The Magician King (52 page)

Pouncy, Asmo, and Failstaff were running a private thread just like back in the day. She checked in.

Electric silence for a minute. And then:

It was weird that they hadn’t talked about this stuff openly before: what they would actually say and do if she came. Maybe it was easier to do it online than face-to-face. There was less pressure. The stakes seemed lower. Keep it casual.

Long silence. Dead air. The next message was time-stamped a full two minutes later.

They did it in the Library. It was the only room big enough. They’d had to pack up all the books and stack them in the Long Study and elsewhere—the halls were overflowing with them—and dismantle those beautiful floating shelves. The walls were bare, the way they would have been when this was a farmhouse. The windows were flung open to the cold, quiet late-autumn air. The early evening sky was an unnaturally amazing blue, almost a royal blue.

It was all arranged very precisely according to ex-Saint Amadour’s Phoenician invocation, down to the letter. The floor was a maze of chalk runes and patterns. Gummidgy would take the role of mistress of ceremonies and high priestess. Any of them could have handled the technicalities, but it had to be a woman, and of the women, dour, towering Gummidgy was the player deemed least likely to crack up at a crucial moment. She wore a simple flowing white gown. So did everybody else. Gummidgy also wore a crown of mistletoe.

So your basic Golden Bough deal, Julia thought. Fucking mistletoe. She never saw what all the fuss was about. Sure, it’s pretty enough, but at the end of the day it’s still a botanical parasite that strangles its host.

All the old furniture had been exiled from the room. In its place there was only a thick yew table, constructed to exacting specifications, and a huge hewn stone altar that would have cracked the floor if they hadn’t braced it up from below and put some structural spells on the brace. The entire place had been purified in half a dozen ways, as had they—they’d fasted, and then drunk some nasty teas that made their pee change color and smell weird, and burned herbs in clay pots.

They’d done just about everything but actually bathe. The purification was symbolic, not hygienic. Actual medical hygiene didn’t seem to be of great interest to the goddess.

“This isn’t a patriarchal, Old Testament show,” Asmodeus said sharply, when people complained. “Get it? Dirt does not contaminate, it generates. O.L.U. doesn’t care if we’re menstruating. She embraces the body.”

This was followed by ribald witticisms from the menfolk signifying their willingness to offer themselves as symbolic husbands to the goddess. I got yer chthonic sacrifice right here in my pants, etc. etc. But Asmodeus’s famous sense of humor was temporarily in remission for the occasion. Maybe it was nerves. Asmodeus wasn’t high priestess material, but she seemed to have appointed herself the goddess’s chief political compliance officer. She’d even argued that they should all go off their various medications for the occasion too, a suggestion that was universally ridiculed.

The yew table supported three beeswax candles and a big silver bowl full of rainwater; the bowl had cost about as much as the entire swimming pool had. The stone, a massive block of local marble, supported nothing. To be honest they weren’t totally sure what it was for. Gummidgy took her place before the table while the others stood along the walls on either side, four and five. It was asymmetrical, but there was nothing specifically against it in Amadour’s palimpsest, which was otherwise pretty lucid for a document prepared by a guy who lived in a cave and was pushing two millennia at least.

Julia’s mind was a hot, churning mix of excitement and nerves, which she kept from boiling over with lashings of cool skepticism. But she remembered the rough, stiff feel of the statue’s kiss in her dream. As creepy and Freudian as it sounded, she had felt so loved. She’d hoped she’d dream it again last night, but there had been nothing. Just dead air.

Pouncy was to her left. Asmodeus and Failstaff were opposite her so she could see them, but she avoided their eyes. They needed a full hour of silence before the summoning could begin, and tittering had to be kept to an absolute minimum. From outside they could hear the lowing and bleating of the sacrificial animals they’d brought in for the occasion: two sheep, two goats, and two calves, one of each pure black and all white, all shampooed within an inch of their imminently endangered lives. Should a symbolic sacrifice be required, they wanted to make sure the cupboard wasn’t bare.

By seven o’clock the sun was down and the moon was on the rise, lipping up over the hills and fields behind Murs. Once it cleared the trees, a huge white arc light that seemed to be trained on their house alone, Gummidgy moved from her station in the center of the room and lit their candles one by one with the tip of her finger. Julia angled her candle so the wax wouldn’t run down it and onto her hand. A hot droplet pricked her bare foot.

Gummidgy returned to the table and began the invocation. Somehow the candles on the table had been lit in the meantime, without anybody noticing.

Julia was glad it wasn’t her in the hot seat. For one thing the invocation was long, and who knew what would happen if you munged it. Maybe it would just fizzle, but maybe it would snap back at you. Some spells did that.

For another it wasn’t a spell, exactly. There was a lot of beseeching in it, and in Julia’s opinion a magician did not beseech, she commanded. The grammar of it was all weird too. It kept repeating and circling back on itself, working through the same phrases over and over again. Frankly it sounded like junk to Julia. There was no proper structure to it, just a lot of talk about mothers and daughters and grain and earth and honey and wine, all that Song of Solomon stuff.

But it wasn’t bullshit, that was the really crazy thing. Gummidgy was getting traction with this crap. Julia couldn’t see anything, there were no visual phenomena, but she didn’t have to. It was blindingly obvious that magic was happening. Gummidgy’s voice was getting deeper and more echoey. Certain words made the air vibrate, or caused sudden rushes of wind.

Julia’s candle started flaring up like a torch. She wished it wouldn’t—she had to hold it at arm’s length to keep it from singeing her hair, which she had left loose, because it had seemed more feminine and O.L.U.-like. Something was happening. Something was on its way. She could feel it coming like a freight train.

It was only then that Julia realized something, something absolutely terrible, that it would have been hard to admit to Pouncy or the others even if it weren’t too late: she didn’t want it to work. She wanted the spell to fail. She had made a grave mistake—she had misunderstood something about herself, something so basic she couldn’t understand how she’d missed it until now. She didn’t need this, and she didn’t want it. She didn’t want the goddess to come.

Pouncy had told her when she first got to Murs that it wasn’t enough for her to love him and the others, she had to love magic more. But she didn’t. She came to Murs looking for magic, but she was also looking for a new home, and a new family, and she’d found them all, all three, and it was enough. She was content; she didn’t need anything else, least of all more power. Her quest had ended and she hadn’t even known it till this moment. She didn’t want to become a goddess. All she’d wanted was to become human, and here at Murs it had finally happened.

Now it was too late. She couldn’t stop what was happening. The goddess was coming. She wanted to throw down her candle and run around the room shouting at them, breaking up the flow, telling them it was okay, they didn’t have to do this, they had all they needed right there all around them if they could only see it. Our Lady Underground would understand that—O.L.U., goddess of mercy and fruitfulness, she above all would understand what Julia had only just figured out.

But there was no way Julia could make the others understand. And there were titanic energies in the room with them now, giant forces, and there was no telling what would happen if she tried to disrupt the casting. Julia’s whole body was goose bumps. Gummidgy’s voice was getting louder. She was building up to the big finish. Her eyes were closed, and she was swaying from side to side and singing—it wasn’t in the invocation, the melody must have come to her straight over the transom, out of the ether, via the heavenly wireless. The windows on one side of the room were solid moonlight now, as if the moon had come down from its orbit and was hovering right outside, peering in at them.

It was hard to tear her eyes away from Gummidgy, but Julia risked a glance to her left, at Pouncy. He looked back at her and smiled. He wasn’t nervous. He looked calm. He looked happy. Please, if nothing else, please let her give him what he needs, she thought. Julia clung to this truth: that O.L.U. would never ask them for something they couldn’t give. Julia knew her, and she would never do that.