Charlie paused with a forkful of potato halfway to his mouth. “That sounds like quite the feast.”
“I’m told it is. The next Great Equinox, at the end of this cycle, is in…” I paused to calculate, surprised to discover that I did, in fact, remember the relevant figures. “Nine thousand, eight hundred and fifty-three years.”
“So the last one was before humans learned to write,” said Charlie. “Or build cities.”
“Before men of the air learned to write,” said Trumbull. “The folk of the water and rock met that milestone considerably earlier. I actually came down to ask a favor.”
That was enough to still my own fork. “Go on.”
She put down the half-eaten saltcake and splayed her fingers on the table, frowning. “Several times in the past few days, I have failed to conceal my nature. That’s a danger, more so with this new power on the campus. I wish to join you in the Meditation on the Waters Within”—it took me a moment to recognize the alternate translation of the Inner Sea—“to better ground my sense of this body and its capabilities. I must restore my control, and this seems like the most efficient way to do it.”
I shared an uncomfortable look with the others. “Practicing together has already connected us more tightly than we expected…”
“And naturally you don’t want to bring this body into your confluence. Nor, I assure you, do I care to involve myself in human family structures. I can show you how to prevent our streams from flowing together permanently—though I’ll need a temporary connection. I must compare this body to others, to ensure that I haven’t inadvertently deformed it.”
We agreed—it was a fair request, and the lesson she’d offered was a useful one—and after cleaning the dishes we went upstairs to the office.
“Do you want to join us?” I asked Neko. I’d asked all the Kotos before, and they’d always refused—though they’d never hesitated, in the camps, to stand guard over my hastily whispered prayers. “This part—it’s not religious, or it doesn’t have to be.”
“You study your way; I’ll study in mine. I want to look at that book you were reading earlier—it sounds a lot more interesting without a teacher insisting it’s the foundation of all civilization.” Charlie handed over the Plato.
CHAPTER 16
Trumbull had clearly been busy—papers on the desk were shuffled, the mysterious device grown larger, and two additional diagrams hung on the walls.
What I knew as a newly reclaimed art was for Trumbull well-practiced technology. She sketched her variant sigils swiftly, narrating as she went.
“The thng’wy stands for the blood, but can be altered to represent any vital fluid. This line is made thinner to decrease the strength of connections, and the addition of the phwl’k ensures that our wills may overcome such connections as are created during the ritual. It cannot cut connections previously made; that is more difficult and more dangerous.” Her terms for the symbols were unfamiliar. The books I knew presented most of these sigils as parts of a whole, to be memorized spell by spell, rather than named components.
But the end was the same as always: the bowl, the blade, salt water, and blood. For that, my experience was not wholly inadequate.
The reunion with my family had shaken me more than expected, and Spector’s unpleasant colleagues had been worse. Now I sank into my own body and affirmed my own rhythms.
After a time it felt natural to reach out. Tonight my connection to Charlie and Caleb and Audrey was only physical—perhaps our emotions didn’t spill over into our blood without a driving emergency, or perhaps the safeguards provided by Trumbull’s sigils made a difference. Experimentally, I sought to change the tenor of the connection. I heard whispers of emotion like voices in a distant room, the edge of something that might have been thought. It felt so faint as to verge on imagination.
Reaching further, I found Trumbull. This too felt entirely physical: waters narrow but unblocked, banks tangled in brambles. But as I explored, I began to sense something hidden amidst the brush. Predator, my instinct whispered, but it was not even that. The whole landscape shivered, resolving in a shuddering rush as the thing broke from cover—and then the overwhelming awareness of something not at all physical and not at all human.
It is probably impossible to describe so truly alien a mind in English. Enochian and R’lyehn have better words for strangeness, for thoughts as cold as space, for memories as deep and dense as magma, for minds that know time as intimately as a childhood home.
I recoiled instinctively—but I had promised to look. I forced myself to reach out again. Even braced, its presence burned and froze, but it had drawn the spell to strengthen will and I made myself persist. I could see now how the thing fit itself into Trumbull’s form, how it was formed to fold forever into new shapes, to adapt endlessly. How the terrible cold and heat allowed it to maintain identity through all those permutations.
And—harder still—I let the thing look back at me, and sensed the others following my example. I felt it examining joins—invisible even to me—between mind and body, refolding itself to better mimic those connections.
Felt it shrink from something I could not see, then extend a cautious tendril. Felt a hint of Yithian emotion: jagged and vast and faceted with a million associated memories.
And returned to awareness of my own body, Trumbull’s inner self fully and mercifully invisible once more. Tenebrous impressions lingered among the rest of us—by our own desire, I suspected. A clutch of mammals, we huddled together for warmth.
Trumbull turned her gaze on Audrey, frowning. “You appear perfectly sane.”
Audrey blinked. If she felt any fear or repugnance, she kept it well hidden. “Do people often go mad at the sight of you? That seems like it would be awkward.”
“Do you know of anything odd in your heritage? An unidentified grandparent, or an adoption under doubtful circumstances?”
“Of course not. My family’s been in Massachusetts for three hundred years, and our records go back even further. Ask the Daughters of the American Revolution if you don’t believe me.”
Trumbull shrugged. “The interference could be from earlier, I suppose—though the blood is strong.”
“I’ve seen her blood,” I said. “It’s fine.”
“I suppose you’ve only examined a few people of the air. You should know what you’ve bound yourself to. Your pupil is unmistakably dust-blooded.” She edged away from the rest of us and lifted a hand, as if preparing to defend herself. I resisted the urge to back away from both. Trumbull looked more threatening, but “dust-blooded” was a word rarely heard outside cautionary tales.