Young Brennan looked stricken, his stubbly face pale in the monitor light.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.
“I didn’t know,” I said.
“I hate this game,” he said. And I woke to the fluorescent lights coming on at seven. I was asleep at my desk, my head cradled in my arms. I got up and went to the kitchen to find some Skittles and went back to work.
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Lorac and I walked up Oxford Street together. He smelled like jasmine and ash. His eyes gleamed with the unnatural intelligence that could retain twelve different daemonic languages in as many alphabets; he’d done Sanskrit that afternoon. I wondered if he had been born with the talent or if he had paid a price, and what it was.
“Lorac, how does magic work?” I asked. He sighed, barely stopping himself from rolling his eyes a little.
“It depends what kind—they’re all different.”
“Your thing, then. Conjuration.”
He plucked at the hem of his robe. His hands were spotted with age but quick and limber, and they looked strong. He saw me watching and stopped.
“Well,” he said, “I bought a level-eight specialization in it, if that’s what you mean. But it’s… you have to realize, when the Houses of the Nine were sealed, words were spoken and signs were engraved that cannot now be unsaid or erased. When I speak, when I make the shapes, I take part in…” He trailed off, muttering in a language I didn’t recognize.
“Start again. What’s it like to cast spells?” I asked.
“I’ll just say—when your body and your voice can shape the world…” he said. He was more animated than I’d ever seen him. “There are ways in which I have cracked the secrets of creation. The joy, the sense of belonging—I can’t explain it to one like you.”
“Okay, so why can’t I do it?”
“Because you live beyond the end of the Third Age. In your time, magic has retreated and even the ruins of the ruins of the Firstcomers have been dust for aeons, long after their knowledge has been lost to humanity. Long after the last of my kind read the final prophecy of the Earth’s Heart and broke his staff across his knee and cursed his art and was never heard from again.”
“Great.”
“Also because you grew up in Newton.”
“So that’s it?” I said. “I’ll never do magic?”
“There are certain scrolls—of doubtful authenticity, mind you—that claim that once in a millennium, a young person of talent and matchless courage will have the chance to rediscover the world of magic—certain words, at least, and one great sign. This person will bring the return of magic and remake the world in an age of splendor that will come. Madness, yes, but great splendor, too.”
“But that’s not me.”
He laughed. “Ah—no.”
“So… magic. It’s nothing to do with… the way you dress.”
He was wearing what seemed like a worn maroon bathrobe over a bright blue blouse thing. His long gray hair was tied back with a faded ribbon. He had slippers with pointed toes that curled upward, and they weren’t coping so well in the slush and mud of a New England sidewalk.
“The way I dress?” he said, looking puzzled. “No.”
“Then how come you dress like that?”
“Because I can do magic.”
“So how come you can’t use metal weapons?”
“I’d rather not talk about it.”
“Lorac, you’re really powerful now. Why don’t you go back to that fancy kingdom you left? Maybe the king would take you back.”
“I did.”
“What happened?”
“It’s gone; something happened to it while I was away. Nothing there but sand and stone buildings. Empty fountains, beautiful mosaics.”
“Shit.”
“Let’s not talk about it.”
“So what happened at the end of the Third Age?”
“I thought I’d explained all that before. Weren’t you listening? Magic ended.”
He saw me off at the Porter Square T stop. He stood on the platform and waved to me as my train pulled away, the only wizard left alive in our time, if he even was alive. In his robes and beard he looked sad and homeless for a moment, but then he winked at me and mimed a golf stroke.
PART V
CLANDESTINE, OR THE SPY WHO LOVED YOU
Chapter Forty
Clandestine (1988)
Clandestine dated from senior year, the year Darren left high school for good, the year after Simon finally quit his job at Kinko’s to live full-time at UMass. He didn’t find an apartment. By that time he was a sort of unofficial mascot of the undergrad computer science lab. He’d drift from dorm room to dorm room or to a student lounge. One