The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)

The Essence of Will Prescott

Previously: "The Sweet Life of a New Magician" 

Yes, you have lots of things to explore. Fortunately, you've no shortage of brains to apply to them. Your own double, as you've learned over the weekend, is at least as quick as you, and totally cooperative. Blackwell is now under your control. And Melody seems pretty sharp. After thinking it over, you decide to parcel out the brainpower to match the difficulty of the tasks: You and Blackwell will concentrate on figuring out what--if anything--is so special about you, and Will (maybe with Melody's help) will tackle the hex. After all, the golem has at least as much of an incentive as you.

So you bring Blackwell back down into the library. He sits stiffly opposite you. "Be completely honest with me," you tell him. "Always. Hold nothing back."

"I don't like this," he snaps back.

"I'm not interested in your opinions," you retort. "I only want to know what you think, what you suspect, what you know." He grimaces, but again nods. "Why are you interested in me?"

"You have a prodigious talent," he says, talking as if the words are painful. "I wanted to know why, and whether I could bend it to my own purposes."

"What kind of talent? What can I do that is so impressive?"

"Your ability to dissect and understand sigils. Your ability to apply them in novel ways. Some of the things you made." He picks up the fire bowl--the little thing you made for burning scrap paper. "This, for example. The way you discerned how to put a golem inside a mask, without even examining the Libra."

"Maybe it's just a knack," you say. "Some people are good at tinkering."

"Possibly." He seems to fight the next revelation, and prefaces it with a muttered aside. "You ordered me to hold nothing back. The first night you were here, you fashioned a pupa." You give him a puzzled glance; instead of replying, he unlocks a drawer, and from it takes out a wad of clay. "You spat in this and fashioned it into a pupa of me."

You vaguely remember: It was while you were cataloging for him; you'd been nervously playing with the clay. "What's a pupa?"

"A voodoo doll, if you want the misleading answer," he says. "A proxy used in certain primitive spells when the original is not on hand."

"I didn't know that's what I did."

"That is why I was so impressed."

You tug at your lip. "This kind of talent, is it like an ability, like a superpower? Or is it just a skill, a knack?"

He makes a face at the word "superpower." "Your ability to manipulate sigils might simply be a 'knack', as you call it. Some people are very good at math. But the pupa suggested to me the presence of uncommon abilities."

"How uncommon? Do you have any such abilities?"

"I am but a humble golem," he says with a nasty smile.

"Blackwell himself, I mean. Did he have any such abilities?"

"No more than I," he says, still smiling in an unpleasant way. "Immense book learning, if I am allowed to brag about another to whom I am in many ways identical. Skill borne of hard and patient practice."

"Could Blackwell have fashioned a pupa?"

"Yes, but only after a great deal of work and the application of many sigils to imbue it with the necessary qualities. You did it just by spitting in prepared clay."

"I got magic spit?" you laugh.

He doesn't. "It suggests something special in your essentia."

"That's the stuff that goes into making golems."

"Yes, but that is only one application. It is much more than that."

You drum your fingers on the desk. You can hardly believe it, but you're about to ask him for homework: "Make me a reading list. A special study course. I want to read up on it."

"As you wish." He starts to rise.

"Before you start, I got more questions," you say, and he sits again. "You were investigating my relatives. Why?"

"I wished to understand the nature of your essentia. Before I could study it directly, I had to have some notion of what to look for, what I might find."

"Are there different kinds of essentia?"

He hesitates for a bit. It's not reluctance to answer, you can tell, but an attempt to give a clear answer to a murky question. "Yes, no, and rather," he says in a helpless way. "There is only one kind of essentia, and everyone has essentia. But each person's essentia is unique to them, of course, for their essentia is what makes them into who they are. And essentia can enter into different kinds of relations with other metaphysical elements."

You must have made a face, for he shifts in his chair. "Ask me if there are different kinds of atoms," he says. You oblige. "I would give the same answer. Yes, no, and rather. There is only kind of thing that can be called an atom. An assemblage of protons, neutrons and electrons. But there are different kinds of atoms. Hydrogen atoms, helium atoms, carbon atoms, and so forth. A bar made purely of gold atoms and a bar made purely of lead atoms will both be made purely of atoms, but they are made of different kinds of atoms, and will have different properties and react in different ways to the environment. Oxygen reacts with other atoms and gives off heat. Gold does not.

"It is the same with essentia," he continues. "You and I-- Rather, you and the late professor Blackwell both have it. But yours burns in a way that his did not. Before examining it directly, I wanted to know if I was dealing with something like oxygen or something like cesium. I certainly didn't want it blowing up in my face."

"That's why you were investigating the Shabblemans?" you ask.

"Yes. Some species of essentia run in bloodlines. Others have their roots in the humors, or in the Empedoclean elements."

"Make up a list of possibilities and add it to my assignment. One more question. Why wouldn't Blackwell sleep with me?"

You regret the phrasing as soon as it has passed your lips, for the golem doesn't bother to hide its mirth. "You're not his type, Mr. Prescott. May I add that he doesn't seem your type either."

"I mean--" It hits you that the golem doesn't know what happened to his original. "He came back to the house, dressed up like Lucy Vredenburg. I, uh, propositioned him, but he didn't tell me who he was."

His eyebrows go up. "I'm not surprised. He was pretending to be out of town." The golem splays its hand across his chest, and tilts his head.

"He refused, even after I threatened to throw him to the house guardian."

"Really?" His eyes go very wide, then travel to the vampire cyclops-monkey. "Ah. Is that, uh --?"

"Yes. Why would he gamble his life with it instead of with me?"

His face grows long, and he scratches his cheek. "Fear of your essentia, I suppose. So I would feel in his place. It takes a purity of form in the semen." He swallows. "And you had become quite advanced in your studies. He would have feared that you knew more than you were letting on, and that if he exposed himself he would put himself at your mercy."

You're silent for a good long time, trying to get your head around these revelations. But there's really not much more to do until he gets that study course made up for you. With a wave of your hand you tell him to get to work on that.

Meanwhile, you open up the Libra and page through it. There are the familiar spells. The one that makes a mask. The one that copies a brain. The one that makes a golem. The one that turns humans into golems. The one that puts a golem inside a mask.

And after that: "Hey, what's this?" you call to Blackwell. He comes down off a ladder to look over a shoulder. "Did Blackwell rip this page away?"

He shakes his head. "No, it was like that when he found it. A damnable bit of luck."

So it is. The page after the seventh spell is ripped neatly across the middle. At the top is a list of ingredients. But the bottom of the page, where the sigil would be, is gone. The page beneath is visible, but the text is a shifting, metamorphic mess. Without the rest of the page, there is no executing the spell so as to turn the page, to get to the rest of the book.

You frown long over it, but it gives you a headache. You turn back to the beginning, and spend time acquainting yourself again and more directly with the sigils and spells while Blackwell fetches books and scratches out notes on sheets of paper. You don't stop until it's nearly midnight. You put out the lights, lead the golem upstairs, and remove the mask so it won't get up to any mischief during the night. You then seal yourself inside Blackwell's own bedroom so you'll be safe from the gwarcheidwad, and crawl into bed. It's been a busy day, and you fall asleep quite quickly.

* * * * *

It feels almost like Christmas the next morning, and you bound through the shower and out the bedroom almost as soon as you're awake. You revive the golem and have it show you through the work it's assembled for you before sending it on to the college to take care of the professor's mundane existence. You then settle at the breakfast table with some eggs and coffee to start looking over your new coursework.

But your attention keeps going back to that torn page. You've plenty to occupy yourself, but you don't like having that dead end there.

Melody is good with languages. Maybe if you had her come out to look at the book, she could shed some light on that torn page.

Next: "Piercing the Veil" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 1)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 1)"