Page 2

“Photocopier’s on strike,” said the Head of History to Walden when she walked into the staffroom.

“Thanks, Marie,” said Walden. She would have guessed anyway, just from the harassed expressions of several hovering teachers clutching textbooks and printed worksheets. Chetwood had been founded as a school of pure magic, turning out fully trained magicians who were masters of all the arcane disciplines—invocation, evocation, instantiation, and the long-since discredited fourth school, divination—and, as a bonus, could usually add, subtract, and write their own names. But all that was back in the fourteenth century, some six hundred years before the advent of the National Curriculum and OFSTED’s private-sector shadow, the Independent Schools Inspectorate. These days Chetwood School was a specialist foundation, like a technical or musical college, with a full complement of academic teaching staff alongside the magicians. Walden, who was an alumna, remembered an uneasy rivalry between the magical teachers and the academic side back in her own school days. The current Head had stamped on it hard. Good teachers knew that in a school there was only really room for two sides: Us, and Them.

The photocopier was a hulking grey beast looming in the corner of the staffroom. On the noticeboard behind it was pinned a laminated A4 sign: DO NOT EXORCISE . Walden navigated her way through the hovering crowd with polite good-mornings to her colleagues and opened the maintenance panel. “What’s the matter with you?”

Two fiery purple eyes peered up at Walden from the dark, unknowable depths of the multipurpose tray. Strike! squeaked the demon possessing the photocopier.

It was only a minor imp, of the first order. Walden knew it quite well at this point. Demons were attracted to complexity and to personhood. Laypeople assumed that this meant every magician was on the brink of getting possessed all the time, but really demons entering the mundane plane moved into complex and person-shaped spaces, like hermit crabs moving into shells. That could mean a human being, but it took a very strong demon to do it by force. If you were unlucky enough to meet a magician with a demon looking out from behind their eyes, you could usually assume they’d invited it in.

More common was a demon possessing an animal—it could happen randomly, if an opportunistic demon found a weakness in the fabric of reality and a living creature about the right size on the other side, and it was also the source of the old cliché about magicians summoning familiar spirits into black cats. Of course, that sort of thing was frowned on these days as being rather unfair to the cat. Technology, complex and intricate, was always a risk; hence Walden’s clock—hard to find a magician’s clock that hadn’t been possessed at some point—and the school’s draconian, much-protested mobile phone policy. Impossible to detach several hundred teenagers from their phones altogether—and their parents would have been appalled if the school had tried—but, actually, a middle schooler didn’t need a little demon box in their pocket at all times. No, they didn’t. No, turn it off. Yes, it does have to go in the dormitory safe overnight. The commonest incident reports that came across Walden’s desk were repetitive to the point of grim comedy: twelve-year-old with a secret second phone hidden under their mattress, awake at one in the morning scrolling through a social media app they were not legally old enough to sign up for, and shocked, shocked, when the imp possessing their phone started trying to eat them.

So modern technology was one risk. But actually, if anyone had ever looked at something and called it ‘you’—assigning it a self, whether it deserved one or not—then a space had been made, and in that space something could live. Provided, of course, that there was enough magic around for the demon to make the crossing from its own plane to this one.

Since Chetwood was lousy with six and a half centuries’ worth of adolescent wild magic, and the staffroom photocopier was called variations on ‘you bloody bastard thing’ by dozens of people every day, there was no point trying to keep it clear. You just ended up re-exorcising it once a week. Even the Marshals had given up. Its current inhabitant was a known quantity, and there was a large bowl of salt next to the fire extinguisher in the staffroom, in case of emergencies.

“Who told you what a strike is?” Walden asked the photocopier.

“Probably my fault,” said Marie. “We’re doing labour movements with Year Nine.”

“Not to worry,” Walden said. “Besides, arguably, it does work here.” No consent on the school’s part, no employment contract, but if they preferred this fairly benign imp to the other potential inhabitants of the photocopier—and Walden did —then it was worth trying to keep it happy. Making agreements with demons was the heart of her academic discipline, and keeping the school’s wild magic problems under control was one of her core responsibilities as Director of Magic. She would have liked to have her coffee first. “All right,” she said to the photocopier, “what are you striking for? Better working conditions?”

The demon said, Blood!

“All our staff are entitled to sick leave, pension contributions, support from the employee assistance program—”

Blood! shrieked the photocopier. No representation without exsanguination!

There were some chuckles from the crowd of teachers. “No blood,” said Walden firmly. A meal of human bodily fluids was the fastest possible way to turn a minor demonic possession into a major demonic problem. “Would you accept a digestive biscuit?”

The fiery flecks of the purple eyes in the depths of the multipurpose tray flickered. The imp said, with an air of deep cunning, Chocolate.

“Very well,” said Walden. She fetched a chocolate digestive from the staffroom kitchen and carefully fed it into the photocopier’s maintenance hatch. The demon ate it in two sulphurous snaps. Then the machine let out several loud beeps. “Now what?”

Staples! demanded the demon.

Walden fetched a box and tipped it in. Another gulping sound, and a strong smell of rotten eggs: then the photocopier began to spit out perfectly stapled packs of worksheets about—Walden read sideways—the Luddites.

“Thanks, Saffy,” said Marie. “Should I just give it a biscuit next time?”

“A small demon is still a demon. Better not,” said Walden, which was much more diplomatic than saying I ran an entire training session on handling low-level demon issues last INSET day, come on . The main advice she’d given her non-magician colleagues on how to handle low-level demon issues was ‘don’t.’ Chetwood had constant imp problems, and yes, they were annoying; yes, it was tempting just to deal with it yourself. But it was dangerously easy for a non-specialist to accidentally agree to a more serious pact than they’d meant. “Call me down, or any of the magic faculty, or else”—she sighed mentally, but it was what they were for—“one of the Marshals.”

The episode had taken up the time she’d meant to use to have her leisurely morning coffee. Walden filled a travel flask with coal-black caffeinated sludge from the coffee machine instead, and hurried across the quad to the arcane labs.

Outside Lab Three, uncharacteristically early and flicking brazenly through his phone as if he’d never heard of a personal electronics policy, was one of her Upper Sixth. He’d arranged himself, his school rucksack, a rainbow collection of lever arch folders, and a hefty bag of sports kit all in an array on the floor, in such a way as to present a tripping hazard to unwary passersby. “Will,” said Walden. “Legs.”

“Sorry, miss,” said Will, and drew his long legs in black jeans— not the smart trousers mandated by the sixth form dress code—up into a tightly acute triangle, which improved the situation only slightly.

“Will.”

Will looked up from his phone and bestowed upon Walden his most winning smile. “Sorry, Doc,” he said.

“William Daubery, clear this corridor right now or face my wrath,” said Walden. “I ought to dress code you and PEP you.” School rules inevitably turned into verbs. To dress code : to send a child back to their dormitory to change. To PEP : to confiscate a misused mobile phone. The personal electronics policy was relaxed a little for sixth formers, but Will, who was more than halfway through A-levels in Invocation, Evocation, and Further Evocation, ought to know better than to play with a tasty little electronic device right outside the arcane labs. Yes, the risk was low, because Walden ran a tight ship. But part of keeping the arcane labs magically secure was knowing that ‘low’ and ‘nonexistent’ were very different beasts.

“Whoops,” said Will, but he obediently got up and hefted his possessions over to the wall, and the phone—a large and expensive-looking model, he would no doubt be very annoyed if it did get possessed and had to be destroyed—went into the front pocket of his rucksack. “Haven’t you had your coffee yet, Doc?”

“No, I haven’t,” said Walden sternly. “And so I’m in a very bad mood. Don’t test me.”

Will faked a shudder. “I’ll warn the others.”

“See that you do,” Walden said. “And turn your phone off in the arcane corridor, and don’t spread your things all over the floor again. Someone will trip and break a leg. Remember, I have eyes in the back of my head.”

“Yes, miss. Doc!”

Walden unlocked Lab Three and let herself in. There was just time before the bell to finish her lesson prep and gulp down about half the black-sludge coffee. She plucked the risk assessment out of her pile of papers and slapped it down front and centre on the big desk at the front of the room.

The lab was otherwise almost empty. The science labs, on the other side of the building, were fully equipped with sinks and Bunsen burners and fume cupboards and all the other apparatus of a twenty-first-century scientific education. Modernity had taken magic in the other direction. The arcane labs were stripped down as far as possible; the less there was in here, the less possibility that someone would accidentally start you-ing something and invite in an unwelcome demon. The room was painted white floor to ceiling, and had no desks except the teacher’s and no chairs at all. There was a whiteboard on the wall behind the desk; the pens were kept in a jar of salt, because Walden knew from bitter experience how easy it was to accidentally say Where are you? to a missing board pen.

When she taught magical theory, she booked one of the seminar rooms upstairs, so her class wouldn’t have to work on the floor. But for practical work, the arcane lab was a necessity.

Very stark in black and yellow against the white safety paint were the incursion wards: north, south, east, west, one over the door, one over the fire exit, one for each of the windows. They were repainted every half term. Walden checked them for errors, fading, or alerts, as she did before every lesson. Then, slowly and with great care, she introduced a minor location error into the ward above the fire exit, changing its area of effect from ‘this laboratory’ to ‘this place.’ It took her almost to the bell, with two minutes to spare. She swallowed another bitter gulp of coffee.

She shuffled through her papers for Upper Sixth’s homework—four problem sheets on arcane attribution, handed in last week and marked yesterday evening. The work was about what she’d expected: Nikki outstanding, Will slapdash, Aneeta careful, Mathias skipping questions that worried him. Walden put them to one side. She paused to straighten her shoulders and arrange her face, putting aside her late night and Laura Kenning and the photocopier demon, putting on—like the armour of blazer and skirt and brooch—the total good-humoured calm of Dr Walden, teacher.

The bell went.

“Come in!” Dr Walden called.

And in they came, shambling, sauntering, seventeen years old: Upper Sixth Invocation.

Walden did not do much frontline teaching anymore. Director of Magic was a deputy-head-level role, and the further you climbed the ladder of a career in education, the less you got to actually teach. Her work calendar was full of meetings, conferences, presentations, project deadlines. There was blocked-out time for boundary patrols and spot checks, and apparently free time which always filled up immediately with crisis management: constant variations on the stern talking-to for the middle schooler with the secret phone under the mattress, along with the diplomatic but firm talking-to for the loving parent who had purchased the phone.

On top of that, there were the hours upon hours she spent maintaining Chetwood’s magical infrastructure. Children were such easy targets for opportunistic demons that even ordinary schools needed a couple of solid incursion wards on site, just in case. One of the things Walden had brought in as Director was the sixth form volunteering club, who went around the local primary schools repainting what were usually faded, half-arsed protections against demons. Magical specialists were expensive, and waiting for the county council to get around to hiring someone was a mug’s game. But at least in a normal school, the worst you were likely to encounter on the demon front was a determined imp, encouraged by a talented but inexperienced child who’d watched too many unhelpful videos on the internet.

Chetwood, with its long magical history, and six-hundred-odd half-trained adolescent magicians living on site, was a different kind of problem. Ordinary schools did not have a dedicated team of Marshals stationed on site. Ordinary schools did not need incursion wards in every building. But Walden’s biggest problem was not the mobile phone incidents, the difficulties of politicking with Marshal Kenning, or keeping the incursion wards up to date. All of those paled next to her most vital responsibility: managing the intricate system of nineteenth-century wards, which had been the height of cutting-edge sorcerous-industrial invention around 1855. They depended on an enormously complex set of old-fashioned thaumic engines, built into and impossible to move from a large room adjoining the Headmaster’s suite in Brewers Hall. The mechanisms were more than a hundred and fifty years old, comically clunky, inherently vulnerable to demonic possession, and a nightmare to maintain. They were also so absolutely integral to the way the rest of the school’s magical defences worked that if they failed, there was a good chance that Chetwood School would just collapse out of mundane reality altogether and disappear into the demonic plane, taking six hundred children with it.

No pressure, the Headmaster had remarked to Walden wryly when he hired her. David Bern had been selected by the school governors to attempt to save Chetwood’s faltering academic reputation, and he was doing a good job on that front, but his background was geography, not sorcery. That was why he lived in a rather nice five-bedroom house in Chetwood village, while Walden lived in the old Head’s suite, sleeping in the room next to the thaumic engines.

She’d had to get out of bed in the middle of the night to fix them three times in the three years she had worked here. It didn’t sound like much, unless you understood what was at stake. The whole system ought to have been shut down and rebuilt from scratch to modern standards, but to do that would take about five years, and those would be five expensive years in which no fees came in. Chetwood School would not survive. Instead, like most schools, the institution went on from year to year by doing what had always more or less worked, or at least seemed to work, or at any rate kept things going.

So Walden’s days were filled, and she barely got to teach. Which was sad, because she loved to teach. She did, at least, do the Year Seven arcane safety course, on the teaching carousel with Relationships Ed, debating, Mindfulness in Schools, and beginners’ yoga. It gave her three weeks with each class, just enough time to learn all their names. Her sixth formers—Years Twelve and Thirteen—were the only sets she saw all the way through; four times a week, for two hours at a time, for two years.

It was unusual for a deputy head to take on an A-level examination set, but invocation, Walden’s subject specialism, was hard to hire for. Modern academic magic was divided into three disciplines. Evocation was what most people thought about when they imagined someone doing magic: magicians using their own physical strength, speaking words and making gestures, to cast spells with immediate results. Instantiation was a more recent academic term for what had once been called alchemy, the branch of magic that used the physical fabric of the world to create long-lasting magical effects, like the warding produced by the thaumic engines.

Invocation was the discipline of the demon summoners.

Anyone from the Evocation or Instantiation Departments could teach the basics, just as Walden could have taught Year Eight Magic without any difficulty. Magical fundamentals were the same across all the arcane disciplines. But a magical A-level was a demanding academic course, and needed a confident teacher. Chetwood continued to advertise, and Walden regularly sent out feelers through her old academic supervisors and colleagues, hoping for a talented postgraduate. In the meantime, she would rather sacrifice her sleep and Sundays to work than have sixth formers taught demonic invocation by someone whose skills were not up to scratch.

It was October now of her fourth term with this set, and she felt she knew them rather better than she knew her own family, most of whom she hadn’t spoken to since last Christmas.

Take them in order:

William Daubery first, because he was the sort of young man who tended to put himself first. He was a scion of one of the bona fide old English magical families, the sort that barely existed these days, with an ancestor who’d stormcalled for Elizabeth I and sunk half the Spanish Armada, at least according to Will. In Walden’s experience, all that ‘old magic’ meant was that children arrived at school with a collection of bad habits to unlearn, and Will was no exception. His magic was effective but careless, and he rolled his eyes every time a teacher gave him the safety lecture. Blue-eyed, curly-haired, always smiling, always pushing at the edges of the dress code—those black jeans! Irritating boy—Will was set fair to become one of those lucky young men who sailed cheerfully through life on a comfortable tide of bullshit. If he had been an adult colleague, Walden would have found him very tiresome. Since he was a schoolboy, and since they had worked out together the limits of Walden’s tolerance for bullshit (low) by this time last year, she was able to be amused by him instead.

Nicola Conway—brilliant Nikki—was Black British, wore her hair in an elbow-length cascade of braids, and carried herself with an air of quiet confidence that meant she succeeded in looking rather cool, even in the sixth form dress code of plain shirt, smart trousers or skirt, and jacket. She was hanging on to her South London accent by a thread after a decade of boarding school: sometimes posh Home Counties vowels came out of her mouth by accident, which seemed to disgust her. Her tragic history was not something she shared. Walden was fairly sure that even Aneeta, who was among Nikki’s closest friends, had no idea beyond the bare facts of ‘parents dead, ward of the school.’ Nikki’s magic was brilliant. In lessons she worked with an intensity which sometimes unnerved her classmates, making Will joke nervously about geeks, making Aneeta worry she wasn’t trying hard enough. Though she was closest to Aneeta, she always sat next to Mathias.

Mathias Wick was a tongue-tied and perpetually anxious white boy with terrible acne, who on the face of things could not have been more different to cool, confident Nikki; but like her, he was a ward of the school. He’d been removed from his family home by the state and placed at Chetwood when he was thirteen. As Walden understood it, it was a shame that the state had not got there sooner. Mathias’s parents had joined one of the handful of obscure religious sects—Walden thought, but would never say, cults —that still conflated ‘demon,’ the magical concept, with ‘devil,’ the theological one. They had felt that Mathias’s natural inclination for magic was proof of inherent evil, and had been correspondingly cruel.

Walden did not know many of the details beyond that. Mathias did not discuss it in lessons, and since it was not directly an academic or magical issue, it was not her business. The school’s traditional role as one of the few safe places to foster a powerful underage magician was, at present, firmly separated from the school as educational institution. School House, where Nikki and Mathias and their handful of younger foster siblings lived, was the domain of Ebele Nwosu, the pastoral deputy head, known in accordance with tradition as Matron. She was a woman whom Walden respected deeply for her endless patience, her academic expertise—before taking the deputy head role, she had been Head of Psychology—and her genius for pastoral work, which was one of the hardest parts of teaching. Her husband, Reverend Ezekiel, was the school chaplain as well as being the only other magician teacher with the invocation skills to handle an A-level set. He taught the current Year Twelve.

Nikki had adopted Mathias when he arrived at Chetwood, and still seemed to look on him with a kind of mother-hen protectiveness. The powerful foster-sibling bond of School House, and the loneliness that lay behind it, clearly meant something to both of them. As far as Walden could tell, they had little else in common beyond a fierce talent for magic—both of them born with the rare, wild magical ability that would manifest even totally untrained, the talent that Chetwood’s scholarship and bursary funds were dedicated to supporting in one of the few parts of the school’s carefully PR-massaged mission statement that Walden was totally uncynical about. Mathias found theory challenging, but on a good day he was the strongest magician of the four. Unfortunately, his good days were rare.

Last but by no means least was Aneeta Shah, a chubby Indian girl who wore glasses with round frames. Aneeta, alone of the group, was taking a magical course in sixth form as an interesting sideline to her education, rather than the main event. It was a characteristic, very quiet, very intellectual boast that she had chosen the most difficult and least practical arcane discipline to study as an ‘extra’ on top of her A-levels in Maths, Chemistry, and Biology. The A-level Invocation class was tiny compared to Evocation and Instantiation. Most people just found it too difficult. Of course, anyone could learn magic, if they tried, but it was bloody hard work if you did not have the knack, and quite hard work even if you did. Aneeta was not afraid of hard work. Walden saw something of herself in how the young woman approached magical theory, as a complex and fascinating puzzle undertaken for its own sake. Her practicals brought her predicted grade down from the precious, coveted A* to an A. Since she was comfortably expecting A*s in all her other subjects, it was unlikely to hinder her university applications.

As for the other three: Nikki would get the A*. Will was probably capable, but that depended on whether his competitiveness with Nikki overcame his natural laziness early enough for him to do some actual work. Mathias would scrape a B if he was lucky—and that only because in such a small group, with three overachievers as his classmates, Walden felt able to dedicate a fair amount of lesson time to what was effectively private tutoring. A-levels, like the thaumic engines grinding away in the room next to Walden’s suite, were something that more or less worked, had always been there, and would be very difficult and complicated to rebuild from scratch. But every time Walden had a student like Mathias, it was impossible not to be appalled by the unfairness of public exams: two years of work by a determined, complicated, talented young person, reduced to a single brutal letter grade.

Walden gave them back their homework. Will immediately tried to negotiate his mark upwards. “Check your work next time,” Walden advised. Aneeta and Nikki swapped problem sheets to look at each other’s answers to the tricky question at the end, which neither of them had quite solved, though both had got close. “ Oh, ” said Nikki after a moment. “It’s a substitution.” Walden nodded approval.

Mathias folded his crumpled worksheet in half and shoved it deep into a pocket.

“All right, Upper Six,” said Walden, “remind me what we’re doing today.”

“Shouldn’t you know, Doc?” said Will. “Don’t they pay you for this?”

Walden took a seat on the teacher’s desk—the four sixth formers were in their usual semicircle on the floor—and said crisply, “Thank you for volunteering, Will, take us through it, please.”

Will pantomimed stab-to-the-heart betrayal, but he did it. “Major summoning, fourth level. Uh, contain, invoke, reify, query, dismiss.”

“Good,” said Walden. “Off you go, then.”

They all stared at her.

“What?”

“Aren’t you going to tell us what to do?” said Mathias.

“I’ve spent a year and a bit telling you what to do,” said Walden. “I hope you were paying attention. Come on.” She picked up her mark book. They all looked at it with distrust. “I’ll be taking notes,” said Walden. “Oh, and Marshal Kenning should be joining us at some point. Don’t mind her, just carry on as usual.”

The sixth formers exchanged looks and mutters. It was all very well to say ‘Don’t mind her.’ They were seventeen, not stupid. They knew what Marshals were for.

“All right,” said Nikki, getting to her feet. “Let’s do it.”

“Are we allowed to work together?” said Aneeta.

Walden crossed her legs and propped her mark book on her lap. She flipped to a blank page and held the pen poised.

“She’d say if we weren’t,” pointed out Will.