by Rachel Aaron
“That is all technically correct,” the UN mage said, nodding. “Though I don’t think you quite appreciate just how much bigger we’re talking about. The relative level of the manasphere is a difficult concept even for theoretical mages, but I think the water metaphor works best here.”
That sounded like the same analogy Amelia had used, but Marci didn’t want to interrupt Sir Myron now that he was finally explaining things, so she just motioned for him to continue.
“Magic pours into this world like a stream into a wetland,” the mage said. “A thousand years ago, something—we don’t know what—stopped the stream’s flow, and the result was a magical drought so severe that spirits, mages, and other creatures and phenomena that relied on magic all but ceased to exist. The wetland became desert, so to speak. When the meteor hit sixty years ago and brought the flow back—again, we don’t know how—the influx of new magic was enough to fill the cracks and bring back all spirits of the land and animals within twenty-four hours. By contrast, given the current rise of ambient magic around the world, my lab’s best calculations estimated that the ambient magic level would not be enough to support Mortal Spirits for another forty to fifty years. In other words, the gusher of magic that was enough to bring back spirits like Raven and Algonquin in a single night will have to flow for a century and then some to fill even the smallest vessel of the Mortal Spirits.”
By the time he finished, Marci’s eyes were round. She’d known there was a difference in scale, but she hadn’t realized until this moment just how much bigger they were talking.
“You don’t have to make it sound that uneven,” Raven said, insulted. “We had a boost because we were already well established. But Mortal Spirits rely on human ideas, which are a far more flimsy foundation than land formations and animals. There are always ravens, but not every person has the same vision of death.”
“That’s true,” General Jackson agreed. “But Myron’s point—which we learned from you, I might add—still stands. Once they become fully formed, Mortal Spirits are exponentially larger and more powerful than any other type of spirit. So much so, in fact, that mages of the ancient world didn’t even call them spirits. They gave Mortal Spirits an entirely different set of names.”
“What was that?” Marci asked, almost leaning over the table in her excitement.
“Gods,” Sir Myron said grimly. “They called them gods.”
Marci supposed she should have guessed that from the start. What else could you call something like the Empty Wind except divine? But while all of this made sense in the historical context, she still didn’t see how it explained her situation now. “If that’s the case, then why is Ghost here now? Amelia also said that he was fifty years early, which agrees with your calculations. But if it’s supposed to take over a hundred years of magic to fill out a Mortal Spirit, how do you explain him? Is he a runt or something?”
Sir Myron smiled politely. “To answer that, it would be helpful if you’d tell us what he’s the Mortal Spirit of.”
He paused expectantly, but like before, Marci’s mouth clamped shut. When it was clear it was going to stay that way, the general sighed. “I’m sure you have your reasons to keep his true nature to yourself,” she said. “But the point you bring up is exactly what we asked you here to talk about. As I’m sure you’ve already guessed, the arrival of what is basically a god fifty years ahead of schedule marks a massive change in the power balance of the world.”
“Oh, come on,” Marci said with a nervous laugh. “Not to downplay my own cat, but I’ve seen him in action. Ghost is pretty intense, but he’s not global-scale.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” General Jackson said, nodding toward her partner. “Three days ago, the night before Algonquin attacked the Three Sisters, Myron’s teams at the various magical research stations all around the world simultaneously detected a disturbance in the Earth’s deep magic.”
That didn’t sound good. “What kind of disturbance?” Marci asked. Because three days ago would have been the night they’d defeated Vann Jeger. “Could it have been the collapse of a spirit?”
“It was far bigger than that,” Sir Myron said, his voice taking on a lecturing tone. “As the UN’s lead sorcerer and world’s foremost expert in Tectonic Magic—” He paused to give her a skeptical look. “You do know what that is?”
“Of course I know what it is,” Marci said, giving him a cutting look of her own. “I wasn’t lying about reading your books. Tectonic magic studies the movements of magic at its deepest, most primal state, before it rises from the ground and becomes usable.”
“There’s more to it than that,” Myron said defensively. “Tectonic Magic isn’t just about looking at magic before it becomes usable. It’s the study of the creation of magic as it wells up from the deepest core of our plane. But this welling doesn’t happen uniformly. Like the plate tectonics it’s named for, magic at the tectonic level is highly volatile with its own fractures, eruptions, hot spots, and so forth. We’ve yet to feel the true impact of these changes since the Earth’s relative ambient magical level is still far lower than it was before the drought, but as more and more magic flows into the world, disturbances in Tectonic Magic have the potential to be every bit as devastating as the volcanoes and earthquakes they’re named after. This is why we study and track them, but the tremor we detected three days ago was different.”
“Different how?” Marci asked.
Myron scowled. “It’s difficult to explain to someone who isn’t familiar with the normal numbers, but the best way to describe it is that, three days ago, something deep in the Earth’s magic moved. Something very large, big enough that the tremors were detected simultaneously by sensors all around the world.”
“And you think it was Ghost?” Because given what he’d just said about the relative size of Mortal Spirits, that was the only thing Marci could think of that’d be big enough to cause such a phenomenon. The timing lined up perfectly, too, since that was the night she’d fed Ghost all the magic she’d pulled out of Vann Jeger, giving him the oomph he needed to regain his name and become the Empty Wind. But while all of that made sense to her, Sir Myron was shaking his head.
“Again, there’s more to it,” he said, placing his hands on either side of the transparent cat on the table. “Despite his current deplorable condition, I’m sure your spirit was quite large at one time, though still not as big as he should have been. The ambient magic of the world is simply too low to support a fully-fledged Mortal Spirit just yet. That said, I do believe the tremor was related to his appearance. Or, more specifically, to yours.”
Marci blinked. “Me?”
He nodded. “The night of the disturbance was the night you bound him, correct?”
“Well, technically, I bound him over a month ago,” she said sheepishly. “But that was the night he changed, so—”
“Changed?” Sir Myron asked sharply. “What do you mean changed?”
“He wasn’t always like this,” Marci explained. “When I first found him, he was smaller and far less intelligent. I actually thought he was a death spirit at first. But as I fed him power, he grew—”
Sir Myron lurched in his seat. “You fed him power?”
“What?” she said, taken aback. “Is that bad?”
“Not bad. Just reckless and stupid. Did it never occur to you that feeding magic into an unknown spirit was perhaps a dangerous thing to do?”
“It did,” Marci said, narrowing her eyes. “But not as dangerous as the other things I was dealing with at the time. I’ve spent the last month running with dragons in the DFZ and fighting one of their seers. Given everything else that was happening, Ghost’s growth was the least of my worries.”
By the time she finished, Sir Myron was looking very satisfactorily cowed, and Marci wasn’t above giving him a superior smirk. She might not hold a Chair at Cambridge, but she wasn’t some undergrad he could push around, either.
“Be that as it may,” the unders
ecretary said when he’d recovered, “you’re lucky you were able to maintain control, and that he wasn’t something dreadful.”
“Luck had nothing to do with it,” Marci said proudly. “I fought for him all the way. And I never said he wasn’t dreadful.”
Now she was just pushing her luck, but Marci had had it up to here with being talked down to. If she could hold her own against dragons, there was no reason at all to let another human mage walk all over her, no matter how famous he was. It was time she took control of this conversation, and Marci had a good idea how to do it. “That disturbance you were talking about before,” she said, resting her elbows on the table. “Does it have anything to do with Merlins?”
That was a total stab in the dark, but from the way Myron’s eyes went wide, she knew it was a bull’s-eye.
“How do you know about that?”
Marci shrugged. “Amelia mentioned it.” Obliquely, in passing, while drunk and reeling from Svena’s spell. But she wasn’t about to give away how ignorant she actually was, so she just sat there, smiling her best “I know, I just want to see if you know” grin as she waited for the know-it-all UN mage to cave.
It didn’t take long.
“I’m not sure how much a dragon would know,” he said a few seconds later. “Even before the drought, Merlins were very secretive. I’ve read every magical text in the Vatican’s secret library, and I’ve only ever found a handful of mentions of Merlins, most of them wildly contradictory.”
Now they were getting somewhere. “Just so we’re clear,” Marci said, trying her best not to sound too excited. “When you say Merlin, you’re not talking about the King Arthur, big blue wizard hat, time-travels with his pet owl kind of Merlin, right?”
“I suppose if one’s history was taken entirely from children’s television, that would be one description of an historical mage who was known to be a Merlin,” Sir Myron said disdainfully. “But here, Merlin is a title, not a person. It seems to be a technical designation for a specific kind of very powerful mage, but the few texts I’ve read that mention Merlins specifically don’t agree on what that actually entails. There are wild accounts of Merlins doing everything from slaying dragons to commanding the seas to part and give way to new land. The only actual connecting factor I’ve found is that, whatever other powers they were reported to possess, a Merlin is always a mage who has bound and controls a Mortal Spirit.”
By this point, Marci’s heart was pounding so hard she thought it might thump straight out of her chest. “And you think I’m a Merlin!?”
“Not just a Merlin,” General Jackson said. “The first Merlin. At least of our generation.”
“That has yet to be proven,” Sir Myron said quickly, glaring at Marci. “Binding a Mortal Spirit is merely the first step. There are still other qualifications that—”
“Like what?” Marci asked. Because if it meant becoming some kind of super mage, she was ready.
Again, though, Sir Myron’s face crumpled into an annoyed scowl. “We don’t know,” he admitted at last.
“You don’t know?” she cried. “But you’re the one with all the secret knowledge and Vatican connections and—”
“We’re talking about things that were considered great mysteries when they were current a thousand years ago,” Myron snapped back. “I only can only work with what I have!”
“What about you?” Marci asked, turning to Raven, who was in the process of stealing the uneaten pancakes from the general’s plate. “You’re always going on about how you’re ancient and wise. Don’t you know all this stuff?”
“I am indeed old and powerful,” Raven said, swallowing a beakful of pancake. “But I’m also an animal spirit. My concerns are my ravens, my world, and having a good time. I admit to a great fondness for humans—your kind has given me an enormous amount of entertainment over the years—but I’m afraid the specifics of Merlin creation are outside of my area of expertise. Frankly, I had my talons full just dealing with the bastards on a day-to-day basis. You wouldn’t believe how pushy humans get once they’ve got the power of a god behind them.”
“Well,” Marci said, her face splitting into a grin, “if you don’t know and you don’t know”—she flicked her gaze back to Sir Myron—“who’s to say I’m not a Merlin right now?”
You’re not.
The words made her jump, and Marci looked down just in time to see Ghost crack his glowing eyes.
You’re not a Merlin, he said. Not yet.
Way to take the wind out of my sails, she thought back, her whole body slumping. So how do I become one?
The spirit flicked his ears in the cat equivalent of a shrug, and Marci gaped at him. “Really?” she asked out loud.
“Are you talking to the spirit?” Sir Myron demanded, grabbing the table as he leaned in closer. “What does he say?”
Marci waved for him to be quiet and kept her focus on Ghost, who unfortunately seemed to be struggling to stay awake. “Come on, buddy,” she coaxed. “If there was ever a time to drop the cryptic-cat act and just give me a straight answer, it’s now.”
I’m not being cryptic, the spirit whispered grumpily in her mind. I’m as new to this as you. But I know you’re not what they say. At least not yet.
“How?”
The cat yawned and closed his eyes again. Because if you were, I wouldn’t be this tired.
“Oh, come on,” she said, reaching out to pinch the icy fur on his back. “Don’t go back to sleep.”
But it was too late. Ghost had already turned nearly completely transparent, his presence in her mind receding as it only did when he was deeply asleep.
“He faded,” Myron said accusingly. “The magic here is simply too weak to support a spirit of his size.”
Marci dropped her eyes. Much as she hated to admit it, Sir Myron was right. She’d dismissed Ghost’s current downturn as the natural consequence of blowing so much magic to scare Gregory, but if she was honest with herself, he’d been running on low power ever since they’d left the DFZ, and no wonder. She’d noticed herself how empty and lifeless Heartstriker Mountain felt when compared to the pea-soup magic you found in Algonquin’s city. If that was how it felt to her, how much worse must it be for Ghost, who was entirely made of magic? If it wasn’t for Amelia’s flame, he might have vanished entirely.
Even without all the stuff Sir Myron had told her, that was a sobering thought. She’d only had Ghost for a little over a month, but what a month it had been. He was her cat and her foxhole buddy, as close and dear to her as Julius himself. Maybe even more so, because while Julius belonged to his world, Ghost was hers. He depended on her, and as she looked down at the faint shadow of his outline on the table, all Marci could think was that she was doing a piss-poor job of it.
“Okay,” she said quietly.
Sir Myron arched an eyebrow. “Okay what?”
“I’m ready to become a Merlin,” she said solemnly, folding her hands on the table. “I know you just said you don’t know exactly how that works, but you clearly know more than I do, so I’m ready to try. What do I do?”
For some reason, this announcement drew a sour look from the older mage. General Jackson, on the other hand, was grinning like she’d just landed the shot of the century. “I was hoping you’d say that,” she said, folding her gloved hands on the table. “With your permission, Miss Novalli, I’d like to take you into protective custody.”
“Huh?” Marci said, blinking in surprise. “Why? Protective from what?”
“Everything,” the general said flatly. “I’m not a mage like you or Myron, but I am highly invested in humanity’s long-term magical security. I’ve just had a Merlin dropped into my lap fifty years ahead of schedule. That’s not the kind of good fortune I’m willing to gamble.”
Marci still didn’t get it. “But…Sir Myron just said you guys don’t even know what a Merlin actually does.”
The general shrugged. “We know they’re powerful. That’s enough for me.”
That seemed like nebulous reasoning to Marci, but before she could say as much, General Jackson leaned over the table, her dark eyes sharp as knives in her oddly ageless face. “I don’t think you understand our situation,” she said quietly. “For the past sixty years, the reawakening of spirits and reemergence of dragons has left humanity scrambling to keep up. Even with modern magical advances in weapons and security, we’ve always been the weakest force in this new power structure. That’s how spirits like Algonquin and dragons like Bethesda have been able to take and hold so much ground. Because for the last six decades, humanity has been at a crippling disadvantage. Quite frankly, the only reason we haven’t been wiped out or enslaved already is because of our gross numbers advantage. But even that edge won’t last forever. Spirits and dragons have time on their side. We, on the other hand, are mortal, and while we have our own form of magic, we’ve lost all cultural knowledge for how to use it. Myron’s one of the best mages in the world, and even he knows only a fraction of what an apprentice would have been taught before the drought.”
“Less than a fraction,” Sir Myron growled, his ringed fingers curling into fists. “A sliver. A pittance.”
His voice shook with an anger Marci knew very well. She’d raged herself at how unfair it was that dragons and spirits had gone right back to business as usual while humanity had been forced to relearn everything from scratch. But even so. “It’s not like we’re helpless,” she said. “The EU shot down that dragon who went crazy over Turkey twenty years ago. And you!” She turned to Myron. “You got your knighthood because you banished the spirit of the Thames River and stopped it from flooding London. I wrote an entire paper about it.”
“Then you should know that I and my entire team nearly died in the process,” Sir Myron said bitterly. “We’ve made huge advancements in magic considering we didn’t even believe in the stuff sixty years ago, but we are still far, far behind where we need to be.”
“Population and military strength have kept us from open conflict,” the general picked up. “But none of that helped us save Detroit when Algonquin claimed it, and we won’t be able to save the next city a spirit decides to take, either. Just look at China. Dragons took over the ruling Communist Party barely a week after the return of magic, and they’ve been running the country like their own private kingdom ever since. Same goes for Algonquin and the DFZ. We can’t even make her honor basic human rights because we can’t do anything to her, and she knows it.”
