Broken Homes

hearts behind him thereafter.
    ‘What do you mean Effra wanted to keep him?’ asked Lesley suspiciously.
    She never had so sweet a changeling , I thought. We’d done A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream at school when I was twelve – I was third magic tree on the left. I’d wanted to play Bottom, but then so did everyone else.
    ‘Don’t worry,’ said Abigail. ‘I got his name out of him and then got Reynard to sniff out his parents.’
    ‘Who’s Raymond?’ I asked.
    ‘Reynard,’ said Abigail. ‘Just this guy. You know . . .’
    ‘No we don’t know,’ I said.
    ‘You met him,’ she said. ‘You know – earlier.’
    ‘You mean the fox?’ said Lesley. ‘The one that was trying to chat you up?’
    ‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘Is that the same fox that talked to you at Christmas?’
    ‘Not unless he’s shed a lot of fur,’ said Abigail, ‘started walking upright, oh and let’s see, put on about fifty kilograms . . . Unless you think that’s possible.’
    I wasn’t sure what to say. There were reports of were-creatures and shape changers in the Folly’s library, but nothing after the nineteenth century. Nightingale had taught me to be cautious of the early sources. ‘A great deal of it is accurate,’ he’d said. ‘And great deal is less so. Unfortunately it can be difficult to determine which is which.’
    ‘Unlikely,’ Nightingale told Abigail. ‘But I have to say that recently I have lost my faith in the word impossible.’
    But ‘impossible’ still seemed to apply to catching a break in any of our cases. Nightingale returned from the Monday morning briefing and reported that the mood was not optimistic.
    ‘At this rate,’ said Lesley, ‘no one’s going to want to work with us. We’re clear-up rate poison.’
    Nightingale – who came from an era when clear-up rates were something applied to char ladies – decided, as he had threatened in the aftermath of the Spring Court, to teach us some magical blacksmithing. So we trooped into the classroom with a forge – Nightingale insisted that we call it the smithy – and donned our heavy leather aprons and protective goggles.
    The forge itself looked bolted together out of random sheets of blackened steel. There was an extractor hood surmounted by what appeared to be a lawnmower engine and a shelf filled with coke at groin level which was fed by what looked to me to be a suspiciously jury-rigged gas line.
    ‘The Sons of Weyland maintain,’ said Nightingale as he turned the gas on, ‘that the smiths were the first true practitioners of magic.’ He lit the forge with a practised flick of his finger and a lux spell.
    For the hardy men of the North, the alchemists and the astrologers that preceded the Newtonian revolution were a bunch of conmen and grifters. ‘As above, so below,’ was so much bollocks. Not that Nightingale used the word bollocks. Craft, dedication, hard work and hitting bits of metal very hard with a hammer – that was the true path to wisdom.
    ‘And it is true,’ said Nightingale. ‘That you can always tell where a smithy stood by the vestigium it leaves behind.’
    ‘What about hospitals?’ asked Lesley. ‘You get tons of vestigia off old hospitals.’
    ‘But not the new ones,’ said Nightingale. ‘Have you noticed that?’
    I hadn’t, until he pointed it out.
    ‘Sudden death seems to imbue a locality with a degree of power,’ he said. ‘People don’t die in hospitals in the quantity they once did.’ He paused and frowned. ‘Or perhaps the technology mutes the effect. In either case, it is of a quite different quality from the sensus illic of a smithy.’
    ‘You don’t get much around graveyards,’ I said.
    ‘The magic is released upon the point of death,’ said Nightingale. ‘Despite the attachment spirits have for their bodies, I was taught that little magic stays with those earthly remains.’
    ‘What about massacre sites?’ I asked. ‘You know like when they get the victims to dig a pit and then—’
    ‘Extremely magical and extremely unpleasant,’ said Nightingale. ‘I suggest you try to avoid such sites if you wish to sleep soundly again. Although I imagine becoming inured would be worse.’
    He pulled out a steel rod, ten centimetres long, from a box on a nearby work surface.
    ‘This will be our raw material,’ he said. ‘One rod of sprung steel, six of mild.’
    But first they needed cleaning with wire wool, which can be a surprisingly painful experience if you’re not