“What’s all this in the margins?” She held it out, pinched between thumb and forefinger as if it carried some unknown contagion.
I looked. “It’s Enochian. What kind of species withholds basic calculus until its young near adulthood? Compress section on matrices and insist on a more reasonable pace of learning. That sort of thing. It looks like notes to herself—she must have left the sheet she made for her own reference.”
“Isn’t Enochian one of those obscure dead tongues they obsess over in the folklore classes?”
“It may be that,” I said. “It’s also the Yith’s native language. And I use it for liturgical purposes, but that’s neither here nor there.”
She set the schedule firmly on the desk, and pinned it with the water glass. “If you try to pull a penny out of my ear, I will throw you all out into the storm.”
I began drawing the diagram. Some time in the last few hours the slate had been washed clean, its previous palimpsest erased. Presumably the cultist who aided Trumbull’s return had wanted to be thorough. “The Inner Sea would be best”—among other things, it was the only ritual I felt adequate to perform right now—“and might even help a little with our problem. At the very least, those of us in the confluence can support each other a little more. It’s risky, though, strengthening our connection under the circumstances…”
“If I can help, I’ll do it,” said Caleb. Charlie nodded, as did Dawson after a moment of hesitation.
“Thank you,” I said. I continued drawing, and focused on keeping my hand steady. “I can use Trumbull’s—the other Trumbull’s—alterations to protect the professor.”
“What do I need protecting from?” Her tone was sharp, but she watched the diagram unfold with interest.
“As I said, we’re in considerable danger. Last night we had to deal with … it’s hard to explain. Another entity, less comprehensible and less interested in our well-being than the Yith who had your body. It left a piece of itself in Miss Winslow, and in—someone else I’m connected to. I’m afraid this would be difficult to explain all at once, even if you believed me about the basics. But you shouldn’t be at risk from the ritual. Mr. Spector, Neko, if you want to wait downstairs, this shouldn’t take more than half an hour or so.”
“If you think the risk is reasonably small,” said Spector, “I feel like I ought to observe. I’ve read plenty, but I’m beginning to realize how much I’ve missed.”
I paused my drawing. “Mr. Spector, this is a sacred ritual. You may wait downstairs, or you may participate. You may not stand by the door and take notes.”
He hesitated. “Does the ritual involve prayer?”
“To gods foreign to your own? No, it’s not religious. It’s just sacred.”
He squared his shoulders. “All right, then.”
Neko hovered in the doorway, and at last stepped in. “Just this once.”
“Are you sure?” I asked. “You’ve never wanted to before.”
“I’ll admit, I’m kind of curious. And I’m already stuck with the trouble.”
Caleb refilled the salt water. I drew my knife—Yith-Trumbull’s apparently having been removed along with most other overt traces of her presence—and showed our newcomers where to sit and what to do. I started the chant as we each bled into the water. The rhythm of the familiar syllables warmed me, and I tried to pass a little of that warmth down the link to Sally. It was hard not to clutch it close, even knowing her pain for the source of my own.
There was a taint in the river of my blood, stagnant in the midst of torrent. It glowed and pulsed, never quite there when I tried to examine it directly. Around it the water grew cloudy and slow.
As I looked more closely I found thin threads, almost invisible, stretching out and away. I examined one, cautiously. It hummed beneath the touch of my mind, and I caught another glimpse of Sally, shivering, trying to concentrate on her note-taking as sound faded in and out. Barlow speaking to me sharply, my twitch of guilt and fear as I tried to focus.
I could do little about what had already spilled into my blood, but the threads were slender, fragile and finite. I could easily break the spell that my grandfather had set in place. Not only for me—the whole confluence would be safer if we could focus on Audrey alone.
They said that it was safest to leave me here.
I let the threads be and joined with the rest of the confluence, already flowing together. Spector and Trumbull and Neko, if I had done my work right, were well isolated. Unless they knew how to reach for us, as the Yith had, they would be safe in their own waters.
Charlie and Caleb and Dawson suffered only hints of disturbance—here and there amid their streams I winced at a flash of cold. But Audrey’s blood had grown strange. The cold thing had entered her more deeply than me, and burrowed into the soft mud and silt that ought to have been her natural protection. Where the glow pulsed out, something else clustered around it: tiny spots of absolute darkness that absorbed all attempts to perceive detail. They ate at the glow. Not fast enough, for it still swelled and bubbled from the burrows where it had fastened, but they ate. And as they ate, they grew. No more than half of what ran in her veins remained mistakable for ordinary human blood.
There was a certain hypnotic fascination to it. But I drew back, broadened my focus. I pushed strength into Audrey, and the simple reminder of our presence. Charlie and Caleb and Dawson did the same, and I hoped there was enough that I needn’t feel guilty redirecting a little to Sally.
The connection persisted as I pulled back to the study. Neko looked relieved when she saw me wake. I ought to have checked first on Trumbull or Spector, but it was my sister’s opinion that my eyes sought.
“Well,” she said, leaning back on her hands. “I see what the fuss is about.”
“Going to try it again?” I asked.
“Maybe someday. Like I said, it’s not what I want to spend all my time on—but I’m glad I tried it. Are you guys okay?”
“That’s a complicated question,” I said. “Mr. Spector, are you well?”
“Apparently so.” His brow was furrowed, but he didn’t seem inclined to share and I let him have his privacy.
Finally I turned to Trumbull. “Well?”
If her mask had slipped, it was back now. But she said: “All right. Suppose we posit that you’re not as mad as you sound.”
I shivered. “That’s better than nothing.”
“Tell me again what’s going on.”
I summarized the situation as best I could—the outlines of our research, Spector’s colleagues and their dangerous studies, the Yith, the barely-averted disaster that had caused her to flee. The cold that ate at Sally and Audrey.