Impossible.
She looked up at Elodie once more.
“Why are you helping me?” she asked.
Elodie shivered, then disappeared. The chair blocking the door scraped an inch across the floor.
This was madness; Dr. Nizamiev’s warnings echoed in her mind. But Orren was close, and magic was merely a matter of following the steps of a proof. She skimmed the instructions as quickly as she could, and found them clear. They were within her grasp.
What would happen to her if she did not at least try?
Jane didn’t have time to wonder, to plead for Elodie to return. Trick or not, gift or not, she had what she needed, and when she turned back to the room, the darkness of the hallway slashed through the gap of the open door like a wound. She took the book and shoved the couch out of the way, pulled up the rug. Then she hurried to the hearth and crouched, making a bowl out of her skirts, filling them with several scoops of soft, silken ashes. Not salt, but maybe enough, maybe. She clutched the bundle close to her chest as she returned to the book, knelt, and began to draw.
She imagined a great stone wall, assembled piece by piece by skilled hands, as she inscribed the floorboards with chalk, then followed it up with carefully sprinkled ash. She recited the nonsense syllables from the instructions. She wished, and she hoped, and then she fought to know that she was already safe.
But her breath was coming too shallowly; her head swam and her vision narrowed. The chair screeched against the floorboards, and was at last moved out of the way. The door was open. The hallway yawned.
The lights in the study went out.
Something welled beneath her breast, but it was an eel between her fingers as she tried to grasp it. She felt like a child playing at games. A desperate girl wishing that her love alone could keep her mother safe.
There—a movement in the doorway, low, a young boy’s head. She heard a wracking cough. A whispered plea.
Ignore him.
Jane’s lips were moving, but no sound escaped them. She grasped again for the eel and thought of the circle. A wall. Safety. Three hundred and sixty degrees, and also zero; everything and nothing. The infinite line in the finite space.
The movement inside of her caught on the familiar logic and grew along the scaffolding of the chalk. She felt it click into place, saw the numbers resolve themselves into orderly columns.
The boy stopped just beyond the threshold.
In the flashes of light from the storm, he regarded her with bloody tears in his eyes. If he spoke, she could not hear him. The whole world was growing distant, far away and muffled. She stared across the boundary she had created.
She felt a flare of curious pride, beating out her shame and guilt for just long enough that she could breathe.
The dead boy studied her at length, and her knees screamed from how still she held, moving only to take the text in her arms and cradle it in her lap. The book sang to her, and she wanted nothing more than to dive into its instructions, its proven logic. But she didn’t dare look down until, at last, the ghost retreated, gliding backward without turning, out the door and away.
She had solved the equation.
She sat vigil into the depths of the night. She might have dozed, but she never moved from her seat within the circle. At length, the storm lifted, and the gas lamps crept to half glow once more. She turned the pages slowly, wishing for her reading glasses, then stopped as she came across Augustine’s dense, frantic hand, notes scribbled in the margins, filling them. Beneath them, inside them, a description of a resurrection.
Instructions for the impossible.
* * *
AUGUSTINE HAD SUMMONED up the dead by desecrating Elodie Lawrence’s body.
He had made seven incisions into her cooling flesh: between the brows, on the tips of her longest fingers, on the heels of her feet, at her throat, and above her belly. He had driven a cold metal pin through her heart, and he must have been so relieved that he had already exposed it in his desperate attempts to revive her. He had burned candles and incense made of herbs Jane did not recognize the names of, from sunset to sunup, and he had sat with her for each hour of darkness, whispering prescribed chants detailing the world of the dead.
The world of the dead; the description in Augustine’s notes was unfamiliar. It was not the old platitudes of Breltainian faith, nor anything else she had ever encountered. Now, people spoke of cold graves and the hard stop of the light of the soul, a limited existence but one made more precious due to its brevity, and more believable by its cruelty. But this text described a glass orb a thousand times the size of the world that the essence of every soul who had ever lived was thrust into, where they could make fecund worlds of their own.