This choice: It's still too dangerous; deal with Robert later. • Go Back...Chapter #20Augmented (Possibilities for a Dour) Reality by: Nostrum   You’re close. So close. Any mistake would set you up badly. Robert can be a spiteful little imp, and you did make him a promise. But it's one that you regret. You don’t want to endanger your brother.
"Don't try bluffing me," you tell him. "Tell Dad, and you’re never gonna see those stink-bombs again. He’ll ground both of us until you graduate!"
"You’re gonna be the one in trouble, Will! You’re the one that told me to hide that stuff for you!"
"I didn't tell you to take it! I didn't know what happened to it! I even asked Dad where it went!"
"Fine!" he grumbles. "But when your dick falls off because you broke your promise to me—!" He wheels and charges back into the house.
You can't help wincing. Of course you don't believe your dick will fall off because you broke an oath. But even if it did—
Well, it's not like you're getting any use out of it anyway.
--
Your worries about your dad prove groundless—for that night, at least—and after you finish your dinner and homework you are able to tackle Blackwell's notebook undisturbed.
The pattern of each entry is constant. Only the colors of the ink change from page to page. At the bottom corner of each is a Latin word or phrase that seems to identify each spell. A list of chemical notations seems to correspond to the ingredients. Short, cryptic notes—"Mix." "Stir." "Fire." "Purify."—apparently refer to instructions on how to proceed.
The trouble is with the sigils. Or the lack of them. The first spell in the book, you remember, came with a sigil that filled the bottom of a very large page, and it took the form of a wheel with intricate symbols written against the inside and outside rims. Some of the symbols that Blackwell has set down vaguely recall—as well as you can remember—some of the designs contained within the sigil. But they are not arranged in anything like a circle, and they would only constitute a negligible fraction of the symbols contained in any of the sigils. Blackwell seems to have spent a lot of time worrying over them, though, for he dug the nib of the pen deeply into the paper, and traced each stroke several times.
So you concentrate on the names of the spells, hoping that will at least give you a clue as to what the book is capable of.
The label for the first spell seems to confirm your hunch that Blackwell was noting the purpose or effect of each spell, for "Persona" translates not only as "person" but also as "mask" or "disguise." "Emplastrum" is more cryptic, though: "plaster." Your eyebrows go up in alarm when you translate "Mens": "mind," says the online translator. Is it possible the book has spells for duplicating not only bodies but brains as well?
"Gluten," like "Emplastrum," is very obscure: "glue." A "Pedisequos," meanwhile, is an "attendant" or a "lackey." That also seems obscure, until you recall the double that Lucy saw of herself, and then you shiver. You've seen enough bad science-fiction shows to know that "lackey" might be closest a Latin speaker could get to "clone" or "evil robot duplicate."
You don't need to translate "Cadaver," and that makes you even sicker than "Pedisequos." And the obscurity of its magical meaning makes it even creepier. Could the book contain a spell for raising a zombie army? And "Servus"—"slave"—seems redundant with "Pedisequos," except for sounding even more awful.
But none of the ingredients, to extent that you can "translate" the notation, gives a further clue as to the purpose of each spell, and so you are driven back to studying the fragmentary sigils. You flip back and forth through the notebook, comparing them, looking for commonalities but not finding them. By the time you give up, you feel as though they have been burned onto the back of your eyelids.
It's funny, you think as you brush your teeth. I never work this hard at math or science. But I don't feel nearly as tired or frustrated as when I'm working at those subjects! You put it down to the driving need to find a way of helping Scott and stopping Blackwell.
--
But that night, you dream.
You are standing in a planetarium, it seems to you, on an invisible floor, so that the star-speckled crystalline hemisphere above is mirrored by a star-speckled hemisphere below. The whole thing rotates slowly about you.
A haze condenses in the center of the sphere, glowing more and more brightly as it collapses into a singularity. There's a flare of light, and a fiery symbol floats before you. You feel certain you have seen it before—it is one of the fragmentary sigils you studied in Blackwell's notebook: two barbed hooks, side by side, connected by a bar.
As you watch, the figure rotates in all dimensions. Its tips flare and burn, tracing a fiery trail in the air. This trail forms the outlines of a box, bounding the still spinning sigil within. Then the box begins to rotate, and you realize it is a not a square, but a cube.
The enclosed symbol fades away, but the sides of the cube open and fold back, like the petals of a flower, making a more complicated figure. A dodecahedron? It spins too quickly for you to count the sides, but it doesn't matter. The sides of this figure fold open again, multiplying the number of sides and making a still more complicated figure. On it goes, opening and acquiring more and more sides, until at last it is a smooth sphere, glistening before you. The surface fades but the rim brightens, until the sphere itself has vanished, leaving only a bright circle. This spins like a wheel, and complicated figures—like algebraic notation—appear around the rim.
It's a sigil, and you are quite certain that it is the sigil that appears at the bottom of the first spell in the Libra.
The vision is still vivid in your imagination when you wake the next morning, and you struggle over to your desk to flip to the first page of the notebook. There, beside the word PERSONA, is a crooked figure: two hooks, side by side, connected by a bar.
--
Wednesday afternoon. You and Scott have split duties for the day. He will return to the school basement, to take Lucy some more food and water (and probably to have some other kind of fun with her, you can't help suspecting) and to work some more at getting the mask off with her help. You meanwhile, are heading up to Keyserling College, to the library, to follow up on your researches.
Scott looked dubious when you told him about the dream, and the certainty it gave you, that the symbols Blackwell had written were guides to the complete sigils. "How are you going to decipher them?" he asked, and you had to admit it was a reasonable question. Your only idea was to find a book that explained what sigils were and how they worked.
But after an hour up at the university library, you have to confess yourself baffled and frustrated. Not by the "science" (if there is such a thing) of sigils, but because you can't find a good book on them. You can't find any kind of book on them. And the only books on magic that you can find in the library are neither practical nor theoretical. They are either histories or biographies of alchemists and magicians, or they are treatises full of bold promises about how to perform magic but which contain no actual formulas or spells.
Well, it shouldn't be surprising, you conclude with a sigh. A modern library probably wouldn't be interested in holding such stuff; and any real books of magic have probably long since vanished into the personal collections of practicing necromancers—like Professor Aubrey Blackwell.
Professor Blackwell. You drum your fingers as you think of the man. On an impulse you go online to look at the school website, and find his departmental webpage. It is mostly uninformative, listing only a lot of publications with very dry and obviously mundane titles. But it does list his office number and office hours. You hesitate, but then impulsively close up your bag and trudge over to the Anthropology building.
His office is on an upper floor, and from outside, below, you gaze up, trying to pick out which window his might be. What you're doing is very dangerous—if he spots you, it could excite his suspicions against you. But his hours should have ended twenty minutes ago, so you judge there's not much risk in at least walking by his door. Who knows? There might be some profit in it.
The hallway outside the department is dimly lit, and your footfalls only whisper against the carpet. You pad along, checking the nameplates on the doors, until you find the one with Blackwell's name on it. You hesitate. Is it possible he left it unlocked?
Then, before you are prepared, muffled voices sound on the other side, and there's a fumbling at the knob. You throw yourself beside the door and will yourself into flattening yourself into the wall as the door opens. You hold your breath as a slim, blonde figure in ass-hugging jeans comes out. She heads the other way down the hall. But even with her back to you, you recognize Lucy Vredenburg.
Well, her evil twin.
You blink. So the fake Lucy has easy access to Blackwell's office, you note to yourself.
But you were careless not to run when you had the chance. Before you can flee, Blackwell himself comes out. You grit your teeth into a desperate grin as he turns to face you.
With a distracted hum, he waddles right past without so much as glancing at you. Dumbly, you stare after him.
His door is still open. You look inside. A leather satchel is resting on his desk, ready to be taken.
You could grab the satchel. Or, before she gets too far, you could chase Lucy's clone. Get close to it, study it, see if there is some telltale difference between it and the original. Something that would allow you to tell the difference between an original and a fake.   indicates the next chapter needs to be written. |
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