The camp was less fractured today. The division between the Spanish teens had healed, and Ana was an accepted part of the group. The Romani were still wary, but Maria’s healing of Elena had removed the animosity, which was good. They still had about four days left to travel.
The road they were heading down was one between farms, with fields spread on either side of them, and only the occasional farmhouse. It was quiet, except for Esmerelda’s snoring. The old woman had once again decided to drive the tilt wagon, only to immediately give the reigns to Selene and fall asleep sitting up.
The sky was clear and cloudless and it was a warm day with a gentle breeze, and the ride was peaceful.
“Can we talk?”
The ride had been peaceful, anyway.
“Come up, Maria,” Selene said, acknowledging the girl. “You’ll need to sit behind us though.”
Esmerelda was small, but still somehow took up three-quarters of the seat. Maria moved forward, and sat close to Selene.
“I don’t know if you heard this morning,” Selene said, “but Elena named her baby Maria.”
“I hadn’t. That’s… I’m glad I could save her. I want to try healing her tonight, again, when we camp.”
Selene frowned. “She is healthy now.”
“I received a new Ability this morning. Well, two, but only one for healing. Replenish Blood Loss. She could be weak for weeks trying to… grow it back on her own? I don’t know if people grow blood. Did you mean what you said last night?”
“Which part?”
“About training. I didn’t know the uterus was an organ. I don’t know how the body replenishes blood. I know… I can guess how my Abilities work, but they come without explanation, and I don’t know how the body works.”
“I meant what I said, Maria. When we get where we are going, we will get you training.”
“The others have been talking. We’d all like to know where we’re going.”
Selene sighed. “Then let me tell you about the Llanthony valley, and my compound hidden on a hill.”
John Kismet was born in Cheapside, London, in 1837, to struggling parents who had nothing to give. He was an intelligent, precocious child who taught himself to read from a Bible he’d liberated from the local Church, and his intelligence was such that it found him a sponsored place in a London school. The sponsorship did not come without ties, and when he left school at fifteen, he went to work for his sponsors, the East India Company.
The Government of India Act had passed through Parliament five years before his birth, in an effort to strip the EIC of political power. The Company had defied the Act, maintaining its armies, magical corps, and revenue systems, and Britain could not enforce the law. The Company was more powerful than the crown.
However, the East India Company was not welcome in Britain, so John found himself on a ship to India shortly after leaving school. He was given an office in Mumbai, and a job, to investigate if spirits truly were part of magic, or if it was pagan nonsense. More and more, magic was being seen as a new branch of science, and if it could not be entirely explained yet… well, neither could the others. There were still new planets being discovered, even. Neptune had been found only a few years before he finished school.
Kismet made a discovery that haunted him, a discovery he couldn’t share with the Company. He discovered what he believed to be the spirit of the very earth itself, which he named Gaia, and which he believed was being harmed by the use of magic. He hypothesised that magic drew its energy from the earth’s magnetic field, which he theorised was the life force of the planet.
In 1857 there was an Indian Rebellion against the Company, which was swiftly crushed by the EICs magical corp, but it provided the distraction Kismet required. He faked his death and vanished. That was when he gave up the name he had before, and took the name John Kismet, and that was when he began wandering.
He’d read all the European theories of magic and, as unpalatable as he was, Agrippa had largely been right about one thing. The nations which had embraced science and reason largely did not have magic, though that could equally be because the Church burnt anyone they thought was a sorcerer, which was neither scientific nor reasonable.
The rest of the world beyond the boundaries of Europe had magic and, if tracked by what they could do, there were six or seven or perhaps eight magical traditions across the world. Since he was in India, he started with the Indian tradition, and studied the ways of the vaidyas, the mantrikas, and the agnihotris. Indian sorcerers believe all living things contain a subtle, manipulatable heat, and are the best fire controllers in the world.
He moved eastwards from India, studying Wuism, or at least the theory behind it, for he was no sorcerer himself. He discounted the ancestor worship of the Asian tradition as a superstition with no observable effect, and mastered the breathing techniques taught to sorcerers in both Indian and Asian traditions.
The Oceanic tradition was where the true issues occurred. Here, the mudang performed rituals to summon spirits, and here Kismet learned of demons, spirits that were not of the earth, that existed outside of time, and wanted only destruction. They would grant power to people, but it never went well as the demons lusted for death, and the Oceanic tradition was the most harmful to Gaia, in his opinion.
From there, he travelled to Australia, on the Northern and Western coast of the great southern continent, and tried to secure permission to enter the inland country, Alcheringa, to discuss with the Aboriginal people their magic tradition and determine if it was an eighth one, different to the rest. The native people of Alcheringa will not discuss magic with outsiders, ever, so he left and travelled next to Africa, where he investigated their power to wield the sun.
He considered heading to Persia, to look into what has been called the seventh tradition, but in his opinion it was simply a mingling of Indian and African traditions and science, and so instead he travelled to America to study their storm-callers and sky-singers. He learned of what they called the heartbeat of the earth, and what Europe knows as Kashani resonances after being predicted and discovered by Persian sorcerer Magus Bahram Kashani; world travelling aetheric currents, and in his opinion these were the literal heartbeats of the earth, for Gaia was alive.
He returned to England at the age of thirty-eight and began the Millennium Grace Congregation. He built a compound in the Llanthony valley, for those who rejected magic and everything about it, and he taught that an apocalypse, a reckoning, was coming, that most of humanity would die, and the survivors would need to build everything up from nothing. He taught people to farm and to fight and to survive after the end of the world.
They gave him everything they had, sold everything they owned and gave him the proceeds, because he promised them all they would be kings and queens after the end. One woman, one silly seventeen year old girl, gave up everything she had, even her name, taking the name Harmony when she joined him. She was my mother.
I was never sure who my father was because everyone in the compound was largely available to everyone else, and my mother was a very beautiful and very stupid teenager, but I think my father was probably Kismet himself. He thought so, too.
And then one day Kismet said the world was going to end on New Years Eve 1899. Everyone gathered and waited for it to happen, and when it didn’t, everyone took poison and went to sleep, except for me and Kismet.
Now everything that the cult had is mine, including a compound that hasn’t been used in twenty years, and that few people ever knew existed in the first place. You will be safe there, I promise.
There was stunned silence as Selene finished speaking, and she reflected that she had probably told them too much, but the truth was the truth, and she’d laid her ghosts to rest long ago.
“What happened to your… Kismet?” Maria asked.
“I didn’t know he lived at first. I didn’t find out until four years later, just before he died. I went to see him, he transferred ownership of everything to me, and…” and she didn’t know what happened next. She couldn’t remember.
The start of that meeting was burned into her mind. “You foolish girl, you think Gaia was going to kill humanity? No, the world will end when Gaia dies, because we are killing our mother even as we live upon her, with nowhere else to go. It wasn’t Gaia that was going to kill humanity, it was my knights, doing mudang rituals, but releasing the demons they summoned to wrought death and destruction on the world. They failed, I failed, and now we are all doomed.”
The end of the meeting, and the next several months, were gone. She had no idea how she had spent the time between meeting Kismet in 1904 and meeting Simon Maris in a London pub in 1905.
“… and everything is mine now,” she finished. “You will all be safe there, and we will be at Caversham soon.” Her mind wasn’t really on the words, though. She was remembering the man who might have been her father. She was wishing she could remember if she had been the one to kill him, or not.
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