Dot frowned. Surely that would cause a bad impression.
Lio handed her the letter and then, in a soft voice, asked, ‘Ready, Miss Walcott?’
She almost said no. But, somehow, the way Lio said her name made her want to appear braver and more capable than she was, and so, she nodded and placed the letter in her pocket and hoisted her carpet bag high on her shoulder.
Lio raised his hand over the rune, and the wind kicked up. Chanting came again from some distant place. Dot, now in the eye of the spell, felt the prickly sensation of magic. As if remembering a snippet of a half-forgotten dream, she knew this warmth.
‘Go now,’ said Lio.
She stepped up onto the throne of Saint Penelope, and the moment her foot connected with the cushion, she was sucked clean through the chair and into the whirling darkness beyond.
CHAPTEREIGHT
Dot landed against carpet, her socks slipping, and found herself engulfed by heavy fabric – a curtain? – which she seized to avoid toppling right over. It was dark. The air was thick with the scent of tobacco and liquor and cologne. She heard the noisy burble of a jazz band playing beyond. Dot stood in what she could only describe as a fitting room, though there was no mirror, lamp or hook to hang one’s clothes. Outside of it, glasses clinked. A trombone blared. Dot had the sudden anxious vision of someone else flying in through the portal like a child on some perverse water chute and landing right on top of her. It was this worry that caused her to push out of the fabric and into the chaos beyond.
The Raven’s Attic was kaleidoscopic, and it dazzled her. Flamboyant swarms of ladies, gentlemen and androgyne gentry mingled indiscriminately with the spirits, cackling, playing strange games, perched on leather armchairs, dancing rambunctiously, craning over the bar or else frolicking in the haze of tobacco. Dot had never seen so many spirits in a single room: the largest was the size of a biplane, crouched in the corner, with four pairs of arms wrapped around seven pairs of legs, and huffing smoke from his nose; the smallest sat on the shoulder of a nearby woman and resembled a hat pin. She spotted the musicians in the corner in salmon pink suits, elevated above the crowd. Each strike of thedrums hit her square in the chest and made her feel as if her heart might stop.
Dot wove into the fray, clutching her carpet bag to her chest. She saw a squat woman with black hair sitting on the lap of a man twenty years her junior. She realised after a moment that the woman was Jennifer Balarby, the Prime Minister. She saw Alan Le, the Minister for Education, hanging upside down while a pretty spirit tickled his nose. It was the King, however, who truly shocked Dot. There he was, Ellarde Custre IV, wiry limbed and pug-eyed, sat at a card table with three spirits. He grumbled in a phlegmy voice, ‘Wildes, you rancid cheat. You saw my hand!’
The accused was a hill spirit. She took up the whole left side of the card table and her wide body resembled a meadow stretched over a rocky knoll. The spirit had eyes but no mouth, and yet a cackle came from deep within her, shaking the nearby glassware in its thunderous timbre. The hill spirit leaned forward. Her right side formed a peninsula to scoop the silver pieces toward herself. However, the King snatched an envelope from his pocket and ripped it open. The table exploded. Dot leaped back, though she was one of the few who did; when the smoke cleared, she saw that the table and all of its cards were intact but a chunk of rock had fallen away from the spirit’s shoulder, leaving a craggy cliff. The King took back the silver, and the spirit was replaced by an old woman with a stuffed flamingo in her hair.
‘’Scuse me!’
A red-haired boy who did not match the raucous tableau shoved past Dot and she stumbled. The boy was lost to the throng and then resurfaced again at the room’s far edge before disappearing behind a black curtain.
The club grew hotter as Dot tugged herself through knots of dancing bodies. Her head swelled. Her muscles ached. A pale arm smacked into her face and champagne sprayed down her blouse. Dotdid not see the culprit, though she heard a woman’s laugh, and saw a moustached person with beaded eyelashes glance at her with pity.
She came finally to the edge of the room and, upon spotting an empty armchair, collapsed into it. She took a sip of her tonic. The club was too loud. Too warm. If one more person touched her, she worried she might burst into tears.
What had Lio told her to look for? A door? Then, the red-haired boy was back again. He possessed the blue-eyed, round-cheeked characteristics of Leithian heritage, and appeared not yet seventeen. He held a box of envelopes and wore a look of self-importance. His suit was shabby, but only at the edges: the kind of subtle shabbiness noticeable only to another person who understood the strain of attempting to obscure their own poverty.
He picked up an envelope and called to the party, ‘Duchess Casilda Saad?’
A woman in her fifties came forward, wrapped in a lime green gown.
‘That should solve your husband’s . . . vitality.’
Duchess Saad snatched the envelope. ‘It is for my sister’s husband.’
‘Of course,’ said the boy, though there was the ghost of a smile on his mouth. He leafed around the box and withdrew another envelope. ‘Carrigon Smith?’
Envelope after envelope found its eager recipient. Every now and then the boy would quip about the contents of the spell. Was that allowed? Was there no confidentiality among Magicians? Eventually, the King barked over the crowd: ‘Where is your mistress today, lad?’
‘She has other business.’
‘What a surprise indeed,’ said the King. ‘De León is nothing compared to my Valiente. I keep telling you all.’
‘Certainly, your majesty,’ said the woman with the flamingo in her hair. ‘De León might be the Minister for Sorcerie and Magic, but she is of course no Grand Magician.’
The boy smirked at this. He called the names of foreign dignitaries and politicians and artists, many of whom Dot had read about in the newspaper. There came starlets with thin pencilled eyebrows, men clasping cigars, a controversial dressmaker, opera singers and emperors of commerce, all of them taking their packet spells with nary a flash of a licence. This, Dot was certain, was illegal. Yet, there sat the King. There giggled the Prime Minister. None of the spirits were called, of course. They had their own magic.
The scene had a dreamlike quality, confounding and colourful. Four weeks ago, she had only seen a handful of spirits in her life, and never a single individual of importance.
When the boy was done, he slipped back through the crowd and behind the black curtain. Dot thought she caught the glint of brass. Could that have been a doorknob?
When the boy appeared once more, swimming through the crowd with a fresh crate of envelopes, Dot pulled herself from her chair. She might not find another opportunity.
‘Rin Ottessa?’ the boy called.
