Thaumatology 12: Vengeance

by Niall Teasdale

  Ceri picked up her tablet and began searching news feeds as the presenter continued. ‘A Christian religious organisation known as the Watchers of Saint John claimed today that the City of London has been decreed blasphemous by God. Leader of the Watchers, Simon Ziel, gave a press conference this afternoon and had this to say.’

  The picture cut to what was obviously a press conference in what looked like a disused church, not old, but lacking a lot of the paraphernalia Ceri would have expected. There was a very large, oak cross mounted on the wall behind the speaker though it looked a little odd to Ceri.

  ‘Exodus, chapter twenty-two, verse eighteen…’ the voice from the TV intoned.

  ‘Here we go again,’ Ceri muttered.

  ‘…thou shall not suffer a sorceress to live. Leviticus, chapter nineteen, verse twenty-six, thou must not practise divination or sorcery. And yet this very city has constructed buildings to study magic. It seeks to power its lights through magic. It allows the dead to walk among the living and its parks are home to beast-men.’

  Ceri looked up. Ziel was a tall, attractive man with the kind of black hair you saw in movies, strong features, and blue eyes which blazed at the audience in his moment of righteousness. She imagined he was probably very charismatic to many, but she had seen people with real charisma; compared to Oberon, Ziel was a rank amateur.

  ‘We have learned that the angels we all know watch us from on high are unable to come within five miles of this city of depravity and corruption. The man who fell to earth through the roof of a mall was one such being. Others have been found, lost and unable to communicate with their God. A God who has turned His sight away from this place before He destroys it. Leviticus, chapter twenty, verse six, whoever turns to mediums and spiritualists, and prostitutes himself with them, I will turn against that person.’

  ‘Oh… goody,’ Lily moaned. ‘Just what we need, another Bible-quoting nut job.’

  The screen had cut back to the presenter, but all she had to say was that no one in government was willing to talk about the matter and Ceri mentally switched the TV to mute as she focussed on her tablet.

  ‘Looks like several evening papers are reporting it. The Watchers… Ah, here we go. The Watchers of Saint John were founded about fifteen years ago by Ziel, weird spelling. They’re named for the John who wrote Revelations. They believe that Revelations is a literal transcript of a conversation John had with Jesus and originally they believed that the end of the world was coming at the turn of the millennium. Have you ever read Revelations?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Lily said, nodding. ‘After the Witch Hunter business and America. I want to know what he was smoking. I mean, I didn’t think they had LSD back then.’

  ‘There’s a mould that grows on wheat that does the same thing.’

  ‘He was on that then. I mean, locusts shaped like horses with the faces of men, the hair of women, and crowns? Oh, and scorpion tails.’

  ‘Well, the Watchers… That’s another name for the Grigori. Interesting. The Watchers are quite sure it’s all going to happen fairly literally. We’ve had our thousand years of Satan being locked in the Pit, and now he’s out and deceiving us with lies.’

  ‘As opposed to deceiving us with the truth?’

  ‘Yeah, that’s what politicians do. The question is, how did they find out about the angels in the first place?’

  Westminster, April 2nd.

  ‘We traced the leak to our ambulance driver,’ Kate stated, her eyes scanning her notes. ‘He’s a member of this cult.’

  ‘You’re calling them a cult?’ Ceri asked.

  ‘Not officially.’ Chief Inspector Barry gave Kate a withering look before continuing. ‘We can’t charge him with anything, but at least we know how the information got out. I’m more concerned at the moment about public reaction to Ziel’s speech.’ Barry was ex-military, a solid man and a good detective. He wore his years of dealing with supernatural crime like a very heavy cloak and the stress was definitely starting to tell around his eyes.

  ‘Is anyone actually going to take him seriously?’ John grumbled. ‘He’s a fruit cake.’

  ‘He’s a fruit cake who got the prime slot on the evening news,’ Lily pointed out. ‘And a lot of people have gone a little funny about spiritual stuff after all that’s happened over the last few years.’

  Barry grunted, possibly in agreement. ‘We’ve tightened security at the power plant and increased patrols around the universities, just in case. There is, however, a complication.’ He tapped a button on a tablet sitting on the conference room table and a screen lit up behind him showing a map of London with three points marked on it. ‘These are where our guests vanished. This is why I actually asked you to come in.’

  Ceri peered at the three dots, mentally joining them up. ‘You know, that does look like the centre point would be around Battersea…’

  Another tap produced a vaguely circular shape on the map, hovering over the general area of the power station. ‘The mathematicians say it’s hazy, given the inexact points of reference, and there only being three of them, but the centre of the effect is somewhere in there.’

  ‘And the power station is right in the centre of that blob,’ Ceri added, frowning.

  ‘So the complication is that the nut job might be right?’ Lily asked.

  ‘Pretty much,’ Barry growled.

  ‘I’d better get Cheryl and go in to take a look,’ Ceri muttered. ‘There’s no way the generator could be doing this, but…’

  ‘But what?’

  ‘This effect would take a huge amount of power to run constantly.’

  ‘And,’ Kate said, ‘there’s a core region close to thirty thaums in there.’

  ‘Is that a lot?’ John asked.

  ‘Let’s put it this way,’ Ceri told him, ‘you need more than sunblock to go in there.’

  Battersea.

  There was a crowd outside the gates of the power station, several of them waving placards with various religious-sounding slogans daubed on them. John drove Ceri and Cheryl in slowly with Kate watching the protestors, but it seemed peaceful enough, if noisy.

  Michael was waiting for them at the main entrance, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, and a pair of moccasins, but with a name badge clipped to his waistband which made him look rather more official than Ceri was used to.

  ‘Michael?’ Ceri said as she got out of the car. ‘They called you in?’

  ‘About that lot outside,’ he corrected, ‘but when I heard you were coming over I said I’d take you in.’

  ‘Oh, the “pack liaison” thing?’

  He nodded. ‘We’re keeping an eye on things out there. We’ve got Brian and Lynn in skin watching them in shifts. The other guards are under orders to steer clear.’

  Ceri nodded in turn and glanced at the two cops. ‘Brian and Lynn are Guards, good people, very good at being unnoticed. They helped at the conference last year.’ She turned back. ‘Let’s get this done with. Did you get me something to wear, Michael?’

  ‘Torpen’s got a boiler suit, boots, and a hardhat for you. I don’t think he realises what you’re up to, but I figured they’d do.’

  ‘He’ll freak,’ Cheryl predicted.

  ~~~

  Horace Torpen, supervising engineer at the plant, watched as Ceri pulled her T-shirt over her head and then spun on the spot, his cheeks flaming red. Cheryl gave him a smile as though Ceri stripping in public was just normal practice. From the way Michael was behaving, you would think it was.

  ‘Has there been anything unusual here in the last few days?’ Cheryl asked.

  ‘No,’ Torpen growled. He was not an agreeable man at the best of times and being embarrassed was not making him more pleasant. ‘Well, we had a slight fluctuation in output a few days ago. It stabilised.’

  ‘That shouldn’t happen,’ Ceri stated flatly. ‘There’s a buffer built into the enchantments on the central pylon. That should absorb any fluctuations in input over a short period.’ She was not about to mentio
n that the buffer was there as a start-up reservoir for an inter-dimensional gate, but it had turned out to be useful anyway.

  ‘Well, it happened. What is it you’re planning to do, Doctor Brent?’

  ‘I need to take a look inside the generator,’ Ceri replied. ‘Someone may have done something to it.’

  ‘Inside… You’re going into the circles?!’ He turned around just as Ceri zipped up her bright orange boiler suit. ‘Are you insane?!’

  ‘Well… that’s a matter of opinion, but I’ve lived through worse than what’s inside there and I’m not risking anyone else. Now, when I come out I’m heading straight for the isolation box.’ She indicated a metal box about ten feet by five feet sitting in a corner of the room. ‘No one gets in my way. I don’t think it’ll be too bad, but it’s best to be cautious.’

  ‘That’s meant as a refuge,’ Torpen said. ‘It’s supposed to keep magic out if something goes wrong.’

  ‘Yes, but there are thaumometers inside and out, and it’ll keep anything I’m carrying in. Now, let me do my job and we can be out of your hair.’ It was not, perhaps, the most tactful of phrases to use; the engineer did not have that much hair to be in. Turning, Ceri headed for the structure which took up much of the middle of the room.

  The generator was a rather clever construction based, very loosely, on Stonehenge. There was an outer circle of eighty pylons, each a stack of geodesic devices which Cheryl had invented to turn thaumic energy into electricity. They also acted as the outer layer of a harmonic system which concentrated energy within the ring and negated it outside, but Ceri could still feel the slight rise as she got within a couple of yards of the metalwork.

  She blinked on her Sight, and quickly blinked it off again. The energy flowing within the circle made any view beyond the mundane a confusion of shifting streams and colours. She was probably not going to find anything that way.

  Beyond the first ring the tension in the back of her neck jumped markedly. She was in a strong magical field, maybe ten thaums, and it would be stronger closer to the inner circle of thirty-three transducer pylons. Still, she had a job to do and she started doing it. If someone had tossed something into the circle then it would likely be here, outside the inner circle, but probably close to it. She walked around, scanning the concrete floor for anything which should not have been there.

  There was nothing. In truth she was not sure she had expected to find anything since the power driving the spell probably needed to be more than it was going to get even at the very edge of the inner ring. She slipped through between two of the inner pylons and her skin began to tingle.

  In here the readings they had got were up above twenty-eight thaums, pushing twenty-nine. At thirty and above probability tended to throw up its hands and cry foul. Twenty-nine was just about safe, but long-term exposure to it was likely to result in… interesting issues. The only ‘natural’ areas of the world with this level of energy were the three sites in Germany where thaumic bombs had been detonated at the start of the Shattering. Feeling as though her skin was trying to crawl off the top of her head, Ceri began walking around the circle, searching for the source of the spell though not really knowing what to look for.

  It was only when she turned to the central pylon that she found it. Right in the centre of the generator, sunk into the concrete and then into the ground beneath, was a hexagonal, granite rod carved with glyphs. Naturally black, it shone from the energy being directed through it. Around that were four columns of transducers, and there were more mounted over it. The whole structure was about twenty feet in height, but the thing Ceri was looking for was at the bottom.

  It was a metal cube with the edges and corners sheared off. Moving closer, she peered at it, shading her eyes against the glare from the rod. She could easily see two of the faces and those were carved with intricate patterns of tiny glyphs. Her fists clenched and she blanched at the sight of them; if the position the cube was in was not a big enough clue, the glyphs were draconic. A demon could have survived in the inner circle, but they would not use draconic glyphs in an enchantment.

  Standing, she slipped back out to stand inside the outer ring where she could call out. ‘I need a camera shielded to work in high-energy areas. There’s something in here and I don’t want to move it until I know what it is.’

  Kennington.

  ‘And this was in the centre of your generator?’ Gwyn asked.

  Ceri nodded. The hall of High Towers now hosted a six-foot-wide copy of the cube she had found in the power station. More specifically, she had carefully transcribed the glyphs on it into the air in the same pattern they had been created in.

  ‘Well… this is definitely what’s causing the effect we’ve observed.’ Gwyn pointed out a sequence of runes curling around near one corner of the nearest face. ‘These deal with the materialisation of the immaterial.’

  Nodding again, Ceri said, ‘Energy-mass conversion structures. I got that bit. There’s a section on the other side dealing with transformations.’

  Gwyn smiled, rather proudly, and moved around a face. ‘Did you get this part?’ She pointed at a sequence near the bottom.

  ‘Uh… opening, breaching, release… Shit! I was right not to move it.’

  ‘I suspect the trigger is on the underside. Lift it out and it would breach the containment of the circles.’

  ‘We’d have a thaumic bomb going off in central London.’

  ‘There may be other little booby traps in other places. There is a lot of enchantment here just to create the spell transforming the angels.’

  ‘It’s going to take ages to work this out,’ Ceri whined. ‘I’ve got you doing the conference and I’ve got all the generator projects to do, and I need to come up with my presentation. I don’t have a clue what I’m going to give them this year. Mei has a job…’

  ‘I think,’ Gwyn said carefully, ‘that it’s time to mend some bridges with Edward. If you wish, I can go…’

  ‘No. No, you’re right. He’s the only other person I know who could figure this out and if I’m going to ask him… Well, I think it should be me who asks him.’

  Aberystwyth, Wales.

  The magical studies building at Aberystwyth was an imposing sort of structure, if you approached it from the right angle. Ceri had heard it described as a ‘Wrenaissance’ building; architecture was not her strong point and all she knew was that it was built of local stone and had a lot of French windows.

  That was at the front. If you walked through the glorious interior and headed out one side you entered a far more prosaic, younger extension. There you would find stairs down into the basement, which was where Professor Edward Perry had his office.

  Ceri knocked and heard ‘Come’ from the other side of it. She pushed the door open and walked in. Ed did not look up from the papers he was marking. He looked just the same as he had, but more so. As the dragon Athro he had taught sorcery, and as Ed Perry he taught thaumatology, and he fitted the role of slightly eccentric college professor perfectly. His salt-and-pepper hair looked a little greyer and far more unkempt. His tweed jacket was on the back of his chair; his shirts had always been badly ironed, but this one looked as though it had missed being washed the last few times. ‘Be right with you,’ Ed added when no one had spoken to him for a second or two.

  Pushing the door closed, Ceri applied a little magic to keep it that way. When she looked around again, Ed had lifted his head, sensing the energy release. She saw his face shift as tiny expressions flickered across it: pain, loss, relief. The one it settled on was fear.

  ‘Ed,’ Ceri said, ‘I know I said I’d kill you if I saw you again, but I’m not going to teleport a couple of hundred miles to do it.’

  ‘Uh, no,’ he said after a second, his voice carrying a soft Welsh accent. ‘I never took you for unreasonably murderous.’

  ‘No, I’m just reasonably murderous. Look, I need your help, but that’s an excuse… I… Maybe I was a little harsh…’

  ‘You weren’
t,’ Ed replied. ‘I’m a coward. I could have come forward with Cheryl’s whereabouts straight after the fall, but I was scared of how you’d react…’

  ‘You stopped Huanglong from having her killed, messily if his other work is anything to go by. You stood up to him on that at least and you deserve more credit for it.’

  ‘Still, I’m sorry…’

  ‘Not to me, Ed,’ Ceri stated flatly. ‘Apologise to Cheryl. I’m not a great believer in “I was only following orders,” but you were under duress. You did what you could. Mei was the same and I forgave her.’

  ‘Can we take my apology as read then, and move on? I’ll talk to Cheryl first chance I get.’

  ‘That may be sooner than you think.’ Taking her tablet from her bag, Ceri tapped up an animation showing the reconstructed cube and passed it across to Ed. ‘What do you make of that?’

  ‘A tesseract-form enchantment,’ Ed stated immediately. ‘That is old school. I haven’t seen anyone use one in… centuries at least. The glyph sequences construct a fourth dimensional inner construct…’

  ‘That’s what Gwyn said. Do you think you can work out exactly what it does?’

  ‘Well… no. You’re missing one of the sides. I can work out almost precisely what it does, but you could be missing something vital.’ He frowned. ‘These glyphs are too small to read properly, but…’

  ‘They’re draconic, Ed. Someone who knows how to build enchantments using draconic symbology has made something which is causing angels to solidify in London. And they’re using the generator to power it. I need… an expert, and you are about as expert as it gets.’

  ‘Gwyn could…’

  ‘Gwyn has a lot on her plate at the moment. I’ve got her helping Cheryl with the conference. She can help. Hell, I doubt you could stop her, but she’s got Cheryl’s sanity in her hands. I’ve got several generator projects and two worlds to juggle. Will you help?’