Chapter 20 #2
Banshee, delighted that Havelock was at last looking in her direction, began to rub her back against the floor, baring her white stomach invitingly.
“I’ll thank you not to insult my cats,” I said, trying not to snort at the image of Havelock fending His Majesty off with a rug.
I noted that His Majesty went out of his way to menace Havelock upstairs, but kept out of sight in the basement, though he’d clearly been exploring down there for some time—it demonstrated the malicious cunning I expected from him.
“On that subject,” I continued, “I have a proposition for you.”
“The subject of your Behemoth? Whatever it is: no.”
“Not him,” I said. “The others. You’re no doubt unaware of this, because you don’t seem to give much thought to anything of a practical nature, but there is now a rumour going around that we are selling enchanted cats.”
“I was worried something like that might happen,” Yannick said, rubbing a hand over his face. “Have the police heard of it? I’ve had enough difficulty throwing them off the scent. We’ll have to put an end to it somehow before it spreads.”
“I don’t want to put an end to it,” I said. “I want to encourage it.”
“Encourage it,” Yannick repeated blankly.
“If I’m to provide cover for this ridiculous operation you two are running,” I said, “and, furthermore, if my life and my cats are to be endangered by the quarrels of magicians, I deserve compensation.”
“You—” Yannick looked at Havelock, seeming lost. Havelock eyed me warily, waiting.
“We’d only have to enchant two or three cats,” I said, clasping my hands together in front of myself, as I often did when excited. “Just enough to add fuel to the rumours and get people through our doors. After that, the demand will drive itself.”
“And when they realize most of your cats aren’t actually magic?” Havelock said.
I waved a hand. “Some will convince themselves otherwise. For most, it won’t matter in the end; it’s near impossible to own a cat without falling in love with it.
Don’t you see? If we can get the people in this city used to taking care of cats, to seeing them as companions more than beasts, we could put an end to the street cat population.
That means an end to cats freezing to death in winter, to suffering injury and illness alone and uncared for.
To say nothing of the benefits they offer their owners!
” I made myself stop, as I could feel myself beginning to tremble with excitement.
“That’s a lot of sentimentality to bear in one go,” Havelock said.
“All right, Mme. Pangloss, you have devised a plot to foist your moggies onto more unsuspecting citizens, but why should I help you? It’s my magic you’re proposing to use in your experiment, and you understand by now where it comes from. ”
His tone didn’t change in any perceptible way, but again I caught a glimpse of the flickering shadow that at times seemed to overlay him. A sliver of cold pierced my determination, but I forged on nevertheless.
“Because I’ve already offered to help you find Vortigern’s book,” I said.
“Trust me when I say that my organizational skills are more than competent. I’ve spent the last five years as the executive director of an exceptionally demanding charity.
I’ll make short work of that mess down in the basement.
” This was perhaps overstating my confidence in dealing with Havelock’s shop, but I doubted anyone could make a better attempt than I.
“If memory serves, you offered to ransack my workshop, steal Vortigern’s book, and give it to my sister.” He paused to rub the sides of his nose, then added, sounding congested, “Can you not remove that creature?”
“Here, Banshee,” I said, kneeling and putting my hand out. She trotted obediently to my side, and I picked her up.
Yannick’s gaze had been shifting from Havelock to me and back again, growing ever more astonished. “Then you do have Vortigern’s Artefact? Why on earth did you keep telling me there was no way?”
“There isn’t,” Havelock said at the same moment I exclaimed, “Yannick believes you have it too?”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Yannick said. “Only Havelock keeps such poor records that I’ve always thought it was possible. He refuses to organize anything. You’d think he’s been hoping Valérie would simply go away.”
“I didn’t—” Havelock began, then stopped. When he continued, I had the sense that he’d shuttered some part of himself. “I didn’t think Valérie would go this far.”
“It wouldn’t take much magic to enchant a cat,” Yannick said, considering the problem thoughtfully.
“Assuming you’re thinking about a simple charm.
Living things can be used as Artefacts, but they rarely are, because they can’t hold much magic—no more than two-layer spells—and the magic leaches out within a few days. What were you thinking?”
“I can’t believe you’re entertaining this,” Havelock said.
“I’m not sure,” I said. “But apparently one of our clients is convinced his new cat cured his insomnia.”
“A simple sleep charm would certainly be doable,” Yannick said, nodding.
“Or perhaps a charm for stress relief, or equanimity? Better for it to be something vague and based in subjective experience. The spell would have to be activated before the cat left the shop, and again, it would only be a temporary effect.”
“I’m afraid I’m failing to understand the advantages of either end of this silly bargain,” Havelock said.
“The advantage is that Valérie will leave you alone if we can find and destroy that Artefact,” Yannick said. “She will leave you and this city in peace. Which is what you want, surely.”
I didn’t understand the question in his voice, nor the sharp look Havelock gave him. There was a storm of emotion in his gaze, too much for me to parse.
“Were you responsible for the apocalypse?” élise said.
Havelock looked at her. He’d shuttered himself again, but imperfectly; his face was still flushed. The irritation élise had roused, though, was easy to read. Yannick was permitted to scold him, and for some reason, so was I. élise was not.
“Yes,” he said. Clearly he thought that would be enough, that élise would be cowed or taken aback, as any sensible person would.
Havelock, though, didn’t know élise. Her expression didn’t change as she said, “Prove it.”
“What are you doing?” I muttered to her. She didn’t look at me.
“Prove it,” Havelock repeated. He didn’t look awkward anymore.
He looked, I realized, like the creature of shadow and flame in all but physicality, as if his human appearance was a thin guise overlaying something else, and again I remembered what he had said about how magicians brought the Rivenwood back with them.
It didn’t seem like Havelock looking out from his eyes, but that other presence I had glimpsed before.
“What a thought,” Yannick said with a forced sort of laugh. “I think one apocalypse was enough.”
“Why?” Havelock said.
élise gave a slight shrug. “I want to know how trustworthy you are.”
“You would trust someone who nearly caused the end of the world?”
élise gazed back with a calm that no doubt made her seem made of stone to Havelock and Yannick, but I recognized the lie—her shoulders were held in tension, her voice unnaturally flat.
“I’m not a simpleton. It’s a matter of relative, not absolute trust. I will place more trust in a man if I have his measure.
At the moment, I can’t make you out at all. ”
“Most prefer it that way,” Havelock said.
élise gave a huff of laughter. “You clearly wish to seem mysterious, but you don’t look particularly frightening, and you dress like you are putting on a play.”
Yannick seemed to smother a snort. Havelock looked down at himself.
He wore antiquated leather riding boots, and his sweater had an odd cowl-like hood and oversized sleeves.
“Clothes can be Artefacts too,” he said.
“This tunic is woven with a seventeenth-century protective charm, and each of these boots holds a separate spell for concealment. They were made nearly a century ago by a magician named Sébastien Medea, who was also a boot maker.”
“Ah,” I said. That explained one more mystery.
“Well?” élise said, still gazing at Havelock. Havelock, for his part, looked as if he had been about to carry on about Sébastien Medea, and blinked as if he’d lost the thread of the conversation.
“I’m not a genie to grant wishes when commanded,” he finally said.
“Just one wish,” élise said. “Think of it as one of the many favours you owe Agnes for everything you’ve put her through.”
“What!” I interjected, my nervousness growing, because I could see Havelock beginning to yield to élise.
Most people did eventually—élise, when she chose, could wield a disarming combination of charm and self-possession.
She had a way of appearing so sure of herself that most couldn’t help seeing the reasonableness of her position, even when it was fundamentally unreasonable.
“You have a peculiar appetite where wishes are concerned,” Havelock said.
He removed a ring from his finger—it was such an absent gesture that I didn’t immediately realize the significance.
Then Havelock spoke a series of foreign words, crisp with a hint of music in them, and the roof was ripped off the building.
I screamed and staggered back. Darkness poured through like fog, and a bolt of lightning struck the counter, charring the books and papers as it sent them careening through the air.
Havelock lifted a hand, his lips moving—I couldn’t hear the enchantment over the chaos—and the walls were torn away like sheets of paper by a violent wind.
The lightning was followed by a slap of rain, then snow—this was how it had been three years ago, day turned to night and the weather thrown into chaos.
I pressed Banshee to my chest and hurled myself to the floor just as the rumbling started.
It was less the sound of an earthquake than of something monstrous moaning from beneath the earth.
élise was at my side suddenly, throwing her arms over me as it began to hail, pebble-sized stones bouncing off the floor.
She was yelling something, and I yelled back—hysterical demands that she stop this, somehow.
I was soaked from the rain, and I could feel the hailstones tangled in my hair.
Havelock wasn’t immune to the weather—he held an arm above his head as the hail pummeled him, the other hand trying to hold his hood in place as the wind buffeted it back.
The ferocity of his own spell seemed to have surprised him, or perhaps he had never intended to revel in it in the first place, but he didn’t argue with Yannick, who was yelling and gesticulating.
He leapt down from the counter—which was still there, an improbable island amidst the nightmarish dark.
The wind nearly knocked him over, but he regained his footing, and with an almost desultory gesture drew the clouds into his hand.
He was left holding a single shard of hail, which he tossed onto the ground.
There was something embedded in it—a ring, its jewel flashing.
Havelock spun around and began rifling through the drawers of the counter.
Though the weather had calmed, the rumbling beneath the earth was only growing louder.
Yannick had his hands outstretched, a pocket watch dangling from one of them, but whatever spell he was trying to unleash didn’t seem to be doing anything.
Havelock excavated something from the back of a drawer and held it aloft like a magic wand.
In another mood, I might have laughed—it was a pair of scissors, which I’d noticed before and had assumed belonged to the former shop owner.
Havelock spoke another incantation, and the walls and ceiling abruptly returned.
In the wrong place.
I screamed again. My throat was raw by this point, but I barely noticed. The ceiling, its beams and cobwebs and all, had become the walls, and the walls, including the windows, draperies, and shelves, had been jumbled together and plastered across the ceiling.
A wave of dizziness washed over me, and I felt certain I would be sick.
The windows above me showed the streetscape outside, sunlight streaming through, perfectly ordinary and completely wrong.
An old woman walked past one, pulling a shopping trolley.
Havelock was cursing under his breath and shaking the scissors.
“It’s old,” I thought I heard him say over the tremors, which had lessened but not subsided. “Some of the magic must have leaked—if I could just—”
He gave up with another curse and flung the scissors aside.
He removed one of his pendants and hurled it at the ceiling in a glittering arc, the incantation coming out sharp and angry.
The pendant struck one of the windows with a noise that was more like a vibration, the clang of a tremendous gong, and the ceiling and walls sorted themselves back into place.
A second later, the tremors stopped, the darkness vanished, and all was as it had been before.