Vintage Soul by David Niall Wilson Page B

direction.   After seven flip-flops, there was a sound like a key sliding into a lock, and the disk spun inward, disappearing from the screen.   What appeared was a single folder, and Donovan opened this quickly.
    He flipped through the directories until he found one titled “Journals” and opened this, then chose Le Duc’s manuscript.   The pages had been scanned in at very high resolution, and the program he viewed them in had singularly amazing magnification properties, as well as a translation algorithm Donovan had designed himself.   Alchemy in the twenty-first century, he liked to call it.   An electronic philosopher’s stone.
    The manuscript was not difficult to read.   The French was archaic, but the script was clear and clean, and Le Duc had taken great pains to separate the lines evenly and to make no mistakes.   Mistakes in such a text could be disastrous, at the one end causing a spell to fail with no result, and at the other sending forces crashing out of control.   Le Duc had been meticulous to the end.
    The formula itself had been developed over a long period of trial and error, gathered piece by piece from a wide variety of sources.   Donovan recognized several of the sources cited, and had to admit that for a fanatic, Le Duc had been very clever.   It was unfortunate when such genius coupled itself with a sociopathic disregard for life or the fragile lines of balance that held the world together.
    There were six ingredients in all.   Two of them were simple powders that anyone could have located.   Donovan knew he could assume that these had already been collected. That left three ingredients to go.   One of those, Vanessa, had already been scratched off the list.   The remaining three might pose more of a problem.
    A certain crystal was required for the wand that had to be manufactured for this spell.   It was one of the rarest of stones, and Donovan knew the location of the only store of it that was known.   It was, coincidentally or not, held in San Valencez – very likely this unknown magician knew this well enough, and had planned his assaults to confine them to the smallest area possible.   Either that or it was pure luck.   In any case, Donovan did not worry immediately about the theft of the crystal.   He turned his concentration on the final ingredient.
    Next was an extremely rare item.   The spell required a pair of perfectly matched Timeline Crystals.   These were used in the creation of certain higher level portals, and were cherished for their rarity, and for the complexity of preserving their potential.   There was a pair in San Valencez, but it was not accessible.   Not without an army, anyway, and certainly not after Donovan warned their owner of trouble to come.
    That left the final ingredient.   He frowned.   “The dust formed of the marrow of the spinal cord of a priest who has performed both last rites and exorcism.”
    This was a truly problematic ingredient.   It would only be stockpiled by a necromancer, and there were less than a handful of these unsavory wizards in existence.    It was possible to retrieve the powder without the aid of necromancy, but grave digging posed problems of its own, and the circumstances of the priest’s life and death needed to be rather singular.   Of the existing necromancers,   Donovan could think of neither an easy mark for extortion, nor one likely to give this sort of assistance to any other.   Necromancers were more comfortable with their once-dead companions.
    That left the more direct approach.   If he could locate a priest that fit the description in the formula, the thief could extract the powder himself.   It wouldn’t’ be easy.   The Last Rites were not rare, but there had been few sanctioned exorcists over the past century, and a crackpot wouldn’t do.   There was also the fact that relics recovered