In the last few weeks, I had discovered five groups who operated in the Greater Puget Sound area. One was a weekend wiccan gathering-housewives who sought to influence neighborhood politics and local weather patterns. Another was based out of an underground club in the Capitol Hill district, though it was more of a social organization held together by a mutual affection for rhythmic noise and power electronic music. The others were more rigidly structured-more of the sort that I was seeking, but they appeared to be traditional. Old rituals, older laws. Transgressive and experimental, they weren't. Kat's group, on the other hand, was probably a splinter, a secret cabal bored with the old rituals, who had gone off on their own. Very quietly, and very under the radar. Best to stay hidden in the sexually and morally repressed West, when you were practicing psychoanimism.
The muscles in my arms were jumpy, and the awkward position required by the handcuff ring wasn't making it any easier to relax. A pranayama breathing ritual would help oxygenate my blood and alleviate some of the exhaustion. Though, even with the tension release of the technique, my right knee was going to be stiff for some time.
An interrogator hadn't shown yet, leading me to believe they were going to let me sit awhile. I wasn't even sure if they were watching me. If a camera was hidden behind the ceiling tiles, it had escaped my notice. But there was no point in trying to ascertain if they were watching-there were things I could be doing with the downtime-internal things the camera couldn't see. I fell into the pranayama mantra, and my breathing found the rhythm quickly. The rest would come-the unwinding of my spine, the unlocking of my hips, the bleed-off of energy through my relaxed fingers. .
My mind drifted into the hazy realm of memory and premonition. I dozed, and the Chorus sighed, their voices fading to a tiny buzz of static. The physical world stretched into a transparent film over the surging grid of the urban energy flow. I stretched for the nearest conduit, and slipped into the vibrant ocean of etheric energy pulsating throughout the city.
A Hopi shaman had taught me how to read the geomantic grid of the world. We had spent a week exposed on a knob of bare rock high in the Arizona desert, drinking rainwater and eating peyote buttons. His body, black with pitch, was invisible to the moon, and he had drawn a pattern of stars on his face with orange and yellow paint. He wore a crown of eagle feathers and a necklace of mountain lion claws, and across his broad back he draped a ragged wolf pelt. After three days, when he stopped being a man, he showed me how to taste the earth, how to interpret the scents of the wind, and how to hear the sighing motion of the stars.
In return, I showed him the skein of energy that lay within. As within, as without, he said, they are mirror patterns. The currents of spiritual power flowed all over the world; they were the rivers of creation from which we came and to which we would return. The shaman, he said-the magus, the mystic-is a fish that breathes both air and water. He can traverse the spiritual currents like a ghost, and still walk the earth like a man.
Since then, I had stumbled across as many schools of magick as flavors at Baskin-Robbins, and the metaphysical rationale for each was as subjective and fleeting as the decision made when choosing a flavor of ice cream. The underlying Truths were like the secrets whispered by the cooks in the back room: there is always sugar and milk, everything else is just preservatives and chemical dyes.
Regional geographies, cultural mores, social histories, divine providences, and local soothsayers all play a part in how the energies of the world are understood. Some schools were filled with shallow spirituality; some were fiercely physical, filled with blood totems and sacrificial rites; some were tangled schemas of mental peregrinations reflected in word games played in dusty parlors. I found schools where simple rhymes sung by children while collecting water contained vibrations of the Word of God; others bound themselves to sequences of arcane gestures and complex physical gyrations like the inexplicable dances of back mountain Baptists and Moroccan fakirs.
In the end, they all reflected the same thing: the world was energy-humanity was energy-and the Universe was a self-perpetuating system. Magick was how we tried to comprehend the chaotic possibilities of creative energy.
I floated on the surface, an idle leaf in the flow, as the Chorus dipped silver ladles in the stream. The warm trickle of absorbed energy further eased the knot in my knee. The twitch in my wrists faded to a dull itch.
Nearby, a disturbance broke the surface of the flow like a fish jumping for a mayfly. A vibrating ball of light, the energy signal moved against the currents, approaching my point of perception. The police were sending someone to talk to me, someone who burned brighter than his surroundings. My interrogator was a magus.
I came out of my trance as the lock on the door clicked. The Chorus took a final sip from the stream, and I wound them down into the dark hole in my chest, hiding them beneath the layers of my meat. The door opened, and I rattled the handcuffs slightly as if the sound had startled me, but made no other effort to get up.
As anticipated, a single man entered the room. He wore a dark green suit with a tiny pattern woven in the fabric, little goldenrod points like seedpods bursting apart in the early summer. His shirt was crisp, and his tie was a melange of reds and violets-too random to suggest anything concrete, but regular enough to suggest machine generation. The Art Deco design of modern business accessories. Clean-shaven, manicured nails, expensive haircut that gave each follicle individual attention (as well as a tint like summer wheat), cuff links that glittered even in the decrepit light of the interrogation room: the package said "Upper Management."
He closed the door quietly, and examined me. Tiny violet pinholes in his pupils twinkled as if he had pricked himself with a straight pin. He was Seeing me, looking beyond the gross physicality of my shell. He was looking for mystical radiances, spirit glimmers, sigil echoes, and other signifiers of a magickal aptitude. His gaze lingered on the white braid about my throat; under close magickal examination, it would glitter, but just enough to seem like a weak bit of flash and not as a magus' focus.
Completing his initial assessment, my interrogator approached the table. He opened the thin manila folder he was carrying and glanced inside. "I'm glad you find this so amusing, Mr. Markham," he said in response to the ghost of a smile on my lips.
"Awkward and tedious, actually," I replied. I rattled the handcuffs a second time.
His eyes flickered toward the sound. "Well," he said, "I apologize for the inconvenience. Bureaucracy, you know. It's the paperwork that needs to be filled out when a veneficus publicly stamps his Will on the world. Fewer lies to fabricate when they keep to themselves."
"Veneficus? Is that the popular term now?" Poisonous, and a sorcerer. How quaint.
He closed the folder and tapped it against my outstretched legs. "You want to tell me what happened?"
"Not really."
A thin crease quirked the edges of his lips. The violet spark in his eyes flashed, and I felt the temperature of the room change. "Too much of a tough guy to talk to me?"
I shrugged, dismissing the shift in energy density. "It's not a question of talking; it's a question of trust."
"I am Lieutenant Pender of the Metropolitan Division, Seattle Police Department," he said, still maintaining the measured facade of Polite Cop, though sarcasm was beginning to creep around the edges. "We can go about this situation two ways: I can make this little nuisance disappear; or, I can drown you in a shitstorm of paperwork. It'll be a year before you can take a piss without filling out a form in triplicate. Your call."