Page 18

chapter sixteen

THE LAKE

It drizzled all day Sunday, in fits and starts. The rain had the November quality of coming at you in sideways gusts, so that no umbrella could possibly keep you completely dry. Walden passed through the student lunch hall in the Old Refectory on the way to the staff dining room and saw the abandoned heaps of soggy coats and winter hats. Teenagers huddled together for warmth over their ham-and-cheese lunch paninis. Todd was lying on his side in the corner bleeding an ancient, uncooperative radiator. Like Walden, he seldom really stopped working.

Staff lunch was also paninis: ham and cheese, just cheese if you were vegetarian, no vegan option on a Sunday. Walden picked at the salad on the side, which was six sad unseasonable leaves and half a tasteless tomato. She did have a kitchen in her flat. She really ought to cook for herself sometimes. But cooking for one was depressing, and the school meals—one of the better staff perks, this—were free.

Todd joined her at the table halfway through the meal, still in his work overalls. He ate two paninis and a large bowl of tragic salad with every sign of enjoyment, which cheered Walden up, and he complained again about the state of the boilers. Walden inquired after his great-nieces and -n ephews. Todd had never married, but everyone knew he kept meticulous track of his sister’s grandchildren. The oldest was in Year Five, and his parents were starting to think about secondary school. “And the Marshals had a look in at their school, and funny old thing, the lad’s got a bit of the fizz,” said Todd, doing an obscure hand gesture which Walden understood from context to mean ‘a knack for magic.’ There were degrees of innate magical ability. Sorcery, the wild uncontrollable talent which had to be trained or else—that was extremely rare. More common—but still not actually common—was ordinary talent: the fizz, the knack, the baseline potential which made doing magic feel easy and natural. Some children were natural athletes, and some children were natural magicians.

That one of Todd’s relatives should share his prodigious untrained talent did not surprise Walden in the least. These things often ran in families. But magic was not taught in state schools—too abstract, too impractical, too old-fashioned, and too bloody expensive. So unless Todd’s great-nephew turned out to be a full sorcerer after all—unlikely, if he’d reached Year Five without a manifestation—there was not going to be any state funding for his magical education. Without a place at Chetwood, or one of the handful of other private schools like it, his talent was unlikely to go anywhere.

Todd knew it as well as she did. “So I told Jennie, well, why not put him in for here, then? And she said, no, no, we couldn’t afford it even if they took him, and I said I don’t know about that, I’ve got a little bit saved up, and you never know, there’s bursaries and so on…”

He gave Walden a worried look, as if she might tell him off for his presumption. “Why not?” said Walden encouragingly. “That’s what the bursary funds are for.”

She found herself thinking, as the conversation went on, of Laura Kenning’s wry look in the moonlight: Why didn’t I have this? It was the same reason that Todd had not had this, an obvious, powerful, intractable knot of money and power and history, changing too slowly for most. “Have you thought any more about adult magical studies?” she said, which Todd seemed to hear as an abrupt change of subject, although in Walden’s head it was not. “The Open University offers a short course—I believe it’s all online these days—”

“Now, Dr Walden, show some sense,” said Todd, with lugubrious good humour. “Some of us have work to do.”

After lunch, she met Mark at Reception, the secure modern box that had been flung up to ruin the facade of the main school building in the nineties. The front desk was unmanned, and the glass-paned front doors were locked. Mark’s Audi pulled up, doing a rather showy turn around the wide gravel circle at the front of the school. He parked in a reserved space, jogged up to the doors, and waved at Walden through them. He’d swapped the good suit for jeans and a chunky jumper, with expensive trainers, all underneath a battered old Barbour that he almost certainly never wore in London. Walden wore the same clothes on Sunday as she did on work days, though in deference to the weather she’d put on a raincoat and wellies. She buzzed him in, and noticed as she did so that there was a little frisson of something inhabiting the electronic keypad that kept the door locked.

Walden frowned at it. That was the second new imp she’d encountered in three days. Yes, you expected minor possessions at Chetwood, but not this many, and not this quickly.

“Another one?” said Mark, peering over her shoulder as she murmured a banishment over the keypad. “Oh, it’s only an imp. What’s the harm?”

“I thought you were a security expert,” said Walden. “You don’t see a problem with stray demons in the security system?”

Mark laughed it off. “Fair, fair. Well, shall we? Where do you want to start?”

“Boundary sweep and work our way in, of course,” said Walden. She flipped the hood of her raincoat up. “Umbrellas are in the stand over there, if you didn’t bring your own.”

She’d had a little bet with herself, but she lost it. Mark did not pull out an old-fashioned black umbrella with a carved bird’s-head handle from the boot of his Audi. Instead he quite happily took one of the large, cheap red umbrellas branded in white with Chetwood’s latest logo. School branding was one of those things that objectively mattered—those school fees paid our salaries, those parents had expectations —while being completely dire to think about. The current logo was a vague shield shape and a large letter C, vaguely reminiscent of banks and law firms and—most importantly—other expensive boarding schools. Mark twirled the umbrella over his head, unfazed by the rain. “Show me a lamppost, I’ll do you a little dance.”

“No lampposts, I’m afraid. We’re starting by the rugby pitches,” said Walden.

“Lovely weather for it,” Mark said. “This brings back memories! They used to make us play in all weathers. You’d be shivering half to death in your Games kit till the mud coating warmed you up.”

“I remember,” Walden said. “Hockey was more or less the same. We have a girls’ rugby team now, of course.” That was an innovation of the last ten years, amazingly enough. For long decades before that the gender divisions of school sport had been as observed as dutifully as the call-and-response prayers at Evensong. Boys’ winter: rugby, of course, and certainly not football. Girls’ winter: netball—a sport apparently designed on the principle that basketball would be more ladylike if it was less fun—and hockey. Boys’ summer: cricket. Girls’ summer: tennis. The whole thing had always been comically sexist, but it had taken a concerted student protest—boys turning up to netball lessons in borrowed Games skirts, girls tramping down to the rugby pitches—before change had come at last.

“You’re never telling me they’ve dumped hockey,” Mark said.

“Of course not,” said Walden. “Chetwood actually wins at hockey.”

“Did you play?”

“I developed,” said Walden, “as early as possible, a strong interest in netball. If you weren’t A-team material, and you managed to get one of the good positions—wing defence, say—you could spend most of a Games lesson standing still and gossiping with whoever was wing attack on the other side.”

The rugby pitches were a generous sweep of land lying at the foot of a gentle rise. The little hillside beyond was crowned with ancient English woodland, which in April was filled with bluebells and on a day like today was probably not filled with vaping sixth formers. There had to be enough pitches for the First through Fourth XV to play home fixtures simultaneously—Chetwood would not have been able to host games otherwise—so the fields looked simply enormous as you came up to them. The grey mist of the rowing lake beyond was mildly picturesque in a Gothic sort of way. The combination of hilly rise and lake meant that these splendid school facilities, which got photographed in summer for the prospectus as a glorious expanse of green, were in fact a gigantic marsh. Canada geese browsed here most of the year. Only meticulous attention from the grounds team stopped the pitches from becoming approximately three acres of mud every autumn.

“Where are we putting the portal?”

“On the boundary, naturally,” said Walden, and set off across the grass. Her wellies went squelch squelch in the saturated mud underneath the green. What you wanted for a planar portal, wherever possible, was a sense of liminality: a border-place, an edge-place, somewhere where it made sense to say you were crossing from one world to another. An actual doorway was ideal—the division between mundane world and demonic plane, during Old Faithful’s incursion, had been marked by the front door of School House. Mark, bedraggled despite the red umbrella, looked hopefully towards the padlocked door of the boating shed. His trainers were muddy and his jeans were not doing particularly well in the driving sideways rain. “Did you ever row?” he said. “Cox, maybe?”

“No,” said Walden, thinking uncharitably And of course he’s a boatie.

“Shame. You’d probably have liked coxing. You strike me as the type.”

“You mean short and bossy?”

Mark faked contrition. “I’d say commanding .”

Ignoring the promise of shelter in the boating shed, she struck out for the jetty. It was cordoned off, with a NO SWIMMING sign—the open-water swimming club would probably start running again in spring—but she just stepped over the low fence. Mark said, “Ah, of course,” behind her as their footsteps sounded among the patter of raindrops on old wood.

“Technically,” Walden said, “Chetwood School does not own the lake.” There was even a village rowing club, with its own rather smaller shed on the far side of the grey water. “This is as far as we can go. Welcome to the boundary.”

School and not-school, private and public, and most importantly land and water; The places we belong, Walden might have said to a class, and the places we do not . Magic followed logical, consistent, learnable internal rules—until it did not; until you ran into the woolly edges where everything depended on the perceptions of the magician. It annoyed some students immensely. Walden had always found it delightful: beyond all the rules and systems so carefully worked out by so many scholars over so many centuries, at the boundaries of knowledge, a space full of beautiful mystery.

Mark came and stood next to her on the jetty. To Walden’s surprise, he furled the umbrella. The rain poured down on him, rapidly soaking his hair and face and beading on the shoulders of his Barbour, but he did not seem to mind. “Smell that,” he said. “Clean air, clean water. Does you good.”

“It’s certainly fresh,” Walden said.

A grin, less calculated and the more charming for it. “Bracing,” said Mark, “that’s the word. All right! I brought salt and chalk, but they’d be sluiced away in seconds. Be honest—do you do this to all your new hires?”

“What on earth do you mean?” said Walden, as if she didn’t know.

“Better be a serious magician,” said Mark, “if you want to impress Chetwood’s Dr Walden. Yes, ma’am, right away, ma’am! Just give me a second.” He joined his hands together and stretched them above his head. “You’ll let me off if I don’t get it perfect first time?” he said.

“Well, I—”

Mark punched a portal.

It was pure evocation, no demonic assistance involved. Walden was certain, right away, that he was in fact a specialist evoker, or had been at some point. He had the smoothness and precision of an academic magician, balanced with the confident physical self-awareness of a sportsman. The very best evokers tended to straddle the borderline between youthful athleticism and middle-aged expertise. Mark was probably just over that line. No matter how good you were, you could not sustain the same amount of magical power out of the strength of your own body forever. Mark Daubery, it seemed, had followed a common path—evocation in youth, turning to invocation as he looked down the barrel of his forties.

Evocation teachers teach PE, instantiation teachers teach design and technology, and invocation teachers teach contract law, ran a common faculty joke, and all of us think all the others are stupid and bad at magic.

Mark’s portal was a good one. It hung shimmering in the air at the end of the old jetty, taking the form of an arched doorway with a purplish curtain of raw magic hung across it. Rain fizzed and evaporated off its glowing edges. Mark glanced at her, Well? and Walden had no criticism ready.

And really, wasn’t it better if he was actually good? Wasn’t that exactly the mistake Walden had made with Laura Kenning—assuming she was less than competent, and then letting that assumption poison their whole relationship, so that they’d barely had a chance to actually know each other before Laura was gone?

You’re being increasingly unprofessional about this, Walden told herself. It was one of the harshest pieces of self-criticism she could think of. This man is trying very hard to set up some kind of worthwhile working relationship. He has gone out of his way to acknowledge your seniority and your expertise, when the position the governors gave him meant he could simply overrule them both. Meanwhile, you are intentionally making the experience of working together as difficult and unpleasant as possible. Laura would have lost her temper by now, and you would deserve it.

And another, softer voice, somewhere in her heart: Admit it, Saffy, you mostly resent him because he’s not Laura.

“Very nice,” she made herself say, and winced: it had come out as if she was bestowing praise on a student, which of course sounded patronising in any other context. And she did not know Mark well enough to follow up with I’m afraid I don’t have normal conversations very often. His brows quirked in amusement, which was a better reaction than being offended. “Shall we?”

“Ladies first,” said Mark.

“How old-fashioned.”

“Self-interest. If something is waiting for us, you get eaten first.”

“Ah. I’m glad to know where you stand.”

“Safely behind you, Dr Walden.”

Walden shook her head and smiled. Basically an overgrown schoolboy, she reminded herself. Basically harmless. “Very well,” she said, and readied a neat gestural banishment charm—a variation on the basic one on the back of her risk assessment—before she stepped off the end of the jetty, through the portal and into the demonic plane.

On the other side: nothing.

A vast pastel nothingness, blurred and softly grey. There was no lake. The demonic plane was hostile to the physical fabric of the real world, and water could only exist here when it was safely contained and cohered within a system of selfhood—an animal, a human being. The nothingness rippled around Walden’s wellies. There were no demons waiting for her. She had not really expected them. There was nothing permanent, reliable, or persistent about a large body of water, not on the level that most demons could comprehend. There was nothing there to pin a sense of self to, unless you counted individual fish. A higher demon the size of the Phoenix might be able to develop a concept of ‘lake’ as a whole, and so tie its territory to a whole feature of the landscape. But why would a demon that strong waste itself on such a thin hunting ground, when the school was right next door?

“It’s always spooky doing this,” Mark said. “No one home? Good stuff. Let’s check the shed.”

He trudged over formless grey towards the land-water boundary, the school boundary. Walden watched without comment as he tried to step back onto what was, in the mundane world, school grounds. The external wards flared briefly golden. Mark sprang away, swearing loudly.

“I think you forgot your staff lanyard,” Walden said. “You were given a staff lanyard to wear on site—weren’t you?”

“Bloody buggering— What?”

“I picked up a guest pass from reception, just in case.” She had it in her raincoat pocket. She fished it out and tossed it over. Mark caught it handily, turned it over to see the holographic outlines of detailed spellwork on the back, and said ruefully, “Daubery fails the test.”

“No, the portal was very good,” Walden said.

He was still examining the pass. The spellwork was Walden’s own, an original design. “This can’t be doing much to keep out demons.”

“There’s more to school security than managing the demon problem. What you just bumped into is actually aimed at unscrupulous human beings.”

“Do you get those often?”

“As with demonic incursion,” Walden said, “the way to assess risk to children is to decide not how often a bad thing happens, but how serious the consequences would be if it did happen.”

“So you’re talking, what, stalking, kidnapping—”

“Honestly, when an unwelcome adult tries breaking into the school grounds, the goal is usually simple theft,” said Walden. “I sometimes think the ICT suite might as well have a target painted on it. But the things you mention are among the worst-case scenarios, yes.”

Mark put the guest lanyard on. “Right. Boundary walk, then?”

“Let’s get going.” Walden crossed the external wards—feeling the welcoming shiver of her own spellwork passing over her, assessing her for belonging, and tidily identifying her as staff—and paused to take in the transformation. From formless foggy pastel, the ground underfoot went abruptly and violently green. The greenery was not grass but the idea of grass, the memory of it, the decades and decades of mowing and rolling and raining and trampling and browsing geese and shouting children. It looked like the brushwork of some abstract painter, which made it quite unnerving to stand on. Mark whistled. “Hear that?”

The shouting: young male voices, mostly, as Walden would have expected. Blurred running figures moving in the green distance. The demonic plane here was shaped by the school. It was not quite as clearly defined as the incursion in School House; but then, School House had been the site of a student boarding house for most of the last five hundred years. “I wonder when rugby was invented,” she said.

“In 1845,” said Mark. “At Rugby. Rugby School, that is.”

“Less than two centuries, then,” Walden said. “But I suppose we have been playing a lot since then.”

“If the history makes a difference, I’m surprised we’re not hearing anything off the water,” said Mark. “Rowing’s an old sport. The Ancient Greeks did it.”

“But the lake is on the other side of the school boundary. And water does not mix well with demons.”

Mark nodded, conceding the point. “Your report on the big incursion—you saw an echo of yourself in there, you said.”

“Yes?” said Walden suspiciously. “What about it?”

“Wonder if I’m out on that field somewhere,” said Mark. “Seventeen forever and covered in mud.”

Walden tried to imagine it, and found it surprisingly difficult. Mark’s overgrown schoolboy attitude didn’t make him an actual schoolboy. There was far too much sophistication and intentionality about the way he deployed the charming smile. Not an innocent person, she thought. But then, who is?