A polite round of applause rose from the other diners as they raised their glasses to the Prime Ministerial toast.
“Bastard,” hissed Rupert, freezing the playback. The Prime Minister paused with His glass raised, immaculate in white tie and tails at the Lord Mayor’s Banquet—a state occasion in which it was traditional for the head of the government to deliver a speech to the council of the City of London Corporation, essentially the hub of the British financial services industries.
Rupert had been invited to attend. Not being entirely insane he had declined with regrets, citing the winter flu that was doing the rounds. Which was why he was watching the speech from the comfort and privacy of his Jacuzzi in the master suite at Castle Skaro. (The bath, a seven-seater with minibar, mood lighting, high-end home cinema system, and filter/sterilization units, was perfect for entertaining. But sometimes Rupert just wanted to wallow in his own wealth.)
The PM was neither human nor entirely sane, and took a zero tolerance approach to would-be rivals.
Rupe rewound a couple of seconds, then replayed the video at a tenth normal speed. There. He backed up and watched the People’s Mandate raise a toast to ruination and the death of gods for a third time: “Wouldn’t you agree?” Glitch. “Mr. de Montfort Bigge?” A tiny judder as something or someone, perhaps some enslaved video editing demon, spliced Rupert’s name into the outgoing stream with random precision, destined for his eyes only. Similar personalized messages were undoubtedly going out to other movers and shakers, the alienated servants of gods who’d lost the toss when His Dreadful Majesty seized power and instituted the New Management of N’yar Lat-Hotep, the Black Pharaoh Returned.
“Shit,” Rupert mumbled as he reached for the coke mirror.
Rumbled.
Magic was a branch of applied mathematics. Systematized in decades and centuries gone by, it had come a long way from its occult roots. The wild efflorescence of computing technology had brought it crashing back to life, a tsunami of inrushing power pouring chaotically back into the world after decades of drought. Now Elder Gods and ancient horrors were awakening in all quarters. Obscure cults could harness the power of imprecatory prayer to damn their enemies and bring prosperity to their fingertips. Barefoot sorcerers awakened daily in ignorance of the real source of their power, and called themselves superheroes or metahumans—at least until the feeders attracted by the magical computation fizzing in their skulls began to eat their brains. It had all gotten a little out of hand, Rupert conceded—especially once the bastard in Downing Street had gotten the drop on his own patron saint, the Mute Poet.
But when faced with a de facto coup d’état, one must behave with pragmatism and grace, lest one lose one’s head. (Quite literally, given the PM’s predilection for reaping crania to adorn His glass-and-chromed-steel Tzompantli, the modernized Aztec skull rack He’d erected atop Marble Arch.) Rupert had hoped that his activities might meet with, if not active approval, then at least tolerance on the part of the New Management. He’d gone long on the right stocks, shorted others on the back of a handshake and a word of advice from the right lips. Ensured that tithes were paid, in blood as well as money. Tried to look suitably chastened and remorseful for having backed the wrong horse, in other words, meanwhile hoping that his delicate efforts to tip the balance his way would go unnoticed until they bore strange fruit.
“He who controls the past controls the present; he who controls the present controls the future.” Fuck, busted. Orwell’s famous words spoke not just of propaganda; they could have been an explanation of how markets worked, a rationale of Rupert’s career, or a history of magic in the modern era. But they meant so much more to Rupert: they spoke of a possible path to survival.
When the New Management came to power, Rupert had pulled in his horns and gone into seclusion for a while to lick his wounds—he hated to come in second, despised being on the losing side—and reflect on lessons learned. And after a while it came to him that the itch he chewed on was caused by an unanswered question: not Why did He seize power? But What stopped Him doing it sooner?
Magic was getting stronger, true. But magic had been plentiful before. If you gave credence to myths and legend, magic had been everywhere in the Bronze Age, squirting out of the ground like wildcat oil strikes. But in the past couple of centuries there was clear evidence for the rarity of magecraft and the difficulty of executing sorcerous protocols. It was almost as if something had suppressed the metanatural, rendering certain computational processes inaccessible to practitioners of the high arts. It was an impairment that had, ironically, facilitated the ascendancy of the Age of Reason. (If it hadn’t happened, Sir Isaac Newton might be better remembered for his alchemical research and his interest in infinitesimals as a tool for confining and constraining devils, rather than his work on optics and gravity.) Perhaps it was the result of some secret agency or power, working behind the scenes to suppress all magical phenomena. Or perhaps it was the Age of Reason itself, the ascendancy of the Newtonian view of the universe as a deterministic chew toy for an omniscient god. Whatever the cause, the end result was clear: magic had become increasingly difficult after the sixteenth century, vanishing almost entirely during the late Victorian age, before making a gradual comeback from the 1940s onwards.
Rupert entertained a bizarre but plausible hypothesis: perhaps the magical drought had come about as a way for the continuum to protect itself from temporal paradoxes—side effects of time travel. Magic gave access to the ghost roads, arcane liminal spaces that linked places and times: to ley lines and paths
