Fathomless (11 page)

“Did you tell Eddy?”

“Not yet.”

Daniel worked fingers under his brace and scratched like his neck was the enemy. The way he grimaced, it had to hurt.

“Hey—”

At Sean's matching wince, Daniel abandoned the self-assault. “Eddy figured you were mad about something Geldman had told you. That's why she went to her room early last night, in case you wanted to talk. I think she was bummed when you didn't show up.”

Surprised, anyway. “It's—we've been tight so long. Did you ever hear what she did during the Servitor mess?”

This time Daniel's smile was anything but weak. “Helen says Eddy talked to you to keep the Servitor from taking over your mind. Then she beat on it with a baseball bat and kept it from killing your dad.”

“You so want Eddy on your side.”

“I do, man.”

“I
was
wanting to talk to her. But a lot of it's about Marvell, and she thinks he's Professor Perfect.”

“Fan girl.”

“Exactly.”

Again Daniel went to attack his neck beneath its foam barricade. He checked himself. “It's not fair you aren't getting a mentor and learning practical magic, same as me. Maybe not to do the big-ass stuff you did before—”

“You heard Marvell say how big-ass that was.”

“He was trying to pop your swelled head,” Daniel said, face sober but eyes gleaming.

The gleam freed Sean to laugh until laughing loosened the springs in his chest that Marvell had wound aching tight. “He wouldn't pop my head in Helen's library. Blood on old books, bad.”

“Important safety tip—thanks, Egon.”

Was that a Perfect Movie Moment from the new guy? “I guess Eddy taught you our game.
Ghostbusters,
by the way.”

“Busted. Five points or ten?”

“Should be five, but because you're a noob, I'll give you ten.”

Grinning, Daniel stood. “I'll waive the points if you'll make lunch.”

“Deal.”

*   *   *

Without
Helen or Eddy around to enforce reasonable nutrition standards, Sean made his infamous Sky-High sandwiches, bologna and cheese with potato chips squashed between the layers. After that belly bomb, he was thinking nap, not the next chapter of Henry Arkwright's
History of the Cthulhu Mythos
. Daniel, on the other hand, was alert to the point of drumming his fingers on the breakfast bar. “Maybe we could do something besides read,” he said.

“Does this something include moving?”

“No, you can sit.”

“Good enough. What's the plan?”

Daniel went to close the kitchen door. Back at the bar, he said, “Since the Order won't give you a mentor, maybe we can share Geldman.”

“How?”

“I can teach you what he's teaching me.”

“Magic?”

“What else?”

Candlemaking? Victorian home décor? “What about Marvell not wanting me to do practical magic?”

“I don't think that's fair. Do you?”

“No, but I don't want you sticking your neck out.”

“I'll only stick it out when there aren't any guillotines around.”

Sean straightened from his stuffed sprawl and scanned the backyard. If Marvell was lurking behind a stack of plywood, he was doing a good job of it. “I guess you could just
show
me the stuff you're learning.”

“Sure.” Daniel swept their paper plates into the garbage can, clearing the decks for action. Sean got a paper towel and wiped the bar down, his heart picking up speed at the prospect of real magic.

Resettled, Daniel said, “What Marvell was talking about, creation-eidolons, psychogenesis? That's great, we've got to know theory, but Geldman puts things a lot plainer.”

Geldman
would
talk like a normal person, even though he had to know way more about theory than Marvell. Not to derail Daniel's lecture, Sean kept the opinion to himself. “He doesn't use—” Jargon. “—technical terms?”

“Not much. It's more than style, though. See, most of the Order are Source magicians. Geldman's an elementalist, which is like going off the grid.”

“Not using electricity?”

“Not using the blind force Marvell talked about. Geldman calls that Source energy, capital
S,
because the Source is Azathoth. Almost no one uses
pure
Source energy, though. It only gets to earth through a few portals or rifts—good thing, because it would fry most people's brains. A few magicians allied with Nyarlathotep can use it. Not even all of them.”

Could Orne? “So if you can't use Source energy—”

“You can't use it pure. But mostly it filters through lots of interdimensional fabric first. That weakens it down to
ambient
energy, which is everywhere, all the time.”

“And that's what most magicians use?”

“Right, but elementalists go a step further. They use energy that's seeped into earth or air or water, or that's coming back out of material as fire. They believe the nature of that energy's different, changed—now it belongs to whatever element absorbed it, not to Azathoth. I guess there's a controversy about whether the elementalists are fooling themselves about getting away from the Outer Gods, but anyhow, going elemental is advanced magic, so Geldman's teaching me Source magic to start.”

If Geldman would teach Source magic, and most of the Order used it, it had to be okay. Even considering the Source. “So there's magical energy all around us, here in the kitchen.”

“Everywhere.”

“And you can feel it?”

“Not all the time. Only when I channel it to do magic.”

“What's that even mean, though? Channeling, intentions. How's it
work
?”

“It's different for each magician.”

“I was afraid you'd say that.”

Daniel laughed. “Right, why can't there be one easy method? But it's all about symbols. Human brains don't like abstractions, so to channel energy, you have to come up with your own symbolic complex for doing it.”

Sean slumped again. “Symbolic complex. That's as bad as creation-eidolons!”

“If I can figure it out, you can.”

“So you have? You can do magic?”

Daniel checked the kitchen door, then the clock over the sink, before nodding. “A little.”

“Seriously?”

“Lame stuff. But I'll show you.” From his breast pocket, Daniel extracted a pencil stub two inches long, which he set on the countertop. Parallel to the stub, he arranged a slip of notepaper, and then he scooted his stool back. “So check me. I can't touch the bar even with my feet.”

Sean checked. Nope, with his legs stretched straight out and his toes pointed, Daniel still came up inches short.

“And you can see my hands.”

“Ah, yeah.”

“I just don't want you to think it's a trick.”

“I trust you.”

“Then shut up.”

“The Great Glassini requires silence!”

“Shut up.”

Sean obeyed and waited for Daniel to draw pentagrams in the air or mutter incantations. He did neither, didn't even look at his pencil stub. Instead his protuberant eyes flicked from side to side until they went glassy, fixed on nothing Sean could see. His body was still except for his shoulders, which rotated like he was trying to swim without moving his arms from his sides. Was he even breathing? Could you concentrate so hard, you forgot to? Though the kitchen AC was on, the atmosphere in the room thickened; Sean felt pressure in his ears, mildly painful.

He managed not to break silence or squirm on his stool.

The pencil stub moved.

Sean didn't see it, but his straining ears caught the slide of wood on quartz countertop. He looked down in time to catch new movement, the stub's pivot from parallel to the notepaper to perpendicular across it.

Though his shoulders kept rotating, the trancey glaze left Daniel's eyes. He leaned forward, breathing, avid.

Inch by inch, the stub scooted toward him across the paper. Then it pivoted to aim its lead point at Sean. What if Daniel (turning out to be an evil wizard) fired that sucker right between his eyes?

Cool in theory, better in practice that Daniel straightened, shoulders stilling. “That's it,” he said, throaty.

“I saw it,” Sean said.

“Hope so. I'm done for a while.”

“No, I mean, I
saw
it, and before that I
felt
like something was happening. The air changed. No way that wasn't magic.”

“Telekinesis.”

“Telekinesis counts.”

“You've seen magic a lot more impressive.”

Sean had seen a Servitor birthed out of flaming briquettes. He'd seen Geldman's Pharmacy age decades in a second. He'd even seen freaking Nyarlathotep, who could be in innumerable places simultaneously, and so no problem for him to drop in on Sean. “But it's different with you. That other stuff looked too easy. Like Geldman shrugs, and the pharmacy's open or closed, and fortunes pop out of the scale, and candles burn forever.”

As if trying to erase his scars, Daniel rubbed the pencil stub between his fingers. “You're not surprised with Geldman, because you figure he can do about anything. With me, you don't expect it.”

“You're a normal guy.”

“Thanks.”

“So when you do magic, you make it seem—”

“Really real?” Eddy said.

She couldn't have been standing in the kitchen doorway for long. During the weighty silence of Daniel's buildup to magic, Sean would have heard her turn the knob. “Um, door's closed, you knock first?”

“That would've messed up the magic.” She came in and snagged a stool. “I knew Daniel was going to show you what he's learned so far. He showed me yesterday, while you were with Geldman. He levitated a straw!”

“About an inch,” Daniel said.

“That's more than Sean can do until he gets a mentor. Which will be when?”

Same question she asked every day. He gave the same answer: “Sometime.”

“I thought you were going to ask Professor Marvell this morning.”

“He'll let me know when the Order decides.”

Sandwiched between them, Daniel mouthed,
Tell her
.

Sean mouthed back,
Not now
.

Daniel frowned and said out loud: “Why not just tell her? It's not like it's your fault.”

Great, that made Eddy lean around Daniel so
she
could frown at Sean. Now that she'd gotten the whiff of a secret, he might as well give it up. “All right. I'm not getting a mentor this year, because I'm not allowed to learn any practical magic, so why bother. Marvell changed his mind, or the Order changed its mind, and he told me at that meeting I had with him and Helen.”

It was gratifying, actually, how Eddy gaped. “Why would they change their minds?”

Sean would have given a noble shrug and spared her illusions about Marvell, but Daniel spoke up again: “We think Marvell might not trust Sean, because Orne picked him for his apprentice. And Mr. Geldman thinks that's the Order's reason, too.”

“But Professor Marvell's known about Sean and Orne all along,” Eddy protested.

“Right,” Daniel said. “But when it came down to training Sean, maybe he got cold feet. Marvell's a lot harder on Sean than on me. This morning he landed on him for asking a question about the summoning. Like, Sean thinks the summoning's his claim to fame when really he was just a—” He looked at Sean.

“An extension cord,” Sean said.

Eddy's jaw slackened again.

“An extension cord between Bishop's spell and Nyarlathotep's energy,” Daniel explained. “In other words, Sean didn't do crap. That's not what Marvell said, but that's what he meant.”

“And what's Geldman got to do with this?”

Sean took that one: “Yesterday he agreed that Marvell hates Orne so much, it could affect how he thinks about me.”

“You were complaining to Geldman about the Professor?”

“We were just talking.”

“And whenever you talk to Geldman,” Daniel said, “the important things come up.”

Eddy pushed off the breakfast bar. Her wheeled stool glided backwards to a gentle impact with the prep island. She was still frowning, but not at them. “I don't get it. Professor Marvell was totally cool with Sean before.”

She didn't get it, because Sean hadn't told her about the root rot Helen had discovered in his family tree. Crazy. He'd told her every stupid thing he'd done during the Servitor crisis, but now he was ashamed to tell her about his ancestors, who were totally not his fault?

Although Marvell seemed to think otherwise.…

“They'll be cool again,” Daniel said. “Meanwhile it's not fair Sean can't learn practical magic.”

“Nothing we can do about that.”

Daniel propelled his stool to the island, next to Eddy's, opposite Sean's. “I can do something. I'm going to teach him what Geldman teaches me.”

If Sean had realized Daniel was bent on full disclosure, he would have blown his brains out his ears trying to do telepathy:
Dude! It's too soon to tell her about that!

Amazingly, Daniel's blasphemous opposition to Marvell didn't stir up Hurricane Eddy, just a brisk chilly wind. “I don't know,” she said. “It sounds like the Professor was too hard on Sean today, but that doesn't mean he's wrong about him waiting. Besides, you keep saying, Marvell, Marvell, but wasn't it the Order's decision?”

“Marvell's in charge of the study program, so—”

“So maybe you guys shouldn't go behind his back. Especially if Helen agrees with him. Does she, Sean?”

Daniel looked surprised by Eddy's reaction, which showed Sean still knew her way better. “Yeah, Helen agrees,” he said.