“Small world.” We’re going up the steps to my luxury residence. I open the outside door for Marvell to go in ahead of me, still rabbiting on.
“I passed, obviously, but Alice didn’t make it. I always thought she should’ve, coz I could see she was good, but she got nervous when it was, you know, a proper test . . .”
I’m not really listening. I’m thinking, we’ll get the head out of the reliquary soon and we can do contiguity with the body and maybe we’ll have some idea what’s going on.
Marvell stops outside my inner door. “So I think you should help me find her. There’s something funny goin’ on and I don’t want her getting hurt just coz you’re a prat.”
I whistle and my door opens. Thank God something likes me. Inside, as I light the gas, there’s still a distinct whiff of a cat that’ll never eat fish again.
Marvo wrinkles her nose. “Jesus, do you ever air this place?”
I’m more worried about the code staring down at us from on my blackboard—the stuff that could get me barbecued.
“Anyway, is that all right?” Marvell asks. “You can do a spell or something that’ll find her.”
“Thanks to you I’m up in front of the board of discipline next week. Serious misconduct.”
“How serious?”
“Seriously serious. I could lose my license.”
“Maybe you’d be better off without it.”
“Maybe you’ll enjoy being blind.”
That shuts her up. The downside of being a tatty: you can see razor-sharp till you’re nearly thirty. Then, just like that, you go stone blind.
Look, I know I’m giving her a hard time, but she’s been on my case and I’m dead tired and wound up about stuff and it’s like she just won’t let go. That’s the trouble with tatties—I mean, it’s what makes them so useful, but it’s a pain in the neck.
“So what about Alice?” she says.
“Ask Ferdia.”
“Yeah, but he’s post-peak, right? I mean, he’s nice—an’ that’s not how I mean it!”
She’s stuffing ham into her mouth with her fingers. I’ve spotted another error in my code. I put down my plate and grab a stick of chalk. I rub out a couple of symbols with my finger and rewrite them.
“What’s that?”
“Magic.”
“What’s it do?”
“Raise the dead. It’s John Dee’s last incantation.”
John Dee was Queen Elizabeth I’s tame astrologer. He talked to angels and claimed to have raised the dead using a spell he devised, the legendary last incantation. Over the four centuries since his death, sorcerers have devoted entire careers to trying to make it work.
“Oh yeah, I read about him. And there was a picture of him in a graveyard with this dead bloke just standin’ there, all wrapped up in a shroud. Sort of creepy stuff you’d be into.”
“That’s right.”
She watches me scrawl away, then she says, “Do you want me to go?”
“I got stuff to do. I’ll see you at the cathedral.”
But she doesn’t move. I’m doing my best to ignore her but finally she says, “Frank, I’ve seen the way people act around you . . .”
“Yeah, well, it’s not just me. Most sorcerers get that.”
“But that amulet Caxton messes about with—”
“Fat lot of good it’ll do her.”
“What’s she so scared of?”
“Being turned into a toad.”
“No, seriously. I mean, she’s OK with me, but it’s like she’s really got it in for you. So you’re a sorcerer, so what? It’s not illegal and you’re doin’ useful stuff.”
“Don’t you get it?” I drop the chalk in the box. “If we didn’t have sorcerers the whole world would fall apart. People like Caxton, they depend on sorcerers and tatties.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
“But with sorcerers there’s that extra thing. We pretty much made the world the way it is. And we can mess it all up.”
I check my watch: I’ve got time for this. I pull the chain to open the window. I turn on a Bunsen burner and stick a small crucible over it.
“Here’s your chance,” I say. “Something to really snitch on me for.”
It’s an absolutely basic . . . no, it’s the basic spell. I don’t even need a wand. Marvell just stands there with this narked-off look on her face while I ransack my cupboards and finally come up with a jar of tin filings.
“Lead is traditional,” I explain as I tip the filings into the crucible. “But tin has a lower melting point. You’d better wear this.”
I toss her a face mask and start pulverizing a few fragments of oak bark.
“Ever hear of Aleister Crowley? He defined magic as the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will. In other words, you don’t need to be Gifted to do magic—you can do it by sheer force of will.”
“Did it work for him?”
“He said it did. Nobody really knows, so they burned him anyway. Keep back, this is poisonous.”
The tin has melted. I toss in an ounce of verdigris, five drachms of arsenic, and some other stuff I’m not going to tell you about, then a few drops of nitric acid. I jump back as the crucible hisses viciously, drowning out the sound of my incantations. The stink is awful—although at least it blots out the lingering smell of cat. I make the final shapes with my hands, then turn off the Bunsen and beckon her over.
“Don’t breathe the fumes.”
She peers into the vessel. The molten metal running around the bottom has turned bright yellow.
“Is that gold?” she whispers.
“Tell Caxton, if you like. Should get a promotion . . .”
“What about you?”
“I’d lose my license.” I waggle my fingers. “Probably these too.” I begin packing the gear away. “Sorcery started with alchemy. All sorts of idiots spent centuries trying to turn base metal into gold. By the time they figured it out, they’d learned how to conjure up demons, turn princes into frogs—the whole circus. But making gold was always the thing.”
“Is it real? I mean, could I—?”
“Middle of the eighteenth century, the Spanish got kicked out of the Americas. No silver, no sugar. Mainly no gold. They were going bankrupt. So they called in every sorcerer in the kingdom. They cracked the last few problems in alchemy—you can see it’s dead easy once you know how—and started manufacturing huge quantities of gold. They melted down weapons, stripped the lead off church roofs . . .”
Marvell’s still staring into the crucible. I take down a pair of tongs from a hook on the wall.
“There was a panic. Every country in Europe had every available sorcerer hard at work. The world’s awash in gold, so its value drops like a stone. Before long it’s worth less than the lead and iron that were melted down to make it. Took a century to turn all the gold back and straighten everybody out.”
I pick up the crucible and tip the molten gold into a basin of water, where it fizzes and bubbles.
“You want to know what everyone’s so afraid of? A few sorcerers can do a lot of damage. First Geneva Convention, 1864: every country agrees not to use sorcerers for military or economic purposes. Of course that’s all fine while the number of sorcerers is limited by the need to have the Gift—and the fact that it gets taken away. But what if Crowley was right? What if anyone can do it? That’s a lot of people out in the garden shed, melting down saucepans and drainpipes.”
Marvell smiles bleakly. “So we’d be better off without magic.”
“Maybe your brother would still be alive.”
“That’s not funny, Frank.”
“I’m sorry.” Why do I keep pissing her off? “Twenty-four karat gold is ninety-nine point nine percent pure. This is alchemist’s gold: one hundred percent. If you tried to sell it you’d be arrested.” That’s why I alloy it with copper before I sell it for pocket money. I fish out the misshapen yellow lump with a spoon and tip it onto the bench. “Like I said, tur
n me in. Stop me before I do real damage.”
“You need to get some sleep.”
And out of nowhere she reaches out and runs the back of her fingers down my cheek. It makes me shiver—actually, for a second I’m afraid I’m going to cry. I jump back.
“Sorry,” she says, and blushes.
“I just don’t like being touched.”
“What if it was the girl?”
“What girl?”
“Shut up, Frank.” She grabs her coat. I raise my hand and the door opens. She takes one step . . . then stops dead and hauls her scryer out. She waves me away angrily and stamps out into the corridor. I hear her say, “Are you sure? Where?” She reappears in the doorway and hisses, “Wallace’s head.”
“What about it?”
“They found it.”
“That’s a shame.” I was quite looking forward to seeing the reliquary opened in front of an unsuspecting congregation.
She’s flapping her hand to shut me up. “I’m on my way.” She closes the scryer. “Sandford Lock. Washed up on the bank.”
“Then it’s not Wallace.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Hey, you’re the one who had the insight. Marvo—”
“I told you not to call me that!”
“Why fight it? You know it suits you.”
I toss the plates back in the kitchen—there’s a few lumps of gristle left and with luck the dog’ll choke on them and I can grab the spare parts—and five minutes later I’m out in the street and the driver’s pointing fingers at me.
Marvo’s already sitting inside the van. “Caxton’s gonna kill me.”
“So play safe,” I say. “Go to Sandford.”
While she struggles to make up her mind, a solitary firework splutters up into the sky and bursts in a white star. One of its five points is badly malformed, but the color work is good: it turns red, then blue, darkening and fading. A long, sad sigh is followed by a deafening bang as hundreds of tiny gold and silver bomblets whizz and explode. There’s a smell of spices.
“Nah, I’ll go with the insight. Get in.”
I toss my case onto the seat opposite her. She bangs on the roof and as we lurch forward I’m thrown across the van, into the seat beside her. She pushes me back and screams at the driver. By the time I’ve opened my case and checked that nothing’s broken, we’re charging down toward the bridges and she’s sitting there with her head buried in her hands.
“You OK?”
“My head’s killing me.” She’s grinding the palms of her hands into her eyes.
I don’t really understand tatties. I mean, I get the general idea, but it’s not magic. Not consciously, anyway. They just . . . see things. And it seems to cost them like hell. Not just the fact that they go completely blind in the end, but the headaches and stuff along the way.
“I can fix it,” I say. “Your head.”
“I’m fine.”
She doesn’t look fine. She leans back in her seat and massages her temples with her fingertips. She looks up at me. “An’ don’t get keen on that girl.”
“I’m not . . .”
“She’s not right.”
“Who sez?”
“I sez. The body, the book, the head . . . it’s like bits out of a puzzle.” She mimes moving them around.
“Yeah, I get that.”
“The girl, though . . . I can’t read her. I dunno what it is.”
“Maybe you’re jealous.”
“As if!”
“Can you read me?”
“Like a book.”
Time to change the subject. “That note Caxton found—”
“Like an open book.” Marvell’s got this superior look on her face.
“Leave her alone . . . D’you think it meant your friend Alice?”
We’ve come around the Oxpens and under the railway bridge. There’s the sound of people yelling and screaming.
“No, prob’ly nothing to do with her. Dunno, but I can’t imagine her with Wallace. Gives me the creeps!” Marvo shudders.
I can see several hundred people milling around outside the cathedral under a full moon. Some are holding flaming torches and lanterns that cast a flickering light over the placards waving above their heads:
Burn the lot of them!
Sorsery = Satan!
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!
A sorserer and a witch are two totally different things. But I don’t think I’ll risk going among them to explain that.
There are two police lines holding the mob back. People going in for the Mass scurry nervously along the clear path to the west door of the cathedral.
“Look, you better go in on your own,” I say.
“It’s just a few idiots—”
“All I need is one idiot who realizes I’m a sorcerer. Or that nutter with the knife from yesterday. And this is a bit of a giveaway.” I put my hand on my case.
“Leave it in the van.”
“No way!”
So she has a word with one of the jacks and I crouch down on the floor while we drive on.
“You’re gutless, Frank.”
“Better gutless than headless.”
The van stops and I kick the door open. As I dash for the west door, waving my ring at security, a stone rattles along the pavement at my feet.
Inside the cathedral, the dancing flames of thousands of candles throw only the faintest glimmer of light up into the vaulted ceiling, high overhead. At the top of the nave, they’ve set up a temporary altar, covered with a crimson cloth. White-robed acolytes flit around making final adjustments.
Marvo and me, we’ve found a spot beside a pillar. Censers swing, emitting toxic clouds of incense. And I’m still scanning the first few rows of pews, looking for the Boss among the People Who Matter, when a mob of overdressed clerics, enough to invade a small country, converge on the altar.
There’s this rumbling and scraping, echoing around the building, as everyone scrambles to their feet. And now I spot the Boss, Matthew, towering over his neighbors as he turns to inspect the congregation . . .
And sees me. He smiles and raises one hand, then turns back to the front. He crosses himself as a procession emerges from the crypt. I never could get my head around how seriously he manages to take all this stuff.
I spot Brother Andrew toward the back of the procession, purple with concentration and bottled-up resentment, sharing the weight of an elaborately carved oak litter.
This is it: the relic that made Doughnut City’s fortune.
The procession fans out along the steps that separate the nave from the choir. And I recognize the guy helping Andrew carry the litter: the fat priest with the birthmark. Arms shaking with the weight, sweat pouring down their faces, they lower the litter onto the altar.
The precious stones gleam in the flickering candlelight. The gold face of the reliquary stares impassively out over the breathless congregation.
The racket from the choir smacks off the walls like the crack of doom. And now the first twitch of uncertainty. An old priest steps forward. He trips and almost goes flying.
I dunno why, but this seems to spook everybody. The choir falters and goes quiet. The congregation just stand there blinking. A collective whisper of doubt comes rustling up the nave and flutters away into the darkness of the roof, where it finds a perch and settles to await a revelation.
The west door bangs open. There is a shrill, spine-chilling scream: a woman’s voice, from outside.
I shiver as a cold wind blows through the building. Marvo clutches my arm. When I turn, her face is white and bathed in sweat. All around me, people are looking at each other like they know what’s coming . . .
The old priest steps up to the altar. He frowns angrily behind his glasses as he struggles to locate the tiny catch at the side of the reliquary. His arthritic fingers fumble hopelessly until Andrew twitches like a rabbit and hops forward to do it for him. The click of the mechanism echoes unnaturally through the silent bu
ilding. The faceplate swings open—
Bingo!
Mouth gaping. Eyes staring. That’s no fifteenth-century skull inside the reliquary.
I grin at Marvo. “The Bishop of Oxford, I presume.”
But I can’t help noticing that the fat priest is looking as astonished as anyone.
Chapter Eleven
An Unfortunate Business
An hour later, I’m the star of the show.
All the candles have been moved up to create this pool of light around me. I’m kneeling with my elbows resting on the altar, examining the main exhibit. I see spatters of dried blood, and bruises and contusions down one side of his face. Otherwise he’s as gray as a ghoul, his lips blue, his eyes clouded over. He smells . . . well, dead.
Trouble is, the head’s so like a waxwork that I can’t help wondering, did some smartarse have it knocked up to see if they could spook me? But when I glance over my shoulder, nobody’s giggling or nudging each other. There’s just a ring of jacks standing there staring at me like owls and flocks of clergy, decked out in black and purple, fluttering around in confused circles.
Can’t see the fat priest anywhere. Never even saw him go.
“Any sign of the previous occupant?” I ask.
“Yeah,” says Marvo, putting away her scryer. “That head they found down the river—well, the idiot I spoke to had it all wrong. It was a skull.”
“What the hell are you doing here?” Caxton has finally rolled up and is standing over me, hands on hips. Her faithful dog has gone, pink flea collar and all.
Credit where credit is due. I nod toward Marvo. “She had a sneaking feeling.”
“Well, you can get lost now.”
Caxton puts one foot up on the altar step and goes into her detecting pose: leaning forward, one hand still on her hip, the other forefinger to her lips. I suspect she practices in a mirror. After a while she realizes that she can’t see anything, so she fishes out her glasses and plonks them on her face.
“Has anyone actually identified it as the bishop?” she asks.
“I can identify him.” The Boss has appeared beside her. He smiles at me. “You look tired, Frank.”
“And who the hell are you?” Caxton frowns as she registers the flash coat and dark suit.
A Dangerous Magic Page 10
