Calamity's Child (7 page)

"Then I'd best make my apologies at
once," he said and stepped energetically forward.

"Benjy!" Denora looked around
Beyemuir's shoulder, and held out her hands. "You are so terribly
late! Look, the lights have gone down once already."

Hillier kissed both hands, with flair,
and a careful eye to a husband's pride, and stepped back, smiling.
"My apologies, dear Lady Charles! That a mere inconvenience of
traffic should cause you an instant's worry!"

"At least it was worry rewarded," Nora
said, smiling brilliantly upon both Hillier and Beyemuir. "Elihu,
do pour Benjy something while he tells me how his daughter goes
on."

"Aletha goes on quite well," Hillier
said promptly, with another smile for her sweet courtesy. "Her
talent for the Arts Magical is growing. Her tutor is quite
encouraged."

"I am gratified to hear it," Denora
said warmly. "So she is responding well to the
treatment?"

Hillier's face darkened, as he glanced
aside to take his glass from Beyemuir. "Thank you, Elihu." He
sipped and looked back to Nora.

"The treatment is not a panacea, and
not even those who love her best believe that she will ever embrace
a normal life. Indeed, her tutor speculates that her affliction
adds potency to her talent. I find no collaboration in the
literature, and one does not like to subject her to any further
testing..."

"Certainly not!" Denora said warmly,
and met her husband's eyes across the box. "Nicky dear, I think we
should get everyone seated, don't you? I do believe the lights have
gone down again..."

*

It was Nicholas and Denora's pleasant
habit, on the mornings when they were both at home, to breakfast
together in their private room, sharing buttered toast, coffee, and
the Times between them.

Two days after opera party, they sat
cozily together in the window nook, she in her carmine silk robe,
he in the kimono Lord Murasaki had given him for his assistance in
repairing a certain irregularity in his lordship's love life. The
window was open in the nook, admitting an agreeable bustling from
the street below. The late morning sun bathed the table and remains
of breakfast in languorous yellow light.

Nora, her father's daughter to the
fingertips, was immersed in the business section, one slim hand
curled 'round her coffee cup. Nicky slouched in his chair, lazily
perusing the world news. According to the Times, the world was
going to pot -- no surprises there.

He turned the page to city news, one
hand groping toward the table in pursuit of his cup -- and
froze.

"I say..." he began, and paused as he
read it again.

"Nicky?" Nora's hand dropped lightly
to his sleeve. "What is it?"

He lowered the paper to meet her deep
brown eyes, and found his voice. "Wolheim's dead."

Her eyes widened. "Oh, no, darling! An
accident, I suppose?"

Anyone who knew of the nature of Dr.
Sir John Wolheim's experiments with the Force Magical would
certainly suppose an accident. Nicholas glanced down at the paper.
Yes, the damning phrase was there...

"Nicky?"

"Suspicious circumstances, it says
here."

"Blast." Nora crumpled her paper onto
her lap with a frown. "Dickon will be calling, won't
he?"

Dickon -- that would be Prince Richard
-- would most assuredly be calling, Nick thought sourly. The wonder
was that he hadn't called already. He sighed, folded the paper and
dropped it on the table.

"I'd better dress," he said, pushing
out of the chair. He smiled down into her eyes and playfully tapped
a finger against her cheek. "Come, now, darling; it's not as if I'm
being sent to Timbuktu."

"This time," she said darkly, just as
the phone rang.

*

It was mid-day when Nicholas arrived
at the house of the late Dr. Sir John Wolheim. The police were
there before him, of course, but Dickon's office had been kind
enough to let them know to expect the Prince's Sorcerer.

Despite the news report, Nicky had
more than half-expected to confront the remains of a catastrophic
release of magical energy. Wolheim's spells always carried a taint
of brute force; a hint of rather too much power used. It was a flaw
which would have earned him the most stringent censure of the Dean
at Balliol, Nick's alma mater. Wolheim had been an Oriel man,
however, and after all these years remained primarily a student of
the philosophy of magic, rather than a practitioner. Benjamin
Hillier, who had as deft a touch with a spell as anyone of Nick's
acquaintance, himself a graduate of Balliol, had read practical
magic, with a second in engineering. So it was that Hillier kept a
house in the city and was no more a danger to his neighbors than
the heedless town traffic, while Wolheim held to a country estate,
where his frequently explosive explorations endangered no one but
himself and his peculiarly devoted house staff.

Nick was let into the house by one of
Appleton's men, and escorted to the laboratory at the back by
another.

"Here you are, sir," his escort said,
as they reached a doorway filled by a stern and wide-shouldered
policeman. The door leaned against the opposite wall.

"Had to take it off the hinges," the
guard said. "Locked from the inside, it was. Housekeeper called us
when he didn't answer the house phone." He stepped aside, giving
Nick room to pass.

"Inspector!" he called into the room.
"It's His Lordship."

Even here, in the belly of the beast,
there was no overt damage. Nicky paused on the threshold to admire
the neat ordinariness of the room. Tools were hung away; vessels
lined up by kind and capacity; books shelved; poisons behind glass;
the famous collection of wind-up toys tidily arranged on their
special shelf, except for one -- a chimp mounted on a tricycle --
sitting quietly, its energy spent, in the center of the otherwise
empty work table.

From behind that spotless work surface
arose the long and dour form of Inspector Appleton. "Your
Lordship," he said. "Here it is, sir. We've left everything as it
was found."

Nick did not number precognition among
his talents, but there was something in Appleton's face that put
him on his guard. Carefully, he walked forward, steeled for the
worst.

It was well that he was, for the
object lying on the floor bore no relationship to the dapper and
impatient little man Nicky remembered meeting at various
professional symposia across the years.

The corpus was hirsute, and thick,
where Wolheim had been bald and thin. Rags of what had once been a
laboratory smock and corduroy trousers clung in ribbons to bestial
arms and trunk. The head was misshapen, showing a curved growth of
horn from the temple, sweeping back around an oddly elongated ear.
The face... Nicky sank carefully down on his heels. The face was as
hairy as the rest of the body, the features thickened into
something ape-like or worse.

Nicky looked up to Appleton. "You're
certain this is Sir John?"

"Sergeant Beerman cast the True-See,
sir. Housemaid identified the ghost."

Nicky nodded. Sylvia Beerman was a
first-rate 'caster. Wasted in the police force, really. He rose and
stood staring down at the thing on the floor.

"Beerman said you was to check her,
sir. Said she didn't believe it herself."

"Well, then. We mustn't disappoint a
lady, eh?" Sighing, Nicky slid his wand from its long pocket inside
the lining of his jacket, and held it poised, eyes half-closed,
gathering energy. The tip of the wand glowed a ridiculous bright
green, which had pained him in his youth, when he first learned
that the wand light's color reflected the magician's life force. He
had been quite the esthete in those days, and would have given his
soul for a wand-glow of icy blue or starry silver. Thank God Nora
had come along and knocked that nonsense out of him.

He glanced at Appleton,
who held the police department's
camera obscura
at the
ready.

The glow from the wand-tip was steady.
Nick drew the pattern in bright green fire around the corpse,
murmuring, "I will see with the eyes of truth."

The pattern flared, bathing the
monstrous corpse in a brilliant wash of color. Superimposed on the
bestial body, emblazoned in brilliant green, was the image of a
thin and tidy little man in rumpled lab coat and at-home corduroys,
his face hairless, his features contorted in agony.

"Got it!" Appleton said, over the snap
of the shutter closing. He fiddled with the camera a moment, then
nodded and held up a glass slide. "Same as Beerman caught, sir.
Hers was a little fainter. Shall I run this past the
maid?"

"It can't hurt, I suppose. Please
express my compliments to Sergeant Beerman -- first rate work, as
always."

"Will do, sir."

The green image above the horrid body
was fading. Nicky stood with the wand between his palms, watching
the last of the spell dissolve. He glanced at Appleton.

"I'll need some room,
Inspector."

"Of course, sir. I'll be right outside
the door."

Nicky stood, his attention was focused
on the ...thing... on the floor. His next order of business was to
identify the magician responsible for the spell -- or spells --
which had beset Wolheim during his last hour of life. This was work
of high order, less energy intensive than the True-Seeing, but more
wearying for the magician. It was not Nicky's favorite spell,
though it was certainly among the enchantments he worked most
often.

It had become something of a challenge
among mages of a certain level of skill -- and mischief -- to
conceal -- to attempt to conceal -- one's magical signature. In
some circles, it was a parlor game. Among the criminal element it
was far from a game, and there were those who were quite ingenious
in their methods. But it all and always came down to cover-up,
obfuscation and misdirection. No one -- no matter how skilled --
could completely erase all trace of their own signature.

Sighing, Nicky had recourse once more
to the wand, this time enclosing himself and the corpse within the
same circle of glowing green fire. He spoke a Word and the flames
leapt upward, meeting over his head, sealing out the world and any
random magics still afloat in the late doctor's
laboratory.

He closed his eyes, feeling the wand
vibrating in his hand; the air, warmed by power, caressing his
face. Invoking the trance was a matter of a measured breath, the
deliberate forming of a Word in the blackness behind his
eyelids.

As always, it was as if he passed
through a door, leaving a shadowed room and stepping into full,
glorious daylight. All about him, he perceived the cords of power,
the lines of magic which knit the world of the spirit to that of
the flesh. There was no deception in this place, nor was there
mercy. Those who came seeking truth here had best be canny, and
skillful -- and wise. If one could not be wise, caution might
do.

Nicky, who had studied caution at the
feet of a master, brought his attention to the sorry tangle of cord
and discord before him. Even in the remoteness of the sorcerous
viewpoint, he felt a thrill of astonishment, as he counted the
layers of spell enwrapping that which had been John Wolheim. So
numerous were they that the shine of each melded into the next,
rendering the whole a blot of meaningless, shapeless power, obscene
in this place of orderly peril.

So, then. The sorcerer girded his
will, lifted his wand, and set about the tedious and dangerous task
of separating the layers, one by one, subjecting each to the
closest scrutiny before allowing it to evaporate back into the
common reservoir of magic.

*

Some hours later, baffled
and sweat-soaked, his ears ringing with exhaustion, Nicky leaned
against the work table. He had scrutinized each of the
eighty-five
separate and distinct high
level attacks upon Wolheim's person, and yet discovered no smallest
trace of the magician who had conceived and implemented those
attacks. It was as if a textbook spell had suddenly become
maliciously animate, repeating itself over and over. Or a
machine...

He closed his eyes. Memory replayed
Brian's voice, cheerful with gossip: "declared that it is possible
to store -- store -- a spell!"

"Oh," Nicky murmured.
"Blast."

*

He was known to Benjamin Hillier's
butler, and so was shown to the upper parlor while that worthy went
off to roust his master from his work. Restless and exhausted,
Nicky stalked the bookshelves -- novels, mostly, with Benjy's more
interesting books reposing in the research library upstairs, next
to the laboratory.

Sighing, he turned from the shelves --
and caught himself up. Curled into the corner of a wide damask
chair was a tow-headed girl of about twelve years, her dress rucked
up to expose thin knees. There was a book on her lap -- the
bestiary, he saw -- but she was staring at him out of frowning blue
eyes.

"Good afternoon, Aletha," Nicky said
softly. "How are you today?"