs. Pittman had given him a sort of cross-stitched cozy for the box, each side decorated with one of the Major Arcana. It was still, as Joanna had pointed out, "Not quite as classy as Magus's scented handkerchiefs."

"But far more hygienic," Antryg said. "And cheaper to boot."

Price was an important consideration, given the volume he went through. No one came to have their best hopes and great expectations confirmed; they came to hear from someone else the answer they already feared in their secret heart was true.

No, he will not leave his wife. No, he is not trustworthy. Yes, he will break your heart.

There was no magic in it. The cards fell where they would, and he read the people as much as the cards themselves.

His latest broken-hearted querent blew her nose with one final mournful honk. "Well, shit," she said, wiping her eyes and trying for watery smile. "I guess this means I'll have to find a new apartment, huh?"

After she left, Antryg put the tissue box back on the sideboard and gathered the cards back into a neat stack.

There was a tentative knock on the door, and when he saw that it was Jemal and Zylima, he thought it meant his day would improve. For a desert city, L.A. suffered from a shocking dearth of tortoises.

But they had not brought him a tortoise; instead they brought him a small, dark-haired boy with a very solemn face.

"This is Luis," Jemal said. "He needs your help."

"What's wrong?"

"His sister is missing."

Antryg's eyebrows went up of their own accord. "I see," he said.

"You brought Buster back," Jemal said. "You can help us find Ana, right?"

Buster was Zylima's dog, a scrawny, black and white creature of decidedly mixed bloodlines. It had slipped its collar and escaped their backyard. Antryg had put a little "come here" cantrip on the abandoned collar, but he thought the dog's eventual return was due more to habit and the bowl of dog food they'd left out on the porch.

"Surely the police would be a better choice?" he asked gently.

Luis's eyes went huge and he seemed to shrink even more into himself. Zylima scowled at him and Jemal said firmly, "No. We can't go to the police. Luis would get in trouble. They would take him away." He put his arm around Luis's shoulder.

"Layla's mom said it was coyotes," Zylima offered helpfully.

Jemal shot her a quelling looking. When he looked up at Antryg again, some of his certainty had faded. "We just...we don't know who else to ask."

And, well, what could he say to that? "Tell me everything."

After they'd left, Antryg sat very still while his thoughts chased themselves in circles. Finally, with one quick, unthinking movement, he cut the deck of tarot cards and flipped the first exposed card over.

It was the eight of swords.

He flinched despite himself, and hurriedly reshuffled the deck.

The apartment smelled like lamb and lemon and spices when he came in; Joanna had gotten take-out from the Greek place on Sepulveda on her way back from meeting with a client.

They ate in front of the tv, watching a special on whales.

"Did you know," Antryg said, allowing Chainsaw to delicately snag a piece of gyros from his fingers, "that the fisherfolk of the Kalendytha archipelago believe that whales are old gods who have forgotten their own divinity?"

"Five seconds ago I didn't even know there was a Kalendytha archipelago, so no, I can't say that I did," Joanna said. "What's wrong?"

He looked up from the cats and found her watching him with soft eyes. "And here I thought I'd hidden it so well," he said lightly.

She snorted but didn't look away.

"The older sister of one of the neighborhood children is missing."

"Oh."

"She's nineteen. She was travelling from Mexicali with a few other people and was due to arrive here two days ago. They haven't heard anything from her since before she left. They're worried about her." He hesitated, and she didn't interrupt. "Apparently, people are saying the coyotes got her."

He'd seen coyotes a few times, coming off a late shift at Enyart's, glimpses of them trotting through the false dawn like skinny, desert-colored wolves with sly, sideways smiles. "But I don't think that's the kind of coyote they mean."

Joanna fiddled with her fork for a moment. He couldn't quite read her expression. "There's...people who will guide illegal immigrants across the border into the US for a fee. They're called coyotes, I think."

Antryg grimaced. "Ah."

"Are you going to help them?" It wasn't really a question.

"Well, if she's just been delayed on the road, it couldn't really hurt to look for her. And if she...hasn't — then frankly, I don't suppose it will matter one way or the other if I try."

Joanna nodded and gathered up the dinner dishes in silence.

She came back from the kitchen with baklava, though, and dropped a kiss on the top of his head.

As an exiled wizard in another universe, Antryg didn't have much call for the Master-Spells of the Archmage in his day-to-day life.

Still, he always knew they were there. He could feel them in the back of his mind, heavy as chains and fragile as butterflies.

He would dream about them sometimes, dream himself standing in that empty concrete river and cracking his own skull open to pull out the Master-Spells in great shining ropes. Dream himself binding the Void open with those ropes and stepping through.

He was never quite sure if they were nightmares or not.

The children came back exactly at ten o'clock the next day.

Luis shyly held out an old rag doll. "Grandma made it for her when she was little. Ana asked me to bring it here and protect it for her until she could come."

Antryg had asked Luis to bring something that belonged to his sister, if he had anything. The doll was better than he'd expected.

"Will it work?" Luis asked.

"If this doesn't, then nothing will."

The doll wore a little bead necklace, knotted close. "I'm going to take this off," Antryg said. "When I'm done, I'll put it back on again, good as new."

Luis did not object, but he did not look reassured.

Antryg wrapped the tiny string of beads around a crystal, not one of the cheap showy things that decorated the room where he did his readings, but a rough shard of quartz he'd stumbled on hiking in the desert. He tied a long strand of crimson thread to the crystal and spread a map of Los Angeles open on the kitchen table.

Joanna had marked the address of her apartment and Antryg's rented parlor with little red dots. He made sure the map was lined up with the cardinal directions and let the crystal dangle from the thread directly over the dot representing the bungalow. The crystal swung and twisted, and he breathed out, willing his thoughts to stillness.

He had no magic in this universe, but this universe had something, some sympathy to power. If it hadn't, the Master-Spells would have evaporated from his mind, and the Spell of Tongues would have failed, and the Council would never have been able to touch the dreams of Joanna and Ruth last summer.

So he breathed out and focused all his thoughts until all that was left was Please.

The crystal finally stopped moving, but instead of hanging perfectly straight, it pulled the thread at an angle, pointing south.

"Cool," Jemal whispered, eyes huge.

The children looked deeply impressed, and Antryg suspected he looked just as shocked himself.

He sent the children home after that. Luis told him to keep the doll, so he could give it to Ana when he found her.

"It will make her feel better."

"Of course," Antryg said gravely.

He took the doll, the map, and the crystal and set out on his bicycle, going south.

He stopped every few miles to check, but the crystal kept pulling south. Finally, he had to admit that wherever Ana was, she was probably beyond the reach of a wizard on a bicycle.

Clearly, he needed a car.

The problem, of course, was that he didn't know how to operate a car.

"Hey," Joanna said, "you're home early. How did it go today?"

For a second he thought about not involving her, about evading the question and going back out to hitchhike south. He could not imagine there was anything good waiting in that desert. But he looked at her, leaning back in her chair with a quizzical expression, so small and fierce and competent, and knew himself to be a fool.

"I have something to show you," he said instead.

They drove south, out of the city, and every so often, Joanna pulled off to the side of the road so Antryg could spread the map out over his knees and check the crystal.

Each time, she watched and shook her head, astonishment and doubt and laughter vivid across her face.

"I don't know how I feel about you violating the laws of physics in my universe," she said.

He waved his free hand dismissively. "I'm not violating them — I am merely consulting a minor footnote in the legal canon."

The crystal started to pull more east than south and they turned away from the ocean. The roads narrowed and the buildings became smaller and farther apart. Soft, worn foothills rose up around them and in the distance.

The sun started to set in a blaze of ridiculous, fantastic colors.

The next time they stopped, the crystal swung to a stop pointing slightly back in the direction that they had come, but mostly away from the road all together. They looked at each other for a long moment, and then Joanna turned off the car.

Antryg took his bokken, his wooden practice sword, from the back seat of the car and passed it through his belt to hang at his hip. Joanna pulled her monstrous purse out as well and hefted it up on her shoulder.

"Right," she said, and they stepped off the road.

There was a fence beside the road, two strands of barbed wire and a line of fence posts running off as far as the eye could see. He stepped on the bottom strand and lifted up the top, hand and foot carefully between the barbs, so Joanna could clamber awkwardly through. She returned the favor for him.

"I really hope we're on state land right now," she said as they walked, "and not some trigger-happy rancher's property."

The last of the color faded from the sky. The moon hadn't risen yet, but to his mageborn eyes, the desert was as clear as if it were beneath a full moon. It was a harsh landscape, rocky, scrub-covered flatness where it wasn't scrub-covered hills.

The crystal's pull got weaker as they went.

"We're too close to her," he said, deliberately shutting away the possibility that it had just stopped working.

Finally, it just hung straight. There was nothing within a hundred yards of them.

"Ana! Ana Gutierrez!" he shouted. "We are friends! Your family asked us to find you!"

There was no response.

"Your brother gave us your doll, the one your grandmother made for you!"

A long moment of silence, and then a thin voice said, "Here! I'm here!"

There was a scrabbling noise, and then a pair of hands rose up from the ground. Antryg broke into a trot, Joanna at his heels. He dropped to his knees at the edge of a narrow gully, carved out by run-off and hidden by shadows and brush. A bruised, dusty face stared back up at him.

"Hello, my dear," he said. "We've come to rescue you."

She gave a shaky, disbelieving little laugh.

There was enough room in the gully for all them, Antryg decided, and scrambled down. Joanna followed in a shower of sand and bitten-off curses.

Ana watched them warily until Joanna pulled the doll out of her bag. She handed it over, and Ana's face crumpled, eyes filling with tears. She bit her lip, though, and gripped the doll very tightly, and didn't cry.

"We walked all night," Ana said, "and in the morning, a truck met us. One of the guys in charge took me aside and said the price had gone up and if I couldn't pay it in cash, I could pay it in other ways."

They sat on the floor of the gully. Ana looked down at her hands as she talked, shredding the wrapper of the granola bar that Joanna had produced from the depths of her bag along with a bottle of water.

"So you ran away," Antryg said, glossing over the bruise on her face and the scrapes on her hands.

She met his eyes. "Yes, I — yes. I ran and hid in the desert. I thought if I could get to a highway, I would be safe, but I've been walking so long..."

They were all quiet for a moment, and in the silence, he heard it, the scrape of feet on sand, the patter of dislodged gravel.

Joanna opened her mouth, and Antryg held up a silencing hand.

She frowned. What? she mouthed, but they all heard the next sounds.

"I'm telling you, I heard shouting." The man's voice was faint but clear, carrying in the still desert air.

"That fucking bitch. We'll see how far she runs on a broken leg, huh?"

Ana pressed a hand over her mouth.

Moving very carefully, Antryg peered over the lip of the gully. Two men were coming out of the hills, moving towards their hiding place. He couldn't be sure, but it looked like they were carrying the large versions of this universe's guns.

He glanced back at Joanna and the girl.

"Stay here," he whispered, and drew the wooden sword.

"Antryg, no —" Joanna hissed.

He smiled at her, and turned and ran. He kept as low as he could, running along the gully towards the men, until it started to become too shallow to hide him.

He picked up one fist-sized rock and a handful of smaller ones. He threw the smaller ones hard into the bushes to the right of the men. They turned fast, scanning for the source of the sound, and Antryg sprang up out of the gully, moving in the opposite direction.

One of them shouted and cursed when Antryg broke cover. Antryg took a few more strides and flung himself flat into a roll, coming to rest in the branches of some spiny shrub. He held himself perfectly still.

The men moved towards him, spreading out and walking slowly. He had to hope that their night-vision did not equal his own, and from their clumsy, over-careful movements, it seemed he did not hope in vain.

When the closer one was only three body-lengths away, Antryg threw the larger rock. It hit the man in the face, snapping his head back, and he grunted. Antryg was already up and moving.

The man bellowed when Antryg's sword cracked down on his wrist, and the gun fell from his hand. His bellow turned into a shriek when Antryg slammed his foot into the side of the man's leg, just below his knee. The knee popped and he went down, and Antryg swung the sword in a flat arc that ended at the man's temple. The man pitched forward onto his face, and was silent after that.

"Son of a whore!" the other man shouted, and Antryg ducked flat to the ground as the other man fired a rapid burst of gunshots in his general direction.

Then there was a single, flat crack of a pistol shot, and Joanna shouted, "Freeze! Federal agents!"

The other man spun around, and Antryg rolled to his feet.

Joanna was down on one knee at the edge of the gully, her gun steady in a two-handed grip. Antryg crossed the distance to the other man in half a dozen long strides, swift and silent as a cat. He brought his sword down in a powerful overhead stroke, striking the side of his neck where it met his shoulder. The other man dropped like a stone.

Antryg's heart hammered in his chest, but he could still hear Joanna when she turned to the gully and said, "Don't worry, I just said that to scare him. We're not really federal agents."

They dropped Ana off a few houses down from the little bungalow where her family lived, and watched from the car as light and people spilled out to embrace her.

"You did a good thing, babe," Joanna said softly.

"We," he said, and her eyes dropped. "We did. And yes, I suppose it was."

Antryg sat in the silent shop and shuffled his cards. He pulled his own significator, the Mage, out.

The first card he drew was the eight of swords.

He'd thought the first time that that card had been for Ana, but perhaps he needed to reconsider.

He was still staring at it when Joanna stopped by with hotdogs and fries for lunch.

"Amazing, isn't it?" Antryg said. "The trans-universal appeal of sausages."

"Mmmm," she said. "Hey, I got you some new business cards."

Antryg raised his eyebrows. "Indeed?"

She slid a stack of cards across the table.

In elegant copperplate text it said:

He laughed, in surprise and wonderment, something warm and joyful unfolding in his chest.

"First Buster, then Ana — I figure you're on a roll here."

"The only way out is through," he said softly.

"What?"

"Nothing, nothing at all, my dear." He took her hand and kissed the back of it. "Thank you. However this venture turns out, I am sure I will never lack for interesting cases."