Too Many Magicians (lord darcy)

by Randall Garrett

  At another booth, a priest in clerical black with white lace at collar and cuffs was distributing booklets describing the new building being erected at Oxford to house the Royal Thaumaturgical Laboratories at Edward’s College. The display was a scale model of the proposed structure.

  Directly in their path, the two men saw what looked like an ordinary door frame. An illusion sign floated in its center, translucent blue letters that said: please step through.

  As they did, the illusion sign vanished and they could feel what seemed to be a slight wind tugging at their clothing. On the other side, another illusion sign appeared.

  thank you

  If you will examine your clothing, you will see that every speck of loose dust and lint has been removed. This is a prototype device, still in the experimental stage. Eventually, no home will be without one.

  Wells Sons

  Thaumaturgical Home Appliances

  “Quite a gadget,” said Lord Bontriomphe. “Look; even our boots are shiny,” he added as they walked through the second sign and it dissolved around them.

  “Useful,” Lord Darcy agreed, “but quite impracticable. Sean told me they had it at the last Convention. It makes a good advertisement for the company, but that ’no home will be without one’ is visionary. Far too expensive, since the spell has to be renewed by a Master Sorcerer at least once a week. With this mob in here, they’ll be lucky if they get through the day with it.”

  “Hm-m-m. Like that ‘See London From the Air’ device they had a few years back,” said Bontriomphe. “Remember that?”

  “I read something about it. I don’t recall the details,” Lord Darcy said.

  “It looked quite impressive. They had a crystal ball about” — he held his hands in front of him as though he were grasping an imaginary sphere — “oh, ten inches in diameter, I guess. It was mounted on a pedestal, and you looked into it from above. It gave you the weird feeling that you were looking down from a great height, from a point just above Admiral Buckingham Hall, where the exhibit was. You could actually see people walking about, and carriages moving through the streets, as though you were up in a cathedral spire looking down. There was a magic mirror suspended a couple of hundred feet above the building, you see, which projected the scene into the crystal by psychic reflection.”

  “Ah, I see. Whatever happened to it? I’ve heard no more about it,” Lord Darcy said.

  “Well, right off the bat, the War Office was interested. You can imagine what sort of reconnaissance you’d have, with a magic mirror floating high over enemy lines and an observer safe behind your own lines watching everything they were doing. Anyway, the War Office thaumaturgists are still working on it, but it hasn’t come to anything. In the first place, it takes three Masters to run it: One to levitate the mirror, one to keep the mirror activated, and one to keep the receiving crystal activated. And they have to be specially trained for the job and then train together as a team. In the second place, the sorcerers controlling the mirror have to be within sight of the mirror, and the plane of the surface has to be perpendicular to a radius of the crystal ball. Don’t ask me why; I’m no sorcerer and I don’t know a thing about the theory. At any rate, the thing hasn’t been made practical for long distance transmission of images yet.”

  They left the lobby and started upstairs toward the late Sir James Zwinge’s room.

  “So far,” said Lord Darcy, “aside from such things as the semaphore and the heliotelegraph — both of which require line-of-sight towers for transmission — the only practical means of long distance communication we have is the teleson. And the mathematical thaumaturgists still have not come up with a satisfactory theory to explain its functioning. Ah! I see that your Armsmen are on duty.” They had reached the top of the stairway. Down the hall, directly in front of the door to the murder room were two black-clad Armsmen of the King’s Peace.

  “Good morning, Jeffers, Dubois,” said Lord Bontriomphe as he and Lord Darcy approached the door.

  The Armsmen saluted. “Good morning, my lord,” said the older of the two.

  “Everything all right? No disturbances?”

  “None, my lord. Quiet as a tomb.”

  “Jeffers, ” said Lord Bontriomphe with a smile, “with a wit like that, you will either rise rapidly to Master-at-Arms or you will remain a foot patrolman all your life.”

  “My ambition is modest, my lord,” said Jeffers with a straight face. “I only wish to become a Sergeant-at-Arms. For that, I need only to be a half-wit.”

  “Foot patrolman,” Lord Darcy said sadly. “Forever.” He looked at the door to the murder room. “I see they have covered the hole in the door.”

  “Yes, my lord,” said Jeffers. “They just tacked this panel over the hole. Otherwise, the door’s untouched. Would you be wanting to look in, my lords?” He took a large, thick, heavy brass key from the pouch at his belt. “This is Sir James’ key,” he said. “You can open the door, but Grand Master Sir Lyon has put a spell on the room itself, my lords.”

  Lord Darcy took the key, fitted it into the long, narrow keyhole, turned the bolt, and opened the door. He and Lord Bontriomphe stopped at the threshold.

  There was no tangible barrier at the door. There was nothing they could see or touch. But the barrier was almost palpably there, nonetheless. Lord Darcy found that he had no desire to enter the room at all. Quite the contrary; he felt a distinct aversion to the room, a sense of wanting to avoid, at all costs, going into that room for any reason whatever. There was nothing in that room that interested him, no reason at all why he should enter it. It was taboo — a forbidden place. To look from without was both necessary and desirable; to enter was neither necessary nor desirable.

  Lord Darcy surveyed the room with his eyes.

  Master Sir James Zwinge still lay where he had fallen, looking as though he had died only minutes before, thanks to the preservative spell which had been cast over the corpse.

  Footsteps came down the hall. Lord Darcy turned to see Master Sean approaching.

  “Sorry to be so long, my lord,” said the sorcerer as he neared the door. He stopped at the threshold. “Now what have we here? Hm-m-m. An aversion spell, eh? Hm-m-m. And cast by a Master, too, I’ll be bound. It would take quite a time to solve that one.” He stood looking through the door.

  “It was cast by Grand Master Sir Lyon himself,” said Lord Darcy.

  “Then I’ll go fetch him to take it off,” said Master Sean. “I wouldn’t waste time trying to take it off meself.”

  “Pardon me, Master Sorcerer,” said Armsman Jeffers deferentially, “are you Master Sean O Lochlainn?”

  “That I am.”

  The Armsman took an envelope from an inside jacket pocket. “The Grand Master,” he said, “told me to be sure and give this to you when you came, Master Sean.”

  Master Sean placed his symbol-decorated carpetbag on the floor, took the envelope, opened it, extracted a single sheet of paper, and read it carefully.

  “Ah!” he said, his round Irish face beaming. “I see! Ingenious! I shall most certainly have to remember that one!” He looked at Lord Darcy with the smile still wreathing his face. “Sir Lyon has given me the key. He expected me to be here this morning. Now, if you’ll excuse me for a few minutes—”

  The tubby little Irish sorcerer knelt down and opened his carpetbag. He fished around inside and took out a gold-and-ebony wand, a small brazen bowl, an iron tripod with six-inch legs, two silver phials, and an oddly constructed flint-and-steel fire-striker.

  The others stepped back respectfully. One does not disturb a magician at work.

  Master Sean placed the tripod on the floor just in front of the open door and set the small brazen bowl on top of it. Then he put in a few lumps of charcoal from his carpetbag. Within two minutes, he had the coals glowing redly. Then he added a large pinch of powder from each of the two silver phials, and a dense column of aromatic blue-gray smoke arose from the small brazier. Master Sean traced a series of symbols in the
air with his wand while he murmured something the others could not hear. Then he carefully folded, in an intricate and complex manner, the letter from Sir Lyon Grey. When it was properly folded, he dropped it on the coals. As it burst into flame, he traced more symbols and murmured further words.

  “There,” he said. “You can go in now, my lords.”

  The two investigators walked across the threshold. Their aversion to doing so had completely vanished. Master Sean took a small bronze lid from his carpetbag and fitted it tightly over the mouth of the little brazier.

  “Just leave it there, lads,” he said to the two Armsmen. “It will cool off in a few minutes. Mind you don’t knock it over, now.” Then he joined Lord Darcy and Lord Bontriomphe inside the murder room.

  Lord Darcy closed the door and looked at it. From the inside, the damage done by Lord Bontriomphe’s ax work was plainly visible. Otherwise, there was nothing unusual about the door. A rapid but thorough inspection of the doors and windows convinced Lord Darcy that Lord Bontriomphe had been absolutely right when he said the room was sealed. There were no secret panels, no trapdoors. The windows were firmly bolted, and there was no way they could have been bolted from the outside by other than magical means.

  With difficulty, Lord Darcy slid back the bolt on one of the windows and opened it. It creaked gently as it swung outward.

  Lord Darcy looked out the window. There was a thirty-foot drop of smooth stone beneath him. The window opened onto a small courtyard, where several chair-surrounded tables formed a part of the dining facilities of the Royal Steward Hotel.

  Some of the tables were occupied. Five sorcerers, three priests, and a bishop had all heard the window open and were looking up at him.

  Lord Darcy craned his neck around and looked up. Ten feet above were the windows of the next floor. Lord Darcy pulled his head back in and closed the window.

  “No one went out that way,” he said firmly. “For an ordinary man to have done so would have required a rope. He would have had either to slide down thirty feet or to climb up ten feet hand over hand.”

  “An ordinary man,” said Lord Bontriomphe, emphasizing the word. “But levitation is not too difficult a trick for a Master Sorcerer.”

  “What say you, Master Sean?” Lord Darcy asked the tubby little sorcerer.

  “It could have been done that way,” Master Sean admitted.

  “Furthermore,” said Lord Bontriomphe, “those bolts could have been thrown from the outside by magic.”

  “Indeed they could,” Master Sean agreed.

  Lord Bontriomphe looked expectantly at Lord Darcy.

  “Very well,” said Lord Darcy with a smile, “let us proceed to try that theory by what the geometers call, I believe, the reductio ad absurdum. Imagine the scene. What happens?”

  He gestured toward the body on the floor. “Sir James is stabbed. Our sorcerer-murderer — if you’ll pardon the double entendre — goes to the window. He opens it. Then he steps up to the sill and steps out into empty air, levitating himself as he does so. Then he closes the window and proceeds to cast a spell which slides the bolts into their sockets. When that is done, he floats off somewhere — up or down, it matters not which.” He looked at Master Sean. “How long would that take?”

  “Five or six minutes at the least. If he could do it at all. Levitation causes a tremendous psychic drain; the spell can only be held for a matter of minutes. In addition, you’re asking him to cast a second spell while he’s holding the first. A spell of the type that was cast on this room is what we call a static spell, my lord. It imposes a condition, you see. But levitating and the moving of bolts are kinetic spells; you have to keep them moving. To use two kinetic spells at the same time requires tremendous concentration, power, and precision. I would hesitate, myself, to try casting a window-locking spell with a thirty-foot drop beneath me. Certainly not if I were in a hurry or distracted.”

  “And even if it could be done, it would take five or six minutes,” Lord Darcy said. “Bontriomphe, would you mind opening the other window? We haven’t tested it yet.”

  The London investigator drew back the bolt and pushed the window open. It groaned audibly.

  “What do you see out there?” Lord Darcy asked.

  “About nine pairs of eyes staring up at me,” Lord Bontriomphe said.

  “Exactly. Both windows make a slight noise when they are opened. That noise is quite audible in the courtyard below. Yesterday morning, Sir James’ scream was clearly audible through that window, but even if it had not been — even if Sir James had not screamed at all when he was stabbed — the killer could not have gone out through that window without being seen, much less hovered there for five or six minutes.”

  Lord Bontriomphe pulled the window closed again. “What if he were invisible?” he asked, looking at the little Irish sorcerer.

  “The Tarnhelm Effect?” asked Master Sean. He chuckled. “My lord, regardless of what the layman may think, the Tarnhelm Effect is extremely difficult to use in practice. Besides, ‘invisibility’ is a layman’s term. Spells using the Tarnhelm Effect are very similar in structure to the aversion spell you met at the door to this room. If a sorcerer were to cast such a spell about himself, your eyes would avoid looking directly at him. You wouldn’t realize it yourself, but you would simply keep your eyes averted from him at all times. He could stand in the middle of a crowd and no one could later swear that he was there because no one would have seen him except out of the corner of the eye, if you follow me.

  “Even if he were alone, you wouldn’t see him because you’d never look at him. You would subconsciously assume that whatever it was you were seeing out of the corner of your eye was a cabinet or a hatrack or an umbrella stand or a lamppost — whatever was most likely under the circumstances. Your mind would explain him away as something that ought to be there, as a part of the normal background and therefore unnoticeable.

  “But he wouldn’t actually be invisible. You could see him, for instance, in a mirror or other reflecting surface simply because the spell wouldn’t keep your eyes away from the mirror.”

  “He could cast a sight-avoidance spell on the mirror, couldn’t he?” Lord Bontriomphe asked. “That’s a static spell, I believe.”

  “Certainly,” said Master Sean. “He could cast a sight-avoidance spell on every reflecting surface in the place. But a man has to look somewhere, and even a layman would get suspicious under circumstances like that. Besides, to anyone with even a half-trained Talent, he’d be detectable immediately.

  “And even supposing he did make himself invisible outside that window, do you realize what he would have to do? Now you have him juggling three spells at once: he’s levitating himself; he’s making himself ‘invisible’; and he’s closing that window.

  “No, my lord; it won’t do. It just isn’t humanly possible.”

  Lord Darcy let his gaze wander over the room. “That’s settled, then. Our killer did not go out those windows either by thaumaturgical or by ordinary physical means. Therefore, we—”

  “Wait a minute!” said Lord Bontriomphe, his eyes widening. He pointed a finger at Master Sean. “Look here; suppose it happened this way. The killer stabs Master Sir James. His victim screams. The killer knows that you are outside the door. He knows he can’t get out through the door. The windows are out, too, for the reasons you’ve just given. What can he do? He uses the Tarnhelm Effect. When I come busting in here with an ax, I don’t see him. As far as I’m concerned, the room is empty except for the corpse. I wouldn’t be able to see him, would I? Then, when the door’s open, he walks out as cool as an oyster, with nobody noticing him.”

  Master Sean shook his head. “You wouldn’t notice him; that’s so. But I would have. And so would Grand Master Sir Lyon. We were both looking in through that hole in the door, and a man can see the whole room from there — even the bathroom, when the door to it is open.”

  Lord Bontriomphe looked at the bathroom through the open door. “No, you can’t. Tak
e a look. Suppose he were lying down in the tub. You couldn’t even see him from in here.”

  “True. But I distinctly recall your looking down directly into the tub. You couldn’t have done that if a killer using the Tarnhelm Effect were in it.”

  Lord Bontriomphe frowned thoughtfully. “Yes. I did. Hm-m-m. Well, that eliminates that. He wasn’t in the room, and he didn’t leave the room.” He looked at Lord Darcy. “What does that leave?”

  “We don’t know yet, my dear fellow. We need more data.” He stepped over to where the body lay and knelt down, being careful not to disturb anything.

  * * *

  Master Sir James Zwinge had been a short, lean man, with receding gray hair and a small gray beard and moustache. He was wearing a neat, fairly expensive gentleman’s suit, rather than the formal sorcerer’s costume to which he was entitled. As Bontriomphe had said, it was difficult to see the stab wound at first glance. It was small, barely an inch long, and had not opened widely. It was further obscured by the blood which covered the front of the dead magician’s clothing. Nearby, a black-handled, silver-bladed knife lay in the pool of blood on the floor, its gleaming blade splashed with red.

  “This blood—” Lord Darcy gestured with his hand. “Are you absolutely certain, Bontriomphe, that it was fresh when you broke into this room?”