Fugue, page 31
“So be careful.”
“What if I mess it up?”
“You’ll probably kill Jim, maybe yourself, and do unpredictable things to most of the hospital. But you already knew the answer.”
“Will you…?”
“I won’t do it for you, but I’ll do my best to assist you. You’ll do the spell, but I’ll try to shield you if you make a mistake.”
“Spells of intent make me nervous.”
“It’s unpredictable magic,” I acknowledged. “You have to focus only on what you want to happen, not what you’re afraid will happen—or anything else, for that matter. You have to put aside your fear and focus only on your hope. And, right now, regardless of whether or not Jim blames you for his condition, you’re it. Help him, Phoebe Kent. You’re his only hope.”
“I never thought of it like that,” she mused.
“Now you can. Think about it while you get your things together. We’re going to pay a midnight visit on Jim.”
Wednesday, June 24th, 1959
We entered the hospital on Wednesday night. I wore a three-piece black suit. Phoebe wore a similarly somber ensemble, although hers was more mundane. Phoebe carried the power crystals in her handbag. I carried a backpack under my sport coat—nobody would notice it there since it wasn’t technically in this universe. I also handled the sneaking spells. We remained nondescript to the point of being unobserved.
We hit a bit of a snag in Jim’s room. While Jim was on drugs and unlikely to wake, his mother was merely asleep in a chair beside his bed. Phoebe looked panicky but I touched a finger to my lips. A few minutes later, Mrs. Abbott was even more thoroughly asleep and unlikely to wake for a little spellcasting, several hours, or Armageddon. We pushed chairs together and laid her down, well out of the way.
Phoebe started her spells—the prepared ones—and let them get started on fixing what she was confident she could fix. With those engaged and running, she started preparations for the bigger, brute-force spell. She started by dragging the bed away from the wall so she could draw a rectangle on the floor around it. A circle is usually ideal, but the geometry of the room forced her to adapt. She laid out several of the things she packed in my backpack, from candles to grease pencils, including bits of telephone cord, snakeskin, and a live spider in a jar.
I didn’t ask. I was only present as security and maybe a consultant. And safety net. What she was doing was dangerous, potentially even deadly, but she had to experience this first-hand. She’s participated in similar spells as part of her training, so she knew what she was doing, but the danger was still there.
If I remember right, the last time I did this on a major scale, I rewrote an infant’s genetic code all in one big go, eliminating a mouthful of mutant teeth. Or have I done this since? I’m not looking it up in my headspace. It doesn’t matter. I do still wonder, now and again, if I got the kid completely right. I hope so. Jim’s troubles were more specific and should be easier to fix.
If it went seriously, catastrophically wrong, nothing I could do would save her, Jim, or most of the hospital. But I have faith in Phoebe. It might go wrong, but she wouldn’t screw it up completely. I could mitigate lesser disasters.
The candles, as it happens, were a new thing. They were some of my pre-prepared, high-energy candles. They were about the same diameter as a votive candle—maybe an inch and a quarter or thereabouts. They were quite tall, nearly eight inches, and had non-Euclidian carving spiraling around their waxen sides. I’m rather proud of them.
Phoebe accidentally suggested it when she was, oh, about ten, I think. We were going over my spellwork on a new generator in the basement, lecturing on the principles. She knew the basics of an energy-conversion spell already, but we had a laboratory session on how it related to the house. Her very first thought?
“So, that’s why there are candles around a power diagram? To make heat to turn into magic?”
My first thought was more along the lines of “sonofabitch!” Maybe low-magic worlds have something like it worked into the power diagrams. It may not be a great conversion, granted, but ask a chemist how much energy is packed into a candle. They hold a surprising amount. A candle this size holds close to nine megajoules. It’s about the same as nine hand grenades, but a lot slower.
Therefore, my candles—my heavy working candles—are already mildly magical, holding a slight charge. The candle holders, on the other hand, are enchanted with a nested series of conversion spells to get everything they possibly can from the burning. They also have some air-movement functions for more efficient burning.
Phoebe might need the extra oomph.
While she got on with her preparations, I consulted Jim’s chart. The IV in his arm was mostly saline, but it included phenytoin to help control seizures. Not a bad choice, I guess, for the time and place. I’m not sure the full-body restraints were called for, though. The monkeys tended more toward violent trembling than convulsions.
I sat in a chair by the door and watched. Phoebe did good work, drawing her diagrams and symbols with a neat hand. Her room may be a mess, but her handwriting is lovely. She took extra care, too. Her life and Jim’s might depend on the neatness of her spell-work. With other spells, a goof usually results in wasted power and a failed spell. With a spell of intent, it can go… awry. Wrong. Weird.
She set the candles in their circles and placed the “messy bits” in theirs. Snakeskin for the striking snake, the spider for the coordination, and a hummingbird feather for the speed. The telephone cord she strung from component to component, symbolic of how things must all communicate with each other. Not bad. My initial thought was fiber optic cable, but on reflection, telephone wire is electrical, like nerves, so it was probably the right choice. I’m quite proud of her for asking for a special, high-tech paint, too. It’s a paint-on conductive substance, not regular paint, which further symbolized electrical connections. Phoebe was careful and thorough with her spell diagrams.
She wasn’t doing it to make her old man proud. But he was.
She drew her diagrams in black. White is for containing things you don’t want getting away. Black is for drawing in power and concentrating it for an active spell. There are other, finer variations in which specific colors are advisable, but black and white are usually all you need. Well, generally all I need, but I’m hardly a role model.
While she worked, I traced my tendrils delicately through Jim’s nervous system, examining it more closely. I can’t expect Phoebe to duplicate tendrils, so I might as well use them. The drugs suppressed a lot of the nerve activity, but it wasn’t too hard to see which bits were connected in a line and which ones were lumps added on. Phoebe’s new spells were doing a fine job of finding existing nerve paths and tagging them. Nerve pathways that didn’t go anywhere were the problem. That’s a simplification, but it gets the idea across. Those nerve clusters, still attached to functioning communication lines, occasionally registered a signal, amplified it, passed it around among themselves, and started a feedback loop in the working nervous system.
Phoebe’s big concern was, clearly, keeping working lines of communication intact. No paralysis, no sudden heart stoppage, none of that stuff. From what I could see, she was doing a fine job of it. We would have preferred to have a conscious subject actively using his voluntary systems for check, but, since he was unconscious, she erred on the side of caution.
On a less occult note, I did remind her about the candles. She looked puzzled until I mentioned they would use oxygen at a high rate. Then the light dawned and she added extra symbols to the candle-points in the diagram to concentrate oxygen around them.
I opened the windows and set up air-movement spells for the room and the inevitable smoke. Well, she was focused on the magical portion of her work, not on the byproducts of combustion. This is what we assistants are for.
She completed her major preparations and placed the two power crystals. The diagram was already live. It surged, flickering with errant currents of color along the black lines. They washed around the circle like a lighting effect, glowing from within the lines themselves, and eventually steadied down to a pale nimbus around each bit of drawing. The candles blazed brighter for a moment, then glowed a bloody red—an appropriate color for a spell dedicated to healing a physical ailment.
Phoebe moved to the conjurer’s circle at the foot of the bed. I stayed out of the way and kept the room shielded. We didn’t need anyone hearing the chant. Nor, for that matter, to have anyone with any latent magical sensitivity get a weird feeling about the room. I kept the room secure while Phoebe chanted a short, rhythmic phrase, focusing her attention and intent on a sizable charge of undifferentiated magic. The whole elaborate setup was there specifically for this purpose: to “wish real hard” and back it with power. Intention combined with force.
Ideally, all spells are intention, method, and force. For spells of intent like this, two out of three ain’t bad. It requires doubling down on the other two.
Someday, probably soon, she’s going to sit in an Ascension Sphere. At the moment, she handled a devastatingly large amount of energy for most mortals. She’s worked with magic most of her life, so she’s got a higher tolerance and capacity than average. She was fully up to this challenge.
I watched closely, observing the effect. She was focused, almost in a trance, stripping away every extraneous thought while the power cycled through her and through the diagram. Every repetition of her chant honed it, refined it, laid the pattern of her will upon it.
I didn’t interfere in any way. All I did was watch and wait, ready to intervene if anything started to unravel. She kept at it, building the power and cranking it around, refining the goal more and more. From a force standpoint, it was like pulling a rope through a block and tackle, hauling a massive weight higher and higher, until it was time to pull the pin and release it, sending it crashing down. It was quite impressive.
Sadly, my readiness to intervene was limited strictly to where I focused my attention. If something had started to come apart in her spell, I would have been on it like lightning on a lightning rod. I wasn’t paying attention to other issues.
The sound-dampening spell works in both directions, so the crisp, white-garbed nurse had no more clue than I did. As far as she and the rest of the hospital were concerned, it was a quiet night. There was nothing out of the ordinary in any way, and her routine check on the patient in Room 316 should have been nothing more than a walk in, a quick look at his various fluid levels, maybe a check mark on the chart at the foot of the bed, and done. She didn’t expect to walk in on a delicate, high-voltage arcane operation.
In retrospect, I should probably have sealed the door. It didn’t actually have a lock, but I could have spot-welded it to the frame, or shoved my chair against it, or something. Ah, hindsight.
She pushed it open and stood in the doorway, gaping at the tableau for a moment. Then she started a demand. It began with “What do” and got no further.
Phoebe was never, at any point, comfortable with casting such a high-powered spell. She knows the inherent risk for drastic and potentially irreversible consequences. She’s read all the fairy tales and fables about wishing for things. For most people, they’re moral lessons. For wizards, they’re safety briefings. So she was nervous about anything going wrong. I think this is a good thing. Scared means focused, as long as you’re not too scared to do it. Taking a high-power operation like this for granted, doing it casually, means you’re not giving it the respect it damn well deserves.
Phoebe, almost entirely focused on her spell, barely registered the nurse. Phoebe spared one gesture, a minor flick of the fingers in her direction, and was instantly back to utter and total concentration on her spell.
At her gesture, a flicker in the air passed from Phoebe to the target—I mean, “the nurse”—and the nurse went away. Suddenly. Violently. It put me in mind of the time a lady wizard blasted me through a garage wall, into an electric car, and out onto the front lawn. The nurse didn’t take it nearly as well as I did, and I was, among other things, dead at the time. She launched backward, across the hall, through the wall, turned into meat bag of chunky paste on the way, and shotgunned through the window on the other side of the room.
Messy, but far enough away it wasn’t going to crawl back to me.
Three people in the hall were in positions to observe. Two of the staff looked shocked and headed toward us to investigate the noise. At the door to the freshly-ventilated room, a patient was remonstrating with another nurse about something. He simply stared at me and past me. His nurse started to turn and I closed our door.
This time, I passed a hand over it, speaking quietly so as not to distract Phoebe. There wasn’t anything to be done for what was left of the nurse, not without a scraper and a sponge. At least Phoebe could still finish her work on Jim.
I scratched on the four corners of the door with my fingernails, drawing small ideograms. Now, no one would enter for at least ten minutes and Phoebe would be done in no more than five. Let them pound on the door. Let them try the knob. Let them send for security. They’d have to take the doorframe out of the wall to get in.
And none too soon. Phoebe was having trouble with her spell.
A spell of intent is built on the foundation of a clear and precise desire. Phoebe accidentally injected a stray thought when the nurse came in. As her assistant, Phoebe should have let me handle it. Instead, her spell now had two things—Go Away and the original Get Better.
True, she damped down the Go Away part almost immediately, but the imbalance in her spell’s energy made it… wobble? Wobble. It wobbled like an unbalanced tire. This caused her to worry about the wobble and try to correct it, further drawing her focus from the original intent of Get Better by adding more and more Stop Wobbling. Which, naturally, threw it even more out of balance, increased her concern, and fed back on itself to make things worse.
I shot her a thought. It was an instantaneous thing, not a long statement, but it basically meant she should focus on the Get Better and leave the rest to me.
If Phoebe hadn’t had utter faith in her Pop, it wouldn’t have worked. She stopped worrying about the imbalances in her spell, the possible disaster, and the overwhelming quantity of energy cycling around inside her diagram. She ignored it and went back to what she was supposed to be doing: Fixing Jim.
As for my part, I shifted quickly into a much higher gear. I couldn’t insert myself into her spell-working without acting as a grounding channel for it. I didn’t have a part in her diagram, so I wasn’t part of the circuit. Since I don’t enjoy being flash-fried by magical lightning, I didn’t even try to touch it. What I could do was inject surges of energy. If this was a spinning wheel, wobbling madly because it was out of balance, I couldn’t grab it and adjust it—but I could hit it at certain key points in the wobble, damp them out, minimize them. It wouldn’t balance the spin, but it would keep it from vibrating itself apart while Phoebe focused on finishing.
It’s a good thing I have a spare power crystal on me. At home, it’s not a big deal. Out in a low-magic Earth? I like having a battery. I expended it in the three sharp bursts of magical force. The spell’s wobble flattened out and I hoped it was enough.
Phoebe’s eyes were half-closed as she focused on Jim. The power levels were lowered a bit by the unexpected discharge, true, but they still looked good to me. My improvised input seemed to be taking on the pattern of the spell as the wobble continued to diminish. If nothing else went wrong…
Phoebe settled into her rhythm again, felt the smoothness of her spell’s form, and decided it was as good as she was going to get. She completed her spell, raising both hands sharply upward, and the candles, already burning like blowtorches, flared into pillars of crimson flame. They roared up almost to the ceiling, shedding bloody light, dumping their energy into the diagram. Power flowed up like a fountain. The greater circle—rectangle—shimmered with it, filled completely with the pattern of her desire, before it shrank, took on human outline, and merged with Jim’s body. He coruscated and shone with multicolored light for several seconds, as though his skin was made of swirling oil and glitter. It settled into him and changed him.
Phoebe’s spell finished, all the energies of the diagram discharged. She staggered backward out of the conjurer’s circle to bump into the wall and slide slowly down to sit on the floor. She looked fine to my eyes, so I did a quick check on Jim. I saw nothing untoward in his nervous system. All the nodules and growth areas I’d noted were now smooth and clean. His heart beat normally and his breathing continued, so his autonomic system couldn’t be too badly compromised.
Pity I didn’t have time to give him a full examination. I couldn’t tell with my preliminary once-over if he was cured or not, but everything I could see was better than before. I was prepared to call it a win. Any positive gain for the patient can’t be considered a failure. Besides, Phoebe’s more usual healing spells would backstop the major spell’s work, encouraging Jim to be in the best possible condition.
I crouched beside Phoebe. She sat on the floor and leaned back against the wall. Her face was sheened in sweat and her eyes closed. She breathed slowly, deliberately.
“How are you feeling, Punkin?”
“Tired,” she answered on an exhale.
“I imagine so. Good work, though. It went off almost without a hitch, and Jim looks good.”
“Will he be all right?” she asked, still breathing deeply.
“No way to tell just now. And no time to check.” I gathered up the two crystals and the candle-holders, tucking them in her handbag. The rest of the paraphernalia and suchlike I swept away with a fold of my cloak. It didn’t get the paint, but it got everything else. Close enough. “Come on. We’re leaving by the express route.”
“Am I riding piggy-back under your cloak?”
“Yes, but not far.”
I considered, briefly, turning the bathroom door into a temporary gate to home. I probably had time—nobody was hammering on the room door, and the length of time it would take to get through wouldn’t start until the pounding did. Rather than time shortages, I had power shortages.
