Modern Magick

Alchemy and Argent: 13

'You think there's a surviving will?' Jay's voice oozed scepticism.

'There could be. There really could be. People's wills are a great source of historical info, especially from the early modern period. It's the one kind of document anyone with any property at all would create, and since they were important they tended to be cared for. Lots of last-will-and-testaments have survived, relatively speaking. And Cicily was an Elvyng. We know that family line has survived, and if they've managed to hang on to the same house all these centuries, surely they've hung onto a lot of family papers too.'

Jay began to look revived. And thoughtful.

'The difficulty is getting hold of them,' I said. 'I already conducted a search of the Academy's attics and didn't find anything like that.'

'Attics?' said Jay, and the scepticism was back.

No, not scepticism. Exasperation.

'Why would they keep papers like that in an attic?' said Jay.

I shrugged. 'Lots of old families don't really value that kind of thing, or they just don't really know what they have. A lot of it gets passed down in boxes, and it goes in the attic with the rest of grandma's stuff that you don't know what to do with but feel too guilty to throw out.'

'Likely true,' said Jay. 'But this is the Elvyng family. They know the value of everything.'

'Point,' I conceded.

'There's an archive in the cellar,' he continued. 'It's a repository for all the records, documents and so on pertaining to the academy's history and its students — you know the kind of thing. But since it's specially designed to keep fragile paperwork from succumbing to the ravages of time — and since this is the fabulously wealthy Elvyngs and they have stuff like that book box I'd still give my left arm for — I think they know how to keep old documents intact.'

I felt a rising excitement — and a commensurate puzzlement. 'Totally conceivable that they'd have ancient family papers somewhere in there, I grant you, and you're a genius. One question, though. How the hell do you know all that?'

'I'm alumni.'

'You... studied there?'

Jay inclined his head. He had the grace to look faintly abashed. 'Um, they have the best musical programme in the country... I did a six-year stint there before the University.'

I swallowed my envy with only a little difficulty. 'Excellent,' I managed. 'Sometime you should tell me every single detail about what that was like, but in the meantime: how do we extract paperwork from this mythical archive?'

'Easy,' said Jay. He'd taken something out of his wallet while he spoke, and now waved it around. I gathered that it was an Elvyng Alumni card of some sort. 'I'll submit a research request.'

'You can do that?'

Jay nodded, already pushing me out of the way of the computer. 'This doubles as a library card.'

And back came the envy.

We had an answer far more quickly than I'd dared to hope. Jay's request was processed within an hour, and when he opened up the email he found it contained an attachment.

'Dear Mr. Patel,' Jay read. 'Your request for yada yada has been received, blah blah... ah! They've found it.'

He opened the attachment, and up came a scanned facsimile of Cicily Werewode's last will and testament.

The document was in surprisingly good shape considering it was five hundred years old. Testament to the Elvyngs' magickal conveniences, no doubt. But since it was written in tiny, crabbed script, it bordered upon illegible.