O'Meara hauled the door open to reveal an office manager's nightmare. Unconnected cubicles the color of my grandfather's decades-old easy chair were scattered about a large room randomly. They were the sort of cubes I hadn't seen since the mid-nineties, each panel consisting of a plastic frame over which a cheap knitted fabric was stretched. In the center of the room, a double-wide cubicle seemed to be floating in a sea of paper stacked around it. The papers were sorted into precarious piles due to the nonuniform sizes, as if somebody had run out of office paper and restocked from a fancy art store instead of Office Depot. Large sheets of thick patterned paper with detailed calligraphy were sandwiched between normal white office stock. A few scrolls lay scattered around like pieces of driftwood.
A woman's voice called across the paper sea. "Mistress O'Meara? That you?" The cadence of the words was slightly halting.
"Ixey!" O'Meara stared at the tide of papers surrounding the cube. "What the hell are you doing with all this paper? I'm a fire magus! One wrong message from the council and fwoosh! This place is gonna be an inferno!"
A smiling round face framed by rainbow-dyed hair popped over the top of the flooded cubicle. "It’s okay—I made friends with a salamander last week!" Her eyes widened and a grin spread over her purple lips as I stepped forward. "
Oh, my God!
" Her head popped back behind the cubicle’s barrier only to reappear at the side of the cubicle with her entire body in tow. O'Meara held me up to her own eyes in order to witness the visual assault that was Ixey's outfit. A smart business suit sparkled with neon pink trim and bright purple pinstripes on a background of shiny gold fabric that hugged her lean body. She picked her way through the stack of the paper, her eyes never leaving my face. "You're Thomas, right?"
"News travels fast," O'Meara huffed, crossing her arms.
Her smile spread wider. "You bonded in front of Jowls, he’s a gossip wormhole."
O'Meara groaned besides me. "The only reason Jules gets any business at all is to trade gossip with Jowls."
Ixey chuckled. "He's getting more business after Archibald stopped paying his minions. I even saw that werewolf pack in there last week." The rainbow punk girl knelt in front of me, and only then did I see her familiar, watching me with two glittering ruby eyes—a lizard clinging to the shoulder of her jacket. Its scales were metallic gold, the claws silver, and a row of purple garnets laced down its spine. She held out her hand in front of my nose. "Hi, I'm Ixey and this is Garn," she said, indicating the lizard with a slight tilt of her head.
It took me a moment to realize that she had offered her hand so I could give it a sniff—which I then did. She smelled human with an earthen undertone.
"Could I pet you? Or are you a no-touching sort of cat?"
The question caught me off guard, and as usual when confused I consented. "Uh, okay?" Her hand slid over my head and down my back.
"You're softer than I thought you'd be," she said after a few strokes. "Feels like you could use a good brushing."
My ears started to heat up as I felt her fingers catch on a few knots. Each tug was like hammer to a primal sort of pride. My tongue began to itch, and I licked my chops to relieve the urge.
"Thomas is still very much at war with the idea that grooming with his tongue is sanitary. I know he'd love a good brushing."
"O'Meara!" I snapped, annoyed at being called out on that, although my thoughts had gone there.
"Thomas, Ixey is as close as I've ever gotten to having an apprentice. You can trust her as you would me, perhaps more so because she's a huge softy and a bit of a wuss."
"Hey!" Ixey protested. The petting stopped, and I found myself leaning against her legs. The urge to groom redoubled with the loss of that stroking hand.
"Try scratching him right at the base of his skull—he really enjoys that." O'Meara smirked at me.
Ixey's eager hands found me before I could get up the gumption to remove myself. I may have tilted my head a little to allow them better access, I don't know. At that moment I was a pretty sorry excuse for an apex predator. Eventually my pride outweighed the petting, and I pulled away, taking refuge behind O'Meara, who immediately started scratching the same spot. This had nearly twice the effect, her fingers reading my thought as they chased an itch along my spine.
"Why are you doing this to me?"
I mentally mewled at her. Both women looked at me with the expression they get while playing with adorable children.
"I'm not allowed to give my familiar a little love and attention?"
O’Meara thought. Her hand crept down to the base of my tail, which did things that went well beyond a back rub. Her hands quickly retreated back to my ears.
"This is a temporary thing!"
I protested as I leaned against her, my conscious thoughts threatening to melt away in a slurry of purrs.
"I know. But I have to admit I'm hoping you change your mind on that. It’s going to be doubly difficult to get someone after you. Not that the TAU were happy with me to begin with. I might have to get split done,"
she thought at me, but I could see a little shining gem of truth behind the words. I plucked it from her mind and opened it.
"Hey—don't!"
Dread filled my mind as a thousand angry papers screamed for my blood. The link closed with an angry slam as the petting stopped dead. I opened my eyes to find O'Meara glaring down at me. "What's the matter, boss? Is magi paper work that scary? Do magi send screaming letters like in Harry Potter?" I grinned up at her. I'd just done something to surprise her, and that was definitely worth a few missed pets.
"Pretty close," Ixey piped in as O'Meara shook her finger at me, but there was no heat behind this anger.
"Damn it, Thomas—firstly you’re not supposed be able to snatch at my thoughts yet! Second, stop exposing my weaknesses in front of the employees."
"But I know about your weakness to paper work. I practically have to staple you to your desk to get you to look at it," Ixey said as she leaned against a nearby cube. If she had another few pounds on her thin frame the entire cube would have toppled.
O'Meara crossed her arms and huffed, and then cast a baleful look at the sea of paper work in the middle of the room. "Get it all organized and bring it into the office." Then, turning to me, she said, "How hungry are you?"
"I could eat," I said automatically, hopefully even. Those sausages had been an eternity ago, and as a general rule I did not refuse offered food.
O'Meara waved at an empty wastebasket in front of me. "Good, I really don't want to work with you on a full stomach. If you gotta hurl, use this."
I was so disappointed. I had already pictured a juicy steak being placed in front of me.
O'Meara led me towards the back of the building—well, the front actually. The store's display windows had been boarded up with plywood. I followed her to a jumbo-sized cubicle parked in the corner of the room. Double the size of Ixey's office, this had been constructed out of four units, with an actual door on one side. It had a scent different from the rest of the office, more of a charge to the air than a scent exactly.
"In case you’re wondering where our budget for office furniture went, it’s in here." She pulled the door open, revealing a dark chasm in the floor beyond it. Or so I thought, because O'Meara stepped out onto it and did not fall into an abyss. She whirled on one foot, her aura suddenly coming to life and bathing her body in flame. Around her feet runes flared into existence, set aflame by the heat of her aura. Complex circular diagrams came to life, and then slowly started to rotate. I blinked as some of the circles looked to be sinking down into the cavernous blackness. Circles became pillars; runes elongated from their moorings and interlocked with each other. Circles threaded down the outside of the pillars, spinning up and down their length. Heat pulsed up through the center, and the scent of molten iron intruded into my nose.
This was no magic. This was a machine, a machine powered via O'Meara’s anchor.
"Oh, it’s so good to see this again,"
O'Meara whispered in my head, peering through my eyes.
"It’s been over a year since I've seen it work for me."
"O'Meara, what is this?"
I asked, watching what appeared to be a ribbon of lava fly up at us through the darkness.
"It is a ritual surface, a magic circle."
"If this is a circle of salt, then I’m Cobra Commander’s concubine."
Pride swelled her thoughts.
"Well, it’s a pretty fancy circle, I admit. In town, only the Archmagus had one better. Remember how difficult it was to bring back that little bit of authority for the badge trinket?"
"My claws still tingle from that."
"That’s part of it; a good circle allows its users to draw much more power and surf through the infinite planes for much longer. A simple circle, composed of material native to our plane, strengthens the connection between a magus and a familiar. That helps with the creation of weaves or spells.
“This"
—she gestured to the whirling mechanism below her—
"extends that strength all the way to our anchors so we can draw ten times the amount of energy from the higher planes or larger things from the lower."
"How does it work?"
I asked, watching as the ribbon of lava touched a spinning column of runes. It twisted around the column and stopped it dead, like a thread jamming a gear. At first I thought it had been broken, but small runes separated from the column and swarmed down it like a colony of ants. They marched down its length, into the void below, and the string thickened in their wake.
O'Meara mentally shrugged.
"Magic, of course."
I
looked up at her, seated lotus-style on one side of the machine, the pillar attached to the thread extending beneath her as she watched me and my mind with undisguised amusement. Her eyes twinkled as she took in my scowl.
"Okay, yes, but how?"
I thought at her.
"Do you know how a cell phone works?"
"Uh . . . vaguely?"
"Well, that’s about all I know about this circle. There are a few magi alive who can understand it and possibly even build its equal, but I'm not one of them. Archibald in his youth was one of them, but that was a long time ago."
"So we're not living in a golden age of magic? This is a relic, then?"
"It’s what we call an Atlantean artifact."
"The whole superadvanced civilization that fell into the sea thing and left no proof of their existence is real?"
I tried and failed to tamp down my skepticism.
"Even on this side of the Veil we don't know much, but we believe that they are the reason the Veil exists. However, we do know they were not human. They had a civilization that stretched across many planes. We believe the so-called island was their first toehold on our world."
"So they created the Veil to keep the natives in line?"
"No, the Veil was put in place by those who crushed the Atlanteans and erased almost all traces of them from the earth. The Veil called them The Fey."
My brain failed to process that thought on the first time through my noggin, so I repeated it to myself to try again. Okay, so the ancient Atlanteans who had made the epic magic machine under our feet had been wiped out by a bunch of pixies? Oh, and you can chat with the Veil itself?
O'Meara plucked the thought from my head before I could organize a witticism from it.
"Okay, two things: the Veil only ever talked to Merlin, so you can take that with a grain of salt. And second, while Fey are the origin of pixies and elves, if you ever encounter them, remember that they are the finger puppets of a creature that resembles a multidimensional octopus more than anything else. While they lack the same punch of a dragon, most magi think this is due to compassion and carefulness than lack of raw power. When they do visit, we are but ants at their picnic."
"Wait, so Merlin exists?"
"Did. He's dead or really good at convincing us that he's dead—either way he's long gone."
She held up a hand to ward off the questions that were piling up like cars on an off-ramp.
"We'll have time for the history lesson later, Thomas. Now we have to get work done. Take your place."
She pointed at a pillar directly across from her.
I swallowed back my questions and took a halting step forward; the surface felt cool and smooth beneath my paw. The circle reacted instantly to the contact, a few runes peeling off from the larger circles to sniff at my paw. I quickly scampered to my designated pillar. The symbols followed after me and circled the pillar warily. I looked across the circle to O'Meara, only to find the spiraling surface of her pillar there while she smiled down on me from above. In fact all around me the circle's mechanisms had sprung up from the surface of the artifact, invading the space.
A sudden loss of balance gripped me as the illusion of depth became real. It was as if I walked up to a street painting that had the illusion of a deep pit or steep cliff. The pillar beneath me shuddered, and I threw myself down on it, gripping the sides with all four paws. The void loomed dizzyingly deep below me. I heard the distant whir as the pillar below me unfolded in a similar fashion to O'Meara's, and I began to gain altitude, accompanied by what I can only describe as a very curious sensation. It was perhaps similar to when I had first discovered I had developed the tail, although this involved far less panic. The chain around my neck grew warm as I felt something wrap around a body part I had not known I possessed until this artifact touched it. I couldn't quite figure out how it attached to me precisely, but it was long and tube-like as the machine extended its touch along its length, pulling on it width-wise, stretching it beyond its usual shape, like the feeling of a tendon being stretched out along a leg. As I reached a height equal to O'Meara's, the pulling sensation had reached the tip of my newly discovered limb.