‘Oh, yes.’ Cheryl set the power-up sequence going and turned around. ‘It’s a containment circle which isolates everything within. Nothing gets out, not even light, so the circle goes black.’
‘Okay,’ Ceri said, finishing off the inner ring. ‘That doesn’t sound too useful.’
‘I’m not aware of a practical application,’ Cheryl replied. ‘It was pure research. We’re set, do you want to start the outer ring?’
Nodding, Ceri moved to the northern point of the pentagram and began laying the salt, moving deliberately around until the circle was complete. Standing where she had started, she drew in a breath and focussed herself on the circle. Raising her arms was a pointless gesture, but it felt right. The salt in the circle glowed a brilliant white for a second and Ceri smiled. Her Sight showed her the shimmering cylinder she had created and it looked rock solid. ‘We’re ready,’ she said.
‘In the cage with me,’ Cheryl said. ‘You don’t need to be watching things out here and it’s safer.’
With both of them inside the silver-iron mesh, Cheryl stood before the main control console and typed in a command. ‘Resonance inducers coming up,’ she said. On the monitor screen for the cameras around the lab, Ceri could see the familiar light display as the coils began to resonate the magic of the circle. As it turned solid white, Cheryl typed another command in and said, ‘Initiating the pulse generators.’
Ripples of colour began to run across the surface of the cylinder like stones hitting a pond as the accelerators fired. Ceri’s eyes flicked to the data readouts from the sensors inside the circle. ‘I think this’ll be better than the last run,’ she said. ‘Look at those thaumic field readings.’
Cheryl followed her gaze and smiled. ‘This is excellent. You see the way the reading dips and then recovers? I’m fairly sure that’s an effect of recombination. If we have solid evidence of that then we’ve cracked the second element of the…’ She stopped speaking as the readings from the interior sensors died without warning. ‘Damn! We’ve lost the signal,’ she said. ‘Shutting down.’ Her fingers danced over the keys and the accelerators and coils fell silent.
Ceri stepped out of the cage, looking around at the circle, and came to a grinding halt. With the coils and accelerators off, the circle should have gone transparent again. Instead it was a boiling wash of colours. She summoned her Sight and things only got worse. Arcs of thaumic energy rippled across the surface of the barrier, never getting outside it, but snaking across the surface like undercurrents. ‘Uh, Cheryl, we have a problem,’ she said.
Cheryl joined her. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Maybe you should drop the circle.’
‘I can’t,’ Ceri replied. ‘The field inside isn’t falling off. If I drop the circle, we get hit in the face with several hundred thaums.’
~~~
‘Okay,’ Cheryl said, ‘what do we have?’ An hour had passed and the circle was still going. The building had been evacuated, apart from Ceri and her boss. For the last forty minutes, Ceri had been alone while Cheryl had calmed down the Dean. For once the High-energy Thaumatology Building was living up to its reputation and people were nervous.
‘I’ve run simulations,’ Ceri said. ‘I think I’ve got this almost worked out.’
‘Go on then,’ Cheryl said.
‘Okay,’ Ceri began. ‘The system works by creating an intense energy field just inside the containment circle. A normal energy field, not a thaumic one. Null thaumitons enter the circle, strike the field, and some of them decay taking energy from the field to create the mass for a pair of positive and negative thaumitons which stay within the circle.’
Cheryl nodded. ‘But then we add in the recombination effect,’ she said.
Ceri nodded. ‘A T-Plus and a T-Minus hitting each other within the right vector range collapse back into a T-Null, releasing their mass as electromagnetic energy.’
‘Which reinforces the field the nulls can use in the decay process!’ Cheryl said exultantly. Despite the massive problem they had, she was positively glowing at the discovery.
Ceri nodded, grinning despite herself. ‘With the old circle, the leakage would prevent this from happening, and then we had the breach. The new version stops any thaumitons with mass from escaping, so the field builds up until the energy generated inside the circle is enough to make it self-sustaining.’
‘All right,’ Cheryl said. ‘How do we stop it? We’ve got a thaumic bomb in the middle of London at the moment.’
‘Ah, well if my figures are right, we don’t have to.’ Ceri tapped the screen of her tablet. ‘The excited energy field gives off light, which can escape the circle. That will bleed energy out of the decay field and, eventually, collapse the system.’
‘How long?’
‘According to the readings we got just before the sensors went down, estimating how much more energy went in before you killed the power, and taking an average for the frequency spectrum we seem to be getting out… another four hours.’
Kennington
It took four hours and seventeen nerve-racking minutes for the thaumic field to begin collapsing, and then another thirty-five minutes before Ceri was happy that they were not going to unleash a rain of frogs on the university, or turn everyone blue, when she dropped the circle. The instrument column on the inside of the circle had been a pile of molten metal when they could finally see it. Cheryl was, surprisingly, sanguine about it.
‘The data we have is remarkably good,’ she said as she went over it on her laptop back at High Towers, ‘and it’s not like we’ll be able to repeat the experiment.’
Ceri nodded. ‘Yeah, I think the Dean might blow a fuse. Okay, I think I’ve got this model right. The thaumic field in the circle reaches a natural balance at about four-hundred and fifty-two thaums. At that point, the radiant energy from the excitation field becomes large enough that it can’t grow. Not without external input anyway. It took a little longer to come down than I think it should have and I haven’t quite worked out why that is yet, but I have a good approximation working.’
‘Bad, but not too bad,’ Cheryl commented.
‘Yeah, like it would have levelled the university, but not the city,’ Ceri laughed. ‘You think this is what Barnes was trying to stop us finding out?’
Cheryl frowned. ‘If he had worked out that this was possible, wouldn’t he have published the theory? Besides, it’s interesting as an effect, but not exactly useful.’
‘Make a pretty good weapon.’
‘Barnes does get a lot of funding from the military for exotic application of theoretical techniques. One of his teams came up with the encrypted network system the Army started using last year.’ She frowned in thought for a second and then shook her head. ‘But no, it’s not big enough. There are perfectly good mundane methods of levelling a building. Even though nukes are banned under the Glasgow Accords, things like fuel-air bombs have as much punch without the issue of blowing a hole in the universe.’
Ceri turned her tablet around to show Cheryl a graph. It grew rapidly, vanishing off the top of the scale at the end. ‘That’s if you use a standard circle,’ Ceri said. ‘If you remove the radiant energy leakage you get this. As far as I can tell, the field never stops growing.’
‘But how would you stop the radiant…’ Cheryl face showed her sudden comprehension, and a degree of horror. ‘Dark circles,’ she said. ‘Barnes stole the dark circle work from Bellamy. If he could get our resonance system to work on a dark circle…’
‘He’d have a doomsday device,’ Ceri said. ‘An explosion of thaumic energy with a near infinite field potential.’ She looked at the screen. ‘I don’t even know where to start calculating what it would do.’
‘I don’t think you can start,’ Cheryl replied. ‘Infinite Field Theory is being studied by a couple of thaumatologists in the US, but it’s not really considered a serious subject. Half of it is conjecture and imagination.’
‘Well this,’ Ceri said, waving a hand at the screen, ‘isn’t conjectu
re or fiction. You have to call the Journal and tell them we need to add a warning to the article.’
Nodding, Cheryl reached for the phone. ‘We’ll go in tomorrow and disable the accelerators,’ she said. ‘I don’t want anything happening accidentally.’
Ceri nodded. She was busy accessing the university’s archive of theoretical papers for anything she could find on Infinite Field Theory.
Holloway, October 16th
Half a dozen uniformed policemen were still on guard at the High-energy Thaumatology Building. It made Ceri feel safer knowing they were there, decked out in enchanted body armour and carrying sleep batons. She nodded to the two at the main entrance as she walked in with Cheryl. It was Saturday morning and the place was quiet, almost unnaturally quiet. Ceri found herself looking around nervously.
‘How are we going to do this?’ she asked Cheryl as they walked into the lab.
‘Remove the primary accelerator coils,’ Cheryl replied, walking into the cage, ‘and disconnect the resonator units from the coil. We’ll remove them from site, and…’
Ceri turned as the thaumatologist’s voice cut off suddenly. ‘Boss?’ There was no answer. ‘Cheryl? You okay?’
Someone stepped out of the cage and Ceri gasped. ‘She’s fine,’ Matthew Barnes said, ‘sleeping soundly. You, unfortunately, will be harder to enspell, so…’
Pain exploded across the back of Ceri’s skull. She fell, rolling onto her back, and saw the brunette vampire, Eleanor, standing behind her. Then she saw nothing.
~~~
The pain behind her eyes kept her lying still for several seconds after she regained consciousness. She was resting on cold stone; the granite block of the containment circle, she guessed. The cool felt good against her temple and she decided that just listening was probably the best bet for a while.
‘The policemen have been dealt with?’ Barnes’ voice. The reply was in a language she did not understand, but the guttural quality and Barnes’ history suggested a demon. ‘Good,’ Barnes went on, ‘see that we are not disturbed. I want to savour this.’ There was the sound of heavy footfalls moving away, out of the room.
‘The backup will be complete in ten minutes.’ Another voice, female. Eleanor?
‘That long?’ Barnes sounded impatient.
‘There’s a lot of data. You want all of it, don’t you, Master?’ Yes, that would be Eleanor; just as enthralled as her sister had been.
‘How hard did you hit the witch?’ Barnes said. ‘I want her awake for this.’
Ceri prepared herself. When she moved, she would have little time to take Barnes out; possibly less to stop the vampire. Fire was probably out, perhaps electricity.
‘She’ll probably wake up before the backup’s finished.’
Ceri opened her eyes, locating Barnes immediately. Eleanor was standing right beside him, but there was no sign of Cheryl. Not to worry about that now. She pushed the worry from her head, summoned her power, and stretched out a hand toward Barnes. Lightning arced from her fingertips, travelled six or so inches, and then struck the edge of the circle, shattering into a spider web of charge.
When her ears stopped ringing, Ceri heard Barnes clapping, slowly. ‘That was very good, Miss Brent,’ Barnes said. ‘Remarkably good, in fact. I knew there was no way you could have gained magical power from that accident. As you can see, I’ve raised the circle. Congratulations again, you did a remarkable job of fixing the “errors” Walters put in.’
Ceri pulled herself into a sitting position. Her head was throbbing. Reaching to the back of her neck she winced and drew it away. There was blood on her fingers. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ she asked. ‘And where’s Cheryl?’
‘Doctor Tennant is fine. In her cage, waiting for me to tell her what to do like a good slave.’ Barnes’ smile was malicious. ‘If it were you there, I’d make it permanent and enjoy myself, but she’s too old. I prefer something younger.’ His gaze shifted to Eleanor and he licked his lips.
‘What did you mean about my power?’ Ceri snapped. Gritting her teeth hurt and she had to force her jaw to unclench.
‘Nothing could have survived that blast,’ Barnes replied. ‘I assume you were contacted by a demon. Such an intense field could easily attract one. No one learns magic as fast as you have, girl. I know! I’m a genius and I couldn’t work that kind of spell so soon after developing my power.’
‘That’s because you’re impatient,’ Ceri said. ‘Impatient and stupid. I couldn’t work magic until recently, but I’ve been learning about it for two decades. You wanted everything and you wanted it now. It takes time to learn things, you perverted imbecile.’
Barnes’ face darkened. ‘You’re in no position to insult me, witch, I’ll…’
‘I’m in a perfect position to insult you, you widder-damned, black-souled son of a bitch. You’re going to kill me anyway, what’ve I got to lose.’ Ceri struggled to her feet. ‘Maybe once upon a time you were a genius, but that was years ago. Now you’re just a finger puppet for some demon lord. Do you like it having his hand up your arse?’
Barnes bolted toward her and it was only the superhuman speed of his vampire bodyguard which stopped him breaking the circle. ‘No, Master! The circle!’ It seemed to be taking most of Eleanor’s strength to hold him back, but he calmed down to a mostly sentient level after a few seconds.
‘Very clever, Miss Brent,’ he growled. ‘Get me to cross my own circle. Very clever.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Ceri said, annoyed that the vampire had stopped him, ‘what can you possibly gain from blowing the country apart?’
‘Don’t be stupid, girl,’ Barnes snapped, ‘the bomb isn’t that…’
‘Using a dark circle the thaumic field reaches a transfinite level pretty quickly,’ Ceri snapped. ‘Didn’t you do the… No, of course you didn’t do the math. I doubt you’re even up to doing it now. You just took the word of your master.’
‘I don’t have a master,’ Barnes said flatly.
‘Yes you do,’ Ceri said, smiling sweetly at you. ‘Y’know, that demon with his arm rammed up your…’
‘Enough!’ Barnes roared, holding himself back with main force. ‘Tennant, start up the system.’
From the cage, Cheryl’s voice sounded, flat and vaguely inhuman. ‘Initiating resonance inducers.’ Ceri went pale.
‘You see, Miss Brent,’ Barnes said, ‘I’m not going to kill you. I don’t kill people. I have other people do it for me.’
The first flickers of colour began to slide across the surface of the circle. Ceri ran at it, slamming her fists into the impenetrable shield. ‘Cheryl!’ she screamed. ‘Cheryl, stop it! Shut it down!’
‘She won’t respond,’ Barnes said. ‘The spell is quite powerful.’
Ceri could barely see out through the circle now. Her skin was prickling. She had to think of something, but the throbbing in her skull was not helping.
‘Initiating pulse generators.’ She heard Cheryl’s voice over the hum of machinery and saw the burst of particles as the four beams hit the circle. In a few seconds, she would be standing in several hundred thaums of magic field. Sorcerer or not, she doubted she could survive it. It would be like the breach, but infinitely worse. She blinked. The breach…
Barnes watched as bands of colour began to twist across the surface of the shining white cylinder. His smile was pure malice. ‘Goodbye, Miss Brent,’ he said. He was starting to turn away when he saw something; a spot of silver appeared in the white, moving quickly, inscribing what looked like a rune of some kind. He recognised it a second before it was completed; Blotherian, the rune of betrayal, assassination, and the opening of hidden ways. His eyes widened. Then he was hit in the face with a few hundred thaums of magical energy.
The circle collapsed and a wave of energy blew outward. Eleanor screamed as she was tossed across the room like a rag doll. Thaumic sensors cut the power to the equipment around the room before overloading and exploding. Ceri was left standing in the circle, surrounded by a n
imbus of bluish light.
There was a roar and the demon rushed into the room. Big, hulking, with a draconic head; a Dakag demon, common bodyguard and thug material. There was a scream from the cage; Cheryl had regained her senses. The demon ignored her and charged toward Ceri, stopping as a bolt of energy as big as its head shot from her hand. For an instant it stood there, wreathed in blue light and arcs of electricity, then it seemed to collapse in on itself and vanish.
Cheryl rushed out of the cage and started to run toward Ceri, but a raised hand stopped her. ‘No!’ Ceri said through gritted teeth. ‘Too hot. Get a containment team. Hurry!’ The doctor’s common sense started to cut in again and she nodded, rushing out to find a phone.
Ceri fell to her knees, her eyes on the spot where Barnes had been standing. There was nothing there, not even a pile of ash. Matthew Barnes was gone.
Part Five: All Hallows’ Eve
Denmark Hill, October 17th 2010
‘To be honest,’ Doctor Looper said from inside a magical hazard suit, ‘I was not expecting to see you again so soon, Miss Brent.’
‘At least I’m conscious this time,’ Ceri replied, grinning a little.
‘Indeed. And you seem to be quite healthy aside from the rather high thaumic output level.’ He glanced down at the wooden box containing his thaumometer. ‘Thirty-eight thaums,’ he said. ‘Quite how you’re alive I’m not sure, but at least it’s dropping. I’ll leave you to the tender mercies of Miss Carpenter.’
‘Thanks, Doctor,’ Ceri said as he waddled to the door in the thick rubber suit with its silver-iron mesh lining.
Lily bounced in as soon as he was out. She had been scared silly with worry when Detective Middleshaw had informed her that Ceri and Cheryl were being taken to the hospital, but now that it seemed clear that Ceri was going to be all right, she was back to her perky self. Cheryl had already been released; there seemed to be no lasting effect from Barnes’ mind control spell. No physical or metaphysical effect anyway.
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