Modern Magick

The Fifth Britain: 16

'Listen,' I said, and explained some of this. 'We have to find a way to stop Fenella, or virtually every magicker from our world will try to move here.'

'It may be too late,' said Alban. 'She made a very big, very public announcement about it all, remember? As soon as her people make it home, they'll spread the news far and wide.'

'If they make it home.'

Alban just looked at me.

'What if we could persuade Ashdown Castle to go home without them?'

I do not want them here! said Melmidoc.

'Just for a little while! We need time to talk with Milady, and Their Majesties, and the Ministry, and pretty much every other magickal authority in the sixth Britain-and-beyond, and figure out how to — uh, deal with this.'

I will not have them here. Melmidoc spoke with a ringing certainty which echoed through the floors and set my teeth on edge.

'Besides,' put in Zareen, 'Ashdown Castle is going nowhere today. You heard Jay. Millie Makepeace is an old hand at this and even she can't world-hop all that often. Those poor, naïve bastards at the Castle aren't even capable of coherent thought right now.'

'So if we can't leave everyone here and we can't ship them home? What's the third option?'

'Scare the living daylights out of them,' said Zareen, flashing what I tend to think of as her batshit crazy smile. 'Tell them it only gets worse, and will, if they ever tell a soul.'

I looked at Zareen in silence, and my mind wandered back to that pamphlet of hers. Just what weird and far from wonderful things had Zareen done in her life?

'What?' she said, when nobody else spoke either. 'We're in the land of haunted houses. Scaring Ancestria Magicka silly would be a piece of cake.'

'But not lastingly effective.' Alban favoured Zareen with one of his grave, serious looks — which, it struck me, were relatively rare. There was so often that lurking twinkle in his eye. 'Fear fades. We need something more durable.'

Zareen acknowledged this point with a gracious nod. Apparently practicality weighed more with her than morality.

Good to know.

'If only there was a way to undo it,' I sighed. 'Fenella's entire announcement. I'm a bit gutted that this wasn't about time travel after all.'

'You don't truly want to travel in time, Ves,' said Jay.

'I do too.'

'Weren't you panicking about smallpox, when you thought Jay was lost in 1789?' said Zareen.

'There's that, but—'

Jay was laughing at me. 'And measles and polio and bubonic plague and a host of other nasties,' he added. 'Then there's all the other problems. Like, we're giants compared to the people of a few centuries ago, we'd stick out like a sore thumb.'

'Maybe not Ves,' said Alban, and the twinkle was back.

I stuck out my tongue at him.

'And you couldn't have cornflower-coloured hair,' said Jay, wisely electing not to join in casting aspersions upon my height. 'Then there's clothes. I know historical costume can be convincing, but only to us. Try making a liripipe hood that'd pass inspection six hundred years ago. There would be a thousand things wrong with it. It would be like people six centuries from now trying to make a passable pair of jeans, armed with about three paintings in oils and exactly no extant examples. Do you think they'd look real to us?'