Armand’s First Letter. Amelia’s First Letter.

14 June 1022, 22 Merton Street, Edenford

My dearest cousin Armand,

Between them, Dr. Tillotson, Jérôme Lavigne, and my Maximilian have created a catastrophe. And though it is what we had been looking for, I find I rather wish they hadn’t.

Maximilian was late getting home for tea last week. He apologized, of course, but I was more interested in his smile, for he truly he was beaming!

“You’ve done it!” I said.

“We have done it,” he said, with a bow. “You shall come with me tomorrow and see all.” And no more would he tell me, even after I drew his attention to the soot marks on one cheek.

“Oh, did I not get them all?” he cried cheerily, and went to wash.

We gathered in Dr. Tillotson’s workroom the next morning. “My laboratory,” as he told me on my first visit there, “though perhaps they use a different term in Provençe? Sanctum, perhaps?”

“I have no notion at all,” I said on that occasion. “Dr. Laguerre most commonly does magic in her sitting room.”

On this occasion there was a crude table in the middle of the space, a scarred and burned wooden panel suspended on two trestles. A plank lay on the table; it was perhaps six foot long, and was adorned with a series of wooden pegs along its length, rather like an extended version of the construction I told you of in February, with many more pegs.

Dr. Tillotson handed me a marble, and said, “Mrs. Archer, if you would be so good as to place this on the peg at this end.”

Nodding, I took it and placed it carefully atop the indicated peg. After a moment the marble disappeared from its place and reappeared atop the next peg in the sequence; and then again, and again, until it came to rest on the peg at the opposite end of the plank, where Maximilian was waiting.

“Max?” said Dr. Tillotson.

Maximilian picked up the the marble, held it up for moment, and then put it back on the peg, after which it did its vanishing trick from peg to peg until it was once again in front of me.

I clapped my hands. “Oh, magnificent!” I cried, and then frowned. “But that doesn’t explain the burn marks and soot stains.”

Dr. Tillotson bowed. “We have just showed you how the trick ought to be done, Mrs. Archer. But do you recall what I told you about the Langston Transform some years ago?”

Perhaps you will not recall, Armand, but the Langston Transform was the spell that was used to charm my brother almost into marriage with that harpy. We discovered it in time, but only because the spell was not—”The spell must balance!” I said with a rush. “Each peg is a node in the spell, and the magical flows through the network must balance or there will be trouble!”

“Trouble indeed!” said Tillotson.

“Hence the soot stains,” said Maximilian.

And with that they remove the plank and its pegs from the table, leaning it against the wall, and replaced it with a rather more complicated affair. It too had a plank with pegs, but there was some kind of funnel at the near end and something different about the peg at the far end that I could not quite make out.

The two of them positioned the device so that the far end hung over the edge of the table, where I only now noticed a small bucket placed on the floor below. Taking another small bucket from the corner, Maximilian came and stood next to me at the near end.

“You’d best move well back,” he said. “If you stand over there by the door you’ll be able to see it all.”

I did so, and Dr. Tillotson came to stand by me.

“Watch carefully,” he instructed.

Maximilian’s bucket proved to be filled with a large quantity of marbles, which he poured slowly into the funnel. As he did so the marbles began to drop one at a time onto the first peg in the sequence, from which they flashed immediately to the second peg, and so on until the last, where they immediately fell off into the bucket on the floor with a plinking sound.

“They are moving rather faster,” I said.

“Yes,” said Dr. Tillotson. “It takes a little while, so we adjusted the spell so that it happens more quickly.”

Armand kept pouring, and the marbles kept plinking, and then I began to notice curls of smoke rising from the last peg.

“Oh!” I said.

Soon the peg nearest it was also smoking, and then a third, and the smoke got thicker and thicker, and the marbles continued to fall, plink, plink, plink, into the bucket, and then Dr. TIllotson said, “You may wish to shield your eyes, Mrs. Archer.” Mere moments after I had done so there was a rapid succession of loud cracking noise followed by the sound of marbles tumbling onto the floor.

The windows were open, it being a fine day, and the smoke soon cleared to reveal…a catastrophe. The last seven pegs had shattered into splinters, leaving nothing but jagged stump, and the plank was cracked nearly in half in a number of places. Several more pegs were still smoking, and there were shards of broken marbles at the far end of the table.

I inclined myself forward so as to see better, but Dr. Tillotson put out a warning arm. “Best not,” he said. “Some of the surviving pegs still have dangerously high levels of magic. In fact, we’d best continue this in my sitting room.”

And so we adjourned for a mid-morning tea.

One we were settled, Dr. Tillotson regarded me over his steaming cup. “Do you see what happened?”

“Of course I did,” I said. “As each marble made its leap it carried some magic from its starting peg to its new peg, and so on to the end. Magic accumulated at the final peg, until finally it was too much. And then, boom,” I said, making an exploding motion with my hands.

“Just so,” he said. “And now I think we know what happened to the Iturians.”

My eyes widened, and I shuddered.

Maximilian nodded. “They had a vast array, with many, many nodes. The magic would have dispersed slowly through the array; but the array was haphazard, as we have seen.”

“No one has ever been able to discern a pattern in it,” I said slowly, “because there was never any pattern to find.”

“Precisely. It would have been difficult or impossible to balance,” said Maximilian.

“And it would not have occurred to them to balance it; the maths required to do so had not yet been discovered.” said Tillotson.

“And if the Iturians moved large quantities of troops and good along the ley lines in an unbalanced way, over many years—” I said.

“—boom,” finished Maximilian, echoing my explosive gesture.

I pictured the map of the Old Lands, and the vast open space where, we had guessed, the nation of Ituria once lay.

“Great store of goods would have been flowing to the capital, the City of Flowers,” I said.

“And people,” said Maximilian, “all coming to the capital to seek their fortunes.”

“Most would have died and been buried there,” I said.

“And the goods would have been consumed and the remains consigned to the middens,” said Maximilian.

“And so none of it would ever have left Ituria,” said Dr. TIllotson.

“For centuries,” I said.

We all sat silently for a time, and I admit, Armand, that I found myself shedding tears into my tea.

Your awestruck and horrified cousin,

Amelia

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