“Meaning that it’s possible nothing has happened, yet. But that he wanted to put you on your guard against something that’s coming in the immediate future.”
“Why not just tell me?” I asked.
Bob sighed. “You just don’t get this, do you?”
“I guess not.”
“Okay. Let’s say he finds out that someone is going to steal your car tomorrow.”
“Heh,” I said bitterly. “Okay, let’s say that.”
“Right. Well, he can’t just call you up and tell you to move your car.”
“Why not?”
“Because if he significantly altered what happened with his knowledge of the future it could cause all sorts of temporal instabilities. It could cause new parallel realities to split off from the point of the alteration, ripple out into multiple alterations he couldn’t predict, or kind of backlash into his consciousness and drive him insane.” Bob glanced at me again. “Which, you know, might not do much to deter you, but other wizards take that kind of thing seriously.”
“Thank you, Bob,” I said. “But I still don’t get why any of those things would happen.”
Bob sighed. “Okay. Temporal studies 101. Let’s say that he hears about your car being stolen. He comes back to warn you, and as a result, you keep your car.”
“Sounds good so far.”
“But if your car never got stolen,” Bob said, “then how did he know to come back and warn you?”
I frowned.
“That’s paradox, and it can have all kinds of nasty backlash. Theory holds that it could even destroy our reality if it happened in a weak enough spot. But that’s never been proven, and never happened. You can tell, on account of how everything keeps existing.”
“Okay,” I said. “So what’s the point in sending the message at all, if it can’t change anything?”
“Oh, it can,” Bob said. “If it’s done subtly enough, indirectly enough, you can get all kinds of things changed. Like, for example, he tells you that your car is going to be stolen. So you move it to a parking garage, where instead of getting stolen by the junkie who was going to shoot you and take the car on the street, you get jacked by a professional who takes the car without hurting you—because by slightly altering the fate of the car, he indirectly alters yours.”
I frowned. “That’s a pretty fine line.”
“Yes, which is why not mucking around with time is one of the Laws,” Bob said. “It’s possible to change the past—but you have to do it indirectly, and if you screw it up you run the risk of Paradox-egeddon.”
“So what you’re saying is that by sending me this warning, he’s indirectly working some other angle completely?”
“I’m saying that the Gatekeeper is usually a hell of a lot more specific about this kind of thing,” Bob said. “All of the Senior Council take black magic seriously. There’s got to be a reason he’s throwing it at you like this. My gut says he’s working from a temporal angle.”
“You don’t have any guts,” I said sourly.
“Your jealousy of my intellect is an ugly, ugly thing, Harry,” Bob said.
I scowled. “Get to the point.”
“Right, boss,” said the skull. “The point is that black magic is very hard to find when you look for it directly. If you try to bring up instances of black magic on your model, like Little Chicago is some kind of evil-juju radar array, it’s probably going to blow up in your face.”
“The Gatekeeper put me on guard against black magic,” I said. “But maybe he’s telling me that so that I can watch for something else. Something black-magic related.”
“Which might be a lot easier to find with your model,” Bob said cheerfully.
“Sure,” I said. “If I had the vaguest idea of what to look for.” I frowned, scowling. “So instead of looking for black magic, we look for the things that go along with black magic.”
“Bingo,” Bob said. “And the more normal the better.”
I pulled out my stool and sat down, frowning. “So, how about we look for corpses? Blood. Fear. Those are pretty standard black wizardry accessories.”
“Pain, too,” Bob said. “They’re into pain.”
“So’s the BDSM community,” I said. “In a city of eight million there are tens of thousands like that.”
“Oh. Good point,” Bob said.
“One would almost think you should have thought of that one,” I gloated. “But for the BDSM crowd, the pain isn’t something they fear. So you just look for the fear instead. Real fear, not movie-theater fear. Terror. And there can’t be a lot of spilled human blood