I've invented swimming!
And now, more Magic Husbands! You're excited, right? Don't try to hide it, it's okay.
(For those just coming in: chapter one, chapter two.)
Title: The Ghost in the Grand Chamber, chapter three
Summary: Jonathan Easter was a mild-mannered government clerk, until he met Essabeth Stone- one of the country's best-known sorcerers. Now he's a mild-mannered clerk who happens to be mixed up with dangerous magic, dangerous women, and a very dangerous government conspiracy.
IN THIS CHAPTER: research, Miss Stone's magical-theory soapbox, spying, all-nighters, UST, more research, and an explosion.
The infirmary staff, whether out of respect for Miss Stone or embarrassment for themselves, said nothing about what had happened. I was just as glad of it. The less connection I appeared to have to the incident, the better for our purpose. All the same, I made a show of going back again the next day, and the attendant on duty made a show of telling me that Miss Stone had been discharged.
Getting myself assigned to do errands for her was no difficult task. Running round after a disgruntled sorcerer- even if the sorcerer was Essabeth Stone- was something no one particularly wanted to do, and as such it was exactly the type of job that Queen’s Court loves to assign to junior associates. I made sure to accept the assignment with my usual manner; that is to say, with resigned politeness.
Establishing the framework of our ruse may have been easy, but I quickly discovered that carrying it out was another matter. We had no idea what to look for. I brought Miss Stone records of all the legislation that had been drafted and passed in the past year, then the past five, and then the past ten, as well as records of all the maintenance work that had been done in the Grand Chamber in that time. But we could find no pattern in the legislation, nor any clues as to who could have planted the spell. What we really needed was a way to look at the spell itself- but I had no means to study it, and I could think of no way to get Miss Stone back into the chamber that would not incur suspicion or, worse, another magical attack.
“For the tenth time,” she said, pacing the sitting room in her guest chambers one night, “this wouldn’t be a problem if you would just let me teach you enough magic to-”
“For the tenth time, Miss Stone,” I said, “and with all due respect, no.”
She scowled at me. “You’re being hidebound again,” she accused.
“I’m not,” I said, bearing up under the force of her frown. “I am merely pointing out that even if I proved an exceptional student, which, quite frankly, in magic I never was, any spell I would use to study the Grand Chamber without detection or backlash would still be quite beyond my means.”
“Yes, and what do you think I meant by hidebound, Mr. Easter? Anyway, you’ve done bigger magic than this already. Twice!”
“To save you,” I retorted. Immediately I felt myself start to blush, but I barreled on. “And only when no other option presented itself. Until it’s absolutely necessary, I would rather not experiment with something I don’t understand.”
“Ye gods,” said Miss Stone, “it’s the University all over again!” She threw up her hands and sank into a chair. Her black-and-white cat, which had been getting under my feet- having clearly changed its opinion of me since the episode in the infirmary hall- immediately jumped up into her lap, where it began kneading at the fabric of her dress.
When she saw that I was looking at her in some confusion, she sighed and made what looked like a concerted effort to calm herself. “The only way a person can understand magic,” she said, “is by experimenting with it. Or it would be, if the University and the rest of our fine educational institutions weren’t tied up in this idea that magic is complicated and difficult.”
“Isn’t it?” I said.
She frowned at me again. After nearly a week of working with her, I was almost used to it. “Of course it is,” she said, “but not in the way you’ve been taught to think. The practice of magic is very- personal, do you understand? As a magic practitioner you must experiment, to learn how to interact with your own power. Otherwise you can comprehend every inch of magical theory and still not truly understand magic. That is why it is complicated, Mr. Easter.”
She had gotten herself rather worked up again. I had the distinct sense that she would have stood up to pace again, if the cat on her lap had not prevented her. “I understand,” I said, holding up my hands. “But even by that standard, I doubt I could learn enough, and quickly enough, to be of any magical assistance. There must be another way.”
So we thought some more. Miss Stone sent me to the kitchens to fetch some more salt- she seemed to be having fun sending me on errands- and I racked my brain the entire way there and back. I still hadn’t come up with anything by the time I got back to her chambers. She, however, had.
“A duplication spell,” she announced triumphantly. “It will copy all the spells inside the Grand Chamber- we should be able to pick the one we’re after out of the lot. All you have to do is get it inside and activate it.” She smirked. I couldn’t decide whether her smirk was more or less terrifying than her frown. “So you’re going to have to learn some magic after all,” she said.
I just sighed. “All right,” I said, “how does it work?”
It was very late by the time she finished explaining the duplication spell to me. Surprisingly, I was fairly sure I understood the theory behind it. I left her working on the spell itself, checked the corridor outside- I didn’t think it would do for me to be seen leaving Miss Stone’s chambers at an advanced hour of the night, for more reasons than one- and made my way through the labyrinth of Queen’s Court back to my own small set of rooms in the associates’ wing.
When I returned to Miss Stone’s chambers the next morning, under the guise of bringing her the day’s post, she was pacing again. “This business of pretending to be an invalid is wearing extremely thin,” she informed me.
“Good morning to you too, Miss Stone,” I said, unperturbed. After all, we were finally making progress in our investigation. I felt particularly equipped to handle anything else the world might throw at me.
“Ye gods,” said Miss Stone, “you’ve been inside my mental plane and I’ve seen what you think you look like naked, you may as well call me Essa.”
Me? Call Essabeth Stone by her first name- no, a derivative, even? My cavalier attitude vanished immediately. “Er,” I said.
She must have interpreted the look on my face correctly. “Too soon?” she said. “Oh, well. Here.” And before I could react in any way, she put something into my hand.
It was a small metal disc, a lttle larger than a coin, with a few arcane marks scratched on either side. “This is the duplication spell?” I said. “I thought it would be more… complex.”
She laughed. It was a short sharp burst of a laugh, not at all musical or poetic, but I found it very compelling. “You would think so, wouldn’t you,” she said. “No, this is it. All you need to do is tap it once against the doorframe as you go into the chamber, and once more as you leave. The rest of the time you can keep it in a pocket.”
I turned the little disc over. “That’s very impressive,” I said.
“I think I can develop a version that won’t require even that much to activate,” she said, “but it would take several more days of experiments.”
She was, I realized, wearing the same clothes as she had been the previous night. I could see the pockmarks in the front of her skirt where her cat had pulled the fabric. And now that I was looking around properly, I saw the debris of other spells littered around the room. “Miss Stone,” I said, “have you been working on this all night?”
“It’s entirely possible,” she said.
I resisted the urge to put my hand over my forehead, the way one of my professors at University had done. “For goodness’ sake,” I said instead. “I’ll take care of this-” I put the duplication spell into a pocket of my waistcoat- “and you get some rest.”
The duplication spell was almost too easy to activate. The Grand Chamber, as a rule, is always very busy during working hours, but the many people around me were absorbed enough in their own business that none of them saw me tap the little metal coin against the polished wood of the doorframe.
The problem was that I had no way to tell if it was working. The disc did not change at all- it did not glow, heat up, vibrate, or anything of the sort, which I had half expected it to do- and I had no magical sense to tell me that the spell was now operating. I decided I simply had to trust in Miss Stone’s abilities, and put the disc back into my pocket.
She had not specified how long the disc had to be inside the chamber for the spell to take effect, so I found excuses to stay there for as long as possible. I busied myself with organizing records and filling in forms- I even resorted to sweeping the floors, which also gave me a convenient excuse to stand directly under the spot where we had found the spell. I wanted to make sure Miss Stone’s duplication spell missed nothing. Around midday, however, I ran out of excuses. Judging half of a working day to be enough time, I set off to perform my assorted errands. Once again I tapped the little disc against the doorframe, and once again I observed no change. When I went to Miss Stone’s chambers to give it back to her, she was asleep- I left the disc on her study table and let myself quietly out.
I was awakened the following morning by Miss Stone’s voice, as loud and clear as if she spoke directly into my ear. “Mr. Easter,” she said, “come here, quickly.”
In my half-asleep state it didn’t occur to me that this phenomenon was in any way strange. “What’s happening?” I said, to thin air.
“I’ve discovered something,” said the disembodied voice, rather tersely. “I’ll explain when you get here.”
I got out of bed and pulled clothes on as quickly as I could in the dim light. It was that gray hour just before dawn, and very little of the grayness had filtered into my small bedchamber. I had the suspicion that Miss Stone had been awake all night again.
By the time I reached her chambers, the strangeness of her communication had occurred to me properly. “How did you do that?” I said, when the door was safely shut behind me.
She leveled one of her frowns at me. “It’s a simple primary-focus speech spell,” she said, “enhanced, I’m guessing, by the remnants of our shared mental link. But never mind that- look.” She pushed a sheaf of paper into my hands.
The papers were covered, front and back, with startlingly neat notes in some kind of shorthand. Most of them, for all the sense they made to me, may as well have been in a foreign language. I suspect that some of them actually were. But I got a clear enough idea from the sections I did understand, and I didn’t like it.
“Someone’s trying to control magic,” I breathed. “That’s what the spell is for?”
“Not just control it,” said Miss Stone. “Restrict its teaching and practice, maybe outlaw it completely.”
I returned her frown, although I’m sure it wasn’t nearly as effective. “Using magic to eliminate magic?” I said. “That’s somewhat- counterintuitive, isn’t it?”
“You can’t have met many magic practitioners,” she muttered.
She pushed her hair back from her face- bits of her sensible hairstyle had come unpinned, so that her face was framed in a sort of orange-red corona. It was fantastically attractive, honestly, but I pushed the thought firmly out of my mind. Instead I studied her notes again, trying to squeeze some more information out of their incomprehensible pages.
“We have to find the person who planted this spell,” she said.
“Why?” I said, still absorbed in the notes. “Do you need to know who cast it to get rid of it?”
“Not at all,” she said, shaking her head so that more strands of red hair fell loose around her face. “I need to know who did it because when I find out, I am going to destroy them.”
I redoubled my efforts to find the perpetrator. For the better part of a fortnight, I spent all the time I could spare hiding out in the legislative archives, poring over records I had already been through once. There were several nights when I accidentally stayed in the archives until sunrise. I was getting to be as bad about my sleep cycle as Miss Stone, I thought ruefully, watching the first scraps of dawn creep in through the small high windows.
I found myself staying away from Miss Stone’s chambers as much as I could. Every time I went to do a necessary errand- bringing her the post, or supplies, or somesuch- she was deeply absorbed in spellwork that looked far too complicated to interrupt. On top of that, I found I didn’t quite like to disturb her when I had nothing to report. I did my errands quickly and let myself out unobtrusively.
The problem, I thought, as I took down another file of records from the archive shelves, was that I had assumed it would be simple. This time I knew what I was looking for, so it ought to be easier to find, oughtn’t it? But it was proving exactly the opposite. There was no pattern in which associate had written which acts. Nor was there a pattern in who had sponsored them, and not a very clear one in who had voted for them. I scoured all the records pertaining to magical legislation, back to forty-six years ago, when I judged that the restrictive trend had started. Whoever the mastermind behind the control spell was, they were playing a long and careful game.
The answer occurred to me, quite suddenly, during my third accidental overnight session. I was looking at the right records, but in the wrong places. If the perpetrator was confident in the control spell- which they must have been, to have stuck with it for so long- they wouldn’t need to push for restrictive laws. In fact, if they were smart, as an extra cover they might vote against them. They would be above suspicion, if a suspicion was ever planted, and in the meantime the laws would still go through. It was a rather large leap of logic, but, in the small hours of the morning, it made sense. I hoped it would still make sense after I had gotten some sleep.
It did. By the next evening, I had a short list of five names. One of my candidates had died seven years ago, which didn’t rule him out. Another had only been at Court since around the same time, which was a more likely cause for disqualification. Any or all of them might even have been working together. It was still vague, but I decided it was enough progress to justify going to tell Miss Stone. I copied the relevant information in neat Court shorthand and took it along with me.
The chamber door had barely shut behind me when someone grabbed me. “Get down!” Miss Stone shouted, and pulled me to the floor behind the settee.
I didn’t get to ask what was going on- in fact, I didn’t get as far as the first word, because the next thing that happened was an explosion. I felt rather than heard it, a sort of immense pressure in the air, and then an abrupt decompression that left me rather short of breath. Although some of the reason for that, I discovered when my senses had cleared, was that Miss Stone had landed on top of me.
“You idiot,” she said, levering herself up on her forearms, and sounding just as breathless as I felt. “You walked in right as the spell went critical!”
I tried to concentrate. It was difficult, with her still partially pressed against me and with her red hair- which was completely unpinned now- falling around my face. “How was I supposed to know?” I said. “I can’t tell what you’re doing from the other side of the door.”
She peered at me. “Hmph,” she said, finally, and climbed off of me.
I sat up carefully and peered over the top of the settee. On the study’s table, wisps of smoke were rising from something that looked like a bit of glassy volcanic rock. The paper it sat on was blackened and curled up around the edges, as if it had been set on fire. “What was that?” I said.
“It was supposed to be a counterspell,” said Miss Stone. She dusted her skirt off and went over to the table, examining the remains of the spell with her strongest frown. “Only it hasn’t worked. Nothing I’ve tried so far has. I’m going mad in here,” she declared. “This business of pretending to be an invalid-”
“Yes, I know,” I said, “you’ve mentioned it before.” My gaze fell, involuntarily, on the glassy stone- it was still smoking slightly. “Although if you keep this up,” I added, “you may not have to pretend.”
She turned her frown on me. “You know, Mr. Easter, I’ve survived this long without you worrying about me,” she said. But she retreated from the table, and sank back onto the settee instead. The black-and-white cat, whose fur was visibly puffed out but who was making a valiant effort at acting nonchalant, emerged from under the table and came to wind around her feet.
“It’s one of the strangest spells I’ve ever seen,” Miss Stone mused. I couldn’t tell whether she was explaining it to me or simply thinking aloud. “Some of the bits I almost recognize, but I can’t think where from. And the whole structure’s completely different from anything I ever studied. I think the original caster must have written the whole thing from the ground up.”
“Sorry,” I said, “the original caster?”
She gave a little snort of a laugh. “Trust you to pick up on that!” she said. “Yes, the original caster. The spell’s been modified by someone else, about- best guess, six or seven years ago. I think that’s why it’s so gods-cursed difficult to break.”
“Well, here’s some good news,” I said. “I think I know who modified it.”
(For those just coming in: chapter one, chapter two.)
Title: The Ghost in the Grand Chamber, chapter three
Summary: Jonathan Easter was a mild-mannered government clerk, until he met Essabeth Stone- one of the country's best-known sorcerers. Now he's a mild-mannered clerk who happens to be mixed up with dangerous magic, dangerous women, and a very dangerous government conspiracy.
IN THIS CHAPTER: research, Miss Stone's magical-theory soapbox, spying, all-nighters, UST, more research, and an explosion.
The infirmary staff, whether out of respect for Miss Stone or embarrassment for themselves, said nothing about what had happened. I was just as glad of it. The less connection I appeared to have to the incident, the better for our purpose. All the same, I made a show of going back again the next day, and the attendant on duty made a show of telling me that Miss Stone had been discharged.
Getting myself assigned to do errands for her was no difficult task. Running round after a disgruntled sorcerer- even if the sorcerer was Essabeth Stone- was something no one particularly wanted to do, and as such it was exactly the type of job that Queen’s Court loves to assign to junior associates. I made sure to accept the assignment with my usual manner; that is to say, with resigned politeness.
Establishing the framework of our ruse may have been easy, but I quickly discovered that carrying it out was another matter. We had no idea what to look for. I brought Miss Stone records of all the legislation that had been drafted and passed in the past year, then the past five, and then the past ten, as well as records of all the maintenance work that had been done in the Grand Chamber in that time. But we could find no pattern in the legislation, nor any clues as to who could have planted the spell. What we really needed was a way to look at the spell itself- but I had no means to study it, and I could think of no way to get Miss Stone back into the chamber that would not incur suspicion or, worse, another magical attack.
“For the tenth time,” she said, pacing the sitting room in her guest chambers one night, “this wouldn’t be a problem if you would just let me teach you enough magic to-”
“For the tenth time, Miss Stone,” I said, “and with all due respect, no.”
She scowled at me. “You’re being hidebound again,” she accused.
“I’m not,” I said, bearing up under the force of her frown. “I am merely pointing out that even if I proved an exceptional student, which, quite frankly, in magic I never was, any spell I would use to study the Grand Chamber without detection or backlash would still be quite beyond my means.”
“Yes, and what do you think I meant by hidebound, Mr. Easter? Anyway, you’ve done bigger magic than this already. Twice!”
“To save you,” I retorted. Immediately I felt myself start to blush, but I barreled on. “And only when no other option presented itself. Until it’s absolutely necessary, I would rather not experiment with something I don’t understand.”
“Ye gods,” said Miss Stone, “it’s the University all over again!” She threw up her hands and sank into a chair. Her black-and-white cat, which had been getting under my feet- having clearly changed its opinion of me since the episode in the infirmary hall- immediately jumped up into her lap, where it began kneading at the fabric of her dress.
When she saw that I was looking at her in some confusion, she sighed and made what looked like a concerted effort to calm herself. “The only way a person can understand magic,” she said, “is by experimenting with it. Or it would be, if the University and the rest of our fine educational institutions weren’t tied up in this idea that magic is complicated and difficult.”
“Isn’t it?” I said.
She frowned at me again. After nearly a week of working with her, I was almost used to it. “Of course it is,” she said, “but not in the way you’ve been taught to think. The practice of magic is very- personal, do you understand? As a magic practitioner you must experiment, to learn how to interact with your own power. Otherwise you can comprehend every inch of magical theory and still not truly understand magic. That is why it is complicated, Mr. Easter.”
She had gotten herself rather worked up again. I had the distinct sense that she would have stood up to pace again, if the cat on her lap had not prevented her. “I understand,” I said, holding up my hands. “But even by that standard, I doubt I could learn enough, and quickly enough, to be of any magical assistance. There must be another way.”
So we thought some more. Miss Stone sent me to the kitchens to fetch some more salt- she seemed to be having fun sending me on errands- and I racked my brain the entire way there and back. I still hadn’t come up with anything by the time I got back to her chambers. She, however, had.
“A duplication spell,” she announced triumphantly. “It will copy all the spells inside the Grand Chamber- we should be able to pick the one we’re after out of the lot. All you have to do is get it inside and activate it.” She smirked. I couldn’t decide whether her smirk was more or less terrifying than her frown. “So you’re going to have to learn some magic after all,” she said.
I just sighed. “All right,” I said, “how does it work?”
It was very late by the time she finished explaining the duplication spell to me. Surprisingly, I was fairly sure I understood the theory behind it. I left her working on the spell itself, checked the corridor outside- I didn’t think it would do for me to be seen leaving Miss Stone’s chambers at an advanced hour of the night, for more reasons than one- and made my way through the labyrinth of Queen’s Court back to my own small set of rooms in the associates’ wing.
When I returned to Miss Stone’s chambers the next morning, under the guise of bringing her the day’s post, she was pacing again. “This business of pretending to be an invalid is wearing extremely thin,” she informed me.
“Good morning to you too, Miss Stone,” I said, unperturbed. After all, we were finally making progress in our investigation. I felt particularly equipped to handle anything else the world might throw at me.
“Ye gods,” said Miss Stone, “you’ve been inside my mental plane and I’ve seen what you think you look like naked, you may as well call me Essa.”
Me? Call Essabeth Stone by her first name- no, a derivative, even? My cavalier attitude vanished immediately. “Er,” I said.
She must have interpreted the look on my face correctly. “Too soon?” she said. “Oh, well. Here.” And before I could react in any way, she put something into my hand.
It was a small metal disc, a lttle larger than a coin, with a few arcane marks scratched on either side. “This is the duplication spell?” I said. “I thought it would be more… complex.”
She laughed. It was a short sharp burst of a laugh, not at all musical or poetic, but I found it very compelling. “You would think so, wouldn’t you,” she said. “No, this is it. All you need to do is tap it once against the doorframe as you go into the chamber, and once more as you leave. The rest of the time you can keep it in a pocket.”
I turned the little disc over. “That’s very impressive,” I said.
“I think I can develop a version that won’t require even that much to activate,” she said, “but it would take several more days of experiments.”
She was, I realized, wearing the same clothes as she had been the previous night. I could see the pockmarks in the front of her skirt where her cat had pulled the fabric. And now that I was looking around properly, I saw the debris of other spells littered around the room. “Miss Stone,” I said, “have you been working on this all night?”
“It’s entirely possible,” she said.
I resisted the urge to put my hand over my forehead, the way one of my professors at University had done. “For goodness’ sake,” I said instead. “I’ll take care of this-” I put the duplication spell into a pocket of my waistcoat- “and you get some rest.”
The duplication spell was almost too easy to activate. The Grand Chamber, as a rule, is always very busy during working hours, but the many people around me were absorbed enough in their own business that none of them saw me tap the little metal coin against the polished wood of the doorframe.
The problem was that I had no way to tell if it was working. The disc did not change at all- it did not glow, heat up, vibrate, or anything of the sort, which I had half expected it to do- and I had no magical sense to tell me that the spell was now operating. I decided I simply had to trust in Miss Stone’s abilities, and put the disc back into my pocket.
She had not specified how long the disc had to be inside the chamber for the spell to take effect, so I found excuses to stay there for as long as possible. I busied myself with organizing records and filling in forms- I even resorted to sweeping the floors, which also gave me a convenient excuse to stand directly under the spot where we had found the spell. I wanted to make sure Miss Stone’s duplication spell missed nothing. Around midday, however, I ran out of excuses. Judging half of a working day to be enough time, I set off to perform my assorted errands. Once again I tapped the little disc against the doorframe, and once again I observed no change. When I went to Miss Stone’s chambers to give it back to her, she was asleep- I left the disc on her study table and let myself quietly out.
I was awakened the following morning by Miss Stone’s voice, as loud and clear as if she spoke directly into my ear. “Mr. Easter,” she said, “come here, quickly.”
In my half-asleep state it didn’t occur to me that this phenomenon was in any way strange. “What’s happening?” I said, to thin air.
“I’ve discovered something,” said the disembodied voice, rather tersely. “I’ll explain when you get here.”
I got out of bed and pulled clothes on as quickly as I could in the dim light. It was that gray hour just before dawn, and very little of the grayness had filtered into my small bedchamber. I had the suspicion that Miss Stone had been awake all night again.
By the time I reached her chambers, the strangeness of her communication had occurred to me properly. “How did you do that?” I said, when the door was safely shut behind me.
She leveled one of her frowns at me. “It’s a simple primary-focus speech spell,” she said, “enhanced, I’m guessing, by the remnants of our shared mental link. But never mind that- look.” She pushed a sheaf of paper into my hands.
The papers were covered, front and back, with startlingly neat notes in some kind of shorthand. Most of them, for all the sense they made to me, may as well have been in a foreign language. I suspect that some of them actually were. But I got a clear enough idea from the sections I did understand, and I didn’t like it.
“Someone’s trying to control magic,” I breathed. “That’s what the spell is for?”
“Not just control it,” said Miss Stone. “Restrict its teaching and practice, maybe outlaw it completely.”
I returned her frown, although I’m sure it wasn’t nearly as effective. “Using magic to eliminate magic?” I said. “That’s somewhat- counterintuitive, isn’t it?”
“You can’t have met many magic practitioners,” she muttered.
She pushed her hair back from her face- bits of her sensible hairstyle had come unpinned, so that her face was framed in a sort of orange-red corona. It was fantastically attractive, honestly, but I pushed the thought firmly out of my mind. Instead I studied her notes again, trying to squeeze some more information out of their incomprehensible pages.
“We have to find the person who planted this spell,” she said.
“Why?” I said, still absorbed in the notes. “Do you need to know who cast it to get rid of it?”
“Not at all,” she said, shaking her head so that more strands of red hair fell loose around her face. “I need to know who did it because when I find out, I am going to destroy them.”
I redoubled my efforts to find the perpetrator. For the better part of a fortnight, I spent all the time I could spare hiding out in the legislative archives, poring over records I had already been through once. There were several nights when I accidentally stayed in the archives until sunrise. I was getting to be as bad about my sleep cycle as Miss Stone, I thought ruefully, watching the first scraps of dawn creep in through the small high windows.
I found myself staying away from Miss Stone’s chambers as much as I could. Every time I went to do a necessary errand- bringing her the post, or supplies, or somesuch- she was deeply absorbed in spellwork that looked far too complicated to interrupt. On top of that, I found I didn’t quite like to disturb her when I had nothing to report. I did my errands quickly and let myself out unobtrusively.
The problem, I thought, as I took down another file of records from the archive shelves, was that I had assumed it would be simple. This time I knew what I was looking for, so it ought to be easier to find, oughtn’t it? But it was proving exactly the opposite. There was no pattern in which associate had written which acts. Nor was there a pattern in who had sponsored them, and not a very clear one in who had voted for them. I scoured all the records pertaining to magical legislation, back to forty-six years ago, when I judged that the restrictive trend had started. Whoever the mastermind behind the control spell was, they were playing a long and careful game.
The answer occurred to me, quite suddenly, during my third accidental overnight session. I was looking at the right records, but in the wrong places. If the perpetrator was confident in the control spell- which they must have been, to have stuck with it for so long- they wouldn’t need to push for restrictive laws. In fact, if they were smart, as an extra cover they might vote against them. They would be above suspicion, if a suspicion was ever planted, and in the meantime the laws would still go through. It was a rather large leap of logic, but, in the small hours of the morning, it made sense. I hoped it would still make sense after I had gotten some sleep.
It did. By the next evening, I had a short list of five names. One of my candidates had died seven years ago, which didn’t rule him out. Another had only been at Court since around the same time, which was a more likely cause for disqualification. Any or all of them might even have been working together. It was still vague, but I decided it was enough progress to justify going to tell Miss Stone. I copied the relevant information in neat Court shorthand and took it along with me.
The chamber door had barely shut behind me when someone grabbed me. “Get down!” Miss Stone shouted, and pulled me to the floor behind the settee.
I didn’t get to ask what was going on- in fact, I didn’t get as far as the first word, because the next thing that happened was an explosion. I felt rather than heard it, a sort of immense pressure in the air, and then an abrupt decompression that left me rather short of breath. Although some of the reason for that, I discovered when my senses had cleared, was that Miss Stone had landed on top of me.
“You idiot,” she said, levering herself up on her forearms, and sounding just as breathless as I felt. “You walked in right as the spell went critical!”
I tried to concentrate. It was difficult, with her still partially pressed against me and with her red hair- which was completely unpinned now- falling around my face. “How was I supposed to know?” I said. “I can’t tell what you’re doing from the other side of the door.”
She peered at me. “Hmph,” she said, finally, and climbed off of me.
I sat up carefully and peered over the top of the settee. On the study’s table, wisps of smoke were rising from something that looked like a bit of glassy volcanic rock. The paper it sat on was blackened and curled up around the edges, as if it had been set on fire. “What was that?” I said.
“It was supposed to be a counterspell,” said Miss Stone. She dusted her skirt off and went over to the table, examining the remains of the spell with her strongest frown. “Only it hasn’t worked. Nothing I’ve tried so far has. I’m going mad in here,” she declared. “This business of pretending to be an invalid-”
“Yes, I know,” I said, “you’ve mentioned it before.” My gaze fell, involuntarily, on the glassy stone- it was still smoking slightly. “Although if you keep this up,” I added, “you may not have to pretend.”
She turned her frown on me. “You know, Mr. Easter, I’ve survived this long without you worrying about me,” she said. But she retreated from the table, and sank back onto the settee instead. The black-and-white cat, whose fur was visibly puffed out but who was making a valiant effort at acting nonchalant, emerged from under the table and came to wind around her feet.
“It’s one of the strangest spells I’ve ever seen,” Miss Stone mused. I couldn’t tell whether she was explaining it to me or simply thinking aloud. “Some of the bits I almost recognize, but I can’t think where from. And the whole structure’s completely different from anything I ever studied. I think the original caster must have written the whole thing from the ground up.”
“Sorry,” I said, “the original caster?”
She gave a little snort of a laugh. “Trust you to pick up on that!” she said. “Yes, the original caster. The spell’s been modified by someone else, about- best guess, six or seven years ago. I think that’s why it’s so gods-cursed difficult to break.”
“Well, here’s some good news,” I said. “I think I know who modified it.”