IN WHICH BREAD IS BROKEN AND AN UNDERSTANDING IS REACHED

[little_lady_d]

Blessed insisted he thought better when he ate, so he found a bearded, basket-bearing gentleman selling pretzels on a street corner, and he got himself and Immanuel in line. Whether the Bureau was footing the bill, Blessed didn’t say, but he flashed out cash as if it were made for spending, counting down to the cent. He bounced back on his heels, clutching the coins as they waited, and Immanuel fancied he saw wheels within wheels spinning behind the brown of his eyes.

He should avoid fancy, if he could help it. Seldom did Immanuel hesitate to ask a question, but he decided it would be best if he sidled up on this one. “You seemed interested,” he said to Blessed, “in my past. Any reason why?”

“Didn’t I say?” the boy asked back, shining that sunbeam of a smile. “You’re interesting.”

“That’s not a reason. That’s a restatement of the question, which is why you’re interested.” Immanuel edged on directness. “I wonder whether it was relevant to the case.”

“I didn’t have a case. Now it’s much more exciting! I thought maybe there was a problem with the scrying system — maybe a cage-golem got knocked out somewhere and wasn’t showing up — but we’d find it and you’d fix it in time to tell the Monday morning press how re-commissions for the raid went.”

Immanuel hoped against hope that he wouldn’t be expected to tell the press anything, that Blessed was speaking of a general ‘you.’ You’d have nothing to say to them now, he supposed.

But then he wondered what about that Blessed found so damn exciting.

“Now,” Blessed went on, “we have a mystery! A missing cage-golem, and a suspect scryed at the scene, seen working up some sort of thaumaturgy …”

“Theurgy.”

“Theurgy?”

“Theurgy,” clarified Immanuel, “is the branch of thaumaturgy that deals with daemons and daemon-summoning. I should call them ‘the entities of other realms’ — ‘daemon’ is the academic shorthand that became popular in the Golden Age of American Thaumaturgy. It harkens back to Hellenistic categorizations for the spirits of the field and the home, because if there’s one thing American thaumaturges like, it’s showing off their Classical educations.” He was being unfair, of course. Some thaumaturges inherited traditions of hedge witchery, and some — like him — scraped together what education they could saving pocket money for books, studying in secret the rules that rewrote reality. He played music for his pocket money, on a street corner much like this one. Until one day, Narcisse (that beautiful, brilliant fool) came up to him and told him they could be something.

“The Brethren called those beings devils.”

“Of course they did,” Immanuel said, flat as a frying pan. “But the home of daemons isn’t hell, exactly. It has little to do with Christian cosmology. In the stories of the Jewry, we sometimes call it Ergetz, but all Ergetz means is ‘elsewhere.’ It means a place for people not like us. But there are Jewish daemons, too — daemons who hold service in other-world synagogues and brew hamin for what passes for Shabbat — and there are even daemon Christians, from sects more splintered than yours …”

But there he stopped. He’d fallen into the lilt of once-upon-a-time, Blessed watching him with his face turned up, like a sunflower toward sunlight. We’ve moved too far from the point, he thought, before Blessed seized upon the pause and dragged it further.

“What makes you think it’s theurgy?” he asked.

Because Narcisse, the suspect, never hesitated to ask for help, even if that help came from another world, cloaked in nightmare. Immanuel took off his pince-nez — it was as good an excuse as any to cover his face. He struggled to put his thoughts in order.

He didn’t know what Blessed knew. Blessed knew Immanuel had been a musician, once — did he know about Narcisse? Did he know Narcisse would be performing at a speakeasy, that night, against all sense and self-preservation? He imagined shaking Blessed down, demanding tell me before I tell you. But there was nowhere to go without trusting the answer. No reason to go, if he could trust what Blessed said.

“It’s familiar,” Immanuel decided to say. “It makes sense,” he added, too. “There are patterns for everything, and thaumaturgy works smoothest when it works within them.”

He could envision it, the system and semiotics that kept the cage-golem functional: a walking prison, that drew its power from the will of the imprisoned. Somewhere was the crack in logic that let light in, an explanation Immanuel could apprehend and hold on to. That was, after all, his job.

The line moved, and Blessed’s moment came. Eagerly, he swapped his saved-up cash for an armload of pretzels, and heaped such enthusiasm on the bearded gentleman as gourmands reserved for high-end delicacies harvested once in a century. He turned to split his treasure with Immanuel.

Fried gold cracked open over fluffy white dough, still steaming hot in the night air. “‘S salty,” he said, and it was on the tip of Immanuel’s tongue to reply what did you expect. But Blessed looked at him, wide eyes, waiting for him to take a bite, and Immanuel had no choice but to oblige him.

It was salty.

“I believe I can be of use to you,” Immanuel ventured to say. “If my theory is correct. If it isn’t, I can help you disprove it. Either way, I’ll get what I want, which is knowledge.”

“Is that all that you want?” asked Blessed, between mouthfuls.

Immanuel winced. “It’s what I joined the Bureau to find, yes,” he said, shielding himself with the truth. If Blessed knew more than he was saying, it would be too easy to catch Immanuel in a lie. If Blessed only thought he knew more — thought Immanuel was still in contact with Narcisse, or with anyone in the underground of thaumaturgy — well, so much the worse for him. Let the all-too-earnest investigator be thrown off guard by honesty, for once.

“Oh?”

“I wanted to know what caused the Emergence,” Immanuel said. “I felt I had a duty as a thaumaturge, however abstract or absurd that may sound to you. My colleague at the time disagreed with me — he thought it a mystery better left unsolved, or worse yet, unsolvable. He thought I’d drive myself mad trying to answer unanswerable questions, and … I suppose he didn’t want to see that. So I left him, and joined the Bureau.”

The path from one to another twisted more than that, with the passing of Prohibition in-between, and Immanuel forced to either forsake his research or find some other way forward. Even he had to admit his living space had grown alarming: every wall posted with newspaper scraps and sigils and maps of the other realms some Yuan dynasty thaumaturge had explored once in a dream, overlaid maps of all fifty states. Midnight’s coffee cups and mid-afternoon’s shot glasses took over every surface not claimed by research. But what would it mean, to give all that up, before he found an answer? To burn his books and break his staves and ask no more? The cruel thing was he couldn’t even go back to the band. There were letters he wrote, in a rush of ink, and discarded.

He despaired, turned to drink, but then he made a decision. The ad in the newspaper stood out like a bolt from the blue: Agents Needed for New Bureau of Thaumaturgy and Thaumaturgy Prevention.

That decision brought him next to Blessed, the young man licking salt from his fingers who was, inexplicably, his boss. He smiled up, still shining. “Did you have a theory?” he asked.

“Theories, like faith, need to be tested — or else they’re speculation. Stories. The trouble is, how can you test chaos without creating more of it?” Immanuel shook his head. “It can’t be chaos. There has to be a pattern, a pattern anyone could work within and learn from, without loosing a second Emergence. I was still trying to piece something together.”

“I’d heard it was too many people practicing thaumaturgy at once. It put a weight on the world that the world couldn’t bear, and it strained and tore at the edges, letting devils in. They say that’s why America needed an Act of Prohibition, to put a stop to it. To save the world.”

“The Accumulation Theory,” Immanuel enunciated, like a professor calling on a student’s hand. “I’ve heard it, too. It’s a common idea — there are limits to thaumaturgy, like there are limits to anything you want to do. Every act of thaumaturgy changes reality, and reality has be able to stretch and shape itself around the change. Stretch the rubber band of reality too far — the theory goes —and the rubber band breaks. But if it’s a question of reality itself, its warp and weft and character, then why our piece of reality in particular?”

“What do you mean?”

“Why America? The Emergence stopped at our borders. Doorways to daemon realms opened on one side of the Falls, but not the other. Citizens vanished from the streets of San Diego, but not Tijauna across the border. And that was the only pattern between them, the only commonality I could find. The legion of ‘missing persons’ in the papers counted young and old, rich and poor, sick and hale, innocents who never touched a tome of thaumaturgy, and experts like the Honorary General Decoudreau, who controlled daemons in the Great War — yet somehow fell prey to so-called Theurgic Riots.” You don’t find it odd? he asked Narcisse, but Narcisse didn’t want to answer.

“Brethren and Countrymen,” murmured Blessed, as though reciting something from memory. A poem, or pledge.

“And Countrywomen, yes.” Immanuel studied Blessed’s face. He wondered what it was like to be that boy, stumbling out of his sheltered, empty enclave into a world of wild streets and crowding strangers. “Do you consider yourself American?” he asked.

“I do. We do,” Blessed corrected himself. “I think the Brethren consider themselves more American than anything else! My parents were immigrants, but once they were Brethren, they were Brethren. They even shed their old names, and became For-the-fruit-of-the-Spirit-is-in-all-Goodness and Now-are-ye-Light-in-the-Lord Chaudry.”

Immanuel could’ve claimed only cults like the Brethren required their members to shed their names, but he wouldn’t have believed it. He’d heard enough stories in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, of the throngs of Ellis Island. “My parents were also immigrants,” he couldn’t help but confide. “Of different nations, and creeds. The experience united them, I think. They worked together, so that their children might live in better worlds than they had.” Whether they got one, Immanuel couldn’t say. He’d turned too honest; he had to stop himself.

“The city on the hill,” Blessed murmured, wistful. “Kingdom come. You know, we’re alike. The Brethren were always working for the sake of another world.”

“But you’ll recall,” said Immanuel, “that I asked about you, not the Brethren.”

Blessed laughed. “Most interviewers want to know both. They want to know about the Last of the Brethren, so I tell them.”

“This isn’t an interview.” Even if, mere moments before, Immanuel had been tempted to turn into an interrogation.

“All you want is knowledge, right? You’re not looking for any one answer. But,” Blessed asked, eyes bright, dazzling, “don’t you still get a thrill from knowing? From finding you were right, or you were wrong all along, and your whole world’s upside down? Isn’t it dizzying, freeing somehow, like rising up on a Wonder Wheel, watching the ground fall away from your feet?”

“I’ve never been on a ‘Wonder Wheel’.”

“We should go to Coney Island!” Blessed exclaimed. “They’ve got one that’s over a hundred tall! I hear they’ve got a kind of spun sugar now, too. Cotton candy. It melts on your tongue.”

“And how,” asked Immanuel, “will that help our case?”

“It’ll help us get to know each other. There’s a thrill in that, too, isn’t there?”

The thrill of intimacy. Immanuel chose not to mention what that sounded like: taking a day trip to Coney Island, riding the Wonder Wheel, sharing cotton candy. The man, however boyish, was his boss. They’d just met. “I suppose so,” was all he said.

“I don’t think you’re mad for wanting to know things. Or if you are,” Blessed said with a grin half-mad in itself, “sometimes we could use a little madness. Just enough to get off the ground, and into the air! That’s what I like about solving a case.” He tore up another pretzel as he talked, walked on and pressed a piece into Immanuel’s hand. “I think we’ll work well together,” he said. And what’s more, he seemed to believe it.

Immanuel released a breath. Good, he thought, and he didn’t let the guilt rise in his throat and choke him. He tasted bread and salt. The taste of hospitality.

Narcisse — who lived off the help of others, swaying hearts to his side with a song — was a criminal. He’d made off with federal property. But if Immanuel got to Narcisse before anyone else ... if he was right beside of the head of the investigation, right when the investigation came to a close …

It didn’t matter how he got there. He hadn’t told Blessed anything that wasn’t true.

And so, Immanuel pulled the scrying glass from his coat pocket, and held it out, like an apple for Eve. “Here’s something we can test, then.”