The Wizard of London

She arched an eyebrow, though of course he would not be able to see it in the dark. “I was never pretty.” It was an old “disagreement.”

“I thought you were. And I think you are beautiful now. Since I am the one who looks at your face more often than you do, I think I should be the one allowed to make the judgment.” The usual argument.

She wasn’t going to win it. She never did. “I wish the business would run itself.” She sighed.

She felt his hand stroking her hair. “And I wish the school would run itself, or that you and I could build a little hut on the beach of a tropical island and raise goats like Robinson Crusoe. But goatskins make dreadful gowns, or so I’m told.”

“Smelly, anyway.” There were many things she could have talked to him about, but none of them were as important as simply being here in his arms, and luxuriating in the feeling that this was the best, the only place in the world for her, and that she would never have felt like this about anyone else. This was the still center of the whirling universe, where everything was at rest. In its own way, the jewel in the heart of the lotus, the place where love was, had been, and always would be. Buddhists, of course, would argue that point, preferring their way of detachment from the world. But on the whole, she preferred hers.

So she would not spoil the moment with anything other than things that would make him smile. So she told him about Tommy’s latest misadventure until the bed shook with their laughter.

***

Cordelia wished there was a way to look at “herself” in a mirror.

It turned out that there was a way to turn the face of your soul-self into something other than a reflection of the real world “you.” She’d had to search through some excruciatingly boring manuscripts to find it, plowing with determination through things that ranged from absurd to outright duplicitous, but she had found it. She thought that she had done a creditable job, given the cryptically worded instructions. Fortunately she had done enough out-of-body work with David that she knew what his “self” looked like. It would have been a dreadful mistake to have appeared in something other than the chainmail and surcoat he habitually wore in that semblance.

Perhaps it would be a wise choice to gradually have him wear a helm as well. That way she would have less chance of losing hold of the likeness of his face.

Yes, that would be a good idea. It should be easy enough, a little suggestion that if out-of-body work was becoming hazardous, a helm might be in order, to remind the soul-self to keep its defenses up. It was a very good thing that what the avatar wore was often as variable as the personality within. David, the most conservative of mages, had been known to vary the outfitting of his own avatar to suit the occasion, now and again. No one would wonder that he had assumed a helmet, and he himself could implement the change without much thought.

So the next part of the experiment could proceed as planned; to discover if one living soul could be used to push out another. The child that was silent was a weaker personality than the one that hummed. A dose of laudanum mixed with other drugs and a great deal of honey in its bedtime milk would ensure that its hold on its body was weaker still. There was a distinct advantage in that the second child’s spirit would be drawn more strongly to the body that rightfully belonged to it. That would simulate her own will driving her to inhabit David’s shell.

After watching the two children sharply for an hour or so, she was satisfied that she had set up the best possible conditions. It did appear that the child about to be un-housed was another of the Peggoty sort, however. Unlike the other, which was at least learning to play with toys in the manner of a normal child, the boy just sat there staring vaguely at whatever object his nursemaid put in his hands, now and again turning it over and over and studying it, but otherwise showing no signs of real interest in it. And it was getting fat, in a pale and puffy sort of way, from inactivity. Clearly only the scant rations at the orphanage had kept it so slender.

Useless in every way. Best she get rid of it now, as one would dispose of an unwanted puppy.

But she also wanted to eliminate every thought of suspicion, so she went in and exclaimed about the child’s lassitude to the nursemaid.

“Yes’m,” the little nursemaid agreed, bobbing a curtsy. “He don’t look right, and that’s a fact, Mum. But he being a foundling and all, they sometimes are sickly.”

As if your brothers and sisters weren’t! Cordelia thought with amusement, knowing, as the maid did not know, that her mistress knew everything of note about her family, including her mother’s three miscarriages and five dead children. One in every two poor children died in infancy, and it was just too bad that Cordelia didn’t have a way to harvest or use those spirits.

Ah well, perhaps the answer lay in her researches. Now she had more than one lifetime to look into it, and she no longer felt quite such a sense of urgency.

But for a show of concern, she sent for the apothecary—not the doctor, that would have been an excess— who shook his head and opined that he did not know of too many orphanage children able to thrive even in the best of situations. “Bad blood, My Lady,” he pontificated. “Mothers and fathers both usually addicted to gin, opium, hashish—bad blood there and no mistake. Sometimes it’s just as well that they don’t thrive.”

She nodded and the nursemaid nodded, as he prescribed a tonic, a bottle of which he produced with such readiness that she knew he had brought it here on purpose to sell it to her. As was appropriate, however, he did not offer it to her, nor did he name a price. He gave it to the nursemaid, who thanked him. A bill would be forthcoming, of course, and the housekeeper would deal with it.

There. The stage was set for tonight.

When the apothecary had left, she waited for the nursemaid to take the boys off to their bath, and confiscated the tonic, which might be good or ill, might even be the same ingredients as her own potion, only weaker, but did not suit her purposes. She poured the contents down a drain, and substituted her own mixture. The strength of what she poured in there would have put a grown man to sleep, much less a small child.

Then she waited.

She had been forced to make do now that it was summer and she could not expect an ice-laden wind to do her work for her, replacing the cold of winter with drugs and powerful magic. Instead of arranging for the window to be opened, when the nursemaid was safely asleep (thanks to a heavy dose of laudanum in her tea) she made her way quietly into the nursery where the two boys lay on their cots.

With her arms outstretched, and hands cupped upward, she silently mouthed the words of invocation, and felt power drain from her in response. A chill, white mist formed slowly over the two cots, and settled over the two boys. This was called “The breath of the snow dragon,” and was the opposite side of the “breath of the dragon” invocation used by Fire Mages. That brought a furnace heat; this summoned the wind off the glaciers itself.

When she was satisfied that both boys were chilled to the bone and to all intents and purposes very near death, she closed her eyes and reached with spirit hands toward the strong one’s body.

The spirit already drifted a little above it; now she had to detach it altogether.

The incantation she used was one that would have made any good and decent Elemental Mage cover his ears in horror. She had found it in an ancient book that allegedly contained spells dating from the time of Atlantis. Whether that was the truth or not, this was the only one that actually accomplished what it was said to do.

The silver cord connecting soul with body shattered. She snatched up the spirit and shoved it toward the second boy’s body, at the same time repeating her blasphemous words.

The first child was already trying to reestablish a connection with a physical body, the end of the “cord” drifting about like the groping tentacle of a cephalopod. As she had hoped, because his spirit was the stronger of the two, it made the connection with the body that had originally belonged to it before the second boy re-anchored himself. The soul-self sank into the body, as the displaced ghost drifted toward the empty husk.

But before it could reach its former home, she had summoned a shield around it, preventing it from entering, and making it into one of her servants; this was a bit of magic she had long been familiar with and had used innumerable times. The glow of the shield surrounded the spirit and shrank, forming a kind of “skin,” then faded.

Now it was hers. It could neither move back into the vacant body, nor go anywhere else. The spirit was sealed to the earthly plane, unless someone could be found to open a passage into the Other Side for it, or until it willed one open for itself.

It looked very like Peggoty had, a gray-white sketch in the air of an androgynous child figure, as it opened its