Kazia frowns. ‘That won’t take you far.’
Ten quid. But the amount doesn’t matter because I’ll never spend it. Just hang on to it and hope it stops me going post-peak.
My Gift object. As long as I still have it, I’m OK. After all, look what Charlie’s Gift object did for him . . . The trick, obviously, is to keep it safe. I fold the note in half and stick it in my pocket, out of harm’s way.
Andrew’s off in a world of his own. He’s up at the east end, where the altar used to be while this was still a chapel. He’s on his knees, clutching his crucifix, muttering under his breath and watching Kazia like a hawk. A hawk with dove’s eyes. It’s just a matter of time before he starts dribbling.
Kazia’s got one of my books and she’s flicking through the pages. She looks up and smiles at me, and it’s like she lights up the room and everything’s going to be all right.
‘We can do anything we want,’ she says. The smile dies. Her finger brushes across her forehead again.
‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘Just leave it alone.’
But she pulls her scryer out of her pocket. She opens it and peers at herself in the mirror.
‘Frank!’ That’s Charlie. ‘Can you get rid of that idiot?’ He means Andrew, who’s lying flat on his face, banging his head on the floor.
I fiddle with my watch. ‘Andrew.’ I walk across. ‘Shouldn’t you be in the chapel?’
He looks up, red in the face. ‘What time is it?’
I turn my arm so he can see the face of my watch: a couple of minutes before nine, when compline begins.
‘Oh, sodding hell!’ He’s on his feet.
Kazia has turned away. Is she whispering into her scryer?
Andrew bounces off me on his way to the door. ‘Hey, open it!’ he yells.
The case of Kazia’s scryer snaps shut as I make the pass and my door opens. Andrew vanishes and, as the outside door slams shut, I reset my watch to show the correct time. The scryer is back in Kazia’s pocket. The dog is still licking cheerfully away at the bedsheets. She leans down to scratch it between the ears and it does its trick with the cinnamon smell.
‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘shall we get going?’
‘What’s the hurry?’
I realise that I’m scratching my head. With just stubble, that leaves unattractive red marks; so I stop. The hurry is that if I don’t go now I’ll run out of steam.
‘No hurry. I just want to get it over with.’
‘Don’t you need things?’
She waves her hand around the studio. Yeah, I can see it all: books, equipment, the equations scrawled across my blackboard . . .
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say, even though it does.
‘All your things, though: will they be safe?’
‘Charlie’ll look after them.’ I turn to him. ‘Won’t you.’
There’s books in my broom cupboard – that’s the invisible part of my studio, where I keep the really dangerous stuff – that I know I’ll never be able to replace. This is a totally stupid idea and obviously Kazia realises it; she’s standing there, still looking doubtfully around the studio.
‘Forgotten something?’ I can see what’s going on here. Cold feet. If I were her, I wouldn’t be running off with me . . .
And I’m still waiting for her to stop dithering when I hear a voice from my cabinet—
‘Frank.’ Marvo’s voice, from my scryer.
I ignore it. I’ve got my satchel and I’m stuffing my escape kit into it. Herbs and spices, a change of underwear—
‘Frank!’
Kazia can’t hear her, but she can see that something’s up. ‘Are you all right?’ she asks.
‘Nothing. My scryer.’ I turn to Charlie. ‘Just Marvo.’
Kazia isn’t giving up. ‘So why don’t you answer her?’
I can think of all sorts of reasons. ‘Can we just get out of here?’ I tell my door to open.
‘Frank.’ Kazia grabs my arm. ‘She’s your friend.’
‘She’s right, Frank,’ says Charlie. ‘You’ve got to talk to her.’
I’m still wondering why Kazia cares, when Marvo screams, ‘Frank, please!’
Oh hell. No good can come of this, but I dive for my cabinet and dig the scryer out from the back. I open it and touch the five tips of the diagram etched into the base. I blow on the surface of the mirror inside the lid and when the mist clears I can see Marvo’s face.
She looks scared. So does her mum. Behind them I can see the Welsh dresser in their kitchen.
‘What’s the matter?’ I snarl.
‘Frank, I dunno what’s going on but—’
‘Yeah, I can see him.’ Leering over Marvo’s shoulder. A face like a toad. ‘What does he want?’
It’s Marvo’s scryer, so all Cardinal Bruno Vannutelli can see is his own ugly mug in the mirror. Marvo turns to him and repeats my question.
‘Brother Tobias,’ he says. ‘You have something that belongs to me.’
‘I thought you disapproved of sorcerers.’
Marvo passes it on. Vannutelli’s face splits into a wide grin. ‘True. But she is useful to me.’
‘I’ll bet.’
‘So you believe me when I promise I will do much to find her.’
‘Such as?’
As Marvo relays the message, he puts an arm round her shoulder. She tries to pull away, but he locks his elbow round her neck. ‘Your friend—’
‘I don’t have any friends.’ It’s worth a try.
And I get this strange feeling, like I wish I could say that without getting . . . I dunno, it’s a sort of tug and I remember what my dad told me when I was little: too little to be a sorcerer; too little to set him alight yet. He told me I was a skinny little freak and I’d never amount to anything, never have any friends . . .
Good of him to warn me. A loving parent can set you up to deal with everything life throws at you.
‘Yes, you have friend.’ Vannutelli pulls Marvo closer and kisses her hair. ‘You come here. We talk.’
And I’m left looking at my reflection in the mirror. After a moment I close the scryer. ‘He’s got Marvo. He wants to exchange her for you.’
Kazia shakes her head.
‘So what am I supposed to do?’
‘Talk to him. He couldn’t see me in the scryer, so tell him . . . tell him we had a fight and I’ve gone.’
‘He’s not going to believe that.’
‘He’s not a monster. He won’t kill your friend if you talk to him.’
I can’t say that I like this. That’s the thing with friends: you can’t trust them not to mess you about. At best they’ll let you down. At worst they’ll turn on you. And somewhere in between, they’ll get themselves stuck up to their necks in shit and they’ll stare up at you with these big doggy eyes and you know you’ve got to take a big breath, hold your nose and jump in after them.
CHAPTER FORTY
A Rat
MY FEET HIT the ground outside the back of the termite nest. Charlie’s knee buckles as he lands beside me, and he grabs my arm for support.
‘Sorry,’ he says.
‘Do you smell a rat?’
He nods. ‘Dunno what colour, but definitely a rat. The idiot—’
‘Andrew’s not an idiot. Just a termite.’
‘Clever of her to use him to get through your cloaking spell.’
I nod. ‘And she’s still up to something. She scried someone – didn’t you see that? Probably Vannutelli.’
There’s a place somewhere, where this all makes sense. I just haven’t got there yet.
‘Charlie, there’s some herbs I need. Moonwort, asafoetida, Judas’s heart . . .’ I’m scribbling on a scrap of paper. ‘I’ll meet you back here . . . say an hour and a half.’
Forty minutes later, I peer round the corner at Marvo’s mum’s place. The street is empty as I scuttle along in the shadow of a high fence. I creep up the path to the house and duck under the ivy. No lights that I can see. Silence inside. I he
sitate with my hand on the bell-pull. I touch the door and it opens.
I nearly jump out of my socks as Mrs Marvell appears like a ghost out of the front room, knife in hand—
‘They’ve gone.’ She drops the knife on the hall table and pulls out her amulet. ‘And you can go too. You’re not welcome here.’
‘What about Marvo?’
‘They made her call you. Then—’ She’s backing away from me, along the corridor, and I realise I’m supposed to follow her.
On the kitchen floor, the broken fragments of a mirror reflect the lamplight. I pick up the silver case from the dresser: it’s all bent and the hinge is jammed. It’s not like a scryer’s irreplaceable, but there’s a pile of paperwork and then someone’s got to instantiate it . . .
‘They took her.’ Mrs M has begun to weep.
‘Yeah.’
I never expected to find Marvo here. The trouble is, I couldn’t risk being wrong.
That rat I mentioned to Charlie: I can see what colour it is now. I should have caught a whiff of it when we got out of the priory by climbing down a rope made of robes and trousers, but I wasn’t . . . I guess I wasn’t thinking straight. I definitely smelled it when Kazia ditched me down at the river. I heard it squeak when Marvo scried me, just a minute after Kazia made a secret call. I saw its shadow when Vannutelli’s ugly gob showed up in my scryer.
Now it’s sitting on my shoulder, nibbling at my ear with two very sharp front teeth.
‘They’ll be at my place,’ I say.
‘Why?’
‘Someone’s going to do some magic.’
I hear the rattle of iron-bound wheels outside the front door.
‘Did you call the police?’
She nods. ‘A neighbour . . .’
‘Don’t mention me. It won’t help.’ I open the back door. I feel strange asking this question: ‘Will you be all right?’
‘I can look after myself perfectly well,’ she snorts. ‘But I expect you to look after Magdalena.’
The street alongside the termite nest looks empty and I figure I’m first back . . . until I see a small, red point of light in the shadow behind one of the buttresses.
‘The Knights are still around.’ Charlie steps out.
‘Yeah, I heard something clanking.’
His cigarette end fizzles out in a puddle. He pulls a small package out of his pocket and tosses it to me. I head off towards the back of the monastery, pulling at the paper as I go.
Charlie’s right behind me. ‘All there,’ he says.
‘I owe you.’
He grabs me by the arm and swings me round to face him. ‘Yes, you do, Frank.’
‘Yeah, I know,’ I say. ‘I get it.’
‘For now.’ He smiles. ‘So are you ready?’
He steps up to the wall and gets his fingers into a crack between two stones. He levers himself up—
‘Charlie, no.’
He looks down at me.
‘They’ve got Marvo in there. I’ll have my work cut out, you know, with her . . .’
His face has fallen. ‘You can’t look after me too, that’s what you mean.’ I don’t know what to say. He does. He drops to the ground. ‘I’m a liability.’
I still don’t know what to say. I watch him walk away.
‘I’m sorry, Charlie.’
‘Just wait till it’s your turn.’
‘If I live that long.’
But he doesn’t smile. ‘Good luck, Frank,’ he says over his shoulder as he disappears round the corner.
If you were wondering where Dinny had got to, the answer is lying slumped on the steps leading up to my studio, where I can trip over him. He’s dribbling. And yeah, he’s been sick.
I’m tempted to leave him lying there, but I feel safer with him where I can see him. I get my shoulder under his arm and manage to lift him to his feet.
Inside, my studio door is rippling like the wind disturbing the surface of a lake. I touch it, and it whimpers.
‘It’s all right,’ I say, and it opens.
OK, it all kicks off faster than I’d expected. I’m barely inside before the weight on my shoulder disappears, and by the time I’ve caught my balance, a figure in a black and white habit has got one arm locked round Dinny’s neck and the other hand holding a knife to his throat.
So who’s here? The two Dominicans, Lumpy and Hatchet Face, both looking very queasy. My blue-eared dog is scurrying around the floor, cheerfully licking up the contents of their stomachs – the after-effects of being dragged through a cloaking spell.
And there’s the girl who did the dragging: Kazia, sitting on my mattress with her hands clasped tight between her knees. She doesn’t look up, just stares down at the floor like she’s spotted a few specks of dirt that the dog missed.
And the funny thing is: as I stumbled through the door with Dinny, there was still this stupid hope that it wouldn’t be like this.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The Bee’s Knees
I’VE SEEN ALL sorts of weird stuff. Things appearing out of nowhere or vanishing in the blink of an eye, dropping out of the heavens like a stone or fizzling out in a shower of green sparks.
But I’ve never seen anybody tied up. I kind of imagined that it was one of those things that only happen in books, like breaking down a door by putting your shoulder to it, or knocking someone unconscious with a single crisp sock on the jaw.
It’s Marvo, of course, who’s on the receiving end of the tying-up. And I have to admit that, considering the sheltered lives they’ve led, the monks have done a beautiful job. None of this crap with winding a thick rope round and round her middle. She’s got each ankle bound neatly to a leg of the chair, and her hands tied to the back of the chair behind her. She can move – she’s been wriggling like hell ever since I fell in through the door. All she’s managed to do is fall over sideways. She’s still wriggling. Gives her something to concentrate on while I get my orders.
Yeah, sometimes I do the weirdest things. I don’t mean weird like spells and stuff. I mean, things that I really don’t expect. Things I never thought I’d do. Never thought I could do . . .
I kneel beside Marvo. In honour of the occasion, she’s wearing her famous red duffel coat with the missing toggle – the one she was wearing the first time she ever came to my studio. And for some reason that breaks me up. I run the backs of my fingers down her cheek. I feel her shiver. Her eyes close.
‘I won’t let them hurt you,’ I whisper.
I feel, I dunno, like this total fraud. We’re talking demons here, even if Marvo doesn’t know it yet. And once there’s a demon in the room . . .
That’s right. All bets are off.
Of course, the man giving the orders is still missing from the picture. But now I spot Vannutelli in the shadows beside the fireplace. He’s dressed all in black, from the skullcap perched over his receding hairline to the neat, shiny black shoes.
He dances down the two steps like a ballerina. He skips across the floor towards me and holds out his right hand, palm down, fingers extended. I realise I’m expected to kiss the whacking great gold ring on his fourth finger.
‘Show your respect.’ He’s staring at Marvo. ‘Or your friend dies now.’
I kiss the ring.
‘You know what I want. You can do?’
‘I can do,’ I say quietly.
I get these looks. Kazia, it’s more of a glance, like she’s afraid to catch my eye. I get this feeling that she’s grateful, but maybe I’m imagining it.
Marvo, there’s nothing to imagine. I’m quite glad that the hatchet-faced monk has got his hand over her mouth.
Vannutelli . . . it’s a sort of smile. I think he thinks he can see right through me, and I’m hoping like hell that he can’t.
‘But it’ll take a while,’ I point out.
‘How long?’
‘Gimme six hours.’
He leans his head to one side and puts one finger to his fat lips while he thinks about it. ‘Three,
’ he says. Which is two hours more than I’d expected.
It’s something every sorcerer has to put up with: people sitting around tapping their feet, scratching and sighing.
A handful of cloves spit on red-hot charcoal.
‘The prayers,’ Kazia hisses.
‘Don’t need ’em.’
‘Prayers?’ says Vannutelli. ‘What prayers?’
Kazia has got this anxious look on her face. ‘We must ask God to bless the work.’
‘You’re trying to kill someone,’ Marvo spits out, between Hatchet Face’s fingers.
‘Is God’s work. He understands.’ Vannutelli gives me his imperious look. ‘You pray.’
‘OK,’ I say. ‘Everybody on their knees.’
Marvo’s excused, obviously.
‘O Lord God Almighty, full of compassion,’ I start. ‘Aid us in this work which we are about to perform . . .’
Every time you summon a demon, you hit the fundamental paradox of sorcery: you’re wheeling God out to force an evil being to do your dirty work. I’m running through the usual stuff, wondering what would happen if I just skipped it. Would I be damning myself? Not that I believe in damnation. Or should I get bonus heavenly points for at least being honest about what I’m up to?
When everybody’s said ‘Amen’, I exorcise a couple of gallons of water. It’s easy enough: you just toss in a handful of quicklime, mutter some more prayers and stir until everybody’s yawning.
Which is when I give my arm a little shake. Something drops out of my sleeve onto the bench and I push it behind the scales.
Charlie’s herbs.
I use most of the exorcised water to wash the floor; then I start messing around with a stick of chalk and some string. I’m going with a version of a Grand Honorian Circle. It’s powerful and flexible, but kind of slippery and hard to control. At Saint Cyprian’s they told us to steer clear of it, and the one time they caught me playing with one I got a month of detentions and an unpleasant ten minutes on the receiving end of a wet knotted rope.
So why go looking for trouble? Well, it’s fast; you can get away with mucking about with the symbols; I know Kazia likes it, so she won’t get her knickers in a twist . . .
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