The Spellbinder (Tom & Laura Series), page 11
Money had changed hands in dark corners of taverns and he knew that every change of train he made would be at stations whose signs were changed by Spellbinders as he arrived. Trelawney had Spellbinders do this at all the stations across the whole country from time to time, all to hide the location of Hobsgate from the enemy.
Snood didn’t care where Hobsgate was, though several people had offered to sell him that information at an exorbitant cost. What he cared about was his personal safety and he had concluded that the risk of being attacked while travelling to Hobsgate was low.
A porter took his trunks when he arrived at the station and he spotted them being loaded on an otherwise empty baggage car. He carried a carpet bag that held whisky and his Spellbinder kit among other things. Very few Spellbinders went anywhere without the tools of the trade close to hand and Snood was no exception. He walked the length of the train to select a suitable first class compartment. As soon as he boarded the train a whistle blew and the train pulled out of the station.
He took a window seat and put his feet up on the opposite seat, wiping the grime of the city from his shoes onto its material. Placing his bag, hat and umbrella on the seat beside him he unfurled his newspaper and began to read a report on the war in the Crimea. The natives were proving unusually resistant to the British annexation of their country. Unfortunately, he found it impossible to concentrate.
“Damn the Brotherhood,” he said, putting the paper down. His mind kept going over the mission at hand.
“And damn Laura Young.” He would still be living in the capital tutoring naïve Spellbinders like Carmichael if it wasn’t for her. There would be no taverns, music halls or theatres in the vicinity of Hobsgate. No girls walking the streets to show him a good time for a few pence. His life had taken a distinct turn for the worse.
‘And how do they expect me to turn her? She’s a Class A. Even teaching her carries risks.’ The Brotherhood of Knights would not excuse failure. They had paid him well over the years, but they expected results for the money they spent.
Snood knew a lot about magic, but the powers of Class A’s were things of legends and myths. It was rumored that they no longer needed paper, but could place a bind by thought alone. If he pushed this girl too hard she might change him into a cockroach and put him in a matchbox. Nor would the ministry prosecute her if they found out; a Class A was far too valuable to be bound by normal rules.
He consoled himself with the thought that at least he had got a promotion out of the move. He held a deep burning resentment over the way he had been treated at his grading test many years before. He was sure he had performed at Grade 2 level at times, but the examiner had declared him to be a Grade 3.
A Grade 2 could name his own price when he left military service. They could pick their career from a thousand job offers in all the major industries, jobs with status in society. Grade 2’s attended court and were feted by the nobility.
Snood indulged in a daydream of a Grade 2 life where he created new alloys, found new metals by extracting them from rocks. Or he could have worked in the chemical industry creating new compounds. Much of the Empires technology started life as something created by a Grade 2. Once industrialists knew a thing was possible they would find production techniques that didn’t involve magic.
Snood sighed, even though the line that separated a Grade 3 from a Grade 2 could be as thin as tissue paper, once you were graded you were stuck with the result for life. Grade 3’s got lesser jobs that paid an order of magnitude less than their Grade 2 counterparts and the status was significantly less.
He knew he had been lucky to avoid direct military service by taking up teaching for the ministry, but it paid peanuts. That was why he started working for the Brotherhood. They were always looking for people willing to do dirty jobs for a price, and they had paid him well.
Snood got out of his carriage when the train stopped. According to the instruction he carried, he was to walk across the platform and board the train on the other side. However, he wanted to stretch his legs. Porters were moving his trunks and he stood and watched them for a moment. He knew the train wouldn’t leave until he got onboard so he took his time. Let them wait for him.
Barriers had been put up to block access to the platforms from the bridge above the platforms. A couple of people stood on the bridge and watched him from the barrier. He grinned at the thought that they might think he was royalty. Who else got the exclusive use of two platforms at a major station?
A guard with a whistle frowned at him as he made his way leisurely along the platform and onto the new train. It felt good to have such power. The train started to move, but failed to accelerate and travelled alongside the platform at walking pace. At the last moment the compartment door flew open and a man clambered in, slamming the door behind him. He sat facing him with his head down.
Snood was instantly on his guard. The only destination for people on this train was Hobsgate and his enquires had determined he was the only person scheduled to be travelling this day.
The man was of similar build to Snood. He wore a large overcoat with a hat and muffler that served to cover his face.
“Good afternoon,” Snood said, trying to start a conversation.
The man grunted and nodded his head before taking a copy of The Times from his coat and opening it so he was hidden behind it.
Snood opened his own newspaper and reached across for his carpet bag, trying to be as quiet as he could and hoping that his newspaper would cover his actions. He opened the bag, fumbling with the catch and reached into the special pocket where he kept parchment, pen and ink.
Ever the cautious man, Snood had prepared a bind that needed only one more word to complete it. But to write that word he had to open the bottle of ink and dip the nib of his pen in it. Not an easy thing to do while simultaneously holding a newspaper in front of his body to cover his actions.
The man stood up and stumbled forward as Snood completed the bind. The bind was something that Snood was particularly proud of. He had invented it and perfected it without any outside help. For a minute or more his clothing would become impenetrable to blade or bullet. This was fortunate because as the man stumbled into him he thrust a knife that should have penetrated Snood’s ribs and gone deep into his heart.
Snood screamed in pain as the knife slid across his jacket. It was thrust hard enough to bruise his flesh despite the protection the bind gave. He dropped the bind and pen and grabbed at the man.
It was surprise that saved Snood in those first few seconds, his attacker was just too surprised at the knife not penetrating to respond quickly enough. Snood lunged for the man’s throat and squeezed it as if his life depended on it, which, as a strict matter of fact, it did. However, the man was strong and still had the knife in his hand. Once the initial surprise vanished he tried to cut at Snood’s unprotected hands and neck.
Snood used his elbows to deflect the man’s arms, but the man was considerably stronger than Snood and was about to break free. He pushed Snood back onto his seat, trying to gain the leverage to free Snood’s hands from his throat.
Then he broke free, with the knife still in his hand and Snood got up his back against the carriage door. The man tried to take in a deep breath, but nothing happened. Snood had crushed his windpipe. The hand not holding the knife groped at his neck and Snood realized that the man was going to die.
The man also realized he had only seconds left to kill his target. He lunged at Snood with the knife. There were going to be two bodies in the carriage if he had anything to do with it.
Snood knew he had no choice but to trust that his bind was still in operation. He turned his back and hunched his body as the man struck.
His attacker stabbed again and again as Snood hunkered down. The man kicked and punched at Snood between stabs, feeling his strength begin to fade. Snood gasped as the kicks and punches inflicted deep bruises. It had become a race between the attacker and the bind. Whichever lasted longest would win the day.
Snood wasn’t sure he could take any more. His body felt mangled and he wondered whether it would be better to die than endure anymore pain. Then the blows stopped. He remained curled up and cowering for many minutes as the train ploughed uncaringly on.
When Snood finally stood up, groaning at the pain of doing it, he found the man on the floor behind him. He kicked the body as hard as he could, once, twice, three times. Placing his foot on the man’s wrist, he kicked the knife from his hand. Clutching the recovered knife he turned the body over, ready to jab and slice at the first sign of movement.
The man’s face was puffed out and blue, his tongue was swollen and poked out between his teeth, so in death he looked almost inhuman. However, Snood had no problem recognizing him. It was the face he shaved in the mirror every morning and had seen every day of his life. It was his own face staring back at him.
A first he thought ‘bind’, but a bind cannot be sustained during a change from living to death and this man was certainly dead. Someone had found an exact double of him. In some ways that was more unnerving than the man’s attack and attempt to kill him. Snood searched the man’s pockets and found his own favorite things staring back at him. His favorite boiled sweets, this man had a bag of them, just as he did in his pocket. Someone had researched his habits in great detail.
The man had brought a carpet bag with him, not the same as Snood’s, but similar. Snood looked inside. It contained letters and papers that matched Snood’s own. There was better parchment and ink than Snood carried and he would have moved it to his own bag, when he was struck with a sudden thought, ‘Why Not?’
He removed anything that might identify the body as Dominican Snood. He took his time and checked twice to make absolutely sure he had removed everything. Then he dragged the body to the carriage door and opened it. Looking out he saw they were about to cross a river. When the train was on the bridge, Snood flung the body out watching it plunge into the river below. He closed the door, opened the man’s bag of sweets and popped one in his mouth.
He winced from the pain of his bruises, but he had a satisfied smile on his face. He had survived and now he could be both himself and the man sent to replace him. There could be considerable profit in this if he handled it correctly, and he had always had a lot of confidence in the abilities of Dominican Snood.
Chapter 16 Settling In
The next few days passed quickly and Tom and Laura soon settled into the school’s routine. They were ignored by most of the other students, which didn’t bother them in the slightest. However, Cam, Daisy and Leon became good friends. Tompkins spent a great deal of time with the group, but he had become withdrawn and barely spoke. Snood arrived at the school. Tom knew him by sight and recognized him, but so far he had not spoken to Laura.
One of the stranger lessons was called Holistics, which Cam informed them was the study of how everything fitted together. They had their first lesson on the subject on their fifth day at Hobsgate.
The teacher was a Scot named Strength McGuiness. Unlike most of the teachers they met, he made no attempt to introduce himself to them and immediately launched into a lecture, droning on in that boring way at which some teachers excel.
Laura found it impossible to follow what he was talking about. McGuiness said everything in a monotonous tone of voice without the slightest inflection. It was almost hypnotic and she was nearly asleep when he shouted her name.
“Miss Young.” Laura sat bolt upright in her chair and tried to remember where she was. It proved a struggle, but her survival instincts took over and she snapped back a “Yes, Sir,” while uncertain if she had been asked anything.
“Come to the board and write down the seven branches of magic.”
Laura didn’t want to leave the safety of her desk, but she had no choice. She saw Tom give her a sympathetic smile and tried to smile back as she made her way to the board. She hated using chalk. She would always hit a harder bit of the stone while writing and the resultant screech on the board would make her teeth ache. On top of that, she had to be careful she didn’t accidently create a bind. Putting a Spellbinder under stress and giving them any kind of a drawing tool could be a recipe for disaster. It wasn’t that they wanted to do magic, sometimes it happened of its own accord.
“In large enough letters for everyone to read, Miss Young, and write a short description of each talent as you go.”
Fortunately the question was an easy one. She could have named the seven branches of magic at the age of seven.
What she wrote was:
Spellbinding
Transformation, for a time
Healing
Restoring living things to health
Farseeing
Seeing events that are happening elsewhere
Precognition
Seeing things that might happen in the future
Empathy
Reading the emotions of another person
Telepathy
Sending your thoughts into another person’s mind
Reading
Seeing things that have happened in the past
Mr. McGuiness seemed pleased with the result. “Very good. And what is special about the last two?”
That was an easy question too, though what any of this had to do with Holistics was beyond Laura.
“They are very rare skills, sir.”
“Anything else about Telepathy?”
Now she was defeated. “I don’t know, sir.”
“What Miss Young is obviously too ignorant to know is that Newton’s formulae predicted that Telepathy would be common skill. It is not clear yet whether the mathematics is wrong or if some other reason, such as the expectations of our society, is the underlying cause of the shortage.” He paused for a second, eyeing up his class. His eyes fell on Tom. “Carter, what could social reasons have to do with it?”
Unlike Laura, Tom had managed to follow the earlier part of the lesson and so had a good idea of the answer Mr. McGuiness was looking for.
“Telepaths have a hard time of it, sir.”
The beginnings of a smile tugged at Mr. McGuiness’s lips, but never developed into the real thing.”
“Telepaths, have jobs for life, serving the Empire and our Empress. They do not want for clothes or food or any other necessity. They are encouraged to marry and breed. Why would they not come forward to serve? You, Tompkins.”
Tompkins had his head down staring at his desk and didn’t look as though he was going to answer. Then he looked up at the teacher, his eyes blazing with anger. “Because Her Majesty wants telepathic pairs. People who can send messages to each other. Their lives are never their own. The one who stays home must maintain his life at whatever time zone the other one is living in. Both are constantly on call and the one away will always be at or near the front lines. Not everyone wishes to be a soldier for their whole life.”
Mr. McGuiness beamed at Tompkins, ignoring the boy’s anger.
“As you say, Telepaths are conscripted for life. The Empire places large bounties on discovering them. It pays those families predisposed to have twins to have more children. The assumption is that Telepaths shirk their duty and hide their talents, and the state works hard to root them out.”
Mr. McGuiness paused for breath. “But the truth is, Telepaths are rare. Newton may have placed order on the universe, and his laws of motion bind the stars and certainly make the trains run on time. However, he seems to have got the likelihood of telepaths wrong. In the end, even Newton was made of the same imperfect clay as the rest of us.”
After the lesson ended, Laura and Tom did their best to get away from the other students without being seen. They had arranged a secret rendezvous and Cam in particular was keen to find out where they were going and took to watching them during breaks.
They were off to meet Mick. Mick had become a good friend since the incident in the cellar. He saw nothing strange in them wanting to know all the ways in and out of Hobsgate and their meetings always included showing them another route. Hobsgate was a maze with narrow hidden corridors built to allow the servants to move about the house without being seen. The last thing a Lord of the Manor wanted was for his guests to encounter servants unless they required one.
Mick told them many tales about the locals. This had always been smuggling country and as long as both France and Britain imposed massive tariff barriers on each other’s goods, it would remain so. According to Mick, the Revenuers were hopeless at their jobs and couldn’t catch a cold, let alone a wily smuggler.
It particularly amused him that they had been based in Hobsgate for many years before the house became a training school. “Right under their noses and they still couldn’t see it,” he said, but he wouldn’t explain what he meant.
Today, he was taking them up to the roof of Hobbs Tower. They met him in the stables and followed him as he took a circuitous route through the house. They entered the main buildings via a small door in the back of the stables. They went past the kitchens without the cook or his helpers noticing, and then climbed an incredibly narrow set of circular stairs. Laura and Tom had to hold on to the stones in the centre as they climbed to avoid falling.
“How do they get ammunition to the guns?” Tom asked. “You couldn’t get them up these steps.”
Mick stopped and Laura stumbled into him. For a few seconds it looked as though she might fall, but Mick braced himself against the wall and held her until she recovered her balance.
“Yer right, Tom. There’s a pulley on the roof and they can haul things up from the keep.”
“Can we just get to the top of these damnable stairs?” Laura pleaded, eager to be get somewhere safe.
“Aye, that we can.” Mick started climbing again.
At the top of the stairs was a tiny door, only four foot high which Mick unlocked using one of the smaller cast iron keys from the housekeeper’s massive key ring. Mick ‘borrowed’ the house keys from the housekeeper for their trips. Tom was sure he never asked her.
