|
“… And let him be cast forth, into the exterior
darkness.”
—Matthew 22:13
The whole story?
Yeah, I guess it’d save time if you get it
all in one lump. And maybe telling the tale will help me deal with
it. Shared pain is lessened, as a wise man once said …
I have to warn you, though, there are some
things I know that aren’t my secrets to tell. So expect a few
holes here and there.
… And like I said, I’ve been told I
ramble a lot when I tell stories, so if you think I’m going off on a
tangent, feel free to hold up a stop sine.
The whole story. Where to start?
Might as well start with the day everything went
horribly wrong, and digress as necessary …
Santa Cruz, California
October 17, 1989
Some days you just shouldn’t bother getting
up in the morning.
Unfortunately, this never becomes clear until
very late in the day.
Take this particular day. If I’d
known I was headed straight for the most horrible SNAFU of my career,
I’d have pulled the covers over my head, switched off the damn alarm
clock, and hibernated for a few weeks. … At least that’s
what I like to think … but the truth is, I’d probably have
rechecked my calculations, convinced myself nothing could possibly go
wrong, and forged ahead into oblivion like the fool I was.
I woke as usual to the dulcet tones of the
Frantics’ “Boot to the Head”—there’s nothing
better to get you going on those foggy October mornings. Not that I
needed the stimulus on that particular day; I’d been waiting for it
almost a year. Like a kid on Christmas to the tenth power:
juiced up on excitement and anticipation until I could barely sleep the
night before. Only I wasn’t the one getting the presents
… I’d be giving them out, to everyone on Earth.
Today would be the fulfillment of over twelve
thousand years of struggle and pain, twelve millennia of holding on to a
distant dream.
Today was the day I’d bring the magic back.
Some folks boast that they can trace their
ancestry back for centuries. Well, whether those guys came over on the
Mayflower or were waiting at Plymouth with a concession stand, I’ve
got news for the bluebloods: you’re pikers. Latecomers
on a cosmic scale. My family line goes back four hundred and
ninety-two generations, back before anyone else picked up the pieces and
started recording history again. Yes, again …
* * *
“Ano … Maxwell-san?”
The tall mage broke off his recitation.
“Is there a problem?”
Mimi smiled wanly. “Not really …
but if this is going to take a while, I could really do with something to
drink. I don’t think I need to eat anything in here,
but I still feel thirsty … ”
“Yeesh—I’ve been living alone for
so long my manners have atrophied,” Maxwell muttered
contritely. “Well, there’s milk, apple juice, whiskey,
cof—well, not coffee exactly—”
“… Not exactly?”
“Um … ” The wizard looked away,
embarrassed. “I’m afraid there’ll be a slight
problem with food. I’m, er … ”
Mimi’s heart sank. “Oh,
Kami-sama, no … I didn’t think there was anyone outside of
Japan who had … ”
He nodded, grimly. “Kotobuki’s
Disorder. Whenever I try to cook anything more complicated than a
Cup-o-Noodles, I go completely insane.”
“So if you try to make coffee … ”
“Well, that’s not so bad.
I’ve managed to get a consistent result there—not quite what
you’d expect from coffee, but not inedible either.” He
grinned. “Coffee-tea: half Kona Gold, half Lapsang
Souchong, enough caffeine to wake the dead.”
“Actually, that sounds …
interesting. What the heck, I’ll try a cup … ”
“If you’re sure, then. I’ll
be right back.”
Maxwell walked offscreen, toward (Mimi presumed)
the kitchen. Much rattling and clanging ensued, along with an
occasional steam-hiss and at least one yelp of agony. Was this
really such a good idea … ?
Five minutes later, he returned to her field of
view, wheeling a small cart with a bowl of sugar cubes, a cream pitcher,
a steaming cup of … coffee? … and saucer thereon. His
changeable T-shirt, now slightly damp, had switched to Edvard
Münch’s “The Scream”. “So,” he said,
“I think the next step’s up to you.”
“I suppose this is as good a time as any to
test out the Electric Warp system,” Mimi sighed.
“You’d better get out of the way—we don’t want
both of us trapped in here.”
Mike nodded and stepped back off camera.
Now let’s see, how was this supposed to work from inside … ?
Ah, yes. A thought called up a control
panel; she carefully extended the ghostmachine’s digitizer-array
dish, limited its field to the cart, and intoned:
“Witch—ack. Death Busters Electric Warp!”
The cart and its contents vanished from the
monitor, and reappeared in front of her, within the virtual realm.
The dish retracted automatically, and Michael’s worried face poked
into the camera. “Everything all right?”
“Looks like.” She took the cup,
smelled its rather odd but not unappealing aroma. “It came
through fine, at least if it’s supposed to smell like this …
” Sip. “WHOOF! *gasp* Damn this
stuff is fierce!” The tarry tea-flavor blended … interestingly
with the gourmet roast. Or perhaps “synergistically” was more
the word. Mimi dropped two sugar cubes into the cup, then five more
just to be safe. “It’s … pretty good, really.
Arigato.”
“De nada,” her host replied
offhandedly. “So, shall I get back to the story …?”
She nodded.
* * *
Breakfast, as usual, was a brutally plain bowl of
cereal. It must look damn odd to outsiders, this huge fancy kitchen
stocked entirely with convenience foods, but I’d long since learned
to accept my nature: the only thing I can cook with any real chance
of success is curry. Don’t ask me why, almost everyone with KD
has the same odd exception. Trouble is, I HATE curry. The
last time I’d dared to eat a dish of my own creation I
couldn’t cast spells for a week.
The extreme secrecy in which my life was
shrouded made hiring a cook, or even a catering service, unfeasible
… and made it damn hard to meet girls … so if I wanted
to eat it was this or dine out all the time. Well, by this time
next month secrecy would no longer be a problem. Heck, my face
would be on the front page of every newspaper on Earth: Michael
Robert Maxwell, The Man who Saved the World! I’d be
Time’s Man of the Year, the surefire winner of the Nobel Prize,
and—let’s not forget—the World’s Most Eligible
Bachelor!
Of course, fundamentalists everywhere would be
demanding that I be burned at the stake. There’s a little
cloud in every silver lining …
Modern society isn’t the first civilization
to rise on this battered world of ours. It isn’t even the
second … more like the sixth, if you count a couple of
nonhuman precursors.
First came the Ancients, so long ago that the
last traces of their presence were lost with our immediate
predecessors. More recently, the Sidhe and their faerie kindred,
like the Ancients refugees from another star. When they retreated
to a pocket reality, the humans who’d unseated them built an empire
on their magicks, only to lose it when the alien power faded.
Humanity fell back into savagery, only to rise
again when a relic of the Ancients granted them great knowledge—and
the ability to travel throughout all the worlds of Sol System, made
habitable by the Ancients’ unfathomable powers. This Golden
Imperium fell to alien invaders, but centuries later their yoke was
thrown off … and the Silver Millennium began.
So: Once upon a time, there was a shining
civilization built on the power of magic; an age of wonder and beauty,
when tall ships rode the winds between the worlds; a … you get the
idea by now. Unfortunately, ages of wonder and beauty have a
distressing tendency to end in spasms of apocalyptic destruction.
Odd that. The Silver Millennium met its end around twelve thousand
years ago—okay, twelve thousand, three hundred and forty-three last
February—at the hands of a seriously demented sorceress named Beryl,
queen of Arcadia. Spurned love and hunger for power drove her to
attempt conquest of the Earth; but to accomplish her goals she ultimately
released Metallia, the Mother of Demons and incarnation of all human
evil, from her prison in the Abyss. Metallia’s presence in the
physical plane somehow warped whatever magical effects kept the rest of
the Solar System inhabitable and wiped out all life therein. That
and Metallia’s subsequent banishment turned Earth’s continental
drift up to “frappé”, severely rearranging the landscape
in a matter of years and causing no end of headaches for contemporary
geologists.
Somewhere along the way, Earth’s mana
wells—sources of all magical energy for this planet—were capped
off. That pretty much sealed the fate of the era of magical
civilization, and even the memory of the Silver Millennium was distorted
beyond recognition if not lost outright …
… with one slight exception.
I made sure for the n-to-the-nth-power time that
everything I might need was stored in pocketspace. Not hard to do
as one hundred and twenty-eight generations before me had dumped anything
they didn’t have room for, or which was too openly magical to leave
lying around, into the extradimensional warehouse. The control ring
I wore, one of three, came complete with a mental inventory
program—sort of a precursor to the database. Yes, it was all
there, same as last night and the day before that and every time I’d
checked for the past week. Mental note: don’t drink
coffee today, Mike, you’re wired enough as is.
Among the last valiant defenders of Earth there
was a man by the name of Jerran Mazael: a court wizard of the
Golden Kingdom of Mu, sworn to defend the Emerald Throne and so forth and
so on. Not of Muvian blood himself, he was a second-generation
immigrant—his father was half Mercurian and half Belter, and his mom
hailed from California.
(No, really—the modern state is named after
the “legendary” kingdom, one of my ancestors ghostwrote a
fantasy novel loosely based on it just as the Europeans were exploring
North America so the name was picked up again. It was a little
tropical island kingdom, some way off the west coast, so …)
Jerran, being a perceptive kinda guy, realized
the probable consequences of Beryl’s war early on; unfortunately he
couldn’t get folks to listen to him—no one wanted to believe
Beryl would actually go so far as to free the Demon Queen, destroying
most of what she wanted to rule. Preparing for the worst, he sent
his wife and daughter into hiding in the most geographically stable
location he could find—somewhere in what’s now the Canadian
Shield, I believe—and gave them a concise history of the Silver
Millennium, with instructions to keep it safe and the memory of Mu alive
until things had settled down enough to start rebuilding, however many
generations that might take.
In this, Jerran’s foresight very nearly
failed him.
All preparations made, I had just one stop before
heading out: the family shrine.
Built in the closest approximation of ancient
Muvian architecture we could manage, the shrine hall takes up most of the
basement. A bit untraditional but it’d be a lot harder to hide
above ground level, and a room half the size of a football field the
walls of which were hung with four hundred and ninety-two portraits and
family groups—many of which were done on deerskins so old as to
invite carbon-dating—would be considered odd even for this
city. Then there was the flag on the far wall, the ancient emblem
of the Terran Confederation: on a blue field, a golden sunburst
with twenty-three points—one blackened and broken. One point
for each of the old Kingdoms of Earth, minus one for fallen Arcadia.
I paid silent respects to
492-Times-Great-Grandfather Jerran, and walked down the rows of distant
ancestors until I reached familiar faces. Nicholas and Sarah
Maxwell: my parents, dead these three years. Lighting an
incense-cone, I knelt and addressed their portrait.
“Mom, Dad … this is the day. I
cracked the last of the code months ago, but the planetary influences
weren’t right ’til now … waiting all that time nearly
drove me nuts, but I managed.
“Today our oaths are going to be fulfilled,
the dreams of twelve thousand years realized. The seal’s going
down, and it’s just the beginning; with full power to work with, and
magic on the outside of the Outer Seals, I won’t need to wait
another year. Uluru’s next on my list; then Giza, Angkor Wat,
St. Louis … I figure on breaking the seals on Tôkyô in
three months.
“By this time next year, magic will be a
power in the world again … and you can finally rest in peace.
Mom, Dad … everyone …
“… I swear, I’ll make you
proud.”
The devastation following Metallia’s
banishment exceeded Jerran’s wildest nightmares. On top of
that, he hadn’t foreseen that some callous bastard would seal off
the mana wells—no one ever found out just who did it, but the
general feeling in the family is that it was a last bit of vengeance on
Beryl’s part. There was no safe place to hide. The seas
opened, swallowing Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu; earthquakes and volcanoes
turned the surviving continents upside-down; anything left was pulverized
by glaciers advancing with unnatural speed. Widespread drought and
famine were the last straws; within five years, all traces of the
Kingdoms of Earth had vanished, and humanity was reduced to scattered
bands of desperate wanderers, trying to survive in a world that had
simply gone mad.
And yet, through all the chaos, through fire and
darkness and the breaking of the world … through the fall of
civilization and a swift descent into barbarism …
… somehow, Jerran Mazael’s daughter
held on to her father’s dream.
And her son after her, and her granddaughter
… on and on, in an unbroken line … for twelve thousand
years. They passed on the Ton-lo Codex and the spoken and written
language as best they could; they held on to the memory of the Silver
Millennium, while all around them the world changed …
… and they held on to the magic.
I could have teleported over to the site, but
even with pre-prepared departure and arrival circles it’d take too
much time and power. Besides, I wanted to go by the scenic
route: to take one last look at the world before transforming it
utterly. This might be my last free moment for years; once the
seals were down my real work would begin. It’d take
years just to get magic accepted by western civilization, as a benign
force rather than the power of Satan or some such nonsense; developing a
new magic-based society could easily occupy the rest of my life. It
was all too easy to imagine myself in the role of D.D. Harriman, from
Heinlein’s “The Man who Sold the Moon” and
“Requiem”: achieving his dream, yet unable to take part
in it himself … until his death. ’Home is the sailor,
home from sea … ’
… Ancestors, I was getting morbid …
Anyway. I drove the Stingray down Empire
Grade, heading through the UCSC campus into Santa Cruz proper. The
forested foothills and open meadows of the University of California at
Santa Cruz were a beautiful sight as always; this place might be the only
campus in the States where deer and cougar would wander into the parking
lots. It was certainly the weirdest university in the US, if
not the world, but that’s par for the course in this fair
city. (By way of example: back in ’86 the student body
overwhelmingly rejected the official university mascot—a sea
lion—in favor of a critter they felt was more distinctive and
symbolic of the region: Ariolomax dolichophalus, a
shockingly yellow mollusc known commonly as the banana slug.) Down
past Cowell College and the Bay Tree Bookstore, swinging past the
Festival Glen where some of the oddest versions of Shakespeare known to
man are performed each summer; at last I turned onto Bay Street and the
city.
H’mmm. I know you were working with
some pretty advanced magic—all those flamethrowers, jet packs,
alchemically altered daimons—but how much did you really know about
the theory behind it? I’m not sure how much I need to
explain here.
… Yeah, thought so. Nothing but
amateurs these days … oh, sorry, no offense meant.
Magic is part and parcel of the world, an
infinitely renewed energy that wells up from the molten core at certain
spots and spreads across the Earth. At least, that’s the way
it’s supposed to work. With the mana wells capped off, all the
wonders that relied on that power failed and died; skyships fell like
stones, wizard-built castles crumbled, and spellcasting became nearly
impossible.
Nearly.
The seals consumed almost all the mana flowing
into them, but a thin trickle escaped into the world. Some of this
in turn was confined to the regions around the wells by an outer ring of
wards, but a little—a bare minimum—made it out. The
mystic knowledge of the Silver Millennium was predicated on the vast
amounts of mana then available, and few or none of those spells would
function in the magic-starved world; but there was some magic
left, and there were a scattered few who would not give up on it.
Gradually, over thousands of years, new forms of spellcasting were
discovered.
The Mazael clan now had a new goal; the
restoration of civilization, they felt, could not happen without the
restoration of magic. In the cataclysm’s wake, however, a new
attitude was spreading among the survivors: magic, they
felt, was responsible for the destruction of the world—so magic, and
magicians of any stripe, were not to be trusted. At best, shunned;
at worst … well, let’s not go there. Anyone even
suspected of wielding arcane forces was in serious trouble. This
perception wasn’t universal, and most post-lapsarian cultures that
did subscribe to it eventually forgot, but by the time magic could have
been widely accepted again nearly every scrap of true sorcerous lore had
been lost. Fear of wizards, moreover, would persist into
historical times in the culture that eventually produced three of the
most influential religions of the modern era.
There shall not be found among you any one
that maketh his son or his daughter to pass through the fire, or that
uses divination, or an observer of times, or an enchanter, or a witch; or
a charmer, or a consulter with familiar spirits, or a wizard, or a
necromancer.
Or, to sum up:
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
Thus, the family went underground. The
Mazaels became nomads, wandering the world in search of any mystic
knowledge or artifacts that had survived the Fall, and of the mana wells
themselves. Our oaths and history were closely guarded secrets,
passed on only along a single line of descent; at no time would more than
six living people know the full truth. Husbands and wives adopted
into the clan either swore oaths of secrecy or were kept out of the loop
… or, in extreme cases, subjected to spells to insure their
silence. The line came close to extinction time and again, but we
Mazaels are a tenacious breed …
On the surface, Santa Cruz is a nice, quiet
little college town on the north coast of Monterey Bay. On the
surface. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find we fit in nicely
with the general view of California as a weird and silly place; dig deep
enough and you’ll realize that compared to this town, the rest of
the state is a model of sanity and boredom. We don’t generally
have the open, in-your-face insanity that San Francisco and Los Angeles
are famous for; Santa Cruz is more quietly weird, the kind of
weird that sneaks up behind you and reads strange poetry at you while
daubing clown makeup on your face. Tôkyô might be a
magnet for supernatural creatures and magical phenomena, but SC is the
place where all the nonsupernatural weirdness will inevitably find
itself.
You may well have seen Santa Cruz without
knowing it; “The Lost Boys” was filmed here, as was
“Killer Klowns from Outer Space.” Mind you, we don’t
really have vampires … we just have vampire poseurs, roaming
downtown after dark in small black-clad cliques and inspiring passersby
to cry: “Children of the night … shut up!”
The quirky locals were out in full force
today. Driving down Pacific Avenue, I noticed the Belligerent Poet
accosting a hapless yuppie couple. Further along, the Hurdy-Gurdy Man was
cranking his odd-but-delightful musical whatchamacallit and putting on a
puppet show; just out of his range, a couple of very good bagpipers
separated the strong from the weak. An elite squad of Krishnas,
more Goths than I cared to think about, and a small pack of neo-Nazi
skinheads spouted their various brands of philosophy or vitriol with the
usual absolute lack of effect on passersby; and a bunch of ninjas were
assiduously failing to conceal themselves in the shrubbery.
Probably a good sign. The Santa Cruz
Weirdness Effect was cranked all the way up; you never see ninjas
on Pacific. (Usually they hang around Beach Flats, annoying the
Boardwalk-goers.) Ought to make the breaking easier.
At least, I heartily hoped so.
Over thousands of years of exploration, the
family discovered the new locations of many mana wells. What little
magic remained to the world was concentrated in their vicinity, but even
that was a pale shadow of what had once been … most of the time.
Mana wells vary greatly in strength; the four
largest are at least an order of magnitude more powerful than the
rest. From most to least mana output, the Big Four are located at
Tôkyô, Stonehenge, northern Canada … and Santa
Cruz. Of course, the Tôkyô well—on the site of old
Arcadia’s capital, as near as we can make out—pumps out more
mana than the other three put together.
There’s a sort of pressure-release system
built into the Seals; if they simply bottled the mana up, increasing
strain would eventually pop them like a champagne cork … and that
kind of uncontrolled unsealing would be extraordinarily bad.
Anything could happen. Everything could happen, and probably
would, all at once. Instead, in addition to the constant
consumption of energy that keeps the seals themselves in place, excess
mana is vented through one of the Big Four seals into deep space.
The position rotates among the Four every few hundred years; it’s
been Tôkyô’s turn since around 1432. The
concentration of mana around the Seals has … peculiar effects
on probability and the space-time continuum; these are most pronounced
around the current vent, but the other wells all have their little …
oddities.
As I turned off Pacific and headed down toward
Soquel, I sent out a quick mystic probe to the nearby Anomaly.
Good, very good … the links I’d set up to the St. George Hotel
were all in place. The architect couldn’t have known he
was building it around a permanent spacewarp, but nevertheless it’s
a five-dimensional structure and very easy to get lost in. The St.
George was one of the linchpins of the scheme, an anchor to which I and
my parents and grandparents before me had attached dozens of delicate
manastrings; they spread across the county, linked to the borders of the
Outer and Inner Seals and to the other Anomaly up in the mountains.
When the moment came, I’d begin tugging those strings, and the Seals
would distort and weaken; a few hours of that and the currents of mana
would stretch them beyond their limits, and magic would be loose in the
world again.
Working magic became a matter of
conservation. Even extremely simple, low-power spells like
firelighting now required more time and effort than rubbing two sticks of
wood together; the challenge was to either find some other source of
energy, or reduce power requirements. Most wizards, I’m sorry
to say, went with the first option.
Necromancy is an ugly word. It’s even
uglier when put into practice.
Most of the world frowns on killing people, or
even animals, to extract their psychic energy and convert it into
mana. This did nothing to improve magic’s reputation, and
somewhere along the line my ancestors decided something had to be done
before humanity was poisoned against wizardry forever.
Thus began the Hunt.
The road led me down by the bay, past the Beach
Boardwalk and the yacht harbor. As the morning fog burned off,
surfers could be seen continuing the endless search for the perfect wave,
as they had since the day a century past when two Hawaiian princes
introduced their national sport to the bewildered locals; Jack
O’Neill was out there himself today, gray beard and eyepatch
unmistakable, no doubt testing some new refinement of the wetsuit.
It was a beautiful day. How much would
change, I wondered, after the unsealing? Surely not even the rise
of magic could draw their attention away from the sea. Jack’d
probably come up with a water-repellent/heating spell within the year.
The thought crossed my mind, as it had countless
times the past few years: could society cope? Would the chaos
of returning magic save humanity or plunge the world into another, far
worse dark age?
As always, I squelched that traitorous
impulse. Magic was needed, urgently, desperately. The human
species was on the road to self-destruction anyway, and there was no
other solution. I’d follow my ancestors’ dream to its
end, no matter what karma I might accumulate in the process …
… but for the sake of everyone in
California, I’d best not repeat the error of sixty years past.
Problem: how to maintain absolute secrecy
and still hunt down wizards who abused their power?
Solution: a foolproof disguise, and the
creation of a legend.
Somewhere around the fifth millennium BCE, as
primitive cities began to rise, Ninhurga Mazael and her children created
an artifact of power beyond what most wizards of the day would have
believed possible. They took the skin and skull of a dire wolf,
invoking the power of its body and spirit, and made of it a fur cape in
the classic barbarian-warrior fashion, wolf’s head acting as a
rather outre’ hat. Whoever wore the Wolfsark could shift at
will from normal human shape to an eight-foot-tall beastman, gifted with
immense strength, great speed, and the senses and fighting spirit of the
wolf.
Wherever rumors of dark sorcery spread, the
Mazaels followed. If there were indeed necromancers or daemonists
at work, or the rare Unseleigh Sidhe working to take back the world they
lost so long ago, their careers would soon be cut short by an unstoppable
force: the beast that could not be killed, for if one should die
another of the family would take his place; the Guardian of the Arts
Arcane; the Wolf that walked like a man.
“Warlock” is a very old word, and one
that does not mean— as most people think—“male
witch”; the root is “wærloga”,
“oathbreaker.” As my ancestors saw it, any wizard who
used the dark arts was betraying his craft and his species; so the
beastman became known as the warlock-hunting wolf … or, eventually,
the Warwolf. Though the legends have been greatly distorted, nearly
all tales of “werewolves” have their genesis in sightings of
Mazaels at work. The Wolfsark is still in our
possession—my possession now, as the last of the
line—preserved by means of magic and just as efficacious now as it
was when first created.
I’d had to use the ’sark myself a time
or two, though mostly to scare the living daylights out of people
who’ve just discovered dark magicks before they have a chance to get
in too deep. There are, on average, around three cases of
supernatural crime (as the family defines it) a year, worldwide …
or at least there were before the Senshi showed up, it’s quieted
down completely these last few years. In the process of dealing
with such problems, I’ve created new myths myself … to my
eternal regret. If I’d known there was a witness to that last
case, who would years later become a pretentious game designer who spells
his name with a dot, I’d never have put on that act about being the
living avenger of Gaea …
Driving through Live Oak, Capitola and Soquel, I
turned north once more, heading back up into the Santa Cruz Mountains and
a rendesvous with destiny. A quick check of the other Anomaly—the
Mystery Spot, where gravity operates at strange angles and water can flow
uphill—completed the grand tour: time to get to work.
At the forested foot of Loma Prieta, tallest
mountain in the region, I’d set up a shielded workspace in a grassy
clearing. A powerful spell of diversion, variously known as the
“Who Me?” effect or an S.E.P. field, ensured that no passing
hikers would pay any attention to me.
Despite the emergence of other magical traditions
over the millennia, the Mazaels kept their secret even from
wizards. No hint of their true nature was ever allowed to leak out,
for persecution of others might have led back to us. A little too
paranoid if you ask me, but we did survive where so many failed.
This is not to say that the family was
completely isolated. Here and there, as they traveled across
the world, my ancestors saw opportunities to nudge reborn civilization
forward; under various aliases, they introduced non-magical knowledge
into early societies. Most of these efforts were kept quiet, but
now and then legends arose in their wake.
Many demi-deities and culture-heroes the world
over have their origins in my ancestors’ intervention.
Wayland, Maui, Quetzalcoatl, Susa-no-O … in most cases, of course,
the truth has been distorted beyond recognition by local
prejudices. It wasn’t Prometheus but Pandora who taught
the ancient Hellenic peoples metalworking, and it was her idiot husband
who unthinkingly set loose a horde of bound minor demons left over from
the Silver Millennium. So it goes …
Magic does not obey the laws of conventional
physics, of what you might call the electrogravitic spectrum.
Magical energy, in effect, has seniority over electrogravitic
physics, and can alter or negate any and all of its laws as directed.
How magic works—well, that’s a
mystery. My family has been studying the nature of magic for twelve
thousand years and change, and while we know more than anyone else about
what magic does, why still eludes us.
The “what” isn’t exactly
simple. I could take four or five years and give you a basic
understanding of thaumaturgical theory, but neither of us has that kind
of time. Here’s the least inaccurate summation I can
manage:
The fundamental units of electrogravitic energy
manifest themselves as particles or waves, or “wavicles”, or
whatever quantum buzzword is currently popular. The fundamental
units of magical energy are none of the above, but more closely resemble
threads.
There are two basic types of spellcasting found
in any mystic tradition. Many wizards are limited to drawing mana from
their own bodies; living things generate mana in much the same fashion as
worlds, though in far smaller quantities. As few humans have any
great mana reserves, these Low Magicians were severely restricted even
before the Fall. High Magic involves tapping the mana currents of
the outside world; this grants much more potential power, but involves
far more complicated ritual to access, and in the new mana-starved world
it was very nearly useless. Those lucky few who happen to have very
large natural storage capacities can still fuel their own
spells—this also being classified as High Magic—but even
so, outside the mana wells their powers are replenished very very
slowly. A High Wizard in the barrens might be able to cast
one or two major spells a year.
My family rejected both paths, and found one far
more effective.
As there are ninety or so naturally occuring
chemical elements, so there are millions of varieties of
manathread. Each has its own unique frequency; each is attracted to
a particular configuration of matter and/or energy, and can most easily
affect it. These “configurations” cover a range from the
simplicity of, say, a water molecule or a single photon, all the way up
to such “macro” phenomena as trailer parks, giraffes, or random
thoughts about Quentin Tarantino movies. Combinations of
manathreads, like atoms into molecules, increase the potential complexity
even further. (Trailer park mana has a magnetic attraction to
tornado mana, just for example.)
Normally, however, they don’t do
much. Unguided mana just sits there, altering probability in
various subtle ways, but nothing more; each of Earth’s mana wells
has its own particular tricks. The Tôkyô well attracts
supernatural entities and other forms of extreme weirdness, the Santa
Cruz well scooping up any leftovers; Wiltshire causes crop circles.
The three small mana wells surrounding the Bermuda Triangle do not
cause ships and planes to disappear—they make people believe
that ships and planes disappear. Similar effects keep sasquatches
and yeti away from anyone with a really good camera, cause religious
images to appear in rice pudding, and convince otherwise sane and
rational people that Elvis Presley and Marilyn Monroe are dead.
(They’re happily married and live right next door. I’ll
introduce you once we've got you out of that thing.)
In order to truly warp reality, mana must be
motivated— ironically, by the very same sapient life-forms its
probability-shifting helps bring about. True magic requires, above
all else, a vivid imagination and a deliberate act of will.
A picnic blanket, precisely eight feet square,
red and white striped: check. Arrange corners at the four
compass points, weigh down. Check.
1/50 scale model Volkswagen Bug, red, placed on
north point. Check.
Green glass vase holding three carnations and a
plastic chopstick, placed on east point. Check.
A road map of Outer Mongolia, folded into an
origami swan; cloth napkin with the Declaration of Independence scribbled
on it in gold crayon; eleven chocolate Pocky sticks arranged in the form
of the kanji “ki”; all on west point. Check.
The 1973 Tolkien Calendar, missing December; a
statue of Bettie Page carved from a nickel-iron meteorite; both on south
point. Check.
CD player on northwest side with
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony playing on infinite repeat: check.
CD player on southeast side with Warren
Zevon’s “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner” playing on
infinite repeat, backwards: check.
Around all this, the Septagram of Infinite
Recursion and the Enneagram of Unbinding laid out in police-line tape and
Christmas-tree lights: check, double-check, and triple-check
(can’t be too careful with magic circles).
It’s at times like this that you truly
appreciate S.E.P. fields …
Wizards’ work is more peculiar than most
wizards realize.
All that chanting and gesturing, sigils and
incense, eye of newt and hair of dog—it’s all meant to draw in
the right sorts of mana, linking and shaping the threads into a construct
which is then energized by the will of the caster. Get it just right and
reality changes in the way you desire. Get it completely wrong and
your will has nothing to do with the pattern you’ve made, so nothing
happens and the construct dissipates harmlessly. Get it just a
little bit wrong—but you don’t want to know about
that. Really.
The more alike two objects are, the more nearly
identical their mana-signatures will be … and the more easily they
can be used to affect one another: like calls to like, the Law of
Similarity.
Two objects that were once in contact likewise
retain a mana-link: once together always together, the Law of
Contagion.
The basis of the most primitive magicks, right
there.
From there, though, the principles get odder and
harder to understand, even if they can be worked with. Why should a
symbol have the same mana signature as the thing it
represents? I couldn’t tell you, nor could any of my ancestors
back to the Silver Millennium and beyond, but it does …
Thing is, most wizards in the modern world
aren’t really aware of the process on any significant level.
Nine out of ten spellcasters haven’t even developed their mystic
senses properly, and are basically working blind. (I should point
out here that as far as I can tell, the ability to sense magic is present
in every sapient being—possibly in every soul, from the life-force
of bacteria on up—but most humans will never get more than the
occasional chill down their spines. This sense can, however,
be refined and heightened with practice.) Furthermore, of that ten
percent who can perceive arcane forces with some degree of clarity, the
vast majority see only flowing rivers of energy—and must work those
rivers clumsily, with great effort. To shift the metaphor, think of
their spells as thick rope tied into crude knots.
And now we come at last to that tiny minority,
those who have learned to refine their mage-sight to the point that they
can sense—and manipulate—the individual manathreads,
peeling string off the rope and playing cats’-cradle, weaving
powerful and subtle magicks that no mere sorcerer can possibly match,
while using a bare minimum of energy; who can work great wizardries even
outside the wells.
That is a very tiny minority indeed. To
wit:
Me.
I am not a wizard.
I am a Spellweaver.
One thing left to check. In a spell of this
magnitude and precision, any intrusion could be
disastrous—that’s any intrusion in the entire county. If
anyone else out there was working reasonably powerful magic, particularly
the darker varieties, the Unsealing might be warped out of control.
A lesson we’d learned at far too high a cost.
The Santa Cruz area was liberally salted with
intangible, invisible sensor matrices—my own invention, so
delicately crafted as to be utterly undetectable by any normal
wizard. The “ghosteyes” relayed information on local
magical conditions to a central processor of sorts: really just a
bunch of hand mirrors glued to a clipboard, but it worked well
enough. All the mirror monitors came up normal—no trace of
demonic or necromantic energy anywhere in the Zone, just the usual slight
background noise from the few local psychics and white witches with a bit
of real power and no clear idea what to do with it beyond a vague urge to
visit Japan.
This time, nothing could possibly go wrong.
The key proved to be a spell meant to give
nonwizards mage-sight—more properly, to temporarily enhance that
faculty in those who had never developed it. Around 6230 BCE,
great-etc.-granddaddy Jubal found that spell could be used as a sort of
training method; once you’d seen magic, you knew what to look for
and could concentrate more effectively on developing the power within
yourself. A few generations down the line, someone thought of
applying it to an infant—and that was the breakthrough
we’d been searching for.
If one had this spell applied repeatedly from a
very young age, cranking the sensitivity up a bit every time,
mage-sight rapidly developed to the limits the spell was capable
of—said limits being a little beyond those of the magics then
practiced by the family. The children grew up able to work spells
with just that much more attention to detail—and that included the
Spell of Sight. Their children, under the slightly advanced
version, could in turn use magic with even greater ease, and needing
significantly less power. The tradeoff was time: it took much
longer to form a spell matrix of such precision than a conventional
wizard would have needed.
After a few generations, this cycle hit a
wall: there was so much mana within the wells that the spell could
be refined no further, for at this level the power began to obscure the
increasing clarity of Sight. Any further improvements would have to
be made outside, in the near-total absence of mystic forces—but by
this time, the nascent spellweavers could work their magics reasonably
well in the barrens. So it went, generation after generation
refining their Sight and their powers, learning to manipulate mana on a
level no wizard of the Silver Millennium had ever even imagined …
… except that it soon became obvious that
someone had.
The Great Seals could not be perceived with
conventional mage-sight; all one could do was deduce their
existence from local effects. As the family grew in skill and
subtlety, that changed: the eightieth generation since Jubal could
just make out the Seals’ structure—and what they saw was no
conventional magic but something very much like their own weavings.
Only far, far, FAR more complex and
subtle. They couldn’t even begin to understand the Seals, let
alone dispel them.
We never have worked out just how that
happened. Ever since, though, we’ve been mapping the Seals, in
ever-increasing detail as the Sight became clearer. The apparent
limit was reached five hundred years ago, and it’s taken us most of
that time just to fully chart all the near-fractal details of each well
… but now, after so long, we were ready.
I was ready.
Where my great-great-grandfather had failed,
sixty years ago, I was going to succeed. There was no chance of
error. The New Age of Magic was about to unfold, and I’d be
leading the way …
12:30 PM. The setup was as ready as
it’d ever be. Time for the initial bindings. Sitting
crosslegged at the blanket’s center, I extended my senses into the
realm of the invisible.
All around me, energies ebbed and flowed,
currents of force in colors no nonwizard knows drawn toward the absurd
yet powerful collection of artifacts on the blanket. The silvery
pattern of the Great Seal overlaid it all, threads converging here at an
inner corner of the vast pentagram they defined; my own strings of arcane
power and those spun by my parents, and theirs before them, were woven
through that impossibly complex web, warp to its woof. With a
thought, the loose ends drifted toward me, ready for the first stage.
A Mazael with a goal will never turn away from
it, never give up as long as the faintest possibility of success might
exist. It would no doubt be proverbial, if absolute secrecy
weren’t one of our goals.
For twelve millennia we pursued the golden dream
of magic without flag or fail, hanging on to the past with an unbreakable
grip while pursuing the future in an unstoppable charge. A thousand
times we came close to failure, to losing the path and the dream, but
always my ancestors found the will and the means to carry on. Much
knowledge has been lost despite all our efforts; the family’s
understanding of the Codex has fluctuated quite a bit over the ages, and
I strongly suspect that the translation spell now used to convert it to
English tends to present the information in rather more mythic form than
Jerran’s original intent.
But still I grew up learning to see things no
one else could, and to work with that unseen world to accomplish
miracles. I was raised on a diet of fantastic stories: tales
of the Warrior Angels who protected the Nine Worlds, of the StarHunters
who embodied the powers of the constellations, of the great wars that
created the Silver Millennium and the dark uprising that ended it; of the
Hunter Orion and his doomed love for the Angel of Winter; and—best
of all—the adventures of the Iron Captain, last of the Stone
Guardians of Earth. As a child I wanted to be the Captain,
or at least to be a crewman on his skyship, the Nemesis; to hunt
the pirates of the Asteroids, foil the schemes of the Usurpers of the
Tenth Planet, battle the dark armies of Arcadia—
—well, perhaps I’d have a chance to
forge my own legends.
The last knot slid into place; the labor of
millennia was very nearly complete. There remained only a final
charging, and then the Unsealing would at long last begin.
Worlds generate mana. I know, we’ve
been over that one before. What I didn’t tell you then is that
each of the planets of the Solar System creates mana with slightly
different characteristics; a skilled sorcerer, such as myself, can call
down trickles of aspected power from the other worlds to lend strength to
certain types of spell. We don’t really know why this
should be, aside from a few vague references in the Codex to the Ancient
artifacts that maintained the worlds and in some way reflected—or
perhaps caused—the planetary aspects. All I can tell
you is that it’s often considerably harder to sort out the right
varieties of mana from our scant supply than it is to draw a bit of the
pre-refined stuff from the other worlds, lifeless but still
magic-rich. The amounts involved are meaningless in terms of raw
power, but very useful in precision work.
You’ve probably already guessed what some
of these aspects are, but here’s the full list:
To strengthen spells of ice, cold, mathematical
calculations, or heightened senses, invoke the power of Mercury.
For power over light, metal, or divining the
true nature of things, call upon Venus.
If teleportation or the creation of
psychoplasmic, “false matter” artifacts is your desire, Earth
itself holds the key.
Luna, our sister world and
inappropriately-termed “Moon”, can aid in spiritual healing.
Fire and foresight fall under the purview of
Mars.
The four major asteroids have power over alchemy
and refining of any kind, be it the forging of metals or the advancement
of the soul.
For lightning or botany, invoke Jupiter.
Saturn guards the primal forces: Life and
Death, Creation and Obliteration, Existence and Oblivion … the Song
and the Silence. The highest Sephiroth and lowest Qliphoth, in
perfect balance. If you must call upon the ringed world’s
power, to heal or harm, do so very very carefully …
Uranus’s magic strengthens the element of
earth, and the creation of true matter from nothing.
Look to Neptune in matters of the sea, or of
clairvoyance.
If you want to cast a spell involving
alterations in the flow of Time, do not invoke Pluto, because to
do so is to insure your spell will fail utterly. Do, however, call on
that remote world for sonic effects.
Finally, for spells of storms, winds and sheer
destruction, Nemesis —the tenth planet, unknown to modern
astronomers and all but the few real astrologers—is your best
bet.
“{Spirits of space, powers of the
worlds,}” I chanted in the best approximation of ancient Muvian the
family could manage, “{hear my need, lend me your
strength!}” This wasn’t really a request—there was
nothing sapient out there to hear it—but it helped to focus the
spell.
“{Mercury, thrice-mighty messenger, bring
me your gift of cold, clear thought that I may not fail!
“{Jupiter, lord of the lightning, bend your
energies to this task!
“{Nemesis, bringer of righteous wrath, help
me to destroy the seals that bind my world!}”
And so on, for the better part of an hour,
gathering power from above and channeling it into the spell of
unbinding. This day would severely tax the capabilities of my
anti-laryngitis amulet. At last, the second stage complete, I broke
for a late lunch: warmed-over Chinese takeout, garlic shrimp and
lemon chicken …
… and, ancestors save me from my own
foolishness, fortune cookies.
Magic, as I’ve pointed out, warps
probability.
Thing is, this doesn’t just apply to
places. People who practice the arcane arts sometimes find
that the arts are practicing them right back, and they have acquired
… “quirks”, you might say. Little things, like
constantly getting other people’s mail, or never (and I mean
never) being able to find an unoccupied parking space within half
a mile of one’s destination. Life’s little annoyances,
elevated to the level of running gags. You’d better watch out
for that.
Whenever I open a fortune cookie, and read the
pithy saying within … it is always, always, one hundred per
cent accurate. And I don’t just get the standard proverbs or
vague well-wishes, either; once in a while something undeniably prophetic
pops up. “Your car will be struck by lightning tomorrow,”
say, or “There is an 1834 silver dollar stuck to the heel of your
sneaker.”
… And let’s not even discuss the time
I got “Help! I’m being held prisoner in a fortune cookie
factory!” Took me nearly a month to track the poor guy down.
Given that, cracking the cookie could be
described as a bad move. Whatever it had to say, I’d be stuck with
it—once foreseen, the future was fixed, at least beyond my power to
change. And normally I avoid prophecy like the plague; on the
whole, I think knowing the future is something to be avoided at all
costs. Certain foreknowledge destroys hope …
… but the siren call of the crunchy sesame
cookies and their little pink slips of paper has seduced me more often
than I care to think about. For one thing, when most of your
friends love Chinese food it’s hard to avoid the damn things.
And how much prophecy can you pack into one of those things, anyway?
So, half-afraid and half-expectant, I unfurled
the fortune and read:
“By the end of the day you are going to wish
you had stayed in bed.”
Disturbing. But so damn vague that it could
mean anything; maybe I was going to get rained on, or the anti-laryngitis
charm would give out …
Okay, let’s try another.
“You will soon be going on a very strange
journey.”
Wonderful, the fortune writers were Pratchett
fans. Could point to success; hopping round the world breaking the
seals, or something similar.
Throwing caution to the winds, I picked another
cookie out of the bag. Just time for one more before zero hour …
“Continue your current course of action and
you will meet your one true love within three months. Turn aside
now and lose her forever.”
Well now! If that wasn’t a good
omen, someone had redefined the term while my back was turned.
I’d always (if somewhat reluctantly) held the fate of the world to
be more important than my love life—or lack thereof—but if the
two were actually intertwined that tightly, I wasn’t about to
complain!
And when a Mazael talks about “one true
love”, he means it … there’s never been more than
one chance for any of us. One of the reasons why the family’s
stayed so small. Our destiny was foretold ages ago, in the Fire of
Mars and the Mirror of Venus: No Mazael shall ever love more
than once. But no Mazael shall ever love falsely. I was
the last, and could by no means afford to ignore a message like that.
But there wasn’t time to consider this
further. 2:43 PM: time for the main event. Once more
gathering the strands about me, sending awareness out through the entire
network, I began the Unsealing.
Ever so delicately, exert pressure on the
northwest-central node at the first level: so. There,
it’s already fighting back—but the anchors have long been in
place, and my threads bind it securely, forcing the node more than fifty
feet out of position. That wakens the others, but they will shortly
have their own problems. Loop an aleph-hitch around the conduit to
the northeast-central node, watch as its defenses shore up— then
mount a sudden assault on the southwestern point of the pentagram, out in
the Bay. Weren’t expecting that, eh? Two nodes of the
ten are out of balance now, and things are getting just a bit hairy.
The first great defense kicks in, as the Seals
begin to vibrate on a destructive frequency. My own network
automatically counters with damping oscillations; a brief duel of
vibratory shifts ensues before the Seals concede the round, and while
they’ve been busy I have taken two more nodes and begun the war for
the second, middle-band level. Forty-five minutes have passed, and
the strain is incredible—but I will not let go!
Move and countermove, attack and defense.
The Seals assail my mind with fears and phantoms, but my mental screens
are more than sufficient to hold them at bay. The air about me
threatens to catch fire or freeze solid, to no avail. Six nodes are
distorted now, on all three levels. It is past four o’clock,
and still the battle continues, but every defense, every power the Seals
possess has been analyzed for generations and I know their every
weakness; they cannot stand against me.
Great-great-grandfather’s failure will not be repeated today—
—what—?
The next defense should be a power surge,
but that’s not happening. Something new is taking shape, woven
through the three Seals—
—Jerran’s Bones, it’s another
Seal! TWO of them!
This can’t be happening, there was no sign,
no trace—but there they are, already throwing my weaves off
balance. Three of the nodes are nearly back into position, my hold
on the rest threatened. I should back off, shut the network down
and revise the whole scheme to incorporate this development—
—no. I’ve come so far today, I
was so close—and these two Seals, I see now, are just variants on
the first three; I can still win!
The battle is truly joined now, as I improvise
new strategies with increasing haste. Gravity is beginning to fail
around me, but the artifacts are no longer necessary and as long as I can
hold myself down it doesn’t matter if all that junk drifts
off. I see now: the Seals are using the power of the Mystery
Spot against me, redirecting the gravitic Anomaly my way. Clever,
but not nearly enough! Five nodes back where I want them, halfway
there and it’s just past five o’clock, I’ll be done before
nightfall—
—and then, a sixth and seventh Seal
materialize, and I belatedly realize just how much of an egomaniacal fool
I’ve been—
—but by then it’s far too late, as the
seven Seals channel all the power of the Saint George Anomaly directly at
me, and the fabric of spacetime gives up and stops trying—
—and I have just enough time left in this
world to see the mountain begin to shake, and to know that I’ve made
a terrible mistake.
You’ve probably read a dozen descriptions of
bizarre interdimensional rips and the hallucinogenic effects they have on
those caught up in them, so I’ll spare you all that junk about
synesthesia and the taste of paisley, and just say that they’re
pretty damn accurate. I fell through a myriad dimensions in an
instant that stretched to an eter—wait, you’ve probaby heard
that too. Never mind. I’ll try to stick to the high
points.
You see some pretty weird things on a trip like
this. I especially liked the marble city floating on a pink cloud,
and the infinite wall studded with vast, petrified gods; but I could
really have done without the vision of a mist-shrouded black lake
and a terrible city whose towers rose behind the moon. Hastur was a
planet in our universe, yes, but stopping there would have been a bad
idea and even passing through might attract unwanted attention.
Lost Carcosa mercifully vanished, to be replaced by less comprehensible
visions which melted at last into some semblance of reality …
… Reality was a white room—no, a white
space, of uncertain dimensions. Two things occupied the
void: an ornate oaken desk without visible support, and, sitting
behind it, a tall, olive-skinned, serenely beautiful woman. Her
features were vaguely Grecian, though you rarely see that dark green hair
among those of Hellenic ancestry. She wore a flowing silk gown
several shades darker than her hair.
She was staring at me, as if … as if she
had never before in her life been surprised, or even believed that
surprise was possible, until that very moment. If Phileas Fogg, sitting
in his study, had suddenly been visited by the angel Gabriel, he would
have looked very much like this person did now.
I would have said something witty to break the
tension, but I was completely paralyzed.
“You’re five years early,”
she nonsequitured. Well, there wasn’t a whole lot I could say
to that, was there? Come on, larynx, work with me! She
doesn’t look happy, and I can’t exactly defend myself if I
can’t move, for Jerran’s sake …
Mystery Woman got up from the desk, looking more
pissed by the moment. As she swept toward me, a baroque metal staff
appeared in her hand … or was it, as it appeared, really a giant
key? I wondered what it might open, and worried that it might turn
out to be me.
And then, quite suddenly, there were two of
her. The new one—an exact duplicate of the first, except for
the giant garnet atop her staff/key—held her double back,
saying: “This is necessary.”
MW1 didn’t look too happy about that, but
she calmed down almost instantly. Well, if you can’t trust
yourself, who can you trust? “How can it be?”
“There are … complications.
Other players are entering the field, and the warriors must be ready for
them.” MW2 nodded toward me. “He is the key.”
No, actually, I wanted to gibber, that thing you’re holding is the
key, I’m just Mike, and could you please tell me what in Thomas
Paine’s name is going on here?!
MW1 sighed. “Then he must
proceed. Despite the consequences.” They stepped up to
me and touched their staves to my temples, two pairs of crimson eyes
boring into mine. Those eyes … it was easy to tell them apart,
now. The first was certainly no older than she looked, maybe a bit
younger than me. The second … she might appear to be in her
early twenties, but her eyes were ancient. The weight of
eons was in them, and pain beyond measure: but a spark of hope
still remained, was in fact growing brighter …
“I would spare you what is to come, if I
could,” #1 whispered. “If you had waited … but that
would doom us all.
“In the days ahead, you may not believe
this … but I truly wish there could have been another way. I
am sorry.”
And with that the keys/staves/whatevers flared
neon-bright, and reality went on vacation again …
|