Sorcery of the Stony Heart Page 4
Under other circumstances, Swaine might have been tempted to discount Hozier’s poetic color as proof that the man was living more than half in his own imagination, driven by his own drought and thirst to rave about the beauty of a mirage on the unreachable horizon. But not in this case. The poor fellow was raw.
“Then I’m afraid I don’t understand what happened,” Swaine said.
“Nor I, sir. Nor I.” Hozier put his hand to his brow. “We were to meet in the morning. I was to help her retrieve a cedar trunk from her aunt’s house in Shoreditch. She had a rehearsal at the theatre in the evening. All seemed fine, according to the other members of the troupe—she left late, though she wasn’t the last to leave. No one saw her after that until her landlord found—found her—in the stairwell of the building. A rope, sir. Around the balustrade. And around her—her—”
“Yes, I see.” It didn’t sound to Swaine like anything having to do with the magic he’d created. That said, it struck him as it clearly struck Hozier: peculiar. Why do something so rash—especially after appearing fine, even more than fine, by all those around her? True, a darkness could be well hidden. And who really knew what made sense or not within the context of a person willing to take their own life.
“I’m crushed beyond all hope, sir,” Hozier said. He spoke the words with such melancholy that Swaine imagined he might physically disintegrate into the chair he sat in, dissolve into the floor of the dark corner of the library. “They’re to inter her in a pauper’s grave come tomorrow, and the company is scraping together what they can to get her a proper burial. I can’t face it. Might as well rip my heart from my thin chest and bury it right along with her in the cold November soil.”
The story didn’t settle well with Swaine—though he supposed such stories likely didn’t settle well with anyone involved. Still, Hozier had clearly never suffered such an improbable victory before nor had it snatched away with such cruel finality. Meek though he was, more likely than not to blend in with whatever background he stood before, he was a kind and decent enough fellow.
“Listen to me, Mr. Hozier—terrible as this is, you must find a way to keep going. For Catherine’s sake, if your own doesn’t feel strong enough right now.”
Swaine wasn’t sure his words were the right ones to use. When it came to the unseen arts, he was as confident as a sea captain who’d plied all the world’s oceans, reading the color of the waves to predict a storm. When it came to people, however, he knew that logic mattered little, that intuition—his, at any rate—often as not put him at cross-purpose to what society recommended. A room full of books, planar energy harnessed, glamours cast, and demons summoned made infinitely more sense to him than any public room in any tavern in London and all the murky expectations of the people who might fill it.
“I’m truly sorry for your loss, my good man,” he added.
Oh, there went the weeping again. Hozier’s shoulders heaved in great spasms while various fluids seeped out from beneath the palms he pressed to his face. Swaine held his hand out, pulled it back, and finally settled for patting the man on the shoulder yet again. It worked significantly less well than a spell might have, as far as he could tell.
7
Harmonious Entrainment
Later, Swaine looked up from his notes, startled to realize that midnight loomed. He reached for the teacup only to find it long drained, as was the kettle, and both cold to the touch. Ink speckled the fingers and thumb of his left hand, and the nib of the quill had dulled. He laid the quill down and blotted the notes he’d made.
Never enough hours. Or tea.
Hill hadn’t helped. As far as Swaine was concerned, the man’s genius was obvious. His ability to get to the point, however, much less so. It was as though the man proffered a detailed account of the role of a castle in a medieval town—yet infuriatingly omitted any of the following words: castle, stone, parapet, bridge, crenel, tower, liege, barbican, or keep.
For a work purporting to bring special insight into the curious relationship between alchemical interactions and recombinant elemental energies, Hill spent precious little time actually describing how either alchemical interactions or recombinant elemental energies might interact with the other.
Yet the work lingered in Swaine’s thoughts. Hill had baffled a century’s worth of scholars, so why not him? Having written out his own thoughts on the matter, Swaine felt no closer to understanding than when he’d sat down at his desk five hours earlier. Maybe the work simply lingered in his mind as the quills of a porcupine might linger in the mouth of an unwitting hound—leaving him out twenty quid for the privilege.
He stood and stretched. His tin of tea leaves was down to scraps and dust. The clock on the mantle ticked, taunting him. Seconds, minutes, hours, days—all might vanish down a hole chasing a genius like Hill. He begrudged the time lost worse than the money. He could always make more money, but the sand in the hourglass only ever disappeared.
If only he had five of himself.
He sighed as he stretched his neck, raising arms overhead, clenching and unclenching his fingers. The thought amused him. One of him could wrestle with Hill’s notion of concentrated harmonies of parallel substrates while another could scour the bundle of yellowed rolls of paper he’d purchased from a merchant in Munich in search of elusive names of demons. A third could experiment with the variations of the glyphs he’d identified as strong enough for the new styles of glamours he’d conceived of. A fourth could practice the seventeenth ward in Angus Hume’s majestic translation of Grímhildr’s ‘Srávobhiśśravasíyas’—a particularly vexing protection against the infernal—as a fifth August Swaine could titrate the boletus laricis that he’d acquired from Hambley & Harwick’s Far East Trading Co. the fortnight before and which had sat carefully protected within a magicked box deep in one of his trunks of ingredients.
Put them all in harmonious entrainment, as Hill would say. Swaine gazed out the window at the moon over London. Of course, five of him would require five times the energy. From his rooms, he could just make out the Thames. With enough of a power source—the energy could be channeled, he supposed. And if each version of himself concentrated the substrates of such energy, allowing for more energy to be harnessed for the subsequent instances? The smile on his face disappeared, whimsy evaporating in a flash of insight.
It would work with demons. In fact—it had worked with a demon, not three months earlier—leaving him stumped and puzzled, unable to explain what he’d done.
With certainty Swaine knew he’d unlocked a mystery in an instant. Not that Hill had mentioned demons once—the man had been a magician, not a sorcerer. Still, the principle ought to be the same in dealing with energies forced into parallel entrainment. And what was the binding of a demon, if not another form of a concentrated substrate?
By God—that was it.
The pieces clicked into place: a planar confluence, such as found in the village of Heggen, Norway; abundant energies, there for the tapping; a serial harnessing of demonic strength. Swaine felt his way through the logic—knowing even then that he’d wandered past the leading edge of sorcery’s prior achievements. Swaine turned back to his writing desk, sweeping aside his notes on Hill, grabbing a fresh quill and paper. He dipped the quill and held it above the blank page. What am I missing? That was the key, wasn’t it? Easy enough to spot a flaw in the material before one’s eyes—the real skill was in identifying what wasn’t even there—and ought to be.
He closed his eyes, concentrating his own thoughts. After a while, he scratched out his thoughts, his hand struggling to keep up with the ideas that poured forth.
Hours later, his curtains proved no match for the strong morning sunlight. When Swaine stirred, he didn’t begrudge the chunk of sleep that had been devoured by his insight—in fact, he still felt the surge of excitement, worth any number of kettles of tea. He ran a hand over his face, pushing aside the hair across his eyes. Such a peculiar feat, having a flash of unexpected acumen. Swaine thou
ght it akin to discovering a hidden doorway, one that might well have been passed by without notice a thousand times but for an alignment of circumstance that couldn’t be anticipated or repeated. If he hadn’t been at Punchard’s Bookshop on Piccadilly earlier in the year at precisely the moment he had, he’d never have met Hozier. If he’d never have met Hozier, he wouldn’t have learned of the secret Acts collection at the library. If he hadn’t learned of that, he’d never have gotten his hands on Hill. If he hadn’t been wrestling with Hill’s labyrinthine exposition on harmonious entrainment at nearly the same time he’d been thinking about the mystery of how he’d bound an unknown demon in Heggen three months earlier—well, he was quite prepared to give luck its due. The difference between the merely lucky and the successful, however—well, that required a certain genius.
We’d discovered something, some space between us that neither of us expected, a walled-in garden we didn’t know existed but had room for both of us.
Swaine recalled the words of poor Hozier. Had it been a similar feeling between Hozier and the doomed actress? Of course. Uncovering a future where none had been apparent. Discovering a connection—a profound, electrifying connection—that changed all that came before it. He supposed it must have been the same, for Hozier at least. Sitting up, he wondered again about the woman, the actress. She must not have felt the same, despite Hozier’s protests to the contrary—otherwise, why take her own life?
The eyes that watched her. The voices that she found, inside. A trapped bird, she said; a trapped bird who sings of soaring over forests and foothills.
As Swaine reached for his breeches, he paused, recalling what Hozier had said the actress had told him.
A trapped bird—who sings of soaring over forests and foothills.
He’d heard those words before, though not in English. Maybe that was why he hadn’t registered them the moment Hozier relayed them. Maybe it was the shock of hearing of the actress’s suicide. Or the need to comfort Hozier in his despair.
The shock fell across Swaine like ice water. He scrambled off his bed and rushed into the next room to crouch before one of the many bookcases, the one where he kept the volumes of his summoning notes.
8
The Demise of Heggen
Three months earlier
Climbing over a tumbled stone wall of what had once been a churchyard, a six-foot spar of iron tore from an old gate and hurtled at Swaine’s head. With a snap of his arms, he deflected the spar with a spell, sending it clanging across a slanted headstone. Before the metallic racket ceased, however, half of the headstone cracked apart and shot at him like a cannonball. He only had time to drop to the ground, missing having his head taken off by the merest of inches. Lifting his head, he felt a surge of gratitude: the trip had been worth it.
Scanning the remnants of the village of Heggen huddled along the eaves of the pine forest, he wondered what sort of fiend he was dealing with. Rotted roofs had given way beneath nearly a century of abandonment; wind and rain and sun gnawed away the remaining wood, earth stains and mildew claiming the rest. Timbers canted like the ribs of dead beasts picked clean. Chimneys and stone foundations appeared little different from the granite markers lurking beneath moss and lichen in the old cemetery. Beyond rose the wooded hills of Krokskogen.
Swaine had left Oslo three days earlier, following sparsely marked roads on horseback, questioning the wisdom of extending his book-buying trip on the Continent in order to chase down a rumor supported by little more than guesswork.
The account of the demise of Heggen was once well known enough to have been remarked upon by Pope Innocent XI in an encyclical titled Nequid Obrepat Satanasas as evidence of the encroachment of Satan into the realm of believers. To Swaine’s eye, the original incident—a sorcerer losing control of a powerful demon, the demon possessing the sorcerer’s grandchild, the possessed child murdering the sorcerer’s family and most of the village in one bloody spree—wasn’t particularly noteworthy, save for the number of those killed. Lifting the tale from the ghastly wreckage of sorcery’s long history of deadly failures, however, was the possibility of the demon in question having been an arch-fiend. Better still, an arch-fiend still troubling the forested hills, ninety-seven years after the fact.
In the decade after the incident, the small villages near Heggen bled themselves dry of inhabitants. Talk of a curse took root. Those who could, left. Those who couldn’t—or wouldn’t—endured, for a time, until handful by handful, individual by individual, they all passed on. Some died, while others vanished, never heard from again. People in the nearby valley avoided the roads that led to Heggen, and the forest around it gained a reputation as home to ravenous shades ready to waylay travelers, luring them into the lonesome dells with sweet whispers.
Still, nothing any run-of-the-mill demon couldn’t be capable of. The story piqued Swaine’s interest, however, when he came across accounts of a well-regarded German magician by the name of Heinrich Flüsse having explored the area in the mid-17th century and amassing a number of compelling readings indicating disturbances in the unseen planar energies converging on Heggen—disturbances of a scale beyond that which might be explained by a demon of the more common strain.
As Swaine got cautiously to his feet, whispers and screams erupted all around. He hurried by the tumbled church, noting stenches, marked shifts in temperature, shadows seen only in the corner of his eyes. By the time he reached a safe corner of the ruins to shield himself, a rusted bell from the slanting steeple flew at him, taking out half a dozen bricks, stinging his face with shards of mortar and stone, leaving his ears ringing. A potent demon, indeed.
Keeping himself protected as well as he could with a number of wards, he crouched and darted along the length of the church. Not far off stood a cabin in better shape than the other buildings he’d scouted, so he sprinted for that, dodging a series of projectiles, including an assortment of cutlery, animal bones, and enough stones to build a respectable field wall. Crashing in through the cabin door, he slid on a spray of old leaves and lost his footing, slamming down on one knee with a grunt. Before he’d even stopped his tumble, he swept the satchel off his shoulder and poured out the materials he’d need to ready the room for the summoning.
Hands steady, he installed specialized glyphs in the doorway and on the windowsills, moving quickly. Once that was done, he cast a series of sealing spells along the four cardinal directions just inside the walls. The mayhem continued outside—rock and branch banging against the planks with tremendous force—but he knew he was, for the moment, safe. Slowing his breathing, he instantiated seven glamours across the floor, concentric circles alternating magicked ash and iron filings, imbued with powerful spells of protection. Inside the innermost circle, he placed a small steel key.
The only clue—in retrospect—he’d embarked on the most perilous summoning of his career was the strange way in which his shadow doubled and trebled across the floor for brief moments. The low, slanting rays of the late summer sunset came in through the open doorway and missing windows, leaving his shadow to stretch across the floor and up the walls. He studied the peculiar effect on his shadow but dismissed it as some form of unexpected interplay between his precautions.
Silence from outside. Swaine cocked his head, listening. “You’re curious now, aren’t you?” he whispered. “Well, wait and see what I have in store for you.”
Readying his ingredients, Swaine soon began the summoning, following the traditional structure designed to maximize both the focus of his mind and the potency of the spells of binding. Known as the Keystone of the Infernal, the process is divided into sections, each of which performs a specific function in the subjugation of the demon’s will. As he recited the first Canto, he felt the familiar shift in awareness brought about by a demonic summoning: one part intense concentration, one part expansion of consciousness. As though the world both sharpened and loosened at the same time.
The words he spoke fell flat in the still air of the cabin�
�but as he continued, some of them took flight, sounding as if spoken in a large stone chamber, echoing queerly. He sensed an unevenness to the Canto, strange lulls where the growing strength of the incantations flagged, grew slack.
By the time he reached the first speaking of the demon’s name—the section known as the Nomino Daemonium—he knew the energies in the cabin were far from normal. The moment he spoke the name gleaned from the accounts, Svaradallanave, he recoiled—his voice crackled like blazing fire in his ears and smoke poured from his broiling mouth. The cloying stench of burning feces filled his nostrils. Though he’d never experienced it before, he recognized the phenomenon immediately: Vox Satanas, or Satan’s voice. In effect a proximity-based curse, the Vox Satanas was a defensive magic of certain demons meant to deter the speaking of their name, that irresistible lure that drew them into the trap the sorcerer set.
Swaine gasped and waved away the smoke, spitting and wiping his mouth, continuing the summoning. (While the effect of Vox Satanas was disconcerting, it did little in the way of damage to the summoner’s mouth, serving mainly as a distraction.) So he continued, moving into the section known as the stitching of the name, wherein he repeated the name of Svaradallanave thirteen times, each time stepping counterclockwise around the circumference of the binding glamour he’d laid out on the floor. Smoke filled the cabin, roiling from Swaine’s mouth. Each repetition increased the sound of the blaze in his ears until he heard little else. (In fact, his ears would ring for days afterwards, and it would be even longer before the smell of soot left his nose.)