Fathomless (2 page)

Efficient. Elegant. Geldman.

Redemption next rolled Garth to an alcove curtained off from the rest of the subcellar and set a stool between alcove and gurney. Light-headed, he sank onto it. Ensorcelling Garth had drained him, and it was a month since he'd taken time to feed himself. It was unlucky Patience's reawakening coincided with Sean's arrival, but Redemption couldn't let her luxuriate in trance until fall. She'd been walking the dream realms for two years; any longer, and she'd wake in a fury of starvation, uncontrollable.

From the inner pocket of his sport coat, he withdrew an implement Garth would have admired. The handle of the ladle was merely beautiful, silver chased with dimensional efts. The shallow bowl, with half the rim ground to a razor edge, was both beautiful and practical. Redemption probed Garth's right wrist. He ran the razor edge over a shallow vein and tapped a ladleful of blood, which he set aside while he pressed the cut with his thumb and muttered a stanching spell he'd heard first when Patience was alive. In those days healers would bleed the sick for their supposed good, while she had done it for her secret sustenance. He withdrew his thumb from a scar already paling, and then he drank off his ladle.

Astonishing, how rich the least magical spark made a person's blood. He swallowed the full two ounces the ladle held but refrained from licking the bowl. The last drops he'd need for her.

Redemption reached through the alcove curtains and drew out first a padded bench and second Patience's left arm. He rested her forearm on the bench, then arranged Garth's right forearm beside it. Two velvet ribbons sufficed to bind the limbs, the tanned to the bleached, the warm to the marble cold. Patience's hand lay palm up, fingers furled, nails a steely blue. Despite the proximity of prey, not a finger twitched. Though magic might detect the dream-flicker in her brain, she remained dead to any medical test. With careful management, she would wake gradually, breaking from trance only when he permitted it. Just prenourished enough to prevent hunger-rage, she'd remain weak and docile. He would even love her again, until lamb reverted to lioness. Then? He'd love her still, but hate himself all the more for it.

As always at this point, Redemption hesitated. As always, he unfurled her fingers, poured the last of the ladle onto her palm, chafed the blood into her skin. Slowly the skin budded; slowly the buds bloomed into five fleshy tubular petals, sea anemone feelers. When they'd grown a foot long, he guided them to Garth's forearm, where they opened lamprey mouths and battened onto the boy. In seconds, the translucent ivory tentacles turned pale pink, then rosy, then a pulsing scarlet.

On one side the reverse leech, giving. On the other side Patience, taking away. In the middle Redemption, balancing gift with sacrifice.

He looked down at his watch and let the proper number of minutes pass.

*   *   *

After
separating Patience and Garth, Redemption climbed to his attic study and looked through Garth's backpack. There wasn't much: briefs and T-shirts and socks; charcoal pencils and worn erasers; a wallet guarding a driver's license, seven dollars, and one photograph of a girl in a prom dress. The girl appeared again in Garth's sketchpad, naked but with crossed legs and arms that rendered her touchingly modest. The caption named her “Stace,” and though a frequent subject, she never appeared as one of the lamiae that dominated Garth's bestiary.

Redemption repacked all but the sketchbook. It wasn't likely that the authorities would trace Garth to this house or, indeed, that anyone had reported him missing, but he put the pack into a cubbyhole behind a bookcase. Garth's other clothes he'd already fed to the furnace. He'd supply the boy with a new wardrobe when he woke him.

The most telling evidence, the sketchbook, he'd hide later. For now, he flipped to the naked Stace and hovered his fingertips above the page. The energy lingering in charcoal and paper was faint. Even when Kate Wyndham had been as unschooled as Garth, her magic was much stronger. He looked at the painting above his desk. Though he'd hung it within hand's reach, he didn't need to touch the canvas to feel its energy—that was like sunlight arrowing through breeze-stirred leaves, only not intermittently, irregularly, but with the steadiness of a healthy pulse, warmth and then warmth and then warmth again. Sunlight itself was the subject of the piece: sunlight on sea and sand and Sean—Kate's son, four or five, who crouched at the tide line with dunes behind him. In Kate's pigments and brushstrokes, everything lived more vividly than in life, and Sean's chubby hands were miracles of arrested transience as they pressed shells into his sand castle and fortified its ramparts with the spiny tails of horseshoe crabs.

While Redemption still gazed at painted Sean, Raphael returned from his surveillance of the original. The aether-newt melted through the skylight and corkscrewed to his shoulder. He put his ear to its feathery antennae.
Is the boy ready to come, nothing's gone wrong?

His things in the car. His things, many things, and his father's gone away.

Go back and let him see you, then. Let him know I'm still watching.

Raphael departed as it had come. Soon Sean would be in Arkham for two full months, and every day, whatever Patience's situation, Redemption would see him. And perhaps, one way or another, they would meet. Finally, knowingly.

Face-to-face.

 

1

Sean
and Eddy had hoisted their kayaks onto the roof of the Civic. They'd stuffed suitcases into the trunk, strapped bikes to the trunk rack, crammed the backseat with paddles and life vests, bike helmets and beach umbrellas. Now Eddy had gone home to pack books. She'd promised to limit herself to a single backpack, but even that was like shipping Coke to the Coke factory. She'd be working in the Miskatonic University Library, plus the Arkwright House had its own library, plus Horrocke's Bookstore was five minutes from campus. Good thing the Civic could handle her fear of getting stranded on a bookless desert island between Providence and Arkham—Dad had made sure the car was in top shape before he handed Sean the keys.

Sean had expected to drive the Civic more after Dad got his new Accord, but for Dad to give it to him? That was the (forest green) cherry on top of a whole summer studying magic, another gift he hadn't dared take for granted, even with Helen Arkwright and Professor Marvell arguing for it. The Servitor incident was a year behind them. Things had returned to normal, pretty much. So why would Dad risk Sean plunging them in another magical shit-storm?

Reason One: Dad would be in England all summer on a big restoration job, while Aunt Cel and Uncle Gus would be in Italy from mid-July on. Better Sean go to Arkham than poke around home alone. And Reason Two: Whether Sean pursued magic or not, the shit-storm that was Redemption Orne still rumbled over Sean's head.

At Marvell's request, an Order magician had come to Rhode Island to determine whether Orne still watched Sean. Right off, Afua Benetutti had felt brushes of too-sentient air, fluctuations in ambient energy, and with a puff of the dust that gloved her brown hands in sparkling silver, she'd revealed an invisible spy: a sinuous wisp of legs and feelers that cavorted around Sean, flicking its longest tail as if to chuck them an ethereal bird. Though the aether-newt had shaken off the dust and vanished from sight, Benetutti had continued to sense its energetic signature. Dad had exploded: Orne promised he'd leave Sean alone! Zap the thing! But Benetutti had said dispelling the newt would be wasted effort; Orne could simply resummon it. Better to ward the places where Sean spent the most time, his own house and his aunt's. The newt couldn't pass through the wards, so inside their perimeter, Sean would be safe from Orne's observation.

Not the scorched-aether solution Dad had wanted, but he let Benetutti weave the defensive webs. Every month a paramagician—someone who couldn't do spells himself but who could energize spells already in place—needed to reinforce the wards. Marvell and Helen had done the job. They'd have come anyway, because their other job was counseling Sean and Dad and Eddy, even Gus and Celeste, through their transitions from blissfully ignorant to people who could face the reality of magic without going nuts.

Far as Sean could tell, Gus and Celeste had needed the least counseling, Dad the most. Eddy, hard to say. She liked hanging with Helen—they talked about everything, not just the scary truth of the worlds. Obviously Helen thought Eddy was cool, or she wouldn't have offered her a summer internship at the MU Library. But pre-Servitor, Eddy had never had trouble sleeping. Now, when Sean was staying at Cel and Gus's, he'd look next door and see her “office” lights burning long after midnight. A couple times the blinds had been up, and he'd seen Eddy tilted back in her desk chair, clutching a book like a shield.

Sean dropped his tennis racquet through the Civic's rear window, afraid if he opened the door, he'd unleash a junk avalanche. Eddy had better stick to the one-backpack deal, but he wouldn't grouse if she didn't. He got why she'd want to bring comfort books to Arkham; in fact, he'd stuck comfort books of his own under the driver's seat. One was his duct-taped
Lord of the Rings
. The other was Marvell's
Infinity Unimaginable
—the matter-of-fact way it treated magic had helped him chill whenever he started thinking too much about the Servitor or, worse, the god who'd sent it.

Sean backed the Civic out of the driveway. After that he had nothing to do but sit on the porch steps until it was time to drive Dad to the airport. Maybe he'd stowed
Infinity
too soon, because he lapsed into thinking about how, Servitor-possessed and mentally delivered to its creator, he'd come that close to teaming up with Nyarlathotep, the Master of Magic himself. If Dad hadn't called him back. If Helen hadn't broken the Servitor's psychic grip by ramming a pitchfork, and herself, into its gut. Even now Sean could close his eyes and see the poison-green sky with its three black suns, the obsidian shore lapped by a protoplasmic ocean of shoggoths, the crystal-shard palace of a pseudo-Pharaoh who smiled because he understood the freaky hollowness inside a speck like Sean, a speck that longed to suck in the universe, to own the magic. He couldn't do that unless, to earn the Outer Gods' favor, he became their servant—

Servant or
slave,
like Orne. For everything Nyarlathotep promised, he wanted everything in return.

Everything
was too big. Better to break magic down into speck-sized nibbles Sean could handle without divine intervention. Since dismissing the Servitor, he hadn't done any magic. He'd been afraid to try, and besides,
Infinity
's descriptions of spell-casting didn't amount to much more than Obi-Wan telling Luke to use the Force. Marvell had explained that since
Infinity
was written for the general public, its vagueness was a deliberate precaution. Besides, Sean shouldn't attempt further magic until he'd been properly trained. In Arkham, Marvell would handle theory, and the Order would assign Sean a magician mentor to handle practice.

This time tomorrow, Sean would know his mentor's name. Maybe it would be Geldman—Helen had mentioned he sometimes took Order students. Geldman would be amazing, but Sean would be happy with any legit magician other than Orne. And maybe he wouldn't have to wait until tomorrow, because Dad came onto the porch with his cell phone ringing, and when he dropped his suitcases to answer it, he said, “Oh, hello, Helen.”

Good old Helen. She must've gotten the advance scoop on Sean's mentor and was calling with the news. He jumped up and walked over to Dad, to be ready to take the phone. But Dad didn't offer it. In fact, he turned away, frowning. “Yes, my flight's not for a couple hours, I can talk.”

Talk about what? “Hey, Dad.”

Dad shook his head, phone to ear.

“Let me say hi to her.”

Dad walked into the house and shut himself in his study.

It was either squash his ear to the study door or wait for bad news in the comfort of a porch rocker, and, yeah, Helen's news had to be bad to drive Dad into seclusion. Sean opted for the rocker and speculation. His summer in Arkham was off because no Order magician would mentor him, and that was because the Servitor had been a fluke—Sean wasn't magician material, after all. Or else he was, but in so hazardous a form that the black helicopters were coming to take him to Area 52, Magical Miscreants.

Half an hour later, the helicopters hadn't arrived. Dad had left the study, though, and gone to the carriage house. Following, Sean watched lights come on in Mom's old studio while Dad's stayed dark. Not an encouraging sign. He dithered in the garden for a few minutes, then sucked it up and finished the pursuit.

Dad stood under the window he'd made while Mom was sick, eyes fixed on the Madonna who sat painting in a walled garden. Sean climbed the stairs as if he were sneaking into church after the funeral had started, but Dad heard him, and he said, “I was talking to Helen.”

“I know. I was there when she called, remember?”

Dad sat on a worktable and nodded at the stretch of unoccupied tabletop beside him. His hair was a pawed-through mess, and the jaw muscle that twitched when he was pissed off looked like it was jumping rope. Sean stayed put at the top of the stairs. “Something's wrong about Arkham, right?”

“No, if you mean something to keep you from going. Helen's still expecting you and Eddy tomorrow.”

“So everything's okay.”

Dad looked him in the eye. “As long as you can study magic, all's right with the world?”

“I didn't say that!”

“But that's how you feel?”

“No, because there's still wars and climate change.”

“I'm glad you take a global view.”

“What did Helen say, Dad?”