Blood and Whispers by A. C. Haskins

Author:A. C. Haskins
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fantasy, Contemporary, Urban, Military, Fiction
ISBN: 9781982125233
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2021-03-02T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 17

I woke up in the same chair, hours later, to sunlight streaming through the cracks in the window blinds. I looked around, momentarily disoriented. Seeing Roxana in the other chair and an empty Oban bottle on the floor near me, I realized I must have passed out in the reading nook sometime after my mother’s visit.

At least I didn’t have a hangover. Benefits of high-level sorcery: aging five or six times slower than the normal population, immunity to most diseases, and healing extremely quickly from anything short of death. No matter how drunk I got, I generally recovered from the hangover before I woke up.

That did not, however, protect me from being somewhat sore and creaky after sleeping in an awkward sitting position. I stood up and stretched with a groan, and slowly walked over to the counter. I wasn’t sure what time it was, but I was definitely late opening the shop. I dragged myself upstairs to brush my teeth and wipe the sleep gunk out of my eyes.

By the time I got back downstairs and opened the shop up for business, I was feeling mostly human again. Unsurprisingly no one had lined up outside waiting for me to open the doors, so I headed to the back office to begin puzzling over the Avartagh’s words.

I went through my bookshelves—both my personal collection and the rare tomes in the cage—and pulled out anything that might shed any light on the Avartagh, his reign of terror in Ireland, his blood rites in Brittany, or whatever the hell he meant about the cycles of the two worlds. I ended up with a stack of books about a foot and a half high, most leather-bound, all old. Then I sat down, poured myself a breakfast glass of Lagavulin, and opened the first one.

I couldn’t find much detail on the Avartagh or the blood rites beyond what we already knew. But after a great deal of skimming various books, interrupted a couple times by customers, I finally found something useful.

It was a three-hundred-year-old monograph on comparative metaphysics by an Italian sorcerer, Giuseppi Bertoni, which had been in my cage for a while, but I hadn’t yet gotten around to reading. Now that I did so, I realized it was precisely what I needed.

Bertoni analyzed more than a dozen different metaphysical theories from various religious and mystical traditions across the world and discovered some interesting commonalities. He postulated that each of these systems was a distorted view of a part of the whole, much like the ancient parable of the blind men and the elephant. This alone wasn’t particularly groundbreaking, as plenty of magical scholars would agree with him. But where he went further was in his effort to put the parts together to develop a tentative metaphysics of the universe, based on a nested series of cycles.

Bertoni theorized that our world and the Otherworld were locked together in a metaphysical orbit, which he called Il Grande Ciclo—“the Great Cycle.” This resulted in the periodic patterns seen in things like magical fields and ley-lines.

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