Ben Aaronovitch - Broken Homes

‘And what else?’ asked Nightingale.

‘It’s your wizard’s staff,’ said Lesley.

‘Well done,’ said Nightingale.

‘The cadwallopper,’ I said, and when Lesley raised what was left of her eyebrow I added, ‘A stick for walloping cads.’

‘And the source of a wizard’s power,’ said Nightingale.

Using magic has a very specific limitation. If you overdo it your brain turns into Swiss cheese. Hyperthaumaturgical degradation, Dr Walid calls it, and he has some brains in a drawer which he whips out at the slightest excuse to show young apprentices. The rule of thumb with brain injuries is that by the time you feel anything, the damage is already done. So a practitioner of the arts tends to err on the side of caution. This can cause tension when, for the sake of argument, two Tiger tanks emerge suddenly from the treeline on a rainy night in 1945. In order to be the hero of Boy’s Own Weekly and still have an intact brain, a sensible wizard carries a staff in which he has personally imbued a great deal of power.

Don’t ask me what kind of power that is, because the only thing I’ve got that can detect it is Toby the Dog. I’d love to stick some high vestigia material into a mass spectrometer, but first I’d have to get myself a mass spectrometer and then I’d have to learn enough physics to interpret the bloody results.

Nightingale took his walking stick over to one of the workbenches, unscrewed the top and clamped the stick part in a vice. Then, taking a hammer and chisel, he cracked it along its length to reveal a dull gun-metal blue core the thickness of a pencil.

‘This is the heart of the staff,’ he said and fished a magnifying glass out of a nearby drawer. ‘Have a closer look.’

We took it in turns. The surface of the core had faint but distinct ripples of shade that appeared to spiral up its length.

‘What’s it made of?’ asked Lesley as she looked.

‘Steel,’ said Nightingale.

‘Folded steel,’ I said. ‘Like a samurai sword.’

‘It’s called pattern welding,’ said Nightingale. ‘Different steel alloys, forge-welded in a deliberate pattern. Done correctly it creates a matrix that retains magic so that a master can draw upon it later.’

With a great saving on wear and tear of the brain, I thought.

‘How do you get the magic in?’ asked Lesley.

‘While you’re forging it,’ said Nightingale and mimed using a hammer. ‘You use a third-order spell to raise the forge temperature and another to keep it hot while you hammer the work.’

‘What about the magic?’ I asked.

‘It derives, or so I was taught, from the spells you use during the forging,’ he said.

Lesley rubbed her face. ‘How long will that take?’ she asked.

‘This staff will take upwards of three months.’ He saw our expressions. ‘Working say an hour or two a day. One has to avoid overdoing the magic otherwise the purpose of the staff becomes moot.’

‘And we’re going to make a staff each?’ she asked.

‘Eventually, yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘But first you’re going to watch and learn.’

Faintly we heard the phone ringing in the distance and all turned to the doorway and waited for Molly to appear. When she did she inclined her head at Nightingale indicating that the call was for him.

We followed at a discreet distance in the hope of overhearing the conversation.

‘I knew I should have paid more attention in D amp;T,’ said Lesley.

We were already on the landing when Nightingale called us down. We found him standing with the phone in his hand, a look of total amazement on his face.

‘We have a report of a rogue magician,’ he said.

Me and the rogue magician stared at each other in mutual incomprehension. He was wondering why the hell there was a police officer sitting by his bed and I was wondering where the hell this guy had come from.

His name was George Nolfi and he was an ordinary-looking white man in his late sixties — sixty-seven according to my notes. His hair was thinning but still mostly brown, he had blue eyes and a face that had obviously gone for a gaunt old age rather than jowls. His hands were bandaged from the wrist down so that only the tips of his fingers showed — occasionally he held them up and examined them with a look of utter surprise on his face. My notes said that he’d suffered second-degree burns to his hands during the ‘incident’, but that nobody else had been injured although several young children had been treated for shock.

‘Why don’t you tell me what happened?’ I said.

‘You won’t believe me,’ he said.

‘You made a ball of fire appear out of thin air,’ I said. ‘See, I believe you — this sort of thing happens all the time.’

He stared at me stupidly. We get this a lot even from people with some experience of the supernatural — bugger that — we get this from people who are supernatural.

He was from Wimbledon and was a retired chartered surveyor. He wasn’t on our list of Little Crocodiles. In fact he’d been educated at Leeds University, and the Nolfi name was not listed amongst the rolls of Nightingale’s old school or the Folly. And yet he’d conjured a fireball in the living room of his daughter’s house — it had all been captured on camcorder.

‘Have you ever done it before?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But not since I was a boy.’

I made a note. Nightingale and Lesley were even then going through his house looking for books on magic, vestigium hotspots, lacuna , household gods and malign spirits. Nightingale had made my job clear; first establish what Mr Nolfi had done, then why he had done it and, finally, how had he known how to do it.

‘It was Gabriella’s birthday party,’ he said. ‘She’s my granddaughter. Delightful child but, being six, a bit of a handful. Have you got any children?’

‘Not yet,’ I said.

‘En masse a room full of six-year-old girls can be a daunting prospect, so I may have fortified myself with a tad more sherry than I meant to,’ he said. ‘There was a problem with the cake.’

Even worse, the lights had already been switched off in anticipation of its entrance and candles lit, accompanied by a chorus of ‘Happy Birthday to You (Squashed Tomatoes and Stew)’.

And so Mr Nolfi, granddad, was instructed to keep the children entertained while the problem was sorted out.

‘And I remembered this trick that I used to do when I was a boy,’ he said. ‘It seemed like a good idea at the time. I got their attention, not an easy thing, mind you, rolled up my sleeves and said the magic word.’

‘What was the magic word?’ I asked.

‘ Lux !’ he said. ‘It’s Latin for light.’

But of course I knew that already. It’s also the first forma that a classically trained apprentice wizard learns. I asked Mr Nolfi what he’d expected to happen.

‘I used to be able to make a fairy light,’ he said. ‘It used to keep my sister amused.’

A bit of prodding revealed that he only knew the one spell and that he’d stopped performing it once he was sent off to school.

‘Mine was a Catholic school,’ he said. ‘They took a dim view of dabbling in the occult — or even just dabbling, to be honest. The headmaster believed that if you’re going to do something you should do it all the way.’

He gave me details of the school, but warned me that it had closed due to a scandal in the late 1960s. ‘Headmaster had his hand in the till,’ he said.

‘So who did you learn this magic trick from?’ I asked.

‘From my mother of course,’ said Mr Nolfi.

‘From his mother,’ said Nightingale.

‘So he says,’ I said.

We were in the so-called private dining room where we were all eating- to be honest we weren’t sure what it was, Molly was experimenting again. Shanks of lamb, according to Lesley, casseroled with something fishy, possibly anchovies, possibly sardines and two scoops of mashed- I said swede but Nightingale insisted at least one of them was parsnip.