"Yeah, yeah," Bob said, his eyelights flickering to life. "Island go boom or something."

"We're on a mission to find out what it's going to do, and why, and how we can stop it."

"Gosh, I'd never have thought of that myself, Harry."

"This is top secret stuff," I said. "Anything you learn here is for me and you only. You go to someone else, I want this whole evening locked away someplace nice and tight. And don't go splitting off another personality on me, like you did with Evil Bob."

"Entirely confidential, check," Bob said. "And it would take a lot more than one night working with you to build up enough momentum to spin off a whole new me. I have to actually learn things to make that happen."

"Less insult, more analysis," I said.

The beams from the skull's eye sockets grew brighter. They swept left and right, up and down, panning around like prison searchlights. Bob made thoughtful noises.

I tended the coffeepot. After it had been boiling for a few minutes, I took it off the fire, added a splash of cold water from the pump to settle the grounds, and poured myself a cup. I added a little powdered creamer and a bunch of sugar.

"Might as well drink syrup," Bob muttered.

"Says the guy with no taste buds," I said. I sipped. "Been meaning to have you out here to take a look at the place anyway."

"Uh-huh," Bob said absently.

"So?" I asked.

"Um," Bob said. "I'm still working on the surface layer of spells on the stones of this cottage, Harry."

I frowned. "Uh. What?"

"You know there're symbols there, right?"

I sipped coffee. "Sure," I said. "They kinda lit up when-"

Nauseating, mind-numbing horror and pain flashed over my thoughts for a couple of seconds. I'd used my wizard's Sight to look at the wrong being a couple of years ago, and that isn't the kind of mistake you ever live down. Now the memory of seeing that thing's true being was locked into my noggin, and it wouldn't go away or fade into the past-not ever.

That's bad. But the really bad part is that I've gotten used to it. It just caused a stutter step in my speech.

"-the naagloshii tried to get inside. It didn't seem to like them much."

"I should f**king think not," Bob said, his voice nervous. "Um, Harry . . . I don't know what these are."

I frowned at him. "Uh. What?"

"I don't know," he repeated. He sounded genuinely surprised. "I don't know what they are, Harry."

Magic is like a lot of other disciplines that people have recently begun developing, in historic terms. Working with magic is a way of understanding the universe and how it functions. You can approach it from a lot of different angles, applying a lot of differenttheories and mental models to it. You can get to the same place through a lot of different lines of theory and reasoning, kind of like really advanced mathematics. There's no truly right or wrong way to get there, either-there are just different ways, some more or less useful than others for a given application. And new vistas of thought, theory, and application open up on a pretty regular basis, as the Art develops and expands through the participation of multiple brilliant minds.

But that said, once you have a good grounding in it, you get a pretty solid idea of what's possible and what isn't. No matter how much circumlocution you do with your formulae, two plus two doesn't equal five. (Except maybe very, very rarely, sometimes, in extremely specific and highly unlikely circumstances.) Magic isn't something that just makes things happen, poof. There are laws to how it behaves, structure, limits-and the whole reason Bob was created was so that those limits could be explored, tested, and charted.

I could count on the fingers of no hands how many times Bob had come up completely dry. He always knew something. The skull had been working with wizards for centuries. He'd run into damned near everything.

"Uh, what?" I said. "Seriously? Nothing?"

"They're powerful," he said. "I can tell you that much. But they're also complex. I mean, like, Molly on her best day could not come close to weaving together something this crazy. You on your best day could not sling around enough power to juice up one of the smallest stones. And that's just the first layer. I think there are more. Maybe a lot more. Uh, like hundreds."

"On each stone?"

"Yeah."

"That's . . . It isn't . . . You can't put that much magic into that little space," I protested.

"No, no, I can't," Bob said. "And, no, you can't. Because it's impossible. But, um. Someone doesn't care."

"How did they do it?"

"If I knew that, it wouldn't be impossible," Bob said, an edge to his voice. "But I can tell you this much: It predates wizardry as we know it."

I would have said, What? but I felt like I'd been saying that a lot already. So I sipped coffee and scowled interrogatively instead.

"This work, the actual spells on the stone, comes from before even the predecessors to the White Council. I'm conversant in the course and application of the Art since the golden age of Greece. This stuff, whatever it is? It's older."

"You can't lay out spells that last that long," I mumbled. "It isn't possible."

"Lot of that going around," Bob said. "Harry . . . you're . . . we're talking about a whole different level, here. One that I didn't even know existed. Uh. Do you get what that means? In round terms, at least?"