31. A Matter of Record #2
‘Good. That’s good. Me and Orph have been trying to work out what the next Trial might be,’ she says, falling into step with Briar as if they’re trusted colleagues.
‘I think it’ll be something mental. Maze in the dark, that sort of thing.
He thinks they’re going to hit us with hot pokers.
’ Her bravado falters. ‘What do you think?’
‘Um.’ Briar glances up the hallway, at a few scholars walking in pairs, engrossed in their own private dramas. ‘They’re going to make you eat or drink something disgusting, Evie. Sorry.’
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Oh, no. I have a very queasy disposition.’ Briar looks at her. Just the thought of the Trial seems to have her looking a bit green around the gills. ‘Do you think I can just pretend to eat it?’
Briar’s nose wrinkles. ‘I don’t think they’ll give you much of an option.’
‘No,’ she says, very worried now. ‘Well, thanks for telling me. Do you have any chocolate?’
‘Not today.’
‘You can’t win them all,’ she says, and then gives Briar a distracted wave and hurries off, presumably to warn the rest of the pips to urgently secure some mints.
‘Breaks your heart, doesn’t it?’ Briar is startled, and turns to see Daniel standing there with a cup of coffee in his hand, wincing sympathetically at Evie’s retreating back. ‘Poor little mites.’
Briar wonders how much he heard. Surely, not even a benevolent librarian would approve of Briar interfering with the Trials - but Daniel doesn’t look the least bit concerned.
‘It’s rough here,’ Briar says, and Daniel sighs.
‘It is. Too rough. Some of the kids that come through my office, looking for a shoulder to cry on . . . they’re just desperate for a bit of kindness.
’ Briar can only imagine. A friendly young librarian in a place like this must feel like a tiny island of respite.
‘How are you doing? Keeping out of trouble?’
‘Yeah,’ Briar says distractedly. ‘Thanks.’
‘Coffee’s always here when you want it!’ Daniel calls after them, as they wave at him over their shoulder.
In the tower, Briar sits on the sofa and studies the small green book of made-up magic.
It’s useful, even if it isn’t fully realised - a glimpse behind the curtain, an idea of what makes the Work tick.
Westby is at the desk, right back in the thick of his project, but he seems content to answer Briar’s questions between long stretches of silence.
‘So the introduction unlocks the mystery - each sentence is actually a clue. There’s the meat of it, then a sort of subsidiary indication, which is another hint at what you’re supposed to be getting at.
Honestly, the most useful thing you can do to prep for Temple is do the damned cryptic crosswords every morning.
Wish my mother’d had the foresight. So, for example, here.
’ He taps at a sentence on the page that Briar has read three times already.
‘This mad genius wants you to know that everything in chapter two that might seem like a negative is actually meant to be read as a positive. So if it says the parties will not be subject to something, it means they will.’
Briar’s head hurts. ‘But . . . how did you know that?’
‘Because the second paragraph starts with a sentence that has the word “opposing” in it,’ says Westby, which hardly helps.
‘Look, you’re really diving in at the deep end here.
The oldest Workings are far more simple, because while they might mostly be in Latin, they hadn’t developed the complexities of legal language yet, so it’s a more direct form of Procedural. How’s your Latin?’
Briar just looks at him.
‘Well, never mind. Look, they’re horrible, but it’s by design - so you have to put your blood, sweat and tears into them, earn the power.
The work is the Work, Jones. I’ll take a look at yours later, once I’m done with this .
. . I want to see where he broke it. If I can identify that, I might be halfway to solving my own problems . . .’
‘When’s the last time someone finished one?’ Briar asks, looking at the mess of papers strewn across the desk. ‘Successfully.’
‘Ah,’ Westby says, wiping his face, leaving a smudge of ink behind on his chin.
‘Victorian, I think. Obviously the board have been trying, but lots of them just don’t take.
Personally I think there’s something . .
. chivalrous about them. Only unlock for the pure-hearted.
That’s why monks were so good at it. And perhaps why mine will never work. ’
‘You don’t think you’re pure-hearted?’
Westby doesn’t look up. ‘Ha. No. Too many dark thoughts. If only I had your gentleman’s heart, Jones, I’d be away.’
Hadley is the only one Briar has told about Thursday night, the next Trial.
She didn’t ask for any details about how they’d obtained this information - the precise methods don’t seem to matter to her, but Briar could see her immediately starting to think, formulating some plan.
Maybe the methods shouldn’t matter to Briar, either, but they think of Bastian’s hands on their body and the tentative, hunted expression on his face and feel far from a gentleman right now.
‘West,’ they say, ‘can you reverse a powerful Working?’
‘Um, you can sort of negate it,’ Westby says, turning a page. ‘But they usually stop once somebody stops focusing on them, anyway.’
‘What about . . . the memory stuff the board does?’
Westby hums distractedly. ‘What about it?’
‘Can it be reversed?’
Westby looks up briefly, thinking. ‘Well. Perhaps. I imagine the person doing the reversing would need to know an awful lot about what they’re giving back. But frankly, I doubt they’ve ever tried.’
There’s the raspy sound of a key in the lock, and they both glance up, but it’s just Tate letting himself in.
‘It’s actually nice outside,’ he says, slipping off his sunglasses.
‘Come and revise in the sun. Be happy lizards with me and Hads.’ He looks at Briar, the book in their hand and the notebook beside them.
‘Jesus, you know you don’t have exams, right?
Put the book down and back away with your hands up, before you hurt yourself. ’
‘It’s interesting,’ Briar says, because it is.
‘Oh good,’ he says, looking accusatorially at Westby. ‘It’s catching. Briar, can I have your attic key?’
‘No,’ Briar says automatically. ‘Why?’
‘Because there’s a sun lounger up there, if I remember rightly,’ Tate says, grinning. ‘And if it’s still sittable, it’ll be my finest coup.’
Briar needs to take a break from staring at their little green book, anyway. They stash it in their inside pocket and follow Tate down the hallways and into the sunshine, blinking away the sudden brightness, then back into the gloom of the attic stairwell.
Light is streaming in through the window upstairs, casting a wide gold circle on the floorboards like the ritual markings of the magic on television. Tate crosses through it, illuminated for a second, and then finds the rusted sun lounger in Briar’s maybe pile and starts to haul it out.
‘Score. Good condition, too. And it’s got a cup holder!
I need to find something to put in a cup.
Someone in this hellhole must know how to mix a good mojito.
Not really the same without the tiny umbrella, though, is it?
They should do a scientific study testing cocktails with them and without, because I’m sure the umbrella does half the heavy lifting. ’
While he’s talking, Briar wanders their piles, checking on each one like they’re shepherding very stationary sheep.
They’d found a good, damp-free wooden crate earlier that day and started putting all the loose materials in it - pages torn from books, newspapers - and they start again automatically, unable to sit here among their work with their hands idle.
They’re just glancing over the front page of a newspaper from the 1970s - MAGGIE WON’T BE SILENCED - when a thought clicks into place like the loading of a gun.
They drop to their knees and begin pulling out newspapers, checking the date on each one before discarding it. 1897, 1924, 2001.
‘Hey,’ Tate says breathlessly from the other side of the attic. ‘Can you give me a hand with this? There’s no way I’m going to get it down the stairs by myself. Wish we could just drop it out the window.’
‘Just a second,’ Briar says. 1956, 1904, 1994. Prime Ministers rise and fall on the front pages as they search, wars begin and end, diseases flourish and are eradicated.
They find it almost at the bottom of the box, sandwiched between other familiar headlines read during their first week at Temple. It’s dated the fifteenth of July, 1998. Briar turns to the back.
MAN’S PLEA FOR HELP IN CASE OF MISSING FRIEND
Mr Grayson of Norfolk is offering a cash reward of ￡5,000 for any information pertaining to his missing friend, Mr Robert Parker, aged thirty-seven.
The two live together in the town of Winterton-on-Sea; Mr Grayson raised the alarm when Mr Parker failed to return home from work on Friday the 10th of May.
Mr Parker works as a travelling salesman during the week, and difficulties have arisen as his last known whereabouts span the breadth of the country.
There’s a large photo of a broad man wearing narrow glasses; in this one, as in the other Briar’s seen, Robert Parker’s tie is a striking monstrosity of colour.
‘Look,’ Briar says, holding it out for Tate to take.
‘I’m hauling chair,’ Tate says, the chair in question making a cacophonous scrape against the floor, no doubt leaving a mark.
‘Tate,’ Briar says, more urgently, and Tate sighs, drops his cargo and comes to see.
‘Shit,’ he says, once his eyes have scanned the notice twice. ‘There he is.’
‘I found his glasses,’ Briar says, strangely numb. ‘When I first went into his office. Broken, on the floor. Like they’d been knocked off his head.’
Tate tears the page from the newspaper, carefully folds it and puts it in his pocket. Sun lounger abandoned, he puts his hands on his hips and nods.
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘We’ve got work to do.’