Other Heroes

Martyn Carey

Description

When an inept robber steals a single magical ceramic from a stately home, a disparate group of wizards are reluctantly drafted in to investigate. When their search for an item takes them to Holy Island and Newcastle one of the team is nearly killed. Then they locate more of the magical ceramics, this time in London, but the person holding them is murdered in the cells of a police station, and nobody can work out how. So they have to battle a lack of information, pressure from the police to quit and an increasingly deadly threat to find where the stolen item has gone, who took it and, most importantly, why...This is the second book in the Ordinary Wizards series.

Sujets

• Fantasy (canción de Mariah Carey)
• Magic realism
• Fantasy

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 02 avril 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781803139159
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

Also by Martyn Carey
Grey Neighbours
Ordinary Wizards Series
Ordinary Miracles
Short Story Collections
Snow
Broken House






Copyright © 2022 Martyn Carey

The moral right of the author has been asserted.

Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

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ISBN 9781803139159

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Matador® is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd



For Jane, as always,
for Grimalkin the cat
and for my children,
who usually laugh in the right places.


Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13


1
The cat heard only a faint sound when one of the outside doors into the kitchen was carefully broken open. That wasn’t interesting enough to make her leave her usual plush chair at the foot of the stairs, but her head came up inquisitively.
The door from the kitchen into the hall opened quietly but nobody came out. After a moment something that smelled interesting, but was no more substantial than thin smoke, drifted slowly up the broad, ornate staircase. Relying on her nose more than her eyes she jumped down on velvet paws and followed it.
The smell silently ascended the wide baroque staircase, ignored a tapestried hallway on the first floor that stretched away into the darkness, and continued up until it reached a long gallery on the top floor. This one was beset with flattering but unrealistic portraits and implausibly perfect landscapes. It drifted down the length of the room, still making barely a sound, and stopped at one of the polished wood display cabinets clustered at the far end.
The cat sat on her haunches and waited, blinking with lazy curiosity. After a few moments one of the cabinets opened with a tiny hiss, which set her ears turning, then closed again almost immediately. There was the tiniest glow, no more than a slight change in the granular quality of the darkness, and whatever it was drifted off through the dimness of the long room.
She remained still for another curious moment, looking at the air around the cabinet. Then she turned her head towards the nearest window for a long second before padding slowly back towards the kitchen, one soft paw at a time. The smell had faded when she got back to her usual chair and settled to sleep again, but one ear remained on alert.
*
I don’t often get simple magic wrong, but when I do it can be dramatic. We live in a converted barn on a hillside about ten miles north of Nottingham, and it’s about as rural as you can get short of living inside a silage clamp. It’s a lovely house, with a smaller barn to the right where our cars will go if I ever get around to clearing it out, a nascent pond on the left and an enormous range of birds that start singing far too bleeding early.
Between the house and the lane there is a high, ornate stone wall with carved owls watching the entrance with expressions of perpetual curiosity. The wall looks older than Methuselah’s dad and has withstood years of bolshie cattle, insane sheep, clumsy ramblers and the worst that the wind and rain could do. But, sadly, it hadn’t been able to resist the might of the Supermarket Delivery Van.
I stood next to Jim Brennan, who farms the land around us. We were standing on the side of the big hill and the views – and the wind – were staggering. We surveyed the damage to the wall and the mass of stone that had tumbled onto my lawn. The hole was about three car lengths, apparently the distance it takes a delivery driver to realise he can’t squeeze past a tractor going the other way down the lane.
“I’ll ’ave to get those guys in again,” said Jim after a minute or so. His voice has a stridency that can startle sheep at half a mile. Mind you, some of his sheep would drop dead if a badger farted in the next field, so that isn’t saying all that much.
“I’ll take care of it,” I said. “You’ve better things to worry about than a bit of a wall.” He nodded, which counts as ‘thank you’ in these parts, and ambled off.
I suppose I should mention at this point that I am a proper mage and not one of the ‘bunch of flowers up the sleeve’ type of magician. I can do real spells, honest. So can my fiancée, Amy. In fact, she’s probably better at them than me.
Anyway, this wall. I just needed to restack the stones and it would be fine. Yes, I know it’s a lot more complicated than that. Well, when I say ‘I know’, what I mean is ‘I know now ’.
I used a basic lifting spell called Jaso to try to roll the tumbled parts of the wall back up to where they had been and settle them in place. You won’t be surprised to learn that it didn’t work. In fact, the whole bloody lot fell outwards into the lane just as a car was coming up it. Fortunately the people in it were my magical partner and Amy’s, so they were able to use a push spell called Bultza to shove the stones aside rather than crashing into them.
“What you do now?” Sam asked, slipping out of the car and smiling at me.
“It fell down,” I said, gesturing at the stones.
Clara chuckled, squinting into the blazing blue sky through her huge gold sunglasses. “Yeah, we spotted that. It nearly landed on us.”
“I was trying to put it back up,” I said, irritated and slightly embarrassed. I explained about the van, just in case she was assuming that I had knocked it down. You can’t just say ‘repair yourself’ to a wall, because the stones don’t know where they should be. Clara made a purple glow that surrounded the fallen masonry and lifted it off the lane and back onto the lawn. She’s good at that sort of thing.
Amy opened the front door as we came towards the house. “I’ve phoned the people Jim got to repair the storm damage last year,” she said. “They said they’ll have a look at it tomorrow.”
“OK.” They fell to chatting, and I knew that they would eventually tell me why they were here. But until then I decided to sit outside and soak up some heat. I had broken a great many ribs, as well as other bones, when a building fell on me a month ago. It had squished other bits of me too, so it was no surprise that they still ached. In the warm shade, and with a comfortable seat overlooking our partially installed pond, I fell asleep very quickly.
*
Amy woke me about half an hour later by prodding me in the leg with her walking stick. “It’s all right love, we’ve stopped talking about period pains and bra sizes, so you can come back in now.”
The ground floor of our house – Whin Hill Farm – is pretty much one big room, with the kitchen at one end and the sitting area at the other end, plus a toilet, larder, garden room and wood store stuck on the back as a ‘what have we forgotten’ sort of afterthought. We’d added solar panels to every roof when we bought it.
The womenfolk – I would call them ‘the girls’ but Amy has a glare that could wither an oak tree – were all sitting around our big wooden table drinking long things containing a lot of ice.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“We got sent a problem,” said Sam. She indicated a folder on the table.
The thing we’d been caught up in the month before had been messy, painful, complicated and totally not my fault. It had involved a police inspector casting light spells badly, toilets exploding on an army base and someone setting fire to our first house. We’d come out of it battered and confused and with something of a reputation – possibly deserved but certainly not sought – for resolving magical problems.
So I looked dubiously at the paperwork that was lying on the decorated wooden surface of the table, picked up the top sheet and scanned it.
The Dukes of Ashwell , it began, lived in Marchwood Hall near Oakham . I knew the house, but only slightly. It’s a large, cumbersome sort of building set in grounds that were badly mauled by Capability Brown in the 1760s. The Hall is a popular wedding venue as well as the home of a small but internationally important museum. The first Duke, dead some three hundred years, was a fanatical if somewhat indiscriminate collector. He filled the grandiose house with what at the time might – should – have been called ‘tat’ and is now called ‘very old tat’. This means, irrelevant of quality, virtue or utility, these items are now potentially extremely valuable .
The author went on to describe the theft of just one item from the collection of ‘portable antiquities’. The report was uncertain why the intruder had stolen only one piece when they’d apparently had unfettered access to a significant part of the collection. The theft was, on the surface, far from sophisticated. The kitchen door had been broken open and the thief had walked dusty footprints – size eight – all the way up the stairs and down the Long Gallery to some anti