Mirabilis said, withdrawing the Otherwhere Marble from his pocket and placing it in her hand. Marble and nut clicked gently against each other in her fist. “I don’t think I need to remind you to handle it with great care.”
Mirabilis gestured to the center of the circle. “Miss Edwards, please kneel here.” Emily arranged herself carefully, her tightly clenched hand resting on her knee. She breathed deeply, trying to calm her thudding heart.
She remembered how she and Stanton had performed the séance before; they had sat with their hands close but not touching. It appeared that a group séance required the same proximate distance. The colleagues gathered around her, letting their hands hover over her without actually touching. Strangely enough, she could feel each hand as clearly as if it were touching her. She felt the sangrimancers’ hands floating over her back, exuding an aura of rot. Caul’s hand hovered an inch from her throat, and she had to fight the urge to shy away from it. Tarnham’s hand was suspended over her upper arm, but it didn’t feel like a hand, it felt like myriad scurrying paws, making her flesh crawl. Miss Pendennis’ hand, smooth and firm as wax, trembled alongside her ankle. Stanton knelt beside her, his hand cupped an inch above the hand that lay on her knee. Mirabilis stood over her, his hand stretched out flat across the top of her head.
Ososolyeh, she thought, letting herself tumble toward it.
Emily concentrated as she had at the séance before. But instead of concentrating on Komé, Emily remembered the place she had seen in her dream, the vast beautiful landscape that stretched into infinity. The place where the light was her plaything, where she was Ososolyeh—ancient and vast, wanderer from the stars, the great spirit of the earth.
The sound of a great heart beating.
Basket of Secrets. Basket of Secrets. Basket of Secrets.
Miwok words floated around her, darting about her head like fireflies.
She felt herself spreading out, becoming huge and eternal and deep, felt the threads of her human consciousness stretching unimaginably thin over a tessellation of incomprehensible intricacy. She stretched and spread until she was no longer anyone human at all. The Warlocks called her the Mantic Anastomosis, Komé called her Ososolyeh, but she had no name. She was only what she was. She was only memories—an infinity of memories.
The memory of traveling through endless reaches of empty blackness, measuring each moment by the unique smell of the star-seeded clouds as they drifted by, borne on thin winds of old power that vibrated like a current. A million smaller indecipherable sense memories: The sense of darkness. The sense of never. The sense of the vibrations of things infinitely small. The sense of the eternity within every single fraction of every single moment.
Komé’s voice surrounded her. This is where you come from. From the stars, never born, never dying.
Then, another flash of memory—a treasured memory of a beautiful sphere of fire, shimmering like a droplet of molten steel on a bed of powdered coal. A young sphere, churning with fire and energy, not yet painted in the greens and blues that would come. She wrapped herself around the flaming sphere, the young tender planet, taking its molten warmth into her core. She wrapped herself around it tight and snug, threading herself into the tiniest places, wicking the energy into herself. Keeping the hot secret core safe within, a yolk on which to feed. She cooled, cracked, smoothed. Became a web. A web that breathed in and out, taking and receiving, radiating power and bringing it back in a sweet respiration.
Home, sweet home.
A billion years passed. She felt them all pass, felt the exact detail of each second with complete clarity. Each eon, each year, each day, each moment was a miracle of separation, a brilliance of meaning, a richness of experience. She savored them all.
And then …
Pain.
Ososolyeh had never known pain, had never known of the existence or concept of pain. It could only be understood in human terms, animal terms, the terms of the tiny crawling creatures. It was agony. It was wretched misery. It was deep needles plunged into her, sucking at her greedily, bleeding her, emptying her. Unbalancing the delicate dance, the eternal respiration, taking and receiving … making her hollow. The pools of filth grew ever larger, welling and pooling and bubbling. She was a lake being drained, mud congealing at the