“What did you expect?” she asked, trying her best not to let either of them see just how amused she was. “You tied yourself to the spirit of the Detroit Free Zone, Myron. That’s not a place known for volunteering. If you want something in the city, you have to do it yourself or pay someone else to.”
The city spirit’s orange eyes flashed. “I like being paid.”
Myron looked horrified. “You expect me to pay my own spirit? That’s ridiculous!”
“Hey, I got here through a swirling vortex of dead cats,” Marci said with a shrug. “Mortal Spirits are as ridiculous as the human desires that create them. Sometimes you’ve just gotta roll with it. That said, if you two are going to work together, you might want to try understanding how the DFZ does things instead of just giving her orders.”
Myron scoffed. “Are you a relationship counselor now?”
“Nope,” Marci said. “Just someone who’s already had to learn this lesson and wants to spare you the trouble. Not that I don’t enjoy watching you suffer, but repetition is inefficient, and we’re crunched enough for time as it is.” She grinned at the city spirit. “I don’t care what it takes. Promise her ownership of the entire DFZ if you have to, but I want that circle up and ready to receive on time. The dragons and General Jackson’s troops are probably in the air by now, and I don’t want them in danger one second longer than necessary because you’re bad at communicating.”
“I’m not bad at communicating!” Myron cried. “I’m a professor! I’ve written fourteen books! I—” He cut off with a clench of his jaw. “You know, never mind. I’ve made a career out of doing the impossible. I’ll do it again now. You’d do better to focus on holding up your end of this bargain, and speaking of.” He folded his arms over his chest. “How do you intend to get enough magic to drop a hammer banish? I let you brush me off before because I didn’t want a bunch of dragons asking questions, but now that it’s just us, I need to know. You said you had a plan. What is it?”
“Oh, that’s easy,” Marci said. “I’m going to ask the spirits.”
Everyone turned to stare at her.
“What?” Amelia said at last.
“I’m going to ask the spirits for help,” Marci clarified. “They’re sentient magic, and magic is what we need. I know they can give up their magic freely because they did it for Algonquin while she was trying to fill up the DFZ, and since they’re all going to die too if this Leviathan thing goes south, I thought I’d ask them to pitch in.”
“Let me get this straight,” Myron said, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “You’re going to ask a bunch of ancient spirits—many of whom see you, a Merlin, as the bringer of a different sort of apocalypse—to commit suicide in order to help you defeat Algonquin’s weapon?”
“It’s not suicide,” Marci said irritably. “They’ll just re-form in their domains once the banishment is complete. Most of them will be down for a week at the worst, and when they wake up, they’ll still have a world to call home. That sounds like a good deal to me.”
“It doesn’t matter what you think,” Raven said. “Algonquin’s spent the last six decades teaching them that this was the only way. They’ve already made up their minds. You’re not going to change that.”
“Yes, I can,” she said. “Because this goes beyond normal spirit politics. We’re talking about an end even you immortals can’t survive. I know Algonquin’s poisoned the well, but ‘work with me or we’re all dead’ is a pretty powerful argument.”
“But you won’t just be dealing with Spirits of the Land,” Myron said, reaching into his pocket to pull out a small slip of paper, or the representation of his memory of a slip of paper since nothing was actually physical on this side. “I suspected you wouldn’t have a proper grasp on this subject, so I did the math for just how much power it will take to hammer banish Algonquin’s magic off the Leviathan before I left. Assuming the standard formula, the answer seems to be just shy of…” He trailed off, checking his equation one last time. “All of it.”
Marci blinked. “All of what?”
“All the magic that currently exists on this plane,” Myron clarified. “Give or take a few percent.”
His Cambridge professor accent rendered every word perfectly, but Marci still couldn’t understand what Myron was saying. “Wait, wait, wait,” she said, putting up her hands. “You’re seriously telling me that banishing the Leviathan is going to take all the magic there is?” When he nodded, she gaped at him. “How is that even possible? Algonquin’s five lakes. She’s not the Pacific Ocean!”
“If she were an ocean of any sort, we couldn’t banish her at all,” Myron said. “You said it yourself: hammer banishes work by using a blast of overwhelming power to completely disperse a spirit’s magic. But the amount of power required to qualify as ‘overwhelming’ increases exponentially with the spirit’s size. Algonquin’s one of the largest spirits of the land. No one’s ever used the hammer method on something her size before, let alone a spirit that’s currently inside a separate extraplanar being.” He held the paper out so Marci could see. “Frankly, some of these numbers are just guesses on my part. There’s a chance we could swing everything we have, and it still wouldn’t be enough.”
She snatched the paper from his hand, but when she looked the figures over, she saw Myron was right. When she’d come up with this idea, she’d assumed the standard ten-to-one ratio for a hammer banish, which meant that if she could get just ten or twenty big spirits on board, it would be enough. But she’d forgotten about the exponential curve. Under that math, she needed to multiply every number by a power of ten. Once you did that, all the magic in the world started to look terrifyingly short.
“We can still do it,” she said, hands shaking as she handed the paper back to Myron. “We’re just going to need everyone now. But that’s fine. So far as I know, everyone wants to live, so my argument still stands.”
“And there are Mortal Spirits now as well,” Ghost added. “Our kind is much more powerful than the land and untainted by Algonquin’s hate.”
“You are also mad and unpredictable,” Shiro said angrily, pointing at the battles that thrashed the sea. “All the gods humanity learned to fear have risen. I sided with you before because you said you would do it slowly, and that you would find them all Merlins, but there’s been no time for that. Those are all newborn powers, maddened spirits who don’t yet know the destruction they are capable of. They don’t even know their names yet! Forces like that cannot be reasoned with.”
“Nothing can be reasoned with if you don’t try,” Marci snapped, marching back to the line on the ground that marked the temporary, un-submerged Merlin Gate. “I’m going.”
Shiro stepped in front of her. “With respect, Merlin, that is suicide. The Sea of Magic is more treacherous than I have ever seen it. The chaos will rip you to shreds.”