Before her was a page she had filled with carefully plotted angles, regular polygons inscribed one within the other, meeting perfectly. Dr. Nizamiev’s instructions had called for a sigil, an anchor, but had given only haphazard explanations as to what that meant. It referenced alchemical equations that did not balance and letters of Old Breltainian that she was half certain were drawn upside down, and no order or logic to any of it. But this? This was elegant, and powerful, and it was the strongest anchor she knew of between herself and the seemingly impossible.
As she traced its lines with her fingertips, her spine arched. She felt something moving inside of her, beneath her rib cage, just below her lungs. It squirmed and writhed and tried to force itself upward.
I walk the path of the student, she thought again, bowing low and pressing her forehead to the inked paper, crushing down the slithering inside her. I walk the path of the student.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
THE RIVER GRASS and sprouted grain was as horrid as she’d anticipated, but no more than that, slick and flavorless but gone fast enough. It did nothing to shadow the glow inside of her. She had felt the working’s power, just as she had felt the circle’s. It was all real, and it would work. She wanted to rush upstairs and read through Augustine’s text one more time, pick out spells to test and try, set herself against the door.
But she restrained herself. She made herself look at the picture of the hanging magician, and felt the throbbing in her veins lessen, her skin lose its hot flush. She recalled Dr. Nizamiev’s instructions, her admonition to keep a clear focus in mind.
Augustine. She must never lose sight of him. It was for his salvation that she pursued the impossible, not for herself. This house was his prison; she would break down the walls.
Would it really take all seven days to free him, though?
She had raised circles. She had repelled ghosts. She could feel the power within her breast. What else could she do? What else could she shatter?
She made herself clean up the dishes. It was safer, she lectured herself, to follow the instructions. Seven days. But the seven days were not to free a man, they were to reach an awakening.
Jane gathered the chilling photographs and locked them away in the sitting room desk. Then she went to the hallway.
Settling her hands upon the impossible stone slab, Jane fixed the image of a door in her mind. The wood—what had it felt like? She remembered it jerking against her shoulder, but nothing of the texture. What shade of gray had the padlock been? What shape the escutcheon? She struggled to recall the details, and felt a burgeoning press within her, below her diaphragm, heaving, shuddering. If she could only conjure them up, they might be real once more.
Or …
Did it matter what the details had been, if she could conjure new ones in vibrant reality?
She remembered a door in the magistrate’s building, the one she had stared at, waiting for the wedding to begin. It had been made of old, old oak, with rose head nails and wrought-iron hinges, and it had been beautiful, and ancient, and possessed of an almost mystical quality. But she could not recall how it felt beneath her hands. She wasn’t sure she had even touched it. She cast the image aside and thought instead of the door to her bedroom at the Cunninghams’。 She had felt it so recently, and the details came to her in crystal clarity, down to the beveling and the odd joints where the pieces had not quite fit together. The oak had been worn smooth where people had pushed it open for generations, before fashions changed and the doorknob had been installed.
She missed that door with a feverish pain. She knew every inch of it in a fullness of detail that surprised her. It was as if she could feel it there, as if all she had to do was turn the knob.
But when she opened her eyes, the stone slab stood as before. Her heart fell, her eager confidence punctured, deflated.
It was not as simple as willing the world to be different from what it was. Dr. Nizamiev had been quite clear; the ritual was the thing, the rails upon which the magician’s mind ran. The steps of the proof, to be followed conjecture by conjecture until a final logic was arrived at. This door would not move for her.
“Jane?”
She went still as a sighted mouse at Augustine’s voice. It came from the other side of the wall, soft and weak. She was certain it was his.
“Augustine, I am here.” She waited for the bursting of pipes or the rocking of the foundation that had accompanied his thundering cries of anguish a day before.
Neither came. Instead, Augustine let out a broken, muffled, distant sob. “Jane, where am I?”
Oh, Augustine. She could almost see him, huddled on the stairs. Confused. Afraid.