The Native Star (36 page)

“I cultivate an open mind, Mr. Rocheblave,” Mirabilis said. “I am sure you’ll agree that there is much about the Mantic Anastomosis we do not understand.”

“There’s nothing
to
understand,” Rocheblave countered. “It’s a pile of rock. Nothing more.”

“You’re wrong,” Emily snapped at him. “It’s alive. It thinks, it dreams. I know. I’ve seen it.”

Heusler and Rocheblave exchanged scornful smiles.

“Like I said,” Rocheblave said. “Crackpot baloney from a dirt Witch.”

“Why, you …” Miss Pendennis looked on the verge of charging the self-satisfied sangrimancer, captain of industry or no. But Mirabilis’ next words stayed her.

“Regardless of your prejudices, Mr. Rocheblave, I would like us all to hear the testimony of the third animantic colleague—Komé, a Miwok Indian Holy Woman.”

“Yes, I’ve been meaning to ask about that,” Heusler said. “Where exactly is this third animantic colleague, this Indian Holy Woman?”

“She is in Miss Edwards’ possession,” Mirabilis said. “Her spirit is currently encapsulated within an acorn. The woman performed a spiritual transfer so that she could stay with the stone. She claims to serve as an interpreter for it.”

“An interpreter? For a
rock?”
Rocheblave barked a humorless laugh. “Is this a joke? Do you really think you’re going to sell me on a fraud so obviously self-serving? Your redskin squaw will say whatever that dirt Witch—or
you
, more likely—has told her to say.” Rocheblave leapt to his feet. “I can’t believe I wasted my time with this nonsense.”

“How do you propose we contact this Holy Woman?” Heusler asked, bringing his hand down to rest on his leg. His thumb stroked the fabric of his trousers lazily.

“We will contact her through a group séance,” Mirabilis said. “You will each be in direct contact with her. You will each be able to perceive, for yourselves, the genuineness of her claims.”

There was a challenging silence. With a grumble, Rocheblave settled back into his chair, and Heusler shrugged with resignation, the kind of shrug a skeptic would give before a game of three-card monte. “It’s your Grand Symposium, Mirabilis.”

Mirabilis gestured to Emily.

“Miss Edwards, will you bring out the nut?”

Emily reached down inside her dress and pulled the silk pouch from where it was nestled. She ignored Heusler’s snide stage-mutter: “And I was worried about her stockings. I wonder what else she has down that dress!”

Emily retrieved the acorn and held it loosely in the palm of her hand, showing it around to the participants.

“You’ll also need this,” Mirabilis said, withdrawing the Otherwhere Marble from his pocket and placing it in her hand. Marble and nut clicked gently against each other in her fist. “I don’t think I need to remind you to handle it with great care.”

Mirabilis gestured to the center of the circle. “Miss Edwards, please kneel here.” Emily arranged herself carefully, her tightly clenched hand resting on her knee. She breathed deeply, trying to calm her thudding heart.

She remembered how she and Stanton had performed the séance before; they had sat with their hands close but not touching. It appeared that a group séance required the same proximate distance. The colleagues gathered around her, letting their hands hover over her without actually touching. Strangely enough, she could feel each hand as clearly as if it were touching her. She felt the sangrimancers’ hands floating over her back, exuding an aura of rot. Caul’s hand hovered an inch from her throat, and she had to fight the urge to shy away from it. Tarnham’s hand was suspended over her upper arm, but it didn’t feel like a hand, it felt like myriad scurrying paws, making her flesh crawl. Miss Pendennis’ hand, smooth and firm as wax, trembled alongside her ankle. Stanton knelt beside her, his hand cupped an inch above the hand that lay on her knee. Mirabilis stood over her, his hand stretched out flat across the top of her head.

“Miss Edwards,” Mirabilis said, “please summon Komé’s spirit.”

Taking a deep breath, Emily closed her eyes.

Ososolyeh
, she thought, letting herself tumble toward it.

Emily concentrated as she had at the séance before. But instead of concentrating on Komé, Emily remembered the place she had seen in her dream, the vast beautiful landscape that stretched into infinity. The place where the light was her plaything, where she was Ososolyeh—ancient and vast, wanderer from the stars, the great spirit of the earth.

The sound of a great heart beating.

Basket of Secrets. Basket of Secrets. Basket of Secrets
.

Miwok words floated around her, darting about her head like fireflies.

She felt herself spreading out, becoming huge and eternal and deep, felt the threads of her human consciousness stretching unimaginably thin over a tessellation of incomprehensible intricacy. She stretched and spread until she was no longer anyone human at all. The Warlocks called her the Mantic Anastomosis, Komé called her Ososolyeh, but she had no name. She was only what she was. She was only memories—an infinity of memories.

The memory of traveling through endless reaches of empty blackness, measuring each moment by the unique smell of the star-seeded clouds as they drifted by, borne on thin winds of old power that vibrated like a current. A million smaller indecipherable sense memories: The sense of darkness. The sense of never. The sense of the vibrations of things infinitely small. The sense of the eternity within every single fraction of every single moment.

Komé’s voice surrounded her.
This is where you come from. From the stars, never born, never dying
.

Then, another flash of memory—a treasured memory of a beautiful sphere of fire, shimmering like a droplet of molten steel on a bed of powdered coal. A young sphere, churning with fire and energy, not yet painted in the greens and blues that would come. She wrapped herself around the flaming sphere, the young tender planet, taking its molten warmth into her core. She wrapped herself around it tight and snug, threading herself into the tiniest places, wicking the energy into herself. Keeping the hot secret core safe within, a yolk on which to feed. She cooled, cracked, smoothed. Became a web. A web that breathed in and out, taking and receiving, radiating power and bringing it back in a sweet respiration.

Home, sweet home
.

A billion years passed. She felt them all pass, felt the exact detail of each second with complete clarity. Each eon, each year, each day, each moment was a miracle of separation, a brilliance of meaning, a richness of experience. She savored them all.

And then …

Pain
.

Ososolyeh had never known pain, had never known of the existence or concept of pain. It could only be understood in human terms, animal terms, the terms of the tiny crawling creatures. It was agony. It was wretched misery. It was deep needles plunged into her, sucking at her greedily, bleeding her, emptying her. Unbalancing the delicate dance, the eternal respiration, taking and receiving … making her hollow. The pools of filth grew ever larger, welling and pooling and bubbling. She was a lake being drained, mud congealing at the bottom, cracking and thick …

And then, she began to expand. To transform. Her entire body, her entire existence inflated like an exploding sun, blossoming with pustulant black eruptions. She churned into a foul froth. She was engulfing herself, transformed by the waste she could not excrete fast enough, green and blue gone now, transmogrified into an unending blackness—roiling, stinking foulness …

An Abberancy
. The tiny, insignificant part of her mind that was still Emily Edwards screamed out in panic. She was turning into an Aberrancy.

It can be stopped
, Komé’s voice susurrated urgently.
It can be stopped, Basket of Secrets
.

Black and roiling, bubbling and hissing. An Aberrancy that engulfed the entire world, a planet of pestilence, a whole world of blackness and filth and rot and death …

The poison
, the Maien said.
The poison hidden by the god of oaths. It did not die with him
.

Komé’s words were lost in the torrential garble that was her, that was everything. She could hear nothing, only blackness. She could see nothing, only blackness. She was frothing and tumbling and dying. She was dying.

Ososolyeh desires it
.

Then, in the Grand Trine Room, someone screamed. The piercing, tortured shriek tore Emily’s mind from the grasp of Ososolyeh’s consciousness, one reality cracking to reveal glimpses of another …

And she fell, and she bubbled, and she died.

In the Grand Trine Room, someone screamed—a high lingering warbling scream rent from the core of the creature that gave it voice.

Emily opened her eyes, gasping, fumbling around herself like a drowning victim. She felt Stanton falling to his knees beside her, reaching for her arms; she looked at the place where her hand should be. She looked for the bubbling blackness, for the foulness that would engulf her …

… but her hand was still just a ghost-image floating above a cuff of silver, and her arm was smooth and white.

“It’s all right,” Stanton murmured, holding her to still her violent trembling. He smelled of blood, but maybe that was just another part of the horror. “It’s all right, Emily. It was just a vision. A Cassandra.”

The screaming continued, like a man being torn to pieces. Emily looked to see where the soul-wrenching sound was coming from.

It was coming from Tarnham.

The scene was ghastly. Tarnham was soaked in blood, bound by lashing tendrils of power. He struggled in wild terror. In his teeth, clenched like a bit, was the Otherwhere Marble. He screamed against it like a man gagged. Emily looked down into her palm. Only the acorn remained there.

“He’s got it!” Emily screamed. “He’s got my
hand
!”

“Stop him!” Mirabilis roared. But it was too late. In a flash, Tarnham was gone, leaving behind only a smell of brimstone and burning hair.

“His ferret!” Miss Pendennis pointed. “Look there!”

Tarnham’s ferret had been slaughtered, torn to pieces by someone’s hand, and the bloody remains of the creature used to inscribe a magical sigil on the floor of the Grand Trine Room.

“Blood magic,” Stanton barked, jumping to his feet and storming forward. He looked at each of the sangrimancers in turn. “Which of you did it? And how … in Mirabilis’ own Grand Trine Room?”

Heusler and Rocheblave looked at each other suspiciously, each scrutinizing the hands of the other for traces of blood. It wasn’t until that moment that Emily noticed that Caul wasn’t with them. Rising quickly, Emily felt a hand wrap around her arm. She looked up, into Caul’s twitching face. He smiled.

“Carissima mia,”
he whispered. “It is t-t-time.”

She winced, sudden pain bending her almost double. It was as if acid had been poured into the twisting channels of her cerebellum.
No
, she thought.
No … she would not …

It is time
, the voices in her head commanded her.

Hardly knowing what she was doing, Emily leaned forward. Her hands moved on their own. She squeezed her breasts together from the sides to slacken her corset front. Reaching down between the corset and her chemise, she felt for the black-handled knife that she had hidden there, the sharp athame that she had stolen from Miss Pendennis’ traveling case. The muscles of her arms spasmed as she struggled against the compulsion, but the magic was too strong. She withdrew the knife, holding it loosely in a shaking hand.

Caul snatched it. And then everything that had been moving so quickly moved even faster.

The huge man crossed the Grand Trine Room in two strides, toward Mirabilis. Before anyone even saw his movement, Caul had a hand buried in the Sophos’ white hair. He jerked the old man’s head back sharply, and with a swift, easy movement, Caul slashed Mirabilis’ throat. Blood sprayed dark in the murky half-light.

Mirabilis gurgled, choking, scrabbling at the air for a moment before dropping to his knees. Caul threw him backward, and the knife came down again with swift efficiency. Emily saw Stanton and Miss Pendennis throwing themselves at Caul, grabbing at him to make him stop, but Caul was too huge, too strong. Even as they hung off him, trying to pull him away, Caul butchered the old man. The knife in his hand tore open Mirabilis’ chest from throat to belly. A foul odor rose. Caul plunged his hand into Mirabilis’ chest, pulled out the old man’s shuddering heart, slashed it free with a short movement from the knife. Arterial blood sprayed black in the dim flickering light. Caul raised the heart high.

I claim this place!

Caul’s voice boomed against the walls of the Great Trine Room, echoing and thundering.

I claim mastery of the Great Trine!

The explosion of light that came from Caul’s gory up-stretched fist was blinding; it outlined each of the colleagues in white-hot brilliance, sending them staggering, then spinning away from him on the blood-streaked marble floor. Caul stood wreathed in brilliance, restored and rejuvenated as if he’d bathed in the blood of a whole regiment of Sergeant Booths. He threw his head back and laughed—a rich Italian-scented laugh, high and fluty.

Then, another voice.

“No.”

Resounding, old, powerful, the voice shook the walls to their foundations, cutting Caul’s horrible laughter short.

The word came from Ben. He stepped out from behind his desk. He came to stand before Caul. His hands were held in front of his chest, his fingers almost touching. He did not look like old Ben anymore, though; he looked like someone much greater. Emily realized suddenly that she had seen his face before.

“Benedictus Zeno.” Caul broke the silence, making the air vibrate cruelly. His voice was touched with recognition and surprise. “I had no idea you were still alive. And working as a servant for the Institute. Is that how old credomancers are put out to pasture?”

“Leave this place!” Ben commanded, taking two menacing steps toward Caul.