Kinspit
The mail paper appeared high up above
the apple trees and floated down in a long arc. Hardacre knew what it was
immediately, but
he’d never seen one behave quite like this before. It dropped almost exactly in
to his hands. Something told him to read
it quickly. It was very short and had been scrawled in a great hurry. The ink
was streaked and smudged and it was clear that the writing of the message had
been interrupted.
To Lawrence Herdaker, Kinspit
Please rescue us. I am a friend of V…
And that was it.
‘How can that have
worked?’ thought Hardacre, marvelling at the strangeness of mail paper. He knew
that it was clever in the way it found people but that represented a truly feeble
attempt at spelling his name. Could mail papers read phonetically?
He forced himself
from his brief reverie – who could possibly need his help who also didn’t know
how to spell his name? He walked over to his garden workbench and dropped the
paper on to it. It blew off immediately. That was strange – it was an almost windless
day. He bent over to pick it up and then put it down on the bench again. It
blew off again, but this time he wasn’t really surprised. Someone had cast a
little spell on the mail paper. However,
it was a very feeble spell. Hardacre guessed that it must have been a mage.
He scooped up the
paper and sat on the bench. Somebody was in trouble but he had no exact idea
who, and more importantly he had no idea where they were. A semi-literate mage? He didn’t think there
were any of those. Semi-literate witches, though – there were far too many of
those.
He got up and placed the
paper on the ground. Perhaps it would
lead him somewhere? He followed it as it blew erratically round the garden: there
was no pattern or direction to it. It seemed that the magic user had just cast
a little breeze spell on the mail paper, but why? He folded up the note and put
it in his pocket. He made his way into
the house.
He went straight to
his room. He wanted to examine the spell on the mail paper in more detail.
There was a spell to do that – diagnostikos
– and it was one of the few mage spells that witches ever felt it was worth
learning.
He cast the spell and
sifted through the cluster of data that it produced. He was surprised to see
that it had an open trace, which was very unusual. Most spells that were cast
on objects had a closed trace so that one’s signature was hidden – it was among
the first things that any spell caster learnt to do. He looked closely at the
signature – he didn’t recognise it at all. Then he committed it to his trace
memory so that he would be able to see any spell cast subsequently by that
person.
He put the paper in a
draw and sat down in his armchair to think. ‘A friend of V…’ most probably
meant a friend of Viola’s, but this person was clearly not someone that he
knew. It could all be a hoax or a trap. The open signature left him with a dilemma
– if he saw the trace again then he would be able to teleport to the mage’s
position. However, that might be exactly what an enemy wanted him to do. He waited, scanning his mind map. As he did
this he wrote a note on a piece of paper.
A few minutes later
the trace reappeared and he had to make a decision. He needed to teleport now or wait for another
trace, and that might never come. He already knew what the answer had to be –
if there was any chance that Viola was in trouble then he had to go to help her. He hurried down stairs, slipped the note into
an envelope, and put it on John’s desk in clear sight. Then he blinked away.
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