6. Briar’s Job Is Arms #2
‘Rat shit,’ says Briar. ‘I think.’ They retrieve the box, taking the roll of shiny black rubbish bags and tearing one off with a satisfying zip. As with most intimidating things, best to just start and not think too hard about it; put their hands on the problem, and see what follows.
‘A rat metropolis, by this point,’ Tate says, touching the corner of a curling map on the nearest stack. ‘They’ve probably got a downtown district and regional dialects.’
‘Probably,’ says Briar, putting on gardening gloves. They see a very grey cleaning rag on the floor, solid with age, pick it up and bin it. There. One thing down. Ten thousand to go.
Tate brushes dust off the cover of a faded burgundy book the approximate size and weight of a toddler and then frowns down at it. ‘Hold on, is this a scholarly text?’
‘No idea.’ Ornate chair with only three legs? Briar drags it across to one side of the room and starts a furniture pile, subcategory: repair??
‘Well, there’s one way to find out,’ Tate says, hefting the book in his arms and sneezing when it retaliates. ‘God, this is heavy. I guess they weren’t bringing it along on horse and cart journeys for light reading. Have a look at this.’
He cracks it open, turning it around, and more than a few yellowed leaves immediately fall out.
Briar puts down the rubbish bag and goes obediently over.
Why is their heart beating so fast? It’s just a book.
A book kept locked up in Temple, so that plebs like Briar can’t read it. A book about magic.
Briar starts with the first word on the page - ‘ergo’ - and then something strange happens.
They can’t read the rest of the sentence.
It seems to be in English, meticulously hand-lettered pre-printing press, but when Briar tries to get a hold on anything past ‘ergo’ it becomes incomprehensible gibberish, and suddenly ‘ergo’ also seems to have gone missing, when it should be right where they left it.
They find it again, but it doesn’t help.
‘You look confused,’ says Tate. ‘Which answers my question.’
‘Show me another page.’
Tate does. Same result.
‘Is this in Latin or something?’
‘Not this one. It’s just written in Procedural. It’s like . . . magical legalese.’
‘You can read this?’
‘If I must,’ says Tate. He turns the book around to face him.
‘Hmmm. Something to do with . . . bushels of something. Trade? It must be next to useless, or they wouldn’t have left it up here to rot.
Scholarly texts are usually treated like gold dust. To read it properly I’d need to start from the beginning.
All the tells are usually in the introduction, sort of like clues, or .
. . a key . . . and then you know how to read it.
Have you ever done cryptic crosswords? No?
Me neither, but apparently it’s the same skill set. ’
‘So if I read the introduction . . .’
‘Nope,’ Tate says, flicking to the introduction and letting Briar have a cursory glance at what looks like more of the same nonsense.
He shuts the book and bends to put it down on the floor.
‘Book pile! Yeah, no, it doesn’t work like that.
You have to be a thaumaturge or none of it makes sense, even the key. ’
A tiny ember of hope, kept alive for seven long years, dies in Briar’s chest.
During boring first-year introductory assemblies at Dunts & Heaves, Briar had sat fuming in their stiff, plasticky school blazer, thinking that just maybe, if they grabbed their bike and rode the eighteen miles to Temple, the school would realise that they’d made a mistake during the admissions process.
That Briar belonged there just as much as Seb.
That they had potential, just waiting to be unlocked.
But Briar can’t read the stupid fucking book. They’re not magic. Temple had been right to reject them. They’re nothing special at all.
‘You did us a real solid last night,’ Tate says, sitting down on one of the rare empty patches of floorboard.
‘Don’t let Hadley freak you out. She just gets very focused when he has an idea.
And whatever you do, don’t let West up here.
He’ll insist on digging through it all looking for more texts, and he won’t let you throw anything out, not even the rats. ’
Briar is still trying to arrange their face, to swallow the acrid taste of disappointment and the mortifying tightness in their throat. ‘Mmm. So . . . what happened to those scholars? With the allergies?’
Tate shrugs, still smiling, but his gaze drops to the floor.
It’s an interesting tell. ‘Least four of them spent the night in the infirmary. Hadley has a throw-everything-at-the-wall approach, so she did common allergens in all the masks, just to see if another one might hit. I think they actually called an ambulance for Rudersberg, but he was probably just being dramatic. They had to cancel the Baptism. Mons are on the warpath. Hadley’s very happy. ’
‘I bet she is,’ Briar says, binning a browned newspaper from 1976 that’s soaked through with something dark and bloody. An ambulance for Rudersberg. Said so casually, as if nobody’d ever died from anaphylactic shock. ‘I don’t think she likes me.’
‘She’ll get over it. Just keep lifting heavy stuff in front of her, it’ll soothe her.’
‘Right.’ Now that they’ve seen her at work, Briar certainly does not want to get on the wrong side of Hadley Watson.
‘Anyway, I’m your buddy today, and I like you. What sort of buddying do you require?’
Briar picks up a decidedly ordinary paperback and adds it to the correct pile. ‘Westby said he’d tell me . . . stuff.’
‘Stuff?’ Tate says, pulling up one of his argyle socks.
He’s cuffed his school trousers above the ankle, and he’s wearing gorgeous oxblood loafers that are probably secretly designer, in that understated way that forgoes spectacle.
Seb had some clothes like that, even as a kid.
‘Oh, magic stuff. Right. Yes. Well. I’ve basically already told you.
We mostly study texts written in Procedural.
Deathly boring, start to finish, and you end up having to re-read them loads to catch all the meanings.
You can spend years reading the same Working, trying to strengthen your understanding.
That’s all the Work is. Reading these endlessly long fucking books until you get it, and then something clicks in your head. Voilà - magic.’
‘That’s it?’ Briar says, pausing with a book in each hand.
‘Yep. We take regular subjects too, to prepare us for uni. They like us to have three languages, Latin’s mandatory, and then there are classes dedicated to better understanding the Work.’
‘But what can you actually do with it?’ Briar says. ‘Are the books teaching you . . . spells?’
Briar is inordinately glad at that moment that Tate was the one to follow them up into the attic today, because he doesn’t laugh, or scoff, or make Briar feel like a silly baby for asking.
‘Basically yes. It’s like you . . . strike a deal with the text. The better you understand it, the better you are at whatever you’re trying to do with it. It’s not very flashy, though. I’ve been here for seven years, and the most powerful thing I can do is make people happy to see me.’
‘Oh,’ says Briar. ‘So . . . today, with me, did you . . . ?’
‘Nah.’ Tate smiles again, a real one, ear to ear. ‘But now I know you were pleased to see me. That’s so embarrassing for you. It doesn’t sound like much, but it can come in very handy in certain situations. I wouldn’t use it on you without your permission. Unlike some people here, we have manners.’
Briar, duly embarrassed, goes back to sorting, creating a pile for documents that aren’t books but look like they might be important anyway. ‘Sebastian Wolfe tripped me using magic. The Work.’
‘Ah. Yes. Wolfe is . . .’ Briar expects him to say special, or powerful, but instead he says ‘weird’.
‘Weird how?’
‘Thaumaturgy is all about . . . changing atmospheres, perceptions, feelings. Influence. It literally means “wonder-working”, like . . . performing miracles. Very vibes-based science. It’s not about tripping people over in the quad.
I don’t know which text he’s managed to squeeze that one out of, but the best a normal scholar could do with it would probably be to make somebody stumble over a thought.
And most people need to anchor their Workings to spoken words, even if they’re only mouthing them.
According to West, Wolfe is doing something nobody’s done at Temple for generations. ’
Great. So not only is Seb definitely supposed to be here and Briar decidedly not, he’s an extra-juiced-up magician with double the power of everybody else, and he’s decided to use that power for evil.
Wonderful.
‘I think he might actually end up being a serial killer,’ Tate says brightly, speaking Briar’s thoughts aloud. ‘Not ideal.’
‘Last night with the thing, the . . . baptism. That’s what it’s always like? Initiation?’
‘Mmm.’ Tate pulls a baked good out of his pocket and inspects it.
It’s very flat. ‘An ancient and glorious tradition. They’ll probably have to redo the entire opening ceremony now, Mons will be so miffed.
They won’t know for sure it’s us, but they’ll suspect, ’cos Hadley’s been pushing their buttons for years.
Alistair Buckingham is probably staring at my empty chair in Languages trying to explode me with his mind. Do you want some muffin?’
Briar, who can’t even conceive of a muffin right now, shakes their head. Tate shrugs, and takes a bite.
‘So what are the rest of the Trials? Are they all physical or is it more like—’
‘This is a subpar muffin,’ Tate says, nose wrinkling. ‘You made a good call. I think they’re putting chalk in the flour to stretch it out or something. Did you know Victorians actually started to like the taste? Admirable freaks.’
Message received, Briar turns to another pile, while unanswered questions buzz in their mind like flies against a window.