‘Would you like a home?’
The spirit chuckled. ‘I am quite alright without help.’
Yet, when he stood, he clutched at his middle. The girl scooped him up in her arms. He was light, as if made of tin and he said, ‘Oh, fine, then.’
As she walked, his eyes drooped shut. She hid him under her coat as she passed the hostel staff. She had recently moved into a private room the size of a shoe cupboard; she set the spirit down on her bed and placed a plate of salt and a bowl of rosewater beside him.
‘A fast learner,’ mumbled the spirit.
‘The spirits are good teachers,’ she said.
‘Perhaps you ought to teach me a thing or two,’ said Belchamber, breathing in the salts and drinking down the rosewater. ‘Why is your kind so resistant to help?’
‘Why are you so insistenttohelp?’ asked the girl.
‘Because I can,’ said Belchamber. ‘Because people need it.’
‘Do they deserve it?’
‘Kindness is not a currency, always in need of equilibrium,’ said the little spirit. ‘It’s been hardly a year since the rifles were set down; next year, it shall be a decade since the change to the constitution. Still, humans are losing hands and eyes for what is a birthright.’
‘Magic is a burden,’ said the girl.
‘That is rot,’ said Belchamber. ‘It is a tool, imbued with whatever meaning we give it.’
‘The war changed things, I suppose.’
‘The war was a farce. We’ve a corrupt king who wanted to cover up his mistakes by provoking the very people he once depended on. How terribly unfair it is that the United Allies did not throw him out of the palace. Instead, they made himceremonial.’
‘What do you mean, “ceremonial”?’ asked the girl.
‘Did your school masters or mistresses not teach you?’
The girl shook her head.
‘Ellarde Custre IV is a king in name only,’ said Belchamber. ‘After Calléum lost the war, the United Allies couldn’t execute him. Calléans are not terribly fond of their monarch, but proud enough to riot should someone chop off his head. So, the Allies stripped him of his power and gave that power to the Prime Minister, and lo and behold, that terrible man kept his palace and gold and charms and Grand Magician.’ The spirit shook his little head. ‘Three years ago, we were a nation so poor you could not find a dozen eggs in a single corner shop. Now, they open specialty egg shops! We all forget domestic horror so quickly. I feel as if I am howling into the abyss, Miss Edwina.Wheredid the eggs go during the war? What were the chickens doing? I want to understand everything and I understand nothing, and now here we are with a daemon sellingfalse packet spells to the very soldiers who went to war because of the offence caused by his punishment.’
‘Who is this daemon?’ asked the girl.
‘Salamander,’ said Belchamber.
‘And he has a poor reputation?’
‘To those who know and remember,’ said the spirit. ‘To many I am sure he has a wondrous reputation – the newspapers like to imply as much. He was the Minister for Sorcerie and Magic until it was discovered that beneath his department store – Hemmington’s, that is – he was keeping a depraved menagerie of caged spirits. He was doing testson us. Thousands of us. The United Allies – those are the affluent countries, Edwina, on the north side of the continent – it was their eldest spirits who performed his daemotion.’
‘They took away this Salamander’s magic?’ asked the girl.
‘Most of it,’ said Belchamber. ‘He is a thousand years old, now relegated to the kind of power a decade-old spirit might have. I, myself am only two hundred and fifty-three. I was born a tiny, flickering thing, out of a speck of dust from an old church tower in a small town in East Calléum.’
The spirit smiled as if he recalled it.
‘I digress. The United Allies threw the very first stone by calling for our Minister for Sorcerie and Magic, Salamander, to be daemoted. They sent their spirits to do the job and so our King, in a terrible tantrum, humoured that ridiculous little political group, the Radical Spokes, and introduced The Prohibition on Magicand the articles within it; the King thought that if his friend Salamander could not use magic, then none shall! So, the Mass Exodus eventuated because our spirits were offended and terrified of facing such a rare punishment themselves. Then this politician committed espionage and then that duchess was assassinated and the United Allies took retaliatory offence and our ridiculous King started offering licences to theelite students of the Royal Academy so long as they signed binding contracts of obedience, and quite suddenly, we are in the middle of a war against the rest of the continent and there go the eggs!’
The spirit stuck his little hands in the remaining rosewater and patted it over his face.
‘And now,’ said Belchamber, ‘Salamander runs a department store and several factories and sells shoddy packet spells so that he can pay scads of silver to the United Allies – he means to make friends of them. He wants their political support. He wants his daemotion reversed, I fear, and he seems to believe that his copious “donations” to the countries that once occupied ours will serve his goal to change the constitution.’
‘He would be making a lot of money,’ said the girl.
