Master of the Revels Read online

  CHIRA: Agreed. And if it’s Blevins, likely it is really Gráinne, right? I don’t think she would care about things like a DOer profile. I think her priority is to use somebody who cannot risk pushing back.

  MORTIMER: Yeah, good point. I’m sorry that’s the sitch. Keep me updated. We’re also wondering if you’ve heard any chatter about seventeenth-century Amsterdam, especially regarding lens grinders and especially Baruch Spinoza. Not DEDEs so much as results.

  CHIRA: I have heard nothing about that, but I will keep my ears open.

  MORTIMER: Thanks, Chira, you rock.

  [end call]

  Post from Mortimer Shore:

  There it is, gang, please opine.

  Reply from Melisande Stokes:

  I agree about Gráinne. As for the DEDE itself, Cosimo de’ Medici was only a child at that time, but this might have something to do with the forces that shaped him growing up. Follow the money. Maybe Blevins wants to pull another Bay Psalm Book gambit. Probably not related to Gráinne’s game.

  From Tristan Lyons:

  Agreed, but we should still stay abreast of what they’re doing over there.

  From Rebecca East-Oda:

  So many world-shapers in that era. Maybe something to do with Machiavelli?

  From Melisande Stokes:

  Maybe indirectly. Machiavelli’s later. So is da Vinci.

  From Frank Oda:

  But DEDEs generally predate their intended result by several generations.

  From Tristan Lyons:

  There was internecine fighting among all the city-states around then, especially Florence and Milan. Maybe it’s a balance-of-power DEDE. Mortimer, tell Chira to get intel on whomever she’s stealing the slave from, as well as the driver of the cart.

  From Mortimer Shore:

  On it.

  From Tristan Lyons:

  Stokes, research the hamlet—what’s it called—

  From Melisande Stokes:

  Ascella. Means “armpit” in Italian.

  From Mortimer Shore:

  Nice.

  From Rebecca East-Oda:

  Rebecca here, reporting from the kitchen iPad—Erzsébet has just demanded an emergency meeting in Frank’s study.

  From Mortimer Shore:

  Can we do it in the living room? That’s where Freya’s mikes are set up.

  From Rebecca East-Oda:

  She thinks the recording system could be hacked.

  From Mortimer Shore:

  It doesn’t work that way. Plus it’s on an air-gapped subnetwork. Total physical isolation. Freya’s more secure than the Pentagon.

  From Rebecca East-Oda:

  She says she wants to talk into the naked air. Not my phrase.

  From Tristan Lyons:

  I’m downstairs doing a maintenance check on the ODEC. I can be up in a few.

  From Melisande Stokes:

  I’m already in Frank’s office.

  From Rebecca East-Oda:

  I think Felix and Esme are at their money jobs.

  From Mortimer Shore:

  Julie’s busking in the Porter Square T station, but I’ll text her. She could be here in ten.

  From Rebecca East-Oda:

  Erzsébet says no. Julie has been playing Liszt’s Preludes, and people need to hear it to cleanse their souls after shopping at Target.

  From Mortimer Shore:

  Tell her she is so right about that.

  Post by Melisande Stokes on her personal GRIMNIR channel

  DAY 1988 (7 JANUARY, YEAR 6)

  (I’ll put this into the “General” channel, but I write faster when I’m not censoring myself, so I’m writing the first draft on my private channel.)

  Here is an account of the January 7 meeting that Erzsébet called. In addition to Erzsébet and myself, the attendees were Tristan, Rebecca & Frank, and Mortimer. We met in Frank’s study, with the big old double-hungs looking out onto the damp gray afternoon. The afternoon is even grayer now that Tristan and Mortimer have adhered mirrored film to the windowpanes.

  I’d lit the fire, and Rebecca, of course, brought in a teapot and biscuits. We have never had a meeting in this room without Rebecca making tea, as if she were genetically conditioned to it.

  I was settled in the overstuffed chair in the corner, surfing for info about 1397 Ascella. (There is none. At all. Which doesn’t mean DODO won’t have data on it. Dammit, I miss those archives.) Erzsébet entered first, pretty and pouty as ever in her favorite winter cocktail dress, clutching a slender paperback in her perfectly manicured fingers and fidgeting with it. I have known her five years, and I have rarely seen her actually anxious, but she was riffling her fingertips across the corner of the book, tapping it against her hip, biting her lower lip. For a moment she didn’t see me. Once she did, she made a show of being not anxious, which only further betrayed how anxious she was.

  “Gráinne has meddled,” she said with her haughty Hungarian accent. “I have discovered it.” She sounded vaguely boastful but also unnerved.

  I can’t blame her, given she and Gráinne were thick as thieves until last month. They were going to kill off Tristan and me and plunge civilization into Stone Age chaos . . . until Erzsébet had a change of heart. I think this was due purely to a grudging affection for me, and I’ve wondered sometimes in these past weeks if she’s had regrets about not going through with it. Tristan would be dead now, I’d be stuck in a Victorian madhouse, and who the hell knows what the world would look like. Repeatedly I have to remind myself that Erzsébet, for all of her prima donna tendencies, is the most important savior of civilization nobody’s ever heard of.

  By now Tristan and Frank were entering, and Mortimer followed on their heels from his overheated Lerkim in the guest room (converted into the server room), and a minute later, Rebecca came in with the tea tray, which she set by the low table near the fire.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Tristan, settling onto a stool.

  If there were a stage here, Erzsébet would have taken it. She stood by the fire and stared intensely at all of us for a moment. Then she waved the paperback dramatically and began to pace, her heel-clacks muffled by the worn Persian carpet. “As we all know, like most people who do not watch trash TV, I am a big reader, and I decided to re-read the collected works of Mr. William Shakespeare. In particular I was interested to remind myself how he writes about magic. So I read A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but all the magic ones are imaginary, and then I read The Tempest, but this is nonsense, because Prospero is a man and men cannot do magic. But then . . .” And here she paused in her pacing, turned to face us all, and dramatically held out the paperback. It was a yellowing copy of Macbeth, the Folger Shakespeare Library edition. “Then I re-read this play, which I have read about once each decade. And in this play, there are witches, and the witches speak spells.”

  She stared at us meaningfully. We stared back.

  “Yeah,” Tristan said at last. “Even I know that. ‘Double, double, toil and trouble,’ and so on.”

  “Exactly—and so on!” said Erzsébet fiercely. “Tell me: What’s the next line?”

  “Something about . . . rubble, isn’t it?” said Rebecca. “Or stubble?”

  “Yes, um, give me a sec,” I said. “‘Double, double, toil and trouble . . .’” I waited for it to come to me. Nothing.

  “I got it,” said Mortimer. “I played Macduff in junior high, that’s what got me interested in historical martial arts . . . Hang on, it’s . . . ‘Double, double, toil and trouble; / Scorch their minds and raze the rubble—’”

  “This is not what Mr. Shakespeare wrote,” said Erzsébet grimly, like a schoolmarm chastising. “It is not what you heard your fellow students saying. I know the real words because I am a big reader and I have read Macbeth many times before now. I remember them because they are nonsense, they are just some rhymes he invented. But this phrase that you think you remember, scorch their minds and raze the rubble, this is the beginning of a spell. It is a violent, destructive spell t
o undo things.”

  “That’s interesting, I didn’t realize real witches used verbal spells,” said Frank. “Since you all do the same magic, no matter what language you speak.”

  “For certain rare things, there are spells. Each language has its own variation depending upon the potency of certain words. This one spell is the most destructive I ever knew of. There is a taboo against using it, and it is learned only as a thing to be avoided. It is so potent and dark that in my childhood, we were schooled never to say the whole thing—one girl would say a phrase, and then another would say a phrase, and so on, so that we might learn it without any one of us uttering the entire spell at once.”

  “Oh dear,” said Rebecca. “I see where this is going.”

  “And so I read the rest of the witches’ lines,” said Erzsébet, her voice still strained. “Gráinne—it must be her—has changed the nonsense charms into lines from this most dreadful and elemental spell. This scorch their minds and raze the rubble. This spell that is like a nuclear bomb shrunk down to work like a laser.”

  “So she is using the play Macbeth as a kind of repository?” Frank said.

  Erzsébet nodded. “Maybe something like that, to make sure the most destructive spell is not lost. The very fact that it is an act of hers means it is a dangerous act.”

  There was a pause.

  “Are you sure that’s the wrong line?” asked Mortimer. “I totally remember hearing about rubble. I even remember their intonation and movements and stuff.”

  Erzsébet frowned at him. “This is because she has—so very easily, do you see?—changed the past. Now this Strand has always been that way. And this is only the first week of January, so she has done this very quickly. Maybe it only took one Strand to sway all of reality, and this means that the universe is tending toward this new reality. In fact”—and here her face twitched—“if her other plans to bring back magic are a little bit successful, then anyone who is a witch—even if, as it was with Rebecca, they do not even know that they’re a witch—it is possible that they might say the lines aloud and actually cast the spell, even if that is the furthest thing from their mind.”

  “Magic doesn’t quite work that way, though,” Rebecca said tentatively.

  “How do we know how magic works in this particular situation? Magic has never in the history of the world been subjected to this particular situation! Even if this action were no more malignant than a flea bite, it must be reversed—”

  “Yes, just to make sure Gráinne’s influence on this Strand can be contained,” agreed Tristan. “In fact, that might be all this is for her—simply a way of testing, establishing a touchstone.”

  Erzsébet, still very agitated: “That might be true, but also, she is trying to preserve ancient knowledge in a medium where it will not be destroyed, where it will be readily available to all future witches—even if they don’t know they’re witches.”

  “Why not the Bible, then?” asked Rebecca. “Surely that’s more universal than a play.”

  “Less than half the world reads the Bible,” I said. “And there’s no universal first edition of the Bible. Translations, editions, different sects. There is one actual, official script that is the original Macbeth, one authoritative—literally authoritative—source.”

  “Actually,” said Rebecca, “I’m not certain that’s true. I think there are slight variations in different editions. I’ll research it.”

  “Okay, but still—it’s secular, so it’s not going to be banned anywhere, it’s easy to find online, it’s easy to find the original.”

  “Yes. And,” Erzsébet added, “many witches are amused by theatre because it is a kind of pretend alchemy, where one person is briefly transformed into another person, just with the trick of words and movements. Perhaps she thinks witches would intuitively look there. And if a script, then why not the most famous playwright?”

  “It’s not his most famous play,” Rebecca observed.

  “It’s his most famous play with witches,” said Erzsébet. “Those witches are the most famous witches in print, except for that Wizard of Oz. You must prevent her from doing this,” she said, pleadingly, to Tristan. “Even when magic was everywhere, and any witch could do whatever spell she wanted—even then, this spell was taboo. At no time in history should it have ever been easily at hand, but especially now, when there are witches walking around who don’t even know they’re witches! If they are an actor or a professor or just one of those people who likes to walk around quoting Shakespeare, and they say those words—”

  “Nothing will happen because they’re not saying them in an ODEC,” said Tristan. “We’ve got to stay on point here, we don’t have the bandwidth for you to be an alarmist.”

  “Tristan Lyons, listen to me! I am not being an alarmist! I am telling you what will happen once Gráinne has even a little bit of success with her anti-technology crusade. Was magic going along perfectly normally and then just, bam, stopped in July of 1851? No! It had weakened over many, many decades before that, and even its death throes took years. So it will come back gradually too. Every now and then, some witch’s effort will suddenly have potency. And then a little more often, and then a little more often. I’m not being an alarmist, I am just telling you that until you stop Gráinne completely, logic dictates that will happen. That isn’t ipso facto dangerous, because for magic to happen, a witch has to perform a spell, and there are very few of us witches alive right now who know many spells. But because of what Gráinne is doing, everyone, including witches who don’t know they’re witches, will know the worst spell there ever was. Do you understand what I’m saying? It is almost literally like leaving a nuclear weapon on every street corner. Eventually they will all be detonated, and almost never on purpose. You must take the weapons off the street corners. You must prevent her from immortalizing those words in Macbeth. You must warn Mr. Shakespeare against her.”

  Tristan and I exchanged looks. “This means a trip to seventeenth-century London,” Tristan said. “That’s my stomping grounds, I’ll go, I know the ropes there. Thank you, Erzsébet.”

  “Better make sure you have a specific date,” I said. “If you show up the year before or after Macbeth, that’s no good. Erzsébet, does it say in there when it was written?”

  She was already leafing urgently through the pages. “There is no way to know for sure, but it is believed that it was performed in August of 1606 in the royal court, but also that it was written possibly in early November of the previous year. I do not know why it says that.”

  “What’s the plan?” Frank asked Tristan.

  Tristan crossed his arms and frowned thoughtfully. “To start with, find William Shakespeare. He’s the most famous playwright in history, we can get plenty of intel on him just from Google. Stokes?”

  “I’m on it,” I said, and, after downing my last swallow of tea, drew my computer back onto my lap.

  HANDWRITTEN IN RECYCLED-PAPER DIARY

  BY ROBIN LYONS

  JANUARY 8, NEW YORK CITY

  I didn’t think shit could get weirder, but I just read over my Jan. 6 entry about the fire at the Macbeth performance, and guess what, shit got even weirder.

  I remember writing “Double, double, toil and trouble; / Scorch their minds and raze the rubble,” because those were the words to the spell. But of course those aren’t the words. The actual words are “Double, double, toil and trouble; / Fire burn and cauldron bubble.” I mean, duh. I’ve known that rhyme since I was six, I’d sneak up on Tristan and whisper it in his ear when he was studying, because little sister. Where did “Scorch their minds and raze the rubble” come from??? I’ve never seen or heard that phrase before! I wrote it after coffee, meaning I was completely clear-headed, so wtaf?

  I am so creeped out by this that—can’t believe I’m saying this—it will be great to spend a couple days chilling with Tristan in his tyrannically rational world.

  Post by Melisande Stokes on her personal GRIMNIR channel

  DAY 19
90 (9 JANUARY, YEAR 6)

  The spoken text of (most of) what follows will be transcribed by vocal-recognition software Freya, but there was enough nonverbal communication going on that I felt it should be described as well.

  Erzsébet had a busy day, by Erzsébet standards.

  First, she Sent Oda-sensei to 1450 Kyoto (more precisely, a village near Kyoto, where we have reason to believe Gráinne has tried to hide something in a local shrine). Frank reminded me of a kid who was excited for his first day of school. He and Rebecca never engage in PDA (because Japanese/WASP), but she gave him a big smooch and he hugged her tight, beaming. Turns out they have a private handshake none of us ever knew about until today. As soon as he had been Sent, she went into the kitchen to start making his favorite soup in anticipation of his homecoming. Those two.

  That is not what I felt I had to write about here.

  After Sending Frank, Erzsébet Sent Tristan to DTAP late-1605 London, which we believe is when Shakespeare was writing, or at least contemplating, Macbeth. We had discussed whether it was best to head the Bard off at the pass (i.e., warning him about Gráinne before she got to him) or to instead put more effort into shaping the final project (i.e., coming to him after Gráinne had influenced him). At Erzsébet’s recommendation, we decided to try both, back-to-back. (Erzsébet, fatigued at having to do two Sendings in one afternoon, reminded us that she has never signed a contract or made a promise with anyone in any organization, and she is free to walk away and leave us stranded at her own discretion. I don’t need to detail Tristan’s response.)

  This is not how DODO functions, of course, but DODO isn’t functioning normally. Before everything went batshit crazy, we would use the Chronotron to determine which very, very subtle action could accomplish our goal via the butterfly effect. But it was alarming Gráinne had accomplished such a concrete shift so quickly. Therefore—especially without the Chronotron to help us out—Tristan is determined to go for the jugular.

  Because I’m not a witch, I cannot know how they effect to Send somebody. The only times we ever had accuracy issues at DODO was when a new witch was trying to Send someone to a place she wasn’t familiar with, and even that was rarely a problem. I assumed that they were essentially infallible. I was disabused of this notion when Tristan returned barely an hour after he was Sent, and not in good form.