CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
They stepped into and out of portals, the three of them together, flying through the darkness and into opulent sitting rooms, libraries, tea house entryways, cloakrooms, billiards rooms, all of them cast in dank, oceanic light.
They chased the direction of Dot’s magic.
Theodora had charmed the Sympathetic link, the rune drawn onto Dot’s hand with Lio’s chalk, connecting Dot’s living skin to the missing finger.
Blood to blood. Lio cast the portals, over and over, his own body racketed by the last of his pneumonia.
With each portal closer, those strange pulses of desolate magic grew sharper in Dot.
Each time, she balanced them away, leading the group onward, writhing with the pain of each portal tearing at her healing wounds, rocking back and forth with the rhythm of the magic like the waves, always searching for equilibrium.
‘One hundred and fifty metres north-east,’ said Dot, hastening across to the eastern wall of a parlour room that must have belonged to a duchess or minister.
The seawater outside the window lapped at the glass.
They spotted schools of fish and rising bubbles, and Dot remembered the men and women she had seen camping under the bridge across the Lourdes. Oh, Saints. Had all of them drowned?
Lio cast the final portal, finding with the deftness of his talent the only available space to exit it. He almost collapsed with this effort, but he pulled them through and they stepped out from the portal and onto the palace roof of King Ellarde Custre IV.
‘Oh,’ said Theodora, surprised. The top of Saint Penelope’s Cathedral and the Tower of étienne peeked through the skin of the water just beyond.
‘Opal must be directly beneath us,’ said Dot. Her head swelled, and she concentrated firmly on the cold slap of the seawater against her ankles.
‘She must be in the study of the Grand Magician Valiente,’ said Theodora. ‘She knows this is my office – perhaps she is looking for information here on the Ancient Spirit’s magic. The distance is not too great. Dorothy, will you be able to swim?’
Dot nodded.
‘And you, Liutprand?’
‘If I couldn’t, I’d have died in the South Sea every time I slipped off a trawler.’
Theodora crossed to the edge of the roof, the sea water spilling over her pointed boots.
‘Lucky that the palace was built on a hill,’ said the witch, counting the metres below. ‘Deep breath, chums. Dorothy, take a hold of my leg. Lio, hold onto Dorothy’s. Aren’t we glad you borrowed my mother’s trousers in the end, Dorothy, not that skirt you wanted?’
‘This is hardly the time to be a comedienne,’ said Dot, but then Theodora gave her a sad smile, and Dot knew that this could be the witch’s final time to be a comedienne.
They each took a long, deep breath and plunged into the enchanted sea water.
Theodora sent out a summoning charm at the grand doors of the palace and the three of them propelled toward it.
As they moved through the water, Dot stared around at the submerged city.
It was coated in a sea-green gloom. Beyond the palace fences, Dot caught glimpses of pods of whales and deep-sea creatures.
Goblin sharks, coelacanth, giant squid. Several omnibuses floated nearby, while strange arthropods with shining exoskeletons scuttled over them.
The smallest of the acolytes were dark like Dot’s own talons, and the largest were ivory.
Is that what the Ancient Spirit looked like?
Would she, Dot, look like that in a thousand years, if the affliction took the rest of her?
What had all these many creatures been, before? Ancient peoples? Poets? Anglerfish?
At last, Theodora’s hands clasped around the palace doorhandles. With a fierce blast of magic, the door opened and the three of them were sucked right in. They tumbled, sopping, onto the palace floor, the door slamming behind them.
Lio coughed wetly. ‘Saints above. I had a tickle in my chest that whole time.’
‘My ears are blocked,’ said Dot, waggling her jaw.
Theodora looked about. ‘Good thing Salamander decided to leave air in the buildings when he had Opal flood everything.’
‘The death toll would be a lot higher if he hadn’t,’ said Lio.
Dot looked around as she weakly tipped water out of her brogues. ‘There are no guards.’
‘Ellarde must be elsewhere,’ said Theodora. ‘No wonder Opal made it into my study.’
‘Did Opal break these wards too?’ asked Dot.
‘All of my wards went when the keystone was destroyed,’ said Theodora.
The witch raised one arm and pulled down a plume of fire that illuminated the space and doused them in warmth.
‘Still, I would rather swim a few metres to the palace than portal right in and discover that the King had replaced his Grand Magician and instated new wards.’
Briskly, they followed the witch up the red-carpeted stairs and through the halls of the palace.
The windows refracted the waves outside, sending strange shadows across the carpet.
It took a moment before Theodora noticed Dot and Lio shivering and the sound of their shoes squelching upon the carpet.
She threw out a hand and they all dried immediately.
Lio cleared his throat again. Dot reached for more tonic.
She drank it. At last, they came to the olive-green door, and without so much as a backward glance, Theodora threw it open.
The three of them stepped into the study of Grand Magician Valiente.
If Dot had thought the witch’s bedroom was haphazard and occult in its decadence, then this space was another thing entirely.
Larger than a community hall, the main room was filled with shelves of books and myriad desks and a fleet of cauldrons.
The chamber was encircled in scarlet wallpaper and heavy purple curtains that had been drawn shut against the ocean.
In one corner sat a skeleton of a winged dinosaur.
In another corner was a lightbulb larger than a hot air balloon.
A flash of light came. Through an archway off the main room arose the sound of tearing paper and loud sobs. Another flash. Another. The cold magic within Dot pulsed in perfect time with each burst of light.
Dot, Theodora and Lio tiptoed across the carpet, around a cloth screen depicting a painted albatross, and into the annex room.
Here, Opal sobbed against the floor of the dark space.
She clutched Dot’s severed finger, the skin turned an ugly, foul grey, and pulled on the Ancient Spirit’s magic.
Dot felt each tug of magic and snuffed it out easily.
‘Opal,’ said Theodora, her eyes narrow.
‘Tessa,’ gasped Opal. She dropped Dot’s finger and it bounced against the carpet. ‘Oh, Tessa, Lio. How can you love me after what I’ve done?’
Theodora cast her hand out at the gas lamps. The space illuminated, revealing the torn books and papers strewn across the room. Blood was smeared about the carpet, joined by strange oozes of white liquid. Both, it seemed, had come from Opal.
‘Did you do this to me? To punish me?’ Opal’s eyes filled with tears. ‘Look at me.’
From the tips of her fingers to the base of her throat, Opal’s skin was the chalky white of the oldest acolytes – she was covered, almost entirely, in scales.
The sight made Dot realise at once that her scales were safe, youthful, even pretty.
Only Opal’s face and the very middle of her chest remained her own, the tattoos of the conduence still visible over her sternum.
Her satin dress was ripped. Plates spiked through the place where her scars had once been.
‘Why should we care what happens to you?’ asked Lio, his voice low and furious.
‘I know you cared for that boy,’ said Opal.
Her eyes darted about. ‘I should not have killed him. It was a heinous thing to do in a moment of terrible passion. I did not mean to. He killed my Eliot, but I know I should not have done it. I am not my mother. I wouldn’t do what she did, but my hands are stained, and I am sorry.
All of me, is stained. Wasn’t it evil of me? I wish I could undo it.’
‘You don’t have to listen to this,’ whispered Dot to Theodora and Lio. ‘Let’s see if she can help us get to Salamander.’
‘How are you standing?’ Opal begged of Dot, darting toward her.
Dot envisioned the rune for repel and cast a gentle force to topple her.
Opal fell against the carpet, but still she babbled.
‘Tessa loves you more than me – there are hundreds of books here all on curses and maladies, and more at the university, and more were in the attic, and not one has the answer she procured for you. That stupid spirit, Belchamber, was babbling about the Ancients, but how do I fix it? I want myself back. I want to undo it all. How do I cure it?’
‘You don’t,’ said Dot, and Opal’s eyes flashed with fury.
Opal took up Dot’s discarded finger and threw all of her magic into the connection to the Ancient Spirit.
Dot glimpsed the little rune that Opal had etched into the skin, right beneath her chewed fingernail.
Another tug of magic came, far stronger than the earlier ones, buckling Dot.
She almost lost control, and it frightened her, but Theodora sent a blast of magic at Opal.
The addled woman flew back and dropped the finger. Dot lunged and grabbed it.
‘No!’ cried Opal.
Before Dot could stop herself, she pictured the rune for fire and the rune for destruction, and she balanced the twin pools of magic as best she could; she clutched the finger in both hands as a gentle burst of flame shot out and engulfed the ruined flesh and bone.
Dot’s severed finger burned, and with it, Opal howled. She writhed as a woman possessed.
‘Stop!’ shrieked Opal. ‘She murders me!’
The finger burned to cinders, and with its destruction Dot felt her tie to Opal extinguish.