A Dangerous Magic Read online

  As I stagger to my feet, spitting out horseshit, the cab door flies open and this guy throws himself out at me.

  I grab my case and hit him with it.

  Not hard enough. He pulls a knife.

  I wonder if, in the interests of fair play, he’d be prepared to give me a moment to put my case down, open it, and find my own knife.

  Guess not.

  I’m stumbling backward, holding the case defensively in front of me. In a situation like this, you get a kind of blinkered vision of the world you’re about to leave. I’ve no idea where Marvell’s got to. All I see is a sudden flash of reflected light as the knife slices through the air . . .

  There’s a loud bang. Me and the guy both look around.

  Marvell’s holding a pistol, pointed into the sky. As she lowers it threateningly, I notice that my attacker’s wearing an armband with an emblem: a burning five-pointed star.

  He throws himself back into the cab. The whip cracks. The cab thunders off, the door still flapping.

  * * *

  1 Yeah, there’s a lot to take in, so I’ve stuck a glossary at the back. A bit of history, a few jokes . . .

  Chapter Two

  Style Counts

  “Who the hell was that?” says Marvell.

  “Why didn’t you shoot him and find out?”

  We pile into the van. Marvell falls back into the seat opposite me, clutching her left elbow in her other hand.

  “Let me see that,” I offer. But she shoves me away and pulls her elbow closer to her chest.

  I hate jack vans. The dirty yellow paneling. The overflowing ashtrays and the stink of stale tobacco. The driver’s had enough excitement for one night and isn’t taking any more chances; so rather than risk going through the Hole, he takes us the long way around, through Iffley and across the bridges to the Grandpont.

  The sleeve of Marvell’s coat has a gaping tear in it and she’s dripping blood onto the leather seat.

  “Christ, I can’t go to the emergency room,” she groans. “Caxton’ll kill me!”

  “The hell with Caxton.” That’s Marvell’s boss. Mine too, sort of. “I can fix it.”

  I knock on the roof and yell at the driver to stop under one of the lamps. I can see Marvell doesn’t trust me; she pulls faces and makes hissing noises while I help her out of her coat and sweater. I tear the sleeve of her shirt up to the shoulder.

  She’s got these scrawny little arms, like she’s never lifted anything in her life, and I can see she’s self-conscious about them. Her elbow is split open, right on the joint. I can see the bone.

  I open my case.

  “Bloody hell!” she mutters.

  As well she might. One of the customs of the Craft is that your Master presents you with a case when you get your license. My Master is a big noise in the Society of Sorcerers and a very rich bunny indeed.

  The Society, by the way, is big on chastity and massive on obedience, but crap at poverty.

  Anyway, my case is crocodile with silver fittings outside, and snakeskin and ivory inside. It’s divided into compartments with black silk linings for all the instruments, herbs, and other gear I need in the field. There are good thaumaturgic arguments for all this, but frankly other sorcerers seem to get by on calfskin and brass. In short, my case is pretty tacky—and I love it.

  I squeeze a few drops of aloe into my palm—I always carry a couple of leaves because I’ve a tendency to set fire to things, including myself. I sprinkle in comfrey, add a few drops of exorcised water, and mix it all together with the tip of a small silver knife.

  “In the name of Adonai the most high. In the name of Jehovah the most holy!”

  Marvell’s eyes go wide with shock as I slap the goo over the wound. I clamp my hand around her elbow so she can’t wriggle loose. It’s a simple spell and it works fast, or not at all. I make a shape in the air with the first two fingers of my free hand.

  “In the name of the Lord who maketh all things whole. In the name of the Lord who is blessed. In the name of the Lord who healeth the sick.” I do a lot of stuff in threes. I take my hand away. “You can give it a wipe now.”

  She’s twisting her arm, staring at her elbow in disbelief. “That’s amazing!”

  “It’s routine.”

  She stares at me for a moment, then she says, “Suit yourself.” She’s prodding her elbow, where the wound has vanished completely. She won’t even have a scar. “That lunatic.” She pulls down her sleeve. “Who was he, anyway?”

  “Didn’t you see the badge?” I point to my arm, where he was wearing the burning pentagram emblem, but she just shakes her head. “He was ASB.”

  “Anti-Sorcery . . . Brigade?”

  “Brotherhood.”

  The protesters I get outside the termite nest are just a nuisance, but the ASB are genuine nutters. I close my case and knock on the roof of the van.

  We pass warehouses and a stockyard, with mad-eyed cattle staring out at us between the bars. Then we’re rattling over the main bridge across the Isis. Through the crumbling stone pillars of the balustrade, I can see the wharves along the riverside. The gaslight gleams on the bodies of a couple of big guys, stripped to the waist, stretching up like lost souls in hell to steady a pallet swinging from a crane. And there’s a boy, aged maybe eight or nine, perched on a seat at the top of a ladder, checking off a manifest and screaming at dozens more guys chucking stuff into a boat.

  Enjoy it while it lasts, kid!

  Out in the darkness of midstream, the lights of a chain of barges drift slowly past. Even with the van windows closed, the sinus-clenching stench of rotting rubbish makes the horseshit smeared across my face smell like roses.

  Marvell has fastened the torn remains of her shirtsleeve at the cuff. She looks around for her sweater, sees that I’m wiping my hands on it, and grabs it.

  “You don’t look too hot,” she says.

  “I’m fine.” But I’m not. I feel sick and I’m sweating—nervous about what’s waiting for me at the palace. Despite all the practice with cats, I’ve never really got used to seeing people mangled up and spread around the place. With my right index finger, I draw a protective pentagram in the condensation on each window.

  “What’s that for?” Marvell says.

  I shake my head. Without an incantation and some more symbols, the pentagrams have no real power, but they make me feel better.

  Marvell leans forward. I slap her hand away before she can draw in the condensation.

  “You don’t know what it is,” I mutter. “So don’t fiddle.”

  She frowns and looks around the van, obviously wondering what to fiddle with next. She makes a grab for my case.

  “Leave that alone!” I snap. “It could have your hand off.”

  There’s this flicker of anger across her face. She pulls her sweater on and says, “Never really worked with a sorcerer.”

  “Don’t worry about me. Just keep Caxton off my back.”

  “You’ve still got horseshit on your face.”

  “I may need you to help me with some stuff.” I wipe my shirtsleeve across my face. “Just here and there. I’ll ask.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Never do more than I ask. Things bite—like my door.”

  She nods, but she doesn’t like being told what to do.

  I add insult to injury: “You’ll get the hang of it.” I’m dangerously close to patting her on the knee.

  Amazingly, we get there without her strangling me.

  From the Oxpens I can see the silhouette of the cathedral looming over the gasworks, the spire still shattered at the top and shrouded in scaffolding after the Montgolfier airship raids twenty years back.

  As we pass under the railway bridge, the early train to London rumbles overhead, spitting out cinders and leaving a plume of steam. We turn left down the Palace Road. In the greengrocer’s on the corner, the shopkeeper is holding up a lantern for this kid to write out price tags. The boy turns to stare at us, and the shopkeeper clips him o
ne on the ear.

  We rattle along a terrace of crumbling houses to the palace lodge, a dingy Gothic heap of stones with a hole through the middle for carriages to go in and out, and deep ruts worn into the pavement by centuries of metal-bound wheels. There’s no security elemental here, just a uniformed jack and a knock-kneed old geezer in tights—some sort of gatekeeper, I suppose. They wave us straight through.

  The van drives around some sort of lawn and stops on a paved area in front of a red brick building that’s far too big for one bloke, however holy, and must be murder to heat. A couple of torches are burning in brackets hanging out of the wall.

  In the middle of the lawn, two uniformed jacks are bent over in an ornamental pond, their trousers rolled up above their knees, fishing around with their hands. And beyond them I can see another jack holding up a lantern while a young guy with white hair pokes around in the bushes.

  I let Marvell get down from the van first. I stretch back to wipe away the pentagram from the far window: it’s dangerous to leave any sort of trace behind you. I grab my case and I’m just stepping out, erasing the second pentagram with my sleeve, when I hear Marvell mutter:

  “Oh hell! Can’t stand them things.”

  I look around. There’s a lion prowling toward us, its mane fluorescent in the flickering torchlight. It stops a couple of yards away, its eyes burning. Marvell’s hand trembles as she holds it out. The lion advances, lowering its head and giving out a deep growl like machinery turning underground.

  It’s not a machine, though; it’s an elemental. It sniffs at the small ruby set in the ring on her little finger, and licks the back of her hand. She nearly faints with relief.

  My turn. Style counts. I hold out my hand, palm up. The lion watches with interest as I make a fist. Abracadabra! When I open my hand again there’s a white mouse running around it. I toss the mouse into the air. The lion opens its mouth and swallows it whole.

  Bit rough on the mouse, but Marvell’s impressed. The lion too—it turns and pads away. The front door of the palace swings open.

  “Show-off!” Marvell mutters, just a whisker too late.

  Inside there’s an entrance hall, with black-and-white chessboard tiling and a giddying stench of furniture polish.

  It’s pretty dark, but through an open door to the left I can see people sitting around a table. There’s a kid my age and a middle-aged woman with dyed red hair who looks up at me, crosses herself, and fumbles with a couple of chains hanging around her neck. It takes her a few seconds to disentangle a pair of spectacles from a silver amulet, which she raises to her lips.

  Household staff, I guess. Bishops, in my admittedly limited experience, don’t make their own beds.

  Peering around the hall, I can see half a dozen portraits hanging high on the walls, above the wainscoting: dead bishops keeping an eye on the visitors. They don’t like the look of me; I don’t like the look of them.

  To my right, there’s a wide staircase. The light is coming from a chandelier hung high in the stairwell. And as the candles flicker in the draft, I glimpse someone leaning over the banister two floors up.

  She’s got blonde hair, cropped dead short. It’s hard to tell at this distance, and it could be just wishful thinking, but it looks like she’s staring at me. Maybe that’s encouraging. Maybe she’s thinking, who’s the twerp? Me and girls—there’s not much to say; I’m too busy dismantling domestic animals.

  “Through here,” says Marvell, pointing to a heavy door.

  How does she know? Coz she’s a tatty and sometimes . . . OK, it is kind of weird, but it’s like sometimes tatties just know stuff without being told. The uniformed jack slumped in the chair in the corner looks like he’s happy to know nothing. He gets up and pushes the door open. I take a moment to peer up the stairwell.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Marvell mutters.

  The girl has gone.

  We stumble down a long dark corridor with a single candle glowing in the distance. The floor is stone, uneven, and slippery. We pass the outlines of doorways, heavy furniture, and dark, indecipherable paintings. More dead bishops, I guess. This isn’t a murder, it’s a suicide brought on by the interior decorating.

  Halfway along, Marvell jumps as a dark shape looms up from a chair. I can’t see his face, but I’ve been waiting for him to pop out.

  “Nice lion, Charlie!”

  The candlelight gleams on his teeth as he grins. My old pal Charlie Burgess has great choppers; otherwise he’s this wispy little bloke with curly hair bleached white, like most of the CID wear it.

  He whispers, “Best behavior, Frank. It’s Caxton.”

  “Yeah, I know. My cup runneth over.”

  We’ve reached the candle, stuck in a bracket screwed to the rough stone wall at the end of the corridor. On our left there’s a doorway. Marvell reaches for the handle—

  “Hang on!”

  I’ve got this sudden attack of stage fright. My stomach’s doing cartwheels and I’m shaking like a monkey on a barrel organ. I’ll admit it, OK? I’m wound up about what’s waiting for me behind the door. Not just the corpse, either. Beryl Caxton is like every jack I’ve ever met: aggressive around sorcerers. And me, it’s like I’ve got this special talent for getting right up her nose.

  Fact is, I lack a good corpse-side manner. And when I get twitchy I act like an arsehole.

  “Mr. Memory?” I croak.

  “Inside with Caxton.” Charlie doesn’t look too hot either: it’s not difficult, instantiating elementals, but it takes it out of you. “Wound up and ready to go.”

  Marvell opens the door. As I pass Charlie, he whispers, “Deep, slow breaths.”

  Good advice. Caxton’s a pain, just in case you weren’t getting the picture.

  Charlie closes the door behind us.

  Chapter Three

  A Dead Gent

  The first thing I see is the reason why we’re all here so early in the morning. There’s a massive wooden desk in the middle of the room, and a man wearing a blue silk dressing gown and clutching an open book, sitting motionless in the chair behind it.

  “Wow!”

  Detective Chief Inspector Beryl Caxton glares at me. “Behave yourself, Sampson, or clear out now.”

  I am behaving myself. I’ve managed not to throw up.

  This guy has no head.

  I catch a glint of silver as Caxton sticks the inevitable amulet back in her coat pocket. Damned if I know what she’s afraid of; she’s twice my size with hands like shovels. I checked her file once so I know she’s thirty-five, but she’s got this permanently sour expression that makes her look even older. Like Charlie, she’s bleached her hair snow white. On her, it doesn’t look even remotely cool.

  She takes off her glasses to stare at the damage to Marvell’s coat. “What happened to you?”

  “Nothing, Chief. I’m fine.”

  Yeah, right. Her boss might not have clocked her hands trembling before she stuffed them in her pockets, but I did. Now Marvell’s just standing there, face blank, sniffing the air and looking around the rest of the room.

  On with the show. I put my case down on the floor and dig in my pocket. I pull out a couple of tiny silver pentagrams and look around for the best place to put them.

  We’re in some sort of library. From behind the door, the shelves, crammed with dark, leather-bound books, run unbroken along two walls. The first hints of dawn seep in through open French windows that stretch from the high, painted ceiling—all curly clouds and pink cherubs—to the wooden floor.

  “That’s where they got in,” says Caxton. The gaslight is reflected in splinters of scattered glass where one pane has been smashed.

  Marvell stoops to peer at a silver candlestick lying on the floor. It’s ornately worked, about fifteen inches long, heavy enough to do serious damage.

  “It’s from the cathedral. One of a pair.” Caxton sticks her specs back on and squints down at her notebook. “From the Lady Chapel, apparently.”

  “And
who’s the stiff?” I ask as I place the pentagrams at each end of the mantelpiece. I’m getting a faint tingle of residual magic off everything, but I’d expect that in a building this age.

  “Show some respect, will you?” Caxton growls. “It’s the bishop.”

  “Sez who?”

  There’s a typewriter on the desk, and an electric lamp that must have been on all night, because the battery’s nearly flat and it casts only the faintest glimmer over the piles of books and documents. I take a deep breath and stoop to examine the body. Whoever he is, he’s incredibly dead. There’s a fair amount of gore where the neck has been severed.

  “Clean job,” I say, just managing to keep my voice steady. “One blow, maybe two. An ax or a cleaver—a guillotine if you had one to hand.”

  “A sword?” says Marvell.

  “Who the hell drags a sword around with them these days?”

  “You do, Sampson.” Caxton has taken her spectacles off and is polishing them furiously. She sticks them back on her face and screws up her eyes as she goes around the desk to peer at the book the stiff is clutching. “Marvell, what is this?”

  But before Marvell can get there, a voice pipes up from a chair beside the ornate marble fireplace. “In Defense of Sorcery, by Henry Wallace, MD, Bishop of Oxford.”

  Mr. Memory looks strikingly like Charlie. Not really surprising: Charlie instantiated him. He’s the data elemental for the case, who gets to remember everything, then spit it out later. Since Charlie has a sense of humor he’s wearing a baggy, slightly threadbare dinner suit over a crumpled white dress shirt and a black bow tie with a food stain on it. His eyes are closed. He looks tired. But then Charlie’s elementals always look tired.

  “You’re the sorcerer, Sampson.” Wow, Caxton’s noticed! “What’s it about?”

  “Basically Wallace doesn’t understand what the Church has got against sorcerers.”

  Caxton makes a face.