Signatures
From THE DAILY CRIER, Friday, Meteorological Notes
Several correspondents have written to remark upon the cloud which has stood over the College District since the beginning of the week, and which does not appear to move with the wind. The Municipal Observatory informs us that such formations are common above a Well of any size and are of no significance whatever. Rain is expected to continue through Monday. Correspondents are asked not to write again.
They went up along the park, through Queen’s District, and in at the west gate. Beyond the wall, the road widened before opening into a square dominated by a building that had plainly been designed to impress. It was all grey stone and tall windows, with steps running almost the entire width of the front.
The square was full. Carriages stood deep along one side, while a dozen motor cars occupied the other, their drivers leaning against the doors as they waited. Between them, the crowd moved in every direction at once: boys of fifteen with their fathers, boys of fifteen without them, young men in good coats who were plainly no longer boys but had come for the same entrance, and grey-uniformed guards at the foot of the steps who appeared to be counting nothing while watching everything. The chauffeur brought the car to the edge of the square and stopped.
“I will get the forms, sir. You may remain seated.”
He disappeared into the crowd before anyone could answer and returned several minutes later with a sheaf of papers beneath one arm. From the box beneath the dashboard he took a case containing three fountain pens, each laid neatly in velvet. He handed one to each of them, followed by the forms, then leaned forward and folded down three small tables from the backs of the front seats. Leon looked at his pen for a moment before removing the cap.
“Do you want a hand with that?” Croft asked.
Leon looked down at the form. It took him a minute to read the first page.
“No, sir. I can do it.”
So Croft and Lucian filled in the faculty forms while Leon worked through the student one. For a while the only sound inside the car was the scratching of three pens.
Lucian wrote quickly and without hesitation. He had filled in this form before, or one very like it, in three other countries and under two other names, and the questions were always much the same: where born, Circle held, licence number, previous appointment, previous refusal. He supplied the answers belonging to Lucian Grey. That man had been born in a market town in the kingdom, held a Circle 4 licence, and had never been refused anything because he had never applied. Across from him, Croft wrote slowly, pausing over each answer and reading it back to himself under his breath.
“Sirs.”
The chauffeur had turned in his seat.
“You will have to take those in yourselves. They record the signature at the window.”
“Signature?” Leon looked up. “I am not a mage yet, sir.”
“Mana signature,” said Croft, without looking up. “There is a device on the counter. It sends out a wisp and records what comes back. Everybody has one, mage or not. Yours will be a small one.”
“Oh.”
Four ways to forge one, said a mind.
We have used three, answered another.
“Mr. Croft,” said the chauffeur. “You will want to attach your letter from the College. And the referral.”
Croft stopped writing.
“Yes,” he said.
He took the college letter from his satchel and pinned it to the form, but he did not take out a referral. Then he screwed the cap back onto the pen and looked through the window at the crowd. Lucian noticed, but he said nothing.
The windows were set inside the great entrance, six of them in a row, with a queue at each. When they reached the front, a clerk took Lucian’s form and read every line before pushing a brass box across the counter. A plate of dark glass sat in the top, roughly the size of a hand, with a dial beside it and a needle resting at zero.
“Hand flat, sir.”
Lucian placed his hand on the glass, and a wisp went out from the box and came back. The needle moved, settled, and stopped. The clerk wrote down a number and made a small drawing on the form before turning it over and stamping it.
“Your card, sir. The Hall sits at nine on Monday.”
Croft went next. The clerk read his placing, looked up at him, then read it again. He ran the device over Croft’s hand, stamped the form, and handed him a card identical to Lucian’s. Leon was last.
“Hand flat.”
Leon put out his right hand with the glove still on it. The clerk did not look up.
“Glove off, please.”
Leon glanced at the glove, then slowly removed it. He placed his hand flat against the glass, the back of it upward as instructed, and waited for the clerk to look. The clerk was watching the dial instead. The needle travelled considerably farther than it had for Croft before returning and settling.
“Hm.”
He wrote down the number, made his drawing, stamped the form and handed Leon a card.
“Monday, eight sharp. Long Room. The paper is at nine.”
He never looked at Leon’s hand.
The chauffeur drove them to a library. It was a public one, with a bookshop on the ground floor and a reading room above. It stood two streets from the College wall and was already full of people who had been to the same windows that morning.
“Master Leon. You can look at the past years’ papers here.”
“Papers, sir?”
“The written paper,” said Croft. “They give you an aptitude paper in the morning. Logic, mostly. Don’t try to learn anything for it. Just read a few of the old questions so the format does not surprise you.”
“Oh. Yes, sir.”
The chauffeur took Leon to a shelf at the back, then returned carrying an armful of books for the other two and placed them on the table.
“Sirs. You may care to refresh your memory.”
“Very good,” said Croft, picking up a bound volume of the College’s past interviews.
Lucian took a periodical, then another. They were the quarterly reviews, the last four years of everything the College had allowed its people to publish. He read the first one from cover to cover in a little over eleven minutes.
Nine minds took a page each and passed it on, while one kept their place. It was not fast by his standards. He was not reading for what the College had said; he was reading for what it had not.
By the time the lamps were lit, he had gone through all sixteen issues, two of the bound volumes, and a pamphlet on the tariff of the charging houses. Croft had managed eleven pages of the interviews. He had stopped reading some time ago and was looking across the table at the stack Lucian had finished.
“Mr. Grey.”
“Mr. Croft.”
“Did you read those?”
“Yes.”
Croft looked at the stack for another moment. Then he went back to page eleven. They had lunch in the library’s tea room and returned to the hotel in the evening.
“Leon,” said Lucian as they reached the stairs. “Practise the sample questions until Monday. You have Saturday and Sunday. We leave together on Monday morning.”
“Yes, sir.”
Croft had stopped at the desk.
“Can a man practise spells in his room here?”
“Yes, sir,” said the chauffeur, who had followed them inside. “The rooms are warded. There is a training room in the basement if you would prefer it.”
“Oh, no. Apprentice grade only. I shall not blow anything up.”
“Very good, sir.”
Lucian continued toward the lift.
“I hope the roof pool is heated.”
“It is, sir.”
Monday came, and the three of them were driven back along the park and through the west gate. This time the car did not stop in the square but continued through it, and Leon saw that the whole district beyond the wall belonged to the College. There were halls and houses, a chapel, dormitories in long rows with washing hanging between them, and a long, low building with chimneys that Lucian marked as a charging house. The car stopped before a building with a great many steps.
“Master Leon. The Long Room is this way.”
The chauffeur took Leon away with his card in one hand and his oilcloth bundle under the other arm, because Leon would not leave it in the car. Leon looked back once, but the crowd on the steps swallowed him before he could see either of the others.
Lucian went the other way, toward a taller building behind the first. He had gone perhaps twenty yards before he realised Croft was walking beside him.
“Mr. Croft. Will you not be late for your interview?”
Croft continued for several more steps before answering.
“I am not giving one.”
For a moment, neither of them said anything. The steps rose ahead of them.
“Are you confident in your creation?” Lucian asked.
“Frankly? No.” Croft gave a small laugh at his own expense. “I am a historian, Mr. Grey. I dig up old spells. Most of them are no use to anybody now. Theory has moved on and left them behind.”
“But you have one.”
“I have one. I have made a change to it.”
He shifted the satchel higher on his shoulder. The repaired strap held.
“We shall see if the panel cares.”
Lucian smiled, and they continued up the stairs.
The Hall was an amphitheatre. Rows of seats rose steeply on three sides, and every one was occupied by older students who had come to watch. At the bottom stood a round platform of pale stone, and before it sat five people in black gowns behind a long table covered with papers.
Above the whole room was a roof of glass. Fine rain fell against it and ran in thin streams toward the edges.
Lucian looked up. Then he stopped watching the rain, because the cloud beyond it had caught his attention. All nine minds stopped at once.
“Mr. Grey. Are you quite well?”
He came back to himself and followed the cloud down from the sky, through the glass, over the tiers of seats and past the five black gowns until his attention settled on a young woman sitting alone in the row behind them. Thirty, perhaps.
Her face was ordinary enough that a man’s eye might pass over it in a crowd until it reached her eyes. They were very deep and very blue. Her skin was pale, her brown hair pinned into a simple bun without ornament, and she wore an old-fashioned grey-and-black dress buttoned to the throat with white gloves.
“Everybody freezes the first time,” said Croft comfortably. “I did.”
Then the young woman turned her head. Someone might have said her name, but nobody had. She looked directly at Lucian.
For the length of a breath, the blue disappeared from her eyes, and every colour at once occupied them instead, turning slowly through the spectrum. Nobody else in the Hall reacted, because a person could not see it unless it was being done to them. Lucian knew what it was.
Spirit sight, said one mind.
Master Pigeon, said another, quite calmly. You underestimated her. We all have.
A long posting, said a third. And not a safe one.
The colours vanished, and her eyes were blue again. She gave him the slightest nod.
“Come along, Mr. Grey,” said Croft. “We observe first, I think.”
Lucian inclined his head to the woman in the second row.
Lara Allard.
Headmistress of the Royal College of Ashfox. Circle 7. Very possibly the most dangerous person on the continent.
Then he followed Croft up the steps to the back row.
The first name was called, and a young man came down the aisle and stepped onto the pale stone. Lucian knew him. Beside him, Croft went still.
Gerald Croft had his hair cut, his shoes shined, and a case tucked beneath one arm. He placed the case on the platform and opened it. Inside were chalks, a rule and a compass. Then he knelt and began to draw.
It took him a quarter of an hour. He worked carefully, drawing one circle almost to the edge of the platform, then another inside it, filling the space between them with figures as he moved around the stone on his knees. At first the gallery murmured among itself, but the noise gradually died away as the drawing took shape. Even from the back row, Lucian could see that it was good. Very good.
When Gerald finally stood, the array covered almost the entire platform. A block of dressed stone had been placed in the centre while he worked, carried in by two porters.
“A holding array,” Gerald said to the panel. His voice was quiet but carried through the Hall. “It will take a man, or anything approximately the size of a man, and hold him where he stands. It draws from the spirit world rather than from ambers, so it may be left set for a week before it degrades. I have built it for the Ministry.”
One of the five judges wrote a note. Gerald placed his hand against the outer ring.
The array lit. Every line came up gold at once. The block of stone in the centre rose an inch from the platform and hung there, perfectly still.
A sound passed through the gallery. Gerald stepped back and let them look.
Then the gold turned white.
It happened in roughly a second. The lines brightened beyond the strength for which they had been drawn, the outer ring tightened around the block, and the stone came apart between the lines. It became powder.
The dust fell through the air and scattered across the pale platform. The array went dark, and the Hall fell completely silent. Gerald’s forehead twitched.
Good array, said one mind.
Built in a thin room, said another. He never tested it over a Well. It fed him a third more than he asked for, and he has no controlling mechanism.
Internal Affairs would buy that tomorrow, said a third. For exactly what it just did.
“Thank you, Mr. Croft,” said the woman at the end of the table.
“Ma’am. If I might explain what…”
“Thank you.”
Gerald closed his case. He walked back up the aisle with it beneath his arm and did not look toward the back row. Two porters came out with brooms. Beside Lucian, Croft had not moved.
“He is good,” he said quietly, to nobody in particular. “He has always been good.”
Then the clerk read the next name.