Caspar sat back in a peach-colored chair, his brow furrowed and fingers steepled as he thought. "The Simia Gestor Coda. Hmm. The name is somewhat familiar, but not something I remember much… ah. Wait. I have it. The Coda concerns the origins of several races—Dark Ones, Fomhóire, and Ilargi are what I remember, but there may be more in the manuscript."
I licked lemony powdered sugar off my lips as I pulled out my PDA, relieved that my long shot had turned out so well. "Fomhóire I've heard of—they are the Celtic branch of faeries, yes? But I don't think I've ever heard mention of Ilargi."
Caspar waved an elegant hand at the plate of cookies. I shook my head, taking notes on my PDA as he spoke. "I believe the Fomhóire would be very surprised to find themselves called faeries, but that is neither here nor there. The Ilargi have Basque origins. They are reapers, of the moon clan."
"Oh," I said, a little chill going down my spine. Reapers I'd heard of from my Diviner studies—they are beings that light the way of the dead. Not someone you want to hang around. "Do you happen to know who wrote the Coda? Thus far I haven't been able to find out any information regarding its author, or more than a vague skeleton of its history. I know it was connected with Marco Polo somehow, and it disappeared approximately three centuries ago, but that's about it."
"I wish I could help you, but alas"—Caspar spread his hands again, showing me they were empty—"I know little more about it than you. I do not know who authored it, although I have heard the name of Samaria Magnus mentioned in connection with the Coda."
"Samaria Magnus?" I asked, making a note of that name for further research. "A woman?"
"No, it was a false name, one taken to protect the identity of the individual from charges of heresy. No doubt his origins were in Samaria. Magnus was a common surname adopted by mages over the centuries."
"Ah. That makes sense. So this Samaria Magnus wrote a manuscript about the origins of a bunch of different people, and then… what?"
"No one knows. Both Magnus and the Coda disappeared for several hundreds of years. The latter made an appearance in the late seventeenth century, when it was the cause of much infighting between the mages of the time. But it, too, slipped from view. Few know it ever existed, let alone know much about it. I'm afraid that is the extent of my knowledge about both the Coda and Samaria Magnus."
"Well, I appreciate both," I said, tucking away my PDA and taking a sip of tea before setting the delicate china teacup on the table next to me. "There's not a lot to be found about it, but this should give me a little more to go on. Thank you so much for your time."
"It is my pleasure," Caspar said, escorting me to the door. "If I can assist you any further with mages, thirteenth century or otherwise, I am at your disposal."
He made me an elegant bow, his smile lingering in my mind as I tromped down the stairs to the street, aware by the prickling of my back that something wasn't as it should be. It wasn't until I was on the bus, halfway to Diviners' House, that something occurred to me—at no point during our conversation did Caspar Green express the slightest bit of curiosity as to my interest in Samaria Magnus or the Coda.
"What do you think that means?" I asked Jake a good forty minutes later, as we were on another bus, this one headed for Butterfly World, an insect zoo of sorts.
Jake looked pensive—not an unnatural state for a Diviner, but a stranger to his usually sunny countenance. "I'm not sure. It could be that he has no interest in the Coda or this mage, despite his academic studies."
"Or it could be something he's not telling me," I said. "My elf warning system was into the red zone while I was in his apartment."
"Your elf warning system is notoriously unreliable," he answered, giving me a look.
"It's not unreliable. Just a bit… touchy."
"Touchy? Like the time you swore your room was haunted, and you conducted nightly séances to try to contact the haunting spirit?"
I looked out the window and tried my best to ignore him.
"You had everyone up for three nights in a row, convinced that your room contained a poor, lost spirit who was stuck in this dimension, unable to get to the next, isn't that right?"
It's amazing how hard it is to ignore someone sitting right next to you.
"You even demanded that Brother Immanuel conduct a ritual of purification in your room, in an attempt to help the spirit on its way."
I gritted my teeth.
"And what was it that turned out to be inhabiting your room?" Jake asked, laughter rife in his voice.
I turned around just enough to glare at him. "You know full well it was a mouse, so stop smirking. I never said my elf sense was very highly attuned. I just said it's there, and it warns me about things."
"Not always Otherworld things, though," Jake pointed out gently.
I let that go, partly because he was doing me a favor in agreeing to monitor me while I scryed, but mostly because he was right.
"Tell me again why we're doing this at Butterfly World?" Jake asked as I paid our entrance fee (Diviners take a vow of poverty not to purify their souls, but to keep them from being tempted to divine locations of material goods that could make them impossibly wealthy). He looked with interest at the brochure that was given to us with our admittance tickets. "Will we have time to see the poison arrow frogs and the royal python?"
"If you're good, yes. And we're here because this is the sunniest, warmest place in Edinburgh, thanks to their industrial-strength sunlamps. I think the jungle area is going to be our best bet," I said, consulting the giant map posted at the entrance. "Hopefully we can find a quiet, out-of-the-way corner where no one will bother us."
Jake followed docilely as we entered what looked like a huge, outsized greenhouse, happily perusing the informational pamphlet. "Did you know that the life span of your average butterfly is only a fortnight? There is one type, a zebra butterfly, that can live ten months, though."
"Fascinating." I paused for a moment to get my bearings, a little thrown by the mass of color flitting around. There must have been two or three hundred different types of butterflies—some brightly colored, others in camouflage, and all of them swooping around in a never-ending palette of color. The air was thick and humid, heavy with the scent of damp earth and sickly sweet flowers. I started sweating almost immediately. "Look, behind that clump of palmish whatever, next to the big machine. That looks like no one goes there."
"Probably because it's off the pathway," Jake remarked as I leaped over the low barrier intended to keep people out of the tropical foliage.
"Yeah, yeah. I'm not going to do any damage. I just want a little privacy."
Luckily the group of kids in school uniforms that had arrived before us sucked up the attention of the Butterfly World attendants, leaving us able to slip behind a dense clump of palms in a corner of the building. I pulled a lap blanket out of my backpack and spread it out on the moist earth, glancing up for a moment at a sunlamp that beamed its rays down on us. It wouldn't have done as a substitute on its own, but since it was sunny outside, the combination of artificial and real sunlight was enough to power my elf cells.
"Right. If you'll sit there… mind the butterfly… I'll sit across from you, and I think we should both be hidden from view by anyone on the path." I gestured to a spot. Jake obediently sat down cross-legged on the blanket, looking expectant.
I settled myself in a pool of sunlight, pulling a soft leather bag from the backpack, carefully removing from it both my black mirror bowl and a small flask of water. I held the bowl up so it shared the sunlight with me, closing my eyes as I allowed the sun to soak into my being, merging with my essence, becoming something new, a bright, shining light of everything that I was. Concentrating fiercely, I poured the light into the black abyss of the waiting receptacle.