I’ve scooped up Marvo’s pentacle and stuck it back in her hand. But Alastor has done a scoop of his own: he’s got her gun.
‘Stop him!’ Matthew gasps.
I can’t think of anything better to do than wave my pentacle around. Alastor is turning blue now, starting from his feet. He’s pointing the gun at each of us in turn and jerking it wildly—
But my magic is holding: he can’t actually pull the trigger. As the blue colour spreads through his torso and neck, rising up his head like water filling a glass tank, he spins round and looses off shot after shot into the walls. The bullets whine and ricochet. Anyone who’s not a demon or an elemental is on the floor.
Clicking noises. Alastor pulls futilely at the trigger. Finally, he eats the gun.
Marvo’s eyes are open. I pull her to her feet. ‘Damn it, Marvo! This is getting boring . . .’
She’s looking around. ‘Where’s my gun?’
There’s the sound of a brief, precise fart and a waft of sulphur. An empty cartridge case rattles across the floor behind Alastor.
‘Too late,’ I say.
‘I’m still gonna kill him.’ She’s looking at Matthew.
The kid has opened a neat stack of sandwiches. He takes the lid off the old bucket and drops the paper wrapping inside. Matthew stands there, staring down at him. He’s got both hands to his head, like he’s trying to stop it bursting apart.
‘Oh God!’ he says.
Look, I try not to do . . . you know, deep stuff. Because it doesn’t really get anybody anywhere and it just makes me feel bad. But the Boss . . . well, he looks like hell, even if he hasn’t actually been dragged off there yet. It’s like his whole face has sagged.
He’s been down here for three weeks, remember. And it’s my fault.
I watch the kid throw his empty satchel back over his shoulder and pick up the bucket. He may be an elemental, but he struggles with the weight in the split second before he steps out of the circle and is transformed again into a ball of light. Alastor holds his hands over his eyes until the kid has disappeared up the stairs.
Another fart. Another empty cartridge case rattles across the floor behind Alastor.
‘This cardinal – Vannutelli. Who is he, anyway?’
‘C’mon, Marvo, I told you—’
‘Yeah, but what do you know?’ She points at Matthew. ‘You tell me.’
Matthew sighs. ‘He’s a papal legate – a diplomat, if you like. He came to Oxford last year to negotiate an agreement between the Society of Sorcerers and the Vatican.’ He turns to me. ‘You’ve got to let me go, Frank. This is more important than . . . some fantasy about a stupid child. It’s about the future of the Society—’
That goes down well with Marvo. ‘I don’t care about the future of the Society,’ she says in her dull voice.
‘Then maybe you should!’ Matthew snaps. ‘What do you know about the Concordat?’
Notebooks out for a history lesson.
The Society of Sorcerers was founded in 1513. Fifty years later, Pope Pius IV issued a papal bull, Regimini artis magicae ecclesiae, recognising the Society and authorising it to develop the Craft in the service of God and the Church.
On 15 September 1590 a cardinal called Giovanni Castagna was elected pope and took the name Urban VII. He had two bees in his bonnet. One was tobacco: he announced that anyone caught smoking in a church would be excommunicated. The other was sorcery: he set up a commission to close down the Society of Sorcerers.
Twelve days after his election he was ambushed at the high altar of Saint Peter’s, in front of a screaming congregation, and hauled off to hell by a crowd of demons.
Over the next few centuries, the Society got into the habit of hauling demons up out of hell to make things explode. The Church couldn’t stop it, but it never quite let go of the idea that this wasn’t really what God had in mind.
Things got sticky again towards the end of the nineteenth century, and the Society sent in a flock of demons to pull the dome off Saint Peter’s and drop it in the river Tiber. The Church didn’t see the joke and excommunicated the Society. A week later, on his Easter appearance to bless pilgrims, the pope turned into a piano and started rattling out a selection of popular waltzes.
Everyone agreed that this was getting silly. So in 1908 they finally signed the Concordat, a document the size of an encyclopaedia agreeing what they could and could not do to each other.
Matthew’s Gift is long gone. He’s standing in a magic circle with a stack of sandwiches, a bottle of water and a bucket. But I’ve noticed it before: he’s got this other gift, the ability . . . I dunno, just to take charge of a situation. Doesn’t matter what sort of shit he’s in.
‘All I know is what Frank’s told me,’ Marvo says. ‘Sounds like a stitch-up to me.’
Matthew smiles wearily. ‘But a stitch-up that has kept the Church and the Society from turning on each other . . . until Vannutelli came along.’ He turns to me. ‘He was a member of the Society, of course.’
Of course he was.
‘He was in my year at Saint Cyprian’s. A marginal Gift. He left after two terms.’
‘So what does he want?’ Marvo asks.
‘To close the Society down.’
Yeah, the Church hierarchy is stuffed with these guys who studied sorcery but didn’t have enough of a Gift to go all the way. Most of them get over it and settle for doing cheap card tricks and throwing their weight around. But you always get a few of them who really resent the Society for messing with their heads and decide that it’s time someone took it down a peg or two. The ASB is packed with them.
‘He truly believes that sorcery is Satan’s work,’ says Matthew. ‘He has a lot of support in the College of Cardinals. And he has ambitions to be the next pope.’
‘So what?’ I say. ‘I mean, if he tries anything, the Society can have him turned inside out and folded along the dotted lines.’
Matthew looks up at me. ‘Have you heard of the Congregation for the Defence of the Holy See?’
‘Nope. Sounds fun, though.’
‘The Vatican has its own team of sorcerers—’
‘You couldn’t make this shit up, could you?’ Marvo mutters.
‘With a single purpose: to defend the Church against any magical assault by the Society of Sorcerers.’
‘So these guys,’ I say. ‘They’re just hiding out on top of a mountain or something . . .?’
‘The papal palace at Castel Gandolfo, actually.’
‘Sniffing the air for trouble and keeping a mob of demons ready to jump out?’
‘They say angels.’ Matthew smiles bleakly. ‘I’d be surprised, though. Anyway . . .’ He smooths his hair back. ‘Let’s talk about your friend’s brother. Do you know what a pariah spell is?’
‘What is this?’ I say. ‘A quiz?’
‘Shut up and listen, Sampson. You might learn something.’ Matthew turns to Marvo. ‘It isn’t taught at Saint Cyprian’s. In fact, as far as I know, the only copy of the actual spell is in the Closed Archive.’
‘What’s that?’ she says.
‘An archive of documents to which only the Superior General has access.’
I’m beginning to get it: ‘Pariah as in . . . outcast . . .?’
‘The immediate effect of the spell is to put the victim into a coma. In the only documented case of its enactment, in Paris in the mid-seventeenth century, the victim lay in an apartment, alive but unconscious, for more than fifty years—’
‘Didn’t anybody find him?’ says Marvo.
‘That’s the “pariah” part.’ Matthew smiles proudly. ‘The other tenants of the building unconsciously conspired to forget that the apartment was even there.’
I get it. Like a cloaking spell, but done on somebody, rather than by somebody.
‘His family, all his friends,’ says Matthew. ‘Everyone who knew him thought he was dead. They even thought they’d attended a funeral.’
‘So Vannutelli told you to kill Sean,’ I
say. ‘But you didn’t—’
‘It would have been wrong.’
I manage not to laugh.
‘Vannutelli wanted him dead,’ Matthew says. ‘And in retrospect that would have been the cleanest solution. But it seemed . . . I don’t know . . . just wrong to me. I remembered the pariah spell and dug it out of the Closed Archive.’ He grins and I notice that his gums have receded in the time he’s been here; his teeth are like fangs now. ‘I had a sorcerer at my disposal—’
‘Kazia.’
‘Exceptionally talented and not known to the Society. I retrieved the pariah spell from the archive. It took us several days to disentangle it and assemble the necessary materials—’
I look around at the tiled floor with its chalked traces of magic. And I’m about to ask whether they enacted the spell down here, when the answer just pops into my mind—
Of course: Matthew and Kazia took him to a ruined church in the Hole.
Sean Marvell: the Crypt Boy.
Matthew smiles. ‘It all worked. Better than I had expected—’
‘But not well enough.’
‘With hindsight, I realise why the spell was originally banished to the archive. Any pariah spell is doomed to failure by its own internal contradictions.’ He gestures in Marvo’s direction. ‘As you can see, in this case it persuaded your colleague to believe that her brother was dead. But it contained no mechanism to deal with her obsessive need to resolve the illusory mystery of who killed him. It was therefore doomed to unwind sooner or later . . .’
‘What are you two goin’ on about?’ Marvo really doesn’t look well.
‘Sean.’ I’ve had about enough of this now. Or maybe I’m just testing. ‘He’s still alive.’
Yup, it’s a pariah spell. It stopped Marvo from ever entering the same room as the Crypt Boy, in case she recognised him. Now it stops her from even thinking about him. Her eyes roll up in the sockets and I just manage to grab her under the arm before she tips over.
‘C’mon,’ I say. ‘Let’s get you out of here.’
‘You’re going?’ Matthew’s holding out one hand and he looks . . . I dunno, like an abandoned child, or something. I know the look: I caught my reflection in a window, the day they dragged me off to Saint Cyprian’s.
‘Frank, you can’t!’
But the hand he’s holding out . . . it’s his left hand, and I know it’s deliberate. He’s even holding it palm up, slightly turned out, to show where he sacrificed the little finger to save my life.
I’m a sucker for a lot of things, but there are limits. ‘I got what I came for.’ I can’t tell you how good it feels, saying that. And I realise just how angry I am with Matthew.
‘You have to let me out,’ he says. ‘What about the Society?’
I don’t care about the Society: let Vannutelli close it down. I see no reason to tell Matthew that Sean has been found. I feel in control—
And that worries me. I step back to check the symbols keeping Alastor in. Looking over my shoulder, I see the demon sitting on the floor, his back against one of the columns, with one blade of his dagger up his nose, working away.
Matthew has folded his arms. ‘I shall get out of here, one way or another.’
Alastor glances up and grins. ‘Happy to help.’
I push Marvo through the door at the top of the stairs. It slams behind me, nearly catching my fingers.
‘I’ll get you for this, you bugger!’ it hisses.
Charming.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Shock Treatment
OUT ON THE riverbank, the sun’s just up and not looking very cheerful about it. I turn to Marvo. ‘Got your scryer? OK, call Charlie. Ask him to meet you at the goods entrance of the mortuary.’
‘Why?’
‘Just do what I tell you.’
‘Why can’t you do it?’
In the few days since I tripped over her in the Hole, she’s been getting paler and paler. She’s lost weight and she even looks smaller.
‘I told you, the Society listens in to scryers—’
I’m not entirely sure about that, but would you trust them? I watch Marvo haul out her scryer. She looks round at me—
‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why are we going to the mortuary?’
It’s a good spell, a pariah spell.
‘You’ll see when we get there. Outside, remember—’
‘I ought to call Caxton.’
‘And tell her what? Just call Charlie, will you?’
By the time we’ve walked up to the mortuary, I still don’t know if this stunt is going to convince Marvo that her brother’s alive. And even if it does, I’m damned if I know how to fix him. Kazia did the dirty work, maybe she can undo it . . . except that I’ve got to find her and talk her out of trying to do me in again. And I have to find some way to straighten things out with the Society – not the easiest thing to do when you’ve got the Superior General locked in a cellar with a demon.
And even if I sort Marvo out, I still have to find a way to explain to Caxton how Sean got into this state, without blowing the whistle on Vannutelli, Matthew . . . and Kazia.
Charlie’s waiting outside the open door at the back of the mortuary. Marvo’s wobbling like hell, so I prop her up against the wall and take him aside and explain what we’ve got to do. Which is actually very simple.
We just grab Marvo and push her inside. At first she’s confused. Then she gets scared and starts to struggle. We drag her along corridors and round corners. Finally, I shove her through the door into the amphitheatre.
The Crypt Boy is still lying on the floor, at the centre of Ferdia’s protective circle. Pale as death. Black marks scored across his protruding ribs. Mouth gaping. Eyes open, but every bit as unconscious as he was before. I’m getting that feeling again, that it could be me lying there . . .
Ferdia stares. Caxton’s spectacles fly off and rattle on the floor as she spins round.
‘Bloody hell, Beryl, do you live here?’
‘OK, so he’s got under my skin. What’s your story?’ She’s on her knees, fumbling around for her specs.
‘I need Marvo to see something.’
Ferdia has walked over to her. He puts his hand to her forehead and gives me this angry look. ‘She’s running a fever.’ He turns back to Marvo. ‘You should be in bed.’
She just stands there, inside the door, staring around. Her voice shakes. ‘What’s goin’ on?’
‘Sean.’ I point helpfully. ‘There.’
‘It’s not funny, Frank.’
‘C’mon, Marvo.’ I’m still pointing. I can see her eyes darting across the floor, not seeing what I want her to see.
Ferdia has her by the hand. ‘Let’s get you out of here.’
I yell, ‘For Christ’s sake, Marvo! Will you just look?’
She stares at me, totally bewildered. ‘Look at what?’
I’m pointing again. I can’t think of anything better to do. ‘Sean.’
Caxton’s found her glasses. ‘What are you playing at, Sampson?’
‘It’s her brother.’
‘Where?’
Why stop pointing now? ‘There!’
Caxton stares down at the kid on the floor. ‘Her brother’s dead.’
‘That’s what they wanted you to think.’
‘Who?’
And it’s time to shut up. If I mention Matthew, Caxton’s bound to talk to the Society and they’ll remember that Matthew’s missing and that they’d quite like a word with me. OK, so they’re already on my case and I can go back to hiding out in my studio, but sooner or later someone’s going to realise that if Marvo came through the door with me tonight, she must be able to answer their questions . . .
And I don’t think Marvo’s in any state to know what not to say.
Shock treatment. I push Ferdia out of the way, grab Marvo by the arm and drag her into the circle. Candles and herbs go flying—
‘Are you mad?’ Ferdia’s hea
ding in my direction, but Charlie gets in his way.
I force Marvo down onto her knees. But it suddenly reminds me of when I was a nipper and I came home with this puppy, and the first thing it did was shit on the floor; and my dad just grabbed it by the scruff of the neck and rubbed its nose in the mess.
It didn’t last long, the puppy.
Me neither. Last try—
‘Marvo, it’s Sean – can’t you see?’
But the thing is, she won’t see.
I hold her there for a moment, gazing down at the pathetic figure on the floor and trying to square it with the plump little boy in the photograph in Marvo’s mum’s front room. I see no resemblance.
Marvo’s whimpering and trembling. I let go of her. She crawls out of the circle and scuttles over to the wall. Then she curls up in a ball and just lies there with her shoulders shaking.
‘Nice work,’ says Caxton, picking up a candlestick. ‘Now, do you want to explain what you think you’re doing?’
Under the circumstances, I decide that the best thing to do is just run for it.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
A Plan
SINCE I’M HERE in the mortuary anyway, what about what’s left of the shark?
The diener on duty, when I get down to the utility area . . . he isn’t exactly a pal, but he’s prepared to go off on a fag break while I fetch something to toss into the incinerator.
The door of the children’s ice room closes behind me. The gas light is burning low and I can barely make out the wall of doors concealing the dead kids.
I check my watch and it’s not late; there should be somebody on duty. And I’m about to yell out when I hear something. I don’t know why it spooks me. It’s just a bit of rustling and scratching, coming from right up at the far end of the room. I put my hand against the wall on my left, opposite the compartments, and tiptoe along the room. There’s a distinct smell of decomposing shark.
I almost jump out of my skin as a black shape appears from behind the desk. The kid – the assistant – stretches up to clap his hand across my mouth. He pulls me down and whispers, ‘Don’t make a sound.’
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