IN WHICH AGENT CHAUDRY'S STORIED CAREER IS GIVEN CONTEXT

[little_lady_d]

The headlines loved him, the Last of the Brethren, the Paladin of Prohibition. Never mind no one knew the Brethren from Adam before the Emergence, and then the headline was one of many: So-Called ‘Theurgic Riots’ Shake Nation, Mystify Experts … Disappearances Reported Across Country, Could Otherworlders Be To Blame?

Most everyone lost someone — or knew someone who lost someone — the day doors to other-realms opened across America, and visions of monsters and madness poured through. Not that they’d died, the ones who were lost. They were gone, that’s all, gone wherever they paused between one room and the next, wherever they sat sipping lemonade on their porches, or looking out the window from their hospital beds. Nothing unified them, except the day they disappeared. The day where everything went wrong, and there was no one to blame but some fool thaumaturge who’d overreached, or maybe it was all of them. Folks said ‘Riots’ because theurgy was supposed to bind a daemon to the mortal realm with rules and order, but this, this had neither. This was chaos. Someone screwed up, so who, how?

Most everyone lost someone. But he lost everything and everyone. Entire Community Vanished During Theurgic Riots, Last Of The Brethren Shares Story. Blessed-be-the-king-that-cometh Chaudry —  or Blessed, for sweet brevity’s sake — walked out of the woods one day and stumbled into a police station. They draped him in a blanket (he recalled) as if to absorb the shock, and gave him a piping hot cup of coffee, which he flooded with sugar one packet at a time. They interviewed him first, then came the reporters.    

The weekly news ate up the tragedy. It sold copy faster than rumor could fly.

Blessed, you see, survived an isolated religious community that called itself the Brethren. The Brethren believed that thaumaturgy was vanity and presumption, and all that talk of using the language of the world to shape the world to your will was like barging into a conversation between your betters, demanding they hear whatever you had to say. Rude, arrogant, and — worse! — unchristian. The Brethren believed they were well off without it. They went off on their own, into the American wilderness, and built a community free of witchcraft.

And where did that get them? What were their protections worth, when the Riots came? They left Blessed alone — poor, hapless boy, couldn’t even drink bitter coffee without wrinkling his nose. How would someone like him survive in the wicked world?

But then the boy had a turn of good luck. Last Of The Brethren Joins Bureau.

The public clambered to call him a prodigy, the youngest member of the still-young department of witch-hunters. They told the story of his first bust, his first day as an agent: he befriended a society hostess at a soda fountain, and peppered her with questions. She brought together New York intellectuals, and Blessed — who knew no one and nothing of New York — wanted to know all the whos and hows and wheres. There was a lilt to her intellectuals that meant more than she said.

When he asked one question too many, she turned it back — she asked him, “What’s got you so interested?”

“Well, if I’m honest,” he said, “I’m an agent with the Bureau of Thaumaturgy.”

She took one look at baby-face Blessed and laughed. “Oh, that’s the funniest thing I’ve heard all day! You should come to a philosopher’s speakeasy. That’s where everyone who’s anyone comes and casts the spells they can’t in public. We don’t just need experienced thaumaturges, you know — we need someone entertaining.”

He thanked her, polite as you please, and when she passed him the crystal lens that would show him the secret door, he passed that on to his superior.

Blessed had a way with people. “I like being an investigator,” he told Immanuel with an angel’s smile. “You make friends everywhere you go.”

“Friends you then arrest,” Immanuel observed.

“Not all of them! I have friends in the papers.”

The papers aren’t your friend. It said something about Blessed that Blessed thought they were, but he’d lived without the New York newspapers in the years before Emergence, lived without flashbulbs and newshounds and a-moment-of-your-time-Mister-Chaudry. Where he came from, reporters weren’t always chasing the next big beat, weren’t frenzying for first print, weren’t stirring up sensationalism and serving it with a teaspoon of truth. The papers’ friendship was fickle. What did the Brethren have? Community newsletters? Calls for barn-raisings, but the barns were shaped from stained witch-glass, the windows sealed with counterspells?

“That’s just how it was,” Blessed said once in an interview with some Tribune or another. “People call what I do ‘turning-magic’ or ‘apotropaios,’ but we always said ‘our ways.’ It’s what we built into our homes, to shield us from heathen magics, and everyone was trained in our ways from a child, so everyone came out to help. For a new building there’d be a potluck, too, and we’d have lots of good food. My favorite … that had to be By-the-grace-God-has-given-me’s candied pumpkin. I’ll eat anything sweet!”

The papers liked that, his childish charm. Never too serious. When asked what he meant by ‘heathen magics,’ he answered, “Oh, Heathen’s what we called everyone who wasn’t Brethren. But now that I’ve met people who aren’t Brethren, I like them. I like to see movies, too, even though the Brethren always said theater was sinful. Tell that to your readers, please? I don’t think anyone’s all bad. I hope we can get along.”

Immanuel had his own opinion. Cult. But he didn’t say that aloud.

By now, Blessed had grown old enough to vote, to drink, to die in a war. But Immanuel still thought Blessed a boy, when he met him — he still carried himself like someone starting out in the world, still stared at the city bustle with wonder-wide eyes. That made the other stories harder to swallow.

Paladin Of Prohibition Defeats Demon-Worshiper Gang! Emerges Victorious In Battle Of Wits Versus Wizardry! Cuts Swathe Through Criminal Underground, Comes Out Without A Scratch!

One first-hand account described Blessed, hands outstretched in kid-leather gloves, witch-glass orbs floating above his palms. The thaumaturges threw everything they had at him: lightning that lanced out of conjured clouds, daggers of ice that condensed from a chill in the air, spells recited so fast they droned like a hell’s worth of wasp-wings descending. Nothing hit. Lightning and ice spun around Blessed in a whirlwind, and he stood at the center, the eye of the storm.

“So sorry,” he’d said, still smiling like a cherub. The witch-glass twisted, turned, and flashed.

All the spells thrown at him, Blessed threw back. His turning-magic shocked the thaumaturges with borrowed electricity, while frozen manacles formed around their limbs and held them fast. “You’re under arrest,” he’d told them.

You couldn’t believe everything you read. Blessed had lived two lives in the press, victim and hero, and — knowing the press — villain couldn’t be too far behind. This was the same Blessed who asked Immanuel whether either of them could drive, and confessed he never did get a New York state license because taking the test was so hard.

“Let’s call a cab,” he decided for the both of them. Before they went out, he pulled a flat cap over his tousled dark hair; he looked like someone who should be selling papers, not featuring in them. He looked very little like the flashbulb photos, which washed out the warm browns of his skin. “The Bureau can cover the bill.”

Inconspicuous, he had that going for him. Better the two of them go by cab than by patrol wagon. Better the two of them, than a whole sirening stream of feds. Blessed kept insisting clearance wouldn’t be a problem.

“Can I be honest with you?”

“Does that mean you haven’t been?” Immanuel didn’t look up. He had work to do, after all, even if the lure of a honest word tugged at him. With a stub of chalk, he sketched a circle unto the floor of the empty club, stepping over spilled drinks, overturned tables, chairs from whence some thaumaturge had sprung and fled into the belly of a cage-golem. And, from there, into custody and questioning. Other people’s business. Immanuel had a clear stage and silence — that’s all that mattered for him and his work. Detritus could always be swept away.

Blessed stood somewhere in the middle of everything, straight and still, cradling the scrying glass in both hands. Every once in a while Immanuel instructed him to hold it higher, or off to the left, and he obeyed each command like a show dog.

“I didn’t only invite you out for your scrying help, Mister Bachman. Well,” he said, “you are a help. But I wanted to spend more time with you, and maybe get to know you better.”

“Along with everyone else you’ve gotten to know and arrested?”

“I wouldn’t arrest you.” He said it, brow furrowing, and Immanuel had the grace to feel ungracious. It was a bad habit, always answering a question with a question. Can you promise that? he held at the tip of his tongue.

“There’s not much to know,” Immanuel said instead, after a moment’s pause. Beside the chalk circle, with a draftsman’s hand, he began to write runes like spiderwebs branching from the center. “I keep to myself, and even then, it’s not by choice. If I could avoid myself, too, I would. ”

“That sounds very sad,” Blessed replied. “Are you sad, Mister Bachman?”

It was a credit to Immanuel’s steady draftsman’s hand that the chalk didn’t break. “Am I sad — is that a question to ask a co-worker?”

“Why not? If we’re working together, depending on each other, why shouldn’t we care about each other’s happiness?”

“Is that how it was with the Brethren?” he asked. Curious, that was all, but then he realized what he was asking. He realized why Blessed would want to reach out to whoever he found, wherever work happened to lead him.

He’s lonely.

The papers paid him attention, and the Bureau barely paid him anything if his wages were like Immanuel’s, but at least he could say he was part of something. It made Immanuel feel foolish and petty for holding himself off, for never getting too close.

It wouldn’t, he supposed, be the first time. Immanuel remembered — clear as a scrying spell — another lonely boy who’d held out a hand and asked whether they might work together, one day. The papers loved him, too.

However ungracious it was to ask, Blessed considered the question. “It’s strange,” he said. “Thinking about how it is here, how it was there. You never think about what it’s like, to live the life you’re living, until you see another’s. You can’t say how it is without other ways it could be.”

“Can’t you?” asked Immanuel. “Can’t you define a thing by its own, intrinsic properties, without relying on comparison?” He philosophized around the point when the point was something too sharp for him to handle.

“Oh, I don’t know. The Brethren like to compare things … Heathen and Brethren, outside and inside, wicked and righteous. But that really is relying on the comparison, isn’t it? I wonder how we’d define ourselves without it. If the world didn’t have any darkness, would we say how bright everything was? Or if it didn’t have any light, could we see how dark?”

“You’ll find ways to describe the dark, given enough time and introspection. Distinctions and gradations.” Something near whimsy crept spider-like into Immanuel’s tone, though he remained hunched and diligent over his growing web. “The hiding dark, the empty dark, the dark where mushrooms flourish ...”

Blessed laughed. “Well, then maybe we’re in a world like that, and what we call bright is another kind of dark. It’s almost a shame to split them up, don’t you think? A vocabulary of different darknesses is so much richer.”

“I wouldn’t go so far.” It surprised him, that Blessed would, and surprise shook him from the fog of studied carelessness. “It’s a semantic argument,” Immanuel said, “but there’s power, and skill, in semantics. There are gradations of darkness which can be named, and in the naming, reveal themselves. That’s the domain of thaumaturgy.”

“Oh?”

“It’s how we get to the truth of a matter. The truth of the world is in its propositions, in what can be asserted or contested, believed or doubted, supposed or presupposed. ‘Sätze an sich,’ to borrow from the likes of Bolzano, Frege, and Wittgenstein — sentences-in-themselves. Beyond its function as a slip-shod assemblage of linguistic conventions, a sentence is a stand-in for any potential state of affairs. Any potential truth. What can be stated can be understood, and what can be understood can be proven. And what can neither be stated nor understood nor proven … thereof one must be silent. You can think of the world as one long sentence that describes all states of affairs within it. Thaumaturgy is adding on to that sentence while still maintaining sense. It’s finding the right words, the revelatory ones. The ones that make the darkness shine with difference.”

“Like you’re doing now.”

“More or less.” He moved up unto his feet up to survey his runework, flicking back the train of his trench coat. “Most of what I'm doing is adding on to thaumaturgy already done. That’s why you need to hold the glass — there. Right there. Now let it go.”

Dropped, the glass did not fall, but hung suspended by stipulations that glistened in gaslight like spools of silver thread. Their criss-cross gleam reflected off of Blessed’s widening eyes.

“Another thaumaturge already did the work of defining glass as something that can be seen through,” Immanuel explained. "Simple enough. It just needs to be further defined what’s meant by ‘seen,’ or by ‘through.’ The domain of thaumaturgy is meaning — not in things, but in what things signify. Once you grasp their meaning, mere things are easily manipulable.”

“You know,” said Blessed, with a slow, beaming smile, “when you talk about semantics, you sound so much more passionate. And you said there wasn’t much to know about you!”

Immanuel flinched from that plain admiration. He pushed back his pince-nez, long fingers eclipsing his face. “Think of it this way,” he suggested. “There’s more to know than me. I seek knowledge for knowledge’s sake, not to make myself more interesting.”

“But you are interesting.”

Not to myself. Blessed was right — it sounded too blunt, too sad, said like that. Immanuel put the thought aside, as he paced the perimeter of circle. He woke the runes as he walked, reminding them of their new meaning.

His runes expanded on the concept of transparency, on the properties of glass that let light pass from one pane to another. Light (they established) was a thing that traveled, quicker than a word could reach an ear, patient as a problem reaching a long-sought resolution. It carved through distance, through shadowed space, through the lens of telescope to the eye of an astronomer. Galileo’s moons, invisible to the eye, were revealed through the confluence of light and glass. So, too, went the science of scrying. It took the subject obscured by separation, and brought it into crystal focus.

  

“So let’s see,” Blessed mused aloud. “If I could define the life I’ve lived until now, and put it in a proposition ... if I could say what it’s like for me, being one of the Brethren, in a way that could be asserted, contested, and everything else you said ... then I could change that, too. Is that right?”

It wasn’t wrong. Not entirely. And yet. “Did you want to change your life, Agent Chaudry?”

“I wouldn’t know what change looked like. Every day was the same with the Brethren! Thaumaturgy was forbidden ... and I wonder if it’s because they didn’t want the dark shining with difference. They wanted to keep the world the way God made it, after all. They’d say thaumaturges meddle too much with things that oughtn’t be meddled with, and everything was fine in the beginning before Babel, before we got off track.”

“‘They’? Not ‘we’?”

“It’s only me now, isn’t it?” Blessed smiled, but his eyes didn’t. His eyes were windows somewhere faraway.

“Some might say you’re still continuing their work.” Immanuel didn’t say who, or whether he was one of them. God’s will was never something settled, for him, but another proposition to be considered. “You’re using the tools they taught you, to counter the incursions of thaumaturgy.”

“It’s the only life I’ve known.” Like snowfall suddenly dropped from a tree, Blessed seemed to shake off his melancholy — if it was ever melancholy to begin with. He linked his hands behind his back and looked up at Immanuel with a face full of questions. “But you,” he exclaimed, with  too much excitement, “you’ve lived a far more varied life! Haven’t you, Mister Bachman?”

“I’ve lived one life. If you’re referring to the error in my file —“ because he wouldn’t put it past his superior to refer to the file “— then my one and only name is Immanuel. There’s another name which exists, but which cannot be ascribed to me: the name I was given when I was born. I changed it. Whenever someone attempts to make a record of me by that name, pens run out of ink, typewriters fail, and the attempt ends shortly with an incoherent scrawl. It happens when you re-define a true-name through thaumaturgy. And no, it can’t be undone.”

“That’s not what I was thinking of … but I didn’t know that was possible! You don’t miss your old name, then?”

“I don’t, because it was never mine. It might’ve been acceptable for a young lady, but as you can see, I’m neither of those things.”

Either Blessed didn’t catch on to the implication, or he didn’t care. “I wouldn’t call you old,” he said.

And Immanuel didn’t know how to answer that. So he didn’t.

He’d walked the full circle; he’d revisited the last of his definitions. It took an outstretched hand, a whispered word of power, to finalize the modification. These are the principles by which one scries through space. Now, to scry through time ...

“Say,” asked Blessed, “is it true you used to be a musician?”

Vision flowed from the glass and filled the chalk circle, disorienting at first, like a prism refracting sight off to the side. Scenes from the speakeasy Immanuel had so steadfastly ignored rippled and rose up in front of him: empty seats filled again by fluttering patrons, and the little stage ruled by a beautiful, golden-eyed man, head haloed in slick curls, conductor’s wand raised.

A flicker, and Immanuel saw that man as the cage-golem saw him, as it barreled down with hungry ribs, as it tumbled on through nothingness and into the air of an autumn. Now they were face to face, backed by open skyline, and the beautiful man was bleeding, his mouth moving — he put up his hand —

Immanuel recognized that face — that saber’s edge of a smirk, pointed en garde at a problem — and his heart sunk in his chest like a stone.

Stay out of trouble. That’s all you had to do. I’d figure things out, I’d set things right …

“Mister Bachman?”

Shadow swallowed the conjured space, covered up the scried-in skyline, covered the man who fell into the night with one last look of desperation. He looked straight at Immanuel, though of course he could not see.

“Quiet a moment,” Immanuel requested, rasped, as if his throat were sandpaper.

“Oh? Oh, of course! you’re doing excellent work, I didn’t mean to interrupt. Can we watch that again?” Blessed’s face lit up —  there was the eager investigator the headlines praised. “I think we have a suspect.”