“Faithful to the Praetorians? Yes. But he doesn’t care. That’s the . . . really strange thing. He’s . . . in my head, sometimes . . . “ Kanmi sounded sick. “But he doesn’t seem to care why I do what I do, so long as I do it.” Behind her back, he slid all of the coins into one pile. Found her hand-bag, and swept all the coins from the table into the bag for her. “For the record, I’ve never paid so much before in my life, and I don’t even care if anyone listening knows that I think you’re worth every assarii.” He kissed her, and Minori could feel the pulse of interest in her own body, and a surge from Lassair. Lassair! Stop that!
You have to make this look good, do you not?
Geisha and their poseur counterparts are more restrained than . . . oh, gods, I’d forgotten what he smells like . . . . Minori pulled back, after a moment, and put a demure finger to his lips. Slipped out of the booth, and adjusted her hair with a compact, trying not to boggle at what she had, apparently, once looked like. We never appreciate what we have, until it’s gone, she thought, as Kanmi tossed a couple of coins on the table to pay for untasted coffee and tea, and regained his composure before taking her arm in his, and heading for the door. Minori was very aware of the interested stares, and marked out the only two men in the room who weren’t smiling slightly and nudging each other. They weren’t here when I came in.
They followed behind Emberstone. I can barely see their inwards glows, either.
Tell Adam and the others I’m going with him. He’s . . . himself. Just . . . gods. Bound.
They agree. Get more information, Steelsoul says.
Outside, Kanmi had a motorcar waiting, and he pushed her up against it for a moment, kissing her urgently. Putting on a show for any observers, Minori knew better than to speak about actual work in the vehicle; the CPL obviously didn’t trust him entirely, so it was almost certainly bugged. So instead, she . . . put on a show, which she . . . desperately hoped her friends weren’t listening to on the radio. She talked about music, theater, politics, and sex acts, with equal calmness and politeness. She always agreed with Kanmi’s opinion in the end, though she lightly pushed him on various topics. And when they got to his hotel, she noted, again that there were men in the lobby, who watched them as they headed up the stairs. Kanmi kissed her at the door, backing her up against the wall, and fumbled for the keys to open the way for them. And inside, she could feel the wards he’d put into place. Sound couldn’t go more than a foot in any direction inside the room without being caught and deadened. The door and windows had electrical wardings on them, unusual for Kanmi; he usually worried about ordinary maids and maintenance workers, and usually simply set up wardings that notified him when there had been a breach. Even the walls had wardings, counter-spirit scrawlings that she’d never seen him use before.
And while he moved her, quickly, to the bed, as soon as she perched on the edge, Kanmi knelt before her, and put his head on her thighs, wrapping his arms around her legs, and clutched at her almost convulsively. “Talk to me,” Minori whispered, leaning down so she could be heard, and trying to hold him, in return, stroking her hands down his head and back. “Just talk to me, Kanmi-kun. It’s been so long since I’ve heard your voice.”
The story came out in dribs and drabs. “Baal-Hamon was . . . amused . . . at first, I think,” Kanmi said, his voice muffled against her legs. “I was a mouse that wanted to defy him and the CPL. But I think he . . . almost likes me, in a way. He could have told them all that I was a traitor to their cause. But . . . he might understand . . . that I’m not necessarily a traitor to my people. That the CPL themselves might be, instead. He listens to them. But he . . . does hear me.” Kanmi looked up, his face gray with tiredness. “I’ve had worse bosses.”
“What . . . what does he want?” Minori whispered.
“Gods. I don’t even know. I can’t claim to understand him. He’s . . . he’s used to the idea, after two thousand years . . . of being sacrificed. Of being torn apart, like Tammuz, to renew the earth. It wasn’t integral to his worship, back in the day. Back then, it was ‘sacrifice your first-born, preferably a son.’” Kanmi hugged her legs more tightly. “They’re . . . telling him they need his power to free our people. And he has no problem with being torn apart to do it. Because he thinks he’ll . . . re-integrate afterwards. And the world will be renewed.” Kanmi shuddered. “I can’t tell if he’s bought into his own mythology, or . . . or if he has a plan . . . or if they’ve lied to him so successfully . . . .”
“Who are they?” Minori asked, prompted by Lassair.
“I don’t know. Any time I’ve met them, it’s been with a hood over my head as I go through . . . another initiation rite. I think there are over a dozen others. Maybe as many as twenty. All . . . very powerful technomancers.” Kanmi swallowed. She could feel it against her leg. “Every ritual is designed to bind me more securely to Baal-Hamon. And to their fucking cause.”
Minori’s stomach churned, and she desperately stroked his hair back from his face. “We can smuggle you out, Kanmi. We can . . . find another god to unbind you. Or . . . counter-bind you, or something.” Her mind raced. “Amaterasu. We’ll take you so far out of Baal’s territory, he can’t reach you, and my sun-goddess can . . . bind you to her, in his place.’
“Oh, gods, just what I always wanted, to have my soul turned into a wishbone pulled at by two gods,” Kanmi said, his voice hoarse. “But you don’t understand. Part of him wants me there, doing what they have me doing. Training their young sorcerers. Making them into soldiers, out in the desert. He’s old, Min. You ever read the really old stories of the gods, and wonder why they couldn’t stay consistent from one story to the next? Some of that is humans messing up the damned stories. And some of that is that the very earliest gods, I think, were . . . just so primitive, and they were so . . . pulled . . . by the beliefs of their worshippers . . . .” Kanmi swallowed. “He’s old, Min,” he repeated, dully. “I’m not saying senile, because . . . he’s not. He’s aware. He’s just so many things to so many people, that I don’t know if he knows what he is some days. But he’s . . . very aware of me. And he won’t permit me to leave. He’s . . . permitting me time with you. As a . . . reward. Like a pat on the head to a dog. I’ve amused him. I’ve trained his people.”
He had always been an organized thinker. It showed in the way he spoke, in the way he wrote. And at the moment, his thoughts were clearly scattered to the four winds. Possibly because the god that bound him was . . . in and of himself . . . scattered. This infuriated Minori. Her husband’s mind was a bright flame, a beacon, and seeing him so . . . distracted, degraded, by circumstances and a god’s touch hurt. “We have to do something,” she whispered, urgently. “We have to save you. I came here to bring you home.” She blocked, desperately, Sophia Caetia’s words. That he would never come home to her. Ever.
Kanmi looked up, and his lips curled up, faintly. “I can get in closer,” he told her, softly. “I might be the last one they want to bind fully. And when I’m all the way bound, they’ll have enough people to . . . sacrifice Baal. I . . . think they want to divide him up between everyone involved. Baal thinks he’ll overwhelm them, burn them out, and come back to himself. They think . . . that they can hold pieces of him inside of themselves. They’ve been using calculi to write the binding spells. They might even be able to do it, Min. Imagine the power of a six-thousand-year-old god, divided not over . . . fourteen million jotun and seven million fenris and a whole lot of other people. Just . . . embedded . . . in twenty people. Twenty new gods. All of whom hate Rome.”
Minori stared down at him. “What are you saying?” she asked, softly. She almost didn’t want to hear the answer.
“That . . . that if I can hold out long enough . . . I can bring these fuckers down. I can give them to you all. If . . . if Baal-Hamon lets me.” Kanmi swallowed. “Help me, Min. All of you, I know you’re listening. We can do this. I just . . . need to get deeper. It’ll take time.”
“And what is to say,” Minori
asked, swallowing, “that Baal-Hamon will let you disrupt his sacrifice?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know, Min, but I have to try. If . . . if you all don’t think I’m handling it . . . keep tabs on me. You can . . . I don’t know, be my favorite prostitute ever, Min, and if you all don’t think I have a shot at convincing him that the others are wrong, that they’re only after power . . . if you think I’m being taken over . . . then Adam takes his gun and he shoots me in the head. You understand? Two shots, Adam ben Maor. Make sure the brain is gone.”
Kanmi was rocking against her legs now, and she could feel hot tears there, again. Minori wrapped her arms around him, tightly. “You’re going to win,” she told him, swallowing hard. “Sophia said so. She said you’re going to be a hero.”
“Fuck that. I’m not doing this to be a hero. I’m not doing this for the good of the fucking Empire. And while I wish I could claim that I was doing it to save innocent lives, that’s not why, either. I’m doing it because a good man asked me to. A man I know is better than I am myself. And I trust Adam’s opinion more than I trust my own.” Kanmi’s voice was miserable. “I’m compromised. I know it. But I’m coming home. Or I’m going to die trying.”
That conversation was tabled there, as Minori, tears burning in her eyes, slipped her kimono off her shoulders. Kanmi found the wire taped to her ribs, and spoke directly into it. “I’d like a few minutes alone with my wife. I promise, she’s safe with me.” Terrible, gentle irony in his words. And then he switched the transmitter off. “Lassair? I can’t hear you, but I know you can hear me. Please leave.”
Minori hesitated. She’d seen and felt his reaction to her . . . looking like this. Her older self was going to be a let-down. Lassair, for her part, extended a hand of flame outside of Minori’s body, and touched Kanmi’s arm, directly. I am meant to protect Truthsayer today.
Kanmi’s head snapped back. “I . . . I could hear that.”
Physical contact overcomes some of the blocks. Intriguing.
Kanmi waved it away. “Lassair . . . you know I’m not going to harm the woman I love. I don’t think I’d have . . . any me left . . . if I did that.”
Lassair still hesitated. It’s not as if the two of you haven’t thought of me being here, while . . . It both was, and wasn’t, a feeble joke. The spirit was genuinely concerned at the thought of leaving Minori alone with Kanmi. A private thought, directly solely at Minori. He’s not stable.
I know. Sophia said . . . I’d be his center. His anchor. Oh, gods, I’m placing faith in the words of a madwoman. A madwoman who said he’d die. Minori cleared her throat, and shook the thoughts away. “I . . . won’t look as good . . . if she leaves.” Insecurity, plain and simple, and she knew it. She was fifty-four years old. She knew what she looked like.
“You’ll look like you. That’s all I want, Min. That’s all that matters. Lassair, please. Give us . . . a little privacy. We might not . . . ever get another chance.”
Lassair departed. And Minori relaxed only once Kanmi had taken her into his arms, gray hair and all. “You’re . . . going to give me my money’s worth, right?” Kanmi managed to joke, but she could see the despair and anger so deeply commingled within him, that she didn’t even know if she could lift it, even for a little while.
But I’m going to try. And I’m going to bring you home, Kanmi Eshmunazar. I promise you that. No matter what prophecy says.
Chapter 11: Precursors
Chaos theory hadn’t been used much in sorcery until the advent of main-frame calculi, but it was really the innovation of the personal calculi that anyone could have at home or in a lab that unleashed its full potential for modeling what a spell will actually do. We try, in our incantations, to be extremely deterministic, but there are always outside variables that we might not fully account for—air pressure, wind, humidity in the environment can affect someone attempting to use the atmosphere for a very specific effect. Someone attempting to ignite a fire with raw energy might get a much larger, or much smaller effect, than anticipated, due to environmental variables.
However, it’s the small change made at a start point that has an unforeseen but self-replicating pattern of results that really interests most sorcerers in terms of chaos theory—that, and predicting it. The favorite example, of a butterfly’s wings causing a tornado hundreds of miles away, is an example of that self-replicating pattern getting larger and more powerful over time. That’s the hallmark of chaos in a system: the error, or at least pattern, that develops exponentially.
There are theorists who say that they can use chaos theory to model the social behavior of crowds, map seismic activity, and even predict wars. I’d like to point out that while they’ve had some success with earthquakes, and crowds dispersing out of a building, when viewed from above, certainly look pretty fractal, that they haven’t yet had any success in modeling war. Part of that is their perspective; they can’t get far enough away to be able to see the whole pattern. And part of it is the pure nature of the human animal. Sometimes, a single individual refuses to be defined by numbers or a pattern, and the whole emerging pattern crystallizes around him or her, and not the way a researcher thinks the pattern should go.
I also find it fascinating that some of those same chaos theoreticians use their math to prove that we do not live in a deterministic universe. I’ve met a Pythia at Delphi who would probably disagree with their analysis, but their contention is that if errors occur at a regular rate, the system is deterministic. If the errors agglomerate exponentially, then the system is non-deterministic, and chaotic instead. So we can all take comfort in the fact that the faster the world plummets into Tartarus in a hand-basket, the more likely it is that we all have free will. I’m feeling warm and fuzzy now, aren’t you?
So, how does one apply this to spell-casting? Ah, practicality. There are two methods. I personally favor limiting variables and starting conditions. And by limiting them, I mean controlling them through your incantation. Overcome the force of the wind with more force applied to your projectile, or still the wind, yourself, in a localized area. Proponents of chaos theory in magic suggest modeling the spell ahead of time on a calculus and using applied chaos to make the spell better. I personally do not want to see the fractal nature of my explosions. Though, as I definitely prefer to be as far away from them as I can manage, I might very well wind up with the necessary perspective in the end, anyway.
—Kanmi Eshmunazar, recorded lecture at the University of Jerusalem. “Chaos Theory and Modern Thaumaturgy.” Ianuarius 17, 1980 AC.
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Aprilis 2, 1984 AC
They’d retrieved Minori early the next morning, and retreated to a hotel suite, which she’d warded against eavesdropping, and that they’d searched for bugs. Sigrun could see how puffy Minori’s eyes were, and knew that her friend had spent a good portion of the last few hours weeping. The first thing Minori said, as she sealed off the room from observation, was addressed to Sigrun herself. “You told me what Sophia said, years ago. She used almost his exact words.” Minori’s voice was dull. “She said he’d tell us that he . . . was doing this because a good man had asked him to do so.”
Sigrun saw Adam turn his face away, as he walked over to the mini-bar, and, unusually for him, poured himself a drink. Uisce beatha, probably imported from Gaul. He threw his head back, swallowing the alcohol in one shot, and poured himself a second, before slumping into one of the room’s armchairs, staring out the window at the still-darkened streets of Alexandria. Trennus moved behind Minori, who’d taken another chair, and was staring blankly into the mid-distance now, herself. He squeezed her shoulder, gently, and Minori looked up to find Sigrun’s eyes. “I don’t care what she said,” Min said now, quietly, but fiercely. “She might have an incredible track record so far, but I am bringing him home.”
Sigrun’s throat closed. She’d told Minori three years ago, at Delphi, that she’d spent a lifetime fighting her sister’s prophecies, and that she wasn’t going
to stop now. And she’d spent most of the years between then and now in a haze of exhaustion or adrenaline, scarcely able to think. But in the past twenty-four hours, she’d had time to do precisely that. And hearing Kanmi speak Sophia's prophesied words had been the real trigger. After Loki, I said I’d fight the future. That I’d try to prevent Ragnarok, just as he had fought to do. But now . . . knowing that the reason why Sophia’s visions are so . . . iron-clad . . . is that they aren’t futures, but memories of Apollo’s future-self, transmitted through the Veil, as from one antenna in space-time to another . . . perhaps the only hope there is, is that we might win once Apollo of Delphi is dead. Once the iron-clad future becomes . . . probability, once more.
But she couldn’t tell Minori that. She couldn’t look her friend in the eye, and tell her to stop fighting, any more than she, herself, could stop fighting. She couldn’t tell her that there was no hope. Because humans needed hope to live. And that is why Sophia’s been dying by inches for decades. Because she has no hope, or at least, damned little. That, and a spiteful, petty god is angry that she is better at prophecy than he is, and that she might outlive him. And he’s punishing her for it. Is it too much to hope for, that if I ever happen to be there when a god is slain again, that it might be Apollo of Delphi’s death that I witness?
The Goddess Denied (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 2) Page 76