I was in over my head. Vassily was right. There’s a rule of boxing, which is that you never let the other guy push you around the ring in a match. You had to keep control, even if that meant faking out to lead the other guy into thinking he had the upper hand. I was the one being led around right now: my opponents were juiced up and experienced, and I was not keeping up with the blows. Yuri’s words had struck me low. I’d always known the things he was talking about in some part of myself, but it was the first time I’d ever heard anyone say them aloud. I thought back to the discussion in Lev’s living room. The way he had effortlessly induced shame.
No, not shame. Guilt. Even an unrepentant killer could be controlled by guilt, if he had been raised in it, steeped in it, like a foal trained to the bit and bridle on its way to adulthood. But maybe it wasn’t just guilt that kept me here, working for Lev and Sergei, fighting for Vassily, striving in my own, small, dark way to serve the people I’d built my life around. My community. Maybe it was fear. They didn’t respect me, thought I was… deviant. But they were all I had.
Wearily, I looked around at the mess of my study. Before whatever happened next, I had to destroy these sigils.
The kitchen smelled sweet and sick, and my plants were dead. The oily black liquid had dried up and vanished, like the rest of Yuri. I double-checked the room uneasily, and only when I was certain nothing was left did I set up the gas burner and get my tools. I found Binah under the bed, the preferred refuge of any cat. I was going to have to pick her up an extra can of salmon or something, given that she’d just saved my life.
I set up a crucible over the burner and drew a small circle around the stove with salt and chalk. The crucible was used to melt the seal I’d pulled from Yuri’s remains, which I poured into a makeshift mold made from a jar lid. When I turned the small blackened metal ingot out, it was unremarkable, faceless. Nothing was left of its magic.
The tin chalice with Frank’s seal was still in the freezer. I pursed my lips as I looked into the chalice and found the ice cracked and crumbly, the texture of a snow cone. It was brown, the water rimed with veins of corruption. I dried the unharmed sigil off before setting it on the crucible, where I watched it intently. It sat there and did not stir.
So much for that. I rubbed my jaw, turned the heat to full blast, and when that failed, picked the caster up in a pair of tongs and held it directly over the flame. It didn’t even soften, in a wholly un-lead–like fashion.
“Well.” I blinked, swallowing, and set it back in the cup. It entered the water with a hiss of spent heat. “That’s not good.”
“The energy attached to it must be absorbed or banished,” Kutkha replied. “And either you must do it, or another Phitometrist.”
I glared down at it, watching as air bubbles gathered around its surface. “I can assume a Phitometrist is someone capable of manipulating Phi. You’ve never explained to me what that is, Kutkha.”
“You don’t have the language for me to describe it to you.”
How many languages did a man need? I already spoke three. I sighed and lifted my eyes to the ceiling. “Can you give me a rough approximation?”
An image flashed into my mind. I saw myself in a mirror that faced a long hallway of mirrors, each one reflecting my face back to infinity. I reached out to my reflection, and my hand entered the pane as if it were a fluid. Silver crept over my fingers, up my arm, and then plunged painlessly through my chest. All of them. It connected every mirror in the illusion, linking my many selves into a chain which drew forward and back as far as the eye could see.
“Does that help?” Kutkha asked wryly.
I jerked on my feet as the vision passed, rubbed my eyes, and paused to regain my sense of place. Irritably, I reached out and turned off the burner. “Not really. And unfortunately, I don’t know anyone who could do what you describe, except perhaps Lev, and Lev… Lev isn’t powerful enough, is he?”
“No. His Mass is small and his Pressure is weak.”
Mass, another familiar word in an unfamiliar context.
I took a box of salt and sprinkled the mineral into a new flask of water. “I can’t just leave it like this. Whoever summoned this demon is using this artifact to spy on us. It has to be Carmine. He summoned those dogs, or possessed them, or whatever it was he did. He could do this.”
“I don’t know. The Phitonic spoor has passed, and your foe already knows where we are,” Kutkha said. My Neshamah’s voice was as hazy as a silk shroud around my ears. “One more day will not make a difference. Study and learn. Rest and recover, and we will try to track the summoner when they reveal themselves.”
He was right. I needed to find the symbol engraved on the caster and puzzle it out. Whatever it was, it would tell me something about the mage who enchanted it and how it could be used as an improvised tracking device.
First things first, though. A quick cold shower, and then coffee. I poured the cold coffee from this morning’s pot back through the machine, added more coffee in a new filter, and set it to brew jet fuel. Binah rediscovered her courage and came out to join me, purring as she threw herself at my shins.
“The feline enigma,” I mused aloud. She had broken the trance Yuri had worked over me and, maybe, saved my life. Was she a familiar? Did she have kitty Stockholm syndrome? “What defines a familiar, Kutkha? Versus a normal but precocious pet?”
“As I told you, a soul has many branches, many Ruachim,” my Neshamah replied. “Not all of the branches are human.”
Binah made several complex murring and mewing sounds, the language of the Siamese, as she drew a figure eight of shed fur around my damp legs.
With coffee in hand, I gathered a few of my favorite old grimoires at my desk. I knew I’d seen the elements of the sigil design somewhere, but I couldn’t remember where. This told me it was probably in one of the ones I’d read and paid attention to, but not studied in depth.
“So, let’s say there were two of these enchanted lead casters. The other eye was ripped open and the caster removed,” I said, sitting at my desk. “The question is, why the demonic seal AND the casters? Why not just the seal? And what do these things represent?”
Some mythologies had the dead sent along with false eyes made out of metals and precious stones, the better to guide them to their destination in the higher spheres. Greek and Egyptian funerary rites, to name two, but there was nothing holy about Frank Nacari’s death. I thought back: the other empty eye socket had foamy spittle in it. Carmine’s spirit hounds hadn’t slavered, but what about the dog in the alley? Dogs were Carmine’s creatures. If he used dogs as spies on the streets, he could have had one take the other caster: that would explain the gnawed face, and the car bomb. But why raid his own murder scene?
“All right. Assuming Carmine’s torture didn’t induce latent schizophrenia and I am not actually talking to a traumatic hallucination, I’m going to suggest, Kutkha, that you know a lot more about the operation of magic than I do,” I said aloud. “So start from the beginning. I need to understand why Carmine is so good at what he does, and why I am not. I need to learn how to get better. Preferably without selling my soul for the bargain.”
“Fortunately for you, I don’t come with a price tag.” Kutkha sniffed, as much as a disembodied voice could sniff. “There are many different kinds of Phitometrists, or mages, as you call them. Phitometry is just the ability to manipulate Phi under the pressure of your will. So the better question would be ‘what kind of mage do I want to be?’”