A Radical Act of Free Magic

by H. G. Parry

  “Read it!” his son demanded.

  Wilberforce snatched the paper out of his hand, then made a face as the print blurred before his eyes. The first few hours of the morning were always something of a fog. “Read it for me, William,” he said, offering it back, and saw his son’s face light up. It was a relief: his eldest son was one of the sweetest-natured children Wilberforce knew, but he had to admit he was inclined to be lazy about anything approaching hard thought.

  His son’s seven-year-old vocabulary made creative work of the report, but Barbara’s corrections and common sense swiftly informed him of the substance. There had been a great victory out at sea. Nelson had lost his life. Most of the army of the dead were burned at sea; the kraken was dead. The French were soundly defeated. It was doubtful they would ever be able to cross the Channel. The news sounded hopeful, though the loss of Nelson was a bitter one. It didn’t tell him what he truly needed to know.

  “A note came from Downing Street about the same time as the paper,” Barbara said, as if reading his mind.

  His friend’s familiar script was easier than the dense newsprint, and his eyes were beginning to clear. He skimmed it quickly, then looked at Barbara. “The enemy wasn’t on board the captured ships. Hester thinks he survived, but neither she nor Fina could find any trace of him. It’s possible he escaped on one of the ships that fled, in which case he might yet have been captured in the time since this was sent. But either way, he’s not coming to Britain.”

  “And Fina? Is she safe?”

  “Safe and well—so is Lady Hester. The fleet has yet to return, but they’ll both be with it when it does. Unless Fina chooses to go elsewhere, of course.”

  He glanced at Barbara and saw her smiling. He smiled back. “Thank God,” he said simply.

  Napoléon Bonaparte was in Vienna when the news of Trafalgar came by daemon-stone. When he had heard it all, he set the stone down on the desk beside him and pulled a sheaf of paper from his desk drawer. The writing on it was recent—the ink was still fresh and unfaded. Napoléon sealed it, summoned his aide into the room, and gave it to him with his orders. Then he sat back in his chair. It was a cold gray day, with a hint of winter chill in the air.

  For the first time in a long while, Napoléon heard the familiar voice in his waking thoughts. It sounded faint, as though coming from a long distance, or as though the speaker was very weak.

  What do you think you’re doing?

  “I’m sorry, my friend,” Napoléon said. He even meant it, to some degree. “But your ploy failed.”

  I have plans in place. There are still ways for the invasion of Britain to succeed.

  “There are. But it will be my invasion, not yours. And I have my own conquests to make first. Oh, don’t worry. I’ll deal with the Saint-Domingue magician with the British fleet. I have no desire to deal with the aftermath of whatever mess you made over there.”

  Is this—? For the first time in Napoléon’s memory, the voice trailed off in disbelief. Are you betraying me?

  “We spoke of this, did we not? About how once the world was ours, you would step out of the shadows, take command of the army of the dead, and try to take control of the empire we built together? Well, you have no army of the dead now, and I do not intend to wait. This will be my empire. I can lead us back into the age of dark magic and chaos on my own.”

  Listen to me—

  “No,” the emperor Napoléon Bonaparte said, and he raised his head. He had been learning how to force the stranger from his mind for a very long time. His mesmerism should not have been strong enough. And yet he raised his head, and the voice was silenced. “I’ve listened to you long enough. It’s my turn now.”

  Austerlitz

  December 1805

  On the 2nd December 1805, the forces of the Third Coalition met the French Army at Austerlitz. It was expected to be a decisive victory for the coalition. The army of the dead, it had transpired, now numbered only a handful of corpses; its human forces, by last count, were only a little over half the combined forces of Austria and Russia. Napoléon himself seemed well aware of his weakness and had sent envoys to the leaders of both armies, expressing a wish for an armistice. The aides sent to treat with him came back with excited reports of how few magicians the emperor of France had at his immediate disposal, and the chaos in which the French camp appeared to be operating. It seemed the perfect time to move forward. Only General Kutuzov, commander-in-chief of the campaign, was unconvinced, and he was quickly overruled by the tsar and his advisers.

  Major Ivan Radomsky was at the head of the frontal assault. He was a young commander, from respected but not Aristocratic stock, and would in normal circumstances not have been able to afford such a promising commission. The war of magic had been his making, as it had been the making of many others. Russia had disposed of its bracelets shortly after France had done so, and by the time Britain had followed suit there was little practical distinction between Aristocratic and Commoner magic in the Russian military. Radomsky was a skilled shadowmancer, and it was for this reason that he was permitted to lead the attack. He had pulled two winged, insubstantial shadows from the ether, and as the troops advanced he sent them to skim the air and report on the enemy terrain.

  Usually, his shadows could be relied upon to give some indication as to the size and spread of the enemy forces—not through numbers, of course, but through the feelings and impressions that skittered across his mind. This time, however, they were confused by the low, dense mist surrounding the gently sloping hill that bulged in the center of the battlefield. He felt it pass through his shadows, and he shivered at both the cold and its unsettling quality. It might have been natural, of course: it was certainly a cold day, and overcast, with the straw-yellow grass and mud stretching out under a gray bowl of a sky. But it felt unnatural, clammy and disorienting; the men behind him were fidgeting nervously despite their previously high spirits. It felt like weather magic.

  And yet the few French troops left on the Pratzen Heights were indeed retreating, moving back over the ridge almost without pausing to fight back against the swords and volleys hurtled their way. Only a few of the French magicians turned to hurl fire and water in the direction of the opposing forces, causing tufts of grass to flare into flames and the ground to turn to mud. Every so often, one of Radomsky’s men would fall with a sharp cry, in flames or pierced by bullets; more often the French would fall and be trampled underfoot by the advancing army.

  “Only mist, probably,” his aide said to him, as if he was reading his mind. “And if it is magic, it’s only the French trying to cover their own weakness.”

  “You’re probably right,” Radomsky agreed. It felt right, and if it didn’t, he wasn’t going to be the one to admit it. The orders were to take the heights. He could perhaps have held back in the ranks rather than moved forward to lead his forces in person, but his commission was by no means so secure as that. If he didn’t command boldly, this might well be his last command.

  They had actually reached the peak of the gentle slope, when out of nowhere it came. At first they heard only a rumble like approaching thunder, or cannon fire, and then the ground rose before them. Some of the men were standing on it when it reared, and they either clung to the ridges jutting suddenly from the earth or fell with a despairing cry: one hit the ground and lay limp, his neck or back broken. A loud, guttural roar reverberated throughout the field, and suddenly it was awash with fire. The mist parted so quickly and the sun shone so instantly brightly that Radomsky knew that the mist had indeed been conjured in the same moment that he knew why.

  Napoléon Bonaparte’s dragon was before them.

  It had been an ancient, powerful creature when the young commander had found it in Egypt nearly ten years ago. In the time since, it had prepared, creeping out every night to build its strength, taking wing against the sky, gorging itself on people and livestock miles away, before shimmering back through the sand to its home beneath the pyramids, until it had grown a
lmost a third the size again. Its bloodlust had grown at the same rate. The vampire it had sensed lurking in the young commander’s mind had ordered it to wait until it was called to accompany the fleet across the Channel. But that call had never come, and it wasn’t the vampire, in the end, to whom it had made its promise. It was to the young commander, the one who had promised him entire armies to devour, and he had called it at last. Now, at last, it arched its head, and its mouth gaped.

  Radomsky was dead before he could give orders, but they would have been lost anyway in the roar of the dragon and the crackling of the artillery and the shrieks and moans of the dying.

  Bath

  December 1805

  In Bath, young George Canning was composing a poem about the victory at Trafalgar. It was sixteen verses long, and prone to rapid growth. Pitt had found out about it two hours ago, when his young protégé and Rose arrived at his rooms holding the manuscript.

  “We’ve come to ask your help,” Canning had said brightly. “How much do you know about heroic couplets, and can you think of a rhyme for ‘kraken’?”

  When Pitt had given in to the urging of his physicians and agreed to go to Bath to recover his strength before the opening of Parliament, a varied collection of the British government had come with him. Part of this was because they needed access to him during what was still a time of political crisis and war. Another part was to keep him company. Since they had arrived, Bath had given them nothing but drizzle and bitter frosts, and that combined with his physical weakness and his desire to avoid public scrutiny had kept him largely to his rooms. Without distraction, he would be doing little but government business and waiting on tenterhooks for news from the front, and this, according to medical advice, was bad for him. According to medical advice, anything that wasn’t complete physical and mental rest was bad for him, and he was teetering on the brink of collapse. Pitt chose to view this as exaggeration, because there was little alternative. He had doubled Forester’s elixir now, and he was in no mood to ask the Knight Templar how his long-ago promise to improve it was coming. With the enemy apparently dealt with, it was entirely possible Forester would poison him.

  Generally, Pitt found Canning’s frequent outbursts of political verse embarrassing, not because they were inept—they weren’t—but because they were far too often written in praise of him. Canning was perhaps the most promising of the young politicians who had attached themselves to Pitt politically during his last term, and he had attached himself fiercely. Trafalgar was not Pitt’s victory, though. It was Britain’s, and Nelson’s; it was Fina’s, though her contribution was being kept secret from the public at large; it was Catherine Dove’s, whose plunge toward the kraken with Nelson had caught the public imagination. Besides, Canning and the others involved were requesting his help out of friendship. He appreciated it, and for the most part he enjoyed it. He had never been a poet, not even in Latin, but he loved words, and he welcomed the chance to give the literary parts of his mind a thorough stretch. It reminded him of the long strings of nonsense he and Wilberforce and Eliot had threaded under the trees at Lauriston, getting steadily more drunk with laughter as the sun rose and fell overhead. Except that Canning, while equally clever and exuberant, tended to get more drunk on patriotism and skewering the opposition, and would never attempt anything like the dreadful puns that had been Wilberforce’s specialty.

  “All I will say is,” Pitt now declared calmly, leaning back in his chair, “if you rhyme ‘waves’ with ‘graves,’ I will never speak to you again.”

  “It’s a perfectly valid rhyme,” Canning protested, in mock indignation.

  “It’s an appalling set of associations. Besides, if men are sinking beneath the waves, they are by definition not being sent to their graves.”

  “He’s right,” Rose said to Canning, from where he sat in a nearby chair. “You’ll have to take it out.”

  “Of course you’d say he’s right; he’s the prime minister.”

  “Even Fox would concur with me in this case,” Pitt said. “If I put this through Parliament, there would be a completely unanimous agreement with my opinion. For the first time in history, we would have a united House.”

  “You should do that,” Rose suggested. “It would be a pleasant start to proceedings next month.”

  “Very pleasant,” Canning said skeptically. “‘This session will open with a unanimous attack on George Canning. All in favor of his public ridicule, raise your hand, or just throw something at him.’”

  Pitt scooped up one of the crumpled bits of paper from the floor by his chair and threw it deftly. It hit Canning square on the shoulder. “Motion carried.”

  “I am never writing another song in your praise again,” Canning sniffed.

  “All in favor of Canning never writing another song in Pitt’s praise again?” Rose asked an imaginary House.

  Pitt found another ball of rejected paper and threw it again. This time, it hit Canning’s chest. “Aye.”

  “Motion carried,” Rose replied.

  Canning finally broke down and laughed. “All right, very well, I’ll change the line. But if I can only think of something terrible, it will be on your head, Mr. Pitt.”

  “What isn’t?” Pitt asked, with a laugh of his own.

  After they left for their various engagements, Pitt stretched out by the fire with a sigh, physically worn out by laughter and conversation but unable to keep his mind still even if he wished to. On the whole, he didn’t wish to, particularly as the outlook from where it was roaming seemed more hopeful than it had in many grueling months. Trafalgar had lost them Nelson, which was a sad personal blow, but the victory he had brought about had demolished all fears of an invasion across the Channel and had established Britain as masters of the sea. On the Continent, too, armies of their allies were massing against Bonaparte to take advantage of his military weakness; rumor was they had already engaged and defeated the French forces soundly in Austria. There wasn’t a great deal of planning to do until he received further news, so Pitt was content to let his thoughts drift over possibilities and calculations as he stared into the flames; once or twice he felt them tickling the edge of dreams as the warmth and his own tiredness lulled him into drowsiness. He always shook himself awake, though. He didn’t want to admit to himself that a few hours’ company had left him exhausted, and he didn’t want to think about what would happen if it was continuing to do so in a few weeks, when Parliament was set to open. He had parted company with Addington and his party before the recess, but the king was still opposing any alliance with Fox or any of the opposition, and it looked as though the coming sitting was going to be even more hard fought than the last. His hope, and that of his remaining allies, was that their military success overseas would give them a strong enough position from which to fight.

  He had heard nothing from the enemy since Trafalgar. He didn’t know what that meant, only what he hoped it meant.

  He was still sitting there, uncharacteristically dreamy, when a knock came at the door. He roused himself quickly and drew himself up in his chair.

  “Come in,” he called.

  The butler entered, brisk and dapper as usual. “Mr. Rose to see you, sir,” he announced.

  “Thank you,” Pitt said, trying to hide his surprise. Rose had left barely an hour ago, and he had said as he left that he had a dinner elsewhere. “Tell him to come up.”

  As the butler disappeared, he forced himself to stand and to step away from the hearth: lately, he’d been finding it increasingly necessary to sit down and increasingly difficult to keep warm, and Rose would pick up on both. Apart from his reluctance to cause his friend concern, this was almost certainly going to be business, and he needed to look fit for it.

  His suspicions were confirmed when Rose entered. His friend came in slowly, holding a letter, and the smile he offered didn’t quite meet his eyes.

  “I’m sorry to intrude again so soon,” Rose said.

  “Not at all,” Pitt replied auto
matically. “Come in and make yourself comfortable.”

  “No, thank you, I can’t stay long,” Rose said, with a quick glance at the chair being offered. “I just came back to bring you news.”

  “I guessed as much from the letter in your hand. What kind of news?”

  “News from the battlefield,” Rose said. It could have been good—Pitt had expected it to be good—but it was not. Rose’s mouth was set, and his eyes were blinking rapidly as though he were trying not to cry. “It came only minutes ago.”

  “Tell me,” Pitt said.

  “The Russians and the Austrians combined were defeated by Bonaparte’s forces at Austerlitz,” Rose said bluntly. “The early reports were wrong.”

  The thought filled Pitt’s head: This is it. He couldn’t think anything else, and he was thankful only that some combination of shock and will and long habit kept his face still and his mouth silent while he gathered his wits behind them. Rose was one of the few people who had ever seen him break down, and with the kindest intentions in the world he would be watching for signs of him doing so again.

  “I see,” he said finally. It was a little too soon, and his voice was not quite under control. But for the silence to have stretched out any longer would have been worse. “Thank you for telling me.”

  “You’re welcome,” Rose said miserably. “I hate to bear such bad news.”

  “You’re not to blame for that. I’d rather hear it from you than from someone less sympathetic.” That brought with it a reminder that he would have to hear it from many less sympathetic once Parliament opened, and the thought on top of everything else was devastating.

  “How in God’s name did it happen?” Pitt asked, with a welcome flash of exasperation. “Bonaparte was outmatched in both numbers and supernatural artillery this time. They should have won. We all heard they had won.”