Sorcery of the Stony Heart Read online

  Sorcery of the Stony Heart

  A Novella

  Kevan Dale

  Copyright © 2018 by Kevan Dale

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-7329853-0-8

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, businesses, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Contents

  1. The Man With the Crooked Leg

  2. Confiscation of Tomes

  3. Dwimmeresque

  4. Art Demands

  5. As London Slept

  6. A Walled-in Garden

  7. Harmonious Entrainment

  8. The Demise of Heggen

  9. Blossoms of Flame

  10. Stony Ground Indeed

  11. Unseen, Unheard, Unspoken

  12. Leave Sorcery to the Sorcerer

  13. English Magic

  14. Asps and Adders

  15. A Public Spectacle

  16. Driverless

  17. Hearts Brimming with Courage

  18. A Dark Key

  A Word From Kevan

  A Quick Favor?

  Also By Kevan Dale

  1

  The Man With the Crooked Leg

  Autumn, 1735

  Evening stole across London by degree, leaving first the river, then the bridges, streets, and alleys, and eventually the chimneys, steeples, and towers in dusky shadow. Such fading of the light crept earlier each day as winter neared, as if the chill wind fingering collars and prying at pane and jamb weren’t proof enough. As the gloaming deepened, no one gave much thought—at first—to the man with the crooked leg.

  No gentleman was he, the tattered coat and stained breeches made plain. Normally, the destitute, if noticed as anything more than obstacles to achieve hurried distance from, faded from memory faster than daylight left the late autumn sky. Yet the man with the crooked leg—eyed, avoided, averted—remained rather stubbornly in the back of the mind even as his slouching gait receded into the darkness and bustle.

  A glimpse of his face—slack, pale, and scarred—engendered little in the way of pity. And if any of the men and women who passed him by held even the smallest flame of curiosity as to his condition—A luckless soldier? Laborer bereft by gruesome accident? Malformed by the Lord at birth?—such questions drifted from their minds along with the breath that drifted from their mouths. A shape, a curl, then nothing as night consumed it.

  And yet.

  The lawyer from Holborn Hill, who’d grunted his way past the man with the crooked leg, unhappy to find himself slowed for even a minute, spent the hours leading up to midnight holding the small bottle of poison he’d stolen, his mind settled after so many months. As he imagined the face of his employer—one Jedidiah Croft, Esq.—growing mottled red and then purple before collapsing onto his writing desk, the lawyer recalled the milky eye of the man with the crooked leg, an empty window into a plague house.

  The young mother, who’d recoiled at the unwashed stench of the man with the crooked leg, putting the collar of her cloak to her nose and mouth as she passed behind him at the corner of Chancery Lane and Carey Street, later wondered how far he’d ended up shuffling as she stared at little Geoffrey’s crib. She also caught herself thinking, again, how much more peaceful her life might be were her sister’s three squalling children smothered and in their graves.

  Two sailors from Philadelphia, primed with ale and rum from the Duck and Drake, ready to explore the alehouses and taverns of the Strand until their ship, the Pearl, slipped its lines and set out into the restless gales of the grey North Sea come dawn, would both quietly believe they saw his sallow face peering at them through the smoky public rooms again that evening—shortly before their argument escalated into a broken bottle, a severed artery, and iron manacles. The Pearl sailed without them.

  So it went. Chance encounters. Dark keys—perhaps already well burnished, perhaps newly discovered—examined and considered. Some slid into a shadowy lock—and turned, click. Others slipped away out of guilt, or shame, or fear of damnation. But none tossed aside, only secreted away for the time being.

  For the man with the crooked leg was more generous than anyone might have guessed—a locksmith was he, ready to unbolt the darkest urges of the heart, sharing his craft with all who crossed his path. A key here, a key there. One for you, and here’s one for you, of course. Please, take.

  He fancied his name might have been Charity.

  Still, he had a promise to keep—and a special key to deliver. As the fog rolled in off the Thames, the man with the crooked leg limped from lane to street to alleyway, quite content as the lanterns strained against the thickening night, always with a dark gift for those he passed along the way.

  2

  Confiscation of Tomes

  The dust puffed in a rolling cloud. A fine skein of it landed on the glass of the lantern, another on the front of August Swaine’s waistcoat and jacket, and still more in his hair. He blinked.

  “Oh, dear. Didn’t think about that.” Phineas Hozier sputtered for a moment, his mouth searching for the always elusive letter P. “P-p-pardon me, Mr. Swaine, sir.” He lowered the book and set to brushing Swaine’s jacket with his fingers, wrinkling his nose at the residual dust still hanging in the air.

  Swaine raised his hand. “That’s quite all right. Don’t trouble yourself.”

  “Just take a moment, sir.”

  “I’ll survive. Thank you. Please. Yes, that’s fine. Let’s get on with it, shall we?” It required a pair of steps back before Hozier relented, evidently unhappy about leaving the job half-finished. “That is the Hill volume?”

  Hozier looked down at the book in his hand, the noteworthy span of his nose veering like the prow of a ship tacking into the wind. His uneven eyes widened as though the sight of the book struck him with the thrill of discovery all over again. “Ah, yes. Derrik Hill. As I said, sir.” He lifted the weighty book and caught himself just prior to blowing the dust from the cover and spine a second time, settling for wiping the leather with his palm in a series of fussy circles.

  Behind him, a wall-length trio of bookshelves rose to the ceiling of the narrow alcove. Each shelf—dusty as the Hill volume—bore a most arresting assemblage of books on magic. Under the Confiscation of Tomes on Conjury and Magick Acts, possession of such volumes by a subject of the Crown was made criminal in 1649, punished by fines and imprisonment upon discovery. While the University of Cambridge was, in secret, granted sole permission to maintain the collection of books confiscated by the Acts, a brisk and illicit market for such works had continued in the intervening decades, necessitating the onerous precautions and security surrounding the University’s collection. The visit hadn’t come easily—nor cheaply.

  That Swaine found the shelves sagging underneath four fraudulent tomes for every one genuine article didn’t surprise him. Oh, there were the obvious real volumes one would expect to find in such a collection: works by Gustav Koeffler, Alfred Summerfield, Thomas Wexler, Jérome Barnave, Ephraim Rush, and others. Fine, as far as they went—Swaine had read most of them when he’d still been a lad in Lincoln and had long since moved on to more obscure works.

  None of those presented themselves amongst the dozens upon dozens of counterfeit tomes with such ridiculous titles as Sorceries & Hexes for the Versant Conjurer, The Law of Inerrant Devilrie, and Vile Keys to Wi
tchcraft. Books whose purview and pedigree hardly merited any place on any bookshelf, let alone being held under lock and key within the Acts collection. Whatever purpose they’d been written for—bilking the foolish out of money, frightening the lustful out of (or perhaps into) someone else’s undergarments, goosing the attendance in nave and chapel by those underwhelmed by pastors’ more mundane admonitions on the fragility of the soul—had nothing to do with actual magic or, heaven forfend, sorcery.

  Still, even a handful of worthless stones might contain a gem, should one know where to look.

  Swaine took the book from Hozier. The words Spelles of Elemental Transferrence were embossed into the faded leather of the cover. Hill’s work was nearly impossible to come by. But one run of his lone volume had been printed, totaling ninety copies. In the intervening half-century, beyond the more prosaic fates of silverfish, flood, and confiscation, there had been the dreadful problem of the magic within the book itself over-spilling its bindings, as it were. The precise defect appeared to involve a transcription of a spell mellifluously named ‘Hallowed Shallows of Shadowed Halos.’ It was a clever—perhaps too clever—interpretation of a classic tracking spell, which leveraged the principles of transferrent adaption to divine the comings and goings of a targeted victim. Said victim would, ideally, be unaware of the curious patch of shadow that trailed several feet behind their head. Due to a flaw in the printing, or so Hill had claimed for the remainder of his short life, it wasn’t uncommon for the book to seep shadows, often to the point where it became impossible to find. More alarming, a similar untamed expression of magic was tied to another spell within the volume: ‘The Unquenchable Raven of Fire.’

  Swaine opened the book with care.

  It appeared to be genuine and intact. The print still read well; the paper, while crisp, wasn’t damaged; and the bindings hadn’t loosened.

  “Well done, Mr. Hozier,” he said.

  “I knew the name sounded f-f-familiar, sir.”

  Swaine scanned several pages. Yes, this was what he’d been looking for. Hill’s reputation had been damaged by being the author of a frequently disappearing and occasionally self-immolating book; a book that any experienced practitioner of the unseen arts would think twice before introducing to their own collection—let alone their dwelling. Nevertheless, his research into the realm of alchemical influences on the principle of transferrent adaption had proven to be well ahead of his contemporaries. Swaine had sought a copy of the book for well over a decade.

  “It’s kept in a—” Hozier began.

  Swaine flipped a few more pages while man tamed his stammer and continued.

  “Box. A b-b-box, sir. Lead-lined iron.”

  “Yes, prudent.” Swaine closed the volume and tucked it under his arm. “Wouldn’t want to burn down the University’s library, now would we?”

  “So it’s true, sir? Amazing. T-truly amazing. All of it.” Hozier crossed his arms and shook his head, putting in mind a sparrow in a birdbath shaking off drops of water.

  Prize tucked under his arm, Swaine paced the shelves, scanning the titles, not expecting to be excited about any of the book’s brethren. Still, he always looked. “And they’re all accounted for?”

  “Every one, sir. Every three months I make the accounting—though I’ve only done it the once. So far, they’re all there.”

  “Never an unexpected guest?”

  “By guest I take it you mean book, sir?”

  “Indeed I do.”

  Hozier shook his head. “Th-th-th-they come in only by decree, sir. Authorized by His Majesty’s man.”

  “The Earl of Middlesex. Yes, I understand.”

  “A whole procedure is required. And there hasn’t been one in a decade, I understand.”

  “So if one—appeared, you or your predecessor would know it within months.”

  “As I said, sir—they don’t just appear.”

  Swaine arched an eyebrow, wondering. “Of course you’re right.” Satisfied that the contents of the collection matched the secretive list that Hozier had provided him the week before, he spun on his heel and slid the Hill inside his frock coat. “My gratitude knows no bounds, Mr. Hozier.”

  “And you’ll have it back within the week, sir?”

  “To the hour.”

  “My employment will depend upon it, sir.”

  “You have no reason to worry, my good man. A book in my hands is safer than a sleeping babe in the arms of her nursemaid.”

  Hozier lowered his voice to a near whisper. “And—well, the other detail in our bargain, sir? The com-com—”

  “Compensation? Why, of course.” Swaine pulled out a small leather sack containing twenty guineas. The weight of it reminded him it was nearly the last of his money, most of it having gone to books, and little more on the horizon. The countess who’d kept him funded for the prior two years had finally tired of his unwillingness to submit to her romantic overtures. Making matters worse, an intemperate use of magic on his part had drawn the scrutiny of the authorities, thereby cutting off other avenues of making more money through his practice of the unseen arts. Thus, his vow to get by on one meal each day, to steep his tea half a dozen times to stretch it out, to bear the chill left by a barren coal shuttle, to patch his clothing as best he might. A fragile plan. But as far as he saw it, he had little choice. Books were his food, work his sustenance. The rest would have to sort itself out.

  Still, as the money left his hand, a flutter of anxiety, apparently deaf to his dedication and ideals, twisted his stomach.

  Hozier nodded thanks and half-bowed, sliding the sack into his pocket with his spidery fingers. “Have to check it’s there later, won’t I?” he said with a nervous laugh. “Dealing with a magician, as it were. Could appear back where it came from. Spells.”

  Swaine straightened his spine. “In the first place, Mr. Hozier, I am a practitioner of the unseen arts, not a magician. And in the second, my word is without reproach, as you shall see.”

  Hozier waved his fingers as though unconsciously mimicking his notion of spellcasting. “I beg your p-p-pardon, sir. Merely a jest. There was, however, the other aspect of our deal, sir. Not to imply you’ve forgotten, of course.”

  Swaine struggled to not roll his eyes. “Yes, of course. I hadn’t forgotten, Mr. Hozier. Arrive at my rooms at half past two tomorrow afternoon.”

  Hozier’s eyes blinked as though struggling to contain the unadulterated excitement that appeared in them. Swaine didn’t want to know what went through the poor fellow’s mind.

  “Should I dress in any particular fashion, sir?” Hozier whispered.

  “How you dress is immaterial.”

  “I don’t have finery, sir.”

  “As I said.”

  While Hozier’s tongue seemed to have gotten away from him—perhaps his stammer grew more combative as his cheeks flushed—Swaine nodded his thanks and goodnight. He let himself out of the Acts collection and made his way through the darkened stacks of the empty library, deathly quiet at midnight, his mind already preparing to tussle with the infamous Spelles of Elemental Transferrence.

  3

  Dwimmeresque

  The mind is a forge.

  Kept properly stoked, it is capable of releasing base ideas from their rigid state, ready to be hammered into new shapes, new tools, new instruments. Left to cool, such transformation is hopeless, and one has little choice but to accept the world as presented. August Swaine kept his mind white hot, as evidenced by the quarters he inhabited above Billiter Square, in sight of the Tower. Books laid claim to every free vertical surface, an occupying army bivouacked across three dim rooms. Mantle, writing desk, table, cupboard, sill, and even stretches of the timeworn flooring vanished beneath the stacks. Particular passages marked with scraps of paper, old quills, ribbons, stray threads, thin nails—and in one case, a fish bone. Kindling for his mind.

  And like a proper smith, additional tools of various utility sat within reach. Bouquets of quills. Inkpots. Sheaves
of paper in quality ranging from correspondence-worthy to alleyway-toss-off. Magnifying glass. Tinderbox, lantern, candle. Rows of bottles, vials, and snuffboxes, carefully labeled, containing powder, tincture, or flecks in a painter’s palette of hues. Book-sized slabs of marble bore the scars and scorches of scores of experiments.

  Yet one might think that to watch Swaine at work would have none of the drama of the blacksmith—the clang, the heat, the sparks, the subtle shadings of heated metal lighting the scene, the display of exertion and strength, man subjecting normally unyielding material to his will. A veritable glimpse of the engine of civilization itself, iconic and singular. Yet Swaine, to outward appearances a slender gentleman of measured bearing with a glint of unwavering intelligence in his gaze, had but two soft hands unscarred by physical labor.

  Still, he put every blacksmith in London to shame.

  Observing the man at work might reveal flames untethered to wick or lamp, sprung from neither spark nor candle, and in colors ranging from snow-shadow blue to glinting emerald to the white of stars. Glyphs scribed in magicked ink might smolder and shimmer. Lines of metal filings—some common, some precious—might rearrange themselves as though pushed by invisible fingers. A book, a quill, a bell might float through the room, untouched by human hand. Thin metal chains describing unusual shapes could rise into the air on their own. Dwimmeresque glimpses of worlds quite beyond Fenchurch Street might appear within glamours arranged on the floor.