Page 9

chapter seven

THREE-STEP PLAN

Every teacher Walden knew had occasionally resorted to the three-step lesson plan, which was to say, the lesson you planned in the three steps it took you to walk into the classroom. It was just a fact of the job: there was never enough time to do everything right. She’d comforted her share of overwhelmed perfectionist trainees, up all night working on six full lesson plans for the next day. She’d been that person, well into her NQT year. But it was unsustainable. You had to forgive yourself for imperfection. You had to teach the lessons, let them go, do better next time if you could. Ultimately, some lessons got the full minute-by-minute detailed plan that you learned in teacher training. Some, with experience, you pulled out of your pocket based on a half-remembered activity you’d cooked up years ago. Some you begged colleagues to lend you their PowerPoints for. And some you just had to make up on the spot.

Walden had never walked into a critical incursion before. She didn’t have a plan. No one could. No risk assessment would help her now.

Three steps took her through the ruined front door of School House.

She felt raw demonic magic descend around her, greasy and claustrophobic. The air smelled of sulphur and gunpowder smoke. When she glanced back, the doorframe was still there, but the world beyond was gone. There was nothing but a louring darkness. Getting out of here again was not going to be straightforward.

“Stay behind me,” said Kenning. “You do realise we’re basically in the demonic plane here?”

Walden obviously knew that. She caught herself before she snapped about it. Kenning wasn’t tense because of her; this wasn’t the moment to restart what they’d both agreed were really just childish squabbles.

Kenning was ignoring her anyway. Her focus was on setting up the cast for a magical shield: not a pale sphere like Reverend Ezekiel’s, but a shifting and layered shimmer in the air which hooked into one of the runes on Kenning’s left bracer for support, so it would self-sustain for a few moments if she was distracted. It was very neat work, especially since Kenning took an extra moment or two to get it precisely balanced, with an attention to detail that Walden didn’t usually expect from a non-academic magical practitioner. She had written about Marshal magic during her MThau, but the Marshals she’d interviewed had been suspicious and unwilling to give away their secrets. Academic invocation specialists like Walden were, traditionally, their enemies. She’d never seen the spell Kenning was using before.

“What beautiful shielding,” she said.

Kenning glanced at her. She seemed to think she was being patronised. “I’m not a trained magician. We use what works for us.”

“I was being sincere,” said Walden. “I do know academic magic isn’t the only way to do things.” During their brief shared life as postdocs at Stanford, Roz Chan had taught an undergraduate course on non-elite and non-Western magical traditions, shared with a junior professor from the Anthropology Department. It was interesting stuff, and the lecture hall had always been packed to the gills even though Roz had been objectively—Walden could think it without unkindness now—a pretty bad teacher.

The Marshal shield really was lovely. She said, “How do the layers”—and seeing Kenning’s closed expression—“never mind.”

They were advancing as she spoke, along School House’s front hall. Walden probably shouldn’t have been talking, but few things were as ghostly and unnerving as dead silence in a school building. Through the swirls of shadow and the dull purple gleam of loose magic, she glimpsed coat hooks, a jumble of black school shoes in various sizes, family photographs of Ebele and Ezekiel with their children and foster children in assorted combinations, and a child’s bicycle. No demons here. No sign of Will.

He hadn’t got far. They found him in the kitchen.

Also in the kitchen was a seventh-order archdemon. In this place, as the demonic plane and mundane world overlapped and blurred together, it had assumed a physical form without difficulty: a ghastly collection of sucking toothless mouths and fleshy tentacles. Will was unconscious, his head under the kitchen table. Walden rather thought he’d run straight in without any defences up and hit the wall of malevolence the archdemon was throwing off. It was giving her a headache even through Kenning’s shield.

“Leave the hostile to me,” Kenning said.

Walden was not an expert on magical combat per se, so she was perfectly happy to do so. She cast her own shield, since Kenning presumably needed all her focus for the fight—she used the traditional one she knew, which manifested as an upturned bowl of white light—and went to her knees next to Will. Blood in his curly chestnut hair meant a head wound. Not the demon’s work—it would have taken his head off completely. He’d hit the table on his way down, and the kitchen floor was stone flags.

He was still breathing. He was still alive. The main reason he was still alive was that the archdemon was big enough—just—to be contemplating a possession, and not quite big enough to have forced it already. Anything smaller would have started eating Will by now. Anything bigger would already be settling down to a comfortable new home inside him.

“You have a charmed life, William Daubery,” Walden told the unconscious boy softly. “You have no idea how lucky you just were.”

Magical healing beyond the most basic first aid required a medical degree before they even let you try. Walden certainly did not want to go poking around in a potential concussion. She looked up, intending to offer Kenning support.

And then she took a moment to watch in frank admiration.

Kenning was very good.

It wasn’t that she was strong, although she was. Indeed, she was throwing around quite a lot more raw power than Walden would have been in her position. Her spellwork did not have the stripped-back precision of an academically trained magician; it shimmered at the edges, and drew lines of thaumic aftershock through the raw magical ambience of the demonic plane. In any case, simple magical power did not impress Walden. Any demon had it, and any talented schoolchild. She herself had been strong to start with—not a true sorcerer, but strong—and she had spent decades since then becoming expert. Very few people these days could call on more magical power than her.

It was the way Kenning used what she had.

She cast wordlessly, or in brief staccato syllables, relying above all on gesture: hands, feet, the motion of her body. It was the motion that arrested Walden’s attention, the smooth flow from one stance to another; the way the magical sword, blazing with white light, functioned as an extension of the Marshal’s right arm; how she wrapped the ambient power of the demonic plane around herself and turned it into traps and tripwires for the archdemon’s groping tentacles. Kenning’s face was set in calm, concentrating lines as she battled the monstrosity. This was hard work for her, but in the way that a marathon was hard work for a serious runner. Walden could tell she wasn’t needed at all.

She did gasp when the archdemon disarmed Kenning. The sword clattered on the stone flags of the kitchen floor, its light blinking out. But Kenning didn’t panic, didn’t flinch; the white blaze reappeared in bunches gathered around her fists and feet. Walden watched her force the archdemon back with blow upon blow: fast kicks, jabs with her fists, even her elbow. It was losing its grip on reified physicality, the tentacles evaporating one by one, leaving a quivering pink core. Kenning lunged forward and tackled it flat, letting out a shout— ha! —that was mostly a sharp explosion of breath.

The archdemon writhed and struggled under her, but Kenning was now striking repeatedly at that quivering core, magic shining around her fist. Before long it collapsed into fine pink mist, which evaporated.

Kenning picked up her sword, got to her feet, and caught her breath. Walden caught hers too. Good grief, she heard herself think.

“You, er… know karate?” she said.

“MMA,” said Kenning. She wiped sweat off her forehead. “How is he?”

“He’ll live,” said Walden. “If we get him out of here fast enough.”

“Couldn’t have been one of your small students, could it?” Kenning said, eyeing Will’s prone form. “I can get him into a fireman’s lift if we drag him out from under the table.”

“No need,” said Walden, and levitated him.

It was a bit showy—like all magic that involved really serious disagreements with physics—but she had the very good excuse that a child’s life was at stake. In any case, she doubted Kenning was going to be much impressed by a mere temporary abeyance of gravity after a demon-killing performance like that. Walden was already regretting what she’d said, about talented Marshals not ending up working for Chetwood; though a part of her was also thinking, Why on Earth is someone like you working for Chetwood?

Kenning recast her multilayered shield and they took Will back down the corridor to the front door. Walden frowned at the darkness beyond it. “Well, that won’t do,” she said. “If you could just stand back for a moment?”

Kenning did.

Walden would normally have summoned a mid-level demon for assistance with punching a controlled planar portal. What was the point of being an invocation specialist otherwise? But summoning anything in the middle of a critical incursion was decidedly unsafe. She opened the portal herself, with a sharp gesture and a grunt of effort, and felt the minor earthquake under her feet as the view past the doorway shimmered and resolved into the late-night lawn at the front of School House. She was pleased to glimpse that someone—most likely Ezekiel—had had the sense to set up a perimeter. “If you take him through,” she said. “Thank you very much.”

“You first,” said Kenning. “In case any nasties try to follow us out. I’ll cover you.”

“I’m not coming,” Walden said. “There are two more of them still in here, Marshal. I’m going for the tower.”

Kenning looked grave. In the tones of a medical professional delivering an unhappy diagnosis, she said, “Dr Walden, it’s already been too long. You must know there’s no chance.”

Walden inclined her head. “As I said before. Give me two hours. Then collapse the incursion.”

“You’re throwing your life away,” said Kenning. “I know we’ve had our disagreements, but this isn’t the time for an argument. Listen to me. Please.”

She meant it. Walden was touched. It didn’t change anything about what she had to do. It was her fault Nikki and Mathias were trapped in here; her fault, because she hadn’t seen it coming; her fault, because Old Faithful had first got its claws into Nikki during her lesson; her fault, for another reason too.

I still belong. You know me. You know I do.

“Thank you for your help, Laura,” she said. “I must apologise for what I said earlier. You are very good at your job. And it’s been a privilege.”

And then, since Kenning didn’t seem inclined to move, she cast a modified wind spell to give her a little shove out of the door, and sent Will floating through alongside her. She had just enough time to let the levitation down gently before the strain of holding the portal open grew to be too much. Walden felt the sting of magical backlash when it snapped shut, as if something had just tried to close needle-sharp teeth on her fingertips.

Then she was alone in School House, alone in a critical demonic incursion. She could no longer make out the lines of the front hall—the coat hooks, the family pictures, the bicycle—through the fog of wild magic. The doorframe behind her stood alone in an expanse of shadow that was punctuated only by a boreal shimmer of shifting purple light.

No sign of Old Faithful yet. That was not a hopeful thought. Walden knew it was here; and if it was not paying attention to her, then it was paying attention to something else.

Nikki and Mathias were in the tower. They were still alive. Walden chose to believe this because the alternative was unbearable.

She turned away from the door and headed in.