by Stanzin
CHAPTER 12
Private Investigations
They woke early; Uncle Quincy still held him and Johanna had somehow managed to curl Gregory’s own arm around herself. Sensing Gregory didn’t want to talk, they made breakfast, something that had become a shared morning ritual at the Apple.
‘Uncle?’ Gregory asked over pancake.
‘Yes, Greg?’
‘My friend, Mixer. He’s alive, but badly injured. I’d like to take some of the tithe money to send to the Director… to help him get the healing he needs.’
‘Go right ahead, Gregory,’ Uncle Quincy said without hesitation. ‘I wondered though… would you like to postpone starting classes for a few days? No one would complain… I could easily send the Headmistress a memo.’
‘No, I want to go.’
‘Alright, then.’
Uncle Quincy left for work at eight, and Johanna left for Fundamentals at nine but gave him a hug and kiss on the cheek first. His own Preparatory classes would begin at eleven everyday.
Once she had left, Gregory read the letter again. The words were remote and cold; they didn’t seem real. Reggie and Alf… how could something as vivid as them fade from his life? Would he behave differently if he had actually seen Reggie and Alf’s unmoving faces? Had they hurt? Could they know, somehow, that they finally had their own instruments, and did that comfort them? Would he have been able to save them if he had been back home instead of at the Caverns when the Voidmark struck?
What happens when you die? Gregory had seen mourners at funerals; who were they more sorry for? The dead, who couldn’t now care about the life denied to them, or themselves? Gregory looked at that closed part of him that was screaming – he would not let it out until he was ready… until he understood why it hurt.
He wrote a letter to the Director, enclosed twenty Caesars (five for Mixer, fifteen for the orphanage), and posted it.
Reaching the Caverns, he was glad that the mage flare had faded – his mood right now would likely have alarmed everybody at school.
The Preparatory classroom opened to the sky. High stone walls covered in murals encircled a grassy arena, and wispy clouds soared in blue skies. A cobblestoned duelling ramp stretched from the doorway to the opposite wall.
‘Oh, hello,’ said a familiar and nervous looking boy whose name Gregory had forgotten.
Gregory nodded non-committally; discouraged, the boy folded in on himself, and shot Gregory the occasional furtive look. However, when Mango, Susannah and Zach arrived, Gregory decided that he wouldn’t act the least bit out of the ordinary. Susannah jostled her way over to Gregory. They prattled about what they knew of thaumic exercises.
The Headmistress walked in precisely at eleven, and stood at the centre of the classroom, where a mound of black pebbles lay at her feet.
‘You are here to learn to control your thauma,’ she said, ‘but what does control look like?’
The black pebbles rose – they were not pebbles at all, but tiles. Dominoes. They formed a sphere around her, as if entrapping her, and whirled around her, circling faster till they couldn’t be seen, only heard; reappearing, frozen in space; coming together as a serpent; dissolving like liquid death; and so on it went, until finally she stacked them into an impossibly high and slender tower.
Their glee drew a smile from her and she said, ‘If you think that was fun, wait until you try Jenga.’
To Gregory’s annoyance, he learned would not be conjuring fire anytime soon. And to his surprise, they were made shuck their shoes and spend the first minutes of their class sprinting along the sides of the arena, to the point of ‘unreasonable discomfort’. They couldn’t fake it either; the Headmistress checked their discomfort with a spell (Gregory hadn’t thought you could put a number on discomfort) and if it wasn’t up to scratch, she put them right back into the run.
Eventually though, they all lay panting on the grass. Gregory didn’t feel quite as miserable as the others looked though; the burning in his legs and lungs were nicely distracting.
‘Thrice a week, you will sprint,’ the Headmistress said to collective horror. ‘Sprinting till it burns, empties your head of all thoughts, and focuses your mind on how miserable you’re feeling. You need it, because strengthening thauma is about learning to focus on yourself. So while you collect your breaths, listen.
‘Gurukul. The entire Reflective network of schools is called that, and it means a family of masters. The word originally referred to an ancient community of archmage ascetics who lived in what we today call Aryana. Extremely curious about the way magic relates to the world, they spent hundreds of years trying to better their influence over it. Naturally, they discovered, the stronger their wills, the stronger their magic.
‘Willpower – it’s like a muscle – a muscle that extends into your thauma. To strengthen one means to strengthen the other. Over the course of this month, everything we do, we do to boost your wills. We will focus on your breath, your physique, your mana, your thauma, and your mind. Now, seat yourself facing east.’
The performed no magic, but at the end of two hours of practicing more different types of breath than Gregory knew existed (one), they were exhausted. To Gregory’s delight, the Headmistress helped discover their individual thaumic radii. She had stood in the centre of the arena and doodled away; the students were directed to focus on their thauma, and to walk forward slowly, and stop the second they became aware of the Headmistress’s magic. To Gregory’s dismay, he’d wound up closer to the Headmistress than anyone else in class. By the end of the lesson, Gregory could tell the size of his thaumic field – a measly eight feet! The beginner average was twelve feet. The insufferable Janvi’s thaumic radius was sixteen feet. Sixteen feet!
‘She’s necro,’ Zach fumed at the end of the lesson, though his thaumic own radius had been exactly twelve feet.
Gregory grunted. His weak radius had an unexpected benefit; he could pass off the numbness he’d carried since last night as mere disgruntlement.
‘There, there,’ Mango said happily – she’d struck fourteen feet.
Susannah had done a solid thirteen feet. ‘Don’t worry about it. Thaumic radii growth slows down quickly. You’ll soon catch-up.’
‘I can’t believe we still don’t get to do magic,’ Gregory grumbled. All the breathing exercises had done was make him more sensitive to his mana. ‘Which reminds me – why can’t we sense magic all over the place? With our mana kicking and everything, aren’t we supposed to feel every bit of enchantment or something?’
‘Yes, but enchantments are always wrapped in a dampening field,’ Susannah explained. ‘You’d go crazy if you felt every bit of magic that runs Domremy.’
‘Hmmm.’
They had been let off for the day. However, the Headmistress asked Gregory and Mango to stay behind briefly.
‘Oh, don’t let mere commoners such as us keep ye noble Heroes,’ Zach said, taking Susannah’s arm. ‘Come milady, let us leave the lofty to their heights.’
Susannah rolled her eyes. ‘We’ll see you at the Grotto.’
The Headmistress led them to a small office hollowed out from the arena’s wall; Gregory and Mango exchanged unsure looks, which only became more pronouncedly puzzled when she handed each of them a palm-sized square slab of marble. It was surprisingly light.
Runestone, Gregory realised. His brain realised that he was holding enough wealth to retire in Pencier forever if he wished, and he nearly dropped it.
‘Careful, Gregory,’ the Headmistress said, though she looked amused. ‘I don’t have too many spares.’
‘What is it?’
‘The two of you have been thanked by everyone but me for saving their children. So this Index is a token of my gratitude, for those you saved will one day become my students, just like you are now.’
‘Thank you… but what’s an Index?’ Mango asked.
‘It’ll be easier to show you. May I?’ The Headmistress pulled out a thick volume that Gregory recognised immediately, and fe
lt his face redden.
‘You’re quite the storyteller, Mr. Grey,’ she teased, placing the Index atop her copy of The Grey Unfinished. She touched a slight depression on the stone and said, ‘Hello, Index.’
To Gregory’s and Mango’s astonishment, black ink swirled across the stone and resolved into:
‘Hello. Do I belong to you?’
‘No, you belong to Mango Piper.’
‘Hello, Mango.’
‘He… hello?’ Mango said in slack-jawed wonder.
‘It won’t respond unless you’re fingering this depression,’ the Headmistress said.
Mango’s finger tickled the Index into reading: ‘Restrict access to owner?’
‘I recommend it,’ the Headmistress said.
‘Yes?’ Mango said.
‘Access restricted to Mango. Name Index now?’
‘What do you want to call it?’
But Mango looked uncomfortable. ‘Is this… Index… is it alive?’
‘No.’
‘But it’s talking and everything!’ Gregory burst out. ‘You can’t own creatures that know themselves – it’s not allowed!’
‘The Index isn’t sentient… though it is smart. We’ve taught it over fifty different languages. Its runes tell it how to respond to questions and commands. We’ve been developing it for almost six years now.’
‘What runes, Headmistress? I can’t see any,’ Mango said.
‘You won’t.’ The Headmistress looked smug. ‘They’re carved into the stone alright, at sizes about the same as a speck of dust.’
Gregory filed that away in his mind as something he definitely needed to talk to Alf about – his brain hiccoughed, and iciness flared up his spine; he fought it down.
‘But what is it for?’ he forced out.
‘Right. Tell your index you’ll name it later.’
‘I’ll name you later?’ Mango said.
Black ink swirled.
‘Your wish is my command.’
‘Put the Index on top of the book, and tell it to assimilate The Grey Unfinished.’
‘Assimilate the book… assimilate The Grey Unfinished.’
A black bar filled up. ‘The Grey Unfinished copied. Tag now?’
The Headmistress directed Mango to use the tags ‘book’, ‘novel’, and ‘anthology’. Once she was done, ink resolved each of those into a list. At ‘open anthology’ from Mango, the whorl of ink resolved back into The Grey Unfinished, and at another ‘open the Grey Unfinished’, the whole face of the Index resolved itself into a words… words identical to the first page of the book under it!
‘It reads books?’ Gregory said, impressed.
‘It stores information,’ the Headmistress corrected. ‘It stores any information you care to assimilate into it… and sorts that information however you need it to.’
Gregory regarded the unassuming looking stone, a faint excitement stirring in his heart. It sorted… information? He shivered. For all that it sounded clerical and mundane, he felt as if it were… more, a power he couldn’t comprehend yet. Mango didn’t seem quite so enthused; she was still looking at her Index dubiously. Nevertheless, they both thanked the Headmistress.
‘I hope you find use for it,’ the Headmistress said. ‘But I must ask you to keep this quiet. Only a dozen people in the world own one of these – including the two of you.’
Gregory and Mango agreed at once.
‘Now, I have another question for the two of you, but not under my Headmistress cap… it’s under my Queen cap. And since the laws forbid me from unduly influencing you, I must ask you to answer in only one of three ways – yes, no, or undecided. My darlings, have you or have you not decided to accept your nominations to become Domremy’s Heroes?’
‘I have,’ Mango said at once, as if she’d been expecting the question.
Gregory though was taken aback, and started out nodding before figuring it might better to speak. ‘I have, too.’
The Queen beamed at them, and then became their Headmistress again.
‘Now, Mango, would you mind if I had a private word with Gregory?’
Mango glanced curiously over her shoulder as she left; it mirrored Gregory’s confusion. The Headmistress’s gaze was appraising again.
‘Your thaumic radius is eight feet – the shortest in class.’
Gregory’s ears flamed, for all that he kept his face neutral. ‘You said it goes on to grow.’
‘Yes… but more than age and practice affect your thaumic circle, or Will. Grief is one of them. I received a memo from your uncle this morning – you lost someone.’
Gregory held his resentment back behind clenched teeth. Why on Earth had his Uncle…?
‘Grief compounds itself when unchecked. I know you heard your classmates whispering about your lack of magical aptitude. They are mistaken, and in time, they – and you – will find out how much. You are not untalented, just sad.’
The lady was sharp, Gregory thought. His creeping shame, brought on by his unexpected magical inadequacy, evaporated at her words – she’d known exactly what to say.
‘Are you sure you would not rather stay home a few days and adjust?’ she asked.
Gregory shook his head. ‘I’d go crazy trying to not think.’
‘You’ll think anyway,’ the Headmistress said; melancholy flashed across her face so quickly, that if Gregory hadn’t known her own daughter was missing, he would have missed it.
On an impulse, he asked, ‘Is it worse… not knowing?’ Perhaps it had been all those appraising looks she’d been giving him, but he felt bold enough to ask.
‘Perhaps,’ the Headmistress said eventually. ‘It may sound like a mother’s folly, but I’ve more faith in my daughter than I dare express in public.’
Gregory thanked her again for the Index and left to join the others at the Grotto, where everyone was getting familiar with the Cavern’s Monday lunch options. ‘Hot dogs’ looked interesting, though, for the life of him, Gregory couldn’t come up with an explanation for the name.
He brushed off the other’s questions about why the Headmistress had held him back; luckily, another topic was hot on everyone’s minds: Domremy was taking the revelation to magic’s apparently spontaneous creation surprisingly well – no one was disputing the Queen’s findings.
‘I suppose the Voidmark softened everybody up as far as magic’s concerned?’ Gregory said. ‘You could dress magic up in a tutu and send it dancing through a cesspool, and people won’t do more than blink an eye.’
‘Yes, there’s been a little talk that you can’t judge magic by mundane methods,’ Mango said, ‘but most people are just split on ‘why’. Why’s magic behaving the way it is?’
‘The Seraphic has been going around prodding everyone about what they think,’ Mango said. ‘I’ve got an aunt in Wengen – she said that it’s our thauma that’s putting magic back into the world after the Voidmark.’
‘Foulting – the bloke with the Alchemic store – he figures the Voidmark broke the world, magic drained out, and now it’s seeping back in through the cracks,’ Zach said.
‘Weird,’ Gregory said. ‘Is there anyone at all saying that maybe magic’s always been this way?’
‘That won’t fit in well with people at all, would it?’ Susannah said. ‘Did any of you read the announcement the Queen made? She doesn’t say when it was that we discovered this result.’
‘Clever,’ Gregory said. ‘If she’d put out that they’d known it for half a year before the Voidmark even happened… people wouldn’t believe it so easily. No one wants to believe they’ve been wrong all these years.’
‘Daddy said everyone’s looking for answers to the Voidmark,’ Susannah said. ‘And everyone is going to pretend this explains things somehow.’
Gregory sniggered. ‘Everyone at Pencier thinks everyone in Domremy’s a magical genius. If they only knew.’
‘That’s not fair,’ Mango said, looking a little stung. ‘Not everyone get’s to go the Cavern. M
ost people learn magic down at Tuition Street, and tutors there aren’t exactly geniuses.’
‘It’s not fair, but it’s still funny.’
Mango punched his shoulder, hard.
Gregory told no one of the deaths of his childhood friends. Like crying, talking about it would make it real, so he did neither. It was curious, but keeping Pencier distant from his thoughts let him think of it as an unfinished story. His last remembered moment, of Reggie and Alf and Mixer staring up at his cabin window as the night sky swallowed them, remained frozen in his memory, and that’s how it would stay so long he didn’t think about it.
Fortunately, he had many distractions. Magic lessons were nothing like he’d dreamt they would be. Gregory felt no remorse when the Headmistress spent day after day pushing their bodies and minds through a gruelling regime of what she called ‘core’ development. Thaumic radii were re-evaluated at the beginning and at the end of every lesson; they had to keep a record of their progress.
To general alarm, the first two days of classes saw an actual dip in radii rather in growth.
‘Break your muscles down before you can build them up stronger,’ the Headmistress admonished. ‘These first days will tell you nothing of your eventual magical prowess.’
‘Someone explain to her the difference between broken muscles and broken bodies,’ Zach whined, wincing with every step as his sore legs trembled.
He wasn’t the only one groaning. Johanna had showed great sympathy after Gregory’s first day of exercises; the second day, she’d turned into a demon, poking at his sore muscles at every opportunity. His threat to nurse a grudge and return the torment tenfold when it was her turn to suffer did nothing to deter her.
Breathing and meditation happened everyday. Tuesday suffered some unexpectedly difficult core exercises (planks, side-planks, leg lifts, shoulder-bridges, inverse push-ups); Wednesday, their arms and upper torso were pulverised (push-ups, press-ups, divebombs, seated-dips, curls, pull-ups); and Thursday reduced their legs to jelly (squats, lunges, hip-ups, towel-curls, calf-raises). Friday opened a mixed bag of burpees, bear crawls, front rolls and donkey kicks. Gregory was too winded to laugh at how ridiculous everyone looked. On Monday, Wednesday and Friday, they spent an hour doing variable sprint runs.
At then end of each day, Gregory kept a minutely detailed diary of his lessons, which had outraged Uncle Quincy.
‘They don’t even give you homework yet!’ he exclaimed.
Gregory was reluctant to tell Uncle Quincy of his plans to send his notes to Mixer, so he had just smiled sheepishly.
After each day’s workout, they’d feast at the Grotto, where lunches were quickly turning into a spiritual experience. Each afternoon was a banquet! It almost made their daily punishment feel worthwhile.
‘It’s not always like this,’ Mango said through a mouthful of quesadilla. ‘They always spoil preppies. We have to pay for the regular stuff once the term starts.’
‘All the more reason to gorge till we’re sick,’ Zach declared.
Gregory was so distracted by the lessons and his quiet mourning of Alf and Reggie, that it was Saturday before he even remembered his parent’s records again.
Somehow, everybody had, without quite discussing it, come to a simultaneous decision to spend the weekend at home, and rest their aching bodies. Gregory was grateful for the break. Settling comfortably into the balcony, he read the Preface to Cultural Transmissions: Eurasia’s Unacknowledged Gypsy Legacy by Veracity Lake and Vincent Grey.
The twenty-five major Eurasian nomadic tribes today account for a little over a million people. They identify with no homeland; instead, they profess an intense loyalty to members of their own tribe; a lesser loyalty for the gypsy nation; and a congenial if wary acceptance of the ‘geographically attached’. Ever since their first migration out of Dravida roughly three thousand years ago, they have persevered through persecution, exile, bans, religious intolerance, and general suspicion with remarkable tenacity, guile, trade, military assistance, and sycophancy – an incredibly adaptive symbiosis.
How have they managed this? By all appearances, the gypsy nation is exotic to every other nation on this planet. Their language, their dress, their culture, their traditions, and their appearance are all a hodgepodge medley of the influences of the lands they pass through… some of which are openly hostile to each other. They travel interminably long routes (the longest of which is six thousand kilometres long and takes twelve years to traverse), which are largely guided by astronomical and natural cycles. They invest little enough in the welfare of the nations they pass through, and subscribe to no nation’s auto-described spiritual legacy. They have little wealth of their own, other than the commissions they earn for their skilled services (which are many and diverse). When threatened, they think little of abandoning material possessions, preferring to flee and rebuild elsewhere.
This geographic transience would be less remarkable if gypsies truly were as immaterial as we perceive.
The term ‘unacknowledged’ in the dissertation title may seem to highlight a deliberate and malicious exclusion of the gypsy nation from the various national historical records. This interpretation can mislead; the gypsies are excluded from the collective national conscious of all countries for the same reason the weather, the mountains, the rivers and the animals are – they are not seen as participatory elements in any nation’s image and identity. They are seen as an environmental feature to be reacted to, not a contributory party to be conversed with.
Yet, their contributions are real, tangible and inextricably bound to every Eurasian culture.
Consider speech. Language is the single greatest anthropic unifier after religion. For all their garbled treatment of the various languages, the basic gypsy tongue itself hasn’t changed much over the millennia. Note, we mention gypsy speech. It is uncommon knowledge that most adult gypsies speak eight to six distinct languages. This is more than a sign of remarkable adaptability… it is remarkable scholarship!
Languages historically diffuse away from a centre, and then evolve into localised dialects that nevertheless carry much character of the parent tongue. The mobility of the gypsy has inadvertently preserved the exact same language through three thousand years. This ancient and unsullied tongue is spoken not with the ‘geographically attached’, but among the gypsies themselves, during their rites, rituals and tribal confluences.
They call this tongue ‘Hope’.
Invariably, language brings us to literature. The gypsy has forever fascinated the playwright and the storyteller. These tales usually explore the author’s fascination for the mystique that shrouds the strange customs and lifestyles the nomads ascribe to. They romanticise an escape into intransience, when the gypsies are anything but intransient. As their language has demonstrated, they are more enduring by far than any other culture this Earth has seen flourish.
A cursory exploration of Eurasian folktales demonstrates startling parallels across mythopoeia, as if they were borrowing from the same roots. Indeed, these roots have been remarked on before. The Pencier Stories narrated by North, of the tribe Pencier, stunned the scholastic medieval world with its undeniable similarities to ancient Saxony mythology.
Mythological similarity leads to festive similarity. At gypsy festivals you’ll find musical and theatrical traditions that embody root concepts of regional Eurasian cultures. Did the gypsies learn from us, or are they our teachers? Which is the cause, and which is the effect? Civilisations separated by many centuries and thousands of leagues have perplexingly share the same constellation map of the night sky. Have we finally found the answer why? Have the gypsies played an inadvertent role in keeping our cultures aligned and in touch? What would the world have looked like, had the gypsies not kept every major civilisation technologically abreast with the other? Late Medieval historian and naval commander Igor Zabrodin once warned the Tzar that his tolerance for the nomadic flow undermined military advantage; he was ridiculed for over-emphasising g
ypsy impact, but had he been right? Have the gypsies been quietly enforcing military equilibrium throughout the continent?
The gypsy influence is beyond cultural. Even as world population soars, the gypsies have maintained roughly the same numbers for the last thousand years… if you count only their roving numbers. Gypsies have not contained themselves to their tribes. They have assimilated into local populations everywhere. There are entire villages descended from nomads of old. Domremy itself honours the gypsy more than any other country does. Occilox won his first battles against Helika with the might of a guerrilla gypsy army converted to his cause.
The purpose of this dissertation, then, is to explore the various degrees to which the gypsy influence penetrates Domremy’s culture, and if possible, to identify the historical points of such confluence. The dissertation shall further investigate the arguments for and against pursuing future study of gypsy legacies and cultural transmissions.
‘Woah.’
‘What is it?’ Johanna asked, looking up from her own book.
‘My parents… they’d planned on chasing gypsies right from their school days,’ Gregory said.
‘I’m going to be a dog-trainer,’ Johanna said.
‘Mutts slobbering all over your pretty little dresses. Sounds fetching,’ Gregory said, absently dodging the pillow she threw at him.
His parent’s long nursed ambition wasn’t the only thing that startled him. He would never have guessed that Pencier had gypsy roots. The village was so unchanging, it was near impossible to imagine that it had not always existed, let alone established by gypsies of all people.
Had they been part of the main twenty-five tribes? How many tribes had his parents covered anyway?
Gregory found a dense list of tribe names at the very back of the book– twenty-five major, and fifty minor tribes. He recognised the names of most of the major tribes; he’d read their stories. Vincent and Veracity Grey had been prolific travellers and writers; they had covered nineteen tribes in the twelve years between their graduation from Gurukul and their disappearance.
The Grey Unwritten contained their excerpts from the twentieth tribe on their list.
It was a shame, Gregory thought, that they hadn’t been able to complete it, to cover every last tribe…
‘A shame…’
‘What?’ Johanna asked, looking up, ready to throw another pillow.
‘Nothing.’
Gregory hadn’t realised he’d spoken out loud. A thought flit around his mind… ridiculous, impossible, and implausible… there was just no way something that fantastic could be true. But it wouldn’t leave, wouldn’t stop demanding his attention, wouldn’t stop sounding more and more reasonable every second he that he pondered it.
‘Is there a naughty picture in your book?’ Johanna asked.
‘Wha-?’
‘You look like Alexei did when Rita showed him one of her brother’s naughty pictures.’
‘What was Rita doing with her brother’s naughty pictures, anyway?’ Gregory said. ‘Scratch that. Do you know where I can get a really big map of Eurasia? One with just the countries filled in?’ he asked, getting up and pulling out his trunk from under his bed.
‘Coffer Street,’ Johanna said at once, ‘but you won’t get them with the countries filled in. Manrara’s Stationery keeps them for the Fundamental’s geography classes. You have to fill them in yourselves.’
‘That’s alright.’
Gregory tossed every book in the Grey folktale collection he had onto his bed, and flipped through to their appendixes, where bold lines traced the paths of the gypsy tribes across large and folded maps. Excitement sang through his blood, and goosebumps erupted over his skin.
Back in Pencier, Gregory had many favourites in the Director’s bookshelf, and not all of them were folktales. Of these, the adventures of Sherlock Holmes were particularly thrilling! Holmes, a ‘consulting detective’, had tremendous powers of observation and reasoning. One of the first things he did on any case was set an upper bound and a lower bound on what could and could not be. This gave him a ‘window’ of information to investigate.
Now, Gregory thought, he could draw up a window of his own! Putting pen to paper at his desk, he began to write.
Assume, that Vincent and Veracity Grey were not dead. Though Gregory had surprised Uncle Quincy by arguing that his own survival indicated a greater likelihood of his parent’s survival, he hadn’t really been thinking from that perspective inside his own head. If his parents were indeed alive, how would they behave now? What could they be doing?
The chain of thought strung itself across his mind with crystalline clarity.
Assume, that for some reason, the Greys wished to travel hidden from the world’s sight. Assume, that in their secret travels, some dire event or circumstance had befallen them, which may have inflicted a terrible illness on their son, Gregory. Unable to treat Gregory themselves, they brought him to a village greatly reputed for its healing prowess. Assume further, that though Gregory was healed by the time they returned to collect him, he had lost his memories, and no longer recognised his parents, and so they had left him where he might be safer.
The obvious question to ask next, then, was: Where had Gregory fallen ill, and under what circumstances? Sherlock Holmes liked to identify constraints of time and space.
Gregory’s time constraint was easy. The note he had been dropped off with said Gregory had been unconscious for three days prior to his arrival at the orphanage, on the midnight of the seventh of July, nineteen-oh-two. That meant Gregory had fallen ill somewhere between the third and the fifth of July nineteen-oh-two.
Constraint of space would be harder.
If Vincent and Vera had been mundane, Gregory could have drawn a circle with a radius of a hundred to two hundred kilometres around Pencier, and then investigated any and all events that happened with that circle; the fastest a mundane could go over land averaged about a hundred kilometres a day. But a pair of magi on a carpet could easily fly a fifteen hundred kilometres in as much time, if they took turns to fly.
But what if the Greys had continued to travel with the gypsies all this time? Gypsies didn’t mess about with their migratory cycles. If Gregory could create a map of gypsy movement within those dates, then, even if every one of the seventy-five odd major and minor tribes fell into the fifteen hundred kilometres radius circle around Pencier, he would still not have to investigate more than seventy-five locations.
Gregory highly doubted he’d have to investigate more than twenty tribes anyway. Finding out gypsy routes couldn’t be hard, he thought, flipping through an anthology of Scandinavian stories to the map at the back. Just as he had suspected, the map his parents had provided was not their own; they had copied it from an older publishing titled An Atlas of Human Movement.
Once he had the locations though, he couldn’t exactly gallivant away to far off cities. How then, was he going to find out what happened in all those locations? If it were only Domremy, he could just look up every newspaper stored away at the Wormhole.
… well, he could always procure newspapers from the other places, couldn’t he? He could likely find out which villages, towns and cities circulated their own papers, and mail those news-houses for a copy of their records from eight years ago, covering news and events for the period from the second to the sixteenth of July.
The Director had given him one more clue – the two unknowns had brought enough burn salve from the hospice to treat a hundred bodies. So that was the first thing he’d look for in the newspapers – mentions of fires around the dates of his falling ill and arriving at the orphanage.
Another thought struck him – it wouldn’t make sense for Vincent and Vera to fly fifteen hundred kilometres to get Gregory to a hospital! How far would anyone really go to get to a good hospital? Two hundred kilometres? Three hundred kilometres? He might be better off investigating closer to Pencier after all!
How long could it possibly take him to find o
ut where this might lead? Not for a second did he think ‘nowhere’. Not once did he consider that his conjecture might be far-fetched or narrow-minded. If someone had accused Gregory of seeking out unsustainable distractions from his grief, he would not have bothered to stay in one place long enough for the accuser to complete the accusation.
That evening, once Gregory had made a quick trip to Manrara’s at Coffer Street, and then an even more frantic excursion to the Wormhole for An Atlas of Human Movement, Johanna summed up her own judgement of her cousin’s behaviour.
‘He’s gone around the bend,’ she complained to her father in a whisper as soon as he returned from work.
Uncle Quincy looked into his nephew’s room. The bed was strewn with a number of large and partially filled-in maps; the desktop suffered an explosion of crumbled or untidily scribbled papers; and Gregory sat hunched over a so far un-abused sheet.
‘Big project?’ Uncle Quincy asked, stepping into Gregory’s room, a worried Johanna behind his elbow.
The boy jumped and whirled, and for a second Quincy Appleby thought his daughter’s fears were justified: the boy’s face and hands were liberally decorated with ink; his hair looked as if it had suffered much pulling; and his eyes were wide and bright, like a predator watching prey.
‘Yes… yes. I’m looking into the background of my mum and dad’s writings.’
‘Is it going well?’
The boy’s eyes gleamed. ‘Very.’
‘I wondered if you’d join us for dinner.’
Leaving Gregory to clean up, Quincy Appleby soothed his daughter’s fears. ‘People are sad in different ways,’ he told her. ‘Gregory’s way is a good way… keeping busy stops one’s mind from wasting away.’
‘He didn’t speak to me the whole day,’ Johanna pouted.
‘Let him mourn, darling.’
Over a steak and stew supper, Johanna waited for her cousin to notice her displeasure, but he was lost in thought, his eyes fixed and staring away into empty space.
Quincy Apple surrendered to the silent plea in his daughter’s eyes. ‘How was your first week?’
Gregory jerked out of his reverie, but he dutifully recounted his lessons to Uncle Quincy. ‘My thaumic radius isn’t up to scratch, but the Headmistress says it doesn’t matter quite as much right now.’
‘It will be, before too long. Once you’re further removed from last week’s bad news…’
Gregory’s head twitched, as if shaking away something annoying. ‘Yeah, that’s what the Headmistress said.’
‘I warned her to give you a head’s up if your practices did not go as well as you wanted. Many things affect your thaumic radius, after all.’
But Johanna had had quite enough of her cousin’s withdrawal. She had been good and generous like her father has asked of her for an entire week, and not mentioned the letter at all. It was inconceivable that she wait a second longer! She didn’t molly-coddle her friends, and she certainly wouldn’t molly-coddle her cousin.
‘Was it the creeps?’ she asked, putting a hand on Gregory’s elbow. ‘Did they get your friends?’
‘Johanna…’
‘No, it’s fine. No, it was the quake.’
‘Did they die quick and easy, or long and painful?’
‘Johanna!’
‘Quick and easy. Two of my friends are still all right, though.’
‘What do they say about why the Voidmark happened?’
‘The same thing they say about any magic they don’t understand – magic went wonky.’
‘That’s no answer.’
‘They have nothing else to say,’ Gregory said. ‘Can no one even guess where those creeps were coming from?’
He hadn’t asked the question seriously. It had become habit to ask it in any conversation regarding the spectres. But when Uncle Quincy failed to give the standard answer (‘No, it’s a complete mystery!), but rather, looked appraisingly at Gregory and Johanna, the children’s blood quickened.
‘Consider yourself lucky, in that you have a Commander of the Throne’s Watch living with you,’ Uncle Quincy said finally. ‘As it happens, we have learnt something – not the cause of the Voidmark – but something almost as important. The Voidmark Confluence will announce this on Monday.’
Gregory and Johanna stared at him eagerly.
‘Gregory, you’ve learned about the elements of magic already, haven’t you?’
‘Yes. Mana, thauma, will, magical energy, and instrument.’
Uncle Quincy nodded. ‘That defines the ways in which we relate to magic… but there’s yet another way to do so – that is to define magic by its function.’
‘Raw, Directed, Residual, Suspended, and Dormant,’ Johanna said with a smirk. ‘I’ve been reading books on magic too.’
‘Go on, then. Tell us about it,’ Uncle Quincy said, looking amused.
‘Raw magic’s the stuff you find in a magical field – it’s what your thauma picks up,’ Johanna said authoritatively. ‘Once your thauma’s picked it up – I mean, when you’re casting a spell, that’s called Directed magic. If you’re not casting properly, or if you’re not focused, a bit of Raw magic bleeds out into the world – that’s Residual Magic, and it’s useless. Suspended Magic is the magic used in active wards and enchantments. Dormant magic is the kind you get in magical animals and plants – will is a kind of Dormant Magic – it’s held within another physical construct, like medicine.’
Uncle Quincy looked impressed. ‘Very clever, Johanna. I don’t think even your cousin knew all of that.’
Gregory stuck his tongue out at Johanna, who stuck hers out at him.
‘But you’re right,’ Uncle Quincy continued. ‘When the Voidmark struck, Dormant Magic was unaffected and Suspended Magic dissipated from all enchantments and wards. Directed Magic is too brief-lived to matter, and Raw Magic… well, you saw the spectres – what does that imply?’
‘I don’t know,’ Gregory said. ‘Either something went wrong with the connection between instruments and casters everywhere, or something went wrong with Raw Magic itself… wait… Suspended Magic, like Raw Magic, needs an active magical field to work, doesn’t it?’
Uncle Quincy nodded.
‘Then it’s not the casters,’ Gregory said slowly. ‘Something really did go wrong with the source of Raw Magic itself.’ But how could anything affect Raw Magic, when Raw Magic came from nothing?
‘That’s what’s got most people scared,’ Uncle Quincy said. ‘They shouldn’t be though, because we now have proof that the creeps had nothing to do with raw magic.
‘Over the years, we’ve developed many models and methods to try and measure flows of magical energy, and we’ve become pretty good at it. Using Arithmantics, we can measure Raw, Residual and Directed magic with great precision, and to a lesser degree, Will. Will is hard to measure because it’s different for every person and every situation. Still, the models can guess at the general levels of Will a caster might have.
‘Now, the creeps… they’re not spectres. We know exactly what spectres are: echoes of malignant spells, which, in an environment saturated with Residual magic, can affect the physical world… but spectres do not have physical presence. Yet, the creeps can touch and be touched.
‘We studied the Arithmantics of the spooks we captured. They made no sense at all, corresponded to none of the standard model applications of Raw, Residual or Directed magic – they were Arithmantically impossible.
‘So, on a whim, because we couldn’t think of anything else, we mapped them to the theoretical models of Will… and whaddya know, the calculations worked out – albeit with ridiculous results. In layman terms, the results said that the wraiths were the Arithmantic mirror of Will.’
Gregory was lost, but Uncle Quincy seemed to have finished.
‘Ok, I didn’t understand,’ Johanna said.
‘Me either,’ Gregory said.
Uncle Quincy tried to explain.
‘What we call Will, is what you may poetically
call the soul. All living creatures have it, though it’s more mature in humans than in any other creature. It guides everything we do, but we can’t access it by any direct means. That’s why we say the soul, or will, is intangible - you can’t touch it, and you can’t see it.’
Uncle Quincy looked intently at them. ‘Do you understand? What could be the mirror of Intangible Will?’
‘Something soulless… that can be touched?’ Gregory ventured.
‘Something without will… something with a corrupt purpose… based on whatever spell conjured it?’ said Johanna, frowning hard.
‘Not quite, Jo,’ Uncle Quincy said. ‘These things were not mirrors of the spells that mages cast. They were mirrors of… well, will itself – they were the anti-thesis to soul.’
There was a silence and Gregory, who knew more folklore than anyone else at the table, broke it flatly:
‘Undead. You’re saying they were the undead.’
