14

THIS IS HOW THE WORLD BENDS

Kevin Kichida opened the door to Sarah’s rented quarters. He was twenty now, but in the short time that I’d known Kevin, he had lost a father, killed a grandfather, found out he had a child of his own, inherited a fortune he couldn’t legally declare, quit college, and become a cunning woman’s apprentice. Any one of those things could age someone a decade, and Kevin’s slender frame had gained weight, both in muscle mass and emotional presence. He’d lost his orthodontia and his hipster hair, but more than that, he’d lost some of his twinkle, and he didn’t have that much outward sparkle to begin with. The light summer suit he was wearing over a black shirt was an expensive-looking turquoise.

“Hey, Kevin. Why are you all dressed up?” I asked by way of hello.

“I don’t know yet.” He offered a hand for me to shake. “This suit put me on this morning.”

You have to expect statements like that if you hang around cunning folk. It’s why I don’t. I could hear Sarah making clanking and scraping sounds somewhere west of us—she’s an aleuromancer, which means she can sometimes see the future in sifting flour. It also means that she bakes a lot, even at the most inappropriate times. Especially at the most inappropriate times. I stepped through the doorway and introduced Kasia.

The room didn’t exactly seem like a sentry post for Armageddon. The quarters were modestly decorated with furniture that looked comfortable but old and secondhand, the kind of place you’d expect to rent furnished from an elderly widow. The living room opened into one narrow hallway that had an opening where the kitchen sounds and smells were coming from.

Sarah came out with a plate of fresh, hot scones, and we gravitated toward a coffee table surrounded by chairs in the middle of the living room. I found a red-cushioned armchair that smelled like pipe smoke, and Sarah sent Kevin to get some blackberry tea. When we were all settled in, I asked Sarah, “What kind of madhouse have you checked yourself in to? Is this place an inn or a shrine?”

Sarah smiled. She had a nice smile, and her long black hair framed clear skin and soft curves. “The two used to be synonymous. That was a good thing.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I’m serious. This place is a shelter for outcasts and travelers.” Sarah sipped her tea. “All you have to do to be welcome here is not belong anywhere else. You and your friends can probably stay here too, if you want.”

“I’m afraid I might die horribly,” I said. “And I don’t want to be rude.”

“The sooner we get on with this, the sooner we can leave,” Kasia told me with all the subtlety of a bulldozer. She was giving off a growing sense of impatience like a coal giving off heat.

“Tell me how I can help,” Sarah said.

“I know what’s happening, but I need a better understanding of how it’s happening,” I said. “And who might be able to do it, and why.”

I guess I can’t blame Sarah for being skeptical. “So, you finally want to learn more about magic?”

I’ve never had an objection to learning enough about magic to stop anyone who abuses it. I’ve just never wanted to mess with the stuff myself. As far as I’m concerned, magic is a bucket full of unstable explosives covered with rusty nails smeared in feces. And the bucket is sitting on a rotting plank suspended over a dark bottomless pit. “You bet,” I said.

It’s possible that I wasn’t entirely convincing. Sarah’s smile was a little crooked as she looked at Kevin. “Why don’t you tell him the basics, apprentice?”

Kevin looked at me, didn’t look at Kasia, and cleared his throat again before launching straight into lecture mode. “All right. The first thing you need to understand is that all physical reality is made up of three things: varying wavelengths of thought, sound, and light—”

“Hold up.” I made the time-out sign with my hands. “Physical reality is made of thought?”

“Quantum physicists have proven that the very act of observing molecules changes the way they interact,” Kevin responded. “They only have theories as to why.”

There was something self-serious and a little too earnest and formal about Kevin. It almost seemed pompous, but I didn’t get that vibe, not really. Kevin’s father had died trying to save Kevin not too long before. Maybe Kevin was dealing with it by trying a little too hard to make his life count.

Sarah decided to help her apprentice out. “You were raised Catholic, John. In the first chapter of Genesis, God says that there is light, then there is light. Then God sees that it is good. First God imagines light, which is thought. Then God says that there is light, which is sound. Then God sees that there is light, which is light. Thought, sound, light. That’s the basis of the time-space continuum, all three reinforcing each other. Things like mass and motion and gravity are the byproduct of those creations moving through time and space.”

I didn’t bother wondering what an actual physicist would say about all this. “Okay.”

Kevin picked up the thread again. “Sound is a medium through which thought perceives time. When we speak or listen, it is in a series of beats proceeding one after another in chronological order.”

“I’m with you,” I said.

“Light is a medium through which thought perceives space,” Kevin said. “Without light, there is no sight.”

“Still with you,” I said.

“The mind experiences physical reality through time and space, but the mind is not bound by either,” Kevin said.

I didn’t tell him I was still with him.

“I know you’re not psychic—” Kevin began.

“He says he’s not psychic,” Sarah corrected.

“But have you ever been in a car and suddenly known exactly what song is going to come on next?” Kevin asked. “Have you ever had a feeling about someone who was far away, and when you called that person, you discovered that your feeling about them was accurate? Have you ever realized that you’re living through a moment that you’ve dreamed before? Have you ever literally felt someone staring at you?”

“John’s experienced all of those things.” Sarah stated it like a fact.

Kasia was looking at me now, but she spoke to Sarah. “What if I have not?”

“Close your eyes.” Sarah waited until Kasia reluctantly did so. “Now hold your hand in front of your head and picture it there, in front of your closed eyes. Can you do that?”

Kasia humored her and put her hand in front of her closed eyes. “Yes.”

“You just made a picture inside your head that is bigger than the inside of your head,” Sarah pointed out. “How is that possible?”

“Why should I care?”

“I’ll get to that.” Kevin sounded a tad peevish. “If you’ll let me finish. As far as manipulating reality goes, what you have to realize is that things look solid, but all matter is actually a moving current of atoms and molecules. In seven years, all of the cells in our body will have been replaced by new ones.”

“True,” Kasia granted.

“Good.” Kevin gestured at the apartment around us. “Reality is a liquid, not a solid. The only thing binding the constant flow of atoms and molecules in specific patterns is electrons, or electromagnetic connections. Shift enough electrons around and you begin to change one element to another, one shape to another.”

“So, something is shifting a lot of electrons.” Kasia sounded bored. “This helps us how?”

Despite my reservations about Kevin’s new air of seriousness, I had to admire his composure. He kept going despite the hecklers in the crowd. “Our thoughts are basically electrical impulses. That’s why observing something affects the way its molecules interact. When you cut right down to an object’s atomic structure, our thoughts are made of the same energy that binds molecules in the specific patterns that we call reality.”

“That’s why symbolism is so important to magic,” Sarah cut in. “We deny it instinctively because we’re terrified of losing our individuality, but we are all connected physically and mentally. Some of the atoms that are you might be me soon. And all of our minds can go to places outside our physical bodies where other minds travel and meet.”

Kasia sneered. “Are you saying we are all one?”

“Don’t ruin this for me,” I told her. “We’re almost to the part where I get a lightsaber.”

“You asked us to talk to you,” Sarah reminded me.

“You’re right,” I admitted. “Sorry.”

“The most powerful types of magic, like the Pax Arcana, tap into a place where all minds can travel,” Kevin said. “It’s like an ocean made up of drops of water that all think they’re individuals. Think of making magic like building dams and channels and water wheels to harness the power of mass minds to shift reality. The water drops don’t know what they’re doing—they’re all still just moving and traveling along—but the current they are a part of is producing power all the same.”

“I get why a bunch of people believing the same thing would be so important for this kind of magic,” I said. “Getting thoughts to move in the same direction, so to speak. But I’m not seeing your point about symbolism.”

“Symbolism naturally channels thought,” Sarah said. “All symbols condense complicated truths into visual or verbal representations that have strong emotional charges. We call symbols that do this consciously art. We call symbols that do this unconsciously archetypes.”

“I’ve heard of them,” I admitted.

“Symbolism is like mental spackling,” Sarah said. “It makes instant connections between perception and reality and emotion that might not hold together if someone stopped and questioned them too intently. It goes straight to a part of the brain that we don’t consciously access.”

I read a lot, and not just my complete Calvin and Hobbes collection. These were not new concepts. Jung called the place where all minds are united the collective unconscious. At least some types of Eastern religions believe that physical reality is a shared dream created and maintained by our minds, and Nirvana is where the shackles of our material bodies are thrown off and all physical reality melts away. A lot of modern physicists think we’re living in a simulation. Medieval Christians believed that a cavern angel put a finger on the lips of all newborn babes and told them not to tell anyone where they had just come from, and that this is why lips have clefts and why souls can’t remember being joined all together in heaven. At least some pagans believe that every living soul is a part of God, that we are the vehicles through which God experiences the world. Plato believed that our reality is but one in a series of reflections and shadows corresponding to perfect truths that we sense but cannot consciously recall. Modern Christians believe in intercessory prayer, believe that if enough minds focus their sincere thoughts on asking for something to happen, God might listen and change their reality.

Sarah’s mind went down a similar track. “I personally believe that the reason everything is all connected … thought, time, and space … is because before our reality was our reality, everything … all of us … existed as a thought in the imagination of one being. For lack of a better word, we call that being God.”

“I do not believe in God,” Kasia said flatly.

Sarah’s brief smile was genuine. “I did say that was personal.”

I had a moment of silent struggle. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the fate of the entire world hung on that moment, or at least the fate of my world as I knew it. I almost didn’t tell Sarah the rest of it. She didn’t need to know, and between my geas, my training, and my own cynicism, the instinct to isolate, compartmentalize, and ration information is so deep that it might as well be in my DNA. But Sig had recently taken me to task for that tendency, and Ted Cahill had died playing that game and almost taken the rest of us with him, and I was pissed off at Simon for playing that game with me. Not only that, but Sarah and Kevin weren’t tools for me to use. They had come here into the eye of a storm and talked to me freely, with no strings, because they trusted me.

“This involves John Dee,” I began, and stopped because Sarah did something. I don’t know exactly what she did, but suddenly the world seemed to narrow to a point between the two of us. I could feel her concentration so intensely that I wouldn’t have been surprised if the chair I was sitting on had been dragged toward her. “What’s wrong, Sarah?”

Sarah didn’t answer. Her voice was a power wire stripped of insulation, and she smelled like fear. “How does this involve John Dee?”

“It’s likely some associates or followers of his are causing these weird incidents,” I said cautiously. “Some new incarnation of the School of Night, if that means anything to you.”

It meant something to her, all right. Sarah swore. Me, I view most profanity like any other kind of vocabulary, but Sarah … she’s not the swearing kind.

Kasia sensed this. “Say what you need to say.”

Sarah took another sip of tea, and her hand was trembling slightly. “John Dee claimed to talk with angels.”

Kasia scowled. “If I do not believe in God, I certainly do not believe in angels.”

“Then treat it like a metaphor!” The skin over Sarah’s face seemed to be drawing tighter. “Or assume he talked to powerful beings pretending to be angels. The Fae or djinn, perhaps. He published several books based on those conversations.”

There was something in Sarah’s inflection … so slight that if it weren’t for my enhanced hearing, I’m not sure I would have caught it. “You put a little extra sauce on the word published,” I accused, “and most people would have said that he wrote those books, not published them. Either you think Dee didn’t really write them, or there were unpublished ones, too.”

“There is a rumor, no, more like a whisper of a rumor, of an unpublished book with a strange power over reality.” Sarah’s voice was soft. “A very, very bad book.”

“Was it Fifty Shades of Grey?” I asked. “This explains everything!”

Sarah smiled reluctantly. It was better than what her face had been doing. “It’s called the Book of Am.”

If she was waiting for some sign of shocked recognition, she was disappointed. Kevin sounded half-accusing: “I’ve never heard of it.”

“Very few people have,” Sarah said. “And even fewer believe what they hear, for which we should be very, very thankful.”

I took a guess: “The book of half-God or almost-God?”

“Very good,” Sarah said. Kasia and Kevin gave me odd looks.

“In Hebrew, God’s name, Yahweh, means I am,” I explained. What? I said I read a lot.

“The Book of Am was about developing the powers of creation and destruction,” Sarah said. “But it was a horrible perversion of how reading is supposed to work. The book had a living will. People didn’t read the book so much as the book read them.”

“If the book reads people, what does it do when it is through with them?” Kasia asked. “Somehow, I do not think it throws them away or puts them on a shelf.”

I saw where she was going with that. Kasia was wondering if the people who were transformed had read the book, but I didn’t buy that. Randy Prutko hadn’t been a reader, and nobody who’d changed into a giant freaking eyeball in the middle of a knight holding cell had smuggled a copy of a book in with them.

“I’m not explaining this well,” Sarah said. “When someone reads a book, they take an author’s ideas and filter them through their own experience and needs and circumstances. That’s why no two people ever read the same book, and why no one ever completely agrees about a book with anyone else. The effect of the book’s words is changed as it moves through the filter of the person reading it. Reading is an interaction. But the Book of Am changes all of its readers to make them fit its needs.”

“And what are its needs?” Kasia asked.

“The book transforms the reader into a kind of puppet god,” Sarah said. “It uses the reader’s imagination and will to create a literal world where magic lives and breathes openly.”

“So, basically, it’s like Genesis for Dummies,” I said.

Startled, Sarah laughed, then put a hand over her mouth as if ashamed of herself. “You really don’t have a reverent bone in your body, do you?”

“It’s okay,” I said. “Maybe I’ll have one in seven years.”

Kasia stayed focused like a cobra. “What happened to this book? Where is it?”

Sarah’s eyes slid toward me oddly. “People who have even heard a rumor of it say that the book was taken by the Knights Templar back in the Elizabethan era.”

Uh-huh. I really had been researching the School of Night, and a couple of random facts I’d stumbled across didn’t seem quite so random anymore. Simon had said that the knights shut down the School of Night back during the Elizabethan era, and not long after that, a book called the Voynich manuscript had surfaced, a mysterious tome that a lot of people associated with John Dee. In a long-ago lore class, that book had once been mentioned as an example of how knights work—Templars had stolen the book and replaced it with a counterfeit full of an entirely fabricated language. The original Voynich manuscript had gotten its name from the person who held it for a time—could it have been the Book of Am? If the knights had a book like that, they would keep the book in their central archives, and the archives had been breached earlier that year. Breached by members of the School of Night. It was how we’d found out about them. And one of the School of Night’s founders was John Dee. There was no way all of that was a coincidence, and Simon hadn’t mentioned any of it.