“Blackfoot doesn’t think it’s a very good idea,” Annabel said instead. Peter would hardly react well to being called a child. Sometimes she thought it was quite a good thing he couldn’t understand Blackfoot.
That’s not what I said.
“What would the cat know?” demanded Peter. “I’ve never seen it do magic!”
By all means, go ahead, said Blackfoot. I’m sure the castle will just love having an ignorant and undeservedly powerful young wizard interfering with its workings.
“Neither have I,” said Annabel. “That only means I can’t see it, though. Weren’t you saying just before that sometimes magic is so good it’s unseeable?”
Peter opened his mouth and closed it again. “Stop trying to pull me into your delusions, Ann! The castle workings already recognise Mordion. It’s just a matter of trying to use that recognition to run a Tracer, and then hitching that to a standard Look-See.”
Oh, this is hard, said Blackfoot. There are so many biting comments to be made here, but the child really is ridiculously clever about his workings. He might as well try it: he’s just strong enough to perhaps get away with it– and if he doesn’t, it’ll be a well-deserved lesson.
“Blackfoot still doesn’t recommend it,” Annabel told Peter, who was already preparing for his spell. Unlike Grenna, who had to do item-based spells and scratch conduits and wards on the ground, Peter did very little in the way of preparation. He simply found a comfortable spot with his back against a wall, and sat down facing one of the new, sparkling windows, so that he wouldn’t fall over if he sank too deeply into his working to keep control of his body.
She wandered closer, looking around in some interest at the spot Peter had chosen. “Also he says it’ll serve you right if you get it wrong and the castle does something nasty to you.”
Nan, began Blackfoot, and then added more mildly: Well, I suppose that’s close enough. What a forward-thinking child he is: he’s going to use the window as a view-screen.
“Blackfoot’s impressed by you using the window as a view screen,” said Annabel. She didn’t like to compliment Peter too much, since it made him more than usually difficult to deal with, but complimenting him in Blackfoot’s name was oddly satisfying. He couldn’t take it at face value, since he still refused to believe Blackfoot was anything more than an ordinary cat.
Peter looked wary, but wasn’t able to resist continuing on in his lecturing voice: “The window is an important part of the spell, actually–”
Good heavens, I’m sorry I mentioned it.
“–since it gives the picture from the Look-See more depth. It gives it a three-dimensional effect that makes it seem more real.”
That could be because it is real.
“It is real,” said Annabel, at the same time. Quite against her will, she had learned more about magic from watching and listening to Peter these last few years than she had in her entire time with Grenna. “Just because you’re seeing it through a spell doesn’t mean it isn’t real.”
“I know that,” Peter said in annoyance. “What I meant is that the picture is better than you’d get from say, water, or ink. The window has more depth, you see—an inside of its own—and it gives the spell a corresponding depth.”
Annabel tried to make a face at him, but her face was too stiff for that, too. Peter, caught up in the spell and in his own cleverness, didn’t notice, and before long the glass in the window frame became opaque.
“Anyway,” said Annabel, “this window was broken yesterday. Why is it fine now?”
“You’re imagining things,” Peter murmured, peering at the cloudy glass.
“Blackfoot?”
I told you about this before, sighed Blackfoot. You should really listen to me more often, Nan. I told you that the castle would start coming back.
“Blackfoot says it was broken yesterday–”
I didn’t say that.
“–and that it’s just the castle coming back like he said it would.”
Peter said impatiently, “What do a few windows matter? Bother! Why won’t it establish a connection with the castle’s sealing?”
“Why are you looking at me?” demanded Annabel. “I don’t know anything about it.”
“It was a rhetorical question, Ann! I didn’t really think you’d know the answer.”
“Oh,” Annabel said, and listened to Blackfoot’s murmur at the back of her mind. “Well, Blackfoot says you haven’t established value, whatever that means.”
Peter stared at her. “Haven’t est– what– wait. Where did you learn about that, Ann?”
“Is that a real question?”
“Ann.”
“I didn’t learn about it. It’s what Blackfoot said. Why? Isn’t it right?”
Faithless child.
“No, it is right,” said Peter, still looking at her narrowly. “That’s why I’m surprised. The castle workings have no reason to accept a piggy-backed spell unless it directly benefits the workings. My spell needs to provide a building block for the castle workings or give them a direct benefit they don’t normally have.”
“Oh,” Annabel said again. She still didn’t understand. “Then establish value, I suppose.”
“I’m thinking,” said Peter, with dignity.
In the back of her mind, Annabel heard Blackfoot laugh. A remarkably strong-headed boy, isn’t he?
“Is that what you’d call it?” muttered Annabel. “I would have called it pig-headed.”
“Don’t insult me to the cat, Ann.”
“Why? You don’t think he talks, anyway.”
Heatedly, Peter said: “That’s exactly why! You’re insulting me to your imaginary friend.”
Blackfoot bit Peter’s ankle. Imaginary, am I?
“Ow! Ann!”
“What? If he’s imaginary, it shouldn’t have hurt you.”
“I need to concentrate. Stop talking at me!”
Annabel stuck her tongue out at him and went back to drawing. Peter wouldn’t admit he didn’t know what to do, and he was clever enough to figure out what to do if she left him alone, anyway. She drew more windows into the sketch of the castle, making them bright and reflective, and pencilled in blocks along the front of the castle so that the blank inside was hidden. It was still in there behind the bricks, of course, but Annabel was a firm believer in the idea that if she could cover up something enough, it would eventually be forgotten and cease to trouble her. And that slightly springy, dense darkness did trouble her.
What are you doing, Nan?
“Bricking it up,” said Annabel. “It’s ugly and makes me feel wobbly inside. I like my drawings to be happy.”
That, said Blackfoot rather dryly, is not a happy drawing.
Annabel looked at it again and hunched her shoulders. It wasn’t a particularly happy drawing: the blocked up bit was blank and deliberately bland—a bit like her own blank look, thought Annabel, startled—taking away from the pretty, spindly look of the skeletal castle without doing away with the menace it currently exuded. Like Annabel’s blank look, it gave the impression that there was something else going on underneath.
On the other hand, Blackfoot remarked, it’s a particularly typical example of–
“Oh, shut up!” said Annabel. Now that she looked at her drawing again, the block façade made her feel as uncomfortable as the empty, black space had done. She carefully erased through the block segment, creating a deep gash in the space she’d just filled, but left some blocks edging that section. It wasn’t quite right, but it looked like the rest of the castle now: incomplete, sprawling, and lively.
To make herself feel better, Annabel turned the page against the deep blackness the segment revealed, and began to draw room interiors instead. Blackfoot made a rather derisive sound when he saw the interiors, all clothes and food and pretty furniture, but he didn’t find it necessary to make any remarks. In fact, thought Annabel, with one eye on Blackfoot and another on her drawings, he must have been in a good mood: when the wi
ndow opposite them began to show something other than a bright reflection of them in the courtyard, and shadowy depth behind that, he sat up in distinct interest. He didn’t make any sarcastic remarks about Peter, either, or repeat his gloomy warnings with the rather macabre glee of someone who knows he will not be attended to.
“Got it!” said Peter as the window flickered, his voice thick with satisfaction. A shadowy scene replaced their reflections in the window, rapidly becoming clearer as Peter’s spell refined itself and pulled closer.
Oh, very nice! Blackfoot said, sitting with all the prickly interest of a cat who has seen its prey. I’ve not seen such precision of spell refining since– well, since working with another particularly irritating wizard, actually. No, don’t tell him that, Nan.
Annabel grinned. “I won’t.”
“You won’t what?” demanded Peter.
“Nothing,” said Annabel provocatively. She was quite well aware that Peter was needled because she wasn’t paying enough attention to his cleverness. More provocatively still, she added: “We were talking about your spell.”
“What about my spell? Is the cat saying rude things about my magic again? Ann, stop trading rude remarks about my magic with the cat! What does it know about magic, anyway?”
Nan, you beautiful child. I think you’ve broken him.
“It wasn’t anything much,” Annabel said, relenting. “Oh, look! That’s Grenna’s cottage, isn’t it?”
Disgruntled, Peter said: “I suppose so,” and looked his spell over with a professional eye. “We should be able to see Mordion properly soon.”
“Wait,” said Annabel uncertainly, as the picture refined itself into clear lines. It was certainly a man there in Grenna’s cottage, but where she had been expecting an older man, this one was young and insolently energetic. “That’s not– that’s not him, is it?”
“It has to be him,” Peter said. “I set the parameters from his signature.”
Annabel gazed dubiously at the living reflection in the window. “It doesn’t look like him, though.”
It does look like him, said Blackfoot, in a particularly grim voice.
“But he was older than that!” protested Annabel, who distinctly remembered the thin, grey face of the man-cat who had crawled out of the spell in pursuit of her and Blackfoot. “His hair was grey and his eyes were–”
Her voice trailed away, because the man had looked up, his eyes dark blue and terrifyingly reflective. Annabel knew those eyes very well: she’d seen them looking steadily at her as she waited for Peter at the cusp of the castle courtyard. She’d seen them since in her dreams, unhurried, unworried, and certain of their eventual success. Now they were clearer and crueller, in a smooth, unlined face that spoke certainty and arrogance in every beautiful line of it.
This is how Mordion looks at his best, Blackfoot said quietly. He must have found a particularly strong source of magic.
“Does that mean– does that mean there’s another body out there, like Grenna?”
Nan–
“Of course not,” scoffed Peter. “Grenna only had a spark of magic to take. If he got all that magic from one person, there wouldn’t have been enough of them left to leave a corpse.”
Oh, for hands to box his ears!
“Peter, he’s looking at us.”
Peter briefly assessed his spell. “He can’t be. He can’t see us– or hear us, for that matter.”
“That,” said Mordion, with a particularly beautiful smile, his eyes pinioning Peter, “is not entirely correct.”
6
Mordion gazed at Peter for a long time, his dark blue eyes velvet and shadowed and bottomless. At last he said, still with that beautiful smile: “Now, this is very interesting. You didn’t have to go to these lengths to meet with me, Peter Carlisle. Step outside the castle and I’ll be glad to speak with you. Better still, send out my plump little friend: she and I have much to discuss.”
Somehow, it was worse hearing Mordion caressingly call her his ‘plump little friend’ than it was to hear Peter refer to her bluntly as being fat.
“We don’t have anything to talk about,” Annabel said. “And we’re not friends.”
“That’s not very polite, darling,” said Mordion. “After all, I’ve been searching for you for quite some time. I’ve put a lot of effort into finding you.”
Annabel, in her discomfort, retreated into her blank, slack-jawed face and simply stared at him.
Tell Peter to cut the connection, Nan, said Blackfoot sharply. It’s one thing to be sneaking a look at Mordion when he doesn’t know about it: it’s quite another to give him any more information about ourselves than needful.
“You really shouldn’t do that, darling,” said Mordion, to Annabel’s blank face. “It’s unattractive, and I’m hardly likely to underestimate you twice, no matter how cow-like you appear to be.”
“Blackfoot says to cut the connection,” Annabel told Peter.
Mordion smiled again, and this time there was more than insincere friendliness to it. “So you do communicate with each other. I wondered.”
Nan! This time, Blackfoot sounded distinctly exasperated. How much more information are you prepared to give him? Sever the link!
“Stop the spell, Peter!” Annabel said crossly. “It’s gone wrong anyway!”
“It hasn’t gone wrong! There’s just more of it than usual: in fact, it’s a lot stronger than it would normally be.”
“What’s the use of that?” snapped Annabel. “What’s the use of being stronger if it’s doing things we don’t want it to do?”
Mordion shrugged elegantly. “You may not have considered the effect of the castle magics. Still, it’s an impressive working, Peter Carlisle: you might even be as strong as I am.”
“As strong?” said Peter, in his most lordly tone: “I’m stronger!”
Now we’re in for it: they’re going to have an argument about which one of them is the stronger.
“Shut up, Peter!” hissed Annabel. “Stop the spell!”
Peter sighed gustily. “All right, all right, Ann!”
“You take your marching orders very well, Peter Carlisle,” said Mordion, his smile thin-edged. “It is painfully obvious that you’re the younger friend: do you always do as you’re told?”
“You can shut up, too,” Peter said briefly. “It’s no use trying to make me annoyed with her.”
“Now, that’s very touching. You’re such firm friends?”
“No,” said Peter, and cut the connection. To the empty, reflecting window, he said: “She annoys me all the time, anyway. I’m used to it.”
The next morning, the coloured glass that had once lined the throne room was again whole, and coloured light was beginning to edge through the spaces between vine and rubble.
More importantly, there was a man in that glass when Annabel returned from washing under the pump. She squeaked in her shock, but unlike Mordion, this man didn’t seem to be able to see her in return. Once the first shock of it was over, Annabel scrambled up and approached the coloured windows, her eyes running over the whole series of glass in fascination. The man was busily scribbling a few sentences on a piece of paper, his long sleeves dangling in the ink and nudging papers off the already heavily laden desk. He was a lanky, dark-skinned man with very long, very knobbly arms and legs, and an even longer, hooked nose. Annabel wasn’t exactly sure about the countries further afar than Glause, but she concluded cautiously that he was probably Caliphan.
More importantly, Annabel was sure that he was in the throne room, too. His version of the throne room was less inclined to cobwebs and berry brambles, but it was just as untidy as her version. The desk was distinctly out of place in front of the dais, with all its papers and sludgy ink, but once the man stopped writing and read his note over in a pleased sort of a way, the whole desk, note and all, vanished in a wave of his hand.
“Hey, wait!” said Annabel. “That’s the desk– that’s the note! Hey!” She thumped at the glass wi
th her palm, bouncing impatiently, and the other version of the room vanished completely.
“What?” Peter mumbled. “What’s’matter?”
“Bother!” said Annabel, feeling instinctively for her pencil and sketchbook. She found it and dashed down the base lines for the Caliphan’s face, nudging Peter with her toe. “Peter! There was a man in the glass!”
Peter groaned and opened his eyes. “Oh, Ann, not another imaginary friend!”
“This one’s not imaginary, either,” said Annabel, busily drawing. “Besides, he’s not a friend. He’s just a man I saw in the glass along the wall there.”
“There isn’t any gl–” Peter sat up, catching sight of the colourful progression of glass and said, “Oh. That wasn’t there yesterday, was it?”
“It must have come back last night. Told you the windows were coming back.”
Peter scratched his head. “Must be less rubbish outside now, too. The triad’s coming in a bit.”
“Much less,” said Annabel, who hadn’t actually checked any such thing on her way to wash. She sketched in the man’s awkward adam’s apple and tried to shade his eyes just right, but she couldn’t catch the hawk-like gleam they’d had. She huffed her annoyance into the dusty air, and said: “What a pity he was so tall and odd: I can’t get his eyes to work, now.”
“At least your figments are becoming human now,” observed Peter, in a congratulatory kind of way. “That’s probably an improvement.”
Blackfoot sat up, lashing his tail. It’s entirely too early for that amount of concentrated superiority. Show me the drawing, Nan.
Annabel kept drawing, but tilted it for his inspection.
Hm. Not bad. Are you sure you weren’t still dreaming?
“Of course I am!” Annabel said indignantly. “He was there, and I wasn’t imagining him, and I wasn’t dreaming.”
“Oh, that’s a bad sign,” said Peter, tying his shoelaces. “Even your imaginary friends think you’re potty.”
Annabel made a face at him. “Where are you going, anyway?”
“To check on the sealing. What about you?”
Blackfoot Page 9
