Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver)

by Hiatt, Bill

  “They won’t,” said Shar confidently.

  “Nonetheless,” said Nurse Florence in her this-is-an-order tone, “you never have a second chance to make a first impression. If you are right, well, no harm done. If you are wrong, you have the backup you need.”

  “OK,” said Shar grudgingly.

  “Why don’t you and Khalid wait outside for just a minute? I need to talk to Tal.”

  Shar took Khalid outside, and the other guys, taking the obvious hint, said their goodbyes and shuffled out quickly. I noticed that each one gave Khalid a hug as he left. I thought I even saw the ghost of a smile on Khalid’s lips, but I was too far away to be sure. Then the door closed, and I turned my attention back to Nurse Florence. She sat behind her desk and motioned for me to sit in the chair on the other side.

  “I’m sure Shar will do a good job with Khalid, but, Tal, I’m curious why you didn’t offer to take Khalid in; he seems to have more rapport with you than anyone, especially after you shared your memories with him.”

  “I wanted to take him in, Nurse Florence; I really did, but there is… a problem with my mom.” Nurse Florence leaned forward.

  “That sounds ominous,” she said, looking concerned.

  “It isn’t anything life threatening; it’s just that I think she’s…getting a little magic.”

  Nurse Florence raised an eyebrow. “How do you know?”

  “She’s putting out energy, low-level, but still there, and this morning she noticed the protective spell on the house.”

  Nurse Florence sat straight up in her chair. “She knows about the existence of spells?”

  “No, but she could feel something was different. Her reaction was too immediate to be coincidence,” I said somewhat defensively, knowing Nurse Florence was about to make exactly that suggestion.

  “Well, actually this kind of situation isn’t that uncommon in families with one really strong practitioner.”

  “You mean the skill is hereditary? I thought I got mine from being a reincarnation of Taliesin.”

  “I believe you did,” replied Nurse Florence slowly, clearly thinking through the possibilities. “However, we know you are also a descendant of the original Taliesin. I have never studied the genealogy involved. I just assumed you were descended from Taliesin on your father’s side, but it could just as easily be your mother’s side, in which case your mother could have some predisposition. The real answer, though, lies in the nature of this world. Have you asked yourself why most spell casters, faerie or even human, tend to prefer Annwn?”

  “No,” I said with a little grin, “I can’t say that has been exactly my most pressing question.”

  “I’m serious,” said Nurse Florence. “Annwn is a friendlier environment for magic. Remember that modern technology works only erratically at best there. Natural law is—hmmm…I’m not sure how best to express it—softer there. There are worlds where natural law is so hard and fast that magic won’t work there at all, or so I’m told. Our world is somewhere in the middle. Scientists can identify predictable natural laws, and technology based on those scientific principles will work. Magic will also work, but for most people it takes a lot more effort than it would in Annwn, and some magic effects aren’t possible on Earth at all. Also, from what the Order has been able to discover, many people who might have magic if they grew up in Annwn never discover it here at all. Those of us who do somehow discover our magical ability need to visit Annwn to renew ourselves periodically; otherwise, our spell casting tends to get weaker and weaker.”

  “I have cast spells both here and in Annwn,” I objected after a few seconds. “I don’t recall it being all that much easier in Annwn.”

  “That’s because you are an exceptional case. Maybe this is another example of the side-effects of gaining knowledge from Ceridwen’s cauldron, or of being reborn from Ceridwen’s womb, or of some combination of the two. For whatever reason, the magic is so strong in you that it becomes somehow self-fueling, less reliant on the surrounding environment. That’s a good thing, especially considering Arawn’s ban keeps you out of Annwn most of the time, so you wouldn’t be able to renew yourself very easily. But it’s a good thing with a few random side-effects, one of which is that the people around you can be affected. You are like a little piece of Annwn yourself. Those you spend large amounts of time with, if they have any kind of magic potential, are more likely to develop magic—especially if you cast on them.”

  I thought about how many times I had needed to cast a spell on my mom to keep her from finding out my secret or to keep her out of harm’s way. I must have looked very downcast, because Nurse Florence immediately switched from giver of wisdom to giver of comfort. “I wouldn’t worry too much. It sounds as if your mother is operating at a very low power level, certainly not strong enough to start reading your mind or something like that. She may occasionally have feelings, as she did today, but she will most likely dismiss them, just as she probably did this time. Now, if she discovered that magic existed, that would be a different problem, but if you don’t tell her, I don’t see how she ever will.”

  “I’m sure you are probably right,” I said slowly. “I just can’t help thinking about how Khalid’s father turned on him when he discovered the truth.”

  “I’m not defending him, but Khalid’s father does belong to a religious tradition that sees that kind of human-djinn union as an abomination. Faced with evidence that he had participated unknowingly in such a union was just too much for him to handle. Your parents are not in the same situation at all. If they knew the truth about you, they would probably need time to adjust, but they wouldn’t stop loving you. So stop worrying! You know, you really worry too much.”

  “Yeah, I’ve only had to fend off one magical attack so far this month, and I’ve only encountered two supernatural beings, but it’s OK—only one of them is evil.”

  “Is there no end to your sarcasm?” asked Nurse Florence, laughing.

  “Actually, no. Oh, but I do have one more serious question before I go. What’s up with Stan?”

  “I think he wants to tell you, but I should prepare you a little I think. Stan is having delusions of some kind.”

  Now it was my turn to sit lean forward in my chair. “What? And you’re just getting around to mentioning this now?”

  “It has been a very busy afternoon,” replied Nurse Florence, without a hint of defensiveness. “And I’m sure his problem is nothing you can’t fix.”

  “What’s his delusion?”

  “Well, part of it is delusion, anyway. Part of it is real. The mental healing you did with him in the days after Samhain is starting to come undone. That past personality that was dominating him when he was first awakened is stirring again.”

  “That can’t be!” I objected. “I did a good job on him. Look at me—I integrated myself four years ago under much more difficult circumstances. Why would doing with Stan exactly what I did with myself last only a few weeks? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “The problem,” replied Nurse Florence, “is that there are many things we don’t know. When you were awakened, you remembered all of your past lives. Stan, as far as we know, only remembered one. Why wouldn’t he have remembered them all, just like you did? I don’t like guessing blind, but if I had to guess, I would say that the jolt the cauldron of knowledge gave to Gwion Bach all those centuries ago may once again be the answer. You have already discovered you can learn magic much faster, and in much more diverse ways, than anyone I have ever heard of. Suppose your mind can also more easily encompass past-life memories that would overload most people. That could account for your ‘integration’ being permanent while Stan’s was only short-term.”

  Now I was really worried. “But what does that mean? Am I going to have to repair Stan every few days for the rest of his life?”

  “Let’s not jump to conclusions. I would say his mind can’t handle the past-life memories as well as yours does. That doesn’t necessarily mean he can’t be strengthened
to the point at which he can handle them better. We may just have to take his situation one day at a time.”

  “Wait a minute. If all of that is real, what’s Stan’s delusion?”

  “He’s claiming to be someone he couldn’t possibly be.”

  “Napoleon?” I said with a smirk. “Because as far as I know, he could be, though he is a little taller than I might expect.”

  “This is not a joke, Tal. Stan thinks he is…I promised I would let him tell you the specifics, but he thinks he is someone who definitely did not believe in reincarnation.”

  I thought back to my first encounters with Nurse Florence. Usually, by this point in the conversation, I had everything figured out, but this time I was still confused. “Why would that make any difference?”

  “Based on the Order’s research, it appears that people end up in something like the afterlife they expect. If someone is expecting Heaven or Hell, that’s exactly where they end up. If someone is expected Valhalla, or the Elysian Fields, or the Happy Hunting Ground, that’s what they get.”

  “How would the Order possibly know that?”

  “The Order can’t know for sure,” admitted Nurse Florence. “The data is very limited, but what data they have supports the idea. Imagine the afterlife as a building with a lot of different doors. However, each person is conditioned by his or her religion to only see one of those doors, and that is the one he or she goes through.”

  “So every religion is wrong, and what happens to us after death is totally subjective?”

  “I’m not saying that,” replied Nurse Florence cautiously. “Maybe one religion is right, but only its adherents perceive reality correctly. Maybe all of them are right, at least in a symbolic sense. Maybe none of them are right. I don’t know anyone with all the answers. I just know I don’t have all of them.” I must have looked incredibly dissatisfied, because I think Nurse Florence had been done, but she continued. “Having magic is not the same thing as understanding the whole universe. We have insight into a small part of it; that’s all. We can probe minds, for instance, and find out whether or not John Smith cheated on that geometry test. But, assuming there is a higher power, we can’t probe its mind and get all the answers. We are just as much in the dark as anyone else that way.”

  “But—”

  “That’s why it’s called faith, Tal. Now you’ve probably kept Shar and Khalid waiting long enough. We’ll talk about this some other time.”

  I didn’t much like being dismissed like that, but I could also tell that Nurse Florence had pretty well exhausted herself today. Between memory adjustments, healings, mind-sharings, and concealment spells, she had been working almost non-stop for hours, and she had been through a rough day yesterday as well. So I swallowed my questions and objections, said good-bye, and went out to meet Shar and Khalid.

  As I was leaving the nurse’s office, I thought about what Shakespeare had written in Hamlet: “When sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.” We were playing an extremely dangerous game with Morgan Le Fay, the girl I loved might be an evil sorceress when we finally awakened her from her coma, we now had a homeless half djinn to help out, my mom was developing inconvenient—to say the least—mental abilities, and now Stan was degenerating back to where he had been on Samhain.

  Well, that’s got to be all our bad luck for this week, anyway.

  Of course, as usual, I was wrong.

  CHAPTER 6: DANCING WITH THE DEVIL

  I was more than a little on edge as I drove to Shar’s house. His parents seemed like nice enough people, but we were about to drop a pretty big bombshell on them. It was hard to feel great about that in the first place, and in the background Stan’s problem preyed on my mind.

  I wonder what it’s like to have only one problem at a time to worry about.

  I pulled up in front of the Sassani house. Like most of the houses in Santa Brígida, the facade was impressively, almost overwhelmingly, Spanish colonial. When the Sassanis had first moved from Beverly Hills, they had wanted to remodel, but Shar had told me at some point since we’d become friends, that Carrie Winn herself (the original, not Vanora in disguise) had come by one day to talk them out of the idea. The Sassanis took the hint (or Carrie Winn did a little magical manipulation—there was no way to tell which so long after the fact).

  Nonetheless, though the exterior still had its pristine, plastic, made-in-Santa Brígida look of which I was thoroughly tired, the interior was another matter entirely. In fact, it looked more as if someone had transported a little piece of Iran to Santa Brígida. Everywhere you looked, you could see vibrantly colored Persian rugs, several different kinds of marble somehow superimposed over the house’s original interior, a wide variety of Middle Eastern and European furniture, some statues that would have looked very much at home in a museum, and a spectacular collection of wall murals portraying the major events of the Shahnameh, the great Persian epic. The painter had cleverly made the murals resemble the style of illustration in some of the better illuminated manuscripts, so that the effect, at least for a viewer familiar with those manuscripts, was to make one feel as if he had been magically transported into the manuscript.

  Khalid’s eyes grew big with wonder. Most people would have been at least somewhat amazed by the Sassani’s interior decor, but to someone who had been living on the street for three years, the place must have seemed like paradise. The elaborate—and clearly very expensive—decor always made me wonder why Shar’s family had settled for Santa Brígida instead of the more elite Montecito, but I had never had the nerve to ask.

  “Shar, you’re home early,” said Mrs. Sassani as she walked into the entry hall. She must have heard Shar unlocking the front door. She was a tall, dark-haired woman, not precisely beautiful, but always immaculately dressed, looking as if she had just stepped out of a formal portrait. Someone meeting her for the first time might find her to be as formal as the portrait, but she had warmed to me quickly once Shar and I became friends, and I hoped she would do the same for Khalid.

  “Tal,” she continued as soon as she saw me, “how wonderful to see you! Are you joining us for dinner?”

  “Thanks, Mrs. Sassani, but I’m afraid I can’t tonight.”

  She hugged me as she always did, then turned to Khalid. “And who is this young man?” She sounded a little worried. Shar and I had gotten his hair combed and cleaned off his face, but it one took one glance for her to see how worn and ill-fitting Khalid’s clothes were. I guess we should have made a stop at the mall first.

  “Mother, I need to speak to you for a moment.” Shar deftly led her out of the room. I couldn’t hear their conversation in the next room, but I knew what they were talking about. My mind reached out in their direction, just enough to make sure Mrs. Sassani wasn’t having a melt-down. The rest of my attention focused on Khalid; I wanted to keep him busy while the family conference was going on. Just in case there was a problem, I didn’t want him overhearing any of the conversation.

  I was also painfully conscious that Khalid was used to stealing things and was now surrounded by small, expensive objects. I believed him when he promised us he would be good, but I didn’t see any reason to give temptation more opportunity than necessary. What is that old expression? Oh, yeah, it’s, “Idle hands do the devil’s work.”

  “Well, what do you think, Khalid? Can you stay here for a while?”

  “It’s…it’s almost the best place I have ever seen,” he replied, looking around, taking in every detail.

  I knew without asking that the very best place was his home—with his father. I deliberately didn’t ask the question that would have started that conversation. Instead, I did the best I could to keep the small talk going. Too bad I didn’t have a little brother; I would have known better how to talk to him. As it was, I had the feeling that Khalid wasn’t really into the conversation, but I did kind of remember what being eleven was like. Then again, I hadn’t been living on the street for three years by the time I turned
eleven. Maybe the problem was that our experiences were just too different.

  If necessary, I had planned to show him the murals and start telling him their stories, but Shar’s conversation with his mom was surprisingly short. In less than five minutes she came racing back into the entry hall, and hugged Khalid very sincerely, just as if he really were related in some way.

  “Khalid, Shar has told me you’ll be saying with us for awhile. I can’t tell you how happy I am. It’s been a few years since I have had a little one around the house, and I have missed it.”

  “He’s eleven,” muttered Shar, knowing Khalid probably didn’t think of himself as a “little one,” but his mother was running on hospitality auto-pilot and probably didn’t even hear him.

  “Shar, why don’t you take Khalid upstairs and see if any of your older things will fit him for right now? Tomorrow we’ll go get him some clothes of his own.”

  “Mother, his build isn’t much like mine when I was that age. What I had isn’t going to fit him any better than what he’s already got.” Khalid was a relatively slender kid, and Shar had been much bulkier even at age eleven, so he was perhaps right. Mrs. Sassani ran an appraising eye up and down Khalid and then nodded in agreement.

  “You’re right, Shar. Well, we need to make time before dinner to make a quick run to the mall. Khalid at least needs to have clothes that fit him. We can’t have people think our relatives are street urchins.”

  Khalid looked down at the ground, embarrassed. Mrs. Sassani patted him on the shoulder. “Oh, I’m sorry! I’m not being critical. I know you have had a lot to deal with, Khalid. That’s over now—for good. But part of making sure you don’t get into trouble is making you look as if you could be related to us. That’s all I meant. We’ll pick up a few things for you this afternoon and then be more thorough tomorrow.”

  Khalid, not used to adult attention any more, was clearly getting confused, and Mrs. Sassani was empathetic enough to pick up on his feelings. “Don’t worry, Khalid. I know boys your age aren’t always that comfortable picking out clothes. Shar will come along and help, won’t you, Shar?” Khalid’s face brightened immediately. Clearly, he had gotten over his initial fear of Shar.