Chapter 13
In Which I Have a Blinding Headache, and Cannot Bear to See Light or Hear Noise or Basically Experience Any of My Five Senses. In Which My Throat Is Dry and Furry and Tastes of Vomit, and In Which I Am Regretting Every Decision and Non-Decision that Has Brought Me to This Point.
Never trust a mad sorcerer, they don’t actually care about you.
Also, never trust yourself to act rationally while sloppy drunk.
It made me wince to remember. The plan had been a success, and I’d blown it!
I’d wriggled into the sorcerer’s affections, even squeezed a drop of sympathy from the man, and then thrown it all away.
What, because it hadn’t been genuine enough?
Of course it wasn’t genuine; none of this was.
When had it stopped being about escaping death and regaining my original body?
At least it had gotten the sorcerer to dispense with the needle.
After I staggered through the portal, woozy and tired, he had mumbled out a spell that had me fearing the worst. Instead, in a shattering of small pretty lights, the chain fell to pieces.
I felt a tiny implosion where the needle had lain buried.
“There!” he shouted, and that was the last we’d spoken for three days.
In addition to groceries, Merulo had purchased for me cleaning supplies, a comb, a change of clothing, and bedding for my wooden cot, which was nice, as I’d been sleeping wrapped in a moth-eaten curtain.
The curtains were soft and thick, which probably meant expensive material, so I made a reconciliatory effort to restring them in their original position downstairs.
(Later that night, I crept out to retrieve the curtains, missing their familiarity. The sorcerer had scarcely missed them the first time, so why not?)
No instruction arrived as to how the cleaning should be attempted, leaving me to experiment.
The wooden bucket, I filled at the pump in the kitchen, and with brushes, lard soap, and washcloths, I set to work tackling the accumulated grime.
The sheer volume of vulture dung I scraped off the stone floors filled me with annoyance at my former self. Only passingly, though.
I developed a peevish relationship with the constructs, which mindlessly tracked in all manner of filth with their comings and goings.
If the sorcerer and I had been on speaking terms, I’d have nagged him about the necessity of indoor constructs and outdoor constructs.
Instead, I took to tackling their legs and forcing their feet up to be scrubbed, much as I’d mucked out the hooves of the Order’s unicorn mounts.
Sometimes, their eye-flames would flash brighter, and I could almost feel the sorcerer peering through their sockets.
Their heads turned eerily at these times, tracking my movements, so I tried to give a performance of blissful domesticity.
I even whistled as I scrubbed; it sounded pretty shit even to my ears, though, so I gave up after a while.
My suspicion was that Merulo tracked my position in the castle to ensure we never ran into one another.
Every time I plundered the kitchen, it contained only his little gnome-like constructs.
Once, I even found his hastily abandoned breakfast, a cooked egg with a serving of meat, which I ate to teach him a lesson.
The lesson being: if you’re a coward I’ll eat your breakfast.
My greatest joy came from discovering that the pits beneath the garderobes were magicked—our leavings disappeared down a portal into God knows where, meaning I wouldn’t be expected to clean human waste.
On the evening of the third day, the agony of boredom became too much.
Half jogging, so that the sorcerer wouldn’t have time to spy me through the constructs, I flung open doors, hunting, until a little out of breath, I slammed through into the library and found Merulo perched on a cushioned chair with a textbook on his lap.
Grimly satisfied, I pulled over a second chair and sat cross-legged in it, waiting.
The sorcerer didn’t look up from his book. “You are a chaos entity, not a human being. And I liked you better as a vulture.”
“Well la de da, good evening to you, too.” Truthfully, I also missed being a vulture; it had been less work. After more silence, I tried again: “What are you reading?”
“You wouldn’t understand it.” The sorcerer licked a finger to turn the page. Above his head hovered an orb of witch-light, painful to look at directly.
“You know . . .” I grimaced, searching for a way to justify my presence.
“I heard that to demonstrate a proper understanding of a subject, you should be able to simplify it enough for a child to understand. Or if not a child, maybe me. Besides, I want to hear more about this ‘Death to God’ business. You’re going to end the world, right? ”
“Of course not.” At last, the sorcerer met my eye, which I counted as a success despite his affronted expression. “The Descent perverted the world. I am going to restore it.”
I blinked at his blasphemy. The time before the Descent was widely understood to have been a waking nightmare. “What about the things they say? That the air used to be unbreathable. That in the daytime, it got hot enough to kill a man?”
“We could have fixed it,” Merulo insisted, book forgotten on his black-robed lap.
“Given enough time. If it hadn’t been for the outside interference.
” He paused, as if searching for words. “We have the world back, that’s true, with blue skies and fruitful lands restored.
But we used to have the entire universe. ”
I frowned, not following. In answer, the sorcerer sprang from his chair in a flurry of black fabric, nearly sending his precious book flying.
He strode down the aisle of shelves, tracking his fingers along spines.
Finding the object of his hunt, Merulo made a small sound of triumph, and withdrew the book with a flourish.
Almost reverently, he placed the tome on the floor, and crouching, flipped it open to a double page spread.
I leaned forward, peeking at the diagrams, but before I could properly make out all their odd rings and orbs, Merulo snapped his fingers, and the witch-light was extinguished.
Blackness swallowed the room entirely. It felt odd for there to be no difference between having my eyes open or shut. Filling the silence, the sorcerer’s chanting rose in volume.
I couldn’t understand his words, but the longing in them moved me. What had I ever wanted with that intensity, aside from my own survival?
At the culmination of his spell, the diagram blazed, a burst of light that made me shield my eyes. It floated off the page, then grew to fill the room. Several golden spheres rotated in wide orbit around a central, burning mass.
“This is the sun.” Merulo, dimly visibly in the golden glow, pointed to the sphere of fire. “And here we are, on this planet.” His finger moved to a middling orb with a mottled surface. “Everything you know, every person, every mountain, is here.”
“But there are others,” I protested. “And bigger ones. What about that?” A larger sphere with a ring had caught my attention.
“Dead planets,” said the sorcerer. “Lifeless. Though we’d begun to take them.
We had a foothold here, on our moon”—he pointed to a smaller ball, spinning companionably about our world—“and on Mars.” He indicated an unimpressive planet, one orbit outward from ours.
“And more would have followed. Our empire was spreading. It was a time of unprecedented innovation, with exponential growth in the sciences and in our population. The start of our mastery over the solar system!”
Someone who liked the sorcerer less might have found this speech fanatical.
He stared at me with giddy eagerness through the shifting lights of the display, like an over-excited kid who’d finally found someone to play with him.
“When God arrived, it destroyed everything. Eviscerated the very rules on which reality operated. Genius technologies, millennia of accumulated human intelligence, rendered into useless trash overnight. All of life reshaped, made magical. It was the day the world ended.”
With a wave of his hand, the diagram vanished, the orb of witch-light returning to its place above his head. The sorcerer looked breathless and sad. “We were our own Gods. All I want is for that to be the case once more.”
I didn’t understand most of it, but he seemed to appreciate a listening ear. “Dragons must have liked the old world,” I tried. “Without magic, nobody would have had reason to hunt them.”
“No, no.” The sorcerer shook his head, exasperated. “There weren’t any dragons!”
I pulled at my feet, tucking them in further. The soft cushion and dim room conspired to make me sleepy. “What do you mean—they were all born on the Day of Descent?”
“Not born—transformed. They were . . . artificial intelligences. Super brains, massive devices that filled rooms, and operated on the principles of physics. They ruled countries in lieu of kings.” An odd, wistful look came over him.
“Their bodies were incapable of motion. But their minds spanned continents.”
I yawned, nestling deeper in the chair. “So, if you change the world back . . . then what? No more spells? Seems to me, being an unbeatable magical genius isn’t so bad. Merulo, you cast more incantations in a day than most people do in a lifetime. Why crave a world where you’d be ordinary?”
The thin man sagged and returned to his seat. “Is that all there is to me, then? My power?”
“No, obviously you have that big ol’ brain.” I closed my eyes experimentally, leaning back in my chair. “I reckon you could become the genius of anti-magic instead. That sounds about right.”
The sorcerer huffed, not sounding entirely displeased.
“So long as we’re sharing . . .” I sank further into the cushions, my senses muddled by comfort. “What’s with the eye?”
“What do you mean, what’s with the eye?”
“Ssnot in there.” I yawned.
“Are you asking me how I came to lose my eye?”
I grunted in confirmation.
“I . . .” He sighed. “I removed it myself. To better control my constructs. And so that it might be used in a spell.”
“Hmmm,” I said. “Ahmm.”
“Are you even listening to me? Are you even awake?” The sorcerer gave another heaving sigh. Then came the whisper of turning pages as he resumed reading.
It is possible, at some point after, that I fell asleep.
When I woke, morning light fell through the thin library windows, and someone had draped the blanket from my cot over me.