by Tim Susman
With that, he pushed Kip one more step out just as flames engulfed the inside of the warehouse. Mr. Gibbet shrieked, but Master Cott slammed the door behind him and though it rattled, the man inside was unable to budge it.
“Please, please,” Mr. Gibbet cried, and then his words crumbled into sobs that Kip could hear perfectly well through the wall. Nobody but he and Master Cott stood outside the building; the ship had gone and the longshoremen returned home for the night. Only the moon’s half-lidded eye gazed down on them.
Any satisfaction Kip felt was fleeting, because as terrible as Mr. Gibbet’s treatment of him had been, Cott was now doing worse to the man. Kip wanted Mr. Gibbet punished, but not tortured, not killed; he should be punished according to the law.
Cott shouted at the door. “How’s that for insolent? How’s that, you miserable creature?”
“Sir,” Kip said. “You can’t let him burn.”
The sorcerer looked uncertain, then shook his head. “He’s not going to burn. He can feel the fire, but it won’t consume him or his precious office. Something you can learn to do.”
At least his new master wasn’t a cold-blooded—or hot-blooded—murderer, but that didn’t make this any better. “You’re terrifying him. And if he feels the fire, doesn’t it hurt?”
“Yes. As ye sow, so shall ye reap. It’s in that Christian book he’s got on his desk.” Cott scowled, and shouted again at the door. “You’d best read some Thomas Aquinas! Prudence, temperance, justice! And charity!”
Mr. Gibbet’s sobs were barely audible now below the crackling and snapping of the flames. Kip could no longer stand it, so he reached out and called the fire back. Cott had created only a simple fire, one Kip was able to quench with a thought.
Silence from inside, and then hysterical laughter and bubbling words. “I’m not—I’m safe—oh, thank you good sir!”
“Thank the Calatian,” Cott called out with a look at Kip. “He’s the one who put out your fire. And remember that next time you feel inclined to break the bones of a weaker fellow.”
In the silence that answered that remark, the sorcerer reached out to Kip and said, “Come on.”
At the edge of the dock, Kip was lifted into the air alongside Cott. He still disliked the sensation, but not enough to protest, not after he’d directly defied his master. But Cott did not seem angry; rather, he looked pensively up at the moon, and when they were directly over the river, he spoke. “My colleagues have often called me quick to temper,” he said. “Any sorcerer may be affected by his work, and fire, as I am sure you know, is a difficult lure to resist. It hungers, and the fire sorcerer longs to give in to that hunger.”
“I’ve felt it,” Kip said.
“I know you have.” Cott’s eyes, full of moonlight, met Kip’s with a comradely understanding. “Had you broken one of my spells under other circumstances, I would be unhappy with you. I am still a little. But in looking back, my anger got the better of me. So thank you for being my conscience.” He sighed. “I suppose I will get another letter from Headmaster Cross.”
“I’m sorry,” Kip said.
“Oh, one of the nice things about being a fire sorcerer is that you’re indispensable and people expect you to be a little crazy, setting fires everywhere, so play up to that. It is always a benefit to appear at least a little crazier than you actually are.” He laughed. “So Cross will send his letter and will inform the aggrieved scoundrel that the nasty fire sorcerer has been reprimanded and all will be quiet again.”
Kip absorbed all that as they drew nearer King’s College. Cott guided them toward the tower farthest back from the river, which Kip felt wasn’t quite right, but he didn’t want to raise an objection. “And Mr. Gibbet?” he said instead. “You said you’d see him charged…?”
“Oh. That was to scare him.” Cott shook his head. “The police wouldn’t have anything to do with that.”
“But…” Kip lifted his arm, sending stabbing pains through his wrist.
“I know. He broke your wrist. And if you were a human, you could go have him arrested for that, and perhaps he’d be beaten, or perhaps simply spend the night in jail.”
“There aren’t laws against assaulting Calatians?”
“There are.” They alit on the roof. Only now, up close, could Kip see the rough patches of lichen and cracks in the stone; this was definitely not the tower he’d departed from. Cott straightened his robes and ended the spell. “But any Calatian who makes a complaint may regret it afterwards. Or his friends may. Often the humans who object to Calatians being treated as equals are unable to distinguish between them. Come along.”
Instead, Kip walked to the other edge of the roof and stared down across the river at the Isle of Dogs. Master Cott spoke evenly and had no reason to try to alarm Kip. And yet what he’d said seemed horribly wrong.
But there was nothing Kip could do about it. So he turned and followed his master down the stairs and into the tower. Cott brought him to the rooms of an obese sorcerer named Turner, who healed Kip’s arm with a careless gesture and a muttered spell, far different from the solicitous care of Master Splint.
While he worked, Cott stood at the window and peered out through a crack of an inch. “Close that thing,” Turner growled at him.
“It’s dark,” Cott said. “We’ll go out this way.”
“Then do it, and quick.” Turner waved and turned his head back to the flagon from which Kip could detect the sharp smell of wine even at the door.
“Come on, Penfold.” Cott pushed the window open, and a moment before Kip was to ask if he should cast his own spell, the sorcerer’s magic gripped him again.
As they flew, Cott asked, “What were you doing at that dock?”
“Ah.” Kip flattened his ears. “I didn’t want to alarm the Calatians by flying directly to them.”
“Whyever not? Never mind, never mind, but why that dock? Why not the empty riverbank?”
Well, Kip thought, anyone might be at a riverbank. “The dock looked like a place for people to arrive.”
“On ships, yes.” Master Cott opened the window to his workroom and flew both of them in. “But do remember what I said earlier about appearing normal. And for God’s sake don’t venture outside of this college again.” He latched the window firmly.
“I still have a letter to deliver to the Isle.”
Cott threw up his hands. “You will do what you must, then. Take the ferry next time. Good night.” And with that he crossed to his narrow office. A moment later, the door to the hallway creaked open and shut.
Until then, Kip hadn’t realized that Cott didn’t sleep in his office. The man’s smell permeated everything just as it would a bedroom, and Master Odden did for certain sleep in his office. So there were bedrooms for the sorcerers elsewhere, and for the apprentices. It was entirely possible that Kip was the only living being left on this floor of the tower.
In Cott’s office, sure enough, a phosphorus elemental slumbering in the brazier was the only sign of life. Kip’s desire for conversation wasn’t strong enough to wake it, so he returned to the workshop. Though it was dark out, he did not feel at all like sleeping. At first he paced back and forth, but his footsteps echoed in the large space and after a little while the clicks of his claws in the silence drove him to the windows to stand still. He wondered how Coppy and Emily and Malcolm were getting along, whether Farley had left them alone or had stepped up his attacks now that Kip was gone. Had they continued to investigate the mystery of the attack on the College? None of them knew Forrest; none of them had the glass beads.
In that moment he would gladly have traded all his affinity for fire for a simple translocational spell, or even a spell that would let him talk to his friends, hear their voices. A raven, perhaps, though he doubted ravens could fly across an ocean (did Cott have a raven?). He contemplated flying up to the roof again just to get outside the workshop. But he’d gotten into enough trouble for one day, so he sat next to the stack of papers Cott had given h
im, called up a fire, and began to read.
The title of the first paper was “Effectes of Magickal Fire Upon Fleisch,” and began with the off-putting sentence, “It has longe been wondered wheather magickal fire might consume the fleisch faster than non-magickal fire.” It did not get much better from there, as Kip read through three pages of clinically described burning (of cadavers, though the cadavers had to be recently deceased for the flesh to be similar to living, and the method of procuring recently deceased bodies was not mentioned), but he did at least understand why Cott wanted him to read this: if the glass beads were the remains of humans who had been burned by magical fire, then any previous experience of the effect of magical fire on humans would be valuable to understand.
What was more, Kip was intrigued that a fire could be set to consume a building but not touch the people within. He only knew the fire’s hunger, but the possibility that he could direct and control that hunger fascinated him. He thought that might be what Odden had been expecting when he’d set Kip the challenge of holding a flame in his paw for ten seconds, although it was very advanced to ask of an untrained apprentice. So he read on. Not all the papers dealt with fire consuming flesh, but enough did that he felt he might not need to eat again for a while.
He woke to movement in the workshop, sunlight, and the uncomfortable feeling of old paper underneath him and near to his nose. His fire had either gone out or been extinguished. Slowly he pushed himself to a sitting position, causing the papers to slide around.
“Good morning,” Cott called cheerfully.
Kip stretched and stood. Cott was sitting on the stone table by the far window with a book in his lap. “Morning.”
“I’ve been up for hours, so I just thought I would sit and wait for you to get up. You must have been up late reading.” The sorcerer set his book aside and hopped down from the table. “I’ve done that many a night myself. Fascinating, isn’t it?”
“Yes.” Kip rubbed sleep from his eyes. He still felt tired.
“Do you need breakfast? It’s over, I’m afraid, but sometimes if you go to the kitchen they have leftover bread they’ll give you. Oh, but maybe not you. I mean, they don’t know you. I could go if you want something.”
“I’m fine, thank you, sir.” Kip’s stomach protested, but he still felt queasy from the previous night’s activities and reading.
“Good, good.” Cott paced back and forth. “So tell me what you think of what you read. Did you get through it all?”
“Most of it, I think.” Kip tried to organize his thoughts. “Mainly that…the hunger of the fire can be directed by the sorcerer.”
“Yes, good. Anything that might relate to our little glass bead?”
There was nothing Kip could think of, but Cott wasn’t disappointed. He promised to have another stack for the fox to read that night, and then began with lessons immediately, asking Kip to cast a fire that would burn paper but not wood. The task proved enough to occupy them for hours, until Kip really was hungry and Cott took him to get lunch.
10
Master Albright
Each tower, Cott told him on their way down, had its own kitchen and lunchroom, staffed by workers from the nearby village.
“I don’t actually know who prepares our food,” Kip said with some shame. “Back at the College. Prince George’s, I mean. The students and apprentices eat outside while the masters eat upstairs in the Tower.”
“Mm-hmm. On holidays,” Cott went on, “we have special meals and puddings. You will be here for Christmas, won’t you? The Christmas feast is delightful.”
That was three weeks away. “I don’t know,” Kip said honestly. “I would like to celebrate with my family.”
“Of course you would, but look, see how lovely it is here.”
They had entered the dining area, a large room with tapestries hung around the walls and a dozen or more long wooden tables around which clustered people in black and purple robes with various colors of trim around the sleeves and collars, filled with the smells of bread, roasted fowl, boiled vegetables, and tonic water. The oldest people sat at a table removed from the others to Kip’s left; he assumed those were the masters. White-shirted students sat in pockets here and there but did not seem to be separated from the purple-robed apprentices. To one side, ravens perched on a long stick six feet off the ground, near the windows and away from the main eating area.
Every single one of the people at the tables was human. Not all of them matched Cott’s pale complexion; that predominated, but there were shades from his pasty white through ruddy brown to a deep black.
Kip stopped for a moment but Cott pulled him forward, still talking about their Christmas feast and how the hall would be decorated for it. Around them, heads turned and conversations stopped as Kip walked by, keeping his tail tightly curled against his body. As they passed, his ears caught mutters from behind, swiveling automatically to focus on the words until he consciously pointed them forward again. “…bringing his new calyx down…” “…never know what he’ll do next…”
“Come on.” Cott pointed toward a table whose end was empty. “Just sit and they’ll bring you lunch.”
The woman who came to serve them dropped a plate of food in front of each of them and walked off without reacting to Kip’s presence at all. As Cott talked cheerfully, Kip watched the rest of the hall over the sorcerer’s shoulder. Nobody sat through the whole meal; apprentices and masters walked up to each other, or stood to greet someone sitting to eat. Nobody fought, even in jest. The whole gathering felt very collegial in a way that his dining tent never had. He wished Coppy, Emily, and Malcolm could be here to share it with him.
Despite all the activity, nobody walked up to Cott, not for the entire duration of the meal. As they got up, Kip asked, “Is Master, ah, Gogin? Is he here?”
“Gugin? Oh, yes, the spiritual work.” Cott peered at the farthest table. “No, but I can take you by his quarters. Oh, Master Albright is here. Master Albright!”
He called across the hall, and from the far table one of the masters lifted his head and then rose to meet them as Cott pulled Kip across the room. As they drew closer Kip made out a face that reminded him of Patris’s, with silvery hair in a large mane, but Albright also had a beard somewhat shorter than Odden’s and a more pensive expression on his olive complexion, where Patris always looked nervously angry.
“Penfold, is it?” His voice felt like it emerged from the bottom of a gravel quarry.
“Yes, sir.”
“Albright. Pleasure to meet you. Thank you for bringing him over, Cott.”
“Of course, of course.” Cott beamed.
“I hope you might be free for a meal tonight, Penfold. I have one or two matters I would like to discuss that you may be able to shed some light upon.”
This was something of a surprise; Kip had expected another “how does a Calatian learn magic” dinner. “I, er, I had hoped to run an errand—”
Cott spoke loudly over him. “But that errand can wait until another day. It was an errand for me. Penfold, you may dine with Albright tonight.”
“I, er…yes, sir.” Kip squared his shoulders. The Isle of Dogs and Coppy’s family would still be there tomorrow, and the day after.
“Excellent.” Cott beamed.
“Meet me at sunset at the base of Lord Winter’s Tower, the side facing the village.” And then Albright spoke in a very low growl in the back of his throat, a sound that Kip’s ears picked up but that Cott, standing two feet away, did not appear to hear at all. “Cott will try to come,” Albright’s whisper-growl said, “but you must not allow him.” And then in his regular voice he added, “Do you understand my instructions?”
“Yes, sir,” Kip said, his ears sweeping back.
“Very well. I will see you then.” And Albright turned and strode back to his meal.
“I did explain about you being indisposed last night,” Cott said as they left the dining room. “But he’s not angry. He always sounds like that.”
“Yes, sir.”
They walked in silence until they had climbed three flights of stairs, and then Cott spoke again in the empty stairwell. “Albright is very important. Well connected. It wouldn’t do to make him wait. You can deliver your message tomorrow, or in another day or week. If you make only one friend at King’s, you could do much worse than Albright.”
“And you, sir.”
Cott paused and then turned with a delighted smile. “Yes. And me.”
That afternoon they brought the glass bead out again and examined it. Cott showed it to the phosphorus elemental in his office, but Chas (that was her name) could make nothing of it and grew bored quickly. The bead’s warmth when placed near fire, they discovered, was not from the heat of the fire but from something within the bead. Cott used a spell to increase his sensitivity to fire which he had Kip repeat and memorize. “You may practice this on your own time,” he said. “It’s quite harmless.”
Cott delighted in these researches, so much that Kip wondered if he would be sad when the puzzle of the bead was finally solved. “It’s a remarkable material,” he said, holding it close to the light of the sun as it dipped toward the horizon. “Glass, but it retains some property that recognizes fire. Glass always remembers fire, of course, but does not ordinarily react to it in this way.”
“If it’s human remains,” Kip felt the need to stress this point every now and again, because Cott often lost sight of it, “then could it be something to do with the spirit of the person who was killed?”
“That’s something you must ask Master Gugin.” Cott waved the bead before Kip. “Or we should ask him together. We could go immediately if you like.”
“I would be delighted, but…” Kip pointed outside to the sunset. “I’m to meet Master Albright shortly.”
“So you are, so you are. And you know, Master Albright might have some insight as well.” Cott replaced the bead in the wooden box and then closed it with a slow ponderousness that Kip already recognized as reflecting thoughts going on inside his head. “You know,” he said, “I know that Master Albright wishes to speak with you privately, but it can’t hurt if I come to dinner. I promise I will leave the two of you to have whatever discussion he wishes, and then I can rejoin you and we can have a pleasant meal. What do you think? I don’t suppose he’ll mind.”
