‘Where’d you get that?’
‘Where you dropped it after you . . . what d’you call it? After you instantiated Preston.’ She turns back to Matthew. ‘Deal?’
‘Don’t be stupid, Marvo!’ I make a dive for the pentacle, but she whips it away and tosses it to Matthew.
Alastor pushes himself off the pillar. We’re all waiting to see what Matthew does next. He’s holding the chain up with one hand. The reflected candlelight glides across his face as the pentacle revolves slowly.
He glares at me. ‘Did you put her up to this?’
I shake my head.
‘Put me up to what?’ says Marvo.
‘You do know what this is . . .’
‘Yeah, it’s a pentacle of Solomon. It’ll get you past him—’
She’s staring open-mouthed at Alastor, who has transformed into a wooden box, about two foot square.
Matthew turns to me. ‘Yours?’
‘Kazia’s, actually.’
‘Don’t forget,’ says Marvo. ‘You promised.’
Matthew smiles, like a cat toying with a mouse. ‘I am the Superior General of the Society of Sorcerers in England,’ he says. ‘I don’t believe that an alleged promise to a very junior police officer carries any weight.’
‘Yeah, but you promised!’ Marvo looks round at me like she really doesn’t understand.
I can only shrug. ‘What’d I tell you? Should’ve listened . . .’
The wooden box opens. A long, grey worm emerges and weaves its way in and out of the pillars around the room . . .
The hand holding the pentacle is trembling. Beads of sweat run down Matthew’s face. I know why he’s hesitating, but I can’t help this sinking feeling that all the resources of the Society are about to descend on my head.
‘Anyway, the issue is academic.’ Matthew sighs. ‘This thing is useless as far as I’m concerned.’
Alastor has transformed back and is standing bang in front of him right on the edge of the circle, axe in one hand, knife in the other, and a huge grin plastered across his face. ‘Looks good to me,’ he says.
‘Nice try, Marvo,’ I say. ‘But Kazia made it for her own use.’
Actually, I want to hit Marvo. I can’t believe she could be so stupid. That she was prepared to betray me like that. If Matthew had got out—
‘Come here, Sampson.’ He’s beckoning me over.
I step up to the edge of the circle, opposite Alastor.
Matthew lifts the lid of the lavatory bucket beside him, and drops the pentacle in. ‘You can go now.’ He sits down and buries his head in his hands.
Alastor’s grin has faded. He sticks his weapons back in his belt and wanders off into the gloom.
‘Let’s get out of here, Marvo.’ I shove her towards the stairs, and I’ve stopped to check the symbols again when I hear the Boss say—
‘It’s hell down here.’ He nods towards Alastor. ‘With him.’
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
Surprise
OUT THE BACK of the palace, it’s daylight . . . of a sort. Marvo follows me down the garden towards the river.
‘Are you really that stupid?’ I say.
‘How was I supposed to know all this pentacle crap?’
‘I’m not talking about that. Suppose it had been good – suppose he’d got out—’
‘I’d have arrested him as soon as we got outside.’
‘Yeah, right. He’s the Superior General—’
‘He’s not above the law.’
‘Benefit of clergy. Ring any bells? He can’t be tried in a secular court. The case’d go to an ecclesiastical court and it’d be packed with his chums.’
‘So do you have it, this benefit of clergy?’
‘Much good may it do me. The point is, when Matthew does get out—’
‘“When” . . .?’
‘Can’t keep him there for ever. And don’t ask me what I’m going to do. Point is: you can’t touch him, so don’t try anything like that again.’
She’s doing her disappointed look. The big eyes and all that. ‘You said you’d help me,’ she says. ‘You promised.’
I scratch my head. I’m too tired and angry to care about unsightly red marks. ‘I think I’ve helped quite a lot.’
‘You still haven’t found out what happened to Sean.’
There’s nothing you can say to that, is there? It’s a great spell, a pariah spell. We’re down by the riverside gate. The security elemental beams at me. ‘Lovely morning, Mr Sampson.’ He opens the gate. In a perfect world it’d be like this all the time.
Beyond the trees, out on the river, a string of barges drifts downstream. I’m wondering what Kazia will do now, when Marvo says, ‘Frank, what happens if you’re swallowed by a demon?’
Yeah, poor old Dinny. He was a nutter, but he wasn’t a bad bloke. Not evil, anyway. And he’d still be alive if I’d just left him lying on the steps outside my studio.
‘He saved my life.’ A tear glints on Marvo’s cheek.
‘What Matthew taught me,’ I say. ‘It’s open and shut. If you’re swallowed by a demon you go to hell.’
‘Even a good person?’
‘By definition, a good person can’t be swallowed by a demon. The Society would say you’re confusing cause and effect.’ I head off along the towpath. ‘Crap like that,’ I say over my shoulder. ‘It’s why me and the Society don’t really hit it off.’
Marvo’s trailing after me. ‘I wasn’t really goin’ to, you know, let your boss go.’
‘It’s true what they say.’
‘What?’
‘Tatties are crap at lying.’
‘Whatever. So what you gonna do?’
‘Let me think.’
We’re up the steps onto the bridge.
‘Well,’ she says, ‘have you thought?’
‘You don’t let up, do you?’
‘Why should I? Everybody else gets what they want – what about me? Frank, you promised!’
‘No I didn’t. You just assumed—’
‘An’ you let me.’
‘Will you just shut up and listen for once?’ I grab her arm, just above the elbow. She’s so scrawny, my middle finger and thumb meet.
‘That hurts!’ She pulls away. ‘I’m going home.’
‘Good.’
And for a few moments, that seems to be that. But ten yards up the road, she turns and says, ‘You know your problem?’
‘Which one specifically?’
‘You’re jealous.’
‘Jealous of who?’
‘Jealous of your boss. You’re not sure what he had going with Kazia.’
‘Huh!’
‘And you’re jealous of her coz she did magic for him and you’re afraid she was better than you.’
‘Nark off.’
‘It’s not just that you’re scared of him—’
‘I’m not scared of him. Just don’t know what to do with him.’
‘The real reason you’ve got him trapped down there isn’t so he can’t get at you. It’s so Kazia can’t get to him. What do you think of that for an insight?’
She turns away. I watch her stomp off up the road towards the railway station. She’s still small and skinny. Her hair’s still a mess. She’s so wrecked she can’t walk straight.
I’m cold and I can’t hang around here all day. After a bit I follow her, careful to keep my distance. She looks back once and sees me. She walks faster. I walk slower. Her red duffel coat disappears round a corner.
I think I prefer Marvo without the insights. That’s what I think.
You expected my studio to be empty, didn’t you? Apart from a couple of dead bodies, obviously.
But Kazia’s still there. Yeah, I’m as surprised as you are. There she is, though, fast asleep on the mattress.
Alastor is still whining away in my head, but quieter than before. Maybe all the fun tired him out.
I get the chair that Marvo was tied to and turn it the right way up. I sit down and watch
Kazia. She’s just lying there on her back with one arm across her eyes. One leg twitches. Maybe she’s dreaming about me . . .
OK, maybe not.
There’s just enough room that someone could lie down beside her and maybe put his arms around her without waking her. But I’m not quite that person. It isn’t something they taught us at Saint Cyprian’s.
I realise I kind of wish she had just made herself scarce. I sit there and wonder what I’m going to do about her.
She made a decision to stay here and wait for me. Why do I have this stupid idea that I owe her something? It’s like I feel responsible for all the shit that’s happened to her. I mean, if I imagine I’m standing back where I can see myself perched on the chair staring at her . . . I dunno, I reckon she’s doing OK. She gets to run wild playing with magic and knocking people off; and any time she gets in over her head, all she has to do is whistle and here comes Frank! Charging to the rescue like a knight in rusty armour on a moth-eaten donkey.
I realise that when I look at her it’s not the real Kazia that I see. It’s this stupid fantasy – and I can’t let go of it.
I get up out of the chair, quietly so I don’t wake her up. I look back to see that she isn’t secretly watching me. Then I step into my broom cupboard and start hunting through my books.
This part of my studio, it isn’t physically partitioned off; it’s hidden behind another cloaking spell. A space about ten feet across, lined with glass cabinets, cupboards and shelves. I run my finger along the spines of old, leather-bound books: the Grande grimoire, the Liber Honorius, the Receuil des signes magiques . . .
I look up from time to time. There’s this one time I catch Kazia moving, but she just turns over on her side, so she’s facing away from me, and curls up in a ball.
After an hour or so, I’ve figured out what to do. I write it all down on virgin parchment and put the books back in the shelves. I step out of the broom cupboard and stand over Kazia.
For a moment I let pictures of her form in my head. I really need to be careful about those. I lean down and shake her shoulder. Her eyes flash open and she almost falls off the other side of the mattress.
‘It’s all right,’ I say. ‘It’s just me.’
‘What’s happening?’
‘You broke Marvo’s brother. So you’re going to help me fix him.’
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
A New Leaf
LET’S TALK ABOUT resurrection. Because obviously that’s what Marvo’s brother needs. Not literally, thank God – we’ve been down that road before and it wasn’t an experience I care to repeat. But I’ve scratched my head some more, and I think I’ve come up with a ritual that might fix him.
Earth. Air. Water. Fire.
The four classical elements. It was a simple idea when the medieval alchemists stole it from the Ancient Greeks; but, being alchemists, they immediately started finding ways to make it more complicated. Adding new and more exciting elements. Thinking up numbers and multiplying them. I’m tired and easily bored, so I decide to stick to the original four.
I’ve got four sheets of paper, one for each element. I’m making lists and drawing little diagrams.
Earth. Jesus spent three days in the tomb before he came bouncing back. Maybe if I could come up with the right way to bury the kid alive . . . and the right magic to stop him turning from buried and unconscious into buried and dead . . . that might work.
Some Indian sorcerers make a big performance of this. We had one who came to Saint Cyprian’s once. I can’t remember whether it was a recruitment drive, or he was trying to raise money, or just showing off. Anyway, he got us to bury him in the rhododendron beds and when we dug him up three days later . . . Well, good thing he hadn’t bought a return ticket.
Air. That one beats me. What am I supposed to do? Tie the kid to a flock of pigeons?
Water? Nope, one wetting’s quite enough, thank you.
Fire? There’s this story in the Bible about how these three guys – Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego – got so far up King Nebuchadnezzar’s nose that he tossed them into a blazing fiery furnace. But when he opened the door to check how the cremation was going, he saw not three, but four men in the furnace, walking around, happy as Larry.
The fourth guy? The Archangel Michael, sent down to rescue them. Obviously, he’s the man to call.
I can’t do a full-blown blazing fiery furnace. But there’s a building I can set alight: the shed out in Wytham Wood, just down the hill from the three Weird Sisters and the crater where I instantiated poor old Preston.
It’s two days since I got a couple of resurrection men I know to cart away the bodies from my studio. Then I grabbed everything I could think of, just in case the Knights of Saint Cyprian came back and worked out how to break the cloaking spell.
Since then, I’ve been camped out, gathering wood and drawing things on the ground. It’s difficult, working out in the open and on this scale. For a start, how do you draw a circle when you’ve got a building in the middle? Normally, I’d just hammer a peg into the ground and run round with a length of string. But I need the shed slap bang in the centre of the circle and the walls are in the way. It takes me a while to work it out. But finally I knock a hole in the roof; then me and Charlie chop down the flagpole in one of the local schools and set it up so the top sticks out through the roof of the shed, and tie the string to that.
The geometry is complicated and pretty damned peculiar. More alchemy than magic. But then what I’m trying to do is transform the kid . . .
It’s a double circle, fifteen yards across. And it’s like there’s an equilateral triangle behind it, with just the corners sticking out. And then inside the circle is a seven-pointed star, which was another nightmare to draw, with all sorts of stuff splattered around the place. And another circle, tight around the shed.
I drew all this by knocking a nail through the bottom of a tin of white paint – several tins, actually – and letting it drip out.
Like I said, two days.
I’m at Charlie’s place now, with Kazia. We’ve ploughed through the prayers and doused ourselves in cold exorcised water. We’ve purified the last few instruments and wrapped them in black silk.
I didn’t really expect her to see it through. You know, I thought she’d just tiptoe quietly away, sometime when I wasn’t looking. I kind of wish she had, because it’s hopeless. Can’t trust her; can’t turn her in; can’t bring myself to tell her to go away.
She acts like she’s seen the light. Turned over a new leaf. Repented of all her sins and wickednesses. She’s told me everything she remembers about how she cast the pariah spell, and she’s helped me work out all the materials, planetary influences and symbols to undo it. That’s one of the reasons the geometry is so peculiar: I get the alchemical bits, but there’s a lot of Baltic magic here that doesn’t mean a thing to me.
She helped me and Charlie kick a hole through the back wall of the shed and pack the inside with brushwood and dead branches, leaving a clear passage down the middle. Then we sat around for three hours together, poking holes in ourselves and drawing the major symbols in blood on linen squares.
But we haven’t talked about anything. It’s like there’s this box with all this stuff inside it that really matters – but if I open the lid even the tiniest crack, it’ll all burst out. And I get a picture in my head of millions and millions of black flies, whirling and screaming . . .
So I leave the box shut tight.
I pack the wrapped instruments into my satchel. I fasten the straps and look at Kazia, and it seems like she’s got smaller.
That’s partly because she’s shaved her head. OK, it’s an archangel, not a demon, that we’re invoking, so there’s no risk of being grabbed by the hair and dragged off to hell. But, to be honest, I don’t trust archangels either – there is such a thing as Too Good To Be True. And anyway we need human hair as part of the burnt offering
Maybe she’s sick. She seems to move slower than I remember
. Her eyes . . . it’s like the blue’s faded and that film across them – the thing that always seemed to shield what she was really thinking – it’s got more opaque.
I’ve said it over and over again, until you must be sick of it: I love her.
Only I don’t. Not any more, anyway . . . and I don’t think I ever really did. At least, that’s what I tell myself. On the other hand, I’m only fifteen so what do I know?
I guess I feel sorry for her. Like she’s messed everything up and maybe if I’d done something different . . . you know, maybe we wouldn’t be here dripping blood onto linen squares and not talking to each other.
Yeah, I know: I should stop whining. It’s Marvo’s brother who’s going to get set alight.
Marvo herself? Haven’t seen her since she walked off. To tell the truth, there’ve been a few times over the last couple of days when I’ve been tempted to call it all off and leave her to it.
I still can’t believe that she was prepared to make a deal with Matthew. But she was. And I guess that’s a sign . . . I dunno, of how desperate she is. I could just go off and sulk and let her sort it all out for herself. It wouldn’t be right, though.
So Charlie’s been round to the jack shack to tell her to be outside the mortuary in a police van. It’s after dark and I can see her silhouette as I duck past, keeping to the shadows. Kazia’s behind me. Charlie’s waiting for us in the yard round the back, with the deliveries door open.
Smash and grab. Me and Charlie bust into the amphitheatre and push a startled diener out of the way. Charlie gets the Crypt Boy over his shoulder, Kazia’s holding the door open, and we just run out with him.
I dash ahead, through the lobby, past the open-mouthed receptionist, and out of the front door. I’m first into the van because I know what’s coming: seeing the kid will send Marvo into a spin. She just has time to splutter, ‘What are you playin’ at?’ before Kazia and Charlie toss him in and her eyes go all wild.
She’s still kicking as we bang off up the Woodstock Road.
Pariah Page 24