The Incandescent

“Apologies, Doctor,” said Kenning blandly, which Walden, a connoisseur of passive-aggression after a career spent with teenagers, interpreted as You can take your DThau and shove it up your arse.

Kenning, like Walden herself, was young for her post, certainly younger than Walden; perhaps thirty-two or thirty-three. She looked irritatingly bright-eyed and bushy-tailed. It was possible she was on a night patrol and only just starting her shift. Her short fair hair was neatly combed, her silver-chased armguards polished to a mirror shine and strapped precisely in place over the white sleeves of her uniform shirt. Her black leather boots shone almost as bright, and her shortsword hung neatly at her hip. Walden glanced at it with displeasure. It rubbed her the wrong way, seeing the Marshals wander around the school fully armed. There was no need for it, and it sent the wrong message. This place was safe. Walden worked extremely hard to make it safe and keep it safe. No one was going to get eaten by demons here, so Laura Kenning had no need to swagger around the place looking like she was about to go on the hunt.

Marshals were demon hunters and demon killers. The enchanted shortswords were an ancient, traditional part of their official kit. Other traditional accoutrements had been discarded in the last two hundred years. Religious symbols were now felt to be an emotional rather than practical support against demons. Full suits of rune-engraved plate armour were both difficult to make and not noticeably more effective than just making the runes smaller and putting them all on the armguards. But Marshals had other resources besides the swords. Walden had written a paper during her MThau on the unique sets of physically defined spells that they employed in combat. No member of the Order of Marshals would ever call themselves a ‘magician’—that word belonged to the academic tradition—but they were certainly, in the inelegant phrasing of modern generalist accounts of magical practice, magic-users.

So Laura Kenning and her squad had plenty of tools at their disposal for managing the minor demons that cropped up every day in the natural course of putting six hundred teenagers in one place and letting them learn magic. The thing that set an enchanted sword apart was not that it hurt demons, but that it could also, very easily, hurt people. That felt wrong to Walden. Her students should not feel themselves perpetually on edge around Laura Kenning’s squadron of paranoid paramilitary brutes.

Walden would never put it quite like that out loud. The Marshals were of course ‘a valued traditional element of the rich fabric of Chetwood life, here above all to ensure the safety of our students and staff.’ Walden visualised the relevant page of the school prospectus—with a large photograph of Kenning on it; the woman photographed well—and gave the Chief Marshal a bland and professional smile. “What can I do for you, Laura?”

“I’d like to discuss Nicola Conway,” said Kenning.

Nikki Conway: seventeen years old, originally from South London, the most talented teenage magician that Walden had come across in nearly twenty years, and for more than a decade now a ward of the school. There was absolutely nothing to discuss, or at least nothing that the Marshals hadn’t made clear already in their repeated, annual formal protests, which they had been making ever since Nikki started studying magic in Year Seven—like every single child in the school—years before Kenning even took this job. On top of that, Kenning seemed to take Walden’s polite stonewalling about the whole thing personally. Over the last three years, they had had this conversation so many times that Walden could probably have done it in her sleep. It had been bad enough during Nikki’s GCSEs, and even worse since she had started her Invocation A-level.

The Marshals’ problem with Nikki was not based on her grades (outstanding) or her character (remarkably level-headed, for a teenager). It was simply that when she was seven years old, Nikki had been responsible for the demonic incursion that had killed her mother, her father, and her younger brother. Marshals did not believe in extenuating circumstances. They were not interested in second chances.

And this was the real core of why Walden found herself having a conversation like this one with Kenning every couple of weeks. Both of them—Walden as Director of Magic, Kenning as Chief Marshal—were responsible for the magical security of the school. Walden, at deputy head level, technically outranked Kenning within the school hierarchy. But the school’s squadron of Marshals reported not to her—which they should, in Walden’s opinion—but to Chetwood’s Board of Governors on the one hand, and the Knightly Council of the Reverend Order of Marshals (District of Buckinghamshire) on the other.

In an ideal world they would have been working harmoniously together to share expertise on magical security issues. The problem was that they disagreed profoundly about nearly every issue. Sometimes they disagreed that there even was an issue. Kenning clearly felt she outranked Walden on any issue with potential demonic involvement. As far as Walden could tell, Kenning’s position was that demons were so dangerous that no one should ever risk doing any magic at all. Which was certainly a view, and she was entitled to hold it; but then why on earth take a job at a school which taught magic?

Walden was winning the Nikki Conway debate, and intended to continue doing so. Kenning was not going to get any benefit from her 10 P.M. ambush.

“As you are no doubt aware, I’m concerned, Dr Walden,” said Kenning. “Perhaps you’re not aware that the best predictor of a serious incursion is the magician’s history? If it happened once, it’s infinitely more likely to happen again. And we both know Nicola wouldn’t even be here if it hadn’t happened once.”

“I’m familiar with the research, yes. The study you’re talking about—”

“—doesn’t control for age, you’re going to say. But caution is never a bad idea. I know Nicola is your star pupil.” (Walden barely resisted grinding her teeth.) “I just think your relationship with her, as her teacher—especially given her family situation—is getting in the way here.”

“Are you questioning my judgement, Marshal?”

Kenning said, “That’s my job.”

A pause. A chill in the room was not a demon—though Walden was almost tempted, just to even things up a bit—but the shared knowledge of an unspoken threat: Kenning could try to go over Walden’s head, to the District Commissioner of the Marshals, or else to the school governors.

It wouldn’t work. Walden would win those arguments too. But it would be extremely annoying to have to attend more meetings.

“I’ve become aware that you’re teaching a practical tomorrow morning,” Kenning said. “Which I should really have known already. May I repeat my request for clear schemes of work, with dates, at the start of term?”

“We do our best, Marshal,” said Walden, “but teachers’ plans seldom resist first contact with the enemy.”

Kenning didn’t even smile. “Nicola must be excluded from that lesson.”

“Request denied,” said Walden, as if it had been a request. “I would much rather Nikki learn advanced invocation where I can see her than try it herself unsupervised.”

“You admit that she might try it unsupervised?”

“Show me a young person with her brains and talent who wouldn’t,” said Walden. “Marshal, I understand your concern. As you say, it’s your job. My job, among other things, is to consider the needs of our students. I don’t deny that you’re an expert on demons; will you grant that I am an expert on teenagers?” And on demons, more than you, she could have said. She had multiple university degrees in academic magic. Kenning had the eighteen-week Marshal training course, probably over a decade ago now, and whatever she’d picked up along the way in terms of practical experience since then. There was no comparison. But Kenning already knew all of that—Ms Walden, indeed—and Walden didn’t need to antagonise her any more than she already was.

Instead she tried—not for the first time—being straightforward and reasonable. “Nicola Conway is going to deal with demons in her life. She is far too talented to avoid it. She is already considerably more thoughtful, and more careful, than most magicians her age—precisely because of the history that worries you so much. In my professional judgement, she and her classmates are ready for this practical. Delaying it would only create more risk of a demonic incursion. And if one begins, I would rather it happened in front of me, in a lab I warded myself, rather than in someone’s bedroom at two in the morning.”

“I’ll be observing,” said Kenning.

“We’d be delighted to have you,” Walden lied.

They stared at each other a moment longer. Walden became aware that she was wearing a white towelling dressing gown over a ratty set of pyjamas she’d owned since university. If Kenning was going to make a habit of dropping in impeccably uniformed and unannounced at this time of night, then Walden would have to start spending her evenings in the outfits she thought of as her professional armour—sharply cut blazers, A-line skirts, a brooch from the jewellery box she’d inherited from her grandmother.

“I apologise for disturbing you so late,” said Kenning abruptly.

You could have led with that, Walden thought. “Not at all,” she said. “I’m always willing to listen to my colleagues’ concerns. I’ll see you in the morning, Marshal.”

“Did you know that clock is possessed?” Kenning said, gesturing to the wall clock. “I can sort it out for you.”

“That’s quite all right,” said Walden. “It’s not doing any harm.”

“It’s a demon.”

“Only a very small one,” Walden said soothingly. “Good night, Marshal.”

After Kenning was gone, Walden sat back in her chair and sighed. The risk assessment form glared accusingly up from her desk. The wall clock, in an unusual burst of activity, gave out thirteen very fast chimes and then manifested a cuckoo which emerged with glowing red eyes, opened its beak, and screamed.

“Yes, yes, I don’t like her either,” Walden said, and picked up her pen for the next bullet point. DEMONIC INCURSION, she wrote. In the risk mitigation column, she put: ME.

chapter two UPPER SIXTH INVOCATION

“Photocopier’s on strike,” said the Head of History to Walden when she walked into the staffroom.

“Thanks, Marie,” said Walden. She would have guessed anyway, just from the harassed expressions of several hovering teachers clutching textbooks and printed worksheets. Chetwood had been founded as a school of pure magic, turning out fully trained magicians who were masters of all the arcane disciplines—invocation, evocation, instantiation, and the long-since discredited fourth school, divination—and, as a bonus, could usually add, subtract, and write their own names. But all that was back in the fourteenth century, some six hundred years before the advent of the National Curriculum and OFSTED’s private-sector shadow, the Independent Schools Inspectorate. These days Chetwood School was a specialist foundation, like a technical or musical college, with a full complement of academic teaching staff alongside the magicians. Walden, who was an alumna, remembered an uneasy rivalry between the magical teachers and the academic side back in her own school days. The current Head had stamped on it hard. Good teachers knew that in a school there was only really room for two sides: Us, and Them.

The photocopier was a hulking grey beast looming in the corner of the staffroom. On the noticeboard behind it was pinned a laminated A4 sign: DO NOT EXORCISE. Walden navigated her way through the hovering crowd with polite good-mornings to her colleagues and opened the maintenance panel. “What’s the matter with you?”

Two fiery purple eyes peered up at Walden from the dark, unknowable depths of the multipurpose tray. Strike! squeaked the demon possessing the photocopier.

It was only a minor imp, of the first order. Walden knew it quite well at this point. Demons were attracted to complexity and to personhood. Laypeople assumed that this meant every magician was on the brink of getting possessed all the time, but really demons entering the mundane plane moved into complex and person-shaped spaces, like hermit crabs moving into shells. That could mean a human being, but it took a very strong demon to do it by force. If you were unlucky enough to meet a magician with a demon looking out from behind their eyes, you could usually assume they’d invited it in.

More common was a demon possessing an animal—it could happen randomly, if an opportunistic demon found a weakness in the fabric of reality and a living creature about the right size on the other side, and it was also the source of the old cliché about magicians summoning familiar spirits into black cats. Of course, that sort of thing was frowned on these days as being rather unfair to the cat. Technology, complex and intricate, was always a risk; hence Walden’s clock—hard to find a magician’s clock that hadn’t been possessed at some point—and the school’s draconian, much-protested mobile phone policy. Impossible to detach several hundred teenagers from their phones altogether—and their parents would have been appalled if the school had tried—but, actually, a middle schooler didn’t need a little demon box in their pocket at all times. No, they didn’t. No, turn it off. Yes, it does have to go in the dormitory safe overnight. The commonest incident reports that came across Walden’s desk were repetitive to the point of grim comedy: twelve-year-old with a secret second phone hidden under their mattress, awake at one in the morning scrolling through a social media app they were not legally old enough to sign up for, and shocked, shocked, when the imp possessing their phone started trying to eat them.

So modern technology was one risk. But actually, if anyone had ever looked at something and called it ‘you’—assigning it a self, whether it deserved one or not—then a space had been made, and in that space something could live. Provided, of course, that there was enough magic around for the demon to make the crossing from its own plane to this one.

Since Chetwood was lousy with six and a half centuries’ worth of adolescent wild magic, and the staffroom photocopier was called variations on ‘you bloody bastard thing’ by dozens of people every day, there was no point trying to keep it clear. You just ended up re-exorcising it once a week. Even the Marshals had given up. Its current inhabitant was a known quantity, and there was a large bowl of salt next to the fire extinguisher in the staffroom, in case of emergencies.

“Who told you what a strike is?” Walden asked the photocopier.

“Probably my fault,” said Marie. “We’re doing labour movements with Year Nine.”

“Not to worry,” Walden said. “Besides, arguably, it does work here.” No consent on the school’s part, no employment contract, but if they preferred this fairly benign imp to the other potential inhabitants of the photocopier—and Walden did—then it was worth trying to keep it happy. Making agreements with demons was the heart of her academic discipline, and keeping the school’s wild magic problems under control was one of her core responsibilities as Director of Magic. She would have liked to have her coffee first. “All right,” she said to the photocopier, “what are you striking for? Better working conditions?”

The demon said, Blood!

“All our staff are entitled to sick leave, pension contributions, support from the employee assistance program—”

Blood! shrieked the photocopier. No representation without exsanguination!

There were some chuckles from the crowd of teachers. “No blood,” said Walden firmly. A meal of human bodily fluids was the fastest possible way to turn a minor demonic possession into a major demonic problem. “Would you accept a digestive biscuit?”

The fiery flecks of the purple eyes in the depths of the multipurpose tray flickered. The imp said, with an air of deep cunning, Chocolate.

“Very well,” said Walden. She fetched a chocolate digestive from the staffroom kitchen and carefully fed it into the photocopier’s maintenance hatch. The demon ate it in two sulphurous snaps. Then the machine let out several loud beeps. “Now what?”

Staples! demanded the demon.

Walden fetched a box and tipped it in. Another gulping sound, and a strong smell of rotten eggs: then the photocopier began to spit out perfectly stapled packs of worksheets about—Walden read sideways—the Luddites.

“Thanks, Saffy,” said Marie. “Should I just give it a biscuit next time?”

“A small demon is still a demon. Better not,” said Walden, which was much more diplomatic than saying I ran an entire training session on handling low-level demon issues last INSET day, come on. The main advice she’d given her non-magician colleagues on how to handle low-level demon issues was ‘don’t.’ Chetwood had constant imp problems, and yes, they were annoying; yes, it was tempting just to deal with it yourself. But it was dangerously easy for a non-specialist to accidentally agree to a more serious pact than they’d meant. “Call me down, or any of the magic faculty, or else”—she sighed mentally, but it was what they were for—“one of the Marshals.”

The episode had taken up the time she’d meant to use to have her leisurely morning coffee. Walden filled a travel flask with coal-black caffeinated sludge from the coffee machine instead, and hurried across the quad to the arcane labs.

Outside Lab Three, uncharacteristically early and flicking brazenly through his phone as if he’d never heard of a personal electronics policy, was one of her Upper Sixth. He’d arranged himself, his school rucksack, a rainbow collection of lever arch folders, and a hefty bag of sports kit all in an array on the floor, in such a way as to present a tripping hazard to unwary passersby. “Will,” said Walden. “Legs.”

“Sorry, miss,” said Will, and drew his long legs in black jeans—not the smart trousers mandated by the sixth form dress code—up into a tightly acute triangle, which improved the situation only slightly.

“Will.”

Will looked up from his phone and bestowed upon Walden his most winning smile. “Sorry, Doc,” he said.

“William Daubery, clear this corridor right now or face my wrath,” said Walden. “I ought to dress code you and PEP you.” School rules inevitably turned into verbs. To dress code: to send a child back to their dormitory to change. To PEP: to confiscate a misused mobile phone. The personal electronics policy was relaxed a little for sixth formers, but Will, who was more than halfway through A-levels in Invocation, Evocation, and Further Evocation, ought to know better than to play with a tasty little electronic device right outside the arcane labs. Yes, the risk was low, because Walden ran a tight ship. But part of keeping the arcane labs magically secure was knowing that ‘low’ and ‘nonexistent’ were very different beasts.

“Whoops,” said Will, but he obediently got up and hefted his possessions over to the wall, and the phone—a large and expensive-looking model, he would no doubt be very annoyed if it did get possessed and had to be destroyed—went into the front pocket of his rucksack. “Haven’t you had your coffee yet, Doc?”

“No, I haven’t,” said Walden sternly. “And so I’m in a very bad mood. Don’t test me.”

Will faked a shudder. “I’ll warn the others.”

“See that you do,” Walden said. “And turn your phone off in the arcane corridor, and don’t spread your things all over the floor again. Someone will trip and break a leg. Remember, I have eyes in the back of my head.”

“Yes, miss. Doc!”

Walden unlocked Lab Three and let herself in. There was just time before the bell to finish her lesson prep and gulp down about half the black-sludge coffee. She plucked the risk assessment out of her pile of papers and slapped it down front and centre on the big desk at the front of the room.

The lab was otherwise almost empty. The science labs, on the other side of the building, were fully equipped with sinks and Bunsen burners and fume cupboards and all the other apparatus of a twenty-first-century scientific education. Modernity had taken magic in the other direction. The arcane labs were stripped down as far as possible; the less there was in here, the less possibility that someone would accidentally start you-ing something and invite in an unwelcome demon. The room was painted white floor to ceiling, and had no desks except the teacher’s and no chairs at all. There was a whiteboard on the wall behind the desk; the pens were kept in a jar of salt, because Walden knew from bitter experience how easy it was to accidentally say Where are you? to a missing board pen.

When she taught magical theory, she booked one of the seminar rooms upstairs, so her class wouldn’t have to work on the floor. But for practical work, the arcane lab was a necessity.

Very stark in black and yellow against the white safety paint were the incursion wards: north, south, east, west, one over the door, one over the fire exit, one for each of the windows. They were repainted every half term. Walden checked them for errors, fading, or alerts, as she did before every lesson. Then, slowly and with great care, she introduced a minor location error into the ward above the fire exit, changing its area of effect from ‘this laboratory’ to ‘this place.’ It took her almost to the bell, with two minutes to spare. She swallowed another bitter gulp of coffee.

She shuffled through her papers for Upper Sixth’s homework—four problem sheets on arcane attribution, handed in last week and marked yesterday evening. The work was about what she’d expected: Nikki outstanding, Will slapdash, Aneeta careful, Mathias skipping questions that worried him. Walden put them to one side. She paused to straighten her shoulders and arrange her face, putting aside her late night and Laura Kenning and the photocopier demon, putting on—like the armour of blazer and skirt and brooch—the total good-humoured calm of Dr Walden, teacher.

The bell went.

“Come in!” Dr Walden called.

And in they came, shambling, sauntering, seventeen years old: Upper Sixth Invocation.

Walden did not do much frontline teaching anymore. Director of Magic was a deputy-head-level role, and the further you climbed the ladder of a career in education, the less you got to actually teach. Her work calendar was full of meetings, conferences, presentations, project deadlines. There was blocked-out time for boundary patrols and spot checks, and apparently free time which always filled up immediately with crisis management: constant variations on the stern talking-to for the middle schooler with the secret phone under the mattress, along with the diplomatic but firm talking-to for the loving parent who had purchased the phone.

On top of that, there were the hours upon hours she spent maintaining Chetwood’s magical infrastructure. Children were such easy targets for opportunistic demons that even ordinary schools needed a couple of solid incursion wards on site, just in case. One of the things Walden had brought in as Director was the sixth form volunteering club, who went around the local primary schools repainting what were usually faded, half-arsed protections against demons. Magical specialists were expensive, and waiting for the county council to get around to hiring someone was a mug’s game. But at least in a normal school, the worst you were likely to encounter on the demon front was a determined imp, encouraged by a talented but inexperienced child who’d watched too many unhelpful videos on the internet.

Chetwood, with its long magical history, and six-hundred-odd half-trained adolescent magicians living on site, was a different kind of problem. Ordinary schools did not have a dedicated team of Marshals stationed on site. Ordinary schools did not need incursion wards in every building. But Walden’s biggest problem was not the mobile phone incidents, the difficulties of politicking with Marshal Kenning, or keeping the incursion wards up to date. All of those paled next to her most vital responsibility: managing the intricate system of nineteenth-century wards, which had been the height of cutting-edge sorcerous-industrial invention around 1855. They depended on an enormously complex set of old-fashioned thaumic engines, built into and impossible to move from a large room adjoining the Headmaster’s suite in Brewers Hall. The mechanisms were more than a hundred and fifty years old, comically clunky, inherently vulnerable to demonic possession, and a nightmare to maintain. They were also so absolutely integral to the way the rest of the school’s magical defences worked that if they failed, there was a good chance that Chetwood School would just collapse out of mundane reality altogether and disappear into the demonic plane, taking six hundred children with it.