Modern Magick 4

by Charlotte E. English

  ‘Which scholars?’ said Alban.

  Whitmore is also a centre of learning, said Melmidoc. Academics from more than one of the nine have gathered here. Even one or two from your Britain, Baron.

  ‘Well, this is…’ Alban left the sentence unfinished, and looked helplessly at me.

  ‘How many did you know about?’ I said shrewdly, for he alone had been little surprised by the general substance of Fenella’s speech.

  ‘Three are known to the Court. Not, I think, including this one.’

  Considering the unique obstacles posed by your particular Britain, that is a respectable achievement, Melmidoc remarked.

  ‘Thank you.’ The Baron’s voice was wintry.

  ‘How are there nine?’ I put in, my mind reeling. ‘Are they all the same? Did they all come into being at the same time? How did you get here — what is this island — what became of the Whitmore of our Britain — what did you mean about the magickal government for the North — the North? Is there a separate one for the South? Why? Is that the fifth Scarborough over there? I—’

  Peace, interrupted Melmidoc, and I stopped gabbling with a gulp.

  ‘Sorry. But when we’ve finished with those questions I have about two thousand more.’

  Melmidoc gave a dry chuckle. Questions are the product of an enquiring mind, and should never be apologised for. Let me begin with the first. How are there nine? Multiple theories upon that point have been proposed, but none have yet been proved beyond all doubt. They are not thought to have come into being all together, but that, too, is the subject of debate. Melmidoc’s dry voice warmed with enthusiasm as he continued. I will be happy to hold a more detailed discourse with you upon those topics, should you like to hear about the leading theories. Now then, how do we get here? It is a sideways step, nothing more. Simple in explanation, difficult in practice, for your young friend here has not yet contrived to master the ability despite two days of practice. Perhaps, in your Britain — ours, I should say — it is by now a lost art. I should be sorry to think so. The Whitmore of your Britain sank, I am afraid. Rather an inconvenience to us at the time, but our removal here has turned out very well indeed, for we have been able to build the kind of magickal government in the North of this Britain of which we could only dream under the conditions prevailing in the sixth.

  ‘That’s ours?’ I put in. ‘The sixth Britain?’

  Yes.

  ‘What is the fourth like?’

  Of the nine worlds, said Melmidoc patiently, three are no more, including the one we think of as the fourth. In two, magick has met a permanent death and cannot now be revived at all. Of the four remaining, two have succumbed to fear and irrationality and outlawed magick entirely. That leaves your world, where magick survives in a diminished and hidden capacity, and this one, the fifth Britain, where magick thrives and need never hide.

  I thought briefly of Fenella Beaumont, and Ancestria Magicka. To build so powerful an organisation in a single year, she must have had an equally powerful motive. Was this it? Had she somehow discovered the fifth Britain, a vision of a world where people like us could practice our magicks openly, and with unabated power?

  It was a seductive prospect, that I could not deny. But what did she now plan to do?

  I hesitate to call a close to this instructive interlude, said Melmidoc, but was it strictly necessary to bring so large a party hither?

  Startled, I looked down over the cliff. For a little while, I’d forgotten about the rest of Fenella’s guests. They had made their way out of the transplanted castle by now and were milling about on the beach — staring around at everything, exclaiming and, in short, looking like a pack of excited tourists.

  Which, I suppose, we all were.

  ‘They pose a problem,’ I said, and outlined the events of the past few hours — for Jay’s benefit as well as Melmidoc’s.

  And you do not think they are here in good faith?

  ‘In a spirit of happy exploration, with the best of intentions and no nefarious motives in mind? No.’

  Then they will be disposed of, said Melmidoc mildly.

  ‘Not chilling at all.’ As I watched, Fenella took up a spot partway up the cliff and began, once again, to hold forth. From this height, I could not hear what she was saying, but it involved a fair amount of pointing and gesturing up to the top of the cliff, and over the water to the huddle of buildings clinging to the far shore. I could not see Rob or Val in the mass of people, or any of our folk. Wherever they had gone, it wasn’t with Fenella.

  ‘Let’s go in,’ said Jay, and the door of the spire creaked open a bit wider in invitation. ‘I can see we’re going to need a cunning plan.’

  I stared hungrily over the island of Whitmore, spread before us like a birthday buffet. I had a fierce lust to explore its plethora of shining buildings, their architecture so intriguing a mixture of the familiar and the strange; another spire rose somewhere in the distance, so similar in style to Melmidoc’s that it had to be related, and was that Drystan’s? Another set of people wandered the narrow streets of the town, similar to and yet different from us in the same way as their homes and shops and offices. What must it be like, to grow up here, live here, work here right out in the open? As part of an organisation known to, and accepted by, every denizen of this world whether magickal or not? What feats were they capable of, that we had forgotten long ago?

  But now was not the time, for we had a more pressing problem on our hands: Fenella. I’d have to trust that my opportunity to explore would come soon, if not today. ‘What’s become of Millie?’ I asked as I preceded Jay into the Starstone Spire.

  ‘She’s dozing,’ he answered, ushering Zareen and George inside. The Baron brought up the rear, uncharacteristically quiet. I wondered just how many questions were buzzing through his mind at that moment, and how many worries. He rewarded my look of enquiring concern with a smile and the barest trace of a wink.

  ‘In the hopes of warding off a beating,’ said Jay as we trooped up the stairs, ‘I did try to find a way to get word to you, but phones from our Britain don’t work here — big surprise — and Millie can’t go back and forth all that often. It tires her.’

  I am afraid I declined to be pressed into service as a messenger, Melmidoc put in, though Mr. Patel is tiresomely persuasive. In another day, perhaps two, I would have been dispatched quite against my will, I am sure of it.

  ‘Ves worries,’ said Jay, with a shrug.

  She appears to me the very picture of a composed young woman.

  ‘All a lie. Underneath that calm exterior, she’s stewing over at least a dozen things.’

  I blushed, for this I could not deny. ‘Maybe not a dozen…’

  ‘Anyway,’ Jay continued, ‘I wanted to share. Who wouldn’t?’ We reached the top of the spire, where the cosy library had once been. The room was still bare in comparison with before, but Jay had acquired a few chairs from somewhere and hauled them in — somehow — and he now collapsed into one. ‘It’s amazing,’ he enthused. ‘You have to get a look around, Ves. This is what our world could’ve been like, if we hadn’t screwed everything up.’

  ‘You know,’ I said, taking the chair beside his. ‘That’s more or less exactly what Fenella Beaumont was saying before she kidnapped us all here.’

  ‘Uh huh. And who is she?’

  I explained.

  Jay looked nonplussed, but he shrugged. ‘Never thought I’d be in agreement with Ancestria Magicka, but she’s not wrong.’

  ‘No, indeed. But what of it? It’s too late to turn our Britain into this one.’

  ‘Is it?’ One of Jay’s brows went up.

  The world shifted under us, but subtly. Melmidoc had moved us, but it came in a smooth, unobtrusive feeling of motion, nothing like Ashdown Castle at all. The effects of practice, I supposed.

  ‘It is,’ said Alban. ‘Well — it is too late to come out of the shadows. Can you imagine the result if we tried?’ He had eschewed the chairs in favour of perching on the windo
wsill, and he did not look at us as he spoke: his attention was fixed upon the island flying by outside.

  ‘Total uproar,’ I said, for I had to agree.

  ‘True,’ Jay conceded. ‘But all our lost arts? What could we relearn, with help from the fifth?’

  ‘You did not have much luck learning to jump sideways, right?’

  Jay rolled his eyes, and slouched disconsolately in his chair. ‘I’ve had only two days to practice. It took more like two years to learn to jump at all, as you put it. If I could stay here—’

  ‘Wait.’ I stared, shocked. ‘You want to stay?’

  Jay avoided my eyes. ‘Think about it, Ves. All the things we could learn. All the things we could do.’

  I had been thinking about it, pretty much without cease ever since Fenella had opened her big mouth and let all these delicious and dangerous secrets come tumbling out. It was, as I have already said, a seductive prospect. ‘But.’ I rallied, with a struggle. ‘This is exactly why we have to go home. We’re needed there. We aren’t remotely needed here.’

  ‘And we could do our work much better there if we’ve been properly trained here. I don’t propose to stay forever, Ves. Just long enough.’

  ‘How long is long enough?’

  Jay just shrugged.

  ‘Melmidoc,’ said the Baron, finally turning around. ‘I don’t think we should leave that lot roaming around Whitmore for very long. Certainly not without supervision.’

  Do not be concerned, said Melmidoc coolly. They are not unsupervised.

  ‘Oh?’

  Almost every house on Whitmore has its own occupants with my general characteristics, he supplied. Most have more than one. I am receiving regular reports as to the movements of your friends.

  ‘Not our friends,’ Zareen said coldly.

  ‘Hey,’ said George. ‘Some of them are mine.’

  ‘Yes, about that?’ Zareen threw him a challenging look. ‘You need better friends.’

  ‘So you’ve said.’

  I held up a hand to forestall further argument. ‘Are you saying every building on the entire island is haunted?’ I said to Melmidoc.

  Haunted. His dry, aged voice registered amusement. If you wish to call it by such a term.

  ‘It’s the best I’ve got,’ I apologised. ‘I come from the diminished sixth, remember? These things are rare and weird back there.’

  Rare and weird. Melmidoc was definitely laughing at me.

  ‘You know what I mean.’

  ‘What are their movements?’ interrupted Alban.

  At present they are nearing the top of the cliff. They seem to be engaged mostly in pointing at things and saying the word wow unnecessarily often.

  Tourists.

  Which raised an unpleasant prospect for the fifth Britain, for this was what Fenella’s decisions would initially condemn them to. Endless trips from starry-eyed magickal tourists. Whitmore awash with wistful and marvelling magickers from the sixth Britain, eager to see and experience every single little thing they could — and to take as much of it back with them as possible.

  What’s more, Jay would not be the only person who’d try to stay. Far from it. Our own, beloved Britain would be half emptied of magickers by the time the excitement died down, which would only cripple it further.

  We had a full-scale emergency on our hands.

  16

  ‘Listen,’ I said, and explained some of this. ‘We have to find a way to stop Fenella, or virtually every magicker from our world will try to move here.’

  ‘It may be too late,’ said Alban. ‘She made a very big, very public announcement about it all, remember? As soon as her people make it home, they’ll spread the news far and wide.’

  ‘If they make it home.’

  Alban just looked at me.

  ‘What if we could persuade Ashdown Castle to go home without them?’

  I do not want them here! said Melmidoc.

  ‘Just for a little while! We need time to talk with Milady, and Their Majesties, and the Ministry, and pretty much every other magickal authority in the sixth Britain-and-beyond, and figure out how to — uh, deal with this.’

  I will not have them here. Melmidoc spoke with a ringing certainty which echoed through the floors and set my teeth on edge.

  ‘Besides,’ put in Zareen, ‘Ashdown Castle is going nowhere today. You heard Jay. Millie Makepeace is an old hand at this and even she can’t world-hop all that often. Those poor, naïve bastards at the Castle aren’t even capable of coherent thought right now.’

  ‘So if we can’t leave everyone here and we can’t ship them home? What’s the third option?’

  ‘Scare the living daylights out of them,’ said Zareen, flashing what I tend to think of as her batshit crazy smile. ‘Tell them it only gets worse, and will, if they ever tell a soul.’

  I looked at Zareen in silence, and my mind wandered back to that pamphlet of hers. Just what weird and far from wonderful things had Zareen done in her life?

  ‘What?’ she said, when nobody else spoke either. ‘We’re in the land of haunted houses. Scaring Ancestria Magicka silly would be a piece of cake.’

  ‘But not lastingly effective.’ Alban favoured Zareen with one of his grave, serious looks — which, it struck me, were relatively rare. There was so often that lurking twinkle in his eye. ‘Fear fades. We need something more durable.’

  Zareen acknowledged this point with a gracious nod. Apparently practicality weighed more with her than morality.

  Good to know.

  ‘If only there was a way to undo it,’ I sighed. ‘Fenella’s entire announcement. I’m a bit gutted that this wasn’t about time travel after all.’

  ‘You don’t truly want to travel in time, Ves,’ said Jay.

  ‘I do too.’

  ‘Weren’t you panicking about smallpox, when you thought Jay was lost in 1789?’ said Zareen.

  ‘There’s that, but—’

  Jay was laughing at me. ‘And measles and polio and bubonic plague and a host of other nasties,’ he added. ‘Then there’s all the other problems. Like, we’re giants compared to the people of a few centuries ago, we’d stick out like a sore thumb.’

  ‘Maybe not Ves,’ said Alban, and the twinkle was back.

  I stuck out my tongue at him.

  ‘And you couldn’t have cornflower-coloured hair,’ said Jay, wisely electing not to join in casting aspersions upon my height. ‘Then there’s clothes. I know historical costume can be convincing, but only to us. Try making a liripipe hood that’d pass inspection six hundred years ago. There would be a thousand things wrong with it. It would be like people six centuries from now trying to make a passable pair of jeans, armed with about three paintings in oils and exactly no extant examples. Do you think they’d look real to us?’

  ‘Details,’ I said, waving all this away.

  ‘And then there’s the lawlessness of society, the fact that getting robbed or raped or murdered would be about six thousand times more likely than it is now and there’s no police to call, no ambulance to summon—’

  ‘All right,’ I said, glaring. ‘Point made.’

  He smiled at me, half apology, half sympathy. ‘But aside from all of that, it would be fantastic.’

  ‘Way fantastic.’ I went to the window, and feasted my eyes upon the view. Melmidoc had taken us to the top of a tallish hill, and from that vantage point most of Whitmore lay spread before us. Its starstone buildings shone, pearly and faintly blue, in the afternoon sun, the white plaster or smooth grey brick of its less fantastical buildings gleamed, and everywhere I looked I saw the same vague shimmer of latent magick, just like the dells and enclaves at home. I could see why Jay wanted to stay. It would take me a lot less than two days to fall in love with this place.

  There may be another way, said Melmidoc, interrupting the flow of chatter that had been rippling back and forth among my friends.

  ‘Another way to what?’ I said, turning back to the room.

  To undo your inco
nvenient colleague’s announcement.

  ‘She’s not— never mind. What are you thinking of?’

  It does not matter what came to pass, if no one present happens to remember it.

  Baron Alban shifted uneasily. ‘That practice is outlawed in the— the sixth Britain, and for good reason.’

  What are these good reasons?

  ‘It is impossible to be precise with the amnesiate charm. More memories than just those targeted are lost, which makes it unethical—’

  It is impossible for you to be precise with the charm, said Melmidoc frostily. It was not so in my day, and it is not so here.

  Alban blinked, taken aback. ‘My apologies,’ he said, with his diplomat’s graciousness. ‘I did not mean to cast doubt upon your skills.’

  It can be difficult to grasp that one’s own limitations are not shared by all. Melmidoc, clearly, was not ambassador material.

  Alban’s mouth twitched. ‘Regardless, it is difficult to condone the erasing of memories in so large a group of people.’

  Then do not. Your friends may, perhaps, think differently.

  The Baron looked my way, and must have seen my very different opinion in my face, for he sat once more upon the windowsill with a sigh. I waited for him to speak, but he did not.

  ‘You’re in a difficult position,’ I said, drifting nearer. ‘Their Majesties’ authority may not extend to the fifth Britain, nor are the people of Ancestria Magicka any subjects of theirs. But you must still report to them upon our return, and justify your actions, and that makes this hard for you.’

  ‘But?’ he said. ‘I presume there’s one coming.’

  ‘But, I don’t have to.’

  ‘Have to what?’

  ‘Play by the rules. Not for now. Jay and Zar and I are officially cut loose and that gives us freedoms—’

  ‘Ethics still apply, Ves!’

  ‘Can you think of a better solution?’