Science and Sorcery

by Christopher Nuttall

  She smiled as she reached out with her mind, sensing the growing fear and panic among those who were unaffected by her control. They’d be brought into the mob, perhaps even broken once they were within its influence, or eventually killed. And if they killed a few mob members along the way, who cared? There were plenty more where they came from.

  This society was fantastic in many ways. And yet it couldn't really hope to defend itself against a trained magician. They weren't even ready to grovel properly, or to recognise her superiority. But they would still fall.

  And there was nothing that Enchanter’s servant could do about it.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Washington DC, USA

  Day 36/37

  Years ago, during her training, Caitlyn had studied under an FBI agent who had been acknowledged as somewhat eccentric, although very definitely an expert in his field. He’d told his trainees about how different cultures accepted different standards of evidence, and about some of the strangest fallacies that had popped up over the years. One of them had been Spectral Evidence, witness reports from the newly departed, as reported by those who had seen the ghosts. It hadn't taken much imagination to see how the system could be abused, particularly as the ghosts never seemed to show themselves to the entire world, and the entire concept had been declared nonsense hundreds of years ago.

  And now she was looking at a ghost, and talking to a ghost.

  Calvin’s form was translucent, barely visible in the lighted room. When she’d reached out and touched his chest, she’d felt nothing apart from a faint tingle and a vague sense that the ghost was as cold as ice. Certainly, the monitors had picked up nothing, even if the WAND had detected a very faint shift in the mana level surrounding the ghost. Mana, it seemed, was keeping him visible. Absently, she wondered why Calvin was wearing clothes, or even why he was still in human form. Could it be that a ghost’s appearance was purely determined by its own concept of how it should look? Calvin looked like himself because he thought he should look like himself?

  “All right,” she said, trying to remain calm. If they’d been trying to put Calvin – or Harrow –on trial, any competent defence lawyer could probably have managed to dismiss the evidence. On the other hand, Calvin was very definitely dead...how could they imprison a ghost? Perhaps they could starve it of mana and see if it winked out of existence. “What happened to you, right from the start?”

  Calvin’s voice was strange. His lips moved and the words appeared in Caitlyn’s head, but she couldn't hear anything. It might be some form of telepathy, which raised worrying questions about ghosts and mind-reading, or perhaps it was just something else to puzzle over later. Bit by bit, his story came out, starting with the death of Moe and his cronies. As Caitlyn had expected, Moe had bullied Calvin to the point where he’d snapped, drawn on powers he hadn't known he’d had and incinerated them. That, at least, might have been forgivable. Calvin had panicked and lashed out in self-defence.

  Harrow had come to him that night in his dreams and started training him in how to use his powers. An older and wiser person might have suspected that something was very wrong, but Calvin had been in a state of shock and besides, she was offering him a chance to put the world to rights. He’d swallowed her bait and started to corrupt himself, pushing against the line until he finally stepped right over it. The ghost’s confession – he’d spied on his female classmates, wrecked a fellow student’s career and eventually raped a girl he’d lusted after for years – left Caitlyn shaking her head in disbelief. How could someone be so smart and yet so stupid?

  But it wasn't really unprecedented. Very few drug addicts set out to become drug addicts – and the pushers never told them that they might end up addicts, stealing from their parents and friends to fund their habits. No, they took a small taste – which might well be free – and then were sucked under gradually, unless they found the strength of will to say stop. Something similar tended to happen with internet porn addicts. Caitlyn had been marginally involved in a FBI probe to track down a collector of child porn who had turned out to be a twelve-year-old boy. The post-arrest interviews with the child had revealed that he’d been disgusted, at first, but the porn had slowly grown on him until he’d become an addict. As horrible as it was, Caitlyn could see how Calvin had been slowly corrupted until he’d murdered one of his classmates in cold blood.

  Golem loomed forward when Calvin had finished talking. “Why didn't she release the other members of her group at once?”

  “I don’t think she had the power,” Calvin admitted. “I had to kill five people to gain the power to release her, and do it at a place of power.”

  Caitlyn and Matt exchanged glances, sharing the same thought. It wouldn't take long for Harrow to murder another five people, if she intended to release her comrades. On the other hand, Golem had pointed out that Harrow wouldn't have been able to pull that much mana out of the pocket dimension and she’d be very low on power after her teleport. Indeed, it was even possible that she would have run out of power mid-teleport, although Caitlyn doubted that they would get that lucky.

  They’d spent hours studying maps of the United States, trying to identify other possible places of power. Battlefields from the Civil War, or the Revolutionary War, were quite likely to be places of power; they’d certainly had plenty of ghosts reported there over the years. Or famous buildings, or graveyards; Arlington was hardly the only graveyard in the continental United States. And then there was the World Trade Centre, destroyed on 9/11. There were just too many possibilities for them all to be secured, and Harrow might be able to simply brush her way through any military cordon anyway. Everything depended on coming up with a combination of science and magic that would catch the bitch by surprise before it was too late.

  “Right,” Caitlyn said. She changed tack, thinking hard. “And why are you still here?”

  “I’m not sure,” Calvin said. “I think...I saw myself, right after she destroyed my body. I realised what a fool I’d been and somehow I found myself still here, but just as a ghost.”

  “Those who are separated from their bodies often see the world more clearly than those who are still alive,” Golem rumbled, “but the spirits are often...strange by human standards. They can no longer hide from themselves.”

  Caitlyn shot him a sharp glance. Necromancy didn't just involve sacrificing an unwilling victim to gain mana; Golem had outlined a hundred different uses for the act, including summoning back the dead to ask them questions. A forensic necromancer, she had decided, could actually ask the murder victim who had killed him, if he had access to part of the victim’s body. But the longer a person remained dead, the harder it was to summon him back to the living world...and the less useful their answers were likely to be.

  The real question was simple; did she trust Calvin the Ghost? Caitlyn honestly wasn't sure; Mindy seemed to trust him, but Mindy was his sister, the only one who had ever stood up for him. And she was only eight years old, no matter how old she acted, too young to make any proper value judgements. If Calvin were to be believed, it might make it easier to track Harrow, but if he were lying...he could be trying to mislead them.

  But Harrow might not see the need to bother, she thought, grimly. Why should she try to trick us when she has so much power at her disposal – and an easy way to gain more?

  She looked over at Matt and inclined her head towards the door. Matt followed her outside into the corridor, nodding to the Navy SEAL on duty outside Mindy’s quarters before they walked into a side room, out of earshot.

  “Do you trust him?” She asked. “Because I don't know if I do.”

  Matt considered. “You know I can tell if I’m being lied to now,” he said. Caitlyn nodded. It seemed that Hunters could detect lies, no matter how skilled the liar was at concealing his emotions. They’d tested the ability extensively and the only way anyone had found to fool Matt was to have the speaker unaware that he was telling a lie. “I don’t think he’s lying to us.”

/>   He hesitated. “And all of the physical evidence backs him up,” he added. “I don't think we can disprove anything he’s told us.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Caitlyn said. The entire country was on a knife-edge, not least because the President had yet to speak to the nation. He was too busy trying to warn the rest of the world about the Thirteen, which meant explaining Golem’s existence, among other things. “And what if you’re wrong?”

  “We’re even more fucked than we were the moment she broke free,” Matt said. He’d barely avoided speaking Harrow’s name. “I think we don’t have any choice.”

  Caitlyn nodded, and then led the way back to Mindy’s room. “Tell me,” she said, “do you still have a connection to Harrow?”

  “Yes,” Calvin said. “I can still feel her with my mind.”

  Golem shifted uncomfortably at Caitlyn’s questioning look. “The Queen of Nightmares will have established a link between herself and anyone she wanted to influence,” he explained. “That link will still be there, I believe. She may be unaware of it now that she has destroyed his body, but a door, once opened, can swing in both directions.”

  “So you can step into her mind?” Matt asked Calvin. “See through her eyes?”

  “If he did,” Golem said, quickly, “she would become aware of his...current existence. I would suggest attempting to locate her instead.”

  Caitlyn nodded. “Calvin, can you tell us where she is?”

  Calvin shook his head. “I can point in her direction, if you like, but I don’t know where she is...”

  “That will be enough,” Matt said. “We’ll have you do it in two places and then use the bearings to fix her position.”

  Caitlyn’s cell phone began to ring. “Crap,” she said. “Hang on.”

  She listened grimly to the message. “I think we don’t need to bother trying to triangulate her position,” she said. “She’s in New York.”

  ***

  Golem would have cursed himself, if he had been human. He'd known what Harrow could do and yet he’d never considered the possibilities of her abilities matched with the sheer population density of the modern world. Given time and enough mana, she could walk into the dreams of countless people and start bending them to her will, the same thing she’d done to Calvin, only on a much larger scale. Worse, there were probably enough people within the city she’d infected who had magical talents of their own, people who could help to spread the infection further. Or, for that matter, serve as a source of additional mana.

  “The reports are still coming in,” Caitlyn said. “Half of New York seems to have become a giant flash mob and is intent on hunting down the other half. We have reports of rioting throughout the suburbs...what the hell is going on?”

  “She reached into their nightmares and pushed something of herself into their minds,” Golem informed her. Something about the reports seemed odd, as though there was something wrong with Harrow’s powers, but he couldn't place his finger on it. “Those who surrendered to her influence are now fighting those who were unaffected.”

  Matt looked down at the ground in despair. “How do you even fight something like that?” He demanded. “Hell, why doesn't she just overwhelm Congress and the President and declare herself our Queen?”

  “Even the slightest protective rune would provide a shield,” Golem said, patiently. Despair was something he only knew in the abstract, thankfully. Gibbering panic would not help the situation. “And her power has very limited range, even without protection. I would doubt that anyone outside a few miles of her current location is truly threatened by her influence.”

  “That only leaves a few million people under threat,” Matt pointed out, bitterly. “How the hell do we stop something like that?”

  Caitlyn had a more practical question. “How long is it likely to take her to consolidate her power?”

  Golem allowed himself a moment of cold amusement. He’d discovered what he’d been missing. “Days, perhaps weeks,” he said. Harrow was the undisputed Queen of Nightmares, one of the few magicians to use the dreaming as a conduit for her magic, but she could never have imagined what it was like to touch so many minds at once. The chaos breaking out along the edge of her influence suggested that she was already losing control. “No mortal magician can hope to control so many minds at once.”

  “She certainly seems to be succeeding,” Matt said, savagely. “How long did it take her to overrun New York?”

  “If she was in total control of the people she’d influenced, the city would be quiet by now,” Golem pointed out. Harrow, like a number of stronger magicians with questionable grips on both sanity and ethics, would try to control her slaves directly, but handling so many slaves would be almost impossible. Even trying might destroy her. The smart thing to do would be to concentrate on a relative handful of people, secure her control and then use her slaves to keep the masses in line, but that might not be possible. “There is a chance to dislodge her.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Matt asked. “Then why is it that she kicked our asses when we last faced her?”

  “We were not prepared for her,” Golem said. “We need to start working to limit her influence as quickly as possible, and then break up her army.”

  Caitlyn held up a hand to stop the bickering. “We can tell people how to draw the basic protection runes,” she said. “Are you sure those will be enough?”

  “They should be, unless Harrow tries to break them personally,” Golem said. “But doing that one by one would be very inefficient.”

  “Or before she tries to kill everyone in New York to boost her powers,” Matt pointed out. “And then she might well be unstoppable.”

  “It will take time,” Golem assured him. “She will have to carry out every sacrifice personally in order to tap the power for herself. Even for an experienced necromancer, killing the entire city would take years. And she’d need to be sure that the person she tried to kill was untouched by her influence.”

  Caitlyn leaned forward. “What would happen if she did kill someone who was already under her influence?”

  “I don’t know,” Golem admitted. Necromantic rituals to draw power through murder were always risky, prone to disaster. “No one was stupid enough to try and find out.”

  He hesitated. They weren't going to like the next part. “If we can't stop her,” he added, “we will have to destroy the entire city.”

  “There are millions of people in New York,” Caitlyn said, sharply. “The President won’t order the city nuked and...and I’m not even sure if the submarines would obey orders to fire on an American city.”

  Her cell phone buzzed again. “Excuse me,” she said, and stepped away to take the call. “I’ll be back in a moment.”

  Matt stepped up to Golem as Caitlyn walked out of earshot. “Why couldn't I kill her?”

  “We discussed that,” Golem reminded him. Humans were so forgetful when stressed, yet another weakness Enchanter hadn't seen fit to duplicate. “The magic woven into your body automatically produces charms for any weapon you hold in your hand, charms that make it lethal for supernatural forms of life. Harrow knew how to alter her own wards to counter your charms.”

  “And Calvin didn't know to do it,” Matt mused. “Can we alter my charms so that they break through her wards?”

  “Maybe,” Golem said. Enchanter could have done it, given enough time, but Golem had never been taught the fundamentals of charms. Calvin had been manipulated, yet he’d also been given a fairly complete education in the basics of magic. He had been firmly on the path that led to sorcerer status when he'd died. “I don’t think we could rediscover how to do it in time.”

  “Calvin might be able to help us,” Matt said. “And Misty is learning fast too.”

  Golem would have gaped, if he had been human – but then, to be human was to be wilfully perverse. He could easily see how someone might choose to follow Harrow, or another sorcerer with power and skill, yet betrayal was alien to him. Calvin turning on Harro
w had been a surprise, even if the outcome hadn't been remotely unexpected. Harrow had probably expected him to turn on her soon enough.

  “It might be possible,” he said, finally. Calvin certainly couldn't use magic as a ghost, even assuming that he still had all his knowledge. And he might have some problems explaining the whole idea to Mindy and Misty. But if it worked... “We will need to discuss it with him.”

  Caitlyn returned to them, one hand replacing the cell phone in her pocket. “That was Jorlem,” she said. “He thinks he has a workable concept for dealing with her, using the tools he’s been producing. I have to brief the President on what we have in mind. He has to warn people to use the protective runes...”