The Summoner's Sigil

by Renee Sebastian

  “We need to gather up as much of the dust in here as possible,” I told Colin.

  “What for?” he asked me.

  “A little trick Grandfather taught me.”

  “I don’t think we’ll find a sweeper in here to help us,” he replied, referring to a cleaning contraption.

  I shucked off my coat and untucked my shirt. Then I took one of my athames and cut several inches from the bottom portion of my shirt. Soon, none of my shirts would be long enough to cover my corset.

  After I replaced the knife in its sheath, he said, “You are unlike any woman I have ever met.”

  “I should hope so,” I replied as I stooped down and started collecting as much of the grit and dust on the floor that I could get. After I collected it into small piles, I would scoop up handfuls of it and place it into the pockets of my coat. I had to give Colin credit, since he crawled along right beside me, mimicking my motions.

  “I can’t think of another girl who would let a strange man sleep in her bedroom after only knowing him one day,” I said quietly.

  He looked up from under his shaggy hair and said, “At least your father approves of me.”

  “In my bedroom?”

  “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  “About that, how in the world did you manage to kill King Draug?” I asked as I scraped more grime and muck from the floor.

  “Is that what you call it?”

  I looked up from surveying my most recent pile, trying to determine if it was big enough to scoop up yet. I asked, “It wasn’t a draug?”

  “No, it wasn’t. It was a demon infested draug.”

  “How do you know he was a demon infested draug? I’ve encountered that creature before, and I couldn’t sense any demon in him then, and I should know.”

  “He smelled of demon,” he calmly replied. “The draug shell hid what it was fairly well from most of the senses, but when it breathed out, I could smell it on him.”

  He was full of surprises. I leveled a stare at him and said, “You could have told me this sooner.”

  “When?” he asked while he pushed his own dust pile to merge with mine.

  He was right. Things had been crazy over the last twenty-four hours. “I’m going to get to the bottom of this,” I told him.

  He smiled grimly at me and said, “Not without me you won’t.”

  I looked down and saw we had collected enough. After I grabbed the last fistfuls of dirt to put in my pockets, I approached the walls.

  “What do you need me to do?” he said while grasping a few handfuls himself.

  “I am going to rub this over the wall and then do a sigil that should reveal any seals that have been drawn on the wall recently.” The only thing I wasn’t telling him was that it should also show me the sigils used when my grandfather had died.

  “I don’t see anything. What makes you think there is something there?” he asked.

  I didn’t answer him except by pointing at my eye, which wasn’t precisely true. I didn’t feel like explaining the voice to him. He probably wouldn’t believe me anyway.

  “What does it show you?”

  “That something is here, but I’m not quite sure what,” I quietly replied, while staring at the wall in front of us.

  “I see a faint shadow of something too. Are those seals?” he asked.

  “Yes. Most are from when my Grandfather died, but I think there may be some fresher ones drawn over them too.”

  “Do you think the seals on the wall have something to do with what has been happening with the demons?” he asked. I kept forgetting that he wasn’t a trained Summoner, even though he certainly had a lot of pertinent knowledge.

  “I’m hoping that it will show what they were trying to summon or any signatures that would let me know who cast it. Maybe you can tell if they have anything to do with what is going on now.”

  He nodded his head in agreement and then I mumbled the few words necessary for this spell to work. I threw the grime onto the wall in front of me, and nothing happened.

  “Are you certain you did it correctly?” Colin asked.

  “Yes, but obviously there was nothing in that particular spot. Let me try a little further down.”

  “Don’t bother,” Calidum called out from the choir. I glanced over my shoulder at him. When did he come into the church? “But you may want to try over there,” he said as he pointed over to a section of the wall behind the pulpit.

  I walked over to it and asked, “Here?”

  He nodded his head in the dim light. I then took out another handful of dust and threw it up onto the wall. A cascading shimmer of gold light lit up the wall, but yet again, there was no tell-tale seal. What did surprise me though was that the shimmer slid down the wall and travelled along the floor. We jumped out of its way as slithered here and there, gaining momentum across the wooden planks.

  When it reached the nave, it flared out into a series of blue and gold lines that outlined a previously invisible sigil, rather like dominoes falling down to create a pattern. The entire nave lit up with an artificial light, and then it split off to the walls, where the shimmering gold lines crawled up them and revealed the old marks that had been painted over a year ago. Vibrant energy lit up all the old and new sigils. They were connected. What had started over a year ago was still going on today.

  Colin immediately took out a small pad of paper and a pencil and began sketching out the design that had sprouted out from the wall in front of us.

  “Do you recognize it?” I asked him as I slowly approached the edge of the design.

  “I recognize parts of it, but I have never seen so many interlocking sigils together.”

  “Neither have I.” I went over to one, which resembled the Eye of Tiamat. It glowed eerily in a gold outline.

  “Look over here,” Colin told me. I looked over and observed the design had grown so large in such a short time that he now stood in the middle of a very large seal.

  “Colin, you’re standing in it.”

  “So are you.”

  I looked down and saw it had indeed stretched under my feet as well.

  “Don’t try to leave it just yet, until we know that it is completely deactivated.”

  “It is spent,” he told me as he shifted his attention away from the Strutt meter to look at me. I allowed my line of sight to follow the snaking lines to the walls. I wasn’t so certain.

  “Come here,” he bid me.

  I hesitantly crossed over to him, even though I thought I felt a ghost of power vibrate through the markings.

  “Look here, are those hieroglyphics?” he said while looking down at the sigil.

  I looked at what he was referring to and had to agree with him. Although Summoner’s used some of their ancient symbols, it didn’t mean I could translate these. I looked up again at the old designs on the wall that were now mutely glowing blue from under the paint, while gold outlines ran from them to the sigil underfoot. I wasn’t going to be able to make heads or tails out of these today.

  After seeing a marking I recognized, I said, “I also see quite a bit of cuneiform in there too.”

  “I believe you are correct,” he said while pointing to a series of straight lines with triangles. He flipped the page in his pad of paper and scratched out some more notes. I stared at him for a minute, and then I heard him mutter, “This is most exciting, isn’t it? Maybe they’ll name this sigil after us.”

  I rolled my eyes and didn’t comment. The chances of this sigil being named for us were about as likely as my mother crying real tears at Nigel’s funeral.

  As I walked away from him to look more closely at the ones on the walls, I said, “They’ll name it after whoever drew it first. Most likely whoever we are looking for.”

  “Even in infamy?” he asked.

  “Doubly so.”

  He stopped writing for a moment, sighed, and then began his transcription again.

  I drew closer to one of the marks glowing mutely blue on the wall.


  “What are you looking at?” he asked.

  I reached out, almost touching the lines that mutely glowed in front of me. I said, “Can’t you see them too?”

  “See what?” he asked as he approached the location of where I was standing.

  “The marks on the wall.”

  “No, I only see the white paint, but there might be some faint old lines under it. Hard to say really, but I think I may have something that could help us out in my bag.”

  “I’ll go with you, since I want to check over what is left of Nigel’s remains. There might be a Necromancer mark on him,” I told Colin.

  “I’ll stay here and make sure none of my brothers and sisters come through,” Calidum said.

  “How many do you have?” Colin asked at the same time that I asked, “Is this a portal into your realm?”

  Calidum did his best impression of a smile, which was grisly in its own way with blue gums and red teeth. “Got you,” he said before laughing, which sounded akin to glass shattering.

  I huffed out a breath, unamused, and said to Colin, “Demon humor.”

  As we left the interior of the church, I turned around and saw the shimmering lights had made the doorframe look as if it had a miniature golden corona.

  After leaving Colin to retrieve his item, I walked over to see the mess that was left of Nigel. I had shared much of my childhood with him, before I was sent to live with Grandfather. He was a year older than I was, but he often acted at least four years my junior. None of that mattered anymore, did it?

  I would have liked to say that it was shock that prevented me from feeling despair at finding first his hand, but war and time apart had cooled my heart. On his middle finger was our family ring with an emblem of a gryphon on it. It indicated that he was the heir of the Beckenbauer fortune. I slipped it off, pocketed it, and then started systematically walking through the grass, scanning for additional lost items and bits of flesh. Finally, I found a part of his scalp, and after moving the hairs around, I found the mark I was looking for.

  “Colin, do you have a something I can put this in?”

  He came over, and when he saw what I held, he said, “That is foul. I will not carry around a man’s scalp.”

  I sniffed at it, and while it was no rose, it wasn’t that malodourous yet. I sighed.

  “What is so special about it?” he begrudgingly asked.

  “I need the mark to determine who did this to him.”

  “I’ll redraw it.”

  “That will be a good substitute, but to be certain a scraping needs to be done too,” I added. “My family will view his death more honorably if he offed himself in opposition to becoming a revenant. How about I cut the mark out? Would you carry that?”

  “If I must,” he said while wrinkling his nose. I then sat down upon the damp earth and took out my knife and began whittling it down. The mark itself was of a twisted pitchfork with a plus sign in the middle of the three tonged end.

  “I’m going back inside to see if I can make any sense of the markings on the floor,” he added.

  I looked up at him and asked, “What is in your hand?”

  “A scarab bot.” I used to have one, but it had gotten crushed back on the boat to Espoir months ago. They helped in identifying sigils and translating foreign languages. I wondered how well his could read dead languages.

  “Let me know what you learn.”

  “Will do,” he said.

  I cleanly shaved off the spot with one of my knives and then cut away the rest of the skin until I was left with a satisfactorily two inch square of Nigel’s scalp. I placed it in an outside pocket of one of his bags and then looked over what used to be Nigel one last time. I had no tools to dig a hole to bury him, and besides, I didn’t think he would want to be buried in the desecrated earth surrounding the church. Here he would have to stay until I could contact Uncle Charles to make other arrangements.

  “Basil, come here!” I heard Colin call out from the church.

  I brushed myself off and then strode into the church. The light from the sigils was definitely dying down as the energy fueling the spell faded, but I easily found Colin as he was kneeling down in the center of the design.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “What isn’t it,” he replied.

  Chapter 10

  Undead Tongues

  Rule number eighteen: Read the Sigils daily.

  “They are all dead tongues, except for this one,” he said while pointing down at the ground at a particular set of pictures.

  “What do you mean?” I asked him.

  “Most of these are Egyptian hieroglyphics, while cuneiforms connect the petroglyphs and Proto Mayan symbols together to it.”

  “Mayan? As in the people in the south lands?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Do you think Mayans are involved?” I asked.

  “Maybe.”

  “What does it say?”

  “It’s problematic. While this scarab can translate most dead languages, it cannot translate Mayan. Having said that, it appears that the exterior circle was meant to keep people out, not to trap anything inside of it. It also gives no clue as to who created it.”

  “That’s not good.”

  “Also, there appears to be an apocalyptic undertone to what it translated,” he added.

  “How so?”

  “Well, it may have to do with the repetitive illustrations of ancient Egyptian death deities resurrecting the dead and bringing their heralds of evil with them, which I assumed meant demons.”

  I looked down at where he was looking, and I could obviously see a skillfully drawn ancient Egyptian Osiris with Sobek eating the heart of a petroglyph man. There were three heartless dead bodies laid below the ground line underneath him.

  “I only know a little of standard Mayan mythology. For instance, I know that the skull headed man with the dragon spines over there is of Hunhau, their death deity.”

  “Mistress, you should come up here,” Calidum called down to us.

  We both looked up at Calidum, and the choir behind him was pulsing with a bright light, while the rest of the sigils on the floor were dimming with the passage of time. We both ran for the stairs and when we got to the top, Calidum was cornered at the back of the choir by an eerily similar looking circle that resembled the one Grandfather had attempted to nullify. I then saw where the line of magic ran to the back of the choir. It must have connected to the sigil on the floor through the wall and then under the floor.

  “I don’t like it,” Calidum said.

  “This spell only shows what has happened in the past,” I said, trying to assure him that he was safe.

  “It feels wrong.”

  I looked at the sigil and while it seemed to be the same marking as when Grandfather had died, it was difficult to tell for sure. First Father Periwinkle had distracted me, followed by the demon. Once the whole affair was over, I never wanted to return here in a blind hope of forgetting the whole incident.

  I was forced now to study the markings. After finding a Killian’s tail and a monarch’s crescent in the sigil, something began to germinate in my mind, and I prayed that I was wrong. I went over to the half wall that was boxing in the second story choir, and I gazed out over the entire main floor below me.

  All the markings on the wall were connected to the one large sigil in the middle of the floor. I counted how many other sigils were drawn along the walls. One, two, three …seven, and then the one up here made a total of eight. I wondered if each sigil was a representation of dimensions four through eleven.

  “I need a scrub brush!” I blurted before running back down the stairs. “Help me find one before the magic putters out.”

  We scoured the rooms leading off the pulpit hoping to find something of use. We finally settled on a short needle pine limb, my sleeve, and a leather drinking skin filled with water.

  After we got enough of the paint off the wall for us to see the markings more clearl
y, Colin said, “This is a level six summoning circle.”

  I looked to the right at where the next sigil was hidden and then I said, “Let’s look at that one next.”

  Calidum finally found his way down and said, “I could light the wall on fire if you prefer.”

  “You might take the whole church down if you did, with us in it. Best not this time,” I told him.

  “I agree. The wood is rotting within the walls and the stone foundation is crumbling,” Colin added. “In fact, I think this spell may be the only thing holding this place together.”

  We scrubbed the wall enough to recognize that it was a level seven summoning circle. “What are the odds that altogether the circles on the walls are for levels five through twelve?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised at all. That the large one on the floor, would it represent the fourth dimension?” Colin asked.

  “The one that Summoner’s are forbidden from visiting or summoning from?” I added.

  “Exactly.”

  “Why would the large sigil on the floor be dependent on the other levels?” I asked absentmindedly while I thought about the possibilities. What was the true purpose of the fourth sigil?

  “I’ve seen enough, let’s leave here and see if anyone can identify Nigel’s marking,” I said.

  “We could swoop back down to your family’s house before we head to Convent. That way we could inform them of his death in person.”

  “Oh, I’m going to tell them in person, once I have his killer in chains.”

  “Well, we have to find him first,” he said while he finished up his drawings. Then he scooped up the scarab bot and deposited it into one of his coat’s pockets. The magic puffed out of the sigils, making them go dim as surely as a child who had blown out their birthday candles.

  “After you,” I told Colin.

  As we walked out to Tenebris, I thought that it was unfortunate that Colin’s horse could not handle a two seater carriage. We had one back at the lake house, which had been stored in the barn near the house. It was probably for the best though, since I would have packed more than I needed. I kept telling myself I was a changed girl now, and resolutely did not need the petticoats or bustles that the old Basil required, but they had to make these riding pants in different colors certainly. Maybe I would do some shopping while we were in Convent.