A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians--A Novel

by H. G. Parry

  “I know who you mean. No. The visitor withdrew from me when I was convicted, and took his power with him. I have only my own very weak alchemical abilities now. I suppose he had no further use for me. I couldn’t help you to find him, if that’s what you mean. I never even saw his face.”

  “And that was all it wanted?” Pitt said. It was the first time he had spoken in a while. “Your help for Saint-Domingue?”

  “He asked me to free slaves,” Clarkson repeated. “What would you have done?”

  “Did you know what it was? The figure who came to you. What was it?”

  Clarkson looked at him. “He never said.”

  “But you knew.”

  “How could I?”

  “Don’t lie to us, Clarkson,” Pitt said, and Wilberforce glanced at him with alarm. His voice was very low and quiet, and his eyes were blazing. Mesmerism was supposed to be impossible to detect except by those who had made long study of it. Wilberforce had made no such study of magic, but he had made a study of Pitt over several years, and he knew what he was seeing.

  Clarkson couldn’t have known he was being mesmerized, but Wilberforce saw him swallow hard as he struggled against it instinctively. “You have no right to ask me. It isn’t your cause.”

  “It’s my country,” Pitt said. Magic crackled in the air around him; Wilberforce, next to him, felt it like a heat wave. “And you will tell me what you’ve done to it.”

  “Pitt,” Wilberforce warned softly.

  For a second, Pitt’s eyes remained fixed on Clarkson. Then, all at once, Wilberforce’s voice reached him. He glanced away, both mesmeric fire and fury draining so swiftly from his face that he seemed to lose all color, and caught his breath with a shudder that only Wilberforce heard.

  “Excuse me,” he said, without looking at either of them, and he stood and left the cell. The door opened for him from the outside, then closed again with a dull thud.

  Wilberforce’s first impulse was to follow him, but he turned to Clarkson instead. The abolitionist looked understandably shaken.

  “Is he right?” Wilberforce asked. “Did you know?”

  Clarkson hesitated, then shrugged. “It was a blood magician.” He rubbed his eyes tiredly. “A vampire. Yes, I knew.”

  The world rang dizzyingly in Wilberforce’s ears. When he breathed again, it had settled into something unfamiliar and strange.

  “How?” he managed, at last. “How did you know?”

  “What else could have felt the magic in my blood? Of course it was a vampire. I didn’t care. Blood magic. It’s an Inheritance like any other.”

  “It isn’t.” It was what Pitt had been trying to tell him for years. He realized that when he contradicted his friend, he hadn’t been honest. “It requires human sacrifice.”

  “So does slavery!” Clarkson retorted. “A lot of it. I want those slaves freed. I always have. That’s all I want. If a vampire is an enemy to the slave trade, there’s no difference in my mind between that vampire and yourself.”

  “You can’t believe that. You’re one of the most principled people I know.”

  “Yes. And I was willing to sacrifice my honor and my principles for the lives of hundreds of thousands—more than willing. For all the praise and all the blame they heap on your head, Wilberforce, you can’t say the same.”

  “No.” Wilberforce felt very tired suddenly. “No, I can’t.”

  Outside the Tower gates, the night sky had clouded over; a chill mist rose from the Thames, and the lights burning across the river from the South Bank were cloaked in fog. The street was very quiet. At first, Wilberforce was afraid that Pitt had already left, but he quickly caught sight of him, standing a little way off beside one of the trees that overhung the river.

  “Wilberforce,” Pitt greeted him without turning around, which Wilberforce thought was probably a bad sign. At any rate, he couldn’t have done it without senses that were very enhanced.

  “Good evening,” Wilberforce replied as cheerfully as he could, drawing nearer. Up close, his friend’s tall, angular frame was unnaturally still even for him. “Or morning, rather, I suppose… Are you well?”

  “Perfectly,” Pitt replied, in something that was almost his usual voice but too tight. He took a deep breath. “Could you just… talk to me for a moment, please?”

  “What should I talk about?”

  “Anything. Anything human and ordinary.”

  “Ordinary.” Wilberforce thought frantically. “You already know about the new house out at Clapham, don’t you?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Tell me about it.”

  “Thornton has his heart set on inviting as many as possible of the evangelicals and abolitionists to join us out at Clapham. I wrote to him about the school Hannah More and I set up, with her education and my income, and it’s made him even more excited. He thinks that so many of us working together, using our skills and ideas and strengths—who knows what good we might be able to do? Macaulay’s coming, and I just spoke to Hannah More about her buying a house out there as well. Thornton still loves showing complete strangers around the library you designed for him, by the way. He tells them all that he was so lost as to what to do with the space, the prime minister of Great Britain had to kindly step in and help him.”

  “That’s very tactful of him,” Pitt said, in something far more like his usual voice. “I think I actually just dropped so many wistful hints about libraries that he took pity on me.” He shivered, just once, and relaxed. “Thank you. When does everybody plan to move in? Do you know yet?”

  “What happened in there?”

  For a moment Pitt looked as if he wouldn’t answer. Then he sighed. “I made a mistake. I haven’t done that in a very long time. I won’t do it again.”

  Wilberforce wasn’t quite sure what to say. “It was understandable, just this once. We needed him to talk to us.”

  “Understandable,” he conceded. “But unforgivable. Thank you for intervening, and please stop me if you ever see anything like that again. I sometimes think ‘just this once’ is the most dangerous phrase in the English language.”

  “I promise to stop you. But I think you’re rather hard on yourself. You’ve just lost Harriot, and I know you’re very worried about France, whatever you say. Magic is almost impossible to control when feelings run high.”

  “That makes it rather worse. I’m the head of the British government. I can’t very well go about unleashing dark magic every time I’m less than composed about something. Did Clarkson tell you anything more?”

  Wilberforce accepted the change in subject without comment. “You were right,” he said. “He knew what spoke to him. It was a vampire.”

  Pitt nodded without surprise.

  “You already knew, didn’t you?”

  “Not before we came—I had no idea that vampires could awaken bloodlines, only sense them. I knew when Clarkson described the way it came to him. It’s called nightwalking. It’s a vampiric manifestation. They can converse with other minds while they sleep—sometimes only with words, sometimes with images as well.”

  Despite everything, Wilberforce felt a flash of interest. “Can they really? Have you ever done it?”

  Pitt smiled. “No. I’ve only read about it.”

  “That’s a shame. It sounds fascinating.”

  “That’s because you object to abandoning conversations occasionally in order to sleep.”

  “I do so only very occasionally. It’s very late now, and we’re still conversing.” He grew more serious. “So a vampire has been born in France and somehow escaped the Knights Templar. I suppose there’s no reason why that shouldn’t happen. It happened here with you.”

  “This one seems to have a stronger strain than I do. Or possibly he’s just more diligent about learning how to use it. This does cast a new light on one thing.”

  “The undead.” Wilberforce had thought of it too. “Necromancers used to raise the undead for the vampire kings, hundreds of years ago. The knowledge of how
to do so died with those kings. It can’t be a coincidence that an undead has appeared at the same time as a practicing blood magician. And it also helps explain why King George’s magic turned in on itself so violently when the undead was created.”

  “An aspiring vampire king employing that kind of magic in France would certainly constitute a supernatural threat against Britain—the kind a mage-king’s powers are said to respond to. I know that’s viewed as superstition these days. But it’s been a very long time since there’s been cause to test it.”

  “Not since the end of the Vampire Wars.” Wilberforce hesitated. “We’ve assumed this is a vampire with a bloodline like yours, who manifested recently. There is another possibility. Full-blooded vampires are more or less immortal. In theory, if a vampire survived the Templars’ massacre, and he is killing to survive, he could have lived a long time.”

  “It’s possible. I just can’t believe anybody survived that massacre. The Templars were very thorough. They recorded each death—all the noble vampire families were accounted for. And if one of them somehow escaped and has been in hiding for over three hundred years, it seems strange he should reveal himself now.” He shook his head. “It’s possible. Either way, we need to deal with it.”

  Wilberforce wasn’t entirely satisfied with that answer, but he let it go for now. “Can we warn the new French Republic of Magicians?”

  “I doubt they would give any credence to it. At the best of times, it would be the hearsay of an English prisoner, probably calculated to deflect responsibility for his crime. At the moment, I doubt they would trust me to tell them that the sky is blue.”

  “Well, it isn’t. It’s gray.”

  “You don’t trust me to tell you that the sky is blue. For your information, the clouds are gray. The sky is blue somewhere behind them. Or will be, when the sun comes up.”

  “There’s probably a metaphor in there.”

  “I certainly hope not. The weather-mages have predicted rain and cloud for the foreseeable future. I deny your metaphor. And the French, by the way, are going to deny any vampiric involvement in Saint-Domingue. They’ve just changed governments. I hope that this new one will be less aggressive than the old, but everything points to the opposite. They are not interested in assigning blame for Saint-Domingue to anybody but us. More important, anything too overt would warn the vampire that we know about it. It will go deeper into hiding. We might never find it.”

  “In short, then, we need to find him ourselves. But he will be well hidden.”

  “If it can nightwalk, it could have been thousands of miles from Clarkson while it spoke to him. Probably in France, though. Vampires tend to stay within their territories.”

  “Is that why you’ve been promising to come spend the summer in the Lake District with me for years, but never seem to get any further than Bath?”

  That finally surprised a laugh from him. “No, that’s because I’ve been unfeasibly busy for the past ten years. I don’t have a territory.”

  “It might not agree with you on that.” The thought had come to him, unbidden and unwelcome. “Pitt. Is there any chance it knows about you? What you are, I mean?”

  “I have no idea,” Pitt said. “I suppose it might. Whether it cares is another question. I’m hardly a threat to it, on a supernatural level.”

  “But you could be, under different circumstances. And it may not be willing to risk that you won’t be. That first shadow, the one in Rheims—you said it was looking right at you.”

  “Possibly,” Pitt said, cautiously. “Though it was only a shadow, such as anyone might have summoned. The undead that stabbed you was almost certainly sent by our enemy—vampires have always been linked with the undead. But that didn’t appear until later. Nothing very much happened in ’83.”

  “Quite a lot happened in ’83. You became prime minister of Great Britain. And immediately before that, you came to France. You came into its territory. And it saw you.”

  “This isn’t about me visiting France in ’83,” Pitt said, rather too firmly. “It can’t be.”

  “Why not? Isn’t that how vampire territorial wars have always begun? With an infringement, and a challenge?”

  “I didn’t issue any challenge.”

  “No. But perhaps it’s issued one to you.”

  “There haven’t been any vampire territorial wars for hundreds of years.”

  “There haven’t been any vampires for hundreds of years. They were wiped from the face of the earth, and any subsequent aberrations were killed at birth. Now this one’s appeared. And at the same time, so have you. I know you’re not a pure vampire,” he added quickly, before Pitt could protest. “I know you’re not a practicing blood magician. I know you don’t see yourself, or this country, that way. I’m just suggesting we keep it in mind as a possibility.”

  “I’m not sure I want that possibility in my mind. I want to be able to sleep sometime in the rest of my life.” He shook his head. “I’ll see what records the Knights Templar have of any vampire bloodlines left in France. My bloodline’s on record, after all—perhaps we’ll find where this one might have emerged.”

  “We didn’t have any such luck finding the necromancer.”

  “For now, it’s all we have. We need for it to make a mistake, or we need to look for one that it’s already made.”

  “What if it hasn’t made one?”

  “Everyone makes mistakes.”

  It was a hopeful statement, in context. But the night was very dark, and applied to other things, it didn’t sound so very hopeful.

  “The new house out at Clapham,” Wilberforce heard himself say. “That’s one thing I talked to Eliot about tonight. He wants to move out of Downing Street and come and live out there with us, with his new daughter. To convert, I suppose you would call it. He thinks—well, he thinks it might help.”

  Pitt, understandably, took a moment to work out what on earth Wilberforce was talking about. “I see. Well. That explains why you were discussing religious consolation, I suppose.”

  “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Why would I mind?”

  He didn’t know, really, except that Downing Street had seemed such a poisonous labyrinth that evening, and he didn’t like to think of his friend being drawn deeper into the middle of it alone. Except, perhaps, that since he had found God, it seemed that he, and now Eliot, were being drawn somewhere else entirely, and he knew that it was one place Pitt had no idea how to follow them to. Except that he was afraid.

  “I don’t know,” he said instead. “I suppose you wouldn’t… May I ask you something?”

  “Of course. Anything.”

  “In there… If you had done what you did to Clarkson in the House on the day of one of the abolition debates…”

  “Could I have forced the House to vote our way?” Pitt didn’t seem surprised at the question. “Yes.”

  “You know that for certain?”

  “For certain, no. I’ve never done anything of the kind. But in theory. It would be a considerable strain on the elixir, of course; a true vampire fueled by human blood could control entire countries, but I’m neither. I’m still not feeling very well from those few seconds of mesmerism with Clarkson, to be honest. Even so—what was our margin last time? Seventy-five?”

  “Exactly. If you were to influence, perhaps, eighty people…”

  “I could do it.”

  “Really?”

  “Really.” He paused. “Are you asking me to?”

  “No,” Wilberforce said. He hated himself for the brief second’s hesitation that preceded it. “Of course not. No. That would be wrong.”

  “Would it?”

  “Of course it would. You can’t force your will on another human soul, without their consent. It’s not how government works. It’s not how free will works.”

  “And so the cost of free will is thousands suffering and dying?” It was difficult to tell how bitterly that question was intended: the tone seemed merely curious.


  “Always,” Wilberforce answered. “Since the fall of man. You can’t be held responsible for that.”

  “Only since the fall of man.” A trace of amusement crept in. “Tell me, is it comforting to have such a wide view of things?”

  “Of course it’s not comforting. It’s absolutely terrifying. If you find it comforting to see the entire world as a battle between good and evil, with every action you take reverberating through time like ripples in a pond, then you are clearly doing something very wrong. Except every once in a while, then it is, yes.” He hesitated. “What would you have done if I had said yes? If I had asked you to do it?”

  Pitt smiled. “You never would.”

  Wilberforce went to the Temple Church himself the following day. Frederick Holt had finished his service in the Tower of London—he was a research cleric now, mostly working on the projects of higher Templars like Forester. He sighed when he saw who was waiting for him. “Oh no.”

  “Frederick,” Wilberforce greeted him, undaunted. “It’s wonderful to see you too. How are you? Has your cat had her kittens yet?”

  Holt had to smile reluctantly. “Last week, as it happens, thank you for asking. Three tabbies and one black, all well. If this is about Clarkson, Wilber, I really can tell you no more. His bloodlines are the least of our troubles now—and you’re under investigation yourself, after what you and the More sisters began in Mendip.”

  “If you mean the school, there’s no law against Commoners being educated in anything—including magic, as long as they don’t practice, and your bracelets see to that. And I haven’t come about Clarkson. I wanted to know if there were any records of vampire bloodlines left in France.”

  His school friend looked startled but recovered remarkably quickly. Anyone who dealt with Wilberforce was used to how wide-ranging and eclectic his interests could be. “Well, to begin with, there are few records of any kind from France anymore. They were destroyed with the Bastille, or not long after. But I can almost promise there were none to start with. The Templars in France were even more thorough than here. I don’t think they’ve ever had a child test for blood magic after the war. You don’t intend to start campaigning for the rights of the illegal magics, do you? It isn’t worth it. Particularly not in the case of blood magicians. There are almost none left, and they’d die in any case unless you want to murder to keep them alive.”