A Declaration of the Rights of Magicians--A Novel Read online

  Copyright

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by H. G. Parry

  Cover design by Lisa Marie Pompilio

  Cover illustrations by Shutterstock

  Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

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  First Edition: June 2020

  Simultaneously published in Great Britain by Orbit

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Parry, H. G., author.

  Title: A declaration of the rights of magicians / H.G. Parry.

  Description: First Edition. | New York, NY : Redhook, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019032229 | ISBN 9780316459082 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780316459105 (e-book)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR9639.4.P376 D43 2020 | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019032229

  ISBNs: 978-0-316-45908-2 (hardcover), 978-0-316-45909-9 (ebook)

  E3-20200508-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One: Rising

  West Africa

  France

  London: Autumn 1779

  England/France: Summer 1783

  Jamaica: Summer 1783

  London: December 1785

  England: 1787

  Arras: October 1788

  London: November 1788

  Jamaica: Autumn 1788

  London: November 1788

  England: The Regency Crisis

  London: May 1789

  Paris: July 1789

  Part Two: Revolutions

  Paris: June 1791

  Saint-Domingue/Jamaica: August 1791

  London/Paris: September 1791

  Jamaica: Autumn 1791

  London: April 1792

  Saint-Domingue: Spring 1792

  Paris: August 1792

  Paris: September 1792

  London: October 1792

  Paris: Winter 1792–1793

  London: February 1793

  Part Three: Terror

  London/Paris/Saint-Domingue: Spring 1793

  Paris: June 1793

  Saint-Domingue: August 1793

  Paris/London: September 1793

  France: The Reign of Terror

  Clapham: Autumn 1793

  Paris: December 1793

  Saint-Domingue: January 1794

  Paris: February 1794

  Paris: March 1794

  London/Saint-Domingue: April 1794

  Saint-Domingue/London: July 1794

  Paris/London/Saint-Domingue: 9 Thermidor, Year II of the French Republic of Magicians / 27 July 1794

  London: 28 July 1794

  Paris/London/Saint-Domingue: 10 Thermidor, Year II of the French Republic of Magicians / 28 July 1794

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  Also by H. G. Parry

  This one’s for my parents, William John and Dorothy Lynette Parry. Thank you for everything.

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  PART ONE

  RISING

  West Africa

  They came the summer she was six. She and her brother were alone in the house when strangers broke in, armed with muskets and knives. Her brother yelled to her to run, but she stumbled on the ground outside, and a pair of hands seized her. They took her brother too. She never knew what happened to her parents.

  When she saw the blanched white faces and pale eyes of the men to whom she was to be sold, her attempts at bravery broke, and she burst into tears. Her brother and his friends had told stories about the ghosts that came and took people away. The ghosts lived in a hollow world, they said, that roamed the sea and swallowed people up. The people brought to them were placed under evil magic, so that their minds fell asleep and their bodies belonged to the ghosts.

  The man who sold her told her that it wasn’t true. The ghosts were men, white men, and they were from a country over the sea. They didn’t want to feed her to their hollow world—which was called a ship and was used for traveling oceans. They only wanted her to work for them in their own country. It was true about the magic, though. They would feed it to her on the first day. From then on, she would belong to them.

  They took the men and older boys into the ship first. Her brother crying out to her as she was torn away from his arms wrenched her heart in two. It was the last time she would hear her name for a very long time.

  It was dark in the belly of the ship, and the fetid stench was worse than anything she had ever imagined. She cried and fought not to go down, but one of the men cuffed her hard so she was dizzy, and before her head could recover she was lying in a tiny, filthy space with shackles about her wrists and ankles. The metal was cold, and sticky with someone else’s blood.

  When they gave her the food that would spellbind her, she swallowed it. She wanted to. In her village, when the children had talked about the ghosts that took people over the seas, they had said that your mind fell asleep under the spell. They said it was like dying, and she wanted to die.

  She waited while the creeping numbness took her fingers and her toes and her heart. She waited until she felt her breathing become harsh and regular and her tears stop. At last she could not move even her eyes. She waited for her thoughts to still in the same way, as she might wait to fall asleep on a hot night; she longed for it, as an escape from the fear and the pain. But it never came. Her body was asleep. Her mind was still awake inside. When she realized this, she screamed and screamed, but her screams never made it farther than her own head.

  All the way across the world, she was awake. She couldn’t move unless they told her to, not even a finger, not even to make a sound. She breathed; she blinked; she retched when the motion of the ship became too much. Outside of this and other such involuntary spasms, she was helpless. But she felt everything. She felt the bite of iron at her wrists and the cramping of her muscles as her limbs lay rigid in the small space. She felt the grain of the wooden floor against her skin as the ship rocked, rubbing until her back and legs were raw and bleeding. She smelled the urine and blood and vomit, and she heard the strange, jarring language of the men tromping the decks overhead. Sometimes, right before they were fed and th
e last dose of the spell was beginning to wear off, she heard the others in the hold begin to groan or sob or speak. All day, she fought to make a sound herself, just enough to call out and see if any of her family were there to answer her. But then the men would come with their food again, and the hold would fall silent. If someone else had died, that was when they took the bodies away. Sometimes they took people away who were still alive, and did things to them. She didn’t know what they did, but they came back more broken, and sometimes they didn’t come back at all.

  She didn’t know where her family was, and everything hurt so much. She was a child. She had never hurt like that before.

  After they sold her in the marketplace, they branded her. Part of this was to mark her, once and for all, as property. She belonged to a sugar plantation now, in Jamaica. In time, she would learn what that meant.

  The other part was to test that the spellbinding really had taken effect entirely. One of the men in line in front of her let out a strangled noise when the iron seared his flesh, and he was taken away. She didn’t know what happened to him.

  She was perfectly bound now. The metal touched her skin and scorched it with heat that seemed to go clear through to the bone. In her head, she writhed and screamed. Her body never made a sound.

  Her new owners named her Fina. From now on, she was to answer to that name, and that alone.

  France

  Camille Desmoulins was five years old, and he was playing with shadows.

  It was midsummer’s eve, and Guise was sleepy and sunbaked in the deepening twilight. Camille was outside the main town, down by the river, where the grass grew thick under the old stone bridge. He was too young to be away from home alone, but his father was at work, and his tutor, on such a languid evening, was content to believe that his pupil liked to study alone. Soon, he would enter the tiny makeshift schoolroom to check on his charge and realize, with irritation and alarm, that he had wandered away again, but that would come too late. In fact, Camille did like to study alone. Today, though, his magic had stirred in his blood and set his heart racing. He had come to the river to make the shadows dance.

  The shadows with which he played weren’t shadows of anything in particular, or they didn’t seem to be. They lurked in cracks and crevices between the borders of this world and another, watching and waiting. Camille stirred them with a feather touch, as lightly as he could, and they responded at once. He swirled them in the air, the way one might swirl a leaf in the water, making patterns, watching the ripples. He paused once to scratch his wrist, where his bracelet was beginning to heat in response to his magic. The bracelet had been locked about his arm from infancy, as was the case for all Commoner magicians. Its smooth metallic band was meant to grow with him, but it always felt too tight. It felt particularly so today. The air was translucent with light and shade.

  It was at this point that he usually stopped, before his bracelet could scald him further. This time, however, he did not. The evening bewitched him. It all seemed a lucid dream: the green-blue sky, the cool water, the warmth of the summer air. He reached out with his magic, and pulled.

  The shadows began to converge. What had been faint wisps of darkness gathered in front of him in a tall plume like smoke. His bracelet burned at his wrist, hotter and hotter. He drew the shadows closer. They struggled; his heart beat in his chest like a kite tugging at the end of a rope in a high wind. The plume of smoke-darkness writhed, twisted—and then, at last, resolved itself into a single black shadow. Human-formed, trailing lighter fragments like whispers of fog. It turned to Camille and looked at him.

  Something was screaming: a high, piercing note that penetrated the haze of magic and heat. Dimly, Camille recognized that it was coming from his wrist. His bracelet wailed a long note of warning, and still it burned, hotter than ever, so hot that reflexive tears spilled down his cheeks. But the pain was nothing compared to the wonder he felt. There was a living shadow in front of him, and it was real, and it was him but not him at once. It was tall and thin—a human shape, yes, but one that had been stretched like dough under a baker’s hands.

  The shadow regarded him for a long moment. Then, quite deliberately, it bowed. Camille bowed back, his burning wrist held clumsily apart from his body. It was as though his soul had opened its eyes for the first time.

  “Get back!” Without further warning, a pistol shot cracked the air. There was a faint hiss as the shot passed through vapor, and then the shadow was gone. Nothing but a smoke trail was left to show it had ever been there.

  Camille screamed. The bullet had not hit him, yet he felt it sear as though through his heart, and the nothingness that came to engulf him in its wake was worse. His cries joined the wail of the bracelet, as though both were being killed together. He screamed, over and over, as the crowd drawn from the village by his bracelet’s alarm rushed forward. He was still screaming as Leroy the blacksmith grabbed him by the arms and held him roughly, careful to avoid the shrieking piece of hot metal at his wrist. He still screamed as the Knight Templar from the village came on the scene. He screamed right until the Templar, fumbling, touched his bracelet with the spell to silence the alarm, and then he stopped so abruptly that some of the onlookers thought he was dead. He wasn’t. He was white and limp, but gasping, as Leroy caught him up in his arms and took him to the Temple Church.

  He was in the underground cell for twelve hours. The Templar tried to offer him food, and even words of comfort. Camille was a tiny waif, with eyes too big for his face under a fringe of black curls, and the Templar was not a monster. The child remained curled up in the corner, unresponsive, shaking, and distraught.

  It was perhaps the best thing he could have done, though he could not have known or cared. By the early hours of the morning, Jean Benoit Nicolas Desmoulins had come to bargain, quietly, for the freedom of his son. He was a well-connected man in the town, a lawyer and lieutenant general of the local bailliage; it was unlikely under any circumstances that Camille would be convicted of illegal magic and carted off to the Bastille like a common street urchin. But by the time Desmoulins arrived with his purse and his double meanings, the Templar was unnerved enough by the small, haunted figure in the bowels of the church that he was willing to surrender him without a fight. He had taken illegal magicians before—even underage ones, even in Guise. He was used to their fear and their guilt. Little Camille was incapacitated by neither. He could not imagine what was happening in the child’s head, but it sent a shiver down his spine.

  For a while, when they brought him home, there were fears that nothing would ever happen in Camille’s head again. His father, still burning with shame and anger, pushed him into his mother’s waiting arms. Camille had walked to and from the carriage under his own power, but he still had not spoken.

  “Take him,” Desmoulins said roughly. “Not that it’ll do much good. My son and heir, no better than an idiot now. Those bastards. Someone needs to teach them a lesson.”

  He had underestimated the resilience of small children, or at least of this one. Late that morning, Camille came back downstairs, fed and washed and rested, and little the worse for his dark night. He spoke as brightly and intelligently as he ever had, a little too much so for some people’s liking. But he had changed. His voice had been clear as a bell; now it had an unmistakable stammer that never went away, no matter how his father frowned and encouraged in turn. At times his eyes would stare, disconcertingly, at things that weren’t there. He had been somewhere that nobody could quite understand. And every so often, at church, or in the street, the local Knight Templar would look up to see Camille watching him, and would know that he had not forgiven it.

  London

  Autumn 1779

  On the night of 22 October 1779, John Terrell, London saddler and unbraceleted Commoner, was surprised in his bed by a would-be burglar brandishing a pistol. Strictly speaking, it was his wife who surprised him. Her cry upon awakening to a dark shape entering their bedroom woke Mr. Terrell in turn, and the burgla
r swiftly found himself lying on the floor, groaning from a blow to the head. The commotion woke the neighbors, who arrived on the scene to find Mr. Terrell holding the man down while Mrs. Terrell held the heavy poker that had struck him. The burglar was arrested.

  The Bow Street Runners were not impolite enough to ask how the burglar came to be struck from behind, when the only two occupants of the house were both in front of him in bed. Unfortunately, the burglar was more than happy to tell them, as soon as he had recovered speech. The Terrells were soon wakened again, this time by a member of the Knights Templar knocking on the door. A week later, while the burglar in question still languished in Newgate Prison, John Terrell was standing in the dock at the Old Bailey, facing charges of unregistered magic and failure to report a magical Inheritance to the appropriate authorities.

  It was a perfectly ordinary incident. It would not change the world. But it was as good a place to begin as any.

  William Pitt was late to the parliamentary debates that night, not because the trial had run late—in fact, the judge had adjourned early to attend a dinner—but because he had held back to argue the case with the senior advocate.

  “The point is,” he said, as his older colleague gathered his notes, “Mr. Terrell would have been legally within his rights to use his Inheritance had he been registered. Even Commoners are allowed to use magic to defend themselves, if circumstances call for it. They clearly called for it in this case. His house was broken into, and the housebreaker was armed. Mr. Terrell used his weak telekinesis to pick up a fire poker and hit the assailant from behind. It’s hardly vampirism, is it?”

  “The problem is, he wasn’t registered,” his colleague said. “The Temple Church have no record of his magic. He had no bracelet.” He said it patiently, in Pitt’s opinion. John Drudge had been working these courts for twenty years—Pitt’s entire lifetime. He would probably have quite liked to go to dinner himself, rather than be pressed about a routine case of unregistered magic by an inexperienced junior.