A Scholar of Magics

by Caroline Stevermer

  “Who’s the four-point buck down the hall?” Lambert asked.

  Voysey thought it over. “The vicar, I think. No one you know, at any rate.”

  “Where are the inmates of this asylum?” Lambert asked. “What have you done with them?”

  “So many questions, Samuel,” Voysey chided. “You’re not playing for time, by any chance?”

  Jane looked fierce. “What did you do to them?”

  “Nothing, I promise you.” Voysey smiled at Jane. “To tell the truth, they didn’t seem particularly mad to me. I sent them home. Let their families deal with them.”

  “To you, no one seems mad.” Jane’s disapproval was evident. “I suppose that makes perfect sense. Compared to you, they were probably quite sane.”

  “Now, there’s no need to be insulting. Are there any other questions?” Voysey prompted. “No? Very good.” He pointed the elaborate bundle of brass cylinders at Lambert.

  Lambert fired. The report and recoil made him wince. Even in self-defense, pulling the trigger made him feel sick. His father’s words came back to him, relic of the first time he’d ever touched a weapon. Never aim a gun at anyone unless you’re fixing to kill him. He turned to cover the staircase, lest Voysey’s men dare rush him. There was only one man left. On the step beside him, a rat terrier gave a single sharp bark and then retreated down the stairs, leaving only a collar and lead to mark the place where he’d been standing.

  “Missed.” Voysey was studying the device, scowling. “It’s never done that before.”

  “You or me?” asked Lambert. He stared from the Colt Peacemaker to Voysey. Both seemed to be in proper working order, which meant there was something very wrong somewhere. To judge from the expression on Voysey’s face, he was thinking much the same thing about Lambert.

  Jane’s voice was crisp with annoyance. “You both missed. He is a wizard of Glasscastle, Lambert. You might give him some credit—for an instinct toward self-protection, if nothing else.”

  “You mean he’s made himself bullet-proof?” That was easier for Lambert to believe than that he’d missed at such short range.

  “I do. You’re lucky you didn’t hurt yourself, the way the bullet ricocheted.”

  “Are you all right?” Lambert leaned over Jane, his face only inches from hers.

  Although her fine eyes were full of emotion, outwardly Jane seemed as composed as ever, only the edge in her voice betraying her agitation. “I think so. It’s difficult to be sure, since I’m frozen from the shoulders down. I’m not bleeding or anything, am I?”

  “You look fine. Just fine.” Belatedly, a thought struck Lambert. “Why am I fine? Why aren’t I a rat terrier?”

  “He missed you, that’s why.” Jane sounded puzzled. “That must be why.” Much more slowly and thoughtfully, she added, “Mustn’t it?”

  “I can’t have missed you.” Voysey had finished his inspection of the device. Now he aimed it at Lambert again.

  “Careful with that. You’re going to run out of henchmen.” Lambert was aware of the man behind him retreating a half dozen steps so that he was far enough down the staircase to be out of the line of fire. “I think you ought to worry about ricochets too, Voysey. Wonder what kind of animal you’d make.”

  “Snake,” said Jane instantly.

  “Really, Samuel.” Voysey’s tone was exaggeratedly patient. He sighted with care. “I’ve taken every precaution.” He lowered the device and gave it a violent shake. “Blast!”

  “Why, Lambert,” Jane sounded pleased. “At this rate, you’ll get an armchair of your very own.”

  Lambert didn’t risk a glance down at her. All his attention was on the man in his sights. “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t tell me you’re a virgin too?”

  Lambert grimaced. He couldn’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t make the guess into a certainty. He felt his face and neck grow hot.

  “You are.” Jane called to Voysey, “Score one for field testing. Imagine coming across this little problem in the field. This could change military recruitment standards drastically. Not to mention the demand for camp followers.” Jane grew abruptly serious. “Run, Lambert,” she said, her urgency unmistakable as she pushed herself to her feet. Silently, she confronted Voysey, who gaped at her.

  “You can’t—” Voysey began. “I forbid you!”

  Lambert reached for Jane’s arm. He intended to run with her. They had to retreat together down the staircase no matter how many of Voysey’s henchmen lurked there. But there was no arm. There was not even the fabric of a sleeve to grasp. He pawed at empty air.

  Jane stood silently before Voysey, waiting for his response. She was still touching the chair.

  Lambert tugged at Jane’s gown, or tried. There was nothing to meet his touch, though every detail of vision told him Jane stood there. She might have been a ghost, she was so insubstantial.

  “Go,” cried Jane, her voice trembling with strain.

  Lambert gave up. He turned tail and ran down the stairs.

  Jane’s departure from her room at the Feathers, mere hours after her arrival in Ludlow, had been ignominious. The armchair held her fast and clouded her mind. She was intermittently aware of her surroundings despite the pins and needles and eventual numbness that kept her helpless. She knew enough to understand that strong men were required to lift her, chair and all, down the stairs and into a horse-drawn van they had waiting. She knew enough to try to enlist help from the servants at the inn. All she could do, however, was sob and scream. The men said she was mad and in the silent faces that watched her struggles, she could see they were believed.

  Nothing she tried helped. Everyone, even the men who hoisted her unwieldy chair, believed her to be mad. Nothing Jane could think of disabused them of the notion. Eventually she stopped fighting.

  When Jane was locked up alone in her empty cell, in relative comfort thanks to the armchair, she marshaled the strength she had left. She knew of no spell that could hold her indefinitely, provided she brought the right kind of knowledge to the task of breaking it, so long as her strength held out.

  Jane settled in to fight the spell that held her. The task required exacting concentration. Jane grew impatient with herself as her mind wandered from the analysis of the spell to futile worries.

  Why was she in this ridiculous situation? Who had brought her here? What did they want and when were they going to want it?

  Useless fretting, Jane scolded herself, and went back to work.

  After an amount of time that seemed like hours but that Jane assured herself could hardly have lasted sixty minutes, the door of her cell opened and Adam Voysey came in. He looked much as she’d seen him last, quietly pleased with himself. In the crook of his arm he cradled a gleaming metallic device about eighteen inches long. It was tapered, roughly the shape of a toy cannon, and had a narrower cylinder of equal length bracketed with it. There were a few smaller cylinders, some curving off in a purposeful way, as if they had been grafted from an unsuccessful musical instrument. Voysey patted the bright metal tubing with an air of proud possession.

  “Welcome to the Agincourt Project, Miss Brailsford.” Voysey was as polite as ever. “I’m delighted that you will be able to participate in the field testing.”

  “Well, I’m not,” Jane said tartly. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “I’m about to test the weapon,” Voysey replied. He lifted the device to his shoulder and sighted through the narrower cylinder. As the mouth of the weapon was leveled at her, Jane could glimpse reflections within, as if there were lenses mounted deep inside.

  “Don’t point that thing!” Jane could only shout.

  Voysey lowered the weapon and regarded Jane with deep satisfaction. “You can stop whining. I’m finished.”

  Jane goggled at him. “You haven’t done anything.”

  “No, I haven’t. There’s one theoretical constraint confirmed. Though if it had worked on you, it might only have confirmed the ru
mors about young women who travel alone.”

  Voysey’s smugness snapped Jane’s already threadbare patience. “Stop talking to yourself and let me go.”

  Voysey left while Jane was in full spate. Eventually her voice gave out, her rage ran down, and she let the silence in the room have its way.

  Jane had spent the time after that in vain attempts to free herself from the spell that bound her. Night yielded to day. Day gave way to night. Jane knew she had slept, but her uneasy rest was very like the nightmarish hours of wakefulness, so she did not know how long. Night yielded again to day, and somewhere in the middle of that endless morning, she’d looked up to find Lambert at the door of her cell, peering at her through the grille.

  Relief flooded Jane. She hadn’t known until that moment just how frightened she had been. There was too much she didn’t know. She couldn’t gauge the odds. But with Lambert here, already working on the lock, surely the odds were in their favor?

  Lambert was staring at her as if she were his best hope of heaven. When he broke the silence at last, his voice was so deep and hoarse it was as if he were slowly remembering how to speak. “Are you all right? Has he hurt you?”

  “I’m fine—” Jane broke off, horrified by how weak she sounded. She pulled herself together. “It’s just taking me a while to break this spell.”

  “God, you had me worried.” Lambert was fussing with the lock. He muttered something cross and then said, more audibly, “I don’t know why. I told Bridgewater you could take care of yourself.”

  Jane’s sudden impulses returned in full cry. She wanted to put her arms around Lambert and hug him until his ribs creaked. She wanted to shout at him to hurry. Stick to the point, she reminded herself. Stay calm. First you need to break the spell.

  12

  “List, list, I hear

  Some far-off halloo break the silent air.”

  Lambert kept an eye out for henchmen, but made it down to the next floor without meeting any. He ducked out of the stairwell and found himself in a corridor identical to the first he’d explored. Doors lined the dark hallway. Lambert knew what he would find in those rooms and he weighed the alternatives before him. Voysey would find some fresh weapon, magical or material, to use against him if he stayed. If Lambert fled, he would leave Voysey possessed of a powerful, if unreliable, weapon. Jane would be at Voysey’s mercy. Assuming Voysey’s word could be trusted, he would leave Fell captive somewhere on the premises and Robert Brailsford stuck in the form of a border collie. Lambert could not keep himself from imagining Amy’s response to that last bit of news. The very thought of it made him close his eyes and shudder.

  Voysey had to be stopped. Lambert had been an idiot not to wait for Bridgewater, and a bigger idiot to think he could handle things on his own. An army wouldn’t be out of place, under the circumstances. Lambert would have to get to Bridgewater and anyone else he could enlist to help. First order of business was to escape. If he could find a window he could fit through, Lambert would risk the leap. Any disorientation he felt leaving the grounds would just have to be dealt with. Lambert refused to concede that it might take him as long to get away from St. Hubert’s as it had to get in.

  Lambert hunted along the corridor for a suitable window. Every room he peered into had its window barred. After the first half dozen, he didn’t bother to slow down for more than a glance through the grille. Halfway along the hall, he heard music. It was scratchy and faint but there was no mistaking the source. One of the locked rooms contained a gramophone.

  Lambert let his curiosity lead him along until he was peering through the grille into a room that seemed less gloomy than the others. The music stopped. For a long moment, he watched the occupant in silence.

  Nicholas Fell sat at a table covered with paperwork. On the floor beside him a gramophone was spinning itself ever more slowly into stillness, the melody yielding to the crackling silence at the end of the disc. Fell was watching the gramophone record intently.

  To Lambert, Fell seemed almost exactly as he had seen him last. He needed a shave and a clean collar, no question. But his friend seemed completely unscathed. Fell looked as calm as ever when he glanced at the door. “Hello, Lambert. What on earth have you done to your eye? No—don’t bother”

  “Wasp. What on earth are you doing here?” Lambert shot out the lock before Fell could finish his sentence, opened the door, and crossed to check the bars on the window. One was enticingly loose.

  “I’m Voysey’s prisoner,” Fell replied. “I was about to say, don’t bother trying to rescue me. I’m afraid I’m not able to leave.”

  For the first time, Lambert noticed the water carafe, glass, and empty plate on the floor behind Fell’s chair. His heart sank. “You didn’t fall for Voysey’s toasted cheese trick, did you?”

  Fell looked irritated. “I’ve been here long enough to die of thirst, Samuel. Water, I had to have. No trickery was involved.”

  “But you ate something. That plate’s empty.” Lambert worked at the loose bar.

  Fell sounded, if possible, even more annoyed than he looked. “I did eat something, unfortunately, although I cannot tell you what. It resembled chicken sandwiches, but it tasted dreadful. Until Voysey’s spells are broken, or until he chooses to release me, I must remain here.”

  “If that’s so, why did he bother to lock the door on you?” Lambert kept working on the loose bar. “It was Voysey who brought you here?”

  “Voysey’s minions, to be precise. He had more than one man in a bowler hat, it turns out, and cantrips plenty.” Fell added, “I’ve never liked Adam Voysey, but I must admit he makes a capital jailer, most accommodating to my requests for equipment. No interruptions to speak of. I’ve been able to get on with my work at last.”

  “Why did he bring you here?”

  “Voysey disapproved of my sociability. He wants me left alone to work.”

  “Funny way of working you’ve discovered. But I meant, why did he bring you here? Why this place?”

  “I can only presume Voysey prefers seclusion for his research. He has a point. It is galling to be forced to stay here, but at least I’ve been able to concentrate on my work”

  Fell’s air of conscious virtue annoyed Lambert. “Oh, is that what you’ve been doing? Listening to gramophone records while Voysey’s turning people into animals?”

  “Does he have it working now? He’s succeeded in turning people into animals?” Fell sounded intrigued. “Anyone I know?”

  “What difference does it make?”

  “There’s no need to raise your voice.”

  Lambert turned back from the window to snarl at Fell. “He’s transformed Robert Brailsford into a dog. Would it matter more if he’d turned the Earl of Bridgewater into an alligator?”

  “I understand your agitation but there’s no need to be brusque. Voysey has stolen the Agincourt device to use for his own ends, the slyboots. At least he lets me get on with my work.”

  “He put a spell on Jane too.”

  “Reckless fellow! What did he turn her into?”

  “Nothing. It didn’t work on her. He tried to turn me into an animal too but he missed—or the weapon jammed—or something.” Lambert went back to struggling with the barred window. Unwilling to repeat Jane’s diagnosis, he hoped the heat he felt suffusing his face could be explained by his persistent efforts at the window.

  “Voysey didn’t miss, whatever happened,” Fell said. “The whole theory underlying the device was that it relied on the selection of a single mathematical point as its target. The selection of the point was derived from your own perceptions. How often do you miss?”

  “Not very often,” Lambert conceded. Strange sounds distracted him from the window bar and he looked over his shoulder. “What are you doing?”

  Fell had bestirred himself sufficiently to lift the needle, rewind the gramophone, and start the gramophone playing again. “Research.” He sat back in his chair but his eyes did not stray from the turntable. The morning-glory
flair of the gramophone’s trumpet brought forth measured beauty.

  Lambert didn’t try to hide his disgust. “Listening to pretty music?”

  “Listening to time,” Fell corrected. He pointed at the turntable. “Look while you listen. This is time, Lambert. Look closely and think while you look. What do you see?”

  “A gramophone record.”

  “Don’t be so bloody-minded. Keep looking. Now, what do you see?”

  Lambert tried to see things the way Fell might. “I see a disk on a flat surface. A surface that spins. There’s a label, ‘Little Fugue in G minor.’ Want me to read the rest?”

  “Your vision is remarkable, but no, thank you. What else do you see?”

  “I see a needle tracing a groove carved in the disk to reproduce the noises made when the groove was cut.”

  “Excellent. The groove you see, Lambert, is a spiral. That groove is time. Time made manifest. I’ve been looking at armillary spheres too long, thinking in circles. Perfect circles aren’t what we’re dealing with here.”

  “Time is a spiral?”

  “It might be.” Fell’s eyes blazed with his enthusiasm. “Under certain conditions, it might be.”

  With an effort, Lambert kept his voice down. “I hate to be the one to break it to you, but time is not a spiral. Nor is it a circle. Nor is it an octagon, nor a dodecahedron, nor any other geometric form. Time is what we are wasting here. I need help to handle Voysey. If you aren’t willing to interrupt the concert to help me with this window—” At Fell’s unenthusiastic expression, Lambert nodded to himself, and continued, “That’s what I thought. If I ever get this thing wide enough to squeeze through, I’ll have to leave you here.”

  “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.” Fell’s air of mild apology had never been more pronounced. “How little one man can ever truly know another, despite sharing the same living quarters. I had no idea you even knew the word dodecahedron, Lambert. Go, by all means. I’m sorry I’ve delayed you. The chance to work undistracted is a novelty. I’ve made enough progress to give me hope. I may be able to alter the imbalance before I yield to the need to become a warden.”