Salt Magic, Skin Magic Read online

  John found himself gazing at Thornby’s smile. His pulse, which had just started to slow down after that blow to the jaw, now sped back up. Damn, of course that had sounded—

  He cleared his throat and forced himself to answer honestly.

  “I keep nearly sensing it, then it goes. I don’t know if it’s magic, though I don’t see how it could be anything else. But in any case, it’s not like anything I’ve ever come across before.”

  “You’re sure it’s not my winning ways and ever-present charm?” Thornby held the decanter out to him. “Sorry for hitting you.”

  John put one hand to his jaw and took the decanter in the other. “It’s all right. I’d have hit me, too.” He took a swig. It was French brandy. Smooth as silk. Whatever economies Dalton might be making, they weren’t with his wine merchant. He could feel Thornby’s eyes on him, considering.

  “You’re quite a singular individual yourself, Mr Blake, if I may say so. It’s not everyone who claims to know about magic, is it? That’s very unusual. Forgive me, did that sound offensive? Perhaps that’s the wrong word. Maybe I mean—remarkable.”

  John shrugged. “You needn’t to be so polite about it, my lord. I’ve had a lot worse than ‘unusual’. I’ve had un-Christian, unnatural, un-English.” He took another mouthful of brandy and passed it back. “‘Unusual’ is really very civil.”

  “Unnatural, eh? And are you really unnatural, Mr Blake?” Thornby’s eyes glittered. He was still half smiling.

  John narrowed his eyes, heart in his mouth again. “Some call it that. What do you think?”

  “I can’t quite tell. I hope I’m going to find out.” Thornby leant closer.

  “What do you mean?” John could barely get the words out. Thornby’s eyes had a wicked look. His lips were parted; those lips that were made for kissing. Was Thornby going to kiss him now?

  “Well, you tell me you can do magic. You tell me you can detect it, or its absence. I’ve seen you with that peculiar glass eye and your pile of sand. I’ve seen you apparently fooling Father into letting you stay. But I haven’t actually seen any proof.”

  “I see.” John swallowed hard. He realised he’d leant forward too, just a little. He straightened his back. He was sweating all over. God, for a moment he had really thought—

  Lord Dalton’s comments were making him look at Thornby in a whole new light. Dalton had called Thornby a mary-ann, had said ‘you’ve never had a woman in your life’. Random insults? Or the truth? Thornby had not denied it, and he certainly appeared to be flirting now. Or was he? The problem was that Thornby was so damned attractive, it was impossible to be objective. Why couldn’t Thornby have had a hare lip, or a squint, or a few pockmarks? It would have made things so much simpler. It would have been easier to look away.

  “You could be telling me tales, couldn’t you?” said Thornby. “It seems a little bit too convenient that your magic doesn’t work on me for some mysterious reason. I would like to believe you. I am even inclined to believe you. You seem as if you’re a truthful sort of fellow, mostly. But you do see my problem?”

  “You want to see some magic. All right. What?”

  Thornby looked at him wide-eyed. “What can you do?”

  “I work with materials. I could ask that decanter its history, if you like, especially what it knows of magic.”

  “You could make that up. How would I know? What about that glass eye thing—you thought it would make you invisible, didn’t you? I want you to do that to someone else. I want to stand right next to you and ask them if they see you. Fair enough?”

  “If you like.”

  “Now? Do you have it on you?”

  For answer, John took out the items for the charm; the glass eye, the sand in its oilskin bag, and the spancel, coiled like a sleeping snake. “Where do you want me to do it?”

  “Here, near the candles, where the light’s best. Once you’re set up, I shall lure someone in. One of the servants probably, so I hope it’ll work or you’ll develop a reputation for oddity to surpass mine.”

  “It’ll work.”

  John put the charm together, laying the spancel in a circle on the carpet, setting the sand, nestling the glass eye on top, and sending magic through them. He straightened to find Thornby watching him, half smiling. It felt bizarre to stand within a charm he knew to be sound, and for it to have no effect. More than bizarre; positively unsettling.

  “It works with everyone else,” John said defensively, but a sudden doubt crossed his mind. If Thornby could see him—and he clearly could—was the charm losing efficacy?

  “Even if you’re gulling me, it’s worth it to see you standing there,” said Thornby, smiling. “You look like an obscure mediaeval saint with his attributes; St Blake who was martyred by a grain of sand in the eye.”

  John crossed his arms. No one had ever teased him about magic before. They had feared him, or hated him, or respected him. But no one had ever made a joke of it. He wasn’t sure he liked it.

  “Get away with you. I’m not standing here all night,” he said.

  “Only your eyes give you away, Mr Blake. They’re not saintly at all sometimes, are they?”

  And before John could say anything else, Thornby had vanished down the dark passage. John stood, arms crossed over his chest, that last remark ringing uncomfortably in his ears. Had he given himself away so obviously? Did it matter? He wasn’t sure how he’d come to be here—why did he have to prove anything to Thornby? And yet, somehow, he did. The wounds on Thornby’s face were a reminder of why.

  He could feel the magic flowing around the items on the ground. It blocked out the whisperings of Raskelf, giving him a few moments of peace, until he heard Thornby’s voice again.

  “Let’s go into the Blue Room. It’s more private.”

  And Lady Amelia replying, “If you like.”

  Thornby let his aunt precede him into the room. He looked at John, then at his aunt.

  “By the by, you haven’t seen Mr Blake anywhere, Aunt Amelia?”

  “That peculiar fellow? No, I haven’t.”

  “Are you sure? You don’t think he might be in this room?”

  Lady Amelia glanced around the room, her gaze going straight through John. “Of course not. Why? Do you think he’s one of your father’s spies?”

  Thornby stared at John open-mouthed, then glanced back at his aunt and back to John. John frowned and nodded his head meaningfully at Lady Amelia. Thornby blinked at him, shaking his head in wonder, then realised he must keep up his end of the conversation.

  “Uh, no,” Thornby said. “He seemed all right.”

  “I think he’s peculiar,” Lady Amelia said firmly.

  “You think everyone’s peculiar.” Thornby grinned at her, then gave John a delighted sideways smile.

  Lady Amelia gave an unladylike snort. “Of course you’re all peculiar. Anyone who chooses to live on Porridge Island must be mad. Tcha! England! Suet puddings and rain.”

  Thornby and his aunt smirked at each other. This was clearly an on-going conversation between them. For the first time, John could see a family resemblance. Thornby looked nothing like his father, but he and his aunt had the same willowy build, and her hair sprang from her brow in a similar manner.

  “Now, Soren—” she began.

  “A moment, Aunt Amelia, I want to stand over here.”

  To John’s alarm, Thornby walked over to him, turned, and got inside the spancel with him. John had to step hastily backwards to make room, trying desperately to keep heels and elbows inside the spancel and off the sand.

  “What the devil are you doing?” he hissed in Thornby’s ear. Thornby’s silk-clad buttocks were pushing lightly against his groin in a way that was very distracting.

  Lady Amelia advanced. “Why do you want to stand there? Are you quite all right, Soren?”

  “Yes, I’m all right, Aunt. I just wanted to apologise. For making a scene.”

  “Oh, there’s no need to apologise, boy. We both know w
hat he is; he deserves all he gets. I—I’m glad you remember your mother. I wish I’d met her. She was the most beautiful woman alive, you know, when you were a child. Everyone said so. Not that he ever wrote, but I had contacts in Cairo at the time and they told me. And I saw the society pages in The Times.”

  “Yes, I know. But I must stop rising to the bait at the dinner table, mustn’t I? Or we shall all be thin as rakes by Christmas.”

  She laughed. “Come, walk me to my room. I’ve sent that silly girl to bed, so we can sit and have a nightcap.”

  “All right, if you think you’re up to it.” Thornby took her arm, then half-turned, looking John in the eye. “A quick one. I’ll look for Mr Blake in his room afterwards.”

  John nodded.

  “If you like, dear,” Aunt Amelia said. “But what you want with such a dull fellow I don’t know. At luncheon he went on and on about foundries and glazing. I can’t think why he thought we’d be interested. These modern types—all they care about is making money. Not that I wouldn’t like a little myself, but it’s so tedious to talk about, isn’t it?”

  Thornby shot John one last look over his shoulder as they left the room. “Very dull,” he agreed, with a glint in his eye.

  Chapter Five

  John paced in his room, waiting for Thornby. He could not stop thinking of the moment Thornby had smiled and said, “Your eyes give you away.” He hadn’t seemed disgusted or offended. Was he—oh God—could he be interested? John found he’d groaned aloud.

  Had that light contact between them in the spancel been a tease, or just chance? Thornby had certainly kept his presence of mind. By stepping into the spancel he’d managed to prove for himself that the magic worked on John but not on him.

  But how many drinks was he going to have with his aunt? John wiped the palms of his hands on his trousers. This was ludicrous; he was fretting for a man who probably only wanted his professional skills. No wonder Thornby seemed interested. He must be desperate to get away, and John must be his first real hope in over a year.

  John caught sight of the hatbox, half pushed under the bed. He would use the time before Thornby arrived to take another look at that hedgehog. In the stables, he’d worked with touch alone and found nothing. Now he would bring his materials into play. If he could pinpoint whatever was odd about the creature, maybe he’d discover something about the spell—or whatever it was—that bound Thornby to the estate.

  He lit a branch of candles and took the lid off the hatbox. The hedgehog froze, then began trying to climb out, feet scrabbling on the sides of the box, nose snuffing. John refreshed its saucer of water and felt in his pocket for the crust of bread and walnuts he’d got from the kitchen. The hedgehog fell upon these hungrily and John quested towards it with magic. As before, there seemed to be nothing to find. And yet, there came again that faint hint of something unseen.

  The staff had strict instructions not to enter his room unless he rang, and it didn’t matter if Thornby saw him at it. He rolled back the carpet, opened his trunk and took out powdered lapis and the Osiris amulet. He charged the amulet and sprinkled a pinch of lapis on the hedgehog. Nothing.

  Perhaps a more rustic approach. Moly might work. Montpelier moly seemed best, given the time of year. He opened the tin and allowed the pungent smell to waft towards the hedgehog. Nothing. He put a pinch of the dried herb in front of the creature. It sniffed it, sneezed, and went back to its walnut.

  Maybe something stronger. He began to lay the salt in a reveal sigil—the Peacock’s Tail—yet as he did so, he felt the salt trying to tell him something. It happened occasionally. It was a side-effect of working with materials. Most men, even materials men, didn’t notice the silent things, the inanimate things, trying to talk to them. But, for John, it had always been a distraction. To have one’s salt babbling something could cause one’s focus to slip and the magic to lose efficacy.

  His masters at the Institute had told him to discard his salt and other basic materials more often. Other men swept their salt into the fire when they’d finished with it, or kicked out the sigil and left the mess for the maid. But John, the son of a shopkeeper who straightened bent nails for re-sale, and a mother who washed and reused the bloody string from butcher’s parcels, still found himself quite unable to do that.

  So, although he felt a fool every time he swept up his salt—sometimes gathering it, grain by grain, with the tip of his finger—he did it anyway. By now, he’d worked with this salt for years. And while he knew it was merely the fancy of a man who worked alone and lived alone, he sometimes felt that it liked him and the magic he sent through it. He felt the same about some of his other materials. They almost had personalities.

  This evening, the salt was putting the Woden’s Eye sigil into his mind, which was strange because he never used it. It was obsolete. The only reason he recognised it was because it was used in teaching as an example of how the power of a once-strong and certain sigil could fade over the centuries. Yet he knew the looping, rambling lines well enough.

  His hand wobbled as he made the Peacock’s Tail and he had to sweep up his mistake and do it again.

  “Concentrate,” he muttered, unsure whether he was addressing the salt or himself.

  He finished the Peacock’s Tail and ran magic through it. The hedgehog drank some water and started another walnut. Nothing.

  John sat back on his heels, stumped. Thornby would be here any moment and find him crouched on the floor with a puzzled look on his face. Thornby, with his tight breeches and that cool, cut-glass voice that could as easily humiliate as set your blood on fire.

  More to keep busy than anything, John began to arrange the salt into the loops and curves of the Woden’s Eye. It called for the devil’s toenails—seven of them. He added those and set all humming with magic. The hedgehog finished crunching pieces of walnut, and started on the crust. But, did it look a little larger? No, it was a trick of the light.

  Wasn’t it?

  John turned back to the trunk for a handful of large iron pins. They looked rather like ladies’ hat pins, but made for Valkyries twelve feet tall and impatient of furbelows. He used the pins often and they had become convenient power-sinks, enabling him to focus elsewhere while maintaining his original flow of magic. The iron, like the salt, seemed to welcome him, glad of the heat and life of magic. He set them around the Woden’s Eye where they balanced, quivering impossibly on their points, and sent a ward through them. Now everything was contained under a glowing orange-red dome of power, the hedgehog and sigil on the inside, himself on the outside. Nothing could get past the pins.

  The hedgehog dropped the crust and looked at him, cocking its head like a curious dog. Then, there it was again—that sensation so fleeting that it was barely there. It came again, and again, and resolved itself as a strain of music; a silvery piping, a tinkle of bells. The hedgehog had grown unmistakably larger and was still growing. It reared up and stood on its two hind legs in the hatbox.

  John waited, every sense alert, for a flood of magic to spill from the creature—not affecting him, but telling its tale; what it was doing, how it was doing it, and a bit about the person who had done it. But he felt nothing—or almost nothing. It was like the time with Thornby on Howarth’s moorland: magical effect without magical cause. Which was impossible. His heart was pounding. He hastily strengthened the ward connection between the pins.

  Yet the hedgehog, now the size of a small child, with spines as long as his hand, and teeth like a terrier, was still just itself. There was no magic on it, apparently. It stepped out of the hatbox and stretched its forelegs in a remarkably human gesture. Its face had changed too, to some hybrid of hedgehog and human. It had an insouciant air, which reminded him distantly of Thornby. Could this somehow be Thornby’s creature? Had Thornby just played him for the biggest fool in the world? Was Thornby a magical genius who’d discovered a way to conjure undetectable spells?

  The hedgehog sidled to the edge of the sigil and began to walk into th
e wards. John scrambled to his feet, cold with horror and disbelief. It shouldn’t have been able to touch them. He’d once seen a man caught in a sheet of flame in a foundry accident, and it had looked just like this; the dark figure plunging through the living fire. But this fire was orange-red magic, and the hedgehog did not fall, but kept walking, dragging the magic with it across the room towards the far wall. Now the dome of magic was stretched, the way a glass-blower stretches molten glass, with the creature at one end and the sigil at the other. Christ, what if it broke? He needed to strengthen it, now.

  He lunged for more pins, but before he could reach them, the ward exploded in a spray of red sparks and discordant musical notes. He was knocked off his feet, but somehow did not land on the floorboards. Torn shreds of the ward were whirling around and he was whirling with them, helpless as an autumn leaf. The silvery music grew louder. Now it was like being in the midst of a symphony orchestra playing full tilt. But it was playing no tune he could follow. And it hurt. He clapped his hands to his ears, but it made no difference. The music was inside his head. It was in his bones, in his blood. He was breathing it in. Christ, what to do? This was what came of listening to materials. He twisted in the air and managed to grab the open lid of the trunk. It was too late for pins. He pulled his personal ward stone from his pocket, flinging power into it until its golden glow lit up his fist and cocooned him as he hung in the air above his trunk.

  The hedgehog creature turned to look at him. It was silhouetted against a new white glow of magic that seemed to be coming from the wall. Then, a host of creatures came streaming out of the whiteness towards him. Not people, not demons, but something else: women with the faces of owls, a stag with wings. There were green-eyed girls with leaves for hair, a pair of thin naked boys with bright blue skin, a hag with blackthorn fingers, and a huge shaggy dog, red with white spots like a toadstool. They were reaching for him, grabbing him with hands and claws and jaws. And their power was a musical storm, a magical lightning strike. They had him, and his magic was nothing to them.