Broken Homes Read Online Free PDF Page B

from the treeline on a rainy night in 1945. In order to be the hero of Boy’s Own Weekly and still have an intact brain, a sensible wizard carries a staff in which he has personally imbued a great deal of power.
    Don’t ask me what kind of power that is, because the only thing I’ve got that can detect it is Toby the Dog. I’d love to stick some high vestigia material into a mass spectrometer, but first I’d have to get myself a mass spectrometer and then I’d have to learn enough physics to interpret the bloody results.
    Nightingale took his walking stick over to one of the workbenches, unscrewed the top and clamped the stick part in a vice. Then, taking a hammer and chisel, he cracked it along its length to reveal a dull gun-metal blue core the thickness of a pencil.
    ‘This is the heart of the staff,’ he said and fished a magnifying glass out of a nearby drawer. ‘Have a closer look.’
    We took it in turns. The surface of the core had faint but distinct ripples of shade that appeared to spiral up its length.
    ‘What’s it made of?’ asked Lesley as she looked.
    ‘Steel,’ said Nightingale.
    ‘Folded steel,’ I said. ‘Like a samurai sword.’
    ‘It’s called pattern welding,’ said Nightingale. ‘Different steel alloys, forge-welded in a deliberate pattern. Done correctly it creates a matrix that retains magic so that a master can draw upon it later.’
    With a great saving on wear and tear of the brain, I thought.
    ‘How do you get the magic in?’ asked Lesley.
    ‘While you’re forging it,’ said Nightingale and mimed using a hammer. ‘You use a third-order spell to raise the forge temperature and another to keep it hot while you hammer the work.’
    ‘What about the magic?’ I asked.
    ‘It derives, or so I was taught, from the spells you use during the forging,’ he said.
    Lesley rubbed her face. ‘How long will that take?’ she asked.
    ‘This staff will take upwards of three months.’ He saw our expressions. ‘Working say an hour or two a day. One has to avoid overdoing the magic otherwise the purpose of the staff becomes moot.’
    ‘And we’re going to make a staff each?’ she asked.
    ‘Eventually, yes,’ said Nightingale. ‘But first you’re going to watch and learn.’
    Faintly we heard the phone ringing in the distance and all turned to the doorway and waited for Molly to appear. When she did she inclined her head at Nightingale indicating that the call was for him.
    We followed at a discreet distance in the hope of overhearing the conversation.
    ‘I knew I should have paid more attention in D&T,’ said Lesley.
    We were already on the landing when Nightingale called us down. We found him standing with the phone in his hand, a look of total amazement on his face.
    ‘We have a report of a rogue magician,’ he said.
    Me and the rogue magician stared at each other in mutual incomprehension. He was wondering why the hell there was a police officer sitting by his bed and I was wondering where the hell this guy had come from.
    His name was George Nolfi and he was an ordinary-looking white man in his late sixties – sixty-seven according to my notes. His hair was thinning but still mostly brown, he had blue eyes and a face that had obviously gone for a gaunt old age rather than jowls. His hands were bandaged from the wrist down so that only the tips of his fingers showed – occasionally he held them up and examined them with a look of utter surprise on his face. My notes said that he’d suffered second-degree burns to his hands during the ‘incident’, but that nobody else had been injured although several young children had been treated for shock.
    ‘Why don’t you tell me what happened?’ I said.
    ‘You won’t believe me,’ he said.
    ‘You made a ball of fire appear out of thin air,’ I said. ‘See, I believe you – this sort of thing happens all the time.’
    He stared at me stupidly. We get this a lot even from people with some experience of the supernatural