Ch. 10

Always bring a gun to a wandfight.

-Ancient Wand Katta

Horbid's wand blurs into an enormous handgun, and he immediately fires. Three of the men drop in turn after baritone blasts. A fourth is knocked backwards, through a window, but the fifth and sixth manage to cast strange light-bending bubbles that deflect the bullets around them. Blue-eye walks forward, casually, as the bullets obliterate brickwork inches from his head.

Horbid tosses a sphere to the ground that erupts into a tidal wave of foam. He turns to Horry, "Run."

Horry's legs spring into movement without much input on Horry's part—a surge of adrenaline buffets him forward. That small, introspective part of himself capable of dispassionate, rational analysis is a blur of white noise—tuned to a dead television channel.

As they sprint down the alley, Horry shouts, "Why can't we teleport?"

"That's tha first thing I tried,"

"Or call for help?"

"Tha second."

"Or…or…"

"'E's cancellin' me spells. Still is, actually,"

Horry turns, and sees Horbid's left hand continues to flick up, down, and around with a wand.

It's all a familiar fear—like Horry's floating in a vacuum, and however much he might flail, he won't move any further from the certainty of future, overwhelming, inescapable pain.

"Who—who are they!"

"Bad news," says Horbid as he tosses another foam-sphere.

A hole melts in the foam wall behind them, and the first mask to walk through it takes a bullet to the torso. The second rolls and sends a silent lightning bolt at Horbid. Horbid catches it in his hand, gritting his teeth.

"'Urry, this alley!"

For the past three turns, no one else has been on the streets—the shopfronts look more aged—dust and trash accumulates in doorways and bins. Even the lights are dimmer, or off completely. Horry nonetheless has that increasing familiar, overwhelming sense that he's being watched.

Blue-eyes turns the corner in front of them and raises his wand. Horbid tosses a third sphere at him, but right as it hits the ground, the man jerks at it, and the ball—and a good bit of concrete around it—disappears with a crack.

Horbid grabs Horry by the collar and bodily slams his way through a door. Alarm spells scream in Horry's ear for a half second before they cut off. A masked fellow cracks into the space by the backdoor, but takes a bullet to the back before he can turn around. Not even pausing, Horbid throws Horry through the door, and swipes a pile of sticks off a counter.

"Where did—where did everyone go?" Horry looks around frantically for someone, for help.

"'E's corralin' us. The Alley's bigger'n it looks. Mostly abandoned…" Horbid trails off, as he sorts though the sticks in his hand—shaking his head, and tossing them onto the ground one by one.

"I think that's all o' them 'cept the Blue feller," Horbid says, just as a masked man covered in broken glass crashes into Horbid. Horbid—with frankly unbelievable agility for his size—rolls with the tackle, and in one fluid motion, stands, and throws the man through another shopfront window. Alarms chirp for a half second again and cut out.

"'Ere, grab me hand." Horbid cracks the stick, and Horry feels an intense gust of wind as the world whirlpools around him. His head spins, and he dry heaves again, falling to his knees. Wind, and a light rain buffets them both.

"Blast, still?!" Horbid gasps. His wand flickers in the air, doing little more than make a soft cutting sound with each swipe.

Horry looks around—they've teleported to a roof. It still has the characteristic style of Longitudinal Alley, if a bit less seedy than the streets below.

Suddenly, everything feels a hundred times heavier, and Horry collapses to the ground. Horbid falls to one knee and groans. Yelling, he grabs Horry by the scruff of the jacket, and leaps off to the next roof. The overwhelming heaviness cuts off midjump, and Horbid cracks another stick right as they touch the ground.

The world doesn't stop spinning when the swirling teleportation ends, this time. The lights are brighter, and there are voices on the streets below, but Horry's will to continue has broken. Light raindrops tickle Horry's face—little pinpricks of cold. Such a strange sensation—such a strange thing to focus on at such a terrifying time.

"C'mon Horry, we're almost te some 'elp," Horbid groans to his feet again, but the immense weight crashes down upon them again, and Horbid's flattened, too.

Where did my books go? Horry wonders. He's distracted—blinking.

A dark silhouette punctuated with a glowing blue point rises up the edge of the far balcony. It glides towards Horry, and the silhouette gradually gives shape to the man—worn robes, black shoes—scarred forearms.

The man approaches Horry, and he can see the finer features of his face—the stubble on his cheeks, the light scarring around his neck—even the profound scar running vertically through the blue eye, cheekbone to eyebrow. Most of prominent of all, though—completely seizing Horry's attention—he can see the cactus-shaped scar on his forehead, just barely obscured by the man's dark hair.

"Moderatus non hadamardus projectus." Says Blue-eye, pointing his wand at Horry.

"Sorry…'Orry," Horbid says, as he tilts the gun towards Horry and fires.

Author's Notes, Chs. 1-10

Thanks for (still) reading! Updates seem to be happening on Tuesdays and Saturdays. This should happen without too much difficulty until Ch. 30ish. I've been Nanowrimo-ing this, so I'm building up a bit of a backlog of chapters to post, but I don't think that production rate is sustainable through the holidays. The good news is that this will keep me afloat through the holidays, but come January I'll be interning, and may have considerably less time to spend on this project.

That said, this is planned roughly through to the end.

Some various thoughts on what is already written:

Ch. 1-3: Really, I was trying to establish that this is not anything like J. 's Harry Potter world at all. I seem to have been successful. We'll see more, larger departures later.

Ch. 4: All this [classified] business is based on Zero Knowledge Proofs—a neat idea for how you can prove mathematical statements to people without revealing any of the details of the proof. Much of the economy of magickal Britain (as well as the causal-consistency-enforcement of the library books later) is based upon this.

Ch. 5: Rot13 for a supremely unhelpful hint (not even really a spoiler, but may tip people off on something): Puncgre svir unf n frperg

Ch. 6: This chapter should be a strong hint that this story is going to be meta as hell. Also no I don't know latin don't make fun of me google translate is your friend.

Ch. 7: The wand's ruminations about what is or is not a book and what is or is not a spell are a hint that, whatever magick is doing, it's somehow solving the Symbol Grounding Problem. Of course, a 'sufficiently advanced classifier' could do this too, but you know what they say about sufficiently advanced things.

Ch. 8: The nested squares thing Horry's describing on the books is a way of encoding an infinitely long quaternary sequence in a square (because magick lest you have infinitely small things). I really should just post a picture of what I mean. I needed a way to encode an arbitrary real number as the book's 'index' (i.e., its index in the Chogbort's Library), but also the freedom to define other auxiliary real numbers related to the index. This is a simplish way of doing that. H/t to Scott A. for pointing out such a n indexing system for a real physical collection of uncountably many objects requires the Axiom of Choice. (More specifically, you need a well-ordering of the Real Numbers (library indices are in the open interval (0,1)).

Re: 'Longitudin Alley', I did not realize Diagon Alley was a pun on Diagonally until I was into my twenties. Also, if you don't believe Horbid writes self-help books in his spare time, then I don't know what to tell you.

Ch. 9's spellchain is my attempt to make a 'real' commodities market for magical Britain, in the form of a crypto-currency that acts both as a currency and as a commodity. If someone wants to implement Spellcoin, feel free—I suspect it wouldn't be too hard if you trained an RNN on harry potter spells, and used the ID of individually mined coins as some part of the randomness token for the generated text. The problem is that spells aren't exactly uh divisible, and you'd need some way of standardizing what generator to use for the actual spell-identities. This could be baked into the spell-mining software, of course, but it would be nice to be able to update it over time as generative text networks get better and better.

Ch. 10: Of course there's going to be time travel too.