by Tim Susman
Richard lowered his head and didn’t answer. Kip pulled him back toward Malcolm, going on as they walked. “I know you want to be a hero, but you must choose the right time.”
“I helped with the tree. That wasn’t bad, was it?”
“No. And let’s be clear: he attacked you. There was no fault of yours there. But the wave out of the canal—that wasn’t necessary.”
“It could have been anyone,” Richard protested with a smile. “There were half a dozen people trying to control him.”
Kip laughed shortly, arriving next to Chakrabarti. “It could have been anyone, but I know it was you. Now stay here with Charity and Jorey and we’ll all walk back to the hotel together in a moment.” Ash kept an eye on Victor, who’d watched Kip without any change in his amused expression.
“I’ve just been explaining to Master Chakrabarti here,” Malcolm said as Kip and Richard arrived, “that alcohol is not permitted in our colleges, as he’s been telling me it’s forbidden in his.”
“I am surprised that sorcerers are permitted to indulge here,” Chakrabarti said.
“For my part, I’m surprised it was only two.” Malcolm gestured at the crowd. “All these people, and wine flowing freely in the Salon. Mind you, it takes a good amount of determination to get that drunk on wine. I prefer a nice whisky myself, or did, back when it was allowed.”
“Neither of you drink at all?” Chakrabarti looked between them.
Malcolm shook his head as Kip said, “No. I can’t ever lose control, or I could do more than just drop a tree on someone.”
“Ah, yes. The Road.” Chakrabarti nodded and clasped his hands in front of himself. “I have often thanked the gods for blessing me with the power I have. I would not trust myself with the capacity for destruction.”
“Some of us have no choice,” Kip said, though he was thinking about all the harm a spiritual sorcerer might in fact do.
“Yes, of course, of course.” He turned to Malcolm. “And what sort of sorcery do you practice, Master O’Brien?”
“I’m a defensive specialist,” Malcolm said. “I cast a ward over myself and Charity, and you two as well.”
“Malcolm kept me alive during the war, for sure,” Kip said.
“Ah, maybe I spared you a concussion or two.” Malcolm smiled broadly. “Tis nothing, really.”
Chakrabarti inclined his head. “I look forward to hearing many stories about the war.”
“Ah, you’re asking the wrong people, sir,” Richard said. “These two won’t give us any war stories no matter how much we ask to hear about their valiant deeds of heroism.”
“Aye.” Malcolm swatted playfully at his shoulder. “Almost as though war is a terrible, grim enterprise and not a fantastic adventure.”
Richard bore the swat stoutly, standing before Charity and Jorey. Charity spoke up. “But if you won’t tell us the stories, how are we to know how to act in situations like these?”
“I’m right here,” Kip said. “You could have asked.”
“Sometimes there isn’t time.” This was Jorey, standing on Richard’s other side.
Malcolm laughed. “All right, it’s wonderful and admirable that you all stand up for each other. It warms my heart, it does. But for the moment, your best course of action is to avoid these situations, at least until you’ve a little more training.”
“How much did you have when you kept all the Calatians safe in Australia?” Jorey asked.
“More than a year and a half. Now let’s all get on back to the hotel.”
They walked off with Malcolm, grumbling good-naturedly. Kip and Chakrabarti followed a short way behind. As they passed Trippenhuis, Kip looked for Victor, but the blond man was no longer there. “We’re very proud of them,” he said to Chakrabarti, “as I expect you can tell.”
“With good reason.” The Indian sorcerer smiled. “I can also understand that you would need help with discipline.”
Emily and Alice arrived back at the hotel that evening with some good news: the French nobles they’d been talking to had agreed to help the school. “Provisionally,” Emily said as everyone cheered, sitting around the hotel’s parlor area.
“What does ‘provisionally’ mean?” Malcolm asked, his arm already around her shoulders.
“It means they’re going to talk to some more people tomorrow and if they find someone they like better, we won’t get anything.” Alice stuck her tongue out.
“Mmm.” Malcolm stroked his chin. “Can we kidnap them? Just for a day?”
Emily laughed. “If only. We’ve made our case and I did lean rather heavily on my association with the Adamses, so I hope they’ll find that convincing enough.”
“We don’t have any other donors?” Kip asked.
Emily shook her head. “Not of substance.”
“What about that von Bismarck?” Alice asked.
“Oh, yes. He pledged to send us some money, but it’s really only enough to pay one of your healing masters. So that’s good news. But the French nobles, they’re discussing numbers that would—well, it would give us five years. They have an amount of money that is hard for me to comprehend.”
“That’s amazing,” Kip said. “Well done.”
“It’s not done yet.” Emily rose. “We’ve one more day, so we have a chance to find one more donor.”
“If there’s anything we can do to help,” Kip said, “just ask. I don’t have anything to do tomorrow except see Victor’s demonstration.”
“Oh, yes.” Alice leaned against Kip’s side. “What is that about?”
“I don’t know. Nobody will tell me, least of all Victor.”
“Take my advice.” Malcolm leaned forward. “Don’t go. You don’t need to give him the satisfaction.”
“I don’t want to go, but I don’t think I can stop myself. What if I don’t go and he ends up showing something powerful that we need to be warned about? Maybe he wanted to show off to me?”
“He’s always felt inferior.” Malcolm tapped the table. “And with good reason.”
“He’s not incapable or useless,” Kip argued. “He just doesn’t have the one thing he really wants.”
“If he had it, he wouldn’t want it any more.” Emily gestured around to them. “Now that’s enough talk about Victor and enough talk in general. We have one more day, so let’s all get some sleep.”
Kip and Malcolm spent most of the next day keeping an eye on the students, Kip inside Trippenhuis and Malcolm outside, as the Exposition refused to reverse its rule on the ravens despite Emily’s protest. Richard and Charity avoided the Prussian group altogether, making their final day reports on the non-European countries, and Jorey mostly stayed with them, though he did go back to talk to the British sorcerers.
When the time came for Victor’s presentation, Kip walked down to the Salon with Richard, Charity, and Jorey, the two humans ahead of him and the squirrel at his side. Charity and Richard talked about an alchemical sorcerer who had fused sand into many-colored glass in a variety of decorative shapes; Richard had met a French apprentice of physical sorcery and had struck up a friendship, but they were struggling to find out how to correspond once the Exposition was over. Jorey remained uncharacteristically quiet until Kip asked what he’d seen, and he said he had seen the fused glass display with Charity and was trying to work out whether he could make something of value with it that the school or his family could sell.
Kip thought this an interesting idea, though he gently reminded Jorey that creating something beautiful required artistic training as well as magic. But he encouraged the squirrel to keep thinking about it as they walked into the Salon and joined the people pushing to get into the hall beyond. Making their way through the small doorway, they found a place together in the exhibition hall near Emily and Alice.
Jorey stayed close to Kip, looking around at the crowd of humans, his nose twitching. Kip made sure to keep the young squirrel in front of him so that he wouldn’t lose track of him as he focused his attention on t
he stage. The crowd was more restless now than at the exhibition on the first day, which Kip would not have expected after three days of walking around. He focused his ears on and caught snatches of conversation around him, people talking about what they were there to see.
Like him, many of them had talked to Victor, and he had told them the same story he’d told Kip. Something “incredible,” something “unprecedented,” something “revolutionary.” Kip wanted to tell them that Victor was probably lying, but part of him worried that the magic-less sorcerer had in fact uncovered something of great interest. Exchanging a look with Emily, he saw that she shared his thoughts.
They did not have much more time to speculate; barely ten minutes after they arrived, Victor strode out onto the stage. The crowd murmur quieted as he made his way to the center of the stage and stopped there, hands steepled in front of him, head bowed. Only when the room was nearly silent did Victor look up.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he said, with a stronger English accent than Kip remembered him having. “Thank you all for coming. I have promised many of you a unique, historical spectacle, and I promise that you will not be disappointed. In a moment I will bring out on stage my two assistants, but before that, I would like to give you a little bit of history to provide the context for what you are about to see.”
Lovely, Kip thought, but he kept his ears forward. Beside him, Emily sighed.
“Throughout history, we have understood sorcery to be divided, broadly, into three classes: earthly spells, which include all physical, alchemical, and spiritual magic; ætherial spells, which include summonings and translocation; and Great Feats, which may appear to be earthly in nature but which persist beyond the death of the sorcerer and are therefore suspected to have an ætherial component.”
Kip stood straighter and turned to Emily. She appeared to be just as bewildered by this system of classification as most of the sorcerers around them also seemed to be.
“Perhaps you have not heard of these classes.” Victor wore the faintly superior smile Kip knew well. “They have not seen broad use, but a few sorcerers in history and today have explored the difference between Earth and Æther. I set myself to this task some two years ago and am pleased to present you with the first fruits of my labors.” He waited for the crowd noise to rise, and then said over the loud murmurs, “Today you will witness the first replication of a Great Feat.”
The crowd erupted. “Won’t be a Great Feat then, will it?” someone near Kip said, while behind him a man said, “Impossible!” in a German accent. These sentiments were echoed over and over until Victor held up a pale white hand.
Slowly, the crowd stilled. “I understand your skepticism,” he said. “Believe me, I have faced it many times. I would not be here if I could not answer it convincingly.”
Jorey looked up at Kip. “He can’t really…?” he whispered, as Victor went on.
“Shh,” Kip said. “Judge by the action, not the words.”
“Good policy with Victor anyway,” Emily muttered.
“You know Master Adamson?” a sorcerer behind them asked with a slight Dutch accent.
Kip and Emily both turned and nodded shortly. The sorcerer said, “I hear he is quite brilliant.”
“He kidnapped me once and almost killed me.” Alice turned only enough to make sure the sorcerer heard her words.
He subsided, but a moment later asked, “Was this for—?”
They never heard the justification he was going to present for Victor’s actions, because Victor finished his spiel and gestured to the curtain hanging at one side of the stage. Two men walked out, one a sorcerer in robes, and the other—
Kip stood straighter. He hissed to Emily, “Is that—?”
“Looks like him,” she whispered back. “But it can’t be.”
Alice squinted and then gasped. “Farley?”
To all appearances, the first man to join Victor on stage was broad-shouldered, dark, sulky Farley Broadside—not as Kip had seen him most recently, a marmot-Calatian in a hooded cloak, but as Kip had known him in school, a stocky bully, fully human.
Emily looked down at the floor and Kip knew her thoughts as surely as if he could hear them. If this demon curse could be reversed, then what of Malcolm’s? Could he have his eyes restored? And then: if this was real, would they have to ask Victor for help?
“My very gracious volunteer here will help me demonstrate, and Master Gupta will cast the necessary spells.” The second man, a gaunt-faced Indian sorcerer wrapped in a black robe, bowed as Victor spoke his name.
There was only one Great Feat in memory that Victor could be thinking of re-creating, and it didn’t take the crowd long to come to the same conclusion Kip did. “He’s going to make a Calatian,” he breathed, and then he went one step farther. “It’s a trick.”
“What?” Emily took a half-step closer to him.
“It’s not real,” he said, as Victor raised his hands and called for silence. Kip lowered his voice so that Emily, leaning in, could hear him. Jorey looked up as well, ears perked. “There’s an illusion on Farley. He’s just going to take it away.”
“Sorcery can make people see what’s not there?” Jorey asked.
“It’s spiritual magic.” Emily squinted at the stage. “It’s very hard to do with so many people, though, and at a distance like this.”
“Yes,” Kip said, “but Chakrabarti told me that in India they have spiritual sorcerers who can affect crowds, at least for a short time.” He wrapped his robe around his paws and gathered magic, casting a quick spell to free himself from spiritual holds, on the chance that it might be effective against Victor’s illusion. He completed the spell while Master Gupta was still in the process of casting his, and peered eagerly at the stage.
There was no change. Farley remained human, glowering down at the boards. And then Master Gupta finished his spell and raised his arms with a flourish.
Farley let out a cry and doubled over, moaning, arms over his head. To Kip’s ears, the moans sounded faked, but when Farley stood up, his face had changed to the marmot-Calatian, his hands were furred paws, and a thin tail uncurled behind him.
The room erupted in noise. “Incredible!” some cried, while others yelled, “Fakery!” For nearly a full minute, Victor held his pale hands up but was unable to calm the crowd. When finally the noise had subsided—though people at the front still agitated, reaching their hands up to try to touch Farley—he said, “I completely understand your surprise and disbelief. For years I have struggled against the same restrictive preconceptions. But I can assure you that this transformation is completely real. Any human can be turned into a Calatian.”
Victor seemed to be staring directly at Kip as he said that. Was he challenging Kip to contradict him? Or was he boasting directly to Kip that he had, in fact, changed Farley back and forth from Calatian to human at will? What would that mean to the world and to Calatians if that spell existed and could be learned?
Kip’s chest chilled. Jorey tugged on his robe. “It’s a trick, right?”
“I think so. I mean, it has to be.” He looked over Jorey’s head at Emily, who also looked quite worried. “If that’s all he has, though, we should take our leave.”
He turned, but before he could take more than a step, someone near the front called loudly, “He’s going to turn us all into animals!”
This incited an immediate panic. People turned and ran for the exits, pushing past each other. Some translocated out of the room but many either didn’t know how or didn’t trust themselves to cast the spell while being jostled and shoved. Kip curled his tail around him and held the tip to stop it being trampled; next to him, Jorey did the same, but a moment later Kip had lost sight of the squirrel as a wave of people pushed between them.
Richard and Charity had hold of each other. Kip took Charity’s hand and pushed toward the squirrel, the two students trailing behind him. When they got close enough, he put Charity’s hand in Jorey’s paw. “Side exit,” he said shor
tly, pointing toward the door he’d chased Farley out of two days ago.
They struggled across a stream of people heading for the exit into the Salon, pushing their way through as best they could. Kip spared a glance for the stage, where Victor was hustling Farley and Master Gupta back toward the curtained exit. The question ate at him: was this truly a spell, or just a trick?
They reached the cluster of people forcing their way through the side door as Kip reached a decision. “Go out,” he told the students. “Find Malcolm and go directly back to the hotel. No heroics. I’ll have Ash watching over you.”
“Yes, sir,” the squirrel said, and the two humans nodded.
Kip alerted Ash to watch the side door, then turned to make his way toward the stage. Ironically, it was easier to move against the current of people than across them, and in a few seconds he had reached the back of the crowd. A few sorcerers had clambered up onto the stage, headed for the exit Victor had taken, so Kip followed them up, across the stage, and through a wooden door that hung ajar.
He caught up to them at an intersection in a narrow hallway where they stood arguing in Russian. When Kip reached them, the one nearest him said something sharply and then turned. “You are American sorcerer, yes?”
“Yes,” Kip said. “You’re looking for Victor?”
They all nodded, and the one who’d spoken, a short dark-haired man with a great black beard, said, “We wish to determine that it is not a falsehood.” His brow lowered. “What do you think it is?”
“I think it’s a trick,” Kip said, “but I think it was a trick to make him seem human before the spell. I know that Calatian. He’s demon-cursed.”
One of the other sorcerers, a stocky red-bearded man, snapped what sounded like an oath in Russian. The black-bearded man said, “Ah! This explains much. Then why do you follow?”
“Because…” Kip squeezed his tail and let it go, finally. “There is a small chance that it is not a trick.”
