“You will ask more of me?” His boy’s voice sounded innocent, almost tearful. “Or will you dismiss me so soon?”
Magda’s breath caught in her throat. “No more. Go—”
Quickly she repeated the rest of the incantation. Eisheth bowed his head, ebony locks spilling across his shoulders. From his wings smoke purled. Then, in a soundless conflagration, his entire body burst into flame. Magda stumbled backward, shielding her face. When she lowered her hand the naphaïm was gone. She drew a shuddering breath, looked down to see that the fingers of the Hand of Glory had burned away. A single ragged flame, brownish red like dried blood, scored the air above its clenched palm.
One last time she knelt before the copper dish. Almost frantically she began to whisper strings of words—Greek, Latin, Old Norse, and English, too, just to be sure. A simple cantrip, something to disrupt the meeting between those she had glimpsed.
Because almost certainly the girl could be turned to serve Her whom Magda served. But the boy was another matter. And the two of them were linked, Magda had seen that.
So now let them be torn apart.
And so Magda pronounced her cantrip. It was an ancient spell—Magda found such old folkways charming, and useful, too—and one that seldom failed to work. At the appropriate moment she whispered the boy’s name. Let him bear the brunt of whatever danger might come from Magda’s interference in the work of the Benandanti. She would trust her Mistress to see that the rest followed as it should.
“…uia Othiym psinother theropsin nopsither nephthomaoth…”
When she finished Magda sighed and stood. She crossed to where a white ceramic pitcher waited upon a windowsill. She took the pitcher, returned to the Hand of Glory and poured a thin stream of milk onto it. The Hand of Glory, sizzled, sending up a sour, clotted smell, then gave a shrill whistle as steam escaped from its pores.
“There,” Magda pronounced. She smiled with relief. So very simple, and also a little chastening, when one thought how it was that tiny acts such as these had kept their great and ancient feud alive for so many thousands of years. She moved cheerfully about the room, blowing out one candle after another, humming. She had been a promising student at the Divine herself once, before she joined the Benandanti and then betrayed them. It gave her a poignant thrill of nostalgia to think of those two attractive young people with all the world before them. With a final pouff like a kiss she blew out the last candle. Then, gathering her papers, she left the room, to spend the night at a friend’s apartment.
As for the candles and bowls, and the smirched remains of the Hand of Glory—well, custodians at the Divine were accustomed to disposing of such things.
CHAPTER 3
Oliver and Angelica
I DON’T KNOW WHAT I was thinking when I dressed for my first day of class. Recalling September in New York, I guess, where the air would have the ringing chill of true autumn. Or else maybe it was some kind of magical thinking already at work inside my head, stirred by that terrible dream of angels in my room, the bizarre and inexplicable reality of the long crimson feather I had carefully wrapped and hidden in the bottom of my knapsack. For whatever reasons, I left my room poorly armed against the numbing heat outside. I wore black velvet trousers tucked into knee-high black leather boots and a white cotton poet’s shirt, and a man’s black satin vest, very old and with tarnished silver buttons. By the time I was halfway across the Mall the shirt clung damply to my back. A blister throbbed insistently on the side of my left ankle. The sun beat against my cheeks like hot fists, and for a few minutes I considered returning to my room to change, or just going back to bed.
But then I saw the boy who’d waved at me the day before, strolling across the parking lot with his Frisbee sticking out of a knapsack. When he saw me he smiled and waved.
A Sign, I thought. I was always looking for Signs. And so I went on.
The Department of Anthropology was at the far end of campus. Today all that part of the Divine has been built up, given over to the Bramwell Center for Dysfunctional Study and Thought. But then it was mostly trees, scraggly kudzu-hung locust trees and sumac bushes, with that nasty footing of broken bottles and tattered newsprint that you find in city woodlots.
I followed a narrow meandering path. All the tropic glamour that had clung to the city last night was gone, burned away by the remorseless sun. The air smelled faintly of garbage. I wiped my face, panting with relief when finally I saw my destination, rising from steaming sumac mounds like Atlantis from the sea.
I approached it slowly: an ancient building formed of blocks of granite so colossal they might have been stolen from some neglected menhir. Several students lolled on the steps. They had that ruddy heartiness I would soon associate with archaeology majors—sunburned and freckled, hair bleached by the sun, sturdy work boots and fatigues stained red with mud. They smiled but said nothing when I passed, feeling dandyish and stupid in my velvet pants and harlot’s boots. At the door I paused to catch my breath. They didn’t even glance at me as I went inside.
Edgar Hall was like all the buildings at the Divine. Cool and old and silent, even the loudest of voices hushed by the long high corridors with their aqueous light. I found my class on the second floor, the door propped open with a torn textbook. Like my room at Rossetti, the classroom had high arched windows, though these were of stained glass that formed uninspiring geometric patterns, blue, yellow, red, blue, yellow, red. After the soft green light of the corridor, the riotous colors were painful to look upon. For a moment I stood there, shy, embarrassed by my clothes. I nudged the textbook that held the door open. The spine crackled softly, and a signature of pages slipped to the floor.
Child Sacrifice in Edessa, A Study in Ritual Infanticide. I kicked the pages aside. When I entered the room, four faces in the front swiveled to look at me, then returned to staring at the runic words on a blackboard.
An unusually small wooden podium had been set beside the chalkboard, and in front of this a slight man stood sorting papers. Except for him and those four students, the place seemed empty. Some thirty-odd seats staggered toward the back of the room. In one of them someone slouched, head flung forward above the desk so that all I saw was a mass of long straight black hair, an arch of neck with a white crescent bitten out of sunburned skin. I had never sat in the front of a classroom in my life, but I didn’t want to be alone amidst all those empty chairs. So I settled on an empty seat near the black-haired apparition, who didn’t look up. I dug into my knapsack, grubbing among wadded tissue, leaky pens, three new notebooks already soiled with ink. For an instant I grazed something sharp: like running my fingers longways across a razor.
The feather.
I snatched my hand back, dug more deeply until I pulled out a heavy book. It fell open and I looked down at the curling pages, pretending to be engrossed. A much-worn copy of Finnegan’s Wake that I carried everywhere but never actually read. The room grew warmer, the other students whispered as I sweated and tried to focus my eyes.
O, O, her fairy setalite! Casting such shadows to Persia’s blind! The man in the street can see the coming event. Photoflashing it far too wide. It will be known through all Urania soon.