So I get to skulk on the bridge, looking out for trouble. After five minutes there’s no sign of Sunglasses and I relax a bit and watch a gang of uniformed jacks poking around the reeds in waders. Through the trees, I can see the famous gate to the palace gardens, with a shiny new elemental on patrol in a dark suit and blue shirt.
Before I can get too bored with it all, there’s a yell behind me and Marvo’s hanging out of a van. She looks wrecked: pale as a ghost, dark rings under her eyes, the works.
Insight. You don’t get something for nothing.
Back inside the cathedral, still no Sunglasses, but things are really heating up for the Mass tonight. People are swarming all over the place, fiddling with the scryers, brushing between the pews, throwing hymn books around, jamming new candles into holders, hanging banners.
Down in the crypt, the workmen are too busy clearing up to pay us any attention. But when we get to the back, there’s this mob of clergy packed into the side chapel watching an old woman in a ragged gray coat as she polishes up the reliquary.
“Why didn’t you open it?” Marvo hisses.
My pal Andrew’s lurking at the back of the chapel with his arms folded and a disapproving look on his gob.
Marvo plows on: “It was coz the girl was there, right?”
“What girl?” Hey, it’s worth a try.
“The girl from the palace.” Marvo pulls out her scryer. “Don’t mess me about, Frank—I saw her.”
I could make up a story, but what’s the point? “I didn’t want to gross her out, OK? I mean, if you’re right—”
“I am right.”
“Then that’s her uncle’s head inside the reliquary.”
“I told you, Wallace was her dad—”
“Was Wallace Lithuanian? Coz she is.”
“So you had a good chat.”
“The point is, she knows the guy and I’d be surprised if he’s looking his best. I didn’t want to upset her.”
“Didn’t want to hurt your chances, more like.” Marvo looks around. “Anyway, she’s gone now—”
“Wait.” I grab her arm and I’m amazed again how scrawny it is. “The guy in the corner, next to Andrew.”
Marvo’s eyes widen. He’s only got one crucifix hanging around his neck and he’s lost the cross on the pole, but it’s unmistakably the fat priest with the birthmark from Alice Constant’s lodgings.
“I’ll scry Caxton,” Marvo says, and tries to wrench her arm away.
“No.” And before anyone sees us, I drag Marvo back across the crypt toward the steps.
It’s a struggle, but I manage to get Marvo out of the cathedral and into the van, where I tell the driver to take us to my place. According to my magic watch, it’s just after five. I’ve drawn my pentagrams in the dirt on the windows on each side of the van, but even if they succeed in keeping evil forces at bay, they can’t shut Marvo up.
“Frank, we gotta call Caxton. Get back in, open that thing up.”
“No, leave it alone. Let it play out.”
Marvo stares at me. “What’s the point of that?”
“For a start, if you’re wrong we don’t get into trouble for prying open a saint on his big day.”
“But I’m not wrong.”
“Then it’s what you said: a message. Listen, Marvo—”
“Marvell’s fine. You can call me Magdalena, for all I care.”
I can see she’s dead set on feeling pissed off and the more I try to explain, the more she’s going to hang on to the wrong end of the stick like her life depends on it.
“Fine,” I say. “So listen, Magdalena. They’ll open the reliquary at the Mass tonight. So we can be there, and we can see how people react and maybe that’ll give us some idea what this is all about.”
“Maybe the girl will be there.”
“Look, the reason I went to the cathedral was because I wanted to see the reliquary. You know, get a fix on all this crap about Saint Oswald.” OK, I can’t put my hand on my heart and say it never occurred to me that Kazia would be around, but still . . .
“Honest.”
So we both sit there sulking and staring out of the windows until we’re halfway up the hill to the termite nest and Marvell starts up again.
Apparently Caxton’s a pain. As if we didn’t know that. But somehow Marvo gets on to how unfair everything is, just because we’re kids and we can do stuff that grown-ups can’t do . . . like actually see objects smaller than a building.
I’m about to point out that she gets a pretty easy ride off Caxton compared with me; but she’s already switched to how it wasn’t her fault that her and me got off to a bad start, because nobody explained things to her and this is typical of how they treat tatties and nekkers. So I take a couple of minutes to explain that a nekker is a necromancer; and that raising the dead to predict the future is a toastable offense, so I’d prefer it if she stuck to “sorcerer”—or “freak,” if she must.
She goes all quiet then and we both sit there staring out of opposite sides of the van until she says, “But it’s still not fair. I got Caxton on my back, goin’ on at me to get an insight and solve the case for her. And then when I do get one, you tell me to keep my mouth shut.”
“I’m sorry.” I can’t believe I said that. “Look, the fat priest—we know he’s ASB. And there was this other bloke—”
“What other bloke?”
I tell her about Sunglasses following me around by the river and into the cathedral, and how the woman from the almshouse said she’d seen him outside the palace the night Wallace was murdered.
“So you think he’s ASB too, yeah? An’ it was them that done Wallace.”
“Well, we still don’t know that it was Wallace.”
“Oh, come on, Frank!”
“OK, obviously the ASB didn’t like his book. I thought it was pretty damn boring myself. But this whole circus . . . it’s all too complicated for them. I mean, they shout and scream and come at sorcerers with knives—”
“Can’t say I blame them.”
So we don’t say anything for a bit, and we’re just coming up to the termite nest when she cracks and says, “What is contiguity, anyway?”
“Didn’t they teach you it?”
“Just that it’s a force. Like gravity, only magic.”
I’ll take that as a no. Still, at least we’re talking again, so pay attention at the back . . .
“Sympathetic magic. First law: the Law of Similarity. A sorcerer can produce an effect by imitating it. That’s how most curses work. You make a wax doll to look like somebody; then when you stick pins in the doll, the victim feels the pain.”
“That don’t work though.”
“Done right, you can kill somebody.”
“Have you?”
I do my enigmatic smile and put my fists together, knuckles touching.
“Second law: the Law of Contiguity. When any object comes into contact with another, they establish a physical affinity—they remember each other.”
I move my fists apart. “When they’re separated, the contiguity weakens over time but never completely disappears. If you pick up a pebble on a beach, that creates a contiguity. You can throw it out to sea, but the affinity between you and that pebble persists.”
“What’s the difference between contiguity an’ affinity?”
“No difference. Contiguity’s the technical term. I use ‘affinity’ sometimes to avoid tiresome repetition. So that pebble you threw away, right? I could identify it eventually, by picking up every pebble in reach and testing it.”
“That’d take forever!”
“More usefully, if someone gives me a pebble I can tell if you’ve ever handled it.”
She nods and says, “Coz Ferdia did the contiguity test with hairs from the body and from the hairbrush they found in Bishop Wallace’s bedroom. He said it was absolute.”
“But he’s post-peak. And the brush could’ve been planted.”
“That’s what I said. But Akinbiyi identified it.”
“And he’s clergy so he must be telling the truth.”
The termites, right: they don’t like me any more than I like them, but at least they’re used to me. The evidence is in the kitchen: two plates of cold ham. I hand Marvo the one from the icebox. The cook’s pet dog hasn’t got to the one on the floor yet, so I grab it for myself.
“You sure it’s not poisoned?” she says, sniffing suspiciously.
“Here.” I swap with her. “They wouldn’t hurt the dog.”
It’s getting dark as we hike across the vegetable garden to my studio. It’s beginning to look like maybe we’re friends again, when she starts up. “And why’d you have to be such a prat with Alice?”
“How was I to know she was scared of mice?”
“She wasn’t.” Marvo frowns. “Not when I knew her, anyway. She had a pet rat at training college—I told you she had the Tats . . .”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Do you know how I was spotted? As a tatty, I mean.”
“No. But I’ll bet you’re going to tell me.”
“I was twelve, yeah? I was in town with my mum and I saw this old guy doing that trick with the three shells.”
I know the scam. He’s got three walnut shells, or whatever, on a flat surface. He puts a dried pea under one of them and shuffles them around, dead fast.
“It was obvious,” says Marvo. “Sleight of hand, like your trick with the card. He slipped the pea out before he moved the shells, then after this prat bet ten quid on where it was, he stuck it under a different one. So I’m about to call the jacks but this guy grabs my arm and shoves a badge in Mum’s face and says he’s from your lot . . .”
Yeah, that’s another job you can do when you’re post-peak: hang around doing stunts on street corners to winkle out tatties.
“So they drag me in for these tests—games with playing cards and stuff like that—and that’s where I bumped into Alice.” Her voice has gone a bit funny. “Coz I sort of remembered her from primary school.”
“Small world.” We’re going up the steps to my luxury residence. I open the outside door for Marvell to go in ahead of me, still rabbiting on.
“I passed, obviously, but Alice didn’t make it. I always thought she should’ve, coz I could see she was good, but she got nervous when it was, you know, a proper test . . .”
I’m not really listening. I’m thinking, we’ll get the head out of the reliquary soon and we can do contiguity with the body and maybe we’ll have some idea what’s going on.
Marvell stops outside my inner door. “So I think you should help me find her. There’s something funny goin’ on and I don’t want her getting hurt just coz you’re a prat.”
I whistle and my door opens. Thank God something likes me. Inside, as I light the gas, there’s still a distinct whiff of a cat that’ll never eat fish again.
Marvo wrinkles her nose. “Jesus, do you ever air this place?”
I’m more worried about the code staring down at us from on my blackboard—the stuff that could get me barbecued.
“Anyway, is that all right?” Marvell asks. “You can do a spell or something that’ll find her.”
“Thanks to you I’m up in front of the board of discipline next week. Serious misconduct.”
“How serious?”
“Seriously serious. I could lose my license.”
“Maybe you’d be better off without it.”
“Maybe you’ll enjoy being blind.”
That shuts her up. The downside of being a tatty: you can see razor-sharp till you’re nearly thirty. Then, just like that, you go stone blind.
Look, I know I’m giving her a hard time, but she’s been on my case and I’m dead tired and wound up about stuff and it’s like she just won’t let go. That’s the trouble with tatties—I mean, it’s what makes them so useful, but it’s a pain in the neck.
“So what about Alice?” she says.
“Ask Ferdia.”
“Yeah, but he’s post-peak, right? I mean, he’s nice—an’ that’s not how I mean it!”
She’s stuffing ham into her mouth with her fingers. I’ve spotted another error in my code. I put down my plate and grab a stick of chalk. I rub out a couple of symbols with my finger and rewrite them.
“What’s that?”
“Magic.”
“What’s it do?”
“Raise the dead. It’s John Dee’s last incantation.”
John Dee was Queen Elizabeth I’s tame astrologer. He talked to angels and claimed to have raised the dead using a spell he devised, the legendary last incantation. Over the four centuries since his death, sorcerers have devoted entire careers to trying to make it work.
“Oh yeah, I read about him. And there was a picture of him in a graveyard with this dead bloke just standin’ there, all wrapped up in a shroud. Sort of creepy stuff you’d be into.”
“That’s right.”
She watches me scrawl away, then she says, “Do you want me to go?”
“I got stuff to do. I’ll see you at the cathedral.”
But she doesn’t move. I’m doing my best to ignore her but finally she says, “Frank, I’ve seen the way people act around you . . .”
“Yeah, well, it’s not just me. Most sorcerers get that.”
“But that amulet Caxton messes about with—”
“Fat lot of good it’ll do her.”
“What’s she so scared of?”
“Being turned into a toad.”
“No, seriously. I mean, she’s OK with me, but it’s like she’s really got it in for you. So you’re a sorcerer, so what? It’s not illegal and you’re doin’ useful stuff.”
“Don’t you get it?” I drop the chalk in the box. “If we didn’t have sorcerers the whole world would fall apart. People like Caxton, they depend on sorcerers and tatties.”
“Yeah, I get that.”
“But with sorcerers there’s that extra thing. We pretty much made the world the way it is. And we can mess it all up.”
I check my watch: I’ve got time for this. I pull the chain to open the window. I turn on a Bunsen burner and stick a small crucible over it.
“Here’s your chance,” I say. “Something to really snitch on me for.”
It’s an absolutely basic . . . no, it’s the basic spell. I don’t even need a wand. Marvell just stands there with this narked-off look on her face while I ransack my cupboards and finally come up with a jar of tin filings.
“Lead is traditional,” I explain as I tip the filings into the crucible. “But tin has a lower melting point. You’d better wear this.”
I toss her a face mask and start pulverizing a few fragments of oak bark.
“Ever hear of Aleister Crowley? He defined magic as the science and art of causing change to occur in conformity with will. In other words, you don’t need to be Gifted to do magic—you can do it by sheer force of will.”
“Did it work for him?”
“He said it did. Nobody really knows, so they burned him anyway. Keep back, this is poisonous.”
The tin has melted. I toss in an ounce of verdigris, five drachms of arsenic, and some other stuff I’m not going to tell you about, then a few drops of nitric acid. I jump back as the crucible hisses viciously, drowning out the sound of my incantations. The stink is awful—although at least it blots out the lingering smell of cat. I make the final shapes with my hands, then turn off the Bunsen and beckon her over.
“Don’t breathe the fumes.”
She peers into the vessel. The molten metal running around the bottom has turned bright yellow.
“Is that gold?” she whispers.
“Tell Caxton, if you like. Should get a promotion . . .”
“What about you?”
“I’d lose my license.” I waggle my fingers. “Probably these too.” I begin packing the gear away. “Sorcery started with alchemy. All sorts of idiots spent centuries trying to turn base metal into gold. By the time they figured it out, they’d learned how to conjure up demons, turn princes into frogs—the whole circus. But making gold was always the thing.”
“Is it real? I mean, could I—?”
“Middle of the eighteenth century, the Spanish got kicked out of the Americas. No silver, no sugar. Mainly no gold. They were going bankrupt. So they called in every sorcerer in the kingdom. They cracked the last few problems in alchemy—you can see it’s dead easy once you know how—and started manufacturing huge quantities of gold. They melted down weapons, stripped the lead off church roofs . . .”
Marvell’s still staring into the crucible. I take down a pair of tongs from a hook on the wall.
“There was a panic. Every country in Europe had every available sorcerer hard at work. The world’s awash in gold, so its value drops like a stone. Before long it’s worth less than the lead and iron that were melted down to make it. Took a century to turn all the gold back and straighten everybody out.”
I pick up the crucible and tip the molten gold into a basin of water, where it fizzes and bubbles.
“You want to know what everyone’s so afraid of? A few sorcerers can do a lot of damage. First Geneva Convention, 1864: every country agrees not to use sorcerers for military or economic purposes. Of course that’s all fine while the number of sorcerers is limited by the need to have the Gift—and the fact that it gets taken away. But what if Crowley was right? What if anyone can do it? That’s a lot of people out in the garden shed, melting down saucepans and drainpipes.”
Marvell smiles bleakly. “So we’d be better off without magic.”
“Maybe your brother would still be alive.”
“That’s not funny, Frank.”
“I’m sorry.” Why do I keep pissing her off? “Twenty-four karat gold is ninety-nine point nine percent pure. This is alchemist’s gold: one hundred percent. If you tried to sell it you’d be arrested.” That’s why I alloy it with copper before I sell it for pocket money. I fish out the misshapen yellow lump with a spoon and tip it onto the bench. “Like I said, turn me in. Stop me before I do real damage.”
“You need to get some sleep.”
And out of nowhere she reaches out and runs the back of her fingers down my cheek. It makes me shiver—actually, for a second I’m afraid I’m going to cry. I jump back.
“Sorry,” she says, and blushes.
“I just don’t like being touched.”
“What if it was the girl?”
“What girl?”
“Shut up, Frank.” She grabs her coat. I raise my hand and the door opens. She takes one step . . . then stops dead and hauls her scryer out. She waves me away angrily and stamps out into the corridor. I hear her say, “Are you sure? Where?” She reappears in the doorway and hisses, “Wallace’s head.”
“What about it?”
“They found it.”
“That’s a shame.” I was quite looking forward to seeing the reliquary opened in front of an unsuspecting congregation.
She’s flapping her hand to shut me up. “I’m on my way.” She closes the scryer. “Sandford Lock. Washed up on the bank.”
“Then it’s not Wallace.”
“Don’t be stupid.”
“Hey, you’re the one who had the insight. Marvo—”
“I told you not to call me that!”
“Why fight it? You know it suits you.”
I toss the plates back in the kitchen—there’s a few lumps of gristle left and with luck the dog’ll choke on them and I can grab the spare parts—and five minutes later I’m out in the street and the driver’s pointing fingers at me.
Marvo’s already sitting inside the van. “Caxton’s gonna kill me.”
“So play safe,” I say. “Go to Sandford.”
While she struggles to make up her mind, a solitary firework splutters up into the sky and bursts in a white star. One of its five points is badly malformed, but the color work is good: it turns red, then blue, darkening and fading. A long, sad sigh is followed by a deafening bang as hundreds of tiny gold and silver bomblets whizz and explode. There’s a smell of spices.
“Nah, I’ll go with the insight. Get in.”
I toss my case onto the seat opposite her. She bangs on the roof and as we lurch forward I’m thrown across the van, into the seat beside her. She pushes me back and screams at the driver. By the time I’ve opened my case and checked that nothing’s broken, we’re charging down toward the bridges and she’s sitting there with her head buried in her hands.
“You OK?”
“My head’s killing me.” She’s grinding the palms of her hands into her eyes.
I don’t really understand tatties. I mean, I get the general idea, but it’s not magic. Not consciously, anyway. They just . . . see things. And it seems to cost them like hell. Not just the fact that they go completely blind in the end, but the headaches and stuff along the way.
“I can fix it,” I say. “Your head.”
“I’m fine.”
She doesn’t look fine. She leans back in her seat and massages her temples with her fingertips. She looks up at me. “An’ don’t get keen on that girl.”
“I’m not . . .”
“She’s not right.”
“Who sez?”
“I sez. The body, the book, the head . . . it’s like bits out of a puzzle.” She mimes moving them around.
“Yeah, I get that.”
“The girl, though . . . I can’t read her. I dunno what it is.”
“Maybe you’re jealous.”
“As if!”
“Can you read me?”
“Like a book.”
Time to change the subject. “That note Caxton found—”
“Like an open book.” Marvell’s got this superior look on her face.
“Leave her alone . . . D’you think it meant your friend Alice?”
We’ve come around the Oxpens and under the railway bridge. There’s the sound of people yelling and screaming.
“No, prob’ly nothing to do with her. Dunno, but I can’t imagine her with Wallace. Gives me the creeps!” Marvo shudders.
I can see several hundred people milling around outside the cathedral under a full moon. Some are holding flaming torches and lanterns that cast a flickering light over the placards waving above their heads:
Burn the lot of them!
Sorsery = Satan!
Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live!
A sorserer and a witch are two totally different things. But I don’t think I’ll risk going among them to explain that.
There are two police lines holding the mob back. People going in for the Mass scurry nervously along the clear path to the west door of the cathedral.
“Look, you better go in on your own,” I say.
“It’s just a few idiots—”
“All I need is one idiot who realizes I’m a sorcerer. Or that nutter with the knife from yesterday. And this is a bit of a giveaway.” I put my hand on my case.
“Leave it in the van.”
“No way!”
So she has a word with one of the jacks and I crouch down on the floor while we drive on.
“You’re gutless, Frank.”
“Better gutless than headless.”
The van stops and I kick the door open. As I dash for the west door, waving my ring at security, a stone rattles along the pavement at my feet.
Inside the cathedral, the dancing flames of thousands of candles throw only the faintest glimmer of light up into the vaulted ceiling, high overhead. At the top of the nave, they’ve set up a temporary altar, covered with a crimson cloth. White-robed acolytes flit around making final adjustments.
Marvo and me, we’ve found a spot beside a pillar. Censers swing, emitting toxic clouds of incense. And I’m still scanning the first few rows of pews, looking for the Boss among the People Who Matter, when a mob of overdressed clerics, enough to invade a small country, converge on the altar.
There’s this rumbling and scraping, echoing around the building, as everyone scrambles to their feet. And now I spot the Boss, Matthew, towering over his neighbors as he turns to inspect the congregation . . .
And sees me. He smiles and raises one hand, then turns back to the front. He crosses himself as a procession emerges from the crypt. I never could get my head around how seriously he manages to take all this stuff.
I spot Brother Andrew toward the back of the procession, purple with concentration and bottled-up resentment, sharing the weight of an elaborately carved oak litter.
This is it: the relic that made Doughnut City’s fortune.
The procession fans out along the steps that separate the nave from the choir. And I recognize the guy helping Andrew carry the litter: the fat priest with the birthmark. Arms shaking with the weight, sweat pouring down their faces, they lower the litter onto the altar.
The precious stones gleam in the flickering candlelight. The gold face of the reliquary stares impassively out over the breathless congregation.
The racket from the choir smacks off the walls like the crack of doom. And now the first twitch of uncertainty. An old priest steps forward. He trips and almost goes flying.
I dunno why, but this seems to spook everybody. The choir falters and goes quiet. The congregation just stand there blinking. A collective whisper of doubt comes rustling up the nave and flutters away into the darkness of the roof, where it finds a perch and settles to await a revelation.
The west door bangs open. There is a shrill, spine-chilling scream: a woman’s voice, from outside.
I shiver as a cold wind blows through the building. Marvo clutches my arm. When I turn, her face is white and bathed in sweat. All around me, people are looking at each other like they know what’s coming . . .
The old priest steps up to the altar. He frowns angrily behind his glasses as he struggles to locate the tiny catch at the side of the reliquary. His arthritic fingers fumble hopelessly until Andrew twitches like a rabbit and hops forward to do it for him. The click of the mechanism echoes unnaturally through the silent building. The faceplate swings open—
Bingo!
Mouth gaping. Eyes staring. That’s no fifteenth-century skull inside the reliquary.
I grin at Marvo. “The Bishop of Oxford, I presume.”
But I can’t help noticing that the fat priest is looking as astonished as anyone.