Sanity Line

by Zachary Adam

  “Identify that man.” “Heard.” Vidcund continued to flick through the cameras while they obeyed his order, and was pleased to see a message flash on the main display just before someone read it out loud. “GOON reports Area Isolation in Effect.”

  That, at least, was a relief. Under Area Isolation, the entire National Library had been effectively excised from reality, albeit temporarily. Nobody outside, even those with scheduled shifts, would feel the need to arrive there. Nobody on the inside now had the power to leave. It was an extreme measure to use in this case, but Därk wanted to make it perfectly clear – both to Kline and to whoever was distributing his proscribed material collection – that Agency was not taking the matter lightly.

  “Identity match. 84% confidence.” That earned the operator responsible a frown. “Why so low?”

  “He’s deliberately avoiding looking at the cameras, and the system at the National Library isn’t all that great to begin with. Still, the computer’s 84% certain that’s Eli Sharona, known S-Class subject. Need the file?” “No.”

  Archangel needed no introduction. Reaching out across the great gulfs of the mental dimensions, Vidcund decided it was time to bring a more personal touch to these proceedings.

  --Donnovan Kline could not recall a time he had been more angry, and he had had ample opportunity to get angry, over a very long and illustrious (for his profession) career. As a chef without her knives or claims adjustor without his actuarial tables, neither wizard nor librarian could perform their role without their books, and the loss of the W.A. Keeping collection was a vital blow to both roles. Kline doubted very much that Agency had yet to discover him for what he was – else he would never have risen to this position in the first place – and yet that small, vestigial bit of illogical humanity yet ticking away in his heart of hearts could not help but to feel that the decision to permanently sequester the collection was not so much happening to him as directed at him.

  Kline’s personal collections were considerable, with a depth and breadth of knowledge perhaps unrivalled in the world, at least in his particular area of expertise. To his personal system of classification, there were about three different varieties of arcanist – that was to say, those few occultists who managed to grapple on to useful knowledge instead of the usual occult trivia. The Kitabists, of which he was perhaps the archetypical example, who derived their knowledge from that ndiscovered in the past, dredging up from times older than memory That Which Could Not Be Denied. Then you had Order Mages

  – few, in these days, at least, few who truly held any real power. Shaping the universe to their will. Kline had long suspected that a few of this group worked within, or perhaps above, Agency Division. The third category... well, the least said about those who delve into the time before time perhaps the better.

  Still and all, there were works in the W.A. Keeping collection that were likely to be irreplaceable. It was the sort of thing that bold men would take large risks to safeguard, and today was a day for such risks.

  When Kline had been young, there was a practice in effect known as the commonplace book. It was a sort of mental junk-drawer, a place to jot such things as had no better place, or perhaps as would be needed in something of a hurry.

  He still maintained such a thing, and reaching into the drawer of his richly-appointed office desk, he sought out the solution to his problem, and prepared to issue a clarion call that would bridge even Vidcund Därk’s little ‘reality gap’.

  It was time for Socrates and Plato to show off a little.

  --A knife crafted from living bone of a creature long past man’s memory sounded like two things: a literary cliché and impossibility. It was, at the very least, the latter. Maria had gone through great tribulations to obtain Gloria’s signature weapon, and had long since come to terms with it having been fake. Still and all, it was a good knife – sturdy and sharp, which to her mind was the only thing a knife should ever be. The look, and its history, however exaggerated, were a credit to the drama of the weapon – a facet admired by both Cassilda and Maria-Cassilda’s etheric master.

  It was for that reason, more than laziness or paranoia that she had chosen to keep the thing on her person. She couldn’t have brought herself to discard it with all the willpower in the world. Now, of course, she was thankful she had not. It was one more of the ways in which the Unnamable’s script shaped her life, whether she wished it to or not, and one more way in which she could be assured of His benevolence.

  A benevolence which, at the balance of the day, would not be felt by many. It was with a deft stroke of her fake knife that very real blood was spilled, and not her own. Gloria had taught her well, in this regard. Sure, the Old Sow might have invested considerably more care in the selection of her sacrificial lambs, consulting astrology and arcane math, but Maria had the solvent lucidity of the modern. Blood was blood, and the young man studying in the psychology section made as good a volume of it as any.

  Of course, this wasn’t a play. There was a goodly amount of panic – Mr. Pscyhology had plenty of friends to panic and run and bolt, and in this post-’98 society, there were plenty of security guards to rush onto the scene.

  What happened next was difficult to explain, even for Maria, whose ancient bonding with Cassilda gave her insight into such moments. Speaking in that proper tongue of the Original Play, she performed the usual rote gestures and delivered the prescribed line. What was hard to explain, though, was the effect. The guards continued to run, as did, one supposes, everyone else. The blood, on the other hand, was changed.

  Once, when she was a young girl, she’d seen a match applied to a pool of spilled gasoline. It was a slow-motion shot, some sort of stock photography or footage from one of those shows where they find a dim, vaguelyeducational reason to blow something up in front of very expensive camera equipment. As the flame spread across the pool, so too did something best described only as aurora borealis flash across the bloodied floor,

  transforming it in its passing and leaving Maria changed.

  The world’s most costly quick-change act aside, it did have one other, small effect, and it was the one which Maria had desired – she was no longer alone.

  “Your wish, your Majesty?”

  “Defend your Queen, Il Fantoma.”

  --The Saffron Academy, in spite of a name and

  conservatism of uniform that suggested otherwise, was among the newer of the occult traditions. Unlike, however, almost all other newcomers, they made no secret of their freshness. New approaches were needed, they’d say. The old ways died out because they no longer functioned, and clearly that meant they were in error. Honesty was not their only eschewal of tradition, either – their founder would often boast to those knowledgeable in such matters that they belonged to none of the established schools – neither Order nor Kitabist nor Throwback. They formed on their own a fourth school, he said, a synthesis of the willful constructs of the Order mages and the erudition of the Kitabist.

  It was this founder, one self-named Professor Malvolio Coultier, who had discovered and improved upon the original Excise Edict. The ritual, a bit of old lore hinted at in Kitabist myth as some power purported by Order Mages, had originally been intended to remove humans, rather than places, from reality, and irreversibly at that. Malvolio decided that wasn’t worth monetizing – the costs in terms of karma would just be too great. So, he had developed this altered version, this metaphysical cordon.

  That, itself, had been a major revenue driver. Not as good as the scores of Academy members who learned nothing of value but none-the-less paid dues into what was, essentially, the first of the co-ed fraternal orders – but, none the less, a major revenue driver. Mostly government

  – Coultier didn’t like giving corporations or even private individuals the kind of at-will immunity that came with a pocket dimension.

  That having been said, he’d never tried to ward off a whole building before, and certainly never anything the size of the national library. Even wit
h a small host of his best apprentices, and the combined manna provided by the laymen, he’d been surprised that it had worked.

  Therefore, when everyone came out of the trance of sustaining the effect at once, he shouldn’t have been surprised, and yet, his practiced mind knew the loss of sufficient capital when it felt it. This had felt less like an empty bank account, and more like a breach.

  As the flurry of discussion started up around him, he calmly fished his phone from a pocket, and dialled.

  --

  Okay... that one didn’t feel that great. There was some quality of the transit between bodies that left an impression on the mind, Vidcund was coming to learn. It was a fatigue, and he supposed there was no reason for it not to be. Surely, projecting your

  consciousness from wherever it sat to effectively hijack another body was going to require some energy. But the transit itself had a texture, if you wished to think of it as a road. Sometimes the road was rockier than others.

  It wasn’t accurate language, which maddened him, but of course English had no accurate language to discuss it. He glanced around the W.A. Keeping Room, trying to remember what he was doing here. The bumpier transitions could be disorienting, as though something pressing had shoved his previous concern out of his mind. He thought back to a second before – he had been at the Operations Control Centre. Their private-sector contractor had been telling him the Excision Order had broken down, right after...

  Right after he’d lost contact with the Enforcement team in the Material Handling Annex. He broke into a run, palming one of the collapsible batons under his jacket as he made for that direction with as much speed as he could manage. Judging by the panicked state of the civilians he was passing, there was no need to pretend everything was under control.

  He touched his ear to wake up his Bluetooth headset, which formed an automatic connection to dispatch. “Group Creena, Team 3 to National Library.”

  Whatever was happening, this was going to have to be worth the paperwork.

  --When you wanted to be unable to believe your luck, you brought along Prodigal. That, at least, was the active philosophy Archangel brought to the operations of the Grey Angels. He wasn’t sure he believed in luck – he was raised on predestination and had lived through an adolescence and early adulthood further steeped in confirmation bias – but you couldn’t argue that Prodigal wasn’t a good luck charm. He’d never been injured, and seemed to ward off bad luck.

  That, he supposed, must have been how Agency Division had managed to miss the Juanita Coultier Memorial Collection. He was quite certain there was a more complex reason, somewhere, but the fact that they were emptying out the Keeping collection, but leaving behind the Memorial, was suspect. The Memorial was just as full of eldritch gems – admittedly, however, in the form of lateral references buried at the bottom of less than interesting pages.

  Still, as Prodigal had a knack for luck, Archangel had a knack for grand leaps of logic with such lateral references. The rising chorus of screams and gunshots came while he was scanning through a passage Prince had keyed upon, from his stack of assigned reading, and he calmly turned to face the general direction of the commotion, even while his companions did so, albeit looking much more consumed.

  Clayton glanced to him questioningly; no doubt keen to see how his once-nemesis would react. Eli would not disappoint. “Suit up. Prince... call Banker. Tell him we’re going to need a speedier exit. Prodigal, give Driver a call and tell him to go collect Scion.”

  Eli closed the door to the collection room, before turning to return to his duffle bag.

  --The Materials Handling Annex and the National Library Proper were separated by each other from an

  architectural firewall, with the only breach between the two being a large, triple-doored corridor whose doors were kept closed at all times – in fact, it was impossible to get down the corridor with all three doors open, unless you were willing to wedge each open in turn. If you were moving from the library into the much richer annex, the doors opened away from you, which lead to the incredibly therapeutic action of being able to slam through the doors at high speed, taking each at a shoulder in turn, in what could only be described as a display of tenacity.

  Vidcund cleared the last door with quite a bit of velocity behind him, the sensitivity he brought to perception amplified by training and adrenaline.

  Turning to his right, and then his left, he saw nothing out of the ordinary. In the end, he went left, heading toward the parked convoy of removal vehicles, where the enforcement team should have been. He rounded the corner behind the rearmost truck at a run, discarding one of the ill-chosen batons in order to draw a handgun.

  He heard a curious sound over the pounding of his heartbeat and his entirely indiscrete footfalls. There, behind the last armoured vehicle in the line. It was a wet snapping, a curious rending that seemed familiar and alien all at once, and it was this sound that had inspired his heightened caution.

  However, the caution had stolen from him the opportunity to earn an expedient answer, as, upon his rounding of the final corner, he had time only to spy a dark and hungry something, bounding away from him through a corner formed by the join between the garage door and the wall, which opened as though blown outward, into a starry void.

  Through his growing sense of dread and the haze of a developing migraine, he became aware of the call holding tone in his earpiece, and touched it. As he did, he blinked, and everything seemed to return to normal.

  “Därk.”

  “Team three in position. Disturbance is in the 10 o’clock wing relative public entrance.”

  Vidcund wanted to correct them, and then realized all of that panic he had rushed passed had to be for something. “En route. Don’t engage until I get there.”

  At least, he thought, he could rely on this particular team

  – they were all MOSES clones, after all. He started in that direction, relying on residual memory and inertia to carry that body back to where it needed to be, as he jumped back into his body at the control room. It was a rough transit – and to him, an unacceptable delay.

  By the end of the day, he thought, he was going to have to try to control two bodies at once. Couldn’t be that hard, really. It’s not like any of the perspective-points he had today were his from a purely biological standpoint, and surely it was just a matter of practice.

  “... Is this a joke? What’s wrong with the display?” He frowned at the master display, removing his glasses as he watched the scene in the “ten o’clock wing” unfold. Nothing looked right – the books were too old, the shelves too baroque, the clothing of the few present too regal and festive. It was like watching a movie or drama unfold. Men with clubs – he took to be some sort of perceptive analogue to the guards – fighting men with swords.

  Sighing, he realized, entirely too late, that this had to be some form of mimetic contamination – and he wasn’t about to expose more people to it. Reaching down to his workstation, he sealed the doors, and reached under his coat for his firearm. It was just as well, really. None of those present seemed fit to answer him, and the monitor wasn’t supposed to be set in gilded, hand-graven trim.

  --The earliest vaccinations were crude techniques, inoculating the treated with very real pathogens in order to promote a healthy immune response against even worse illnesses. So too was it with Archangel. He had been steeped in horror since birth, immersed in the perverse morality of those wars that are waged out of the public view.

  But for the accidents of that birth, he could have been an Agent, or indeed any form of wet-worker. He was immune to most of your standard horrors, and there was little that terrified him.

  That, in and of itself, tended to inspire as much fear as it did respect from his followers in the Grey Angels, for when wisdom suggested standing back and letting authority handle it, or at least coming up with a plan, Archangel often only acted. His more loyal followers, Scion among them, had learned that he was never truly acting without a pla
n – he carried in his head so many general contingencies that the telepath often wondered how there could be room in that skull for anything else.

  The library guards had all but fallen to the present threat by the time the active trio had arrived, and Archangel seemed unwilling to waste an opportunity, pausing only to turn to them and issue the minimum they would need.

  “Hold this entrance. Scion will find us well enough but he needs a door to come in through. Prodigal – mind your targets. At some point this’ll raise Agency eyebrows and getting out of here will be a lot easier if they consider us less of a threat.”

  With that, he rounded the final archway, reaching beneath his jacket, and Prince was somewhat surprised to see that he didn’t draw a firearm, or even some more common melee weapon, but a mechanism which unfolded in a swift motion, providing him with a cruelseeming (but impractical, to Prince’s thinking) scythe. Archangel paraded into the line of sight of the conflict without the least care for his own safety, and indeed made every effort to draw attention to his rather recognizable appearance. That mask, that death-gaze visage, was known everywhere in the Union, and depending on how deeply steeped in the occult you were, you either feared or revered him.

  For those masked invaders who were milling about the library, protecting the centre of this particular reading space, the answer seemed to be fear. They were cowed by his presence, and Prince, from his position of cover, could see that some balefire-effect, a corona of suggestive St Elmo’s Fire, radiated from the necromancer’s very person.

  Then, very quickly, they recovered from their initial fear, and rushed toward him. Prince found the moments that followed very difficult to follow, as suddenly, they seemed to come from all sides, and he had his own door to defend – such had been the fear Archangel had initially commanded, that he had actually passed through a great number of them before he even needed his weapon.