Science and Sorcery

by Christopher Nuttall

  Harrow regarded him blankly. They'd just had another session, where she’d taught him a handful of runes that could be used to channel mana and several more spells he could use to torment his enemies. He’d wanted to learn how to turn some of the bullies into slugs, or caterpillars, or something equally helpless, but apparently the mana wasn't strong enough to support such spells yet. It was very frustrating, but he’d just have to learn to wait. Harrow was fond of pointing out that patience was a very important part of control.

  “I do not understand the question,” Harrow said, finally. “What does God want with a starship?”

  Calvin hesitated, considering his next words carefully. They were meeting inside his dreams, inside his mind, and he had a feeling that Harrow was drawing words and concepts from his memories to ensure that she could communicate with him. But there were times when it was clear that they came from very different societies. Very few people in the modern world wouldn't know what a starship was, even if they’d never seen a single episode of Star Trek or Babylon 5. Harrow seemed barely aware of the existence of anything beyond the moon.

  “You’re teaching me all this so I can free you,” he said, finally. “Why do you need me in the first place?”

  Harrow smiled. “A good question,” she said, approvingly. “Having the ability to actually think is what separates the mundane folk from the sorcerers.”

  There was a pause. “Your theoretical understanding is incomplete,” she added, a moment later. “The easiest example would be to imagine our prison permanently held under water, constantly pushed under the waves by a stream of water.”

  “As if it were suspended under a waterfall,” Calvin said, just to show that he understood. “It can never bobble to the surface.”

  “No,” Harrow agreed. “Cracks have appeared in the prison when mana started to return to your world, enough to allow me to send my mind roaming out for magicians I can train, but not enough to permit escape. You, on the other hand, can unlock the prison with a simple ritual, once you learn how to channel enough mana to do it.”

  “Because I’m already outside the whirlpool,” Calvin guessed. Harrow inclined her head in a respectful nod. “And what happens to me afterwards?”

  “You become my apprentice and eventually graduate to becoming a sorcerer yourself,” Harrow told him. “And you will have dominion over your lands, if you choose.”

  Calvin remembered the visions she’d shown him, the first time they’d met, and nodded. He wanted power, power to keep himself safe, power to extract revenge on his tormentors. Moe was dead, but there were others who needed to be punished. And the thought of bending Marie and the other girls to his will...

  He smiled as a thought struck him. “Can I resurrect Moe?”

  “The mana is not high enough to support a resurrection spell,” Harrow informed him, flatly. “And besides, such spells are often unreliable. You would be well advised to leave them alone until you gain more experience in magic.”

  Calvin found the implications fascinating. “Do you know what happens to the soul after a person dies?”

  “It goes onwards, we believe,” Harrow said. “My old Master used to believe that a soul could be summoned back to the mortal world, but only as long as someone who remembered it was still alive. He had a theory about all times being one to the dead, so that a dead soul would return to answer every summons before going onwards to the next world.”

  “So I could summon Moe back for a friendly chat?”

  “Yes, you could,” Harrow said, “but it would be pointless. You killed him. What more do you need to do?”

  Calvin heard the irritation in her voice and changed the subject. “What are we going to study now?”

  Harrow switched gears smoothly, as if her irritation had been a facade. “Bloodlines,” she said, “and sympathetic magic.”

  It seemed to take hours in the dream as Harrow outlined the concept for him. As Calvin understood it, sympathetic magic worked through the link between a person and their blood, or skin, or hair...it was easy to use a piece of someone’s body to work magic against them. It was much less dramatic than incinerating a bully, but it was also harder to detect and counter. Smart magicians learned rapidly to guard against the prospect of someone using their hair against them, or – worse – their blood. People without magic were completely helpless against it.

  “Shape the runes you want to use carefully,” Harrow said. Runes seemed to be a way of concentrating without actually concentrating, as far as Calvin could tell. Once the magician had unlocked his magic, he could use them to cast spells. “And make sure that the material you use is definitely linked to the right person. I’ve known magicians who accidentally managed to kill themselves while trying to use sympathetic magic. Take every precaution every time you try to use it.”

  “I see,” Calvin said. Using the wrong hair would be disastrous, particularly with the more subtle curses. He might curse the wrong person and never know it. Or he might strike himself dead, if he used his own hair or pricked his finger or...there were just too many dangers for him to take it lightly. “I won’t mess it up.”

  “My Master watched me like a hawk until I could use it properly,” Harrow said. “I cannot watch you so closely. Be very careful what you do.”

  Calvin nodded, taking the warning seriously. “I’ll be careful,” he promised. He scowled as he remembered something. “I need to ask you a different question.”

  Harrow lifted a single elegant eyebrow. “What?”

  “It's complicated,” Calvin said, although he knew that it was more embarrassing than complicated. And he had no idea how Harrow would react to it. “I was using the viewing spell to look at my classmates and I think one of them sensed my intrusion.”

  Harrow considered it. “She may have magical talent of her own,” she said, finally. She didn't seem to have deduced that Calvin was trying to see the girls naked, or maybe she just didn't consider it important. “I’d suggest not working any magic around her, or she might realise that it was you casting the spells.”

  Calvin nodded. It wasn't as if Sandra was as beautiful as Marie, or several others he’d been peeking at over the last couple of days. Besides, he had a feeling that it would soon be time to take it further than just peeking in on the girls. There were all sorts of possibilities flooding through his mind.

  “Time to wake up,” Harrow said. “Goodbye...”

  Calvin crashed back into his own body, opening his eyes wide. It was 4am, as always, and he felt tired, even though he'd been sleeping. Harrow had told him that he was still thinking, even if he wasn't actually moving his body, and that he should try to get some proper sleep afterwards. He wasn't sure what he was going to do when school reopened in a couple of days, except perhaps find a way to use magic to replenish his energies. Or perhaps he could convince Harrow to only contact him during weekends...no, that wouldn't work. He needed the lessons, more than anything else.

  It was early afternoon when he opened his eyes for the second time and climbed out of bed. Downstairs, he could hear his mother and father talking about something, probably nothing particularly important. Judging from the nearby sounds, Mindy had one of her friends over and they were playing some kind of boisterous game in her bedroom. Calvin felt a flicker of envy at how easily his sister made friends before pulling on his dressing gown and heading to the bathroom. Maybe magic could be used to make friends.

  Shaking his head, he walked downstairs and into the kitchen, nodding absently to his parents. His mother was bent over the stove, cooking something that smelled nice and spicy; his father was reading the paper and commenting aloud on how absurd it was that even the President should have bought into the whole theory of magic. Everyone knew that there was no such thing. Calvin kept his face blank; he’d had a nasty shock when he’d seen the President’s speech, realising that it meant that he’d better be careful. Someone might realise that Moe and his friends had been killed by magic.

  “That’s what yo
u get for putting a liberal in the White House,” his father said, as Calvin poured himself a bowl of cereal and settled down to eat it. “They can’t fix the financial crisis, so they invent a magical crisis to get us to look away. What next? Voodoo economics?”

  Calvin rolled his eyes at the terrible joke. Parents could be so embarrassing, even to the most popular kids in school. But if his father really didn't believe in magic, he might ignore the signs that Calvin was using magic, if he grew careless enough to leave them lying around. Finishing his cereal, Calvin put the bowl in the sink, ignored his mother’s sharp look and fled the house. He had an idea in mind.

  Harrow had taught him several spells for avoiding detection. One of them worked on weak minds, she’d explained, and couldn't be trusted to fool everyone. The second used a false image to hide his real appearance and was more trustworthy, although it took more concentration to cast it and then hold the spell firmly in place. They both paled compared to the third spell, which made it hard for someone to notice him and harder still for them to remember him when they looked away. He cast the third spell around himself as he neared the school, wondering if the gym would still be open. It normally was, but the school had been closed for the past few days because of Moe’s death. Luck was with him; someone, probably Coach Thornton, had convinced the NYPD to allow the gym to remain open. It did help keep kids off the streets, after all.

  Calvin had never been inside the gym on weekends; in fact, he'd only ever gone into the building during PE, when he’d been put through hell by the PE teachers and his fellow students. The thought of remembered humiliation stung as he recalled always being the last to be chosen for teams, or times when he’d been accidentally shoved during football, or basketball, or had a ball slammed into his head. Cold rage burned away any scruples he had about extracting more than a little revenge. He was damned if he was going to leave any of the bastards unpunished.

  He glanced inside the locker rooms and smiled as he saw the piles of clothing, each one clearly marked – as per school rules – with the name of its owner. Stepping inside, he picked up a shirt belonging to Gavin, one of Moe’s friends, and looked through it for a hair. Finding one, he picked it up with a pair of tweezers and placed it neatly in a pillbox he’d used as a child. Marking it with a G, for Gavin, he looked for other pieces of body material, carefully marking each one as he went along. Finally, he left the locker room and nearly walked right into the Coach.

  Coach Thornton was a big beefy man, who acted like a bad parody of a Drill Instructor. Calvin had been terrified of him since their first meeting, where he’d openly mocked Calvin’s puny body, much to the amusement of the jocks. Now, his eyes just flickered over Calvin, as if they refused to register that he was there. Calvin stepped to one side and watched the Coach walk past, already forgetting about the strange boy in the corridor.

  Grinning to himself, Calvin walked out of the gym and stared across the field. As always, the football team were practicing for the upcoming matches against other schools, rather than doing anything useful like studying for their futures. Calvin caught sight of a handful of girls watching from the sidelines, including Marie, and looked away before they caught sight of his smirk. He’d seen more of the girls than their boyfriends had, at least for some of them. Wendy had a reputation for never doing anything more than kissing her boyfriends. No wonder they moved on so quickly.

  Reaching into his bag, Calvin produced the pillbox and brought out one of the hairs, sticking it neatly to a piece of sticky paper. Harrow had talked about using a special glue, but Calvin suspected that if intentions mattered, and they did, the spell should work equally well with a modern substitute. Using a pen, he drew the first two runes under the hair and then the third on the other side of the paper. And then he closed his eyes and allowed the magic to flow into the runes.

  Suddenly, a blue line seemed to shimmer into existence, connecting the paper with Gavin, out on the field. Calvin’s eyes snapped open; the blue line flickered and vanished. Harrow had cautioned him that mage sight – the ability to see, rather than sense, magic – required shut eyes, but it still felt as if he’d failed when the line vanished so abruptly. But at least it confirmed that there was a link between Gavin and the paper Calvin had carefully prepared for magic.

  All right, you bastard, he thought, remembering all the little humiliations that Gavin had inflicted on him. He hadn't been as bad as Moe, but he’d been quite bad enough, particularly when he’d beaten Calvin up for being lousy at sports. Let's see who’s laughing now.

  Power flared through the runes as he concentrated, reaching out towards Gavin. The jock was running after the ball when his legs suddenly locked up, just for a second, and he went flying forward and landed on his face. Calvin felt a hot rush of delight as his enemy hit the grass and was nearly trampled by one of his friends. Coach Thornton, who had returned to the field while Calvin was preparing the runes, shouted angrily at Gavin. His little accident had caused his team to lose control of the ball.

  Calvin smirked as the Coach stormed over to Gavin and berated him in front of everyone on the field. They all knew that the Coach had ambitions to rise higher in his chosen field, but the only way to do that was to prove that he could lead a team of football players to victory. Calvin hadn't realised that he was prepared to give his favourites a tongue-lashing too, not until he’d seen it. He might have been more forgiving of Gavin if he had.

  He clutched the paper again as the Coach faced Gavin and concentrated, hard. Gavin’s fist came up at lightning speed and struck the Coach right on the jaw. Thornton tumbled backwards as Gavin stared in horror at his hand, unable to believe what had happened. Calvin took the opportunity to have Gavin kick Thornton in the groin and then stood up, heading towards the exit. Everyone was staring in horror at the fallen coach. Like Gavin, they were having some difficulty grasping what had happened.

  Calvin didn't laugh until he was well away from the sports hall. Gavin’s potential career had been absolutely ruined. No one was going to forgive him assaulting a coach, even if the coach was an asshole. And Thornton was going to find it harder to bully everyone now that the entire football team had seen him knocked down and out by a mere student. His career probably wouldn't survive either.

  He was still chuckling as he returned home, walked upstairs and locked himself in the bathroom. Filling the sink with water, he cast the spying spell again, this time focused on Gavin himself. The young man was sitting on a bench, his hands behind his back. It took Calvin a moment to realise that he was in a police holding cell, presumably helping the NYPD with their enquires. He’d assaulted someone and wouldn't be able to claim any excuse. How would he prove that he had been under outside control? How could he even suspect the truth? After a moment, Calvin switched the spell to the Coach and saw him lying in a hospital bed, spitting with rage. Two policemen were listening carefully to his every word.

  Shame I can't get sound on this, Calvin thought, fighting down the urge to start snickering again. Harrow had said that it was possible, but he hadn't managed to master the trick. I wonder if...

  The water exploded into steam and he stumbled backwards, silently grateful for the protective spells he’d cast on himself as soon as Harrow had taught him how to do it. They protected him from accidentally burning himself. Shaking his head, he started to clean up the mess, kicking himself for using the spell for too long. Harrow had warned him that the spell wouldn't last for more than a few minutes, depending on just what he was doing. It would probably have lasted longer if he’d just looked at one person.

  I could look at Marie again, he thought, and then shook his head. He had other things to do, starting with finding a safe hiding place for his collection of hairs and then seeing if he could borrow – or steal – one of Mindy’s dolls. They weren't designed for sympathetic magic, but he knew he could make them work. And who knew what he could do then?

  He finished cleaning the bathroom, checked his handiwork, and then unlocked the door, headi
ng back to his bedroom. The thought of the look on Gavin’s face made him giggle. Horror, and humiliation, and terror...just how Gavin had made Calvin feel, before the magic. Gavin had only got what he deserved, for what he’d done when he’d been strong.

  Calvin felt no sympathy at all. Why should he?

  Chapter Thirteen

  New York, USA

  Day 10

  “You want to see the records too?”

  Matt nodded, handing over his NYPD card and the search warrant the FBI had produced for him by the simple expedient of running it past a tame judge. The secretary looked at it suspiciously, checked it against a template she had stored in her filing cabinet and then scowled up at Matt. Matt looked back at her, trying to project the impression of calm and control that the NYPD encouraged its officers to learn.

  “This is the second request this week,” the secretary said. She was middle-aged, with a face that could charitably be called homely. Matt would have called it ugly. She looked as if she drank iodine for breakfast and rubbed her skin with something to pickle it. “Do you realise what this is doing to our reputation?”