Fathomless (15 page)

And the crow's flight was smooth, free of the jerky stammers of supernatural movement you saw in horror movies. That almost made it scarier, except why should Sean be scared while the crow still bore Mom's aura? So what if things in her paintings had never moved. Maybe, transplanted to the Arkwright House, her magic drew extra energy from Order members, like the ones who'd met in the library yesterday. That made sense. It had to.

A stronger caw flirted with his eardrums. The crow was calling him, and if it was from Mom, might it not speak for her?

Because he should have been eager to answer that question, Sean made himself haul a stepladder onto the dais. As he positioned it under the center window, the crow stopped circling to hover above the minister's head, an inky reverse of the haloed dove saints wore in old-time paintings. What if he'd been wrong about the crow? What if an Order magician had enchanted it as a joke? What if Nyarlathotep, the real one, had sent it to summon Sean to a second face-to-face? After thinking the crow belonged to Mom, the first alternative pissed him off. The second made his heart and stomach lurch.

Sean climbed a rung on the stepladder.

The crow perched on the minister's shoulder. Was that its equivalent of a step toward him?

He climbed another rung. Another. His eyes were now level with the crow's.

In a harsh avian accent, a lot like Boaz's, it croaked:
Touch me.

Instead Sean touched the window sky, cool opalescent glass that retained his fingerprints.

Touch me, touch me, touch me,
the crow insisted, bobbing its head with each syllable.

It could be Mom. Or a joke, or Nyarlathotep, or—

A trap Marvell had set to catch Sean doing magic?

That thought triggered a surge of anger that swamped any fear of the Master; worse, that polluted any wonder and longing for Mom. Any fool with a stepladder could touch a few cuts of glass lead-bound into the shape of a bird. There was nothing magical about it. Or if there was, Sean didn't give a crap.

With his left hand, he gripped the ladder top. His right he lifted to the crow. Its hum had strengthened—he felt it with his fingertips still an inch from the glass. More, the hum had developed thuds and pauses, like a heartbeat.

He reached through the inch of air and touched the crow, and it pulsed lightning into him.

And then—

He was the crow.

 

11

He.
Sean. Was the crow.

But not the glass crow. No, he was a real one with real nerves and real muscles that suddenly didn't know how to keep him perched on the minister's shoulder, or how to fly, or how to do anything other than misfire and spasm. It was a good thing the minister was also real now, and that he had enough control over his hands to catch Sean and lower him gently to the turf. Real turf, too, not streamer glass: it was thick and soft and starred with clover, just the thing if you had to lie on your feathered side and flail a helpless wing and claws.

“Don't struggle,” the minister said. He sounded amused, but without any meanness to it. “The first transition's always startling, especially if you pass into a nonhuman body. Or construct, I should say. You're no more a crow than I'm the Reverend Benjamin Tyndale, first pastor of the first church in Arkham. We're two minds meeting in a fabricated world, thinner than the glass it's seeded inside, though you'll find it feels as wide and high and deep as our own.”

Sean lay still.

“When your mind finishes merging with the construct, you'll be able to walk, talk, even fly. I thought of merging you into one of the other humans, but I thought you'd like the crow better.”

As his panic subsided, Sean
felt
the merge. He was no longer trapped in the crow's skull, imperfectly connected to its body; like a warming plasma, his will spread through the web of its nerves until he owned the finest fiber and so the whole. He hopped onto his thin-toed feet and ruffled his feathers into place, sleeking both wings with his beak. Then it hit him. Whoever occupied the minister construct didn't sound like Mom. It didn't sound like Marvell, either. No, it couldn't be Marvell, because he wasn't a magician, and whoever had created a whole world inside the
Founding
had to be crazy powerful. One magician came to mind at once. Sean opened his beak. He caw-spoke: “Mr. Geldman?”

The minister settled cross-legged on the turf. “That's a reasonable guess, but I'm not Solomon Geldman.”

Don't let it somehow be Marvell—

“I'm Redemption Orne,” the minister said.

Of their own accord, Sean's wings propelled him into the air. Startle response? He glided to the ground a few yards from the minister. “I don't believe you,” he croaked.

Unoffended, the minister smiled. “Why not?”

“This place, it's inside the library windows?”

“Yes.”

“Well, the windows are inside the Order's shield—the wards go out to the property lines.”

“Oh, I'm aware of that.”

“Then you can't be Orne. You're—someone in the Order pretending to be him.”

“Why would a member of the Order of Alhazred pretend to be a renegade?”

His wings jerked again, but he checked the flight impulse. “Because you're testing me. You want to see if I'll break the rules and talk to Orne. Now that Helen Arkwright's found out about him. Now that they've told me.”

“And what exactly did Ms. Arkwright discover?”

If the minister
was
Marvell, it was a pretty good ploy to pretend he wasn't on a first name basis with Helen. So was pretending not to know about her genealogical research. “She wanted to figure out which magical line I came from. She traced me back to somebody named Constance Cooke.”

“And where did she go from there?”

“She knew you had an uncle named Cooke and a daughter named Constance, who died when she was a baby. Except then Helen found some letters. One was from your uncle to Pastor Brattle. I guess it thanked Brattle for faking Constance's death record. See, because when Cooke adopted her, he wanted to say he found her on the doorstep or something, not that she was related to you and Patience. Witches and murderers.”

The minister stood and walked away. For all their apparent reality, the other Puritans remained inert as wax figures. So did Nyarlathotep in the woods to Sean's left and the Indians on the hillside to his right. In fact, everything but Sean and the minister was inert. He looked up at swallows hanging motionless in the sky, down at a line of ants struck to tiny statues as they climbed a yarrow stalk. The eeriness of it lifted the feathers on his nape, and he flew after the minister and lighted near him on the brink of the hill. Below them was the mouth of the Miskatonic and the
Mayflower
y ships and flocks of seagulls, all frozen in place. The minister wasn't looking at the scenery. In fact, his eyes were closed.

Standing half as high as the minister's knee, Sean had to crane his short neck to make out the tight-lipped sadness of his face. Could Marvell fake that kind of emotion? Would he even bother to try? Or was this the real Orne, in which case, Sean had just been pretty insulting. Not that he should care, but—“Um, Reverend? About the ‘witches and murderers' thing.”

Maybe-Orne looked down. “I was neither a witch nor a murderer when I had to leave Constance behind. Patience was both, however, and I did become a witch soon enough.” He extended an arm toward Sean, like a falconer to a falcon. “You can't think I'll hurt you, now that you know we're kin.”

If maybe-Orne—probably-Orne—had wanted to twist Sean's neck, he could have done it while he was flapping helplessly on the ground. Besides, he'd break his own neck if he kept craning it. Fluttering up, Sean dropped onto the minister's forearm. He sank claws into the thick wool of his coat sleeve but spared the skin underneath, for the moment.

No hood appeared, no jesses around Sean's ankles, no suddenly conjured cage.

“Ms. Arkwright has beaten me to it,” Orne said, “but I did intend to tell you about our relationship. I've known you were a magician since soon after you were born. Your father was out pushing you in a carriage. I was one of those strangers who exclaims over every baby, and since I'd persuaded a plausible young woman to play my wife, your father didn't object. I gave you a finger to grab, as babies will. Even though I'd hoped to feel it, your latent magic startled me. Then, of course, its strength was a delight.”

Going after a baby, with a fake wife? That was hard-core stalkerage. “How did you persuade her?” Sean said.

“Her?”

“The woman.”

“Oh, a mild ensorcellment. I removed it right afterwards and let her go with an extra hundred dollars in her purse. Puzzling over where the money came from was the only aftereffect she might have suffered.”

“You pay people for ensorcelling them?”

“I think it's fair to give compensation. But aren't we getting off track, Sean?”

With so many tracks to pursue, Sean wasn't sure he could jump off one without landing on another. “My dad would freak if he knew you'd done that. He freaked when Helen told him you were my great-grandfather times ten.”

“I'm sorry to hear it.”

“Yeah, he went up to my mom's studio and stared at the window he made for her. He wouldn't tell me what was up, but I could tell it was something bad.”

Orne lifted his eyes to the horizon, where low cliffs declined to sandy marshland and apricot clouds barred a lemon sky. “I know that window well.”

Stop there. “You know what window?”

“The one in your mother's studio. The Crusader, the sick pilgrim, the lady in her garden.”

“Dad's never put photos of that window on his Web site, or even in his portfolio.”

Orne shrugged. “I've seen the window in situ. Last December, during the two weeks you and your father were away.”

At Grandpa Stewie's in Vermont, Christmas vacation. “You broke into Mom's studio?”

“The Order put wards on your home, but they left the carriage house undefended. I spent those two weeks mostly in your
father's
studio. He'd finished restoring the
Founding
windows, and now it was my turn to work on them. I suspected you'd come study with the Order. What better way to keep in touch than to make us a sanctuary within its very sanctum? The Arkwright House was still under repair, and I gambled the
Founding
would be installed
before
the Order put up strong wards. My gamble paid off. Since the windows were again part of the house, the wards didn't detect my seed world as foreign magic.”

“Nobody in the Order knows the window's, like, enchanted?”

“You're the only one to whom it's shown its magic.”

“The crow glowing.” A hollow ache started in Sean's middle, where he supposed his crow stomach must be. “I thought that was my mom. Like her ghost had put the same magic in the crow she used to put in her paintings.”

“Its energy felt like hers?”

“Yeah.”

“Not surprising. The magical signatures of blood relatives are often similar. But now that you know Kate wasn't responsible for the crow, you must be disappointed.”

Try “majorly pissed off,” now that he imagined Orne in the carriage house. Orne staring at Mom's window. Orne handling the paintings she left unfinished when she'd died, still humming with
her
magic. Sean flapped from his arm and touched down on the nearest soldier. His armored shoulder proved too slippery for comfort. He flew to the foremost Indian, who showed no reaction to claws gripping his bare skin. “I could tell Helen and Marvell,” he cawed. “Tell them what you've done to the
Founding
.”

Orne approached slowly. “Yes, you could.”

“I've got to tell them, in fact. Besides, it's creepy enough you spying on me with the aether-newt. Like how you showed it to me before I came here, to rub it in.”

“Rubbing anything in wasn't my intention.”

He flapped to a higher perch atop the Indian's head. “Anyhow, the newt's not the worst thing, or even this window. Helen and Marvell told me how our relationship could matter to you. How an apprentice and master with blood ties can make a stronger psychic bond.”

“Correct.”

“They might even merge their magical energies.”

“A synergy is possible.”

“And in a synergy, the master's boss. He can steal the apprentice's energy. Make the apprentice his slave.”

This time what tightened Orne's lips looked like anger. “I'm not surprised Marvell would tell you that, but he's dead wrong. I want you to be my apprentice, but I don't want to control or enslave you. I promise you that, Sean. I take my oath upon it.”

As if Orne's words charged the air between them, Sean's hide tingled. The sensation startled him, then grew pleasant, soothing, and part of his mind asked why he shouldn't believe Orne. Another part focused on a lightbulb popping in a wine cellar, on sparks and lightning, on electricity, all the images he had used to visualize ambient energy. Would another magician's energy—maybe
directed
energy—also feel electric to him?

He beat his wings as if to shed water, and the charged air around him dissipated. “That's magic!” he croaked. “You're trying to ‘persuade' me, like you did that woman.”

Orne blinked as if he, too, were coming out of a trance.

“You're trying to make me believe you're all right, the Order doesn't know what it's talking about. And then what? You stick a hundred bucks in my pocket to pay for it?”

“No,” Orne said. Low, weary. “I wasn't trying to ensorcell, but I
was
using a magical tone meant to calm you, and even that was wrong. If I can't earn your trust without tricks, I don't deserve to.” He walked toward woods that in the real world were confined to the left window of the
Founding
. In what Orne had called a “seed world,” there were no such divisions. Orne could walk, and Sean fly after, from one “window” to the others. At the edge of the woods was a granite outcropping. Orne selected the flattest boulder for his seat.