Dr. Nizamiev’s notebook was open on her lap, and Jane watched as she penned a quick observation. Whatever it said, she could not read, but Dr. Nizamiev looked pleased.
Jane’s skin crawled. “Of course,” she said. “What is it?”
“That you will accept as true everything I am about to tell you. It will not be easy, but it must become a part of your understanding of the world, or else I will have wasted my time.”
“I promise,” she said hastily, desperately.
Dr. Nizamiev set the pen down in the gutter of the book but did not close it. “Good. Now. I do not know precisely what Augustine did to try to bring Elodie back from death,” she said. The admission kindled quick anger in Jane, but before she could argue, Dr. Nizamiev held up a hand, stilling her. “He only told me of the results. But I can tell you the logic of it.”
Lindridge Hall was silent around them. The lamps beyond the sitting room had dimmed, and they sat alone in a small pool of light. “Please.”
“You are an accountant.”
“Yes.”
“Perhaps you can think of magic, then, at its most basic as changing numbers,” she said. “Shifting the reality of a thing. Making it into something else. Alchemists strived to change lead into gold, water into wine. But it’s not simply replacing a two with a three in a column of sums. It is changing what two represents.”
“I don’t follow,” Jane said, though she could feel herself leaning forward, the mathematical logic seductively familiar. “You could say that the word two means three things, but two items would still always be two items.”
“It’s a strange sort of logic,” Dr. Nizamiev said as if conceding a point.
Jane frowned. “It doesn’t work.”
“Remember your promise, Jane. Here, another option: change the meaning of an operator. Summing goes from one thing being added to another, to one being added to another and another.”
“This is all semantics,” Jane said. The nascent headache from earlier that evening had turned to pounding. She could still hear Elodie’s screams if she was not careful to keep her focus. Semantics could not stop that. Semantics could not save her. She could not accept semantics as a new truth. “It’s impossible.”
“And that is why you and I cannot work magic. Because we know it is impossible.”
Jane’s head jerked up. “Because it is.”
“The premise of the working of magic,” Dr. Nizamiev said, “is first and foremost that the practitioner believes—that she knows—that it is possible.”
“But it isn’t!”
“If the practitioner knows that magic is possible, then the practitioner can change the rules by which the world functions. But that knowing extends beyond belief, extends beyond mere acceptance. Magic must be a part of the practitioner’s every waking moment. It is an altered state of being.”
There was an odd light in Dr. Nizamiev’s eyes, a hunger, an alteration of her predatory gaze. She was not just watching Jane now, she was watching for something. Some response. Some slip.
“It’s madness,” Jane said.
But Jane’s mind was working, turning over the problem, faster and faster. The properties of the number zero were, in and of themselves, impossible. To divide by zero produced irrationality. But if her text was to be believed, that irrationality then produced real, true answers. The area under a curve, the volume of an irregular object, all real things. Her treatise even contained a proof that if division by zero was allowed, one number could be proven to equal another—just what Dr. Nizamiev was now describing.
Except the properties of zero could be tested by reality. Magic could not.
“It’s madness,” she repeated again, quietly, to herself.
Dr. Nizamiev arched her brow. “Madness,” she mused, sitting back. “Yes. It is.”
Jane shivered. “You lock the mad up.” This was it. The trap that Dr. Nizamiev had laid. Jane, mad, removed from this house and her husband’s life—
But Augustine had shown no signs of wanting her gone, and Dr. Nizamiev had no reason to claim her as a patient. And Dr. Nizamiev had made her promise to believe so as not to waste her time; hardly the behavior of a doctor set to commit her.
“I study madness,” Dr. Nizamiev said, lips faintly curved. “And I study the practice of magic. As I said, magic is my personal curiosity. Madness is my professional one.” She paused in thought for a moment, then shrugged. “Have you ever had the experience of somebody telling you a new fact, and it changes how you perceive the world?”