Magic is a bit of a tricky concept to understand if you don’t have the talent for it, so if it’s OK with you, I’m about to use a metaphor and then extend it well beyond its breaking point. Magic is like water. It's vital for life to exist, and something that’s influenced and shaped our history since before we started recording time. But modern mankind on the whole tends to avoid it. Nobody takes boats any more and rivers, while useful to some, act more like an unnoticed background feature to peoples’ daily lives in the 21st century. But some of us live on the coast, and are aware of the huge ocean of power out there.
There’s your coast-dwellers: Those whose lives depend on that ocean but who have to keep something more solid beneath their feet. The crabs and seagulls of this metaphor are your magical-but-mortal races like werewolves, vampires, trolls, and similar.
Further out, we have undersea reefs and the life that makes its home there. They exist surrounded and completely immersed in the magical realm while living a life not dissimilar to our own. They have many names depending on where you’re from, but whether you call them Djinn or Fae or Loa or Spirits, they’re far from being the strangest or most interesting things out there.
Beyond them, beyond where the shelf drops off, we get to the deep water. There are things out there that live permanently suspended in the blue. Those whose existence consists only of the water and the light. They can live their entire lives never coming ashore or seeing the seabed below them, and don’t even know that mortals like us exist.
And then there are things in the deep dark crushing depths with many eyes or none at all, who never see the sun.
Every so often something from the deep water washes ashore and someone like me has to wade out into the knee-high surf, beat it into submission with an oar, and then drag it back out beyond the waves again. And I can’t even swim.
This may not be my best metaphor.
Hurley was right. The death was definitely not mundane. Whoever lay in front of me had been thoroughly burned, almost down to the bone. Their clothes were gone and their flesh had been seared down to blackened and charred scraps, clinging to stick-like bones and a grinning eyeless skull. The body lay where the brick wall of the arch met the road, but neither were scorched by flame or touched by soot. I knelt, gingerly lifted the corpse, and pulled a handful of dried leaves out from the gutter underneath. They were unburned as well. Which means the body was burned elsewhere and then dropped here, or-
“Balefire,” said Cormac from behind me, finishing my thought out loud. I glanced back over my shoulder to see he had walked all the way under the bridge with me. I couldn’t imagine the stress he must have been feeling but I could see it on his face, which was strained and pale with effort. “Probably backfired and immolated himself. You’d have to be pretty stupid to try casting a spell like that under a bridge; I wouldn’t risk a card trick this close to one.”
If magic was truly like water, it ebbed and flowed with something a bit like feng shui. Natural ley-lines were certainly a thing, but power also flowed along paths and roads made and travelled by man. Crossroads were places of power, where two or more roads met and flowed together and around each other like small streams joining to form larger rivers. But bridges, where two paths crossed without touching, were places of conflict and interference; just being near one made spellcasters feel worse than seasick. The Department Wizard we had before Cormac once described the feeling of trying to harness magic in such a spot as like trying to shove two magnets together by the wrong ends. Spells, tricky at the best of times, were near-impossible under a bridge; more likely to backfire and turn your skin inside-out than to do what you wanted them to do.
Of course, none of this affected me, but I still touched the glamour under my shirt protectively. My concern was unnecessary. The magic fueling it was powerful in a way no bridge could disrupt; not even a railway bridge with the added complication of Martin’s Curse radiating from the iron rails above.
I stood and walked further south, emerging from the other side of the bridge, with a grateful Cormac in tow.
“So simple misadventure?” I asked. “Tried casting the wrong spell in the wrong place and fried himself?”
“If he died there and wasn’t moved, yeah. Though why you’d want to be throwing Balefire about the place at five in the morning, I have no idea.”
“Tell me more about Balefire.”
“Nasty spell. Won’t touch anything else except whatever you cast it on, and only goes out when there’s nothing left of the target to burn. Turns people into… well… that.”
“Any chance he was the target? That someone cast it on him?”
“From range? Not likely. They’d have to be a pretty damn powerful mage.”
Cormac knew his magic, alright, and had a pretty good handle on department procedures. But twenty minutes later, while we watched CCTV footage in the back-office of a nearby newsagent, I reflected on how young he was, and how he had a long way to go before he’d develop that sixth sense needed for things like this.
The video was grainy and black-and-white, and the figures blurred, but the tall one was unmistakably rolling up a flame like a snowball and throwing it at the short one as he fled under the bridge. “So that,” I said, tapping the glass of the screen, “must be a pretty damn powerful mage.”
We left the Gardaí to sweep the scene of the attack and got back to the department a few minutes after eight a.m., just as the regular morning shift was fighting New Years’ Day hangovers with the first round of coffee. I poured myself several gallons, found my desk, and lowered my head to the formica. I was barely asleep two minutes when I felt a hand on my shoulder.
It was Kim, the new girl from archives, in her usual cutoff jeans and punk rock t-shirt. “His nibs wants to see you,” she told me in her usual cutoff manner and punk rock accent. I dragged myself back to my feet and looked down on her, trying for what seemed like the ninth time that morning to re-assert dominance.
“I will go see the Magistrate immediately,” I replied, but held my position to see if she would react to the correction. Kim simply retrieved the large stack of books she had been carrying and continued towards the exit. I’d known the Magistrate most of my life, and worked for him since I was little older than a teenager. I owed him a lot, and it bothered me to see him and his title disrespected. Truth be told, it bothered me a lot more than it bothered him. He had long ago abandoned such formalities and was that particular breed of very old-fashioned that let young women get away with most transgressions, especially if they were as attractive as our young Kim from archives. I glanced ruefully in her direction, then headed down to the sub-basement.
I always suspected that the spiral staircase was intentionally designed to be a little disconcerting, so by the time you reached the bottom you could not tell which direction the corridor extended. I was fairly sure it ran behind the building, under the Phoenix Park. But the corridor itself was curved and segmented by thick curtains, and took two right-angled turns, so it was not a bet I would be willing to put a lot of money on.
I pushed through the last curtain and walked to the centre of the tall circular library. His desk there was its usual cluttered self, but the chair behind it was empty. That wasn’t unusual. He did most of his work recently on the higher levels of the drum, up among the dusty scrolls and archaic books that nobody had opened in decades.
“Hello?” I called up into the room.
My call was answered by the sound of a paper stack toppling over and the protuberance of a head from the top walkway. Sir Arthur seemed to all the world like a man in his early seventies, albeit one still in the peak of health. His thick short-cropped hair was pure white but wrinkles only touched the corners of his eyes, which were clear and sharp. He gave newcomers the impression of the college professor who had been around forever, but who still enjoyed debating both freshmen and the funding boards. It was a pretty good impression. “Aha! Victor! The very man.” The head retracted and I felt a brush of air behind me. I turned back to the desk to face Sir Arthur now standing behind it. He was carrying a leather-bound book only slightly smaller than the desk itself that he was struggling to balance on its cluttered surface.
I darted forward and moved a stack of iPads out of the way, placing them next to a thick bible, so as to create a more stable platform. Sir Arthur immediately opened his newfound tome and leafed through it excitedly. “I presume young Kimberly found you? Did she tell you why I called you down here?”
“I assumed it was about the body under the bridge. Gardaí are still processing the scene and we should have their findings before noon. Looks like a mage took out someone with Balefire.”
Sir Arthur paused his page-turning in surprise. “Well, keep me updated. But no, I asked you down to talk about the Jacobite Rebellion.”
I grinned, despite myself. Sir Arthur’s grand project: His ‘Chronicles’. A Complete Chronicle of the Magical World and its Influence on Mortal Histories. No-one was quite sure how long he’d been compiling it, but it was rumoured that he took a Dublin posting about two hundred years ago so he could work on it away from the hustle and bustle of London high society. “Jacobites, sir?”
“Yes. I’ve been collating sightings of trolls around the eighteenth century, and more than one account of Stuart’s army describes… hang on, I’ll get my notes.” I felt the familiar punch of air as he moved, and heard more rustling of paper from the top levels of the library before Sir Arthur was back at his desk, holding a tattered notebook that he laid on top of the larger one. “Here. A troupe of men, uncommonly large with grey skin and fists akin to boulders. They fought with primal savagery and though they occupied the front lines in many battles, few fell to musketballs. Does that sound like trolls to you?”
I had to admit, it did. The grey skin and primal savagery was something I saw every time I passed a mirror while not wearing my glamour.
“How’s that new one working for you, by the way?” Sir Arthur asked. I realised I had been touching the pendant under my shirt again.
“It’s fine. Good, actually. No complaints.” I dropped my hand. “They could have been trolls, alright, but I didn’t know we had any Scottish clans. I could ask my uncle when I see him next.” I was anticipating his request, and was probably overdue for a visit with the clan, anyway.
“Thank you, Victor,” said the Magistrate, and returned to his studies on the top floor with his customary rush of displaced air. But when he spoke again, his voice seemed to emanate from a space just behind my ear. “And keep me up to date with any information about this murder.”
The case was handed over to the Office of Special Investigations around noon that day. Uniformed Gardaí dropped off labelled bags of evidence collected from the scene and the burned remains of the victim were delivered to our medical lab. Hurley himself handed over the transfer paperwork.
They had checked the licence plates of all the cars parked along the street, and only one of them belonged to a non-resident that they were not yet able to contact. Could be nothing. Could be the victim’s car.
Cormac and I were back out on the street that afternoon, peering inside the windows, with hands cupped around our faces to block out the glare of the low winter sun. I could see a large overcoat lying on the back seat, but the rest of the car was surprisingly spotless, considering the NVDF told us its registered owner was a student.
With a solid clunk sound, the locks of the car’s doors all released themselves, and I stepped back to see Cormac holding a large iron key in a clenched fist. Silvery light traced paths around the key and up his wrist as he finished the arcane incantation. He unclenched his fingers with a grunt of effort and some help from his other hand, then stowed the key away in the recesses of his satchel.
“Some people would say that’s illegal,” I pointed out.
“Are any of those people here?”
I replied by opening the car door and pulling out the coat before unfolding it over the bonnet of the car. “Check the boot,” I instructed as I began turning out pockets and laying their contents on the coat. A pair of woolen gloves. An asthma inhaler. A receipt for petrol, dated two days ago. An empty Snickers wrapper. Chain coffee shop loyalty card with eight of its ten circles punched. Nothing to indicate foul play, or even the identity of the owner, but that wouldn’t be found in an overcoat; wallet and keys would not be left in the car, but would be burned to ashes if the owner was indeed the charred skeleton currently awaiting the state pathologist in our morgue.
I was sitting in the car, examining the contents of the glove compartment when Cormac walked into view, carrying a plastic storage crate that he rested next to the outstretched coat on the bonnet. I joined him to rifle through its contents.
“This is our man, alright. Definitely up to magical shenanigans,” Cormac pointed out un-necessarily, as we lifted from the crate all manner of spellcasting components and laid them side-by-side on the coat. Cormac lifted a goat skull with a laugh. “Amateur shenanigans.”
I withdrew a small notebook from the box and flipped through. Some pages were un-finished, some were crossed-out, but the same symbol was drawn on every page. I showed the book to Cormac.
“Maybe a summoning spell?” he hazarded. “Very basic version, if so. But this is interesting…” he was holding a large lump of black wax that had been wrapped in cloth and tucked into the bottom of the crate.
“What’s black wax for?” I asked.
“Concealment illusions. You burn a black candle until it melts, then gather the wax and you can use it to hide anything that doesn’t move.” He handed it to me. One side was scraped and scored, as if it had been dragged over a rough surface repeatedly. The scratches from the scoring were embedded with red dust.
“This looks like brick dust. Could you hide a house you didn’t want found?”
Cormac turned and looked along the row of houses that lined the road. “You could… A terrace house would be tricky, but…” he pulled off the ring with the large clear gem that he wore on his thumb without taking his eyes off the row of houses. “No change. If there’s a hidden house here, it’s- shit!” This expletive was aimed at me. He had just removed his ring of trueseeing and was, for the first time, not seeing through the glamour I wore every day. “Wow, you look human.”
“Thanks, I guess?”
“I mean, I didn’t... you had a different glamour before. It wasn’t as good as this. There seemed to be something off with it, even without my ring, but this one is really effective.”
I tapped the amulet below my shirt. “The old one was losing its oomph. The Magistrate made me a new one.”
We found the concealed house about a hundred yards on the other side of the bridge. I could naturally see every house along the row, but without his ring Cormac was just as susceptible to a concealment spell as anyone else. It was just a case of me calling out the colours of each door until I called out one he couldn’t see.
It was a turn-of-the-century brick townhouse. I mounted the steps and closely examined the brickwork around the door. Now that I knew what I was looking for, I could see runes scribed onto the front of the house in black candlewax. They meant nothing to me, but once he had his trueseeing ring back on, Cormac was able to read them and even grunted in slight admiration.
“Should I knock?” he asked, reaching for his satchel and the key inside.
“When you’re running for your life from a Balefire-casting wizard, would you stop to lock the door behind you?” I replied, as I shoved the door open to reveal a deserted hallway. “Hello?” I called into the house. “Law enforcement, coming in!” I gingerly stepped over the threshold, while behind me, Cormac pulled a wand out of his bag and began a low chant to empower it.
The house was deathly silent except for the sound of our steps, each of which raised small clouds of dust from the threadbare carpet. I peered inside the sitting-room to our right, and could see furniture covered by dust-sheets. The kitchen was similarly abandoned, and a turn of the taps produced no water. But a path through the dust showed that someone had been up and down the stairs several times recently.
“After you,” said Cormac, waving his wand up that direction.
I shouted once more, up the stairs for good measure, then quickly made my way up. The bedrooms on the next floor were just as deserted as the rooms on the ground floor, but the large bathroom was a scene of complete chaos. Two more burned bodies lay inside; one in the bath-tub and the other wedged awkwardly between the wall and the cabinet under the handbasin. The floor and walls around the bodies were completely unscathed by fire. Not even the old plastic shower curtain was scorched or melted by whatever had reduced the figure below it to a charred skeleton.
“Balefire again,” said Cormac from the doorway, but his attention was more focused on the large ugly circle daubed on the tiled floor. “Careful!” he shouted as I examined it.
“I’m immune to magic,” I reminded him as I stepped inside it.
“The circle is painted in blood.”
“Fuck.”
“As you say: Fuck. Until we know what the circle does, stay perfectly still. I’ll call the office for backup."
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