A Hero at the End of the World (3 page)

He had come to work at the Department of Unusuals a little over a year ago. Despite its name, the Unusuals wasn’t about cases that were odd. More often than not, they were cases the other departments simply didn’t want—bestowing upon their division the nickname of “the Department of Barely Interesting.” Truthfully, this was just a pit stop for Oliver, whose real ambition was to work at the prestigious Department of Unsolvables, which was a First and Second Class unit—he needed at least two years at Third Class before he could even submit an application. The Unsolvables had become highly selective in its acceptance of applicants since they’d had to clear out all of Duff Slan’s loyalists.

At any rate, being in the Unusuals was good practice. He had a good partner. His boss liked him. Colleagues were still buying him drinks in thanks for saving Britain. He had an excellent pension and private health insurance. He was exactly where he wanted to be at twenty-two.

Yet the highlight by far was that the Unusuals’ office was on the fifty-ninth floor of the looming, industrial Home Office building. It had the most fantastic view of anywhere in the city of London, especially after the hundred-foot tall statue Slan had erected of himself in St James’s Park had been torn down.

Oliver loved Central London, which was so different and exciting compared to the slow pace of working class North East London, where he had grown up. He loved the Georgian buildings with their blackened rooftops and brick façades, the teetering skyscrapers held together by magical enchantments, the theaters with their bright lights, the towering cranes that reached as high as the next realm, and the dragon that lived on the spires of Westminster Palace. On a clear day—rare in this part of the world—the city seemed to stretch on forever. Even the dark, ominous clouds looming over the city had mostly receded since Slan’s death.

Mostly, though, all he saw was fog, and the occasional glimpse of the dragon’s fiery breath.

He was drawn away from the view of the city by the arrival of his partner, Sophie Stuart. “Guv,” she greeted him, then immediately rolled her eyes upon seeing him swell with pride at the reminder of his promotion.

She had on one of her usual all-black outfits, and her light brown hair was pulled back in its customary ponytail. They didn’t have a uniform, per se, but Sophie always looked like she was wearing one; it had made him start dressing smarter, especially after he’d kept being mistaken for her assistant despite his having worked for the SMCA three months longer than she had. Her ID card, clipped to the lapel of her blouse, declared her a Special Agent, Fourth Class.

Oliver had spent the past week making certain that everyone saw his new card, which read
Third Class
in bold lettering. He liked the way his title looked against the backdrop of the silver lion rampant that represented the agency.

“Do you think we’ll get an assignment today?” he asked, quickly glancing through his e-mail for anything that pertained to him. Spam, department meeting, all-staff briefing, spam, HR update, spam... The computer processor whirled as his inbox loaded.

“Not now that you’ve jinxed—”

The end of her sentence was interrupted by the ringing of a bell. Everyone in the bullpen visibly froze, and conversation around them came to a halt. Oliver fought against the instinct to duck and cover.

Long before the internet had been invented, the Government had designed the Home Office with a system that allowed seniors to pass messages along to agents without ever leaving their desks. Oliver had never met the head of the Unusuals, who was rumored to be a hundred-year-old necromancer—a middleman had been the one to tell him that he had been accepted into the SMCA. The building was constructed entirely out of hollow, wrought iron tubes, and messages were tucked inside silver cubes that were shot through the air. Somehow no one over the past two centuries had bothered to perfect the complex incantations that kept them moving: messages often ended up in the wrong department, or, worse, were fired off with such speed that their trajectories took them past the desk or pigeonhole they had been aiming for and instead slammed them into shelves of reports or even the map, ruining days of work. Oliver had seen at least three agents knocked unconscious since he had started working there.

Protecting the map was a priority. Each wall consisted of a giant map of Greater London that displayed the levels of magic throughout the city in real time. It looked as if it had grown directly out of the blackened, rippled walls, and Oliver had been told that every year new buildings rose out of the walls as the city expanded and changed. Right now, there was an insignificant blue flare in Islington and a slightly more worrisome royal purple one down in Camberwell. The rest of London seemed, from where he was standing at least, to be peaceful and quiet.

During his training, Oliver had learned that the killing of Duff Slan had released the largest surge of magical energy on record. Half the map had lit up red and then slowly faded as Slan’s totem had accepted him as its new owner and transferred its power.

“
Die ic stille on deathe
,” Sophie chanted rapidly, her gaze pinned over Oliver’s shoulder.

Something behind him dropped to the floor in a clatter, and when he twisted around in his chair, he spotted a cube on the floor, mere inches from his desk. With a jolt, he realized she had just saved him from a head injury.

Sophie extended her hand, and the cube floated up and landed gently in her open palm. This particular one was covered in a Celtic stag relief, and when she twisted it, it easily split apart into two halves.

Frowning, Sophie pulled out a folded, beige-colored paper.

“New assignment. Looks like it’s—”

She broke off suddenly, making a startled noise.

That piqued his curiosity. “Yeah? Disappearing homes, unexplained weather changes, unicorn stampedes...?”

“A sacrifice.”

How routine. His heart sank.

“A human sacrifice,” she added, looking perplexed.

“
Human sacrifice
?” Oliver repeated. “Please tell me they weren’t trying to open another portal.”

“Don’t even joke about that sort of thing,” Sophie said sternly. “I’m still traumatized from the last time.”

As she swept her knee-length pea coat off the back of her chair, Oliver’s nose picked up the dusty smell of the herbal remedy she used to slow down the rate of depletion of her power. The impolite word for her type of magic user was
dréag
: a ghost, an otlomancer, someone who used her own energy to fuel her magic. They were twice as powerful as alapomancers, but Oliver would happily deal with the hassle of keeping a totem within arm’s reach for the rest of his life if it meant he’d live an extra ten or fifteen years.

“Let’s go, hero,” Sophie ordered, directing him to the lift.

¤

The crime scene was in Whitechapel, down a tiny alley and in an abandoned building that had once housed restaurant wholesale items. From there, the noises of the busy Commercial Road, only two streets over, were almost too faint to hear over the sounds of nearby building sites. Aside from the view of cranes posed, motionless, over the boxy warehouse, the scene felt strangely dislocated, as though it were hardly part of London at all.

A row of finches perched silently on the edge of the roof. They were dull-colored with keen eyes: Government-issue sentries, most likely.

By the time Oliver and Sophie made it inside, the dim interior of the building had been bisected by bright yellow police tape. Above them, the lights flickered. To their left were the Scene of Crime Officers combing over the scene, and on the right were roughly ten people sitting against the dirty wall with their hands cuffed in front of them, all wearing hooded black robes that hid their faces. One man’s head was bare, and he had a pink-stained bandage on his arm. He was being treated by a paramedic: his wrist must have been slit, but the police, tipped off by the sentries, had arrived before he had bled out.

Sophie headed directly to the arresting inspector. “You called in an attempted human sacrifice?”

Leaving her to the finer details, Oliver approached the suspects. None of them stirred.

“Hello there,” he said, crouching down so that they were nearly at eye level. He ignored the faint twinge in his upper thighs, which were still a little sore from that morning’s run. “I’m Oliver. Do you want to tell me what’s going on?”

At first, there was no reaction. Then, finally, one of them replied, “We have the right to freedom of assembly, freedom of thought, and freedom of magical expression.”

“Aye, this is religious persecution,” another person added.

A murmur of agreement rippled through the group.

“All right,” said Oliver. “Mind telling me what religion it is you belong to?”

The figure closest to him reached up to their neck—Oliver mentally braced himself, ready to tackle them if need be—but when they drew their cuffed hands away, he saw they were only pulling out a shiny, silver locket.

“The officers should’ve confiscated that,” Sophie said from behind him in a low mutter.

Oliver stood. “It’s all right, it’s safe.”

Sophie’s dark brows pinched, and Oliver was reminded that, unlike him, most people didn’t have the range of power to sense everyday incantations. He could feel the enchantments emanating from the locket like warmth from a fire: there were two spells, a forever-polishing spell layered on top of a standard antitheft one people used for personal items. Of course, it was a waste of magic to use anything on a cheap locket, but some people were oddly sentimental.

When he glanced back down at the hooded suspects, the one holding the locket had pushed back her hood. She was an older woman around his foster mum’s age, and it was difficult to imagine her cutting out someone’s heart or whatever it was people did when they sacrificed someone.

She opened her hand. Inside the frame of the locket was a tiny, blurry photo of an old man. “This is our prophet,” she said dreamily. “Ralph the Ravager.”

“Ralph the Ravager,” the rest of the contingent repeated.

“Ralph?” Oliver asked.

“Ralph the Ravager.”

“Oh, for Neorxnawang’s sake,” said Sophie.

“And that’s who you were making the sacrifice to?” Oliver asked, leaning in for a better look. Out of the corner of his eye, Sophie was jotting down notes onto a pad of paper. “Or for?”

“We would all gladly give up our lives for Ralph the Ravager,” said another hooded figure, a man this time.

“Ralph the Ravager.”

Sophie stopped whatever it was she writing. “This was meant to be a group sacrifice?”

“We were going to release our energy back into the universe, in a powerful, unified movement,” the first woman told them. “Then Lord Ravager—”

“Ralph the Ravager.”

“—Would absorb it.” She looked at Oliver with concern. “My dear, do you not know about the healing powers of Zaubernegativum?”

“Zaubernegativum?” Oliver echoed, frowning. The word sounded somewhat familiar, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

She must have mistaken his confusion for something else, because she beamed at him. “Are you a member of our society? You should come to the next meeting.”

Ignoring Sophie’s hard stare, he replied carefully, “I might do. And does your, um, prophet know what you tried to do for him?”

“Of course he doesn’t. If he knew, it wouldn’t be a gift.”

“So you were all”—Sophie pointed her pencil at the group—“going to kill yourselves so that your leader—”

“Prophet,” someone corrected icily.

“So your
prophet
could become more powerful? What was he going to do with that much magic?”

It was a fair point. Oliver waited.

“Whatever he wanted,” said the old woman, smiling.

Sophie looked faintly murderous, but luckily one of the police officers appeared at her side. “Agent Stuart, the injured one’s been taken care of,” he told her, giving the suspects an indifferent look. “We’re ready to cart this lot down to station for further interviews.”

“That’s fine,” she said. “Oliver?”

“We’ll meet you there,” he said to the officer, though honestly he wondered if they would be able to get any more out of them. The one woman eager to speak with them seemed rather obtuse.

The hooded suspects were promptly de-robed and rounded up into several of the police cars waiting on the street. There was a great deal of muttering about the Magical Expression Act again, and one of them shouted, “Fascists!” as she was shoved into a car. The man whose wrist had been cut was escorted out separately, looking sheepish.

“What do you think?” Sophie asked as soon as they were out of earshot. “Cult?”

“No wonder it was assigned to me—erm, to us,” Oliver said, nodding in agreement. “Do you suppose this Ralph the Ravager has overcome, or at least has told
them
he’s overcome, the recharging limit and can now absorb an endless amount of power?”

“That’s not what concerns me,” said Sophie. Her lips flattened into a thin red line. “The real question is, if he has done, then what’s he going to do with it?”

It was a worrisome thought. There was only so much magical energy any one person could possess; most people hit a wall as soon as they attempted to take in anything outside of their source of magic. But certain people had a greater capacity for magic than others did, and those people—like Duff Slan, like Oliver—could be properly dangerous if they put their minds to it. It was rumored that the Government had a watch list for people like that.