“What’s the sword for, anyway?”
“Shut up!”
Around the outer circle, twenty-four pigs’ heads rest on their tables, all gazing blankly in toward the plinth. I’m wearing my coat and slippers, with the paper hat poised at a rakish angle. I’ve got a couple of wands—straight hazel twigs exactly nineteen and a half inches long, cut with a single stroke on the day and in the hour of Mercury—stuck through a red silk scarf tied around my waist.
Inside the inner circle, I have a brazier on a stand beside each shoulder of the body on the plinth. I strike sparks from a flint and steel.
A voice from the audience again. “What’s wrong with matches?”
“The fire has to originate in the brazier.”
I light both braziers and sprinkle in chips of agarwood. That’s what the grimoires specify; it’s hideously expensive and not strictly essential, but I adore the smell.
“I exorcise thee, O creature of fire, by him by whom all things are made, that forthwith thou castest away every phantasm from thee, that it shall not be able to do any hurt in anything.”
Flames flicker. Smoke begins to rise.
“No interruptions.”
I’ve got my instruments and materials lined up on a silk square on the floor. A white dove flutters in the cage. I chalk the last symbols into the inner ring.
I close my eyes and take a series of deep, slow breaths. Every time I start a ritual, it’s like there’s this voice in my head telling me I’m going to mess up. I asked my Master about it when I was at Saint Cyprian’s. He said it would go away.
It never has.
I look around the space. There’s only one shot at this. I open the cage and take out the dove. I secure it, wings pinned, in one hand, while I stretch for my white-handled knife with the other.
“In the name of Adonai the most high. In the name of Jehovah the most holy.”
And I cut off the dove’s head.
“Jesus Christ!” Marvell bolts for the door with her hand to her mouth.
So Plan D worked.
Now that I’ve got the place to myself, I let the blood spurt into a bowl, then stick the twitching corpse back in the cage. The head’s rolled off across the floor. I pick up the bowl and kneel beside the plinth. A lot of what you learn, training as a sorcerer, is simple physical dexterity, like juggling. You can’t afford to spill or break things. I dip my fingertips into the blood and write the word “Tetragrammaton” along one edge of the plinth.
I shuffle around the plinth and smear more words around the edge. “Adonai.” “Tetragrammaton” again, because it’s a big enough word not to look lost along the long side of the plinth. “Jehovah.”
I rinse my fingers in a basin of exorcised water. I formally seal the inner circle by drawing a line around it with my black-handled knife—there’s a lot of cutlery involved in sorcery—and sprinkle herbs and spices into the braziers.
“In the name of the Lord, Amen. In the name of the Lord who is blessed. In the name of the Lord, Amen.”
The smoke from the braziers rises vertically, then folds out into a flat cloud suspended just above my head. The candles are still burning, but the light seems to hang heavy in the room. It is reflected red in the forty-eight eyes watching me unblinkingly from the outer ring.
I start in on the names of God: “Adonai, Tetragrammaton, Jehovah, Tetragrammaton, Adonai, Jehovah, Otheos . . .”
Stuff happens because I want it to. These names, the books say they’re magical; but I think they’re just sounds, and remembering them and pronouncing them correctly—in the right sequence and with the right cadence—concentrates my mind.
Why do I need to concentrate my mind? Because I’m distracted. I’m thinking about the girl—what was her name? Kazia. I remember her horrified expression as she stared at the body on the trolley, but apart from the blonde hair, I can’t really remember what she looked like. I wonder what she thought of me—probably reckons I’m an arsehole, most people do. But suppose she doesn’t; how do I get to meet her again?
I’m thinking about the cat, decomposing back in the studio. I can salvage the skin, claws, and whiskers, but the heart and liver will be unusable.
Then there’s Marvell. I don’t think she trusts me any more than I trust her, but at least she isn’t waving amulets and making protective signs in my face.
And I really ought to visit my mum.
The smells and symbols concentrate my mind. Magic is all in the detail. Picking a herb at a certain time, under a particular conjunction of planets; cutting, shaping, and purifying a wand; making a knife myself—forging, quenching, tempering, setting, attaching the handle . . .
My Gift is focused by the instruments I wield, the space I occupy, and the words I say. What I want to happen, happens.
I stoop to pick up two lengths of thick silk thread—one black, one white. Draping one over each shoulder, I move around to the head of the plinth. Below me, the stump of the dead man’s neck. Above me, just visible through the cloud of smoke, crystals set into the domed ceiling in the form of the major constellations. No expense spared, folks!
I sprinkle saffron into each brazier. The cloud of smoke thickens.
“In this, by this, and with this, which I pour out before thy face—”
The bowl of milk spatters across the floor. On top of everything else, from now on I have to watch my step: it’s a death trap in here.
I raise my arms.
“O Eternal! O King Eternal! Deign to look upon thy most unworthy servant and upon this my intention. Vouchsafe to me thine angel Anaël, that in thy name he may judge and act justly in all that I shall require of him.”
More names. More smells and smoke. Finally I come to the point.
“Make manifest unto my eyes the things that are hidden from me.”
I pull out the two wands and use them to lift the silk threads from my shoulders. I stretch out my arms and let the white thread fall into one brazier, the black into the other.
I feel a faint tingling through my slippers and just for a moment time seems to stop. The silk threads drop vertically, as straight as arrows, until their bottom ends touch the glowing charcoal. For a second they stand there like charmed snakes. Then flames flicker up from bottom to top, completely consuming them.
There’s a sound like rushing air. The candles flutter and go out. The amphitheater is in darkness. It’s freezing cold.
I cross the wands over my head. “Come, great Lord, come, according to thy good pleasure!”
There’s this loud rumbling sound. I feel the floor tremble beneath my feet as the plinth shakes. And I get this sudden sharp pain in my chest, like someone’s poked a sword through me and they’re wiggling it about. I hold my breath—and the Presence passes, leaving only a dull ache.
Silence.
“I thank thee, because thou hast appeared and satisfied my demands.” I pick up my sword and make a single sweep with it, narrowly avoiding taking my toes off. “Do thou therefore depart in peace, and return when I shall call thee.”
The candles are burning strongly again. I cover the braziers. I grab the black-handled knife and formally cut the inner ring. Mr. Memory slides out of the gallery and comes to kneel beside me as I examine the readings from the instruments on the plinth.
The dieners slouch in again. The electric light goes on. The trapdoor in the floor opens for the pigs’ heads to go straight back to the cold store.
Chapter Six
White Mouse
Marvell’s waiting for me outside the amphitheater, still white as a sheet.
“Why didn’t you warn me?”
“I told you to get out. Anyway, he died within a few minutes of midnight.”
“How do you know?”
“Simultaneity.”
“What’s that?”
I sigh. According to my magic watch it’s nearly three. I’ve drunk more than a pint of water since the ritual, but I’m still thirsty—magic dehydrates you like hell—and I haven’t ea
ten anything since the plate of cold shepherd’s pie the termites left outside my studio eighteen hours ago.
I stumble off along the corridor. Marvell trails after me.
“I said, what’s simultaneity?”
Why fight it? “Say a butterfly flaps its wings in China, and at that very same moment, a man falls off his horse in Oxford. There’s a relation of simultaneity between the two events.”
“What’s that got to do with pigs?”
“Will you shut up and listen? The reason they built the mortuary here . . . the city abattoir’s just around the corner and we’ve got this deal. Every fifteen minutes, they pick one of the pigs they slaughter, label the head with the time of death, and send it over to us—there’s a tunnel under the houses. Then they’re kept for six months in a cold store in the basement.”
We’ve reached the lobby. The receptionist frowns as I turn the logbook and grab his pen.
“That’s a hell of a lot of heads,” says Marvell.
“Nearly twenty thousand at any one time. So if there’s a murder within fifty miles, say, and we need to establish time of death, they bring the body in—”
“But how do you know which particular heads?”
“You’ve usually got a rough idea of when someone was killed—like I was pretty sure our guy died after nine last night and before three this morning. That’s six hours. I got them to bring up the heads of pigs killed at nine, nine fifteen, nine thirty . . . every fifteen minutes until two forty-five.”
“And what if the pig wasn’t killed dead on time?”
“There’s a chronometer. And the Society does regular inspections.” I push the logbook back across the desk. The receptionist pushes his glasses up his nose and squints suspiciously at my scrawl. I turn back to Marvell. “Look, can we just get out of here? I’m starving.”
After the gloom of the mortuary the real world is alarmingly bright. I stand at the top of the steps, blinking in the autumn sunlight as I look out over a small herb garden.
“So you’ve got this body—”
“Don’t you ever shut up?”
“Just wanna know what’s goin’ on.”
I lead her down the paved walk, between two laurel hedges, toward the street.
“The body’s got all sorts of potential affinities with the pigs’ heads. Like, he could’ve walked in the field where one of the pigs foraged, or once eaten meat from one of its parents. The purpose of the ritual is to exclude all those possibilities and isolate the relation of simultaneity between his death and that of whichever pig was slaughtered closest to the same moment. And that was at midnight.”
“Caxton’ll want to know.” Marvell stops dead and hauls her scryer out of her pocket.
I say, “You know the Society can listen in to those things.”
She stares at me. She really doesn’t know whether to believe me or not.
“I’m not saying don’t use it. Just telling you, that’s all.”
Her scryer is this flat, round case, about five inches in diameter, made of silver, with an enamel eye set into the lid and symbols engraved around the rim. When she opens it, there’s a diagram etched inside the base: a man inside a circle, his head, hands, and feet touching the points of a five-tipped star. She touches the five tips, then blows on the surface of the mirror inside the lid.
I leave her to it and wander away to lean over the gate to the street and gaze out at a normal day in Doughnut City. Vans and horses, a few idiots on bicycles trying to weave their way through the mountains of dung, pedestrians scuttling for their lives . . .
But here’s something to brighten everyone’s day: a line of maybe a couple hundred men shuffling up the road in single file. It’s freezing cold for late September, but they’re all stripped to the waist; and each one of them is holding a sword, resting across the nape of the neck of the man in front of him.
I can only pray that the idiot leading them doesn’t trip. He’s cross-eyed with concentration, clutching a heavy wooden cross.
Marvell’s beside me, stuffing her scryer back in her pocket. “It’s his Mass.”
“Huh?”
“Saint Oswald . . . you know, to commemorate his death. Tomorrow night.” She nods toward the line of penitents. “Stupid bloody prats! My dad used to do that lark—nearly got his ear cut off one year. I’m telling you, this whole case, it’s no coincidence—”
“How’s Caxton?”
“She’s got a job for us.”
“Us? Look, we can get a sandwich around the corner.” I often go to this scruffy dive, the Russian Tea Room, with Charlie.
“There’s a housemaid at the palace—doesn’t live there, comes in every day. Only she didn’t turn up this morning and the Chief wants to talk to her.”
“You know where she lives?”
“Eynsham.”
“So you don’t need me.”
The line of penitents is still passing. People on the pavement cross themselves and haul out rosary beads. Behind them, on the window of an empty shop, there’s a poster. It shows a screaming face surrounded by red and yellow flames. Big letters: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.” And an emblem in the top right-hand corner: a burning pentagram.
Ring any bells?
“Her name’s Alice Constant.” Marvell smiles. Not at me, but sort of down into herself. “I used to know her.”
“That’s useful. You won’t need a photograph either, then.”
“So are you coming?”
I’m about to say no when I notice a man standing beside the poster, staring fiercely back at me.
I know that stare. The first time I ever saw it, I’d been at Saint Cyprian’s for about a year and I’d decided the rule forbidding novices to leave the seminary was stupid, so I jumped out of a window into a tree, climbed down, and scuttled off into the town, looking for adventure.
I found it, all right. I was going past a pub when I spotted these four blokes giving me the look. I knew at once what it meant and I turned and ran for it, but I was too slow. They got bored with kicking me quite quickly, and it was getting late; so they stripped me naked, tied me to the railings outside Saint Cyprian’s, and rubbed nettle leaves into my eyes.
This time it’s not just the stare that I know, it’s the man doing the staring. I recognize him from earlier this morning when he tried to stick a knife in me.
So we’re miles out of town, rattling up a grubby street in Eynsham, when Marvell says, “That’s all very clever. The thing with the pigs.”
“We think so.”
“In a demented sort of way. It’s like a religious order, right? The Society?”
“Founded by Johannes Trithemius in 1513. Approved by the papal bull Regimini artis magicae ecclesiae, 1563.”
And pretty much a law unto itself. The Society doesn’t actually take over small countries, but it knows people who do and it’s always happy to supply the necessary resources. At a price, of course.
“This is a waste of time,” I say.
“Yeah, it’s what I told Caxton: we find Wallace sitting there with his head cut off, holding this book he wrote about this saint who got his head cut off and who’s got this big Mass comin’ up in the cathedral tomorrow night.” She stops to breathe. “Not a coincidence.” Marvell folds her arms. “And Alice wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
I’m about to point out firstly that we don’t know for certain that it is Wallace and secondly that there’s got to be sorcery because of the elemental on the gate, when the van stops dead and I remind myself to keep my mouth shut until I get a chance to speak to the Society. Marvell gets out and starts arguing about overtime with the driver. I step down and look around . . .
The way my life works, I don’t see much of the big wide world. Most days I scurry around my studio like a hamster in a wheel. Every now and then I get tossed into a van and hauled across to the mortuary to wave wands and watch Ferdia turn dead people inside out. The plan is that I’ll be this expert forensic sorcerer by the time he’s gone ho
pelessly post-peak. Sometimes I get driven out to crime scenes all on my own to pretend I know what I’m doing. And there’s the occasional midnight flit out into the back-end of nowhere to gather wild herbs or trap animals.
“You OK?” Marvell’s staring at me.
My point is, I don’t do normal stuff—so-called. I’ve never been to the cinema. My dad took me to the Vaudeville when I was a little kid and there was a stage magician who made a little boy disappear. Later I realized it was mirrors, not real magic, but at the time I was so scared that I set the theater on fire.
If only my dad had understood then that he had a paying proposition on his hands.
“I’m fine,” I say. But I’m not: I’m dead nervous. I really don’t like being out in the open like this. And I’m not sure that I like the look of the cab that’s just pulled in, a hundred yards back along the street.
“That one, right?” I’m pointing at a crumbling terraced house. But Marvell’s still busy swapping pieces of paper with the driver.
There’s a dozen kids slumped on a step outside a small factory on the corner. One by one they look up and stare at my case.
“Hey, Marvo,” I hiss. “Hurry it up!”
The kids haven’t quite worked out what I am, but they know I’m not right, and they’re whispering intently to each other about it. And there’s this old bloke staring out at me from the front window of the house with an amulet to his lips.
“Marvo!”
“What did you call me?”
“Marvo. You know, coz of Marvell.”
She grins. “Yeah, I can live with that.”
There’s this narrow staircase going up, floor after floor, with no light and just a rickety banister to cling on to. My case weighs a ton and I’m sweating like a pig. One false move and I’m a pancake in the cellar.
“When I was really small,” I pant, “you know, before they discovered I was Gifted—I had this fantasy of going on the stage and doing tricks. I was going to call myself Marvo the Boy Wonder.”
A Dangerous Magic Page 5