Ink Black Magic

by Tansy Rayner Roberts

  “You’re right,” said Invisiblus viciously. “It is this stupid city’s fault. None of this would have happened if it wasn’t for Drak. Let’s take it apart.”

  Lord Dreamer’s eyes glowed adoringly. “Piece by piece,” she vowed.

  Aragon and Lord Sinistre had gathered a small army in the kitchens. Cooks, kitchen hands, scullery maids, poison tasters, footmen and the boy who cleaned the boots all filled the upper corridor. Each was armed with iron pots, cutlery, packages of salt and various stabbing weapons. After ransacking his memory for other anti-magic remedies his mother swore by, and consulting Sherrie the Head Cook on traditional methods of banishing demons, Aragon also included large quantities of vinegar, brown paper, gin, string and honey.

  The demon priestess at the front of the kitchen army touched the door of the observatory and nodded. “There are two inside,” she informed them. “The one who can turn invisible, and the girl who walks in dreams.”

  The corridor shook as a mighty crash resounded from behind the doors. “We’re going in,” said Aragon.

  Egg, at the back of the army, touched Clio’s arm. “The Cloak is still around somewhere,” he whispered.

  She nodded, understanding. “You want us to look for him?”

  “Why not? They’re not shorthanded here.”

  “And it would get me away from Dream Girl,” she said, giving him a hard look. “Just because she’s my counterpart doesn’t mean I’m going to switch sides, Egg.”

  “It would still be a bit weird, wouldn’t it? Trying to vanquish yourself?”

  “Good point. Let’s go find the Cloak.”

  Clutching a large bag of salt and several iron spoons between them, the two students withdrew from the crowd, hurrying along a velvet-strewn corridor. No one saw them go.

  “Charge!” yelled Aragon Silversword.

  “Charge!” echoed Lord Sinistre, half a beat behind.

  The kitchen army charged through the doors of the observatory, brandishing their weapons.

  ***

  The entrance hall was empty when Kassa and her merry band crashed through the front doors of the palace of Drak. “Where’s a butler when you need one?” Kassa complained, looking at the many doors that surrounded them. “Should be a shortcut to the ballroom around here somewhere.” She started opening doors and peering through.

  “Why the ballroom?” asked Incendia Noir.

  “This lot like flair and dramatics,” said Kassa. She looked up at the glowing giant form of Ladybird, who was having to crawl through the huge double doors to fit herself into the entrance hall. “That, and there’s no shortage of head room in there. If the Light Lords are all as tall as this one, it will appeal to them.”

  “In the mood they’re in, they are just as likely to remove the ceilings for their own convenience,” sniffed Ladybird. The palace shook as she spoke, the walls shuddering.

  Kassa found a door that looked promising and ducked inside. “Come on, you lot.”

  ***

  The battle in the observatory was a mad, chaotic mess. Aragon was in the middle of it all, and could see nothing but flying salt, slashing iron and the bright white limbs of Lord Dreamer and Lord Invisiblus. The salt stung them, and they screamed. The iron burned them, and they hissed.

  The kitchen staff ran in circles around the observatory, spraying salt in all directions.

  Lord Dreamer shrieked, letting a powerful storm of magic flow from her fingers in attack against Aragon Silversword. It reflected off the iron toasting fork he held in one hand and bounced harmlessly away.

  Invisiblo vanished from sight before the salt circle was complete, but the head butler threw himself between the invisible Light Lord and the missing wall, chanting an anti-demon nursery rhyme. Flickering visible for a moment, Invisiblo hesitated as the words of the charm slowed his movements, and a few plucky scullery maids took the opportunity to fling more salt and complete the circle.

  It was over quickly, the two glowing giants imprisoned by the basic trappings of folklore.

  “What do we do now?” Lord Sinistre asked, his eyes gleaming with exhilaration despite the fact that he had contributed little to the actual battle.

  “I don’t know,” said Aragon Silversword. “I think we’re supposed to give them a saucer of milk.”

  “I have a better idea, Chamberlain,” said the Head Cook, reaching into an apron pocket and pulling out a length of rope which she handed to him.

  Turning the rope over in his hands, Aragon noticed that it had strands of steel wire woven into it, and that the surface of the rope itself had been rubbed roughly with rock salt. It left a residue on his fingers. “You’re always thinking, Sherrie,” he said, impressed.

  She gasped suddenly, fleeing the room. “My word. I have pies in the oven!”

  ***

  Only one Light Lord had taken up residence in the grand ballroom. It was Quillsmith. He floated above the floor, glowing brightly. He held a long, feathery quill in one hand, and wrote in the air before him.

  “Kassa Daggersharp and her friends cannot move,” he said aloud as he wrote. Each word appeared briefly, glowing faintly white, then faded away.

  The little group stopped short. None of them could move their feet. More than that, their will to step in any direction had been removed. “What were we doing?” asked Lord Ambewine in confusion. No one could answer him.

  Kassa’s thoughts, at least, were clear. Had her natural immunity to mind control returned? She certainly hoped so. Her life would be quite difficult without that particular talent. She hefted her package of salt. Maybe she couldn’t move her feet, but there was nothing wrong with her arms…

  “The salt becomes sugar and the iron becomes water,” said Quillsmith, smug as his nib traced the shape of the words he had spoken aloud.

  The various iron implements Kassa had tucked into her belt suddenly turned into water, soaking her skirts. She tossed the package of sugar away in disgust. Salt had been a protective force against the supernatural for as long as magic had existed, but sugar had little power over anything except dessert pixies. Every piece of iron or steel had melted, leaving the group with a handful of wooden axe handles and a wide puddle at their feet. Even the Great Reversing Barrel had split back into individual planks, its nails transformed into droplets of water.

  “What do we do now?” hissed Singespitter.

  “Not entirely sure,” admitted Kassa.

  “Your words can’t hold me, Quillsmith,” said Ladybird. She stepped over Kassa and the others, making her way to the centre of the ballroom. Her glow was a shade less bright than his.

  “Oh, I like this,” Quillsmith laughed. “Ladybird wants to be a hero. Who saw that coming?”

  “Where are the others?” Ladybird asked.

  “Wreaking havoc somewhere. Does it matter? I’m more interested in you, Lord Ladybird. Since when do you play peacemaker?”

  “I want to live in this world,” she said fiercely. “We’ve lost Harmony, we’re not Lords anymore. But we can still live here! They’ll find a place for us.”

  Quillsmith leaned into her, his eyes holding hers. “Don’t you understand?” he whispered. “We can’t live. We don’t exist.”

  “You can’t hurt me,” said Ladybird.

  “Can’t I?”

  Kassa sensed this was time for an interruption. “Harmony doesn’t have to be lost!” she yelled at them.

  Ladybird and Quillsmith swung around to look at her. Kassa opened her pouch and pulled out the small object that she had removed from the Great Reversing Barrel. It was the gem that had once contained the cities of Harmony and Drak. The world of the silver sand. It was no longer bright white, but a dull grey colour. “It’s here,” she said. “The essential magic of it — the harmonylight — was drained out, but you haven’t lost that magic. It was transformed into the elemental storm, and then into these bodies you wear. If the five of you joined forces, you could recreate your city as it once was.” She wasn’t entirely sure how
such an operation would work, but it was the only plan she had managed to come up with.

  Quillsmith gazed at her for a moment, his face unreadable. He opened the hand which did not hold the quill pen, and the small grey Harmony gem flew to him. He held it thoughtfully between finger and thumb. “Fascinating,” he said. “We could go back to how things were before?”

  “Why not?” said Kassa Daggersharp.

  Ladybird had turned and was gazing at the gem with hope alight in her eyes.

  Quillsmith brought his finger and thumb together, crushing the gem into dust. “I don’t think so.”

  Ladybird shrieked in outrage, throwing herself at him. Quillsmith brought his quill pen up in a stabbing motion and embedded it deeply between her ribs. “The time when I was willing to share a city has passed,” he said in a low, intimate voice.

  The quill glowed fiercely, brighter than the two of them put together. The palace of Drak shook, as if the walls themselves were about to fly apart. Ladybird, the quill still buried in her chest, began screaming and did not stop.

  ***

  It was not all that hard to follow Lord Kloakor’s trail. Too tall for the doors in most of the rooms, he had elected to walk through the walls, leaving a tall Cloak-shaped hole in them. Clio and Egg followed one of these holes into a laboratory-style room full of bubbling glass vials and large bowls of fruit.

  “This must be where they make the food,” said Clio. “They don’t grow things, they just make it all by magic.”

  “Made it,” corrected Egg. The smell of rotten fruit was sweet in the air, and many of the work benches were covered in funny-coloured mush. “The draklight’s gone. Nothing works any more.” His fingers were twitching. Following Kassa’s sage advice, he stuck them in his pockets.

  “This way,” said Clio, spotting another Cloak-shaped hole in the far wall.

  The floor began shaking suddenly, violently. Egg managed to pull his hands out of his pockets quickly enough to grab on to a table for support. Ahead of him, Clio skidded to the floor. As the whole room buckled and shuddered around them, the contents of several workbenches slid on to the floor.

  “Ick,” said Clio, drenched in malformed strawberries and sticky pink juice.

  Egg slid across the slimy floor to reach her and pull her to her feet. “You all right?”

  “Fruity,” she said. “Do you think I’ll ever get rid of the smell?”

  The room shook again, and this time it was Egg who lost his footing.

  Clio held a hand out, grinning. “You all right?”

  He had landed in a mess of mutant apricots. “I’ll live,” he said scraping the pulpy orange mess from his whole left side.

  The next room was evidently where Lord Sinistre’s costumes were made. There was a wide leather-working table on one side, tailor’s dummies everywhere and shelves and shelves of silk, satin, lace, and especially velvet.

  Several tailors huddled together at the back of the room. They had to be tailors because they wore aprons filled with tools of the trade: pins, measuring tapes, fabric swatches, spools of thread. They were not, however, people in the strictest sense of the word. They had tight red skin, blazing orange eyes and clawed feet. Apparently demons were responsible for Lord Sinistre’s wardrobe. Explained a lot, really.

  “Did a large glowing man in a shimmery cloak walk through here?” Egg asked them.

  The floor shuddered a little bit and several of the demon tailors whimpered. The loss of draklight had hit them hard, and the quaking of the palace was terrifying them. One of the demons pointed shakily across the room. A large, sweeping black velvet wall-hanging with several paper patterns pinned to it now had a gaping, Cloak-sized hole in it.

  “Thanks,” said Egg.

  Clio hurried in that direction. She was nearly at the wall when the palace shook violently again.

  “Who is doing this?” Egg asked in frustration, crawling out from under a pile of collapsed tailor’s dummies. As soon as he asked the question he knew the answer.

  He could see into the ballroom where his other self floated in mid-air, laughing as he drained the power from the screaming figure of Ladybird. Quillsmith was becoming more powerful, and the fierce magic that filled him was shaking the palace almost to pieces…

  Egg snapped back to himself just as a long fissure cracked along the floorboards. The floor under Clio’s feet sloped dangerously as the crack widened. A huge set of heavy shelving tipped towards her, falling hard and fast enough to break every bone in her body.

  Clio gasped. There wasn’t enough breath in her to scream. The shelving had stopped only inches from her chest, hovering above her at an unnatural angle. She scrambled out from underneath it, staring at Egg.

  He breathed out, lowering his hands, and the shelving dropped the last few inches to crunch against the floor. “You’d better get out of here,” he said to the few demon tailors who had not already fled. They obeyed, grabbing precious armfuls of cloth and half-finished sewing projects as they went.

  Egg clambered over the fallen shelving to reach Clio. “I think it’s my turn to ask if you’re all right.”

  He had never seen her blue eyes so wide. She was trembling a little, still shocked. “Egg,” she said finally. “That was magic you used to save me. Real magic. Wasn’t it?”

  “I’m pretty sure it’s the real thing.”

  “Since when?”

  “I was born with it, although it’s been lying unused for years. That’s why those warlocks were always after me. I think the draklight woke it up, made it impossible to ignore. Then after the draklight vanished, my magic got stronger.” He winced a little, thinking of Kassa. I trust you, Egg. “Kassa said I shouldn’t use it, no matter what.”

  Clio breathed out shakily, then squeezed his hand. Glad you did.”

  “Me too.”

  ***

  Tears ran down Kassa’s face as she watched Ladybird die. The screaming seemed to go on forever. Ladybird no longer glowed white. Quillsmith glowed brighter than ever. As the white glow of the harmonylight left Ladybird’s body, her colour was restored: wild pink hair and candy-striped gown. Around them, the ballroom shook so violently that it seemed impossible that it was still standing.

  Finally Ladybird’s screams trailed into silence. “If we don’t exist,” she whispered, “Why is power so important to you?”

  “It’s all there is left,” said Quillsmith softly. “Nothing else matters.”

  Professor Incendia Noir, who had been beside Kassa when the group was frozen to the spot, leaned slightly towards her. “Is it worth mentioning at this point that I am still able to move my feet?” she asked in an undertone.

  Kassa stared at her. “What? You are powerful enough to resist Quillsmith’s spell?”

  “Not exactly,” said Professor Noir dryly. “He placed the compulsion on Kassa Daggersharp and her friends. You and I have never been friends.”

  “Point,” said Kassa, impressed. She liked a good loophole. “Get out of here, quick as you can. Fetch help. The Chamberlain of Drak would be particularly useful, but Egfried Friefriedsson is essential. And while you’re at it, find me something to write with.”

  Incendia nodded and slipped back through the group, and out of the ballroom.

  Slowly, painfully, the last of Ladybird was pulled into the quill pen. Her body became as thin as tissue paper, then crumpled into nothing.

  Glowing with her power as well as his own, Quillsmith turned and smiled at Kassa Daggersharp, his quill poised in the air. “Now,” he said in a friendly voice. “What shall I write next?”

  ***

  “Maybe it was those stories of yours,” said Clio. The room they were currently exploring contained a huge swimming pool surrounded by red glass lanterns that sent blood-coloured patterns of light across the walls.

  “What were my stories?” said Egg.

  “All this magic of yours started coming out recently. Maybe it was prevented from coming out before because you devoted all your energy into
writing and illustrating those hero stories. When you stopped doing that, the magic found its way out.”

  “Maybe,” said Egg. “They weren’t my stories, though. That other version of me sent them into my brain from another dimension.”

  Clio made a scornful noise. “How long have you been making up stories and drawing pictures about them?”

  Egg thought about it. “All my life. Ever since I could hold a quill.”

  “So don’t tell me it’s not a part of you. If you don’t want this magic, you could start drawing again. Maybe the power will just settle down, go back to being quiet and occasional.”

  Egg stared at her. “You said you were glad I used the magic. I saved your life. Why shouldn’t I use it, if I’m careful?”

  Clio looked at him in surprise. “I didn’t mean that. I thought you didn’t want to be a warlock.”

  “I don’t,” he muttered.

  “Well, then.”

  “It’s an interesting idea. Thanks.” The idea of getting rid of his magic was no longer tempting to Egg. It belonged to him, more than his drawings and stories ever had. Why should he give it up?

  “There isn’t a Cloak-sized hole here,” said Clio, examining the intact walls.

  Egg pointed towards the glass doors at the far side of the pool room. They stood open, leading to a balcony.

  “Oh,” said Clio. She hefted her package of salt and her iron spoon. “Do you think we’re ever going to catch up with him?”

  A tortured scream came from the balcony.

  “I think we just did,” said Egg, heading for the glass doors. He summoned up the magic within him — just in case — and the iron spoon in his hand felt hot, uncomfortable. Impatiently, he flung it aside, letting it clatter on the floor. Clio was close behind. He could feel where she was. The close presence of the salt she held made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He didn’t like it, and took another step forward to put some distance between them, stepping out on to the balcony.

  Lord Kloakor was doubled over the ornate black spiral pattern of the balcony rails. His grey-white cloak flapped and shimmered around him. “She’s dead!” he screamed, whirling around to face Egg and Clio. “What are you going to do to me? Ladybird is slain, Quillsmith is mad, Dreamer and Invisiblus are captured, their cries for help muffled by insultingly primitive devices of folklore. My city is lost, the people we tried to protect are dead. We did not exist, should not exist. Will you blind me with salt and beat me with iron, or have you done enough?”