The Hidden Goddess

by M. K. Hobson

  “I’m not the only one who skipped out on my duties,” Emily said. “You were supposed to speak to Rose’s Admiration League today. You can’t always be ducking them.”

  “Having Rose as the president of my Admiration League—indeed, having an Admiration League at all—is an exercise in patience to which I am not always equal.”

  “She adores you.” Emily smiled up at him. “She’d walk through fire for you.”

  “Sometimes I wish she would.”

  “Oh, stop it. You have to take your duties seriously, you know.”

  “Of course I must,” Stanton said, with the exasperation of a man who has heard the same thing a million different times from a million different people—an exasperation Emily was intimately acquainted with herself. “But I hadn’t realized exactly how consuming they were going to be. Having to meet you in a public park, as if this were some kind of … assignation? Having to resort to a child’s toy just to get messages to you?” He glanced at the student slate he was still holding in his hand, then tucked it away inside his coat. “But Zeno maintains I have to stay focused. He’s got this odd idea that you distract me.”

  “Who, me?” Emily said. “My, what you have to go through, just to achieve the zenith of credomantic power.”

  “I just hope it won’t be too much,” he said, raising a hand to touch a shining brunette lock that had escaped from beneath her small feathered hat. He pulled the movement up short when a loud exclamation came from behind them; the Germans, who were still lingering nearby, had drawn out a map and were consulting it and conversing loudly among themselves.

  “For pity’s sake!” he muttered. “Even if they can’t find where they’re going, can’t they at least find their way away from us?”

  He went over to the Germans and spoke a few words to them in their own language. They seemed overjoyed at his help and clapped him on the back. When Stanton returned to Emily’s side, there was a wicked grin on his face.

  “Did you help them find what they were looking for?” she asked, not quite understanding what had transpired as Stanton took her arm and led her away.

  “No,” Stanton said. “But I did share a closely guarded secret with them. Specifically, that all the city’s streetcars may be ridden free of charge if one tells the driver that one’s brother-in-law’s name is Mickey Doogan.”

  “Mickey Doogan?” Emily scrunched her nose. “Who’s he?”

  “No idea,” Stanton said. “Made him up whole cloth. I haven’t the time to put a bunch of bothersome tourists in their place. The streetcar drivers are better at it anyway. They’ve practically elevated it to an art form.”

  Emily looked after the Germans. Having experienced the artful brusqueness of New York’s streetcar drivers herself once or twice, she felt a twinge of sympathy for them.

  “You’re just plain cruel, that’s what you are.”

  “Not as cruel as not being able to kiss you as much as I like, given how pretty you look today. Come on. We’re going to find someplace less populated.”

  Emily tried to match his long strides, but she found herself faltering. In her small boots of tight kid, her ankle was swelling and aching again. He paused, looking down at her foot.

  “Did you hurt yourself?”

  “I’ll tell you about it when we get to that less populated place you promised me.” She squeezed his warm arm closer to her, acutely desiring a change of subject. “Just exactly how many languages do you know, anyway?”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever counted,” Stanton said thoughtfully. “Latin and Greek don’t count; anyone with pretensions to know anything should know those. Same with Sanskrit, Sumerian, and the Dravidian languages, though one needs only to be able to read them. As far as speaking, I’m quite good in French, Spanish, Russian, German, Hebrew, and Arabic. I can get around in Turkish and speak enough Hindi to buy dosas and a mango lassi, if required. Then there’s bits and pieces of others.”

  She stared at him for a long moment. She felt as if he’d just hit her over the head with a dictionary.

  “You can’t be serious,” she said.

  “Well, I haven’t got a stick of Chinese,” Stanton said, making the lack sound egregious indeed. “Believe me, the list I just gave you is unimpressive compared to some credomancers you’ll meet.”

  “Where on earth do you put them all?” She tried to imagine knowing thirteen ways to say the word “pickle,” never mind that you didn’t know how to say it in Chinese.

  “My dear, language is the currency of credomantic power,” he said. “A spell in English won’t do you a sliver of good in Moscow, or Berlin, or Paris. Besides, a credomancer’s power derives entirely from local customs and beliefs. One must have the ability to discern and exploit those beliefs.”

  They turned onto an overgrown path that wound up into the green darkness of a densely wooded, boulder-strewn hillside.

  “Will your ankle bear up?” he asked Emily, putting an arm around her waist to support her once the threat of being seen had passed.

  “My ankle has been through worse,” Emily said, but let herself lean against him nonetheless.

  They ascended up the tangled path, pausing every now and again to disengage Emily’s garments from snagging branches and roots.

  Somehow they managed to outwit the local flora and achieve the objective Stanton had apparently been aiming for: a squat, thick-walled building of irregularly shaped stones. It was a perfect cube, with one very small, rusty door hanging off its hinges. Ivy grew all around the structure; midafternoon light poured down through its shattered roof.

  “It’s called the blockhouse,” Stanton said, taking Emily by the waist and lifting her up over a fallen tree trunk. “It was here long before Central Park was even thought of. My grandfather fought here in the War of 1812. He used to bring me up here to shoot birds.” He touched the door, which creaked and showered them with flakes of rust. He peered inside. “It’s fallen apart a bit since then.”

  As Emily stepped inside the large empty fortress, she noticed that there were two small barred casement windows set in each stone wall. While secluded, it was also rather like being in a jail.

  “How romantic,” Emily said, looking up at the sky through the collapsed roof. Fat, curling tendrils of ivy framed the ceiling of mellow blue. It was like looking up from the bottom of a well.

  But Stanton seemed to have no interest in the sky. He gathered her in his arms and pulled her close into his sweltering embrace; he was as warm as a fever victim. He began kissing her—kisses that progressed in duration and intensity until it was clear that for the moment, it was better to stop kissing altogether.

  He let his arms rest loosely around her waist, resting his forehead against hers.

  “You promised me you’d tell me about your ankle,” Stanton murmured. “Have you been chasing Aberrancies again?”

  The guess, though playfully intended, was far too close to the truth for Emily’s liking, and she found that she didn’t want to talk about all that now. She enjoyed the warm glow of Stanton’s embrace far too much to risk losing it.

  “You first,” she said, lifting her chin. “Your note said ‘Urgent.’ Is anything wrong?”

  “Other than you missing my mother’s lunch?” Stanton said. “Everything pales in comparison to that, I’m afraid.”

  Before she could hit him, he pulled a velvet box from his pocket and presented it to her with a flourish. She opened the box, and found that it contained a ring of mellow white gold, set with a huge diamond. The stone didn’t just sparkle like other diamonds she’d seen; it blazed fire all around it, blue and red.

  “I captured it from the Dark Sorcerer of Trieste,” Stanton explained. “Haven’t you been reading my books?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a meteorite diamond. Incredibly rare, outlandishly expensive.” Stanton took the box from her and removed the ring. “I rather wish I had captured it from the Dark Sorcerer of Trieste; it wouldn’t have set the Institute back quit
e so much, and we wouldn’t have had to go through such paroxysms of secrecy to obtain it.” He took her hand and slid the ring on her finger. “It’s to be your engagement ring. I was supposed to have given it to you before the lunch you didn’t attend, so you could flash it around. Oh well.”

  “The Institute bought me a big vulgar diamond ring?”

  “Well, I couldn’t afford it,” Stanton said. “If it were up to me, you’d keep that one.” He gestured to his gold Jefferson Chair ring that Emily had taken to wearing on her thumb. “But Fortissimus says you have to help reinforce the mythology. I supposedly captured this ring from an enemy of exceptional power and villainy. If you’re seen wearing it, it heightens the illusion.” He tilted her hand up to the light and placed a kiss on each of her fingertips.

  “It’s grotesque!” Emily said. “Think of the muscles I’ll have to grow to carry this thing around. I’ll have to have a dress of one size and a sleeve two sizes larger!”

  “Now, mustn’t overdramatize.” Stanton smiled, apparently wholly unaware of the irony. He slid the gold Jefferson Chair ring from her thumb and pocketed it. She swallowed a sound of protest; she’d grown quite fond of the simple gold band.

  “So what does this monstrosity do?” Emily tilted her hand back and forth, watching the diamond glitter. “Does it allow me to summon armies of the undead? Levitate on nights with a full moon? Read the hidden motives of the wicked and untrue?”

  “It doesn’t do anything.”

  Mildly exasperated, she let her hand fall.

  “Well, it must have some magical power, otherwise why did you risk your life capturing it from the Dark Sorcerer of Trieste?”

  “It wasn’t the diamond I risked my life for,” Stanton said quite seriously, despite the fact that his life had been risked only in the most purely fictional sense. “It was an affirmation of the Manichaean principle of Ultimate Good triumphing over Ultimate Evil. Dreadnought Stanton does not battle for material gains, he battles to defeat the forces of darkness. The capturing of treasure is mostly incidental.” He sounded heroic—melodramatically so—and she smiled at him patiently until he got ahold of himself.

  A sheepish grin curved his lips. “One does tend to start thinking of one’s self in the third person,” he said more mildly.

  “So, no armies of the undead,” Emily said.

  “Like you said, it’s just a big grotesque diamond. It’s supposed to sit there and look pretty.”

  Emily stared mutely at the mostly incidental ring, which carried on blazing ostentatiously in the afternoon sunshine. Obviously, she could learn a lot from such a ring.

  Noticing her unexpected shift in mood, Stanton adopted a lighter tone. “Never mind, you’ll get used to it. Now … your ankle. And an explanation of the injury thereto.”

  Emily sighed, looking over her shoulder for a place to sit. Speaking about her ankle reminded her of it, and that was enough to set it throbbing. She eased herself onto one of the blockhouse’s weathered concrete abutments. She had been so looking forward to talking things over with Stanton, but now she didn’t want to. She wanted to forget anything had ever happened. She wanted to forget about the bottle of memories in her pocket, pretend it never existed. But unpleasant things could not just be forgotten, no matter how one wished they could. She drew a deep breath, let it out. The afternoon smelled of warmth and growing plants and sunshine.

  “I had a strange talk with Pap,” Emily began. “He had a lot of things to tell me.” She paused. “He told me that there were things about my mother I never knew. He gave me this.” She pulled the heavy blue bottle from her pocket. “It’s called a Lethe Draught.”

  “A Lethe Draught!” Stanton settled himself beside her. He took the bottle between his fingers and held it up to the light. He examined the card that was attached to the neck.

  “ ‘Catherine Kendall,’ ” he read. “ ‘Boston.’ ”

  “It was my mother’s card,” Emily said softly.

  “Unglazed bristol board, excellent engraving. This is the card of a woman of good family.” Stanton paused, obviously surprised. “How unexpected.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “When I can spare a second, I’ll take you down to the Institute’s library, and we’ll look up the name in the Boston Social Register. The Institute has copies of all of them back a hundred years or more.”

  “I hardly think my mother would be in the Boston Social Register,” Emily said.

  Stanton did not comment, but continued to peer closely at the contents of the bottle. “Why would he Lethe you?”

  “He said my mother was evil.”

  “Evil?”

  “He didn’t want to explain,” Emily said. “He just said that my memories were so bad that I had to be protected from them.”

  Stanton frowned. “That is the commonly accepted usage of Lethe Draughts—to mitigate the harm of traumatic memories. But it’s a pretty drastic step, one that most practitioners don’t take lightly.”

  “I’m sure Pap wouldn’t have done it if he didn’t have to.” Emily felt suddenly cold, and pressed closer to Stanton for warmth. “Well, what do you think? Should I drink it, or what?”

  Stanton’s response was immediate. “Drink a Lethe Draught decocted by your pap? I think not!”

  Then he quickly lifted an ameliorating hand. “Not that he isn’t an able Warlock, but they’re awfully tricky potions, Emily. Easy to get wrong.”

  “So I should let my memories of my mother go? Just like that?” Emily said. “Let my history stay dead and bottled up?”

  “Sometimes it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie,” Stanton said. Then he let out a long sigh. “But knowing you, you won’t let them. Promise me one thing. If you decide to drink it, don’t do it alone. Wait until I can be there with you.”

  Emily nodded assent, remembering her similar promise to Pap.

  “A Lethe Draught!” Stanton shook his head in disbelief. Then, in a darker tone, he added, “He kept a lot from you, didn’t he?”

  “He did it to protect me,” Emily said.

  “I wonder if that makes it right,” Stanton mused. Then his eyes widened. “But you still haven’t explained your ankle!”

  “Well, that happened when I ran into the Sini Mira,” Emily said. The words had the predicable effect of making Stanton blink twice at her; Emily compressed her lips, but did not smile.

  “The Sini Mira sent men to Pap’s cabin to ask about my mother,” Emily explained. “They are interested in her. They wouldn’t tell me why.”

  “They wouldn’t tell … you spoke to them?”

  “I spoke to one of them. His name was Dmitri.”

  “He hurt you?”

  “No …” Emily was hesitant to go into all the details of her battle with the Aberrancies; she felt he’d been alarmed enough for one day. “There was an earthquake … you know, there’ve been terrible earthquakes in San Francisco … and I twisted my ankle. He was there, he helped me up …” She waved an impatient hand, as if to brush aside the strands of her story that didn’t hold together. “He had been following me. He said he’d been sent to protect me.”

  “The Sini Mira is not interested in protecting Witches.”

  Emily frowned. Dmitri had said as much himself. “Why do they hate us so much?” she asked, inching herself back on the ledge and extending her ankle to rotate it. “Magic is as natural as … sunshine! They might as well hate sunshine!”

  Stanton lifted her foot and let it rest in the crook of his arm. With his large hand, he began lightly kneading her ankle through the soft kid.

  “And how exactly do they think they can stop people using magic, anyway?” Emily added, leaning back and enjoying the warm play of Stanton’s fingers on her leg.

  “As I understand it, they propose to implement a sort of poison,” Stanton said. “A poison, deployed within the Mantic Anastomosis itself, that would make magic toxic to any practitioner channeling it. The idea was put forth in the fifties by a scientist named Alekse
i Morozovich. It sent the magical community into an uproar.”

  “I can imagine.” Emily winced as Stanton’s fingers found a particularly sore spot. Then, she asked softly, “How toxic?”

  “As Morozovich’s research was never disseminated, that’s a matter of speculation. Some say that even the smallest charm could leave a practitioner feeling ill … and that perhaps, it could be fatal to an individual working a great magic.”

  “And what about someone like you?” Emily asked. “Someone burned?”

  Stanton pressed his lips together and was silent for a long time. His hand played over her ankle gently.

  “Being burned means I cannot control the magic that flows through my body,” he said eventually. “I have no defenses against it; it flows through me untrammeled. I do not choose to channel magic, and thus I cannot choose not to channel magic. If the poison as it has been described were to be implemented, I imagine it would be unpleasant.”

  “Mildly unpleasant?” Emily ventured hopefully. “Maybe?”

  “Fatally unpleasant,” Stanton said. “Probably.”

  Emily let his words hang in the air, hoping the afternoon brightness would blunt them. It didn’t.

  It was Stanton who finally spoke again.

  “The Sini Mira does not care about me, or people like me. They are fanatics, willing to trample innocent bystanders in the pursuit of their goals.”

  “Great. So I have fanatics following me around. Again.”

  He looked at her. “Well, the preliminary indications are that they’re not after you, per se. They are interested in your mother. And even if they do think that you can help them find something out about her, as long as you stay within the Institute, you’ll be completely safe.”