Read The Bane Chronicles 1: What Really Happened in Peru for Free Online

an ancient ritual to summon water from the earth. Seeing them at all was worth coming to this country.”
    Magnus still had his head sunk deep in the pillow, but he preened slightly.
    “Always happy to enrich your life, Catarina.”
    “It was not grand or beautiful,” Catarina said reminiscently, “when you were sick all over those mystical and immense designs from a civilization long gone by. From a height. Continuously.”
    He briefly felt regret and shame. Then he mostly felt the urge to get sick again.
    Later, when he was soberer, Magnus would go to see the Nazca Lines, and commit to memory the trenches where gravel had been cut away to show naked clay in sprawling, specific patterns: a bird with its wings outstretched in soaring flight, a monkey with a tail whose curves Magnus thought positively indecent—obviously, he approved—and a shape that might have been a man.
    When scientists discovered and spent the 1930s and 1940s investigating the Nazca Lines, Magnus was a little annoyed, as if shapes scored in stone were his own personal property.
    But then he accepted it. That was what humans did: They left one another messages through time, pressed between pages or carved into rock. Like reaching out a hand through time, and trusting in a phantom hoped-for hand to catch yours. Humans did not live forever. They could only hope what they made would endure.
    Magnus supposed he could let the humans pass their message on.
    But his acceptance came much, much later. Magnus had other things to do the day after he first saw the Nazca Lines. He had to be sick thirty-seven times.

    After the thirtieth time Magnus was ill, Catarina became concerned.
    “I really think you might have a fever.”
    “I have told you again and again that I am most vilely unwell, yes,” Magnus said coldly. “Probably dying, not that either of you ingrates will care.”
    “Shouldn’t have had the guinea pig,” said Ragnor, and he cackled. He seemed to be bearing a grudge.
    “I feel far too faint to help myself,” Magnus said, turning to the person who cared for him and did not take unholy joy in his suffering. He did his best to look pathetic and suspected that right now his best was really excellent. “Catarina, would you—”
    “I’m not going to waste magic and energy that could save lives to cure the ill effects of a night spent drinking excessively and spinning at high altitudes!”
    When Catarina looked stern, it was all over. It would be more use to throw himself on Ragnor’s tender green mercies.
    Magnus was just about to try that when Catarina announced thoughtfully, “I think it would be best if we tried out some of the local mundane medicines.”
    The way mundanes in this part of Peru practiced medicine, it appeared, was to rub a guinea pig all over the afflicted sufferer’s body.
    “I demand that you stop this!” Magnus protested. “I am a warlock and I can heal myself, and also I can blast your head clean off!”
    “Oh, no. He’s delirious, he’s crazed, don’t listen to him,” Ragnor said. “Continue applying the guinea pig!”
    The lady with the guinea pigs gave them all an unimpressed look and continued to go about her guinea pig business.
    “Lie back, Magnus,” said Catarina, who was extremely open-minded and always interested in exploring other fields of medicine, and apparently willing to have Magnus serve as a hapless pawn in her medical game. “Let the magic of the guinea pig flow through you.”
    “Yes indeed,” put in Ragnor, who was not very open-minded at all, and giggled.
    Magnus did not find the whole process as inherently hilarious as Ragnor did. As a child he’d taken djamu many times. There was bile of goat in that (if you were lucky—bile of alligator if you weren’t). And guinea pigs and djamu were both better than the bloodletting someone had tried on him in England once.
    It was just that he generally found mundane medicine very trying, and he wished they would wait until he felt better