Then, there was getting Nathan safely into and out of the Abyss itself. Magic would work differently inside, so Nathan determined that we’d have to come up with some means of taking terrestrial magic—anathema to the Abyss—in with him so that he could complete the separation. Which was the fourth component that we had absolutely no literature on other than the general structure of exorcisms as a science.
Even then, that wasn’t all of it. In the Abyss, the physical body was spread out, unrestrained by the spatial dimensions that gave everything terrestrial length, width, depth and continuity in time. In short, he wouldn’t have hands or lips to cast with, which meant looking into alternative casting styles. Unsurprisingly, those were the realm of a handful of exceptionally determined magicians with various disabilities—and there weren’t many of them that fit the bill. Fifth problem defined.
The last problem wasn’t something we could possibly control.
“Because even if we can get him back after he’s separated, we have to be sure that nothing else comes with him,” I whispered to Hunter as the new term of Abyssal Magic and Outsider Cults started, the Monday after winter break ended. I showed him my notebook—one of about twenty I’d gone through so far with Nathan—and pointed to the calculations meant to give us our window of timing for shutting the passage down after Nathan returned.
He looked it over, frowning. “Three seconds? If you pull the plug—”
“There’ll be so much magic in the circle itself that it can’t just be shut down,” I said. “It’s a whole process. Last year, in Sinclaire’s dungeon, if I’d just stopped casting all that would have happened is that the containment elements would fail. The same thing would happen here, unless we devise a kind of kill-switch, but honestly, it would take months, maybe years, to figure out what to do with the errant magic. Nathan did suggest constructing a sort of sink device, but there are risks to that, too. Explosive ones.”
Hunter nodded grimly as he re-read the equations. “So you need a bigger window.”
“Yeah,” I breathed, “but every time we try to solve for a bigger one, shit gets weird. And that’s just the math we can predict. Abyssal magic doesn’t exactly follow the same rules, so trying to solve with those variables is like… I don’t know, trying to make a cake with spaghetti and moonlight, using a blender instead of an oven. Everything just stops making any sense. There’s some bit that we’re missing, I know it, but I just can’t figure—”
“Class is officially in session,” a man said from the front of the room. He had the slightest hint of an accent I thought might be Dutch or German.
He definitely wasn’t Percy. This man was a little past middle age, his thick silver hair swept back into a tail at the base of his neck. He had scars over his face, down his neck, along his hands. It looked like there wasn’t a part of him that hadn’t been cut or burned at some point, and one of his eyes was pale and milky, crossed by a puckered scar that ran from his brow almost to his chin. He gave the class a long, hard stare that sent a chill down my spine as it swept past me and Hunter.
Did it linger on me for half a second?
“My name,” the man said, “is Professor Aramus Klein. I will be taking over for the remainder of the year. I understand there is a great deal of catching up to accomplish, so this will be a rather difficult term. However, it is critically necessary, now more so than ever.”
Now, he was definitely looking at me. I resisted the urge to squirm. That was the specialist Headmistress Hayes mentioned. The one that Percy was so uncomfortable over. Why? Other than his general creepy vibe, anyway. I could see how Klein would make anyone uncomfortable, not just from his appearance, but from his grim countenance.
“What happened to Professor Turner?” A girl at the front of the class asked. I only really knew her by the back of her head, but I recognized her as one of several that seemed to have no limit of interest in Percy’s stories.
Klein gave a deep sigh and looked around the room again. “I will say this once, and only once, and I will not elaborate further. Professor Turner was an assistant of mine for many years. I am more qualified to teach this class. Now, I suggest you all prepare notebooks. We have a great deal of ground to cover, starting with the various signs associated with the presence of Abyssal magic.”
He wasn’t exaggerating at all. Klein lectured at a breakneck pace and took no questions until the last fifteen minutes of class. By the time Hunter and I filed out with the other students, my brain was aching from so much information. “Why couldn’t Hayes have brought Klein in from the beginning?” I wondered out loud as we took the turn toward the clinic. “We could have been on top of this shadow entity thing from day one. And Percy must have told dozens of stories about his adventures—he never mentioned Klein once. Why is that?”
“I have a hypothesis,” Hunter muttered, “but it doesn’t paint a very pretty picture.”
“I probably have the same one,” I said. Percy seemed like a nice enough guy. But in all those stories of unearthing ancient ruins and combatting nascent Outsider cults, well… he didn’t exactly look like someone who had been through all of that. Now, Klein? Klein was a man who’d been in fights. A lot of them. And while I could imagine Percy swaggering into an ancient temple to loot a desiccated sanctuary Indiana Jones style… I could more easily envision Klein doing it with a relentless interest.
On the other hand, I could see Klein showing up at my house over the summer to root out an Abyssal threat. And he’d given me the sort of eye that seemed like he was already planning it. “He’s a little creepy, isn’t he?”
“A little?” Hunter snorted. “That’s being generous. Probably being around all that stuff does that to you, though.”
I glanced up at him critically.
He grimaced. “Sorry. Not you, I mean. You’re not creepy.”
“Not yet,” I breathed. We came to the entrance to the clinic. “You want to see him?”
“Yes,” Hunter admitted. “But… I think he’d rather me be in the library digging through the restricted section with Lucas and Isaac. We’ll bring over anything that seems like it might help. You two getting along in there?”
“You know, we kind of are,” I said, as amazed to hear myself say it as he was to hear it. “Nathan’s complicated, and I really get that now… but he seems to finally respect that I only want to help. And the talks we have—no offense, but Nathan gets excited about magic in a way that you guys don’t. It’s infectious, and I can kind of see how he got to where he is. He loves it.” Plus, we’d been opening up to one another and sharing secrets a little at a time—that, though, was a discussion for after Nathan survived this shit.
Hunter smiled fondly. “Yeah, he does. More than anything else, I think. Including people. Well, you go on in. I’ll see you later, yeah?”
I got up on my toes as Hunter bent his neck so that I could kiss him. His big hand trailed along my side briefly, sending tingles to all the places, until we were pushed right up against the limits of what was decent, and also practical. Nathan wasn’t going to save himself sitting in that room. He needed us.
Hunter paused, after we parted, his eyes locked on mine a moment before he gave a nod, colored a bit around the tops of his cheeks, and then let me go. “Yeah, um… right. So, I’ll see you later, then.”
“Uh huh,” I said as he turned and left. Well… now that was a little odd. Maybe he hadn’t quite gotten comfortable kissing me in public. Though, there were just a handful of students lounging at the far corner of the hall, and none of them paying attention to us.
I pushed through into the clinic, eager to pitch Nathan the handful of potential solutions I’d come up with throughout the day, and waved at Gina, the woman who managed the clinic for the most part. A powerful telepath, she never actually spoke aloud as far as I could tell. Instead, she greeted me without looking up, her voice echoing in my head. “Evening, Amelia. Nathan’s got a visitor.”
Probably one of the boys, I decided as I made my way
through the next door and down the hall to where the secure facility was. Nathan’s door was closed, of course, and Gershwin stood guard outside it. I knew him and Emira both fairly well, now. At least, as well as anyone knew the security agents. Gershwin gave me a nod. “He’s got company.”
“I know,” I said. “Gina told me. Lucas?”
“Close,” Gershwin muttered. He knocked once before he opened the door to let me in.
It was Percy, in fact. He looked… defeated.
I stepped far enough in that Gershwin could close the door. “Uh… Professor Turner. Good to see you. We missed you in class.”
Percy’s face turned pink. “Ah… yes. It was decided that Aramus—Professor Klein, that is—would be… ah, more formal. Provide a better background. I’m actually just leaving. I mean to visit with Lucas before I go, briefly, before I get back to the good work. I brought these.”
Nathan stepped aside as Percy gestured to a stack of small, weathered journals on the bed. “Just my observations, bits of abyssal script I’ve recorded from a few sites, some of my own personal pet theories… I’m not sure that it will help, but I hope that something there is of value.”
“You’re leaving them?” I asked. I looked to Nathan, wondering if he had anything to say.
Nathan only pursed his lips slightly as Percy nodded and plastered on a smile that I think was supposed to be charming but only made him look slightly constipated. “Yes. Well, I’ll no doubt recover them later. But for now, I suspect you may need them more.”
“Thank you,” I said. It didn’t seem like there was anything more that I could say, without unnecessarily hurting his feelings more than they already clearly were. “I’m sure they’ll be helpful. After all this, I’ll make sure Lucas gets them.”
“That would be… yes. That’s a good idea.” Percy looked around the room and patted down his jacket briefly before he finally put his hands in his pockets. “Right. Well, I will… let the two of you get to your work.”
He turned to leave, and I moved out of the way of the door so that he could, but as he passed me, he paused, and turned his head, his voice low. “Aramus is… accomplished. And quite zealous. Do your best to stay well out of his notice, if you can.”
Percy gave me a pat on the shoulder, and then knocked to be let out.
When the door closed, I turned back to Nathan, confused as I jerked a thumb at the door. “What’s that all about?”
“Percy’s chickens coming home to roost, I think,” Nathan drawled. “There may well be something useful in his journals, but… I believe that the majority of his vast experience is rather second hand. Aramus Klein has, somewhat mysteriously, published a number of short volumes about his exploits. They bear a shocking resemblance to Percy’s first-hand accounts.”
I groaned as I took my usual seat at the end of the bed. “I was afraid of that. Klein’s class today was… a lot to take in. All about how to look for traces of Abyssal magic, he assigned us a new revelation spell that I’m probably going to have to break my fingers a few times to actually cast. I could show you?”
Nathan glanced at the journals, and at the chalk marking on the floor and walls, clearly interested in getting on with our work. But… he did love magic. “If you can execute it,” he said. “I suppose it would be a useful trick to have.”
Maybe it was a little bit of time wasted. But once I showed him, and Nathan in turn showed me the trick to crossing my pinkie over my forefinger without breaking it, we were both a little more relaxed. I cracked open my notebook and laid it down. “So, I was thinking about how bungee jumping works,” I started.
He was skeptical, of course. But after a couple of hours, we had a working theory to build the spell around. Which was one problem down—more or less.
Now, there were just four more impossible things to do, and we were in the clear.
Easy.
Amelia
Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. By March, I knew three new things.
First, magicians can supposedly do impossible things. And given enough time, that’s mostly true. Sure, peering into other dimensions, calling up the elements, changing the weather, and creating remarkably lifelike dolls that walk around and carry your luggage for you all sound impossible—but that’s just a lack of imagination and the proper tools. Some things, it turns out, are damn near impossible for magicians. The sorts of things I never would have worried about at MIT. Not that I’m complaining.
For instance, bungee jumping into the Abyss? Very damn close to impossible, even for magicians. What started as one fairly straight forward spell turned into a series of six. One to create the bungee, one to ensure that terrestrial magic could be stored until it was used, another to make sure that the storage component didn’t break down in the abyss, which meant another tether just for that…
It was like every time we set up magical dominos, we realized we were one short to get them all tumbling. That problem took six weeks to crack, and by the end of it was I pretty sure all the boys were going to break up with me on the basis that I was a slave driver. I had pretended not to notice Lucas mutter that I was as bad as Nathan.
Second, Klein’s new Abyssal Magic Cram Course, which is what it realistically was, was not for the faint of heart.
“Take a good, long look,” he said somewhere in the second week as he flicked on a projector and scrolled through pictures of magicians who had not survived tampering with the Abyss. “This is the consequence of meddling with powers that do not belong in the terrestrial sphere.”
One of the photos was of a man who had been torn in half, from the crown of his head to his crotch. Each half had subsequently sprouted legs like some horrific spider with eight joints to a limb and tried to run off in separate directions. Klein’s team had arrived to put the abomination out of its… misery? I couldn’t imagine there was any human mind left in the creature after that.
Another photo was of a roughhewn temple in the Adirondacks. At first, because the photo was black and white, I thought the walls were carved with relief sculptures of screaming people. Klein disillusioned us of that notion. “That is what remained of the cult we discovered in nineteen eighty-eight,” he warned. Everything sounded like a warning. It was like Sex-Ed in a red state, only instead of the dangers of pregnancy and STIs, it was being turned inside out or playing host to something that would give people nightmares at a casual glance.
He had dozens of pictures just like it, which gave the entire class the impression that Abyssal cults were far more common than Percy had led us to believe.
The third thing was that very soon, I was going to have to open a passage to the Abyss, at the very real risk of becoming one of those photos, and do roughly ten to twelve technically impossible things.
“We could run the equations through another verification,” I told Nathan and the boys the day that we’d gathered together to finalize the plan. “Just to make sure. I’m confident about some of them, but the others—”
Nathan rubbed his face and waved at the wall of his ‘cell’ which was now so covered in equations and diagrams that from far enough away it would look painted chalk white. “We’ve been over them hundreds of times,” he said, probably as weary of having this conversation as I was. “No amount of repetition is going to yield the results you’re hoping for, Amelia. Some variables we simply cannot predict. We should…”
He closed his eyes and sagged a little so that he had to brace himself on the edge of the bed as he sat down, until the pain behind his eyes passed.
Four things.
We’d learned four, over those three months since Christmas. One of them, was that Nathan didn’t have limitless time. The protections around the cell that kept his astral body—or anything hitching a ride—from leaving and wreaking more havoc had a side effect we hadn’t predicted but couldn’t do anything about. Instead of lashing out at the world around it, the shadow had begun to plague Nathan internally, pounding at its fleshy prison any time he got e
ven a little agitated.
At first, that had been when we argued. By now… it was pretty much any time he had so much as an itch.
“I don’t think we can wait any longer,” Hunter said as he went to Nathan and knelt in front of him, taking one hand to let Nathan squeeze while his mind twisted into knots, until the spell passed. “That was a long one. Almost thirty seconds.”
“Only that?” Nathan wondered, bleary eyed and slightly slurred. “Funny. It seemed a lot more like something nearing eternity.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, miserable on Nathan’s behalf. I’d seen so many of those attacks now. They were killing him. They had to be—no one could take that much punishment for that long.
“We should take this to Hayes,” Lucas said, watching Nathan gradually recover. “We can do it tonight. We’ve gotten all the same results for weeks now.”
It made my hands shake to think about it. “I know,” I muttered. “But it’s me that has to do the bulk of the casting. I just have a bad feeling about it.”
Nathan heaved himself up from the bed with Hunter’s help. “We can’t guarantee our success,” he said as he approached me. He came close enough that he could grip my shoulders. “But I have every confidence in your abilities. Take it to Hayes. We need access to Sinclaire’s temple to do this correctly.”
I shuddered involuntarily. “Can’t we make this work—”
“Not because it will be easier,” he said softly. “Sinclaire’s temple has safeguards. If… something was to go wrong, which I’m confident it won’t… we can’t risk letting whatever happens spread.”
Meaning, in simple terms, that the place was a death trap and that if I fucked up, we could rest assured that only we would die horrible, long, screaming deaths. Comforting.
“I trust you,” Nathan said softly, his quiet words giving me more strength than logical. “And I don’t have infinite time, so, let’s make arrangements.”
I don’t know that it was comforting, exactly, but Hayes had many of the same reservations about opening up Sinclaire’s temple that I did. It was nice that someone was roughly on my side—and the side of caution more generally—but it didn’t keep her from agreeing.
A Spell for Shadows: Rosewilde Academy of Magical Arts Page 26