Modern Magick

Music and Misadventure: 11

Mum was looking at Jay. 'That trick with the nothingness. You said you'd open a door through the lindworm.'

'Not the same kind of door. I was just trying to express the general concept in comprehensible language.'

'All right. But could it be adapted for this gate?'

Jay took a moment to consider. 'No,' he finally said. 'A gate — the kind you mean — is an insubstantial thing, it has no tangible presence. In a sense it's already nothing, and I can't open a nothing in nothing.'

Mother took this philosophically, and lapsed into thought.

I wracked my brains, too. What was known about these intra-realm gates? It was the province of the various magickal authorities to maintain existing gate networks; The Hidden Ministry poured a lot of resources into it. And, naturally, they had all kinds of rules about how many gates should remain open, and which should be barred. The Society had no one with those skills, because it wasn't part of our mandate.

That meant I, too, was rather more ignorant about the process than I liked. Opening a new gate is the kind of impossible even I won't venture upon, so I've never considered the matter before.

Course, I told myself, we weren't opening a new gate here. Just freshening up an old one, and purely for the purposes of detective work.

'Ves,' said Mother tightly. She was making strange gestures with her surviving hand, as though she was pulling on an invisible thread. 'Help me here.'

'How?'

'Remember when I taught you to knit?'

'You never taught me to knit.'

'I did, when you were six. You were almost as bad at it as I was.'

'How is this relevant?'

'Well.' She was sweating now, her face glistening in the moonlight. 'If you think of the magickal world as a thing knitted up out of — of — well, magick, then it can also be unknitted. Someone's gone through a door here, and they may have firmly closed it behind themselves, but the door's still here.'

'You're unravelling it?'

'So to speak. Here.' She grabbed my hand and thrust it out before herself. And I felt something. Nothing tangible; more like a sensation that shivered through my skin, neither heat nor cold but something beyond those two things. Whatever it was wound around my hand like — ugh, like I'd thrust my arm into a knot of spider's webs. 'You feel that?'

'I wish a bit that I didn't, but yes.'

'Great. Grab a handful and pull.'

I obeyed — but the moment Mum let go of my hand, the sensations vanished and I was groping at empty air. 'You've a sensitivity I lack, Mum. You'll need to guide me.'

'Fine. I'll do this, you do that.'

We did all that, Mum keeping a firm grip on my wrist with her healthy hand and me using both of mine to tear holes in the magickal fabric of the Halls of Yllanfalen. As mother/daughter bonding events go, it was a weird one, but I'd take it over nothing at all, any day.

After twenty minutes or so, Mum — who'd been periodically waving her stump of an arm about, apparently testing the tear we were making — said, 'Stop. I think we can go through.'

I was happy to obey, for I was trembling with weariness by then. You wouldn't think unravelling the very fabric of magick would take so much out of a person.

'Just need a second,' I gasped.

Mum rolled her eyes and stood up, which was humbling. The woman had lost three friends, a hand and a lot of blood in recent days, and she was still unstoppable.