The Magician King

PouncySilverkitten: be. but this = necessary first step

Failstaff: but OK good point VC. maybe OLU isn’t looking for interns

ViciousCirce: seriously say she manifests tomorrow. how does the conversation go pouncy?

It was weird that they hadn’t talked about this stuff openly before: what they would actually say and do if she came. Maybe it was easier to do it online than face-to-face. There was less pressure. The stakes seemed lower. Keep it casual.

PouncySilverkitten: since you ask I’ve thought a lot about this

Asmodeus: you better have

PouncySilverkitten: so. ahem. yr standard issue god follows one of two protocols, right?

Failstaff: uh. splain.

PouncySilverkitten: protocol #1 = prayer. this is more yr modern christian deity. you pray for X. god listens then judges you. if you’re deemed worthy/good/whatever you get what you prayed for. you get X. if not then not.

Asmodeus: OOOOOPS I forgot to be good

PouncySilverkitten: now yr ancient pagan deity follows protocol #2. more a basic transactional kinda deal. demands a sacrifice in return for goods and services.

Failstaff: those were the days

PouncySilverkitten: and then the nature of the sacrifice itself follows one of two protocols. symbolic or real.

Asmodeus: testify my bruthaaaaa

PouncySilverkitten: #1 symbolic = something you don’t really need but that signifies yr devotion to the deity. a fatted calf or whatever etc. #2 real = something you do need, that proves yr devotion to the deity. ie your hand, foot, blood, child, etc

ViciousCirce: like abraham & isaac. sometimes God wants your son. sometimes He’ll settle for a ram.

PouncySilverkitten: exactly. that’s my rough n ready take

ViciousCirce: fine so run the numbers gents and you get three different scenarios and we’re screwed 2 out of 3.

ViciousCirce: modern deity: we’re screwed because we are presumably unworthy hence our prayers go unanswered

ViciousCirce: pagan deity #2: if she demands

a real sacrifice we’re screwed because hello pouncy I need my foot or whatever

ViciousCirce: pagan deity #1 is our only shot. symbolic sacrifice. fatted calf in exchange for the divine praxis. one in three. that’s my take. rough n ready

Failstaff: AND SORRY BUT WHAT IF I REALLY NEED MY FATTED CALF WHAT THEN P WHAT THEN

Asmodeus: sorry pouncy but do I really have to be the one to say that you have no FUCKEN idea what you’re talking about

Asmodeus: literally none

PouncySilverkitten: o rly?

Failstaff: ?

ViciousCirce: . . .

Asmodeus: you think this is a male god you are dealing with ie you writ large. wrong. OLU is a godDESS. a lady god. this is NOT about PROTOCOLS

Asmodeus: I believe in Our Lady Underground and I believe that she will help us not because it is in her interest to do so or because she wants to eat your fucking foot or whatever but because she is KIND. pouncy u twat

Asmodeus: this is not a transaction bitches this is about mercy. this is about forgiveness. this is about divine grace. if Our Lady comes, that is what will save us.

Long silence. Dead air. The next message was time-stamped a full two minutes later.

PouncySilverkitten: so how about it VC. r you in or r you out or what r u?

[ViciousCirce has left this thread]

* * *

They did it in the Library. It was the only room big enough. They’d had to pack up all the books and stack them in the Long Study and elsewhere—the halls were overflowing with them—and dismantle those beautiful floating shelves. The walls were bare, the way they would have been when this was a farmhouse. The windows were flung open to the cold, quiet late-autumn air. The early evening sky was an unnaturally amazing blue, almost a royal blue.

It was all arranged very precisely according to ex-Saint Amadour’s Phoenician invocation, down to the letter. The floor was a maze of chalk runes and patterns. Gummidgy would take the role of mistress of ceremonies and high priestess. Any of them could have handled the technicalities, but it had to be a woman, and of the women, dour, towering Gummidgy was the player deemed least likely to crack up at a crucial moment. She wore a simple flowing white gown. So did everybody else. Gummidgy also wore a crown of mistletoe.

So your basic Golden Bough deal, Julia thought. Fucking mistletoe. She never saw what all the fuss was about. Sure, it’s pretty enough, but at the end of the day it’s still a botanical parasite that strangles its host.

All the old furniture had been exiled from the room. In its place there was only a thick yew table, constructed to exacting specifications, and a huge hewn stone altar that would have cracked the floor if they hadn’t braced it up from below and put some structural spells on the brace. The entire place had been purified in half a dozen ways, as had they—they’d fasted, and then drunk some nasty teas that made their pee change color and smell weird, and burned herbs in clay pots.

They’d done just about everything but actually bathe. The purification was symbolic, not hygienic. Actual medical hygiene didn’t seem to be of great interest to the goddess.

“This isn’t a patriarchal, Old Testament show,” Asmodeus said sharply, when people complained. “Get it? Dirt does not contaminate, it generates. O.L.U. doesn’t care if we’re menstruating. She embraces the body.”

This was followed by ribald witticisms from the menfolk signifying their willingness to offer themselves as symbolic husbands to the goddess. I got yer chthonic sacrifice right here in my pants, etc. etc. But Asmodeus’s famous sense of humor was temporarily in remission for the occasion. Maybe it was nerves. Asmodeus wasn’t high priestess material, but she seemed to have appointed herself the goddess’s chief political compliance officer. She’d even argued that they should all go off their various medications for the occasion too, a suggestion that was universally ridiculed.

The yew table supported three beeswax candles and a big silver bowl full of rainwater; the bowl had cost about as much as the entire swimming pool had. The stone, a massive block of local marble, supported nothing. To be honest they weren’t totally sure what it was for. Gummidgy took her place before the table while the others stood along the walls on either side, four and five. It was asymmetrical, but there was nothing specifically against it in Amadour’s palimpsest, which was otherwise pretty lucid for a document prepared by a guy who lived in a cave and was pushing two millennia at least.

Julia’s mind was a hot, churning mix of excitement and nerves, which she kept from boiling over with lashings of cool skepticism. But she remembered the rough, stiff feel of the statue’s kiss in her dream. As creepy and Freudian as it sounded, she had felt so loved. She’d hoped she’d dream it again last night, but there had been nothing. Just dead air.

Pouncy was to her left. Asmodeus and Failstaff were opposite her so she could see them, but she avoided their eyes. They needed a full hour of silence before the summoning could begin, and tittering had to be kept to an absolute minimum. From outside they could hear the lowing and bleating of the sacrificial animals they’d brought in for the occasion: two sheep, two goats, and two calves, one of each pure black and all white, all shampooed within an inch of their imminently endangered lives. Should a symbolic sacrifice be required, they wanted to make sure the cupboard wasn’t bare.

By seven o’clock the sun was down and the moon was on the rise, lipping up over the hills and fields behind Murs. Once it cleared the trees, a huge white arc light that seemed to be trained on their house alone, Gummidgy moved from her station in the center of the room and lit their candles one by one with the tip of her finger. Julia