Conjuror Read online

  The soldier sheathed his swords. He quickly took measure of the mummified Grand Inquisitor and the stunned castrato before striding to the boy he’d rescued from the slave blocks at Cadiz two months since.

  ‘Damn you, Moor,’ croaked Don Grigori.

  ‘I was delayed, child,’ said the soldier, soothing the boy with his mind as he spoke in a mash-up of Spanish and Swahili. ‘I regret it most bitterly.’

  Pulling down his makeshift hood, the boy threw himself into the Moor’s arms and pressed his face against the leather bands that criss-crossed the soldier’s loose white tunic.

  Don Grigori suddenly lunged for the Grand Inquisitor’s pipe on the floor.

  The Moor put the boy aside, pulled a blade from his boot and, with a brutal swiftness, chopped off the long fingers on the castrato’s right hand. Don Grigori flew backwards, howling, his blood spraying the velvet-papered walls.

  Fat with the flesh of the slaughtered guards and Don Grigori’s severed hand, the beetles swarmed once more around the boy’s head and mouth, insatiable in their bloodlust. The Moor pivoted back to the child, calming his small, trembling body and settling his terror as the beetles flew about them both in thick bloody clouds.

  Through a gap in the swarm, the Moor’s dark eyes caught Don Grigori struggling to lift the enchanted ivory pipe to his own thin lips.

  ‘Boy!’ The Moor hissed. ‘Sing again, before it is too late!’

  But Don Grigori blew on the pipe at exactly the same moment as the boy opened his mouth and struck a perfect high C. Their conjuring rose up in two great dissonant waves of sound, colliding in a blinding white explosion of music and marble.

  4.

  SMOKE IN THE AIR

  On the red mountain bordering the Grand Inquisitor’s garden, the artist gasped, yanked off his skullcap, dropped to his knees and prayed. He then sat back on his haunches and took a sip of ale, then another, and one more for good measure from the pouch fastened at his waist. What had he witnessed? When the sounds had collided, it was as if the earth shifted inside the Grand Inquisitor’s chambers with a force so powerful the rear of the palace had collapsed.

  He secured his pack round his waist, and climbed quickly from the rocky ledge before jumping the last few metres on to the narrow path that led to the outer wall of the palace, or what was left of it. Ducking behind the remains of a woodshed, the artist waited, but no guards appeared. No one from the village would risk life or limb to come to El Diablo’s rescue. The palace and its walled grounds were eerily silent, the air heavy and dry, as if the explosion had created a vacuum to which sound had yet to return. As far as the artist could tell, he was alone.

  He ran to the slabs of broken marble and mounds of rubble beneath what was left of the balcony. Staring up at the destruction, he weighed his chances. It would take him, a man deep in his fifth decade, far too long to climb unassisted. What if he should fall or – worse yet – get trapped in the twisted wreckage?

  The artist sighed. He did not take lightly what he needed to do. He had to finish this commission, whether the Moor had survived or not. And that meant he would have to animate.

  He unfolded a torn piece of parchment, stretched the cloth out on the cracked stones, licked his wooden pencil and drew with great haste, his imagination working to its limits. Steps appeared one after the other, rising in a fat line of blue light from the mosaic-tiled path up into the collapsed chambers.

  The artist took them two at a time into the Grand Inquisitor’s lair.

  5.

  WHAT TO DO

  Inside the chamber, the air was thick with dust and grime that coated the artist’s mouth and throat. He couldn’t see the boy amid the chaos. He couldn’t see the Grand Inquisitor or Don Grigori either. He prayed they had both been squashed as flat as the dead, scarlet beetles that carpeted the room.

  Clambering over the rubble, he saw a hand sticking out from beneath what was left of an iron and wood chest. The chest had snapped in three places, the heaviest part pinning the Moor beneath its weight.

  The artist used his own sweat and muscle to lift the broken wood and iron from the Moor’s chest. It wasn’t enough. The Moor’s legs were pinned by something bigger, something the artist couldn’t move.

  He kneeled by the Moor’s turbaned head, which was caked in blood from a gouge slicing through his eyebrow into his scalp. Pulling a paint rag from his pouch, the artist did his best to clean the blood from his friend’s face. He pressed his hand to the Moor’s chest, but his fingers were shaking too much for him to feel a heartbeat over his own racing pulse. Instead he leaned his ear to the man’s lips and listened.

  Nothing. Wait. Something. A ragged whistle of air? Perhaps.

  Quickly, the artist used a chunk of brick and sketched a pouch filled with water on the ground. It burst from the thick air in an oval of blue light, and landed with a splosh next to the Moor. It was all he could do, other than pray – and complete the mission on his dear friend’s behalf.

  He searched quickly until he found the box, the size of a small saddle with the design on the wax seal identical to the mark he had concealed with black ink at the curve of the slave boy’s neck. Securing it under his arm, the artist scrambled back to the balcony and down to the foot of his imagined stairs, where he dug the scrap of parchment from his pouch and rubbed out the drawing. The steps dissolved to nothing in a whizzing zigzag of blue light.

  6.

  NOT EVEN A CROAK

  The boy waited until the artist was gone before he climbed wearily back up to the broken chamber, his whole body aching from where the explosion had blown him clean over the balcony. The Moor was still breathing, but only just.

  For the first time since his capture, the boy wept. Then, as he brushed his arm fiercely across his eyes, he noticed a water pouch with a strange bluish hue sitting off to the side. He lifted the pouch and poured water over his own shaved head first, catching the drips with his tongue, before pouring some on the Moor’s forehead. The Moor’s eyes fluttered. With hope leaping in his thin chest, the boy poured more water directly into the Moor’s mouth.

  The Moor, Don Alessandro de Mendoza, gagged as the water rushed down his throat. The boy dropped into his arms, mumbling incoherently with relief. Gently, groggily, the Moor calmed the boy with his mind. After a moment he touched the boy’s throat, then pointed to the mass pinning his legs.

  ‘Can you get me out, child?’

  The boy placed his palms flat on the mass of marble resting on the Moor’s legs. He inhaled and released. Not a sound came out, not even a croak. His terror was blocking his ability to conjure the music. He needed help. More power.

  Shifting himself into a less painful position, the Moor lifted the golden tablet from around his neck, set it on the ground beside him and, with the hilt of his knife, cracked it in two. He placed the half still on the strap around the child’s neck, tightening the leather a fingertip from the child’s blood mark. He kissed the boy’s forehead and nodded, tucking the other half of the tablet into the loose folds of his own shirt.

  ‘Again. Try again.’

  The boy touched the tablet and tried again.

  This time he inhaled more deeply, the way his father had taught him. He let his heart and his head fill with light before releasing a string of crisp, clean notes. Like the swift current of a river, the music coiled around the marble, lifting the debris inches off the ground. It was enough for the Moor to tug his legs free.

  The deep gash in the Moor’s calf was still bleeding. The boy watched in a daze as the Moor tore a strip of cloth from his yellow turban and tied it tightly around the wound. He picked up his sword from the rubble and sheathed it, scooped the boy wordlessly into his arms and leaped over the broken balcony to the ground below.

  The boy was so drained by the music that he was struggling to stay awake. He felt himself being placed gently on the saddle of a great horse tethered at the palace gate, then felt the great bulk of the soldier vaulting on to the saddle behind him. They g
alloped down the path together into the hush of the red mountains.

  SECOND MOVEMENT

  ‘Such sweet compulsion doth in music lie.’

  John Milton

  7.

  SOME KIND OF FREAKY

  LONDON

  PRESENT DAY

  The sign swaying above the shop’s door read, ‘Old Worm’s Curiosities and Ancient Alchemies’. Tucked in a narrow cobbled alley not far from the Strand, the latticed windows were filthy, concealing the curiosities inside. Rémy Dupree Rush pushed open the heavy wooden door. He winced as the bell jangled, the noise cutting into the low-level thrumming in his head that had led him here. He adjusted his guitar case, settling it against the middle of his back. He cranked the volume on his iPod and flipped up his hood. Static rather than tunes fizzed in his ears, electronic configurations of white noise. The low frequency held the thrumming to a more tolerable background noise.

  A stocky white dude in a cardigan and corduroys and a middle-aged woman with red-pencilled lips looked up from their desks, assessing him. Skin surveillance, he called it. Happened all the time in Chicago. Why would London be any different? It didn’t matter that he was wearing his dad’s expensive Belstaff jacket, that his shirt was clean and pressed and his boots spit-polished, Rémy Dupree Rush was a young black man shopping.

  Ignoring their lingering stares, he scanned the interior. Given how far from normal most of his seventeen years had been, he was prepared for weird, but this was some kind of freaky.

  The shop was long, narrow and poorly lit, with low oak beams. A standing fan kept the stale air moving, fluttering the edges of some 1851 Great Exhibition bunting advertising ‘The Wonder Room of the Wicked’. A curved balcony papered with ancient yellowed maps hung above the congested ground floor. Animal skins, a stuffed vulture, horns of polished ivory, owls with milky glass eyes, a ferret with two heads and a preserved polecat caught Rémy’s eye. Drawers with labels in Latin were everywhere he looked, dust motes swirling where light breached the shop’s shadowy interior.

  The keening in his head from the tablet around his neck grew louder. He bit the insides of his cheeks to stop from crying out. Clearly he’d found the right shop.

  He walked past tables packed with specimen jars and almost knocked over a pine coffin filled with a dozen tiny mummified bodies in ruffled collars and cuffs. Skirting barrels and buckets with calligraphic labels marked, ‘Lizards’ and ‘Mice’, ‘Snakes’ and ‘Miscellaneous’, Rémy noted shelves that buckled from the weight of oversized manuscripts, thick, leather-bound books and more stuffed creatures. The shop smelled of pipe tobacco, damp wood, and old.

  For a second Rémy was transported to Tia Rosa’s balcony looking out over the muddy Bayou Teche, where she’d sit smoking Tupelos, drinking Kentucky bourbon from a china cup and listening to jazz. Tia Rosa had milk crates stacked with vinyl classics of jazz, blues, Zydeco and Louisiana Creole. When they had all fled Louisiana, Tia Rosa had sold most of her albums. She deposited the money into a peanut butter jar behind her headboard for Rémy’s university fund. He’d taken the cash when he’d left.

  Rémy yanked out his ear buds. The static wasn’t helping any more. The thrumming was so loud that it was hurting his teeth. As he headed towards a door marked ‘No Admittance’, the beat in his head trebled and the thrumming golden tablet around his neck burned his skin. He lifted the tablet out and over his shirt. Nestled into a corner of the shop, he spotted a tall antique cabinet with a brass lock.

  He loosened the strap on his guitar case. The tablet was now a full-on orchestra of pain. From the corner of his eye, he saw the shop assistant with red-pencilled lips nod discreetly to the man with the cardigan, who walked quickly to the door and locked it.

  Rémy felt a sting of satisfaction. Truth be told, Rémy Dupree Rush was thirty days, two deaths and one dark conjuring beyond giving a fuck.

  8.

  PLAY SOMETHIN’ SWEET

  CHICAGO

  FOUR YEARS EARLIER

  ‘Let’s make somethin’ sweet for your birthday breakfast, RD.’

  ‘Sure, Mom,’ said Rémy. ‘What’d you like to hear?’

  ‘How ’bout my favourite?’

  Annie Dupree Rush leaned against the chipped Formica table and closed her eyes. Her nappy hair lay plastered against her scalp from the heat, the skin under her eyes dry, her lips cracked, her skinny body wrapped loosely in a pink chenille robe. Rémy watched the deep lines of sadness on her brown skin smooth away as her lips settled into a soft curve, her head tilted back and her slender fingers tapped out a beat on the counter.

  ‘You are my sunshine, my only sunshine,’ she began. ‘You make me happy when skies are grey…’

  She flicked her other hand towards Rémy as if conducting an orchestra, not her only son sitting at a wobbly, Formica table with a guitar on his fourteenth birthday. A stream of light flashed from her fingers. Rémy blinked, not sure what he’d seen.

  And then everything changed.

  *

  For most of his life, Rémy had heard music in his head: fragments of orchestrations, bursts of notes, riffs of chords and melodies. Sometimes the sounds blurred his vision and, on occasion, disrupted his senses. Rémy would see and feel impossible things, velvet between his fingers when there was no velvet to be had, taste peppermint when a violin played. When the music distorted his connection to reality in this way, he’d shut down. Tia Rosa and his mother would let him be, but at school he was the weird kid, the kid with ‘special needs’, the labels and his own withdrawal alienating him from the rest of the world.

  As he got older, Tia Rosa’s lessons on controlling his responses to the music in his head – teaching him how to look less catatonic – began to pay dividends. One day in fourth grade, Rémy realized he could use the structures of sound, the patterns and the images of the music he imagined, to solve a math equation with an elegance that shocked his teacher. From that day on the labels ‘gifted’ and ‘high on the spectrum’ were added to his permanent record, alienating Rémy even further.

  But even at its most extreme, the music had never altered reality the way it did that morning.

  His mother’s singing slipped from rough gravel and sand to smooth whipped cream and sweet-potato pie. The music became lines of colour and light in Rémy’s mind, with his mother’s voice like a thread looping and linking them together, until the images moved outside his head and floated above the table like holograms of old family movies.

  There was Rémy aged eight singing a solo with the Chicago All-School Symphony; playing spirituals on his grandfather’s guitar in a New Orleans’ church at five; as a toddler in his high chair blowing tunes on a penny whistle. Then the pictures stuttered as though the film had snapped, scattering the ghostly images across the kitchen. They weren’t Rémy’s memories any more. They were his mother’s.

  His mother as a teenager taking a bow in a great red and gold music hall, a bouquet of roses in her arms, the audience on its feet, her eyes bright with excitement and then, in a flash, brimming with tears of shock and fear when she suddenly recognized the shape of the tattoo on the wrist of a man in the front row, the roses scattering at her feet. A cloud of silver mist burst from Annie, reaching towards Rémy.

  ‘You’ll always know, dear, how much I love you…’

  The whole kitchen – the cracked white ceramic sink, the stove with its single working burner, the wheezing, green fridge – wavered in front of Rémy’s eyes, and filled with dancing waves of silver. The bands of sound shimmered with each note, warm and sticky on Rémy’s skin. He felt his mother’s voice opening his mind, teasing his imagination, freeing the powerful voice that lived there, the strange sorcery he knew now had always been within him. Then Rémy too began to sing.

  ‘No! No! Stop!’

  Tia Rosa burst into the room, her eyes haunted and horrified. She skidded to her knees, tugging at the ragged hem of her niece’s robe.

  ‘Don’t do this to the boy, Annie! He won’t be able to come
back from this. They’ll find you! They’ll take him…’

  But it was too late. For admonishments. For anger. For regrets. The genie was out. Pandora’s box opened. The apple bitten and shared.

  9.

  STICKY FINGERS

  The song and the sound dissolved like morning fog on Lake Michigan, leaving a stack of hot pancakes drenched in blueberry syrup in the middle of the table. Rémy stared. Had he just conjured food from music?

  ‘Aw, that’s lovely, RD,’ Annie said, sticking her finger in the purple syrup and dribbling it into her mouth.

  Tia Rosa wiped her tears on her sleeves and faced her niece. Even her ropey grey cornrows were shaking with fury. Sweat glistened on her copper skin. She slapped Annie hard across the jaw, knocking her head back, snapping her teeth into her tongue. Blood joined the blueberry syrup coating Annie’s lips.

  Rémy jumped from his seat, reaching for his great-aunt’s hand. ‘Tia Rosa, don’t hit her—’

  ‘Sit down, son.’ Tia Rosa’s voice was as hard as granite.

  Annie spat blood into the sink.

  ‘It was time, Rosa. Boy’s been ready for a while and you know it. He deserves to know ’bout his kind and get prepared for what’s to come.’ She ran the faucet, cupped water to her mouth and drank. ‘And I’m tired… so tired of all of this.’ Her hands swept over the room. ‘Sick of the voices in my head and his evil always clutching my heart.’

  ‘Mom, who are you talking about?’

  ‘Not you, Rémy,’ Annie said. ‘Never you. You were the best thing I ever created. And you’re stronger than me. Even now. You’re stronger than me, baby boy. You always have been. When your voice changes and you’re a man, you’ll be able to conjure without anyone’s help. And you’ll succeed where others in our family failed. I know it. I truly know it.’