Thaumatology 101 (2 page)

‘Mostly,’ Lily said, tapping Ceri on the wrist. As if on cue, Ceri’s wrists started to tingle and she stopped walking. Lily frowned. ‘Something wrong? My aura’s off…’ She trailed off as the four figures stepped out of the shadows in front of them.

Lily let out a hiss as the vampire cast his own aura toward them. Ceri thought back to her classes on supernatural biology; a secondary course, but useful. Undead gave off negative thaumitons as part of their natural body function and could direct them to cause fear. Except that this one was trying it on the best protective enchantment two highly skilled practitioners could make, and a half-demon.

‘You don’t want to do this,’ Ceri said. It seemed only fair to warn them.

‘Master wants someone to play with,’ one of the two women said. She had the slightly distant tone in her voice that marked most thralls. Her mind belonged to the vampire. The male had dropped into a crouch; he had ginger hair.

‘Join us,’ the vampire said, his voice a soft wave of sound which caressed the ears. He stepped into the light from a streetlamp and Ceri knew she was supposed to see an attractive man in his mid-thirties with soft, black hair and a trim body. The trouble was that she could see right through the illusion. Beneath the image was the real vamp, grey skin stretched tight over his skull, fangs quite visible due to the thin lips pulled back by age. He was an old one, maybe even pre-Shattering. ‘You don’t really want to deny me, do you?’ the vamp added. The image smiled beautifully; the vampire’s lips turned into a snarl.

‘Yeah, right,’ Lily said, her coat falling back from her shoulders in a single shrug. Ceri felt the wave of heat pass over her as Lily sent her aura out at full power. This was her other aura, her defensive aura. Even the vampire shuddered. The women closed their eyes and started to moan, the werefox’s eyes bulged and he rolled onto the pavement, panting in ecstasy.

The vampire took a breath, his body tensing. ‘Don’t,’ Ceri said. ‘Walk away or you’ll burn.’ It was not a threat, simply a statement. She took a step forward, putting herself between the undead stalker and her friend. Her wrists were starting to sting.

Snarling, the vampire sprang forward. He moved with the same sort of unnatural speed Lily could pull when she wanted, and he was going for Lily, the one who had his thralls entrapped. But vampires, especially old ones, were arrogant creatures; he was going to go
through
Ceri to get there. His fist struck Ceri’s chest and she fell back into Lily’s waiting arms. The vamp stopped, a look of total shock registering on both of his faces for a fraction of a second. Then a wave of flame flashed down his arm and a second later he was a pile of ash on the paving stones.

Ceri hugged her wrists to her chest until the pain subsided. She looked down at the three ex-thralls as Lily put her back on her feet. All three were now on the floor and clearly enjoying themselves from the amount of writhing. ‘You going to let them go?’ she asked.

‘Already did,’ Lily said. If her wrists had not been throbbing so much, Ceri guessed she would have noticed Lily’s aura subsiding. ‘They’ll stop in a few minutes… maybe an hour… by dawn anyway.’

Ceri found herself giggling. ‘Let’s get home. I don’t want to have to explain to the police… again.’

Lily picked up her coat, slipping it on. ‘Vamps like that deserve what they get,’ she said. ‘Give us supernaturals a bad name.’ She linked her arm through Ceri’s and they stepped over the gently quivering body of one of the women as they carried on the way they had been going.

Kennington, August 29
^th

The roof of High Towers was a perfect place for sunbathing. Large and flat, and high enough up that you were not visible from ground level unless you went to the railing around the edge, Lily could bask in the late-summer sun without attracting attention; useful when you refused to wear a swimsuit of any kind. It was not that she tanned; her skin neither tanned nor burned, even under the hottest sun. The heat, however, felt wonderful.

The roof hatch opened and Ceri climbed through it in a two-piece, carrying a notebook and a plastic bottle. She looked across the roof at Lily through a pair of large sunglasses and shook her head. ‘Don’t you ever wear clothes around the house?’ she asked. Of course, she knew the answer perfectly well.

‘We don’t have company,’ Lily replied.

Ceri finished climbing out through the hatch and walked over to set her notebook down on another lounger. Opening her bottle of sun oil, she poured some into her hand and started coating her arms. She did not tan either, but that was down to skin which resolutely refused to brown. If she was lucky, the freckles across her shoulders got a bit bigger. She did, however, burn. Finishing her arms, she coated her chest, shoulders, and stomach. She looked up when she had finished her legs to find Lily watching her. The half-succubus smiled slightly, and closed her eyes, lying back. Picking up her notebook, Ceri lay back in the sun and started reading.

‘You’re not still working are you?’ Lily asked.

Ceri glanced over. Her friend was still laid back with her eyes closed. ‘Yes, so?’

‘It’s Sunday,’ Lily said, ‘you’re supposed to have the weekend off. You’ve had your nose in that book all weekend.’

‘I think I’ve figured out what’s wrong with Tennant’s containment system,’ Ceri replied as if this was justification enough. ‘There’s an error in the synchronisation algorithms for the particle accelerators.

‘Error in the syncopation, huh?’ Ceri giggled; Lily was
not
that dumb. ‘I thought you were doing quantum thaumatology, not music theory.’

‘Can’t find no T-Null if you don’t got that beat,’ Ceri said.

Lily opened one eye, regarding Ceri with a raised eyebrow. ‘Seriously, hun, you’re too geeky to be “down with the hood.”’

Ceri pouted. ‘It’s just a tiny modification to the frequency distribution,’ she said seriously, ‘I’m amazed they haven’t noticed it before.’

‘Maybe her other assistant worked on that part,’ Lily suggested. ‘You said yourself his work was sloppy.’

It was true; Doctor Tennant’s other assistant was a postgrad named Shane Walters and he had the same instinctive grasp of thaumatology theorem that a fish had for paragliding. Walters hated her. He had had Tennant’s undivided attention for two years and now there was a smarter rival, who had understood the entire system in four days, to contend with. His animosity was almost palpable. ‘I kind of hope it wasn’t him,’ she said, though she did not think Tennant would have made the mistake.

‘Shane the Pain still bugging you?’

Ceri grunted in response and finished annotating the equations in her notebook. Lily was right, she should forget about it and relax. She put the book down and turned onto her front. ‘Would you put some oil on my back?’ she asked.

There was a soft creak from the wooden-framed lounger. ‘Sure,’ Lily said settling herself beside Ceri’s hips. Delicate fingers untied the strings around Ceri’s neck, then her back, laying the ties aside. The same fingers, slim, but strong, began to massage oil into Ceri’s shoulders. She let out a sigh and relaxed onto the lounger. Lily’s skin was smooth against hers; slick with the oil, the fingers slid over her shoulders and back, working down to her hips in slow, looping strokes. The hands stopped at the waistband of her briefs and Lily shifted down the lounger a bit.

Having oil put on the soles of her feet tickled a bit and Ceri giggled before Lily moved up to her ankles and started working up her calves, strong fingers pressing the muscles. As the hands reached Ceri’s knees her legs parted slightly, more or less automatically, allowing Lily’s long fingers to slide over the skin of her inner thighs, up to smooth oil into her buttocks and then, slowly, to slide back down…

Ceri’s body went suddenly rigid as she felt the tingle start in her wrists. There was a sudden gasp so feint that she was unsure she had really heard it and then the creak of the other lounger taking weight. The tingling faded again and Ceri tried to relax once more, feeling foolish and irritated. ‘Sorry,’ she said, turning her head to look over at her friend.

‘I… should have more self-control,’ Lily replied, waving the apology away.

That was the problem, right there, the one source of tension in the house, except when someone spilled something on the carpet and Twill had a hissy fit. Ceri was quite secure in her belief that she liked guys, but gay men had made passes at Lily. The girl was sex on legs and anyone who was not physically frigid was attracted to her. In turn, Lily liked Ceri as a friend and her succubus side tended to think that any friend was a sex partner. But sex with a succubus was more than physical pleasure, and Ceri’s sigils perceived the effect as a threat. Ceri was not really sure what would happen to Lily if they ever slipped, but as it was they had to keep their hands to themselves, and sometimes they forgot.

There was a slightly uncomfortable silence for a few minutes. Ceri had found the best way to deal with the situation was to stay quiet and let Lily’s hormones calm down. It was not just that Lily occasionally lacked self-control. They had made a deal; Ceri would not let herself get into a position where Lily’s baser instincts kicked in, Lily would try to keep herself from straying. When they slipped, they both felt guilty.

‘So,’ Lily said to break the silence, ‘you really think you’ll crack it? The thaumiton thing?’

‘Not sure,’ Ceri replied.

‘But it’s a really big deal, right?’ Lily pressed. ‘People have been looking to prove this T-Null stuff for years?’

‘Since nineteen-ninety-seven,’ Ceri mumbled into her arms. That had been when the Quantum Thaumatology Department at Cambridge had published their paper on Quantum Magic and Gravity, proposing the existence of a gauge boson similar to a graviton referred to as a “Null Thaumiton” or a T-Null. The existence of positive and negative thaumitons, T-Plus and T-Minus, had been known for years, but no one had ever managed to explain where they came from, or why they had increased in abundance following the Shattering. The Cambridge team had, at least, proposed a solution for the origin question, but there was no experimental evidence to prove it.

‘Tennant’s rep will go through the roof if she beats Cambridge to it, right?’ Lily said.

‘Uh-huh,’ Ceri said, ‘she’ll basically be able to write her own research cheques.’

‘And the assistant who helps her crack her synchronisation problem?’

‘Well, I’ll get my name on the paper when it’s published,’ Ceri replied, blandly.

‘Oh come on!’ Lily said. ‘It’s the biggest prize in thaumatology! Show some enthusiasm.’

Ceri’s head lifted from her arms and she grinned across at Lily. ‘I’m enthusiastic,’ she said, ‘I just don’t feel the need to bounce up and down like a demented Jack-in-the-Box to do it.’

Lily did not even open her eyes. ‘I don’t bounce,’ she said. ‘I’m far too firm for bouncing.’

Holloway, August 30
^th

The High-energy Thaumatology Building was a grand title for a small, reinforced concrete annexe on the Metropolitan University’s north campus. It was not really that what they did there was dangerous, it was more that people thought that they
might
do something dangerous.

The person who ran the place was Doctor Cheryl Tennant, tall, thin, and attractive in a slightly waspish MILF sort of way. She almost never smiled and was noted for treating anyone less smart than herself, which was almost everyone, like an idiot. Her red hair matched her almost legendary temper. Ceri
almost
felt sorry for her co-assistant researcher.

‘Quite how this went unnoticed in your work for so long when Miss Brent spotted it within a week is beyond me!’ Tennant was saying while Shane Walters contemplated his desk rather closely. ‘I believe with these changes we should be on the road to a functional system.’ Her glare moved away from him, and Shane fixed Ceri with a glare of his own. Okay, so she did not feel
very
sorry for him. ‘Miss Brent, please change the synchronisation algorithms,’ Tennant continued as she stalked out of the small office the two assistants shared. ‘Mister Walters, prepare the circle.’

Shane stood up and circled around his desk toward Ceri’s. He glanced up to check that the Doctor was gone before speaking in a low growl. ‘You’re her favourite now, newt, but you’ll screw up eventually. Watch your back.’ He slumped out to work on the lab’s containment circle.

Ceri decided that she did not actually feel sorry for Shane at all. He was a big man with a slightly bulbous nose. He looked like he had learned to stoop to make himself look smaller and could not stop. He was not particularly good looking, but not particularly ugly. His hair was a sandy blond and cropped short, and he usually carried what he maybe thought was designer stubble. He was not especially bright, and the only reason he was there, really, was that he had some talent at wizardry. That was why he was handling the circle preparation, though Ceri was fairly sure she could have done a better job at that too. It was also why he felt he could call her a “newt,” it was a derogatory term for normal people who could not work magic.

Standing up, she headed out into the laboratory, bracing herself against the slight sting in her wrists. They had been trying to crack the T-Null problem for two years now and the lab radiated thaumitons like an old-style nuclear reactor gave off gamma rays.

Tennant was in the cage containing the banks of recording computers scavenged from every old project she could acquire them from. Around the walls of the room were further banks of equipment; huge capacitors designed to pump out big surges of power into the four thaumic accelerators, along with an array of control systems designed to synchronise the pulses and control the circle resonance oscillators.

Carved into a granite slab in the middle of the room was the circle itself. Ceri knew the basic design well; her father had cut a similar one into a similar slab in one of the basement rooms of High Towers, though the one there was more complex and had different symbology. It was a double ring around a north-facing pentagram; a containment circle with barrier runes cut between the inner and outer ring. Traditional demon summoning circles used a south-facing pentagram, but this one was designed simply to stop anything passing from one side of the circle to the other. Around it, on the floor, were a series of coils made of copper around a silver-iron alloy core. These would induce resonance effects in the circle’s barrier field, synchronised with the particle accelerators. Right in the centre of the circle stood a sensor array connected through to the external data connectors via an infra-red laser transmitter. Cables would have disrupted the circle, but light was fine.