‘You told us, Miss Dorothy,’ said the spirit, ‘that when you were fourteen, you imagined a voice in the ocean. I had wonderedprivately, for quite some time, if it wasnotyour imagination – if perhapsmy kindhad played a role in your affliction. I did my own research. I interviewed perhaps fifty spirits. I personally have never heard of any incident of a spirit changing a human’s magic until, at last, I was in Mistress Theodora’s attic the night that Opal Weyer attacked me. I had received a message from a friend at the Ollianne Shrine. A friend who has a friend who lives near the South Sea who knows the Ancients well.’
Dot thought of the mosaics in Saint Penelope’s Cathedral, the swirling, enormous beasts depicted in cut tile. She thought of the notes and tomes in Archie’s room. The Ancients had always seemed to her as far away as faerie stories.
‘It wasn’t any old sea spirit you met that day, Miss Dorothy,’ said Belchamber, ‘it wastheSouth Sea Spirit. An Ancient as old as the ocean from which She receives Her name.’
He rose and reached for a mirror that Theodora had procured for him. The little spirit held it up and brushed his hand against the glass. A view of the Ollianne Shrine revealed itself and the spirit said: ‘Her acolytes have arrived in Alliaster.’
Belchamber showed them the large expanse of ocean lapping at the shrine edges, covering the city of Alliaster beyond. The very tips of the tallest buildings peeked out from the sea. Belchamber panned, then, to reveal the foreground: over the stone balustrades of the shrine, strange white creatures scuttled. They plopped into the ocean, scurrying this way and that, distressed. The smallest were darker, with black talons and strange but colourful scales. Dot looked down at her own talons.
‘Is that what I am to become?’ asked Dot, realising.
‘It seems that when Her acolytes were touched by Her, they transformed immediately,’ said Belchamber. ‘It is very strange indeed that you have accessed the Ancient’s magic and yet, here you arewith your faculties intact. It is unlikely that Opal Weyer will find herself as fortunate.’
Theodora’s brow furrowed. ‘Why, Belchamber?’
‘The metamorphosis of a creature touched by an Ancient is usually like a flame to flypaper,’ said Belchamber. ‘Miss Opal, too, is already becoming an acolyte.’
‘What are the acolytes, exactly?’ asked Dot.
‘The Ancient’s children,’ he said. ‘The acolytes’ lives are bound to Her. Some are very old – perhaps they were the first humans who ever walked upon this land. Do they remember their faraway lives? If they do, they have no speech to reveal it.
‘This is what I learned from my friend up in the attic that night. This is the only explanation for your magic, Miss Dorothy. This is why Salamander is interested in it. You share it with the ancient South Sea Spirit.’
Dot’s face had gone very pale. She stared down at her afflicted hand, which had become so normal to her.
‘The fate of these acolytes is one you might yet avoid, Miss Dorothy, if you do not use the Ancient Spirit’s magic too willingly. You offer Miss Weyer unusual protection – a softening, perhaps, to the magic, as she accesses it through you. A balancing. Mistress Theodora,’ said Belchamber, turning to the witch, ‘did we not speak together, time and time again, about the oddness of a lack of research on Miss Dorothy’s condition? How in the world, we wondered, could there be no scholarly findings, no books, no anecdotes? Well we at last have our answer. Those touched by an Ancient Spirit are, invariably, turned from flesh to scale in an instant, their humanity stripped so quick they have nary a moment to write it down.’
With this truth revealed, the five of them worked into the night. Dot weakly practised her magic, balancing the warm and cool poolsand casting spells one by one. As she did so, she told the others what she had remembered about the hierarchy of spirits.
‘Thistlethwaite,’ said Dot excitedly, ‘is over two thousand years old. And if we can find your contract, Theodora, I think she can break it.’
The witch, quite at a loss for words it seemed, took a moment – then, she shook away her surprise and disbelief and gave a determined nod and sprang to action. Theodora sketched out the diagram of Hemmington’s department store, tracing out the path they would take to find the contract. Lio, Belchamber and Archie chimed in, offering thoughts or suggestions as their grand plan took shape.
Stephen had eaten his dinner in the kitchen alone and then retreated to his bedroom.
Theodora scried the members of her empire with increasing fervour. Through the hand mirror, she called out to the ex-bartenders from the Raven’s Attic, her colleagues from the Royal Institute of Magic, her remaining friends from the art studio. Piece by piece, Theodora – with suggestions and encouragement from the others – sewed together an understanding of what had happened to the city. They glimpsed snatches of the ocean outside of living room windows. They saw, once or twice, strange creatures with white scales scuttling along the glass. The surviving Alliastrans were quite safe. They had been delivered food and water. They had been given packet spells to seal their windows. Their protection was all thanks to Salamander, they had been told. Out of desperation, they had begun writing letters and shoving them through their letter slots and out into the sea. The oxygen would run out eventually. Something further needed to be done, and more and more, they believed that the daemon was the one to do it.
The group worked long into the night, plotting their route from the Ollianne Shrine through to Hemmington’s department store. They scried with the spirits who had taken refuge upon thehill at the Ollianne Shrine. Thistlethwaite agreed to help them break Theodora’s contract on the condition that if the tea shop were ever rebuilt, she would be allowed to smack customers if they were rude to her. Theodora had not been sure if the grumpy spirit was joking, but she agreed to Thistlethwaite’s demand anyway.
At last they all fell into a fitful sleep. The sun was rising when Dot woke. Fatigue lay heavy over her bones. To even turn her head was agony, and yet she pulled herself from the couch and drank down her tonic and, upon spotting Theodora through the window, took up the blanket, wrapped it around herself and stumbled across to the door of the cottage. When she sat beside the witch, she noticed that Theodora had put her earrings back in.
‘Whenever I feel anxious, I imagine I am back,’ said Theodora, watching the blackbirds. ‘Back with my mother and father, in this quiet place, making shortbread or picking chives. That must be why I sent the portal here.’
The witch rested her eyes for a moment.
‘I thought,’ said Theodora with a bitter smile, ‘that if I ever returned, they would be so happy to see me. What an empty daydream. My mother died, Dorothy. Three years ago, without a big announcement in the paper or a bomb exploding or any fanfare at all, and I did not notice.’
‘You couldn’t have known,’ said Dot. She pulled the blanket tighter and a pinch of pain lanced up her hand.
‘What kind of daughter was I?’ asked Theodora.
Dot thought of Rupert then, and his mother red in the face and screaming.
‘What kind of a parent forces their own child to flee from them?’
‘My choices were my own,’ said Theodora.
‘You were ten,’ said Dot. Her eyes ached. All of this would catch up with her, she knew. The grief, the fatigue. It was a problem for later. They had a plan, and she had five bottles of tonic packed intoborrowed coat pockets. Dot looked at the witch. ‘I’ve watched your father these past days. He should be overjoyed that you are here, and yet he has ignored you. Is this why you feel that you must solve everything on your own? Theodora, you do not need to be a scholar and a minister and a painter and a Magician and every possible thing you can imagine, in order to simply be enough.’
