Unbound

by Jim C. Hines

  “Volume equals four-thirds pi times radius cubed,” I said, sensing his next question.

  Silent laughter followed. I felt his delight that humanity had mastered such knowledge and understanding of God’s most perfect shape. He pulled the value for pi from my thoughts and marveled at its mysteries.

  This was who Gerbert d’Aurillac had been. Not a politician, nor a master of dark magic as legend once painted him, but a man of learning and dreams. A man who had lived to see those dreams broken.

  Gerbert had hoped to bring about the renaissance of the Holy Roman Empire, an empire built upon knowledge and wisdom and faith. Like him, Meridiana dreamed of an empire, but her ambitions were grander than anything Gerbert could have imagined.

  I showed him what I could of my encounters with Meridiana. How she had first become aware of Jeneta Aboderin when I asked for Jeneta’s help in fighting off an infestation within Lena’s tree. I remembered Jeneta screaming in fear as darkness and death reached through her e-reader, devouring her magic and seeking to do the same to her.

  I was the one who had brought Jeneta and her power to Meridiana’s attention. “What is she?” I asked. “Where is the mask, the bronze head?”

  Confusion. He knew of no mask.

  “Who was Meridiana?”

  The name conjured the image of a child, a little girl named Anna, twin sister to the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III. Gerbert’s memories carried fear and regret, even love.

  “I don’t understand.” I had read only a single reference to Otto III’s twin, a girl who had died before her first birthday.

  Gerbert’s memories gave lie to the history. When Anna was born, the navel cord had encircled her throat like a noose. Her tiny body lay blue and dying, despite Gerbert’s prayers. When God’s mercy failed to save the child, he turned to magic.

  Millennium-old guilt and regret made me stagger. Gerbert knew God had chosen to let Anna die, but in his arrogance, he had ignored God’s will. He conjured spirits from the air—jinn—and sent them into Anna’s lungs, forcing her to breathe. His power warmed her blood and restored life to her body.

  Her spirit was another matter, one Gerbert wouldn’t discover for years to come.

  Anna grew to be a plain child, smaller than her brother, with slurred speech that fooled many into thinking her dimwitted. But she was oh so clever. She often spoke to the shadows, preferring her imagined companions to family and playmates. I could feel Gerbert’s fondness for the girl he had saved, his joy at her childlike questions and unexpected insights.

  Anna was raised in the background of her brother, all but invisible. By the time Otto III was crowned king of Germany at the age of three, Anna had begun to recite lines of age-old poetry or repeat seemingly-random phrases in Latin or Greek. Gerbert dismissed these things as signs of Anna’s eager mind and brilliant memory. He assumed she was merely mimicking what she had heard.

  As the twins grew, Anna remained close to their mother Theophanu, who served as regent. Anna watched and whispered, sharing advice both keen and ruthless. In time, her quiet intensity and unnatural knowledge came to disturb even her mother. Anna’s demeanor was more that of an aged empress and scholar than a young girl. Knowing Gerbert’s skill in things magical, Theophanu begged him to help her daughter.

  He began by preparing a detailed horoscope. Initially, he assumed he had made a mistake. He had misread a chart, or perhaps his algebra contained an error. Gerbert repeated his calculations. When they returned the same results, he consulted with a former instructor in Spain, who confirmed his reading several months later.

  Anna had been born a medium, able to commune with the dead. With her strength, she could have heard their voices alongside her mother’s while still in the womb.

  Gerbert had brought Anna back from the dead on the day of her birth, but she hadn’t returned alone. She had clung instinctively to those that comforted her: not her living parents, but the spirits of her ancestors. Her horoscope revealed fragmented lives and histories, all of which Anna had incorporated into her own being. Her mind was a monstrous patchwork of life and death and power.

  Gerbert tried to save her, to heal her scarred soul and pacify the dead. For a time, he thought he was succeeding.

  Anna had absorbed the lessons of politics and empire. Watching her brother struggle to expand his kingdom, she came to believe herself better suited to rule. She had the power of her magic and the experience of the dead.

  At the age of twelve, Otto led a campaign to retake the city of Brandenburg. Gerbert couldn’t be certain, but he thought it was this defeat that pushed Anna to begin laying the groundwork for the murder of her brother and her own ascension to power.

  She began with Gerbert. In all of Rome, his magic was second only to Anna’s own. But to truly take advantage of Gerbert’s potential, he needed to be moved into a new role.

  She began by stirring instability in the papacy, encouraging the tensions that resulted in the torture and removal of Pope John XVI, who later came to be known as antipope. His successor was Anna’s cousin Bruno of Carinthia, who sat as pope for only a year before disease—or poison—took him. With his death, young Anna cleared the way for her mentor to ascend to the papal throne.

  But Gerbert had taken notice of her machinations. When confronted, she confided her plans to Gerbert, whom she had come to love as a father. She planned to make him the spiritual leader of her empire. With Gerbert’s help, she would succeed where her brother and her ancestors had failed. Not only would she restore the Holy Roman Empire, she would unite Heaven and Earth, the living and the dead, and rule over both worlds as Empress Meridiana I.

  I caught Gerbert’s bitter appreciation for the wordplay. “Meridiana,” from the Latin for midday, that moment when morning was left behind and the world began its journey toward nightfall. The beginning of the end.

  “How did you stop her?” I whispered.

  When I saw what Gerbert had built, I could have wept. I had seen armillary spheres before, series of metal rings and bands designed to show the orbits of the planets and the positions of the stars, but this was a masterpiece.

  A bronze model of the Earth sat at the center, affixed to a slender rod through the poles. A series of vertical and horizontal rings and bands gave the impression of a spherical cage. Curved rods held polished metal marbles representing the moon and five other planets.

  Through his memories, I saw the working of the sphere, though I didn’t understand it all. I recognized the horizontal rings that represented circles of latitude. The flat band intersecting the equatorial ring was broken into the twelve signs of the zodiac. The armillary sphere could be adjusted to show the motion of the Earth and moon, the movement of the stars, or both.

  He must have used magic to achieve that level of detail: etchings of the constellations so precise they appeared alive, fittings with less than a hair’s width between them. The whole thing was perhaps eighteen inches in diameter, and rested within a plain wooden cradle. A brass sighting tube jutted from the sphere like a drinking straw.

  Gerbert lured Anna with news of an armillary sphere so perfect it could be enchanted to reveal the mind of God. They ventured outside, where he had aligned the sighting tube and brought his metal stars into symmetry with the Heavens.

  He had constructed a model of the known universe, lacking only one thing: a true model of Gerbert d’Aurillac’s universe required the presence of God.

  Anna was that final piece. Gerbert invited her to look through the sighting tube, not from the bottom, as a mere mortal gazing up at the sky, but from the top, like God peering down at his creation. When she placed her eye to the end of the tube, her soul was drawn into that bronze universe, bringing completion to Gerbert’s masterpiece. The entire model began to move on its own. Planets rotated through their orbits. Stars began their inexorable seasonal journeys.

  Meridiana wanted the universe. Gerbert had given it to her.

  Share Your Comments About Our Article:

  “JA
CKSONVILLE COACH SUSPENDED FOR ALLEGED USE OF MAGIC,”

  by Laura Mckinsey

  The Jacksonville Journal is not responsible for the views expressed in the comments section of our articles. We reserve the right to delete any comments that violate our terms of service.

  “This whole story is bullshit! Magic? What is this, the 18th century? Even if you believed the accusations, they can’t fire Coach Lutz without proof. That’s the very definition of a witch hunt! So much for innocent until proven guilty.”

  J. Davies | August 8, 2:15 p.m.

  “J. Davies—Did you even read the article? Nobody’s been fired. Lutz was placed on administrative leave with pay while they investigate the accusations. The police have three different witnesses. What if three people had witnessed him molesting kids? Would you still want him around your son or daughter? Shut up and let the system work.”

  WildcatsFan31 | August 8, 2:44 p.m.

  “Gandalf would make an awesome football coach, especially on defense. NONE SHALL PASS! ”

  FrodoLives | August 8, 3:51 p.m.

  “I’ve read some shoddy stories in the Jacksonville Urinal before, but this is the worst. McKinsey should be fired, along with whatever editor approved this garbage. It’s yellow journalism at its worst, nothing but sensationalism at the cost of a man’s career and reputation. There are no facts, no proof, nothing but rumors. Shame on you all!”

  Carla Clark | August 8, 4:01 p.m.

  “The mainstream media is a dinosaur.”

  DFG | August 8, 4:22 p.m.

  This comment has been flagged for review. Click Here to Show Flagged Comments.

  “@Carla Clark—Did you see the video of the last game? It’s on YouTube. Look at the 5:02 mark and watch the pass Johnson makes to Hayes. They say the wind made that ball shift direction, but I was at the game. THERE WAS NO WIND.”

  T.L., Former Referee | August 8, 4:50 p.m.

  “Coach Lutz should sue the district, the parents, the school board, the newspaper, and everyone else spreading these lies.”

  Diane Rodgers | August 8, 6:24 p.m.

  “Check out the YouTube video I made: Hitler weighs in on accusations of football witchcraft.”

  Steven P | August 8, 6:41 p.m.

  This comment has been flagged for review. Click Here to Show Flagged Comments.

  “I don’t know about Coach Lutz, but I’m pretty sure Mrs. Black who teaches seventh grade math is a zombie.”

  Jason | August 8, 8:40 p.m.

  GERBERT D’AURILLAC WAS TOO late to undo the damage Meridiana had begun. She had manipulated kings and queens, bishops and popes, planting the seeds for what would come to be known as the Dark Ages. And though d’Aurillac could never prove it, he believed her final act had been to curse him for his betrayal. Or perhaps it was God punishing him for his mistakes and his arrogance.

  His life began to crumble. King Robert of France burned two of Gerbert’s students as heretics. A rebellion drove Gerbert and Otto III from Rome. Rumors spread that Gerbert d’Aurillac was a sorcerer in league with the devil.

  “Meridiana is searching for the sphere,” I said. She hadn’t been able to free herself from her metal prison, but nothing was eternal. Over time, Gerbert’s magic would have weakened enough for her to begin building her army of the dead, and eventually, to reach out and take Jeneta.

  Through Gerbert’s memories, I watched him prepare a poem in careful Latin. It was a work that took three months to finish, a puzzle with layer upon layer of meaning. He laid the letters out in the shape of a triangle. Within the triangle was a wheel of text. A second, smaller circle sat within the first. A cross divided both circles, and three additional lines connected the inner circle to the outer one.

  When at last the poem was complete, he removed the bronze sphere from its wooden frame and set it atop the poem. He spoke to the sphere as if Meridiana—as if Anna—might yet hear him. He prayed over her for a full day and night, then recited an incantation I couldn’t understand.

  The sphere melted into the text.

  I had dissolved magical items into books using libriomancy, transforming them back into potential magical energy, but this was different. Both the prison and Meridiana had survived the transition. Gerbert had simply transferred the sphere to somewhere else, or perhaps transformed it into the text itself. A prison within a prison.

  It was an amazing work of magic, and I would have loved to understand how he had done it. I pushed the yearning aside, and tried to focus on Gerbert d’Aurillac. “What did you do with the poem that held the sphere?”

  “He sent it away,” came a familiar voice.

  Oh, shit. I tore myself away from the cenotaph. I blinked, trying to focus on the real world. People were whispering and backing away. To my left, Mahefa rummaged through his bag of blood.

  Jeneta Aboderin stood in the center of the aisle about twenty feet away, flanked by two large bodyguards. One was clad head to toe in an emerald green burqa. A matching veil hid the eyes from view. The other was clearly inhuman, eight feet tall and covered in orange fur. Some kind of sasquatch?

  “He’s a yeren, not a sasquatch.” The unspoken “Duh” beneath her words was so familiar, I felt an instant of hope that she had somehow thrown off Meridiana on her own. Hope that died when I saw the arrogance and disdain in her expression.

  Jeneta looked much as she had the last time I saw her. Her hair hung in tightly braided cornrows. Blue polish on her nails matched the plastic frames of her sunglasses. She had lost weight. Her cheekbones were more defined beneath her brown skin. She wore loose cargo pants with oversized pockets, and clutched a black e-reader with both hands.

  I glared at Mahefa. “I told you to keep an eye out.”

  “I did,” said Mahefa. “But I spotted this hot little bambolina, and then your friend showed up with her pet gorilla, and—”

  “Stop talking.” Jeneta tapped her screen, and Mahefa’s left hand turned to stone. The canister he had been holding slipped from his fingers and spilled blood across the floor.

  The only person I’d ever seen perform magic like that was Johannes Gutenberg, and even Gutenberg needed the physical book.

  “What the hell did you do?” Mahefa’s fingers were perfectly sculpted obsidian. His arm muscles tightened from the weight.

  “Get everyone out of here.” I kept my voice calm and tried not to do anything remotely threatening.

  “Fuck this.” Mahefa gripped his bag in his good hand and bolted for the closest exit. Neither Jeneta nor I tried to stop him.

  I studied Jeneta’s shrouded companion. Beneath the veil, her scalp bulged and shifted like boiling molasses. If this wasn’t the gorgon who had helped Jeneta break into the library in Beijing, I was betting it was another of her kin. All she had to do was pull back her veil, and this church would have a lot more statues.

  “Where’d you get the muscle?” I nodded toward the yeren and the gorgon.

  “I made them.”

  Whispers and questions surrounded us. The tourists hadn’t switched over to full-on panic yet. Few of them had seen or understood the transformation of Mahefa’s hand, and the yeren was alien enough that they weren’t yet certain how to react. For now, they kept a safe distance and snapped pictures.

  “Jeneta . . .” I had spent the past month searching for her, and here she was, ready to kill me with a flick of her fingers. “I’m sorry.”

  She looked around. “I expected to find more of your Porters here.”

  “The Porters lost you at the airport. Your parents haven’t stopped searching for you.” I hoped Jeneta could hear me, that she understood we hadn’t given up. “I’ll find a way to fix this.”

  She drummed her fingers on the e-reader’s screen. “Do I need to turn your limbs to stone to get your attention? I could transform you to gold or a pillar of salt. I’ve an entire library of possibilities at my fingertips.”

  I fell back on the oldest defense I knew: smart-assery. “When I get home, I’m firing my travel agent. I s
pecifically asked for a monster-free vacation. All I wanted was a few days to relax and enjoy my retirement. You do know I’m retired, right?”

  Jeneta and her monsters moved closer, stepping in eerie synchronicity that reminded me of the children of Camazotz from A Wrinkle in Time, bouncing balls and jumping rope in perfect unison.

  “What have you learned, Isaac?”

  “Well, the basilica’s façade was built by Alessandro Galilei in the eighteenth century, and—”

  The yeren growled, a sound so low I could feel it. More and more people were scurrying from the church. Those who remained gawked like this was some new form of street theater. How long before the police showed up, or had Meridiana taken steps to make sure no one stopped her from interrogating me?

  “Where did he send the poem?” she continued. “Not to his colleague in Beijing. Nor to Miro Bonfill. He certainly didn’t hide it here.”

  “Why don’t you ask him yourself?”

  She made a brushing-off motion with one hand, a gesture both regal and utterly foreign to Jeneta. “He won’t speak to me, or to anyone under my control. Dead for a thousand years, and still he thwarts me. But he shared his poem with you. I can see the design in your thoughts.”

  Other voices tugged at my awareness: fragmented whispers that seemed to come from Meridiana’s monsters. The yeren’s lips were pulled into a taut snarl. Even if that muzzle was capable of producing human speech, there was no way it was speaking Mandarin without moving its jaw or—

  The realization was like ash in the back of my throat. The blood I had consumed let me hear the dead, and whoever these two people used to be, Meridiana had killed them to create her inhuman guardians. She had likely picked up the yeren during her attack on the Beijing library. I wondered if he had been one of the students of Bi Sheng.