Think of something, Aaron told himself. Some way to play off your snide little comment like you weren’t calling the magic they’re doing on your behalf a bunch of tacky bullshit.
As was so often the case for people whose thoughts had a tendency to spill from their mouths without a filter, the moment Aaron really, truly wanted to say something, his words failed him.
The waiting, brief as it was, felt like forever. With Alice and Tia gazing at him in what was surely silent horror, there could be no clock fine enough to track just how long it seemed to go on.
Then Tia burst into laughter.
“That’s not totally unfair,” she said. “It’s like this — the building and apartments have serious protections on them, but they’re mostly established magics that work based on our understanding of active aether manipulation. Serious, heavy duty sorcery, in other words.”
Aaron wasn’t sure where she was going with this line of thought, but her laughter took some of the pressure off. He latched onto what she was saying like driftwood in a river’s rapids.
“Isn’t that the best option?”
“Yes and no,” Alice said. “Most of our wards and enchantments are based on a more academic perspective of sorcery. It can overlook some forms of sorcery — like folk traditions or hedge magic — because they’re generally not as effective or powerful. Since we have very little idea about the specifics of the magic in The Sleeping Dragon, we don’t know how well those defenses will work. These charms will hopefully plug any gaps our established countermeasures can’t anticipate.”
They don’t seem to be mad about the gift shop gimmick comment, Aaron thought. Maybe it wasn’t as far off-base as I thought?
“I don’t want to seem ignorant or anything but I am, well, pretty much totally ignorant about a lot of this stuff,” he said. “You have drawers filled with crosses and dreamcatchers, of all things; it’s not exactly filling me with, uh, confidence, you know? What am I missing here?”
“You’re getting hippie New Age shit mixed up with the older traditions they’re based on,” Tia scoffed. “You’re not wrong to consider the impact of cultural movements like neo-shamanism and postmodern paganism can have on expectation in working magic, but it doesn’t erase what came before. I can see how not knowing what some of this stuff is, how it works, or why our versions are turbocharged could have you giving it the side-eye.”
“That’s an excellent point, Tia,” Alice said with a nod, causing her hair to fall across one eye before she brushed it back over an ear. “One of the limitations of folk magic — especially in the last five to ten centuries — is that the shaman, priest, or what-have-you often wasn’t able to manipulate aether. That didn’t just limit their ability to leverage these tools, it also meant the tools themselves weren’t always crafted as well as they could be. We don’t face those same limitations.”
Tia lifted one of the dreamcatchers out its box. “Take this, for instance. It’s made from a hand-crafted willow hoop, which is traditional and so simple anyone could do it. The web of this dreamcatcher, however, is made of something way better than mundane string or sinew. The feathers and beads are also more than simple glass or what a crow might leave behind. The same higher standard applies to pretty much everything Alice brought with her.”
“So the difference between using the horn from a narwhal versus one from an actual unicorn, basically,” Aaron said.
“Yes, exactly,” Alice agreed. “Most of what we’re working with are apotropaic charms, as well, which are meant to give general protection against hostile or intrusive magics. Even dreamcatchers weren’t traditionally meant as wards against dream magic.”
“I’m pretty sure I knew that, actually,” Aaron said. “About the dreamcatchers not being for dreams, specifically, I mean. Can you tell me more about what else you’re using? The more I know, the more confident I’ll feel, and the more effective the magic will be, right?”
“Damn straight,” Tia said, offering Aaron a high five.
Alice began showing Aaron the charms she planned to use. “We’ve got some sigils, like ofuda and Futhark runes, that aren’t already installed in the building. There are also cippi, obelisks, and stelæ derived from some older traditions, the hamsa we talked about earlier, and a couple of witch bottles (which I’ll need to add a bit of your hair to).”
“My hair?”
“You can piss in them, too,” Tia teased. “If your aim is solid.”
Aaron didn’t have a tendency to blush, but he felt a bit of heat around the base of his neck regardless. Alice, mercifully, wouldn’t see if he had turned bright red. She’d begun placing her mystic trappings on the windows behind the dinette, which overlooked the street below.
“Speaking of piss,” Tia went on, ruthlessly, directing her comments to Alice, “I see you’re planning to set up a few braziers that might help, too.”
“What does that have to do with pee?” Aaron asked.
“Because there’s no way there won’t be coyote piss in it,” Tia replied.
“That’s true,” Alice agreed. “I thought ahead, though, so there are charms on the braziers to make sure there won’t be a problem with smoke or scents.”
“Coyote pee?”
“Magic can be pretty gross, sometimes,” Alice said, continuing to create a kind of makeshift altar of magic talismans in Aaron’s front windows. “Coyotes are seen as powerful, supernatural tricksters in pretty much every culture that encountered them and they’re invoked in a lot of defensive magic.”
“Gross but effective,” Tia said. “I bet you could smoke a cigarette right next to one of these braziers without stinking up your curtains. Hell, you could drop the ash and butt right in there without messing up the magic.”
Aaron had no idea why Tia had chosen this moment to torment him. Payback for the gift shop comment, perhaps? He tried to communicate that she was being kind of a dick with nothing more than a look while Alice’s back was turned. Tia, for her part, just winked back at him and clicked her tongue against the side of her teeth.
“Anyways, tell him about your very own personal touch, Alice,” Tia suggested.
Alice stopped at the table, several dreamcatchers dangling from her slender fingers, and bit her lip again. Aaron’s instinct was to emphatically agree, even to beg that Alice tell him — what better way to show he was interested in her and an excellent listener? — but he reined in the impulse. For once.
“It’s nothing,” Alice demurred. “I hadn’t even decided to use it.”
“It’s definitely not nothing,” Tia replied, seriously. “From what Zeke described it’s a clever piece of sorcery. I might not know much about oneiromancy but I know magic theory. I’ve been looking forward to seeing it in full.”
“Yes, tell me about it, please,” Aaron said, deciding this was a good chance to weigh in and trying his best to sound light and breezy.
Alice still hesitated, but after a second she nodded and went back to her tote. She withdrew another, smaller box, opened it, and lifted out a box made of pure white marble. It was a foot across in each direction and a bit more than half as tall. The top turned out to be a lid, which Alice pulled off and set aside revealing the box housed a complicated model of a maze.
There was something odd about the maze, but Aaron couldn’t put his finger on it right away.
Each of the walls had a single opening, a simple rectangular frame with no door or covering.
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Set into each wall was a simple, rectangular portal with no door. Looking closer, Aaron could make out fine inscriptions on most of the surfaces in the model. Though they were too faint for him to read, he was pretty sure the alphabet was either Greek or Cyrillic. He also noticed the frames on the doors were made of different materials, more off-white or yellowish with hints of darker shades in two of them.
“I call it an oubliette of dreams,” Alice said. “The individual gates are made of ivory and horn, respectively, based on a concept drawn from the ancient Greeks. The inscriptions are spells, prayers, and exhortations of the Oneiroi, the divine personification of dreams in Greek mythology. In their beliefs, only a true dream could pass through the gate of horn and only a false one could pass through the gate of ivory.”
Tia leaned in to examine the maze more closely. “Tell him how it works,” she urged the other woman.
“It’s just a trick,” Alice said sheepishly. “Each gate only connects to its opposite through the maze, not to one made of the same material. My thinking was that, whether a dream is true or false, it has to enter through an appropriate gate. Then, since there’s only one path available for the sending to use, it will be nullified trying to pass through the other.”
“That’s really clever,” Aaron said. “How do you make sure any dream stuff goes into the maze? Or through the gates, for that matter?”
“The inscriptions should push any sending towards the gates and the lid will make them the only viable entrance. Proximity will help, too, which is why I want to place the oubliette very close to where you’ll sleep, like a bedside table. The main draw of any trap is bait, though, and we’ll create that with a bit of sympathetic magic.”
She pulled out a small figurine, roughly human in shape and made of cloth.
“I’ll add a bit of your hair to this poppet, then place it in the center of the maze,” she said, pointing to the empty space at the heart of the model. “If you look closely, you might notice there are no actual paths leading there from any of the gates.”
Aaron looked at the maze again and realized she was right. Now that he knew what to look for, he recognized what it was about the maze that made it look so strange at first glance. Although there were many walls that gave the illusion of a fair maze, it was all a misdirection — each gate only led to its pair and there was no way to get to the center.
“More of my hair,” Aaron lamented.
“Yes,” Alice said. “Thankfully, it looks like you haven’t shaved in a couple days. That will make things much easier.”
As it turned out, there was no need to yank any hairs out of Aaron’s head, which is precisely what he’d been picturing thanks to a lifetime of movies and TV shows. Instead, Alice produced a folding razor from the capacious depths of her simple cloth tote. It had a mother of pearl handle and the blade flashed threateningly in the light when opened.
Aaron leaned away slightly as she reached for his face with the razor.
“Shouldn’t you at least use a bit of water?”
“No need,” she said. “The enchantment on the blade will take care of that. I’m not sure it even could cut your hair, let alone break skin, without the extremely focused tonsorial magic applied to it.”
“Tonsorial magic… it’s enchanted specifically to cut hair?”
“Oh yes,” Alice replied. “We discovered long ago that drakus hardiness is a major inconvenience to grooming.”
Aaron had never shaved with anything but an electric razor, so that wasn’t as reassuring as Alice probably thought it was. Before he could raise any more concerns, however, one of Alice’s hands was resting against his jaw and her fingers were gently pulling his skin taut so the hairs would stand erect.
The next few minutes were a bit of a blur.
Aaron was able to follow the guidance of Alice’s hands as she turned and angled his head, but almost all of his concentration was turned internally.
He needed to focus on things like keeping his eyes locked on places it wouldn’t be disrespectful to look, maintaining a steady and calm breathing, and quieting the ember of discontent that came from knowing some kind of magic was influencing him. He was mostly successful in each but not entirely in any.
When she was done, Alice had a dusting of whiskers on a piece of wax paper. She stuffed a good number of them into the poppet and the rest were distributed between several bottles made of thick green and brown glass which she then stoppered with cork.
Aaron let out the breath he’d been marginally holding as slowly as he could when there was finally a little space between him and Alice. He steadfastly kept his eyes from turning in Tia’s direction. She’d know he was flustered already, but why give her the opportunity to give him any more guff with a knowing look or a lascivious smirk?
“All that’s left is making sure everything is in its proper place,” Alice said. “Then your sleep will be about as protected as we can make it.”
“I don’t have to wear a hat made of magic tin foil or anything like that?”
Tia snorted. “Hanging a bunch more talismans on you would be a bit of overkill, at this point. Protections that are bound to a place have a stability that usually gives them more oomph than stuff that moves.”
“We could give you something — a gris-gris, nazar, medicine bag, or something similar — if it would make you feel more comfortable,” Alice offered. “I agree with Tia, though; they wouldn’t provide much more than a bit of peace of mind.”
“There are limits to how much confidence can do,” Tia added.
“It’s fine, then. I trust you two.”
With that settled, Alice spent the next fifteen minutes continuing to arrange all the new defenses she’d brought around the apartment. Tia trailed along to observe, asking the occasional question about Alice’s thoughts on placement or positioning and voicing compliments at any instance she felt had particularly strong reasoning.
Aaron followed them because it felt immensely weird for his sensibilities to have people wandering around his home unattended. Plus, he could still try to absorb more about how magic worked from the two gifted women, even if his brain was feeling a little mushy and sluggish at the moment.
When Alice was done, all the windows in the apartment were festooned with various talismans and a number of charms hung from the walls and ceilings (somehow), including the dreamcatchers she’d shown Aaron earlier.
Finally, she placed the oubliette of dreams on the end table beside Aaron’s bed. The poppet went into the middle and the thick marble cover was set atop the whole thing.
When they were back in the dinette and everything was being packinged away, an idea occurred to Aaron. It was a terrible, stupid, goofy-ass idea. A wild flight of fancy that was chasing a half-formed daydream to its own absurd conclusions.
Silly as it was, Aaron found the idea making good its escape from his mind through the open goddamn door that was his mouth before he could rally the conceptual guards to lock everything down.
“I remember you telling me that proximity helped with dream magic,” he said. “The apartment has a spare bedroom. You’re welcome to use it if that would be, uh, y’know… helpful?”
Tia shot him a look then rolled her eyes.
She clearly knew exactly where his mind was and he knew she’d be saying something about it later. For now, she refrained from making any comment that could embarrass him or jeopardize his ploy. That was a real friend, a true homie. Someone who would banter with and razz you as needed, but wouldn’t put you down in front of others.
“That’s very gracious of you,” Alice said. “In this case, though, I think that would actually be too close. Tia and the security people have also offered me places to sleep on every floor of the building and I had to turn them down, as well.”
Tia eyed her curiously. “You turned down the security people, too? Then where the heck are you staying, Alice?”
Aaron was glad of Tia’s question. He was doing his best to keep the mixture of relief and disappointment from his face and a distraction could only help his cause on that front.
As thrilling as having Alice sleeping just across the hall might have been, it would have been a bit of a nightmare, as well. Not only would he have to contend with whatever overclocked nonsense the magic-whammied infatuation conjured in his thoughts, he’d have also had to be extra careful she didn’t find out about Baby Bear.
This was definitely the ideal outcome.
“On the roof,” Alice replied. “I’ll be close enough to monitor Aaron in the Dream and respond whether I’m asleep or awake. Plus, it will give me a better perspective to see anything coming from farther out.”
“Are you going to be okay up there?” Aaron asked.
“I’ll be fine,” Alice reassured him. “It’s surprisingly nice up there. Now, it’s getting a bit late and I need to make sure I’m set up for whenever you fall asleep, so I should probably head up.”
Aaron nodded. “I should be in bed after I do a load of laundry and I usually fall asleep in a half hour or less, so probably not more than two hours. Unless that will be too late for you?”
Tia scoffed. “This is New York and it’s not even quite midnight yet. Going to sleep the same day you wake up is just how we do things.”
“Don’t feel you need to rush on my account,” Alice told him. “Take all the time you need. I can fall and stay asleep pretty much at will.”
After that, Aaron said his goodnights to the ladies and found himself alone in his apartment once more. Sleep, dreams, and whatever may come of them were waiting for him.