The Meridian Line
From the diary of Penny Holloway, written a good deal later
The train. By Harrow Cross I had decided that the man opposite was either a god or a demon, and I have not changed my mind since, though I have changed which.
Clara said I was being dramatic.
Clara was reading, so she missed it.
I was seventeen. I record here that I did not tell anybody, which was the first sensible thing I did that year.
The train whistled as it left the station. The platform slid away, and the steady chugging settled into a rhythm beneath the floor.
“Sir,” said the girl, and Lucian looked up.
“You do not have to worry,” she said. “I will not tell anyone.”
Sirens went off in Lucian’s head, and all nine of his parallel minds turned at once.
Has she discovered something about yesterday?
Has she seen through the disguise?
Has she discovered that I am a spy in the Ashfox Kingdom?
Has she noticed Atomic Spirit?
Has she somehow discovered the truth? That I am not even from this world?
Because he wasn’t.
Lucian had once been a scientist on a certain blue planet, and that life had ended in the middle of an ordinary day. His memories stopped there, cleanly. What he remembered next was being born again as a baby in a world of magic, with everything he had learned in his first life still sitting in his head.
He had been lucky in the ways that mattered. His family loved him, and though they were lower middle class and lived carefully, they still managed to put him through school. A boy with two lifetimes behind his eyes did rather well there.
In his little town, everybody knew him; everybody liked him. That was what a man remembered afterwards, in other countries, under other faces.
Across the aisle, the taller girl had gone the colour of a good brick. She had one hand on her friend’s sleeve and was tugging at it discreetly, with no effect whatsoever.
She has done it again, Clara thought. She has stared at a stranger for a quarter of an hour and then said something stupid.
“Would you like one?” The smaller girl held out a paper twist.
“They are the good ones,” she said. “My father buys them from a man who owes him money, so they cost less than they look. They are the same almonds, though.”
“Penny.”
“It is not rude if it is true.”
Lucian took one. A man who refused everything was remembered.
“Thank you.”
“You may have three,” said Penny, settling back into her seat. “After three, you have to tell me something about yourself. That is the rule.”
“Whose rule?”
“Mine.”
The train ran on, and fields slipped past the window. A milestone went by with them, its painted number reading two hundred and six.
Then the Veldran Empire began its war of expansion across the continent. Lucian had been certain the war would never reach his little kingdom, because he had worked it out: supply lines, distances, the cost of holding ground. He had been very confident.
But this was a fantasy world, with mages in it, and men who could carry a gun carriage on their backs. The war was brutal. He went out with the refugees on the roads, and, to protect himself and his family, he took the only course a young man could think of. He became a mage.
He was bad at it. The science of magic in this world ran against everything he had brought with him from the last one. There is a saying that a grown tree does not bend; it breaks. So Lucian broke a great deal.
He learned slowly, painfully, and was still learning when the war came to his own door and took his family. He could not stop it.
Outside the window, another milestone went by: a hundred and seventy-four.
“Sir, please do not mind my friend Penny,” the taller girl said. “She is… eccentric.”
She put a hand on Penny’s shoulder and made her bow. She made the bow deep enough for both of them. Penny bowed with perfect willingness, then came up smiling. Lucian said nothing, because seven of his nine minds were still busy.
Against the growing aggression, the smaller kingdoms formed the Eastern Alliance and resisted together. Lucian had a head for maps and a memory that did not let go, so he was pulled out of the line and promoted into military intelligence. For a season, it even worked, and the Alliance pushed the Veldrans back.
Then, quite suddenly, the war stopped. The Ashfox Kingdom in the north, the oldest and strongest power on the continent, put one hand on the table, and the continent steadied. Then the Treaty of Greywater was signed by men who all pretended they had won.
But the fighting did not stop. It merely went underground, into the quiet war between the spies of the three great powers and the numberless little kingdoms caught between them.
Lucian was released from the army. By then he had reached Circle 3, which was not nothing, and he had done it with a damaged grimoire, which was nearly impossible.
There was another world beside this one. The Spirit World was the source of all mana, and every spirit existed there in parallel with the body it belonged to, including the spirits of living men.
To become a mage, a man first had to reach across and summon his own spirit out of it. For modern mages, it came back in the shape of a book: a grimoire. It was the pipe through which a mage drew the mana he spent, and he advanced by learning spells and etching them into its pages, one circle at a time.
“Do you want to see mine?”
Lucian returned to the carriage. Penny had a thin book in her hands that had not been there a moment ago. It was plainly bound, with nothing at all written on the cover.
“Penny. You cannot simply show people your grimoire.”
“Why not? It is very boring.”
“That is not the point.”
She turned it around so he could see it, then closed her hand. The book vanished before he had finished looking.
“Seventeen pages,” she said. “I am not very good.”
“Seventeen pages at your age is nothing to apologise for.”
“I was not apologising,” said Penny, sticking out her tongue.
Lucian’s grimoire had been damaged in the battles of the war. Circles One, Two and Three were the apprentice Circles. Anybody with a little talent and a little money could get that far. The fourth was the leap, where a man with a knack became a mage the world took seriously.
And the fourth was closed to Lucian. Every teacher he had told him so, kindly or otherwise.
“He is not angry, Penny,” Clara whispered, without moving her lips. “He is thinking. That is worse.”
“He is not thinking about us,” Penny whispered back.
He was, in fact, thinking about hydrogen. That was where the blue planet had finally paid him back.
Every mage knew that the quality of a grimoire governed how quickly it could draw mana from the Spirit World. What almost nobody bothered with was the second term in the same relationship: surface area.
A grimoire had as many pages as the mage had etched, and its surface area had a minuscule but direct effect on the rate at which it could regenerate mana. And what in this world had more surface area than powder?
So Lucian took his broken grimoire and finished breaking it. He fragmented it into uncountable granules, each about the size of an atom. Then he bound each granule to a real hydrogen atom with an apprentice-grade spell called Bind Spirit, a spell taught to children and used for essentially nothing.
The surface area went up by a factor of trillions, and the minuscule effect went up with it. That was how a failed apprentice with a ruined spirit came to possess essentially endless mana. With that mana, he bulldozed the etching of Parallel Thoughts into his broken grimoire and advanced to Circle 4: strength enough to walk sideways.
“Excuse me,” said Penny. “Are you a professor?”
“Penny.”
“I only asked.”
Some time after that, Master Pigeon of the Dead Letters noticed a nobody in a border kingdom who possessed extraordinary capabilities as a Circle 4 mage. He came to find Lucian, then taught him the whole trade of spycraft and brought him into the Dead Letters.
His first mission had been to join the Eastern Alliance as a spy and grow a second identity there. That had been more than seven years ago, and he was thirty-three now. He had worn a good many faces since, in a good many countries.
Lately, he had spent six weeks in the Ashfox Kingdom finding out whether the Collapsing Bomb was real. It was not, not really. Without the cosmic worm to hold it, nobody on the continent could keep a spatial disturbance folded into a lower dimension for long enough to turn it into a weapon. Now the worm was loose in the world again, and gone, so the Collapsing Bomb could go back to being what it had always been: a dream of space magic.
And now his next mission was to travel to the capital of the Ashfox Kingdom and become a professor.
“Three things,” said Penny.
“I beg your pardon?”
“About Meridian. You are new, and nobody is ever told the things they actually need.”
She held up one finger. “One. Never say Meridian time to a man from Meridian. He tells you the time. It is only Meridian time to the rest of us.”
“Penny,” said Clara.
“Two. Everything is measured from the Zero Stone. So when a man tells you a place is four miles away, ask him four miles from what. Half of them mean from the Stone and half mean from wherever they happen to be standing, which is how everybody in that city is late.”
Lucian had read four books about Meridian in the past month and had learned neither of them. “And the third?”
“Three…”
Penny fell silent. Clearly, she had not planned this part.
“Three was the best one,” she said eventually. “It will come back to me.”
All nine of Lucian’s parallel minds considered every possible way a seventeen-year-old girl in a college sweater might have penetrated the best cover on the continent. They reached the same conclusion: nothing.
They had been reading both girls since the two of them had come down the aisle and entered his range. The tall one with the long face was Circle 1, and the shorter one with the oval face was Circle 2. Two students of no particular promise, going back to college.
So Lucian did what he always did when a reading made no sense: he looked for the ordinary cause. He found it in about a second, and it was so ordinary that he almost laughed.
He was sitting in a third-class carriage in a cream three-piece suit that had cost more than the ticket by a factor of forty. His top hat sat on the rack above him, and his suitcase did not match anything else in the compartment. A well-dressed gentleman riding in the open public carriage pointed to exactly one explanation, and a well-brought-up girl would have been taught never to remark upon it.
She thinks I cannot afford first class, he thought.
And she has decided to spare my feelings.
Lucian smiled. “Then I will trust you, Penny, with my secret.”
“Oh, you can,” said Penny. “I am very good at secrets.”
“Penny,” said Clara, in a voice containing a great deal of nine years.
“I am.”
“You are not.”
“I have never told anyone anything,” said Penny, with dignity, “that they did not already know.”
Lucian looked from one girl to the other. The tall one had gone brick-coloured again, and she was sitting bolt upright, her book unopened on her knee. The small one was eating another sugared almond from the paper twist and watching him with the concentration usually reserved for a professor’s lecture.
Two college girls, said one of his minds.
One of them is odd.
Odd is not a threat, said another.
Everything is a threat, said a third. That was its job.
Let it go, said a fourth, and he let it go.
He turned the page of a newspaper he had already read twice. Across from him, Clara finally opened her book, but she did not read a word.
She had known Penny since they were eight. She had learned, at eight, that there was no profit in asking questions, so she had spent the next nine years developing a small system for managing Penny incidents: the bow, the apology, the change of subject.
He was kind about it, she thought. It is over. We will reach Meridian, and we will never see him again.
The train slowed at Harrow Cross.