Rewrite That Witch
CH181 · Rewrite
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Chapter 181: Soraya’s Paintings

After Barov left, Roland filed the demographic parchment in his desk drawer and turned to look at Nightingale.

He had a question. He had been not-asking it for three days. It had to do with the balloon, and with something he’d noticed in the courtyard afterward — the way Nightingale had sat against the outer wall while everyone else converged on the basket, and the way she’d gone invisible mid-sentence when Wendy spoke to her, which she almost never did in the castle yard.

He had a vague answer forming. Saying it aloud would be embarrassing regardless of whether he was right or wrong. He swallowed the question.

“Now that’s done,” he said instead, “let’s go to the North Slope.”

“You want to see what Soraya’s new ability can do?” Nightingale dropped her hood and came to his side with her usual ease. “Let’s go.”

Maybe I’m overthinking it, Roland told himself, watching her fall into step beside him.

Soraya’s evolution had been an accident, in the way that the best discoveries were accidents: something prepared for without knowing it, produced by a circumstance no one had planned.

The balloon was his gift to Anna, so it lived in the castle courtyard. Two days after the ascent, rain had begun, and Roland had remembered — the rattan basket. Immerse rattan in water and it softened; dry it out afterward and it never quite recovered its original toughness. He’d meant to send a servant, then thought better of it: the balloon was his present, the ropes and airbag could be damaged by careless handling, and it was the kind of thing that warranted his personal attention if it warranted anything.

When he arrived at the vestibule, Hummingbird in tow to help with the weight, he had stopped.

Soraya had been there. She’d been painting on the basket — which was not unusual, she painted most things she found within reach — but what she’d produced was unlike anything he’d seen from her before. The image covered the whole basket surface: a bird’s-eye view of Border Town, looking down as they had looked down from fifty meters up. Soraya had an extraordinary memory for visual information, and her reproductions were usually photographic in their accuracy.

But this one was three-dimensional.

He’d thought at first it was a trick of light. He’d moved closer. He’d reached out and touched the painted roofline, and it was raised — slightly, like a brushstroke thick with pigment, except that Soraya didn’t use brushes, she used magic directly, and her paintings had always been perfectly flat.

The painted wall surface had texture like sandstone under his fingertips. The painted tree canopy was soft, yielding slightly under pressure the way leaves do.

And rain was sliding over the basket’s surface without penetrating. The painted landscape was shedding water.

He’d called for Soraya immediately. Nightingale had confirmed it: looking through her fog, the magic in Soraya’s body had changed. The golden whirlpool that had always characterized her power had condensed into something else — a rotating ribbon, tight and precise.

The military factory compound was warm in the morning light. Anna came out to meet them — and in the weeks since the balloon, the way she greeted Roland had changed in small, specific ways. She crossed the yard directly, and the hug she gave him was real rather than restrained.

He rubbed her head. The silver clip caught the light.

In his peripheral vision, Soraya had started forward to greet him and then stopped, reading the air of the moment and electing to look at the table instead. Her ears had gone pink.

“Cough,” said Nightingale, and took Soraya by the hand and walked her firmly to the worktable. “Did you draw these?”

The table was covered.

Roland let go of Anna and came to look. The paintings spread across its surface were all of the same subject — the factory yard, from slightly above — but each one had a different depth to it. The shallowest were barely a millimeter off the paper. The deepest approached three centimeters, the painted stones and tiles and tiled roof-edges standing in actual relief like a topographic map.

“Is this the thickest?” He ran his finger along the top of a painted wall section. The sky above it was soft, like touching something between cotton and foam. Then his finger crossed into the wall’s surface and felt the immediate shift — fine grain, the specific drag of weathered stone, lighter than actual stone but texturally precise.

“It can go thicker,” Soraya said. “But past a certain point the magic cost climbs very fast.” She pointed to a protrusion on the table’s edge, brown and rough. “I tried to render the tree trunk outside the wall. I barely had the basic shape blocked in before I’d used half my power.”

Roland looked at the tree trunk. He gripped it. He pulled. His feet left the floor.

The painting did not move.

He set himself back down and looked at Nightingale, who produced a knife and spent a long moment sawing at the trunk’s base before concluding that she’d made a small notch and very little else. “It’s embedded,” she said. “Into the table.”

Anna’s black filament solved it: a single pass, thin as a thread, clean as a blade. The painted trunk dropped onto the table with a sound lighter than the visual suggested it should make. Roland picked it up. It weighed almost nothing.

“Why did you decide to try this?” He turned the piece in his hands. “The depth. What made you think of it?”

Soraya thought for a moment. “Up in the air,” she said. “Looking down. I realized my paintings — even the accurate ones, even the ones you called photographs — were flat. But the thing I was looking at wasn’t flat. The trees had tips that moved in the wind. The mountains went up and down like breathing. The river was in the earth, not on top of it.” She paused. “I wanted the picture to be more like the thing. I wanted it to stand up.”

“And the technique?”

She went slightly pink again. “You told us about particles. How everything is made of very small pieces. I thought — if the painting is drawn with magic, shouldn’t the painting’s material also be made of very small pieces? So I tried to think of it that way. Like stacking colored particles together to make a volume instead of just a surface.” She gestured at the table. “The image just — wriggled, and rose, and settled. It surprised Anna too.”

He was quiet for a moment.

“You think this is less useful than Anna’s,” he said. It wasn’t quite a question.

“Compared to black flame?” Soraya pulled a face. “It’s just pretty paintings.”

“No,” Roland said. “It’s a coating.”

He picked up the section of painted sky — soft, light, resistant to his attempts to tear it. He thought about the paper box they’d tested two days ago: water beading on the coated surface, not soaking through, the bottom bone-dry under a full load of liquid. He thought about the molten iron that had burned the paper support but barely affected the coating. He thought about the enameled wire he’d already wound into a simple DC motor in the courtyard.

“It’s not a painting,” he said. “It’s a surface treatment. You can coat anything — pipes, wire, brick. Rust-proof. Waterproof. Chemically stable. Electrically insulating.” He looked at her. “Do you understand what that means for what we’re trying to build?”

Soraya stared at him. Then at the table full of test paintings. Then back at him.

“The tap water system,” he said. “Electricity distribution. Roads. Three things I’ve been planning without quite seeing how to get the materials.” He set the piece down carefully. “You just showed me how.”

The pink in Soraya’s ears had migrated to her face. She looked at the table as if seeing it for the first time.

“Personal experience,” Roland said, mostly to himself, “is more efficient than axioms from books.” He looked at the witch in front of him, who had evolved her ability by looking at the world from fifty meters up and deciding her paintings weren’t accurate enough. “I wonder what would happen if you looked at it from much, much smaller.”

“Smaller than a particle?”

“Something like that.” He filed the thought. First: pipes, wire, brick. One thing at a time. “Let’s start with what you can do right now.”

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