Could you un-epiphanise? Change back? Maximilian would rather be dead. But what could he do? If he wanted to keep the spectacles, he needed to help get Effie’s books back. But it seemed as if this were going to cost him. He would have to gamble some M-currency on . . . well . . . what? He had to get Carl under control, but how?
17
Maximilian knew how to cast a spell, of course. Anyone who spent as much time as he did on the dim web knew how to cast a spell. There were, he understood, two main ways of doing it.
The first way, mainly used by Neophyte or Apprentice hedge-witches with limited access to M-currency, was to spend a great deal of time thinking about your spell, the exact wording of it (The Liminal always contained lots of examples of poorly worded spells and the disasters that followed), the exact personage or spirit in the Otherworld to whom it should be directed, along with the best mode of flattery to persuade them to help you. This request would then be written down, ideally in one’s own blood (though ink from an elegant fountain pen was also acceptable), on extremely nice paper, during a full moon, and then burnt. The ash would then be buried at a sacred spot from where the resident faeries would convey the request to the Otherworld, where it may or may not be granted.
Spells cast in this way often had unexpected results. Given the natural resistance of the Realworld to magic, and the habit of Otherworlders not to do magic in the Realworld, anything not worded precisely enough was bound to go completely wrong. Requests for money would often be met with a death in the family (‘Oh? You mean you didn’t want to get rich through inheritance? You should have said so in the spell!’). Requests for fame could often lead to someone growing the biggest ever toenail or developing the worst breath in the world or something along those lines (‘Oh? You mean you wanted to be famous for something attractive? Why ever didn’t you say?’). The Otherworld frowned on requests made for oneself, but it was also seen as bad form to request something for someone else.
So this way of doing magic was quite hard.
The second way of casting a spell was officially only supposed to work if you were an Adept or Master in your ability and had some amazing boon. But in theory, if you had enough M-currency for what you wanted to achieve then you could simply use your mind to achieve it. If, for example, you wanted to light a candle using magic (which only a fool would attempt, given the low Realworld price of a box of matches), you would look at the wick, concentrate in a special way, think ‘flame’ and, as they say, abracadabra. It would light.
That was the theory. In reality, learning to light a candle using just M-currency was about twice as hard as learning to ride a bike. Not impossible, but tricky. Once you had the ability, you had it for ever, like a two-handed backhand or joined-up writing. But developing the knack required practice. And ideally, guidance. A few Monday evening sessions in St George’s Hall with Dr Green, perhaps. Maximilian had not practised, nor had any guidance. He had not even thought of casting a spell before. Not really.
Carl was walking up the cobbled alleyway with a selection of strange-looking hooks and bits of metal and a book called Easy Pickings. Maximilian and Wolf were alongside him.
‘You have done this before?’ said Wolf.
‘Yes, mate. I’m an apprentice.’
‘But . . .’
‘This is my textbook. Be good practice, this. I failed my last test and— ’
‘Wait. You failed a lock-picking test?’
‘Only by ten marks. Well, eleven.’
‘How many marks did you need to pass?’
‘Pass mark was twenty-nine out of forty. I got eighteen. Not bad, eh?’
Maximilian sighed.
Another problem with using spells in the Realworld was that they could easily start clashing with each other, jostling for position, elbowing one another out of the way, as they all hurtled chaotically together through the thinnest part of the Luminiferous Ether between the Realworld and the Otherworld. (The Luminiferous Ether is, as everyone knows, the main substance that conducts magical energy through the universe.)
For example, right now, several spells were working on Maximilian. There was the spell cast by Effie’s grandfather, Griffin Truelove, as he fought for breath not far from where Maximilian was now. It had not been a very strong spell, given the power he had left, but had been intended to protect his books and get them to Effie. Magic cast in this vague way uses the nearest and most obvious resources to achieve its aims. In a sense, then, Maximilian was simply one of these resources. But elsewhere in the Luminiferous Ether lurked another spell, also quite weak, cast by Odile Underwood when her son was born, that asked for him to live a normal, unremarkable, unmagical life that should be neutral if it could not be good.
This spell, which had been rather badly worded, especially given that the Luminiferous Ether often ignored prefixes like ‘un’, was partly responsible for Carl. (Although, of course, in another quite random way, Carl was just Carl.) There were also other, less significant spells working on Maximilian. Somewhere in the west a farmer had prayed for rain and so Maximilian, along with everyone else in the city, was breathing approximately 0.0000007 times faster than usual to create the moisture so requested. Such is the way of the world.
And then there was the spell being cast right at this moment in the grounds of a dark folly (a sort of pretend castle built by rich people long ago) in a small village to the south of the city by a girl in a black nightdress who really should have been finishing her homework and going to sleep.
Raven Wilde found it hard to sleep when her mother was still downstairs ‘entertaining’, which had so far involved many bottles of expensive wine and a live jazz band (well, the gamekeeper’s son and his friend on tenor sax and double bass). Raven had been part of the dinner party until ten when Torben, a poet from the valleys with long, wild, grey hair, had taken out a bottle of dessert wine and a guitar and given her ‘the wink’ that meant she should go upstairs and allow him to try to serenade her mother in peace. There were other guests to get rid of too, of course, including Skylurian Midzhar, Laurel Wilde’s glamorous publisher who had been holding court at this particular dinner party for what seemed like hours. Or maybe Torben actually planned to serenade her? At the folly it was often unclear who exactly was being serenaded by whom. And if it meant a chance of Torben actually getting his poetry published – he’d probably do anything.
Raven Wilde needed friends. That’s what her spell was for. Like Maximilian and Wolf, she had no father – he had been a lot older than her mother, and had died when Raven was only five. She had no brothers or sisters or cousins and so she spent a lot of time alone. Her mother, being a famous writer and therefore quite temperamental, was prone to locking herself in the folly’s keep (a kind of small tower in which you could in theory hide from your enemies, or amorous poets) in order to plot for long periods of time. Laurel Wilde was also often to be found standing on the battlements, her red hair flying in the wind, sobbing over lost love and the fact that someone else was at number one in the hardback fiction charts.
This week she was particularly upset because her latest book had just sold its one hundred thousandth paperback when the Matchstick Press had announced that it was not going to print any more copies. Where was the logic in that? Skylurian Midzhar had not been very forthcoming on this issue. Rather confusingly, she’d even brought along a magnum of champagne to toast Laurel’s success.
Raven had spent months thinking about her spell and researching it, just as her spell book had said. She had even bought a special fountain pen with which to write it out – having read that this was the correct way to present a spell (after being edited, the book had no longer mentioned that these spells should ideally be written in blood).
In Raven’s mother’s books magic just happened, almost of its own accord, to the select set of attractive people born with the ability to use it. Laurel Wilde wrote about magic but did not believe in it, although she never admitted this to her many fans. Raven believed in her he
art that magic did exist and that it didn’t work the way her mother wrote about it, but she had no real idea how it did work. She’d been trying the invisibility spell for months now and nothing had happened, except that thing with her pencil. But Raven now suspected that the pencil had just been lost or stolen.
The friendship spell was much more important. And it was going to work.
Dear Luminiferous Ether, she had written. Please help me. I am choosing this day to bring friendship into my life. I send this heartfelt request that I will soon find new friends, that these friends will be human children (Raven had read about people who had asked for friends but forgotten to specify their species), ideally from my school, and that we will share life in a beautiful and meaningful way together for many years, helping each other through any difficulties and problems we encounter. In order to help facilitate this spell, I will try my best to bring friendship into my life using normal means – for example, I will try to talk to people more often. And I will continue to make offerings and give aid to any other troubled beings I encounter, in the spirit of Love and Life. Thank you. Yours faithfully, Raven Wilde.
The Luminiferous Ether was quite touched by this. No one ever usually wrote to it. It was hardly ever seen as a magical personage in its own right, only as the vague ‘stuff’ used to carry magic around. But this Realworld girl had chosen it as her way of connecting with the Otherworld. It had been chosen as her special helper. Well, all right, what was it she wanted? Friendship? Hmm. The Luminiferous Ether had quite a few spells flowing through it at this moment that could just be shifted a little here, and there, and rearranged just so, and, well . . .
After a lot of swearing and much consultation of Easy Pickings, Carl managed to get the door open. Maximilian and Wolf walked into the dark interior of Leonard Levar’s Antiquarian Bookshop.
‘So we’re going to pass you the books through that grille I showed you before,’ said Maximilian to Carl. Wolf had the antique brass key all ready. All they had to do was go to the back of the shop, where Wolf would show Maximilian the secret bookshelf that would open onto . . .
‘Right,’ said Carl, distractedly.
‘And then you’re going to wait for us and drive us back to Maximilian’s,’ said Wolf. ‘And help us unload the books into his garage.’
‘Right.’ Carl scratched his head. ‘Unless . . .’
‘What?’
‘Are you sure you haven’t got any more money? If someone else comes along and offers me more I might just . . .’
‘Carl!’ said Wolf.
‘All right,’ said Maximilian. ‘I really didn’t want to have to do this, but . . .’ He looked hard at Carl, who had now started putting his hooks and other implements in a battered leather pouch. ‘Carl?’ Carl looked up at him. ‘I haven’t done this before, so apologies if . . .’
Maximilian looked deep into Carl’s eyes. He thought something in his head like, ‘You are sleepy. You are now in my power.’ Carl started swaying slightly, but his eyes remained fixed on Maximilian, a little as if he were a baby duckling and Maximilian were his mother.
‘You will now do my bidding,’ Maximilian said with his mind. Carl carried on swaying, looking at his new master with just a touch of confusion. He nodded slightly. Yes, he would do whatever Maximilian told him. But . . .
There were so many problems with this spell that it is hard to even know where to begin describing them. This particular spell had occurred to Maximilian in the first place because he’d read something about a similar attempt to overpower a mind that had gone disastrously wrong. He could not remember how it had gone wrong, nor what could have been done to make it right. He had just remembered the idea. And then there was the problem that attempting to overpower someone’s mind was not permitted by the Guild of Craftspeople, which meant that officially Maximilian was now dabbling in what Laurel Wilde would probably call ‘the dark side’. Third, the overpowering of another’s mind, as well as being unethical, is very costly.
It was hard to tell how much of Carl’s mind had been overpowered before Maximilian gave him his main command.
‘You will wait for us to pass you the books and then you will take us to my house and help us unload them. Is that clear?’
Carl’s eyes were floating around like two eggs in a pan.
‘Yes, mate,’ he managed, before turning to walk unsteadily back to the car.
‘Is he all right?’ asked Wolf.
‘I think so,’ said Maximilian. ‘Right. Where’s this bookshelf?’
Carl staggered like a zombie down the alleyway until his mind (which was unaccustomed to holding magical instructions) decided it was indeed very sleepy, and he settled down for a snooze just by the turning to the Funtime Arcade.
Maximilian and Wolf managed to find the secret door hidden among Leonard Levar’s dusty bookshelves. There was a first edition of Summer Lightning by P.G. Wodehouse that you had to sort of push, and then . . . They were through. Maximilian and Wolf groped around until they found the switch that dimly lit the passageway down to the caves. Then they crept down the passageway and used the old brass key to open the large wooden door into the first small cave, and then they made their way into the final cave, which was full of crates.
And then all the lights went out.
‘Good evening,’ said a cold, thin voice. ‘I see you have come for my books.’
18
The evening before the audition went very quickly. After a hearty blackgrain stew, most of which the girls left uneaten, Crescentia lent Effie her clear nail polish and showed her how to file her nails into perfect ovals. She also taught Effie how to exfoliate her skin all over, which was not just extremely boring but painful, too. In her wash bag, Effie found a vial of golden oil. Crescentia explained that this was the very, very expensive Oil of Perfection and that Effie should put it on in the morning, first thing, before getting dressed.
At seven o’clock in the morning, they were ready. Crescentia was wearing the black suede dress with cashmere tights, and Effie was in her black leather jeans with the cream silk pussy-bow blouse and the diamanté sandals. She didn’t like this outfit as much as the one she’d travelled in the day before, but Crescentia had assured her it would go down well with the judges. Crescentia had back-combed her hair and put on a lot of make-up – pink lips and black, smoky eyes. Effie didn’t have any make-up, but the Oil of Perfection had meant she didn’t really need any. She sort of glowed all over.
As they waited for the car, Effie took in just how calm Crescentia now was, compared with the day before.
‘Are you OK?’ Effie asked her.
‘Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?’
‘Well, it’s just that yesterday, when you arrived . . .’
‘I was a different person then. I’m ready for this now.’ She tossed her back-combed hair. ‘I’m ready to be a princess.’
Effie couldn’t help wondering whether something in their breakfast had been drugged. She felt a bit soft and relaxed and not quite so desperate to go home and get on with rescuing her grandfather’s books. She found she’d even started to forget what and where home really was. She touched her silver ring and willed some of her normal self to come back. Yes. She had to get into Truelove House somehow. That was what she was here for, she remembered. Find Dragon’s Green. That’s what her grandfather had said. She had found it. Or at least she thought she had. She just had to get through today and then she could find a way to escape and get a calling card, whatever that even was. Rollo. Again she tried to remember where she had heard that name before.
The car arrived and drove them through winding leafy lanes and up towards the big old house on the hill. Effie again wondered where exactly they were. This place was so much like something from the past, with all the villagers looking like peasants and no sign of anything like a pager or a radio or even – Effie scanned the landscape – any kind of electricity pylon. But there were still cars and fashion. Maybe the girls were just very deep in the countryside.
<
br /> When the car pulled up to the house they were greeted by one footman who took their luggage, and another carrying a large parasol.
‘Well, cover them, cover them!’ called a large woman in a black velvet dress.
‘Sorry, Madame McQueen. Immediately, Madame McQueen.’
‘Do not let the sun touch them!’ shouted Madame McQueen. ‘Hurry, girls, inside, inside. We don’t want freckles.’
‘Good luck,’ whispered Crescentia to Effie.
‘You too,’ said Effie.
Then they were whisked inside. They ended up separated in a room with dozens of other girls, all waiting to take their turn in the audition room. Talk was mainly about make-up, fashion and hair, although two girls in the far corner seemed to be having a more passionate discussion about the ethics of the dragon.
‘Yeah, well,’ one was saying to the other. ‘My mum says that in Dragon’s Wold – and in loads of other places, actually – the dragon insists on having his princesses force-fed with dried apricots, sage and breadcrumbs. He likes them to come pre-stuffed, apparently. The girls in the school there have to live in crates so that they never see the sun and never develop any muscle at all. That dragon can’t bear even the tiniest bit of gristle. Imagine that. So we’re lucky to be here, in fact. It could have been so much worse.’
Effie’s audition was over more quickly than she’d imagined. It took place on the stage in the big hall. When she entered she could see that there were four other judges apart from Madame McQueen.