His eyes widened and he made no further objection. I gathered up the necessary materials—the bowl proved to hold salt water—and drew the first-level seal, occasionally quizzing Charlie on the symbols. We centered ourselves—I on the waves and tide, he on wind and breath—and began the chant. Our voices entwined the room, calling on our own bodies and the rhythms they shared with the changing earth, the rush of wind, the water’s rise and fall through the ocean. As the words filled us, I washed the blade and pricked our fingers to let blood mingle with salt water. Even before the magic took hold, I began to feel calmer, to gain, not indifference to the day’s shocks of fear and sadness and hope, but some measure of equanimity. The tide sweeps in, the tide flows out, and you learn to accept the ocean’s inconstancy.
And then the tide swept in. I felt how my body carried my mind, how it held my selfhood enmeshed in the weave of eyes and veins, bone and skin. I felt my blood: a river, a torrent, a reminder that my body had not forgotten the ocean in which it would someday dwell, or the form it would take there.
But our ritual had another purpose, tonight. I surfaced and reached out to Charlie. I must see through his flesh, if we hoped to heal it. I touched his hand, and dove into the weaker, dryer currents that flowed through a man of the air. Through them I sought the signs of his injury, and the tools of healing.
“I’m sorry,” I said when the ritual was over. “Maintaining health is always easier than repairing injury. Usually a new injury is simpler, but this one is so tangled in the old damage…”
“I know. I saw.” He glared at the seal. “My knee’s been a problem for years. It shouldn’t be more frustrating now, just because I have some control over other things.”
“We thirst more for water just beyond reach.” The old saying felt facile; I had known for a long time that it wasn’t true. “I’m sorry. There’s too much we can’t do.”
He shook his head. “I think you had the right idea, earlier. Tell me about summoning.”
So I did. We could not go far beyond the theoretical tonight, not without the appropriate books convenient to hand—Trumbull might have some, but this wasn’t a good time to ask her.
Summoning spells would at first be more useful to Charlie than to me. It was possible to call on a specific individual, but far easier to summon by kind. A call to Chyrlid Vhel—the people of the air—would likely bring whoever was in the next room. A call to Chyrlid Ajha would bring either me or Caleb, unless we were very close to the Atlantic in just the right spot. A call to Chyrlid Fazh did not bear thinking about. It was always possible that some wayward Mad One might choose to answer.
“Could we summon a Yith?” His eyes darted to the door, lids crinkling at the presumably entertaining image.
“Unfortunately, no. Both because physically she’s a perfectly ordinary woman of the air, and because someone stronger-willed and more skilled in magic can always resist a call. Or follow it under their own power to find the source of the presumption.”
“That sounds unpleasant.”
“Yes. Miskatonic has a reputation for producing the sort of fools who try to summon the gods themselves, or their close servants. Fortunately for the school, they don’t usually get any response.”
“Usually?” He leaned forward.
“The gods have never responded to summons. But Earth is warm, and wet, and full of life. And there are things that care even less for our well-being than the Yith, and who have more dangerous interests. They wait for the opportunity in a badly used word, a misplaced symbol.”
“I might do better to ask around until I found out where you were. It seems safer, somehow.”
I smiled in spite of myself. “I can assure you, Mr. Day, that the symbols that call my people are not conducive to the things that wait out in the cold. It’s the attempts to summon things that you can’t get to any other way that carry the true danger.”
We sat in the study, with its warm browns and crisp papers, and I felt at my back winter creeping through chinks in the window. And I spoke to my friend and pupil of colder, vaster reaches, and tried to hold between us a little space of warmth in which we could take our comfort.
CHAPTER 8
After some discussion, we decided to alternate days at Miskatonic and Hall. Should Spector’s masters require some justification for the Miskatonic days beyond the possibility of new leads, and the promises made to me and Caleb, the alternating schedule also gave Dawson time to track Upton. But the morning paper carried new reports of Russian aggression, and I worried that they’d pressure Spector for fast results, rather than complete ones. They might not be entirely wrong, either—if Russia did have agents who could wear any body, at some point they must use them.
I did not try again to apologize for Dawson’s duties with us, or Skinner’s presumed reaction. Their relationship must be all claws and blades: law and custom gave him a thousand types of power over Dawson, while she had only the one, pointed firmly at his heart. She’d made it clear that it was not my place to discuss this with her, nor to try and help her free of their well-honed tangle.
Charlie and I spent a relatively quiet day in the Miskatonic library, pouring over a copy of On the Calling of Kinds that I’d managed to finagle from the librarian in lieu of yet another Book of Eibon. Orne wrote in engaging style, alternating his slightly eccentric taxonomy of creatures that could be summoned, and “receipts” for doing so, with cautionary tales of impromptu methods gone wrong.
Spector chatted with the Special Collections librarian, apparently trying to overcome his poor first impression. I heard him sympathize, casually, with the man’s worries about the wrong sort of people accessing dangerous books. He didn’t—yet—press for stories about specific people who might have tried to do so.
During a break, Charlie procured a phone and made a long-distance call to the store, checking with the colleague he’d left in charge, and I started on a letter to Mama Rei. I left it unfinished, though, distracted by an all-too-vivid image from Orne’s book—a story of uncontrolled summoning in battle. I feared it would make an easy addition to my nightmares. The unnamed war seemed to have been part of the Roman Empire’s early expansion. Perhaps the specifics would have been obvious to a man of the air, better versed in the details of European history. Orne described in detail the defending tribe—“barbarians,” as he would have them—who knew their territory and way of life lost, pressed to desperation against the wall of surrender. They, or perhaps merely a single skilled magician among them, chose instead to beg help from any creature that might hear.
In the first minutes, it seemed their pleading would bear sweet fruit, for monsters arose from the caves and streams to fall on the legions: Creatures of claw and diaphanous wing flown from far worlds, willing to take the barbarians’ part in exchange for later favor. However, the call never paused at the boundaries of this world, but carried into Outside Realms, to beings of hunger that know nothing of human borders and fears. Where they entered, they made a field of peace: blackened grass, corpses cold and still, and dust where the wings of Yuggoth had descended to join the battle.