Chapter Fifteen: Vile Worm

I didn't fill Simone in on my plan as we raced to the ley and she didn't ask. Rather, I raced to the ley and she matched my pace. As long as Simone's legs were, she accompanied me at a swift jog, loping alongside me without much trouble. It's true - there are some disadvantages to being under five feet tall.

"I don't understand what we're doing…" Simone said.

I couldn't explain it to her - not yet. Not until we were safe at St. Circe's. Speaking of which - we were fast approaching the standing stone at the edge of the resort, the ley nexus allowing for magical travel. I wasn't about to sit down for the minute and change it would take to set up the travel ritual, so I didn't: I made a 'circle' with the fingers of my left hand, smashed my St. Circe's ring against my palm, and dashed through the activated ley. Simone stumbled across right after me.

"I can't believe that worked," she gasped, wincing at the sudden cold. "Now, would you mind telling me…"

"The quartocompus," I said - our word for the witch's cardinal.

"The quartocompus," she nodded, quickly apprehending my plan to find Cassie. "Why didn't I think of that?"

Under gray skies and gently-falling snow, we proceeded to our little workshop in the basement of the administration building. I fetched the artifact from our hiding spot in the wall (it was actually embedded in the wall, but we'd made the brick and plaster very amenable to it and we could just coax it in or out with a little magical tap) while Simone arranged our big map of the US along our little tape markings on the floor. Then I held the cardinal, traced out the quartopus symbol, and placed the device on the little circle we'd traced on the map - the location of St. Circe's as closely as we could calculate it. Immediately, the needle flicked around to northeast. I made a note of the heading and traced out the line as closely as I could - Cassie was somewhere along that line, which included, approximately, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston, so… not a huge help.

"We need to triangulate," Simone said.

I was already ahead of her, folding up our map while she grabbed a compass. Then we were out the door and on my bike, Simone's long arms wrapped around my midsection as I pedaled back out to the ley. Ideally, we needed two other spots for an accurate triangulation, though one more would be almost as good. We had a host of locations to choose from, between which Sacramento and Palm Beach were probably the best (from a triangulation perspective, that is). This time, I had to set up a proper circle, as I didn't have a ring for those locations, but between Simone and myself, it took us less than a minute to do. A few seconds after that, we stepped through and into Sacramento… or not…

We were in San Francisco. Not too terribly far off, geographically speaking, but not where I'd intended to go. Some strange force had welled up inside of me and brought me here instead. From personal experience, I knew that magical forces could pull portals off target - that's how I'd been recaptured by the Gangling Men, after all. But this hadn't been a trap… instead, it felt like some sort of odd internal force welling up inside of me… perhaps something that some deep instinct of mine knew that I, myself, didn't? Well… San Fran was almost as good as Sacramento, so we got to measuring.

I set the map down (an 8"x10" square of folded map with our little St. Circe's circle showing), carefully aligned it with the compass, and set the quartocompus device atop our circle, and took a… nothing. Half an instant after I placed the artifact down, the needle started spinning. Error 404: kidnapped friend not found.

"No!" I cried out, disturbing some nearby pigeons. "Fuck!"

Simone squeezed my hand while making two tiny marks on the map. "I got a bit of a look… the needle was pointing somewhere in this range."

The two points were only a few millimeters apart - a pretty decent accuracy. "You're… you're sure?"

She nodded. "I'm sure. Now let's go back to the 'lab' and figure out where that’s pointing."

Just then, familiar voice called out: "Or you might use some floorspace in my little abode… frankly, I’m a bit hurt you didn't think to call on me, Natalie." Pacing up to us in a slim track suit was a sweaty, heavily-breathing Ambrose Nicht. He checked his pulse on his smartwatch. "Good evening, ladies. Natalie, who's your friend?"

+++++

Ambrose Nicht was a warlock of substantial skill, but he was also a sucker for technology. Usually, those two things mixed about as well as water and a cat made out of elemental sodium, but he was one of the few who managed to make it work. Among his innovations was a 'random' number generator he called Pytho (he'd wanted to call it Oracle or Delphi, he explained, but these names were already trademarked). Unlike other 'random' number generators, such as those based on quantum fluctuations or radioactive decay, this one was based on ley fluctuations, measured by a wayfinder's needle, which were then digitized and fed into a computer.

"You might be surprised to learn that those fluctuations aren't random, not even the tiniest little wobbles," he said. He sat in the front with the two of us in the back as his 'smart car' drove us to Nicht Tower.

"I'm not," I said.

"Me either," Simone said. "There's a deep underlying pattern."

Nicht seemed surprised. "Indeed. It looks random, but, as you say, Miss Clayton, there's a deep underlying pattern. In fact, it appears to be the interaction of higher-dimension manifolds rotating and folding upon one another along the ley. In any case, Pytho is based upon this - I have it add items to my schedule, seemingly at random, but almost always for higher purpose. Case in point - rescheduling my daily jog to seven-thirty in the evening, such that I'd be passing Yerba Buena just when two young witches…" he looked to us pointedly… "popped through. Quelle chance, n'est-ce pas?"

"It seems unlikely," I agreed.

We took the elevator up to Ambrose's penthouse, at which point he wandered into a little closet, stepping out no more than two seconds later, completely clean and dressed in a dapper leisure suit - that was a trick I'd have to learn. He gestured for us to unfold our map.

"You say you're looking for your friend? Based on what metric?"

"Proprietary technology," Simone said - she didn't trust Nicht. I trusted him a bit, but wasn't about to spill the beans on our witch's cardinal to him.

Nicht crouched in front of the map, rubbing at his neatly-groomed beard. "I suppose it doesn't matter how you got the headings. What matters is how exact they are… what are your bounds for error?"

We estimated our error for our original heading to be less than a quarter of a degree, while our San Francisco estimate was a lot less accurate - if Simone's markings were right, we had about a degree of leeway in either direction. Ambrose entered those headings into his computer and came up with a map displaying a tall trapezoidal shape about eight and a half kilometers wide and perhaps thirty-five high - the intersection of our two headings. It was a great big diamond of Eastern seaboard, about half of which was Atlantic Ocean, and the rest of which was Boston.

"Looks like your missing friend's in Boston. And if you lost the signal, that means he or she is likely in a sanctuary somewhere. Let's see if Charybdis can show us where those might be…"

"Charybdis?"

"My web crawler," he explained. "It scours online for references to magic, comes up with plain English summaries, parses them, ranks them on a scale of quality, and then encodes them into my database."

"That sounds pretty advanced," Simone said.

"Pretty advanced," he agreed. "It's pretty good at picking up on ley lines, magical locations, and even sanctuaries, provided the warlock or witch isn't particularly secretive about it. It doesn't know where Lily's is, for instance…" he chuckled. "And I'm certainly not about to add it. But, in our little diamond of New England here, there are…" he tapped some buttons and a series of little crosshairs appeared on the screen. "Twelve known sanctuaries, a few of them significant - Boston's a pretty magical city."

"Define significant," I said.

"Large and old. It takes time and effort to really grow a sanctuary. Right now, for instance, I've only been established here in the tower for about five years. If I stay put, I might be able to make the whole tower a sanctuary in another fifteen or twenty… but enough about that…"

Left unsaid was: it was unthinkable that Ambrose Nicht didn't have a sanctuary in his tower. But if his forty-third floor penthouse wasn't it, then where in the world was it? To which I'll speculate: was his tower really 'only' forty-three stories tall? Warlocks, who like the number thirteen almost as much as witches, wouldn't ever build 'only' forty-three stories. They'd either stop at thirty-nine or build up to fifty-four (that is, four times thirteen). In any case, thoughts for another time.

"Let's assume she's in one of the big ones, then," I said.

Ambrose nodded. "Very well. That leaves us with… Harriet Bard's sanctum, Faneuil Hall - the real one, and… ah! Byron Bryce's place, that old rogue! It's been years since I saw him." Ambrose chuckled good-naturedly, taking a moment to register my shock and anger. "Ah… Natalie Bryce… as in the Bryces…"

"To make a long story short, yes. And now we know where Cassie is."

All of Nicht's attention was on me. He cleared the computer screen and took a few steps forward, his fingers trembling, as if he might launch into spell-casting at any moment. "Wait a minute… you're telling me that Byron Bryce, 'old knickerbocker' Byron Bryce, whom you are somehow, mysteriously related to, has kidnapped your friend and has ill intent toward her? What exactly has he done?"

So I told him. I told Ambrose everything that Rowan and the other Bryce men had done, both to me and to Rowan's own daughter, as well as to Rowan's cousin. And I didn't leave out the bit where I was maybe, possibly, responsible for Lucian's disappearance after he nearly murdered me. I didn't want to be accused of self-serving or telling a partial truth - not to a man whose Charybdis program might well fill in the bits that I'd conveniently left out. No, you told Ambrose Nicht the whole truth or nothing at all. And Ambrose responded to my story about as well as I could have expected - pensive, and then pacing, and then angry, and then clenching his fists and bricking an array of nearby computers in a shower of sparks and smoke when his legendary control faltered. He pursed his lips and glanced to Simone.

"This is all true?"

Simone nodded. "You're damn right it is."

Ambrose Nicht strolled over to the window and looked out over San Francisco. For a minute, I was worried he was just going to stand there all night, staring out at the city and chewing at the little hairs of his beard. But after a minute of reflection, he turned to a dead computer, sighed, and then turned to one that he hadn't broken.

"Pytho, give me two letters." He nodded at the screen's output and then held out his hand. "Random book: W-A."

A book shot out of nowhere, missing my head by about six inches and landing in Ambrose's palm with the smack of leather upon skin. He glanced at the cover and handed it to me.

"The Wayfarer's Companion?" I asked. It was a mid-sized book bound in rich, brownish-red leather.

"Something in there will help you," he said. "That's the way these things work. Bring it back when your use for it is complete, or else compensate me with something that I don't know I need that's of equal or greater value. Thus dictates the law of fair equilibrium."

"Can you help me get into Byron Bryce's sanctuary?"

"That I cannot do," he said with a sigh. "The laws of my coven are as explicit about this as those of your sisterhood. But I wish you luck. I've called a car to drive you to the ley point. And, for whatever it's worth, I hope our next meeting is under better circumstances."

+++++

To say that I was frustrated would be an understatement - I knew where Cassie had been taken, I knew who'd been responsible, and we were in possession of a book that was supposed to help me… and I still couldn't do jack shit. The fact that I knew where Byron Bryce's sanctuary was proved to be no help at all - the next day, during my lunch break, I took a ley portal over to Boston, went right to the supposed location of the sanctuary, and found nothing but an abandoned church with a few tourist plaques. The sanctuary was either too well-hidden for me to find or didn't exist in normal space. And what would I have done if I'd found it? My options were: 1) try to undo the wards of a warlock who'd had a century or more to get them just right or 2) use a kiloton of magical power to bring the whole damn house down, possibly with Cassie inside.

Simone and I read the Wayfarer's Companion, curled up on the couch in the Advanced Girls' dormitory (they'd long since stopped insisting I was forbidden to enter) and hoping we'd find something to help. We didn't figure out how to find Cassie that night or the next night, either, and I grew more anxious and more forlorn as days passed. I held tight to my last memories of Cassie, of her glorious race, of our amazing night together afterward… and the image that kept popping up in my mind was of her terrified expression as the Gangling Men's dark wrappings imprisoned her before they carried her off.

"You're crying again," Simone said.

"I know."

I was getting little spatters of water warping on the Wayfarer's Companion. Another dozen pages in the tome already had subtle warping from my tears, and I'm sure they wouldn't be the last ones. Here I was, trying to control the primal forces of magic to retrieve my girlfriend, and I couldn't even control my own emotions. The tome did, however, have some very useful spells: a spell to open the last portal at a ley nexus (I'd seen the Gangling Men use that one), a spell to find a friend almost anywhere… if they also cast the same spell about the same time with you in mind, and a spell to make hidden places known to you.

Now, an astute witch can see right through the little cantrips that practitioners use to fool regular people. With a little practice and concentration, she can see through confabulations and other bits of more sophisticated trickery. But 'true illusions' are bound to the aura of whoever created the illusion and it takes very special methods to see through them. This spell was one such method, and I put it to use with my junior magic club. Most of the girls were able to apprehend an easier, weaker version of the technique (it was one that I'd already known), and Amanda and Val were able to grasp the trickier version I'd gleaned from the Wayfarer's Tome. We spent close to an hour wandering Masters Hall after-hours and finding all of the little hidden things there.

"Miss Bryce, somebody wrote bad words on the wall!" Zelda Lee said.

Indeed, somebody had written 'Brittany Lacks licks pussy' right on the wall in the upper hallway. And below that, somebody (presumably Ms. Lacks) had added: 'And I eat ass, too!' beneath it. Rather than paint over the offending graffiti, somebody (possibly even the perpetrators) had masked it with a spell. Given that it had remained hidden, that meant it was either a fairly recent addition (though I didn't know of any Brittanys at St. Circe's) or the obfuscation was being maintained on occasion. I dispelled the illusion and gestured to the wall.

"Your assignment, if you want to get the silver sash, is to make a stronger, better illusion there," I said. "Or else figure out how to magically paint over that."

Having tested out the 'hidden places' spell to my satisfaction - I'd found three hidden doors, secret lockers, lots of dirty writing, and a whole hidden corridor - I thought I might be able to find Byron Bryce's sanctuary now. I took another trip to Boston, this time with Simone as backup. It was a slushy, miserable day, and we spent an hour getting cold and wet despite our boots and umbrellas, tromping around a block and change of historic Boston. Byron Bryce's sanctuary was an old, abandoned church that somehow hadn't been reclaimed by the city. There were tourist-y plaques around it proclaiming the church's historical significance back in the colonial era, but even these looked to have been abandoned for decades. It's not uncommon for magic to have this sort of effect - most ordinary people just ignore magical, their brains glossing right over things imbued with even the slightest amount of magical hidden-ness. My own brain, conversely, barely even registered that hidden-ness anymore. But old knickerbocker (apparently) had hidden his place a lot better than that.

"What about these stairs?" Simone said.

"Shit, I'd missed those." And it was pretty obvious why I'd missed them - they were pretty deeply, deeply obscured by magic. We made our way down to a little sunken alley with water up to our boot ankles (well, my ankles… Simone's were a bit higher up), making our way up to a basement door recessed within a shadowy tunnel going back through ten or twelve feet of near blackness.

"Um… I'm not going in there," Simone said.

I couldn't blame her. There was something deeply forbidding about the place, some strange aura of dark malice emanating from it. I took two steps into the tunnel before deciding to turn around and, a moment later, realizing wId already set off a ward. The ward had cast fear onto our minds, and neither of us, prodigious witches both, had even realized it. It was powerful, arcane, masterful shit. Byron Bryce did not fuck around.

Maybe it was the fear talking, but it also made sense to me to get the fuck out. A place guarded by wards so subtle we couldn't even detect them, wards laid down time after time, year after year, until they became ingrained in the fabric of the place… those weren't things to wander into unprepared. And, as we retreated to reconsider our options, I heard a hissing, snuffling sound from down in that dark alley. Looking back over the lip, I spotted something dark and strange… part of a serpent, the lobe of a flipper, I can't really say… something big, accompanied by an array of tiny, green eyes staring out before winking out one by one in the dark. Powerful wards and creepy-as-fuck summoned guardians? Yeah, no thanks. We'd be coming back, but it would be with a lot more firepower…

Simone shook her head. "Sorry, Natalie, but I'm not going back there… not anytime soon…"

I'd be coming back with more firepower, then. I guess Simone's friendship with Cassie had its limit somewhere around pants-shitting terror. But me? I'd do anything - anything - to get her back. But, as Lily would no doubt warn me: I'd need to do it intelligently or not at all. After all, I couldn't help Cassie if I was captured or dead.

OvidLemma

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