The Fox and The Wolf: A Tale of Modern Magic

Chapter 6 - The Empress

Aubrey stood on the observation deck of the CN Tower and took the full overwhelming spiritual weight of the place onto herself. She reached out with a hundred new, nameless senses and unfolded her awareness to encompass the entire city.

She could feel all the places of power that dotted the city in her breath, smell them through the pores of her skin, and hear the energy they bled into the sky. She was only one third attuned to the Tower but the sheer magnitude of the place's power overwhelmed her with possibility. 

Her multifaceted attention snapped immediately to High Park. Something was terribly wrong. Aubrey tasted wrongness, blasphemy. Death.

She moved her narrow human senses to the source of the wrongness. Limited as they were she had much more experience interpreting them. In a pinch she still trusted them more than the more grandiose senses granted to her by the height of her power.

The Cairn had been desecrated by the darkest magic imaginable. All around were signs of the most terrible human sacrifice. Aubrey's awareness was shocked back into her own body. She vomited.

They were dead. All three of her apprentices were dead. They were barely more than children and Simon had used their deaths to bleed every last drop of puissance from the genius loci. The Cairn was once a place of great natural beauty and power. Now all it would do was attract vampires and other night predators.

She would have to see to it that the Cairn was destroyed utterly.

Aubrey was never one to shirk responsibility. She understood immediately that this was her fault. Why hadn't she taken Cicero more seriously? He was irresponsible, sure, unreliable, unequivocally, but he had a connection to the city that, for all her power, Aubrey could never match. People had paid for her dismissiveness with their lives.

She could have at least seen to it that the genius loci of the city were better defended. Or would that just have gotten more people killed?

Aubrey didn't have time to second guess herself. That could come later. For now she needed to find Simon.

Mind, Body and Soul Magic were all possible with nothing more than a little magic energy and a human body. There were, however, spheres of power beyond these three fundaments of magic, their secret mysteries known only to mages of fantastic puissance. Having been the stewardess of the CN Tower for a great many years Aubrey had been able to cultivate some skill in Space Magic and Time Magic.

Aubrey took the elevator to the ground floor, walked to a specific hallway, and opened a door that only existed for people Aubrey had told about it. Aubrey walked through the doorway sideways into a pocket of space/time cut off from the rest of the universe.

This was the Arcane Sanctum of the Tower Council.

The room had a floor but no walls. Instead of ending the floor wrapped back around on itself, creating the effect of walking around on a sphere. The only door stood alone in empty space. Aubrey emerged from it, quickly closing the door behind her.

Free standing shelves of books, from ancient tomes bound in human skin to cheap paperbacks with names like "Psychic Secrets From Behind The Iron Curtain" and "Is Your Dog A Fairy?" transformed what might have otherwise been wide open space into a veritable maze.

The magical geometry of the position of the bookshelves trapped magical energy inside the "room", effectively turning it into a giant puissance battery. The world's largest and most elaborate talisman. Aubrey had been storing energy here for years. With a single, silent spell she absorbed it all into herself in an instant.

Aubrey's eyes glowed white hot as the puissance her soul couldn't metabolize bled off into the aether. She exhaled a plume of smoke and they quickly returned to normal.

Aubrey usually considered using Space magic to track someone down to be a vulgar waste of energy but this was a preference she could no longer afford.

She waved her hands in a circle and a crystalline ball of energy flashed into existence. Aubrey removed her hands and the crystal ball remained suspended in the air. She passed her right hand slowly over the glowing ball and pictured Simon Isengrim as clearly as she could in her minds eye. The way he looked. The way he smelled. His touch. His...

The crystal ball turned from a shimmering mirror into a perfectly transparent window into another place. First it was the Earth from space, but the image came crashing down through the clouds, towards the great lakes, into the city of Toronto, and finally found a tall man dressed in black. The man turned and looked directly at her. His face was sharp and angular and his smile utterly mirthless.

Aubrey was taken off guard, and she made eye contact. She could feel Simon inside her mind immediately, attacking her through her own spell. Aubrey didn't even know that was possible. Reflexively Aubrey fought Simon's magic by expending her own energy. Simon responded with an immense torrent of puissance which Aubrey had no choice but to match.

Barely able to keep up with Simon, Aubrey ended her scrying spell. The crystal ball winked out of existence. Aubrey half fell, half lowered herself to her knees and tried to catch her breath. She felt her forehead and her hand came away covered in sweat.

Simon was even more powerful than she feared. It was true that a human sacrifice at a place of power like the one he committed would be a source of virtually unlimited power, but he could only access as much as he could contain at one time. He had obviously absorbed much more puissance than she thought he was capable of. More than she could have.

His genius with magic was still undiminished. Somehow he had detected her scrying and attacked her through it. He looked back at her through her own spell and more than that cast Mind magic through it. Even through all the Tower's protective wards. It gave Aubrey a terrible, vulnerable feeling.

This was bad. She needed to get in touch with the others. If there was any chance of defeating Simon there were going to need to be three of them.