Powerful magic indeed.
Fortunately, this magic had a boundary as well, and I was able to let go once we’d stepped through the archway at the bottom. “You okay?”
“I’ll live.” There was still just enough ambient light from the city I could make out her yawn. “Let’s get moving. I don’t want to spend another whole night in the field.”
Only one room in the basement remained intact, and it was worth every bit of the magic that had gone into its protection. Too bad I was the only priest still alive who got to use it.
Once we were inside with the door closed behind us, I pulled out a couple mini-lamps and hung them off hooks in the walls. I unpacked the equipment I’d brought, as Iris prowled all about, looking for entertainment.
Before the Abandon, this workroom had been a hub of activity. Archivists like myself, historians, mathematicians, and mystics alike had used this space for the trickiest of magic, taking advantage of generations of rituals that had been carved into the floor. Now the spacious room was a crowded mess of what books and artifacts and miscellaneous treasures we’d managed to rescue.
Iris had no interest in the books and only passing curiosity for the arcane paraphernalia. “Here, help me with this,” I called over to her. “The faster I get set up, the faster I can be done.”
She helped me shove aside books and papers and bags of who-knew-what to clear the circle I needed. Then she stepped back to watch as I pulled out some chalk and started carefully adding to the sigils that were already carved into the floor. It was finicky work that required the whole of my concentration.
“You humans.” Iris stepped up onto an overturned dresser as I had to extend my sigils to where she’d been standing. “You treat magic like it’s a chore.” She dropped her voice into an eerily accurate copy of my own. “Oh no, laundry day again. This pattern isn’t clean enough. Better add more starch.”
I refused to take the bait. This time. “There’s a chest-of-drawers with candles in the back. You want to bring me a few?”
I focused on my ritual edits; even if I’d done them hundreds of times before, careless mistakes could be disastrous. So far, I was laying standard designs; I hadn’t started trying to work in the changes I would need to adjust for the new media. By the time I was done, I realized Iris still hadn’t returned with the candles. I sighed and went to look for her.
#
Iris had made it to the candles and even had some in her hand, but I found her sitting on a pile of atlases, staring at the mural that covered the back wall. “You have the attention span of a goldfish.”
Iris rolled her eyes. She held out the candles without looking at me. “I never noticed this before.”
The mural spread out at least thirty feet along the wall. This had been just another workroom in the vast temple, and I remembered when this mural had been painted, but I’d never given it much thought. It was only one of many great artistic works throughout the Dark God’s sanctuary.
Now I gave it a serious look, and it was easy to tell why it had grabbed Iris’s attention. It was quite something. Just because we priests of the Dark God weren’t as prone to theatrics as our Bright God compatriots didn’t mean we lacked a sense of story. Whoever had painted this mural had been both gifted and faithful.
Kaifail was at the center, naturally. Vibrant and alive, taller than the rest, laughing. I recognized the face he wore. The mural’s artist had used our now-dead Favored Son as his model for the god. For all the gods, I assumed, he’d used their Favored Children. Not that I’d ever seen most of them. But Jansyn, just to the right and a little behind his brother, had a face that echoed every one I’d seen in the Crescent. Settled in the grass in front of Kaifail, Fyea could have been another sister to Copper and Spark. All the gods looked happy, or at least content. A far more harmonious tableau than they ever managed in reality.
Her entire body radiating sadness, Iris crept up to the far left of the mural. Her Favored Child wasn’t present like the rest—how could one paint a creature who had no real shape? She reached out to touch the radiant sphere of energy that was the artist’s rendition of Iris’s creator. Drinion didn’t answer, of course. I had to look away from the naked loss on Iris’s face. We didn’t talk about the gods, she and I. Not about our lives as priests or what their disappearance had meant. And almost nothing remained in the city to remind us of them in day-to-day life.
“Micah said—earlier, he and I were talking. He doesn’t believe in the Abandon. He doesn’t believe they just left us.”
“Does it matter?” Iris asked in a defeated voice. “They’re gone. Knowing why, it won’t bring them back.”
I hated that she sounded like that. I walked along the wall in the opposite direction, tried to give her some privacy. The other end of the mural, on the far side from Drinion, was a human-looking man, shrouded in shadow. His skin was pale, his eyes deep blue, and for some reason, he looked familiar. It must have been the late hour, the stress of the last few days, the fact I’d passed this mural a hundred times back when the church had been alive, because I knew I’d never met the Silent One’s Favored Son.
But I was stalling. I had work to do.
Candles in hand, I fetched the data stick and my NetPad, along with the small portable generator I needed to power it. Now came the tricky part. If this had been a physical book or papers, I would have known exactly what to do. As it was, I would have to improvise.
But this was my job, and dammit, I’d been good at it. One of Kaifail’s archivists, I’d spent my time analyzing documents, digging out the truth of their authenticity. Anyone could trace history and provenance, but with magic, we could reach into the reality of the object itself and determine if any changes had been made at any point over the course of its life.
And oh, but I couldn’t deny this felt good. I missed the careful, crunchy precision magic demanded, drilling down layer after layer to detangle the complex strings of reality. I loved the problem. I loved the working through it. For me, the real high was not finding the solution, but the moment of inevitability when I first realized the solution could be found, and that I was the one who could find it.
The data stick held one folder. Within that, a mix of videos and documents. On the surface, nothing looked wrong, but anything so simple as a modification date out of place, Seana would have found. I needed to go deeper.
Even the best forgeries left traces. A lesson from day one of my training. No secret was so well hidden it couldn’t be found. The trick was learning not just where to look, but how to look. How to see. That was where the magic came in.
But how? Working with a book, a physical page, I would have sensory clues. Rough edges, tiny smudges, even a change of ink texture. The physical cues guided my focus, helped me zoom in on potential problems. Without those, it came down to a matter of examining the files word by word, sentence by sentence, in a process that could take weeks or months. We didn’t have that kind of time.
I opened a couple of the documents. Technical specs and a paper on the weather science. All of it over my head. But again, if the problem had been something a subject-matter expert could find, Seana wouldn’t need me.
I moved the NetPad to the center of my work circle, arranged and lit the candles, read through the weather paper. Harder to focus when I didn’t understand what I was reading, but not impossible. I read it a second time. Locked my eyes on the screen and let my peripheral vision blur. As I sunk into a meditative state, the glow of the candles grew and everything outside the circle faded to shadow, lost behind the wall of light.
I read through a third time. This time, I hardly saw the words on the screen. I read their shape, their pattern, their rhythm. Compared it to the words I had absorbed on my first two readings. Nothing caught; nothing triggered. I got to the end of the document with no sense of anything that didn’t belong.
Which meant either the papers hadn’t been altered, or they were going to require a detailed approach. Time to look at the videos.
I had to admire Seana’s meticulousness. She’d given me a folder full of video files, organized by camera, time-stamped, with lists of every person who came into the camera’s field. Trouble was, everything was so well ordered I could easily calculate the days—no, weeks of footage.
Overwhelmed, I stood, and the world snapped back into focus. Iris had wandered back over and had stretched out on the floor just outside my circle. I sighed. “This is hopeless. I don’t even know how to start.”
#
“My problem,” I said to Iris as I dragged the cursor across random files, “is I’ve got too many variables. The first unknown is if any of these files have been tampered with. The second question is whether my usual approach will work in this different medium. So if I look at a file—really look at a file—and don’t find anything, is that because there’s nothing to find or because I’m not using the right method to find it?”
Iris stared up at the ceiling, arms crossed over her face. “How should I know?”
“Will an electronic medium even retain traces of change?”
“Oh god.” Iris knocked her head against the floor. “We’re going to be here forever.”
“If I could just—”
Iris’s body melted until she was once again the orange cat. She gave an imperious meow and curled into a ball. So much for help from Iris.
At least I had a place to start: Seana’s suspicions of her husband. I had to admit, I wanted him to be guilty. It wasn’t like he’d taken her from me—our separation had been much more complicated and came long before he’d entered the picture—but he stood for everything that had come between us. Jansynian blood and Jansynian politics and Jansynian business—first, last, and always.
Skimming through the lists of names attached to each camera’s recordings, only three of the five cameras listed him regularly, and after a quick glance at footage from each, I was able to narrow my target to one—the camera focused directly on his work area—rather than the two that covered areas he just moved through a lot.
I had one more data point. I knew that sabotage, if it had occurred, happened before the first satellite test failed. So that narrowed my field further.
I went back to the documents folder. Separated out everything that had Eddis’s name on it. Here, again, I was able to winnow things down, separating out papers, reports, and specs he had authored from those he simply approved.
I opened the versioning log, and here was where I started to see a pattern. Eddis was a man of routine. Most Jansynians were, as far as I could tell, but Eddis raised anal retentive to an art form. Each day, he apportioned his time—down to the minute—in the exact same way. If he was reviewing code for the higher-level satellite functions at ten a.m. on the first day of the week, he was doing the same thing at the same time in the middle of the week, at the end of the week, at the end of the month. Once I had all the files arranged by what aspect of the project they belonged to, I could see the history of Eddis’s life writ large across the check-out and update log. Day after day after day.
Except for one.
I double-checked the log, counted through the versioning history, made sure I really was seeing what I thought. One evening—one single instance over the course of three months, where he kept a file checked out an hour longer than usual. Had he just had extra trouble with it that day? Had he been interrupted? What had happened?
Time to go back to the video.
I found the footage for the evening in question, started it running twenty minutes before the usual time he would have checked the document back in…
And spent the next hour staring at Eddis’s back, hunched over the computer terminal. Nothing I could see—no reason he should have changed his behavior, no interruption that should have broken his pattern. Everything exactly the same.
At least, as far as the video showed. “Gotcha,” I whispered.
Kitty-Iris raised her head, tilted it to one side, her ears pricked forward. A clear question—was I done?
“Sorry. Just getting started.” But now I knew where to start. One variable solved. Now all I needed was the magic.
Something happened to Eddis that kept him from sticking to his pattern. Of that much, I was certain. I was also sure Seana had found this same inconsistency. She probably ran this bit of video through whichever tests she had. Which meant the shenanigans, if they existed, were buried deep.
I selected a fifteen-minute segment before what should have been the check-in time and set it to run on a loop. As before, when I’d been reading the file, I let myself sink into it, locked my eyes on the screen and let the rest of the world fade away. Over and over, I watched him sitting there, typing on his computer. Now reaching for his drink. Now tapping on the desk. Now scratching at his neck.
I turned up the audio and closed my eyes. Heard the steady hums of computers and fans. The whisper-sigh of the air conditioning kicking in. The soft clicks of Eddis’s keyboard.
I opened my eyes again and measured my breathing against his. In and out. In and out. Sigh. Shift. Rustle. Until I knew every rhythm of his body. Confident I would recognize the slightest variation, catch the smallest glitch, I backed up a full hour and settled in to watch.
Except…I didn’t see anything. Even in my heightened, meditative awareness, I couldn’t find a single breath out of place. No twitch in posture, no break in typing, nothing. Whoever had modified this tape was better than good. Whoever fixed this video was a master.
The other option was I had simply picked wrong, but I wasn’t ready to consider that. Not yet.
Once more, I backed it up. This time, only half an hour. If finesse wasn’t going to find me the weak point, I’d have to do this the slow way. I closed my eyes, lay a hand over the screen, and clicked forward frame by frame.
I had no idea if this approach would work. It usually required direct, physical contact for me to sense the magic, sense the change in whatever I analyzed. Was the video too many levels removed from the physical computer for me to get any sense of it?
Could I get further inside? The screen beneath my fingertips was glass. Under that, the video, projected by lights. Images defined by electrical pulses. Those pulses triggered by…
I had no idea. So much for that train of thought.
I needed to listen for the change—the change I knew had to be there. But it was well hidden. I no longer believed this could simply be sophisticated video editing. No technological solution could have buried the threads of the change this deep. Was Seana not the only person at Desavris hiring people who could do magic?
Oh but there! There it was. The tiniest jolt beneath my fingers. A twist of energy that didn’t belong. The slightest echo against reality. The circle around me caught the breath of energy and amplified it, drew it through the lines, and the candles around me flared. Yes, I’d found it.
I clung to that tendril of change, fed energy back into it, traced it to its heart. Now I had a lever. A wedge to press in between the video I’d seen and the real video that lurked beneath. Data could be erased, changed, altered, but the universe forgot nothing. No pattern, once created, ever disappeared. All I had to do was trace the line of change, follow it back, strip it away.
Like a loose thread in a sweater, once I’d found that one little piece sticking out, the rest unravelled. All it took was one good tug. I opened my eyes again, double-checked I hadn’t shifted in the circle.
And pulled.
#
As before, I saw Eddis at his computer, typing away. But I was so attuned to his rhythms, his mannerisms, the difference this time was obvious. He kept shifting his weight, fiddling with his jacket, and once he even glanced back over his shoulder. The man was nervous. More than that. Afraid?
Afraid of what? I had to wait and watch. Now I’d sunk into the magic, the scene had to roll along at its own pace. I was a passenger on this trip.
Except—why could nothing about this go smoothly? The scene wavered and blurred as the magic tried t
o slip away from me. I pushed back, worked to keep my concentration. This had never happened before. Once I was in, I should be in.
I didn’t even know how to fight it, except through focus and resolve. But that was the spinning-plate approach to magic, where the more I thought about it, the harder it became. All I could do was force my mind clear and bend all my will to watching Eddis fidget.
He looked over his shoulder again, back into the workroom. “Hello?” he called out. “Is someone there?”
I couldn’t pick up on whatever had him jumpy. I didn’t hear footsteps or breathing or any other noises that would suggest someone else in the lab. Paranoia? Unsurprising if he were about to commit some act so heinous he had to cover it up with magic.
The thought excited me and again the vision rippled. I took a deep breath, calmed myself, sunk deeper in until I’d lost all track of my own body. All I knew was Eddis Desavris and his sterile workroom in the heart of the Crescent.
When the shadows started to move, I thought it was some trick of the magic. Another waver in the vision, or an artifact of the dark, shadowy room in which my body sat. Only when Eddis started staring at the same murky corners, the tenebrous caves under tables and desks, did I realize he saw the same thing I did. The shadows in here were changing, reaching, spreading. Although the light hadn’t changed, the darkness grew.
I pushed further into the vision, anchoring myself in a web of magic. I closed in on the time Eddis should have finished with this work; something was about to happen. I knew it.
But knowing it was coming wasn’t the same as being ready.
Eddis turned back to his computer; his typing picked up speed. Trying to finish quickly and leave. He didn’t see the shadows flow out from their homes. Didn’t see them pool on the floor behind him. Didn’t see them rise up into a form that wouldn’t quite resolve. A twisting shape of claws and wings and teeth, all made of darkness. He didn’t see the thing swoop down on him from behind. Didn’t have warning. Didn’t know what was about to happen.
City of Burning Shadows (Apocrypha: The Dying World) Page 10
