Ink Black Magic

by Tansy Rayner Roberts

  “I suppose not,” said Egg.

  “And you’ll let me read them sometimes?”

  “Maybe, when they’re ready.”

  “Okay.” There was a gleam in Clio’s eyes. “While you’re in a mood for sharing secrets, what are all those envelopes in the second drawer down? The ones with the green wax seals and magic sigils all over?”

  Egg looked at her, aghast. “You’ve been looking through my drawers!”

  “Only a bit. I was bored.”

  “So you knew about my superhero stories all along?”

  “Well, yeah. But I was polite enough to wait until you told me about them.”

  “Polite?” he said, frantically running through his head to figure out what else she might have seen in his drawers.

  “Yes, polite!” she insisted. “So what are those envelopes?”

  “None of your business!”

  “Fine.” Clio went over to her bed, pulled her ghastly grandmother nightgown out from under her pillow and flounced into the wash chamber. “Keep your secrets, see if I care!”

  “You’re just nosy!” Egg yelled after her.

  “Did I deny that?”

  Ten minutes later, there was a knock on the door of their room. Egg was about to answer it when Clio, all white lace and curlers, swept out of the wash chamber and reached the door first. “I suppose you’re looking for Sean McHagrty?” she demanded of the girl who had knocked.

  The girl, a brunette in a pink bodice so tight it hurt to look at, smiled radiantly. “Is he here?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Clio. “I married him this morning. Bad luck.” She let the door slam in the girl’s face.

  Egg laughed. “I’m getting locks for my drawers tomorrow.”

  “I’d do that if I were you,” Clio agreed. “You never know who might be going through your things.” She hopped into bed, tucking herself up to her chin. “Will you tell me a story this time?”

  So Egg did. He told her about Queenbeetle, his new insect-woman villainess, and how she received her mysterious powers when she was bitten by a radioactive bug. He didn’t even know what radioactive meant, but the word sounded good. It sounded right.

  Clio was an appreciative audience, laughing and gasping and sighing at all the right places as Egg described Queenbeetle’s tragic and often melodramatic life. As he neared the tricky bit in the story, the bit he hadn’t figured out yet, Clio conveniently fell asleep.

  Egg slept too, better than he had in ages. It was great to finally be sharing his stories with someone. Maybe this was what he should have been doing all along.

  Sometime later, the student clocks struck three hours, twenty-two minutes. There was a soft scrabbling sound as someone entered the room and moved ever so quietly across the floor. Still half asleep, Egg rolled over. He registered the sound, but was not yet awake enough to do anything about it. That is, until there was a twang of bed springs, closely followed by a thump and the unmistakable sound of Clio screaming at the top of her lungs.

  Boy, that girl could scream. It was sharp enough to cause spots in front of the eyes. Egg lit his lantern quickly.

  Clio was sitting up in bed, blankets clutched around her and an outraged look on her face. A young man sprawled on the floor, his hands pressed to his nose. Blood dribbled from between his fingers. “You hit me!” he said indistinctly.

  “I don’t blame her,” said Egg, staring at the newcomer. “Who are you?” But it was obvious, really. Who else would come strolling in as if they owned the place and try to get into bed? “You must be Sean McHagrty.”

  “Brilliant deduction,” said Sean McHagrty, still holding his nose. “If I say yes, will you give me a towel?”

  “He’s not bleeding on my towels,” Clio snapped.

  “I’ll get something.” Egg yawned, getting out of bed and heading for the wash chamber. Behind the tub, there was a basket of useful things like bandages, safety pins, hangover philtres and spare buttons. Obviously the people responsible for setting up these rooms knew the sort of scrapes students were likely get into. Egg pulled out a bandage and went back to the room.

  “Look — Friefriedsson, right?” said Sean McHagrty, accepting the bandage and pressing it to his nose. “This girl says she’s sleeping in my bed!”

  Clio pulled the blankets more tightly around her and glared at both boys, defending her territory.

  Egg couldn’t help smiling. “She is in your bed. Look, there she is, right there. Hard to miss.”

  “But it’s my bed,” protested Sean. “Mine.”

  Clio made a small growling noise.

  Egg headed back to his own bed and climbed in. “Be reasonable, McHagrty. You can’t expect a respectable girl like Clio to go walking around the corridors in the middle of the night, in her nightgown, just because you’ve dumped her roommate and are finally condescending to come back to your own bed. She was here first.”

  Sean stared at Clio. “You’re Lemissa’s roommate? Actually it would be really helpful if you went back, she was sort of crying when I left.”

  “Isn’t that a shame?” said Clio. “Imagine the sympathy I have for a girl I barely know who made me homeless.”

  Egg blew out the lantern. “We’ll sort it all out in the morning.”

  Sean wiped the last of the blood from his nose in the darkness. “Where am I supposed to sleep tonight?” he asked plaintively.

  There was a soft sound as Clio threw one of her pillows at him. “Count yourself lucky.”

  As usual, Clio went to sleep quickly. Sean too, despite the less than ideal sleeping conditions, was soon snoring. Egg stayed awake. An idea for a story had flitted across his brain and he didn’t want to let go of it.

  He lay on his back, staring at the ceiling. Moonlight streamed in through the uneven curtains. The Cloak, most mysterious of Egg’s superheroes, would finally cross paths with Queenbeetle the insect-woman. They would meet in an alley, surrounded by the blackest of black shadows. She would carry a sleek silver blade, fighting the Cloak with a mad, unrelenting fury. He could counter her attack with ice-cool logic. The tension between them would escalate into restrained passion, and they would kiss…

  The curtains moved, shifting as if blown by a gentle breeze. Egg opened his eyes properly to look at them. There was no breeze. The window was closed. Wasn’t it?

  The curtains parted of their own volition. A leg slid over the window sill: a slender, graceful leg followed by a slender, graceful girl. She landed on the carpet, her feet barely making a sound.

  Egg breathed, watching her move across the room. Her hair was a pale, coppery cloud, drenched in moonlight. The girl bent over Clio’s sleeping form, then glanced at the young man sprawled on the floor.

  Finally, Egg cleared his throat. “Are you looking for Sean McHagrty?” he couldn’t help asking.

  The girl turned slowly, her eyes wide. “I don’t know who I’m looking for,” she whispered.

  “Who are you?” Egg asked. There was something familiar about her that he felt he should recognise.

  “Dahla,” said the girl. She looked around, anxious. “Can you smell smoke?”

  “No,” said Egg, but that wasn’t strictly true. There was a scent in the air, something which might have been lightly perfumed smoke. “Actually, yes. Maybe.”

  “I have to get out of here,” Dahla said, frantic. “I have to leave.” Before Egg could stop her, she ran to the closed door — ran through the closed door — and was gone.

  Egg followed her, opening the door to stare out into the corridor. No sign of the ghostly girl.

  Too wired to sleep now, Egg went back to his bed. His story folder was still on the bedside table, and he put it away, musing about the possibilities of a character who walked through walls. Ghost Girl? No, she would be too similar to Dream Girl, a heroine he’d been working on for months.

  Egg noticed a stray papyrus on the floor. It was his sketch of the nameless city where his characters lived. He picked it up now and stared at it, barely making o
ut the lines in the light that filtered through the curtains. The proportions were all wrong. The walls were too low and there weren’t enough towers. It must be an old sketch, from before he had a clear idea of how the city looked.

  Egg dug out a new piece of parchment and took it with his pen and ink over to the window where the moonlight was at its brightest. Quickly, he began to draw the city as it should be, with the right number of towers, slitted windows and inky black shadows.

  It should have a name, he realised as his hand moved swiftly back and forth across the page. All cities had names. He had never got around to choosing one. It had to be sinister, to convey how dark and dangerous the city was, and why it needed superheroes to protect its mean streets.

  Egg’s hand moved across the parchment, writing a word in large, imposing script. D-R-A-K

  Drak? What kind of a name was that for a city? Egg gazed at his new picture, and the shadows represented by patches of wet ink. Drak. It had the right kind of sound to it. He left the parchment to dry on top of his chest of drawers and climbed back into bed. Drak, he thought to himself. Oh, well. It would do until he came up with something better.

  ***

  As always, there was breakfast to consider. There were eight dining halls around campus which served breakfast, and there was a fine art in selecting the right one on any given day. The Seaweed Room at the foot of the Mermaid Tower was presided over by Mistress Brim, who was resolute in her aim to maintain an oceanic theme in her menu. Since Cluft was regularly subject to rains of fish, ingredients were never a problem for Mistress Brim. She could regularly be seen pulling lobsters or large trout out of the guttering.

  Kassa, as a pirate’s daughter, had been wildly enthusiastic about this all-seafood philosophy at first. During her first semester as a resident professor she had consumed many breakfasts of kedgeree, kippers, salmon cakes, tuna steaks or squid porridge. At the end of that semester, her body rebelled. After throwing up five times her body weight, she made a shaky resolution to avoid seafood — and Mistress Brim’s cooking — for the rest of her natural life.

  It was the second week of the new school year, so Kassa’s dining hall of choice was the Majestic, across the square of student residence. With any luck, the first-years would not yet have discovered that this was the only place that provided fresh fruit in the morning, and there might be a free table. Later in the semester, it would be standing room only as the students desperately attempted to ward off scurvy.

  To Kassa’s surprise, the Majestic dining hall was mostly empty this morning. No students at all. Trays of uneaten breakfasts were littered around the tables, as if everyone had left in a hurry.

  Everyone except Vice-Chancellor Bertie, Lordling of the city-state of Cluft and official administrator in charge of the four Departments of the Polyhedrotechnical College. Vice-Chancellor Bertie was the quintessential absent-minded professor, down to the not-quite-tidy beard and a wardrobe consisting mostly of tweed with elbow patches.

  This morning, Bertie sat at a table by himself in the dining hall, chewing his way through one of Mistress Pott’s full cooked breakfasts, the kind that came with three kinds of egg plus toast, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, beans, fried bread, more bacon, more sausage and one lone grilled slice of tomato.

  Mistress Pott herself stood at the counter with a face like thunder. At this hour, she was usually run off her feet with the extra demand for scrambled egg and hot toast. But the breakfast troughs had barely been touched and their contents congealed unpleasantly as they cooled.

  “Where is everyone?” Kassa asked.

  Mistress Pott grunted, and stirred the porridge. She lifted the ladle half out of the cauldron with an expectant look.

  “No thank you,” said Kassa, selecting a plate of fresh fruit salad and a nourishing muesli yoghurt. After some degree of thought, she added a bacon sandwich to her tray.

  “Ah, it’s you,” said Vice-Chancellor Bertie as Kassa sat opposite him. “Nice and quiet, eh?”

  “Without the students, yes.” Kassa prodded her bacon sandwich with her fork, trying to decide if she really wanted it. “Where are they all? It’s too early in the semester for a hunger strike.”

  Bertie filled his mouth with three kinds of egg. “Strike? If only! Those were grand days, with student strikes every other week. Marvellous fellows, marching up and down in an orderly fashion with those picket signs of theirs, staying away from classes for weeks at a time. Our lecture theatres never looked so tidy…”

  “Where are the students, Vice-Chancellor?” Kassa asked. It was rude to interrupt, but she felt that any rant that used the phrase “grand old days” was fair game.

  “Oh, they’re all out staring at the thing,” said Bertie said. “Can’t see the point of it myself. Damned warlocks, always showing off, trying to outdo each other. Should have rousted out that local colony years ago.”

  Kassa blinked and looked down at her hand. Somehow she had eaten the whole bacon sandwich without realising it. She stabbed her fork into the fruit salad, picking up a chunk of pineapple and something pink and squashy-looking. “What thing? What warlocks? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, I’m sure it’s the warlocks,” said Bertie, cleaning the juicy remains of his plate with a stiff piece of fried bread. “Who else would magic up a city for no good reason? ‘Oh, I’ve just magicked up a dark and mysterious city, aren’t I impressive?’ Showoffs, the lot of them.” He bit into the fried bread, staring sadly at his empty plate.

  “A dark and mysterious city?” repeated Kassa. “Appearing out of nowhere?” She shifted in her seat. “I don’t see what’s so interesting about that. Really, the students should know better than to go off staring at some magical phenomenon when they could be having a healthy breakfast to set themselves up for the day.” She stirred her nourishing muesli yoghurt for a moment. “Actually, I think I’ll just — you know, check that the students aren’t in any danger.”

  “Go on,” sighed Vice-Chancellor Bertie. “Join the crowd, encourage those warlocks by giving them an audience. Just don’t come crying to me when they’ve turned you into a newt.”

  Kassa left in a hurry.

  Once she had gone, Vice-Chancellor Bertie lifted his napkin, under which he had secreted Kassa’s bacon sandwich. Smiling to himself, he finished his breakfast in peace.

  ***

  Egg woke up, still groggy from his late night burst of creativity. Clio was already up, dressed and packing her nightgowns, perfumed towels and hair ribbons into several small pink bags which fitted neatly into her large pink bag. Sean McHagrty was nowhere to be seen.

  Egg sat up. “You don’t have to go,” he protested, yawning.

  “Of course I do,” Clio said. “It’s time I made friends with my real roommate, cheer her up after her disastrous liaison with the dread McHagrty, that sort of thing. Anyway, all my suitcases are there. You can’t expect me to survive the semester with only four changes of clothes, five pairs of shoes and eight nightgowns. I barely lasted the week.”

  Egg stared at the bulging pink bag and considered the ramifications of ‘all my suitcases’. “Well, drop by any time. Where’s McHagrty?”

  “Breakfast, I suppose. If he’s not already plotting to throw some other poor girl out of her room in his mission to get into every pair of knickers on campus. You’ll could end up with a different female roommate every week.”

  Egg thought about this. It didn’t sound too bad. “There are worse ways to meet girls.”

  Clio threw a pillow at him. “Watch it. You’re starting to sound like your roommate.”

  The door crashed open and Sean burst into the room. He threw open the window and leaned out. “Will you look at that? I knew there’d be a great view from up here.”

  “Look at what?” said Egg.

  Clio was already elbowing Sean out of the way so she could see out the window. Her elbows should be classified as deadly weapons. Once she saw what Sean was so interested in, Clio looked back at E
gg. Her eyes flicked to the inked parchment on the chest of drawers, and then back to Egg. “You’d better see this.”

  Egg got out of bed and went slowly to the window. Every step felt like his legs were full of concrete. He had a horrible feeling about what he was going to see before he saw it.

  Even so, it came as a shock.

  Drak.

  ***

  Lord Sinistre of Drak liked an elegant breakfast. Quail eggs were a favourite, lightly boiled and served in a frothy cream of lovage sauce. After that, he liked a small piece of toast carved into the shape of a vulture, with a smear of lark’s brain paté or walnut jam. He would finish with a thimbleful of jasmine-scented coffee, which he consumed in minuscule sips. “Anything new this morning?” he asked as the last drop melted under his tongue.

  The Chamberlain of Drak unrolled a length of parchment. “A few items of interest, my lord. We have possums nesting in the drains again. Apparently they escaped from the Underground Zoo. The City Bailiffs are employing an experimental method to deal with the problem, involving sharp sticks and flamethrowers.”

  “Good, good,” said Lord Sinistre, dabbing at the corner of his mouth with a lime-scented satin napkin.

  “Also, I’m afraid two of your poison tasters died last night, my lord. The matter has been investigated.”

  Lord Sinistre nodded wisely. “The peach souffle. I thought it smelled a little venomy.”

  “No, my lord. They died in a duel. The first poison taster was caught taking certain liberties with the second poison taster’s girlfriend and the matter went to swords. Nothing for you to worry about, my lord.”

  Lord Sinistre yawned. “Is that all?” Of course it wasn’t. There were always exactly three pieces of news, no more and no less. The Chamberlain was a precise sort of man, grading the news from least important to most, just as Lord Sinistre liked it. Some traditions were not only important, they were essential.

  The Chamberlain coughed, which meant the third piece of news was of particular interest. “Well, my lord. There is the matter of the wasteland. You know, the vast and treacherously gritty desert of silver sand which prevents us from contact with the outside world?”