Chapter 6
I did end up drinking later that evening, like most evenings.
What I’d told my father in Paris was true: I drank a lot less now than before I’d met Henri and Adrienne, before I’d reconnected with Aengus, before I’d gotten some measure of closure on many of my personal traumas. The voice in the back of my mind urging me to unleash my rage on the world had gone quiet since Logan Square; I no longer felt the need to live at the bottom of a bottle and drown that voice with whisky.
But that didn’t mean my nights had become any more restful. I still had plenty of nightmares from a long life of serving the Arcanum. That particular voice may have fallen silent, but my memory still held more than enough screams to keep me company, and they always seemed louder after the sun went down.
Plus in the past few weeks, starting shortly after the conclave, Johannes had started showing up, too. I’d learned he was responsible for so many of my nightmares, manipulating me and the events around me in his efforts to mold me into the weapon with which he’d intended to break the world. And now when I heard those screams and saw those images in my sleep, he always seemed to be hovering at the edge of my vision, looking on with pride. He never said anything, and sometimes I didn’t even see him, but I knew he was there, somewhere, silently pulling the strings and watching me become the monster he wanted me to be.
But if I drank enough whisky before crawling into my bed, the dreams would feel like they were happening to someone else and I was just watching them unfold from a distance. A little more and they turned into a series of blurred, incoherent scenes that left me uneasy in the morning, but I could at least sometimes sleep through the night.
About a bottle and a half of single malt usually did the trick. And with my magically enhanced healing abilities, I didn’t even have to worry about a hangover. So the next morning I was up with the sun, feeling almost rested despite the unsettling dreams of dark deeds long past, and I dove back into Johannes’s journals.
Before I found anything more about the four remaining Immortals, I came across an interesting entry describing a meeting with John Dee in 1562. Dee was the most famous sorcerer of his time and by that point was already serving as a personal adviser to Queen Elizabeth I. He was a trained member of the Arcanum’s First Rank, a powerful mage in his own right, but Johannes had been particularly interested in his apparent mastery of seidr, a rare form of magic focused on peering through the threads of time, discovering the truth of past events and getting glimpses of future possibilities. Few humans had ever studied its mysteries, and even fewer had shown such skill as Dee possessed. Which made the Immortal very curious about how an otherwise unremarkable sorcerer had come across such knowledge.
After slowly gaining his trust, Dee had finally told Johannes about a secret trip he’d taken many years before, where he’d crossed the veil to the Otherworld and visited Yggdrasil, the World Tree. There, he’d sacrificed his own life, giving up the healing magic that let mages live for centuries, in exchange for the chance to bathe in the waters of Urdarbrunnr, the Well of Fate. There he’d found what he called The Source, a great primordial power from which all magic seemed to stem, flowing through both worlds before returning in a great cycle of unimaginable beauty and complexity. It had overwhelmed him and almost driven him mad, but when he recovered from the experience, he found he’d acquired the gift of seidr.
Johannes had, of course, immediately recognized that Dee’s Source was none other than what the Immortals knew as the wellspring. He hypothesized that it somehow manifested itself physically in the Otherworld through what the Fae had come to call the Well of Fate, a natural spring hidden among the roots of Yggdrasil, giving anyone who immersed themselves in its waters direct access to the greatest pool of magical power in the universe. Those who survived the experience—and Johannes knew from personal experience that touching the wellspring killed almost everyone who tried it and left most of the survivors insane—would forever retain a lingering connection to its raw power, giving them magic beyond what could otherwise be managed through normal means available to human sorcerers.
Yet Johannes apparently hadn’t known about this route to power despite his many millennia until hearing Dee’s story; there was an ambiguous comment which suggested he and the other Immortals had never crossed the veil at all. That piqued my curiosity. If I were interpreting his words correctly—it was just a small side remark, after all, as Johannes had been writing for himself and would surely have known the context, so he evidently saw no need to elaborate—then that must mean the Immortals, for all their power, were unable to cross the veil at all. There was no other logical reason they wouldn’t have done so, especially given how closely allied to various Fae tribes many of them had been. Johannes himself had been adopted by the Olympians as Janus, but it seemed he’d never actually visited Olympus.
That was very interesting. I’d have to think through the potential implications at some point.
But right then, I decided that instead of worrying about the Immortals, I should reacquaint myself with the wellspring and see what I could discern of its nature, in a context where I wasn’t trying to use its power. I just wanted to observe it directly, to immerse myself in its force once more—in a way I hadn’t since those heady days so long ago, laboring under Johannes’s tutelage—and refresh my sense of what it really was.
I closed my eyes and focused, then went down deep, deep into myself the way Johannes had shown me all those years before. I felt the burning, raw fury of the heart of magic, its overwhelming power blasting away any sense of self, uniting my being with all of magic, all of life through two worlds.
I bathed in its glory for what felt like a long time, though I knew that time didn’t really have any meaning in that place which was not a place. Seconds, perhaps an immeasurably short instant, would have passed back in my shop where my physical body remained, but the wellspring existed throughout all of time and space, and thus time in its presence was a meaningless abstraction that could only be guessed at by my perception of my own thoughts and impressions. I could stay here for what seemed to be millennia and return to myself in the blink of an eye. No wonder Dee’s lingering connection had gifted him the ability to see through time.
But, awesome as the sheer presence of the wellspring was, there was nothing to keep me there for untold ages. There was little here to learn; to do anything I may have cared to do with the wellspring required drawing its power forth into the realm of physical reality. I would have to go back.
But just as I decided to release my connection and return to myself, I felt something at the edge of my awareness, and turned my attention back to the wellspring.
Although it could feel like an overwhelming absolute, once my mind expanded to accommodate its nature, I knew that the wellspring itself wasn’t uniform, but an ever-changing, swirling cycle of power, its pattern incomprehensibly complex. Normally it exuded a sense of perfect equilibrium, but something felt…wrong.
I stretched my awareness back into its depths and let myself flow along with the currents of energy as they danced through time and space, and the sense of wrongness grew closer with each passing thought. While I couldn’t push myself along the flow the way I could with a ley-line, I somehow felt that the pattern was ever-so-slightly out of balance, like it had shifted out of alignment. But before I found the epicenter of that feeling and could investigate further, the world suddenly pulled me home.
I found myself back in my office, and almost fell out of my chair as everything shook around me in a powerful earthquake. Catching myself, I knocked over the mug of coffee on the desk in front of me as I struggled to keep my balance. For a long few seconds, I couldn’t do anything except ride the tremors.
It passed, and I took a moment to let the resulting dizziness fade. Looking around to assess the damage, I was confused: apart from the coffee covering my computer and various papers, nothing else in the room was out of place. The books and knickknacks on the shelves were exactly as they’d been a moment before. There was no sign of an earthquake at all. I glanced over at Roxana, still sleeping peacefully in her bed by the desk like she had been since I came downstairs.
What had just happened?
“Fuck,” I muttered as I saw the laptop screen had gone black, and there was a faint line of smoke wafting up from under the keyboard—something had definitely short-circuited. That was annoying. The damn thing was almost ten years old, and all my files were backed up on the cloud, so it really wasn’t worth trying to save. But replacing it would be a hassle I didn’t want to deal with right now. Especially now I had a new puzzle to figure out.
As I set to mopping up the coffee and laying out the soaked papers and books to dry, my mind turned to whatever had just occurred. I’d experienced earthquakes many times in my life, and I would have sworn up and down that I’d just been through a fairly strong one, but the physical evidence clearly said otherwise. Nothing around me had so much as trembled. Had it just been me?
I thought back and realized that I hadn’t actually felt any external shaking—the sensation was very much like seismic waves, but it had only affected my magical senses, not my physical ones. I’d never felt anything like that before, and had just assumed it was an earthquake, but it clearly wasn’t. That was even more confusing. I’d never heard of a magical “earthquake,” and I’d spent more time studying the nature of magical fields and the ley-line network than any Sorcerer since Hermes Trismegistus—and I’d even read his notes on the subject recently, while investigating the Tamesis rites back in August.
I needed to know if I were the only one who felt it. According to the clock on the wall, it was half past seven, which meant it was way too early to try calling Rachel Liu, the closest Rector—she lived in San Francisco, and if she hadn’t already been awakened by a weird magical earthquake, I doubted she’d appreciate me calling at this hour to ask, even if we were on generally friendly terms since she’d helped me kill Johannes. I picked up the landline from the desk—the coffee had missed it, fortunately—and dialed a different number instead.
“Thomas,” a woman’s voice with a thick Scottish burr answered.
“Hi, Mom.”
“I take it you felt it, too?” she asked without preamble. My mother, the Sorceress Bridget MacDonald, recently re-elected Lord Marshal of the Arcanum, had never been known to make small talk.
“Well,” I replied, “at least that answers my question. Yes, I felt it. Any idea what it was?”
“No, but we’ve been getting reports from around the world. All Rectors have confirmed it affected their territories—you may get a call from Rachel in a few minutes, by the way, as she works her way down the list of ranked Sorcerers in her region. And the Master of the Seal just spoke with his Tuatha Dé counterpart; the Fae felt the same thing we did, both here and in the Otherworld. We have people combing through the Annals for any mention of similar occurrences, but I’m not holding out much hope on that front. The Fae told us they don’t know what it was, either, which likely means nothing like it has happened in at least several thousand years.”
“Hm,” I said, thinking quickly. I didn’t want to waste her time in a potential crisis. “Did it hit everyone at the same time? Or was there a delay, like it spread out from a central point?”
“Same time, as best we can tell,” she answered. “It’s not like anyone thought to mark down the exact second it began and ended to compare, but from the reports, it sounds like it was pretty instantaneous everywhere.”
“Okay. Let me know if you find anything.”
“Aye, we’ll let all Arcanum members know as soon as we have any answers,” she said, sounding formal and professional. Then her tone softened. “Your father and I missed you at dinner on Thursday, by the way.”
“I know, sorry,” I replied, trying to sound remorseful, like a dutiful son. “I had a thing I needed to be at Saturday morning. I’d already paid.”
“I don’t blame you for leaving the Conclave, especially after that business with Marco, but when you get a chance, I’d like to see you in a context that doesn’t involve official Arcanum business or fighting Immortals. Especially now that you aren’t drunk all hours of the day.”
I rolled my eyes. My mother had badgered me to get my life together for decades, and was apparently reluctant to stop even now that I was making an effort to follow that advice.
“Dad mentioned something about coming to visit you in Glasgow next year. I’ll see what I can do. No promises, but if things stay quiet, I might be able to manage a week or two.”
“I won’t hold my breath, but that would be lovely. Anyway, I have to go. I love you, Thomas.”
She hung up before I could say anything else. I shrugged and set the phone down. It rang even before I could take my hand off.
“Hi, Rachel,” I answered. “I just spoke with the Lord Marshal. She told me you’d be calling.”
“You called your mother directly instead of me?” Rachel Liu sounded annoyed. As the Arcane Court’s official representative in North America, had every right to expect Sorcerers in her region to go through her. Skipping straight to an officer of the Court itself wasn’t against any actual rules, but it could be considered insulting at the very least.
“I was trying to figure out if whatever happened was just me, and if it had been, I didn’t want to wake you up. She’s on Glasgow time.”
“Oh,” she said, sounding surprised. “That’s actually pretty thoughtful. Julian called me almost immediately—it’s a good thing I was already awake, or I might have ripped him a new one for forgetting time zones exist again. Fair enough, Quinn. I appreciate it. Anyway, I suppose I can safely assume the event was observed in Philadelphia?”
“Correct,” I replied. “A few seconds of what felt at the time like an earthquake, but in hindsight only affected my magical senses.”
“Yeah, same here,” she said, then I heard a long yawn before she continued. “Any idea what it was?”
“I’m not sure,” I mused, “but I think it may be connected to the wellspring.”
“What do you mean?” Rachel suddenly sounded completely awake.
“I was exploring it this morning, trying to get reacquainted with how it feels when I’m not using it, and felt something off. That was just before the quake.”
“Off how?” she asked, sharply.
“I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head as I thought back, trying to remember how it felt. “It’s hard to remember; human brains aren’t built to cope with something like the wellspring. The memories fade as soon as I break contact. But…I don’t know. It seemed something was out of balance.”
“Hm,” she said, clearly thinking that through. “You said it’s the source of all magic, right? So if the quake started there…”
“Then we don’t know what kind of damage it might have done,” I finished her sentence. “I’ll get started checking the ley-lines right away.”
“That’s exactly what I was going to ask,” she said seriously. “You know as much about them as anyone; you’ll be able to spot any damage better than I could.”
“We’ll need the Fae to check the veil, too,” I said after a moment’s thought. “It flows from the wellspring just like the ley-lines.”
“Hm,” Rachel mused again. “That’s true. And we aren’t allowed to fuck with it. The Master of the Seal will have to reach out to Lugh and make sure they’re on it. I’ll give him a call once I’m done with my rounds.”
“Good.” I nodded. “I’ll let you know if I find anything with the ley-lines.”
I heard a click as she hung up without saying goodbye. With a shrug, I turned my attention back to my desk and my ruined computer. It was clearly beyond salvage; I’d need a new one. Goddammit.
I sighed.