Marci shrugged and looked at Shiro, who shook his head. “I’m not privy to its logic, so I can’t say what exactly you did that caused the door to open, but the Heart of the World does not make mistakes. If you are here now, it’s because something you did between our last meeting and this one was enough to earn the Heart’s trust, and that’s proof enough for me.”
Marci bit her lip. There was a lot to unpack in that statement. She was trying to decide where to start when Myron beat her to it.
“Where are we?” he demanded, looking up at the forested mountain. “All my research said that the Heart of the World was a spell, not a place.”
“It is a spell,” the shikigami said, “to make a place.”
“So it’s an illusion?” Marci said, tapping her foot on the paving stones, which certainly felt real.
“I think it’s more like a model,” Amelia said excitedly. “I’ve always wondered how the great mages overcame humanity’s inherent magical handicaps. I mean, you live in a dual-natured reality, but your perception is confined to the physical world while you’re alive, and stuck in your deaths after that. Even if youdoclaw your way out to the actual Sea of Magic, you still need a spirit to ferry you around and point stuff out since you can’t see squat. That’s a crippling limitation, especially when you’re talking about thereallybig scale magic Merlins were famous for. But if your secret base is actually a constructed reality—a place that takes all the stuff you can’t normally see and translates it into something you can interact with—that would explain a lot.”
“Of course,” Marci said, staring up at the mountain, which she could now see wasn’t craggy or rocky at all, but perfectly regular. A flawless cone, which was nothing but a bunch of circles stacked on top of each other.
She dropped to one knee, brushing her hands over the courtyard’s paving stones, which she now saw weren’t rough at all. They were carved, their stone faces engraved with so many tiny, interlocking lines of spellwork, they felt like sandpaper.
“It’s all a spell,” she said, awestruck. “This whole place was built by people.”
“Of course,” Myron said, dropping down beside her. “Humans can’t see or navigate the Sea of Magic, so they built an artificial physical space inside it. A safe haven.”
“Or a lens,” Marci said, looking up at the blue dome of the cloudless sky. “We’re still inside the Sea of Magic, it just makes sense now. That must be what this place does. It translates all that chaos into something we can interact with.”
“You are both correct,” Shiro said. “The Sea of Magic is as huge and unfathomable to mortals as the actual sea it was named for. Such confusion prevented magical advancement, so the mages who came before my master, the ancient Merlins, built this place to act as an interface. It is a tool that provides both shelter from the chaos of the Sea of Magic and light that renders that chaos of magic into a form humans can understand and use.”
“But that’s incredible!” Marci cried, shooting back to her feet. “You didn’t just draw a circle in the Sea of Magic, you made an entire world!” She looked up at the green mountain. “We’re standing in what has to be the biggest superstructure of magical logic ever built. One made without any of the modern tools like computer simulations or spell-checking software. That’s like discovering a new Great Pyramid built inside of Atlantis!”
“I don’t know what either of those are,” Shiro said apologetically. “But I’m happy you understand the importance and power of this place.”
“The power of this place was never in question,” Myron said, scowling. “What I want to know is what’s all this powerfor? Novalli’s right. This is the biggest spell I’ve ever seen by several orders of magnitude. But I’ve worked for the United Nations long enough to know that humans don’t build things on this scale unless it gives them a serious strategic advantage.”
Marci snorted. “How is that even a question? We’re talking about a tool that lets humans see and interact with magic like the spirits do. That’s ahugestrategic advantage.”
“It is,” Myron agreed. “Ifthat was all it did. But look.”
He marched over to the edge of the clearing and grabbed one of the thick bushes, pulling it down to show Marci the flat green leaf.
“Holy…” Marci grabbed the waxy leaf from his hands, staring down at the delicate veins that ran through it, but not in the usual branching pattern.
“This is spellwork,” she said, running her fingers over the looping ridges of the ancient symbols growing inside the leaf where its chloroplasts should have been. The other leaves were the same, as was the branch they grew from. “It’sallspellwork,” she whispered, reaching out to touch the spirals of symbols that formed the patterns in the bark. “Every inch of it.”
“And you know what that means,” Myron said, letting the tree go. “You never finished your PhD, but even undergrads should know that interlocked spellwork is exponentially co-functional. If all of this is inside the same circle, and I see no reason not to believe that the Heart of the World is one circle, then all of this—the stones in this courtyard and the leaves in the forest and anything else we find—are parts of the same whole. It’s like—”
“Programs running in the same operating system,” Marci finished, nodding.
“Don’t put your dated Comp Sci analogies in my mouth,” Myron said disdainfully. “I was going to say ‘organs functioning in a body.’ We’re doing magic, not writing point-of-sale software for minimum wage. I know you Thaumaturges have a hard time telling the two apart, but while Shamanistic magic has its drawbacks, at least they understand that magic is an organic force. We’re playing god with the stuff of life itself. Not writing logic chains for mindless computational systems.”
Marci rolled her eyes. “Says the man who wrote a book calledThe Logic of Magic.”
“Yes,” he said proudly. “And since you claim to have read all my work, you’ll remember I said that the logic of magic functions like the logic of every other natural system: a chaotic mess governed by a few universal rules, one of which is that all spellwork inside the same circle works together.That point made, take a moment and think about just how much spellwork we’re talking about.”
He stepped back to look up at the densely forested mountain rising above them. “Not counting anything else we might find, but if all of those trees are spellworked like this one, that right there is more magical notation than all the modern spellwork libraries combined. Considering the amount of logic we saw crammed onto one leaf, we might be looking at millions of spells, perhapsbillions, all working together. If that’s true, then the next question has to be: working toward what end?”
Marci frowned. “Aren’t they making this?” She tapped her foot on the stone. “You know, supporting the Heart of the World?”
“As amazing as the Heart of the World unquestionably is, it’s not that complicated,” Myron said confidently. “I could probably create something similar given enough time and the space on the trees that immediately surround us. Even if you doubled those requirements, though, the spellwork required to make a separate reality, even one as complicated as this, still wouldn’t be anywhere near enough to fill all the trees and rocks and other presumably spellworked landscaping that blankets this island. And it’s not even confined to theground. Look up.”
He pointed up at the sky, and Marci gasped. Now that he’d pointed it out, she could plainly see that what had initially looked like a clear blue sky wasn’t actually clear at all, or a sky. It was a dome, a blue shell covered with hundreds of thousands of millions of tiny symbols like pixels on an old-style LED screen.
From all the way down here, they blended together into a flat blue expanse, but if she squinted, Marci could see the symbols were arranged into spellwork, just like everything else. Not just single lines, either. The sky was a grid, a hatch of symbols arranged in a spellwork pattern that could be read not just from side to side, but up and down and maybe even diagonally as well. The complexity behind such a design was enough to make her head spin, but it was also one Marci had seen before.
