“Ned would never,” began the barkeep, then thought better of it.
“Gissa sixpence now?” whined Ned. He clutched a cloth cap so ingrained with dirt that its brim was shiny.
“A crown when we get there,” repeated the Bond. He made the pistol vanish, but allowed Ned and the bartender a glimpse of his tactical webbing and holsters. “Let’s go.”
Ned picked up his tin cup and chugged it frantically, dribbling when he put it back down. “Foller me,” he said, burping as he shuffled towards the door.
The Bond followed, keeping the bartender in view until he was out the door. It wasn’t until he was alone in the mist with the shuffling Ned that it occurred to him to wonder just what the Piers Gaveston Fellowship had done to render themselves so peculiarly unpopular.
Alexei had a problem: none of their phones were working properly.
“Come on,” he muttered, hitting the button to bring up the secure connection to Andrei back at Head Office for the umpteenth time. His phone flashed a loading animation at him, then crashed back to the home screen with a strangled squawk and a message about a connection timeout. “Who made this fucking junk!”
They’d gotten up to the top floor with no sign of company, found the odd door where no door should be that the map indicated was the start of their route. Vassily and Igor had thrown the windows wide open at front and back, and after Alexei’s KO gas detector had shown a solid green LED for three minutes they’d taken off their respirator masks. The targets were clearly somewhere ahead, so Alexei made an executive decision to pursue.
But by the time they’d gone along one corridor, then through an odd windowless hallway, along another passage, and down some stairs to a library, Alexei was seriously done with this Escher architecture shit. And the loss of signal was no joke.
“Can anyone get any signal in here? Because my phone’s fucked,” he announced.
“Sorry, boss…” Boris shook his head. “No signal here either.”
“Anyone with signal?” No hands went up. “Well fuck.” Alexei pocketed his phone and took stock. “Close up.” He noted the chalk marks scrawled by the door they’d come through. “We’re on their trail. Yevgeny, Igor, take point. Boris, eyes on our six. Everyone on the map? Everybody clear we’re on node seven—any disagrees? No, good, let’s move out.”
They flitted through the confusing maze of corridors and stairs like ghosts, touching nothing and making as little noise as possible. They were hampered slightly by the need to check every room they passed for ambushes, to seek the most minute clues that the man they pursued might have left as to his path. But they went fast and hard, for they’d trained since their earliest time as teenage conscripts in how to storm occupied buildings and leave the silence of a graveyard behind them. However they were a team, and so they were slower than one reckless assassin intent on getting to his destination ahead of a concerned executive assistant and her bodyguard: who in turn was trying to outpace a clown-car raid team of junior supervillains led by a theatrical impresario. By the time they came to the outside door leading to the misty streets of another version of old London town, the moon had set. Their quarry was already half a city ahead of them. And the tinkle of glockenspiel mirth stalking them grew ever-louder in the mist.
Even though she was still soft and untempered in those days, Eve wasn’t a screamer. Nor was Imp. But when Dad spread his arms wide and took on the physiognomy of a mummified corpse with blazing blue orbs of fire in his eye sockets, both his children were ever-so-slightly freaked out.
“Magic,” Dad explained, “is real. And if you don’t know what you’re doing it will kill you, just like grabbing a live high-tension cable.” He sounded so matter-of-fact, standing there in his chinos and polo shirt as the green wormy threads writhed hypnotically in his eye sockets. “In case you were wondering this is an illusion, but a practical one: it’s a preconstruction of what I’ll look like in two hundred years’ time.” The litchfather rubbed his bony hands as if they were cold. “Dead, in other words. Like you’d be if you tried to handle the family spell book and weren’t of the blood descended, so that the ward recognized you. This is your first lesson: don’t touch the book, or let anyone else touch it, unless I’m present. And especially don’t try to use it until I’ve taught you how to do so without turning yourself into this—” he pointed at his gaping mandible—“in the here-and-now. Because there are no comebacks from death.”
He made a strange gesture with his left hand then beamed at them as if he’d just accomplished a fine party trick, entirely himself again.
“That includes your mother,” he added. “She has—had—her own kind of magic, but it isn’t ours.”
So that was how magecraft came into Imp’s life: Sunday morning sessions with Dad and Evie while Mum went to church (for the social, she said at first).
Magic, it turned out, was complicated, and involved quite a lot of equations in something like a cross between Boolean algebra and Aramaic graffiti. There was more than one way of doing magic, and more than one kind of effect it could produce, but their family was best at one particular speciality—oneiromancy, with a sideline in chronomancy. (Other stuff like mind control, telekinesis, and setting Marjorie Blake’s hair on fire when she had her big brother’s gang beat up Imp for trying to grope her in year four,1 were far less reliable.)
Oneiromancy was the magic of dreams, which according to Dad weren’t just the brain’s glial system flushing out crap and resetting itself while fixing memories of the previous day. They were fragmentary ghost memories of other versions of reality, other timelines that had diverged from the one the dreamer inhabited. Dad
