Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (18 page)

“Who’s the eighth?” she asked, and suddenly there was silence.

“I’m sorry?” said Yves.

“I think you all heard me,” said Joy. “I noticed that
there were nine places set, but I thought perhaps the additional one was for
absent or departed friends. But there are seven of you here, and I distinctly
heard Abel refer to the eight of you.”

“Idiot,” Bebe said to Abel.

“I love you too, dear,” he said.

“We have an eighth member, but she’s not able to
attend meetings directly,” said Yves.

“Is she ill?”

“No.”

Joy’s reading wasn’t like truth-telling, but it could
tell her when someone was being evasive, and judging by the watery pulses
flowing through every aura in the room, this was something nobody wanted to
talk about.

“If you want me to trust you, let alone help you, you
need to be honest with me,” she said.

“Yes, well. I suppose that’s true,” said Yves. “I
propose that we tell her. Shall we vote?”

“I second it,” said Abel.

“Aye,” said Philip around a mouthful of pork.

“Aye,” said both Ken and Simone as they returned to
the table.

“Nay,” said Bebe and Cyril,
sounding resigned.

“Our eighth member is Veronica Dada,” said Yves. “I
assume you’ve heard of her.”

Joy had. Veronica Dada was the sort of polarizing
figure that seemed to come most often out of the turmoil of the sixties and
early seventies — an activist to some, a terrorist to others; a murderer or a
political prisoner. She was currently a resident of the women’s wing of the
federal prison just to the north.

“I don’t understand,” said Joy. Her head was spinning.
Dada was serving a life sentence, at least in theory; Joy had read about her
most recent parole hearing. She’d been convicted of the deaths — by magical
means — of two Ohio police officers and one plainclothes FBMA agent. She had
vocal allies who claimed that she’d been framed. There were always people who
said things like that, but because Dada was a prominent figure in the anti–Vietnam
War movement, her allies were a little louder than some. Which
was odd, in some ways, because Dada’s history as an activist had been largely
characterized by her very public departures from the groups she had been
involved with. She left the Students for a Democratic Society because of
their clumsiness with issues of race; she broke with the Black Panthers because
of their disinterest in confronting misogyny within their organization; she
publicly repudiated the Anti-Sorcery League when they altered their charter to
condemn all magic and not just magic used by governments to shut down dissent.

Joy hadn’t even been born when Dada had gone to jail,
but she had heard her parents talk about her. They had both read her book, and
when she heard her father talk about politics — which was not often — she was one
of the names on a list of people he recited who had been done wrong by the
United States government. Her mother spoke of such things less often, but she
was even more passionate about the way women of color like Dada, Angela Davis,
and Assata Shakur were
treated. Joy was always mindful of those things, but it was her brother who had
really taken them to heart.

“She’s innocent, for one thing,” said Abel.

“How can you know that?” Joy asked. “She was capable
of it.” Dada had gone to college on a dueling scholarship — she was as dangerous
a magician as anyone alive.

“We actually have proof,” said Ken Song.

“Then why is she still in prison?”

“Because she feels safer there, at least while the
person who is responsible for framing her is still at large.”

“Who—” Joy started.

“I feel like we’re off track, here,” said Simone.
“There’s a reason that we brought someone like Veronica into the group. You
need to understand what we’re fighting.”

“This is…” Joy put her elbows on the table, her head
in her hands. To hell with table manners. She’d gone
through all the work of deciding that the FBMA was the right side to be on;
she’d talked through her misgivings with Martin, she’d worked through them with
her mother and sister. That wasn’t to say that she wasn’t conflicted at times
by things that the agency did, but she had convinced herself that it wasn’t the
same organization it had been forty years ago, that ultimately its aims were
simple: to protect honest people from the worst of magical criminals. This
conversation was stirring it all up again.

“You fucking people,” she said, but in a whisper so
low that she could barely hear herself. “Fine. Tell me
the rest.”

“Where do we start?” said Cyril.

“At the beginning,” said Bebe
Stapleford. She sipped from her wineglass, drinking in the impatient attention
of everyone at the table before she began. “The cosmos persists in a state of
equilibrium, more or less. Order rose out of chaos; out of the violence of
creation, planets formed, and life arose. Whatever you believe, in the
beginning there was nothing; emptiness; entropy. Possibility
without volition. In many cultures the creation is symbolized by the
victory of a culture hero over a monster symbolizing chaos. Saint
George and the dragon; Marduk and Tiamat.
In these stories, chaos is the enemy of life, and order is the nurturer.
Without order, without physical and social laws, we could not exist.”

“Right, OK, so you’re on the side of law and order.
How do you explain the fact that you’re working with Veronica Dada?”

“Because we’re not on the side of law and order,” said
Yves, with an apologetic grimace.

“We’re on the side of chaos.”

They moved into Yves Deschamp’s
sitting room, which was composed of two walls of books, one wall of windows,
and the open arch to the dining room. Crowded in front of the bookshelves were
four antique loveseats, matching not at all except for their claw-footed legs.

Joy sat next to Simone Deschamp.
Bebe had brought out some clear crystal dishes heaped
with berries and cream. It was delicious — Joy had tasted it — but she was too
tense to eat any more. Philip sat next to Ken, shoveling his dessert into his
mouth as if he were in a competition.

“Order makes life possible,” said Bebe,
“but chaos didn’t go away, of course. We can’t account for chance or
coincidence, for what we perceive as luck. In myths, chaos takes on the face of
the trickster: Raven, Hermes, Ananse.
The trickster disrupts the orderly lives even of the gods, stealing their
cattle, their fire, even their fruits of immortality. When the gods try to
bring stasis to the universe, to keep things from changing, the trickster is
the element of chance that destroys their plans. When Frigg tries to cheat
death for the sake of her son Balder, Loki confounds her and guides the hand of destiny.”

Joy’s frustration had reached the point where she
finally had to interrupt. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I have
no idea what it has to do with anything.”

Bebe threw up her hands. “I
thought she was educated.”

“Be a little patient, Bebe,”
said Yves. “You really were in professor mode there for a moment.”

“Let me try,” Abel said. “Look, Philip told you there
was a battle some time ago, one hundred and ninety-six dimensions distant. It
was…it was an extraordinary thing. From what we’ve gleaned of it, the gods and
the great powers of that Earth were bent upon not just victory, but complete
annihilation — and they succeeded. They succeeded in destroying themselves and
their entire world. And what happened then was that a hole opened in the fabric
of existence — as if you put a stack of maps of all the possible Earths into a
paper-punch and pressed down right on the spot where Gooseberry Bluff sits.

“The forces of order in the universe, as you might
expect, were appalled by what had happened. Order is…” He seemed unsure, for a
moment, how to explain. “In most pantheons, order is sort of assumed, and the
gods that govern it are minor, or it’s a minor aspect of gods who handle other
things. But the battle and the disruption that followed — the easy movement
between the dimensions — put the gods of order on high alert, and they started to
band together across the worlds. Slowly, they’ve taken control of more than a
hundred dimensions. And by taken control, we mean lockdown. You submit to order,
or you are destroyed. Chaos and order
should
be in equilibrium — enough stability for life to thrive, enough random chance to
allow for adaptation and invention. But there’s no such thing as an alliance of
tricksters. Order was designed to ally itself with order, but you can’t put Eshu and Hermes in the same room and expect them to agree.
Their nature is to contradict and disrupt, even when their own survival is at
stake.”

Philip laughed, a bit loudly, until he saw that they
were all looking at him. “It’s just so true,” he said.

“OK,” said Joy. “You’re telling me that not only are the gods — plural — real, but they’re fighting a war across
the dimensions, and the ones who are on the side of law and order are the bad
guys?”

Bebe made a face. “We’re
not comfortable framing this in terms of good and evil—”

“What Bebe means to say is
yes
,” said Abel. “Things are far enough
out of balance that our choice — really, the choice of our predecessors, the
founders of this group — was clear. We exist to confound the forces of order,
which is one reason that we are a bit leery of your superiors. It’s also why we
need people like Veronica Dada in the mix.”

“All right, assuming that this makes sense, why now?
What’s happening that would prompt you to share this secret with someone like
me, who could expose you?”

“Well first of all, you
can’t
, because there’s a geas here just
the same as there is in Philip’s office,” said Cyril Lanfair.

Joy had suspected as much, but she was still stung by
the confirmation. Pretty soon she wouldn’t be able to talk about anything, and
her briefings with Flood would just be an inventory of her daily caloric
intake.

“Don’t be smug, Cyril,” said Simone. “What’s
happening, Joy, is that we believe that we’re next.
Ken is our proxy defender for the area, and he’s been fighting a magical duel
for weeks now.”

“Months,” said Ken Song.

“They’re testing our defenses,” said Simone. “They’re
scouting us out to find out if we’re prepared for them. They have probably
infiltrated this dimension in ways we’ve been unable to detect. Government, industry — who knows? We’re a small group, Joy, we
always have been. We always believed that we had to remain so, because our
goals would be seen as a threat to any organization larger than ours. Law
enforcement, the military — these are the forces of order, by definition. But if
there was ever a time for us to recruit, this is it.”

“We’re not asking anything of you right now,” said
Yves. “Take a day or two to consider what you’ve learned here tonight. We’ll be
in touch later in the week to discuss the role we’d like to see you play in our
group.”

“And to test you,” said Bebe.

“Don’t worry about that now,” said Yves. “More
berries?”

Ingrid started awake from a nightmare that she had already
forgotten. She’d gone to sleep in her clothes, and they were soaked with sweat
either from terror or the humidity or both. Her skin was hot; she sat up, put
her head in her hands, folded her arms, but any position in which she was
touching herself was unbearable, so she got up.

She’d been sleeping on the couch at the rental house
on the Point since she’d finalized the lease on Sunday. The place had come
furnished, but she had moved most of the living room ensemble into the garage,
leaving just the couch and the table from the kitchen. She would sleep on the
couch and plan at the table, only leaving to go to work and — once a day — to go
home and care for Selma’s body.

The house sat on the westernmost side of the Point
and looked out over the bay in which the St. Goose Pier lay. It had its own
private dock and lots of windows, all of which Ingrid had covered up in order
to work. The house was old, and the carpet was crunchy in spots, prone to damp
in others. It needed new windows and a new coat of paint, both inside and out.
All of the fixtures in the bathroom and the kitchen had rust rings, and there
was a family of something — probably raccoons — living under the steps.

Ingrid was aware of all of these things. She was
aware that, on some level, she had chosen this house because it would not clash
with her emotional state, which was also neglected, dilapidated, vacant. All day yesterday she had worked inside, and
sometime in the late afternoon she had realized that she had forgotten to eat.
While she heated up a frozen pizza, she had the impression that the house had
sunk into the earth, that the darkness from the windows was not the shades and
black curtains but dirt and sand and clay. A part of her was disappointed when
she opened the door to the deck and found the bay still sparkling in the
sunlight.

Ingrid shut the door, pulled the curtains closed, and
went looking for some clean clothes. She had packed plenty of shorts and T-shirts,
but she had forgotten to bring work-appropriate clothes. She would have to stop
by the house before she went in to the school.

She was not looking forward to it.

She tossed the sweaty clothes she had slept in into a
corner of the living room and put on a pair of gym shorts and the first clean T-shirt
she found. She wasn’t sure where her car keys were; she spent several minutes
searching for them, only to find them on the relocated kitchen table, under the
map she had marked up with grease pencil. She stared at the map for a minute
before she went out to the car.

She went over her plans as she drove. Tonight, she
would summon up the minor demon she needed to perform the major summoning, and
then she would work on the summoning circle for Stolas.
This was going to be tricky, because the circle needed to be big — big enough
that two points of the pentagram would be on the Wisconsin side of the river.
She’d already plotted this out, but actually setting it up was going to be
another matter. One point was just half a mile down the peninsula from her
rental house, and another was on the public beach to the north, but the
Wisconsin points were both on private land and the last was on the southeastern
edge of campus. She was creating the largest summoning circle she could
reasonably control. “Control” was an imperfect way of looking at it, but Ingrid
had done summons in the middle of artillery barrages and was confident she
could handle it. None of her previous summons had ever been this big, though, nor
had she ever attempted to destroy the thing that she was summoning.

She wanted the circle big because she didn’t want any
surprises; she wanted Stolas to manifest at full
strength. Demons, in her experience, had a habit of looking beaten before
growing seven sizes or manifesting ultimate powers. Ingrid wanted to skip
straight to the ultimate and cut through the dramatic tension. She would rather
end up with a 120-foot-tall Stolas with fire arcing
from its eyes than a 4-foot cuddly thing that would hoot harmlessly until it
was attacked. A giant owl-monster with long chicken legs would also scare off
any potential gawkers, keeping them out of harm’s way, and hers.

The drive to her house only took ten minutes — not
nearly long enough. She parked in the driveway and then sat for a moment,
gathering her strength. It was ironic that everything she was trying to do was
for her sister, and yet it was her sister who was making everything so
difficult. But, no, that wasn’t fair. Sometimes Ingrid tried to tell herself
that this depression was all about her sister, but the truth was it had started
before that, sometime after the Conjuration Corps, or even while she was still
in the service. She even suspected that she’d saved Myrtle Vongsay’s
life because she’d been hoping to die in her place.

Ingrid knew she was depressed, but she didn’t feel
like she could really deal with that, couldn’t
fight
it, until she knew
why
she was depressed. If she could isolate the cause, then maybe she could put a
stop to it. And if she couldn’t, then she’d go and see a doctor. But she
couldn’t stand to tell someone she was depressed when she didn’t know why.
My sister was two-thirds dead and she’s
still one-third dead
was reason enough, but it wasn’t
the
reason, and there was something wrong with that. How could she
explain to someone else what she didn’t understand herself? And she couldn’t
focus on why right now, not until Selma was all right, her horrible ghost
reunited with her sleeping-beauty body and the spark that Stolas
had taken from her.

Ingrid took a deep breath and went into the house.

Selma started in immediately. “So now you’re avoiding
me?” said the ghost.

“No,” said Ingrid. “I’m actually trying to—”

“I’ll bet you’re whoring around,” said Selma. “Is it
that spatial distortion professor again? Or maybe that
waitress? You’ll fuck anyone who shows the slightest interest, won’t
you?”

Ingrid had sometimes worried that that was true. She
had told her sister as much, years ago, and Selma had assured her that it
wasn’t the case. It had been so long since anyone had shown the slightest
interest, though, that having it thrown back at her almost didn’t hurt at all.

“I need to take a shower,” Ingrid said, and went
upstairs, her legs feeling like lead.

“Washing them off won’t make you any less of a
whore!” shouted Selma. But the ghost didn’t follow her upstairs. Ingrid had
mentioned the shower deliberately, knowing that the ghost disliked being
reminded of bodily things.

Ingrid turned the shower on hot and glared at herself
in the mirror, disgusted by the expression of defeat she saw. There was a part
of her that almost relished the abuse she got from Selma’s ghost, because she
kept hoping that something Selma said would help her remember how to fight back
and not just
avoid
. But it hadn’t
happened yet. It hadn’t happened, and if she was honest with herself, Ingrid
didn’t believe it ever would.

Agent Renard pulled up outside a
three-story Queen Anne–style home on Marshall Avenue in St. Paul. “This is the
place,” he said.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Joy said. Renard had called her early to tell her that he had a
contact with PoofPost, so she had driven over to the
Minneapolis office to meet him. But once there, Renard
had informed her that the contact wouldn’t come to them, they had to go meet
him. Joy wasn’t sure what she had expected — a bar, maybe, or a nondescript
private club, maybe a barber shop. But this place, with its stained-glass
windows and its wooden rosette detailing and its salmon-and-periwinkle color
scheme, wasn’t it.

Renard checked his watch.
“It’s nearly ten thirty, so he should be up. Don’t expect him to be happy to
see us, though.”

A concrete staircase climbed up from the sidewalk,
ten steps during which to stare up at the house in awe, Joy supposed. Maybe
this made a kind of sense after all.

It was an open secret, at least in law enforcement,
that PoofPost was the legitimate business side of the
Irish Mafia in the United States. After Prohibition and after the war, the
Irish had dipped their toes in various enterprises, but none had panned out
because they were all either too visible or too volatile. Finally, in 1963 a
young couple in rural Iowa had patented a foolproof method for teleporting
parcels instantaneously and without fail. Their primary investor had been a
captain in the St. Paul organization. The nice young people had eventually
retired happily to Hawaii when their share was bought out by a holding
corporation.