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chapter three

OLD FAITHFUL

Their new visitor was hard for Walden’s magical senses to perceive clearly, in the way that an ocean is hard to comprehend by standing on the seashore. Walden felt the great catspaw of its intentions land across the summoning array—which was, after all, only a fourth-order pentagram drawn by students—and start to force it further open. “No, you don’t,” she said, and by a solid effort of will managed to manifest a secondary pentagram, drawn in lines of pure force, around their original array. She had lost track of where the sixth formers were. She prayed they had the sense to stay quiet and out of the way. “Laura!”

Kenning was right underneath their new visitor. What was she doing?

Oh, Walden realised a second later. She was trapped.

Kenning was tangled in a great mass of demonic magic, more like the wild growth of a jungle than the elegant, ordered lines of magical intention that Walden taught to her students. She was hacking hard at it, her sword and little slices of combat spells doing the work of a machete, but the demon’s power was gigantic and the tangling spells were regrowing as fast as she could cut them down. All the while, at the edge of her thoughts, Walden could hear soft, cruel whispers.

She closed her mind to them, invoking layers of personal defence and warding, as the demon poked and probed for insecurities, doubts, and desires. This was not a dim little imp to be satisfied by chocolate digestives. It was not even a mere archdemon, a creature of force and hunger. This worrying at Walden’s mind was subtle, complex, and vicious—the work of a gigantic, malevolent intelligence.

Kenning had stopped fighting. She stood still in the morass of coiling magic that was boiling out of the pentagram. It had started to reify into pale, writhing shapes, like a heap of coiling maggots. Walden swore. “Laura!” she shouted. “Marshal Kenning! For the love of God, don’t listen to it!”

Thankfully Kenning heard her. This was, after all, what she was trained for. She brought up her sword. Walden threw the full force of her own magic behind the Marshal as Kenning sliced through the white maggot-shapes—they withered into nothingness—and then slammed home a deep stab with the sword and a triple-strength banishment at the same time. For a moment the two of them worked in perfect harmony. YOU HAVE NO PLACE HERE, they roared at the demon. BEGONE.

And still it was not enough. The demon bent under the force of their attack, but its monstrous will clung firmly to the original pentagram. It wanted the mundane world. Oh, how it wanted. It wanted Chetwood, specifically: six and a half centuries of wild magic, plus a smorgasbord of half-trained teenage magicians and their untested strength. What demon could resist such a feast? And once it had consumed them all, what human power could contain it? It would swallow up Chetwood village, the meadows and ponds and little woodlands. From there it would spread its dark wings over the Home Counties. It would lift up its monstrous, writhing head, staring greedily southwards, scenting the air, tasting magic and complexity and systems and millions upon millions of selves. Then at last it would begin its slow oozing advance down the Great North Road, through the commuter towns one by one, vacuuming up the Green Belt, rolling over the traffic jams on the M25 without glancing down as the little cars buckled under the force of its passage and burst into flame, bent on the magnificent feast of London.

You’d get the full force of the RAF on you before you got close, thought Walden: but ‘nuclear strike on Hertfordshire’ was only a slightly less terrible an outcome than ‘capital city consumed by a higher demon.’

Minor possessions were common, but minor incursions —true manifestations of demons in the mundane world, reified, uncontrolled, wild—those were rare. Major incursions were very rare, and archdemonic incursions almost unheard of. This thing was bigger than an archdemon. Officially, those topped out at the ninth order. Tenth- and eleventh-order demons, theorised in the nineteenth century but not confirmed by experiment until the twentieth, were the higher demons—the principalities. The big boys, Walden’s thesis advisor had called them.

There was only one higher-demonic incursion in recorded history. It had followed an attempt at a twelfth-order summoning in the USSR in 1968. No one had tried a twelfth-order summoning since. Not officially, anyway.

BEGONE, BEGONE, BEGONE, chanted the combined force of Walden and Kenning, while the higher demon worried at the pentagram’s edges like a cat that had seen something small and tasty scuttling into the cracks of a crumbling brick wall.

I belong here, Saffy, its voice whispered in Walden’s thoughts, clear and coherent and terribly familiar. She had worked at Chetwood for three years and not seen a flicker of this thing; but it had been here all along, and it knew who she was. I still belong. You know me. You know I do .

And then it was dislodged. Something shook it loose from the summoning array and suddenly the full force of Walden and Kenning together was enough to send it whirling away into the void. Walden’s chest heaved as she panted. There was sweat dripping down the back of her neck. She was almost surprised to see the white walls of the arcane lab come back into focus. The black and yellow paint of the incursion wards had all turned scarlet. Kenning, still standing in the remnants of the now inert pentagram, collapsed into a crouch and gasped for breath. “How did you do that?” she demanded.

“That wasn’t me,” Walden said. She turned to the teacher’s desk.

Nikki was standing there, wide-eyed with fright. Aneeta, Will and Mathias were clustered behind her. Nikki held in her shaking hand the risk assessment form that Walden put down on the desk at the start of every lesson.

There was a colourful box at the bottom of the page with a quick banishment cantrip. It was, intentionally, the sort of spell that it was easy to cast in a hurry in an emergency. Walden had felt it slide under the demon’s grip on the summoning array and pry it loose.

“Quick thinking, Nikki,” she said. She felt a certain measure of smugness. Laura Kenning and her narrow Marshal assessment could not have been more wrong about Nicola Conway. “Well done. Have a house point.”

In justice, after a narrow miss like that, Walden would have had a sit-down and a nice cup of tea. Unfortunately, there was still half an hour of the double left. She drank the last of her cold coffee instead, and regretted it immediately. “All right, let’s review,” she said. “I’m sure you’ve already guessed that your homework is to write up a report on today’s practical. What have we learned?”

A painful silence. Kenning had taken up her stance in the corner again. She looked tired.

“Was that him?” said Will. “Old Faithful?”

Of course; Will had a long family connection to Chetwood, he would have heard of the school’s largest and most alarming demonic pest if anyone had. “ It was a very large demon, yes,” said Walden. “Precise identification would be difficult without summoning it. Should we summon it?”

“No,” said Aneeta immediately.

Good. “Why not?”

“Um, because it would kill us?”

“Correct,” Walden said.

“Did anyone else, like—hear it?” said Aneeta. “It said—”

She stopped.

“Remember our higher demons topic. These creatures are predators. The more intelligent ones will absolutely try to play on your emotions in order to create a weakness. I promise you, nothing it said was worth listening to,” said Walden. “We had the bad luck to run into something rather bigger than we were expecting. That can happen. What did we do right? What should we have done better?”

“I froze,” said Mathias, miserable.

“Yes,” said Walden gently. “You did. That can also happen. Let’s see what we can learn from it, so it’s less likely to happen again.”

It took a while to get the group talking, and it was a good ten minutes before Mathias said much more than monosyllables, but by the time the bell went for morning break, they all seemed to have recovered from the incident. “All right, do me a practical report. Use the structure in your notes, and it’s due next week. Yes, as in Monday next week,” Walden said, fully expecting to have the reports all in by Wednesday-ish. “Will, could you stay behind a moment, please.”

Always difficult to tell off a Year Thirteen, and particularly difficult to tell off someone like Will, who as well as being unshakeably self-confident was more than a foot taller than Walden. Scolding was much easier when you could loom a little, but short of magical cheating, Walden could not physically intimidate someone who was six foot three. She knew how to make her tone of voice make up the difference, though. “Do you know why I want to speak to you?” she asked Will when the others were gone, in tones that any intelligent child would instantly parse as ‘alarmingly neutral.’

Will shrugged, which was a fairly good start, because it meant he did know and preferred not to admit it. “It was Matty’s fault, though.”

“We’re not talking about Mathias just now, Will,” said Walden, and then waited. Silence was a powerful tool when you were dealing with a teenager who knew they were in the wrong.

“Okay, okay, okay,” said Will. “I only said oof . I didn’t know it would distract him.”

“What’s the arcane safety standard for secondary casters in a major invocation?” Walden asked.

“Silence,” Will admitted.

“So you do know,” said Walden. “Good. I was concerned that I hadn’t taught you anything. And I am disappointed, Will. You put yourself and your classmates at serious risk through pure carelessness. By now you should be a much better magician than that.”

“But—”

Walden raised her eyebrows.

“It was all fine in the end, though, wasn’t it? It’s not a huge deal.”

Kenning spoke up. Walden had forgotten she was still there. In a flat voice she said, “That was at least a ninth-order archdemon. If it had succeeded in forcing an incursion, it would have eaten you all alive, followed by the rest of the school. The main reason it didn’t succeed is that you are lucky enough to be taught by one of the most skilled invokers in the country. If someone under my command made a mistake that stupid, I would have him kicked out of the Order.”

Will’s mouth worked. He said, “Oh.”

That was a little harder than Walden had meant to hammer him, but it seemed to have worked. “Think about that,” she advised. “I think you owe Mathias an apology. Do I need to call you both into my office, or can I trust you to speak to him yourself?”

Will said, “I’ll do it.”

Walden made a mental note to follow that up later. Will was almost never actively malicious, but he could be slippery, and he tended to conveniently forget anything that he would find difficult or embarrassing to deal with. “And I will look forward to reading your practical report next week,” she said. “It goes without saying that I expect a clear analysis of exactly what went wrong today. Now, off you go.”

When Will was gone, looking chastened, she said, “Well. Thank you for your help this morning, Laura. Shall we go and get a cup of tea?”

“I need to write up this incident,” said Kenning. She still looked annoyed. “So do you, don’t you? That boy should be punished. Detention, at least.”

If Walden thought that a lunchtime detention would have the slightest effect on Will, she would have given him one. But he was the sort of boy who laughed off official punishments, or even boasted about them, and then forgot they had ever happened. Shame, on the other hand, would stick with him. “I assure you,” she said, “having to apologise to someone, and then write a report explaining that he got something wrong, will be much harder on him. If you’ll leave the discipline to me, please.”

“What was an archdemon that size doing here?” Kenning said. “That thing was at least ninth order. It was intelligent! Why didn’t I know about it?”

“Tenth order,” said Walden, stifling a sigh. “Or possibly eleventh. And I’m sure you did know about it. The previous Chief Marshal must have mentioned Old Faithful.”

“Old Faithf—yes, as a joke to frighten the newbie!”

“Not a joke, I assure you,” Walden said. “Old Faithful has been hanging around Chetwood School since the seventeenth century at least. It’s fairly quiet but it makes an occasional push.”

“It’s been here for three hundred years ? Why has no one killed it?”

“It’s been tried,” said Walden. “Haven’t you seen the memorial in the chapel? The Headmaster who died in 1926. I think that was the last serious attempt. After that they tried moving the school site, but Old Faithful just followed, and the new campus was less magically secure—so back we came. Since then, efforts have focused more on keeping it out, and preventing wild magic bleeding through between the planes, so it doesn’t get too much to eat.”

“How often does it get through?” Kenning demanded.

You should already know this, Walden thought. Surely it’s your job to know this. But she also felt guilty. The former Chief Marshal had been a tired man in his sixties plodding towards retirement. Shouldn’t Walden have checked that he’d actually trained his replacement properly on Chetwood’s security position? Wasn’t it her responsibility too?

If she’d known Kenning was actually good…

It was probably Walden’s job to know.

“Its attempts are very rare, and its successes are rarer,” she told Kenning. “A lot of magicians have worked hard to defend Chetwood, over the centuries. And a lot of Marshals, of course. The last serious incident was in 2003.”

Kenning frowned. “I’ve seen that memorial,” she said. “By the cricket pitches. A boy died.”

“Yes. The school’s most recent student death. And, of course, we would all prefer to keep it that way. If you like, Marshal, we could set up a meeting with the archivist and I’ll talk you through everything Chetwood has on our unwelcome demonic squatter. The earlier records are rather piecemeal, but if the information is useful for you…”

“Yes,” said Kenning. “As soon as possible. I want everything on the 2003 incident, to start with.” Of course she did. Walden already regretted offering the archives session; but it was a personal regret, not a professional one. Professionally it was exactly the right call. Kenning added, “Before your time, I suppose.”

It took Walden a moment and then she laughed. “Thank you very much. I was seventeen in 2003.”

Kenning looked embarrassed. “I didn’t mean—”

“It’s quite all right,” Walden said. “When you spend your days with teenagers, you age fast. Spiritually, if not physically, I really am an ancient crone. Sometimes they explain the internet to me.”

“We had internet in 2003.”

Walden snorted. “Try telling them that.”