The Magician King (45 page)

“Usually,” Failstaff said. “There are exceptions.”

“For example, not everybody is such a complete dink that they make their wings out of wax,” Asmodeus said.

Briskly, Failstaff walked Julia through the enormous diagram on the table in front of them, sketching arcs and connections with his thick, soft fingers. The diagram showed the primary narratives of the major and minor religious traditions, collated and cross-referenced—and color-coded!—to highlight areas where they overlapped and confirmed one another. Apparently if you’re enough of a power nerd, there is nothing that cannot be flowcharted.

“The hubristic scenario, the pride that challenges the gods and leads to the death of the challenger, is only one of a number of possible scenarios. And usually the bad outcome can be traced to poor preparation on the part of the principals. It does not at all imply that it is categorically impossible for a mortal to gain access to divine power.”

“Hm,” Julia said. “Theoretically.”

“No, not theoretically,” Asmodeus said sharply. “Practically. Historically. Technically the process is called ascension, or sometimes assumption, or my favorite word for it is
translation
. They all mean the same thing: the process by which a human being is brought bodily into heaven, without dying, and accorded some measure of divine status. And then there’s apotheosis, which is related, whereby a human actually becomes a god. It’s been done, tons of times.”

“Give me examples.”

“Mary.” She ticked off a finger. “As in Jesus’s mom. She was born mortal and ended up divine. Galahad. Arthurian legend. He was Lancelot’s son. He found the Holy Grail and was taken directly up into heaven. So was Enoch—he was an early descendant of Adam’s.”

“There’s a couple of Chinese generals,” Gummidgy said. “Guan Yu. Fan Kuai. There’s the Eight Immortals of Taoism.”

“Dido, Buddha, Simon Magus . . .” Pouncy chimed in. “It just goes on and on.”

“Or look at Ganymede,” Asmo said. “Greek legend. He was a mortal, but of such great beauty that Zeus brought him up to Olympus to be a cupbearer. Hence the project name.”

“We think
cupbearer
was probably a euphemism,” Failstaff added.

“No kidding,” Julia said. “Okay, I get the point. Not everybody ends up like Icarus. But these are just stories. There’s immortals in
Highlander,
but that doesn’t mean they’re real.”

“Those aren’t gods,” Failstaff said. “Sheezus, have you even seen the movie?”

“And these aren’t just ordinary mortals you’re talking about. They were all special in some way. Like you said, Enoch was a descendant of Adam.”

“And you’re not?” Asmo said.

“Galahad was inhumanly virtuous. Ganymede was inhumanly beautiful. Which I don’t think anybody here exactly qualifies for either. You all seem pretty human to me.”

“Very true,” Pouncy said. “Very true. It’s an issue. Listen, for the moment we’re talking proof of concept. We’re in initial trials. We’re nowhere near drawing definitive conclusions yet. We just don’t want to rule anything out.”

Like a professor showing around a prospective graduate student, Pouncy took Julia on a tour of the parts of the East Wing she hadn’t been allowed into before. She passed room after room stuffed with the paraphernalia of a hundred churches and temples. There were raiments and vestments. There were altars and torches and censers and miters. There were a thousand flavors of incense.

She picked up a bundle of sacred staffs tied together with twine—she recognized a bishop’s crosier among them, and a druidical shillelagh. This was a different class of hardware from what she was used to handling, to the say least. It looked like rubbish to her. But who could tell for sure without testing? Maybe this was the industrial-strength stuff. Maybe this really was the big iron, the magical equivalent of the Large Hadron Collider. You couldn’t rule it out till you’d ruled it out. Could you?

So Julia joined Project Ganymede. She pitched in with the others, doing what nerds do: she sliced and diced, organized and spreadsheeted, drew up checklists and then checked the hell out of them. The magicians of Murs chanted, drank, sacrificed, fasted, bathed, painted their faces, consulted the stars, and huffed odd gases from bubbling liquids.

It was hard to assimilate the sight of the solemn, gawky Gummidgy ululating and tripping on peyote, topless and in full face paint, but as Pouncy pointed out, in the context of their present field of study, this was what rigor looked like. (Asmodeus swore, in hushed tones, glittering with suppressed merriment, that Pouncy and Gummidgy were running Bacchic sex rituals on the sly, but if she had proof she declined to make it available to Julia.) They had to find out if there was a magical technique behind all this messy crap, and if there was, who knew, maybe it would make the stuff in the three-ring binders look like bar mitzvah magic.

At the point when Julia joined Project Ganymede, Pouncy didn’t have much to show by way of results, but he’d seen enough to keep hoping that it wasn’t a complete waste of time, all red herring and no white whale. Apparently Iris had been trying a new transcription of a Sumerian chant the other night when something like a swarm of insects issued—no other word really applied—from her mouth. It hovered in the middle of the room for a second, buzzing fiercely, and then broke a window and disappeared outside. Iris couldn’t speak for two days afterward. The thing had scorched her throat coming out.

There were other hints too, scattered manifestations of something, nobody even had a theory as to what. Objects moving by themselves. Glasses and pots shattering. There were those phantom giant footsteps that had woken Julia up. Fiberpunk—the fireplug metamagician—had fasted and meditated for three days, and on the morning of the fourth he swore he’d seen a hand in a ray of sunshine, felt it reach down and gently touch his pudgy face with its hot fingers.

But nobody else could make it happen. That’s what was frustrating. Magic wasn’t a perfect linear grid or anything, but compared with magic religion was just chaos, a complete junk pile. Sure, it was plenty ritualized, and formalized, and codified, but the rituals didn’t deliver consistent, reproducible results. The thing about real magic was, once you learned a spell, and you cast it properly, and you weren’t too tired, and the Circumstances hadn’t shifted while you weren’t looking, then it worked, generally speaking. But this religious stuff didn’t give good data. Pouncy was convinced that if they could drill down far enough, parse the underlying grammar, they’d have the basis for an entirely new and radically more powerful magical technique, but the further down they drilled the more chaotic and less grammatical it got. Sometimes it felt like there was some capricious, mischievous presence on the other side that was pressing buttons and pulling levers at random, just to piss them off.

Pouncy had the patience for it, to sit and wait out the noisy data until the patterns emerged, but Pouncy was a singular individual. So while he and his acolytes pored over sacred texts, and filled hard drive after hard drive with chaotic pseudo-data, Asmodeus took a smaller group out into the field in search of a shortcut. She went looking for a live specimen.

Pouncy wasn’t thrilled to find Asmo leading a splinter movement, but she stood up to him with the icy firmness of a seventeen-year-old corporate vice president. There was, she explained, although everybody already knew, a population of magical beings on Earth. It was a modest population, as Earth wasn’t an especially hospitable environment for them. Magically speaking, the soil was rocky and bitter, the air thin, the winters harsh. Life on Earth for a fairy was analogous to life in the Arctic for a human. They survived, but they did not thrive. And yet some few remained—the Inuits, by analogy, of the magical world.

Among those few there was a hierarchy. Some were more powerful, some less so. At the bottom were the vampires, seedy serial killers from whose population the non-sociopaths had been bred hundreds of generations ago by natural selection. Empathy was not a survival trait among the
strigoi
. They were not well liked.

But above them were any number of orders of fairies and elementals and lycanthropes and one-off oddities, leading up the power chain. And this was where Asmodeus saw her opportunity: if she worked her way up the ladder, patiently, rung by rung, who knows where she might get. She might not get all the way to gods, but she might meet somebody who knew somebody who had the gods’ fax number. It beat fasting.

To begin with they kept things local: day trips to hot spots within easy striking distance. Enough of Provence was still farmland and parkland that they could still ferret out indigenous sprites, minor river sirens, even the odd wyvern without much trouble. But that was small-fry. As July turned to August, and the hills around Murs lit up with lavender fields so idyllically beautiful they looked like something you’d see on a calendar in a dentist’s office, Asmodeus and her handpicked team, which now included Failstaff as well, disappeared into the field for days at a time.

Their efforts were not at first conspicuously successful. Asmo would knock on Julia’s door at three in the morning, dead leaves in her hair and holding a two-thirds-full bottle of Prosecco, and they would sit on Julia’s bed while Asmo described a night of fruitless bullshitting in Old Provençal with a bunch of lutins—basically the French equivalent of your common leprechaun—who kept trying to crawl up under her (admittedly invitingly short) skirt.

But there was progress. Failstaff kept a special room, neatly swept, with a white tablecloth set with fresh food, as a kind of honeypot for local spirits called fadas, who would come bearing good luck in their right hands, bad in their left. Asmo woke her up crowing about having gotten an audience with the Golden Goat, a being usually seen only by shepherds, and from a distance.

It wasn’t all good luck and Golden Goats. One night Asmo came back with wet hair, shivering in the early autumn chill, after a drac, in the middle of an otherwise perfectly civil interview, had abruptly pulled her right into the Rhône. The next day she saw the thing in the supermarket in the shape of a man, stocking its shopping cart with jars of anchovies. It winked at her merrily.

Plus somebody was stealing their hubcaps. Asmo thought it must be a local trickster-deity called Reynard the Fox. He was supposed to be some kind of anti-gentry, anti-clerical hero of the peasantry, but she just considered Him a pain in the ass.

One morning Julia saw Failstaff at breakfast looking as grim as she’d ever seen him. Over espresso and muesli he swore to her that he’d seen a black horse with a back as long as a school bus, with thirty crying children mounted on it, match speeds with them last night as they drove home in the van. It paced them for two solid minutes, sometimes trotting on the ground, sometimes galloping along up on power lines or across the treetops. Then it leaped straight into a river, kids and all. They stopped and waited, but it never came back up. Real, or illusion? They searched the papers for stories about missing kids, but they never found anything.

Most days the two groups would debrief at noon, over lunch for Pouncy’s team and breakfast for Asmo’s, who were out all night in the field most nights and got up late. Each side presented its data, and each side would feed what the other side had learned back into the next stage of its investigations. There was a certain amount of healthy competition between the two sides. Also some unhealthy competition.

“For fuck’s sake, Asmo,” Pouncy said one day in September, interrupting her mid-report. The hay fields all around the house were turning a toasted brown. “How is this getting us anywhere? If I have to hear one more word about that Golden fucking Goat I’m going to go mental. Absolutely mental. The Goat knows nothing. This whole region is just chickenshit! I would kill for something Greek. Anything. God, demigod, spirit, monster, I don’t even care what. A cyclops. There’s got to be a few of those things left. We’re practically on the Mediterranean!”

Asmodeus stared at him balefully across a table strewn with baguette crusts and smears of local jam. Her eyes looked hollow. She was wiped out from lack of sleep. A huge wasp, its legs dangling limply, airlifted from one jam smear to the next.

“No cyclops,” she said. “Sirens. I could get you a siren.”

“Sirens?” Pouncy brightened up. He banged the table with the flat of his hand. “Why didn’t you say so! That’s great!”

“They’re not Greek sirens though. They’re French. They’re half-snake, from the waist down.”

Pouncy frowned. “So like a gorgon.”

“No. Gorgons have snakes for hair. Except anyway, I don’t think gorgons are real.”

“A half-snake woman,” Julia said, “would be a lamia.”

“She would be,” Asmodeus snapped, “if she were in Greece. But we’re in France, so she’s a siren.”

“All right, but maybe she
knows
a lamia,” Pouncy said. “Maybe they’re related. Like cousins. You gotta think all the snake-bodied women have a network—”

“She doesn’t know a lamia.” Asmodeus put her head down on the table. “God, you have no idea what you’re asking.”

“I’m not asking you, I’m telling you, you’ve got to widen your search. I’m so sick of this cutesy Frenchy-French shit. Ever wonder why
Clash of the Lutins
was never a movie? The power levels around here are nothing! We can fly you to Greece, the money isn’t a problem. We can all go to Greece. But you’ve hit a wall here and you’re too stubborn to admit it.”

“You don’t know!” Asmodeus sat up, her red eyes flaming. “You don’t understand what I’m doing! You can’t just go knocking on doors like you’re taking a census. You have to build up trust. I’m running a network of agents here now. Some of these things haven’t talked to a human for centuries. The Golden Goat—”

“God!” He stuck a finger in Asmodeus’s face. “No more with the Goat!”

“Asmo’s right, Pouncy.”

All eyes turned to Julia. She could see that Pouncy had expected her to back him up. Well, she wasn’t here to play power games. If there’s one thing magic had taught her it was that power wasn’t a game.