A Dangerous Magic

by Donald Hounam

  OK, that’s a relief: I know why he’s here now, and for once I haven’t screwed up.

  He listens patiently as I run quickly through the facts. When I get to the sorcerer’s mark on Wallace’s chest, he says:

  “Yes, that’s how we met, as novices at Saint Cyprian’s. But Henry was only marginally Gifted. He left after a year and transferred to Douai to train for the mainstream priesthood.”

  “His book—”

  “I heard he was found holding a copy.” The Boss smiles sadly. “He’d have appreciated that; he was very proud of it. Didn’t make him any friends in the Church, of course, but that doesn’t seem like a reason to kill him.”

  “Was it a coincidence, though?”

  “Was what a coincidence?”

  “Half of the book’s about Saint Oswald, who got his head cut off five hundred years ago. And here we are now, running around like chickens, trying to work out who left a decapitated corpse—”

  “You sound like you’re not sure the body is Henry.”

  “There’s no proof yet.”

  “Who else could it be? And Henry is missing . . .”

  “What I’m trying to say . . . whoever he is, he’s lost his head and he’s sitting in Wallace’s library, clutching a copy of this book. And they’ve got this big Mass tomorrow night and they’re gonna pull out Saint Oswald’s head and make everybody come over all queasy.”

  Matthew sits down, his coat draped over his knees. “Do the police have any thoughts?”

  I roll my eyes.

  “Yes, I can imagine it would be a little esoteric for them. They’d probably prefer a burglar.”

  “Or the ASB.”

  Matthew looks at me keenly. “Would the Brotherhood go that far?”

  “They had two goes at me today.”

  He smiles. “That’s understandable, though, isn’t it?”

  I pretend to think that’s funny.

  “They’re the most likely suspects, I suppose.” He stares down at the chalk marks on the tiles. I’m just beginning to wonder if there’s more trouble that I’ve forgotten I’m in, when he looks up. “Since it might concern the Society, can I ask you to keep me informed? Obviously you don’t work for me, strictly speaking . . .”

  I like to think of myself as a sort of hostage, handed over to the jacks in return for an unspoken promise not to look too closely at what the Society’s getting up to.

  “I’ll do my best,” I say.

  “Good boy. I don’t want you to withhold any information from the police, just let me know what develops.” He gets to his feet. “Is there anything else?”

  I describe the confused security elemental at the river gate, but the Boss holds up his left hand, the one missing the little finger. “I’d look for an instantiation error before jumping to conclusions.” He checks his watch. “Frank, I have to rush. Call me if you need to.”

  I nod.

  He pulls on his coat and says, “You haven’t forgotten the disciplinary committee hearing next week?”

  “Certainly not.” Thanks, Marvo. Matthew is looking down at me like he’s waiting for something, so I mumble, “I’m sorry. I know it was stupid, the business with the eye.”

  “And then you go and pick the wrong people to be rude to.”

  In this case, a Society investigatory committee. I do my apologetic face. “I usually do.”

  “I’ve noticed.” The smile flickers and dies. “But maybe it’s time you learned that you can’t just charge around leaving a trail of destruction behind you.”

  He’s right, of course. Pity I can’t get the hang of it.

  “Anyway, I’m not going to preach.”

  My door opens. I watch Matthew walk away along the corridor. The outer door closes behind him.

  When I’m sure he’s gone, I sit down and close my eyes. I don’t move for twenty minutes. Then I grab a stick of chalk and step up to my blackboard. I give myself another minute to wonder whether this is such a good idea; then I write all my code out again from memory.

  After that it’s routine. Up at the fireplace I crumple a few sheets of newspaper in the grate and lay twigs across them. As the flames flare up I kneel and hold out the two wands I used in the amphitheater. “In the name of he who died on the tree.” I break each of them into three and drop the fragments into the fire. The bark curls and darkens . . .

  And I get this sharp pain again, where my heart would be, if I had one.

  Sympathy.

  And that’s only the start of a very long night, tidying, replenishing, and re-purifying. I’m sure I reconstructed the code on the blackboard correctly, but it makes less sense than ever. Still, there’s Kazia to dream about . . .

  Except that I can’t help wondering about Marvo’s brother. Far as I’m aware, nobody’s ever been killed by a Ghost—with an elemental at the wheel, it’s just not supposed to happen.

  Sure, I know I told her I’d think about it; but I was just trying to shut her up. Even to ask anybody about it . . . I’d sound like an idiot.

  My mum never gave my dad a second thought—just glad to see the back of him. It’s a year since Marvo’s brother died, and it still bothers her enough for her to ask somebody she doesn’t even like to help her out.

  The hell with it. Back to Kazia. I can picture the haircut, and something about her eyes. But that’s as far as I can get . . .

  Even so, I can’t get her out of my mind. My heart’s banging away. Can this be love? Unfortunately it’s not a subject we covered at Saint Cyprian’s.

  There’s a ritual in one of the old grimoires to cause maidens to dance naked before you, and there’s all sorts of spells to make a woman fall in love with a client. Which tells you a lot about the sort of clients private sorcerers get.

  But what do I know about it? Somewhere along the line I signed up to a vow of chastity. I was six at the time and didn’t even know what the word meant.

  Change the subject, Sampson! I feel bad about spooking Alice Constant, but it wasn’t really my fault—

  Damn! I need to bury that bloody cat before it totally stinks the place out.

  Chapter Eight

  Autopsy

  The time by my magic watch, when I manage to get my eyes open, is eight o’clock. Brush teeth. Shave face and head. Examine result. Smile. Not a pretty sight. And I’ve spotted a mistake in my reconstructed code that I’d better fix while I remember . . .

  So it’s after ten when I slip into the autopsy room. No sign of Caxton, but Marvo’s there. She’s abandoned the deck-chair look and come dressed as a funeral director: black trousers and shoes and a dark gray coat, missing a button.

  The main attraction is the body, laid out naked on a solid silver slab under a bank of electric lights. The entire rib cage has been lifted away and Ferdia—smartly turned out in a pale blue rubber apron over black silk overalls and exorcised latex gloves—is leaning over the glistening stew of internal organs, hacking away with a scalpel.

  I put my case on the bench and hang up my jerkin. “Have I missed anything?”

  Ferdia straightens up and stretches. “He was standing when he was stabbed. He went down, first on his knees”—he points to bruises on both kneecaps, then to more on the left arm and shoulder—“then on his left side, with his arm caught under him. The little finger of the left hand is broken.”

  “Well, I don’t suppose that bothered him too much.” I pick up the silver dish containing Wallace’s heart.

  “Blood in the pericardial sac,” says Ferdia. “Moderate hypertrophy—”

  “He liked his food,” says Marvo.

  “Puncture in the right ventricle.” Ferdia points with his scalpel in case I’ve missed it. “Definitely the stab wound that killed him. Narrow, unserrated blade. Triangular cross-section. Fruit knife. Penknife . . .”

  No argument from me. Ferdia may not be able to control anything more demanding than a contiguity test these days, but he’s dissected a lot more corpses than I have. I put down the heart in time to catch
him staring intently at Marvo.

  The door opens. “I thought I told you to wait for me!”

  Caxton is looking her usual cheerful self as she kisses and pockets her amulet. She’s brought a friend: a small dog, wearing a pink flea collar. Not a real dog, of course: a search elemental built to bark and wag his tail if his twin, who’s sniffing around out there somewhere, turns up the missing head.

  She plonks her spectacles on her nose and pulls out a notebook. She blinks and runs the point of a pencil down a list. “Contiguity?” she says.

  Ferdia turns to the bench and opens a silk bundle to reveal a small brush. “From Bishop Wallace’s bedroom.” He picks up a pair of tweezers and teases out a few hairs. “I’ll run them against hairs from the body this afternoon.”

  “Good.” Caxton ticks something off. The notebook and pencil go back in her pocket. She puts on a pair of silk gloves, pulls out an evidence sachet, and tips a small sheet of paper into her palm. “We found this in the pocket of one of Wallace’s jackets.”

  The note is short, simple, and to the point. I can read it upside down, but even with her goggles on, Caxton can’t. Sometimes I’m dangerously close to feeling sorry for her. Luckily Marvo knows what she’s here for. “Leave her alone,” she reads, and looks up at Caxton. “No signature.”

  “Cherchez la femme!” Caxton mutters.

  Ferdia smirks. “The husband, more like!”

  “What about Alice?” Marvo glances at me. “Has anyone seen her?”

  “Not yet.” Caxton nudges the dog out of the way and squints distastefully down at the body. “Could a woman have done that?”

  “Sure,” I say, stepping back out of whacking distance. “My mum did it to my dad.”

  The dog stares up at me in surprise.

  “Stupid nekkers!” Caxton stuffs the note back into the sachet and drops it on the bench.

  Nekker’s short for necromancer—a sorcerer who raises the dead to predict the future. It’s not a term of endearment.

  While Caxton gets Ferdia to run through everything again, Marvo whispers to me. “What was that about your dad?”

  “Just kidding. He did for himself. Fell asleep with a lighted cigarette.”

  That was before my mum won the lottery. She blew the money and now she’s living in this wreck of a place just outside town, up on Boar’s Lump. Unlike my dad, she wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  Ferdia is pointing at bits of the body like the true professional that he is. Caxton has her notebook and pencil out again and is printing away laboriously. Her eyes swim dizzyingly behind her glasses as she struggles to focus.

  Finally she turns to Mr. Memory, sitting patiently in the corner in his baggy suit. He’s changed his bow tie but carried the food stain across.

  “Knives from the palace,” she says. “Anything sharp . . .” The elemental raises his hand and an array of cutlery manifests in midair. There’s various carving and bread knives, and a dozen more, too small to have severed the head and too big to have inflicted the chest wound. Plus a potato peeler. Also a meat cleaver.

  “Show me that.”

  Tell Mr. Memory what you want and he’ll give it to you. He exists to oblige. He hands Caxton the cleaver. No risk of creating a contiguity, by the way: the real cleaver is safe in a drawer, wrapped in silk.

  She peers at the blade, then holds it up for Marvo to examine. “Blood?”

  “Can’t see any, but it could’ve been washed.” Marvo looks up at Ferdia. “Better test it.”

  Caxton runs a finger along the edge. “Waste of time. Too blunt. What do you think we used to pay executioners for? You’ve got to be strong and the blade’s got to be razor sharp.” I don’t like the way she’s looking at me. “Even professionals sometimes took four or five swipes to finish the job.” She hands the cleaver back to Mr. Memory.

  “One good blow in this case,” says Ferdia. “Chipped the fifth vertebra and severed the spinal cord. A sharp weapon rather than a heavy one.”

  “How d’you know?”

  “The second blow was accurate, right into the existing cut.”

  “OK,” says Caxton. “Suppose the bishop’s being unbishoply—”

  “Suppose it’s not the bishop,” I suggest, just for the hell of it.

  “If you’ve nothing useful to say, don’t say it!” Caxton’s giving me what’s meant to be a blank stare, but with her prescription it actually looks like a couple of angry jellyfish trapped in goldfish bowls. “The husband’s sent him that note. Lures him out, say to the riverbank, kills him, brings the body back—”

  “But that doesn’t makes sense, Chief,” Marvo objects. “You’d need two people to move the body—three with a loose head rolling around—”

  This is the bit I love: when nobody actually knows anything, so they just make up stories and try to fit the facts around them.

  “Have you got a better idea?” says Caxton.

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, let me know when you do.”

  That’s the other thing tatties are for: coming up with bright ideas out of nowhere. They call them insights.

  “The beheading could’ve been done back inside the palace,” says Ferdia.

  “No blood,” says Marvo.

  Caxton’s turn. “But if he was already dead . . .”

  “There’s still got to be two weapons.” Marvo turns to Mr. Memory. “And what about the book?”

  “In his new book, the Bishop of Oxford turns his formidable analytic intelligence to one of the great controversies of Western Christendom, the acceptance of sorcery as an article of faith. In particular he re-examines the martyrdom and subsequent canonization of Saint Oswald of Oxford—”

  “All right,” says Caxton. But the elemental is on a roll.

  “The bishop concludes that the cult of Saint Oswald has the potential to heal the current rift between the Society of Sorcerers and the mainstream Church. This is a provocative and insightful book by one of—”

  “That’s enough!” Caxton glares at me. “You told Marvell that Wallace was a sorcerer.”

  “No, I said he was a novice.” I give Marvo my withering look. She sticks her tongue out at me. “Most bishops of Oxford are former members of the Society.”

  Ferdia nods. “It’s a tradition.”

  “You nekkers,” Caxton mutters, “you’re all in it together.”

  “Wallace gets beheaded, just like Saint Oswald, forty-eight hours before this big Mass in Oswald’s memory—it’s gotta be something to do with that.” Marvo’s frowning like her head hurts. “Makes more sense than a jealous husband with a dagger in one hand and a cleaver in the other.”

  “Where is that bloody head, anyway?” says Caxton. The dog looks up at her apologetically.

  “I know!” says Marvo.

  “Yes?” Caxton’s pencil is twitching to go.

  “The beheading and the book, it’s like . . .” Marvo’s face is all screwed up. “You know what I mean, Frank . . .”

  I raise my hands. “I don’t know anything.”

  We wait. “Sorry, it’s gone.” Marvo’s face is white. “Maybe it’ll come back.”

  “I hope so,” says Caxton.

  Marvo blinks. “But this isn’t some burglary gone wrong, where the killer could be any creep in the city.”

  “Maybe it’s a burglary trying to pretend it’s not a burglary,” says Ferdia helpfully.

  “Maybe it was an accident.” I pull on my jerkin.

  “Did I say you could go?” Caxton turns to Mr. Memory. “Any other knives?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Garden tools?”

  He makes a pass in the air. The array of kitchen cutlery evaporates, to be replaced by a pair of secateurs.

  “Sure,” I say. “He was snipped to death.”

  “The cathedral,” Marvo says quickly. “P’raps we should search it again.”

  It’s the first intelligent suggestion anyone’s made, but Caxton just peers cross-eyed at her watch, gives up, and turns
to the clock on the wall. “They’ll be setting up for tonight. And we’ve been right through the place, anyway.”

  I’ve got this picture in my head: a line of jacks, all wearing glasses, down on their hands and knees, feeling their way up the nave of the cathedral.

  Caxton turns a page in her notebook. “I don’t get it; they come in through the gate from the river and go all the way around to the cathedral, just to steal a candlestick to break a window? Because there’s nothing missing . . .”

  “Apart from the obvious,” I point out.

  We all stare down at the empty space, just north of the corpse, where there ought to be a head.

  “But who’d want to decapitate a bishop?” Caxton’s razor-sharp brain has registered this crucial detail and she isn’t letting go of it. She’s got it written down in large capital letters: “DECAPITATE A BISHOP?”

  “Someone with a grudge against bishops?” I suggest, bending down to scratch the dog’s ears. “Another bishop, who fancies this bishop’s palace?”

  “At midnight.”

  “Around midnight.” I’ve got a nasty feeling about where she’s going with this.

  “What the hell would anyone want with a bishop’s head?”

  The question seems to be directed at me, so I put the noose around my own neck. “D’you mean, what would a sorcerer want with a bishop’s head? We don’t use human body parts.”

  Everyone just looks at me, including the dog. I can feel my face going red.

  That stupid thing I said I’d done—the thing Marvo shopped me for . . . Look, the reason I’ve been scrawling all that stuff on the blackboard back at my studio is because I’ve been trying to decode an old incantation and I’d tried just about everything and it still wasn’t working, and I had this wild idea that a human eye might do the trick. So a few weeks back, there was this body we’d finished with in the mortuary . . . I mean, I didn’t think anybody would notice, you know, once the eyelids were closed.

  But of course bloody Marvo noticed.

  I don’t think the jacks cared much, one way or the other. It’s the sort of thing they expect—the sort of thing they wave amulets around to protect themselves from. But the Society took a Very Dim View of it.