Enna shaded her eyes, squinting against the bright sun as it reflected off the buildings and canals outside the train station. "Wow. Are you sure we're not still dreaming?"

"Right?" Orton grinned as he sauntered out to the water taxis and hailed one. "The world is a pretty amazing place." In broken Italian, he explained to the driver that he wanted to head east, towards the Baia del Forte. A few colorful pieces of paper changed hands, then Orton gestured for Enna to step aboard. "Hop in. This fine gentleman is going to convey us."

Enna nodded, stepping gingerly into the small craft as it bucked gently against the dock. Orton clambered in behind her, and the steersman gently piloted the boat out into the crowded canals. The three of them rode in silence for a few moments before Orton nodded to Enna. "Okay. I know you're dying to ask, so just go ahead."

"Well," asked Enna hesitantly, taking in the sights as the boat glided smoothly away from the dock, "I just... want to know. About how long do I have left before I turn into one of those, um, Shade things? Do we have enough time to stop Gentry first?"

"Actually, you don't have to turn into one at all," commented Orton, making a dismissive gesture as he settled back into his seat. "There's a counter-pressure to Fade, which is called various things -- Dharma, Virtue, Harmony, and so on -- but the most common term is Durance, and it emerges from your attachment to facets of the mortal world. If you have something or someone to protect, that resolve keeps you anchored to things you recognize, because you want to keep seeing them exist. You'll still Fade -- nothing can stop that. But if you have at least some Durance, you'll stay in universes that are at least generally recognizable for the most part." He winced a little, remembering the uglier parts of his own education in these topics. "Some mages try to protect individual people or places, but I lost everything I really cared about to Fade pretty quickly. So I settled on more general goals. Protecting innocents, defending civilization, that kind of stuff."

Enna groaned. "Fantastic. So as punishment for being a spoiled brat of a sorceress, I have to spend all of eternity doing community service."

"Probably not eternity," Orton consoled her. "As far as I know, most magi don't live any longer than regular people unless they put effort into it. And even then, we might be talking an century or two, tops. So, you know, just the rest of your life." He grinned.

Enna sighed. "Is this why you spent most of your mage career reading books in a crap apartment?"

"No, I spent most of my mage career reading books in a crap apartment because I am a tremendous nerd." Orton had sublimated his ego a long, long time ago. "The parts where I wasn't doing that, though, I was usually killing monsters, investigating mysteries, and saving people. You know, community service." He poked her playfully, eliciting a giggle. "But it's not like it's a jail sentence. You still get to do whatever you want. You just have to, you know, think about other people when you do it. Like how I paid this guy with actual Euros instead of a conjured gold bar or something like that." He waved cheerfully at the driver, who ignored the two chattering Americans with the skill of long practice.

"Oh really?" Enna gave him a sidelong look. "And where, exactly, did you get said Euros?"

Orton coughed delicately. "I may have liberated them from a mugger that tried to rob me in Paris. And I may have been less-than-staunch in my defense of a few safes belonging to people with very good insurance." He winked at Enna. "I said you had to be good. I didn't say you had to be perfect."

Enna giggled again, and relaxed a little. Despite the fact that it was still Winter, the weather happened to be unseasonably warm, and the breeze off the coast was very soothing. "This is nice. I always wanted to visit here."

Orton nodded, soaking it all in himself. "Me too. It's very..." -- he searched for a word -- "...idyllic. It'd be a nice place for a vacation."

"When was the last time you had one of those?" asked Enna, her eyes still closed.

Orton pondered. "My first time through the loop, about sixty years ago. So yeah, it's been a while." He took a deep breath, then sighed. "Too bad Gentry gets here in about thirty-six hours."

"That's still almost two days from now," Enna pointed out. "We got here really quickly."

Orton nodded. "We did. And if we're lucky, we might have time to get a hotel room and some take-out before he arrives, but that's going to have to wait."

"Oh? Why's that?" Enna frowned, opening her eyes and sitting up.

Orton pointed at the rapidly-approaching dock of the Baia del Forte. "Because we're here."

Disembarking from the water taxi, the two of them picked their way onto the shore and up a small trail, passing through a crowd of other tourists. Enna strained to see over their heads to see what they were watching, but it just looked like three guys playing guitar together. Mystified, she followed Orton as he strode doggedly up the sandy bank towards a cluster of long, low buildings surrounding the bay.

Taking a weaving, meandering path, he made his way between the structures, circling around in a twisting route as Enna followed him in increasing bewilderment. Finally, he deftly shouldered open a rusty door and beckoned her inside.

The interior of the building was dark and seemed mostly deserted; what little illumination there was sprang from scraps of daylight filtering through chinks in the walls and ceiling. At first, she thought it was an abandoned warehouse or another similarly vacant venue, but as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, she picked out illuminating details; a few tables, some casks, and a large number of chairs and glasses. She blinked. "What is this? Some kind of secret restaurant?"

Orton shook his head. "A very exclusive wine-tasting venue, which isn't due to open until this evening. I can't tell exactly where Gentry will show up, but I know it's in this general area -- somewhere in this cluster of buildings -- and I figured that now would be a good time to do a little reconnaissance."

Enna folded her arms and wrinkled her nose. "Ick. So before we can get to the decadence and the relaxation, we have to scrounge around in some dark, dirty buildings?"

Orton nodded mournfully. "Yup. Hope you like digging around in cobwebs." He pulled a pair of flashlights out of his bag and handed one to her.

"You know, sometimes, I think you just enjoy living like a hobo." Enna sighed and began to poke around in the dark, grungy corners of the room. "So, what are we looking for?"

"Anything out of the ordinary. But before we get started, hold on." Orton rummaged around in his bag a little bit more, then pulled out a few dog-eared sheets of paper and a battered ballpoint pen. Taking a seat at one of the tables, he began quickly writing on them. "You won't be able to cast these right away -- they'll take you a few weeks of study. But at least this way you'll have some copies of real, actual spells if we get separated again." Enna tried to continue her search, but the prospect of genuine arcane knowledge proved too enticing to resist; in a few moments, she'd drifted over to watch Orton work.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

With incredible speed, fantastically complicated symbols and dense text were taking form on the pages as Orton drew complex diagrams and clearly-notated sentences -- underlined and sketched with pronunciation guides, to boot -- with great precision. "This first one is called 'The Cantillation of the Hair's Breadth', and it's the base form of the bullet-deflecting enchantment I put on that amulet you wear." Enna's hand unconsciously went to her throat to touch the long-forgotten necklace Orton had given her just before the bookstore job, so many years ago. "The other is called 'The Invocation of the Hawk's Stoop', and it's what I used to blast those robots with quarters in the hotel room the night we met. These spells are fairly basic, and don't require any sort of metaphysical grounding to use other than common concepts such as 'hawks go fast when diving', but you do need to be capable of reciting the incantations perfectly from memory while also satisfying the gestural and diagrammatic components."

Enna's head spun slightly. "The dia-what?"

Orton, unperturbed, continued sketching and writing with perfect penmanship -- a feat which looked impressive, but which was mostly cheating because he was using a servitor process to dump a memorized text straight onto the page. "A formal spell has any number of parts -- usually called 'components' -- that all have to be satisfied in one form or another for the spell to take effect. The method by which you can actually do it is flexible -- you can bear a diagram on your person, or draw it on a nearby surface, or envision it in your mind -- but no matter what you choose, it has to be perfect. So you generally start with carrying around as many of the spell's components in prepared form as you can, usually on small charms that you engrave. However, if you put all of the spell's components on the charm, it immediately activates, which might not be what you want. So usually what you do is put all the components that take a long time on the charm, then perform the quick ones yourself -- usually any incantations or gestures. Those are usually also important in setting the spell's target."

Enna squeezed her eyes shut, holding her hands up pleadingly. "Whoa, wait, slow down. You're going too fast. How does that actually work, in practice?"

Orton finished the two pages, then shuffled them so that the one depicting the invocation of the hawk's stoop was on top. He pointed to the diagrams and scales on the upper portion of the page. "This spell accelerates an object to a high velocity instantaneously, as well as guiding it towards the target. To make it do what you want, though, you have to specify all of those parameters -- how fast it should go, what it should strike, and which object should be enchanted. When it was originally formulated -- around, oh, seventeen hundred years ago -- it was used to hit a target, usually a person you didn't like, from far out of bowshot distance. The first weapons it was applied to were spears and arrowheads, with all of the components engraved into the actual weapon itself. As you can imagine, this was fairly cumbersome and had a lot of trouble dealing with unexpected events, like the fact that wind exists or that your guy is standing five feet further away than you anticipated. Which wasn't made any easier by the fact that standardized units of measurement were considered cutting-edge tech at the time." He handed the pages to Enna, who tucked them with uncharacteristic reverence into the inner cover of her grimoire.

"So, " she hedged, reluctant to sound ungrateful, "do I have to do a bunch of math in my head to cast this? Because, as awesome as this spell sounds, that part isn't so exciting."

"Nah." Orton shook his head. He plucked a pebble from the floor and began rolling it between his fingertips. "Eventually, magi started to figure out that there were ways to think around the problem, like specifying 'the object I am currently throwing' as the weapon, 'maximum possible speed' as the velocity, and 'the creature I am currently wishing harm upon' as the target. So all you basically have to do is chant the incantation with those values as you throw your object, and it does the rest for you." He hefted the pebble, calculating its weight in his mind, as he continued. "It still requires a bit of practice and discipline to use it on anything other than a prepared weapon -- you still have to trace or visualize the sigil very precisely. But if you do, the results can be pretty effective." He murmured a handful of Latin words and tossed the pebble upwards, where it promptly blasted upwards through the ceiling with tremendous force and disappeared into the clouds beyond. Enna gaped.

"Eventually," Orton continued as he flicked on his own flashlight and resumed searching, "a brilliant fellow -- me, in case that wasn't obvious -- figured out that 'this fistful of quarters I am holding' counted as an object for the purposes of the spell, and that was a dark day for robots and other vulnerable-to-physical-harm bad guys everywhere." Enna giggled despite herself. "Coins are cheap, dense, aerodynamically versatile, and nobody ever blinks twice at your possession of them. So they're pretty handy for lots of physical spells."

"Yeah, I remember you turning a stack of them into a dagger back when we first met." Enna poked around behind a few crates, but her attention was mostly focused on the discussion. "How did you do that, anyway?"

Orton discovered a file cabinet tucked behind a partition; he began rifling through its contents with the skill of long practice. "That's actually another class of spell, called 'reification', which involves transforming an object into a principle. In order to do it, you have to not only understand the philosophical principle you're working with in-depth -- which, let me tell you, is a lot of work on its own -- you also have to attune your spirit to it, which can involve some pretty serious stuff in some cases." He paused to peruse a few pages of sales receipts and inventory statements, scratching his neck idly. "When I fought Nej, I could only reify a handful of concepts. I can do more now, but it's still not a huge repertoire. Most mages work for years to master even a single concept."

"Wait, hang on." Enna's flashlight beam had stopped moving entirely, and her gaze had turned inwards. "Concepts. That's the same as the thought-forms in the book, right?"

Orton nodded. "Concepts, chakras, the shiko keitai -- they're all reflections of the same ideas. Resonances between how we think and the 'real' things in the universe." Reaching the end of the documents he'd been reading, he carefully put them back in the file cabinet and moved on to the next area of the room. "The space between your understanding and the channels of power -- the runes, the incantations -- that's where the magic comes from. Some people call it the divine language, or the source code of the universe, or whatever."

She tilted her head. "What do you call it?"

Orton shrugged. "I don't think it can be named, personally. It's like the brahman, the buddha-nature, the true name of God. You can stick a word on it, but that doesn't really convey anything about it." He noted Enna's glassy look and chuckled. "Not that the words mean much to you, I know."

Enna shook herself a little, returning her attention to the search. "Bleh. Sounds like a lot more studying to me."

"Maybe." Orton had found an interesting dust trail and was strolling along its path contemplatively. "But remember, just because I'm a big dork obsessed with philosophy and occultism doesn't mean that's how magic always works -- merely how it works for me and others who share my worldview. If you arrive at the same concepts through some other path -- a different spiritual tradition, your own meditations, whatever -- they're still the same concepts. And the ninety-nine in that book contain everything you really need to figure everything else out."

"Really?" Enna pulled a table away from the wall, then recoiled in disgust that she had discovered nothing more exciting than a collection of rat droppings. "This particular book just so happens to contain the master key to all magic?"

"Oh, sure. But not for the reasons you think." Orton had followed the dust trail to a carpet, where it ended rather abruptly. "Nature -- our nature, the nature of the world -- contains all mysteries. You can figure anything out if you pay attention." He gently tugged the carpet to one side and winced. "For example, if you pay attention to this trapdoor, you can see that there are bloodstains around it."

"What?" Enna whirled around, her face ashen. "What do you mean, bloodstains?"

Orton nodded grimly. "I think we might be late for our hotel check-in."