Stations of the Tide - Michael Swanwick [19]
It wouldn’t hurt to find out who the magician’s father was. Even given that he’d doubtless broken tariff when he brought his money planetside, he must’ve been a rich and quite likely influential man. He thought again of the three sisters, unaged and unsexed by greed and inertia.
I could almost like Gregorian, he said to himself, just for escaping that woman.
At last he asked his briefcase, “Well—what is it?”
“Judging by the sketches and diagrams scattered within, it’s a magical diary—the account book an aspiring sorcerer maintains to keep track of his spiritual progress. It’s written in a floating cypher, using obsolete alchemical symbols, the sort of thing an extremely bright adolescent might invent.”
“Decode it, then.”
“Very well.” The briefcase thought for a moment, and then said, “The first entry begins: I killed a dog today.”
4
Sibyls in Stone
The famous witch Madame Campaspe, who claimed she had transcended humanity and thus had no need to die and who always carried with her a tame water rat, was nowhere to be found. Some said she had retired to the Piedmont, where she owned a walled estate in the Iron Lake district under an assumed name, others that she had been drowned by a horrified lover, that her clothes had been discovered by the river and taken to the local church to be burned. Nobody expected her back.
Hammers sang. Workmen were tearing walls from houses and stringing waxflowers over the streets of Rose Hall. The little river community was half-dismantled, the houses at its core reduced to roofs and floors so that they might serve as dance pavilions. They looked like so many skeletons, flanked by sad piles of rubble.
The bureaucrat and Chu stood before what was once Madame Campaspe’s house. The high roof, ironically like a squared-off version of a witch’s peaked cap, and the corner posts were all that remained intact. The interior had been filled with scrap lumber and other inflammables. “What a mess,” the bureaucrat said disgustedly of the heaped and broken wardrobes and divans, stained blankets, clotted masses of paper, and filthy brown rugs, the flotsam and jetsam of a hastily abandoned life. A broken-backed stuffed angel shark leered from the bottom. The house reeked of white kerosene.
“It’ll make a nice bonfire, anyway,” Chu said. She stepped back as a canvas-gloved woman threw in more planks. “Hey—lady! Yeah, you. You from around here?”
The woman brushed back her short black hair with her wrist, not bothering to doff her work glove. “I was born here.” Her eyes were green, cool, skeptical. “What do you want to know?”
“The woman who used to live here, the witch. Did you know her?”
“I know of her, of course. Madame Campaspe was the richest woman in Rose Hall. Tough old bird. There was plenty of gossip. But I live on the other side of town. I never actually met her.”
Chu smiled dryly. “Of course not. A big place like this, how could you meet her?”
“Actually,” the bureaucrat said, “we’re more interested in a student of hers. A man named Gregorian. Did you know him?”
“I’m sorry, I—”
“This is the man who made all the commercials,” Chu said. Then, when the woman continued to look blank, “On television. Television! Have you ever heard of television?”
Quickly the bureaucrat said, “Excuse me. I couldn’t help but notice that lovely pendant you’re wearing. Is it haunt work?”
Startled in the first flush of anger, the woman glanced down at the stone hanging between her breasts. It was smoothly polished, the length of a human thumb, straightedged on one side, curved on the other, rounded atop, and tapering below to a blunt point. It was too big for a fishing weight and too edgeless and asymmetrical to be a spear point. “It’s a shell knife,” she said. Then, brusquely, she seized her barrow and trundled it away.
The bureaucrat stared after her. “Have you noticed how evasive the locals get when we start asking questions?”
“Yes, it does seem they’ve got something to hide, doesn’t it?” Chu said thoughtfully. “There’s a local trade smuggling haunt artifacts. Stone