Thaumatology 12: Vengeance

by Niall Teasdale

  Cagol looked as though he was trying not to grin, which was progress. He turned a little and waved at a fairly young-looking demon to come forward. The young man took two steps toward Ceri and then dropped to his knees, bowing his head almost to the floor.

  His boss let out a slight cough. ‘This is Aktik. I’m afraid he is a little overawed, but he has a rather unique outlook on magic. He has studied it as much as practising it…’

  ‘A demon thaumatologist?’ Ed said, sounding surprised. ‘Fascinating.’

  ‘Yes,’ Ceri said, ‘well we’re here to talk and I can’t do that looking at the top of his head. Get up, Aktik. You’ll find I’m not especially keen on grovelling.’

  Aktik clambered to his hooves as fast as his reversed knees could manage. ‘Uh… yes, Overlord.’

  ‘Well, it’s a start.’ Ceri frowned. ‘We’re missing someone I think would be useful. Hiffy?’ The blue det rushed forward, bobbing a quick curtsey out of habit. ‘Get everyone sorted out with rooms. Once they’re settled, get them to the magic room. Ed, you and Cheryl can get things started with Gwyn and Mei if I’m not back in time. Lilith? With me.’

  Lily strutted across from her place in line. Five Guandosh demons, one of them a female, watched her move with lust in their eyes. ‘Of course, Mistress,’ Lily said, ‘but where are we going?’

  ‘Nedarim,’ Ceri said. ‘I think Brebbam should be here.’

  Nedarim.

  It was fairly early in the morning, Demon Realm time, and the town square of Nedarim was not heavily populated. There were children playing and the inn was open for business. Someone was setting up a cart with fruit and vegetables on it at one side, and Ooda was drawing water from the well in the middle when Lily appeared out of nowhere dressed in nothing but silver jewellery.

  The young det was about to cry out in shock when a second figure appeared. Ooda knew the woman was Lady Ayasha and she was probably the nicest Demon Lady ever to pass through the village, but at the sight of her the only thing Ooda could think was ‘the Overlord is here, in front of me, right there, and my dress has a big stain down the front.’ The bucket clattered down the well as Ooda threw herself to the ground at Ceri’s feet.

  Turning at the noise, Ceri spotted the girl with the short, pale-gold hair tied into pigtails lying on the ground. ‘Ooda? Is that you?’

  ‘Es, Ov’lord,’ Ooda replied, her speech distorted by the fact that her rather long nose was pressed against the cobbles.

  ‘Well get up. I hate grovelling. You’ve grown! You must be three inches taller than you were last time I was here.’ As the det climbed to her feet, trying to hide the stains on her dress, Ceri added, ‘And you’ve filled out. I bet the boys are queuing up… You’ve been fighting again.’ There was a bruise the size of a hen’s egg under Ooda’s left eye.

  ‘You should see what Poga looks like,’ Ooda muttered.

  Shaking her head, Ceri reached out and smoothed her thumb over Ooda’s cheek. The bruise faded to nothing in a second. ‘That’s better. Now…’ A flick of her wrist had the bucket lifting from the well on its own and settling to the ground, full of water, at Ooda’s feet. ‘I take it school isn’t in?’

  ‘No, Overlord.’

  ‘Well, I need to borrow Brebbam for a couple of days, so you’re going to get a holiday. Would you get your father to come to the school? I should talk to him as well.’

  Ooda bobbed a curtsey and picked up her bucket. ‘Of course, Overlord. Um… Is it okay if I get Tooky and come to the school too?’

  Ceri chuckled. ‘Yes, Ooda, but don’t take too long.’

  As the girl hurried away, Lily stepped closer to Ceri. ‘They get over the awe faster than they did when we first came back,’ she said in English. ‘I don’t feel as… oppressed either.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Ceri agreed thoughtfully. ‘They’re just as obedient, but it’s almost like some of the fear is gone. I can live with that.’

  ‘Have to watch it though. We don’t want them thinking the Overlord is a pushover.’

  ‘They don’t, but it’s like… like someone’s told them they don’t have to be scared unless they have reason to be.’

  ‘Weird,’ Lily stated.

  ‘We’re in the Demon Realm, Lil. Weird has different parameters. Come on, let’s go see Brebbam.’

  ~~~

  Merada walked down the aisle between the school’s desks as though he really wanted to break into a run. He looked a lot like Ooda, including the hair of gold, the pale skin, and the elongated, high-ridged nose which made him look like an accountant.

  Coming to a stop, he bowed deeply to Ceri, and stayed that way as he said, ‘Overlord Ayasha…’

  ‘Straighten up Merada, before I decide you’d be better off as a shivikin in a glue factory.’

  Merada snapped upright so fast Ceri was worried about whiplash. ‘My apologies, Overlord.’

  Ceri glanced at Lily, twitching a brow, and Lily nodded. They were just as terrified when they thought they had done something wrong.

  ‘That was a joke, Merada,’ Ceri said, smiling. ‘I wouldn’t do that. You’d make a terrible shivikin.’ Behind her father, Ooda covered her mouth as she started giggling. Tooky, still something of a shy, wide-eyed young det, was standing there with her mouth open. ‘Close your mouth before something flies in, Tooky.’ There was an audible snapping sound and Ceri winced. ‘As I was telling Brebbam, I need to borrow him for a couple of days for a conference I’m having with the Guandosh and some people I’ve brought over from Earth.’ Brebbam’s eyes widened.

  ‘Of course, Overlord,’ Merada said. ‘The children will, of course, be disappointed at missing the schooling…’ He paused to glare at Ooda and Tooky, who were both giggling. ‘I’m sure they can catch up when Brebbam gets back.’ That cut the giggles off quickly.

  Ceri grinned. ‘Actually, I was thinking that they might enjoy an educational trip.’

  ‘Overlord?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning, an hour after full sun, I’ll come back. Any of the children who want to can come for a visit to the Castle of Bones.’ Ceri held up a hand to stop the mayor from saying anything, because she knew he was going to argue. ‘They won’t be any trouble. I’ve got staff who can look after them and I’ll see they get back when I bring Brebbam home.’

  ‘I’ll have word sent around,’ Merada said, nodding. ‘The Overlord is most generous. I see that Ooda’s eye is back to the right colour as well.’

  Ceri nodded and turned to Brebbam, who was smiling. He was an older det with grey skin and three ridges in place of hair across his skull. He did a good job of looking his role of school teacher. ‘You’ve got your books out of hiding,’ she noted, indicating the shelves behind him which were rather fuller than they had been.

  ‘The Overlord’s decree that anyone should be allowed to study magic has made me more bold,’ Brebbam replied.

  ‘Good,’ Ceri replied, ‘that was the idea. However, I don’t think you’ll need them. I’ve got a really good library at home.’

  Brebbam’s smile got wider.

  Castle of Bones.

  ‘Neka!’ Brebbam’s voice drifted out from among the stacks of the library. He had gone in five minutes earlier and started making incoherent noises as he discovered what was there. Actual words were an improvement. At least he was not swearing, yet.

  Ceri grinned and turned back to Cheryl who was examining a pair of thaumometers. ‘What do we have?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s quite remarkable,’ Cheryl replied. She indicated one of the instruments which was made of copper and mounted in a wooden box. ‘You had this built from scratch by a blacksmith and then did the calibration by dead reckoning?’

  ‘Uh-huh. The local measurement system is the quot. One quot is normal field strength across the world. I couldn’t work with that so I needed something I understood.’

  ‘Well, the expensive, electronic model we brought over is reading eight-point-nine thaums and your scale says eight-point-eight-five.’

  ‘H
uh. Yeland’s a bit more skilled than your typical blacksmith, I think, but I’m still surprised it’s that accurate. The reading’s a little higher than the natural background here as well. It was eight-point-three-five in Nedarim. Come back with me when I take Brebbam and the kids. We’ll check the level there and you’ll get to see the outside world.’

  ‘Qi boradgi tavika chovach…’ Brebbam said from somewhere among the scroll racks.

  ‘What did he say?’ Cheryl asked. ‘It sounded like he was amazed at something.’

  ‘Uh… yeah, it was… well, literally it was “I suck boradgi penis,” but Devotik is terrible about tenses.’

  ‘Maybe we should get him out of there before he faints.’

  ‘Maybe we should.’

  ~~~

  By the time Ceri walked into the magic room wearing jeans and her MIT T-shirt, the demons had grown comfortable enough being around humans and their weird clothing that no one seemed too worried about that. They still got rather quiet as the Overlord returned to the discussion.

  ‘Okay,’ Ceri said, frowning, ‘this isn’t going to work. I’m here to help and learn, just like you lot are. If you’re going to go quiet when I’m in the room, that’ll be hard.’

  ‘Overlord,’ Cagol began.

  ‘No,’ Ceri stated flatly. ‘Ayasha. Lady Ayasha if you feel you absolutely have to be formal, but I’d prefer Ayasha. You can go back to “Overlord” outside this room if you want, but not in here. And we won’t tell anyone so don’t worry.’

  ‘Lady Ayasha is most kind,’ Cagol told her, bowing his head in acknowledgement.

  ‘Lady Ayasha is being practical. How are we doing?’

  ‘Well,’ Carter said, ‘between Ed, Gwyn, Cagol, Aktik, and I, we have managed to get an agreement on some notations. I believe we should be able to bring Cheryl in now, along with the other Guandosh. Cheryl may not speak Devotik, but she does speak excellent maths.’

  Cheryl had not been listening, since they were speaking in a language she only knew a few words of, but she was looking at the various sheets of paper scattered around the floor across the carefully inscribed magic circle which took up much of its centre. ‘Oh,’ she said, ‘I see. This is a translation of a three-dimensional tube into four dimensions. If that’s actually the basis for their lines, no wonder they leak.’

  ‘I rest my case,’ Carter said, grinning.

  Cheryl looked at him, somehow sensing that she was being referred to. ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘I was simply saying that language was going to be less of an issue than one might expect,’ Carter said, ‘due to your exceptional intelligence and wit.’

  Cheryl blushed. ‘Charmer. Someone explain to me how this fits together and we’ll get started.’

  ~~~

  Aktik was looking as though someone had just spread the secrets of the world out in front of him and said, ‘There you go, this is how it works.’ In fact, Ceri was just doing her ‘thaumatology in the air’ trick, which was impressive, but most of the people there had seen it before. Even Brebbam had watched her using it to work out whether she would be able to transport Lily back to Earth without a portal.

  The young Guandosh, however, was both amazed at the working technique and at the mathematics he was seeing being used to describe the way thaumic energy from their ley lines would interact with the high-pressure salt water he spent most of his life in.

  ‘It’s the sodium ions,’ Cheryl was saying, mostly for the benefit of the non-academics watching since the demons did not understand her. ‘It just so happens that thaumitons interact with that ionic structure. Energy is lost and that’s why salt water is good at insulating against magic. Water itself produces a transmission lag, which would normally be okay, but if the water’s moving it tends to disrupt magical effects. Salt water gives you lag and energy loss, which is deadly.’

  ‘That sounds like a bit of a rationalisation rather than an explanation,’ Alec commented. ‘Magic has trouble crossing large expanses of salt water, but it’s not going through the stuff.’

  ‘It’s not an absolutely perfect explanation,’ Cheryl admitted.

  ‘It’s like gravity,’ Ceri said, her hands shifting as she rewrote a block of equations. ‘You’ve got Newton’s equations which give perfectly good results pretty much all the time, but if you look closely they don’t quite fit everything we can see. Along came Einstein and General Relativity, and that explains everything we can see, unless you’re dealing with some very small objects anyway. The Ionic Salt-Magic Theorem does a good job of explaining the basic interaction between the two. If you want the full explanation…’ She waved at a huge section of complex mathematics hanging to her right. ‘Well, there’s a lot of quantum interactions in there which make about as much sense to most people as magic usually does.’

  ‘One of the things you learn in quantum thaumatology,’ Cheryl added, ‘is that things really don’t follow common sense rules. Or rather, if they don’t it doesn’t mean they’re wrong.’

  Aktik peered lovingly at a block of equations he had just grasped, and let out a sigh. ‘This is such a revelation,’ he said in Devotik. ‘My own studies have barely scraped the surface of the subject…’

  ‘Well,’ Ceri replied, not looking around, ‘Cheryl and Ed are the teachers. Try to make some time to talk to them. They can probably suggest some lines of investigation which would push you the right way. They taught me everything I know.’

  ‘Huh,’ Ed grunted. ‘We unlocked the potential and gave some direction. You have exceptional talent. Only Gwyn is your equal in native ability.’

  ‘She’ll surpass me,’ Gwyn said. ‘She has my mate’s genes in her as well.’

  Ceri kept working and said nothing. She knew she was powerful, but the thought that she might surpass the most powerful dragon sorceress ever…

  She felt Lily shifting somewhere behind her, sensing her disquiet. Happy thoughts. They were getting somewhere with the maths, and the demons, especially Aktik, were grasping the mathematics the thaumatologists were putting before them. Now it was just a matter of explaining how to do it better.

  Herne Hill, London.

  Kate was weeding. It was spring and the unwanted plants were starting to rear their heads, and she got little enough time to tend her garden so it was a pleasure to have a little time to work on it now.

  It was more or less mindless work. Being a witch’s garden some of the plants in it might have been considered weeds by a more mundane gardener, but she knew what she was doing and the physical work was done almost automatically. It left her mind to drift and she had found that ideas would come to her while gardening which might have remained submerged otherwise.

  Now her mind brought up the image of the man who had hit her while Lo Chan was escaping their first attack. She had not got a good look at him, but she knew there was something about him which had been distinctive. It was just that her memory was not providing the detail when she tried to see it.

  He had been tall, thin… Oriental, maybe Chinese. Well that sort of fitted with Lo Chan. He had struck at Kate… struck at her backhanded with his left hand. That was something. It had been an unnatural move, clumsy, even if effective. Why his left hand? Of course he could have been left-handed, but there was something else…

  Her hands paused as the image of his retreating back came to her mind. It was uneven. She closed her eyes, seeing the image there in front of her and she knew what it was she was not seeing.

  The man who had attacked her, who had been working with Chan, had had no right hand.

  Castle of Bones, Demon Realm.

  Ceri was unsure of exactly how long they had been working on the problem, but when Gwyn had suggested they take a break she had suddenly realised how tired she was and agreed.

  Hiffy and a team of servants had brought food and drink to the reception room of the Overlord’s suite. It was not the slightly more intimate room Ceri generally entertained in when in the castle, but it could seat more people and she thou
ght it likely that her mystique would survive better if they sat there.

  Right now she was sitting watching Gwyn and Carter trying to teach Cheryl how to cast a spell while the demons sat around watching her with some consternation. Demons, the full ones, were all magically talented. Even det, who were not, could work magic in the strong field of their world, if they could learn the processes necessary to do so.

  ‘Your friend clearly knows a great deal about magic, has she never worked a simple spell before?’ The speaker was Maganola, the one female in the party of Guandosh. She was fairly obviously female; all five of them were dressed in what amounted to expensive loincloths, which left Maganola’s firm, quite full, breasts on display.

  ‘Earth has a very weak magical field compared to here,’ Ceri replied. ‘The det here find it far harder to work magic than demons do, yes?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, Cheryl is to Carter what a det is to you. She understands the mechanisms of magic better than Carter does, but she has no innate talent for it. It means she can’t normally generate the power necessary on Earth, or she would have huge difficulty anyway.’ It was a proven fact that every living thing could catalyse T-Null decay to create magical energy. That was what differentiated living things from inanimate objects. Sorcerers simply did it more easily, and mages and demons were able to use it to direct existing magic to their purpose. A normal, like Cheryl, needed more magic around them to be effective, but Cheryl was trying to do something even more complex.

  ‘She seems to be having more trouble than a typical det,’ Maganola observed.

  ‘Ah well, what Cheryl is doing is applying her magical theory to create the spell. She’s actually trying to do what Gwyn and I do rather than what Carter or you might. Well… You know some ritual magic?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘So you use that to improvise magic you haven’t specifically learned, or work spells which would normally be too difficult. I improvise almost all my magic, using my knowledge of how it works to produce the effect.’