“It’s like the inside of my Kosmolabe.”
Myron gaped at her. “Youhave a Kosmolabe?”
“Had,” she said. “But you’re right. As incredible as this place is, there’s way too much spellwork here just to keep the magic out and support a translation interface. It has to do something else.”
Probably a lot of something elses, including choosing to admit her as a Merlin. But even that kind of seemingly intelligent decision fit within the parameters of the logic that governed wards. Just as she could make a shield that blocked bullets or trapped spirits, the ancient Merlins could surely write a spell that kept out everyone except for the humans who met their requirements. It would take a ton of spellwork—abstract wards always did—but there was definitely enough here to do it. More than enough, which was the problem.Nothingtook this much spellwork.
Marci’s stomach began to sink. If she followed Myron’s logic and assumed the rest of the forest was jam packed like the tree and the stones under their feet, then there was enough spellwork here to hold all the world’s magic through twice over. And given why Myron and Algonquin had wanted to get in here, Marci had the awful feeling that was the entire point.
“You claimed this place was built to be a tool,” she said, turning back to Shiro, who’d never stopped watching her. “Something that wouldn’t just let humans see the magic here, but use and control it as well.”
“Correct,” the shikigami replied.
Marci nodded, crossing her arms over her chest. “So what were they using it to do?”
The shikigami smiled wide. “To answer that question is my purpose,” he said, walking toward her. “But to do so, we must go higher.”
Before she could ask what that meant, Shiro reached the edge of the courtyard, where the trees met the stones. Then he lifted his hand, and the thick line of trees Marci and Myron had been examining peeled back like a curtain.
“Come, Merlin,” he said as he walked into the now-open forest. “I will take you to the Heart of the World.”
“I thought we were already there,” Marci muttered, hurrying after him into the tunnel of trees. Myron followed right behind her, then Ghost and finally Amelia, flapping her way after them out of the sunny courtyard and up the path turned cool green by the dark, leafy canopy of spellwork overhead.
Given the height of the mountain, Marci was braced for a long climb. Apparently, though, constructed magical islands didn’t follow normal rules of distance. After less than a minute of following a footpath uphill between the trees, Shiro pushed aside another wall of undergrowth to reveal a landscape of smooth stone and open sky. Blinking against the suddenly blinding light, Marci followed, stepping out of the forest into the bright, open, and strangely windless world of the perfectly flat plateau that was the mountain’s top.
After the blatant artificiality of everything else here, that really shouldn’t have surprised her, but it was just so odd. Beneath the blanket of forest, the mountain itself was perfectly conical, except for its peak. That was as flat and smooth as a factory floor, as though a passing giant had lopped the mountain’s point off with a razor. The only deviation from the flatness was at the peak’s center, where an elegantly gnarled pine tree grew from the stone beside what appeared to be a well. Aside from that, the only thing to see up here was the ocean.
“Wow,” Marci whispered, staring in wonder at the wild, strikingly blue water. “It really is aSeaof Magic.”
“It is,” Ghost agreed quietly, his glowing eyes round in the void of his face. “Though I’ve never seen it from this height before.” His voice softened. “It’s beautiful.”
It was more than that. The beautiful, clear, jewel-blue ocean stretching out around them was nothing like the nauseating black chaos Marci knew as the Sea of Magic, which was the entire point. This was the lens of the Heart of the World at work, transforming the confusing mess of the Sea of Magic into a form her brain could understand: a clear, shallow sea.
From the top of the mountain—which Marci could now see was indeed a perfect cone with no beach at all, just the vividly green jungle running right up to the waves like a wall—she could look straight down to the ocean floor. A long way down, too, because the base of the Heart of the World didn’t slope out gradually like a natural island. It went straight down like a peg, the stone column they’d seen from outside. And ifthatwas there, then all the thousands of holes and cracks pitting what should have been the ocean’s sandy floor suddenly made a lot more sense.
“Look at all the spirit vessels,” she said, getting right to the edge of the mountain’s flat top.
The land beneath the vibrant blue water was so riddled with gouges, there was barely room for rock between the cracks. Some of the holes were so deep, the water was still pouring in, forming giant whirlpools as the sea was sucked down into the seemingly bottomless pits. From where she was standing, she could only look down into a handful, but the whirlpools were everywhere, dotting the choppy sea like freckles all the way to the horizon.
“Terrifying, isn’t it?”
Marci jumped, whipping around to see Shiro standing right beside her. “I would have said beautiful,” she said when she’d recovered. “Is this what you wanted to show me?”
“Part of it,” he said, staring solemnly at the endless sea. “This was what the Heart of the World was meant for. From up here, things are compressed, allowing us to safely and easily observe the Sea of Magic in its entirety.”
Compression would explain why the cracks looked so small. Or, at least, not the size of mountains and lakes.
“Those are the Mortal Spirits, aren’t they?” she said, pointing at the whirlpools. “The ones that haven’t filled up yet.”
“Correct,” Shiro said, his expression darkening. “Even more than observing, this place was created to protect. With so many spirits rising, we needed a watchtower, somewhere we could see the monsters coming, and prepare to strike back.”
“Monsters, huh?” Marci shook her head. “Have to say, though, I didn’t expect that from you guys. I thought forming partnerships with the Mortal Spirits was the Merlins’ whole shtick.”
“It was,” Shiro said. “Until we got overwhelmed.”
He turned away from the cliff, motioning for her to follow. Curious and frustrated, Marci did so, dogging his heels across the flat stone to the center, where Amelia, Ghost, and Myron were already waiting in the shade of the gnarled pine beside the stone well. Or, at least, she’d assumed it was a well. As they got closer, though, Marci realized that was wrong. The waist-high circle of stone wasn’t a well.
It was a seal.
