Page 16 of Salt Magic, Skin Magic
Chapter Five
John paced in his room, waiting for Thornby. He could not stop thinking of the moment Thornby had smiled and said, “Your eyes give you away.” He hadn’t seemed disgusted or offended. Was he—oh God—could he beinterested? John found he’d groaned aloud.
Had that light contact between them in the spancel been a tease, or just chance? Thornby had certainly kept his presence of mind. By stepping into the spancel he’d managed to prove for himself that the magic worked on John but not on him.
But how many drinks was he going to have with his aunt? John wiped the palms of his hands on his trousers. This was ludicrous; he was fretting for a man who probably only wanted his professional skills. No wonder Thornby seemed interested. He must be desperate to get away, and John must be his first real hope in over a year.
John caught sight of the hatbox, half pushed under the bed. He would use the time before Thornby arrived to take another look at that hedgehog. In the stables, he’d worked with touch alone and found nothing. Now he would bring his materials into play. If he could pinpoint whatever was odd about the creature, maybe he’d discover something about the spell—or whatever it was—that bound Thornby to the estate.
He lit a branch of candles and took the lid off the hatbox. The hedgehog froze, then began trying to climb out, feet scrabbling on the sides of the box, nose snuffing. John refreshed its saucer of water and felt in his pocket for the crust of bread and walnuts he’d got from the kitchen. The hedgehog fell upon these hungrily and John quested towards it with magic. As before, there seemed to be nothing to find. And yet, there came again that faint hint of something unseen.
The staff had strict instructions not to enter his room unless he rang, and it didn’t matter if Thornby saw him at it. He rolled back the carpet, opened his trunk and took out powdered lapis and the Osiris amulet. He charged the amulet and sprinkled a pinch of lapis on the hedgehog. Nothing.
Perhaps a more rustic approach. Moly might work. Montpelier moly seemed best, given the time of year. He opened the tin and allowed the pungent smell to waft towards the hedgehog. Nothing. He put a pinch of the dried herb in front of the creature. It sniffed it, sneezed, and went back to its walnut.
Maybe something stronger. He began to lay the salt in a reveal sigil—the Peacock’s Tail—yet as he did so, he felt the salt trying to tell him something. It happened occasionally. It was a side-effect of working with materials. Most men, even materials men, didn’t notice the silent things, the inanimate things, trying to talk to them. But, for John, it had always been a distraction. To have one’s salt babbling something could cause one’s focus to slip and the magic to lose efficacy.
His masters at the Institute had told him to discard his salt and other basic materials more often. Other men swept their salt into the fire when they’d finished with it, or kicked out the sigil and left the mess for the maid. But John, the son of a shopkeeper who straightened bent nails for re-sale, and a mother who washed and reused the bloody string from butcher’s parcels, still found himself quite unable to do that.
So, although he felt a fool every time he swept up his salt—sometimes gathering it, grain by grain, with the tip of his finger—he did it anyway. By now, he’d worked with this salt for years. And while he knew it was merely the fancy of a man who worked alone and lived alone, he sometimes felt that it liked him and the magic he sent through it. He felt the same about some of his other materials. They almost had personalities.
This evening, the salt was putting the Woden’s Eye sigil into his mind, which was strange because he never used it. It was obsolete. The only reason he recognised it was because it was used in teaching as an example of how the power of a once-strong and certain sigil could fade over the centuries. Yet he knew the looping, rambling lines well enough.
His hand wobbled as he made the Peacock’s Tail and he had to sweep up his mistake and do it again.
“Concentrate,” he muttered, unsure whether he was addressing the salt or himself.
He finished the Peacock’s Tail and ran magic through it. The hedgehog drank some water and started another walnut. Nothing.
John sat back on his heels, stumped. Thornby would be here any moment and find him crouched on the floor with a puzzled look on his face. Thornby, with his tight breeches and that cool, cut-glass voice that could as easily humiliate as set your blood on fire.
More to keep busy than anything, John began to arrange the salt into the loops and curves of the Woden’s Eye. It called for the devil’s toenails—seven of them. He added those and set all humming with magic. The hedgehog finished crunching pieces of walnut, and started on the crust. But, did it look a little larger? No, it was a trick of the light.
Wasn’t it?
John turned back to the trunk for a handful of large iron pins. They looked rather like ladies’ hat pins, but made for Valkyries twelve feet tall and impatient of furbelows. He used the pins often and they had become convenient power-sinks, enabling him to focus elsewhere while maintaining his original flow of magic. The iron, like the salt, seemed to welcome him, glad of the heat and life of magic. He set them around the Woden’s Eye where they balanced, quivering impossibly on their points, and sent a ward through them. Now everything was contained under a glowing orange-red dome of power, the hedgehog and sigil on the inside, himself on the outside. Nothing could get past the pins.
The hedgehog dropped the crust and looked at him, cocking its head like a curious dog. Then, there it was again—that sensation so fleeting that it was barely there. It came again, and again, and resolved itself as a strain of music; a silvery piping, a tinkle of bells. The hedgehog had grown unmistakably larger and was still growing. It reared up and stood on its two hind legs in the hatbox.
John waited, every sense alert, for a flood of magic to spill from the creature—not affecting him, but telling its tale; what it was doing, how it was doing it, and a bit about the person who had done it. But he felt nothing—or almost nothing. It was like the time with Thornby on Howarth’s moorland: magical effect without magical cause. Which was impossible. His heart was pounding. He hastily strengthened the ward connection between the pins.
Yet the hedgehog, now the size of a small child, with spines as long as his hand, and teeth like a terrier, was still just itself. There was no magic on it, apparently. It stepped out of the hatbox and stretched its forelegs in a remarkably human gesture. Its face had changed too, to some hybrid of hedgehog and human. It had an insouciant air, which reminded him distantly of Thornby. Could this somehow be Thornby’s creature? Had Thornby just played him for the biggest fool in the world? Was Thornby a magical genius who’d discovered a way to conjure undetectable spells?
The hedgehog sidled to the edge of the sigil and began to walk into the wards. John scrambled to his feet, cold with horror and disbelief. It shouldn’t have been able to touch them. He’d once seen a man caught in a sheet of flame in a foundry accident, and it had looked just like this; the dark figure plunging through the living fire. But this fire was orange-red magic, and the hedgehog did not fall, but kept walking, dragging the magic with it across the room towards the far wall. Now the dome of magic was stretched, the way a glass-blower stretches molten glass, with the creature at one end and the sigil at the other. Christ, what if it broke? He needed to strengthen it, now.
He lunged for more pins, but before he could reach them, the ward exploded in a spray of red sparks and discordant musical notes. He was knocked off his feet, but somehow did not land on the floorboards. Torn shreds of the ward were whirling around and he was whirling with them, helpless as an autumn leaf. The silvery music grew louder. Now it was like being in the midst of a symphony orchestra playing full tilt. But it was playing no tune he could follow. And ithurt.He clapped his hands to his ears, but it made no difference. The music was inside his head. It was in his bones, in his blood. He was breathing it in. Christ, what to do? This was what came of listening to materials. He twisted in the air and managed to grab the open lid of the trunk. It was too late for pins. He pulled his personal ward stone from his pocket, flinging power into it until its golden glow lit up his fist and cocooned him as he hung in the air above his trunk.
The hedgehog creature turned to look at him. It was silhouetted against a new white glow of magic that seemed to be coming from the wall. Then, a host of creatures came streaming out of the whiteness towards him. Not people, not demons, but something else: women with the faces of owls, a stag with wings. There were green-eyed girls with leaves for hair, a pair of thin naked boys with bright blue skin, a hag with blackthorn fingers, and a huge shaggy dog, red with white spots like a toadstool. They were reaching for him, grabbing him with hands and claws and jaws. And their power was a musical storm, a magical lightning strike. They had him, and his magic was nothing to them.
He tried to knock them away, but there were too many. They were also grabbing at the golden streams of light from the ward stone, tearing the magic and pulling it like ropes to get a better purchase on him. Then an overwhelming pulse of music—or was it magic?—surged over him, and he was embedded in the strangeness like a fly in amber, the tatters of the ward stone in his hand getting dimmer and dimmer, until he knew no more.
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