Ben Aaronovitch - Rivers of London

‘When you’re attempting this spell,’ he said, ‘always have a basin of water ready as a safety precaution.’

‘Are we going to make fire?’

‘Only if you do it wrong,’ said Nightingale. ‘I’m going to make a demonstration and you must pay close attention — as you did when searching for vestigia . Do you understand?’

‘ Vestigia ,’ I said. ‘Got it.’

Nightingale held out his right hand palm upwards and made a fist. ‘Watch my hand,’ he said and opened his fingers. Suddenly, floating a few centimetres above his palm was a ball of light. Bright, but not so bright that I couldn’t stare right at it.

Nightingale closed his fingers and the globe vanished. ‘Again?’ he asked.

Up until then I think a bit of me had been waiting for the rational explanation, but when I saw how casually Nightingale produced that werelight I realised that I had the rational explanation — magic worked. The next question of course was — how did it work?

‘Again,’ I said.

He opened his hand and the light appeared. The source seemed to be the size of a golf ball with a smooth pearlescent surface. I leaned forward but I couldn’t tell whether the light emanated from inside the globe or from its skin.

Nightingale closed his palm. ‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘You don’t want to damage your eyes.’

I blinked and saw purple blotches. He was right — I’d been fooled by the soft quality of the light into staring too long. I splashed some water in my eyes.

‘Ready to go again?’ asked Nightingale. ‘Try and focus on the sensation as I do it — you should feel something.’

‘Something?’ I asked.

‘Magic is like music,’ said Nightingale. ‘Everyone hears it differently. The technical term we use is forma , but that’s no more helpful than “something”, is it?’

‘Can I close my eyes?’ I asked.

‘By all means,’ said Nightingale.

I did feel a ‘something’, like a catch in the silence at the moment of creation. We repeated the exercise until I was sure I wasn’t imagining it. Nightingale asked me if I had any questions. I asked him what the spell was called.

‘Colloquially it’s known as a werelight,’ he said.

‘Can you do it underwater?’ I asked.

Nightingale plunged his hand into the sink and despite the awkward angle, demonstrated forming a werelight without any apparent difficulty.

‘So it’s not a process of oxidisation, is it,’ I said.

‘Focus,’ said Nightingale. ‘Magic first, science later.’

I tried to focus, but on what?

‘In a minute,’ said Nightingale, ‘I’m going to ask you to open your hand in the same manner as I have demonstrated. As you open your hand I want you to make a shape in your mind that conforms to what you sensed when I created my werelight. Think of it as a key that opens a door. Do you understand?’

‘Hand,’ I said. ‘Shape, key, lock, door.’

‘Precisely,’ said Nightingale. ‘Start now.’

I took a deep breath, extended my arm and opened my fist — nothing happened. Nightingale didn’t laugh but I would have preferred it if he had. I took another breath, tried to ‘shape’ my mind, whatever that meant, and opened my hand again.

‘Let me demonstrate again,’ said Nightingale. ‘And then you follow.’

He created the werelight, I felt for the shape of the forma and tried to replicate it. I still failed to create my own light, but this time I thought I felt an echo of the forma in my mind like a snatch of music from a passing car.

We repeated the exercise several times until I was certain I knew what the shape of the forma was, but I couldn’t find the shape in my own mind. The process must have been familiar to Nightingale because he could tell what stage I was at.

‘Practise this for another two hours,’ he said. ‘Then we’ll stop for lunch and then two more hours after that. Then you can have the evening off.’

‘Just do this?’ I asked. ‘No learning of ancient languages, no magic theory?’

‘This is the first step,’ said Nightingale. ‘If you can’t master this then everything else is irrelevant.’

‘So this is a test?’

‘That’s what an apprenticeship is,’ said Nightingale. ‘Once you’ve mastered this forma then I can promise you plenty of study. Latin of course, Greek, Arabic, technical German. Not to mention you’ll be taking over all the legwork on my cases.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Now I’m incentivised.’

Nightingale laughed and left me to it.

There are some things you don’t want to be doing less than ten minutes after waking up, and doing a ton down the Great West Road is one of them. Even at three in the morning with the spinner going and a siren to clear the way and the roads as empty of traffic as London roads ever get. I was hanging onto the door-strap and trying not to think about the fact that the Jag, with its many vintage qualities of style and craftsmanship, was sadly lacking in the airbag and modern crumple-zone department.

‘Have you fixed the radio yet?’ asked Nightingale.

At some point the Jag had been fitted with a modern radio set, which Nightingale cheerfully admitted he didn’t know how to use. I’d managed to get it turned on but got distracted when Nightingale put us around the Hogarth Roundabout fast enough to smack my head against the side window. I took advantage of a relatively straight bit of road to key into Richmond Borough Command, which was where Nightingale said the trouble was. We caught the tail end of a report delivered in the slightly strangulated tone adopted by someone who’s desperately trying to sound like they’re not panicking. It was something about geese.

‘ Tango Whiskey Three from Tango Whiskey one: say again?’

TW-1 would be the Richmond Duty Inspector in the local control room, TW-3 would be one of the Borough’s Incident Response Vehicles.

‘ Tango Whiskey One from Tango Whiskey Three, we’re down by the White Swan being attacked by the bloody geese .’

‘White Swan?’ I asked.

‘It’s a pub in Twickenham,’ said Nightingale. ‘By the bridge to Eel Pie Island.’

Eel Pie Island I knew to be a collection of boatyards and houses on a river islet barely 500 metres long. The Rolling Stones had once played a gig there, and so had my father — that’s where I knew it from.

‘And the geese?’ I asked.

‘Better than watchdogs,’ said Nightingale. ‘Ask the Romans.’

TW-1 wasn’t interested in the geese; she wanted to know about the crime. There’d been multiple 999 calls twenty minutes earlier, reporting a breach of the peace and possible fighting between groups of youths, which in my experience could turn out to be anything from a hen night gone wrong to foxes turning over rubbish bins.

TW-3 reported seeing a group of IC1 males dressed in jeans and donkey jackets fighting with an unknown number of IC3 females on Riverside Road. IC1 is the identification code for white people, IC3 is black people and if you’re wondering, I tend to jump between IC3 and IC6 — Arabic or North African. It depends on how much sun I’ve caught recently. Black versus white was unusual but not impossible, but I’d never heard of boys versus girls before, and neither had TW-1, who wanted clarification.

‘ Female ,’ reported TW-3. ‘ Definitely female, and one of them is stark naked .’

‘I was afraid of that,’ said Nightingale.

‘Afraid of what?’ I asked.

There was a rush of emptiness outside the Jag as we shot across the Chiswick Bridge. Upstream of Chiswick, the Thames throws a loop northwards around Kew Gardens and we were cutting across the base and aiming for Richmond Bridge.