Fathomless

by Anne M. Pillsworth

  Orne lifted his eyes to the horizon, where low cliffs declined to sandy marshland and apricot clouds barred a lemon sky. “I know that window well.”

  Stop there. “You know what window?”

  “The one in your mother’s studio. The Crusader, the sick pilgrim, the lady in her garden.”

  “Dad’s never put photos of that window on his Web site, or even in his portfolio.”

  Orne shrugged. “I’ve seen the window in situ. Last December, during the two weeks you and your father were away.”

  At Grandpa Stewie’s in Vermont, Christmas vacation. “You broke into Mom’s studio?”

  “The Order put wards on your home, but they left the carriage house undefended. I spent those two weeks mostly in your father’s studio. He’d finished restoring the Founding windows, and now it was my turn to work on them. I suspected you’d come study with the Order. What better way to keep in touch than to make us a sanctuary within its very sanctum? The Arkwright House was still under repair, and I gambled the Founding would be installed before the Order put up strong wards. My gamble paid off. Since the windows were again part of the house, the wards didn’t detect my seed world as foreign magic.”

  “Nobody in the Order knows the window’s, like, enchanted?”

  “You’re the only one to whom it’s shown its magic.”

  “The crow glowing.” A hollow ache started in Sean’s middle, where he supposed his crow stomach must be. “I thought that was my mom. Like her ghost had put the same magic in the crow she used to put in her paintings.”

  “Its energy felt like hers?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not surprising. The magical signatures of blood relatives are often similar. But now that you know Kate wasn’t responsible for the crow, you must be disappointed.”

  Try “majorly pissed off,” now that he imagined Orne in the carriage house. Orne staring at Mom’s window. Orne handling the paintings she left unfinished when she’d died, still humming with her magic. Sean flapped from his arm and touched down on the nearest soldier. His armored shoulder proved too slippery for comfort. He flew to the foremost Indian, who showed no reaction to claws gripping his bare skin. “I could tell Helen and Marvell,” he cawed. “Tell them what you’ve done to the Founding.”

  Orne approached slowly. “Yes, you could.”

  “I’ve got to tell them, in fact. Besides, it’s creepy enough you spying on me with the aether-newt. Like how you showed it to me before I came here, to rub it in.”

  “Rubbing anything in wasn’t my intention.”

  He flapped to a higher perch atop the Indian’s head. “Anyhow, the newt’s not the worst thing, or even this window. Helen and Marvell told me how our relationship could matter to you. How an apprentice and master with blood ties can make a stronger psychic bond.”

  “Correct.”

  “They might even merge their magical energies.”

  “A synergy is possible.”

  “And in a synergy, the master’s boss. He can steal the apprentice’s energy. Make the apprentice his slave.”

  This time what tightened Orne’s lips looked like anger. “I’m not surprised Marvell would tell you that, but he’s dead wrong. I want you to be my apprentice, but I don’t want to control or enslave you. I promise you that, Sean. I take my oath upon it.”

  As if Orne’s words charged the air between them, Sean’s hide tingled. The sensation startled him, then grew pleasant, soothing, and part of his mind asked why he shouldn’t believe Orne. Another part focused on a lightbulb popping in a wine cellar, on sparks and lightning, on electricity, all the images he had used to visualize ambient energy. Would another magician’s energy—maybe directed energy—also feel electric to him?

  He beat his wings as if to shed water, and the charged air around him dissipated. “That’s magic!” he croaked. “You’re trying to ‘persuade’ me, like you did that woman.”

  Orne blinked as if he, too, were coming out of a trance.

  “You’re trying to make me believe you’re all right, the Order doesn’t know what it’s talking about. And then what? You stick a hundred bucks in my pocket to pay for it?”

  “No,” Orne said. Low, weary. “I wasn’t trying to ensorcell, but I was using a magical tone meant to calm you, and even that was wrong. If I can’t earn your trust without tricks, I don’t deserve to.” He walked toward woods that in the real world were confined to the left window of the Founding. In what Orne had called a “seed world,” there were no such divisions. Orne could walk, and Sean fly after, from one “window” to the others. At the edge of the woods was a granite outcropping. Orne selected the flattest boulder for his seat.

  Sean made for a pine that had sprouted amongst the rocks and grown up twisted by their rough embrace. One of its branches afforded him a perch level with Orne’s shoulders; it also gave him a direct sight line to Nyarlathotep, whose golden eyes remained fixed on the spot where the crow had been. Sean steeled himself to see the god turn his head, and smile, and beckon his old minion over.

  But Nyarlathotep remained motionless, the one waxwork that didn’t “fit” in the diorama, unless you took the longer view that he could “fit” anywhere he chose to. “Does he come into the Founding?” Sean tried to whisper, but his crow voice refused to be hushed.

  “I couldn’t have created this seed world without my Master’s assistance,” Orne said. “But he doesn’t need the window to watch you. The Order’s wards can’t thwart his glance. No wards can.”

  “So he is watching me?”

  “Possibly, among a billion other items of interest. You don’t have to worry he’ll interfere as he did last year. The Master’s made me his official agent with you.”

  “Like, his recruiter?”

  Orne studied his upturned palms. “You’ve got a long road to walk before it leads you back to the Master, whichever fork you follow.”

  “What are the forks? I come over to you or I stick to the Order?”

  “Just so. About sticking to the Order, the thing that troubles me is how that will subordinate you to Theophilus Marvell. I find it odd that a magical society should be led by a paramagician, especially when his position gives him so much say about how students are trained.”

  “Does it? I mean, he says the whole Order votes on stuff like mentors.”

  “Possibly an Order committee does—the whole Order is a very large and scattered group. Even so, I imagine they take Marvell’s advice, which lately has been that the other new student is ready for a mentor, while you’re not.”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “From Solomon Geldman.”

  Sean did the Boaz slide on his branch. A tuft of needles halted him. He gave the tiny cones at its base a sharp pecking. “Well, maybe you’re the one to blame. Marvell’s afraid I might be a throwback to you.”

  The contempt in Orne’s voice thickened. “Oh yes. He’s afraid, and so you have to prove that you can be controlled, and not by your superior inability, which would at least make sense. He’d have you submit to an inferior.”

  Sean laid off the innocent pinecones. To hear somebody tear Marvell down was sweet. Probably too sweet. “The Professor’s not my inferior. Everyone says he’s one of the biggest Mythos experts, and how all his research—”

  “I don’t dispute Marvell’s accomplishments. He can be of use to you as a scholar, but he’s not a magician, or even the most acute paramagician—Geldman tells me that Ms. Arkwright already surpasses him there.”

  “She does?”

  “She was able to find the dismissing spell for you, under Enoch Bishop’s very powerful blotting ward. Marvell knows he couldn’t have done that. But so long as Helen Arkwright defers to him, he’ll save his envy for others, including his students.”

  “He’s not holding Daniel back.”

  “He’s allowed him a mentor, but he may be withholding other things. However, we can safely leave Daniel Glass to Geldman. You are my concern, and how Marvell’s thw
arting your impulses toward magic. Counterproductive, I say—nothing’s more likely to twist them.”

  “So you think I need a mentor right now.”

  “Yes.”

  “You?”

  Orne turned his palms up again, as if to show Sean he had nothing to hide. It was like the old stage magician’s gag: Nothing in my hands, nothing up my sleeves. But even though stage magicians weren’t really magical, they always had something hidden somewhere.

  He caught himself sidling between two needle tufts, a crowish anxiety dance. “So Professor Marvell says you suck. You say he sucks. You both say you’re on my side. How do I know which to believe?”

  Orne didn’t flinch from the cawed challenge. “Eventually you’ll decide which of us you want to trust.”

  “What’s wanting got to do with it?”

  “Perhaps everything. In the meantime, you watch and listen to him. You watch and listen to me. You weigh us in your balance.”

  “I can watch Marvell easy enough, but not you.”

  “We can meet whenever you like, here.”

  “No, we can’t. I do have to report what you’ve done, and the Order will shut the window down. Take it right out, if they have to. Marvell pisses me off sometimes, but I can’t let you stay inside the wards. It’d be like catching a spy and then letting him go.”

  Sean had braced for Orne to try his persuasion trick again, but his voice didn’t go magically electric. It didn’t even rise. “That all sounds reasonable.”

  “It does?”

  “Certainly. At the very least, there’s Ms. Arkwright. How unchivalrous if you didn’t consider her privacy and safety.”

  “Well, but—” Sean chafed his beak on the pine branch. “You don’t want to talk me out of ratting?”

  Orne laughed. “Do you want me to talk you out of ratting?”

  Sean looked toward the lemon and apricot horizon and into the unexplored woods. He lifted the wings he’d just started to use and felt a breeze tantalize them toward flight. “No, but shutting down your seed world, I don’t know, it seems like a huge waste of magic.”

  “When I explain how the seed world can work from now on, you’ll see you don’t need to shut it down to protect your friends.”

  The horizon. The woods. The breeze. “I’ll listen. Not promising anything, though.”

  Orne pointed at Sean. “Your crow is the portal into this fabrication. Until today I was its controller. Remember how the crow perched on Tyndale’s shoulder before telling you to touch it? That’s because I knew once you touched the portal, your consciousness would flood the avatar and push mine out. I’d need a new avatar—fittingly, Tyndale.”

  “Okay, so?”

  “Now you’re the new controller. I’m merely your guest.”

  Too cool to be true, ergo bullshit. “I don’t know how to control anything.”

  “Here’s how to start: I’ve been able to cast my mind into the crow from a distance, but that’s a discipline you’ll acquire only with time and practice. For now you’ll have to physically touch it. Once inside the crow, you become the keeper of the seed world. No other magician can enter without your permission, and when you want a guest gone, you can dismiss him.”

  “You can’t be in the seed world when I’m not?”

  “Not unless you call me in, then leave yourself without dismissing me.”

  “You couldn’t just enter through the minister?”

  “Tyndale’s not a portal. There’s only one, the crow. Now that I’ve surrendered it to you, you’re the only key, as it were.”

  In his own body, Sean would have sighed. As the crow, he emitted a gargle. “I never even heard of seed worlds before today. You could tell me anything.”

  “I could. But I’ll only tell you the truth.”

  “How do I know that?”

  Orne’s face—the face of his avatar, anyhow—made the short trip from unsmiling earnest to deadly serious. “Sean, if I lied to you about this, I’d throw away my best chance to gain your trust. My only chance, probably. Isn’t that true?”

  He bobbed his head.

  “So I can’t lie. Nothing’s more important to me than your trust.”

  “Why? What do you want from me, if it’s not the synergy thing?”

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t welcome a synergy, only that it wouldn’t be the master–slave relationship Marvell described. But that’s far in the future, if it’s ever feasible at all. Think about our shared blood. Think about companionship. Think about learning magic without the Order’s timid constraints.”

  “Is it? The Order, I mean, timid.”

  “The Order of Alhazred is reactionary, prejudiced, with a police mentality.” Orne paused. “Some of its members, not all. But its founders built on fear, and Marvell is Henry Arkwright’s true descendant, not Helen. Her mind is open, her magical sensibility pure. I’d like to meet her as a friend one day.

  Orne had good taste, anyhow.

  “But speaking of Ms. Arkwright.” Orne’s voice grew urgent. “She and your friends will be back soon. You don’t want them to find you as you are now.”

  Sean looked down at his puffed breast feathers. “A bird?”

  “No, in the library, seemingly catatonic on a stepladder.”

  Right, wasn’t that how he had to look outside, in the real world? “How do I get back?”

  “Look over there.”

  Orne pointed south from their vantage on the hill. Tall headlands marched down the seacoast. Kingsport didn’t exist yet, but there was a big-nosed and bearded cliff that had to be a less eroded King Neptune, and there was the Giant’s Causeway, rock slabs like humongous stairs. And there, on the tallest cliff, far above them, was the Strange High House, only so far it was just a stone foundation.

  “Now find the moon,” Orne said.

  Floating low over the ocean was a silver crescent with a hot-air balloon lodged between its horns. No, it wasn’t a balloon, but the blurry shadow of a palm and five splayed fingers. “A hand!” Sean squawked. “Inside the moon!”

  “Your hand, pressed to the glass where you touched the crow. Fly straight into it, and that will return you to your body and reset the window, everything back to normal.”

  “How do you get out?”

  “You or I say a dismissing word, and I’ll be returned to my body. I’ve chosen one easy to remember but not so common you might dismiss me accidentally.”

  “What’s that?”

  “First, here’s how you can call me back into the seed world. Enter it yourself and then perch on Tyndale’s shoulder. If I’m able to come, I’ll do so within ten minutes.”

  It all sounded simple enough. “I might never call you.”

  “It’s your decision, Sean. Now, here’s the dismissing word.”

  “Ready.”

  Orne produced a slip of parchment from inside his right cuff. One word was inked on it: Nevermore.

  Like Poe’s raven quoth. “That word doesn’t worry you?”

  Laughing, Orne rose and stood with feet apart, as if bracing himself. “Go ahead, Sean, and don’t linger after I’m gone. Good-bye for now.”

  Quoth Sean, then: “Nevermore.”

  If Orne got a jolt on his way out, it didn’t show in his avatar, the Reverend Tyndale. He instantly beamed into his usual position and became just another incredibly realistic wax figure. Sean flew at his face to see if he’d dodge, which Tyndale didn’t.

  There was no time for more tests. He flapped for height, then stroked the air hard southward, beak pointed at the moon-cradled hand. Either it only looked far off or else his intention of leaving beamed him right to it—a dozen wingbeats, and he plunged into his own palm. His entrance into the seed world had merited magical lightning. Not so his exit. One second he was the crow. The next he was Sean, dizzy, clinging with both hands to the stepladder and staring at a Founding of Arkham in which his crow rose from Nyarlathotep’s hand and Reverend Tyndale knelt in gratitude for the newfound land.

 
12

  Sean’s dizziness passed quickly, and good thing. Headlight beams lanced the window from a car pulling into the driveway. It had to be Helen’s. Unless it was Marvell’s, because he had rigged the Founding after all and was coming to expel Sean for talking to Orne.

  He scrambled off the ladder and whisked it back to the bookshelves. It was too late to run for his room, but that didn’t matter—it was Eddy and Daniel and Helen who came in the back door.

  As though he’d had an uneventful night, Sean walked out of the library yawning. “Oh, it’s you guys.”

  “And you were expecting?” Helen said.

  Kinda sorta Marvell. “You guys. The movie any good?”

  “Fairly suckulent,” Eddy said. “But the frozen yogurt was great.”

  Daniel handed him a paper bag stained with chocolate. “We brought you some. I hope it’s not too melted.”

  “Hey, if it is, I’ll drink it. Thanks!”

  “No problem. I’d hang out while you do, but I’m ready for bed.”

  “Me, too,” Eddy said.

  “And me three,” from Helen, but she hung back while the others jogged upstairs. “You okay, Sean?”

  Not so much, actually. He had the jitters like he’d chugged two quadruple espressos. It was either a side effect of being a crow, or it was guilt. His urge to show Helen what Orne had done to her pet window was abruptly, surprisingly strong, and he might have yielded to it if his bag hadn’t started dripping vanilla yogurt and fudge sauce onto the marble floor.

  For Helen, it was a perfect distraction. “I was afraid of that. Eddy ordered you double hot fudge. Do me a favor and get that to the kitchen?”

  Sean put a hand under the sodden bag bottom. “Right, and I’ll clean this up, too, Helen.”

  “You sure? You look a little pale under that tan.”

  “Must be the ghost I saw earlier.”

  “Not seriously.”

  “Totally not seriously.” Unless you counted Orne, who should have been one by now.

  With a last apprehensive look at the spattered marble, Helen followed the others. Sean wiped up the spill with paper towels from the first-floor bath, then carried the offending bag to the kitchen. The soupiness of the sundae wouldn’t have put him off; the jitters did. He poured the glop into the sink and spray-chased it down the drain. Only a cherry survived the hosing; wedged in the drain, it glowered up at him. Gradually the jitters subsided. On their heels came the kind of caffeine comedown that yelled for more, a return to the great high. Which had been what?