My trusty Ford Asbo was parked safely in the garage, so after a breakfast and a bucket bath I departed for Hendon once more. As I climbed into the driver’s seat a powerful vestigium rushed over me. I tasted vodka, smelt machine oil and felt the slip slide of lip balm. There was shouting and screams of excitement and illegal acceleration that pushed you back into your seat while your engine growled like something big and endangered.
There was an open lipstick on the dashboard — shocking pink.
I didn’t know about Goddess of the River Rom, but I’d definitely brushed up against something supernatural. Maybe it hadn’t been the vodka after all.
That’s it, I thought. No more clubbing without a chaperone for you.
I revved up the Asbo, but despite the tweaking I’d given the engine it did not cry like a panther.
It did get me all the way back up to Hendon on time for the start of day two, which was officer equipment safety. The morning lecture was on stop and search with reference to spotting suspicious behaviour. The lecturer who gloried in the full name of Douglas Douglas illustrated the weird stiffening of the limbs exhibited by shoplifters known as ‘the robot’, or the exaggerated mime-like behaviour adopted by the truly guilty when they unexpectedly encounter the police. ‘You can’t go wrong,’ he said, ‘by searching anyone who engages you in conversation.’ On the basis that nobody willingly engages the police in conversation unless they’re trying to deflect attention from something. But he did warn us to make an exception for tourists, because London needed the foreign currency.
After that we were back in the gym being reminded how to use our handcuffs properly. We use the ones with a solid middle which you can grab hold of and twist to put pressure on your suspect’s arms, and ensure what our instructor called compliance and co-operation. In the afternoon one of the instructors donned a padded suit and adopted a mad aspect and challenged us to subdue him with our extendable batons. This bit used to be called the ‘nutter’ training but now it’s officially called ‘the person with differences’. It’s useful stuff. You never know when you’re going to have to ensure compliance and co-operation from people with differences, in a state of excited delirium or not.
When we’d finished I was invited out again but I declined and drove slowly and carefully home instead.
Lesley got out of hospital and turned up unexpectedly while I was trying to perfect a forma called aqua which, for those of you who didn’t have a classical education, is a base forma for manipulating water. It used to form the empedoclean along with lux, aer and terra — two of which went out of fashion when the four-element theory of matter failed to survive the age of Enlightenment.
It’s a lot like lux in that you shape the forma in your mind, open your palm and, hopefully, find yourself with a globe of water the size of a ping-pong ball. Nightingale claimed not to know where the water came from, but I assumed it was drawn out of the surrounding air. It was that or it was being sucked out of a parallel dimension, or hyperspace or something even weirder. I hoped it wasn’t hyperspace because I wasn’t ready for the implications of that.
In my case, so far, I’d managed a small cloud, a frozen rain drop and a puddle. And that was after it had taken me four weeks to get anything at all. Nightingale was supervising me in the teaching lab on the first floor when the vapour haze above my palm shrank down to a wobbly globe. The trouble with this stage of mastering a forma is that it’s almost impossible to tell why what you’re currently doing is working better than what you were doing two seconds ago. That’s why you end up doing a lot of practice and why it isn’t easy maintaining a new forma — particularly when someone decides to start singing the chorus of ‘Rehab’ outside the door — loudly and a quarter tone flat.
The globe exploded like a water balloon, splattering me, the bench and the surrounding floor. Nightingale, who had become wise to my peculiar aptitude with exploding formae had been standing well back and wearing a raincoat.
I glared at Lesley, who struck a pose in the doorway.
‘Got my voice back,’ she said. ‘Sort of.’ She’d stopped wearing the mask inside the Folly and, while her face was still ruined, at least I could tell when she was smiling.
‘No,’ I said. ‘You always sang flat.’
Nightingale waved Lesley over.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘I’m glad you’re here. I’ve got a demonstration and I’ve been waiting until I could show both of you at the same time.’
‘Can I dump my stuff first?’ asked Lesley.
‘Of course,’ said Nightingale. ‘While you do that, Peter here can clean up the lab.’
‘It’s a good thing it was water,’ said Lesley. ‘Even Peter can’t explode water.’
‘Let’s not tempt fate,’ said Nightingale.
We reconvened half an hour later and Nightingale led us to one of the unused labs down the hall. He pulled off dust sheets to reveal scarred work benches, lathes and vices. I recognised it as a Design and Technology workshop, like the one I’d used at school, only stuck in a time warp back in the days of steam power and child labour. He pulled off a last sheet, under which was a black iron anvil of the sort I’ve only ever seen falling onto the heads of cartoon characters.
‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Lesley?’ I asked.
‘I think so, Peter,’ she said. ‘But how are we going to get the pony up here?’
‘Shoeing a horse is a very useful skill,’ said Nightingale. ‘And when I was a boy there used to be a smithy downstairs in the yard. This, however, is where we turn boys into men.’ He paused to look at Lesley. ‘And I suppose young women into women.’
‘Are we forging the one ring?’ I asked.
Nightingale held up a walking stick. ‘Do you recognise this?’ he asked.
I did. It was a silver-topped gentleman’s cane, the head a bit tarnished looking.
‘It’s your cane,’ I said.
‘And what else?’ asked Nightingale.
‘It’s your wizard’s staff,’ said Lesley.
‘Well done,’ said Nightingale.
‘The cadwallopper,’ I said, and when Lesley raised what was left of her eyebrow I added, ‘A stick for walloping cads.’
‘And the source of a wizard’s power,’ said Nightingale.
Using magic has a very specific limitation. If you overdo it your brain turns into Swiss cheese. Hyperthaumaturgical degradation, Dr Walid calls it, and he has some brains in a drawer which he whips out at the slightest excuse to show young apprentices. The rule of thumb with brain injuries is that by the time you feel anything, the damage is already done. So a practitioner of the arts tends to err on the side of caution. This can cause tension when, for the sake of argument, two Tiger tanks emerge suddenly from the treeline on a rainy night in 1945. In order to be the hero of Boy’s Own Weekly and still have an intact brain, a sensible wizard carries a staff in which he has personally imbued a great deal of power.
Don’t ask me what kind of power that is, because the only thing I’ve got that can detect it is Toby the Dog. I’d love to stick some high vestigia material into a mass spectrometer, but first I’d have to get myself a mass spectrometer and then I’d have to learn enough physics to interpret the bloody results.