Fireworks and Darkness Read online

  ‘A roman candle. A packet of squibs. And a pennyworth of small crackers.’ The boy took some money out of his pocket. Casimir shook the crackers out into a screw of newspaper and cut a strip of slow match from the roll under the counter.

  ‘Make sure you keep them out of the rain,’ he said, with a sense of relief that the transaction was closing, ‘and stand well back when you let them off.’

  The boy saluted him with the rocket. ‘See you soon.’ The shop bell jangled loudly as he stepped into the street and he swaggered off jauntily through the rain.

  ‘I went to visit Ruth this morning.’ In the quiet of the deserted shop Simeon’s voice sounded unnaturally loud. Casimir jumped and turned around. Simeon went on, ‘She’s a bit upset about what happened last night. It looks like there’s going to be trouble.’

  Casimir put the roll of slow match on the counter. His father was standing in the workroom doorway, an indistinct figure swathed with shadow. Outside, night had fallen. Rain drove in gusts along the cobbles. The lamplighter came and bobbed away again like a firefly in the gloom.

  ‘What do you mean, trouble?’

  ‘With the Queen’s Guard. On account of Princess Christina being in the house when the explosion happened. They called Ruth up this morning to account for it, though of course, she couldn’t tell them much. It seems we may lose the warrant. Well, I don’t care about that, but we’ve borrowed money against it and it could become unpleasant if it’s not paid back.’

  ‘Did they speak to you, too?’

  Simeon frowned. ‘No. I thought that was rather strange. But the guard reports to Princess Christina and I’m to see her tomorrow morning. Ruth’s arranged it for me.’

  I bet she has, thought Casimir. He said, ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, did you tell Ruth about the magic?’

  Simeon did not immediately answer. He ran his hand along the shelf at the back of the counter where they kept the coloured matches and roman candles. A phosphorescent gleam showed in the dust where his fingers had passed and when he took his hand away it left a small pale flame burning on the shelf behind it. Casimir felt something twist inside him. All at once it seemed there had been a fundamental shift in the mode of their existence. In the nine years since his mother left, he had never seen his father use magic, let alone so casually as this.

  Simeon clicked his fingers. The flame snapped out.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I haven’t told her. But she suspects. She’s not a fool.’

  There was a silence. Words formed in Casimir’s head, but fear blocked them on their way to his lips.

  ‘Cas,’ said Simeon quietly, ‘I know what you’re thinking. I know you’re angry with me. But if there are things I haven’t told you, it’s for good reason. The magician who attacked you last night, Circastes, has been seeking me out for years. He holds a grudge against me and by extension against you. I’ve always taken the view that the less you know about him, the better.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because of the way certain types of magic work. A magician can take the victim’s knowledge, fears and desires and turn them back on him. When you know about him, you become frightened and your terror forms a link he can focus in on. The best protection is not to attract his attention in the first place.’

  ‘But you’re a magician, too.’

  ‘Once. Not any more.’

  ‘You used magic last night.’

  ‘Only because Circastes let me. He gave me no choice. Neither of those things make it right.’

  ‘You mean, it was wrong to save me? It would have been better to let me die?’

  ‘No. I didn’t say that, that’s not the way it works. Cas, try and understand, this is not like anything you’ve ever experienced. I’m not talking about good and evil, black and white. When I say magic is wrong I mean something far more fundamental than that. Magic is interfering with the order of the universe.

  ‘Listen to me. Imagine, at the beginning of the world, a book. A huge book, with the whole of creation written into it, full of instructions. Instructions telling the sun when to rise, instructions to hold the stars in their places. Instructions for the trees so they know when to fruit. And whole chapters, telling the story of the human race, a page for each man, woman and child who has ever lived.

  ‘Magicians want to get hold of that book and rewrite the rules, but the problem is there’s only so much they can rub out. They scratch out phrases and bits of sentences, and then try and concoct something that will fit into the gap. They try and force their own words into the spaces and the margins defining the page become ragged. Sometimes they’re impatient and smudge whole sentences. At the very worst, when they try and erase the writing, the page tears across, and there’s a hole which will never quite be fixed before the end of the world.

  ‘Think of it Cas. That is the sort of power a magician wields. He creates nothing. He merely manipulates what is already in existence, balancing spell against spell, setting up ripples of disturbance, destroying to build anew in his own image. Let me tell you exactly what that means. It means that when you fell from the machine last night and I caught you, somewhere in the world, a boy your own age had to die. I don’t know who he was, or where he lived, but his death was necessary to balance out the power I used to pervert the laws of nature and save you. I killed him, and his death will remain on my conscience, but men like Circastes have no conscience. They are trained to believe that all things and people are expendable to their purposes. I, too, once thought like that. That is why I gave up magic. That is why I know what Circastes does is wrong.’

  Casimir said nothing. He was still standing behind the shop counter and Simeon was blocking his way out, but he suddenly found he wanted desperately to get out of the room. Simeon reached out a hand to his shoulder and he recoiled as if he had been struck.

  ‘No! Don’t!’

  ‘Casimir, listen—’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Listen to me! This is important. Do you think I haven’t spent the whole day chasing this round inside my head, wondering what to say? You’re upset, Cas, but I have lived with this for twenty years—twenty years trying to be sure in my heart what is right and what is wrong.’

  ‘How can you say that? How can you talk about what’s right and wrong when you’ve just told me you killed someone?’

  ‘Yes. I killed someone, but I did it to save you. There are worse things, Cas, far worse. That boy is dead and will never come back to life, but there are people walking on this earth who are dead inside because of what magicians like Circastes have done to them. A magician can turn you into another person without your knowing it. He can give you memories you never thought you had, he can take away your free will, change your character, make you do things you would normally never do. I know, Casimir, because I’ve done it. Not once, but many times. Sometimes I was even proud of it. But then I made a mistake. It wrecked my life, it wrecked your mother’s, and now it’s wrecking yours too and I don’t know how to stop it.’

  ‘What mistake? What did you do?’

  ‘I looked into a grimoire, a book of spells,’ said Simeon, ‘when I was seventeen and in the last year of my apprenticeship. And I cast a spell, a stupid spell. It doesn’t matter now what it was. The grimoires were all locked up, but my master was away from home, and I thought I was safe to pry. I was wrong.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘My master came home and caught me,’ said Simeon. ‘When he saw what I was doing he severed my indentures, ended my apprenticeship. You can’t understand what that meant, Cas. When I was apprenticed to him, I was ten years old. It was my tenth birthday and every memory I had of my life before that day was wiped from my head. I couldn’t remember my parents, I didn’t know where I’d been born or who I was. I had to give my master the power of my name, so he could control whether I lived or died. For him, I had rejected the world, and now I had to go back out into it. The real world, a world I knew
only dimly from the images in my crystal. A world without magic.

  ‘You must understand: my master would never let me go without taking back all I had learned from him. He fetched one of the other grimoires, one that contained a spell to banish memory, the same he had used on me when I came to him. When he started to cast the spell I panicked, tried to deflect it. I don’t know what I thought I was doing. It shouldn’t have worked, he should have shielded himself. But he didn’t.

  ‘All I wanted to do was protect myself. But instead I turned the spell back. It hit my master and erased his whole mind—left it blank as a baby’s. And my master, the man whose memories I destroyed, was Circastes’s father.’

  ‘Circastes’s father?’

  Simeon nodded. ‘That’s why he hates me. Of course, as soon as I realised what had happened I ran away. I travelled, ended up in Ostermark, and joined the army. I think I was hoping I’d be killed, but I wasn’t. Then I met your mother and you were born. But all the while, Circastes has been looking for me. Now he’s found me, and worse, he’s found my son. You see, Casimir, that’s what he really wants. That’s Circastes’s revenge. My son, for his father.’

  Now Casimir was really frightened. ‘Me? He wants me?’

  ‘Yes. That’s why he came to me in the park.’

  ‘But how can we stop him? What can we do?’

  Simeon wiped his face with his hand. His muscles seemed to have sagged, making him look much older than he really was.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Nothing at all.’

  ‘Can’t we run away?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Simeon. ‘We can run. Again and again and again and still he’ll find us. I’ve been hiding from Peter Circastes almost all my adult life, Casimir. Perhaps the time has come to stop.

  ‘But we can be careful. There are three ways a magician can get power over you, three things you must always watch for. The first is never to invite him into your home. The moment he crosses your threshold he has the power of hospitality over every member of the household. The second is never to share food with him. You’ve already done that Cas, otherwise he would never have been able to throw you off the machine. I’m not sure how it happened, but the link is broken and he can’t use it again. Finally, whatever else you do, you must never give a magician power by giving him the power of your true name. There are lots of ways he can trick you, so you must be very careful. Don’t forget, he can change his shape, become a woman, a child, even an animal. Tell me, did you notice Circastes’s feet?’

  Casimir thought. ‘They were bare,’ he said. ‘The ground was icy and they must have been absolutely freezing, but he wasn’t wearing any shoes.’

  ‘There are types of magic,’ said Simeon, ‘which require the user to be in constant contact with the earth. It’s a way of controlling the power which runs through your body when you cast a spell. Here, let me show you something.’

  Simeon pulled off one of his boots and stripped off the sock. The sole of his foot was burnt as thoroughly as if he had stood on a red-hot griddle, and covered in blisters and blackened, peeling skin.

  ‘I got that last night,’ Simeon said, ‘rescuing you. It’s so long since I’ve used my magic my feet have softened. I’ve helped the healing along a little, otherwise I wouldn’t even be able to walk today. You get used to it of course, but the more magic you work, the more powerful you become, the more important it is to maintain that contact with the earth. I’m explaining this, because from now on you’ll have to be on your guard. Last night was simply a warning. As soon as you see or hear anything unusual, you’re to come and tell me at once.’

  ‘All right,’ said Casimir. As he said this, something niggled at his memory. But the thought fled away and instead he asked, ‘Do you ever want to go back to it?’

  Simeon looked sad.

  ‘For seven years of my life there was nothing else,’ he said. ‘If I believed I had one, I sometimes think I would give my soul.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Casimir’s sleep that night was broken and disturbed. The dead boy whom Simeon had murdered in his place ambushed his thoughts and kept him awake, and in his train came ghosts from his own more distant past. Casimir’s mother, Jessica, had been gone so long he now could scarcely picture her; her absence, after his small child’s grief had faded, had hardly mattered until Ruth had arrived to drive the first wedge between him and his father. But tonight, unaccountably, Casimir found himself thinking about her. She had been red-headed like himself, with freckles and a throaty laugh, and he had a fleeting recollection of her playing the guitar and getting him to dance on the kitchen table, whirling dangerously around until Simeon had intervened and plucked him off. He knew she had not tried to take him with her when she went. At times, he had bitterly resented this, and as he grew older had come to question what sort of woman could have walked out on a six-year-old child. Now, all Casimir could remember was the stink of magic which had filled the house on the night she had vanished. In the light of what had just happened to him, it was hard not to ask what sort of provocation had made her go.

  He wanted answers, but Simeon was not going to give them. The outburst in the firework shop had been uncharacteristic, born of necessity and stress, and he knew better than to expect it would be repeated. He himself was too oppressed by the enormity of what had happened to him to initiate any further conversation. Death, particularly his own death, was something Casimir had never cared to think about. And yet, last night he had confronted and come within a hairsbreadth of his own mortality. Casimir was not sure he could even face Simeon in the morning, knowing what he had done to save him. He felt he no longer knew who his father was, and furthermore, which was worst of all, he realised he was afraid of him. Artilleryman, poet, firework maker, anarchist, magician—Simeon Runciman was nothing but a construct of all these things, a man made of tissue paper who floated away layer by layer as Casimir tried to grapple with the reality that lay underneath. The further he pursued this, the more his father slipped away, until at last Casimir began to wonder whether there was anything at the heart of him at all, or whether he was just a void, a great, black blank which could never be filled.

  The sound of the rain driving down over their slate roof finally lulled Casimir into an uneasy sleep. It was past midnight when he was woken by the sound of heavy furniture being dragged about in the room below. The noise was coming from Simeon’s study, the otherwise unused parlour at the front of the house where he kept the accounts and did his writing. Casimir got out of bed and retrieved his breeches from the floor. Out on the landing something glimmered in the darkness around the skylight.

  Casimir pulled on his clothes; he felt frightened, but was growing too inured now to evidence of magical activity to hang back. He went out onto the landing, where the skylight was set into the low sloping ceiling, and traced his hands over its wooden frame. Arcane silver letters glowed around it, like snail tracks in the dark. There were no proper words and the text was punctuated with occult symbols he could not guess the meaning of. But there was enough of Simeon’s distinctive, sloping handwriting to leave him in no doubt as to who had written them.

  Casimir went softly downstairs. A lamp was burning in Simeon’s study, and inside, he could see Simeon himself standing in front of the window. He had dragged aside their heavy travelling chest and was writing intently around the window frame with what looked like a pencil, but which Casimir realised was actually a thick short wand made out of some sort of dark wood. Silver letters flared into life at the passage of his hand, like firework messages across a scaffold: bright at first, then fading to the same glimmer as the ones on the skylight. A faint magical scent exuded from the window, redolent as gunpowder on the first night of the summer firework season.

  Simeon finished writing. He flexed his fingers and laid down his wand, and then, although Casimir had not made a sound, he looked at him over his shoulder.

  ‘Go to bed, Cas,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing you can do. Just go back to bed.’


  He turned back to the window, leaned his forehead against the glass and stood, looking out into the darkness. Casimir stepped back from the door and crept away up the stairs to his attic. Later, when he woke in the greyness of early morning, he remembered that he had dreamed, not of Simeon or the previous night’s horrors, but of his mother, Jessica, and the night she had left when he was six years old. In his dream, he had been a child again and had cried as he and Simeon drove away in haste and darkness. In real life, he had not understood that his mother was no longer there and had thought they were leaving her behind. But in the dream Casimir had seen her once more and known her. Which only made his grief on waking the keener: that after so many years the only time he could truly recognise her face was in a nightmare.

  The rain had eased slightly overnight but the skies over the city were still clouded when Casimir went downstairs. He found Simeon in the kitchen, a fire burning before him on the hearth. On the table were several stacks of paper and the tin box—an old gun case—which held their personal papers. As Casimir came into the room, Simeon picked up a pile of pamphlets and tipped it into the fire. They caught, the chemicals in the ink turning the flames virulent green and purple.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Burning things we need to get rid of.’ Simeon poked up the fire and started thrusting the contents of the tin box into the grate. For a moment Casimir watched without really registering what he was doing. Then a familiar-looking paper grabbed his attention and he yelled and dived at the flames.

  ‘Hey! Don’t burn that. It’s my birth certificate!’

  ‘Sorry, Cas, it’s got to go.’ The certificate was gone in an instant, the wax seal popping and spitting sparks as it burned more slowly. It was followed by the lease documents for the shop, several agreements with local money lenders, and the big stiff parchment that was their warrant for the queen’s wedding. It did not burn, but curled up at the edges and smoked, like something still partly alive. Casimir stared at it, half fascinated, half horrified by the wanton destruction.