The Book of Magic

by George R. R. Martin

  He sighed and reached for the phone, but Carolien put her hand over his. “Just a moment,” she said. She turned to Archie. “Have the Djinn asked the queen who, or what, is behind this?”

  He shook his head. “It is haram, forbidden, for us to seek what is hidden, even from prayer.”

  “And have you prayed?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then what about the Djinn who did not accept the Messenger?” She added, “Peace be upon him.”

  Archie said, “I believe they tried but got no answer.”

  “Shall I call her?” Jack asked. His hand didn’t move to the phone.

  Carolien said, “Perhaps. But let me try something.” She reached into the large side pocket of her smock and took out a walnut box about six inches long, three inches wide, and two inches deep. She slid off the top, and Jack could see a stack of hand-painted cards. The top one showed a raven coming to a rest on a tree, with snakes coiled at the bottom.

  Jack asked, “Are those tarot cards?”

  Carolien smiled. “No, schatje. Perhaps we might call them Hounstra cards.”

  “Of course. Can I look at them?”

  “They are not finished. But they will do for our purpose here.” She set the raven on the table, then another, a picture of a very round woman asleep on a stone bench in front of a dark cave, with a large cat prowling outside the mouth. The cards were drawn in ink, with varying thicknesses, then colored with gouache. Jack found himself yearning for a set. Carolien laid down a third: someone wrapped in a red cloak, walking past a tree with horned owls perched on the branches. Just as the picture touched the table, Jack’s phone rang.

  He looked at the screen. “Margaret Strand,” it said. He slid it open and put it on speaker.

  “Margarita Mariq?”

  The queen said, “Tell Ms. Hounstra her work honors me.” She sounded distant, yet warm, like a mother who wishes she could do more for her children. And indeed, she said, “The answers you seek lie beyond me. Whoever has stolen the songs has cloaked them from oracular light.”

  “Whoever—is it a person? Or a single being? Not a group?”

  “I am sorry, Jack. I can only tell you to go to the source.” She hung up.

  “Damn!” Jack said. “How are we supposed to go to the source if we don’t know who it is?”

  Carolien frowned. “Maybe she does not mean the source of the spell, but rather the source of the songs.”

  “The Kallistochoi?” She nodded. Jack turned toward the djinni. “Archie? What do you think?”

  Archie lowered his head slightly and closed his eyes. A few seconds later he looked up and said, “Yes. I have consulted with my people, and we agree. Nliana Hand may be saying that the Kallistochoi have lost their songs but still are able to give answers.”

  “Great,” Jack said. “How do I find them?”

  Archie looked away. It struck Jack that he would not have believed the djinni could ever be embarrassed, but that’s what he was seeing. Finally, Archie said, “I—we—do not know.”

  “What?”

  “The songs feed us, but from the beginning we understood that we were not to seek them out.”

  Jack threw up his hands. “Jesus,” he said. “I’m supposed to go ask these heads on a stick who stole their music, but no one knows where to find them? No one’s ever seen them?”

  Carolien said, “That is not exactly true.”

  Jack stared at her a moment, then burst out laughing. “Schatje!” he said, and took her face in his hands and kissed her. “Of course it would be you. So—where do I go?”

  “Ah. I am sorry, dear Jack. What I did—where I went—cannot simply be repeated.”

  Jack sighed. “Okay, then. Tell me at least what happened.”

  “It came about during my apprenticeship. My teacher—” She hesitated, a recognition of an awkwardness that came up whenever Carolien talked about her training. She’d always refused to tell Jack her teacher’s name or anything about him (except the pronoun). Jack sometimes suspected that Carolien’s teacher was a frog, or had been turned into one, for she collected carvings of frogs, a whole room of them. Now she went on, “My teacher possessed many books, very special books. For me, of course, this was a kind of paradise.” She paused. “One of these was the Book of Doors.”

  “I know that book,” Jack said.

  “Not this edition, I’m afraid. One day I read about the Kallistochoi. For days I could think of nothing else. You might say I went on strike until my teacher promised to show the way.”

  “What happened?”

  “He took me to a small street in the Jordaan.” She pronounced it “Your don,” but Jack recognized it as the oldest part of Amsterdam, just beyond the Princes’ Canal, once a working-class neighborhood of small brick houses and old-fashioned “brown bars,” but now more gentrified. Carolien went on, “There was a condemned building, long gone now, that was upheld by two giant poles, like tree trunks. Krakers—squatters—had opened a coffee shop on the ground floor, with a window to see the pillars. At night, naturally, it was closed, but my teacher had made some kind of arrangement with the owner. She met us in the doorway. My teacher had glammed himself so he would not—startle—her, and then he gave her an old music box, which seemed to make her very happy. She left, and we went in.”

  Jack noticed that the djinni was staring at Carolien with an intensity he’d never seen before. Carolien continued, “We went inside, and he told me I must stand between the two pillars. Then he made a mark on my forehead, stepped back, and”—she took a breath—“said something.”

  “Can you remember it?”

  “I cannot not remember it.”

  “Tell me.”

  Archie said, “Effendi, we should not—”

  Jack waved him silent. “You want your fire back, don’t you?” To Carolien, he said “Go on.”

  And then she said it. It was short, though Jack did not realize that until later, when he stood at the window and thought about it all. And it wasn’t exactly ugly. In fact, he suspected that if they’d recorded it (and thank God they didn’t), and run it through some algorithm of anti-harmonic aesthetics, it would register as “beautiful.” And yet, for an instant, Jack thought it could twist his spine.

  “What the hell was that?” Jack said.

  Anger surged through Archie and then quickly died. Not enough fire left to fuel it, Jack thought. Archie said, “I tried to warn you. That was the Opening of the Door, spoken in the Fourth Language of the Rocks.”

  Carolien held on to the edge of the table. A very fine web of lines emanated from her fingertips, and Jack wondered if he’d have to pay Miss Yao for the table, and wondered if it was some priceless antique. But then Carolien stood without support, and the lines vanished. “Please,” she said. “I am sorry. I did not mean—I did not wish—”

  Jack got up and kissed her lightly on the lips. “It’s okay, schatje,” he said. “Can you tell us what happened next?”

  “Jazeker,” she said, Dutch for “of course.” She went on, “The café and the pillars vanished, and I was in a long hallway, with walls made of stone. I am usually good with stones, as you know well, but these I did not recognize. Perhaps if I had studied it. But at the end…” She paused, and took a breath. “It was simply a head on top of a black stick. As Archie has told us. But something radiated from it. I can only say, beauty, but that is a weak word.”

  “What color was it?” Jack asked.

  She looked startled a moment, then laughed. She touched Jack’s cheek, above the scar, then her own. “Somewhere between you and me,” she said. “Perhaps a little closer to you. The hair, however, was like neither of us. Red, but like waves of water.” She looked at Archie. “Or perhaps fire.” She looked down a moment, then up to meet their eyes. “I might give a bett
er report, except—well, just as I was staring at it, it began to sing.”

  She shuddered. “That sound. Three times, Jack, I nearly begged it to stop. But I knew I would only beg it to start again. And what if it refused? How could I live?”

  Jack asked, “Can you compare it to anything? Bach? B. B. King? Ghanian drummers?”

  She shook her head. “No, no. The music of us, people, comes from our bodies, and nature. Heartbeats, birds, wind, even the sun. This song, Jack—it was so old.” She began to shake. She took a breath, and it stopped. She said, “After it ended, and I do not remember how that happened, I was back in the café with my teacher. I said nothing to him. I could not look at him. Instead, I went home and went to bed. I stayed—a week, I believe, I am not sure. When I saw my teacher again we never spoke of it. I—I have never described this to anyone before now.”

  Jack took a breath. “Okay. So at least we know where there’s an opening.”

  “Neen,” Carolien said, the Dutch word for no, pronounced nay. She said, “The building is long gone. I believe it is now an office block. More important, the pillars are gone. They were the true gateway.”

  “Shit,” Jack said. “What about your teacher? Maybe he knows somewhere else. Maybe there’s a Kallistocha in Rotterdam.”

  Carolien said, “I’m sorry, but he’s gone too. He died. It was why I left Amsterdam.”

  Jack said “Was he Traveling?”

  She smiled slightly. “Yes.” Jack nodded. No Traveler wanted to die “at home,” as they called everyday life.

  Archie said, “Effendi, excuse me, why would it help to find a Kallistocha? If they have gone silent, what can they tell us?”

  Jack said, “Margaret told us, go to the source. That means there’s something we can learn.”

  Archie bowed his head. “Ah, of course. Forgive me.” Jack discovered he didn’t want to think about how weak Archie seemed, or how he and all his people might die, or just vanish, if Jack couldn’t help them. Years ago, Jack had laid a foolish obligation on himself that he could not turn down anyone who came with Jack’s business card. A couple of times this had gotten him into serious trouble, and he’d really wished he could back away. But this time the “guest,” as Jack’s self-inflicted curse was called, was almost irrelevant. Jack would have helped Archie no matter what. And it hurt him to see the djinni’s difficulties.

  But then Archie looked at Jack directly, and all that weakness seemed to vanish. “Perhaps I have an idea,” he said.

  Jack suspected he wasn’t going to like this. “Go on.”

  “Clearly, Ms. Hounstra studied with a wise and powerful teacher. But so did you.”

  “Shit,” Jack said. He had not seen Anatolie for a couple of years, but more importantly, he had not really talked to her for a lot longer. At one point, Carolien had assumed that their break was connected to the death of Layla, Jack’s wife. But when she’d asked him, he’d said no, it happened before that, and he wouldn’t say any more.

  The last time he’d seen Anatolie had only made things worse. Jack had been fighting a duplicate of himself who had managed to outlive his usefulness, and now wanted to take over Jack’s life. In the course of all this, someone had scornfully referred to Jack’s teacher as “Anatolie the Younger.”

  After the crisis had passed, Jack went to see her. “Are you a duplicate?” he’d asked her. Yes, she’d said. So Jack had asked if she’d ever known the original—the “elder.” No. Was she ever coming back? Anatolie—the Younger—had said she didn’t know. After that, Jack had just left.

  Now he tried to tell himself, what could a copy know about the Kallistochoi? But he knew the question was ridiculous. Dupe or not, Anatolie just knew more than any Traveler Jack had ever encountered, including even Carolien. Carolien was a great scholar, but Anatolie simply knew.

  He sighed, then looked at Archie. “You’re right. Of course you are.” He hesitated, then asked, “Can you transport me there?” He hoped “transport” was the right word.

  Archie shook his head. “My apologies, Effendi. I was able to bring Ms. Hounstra here, but I’m afraid that was a final burst of such action.”

  Jack said, “All right, then. I’ll go see her on my own. Do you want to wait here until I return?”

  “No. Once again, my apologies. My place remains at Suleiman International. With the others.”

  Carolien said, “And I should seek to find out whatever I can.”

  Jack watched them leave his office, then took the stairs to his private rooms. He wanted to get out of his poker clothes and into his all-black work outfit—the jacket with its many pockets for various tools he might need, the black jeans, and especially his boots, with the black knife in the right calf.

  Before he changed, however, he took that moment to stare out at the dull, rusty gargoyles and think how he should have known what was happening. Finally, he just shook his head and went and got ready.

  2.

  Anatolie lived in a fifth floor walk-up above a Chinese restaurant on Bayard Street. When Jack was her student he always stopped in at the Lucky Star and brought Anatolie some food. Though he was hardly her student anymore, he still kept up the practice whenever he came to see her.

  Jack walked into the restaurant and smiled. It never changed—small and narrow, with Formica-topped tables and wooden chairs, and pictures on the walls of extra dishes with names only in Chinese characters. Mrs. Shen, the owner, stood behind her wooden counter at the back, reading a Chinese newspaper.

  She looked up when the door closed. “Jack!” she said, with a big smile. Mrs. Shen was small and thin, with black frizzy hair cut short, and a face of fine lines that made it impossible to guess her age.

  Jack smiled back. “Hello, Mrs. Shen.”

  “Are you returning to us?” She always asked that. Jack wondered if Mrs. Shen thought he and Anatolie were lovers who’d broken up and maybe someday would restore their relationship.

  He said, “Not today, I’m afraid. I just need to ask her something.” Mrs. Shen sighed. “What is she eating these days?”

  Mrs. Shen smiled again. “Bitter melon with shitake, sea cucumbers with black bean sauce, and of course, har kow.”

  Jack grinned. Har kow—shrimp dumplings—was the one dish Anatolie never tired of. “How long?”

  “Ten minutes. You sit.” Jack found a chair at the table nearest the counter. Glancing around, he noticed a young white woman, college student by the academic-looking book and spiral notebook alongside her plate of vegetable chow fun. Jack found himself thinking of Eugenia. She’d be in college now if she wasn’t stuck in the Forest of Souls. Jack could never decide who was really to blame, the geist or himself. Layla had demanded he take it seriously, and he kept saying, it’s just a poltergeist, they’re like household pests, kids grow out of them. Now Layla was gone, her throat cut by the kitchen knives the geist flung at her, Genie was trapped in the Forest of Souls, and Jack himself— He ran his finger along the scar on his jaw.

  Mrs. Shen came out with a bowl of braised brisket and guy laan. “Eat,” she said, as she handed him plastic chopsticks. “Eating makes everything better.”

  Jack nodded. “Thank you, Mrs. Shen. You’re a wise woman.”

  The food was delicious, and just as Jack finished, Mrs. Shen brought him the bag containing Anatolie’s takeout. “Good luck,” she said.

  “Thank you,” he said again. He knew she’d say “Nothing” if he asked what he owed her, so he slipped a pair of twenties under his plate and left with the bag.

  The pale brown door to the upstairs apartments was unlocked, as it always was, at least for Jack. Years ago, he’d said to her, “You know this is New York, right? What happens if some junkies discover an unlocked door and decide to take you for everything you’ve got?”

  She’d done that quarter-smile of hers
, where only the left corner of her mouth turned up. She said, “It would not be a pleasant experience.” And Jack knew she wasn’t referring to herself.

  At the third floor landing Jack had to stop and catch his breath. It was always that way. The third floor was a kind of border, though presumably not for everyone, since someone actually lived there, an elderly Frenchman. But for anyone going to the top—one of these days, Jack thought, he’ll find himself stopped, unwelcome to go any farther.

  But not today. He continued, and at the fifth floor opened the door without knocking.

  “Good afternoon, Jack,” she said.

  She looked exactly the same as when he’d last seen her, five hundred pounds lying on a reinforced steel bed, propped up with yellow silk pillows behind her, and silk sheets under her. She wore a plain green cotton shift without shoes. The longest dreads Jack had ever seen snaked down her back and over her belly to twine together at the height of the mountain. They reminded Jack of the giant serpents that used to hold the world together until the Great Treaty allowed them to rest.

  Jack said, “Good afternoon. I brought you some food.”

  She nodded to the metal tray on a wooden stand alongside the bed. “Put it there, please.” As Jack set down the bag, Anatolie said, “Thank you. That was very thoughtful.”

  “Sure,” Jack said. Not for the first time, he wondered how she kept up her diet when he wasn’t around. Or what happened to the empty cartons (he’d never seen her use a dish). Maybe she had other apprentices. Or Mrs. Shen came herself. Jack wondered what Mrs. Shen might experience at the third floor.

  Anatolie said, “I assume you need help.”

  Jack nodded. “Yeah. I need to find a Kallistocha.”

  “Ah. They’ve stopped singing, you know.”

  “I figured you would have noticed. But I’m hoping one will at least speak to me.” He added, “Margaret seems to think so.” He told her what Archie had said, and about the phone call from Nliana Hand.