“Go ahead. I’m listening.”
“I want my daughter back.”
The cloth pulls away. Groce has the disillusioned expression of someone for whom death has lived up to all his worst expectations. For a moment I ask myself, what am I playing at? But I carry on cutting down the length of the shroud.
“Outside bishop’s house, by river, I see him.” Siménas points down at Groce’s body. “Young woman too.”
“And a dog?”
While he puzzles over that, I brush a few insects away and lift Groce’s hands. They’re cold, obviously, and flabby—like fish that’ve been too long on the slab. But I haven’t got enough light to read the gashes on his wrists.
“OK.” I shuffle backward to the bottom of the coffin. “Let’s get him out.”
I look around, expecting to see Leo and Martin. Instead I get a spadeful of dirt in the face. As I try to scramble out of the grave, something cracks into the side of my head and I find myself face down in James Groce.
Let’s just say it’s disgusting.
I try to pull myself up to my hands and knees, but there’s something cold and sharp pressing down on the back of my neck. As I realize it’s the edge of a spade . . .
“Where is she?” Siménas hisses.
“Kazia? I don’t know!” The pressure increases, forcing me down. “She went home to the palace—”
“I look there!”
Oh yes, the burglary that wasn’t a burglary.
I hear shouting. The pressure of the spade is released. More yelling, then several sharp bangs. The spade rattles against the coffin as Siménas lets it drop.
I make another attempt to raise myself, but all the breath is knocked out of me as someone jumps down onto my back. I’m not on James Groce anymore; I’m in him, retching and gasping. The foul taste in my mouth could be my own bile; it could be him. I’m howling and screaming—I’m going to die down here, buried alive with a rotting corpse.
“Shut up, Frank!” Leo hisses in my ear as he scrambles off my back.
My arms are like jelly, but I manage to straighten them. I’m spitting out dirt and God knows what.
There’s a scream. More shots. Running feet . . .
I peek over the side of the grave and see two silhouettes scrambling out over the cemetery wall. As I climb out, an armed jack vaults after them. A distant shot. The crunch of glass under my feet. I crouch and fumble gingerly around. I’m holding Siménas’s broken sunglasses up to the faint glow of the cloud-shrouded moon when I spot a more immediate problem.
Everyone who’s got it in for me is here tonight. The new arrival is the Greek god from the ASB—the one who’s afraid of mice. The good news is that he doesn’t seem to have his knife. And the bad news is that he’s pointing a pistol at me.
The fat priest waddles up. He’s knock-kneed, with huge thighs that sort of roll around each other. He makes the sign of the cross. “Get thee hence, Satan! For it is written, thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him only shalt thou serve.”
OK, that didn’t hurt but I figure the next bit will. I can see the Greek god’s finger tightening on the trigger. I feel I should close my eyes for this, but I can’t. I’m thinking, wow, this is it!
When I was at Saint Cyprian’s, they promised us heaven and threatened us with hell. Light and happiness. Fire and pain. You’re a kid, right? You buy this stuff. And you kind of put it away inside you so it’s always there, even if you never really think about it till it’s too late.
The Greek god is in no great hurry. Which way? Maybe no way.
This is such a waste of time. Run for it, Frank. You never know your luck. But all I can do is stare back at this maniac who’s dead sure about hell and is about to send me off there . . .
When Martin steps out from behind the yew tree and crowns him with the back of a shovel. The priest turns and lumbers off at an astonishing speed.
No point in us hanging about, either. Leo passes up the body. We roll it over the wall and toss it onto the cart. No sign of Siménas. We throw a tarpaulin over Groce and make a dash for my place.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Too Clever By Half
Running along the narrow street behind the termite nest, there’s this wall, about twelve feet high. And if you look carefully, in the right place, you’ll see a couple of iron pegs hammered into the mortar between the stones to make footholds.
Getting Groce over the wall and into the corridor outside my studio is the easy bit. My door turns its nose up at the smell and it takes me ten minutes to talk it into opening. We park Groce in the space I’ve cleared on the bench. I give Leo and Martin half their money. They clamber out over the wall and rattle off into the dawn with the promise to come back tonight and get rid of him for me.
It’s freezing in my studio; but with the state Groce is in, fires don’t seem like a great idea. I knock back a couple of glasses of my personal energy brew; then crush rosemary and thyme leaves, roll them in a couple of tiny squares of muslin, and poke them up my nostrils. I bring in all my lamps, and set about examining Groce’s wrists.
Right, first of all, the slashes on both wrists run across the veins. Not a very effective way of killing yourself: if you really want to make a good job of it, the trick—useful tip, this—is to cut down the forearm, following the veins. But since most people don’t know that, it proves nothing.
Second point: there is a single deep, clean cut all the way across the left wrist. But the right wrist is a total mess: almost a dozen short, shallow slashes, only a couple of which actually hit the veins. Think about it. You pick up the knife in one hand and slash your other wrist. The handle’s all slippery with blood now and you’ve probably severed a few tendons, so you’re not going to do a good job when you change hands . . .
And finally, when I bring one of the lamps close in, I find a couple of hesitation cuts on the left wrist. You get them with most knife suicides, wrist or throat: sort of nervous dry runs while the punter’s trying to work up the courage to go for the big slash.
After an hour I throw a sheet over the body and sit down to sulk. No question about it: Groce killed himself.
So basically it’s seven o’clock in the morning and I’m stuck here all day with Stinky James, until Leo and Martin come back to take him off my hands. If they come back at all.
I realize that half the trick of being a sorcerer is not to think about what you’re doing. Angels and demons. Marvo hit the nail on the head: suppose it’s all true . . .
I don’t want to think about that right now. Change the subject.
Am I in love with Kazia, or do I just fancy her something rotten? What’s the difference? When I see her, my heart skips a beat. When I think about her, it’s like someone’s punched a hole clean through me. Maybe that’s love and I just can’t get my head around it, like it’s too grand for an idiot like me. I don’t do serious stuff. It only gets me into trouble.
I pull the sheet away from Groce’s face.
What was he playing at? He was a priest, so he shouldn’t have been playing around in the first place. But maybe he loved Alice, whatever that means.
I close my eyes and paint pictures in my head . . .
It’s late—nearly midnight. Groce wakes up and sees Alice creeping out. I imagine him following her, down to the towpath behind the palace and through the gate into the garden . . .
Was it the power of love that knocked the security elemental out? That’s not a serious question, by the way.
He follows her somewhere; I still don’t know where, but it has to be around the palace because Wallace is waiting for her. And there’s a pain in Groce’s heart, so fierce that he can only fix it by sticking a knife through Wallace’s heart.
I stare into Groce’s dead face. “Why didn’t you kill Alice right there and then? Why’d you wait?” He just lies there with his eyes closed. He doesn’t care anymore. Sadly, I do.
Maybe he did try to kill her and she ran for it. So why didn’t he go after her
? Who helped him carry the body into the library?
“And why all the stuff with the head?” I say aloud.
Groce seems to have this faint smile on his lips now. He knows, but he isn’t telling.
OK, let’s say he really loved Alice. He finds her with another man and does all this crazy stuff because he loves her. She hides, but he finds her and kills her because he loves her. Thinks he loves her, anyway.
Could I ever feel strongly enough about anybody to do something like that?
When I was a kid, things used to catch fire around me. Stuff in the house. The nursery where my mum used to leave me. After the pub where Dad used to hang out burned down, the penny dropped and they called in the Society. Then the Christmas after I started at Saint Cyprian’s, I came home for the holiday and this time it wasn’t the plum pudding that went up in flames. It was Dad.
So I guess there’s all sorts of things you can do to people when you love them.
James Groce. Killed the best part of himself. Then finished the job by opening his wrists.
Frank Sampson. Too clever by half.
I stuff more herbs up my nose, purify a tiny pair of tweezers, and lean over Groce’s face. I pinch the lashes of his left eye and pull the lid back . . .
The outside door creaks. I blow out the lamps. Footsteps in the corridor.
“Frank?” Marvo, of course. “You there?”
She knocks on the door. There’s just enough light seeping through the window for me to see the wood realign itself, ready to attack.
“Frank!” She bangs on the door. I hear it snarl, and her footsteps as she jumps back.
“Frank, I know you’re in there!”
Good for you.
“Frank, I’m gonna hit the door again. You can let it bite me if you want . . .”
I don’t realize quite how angry I am; but the door does, and by the time I get it open the damage has been done and she’s cringing against the wall opposite, clutching her arm.
What the hell’s happened to her? Her hair has turned white.
I drag her inside. There’s blood all over the place and she’s in shock, trembling so badly that she can barely stand up.
I haul her up to the fireplace and drop her into a chair. I relight a couple of lamps. The cuts don’t need cleaning—the thing that bit her doesn’t, strictly speaking, exist. But she’s losing quite a lot of blood and I can’t send her home like this. Quickly I throw the sheet back over Groce, before ducking back to help Marvo off with her duffle coat. I dig out the aloe, comfrey, and exorcised water and sprinkle them onto a scrap of silk, then wrap it around her wrist.
“Am I hurting you?”
“What’s the smell?”
“I farted.” Her eyes are already darting around the place. I have to get her out of here before she notices Groce. “Sorry.”
“You look like hell.” She’s staring up at me. Her voice softens. “Do they look after you here?”
“They’re not here to look after me. They’re here to keep a lid on me. They feed me. They pray they’re not in the way when the devil comes for me. You can’t say fairer than that.”
I make a pass over her arm and mutter a few words. I unwrap the silk. She stares down at the unbroken skin for a moment then says, “How did the hearing go?”
“Water off a duck’s back.”
“Seriously!”
“It was OK. I’ve got to go on pilgrimage to Rome, that’s all.”
“When?”
“No hurry. Any time today is fine.”
She looks up at me for a bit, then she says, “Travel broadens the mind.”
“Actually, it hurts the feet. I’m supposed to walk. So what are you here for, anyway?”
“I wanted to explain.”
“Why you informed on me, or why you put in for a transfer? There’s nothing to explain.” I pull her to her feet. “Good-bye.”
“Frank, wait—you gotta understand. I can’t deal with this right now.”
“You managed to deal with a bottle of peroxide.” She had me going, but now I see she’s bleached her hair, like Caxton and the rest of the CID. “I thought you were on my side.”
“Frank, I am on your side.” She’s gone red in the face.
“Doesn’t look like it.”
“You don’t make it easy.”
“The door’s behind you.”
I let go of her arm, but she doesn’t move. She looks like she’s going to cry. She mumbles, “What I said before—you know, about who told Caxton about Cimerez . . . Well, it wasn’t all true. One of the dieners spotted something. Caxton had me in. Frank, she wasn’t letting go of it . . .”
OK, so I know what it’s like—I mean, you’re just a kid and you’ve got Caxton shouting across her desk at you. But that’s why you’ve got to stick together.
Marvo’s doing her helpless look: big eyes, arms out. “What was I s’posed to say?”
“You could’ve lied.”
“I’m crap at lying. I can’t handle all this.” She’s making this wide gesture around the studio, but she stops dead and stares. “What’s that?”
And before I can grab her again, she’s ducked past me and dragged the sheet off Groce.
“Are you mad?” Her face has gone whiter than her hair. “Trying to get yourself killed?”
“Yeah, but look at this.” I grab the tweezers and pull Groce’s eyelid back. “See there? That mark?”
It’s a tiny black dot, no bigger than the head of a pin, on the inside of the eyelid.
“It’s a mark of submission,” I say.
She lights a candle and brings it close. Finally she mutters, “Never heard of it.”
“Well, of course you haven’t. I’ve never seen it before—they didn’t teach it at Saint Cyprian’s—but I read about it in this old grimoire I found.”
“What’s a grimoire?”
“A book of magic. We don’t make this crap up as we go along, you know. We get it out of books written by dead guys who made it up as they went along—”
“What I see is a ruptured blood vessel.”
“Well, it’s not. It’s an attribute, like my license. The way it works, the sorcerer sends a demon to talk to the victim and convince him of . . . you know, the utter futility of everything—”
“You need a demon to tell you that?”
“The mark, it’s a secret token of submission to a state of diabolical despair that can’t be healed by divine grace.” That’s what it said in the grimoire, anyway. “Basically, the demon talks the victim into a state of total depression. Then he tells him what to do. How to End It.”
“Got a magnifying glass?”
I hand it to her. She leans back, takes a deep breath, and leans in to peer at the dot. Finally she steps back and exhales.
“So Groce murdered Alice, then killed himself. But we knew that. Caxton closed the case.”
“She’s a fool.”
“We knew that too.” She sighs. “C’mon Frank, you’ve got something you don’t like, so you just make up this story—”
“It’s not a story. Someone made Groce do it. Same person who spooked the security elemental by the gate. Same person who stuck Wallace’s head in the reliquary then messed up the contiguity with the body . . .”
“Can you do that?”
“According to Einstein, no: contiguity can’t be destroyed by magical means. But I don’t see how any of this could’ve happened without sorcery.”
Marvo hands me back the magnifying glass. “Caxton knows it don’t make any sense. But she’s been told to wrap it up and she’s pretty sure Groce did kill Wallace, and that’s good enough. You’re wasting your time.”
“But what did Cimerez mean, ‘This guy has no head’?”
I’ll have to get that carved on my tombstone. Not that I’ll get one, the way I’m carrying on. Just a small box of ashes on Ignacio Gresh’s bedside table.
“Maybe he was winding you up,” Marvo suggests. “Demons do that, right?”
“It’s always about you, Frank, isn’t it?”
“Just get out of here, OK?”
She throws the sheet at me. “C’mon, you know who’s behind all this.”
“Do I?”
“Christ, Frank, for a bright kid you’re incredibly slow sometimes. The girl! I told you, she’s not right.”
It takes me a moment to catch on. “And I told you, girls don’t get the Gift.”
“Sez who?”
“Sez all the books.”
“And you believe them?” She grabs her coat, thank God, and I’m just about to tell the door to open—
When she chucks the coat down again and says, “So prove it.”
“Prove what?”
“That it’s not her. You’re right: there’s gotta be sorcery. So prove it’s not her. That John Dee crap up there”—she’s pointing at the code on the blackboard—“you said it was to raise the dead.” She walks over to the body. “So raise Groce. Ask him what happened.”
“You gotta be kidding!”
She’s standing beside the bench, pinching her nose between two fingers, staring down at Groce. “Frank, I saw you call up a demon. I got no idea what’s goin’ on anymore. You told me ‘nekker’ was short for necromancer and that means bringing people back from the dead to predict the future, right? So obviously you can do it.”
This is suddenly moving far too fast for me. I’m feeling a bit light-headed. “We did it at Saint Cyprian’s . . .”
“So there you are.”
“Yeah, but actually we didn’t. What they told us, people like Simon Magus and John Dee claimed to have done it, but they were lying. And if we tried it the Society would show us what it’d be like, being dead.”
“I won’t tell anyone.”
“It’s not up to you!” I yell. “It’s me who’s gotta do it and it’s not just whether the Society’ll catch up with me, it’s—”
Groce is just lying there. Marvo’s candle has gone out, so his face is in shadow. He looks . . . less pissed off about being dead.
I drop the sheet over him. “It’s whether it’s right.”
A Dangerous Magic Page 21