Carry On (10 page)

She looks up at me doubtfully. She has narrow blue eyes, bright blue—brighter somehow because her face is so dirty.

“Ebb,” I insist, “he tried to kill me.”

“Not successfully.” She shrugs. “Not recently.”

“He's tried to kill me three times! That I know of! It doesn't actually matter whether it worked.”

“It matters a bit,” she says. “'Sides, how old was he the first time, eleven? Twelve? That hardly counts.”

“It counts with me,” I say.

“Does it.”

I huff. “Yes. Ebb. It does. He hated me before he even met me.”

“Exactly,” she says.

“Exactly!”

“I'm just saying—been a long time since I had to spell you two apart.”

“Well, there's no point in throwing down all the time,” I say. “Doesn't get us anywhere. And it hurts. I suspect we're saving up.”

“For what?” she asks.

“The end.”

“The end of school?”

“The end of the end,” I say. “The big fight.”

“So you were saving it, and then he didn't come back for it?”

“Exactly!”

“Well, I wouldn't lose hope,” Ebb says. “I think he'll be back. His mother always valued a good education. I miss her this time a'year.…”

She wipes her eyes on her sleeve. I sigh. Sometimes, with Ebb, you're better off just enjoying the silence. And the goats.

*   *   *

Three weeks pass. Four, five, six.

I stop looking for Baz anywhere where he's supposed to be.

Whenever I hear someone on the stairs outside our room now, I know it's Penny. I even let her spend the night sometimes and sleep in his bed; there doesn't seem to be any immediate danger of Baz bursting in and lighting her on fire for it. (The Roommate's Anathema doesn't prevent you from hurting anyone
else
in your room.)

I hassle Niall a few more times, but he doesn't even hint that he knows where Baz is. If anything, it seems like Niall's hoping that I'll turn up some answers.

I feel like I should talk to the Mage about it. About Baz. But I don't
want
to talk to the Mage. I'm afraid he might still be planning to send me away.

Penny says it's pointless to avoid him. “It's not like you'll fall off the Mage's radar.”

But maybe I have.… And that bothers me, too.

The Mage is always gone a lot, but he's hardly been at Watford at all this term. And whenever he is here, he's surrounded by his Men.

Normally, he'd be checking on me. Calling me to his office. Giving me assignments, asking for help. Sometimes I think the Mage actually needs my help—he can trust me better than anyone—but sometimes I think he's just testing me. To see what I'm made of. To keep me in order.

I'm sitting in class one day when I see the Mage walking alone towards the Weeping Tower. As soon as class ends, I make for the Tower.

It's a tall, red brick building—one of the oldest at Watford, almost as old as the Chapel. It's called the Weeping Tower because there are vines that grow in every summer and creep from the top down—and because the building has started to sag forward over the years, almost like it's slumping in grief. Ebb says not to worry about it falling; the spells are still strong.

The dining hall is on the ground floor of the Tower, the whole ground floor, and then above that are classrooms and meeting rooms and summoning chambers; the Mage's office and sanctum are at the very top.

He comes and goes as he needs to. The Mage has the whole magickal world to keep track of—in the UK, anyway—and hunting the Humdrum takes up a lot of his time.

The Humdrum doesn't just attack me. That isn't even the worst of it. (If it were, the other magicians probably would have thrown me to him by now.)

When the Humdrum first showed up, almost twenty years ago, holes began appearing in the magickal atmosphere. It seems like he (it?) can suck the magic out of a place, probably to use against us.

If you go to one of these dead spots, it's like stepping into a room without air. There's just nothing there for you, no magic—even I run dry.

Most magicians can't take it. They're so used to magic, to feeling magic, that they go spare without it. That's how the monster got its name. One of the first magicians to encounter the holes said they were like an “
insidious humdrum, a mundanity that creeps into your very soul.”

The dead spots stay dead. You get
your
magic back if you leave, but the magic never comes back to that place.

Magicians have had to leave their homes because the Humdrum has pulled the magic out from underneath them.

It'd be a disaster if the Humdrum ever came to Watford.

So far, he usually sends someone else—or some
thing
else, some dark creature—in after me.

It's easy for the Humdrum to find allies. Every dark creature in this world and its neighbours would love to see the mages fall. The vampires, the werewolves, the demons and banshees, the Manticorps, the
goblins
—they all resent us. We can control magic, and they can't. Plus we keep them in check. If the dark things had their way, the Normal world would be chaos. They'd treat regular people like livestock. We—magicians—need the Normals to live their normal lives, relatively unaffected by magic. Our spells depend on them being able to speak freely.

That explains why the dark creatures hate us.

But I still don't know why the Humdrum has targeted
me,
specifically. Because I'm the most powerful magician, I suppose. Because I'm the biggest threat.

The Mage says that he himself followed my power like a beacon when it was time to bring me to Watford.

Maybe that's how the Humdrum finds me, too.

I take a winding staircase to the top of the Weeping Tower, where it opens up into a round foyer. The school seal is laid out in marble tile on the floor and polished till it looks wet. And the domed ceiling has a mural of Merlin himself calling magic up through his hands into the sky, his mouth open. He kind of looks like the guy who hosts
QI.

There are two doors. The Mage's office is behind the tall, arched door on the left. And his sanctum, his rooms, is behind the smaller door on the right.

I knock on his office door first—no one answers. I consider knocking on the door to his rooms, but that feels too intimate. Maybe I'll just leave him a note.

I open the door to the Mage's office—it's warded, but the wards are set to welcome me—then I walk in slowly, just in case I'm disturbing him.…

It's dark. The curtains are drawn. The walls are normally lined with books, but a bunch have been taken down, and they're piled in stacks around the desk.

I don't turn on the light. I wish I'd brought some paper or something—I don't want to scrounge around the Mage's desk. It's not the sort of desk that has Post-it notes and a
WHILE YOU WERE OUT
pad.

I pick up a heavy fountain pen. There're a few sheets of paper on his desk, lists of dates, and I turn one over and write:

Sir, I'd like to talk to you when you have a moment. About everything. About my roommate.

And then I add:

(T. Basilton Grimm-Pitch.)

And then I wish I hadn't, because of course the Mage knows who my roommate is, and now it sort of looks like I've signed it. So then I
do
sign it:

Simon

“Simon,” someone says, and I startle, dropping the pen.

Miss Possibelf is standing in the doorway, but doesn't step inside the office.

Miss Possibelf is our Magic Words teacher, and the dean of students. She's my favourite teacher. She's not exactly friendly, but I think she genuinely cares, and she seems more human sometimes than the Mage. (Even though she's not exactly human, I don't think.…) She's much more likely to notice if you're feeling sick or miserable, or if your thumb is hanging on by a thread.

“Miss Possibelf,” I say. “The Mage isn't in.”

“I see that—do you have business here?”

“I thought he might be here. There were a few things I was going to talk to him about.”

“He was here this morning, but he's left again.” Miss Possibelf is tall and broad, with a thick silver plait hanging down her back. She's impossibly graceful, and impossibly eloquent, and if she's talking to you directly, her voice kind of tickles your ears. “You could talk to me,” she says.

She still doesn't come in—she must not have permission to cross the wards.

“Well,” I say. “It's partly about Baz. Basil. He hasn't come back to school.”

“I've noticed,” she says.

“Do you know if he's coming back?”

She looks down at her wand, a walking stick, and moves the handle in a circle. “I'm not sure.”

“Have you talked to his parents?” I ask.

She looks up at me. “That's confidential.”

I nod and kick the side of the Mage's desk—then realize what I'm doing and take a step away from it, tangling my fingers into the front of my hair.

Miss Possibelf clears her throat prettily; even across the room, it sends a buzz up the back of my neck.

“I
can
tell you,” she says, “that it's school policy to contact a student's parents when a child doesn't return for the term.…”

“So you have talked to the Pitches?”

She narrows her dark brown eyes. “What do you hope to learn, Simon?”

I drop my hand in frustration. “The truth. Is he gone? Is he sick? Has the war started?”

“The truth…”

I keep waiting for her to blink. Even magicians blink.

“The truth,” she says, “is that I don't have answers to any of those questions. His parents have been contacted. They were aware that he wasn't in school, but they didn't elaborate. Mr. Pitch is of legal age—like you, technically an adult. If he doesn't attend this school, I'm not responsible for his welfare.”

“But you can't just ignore it when a student doesn't come back to school! What if he's planning something?”

“Then that's a concern for the Coven, not for the dean of students.”

“If Baz is off organizing an insurgency,” I press, “that's all of our concern.”

She watches me. I push my jaw forward and stand my ground. (This is my standard move when I don't know what else to do.) (Because if there's one thing I'm good at…)

Miss Possibelf closes her eyes, but still not like she needs to blink—it's more like she's giving in.
Good.

She looks back up at me. “Simon, I care about you, and I've always been honest with you. Listen to me—I don't
know
where Basilton is. Maybe he is off planning something awful; I hope not, for his sake and yours. All I do know is that when I talked to his father, he seemed unsurprised and ill at ease; he knew that his son wasn't here, and he didn't seem happy. Honestly, Simon? He sounded like a man at the end of his rope.”

I puff a breath out hard through my nose and nod my head.

“That's all I know,” she says. “I'll tell you if I learn more, if I'm able.”

I nod again.

“Now, perhaps you should go to lunch.”

“Thank you, Miss Possibelf.”

As I move past her in the doorway, she tries to pat my arm—but I keep walking, and it's awkward. I hear the heavy oak door close behind us.

I don't go to lunch. I go for a walk that turns into a run that turns into me hacking away at a tree on the edge of the woods.

I can't believe that my blade comes when I call for it.

 

17

SIMON

I stop looking for Baz anywhere where he's supposed to be.…

But I don't stop looking for him.

I take walks in the Wavering Wood at night. Penny sees the look on my face and doesn't try to join me. Agatha's always off doing schoolwork; she must be buckling down this year—maybe her dad's promised her a new horse or something.

I used to love the Wood, I used to find it calming.

I realize after a few nights that I'm not just walking aimlessly; I'm covering the Wood like I'm sweeping it. Like we swept it that year that Elspeth disappeared—all of us holding hands, walking side by side, marking off parcels as we moved through them. I'm marking off parcels in my head now, casting for light and waving my blade back and forth to clear branches. I'll mow the whole fucking forest down if I go on like this.

I don't find anything. And I frighten the sprites. And a dryad comes out to tell me that I'm basically a one-man walking woodland apocalypse.

“What do you seek?” the nymph asks, hovering over the ground even though I've already told her that it gives me the creeps. She's got hair like moss, and she's dressed like one of those manga girls with the Victorian boots and the umbrellas.

“Baz,” I say. “My roommate.”

“The dead one? With the pretty eyes?”

“Yes.”
Is
Baz dead? I've never thought of him that way. I mean, he is a vampire, I guess. “Wait, are you saying he's dead? Like, really dead?”

“All the bloodeaters are dead.”

“Have you actually seen him eat blood?”

She stares at me. My sword is stuck in the ground beside my feet.

“What do you seek, Chosen One?” She sounds irritated now. She lets her green brolly rest on her shoulder.

“My roommate. Baz. The bloodeater.”

“He's not here,” she says.

“Are you sure?”

“More sure than you.”

I sigh and dig my sword deeper into the ground. “Well, I'm not sure at all.”

“You're burning up goodwill here, magician.”

“How many times do I have to save the Wood to win you people over?”