The body is back in the ice room. My ring is in my case, where it can’t mess anything up. The head is watching suspiciously from a silk square on the bench. I’ve chalked a square on the tiles around a small table, leaving myself enough room to light a couple of braziers and hop around inside without falling over my own feet. I’ve done the symbols, put on my paper hat, and pinned a sheet of paper to my chest. The grimoires specify that the operator should wear a linen coat with various symbols embroidered across the breast in red silk, but I can’t be bothered dragging one across from the amphitheater. So I use a sheet of paper with a complicated symbol representing the coat—complete with its symbols—drawn in my own blood. It’s all in the math.
“In the name of Adonai the most high. In the name of Jehovah the most holy.”
I take a paper sachet from the table and sprinkle the herbs into both braziers. Flames crackle and dance. An almost invisible mist rises to fill the magic space inside the square. I pick up my wand and draw the signs in the air.
“Adonai, Tetragrammaton, Jehovah, Tetragrammaton . . .”
I pick up the blue dish and tip out the scrapings of blood from the stump of the neck into one of the braziers. They spit momentarily on the hot charcoal. I hold my wand out horizontally and watch as a thin plume of powder-blue smoke drifts up and wraps itself in a spiral around the wand. The color’s a bit flashy, but I like to keep myself on my toes . . .
This is delicate work. They’ll tell you that sorcerers abstain from alcohol and all that stuff to keep their bodies pure, but that’s bollocks: we’re working with all sorts of poisons all the time. The reason we don’t drink or do drugs is because if your hands aren’t steady, at best you have to start again. And at worst you’re dead—and dragged off to God knows where by God knows what.
I have to keep the wand absolutely motionless while I put down the blue dish and pick up the yellow one. I tip out the blood scrapings from the head. A plume of smoke rises from the second brazier, cowslip-yellow this time.
“Adonai, Jehovah, Otheos . . .”
I clear my mind and focus on the two plumes of smoke, coiled around the wand. Carefully I pull it back, leaving them suspended in midair, still entwined.
“Athenatos, Aschyros, Agla, Pentagrammaton . . .”
What’s supposed to happen, right—the blue and yellow plumes should blur and drift together into a pure green, proving contiguity.
Except that nothing happens.
I wait. Ten seconds. Twenty . . .
I hear the door open. I figure it’s Marvo and I raise my free hand to shut her up before she distracts me.
“What the hell are you playing at?”
Oh Christ, it’s bloody Ferdia!
Concentrate, Frank. One yellow plume. One blue. What’s going on here?
“Sampson!”
Ferdia has walked across to face me. I try to ignore him, but he plants himself in front of me.
I shake the wand, grab my black-handled knife, and stoop to cut the square. The two plumes of smoke drift out, one yellow, one blue, maintaining their distinct identities until they finally disperse into the air of the laboratory.
Ferdia puts a silk-wrapped package on the bench. “The skull from the river.” He turns to Marvo, who’s standing just inside the door. “Are you going to scry Caxton, or do I have to?”
She just stands there looking down at the floor.
“Suit yourself.” He pushes past her. His footsteps recede along the corridor.
“Told you not to do it.” Marvo puts a plate on the bench. “Sandwich. Ham and pickle all right?”
“What do I owe you?”
“Don’t be a prat, Frank.”
“Sorry.”
Well, I am. Sorry. And a prat. My trouble is, I want people to like me but don’t trust them when they give any sign of it. Most of the time, I find Caxton’s hostility easier to deal with. I guess that’s why I keep winding her up.
I’m starving. I grab the plate.
“I gave them all a lick so I’d be sure I was getting you the best one.”
“Don’t hang around for my sake.” I don’t know why I’m saying this, but I can’t stop myself. “Stick with lover boy.”
She pulls her scryer out of her pocket and stabs at it with her fingertips. “Damn!” She snaps it shut and opens it again. More wild stabbing. She glares up at me. “Can’t have a sensible conversation on these bloody things anyway. I’m going over to wait for Caxton.” The scryer’s back in her pocket. “You coming?” She grabs the plate from me and she’s gone.
A relic’s a relic; I unwrap the skull and pocket a loose tooth. I realize, as I scoot after Marvo, that the result of the ritual was no surprise: I was expecting something like this. I just thought everybody would be telling me how clever I am.
Heading into the jack shack we pass Charlie, sitting on the steps outside the main door, smoking a cigarette. He gives me this look like, what’s going on? But Marvo’s already got the door open and steam coming out of her ears.
Inside, up a dingy flight of stairs and along a sad corridor, it turns out that the grown-ups have got more important stuff to do than talk to us kids. Marvo throws herself into a chair outside Caxton’s office and starts rapping her heel on the green linoleum. I don’t want to talk to her, but I don’t want her to think I’m ignoring her, so I tell her I need some fresh air and wander back outside.
Charlie’s tipping tobacco into a fresh cigarette paper. I park my case and sit down beside him. Daylight, ouch! I pick up a sharp pebble and scratch a pentagram on a paving stone.
Sorcerers. We’re an insecure bunch. We’ve been handed this Gift that everyone’s jealous and scared of, only it doesn’t last. With luck you get five years, maybe seven, at the peak of your powers. After that it’s downhill. And what are you when you’re not a sorcerer anymore? Just some sad bastard with a set of skills you can’t do anything with. Except teach, or mess around with elementals.
“Charlie, can I ask you a question?”
He grins. “Can I stop you?”
“When you lost it, what did it feel like? I mean, how did you know?”
The grin has disappeared. He runs the tip of his tongue along the gummed edge of the paper and rolls the snout between his fingers. He picks away a loose strand of tobacco from the end. He holds it out to me. I shake my head.
“Never tempted?” he says.
“If I want to damage myself, I’ve got a studio full of cutlery.”
“Are you still doing that?” He sticks the snout in his mouth and sets fire to it.
“Nah, got bored. You don’t have to answer the question if you don’t want to.”
Smoke drifts off up the street. Finally he says, “I think it’s different for everyone. I mean, you were pals with Dinny Saint-Gilles, weren’t you?”
Dinny was in the year ahead of me at Saint Cyprian’s. He was an OK guy, even if he was French. He graduated and got a job with Research and Development at the Ghost factory out in Cowley. Golden future, the world his oyster . . .
Until his Gift was taken away. Like, overnight. He went to bed a sorcerer and woke up . . . well, not a sorcerer. He took the train into work, hung up his coat, walked down to the body shop, and fed both hands into the machinery.
“Me,” says Charlie, “it was just getting more and more like hard work. So you’re tired and you convince yourself that’s the problem and you just need to try harder—you know, get the symbols spot-on, and all that. You spend hours setting up, so now you’re exhausted before you even start to make magic—”
The door opens behind us and Caxton’s sergeant, Gerry Ormerod, steps out. He’s followed by this sad-looking middle-aged bloke wearing a grubby dog collar and struggling to poke a spindly pair of horn-rimmed glasses into the top pocket of a shiny black suit.
Gerry looks down at Charlie. “Caxton wants an elemental if you’ve got a minute,” he squeaks. I have to struggle to keep a straight face. Charlie nudges me in the ribs. We watch Gerry lead the
cleric across the street to a van.
“Go easy on him,” says Charlie.
“Why?”
Charlie points to his eyes. “Just starting to go.”
“It’s not the same as losing the Gift, though.”
“Isn’t it?” Charlie takes a long drag at his roll-up. “I was nearly twenty-two.”
“That’s late.”
“Yeah, I’d even begun to think I was the exception—you know, the guy who never loses it.” He turns away from me as he puts the snout up to his mouth again, but he makes this weird movement with his hand and I realize he’s wiping away tears.
“Then one day, it’s not like you’re getting funny results or anything. You’re just standing there with all the gear on and, I dunno . . . it just isn’t happening. You look around and everything’s right—the geometry, the symbols, the smells . . .”
Gerry slams the van door on the bloke in the dog collar. The driver flicks the reins, and the horses twitch resentfully and move off.
“I was afraid, Frank. That was it.”
“But everyone’s afraid.”
“Nah, this was different. I wasn’t afraid of looking like a fool or of what could go wrong. I was afraid of myself. I knew I couldn’t be trusted anymore.” He throws away the cigarette butt and pulls out his tin again. “I did consider topping myself.”
“Nobody does, though, do they? Funny, that.”
“Not being a sorcerer’s better than being dead and not a sorcerer.” Charlie shrugs. “You get used to elementals.”
Gerry is coming back across the street toward us.
“So what about me?” I ask.
“Sorry, can’t help you. Law of averages says you should be good for another few years . . . maybe longer—you’re the best sorcerer I ever saw.”
I blush. I mean, Matthew says that but he’s kind of got this interest, you know? Because he’s my Master.
When Charlie says it, it’s like it really counts.
He shrugs. “Who knows, though. It’s a bugger.”
Gerry arrives. “Who was that?” I say, nodding toward the van as it disappears around the corner.
“James Groce. Rector of Saint Ebbe’s church. There was a letter from him on Wallace’s desk, remember?”
“Not really.”
“What about the note we found in Wallace’s jacket pocket? Remember that?”
“Sure I do. It said, ‘Leave her alone,’ right?”
Gerry nods. “The handwriting on Groce’s letter matches the note. Get it?”
“What’s Groce’s story?”
“He admits to writing the note, but he says he only did it to give Wallace a scare.” Gerry’s squeak sharpens. “Apparently there’s a whole gang of clergy who don’t like nekkers and resented Wallace’s book, and they were planning to resign their livings together in protest. Groce is one of them. He says he’d heard rumors that Wallace had an eye for the ladies, so he sent the note out of malice, just to put the wind up him.” He glares at Charlie. “Didn’t I tell you—?”
“That Caxton wants an elemental. Sure,” says Charlie. “What’s it for?”
“The missing housemaid, Alice Constant.” Gerry turns to me. “Nobody’s seen her since you and Marvell lost her.”
I say, “I thought you were trying to fit the ASB up for Wallace.”
“We’re open-minded. Seems like Groce was playing around with the housemaid. We figure—”
“We?”
“Me and Caxton.” Gerry blinks and moves his hand toward his eyes. But he catches me watching him and jams it in his pocket. “We figure maybe Wallace was messing about with her too and Groce murdered him. But Groce says he’s never even heard of Alice Constant.”
“He doesn’t really look bright enough to juggle a book, a head, and a reliquary,” I point out. “I mean, have you got anything specific that ties him to the murder?”
“No.” He glares at Charlie. “So are you coming or not?”
Charlie sighs as he puts his tin away and climbs to his feet. He’s almost back inside the jack shack when he turns back to me and says, “The ritual this morning—yeah, news gets around. But how did it feel?”
“OK, I guess. It felt right.”
“There you go, then.”
The door closes behind him. I sit there watching one of the police drivers set his horse up with a nose bag. Finally the door opens again and Marvo yells, “Caxton says, where the hell have you got to?”
The more energy someone wastes yelling at you, the less likely they are to hit you. About the only useful thing I learned from my dad.
Caxton finally gets bored of hammering on about stupid teenage sorcerers making a mess of everything. Hanging on the wall behind her is a curious silver object: a circular plaque, about ten inches across. Engraved in the center is an open human eye, with an owl perched on top. An amulet against the evil eye. Ironic, really. I nudge Marvo and nod in its direction, but she ignores me.
“OK,” I say. “But there’s still no contiguity between the head and the body.” And in case I’m being too technical for Caxton: “They’ve never been in contact with each other.”
I’m sitting beside Marvo beneath row after row of framed prints of women’s soccer teams, most faded to a uniform gray by exposure to the sheer tedium of Caxton’s company. Marvo’s knee is bounding up and down. Ferdia is perched seductively on a filing cabinet wearing his “I’d never do anything that stupid in a million years” look.
I’m definitely the center of attention. Caxton has gone red in the face. Even the soccer teams in the pictures look narked off with me.
Marvo just looks . . . disappointed.
“That’s impossible,” says Ferdia. “There’s got to be contiguity.”
“Sez you.”
“You’re this close!” Caxton has got hold of a penknife and waves it in my face. She’s in a crappy mood again. Maybe she’s missing the dog.
“The head,” says Marvo. “Definitely Wallace, right? So the body has to be him too.”
“Does it?” I ask.
Caxton has abandoned the idea of cutting my cheek open—for now at least—and is hacking away at a pencil. “Who else could it be?”
“You’re the detective.”
Before she can fly across the desk at me, Marvo says, “Frank, you didn’t sleep last night . . .”
Is that meant to help?
“I’m fine.”
“But you could’ve made a mistake.”
“I don’t make mistakes.” I turn to Caxton. “Do you want me to do it again?”
“What’s the point if you don’t make mistakes? Or are you losing it?”
I catch Ferdia’s eye. He doesn’t exactly shrug—in fact, he hardly moves. Just for a second, though, it’s like we’re both staring down the same hole.
“I’ll do it,” he says.
“No way!” I’m on my feet.
“What’s your problem?”
“You’re crap, for a start.”
“You mean, I’m taller than you.” Ferdia smirks at Marvo. The ghost of a smile flickers across her face before she manages to set it straight.
Just what the world needed: more magic.
We’re in the east wing of the mortuary, in one of Ferdia’s luxury arenas, complete with the major constellations inlaid in real diamonds across the dome. The electric lights are switched off and the man himself is standing in the middle, winding himself up.
There was this weird moment, though, two hours ago outside Caxton’s office, where he caught my arm and whispered, “I’m sorry, Frank—I didn’t mean for it to go this far.” I could see he meant well and I figured he was thinking of the moment when it all started to go downhill for him. But what I said was, “Just get on with it.”
So he did.
He looks the very model of the fashionably attired sorcerer. He has the hat. He has the gown and slippers. He has the wand and knife. He looks like something out of a pantomime. Also present: one headless corpse and one head,
allegedly the property of said corpse. Ferdia’s perfumes and fumigations can’t cover up the fact that they’re both getting just the tiniest bit ripe.
The audience are taking their seats in the gallery: me; Marvo; Caxton, tapping her pencil on an open notebook; and Mr. Memory, still in the same grubby suit and bow tie.
“This is a waste of time,” I mutter.
“In which case you’ll be proved right,” says Caxton. She catches Ferdia’s eye and nods. He glances at me uncertainly for a split second . . .
And the herbs start flying.
He’s going the tried-and-tested route: two samples of hair, one shaved from the head and the other from the body’s forearm. Wisps of smoke drift up from two separate braziers, side by side.
It’s not like he can turn up anything different from my results. He can’t rearrange the universe.
“In the name of Adonai the most high. In the name of Jehovah the most holy.”
The candles flicker. Not a dramatic touch, just a draft that he hasn’t suppressed. He wouldn’t have let that happen eighteen months ago. I give him another year before he’s trying to steal elemental work off Charlie . . .
He tips hairs from a dish into the left-hand brazier. Some of it falls to the floor but enough crackles and hisses on the glowing charcoal. A plume of black smoke rises into the air. He tips hairs from another dish into the right-hand brazier. A plume of white smoke rises. It’s a mess—all tiny eddies twitched this way and that by the draft. If this was a paying audience, they’d be hissing and booing and throwing things by now.
“Adonai, Tetragrammaton, Jehovah . . .”
This isn’t right. The two columns of smoke are already drifting into each other and he hasn’t even started the punch line.
“Otheos, Athenatos, Aschyros, Agla, Pentagrammaton . . .”
He’s wasting his breath. Invisible hands have already crushed the smoke into a compact gray cloud. No untidy wisps. No loose eddies. Ferdia looks around at me and leers triumphantly.
“I’m convinced,” says Caxton. She puts on her glasses and prints “CONTIGUITY” in her notebook. She looks down proudly and ticks it.
“Yeah, but you’re easily pleased.” I turn to Ferdia. “The smoke was merging before you even started the final incantation.”
A Dangerous Magic Page 12