by Zen Cho
“I am preparing a paper for the Society,” said Midsomer. He seemed ill at ease, and glanced around the room as if looking for some means to extract himself from the conversation he had begun.
Zacharias was really interested in what Midsomer might have to say regarding the Fairy Court, and he might have forgotten his own discomfort in pursuit of this subject if John Edgeworth had not emerged from the crowds and approached them.
Edgeworth was accompanied by Sultan Ahmad and his interpreter, though the sultana was absent. Zacharias would have to find some means of dispensing with Edgeworth’s foreign guests while they spoke. Edgeworth would hardly desire the sultan to know of Mak Genggang’s arrival before he had had the opportunity to digest the news himself.
“Edgeworth! I had hoped to see you here,” said Zacharias.
Perhaps he spoke with more heartiness than he felt, in recollection of the unfriendly note on which they had last parted. He was braced for Edgeworth still to be aggrieved, though disguising it with a statesman’s politic civility, but he was not prepared for Edgeworth’s response.
“Yes, how do you do?” he said, barely glancing at Zacharias. “You have been ruralising, I hear. I hope it has done you good. Nothing like a retreat to the country to set a man up.”
Without waiting for Zacharias’s reply, he turned to Midsomer. “Geoffrey, I had nearly despaired of finding you in this crowd. I had no notion Parliament kept so many braying donkeys fed—Ministers and magicians both. Pray, will you take me to see the Society’s collection of magical artefacts? I believe Uncle Augustine’s thighbone is among them. It is an ancient family legend how he was discovered to have been a changeling only after his demise, and I should like to see him.”
“I should be happy,” said Midsomer, looking relieved at the chance to remove himself.
“Perhaps Mr. Wythe would be so good as to entertain Sultan Ahmad in the meantime, so that we may avoid boring His Highness,” said Edgeworth. “I am conscious that these familial relics must have little interest for any but an Edgeworth.”
With a nod at Zacharias and the sultan, he strode off with Midsomer and his wife. As they vanished into the crowd Edgeworth could be heard saying:
“Now, Geoffrey, regarding that spell you promised . . .”
The situation was worse than Zacharias had thought. He had expected some coolness on Edgeworth’s part, but not this readiness to snub him in public.
That Edgeworth was on such terms with Midsomer as to address him by his Christian name was no surprise—they had probably been at school together. What worried Zacharias more was what it was that Midsomer had promised.
“I must say, this is very irregular!” exclaimed Mr. Othman.
Sultan Ahmad corroborated this with a murmured complaint. He was richly attired in an embroidered gold suit, the look completed by a knotted headdress and a dagger in an elegant scabbard at his hip. His splendour drew admiring glances from the other guests, but any desire to be introduced could not survive the sultan’s glower.
Zacharias roused himself. He must consider his position at another time. For now, he had an offended foreign dignitary to deal with.
“I wish you would convey my apologies for what occurred at our previous encounter,” he said to the translator. “I had no notion we would be broken in upon in that fashion. I would not have offended His Highness for the world.”
“Mr. Edgeworth has explained all,” said Mr. Othman grudgingly. “It was a shamefully botched affair, but His Highness is willing to overlook it. He is extremely unhappy that he has not yet received a commitment from your Government, however.”
It struck Zacharias that it might have served Edgeworth’s purpose to avoid giving the sultan a proper account of the Sorcerer Royal’s position. Edgeworth himself knew, or ought to know, that Zacharias was not beholden to the Crown, nor even at the service of the Society. His first allegiance was to the cause of magic itself, and how it could be turned to the nation’s advantage.
“His Highness knows, of course, that it could not rightly be called my Government,” Zacharias began.
“The sultan is not surprised! He thought it strange that a black man should be a representative of the British King,” said Mr. Othman. “He is pleased to understand the true state of affairs.”
Sultan Ahmad added a stream of lugubrious commentary, which Mr. Othman translated into a fluid particularisation of grievances, much to Zacharias’s discomfort:
“Since you, too, are a stranger here, you will enter into the sultan’s feelings. He fears the British are as untrustworthy as we have always heard. He suspects they have no intention of giving us ships or guns. The sultan wishes he had never been so injudicious as to abandon his island—he finds England excessively cold and uncomfortable, the food unpalatable, and the people unfriendly. It is all the more unfortunate that the country should be so inhospitable, with the queen in her delicate condition. She could not bear to let the sultan leave her for so long, and insisted on accompanying us. We cannot even leave, for we cannot contemplate travelling until the queen is safe. To think that the prince will be born under foreign skies, and not on the soil of his own kingdom!”
Zacharias tried to break into this flow of confidence, but in vain. When Mr. Othman finally paused for breath, he said:
“I sympathise extremely with the sultan’s distress, and am sorry he should be so displeased with this country, but I fear he labours under a misapprehension.”
But Mr. Othman was not listening. Both he and the sultan were staring over Zacharias’s shoulder, transfixed by a sight that seemed to horrify them. The translator opened his mouth and closed it again, and pointed a trembling finger.
“Witch!” he cried. He shot Zacharias a furious look. “You have led her to us. We are betrayed!”
Zacharias turned, and saw something even more dreadful than Mak Genggang standing at the end of the room with her arms akimbo and her eyes ablaze with the light of war. Next to her, rigged out in a spectacular pink dress and looking around with lively curiosity, was Prunella.
13
PRUNELLA HAD NOT begun the day with any intention of making an appearance at the Spring Ball. Zacharias had departed at noon, leaving her and Mak Genggang at his town house—which was just as well, in Prunella’s view, for she had her own plans for the day.
Mak Genggang disposed of herself, declaring that she meant to examine the English sky.
“Surely it cannot be very different from the skies above your country,” said Prunella.
Mak Genggang looked pityingly at her. “That shows you have not travelled abroad, child. There is much that can be read from a foreign sky. I shall require solitude, so you need not come with me.”
With that Prunella was left alone, which suited her.
The longer she continued in possession of the eggs, the more she felt a strange sympathy with them—but she lacked any language in which to communicate with her treasures. If she was to awaken the eggs, she must learn more about them, and the Sorcerer Royal’s library would contain all she could need to know.
The house formed part of the Crown’s property, the lease of which was enjoyed by the Society, and it had been inhabited for centuries by Sorcerers Royal conscious of the fact that more rooms meant a greater number of nooks and crannies in which their enemies might conceal themselves. It required only a brief search for Prunella to find Zacharias’s study.
She was not an imaginative creature, and she was more amused than daunted by the alchemical sigils on the floor and the skull on the windowsill.
“How divertingly thaumaturgical!” she exclaimed. “I wonder what the symbols signify, and what would happen if one were to string them into a spell. But there, if anything like the squashes should recur, Mr. Wythe would be very cross, and likely send me back to the school directly. I must be circumspect.”
She curbed the temptation to rummage in Mr.
Wythe’s desk, decipher the sigils on the floor, or take a closer look at the unlamented Mr. Longmire. Instead she mounted a step Zacharias kept in the study to enable his reaching the higher shelves (though for Prunella it only served to elevate her to the middling level), and surveyed the books.
Zacharias possessed a tidy mind, but it was not a mind organised on wholly predictable principles. Prunella could not at first make out that the books had been arranged according to any sensible system. She discarded tome after weighty tome of thaumaturgical lore—all prodigiously interesting and philosophical, no doubt, but not at all to the purpose. But when she had pulled out and dismissed six medieval bestiaries in a row, the answer struck her.
He has ordered his books by subject, of course.
She soon divined that there was an underlying alphabetical sequence in accordance with which the books were arranged, for a number of treatises on talking moldiwarpes (a subject which had drawn a surprising amount of scholarly interest) were to be found immediately following the medieval bestiaries. Still, Prunella had a trying time attempting to trace the routes taken by Zacharias’s thoughts. The books she desired were not to be found under familiars (though there was a great deal on fairy, which took her off course for a full hour), but comprised five shelves between objects, magical and pellars, Cornish. A thin monograph on Paredros, vulgarly styled Familiars explained the position.
She began reading the monograph, toying with the silver ball she now wore on her neck. Here Prunella ran into further difficulties. She was no great reader, and her choice was written in so laborious a style that she found herself rereading the same page several times, without absorbing any of the sense.
Not that there is much sense in it, for I believe this man is saying he thinks familiars come from Heaven, not Fairyland at all, thought Prunella. Which I think must be blasphemy, and I know is silliness!
She was beginning to tire of reaching for books on shelves built for the use of someone considerably longer in limb than she, and she was discouraged by the rows of books which might all—or none of them—contain what she desired. She was therefore not displeased to be interrupted by Mak Genggang.
Prunella put down her book, but made no attempt to conceal the fact that she had been going through the Sorcerer Royal’s possessions. Mak Genggang would not mind it.
“What is it you have there? A book?” said Mak Genggang. She thought it clever of Prunella to read, though she was doubtful of its utility: “I do not know if reading is quite natural for a girl. In my day females kept to enchantery and agriculture, trading at market and tending to the children, and that was enough for us.”
She glanced over the shelves with a jaundiced eye. “And are all these books the young gentleman’s? I do not think much of your sorcerers, if they must rely upon paper for their enchantments! My sorceresses have all their spells here.”
She tapped a spot on her person below her bosom, but well above her navel. Prunella said, surprised:
“Are there sorceresses in your country?”
Mak Genggang was a puzzle. In manner and appearance she struck Prunella as being little different from an English village witch, of the sort who plied villagers with love philtres and finding charms, far away from the disapproving eye of the Society. Yet she had walked through Fairyland to England; the Sorcerer Royal treated her as an equal; and she was possessed of such a serene and persuasive conviction of her own power that neither fact seemed remarkable.
“Perhaps you would call most of them magicians,” Mak Genggang allowed. “There are one or two women that have entered into pacts with familiar spirits, but I have no truck with such irreligiousness.”
“But your lady-magicians are able to sustain the connection with their familiars?” said Prunella. “They do not suffer any ill consequences from their pacts?”
“No worse than the men,” said Mak Genggang ominously. “To commune with spirits is one thing. Unlike Raja Ahmad, I have no prejudice against lamiae—poor women, most of them, who were ill used in life, and abandoned in death!—or indeed any of the other spirits that inhabit our country. But I could not abide the unholy bondage to which British thaumaturges submit.”
Prunella only half-understood this, but what she did comprehend was novel, and not unwelcome. She stored away this tidbit to consider later, murmuring:
“It is shocking, I am sure!”
She rose to return her monograph to the bookcase—conversation with Mak Genggang seemed infinitely more attractive than the author’s tortured periods. As she moved, the silver ball on its chain swung out of the collar of her dress.
“I did not know the British had singing orbs,” remarked Mak Genggang. “I hope you did not pay too much for that. The foreign traders are always seeking to pass them off on my women. They say the best are as rare as Saktimuna’s tears, and vastly powerful, but what I say is my women have as much magic in one of their fingernails as could be contained in any bauble—or any book.”
“It was a gift,” said Prunella, after a pause. She touched the silver ball at her throat. “Is it called a singing orb in your country?”
“It is called a singing orb in whatever country you are likely to find it,” said Mak Genggang, seeing through her nonchalance. “Do not you know how to use it? Give yours to me, and I will show you the way of it.”
Prunella unchained the little silver ball from around her neck. Mak Genggang had such force of character as rendered it difficult to deny her anything she requested, and besides, Prunella was curious to see what she might draw from her trinket.
The first results of the witch’s experiment were unpromising. Mak Genggang twisted the ball with her bony, strong fingers, but whatever she expected did not transpire. She let out an indignant huff of breath, and murmured a spell, but still nothing happened. She held the orb up to her eye, glaring, then thumped Zacharias’s handsome walnut desk with it.
“Oh!” said Prunella, springing up at the cracking noise.
“No effect whatsoever!” exclaimed Mak Genggang, inspecting the silver ball. Fortunately the table, too, seemed unaffected. It was one thing to read Mr. Wythe’s books, thought Prunella, but to break his furniture would really be too bad. “How odd to have given you a locked orb! But perhaps it is not odd at all. I suppose you had the orb from some suspicious character?”
“I had it from my parents,” said Prunella, surprising herself with the truth. “They died when I was a child.”
Mak Genggang looked pleased.
“That accounts for it,” she said. “That is one common use of a singing orb, to hold family secrets and convey legacies. The secrets will be chained to your blood, of course. Give me your hand, child.”
Prunella hesitated—rightly, as it turned out. Without waiting for an answer, Mak Genggang grasped her hand, picked up a penknife from the desk, and slashed Prunella’s thumb with it. Prunella yelped, in startlement as much as in pain.
“Now, don’t be babyish!” said Mak Genggang. “I am sure you are too brave to cry out at a little cut, and I will bind it up in a moment.”
Prunella had been scolded often enough by Mrs. Daubeney for her wicked obstinacy and her unguarded tongue. How Mrs. D would marvel to see her now, meek as a lamb! she reflected. But Mak Genggang would reduce anyone to silence. Prunella only let out the smallest of squeaks when Mak Genggang held her injured thumb above the orb and squeezed it.
A drop of blood pooled in an indentation on the orb. The blood ran into the grooves of the carvings, filling out the strokes and curls and flourishes. Where it flowed, light shone out of the sphere.
Mak Genggang threw the ball in the air. It described a silver arc, glinting in the sunlight, but when it ought to have begun falling to the ground, it stopped, and hovered mid-air.
“Oh!” said Prunella, forgetting her thumb in her delight.
The light shining out from the orb gave the carvings on its surface
the appearance of being traced in fire. The minute flowers and animals, the graceful loops and swirls, all shone forth brilliantly.
The orb began to sing in a woman’s voice: a quavering contralto, deep, throaty and rough, as though she had worn her voice thin with shouting. The words were unfamiliar. Prunella did not understand the language, but she thought suddenly: She is very angry. I wonder why?
She felt the stones stir in the pouch tied under her skirts. Prunella pressed down upon them with her hand, thinking she must be mistaken—but no, the pebbles which had been so still even at the edge of Fairy were wriggling. It was as though she had a pocket full of beetles.
“Oh!” said Prunella, now in dismay.
“There,” said Mak Genggang. “It is the blood that does it. I don’t suppose you can make out anything she is singing? The song is an enchantment, that is clear, but she might have had the sense to include a translation spell. Why, child, what are you about?”
Prunella had caught the orb out of the air. She rubbed it against her skirt, and was relieved to see the blood come off. The song began to waver. When she had wiped it clean the voice died away entirely, and the treasures went still in their pouch.
She had found the secret of awakening them.
“I don’t wish to alarm the servants,” said Prunella hurriedly. “What they would think if they came in to find a flying orb warbling at us!”
“I expect they would not think anything at all,” said Mak Genggang. “They seem idiotish creatures. Not a one of them understood me when I desired them to take me to the Society of Unnatural Philosophers.”
If Prunella thought her subterfuge had succeeded, however, she was wrong. Mak Genggang continued: