Reaping a Whirlwind Read online

  Reaping a Whirlwind

  by Tim Pratt

  I grew up in Chicago, where twisters are rare, but I spent a lot of time out in the flats of Illinois visiting my grandma, and I still dream of the tornado I saw there one stormy June day, even though it was over ten years ago. It’s difficult to describe the eerie feeling of dread that comes with standing on a porch and watching a column of howling darkness precess randomly across the landscape in your direction. We ended up in the bathroom that day, the innermost windowless room of my grandma’s farmhouse, with me curled up in the old iron bathtub while she draped her body over mine.

  The funnel passed by without harm, though it obliterated a sagging old barn on the next farm over; the owner joked the storm saved him the cost of tearing it down himself. In my dreams, of course, the tornado doesn’t pass by. It tears the house from its foundations and hurls the whole structure into the sky while I lie on my back in the exposed tub, looking up through the still center of the whirlwind that surrounds me, like peering through a telescope at an empty spot in the sky.

  When I inherited my biological father’s strange old house in the mountains of North Carolina, I assumed tornadoes were behind me forever, traded in for blizzards and flash floods. I thought at first I was dreaming when I stepped onto the back porch with a cup of coffee in my hand and a longing for my absent family in my heart. The back lawn was an expanse of scraggly grass dotted with a fire pit and a ring of fallen-log benches, plus a gazebo, my partner Trey’s fancy propane grill, a horseshoe pit, and our adopted daughter Clara’s wooden playhouse, mocked up to look like a princess’s castle, though Clara was always more warlord than princess. A sea of green spring grass stretched for a hundred yards beyond the gazebo until it ran into the piney woods, and beyond that, the rounded shoulders of the mountains loomed.

  And a tornado, making that forgotten but familiar radio-static-waterfall-freight-train sound, churning its way through the trees toward me. The funnel was black and sharply defined, like a child’s drawing of a tornado, and it stretched twice as tall as the tallest tree, though it shrank as it approached, the wide top drawing down and widening, until, by the time it emerged from the forest onto my lawn, the twister was only about forty feet high. The sky was green and the air went flat and strange and I realized I wasn’t dreaming, and this was real.

  I never knew my biological father, but he was a sorcerer, and I inherited more than his property when he died. The Grace house was protected by magics far older than myself, immune to everything from termites to wrecking balls, but I didn’t want the playhouse or the gazebo ripped apart, either.

  I stared at the funnel, spinning toward me counterclockwise, and then I exhaled a heavy breath over the surface of my coffee. I stirred my spoon clockwise, and the tornado jumped back like a dog that just got scratched on the nose by a cat. The funnel surged toward me, as if outraged, but my magic was already unraveling the storm, an anti-cyclonic whirl countering its widdershins momentum.

  The tornado burst apart, showering broken branches and leaves and miscellaneous debris across the lawn—and something else dropped out of the funnel, and fell like a broken doll to the ground. There is no silence like the sudden absence of a tornado’s roar, and I took two breaths in that quiet, unable to believe I’d seen what I’d seen.

  Then I dropped my cup and pelted down the steps and ran across the lawn in my robe, and found the broken girl.

  She wasn’t human, which was strange, but she was dressed like a human, which was actually stranger. Her skin was the green of fresh mint leaves, and her hair was really some kind of grass twisted into beribboned pigtails, but she had two eyes, two ears, a nose, a mouth, two arms, two legs, and a decidedly female shape underneath her improbable blue-checked gingham dress. Her feet were small and bare. What, no ruby slippers? I thought.

  My healing magics slid right off her, which made sense, as they were tuned for humans, and the few veterinary spells I’d learned after Clara’s hamster incident didn’t work either. I took a hint from the grassy hair and tried a spell for the restoration of storm-damaged gardens. Her eyes popped open and she gasped, though I had my doubts about whether she needed to breathe; her bosom certainly heaved dramatically when she took in the air, though, which was probably the real point. (Plants don’t need mammary glands, but, well: there are orchids that look and smell like bees, to attract insects to pollinate them.) She fluttered her green eyelashes at me, blinking.

  “Welcome to the land under the rainbow,” I said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’ve come to see the wizard.” Her voice was a cross between a torch singer and that breathy baby-talk voice you heard in old Marilyn Monroe movies. She smelled faintly of sweet flowers.

  I nodded. “You’re just his type, too, from what I’ve heard. Unfortunately, he’s dead.”

  Her eyes went wide, and she let out a gasping little sob. “Then—then—am I trapped here forever, in this strange world?”

  “Okay, Dorothy, ease up on the angst.” I stood up. “Let’s follow the non-brick road to the house and talk about this.”

  “My name isn’t Dorothy. It’s Flora—”

  “Ugh, stop, no way is that your name.”

  She stood up too, hugging herself, though I doubted she got cold the way people do. “Who are you? Are you the wizard’s assistant? Or his....” A long, significant pause. “His friend?”

  “Eww. No. I am the wizard now. Just not the one you’re looking for. He was my father, but he’s gone. I guess news like that takes a while to make it over the rainbow.”

  “I don’t understand.” Flora—I guess I had to call her that—was trembling like, ha, a leaf. “The tornado came to our farm, for the first time in a generation, but I remember my lessons: find the wizard, do as he commands, and he will return you home safely. But if there is no wizard, why did the tornado come? What am I to do?”

  I frowned. “Okay. Come on in. We’ll figure this out.” I’d assumed Flora was some kind of vegetable sex-golem created by one of my dead father’s many enemies, sent on a woefully late mission of seduction and theft, or seduction and assassination, or seduction and manipulation. Having met my assorted demi-human half-siblings and learned about their parentages over the years, I knew Flora was my dead dad’s type: sexy and supernatural. Depending on who you asked, the not-so-dearly departed Archibald Grace either had a fetish for the non-human, or he was just a power-hungry maniac trying to learn magic from as many sources as possible... and what better way than getting up close and personal with gods and monsters? Dropping a curvy dryad from a tornado in a sort of reverse-Oz move would have gotten my father’s attention, so I’d figured it for subterfuge. But now... maybe Flora was a victim, picked up by some spell Grace had set long ago, the magic running on auto-pilot now that he was gone. My father didn’t just seduce supernatural creatures, after all. He had a history of magically binding and enslaving them.

  I sat Flora down at the kitchen table and made her a cup of tea. Plants need water, right? I got a fresh cup of coffee and sat across from her. She gazed around, wide-eyed, taking in the pots hanging from hooks, the herb garden in the windowbox, the mismatched chairs, the collection of cookie jars, and all the other jumble I’d inherited and still only partly organized. “You are the wizard’s heir?”

  “Mmm hmm.”

  “His daughter?”

  “Yes. Born, though not raised.” I’d been adopted, and grown up blissfully unaware of magic, until I got my inheritance.

  “Forgive me, but in the stories they say the wizard is pale as a winter melon—”

  “My biological mother was black, yes. I mostly take after her in the visible ways. Grace’s influence is... more subtle.”

  “Do you live here all alone?�
�

  I wasn’t ready to reveal details, in case she was more than she seemed. “I’m alone now, yes.” Trey was off at a law conference in Greensboro, and Clara was on a camping trip with her aunt Hannah (who was half sea-goddess, and thus pretty good at nature stuff), and neither was due back for a couple of days. I was supposed to be painting, for a show in the fall, but oh well. Once magic is in your life, it gets in everywhere, like sand after a trip to the beach.

  “Then... did you send the tornado for me? Do you have a task I must fulfill? Please, only tell me what I must do, and send me home.” Flora’s eyes welled with what looked like tears but must have been nectar or sap or something.

  “I didn’t send a tornado. I wouldn’t know how. I’m a little confused, Flora. Assume I don’t know anything about you, or your people. Where are you from?”

  She turned the teacup back and forth in her hands. “The wizard, he called it Summerhome, but we just call it the farm. We tend the gardens, and keep the bees, and we sing, and we live, and we grow... The wizard used to send tornadoes often, I’m told. We would leave out baskets filled with the fruits of our garden—avern, and bat-plant, and lotus, and raskovnic—and they would be carried away. Sometimes, one of us would be carried away, and return scarred, or changed, or not at all, but my parents told me, if we obeyed the wizard and did as he commanded, we would be returned safely. No one has been taken in many years, and the baskets rot in the fields, uncollected, but today—a tornado came, and caught me.”

  I nodded. I’d found references in Grace’s papers to some deeply wild shit, about other worlds, and pocket dimensions, and pinched-off bits of space, and this “Summerhome” could be any of those. It sounded like Grace had set up a plantation to grow magical plants—I recognized lotus, of course, and “raskovnic” was a mythic herb used to open locks and unseal bindings, so I assumed the others were supernatural plants, too. Just like Grace to create a magical herb garden tended by enslaved sentient plants.

  “I don’t know why the tornado came for you,” I said. “My father set up some long-term spells, and some recurring ones, and I’ve been unraveling them when I find them, but I didn’t know about this one. I’ll see if I can discover the source of this tornado spell.” I reached across and patted her hand, which was warm as the grass in a patch of summer sunshine. “The good news is, your people are free now. My father forced you into service. I won’t. You can tear up the gardens or sell your crops or do whatever you like. Take that news back when we get you home.”

  “Do you mean it?” More tears, more trembling lips, more heaving bosom. My mind briefly wondered to what extend my father had engineered these plant people, and what he used them for when he whirlwinded them down to Earth, then skittered wisely away.

  “I’ll send you back. I don’t have a hot air balloon or magic slippers handy, but I do have something that can help.” I stood up. “Wait here, and I’ll be right back.”

  I left Flora spilling out more sappy tears and went into the living room, pausing by the terrariums and passing the oversized bird cages and globes of subtly or grossly different Earths, and on to the secret shelf, hidden from ordinary sight. The handful of grimoires there shivered and fluttered their pages as I approached, hoping today would be the day I’d want to raise the dead, raze the living, or live forever by drinking blood, and turn to their pages for help achieving my dark dreams. I disappointed them, as usual, and took down the Book of Grace in its blue binding. Before he died my, father helpfully created a magical codex for aid in teleportation—a book of apparently infinite pages that allowed the user to travel almost anywhere at will. I had no doubt there’d be an entry in the index for “Summerhome.” I flipped to the back, scanning down the “S”s—Subataca, Suddene, Suez, Sullana, Sumaré—

  Summerhome. Right there in alphabetical order. But there was a line drawn through the listing, and in parentheses after it, the word “interdicted.” There was no page number. There was always a page number. That’s how you traveled: you turned to the right page, and blip, you were transported.

  I’d never seen a crossed-out entry before. What did “interdicted” even mean? Archibald Grace had been the most powerful sorcerer in the world. He’d only even died when he wanted to. Who could forbid him to go anywhere? Or had he forbidden himself?

  I put the book away and went back to the kitchen, calling, “Flora, this might be a little trickier than I—”

  She was gone, her teacup abandoned on the table. “House, where did she go?”

  The door to the basement obligingly swung open. That door and the space below had only appeared recently, and I hadn’t even begun to fully inventory the contents of the basement itself. As far as I could tell it went on for miles, possibly farther. There were bricked-up passageways I’d decided not to open, and empty dungeon cells, and a vintage washing machine, and a labyrinth, and a broken boiler, and an apparently bottomless pit that Trey was lobbying for us to use as a trash hole.

  Crap. “Flora? Are you down here?” I stepped onto the wooden stairs and flicked the light switch, but nothing happened. I waved my hand and the lights came on. I saw all the bulbs has been smashed, which didn’t matter, because magic, but it did indicate an attempt to leave me in the dark. Flora was rummaging around on a shelf full of canopic jars and ancient wooden crates and wax-sealed amphorae. She didn’t look so sweet and curvy anymore—thorny ridges had broken through her gingham dress all over, shredding the fabric, and thick vines wound around her arms and legs like extra musculature.

  She spun toward me in the light, and her mouth was wider, and full of briar teeth. “I need the Seed,” she said, and the Capital Letter Was Audible.

  I nodded, thinking I finally understood the situation. “Ah. So, Grace stole something from your people, and you want it back. You came to seduce it out of him, but now that he’s dead, you’re going for... randomly rummaging through endless acres of basement? You could have just asked me for help.”

  “The Graces are the enemies of the Summerfolk.” She swept all the jars off a shelf with one gnarled-root arm, and stalked toward me. “Your father enslaved us, and now you revel in his power.”

  “I don’t know that I’d say ‘revel,’ exactly.”

  “You use his books? His tomes and grimoires?”

  “I know what books are, thanks. Sure, I have them, and I was going to use the Book of Grace to send you home, but—”

  “The pages of his books are made from my people.” She shuddered, and her eyes streamed sap. “He would summon us, and remove an arm, or a leg, or strip layers from our backs, and soak and press our stolen flesh to make paper for his magical tomes.”

  I winced. That explained how the books seemed so alive. “Oh, Flora, I’m so sorry. That’s... I can’t imagine. This Seed you’re looking for—what is it? I’ll help you find it and you can be on your way.”

  Her body rippled and got even thornier and vinier. “Do not pretend to be my friend. We know what Graces are. Your father told us we weren’t producing enough for his needs. He said we had to modernize.” She spat the last word. “He sent us fertilizers. We used them to make a bomb. When he picked up his last basket of tribute, and brought it to this world....” She chuckled. Her feet were sprouting roots, pushing into cracks in the concrete floor, widening them, seeking soil underneath. “The basket exploded, and destroyed his greenhouse. But it didn’t kill him.”

  I nodded. “No, it wouldn’t have. He was a tough old monster. In case it’s not clear, my sympathies lie with the revolutionaries and not the oppressor, okay?”

  She didn’t seem to hear me. “We stole the secret of his tornado magic, and attacked him in his home. We would have destroyed him, but... he crept into our world on the longest night, and stole our Seed away. The source of our life! He told us, if we left him in peace, he would leave us, and not harm the Seed, and some day, when we were ready to obey him again, he would give it back. Since then we have not been able to hybridize, to cross-pollinate, to create anything who
lly new—all we can do is take cuttings, and make clones. I am a cutting, grown identically to my mother, and my grandmother, and her mother, who was a favorite of your father’s. We accepted our lot, though it grieved us. But there is a blight now, and none of us are immune, because we are all of the same root-stock, and we are dying.”

  Of course. No genetic diversity meant greater vulnerability to disease. The problem with monocultures everywhere.

  “I must find the Seed,” she said.

  “Of course you must! Here, let me run upstairs and get—”

  A vine whipped out and wrapped around my ankle, and I hissed as thorns broke the skin.

  “You will not escape. I was sent to find the Seed, yes, but also to destroy Grace, to tear him up, root and branch.”

  “I told you, he’s dead—”

  “The root is dead, but you are the branch. Fruit of the poisonous tree.”

  The vine tightened and tried to pull me down the stairs, but I grabbed onto the railing and held my ground. “I’m not like Grace. The apple fell pretty far from that particular tree, Flora—”

  “Flora was my great-grandmother, a favorite of your father. He named her that. I was sent to impersonate her, to beg forgiveness, to promise obedience, but that lie is done. My name is Ankathatos.”

  “That’s real pretty. Can I call you Kath for short? You can call me Bekah. You really need to let me go.”

  “Your blood will nourish my roots, and I will take news of your death to my people, to comfort them as the blight destroys us. Your death is better than nothing.”

  “Right. Look, I’m sorry about this.” I brought a pair of small pruning shears out of my pocket. We used them for the tiny ornamental trees (including some non-native to Earth) that grew in the terrariums in the living room, and I’d picked them up on my way to get the Book of Grace, just in case. I snipped the shears in her general direction and whispered “Deadhead.”

  The vine around my ankle went slack as Kath’s head rolled off her shoulders, and her body lurched around wildly. Cutting off her head probably wouldn’t hurt her much—it’s not like she had a brain in there, any more than she had a heart in her chest, though she didn’t lack courage—but it disoriented her, and bought me some time. I ran back upstairs, slammed the door shut, and told the house to keep it locked. A moment later the door thudded and rattled as the headless plant monster tried to escape, but any door in this house was capable of standing up to a Sherman tank, so I wasn’t worried.