Ninety Seconds
From the diary of Penny Holloway, written a good deal later
Monday. The Hall. I went because everybody went (that was a good excuse) and sat at the back with Clara, who did not want to be there and stayed for all of it. Three hundred people watched a man do a small thing with a sparrow, and I was the only one who laughed. Clara put her elbow in my ribs for it. I record here that I was right to laugh, and that it took the rest of them about a year to see why. I am not going to write down why. It is my diary and I can be as annoying as I like.
“Is that the finance minister’s daughter?” said Croft. “Penny, was it?”
It was. She came in at the back gate in the navy mantle with the copper button undone, her hat in her hand and her red hair coming down on one side, and sat down beside Lucian without asking whether the seat was taken.
“You did not invite me to your action, Mr. Lucian.”
“There is no action, Miss Penny. We show a spell of our own making, or a piece of research. Something we have done.”
“And do you young ladies not have classes?” said Croft, because Clara had come in behind her and was sitting down too. Clara’s mantle was the same navy, turned back to show the grey, and her dark hair was exactly where she had put it that morning. Everything under the mantle was better than it needed to be, and she did not appear to have noticed.
“Most of the rosters are not even filled yet, sir.” Clara smiled and turned round in her seat. “And everybody is here.”
Everybody was; the senior students had filled the Hall to the back wall. The clerk called the next name.
“Mr. Roan Steelheart.”
A finely dressed man with a moustache went down the aisle: square face, weathered, the moustache waxed at the ends. He had a frame built for lifting, in a coat cut the Veldran way, high at the neck and short at the waist, and boots that had been made for him. He carried a long case under one arm, black leather, scuffed at the corners, older than he was.
“Is that the Veldran?” said somebody in the row behind.
“Veldran?”
“Not only students. They are taking professors from abroad this year as well.”
“Oh. This year is going to be interesting.”
“They say he is from an old knight family.”
“Knights?” A giggle. “Is he going to lift iron for us?”
“What do you make of him, Professor?” said Penny.
“I am not a professor yet, Miss Penny.”
“If the Headmistress has her eye on you, you will be.”
Croft jumped. “The Headmistress is here?”
Down on the platform Steelheart had turned, not to the table, but to the woman in the row behind it, and bowed. “It is my pleasure to show my little spell before the Headmistress,” he said. The accent was thick and he did not try to hide it.
“Is that Lara Allard?” said Croft. His voice had gone up.
“Is she not pretty?” said Penny, and Clara said her name in the voice that meant stop.
Steelheart had the long case open. “My family believe in the power of steel,” he said. “I prefer the way of music.”
He took a violin out of it, and the gallery made a sound. A man that size, with a violin.
“I ask only that you listen.”
Sound working, said one mind. Stop your ears and it is nothing.
He knows that, said another. That is the weakness of sound spells. The reason why this field has not developed over the years.
The Headmistress nodded, and he began. The room went soft, not dark but soft at the edges, and then out of the softness two figures stepped, translucent, small, dancing. They were two ballerinas who turned with the music, and their feet did not touch the platform. The girls in the gallery squealed.
“Mr. Grey.” Croft was leaning in. “Do you understand this sort of spell? I confess my knowledge of sound working is very thin.”
“Illusion carried on sound,” said Lucian. “The music does the work on the ear. The ear tricks the mind into seeing things.”
“Oh!” Penny sat up. “I shall take his classes.”
“Can you play anything at all?” said Clara.
“I can learn anything,” said Penny, who was extremely pleased with herself.
Steelheart played for three minutes. At the end of it he bowed, and the bow was a performer’s bow; the playing had been as good as the magic.
“The sound illusion paper,” said the Headmistress, from her row. “Last year’s Halverford Symposium. A very good practical use of it, Mr. Steelheart.”
“I am honoured, Headmistress.”
“Thank you, Mr. Steelheart,” said the table.
The clerk stood. “Mr. Barnaby Croft.”
“Go and get them, Mr. Croft,” said Penny.
“Not Professor?” said Croft, and stood up.
He went down the aisle with his satchel on his shoulder, in the coat that had been good in the spring, past two hundred students in navy mantles who had never heard of him. At the platform he stopped and looked at the row behind the table, then said, “It is a pleasure to be here, Headmistress,” somehow managing to get the words out in the right order. She nodded and he began.
“I am a scholar of the history of magic. I have come across a good many old spells that have fallen out of use, because the theory has moved on.” He looked up at the back row, then back at her. “Some of them are still useful. They just need a little modification.”
He took a wand out of his inside pocket. It was old-fashioned, plain wood, and looked a good deal like a stick. He drew a spell knot in the air with it, then a second and a third, so that the three stood in a triangle in front of him.
He said a few words under his breath, and a pale blue light came up in the middle of the triangle. Out of it flew a sparrow, translucent and grey, which went once round Croft’s head and perched on his hand.
“An ordinary spirit,” said Croft, to the table. “Nothing etched on it.”
He traced a fourth spell knot round the sparrow. The knot came apart into gold smoke and soaked into the bird, and the bird, which had been fidgeting, went still.
Croft worked fast then, and with the sparrow held he drew a fifth knot inside it, small. The gold went down out of the bird, and what came up in its place was fire: a tiny phoenix, sitting on a fat man’s hand.
He let it go, and it flew twice round the platform while the gallery followed it with their heads. On the second circuit it broke up in a wash of blue light and was gone. A minute and a half, from the first knot to the last of the light.
Lara Allard’s eyes had sharpened, and for a moment she looked not at the little phoenix, but at Lucian. Her spirit sight moved over him in a way ordinary eyes could not. The spell was there, the mana was there, the working was there.
The grimoire was not.
Lucian noticed the pause, but he did not look at her. After a moment, Lara looked back at the platform.
“My cousin,” said a voice from four rows down, pitched to carry, “has taught a sparrow to catch fire.”
Gerald had come back in. He was sitting with two young men in good coats and stiff collars, who had plainly never carried anything heavier than a glass, and one of them laughed.
At the table, the man at the near end put his pen down. “Charming, Mr. Croft. And the application?”
“The spirit carries the working, sir. Not the caster. So a mage can cast what he has not…”
“For a minute and a half.”
“Right.”
“And then it is gone.”
“That appears to be the case.”
The man at the far end smiled. “Is the sparrow for sale, Mr. Croft? My daughter would like one.”
The table laughed, not unkindly; it was worse than unkindly. Croft stood on the platform with his stick in his hand and went red from the collar up.
Thank you, Mr. Croft, said one of Lucian’s minds, before the table could. That is what comes next.
We will put him in the newspaper tomorrow, said another.
This is more than the post is worth, said a third. Sit still.
Lucian stood up.
“Mr. Grey?” said Penny.
He went down the aisle. The table watched him come and did not know what to do about it, because nobody had called his name. He stopped at the edge of the platform.
“Forgive me. May I borrow your spirit for a moment, Mr. Croft?”
Croft stared at him. “It has gone.”
“Not entirely.”
He held out his left hand, palm up, and did nothing anyone could see. The blue light came back out of nothing at the edge of the platform, and the sparrow came with it, still faintly alight and frayed at the edges. It landed on his palm and sat there, and the flame did not touch his glove. The gallery had stopped talking.
“How…” said the man at the near end.
“Your wand, Mr. Croft. Hold it out.”
Croft held out the stick, and the sparrow hopped off Lucian’s palm onto it and sat there. A sparrow on a stick. It was the first natural move it had made since it came back.
Lucian drew one spell knot round the two of them with his right forefinger, and the sparrow went into the wood. For a moment the grain of the stick lit orange from inside like a coal with the ash blown off. Then it went dark and was a stick again.
Croft was looking at his own hand. “It is warm,” he said.
“Cast, Mr. Croft.”
Croft raised the stick, and just as he imagined the fire spell, the phoenix came out of the tip. It flew once round his head and went back into the wood. Croft did it again, and it came out again. He did it a third time, because the man at the near end had said, quietly, “Again,” and it came out a third time and went back.
Nobody in the Hall said anything at all.
There, said one mind.
Now look at the table, said another. And the gallery.
Lucian looked, and three of the five had leaned back while one had leaned forward. The man at the far end, who had asked about the sparrow, was not looking at the platform at all. He was looking at the woman behind him, and she had not moved.
She was looking at Lucian’s right hand.
Up in the back row somebody was laughing, one person in a Hall of three hundred. It was Penny, with her hand over her mouth and Clara’s elbow in her ribs. She had been waiting five days for this joke, and it had finally arrived.
And in the fourth tier, two seats from the aisle, a man in a brown coat had been watching the table since Gerald’s block went to powder, and was watching it still.
“Mr. Grey.” It was the man at the near end, the one who had asked Croft about the application. “How long will it hold?”
“Ask the sparrow,” said Lucian. “It has not told me.”
The gallery laughed, but the man at the near end did not, and wrote a note instead. The man at the far end had been waiting for that, and he leaned forward. He had asked whether the sparrow was for sale, and the whole Hall remembered it, and he needed that forgotten.
“Any working, Mr. Grey? Or only Mr. Croft’s little bird?”
“Any the spirit is willing to carry. They have minds of their own.” Lucian glanced at the stick in Croft’s hand. “That one happens to like fire.”
“It does,” said Croft, before he could stop himself. “It went straight for it.”
Somebody in the third tier laughed out loud, and the man at the far end sat back. The clerk, who had a form to finish, cleared his throat. “And the name of the working, Mr. Grey? For the register.”
He smiled. None of it appeared to matter to him in the least. “You may put down whatever you like.”
The clerk looked at the table, and the table looked at the clerk. Nobody had a rule for that, so the clerk left the column empty.
“Thank you, Mr. Grey,” said the table. Lucian inclined his head and went back up the aisle. Croft came after him with the stick in his hand, held a little away from his coat.
Gerald did not look up as they passed.