Wearing the Cape 5: Ronin Games

by Marion G. Harmon

  She ignored Ozma and her party. “Astra. It’s good to see you.” The silver orb hovering above her shoulder rippled in micro-patterns as it projected her voice.

  “You, too.” I smiled, uncertain if she “saw” it. “How’ve you been?”

  “Busy.”

  I certainly knew that; Orb Investigations had become the premier superhuman investigations agency in California since Orb and Rafael Jones “adventured” with us in the Villains Inc. case. Her orb’s sensory powers let her detect and analyze anything physical, while Rafael—now Doctor Cornelius—could do the same for anything metaphysical with his Agrippan magic. They consulted across the country, and I was lucky they were available to see me.

  Finally nodding at Ozma and the boys, she pulled the door open and led us through the empty club. Shell popped in beside me, looked around as we crossed the open dance floor. “You’d think they would have upgraded to a better office.”

  “Hush,” I whispered automatically; of course Orb didn’t notice—Shell’s body was virtual, after all.

  Orb led us to a door at the back of the club, drawing a red curtain aside to usher us into a private room where Doctor Cornelius waited for us beside an ominous and intricately drawn magic circle.

  “Astra.” He nodded, smiling. “Good to see you and Shelly again.” He always saw her just fine. “And Ozma, good to finally meet you.”

  I tore my eyes from the circle. “The same. You’re looking good.”

  He did look good. The first time I’d seen him I’d recognized a strung out meth-head; the last time I’d seen him hadn’t been long after he’d spoken one of the three Deccanic “Words of God” in his head to spontaneously heal Orb’s fatal injury. That spoken Word had also raised Jacky from an undead vampire into a fully alive one and cured my PTSD as a side-effect. The effect had extended to him, and he’d looked a lot better then; now any lingering evidence of his hard years were gone and his eyes sparkled in his darkly handsome patrician face.

  Ozma just gave him a regal nod and stepped over to a prepared side table; accepting a box from Grendel—the magic box that looked like an empty ornamental box of made of gem-dusted gold wire filigree—she opened. Riptide watched Doctor Cornelius and Ozma with arms folded and an I’ve seen weirder shit eye.

  “Did you ever speak the last Word?” I blurted without thinking as Orb closed the door behind us and Ozma pulled stuff out of her empty box.

  His smile turned into a deep laugh. “Have you read about the Everglades Deadzone? All the Words are gone from my head. I am only myself, now.”

  Shell started. “Really? What did you kill?” The final Word had been the word for Death.

  “Besides many square miles of glades? Something that badly needed to be dead. Shall we get started?” He nodded to the circle.

  He had drawn the circle on a single piece of polished black granite that floored the center of the workroom, at least fifteen feet on a side. Russet-red banners had been hung around the circle on eight freestanding frames to give the room an octagonal shape. The room’s walls were purest white.

  I swallowed. “What do I do?”

  “Change into this. Leave everything else.” He held out a small white bundle. “Then stand inside the circle.”

  When I reached out he dropped it into my hand, carefully not touching me. Unfolding it, I found myself holding a plain white cotton shift.

  “You can change in any corner,” he said. He was right; there was plenty of room behind the banners.

  “What’s this for?”

  “I spoke with both Chakra and Ozma after Blackstone called.” He nodded to Ozma. “Since both of them are sensitive, in themselves or in the tools they can use, and neither found traces of psychic or supernatural influences, we’re going to look deeper. This—” he waved at the bewilderingly complex white circle again “—is specifically tuned to you and only to you. Everything you’re wearing brings its own signature and nature with it, and taking any of it into the circle with you will interfere with what we are trying to do.”

  “So, you need a clean testing environment?”

  “Exactly.”

  I took a breath. Okay, I could do this.

  I picked a corner and stripped out of the uniform, setting my earbug on top of it, and slipped on the sleeveless tunic. It covered everything important, but it was so light it barely felt like it was there. Which was the point, I supposed; barely there, it wouldn’t get in the way. At least it wasn’t as bad as an ass-flashing hospital gown.

  Leaving everything piled in the corner and coming back out, I started to carefully step into the circle when Doctor Cornelius cleared his throat. He looked at Shell.

  “I’m going to have to ask you to remove yourself as well, young lady.”

  I cringed as Shell started to protest loudly—then shut up. She could work it through, too; if she was present virtually, it was through our quantum-link and that brought her into the circle with me.

  “Fine,” she huffed. “But I’m turning her earbug way up.”

  “Understood. Astra? The lines are painted, so you don’t need to worry about scuffing them.”

  Painted? Now I could smell it, under the aroma of musk and some kind of fragrant dried plant (not a controlled substance or something otherwise psychosomatic; I could recognize those from my training with Fisher’s team). He must have spent the entire morning carefully tracing and then painting the circle with fast-drying acrylic—it was complex.

  The circle’s circumference was two thick and close-spaced concentric rings, then a ring of Latin and mystic symbols, then a thinner inner ring, then a hexagon. A nest of crisscrossing inside lines touched all the hexagon’s corners, three of the lines thicker to form a triangle framing three touching circles enclosing more symbols that I assumed described me somehow and an empty double-lined and word-ringed circle at the center. All of it was meticulously drawn, laid with a drafter’s precision that had to require special tools.

  Doctor Cornelius directed me to stand in the center. I’d never seen anything this elaborate before—even the wards he made for the Dome last year didn’t look like this—but I recognized the russet bundle he pulled out of his black coat. Seeing it made my palms go damp and my heart beat fast; the last time he’d used that stuff, a thing from somewhere worse than Hell had showed up and tried to kill everyone. It had “temporarily” killed Orb and Jacky, and had nearly killed me.

  Orb made a noise and Doctor Cornelius looked up. He gave me a reassuring smile.

  “Don’t worry. This time there’s no tether to the lower regions left behind to trip, so no qlippoths today I promise you. This is my workplace.” Standing beside Ozma, Riptide folded his arms and nodded and I suddenly realized why he’d tagged along with Grendel: he’d heard what happened the first time Dr. Cornelius had done a favor for me, and had come just in case.

  My heart was still beating fast, but I jerked a nod and tucked my hands down by my sides. Tugging on the tunic’s hem, I tried to be still, to pretend it was just a bizarre medical checkup. Ozma slipped on a pair of narrow gold-rimmed glasses, and gave me her own reassuring smile.

  I tried to return it. I could do this.

  Doctor Cornelius began, reciting in Latin as he unwound the russet stole from the sticks, draping it over his shoulders and connecting the bundle of sticks into his surveyor’s rod. And just like last time, the world changed as he spoke, my ears telling me the words of his recitation were going out from us, no longer trapped and reflected by walls. The words grew heavier than the tone and strength in them could convey, and as seconds passed everything outside the circle grew less present, less real, though nothing had gone away.

  I tried not to breathe, then realized that was silly. The atonal Greek chorus was back, somewhere out of sight but echoing under his words as he went on.

  Minutes ticked by, until I wondered how long he could keep going without a pause—the last time we’d been interrupted by the qlippoth, so I had no idea how long it was supposed to tak
e—and then I wondered just how much I could move without messing him up. Was it like lying still for a CAT scan? I really should have asked. At least nothing too hideously ugly to think about arrived, which was a good sign.

  I couldn’t see Ozma or the boys—only Doctor Cornelius, and Orb who stood beside him holding a silver bell in her hand.

  Then I felt the breeze, air moving on my skin. My first panicked thought was for my too-brief shield of modesty, but the gossamer cotton didn’t stir. The air in the room didn’t stir, but I felt it anyway.

  And I smelled it, too. As Doctor Cornelius’ voice rose and fell, I smelled wildgrass and cherry blossoms. The air got wetter and then my tree was there, along with a landscape clearer than I’d ever seen it before. The stream I’d followed last night bubbled up from a spring at the base of my hill, winding through lower dips and hills to a shore. My tree stood on the highest hill of a small island, one of many islands off of a circling coastline, part of an inland sea or great lake. The scent of saltwater said sea.

  I could barely see the magic circle, and Doctor Cornelius stood in the grass watching me as I turned about. Time was only my heartbeat until I saw him raise his hand and heard Orb’s bell ring, bright and pure. With each clear strike of her musician’s hammer on the bell, the tree, the hill, and the sea faded until I stood inside the circle again.

  Along with a light dusting of cherry blossoms.

  He bent down and carefully picked one up to examine it. “Well, that is interesting.”

  * * *

  Back in uniform and at a club table in the main room, I wrapped my hands around the warm cup Orb brought me. The coffee was mud compared to Jacky’s or even Willis’s, but it was real.

  “What was that?” Shell asked.

  She’d come back and now she sat beside me. I could tell she was worked up—her black athletic shirt, read What the Freak? All she’d heard through my earbug in the corner was minutes of Doctor Cornelius’ reciting and then the bell. She’d actually turned her gain and filters up enough to hear my heartbeat speed up and then drop off, but even checking my sense-memory through our neural link after the fact hadn’t told her anything; I hadn’t seen any of it, not through my optic nerve anyway.

  On my other side, Ozma was pulling little bottles and dishes out of her empty box. As freaked as I was, watching her pull stuff out of a box you could see right through didn’t get to me at all. Or maybe I’d just gotten used to Ozma.

  “That was nothing,” she told Shell, who must have been relaying through Ozma’s own earbug. “There was nothing in the circle with Hope. She went somewhere else.”

  “But she didn’t go anywhere!” Shell protested. Grendel rumbled his agreement and Riptide nodded.

  “You can go somewhere else and not leave,” Ozma said like it made perfect sense. “But it might be more correct to say that another place came to her. Doctor Cornelius?”

  “Yes.” He had found an orange somewhere and sat peeling it into a bowl.

  I had a dizzying moment of déjà vu. As relieved as I was that it was over, the fruit actually made me smile. “The orange?”

  “Indeed, the orange.”

  Shell scowled, but she remembered Doctor Cornelius’ fruity metaphor for the structure of reality.

  “Reading about your interactions with this Kitsune person,” Doctor Cornelius mused as he peeled, “and from what I saw in there just now, I would say that you have been brought to the attention of a more real portion of reality. Closer to the center of the orange.”

  “Why didn’t Chakra or Ozma find anything?”

  “That would be because you haven’t changed. Does the fact that I can see you, even call you and speak with you on your cell when you’re somewhere else, change you?”

  I couldn’t help the laugh. “That depends on what you say to me.”

  “Point. But nobody looking at you would see anything different forensically, even metaphysically. Ozma?”

  While he’d been talking, Ozma had gotten out a small golden bowl and dumped a handful of the gathered cherry blossoms into it. Now she popped the top off a wax sealed bottle and carefully measured out crystal grains onto a fold of wax paper.

  “Sands of time,” she said to everyone, capping the bottle.

  Doctor Cornelius didn’t ask and I couldn’t tell what Orb was thinking, but I just couldn’t let that go. “The sands of time are real?”

  “Real enough. To be more precise this is time squeezed from sand, like juice from a grape. You can extract time from anything, but sand is easiest.”

  “Why?”

  “For measuring doses.” She gently shook the paper over the bowl, letting the sand fall over the petals. “You cannot extract time from just a portion of an object. You could take time from a hundred pound rock, but then you would have a hundred pound piece of time. Add it to something as small and light as this, and you might get interesting results but probably not the ones you want.”

  That was typical of any explanation from Ozma—I would understand every word, but all of them together would make me wonder if I’d heard her right. It was like when she told me “Yellow is bright, brightness is an energy state, energy is speed, so yellow is fast.” I’d learned that when I asked about the Yellow Brick Road, and of course it was obvious. To Ozma.

  The sand falling onto the pink-white petals dissolved, or faded away, or whatever its disappearing meant. The petals didn’t change, and Ozma sat back.

  “Doctor Cornelius works from a different model of reality than the one I possess, but I agree with his conclusion. The petals you brought back with you originate from and remain part of a domain in which time is more eternal than sequential. They are always blooming, always falling, always waiting to fall. They are not dying.” She put away the bottle, not at all perturbed by the fact that she was looking at something that shouldn’t be here.

  “But—they’re from my dream!”

  “You’ve always known that your Kitsune visions were more than mere dreams, Hope. We’ve just been assuming they were less than real. Doctor? The Wizard might have been able to tell me more, but I am not familiar with many places outside this world and Oz. Do you know where these are from?”

  He shrugged thoughtfully, nibbling on a piece of orange.

  “Considering that a kitsune is a Japanese fox-spirit, and based on what I saw, I would have to say that the tree these fell from sits somewhere in what Shinto belief calls the High Plane of Heaven. I would call it a part of Briah, the Iconic Realm.”

  “Heaven—” There was no way I’d been meeting that fox in Heaven.

  He chuckled. “Don’t get theologically confused, Astra. The Iconic Realm incorporates all spirit realms, both afterlife realms and godhomes, all manifestations of the divine shaped by humankind. The High Plane of Heaven is the Japanese equivalent of Mount Olympus or Asgard. It’s the dwelling place of their celestial spirits.”

  “Okay. I think?” That sounded a little better, anyway. “So what does it mean? What’s happening to me?”

  “Just on a guess, I’d say it looks like a tree on the High Plane of Heaven really likes you.”

  “What?” Shell didn’t quite screech, but Doctor Cornelius smiled.

  “This is pure conjecture, understand. You already know Kitsune is more than just a shapeshifter. What if he has access to the High Plane of Heaven? Say that he wanted to pass you a message, so he went to that place you’re always seeing, the tree, and opened your sleeping awareness to it? Do you follow so far?”