Defeated, she changed again. Human height and with her field of vision expanded, Ilsa realised she was no longer alone. The door across the hall had opened and Fyfe stood on the threshold, black curls falling into his eyes, a cup of coffee in one hand. He was watching her and failing to suppress his amusement.
“Good effort, but there’s no door in this house anyone can fit under.”
Ilsa wanted to scowl, but there was nothing mean or mocking in Fyfe’s words, nor in the way his face broke into a grin, and Ilsa was grateful it was him and not Eliot who had caught her. Instead, she took her frustration out with a kick to the door. “Well, seems obvious now you say it,” she grumbled.
Fyfe nudged his shoulder into his own door and it swung wide. “This one’s open.” He beckoned her with a hand and disappeared inside, so Ilsa followed.
She couldn’t suppress a gasp as she stepped inside. Fyfe’s room was a study-turned-laboratory, laid out across a main level and a makeshift mezzanine floor – little more than scaffolding accessed by a mobile spiral staircase. Bookcases covered two walls, and ladders on rollers reached to the topmost shelves high above. Another wall housed a number of units like those a pharmacy or apothecary might have, with dozens of small drawers, each with a label in a brass brace, and there was a ladder for these too. Between them, the wall was plastered with maps, diagrams, mathematical equations, and papers in languages and symbols Ilsa couldn’t read. A door on the other side of the room led to what appeared to be a bedchamber.
Several contraptions bigger than herself took up most of the floor space, but there was also a table crammed with glass beakers and jars containing liquids in vibrant colours – sky blue, violet, luminescent green – some connected with glass tubes; some producing steam; one sat on a wind-up apparatus that was revolving slowly so that the contents churned. More surfaces were piled with open books and yet more unreadable papers. A human skeleton, like Ilsa had once seen in a curiosity show, hung upright in one corner, but the space was littered with other vaguely macabre objects she couldn’t identify. Above, on the iron mezzanine, was what Ilsa guessed was a telescope, though she’d never seen one in person, and above that, a domed glass ceiling revealed a view of the sky.
“What kind of scientist are you?” she said, failing to mask the excitement in her voice; the room was like nothing she’d ever seen.
“I don’t think I’m any kind,” said Fyfe, haphazardly scooping up armfuls of the books and papers that littered the floor. “I prefer to think of myself as an investigator. It’s more broad.”
As Fyfe made an effort to tidy that was more just shifting clutter into new piles, Ilsa inspected an alarming glass cube. The walls of the cube contained a pattern of tubes carved into the glass, and a greenish smoke flowed gently through them. Reams of copper wire surrounded a plate at the centre, above which a single oak leaf was held in the jaws of a clamp. “What’s this do?”
“Ah!” Fyfe leapt over some of the debris, looking graceless with his awkwardly long limbs, and landed beside her. Ilsa didn’t know if her excitement was feeding his or vice versa, but when he beamed his huge smile, Ilsa beamed back. “I’ve been experimenting with increasingly complex organic matter to see if I can cause another object to pass through it, the way Wraiths can become ethereal.”
Fyfe opened a hatch in one side of the cube, took a pen from behind his ear and reached in to wave it through the leaf like it was nothing but a mirage.
“I haven’t found a way to replicate their other skills yet, though. And this device is really only theoretical. I tried it with a feather and only succeeded in setting it alight.”
“And what ’bout that one?” Ilsa pointed to an eccentric mess of copper and vulcanised rubber on a wooden platform. Within the main frame of the apparatus were a series of cogs and belts, a row of vials of emerald liquid, and two polished copper globes in a space at the centre.
“That,” said Fyfe with a self-conscious laugh, “doesn’t work, but the principle is the same. Transference. Harnessing the power of another people. It’s supposed to extract a person’s thoughts.”
Ilsa took a large step away from the machine. “That sounds… painful.”
“No, no, no! I mean psychically. It reads their mind.”
“D’you mean like a Whisperer? Eliot told me they was mind readers.”
Fyfe grinned his approval. “Exactly like that! A Whisperer can see inside your mind if you don’t know how to keep them out, and they can manipulate it too. They can be quite dangerous.” He flicked one of the vials of emerald liquid suspended between a set of tongs, and it made a delightful ringing sound. “See, I rendered this liquor from the brain matter of a Whisperer – already deceased of course. My theory is that I can channel its properties by running an electrical current through it.”
Ilsa eyed him sceptically. “And that’ll work?”
Fyfe rubbed his hair. “I don’t see that magic and science are all that different. If a Sorcerer can manipulate pure magic to do what they want it to, then perhaps there’s a way for me to do so too.”
It sounded like a big dream, a long shot. But Ilsa knew a thing or two about those. She’d never wanted someone else to succeed at something so
