Retreat
25
“Hmm,” Bernie said, looking over Emily’s shoulder at the lifeless panorama that was the Daggett farm in February—beautiful in a stark sort of way, but mainly stark. Rain fell in a desultory fashion from the mottled-gray sky. “Why don’t you let me turn your rocking chair around? View’s a bit of a downer, if you hadn’t noticed.”
“Perfectly illustrates how I feel,” she said.
“Ah, come on—you’re out of the hospital.”
“For all the good it does me.”
Bernie pulled up another chair and sat beside her. “You just need to take it easy for a while.”
“I’m thoroughly sick of taking it easy,” she snapped, then instantly regretted venting her anger and unhappiness on him. Bernie had never let her down. “I’m sorry. I hate just sitting here, and ...” She thought of telling him both reasons her life was unraveling but settled on one. “And I won’t have a job to go back to when I’m better.”
“They’re not going to blame you for getting stabbed!”
She shook her head. “That’s not it. I never finished any new research, never got better than adequate at lecturing—I let myself get completely distracted by magic. And it’s just a one-year contract. The only other offers I got last year were piecework—four courses spread across four colleges—and you can’t live on that.”
“Well ... there’s always high school history.”
She sighed the deepest of sighs. She’d been attracted to academic life by the prospect of researching, not teaching, and there wasn’t even the pretense of the former in high school. But what else could she do now?
“Something will turn up,” Bernie said, patting her on the shoulder. “Besides, this isn’t the time to worry about what to do with the rest of your life. This is the time to wallow decadently in the joy of having a life to live.”
Good advice she doubted she could take. Besides all the quite reasonable emotions battering her right now, she also felt irrationally put out. Fantasy characters did not push through the final battle only to discover afterward that nothing had been nicely wrapped up, damn it.
Bernie cleared his throat.
“Sorry,” she muttered, “I’ve moved past joy to the why-the-heck-do-I-still-hurt phase of recovery.”
Her body felt no worse than it had three days ago, but three days ago she still had the counterbalancing expectation that everything would work out with —
“Hartgrave,” Bernie said.
She sucked in a startled breath. “Sorry, what did you say?”
He grimaced. “That you’re in nearly as bad a mood as Hartgrave. I know it’s none of my business, but have you broken it off?”
Well, she had known the question would come at some point. She nodded, a sick feeling in the pit of her stomach at the thought of all the follow-ups.
“Ah,” he said.
What, that was it? She stole a glance at him. “Lose the pool, did you?”
“Betting on hurt feelings—what kind of reprobate do you take me for?”
She snorted.
Bernie shifted in his seat, grin slipping. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“God, no.”
He looked relieved. The man was always on firmer footing when the subject wasn’t serious.
“So ...” She searched for a topic guaranteed to provoke his sense of humor. “How are the new students?”
After Bernie left, her mother sat with her for a while, chatting about this and that. Then her father took a turn—with cookies.
This time, he didn’t have to resort to hmm -ing. She unloaded everything on him before he even asked, starting with the day she found Hartgrave’s room and ending with their fraught farewell.
He listened to it all, including just how much danger he and her mother had been in, without interrupting once. When she finally finished, he issued an admirably restrained, “Well.” After a few seconds he added, “How do you feel?”
“Angry.” She didn’t have to ponder that point for even one second.
He nodded. “But at whom?”
The fact that he asked told her he already knew the answer. Knew it by the way she’d told the story. “Me, mostly.”
He put a ginger snap in her hands. “Why not Hartgrave? A convenient outlet for fury, and possibly also the right one.”
“I do blame him for everything that’s properly his fault, but so much of what happened was my doing,” she said. “Dad—I’ve been incredibly selfish. Ever since I saw him flying in that room, I trampled all over him in the interest of getting what I wanted. It’s a wonder he ever fell in love with me.”
Her father’s smile suggested he thought this overstated her errors and understated her appeal, but he hadn’t been there. The nearly fatal adventure, the failed romance and the ruined career were a direct result of her decision to force her way into Hartgrave’s life. And for what? To pursue an unresolved childhood obsession. What terrible things might she have done had she been in his position, an autodidact recruited by Kincaid?
She shivered. But as she tried to imagine it, she knew—as much as she knew anything about herself—that Kincaid could never have persuaded her to kill an innocent person. The thought of killing even in justified self-defense had filled her with a creeping horror .
She wasn’t nearly as good as she’d given herself credit for, but there was—thank God—a difference between her failings and the utter disregard for individual lives that made the Organization possible.
How could Hartgrave have done it?
A rap on the door interrupted this terrible thought. “Hang on,” her father said and went to see who it was.
Willi.
“Hallo,” he said, giving her a level glance as he settled into the seat her father vacated. He looked better. Neater. “How can I help you?”
More direct than Bernie, though Bernie’s intent was obviously the same. She could see her future: Emily the Project.
“I’m all right,” she said. “Mostly. Okay, somewhat. But I have to get back to all right on my own.”
Willi’s furrowed brow told her what he thought of that. “I at least could talk to you. What would you like to hear about?”
In all honesty—Hartgrave. Willi could certainly tell her things about him that she didn’t know, tempting and dismaying in equal measure. She shouldn’t want to know more. She needed to turn Hartgrave into a faded memory that no longer hurt, rather than one as intense as standing on the sun.
She settled on a topic a degree shy of him. “What’s happening with the Organization? Is it feasible to dismantle it?”
Willi sighed. “I begin to doubt. We would like the technicians to be working directly for the microchip companies, but even if this could be managed, we need some way of”—he made a frustrated motion with his hand—“containing bad convincers.”
“So you find yourself needing to come up with the alternative Kincaid claimed was impossible,” she murmured.
His face clouded at this mention of the man, but he inclined his head. “True.”
“Are you going to train some convincers? Recruit people for a Stop Doing That Squad?”
“But what do we do with a very bad guy—that is the problem.”
Right. A fight to the death was a terrible idea. And a holding cell wouldn’t hold a magic user for long, even one less talented than Kincaid. “Any luck?”
“No. Not yet. I am no good at inventing spells and Bernie is not either, so it will be up to—”
He stopped as if he understood her desire to press Hartgrave from her head. But not saying the name made it echo even more.
Well. Pigheadedness helped get her into this mess, and it could get her out. She would just think of something else, and she would keep thinking of something else until it worked.
The containment problem wasn’t ideal, involving Hartgrave as it did, but it was close at hand, so she started there. Magic that didn’t dissipate with time or quickly fail under attack—that was what the situation called for. Developing such a thing would have to be enormously difficult. It would take an entirely new sort of magic.
Or ... old .
“The room in the Inferno,” she said, something stirring in her stomach that wasn’t anger or misery. “What about that? Could it be duplicated?”
Willi shrugged. “We have never managed it. We did try for quite a while after ... after I moved to here.”
After his wife was killed. After the Organization murdered who knew how many autodidacts. The damage Kincaid did, not only to lives but also to magical knowledge ...
But something must have happened before him. Otherwise, he would have been up against a thriving community of magic-users who couldn’t so easily be picked off. Maybe the witch hunts really did get witches? Maybe there were talented spellcasters in the nineteenth century, when the Inferno was built, but not (for some reason) in the twentieth and twenty-first?
She pursed her lips. She wanted to know, the men needed to learn how the Inferno spells had been cast and she might get answers to both by going after the same target.
“Willi,” she said, getting up unsteadily, careful of her foot in its protective boot. “Would you take me to Ashburn?”
He jumped to his feet to give her a hand, a priceless expression on his face. “What? Why?”
“To find out who designed the humanities building.”
He argued and wheedled and insisted she needed rest, but in the end, he gave in. He of all people knew the value of distraction.
. . . . .
Ashburn College, barely useful for historical research, proved an excellent source of information about Ashburn College. Within half an hour, she had the blueprints for the humanities building in hand.
They showed no room branching off from the main expanse of basement, but she had hardly thought they would. She found the detail she wanted in the lower right-hand corner, above the 1890 date: C.W. Olsson, architect .
A thrill went down her spine before she could remind herself that architect and wizard didn’t have to be one and the same. A large academic building took scores of people to construct—it could have been any of them. Or none of them, if the room was added after the fact.
Never mind how it was done; just finding out who would be a long shot. Barring a miracle or fantastical coincidence, the inevitable end to this project was disappointment. If she intended to start living life as a cold-eyed realist, she ought to give up on the idea now.
She frowned at the blueprints.
Then she struggled to her feet, cane in hand, to start poking into the architect’s history.
Caspar Warwick Olsson—no wonder the man used his initials—proved a historian’s dream. He’d kept absurdly meticulous notes. The ones written during the period he worked on the humanities building, acquired by Ashburn after his death, filled three large diaries. With tiny handwriting.
She couldn’t take the diaries home, and she tired after a few hours away from the comforts of the farm, so it took her several weeks to get through the first two volumes.
By then, she had an intimate understanding of Olsson’s dietary habits thanks to his entries detailing every meal he ate and the effect on his digestion. She’d expanded her repertoire of insults because he liked to gripe, particularly about the campus administrator overseeing the construction, a man named Vintner. And she’d discovered the reason for the Inferno’s corridor-only design: The eccentric college founder whose money bankrolled the building had the idea of a catacombs—though no one wanted to be entombed there when push came to shove, not even its creator.
Of magic, there was no hint.
Emily kept reading anyway, partly because she was curious how many new insults Olsson would dream up for the poor Vintner, but mostly because it felt good to be doing something. To be researching.
Deep into Olsson’s third journal, she hit what had to be the five hundredth reference to Vintner, who’d “requested yet another meeting in the hope (no doubt) of topping his prior best for unreasonable demands.” (Olsson speculated on what it could be this time: “Higher ceilings? Thinner walls? Limestone rather than quartzite? Construction begins in a month, the damnable fool.”)
Emily laughed out loud when she got to Olsson’s plans for lunch: cabbage and beans, “to make the appointment as unpleasant for him as it will be for me.”
Her amusement evaporated when she read the entry about that meeting .
My tormentor concluded by badgering me for half an hour—half an hour—about the underground level. Did the corridors have to crisscross the entirety? Was there no space for any other use? I admit the design is a vexatious waste, but he knows as well as I that one cannot reason with a man possessed of more wealth than sense. Half an hour! Why is he so fixated?
She sped through the diary after that, heart fluttering, looking for more mentions of Vintner or basements or fixations. When she finally found one, it was uncharacteristically terse:
Spoke at length to V. Despite my inclinations, I fear I am—no, I know I am swayed.
The following sentences were blacked out, apparently by the same fountain pen that had written them. The pages immediately afterward were ripped out, nothing but jagged stubs remaining.
And thus ended the journal.
She jumped to her good foot so quickly in search of something, anything on this Vintner that her cane toppled with an echoing crash.
If Valerian Vintner kept a diary, however, he did not will it to the institution that had employed him as head of administration and facilities. She found a number of references to him as a founding staff member, but nothing suggesting a sideline in the supernatural.
When Bernie appeared at three o’clock to take her home, she handed her notes to him without comment.
“Holy shit,” he said under his breath. “Em, this is—you may have just found the first provable historical example of a convincer. Maybe the only provable one, considering how hard it is to sort magic fact from fiction.”
“I haven’t proved anything yet. Still, this guy has at least one surviving descendent ...” She handed over the Minnesota address she’d spent half an hour tracking down.
Bernie flashed his rogues-gallery grin. “Feel up to a field trip?”
She did indeed. Ten minutes later, they were standing on a porch outside Minneapolis as Vintner’s great-granddaughter—a seventy-something woman with flaming red hair—blinked at them in evident surprise.
“Well,” Mrs. Summers née Vintner said, “if you two are robbers trying to worm your way into my house, that’s the most creative opening I’ve ever heard. Come on in and get warm. I don’t have anything worth stealing, anyway.”
“Thank you,” Emily said, laughing and hobbling over the threshold. “But we really are researching his life. He’s an important figure in the early years of the college.”
Mrs. Summers closed the door behind them. “I have a photograph of him—would that help?”
“We’re hoping for information, actually,” Bernie said. “Details about his life.”
Her face fell. “Oh. I don’t know that I can be of much assistance, then. Too far removed, you see. He died before I was born, and I never heard any specifics about his Ashburn years. ”
“Perhaps he had personal papers we could read? We wouldn’t need to take them with us,” Emily said.
“You’d be welcome to look if I had anything, but I don’t,” said their host, who appeared genuinely sorry. “And I’m really the only one who would—we Vintners weren’t a fertile bunch. Great-granddad had one son, who had one son, who had me.”
Emily sighed, disappointment seeping into her marrow like freezing rain. “I don’t suppose any stories of him were passed down? Um, unusual hobbies or the like?”
Mrs. Summers screwed up her face and tapped her chin. “I think he liked croquet.”
They’d agreed not to talk about magic unless Mrs. Summers brought it up herself, but now Emily wondered whether to go for broke. They’d run out of other options. Hitting a dead end just as she’d been getting somewhere, a dead end on a journey with no apparent alternate routes, was worse than if she’d never stumbled upon Vintner at all.
She glanced at Bernie. He gave a tiny shake of the head.
“Well,” he said, “we do appreciate your time. Thank you anyway.”
“No, no, wait a moment.” Mrs. Summers tapped her chin again. “He had a little house near Ashburn where he slept during the week because my great-gran insisted on a farmhouse two hours away by horse. My grandfather kept it. There’s always the outside chance that when my father sold it after Granddad’s death, he left some things in the attic. ”
Emily emitted a squeak of badly suppressed excitement.
“Of course,” Mrs. Summers added, “that was more than fifty years ago now, so it’s an outside chance of an outside chance that anything would still be there.”
“Worth a shot.” Bernie pulled a notepad from his coat. “What’s the address?”
“Oh—what was it? Let me see ... Twenty-two something-or-other ... not Main, I remember turning off that road to get there ... Oh yes! Grand Avenue. Twenty-two Grand.”
Bernie frowned. “Hey, Em, isn’t that near the place you were renting?”
“No.” She pressed her fingers against her cane, feeling lightheaded enough to keel over. “No, that was the place I was renting.”
A few minutes later, she was full circle—standing in front of the tiny Cape Cod that six months and a lifetime ago she’d moved into.
She supposed it wasn’t the biggest coincidence in the world that she ended up in Vintner’s former home, considering their shared goal of living as close to Ashburn as possible for the least amount of money. Even so, she could hardly believe it.
“I guess this place was nice back in the day,” Bernie said, taking in the faded paint, the overgrown scrap of lawn and the ragged “For Rent” sign.
“That day was long ago.”
He laughed. “Shall we?”
They walked to the back yard, where no one would see them, and teleported in. Bernie looked around the empty kitchen, living room, laundry room, bathroom and bedroom, the extent of the house save for one exception.
“You’re sure you’ve never been up to the attic?” he asked.
“Certain.” She tugged at the trap door in the bedroom ceiling and found built-in steps that pulled down. “I didn’t even have enough stuff to fill up the one level. Here, take my cane—I think I can get up on my own.”
She stopped halfway up the steps, speechless at the sight.
“Well? Out of the way, Em,” Bernie said, sounding as impatient as a kid held back from birthday presents.
But he gaped just as she had when he poked his head through the hatchway. Then he let out a long whistle.
Every inch of floor space besides the spot where she stood was covered in boxes—piles of boxes reaching as high as the pitched roof.
. . . . .
Exhaustion and hunger eventually forced a retreat, both of them to their respective homes. But she returned the next day, slogging through the unfortunately unlabeled boxes with her one good hand, her still-healing foot propped up with a pillow.
When Bernie popped in after his classes, she shook her head. “Still nothing. A whole lot of old clothes and toys. ”
“It occurred to me that he might have stored something in the Inferno itself,” he said. “Lots of old boxes there, too—”
“Oh! That’s true!”
But it was his turn to shake his head. “I looked through them all. Nothing but old campus-related paperwork.”
She grimaced. So this was it. If none of the boxes belonged to Vintner, she had no idea where to go next. In more ways than one—her Inferno research was all she had at the moment, and though her physical recovery was coming along nicely, the emotional one was still mired in first gear.
When she wasn’t dreaming of the battle, she dreamt of Hartgrave. Saw him in every bald passerby. Was constantly reminded of him by everyday life.
And she wondered all sorts of pointless things. How many people he’d killed. What caused him to see the light. What he would have been like if Kincaid had never found him.
As she shifted another box, she thought suddenly of the wizard Hartgrave had knocked out—the man whose injuries were partially her fault in a legal and moral sense.
She winced. “Have you met a wizard named Jack?”
Bernie looked up from the box he was re-taping shut. “Jack Stearne? Ex-Organization man?”
“Yes,” she said. “Yes,” she repeated, trying not to think of what the nurses had said—when she came in for her head injury—about the difference between a blackout of less than sixty seconds and one lasting a quarter of an hour. “Is he all right?”
“Seems fine to me,” he said, shooting her a perplexed look.
“Are you sure? He, uh, got knocked out when—well, you know when. And he was unconscious for about fifteen minutes.”
Bernie’s face cleared. “Oh! No, he wasn’t.”
“Yes, he was.” She frowned. “Who was there, you or me?”
“He was there. He says he quickly came to, and—ah—certain convincers suggested the best thing for a man in his position was pretending to be out cold, thus getting no further attention from said convincers or later blame from Organization leaders.”
She felt nearly as relieved as she had when first able to recategorize the wizard from dead to alive. One fewer item on her list of things to be ashamed about. And one less wrongdoing to heap at Hartgrave’s doorstep, though it wasn’t as if that shifted the balance of his deeds in a substantial way.
She sighed, closed the wine box she’d finished checking and moved it out of the way. Just beyond, at the bottom of a stack of plain brown boxes, was a battered trunk—the first thing she’d seen here that wasn’t made of or stored in cardboard.
“Hey,” she said, “this looks promising.”
Bernie, at the other end of the attic, wasted no time by picking his way around the boxes they hadn’t already moved downstairs. He materialized beside her and shifted the boxes stacked on the trunk so they could try opening it.
Locked. Naturally.
She glared at the thing. “Can you convince it open?”
He shrugged, a dubious twist to his lips. “I could try, but I’ve never been taught.”
“Maybe the key’s in another box.” She reached out to examine the old lock. “It seems only appro—oh!”
She jerked back out of sheer surprise.
“What? Are you hurt?”
“No.” She wrapped her fingers around the metal a second time, the vibrations faint but unmistakable.
The lock came apart. She held it up for Bernie to see.
“Jackpot,” he murmured.
Together, they lifted the lid.