Ordinary Miracles, page 22
Once I’d started thinking a bit more clearly it took me less than a minute to realise that really didn’t make sense as a motive – in fact almost none of it made sense, least of all why he would expose himself now.
Weaver had organised the hard-light attacks, for God alone knows what reason. Because of what he thought was the power I was getting from Sam, he’d used me three times without managing to kill me. But, by malign coincidence, Richard Slater had managed to seal his nasty little parasite in my gogoan.
Fearing that it could reveal his identity he had tried to kill me again, twice, but the attempts had seemed unconvincing, half-hearted even. Maybe he only did it when he thought we were getting close to finding out. That was another question I was going to ask him, just before I ripped his heart out.
Then he took Amy, but in a way that almost guaranteed that he would be identified. That didn’t make sense either. Only killing Clara would have prevented it, but maybe he hadn’t known she was there, or hadn’t had the guts to kill her when he found out. Maybe the blow to the head was supposed to finish her off, although why he didn’t stop to make sure… or maybe I just had no fucking clue what was going on. I was getting a headache again.
“Him húndàn,” – a bastard – was Sam’s considered opinion. “We find him.”
“He can wait – we find Amy first.”
“Find Amy, find him.”
“Probably not. He’ll know we’ll have lots of help. My guess is that he’ll stash her somewhere and then leave, so even if we do manage to find her, we won’t find him.”
“Sounds reasonable,” said Clara. She looked thoughtful for a moment. “So we have to focus on finding Amy. I have a slight idea about that – let me think about it for a bit.” Sam and I had done some amateurish Healing on her head wound, and she was looking much better.
“OK. We know Amy won’t be lying around waiting to be rescued either. If she can’t get herself free she’ll be doing her best to make it easier for us to find her.”
“How you think she do that?”
“Well, anything from sending out a beacon in kemen, making the building glow in the dark, setting it on fire or, knowing her, knocking it down with a wall of water.”
“If she’s conscious,” Clara said carefully. “I’d know if she… wasn’t with us anymore, but even though I can feel her, I get absolutely no response.”
“Shielded or unconscious?”
“Unconscious, very, very far down, much further than just sleeping. If I had to put a word to it, I would say comatose.”
“Shit.” I remembered Melita and her chums talking about the person who was trying to find us in Malta. “Clara, can you do a track and trace and get a rough direction for her?”
“No problem.”
Sam got out a large-scale OS map. Clara turned slowly on the spot, her hand extended. The pirouette was more mechanical than balletic, and I was glad that Halsted and PC Perera, who was the other family liaison officer, had absented themselves. It being a Sunday, the DCI in charge had been making noises about the overtime bill.
As she was looking for her erdikide, I had hoped that Clara would be able to do more than an ordinary ‘track and trace’ and give us an exact location, but she couldn’t. It’s a bit like the military – the higher the rank, the bigger the pointer they use: a General will indicate a battlefront with a sweep of his hand; a Major will use the blunt end of a pencil to specify a line of attack; a Lieutenant will show which side of the trees to go around with the tip of a blade of grass. By that standard Clara was at least a Colonel.
That said, it was solidly south-south-east, heading in the direction of eastern Leicestershire. Or Corby, or Bedford, or possibly even Milton Keynes. And at a stretch it could even be Ilford or Hastings. I hoped that it didn’t cross the Channel, because by then the width of the arc she was indicating was well over a thousand miles and probably contained more than ten million people.
Sam quickly marked the wedge on the map. We are taught to do this from the middle of the second year at college – ‘track and trace’ is a big part of what we do in the public domain, even though you’ve probably never heard of it. We stared at it.
“We’d have to go to bloody Plymouth to triangulate on that,” said Clara, “and we’d still have an area the size of Derbyshire to search – even if he doesn’t move her in the meantime. I really can’t get close enough.” She went on. “We need some help.”
She looked at the map, tracing the countryside with her finger and stopping not far from Corby. She looked away, one of those distant moments when you know that somebody is making a really, really big decision that you know nothing about. “I should have done this a long time ago. We need to go to Rockingham.”
*
We had been in the car for nearly half an hour before Clara would tell us even vaguely why she had made what was, apparently, a very important decision. “Have you visited the castle at Rockingham?”
“No.” I glanced at her. She’s normally quite lively, and prone to a big white smile in a dark face, but now she looked like she was carved from obsidian.
“There’s power at the castle like you wouldn’t believe. The people who can see spirit animals say it’s a dragon – funny how they always see eagles and tigers and never stuff like slugs or weasels. Anyway, aura readers see the entire castle pouring out golden light like a volcano. Some days birds will change direction rather than fly over it. I’ve seen clouds change direction rather than fly over it.” She paused. “You told me what that place in York was like, how strong it made you feel. Rockingham Castle makes that look like a firefly in a jam jar.”
“Then why don’t we all know about this? Why aren’t we taught about it?”
“Some people get nothing when they go there. In the big serious ones, like St Paul’s and that one in York, everyone gets a boost. In places like this, fire Talents and earth Talents get it in spades, kemen get a little but otherwise – nothing. So they call it an ‘unreliable source’.”
I nodded. “Those I’ve heard of.” We wound through the countryside on a steady switchback of a road. “So how do you know about it?”
“We came to this country when I was not quite three, and I was brought up in Corby.” Her mum is the head of radiology at the local hospital. “I used to have a summer job in the teashop at the castle. One day I was clearing up after we’d closed and I felt the need to go outside. There’s this little sward just beyond the entrance and I kept walking until I was standing on it. No idea why. When the power hit me I was literally pulled to the ground. I was about sixteen and I’d never heard of magic outside of Hogwarts and Narnia. I woke up half an hour later when one of the groundsmen found me. He thought I’d been attacked. Then some other person, a woman, came over, said that she understood what had happened to me and that she would send someone to see me.”
“Who was she?”
“I never found out, but the groundsman didn’t know her. The college contacted me three days later. It was Professor Ngozi who came – mum was well impressed that I warranted a professor.” She fell silent and her eyes came back to the present.
We drove on in peace until we crossed the long causeway over the River Welland from Caldecott to Rockingham, then climbed steeply through the village to the castle entrance. It was closed to the public that day, but we pulled off the road into the drive anyway. In the medium distance the castle sat nestled in the landscape, a broad, not very high and extremely old building of pale stone set amidst impressive grounds that dropped sharply towards the river valley. It looked beautiful and I was sure that Amy, with her archaeological head on, would have been fascinated. I decided I would bring her here as soon as I could. I felt that there was power here, even when we climbed out of the car, but nothing like the great beast of a thing that Clara had suggested. Sam clearly felt nothing, but Clara was so silent, so absorbed, that it was hard to attract her attention.
“Can you feel it?” Her voice was soft and abstracted.
I couldn’t, and I was about to say so when the Dragon came over for a look. Magic is not sentient any more than the wind is, but we all know the feeling that it gets stronger the moment you try to open a map or fold a picnic blanket. It was like that, in the same way that being hit by a snowball is like being hit by a hand grenade.
“Bloody hell,” I said in a desperate whisper. It was all I could manage.
Clara laughed, a brittle sound that echoed inside my head like crystal glass shattering. “Amazing, isn’t it?”
I couldn’t reply. I didn’t have the words to describe what was happening – it was like I’d stuck my finger into the mains socket for the universe. My vision blurred and pulsed. I sagged back against the side of the car and slid to the ground, struggling to take a breath. Clara laughed again. Sam looked anxious.
“You hurt?”
“He’s fine,” said Clara, lifting her hands towards the sky in a supplicant gesture.
“Why here?” Well, that’s what I tried to say; it probably came out like the first line of the Magna Carta in Maori, or possibly hamster. Clara understood me anyway.
“There are places of extraordinary power like this, but only a few.” She was almost purring. “Lindisfarne, one near Stirling, Southall, near Yeovil, Canterbury Cathedral.”
I couldn’t speak; I felt light-headed, like my brain was full of helium or I’d been smoking some seriously funny cigarettes. I felt we shouldn’t be here; we were supposed to be searching for Amy and that bastard Weaver, but we’d come here instead. But there was no way that I could feel that this was wrong, that we shouldn’t be doing it. It felt… extraordinary, exhilarating. I know that cars were passing us all the time and the air smelled of petrol fumes, but it was as if we were in a bubble.
This mattered, far more than anything else I could think of in the last, say, ten years. This is what it’s like to be in full possession of your powers. This is why most people are frightened of mages, and are frightened of magic, and why we choose to hide. It is a terrifying beauty, and I revelled in it.
I felt my gogoan being ablated, and at the same time I was burning. Every nerve was firing, every synapse sparking, sensations so strong that they bordered on pain. I didn’t ever want it to stop, but I wasn’t sure how much longer it could go on, how much more I could bear.
And then it did stop. Just like that. The Dragon had turned away, and the chill spring air made me shiver. My trousers were cold and wet from where I’d been sitting on the ground, and I was shaking.
Sam helped me up. “You okay? You not look okay. You look… I not know. Odd.”
“I’m fine,” I replied shakily, taking her hand. Something of it passed to her in that moment, because she clenched my fingers and stared at me, wide-eyed. I felt alive, alert and hard enough to spit nails through a wall. “Clara, did you know this would happen?”
“What?” I think she was still communing with the Dragon, because she seemed very distracted.
“Did you know that this would happen to me?”
She seemed to focus slightly. “No. I did wonder, but you’re a big boy, so I thought you could cope.”
“Thanks. You know what it’s done, but it’s also opened the parasite a bit. I know why we couldn’t make sense of how Weaver was doing all this.”
“How?”
“Because he hasn’t been working alone. The esku of the person who went for me in London isn’t Weaver’s. He may have set the parasite, but someone else carried out the attacks. I don’t know who.”
Clara nodded, but she wasn’t really listening.
“I found her,” she said matter-of-factly. “I needed the boost from the Dragon to be able to do it properly.” She giggled. “A locator without using the spell.”
“How?”
“I set the earth searching for her.”
I digested that for a moment. “Where is she?”
“Near Burrough Hill. It’s a multivallate Iron Age promontory fort on the edge of Rutland.”
“Another place of power?”
“Nah, it’s just a sodding great hill.”
We left, stopping only once on the twenty-mile journey to fill up with petrol – a mage can make an awful lot of things, but not miracle-powered cars.
*
We called Nadia and Dave Halsted as soon as we hit the road. We were more than capable of looking after ourselves, even if we did look like a poster for a diversity initiative, but we needed backup, so the police were the people to go to. There’s being self-sufficient and heroic, and then there’s being stupid about it. Clara got more accurate as we got closer; Amy was no longer near Burrough Hill, she was now actually on it.
I made sure we got to the hill first. There is a soggy car park on a bend in the road, some wet grass, a toilet block and mud, lots and lots of sticky mud. Did Weaver know we’d find her this quickly?
We didn’t care. If we were being decoyed here, why? Was it to put us where we could be attacked, or to get us away from somewhere else? Flip a coin. At that moment, I didn’t give a flying fuck.
We ran past the farm up the half-mile-long, foot-sucking path to the hill fort. It stands out over the east Leicestershire countryside like a pointing finger, surrounded by at least two layers of bank and ditch, which are still huge, more than three metres high. The vertical drop to the plain below is the best part of thirty-five metres. On the ramparts you feel like you’re flying.
Wrapped in Harrise I ran through the forty-five-metre-long entranceway and into the vast, empty interior as the others circled the ramparts. There was no sign of Amy on the rough, flat grass inside, but we didn’t have to search the whole twelve acres because now even I could sense her. I pointed to the far side and Clara ran towards it. Once we joined up she and I walked forwards, closing in on the location. Sam came in from the other direction and we stepped down over the edge. The wind was swirling from the huge sky, a storm poised to strike, and I knew Sam was stopping it, at least for now. The furze grabbed, but we ignored it. I’m sure the views were magnificent, but I didn’t see them.
We found her bundled up in the bottom of one of the folds of ground that make up the outer edge of the rampart. She was wrapped in a stained and torn blanket that had a distinctive and particular odour to it. She was unconscious and unresponsive, deathly cold, still dressed in the jeans and shirt that she had been wearing three days earlier.
Sam called Halsted again as Clara pumped Indar into her and I warmed her up and wrapped her in my jacket. I was near to tears, but lack of visible injury, the regularity of her pulse and the evenness of her breathing gave me hope.
Then the police arrived with first aid and thermal blankets, and less than fifteen minutes after that there was the glorious sight of the air ambulance. The blue and yellow miracle workers landed in the centre of the fort and disgorged a doctor, a stretcher and heat packs. They said that Amy hadn’t been here very long, which suggested that Weaver had somehow detected Clara locating her. And that meant we had been lured here. Clara went in the helicopter and Sam drove while I made lots of phone calls.
*
The hospital was just another hospital, full of people who needed help and people dedicated to helping them, whatever shit they got handed by governments or managers or any other fucker who knows all about performance targets and penny-pinching and doesn’t give a damn about the scared, the sick, the desperate and the dying.
Amy was asleep when we arrived, with Clara dozing next to her. She stirred when we came into the room, blinking at us, and then smiled.
“She’ll be fine. Mild exposure and slight dehydration. They don’t think she’d been there very long – possibly only a couple of hours. They said she was drugged when she was taken, and they think she’s just coming out of it now. She wasn’t drugged,” she added. “I called Nadia. She said it was probably a spell that Healers use called Lasai, which reduces neural activity to maintenance functions only while it’s active. Very advanced and quite obscure, but well within Weaver’s abilities.”
“Was she hurt…” I swallowed. This was a difficult question, “… in any way?”
“One injury, but otherwise no.”
“Injury?”
“She’s partially dislocated her right hip.”
“Oh shit, not again.” I unclenched my teeth. That was not nice, but it was at least familiar territory.
“I suspect it happened when he took her,” said Clara. “I don’t suppose he supported her fully when he started to float her out of the house.”
I sat next to Amy and took her hand. Her skin was cold and dry and a little rough, and I knew that I would have to bring some of her hand cream from home on my next visit. Or get sent to the hospital shop to buy some when I forgot. I’m good at that.
I felt her hand move slightly and then tighten the tiniest fraction on mine. She was only just waking up so she didn’t open her eyes, but I think she knew I was there. Sam and Clara left, and I stayed for an hour. Amy became a little more alert as each minute passed.
Clara, influenced by Amy’s condition and exhausted by her encounter with the Dragon, had been sent home to sleep, so Sam had driven her. Amy was not expected to wake fully for several hours so I was told that I should go too, but I couldn’t. They insisted that I leave the room when they had to do something medical and aimed me at the restaurant.
I headed that way but, when I reached the distant reception area, I found that Dave Halsted had been waiting for me. I sat next to him on the ragged benches, but we didn’t speak for some moments.
Eventually I told him of my belief that Weaver hadn’t been working alone, and he passed it on to Addison. I shifted in my seat and he looked at me anxiously. I suddenly felt another Talent in the area. Then I saw Jan Cherekov, the person who had helped Professor Wicks to put up the barriers on our house, presumably here to take up bodyguard duties on Amy. I relaxed a tiny bit.
