“It counts with me,” I say.
“Does it.”
I huff. “Yes. Ebb. It does. He hated me before he even met me.”
“Exactly,” she says.
“Exactly!”
“I’m just saying—been a long time since I had to spell you two apart.”
“Well, there’s no point in throwing down all the time,” I say. “Doesn’t get us anywhere. And it hurts. I suspect we’re saving up.”
“For what?” she asks.
“The end.”
“The end of school?”
“The end of the end,” I say. “The big fight.”
“So you were saving it, and then he didn’t come back for it?”
“Exactly!”
“Well, I wouldn’t lose hope,” Ebb says. “I think he’ll be back. His mother always valued a good education. I miss her this time a’year.…”
She wipes her eyes on her sleeve. I sigh. Sometimes, with Ebb, you’re better off just enjoying the silence. And the goats.
* * *
Three weeks pass. Four, five, six.
I stop looking for Baz anywhere where he’s supposed to be.
Whenever I hear someone on the stairs outside our room now, I know it’s Penny. I even let her spend the night sometimes and sleep in his bed; there doesn’t seem to be any immediate danger of Baz bursting in and lighting her on fire for it. (The Roommate’s Anathema doesn’t prevent you from hurting anyone else in your room.)
I hassle Niall a few more times, but he doesn’t even hint that he knows where Baz is. If anything, it seems like Niall’s hoping that I’ll turn up some answers.
I feel like I should talk to the Mage about it. About Baz. But I don’t want to talk to the Mage. I’m afraid he might still be planning to send me away.
Penny says it’s pointless to avoid him. “It’s not like you’ll fall off the Mage’s radar.”
But maybe I have.… And that bothers me, too.
The Mage is always gone a lot, but he’s hardly been at Watford at all this term. And whenever he is here, he’s surrounded by his Men.
Normally, he’d be checking on me. Calling me to his office. Giving me assignments, asking for help. Sometimes I think the Mage actually needs my help—he can trust me better than anyone—but sometimes I think he’s just testing me. To see what I’m made of. To keep me in order.
I’m sitting in class one day when I see the Mage walking alone towards the Weeping Tower. As soon as class ends, I make for the Tower.
It’s a tall, red brick building—one of the oldest at Watford, almost as old as the Chapel. It’s called the Weeping Tower because there are vines that grow in every summer and creep from the top down—and because the building has started to sag forward over the years, almost like it’s slumping in grief. Ebb says not to worry about it falling; the spells are still strong.
The dining hall is on the ground floor of the Tower, the whole ground floor, and then above that are classrooms and meeting rooms and summoning chambers; the Mage’s office and sanctum are at the very top.
He comes and goes as he needs to. The Mage has the whole magickal world to keep track of—in the UK, anyway—and hunting the Humdrum takes up a lot of his time.
The Humdrum doesn’t just attack me. That isn’t even the worst of it. (If it were, the other magicians probably would have thrown me to him by now.)
When the Humdrum first showed up, almost twenty years ago, holes began appearing in the magickal atmosphere. It seems like he (it?) can suck the magic out of a place, probably to use against us.
If you go to one of these dead spots, it’s like stepping into a room without air. There’s just nothing there for you, no magic—even I run dry.
Most magicians can’t take it. They’re so used to magic, to feeling magic, that they go spare without it. That’s how the monster got its name. One of the first magicians to encounter the holes said they were like an “insidious humdrum, a mundanity that creeps into your very soul.”
The dead spots stay dead. You get your magic back if you leave, but the magic never comes back to that place.
Magicians have had to leave their homes because the Humdrum has pulled the magic out from underneath them.
It’d be a disaster if the Humdrum ever came to Watford.
So far, he usually sends someone else—or something else, some dark creature—in after me.
It’s easy for the Humdrum to find allies. Every dark creature in this world and its neighbours would love to see the mages fall. The vampires, the werewolves, the demons and banshees, the Manticorps, the goblins—they all resent us. We can control magic, and they can’t. Plus we keep them in check. If the dark things had their way, the Normal world would be chaos. They’d treat regular people like livestock. We—magicians—need the Normals to live their normal lives, relatively unaffected by magic. Our spells depend on them being able to speak freely.
That explains why the dark creatures hate us.
But I still don’t know why the Humdrum has targeted me, specifically. Because I’m the most powerful magician, I suppose. Because I’m the biggest threat.
The Mage says that he himself followed my power like a beacon when it was time to bring me to Watford.
Maybe that’s how the Humdrum finds me, too.
I take a winding staircase to the top of the Weeping Tower, where it opens up into a round foyer. The school seal is laid out in marble tile on the floor and polished till it looks wet. And the domed ceiling has a mural of Merlin himself calling magic up through his hands into the sky, his mouth open. He kind of looks like the guy who hosts QI.