om had failed, once, and had sunken eyes and trembling hands to show for it. It had been hours ago, before the sun had slunk beneath the rooftops. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed; he knew that he’d managed to hold down what little breakfast Pendulum had sent up, but only just. He knew that for a time, he’d lain on his side, the world spinning, Vita spinning, spinning on its axis.
When it was still enough to raise his head, the room was gold and draped in evening shadow. There was still a trickle of dried blood coming from his nose. He hadn’t thought to wipe it away.
Everything was still in place. He drew his grimoire back into his lap and his shoulders back. The mona were still around him, still fizzing wild. They hadn’t left.
He began again, from the start, which meant finding his breath again. It felt tender in his lungs, at first. His stomach lurched, once; he gasped and stopped and rested his head in his hands for what must’ve been half an hour. Then he began again, from the start, from the outermost line: pull, push; in, out.
The floor had been cleared. It was part of the ritual, just as much as tracing the lines over and over and then scrubbing them clean, regardless of how proud you were of them, regardless of how tired you felt after you got done. It was a part of the process, like anything else, pushing the unwieldy chairs with his skinny arms, shifting the table out of the way.
You’d think he’d’ve been tired, after a night like last, but every fiber of him was full of nervous energy. That morning – he’d made it about twenty minutes after Aremu had left for Brunnhold campus proper, had left him with a kiss and a knowing look. Twenty minutes, he’d sat reading quietly by the balcony door. It had been more out of numbness than any real calm.
He had looked out through the glass, and all he had seen was himself, sitting with the book in his lap, wrapped in his heavy green morning coat. He had not felt frail and old, lying with Aremu, but he thought the man in the glass looked it. The crisp light made the skin it could find even paler, drained his hair of color and caught silver on the grey; it deepened every shadow.
There was no courtyard. The other side of the courtyard was vanished behind the mist, and he could barely see the streetlamp that reared its head just below the level of the balcony. The walkway round and through the garden was lost, too; if anybody wandered down there, there was no seeing them.
The just-risen sun trickled down through the clouds and danced through the fog, at times strangely crisp, but the light it filled the room with had a soul the color pale grey.
When he hadn’t been able to take it anymore, he’d gotten up and tumbled into motion, like he’d known where he was headed all along.
The last thing he had done was roll up the long, wide Hessean carpet. He remembered last night, after, taking a few ginger barefoot steps on the carpet – he had only had time to wrestle his shoes off halfway into bed – and laughing to Aremu how soft it was underfoot. The underside of it had been rough and scratchy against his aching hands as he’d rolled it up; it was thick and heavy, and after he’d done pushing the bulk of it against the wall, he’d worried he wouldn’t be able to get to his feet without help.
But he had levered himself up on the soft arm of the sofa, though his knees had cracked, and had turned to survey the cleared, polished floor with something akin to satisfaction.
Now, a dizzying map of chalked lines sprawled across it.
It was drawing into evening. There was no light but the hearth, the fire crackling a little low, and what must’ve been a dozen candles perched about the hotel room. They wavered and winked on the mantle, on the table shoved up against the far wall, on the window-sill, at the places were key lines intersected; some of them burned low, but all of them burned.
On the bed, tucked a little out of the way, lay a long folding straightedge and a protractor. They glinted occasionally, but for the most part were content to sleep in the quiet dark, their work completed.
At the center of the plot was a smaller circle, large enough for a man to sit in, clear of lines; Tom sat in it, still in his housecoat, with a grimoire open in his lap. An incense burner sat nearby, and smoke drifted on the air, smelling of lavender and oud and lovely burnt things. Near it, half-open, a little case of chalks, a few whole but most broken and scattering white dust.
Tom had failed once, but he’d found his breath again, there in the midst of the plot. As the afternoon had rolled over, the pit in his stomach had threatened to tighten; he’d just redoubled his efforts, because there was nothing he could do but wait – hold on.
So he held, remembering the patience that’d steadied his hand enough to dissect each clause in white chalk; the precision to quarter and place them on the diagram, to map out the rhythm you felt when you spoke them. He could hold all the words in his head, now, and he knew the way they ought to fall around his breaths.
He laid his still-shaking hand flat against the page, feeling the soft raised lines of ink under his fingertips. He raised his face to the cool, dark, candlelit air, breathing in the incense, and he began to incant the ward again. The clairvoyant mona stirred and thickened in the room, drawn to him, and this time he knew he hadn’t fizzled. He could feel it in him, all through him.
He almost didn’t hear it, underneath the monotonous rumble of his voice. Like the click of a shutting door behind him, at the end of the hall. He knew better than to brail, or even to stumble. His breath held steady, and so did his voice, through the very last clause.
It was never easy, after he curled. It was sudden. Tom might’ve said it was cruel, if he’d known the mona were capable of cruelty; he might’ve called it capricious, if he’d known they had a sense of humor. He felt his body locked into place, as if tied down with invisible ropes. This time, he was ready for it, so his breath didn’t catch, but it did come shallower.
It was either hotel staff or Aremu, and Tom had his bets on the latter. Holding the upkeep, he didn’t have the space in his head to think too hard about it. It was tenuous; he knew he had to let go easy, to let it drain out of him instead of cast it off. He couldn’t even afford shame, or worry, or fear. His back stayed utterly straight.
“In here, dove,” he heard himself say. It was calm and even, despite the stiffness of his jaw, if a little labored. “Please, come in.”