Wonderful. My conscious soul really was some kind of wiseass. “What kinds of mages are there? I was under the impression that you follow the rules, draw your figures correctly and speak the right words, and do whatever you please.”
“You will always be limited by the rules that you follow,” Kutkha said. “The correct figures have power of their own, but even the most dynamic is still a static object. The only things you find in ceremony are comfort and pride in how clever and learned you are relative to the common man, my Ruach.”
I grimaced and pulled across the first book, De Nigromancia, a late Middle Ages tome dedicated to safety during demonic summoning. “So, tell me about these types of magi and how they work their magic, and I will summarily ignore five thousand years of Occult history to listen to a voice inside my head.”
“An excellent idea,” Kutkha said cheerfully. In my mind, I saw him: the ghostly raven from the warehouse dungeon, perched on an arced span of gold in a darkened chamber. “There are mages like Carmine, obviously. Inotropists.”
“Inotropy. That’s a medical term,” I said, turning to the table of contents. It was Middle English, and not terribly well organized. “An inotrope is an agent that alters the force or energy of muscular contractions.”
“It is. And the Inotropist is an agent that increases or decreases the pressure of Phi in a local area, pumping it like a heart. They create fire, force and friction, manipulate gravity, and suchlike,” Kutkha said. “It causes inflammation and tends to harden the color of Phi in a given area to red.”
“Phi has different colors?” I asked, absently.
“All the colors of the prism, and then some. The basic spectrum is from violet to blue, then silver, white, glass. Red is a coarse energy, and common in this world. Violet is dirty Phi, used in Pravamancy. Demonic summoning, disease creation, corruption, leeching. Little better than pus from the skin of GOD, and just as likely to make me sick, if one was to imbibe too much of it.”
I tapped my desktop with the end of a pen, bouncing it off the edge of the leather trim, while my eyes skimmed rows of neatly drawn circles, symbols, and spells in De Nigromancia. “I’ll take that as a hint. And the others?”
“Orange is the color of deception and horror, the color of Illusionists and tricksters,” Kutkha said. “Yellow is the color of the mind and of time, which are both forms of mortal perception, and the mages who specialize in such things are called Mentalists and Temporalists.”
“Like Lev,” I said.
“Like Lev. Green is the color of life, and mages who use this subtle form of energy are called Biomancers. This includes the raising of the dead, the revival and reanimation of corpses,” Kutkha continued. “Which I might add is a practice that is neither good nor evil in the greater scheme of things, though HuMans as a rule fixate on it as the height of diablerie.”
“I see. And anything else?” The book was not looking particularly promising. De Nigromancia was a good tome for information on summoning, more advanced than the Goetia, but the symbol was not to be found. I set it aside.
“Blue is the color of Hierognosis, and the Hierognostic specialist is a Hierophant. Precognition, theurgy, the creation of wards and the rending of them. They guard the mystery. They create understanding.”
“I see.” That sounded a little like my own magic, but for some reason, the thought made me uncomfortable. Wardbreaking, déjà vu, dreams so real I woke with the sensation of sand in my nose. Maybe it was the ease with which Kutkha categorized it. “And how does one… pick up a specialization? Say I wanted to change mine and take up another.”
“Each works according to their nature. The substance of a thing will dissolve into its own roots. HuMans are unique, in that they may have a dual or tripartite nature, and they may have talent in more than one area of magic. But each requires time to master.”
“Huh.” I picked up the next book on the stack, a thin volume with a pomegranate tree in bloom on the front cover. I opened it and flipped the pages until I finished the text, then skipped forward to flip through the pictures. “That seems simpler than I expected.”
“Such matters are narrow, but very deep. Reality is often like that. Mortals feel the need to complicate things,” Kutkha replied. “Now look down.”
“What?” I glanced at the page I’d just opened. It was a column of planetary tables, the familiar symbols of each of the seven classical planets used in Astrology. They were set against horizontal rows of squiggly sigils, twelve in each row. They seemed to move and shift on the page. For a moment, I wasn’t certain what it was Kutkha was trying to point out to me—and then I saw it. The entire row of symbolic components for the Sun. They had been worked into one design.
“Wait… no. These are angelic binding symbols. These have nothing to do with demons.” But there it was. Mesh them together, and you had the bell-and-spiral shape of the sigil I had found in Frank Nacari’s eye. “The mage that murdered Nacari… he wasn’t summoning Aamon at all.”
“A red herring, as you might say,” Kutkha added.
“So whoever did this made it look like an over-the-top Goetic rite to mislead… so they clearly expected to be dealing with another mage.” Me? Were they expecting to have to contend with me? I wasn’t nearly powerful enough to be worth that amount of effort. And if they’d been trying to summon some kind of angelic being, what about the smell? The unhallow, rotten strangeness? I mashed a hand through my hair and frowned down at the page. None of this made any sense.
I glanced at the clock and froze. Ten a.m.? When had it become ten a.m.? And it was Monday. Vassily wasn’t home, and… he was supposed to meeting his parole officer at one.
“Goddammit, Vassily.” I hesitated before marking the page and picking up the phone. Why did this sort of thing always fall on me to remember? He was an adult man, and I was almost exhausted beyond caring. Almost. Not enough to stop me from jamming the handset between shoulder and ear and dialing Mariya’s number.
It rang several times before she picked up. “Maritka, it’s Alexi. I was wondering if Vassily had left already? He has an appointment to go to, and hasn’t arrived home yet.”
“What?” Mariya sounded harried, like she had just rushed to speak to me. “Vassily isn’t here, Alexi.”
My heart turned cold. “He isn’t? Did he leave already? He said he was visiting you.”
“No, I haven’t seen him today.” In the background, I heard the laughter of children. Mariya’s sometimes-boyfriend had two, a little girl and even younger boy. The sound carried through the handset, piercing the silence between Mariya and me. She sighed. “Alexi, you should know by now. Everything that comes out of that man’s mouth is horseshit. He’s probably at Vanya’s.”
The apologetic tone in her voice didn’t soften the knowledge that Vassily had lied to me. He’d never lied to me before like this, not about his whereabouts. “Thank you. I’ll check there.”
“Brothers. Oy.” She groaned before she hung up.
Vanya’s phone rang out. With numb fingers, I tried a second time, stabbing the pen into a sticky note pad that was soon full of dark pinpoint holes. After five rings, a blurry voice I didn’t immediately recognize picked up. “Whozat?”
“I want to speak with Vassily,” I said, tonelessly.
There was a pause. “Who wants to know?”