From there, as the carriage moved from the shoulder and on/off ramps, and farther in, the ley line moved faster and with more potency.The authorities tried to keep everyone to maximum speeds, but that’s where the talents of a good ley rider—and the muscle of an expensive carriage beast—came in.Cha had a gift for it.She wasn’t modest about it either as she wasn’t particularly gifted in much.But she could ride the ley lines, and she could make them do what she wanted.
And she wanted fast.Catching up to Big Betty wouldn’t be a problem, but she’d calculated the distance to Lordgay.They didn’t have very long before they’d be stuck in the queue for the traffic stop, and then they’d be skunked out of luck.If Dy had a good plan—and let’s be honest, part of why Dy was an excellent partner was because the sorceress always came up with doozies—then Cha wanted to get on the implementation as fast as possible.
Using her innate sense for the ley lines, she guided Katu into a lovely stream of mostly unadulterated black.Must be newly repaired.The pixie dust flowed like a river when embedded in the ley magic.Sometimes more like a muddy creek, it was true.Over time, with the travel of the various carriages, the pixie dust lost its potency.Some of it came from aging out; some from various pollutants—not from the animals who lived off of ambrosia and didn’t defecate, but from the shittier ley riders who couldn’t seem to help dropping trash.Just because anything organic and unenchanted that hit the ley lines melted and sizzled to nothing, didn’t mean that stuff truly disappeared.It all tainted the leys, which meant that sorcerers had to come in to maintain the lines, laying in fresh black.
That’s where Cha’s talents came in.She had a nose for the fastest flow, the freshest black.If Dy were closer, the sorceress could lay in some higher test dust for Katu to grab a hold of—some white or even a little yellow—but for now they just had the same black as everyone else.Except that Cha could find the best black in the lot.
The other ley riders knew it, too.She and Dy might have a rep currently in the shitter thanks to the duplicitous Otto, but no one could say a single thing about her ability to ride the leys.She couldn’t even say how she did it.Magic.She just knew where the creamiest, freshest, fastest black would be—and she guided Katu right to it.
He dug in his metaphorical, magical claws, purring with sheer speedy delight and cruised at blazing speed.And, because the other ley riders knew it—at least the savvy ones—a convoy formed behind her, following along to take advantage of her ability.Which was generally fine, but…
She tapped open the most commonly used channel.“Bandit calling all ley lice.If you have my tail, it’s cool, but don’t pull too hard, read me?”
A few acknowledgments came back.Not so many as she counted drafting her.And those were the ones she could see and feel.Bunch of newbies on the lines these days.No manners.No respect for their elders.“One more thing,” she said on the broadcast.“If you’re a new friend and haven’t said hi yet, a good way to introduce yourself is to take some heat if there’s any fire.”
There.That should do it.This way, if the fae law did twig to the fact that she was speeding above the legal limit—and they weren’t the brightest fae who got stuck in that job, but it didn’t a lot of smarts to ID a convoy—one of the newbies would be expected to take the heat.If they didn’t, well, they’d flag themselves as not a team player and no one would play reindeer games with them anymore.Basically, career suicide as, for humans on the ley lines, they had only each other to depend upon.Dy was spot on when she said the fae would prefer to squash them than be irritated.
With one salient exception.
You are not thinking about Azul anymore,she told herself firmly.
Fortunately, before her baser self could argue, she spotted Big Betty up ahead.Slowing Katu—to his growling displeasure—she changed lanes to slide over parallel to Dy.The sorceress didn’t have Big Betty trawling the very slowest ley, where most cargo vehicles traveled, and where she’d be if they were carrying something illegal, but it was still a heap slower.The ley riders who’d been drafting her blazed on by, keeping to the fresh black she’d shown them.The better ones among them could stick to it now that they had their noses in it.The others, well, they’d learn or they’d lose.
Dy leaned out her window, complicated by the fact that Warg was already draped more than halfway out.His alligator mouth gaped wide open, chartreuse tongue flapping in the wind of their passage, spittle flying in a silver rain.See?Thatwas the kind of shit that polluted the leys.You’d think Dy would know better, but no.She needed Warg to be her lodestone and refused to purchase a newer—more attractive, and less drooly—one.Served her right to be cheek to jowl with the slimy creature.Not that Dy seemed to care.
“I know a road,” Dy called down from her higher perch.Conversations like these were best held in person, not over the path box, for obvious reasons.“Follow me.”
“We don’t need to take risks yet,” Cha called back, deeply aware of the irony of the role-reversal.Usually, she was the one chafing to up the ante a bit while Dy argued for keeping it conservative and discreet.
“We’ll lose too much time,” Dy called back.“I checked with my sources and the backup is huge.Besides, it might be legal to do it, but I don’t really want to explain why I’m going this direction with this much agnicurna.Let’s not test Nerd Girl’s fake manifests before we absolutely have to.”
“All right.”Cha held up her hands in surrender, but she had a bad feeling about this.“But don’t take me down one of those swamp-ass ley lines that terminates in a bog like that one time.”
Dy laughed.“That was seven years ago.”
“I still have nightmares.”
Katu growled in agreement.The big cat liked water just fine, but not the stinky kind.
“Builds character!”Dy sang out and Big Betty trumpeted as they picked up speed.
Used to this routine, Cha fell in behind, sticking close to Betty’s tail.Katu knew it, too.The two carriage animals were the best of buds also, having each other’s backs and always aware of the other and what they needed to be safe.
Cha looked at the enchanted map globe, zooming in to see if she could spot this alternate route Dy had in mind.As she suspected, the answer was a definitive no.If it showed up on the maps, everyone would be taking that route instead of the deeply unpopular loop-de-loo.Cha also didn’t doubt it was there.Part of Dy’s powerful sorcery allowed her to detect ley lines that remained unmapped, or that had fallen off the maps due to disuse.Thus, the debacle a few years back when it turned out the ley line wasn’t on the map because it wasactually under water.
Katu caught the turn before Cha fully registered the change in direction.Being an unmapped ley line, it had no on and off ramp.The ley line still connected to the Thirteen.Ley lines tended to stay attached—a definite feature for this sort of maneuver—and in fact would gravitate towards each other as if magnetically attracted, when not maintained in the courses desired by those keeping them up.
The bump and lurch from the commercially maintained Thirteen onto the barely there and probably abandoned rural ley line rattled Cha’s bones.Normally traveling by ley line was a smooth, steady glide.Part of why the carriage animals were immune to the ley magic was that they didn’t come into physical contact with the magically charged pixie dust.They kind of floated above it.Even the sorcerer-physicists didn’t completely understand the mechanism, which was Cha’s main takeaway from her class on ley line quantum mechanics.She’d attended that one, more or less faithfully—for her—because ley riding was her gig and she actually had wanted to know as much as possible about it.The gaps in information had been annoying.Just wave your hands and say it’s magic and have done already.
On a deteriorating, neglected ley line like this one, there was no seeking out the good stuff.First, there wasn’t anything remotely resembling “good stuff.”It was all shit.Second, Cha was following her bestie, among whose many talents were stabilizing ley lines.When pressed, Dy could create fully new ley lines where none had existed before, but that burned a lot of magic.Dy would be wanting to conserve her resources as much as possible for the challenges ahead.Accordingly, she also kept the ley line black, not even salting it a little with some white to speed things up.
So it was reasonably solid, if occasionally bumpy, and Cha didn’t really need to pay attention to anything while they were on it and she was playing second horse in the nose-to-tail parade.Additionally, she took a gander at their location pin on the map and figured that Dy planned to be on this ley almost to the Obsidian border.A couple of hours at least.
So, with time to kill—and to fend off the erotic daydreams of Azul that inevitably flowed in to fill any vacuum in her brain—Cha unsheathed her Moonruby wand, determined to make some sense of it.The wand glittered as if happy to be in the open air again, spontaneously showering pink glitter all over Katu’s black upholstery and Cha’s once bad-ass outfit.It wasn’t easy to look dangerous while spattered with pink glitter.
Nerd Girl had thoughtfully, that is,smirkingly, provided a “simple handbook”—her words—for Cha to “actually learn to use the thing without killing herself.”Holding the wand to the side where it could shed in the smallest possible area, Cha extracted the “simple handbook” from the center console and eyed it unhappily.It looked more like a textbook to her and she had never loved that ilk of instructional tomes.
“I used the wand before without killing myself,” Cha muttered to Katu, who purred in agreement.True, it hadn’t worked at all more than once and had worked much better for Azul with his singing magic.She could stand to study, which was probably not a thought that had ever crossed her mind before.