Three Stories About Ghosts

  “What was that?” Claire asked as her face shot towards the house.

  John turned and walked back into the kitchen, crossed the corridor, and entered the study to find Margaret standing by Agatha at the room’s far end. He looked around, but Trish was nowhere to be found.

  Agatha had a hand on Margaret’s shoulder, who was visibly shaking and leaning on the back of one of the chairs. Margaret gave John a look and shook her head slightly before glancing over to Claire as she entered the room behind him.

  “Mum, what’s wrong?” Claire asked.

  Margaret did her best to smile as she lowered herself into the seat she was leaning on. She sighed, tried to compose herself, and turned to her daughter.

  “I’m alright, dear. Nothing to worry about. Chief Warden Agatha has asked about your father’s latest work.”

  Claire looked on, confused.

  “I’ve told her that no one has broken in here. Your father and Trish themselves burned and wiped every vestige of their work before leaving.” She looked up around the bookshelves and grimaced for a moment before recomposing herself. “The reason there’s nothing to be found is that they didn’t want anything to be found.”

  So, whoever had murdered them didn’t wipe the records of the expedition, as the Wardens had thought. But that raised a hundred fresh questions, and he felt the familiar ache at the base of his skull as he tried to focus his mind. He stretched out his neck and shoulders, took a seat by the door, rested his chin on his fist as he sat forward and yawned. He’d need more scholin extract soon.

  “Do you know why they destroyed the records?” he asked.

  He looked up to find Claire staring at him. She exchanged a look with her mother and seemed to hesitate for a moment until her mother nodded, and pulled up a chair near him. She reached a hand into her blouse. John turned away in embarrassment until he felt something leathery tap against his leg. He turned back to find Claire proffering him a sheet of suede.

  He took it, though his cheeks flushed in embarrassment at the warmth of the leather, unwrapped a piece of paper from it, and handed the cover back. He looked up to find Agatha staring intently at the paper and Margaret urging him to read.

  He unfolded the small square of paper; it looked like a page torn from a journal. He read Professor Goodland’s hand.

  7th of April, 1993

  Oxford

  What makes Shangri-La, Shangri-La? A hermit found a world engine in the mountains and tapped it. What makes the Desert Spring flow endlessly into the world’s ley lines? A nomad found a world engine in the dunes and tapped it. Why does Damavand flow mana into the world? Because a miner found a world engine there and unsealed it. Until those exact moments in our species’ evolution, our knowledge and capacity to absorb the strength of our Sky Mother was limited.

  Since then, with the now seven world engines flowing as they are, we as a species are taking unprecedented flows of mana from Her whom we revere, and not caring one iota for the pain it may cause Her. We are children, suckling at the teats of our Mother, believing Her milk to be endless, unaware—or unwilling to accept—that we are killing Her.

  The engines that feed us, our Sky Mother’s teats, may be the organs through which She draws breath. If my friend Antony Trevelyan is right—

  John paused at the mention of his father. Though that wound had long since scabbed over, he lacked the mental strength to think about it now. His father had lived a long and full life, but now, more than ever, he wished that he would swoop in and fight away his worries like he had done so many times before.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He continued reading.

  —the world engines may exist to feed our Mother, not us. Like Shangri-La, our objective lays hidden, waiting to be found. If our research is blessed with success, and we can find and unseal an American world engine, bringing it into the partnership between the American Tribal Circles and the Trevelyan network of colonial ley mines, for the first time since humanity tapped her power, our Sky Mother may be able to draw a breath.

  We don’t know what celestial forces enable our Sky Mother to live, but we are now sure from studying the pattern of yields from ley mines across the world, that if we don’t find and activate a world engine, under the control of Antony and the Grand Shaman, humanity will suffocate its own Sky Mother as it draws from Her unceasingly.

  John stood from his seat as Trish’s mind flared in his. Something familiar rang out to her, but she couldn’t remember what. Sky Mother grant me strength.

  The quest for an American world engine had driven his father’s life for more than two decades, and then, a few months before his death, had come to an abrupt halt. He wasn’t aware that his father’s madness was shared by another.

  For the last months of his life, all his father would talk about was ‘them.’ The others, watching him, listening to his thoughts. His father had driven himself mad in a deluded quest of self-sacrifice, trying to lead his phantom pursuers away from a truth that only he could see. John had never believed him.

  He sat there, stunned. Talk of the Sky Mother’s weakened strength was near heresy, and though he couldn’t deny the hard data his father had collected about the weakening of the ley network, especially after the battle at Damavand, this talk of the Sky Mother ‘drawing breath’ through the world engines was madness. Even so, he couldn’t help but think back to Preston College’s clock tower, to the phantom threat he had felt as he stood there—was it just yesterday morning?—and the unshakable instinct that he was being watched from the treeline. His heart shuddered.

  “My father,” he said, though his voice croaked and he burst into a fit of coughs. “My father,” he tried again, swallowing hard. He dropped his head into his hands and tried to calm his nerves by drawing long breaths.

  “I think,” Margaret said, the strength in her voice at odds with the grief she had shown moments before. “I think my husband had found what your father and he sought, all those years ago. That’s why he wiped his steps. You remember nothing of what Trish was doing in the days before they left?”

  John looked up and shook his head, ashamed. He had been so buried in his work that he hardly ever had any idea what Trish was doing. All those nights, locked away in his study, protecting his father’s company. He’d give it all away to have her back now. He dropped his head and shook it again as his mind drew itself back to Preston College’s clock tower.

  John felt as though his heart should tremble, that he should worry. He wanted to be afraid, as his father had been of the phantoms chasing him. He had thought his father mad, all those years ago, imagining an unseen pursuer. But at this moment, now, he welcomed them. He wanted them to chase him. He wanted to be found, to confront the bastards and bring every ounce of his wealth to bear on them, to blast them to oblivion and back, and kill them again. He found his face shook in his rage and calmed himself.

  “And you?” he asked. “Do either of you remember anything about his work before the expedition?”

  Claire shook her head, but Margaret lurched forward again and stood from her chair with force that took John by surprise. She shuffled over to the globe by the window, lifted the top half open, pulled a cork from a glass decanter there, and took three deep gulps of what smelled like fine whiskey.

  She coughed, cleared her throat, and shook her head.

  “After,” Margaret said as she turned to Agatha, “what you’ve shown me, am I safe in assuming that you’re not linked to your Warden Tower?”

  Agatha didn’t respond for a moment, but nodded as Margaret handed her the whiskey. She took a gulp and leaned forward on her chair, rested her elbows above her knees, and breathed out hard.

  “I cut the link yesterday,” Agatha croaked. She took another gulp of whiskey.

  Margaret paused for a moment, exchanged a look with Claire, and reached into a pocket at the side of her skirt. She pulled out an official looking letter with the emblem of the Hungarian Tower of Magi and threw it onto the middle of the table as she
stared at it with distain.

  “He destroyed everything,” Margaret said, her face screwing into a deep frown, “every last shred of paper but the one you hold. He bound the two of us into secrecy. But, there’s nothing in what we swore about his posthumous mail.”

  John looked forward and studied the glyphs on the letter. The last one, from Laird Bellard’s mailroom, was dated the week after Trish had left on her expedition.

  “And Trish?” Claire asked.

  He turned to meet her eyes. “Hmm?”

  “My father,” Claire said, “destroyed every shred of paper he owned, but left me that.” She gestured to his hand and shrugged. He gave it back to her. “Did Trish not bind you to secrecy?”

  John couldn’t help but scoff at himself. “She didn’t need to.”

  Claire slowly nodded and gestured over to the letter. “The truth,” she said as she kept her eyes locked on the letter, “is that even if we weren’t bound to secrecy by his power, there wouldn’t be much we could tell you beyond what that letter contains.” She grimaced with pain for a moment as a restraining spell flared in blue arcs of energy at her neck, but she still nodded over to the letter. “It came a week after the Wardens came and told us that his life force had been snuffed out somewhere in America.”

  John stepped to the table and took it, his hands suddenly unsteady as he hurried to open the letter, bile flaring in his gut as he unfolded the first real piece of information he’d seen about what Trish and the professor had pursued. There were two sheets. The first was a covering note from the Hungarian Mining Network, asking the professor to pay a bill.

  “What?” he whispered under his breath.

  Clipped behind the note, an official state treasury invoice was signed by Maurius Duma, Force Commander of the Hungarian Interior Militia, for the provision of seven sets of military GPS trackers tagged with the reference, ‘Goblins.’ John looked over to Agatha, his head swimming. What did any of this have to do with goblins?

  “Did the professor ever mention goblins?” he asked, but no one answered.

  He glanced over to Agatha who shook her head, looking about as confused as he was, but something familiar rang from Trish in his mind. He felt her start to say something, but the thought scattered.

  He looked down and sighed. Hungary. He’d need more power for the apparture.

  Chapter Four

  JOHN AND AGATHA floated a mile above the main Hungarian ley line, following the Danube’s path through Budapest. The city lights lit the night beneath them, the Danube a solid black amidst the blazing suns of bridges and palaces. People moved about in the pools of light, little more than specs at this distance, and a tourist boat, nearly a hundred feet long, lazed through the water with the occasional camera light flashing from its upper deck.

  He tapped his wand against his thigh impatiently as the Hungarian Tower slowly started to materialise above them, seeping into the corporeal world in a sea of mist and sparks, as though a thundercloud flashed with a million tendrils all at once above them and pushed the crystal tip of a grand obelisk out of itself. He wondered at the power it took to hide all of this from unattuned eyes. He floated a hundred meters below the cloud, but even this close the warding around it prevented all but the faintest hiss from reaching his ears.

  The tower emerged upside down and turned on its axis as it slithered out of the cloud of mist. It was made of a solid black stone, the seams between the colossal bricks almost invisible in the night, making the tower a solid mass of shadow. It was a four-cornered obelisk, capped with a crystal pyramid that would normally hum with power; now it seemed dim, almost dead to his eye. Something was wrong.

  He glanced over to Agatha, who craned her neck up to the tower’s apex, now several hundred meters above them and climbing up into the night sky as it twisted. She shook her head and looked back down to the river.

  Above them, the tower’s base began to emerge from the mist. The tower proper hovered above the base, suspended on a cushion of azure-blue haze. The tower’s base was made of seven interlocking disks, spinning around one another, together forming a giant circle—almost two thousand meters in diameter—that clicked and whirred as the circles turned.

  The circles were flat, less than a meter thick, but made of intricate filigree meshing, as though knitted from steel wires, and filled with the same azure-blue haze of power that supported the tower. He looked back down to the Danube and saw the film of mana snaking its way up from the base of the river and binding to the wheels spinning around the tower’s base. The lines of power filled the sky above him as far as he could see.

  He floated over to Agatha, tapped her on the shoulder, and gestured for them to go up and around, but she didn’t move. She shook her head and kept her eyes locked on the river.

  “Pride of Hungary,” she said, an unfamiliar, grim look to her face. She kept her head bowed, raised her wand arm up, and held her fist out in salute. John started as Trish reminded him with a whisper in his mind that Agatha was there at Damavand, forty-three years ago. She was there at the mountain’s peak, where the fighting was at its thickest. He looked up again with fresh eyes, trying to imagine what Agatha had seen, forty-three years ago. He imagined a tower, exactly like this, materialising out of the mist and loosing all its batteries down on her enemy.

  The Pride of Hungary, the sister tower to the one above them, had rushed into the fray and saved her allies from total massacre by the Ashabaltari, sacrificing herself to blast their enemy back from the cusp of victory. It now rested somewhere at the bottom of the Caspian Sea, lost to the Hungarian Magi who had built it.

  Agatha never breathed a word about it: it was so easy for him to ignore her past, but Trish had mentioned some details about her mother’s life during the great wars.

  “Fort Endurance Militia, weren’t you?” he asked.

  She didn’t answer for a moment, but then tried to smile and nodded to him. “Still am,” she said.

  He inclined his head and gestured for her to follow, but paused as he caught a glimpse of an emblem pinned above her heart. The wind shifted the folds of her robe, revealing her Gold Order of Damavand. That was strange. She never wore any outward sign of her wartime past. The usual air of superiority that she exuded while flying was missing, and in its place, a grim stoicism had descended upon her.

  They crested the spinning discs of the tower’s base and almost immediately the first of the Hungarian tower guards approached them, but instead of a challenge, he saluted. John looked around to find almost every guard there, uniformed in a deep navy blue with maroon leather shoulder pads and golden buttons, giving them a strange look as they passed. They were unusually well armed, holding long branches shimmering with azure power, though some of their branches looked drained. Several guards flying above had stopped on their broomsticks to stare at them, and at the opposite end of the tower, John thought he could see the white plumes of a Polish Hussar, though he couldn’t be sure at this distance. What would they be doing here?

  They reached the tower’s portal without challenge, and the guards didn’t hesitate before swinging the colossal stone doors inward for them. Though Anton, John’s best friend from Preston College, was now Arch Magus of the Tower, even he hadn’t ever been welcomed inside the tower without identifying himself. He conjured his name-bracelet and looked around for someone to present it to, but the man who’d opened the door ignored it as he ushered them inside with a curt gesture. This felt wrong. He hesitated, but walked in.

  They passed through the entrance into a small atrium, lined on both sides with guards, and descended to the floor. John put his wand away, and Agatha dismissed her broomstick into a haze of mist and light. But when they walked through a doorway and stepped into the heart of the tower, the calm silence of the tower’s exterior was shattered in a moment as movement surged passed them in all directions.

  The central shaft of the tower was an oval, extending high above them to the tower’s apex without interruption. Rooms and levels lin
ed the tower on all sides, and lights shone from countless windows into the tower’s central cavity.

  A thousand conversations buffeted their ears as officers dashed this way and that, all of them in some inexplicable hurry. The looks on their faces seemed panicked, and no one looked quite sure of what was going on. He tried to catch anyone’s attention, but everyone around them was locked in their own turmoil. No one even noticed them as they walked into the tower’s central cavity.

  Halfway up the tower, the industrial levels hissed vapored mana into the air, filling it with a metallic tang that struck his nostrils, and the various mechanical arms and wheels operating this way and that drew in the power in thin tendrils of azure-blue power through the air. The sight always took John’s breath away, but something seemed wrong this time. He remembered the crystal at the tower’s apex, dim and drained, and started as he saw tendrils of mana float to power banks normally reserved for weapons of war. He peered closer, and a chill ran down his back as he saw even the tower’s interior Arkannon batteries empty of power. Someone had loosed every ounce of energy in the tower, and judging from the hiss and shimmer still escaping from the heat banks beneath the tower’s main arsenal, they’d done so mere minutes ago.

  “I don’t agree with this,” Agatha mused as they walked on towards the central desk, a circular table with three officers around it behind computers. “If someone knocks this out, all of Hungary is vulnerable.”

  “If,” John answered. “That’s a very big ‘if.’ Do you think they’ve been running drills?” He looked back up at the depleted mana-cells and overheated power banks, struggling to find an explanation as to why their weapons had been pushed so heavily, or used at all.

  Agatha nodded but went on as she pointed up to the tower’s central weapons systems. “Look, the central emitters are empty, and even the interior Arkannons are spent. Stacking all of a nation’s power into one structure, it makes them vulnerable.”