by J. P. Sloan
“Yeah, but I have a thing.” Damn it… nouns. “I have a dinner tonight. Me and Julian.
He shrugged. “I’ll call Jean. I bet he has contacts.”
“Be careful with that. We’re not sure who’s involved with this coup against the Presidium. If he spreads word around too wide, we might end up tipping off the very people we’re trying to nail.”
I wished Ches were there.
“I need your help, Reed,” I stated. “I’m going a million directions, here.”
He slipped his hands into his pockets. “This is going to be over, eventually. You know?”
“That’s the plan.”
ight bathed Ellicott City in deep shadows. Its main drag ran along a sliver of land running between the Patapsco River and the sharp rise of hills running parallel. The old clapboard buildings eased in a lazy curve, the streets with cobblestone walkways sliding down to the mill at the bottom of the valley. The area was a kind of Lost World tucked away in the woods just west of Baltimore, weirdly segregated from the urban reality just two miles in any direction.
I stepped along the tiny granite cobbles, squinting in the darkness between buildings. A tour group followed a man in period costume holding an oil lantern. As they passed, I overheard the guide spinning a tale of a haunting nearby. The crisp springtime air hung around the cramped alleyways between the colonial buildings as fog lifted from the river. It was a spectacular night for a ghost tour.
I found the Meyer Livery after passing it several times. The old building, or what remained of it, sat huddled behind the taller buildings along the main street. Three wooden walls clung to the granite rock face of the hills behind, with a modern reproduction of a thatched roof slung overhead. There was very little light to be found. All I had to choose my footsteps by was a buzzing sodium lamp bolted to a building two doors down, spilling an orange light across the top of the thatched roof that managed to add more gloom than illumination.
A voice called from the shadows inside of the three walls.
“You actually came alone. I assumed you’d try to hedge your safety.”
Brown stepped out from the interior of the structure, half of his white beard catching the light from behind me.
“Didn’t want to dick around,” I replied. “I’m running out of time.”
“You and the Presidium, both.” He gathered his overcoat, buttoning it as he turned back to the wrecked walls. “It’ll be in ruins soon, much like this old livery. Unless we choose our steps very carefully.”
“Go team,” I grumbled.
“Adrastos called you in. This much I’m aware of.”
“The Presidium is running out of assets, or whatever you call your passel of sanctioned Netherworkers. He needed someone with dirt under his fingernails, and I was his last best choice.”
Brown nodded. “Those whom the Presidium weren’t baited into liquidating were disposed of by those who’ve started this conflict.”
“And they are?”
He lifted a finger. “That is the entire question, isn’t it? You’ve been lucky this far, Lake.”
“Funny. Doesn’t feel that way to me.”
“These individuals are dealing in violent, unpredictable forces. I wonder, why would any sane practitioner choose Chaos over something useful?”
My thoughts exactly. “Assuming they’re sane. What if we’re dealing with lunatics?”
Brown scowled. “Surely you’ve seen the pattern, by now?”
Aha. So there was a pattern, after all. I had a theory baking in my brain… time to see if Brown could bring me another step.
I asked, “What pattern?”
His scowl lifted into a sneer. “Patterns don’t fit into Chaos magic, and only in the most strictly arbitrary sense would they conform to lunacy. No, this is an organized attack against the Presidium. Organized and orchestrated with considerable patience.”
“What pattern?” I prodded.
“Gettysburg. Harper’s Ferry. Locust Grove.”
“Locust Grove?” I blurted. “You mean Enoch Pratt.”
He sighed. “You have some catching up to do. No, there have been more attacks. In Virginia.”
“Virginia?” My stomach knotted. “It isn’t a straight line at all. It’s a circle.”
“More than a circle, Lake. There is specificity in their methods. A sacred geometry of sorts.”
I turned away and shook my head. How blind had I been? This should have been obvious. Painfully obvious.
I whispered, “So, you’re saying that they’re surrounding the Presidium?”
Brown released a dry chuckle. “Nothing so facile. You’ve seen these attack sites, I trust?”
I nodded.
“And what do they have in common?”
“Old buildings.”
“Specifically?”
I turned back to face him. “Colonial-era buildings.”
He snapped his fingers. “And there we have it.”
Did we?
“What do we have, exactly?” I asked, my brain buzzing with a notion too bashful to show itself. “Okay, so, these people have a hate-on for the Presidium and decide to start dropping jinxes in a circle around DC. They’re choosing specific sites that were all built during the colonial period. At the same time, they’ve been eroding the Presidium’s power base. Kicked up all the dust with Durning. The Presidium goes batshit and drops the hammer on Netherworkers. In the ensuing chaos, they move on to, what? I guess it’s Phase Two. Remove the Netherworkers the Presidium keeps on speed-dial, as well as a harmless geomancer whose only threat was her ability to identify this pattern. But all of it was a smoke screen for the jinxes, to keep everyone focused away from these tactical chaos nukes.”
Brown crossed his arms, eyes alive with thought.
I continued,” You said there were more in Virginia?”
“Locust Grove and Port Royal,” he responded.
“That’s five jinxes. What the hell are they up to?”
Uncrossing his arms, Brown paced forward lifting fingers as he counted. “First, if you’re to appease the Ipsissimus, you must determine who these people are. And I don’t mean some vague label to hang over their necks. You’ll need names. Two, you will have to deal with the wreckage these chaos attacks have wrought.”
“That’s about the long and short of it,” I said.
He shook his head. “Wrong. There is a third question pertinent to your survival.”
“And what is that?”
He replied, “Who can you trust?”
I cocked my head. “A bit obvious.”
“Is it, though? You were quick to rush into Adrastos’s good graces.”
“Didn’t have a lot of choice, Clarence,” I groused.
“Well,” he countered with a knowing grin, “let’s consider who would benefit from a complete collapse of the Presidium? Because that’s what Adrastos is looking at, right now.”
“That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it? I mean, the Presidium’s taking a bloody nose right now, but―”
He shook his head. “You don’t understand what it is these people are doing.”
“So, enlighten me.”
He sighed. “I’m risking enough by meeting you. We have diviners who can spot entangled energies. Your resonance is loud enough, I don’t want to mingle my fate with yours any more than I have to. Thus, I won’t open the door for you, Lake. But I can save you time by keeping you from picking the wrong lock.”
I threw up my hands. “Fine. Keep your diviners in the dark. So, who benefits from the Presidium going tits up?”
“What does the Presidium accomplish?”
“It polices magical practices in America, keeps the Old World cabals from interfering. Makes my life harder than it needs to be. Pick one.”
Brown gestured to the livery. “Look to history, Lake. When did that become the Presidium’s mandate? Who made that decision, and when? What were the circumstances at the moment? These are the questions that will explain to you both what
is happening, and who is doing it.” His eyes fell into a sad stare. “These are old enemies.”
I grinned. “The Ipsissimus had you figured wrong, I think.”
The sadness in his eyes snapped into intense inquiry. “He mentioned me?”
“Well, sort of. I did, and he responded.”
He took a step toward me. “What did he say about me?” he asked in breathy gasps.
“Keep your pants on. Nothing big. He made a comment about me having a handler, and I assumed it was you. He implied that you’ve been trying to have me black-bagged for a while now.”
He considered my comment, then nodded slowly. “It seems there’s another question you’ve failed to ask yourself.”
I ran a hand over the side of my face, eyes searching out the shadows. “Who… is my handler?”
Brown stepped away. “You shouldn’t have mentioned my name to the Ipsissimus. Now our names are joined on an Akashic level.”
“Why are you so worried about the Presidium’s diviners?”
“We should part company. Now.”
He moved to step around me for the front street, but I held up a hand.
“This isn’t an attack from outside the Presidium at all, is it?”
Brown smiled. “You are at the brink, now. The door is before you. If I say anything else, we’re both dead.”
He hopped away, easing down the alley.
I called out, “You said to look to history. How? You people don’t exactly publish textbooks.”
Without turning, he waved an arm over his head. “It’s all around you, Lake. Literally all around you.”
Brown increased his speed, and slipped onto the street and out of sight. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was spooked.
Who was I kidding? I didn’t know better.
I stood in the darkness behind the front buildings, lingering by the inkier shadows within the ruins of the Meyer Livery.
So, this was some kind of civil war within the Presidium, a coup d’état at the hands of some subgroup, some junta within the Presidium itself. It made sense to me, as I thought about it. Adrastos needed outsiders to solve this problem, likely because even the Ipsissimus himself wasn’t sure who was on his side and who wasn’t. He didn’t even let Wexler onto his property.
Was she part of this? It was as likely as anyone.
Old enemies, Brown had called them.
As I made the short drive back home, it became clear to me that I’d have to hunt down some Presidium history. Could Emil have collected anything with that kind of information? It would be my first stop.
or the first time in what felt like months, I came home to an empty house. Malosi was somewhere, ostensibly researching chaos magic or otherwise tapping his pipeline of contacts for the information we needed.
Ches and Ricky were probably in Oregon by now. I wondered how long it would be before she reached out to Gillette. Or the Dead Dragons. I felt like saying a prayer for her, but I wasn’t sure who the hell would listen.
And so, without distraction for well or ill, I descended into my basement workspace and stood stiff-armed as I stared across the room at the cabinet. It loomed, massive, its dark-stained wood absorbing light like a fly trap. The cedar planks lining the interior of the cabinet did what it could to contain the malevolent energies resident in those tombs, but I knew what was inside. And because I knew, it had a hook in my brain. Brown had spoken of undesired resonance. I had truckloads of resonance with these books, and none of it was desirable.
I fished out my keys and unlocked the doors. They swung open on ancient hinges, oddly silent for their age. The aromas of cedar and musky parchment washed over my face. I snatched the clipboard from its nail on the inside of the door and gave the makeshift index a good once-over. I found nothing that screamed “Presidium History and How to Deal with It.” There were several promising candidates for the chaos study. Early industrial age Golden Dawn-era booklets. They seemed innocuous enough, but there had to be a reason Emil had sequestered these from the shelves upon shelves of legitimate hermetic theory he didn’t bequeath to me.
I pulled one of these booklets from between two hand-stitched leather-bound texts, and held it up to the light. A DISCOURSE ON HIDDEN MAGICKS. Lame title. Perhaps from a Victorian sensibility, this would have been a scandalous piece of publishing.
What the hell… I opened it up and skimmed the first couple pages. Florid prose made a case for hermetic practice, stitched heavily with spiritualism and a fawning eye toward Deist thought. It was utterly forgettable, though before I put it back, one phrase caught my eye.
“The darker aspects of human thought owe their patrilineage to a host, a choir parallel of and sinister to the angels of Creation. Such ancient and forgotten beings dwell not in eternal flame but in shadow, watching and at times guiding the wickedness of Man toward their own amusement and nourishments.”
A wave of nostalgia poured over me. My brain injected the memory of tarry cigarette smoke and Emil’s awful sherry into the scents wafting from the cabinet. Was this passage the inspiration for Emil coining the term “Dark Choir”? I continued skimming over the booklet, but found little else of use. Some further discourse over the justifications in dealing with the Dark Choir, but nothing on the Presidium or chaos magic.
I took some time to grab books almost at random and rifling through their pages. As was generally the case on the rare instances I dove into the Library, time became somewhat fluid. I indulged in some academic free-fall, pausing to swallow up sections of interest, and running a thread into another text from another century. By the time I came up for air, three hours had passed.
I gathered the alarming number of books I’d pulled out and set them back inside the cabinet, locking it up before giving my neck a good stretch. My eyes shifted to Ches’s desk. Her study materials sat in neat stacks with tiny multi-colored stick-on tabs spraying from the sides. I walked over and rummaged over the top of the stack. Basic energy theory. Palpation. Divination. Dowsing. My Hermetic Theory 101. I noted that most of the language texts sat at the bottom. She truly hated studying dead languages. And lively ones, for that matter.
A separate stack of papers remained tucked underneath her desk topper. I snagged the top sheet to find a series of logograms and the name Matilda Garcia written across the top. Ches’s private addiction consultancy work. At the time, I thought she was lashing out against my prohibition against practicing the art. In truth, she was finding a way to help Ricky. In general, it was a good idea. Charms for addiction recovery. It was something I’d dabbled with in the past, but never really committed to. They weren’t real money-makers. But it did feel good to help people, I had to admit.
That used to be my thing. Helping people. Karma manipulation was my tool, a check-valve against the consequences of Netherwork. But there were moments when I managed to do the right thing despite myself, and those were the memories from ten years’ worth of practice that I tended to dwell upon when I was alone in my basement, wondering what the hell I was doing with my life.
As I slid her personal notes back under her desk topper, a slip of notepad paper curled up and fell to the side. I reached for it and placed it neatly on top, and as I did so, the messy pencil scratching on the paper caught my attention.
LENFANT.
Minerva’s scribblings, her decoded message from Deirdre.
I turned to the marker board and wrote the word “L’Enfant” near the center. I took a step back, then reached up to add the accent… L’Enfant.
“Mais oui,” I said out loud with a self-amused grin.
That grin faded slowly as I considered the word.
The French word.
I returned to Ches’s desk and reached for her research stack once again. I rifled through her papers until I found print outs of the Enoch Pratt sigils.
Ches had written “L’Ecole de la Nombre D’or” in large block letters across the bottom of the last photo. Behind that, I found a few pages she’d printed from some web
site outlining the basics of the old French Pythagorean school. Short-lived, fading in and out of existence between the 1730’s and 1790’s.
Right about the time the colonists decided they’d had enough of England and formed a new nation.
“Look to your history, huh?” I whispered as I scanned the page with eager eyes.
Did the L’Ecole de la Nombre D’or actually disappear? Or did it transform into something else? Something on a new continent.
Something like the Presidium.
I pulled my keys back out and opened up the cabinet. In my academic free-fall, I stumbled across at least three French texts, all of them pressed in movable type. I pulled book after book out, restacking them on my workbench, until I finally found all three. For a change, I wasn’t interested in mechanics or hermetic theory. I was looking for history. My French wasn’t terrible, but I was used to poring over recipes and ritual prescriptions. The prose in this book was a bit thick, but I managed. Good thing French hadn’t changed much in the past couple hundred years.
The first book was too recent to be any use, a catalog of basic disease curses from the early nineteenth century. The second, however, was a bit more my speed. Nearly half the book was dedicated to chronicling several secret societies on the Continent from the late Crusades to the Industrial Age. It was a veritable Who’s Who of the cabals that had survived the Burning Times. The Nombre D’or wasn’t hard to find, though its entry was short. Everything I expected to find was there. The school was dedicated to the observance of sacred geometries and an Enlightenment Period take on Pythagorean practice, but with most of the Gnosticism stripped away.
My eyes shot wide when I spotted the name of the school’s one and only adherent whom the author had deemed worthy of mention.
Pierre Charles L’Enfant.
Holy shit. Deirdre did have it figured out!
Continuing on, I learned that L’Enfant had studied under the Nombre D’or during his terms at the Royal Academy, where most of the practitioners had established their base. They had experimented with a method for platting a modern village according to strict geomantic principles. However, a deep rift had developed between those still clinging to Egyptian ideals for spatial confluence, and those who felt no desire to re-create a Necropolis in rural France. Despite this rift, the village of Nouveau Marché was granted a charter by King Louis XV. A crude lithograph of the plat filled an entire page. Largely unremarkable, excepting for five city gates leading to roads that were clearly redirected in order to accommodate a scheme that didn’t conform to the points of the compass.
