Pariah Read online

I feel my way along the wall to my right – trying to hurry, trying not to fall over – until I hit the corner. I have to do as much of this as I can in the darkness. I can barely hear Kazia over the cawing of the birds. Once I’m standing with my back into the angle of the corner, I put the brazier on the floor behind my feet, where I can find it again, and take two paces towards the centre of the room.

  Kazia still hasn’t noticed me. She’s too busy waving her arms and chanting away – in Lithuanian, I suppose.

  I’ve got five minutes at most to stop whatever she’s up to. I slip the loop of the cord over my ankles. I wind the other end round the chalk and draw around myself on the floor. Not a perfect circle, but close enough.

  I hope.

  I take another few turns of the cord around the chalk and draw a second circle, inside the first. And that’s as much as I can do in the dark. I fumble behind my back until I feel the brazier.

  Kazia doesn’t hear the scrape of the match. There’s too much noise now: not just the screaming of the birds, the crash of waves breaking against a cliff-face. She doesn’t notice the flames licking up from the brazier.

  Peering into the gloom, I see that my circles are surprisingly regular. I scrawl symbols between them: north, south, east and west. I scrape the tip of the knife around the outer circle.

  It’s all crap. Nothing’s been purified. I haven’t washed myself or put on the proper gear. I didn’t use a flint and steel to start the fire, like I’m supposed to. The symbols and herbs make no sense whatsoever. But the thing is, I don’t have to do magic . . .

  I just have to mess up hers.

  I tip the herbs into the flames, raise my wand over my head and scream: ‘Adonai, Tetragrammaton, Jehovah, Tetragrammaton, Otheos, Tetragrammaton—’

  A blinding flash of white light cuts through the darkness, and for a split second everything stands out flat like it’s been cut from paper. The silver candlesticks. A wand protruding from a brass brazier, flames flickering along its length. The circle chalked on the floor—

  And Kazia, spinning round at me to stare, mouth open in a perfect O.

  ‘Athenatos, Aschyros, Agla, Pentagrammaton.’ It doesn’t matter which names of God I throw into the room. This isn’t real counter-magic. All I’m trying to do is disrupt the magic space that Kazia has created. And it’s working: the obscurity is dispersing; her candles flicker as cross-currents of air cut across the room . . .

  The wand projecting from the charcoal slips and falls to the floor in a shower of sparks. The flames flicker and go out—

  There’s a sound like the wingbeats of a thousand birds rising into the sky. The light in the room flashes repeatedly like someone’s switching an electric lamp on and off – only the battery’s dying because each flash is weaker than the last . . .

  . . . until I’m staring around the room in the dim, flickering glow of the candles.

  Kazia’s cornflower-blue eyes stare back at me. She’s panting for breath, her breasts rising and falling—

  I manage to gasp, ‘We can’t go on meeting like this.’

  She doesn’t seem to think that’s funny. To be honest, neither do I; but I’m still busy scanning the room for any sign of the manifestation.

  The birds’ wings fade into the distance.

  Let me tell you something about Kazia: she shouldn’t exist. One of the first things they taught us when I was a novice at Saint Cyprian’s was that girls can’t be sorcerers – they don’t receive the Gift. I still can’t work out if they were lying deliberately; but Kazia is living proof that they were wrong. I’ve been on the receiving end of her work, so I know.

  It’s obvious she’s trying to get in and out of here fast. Her geometry, it’s just two concentric circles with pentagrams at the four points of the compass. I couldn’t work with that.

  She’s powerful.

  And dangerous.

  I’m still looking around, wondering if it’s safe to step out of my circle. ‘What are you playing at?’ I ask.

  ‘Leave me alone, Frank.’ She’s got this east European accent that for some reason makes me think of blackberries. Like I said, she’s originally from Lithuania. When she was ten, her mother was accused of witchcraft. My boss – the guy in the cellar – was observing the trial for the Society of Sorcerers and he realised that it was Kazia who had really done the magic.

  An unlicensed sorcerer can be a very useful thing to have around the place if you want to do stuff and you don’t want anybody else to know about it. And if that unlicensed sorcerer is a girl . . . who’d suspect?

  He let her mother go to the stake. He grabbed Kazia, brought her back to England and trained her up secretly. He was working for the intelligence services back then. Maybe she had something to do with him getting made Superior General of the Society of Sorcerers.

  But it’s not all sunshine and bunny rabbits. As an unlicensed sorcerer, Kazia is always in danger of winding up like her mother. As a girl with the Gift, she’s liable to be dismantled, to see how she works, before the roasting.

  The stuff that Matthew got her to do . . . it ended with several people winding up dead. It was she who summoned Alastor to turn me inside out, take me apart and jump up and down on the pieces.

  ‘I want to help you,’ I say.

  ‘You can’t help me.’

  An inky black cloud has spread across the floor, hiding her fallen instruments. She’s staring back at me wide-eyed, like a cat on a wall. Hair hacked short so demons can’t grab it. Clutching one of my swords.

  The last time I saw her was down in the cellar with Matthew, trapped by her own demon. I got her out of trouble, but she didn’t appreciate it enough to stick around and discuss our future together. Just lobbed a chair at me and ran.

  The room is silent. The candles burn steadily. A thin plume of smoke rises unbroken from her brazier.

  ‘How did you get in here?’ It looks safe: I step out of my circle.

  The sword rattles away across the floor, and she comes running at me. There’s this ludicrous moment when I actually think maybe she’s pleased to see me after all. But she just lowers her head and butts me hard in the stomach.

  I make a wild grab for her. Something cuts into my fingers and I clutch at it. A moment later I’m sitting on the floor, staring stupidly at a silver disc swinging on a gold chain . . . and Kazia is just the slap of footsteps fading away along the corridor.

  Demon?

  No. Apart from me, the room is empty. Just the distant cry of a bird and the black cloud across the floor, retreating like an ebbing tide to reveal first the sword . . . then the wand, still giving off a thin plume of grey smoke, and finally the smudged gap in the chalk circle where she dashed out.

  No Presence. No danger.

  ‘Kazia, wait!’ And I go charging after her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Insight

  I CHASE AFTER her, up some steps and along a narrow side passage. I stumble round a few corners and struggle up another set of stairs. It all ends with a bang when I skid round a blind corner and trip over someone lying on the floor.

  My first thought is that the dieners have been careless with a stiff. But when I pick myself up, I realise it’s Marvo.

  Yeah, well, that’s her problem; I’ve got a chase to get on with. I pick myself up and scuttle off along the corridor to the foot of another staircase, where I take the first three steps in one leap—

  And stop dead, one hand on the banister. I can just hear the faint slap of Kazia’s slippers above me.

  Damn Marvo! We didn’t exactly hit it off first time we worked together. She’s kind of touchy. Easily pissed off. But if it hadn’t been for her, I could’ve wound up dead.

  I can’t hear Kazia’s footsteps any more. I hold up my hand. The silver disc, a couple of inches across, dangles from the gold chain still wrapped around my fingers. The magic symbols etched into it identify it as a pentacle of Solomon – worn by a sorcerer to help compel a demon.

  I stick it in my pocket, t
hen turn and go back to kneel beside Marvo.

  She’s got this strange face, a bit like a bird’s, with a sloping forehead and pointy nose. The first time we met – before she got stuck in with the scissors and the bottle of bleach – her hair was black and curly and a bit of a mess.

  My Gift, it’s just for magic. I don’t really understand what makes people tick. But I suddenly realise that maybe Marvo’s bleach job was so that . . . yeah, not so she could fit in with the rest of the CID, but to be blonde, like Kazia, in my eyes.

  The great thing about falling for Kazia is that she wants nothing to do with me. I get all the fun, with none of the confusing consequences. Getting fallen for – I mean, what am I supposed to do about that?

  Like I said, I really don’t feel comfortable touching people – not when they’re alive, anyway. But I put my fingers to Marvo’s neck. Her pulse is faint and irregular; she feels cold.

  ‘Marvo?’

  She doesn’t move.

  Caxton would be helpless without a tatty like Marvo to see things up close for her. Right now, though, it’s Marvo who’s helpless. Crumpled up on the floor, eyes closed, breathing kind of strange . . .

  A voice: ‘What’s going on?’

  I look up at Ferdia. ‘Help me move her.’

  Together we haul her across the floor so she’s propped up against the wall.

  ‘So what happened?’ Ferdia’s pale, with beads of perspiration across his forehead. Something’s shaken him up.

  ‘No idea,’ I say. ‘I found her like this.’ I blow into her face. ‘Marvo?’ She twitches but doesn’t wake up. Back to Ferdia. ‘Why aren’t you carving?’

  And he gives me this weird grin. I mean, it’s not that the grin itself is anything special; it’s just that Ferdia has never looked at me any way except down his nose.

  ‘He woke up.’ He makes this gesture, like cutting with a scalpel. ‘The moment—’

  ‘Told you he wasn’t dead.’

  The grin dies. Ferdia takes Marvo’s hand. He lays his other hand across her forehead.

  ‘Do you want me to look at him?’ I say quickly. ‘The boy?’

  Ferdia hesitates. ‘A second opinion wouldn’t hurt . . .’

  I’m tempted to laugh, but I can see that was painful. And I get one of those moments – rare and brief, thank God! – when I actually feel sorry for Ferdia. He’s six years older than me and he’s always treated me like I’m an idiot.

  And I sort of understand that. In the first place, I am an idiot. And in the second place, any sorcerer feels threatened by a younger one, simply because you’ve hardly got the hang of your Gift before it starts to fade, and by the time you’re twenty-one – which is how old Ferdia is – you’re post-peak and that’s pretty much it.

  He lays Marvo’s hand in her lap and gets to his feet. ‘Come on, then.’

  ‘I’ll follow you,’ I say.

  For a moment, I’m expecting him to pick Marvo up and throw her at me. Instead, he twitches and fishes his scryer out of his pocket. ‘Yes, Chief,’ he says into it.

  Caxton, then. That’s the trouble with scryers: only the owner can see or hear the person at the other end. A circle of reflected light dances across Ferdia’s face.

  ‘Found him.’ He turns the scryer so that the mirror points at me. ‘We’re on our way.’ He closes the lid and looks up at me. ‘Let’s go, then.’

  ‘I can’t just leave Marvo . . .’

  ‘I’ve got to go.’ It’s like he’s trying to talk himself into it.

  ‘Go ahead. I’ll just see she’s OK,’ I say. ‘Ten minutes.’

  ‘I’ll bet.’ He turns away, but stops. ‘One thing, Sampson—’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘I didn’t want to say anything in front of Caxton, because the Society hasn’t yet made it public . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The Superior General . . .’

  I manage to look blank. At least, I hope I do.

  ‘You must know he’s missing,’ Ferdia says.

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since around the time you ran off.’

  Dodge a question by asking your own. ‘So who’s in charge?’

  Ferdia pulls a face. ‘Ignacio Gresh.’

  The Society’s Grand Inquisitor.

  ‘That’s nice,’ I say. Actually, he’s a shit.

  ‘He thinks you might know something about it.’

  ‘He would think that, though, wouldn’t he? And I don’t, by the way.’

  Ferdia nods, but I don’t think he believes me for a second. ‘We need the Superior General.’

  ‘I’m sure the Grand Inquisitor can run the show.’

  Ferdia looks around, then whispers, ‘Do you trust him?’

  I shake my head. It was Gresh who lumbered me with that stupid pilgrimage to Rome.

  ‘We need the Superior General,’ Ferdia says again.

  ‘If I bump into him, I’ll be sure to mention that.’ I point along the corridor. ‘Beryl’s waiting . . .’

  Just before he disappears round the corner, I hear Ferdia mutter to himself, ‘Skinny little freak!’

  Once his footsteps have faded away, I get Marvo under the shoulders and haul her to her feet. She’s a shrimp, but she’s a heavy shrimp and she’s not doing anything to help. I drag her dead weight along the corridor and down the stairs, and after a while I’m close to death but we’ve reached the alcove where I left the shark.

  I sit her down and go through to the summoning room. All quiet. Just the smeared chalk marks, the scattered equipment and the lingering smell of herbs and spices.

  ‘Hello,’ I say, and my voice echoes reassuringly off the walls. I don’t get the tingle of any kind of manifestation through my feet.

  Back in the alcove, nobody’s moving.

  ‘Marvo!’

  I get bored quickly. I could mix together some sort of wake-up potion, but there’s a dead shark to hand. I bend Marvo over until her nose is almost buried in it. She wriggles and goes red and finally kicks out like a galvanised frog and sends me flying.

  ‘What the hell are you playing at?’ she hisses.

  ‘Nothing. What’s up with you?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Like hell you are.’

  ‘Leave me alone, will you?’ She’s clutching her head like she’s afraid it’s going to fall off. ‘I don’t feel great.’ She looks around. ‘Where the hell is this?’

  ‘The mortuary.’ Puzzled look. ‘You know, we were in the Hole, but you wanted me to look at the Crypt Boy. I told Caxton—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah. Christ, that thing stinks!’ She glares at the shark. ‘What the hell’s it for, anyway?’

  I kneel to wrap the sheet securely around the shark. ‘I told you, I’m making—’

  ‘No you’re not. It’s for a spell.’

  Marvo’s got her eyes screwed up like someone’s shining a dazzling light into them. Mouth open; white as a sheet; one hand to her head . . . I know what’s coming. And sure enough, she stares at me and whispers, ‘You’re looking for the girl.’

  ‘What girl?’ Hey, it’s worth a try.

  ‘Kazia.’ Marvo kicks out at the shark. ‘You stupid prat – you think you can use that to find her.’

  Insights.

  Yeah, that’s the other thing tatties do. Most of the time, Marvo gets to stand around looking pale and interesting and reading the small print on the backs of tins . . . until some wild idea that nobody else could ever conceivably have thought up comes roaring in like a hurricane and knocks her for six.

  Great for crossword puzzles, or for murders where there’s nobody actually standing over the corpse with a bloody knife when the jacks roll up. Drag in a tatty. A bit of blinking and twitching – case solved! Everybody back to bed.

  Marvo crouches down and runs a finger along the shark’s snout, until she comes to one of those fleshy whiskers I told you about, growing out of the corners of its mouth. ‘Sharks use these things—’

  ‘They’re called barbe
ls.’

  ‘Whatever. To detect prey in all the crap on the sea bed.’

  ‘Been reading the encyclopaedia again?’

  ‘So that’s what it’s for.’ She gives the shark another good kick. ‘To build yourself a search elemental—’

  ‘Instantiate.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You don’t build a search elemental. You instantiate it.’ Actually, I say ‘build’ all the time.

  ‘Whatever. That’s what you’re gonna do.’

  ‘You think you’re pretty clever.’

  ‘I’m clever about some things, Frank.’

  She turns away from me and I see something glistening on one cheek. ‘God,’ she mutters. ‘You couldn’t make this stuff up!’

  Best not to think about it, then. Best to change the subject. ‘While you were asleep, anyway—’

  ‘When was I asleep?’ She pokes a finger into my chest. I’m skinny. She needs to cut her fingernails. It hurts, OK?

  ‘The Crypt Boy,’ I say. ‘He isn’t dead.’

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Birds

  ‘HE ISN’T DOING much,’ I point out.

  There’s a thin, dark line where Ferdia began his incision at the top of the breastbone. The boy is flat on his back on the silver slab in the autopsy room. His eyes are open, but the pupils are still like pinheads. No pulse that I can detect . . .

  ‘Turn off the lights,’ I say. And when Ferdia just gives me this flat stare, ‘OK, turn off the lights, please.’

  The switch clicks. The room goes dark except for a single candle. Mr Memory steps forward to peer over my shoulder. I pick up the candle and bring it close to the boy. I raise my other hand so that my ring throws a sliver of light across his eyes. He doesn’t blink; just lies there with his arms at his sides, utterly still.

  I put the candle back. ‘Are you cold?’

  ‘It’s a mortuary, Sampson,’ Ferdia groans. ‘Remember?’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s freezing.’ I pull a grey woolly hat out of my pocket and cram it on my head.

  Ferdia sniggers. ‘Did anyone ever tell you that you look like an idiot in that?’

  I’m about to stuff it back in my pocket, but I realise I’m shivering.