Like I said, I don’t like snow—especially the supernatural kind.
13. FIMBULWINTER
PERSEPHONE HAZARD LIES FULLY CLAD ON TOP OF A MOTEL bed, with her eyes open, staring at the ceiling.
She does not appear to be breathing, but she is not dead. In fact, she is very much awake.
In her mind’s eye she is standing on an infinite gray plain, flat and dusty, that sweeps away towards a horizon beneath the utterly black sky above. She is wearing ritual vestments, a gown made to a pattern designed by Jeanne Robert Foster to the specifications of her magus; her hair is bound up with silver wire, and she holds a blunt-tipped knife with two notched ivory blades bound together by a band.
All this is immaterial, existing only within her imagination—but for a practitioner of ritual magic, as opposed to a technician of computational demonology, the set dressing of the Cartesian theater is a matter of great importance. Ritual magic is unpredictable, and the civil service hates it because it relies on the unaccountable exercise of power by the dismally eccentric, if not un–house trained; nor does it work as reliably as numerology or cabbalism, let alone their infinitely more potent and reliable descendants, algorithmic imprecation and computational demonology. Its practitioners also tend to die young and horribly, of Krantzberg syndrome or something worse. But to a trained adept it delivers the power to make a reality from the field of dreams and visions.
The plain she stands on—again, imaginary—is the raw material with which she works. It is also a meeting place, for minds and other things.
Persephone kneels and begins to inscribe symbols on the featureless landscape with the tip of her ritual object. Where it touches the ground it leaves a glowing trail like a line of red LEDs in the dust. She writes rapidly, in a formal dialect of Old Enochian. The featureless plain provides syntax completion and automatic indentation: as she scribes, some of the words change shape and hue subtly. (There are many (many (nested)) parentheses: ritual magic, realtime spell-casting, hasn’t been the same since John McCarthy.)
Finally she completes her—spell? theorem?—and watches as a violet border forms around it, shrinking until the words are wrapped in a fist-sized knot of metaphor. It begins to rise, pulling free of the landscape, forming a glowing sphere. “Go,” she tells it. It slowly drifts away from her face, until after a meter it stops abruptly and rebounds sideways.
Below it, the featureless ground begins to glow, forming first the yellow outline of a wall, and then an open doorway.
Thaumotaxis: the attraction of magical power. Persephone has constructed a tool that will map the energy gradients around her and sketch yellow contours across the infinite plain, building up a map. If Fimbulwinter is indeed on the way, or if Schiller is preparing a rite of power, the solar glare of the ground will show her which directions to avoid. The map, growing in her mind’s eye, will take some hours to mature. But there’s nothing like knowing the ground you’re fighting over better than your enemy…
She can’t return to the real world while the spider is spinning the first iteration of its map-web. It’s going to take quite some time. She rises to her feet and stretches; then, reluctantly, she raises one leg and pinches the blister plaster on the back of her heel between two sharp fingernails.
***Johnny. Sitrep.***
He’s lying on his back in a dark space that stinks of mildew and neglect: an underfloor space, or a tomb, perhaps. It’s bitterly cold but he’s swaddled up in a bivvy bag, like a moth in a cocoon.
***Duchess? Where are you?***
***I’m in the Other Place, working on a map. My body is secure and I’m with Howard. Sitrep.***
***They jumped me as I checked on safe house three. We’ve been tracked—***
***I know. Howard took down two of them.***
She feels Johnny’s flicker of surprise.
***Eh? Well, they sent a brick to tackle me. I showed ’em a clean pair of heels and pocketed two. Found a suitable venue and unpacked them and they lit up on me, so I nailed one with Soulsucker and KO’d the less crazy motherfucker. Then laughing boy and me had a nice long chat.***
His mood is grim.
***I told you I had a bad feeling about this?***
Persephone waits. Finally he continues.
***The cops from Pinecrest, they’re all possessed. All of them. And the hosts are, they’re…they’re like that time in Barcelona, Duchess, that hive we ran across. So I did the full smackdown take-me-to-your-leader thing and what do you know, he did. Full-on channeling. The usual all-your-souls-are-belong-to-me bullshit, at which time I terminated the interview, but. But. Their boss is close enough to dial in for a chat, know what I mean? Schiller’s almost certainly an elder of the old church, he recognized me that time in London, and he’s actually trying to set up one of the great summonings. It’s the only explanation that fits, and it does not fill me with joy and happiness. Oh, and before I forget, Patrick says to say ‘hi.’ He’s stringing for the Nazgûl who are having a spot of bother with Denver. I don’t know about you, but I reckon the shitter is about to blow up under us; I would strongly recommend wiping arse and leaving the bathroom with extreme prejudice.***
Patrick?
***What’s Patrick doing here?***
***He’s stringing for the Black Chamber, like I said. They’ve got their claws in deep—not his fault, by the way. We had a little misunderstanding over him tailing me but it’s all sorted now. He says the Nazgûl would be very grateful for any information we could give them about what the fuck is happening in Colorado because their own people can’t visit and the local affiliate offices are all compromised. Am I getting this across, Duchess? Because if not, I am really not very fucking happy about being here. This level of shit is above even your admittedly stratospheric pay grade, in my opinion—***
Persephone has heard enough.
***Agreed, and we’re leaving tomorrow. How mobile are you? What did you do with the cops?***
***I’ve got wheels. As for laughing boy, after his boss used him as a telephone there wasn’t a lot left. Nobody’s going to find them for a while.***
***Good. I want you to come round here at first light.*** She visualizes the motel’s location. ***You, Howard, and I are going to try to drive out. But it looks like Schiller’s put a cordon around us. If we can’t get out, I intend to go for the throat. I want to nail these bastards, Johnny.***
***Whoa, you’re taking it personal, Duchess?***
***You bet I am. But I’m going to be professional about it. See you first thing tomorrow morning.***
SIGNING OFF, SHE OPENS HER EYES TO SEE WHAT KIND OF web her thaumotropic spider has woven.
Beyond the threshold of her room—a yellow outline surrounding a rectangle of slate-gray emptiness—loop vast whorls and spires of sun-yellow energy. Denver itself is a valley, low and dark, but around it rise ramparts of power. A narrow cutting leads towards Colorado Springs, another valley cupped between high walls of compulsion, but near the edge of the city there rises one leg of a towering arch of light. A torrent of power roaring into the sky, coming out of nowhere and leaping out across the plain towards an answering pillar ten miles to the north. It’s so strong it’s right off the scale, a multiple reactor meltdown in the middle of the background field of ambient radiation.