Meadow or something, I checked my phone again to see if I had any more updates from people wanting to know why I was being such an arsehole all of a sudden. And by all of a sudden I meant for at least a year and a half.
There weren’t, but there was a reply from Nicola Bright. I guess emeritus professors got up earlier than I thought.
Academic rumour mill was the message. I wasn’t sure that counted as an answer. But it was followed up with. And your number is on your professional website. I’ve been looking for a copy of the Book of Living Fire my whole career.
The problem with my line of work was that everything read as ominous. You got a text like “I’ve been looking for a copy of the Book of Living Fire my whole career” and you automatically tacked on “because when I watched my lover die at the age of twenty-three I swore I would have them back if I had to tear down the sky itself, and that book is part of my secret master plan to invade hell with an army of robots.”
How come? I replied as casually as I could.
I don’t want to bore you with details, but it represents an interesting example of evolving conceptions of the soul in classical thought.
She was right. The details were boring. I sent her the address of my office, such as it was, and my business hours, such as they were. When the bus arrived I was feeling pretty damned good about myself. Yes, this wasn’t strictly paying work, it was a side hustle driven by a vortex of guilt and shame that was slowly swallowing me, but it was still a big tick in the productivity box.
The route back from the middle of nowhere by thing-you-don’t-drive-yourself was a total shitter, so even though I’d got up at ridiculous-o-clock I wound up getting into my office well after ten. Part of that was because as well as avoiding the car I was also trying to avoid the tube. Once you realised how easy it was for a wizard to hijack the entire underground into a mythologically resonant proxy for the underworld, you felt safer being able to see the sky.
To say that business had been slow recently would be—well, accurate. On account of how slow it had been. Of course since my original partner had died way too long ago and my new partner-assistant-sidekick-best-friend was in a state of indefinite suspended animation, I had literally nobody to blame but myself. True, it’s not like the economy was exactly rosy right now what with everything that was going on in the world, but if I was being really, really, super honest and self-scrutinising, the dip in billable hours probably had at least a little bit to do with my wacky habit of showing up at noon, passing out drunk on my desk, or staying away from work for weeks on end because I couldn’t see the point in carrying on with anything even spitting distance from normal any more.
I flipped the old-fashioned open/closed sign on the window, which still read Kane and Archer, meaning it was now two fatal cockups out of date. Then I sat at my desk and for about one point three minutes allowed myself to feel proud of the fact that I’d got into work before noon for once. Of course my pride drained away like coffee grouts down a sink when I realised that now I was actually in work I was still just sitting around and—before I could finish the thought there was a sharp rap on the door. Shit, this wasn’t a client was it? I didn’t realise I was still allowed to have those.
The silhouette on the other side of the frosted glass looked familiar somehow—although with the classical figure and the lighting, it might have been that I could let myself pretend she was Lauren Bacall.
Turned out that wasn’t it. The door opened to reveal a raven-headed goddess who looked like what you’d get if a lonely weirdo carved his perfect woman out of marble then defied all the laws of gods and men to bring her to life. And when I say she looked like that, I mean that was exactly what she was. And for a moment which could seriously, seriously go fuck itself I forgot that Elise had sisters—all variations on the same girl that this arsehole wizard called Russel had been