1553

Liberated by his day's notice, Ry'd mounted Sasha and rode her hard under the grim, artificial sky. He took St John's Street north all the way into Lincolnshire, a crazed horseman tearing along in a lather, making it as far as Stamford before Sasha refused to go further. Ended up renting a room upstairs of a tavern kept by a homely, good-natured Muggle widow with an enormous bust. Walked with a cane, did Beth. Ry, having taken half his pay in the local specie, paid what it cost to get dizzy on German wine, and was struggling with his codpiece in the airless attic room overhead when he heard the messengers in the night and the frantic exchanges of migrating news, then the steady thump thump of the cane on the dusty steps. She entirely extinguished the doorframe. 'It appears the end of days is upon us. Let me help you with that.' Even cross-eyed drunk, he knew she meant the codpiece.

Which is why for the rest of his numbered days Ry associated False Dawn with Honest Beth, and, in particular, the experience of nearly drowning in her abyssal cleavage.

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They said the sky opened up in the fat of evening. A sun—something wrong with it. A lumpiness in its shape. Radiating yellow dawn. The night not dismissed, like, not retreating how it does, but fended off, fighting back. The thing was a struggle. Actually that was the scariest part: to see night with its dander up, hungry, possessive, awoken. Fake clouds dribbled and dawdled, illumined by vast spoking arrays of yellow crepuscular light. They said you should've heard the birds.

Now, even a moon would've been considered an omen—it having been so long since one had been seen in the city. The obscuring spell had taken on its own legend. Wizardry after a time began to get suspicious. Wasn't it too regular a scape of clouds up there? Too uniform? Wasn't it funny how it seemed to grow from a point? Meanwhile Muggle religious enthusiasts (basically all of them) ratcheted up their levels of mania day by day. 'The heavens are falling!'—was the most popular view. The cloud-cover only appeared to be spreading, that was a trick of perspective caused by the gradual descent of the Heavens Entire—caused itself (though over this was much discord) by deeds of the Very Great. Heaven fell to save King Edward from the wasting disease; to herald the immanent ascension of the Protestant Elizabeth; or as a punishment for and scourge of the Tudors' idols, a Terrible Broom that would sweep from history the errors of the recent past and reassert Holy Mother Church, fragile Lady Mary her unlikely champion.

Ry was assiduous about nothing more than not paying attention, but even he couldn't sustain total ignorance of the local goings-on. Epochal changes, they said. 'Historic,' whatever that meant. He'd learned more of Muggle affairs in three fortnights with the Merlings on the Tower than he had in his entire life to that point. Oh how the devout consumed the lives and times of the Muggles! So unseemly to Ry. If Edward lives, if Mary don't, if Ginger Lizzy the Traitor's Daughter comes to power, if Sussex, if Winchester, if they marry Spain, if they war with France, blah blah blah. 'Who cares?' he'd exploded, once. 'Who cares what they do? We're wizards!'

'Ignore him,' Brood advised his cohort. 'deMille can't see past his own wand.'

'If I brandished it you'd not see past it either,' is what he'd probably retorted. But Alex had a point. Ry couldn't interest himself in the Muggles and didn't understand them who did. If pressed to furnish a decisive motivation for his life, an animating purpose, he'd try and find a way to say 'pussy' and 'magic' at once.

Even so there was something especially indecent about this habit of the devout, the Merlings, their peculiar fetishizing of Muggle gossip. Coming to on the morning (or late morning, afternoon maybe) following the end of the world, the gracious tavern-keeper having left only an immense divot in the mattress, Ry'd found himself thinking about this and muttering. He'd left her an extravagant gratuity—dropped it right in the pit she'd made in the bed—and fled the scene.

He'd never given much thought to the ease with which Muggle and wizard moneys were exchanged. Uptight little goblins at Gringotts were always amenable to a swap—were never not. He'd mutteringly discussed this with Sasha while trotting still north (he wasn't in any rush to return to the scene of the crime). Because didn't it imply—couldn't it not mean but—that somewhere a Muggle banker was swapping his gold for ours?

It wasn't possible that Gringotts financed and commanded an operation large scale enough to keep every branch in shillings and pence without his knowing about it—without his at the very least having caught a whiff of it. Him! Who'd plied trades of lawless desperation all around the country! Who'd made a study of getting between Muggle wives and their purses!

And if they weren't gathering up these monies underhandedly, they must have been doing it overhandedly—unctuous well-groomed goblins extending high their grasping hands to shake with big-bellied Muggle bankers. And wasn't that a bit too close for comfort? And what did it say about the upper reaches of both societies? And was he the first person to think about this?

Ry'd spent the next year muttering to Sasha. He finagled to appoint himself roving ambassador of Messrs. Smythe, Hammerstein & deMille and so traveled as frequently and as far as he could. Everywhere he went he heard the tale of the False Dawn.

The scandal had only magnified Van's celebrity. He went, overnight (in a manner of speaking), from slightly boring scion of a Plymouth boatwright family and portraitist of expanding, if uncontroversial, repute, to renegade wild man of the arts. The Muggle, a Sir Beauregard Jones, was revealed to have been bewitched (imperius'd, most likely) into funding the scheme—but to Ry's discomfort the name Ann Susurro didn't factor, didn't even come into it. Nor did his—for which he was grateful—nor Alex Brood's and his stable of Merlings. The official story came to follow the generally adopted one: that Vandal's got a lot on the ball! He biffed a Muggle on-the-make out of a dragon's hoard of gold and converted it into art—and not just art, but Art, a masterpiece, a floating revolution, a work of breathtaking audacity, the defining symbol of the age!

Susurro's self-negation from the story (he respected her too much to allow that it could have been other) sat ill with him, especially given the coziness he'd lately come to assume dominated at high levels between Muggledom and Wizardry.

'If this Jones bloke was left out to dry by our side,' muttered Ry to his Sasha, 'what do you want to bet the Muggles laid it on Susurro? Each the other's alibi, neither fit to be prosecuted. And only Van gets off clean—dash clean: enhanced!'

Sasha didn't offer a bet.

'But of course you'd want it that way, wouldn't you, Sash? If you were Susurro? Your side looking everywhere but at you: vilifying Jones, lionizing Van. No room under that curtain for the busy little props-girl making chalk marks on the floor…'

When Day came back to England he did it in a storm. No pipes exalted. No carpet thrown down. No forward echelon of minders readying his path. Merely: clouds rolled in gravid with rain, thunder belted it loose, lightning slashed the wind to screaming. And when it had all scattered, the way a marauding army quits a sacked countryside, there stood Day outside the Wizengamot.

Penthrift knew. He'd been there.

'I'm not fooling, Rybel. We was all massed by the windows, like, on account of the storm. Had only just adjourned but wasn't nobody making a move to step out. Then it cleared up out of nowhere and there he was, wet and, wet and…looking at us. That creepy owl on his shoulder.'

'I killed that owl once.'

'Did you?'

'It didn't take. But why step out at all? Is there not a portkey from the Wizenthing?'

'Not since the Disagreement of 1313. We used to have, but not since then. Now we must cross to the Council and use their portkeys if we are to portkey at all.'

'I thought the Council and the Wizenwhathaveyou were the same thing.'

Penthrift giggled. 'Do you mean it?'

'Well, will you goddamn explain it to me, then, goddamnit?'

It was lunchtime, probably, and they were drunk in the streets.

Penthrift was approximately twice as tall as Rybel and took twice as much to inebriate, so Ry was swimming a bit as they sat upon their haunches in a public square. Clots of Muggles standing round. Two boys stacking wood. Crows about. Penthrift explained.

The Wizengamot was Wizardry's first attempt at an institution of any kind. It even predated Hogwarts. Maybe someone knew how old it was exactly, but let's not get lost in the details. It was founded as a court for the powerful, that they might find solutions to their grievances, grudges, and vendettas that were less costly to the rest of society in blood and treasure. It was, initially, the least that could have been expected, and proved ultimately a powerful and lasting change for the better by preparing the ground for the Wizard's Council, which followed centuries later (let's not make a fuss about the exact dates) from: a. a tradition of mediation; two: improved lines of communication (owls); and d: balls.

'Balls?' Ry checked.

'Balls,' Penthrift affirmed.

'Whose balls? What balls you say?' A stranger drunker than they had careened into their conversation—lank white hair sweat-basted to his crooked neck, eyes pointing in opposite directions, the stink off him so vibrant as to waft above the daily permeating fetor of chamber-pot and corpse-stack.

'Fuck off!' said Ry, coming swiftly and wheelingly to his feet. 'Run away!'

Everybody said fight fire with fire, but that was just stupid. Fight fire—fight anything—with insanity. Not one person didn't fear the insane.

The weird-eyed assailant stumbled away. Ry resumed his seat.

'Whose balls did you mean, exactly?'

'Some Chief Warlock—which is the high judge of the Wizengamot. Whichever one played midwife to the Wizards Council.' Penthrift explained, somewhat shakily, how the Council emerged from the Wizengamot. A body with a roomier remit, helmed by this selfsame Chief Warlock (only now in the titular capacity of 'Wizard Chief'), and which arrogated to itself the task of making sense of Wizardry.

Every time Ry looked up the square was…crowdeder. A black-robed man was clearing his throat and pacing over by the wood-gathering boys. Another man, his neck and arms sticking out of an ale barrel, walked around the square crying. The public drinking situation in England was getting out of hand. 'So who's it now?'

'Who's what?'

'Chief Warlock, or whatever. Wizard Chief.'

'Just now they're separate. Have you been listening?'

Ry stared at him and hiccupped.

'Nightless Day has the Wizengamot. We voted him in by acclamation after the storm and the Andy Vandal business with the, um, with the,' he waved at the sky. 'It happened very quickly. The old Chief Warlock, Penelope Pilliwickle, we were looking out the window and she, she just shrunk some, and sighed, and resigned on the spot. It was, well, he's something of a force of nature, isn't he?'

'Do you know what we used to say about you, Linsey? We said your grandfather diddled a spider.'

'I know.'

'Or married. I can't remember. Diddled or married.'

'This is Mibu.'

'What? What is?'

'Oriental chap standing over you. He's here for next year's Potions Championship. From Mahoutokoro I think. Iwo Jima. Mibu's my charge while he's here.'

'Does he speak English?'

'Not a word. Say hello, Mibu!'

'Hello!' said Mibu.

'Well, he does have that one down, all right,' said Penthrift.

'What's going on?' Ry asked. He climbed up the smiling Oriental's strong young arm. Turn away for an instant and Muggles got up around you like an infestation, like rats or flies. They were packing in.

Penthrift too, with everyone's help, came unwinding to his feet. 'To conclude: Nightless Day's Chief Warlock, and Lord Castlemore's Chief of the Council.'

'Did you say Castlemore?'

'Nee Doddle, before his "conversion". It is getting a bit thick, isn't it? Mibu, were you looking for me? Why are you here?'

'Burning!'

The black-robed man was standing on a platform and had everyone's attention. He was declaring judgment.

The mob had a nervous quality to it: a licking-of-teeth quality of rashness and lust. Torches of greasy rags were lit up near the front in a ring around the woman lashed to a post amidst the kindling.

Men and women who were themselves the children of parents and parents of children egged on the torchbearers. 'Burn her!'

The practice was to denude the victim of all their hair—all of it, from every part of the body—to locate the devil's mark.

But even absent her long sorrel tresses, Ry recognized Mary Potter.

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