The Black Amulet

by J. R. Wallis

  For the first time in what seemed like ages, Ruby smiled.

  ‘What?’ asked Givens. Ruby tapped the mirror. She touched the wood surround. It was made of oak as far as she could tell. She felt the urge to look deeper into the glass, at whatever she wanted. Her gift for scrying was alive and wanting to be used.

  Givens tutted. ‘You see, Wilfried. We have before us a girl and all she’s interested in doing is admiring herself, in seeing how she looks. If she were a great Badlander then she’d use her exceptional gift for scrying to get out of this damned place and save us all.’

  Ruby waited for Givens’s words to stop echoing round the chamber and then she turned to look at him.

  ‘That, Mr Givens, is exactly what I’m going to do. Unless you want to be the hero instead and show Wilfried here how it’s done and save us all?’

  Givens’s mouth dropped open so wide Ruby could have stuffed her fist inside it.

  ‘No? Okay then, so why don’t you tell me what sort of a plan you had in mind?’

  TWENTY-SIX

  Ruby waited for Givens to say something. But he seemed to be in a state of shock.

  ‘Mr Givens, I’ll ask you again. If I were to go through this mirror, how would I save you, Wilfried and Jones, because I’m guessing none of you are anywhere near good enough at scrying, so it’s going to have to be me. A girl.’ She heard Jones cough a few words under his breath and she wondered if perhaps she was enjoying all this too much. She folded her arms. Waited for Givens to speak.

  ‘Why don’t you show him what you can do, Ruby?’ suggested Jones quietly. ‘It might help.’

  Ruby cleared her throat and stood in front of the mirror. There was a tin of polish in her pocket and she rubbed some of the soft white contents into the glass. Then she imagined Givens’s study and watched it appear in the mirror. Drewman gasped. So did Wilfried.

  Everyone in the chamber could see the ashen remains of the picture. They were smouldering below the black mark on the wall. Ruby pushed a hand through the glass and it disappeared.

  Givens cursed, but Drewman chuckled. ‘The Order’s going to be so much better with girls in it one day, Givens, mark my words.’

  When Ruby brought her hand back out, she waggled the fingers to show they were all right and then looked at Givens.

  ‘So. What do you want me to do? How can I save you? If you want to be saved by a girl, that is?’

  Givens spoke quietly. ‘There is another way in and out of the chamber. A back door. In case the picture ever got damaged and I couldn’t enter.’

  ‘Where is it?’

  ‘In the attic. There’s a window at the far end. Run at it and you’ll open a door that will lead to this chamber.’

  ‘Right, so I run at the window. And I’ll end up in here.’

  Givens nodded. ‘It’ll open a door that we can all use to get out.’

  ‘Sounds simple enough,’ said Ruby.

  She was about to step through the mirror when Jones grabbed her. ‘What about Thomas Gabriel?’

  Ruby looked in the mirror and scanned the study. But there was no sign of him. ‘Either he’s gone or he’s making himself a congratulatory cup of tea. I’m presuming the former.’ She took a large stride through the mirror and her leg disappeared. ‘Won’t be long.’

  She gave Givens a big smile before she vanished.

  The study smelt of burnt picture. Ruby sneezed and stood listening, hoping that Thomas Gabriel had indeed gone. It seemed that way after waiting a little while, but she tiptoed to the door anyway before looking out into the hallway. Not a sound except for the ticking of a clock. She pulled out the gun from her waistband and started walking and whispering, explaining what had happened since it had been tucked away.

  ‘That Thomas Gabriel’s gone too far,’ it whispered back. ‘Too far! You should have let me do the talking.’

  ‘I’m not sure that would have worked,’ said Ruby. ‘He wasn’t exactly in the mood for listening. The amulet’s in control of him.’

  ‘He would have listened to my particular kind of talking,’ said the gun. ‘One clean shot and . . .’

  Ruby knew what it was getting at, but she said nothing else as she stood in the hallway and listened. Satisfied there was no sign of Thomas Gabriel, she walked quickly up the two flights of stairs to the top of the house to find the attic. Her thinking spiralled round too. As she went, she seemed to pump anger into herself about what Thomas Gabriel had done. Not only had he taken away the chance for her and Jones to finally sort out their Commencement, but he’d tricked her on that final eyot.

  She’d been scared of him less than an hour ago, but, by the time she reached the top floor of the house, she was feeling very different.

  ‘Okay, I’m angry now,’ she said to the gun as she caught her breath. ‘But angry in a calculating, let’s-sort-this-out kind of a way.’

  ‘Riii-ght,’ said the gun. ‘I’m not sure what that means, but isn’t the attic maybe up there?’ it asked as Ruby passed a small flight of narrow stairs and veered into a large bedroom.

  ‘Probably,’ said Ruby. She walked round the bedroom and tutted when she couldn’t find what she was looking for and went into the next room. Her eyes lit up when she saw a full-length mirror screwed to the back of the door.

  ‘Er, Ruby. What precisely is going on in that head of yours?’

  Ruby touched the mirror and liked the feel of it. ‘If Thomas Gabriel thinks I’m stuck in that chamber with the others, I’ve got an advantage.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘The element of surprise. He won’t be expecting me to turn up wherever he is.’

  ‘No, he wouldn’t expect you to be so stupid. He’s wearing the Black Amulet and you can’t do magic.’

  ‘I don’t mean to take him on. But what if I can steal the golden boxes me and Jones need? If I can get them, Drewman can still sort out our Commencement and everything we’ve done will still matter. Givens doesn’t think much of girls being Badlanders, but if I can do magic perhaps he’ll change his mind. I’ve shown him a thing or two already. We need to get those boxes back.’

  The gun sighed. It looked at itself in the mirror. ‘You know what, Ruby?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Will whatever I say make any difference?’

  Ruby thought about that and shook her head.

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ said the gun.

  Ruby used the mirror to scry on Thomas Gabriel and find out where he was. It only took a matter of seconds. She saw that he was packing a bag in his bedroom, a limitless one, she presumed, judging by the amount of things he was putting in it.

  ‘What about the boxes?’ asked the gun.

  Ruby searched the house, trying to find the string bag. When she saw it hanging off the back of the chair in the kitchen, she punched the air. ‘Oh, this is going to be easy,’ she said and tucked the gun into her waistband.

  She asked the mirror to focus closer on the bag and, carefully, she reached through to take it off the back of the chair. It was heavier than she remembered, but she managed to unhook it. Yet, in her eagerness to have it, she pulled it towards her so quickly that one of the string holes caught on a protruding nail. The chair screeched across the floor and toppled over and gave her such a shock that she dropped the bag and it fell to the floor. Breathing hard, she heard a thunder of feet down the stairs and she knew she had to reach in now or never get the boxes. Plunging a hand back through, she grabbed the bag.

  And then she felt a tug as Thomas Gabriel took hold of the other end.

  He yanked so hard, and Ruby held on so tightly, her fingers wrapped in the string of the bag, that she was pulled head first through the mirror.

  Thomas Gabriel stumbled back as Ruby slipped through the glass like an eel and they both landed on the floor.

  ‘How did you get out?’ he screamed as he struggled to stand up, his lip bleeding where it had been struck by Ruby’s elbow. ‘How are you out of that chamber?’

  Ruby didn’t answ
er. She was too busy focusing on getting up first which she managed to do. She didn’t look back at Thomas Gabriel and scampered through the doorway as a burst of white sparks shattered the door frame. She ran up the stairs and into a room and shut the door.

  Ruby looked around and realized she was in a spare bedroom. There was a large rectangular mirror on the wall and it was high. But it was one way out. And then she thought about the golden boxes and how this was her only chance to try and get them.

  She dragged a chair across to the mirror and then left it there, instead of leaving, and climbed into the large pine wardrobe in the corner, taking out the key. After shutting the door, she hid in the musty-smelling dark and drew out the gun in a shaking hand.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ it asked. ‘Where are we? Why’s it so dark?’ and Ruby hissed at it to be quiet.

  ‘I’ve got a plan,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, you mean another bad one, judging by it,’ said the gun.

  Ruby heard the bedroom door slam open. Thomas Gabriel was breathing hard. She could hear the anger in him. He walked across the room and stopped.

  Ruby imagined he must be looking at the mirror and the chair, and she hoped he was going to fall for the idea she’d set up for him. But he started walking again, the footsteps coming closer. She braced herself against the inside of the wardrobe door, to keep it shut. She felt the cold surface of a mirror on the inside of the door. But she didn’t move. She didn’t dare make a noise. Thomas Gabriel tried the wardrobe door and Ruby held it tight, making it seem as though it was locked. When he gave up trying to open it, and Ruby breathed a very quiet sigh of relief.

  She listened as Thomas Gabriel stood for some time in the room. She could hear him breathing hard and shuffling his feet, tapping a knuckle on the mirror, and thinking everything through. She flinched when she heard the mirror on the wall break with a great booming noise and pieces fell to the floor in a great crash.

  Thomas Gabriel slammed the bedroom door hard as he left and only then did Ruby relax, realizing he’d fallen for what she had intended.

  She stayed in the dark of the wardrobe, not daring to move, conjuring up Thomas Gabriel in the mirror on the back of the door, and watching him. And what she saw next she did not like.

  The boy was in the kitchen with all three golden boxes lined up in a row on the counter. One after the other, he opened the lids and tipped out the black-looking ash in them down the sink, flushing it down the plughole with the taps on full blast. And then he tossed the boxes onto the floor and left.

  Ruby thought she heard her heart burst with a POP!

  ‘Ruby, it’s over. Drewman’s gone. There’s nothing left of him except for that head of his now. Thomas Gabriel has flushed the rest down the sink.’

  Ruby thought about that in the dark and then she spoke again.

  ‘Now.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Now, you said the word “now”. You said there’s nothing left of Drewman except for that head of his now.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what I just said,’ groaned the gun. ‘So give it up and save yourself. We need to leave.’

  ‘But Drewman’s still all there in the past.’

  ‘What? What are you talking about?’

  Ruby took out the little tin of scrying polish in her pocket and rubbed a white nub of it onto the mirror. She stared at the glass and thought about where she wanted to go. The interior of the VW camper van appeared. She could hear distant voices outside.

  Carefully, she crept through a slightly sticky patch of time, her old army camouflage jacket snagging a little, before crawling through into the van. She plucked out a little piece of her exit point back.

  It was early morning. Ruby could hear Jones, Thomas Gabriel and herself, standing outside, talking about going to see Givens now they had all three golden boxes and forcing him to open the hidden door to see Drewman. Through the window, she could make out a couple of buildings in the distance and knew they were parked on the outskirts of Reading.

  The three golden boxes were sitting on the table in the van next to Thomas Gabriel’s ticking invitation.

  ‘Ruby,’ whispered the gun in her hand. ‘You can’t change anything in the past. If you do, it might change the future. If that happens then the time we’ve come from could be very different. We might not even be here, because you might not have gone back in time in the first place. Oh,’ it moaned, ‘this is not good for my brain.’

  Ruby was surprised to hear that the gun thought it had a brain. But she wasn’t too interested in whether it did or not. She had a plan for the problem it had mentioned. First she put the gun into her waistband. Then, as she listened to the voices outside, she found an empty jar in one of the cupboards as quickly as she could and carefully poured the contents of all three golden boxes into it and screwed on the lid and stuck it in her pocket. Then she poured some Slap Dust into each box and put them back on the table.

  It didn’t take long and she didn’t hang around, but, when she heard footsteps outside and the door to the van starting to open, she held up the piece of her exit point and felt it tug her towards the way back to her own time.

  Ruby dived through as the door to the van opened.

  *

  She landed in the wardrobe, slamming into the back of it with a loud BANG! that she worried Thomas Gabriel would have heard, wherever he was in the house. The mirror in the wardrobe had shattered and she had nothing to scry with.

  She opened the doors and clambered out, taking the gun out of her waistband.

  ‘What’s happened?’ it asked. ‘Were you seen?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘The future would be different. We’re back in Thomas Gabriel’s house and nothing’s changed.’

  ‘So Thomas Gabriel’s still here?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  She heard footsteps hammering up the stairs.

  ‘We need to leave.’

  ‘Looks like it’ll have to be the old-fashioned way,’ said Ruby, looking at the broken glass of the mirror that had been on the wall.

  ‘You mean Slap Dust?’

  ‘No, we’re out of that.’

  ‘So you mean the front door?’

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘And we’re just going to walk out of it, are we?’

  Thomas Gabriel thundered down the landing.

  ‘Ruby!’

  ‘If I’m not good enough to be a Badlander then you think of something,’ said Ruby and hurled the gun onto the floor in frustration. It spluttered something she didn’t hear because she was almost in tears as the door burst open and Thomas Gabriel ran in, his face dark with rage and his hand raised, white sparks flickering round the ends of his fingers.

  Ruby saw his face turn from delight to pain in an instant as his arms went flailing and he slipped, as though he was on ice, and flew through the air and collapsed in a heap.

  The gun squirted out from under his foot at the same time and thudded into Ruby’s shin, making her curse.

  But there was no time to rub her leg as she watched Thomas Gabriel scrabbling round in the glass, trying to stand up, and she picked up the chair that had been in front of the mirror and hit him hard on the head. He fell like his legs had been cut away. Ruby stood with the chair raised, ready to hit him again. But this time he wasn’t moving. It looked like a large egg had been laid on his forehead as the bump swelled up.

  She put the chair down and picked up the gun. ‘Well, that worked out rather well,’ she said with admiration in her voice.

  A hiss made her look round. The two serpent heads of the Black Amulet were wiggling and moving and they clamped their mouths down on Thomas Gabriel’s arm. Black shapes moved over his skin. He started to twitch.

  ‘Time to go, I think,’ said the gun.

  ‘In a moment.’

  Ruby reached into his coat pocket and rummaged around, then drew out the little silver pillbox and opened it, to check it contained
the wælmist.

  ‘Ruby, I won’t say this again—’

  ‘All right! We’re leaving,’ said the girl. ‘I just need to find a mirror.’

  She ran downstairs and saw a big square one on the wall in the hallway. She jumped through it like a dolphin through a hoop.

  She landed on the floor of the landing in Givens’s house, rolling over in a single somersault and lay on her back for a moment, looking up at the ceiling. And then she smiled.

  She stood up and ran upstairs to the attic and looked at the window at the far end. She weighed up the blue sky through the window.

  Ruby gritted her teeth and ran as fast as she could down the attic towards the window and dived through, trying not to scream as she fell, the gun yelling out loud.

  Ruby appeared through a door in the wall of the chamber, in front of a very surprised Givens, and grinned as she bent over to catch her breath. The silver pillbox was clutched tight in her fist.

  ‘Here you go,’ she said and handed it to Givens. The man stared at the pillbox lying in his hand and swallowed hard as he opened it and saw the wælmist swirling inside the glass vial. And then he looked up at her and nodded.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said in a quiet voice.

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  When Givens kept staring, Ruby wondered if she should say something else. But Drewman piped up and hollered at them.

  ‘She’s as good as any boy, Givens, you’ve got to admit that.’

  Givens cleared his throat and nodded.

  ‘Yes,’ he agreed. ‘As good as any apprentice I’ve ever seen.’ He turned round and ushered Wilfried towards him as he headed for the door.

  Ruby grinned and felt herself turn red at the edges. And then Jones was there, grabbing her hand.

  ‘What about the boxes?’ he asked.

  Ruby reached into her pocket and drew out the glass jar full of the black ash from the golden boxes.

  ‘All in here,’ she said.

  At first a look of relief washed over Jones’s face and then he frowned and opened his mouth, ready to ask a question.

  ‘I’ll tell you later,’ said Ruby before the boy could say anything.