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chapter five

THE ARCHIVES

Walden managed to get the lesson observation properly typed up and emailed over to Ezekiel during her lunch break. She made a note to find a meeting time with him to talk it over in person—she was interested in his opinions of those students, and which ones he thought would go on to A-level. And she needed to float taking Year Ten next year, which meant asking him to take Year Twelve, she couldn’t do both with a management workload; and that would leave him with two A-level sets, which was a big ask. Add it to the list. There was always more to do.

After lunch, in the high room next door to her flat, surrounded by heavy glass panels set into walnut-and-brass facades, Walden tuned up the thaumic engines. She didn’t deal with the physical, mechanical side—that probably should have been handed off to an Instantiation teacher, but in practice none of them was as good at it as Todd Cartwright, who’d been adjusting misaligned gears and replacing damaged pneumatic tubes for the better part of forty years. Walden’s business was the invisible magical web of defences that the engines powered. She worked with salt and red chalk, drawing intricate miniaturised warding arrays on the wide parquet floor with the humming engines surrounding her—miniaturised because they were a mere fifteen feet across, rather than the several acres they needed to be to cover the whole school site. Every time she finished one, she flipped half a dozen brass switches. The engine’s hum deepened, and the latest refreshed ward flashed gold and then vanished as it got picked up and projected outwards.

Today, Walden spent longer than usual on the ward against higher demons. I belong here. You know I do, something whispered—not a true demonic whisper, just a memory sharpened by worry. It was rare for Old Faithful to stir. The old monster had been feeding on the ambient wild magic of Chetwood for centuries, and that was usually enough to keep it satisfied. It was very bad luck for a magical working as small as a sixth form lesson to attract its attention. If only Mathias wasn’t so strong!

Walden kept a close eye on Mathias in their lessons that week, but he seemed fine: shaken, but fine. Will was making a show of being friendlier and more considerate towards him than usual. Aneeta was quiet in lessons—well, she was a quiet person. Nikki, meanwhile, seemed to be enjoying the fourth-order summoning topic. She wrote notes frantically fast in their theory lesson on Thursday, and peppered Walden with questions. She really was a delight to teach. Walden had to be careful not to let herself get drawn into the weeds: several times she found herself saying That’s a bit too advanced for what we’re doing here, Nikki, but if you want to read up on it… By the end of the week she’d dug out her undergrad copy of Nielle’s Arrays, very dog-eared—Walden had once referred to it several times a day, though nowadays she had most of it by heart—and very useful. Nikki accepted it with an air of determination. “Thank you, Dr Walden,” she said.

“Nerd,” said Will across the classroom. Nikki only glanced at him, uninterested, and then started flicking through the book. Will looked disappointed not to get more of a reaction.

That was Friday afternoon. On Saturday morning, with gloom in her heart, Walden climbed the spiral staircase opposite the staffroom to reach the funny little loft above the library that housed the school archives. She had promised Laura Kenning a meeting, and a meeting they would have.

The archives were lit only by a small skylight with a slatted blind. The chilly light of the October morning came through in pale stripes. Walden was late, apparently, although not according to her watch; Kenning was already there, and the archivist—Philomela Jones, an older woman in a soft grey dress, occasionally and unwillingly also the assistant school librarian—was talking to her. Or at her, rather. Philomela was always a bit more intense than people expected.

“Now, this is a copy of the royal grant of suspension,” she was saying, “barring Marshals from the site—this is the Tudor period, academic magic occupies a bit of a legal grey area at the time, and the Marshals are sometimes little more than acquisitive thugs—oh, not you, Marshal Kenning, I’m speaking historically. The grant is signed by Henry VII—the original still has his seal but it’s not here, it’s in the Tower of London. The impetus probably came from his mother, Margaret Beaufort. She was a patron of the school, of lots of educational institutions in fact, hence Lady Margaret House which we still have, and the portrait, a small-scale eighteenth-century copy of the famous Wewyck portrait from about 1510, which is hanging in the staff dining room now—it’s not a very good copy, of course, they sexed her up a bit by eighteenth-century standards, but that’s to be expected. Now, this —”

Walden leaned against the doorframe, folded her arms, and tried not to smile meanly. Kenning kept opening and closing her mouth, trying to find an opening. It was basically impossible to get Philomela on topic politely. You just had to interrupt the steady stream of history. “Good morning,” Walden said at last, just as Philomela began “Of course once we beheaded King Charles,” sounding as if she personally had sharpened the axe. “I’m afraid we need to focus it a bit for Chief Marshal Kenning. Shall we start with the Dorking Record?”

“Oh—yes—Headmasters!” said Philomela. “Let me just…”

William Dorking, Headmaster from 1660 to 1682, had kept a meticulous diary, consisting almost entirely of daily summaries of his meals and bowel movements, and a list of women’s names. “Prostitutes,” said Philomela, “is the usual explanation, although I think some of these poor girls were most likely just locals in domestic service. But… here we are, volume fourteen.”

Volume fourteen of the Dorking Record contained the earliest evidence of Old Faithful on the school site. “‘On this day the great demon returned here’s the deed of gift from the Worshipful Company of Brewers, which of course is how the school could afford to build the thaumic engines—and Brewers Hall to put them in, naturally. There’s still a Brewers scholarship every year. Now once you get to the twentieth century things get a little interesting— this is a letter to The Times from 1913 that mentions a ‘greater demonic power’ in the context of Chetwood School—you can see the contemporary politics behind it, because of course we’re building up to the First World War and everyone has started thinking about demons as weapons…”

“What about incursions?” demanded Kenning.

“If I may,” said Walden, and pointed. Philomela gave her hands an assessing glance—they were clean, of course—and then handed her the stiff folded card. Walden showed it to Kenning. “The order of service for a funeral,” she said. “Rodney Merringham. The Headmaster who died in 1926.”

“We actually don’t know very much about him!” said Philomela. “He was an alumnus, of course—there have only been a handful of non-alumnus Headmasters, our current Mr Bern among them. And like practically all Englishmen of his generation, he was a survivor of the trenches. Most of his contemporaries from school were already dead—you’ve seen the memorial board in the chapel, haven’t you?” She took the funeral order of service gently from Walden’s hands. “He was quite young, only forty-something. And people were rethinking it all in the twenties—arcane safety, as they say now—after everything that had happened during the war. I’m sure it must have influenced his decision to try to destroy Old Faithful. Of course he failed. Technically this was for a memorial service, not a funeral. There was no body found, you see. That’s a common thread in Old Faithful’s incursions. Here’s the next one.”

In 1926 there was a major incursion. Three minor ones followed: 1929, 1935, 1938, and then Old Faithful slowed down after a retooling and expansion of the thaumic engines. In 1961, another major incursion, with two deaths, following an attempt to move Chetwood’s school site across the county. It had turned out that abandoning a centuries-old set of protections was not a good idea. Old Faithful had seized the opportunity, the school had moved back to its original site after the disaster, and the Headmaster had resigned in disgrace. In 1962, a minor incursion, aftershocks. In 1978, another minor. Then a long period of quiet. “By this point,” said Philomela, “the school’s defences have the problem more or less under control. Provided everyone is sensible, of course. Sometimes, people aren’t.”

And that brought them to 2003. The photographs were all in colour now, the records printed, not typed. Philomela said, “Here he is,” and took out a school photo, the traditional rows of children in smart jackets, names listed underneath. She pointed to the top corner. “Charles Green. This is a house photograph—he was in St Jude’s. Of course, he was also a School House boy. One of Chetwood’s traditional functions, as a school, is the education of young sorcerers.”

Walden looked at the photograph and said nothing.

Kenning peered at it. “Bad hair,” she said.

“Well, he was a teenager, you know,” said Philomela, but she laughed a little. “I’m afraid this one is a very typical story of schoolboy hubris. Green attempted to summon Old Faithful on purpose—heaven knows why. I believe he even talked some classmates into helping him. His was the only death, which was honestly very lucky, considering. Awful for him, of course.”

“Kids can be stupid,” said Kenning.

“They can, can’t they?”

Walden said nothing, and said nothing. She possibly should have said something. But it wasn’t Kenning’s business, or Philomela’s, not really. The purpose of this meeting was to give Chetwood’s Chief Marshal a clearer picture of the scale of what was lurking in the school’s magical shadow. It wasn’t to wake up old ghosts.

“Well, that’s completely fucking terrifying,” said Kenning as they walked through the colonnade and then cut across the quad for the staffroom door. It was ten o’clock and there was simply no way to avoid having a polite cup of tea with her, short of inventing a meeting or an urgent phone call. “There shouldn’t be a school here. You realise that, don’t you? There’s a demon the size of an elephant here, so there shouldn’t be a school.”

“Biomass is a tricky measure,” said Walden, “but I think a more accurate comparison would be whale, not elephant. One of the larger species of whale.”

Kenning gave her an exasperated look. “Not my point, Dr Walden.”

“You know,” said Walden, “most of my colleagues do call me Saffy. So where, exactly, were you thinking of sending the students?”

“What?”

“Chetwood School is closed on the recommendation of the Marshals,” Walden said. “We have just over six hundred pupils and all of them know some magic. Where are they going to go?”

“A normal school,” said Kenning. “With normal people in it. It’d be good for most of them.”

Walden inclined her head. “Good luck persuading their parents.”

“Fine. A different boarding school. One without, again, the giant demon.”

“And where do you think the giant demon will go,” said Walden, “when it’s not getting anything to eat?”

Kenning stopped walking. They had just reached the oak tree on the far side of the quad. The grounds team came most days and swept up the leaves and acorns that it dropped at this time of year, but they didn’t work on Saturdays. The gnarled ground and the wooden bench underneath the tree were heaped with curling dry leaves, and a low breeze stirred them, making faint rustling sounds. Kenning said, “So are you actually saying that it’s fine to keep feeding an occasional kid to the big demon, if that keeps it happy enough to leave the rest of them alone?”

Walden just looked at her. She looked until Kenning glanced away, embarrassed. “No,” she said at last. “I don’t appreciate that accusation, Marshal Kenning, and I am very sure you don’t actually believe it.”

Kenning tucked her hands in her pockets. “It’s just crazy,” she said. “That thing is here and no one has done anything about it. It’s crazy.”

“I think the problem with this conversation is that you have cause and effect reversed,” Walden said. They kept walking; the tense moment was over. And Walden did need to work with this woman, and she was good, and it was not unreasonable to be upset about the presence of a giant demon on the school site. Walden also found it upsetting. “You’re acting as if the demon was here first and some complete idiot decided to build a school on top of it. But it’s the other way round. The school was here first; the demon is here because of the school. If the school was somewhere else, or if the students were somewhere else, that’s where the demon would go too. That’s exactly what happened when they tried to move the school site in the sixties. Powerful demons become powerful by going where the power is and digging in. Old Faithful became what it is by moving into Chetwood’s shadow in the demonic plane and staying there.”

“I don’t have to like it.”

“I don’t think anyone likes Old Faithful, no. But the work we do keeps our students safe from it.”

“No big incursions in twenty years,” said Kenning. “And thirty years before that.”

“A couple of blips in a five-decade record of excellent arcane security,” said Walden, and then hated herself for it. “‘Blips’ is not the word. Even a minor incident is a terrible disaster when a higher demon is involved. But Chetwood exists to protect its students as well as to educate them. That’s true of any school, but it’s doubly true here. I think we do it well, on the whole. Tea?” The relaxation end of the staffroom—well away from the possessed photocopier—was all sagging, comfortable armchairs and institutional mud-brown carpet. There was a fresh pot of tea already brewed in the little attached kitchen.

“The work we do,” muttered Kenning, and then nodded yes to tea. “Listen, Dr Walden—” a pause, and then Kenning corrected herself, abruptly, “Saffy. I think we need a reset.”

“A reset?” Walden passed Kenning a mug of tea. Kenning started shovelling sugar cubes into it.

“I mean—” Did the woman always stop and start this much when she was talking? “Look. You’re not my boss. I know you don’t like that, but it’s true. Marshal work, my team’s work, it’s not the same as the kind of magic you do. You don’t understand the work we do.” Walden raised her eyebrows—she could have said Actually I wrote a rather well-received paper on —but Kenning was barrelling on. “You’ve been a magician probably all your life, and you’ve never been a demon hunter. You’ve never seen the amount of damage these fuckers can do to a normal person’s life. But I get that you’re good at this and you care. Well, I’m good and I care too. We ought to be working together. We can disagree like grown-ups, probably.”

“Would you say that we haven’t been grown-up until now?” asked Walden.

Kenning gave her a Look. “‘It’s only a very small demon,’” she said.

Walden remembered saying it, but she didn’t remember sounding quite so condescending. “‘Good evening, Ms Walden’?” she answered.

Kenning snorted. “Sorry. Your face—well. Yes, all right, childish. You agree we’ve been childish?”

“It’s the school environment,” Walden said. “It brings out everyone’s inner teenager.”

Kenning laughed faintly, and drank some tea. Walden noticed, again, that she was gorgeous. This was out of character for her. She needed more of a non-school social life, probably, which was something she would add to her to-do list as soon as she had the time. “A reset, then,” she said. “We can share expertise more productively. I couldn’t agree more.”

Share expertise productively, Kenning mouthed, and then took another mouthful of over-sugared tea in apparent despair.

Walden decided to ignore this as leftover childishness. “Shall we start by setting up a standing meeting? I have a slot on Sunday afternoons.”

“You work on Sundays?”

“Well—” Technically, officially, Walden did not. But what else was she going to do with her time? “Friday morning, then.”

“No mornings this term. I’m leading the night shift,” said Kenning. “Have you got an evening?”

“Thursday,” said Walden, though it was going to eat into her lesson prep time. “We can meet on Thursday evenings. I’ll look forward to it.”

It was Saturday, so she had a single with the Upper Sixth before lunch. Keeping hundreds of children busy at the weekend was one of the great challenges of boarding school life. Saturday morning, Saturday afternoon sports teams and academic societies, Sunday morning chapel—optional, but if you weren’t attending you were expected to be either in the library or on the sports fields—and Sunday afternoon for clubs and excursions, usually to the village but occasionally a larger and more exhausting trip to a zoo or a theatre or a theme park. All of those needed to be supervised, which meant staff didn’t get a full weekend off either. Usually you got either Saturday or Sunday. If you put in for cover early enough and could arrange swaps with enough colleagues, occasionally you managed both.

It wore on people. It even wore on Walden. She always tried to plan her easiest teaching for the week in the Saturday morning single slot.

This week, for example, she had them all doing practice questions for the A-level exam, timed and in silence. This had the double benefit of being extremely good for them—of the four, only Aneeta could be relied on to practise exam technique on her own initiative—while being fairly restful for Walden. She put the Thursday evening meeting with Kenning in her calendar. She replied to some emails. She looked up and said, “Yes, Nikki?”

“It’s about the book you gave me,” Nikki said.

Walden raised her eyebrows. “Does that mean you’ve finished the work I asked you to do?”

“Well, I just—”

“Timed and in silence, Nikki,” Walden said. “Thank you.”

She glanced around at the other three. All of them had their heads down over their work. Mathias’s worksheet had developed some doodled star-shapes in the corner, which meant he’d got stuck somewhere and hadn’t wanted to ask for help. Walden went over and began to speak quietly to him. She was aware, with a teacher’s sixth sense, that Nikki had gone back to work, with a wronged and mutinous air. Well, she might be one of Chetwood’s best, but she was still a teenager, with a teenager’s tendency towards overreaction. She would get over it.