by B. C. Palmer
“I don’t think you quite qualify as that,” he said. There was apology written on his face when I glanced up at him hopefully.
“Oh,” I said. “Right. I’m the magician from the black lagoon. Well, I guess not, then. Still, it would be nice to feel like there was some particular thing for me, you know?”
He paused at the stairs. “You know, a lot of famous magicians didn’t have a path.”
“Anyone I’ve heard of?” I asked.
Yeah, I had him there. “Well, no. Famous to magicians would be more accurate. Except—there was Winston Churchill.”
Color me skeptical. “Churchill was a magician?”
Hunter nodded, wincing. “Yeah. So was Hitler. They spent most of the war trying to kill each other with magic. I think you’ll have history next semester. The woman that made the Bermuda Triangle? She didn’t have a path either. That whole thing was an accident, and she died—or, disappeared, perhaps—in the process, but still, also very well-known.”
“This is all so encouraging,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t trip on the sarcasm I was spilling.
Hunter gave me a rare smile as he put his hand on my shoulder. Warm, heavy, comforting. I wanted him to pull me to him, hug me in those big arms. He didn’t, though. He never did. “I suspect you’re remarkable in ways you don’t yet realize, Amelia. Don’t sweat it. There are still nine paths to go.”
“I know,” I breathed. “I’m just anxious. And hungry.”
We continued the rest of the way to the dining hall, where we had to separate and go to our respective class tables. I ate quickly, mindlessly, while I thought about the possibilities of the other paths. Honestly, what I really hoped for was something that would be useful to understanding what happened to Nathan, and, by extension, what happened to my parents. What that might be, though, was beyond me. Necromancy had been promising. The prospect of life after death? Maybe I could just summon up Laura’s spirit, or even my parents, and ask them directly.
When I asked Lucas about the prospect, he hadn’t seemed to think it was out of the realm of possibility. “Nathan would have thought of it,” he said, “but he may not have had a sufficient connection to them to make it work. You’d be a different story. Blood calls to blood, after all.”
Necromancy was fickle, though, and while I would learn the general principles in third year, it wasn’t likely I’d be calling ghosts with that knowledge. You had to have a certain quality of Yin, Professor Yakovich explained. She didn’t tell me what quality my Yin had, if it had any, but whatever it was wasn’t necromancy material.
As usual, the five of us met after dinner in my and Hunter’s room, where the wards kept our discussions private. Except this time, as soon as we arrived, Serena made a shocked little sound and put a hand to her mouth. “I can’t believe I forgot; I have a tutoring session to get to. Sorry! Where’s my head these days? You four just… carry on. I’ll catch up later.”
“No problem,” Isaac assured her.
I smelled a trick, and it was confirmed when the boys headed in and Serena gave me an exaggerated wink. Why that woman was so interested in my sex life was beyond me.
“How’s that now?” Isaac asked as I closed the door. “Everything well?”
“Hm?” I asked.
Lucas smiled, waving a finger at my face. “You’re a little flushed, looks like. It’s good on you.”
“I’ll turn the heat down,” Hunter said.
Isaac and Lucas shared an exasperated sort of glance but didn’t press the issue further. I was glad for that and took my seat while Hunter cracked open the latest book that Isaac had apparently slipped out of the restricted library. It was one of the books checked out the year my parents had survived the massacre, and apparently it was potentially relevant.
“There are two mentions of the Abyss in this book,” Hunter said, thankfully pulling Isaac’s and Lucas’s focus, which was making my cheeks worse. He flipped to the first one, which was marked with a ribbon between the pages about halfway into the volume. He read it in Hebrew. “And God spoke unto creation, saying, I Perfect Thee, and the inequity of the creation suffered, and rebelled, and perfection became destruction, and the shells of the tree were broken and cast into the Abyss, out of the sight of God.”
“The Qliphoth,” Isaac muttered. “Right? The story of the original creation, the one before this one. But it didn’t measure up. We study it in alchemy, sort of.”
“The word itself means shells, or husks,” Hunter said. “I’ve seen the reference once before, but it didn’t mention any Abyss—just that the ‘glory of God’ was too much to contain and they broke. Makes it sound like there was some second attempt at creation where whatever creative force was at work stayed clear to keep from breaking it the second time around.”
“Wait,” I said, “so is this… apocryphal or like a magician’s actual history? I mean, is there like… an actual God?”
Lucas waggled a hand. “Eh… jury’s sort of out on that one. There are divine beings; theurgists work with them often. And many of them reference something they call the Divine Eternal, which a lot of theurgists claim is the original, primordial sort of ‘god’ creator. But plenty of other divine beings claim to have created the universe. Hard to say.”
“This book is a collection of theory based on myths and legends around Kabbalistic traditions,” Hunter explained. “It’s not really possible to say how literal any of it is. But it’s the theory that’s interesting. Later on…” he flipped through pages and then turned it around to show us. There was a complex figure drawn on the page, some kind of circle with a series of interlocking, ever smaller circles inside, almost like a fractal in reverse. “See, this outlines the theory, but not the practice, of reconstructing those shells in a kind of microcosm. Basically, recreating the old creation on the small scale. It supposes that without those shells, the beings that inhabited that creation are incorporeal, and unable to take physical form—which in this context almost means spiritual form. It also suggests that this Abyss—”
“Is full of whatever was in the old shell,” I muttered, reading some of the text and putting the rest together with my own experience in the pre-birth memories. “You think Nathan used this book?”
Hunter held a finger up as he tugged at the second ribbon to open up the other marked page. “I think he must have at least read over it. Look at this.”
The figures on this page lined the right margin. They were glyphs, like some that I’d seen in Nathan’s work when Hunter finally laid it out for us. Not exact, none of them seemed to be a match, if memory served—and it was possible memory did not serve because they were fiendishly complex—but the style was unmistakable.
“So Ibrahim the Elder calls these the names of the unnamed,” he said. “Unnamed, in the sense of names being stripped. Now, in all the old Semitic traditions, words and names were power, and form—God spoke creation into existence, named this thing and that thing, told Adam to name things. In Babylonian creation myths, Marduk was given the secret words, and so on. Obviously, we know the value of language and words, but this is different. This references beings or maybe states or dimensions that were stripped of that quality. And the note at the bottom mentions the Abyss again.”
I had to squint at the faded ink to read it. “Which what God has taken away, a magician of sufficient intellect and knowing and will may yet return, temporarily… offering up to the Abyss that which is denied it…”
“Those characters,” Lucas said. “They’re similar to Nathan’s grand ritual.”
“Not exact,” Hunter said. “But yes. They’re the same style. He must have gotten his from some other source, these are the only ones recorded in this book, but there should be three other books written by Ibrahim the Elder.”
“Right,” Isaac said. “Well, next time I can nip into the restricted section I’ll see what I can find.”
Hunter closed the book and set it aside. “If this is the right direction,” he said, grim, “it may mean
that Nathan was attempting to commune with or reach into the Abyss. And if so… I can’t think of a reason why.”
“We’ll leave why for when we’ve got the full picture,” Lucas said. “For all we know it was curiosity, that’s all.”
“A person doesn’t take a risk like this out of curiosity,” Hunter said. He drummed his fingers on the tome. “It was dangerous. Deadly dangerous. If this book is anywhere close to painting an accurate picture, the things that inhabit that place don’t like us. They’re jealous. They want what creation has—form, structure, existence. They want to bask in whatever light creation gives off. Magic itself, maybe; I don’t know.”
“Your point is?” Isaac asked.
I knew. I’d seen the way Hunter grew more and more sad the last couple of weeks, as whatever gears turned in his head rolled it all over. “He isn’t sure it’s a good idea to keep going.”
Hunter glanced up at me with sad eyes, and nodded.
Lucas scoffed, standing. “Well, that’s just bullshit. Look, no one’s saying we have to go through and do everything he did, even if we could—which I’m not convinced we’re even capable of—but the only way to put it all together is to put it all together.”
“He’s right,” Isaac said. “There’s no danger in collecting the knowledge itself.”
“You sure about that?” Hunter asked. “You know full well there are books that are heavily guarded specifically because the knowledge in them drives people to madness. That’s collected work—we can’t possibly know that Nathan didn’t put enough discrete pieces together to affect his mind. Magical knowledge is real, tangible, psychic material. Some of it is dangerous, and if anyone could have found it, it would have been him.”
Though this wasn’t familiar to me, it seemed to give Isaac and Lucas pause. They both grew distant, thinking.
“Well, Nathan was one person,” I said. Their eyes turned to me. I spread my hands helplessly. “None of this is freshman first-semester material, but it… seems to me that if combinations of magical knowledge could be dangerous then the logical answer is to spread it out. Between people—between books, I guess, too. Maybe. Right?”
“Amelia…” Hunter breathed.
“She’s right,” Lucas said. “That’s exactly right. It’s been done before. The Codex Diabolica et Arcana is an example—it’s nine different books, all identical at a glance but each one has subtle differences that lay out a ritual to make compacts with dark spirits. You have to collect and collate the differences to use the ritual. The only people to have done it successfully did so with partners. It’s always this or that cult, not so-and-so the evil magician.”
“That’s different,” Hunter argued, “it’s a story.”
“It’s based on truth,” Lucas insisted. “There really is a Codex Diabolica et Arcana; there’s a knockoff copy in the restricted library. It’s reference material without the other eight versions but the story is well-known; there’s a whole introduction about it.”
Isaac stood as well, and went to the door. “I’m going to see if I can prompt Dean Maycomb with a few questions, get him to send me to the restricted library. I’ll pull what I can from Ibrahim the Elder. You need this book longer, Hunter?”
Hunter said nothing as he picked the book up and handed it to Isaac.
Isaac took the tome, kissed Lucas on the cheek and surprised me by kissing me on the cheek as well. Then he left, apparently intent on doing the task right away.
Lucas was smiling. “Well. That’s a breakthrough. Progress, finally. We might figure out what happened yet.”
Hunter turned to his desk and opened a notepad. “Maybe we will.”
The room grew colder suddenly. Metaphorically speaking—though it was cooled down from when I’d first come in with red cheeks. Lucas stared at Hunter’s back for a long moment, pensive, then seemed to banish the mood and smiled at me. “Care for a walk?”
I did, and almost took him up on it. The whole interlude had been taken up with the excitement of discovery, and any chance for taking Serena’s advice had passed, it seemed.
But I could tell something was bothering Hunter still. More than what he’d said. It was easier to read him these days, now that we’d had time to actually talk. “Uh… I’m pretty tired,” I told Lucas. “I’m gonna turn in. Big day tomorrow. I could turn out to be an abjurer, an alchemist, or a psychic.”
It was obvious he saw through it. He glanced at Hunter again before he nodded. Then, like Isaac, he approached and kissed my cheek. “All right then. Sleep well, and let us know how it goes.”
“I will,” I said. When he stood there just a moment longer, I risked leaning in to kiss his cheek as well. “See you tomorrow.”
Lucas’s lips spread slowly into a smile as he backed away, then turned to stroll through the door and into the hallway. I closed the door as quietly as I could after him, wondering if that had been awkward for Hunter. There was a subtle but definite shift in the room. It didn’t take long to confirm it.
“So,” Hunter muttered, “you and Lucas? And Isaac?”
“What?” I asked, but as soon as the word came out I knew it sounded like I was over-dramatically playing dumb. I sighed and sat on the edge of my bed. “Sorry, I know. You’re not blind. I’m not sure, I guess. Serena seems to be, but… I mean, you know Serena.”
“I do,” he agreed, tapping his pen against his notebook. He wasn’t looking at me but I could feel his attention like it was a military-grade searchlight.
I licked my lips and tried to ignore my pounding heart. “You know, I do think you’re—”
“I’m not jealous,” he said quickly. “That wasn’t what I meant.”
“No, I know that,” I said, and stood. I took the couple of steps needed to get close and put a hand on his back. “I was going to say now that I know you better, I do… wonder why you aren’t with anyone. It’s not like you aren’t attractive; hell, even I’ve considered it. You know, let out some steam after studying or something.” Even I heard how cringeworthy that sounded.
Hunter had gone stiff under my hand. His pen rested on the paper, but there was no writing under it. Slowly, he laid it down. And when he did, he turned and shrugged my hand off. “I really can’t, Amelia. Not right now. Not… not with all this.”
“I know,” I said, hiding the sting of hearing it out loud. It was obvious how committed Hunter was to his quest. Whether or not he thought it was a good idea, it was something he couldn’t give up on. The more he knew, the more he just seemed to hate that he had to go through with it. Like he already understood that he wasn’t going to like where it led him. “It’s okay. I just thought I’d better say something. Air it out, you know. Three months of therapy after Laura died, and that’s pretty much what I bought.”
“Amelia, I—”
“It’s okay,” I assured him. “Really. And I am kind of tired. I’m gonna… read this next chapter in Woolsey’s Thaumaturgical Essays and turn in. Don’t worry about the light.”
I hoped he would say something else, ask me to talk, maybe even grab me and confess his tortured desires. Instead, he gave a stiff nod, tried to smile, and went back to his notes—though, he still didn’t immediately write anything down.
Maybe it was cruel of me, in retrospect, but rather than undressing under my blanket this time, I peeled my uniform off until I was in my bra and panties, folded it up neatly, and replaced it in the trunk before I crawled into bed. If Hunter looked up, I didn’t see it, but when I glanced up from Woolsey’s essays, he had turned slightly to face away from me.
Well. I could at least tell Serena I tried. Maybe if I did, she’d stop haranguing me about it. So much for the bold approach.
Hunter
Once Amelia had drifted off, I dimmed the light on her side of the room and tried to ignore the tug I felt toward her. There was too much work in front of me to let myself become distracted by her. And she was, distracting that is. I’d find myself thinking of her at random moments, any time my brain quiete
d, suddenly she’d be there. It didn’t matter if I were in class, in the library, eating, or even, to my chagrin, in the shower.
Knowing that Isaac and Lucas had been with her simultaneously gutted me and aroused me. I’d accepted my self-imposed celibacy after Nathan’s disappearance without issue until the damn headmaster’s room-assigning spell indicated she’d be best fitted with me. It was magic that Lucas likely understood a fraction better than I, and he knew hardly anything about it. The academy simply placed students where the magic said they needed to be—giving no concern for class standing or genders.
I’d thrown myself into the hunt for answers even more after she’d appeared, desperate to keep her out of my thoughts. Others might say it was out of guilt or loyalty to Nathan but it wasn’t. Hell, even I knew Nathan would be the first person egging me on to take the woman up on her offer. All I knew was that the glimpse I’d let myself selfishly have of the soft curve of her hips, pert ass covered by the plain but bafflingly sexy panties, and soft slope of her breasts was going to taunt me. It was all I could let myself have, though. It wouldn’t be fair to her to tumble into the bed and drive myself into her, not when I couldn’t offer more. Amelia, I knew it in my bones as well as I knew I was a magician, was meant for more than just a fuck for fun. And I couldn’t offer that.
I shook my head and turned back to my work.
Translating incantations from one language to another rarely revealed their purpose. Some spells were direct enough with their semantic components—my dimming spell lux cadere literally translated as ‘light, fall’. Other spells, however, were more poetic. Dissecting them could be the work of years without proper references, digging not just through the words themselves but through the poetry and literature of the culture, looking for the native context.
That was easier when the language in question came attached to a culture that had been preserved. Whatever Nathan had been attempting, he employed spells from cultures that had been dead for thousands of years. Little more than a few scraps remained, and those that did were often useless. Maybe I overestimated myself thinking I could match wits with someone like Nathan. How he’d amassed the necessary understanding to actually use this kind of magic was beyond me.