A Hero at the End of the World (7 page)

“That was,” began Archie.

“Bloody hilarious,” Louise finished.

A white feather drifted through the air and landed on Archie’s perfect blond head. He scowled.

“So what’s this project?” Ewan asked, relieved.

“Oh, it’s rather simple, really.” The little chick, rocketing away from its parents, hit the edge of the table and ricocheted off, chirping loudly, and Louise snatched up her wine glass before it toppled to the floor. She smiled at Ewan. “We’re going to kill Oliver Abrams.”

Chapter 6

O
liver had never imagined a human sacrifice would involve so much paperwork. First there was the Incident Report (burglary with intent to commit ritualistic suicide), written nine times and put into nine separate folders, all of which had to be signed by the Met police as well as by him and Sophie. Then there were the statements from each of the cultists. As with other cases, his handwritten notes had to be added to each of the files, and each form had to be identical. A single error could be used against the Crown in court, and then there would be nine mad Sazzies running back to try their ritual again.

Just in case, Oliver also filled out an interdepartmental report for Attempted Murder: Demonic Uprising (non-plaguebearing), and, after some hesitation, also nabbed one for Cult: Doomsday.

He stared at the forms for a long time, tapping his pencil against the desk until Sophie snapped at him to cut it out. According to procedure, the reports would head upstairs to the Department of Unsolvables, and the investigation would change hands. It was blindingly obvious to Oliver that Louise Gardener Hobbes, Ralph the Ravager, and their entire beastly class of magic had to be stopped, but handing the case over also meant that the Unsolvables could choose not to pursue it.

He had good reason to feel reluctant. The Government, and the Home Office in particular, had the right to lock anyone up for as long as they deemed necessary. During Duff Slan’s reign thousands had been given life sentences for crimes ranging from expressing unhappiness over Slan’s regime to failing to fill out census forms correctly. Yet having a title and being ludicrously minted, as Gardener Hobbes clearly was, meant that the Crown wouldn’t want to touch her without utter certainty that she was complicit in evilness, and Oliver didn’t have any real proof aside from his gut.

Oliver had seen it all before. After killing Slan, he had been called before Parliament to explain himself. Both the MPs who had been appointed by Slan and those who had turned a blind eye to the evils of the past decade had done everything they could to make it seem like Oliver had done something wrong. If it hadn’t been for Headmaster Seabrooke, he might have gone to jail for the rest of his life. As it was, all but seven of the same MPs had been re-elected.

Gloomy now, Oliver decided he needed the one thing that comforted him when he was this stressed.

“I’m going to make a cup of tea,” he told Sophie. “Want one?”

She looked up eagerly. “Oh, yes, if you’re making one for yourself...”

As he walked through the dark corridor of the fifty-ninth floor, away from the Department of Unusuals, past the Department of Thought Crimes and the smaller but no less important Department of Human Resources, he thought hard about a plan to catch Gardener Hobbes in action. He could requisition a sentry—a pigeon, perhaps, that might be let in to sit on her front step, or a sparrow that could find a hole in the wards—but he would have to explain that to his superiors as well. If only there had been physical evidence aside from a few knob-heads trying to give themselves as a gift. With most other cases involving cults, the leaders had been there in person for their grand finale.

He froze in the doorway of the tiny kitchen.

“What if,” he said to the empty room, a spark going through him at his epiphany, “this was only the first step of her plan?”

He could have slapped himself. It was so obvious now that he thought about it. He shouldn’t have been putting Gardener Hobbes in with other barmy cult leaders like the Grand Master Buffalo, who’d had a vision after eating mushrooms he’d found growing in Alexandra Palace Park.

If she had a long-term plan, she was even more dangerous than he had thought.

He made two cups of tea as quickly as possible, burning with the need to get back to his desk and see if he could find her name in conjunction with any other investigations. But as soon as he finished stirring he caught a strong whiff of pomade over the familiar scent of milk and tea and knew exactly who had just walked into the kitchen behind him.

“You all right, Abrams?” greeted Agent Kaur as Oliver turned around.

His partner, Yates, gave him a nod hello. Their matching slicked-back hairstyles—Kaur’s a deep black, Yates’ a dishwater blond—shone in the unflattering overhead light.

“You look chuffed,” Oliver replied with as much civility as possible. “So you’ve a case then?”

He had never particularly liked either of them. Kaur was a sycophant, Yates was lazy, and Sophie had once pointed out to him that both of them began every e-mail with,
Hi, lads
. On top of that, they had both been agents while Slan was in power, and Oliver had an instant and visceral distrust of anyone who had been a part of Slan’s regime.

“You bet your arse we do,” Yates said. He turned the kettle on with a triumphant air. “We’ll have it closed in time for tea.”

“You won’t believe this,” said Kaur, laughing, “but we received a call that three giant chickens were on the loose in the City. They’ve blocked off Fleet Street from Saint Paul’s all the way down to the Strand.”

“What’re you working on?” Yates asked him.

Oliver set his mugs back down on the counter, splashing tea over the edges. His patience was already wearing thin. “I believe that a woman called Lady Gardener Hobbes is the head of a cult, possibly one which will destroy the world by consuming all the magical energy of the universe and leaving it a dry, empty husk, ending everything that we know and love.”

“Oh,” Yates said. He and Kaur exchanged glances.

“That’s sick, mate,” said Kaur unconvincingly.

Oliver left them in the kitchen with matching puzzled expressions on their faces.

When he had made his way back to the office, Sophie exclaimed, “There you are! I’ve an idea of how to prove the Society for the Advancement of Zaubernegativum is doing something that warrants further investigation.”

“That’s brilliant,” Oliver replied excitedly. She ignored the tea he placed on her desk.

“I was thinking about that spell,” she said in a hushed tone, “the one they were using for their sacrifice. Or rather, the one that Ralph the Ravager was using.”

“Ralph the Ravager,” he repeated automatically. He shook his head. “Sorry, reflex. What do you mean, the spell they were using?”

“Well, it’s one thing for them to ‘release their energy back into the universe.’ It’s another for it to actually work. I’m no expert on devouring, but isn’t the energy of nine people rather a lot to take in at once? If so, Ralph the Ravager would’ve had to conjure something in advance—perhaps days in advance, depending on the spell.”

That raised his spirits. “So if we can find the incantation that he used...”

“We could trace it back to him, proving that he’s both a danger to society and that he coerced cultists into killing themselves,” said Sophie. She looked pleased with herself. “The Crown would
have
to prosecute that, especially given their crackdown on cults.”

But there was one giant flaw in her plan. “I haven’t tried to calculate a spell’s origin since uni,” Oliver admitted.

“I have done.” Sophie bit her lip. “Well, I did once. First, however, we need to find out what we’re dealing with.”

¤

As with the creation of totems, the use of spells was restricted. Those taught in educational institutions, clubs and societies, and even at home had to be approved by the Ministry of Information. New spells underwent a lengthy clinical trial by the Department of Health and Public Safety before being added to the register of approved conjurations.

When they were children, Oliver and his best friend had experimented in creating their own spells. It was a normal thing for kids to do, but Oliver had always thought that they had been much cleverer than their schoolmates—until he had been recruited into the SMCA and learned that there were far more complex enchantments out there, ones more dangerous than those they had used for pranks and games. Even the defensive spells they had learned in sixth form were simplistic compared to what he had been exposed to in the past year as an agent. There were loads of twisted people out there.

Forensic Divination was located several floors beneath the Department of Unusuals. The walk from the lifts took Sophie and Oliver past the Offices of the Medical Examiner and the Cryptozoology Crime Unit. As they passed the latter, Oliver thought he heard a low growl coming from inside, and a shadow passed under the door.

“This way,” Sophie said, pulling him down the dark corridor.

It wasn’t long before they stood outside a door.
Office of Forensic Divination
, it read. Underneath, in smaller print, was,
No outside magic permitted
.

Sophie rapped her knuckles on the door. Without waiting for an answer, she pushed it open. “Doctor Barath?”

Oliver had worked with Forensic Divination a handful of times, but he had never had cause to go down to their office; their reports had always been enough for him to close his cases. Like every other department in the building, he found himself in a rectangular room with rippled black walls and a high ceiling. But where the Unusuals’ office was filled with desks, bookshelves, and cupboards, this one had a single long table not unlike the workstation Oliver had sat at in his school science lab. Several open cupboards were overflowing with scientific equipment, stacks of books littered the floor, and a large, ancient-looking computer sat on the corner of the table. Rather than being left open to look out onto the city, the windows had been lined with untidy shelves of vials and flasks filled with an assortment of brightly colored liquids; sunlight refracted through them like stained glass.

The tall woman seated at the table must have been Doctor Barath. In front of her, a ring sat on top of a flat, black disk; the ring was a totem, Oliver sensed, but he hadn’t the foggiest what the disk could have been.

She waved them in. “Can I help you?” she asked.

“Doctor Barath, we’re Agents Stuart and Abrams,” Sophie replied. “We need your help with an investigation.”

Barath stared at Oliver for a long moment, and he had the feeling that she was trying to contain herself. He raised his chin, trying to convey that, yes, he
was
who she thought he was.

“Of course, I’ll do what I can,” she said, visibly shaking herself. From the pocket of her lab coat, she took out a pen and paper. “What’s the case? I have a long queue at the moment, but for the slayer of Duff Slan...”

“It’s more of a question, really,” Oliver jumped in. He flashed her a smile. “Do you know if it’s possible to create a spell that would allow you to overcome the recharge limit? For example, let’s say someone was attempting to absorb the power of nine people.”

“
Nine
?” Barath repeated with a strangled laugh. “Unlikely.”

Sophie frowned. “Unlikely or impossible?”

Beckoning them to follow, Barath crossed the room and took a seat at the computer. It was an old piece of machinery that looked like it had been customized over the years with new parts: the monitor was a faded off-white, but the tower was a misshapen conjunction of at least three different components.

Given all the cool equipment in her office, Oliver was disappointed when she opened her internet browser. He’d been hoping for an interesting bit of kit.

“What’s this?” he asked, leaning over her shoulder to point at the screen. A website was loading slowly; the computer’s processor screeched along.

She glanced up at him. “Grimoire Online. Europe’s most complete encyclopedia of spells.”

Grimoire Online was a bare-bones, simple text-based website, with a white background and a search bar at the top of the page. Beneath the bar were several columns of links, broken down into categories: publication date, location, subject, and item type. Barath clicked on a link for “Power Augmentation” and then, in the search box on the next page, typed, “Absorb.”

“Oh, I used this in uni,” said Sophie, standing on the other side of Barath, as hundreds of links filled the screen. “We had to have permission from the librarian, and a great deal of it was blocked. I suppose they were afraid we’d do something we read about. Though at the time all I cared about was my marks, not

finding new party tricks.”

“I would’ve used the spells,” Oliver confessed.

Barath clicked on the first link, which loaded a page containing a picture of a scanned book; a single word was highlighted in the next to last paragraph. The handwriting was tall and narrow, and it took Oliver a moment of squinting at it to realize it wasn’t in English. A text box beneath the picture provided a translation. He pushed Barath aside to look at it more closely.

“That’s not it,” he told them, disappointed.

An hour later, they were still searching. Sophie had long given up on Grimoire Online and was instead sorting through one of the many piles of books, gazing at each title thoughtfully, but Oliver kept pestering Barath to keep going until she cried, “
Please
, Agent Abrams, I have other work to be getting on with. This isn’t a priority.”

Oliver wanted to protest that it was, it was
very
important, end-of-the-world important, but Sophie interrupted with, “Can I borrow this?” She held up a thick paperback. “It doesn’t have an SMCA stamp on it.”

Barath hardly glanced at her before replying, “Yes, yes, whatever you need.” To Oliver, she said, “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can find what you’re looking for. It doesn’t exist. We are born with the ability to absorb only a finite amount of power.”

Oliver turned to Sophie. “Aha,” he said triumphantly, his hands on his hips.