Chapter #69Advice from a Dead Man by: Seuzz   Your final decision is maybe a heartless one, but it seems the most logical: "Frank's suspended and he's grounded," you tell Joe. "It sucks for him, but he's safe where he is." Joe acquiesces with a shrug.
* * * * *
That takes care of two crises: What to do about your Westside doppelganger, and how to keep "Joe Durras" available even when your colleague is operating under another face. (You'll have to give Frank the same operation when he's able to leave the house again.) But it leaves you at loose ends.
It's eleven o'clock now. Jonathan has gone home, and you're in the library disconsolately doodling sigils when a shadow appears around the corner, and the golem of the late Professor Blackwell looks in. He hastily withdraws his head.
"You can come in," you shout after him, and his creaking bulk limps into the library. His expression is pinched.
You've not had many dealings with the golem since your return from Cuthbert. Of his own volition, perhaps, he has taken to spending most of his time on the Keyserling campus, or about town, and even when home he has kept himself upstairs or in one of the villa's back rooms. Occasionally you will summon him when you need money for takeout. But you've nothing to say to him. He's a fake, a manufactured thing incapable of executing any magic. He's also a reminder of the odious magician who tried taking advantage of you.
You're thinking of the latter after he has sat on the opposite side of the table from you and lowered his great head to look at you out of dark eyes.
"You were trying to study my essentia," you say. "That's why you hired me."
"That is why my original hired you," he says with the tiresome exactitude of the academic pedagogue.
"Your original got eaten. Let's just say it was you. You were trying to steal it," you add.
He shifts in his chair. "Yes, well, that's all in the past, and it's a moot point now. But it would have been ... useful to me. Certainly more useful than I even suspected," he adds.
"I could give it to you now." You don't mean to tease the thing. "I've figured out how to get it out of one person and into another."
"Indeed?" His eyebrows go up, and briefly his eyes gleam. Then they fade. "But it doesn't matter now. Technically, I already have your essentia. You used it to—" He waves his finger before his face. "In the mask."
"That's true. But I could—" You break off and cock your head to study him. He's a mask on a golem ...
You lunge forward, and he suffers you to remove the mask. The petrified form of Lucy Vredenburg appears.
Lucy Vredenburg. You could bring her back now. Almost in passing, you noticed in your studies how to reverse the first seven spells in the book. The sigils, if run backwards, can unmake masks and erase mind bands and unseal disguises and dissolve golems and turn petrified people, like Lucy, back to normal.
But Lucy Vredenburg is dead. You put a golem of her in her SUV and sent it hurtling over a ravine. There was a very public funeral.
If you brought her back, you'd have to give her a new identity. You'd have to explain yourself to her. She wouldn't like that.
Unless it was your anima guiding her. Your anima with her personality? Or married to the personality of the Stellae Aparijita, whose imago and essentia are still in storage awaiting a use?
But would there be any use in that? You've already killed several people. What's another, more or less?
You wince. For now, maybe it's a kindness just to leave her in this suspended state.
Or maybe not, and you pause before returning Blackwell's mask to the golem. There's not much difference, from Lucy's point of view, between being petrified and being disassembled, the way Aparijita and Rick Bredon are. She would take up less room in the form of a mask and a bottle and an anima band, and it would leave you a bare golem to repurpose.
That's why you took the mask off Blackwell in the first place: you were thinking about inscribing his face directly onto the underlying golem.
On the other hand, you're still not sure that he and his villa are going to survive, because you're not convinced the Stellae aren't going to come visiting.
But what the hell. You can at least simplify the golem, and you've nothing else to do.
You replace the mask, and tell the professor to follow you into the living room.
* * * * *
"Most remarkable, most remarkable," the ex-warlock mutters as he buttons up his shirt. He is staring down at the operating table. "I can, of course, make hardly anything of it all, but the very look of it, the construction of it!" He shakes his head, and turns to the small cardboard box nearby. "And these are her metaphysical constituents, neatly removed and separated," he says as he picks up the mask, the anima band, and the faintly glowing bottle. "May I ask what you intend to do with them?"
"Put them on a shelf somewhere," you mutter. It was the work of twenty minutes to turn Lucy back to herself before tearing her into bits; and to carve the remote sigil on the resulting golem so that you can insert yourself into any masks it winds up wearing—like the professor's. But now you're feeling bored and anxious again. "You know, I can do all this stuff. I just don't know what to do with it!"
"Mm. Yes. I do sympathize," the professor says with a fatherly chuckle as he settles back into an easy chair and slips his shoes back on. "I know when I was— Oh, but you don't want to hear from an old duffer like me."
"No, go on," you say.
"Well, I was only going to observe that I myself suffered the same—or perhaps merely similar—anxieties."
"Like what?"
"Like what you are complaining of." He eases back into the chair, and worms his ass deeper into the cushion. "I was first attracted to the occult, I may as well confess, by the prospect of power. I was abused as a boy— Well, let's not be melodramatic. I'll only say I was bullied by classmates." His lips twist inside his beard. "As I recall, that was your reason for accepting my invitation to study these arcane arts."
Now you twist in your seat. Yes, it's true. You were being abused by bullies like the Molester, and you wanted to get some of your own back. You almost tell him to shut up—it's not fun to listen to him, in his clammy way, try to put you and himself on the same level—but you hold your tongue.
"And after executing some, by my own admission, squalid acts of persecution and revenge, I found myself at a loss for what else to do with my skills. By then, of course, I was fascinated by what I had learned, and determined to learn more. I made the study of these arts my life's occupation, and, if I may say so, I made myself one of its more learned modern practitioners."
You almost argue—how good can he be if you, a high school student, in the space of a few months of study have so completely outdistanced him? But still you only listen.
"I realize now— Well, I realized it some time ago, that my entire life of study was an exercise in avoidance. I had learned so much. But what was I to do with it? I did not know. So I studied deeper and added to my knowledge in the unarticulated hope that in my researches I would discover for myself a purpose."
His face sags, losing its shape. "And now here I am. I remember all that I have learned—" He holds out his empty palms. "And am powerless to do anything with it."
"Are you saying there's a lesson there for me?" you ask, and you fear you ask it very impatiently, for his little speech has stung you.
"I don't know, William. Perhaps I have only imparted a little more knowledge to you, to make of what you can."
* * * * *
Blackwell's little talk has left you restless and wanting a project. But you fill the next morning with more research. With experimentation, actually.
You have decided during the night that you will quit Blackwell's villa and move your operation to the Strausslers', but to do that you will need to take over their household. That will cost essentia, and you spend the morning experimenting to see how much you will have on hand.
You start by separating Rosalie's essentia into its own constituents: Sulva and Glundandra. The resulting two bottles are easy to identify, for her Sulvan essentia glows with a milky light while Glundandra is a fierce orange. The Sulvan is expendable, for you have Sulva as one of your ousiarchs, so you experiment with dividing it among multiple bottles.
You start by separating the contents of one bottle into two, and find that each bottle appears full despite supposedly containing only half of her essentia. Well, that's to be expected, as essentia is not, exactly, physically divisible. You continue to separate each bottle until you have six of them. You grow concerned when they divide further into eight and then nine bottles, for essentia should not be so divisible. Ten bottles then appear, and you are certain you are misunderstanding what has happened in front of you.
But they you divide one bottle in two, to create eleven in total, when a warm flash envelops the room, and a wave of heat rolls over you. After you've started your heart beating again, you look around to find that all eleven bottles have melted into hot, tinkling masses of molten glass.
* * * * *
"You mean we're divisible ten ways," Jonathan says later that afternoon when he's come out to the villa. "You know what this means?"  indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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