Fractures: Caulborn 4

by Nicholas Olivo

  “What’s the range on it, and can you make it bigger?”

  “About ten miles, and maybe.” Thad tapped the jeweler’s loupe again, and the lens turned gold. “Thing is, sweetie, enchantments like this are limited based on what they’re put into. This little glass box is just a few square inches big. You can only put so much enchantment into a little space like this. I could expand the enchantment easily enough, but there’s no more surface area within the box to contain it.”

  I thought about this for a minute. “So if the box was say, twice as big, you could double the size of the enchantment, and we’d get a range of twenty miles?”

  “Right.”

  “Does it have to be stable space?”

  Thad narrowed his eyes at me. “What are you thinking?”

  Thad’s known me since high school, so he can read me pretty well when I’m thinking of something crazy. And this would definitely be crazier than say, that time we’d let goats into the school during finals week as part of a senior prank. More productive, too. Hopefully.

  I thought back to my encounter with the nirrin and how they’d bridged two places together with extradimensional energy. “Let’s say I was able to create an extradimensional pocket inside the box, essentially make it bigger on the inside. Could you expand the enchantment to fill that space?”

  Thad drummed his fingers on the desk. “Maybe. And the enchantment would only last for as long as the pocket existed. Once it collapsed, the enchantment would go back to its normal size and state.”

  Kristin’s recent lectures about not being reckless came to the front of my mind. “Is this safe? Like, do we risk blowing up the building or something if anything goes sideways?”

  “If you were working with containment enchantments or something weaponized, sure,” Thad replied. “But a scanner? No, the worst-case scenario would be that any psychically sensitive individuals in the city would have a sudden urge to go hunting for whatever you were looking for, and that would probably only last a few seconds.”

  “Can we try it now? I mean, do you need to watch the store or anything?”

  “Today was an appointments-only day, so I could get some inventory done,” Thad said.

  I glanced around the room. Wooden crates, cardboard boxes, and tubes were everywhere. The back room of Thad’s shop has always reminded me of the closing scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark. “Yeah, so how’s that going?”

  “Perfectly well,” Thad said. “I had just finished when you popped in.”

  I smirked. “You mean you’d given up on organizing this mess.”

  “Not a word out of you,” Thad said, mock sternness on his face. “I took inventory. I know now that I have stuff. A lot of stuff.” He kept a straight face for a moment, and then we both started laughing.

  “All right,” I said. “Seriously, do you have time for this now?”

  He nodded. “Let me gather up some materials. I’ll need a little time to get everything prepped.”

  Thad pulled a duffel bag from one of the shelves on the far wall as I cleared off a worktable. He set a few items from the duffel on the table and began drawing runes on the table’s surface in chalk. About twenty minutes later, a series of complex geometric symbols adorned the table in pastel pink. “Enchantment extension is probably the simplest thing there is,” Thad said. “It’s one of the first things we’re taught. Just give me a sec to prep for the invocations.”

  Artificery, Thad’s brand of magic, is different from what I do. For starters, in artificery, there’s a ton of math involved. Where I control the elements and psychically manipulate things through sheer willpower, what Thad does is more akin to what would happen if computer programming and calculus got drunk and had a baby while sitting atop the Necronomicon. His runes spell out instructions for the eldritch energy, and the invocations he performs allow him to tap into that energy. The energy then behaves according to the mathematical models that he was now sketching out on a piece of paper. Just because what Thad was doing was, by artificer standards, very simple, my friend was never one to just wing it.

  I thought about Cynthia and the Rosario back in HQ. “Oh, hey, Thad, can you exclude a certain spot from the detection spell? There’s a deposit of celestial metal at my office, and I don’t want it interfering with what we’re doing now.”

  “Can do,” he replied. When Thad was satisfied with his calculations, he gave me a thumbs up.

  I took a breath and focused my Glimpse, looking back again at the bubble in reality the nirrin had created, and what I’d done before in my bedroom. I took my time, carefully planning how I was going to approach this. Then I began folding the space inside the box, connecting it to the space inside the back room, threading the whole thing together with tight stitches of extradimensional energy. As I did, a bit of space at the ceiling, about the size of a golf ball, turned a hazy green. So that’s what it looked like from outside the bubble. A second hazy green golf ball appeared next to that one as I stitched in more space. And more. When I was done, there must’ve been a few thousand spheres of green extradimensional light jumbled about the ceiling.

  “So what did you do?” Thad asked, his face bathed in pale green light.

  “Each ball up there is a bit more space connected to the space inside the box. They’re all connected to each other, so the box has that much total room inside it. Once you put your enchantments inside that space, the metal detector’s range should be increased significantly.” I looked to my friend. “Ready?” He nodded. “Go for it, Thad,” I said, my eyes locked on the box. I felt Thad’s magic take effect. It rippled along the surface of the extradimensional pocket, spreading out, coating it with what felt like a fine layer of chalk.

  The compass rose etched onto the surface of the box began to glow, a spectral needle winking into being above it. The needle spun wildly, clockwise, then counterclockwise, barely stopping before switching back to clockwise again. I wove in more space, increasing the speed of my stitching to keep pace with Thad’s expansion enchantment.

  It was hard to quantify just how much space I’d stitched together in there. Easily two or three hundred cubic feet, maybe more. Thad didn’t show any sign of slowing down with the enchantment process, and the compass needle continued to spin. Faster and faster it whirred, until it snapped to a stop, pointing northeast.

  Thad and I froze. “Well,” he said. “Methinks we’ve found something.” He rubbed his chin. “Though northeast doesn’t seem very specific.”

  “Hang on, I want to try something,” I said.

  “The last time you said that, you wrecked my car.”

  “That was a long time ago and this is completely different,” I said without taking my eyes off the needle. “Can you give me your best guess on how much the range of this thing has been increased?”

  Thad popped the jeweler’s loupe back on, tapped it a few times, and whistled. “Jumpin’ Jehosaphat,” he said. “The range… it’s…” He squinted at the box. “Jesus, how many zeroes is that? It’s millions and millions of miles, Vincent. I don’t think it’s even pointing at this plane of existence.”

  Wow. I knew I’d packed a lot of extradimensional space into that little box, but I hadn’t been expecting to be able to get it to look across dimensions. It was exciting, but my good mood evaporated almost instantly. “Crap,” I said. “It’s telling us the location of a plane that has celestial metal, but I don’t know where it is. I can only Open portals to places I can see or know well.”

  Thad looked at the compass needle. “It’s telling you where to go, right? Can you maybe… feel your way along?”

  “That might work.” I stretched out a thin line of extradimensional energy, laying it atop the needle. The thread shot out along the path the needle pointed, surging along for miles and miles until it came to an abrupt halt against the edge of the reality I’d
detected the metal on.

  “I’ve made contact,” I said, an idea jumping into my head. “And now I think I can join this reality to ours, just like what I did with the space in the metal detector. Thad, you’re a genius!”

  “A person less modest than I would agree with you, Vincent.” He paused. “Oh, who am I kidding? Of course I am.”

  I gently pulled the edge of the other reality closer to me, like I was reeling in an enormous extradimensional fish. Sweat ran into my eyes when I finally held the edge in my hand, figuratively speaking. Part of me wanted to just bridge the gap, bind the realities together, but that would be stupid. I’d seen enough Star Trek to know that you didn’t just beam down to a planet without verifying that it was Class M first. And even if you could breathe the atmosphere, you didn’t go in blind without knowing you weren’t going to land in the lair of some Thanagarian Snare Beast.

  So instead, I connected a very small piece of the reality to ours, creating the equivalent of a peephole. The air coming out was sour, like spoiled milk. It was hot, too. Not like when you stand over a heating grate on a cold day, but like when you step outside in the middle of August and the air is so hot and humid it sticks to you. I couldn’t see much; the peephole was small, but I was afforded a view of the hellish red light of a molten lava flow. “This doesn’t look like a friendly place,” I said to Thad.

  My friend was standing behind me, looking over my shoulder through the peephole. “I certainly wouldn’t want to vacation there, sweetie,” Thad said. “Do you see any of the metal?”

  I squinted against the light and the heat coming through the peephole and risked making it a bit wider, about the size of a coaster. “No,” I replied, “but I’d imagine we’re looking for it in its natural state. I’m not sure if it shows up in veins on its own or—”

  A rock the size of a kitchen table exploded from the surface of the molten lava flow. It was pure silver, and shone with its own light. The rock sailed up into the sky, and continued going up. It shot straight out of the atmosphere and turned into a shooting star. My metal detector’s needle stopped spinning and pointed at the rock, following it up as it vanished. It had shot into the sky so fast that I hadn’t even had a chance to make a telekinetic grab for it.

  “Shit and Shinola,” Thad whispered.

  “That entire rock was celestial metal,” I said, amazed at the size of it. That much would’ve been enough to make dozens of Rosarios. Pictures formed in my mind, and I hastily relayed what I was imagining to Thad. “It must be along the bottom of this molten lake. It must occasionally get ejected from wherever this is, and then go out into space. Once it’s in space, it probably floats around out there as asteroids, and then gradually breaks up as it hits other asteroids or enters another planet’s atmosphere.” I snapped my fingers. “That must’ve been how Paracelsus got his celestial metal in the first place, a meteor.” The metal detector’s needle spun again and pointed directly at the lake of lava. I grinned. “Okay, so there’s celestial metal in that there lake o’ fire.” I sent out telekinetic feelers into the lava, searching for a big rock. I felt something and began hauling it up.

  Unfortunately, while what I latched onto was big and heavy, it wasn’t a deposit of celestial metal.

  It was alive.

  I’m not sure what the thing was, but it lashed out at me with a tentacle that was made of living magma. The attack went well wide of the peephole, but some of the magma spray shot through, setting my hair on fire. Now, I don’t care how disciplined you are, having your head catch aflame is a guaranteed way to lose your concentration. I lost my grip on the other reality as well as the TARDIS-ification I’d done on the celestial metal detector, and the peephole vanished. There was a sucking sound as the space I’d created inside the device imploded.

  I used the kobolds’ elemental fire to extinguish the flames and gently probed my scalp. I winced as I touched the tender flesh.

  “Oooh, Vincent,” Thad said, his face crinkled with concern. “Does it hurt?”

  “Yeah, a bit,” I said through clenched teeth. “How bad does it look?”

  In response, Thad took a small mirror from his desk drawer and held it out to me. The top of my hair was gone, and the scalp was nothing but burns. Man, first the silver at my temples and now this?

  “Will it grow back?” Thad asked.

  “I think so,” I said, feeling the onset of my healing fever. “I burned my eyebrows off in eighth grade, and my healing fever put them back that night.”

  “You should have that looked at just the same.”

  “I will.” I let out a breath. “Is the metal detector salvageable?”

  Thad picked up the crunched remains of the device. “Well, I hate to be a glass-half-empty sort of guy, Vincent, but I’m going to have to go with a no on that one.” My shoulders slumped, but then Thad continued. “However, a truly brilliant artificer would have made some notes about a device like this and how it was built, so he could make his own. Maybe even improve on it.”

  I couldn’t keep the hope out of my voice. “How long until you can make a new one?”

  “Give me a day or two, sweetie.” Thad smiled. “Should be just enough time for you to rest up and become the new poster boy for The Hair Club for Men.”

  Chapter 4

  The Caulborn have found one of the old Urisk battle symbiotes. Corinthos is calling it the Black Flash, typical comic book nonsense. The symbiote has a handful of those tadpoles growing in its armpit. If I bring those back to the Bright Side, then I might be able to secure Urisk soldiers for Sakave. Now I just need to wait for the right moment.

  —From Treggen’s personal journal

  I thanked Thad and portaled back to HQ. Once there, I headed to Medical. Doc Ryan took one look at me and said, “Jesus Christ, Corinthos. What’d you do this time?”

  “Having a bad hair day, Doc,” I said. “How bad is it?”

  The doc sat me under a bright light while he examined my scalp. “Say something else,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Anything. Recite ‘Mary Had A Little Lamb,’ for all I care, but keep talking.”

  I wound up reciting the scene from Ghostbusters where Peter Venkman is telling Stanz that the sponges migrated a foot and a half when the doc waved me to silence. “All right, all right, that’s enough.”

  “What’d you have me do that for?” I asked.

  In response, Doc ran a thermometer across my forehead. “A hundred and fifty,” he said, showing me the readout. “Your fever’s gotten stronger, but the other symptoms you normally have, the stuffiness and grogginess, don’t seem to be there. You used to not be able to shrug those off. I’m watching your scalp regenerate, and you’re having a normal conversation with me.”

  I gingerly touched the top of my head and found it sensitive, but nowhere nearly as painful as it had been five minutes ago. I felt the peach fuzz of new hair growth, too. Doc pointed at the side of my head. “The gray’s new.”

  “Yeah, what can I say? The mileage is starting to show.”

  Doc rolled his eyes at me. “I’m seventy-eight years old, Corinthos. Cry me a friggin’ river.” He paused, popped another piece of gum into his mouth, and chewed thoughtfully. “Mrs. Rita mentioned that she thought your healing was getting faster. Looks like she was right. We can run tests on that later, if you want.”

  “We’ll see,” I said. “I’ve got other things to think on right now. Meantime, do you have a hat I can borrow?”

  I left Medical wearing a Patriots AFC Champions ball cap and headed up to my office. I’d been hoping to catch Megan to let her know that I’d found a realm filled with celestial metal, but she wasn’t in her office. Instead, I bumped into Galahad. It was becoming all too normal for the boss to look tired, but right now, he looked exhausted. “Boss?” I asked. “You all right?”


  “I am certain I will be, Vincent,” he said, forcing a smile. “When all this Omnicron business is over with. Our office has not had the opportunity to recover from the various ordeals we’ve faced recently. I’ve put word into Dublin that we need staff and support, and that we need the resources back that were diverted from us over to Ashgate. The Care Taker’s assistant has assured me they’re looking into the matter, but I’m… well… less than impressed with how they’ve handled the situation so far.”

  My Glimpse kicked on.

  Galahad XI stood in a sub-basement of Park Street Church, in the center of twelve obsidian pillars. The only light came from the blade of the sword Galahad held over his head. It flooded the cramped space with something akin to daylight, letting me see the crimson-skinned demons that were chained to each of the pillars, their bonds as thick as my wrist. Flecks of rust drifted from the chains as the demons flexed their muscles. Metal squealed and creaked as the links stretched. “Soon, priest,” one of the demons said, its voice deep and rough. “Soon it will be our time. We twelve will have our retribution.”

  The Glimpse kicked off.

  “What did you see?” Galahad asked. The boss is one of the few people who can tell when I’ve Glimpsed something. He says it’s got something to do with the look in my eyes.

  “The demons from that prophecy you told me about,” I said. “The Prophecy of Twelve.”

  “The Dodici Prophecy,” Galahad corrected. “But yes, I suppose that would be a somewhat accurate translation.”

  “Those demons’ bindings are getting weaker, boss. What can we do to reinforce them?”

  “That is a bit of a mystery, I’m afraid, Vincent. Mrs. Rita and I have been trying everything we can think of to keep the chains from breaking, to stop the demons from ravaging this world. It’s almost as if the chains don’t want to be repaired. I’m looking into a few other things now.”