A Study in Darkness (36 page)

“Good morning.” Evelina picked up a tool at random and attempted to look busy. Casimir lay on the workbench before her, utterly inert.

“How is the work coming along?” Magnus asked. “Were you able to find what you needed last night?”

Evelina felt herself tense. “I found something that might serve with a little adjustment. I stopped at Brownlee’s last night. He’ll bring the assembly around this afternoon.”

She felt Magnus’s dark gaze slide over her. “You didn’t try the Saracen’s Head?”

“There was a fight going on. I didn’t go in.”

Magnus huffed with disgust. “I thought Black George
kept a better handle on his customers. I’m sorry I sent you there. How is the rest of the repair going?”

Evelina cast him a sidelong look. Had he known Nick—and by extension, the casket—was in town? Magnus had touched the subject so lightly, it was impossible to tell. But since he’d passed over it, she wasn’t going to risk lingering there. “I’ll show you.”

Like Serafina, Casimir was brought to life by activating his logic processor. Evelina slid the long pin into his neck and it clicked into place with a slight rattle of metal on metal. The doll’s long-lashed eyes immediately opened, the glass orbs so cunningly wrought that each brown iris had the same striated variation as a living man’s. Slowly, Casimir sat up. But that was all he did. Unlike Serafina, he didn’t look around to see who was there.

“How are you?” Magnus asked.

There was a slight pause, and the silence was filled by the sound of gears churning in Casimir’s head. His face slowly turned toward Magnus’s voice. “My left knee is still not functioning in an optimum manner.” The oddly mechanical tone of his voice was not as pronounced as Serafina’s, perhaps because it was deeper.

“Your knee will be fixed soon,” Evelina promised.

The doll didn’t respond.

“Does that make you happy?” she asked, curious to see how he would respond.

“He will only find it satisfactory,” Magnus supplied. “He has no capacity to feel pleasure, for I have never imbued him with more than basic consciousness. There are many degrees of such things.”

“Would it not improve his performance on the stage if he had more personality? Serafina is dazzling, and I am sure much of her talent has to do with the fact that she is more alive.”

Magnus moved his hand in a seesaw gesture. “In principle, I agree. But I have found that there is a risk inherent in half-measures. Too little and, yes, one has an automaton that is nothing more than a sophisticated toy. But I have learned to my sorrow that a toy with a will of its own can be
dangerous. I do not venture there lightly, and certainly not in a widespread fashion.”

“Hence Serafina, and all your experiments on a single subject?”

“Some of the earliest results were, shall we say, slightly nerve-racking. You may note that I am still careful to pull her pin every night.”

Casimir sat through the conversation like a statue. What would he be like, Evelina wondered, with a personality of his own? The doll’s expression was strong, square-jawed. The very picture of masculinity—and yet utterly vacant. “How do you do it? How do you make them more than they are?”

“Ah,” Magnus gave a quick smile. “That is a long and complex process, but the short answer is that there are two methods. One is what you have done with your creatures—taking an existing entity and housing it in the machine. That requires pure Blood talent, which you obviously possess in abundance. What I have done with my dancers is rather more straightforward. I gather enough of my own life force that I am able to split some of it off. A spark of life—me and not me—that then powers the automaton. As long as I live, they live. I am in no way aware of their consciousness, but there is a reason that the corps de ballet moves in perfect unison. On some level they are truly all of one mind.”

Evelina listened, fascinated and bewildered. “But how do you do that without depleting yourself to nothing?”

Magnus gave a quick smile. “Did your Gran Cooper never tell you how to gather your power into a cohesive force? That is the first step.”

Evelina bit her lip. “No.”

“Do you want me to show you how?”

She did. Desperately. “How easily can I learn this?”

She meant
how quickly
. She only had a week before she was supposed to report to Keating and go home. There was no time to spend indulging her thirst for magic lessons, for she’d already extended her deadline once.
What sort of excuse could I give so that I could stay a little longer?
That would be pure folly.

Magnus folded his arms and leaned against the workbench,
the picture of casual ease. “There is a simple way to discover that. Do you know how to call fire?”

“Yes.” She could light a candle or kindling just by awakening the potential flame within it.

“From nothing?” He opened his hand, a ball of flame appeared, just as it had during the ballet.

Evelina flinched away. “Witchlight.” A sign of sorcery, her Gran Cooper had said. A sign to be reviled and avoided, because such displays were typically powered through death magic.

“Always handy if you’re caught without a candle,” Magnus said, closing his palm to extinguish the flames. “It’s the simple tricks that one ends up using the most.”

Evelina floundered a moment, caught between his matter-of-fact tone and a mire of grandmotherly disapproval. “So how does that help you gather your power?”

“Unless you know how to pull it together, the light won’t work. In ancient days, when I learned my craft, the technique was taught as an exercise.”

“When was that?”

“A long, long time ago, little kitten.” His voice was a gentle rebuff. “Now do you want to learn how to do this?”

For some reason, Evelina glanced at Casimir, but there was no advice from that quarter. The automaton sat expressionless and unmoving, a void waiting for orders. For a moment she envied him, not having to decide anything. Not caught between choices. She remembered the light-headed rush of power she’d felt when Magnus had shown her his healing trick, and she was more than a little scared of it.

“All you need to do is to imagine your power gathering into a tight, hard ball,” Magnus said. “Then feed a tiny bit of it into the flame. Not on your hand—you’ll burn yourself—but just over it.”

He sounded reasonable, reassuring. The one person who understood the Blood could teach her to light up dark places—a symbolic gesture if there ever was one. Her Gran Cooper would tell her to back away, that no amount of knowledge was worth dealing with Magnus. And yet Gran wasn’t there to teach her anything.

Nothing moved in the workshop but dust motes, swirling in the soft morning light that fell from the high transom windows. All of a sudden Evelina felt very small in the vast space.
Make a decision. Stay safe, or learn to use your power. Yes or no
.

It was just a light. On the other hand, she needed every tool she could get if she was going to defend herself and the people she loved from Jasper Keating. A bit of witchfire might be all she had.

“All right.” Evelina held out her hand, palm upward, just like Magnus had done. “Teach me.”

He gave a gentle smile. “Excellent.”

“
WHY ARE THERE
no devas here?” Evelina asked Magnus the next day. She had been working on witchlight all night, and had rushed into the theater earlier that morning to show him the pale glimmer she’d finally managed to produce. And then—as seemed to happen with them—one bit of conversation had led to the next.

“Why do you think the devas have left these streets?” Magnus replied, lifting his cup of tea.

Evelina blinked, coming back to the present, and watched the sorcerer, trying to figure out what part he played in the complex game for power. Was he really the Blue King’s maker? Or was he pursuing some gambit of his own? And why was he taking the time to teach her?

“I don’t know why the devas are gone,” she said. “You’d think something would thrive here. There’s a river, and there are still gardens.”

“Think harder.”

It was late morning and they sat in his library, surrounded by all those wonderful books. He’d pointed some out to her and she’d spent blissful hours curled up in a large, comfortable chair poring through the writings of a mage from five centuries ago. It was a history book of sorts, but not the history of kings and queens and borders. It was the history of her people and their Bloodlines, and how they had come from the steppes thousands of years past, and from the Gardens
of Babylon, and the deepest roots of the Niger. The words were like a voice whispering from somewhere deep inside her. On some primal level, she knew this story to be true, and that she had a right to hear it. As strange a turn of events as it seemed, Magnus was giving her the birthright of her Blood.

Not many months ago, she had refused him out of fear, and none of her reasons had gone away. And she wasn’t sure what would happen once her deal with the Gold King was done. But until that moment for decision came, she would learn all she could.

“All right,” she said. “The devas used to be everywhere. Every herbwife and hedge wizard left offerings to their favorites, asking them to help with their spells. Then the factories came along. No one liked them tearing up the woods and fields and driving the devas away.”

“And so Church and State turned against magic,” Magnus finished. “If no one had reverence for the woods, there would be no objection to tearing them down, putting up manufactories, and offering the people jobs instead. Quite the contrary, because in this new century fewer and fewer work their own land. They need employment, and will silence anyone who stands in the way of earning a living. The steam barons and their witch trials have taken this to new heights.”

That was all very true, but nothing that Evelina didn’t know already. “But there are still devas in parts of London. The garden at Hilliard House has some, and Regent’s Park …”

Magnus’s lip curled in a half smile that said he was about to come to the point. “Think about it. Devas do not go near human habitation without incentive. The residents of Hilliard House place a high value on the beauty of their gardens, and thus they attract the spirits. But if a relationship with devas is fostered by affection for the leafy wood and rippling stream, what drives them away?”

“A need for the engines of commerce, and a fear of whatever stands in their way,” she said quietly. “Gardens and parks are exceptions.”

“Every human needs nature to be whole, but how many of the wretches in the Old Nichol rookery have time and energy to spare for flower gardens? Their attention is on the business of filling their bellies.”

She knew that all too well. “But with no spirits around to help, it’s a wonder any magic gets done here.”

“But it does.” Magnus sat back, crossing his long legs. “It’s a question of harnessing what is available.”

She looked at him suspiciously. He waved a hand. “I’m not speaking of stealing life from living bodies other than your own. We’ve been through that. You can’t even do it with your lack of training. But there are other sources of energy. The spirits of the dead is one, but I do not recommend it. They aren’t pleasant company—all very full of their missed opportunities and the unfairness of it all. True necromancy is another, but even I hesitate to start casting circles without a very, very good reason.”

“So far, you’re not inspiring me. With this lack of life going around, how do you make your magic?”

Magnus flashed a smile. “Ah, that is simple. You remember once I showed you a toy beetle?”

He had let the wretched thing run all over the dinner table at Hilliard House. “Yes. But anything on a larger scale takes a great deal of power.”

He nodded.

“So does Serafina work the same way?” She had approached the question several times but never got a satisfactory answer.

“In part,” he said with a smile. “She is something of a trade secret. There are a few concepts you need to master before you would understand.”

“Then teach me more. I’ve made the witchlight.”

“Very well. Did you ever learn to work with wands?”

“No.” She sat forward in her chair. “My Gran Cooper gave me some tools, but she never showed me how to use them. She said I didn’t have enough training.”

“You mean these.” He reached into the pocket of his neat black jacket and pulled out a handful of objects. One looked like a bracelet of twisted copper, another a wand no bigger
than a pencil, the third was a painted stone with a hole in it, and the last a triangle of silver etched with tiny runes.

Shot through with sudden panic, Evelina nearly jumped out of her chair. “You took those from my tool chest!”

“I did,” he said calmly. “Pardon the invasion of your belongings, but I wanted to look them over before introducing them to our conversation today. They may not look like much, but they are good workmanship. I think it’s time you learned how to use them.”

She slowly sank back into the chair, nerves still tingling. A feeling of guilt nagged at her, as if she were betraying her Gran’s memory by allowing a sorcerer to teach her to use her gifts.
But what harm can there be? These are Cooper family tools. I’m supposed to use them
.

Without waiting for an answer, Magnus handed her the tiny wand. It was made of smooth, plain wood with a pattern of vines burned into it. There were no gems or words of power. It looked as magical as a knitting needle. “So how does it work?” she asked.

“It’s not a steam engine. It does not
work
. It is a receptor. You are right-handed, yes? Then hold it lightly in your left. We are not producing here; we are listening. Your left hand will do that better. Stand up.”

Evelina did as she was told, standing in the center of the study, her hands at her sides and a little away from her body. She’d seen Gran do this much before.

He adjusted her arms slightly, his hands gentle but not too familiar. “Good. Now close your eyes and reach out through the wand. Move it about until you feel something.”

“What? What am I supposed to feel?”

“I invoke the right to be irritating and say you’ll know it when you feel it.”