The Witch Watch

by Shamus Young

  “Not so. If the ministry had taken part in his arrest, we would have taken his head.”

  “The Witch Watch beheads prisoners?” Gilbert asked in surprise.

  “Not as a manner of execution. It’s seen as a barbaric and gruesome means of death. It’s publicly unpopular, you understand. We usually take the head after death, before burial. We also bury sorcerers and necromancers in our ground at Tyburn, and not on their own property.” Alice stopped and looked at Gilbert thoughtfully, “You know, this may explain why the viscount gave himself over to the church. My father had been suspicious of Lord Mordaunt for a long time. Perhaps the man learned that he’d attracted the attention of Ethereal Affairs. Then, fearing our more certain execution, he baited the church into killing him instead.”

  “That seems like a terrible risk,” Gilbert said doubtfully. “I don’t know. It doesn’t fully explain his behavior. Why not flee? Or feign death?”

  “He’s working towards becoming a lich. It sounds like death was part of his plan,” Alice pointed out.

  “Then why not simply take his own life?”

  They stopped, and Alice leaned out over the railing, looking down into the dark, noisy ocean below. “I don’t know,” she said at last.

  “You appear to have some admirers,” Gilbert said, nodding towards the balcony above them. As she looked, two crewmen turned away abruptly and pretended to be interested in something else.

  “Those two again,” she said. “I saw them watching us earlier today. I wonder if the headmaster has put some malicious words in their ear.”

  “It’s more likely they’re sailors who have taken notice of a pretty girl,” Gilbert said.

  “I hope you’re right,” she said doubtfully. “But you have again hijacked my thinking. Whatever his reasons, Mordaunt wanted to be killed by the church. He arranged for it to happen, on purpose. He’s working on some plan, even if we don’t yet see it.”

  “He showed a lot of foresight by collecting my family information when I was hired,” Gilbert agreed. “And again when he sent his men after my mother. It seems like he planned for many eventualities, both good and bad. Which worries me. So many of his actions seem foolish or random to us, but it’s clear he is very wise and calculating. There is a great deal of his plan that we do not see.”

  “If what Mr. Graves says is true, then we have angered and frustrated His Lordship. Whatever his plans are, we are likely ahead of them.”

  “I hope you’re right. Another thing that Graves said is puzzling me. You said that he threatened to report me to the captain.”

  “An empty threat, I’m sure,” Alice said. “The crew would never trouble a first-class passenger based on an accusation made by someone in steerage.”

  “I disagree. If several people made the same accusation, they might be able to persuade the crew to action. Remember that seamen are famously hostile towards sorcery.”

  “But that would be disastrous for them. They need to recover the vigor, which they won’t be able to do if you’re discovered. It’s to the advantage of both sides to avoid taking action during this journey.”

  They had reached the front of the ship. They were at the tip of the knife as it cut through the ocean. Alice shivered a bit. Out of habit, Gilbert almost put his arm around her. Then he remembered himself. He was grotesque. Moreover, he had no heat to impart. He felt suddenly depressed.

  “A question comes to mind,” she said suddenly. “Mr. Graves said that His Lordship was displeased with us.”

  “I imagine he would be,” Gilbert said, happy to have something to think about besides being dead.

  “Yes, but how does he know what has happened? You explained how they were able to commune with His Lordship using blood. That technique was new to me.”

  “It was new to me, too,” Gilbert said dryly.

  “Clearly Mr. Graves came to us at the behest of his master. Which means he spoke with his dead master since coming aboard. They are reporting in and receiving orders.”

  “You’re suggesting they’re performing necromancy on the ship?”

  “Is it still called necromancy if you commune with the dead and do not revive or animate a body?” She asked idly.

  “You are asking the wrong corpse. I have no understanding of such business.”

  “Of course. I wasn’t really asking you. Anyway, yes. They must be performing sorcery here on the ship.”

  “That sounds like a reasonable assumption,” agreed Gilbert.

  “A moment ago I said it was to the advantage of both sides to avoid conflict, but perhaps we can move against them indirectly. If they were discovered in the midst of their magic, they would be executed before we reached port. As you pointed out, ship captains are very superstitious and extremely prejudiced against magic.”

  Gilbert nodded. “If they are discovered by the crew, nobody will listen to what the headmaster has to say about me. We could be rid of them without risking discovery ourselves. All we need to do is find them and point the crew in the right direction. I assume they must go somewhere below to do this thing?”

  “I agree. They would be discovered quickly if they attempted to perform their villainy on the shuffleboard court,” Alice said.

  “This ship is over five thousand tons of floating iron. The area below is vast. You could search for the entire voyage and not find their hiding place.”

  “We won’t need to search,” Alice said brightly. “At least, not the whole ship.”

  They returned to their room to find Simon awake and restless. He was disappointed at missing out on their walk. Alice explained their suspicion that the headmaster was using sorcery on the ship. She retrieved her strange device from her bag and fastened it to her arm.

  “My ethergram,” she explained. “It can point us towards magical activity.”

  “A machine that detects magic?” Gilbert marveled. “I can’t imagine how that’s possible. How does it ‘know’ about the magic?”

  “A bit of wisdom from a Dutch physician and sometime-necromancer named Rutger de Bray. About twenty years ago he noticed that his stores of ether would react to the presence of magic. It boiled and expanded, as if attracted to the supernatural activity. He was later discovered and executed by the church, but before that he relayed his findings to a fellow sorcerer here in England. For a while sorcerers were convinced that the liquid itself had magical properties, or that it could be used to augment magic. Ten years ago there was a rash of explosions around London as various sorcerers blew themselves up experimenting with it. It is highly flammable.

  “My father learned about this through confessions and confiscated materials, and he constructed a crude device to detect magic. It was just a canister with a bell inside that rang when the ether was agitated by magic. I took his design and improved upon it. It has very small vials of ether, contained under pressure, which will send the needle in the appropriate direction. It’s mostly made from watch works. See?” She held up the device, which had the face of a watch set amidst the tubes and wires.

  “Based on ether? Now I see why you call it an ‘ethergram’,” Gilbert said, slightly regretting asking the question.

  “My father called it my ‘witch watch’. He thought this was very funny.”

  Simon stood by her and admired the device. “So you just follow the dial on your wrist and it will take us to the source of the sorcery?”

  “I’m not sure it will be that easy,” she replied. “The device is not terribly accurate, and you must hold very, very still to get anything out of it. And it reacts slightly to Gilbert’s presence, which means I have to stand away from him in order to use it properly. The motion of the ship might be enough to render the thing useless. I’m sure I could build a better one if I had smaller parts and finer tools. My tinkering has faltered in the past few years as I’ve been obliged to study sorcery instead. Even if the device does work on the ship, I don’t know how close we will need to be.”

  “Is there any way we can run a test?”
Simon asked.

  “How very scientific of you,” Alice said with approval. “There is, but it means doing sorcery ourselves.”

  There was a silent moment, which Gilbert broke. “Commit sorcery? Here on the ship?”

  “We already have an abomination in our company. I don’t know that this is going to increase our danger of discovery,” she replied.

  “Can I help somehow?” asked Simon.

  “By all means,” said Gilbert. “We need to make sure that none of us are innocent.”

  Alice glared at him, “This entire adventure is full of peril, and has been undertaken for your benefit.”

  “For my mother,” Gilbert corrected her.

  “In either case, I should think that after all of the reckless chances you’ve taken so far, this would seem like a small thing to you.”

  “It’s not the risk,” Gilbert said. “It’s the hypocrisy. And sorcery... unsettles me.”

  “We are only fighting fire with fire,” Alice argued. “And I’m sure your fear will be tempered by the apprehension of our foes.” She drew the curtains and then placed her bag on the bed. From this she drew out a large, heavy block of undergarments. Simon gasped and blushed.

  “I was worried that someone might peek inside my bag,” she explained. “But even the rudest of busybodies will pause before rummaging through a lady’s undergarments.” She unwrapped a large book from the frilly package and returned the rest to her bag. Turning to Simon she said, “I brought along your book. Or Lord Mordaunt’s book, which you used in reviving Gilbert. I have many questions about it that I hope you can answer.”

  Simon blinked, and slowly realized she was talking to him. He pulled his eyes away from the mouth of her bag and met her gaze dumbly.

  “The book?” she smiled, holding it up.

  “Oh, that thing,” he said sadly. “I’d hoped I’d seen the last of that book. It was a source of misery. Whenever I see it I can only think of being hungry.”

  “Hungry?”

  Simon dropped himself onto the couch, “I mentioned before about the Ravenstead Academy for Boys.”

  “You have only spoken about the place in hints so far, but the little that I’ve heard has been disturbing enough.”

  Simon continued, “There were two groups of boys - the scholars, and the laborers. The strong ones are laborers. They do manual labor and help take care of the other boys. The smart ones become scholars and sit all day and copy books like the one in your hands. The really smart ones - or at least the ones with a good memory - are taught Black Latin and sorcery. I was one of the latter sort. Often we weren’t allowed to eat until we got the spell to work.”

  “Sounds like a dreadful place,” Alice said. “Did you have friends?”

  “Once. There usually wasn’t room for friendship. Every boy had to look out for himself just to fill his belly. I was a scholar and was given extra food when I did well, but the food was given to me when other boys were around. They usually ganged up on me to take it for themselves. I suppose they were friends with each other. Or at least, they liked one another better than they liked me.

  “When I was perhaps fourteen, I met a laborer named Dillon. He was strong. Husky. He was also quiet, and not very bright. But we worked together. He protected me from the other boys, and I shared my extra food with him. We never made an agreement. Not verbally. It just happened. I don’t even remember which one of us acted first, but it seemed very natural. He defended me from bullying and pranks, and I helped keep his belly full. He protected me even when I didn’t have food to share, and I shared even when his duties prevented him from protecting me.

  “We rarely spoke. There was nothing to talk about. His work was too dull to discuss, and my work too terrifying. He couldn’t read and didn’t care about magic. Neither of us had any memories of our parents. We sat and ate in silence, day after day.

  “Then one day he was chosen by Headmaster Graves for leech duty.”

  “Leech duty?” Gilbert asked.

  “Headmaster Graves is a wizard, and wizards need someone to leech. There was a stone room in the basement with a metal cage. There was a feeding circle etched into the bottom of the cage, so you couldn’t erase it. A boy would go into the cage and then the headmaster could cast magic spells.”

  “A wizard doesn’t need to feed off of another person,” Alice corrected him. “They’re simply limited to a few spells before they become too weak to cast them.”

  “Well, the headmaster never did magic under his own power. He always used a leech.”

  “If the headmaster is drawing energy from the boy, wouldn’t that make him the leech, and not the boy?” asked Gilbert.

  “Properly, I suppose,” Simon admitted. “But the boys didn’t know anything about leeches. They figured, if you’re on ‘leech duty’, then you must be the leech. Sometimes we were picked at random. Sometimes it was a punishment. He’d usually gather up a few boys and drag them to the basement for leech duty. He would practice his magic until the boys were spent.” Simon took a deep sigh and seemed to be looking far away. “Being in the cage - in the feeding circle - is the worst feeling in the world. Worse than hunger, cold, beatings, or loneliness, because it sort of feels like all of them at once. It’s not pain. Not like the other kinds of pain, anyway. It feels empty. Like an ache that begins in your heart and expands out to your fingertips. Like being poured out over cold stones. Like breathing ice into your lungs. I would always press against the bars, as far from the center of the circle. It never helped, but I always clung there until I collapsed.”

  Alice took him by the shoulders and lifted him up, “Well, I promise you there will be no starvation during the course of this magic. And we won’t be using the book right now, just a few notes of my own. If you like, we can probably still get you some food before we start.”

  Simon declined, and insisted they get started right away.

  She handed Simon a bit of chalk. Then she walked into the middle of the room and threw aside the rug that lay between the couch and the bed. She showed him a bit of paper that she’d tucked into the book, “Can you do this circle for me?”

  Simon looked at the sorcery depicted. “I’ve never seen this spell before. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. I can’t see what it does.”

  “Nothing,” Alice said. “It’s a spell that does nothing. It activates and draws power like a normal spell, but it doesn’t make anything happen. I found it in my father’s notes, and I use it for testing.”

  Simon handed her back the page. She looked down at it with disappointment, “You won’t do it?”

  “Of course I will,” he said, and went to work. He crouched down and began drawing a broad circle around himself.

  “But don’t you need to look at the page to...” she began but her words faltered and she stood in wonder and watched him work. He’d drawn a perfect circle without using any sort of guide. After that he drew the inner circle, and the connecting arcs. The arcs were all the same size, evenly spaced. Then he began writing the characters. He turned the chalk in his fingers as he went, so that he wouldn’t flatten out one side and end up with lines of differing thickness. Alice looked down and saw his work matched the page in her hand perfectly, except that perhaps his was more accurately proportioned.

  “Amazing,” she whispered.

  “I learned early on to remember what I saw and reproduce it accurately,” he said without looking up. “I had a better chance of eating that way. Although, some days even that wasn’t enough. Since they were copied by other boys, the books themselves sometimes contained errors.”

  She shook her head in disbelief. “That circle would have taken me a quarter hour.”

  “Spending a quarter hour on a drawing that size would have earned me a thrashing,” Simon said glumly. He stepped away from the completed circle, brushing the chalk off of himself.

  Alice suddenly looked down in shame. “Simon, I’m so sorry that I asked you to do this. It was thoughtless of me to ask you to do so
mething that brings back such painful memories.”

  “Seems a bit late to arrive at that conclusion,” Gilbert said. He was sitting in a corner of the room, looking bored.

  “You’re right,” she said. “I just... this was how my father and I worked on things. He would hand me a bit of chalk, we’d draw a circle, and discuss it.”

  “I’m not bothered by this,” Simon said defensively. “I always liked sorcery. Well, not the magic parts. That was usually frustrating. Or disquieting. Or terrifying. But I enjoy the circles. Making them as large as I can. Making the curves. Drawing the letters just so.”

  “You must have been two of the creepiest children who ever lived,” Gilbert said. “The idea of doing sorcery with youths is perverse.”

  “And what did your father teach you?” Alice asked.

  “Swordfighting,” Gilbert nodded with satisfaction. “We’d go out and find a couple of sticks, and he’d teach me fencing. We also practiced the bayonet. And archery. I wanted to learn boxing, but Father said it was barbaric.”

  “And you think these are more wholesome things to teach children than sorcery?” Alice asked.

  Suddenly there was a heavy knock at the door, and the three of them froze. There was an open book of sorcery on the bed, Gilbert was sitting by the door with his face exposed, and there was a large and unmistakable sorcery circle in the middle of the room. They stood looking dumbly at one another for a few moments, and the knock came again.

  They all lunged into motion at once. “Who’s there?” asked Alice as she stuffed the book under the bed covers.

  “Purser, ma’am,” came a man’s voice.

  Gilbert dove into bed. Simon threw the rug over the circle on the floor. It was too small to conceal the sorcery, so he yanked the blankets off of the bed to cover up the rest. This exposed both Gilbert and the book, and began an argument of frantic whispers. Alice tried to explain that they should put the blanket over the sorcery and the sheets over Gilbert. Their own arguments and the pounding on the door drowned her out, but they came to the same conclusion and after a bit of tugging and dashing about they had the room situated.