Gooseberry Bluff Community College of Magic: The Thirteenth Rib (Kindle Serial) (12 page)

“It must be so strange,” said Joy. “The biggest thing in your field is the thing you can’t talk about.”

“We can talk about it. We actually talk a lot about the principles of demonology, but a lot of it is cautionary. But most of these people are looking to get a job in elemental work, lost objects, that sort of thing. Salamander boxes and wedding weather.”

“Did you ever…you know?”

Ingwiersen blinked and shook her head. “What?”

“Did you ever summon a demon?”

“I was in Special Forces, Conjuration Corps. But I can’t talk about that.”

“Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” It was a good thing Ingwiersen wasn’t a truth-teller like Gray, Joy thought.

“Listen, I really need to get over to the Stag library and then home. Are you coming along?”

“Yes, if you don’t mind.” Joy slung her purse over her shoulder. “You have plans for later, then?”

“No. I just have some…gardening to do.”

Ingwiersen was obviously lying, and obviously hiding some other things, but Joy didn’t think she was going to get any more out of her right now. She’d have to come up with another approach. She made small talk as they walked south, past the Farmer’s Market being slowly dismantled, and past the Stag College auditorium that marked the edge of the campus. The library was at the southernmost end of the quad, one story aboveground and three below.

Inside, Ingwiersen pointed her at the kiosk. “Just show them your Gooseberry Bluff ID and they’ll give you a visiting faculty pass. I’ll get you that list of textbooks next week, OK?”

“Thanks,” Joy said, but Ingwiersen had already darted inside.

At 1:13 p.m. that Saturday afternoon, Ken Song experienced the worst attack yet.

In a competitive magical duel there were always several things happening at once, several
objectives
, or, for scoring purposes, several categories. There were points for offense and points for defense, and there were points for style, which encompassed things like originality, precision, and speed. Master duelist T. F. Lockwood once referred to it as “Like a boxing match fought with poetry, adjudicated by figure skating judges.”

But she was speaking of regulation dueling, which was to the earnest, life-or-death reality as the game of euchre was to a knife fight. Pure magical duels had no referees and no rules, only basic and immutable principles, such as:

I. Dueling is, in essence, an exchange of energies between two opponents.

II. While energy can be shaped and used in various ways, its essential nature cannot be changed. In other words, there is no such thing as offensive or defensive magic, only energy that is used for offensive or defensive purposes.

III. It follows from the previous statement that a duelist can absorb an enemy’s offensive energy and exploit it for defensive purposes, or launch an assault that turns the enemy’s defense against them, or otherwise repurpose the magical energies in play.

In competitive dueling arenas the energies were illuminated, or at least simulated, so that spectators and officials could see who was doing what. The results were often spectacular light shows, with the duelists on platforms at either end, the lights lowered as green clashed with purple, silver with red.

Ken had toured on the professional circuit for eight and a half years. He still had dreams of electric-blue tendrils arcing out from him toward an unseen opponent, lattices of light surrounding him protectively, the lash of a golden whip snaking through and squeezing his lungs…

…that pain, though, had been nothing compared to what he felt at 1:13 p.m. He was watching one of the cable news channels when it happened, and the clock in the corner of the screen was all he could focus on as his insides burned. The pain was in his lower intestines; he would have thought his appendix had burst if it hadn’t come out decades before. And yet it was the same pain, which told him that they were striking at his memory, using the pain as an anchor to learn more about the college’s defenses.

Instead of flinching away from the pain, then, he focused on it, used his own energies to amplify it until his awareness dimmed to pain, more pain, and the clock shifting over from 1:13 p.m. to 82° F. He gritted his teeth so he couldn’t cry out, but a whimper escaped him. The invading presence in his mind tried to wriggle loose, to fix on some other memory, but Ken held fast to it, like a centurion clinging to the spear that had run him through. Then the spear dissolved and the presence with it. The pain faded. 1:14 p.m.

Ken was on his hands and knees, slick with perspiration. He had pissed himself and maybe worse; he shook his head, blinking back tears of shame. Victor the basset hound sniffed at his hair, licked him on the forehead. Ken hated it when the dog slobbered on him, but he could hardly move.

When he could stand he walked to the laundry room, stripped, and threw the clothes into the washer. Then he washed himself, a long, hot, soapy shower that erased some of his aches.

“I’m too damn old for this,” he whispered to the sky-blue tiles. Then: “Goddammit, Philip, you need to come home.”

He finished his shower and put on a nice blue shirt and linen pants while Victor watched. He was going to drink today but he wasn’t going to do it alone. A nice table down at Solera, a bottle of Don David, a plate of paella — no one could begrudge him that. The staff there loved Victor; they would fuss over him and feed him kitchen scraps. But when the two of them stepped out onto the porch, there was Philip, standing on the sidewalk outside his house.

Victor galloped over to him, and Philip squatted down to rub the old dog’s neck. Ken was slower to approach, relief and resentment still circling each other in his chest. He kept biting off things he had better not say.
Goddammit, Philip. This had better have been worth it. I could have died.

“Kango.” Ken’s given name was Kang-ho, but Philip’s lazy Midwestern enunciation never got it quite right. He was sunburned, and he wore a yellow polo shirt that Ken couldn’t remember having seen him wear in years.

“You should have told me you were home,” Ken said.

“I just got here.”

Ken allowed himself another moment to resent Philip; then he hugged him. “You were gone a long time this time,” he said. “Did you find what you were looking for?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t.”

Ken made an exasperated sound. “They hit pretty hard just before you got here. It felt a little like a desperation move; I hoped that meant that you had located them.”

“Are you all right?” Philip asked.

“I’m very tired,” said Ken. There was a pause, and Ken knew that Philip was thinking about whether or not he had been drinking. He mentally downgraded his bottle of Don David to a glass. “I was thinking about lunch. Solera?”

“Sure,” Philip said.

“By the way, your undercover girl came by my office asking about you. Edith was stonewalling her.”

“Of course she was. That’s what I pay her for.”

“This Wilkins, I don’t know if she’s up to it, Philip.”

“We’ll see,” said Philip. “I’d really rather not think about it until I eat something.”

Ken sighed. “OK. But you’re buying.”

“Don’t I always?”

They walked to the town square, two old men and one old dog. Ken was content to say nothing, just to have Philip next to him. He knew himself to be cranky and unreasonable much of the time, but it was always easy to appreciate Philip after he’d been worried about him for a while.

They walked north along Inspiration Avenue, then east down First to the town square, the sun warm on their backs. Philip seemed to be taking it all in, breathing deep of the warm evening air, turning to inspect every building along the way and every car that passed.

“You got scared, didn’t you?” Ken asked him.

“I
what
?”

“You seem to be…appreciating things more than usual. You had a close call, didn’t you?”

“Not really. Nothing to worry about. It’s just a lovely evening, isn’t it? Look at the river down there! It’s so…blue!”

Ken laughed, letting the relief take over. His eyes went moist, and he turned away to wipe them surreptitiously. “Yes, it is. I think we need to get some food in you.”

Solera had a table for them outside on the plaza. A bluegrass combo was playing at the bandstand in the center of the square; it wasn’t really Ken’s thing, but Philip kept bobbing his head to the fiddle. Victor lay sprawled out under the table, gnawing on a rib eye bone. Ken savored his wine, knowing he would have to make it last.

“This is wonderful,” said Philip, and Ken just shook his head and smiled. When the food arrived, Philip became even more animated, alternately wolfing it down and picking out chunks to inspect them. “Is this snail?” he asked at one point.

“I certainly hope so,” said Ken. “You’ve had it before.”

“Of course. Of course! It’s just, it’s been a while.”

Ken’s crystal rang, and he tapped it. “This is Ken,” he said.

“Kango, it’s Philip.”

Philip was washing down his paella with a glass of wine. He’d never displayed a talent for ventriloquism before.

“You’re with me right now, aren’t you?”

“Who is this?”

Philip — or whoever was on the other end of the call — sighed. “It’s me, Ken. It’s…this is going to take some explaining.”

The Philip across the table caught Ken’s eye and leaned forward. “That’s me calling, isn’t it?”

“What’s happening?” Ken asked.

“Ken, I found something,” said Philip through the crystal. “But the people here aren’t ready to trust me yet, so they sent someone back in my place.”

The Philip across the table picked up Ken’s wine and drank that down as well. “The fate of the universe depends upon your cooperation, Kango Song,” the false Philip said. “But first, let’s order some more of this paella.”

Ingrid Ingwiersen ducked behind some magazine racks near the front
of the Arthur Stag Memorial Library and waited for Joy Wilkins to get her
visiting faculty pass. Ingrid wasn’t so far gone that she didn’t realize she
was getting paranoid, but there was something off about Wilkins. She couldn’t
figure out if she was prying into Ingrid’s business specifically or if she was
just nosy, but Ingrid wanted to make sure that Joy was nowhere near the meeting
she was about to have.

When Wilkins entered, Ingrid stayed out of sight until she saw her
directed to the elevators. She moved to stand near the New Releases shelf until
she saw Joy get on an elevator going down. Then Ingrid moved swiftly toward the
back of the library, where the staircases were, and made her way down toward
the seventh subfloor.

Ingrid knew of at least four places she could purchase a nameless demon — illegally,
of course, but also theoretically, since she had no hope of raising the kind of
money that would require. So she was going to have to summon her own. But
before she did that, she needed to know which major demon she was looking for.

The difference between a nameless demon and a major demon was marked
enough that more than one scholar had argued that the terminology should be
changed entirely. Minor or nameless demons were little more than force without
will, coherent knots of energy that could be set in relentless motion with a
simple command. In war they could be devastating, but difficult to stop, as
with the raw and unfocused entities that had left Germany and Japan in ruins at
the end of World War II. Since then the subtleties of demon command had been
refined, but treaties outlawed their use in conventional warfare, and the trade
or conjuration of minor demons was highly restricted. In her classes Ingrid
taught the theory of demon use and its history, but in terms of actual
conjuration she covered the range from zephyrs to salamanders, basic weather
witchery, and little else. Those were the sorts of skills that could get
someone an honest job; if they were looking for a dishonest job, they’d have to
do some independent study.

A major demon was to a nameless demon what a human being was to a
wind-up toy. These were the creatures that the religions and folk traditions of
every culture warned of, beings of great power and trickery. If the Seoul
police were correct and the Heartstopper attacks were
meant to summon major demons, then there were as many as seven of them loose in
the world, presumably in hiding, gathering strength. Whoever was behind their
summoning had to be a little bit insane to go to the risk and expense that they
had.

During Ingrid’s service she had seen action in the siege of Sarajevo, where
the BPC’s Conjuration Corps had attempted to summon Count Furfur,
an Earl of Hell who was supposed to manifest in the shape of a giant winged
stag. Ingrid’s division had managed to put a stop to it, but not before 127
Bosnian prisoners of war were killed in the ritual. There was no shortage of
things that Ingrid had nightmares about, but Sarajevo was a particularly bad
one.

To bring a major demon onto the material plane required an equal number
of human souls and minor demons; the precise number depended upon the specific
demon. Demonic numbers, as they were called, were always prime,
and the demons they corresponded to were a closely guarded secret. The most
complete Infernal Index — the portentous title was from Aleister
Crowley, after the Catholic Church’s list of banned books — was a kept by the
United States government, accessible only to officials with a security
clearance of level three or higher.

Fortunately, Ingrid knew of such a person.

On the seventh sublevel of the Arthur Stag Memorial Library, next to
the locked room that held the college’s restricted demonology collection, was a secluded study room that Ingrid had
reserved the day before. Inside, seated at the wide blond-wood table, sat a
compactly built Asian woman wearing a green sleeveless top. Ingrid suppressed
the urge to salute and offered her hand instead; the woman rose and shook it
firmly.

“Thank you for coming,” Ingrid said.

“I’ve been here a while,” said Colonel Myrtle Vongsay
as she resumed her seat.

“I’m sorry,” Ingrid said. “I had another meeting that I had trouble
getting away from.”

“I don’t have a great deal of time, so let’s cut to the chase,” Myrtle
said. “I need to know why you want to look at the Index. Is this about revenge?
I know about your sister.”

“It’s not revenge, it’s…” Ingrid hesitated, knowing that Myrtle wasn’t
entirely wrong. But there was more to it. “I think I can bring her back,
Myrtle. I think her life force is caught up in whatever major demon the Heartstoppers summoned.”

“Nobody’s sure yet that that’s what’s going on,” Myrtle said.

“Bullshit.” Ingrid smiled. “You’re sure, aren’t you? But they won’t let
you do anything about it because that would mean bringing a major out into the
open. They’re afraid of a panic.”

Myrtle leaned forward. “Do you blame them? How do
you
expect to put down a major without collateral damage?”

“By being better than anyone else at handling demons,” Ingrid said. “I
know how to play by their rules. I guarantee you that not a single innocent
life will be lost.”

Myrtle shook her head. “You know, you look like absolute hell. When’s
the last time you slept? I should be dragging you into a psych ward, not
handing you national secrets.”

“I’m not crazy,” Ingrid said, “but I
am
very determined. I’ll get the information somewhere else if not
from you. I just thought that, considering what you owe me, I’d ask you first.”

“Ah, there it is. What I owe you.” Myrtle sat back in her chair. “Everything’s
a transaction with you, isn’t it? Is there a balance written down in a little
black book you keep somewhere? I could swear that you saved my life over there
just because you saw it as an investment.”

“I’ll never ask you for another favor after this one,” Ingrid said.

“Once again, Lieutenant, you manage to spectacularly miss the point.
But I wouldn’t want it said that I don’t pay my debts.” Myrtle pulled a perfect-bound
document out of her purse and set it on the table. “I’m going to hit the head. Here’s
some reading material for while I’m gone.”

As soon as she was gone Ingrid turned the document to face her. As she
touched it, text appeared on the blank cover.
Index of Known Class Two Infernal Entities
, it read;
Department of Defense
. Ingrid flipped
through to the main section, but the demons were listed by name, not number.

The DOD meant “Index” in the Church sense, but the document contained
multiple indexes for cross-referencing. Indexes within
indexes. Ingrid looked in the one for demonic numbers:

149 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . Prince Stolas

She flipped back to the page listed and found a rather absurd drawing of
a long-legged owl wearing a crown.

Prince Stolas
is a Great Prince of Hell commanding 25 or 26 legions of demons. It has
knowledge of astronomy, poisonous plants, herbs, and precious stones.
The
entry cited the
Pseudomonarchia
daemonum
and
the
Ars
Goetia
, the
first part of
The Lesser Key of Solomon
.
Ingrid scribbled down the pages and then, since Myrtle hadn’t returned, she
quickly paged back to the directory of demonic numbers to look up a few more.
She tucked away the notebook just as Myrtle returned.

“I hope you’re done with that,” Myrtle said.

“Sure, I’m done.” Ingrid slid it across the table. “Thanks.”

Myrtle remained standing as she returned the Index to her purse. “Don’t
thank me,” she said. “Just don’t get anybody killed. And
Ingrid?”

“Yes, sir?”

“That includes you, Ingrid.” Myrtle looked like she was about to say
more, but she lowered her eyes. “Good-bye, Ingrid.”

Ingrid waited until Myrtle had gone before she took the stairs back up
to the library entrance. The books she would need were either at home or in the
Gooseberry Bluff library; she needed concrete things now. She needed a place to
work. She couldn’t plan to summon and duel a major demon at the office, and she
couldn’t work in the same house as her sister’s ghost. She’d found a month-to-month
lease on a little house on the peninsula on the north side of town, and she was
planning to put down a deposit this afternoon.

Once she was outside in the sun, she grasped her crystal. “Glass House
Real Estate,” she whispered, but instead she got a ghost.

“Wilson? Is that you?” It was a woman’s voice; she spoke sharply and
impatiently.

“No, ma’am. Sorry, wrong number.”

“You tell Wilson that I need to talk to him. This is his mother, do you
understand me? You tell him I need to talk to him.”

“If I talk to someone named Wilson, I’ll let him know.”

“Don’t play coy with me, dammit! Are you
sleeping with him?”

“Jesus Christ. I have to go, ma’am.”

“Who is this? What’s your name? I’ve got—”

Ingrid broke the connection. It was tempting, when connected with a
ghost, to mess with them; to ask them to describe the room they were in, to ask
them what they were wearing, or even just to tell them flat out that they were
dead. But living with a ghost had made her more sympathetic, if not more
patient.

At least her sister had a body to go back to. Maybe.
If Ingrid could make this work.

She started to reach for the crystal again, but she stopped. She’d
broken into a sweat, and when she raised her hand to wipe her face she realized
that she was shaking. She hurried into the shade of a nearby maple and leaned
against it.

Maybe she shouldn’t be doing this alone. Maybe Myrtle was right; maybe
she shouldn’t be doing this at all. She was exhausted; she wasn’t eating; she
couldn’t concentrate on her teaching. She could lose her job.

But every time she thought of the things she could lose, she was
reminded of all the things that Selma had already lost, that she could never
get back unless Ingrid helped her. And if she told anyone, they would bring in
the FBMA, and they would take her sister’s body, and they would stop her from
summoning and destroying Stolas. It was dangerous,
what she was going to do, and no one else would understand that the risk was
worth it. No one else was going to help her.

She took a deep breath and stepped back into the sun.

Joy had no
trouble getting access to Arthur Stag’s private papers, but the process was a
bit tedious. She had to fill out some more forms regarding her liability and
intent, and the librarian on duty gave her a pair of latex gloves and a brief
tutorial on how to handle the books. She could also only request three volumes
at a time of Stag’s journals or letters. None of them were indexed by topic,
nor were they enchanted with search spells, because (the librarian explained)
that type of magic tended to have adverse interactions with the preservation
magic.

This meant that she had to skim every page for mentions of the Thirteenth
Rib. Fortunately Arthur Stag’s handwriting was clear and bold; if it had
possessed an aura, it would have indicated oblivious overconfidence.
Unfortunately, Stag was a long-winded and repetitive correspondent, often
describing the same people, ideas, and events in similar but not identical
terms, so that she ended up reading an account of the same dinner party five
times in three letters and two journal entries. She also had to go through
dozens of vehement denunciations of Aleister Crowley’s
arrogance, manners, personal hygiene, and deviant sexuality. The fact that many
of these things were known to be true did not prevent Stag’s puritanism from lowering him even further in her esteem
than he already stood.

It was in a journal entry from January 1956 that she finally found what
she was looking for. At the end of an entry on yet another dinner party that
Stag had attended on New Year’s Eve, after a detailed description of the meal
and the more notable attendees, she found three uncharacteristically terse
lines:

Unpleasant moment as H.R. cornered me to beg me to reconsider this 13
^th
Rib business. Said very little in response as memory of her insistence that I
was building in “wrong place” is still fresh. They may do what they like.

The way it was phrased left Joy in doubt as to whether H.R. was asking
Stag to reconsider his involvement with the Thirteenth Rib or his lack thereof.
And who might H.R. be? There was no one by those initials listed among the
guests, but then Stag had managed not even to specify who the host had been.
Either it was someone he considered beneath his notice or someone he preferred
not to acknowledge. Perhaps someone with whom he’d had a falling out.

Joy paged carefully back to the beginning of 1955. On June 28
^th
there was another terse passage in the middle of a long entry:

Lunch with Hilda. She is being quite
unreasonable. We parted on bad terms.

H.R. could be Hilda Ruiz — Andy’s grandmother, one of the founders of
Gooseberry Bluff Community College. Joy scribbled down the dates of both
entries and went to speak to the librarian.

“Would you have any of Hilda Ruiz’s papers here?” The woman looked
blank. “She was one of the founders of Gooseberry Bluff. The college, I mean.”

“Oh. I’ll check, but…” The woman typed the search into her terminal, then shook her head. “Sorry. If they’re collected, I’d guess
they’d be over there.”

Joy nodded. “Probably. Thanks a lot for your
help.” She pulled off the latex gloves and dropped them in the garbage near the
door as she left.

It was just a little after five, but the sun was setting behind the
ridge by the time Joy made it back to her car and drove northeast across town
to Gooseberry Bluff. There were few cars in the parking lot on a Saturday
night. She climbed the steps to the squirrel-trap-shaped building, her mind
racing.