Harry’s first stop is Charlotte Palmer’s new cafe, Half & Half. It doesn’t have a fixed address, but Harry has a loyalty card, and apparently the cafe will show up generally wherever you are, if you want to find it.
He walks in to find Charlotte urgently planning things with her staff.
“Hey, I was hoping you could help me with something.”
With Charlotte’s attention on him, he hands over the mysterious message and explains. “Someone or something magical is attacking my family.”
Charlotte inspects it carefully. Harry can see a tense frown cross her face. She hands the message back and dispels the frown with force of will. “I wish I could help with this, but unfortunately I am trying to save reality. Or a part of it, right at the moment.”
This sounds pretty serious. “Do you… need any help?” Harry ventures. Without his speed, he’s not sure what he could offer, but if–
“I’ve got at least one Harry helping already,” Charlotte answers. “But I am grateful for the offer and I will let you know should we need more. It may come to that.”
Ah. That does sound serious.
But she continues. “There is a place, Santuario de las Brujas, in the city. The Witches’ Sanctum. They should be able to assist you. Ask for Stella and tell her she’s got five holes punched, and she’ll understand that you speak with my blessing.”
She finds and presents a business card, marked with a cauldron and a shooting star. Harry snaps the street address on his phone camera.
He smiles and salutes on his way out. “Hey, this has been helpful. Thanks. And good luck with the uh, saving reality stuff.”
Harry is really annoyed at one other new reality of driving: finding parking. When he runs, he can just go somewhere, walk inside, do what he’s there to do, and walk out.
Now, to stop a threat against his family’s life, he’s had to circle the same city block three times, signaling a turn every time, braking for sudden rushes of oncoming traffic, waiting for pedestrians, and so on and so on and so on. The one upside is that he’s not immediately recognized as a superhero. Of course that also means he gets cussed out by angry drivers every so often.
The Witches’ Sanctum isn’t labeled as such on the street. But etched into the glass of the store front is the same cauldron and shooting star Harry saw on the business card.
The interior is gloomy. It’s lit by sunlight coming through the front windows, and by actual candles (with proper ventilation to outside). It looks like a cross between a bookstore and a head shop that sold every variety of herb except cannabis. People here have hair in every color of the rainbow. If anyone is surprised to see a well known superhero come through the door, nobody shows it.
Harry approaches the counter and addresses the green haired and thoroughly pierced girl waiting there. “I’m looking for Stella. Charlotte says she’s got five holes punched.”
He hears a response from behind him. “I’m Stella. I hope Ms. Palmer is doing well.”
He turns, to find an older woman speaking. She’s dressed like someone out of the 19th century, looks like she could be his mother’s younger sister, but has blue hair with rainbow highlights and expensive-looking jeweled earrings.
Harry smiles. “Hi. Nice to meet you. Harry Gale aka Mercury. Uh, can we talk somewhere?”
Stella leads the way to a secluded nook. Harry takes one of the narrow, uncomfortable wooden seats and she takes another.
She reads the message his family received, and looks up with some consternation. “So you’ve been targeted by him.”
“Him?”
“Nobody knows his real name. But he signs his messages this way. ‘The Sentence is Death’. He’s known to use writing and linguistic magic, and he’s an assassination, so we’ve come to call him ‘The Sentence’.”
Harry leans forward, partially to ease off the discomfort of the chair. “Linguistic magic?”
“Lean back, please,” Stella says, and Harry does so without thinking.
“Why did you do that?” she asks with a smile.
Harry’s confused for a moment. “Because… you told me to? Did you… Wait, did you do something magic?”
Stella smiles the smile of a teacher on her first day in class. “In a sense. Magic means many things. It can be overt supernatural power. It can be trickery, or mystery, or misdirection. Crowley said magick is the science and art of causing change in conformity to the will. He goes on to say, ‘any required change may be effected by application of the proper kind and degree of force in the proper manner through the proper medium to the proper object.’ All this is to say that magic is a very broad field in terms of its methods.”
She gestures at the chair. “There’s nothing supernatural about the chair, or my commandment. Here, I am the host and you are my guest. The cultural customs of hospitality make you susceptible to following my orders in small matters, matters of decorum and so on. My words have the power you gave them.”
Harry thinks about that. “So it’s kinda like, hmm. Can I tell you a story about stage magic?”
Stella beams. “Certainly.”
Harry leans forward again, just slightly. But this time, he’s conscious of doing it.
“When my powers were developing, my parents would take me to magic shows for practice. ‘See how they do it’, they would say. It had to be live, because the frame rate of television was too low to catch the trick sometimes. So we’d go to these shows. My dad called it a cabaret. My mom wasn’t too enthusiastic about that term, I didn’t figure out why until later. But it was dinner and a show.”
“People would come to the show as well, and talk to my parents about stuff. Politics, superhero stuff, law enforcement stuff. My dad didn’t have to tell me to tune out the talk. I listened, later, but starting out, I wanted to see the magicians, and that’s all I paid attention to.”
“Pretty soon, I could see the tricks. I could speed myself up and see it. I’d watch it again and again, until I learned the trick they were doing. But you know, once I learned it, I was still eager to see magicians, but not that magician. Then I’d learn their tricks. And soon, it wasn’t interesting. The magic was gone.”
“I’d still watch, because my dad had told me to. But I started listening to the other stuff. The guys would tell my dad they needed stuff. He’d tell them what he needed. My mom would say stuff. They’d say stuff. And you could start telling, like, what would get them to listen, what would get my parents to listen. They would call in favors, or mention names, or whatever.”
“I think that’s what you’re talking about with magick, the ‘proper manner, medium, object’ stuff. Anyone can do stuff. I don’t know if I’d call that magic. That feels like it overstates what’s happening. If I go to the fridge at 3am for pie, that’s not magic, that’s getting pie. But if I get away with it, if I’m not obvious about it, if nobody knows who did it, or they tried to stop me but I got around it and they can’t figure out how it was done, that feels more like the magic I keep hearing people talk about.”
Harry looks up, and smiles. “You know, there’s someone on the villain team, the Seven Wonders. The Hand. She’s a magician too, or dresses like one anyway. Nobody knows how she does what she does. And there’s others on that team too. You know, an important part of supervillain battles is figuring out how the villain does what they do, or how to stop it. You gotta be able to see the trick. Or, I guess how you describe magick, figure out the manner, medium, object.”
The speedster grins in embarrassment. “But I feel like I got away from you on this. Linguistic magic.”
Stella smiles kindly. She’s been listening to everything Harry said, nodding along slightly, and she seems to have followed it all. “I think you understand the fundamentals. And your mention of your father and mother, and the influential individuals they interacted with, takes us to the answer to your question.”
“Language can be a medium, or a manner. The Catholic church, and some practitioners of Hermetic magickal traditions, and even scientists, all use languages like Latin and ancient Greek. For different purposes, to be sure, but to some people, Latin carries more gravitas. It has the weight of tradition behind it. Winston Churchill’s speeches were full of Anglo-Saxon words that resonated with his English audience in a way that the broader vocabulary of English, full of loan-words from French and elsewhere, couldn’t do. Even mundane language can have some magic to it.”
Stella gestures at one of the far shelves of the bookshop. “In the novel ‘Snow Crash’, the author postulates that the ancient Sumerian language fundamentally altered human thought. You’ll find a copy if you wish. We also have a Blu-Ray copy of the movie ‘Arrival’, and if you’ll pardon a minor spoiler, the language of the aliens in that movie has a profound effect on the human psyche.”
She tilts her head, and looks carefully at Harry. “What, then, if there were a language such as is written about in the Bible, which God spoke to create the world? John Dee attested to an angelic language, erroneously called ‘Enochian’ today. Suppose a human speaker were to learn a divine language. If Anglo-Saxon words can contribute to winning a war, what then of a speaker commanding the language of Heaven?”
Harry sits back. To his surprise, even after all the discussion, he’s still conscious of what Stella did to him earlier - giving him the order to sit back, then questioning him on why he’d obeyed.
He smiles. “I guess that would be pretty powerful. But I also like things simple. So, how do you stop something like that?”
Stella nods. “I supposed you’d ask that. There isn’t a simple answer. I’ll tell you what I know, as an archivist and historian of the Sanctum. Like many other ritual practitioners of magic, Churchill knew the power of rhythm, repetition, and buildup. He’d decorate his notes with places for pauses, then enthrall his audiences with waves of sound between those. He knew that real effectiveness depended on directing stanza after stanza into a focal point.”
“Everything breathes, Mr. Gale, even our minds. We take in what we hear, and then we must process it. You can only breathe in so much, and you can only breathe out for so long.”
“Expect the Sentence to build up to his final working. It will not simply be a thunderclap of magical power. It will come in waves. They will build upon themselves.”
The woman shrugs helplessly. “I can give you the texts we have on the Sentence. They may be useful, but perhaps not useful to you as a non-practitioner. The only other advice I have is that like all words, there is also great power in simply not paying attention to what is said. Though how you would do that in the scope of a divine language is not something I know how to explain.”
Harry’s car is becoming a mobile library. Dr. Wissen’s books sit on top of a sweater vest he’ll never wear. Next to them go Stella’s recommended texts on linguistic magic and encounters with “The Sentence”, along with a related thing called the “League of Lemuria”.
It’s frustrating.
If he had his speed, he could be through these books in a couple hours, tops. But right now, even if he tries to speed himself up a little bit, it hurts like he’s on fire, and he gets splitting headaches.
He also can’t just go out and do some superheroics to clear his head. It’s easy to just run around, saving people, getting cats out of trees, moving boxes for people, just casual stuff he can do a thousand times faster than anyone.
He has to read. At normal speed.
So, he finds a nice place to park, turns the radio on, sets the volume low, and starts reading.