A Practical Guide to Sorcery

Chapter 264: A Hungry Sky

Chapter 264: A Hungry SkySiobhan

Month 5, Day 1, Thursday 4:00 a.m.

Why had Grandfather destroyed the sheep? They were evidence.

This was Siobhan’s first thought, but she realized quickly that, if these seemingly disconnected phenomena were caused by some malicious magic, and said magic really was spreading farther and growing stronger, perhaps he had been trying to stymie its proliferation. That might also be why he had gotten rid of all evidence from the prior incident so quickly.

She walked around the paddock looking for anything strange, but while her eyes were on the ground, her mind was full of recent memories. Grandfather had started acting strange long before the first hint at this kind of incident—the first that Siobhan had been aware of, at least. She’d assumed it was because of grief. But what if he had known about the danger for some time now? What if his “mapping” project was actually an attempt to track down all traces of contamination and wipe them out while they were still relatively harmless?

Could that have been why he invited Claudio? Except…Siobhan wasn’t sure how Claudio’s particular skills could do anything to help with a curse or a malediction. What use could Grandfather have for a young shaman’s wishing dreams?

Siobhan let out a frustrated sigh. There was just too much that didn’t make sense, and no matter how she tried to piece together the puzzle, it didn’t feel like it ever formed a coherent image.

But at the very least, the death and subsequent disappearance of the sheep—and Grandfather’s response to it—was undeniable proof that whatever had been happening wasn’t over.

Whether this was the work of a curse or a malediction, Siobhan wasn’t really sure it mattered. The important thing was how it worked. She was no expert but thought the big difference between the two lay in how the danger might be resolved. A curse always had a key, a way in which it could be unraveled, a solution that could cancel it out. A malediction… Maybe it would stop when whoever Mom had wanted punished met enough misfortune.

The death of the sheep lent credence to the theory that this was the work of a curse, and not a malediction. Siobhan didn’t think mom had ever interacted with the O’Dredricks, so what reason would she have to call justice down upon them with her last breath? But Siobhan also didn’t understand the mechanisms behind the curse. How had it attached to Mom? How was it spreading now?Judging by what she’d seen so far, perhaps it was taking control of local plants and animals and twisting their nature? If these strange manifestations kept getting stronger, what would happen next? Was that why Claudio had wondered if it might be able to take over a human?

Siobhan shuddered at the thought, grotesque images of several humanoid beasts from Grandfather’s books flashing through her mind. She wished otherwise, but the theory made almost too much sense.

Grandfather wouldn’t tell her the truth and Claudio, perhaps, couldn’t. She didn’t understand enough about what Mom had been going through before her death to deduce anything from that end. But if Siobhan investigated the effects, she had some hope that gathering enough information would lead her to the truth. It was something—perhaps the only thing—that she could do.

After finding no remaining clues in the paddock, Siobhan trudged back to her house, the furled umbrella in one hand and the maybe-weapon, maybe-dehydrated-root-stick in the other. She felt less apprehensive this time, and again, nothing went wrong. Some part of her still expected a nasty surprise, but she got back home and up to her room without incident. She kept all of her new “appropriated” gear under her bed. After all, she might need to use it again soon.

Siobhan missed breakfast that morning and couldn’t force herself to get up when Aimee came looking. The woman had a terrible time trying to wake her and ended up tickling Siobhan’s feet with a feather duster until the younger girl fell out of bed shrieking with laughter.

Once up, Siobhan did her best to hide her exhaustion and even had several excuses planned, but Grandfather seemed exhausted enough himself and only paid her perfunctory attention. She knew she should be happy that she had gotten away with her nighttime excursion, but some part of her remained irrationally peeved.

After the day’s chores and studies, Siobhan went out to her treehouse—which still looked like a mottled abomination—with the personal grimoire Grandfather had helped her make. She wrote down every strange thing she could remember and accompanied it all with detailed sketches.

It wasn’t enough. She had hoped looking through all of the information on paper might spark some revelation, but she was as lost as ever. “I need more,” she muttered. And she had an idea how to get it.

She packed up her journal and drawing supplies and marched down to the village, directly to the O’Dredricks’s house. The black bubble that had been looming over the back of his property like some kind of giant tick was gone.

Mr. O’Dredricks, who had been screaming in the street the day before, cracked the door open barely enough to peek out of it.

“Hello,” Siobhan said, standing straight with her grimoire and a pen in her hands. “I’m here to ask about any strange experiences you might remember surrounding the death of your sheep.”

His gaze flicked around, over, and behind her. “Is the master sorcerer with you?”

Siobhan’s fingers tightened around her grimoire. “No.”

“Did he send you?”

She hesitated, unsure whether to lie. The moral implications didn’t bother her, but if she said he was involved, what she was doing might get back to Grandfather sooner rather than later. “I’m gathering material for investigation,” she said instead.

The man peered at her suspiciously, looked around again, and then turned his head to listen to someone talking inside, before saying, “I don’t remember anything strange, and I’ve already told the sorcerer all I know about the sheep.” He closed the door in her face.

Siobhan raised her hand to knock again, hesitated, and then decided against it. She trudged around for a while until she found Rory using a hoe to turn over the ground in the garden area in front of his house.

He jumped in fright when she stopped next to him but quickly brightened. “Siobhan! Did you come looking for me? Do you want to play? But I…” He turned to look at the half-finished garden bed.

Siobhan gave a wordless, irritable grunt and moved to the shallow pots full of still-tender seedlings. “Last frost of the year is over?” she confirmed, taking one out and digging a small hole with her hand to plant it in.

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“Yep!” Rory said. “Divined by Mrs. Black and confirmed by Old Lady Hebbers’s bones.” Mrs. Black was a poor diviner at best, and knew only a few tricks passed down through her family, but even Grandfather admitted that Old Lady Hebbers was an expert at predicting the weather through the aches and pains that plagued her gnarled old body.

“Well, hurry up and let’s finish this, then. I need your help with something else,” Siobhan said.

Working together, it took them a couple of hours to finish loosening the ground, planting the vegetable seedlings, and then watering everything with the putrid-smelling fertilizing concoction that Siobhan was pretty sure

contained urine as the main ingredient. While they worked, she explained her trouble with the O’Dredricks. Rory laughed at her! When she glared at him, he choked down his snorts and giggles and put on a serious face. “We need to go to the neighbors. People who haven’t been directly frightened into silence but want to gossip. They’re the ones who will have details about anything even slightly related.”

Siobhan pursed her lips skeptically. “But is anything they have to say going to be reliable?”

Rory shrugged. “It is a little late to be collecting rumors. Things will have gotten a bit extra-dramatic in the retellings.”

Siobhan snorted uncharitably at this understatement.

Rory continued on valiantly. “But if we talk to enough people, we might still get some good information! Unless you have a better idea?”

Siobhan had to admit that she did not, and so they cleaned themselves up a bit and then implemented his plan. Rory took the lead, grinning guilelessly on a nearby villager’s doorstep and volunteering the both of them to help out with chores—of which Siobhan could do a few magical basics, and Rory could handle more mundane tasks. She tried to start asking questions right away, but he elbowed her into silence. After they had spent some time puttering around fixing and cleaning things, he brought up the topic.

“Did you hear about what happened to the O’Dredricks’s sheep?” he asked.

“Of course!” the housewife, whose copper pot Siobhan had just finished laboriously mending, exclaimed. “The whole village has heard about it!”

Rory hung his head morosely. “I wasn’t there. Could you tell me what happened?” Then, while Siobhan took notes, he listened with rapt attention, asking leading questions and poking for details in a way that seemed nothing more than the fascination of a young boy.

By the time Siobhan butted in with her attempts at sketches, asking for feedback and correction on the veracity of the scene, the woman was so captivated by the excitement of this delicious piece of gossip that she was neither bothered nor suspicious.

Trying to take a leaf from her father’s playbook, Siobhan praised the woman’s memory for detail and her discretion—not like the other villagers, who kept embellishing everything until the retellings had nothing to do with the truth.

The woman patted Siobhan on the head and shoved a plate of apple crumble into her lap, then pinched her cheek until it throbbed. “Oh, you might talk like a little lordling, but you’re a cutie pie underneath.”

Rory nodded seriously, one cheek full of food, and leaned forward conspiratorially. “Well, you know she was raised by her grandfather, mostly.”

The woman sighed. “Oh, I know. She can’t help it, most like.”

Siobhan puffed up with anger, but at a quick, warning glance from Rory, forced herself to deflate and keep her mouth shut. She put on a begrudging smile, shoveled her mouth full of apple crumble so that she wouldn’t have to speak, and returned to her gruesome sketches.

Like this, over the next couple of days, after she helped to finish Rory’s chores, he repaid Siobhan by lubricating her interactions with the other villagers. They were able to interview several people, and though Siobhan found the process quite exhausting, Rory remained fully energetic and as enthusiastic as a young puppy. He probably didn’t mind all the food that was forced on them, either.

What Siobhan compiled left her worried. Once again hiding out in her treehouse, she sat with her knees tucked to her chest and read through the most relevant investigative entries.

Grandfather had once quoted some old writer with a statement she found currently relevant. “Once is coincidence. Twice is a pattern. Three times is enemy action.”

Other than the incident that pretty much everyone knew about via the village-wide web of gossip, there had been no hint of the sheep’s mysterious slaughter beforehand. Nothing that warned of what was to come or where it would happen. Nothing that implicated the O’Dredricks as being worthy of harm. Of course, the villagers came up with all kinds of omens that portended the O’Dredricks’s misfortune, but none that were consistent with each other. Also, none which her grandfather had seen fit to involve himself in, which was perhaps more telling.

But, when asked about anything unusual in their lives recently, several of the villagers brought up two things: vague feelings of unease and vivid, recurring dreams.

She had recorded three dreams of particular note in a hasty scrawl, copying the language the villagers used to describe their experiences as closely as possible.

For the first, she had written:

“I am walking through an endless dark hall filled with giant statues. They’re all wearing hooded cloaks, and my lantern light is too dim to see their faces so far, far above. But I know it is best not to look up, because the darkness seems dangerous. I know there is nothing above, no clouds, no birds, no heavens at all. It’s not actually the sky, just a yawning, empty pit that goes on forever. I know it could eat me, and no one would ever notice, so I keep walking.”

The second entry was entirely different, but the look in the eyes of the villager as they told it had been too similar.

“I’m trying to fight my way through some spiderweb—just layers and layers of it, like brambles left to grow untended for decades. Even though I’m afraid of spiders in real life, somehow it doesn’t bother me. Maybe because the web isn’t exactly web. It’s some kind of red, sticky stuff that reminds me of…a fungus? Or maybe, if you were to somehow extract all of the blood vessels out of someone without damaging them, and then hung it all up to dehydrate a bit? Well, something like that. I am trying to break through this cocoon, but I also know that it’s actually protecting me from what’s outside, like a womb protecting a baby from dangers it cannot yet face. But unlike a baby, I’m sure that I will never be able to face the dangers of the open space. I’m not sure why I keep trying to break free, then.”

By then, Siobhan had already been growing suspicious. The third villager’s dream might not have been remarked upon if she hadn’t asked the woman about it specifically.

“In the dreams, I’m in a strange city. A city not built by man, but grown by the earth itself. Its buildings are made of… Well, I don’t know how to describe it. Very thin roots, maybe, that grow in the shape of walls. And the scaffolding is all bones. The bones of something enormous. I am desperately searching for something, running through the streets, but I can never remember what it was when I wake up.”

Siobhan had probed deeper and gotten more detail from the woman.

“These dreams… It’s strange. I know I’m in danger constantly. I feel like I need to keep a grip on something, so I stick to the walls and always duck my head and run when I need to cross the street. I skitter around like some kind of bug because…I feel like I might fall into the sky. Silly, I know! But the sky is watching, and it is hungry.”

All three villagers had obviously been having nightmares. But when Siobhan described the dreams using that term, they had denied it immediately. They all insisted that the dreams might seem scary or negative, but that was just a failure of interpretation.

The woman who’d told Siobhan and Rory about the third dream had laughed at their concern. “After I’ve said it all out loud, I realize the dreams do seem somewhat disturbing,” she’d said, patting Siobhan’s hand, which had clenched painfully tight around her pen. “But I promise, dear, they actually leave me feeling very peaceful, positive, and full of purpose after waking.”

Siobhan had sketched out the horrific scenes according to the villagers’ descriptions, and she stared at them now as unease prickled at the skin of her back and neck. She didn’t see how it was possible for those experiences to create any kind of positive emotion.

But there was one other reason they disturbed her. “My dreams are nightmares,” Siobhan said, somehow reassuring herself with the words. Her dreams of Mom did not leave her with any inexplicable positive emotions. But Siobhan still turned to a new page and began to record them in as much detail as she could remember, in case they were clues, too.

She hoped they were not. Clues so horrible seemed as if they would inevitably lead to an equally horrifying truth.