“I have it!” said Damerell quickly. “Zacharias will give the speech in your stead.”
Zacharias had been making swift progress on his boiled fowl as his friends argued. At this he sat bolt upright. “Hold up!”
“I was about to suggest that you might do it, but that is an even better notion,” said Rollo to Damerell. “Landing the Sorcerer Royal would be a coup for that headmistress. Aunt Georgiana could have no reason to object.”
He looked relieved. Damerell could be a froward customer when he chose, but you could rely upon Zacharias. Sort of fellow who would lend you a guinea and never ask to see it again. He would certainly help a friend in need.
But Zacharias had no compunction in disenchanting Rollo.
“It is out of the question,” he said. “There is this business of the Committee of Thaumaturgical Standards to settle, and I have a meeting with John Edgeworth tomorrow.”
“I am not meant to go down for a fortnight yet,” said Rollo hopefully.
“No one could reproach you for your absence from London, with such excellent reason to be gone,” added Damerell. “Your visit would be as good as a tonic for the young ladies’ constitutions. The inmates of every good girls’ school are perpetually on the brink of expiring from boredom, and you would stir them up nicely. Women find you so frightening, and so romantic.”
“Indeed, Zacharias, I have no notion what I will do if you do not help me,” pleaded Rollo. “A speech is nothing to a fellow like you, but imagine me standing up before a pack of ravening schoolgirls! I expect I shall go into a decline before I ever reach the school.”
Zacharias glared at them. “Much as you are to be pitied, Rollo, I have a great many things to attend to, and I have no intention of delaying them to make a cake of myself before a parcel of schoolgirls.”
“But—”
“Let us have an end to this, if you please,” said Zacharias. “I have heard enough. You must simply give this speech yourself, for I will not do it, and that is my final word on the matter.”
3
EDGEWORTHHADNOTtroubled to confirm the time of day when Zacharias might expect him, but he did not leave Zacharias in suspense for very long. Zacharias had not been in his study for an hour when his manservant knocked on the door, begging pardon for interrupting. Mr. Edgeworth had arrived with his guests.
“Foreign gentlemen, sir, two of them,” said Simpson. He hesitated. “And a lady—I believe the wife of one of the gentlemen.”
Zacharias saw the reason for his hesitation soon enough. The two gentlemen Edgeworth ushered into the room were impressively attired in rich foreign dress, but it was the fourth member of the party who made Zacharias stare.
“Your Highness, may I present to you Mr. Wythe, our Sorcerer Royal?” said Edgeworth, addressing the more gorgeous of the two gentlemen.
“Sultan Ahmad governs the island of Janda Baik in the Malaccan Strait,” he added, turning to Zacharias. “His companion is Mr. Othman,and this is his royal wife. I hope you do not object to Her Highness’s joining us. The sultan cannot be comfortable leaving her alone in a foreign land, as I am sure you will understand.”
Edgeworth’s pointed look recalled Zacharias to his manners, and he averted his eyes from the sultana, his cheeks warm. She was a pretty creature, very young, but it was her incongruously large belly that had drawn his gaze. It seemed extraordinary that she should have undertaken the rigours of travel in her condition.
“Yes, of course,” he said. “Pray take a seat, Your Highness. I beg you will not be concerned by the skull at the window—it is only a harmless relic. In life it belonged to Felix Longmire, who was exceedingly mild-tempered as Sorcerers Royal go.”
This did not seem to assuage his visitors’ nervousness. Zacharias’s study bore the marks of his predecessors, whose taste had run decidedly stoicheiotical. They had had a fondness for skulls with burning lights in their eye sockets, crystal balls in which mysterious shapes came and went, and dark velvet window curtains traced with obscure runes.
Though Zacharias had asserted himself so far as to cover the walls in a light sprigged paper, which did wonders for the room, the study was still wont to induce unease in the unmagical. His guests sat at the edge of their seats, drawing their feet away from the mystic sigils inscribed upon the floor.
Zacharias was scarcely more comfortable than they. At least it did not seem likely that Edgeworth would confront Zacharias with the dwindling of English magic, since he had brought a foreign potentate with him. But if Edgeworth had not discovered their crisis of magical resource, then his visit must be for the usual reason the Government sought out the Sorcerer Royal—in reliance upon that magic, and in expectation that it should be used for whatever purpose the Government deemed best.
“Janda Baik, alas, is beset with magical difficulties,” beganEdgeworth unpromisingly. “When Sultan Ahmad approached us for assistance—for His Highness knows what an interest we take in everything concerning his nation—I told him I knew just the fellow to help him. Mr. Wythe would settle these wretched females in a trice!”
“Wretched females?” said Zacharias, glancing at the globe by his desk. Janda Baik was a minute speck in the Malay archipelago, so small it seemed hardly to merit a name—but to the east lay the riches of China; to the west, the vast waters of the Indian Ocean, to which Bonaparte had such convenient access from the Isle de France. The reasons for the Government’s tender concern for Janda Baik were obvious.
“I daresay the trouble is best explained by the sultan himself,” said Edgeworth.
The sultan was a slender, handsome man, not much older than his wife. Though he had looked askance at Zacharias upon their introduction—a black man could not have been his idea of Britain’s first magician—his manner was courteous when he spoke. Mr. Othman interpreted.
“Our kingdom is afflicted by a group of old women who profess to practise magic,” Sultan Ahmad began. “Aunts and grandmothers, whom we have tolerated out of respect for their great age, and because we believed they did no harm with their chantments.”
“Witches, in short!” interjected Edgeworth, who was enough of a thaumaturge to grimace at the notion. Nothing disgusted a thaumaturge so much as a witch. Shameless, impudent, meddling females, who presumed to set at naught the Society’s prohibition on women’s magic, and duped the common people with their potions and cantrips!
“At first they contented themselves with rain-making and wave-settling, to which we made no objection, since it pleased the people,” continued the sultan. “But now we have reason to regret our magnanimity. Of late our witches have entered into commerce with evil spirits, even taking these creatures into their own homes. We find ourselvesoverrun by monsters! The lamiae swarm our isle, so that decent people cannot sleep peacefully for fear they will be devoured in the night. It is to succour our people that we travelled here to seek assistance.”
