The fresh air might have smelled of gasoline fumes, but it tasted wonderful as I walked away from the school towards the police line. They hadn’t wasted time, I realised; the police had been joined by a unit from the National Guard. The Mayor probably wanted to show people that he was Doing Something about the magical menace, although the Guardsmen would probably be worse than useless against the demon. It would just have given the monster more warm bodies to play with after it broke loose from the circle.
And then there were the reporters. I tried to walk away from them, trying to reach a place where I could teleport away from the city, but they got in my way, shouting all kinds of questions. I had learned to hate reporters very quickly and most Guardians don’t talk to them at all. They never understand a word we say, or why we do the things we do. Two of my comrades died last year because an investigative reporter found out their real names…and published them. Their enemies used that information to kill them.
I ignored them until one of them got in my way. “Guardian,” he shouted, loudly enough to be heard over the crowd. “What happened in there? The people demand answers! Tell us what happened! Who did this to our kids? Did you do it to them?”
Red rage bubbled up in my mind. I felt the magic twisting and bending around me, resolving into a sense of death…or worse. It would have been easy to kill him, or to force him to do something – anything – or transform him into a frog. It would have been so easy…
Something must have shown on my face, because he dropped his notebook and ran. The other reporters stumbled back – some of them were probably sensitive enough to feel the magic charge billowing around me like an oncoming thunderstorm – and I forced myself to relax. The magic field calmed down, just enough for me to alter it and teleport home.
The moment I arrived home, I collapsed on the floor and blacked out.
Chapter Three
“You can't ask questions, it's magic. It doesn't explain anything, it's magic. You don't know where it comes from, it's magic! That's what I don't like about magic, it does everything by magic!”
Commander Vimes, Discworld
The floor might have been hard stone, but it felt so good.
“Come on,” a voice said. “You can’t lie there all day.”
“Get lost,” I said, when I could muster the energy to speak. “I’ve had a long day.”
A brown hand reached down and helped me to my feet. “I noticed,” Varsha said, softly. “As long as you lie on the landing pad, Glass, no one else is going to be able to visit.”
“I don’t want anyone visiting,” I said, between breaths. It was suddenly much harder to breathe. The Demon Shock hadn’t worn off yet. It would be days before I felt anything approaching normal again. “I want a long bath and a cup of coffee.”
Varsha snorted. “I’ll give you the coffee when you’ve had a bath,” she said, firmly. She kept hold of my arm as I started to stumble towards the stairs. Normally, I would have brushed her off and told her to stop mothering me, but right now I needed it. The concern in her eyes was worrying, however. She should know better than to grow too attached to me, or any other Guardian. We don’t always live long enough to enjoy our retirement pay. “I heard something on the news, but they didn’t say very much. What happened?”
“Leave it,” I said, harshly. I didn’t want to talk about it, to her or to anyone else. There are no psychologists who can talk to Guardians on their own terms. Some civilian psychologists make good money on the talk show circuit claiming that we’re all power-mad bastards who have somehow escaped Washington’s control, or worse, humanity’s enemies in friendly clothing. They don’t understand us, but then, I don’t understand them either. A psychologist can take a small problem – a kid, perhaps, who needs nothing more than a clout on the ear – and turn it into a major problem requiring many expensive sessions to cure. “Don’t touch the book either. Just help me upstairs.”
Varsha nodded once, her dark hair falling over my arm. Varsha Gupta was a refugee from India, a child born to untouchable parents, but with a taste of magic. The Indian Government swears blind that it doesn’t happen, but with some of their gods walking the Earth again, an untouchable child with magic will either be taken away by a higher caste family or simply killed out of hand. Untouchables aren’t meant to have magic, according to the higher castes. Her family had fled to America, but the cultists had come after them, killing both of her parents before they were stopped. I ended up giving Varsha a home and some training in the use of her powers. She had too much potential to allow it to go to waste, or to be exploited by someone with nastier motives.
“Of course, Glass,” she said, softly. The deal’s simple enough. She takes care of me – I don’t take very good care of myself – and in return I teach her magic and provide her with a safe home. The cultists might still want her back, but they know better than to bring the Guardians down on their heads. Even if something happened to me, Varsha would be taken in by another Guardian. “Hang on.”
She slipped into the bathroom, allowing me to gather my thoughts in a moment of privacy. I still felt terrible, but the demon’s presence had finally faded from my mind, leaving only a stench surrounding me. Varsha showed no sign of having smelt it, but I knew it was there, even though I might have been imagining it into existence. Magic can do that, sometimes. It’s like playing with fire, except that you can sometimes get burned before you light the match. The stench might not be there, but because I thought it was there, it was there.
Confused yet? If you understand that, you’re one step closer to becoming a magician.
The house is the only luxury of the job. It’s a massive house, large enough for an entire family and there are times when I feel guilty about having it, even sharing with Varsha. It’s also a requirement of the job. Magical fields can get out of control sometimes and I needed to remain isolated from others who might walk into a field they didn’t know existed and hurt themselves. The wards surrounding the house started at unpleasant and went downhill from there. Anyone who broke in through the avoidance ward – which convinced people not to come any closer – and the inner wards would end up frozen until I came out and freed them. Every mage’s house is surrounded by wards. If a mage dies, it takes time and effort to dismantle them so that someone else can have the house. The girls – I remembered with a shudder – hadn’t even thought to ward themselves against the demon.
“Come on in,” Varsha said, once the noise of pouring water had abated. “The water’s fine.”
The heat stuck me as soon as I stepped into the bathroom, but I didn’t let it deter me. The bath is large enough for two people – even if they’re not very friendly – but I intended to be alone. Varsha helped me undress, to my private shame, and assisted me to climb into the water, before leaving me to soak in peace. I settled down in the warm water and forced myself to relax. I didn’t want to think, or even to invite one of my occasional girlfriends around for a good time. I just wanted to forget it all, but every time I closed my eyes, I saw the demon before it vanished. I had committed murder to prevent it from breaking free. I knew – I knew well – that the girl would have been dead soon enough anyway, but I still felt like I’d murdered her. The demon had mocked me. It had known what I had been thinking.
There is no redemption for murder, I thought…or was it the last trace of the demon’s presence? Demons and most of the other magical creatures are not human. They’re effectively aliens. They’d do things – strange things, or evil things – for what they consider to be perfectly good reasons. They can’t even imagine why we might object to their actions, let alone acknowledge that we have some worth in the universe. The most odious human aristocrat in history could not compare to some of the Fair Folk.
“Come on,” Varsha said. I blinked. Where had she come from? The bath was suddenly cold. I realised, slowly, that I had fallen asleep in the bath, trusting in the protective wards to prevent me from drowning. After everything I’d done in my long career…th
at would have been the final irony of my life. “I’ve got the coffee ready and even a meal. It’s time to eat…”
I was suddenly ravenously hungry as well. “I’m coming, mother,” I said. She giggled. “Give me two minutes, ok?”
She slipped out of the door, allowing me to climb out of the bath and dry myself in private. The massive mirror in the room showed me every cut and scar on my body, every sign of struggles and battles most of the human race didn’t know occurred on a daily basis. They knew – they could hardly have missed – the infestation of thousands of magical creatures, the loss of all of the National Parks and the monsters roaming the night, but they didn’t know everything. They wouldn’t sleep at night if they knew the truth. Humanity was at war…and we were losing.
I ran one hand through my brown hair and saw, despite my best attempts to deny it, grey hairs. They had been sprouting up more and more frequently over the last few months, a sign of an impending burnout, warning me that I might have to seek retirement soon unless I wanted to die. Guardians – and most other magicians – can’t give up their work so easily. They carry on, get careless, and die because of a foolish mistake that would never have killed them in their youth.
“You’re being foolish, Glass,” I muttered to myself, as I waved my hand over my hair, forming a charm. No one would see the glamour, with the possible exception of my fellow Guardians, and no one would know that my hair was starting to grey. Call me vain if you like – and, like all good magicians, I do have a vain tendency – but I didn’t want anyone to know about the hairs. Let them think that I still had my brown hair. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”
I ignored myself – of course – dressed, and walked down to the dining room. I only use a handful of rooms in the house – the bedroom, the library and the dining room – but Varsha uses them all. I don’t know what she does with all of them, but as a teenage girl, she’s entitled to some privacy. The wards wouldn’t let her bring anything really dangerous inside the house, or any friends. She has to visit her friends, such as they are, outside. They can’t come back here, even if they wanted to. I sometimes wonder if she resents that, even if it is for her own good. Magical houses can be dangerous places.
“Bacon and eggs, sausages and toast,” Varsha announced, waving me to the table. The meal she’d placed in front of me looked as if merely sniffing it would double my cholesterol level, but frankly the odds were against me surviving long enough to care. I picked up the mug of coffee beside the plate and sipped it gratefully. Varsha knew how to make it perfectly. It was black and foul, just right for waking me up in the morning.
She sat down opposite me and gave me one of her charming smiles. I smiled back helplessly. If we could figure out how to use her smile as a weapon, we would be invincible. She was taller than the typical Bengali girl, almost as tall as I was, with a long willowy body. Her current boyfriend, if she had one, was a lucky bastard. I just hoped that she was being careful.
“So,” she announced brightly, “do you want to talk about it?”
I smiled. I had half-expected a request for money, so that she could go out with her friends, or maybe a demand that I went to bed right after eating my lunch, but I couldn’t blame her. Varsha could never make a Guardian, even though I didn’t know if she would be good at the job, because her magical talents were different. She wanted to live in our world, but she could never be a part of it.
“Not really,” I said, eating the bacon carefully. She’d even cut the fat away, just as I liked it. I’m a lousy cook myself. I even burn water. “It was bad, Varsha, very bad.”
“The news was saying that three hundred kids died,” Varsha said, nodding towards the television. I don’t like television myself, although I sometimes watch the Guardian Rogers show, just for some light relief. Hollywood hadn’t bothered to consult a real Guardian before writing the scripts and Guardian Rogers – a moron with muscles on his muscles – was about as real as Batman. If he had to deal with the demon I’d had to deal with he would have folded faster than Superman on laundry day. I suppose I shouldn’t be too sarcastic about the show. It helps keep people unaware of half of what we do to defend them. “Was it really that bad?”
“Yes,” I said, flatly. Three hundred teenagers, some of them barely out of their childhood years, killed…just because a silly bitch had wanted revenge. How many parents would be grieving tonight? How many lives had been ruined? How long would it be before they all recovered from the experience? “Change the subject.”
It was an order and Varsha, to her credit, recognised it as such. “The news from India is growing worse,” she said, her voice darkening. She still kept an eye on the news from there, while I barely had time to keep up with what was happening in America. The rest of the world had the same problems as we did, or worse. “There was another Thug raid on Muslim villages near Pakistan, driving away thousands of refugees.”
I nodded grimly. The Muslims had converted millions of Indians to Islam, mainly the lower castes, who were treated much better under Islam than Hinduism. The balance had tilted when the magic returned and the old gods started to walk the Earth and cultists, including the ones who had killed Varsha’s parents, had been hunting Muslims down and converting them back to Hinduism. It was stupid – the Muslims had been Muslims ever since Islam had reached the subcontinent – but it was happening. The Indian Government was claiming that it was doing whatever it could to end the constant stream of atrocities, but I had seen secret intelligence that suggested that it was actually aiding and abetting the cultists. Ghandi was probably turning in his grave.
“Poor bastards,” I said, as I finished the last piece of sausage. India wasn't the worst-affected place in the world – that was Europe and Russia, for different reasons – but in the long term, I suspected that it would become a significant problem for the rest of the world. As if we didn’t have enough problems already. I stood up and gave her a tight smile. “I’ll see you after you’ve done the washing up, all right?”
“Fine,” Varsha said, absently. She was already miles away, perhaps thinking about what she wanted to do this evening with her friends, or maybe even worrying about her upcoming exams. “You should go to bed now and sleep properly.”
I shook my head and walked out of the kitchen into the library. It was my favourite room in the house. I had chosen the design myself and almost all of the books on the shelves, from history texts I rarely had the time to read to a handful of magical books I had obtained through one means or another. I should have handed them over to the Department of Magic, technically speaking, but they were mine. I wasn't going to get rid of them or hand them over until the day I retired. If I were honest…I didn’t want to hand them over at all, even though most of them were too dangerous to keep for too long.
Two of them were nothing, but fakes. I’d seen hundreds of so-called spellbooks that were nothing, but nonsense, carefully crafted to look convincing…until the buyer actually tried one of the spells and discovered that it didn’t work. It was a persistent nuisance, but we couldn’t prevent any con artist from writing a book and uploading it onto the Internet. The only upside of the entire situation is that a fake spell normally doesn’t do anything. It’s not like trying to produce explosives in your garden shed.
I made a pair of telephone calls to my superiors – I should have done it as soon as I returned home, but the Demon Shock had prevented me from thinking straight – and then opened the book I’d recovered from the school. I examined it quickly, silently cursing the name of the person who’d written it under my breath. If I had known who he was, I would have hexed him; it reminded me, all too much, of other forbidden books I had read. The genius of this book, however, was that any fool could make a copy, secure in the knowledge that it wouldn’t bite him, or be diminished by the mere act of copying it. Anyone who understood the basic principles of magic – and there were people without a hint of magic in their blood who understood them – could use the book and summon demons.
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br /> And it was there, I realised, that the real trap lay. The instructions were far from precise about just how the magic worked. I understood that, at some level – research into just what is vital in magic and what isn’t is rarely the key to a long life – but from what I was looking at, the demon would eventually have broken free anyway, or fallen back to Hell. There was no way to be sure, short of trying it myself – and I wasn't that stupid – but it looked as if the girls had been set up to fail. If they’d actually had six girls with magical talent…
I flicked through the remainder of the book. It didn’t get any better. The level of understanding seemed profound, as if it were the work of someone who had spent years gathering the information and wanted to share it with the world, but there was a curiously slapdash attitude to the whole project. It was as if someone had decided to build a car and leave out the fuel tank, or the seats, or anything else that would make the car run properly, rather than creating a bomb on wheels. It just didn’t make sense.
The door opened and Varsha stuck her head into the library. “I thought I told you to go to bed,” she said, shaking her head. Her voice adopted the mothering tone again. “Why do you never listen to me?”
Guardian Glass Page 3