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chapter eight

INCURSION

Invocation was Walden’s magical specialty and her life’s great passion. She was an expert in creating tiny and tightly contained demonic incursions, overlaps between the mundane and demonic planes, in order to conduct her carefully managed trade: pieces of mundane existence, which could be as small as the vibrations in the air she breathed, in exchange for a demon’s effortless facility with magic, the stuff that was as natural and intrinsic to their existence as water to fish. Incursions were by nature unstable and temporary. A single incursion ought to be just big enough to allow one demon of predictable size to travel from one plane to the other for a very short period of time, without gaining any foothold in material existence beyond a temporary reification. But ‘ought’ was doing a lot of work in that sentence; ‘ought’ was about expert practice and effective risk management. The truth was that there were ways to make bigger incursions, and to have them last longer. These were mostly very expensive in raw materials, beyond the reach of any individual magician who was not personally a billionaire—and also, of course, insanely dangerous and highly regulated. But Walden had seen one such mega-incursion, created under controlled conditions in a lab in the Arizona desert, which had been going for nearly forty years.

This incursion—a critical incursion, with a demon in control—was shaping up to be bigger than the one in Arizona. But then, Old Faithful was bigger than anything anyone had ever dared summon for mere research purposes. The archdemon that had been going for Will must have been a secondary scavenger. Walden saw a few others about the same size as she made her way through School House, as well as plenty of smaller imps feeding on the household electronics and delighting in the unexpected treat. There was nothing larger. Anything big enough to present a challenge to Old Faithful was also smart enough not to pick a fight with it.

In a peculiar backwards way, Old Faithful was an asset to Chetwood. They had far fewer serious demon problems than a school full of underage magicians should, because the one higher demon they did have was so huge and so terrifying that it had scared off all the competition. And, in turn, Old Faithful was so big that the everyday half-trained magic of schoolchildren was barely enough to tempt it. It lay quiescent, uninterested, lazy: a great white shark swimming among the little fish, unwilling to waste effort on anything less than a plump and juicy seal.

Unfortunately, a pair of talented sixth formers fit the demonic definition of ‘juicy seal’ almost perfectly.

Walden, under the barrier of her glowing white shield, tried to move quickly. The physical geography of School House, which she knew well, was of limited help. She made it back to the kitchen, but could not find the staircase which she knew ought to be there. She only had two hours. “Think, Saffy,” she muttered aloud when she felt herself starting to panic.

Silence. And in that silence, another sound: a series of treble yelps and whimpers, and a regular swish and crack .

It took a moment for Walden to understand that she was hearing the sound of a child being beaten with a cane. Horrific. But she went towards the noise, because it was what she had. She found herself walking through a wall which, come to think of it, must have been put up when the kitchen was last remodelled, and into a room that no longer existed: a wood-panelled teacher’s office out of a history book, rather like Walden’s own. Next to the desk, the phantom figure of some sadistic Victorian schoolmaster was caning a boy whose age Walden could only place as ‘too young for secondary school’—perhaps eight or nine. Chetwood had been offering a complete education for young magicians since the fourteenth century. At one point, it had accepted pupils as young as five.

She murmured a variation on the standard banishment and sent it towards the apparition with a sharp gesture. The schoolmaster disintegrated. Hard to guess what it had been. An imp latching onto a memory of strong emotion was more likely than a true ghost.

The little boy pulled up his flannel shorts. His legs were pale and knobby-kneed. He had not been affected by the banishment. “Hello,” Walden said, before remembering that no one had greeted people that way before the invention of the telephone. “I mean—good evening.”

No reply. The child started walking away from her.

“Wait!” Walden said, and took a few steps after it.

They seemed to have been steps in time. The boy grew into adulthood before her eyes. His hair was turning grey by the time Walden recognised him from the oil portrait hanging in the school hall. He was the doomed Headmaster from 1926. “Mr Merringham?” she tried. “Rodney Merringham?”

“They sent a witch?” said Merringham. “I beg your pardon; a lady magician.” The correction was one that would have mattered a great deal in the 1920s, Walden seemed to remember. The contemporary definition of ‘witch’ varied depending on who you asked: possibilities included the straightforwardly sexist ‘female magical criminal,’ the fairly disrespectful ‘non-academic practitioner’—by that definition, Kenning was a witch, though Walden would never have used the word that way—and of course the defiant ‘academic magician with strong feminist views.’ Roz had called herself a witch for a while. Walden herself had never really got on with the term.

Merringham was peering anxiously at Walden through gold-rimmed spectacles. He wore a black academic gown over a threadbare suit. His voice had had a blurred and distant quality, like listening to a poor-quality recording from long ago. “I need to get up to the tower,” Walden said, watching him carefully. This one, she thought, was a ghost. Merringham had been dead for a century. But some part of him lingered, imprinted in the magic of the demonic plane where he’d died.

“We can’t have it threatening our boys,” Merringham said.

“Indeed not. The tower, Mr Merringham?”

“Death, the Fool, the Ten of Swords, the Tower. A poor prospect, very poor. But we can’t have it threatening our boys.”

Divination, once held to be the fourth arcane discipline—invocation, evocation, instantiation, divination—was totally discredited; a dead science, like its kinsman astrology. Even a century ago it had been on its last legs. “Please, Mr Merringham,” Walden said, “do you know the way up?”

Something in her tone made him frown. “Women,” he said, “are too emotional to truly master magic. It is essentially a manly pursuit—like cricket.”

Absolutely no point having an outdated argument with a confused ghost. “I’m sure you’re right, Mr Merringham,” said Walden. “There’s a boy trapped in the tower. How do we get up there?”

That got the ghost’s attention. “Can’t have it threatening our boys,” he said again. Ghosts were not Walden’s area at all, but she rather thought he was stuck on that idea, skipping and repeating like the ancient recording he resembled. “This way, young lady.”

You died in your forties. You’ve got ten years on me, if that, Walden thought. But she took her grandmother’s owl brooch out of her skirt pocket. She jammed it pin-first into the wall, with some force, and looped a spell around it to make sure it stayed firm. When she let it go, the enamelled owl was shining with pale golden light: a beacon, to mark the way back.

Walden followed the ghost.

This was definitely not the present-day School House. The staircases groaned and sagged underfoot in a way that spoke to terrible rottings and splinterings in the dark below the floorboards. Todd Cartwright would have been appalled. And although it was hard to see detail through the greasy fog of the demonic plane, the rooms here seemed much smaller and darker than the light and airy house that Ebele ran now. Walden at one point caught a glimpse of a wall-fitted gas sconce. Occasional figures moved through the fog; imps latched onto echoes of emotion, perhaps, like the schoolmaster she’d dismissed. Boys, mostly. Chetwood had been a single-sex establishment until 1963.

The sobbing was hardest to bear. It rose and fell, and the timbre varied, though it tended towards the treble. Boarding schools nowadays prided themselves on being homes away from home for your darling offspring, all life and fun and well-resourced pastoral support teams. In the nineteenth century, ‘pastoral’ meant poems about sheep. Walden followed Merringham’s ghostly figure through spartan dormitories with glitters of frost on the insides of clouded windowpanes. The stifled whimpers of unhappy children echoed in her ears. She reflected in passing on how much history had been made by men presumably suffering from the aftereffects of traumatic childhood neglect.

A welcome stretch of relief came when Merringham’s ghost led her across a silent space which seemed to be the long-lost kitchen garden from School House’s pre-Victorian incarnation. A bit peculiar, since by that point they’d climbed several flights of stairs, but Walden caught a trace of lavender scent and saw a knee-level motion in the fog which might have been the suggestion of a chicken. I ought to be taking notes, she thought. Critical incursions were poorly understood, mainly because they were very dangerous and everyone tried to make sure they never happened. Attempts to simulate a crisis like this took place in areas where no one lived, or wanted to live. But School House’s long history was casting its shadow over the demonic plane here.

Eventually, a doorway became visible through the fog from a distance. Painted on it in lines of white light was the intricate shape of an incursion ward. Not an old one either. Walden knew what modern spellwork looked like. She only became more certain as Merringham led her closer. She’d marked enough of Nikki’s homework to recognise her handwriting.

“I can go no further,” Merringham said when they reached the door. Walden was startled again by his blurred and distant voice, by his accent with the clipped consonants of long-ago BBC announcers. “I rather think I must have failed. Did I fail?”

Walden looked at the ghost, academic gown and bad suit, gold-rimmed spectacles and greying hair. The plaque in the school chapel and the painting in the hall were all that remained in the world of this man. He had left so slight a mark on history that she doubted he even had a Wikipedia page. His brow was furrowed, his mouth anxious and sad.

And what more will remain of me, she thought, when this is all over?

A photo, rather than an oil painting. The visiting photographer had been in a hurry at the end of a long day slogging through all Year Seven. The image on Walden’s staff ID wasn’t even a nice picture.

One thing you learned, as a teacher: it was very seldom helpful, or kind, to lie to a person about themselves. They usually knew you were lying. It never made them feel better.

“I’m afraid you did fail, Mr Merringham,” she said.

“I had the most rotten teachers, as a boy,” said Merringham. “I wanted to be a good teacher, that’s all.”

“You were,” Walden said, feeling it was true, though she could not know. She had never seen him in a classroom.

“It seemed like the least I could do,” said the ghost. “We can’t have it threatening our boys.”

The incursion ward shone brightly on the door, reversed. It was painted on the other side. Its light made it hard to read the childish plaque that said, in pink bubble letters, NICOLA’S ROOM.

“I’ll take it from here, Mr Merringham,” Walden said. “Thank you for your help.”

The ghost faded away. The outline of its body became part of the shapes and shadows of the landing. Walden stood at the top of the stairs in the present-day School House’s tower. She had not been back here in twenty years. Opposite the door with Nikki’s name and the incursion ward, another door hung open, revealing through a thin layer of magical fog the detritus of teenage boy—scattered hoodies, forgotten plates, a gaming console. No sign of Mathias himself.

Walden found herself praying— oh God oh God please —as she tried the door of Nikki’s room. No atheists in foxholes.

The door would not open.

It was not the incursion ward preventing Walden from entering. A badly drawn or overgeneralised ward might accidentally exclude humans as well as demons, but this one was written with Nikki’s characteristic precision and verve. The identity clause directing it against any unwelcome demon was perfect to the last dot and curve. There was nothing to find fault with at all, in fact, except that there was not enough power in it to present a serious barrier to anything larger than an eighth-order archdemon. Even that was a lot of power for a sixth former. Mathias was in there too. He had to be. Nikki could not have put that much force into a ward alone.

So something else was barring Walden’s way.

She frowned at the door. It took her a few seconds to spot the subtle, smoky shapes of demonic spellwork. Demons very seldom actually cast spells, in the same way that birds seldom needed aeroplanes. The logic and formality of spellcasting were an intellectual step too far for most of them anyway. But Old Faithful was no ordinary demon. The spell barring Walden’s way forward was a subtle and powerful piece of magic. Again she felt the researcher that she no longer was clamouring for her attention: If only you had time to take notes!

She glared at the demonic barrier. It was a spell and therefore it would be possible to analyse it and unravel it. The smoky shapes tried to shift away from her gaze. “No, you don’t,” Walden said, pinning it in place with a glare. The spell had a location clause, she saw, but no weaknesses there—though it defined School House in confusingly roundabout terms, including a timeframe element that ran backwards as well as forwards, which had startling implications. And the identity clause—

Ah.

Those who do not belong, said the demon’s spell. Those who have no right to enter . Unforgivably vague, if a human had written it, but Old Faithful had more than enough power to hold its concept of not-belonging firm without sacrificing overall spell stability.

Nevertheless, it was an opening.

“I am the Director of Magic at Chetwood School,” said Walden. “I am a senior member of school staff, undertaking safeguarding duties in accordance with my professional obligations as outlined in my employment contract. There is nowhere on the school grounds where I have no right to go, particularly if I believe a child is in danger. And your incursion seems very dangerous, my friend.”

She put her hand out and caught her fingers in the spell as she spoke. It twisted away from her, trying to escape—oh, this was not a passive defence; Old Faithful had certainly noticed her, and it was paying attention now. But the principles of invocation relied above all on the inviolability of a bargain; to a demon, the wording of Walden’s employment contract carried as much magical force as any summoning array. Walden closed her fingers on the greasy, smoky heart of the barrier spell. Dr S. Walden, D.Thau, M.Ed, Director of Magic, alumna . Chetwood School knew who she was. She had every right to be here.

The barrier fell apart. The door of Nikki’s bedroom swung open.

Walden could see nothing through it. The fog of demonic magic was thick as the soup from the school canteen. But she heard a low cry of alarm in the distance. Opening the door had disrupted Nikki’s incursion ward, and its white light was fading. Walden stepped over the threshold, slammed the door shut behind her, and sent a firm blast of power into the ward to shore it up. It was much too late to actually prevent this incursion, but every ward still functioning would help to slow its growth. As the spell’s glow grew brighter, the fog around Walden receded a little, revealing that Nikki’s bedroom floor was an absolute tip—shoes, clothes, a ragged-looking stuffed rabbit perched on top of a beanbag, a slipping pile of lever arch files all bursting at the seams, two stray hockey sticks. “Nikki!” Walden called sharply, before she tried to pick her way across. “Mathias!”

There was an answer. Walden recognised Nikki’s voice. It sounded frightened, and very far away.

“Stay where you are!” Walden called back. “I’m coming for you.”

She threw some more power into her upturned pale bowl of a shield, and then for good measure added another layer to it, remembering how neatly Kenning’s shield had reinforced itself. Then she set out across the floor.

Old Faithful, or else the peculiar geography of the demonic plane, was playing tricks. There was much more floor than was logically possible at the top of a tower, and all of it was covered with mess. Nikki couldn’t possibly own this much stuff, and Ebele would never have let her leave all her possessions lying around like this. Out of the corner of her eye, Walden caught sight of a battered blue guitar, decorated with stickers and propped on its amp. The skin on the back of her neck crawled. Neither Nikki nor Mathias was musical.

She began to be afraid that the absurd obstacle course would go on forever. She did not spot the summoning pentagram until she was almost on top of it.

It was a big one, a triple array straight out of Nielle’s Arrays, and very competently done; Walden would have graded an undergraduate highly on a piece of work like this, provided they hadn’t then used it to try to summon something about five times bigger than it was designed to hold. The first and second circles had broken down completely. There was so little left of the outermost pentagram that Walden had already stepped over it before she realised it was there. The second circle still had some traces of power remaining, but most of it was sputtering sadly, useless and undirected.

Nikki and Mathias were trapped in the innermost circle.

The third pentagram, at their feet, had transformed from a drawing in salt and chalk to a sucking black void. Walden saw Nikki step towards it, two little shuffling steps, and then back away with one big step; then forwards, two more little shuffles, and back: dragging herself away. If she stepped into that darkness, she would be possessed at once. The demon was pulling her in. Mathias, on the other side of that black maw, was on his hands and knees, shuddering.

Small mercies, Walden thought. It started with the tougher nut to crack.

There was no time to plan or to hesitate. Walden went briskly forward under her shield. She put a teacherly hand on Nikki’s shoulder and shoved her sideways. Nikki stumbled and fell, shrieking in terror as Old Faithful’s tug dragged her forwards at the same time.

“I think not,” said Walden, and stepped into the black hole that was the central pentagram.

There was a howl of irritation somewhere in the violet fog of the demonic plane, and the void roiled under her feet. Walden felt Old Faithful trying to tug her down. She held her right hand high and her left hand spread out—the oldest, simplest gesture of sorcerous command—and spoke in syllable after precise, focused syllable. The spells rolled confidently off her tongue, defining, compelling, demanding. A thousand years of the European magical tradition, six centuries of Chetwood School, and more than twenty years of study and practice had created Dr Walden. Old Faithful was a lot bigger than she was, but it had never had to work .

Her hands were trembling and her blouse and vest were stuck to her back with sweat by the end. The void still licked at her shoes. “BEGONE,” she finished. “Or else.”

The black maw closed over. The central pentagram ceased to be a howling hole into endless darkness and became Nikki’s scuffed bedroom floor.

Walden, with a gasp of relief, let go of the threads of spellwork she was holding. Only her pale shield remained, and around it a spiderweb of perception and awareness, in case the demon tried to sneak back up on them. Nikki was still on the floor. Her head was in her arms, and her shoulders were heaving as she sobbed. Walden cast a worried glance at Mathias, who hadn’t moved. He was curled on his hands and knees, almost a foetal position. Walden did not dare check on him herself. Old Faithful, faced with a slightly more challenging opponent, had withdrawn—but she was not arrogant enough to think she had actually beaten it. It would be around here somewhere, watching for an opening or a distraction.

Walden’s focus had to be her defences. She did not have enough magical reserves left to do all that again. She could not afford to slip.

“Nikki,” she said, carefully modulating her tone into kind-but-firm, the voice you used when you needed them to listen. “This isn’t the time to go to pieces. I know you’re a sensible girl. I need you to stop crying and stand up. Now.”

Two more awful, gasping wails. Then, with a visible effort, Nikki lifted her head. Her dark brown eyes were still full of tears, her curling lashes stuck together with dampness. She looked younger than seventeen. Her voice was on the verge of breaking into a wail again as she said, “Dr Walden, I’m so sorry .”

“Don’t worry about it now, Nikki,” Walden said. Kind but firm. “I need you to get up for me, and find out what’s the matter with Mathias. I’ll be right here with the shield. Come on. Up you get. You can do it.”

Nikki crawled over to Mathias. She looked exhausted. It had to be after midnight by now, and she had spent most of the last hour trapped at the heart of a critical incursion with Old Faithful on top of her. But Walden’s concern had to be a distant, floating thing, next to the immediacy of maintaining their defences. They were nowhere near safe. One mistake on Walden’s part would most likely doom all three of them.

“Matty? Matty?” she heard Nikki say, and then, “I think he’s having a panic attack.”

Can’t blame him, Walden thought, but oh, that was an unwelcome complication. “Nikki, I need you to get him up and walking,” she said. She could hear the tension leaking through her professional calm. Nikki was far too bright not to know how much trouble they were all in. Her glance up at Walden was frightened, and then determined.

Walden focused fiercely on her shielding and scouting spells, and tried not to listen while Nikki talked softly to Mathias. A twitch at the edges of her perception; Old Faithful was testing how attentive she was. Walden narrowed her eyes and turned to face that way. Another twitch, now directly behind her. She turned again. She still hadn’t actually seen the demon. It was too big. Now it tugged at Walden’s spiderweb in two places at once. She had a feeling it was laughing at her.

“Dr Walden, I think we’re ready,” Nikki said. She’d got Mathias standing, and had a protective arm around him. Mathias was alarmingly pale, the scattering of his acne a livid constellation of red on his forehead and chin. He was still breathing too fast. But Nikki at least looked better, if still very tired. Walden had hoped that having someone else to look after would calm her down. It was the main reason she was calm, after all.

“All right,” Walden said. She made direct, intentional eye contact, first with Nikki and then with Mathias. “We’re all going to walk together. Stay calm and stay with me. Don’t try to hurry. Don’t attempt any magic yourselves. I’ve got you shielded and I will keep you safe. Do you understand?”

Nikki nodded. After a moment, Mathias did too.

“Good,” said Walden. “Let’s go.”

How long ago had Walden left her enamelled owl brooch jammed into the wall of School House’s kitchen? The twist of magic looped through it was a shining beacon to her now. The distorted space of the demonic plane was under Old Faithful’s control and did its best to confuse her, throwing up classrooms that no longer existed and dormitories that had long since been emptied. The great demon was pulling in spaces from the rest of the school now: a section of Brewers Hall, a space punctuated with columns from the colonnade, the shining glassy conference room walls from the new Bursary building, even a double room from Scrubs. Walden bit her lip when she noticed but said nothing. She did not want to frighten the children.

She’d left Laura Kenning outside School House, and she remembered that glimpse of a perimeter. Walden had colleagues who knew what they were doing. If the incursion started spreading quickly, then collapsing it was the only option. An incursion collapse would be experienced by everything inside it as an explosive detonation. Death would be fast, if Walden dropped her shield; or slow, eaten alive by hundreds of demons, if she tried to save herself. How far away now was her two-hour deadline? If the three of them could not find their way out in time—

No use worrying. It would be more dangerous if they tried to run.

Walden did notice, as they moved, that the lesser demons she’d spotted on her way up to the tower had all disappeared. Had they fled, or had they been consumed? Neither possibility was comforting.

She stifled a sigh of relief when they reached the disappeared Victorian office where she’d met Merringham’s ghost. No sign of him now, but the thread of magic tied to her brooch led straight through the wall. Not far now. Nikki and Mathias were both very quiet, but they had started to look less scared. Walden touched the wall and it shimmered. “Walk straight through,” she said. “Imagine it’s not there, and it won’t be.”

They walked through the wall. It disintegrated, revealing School House’s airy present-day kitchen on the other side. Walden put her arm out abruptly. Mathias walked into it. She did not glance over at him. She did not dare look away.

Her owl brooch was no longer jammed into anything. The thread of Walden’s magic looped through it jiggled and twisted as the figure sitting on the table tossed it from hand to hand. Left, then right. Left, then right. He set it on one end on the kitchen table and gave it a spin. The enamelled owl clattered away and fell onto the stone flags.

The figure looked up at them and grinned. He had slightly wonky canine teeth. His jeans were threadbare. Demonic power hung around him in a malevolent cloud.

“Hey, Saffy, you made it,” said Old Faithful, in the voice of a boy who had been dead for twenty years. “I was starting to get worried.”