The Threads of Magic

by Alison Croggon

  He was still pacing up and down in his sunny guest chamber pondering his options when the Cardinal was announced to his presence. Oswald noted with amusement that he had an impressive black eye.

  Without asking permission, Lamir dismissed Oswald’s servants. When the door closed on their heels, the Cardinal lifted his hand, speaking a word in a forgotten language. The chamber vanished: now both men stood in a dim, columned hall that seemed to stretch for infinite distances on every side.

  “Do we really need these theatrics, old friend?” asked Oswald coldly.

  “I do not wish to be overheard.”

  “There are more subtle measures. It’s still too early for such open power.”

  “Is it, Rudolph, my oldest of allies?” Lamir approached him, as if even now he feared being overheard, and spoke close to Oswald’s ear. “Is it really? Me, I fear if we don’t move soon, it will be too late. The witches are rising.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I was openly attacked last night in my own dungeon.” Lamir lifted a finger, and an image appeared in the air between them. It was of the dungeon chair where the witch had been held; the manacles twisted and broken.

  “And you permitted this to happen?”

  “It wasn’t permitted,” hissed the Cardinal. “There is more. My chief translator of witch script has disappeared. And this morning it has been reported that Princess Georgette has also vanished. All in the space of one night. Now the commoners are rioting. It’s a conspiracy, without doubt.”

  “Ah.” So the Princess had absconded. “Perhaps the Princess simply ran away, given the very lax standards of security that exist in this palace. I’m sure she can be easily found.”

  “I have already asked the Void where the Princess is. It couldn’t tell me. That should give you pause.”

  There was a short silence. “You assured me that there was no witch problem in Clarel.”

  “I told you that because I believed it to be true.”

  “I passed on to you all my knowledge of the signs.” Oswald inspected his left hand and noted with irritation that his manservant had overlooked a tiny hangnail. “If you paid no proper heed, you are a bigger fool than I realized.”

  The Cardinal’s lips tightened. “Perhaps it’s no coincidence that the witches are rising precisely at the same time that you have entered Clarel,” he said.

  “What are you insinuating? That I brought the witches with me?”

  Lamir said nothing for a few moments, as if he were striving with himself. “No,” he said at last. “Although I wonder how serious you are about our alliance.”

  “I am very serious, believe me.” You will find out how serious I am, Oswald thought to himself, when I return as Emperor Rudolph and absorb your pathetic essence into my own power…

  The Cardinal stiffened, as if he had picked up the edge of Oswald’s thought. He forced himself to relax. Of course he didn’t trust this man. But for the moment he needed Oswald, just as Oswald needed him. In return for promoting the alliance between Clarel and Awemt, Oswald had promised to unseat King Axel, putting the Cardinal on the throne in his stead.

  The two men studied each other, each hiding their dislike.

  “If we don’t reach for power now, it will be too late.”

  “I think your fears overcome you. The existence of witches is no reason for panic. They remain weak. But the Princess must be found, as a matter of urgency. Of course no one in the palace has seen fit to tell me of her absence. But I will set my own investigations in train.”

  “I think that would be wise.”

  “We’re suffering a few potholes on our journey, but it strikes me as nothing worse. It is only to be expected.”

  “I hope you’re correct.”

  “I usually am.” Oswald snapped his fingers, and his chamber returned to its former state, the morning sunshine streaming through the window. “Thank you for your visit.”

  The Cardinal bowed unsmilingly. “My pleasure, your Grace.” He turned and left.

  Oswald stared after him thoughtfully, wondering how much of a threat the Cardinal really was. He was hiding something. Lamir was an ambitious leftover from the court of Odo the Fifth, and as a Spectre he had some ability. But it didn’t compare to Oswald’s own. Nobody’s did. He was the first and the greatest of them all.

  He had no doubt, however, that Lamir was a treacherous snake. It would do to watch him.

  Oswald thought idly of visiting the King and telling him that he knew that the Princess had run away, dealing him a mortal insult. It might be amusing. With any luck, Axel would burst a vein and drop dead on the spot. That would be extraordinarily convenient.

  Then he frowned. Lamir was correct on one point. Oswald was wary of haste: yet one could be too cautious, and miss the tide in its flood.

  Maybe now was the time to take power.

  Chapter Forty-three

  PIP WAS FEELING MORE AND MORE UNCOMFORTABLE.

  He was sitting in the Witches’ Council tent. El was next to him with her bewildered look, picking her nails. Oni was opposite, next to her mother. He couldn’t tell what Oni was thinking, and she was unusually quiet. Meanwhile, about half a dozen people he didn’t know and whose names he mostly couldn’t remember were all in a deep discussion about whether there were any spells that could help to deal with the Heart.

  One of the council members was invisible. A tiny book was suspended in mid-air on one side of the table. Every now and then a page was flipped over and the invisible person read something out about spells in a squeaky voice.

  “It’s only Bottomly,” Oni said, when she saw that El, who was staring hard at the floating book, was getting anxious. “He’s a ratterbag – they don’t like day people looking at them.”

  “Day people?” said El.

  “People like you, who don’t know about magic.”

  El looked hurt. “I might know something. Just a little bit.”

  “It’s nothing personal.”

  At first Pip liked the oldest witch, Missus Clay. Her spine was so bent that she seemed even smaller than she really was, but her smile had genuine warmth. A man called Helios also seemed friendly. Everyone else was … not exactly rude, but not exactly welcoming, either. He could see the glances that they cast at him when they thought he wasn’t looking.

  There was a lot of talk about different types of spells and magic, which began to bore him, and his mind drifted off. He had a slight headache, which was gradually getting worse, but mostly he was worried that Clovis might start panicking. The last thing they needed was for Clovis to cause another Rupture.

  The first request the witches had made was that he show them the Heart. He had taken it out of his pocket and slowly placed it in the middle of the table. All the witches stared at it as if he had put a scorpion in front of them. Amiable hissed.

  “It doesn’t look like anything, does it?” said Oni, to break the silence.

  “An evil thing,” said Juin in a hollow voice. “An evil, evil thing.”

  Pip had an overwhelming feeling that he ought to defend the Heart. “It’s not its fault,” he objected.

  “One of us destroyed herself to make this,” said Potier. He was looking very sombre.

  “And Clovis,” said Pip. “She destroyed Clovis, too. She cut out his heart while he was still alive.”

  Helios blinked. “That can’t be true,” he said. “No witch would do that.”

  “It is true,” said Pip. “I saw it.” His jaw jutted out belligerently as he stared at the witches around the table.

  “That’s … that’s terrible,” said Potier. He sounded shocked.

  “We all heard her,” said Missus Clay harshly. “I have done a dark thing, in a time of terrible darkness.”

  All the witches stared down at their hands, as if they were ashamed.

  “He was just a vessel for the Spectres,” said Amiable. “And who cares what happens to royals, anyway?”

  “Amiable, be quiet,” said Potier
.

  “Now is not the time to argue,” said Missus Clay. “Yes, Old Missus Pledge did an awful thing, but the good and the bad of it doesn’t concern us here.” She looked at the Heart, her expression unreadable, and then looked away. “What we have to decide now is what to do about it.”

  The witches then cross-examined Pip about the casket. They were particularly interested in how he had taken out the Heart.

  “I just opened it,” said Pip. “It was a bit tricky—”

  “A bit tricky?” said Amiable. “It was spell-shut by one of our best witches!”

  “Nobody could have opened that casket without a counterspell,” said Missus Clay.

  Now everyone was looking at him suspiciously. Pip flushed. “I don’t know about that,” he said, shrugging. “I just opened it.”

  “Maybe the spell was about keeping the Heart in, rather than keeping anybody out,” said Missus Clay.

  “Maybe there wasn’t a spell at all. I just told you what I did. Don’t believe me if you don’t want to.”

  “How do we know that he’s not with the Spectres?” said Juin. “We don’t know anything about him.”

  Pip flushed with anger and opened his mouth to argue.

  “He just asked the box nicely,” said El, before he could say anything. “And then it opened up for him.” There was a short, sceptical silence.

  Amina gave Pip a warning look. “That’s a ridiculous suggestion, Juin,” she said. “I’ve known this boy for years.”

  “We have to destroy it,” said Amiable. “And with it, everything the Spectres are.”

  “But we can’t,” said Missus Clay patiently. “Destroying the Heart would have no effect on the Spectres, and it could open a Rupture that swallows everything.”

  “We have to get the casket back, and return the Heart to it,” said Amina. “It will be in the Office for Witchcraft Extermination, most likely. Though there’s a tiny chance that it might still be at Olibrandis’s shop.”

  No, said Clovis. No, no, no… And he started to cry.

  Pip’s mind flooded with fear and sorrow. He felt, as sharply as if he had been punched in the stomach, the desolation of the imprisonment that Clovis had suffered for years, trapped inside Old Missus Pledge’s spell.

  “Someone should check the shop. What does it look like?” Helios turned to Pip.

  Pip, struggling with Clovis’s despair, didn’t respond at first.

  “Pip?” said Amina. “What does the casket look like?”

  He started. “I can’t remember,” he said.

  “Yes, you do, Pip,” said El. “It was silver, with a red dragon on it, and purple stones. It was very pretty. About so big.” She measured out a space with her hands.

  Pip glared at her. He could feel Clovis trembling, like a small animal crouched inside a burrow hearing a predator scratch at the entrance. The Prince’s fear was like a heart beating inside his own heart.

  He was beginning to realize that the witches were more afraid of Clovis than sorry for him. Amina had said, when she first told them about the Spectres, that what happened to Clovis wasn’t his fault, but even she was ready to punish him with the cruellest thing in the world. Worse, most of the witches were looking at Pip with horror and pity in their eyes, as if Pip himself were part monster.

  This led to an even more uncomfortable thought. Pip was pretty sure the Heart had become an empty shell since the night before. It wasn’t changing temperature any more, and there was no responsive pulse when he touched it. As he had told Oni, it was just an ordinary unliving thing. He thought now that Clovis wasn’t just talking inside his head: maybe, after Pip broke Old Missus Pledge’s binding spell, Clovis could move wherever he liked. And perhaps he had moved house, and now lived inside Pip.

  Which sounded a lot like what Spectres did, except that Pip didn’t think that Clovis was trying to eat his soul. He was just there, kind of being a nuisance.

  If the witches suspected this, they’d want to destroy Pip as well as Clovis. He glanced around the table, feeling hunted, and briefly caught Oni’s eye. She was watching him closely. He was suddenly sure that Oni suspected the same thing.

  “Maybe we don’t have to lock up the Heart,” he said hoarsely. “Maybe we just need to…” He trailed off.

  “Need to what?” said Amiable. “Tell it to be nice to us? Tell it to stop being a Spectre?”

  “He’s not a Spectre, though, is he? And maybe he just needs, you know, to be looked after…”

  Amina spoke gently. “I understand what you feel, Pip. Sometimes we have to do unjust acts, so even more terrible things don’t happen.”

  “But that’s not fair. How are witches any better than Spectres if that’s how they behave? I mean, that’s what Old Missus Pledge did, and look what happened!”

  El was sitting up very straight. Pip could hear her breath rasping. “Everything is horrible since you found the Heart, Pip. Maybe Amina knows best…”

  “Nobody knows best!” said Pip angrily. “And especially not witches.”

  “I think Pip has a point,” said Oni. “If we can’t destroy the Heart, and the other alternative is to imprison it with spells, that doesn’t solve anything. Even if we hid it now from Oswald, who’s to say that another Spectre mightn’t come along later and use it? We got to think about that, too.”

  “But there is no other way,” said Potier. “We already went through all this. There’s no magic anyone knows that can solve this.”

  “Maybe we don’t need magic,” said Oni. She had on her stubborn look. “Maybe we need another way.”

  “What way?” said Helios.

  “Maybe we need to think about the First Law,” she said. “First, do no harm. Forgetting that got us into this mess in the first place.”

  “Yes, I know,” said Helios. “I agree with you. But now that we are in this mess, it’s too late. Sometimes there are only bad choices.”

  Pip stirred uneasily. He was liking this conversation less and less. “Maybe we should just be kind,” he suggested. It sounded pathetic even to his ears.

  Juin laughed straight out, but without mirth. “Witches always used to be kind,” he said. “And then we got betrayed. I think we’re already being too kind, letting all these day people into the Undercroft. Bad mistake.”

  Missus Clay told Juin to be quiet, and then she leaned over the table and took Pip’s hand. “I realize this is upsetting,” she said. “But these are bad times, and maybe there is no good choice. If the Spectres find the Heart, we will all suffer, whether we are witches or not. There will be no escape. Not for anyone.”

  “Yes, but…”

  It was no use. Pip couldn’t argue against that logic. He fell silent, listening to Oni arguing that they had to find another way. He already knew that she was losing.

  I told you, said Clovis. Didn’t I tell you?

  Oni gave him a curious look, and he wondered if she could still hear Clovis talking to him.

  Pip stared at the Heart. It lay on the table, black and shrivelled. A horrible thing, as El had said when she first looked at it. Evidence of a terrible act.

  Let them have it, said Clovis inside his head. It doesn’t matter any more. We have to run away. If we don’t, they’ll do the same thing to you as they did to me.

  The witches were now arguing about how best to break into the Office for Witchcraft Extermination and search for the casket. All they seemed to do was argue.

  Pip met Oni’s eye. He was almost sure that she knew what he was going to do. He wanted to tell her to look after El, but he didn’t dare say anything of the kind out loud.

  “Where’s the privy?” he said.

  Helios told him it was at the other end of the Undercroft and offered to show him the way.

  “I’ll be all right,” said Pip, standing up. “I’ll find it on my own.”

  Chapter Forty-four

  AN ORDER HAD ARRIVED FROM THE PALACE THAT King Oswald required a formal guard of assassins to accompany him on a visit to a pri
vate club that was popular with nobles in the city. Today, Ariosto thought, he would take care of the guard duty himself.

  He changed into his best livery, and walked slowly to the palace. He arrived half an hour early and requested a personal interview, which earned him a puzzled glance from Oswald’s private secretary.

  “This is a rare honour,” said King Oswald, as he entered the guest chambers.

  Ariosto bowed. “At your service, Your Grace.” He took the liberty of looking directly at Oswald and blinked. He hadn’t looked into his eyes before, and they were deeply unsettling.

  “I hear that it has been an unusually busy time at the Office for Witchcraft Extermination,” said Oswald.

  “Yes, sire. The Cardinal has been most anxious.”

  Oswald turned towards the window. “I hear that witches are abroad. I don’t know why this should alarm Lamir so much. After all, isn’t witchcraft his domain?”

  “I’m sure, Your Grace, that you have your own ways of dealing with witches in Awemt.”

  “We are … very efficient. Perhaps Lamir could take a few feathers from our cap. But he is sadly incurious. He seemed to believe there was no problem in Clarel at all.”

  Ariosto’s heart was beating fast, but he showed no sign of it. “For all that, he is deeply interested in witchcraft. Certainly, some of the artefacts we have secretly recovered seem to me of a dubious nature.”

  “Really?” Oswald looked amused. “I thought you believed that he was merely professionally interested. What kind of artefacts do you mean?”

  “In recent years, it’s been an item he called the Stone Heart.” Out of the corner of his eye, Ariosto saw Oswald stiffen. “We managed to track it down, through the offices of a young witchcraft expert called Sibelius d’Artan. But then it was lost.”

  “Lost?”

  “Our men were returning to the office when they were, apparently, robbed by some riff-raff. We’re fairly certain it was taken by a young pickpocket with links to witches. The entire office has since been devoted to its recovery.”