They had agreed to meet at the old waterworks at the edge of the industrial quarter, where the brickwork was thick enough to muffle sound and the city's ambient glow could not find the windows. Four of them. The fifth space in the circle was not, strictly speaking, empty — it was reserved for whoever answered the invitation.
Maren had found the manuscript in a lot of books she bought at auction. Not the interesting lot, with the illuminated psalter and the eighteenth-century almanacs — the other one, the one she had bought only to fill a gap in the shelving. The manuscript was octavo-sized, unbound, written in a hand she couldn't date with confidence. The language shifted between Latin, Middle English, and something she initially took to be corrupted German before she recognized it as something older. She spent four months with it before she stopped trying to identify its provenance and started, instead, reading it for instruction.
The others had come to her through different routes. Felix, who taught palaeography at the university and who had encountered the manuscript before — in a different copy, he said, now lost. Yseult, a conservation chemist who had learned about the compound preparations described in Part III and wanted to see them tested. Dr. Abara, whose interest he declined to specify and whose presence Maren had decided not to question. And Callum, who was there because Maren trusted him, and because the ritual specified an even number of participants external to the invitation, and because she had not wanted to invite someone who might ask for an explanation she didn't have.
The preparation took two hours. The compounds Yseult had prepared were distributed in small clay dishes at the five points of the circle, which was drawn not in chalk — the manuscript was specific about this — but in a mixture she had combined according to the formula in Part II. It dried to a dull copper colour on the stone floor.
At eleven forty-seven, when the preparations were complete, Maren read the invocation aloud.
The Latin portions she had practised. The Middle English required less care — she had spent enough time with the period to feel the rhythm of it. The third section she read phonetically, having spent weeks transcribing the sounds rather than attempting translation. She had not been able to find what it said. Felix had not been able to find it either, which had, at the time, seemed less significant than it did now, as she heard herself saying it in the silence of the waterworks and felt the particular quality of that silence shift.
She finished reading. She set the manuscript down in front of her. The copper circle had not changed that she could see. The compounds in the clay dishes continued their slow combustion, filling the room with a smell that had no common analogue — resinous, mineral, faintly sweet, and underneath it something that made Callum set his jaw.
Nothing appeared to happen for a long time. Then Felix said, quietly: "Look at your hands."
There was no pain. That was the first thing Maren would always note, afterward, when she had to describe it: there was no pain. The tracery that had appeared on the backs of her hands — on all their hands, she saw, looking round the circle — was precise and fine, like something applied by a skilled instrument rather than anything biological. It covered the spaces between the tendons and curved at the wrists. It was the same copper-dull colour as the circle on the floor.
Dr. Abara said, in a tone of academic interest that struck Maren as almost inappropriate: "It's the binding clause. Part IV. I thought that section was metaphorical."
No one answered him. The fifth space in the circle — the one left empty, reserved — was not empty any longer. There was a presence there that none of them could have described with precision. Not a figure. Not a light. A density of attention, directed inward, that made the air feel occupied.
"What is it?" Callum asked.
Maren had thought about this. She had thought about it for the entire four months she spent with the manuscript, and in all that time she had not arrived at a satisfactory answer. What she had arrived at was a provisional understanding: that the ritual was not, as she had originally assumed, a summoning. The thing it invited was not called from elsewhere. It was revealed. Something that had always been present and had simply, until the words were spoken and the circle drawn, been unperceived.
"I don't know," she said honestly. "But I think it's been here the whole time."
The tracery on their hands faded over the following three days. The circle on the floor of the waterworks did not. When Felix returned a week later to document it, he found that the compound had bonded with the stone at a molecular level — it was not drawn on the surface but had become part of it. He photographed it and sent the photographs to Yseult, who sent them to a materials scientist she trusted, who replied within an hour to say that the compound could not have been applied to the stone under any conditions consistent with the physical properties of the materials described.
Maren kept the manuscript in a fireproof box in her study, behind three locks. She did not show it to anyone else. She did not read it again — not because she was afraid of what she might find, but because she had the distinct impression that she had reached the part of it that was addressed to her, and that what came next was addressed to whoever came after.
The fifth space remained occupied. None of them could see it or locate it with any instrument. But none of them, for the rest of their lives, would ever feel entirely alone in a room again.