(with a lucifer from the box on the mantel, Emily noticed; no finger-snap flames here among strangers). He smoked contemplatively, adding nothing to the conversation but listening with extravagant casualness, as if the men were trading choice stock tips.
When Stanton had finished smoking, he strolled back to where Emily was sitting.
“Well?” she said.
“Wasn’t a bad cigar for a nickel.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Come along, then.” He offered her his arm. She stood and took it, then startled. He was astonishingly hot, as if burning up with fever. She looked at him, scrutinized his face.
“Are you sick?” She yanked the glove from her hand, touched his cheek. He pulled back as if alarmed.
“You’re hot as the bottom of a kettle!” It was as if he’d been sitting in the fireplace, instead of standing next to it.
“I’m fine,” he said, curtly. “I told you, I have an unusual metabolism. Now, if you don’t mind?”
Pulling her glove back on, she took his arm again and they went upstairs toward the rooms.
“All right, here’s the big news. Aberrancies.” Stanton spoke as if the word itself was tedious. “Apparently there’s a spate coming from a pit mine close by the main road to Sacramento. Causing trouble for some of the travelers here. There’s talk of government troops being dispatched to clear the trouble.”
Emily stopped short. “Aberrancies?”
“Hardly unusual. Incidents involving Aberrancies have been increasing steadily over the past twenty years. Especially out here in the West.”
“Why would we have more Aberrancies?”
“Their appearance is correlated with certain geological irregularities. Mining—pit mining especially—often exposes these irregularities.”
“Aberrancies are caused by mining?”
“No, Aberrancies are not caused by mining.” He sighed as they came to the door of her room. “Rather, they are an unfortunate by-product. It’s all rather complicated—”
“Explain it to me.” Emily leaned against the wall next to her door.
“Not in the hallway of a public hotel.” As if pretending to be her brother gave him the right to talk to her like one! “It’s just too common.”
“Not as common as having your mad sister pound on your door until you tell her what she wants to know.” Emily narrowed her eyes. “I think you can guess, Mr. Stanton, just how common I am willing to be.”
Stanton glared at her. Emily smiled sweetly.
“Your comfort with extortion is an extremely ugly personality trait,” he said. Then he sighed. “I’ll make it as simple as possible. Deep within the earth lies the Mantic Anastomosis. In layman’s terms, it is a vast interconnected web, like a filigree over the whole globe. This web is made of a special type of mineral—a mineral almost never seen aboveground.”
“Native Star,” Emily said, her thumb stroking her palm. Stanton nodded.
“According to accepted theory, this mineral web is part of the cycle by which magic is absorbed, purified, and released. The Mantic Anastomosis exudes magic slowly, and the magic is knitted into all living things. When those things die, the magic returns to the earth and the cycle begins anew.”
“Yes, I know all about the cycle of magic. Pap taught me,” Emily said. “But everyone knows magic can’t be held within things that never lived. So how can it be stored in a rock?”
“It is theorized that magic binds to the mineral structure of the web, is attracted to it by some kind of magnetism. Therefore the power is not actually within the mineral itself, but held close to it.” He paused, suddenly looking exasperated. “But see here, you wanted to know about Aberrancies. If you’re after a broad-based tutorial on magical theory, we’ll be here all night.”
“All right,” Emily said somewhat reluctantly, for she did like to learn despite her general resistance to being taught. “Aberrancies.”
“Humans have been developing techniques to concentrate and extract magic since the dawn of history. But it is only in the past two hundred years—since most civilized people stopped burning Witches and Warlocks wholesale—that any large-scale, modern application of magic has been developed. Over the past century, research has begun to suggest a correlation between the use of magic in ever-more concentrated forms and an increase in the harmful toxic residuals in the Mantic Anastomosis.”
“So humans working magic dirties up the rock web somehow?”
“Close enough,” Stanton said. “Aberrancies are understood to be the result of the Mantic Anastomosis cleansing itself of these toxic residuals. By some process not entirely understood, the web segregates this highly unstable material. It is called geochole—Bile of the Earth.”
“Black Exunge.” That was the skin-shivering term always used in Mrs. Lyman’s pulp novels.