As though to cover the awkward moment, Dougie gestured frantically at one of the seats. It had an odd, insubstantial, spidery layout, and rested on a thin stalk which split into five roots: that made sense, pentacles had power. Miranda almost fell straight out of it when she sat down, finding that the seat of the chair rotated freely on the stalk, and those roots terminated in funny wheels that could move in any direction on the thin carpet. Fortunately, she managed to recover herself. She almost yelled at Dougie, reflexively, for not warning her about his peculiar chairs. The way he sat down in such a casual fashion, as though it’d never occur to him that anyone might have trouble with them, made the words die in her throat. Miranda had always hated to admit ignorance.
She could see him a bit more clearly now, closer to that odd array of glassy squares with their snowstorm-like grey glow. Hair, glasses…instead of robes, he wore a white shirt with black trousers. At least, she thought they were black—in this imperfect light, it was hard to tell. A black tie was imperfectly tied around his neck, and a black jacket lay in a shapeless heap over the back of his chair. It was warm in here, far warmer than it had been in the corridor. Something must be heating the room; she wondered if he had one of those tiny portable infurnaces powered by an entrapped demon.
Besides his dress, she noticed he was young, befitting his nervous, frantic manner, a boy trying to be a man. She realised she was being silly, as she estimated he was still older than her fifteen years by a year or two. Usually a boy of that age would be in the lower sixth form, preening himself over his success in the G.E.N.I.E. exams that Miranda was still studying for, coolly mature, looking down on her as a mere lower schooler. That is, if he was a student…
“Um, uh, want to check in on the cams?” Dougie suggested, startling her out of her reverie.
The cams? “I…Oh Kay.” It was easier than asking questions. Miranda had always enjoyed doing that, expressing curiosity about the world, but the answers she got had from some teachers at Magwit’s had increasingly put her off asking.
Dougie reached out for the desk or table with all the glassy-fronted boxes and their glowing lights. He clearly couldn’t see very well in the dimness, and the dark glasses didn’t help. He fumbled in his pocket and took out—not a wand, but a stubby cylinder that flared at one end.
Wanting to seem helpful, Miranda produced her own wand, concentrated on a spell and uttered the word: “Lux.” It was a simple enough spell, though poor Will as often as not still created a bunch of flowers instead when he tried. A beam of white light emerged from the tip of her wand.
Dougie, meanwhile, just clicked something on whatever his cylinder was, which produced an almost identical white beam. “Uh, thanks,” he said awkwardly when he saw Miranda had also generated one. He shone his own beam on the desk to see what he was doing.
No word of command? He hadn’t seemed to need to concentrate, either. Whatever this device was, it was clearly of ingenious arcane manufacture, if it allowed anyone to cast the Lux spell regardless of their own talent. Miranda had heard of such things, but they were usually described as very expensive and difficult for experts to create, too much so to be wasted on something as simple as the Lux spell.
The desk was covered with more boxy…things, these ones with slanted tops so someone sitting in Dougie’s position could see more of them at once. Each item sprouted a complex array of…well, things. Miranda felt frustrated, given her voracious reading on any and all subjects, that she didn’t recognise any of it. There were horizontal bars that moved up and down in slots, cones or cylinders that turned like doorknobs, more glimmering lights of red and green and yellow. Everything seemed to be made of that strange material she’d only seen a handful of times before, usually on items the Normie Borns had brought from home…what was it called…plastic. Flimsier and lighter than wood or metal or stone. She thought of it as being brightly coloured, but everything here looked made in shades of grey—though it was hard to tell, even with the lights of her wand and, and whatever it was Dougie had.
“Right,” Dougie muttered to himself and began sliding sliders and turning knobs. To Miranda’s surprise, one of the snowstorm-squares flickered and turned to a recognisable image. People were moving on it, like an enchanted painting, though only in shades of grey. Also, unlike an enchanted painting, they were not facing outwards and meeting her gaze. The image was a classroom, with students facing away from the camera and towards the front of the class. It put her more in mind of what Gareth had said about Professor Hummerhorn’s Noublion device, in which one could view memories from the past.
Miranda squinted at the rather blurry, grey-on-grey image of the teacher at the front of the class. It was Dr Trossberal—an Augurology class, then. She looked back at the students, wondering if she was there herself. There were empty seats. Gareth wasn’t in his usual place, nor was Will…and nor was she. Wait, they hadn’t all missed one of Trossberal’s classes before, had they?
Until…now. Which meant this wasn’t a memory, but an image of what the classroom looked like right now. Miranda was shocked; she’d read a lot, but had never come across a spell that would let one do this—let one spy on people.
“It’s looking from where the big coat of arms on the wall is,” she realised after a moment.
“Of course, it is,” Dougie said in surprise, glancing at her. “Oh, I suppose they don’t tell you field agents in case you forget and look at the camera. Yes, good thing the Serpentine snake has a big eye we can hide the lens in, eh?” He chuckled.
As Miranda watched, she saw Iris Blades put her hand up and rise from her circle of sycophantic cronies. There was no sound, but she could tell Iris was answering a question Trossberal had posed—and probably taking the opportunity to make a spiteful comment about Miranda’s own absence. Tears reflexively started in her eyes, and she hated herself for it.
“That’s Iris Blades,” she began, in an attempt to explain her manner when Dougie glanced at her in curiosity.
But he just laughed. “Well, of course,” he said. “I know I’m new to this, uh, Agent Cooper, but I wouldn’t be much good if I didn’t know Agent Blades. One of our best field agents, second only to Agent Ilvint, depending on who you ask.”
Miranda’s mouth hung open for a moment before she closed it. Machus Ilvint was Gareth’s arch-nemesis, Iris’ on-again off-again lover, and not above making poisonous comments about Miranda’s ancestry to her face. Both of them were Serpentines, of course. She wasn’t used to hearing the word ‘best’ in a sentence describing either of them, unless it was followed by the phrase ‘at being evil scumbags’.
“Of course, he’s not here right now,” Dougie continued. He kept tapping and flicking the strange controls and more of the snowstorm-pictures turned to show grey-on-grey images of different parts of Magwit’s castle. Many were just anonymous corridors, deserted during lesson time, but others were rooms she knew well. “Still off at the Authority set in London, givin’ evidence for Stoke’s trial…I think that’s a bit unrealistic, personally, but I suppose it carries more dramatic weight for the audience then getting some random adult to do it.”
Stoke was Gareth’s surname. Miranda cocked her head on one side, trying to understand what on earth Dougie was talking about.
“We just need to keep things tickin’ over here while that runs its course, of course we might always need some shots depending on how things go in post-production, so can’t get complacent,” Dougie added, clearly trying to sound like he knew more about what he was talking about than he did. It was a form of speech Miranda was well familiar with, when boys tried to impress her. Of course, this was a rare case where he really did know more about all this crazy nonsense than she did.
Miranda found herself staring at one of the glassy pictures as it showed a corridor. Rikrik, the annoying ghost who occasionally interrupted their studies, was there—but there seemed something odd about him, even for a ghost. He was flickering in and out of existence, repeating the same motion over a
nd over, as though he’d been cursed. She’d pointed at the picture. “What’s wrong with Rikrik?”
Dougie glanced over and muttered something pungent under his breath. “Thanks for spotting that.” He reached out and pushed one of those sliders down. Rikrik faded and vanished. Dougie took out a stiff board with individual sheets of paper, not a scroll, attached to it with a big metal clip. Something dangled from the clip by a piece of string. Dougie flipped over several of the sheets until he found the one he wanted, snatched the thing on the string out of midair, and began to…
Began to write. Miranda shone her wand-light on the sheet. Dougie made a noise of thanks, but she was just trying to see herself. The sheet was clean white paper, with none of the brown imperfections of the parchment she was used to. Already printed on it were hard-edged boxes and grids with clean, regular black text next to them: a form of some kind. Dougie agonised for a moment before ticking one box. In a bigger box below it, he scribbled some words. The thing in his hand was a pen! But it was far more compact than a quill pen, and didn’t seem to need dipping in an inkwell. It was as convenient as a pencil. Miranda had trouble reading his handwriting, which was as bad as Will’s, but she caught the words MALFUNCTION and PEPPER’S PROJECTOR (what?) and MARK FOR REPAIR.
Dougie tore off the sheet and stuck it into a tray on the crowded desk. He gave her a grin. “Thanks for spotting that,” he repeated. “Should be fine so long as old Rikrik doesn’t have to appear in that corridor anytime soon.” He shrugged. “They’ll probably cut him out of the final release again anyway, I know Bobby Matthews in SFX is still sore about that.”
“Right,” Miranda said.
This was a dream, it had to be. Nothing made a lick of sense. This man—boy—had just switched off a ghost, like someone quenching a torch.
“Quick routine check of the basement,” Dougie added as he pressed more controls. “Though if we ever put in footage from there, something’s going wrong!”
The basement? Magwit’s had dungeons, of course, but…Miranda felt confused as Dougie switched a picture to show an image she didn’t recognise. It looked like a big kitchen of some kind, but with equipment she’d never seen before. Big metallic ovens, square boxy devices that looked rather like these grey picture-things, but white-clad people were taking steaming food out of them… Of course, there were kitchens below the Great Hall, but they were staffed by Penates, the domesticated goblins whom Miranda had always privately felt were rather exploited.
“Ready for the switchover at lunchtime,” Dougie said, pointing. The people, mostly women, wearing white were stacking up trays of food at a large hatch in the wall. Dougie switched to a different view, and suddenly there were the tiny Penate goblins, their movements jerky as always, taking the trays from the hatch, ready to serve.
“I thought the Penates made the food themselves,” Miranda murmured.
Dougie laughed. “The programs aren’t quite that sophisticated enough yet,” he noted. “Some of those things are still running FORTRAN, Mike Peters told me.”
“Right.” Asking questions of Dougie was as frustrating as asking them of most of her teachers. She needed a textbook on whatever this was.
“So, in summary,” Dougie said, ticking more boxes on his papers, “everything looks fine, we’re ready for the breakout tomorrow, or we will be…everything ticketty-boo, as my mum would say…Dad’s got plenty of time to finish the setup…”
His words trailed off as he switched to yet another view. Miranda recognised this one immediately. It was not a view of the inside of the castle, but its outside—near the secret gate they had discovered last year, an alternative way to get in if one was willing to brave the peril of the Blackheart Oak. This required a branch on the living tree to be wedged in such a position that its flailing other branches would be momentarily immobilised, which could be done with an implement such a gardener’s hoe.
Such as the one currently wedging it in place. The tree was almost as frozen as its more traditional counterparts, with only a trembling vibration to suggest otherwise.
“Dammit! Someone’s hit the cutoff switch!” Dougie muttered. “No-one’s supposed to be…oh, hell!”
The view on the shades-of-grey picture showed two figures disappearing into the secret door, which then shut silently behind them. They had only been visible for a moment, and largely as silhouettes, but Miranda instantly recognised them as her friends. “Gareth and Will?”
“Stoke and Ferrett!” Dougie said at the same time. “They’re not supposed to be…” Another desperate rustle of papers which saw him drop his cylindrical not-wand. “Not until tomorrow! Something’s gone wrong…it’s not set up yet…”
Miranda jerked backward, her strange chair drifting unexpectedly over the carpet as she did, as Dougie reached out across her without warning to grab another of the strange devices. She vaguely recognised it from Normie Studies class as a ‘telephone’, but this one had a big additional section next to the ‘handset’ and the numbered buttons. A red light was pulsating on it. “Missed—oh, sh-sugar…what’s this…” He punched buttons.
There was an unpleasant squealing sound, and then a tinny voice sounded, not unlike the imps they had learned how to entrap to parrot back phrases and songs. “Romeo Two—Rockall breakout ahead of schedule—Wideawakes injured—GS and WF have escaped, believed to be enroute back to Magwit’s—”
“Oh, for—” Dougie gulped back his words. “That’s torn it…” Distractedly, he hit another button. A rectangular piece of plastic slid back, and something popped up, startling Miranda, who jumped. Dougie was too distracted to notice. He pulled out a thicker rectangle of plastic with two holes in it, stuffing it into his pocket. There didn’t seem to be any imp anywhere in the thing.
Dougie grabbed yet another plastic rectangle, this one a bulbous one with lights and knobs on it. He flicked a switch. “Bravo One, this is Romeo Two. Breakout of GS and WF from Rockall, have just entered J2 via that entrance. Acknowledge.” Only disquieting noise came out of the device. He slammed it down. “Jesus…they won’t have reception there…”
Miranda might not know how these devices worked, but at least she had understood some of what the tinny voice had said. Rockall was the site of the windswept wizard prison of Lightmare, guarded by the terrifying Wideawakes, whom she and her friends had tangled with two years ago. Good old Gareth and Will, beating them…but why had they been there in the first place? Gareth had only just been committed for trial by the Authority. Maybe Ilvint’s influence again.
Now Dougie was hunting through books. “Got to do something,” he muttered to himself. “This is really bad…”
Dougie seemed friendly enough, if distracted. But he was clearly not on her side. He’d said approving things about Ilvint and Iris Blades. He seemed to be spying on everyone. And he saw Gareth and Will escaping from prison as being a bad thing. Was he working for Lord Skallheim?
Miranda didn’t know why he seemed to think she was one of his allies, but she decided to use it to her advantage. “Are you going to try to stop them?”
Dougie glanced up from his books. “Stop them? Hah! I can’t!” His dismissive tone made Miranda proud of her friends’s capabilities. “Slow them down, maybe, though…” He squinted at a page in a large book. “This should do.”
He patted his pockets for his lost light-cylinder. “Uh, can you shine yours up there…” Miranda obliged, aiming her wand where his finger pointed. She discovered that on the wall, previously hidden by the lack of light, was an enormous map of Magwit’s. It was even more comprehensive and detailed than Gareth’s grandfather’s magical map. Not only did it show the same secret passages, highlighted in green, but there was another set in red which Miranda couldn’t recall ever seeing before.
She rapidly found the corridor in which she’d been walking before discovering the suspicious draught near the tapestry. Yes, this room was marked in red, with a passageway behind it…
“C3,” Dougie muttered, reading off the
gridlines on the map. He adjusted the controls on the big slab of sliders and knobs on the desk, and the grey pictures flickered and changed to show views of the corridors in that square. There were Gareth and Will, looking worried but determined, sneaking down the corridor. Miranda wished she was with them.
“So that means I want, um, D, no, E5,” Dougie said to himself. He produced a device like a fat black pen attached to a thick cord, not merely string like his pencil. The tip glowed red. He pressed it to the point on the book where he had placed his finger. Miranda watched; in addition to small bits of text, the book included lots of incomprehensible symbols. That wasn’t unusual for the books she read, but these were like no arcane runes she’d ever seen. They were angular clusters of vertical lines of black and white, of varying thickness. When Dougie ran the pen-thing’s red light over one of them, it emitted a loud beep. In the brief light, she saw that beneath the mystical lines were the words OGRES (3) TO E5.
“You’re sending three ogres to attack them? To slow them down?” Miranda tried to keep her voice steady. She’d been attacked by an ogre in her first year and still had nightmares about it.
“Yeah…” Dougie said distractedly. “Not sure if it’ll work…”
“We’ve—they’ve fought ogres before,” Miranda pointed out, hoping she could make him change his plans.
Dougie bit his lip. “You’re right,” he murmured. “They’ll have no trouble with the default programs. Hell…I need to take control.” He hunted across the desk for a moment and found yet another device, which he slung over his shoulder on a strap. “Come with me, I could use your help.”
Fantastic Schools: Volume 2 Page 14
