“I’m glad to hear you say that,” said Lord Bontriomphe, “since it happens to be true. But once in a while, this rivalry goes a little too far. Normally, I keep out of it, but then—”
“Permit me to correct you,” Lord Darcy said with a smile. “Normally, you do not keep out of it. To the contrary, you are normally rigidly loyal to My Lord Marquis; you normally take his side, forcing me to outwit both of you — an admittedly difficult job. This time, however, you felt that imprisoning Master Sean in order to get at me was just a little too much. I am well aware that, had it been I who went to the Tower, the matter would have been quite different.”
Lord Bontriomphe gazed dreamily at the roof of the carriage. “Now there’s a thought,” he said in a speculative tone.
“Don’t think on it too hard, my lord,” said Master Sean with gentle menace. “Not too hard at all, at all.”
Lord Bontriomphe brought his eyes down sharply and started to say something, but his words were forever lost as the carriage slowed suddenly and the driver opened the trapdoor in the roof and said:
“The Royal Steward, my lords.”
Half a minute later, the footman opened the door, and the three men got out. Lord Bontriomphe quietly slipped a couple of large coins into the footman’s hand. “Wait for us, Barney. See that the carriage and horses are taken care of, and then you and Denys wait in the pub across the street. We may be quite some time, so have a few beers and relax. I’ll send word if we need you.”
“Very good, my lord,” Goodman Barney said warmly. “Thank you.”
Then Lord Bontriomphe followed Lord Darcy and Master Sean into the Royal Steward.
Lord Darcy was standing alone just inside the foyer, looking through the glass-paned doors at the crowd in the lobby.
“Where’s Master Sean?” Bontriomphe asked.
“In there. I sent him on ahead. As you will observe, there are at least a dozen well-wishers and possibly two dozen who are merely curious, all of whom are crowded around Sean, congratulating him upon his release, saying they knew all along he was innocent, and pumping him for information about the murder of Sir James Zwinge. While their attention is thus distracted, my lord, you and I will make a quiet entrance and go directly to the murder room. Come.”
They did not attract attention as they went in. This was Visitors’ Day at the Sorcerers Convention, and the lobby was filled with folk who had come to see the displays and the sorcerers themselves. They were just two more sightseers.
At one of the display booths, a journeyman sorcerer was demonstrating a children’s toy to two wide-eyed children and a fondly patronizing father. It consisted of a six-inch black wand with one white tip, five differently-colored pith balls an inch in diameter, and a foot-long board with six holes in it, five of which were ringed with colors to match the balls and the fifth one ringed with white.
“Now you’ll notice, my lads,” said the journeyman sorcerer, “that the balls aren’t in their proper holes; the colors don’t match. The object of the game is to put ’em right, you see. The rule is that you move one ball at a time, like this:” He aimed the wand at the board, which was several feet away, and one of the balls floated smoothly up and across, to drop into the extra hole. Then another moved into the vacated hole to match colors. The process was repeated until all the balls were in the proper holes. “You see? Now, I’ll just mix these balls up again and let you try it, lad. Just point the white tip of the wand and think of which color ball you want to come up; then, when it’s in the air, think of the color hole you want it to go to. There, now. That’s it—”
It was more than just a toy, Lord Darcy knew; it was a testing and teaching device. With the spell it now had on it, anyone could do the trick; but the spell was timed to fade slowly over a period of a few months. By that time, most children were thoroughly tired of it, anyway. But if a rare child with the Talent got hold of one, his interest usually did not wane. Furthermore, he began to get the feel of the spell itself, aided by the simple ritual and ceremony of the game. If that happened, the child would still be able to do the trick a year later, though none of his un-Talented friends would. The original spell had worn off and had been replaced by the child’s own simple version. A booklet went with the game which explained all that to the parents, urging them to have the child given further tests if he succeeded in preserving the activity of the toy.
At another booth, a priest in clerical black with white lace at collar and cuffs was distributing booklets describing the new building being erected at Oxford to house the Royal Thaumaturgical Laboratories at Edward’s College. The display was a scale model of the proposed structure.
Directly in their path, the two men saw what looked like an ordinary door frame. An illusion sign floated in its center, translucent blue letters that said: please step through.
As they did, the illusion sign vanished and they could feel what seemed to be a slight wind tugging at their clothing. On the other side, another illusion sign appeared.
thank you
If you will examine your clothing, you will see that every speck of loose dust and lint has been removed. This is a prototype device, still in the experimental stage. Eventually, no home will be without one.
Wells Sons
Thaumaturgical Home Appliances
“Quite a gadget,” said Lord Bontriomphe. “Look; even our boots are shiny,” he added as they walked through the second sign and it dissolved around them.
“Useful,” Lord Darcy agreed, “but quite impracticable. Sean told me they had it at the last Convention. It makes a good advertisement for the company, but that ’no home will be without one’ is visionary. Far too expensive, since the spell has to be renewed by a Master Sorcerer at least once a week. With this mob in here, they’ll be lucky if they get through the day with it.”
“Hm-m-m. Like that ‘See London From the Air’ device they had a few years back,” said Bontriomphe. “Remember that?”
“I read something about it. I don’t recall the details,” Lord Darcy said.
“It looked quite impressive. They had a crystal ball about” — he held his hands in front of him as though he were grasping an imaginary sphere — “oh, ten inches in diameter, I guess. It was mounted on a pedestal, and you looked into it from above. It gave you the weird feeling that you were looking down from a great height, from a point just above Admiral Buckingham Hall, where the exhibit was. You could actually see people walking about, and carriages moving through the streets, as though you were up in a cathedral spire looking down. There was a magic mirror suspended a couple of hundred feet above the building, you see, which projected the scene into the crystal by psychic reflection.”
“Ah, I see. Whatever happened to it? I’ve heard no more about it,” Lord Darcy said.
“Well, right off the bat, the War Office was interested. You can imagine what sort of reconnaissance you’d have, with a magic mirror floating high over enemy lines and an observer safe behind your own lines watching everything they were doing. Anyway, the War Office thaumaturgists are still working on it, but it hasn’t come to anything. In the first place, it takes three Masters to run it: One to levitate the mirror, one to keep the mirror activated, and one to keep the receiving crystal activated. And they have to be specially trained for the job and then train together as a team. In the second place, the sorcerers controlling the mirror have to be within sight of the mirror, and the plane of the surface has to be perpendicular to a radius of the crystal ball. Don’t ask me why; I’m no sorcerer and I don’t know a thing about the theory. At any rate, the thing hasn’t been made practical for long distance transmission of images yet.”