paused. “It’s been so hard. He would have … helped.”
Pap sighed. “Emily, I’m ashamed. Sore ashamed.” These five words were the entirety of Pap’s remonstration, but Pap’s remonstrations didn’t get much harder than that. The deep disappointment in his voice and the tired slump of his shoulders made hot tears sting her eyes.
She turned abruptly and went into the screened cooking area. Pap wasn’t able to see her tears, but she’d be hanged if she would embarrass herself in front of Stanton. Angrily, she dashed a drop from her cheek.
Poor Dag! She’d promised to meet him for a walk and instead ended up going off with another man. That it was to battle a pack of rampaging zombies wouldn’t make a bit of difference. He’d be hurt and furious.
She got out herbs from earthenware pots on the windowsill, thinking absently of Stanton’s bruised eye, wanting mostly to give her hands something to do. She put a clean piece of white cheesecloth into a blue-enameled bowl, and on the cloth she sprinkled willow bark, nettle, thistle, and a good deal of black tea. Then she poured warm water into the bowl and let it all steep, watching the herbs swirl in the water. They were turning widdershins. A bad sign.
“Perhaps this is a punishment,” Emily said, softly. “Besim called me a bad Witch. Bad magic always gets its comeuppance.”
“Ever mind the Rule of Three … Three times what thou givest returns to thee.” Emily heard the ruefulness in Pap’s voice as he quoted the old rede to her. He did not elaborate—he did not need to.
“Can we please take one problem at a time?” Stanton said. “Your lumberman is the least of our worries. I told you I’d look in my journals and see if I could discover anything about the stone. Well, discover something I did.”
Emily lifted the cloth from the bowl, wringing out the extra water, then she turned in the corners of the cloth so they enfolded the dampened herbs. She handed the poultice to Stanton. She tried to conceal the fact that the hand offering it—the hand with the stone in it—was trembling slightly.
“That will take down the swelling,” she said. He placed it over his eye, gingerly. “What did you find out?”
“Something I began to suspect last night. The Corpse Switch didn’t fail. The miners did.”
“How, exactly, does a zombie fail?”
“Let me tell you what a Corpse Switch actually does.” Stanton leaned back in his chair, and assumed an infuriatingly pedantic air. “Zombies are soulless creatures, and being soulless has been empirically proven to result in an unpleasant disposition. The Corpse Switch provides them with an artificial soul.”
“You don’t say?” Pap leaned forward, fascinated. “How does it do that?”
“The Corpse Switch stands in for the traditional control of a bokor or voodoo sorcerer.” Stanton also leaned forward, obviously pleased to find a receptive audience. “It generates a very large magical aura—a signal which penetrates the minds of the undead. It gives them memories. Not real memories, of course—the mine owners make them up whole cloth. Happy memories featuring picks and shovels and holes in the ground.”
“My, my!” Pap’s milky eyes glistened. “What will they think of next?”
“The Switch pushes the terror of their half-life into abeyance. It comforts them, makes them placid and tractable.”
“But you’ve already said the Switch didn’t fail,” Emily said.
“It didn’t. It was producing the aura just fine. It was the stone that interfered with the zombies receiving it.”
With a dramatic flourish, Stanton reached down to open the flap of his saddlebag. He pulled out a huge leather-bound book, very new looking, with the words Journal of Recent Thaumaturgical Advancements—Volume CDLXXVI pressed upon it in gold. He opened the book to a slender bookmark of carved ivory, then gestured to Emily. “Read that.”
Emily read the rather grandiose title of the article, which was “Prominent Mysteries in the Occult Sciences: Frontiers That Remain Unexplored, Presenting Various Intriguing Fields of Study for the Warlocks of Future Decades.”
She followed Stanton’s finger down past a paragraph subtitled “Can the Mantic Anastomosis Be Cleansed Through Human Intervention?” and another subtitled “Geochole—A Resource for Future Exploitation?” When Stanton’s finger came to rest, she began to read aloud, for Pap’s benefit:
“What Is the Native Star?
“This blue-white mineral of unknown properties is a preternatural mystery of the first water. The only known specimen, hardly the size of a lady’s shoe button, currently resides in the British Museum, returned there after discovery in 1820 in a Canadian gold mine by native laborers,