Salamander

The phalanx outside the boy’s door was shoulder-tight and silent. The second officer from the left knew the halls of the hospital well: he had spent a year there as an intern, and he fought against the temptation to turn and look into the room at the boy’s charred, waxy hands. He dared even less mumble his prognosis, that the boy would see in the New Year getting his wrists measured for prosthetics. 

The cohort outside the girl’s room was cut from a different facet of light: five angular figures in heavy cloaks that triggered headaches in anyone who tried to follow their contours too closely. The girl’s condition was beyond the reach of conventional medicine, so the Magic Office had dispatched an honour guard to keep out ill- and well-wishers alike until the appropriate specialist arrived. They stood as motionless as amber. 

A good five minutes’ walk away, at the opposite end of the casualty wing, was a small and bare office containing nothing more than a desk and two chairs. One of the chairs was currently occupied by a man in a faintly glittering grey cloak, slumped into his hands and trying to blot out the world around him. A beat officer stood guard at the door to the room; the other chair was taken by a detective in a battered wax jacket, wracked by an almost uncontrollable danse macabre urge for a cigarette. 

‘Is your name really Etembras?’ the detective said eventually. 

‘Yes,’ the man opposite replied, dredging his face out of his palms. He was used to explaining himself in terms he hoped were less obscure than his actual situation. ‘You know how priests take on different names when they become priests? It’s like that.’ 

‘Priests don’t go by their real names? You’re telling me Father Samuel at St. Giles’ isn’t really called Samuel? You’re going to make me lose my faith, here.’ 

‘Look: I don’t know what your Father Samuel’s real name is. But he’s still a priest. That’s all that matters, isn’t it?’ 

‘Yes. Yes, that is all that matters.’ The detective sighed and spread his hands over the surface of the table. ‘And you are an enshrined wizard, licensed to practise and ratified by the Magic Office, are you not?’ 

Etembras made a low sound into his beard. 

‘I’m sorry: I didn’t quite catch that. What did you say?’ 

‘YES!’ spat the wizard as he suddenly looked up with his eyes red with fatigue. There was a heavy silence in the room, not even broken by the beat officer shifting his feet. 

‘So you recognise that every enshrined wizard is under a duty to keep their staff in a locked cabinet when not in use?’ the detective continued. 

Etembras remained silent. 

‘And that, on 24 December of this year, you retrieved your staff from the locked cabinet in your home and failed to return it to that cabinet, with the result that Noah Barwick, ten, currently in intensive care in this hospital, was able to take possession of that staff and use it to cast a spell on his sister Emily Barwick, eight, currently also in intensive care in this hospital?’ 

‘They were supposed to be in bed,’ through gritted teeth. 

‘They were supposed to be in bed, or you wished they had been in bed? The call to emergency services came at 18:42; hardly a time for children of such an age to be in bed.’ 

Etembras puffed out his chest for the first time and wavered between desperation and defiance. ‘It’s Christmas. The kids wanted to see some tricks, so I showed them a couple of spells: making the decorations dance on the tree, conjuring some indoor fireworks, changing the colour of the fire in the fireplace. Basic stuff, you know? But they loved it.’ 

‘And what happened next?’ The detective sounded on the verge of falling asleep but he kept one eye trained on his suspect. 

‘I really don’t know. I must have nodded off for a moment, and before I knew it, Noah had the staff in his hand and he was screaming and Emily was…was…’ His voice petered out and he stared at the wall. 

The detective ruffled through the file of papers on the desk in front of him and pulled out a single sheet. He stared at it for several seconds, his gaze flitting between the evidence and his suspect. ‘So…your version is that you don’t know what happened. This is the description of the scene of the accident filed by the arresting officer. It states that the children and the staff were found in the front room and that you were found asleep at the kitchen table, on which was a mostly empty bottle of sherry and a glass.’ 

‘I was just having a little tipple…it’s Christmas…’ Etembras felt as though he were being slowly wrung out like a wet rag. 

There was a knock at the door. The detective stuck his head in the doorway to listen to the nurse and gave a few brief nods. ‘Noah has come out of surgery now,’ returning to his seat. ‘They were unable to save his hands. Blood vessels cooked to charcoal, apparently. This has already gone further than child endangerment.’ 

Etembras leaned forward and the first crystals of a smile appeared at the corner of his mouth. ‘But I can make him new hands! Hands just like his old ones, or made of metal and intricate machinery with the strength of a grown man…hands that can create sparks to light fires and hands that can play music just by drawing in the air…’ He could not keep the wonder from his voice. 

The detective gave him a dead stare. ‘You still don’t appear to appreciate the seriousness of the situation here. I am going to do my level best to make sure you never even touch a staff again.’ He got up and walked out, leaving Etembras alone in the interview room. 

The light in the room felt very aggressive and Etembras could swear he could hear it, although maybe that was the grip of the intense tiredness, the growing hangover and the crash from the adrenaline of the arrest. His staff had been seized in evidence and he did not fancy his chances at overpowering the two officers posted outside the door. There was nothing to do but wait: wait for the detective to return with fresh damning evidence against him; wait for the children’s parents to burst through the door and throttle him and claw at his face; wait for some distant and blessed sleep to claim him even for an hour. He felt worm-eaten on the inside and tried to think back to when the first seeds of the rot had been sown. When he had flown the nest and arrived for his first term at magic school, his world had blossomed from black coffee, boiled vegetables and prayers to as many cheap and colourful drinks as his stipend would allow, late nights and whole months with the fast-forward button glued down. Setting up court in the corner of the student bar with his friends and making the pool balls orbit each other above the table, then sitting in the armchair in his room looking out of the window at the stars with a nightcap in his hand. Three years later, he had pooled the strength of his mind to hold open the doors of the last metro of the evening so he could make it to the late-night shop on his way home. At some point bobbing in the blur of the intervening years, he had practised his cracked and weak voice before calling a friend and saying he was too ill to make their birthday, before hanging up and turning to the full, frosted bottle on his desk with a smile. 

He started to wonder what magic meant. The textbook definition of knitting and casting forth the invisible filaments of energy teased from the cloth of the universe seemed tepid. The marvel it triggered was always in the eye of the beholder: Etembras himself could not remember the last time he had cast a spell and felt imbued with the energy of the moment. He had become accustomed to seeing himself conjure from a distance, though a thick and deadening fog. The real magic, in its lambency and its refulgence and its joy, came with the first shot of the evening. It coaxed his stiff blood to life; it lifted the glare of the world the scant inches from his shoulders that let him breathe; it glazed the hard edges of silence with song. So he had kept feeding the squat salamander he had allowed into his belly even as its skin seared his insides into ash and it kept growling and thrashing in hunger. One day, he knew, it would chew its way out through him and he would be a bloated and weeping chrysalis cast to the winds. He caught his fingers trembling against the tabletop and squeezed them into a fist. 

There was an abrupt wrench in the energies surrounding Etembras and he felt something tugging at him, trying to lift him from his seat and pull him through the wall. The detective had not returned and Etembras could not see through the small window in the interview room door, but he knew that the Archmage had come. Come to minister to the girl and draw the skein of the spell from her body. Etembras felt his presence as a tall, black flame with a scarlet core shimmering on the other side of the wall, clad in a cloud of interference and radio chatter. He sat motionless as the flame walked past the interview room and stopped directly in front of him. He felt the voice gnaw at the base of his skull. 

Fool. 

So Emily would now live, or she would not, or she would be restored to a wizened and fragile carapace that wore her face but only mimicked her soul like a forest bird mimicking speech. The detective would return and add fresh charges to the list and Etembras would be taken to a place of concrete and cold water and silence. There was a kick in his belly as the salamander stirred.