35. Summoning
Chapter 35
Summoning
For the days that followed, the hours passed quickly at Victor’s side. I accompanied him in his herbal chemistry—the compounding of various mixtures and tinctures, some medicinal and some for sorcery alone, which were best prepared with the sun in its present sign of Aquarius and beneath the waxing moon—and at his command I indulged in the enjoyment of reading, the close air of his library thick with the earthy-sweet tang of old books, as he searched his shelves of dusty codexes and calfskin scrolls for historical accounts of dual banishment spells.
Again after breakfast I descended his cold stone stairway as he had bid me, the lingering chill of the upper world and its February fog vanishing with every downward step into the closer, warmer air of the underground. There was no class that day, and a fiendishly grinning Absolon (surely remembering the success of his past trickery) led me back to the library. There I found Victor much as I had left him, amid the teeming shelves and crooked piles of books, yet this time there was a look of triumph in his eyes: he raised his head from the decayed old tome he held in his hands, then set the battered volume down carefully on the bookstand beside him.
“You found it, sir, didn’t you? The description of the spell, I mean.” I watched as he nodded and leaned slightly forward in his upholstered leather chair, observing me with intent. A good thing, I thought, that I routinely wore my black shawl when I was with him: foolish though it might have been, that knot of fabric over my chest—positioned just so, tied rather casually in hopes of looking less like the contrivance it was—assuaged somewhat my horror of him discerning the shape of the Talisman through the layers of my clothes. “Good morning,” I added, nearly as an afterthought.
Behind me, I heard Absolon's departing footsteps. The door of the library creaked shut and locked into place.
“In a medieval French grimoire,” Victor replied, “shortly after you departed for the evening. A rather incomplete description of the experiment, but nonetheless of marginal interest.” He paused, then added in a subtly wry tone: “Good morning.”
I allowed a small, tight smile at his gentle mockery. He seemed to be in what was for him a milder mood, which I took as an auspicious sign: it halfway soothed that faint shiver of trepidation I felt now every time a locking door rendered us alone with each other again.
“Come closer, Elizabeth.”
Were I to buy myself a moment of time, I could quell the quickening of my blood before I approached. “You seem to be watching me particularly closely sir, if I may say so.”
“You seem particularly yourself.”
Knowing well what must come next, I crossed the overlapping rugs with their bold, angular patterns, drawing near to the rolled armrest of Victor’s chair; though I carried the scorpion cane with me still, I used it little now. Scarcely had I closed my eyes before I felt the warm pressure of his first two fingers against my throat once again.
“I was right,” he said, his voice low and yet tense, fraught with something that must have been elation—so rarely had I sensed such an emotion in him, or noted it in the tone of his voice, I nearly failed to recognize it at all. I heard him draw and release a long, deep breath; I felt his fingers grow gentler and shift with the rise and fall of his broad chest. “I was right. You are yourself.”
“Do you mean I’m cured, sir?”
“Some trace of my shadow yet—only to be expected—but beyond that, yes. Yes. Entirely so.”
A deep warmth of relief spread through me, and as I sighed, I touched his hand that touched my throat. I could not help it—the instinct was so pure, it nearly seared my hardened heart; I could not stop myself—not until I had already brushed the ridges of his scars with my fingertips, felt the heat of his skin.
But as my eyes flew open I forced myself, fought myself; I drew away before my fingers could close around his, leaving him with a ghost of a touch and my guilty hand hanging awkwardly at my side.
“I—I ought to give you back your walking-stick then.” Despite my initial stutter, I thought this an adequate recovery and distraction—or, if nothing else, some way to momentarily occupy my hands. “Thank you, sir.” I gripped the scorpion cane, too tightly, in both hands as I held it out to him. “Thank you. For everything.”
His right hand closed around it, and as I let it go, I took one soft step back.
I should have kissed him.
The notion flashed through me like a radiant shock of lightning.
Had I seized the bounty of the moment—had I allowed myself to feel , to feel entirely, as always he had instructed me to do—were he not masked in that cold steel—were it not for my vow of celibacy, for my vow of revenge; those paired, self-forged manacles of restraint and abstract justice that held me from my heart, binding and denying a desire that grew in their despite—a love that ought to have been lawless and free?—
But the moment passed. Time ran on. And time was ever Victor’s greatest foe.
Already he had taken the cane from me, hefting it in his hand with an amused half-familiarity: I did not know whether he sincerely contemplated the sense of it, as if my long use of it had made it feel now to him as much mine as his own; or whether he made much of it to lightly tease me, playing along with my fiction of disregarding that rogue caress.
He set the end of the cane down on the floor, leaning its silver scorpion pommel on his upper leg; I looked away, as if the old French grimoire on the bookstand beside him interested me. I was reminded too keenly of the night of his return, when his hands held mine against his strong thighs.
And I was reminded once again of the moment, just now, that I had lost.
“Your recovery being complete,” he looked up at me where I stood beside his chair, “you are, of course, free to depart if you so wish. But, if you prefer?—”
“If I’m well now, sir,” I interrupted, “I would prefer to take advantage of my robust good health, and practice some aspect of Gremio’s banishment that I could not have managed during my convalescence.”
“Good!” Victor chuckled as he rose to his feet, a vast black shadow beside me. The old grimoire exhaled a breath of dust as he closed its cover, leaning the scorpion cane against the stand where it rested. “I mean to instruct you in practical banishment, while that mule-face continues to lick his wounds in some infernal hiding-hole. Come with me to my parlor.”
“The room where Balnock entered, sir?”
Something about me had emboldened him: my recovery, perhaps, or my choice again to stay rather than depart. There was a brash glint in Victor’s eyes as he considered me with a slight cock of his head. “Now that you are strong again, and understand the principles of magia evocatoria , I think it is high time that you and I entertained your first…” He allowed the sentence to trail off, gathering anticipation, and behind his steel mask I was certain I sensed a sardonic smile. “…Invited guest.”
We left the library, walking down his flickering hallway to the room with the stone gargoyle leaning down over the lintel; it grinned at any who dared trespass beneath its grotesque form with what always struck me as a smug kind of malice. The door was still marked with the symbol Victor had traced on it with his finger so many days ago: a simple, almost crude sign of protection drawn in powdered iron and spirit ash.
He opened the door not with his sorcery, but with a key and his own hand. I wondered if there were some practical purpose to that, or if it simply entertained him to enter his parlor , as he called it, as would a mundane mortal man.
The room was as stark and dark as I remembered it, minimally furnished almost precisely as I recalled: a conversational grouping of two old upholstered chairs, their style considerably out of fashion, on either side of a low table crowned with a simple hurricane lamp. Victor lighted the oil wick at distance—I felt that single pulse of his art through me once again—and then shut the door behind us, blotting out the candlelight from the hallway and altering the angle of our shadows.
There was only one change I noted, and that was that the rolled rug I once saw slumped in the corner now was spread across the stone floor. Victor had, I supposed, visited this room between then and now.
Victor, or—my mind turned to grim imaginings, inspired by the eerie darkness—some other manner of entity, whose name I did not know.
“This room, Elizabeth, is not as closely protected as the rest of my hall. Understand that I do not say this to frighten you—only to remind you of its purpose and design. The sundered worlds are here within closer reach of one another. The veil is thinne r, as some would say.”
“Some degree of inherent risk, then.”
“Precisely. But I would not have brought you here if I did not think you ready, or if I did not presume the hour to be to our advantage.”
“I suppose I did not expect a room in which one consorts with the spirits of the other world to look so… unadorned, sir. Rather ordinary, in a sense.”
“By design,” he replied, some amusement in his voice. “Fewer distractions, for one thing. Ostensibly inviting, and yet with little for a disprite to willfully misinterpret, or turn against the summoner, or use as a weapon. And nothing to cause one to expect my subservience.”
I nodded, watching the lone flame in the hurricane glass—the only light in the room—as I walked with him to the center of the circular, fringed carpet. The choice of glass for the lamp intrigued me, and I thought to ask him why this was the only room (of those few I had seen) in which the light required protection from the elements, but the answer came to me before I spoke: I thought of those whirling winds , as Victor had once called them, that presage the arrival of the uncanny .
An eerie sensation crept over me. A faint, cold sweat. Of all things, it was a simple hurricane glass that made me shudder—that made it all real.
“Then we will summon a disprite,” I made myself sound confident, not wanting him to feel my trepidation, “and banish it?”
It seemed somewhat cruel, I thought—to call a thing only to cast it away, perhaps barring it from this world for years to come—but I said nothing, waiting for him to explain.
“Correct. A compliant one, for the first: one of the several disprites who are in my debt, owing me favors in return for my past assistance, and who are agreeable to the notion of being summoned and banished—for a days only—at my will, as a part of their repayment to me. As your skill and confidence grow, we will progress to drawing in rather less congenial entities,” his eyes and his steel mask flickered in the light of the oil lamp, “and you will exact your art of banishment on those for as lengthy a duration as you are able to enforce.
“But for now,” he continued, “the question I once asked you, when first you summoned me : should the circle go around you, or around the spirit you mean to evoke? Or, given that you summoned my phantom at the oak tree at least as successfully without, do you mean to employ a circle at all? I remind you that the circle I taught you yesterday for magia intrinseca is not by its nature designed for summoning—but that does not preclude its modification.”
“You used it as such, sir, didn’t you? When you traced a version of it on the ground at the park, and called for the will o’ the wisp?”
“In a sense. To be precise, I used a version of the same circle to herald myself: to proclaim to the other world my identity and power before stating my desire.”
“Then I should like to do the same.”
Victor paused, and I felt him watching me in the darkness. “As much as I abhor to curb your natural audacity,” he said slowly, “it may be for the better, for now, that you did not so explicitly declare yourself in this room. Not yet.”
“All right. I think I should rather not cast a circle, then,” I replied after some thought, “given that, as I remember it, my second summoning of you—the one by the oak tree, as you mentioned—felt to me more certain, more powerful, more effortless than the first.”
“Very well. Given the character of your summoning technique, this is for you both a wise and well-suited choice. Now then,” he continued, “all that is left is the inherent challenge of the first summoning via magia intrinseca —the accurate creation in the mind of a new sensation, when the memory is without the advantage of prior experience. Other than water, Elizabeth, which of the four elemental sensations can you most readily re-create, both in mind and in body?”
“Fire, sir, or so I believe. I don’t imagine you’d be surprised.”
“I am not.”
Immediately I regretted that I had said any more than fire alone. The rest was extraneous, foolish, too familiar; it recalled into his voice that hinted warmth that haunted me with doubt, the terrible intimacy of his subtle humor.
“And as such,” he went on, “I had anticipated that your first summoned spirit (other than my own phantom) would likely be a particular old rival of mine—one who, to his credit, later proved himself an ally against a mutual enemy. Every seven years he is allowed a single season in the fiery City of Erebus, reuniting with his doomed beloved; he goes most often by the name of Fortunato Romero de Velasco when he is cast out for another seven years to walk the earth.”
“Is Mr. Velasco a demon , sir, such as some call those disprites of the deep earth? Or is he rather a ghost, and was once a mortal man?”
“Call him Fortunato or Fortunatus , in the old tradition of sorcerers preferring auspicious names. As for your question,” the sound of Victor’s low, foreboding chuckle echoed from the bare stone walls, “some combination of the two is likely closest to the truth. Some manner of disprite—I am not entirely certain he could tell you the particulars himself. But my purpose in selecting him for you is this: the sense of his shadow is not entirely dissimilar to that of my own, and yet, with little of my water aspect, he feels more exclusively of fire.”
“And so I ought to create in myself something like the feeling of you and of fire at once.”
“Correct.”
“What does he look like?”
“He follows the style of the times, yet for your initial summoning I suggest to imagine him as he was long ago: a man of perhaps thirty some years, dark and somewhat tall, clad all in black in the style of Old Spain; his doublet is cut fashionably slim, his codpiece rather presumptuous; he wears a sword at his hip, and when he first notices me, expect also an insolent curl at the corner of his lip. And while you did not ask after his scent, I will tell you that he has taken to wearing fine colognes to mask a faint air of brimstone.”
“Then I mean to create such a man with my senses, say his name thrice, will him into presence, and speak to him as if he already stands before me—over there near the chairs, to one side of the lamp. Is that correct, sir?”
“Quite. When you feel that the moment has come,” he stepped nearer to me, standing closely at my side, “you may begin.”
It all seemed so simple—so simple I could scarcely understand why some of his students were so insistent upon elaborate rite and ritual. I gazed into the edge of the halo of light from the hurricane lamp that had disturbed me so, feeling my hand curl with conviction into a loose fist at my side.
And then I began.
“Fortunato.”
It was no challenge to recall the sensation of Victor, and least of all here, in his lair and at his side; Victor was nearly all I could feel, his shadow soaking through my skin and filling my every breath—but this time, I made myself feel him only as fire: the dark inferno of his eyes—the flames that burst around us when I summoned his phantom into my chamber—the looming silhouette wreathed in firelight before the Hellmouth hearth—the dry heat blasting the skin of my hand?—
“Fortunato.”
I thought that I felt Victor tense beside me, but my will was fixed too firmly to be turned aside now, and I closed my eyes as in my mind I made the man he had described, neglecting none of his words, finding that those details which Victor had not specified arose into being on their own: Fortunato’s sword hilt was polished to a silver sheen, his bearing aristocratic, his short black cape trimmed in rich fur.
“Fortunato. You stand before me.”
A ghostly redolence of cologne spread through the still air of Victor’s parlor, though I sensed the acrid bite of brimstone almost as clearly, and as the seconds passed, it seemed that sulfurous scent grew steadily the stronger.
My mind’s eye faltered. The sensation of fire failed.
“ Ponente! ” I heard Victor bellow, his thundering voice shuddering in the naked stone of the walls; my eyes flew open at once, but before they could search for Fortunato in the dim glow of the lone oil lamp I felt Victor seize me with his left arm and crush me against him, entrapping me, holding me helplessly against his hard body.
“ Tramontana! ”
I struggled in his grasp; how could I not? He had caught me unaware, taken advantage of my concentration and my half-insensibility to the world without; my breasts were pressed against the side of his muscular chest, and all I could think was that he could feel the Talisman against his flesh, the foolish knot of my shawl not near enough to save me now—I had to fight against him to turn my body, even just a little bit, but now his right hand caught hold of my shoulder?—
“ Levante! ”
His overmastering grip relented, just enough for me to shift a little, not nearly enough to let me go. Despite the fabric of my dress and underclothes I felt the scabbard of his dark dagger press against the inside of my thigh, he held me so close; if he meant now to try violence against me I knew I needed only to reach down, to draw his blade before he could— but it felt too much like Crystal Palace Park, when he held me fast against him in the face of danger, casting a circle around us both?—
“ Mezzogiorno! ”
Then I Saw faintly the moon-pale ring of his faerie fire surrounding us, the rising darkness of spectral smoke—and as the smoke twisted in a sudden rush of swirling wind, impossible here in the underground, I watched the steady flame of the hurricane lamp in its glass shield, and at last I understood.
In a moment, the supernatural stirring of the air died down. Victor’s vast black cloak settled around me as I gave up my vain strife and grew still, my hand pressed instinctively against the black robes over his broad chest as my heartbeat throbbed in my head, matching in quickening, maddening time with the racing pulse beneath my palm.
Ponente , he had said first. He had begun with the West Wind.
Something was to the west. Before him. To my left.
Between us and the door.
Fortunato? I pressed the name into Victor’s mind, trying to still the panting of my breath, not daring to speak aloud.
I felt him shake his head. He held me so tightly that the deep, wordless growl that rumbled in his chest resonated through my flesh, into my bone.
Slowly, slowly I raised my head and looked to the west, toward the door.
I wish I had not gasped. I wish I had not allowed either of them the pleasure of knowing what manner of shock could stop my breath:
A white, mule-like head seemed to float before me in the darkness, illuminated by the sickly glow of its own milky eyes.
I sank my left canine tooth into my tongue, but the sharp pain could not awaken me from this living nightmare. And if this were no dream, no mirage of the mind in the heat of some burning fever, then it could only be?—
The ominous silence was broken by the hollow sound of hooves on stone.