Page 50 of The Magpie Lord
“Did you eat human flesh?”
“Did Iwhat?”
“You can always find fresh meat in a graveyard,” Stephen said. “And it’s walking around everywhere you look, if you’re prepared to butcher it yourself. All the meat you could want.”
Crane opened his mouth, closed it again and held up an acknowledging hand. “Right. Fine. You’ve made your point.”
“Exactly. Sourcing from people is wrong.”
“Understood.” Crane frowned. “No, wait. Warlocks are magical cannibals, yes?”
“That’s a...vivid way of putting it.”
“So if stripping people is as repugnant as eating them, how are there such numbers of warlocks as you’ve suggested?”
Stephen sighed. “Ah. Well.” He curled his legs underneath himself. “The thing is, finding sources of power is the main preoccupation of most practitioners most of the time.”
“For you?”
“No. No, I’m one of the lucky ones. I have—” He waved his hands vaguely. “I connect to the flow. I can pull power from the air, simple as breathing, where many of my peers would be gasping like asthmatics. It’s easy for me. And I come to somewhere like Romney Marshes or here, and I realise what it must be like for the rank and file. Constantly gasping and grabbing and desperate. So you’re ready to break the law to feed the need. It’s hateful. I hate it. This house makes me feel sick.”
Crane was watching him closely. “Are you all right?”
Stephen shook himself. “Sorry. I— It bothers me. I haven’t exactly been at my best since I came here.”
“I look forward to your best, then.”
Stephen gave him a tired smile. “You may even get it. Anyway, the point is...power is addicting. It’s hard to drag it out of the ether, but it’s so easy to tap people. Easy, effective, evil. And once one begins, terribly hard to stop, because the sensation of being without power is such a very horrible one. And of course it’s tempting for any practitioner to see the unskilled as lesser—less talented, less able, less worthy of consideration—and if you tap them for power, you start to see them as lesser beings altogether. Cattle, they call them—you,” he amended hastily. “There to feed on. There to use and discard. And that’s a warlock, more or less.”
“Cattle,” Crane said.
“Yes. Sorry.”
“Do you see the unskilled as lesser?”
“No,” Stephen said. “I do a job that makes me hated by quite a large number of my peers, including many who aren’t even warlocks, because I don’t think anyone is entitled to exploit his fellows because of an accident of birth. You’re an earl, I’m a practitioner, both of us were born this way, and neither of us is entitled to feed off other people because of it.”
Crane considered that. “I’m bloody glad you’re here.”
“Really? Because I wish to God we were both somewhere else. Try and get some sleep, Lucien, it’s late. And don’t worry. I am watching you.”
STEPHEN BLINKED, ANDrealised it was morning. Golden light streamed through the gaps in the heavy brocade curtains. He was cold and damp and sweaty from sleeping in his suit, his neck and back ached from the cursedly uncomfortable chair, something was trying to attract his attention, and Crane was...
...right in front of him, shaking his shoulder.
“What happened to the wards?” Stephen demanded, jolting upwards.
“Nothing,” said Crane. “They were still burning when I got out of bed thirty seconds ago. Listen.”
Stephen’s brain finally registered the sound that his ears had been trying to tell him about. “What the devil— Who’s screaming?”
“I don’t know. Merrick’s down there finding out.”
Crane started pulling on clothes as he spoke. Stephen hurried to his own room, rapidly changing into his usual clothing, and irritated that he found himself noticing the baggy knees and worn, permanently grubby cuffs. That triggered a thought, and as he jerked his boots on he called, “Wear something you can run in, please. No Savile Row.”
“I don’t get my suits made on Savile Row,” said Crane, emerging in a casual grey tweed that still looked twenty times the price of anything Stephen had ever bought. “Wouldn’t stoop to it. Come on.”
They hurried down the stairs, ignoring Graham and a panicky-looking housemaid who had emerged. Other staff were heading outside for the source of the appalling noise. It was a dreadful sound, an endless, agonised shrieking in multiple voices, inhuman, and as they ran to the stables, they could hear a human voice too, a deep male sound, but sobbing like a child.
