Blood Rite (Maggie Devereaux Book 2)

by Stephen Penner

  And what if Maggie could cast a spell that did the same?

  She was about to find out.

  Of course she knew there was no small danger in this. She hadn’t yet directed the dark magic against herself. And the thought of allowing the magic direct access to her brain filled her with a healthy dose of concern. On the other hand, the dark magic already had gained at least some access to her mind, as evidenced by the nightmares she endured after each use of it. But more importantly, there was the child.

  She’d not forgotten the purpose of her detour to Wales. The trip to Ireland had enjoyed dual goals. When she’d heard from Hamilton about the Old Gaelic exhibition she had of course wondered how it might relate to her dark dialect and the kidnapped child next to whose crib words of that dialect had been scrawled in blood. But it had been the promise of the white magic—of healing spells and the connection to her great-times-ten-grandmother, the Healer—that had converted a questionable whim into a ferry ticket and hotel reservation.

  But the trip to Wales held a single purpose. The stone carving from Ballincoomer Abbey had listed three events: ‘the banshee shall return to claim her legacy,’ ‘the magic of the Celts shall be reignited,’ and ‘infantsblood shall be spilt onto ancestral earth.’ It was this last event which she had found particularly distressing. Hence the trip to Aberystwyth, in search of more details surrounding this prophecy, to confirm whether it was the prophecy mentioned, in English, on the wall behind the empty MacLeod crib—and if it was, whether she could do anything to stop it. Because even adrift in an ocean of uncertainties, Maggie was sure of one thing: the police had no idea about the Welsh Book of Souls. She suspected that once Prof. Hamilton had provided his expert opinion that the bloody words on the floor were nothing more than gibberish, Sgt. Warwick and the rest of the Aberdeen P.D. had likely given no more thought to the scrawlings, other than perhaps D.N.A. analysis of the blood to confirm it was the boy’s.

  All of which left Maggie as the only one pursuing the linguistic clue left behind by the kidnapper.

  Space Commander Devereaux reporting for duty.

  So Maggie had two choices: find someone who could translate the Welsh Book of Souls for her, or learn Old Welsh herself in the span of a single day. But the former option was fraught with danger; anyone who spoke the tongue might be in league with the kidnapper, and she was uncertain how her own interest might be easily explained. She still wondered whether the kidnapper, who had used her dark dialect on the floorboards of the MacLeod nursery, didn’t already know about her. And if she hadn’t already been certain when she arrived at the library that morning that she couldn’t know whom she could trust, the unexpected letter from a hitherto unheard of ‘Professor S. MacKenzie’ of the University of Aberdeen had sealed it. Maggie hadn’t even contacted Aberdeen; her call had been to Hamilton at Edinburgh.

  Which left the latter option: learning Old Welsh in a day. And there was only one way to do that. So, as nervous as she was to try crafting an original spell to inflict on her own synapses, she needed only to remind herself of one thing: the life of a helpless child hung in the balance.

  She really had no choice. The magic might be dark in origin, she told herself, but she was sure she could harness it for good. She had to. That would have to be enough.

  She looked down at the manuscript. She readied herself. Then she closed her eyes and spoke the translation spell.

  Her scream rebounded off the bookcases. Ten dozen ice-covered steel spikes impaled her frontal lobe, only to dissolve into liquid fire and explode along every synapse of her brain, reducing the pathways to ash. She couldn’t see because her eyes had rolled up into her head. She couldn’t hear because her ears were bleeding. And the only reason she didn’t scream again was because she’d forgotten how.

  She lay there for an indeterminate time, eyes closed and chest heaving, aware less of her surroundings than of her detachment therefrom, as the jelly of her mind slowly rebuilt itself, a jolt of electric agony accompanying every reconnected synapse.

  Finally it subsided. One of her eyelids fluttered open and the eyeball rolled down to obtain an up-close view of the formica table top upon which her face was resting. Gingerly, she lifted her head and with some trepidation opened her other eye.

  She was still alive. That was good.

  The room was still there. That was also good.

  As was the manuscript. Thrice good.

  She must have shoved it to one side as she collapsed onto the table. A fortunate event, in turned out, judging by the blood which her nose and ears had deposited onto the table top. She wiped the blood from her nose with the back of her hand and fumbled in her bag for tissues to mop up the rest. Once this task was completed and she confirmed the bleeding had stopped, she shoved the wet rags into her pocket and turned her attention back to the manuscript.

  She opened her parched mouth to say something—something witty to calm her nerves and dispel the last aching from her sinuses—but nothing came to mind. So instead she closed her mouth again and reached for the ancient Welsh text.

  The first thing she noticed was that she couldn’t see the text. She could read it, but she couldn’t see it. Not in the traditional sense anyway. She couldn’t see any letters on the page, but it wasn’t blank either. More like a blind spot in her vision. A colorless blur where the words should have been. But when she looked there, the expected image of words was replaced with a less expected direct understanding of their meaning, ringing clearly inside her mind. Her brain was refusing to acknowledge the letters transmitted by her optic nerve, electing instead to simply skip that step and move directly to the translation of those symbols into the proper linguistic concepts. She couldn’t see the letters, but she understood the words.

  ‘Welcome, dear reader,’ she understood, ‘to the Welsh Book of Souls. Contained within these pages is the sum total of the knowledge of Our People.’

  She could hear the English words in her mind. She supposed she heard English because even directly translated words needed some medium to manifest their meaning, and English was her mother tongue. But her Gaelic was pretty good too. Focusing on Gaelic, she reread the sentence. This time she heard the same introduction, but in Gaelic.

  Hot damn. She slapped the table. It worked!

  Not without side effects, however, she was compelled to notice. Being blind to the words she was reading proved to be a bit more irritating than she might have imagined. She had to put her finger on the page and follow it with her eyes, lest they inadvertently drop to the next line and begin instantly translating the words found there. It was like guiding a magnifying glass over otherwise illegible fine print. Her brain could immediately understand anything displayed to it, but it had to be presented in the right order.

  Still, it worked, and once Maggie had gotten a hang of ‘reading blind’ she found herself sailing through the pages as easily as if she’d written them herself. The prophecy she was seeking turned out to be toward the end, but she was having so much fun ‘reading’ that she was in no hurry to finish. Even once she encountered her linguistic quarry she was tempted to continue reading to the very end, just because she could—but she resisted the temptation. She hadn’t forgotten the purpose of the mission which had compelled her to cast the potentially dangerous spell. Slowing herself with a deep cleansing breath, she repositioned her finger and let her mind translate the invisible Old Welsh words:

  ‘The Teutons have arrived on our Celtic Isles. Despite the assurances of our military leaders, it is foretold that they will not be defeated. Indeed the wars which shall follow shall last a thousand years, and will end in the near destruction of the Celts. Our enlightened ways shall be supplanted by the barbarous rituals of the invaders. Magic and Nature shall fall to Sword and Axe. What was ours shall become theirs and we will risk losing what we were, the links to our past all but severed by time and defeat.

  ‘But all hope is not lost.

  ‘A millennia hence in tragedy shall we find victory. T
he blood of our descendants shall reestablish their connections to the power and magic of their Celtic forebears. The cost shall be great, but the reward greater. So is it written—so shall it come to pass.’

  This preamble was then followed by the same image Maggie had seen etched in the stones of Ballincoomer Abbey: a knotwork circle. It was essentially identical to its stone cousin save that it was far more beautiful in illuminated red ink and gold foil. The circle held three points which, as near as Maggie’s magic-addled mind could tell, anchored roughly the same information she had previously translated the old fashioned way—save that where the Irish stones held phrases, the Welsh pages boasted near-paragraphs:

  ‘A woman of magic, the banshee, shall return from the West, alive with power and determined to reclaim her legacy.’

  ‘Two infants, a boy and a girl, one from each of the two great clans, shall suffer their throats to be slit, their blood spilt into the earth of their earliest ancestors.’

  ‘The magic of the Celts shall be extracted from the dust of the ancient past, its glory and power reignited in the banshee.’

  Then beneath this, text again, exhorting simply: ‘She shall return to fulfill the prophecy.’ Just like on the wall above Douglas MacLeod’s empty crib, save in the third person rather than the first and the simple future rather than the present perfect.

  Maggie closed her eyes—in part to rest her enchanted brain from the stimuli of the ancient words, in part to consider their meaning. After several moments she opened her eyes again, but her gaze was distant.

  Two? she asked herself in no particular language.

  ***

  Part of the problem with crafting the translation spell turned out to be, ironically enough, the very fact that she didn’t know Old Welsh before casting it. Because of this gap in knowledge, she had been unable to pursue a more focused approach to understanding the manuscript. Hence the direct assault on the language recognition centers of her frontal lobe, rendering them capable of understanding anything it encountered.

  An interesting side-effect—one she hadn’t expected—was that Old Welsh was not the only language she could now understand instantaneously. A glance at the interior of her Dark Book resulted in the identical sensation she had had with the Old Welsh manuscript. Her eyes couldn’t make out the individual words, but her mind understood them anyway, and in a purer way than even her arduously gained fluency in the Old Gaelic dialect had allowed. The same proved true for the call number signs on the bookcase ends as well as each and every title she passed on her way to returning the Welsh Book of Souls to its spot on the shelf. Blind to the words themselves, she could not possibly have identified what language they were written in—Welsh, Old Welsh, English, French, Zulu—but she understood each and every title perfectly.

  The effect seemed also to spill over past visual stimuli. The simple experiment of speaking aloud confirmed that her hearing, and her aural comprehension, had been similarly affected.

  She whispered, “Well done, Devereaux.”

  She heard nothing.

  But she understood, ‘Accomplished/Completed + Good/Well + Me/Self/Name.’

  And so she became quite relieved that she’d decided to make the spell temporary. A lifetime of linguistic deafness seemed certain to prove annoying. She only hoped she’d succeeded as well in the temporal aspect of the enchantment as she had in the substantive.

  She repeated her test phrase, this time in a normal voice, focusing on the rounded lips of the ‘W’ and the dental pressure of the ‘D’s, and working hard to form the right sounds even if she couldn’t hear them. She supposed it was similar to what deaf people must do, unable to hear the sounds they produce and therefore focused on the mechanics of creating them.

  Again she understood what she’d said. But again she couldn’t hear her words, although the hum of the central air was fully audible.

  Oh well, she thought. Hopefully the spell will wear off soon.

  She tried not to be too worried. There wasn’t anything to be done about it just yet, save waiting for the spell to wear off. And if it didn’t, she could always try to craft a second spell to undo the effect—an antidote of sorts. In the meantime she could read Tolstoy in the original.

  Maggie closed the door to the Old Collections behind her and confirmed it was locked. Then she sought out the stairs. Any curiosity she might have had as to what the elevator buttons might look like while the spell was active were far outweighed by her desire to minimize any human interaction until after it wasn’t. She descended the four flights down to the ground floor, and headed straight for the circulation desk around the corner. As she reached the corner she considered whether she needed to vibrate her throat to make the ‘TH’ in ‘thank you’ sound like the one in ‘thatch’ and not the one in ‘that.’ She had no time to consider the ‘G’ in ‘Gwen.’

  Gwen Palmer stepped right in front of Maggie and said something the American couldn’t hear. ‘Hello, Maggie,’ rang inside Maggie’s head.

  “Eh, hello,” Maggie replied as best she could.

  ‘Do you have a cold?’ Gwen asked in silent inquiry.

  I must not be doing a great job of annunciating, Maggie deduced. “Yes, actually,” her mouth replied precisely. “I must have stayed out too late last night.” Maggie laughed lightly, relieved not to have to mimic that sound, and was even more relieved when Gwen returned the laugh.

  ‘Are you doing some research then?’ Maggie understood Gwen to ask.

  “Er yes. The Old Collections.” No point in denying it. “I found some interesting texts for my research.”

  ‘That’s good,’ Gwen nodded companionably. Maggie tried to concentrate on the woman’s lips as she spoke, but Gwen kept moving her head. ‘Well, look,’ came next into Maggie’s brain as Gwen looked away to the wall clock, ‘I can’t really chat. But I saw you and I wanted to say hello.’

  “Okay. Great.” That was a relief. “Well, good to see you, Gwen.”

  ‘Good to see you too, Maggie.’ The words instantly translated in Maggie’s mind as Gwen flashed a friendly smile.

  Maggie nodded in reply and stepped lively toward the circulation desk. She elected just to nod and smile as she returned the key to the Old Collections. Then she made a bee-line for the door.

  Gwen hadn’t moved from her spot. Rather she stood glaring after Maggie as the American hurried out into the Aberystwyth late morning. And Gwen didn’t break off her cold stare even as an elderly tourist woman came over to speak to her.

  “What a remarkable conversation,” the old woman enthused, looking first to Gwen then to where Maggie had exited. “I’ve never heard anything like that before. Tell me, young lady, was that Welsh you were speaking?”

  Gwen Palmer’s eyes narrowed to harsh slits as they clung to the still swinging exit doors. “Yes,” she hissed.

  28. Marketplace of Ideas

  Oh, man. Oh, man. Oh, man. Maggie hurried down the hill toward the harbor and business district. That was close.

  She should have stayed in the Old collections room until the spell had worn off. But who knew when—or even if—that would ever happen. The shop signs she was passing were still the illegible, fully understandable blanks she’d encountered in the Welsh Book of Souls. And the lilt of the passersby mirrored that of Gwen Palmer, entirely inaudible and perfectly comprehensible. But the truth—the pathetic and pedestrian truth—was that simple hunger had forced her out of the room sooner than might have been wise. It was nearing noon and she still hadn’t had a bite to eat that day. She hadn’t even had any coffee to suppress the appetite which had finally asserted itself once the brilliance of her successfully cast spell had diminished the horror of the previous evening’s nightmare.

  Oh, well, she smiled at her deftly executed one-way conversation in the library lobby. No harm, no foul.

  The next order of business, then, was breakfast. Or lunch, she supposed. Food, in any event. Perhaps a little stand or café where she could just point at a croissant and smi
le. Then the half-smile which clung to her lips blossomed into full grin as she glanced up at a sign approaching on her right.

  ‘Archfarchnad,’ it read.

  And she had no idea what that meant.

  She never thought she’d be glad not to be able to read a foreign language, but given the circumstances, she was ecstatic. Not only would she be able to hear her own voice again, but more importantly her home-brewed spell had turned out to be a complete success, right down to its temporary effect.

  “You’re a regular Samantha Stevens,” she told herself. But her self congratulatory smile faded as the last syllables faded again into comprehensible silence. Glancing again at the sign, she watched with begrudging interest as the words morphed slowly from a collection of identifiable but incomprehensible Latin letters to invisible, fully understandable concepts in her mind. ‘Grocery.’ Then the sign morphed back to its unintelligible Welsh, the translation lingering behind in Maggie’s memory. As she waited and allowed her perception of the sign to change yet again, she realized that while the spell was indeed wearing off, it was not entirely finished with her yet.

  Oh, well. Maybe by the time I get to the market… She shrugged and continued on her way.

  ***

  The market was a beehive of bilingual activity. Fruit stands jostled against craft carts against bakery wagons. Merchants hawked flower bouquets on one corner and cheeses on another. All the signs, handwritten and professionally printed alike, were in both Welsh and English, and the shouts and laughs and calls of merchant and customer were similarly a mix of the two tongues. For the most part, much to her delight, Maggie was able to appreciate all this; the translation spell had all but worn off, only the last remnants hanging on stubbornly, not unlike the sensation after a long airplane flight when one’s ears haven’t quite popped yet, despite several minutes already on the ground. She could tell she was only a short time from once again being completely ignorant of Welsh, and she could hardly wait.