The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [157]
“Oh God.” She forced down a hysterical giggle. “Who did you pray to?”
“I found it in one of these old Provençal books. Langue d’oc stuff. The language looked like an incantation, but I was wondering why there were no gestures to go with it. So I just got on my knees and clasped my hands and said the words.” Pouncy flushed. “I thought about—well, I thought about O.L.U.”
“Let’s have a look under the hood.”
There were simple spells to make magic visible: they showed you the ways the energy was running in and around an object with an enchantment on it. But what Julia saw when she cast one on the mirror defied explanation. It was the densest weave of magic she’d ever seen: a tracery of fine lines in an ornate pattern like a tapestry, so dense that it almost obscured the mirror underneath it. It should have taken a team of magicians a year at least to put all those channels in place. Instead Pouncy had done it alone, in one night, with a simple chant. It was unlike any working she’d ever heard of.
“You did this? Just now?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t think so. I said the words, but I think somebody else must have done the work.”
Her hands and her body felt strangely light. There was a sweet smell in the air. Acting on an impulse, she dabbed a little of the milk on each of her eyelids. Instantly her vision sharpened and clarified, like when they change the settings at the ophthalmologist’s.
“We’re getting close, Julia,” Pouncy said. “We’re getting close to the divine praxis. I can feel it.”
“I don’t like feeling things,” she said. “I like knowing them.”
But she had to admit, she felt it too. The only word she could think of to describe this magic was grave. There was nothing light or playful about it: it was dead fucking sober magic. Serious as a heart attack. Where was the line between a spell and a miracle? Turning moonlight into silver coins wasn’t exactly parting the Red Sea, but the effortlessness with which it was accomplished spoke of much larger possibilities. It was a minor effect running off an enormous power source.
The next morning Asmodeus was at breakfast. Real breakfast, not her usual lunch-breakfast. She was practically vibrating with excitement. She refused any food.
“I found him,” she said, with finality.
“Who?” Julia said. It was a little early for Asmodeus in her maximum-intensity mode. “Whom did you find?”
“The hermit. The tarasque’s holy man. He’s a saint. Or not a saint, exactly, not in the strictly Christian sense. But he calls himself one.”
“Explain,” Pouncy said around a hunk of the almost penitentially coarse bread they’d been eating.
“Well,” and here Asmodeus shook off her manic fatigue for a minute and entered her business mode, “as close as I can figure out, this guy is about two thousand years old. Right? He calls himself Amadour—says he used to be a saint, but they defrocked him.
“I found him living in a cave. Red hair, beard down to here. Says he serves the goddess, the old one, the one we’re always hearing about. He wouldn’t name her, but it has to be her. Our Lady, O.L.U. For a while he passed as a Christian saint, he told me, saying he worshipped the Virgin Mary, but eventually he got outed as a pagan and they tried to crucify him. He’s been living in a cave ever since.
“And at first I was all, sure, buddy, saint or crazy homeless guy, it’s a fine line. But he showed me things. Weird things, guys, things we don’t know how to do. He can shape rock with his hands. He heals animals. He knew things about me, things nobody knows. He—he healed a scar I have. Had. He made it go away.”
Her voice faltered. Julia had never seen Asmodeus look so serious. She glared at them, angry that she’d let a secret slip. Julia had never seen Asmodeus’s scar. She wondered if she meant a physical one or something else.
“Can you take us to him?” Pouncy’s voice was gentle. He seemed to sense how close to the edge she was.
She shook her head quickly, trying to recover herself and not succeeding.
“You only see him once,” she said. “You could go