Chapter Eight: Kovacs, Garcia & Warner
Simone, Cassie, and I had invented a method for generating magical symbols, and the first and only symbol it had revealed to us was the exact one that I needed to find Lily's ring - what incredible luck! Or maybe not quite luck... when it comes to magic, its inscrutable ways offer what we need and desire (or the exact opposite) a lot more often than they deliver random nonsense. Thus, we had the symbol needed to cast a cardinal (the quartopus) and now needed to build an artifice to house it. And, as a member of a coven with a patron goddess, our Mistress Starlight, the strangeness of kismet is a lot less mysterious to us than to the uninitiated.
The novices among you might also be asking: Great! You've got the symbol… why not just cast the symbol and follow its little vortex of swirling air wherever it leads? After all, it pointed Simone right to her California king bed, didn't it? And you have a point - if the ring was twenty feet away and I didn't mind following a mini-cyclone to get to it, a single casting of quartopus would find my ring quickly. But for something many miles away and hidden in parts unknown… for something a little more distant and possibly well-defended, casting symbols into the air was next to worthless. Instead, we needed an artifice that would hold and attune the symbol - our quartocompus or, more appropriately, our witch's cardinal.
To that end, Lily gave us permission to set up a temporary workshop in room A012 in the administration building's basement. This was the room I'd first 'discovered' and cleaned out last year in preparation for the ill-fated Winter Festival. It was now used as a practice room for witchcraft - traditionally, all of the magic classes were held in the basement, which was just fine when only thirty or forty girls were learning the craft. But now a handful of other rooms across the campus had been opened to the practice - an inadvertent consequence of the past year's changes at St. Circe's meant interest and enrollment in all things witchcraft was way up. Eighty-five of the Beginner and Advanced girls were taking classes in witchcraft, and at least twenty of the more-gifted Junior girls were eager to try their hand, as well. The remaining girls either had no interest in witchcraft (a sentiment that, frankly, I could not understand), and a few didn't have the right mix of analytical and creative talents to get beyond the most basic levels of practice. In any case, this meant the gymnasium back room could be repurposed for magical practice while we built our witch's cardinal.
Of course, A012 was a bit of a mess, so I brought my midday semiotics class down there on a 'field trip' to clean it up. The girls were excited to come down to the basement, eight of them poking about the hallway, traipsing along its shabby, Cold War era décor in mustard yellow tiles, flickering fluorescent lights, cracking plaster, and linoleum flooring, some of it starting to curl at the seams.
"Don't go down there," I told Abigail Hawes, who stood at the top of the rough-hewn staircase leading to the ritual chamber of the sub-basement.
"Why not?"
"Because it's a ritual chamber, and it's creepy as all get-out," I said. My policy to my class was: tell them the truth whenever possible. In this case, I'd badly miscalculated, and now all of the girls wanted to go down to the creepy chamber.
"Fine… we can take a quick peek. But you have to promise to help me clean A012," I said. Most of them nodded. "You have to say it - promise to help me tidy up. And I'll know you mean it because a witch's word is her bond." I held up my hand as if I were making the pledge. "I promise to help Miss Bryce clean A twelve."
"I promise to help Miss Bryce clean A twelve," they stated.
"I notice you didn't make the pledge, Carla. So you can keep a lookout at the top of the stairs while the rest of us go down."
"I promise to help Miss Bryce lean A twelve," Carla said, and then pushed through to the stairs before I could object. Psychology - it works!
We went down that narrow staircase (well… narrow for somebody like Magnus - all of us fit down just fine), the stone cool against our fingertips, the air slightly chillier than the middling warmth of the basement hallway. We went into the circular underground chamber, carved in stone, the intricate geometries of half a dozen common ritual circles traced across the floor and anchored to built-in meridian stones and a handful of declension stones that slid along an adjustable track.
The room still gave me the chills. I'd been punished here before, including in a ceremony that had seen me unmanned by Dr. Sauvage and Dr. Heirophant - one of the Gangling Men, and one of very few magic users who could manage such a thing. Ultimately, I had come to cherish my new form and embrace it as my own, but that incident remained traumatic to me. Maybe the ritual chamber wasn't that bad, objectively speaking, but it sure gave me the creeps. But I couldn't see much of anything in there now - the room was almost pitch-dark and none of us could see a thing beyond the glint of stairwell light on metal - nor was there any light switch to make things visible.
"The only lights here are magical. Who thinks they can do the pattern we learned to make the other day? Who remembers lumieh? Whoever lights the room first gets to wear the silver sash tomorrow." I'd stolen the silver sash from the school wardrobe (the dress was better off without it anyway) and enlisted some help in sewing low-grade witching symbols into it. When enchanted, it gave the wearer's whole body a slight glow, and I'd employed it as a means for rewarding exceptional students.
"First!" Zelda Lee shouted.
"Fir… crap… second," Abigail said - no sash for her.
I'd taught them the patterned pulse for lumieh - unsurprisingly, a useful symbol for illumination. In fact, it was all you needed to know to get a witch lamp to work - cast little, linear lumieh at it and it would glow. Within thirty seconds, every light in the place was lit, and it didn't seem so gloomy.
"Good job, girls! It's downright homey in here now!"
"What's that stone table in the middle of the room?" Carla asked. She skipped up to it and rapped her knuckles against the surface, perhaps to see if it was hollow (it wasn't). "Is it a sarcophagus?"
"No, it's an altar," I said. "Very useful for summonings - but those are pretty advanced things, and we're not going to get to them for a while. But… no, I shouldn't," I said.
"You should… you should do… whatever it is!" Carla insisted.
"Well… maybe," I allowed. "Fine. Who wants to see a summoning?"
"I do!" a few girls shouted.
"Then get me some dead bugs - they shouldn't be hard to find around here. And Zelda, as my sash recipient and designated Top Assistant, I need you to run upstairs and fetch me some coffee creamers from the teacher's lounge. Three should do it."
While Zelda fetched the creamer, the other girls tracked down bug bodies - flies, spiders (not technically bugs, but close enough), and the husk of a big black cricket, and placed them atop the meridian stones. Then, as soon as Zelda returned with the creamers, I set them upon the altar and got to work - no declension stones needed for such a simple summoning, just three symbols, cream, a circle, and some dead bugs.
"I wasn't sure which kind to get, so I got one of each kind," Zelda said. "Plain, hazelnut, and sweet cream."
"Brownies aren't picky," I said. Then I stood before the altar and chanted:
"This follower of Starlight calls you here,
O Brownie, to a messed room kindly clear,
we offer cream for your reward
to attend to my summoned word!"
It was one of the very few summonings I knew that didn't require secret symbols, and so I couldn't inadvertently give away my ongoing foray into forbidden knowledge (my girls wouldn't know regardless, but they might accidentally explain it to pretty much anybody - discretion is not a strong suit among tween girls). One by one, the creamers cracked open and their contents vanished. As they did so, a brownie… no - three brownies - faded into view, gaining purchase in our world from wherever they'd come. Small humanoid creatures, a foot an a half tall (large for brownies), winged like cicadas and clad in woven leaves or chitinous armor. That made sense, I suppose - we had three creamers available and the ritual circle had far more power than what I might casually scrawl out with a bit of chalk or charcoal.
"Welcome, brownies!" I said. "We require your help in cleaning out room A twelve… everybody, follow me!"
Nobody followed me. All of the girls, excited beyond measure, rushed up the stairs ahead of me, and the brownies zipped up right behind, the buzzing of their wings kicking up cobwebs and rustling my hair. That was fine - an engaged class was a lot better than a disinterested one.
+++++
"I can't believe you summoned a demon in front of the Junior girls," Simone said.
"I summoned a brownie! Well… three showed up, but I only summoned them once. I'm pretty sure that's allowed…"
"Technically a demon," Simone said - and she was right. According to the very old, very strict definition of the word, any being you summoned from a different plane was a demon, even the fairly innocuous ones. "And… pretty sure? Shouldn't you be super sure before playing 'cool teacher' in front of the girls? They'll talk, you know."
I sighed. "Yeah, I know. Now a bunch of girls outside of my class are petitioning to start a 'Junior Witchcraft Club' and even Sauvage has indicated she'll give it the go-ahead, with her usual litany of fun-smothering caveats. Like no explosions and no summoning…"
"So you won't do it then, right?"
I shrugged. "I won't get caught doing explosions or summonings."
We were in a sparkling-clean A012 with our two workbenches and piles of parts and tools all around us. Our quartocompus, currently in-progress, only required four parts, but we were determined to do everything scrupulously, and to make the thing look as similar to a warlock's compass as we could. All we needed was a base, a plate, a rod, and a needle. The base, we already had - Simone, Cassie, and I had practiced a little stone-sculpting magic to make the things, each of us making a candidate base and then having Lily judge them (for the record, mine won).
"This one is just the right mix of skillful and boring to be part of a warlock compass," she said of my base - faint praise, but I'd take it.
All of the other parts were fashioned from metal, mostly brass, which was a bit easier to work with than stone. We could have even gone to the school's tool shop to make them without much issue, but we wanted to do everything with magic just to prove that we could make a true artifice in the technical sense. The last part we managed was the plate, because the etching on it was pretty complex and it took half a dozen times for us to get the symbology right.
"We could make spares with all of these extra parts," Cassie said, and she started fitting one together.
"Yeah, but it'll be worse, and all the rest of our gold foil is only 22-karat," I said. "Plus, we have to keep all of this secret. An extra copy is a liability…"
But Cassie was already assembling one, taking her rounded granite base and searching through our spare pile to find the top plate she liked best - this was the bit that aligned the needle along a plane so the needle wouldn't bend itself out of shape if the item you were after was on the other side of the world (or in the sky, I suppose). It was needed because the pull of the needle was pretty strong, enough to be palpable when you were holding it, and enough to drag the whole artifice along a surface if the friction was low enough. In fact, when we put it on top of one of my low friction socks (an interesting but pretty much useless invention of mine), it accelerated right across the floor, hitting the wall with a bang and requiring some minor repairs.
"Also useful for hockey and curling," Cassie grinned, hefting the disc-shaped quartocompus.
"What's curling?" Simone said.
When we finished expounding upon nerdy winter sports to Simone (we got a bit side-tracked), we put the witch's cardinal through proper testing. We'd already used it to locate nearby objects, but now we unfolded a big four-by-seven foot map of the United States on the floor of A012 and placed the cardinal about where we knew St. Circe's to be in eastern Kentucky, taking turns holding it and tracing the little activating quartopus symbol to get it to point in various directions. For instance, the cardinal pointed right at Stanford, California when Cassie told it to find her brother. It pointed toward Atlanta for Simone's father and toward West Palm Beach for Cousin Vince.
Our cardinal worked! It was also, I realized, very dangerous. With a free hour or two and a decent command of geometry, you could use the artifice to find the exact location of St. Circe's within a mile or two. You could theoretically do so for any sanctuary or warded place you were granted access to (St. Circe's wasn't a sanctuary in the technical sense, since it wasn't bound to a witch and lacked some of the protections out of necessity - for instance, it was much easier to give access privileges and set up transport rites). However, it wasn't all-powerful. For instance, we couldn't use the cardinal to find the location of Lily's sanctuary. I focused on my image of the location and traced out quartopus and… nada. Well, not quite - the needle spun about in lazy circles. This was its way of telling us 'Connection to host lost!' - working but no signal.
"Well I guess that's good," Cassie said, though she didn't sound happy about it. "What about the old abbey?"
Focusing on the old abbey resulted in about the same thing - though, since it was more similar to St. Circe's in being a warded place rather than a sanctuary, we got a bit of signal. The needle still spun lazily about, hesitating in a generally easterly direction, but never fully stopping. You might be able to eventually find a location in that manner, but it wouldn't be easy. Finally, it was time for the instantia crucis: where in the world (literally) was my (Lily's) Black Lily ring? Reply hazy - try again later. The needle circled around but didn't do anything.
"Well… shit," Cassie said. "It must be in a sanctuary."
"Or destroyed," Simone added.
"That would be preferable, actually," I said. "That way, the Gangling Men couldn't use it against us… but I don't think we're that lucky."
"Me either."
I put the cardinal in my bag and started to pack my things - it was almost time for my meeting with Lily and Sauvage over the fate of the 'Junior Witchcraft Club', and one did not show up late to meetings with either co-headmistress, let alone both of them.
"Hey, where are you going with that?" Cassie said. "We all worked on it - isn't it, like, community property?"
"I need it to find the ring - as soon as I get a signal, I need to be ready to go."
"You aren't going by yourself," Cassie stated. "Hand it over. I promise I'll let you know when it gets a signal. Come on, Nat…"
My eyebrows went up. I wiggled my bag (wiggling a bit more in the process). I smirked like nobody's business. "You want it? You're gonna have to take it from me."
Simone rolled her eyes. "Come on, guys… you're going to break it…"
"You brat," Cassie said - it was practically a groan. She leapt to her feet and I tore off, shrieking and giggling down the corridor.
And, for the record, I was exactly on time to my meeting. Victory! Though Cassie did have the cardinal in her bag now. And my panties.
where in the world (literally) was my (Lily's) Black Lily ring?
First assumption: It's not literally in the world. :D
Also, Natalie's habit of being right on time so often reminds me strongly on another literary figure that-shall-not-be-named-nor-shall-its-source:
A Wizard is never late, nor is he early. He arrives precisely when he means to.
Yes, that's true! Certain witches have a flair for the dramatic. And, if you can't find something anywhere in the world, yeah... it might not be there anymore. Though it could also be in a deeply warded location.