A Matter of Magic (62 page)

“I do not desire to be presented to this individual,” Mrs. Lowe informed Kim. “You will oblige me by not doing so.”

Kim nodded and looked at Mannering. Swallowing seven or eight
questions that she wanted to ask immediately, she settled for a cautious, “What is it you want?”

“This is
private
business,” Mannering said with a significant look first at Tom, then at Mrs. Lowe.

With evident reluctance, and a worried look at Kim, Tom vanished through the rear door. Mannering jerked his head at his henchman and said, “Watch him.”

The henchman started to follow Tom out, then hesitated, eyeing Kim. Mannering scowled. “I said, watch the togs man,” he repeated. “I can deal with a couple of women myself.”

The henchman nodded and left at last. Mannering looked pointedly at Mrs. Lowe. Mrs. Lowe, however, was unmoved. “I told you, this business is private,” Mannering said pointedly after a moment.

“I am not in the least hard of hearing,” Mrs. Lowe replied. “However, if you think that I propose to leave my nephew’s ward alone with a person such as yourself, you are quite mistaken.”

“Madam,” said Mannering in a threatening tone, “I am a wizard!”

“What has that to do with the matter?” Mrs. Lowe returned imperturbably. “The social niceties, as I have repeatedly pointed out, must be observed.” She paused. “You will not, I hope, pretend to offer either of us a mischief—not in broad daylight with two grooms and a coachman just outside.”

Mannering looked from Kim to Mrs. Lowe, plainly off balance.

“If you have something to say to me, you’d better say it,” Kim told him.

“And you had best say it quickly,” Mrs. Lowe said. “Perhaps I should also mention that before I came in, I sent that singularly impenetrable young man—the one who brought your message—in search of a constable. While he did not impress me as being particularly reliable as a general matter, I think that in this instance he can be depended upon to fulfill his commission.”

“You’re lying!”

“Care to wager on it?” Kim said. Though it wasn’t likely to do much actual good; in this part of town, Matt could be hours finding anyone. “Pay or play; I got business elsewhere.”

“This is more important,” Mannering said, still eyeing Mrs. Lowe doubtfully.

Frowning slightly, Kim glanced at Mrs. Lowe herself. Mairelon’s aunt stood in front of the grimy windows of Tom’s shop, looking enormously proper, entirely sure of herself, and totally out of place. Kim blinked, then suppressed a grin.
Mannering’s dealt with gentry before, but I’ll wager he’s never dealt with one who didn’t want to borrow money—and for sure he’s never had to face a respectable lady before. No wonder he’s nattered.
Anything that made Mannering uncomfortable was a good notion as far as Kim was concerned; she looked back at Mannering and said, “What’s so important? That de Cambriol book?”

“You’ve got it,” Mannering said, leaning forward. His eyes glittered, and he seemed to have suddenly forgotten Mrs. Lowe’s presence entirely. “My clerk said you showed it to him. I’ll pay a round sum for it.”

“How much?” Kim said, hoping Mrs. Lowe would have sense enough to keep her comments and opinions, whatever they were, to herself. If she could get him talking . . .

Mannering stepped forward. “How does fifty pounds sound?” he said in a voice just above a whisper.

Kim’s eyebrows flew up. Fifty pounds was an undreamed-of fortune, by the standards of her old life. Coming from a usurer accustomed to dealing with the gentry, however, it was nothing short of an insult. “I ain’t no gull,” she said scornfully. “Mairelon gives me more than that for pin-money. Make a serious offer, or I’m leaving.”

“I’m serious.” Mannering stepped forward again, and Kim felt a twinge of fear. “Oh, I’m very serious. You have no idea how serious I am. Give me that book!”

“I think not,” Mrs. Lowe put in calmly. “Kim, am I correct in guessing that this . . . person is responsible for that outrageous disruption in the library two weeks ago?”

Kim turned a little to answer, and took the opportunity to put a little more space between herself and Mannering. She was still well out of his reach, but a little caution never hurt anybody. “He was behind it,” she told Mrs. Lowe.

Mrs. Lowe’s head moved a fraction of an inch, shifting her attention
to Mannering. Mannering fell back a step. Mrs. Lowe continued to study him for a moment; finally, she said in tones of icy reproof, “I take leave to tell you, sir, that you are unprincipled, presumptuous, and criminally self-serving; moreover, I must assume from your behavior that you lack both manners and wit into the bargain.”

Mannering stared at Mrs. Lowe as if he could not believe his ears. Kim wondered whether he had ever before had his character so thoroughly cut up in quite such a formal and cold-blooded manner; somehow, she doubted it. “Wit?” he said in a strangled voice. “You think I lack wit?”

“It is the obvious conclusion,” Mrs. Lowe said. “For even if one sets aside the illegal aspects of pilfering a book from my nephew’s library, a more poorly conceived and badly executed endeavor than your attempt would be difficult to imagine. Nor has my opinion of your civility or intelligence been improved by your actions since our arrival today.”

“I am a genius!” Mannering’s eyes widened in passion and he raised a beefy fist for emphasis.

Mrs. Lowe was unimpressed. “I have seen no sign of it.”

“I am a wizard!”

“So is my nephew,” Mrs. Lowe said. “And while I do not by any means consider him unintelligent, he is certainly no genius.”

“Ah, but he was born a wizard,” Mannering said. “I made myself a wizard! No one else has ever done that.”

“Indeed?” Mrs. Lowe said in tones of polite disbelief.

Mannering flung his arms out and gave an unintelligible roar. Magic exploded into the shop with such force that Kim’s skin stung. The pile of clothes in front of her shivered and rose into the air. It hovered for a moment, then began to spin. Tattered shirts, worn breeches, several mufflers, and a jacket with a hole in the left elbow went flying in all directions. Kim dodged one of the shirts and two mufflers, keeping her eyes on Mannering all the while. She hadn’t really believed, until this minute, that Mannering could be a wizard.

As suddenly as it had begun, the spell stopped. The flying clothes plowed into walls with the last of their momentum and slid down into limp heaps. “There, you see?” Mannering said.

“That is precisely the sort of display I was referring to earlier,” Mrs. Lowe said. “You would have made a more favorable impression had you chosen to
reduce
the mess in this room, rather than to increase it.”

“How
did
you make yourself a wizard?” Kim put in quickly, before Mannering took a notion to blow the whole shop up just to prove his genius to Mrs. Lowe.

“You’d like to know that, wouldn’t you?” Mannering said. “You and your toff friends don’t want anyone doing real magic but you. That’s why you won’t give me the book, isn’t it?”

Kim blinked, startled by this leap of logic. “We haven’t agreed on a price yet,” she pointed out cautiously.

“Hang the price! I want the book. Now.”

“What, you think I’m a flat?” Kim shook her head and snorted. “I don’t cart it around with me everywhere I go. What do you want it for, anyways?”

Mannering smiled. In a calm, too-reasonable voice, he said, “Why, to make it hold on steady-like.”

“To make
what
hold on?”

“The spell.” Mannering rocked forward on the balls of his feet. “It keeps wobbling,” he said in a confidential tone. “And it takes more magic to straighten it out every time. I have to keep finding new magic to keep it from collapsing. If I had the right book, I wouldn’t have to work so hard to keep them in line.”

A chill ran up Kim’s spine; she wasn’t quite sure what Mannering was getting at, but she was positive that she wasn’t going to like it one bit once she figured it out. And she didn’t like his erratic behavior. Still, his mercurial changes of mood had kept him talking so far; if he continued, she might find out something useful. “Keep who in line?”

“My wizards,” Mannering said. “Some of them used to be your friends. You used to like Wags, didn’t you? And Bright Bess, I know you got on with her. You don’t want them to end up like that Yanger woman, do you?”

The image of Ma’s slack-jawed, drooling face rose in Kim’s mind. Kim’s stomach tightened. “What did you do to Ma Yanger?”

“I didn’t do anything,” Mannering said, still in the same much-too-reasonable
voice. “Not really. She could even have had her magic back, if she’d been willing to go along like the rest of them. Some of her magic, anyway. It was your toff friends who destroyed her, and now you’re going to do the same to the others.”

“Gammon!” Kim said. “I ain’t doing nothing.”

“I believe that in this instance, doing nothing is indubitably the wisest course,” Mrs. Lowe commented. “I must deplore your manner of expression, however, no matter how appropriate it may be under these circumstances.”

Mannering turned on her in sudden fury. “Interfering harpy! If you were a wizard, I’d do you like Yanger!”

“So you
were
behind it!” Kim said.

“No, I told you, it was your toff friends,” Mannering said, abruptly reasonable once more. “They unbalanced the spell, and. . . .” He shrugged.

Kim frowned. “You still aren’t making sense.” She was beginning to think he never would.
One thing at a time.
“What has this got to do with the de Cambriol book?”

“It has the rest of the spell in it,” Mannering said. “It has to, or they wouldn’t be trying so hard to keep me from getting it.” He rocked back on his heels. “The comte’s book only had a few words, and the Russian’s was no help at all.”

“The rest of the spell that lets wizards share their power?” Kim guessed.

“You know it!” Mannering rocked forward, eyes glittering feverishly. “You’ve read the de Cambriol book, haven’t you?”

“I’ve heard talk,” Kim said cautiously. “Is that how you made yourself a wizard—by getting somebody to share his power with you?”

“Of course. He didn’t know I wouldn’t have to give it back as long as I kept the spell going.”

“Kept it going?” Kim stared, then shook her head, remembering what Mairelon had told her. “You gudgeon! That spell was never meant to last more than a day or two!”

In the doorway, Mrs. Lowe pursed her lips and gave Kim a reproving glance, but said nothing.

“That’s what they want you to think,” Mannering said, and smiled
slyly. “I’ve kept it up for months now. It just takes adding another wizard’s power now and then, to keep up the level of magic in the spell.”

“You cast the whole spell again every couple of weeks?” Kim said, thinking of the elaborate preparations in the ballroom at Grosvenor Square.

“No, of course not!” Mannering said. “Just the last bit, that links a wizard in with the main spell. I thought of that myself,” he added with pride. “And I don’t even have to do that very often, because the spell absorbs the magic whenever someone attacks me.”

Not just when someone attacks
, Kim thought. Mairelon’s spell had been intended just to trace Mannering’s scrying spell, but all his magic had been swallowed up by this . . . this enchantment of Mannering’s. The thought made her feel ill.

“It’s getting harder to keep it balanced, though,” Mannering went on. “I need more power, but if I get too much at once it starts to burn out the spell. That’s what did for Ma Yanger—when those wizard friends of yours attacked me just for looking at them at that opera, it was too much for my sharing-spell to handle all at once.”

Mairelon’s first tracing spell
, Kim thought, feeling even sicker than before. They’d found Ma the day after the incident with the flying book, and they’d known she couldn’t have been incapacitated for very long, but they’d never connected the two.

“The wobble hurt everybody else in the link, too,” Mannering went on, “but it burned the Yanger woman’s mind out completely.” He laughed suddenly, a harsh, half-mad sound. “Serves her right for being so uncooperative.”

“Uncooperative?”

“She wouldn’t work for me,” Mannering said in the pouting tone of a child complaining that he had been denied a sweet. “I’d have let her have a little magic, if she had agreed, but she wouldn’t.” He frowned and added fretfully, “The spell’s been unbalanced ever since. I thought it would settle after I added that Russian’s magic, but it’s worse than ever. I’m going to need a new wizard soon. I suppose I’ll have to take Starnes after all, but I wanted to have everything steadied down before I started on wizards with real training.”

And in another minute or two, it might occur to him that he had a wizard right in front of him who was barely started on her “real training,” and therefore much safer to steal magic from than Lord Starnes was likely to be. Surreptitiously, behind a fold of her skirt, Kim made the one-handed gesture Shoreham had shown her and murmured the activating word of the spell in a voice too low for Mannering to hear. If he had all the skills of a real wizard, and not just the borrowed power, he’d feel the refuge spell go up, but by then it would be too late for him to stop it. From what Shoreham had said . . .

Mannering’s head jerked back as if he had been struck. “What are you doing?” he demanded. “You’re trying to trick me, like those others, like that Russian. Well, I’ll stop that!
I hold yours, to me thy power comes!
”

The air crackled with the power of Mannering’s final words, and Kim felt his spell strike her shield. The force behind the blow was enormous; had the shield been meant to withstand it, force for force and power for power, Kim knew it would have failed. But Gerard’s Refuge didn’t block or absorb or resist attacks—it “sort of shoves them to one side where they can go off without doing any harm,” Shoreham had said. Mannering’s spell slid sideways and whizzed invisibly past Kim’s ear.

Kim stared at him in shock. “You cast that spell in
English
!”

“Of course! I am an English wizard,” Mannering said proudly. His expression changed. “You—How are you keeping your magic? I should have it by now!” He raised his hands.
“I hold yours, to me—”