Fireworks and Darkness

by Natalie Jane Prior

  Lying on the bed was a dead woman, a stranger, in a faded green dress. Casimir did not think she had been dead very long, though in this cold weather it was possible he was wrong. Her face was so knocked about, so broken by cuts and bruises it was hard to tell her age or what she had looked like in life, though her dress had a girl’s cut about it. Her left hand had been cut off and sat like a dead spider curled up on her breast. A little blood seeped waterily from the jagged flesh and the open eyes which stared up at him were as glazed and flat as those of a fish.

  A door clicked open in Casimir’s head as the spell that had been controlling his thoughts suddenly broke. All the smells he had been struggling to identify resolved in a rush: death, decay and above all, magic. The corpse continued to stare at him, the expression in its eyes neither peaceful nor even horrified, but simply empty. Casimir backed away, turned and ran. At the end of the alcove he slammed into the old man with his blank, baby face, the pewter jug in his hand and bread crumbs on his lips.

  Casimir floundered, tangled in material. With a great ripping sound the curtain tore loose from its rings. The old man looked at him with interest. He put down his jug and pinched out the candle, then turned his eyes to the bed.

  ‘I fished her out of the pool at the bottom of the waterfall,’ he said. ‘You can always pick the suicides. The murder victims, they’re weighed down with bricks or stones, but the suicides float and bang against the rocks. Do you think Peter and Christina will be pleased?’

  Casimir flung off the curtain and ran for the door. The bolts tugged at his fingertips, the door banged open against the wall. He was standing in the doorway, hanging on the brink of nothing. The steps into Wren Alley had disappeared. Mist swirled patchily, but it was not river mist. The door had opened onto a sheer fall of mountainous rock.

  Water roared somewhere close by and the air was deathly cold. A bird cawed in the distance. Casimir turned back to the old man. ‘What is this place? Where have you brought me?’

  ‘Why, to our house in Outer Osterfall, of course,’ said the old man. ‘You’re here to be apprenticed to my son. Simeon’s boy, the one Peter’s waited for all these years. He’s with your father now, in the cellar with the fireworks and when they’re done, my little Christina will be queen. Please come away from the door, Casimir Runciman. It’s a long way down and the rocks are dangerous if you fall.’

  Casimir moved away from the door. ‘What do you mean? What’s my father to you?’

  ‘I’m Ezekial Circastes,’ said the old man simply. ‘Your father Simeon was my apprentice.’

  ‘Your apprentice?’

  Casimir stopped. For the first time he looked at the old man with eyes undeceived by magic. Ezekial had picked up the torn curtain and was rethreading the hooks; his face sagged in pouches like a baby’s, but the underlying bone structure was there. He resembled his son—or rather, Circastes resembled his father—in the same way the crayon portrait of Princess Christina’s dark-haired aunt had reminded him of Circastes. Which meant Christina…

  The princess herself had been here, in this house, this afternoon. Now that Casimir had made the connection, the scent of her floral perfume lingered, so distinct and strong it could almost mask the scent of her magic. She had tricked him, lured him here into a trap of her family’s making. Meanwhile Simeon and Circastes were holed up in the treasurer’s cellar with the complete contents of the firework shop. Casimir knew what that meant. Some time tonight, during the queen’s Christmas ball when the entire court was assembled, Simeon was going to blow up the palace and himself with it. Princess Christina, miraculously called out of Starberg, would survive to become Queen of Ostermark and Casimir would become the magician’s apprentice in Simeon’s place. He remembered what Simeon had told him: how on the day he had been apprenticed, all his memories had been wiped from his head. Soon, all Casimir was and all he had been, all his memories of his parents, all the brave and funny and wonderful and beautiful and frightening moments of his life would be taken away from him. Casimir Runciman, the firework maker’s apprentice, would cease to exist, and then the cycle of Circastes’s revenge would be complete.

  Casimir felt himself flooded by an anguish so acute it was physical. Ezekial looked up. For a moment his mad face seemed to soften in sympathy.

  ‘Don’t worry, firework boy,’ he said. ‘Peter knows what he’s doing. Everything will be all right.’

  ‘No, it won’t!’ cried Casimir. ‘How can it be all right when my father is going to die? And what about me? Don’t I have a right to be who I am, to die the same person I was born?’

  ‘Simeon has to be punished,’ said Ezekial. ‘Peter says he must.’

  ‘But he has been punished,’ said Casimir passionately. ‘All these years he’s been punished. He’s never forgiven himself for what he did. He was only seventeen. He didn’t know what he was doing.’

  Ezekial shook his head. ‘You’re wrong.’ He finished re-hanging the curtain and fetched the candle from the alcove. ‘Your father did know. A magician must never force control on another magician. That is the one rule we all follow. I know what Simeon did to me and why. Paulina and Peter were able to bring some things back. But your father was incompetent. He botched the spell and it couldn’t be reversed.’ He set down the candle and began retracing some of the chalk outlines on the floor. Casimir watched apprehensively, but the old man had apparently lost interest in talking to him. He produced a dish of what looked like dried mud and scattered it in the circle. Then he lit a long spill at the furnace and touched it to the candle.

  Suddenly Casimir realised what he was doing. The chalk circle, the candle, the mud from the river at Wren Alley: the old man was re-opening the way to Starberg. Someone—Christina, her aunt, Circastes—was coming through. The fog in the doorway shimmered and the

  sound of roaring water was replaced by the river splashing against the pylons of the house in Wren Alley. Casimir started inching towards the door.

  Ezekial blew out the spill and looked up.

  ‘No!’ he said, and came swiftly between Casimir and the door. Casimir backed off. He put his hand into his pocket and felt his fist close unexpectedly around the string of crackers he had put there earlier.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Casimir took his hand out of his pocket and inched away from the door. The furnace was behind him now, so close that the heat from the exposed coals burned the backs of his legs through his breeches. He put his hand behind his back. There was a moment of agony as his fingers burned, then the fuse sizzed and he flung up his arm.

  ‘Look out!’

  Ezekial turned. Casimir hurled the crackers straight at him. The old man screamed, half-dived, half-tripped and fell to the floor and then the fireworks went off with a string of rapid explosions, like corks popping out of a bottle.

  Casimir pelted across the room and hurled himself through the door. The stairs seemed to dissolve underneath him and he lost his footing. He had a brief, swift impression of wooden beams and props flying past and then he hit the soft mud below with a thudding splat.

  For a moment he sat, unable to do more than catch his breath. Wren Alley buzzed around him. Then a voice spoke loudly, making him jump.

  ‘My God,’ it said. ‘What an entrance. What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

  A man in a uniform was standing a few feet away, a lantern in his hand. Casimir opened his mouth to shout for help, then saw that it was Joachim.

  ‘What am I doing? What are you doing here?’

  ‘What do you think, you blue-arsed fool?’ His uncle reached out a hand and hauled him up out of the mud. ‘I’ve been looking for you since daybreak. Are you out of your mind, coming on your own to a place like this?’

  ‘I’ve been looking for Simeon.’ Casimir suddenly remembered. ‘He sent me a letter. Only it was a trap. It was Circastes and he’s with Simeon now, in the cellar under the palace!’

  ‘Circastes?’

  ‘Yes.’ Casimir
shivered, and Joachim pulled off his topcoat.

  ‘Here, put this on. You can explain about it later, I’ve got a boat waiting over here.’ He led the way across the mud flats to a small, flat-bottomed skiff. Casimir climbed in and unshipped the oars. As Joachim untied it from its mooring and pushed it out into deeper water, a thought occurred to him.

  ‘Is this boat yours?’

  Joachim’s teeth flashed white in the dirty, rainsmudged shadow of his face. ‘What do you think?’ He scrambled over the side, and for a moment the boat rocked wildly. Then the current caught and whisked them away downstream, and Wren Alley receded into rain and darkness.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  ‘I suppose I ought to warn you I killed a man,’ said Joachim as they skimmed along. Casimir looked alarmed. His uncle went on, ‘That was how I knew where to look for you. When I got out of the Undercroft, I went straight to the firework shop. I found a little leech belonging to the princess. He told me to go to Wren Alley and was kind enough to lend me his uniform before he died. Just so you know you’re associating with a desperate criminal who might be arrested at any moment.’

  ‘How did you get out of the Undercroft?’ asked Casimir.

  ‘I escaped. Do you want the long version, or the simple one? The simple one, I think. I won’t go into the unpleasant details of my arrest. Suffice it to say that I was knocked out like a fool from behind and unconscious for a lot of it. When I finally came to my senses I was in the Undercroft, and there on the floor of my cell was that prize idiot, Marcus Tycho. I don’t know what they’d done to him, but he was in pretty bad shape. He died soon after midnight and the guards came and stitched him up in a sack with some lead weights. When they were out of the room—I suppose they thought I was still non compos mentis—I pulled the weights out and propped the body up against the wall. We’re about the same build and colouring and when I dressed him in my shirt and trousers, it looked just like me, asleep. Then I got into the sack and closed it with a knot I could undo from the inside and they sent me down the chute into the Ling. Interesting. I was never quite sure whether the famous chute really existed. It was quite an education to find it did.’

  ‘I was arrested, too,’ said Casimir. ‘I think they were hoping I’d lead them to Simeon. They questioned me and let me go this morning.’

  ‘That’ll be something to impress your girlfriends with,’ said Joachim. ‘It’s certainly an impressive bump you’ve got on your head.’

  ‘It still aches.’

  ‘I bet it does. I’ve a little experience of these things myself.’

  ‘There’s something else you need to know,’ said Casimir. ‘The procurator suspects Princess Christina. He thinks she’s a magician and he’s right. She’s Circastes’s niece. That’s why Circastes has Simeon and all the fireworks and gunpowder in the treasurer’s cellar. He’s going to get him to blow up the palace so Christina can become queen.’

  ‘Christina’s a magician, too? Well, that’s not surprising. There was certainly talk about her mother, years ago. She came to court as the mistress of some tinpot local nobleman and was supposed to have bewitched the king. Of course, people tend to underestimate the depths of inanity males descend to in the grip of lust. Here, give me the oars, you’re getting tired.’ They changed places and Joachim started cutting more swiftly across the current, steering for the southern arches of the bridge. ‘Now I come to think on it, I seem to remember Simeon telling me there was a much older sister. She was the eldest, I think she ran off with a man. They were never allowed to mention her name. Of course, it all happened before his time. The one he used to talk about was called Paula, something like that.’

  ‘Paulina. She was the aunt who brought Christina up. She told me she was dying and she had to go to her.’

  ‘Well, naturally. Christina’s got to have an excuse not to be in the palace when it explodes. And you can bet Paulina will have been in this up to her eyeballs from the beginning. She’s got more grudges against your father than anyone.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Don’t you know? That’s what the original spell was. The one Simeon cast that caused all the trouble. He and Circastes were about the same age, but Paulina was a few years older, twenty-one or so. Simeon rather fancied her, but she had bigger fish to fry. He tried to cast a glamour out of one of the grimoires to make himself look older, so she would pay him some attention.’ Joachim showed his teeth. ‘Believe it or not, that’s what all this is about. An adolescent love charm that went wrong.’

  ‘Don’t tell me: I don’t want to know.’ Sickened, Casimir turned away and hunched over, staring at the river. Ahead of them oil lamps gleamed on King Frederik’s new bridge, one for every narrow pointed arch. Joachim manoeuvred the boat expertly. As they approached the dark tunnel of the second arch the current gathered speed and shot them through, swirling them down two or three heartstopping feet into the lower reaches near the River Court.

  The river flowed on, a pockmarked ribbon, its murky grey indistinguishable from sky or shore. Joachim steered their boat in amongst the wherries and disused summer pleasure barges and tied it up to an unobtrusive mooring. In the River Court footmen hurried through puddles with umbrellas and the coaches jostled for position as one by one they rolled up and disgorged their occupants, great men dressed in lace and velvet and scented elegant ladies. Nobody bothered to look at a member of the Queen’s Guard in a too-small uniform and a page in filthy livery as they ran up the steps of the treasurer’s darkened house and banged on his front door.

  Their knock was answered by a very junior footman. ‘May I help you?’

  Casimir pushed past him into the house.

  ‘Ruth!’ he yelled. ‘Ruth, where are you?’

  Ruth appeared on the landing at the top of the stairs. She was wearing an old dress and felt slippers and her hair was dishevelled. Her little dog darted out from under her skirts and started barking.

  ‘Casimir! What do you want? Where’s Simeon?’

  ‘He’s here.’

  ‘What do you mean, he’s here?’ Ruth came downstairs, her dog running ahead and yapping around their ankles. The footman withdrew at her approach and she rounded on Casimir. ‘Casimir, what are you talking about? I warn you, if this is another of your—’

  ‘Never mind all this,’ interrupted Joachim. ‘We haven’t got time. Quickly. Did Simeon have a key to the cellar?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Could Simeon have access to the cellar without your knowledge?’

  ‘What cellar?’

  ‘Stop prevaricating!’ shouted Joachim. Ruth appeared startled and backed off a little.

  ‘He didn’t have a key,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you’re asking. But I have keys to all the locks in this house and he knew where I kept them, so if I wasn’t here and he wanted to get in, I suppose he could. He wouldn’t have done it without my permission, though. Simeon’s not that sort of person.’

  ‘Well, he’s down there now,’ said Joachim. ‘Are you going to tell me he asked your permission before he filled your cellars with gunpowder?’

  ‘Fireworks, yes—’

  ‘Gunpowder, fireworks, it’s all the same,’ said Joachim. ‘I tell you, Simeon is down there now with enough explosives to blow up this house, the palace and half the River Court down to the Undercroft. Circastes has him in thrall. So has that sly-faced bitch Christina. Now get your keys, and get down there fast, or none of us are going to be around long enough to argue!’

  ‘Christina?’ Ruth started fumbling in her pocket. Casimir broke away and ran down the corridor to the servants’ stairs. The sound of Christmas festivities and drunken laughter floated out to him from the staff dining hall, and the carriageway at the back of the house was jammed with coaches, drivers, grooms, stablehands all shouting and trying to find places to park. Casimir darted out between the coaches and hurried down the stairs to the cellar.

  ‘Simeon!’ he yelled. ‘Simeon, Simeon!’ He banged on the door, but
there was no answer. A moment later, Joachim and Ruth appeared behind him with a lantern, Ruth carrying a huge bunch of keys.

  ‘What’s in there?’ Joachim indicated the door.

  ‘The mortars from the ordnance. Fireworks. I let Simeon put them there. His powder cellar was full.’

  ‘Not any more,’ said Casimir. ‘He’s taken everything out of it and the shop, too. Even the firework boy.’

  Ruth rattled her fingers through the bunch of keys. ‘My key’s gone. Someone’s taken it.’

  ‘Then we’ll pick the lock.’ Joachim brought a loop of wire out of his pocket. Ruth shook her head.

  ‘That’s no use. There are bolts and a bar on the other side. Simeon and I used to meet in there at one time when we wanted to be private.’ She bent and peered through the keyhole. ‘Simeon? Simeon, are you there?’

  There was no reply. Ruth banged on the door. ‘Simeon? Simeon, let me in!’

  ‘Get a crowbar,’ said Joachim. ‘We’ll have to break it down.’

  ‘No!’ said Ruth. ‘There are too many people out in the carriageway, someone might hear.’

  ‘I don’t give a damn about people hearing.’ Joachim picked up a coal shovel which was standing against the wall and smashed it against the lock. The wood splintered and the door gave perhaps an inch. Casimir peered through the gap.

  ‘Careful! He’s got barrels of gunpowder stacked up against it!’

  Joachim pushed him out of the way and applied his own eye to the gap. ‘You’re right. The door opens inwards, we’ll never get it open from this side. Is there any other way in?’

  ‘No,’ said Ruth.

  ‘Yes, there is,’ said Casimir. ‘There’s another door. I found it the other day when I was looking over the mortars. It’s on the bottom wall, the one nearest the river.’

  ‘That’s not a door,’ objected Ruth. ‘It’s an inspection hatch. There’s a passage that goes down to the river near the water wheel. You can’t get in at the other end, the entrance is underwater.’