Mairelon the Magician Read online

  Hunch’s response was muffled, but a moment later Kim heard Mairelon say, “Thank you. Kim will be with me; don’t disturb us for an hour or so. I’m going to need to concentrate.”

  “Master Richard!” Hunch’s tone was horrified. “You ain’t going to … You wouldn’t never…”

  “There are days, Hunch, when you remind me forcibly of my excessively estimable brother,” Mairelon said in a tone of mild irritation. “Is it her virtue or mine that you’re worrying about?”

  “You ain’t a-going to gammon me,” Hunch said severely. “What are you up to?”

  “I’m going to take that suggestion you made just before Shoreham arrived, if you must know. I trust you don’t expect me to do so outside the wagon, in full view of the road?”

  Hunch snorted but did not answer. A moment later, Mairelon pulled his head and shoulders back into the wagon and closed the door. His right hand held a small packet, presumably the herbs he had gotten from Hunch. Kim eyed him warily. “What’re you goin’ to do?”

  “Reassure myself,” Mairelon said absently. He set the packet down on the counter, then crossed to the chest and opened it. He muttered a word and made a quick gesture with his left hand, hidden from Kim by his body. Then he withdrew the velvet-swathed bundle that had been Kim’s downfall. He set it carefully on the counter and gently folded back the velvet.

  Kim’s eyes went wide as she stared at the heavy silver bowl nested in the ripples of black velvet. It was shallow and circular, like the soup bowls the gentry used, but more than twice as large. The rim was at least two inches wide and carved into intricate leaves, flowers, and vines. It shone softly in the lamplight.

  Kim looked at Mairelon. “Is that the silver bowl you and the gentry cove were on about?”

  “The Saltash Bowl. Yes.” The magician opened a cupboard and removed several small jars. He measured carefully as he added portions of their contents to the bowl, then mixed them with a long wooden rod. Kim noticed that he was careful not to touch any part of the silver with his hands as he worked.

  She started to ask another question, but thought better of interrupting him. She waited until he finished the mixing and laid aside the wooden rod. As he reached for Hunch’s packet, she said, “You ain’t explained nothin’ about what you’re doin’.”

  Mairelon paused in mid-reach and looked at her. “No, I haven’t, have I?” He hesitated, studying her, then sighed. “I suppose you have a right to know what to expect. Very well, then. One of the uses of the Saltash Bowl is to compel people to speak truthfully.”

  “And you’re goin’ to use it on me?” Kim asked cautiously. It was not a welcome thought. There were any number of things she would rather not be forced to discuss truthfully: the uses to which she had put her expertise in lock picking, for instance. On the other hand, this was an opportunity to observe real magic at close hand, and she wasn’t about to pass it up without a reason. Assuming, of course, that she had a choice.

  “Not exactly. The magic of the Saltash Bowl can be used only under very specific circumstances. More important, it can be used only when the entire set is together.”

  “That platter the gentry cove was talkin’ about?”

  “Among other things. I cannot, therefore, use the bowl to force you to be truthful. However, I believe I can cast a similar spell, using the bowl as a focus, which will let me know whether or not you are telling the truth.”

  “So if I don’t say nothin’, you can’t tell what’s true?” Kim said. Mairelon’s lips tightened, and she added hastily, “I’m just tryin’ to understand. You ain’t got no business knowin’ everything about me.”

  “A reasonable objection,” Mairelon said after a moment. “Very well. The spell is just an indicator. If you don’t say anything, it won’t have anything to work with, so it won’t tell me anything.”

  Kim nodded. She understood the unspoken implication well enough. Mairelon would be able to tell a good deal by which questions she chose not to answer. “All right, then,” she said. “I’m ready. What do I have to do?”

  “Just stand there, for the time being.” Mairelon turned back to the silver bowl. He smoothed a wrinkle from the velvet on which it rested and laid a twist of straw beside it, not touching the silver. Then he opened Hunch’s packet and sniffed at it. He nodded in satisfaction, but to Kim’s surprise, he did not dump it into the bowl with the rest of the herbs. Instead, he set it down and reached for the lamp that hung beside the door. He adjusted the wick, then did something to the hook that held it. When he pulled on it, the lamp came away from the wall on a long flexible arm.

  Mairelon positioned the lamp to hang a hand’s breadth above the center of the silver bowl. Then he looked at Kim. “If you have any other questions, ask them now. From here on, any interruption could have … unpleasant consequences.”

  “I understand.” Every street waif in London had heard whispers of the fate that came to anyone foolish enough to interrupt a true wizard in the practice of his magic. Burning alive would be nothing to it. Kim might have her doubts about some of the things she’d heard, but she wasn’t about to test them now.

  Mairelon gave her a searching look, then nodded. He turned back to face the bowl and took a deep breath. The lamp above the bowl threw the magician’s shadow against the opposite wall, large and dark, and made a mask of his face. Kim shivered, then froze as Mairelon began to speak.

  The language was unfamiliar to Kim, but every word seemed to hang in the air, clear and sharp as broken crystal. She could almost feel their edges, and she was afraid to move and jostle their invisible presence. She understood, now, where the saying had come from, “deadly as a wizard’s words.” She wondered how there could be room in the wagon for the solid sounds Mairelon was speaking.

  The magician’s hands moved suddenly, sliding with exquisite precision into a gap in the growing lattice of invisible, razor-edged words. One hand seized the packet of herbs Hunch had provided; the other lifted the twisted straw on the opposite side of the bowl. The straw touched the lamp’s wick and burst into flame. Mairelon’s voice rose to a shout, and herbs and burning straw dropped together into the silver bowl.

  Smoke billowed out of the bowl, spreading a strong, sweet smell throughout the wagon. The lamp went out with the suddenness of a snuffed candle, and the silver bowl began to glow. Mairelon lowered his arms with a sigh and looked at Kim. “What is your name?” he said.

  Kim hesitated. “Jenny Stower,” she said deliberately.

  The glow of the silver bowl dimmed to an angry red point. “Your name?” Mairelon repeated. “And the truth, this time.”

  “Kim.”

  The bowl flashed into silver light once more. Kim stared at it, awed and frightened. “Where did you first hear of me, and from whom?” Mairelon asked.

  “At the Dog and Bull, the day afore I snuck into this wagon. A skinny toff offered to pay me if I’d find out what you had in here.” The bowl remained silver, and Kim relaxed a little.

  “What, exactly, did he tell you?”

  Kim repeated the story she had told Mairelon at their first meeting. The bowl glowed a steady silver throughout the tale. Mairelon nodded when she finished, and made her repeat her reasons for eavesdropping on his conversation with Shoreham. Kim did the best she could, but the bowl’s light faded slightly.

  Mairelon frowned. “And were those your only reasons?”

  Kim shifted uncomfortably. “Mostly.”

  “You’ll have to do better than that,” Mairelon said, watching her closely.

  “All right! I was curious.”

  The silver light brightened. Mairelon’s lips twitched. “Curious?”

  “Why not?” Kim said indignantly. “Anyone as meets you can see you’re a regular swell, and it queers me what your lay is. Bilking the culls in the markets ain’t work for a gentry cove, and you ain’t told me nothin’. I got reason for wonderin’.”

  Mairelon laughed. “I should have guessed. Well, I’ll explain as soon as we’re
finished here. You’ve enough of the pieces to get us all into difficulty by accident if you aren’t told the rest.”

  He asked Kim a few more offhand questions, but his suspicions seemed to be laid to rest. “That’s all, I think,” he said at last. He turned to the bowl and raised a hand, then paused and looked at Kim. “Why did you decide to leave London with us? Curiosity again?”

  Kim swallowed. “Yes,” she said, and the bowl flickered.

  Mairelon looked from her face to the bowl and lowered his hand. “There is more, I think?”

  “It ain’t nothin’ to do with you!”

  The light held steady, and Mairelon nodded. “Perhaps it is not, now. However, we will be returning to London eventually, and I don’t like the possibility of a nasty surprise waiting for me.”

  “He ain’t waitin’ for you,” Kim muttered.

  “Nevertheless, I should like to know who ‘he’ is, and why you considered it so important to remove yourself from his vicinity. Particularly if the reason is something that is likely to interest the constables.”

  “It ain’t the nabbing culls I’m worried on,” Kim said, scowling. “It’s Laverham.” She sighed. “I suppose now I got to tell you.”

  “Have to. I would appreciate it. Who is Laverham?”

  Kim took a deep breath and began trying to explain her antipathy to Dan Laverham. Mairelon waved her to silence after a few sentences.

  “I’ll take your word for it that the man is unpleasant,” the magician said. “But what set you off?”

  “He was at Tom’s shop, where I took those flash togs you asked me to get rid of. He asked a lot of questions, and one of his men tried to follow me when I left.”

  Mairelon frowned. “He had you followed? How far?”

  “Half a block in the wrong direction, I tipped him the double right off.”

  “And you’re sure it was you he was interested in?”

  Kim shrugged. “What else? Laverham’s been aching to get his fambles on me since before old Mother Tibb stuck her spoon in the wall.”

  “Who is Mother Tibb?” Mairelon asked.

  “She raised me and some others,” Kim said shortly. “She’s dead.” She didn’t want to talk about Mother Tibb. Even after two years, talking brought back memories of the skinny old woman’s terrified howls as the constables hauled her off to prison, and of the hangman’s steady tread and the sickening thud as the trapdoors dropped away beneath the feet of his line of victims. Kim preferred to remember the dubious safety and fleeting camaraderie of the earlier years, when she thought of Mother Tibb at all.

  “I’m sorry,” Mairelon said gently. He paused. “About Laverham—” He made her describe her brief encounter in as much detail as she could remember. At last he paused and said, “All right, I’ll agree that he seems to have been after you. But if anything else like that happens, or if you run into Laverham or any of his men again, tell me.”

  Kim nodded. Mairelon turned to the still-glowing silver bowl and moved both hands in a swift, complicated gesture above it. The light gathered around the rim of the bowl, as though something were sucking it upward. Then, with a faint popping noise, the lamp flared into life and the glow of the bowl vanished.

  Mairelon smiled in satisfaction and began setting the wagon to rights. The extended lamp hook folded neatly and invisibly back into the wall beside the door, the ashes of the herbs were thrown outside, and the Saltash Bowl was wiped and wrapped in velvet once more. Kim watched for a few minutes in silence before reminding Mairelon that he had promised to explain to her what was really going on.

  “So I did. The story really starts about fifteen years ago, when old Lord Saltash died. He left a rather large bequest to the Royal College of Wizards. You’ve heard of the Royal College, I trust?”

  “As much as anybody.”

  “Mmmm. Well, Saltash fancied himself a magician, and he’d collected a tremendous number of odds and ends of things that he thought ought to be properly investigated. He dumped the lot on the College. Most of them turned out to be quite worthless, but—”

  “That’s why you called it the Saltash Bowl!” Kim said. “It was part of the rum cull’s collection!”

  “Yes, though I wouldn’t call Saltash a rum cull. The bowl is only part of the grouping, there’s a silver platter that matches it, and four carved balls of different sizes. Together, they’re the key to a very interesting spell.”

  “Making people tell the truth,” Kim said, nodding.

  “I don’t think you realize what that means,” Mairelon said testily. “It’s easy enough to bind someone not to do things, but a spell to force a person to speak, and to speak only the truth, without interfering with the ability to answer intelligently—well, it’s remarkable. Most control spells are obvious; they make the people they’re used on act like sleepwalkers. But the Saltash group—”

  “All right!” Kim said hastily. “It’s bang-up. What next?”

  “The Royal College spent a good deal of time, here and there, trying to duplicate the spell on the grouping. No one ever succeeded, and the Saltash group became a curiosity. And then, four years ago, it was stolen.”

  Mairelon paused. “It was stolen,” he repeated, “in such a way that it appeared that I was the thief.”

  “You were in the Royal College?” Kim asked.

  Mairelon blinked, as if he had expected some other response. Then he smiled slightly. “Yes, I was. Under another name, you understand.”

  “Richard Merrill?”

  “You are a shrewd one. Yes, that is my name.”

  “But you ain’t the sharper who nicked the bowl.”

  “No. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to run into Edward, though, I’d have no way of proving it. The evidence was overwhelming. Even my brother Andrew believed it.”

  Kim snorted. “He’s a noodle, then.”

  Mairelon’s face lost its set look, and he laughed. “A surprisingly apt description, I’m afraid.”

  “So why didn’t this Edward cove tell anybody that you ain’t the one who lifted them things?”

  “Those things, Kim, not them things. At the time, it was … convenient to have an excuse for leaving the country quickly.”

  “How do you mean?” Kim asked suspiciously.

  “I was spying on the French,” Mairelon said baldly.

  “Oh.”

  “And there was my pride, too. Hubris, the failing of the gods. I wanted to recover the stolen items myself, you see. I thought I’d find out who was behind the theft. Someone at the College was involved, I’m certain. I asked Edward to let me try.”

  “And that’s how you got hold of that bowl?”

  “It took me a year to track it down after the war ended. It was in a little town in Germany, property of the local Baron. He’d picked it up as a souvenir of England, and he was incredibly stubborn about selling it.”

  Kim thought back to the conversation she’d inadvertently overheard. “So now you’re going to Ranton Hill to find the platter part. What about the rest of it?”

  “I can use each piece to help find the others, and it gets easier the more pieces I have. With the bowl and the platter together, it won’t be hard to locate the four spheres.”

  “What about—” Kim’s question was interrupted by a peremptory knock at the door. Mairelon lifted an eyebrow in amusement and went to open it.

  Hunch stood outside, his expression clearly disapproving. “You’ve ’ad your hour, Master Richard,” he said. “And I’d like to know where ‘Is Lordship’s sending us off to this time.”

  “Essex,” Mairelon said, and grinned. “Ranton Hill, to be precise. Did you have any other questions, Kim? Then, if you’ll excuse us, we had better go and figure out what route will get us there with a minimum of delay. We can talk more in the morning.”

  EIGHT

  For the next five days, it rained. Torrential downpours alternated with misty drizzle or bone-chilling showers that made even the best roads treacherous going. The seldom-freque
nted lanes used by Mairelon’s wagon became a sticky quagmire which plastered the horses and mired the wagon wheels. Despite Mairelon’s best efforts, their progress slowed to a crawl.

  None of them rode; the wagon alone was nearly too heavy for the horses to tow along the roads. Hunch and Mairelon took turns leading the horses, sliding and stumbling through cold, oozy mud that sucked at their feet and weighted down their boots in inch-thick layers. Even Kim sank ankle-deep unless she kept to the verge and slid on the slippery wet mats of last year’s grass instead.

  By the time they stopped to camp each night, they were all exhausted, but Mairelon insisted that Kim continue her lessons no matter how tired she was. It was easier to agree than argue, so Kim applied herself as best she could to arts such as reading and legerdemain which could not be conveniently practiced while marching through the rain. During the day, Mairelon continued her instruction in what Kim privately called “flash talk.” When her voice grew hoarse, he let her stop and listen while he recited poetry or plays, or rendered the same speech over and over in a variety of styles and accents.

  They slept in the wagon, though Hunch muttered balefully and chewed his mustache over the arrangement. Kim was not really sure whether he was fretting over Mairelon’s morals or the spoons, by the end of the second day, she no longer cared. Sleeping in a place that was even approximately dry was far more important than Hunch’s disapproval. Mairelon appeared as unaware of Hunch’s glares as he seemed unconscious of any impropriety, though Kim did not for a minute believe that he was as oblivious as he looked.

  On the sixth morning, Kim followed Hunch out of the wagon to find a steady, soaking rain falling from an endless sheet of clouds the color of lead. With a snort of disgust, she pulled the collar of her cloak tighter around her neck in a hopeless effort to keep the water out. The cloak was Mairelon’s, and much worn, and she had had to tie it up with a length of rope at her waist to keep it from dragging in the mud. It made a bulky, awkward garment and she was positive that she would slip and end up covered in mud before the morning was over.

  “Cheer up,” Mairelon said as he passed her, heading for the horses. “It will stop before noon.”