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chapter twenty-three

BEFORE IT GOES BANG

Spring Term started quietly, especially for Walden. Without her A-level set taking up eight hours of her time every week, her timetable opened up dramatically.

Well, it opened up for about ten minutes. Then the time got filled up with meetings. It was at least nice to have them during the few hours of weak January sunlight, instead of having to shove something in at 7 A.M . or 6 P.M ., in pitch darkness, to work around the demands of the school day. Meetings: strategic, operational, financial, academic, pastoral, departmental, faculty, twilight training, all hands. It never stopped. At the first all-hands briefing of the term, Walden delivered an update for everyone on the school’s magical security situation, which boiled down to ‘really, we are working hard on this and everything is under control.’ The relieved looks around the school hall told her she should have said it sooner.

Of course, all of that was just the official roster of things teachers needed to talk about. As much or more of the work was done in passing, in the breaktime drop-in Can I just have a word about, the catch-up over lunch And that’s what worries me, the rapid email exchange in the five minutes between lessons that concluded Better log it in the safeguarding portal . One of Walden’s commonest drop-in just-so-you-know encounters at the moment was I hate to be a bother, but I think we’ve got another imp…

On a Saturday morning five days into the Spring Term, Lilly Tibbett poked her head awkwardly round Walden’s office door—NQTs were seldom sure about how much or how little they were allowed to ask for help—and said, “Um, it’s a bit of a weird one. Something in the labs is just… off.”

Walden sighed, put down the examiners’ report she was reading, and stood up.

There was a Year Nine class in PE kit in Lab One. This arcane lab was one of the ones that usually belonged to the Evocation Department, and so it was less snowy and pristine than the lab Walden taught her practicals in. Just now there were soot stains down one wall and scuff marks on the white-painted floor. Two thirteen-year-olds stood facing each other in the middle of an excited, noisy semicircle of their classmates. One of them had a handful of conjured green fire; the other was trying to evoke a shield, not very successfully. Lilly’s intake of breath told Walden that this was not the position she’d left them in.

She shouldn’t have left them at all—not this age group, not unsupervised in a lab, not when she had a weird feeling already. Lilly hadn’t been able to clarify what her bad feeling was, but ‘something’s not right here’ was part of a teacher’s toolkit, not to be disregarded. School days were so extremely routine that you became sensitised to the tiny variations that signalled something out of place, and began to develop a gut instinct for which variations were the bad ones. Walden would talk to Lilly later about when to send a reliable-looking child to run your errands for you.

Under other circumstances she would have let the junior teacher handle her own class, but the moment she stepped through the lab door she felt it too. Something was not right, in a way that went beyond the obvious misbehaviour. She looked at the incipient evocation duel and snapped, “Sit down immediately, Year Nine.”

Twenty-five children in the room, and twenty-three of them folded up cross-legged right where they were standing. Walden seldom used the aura of terror a senior teacher could generate on actual children. Faces turned towards her with big eyes. She knew this group—she tried to know every group, obviously. She’d done the arcane safety carousel with them in Year Seven, and would do it again next year when they hit Year Ten. But two years was a long time, and children could change dramatically in early puberty. The only names she remembered with complete certainty were the class clown, Morris, and a small intense girl who asked excellent questions, whom she’d pegged as a future Invocation student—Noor. Morris was the one she would have expected to be in the middle of the trouble, but he was folded on the floor with the rest of the chastised audience. It was only the two duelists still standing. Walden dragged the name of the gangly boy with the flickering shield out of her memory—Alfie, she was almost sure, though he was a foot and a half taller than when she’d last taught him. Noor, tiny, bespectacled, with a silky dark ponytail, was the one with her hands full of fire. They stood as if they hadn’t heard, focused entirely on each other.

“Alfie, Noor,” began Lilly in a pretty good you’re-in-trouble tone.

“Heads down,” snapped Walden, feeling the stirring of magic in motion a moment before it happened.

Arcane safety lessons paid off: the Year Nines ducked and covered without question as a green sheet of flame erupted over all their heads. The slower on the uptake were grabbed by the quick ones and pushed flat. Walden and Lilly moved in the same moment to rescue Noor’s actual target. Lilly might be an inexperienced teacher but she was a very good evoker, so the shield she flung up on top of Alfie’s panicky, flickering attempt was almost instantaneous, a sheer and shining wall of magical force. Green fire hissed and sizzled against it like boiling water poured into a pan, and then winked out.

Walden called crisply, “Stasis!”—not because you ever needed to announce a spell in order to cast it, that was a beginners’ misconception, but so that Lilly would know what she was doing, and wouldn’t interfere with her work by casting something else at a right angle. Then she slammed a slow-down onto both Alfie and Noor. True stasis was dangerous—a spell that could freeze human muscle could stop a human heart—but if either of the children tried to move, it would feel like swimming through jelly. It should prevent Noor from evoking any more gouts of fire. “Thank you, everyone. Miss Tibbett, I believe Lab Three is available. Please could you continue your lesson there? And just drop an alert email to the Marshals for me. Year Nine, I expect you to leave the room in good order and in silence. Do not collect your belongings. Consider this a practice for the next fire drill. I will speak to your whole class at afternoon registration. Thank you, Miss Tibbett.” She gave a firm, reassuring nod to Lilly, who couldn’t be undermined in front of her Year Nines with the actual words: I have this under control. I know it’s frightening, but keep calm, do your job, and leave me to mine.

A scattering of pencil cases and exercise books were left on the floor as the class filed out. They cast nervous looks at Walden, and at the two children still frozen in the middle of the room. Noor had her hands up in a casting gesture. Alfie’s expression was fixed in a look of terror.

Something was off. Even the most talented Year Nines did not cast spells as strong as that sheet of green flame. And Year Nines, on the whole, did not try to murder their classmates. Teasing, testing, challenging, undermining, outright bullying—these were the expected interpersonal conflicts of the middle school. Brutal magical incineration, even at Chetwood: no.

The children’s faces were finally, slowly, turning towards her. The slow-down spell made the motion into spooky horror-film stuff. Walden did not panic. She swiftly checked the incursion wards, and found them all in order. All the same… best to eliminate the worst possibility first. She quickly set up a diagnostic, drawn in blue marker pen on the whiteboard and fed with the tiniest possible trickle of power: Who’s here?

The array illuminated with silvery light and then sounded three quick, strong chimes: one, two, three humans. A fourth chime, almost as loud: the Phoenix, loud and clear. Nothing else. Walden held her breath.

A fifth note sounded, this one quiet, like a breeze sighing through a distant windchime. And then, almost on the edge of hearing, a sixth.

Two more demons. But they hadn’t broken through the incursion wards in the lab. Which left only one possibility: they must have entered in the same way as the Phoenix—by walking straight through the door, riding on a human being.

Walden kept her expression very calm. The Phoenix was already alert, springing to life in her mind, its scarlet-and-gold body coiling sinuously around her forearm as it craned its head to see. There was nothing to see. Two normal-looking Year Nines. Alfie had the slight nervous stoop of a boy who wasn’t used to being tall yet. Noor had a spot on her chin, slathered in too much concealer, which was probably making it worse.

Possession.

Walden considered those chimes. One quiet, one almost inaudible. Small demons, then. But small demons should not have the strength to forcibly possess even a half-trained human magician. How could this have happened?

Well. You did the job that was in front of you, and then you got on with the next thing. Alfie first, because that had not been a very good shield—suggesting that the weakest, near-inaudible demon was riding on or inside him—and because he looked about as terrified as she had ever seen any child.

The Phoenix paid meticulous attention to Walden’s exorcism array as she drew it in tidy green chalk on the scuffed white floor around Alfie’s slowly shifting feet. Wouldn’t work on me, it said thoughtfully as Walden stood up.

I’d use something bigger for you, thought Walden, taking up a position at the northern edge of the array. Alfie shifted slowly to face her.

She got no words back, just an impression of something snapping its beak and ruffling up all its feathers. She’d hurt its feelings. Did demons have feelings?

I’m very big and complicated, said the Phoenix, with reproach and a touch of pride.

Walden knew how it felt to be exorcised—she’d done a first-year undergraduate lab practical which almost certainly hadn’t been properly risk assessed, an Oxford tradition, where her supervision group had summoned a second-order imp and then been possessed and exorcised one by one. It felt for about three and a half seconds like something was trying to squeeze your lungs out through your throat. Then it was fine; a relief, even, as the weight of demonic power lifted from your limbs. Alfie’s slowed-down cry of agony was still very hard to listen to. His mouth opened. A wisp of something dark and smoky-looking emerged. Walden’s right hand snatched it out of the air without her needing to think about it. The smoke, crushed between her fingers, left a chalky black residue. Barely big enough to eat, the Phoenix remarked.

Walden lifted the stasis and said, “Alfie, please wait over there. Thank you.” She was careful to turn away before the tears brimming in his eyes fell; he was already scrubbing frantically at them with the back of his hand.

Noor looked neither frightened nor unhappy. The corner of her mouth was pulling slowly upwards in a lopsided snarl that showed her teeth, fenced by braces. It was a child’s face, but not a child’s expression. Walden drew the second exorcism array larger, to keep herself well out of physical range. Every time she glanced up Noor had shifted, fighting ferociously against the slow-down spell, trying to get a little closer to Walden. She was not a big girl, but a child did not need to be bigger than you to hurt you—not if you cared about their safety, and they didn’t. This demon, aggressive and fiery as it seemed to be, probably had only a passing interest in keeping Noor herself in one piece.

Array complete. Walden took up a casting position at its northernmost corner, and activated it.

Should have made it bigger, said the Phoenix at the last moment. Walden grunted with effort as she dragged magic through the array, pushing the exorcism into action by brute force. This demon was fighting hard against being pulled out of its host. At last Noor’s worrying snarl fell away, and she cried out in pain and then started to cough horribly. The thing that emerged past her lips was slime, not smoke: gloopy, dark green, smearing over her chin and her red PE kit, blood-flecked.

Walden held out a commanding hand. The bulk of the slimy stuff gathered into a nasty globule of green matter and jumped into her palm. It felt slightly warm and completely disgusting. The image of the Phoenix darted down past the band of tattooed spellwriting at her wrist and slashed at it with shining talons. Third-order demon, Walden thought. Unsettling ooze was a common reification for something this size.

Where had it come from? How had it got here? Why didn’t Walden already know?

Noor’s coughing kept going and turned into awful wheezes. Walden lived inside her authoritative calm, immovable, sepulchral. “Noor, where’s your inhaler?”

Noor sat down hard on the floor, pointing, unable to make words. Walden retrieved the inhaler from the pencil case and handed it over. An asthmatic teenager usually knew what to do for their own emergency better than someone who hadn’t done the first aid training in several months. Noor took deep, slow puffs from the inhaler. From the other side of the room where she’d ordered him to wait, Alfie said, “Should I get the nurse?”

Sensible boy. He still sounded a little wobbly. Walden wasn’t letting him out of her sight until she knew where that imp he’d been carrying had come from. “If Noor can walk, we’re all going to go together.”

“I’m okay,” said Noor faintly after a few minutes. She’d wiped her mouth and chin, but there was still scarlet-flecked slime on her PE top. “I’m okay. It’s fine.” There was a certain kind of teenage girl who would claim everything was fine up to and past the end of the world. The other option, of course, was sobbing hysterics, which would not have been unjustified. Possessed by a third-order demon—at school . Where she should have been safe. Where they all ought to be safe. Walden did not let her feelings show. She was furious with herself.

There was a sound from the doorway. Walden looked up. The duty Marshal stood there, with his sword half out of its sheath. “Perfect timing,” she said. “We’ve had an incident. Please could the Marshals do a full check of this room, and then—are you both boarders?” The children nodded. “Sweep Scrubs, please. Starting in the Year Nine dormitories. Thank you. I’ll join you shortly. If Mr Daubery is on site, do please alert him as well.”

Walden was busy with incident response for the rest of the day. The Marshals unearthed one culprit quickly enough: Alfie’s dormitory had a second-hand, unauthorised Nintendo Switch hidden in the back corner of a wardrobe, apparently held in common by all six boys, actual origin unclear, exactly the sort of device that an imp might find irresistibly attractive as a dwelling place. Once he’d been cleared by the nurse, Walden delivered a blistering tongue-lashing first to Alfie individually and then to the six of them as a group. Two weeks of daily detention. No clubs, fixtures, or extracurricular activities. The Head would be calling their parents. The boys hung their heads.

Class clown Morris came back to knock on Walden’s office door afterwards with an additional confession: the Switch was his idea. He’d found it on eBay. It was all his fault. So that needed another tongue-lashing, and an additional punishment, but this had to be tempered with a measure of approval for Morris’s honesty and obvious agony about the whole thing. Walden was not surprised that her first instinct had been right, and he was mixed up in the trouble somehow. You got a feel for these things.

The Marshals did not find any unauthorised electronics in Noor’s dormitory, or in any other obvious hiding place. Once she was sure Noor was clear of all traces of possession and safe from further demonic threats, Walden headed over to Scrubs herself. On a sharp hunch, she called the grounds office first. Todd wasn’t in there—he hardly ever was—but she got hold of one of the Maintenance team who promised to go and find the Keymaster and send him over at the first opportunity. Gossiping all the way, Walden had no doubt. Premises and Maintenance—the cleaners, gardeners, and handymen who were among the most vital of the non-teaching staff—went everywhere and knew everything that happened in the school.

The Year Nine girls’ dorms had all been tossed through already, and looked even more chaotic than usual. Did the Marshals have to throw all the bed linen on the floor, and could they not have put it back afterwards? Walden knew the thought was unreasonable even as she had it. Besides, half the mess was probably the girls themselves. In any case, she needed to do it all again, under-the-mattress checks and all, and quickly: she could not in good conscience let any of the children back in until she was personally completely convinced that these rooms were magically secure, which meant it needed to be done before evening curfew. Either that, or someone would have to find a different place for fifty-odd thirteen-year-olds to sleep tonight.

It took a long time, and it wasn’t until Todd joined her, tilted his head for a moment, and said, “Did you check the scaffolding?” that they finally pinned down the breach. Walden sat on the windowsill and leaned out to look up at the tower of scaffolding built up around Scrubs’s west wall over the Christmas holidays to reach the dodgiest bit of the flat roof—a very 1960s design, but a flat roof, in England, was an invitation to damp problems. Her breath hissed between her teeth. There was nothing visible in the mundane world, but the Phoenix had sprung into alertness, as a cat might turn its head sharply towards a rustle in the bushes. Walden could feel the fault line in reality, the slow leakage of raw wild magic into the surrounding environment. Drip, drip, through a gap in the wards she had never imagined could be there, following the elaborate system of platforms and girders. The Year Nine dormitories were right under the worst spot. Noor would have been looking out at the scaffolding tower through her bedroom window.

Walden had to climb out there and patch the school wards herself, which meant per Todd’s insistence that she had to kit up in full PPE and listen to a firm lecture on how not to fall off scaffolding. He took his responsibilities just as seriously as she did. She was out there in a borrowed hard hat and high-vis jacket until well after dark, Todd standing by with a thousand-lumen torch. Year Nine’s curfew got pushed back half an hour. Lilly volunteered to sit up in Brewers supervising them. David, as Head, was in there too, and so was Ebele, and the tough Maths teacher who doubled up as Head of Year Nine.

“Let’s discuss,” said David, once the breach was fixed, Year Nine had been put to bed, and lights out sternly enforced. Not many of them would sleep properly after all this excitement. Ebele had already sent out an email warning staff to expect the worst from the year group tomorrow.

So they went to the Headmaster’s office—David, Walden, and Todd as site manager—and had a meeting, though it was getting on for eleven at night. “I need to be on cover for the first half of next week,” was the first thing Walden said. “And I won’t be at the SLT meeting on Monday.” Thank God it was Saturday and no one needed to cover for her tomorrow. Her plan was to get six hours’ sleep, eat breakfast, fill a flask with coffee, and then work until she physically couldn’t anymore.

David raised his brows. Walden, exhausted, remembered that his background was Geography and she actually had to explain what was going on.

So she did: today’s possession disaster was inexplicable. It should not have been possible. No one had summoned those demons. No one had invited them in. An imp in a gaming system, fine—it was impossible to build a magical protection system that was truly impregnable to demons of every size, and there was a lot of wild magic generated on the school site. But a third-order demon should not be able to break through Chetwood’s general wardings and enter the real world spontaneously, any more than a leopard could fit itself through the crack under a door. And neither of them should have had the initiative or power to hide themselves inside human hosts unnoticed until Lilly, thank heaven, had listened to her bad gut feeling.

All of which meant that somewhere in the vast, elaborate, ancient, impossibly complex system of wards that was Walden’s chief responsibility, something had failed.

No. Multiple things had failed. There were backups to the backups. There was a whole additional layer of alerts that she’d spent a month installing two summers ago. She’d been doing planar patrols weekly since last November, and so had Mark Daubery. The Marshals had been on high alert ever since Old Faithful’s incursion had made them all look like fools. Todd as Keymaster walked the mundane boundaries of the entire site every couple of days. And still something had slipped by all of them. David’s expression grew graver and graver as she laid it all out. Magic was her responsibility; but Chetwood, all of it, the whole school, was his responsibility. If she could not find the hole in the school’s defences, and fix it, and explain how and why it could possibly have happened in the first place, she would be out of a job by the end of term. David’s slightly more graceful resignation would follow by the end of the academic year.

They would both deserve it. The first responsibility of any school was to keep the children safe.

“Where’s the problem?” David asked sharply once he’d grasped the situation, as if that wasn’t the exact question that Walden was going to lose sleep over tonight.

“It could be anywhere,” she said. “Anywhere at all. We’ll have to go over the whole site.”

“For my money it’s those old engines,” said Todd. “If it’s anywhere it’s there. Apologies, Mr Bern, Dr Walden—just an old man’s feeling.”

“You’re probably right,” Walden said. “Which is why I’m going to start with a full check on the thaumic engines. It’s a summer holiday job, usually.”

“Did you do it last summer?” said David.

“Yes,” said Walden. She was too tired and worried to even be annoyed that he’d apparently forgotten the detailed report she submitted every September. “And they were fine . As fine as a hideous nineteenth-century bodge job can possibly be. There are hundreds of possible failure points, magical and mechanical. We’ll have to go through all of them.”

She got back to her flat after midnight. She was listening for it, so she could hear the rumble of the thaumic engines as they hummed to themselves next door. They sounded all right.

She went through her office on her way into the flat. Someone had left a pile of papers on her desk. Walden paused to look at them and discovered that they were the A-level mock papers for her set. She’d meant to mark them tomorrow. It was a good three hours of brain work. The deadline for getting the grades in the system was Monday lunchtime.

This was the job. This was school. It never stopped.