by Vivian Shaw
“How do we find and stop them?” Varney asked.
“Patience,” said the god. “I have not finished. The magic that is being done to effect these little destructions is magic, and it is made to look like magic in the Egyptian fashion. What it is not is from this Egypt.”
“How can you have more than one Egypt?” Cranswell wanted to know. “For that matter, how do you know it’s not from here?”
“I am the scribe,” Djehuty said simply. “I am the keeper of the balance and the book of life. I wrote the magic of Egypt, but I did not write this spell. I tell you I know this is designed to look as if it is from an Egypt, but it is not from this one.”
“‘There are other worlds than these,’” Greta murmured. Something was kicking her brain.
“Countless, perhaps. I cannot say.”
“How do we stop it?” said Tefnakhte. “How do we—find who is doing it, and why?”
“That I do not know,” Djehuty said, sounding tired for the first time. “I cannot follow its threads back to the source; its ways are not my ways.”
“What about our patients?” said Sister Brigitte, entering the conversation for the first time. “Can you help them?”
“To some extent,” he said. “But I cannot stop this from happening. Not even I can do that.”
“Then we are out of options entirely,” said Varney, and all the beauty of his voice seemed to have drained away, leaving only a melancholy heavy and dull as lead.
In Hell, in the M&E bullpen, underneath the din of calculating machines clattering and demon claws typing and voices in intense consultation, amid the drifts and heaps of graphic recordings of essograph traces, Ruthven stared at the papers he held, and at his notebook half-full of neat little pencil notations, and back at the papers again.
Fastitocalon had set him to look at the recent esso traces, going back only several months: the recordings that should have been reported monthly by the surface operatives, and in perhaps a third of the cases had been so reported. Those that hadn’t were assigned to the operatives originally appointed by Asmodeus, and Ruthven had a fairly good idea of Asmodeus’s management style and oversight of employees by now. The other demons under Fastitocalon’s overview were working through the backlog of the past several decades of unanalyzed data, and every now and then the general background noise was interrupted by an excited shout as someone found a significant data point and hurried over to add it to the whiteboard that held their running tally of discrepancies.
Ruthven had said to Fastitocalon that pattern-finding was more his speed than crunching numbers, and even so, he’d had to go back several times and make sure he wasn’t cognitive-biasing his way into a false assumption—and then he’d turned the page in his notebook and begun to draw a rough, not-to-scale graph based on the results listed on the whiteboard. Meta-analysis in real time.
Ninety years ago, nothing. Ordinary background noise. Eighty years ago—a couple of incidents, unexplained excursions that didn’t correspond to known and assigned trips between planes. Still could have been nothing more than static, statistically insignificant—but the rate had continued to increase gently but steadily over the next half a century. Something or someone, or several somethings or someones, was making it a habit to pass between planes quite often, without explanation, and in doing so was wearing down the fabric of reality bit by bit. Translocation alone shouldn’t have caused that kind of deterioration: this seemed to be intentional.
And then fifteen years ago, the rate had started to go up sharply. Ruthven didn’t know what had changed—but it seemed fairly clear that Hell either wasn’t paying any attention or was fully aware of the incursions and failed to report them. Monitoring and Evaluation should have raised the alarm decades ago, even under the inefficient oversight of Asmodeus.
Asmodeus, Ruthven thought, and then dismissed the idea: Asmodeus might possibly be behind this, but what the hell he’d get out of destabilizing his own reality, I don’t know; that seems incredibly stupid even for him.
He flipped back through his own notes. There was the incursion of the—entity, the thing that had appeared in London last year; there was the sudden spike of repeated summonings due to the vampire Lilith’s monster menagerie this spring; the intense peak of energy that marked Fastitocalon’s tack-weld job to repair that tear in reality—and a little after that, another series of repeated metaphysical disturbances, centering on—
He looked at the coordinates for the recent series again, typed them into the computer terminal at the desk he had borrowed, and was not as surprised as he’d have liked to be to find out they corresponded to Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Where Grisaille and Cranswell had gone to fetch the magic stone from the museum.
Something or someone was systematically damaging the structure of this particular world’s basic underlying fabric, if he understood it right. And had been doing so for the past eighty years. Perhaps it was more than one group of people, working over time; perhaps it was using different individual tactics in a long game played over decades.
Ruthven just wished he could come up with a reason why.
He got up, a little dizzy but only a little, and collected his notebook and the stack of esso traces, going to knock on Fastitocalon’s half-open office door. “Fass?” he said. “I rather think you need to see this. Right now.”
CHAPTER 13
This time there simply weren’t any flights Ms. Van Dorne could bully, intimidate, and overpay her way onto: no one was leaving Charles de Gaulle for Marseille for several hours due to a line of thunderstorms sweeping their way across the country. They had circled for almost an hour before finally being given clearance to land, and coming down through the brief gap in storms had been one of the more unpleasant experiences she’d had on a plane in years.
She was pacing around one of the observation lounges, the view obscured by pouring rain lit by the occasional stuttering flash of lightning, wondering if it was worth actually trying to charter a flight south, knowing that if commercial airliners weren’t being allowed to take off, personal jets wouldn’t be given clearance, either. Goddamnit, she thought, I have to—find something else to juice, this won’t last long—
It wasn’t just the horror of her visual decay that she needed to fix, either. She had been a smoker for years, and the process of quitting had been miserably difficult; she had recognized something like the crawling discomfort of withdrawal in her own distress on the plane.
The moment in the tiny bathroom when she’d had to close her hand around the gorgeous, brilliant goldwork and inlay of her princess’s pectoral, close her hand and close her eyes so she didn’t have to see all that irreplaceable beauty crumble to dust, had been awful. She’d gone through the words of the spell fast, from memory, and felt the immediate jolt of energy and strength wash through her. The simple relief of looking in the mirror and watching her face transform, watching the age spots on the backs of her hands fade and dwindle to nothing, watching the sagging skin of her throat firm and smooth itself back to beauty, had also cleared her head, resolving that nervy irritable crawling sensation. Letting the faint grey dust of what had been her favorite piece of jewelry, her personal connection to that long-ago royal princess, swirl down the tiny steel sink had felt like losing part of herself, though, and even now her hand kept straying to her chest, expecting to feel warm gold and polished stone, and being reminded over and over again that it was gone.
(She was trying not to wonder how long it would last, and what the hell she was going to do when it wore off; the aging seemed to come on faster every time, and the jolt of energy the spell brought never seemed to last as long.)
Another crack of thunder came, closer now, and the rain hurled itself against the windows like a living thing trying to get in. Nobody was flying anywhere until this little lot moved on.
She looked away from the window, back into the airport proper, and happened to glance past one of the directional information signs guiding passengers to ground tran
sport. Taxis, buses, rail—
Rail. She could take the RER into Paris and get on a train—of course, it’d only take three hours or something—she’d get to Marseille and find a hotel room and work out what to do next when she got there, and she would find something to juice if she needed it before she found the stela, anything with votive power would do to keep her going long enough…
For the first time since she’d seen the wrinkles beginning to reappear, Ms. Van Dorne felt as if matters might once more be under her control. She straightened up, settled her handbag more comfortably, and stalked off toward the rail connection, Louis Vuitton suitcase in tow. She was going to find her stela, and she was going to bloody well use the thing, and she would never again have to see her face sag and shrivel and droop with age: she would never, ever, ever grow old.
The world felt different with Djehuty gone. Different in a way Greta hoped she’d be able to stop noticing at some point: it was as if there were less air in the air, as if some indefinable warmth and richness were suddenly gone.
At least he had helped some of her patients, she thought, rubbing at her temples. At least they seemed a little cheered up, even if nobody was much closer to finding the answer to the fundamental problem. There was no way to trace the energy spell, whatever universe it was from; it seemed to happen at random, unpredictable, and now Greta knew (without wanting to) that it wasn’t limited to just her patients at the spa: this was probably affecting mummies all around the world. And it wasn’t just the spell itself; there were deeper ramifications.
“Grave goods,” Tefnakhte said. “It has to be draining the energy from grave goods. Our—there are so many, and they have been so widely spread over the millennia—each tiny object that’s part of a burial is effectively part of us—”
“Why, though?” Greta asked. “Why now? There has to be some reason behind it. If this really is from another world, why are they doing it, why now, what’s the point?” Whatever it was that had been kicking her brain was still doing it, and she couldn’t quite see what it was.
“Remember Paris,” Varney said quietly. “Remember the summonings,” and Cranswell nodded.
“Oh, no,” she said. “No. It—can’t be happening again.”
“What about Paris?” Tefnakhte asked.
“This spring,” Greta said. “There was a—very stupid vampire who for not-very-good reasons was summoning small monsters, over and over and over again, and each little conjuring weakened the fabric of reality just a little more until it was beginning to tear open, but, Varney, she’s dead, and this isn’t summoning anything from anywhere to anywhere else, it’s just—draining.”
“But the repetition,” said Varney. “What if that’s the point?”
Greta thought despairingly, I want six months of my life in which the phrase “fabric of reality” simply never, ever crosses anybody’s mind; is that so much to ask? Out loud she said, “Hell needs to know about this, if they don’t already.”
“Can you call them?” said Grisaille from the doorway. She turned to look at him; he was still greyish and looked like thirty miles of bad road, but he’d lost some of the shocked expression. “And—find out how Ruthven is?”
“I can try,” she said, and got out her phone. She had no idea how Faust had managed to reach her, but she scrolled back through her recents until she found the number.
Of course the country code was 666. Of course.
“Dr. Faust’s office,” said a bored voice on the other end after two rings. “How may I direct your call?”
“Hi,” she said. “This is Greta Helsing, on Earth. I’m sorry to call your office but I don’t have the number for Monitoring and Evaluation. Would it be possible for you to transfer me?”
“Greta Helsing,” said the voice, and then, as if its owner had just made a mental connection, “You’re the human? The one Dr. Faust was talking about?”
“I have no idea why he’d be talking about me, but I did speak with him recently regarding a patient of mine who’d been transferred to Hell.” Greta felt faintly hysterical: how was this conversation actually happening, and why didn’t it strike her as more improbable than it did?
“Of course I’ll transfer you, one moment,” said the demon, and there was a series of clicks. She looked at Varney and Tefnakhte and Grisaille, and wished enormously that she had never answered her office phone that rainy afternoon; never found her way here, never become part of this whole wretched, stupid, miserable situation.
Of course, then someone else would have had to be.
“—Greta?” said Fastitocalon’s voice in her ear. “What on earth are you up to? We just had a massive incursion spike on the Côte d’Azur essographs, something huge just came through and it’s set up a standing wave, we’re a little busy—”
“We summoned a god,” she said. “We had reasons.”
“You what? Bloody hell, Greta, are you trying to rip the world wide open?”
Oh, fuck, she thought, a cold bloom of realization all at once. What have I done, what have we done, why didn’t I think of that, the danger of it—
“I’m so sorry,” she said, achingly tired, doing everything wrong. “We—I—didn’t think it through, we were trying to find out what’s hurting my mummies—and he told us several useful bits of information, key among which is that it’s sucking out a little bit of energy, or life force, each time, and that it’s being done by a spell that’s designed to look as if it’s Egyptian—but it isn’t from this world.”
“Ah,” he said in a somewhat different tone. “That changes things a little.”
“Changes what?”
“Edmund’s been helping out with the data analysis,” he said, “and has found what I believe to be credible evidence that this goes back almost a hundred years—the slow weakening of reality, and just recently a series of repeated attacks which appear to be located in North America, not unlike the pattern of summonings we saw in Paris.”
“You think that corresponds to this energy spell?” Greta asked. “Like, every time a mummy has one of these magical attacks, reality gets ever so slightly more foxed around the edges?”
“Something like that,” said Fastitocalon, sounding very tired. “It doesn’t make sense from the interior perspective; even someone as bloody-minded as Asmodeus would be unlikely to try it because damaging one’s own reality is an excellent way to stop existing, but if the spell is from somewhere else—”
“Where else is there to be?” Greta demanded. “Djehuty said—oh, that there were other worlds than these, or something, but it makes no sense—shit, that’s what it was—Faust said Ruthven’s curse was made to look angelic in origin but not due to any of the angels he could identify.” She snapped her fingers. “Maybe the spell and the curse are from the same place? How does that even work?”
“When I am not in the middle of attempting to avert apocalypse, I will be glad to draw you quite a lot of diagrams of applied relative cosmology,” said Fastitocalon. “And yes, if Faust can’t identify it as being from this world, it might well be from somewhere else. This does change matters. We need Heaven in on this one, and that means Samael has to make a call.”
“Ask him about Ruthven,” Grisaille said. While Greta had been talking, he’d drifted over to the table and now leaned on it with both hands, intently focused. “I want to know about Ruthven.”
“You said Edmund was helping you in the office?” Greta said, waving a hand at Grisaille: Calm down.
“Yes, he’s been quite helpful. He demanded to be given something to do. Now if you don’t mind, I’ve got to get off the phone—”
“Grisaille is asking after him,” she said. “Meaningfully.”
“Oh, for—look, I’ll send someone up to fetch him, I can’t be having with lovelorn vampires, and one more brief disturbance won’t tip us over the edge. I’ll be in touch. Stay safe,” and he was gone. Greta looked up at Grisaille with a shrug.
“Get packed for Hell,” she said. “You get a front-ro
w seat to this whole mess, apparently.”
“My nipples explode with delight,” he said solemnly, and despite how old and worn and exhausted Greta felt, she discovered she was still able to laugh.
The train from Paris had taken Leonora Van Dorne through the center of the thunderstorm-front into bright sunshine as it raced south, and despite her grief at losing the princess’s pectoral and her shock and horror at having to use it at all, she was considerably cheered up by the improvement in the weather.
It was a little over three hours from Paris to Marseille, which gave her time to make several more phone calls. Checking in with her network to see if anything had shown up on any of the international stolen-antiquities lists; contacting the Marseille airport to inquire about chartered flights, and after some chatty conversation determining that they handled a lot of one-way charters but one private concern kept their own helicopter registered at Marseille Provence Airport and was always flying in and out as it suited them. Her notebook, open on the tray table in front of her, listed the names of the charter companies.
“I’ve been thinking of doing the same,” she said in flawless but accented French. “It’s just simpler to have one’s own, don’t you think, rather than having to arrange it separately every single time one wishes to visit Ibiza or Rome for the weekend—it’s good to know you handle other private individuals’ aircraft with discretion—”
“Oh, no, madame, Oasis Natrun’s not an individual, it’s an exclusive wellness facility,” the representative had said, with the faint emphasis on wellness that implied place for rich people to dry out. “Very private, you understand.”
“Of course,” she said, and smiled. On the notebook page, her pencil printed the words OASIS NATRUN in block capitals, and circled the name twice. “Thank you; you’ve been very helpful.”
That had been an hour ago. Another few minutes of concentrated work on the phone and online had given her an address, flagged with multiple warnings: the entry was gated and guarded, only preapproved clients were allowed to visit. If you had to ask, you weren’t supposed to know, Ms. Van Dorne thought with her enigmatic smile curving at the edges. That type of rule applied to other people, not to her.
