Chapter #81The Booby-Trapped Secretary by: Seuzz   You give Paige your address to pass along to Lenke, telling her that's where she can drop off the check. Your company then races back to the bedsit.
"Hold it," you tell everyone after you've opened the door and flicked on the light. You brace your arm across the door to stop them from entering as you stare at the latest manifestation of disorder. It's on the trembling verge of being recognizable.
Sometimes it's good to help things along, and sometimes it isn't. Given that you've a potential acquisition on her way over, you decide to chance the former. You pull a handful of coins from your pocket and toss them into the room.
Still not there.
At least, not until you enter the room to retrieve the coins. From your new perspective it all snaps into place.
You hop backwards into a corner and take a picture of the room. "Right, everyone in," you call as you bend over the screen of the busted iPhone.
* * * * *
By rotating the image through the filtering cracks in the screen you're quickly able to generate the decagrams obstructing adorning skinning coupling out of it. The second and third seem clear enough, and the fourth, occupying as it does the usual advisory position, is also highly suggestive. But the first makes no sense at all, and since the pattern is supposed to be interpreted as whole, not in piecemeal parts, that means you are as much in the dark now as when you walked into the room.
Well, not in the dark that way. The lights are all on.
Twenty minutes after Paige got the text, there's a sharp knock on the door. Jacob goes to it, and raises a querying eyebrow at you as he grasps the knob. You hesitate, then nod. Rob gets up and pulls back the carpet as Jacob opens the door.
"Good evening I'm looking for—" Lenke Varga starts to say. Then she squawks as she's flies, toes dragging across the floor, into the middle of the room. She sprawls face forward onto the operating table, where she wriggles like a trussed-up buffalo. Rob pulls and pushes her into position while Jacob sets a blank mask, a bottle, a metal band, and a candle onto their respective sigils. As Rob steps back, Jacob lights a candle.
And the room explodes.
* * * * *
It starts as two lightning strikes, arcing from Ms. Varga to two of the receptacles. The third strike, though, goes wild, and blows out all the light bulbs. Paige screams. The bolt sizzles and crackles, then with another blow of thunder it seems to explode. Phantom lights swim in the darkness, and you rub and press your eyes to clear them. "The fuck is that?" someone gasps, and when you've cleared your vision you find that one of the lights is still there.
It's patch of light that glows bluish-green, and it crawls and hisses over a figure on the floor. Little tendrils snake off it, and someone jumps back from one, knocking over one of the computer desks. But the tentacles, as they come off, fizz and die away. But the main fire continues to glow and burn, tracing up and down a prone figure in a blazer jacket and skirt.
After a minute of fascinated watching, you whip out your iPhone and start filming it. "What is it?" someone asks in a hushed, awed voice.
"Dunno," you reply. "Not doing anything 'cept that"—whatever that is it's doing—"but keep your distance."
Car alarms are going off—again—and people are shouting upstairs. Footsteps thump, but none of them come downstairs. Over the next few minutes, though, even as the fire before you burns, outside order is restored.
"I think it's dying," Rob says after ten minutes or so. The phenomenon has weakened, largely, you suspect, because streamers keep leaching off it, to wriggle and fade on the floor. On a hunch you scramble over to retrieve a yardstick from a corner. Gingerly you touch the stick to the fire, and it crawls up the stick like a living mat of phosphorescent fungus. It dies before it reaches your hand, though, and then all is dark.
"There's a torch under the bed," you call out. "Set some candles round," you order after Rob has flashed a light up at the ceiling, to show the exploded bulb. "Keep 'em off the operating table, though." Once you've enough light that you're able to see, you bend over what's left of Lenke Varga.
She looks unharmed, only unconscious, but appearances in these matters are of course untrustworthy. A little investigation shows that the operation discharged her anima and essentia into the proper receptacles. But her imago is still upon her. You look over the table, but the mask is lying in the right position, and so is the triggering candle, so there seems no reason for the spell to have misfired.
With Jacob's help you roll her over. Her eyes are open but sightless, and she's breathing and has a heartbeat. For a minute no one says anything.
Recriminations are few and muted when your company does begin to speak. You are all experts on the craft, thanks to your sharing the Prescott mind and essentia around, and the three of you can't find any fault in the table. You tell the others about the curious resemblances between this "Lenke" and another in Kensington, so attention quickly turns to the imago that Lenke Varga still wears. Fortunately, you still remember the technique you developed back in Saratoga Falls that lets you examine the underlying, sigilistic structure of imago, and how to make the polarizing spectacles that lets you look at it directly. But it still takes you nearly an hour to recalibrate the lens on the iPhone so that you can put what's left of Ms. Varga under a similar microscope.
* * * * *
"Did you have any idea Fane was getting this advanced?" Rob asks as you and he and Jacob huddle around the phone to study the image. Paige is flopped back on the bed, staring at the ceiling.
"Nothing Fane does surprises me anymore," you say. "It's a bit disturbing, though," you have to add. Through the polarized filters you can see that Lenke Varga's imago has been altered, and has been altered more thoroughly even than yours was by that hex that Blackwell wound through it.
The best analogy you can come up with is that she's had a second imago tattooed onto her original. They exist as separate objects, but the second one has been stitched so closely to the first that there is no practical way of separating them. Not even the technique of the Libra can pry them apart so as to copy or swallow one but not the other.
Only Fane could have done this, you have to suppose, and as both the women who answer to the name "Lenke" work for Fane, you have to assume that at least one of them—the woman on the floor before you—is deep in Fane's confidence as she has been submitted to this occult modification.
So she's an even better infiltration point than you dared hope.
But how do you use her? You face the same choices as you did with Paige, but with an even sharper restriction. You can't get Ms. Varga's imago off her, so you are not able to get a remote sigil onto her substantia. That means you can't turn her into a remote-controlled golem unless you put an old-fashioned remote-controlled mask on her, and you're not sure you want to put a masked agent into Fane, not with them showing this kind of advanced technique.
That means you either have to turn Lenke into a standard-issue golem, and one that you won't be able to control remotely, or you will have to move one of your company into her, transferring their essentia and anima into her shell so they can operate under her imago. That, or you'll have to add some of your own anima into her and make her a fourth of your company.
Only now, when it's too late to function as a proper caution or advice, do you understand the decagrams: obstructing adorning skinning coupling.
You and Jacob and Rob discuss the possibilities, the pros and the cons of each, and the pros and the cons of which of you can or should don Lenke Varga's face. You profess yourself willing to do it, but your friends try to talk you out of it, for "Hal Swann" has not vanished, and Rob in particular thinks it important that one of you maintain a secret link with the Stellae, so that you will be forewarned of any moves that bunch might be making.
"Let me go in," he says, and he says it rather grimly, for Lenke does not seem like a physical prize. "Joe Durras's prodigies will work better on the inside than Hal's or Frank's, if I have to use them."
"What about Rob?" you ask, and catch him and Jacob flashing a fast, furtive glance at each other.
"You can have him?" he replies with a smile. "Make everyone friends."
"You mean with a remote?" you ask.
"Sure," he says. "But better than that. We'll make it so Rob and Paige answer to your essentia. That way you can make friends all around."
Maybe that's another interpretation of the advice coupling that Catilindria was trying to give you.
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