by Shannon Page
Gregorio shook his head. “What is happening to witchkind? What will be the next fact we have been certain of to come tumbling apart in our faces?”
My father pulled up a lab stool and sat on it, frowning just as Gregorio was. “The illness, at least, behaves like an infectious agent. Though we have been unable to pinpoint the cause.”
I took another stool. “It’s only witches getting sick, right? Not warlocks?”
“Thus far,” Gregorio said. “Though of course, witches make up a great deal more of our population. If whatever this is affects only, say, one or two percent of us, it may be some time before a warlock sickens.”
I nodded.
“We’re hoping to find the cause—and eliminate it—before that happens,” Sebastian said. Then he blushed, seeming to hear his own implication. “I mean, before any more witches get sick too—before anyone else gets sick!”
“What could cause both drained essence and increased fertility?” I asked, still baffled. “And a vanishing spirit?”
Gregorio looked at me soberly. “At this point, the only commonality we have found in the affected witches is a greater than usual degree of interaction with humans.”
My face fell. Raymond…Logan and her tarot work for humans… “But wait, Mom never has anything to do with them, and she’s sick now.”
“It is only a correlation, and not entirely across the board,” Gregorio said. “Sadly, epidemiology is only fully useful with a large enough sample population.”
I leaned back, putting my hand on my belly again. It was just too mysterious, foggy and ill-formed. “Have you found anything in the patients’ blood? What tests are you doing?” Flavius had mentioned his Melanian assay, but that wasn’t going to show much. I glanced at the lab table behind us, with its clutter of books and flasks and beakers and equipment.
Gregorio sighed, looking at me carefully. He wasn’t going to kick me out now, was he? I’d been in the building for half an hour, in both a patient room and back here in the lab. The argument about “it might be contagious” just wasn’t going to hold water.
Perhaps he came to the same conclusion, because he walked to a big Magitech Fluoro-Blot machine that sat on the far end of the bench. “We are only just getting started,” he said. “But I can show you the results from tests we have performed on the first three ailing witches.”
“Dr. Andromedus,” Flavius said, “I had been hoping to let her look at some of my samples—and results—as well.”
I shot him a quick look; he shrugged and glanced at Sebastian.
Gregorio, of course, did not miss the exchange. He smiled indulgently at all three of us. “Ah, sneaking around behind the old man’s back as usual, I see. Well, that is fine, Dr. Winterheart; you may show Calendula the work you have done as well. She has a keen eye and an even keener intellect. She is likely to see things you have missed.”
I blinked, startled. I shouldn’t be surprised at the compliment—I knew that Dr. Andromedus respected my work—but I was still smarting from his reaction to my pregnancy.
He’s ancient, I reminded myself. When he came of age, there were no witch biologists. Heck, there was hardly biology.
When I left the clinic an hour later, my purse bulging with blood samples that had been run through both Gregorio’s tests and those Flavius had done, I was not much wiser than I’d been before, though at least I now had something to work with. The sick witches—now Mom among them—were being treated with the same kinds of essence transfusions that Jeremy and I had tried with Logan, from the healers and the warlocks. As with blood donation, essence naturally rebuilt itself in time, in a healthy witch or warlock. Gregorio had told me that a call to the community at large would be going out soon, but he’d refused to take any from me. “Not from a pregnant witch.”
“You need everything for that baby,” my father had added.
I felt as though I could spare plenty, but I did not argue with them.
When I returned to my house, an anxious Elnor met me at the door. “Sorry, kitten. She’s going to be okay. Of course she is.” I scratched her ears, then picked her up and carried her to the kitchen, where Petrana stood, idle as usual, in the back corner, like some discarded broom.
Of course I wasn’t afraid of her. A golem is made to carry out the intention of its maker, after all. Any golem’s mud body is imbued with echoes of the traits and talents of its creator; the same song at a lower volume. A rabbi’s golem would have a spiritual element, or a thirst for learning. A human man who desired power and control could perhaps create a brutish creature, one with the capacity to harm others.
When a powerful witch made a golem, it should contain echoes of her potential for magic. Manka had practically said as much, the night of Logan’s illness. And I knew that. It was why I had made her. But, having done so, I seemed to have lost my nerve.
In my defense, life had been rather distracting of late.
Elnor squirmed in my arms. I put her down, still looking at Petrana. My golem gazed back at me without expression. Of course. I could stare at her all day and she would never feel uncomfortable, never wonder what I was doing. Yet she was alive, after a fashion; she was not a machine. I had given her that life.
Could this thing really be an echo of me?
By now my cat had wandered over to the cabinets. She glanced up, then at me, then up, pointedly. “Yes, yes,” I said, getting out a can of tuna and a dish.
While Elnor ate, I thought further about Petrana, and about my ‘tiny helpers’ upstairs in the lab, and the samples in my purse, and about donating essence to sick witches.
And about my inexplicable pregnancy. As a scientist, I was very suspicious of coincidence. Yet I could not see how my pregnancy could have anything to do with mysterious essence-draining. I would need to talk further to Gregorio about this. Perhaps I would gain more insight as the pregnancy progressed.
For now, I focused on what I could do today, with the resources at hand. In my research, I had always imagined my homunculi as the end product. I had poured everything into their ingredients, methods, and spells, but once they appeared, I had considered them immutable. But was that really the whole story? Could I modify existent homunculi? Could they learn and grow, as Petrana did?
“Petrana, come with me.”
“Yes, Mistress Callie.”
Upstairs in the lab, I laid my golem out on a long table in the center of the room and ordered her to remain inert, nonreactive. “I’m going to be doing things to your bodily systems,” I told her. “Please ignore anything I do until I say, ‘Petrana, wake up.’”
“Yes, Mistress Callie,” she said.
I focused on her a minute, then added, “And please close your eyes.”
“Yes, Mistress Callie.”
Putting my hands on her forehead, I began by taking the measure of her, as I would do to a flesh-and-blood entity. Familiar essence and energy ran through her—mine—though modified to animate the mud and sticks of her body. And, as I’d known, at a lesser volume… for the most part. The spark that had brought her to life could still be seen within her head: a bright, almost ultraviolet orb, quietly pulsing with contained power. A network of tiny tendrils emanated from it, leading from her head down throughout her body, much as our muscles and veins and meridian lines do.
I withdrew my hands and studied her. To augment her capacity for magic, should I add to the orb in her head, or try to plump up some of the energetic lines? Or should I try to implant a separate center—in her chest, perhaps—that would contain and control magical abilities?
I put my hands on her chest, closed my eyes, and “looked” inside her torso. More mud and small sticks, of course, but I also saw a stone there, about the size of a hen’s egg, sitting just a little below where the heart would be, if she had had one. I nudged the stone with my mind, looking at it from all sides, seeking its story. It was pinkish—rose quartz?—no, it was mostly morganite, with a little dull sandstone clinging to it. Interesting. Morganite open
ed channels to connection and communication. Though I hadn’t intentionally placed it there, it could hardly be an accident that such a thing had found its way into my golem. She had certainly picked up speech with ease.
The dirt of Petrana’s making had come from the coven house’s backyard, of course—an area which had grown a century’s worth of magical plants, seen countless rituals and workings, and even contained the buried bodies of Nementhe and the two sisters who had gone Beyond before her. Any stone from that soil would hardly be a normal, mundane rock any longer.
Could I wake it up?
Elnor had followed us up to the laboratory once she’d finished her repast. She sat in the corner grooming herself, waiting for me to need her, or just wanting not to be left out if something interesting happened. Like more tuna. “Come here, kitty,” I called now.
I picked her up and set her on the table next to my inert golem. “Watch my energy depletion,” I told her. “I’m going to put some essence into Petrana. Meow if you sense anything amiss.”
Elnor blinked her yellow eyes at me, purring. She might not have understood my words exactly, but she knew it was time to be a familiar, not just a cat.
I closed my eyes again, laying both hands on Petrana’s still chest. I brought the stone into my inner vision once more, and held it awhile, making sure there was no latent spellwork in it, held over from years or decades ago. Then I drew my attention back into my own body, exploring my own essence. It still beat strong and supple throughout me, embracing the baby even as it supported my own well-being.
“Okay,” I whispered. “Here goes.”
I channeled a bit of my essence down into the stone in Petrana’s chest, just as if I were donating essence to a sick witch. The stone glowed slightly to my inner sight as it absorbed the magical infusion. Elnor purred and rubbed her head against my arm, encouraging me.
After a few minutes, I closed the flow, leaving my hands in place a moment longer to make sure everything settled, and to keep taking the measure of Petrana and her stone. It still glowed, now pulsing a little bit like the brain orb did. And, yes! It was sending magical power—just a small bit, but measurable—through Petrana’s system.
I took my hands away and grinned, cracking my knuckles and shrugging the tension out of my shoulders. “Petrana, wake up,” I said.
She opened her eyes. “Yes, Mistress Callie.”
“Petrana, please say something to me without speaking aloud. Send me a thought. Do you understand what I mean?”
She opened her mouth and closed it again, still gazing at me. I could almost read puzzlement on her face, though I’m sure I was projecting it. Damn, had I given her a paradox? She wanted to speak to answer me, and I had told her not to speak…
After a long moment, I heard, very faintly in my head, Like this, Mistress Callie?
“Yes!” I squealed with delight. How easy was that! “I did it, I did it!” I picked up Elnor and danced around the room with her. She put up with it very nearly graciously.
“Whew.” I collapsed into a chair, letting the cat down as I did. Oh, that was draining work. Or was it the pregnancy tapping me out? Either way, I was suddenly as exhausted and starving as if I’d done a major working.
Which, now that I thought about it, I had. Not as large as creating Petrana in the first place, but certainly not small.
Can you hear thoughts I send you? I asked Petrana.
Yes, Mistress Callie.
Her words were stronger this time, though I felt a twinge in my chest as I heard them. As though she was using my own energy to send them. Hadn’t I closed the channel? I sought inside myself, looking at where I tapped my power. Yes, it was closed, but it also seemed…permeable?
Say something else, I commanded.
What would you like me to say?
Again, the twinge. Damn. Would she always have to use my power in order to do anything? But I didn’t get tired when she performed physical tasks—that was kind of the whole point of her, at least so far: to save me from having to do things. Why did she drain my magical power by doing magic?
Was it just a matter of degree? Perhaps the mechanism was different. Or maybe I just didn’t notice when she took my physical energy. After all, people got tired all the time. Unless it was dramatic, I would likely think nothing of it.
I would have to do more experimentation. But not till I felt more energetic—I’d drained myself enough for now. “Okay,” I said. “Don’t do the thought-sending again until I ask you to. Go back to just saying words out loud.”
“Yes, Mistress Callie.”
I went downstairs and grabbed a big hunk of sharp cheddar cheese out of the fridge: instant protein energy. Then I walked more slowly back up to the lab, bringing my purse this time, and its collected samples.
I bound my hair back tightly before laying everything out on the lab bench to look over. Gregorio had packaged everything up together in a spellsack, but the differences were clear. Flavius’s work was cruder, yet with a lot more raw vitality to it. I could see why he was on the Elder path. His magic had strong power and potency. His big challenge was going to be to learn how to temper his brute force, to introduce subtlety and insinuation to his work. If he could do that, he would be an amazing practitioner someday.
For now, at least, the force of his work made it easier to follow his pathways. I set Gregorio’s samples aside and laid Flavius’s three vials in an empty tray, unopened. I decanted a bottle of angelica root bath over the vials, to cleanse away any magical residues from the clinic or my journey on the ley line—or, heck, anything they might have picked up in my purse. I swished them around, making sure the bath covered the vials completely, and let them sit.
After a few minutes, I pulled the vials out and dried them off. They were labeled by date; I poured the earliest sample into a Petri dish. As it spread, I pulled out my Mabel’s Glass and leaned in, just to get a sense of what I was looking at here.
I saw at once how his Melanian assay differed from the traditional kel one, though I wasn’t sure it made much difference to the results. He’d used a shortcut through a curling ribbon of the essence pathway that controlled minor magical aspects such as tenor and resonance of power. Just as I’d already noted: crude, strong magic. It would save a lot of time to do it this way, leaving more resources for a more refined search down the line. So, okay, I could see the point to this; a way of quickly weeding out directions that were not fruitful.
I drew back and set the Glass down, feeling a little queasy. Yep, this was clearly a blood sample from a sick witch. As I looked so closely at it, trying to understand what I was seeing, my own magic automatically tried to reach out, to relate to them, to draw it into myself. My boundaries were more open than usual, after the work I’d done with Petrana earlier. This was the basis for how we communicated with one another, after all. I took a deep breath, willing my own essence to stay put, closing my internal borders. Whether this illness was due to an infectious agent or not, it was not healthy to be immersing myself so carelessly.
Elnor jumped up onto the counter and peered into the dish, her nose twitching. Then I heard the heavy step of Petrana as she approached the bench.
I turned around to look at my golem. “Petrana? What are you doing?”
“Did you wish my assistance, Mistress Callie?”
I had been teaching her to take more initiative…and I had just linked us much more closely together, magically… “I had not thought I had, Petrana, but I do need to take a step back, myself. So please feel free to let me know anything you perceive here.”
She stood by the bench, staring expressionlessly down into the dish. Should I offer her the Mabel’s Glass? I was beginning to feel a little weirded out. Was she an intelligent being or not? Had I actually asked this of her, without realizing? What was she thinking—was she thinking? What could she see?
I narrowed my eyes as I touched the channel between us. Yes, she was exercising magic. Yet it didn’t give me a twinge, this time. Was
it because she was drawing less power, or were we getting smoother with the transfer? Or was she generating her own magic?
“That is not a good thing, in there,” she said at last.
“No, it’s not,” I said. “It’s a blood sample from a very sick witch.”
“Yes, Mistress Callie, I see that; but I also see something unnatural.”
“What do you mean?”
She stared back at me. Boy, the next time I built a golem, I’d try to engineer some capacity for facial expression. “I do not know the technical words for it, but I see a device for stealing away power.”
I gaped at her. “A device?”
“By the third and fourth red dish-like elements. Counting from the top left.”
Red dish-like elements… “The erythrocytes?” I grabbed the Mabel’s Glass again and focused on the red blood cells, following her directions. “I’ll be damned…” I whispered, seeing a dark smudge there, which flickered in and out of view. I started to reach out with my own magic to nudge it, hold it still, maybe even magnify it, but reconsidered. “Petrana, can you make it easier for me to see?” Since I didn’t know how she’d seen it in the first place, I didn’t want to be any more specific—didn’t want to trample on her process.
“I will try, Mistress Callie.” She stared at the dish again. I saw nothing in her face, felt nothing in our bond. After a minute, she turned back to me. “Look now.”
I did. And saw, very clearly, an alien element. It looked for all the world like a microscopic parasite, draining the red blood cell of its essence.
I stuffed myself with more cheese and a dark beer, and brought a box of crackers up to the lab with me. Then I examined, with Petrana’s guidance, the rest of Flavius’s samples, and then those from Gregorio.
Flavius’s all showed the artifact. Gregorio’s did not.
After that, I went and paced around downstairs for a while. Fed Elnor again. Contemplated a nap, but, though I was exhausted, I was also too wound up to rest.
Back to the lab. I looked through all the samples again, slowly and carefully. I reviewed my notes. I made Petrana rearrange the dishes behind my back so that I examined them all blindly.
