A red ribbon of light gleamed from deep within the shelves, and—
“Robin,” said Edwin, “a distraction, please!”
Edwin had been standing facing the ledger. He turned away from it now, and dashed with ungainly speed away between the shelves before any of the Coopers could react. His arms were free and separate at his sides.
“What—” said George, and Robin gave the bloodcurdling yell of an athlete with some rage to burn and swung an impressive fist directly at Rolfe.
The man’s head snapped back in as perfect a piece of boxing form as a caricaturist for the newspaper could ever hope to capture. His grip fell nervelessly away from Violet. Robin didn’t pause, but lunged at Hartley, who had begun to run into the shelves after Edwin.
So they were fighting after all. Jack felt a smile break his face. No time for strategy beyond take out the greatest threat, and the greatest threat was handily not far away.
He moved quickly over to George, took hold of his cousin’s wrists, and forced them apart.
A nascent cradle of orange sparks disappeared. George tried to haul his arms out of Jack’s grip, but Jack’s favoured form of exercise since leaving the army had been singlestick. His grip was unshakable and his arms were strong, and George—
“You should have brought Morris along, George,” said Jack. “Isn’t this what he’s for?”
George never lost his temper, and George employed people to be violent for him; Jack would swear he’d never been in a proper fight in his life. Which also meant he didn’t know anything about defence and misdirection. His eyes slid to the side, over Jack’s shoulder, and so Jack had enough warning to hurl them both sideways and around, as if they were dancing, so that he could see Walter with a spell built between his hands, about to cast it at Jack.
Jack’s neck muscles tightened. And then Adelaide Morrissey, brown arms bare and Robin’s waistcoat swinging as she moved, lunged in front of Walter’s incipient magic.
Jack opened his throat to shout no, with a pure, sick rush of fear.
Walter made a noise instead. It was a short, stubbed-toe noise. Jack could only just glimpse him—Adelaide was mostly in the way, and Jack was still working hard to keep George’s hands apart—but Walter looked baffled and furious, and lifted his fingers to inspect them. They had curled into claws.
“But—you’re not—” Walter said.
“Aren’t I?” said Adelaide, breathless, and kicked him between the legs.
The next sound Walter made was even shorter and more stifled. Jack and George both winced in unwilling sympathy.
“Oh, you shit” came from Violet, and then retching noises. Jack couldn’t spare attention to see what had happened—George, apparently inspired, was now trying to kick him in the bollocks. In his periphery Jack saw a raised hand and his nerves yelled grenade without his consent, sending a splash of cold terror down his spine.
The raised hand was Hartley’s. Robin had hold of his other wrist, holding it high above his head, but the young Cooper clearly had grit—practically dangling, he still cast the contents of his free hand in Jack’s direction.
“Sir!” he yelled as he did so. George made another go at wrenching himself away.
The small glasslike bauble landed at Jack’s feet and spilled out yellow smoke. The first tendrils rose to Jack’s nose and all the air left his lungs at once. It was worse than landing hard off a horse. His chest refused to expand.
George wrenched again, and this time Jack couldn’t hold him. He couldn’t even breathe.
“All right, stop this,” said George to the room at large. He lifted his hands to cradle.
Before he could, the British Isles flung themselves across the room.
It was the Lockroom’s map-spell, designed for locating individuals; the map on the wall was now writ large and in white lines, on every wall and most of the ceiling. The lines turned a vivid purple and the map began to change, to merge and shift fast enough that Jack felt queasy as well as suffocated. Within it appeared one searingly bright line, running all across the ceiling and down the wall to a point close to the floor, like a vein of gold in a rock. Like lightning cutting through the sky.
“No,” said Edwin. “You stop.”
He came out of the shelves with a cradle in his hands and light crawling all over him. The light was the clean white halo of guidelights and electric, and bright enough that it took a moment to notice that Edwin was shaking as if in the grips of fever.
“Oh God,” said Robin hollowly. “You made it work.”
Jack managed to inhale for the first time in what felt like minutes. George, fast as ever, finished his spell and released it in Edwin’s direction. Edwin jerked his wrist and—something appeared in the path of George’s spell, sizzling it into nothing. All the light was concentrating between his palms.
“Give us back the contract, and let us go, or I will unmake you. I will tear your cells apart—”
The lightning line on the crazed map thickened and brightened, as if a crack were forming in the shell keeping an explosion contained. Edwin gasped raggedly, and the light in his hand grew brighter too. He did not look triumphant. He looked as if he’d been awake for three days under heavy fire.
“Mr. Courcey, what are you doing? You will stop that! Immediately!” squawked Prest, huddled near the door.
George tried another spell. Even Walter managed to drag himself upright and cast something, but this time their magic turned to sparking uselessness before even leaving the cradles. Dark clouds were filling the room now as if pouring from hidden vents, the light between Edwin’s hands was brighter and brighter, and the map line began to writhe like a snake pinned down at both ends and tortured.
Even Jack could tell something was going very, very wrong.
Adelaide tried to take hold of Edwin’s arm, and snatched her hand back. Jack took a half a step forward but never finished it. The floor gave a few tremors and then shook hard and fast like a dice cup.
Jack’s leg gave out and he fell down. Walter almost followed suit but caught himself with a curse. Raised voices and shouts of alarm filtered dimly down from above them. Whatever Edwin was doing had stopped being contained by the Lockroom.
“All right, out!” snapped Walter, waving his hand at Prest. “Get out!”
Prest flung the door open and ran.
“Idiot,” said Walter savagely. He limped over and closed the door again in order to cast the exit rune, hands shaking with haste. When he opened the door, it led to the main foyer.
At that point the writhing line of light abruptly shattered, a table leg broke and both table and ledger fell with a heavy crash, and between the thick black clouds and the fact that Edwin was now outright painful to look at, Jack’s vision became more or less useless. He climbed warily to his feet.
He heard voices and shouts and questions and saw the outlines of moving figures. Some of them probably went through the door and out, because the stew of voices thinned to Robin’s alone.
“No, not now—not yet.” Robin sounded frantic. “Edwin, you can stop. Let it go. Please—please. One piece at a time, love.”
An awful crack of stone sounded close above their heads. Dust fell onto Jack’s face. A memory he’d have sworn he’d long ago set aside, one of the worst of the war, grabbed at all the nerves of his body. A high-pitched ringing burrowed into his ears.