Cold Days

I muttered under my breath, bounced the Winchester on my shoulder, and started walking.

Walking on the island is an odd experience. I'd say it's like walking through your house in the dark, except I've never known a house as well as I knew that island. I knew where every stone lay, where every branch stuck out in my path, knew it without being warned by any senses at all. Walking in the dark was as easy as doing it in broad daylight-easier, even. I'd have had to pay at least a little attention to use my eyes. But here, every step was solid, and every motion I made was minimal, efficient, and necessary.

I made my way through unbroken brush in the dark, hardly making a sound, never tripping once. As I did I noted that Molly had been right about another thing: The clash of energies in the air had created enough dissonance to drive away most of the animals, the ones that had the capacity to readily escape. The deer were gone. Birds and raccoons were gone, and so were the skunks-though that would be one hell of a long swim to the nearest stretch of lakeshore, animals had been known to swim farther. Smaller mammals, mice and squirrels and so on, remained, though they had crowded into the ten yards or so nearest the shoreline all around the island. The snakes were having a field day with that, and evidently weren't bright enough to know that there was a bigger problem brewing.

I found the trail to the top of the hill, the high point on the island, and started up it. There were irregular steps cut into the hillside to make the ascent easier. They were treacherous if you didn't walk carefully, or if you didn't have near-omniscience about the place.

At the top of the hill is a ruined lighthouse made of stone. It's basically just a chewed-up silo shape now, having collapsed long ago. Next to the ruined tower, someone cobbled together a small cottage out of fallen stones. When I first saw it, it had been a square, squat little building with no roof. Thomas and I had been planning on putting the roof back on, so that I could overnight on the island someplace where I could build a fire and stay warm, but we hadn't gotten that far yet when everything had gone sideways. The cottage just sat, empty and forlorn-but a soft golden glow bathed the interior wall I could see from my position. There was the scent of wood smoke on the air.

Someone had built me a fire.

I made my way forward cautiously, looking around with both my awareness and my eyes, just in case my omniscience was in actuality nigh-omniscience, but I couldn't sense any threat. So I went into the cabin and looked around.

There was a fire in the fireplace and a folding table stacked with thick plastic boxes containing jars of food that would stay good for months at a time. The boxes would resist the tampering of critters. There were some camp implements stored in another box, and I took the time to break out a metal coffeepot, went out to the little old iron pump just outside the front door, and filled it. I tossed in a couple of handfuls of coffee grounds, hung it on the swivel arm by the fireplace, and nudged it over the fire.

Then I broke out the skull and set him down on the table. "Okay, Bob," I said. "We have work to do. You been listening?"

"Yeah, yeah," Bob said, his eyelights flickering to life. "Island go boom or something."

"We're on a mission to find out what it's going to do, and why, and how we can stop it."

"Gosh, I'd never have thought of that myself, Harry."

"This is top secret stuff," I said. "Anything you learn here is for me and you only. You go to someone else, I want this whole evening locked away someplace nice and tight. And don't go splitting off another personality on me, like you did with Evil Bob."

"Entirely confidential, check," Bob said. "And it would take a lot more than one night working with you to build up enough momentum to spin off a whole new me. I have to actually learn things to make that happen."

"Less insult, more analysis," I said.

The beams from the skull's eye sockets grew brighter. They swept left and right, up and down, panning around like prison searchlights. Bob made thoughtful noises.

I tended the coffeepot. After it had been boiling for a few minutes, I took it off the fire, added a splash of cold water from the pump to settle the grounds, and poured myself a cup. I added a little powdered creamer and a bunch of sugar.

"Might as well drink syrup," Bob muttered.

"Says the guy with no taste buds," I said. I sipped. "Been meaning to have you out here to take a look at the place anyway."

"Uh-huh," Bob said absently.

"So?" I asked.

"Um," Bob said. "I'm still working on the surface layer of spells on the stones of this cottage, Harry."

I frowned. "Uh. What?"

"You know there're symbols there, right?"

I sipped coffee. "Sure," I said. "They kinda lit up when-"

Nauseating, mind-numbing horror and pain flashed over my thoughts for a couple of seconds. I'd used my wizard's Sight to look at the wrong being a couple of years ago, and that isn't the kind of mistake you ever live down. Now the memory of seeing that thing's true being was locked into my noggin, and it wouldn't go away or fade into the past-not ever.

That's bad. But the really bad part is that I've gotten used to it. It just caused a stutter step in my speech.

"-the naagloshii tried to get inside. It didn't seem to like them much."

"I should f**king think not," Bob said, his voice nervous. "Um, Harry . . . I don't know what these are."

I frowned at him. "Uh. What?"

"I don't know," he repeated. He sounded genuinely surprised. "I don't know what they are, Harry."

Magic is like a lot of other disciplines that people have recently begun developing, in historic terms. Working with magic is a way of understanding the universe and how it functions. You can approach it from a lot of different angles, applying a lot of different theories and mental models to it. You can get to the same place through a lot of different lines of theory and reasoning, kind of like really advanced mathematics. There's no truly right or wrong way to get there, either-there are just different ways, some more or less useful than others for a given application. And new vistas of thought, theory, and application open up on a pretty regular basis, as the Art develops and expands through the participation of multiple brilliant minds.

But that said, once you have a good grounding in it, you get a pretty solid idea of what's possible and what isn't. No matter how much circumlocution you do with your formulae, two plus two doesn't equal five. (Except maybe very, very rarely, sometimes, in extremely specific and highly unlikely circumstances.) Magic isn't something that just makes things happen, poof. There are laws to how it behaves, structure, limits-and the whole reason Bob was created was so that those limits could be explored, tested, and charted.