The Triple Goddess (161 page)

The old woman sighed. ‘Pity, we could have done great things together. I need a dependable junior assistant so that I can take on more work, but with the finances as they are.... From time to time I’ve even been reduced to taking in the witches’ snotty children as a day-care facility: the mothers pay me a pittance to mind them while they go off to their bridge and golf games.

‘There was a brat called Wendy I had here who was learning to read; she got into one of the books, and succeeded in turning Volumnia into an elephant; a baby one fortunately, but even so if I hadn’t come home in the nick of time and reversed the spell, the floor would have collapsed.

‘The worst occasion occurred while I was upstairs and Barb Trout’s two-year-old daughter, Yolanda, opened the spigot on the barrel of sand I use for tracing magic circles. She let it all out to make a beach to play and build sandcastles on, added the pickled octopus from a jar I’d taken down from the cupboard, and shook some red okapi powder over it because she liked the colour.

‘Quite by chance Yolanda then crawled around three times and said, “Googoogopotty”, which is close enough to the correct incantation, and Hey presto! there were a dozen Vikings in here. I heard the noise from upstairs in the turret and came down to find them drinking mead out of their horned helmets and trashing the place. They destroyed some valuable specimens and the more fragile of the spell instruments in the laboratory’—Hecate waved at a heavy green curtain on a rail, which closed off the side of the room that Jenny hadn’t got round to investigating—‘before I was able to send them to Arabia to sober up in an alcohol-free environment.

‘That wasn’t the end of it: one of Wanda Empiria’s accounting minions, Dee Ductable, gave me the run-around over the insurance claim to WICCA, the Witches’ Insurance Cooperative & Care Association, because the loss hadn’t been incurred in the conducting of Guild business. Though I took it to the Appeals Board and won, on the grounds that third-party misuse of spell ingredients was a contingency risk under the umbrella coverage, Ductable, prompted I’m sure by Wanda, took a year to cut me a cheque.

‘To be honest, I’m sometimes at fault when things go wrong. I gave a girl called Abby, Debra Cadaver’s daughter, the task of trying to sort some papers into, well, what I’ll admit to being the proper order. Just as Debra had got them sorted into piles and was about to file them in the cabinets,’—Hecate motioned again to the green curtain—‘I returned from a long day collecting capercaillie feathers on the moor for a recipe to cure gout. I’m so used to coming through the windows and having everything messed up by turbulence from outside, that without thinking and before Debra could point out that it was a balmy day without even a whiff of air, I re-sorted the room the instant I got in, and...’

‘I know: all the papers reshuffled back to the order they had been in before she started.’

‘I apologized to Abby by giving her a firework display that cost twice as much as if I’d hired someone to do the job.’

Hecate snorted. ‘Spells! There are so many cheap imitations around that it’s impossible to compete. Standards of quality have deteriorated drastically, because decent ingredients are hard to come by and are often prohibitively expensive. You wouldn’t believe what the suppliers are demanding for bog oak, and wych elm oil, these days…’

‘I’m sure I would, Dame Hecate, were you to tell me, but not knowing what they used…’

‘…and harpy claws are midnight robbery even if you have a coupon. As for wolverine kidney, I prefer fresh to frozen but there’s a minimum size of order and, more often than not as with mixing powdered mustard, I end up with more than I can use. There’s a thought, I should try mustard as a substitute. The ice-box in my fridge is tiny and has to be defrosted every other day, so I can’t win.

‘As a one-woman business, you see, I’ve no clout with the merchants because I order so little compared to the chains. Overheads are always much lower when one is dealing in bulk. The saddest thing is that without me the old ways would die out, and thousands of years of wisdom and knowledge would vanish faster than witches round a collection plate. There’s no such thing as customer loyalty any more, and most Guild practitioners only come to me for the difficult spells they can’t get elsewhere.

‘It’s tough to find a niche in the market. I could turn a decent profit making the sort of starter spells that are popular with children around Christmas-time, for doing fun things that reverse after five minutes…like turning a cat into a mouse, or putting a moustache on Uncle Jim; and flying around the garden no more than fifteen feet off the ground, which is the legal limit without a licence. Those are the sort of things one can get out of a cracker, however, and in addition to there being no professional satisfaction to be gained from them, there’s more effort involved than I have energy for. Mass-produced SpellPacks from China, primed with up to a hundred and fifty common functions, account for over ninety per cent of the market.

‘Everything now is geared to power rather than sophistication, and the catalogues are full of U-Pick combinations, which can be ordered with free standard delivery. But the witches who buy them are lost if they keep nothing else in their inventory, and are asked to come up with something they don’t have at short notice. That’s when they come to me with their rush orders, and although I grind my teeth as much as I do my mortar and pestle, there’s nothing I can say or do about it.’

‘Do you make wands, ma’am, as well as spells?’

‘No. I’m a spell-maker not a practising magician, and the magic is in the wand that delivers the spell. I don’t use one myself—have no need of one—but I’m the sole exception. These days I do practically no magic, except for messing up passwords, which shows how rusty I am. Only wand-makers make wands, and it’s an honourable trade for craftsmen—not the hacks who turn out the many cheap poorly conductive versions, and the expensive but useless designer brands—whose secrets are passed down from generation to generation. There are very few good wand manufacturers left, which is another of my grievances, for what’s the point of making the best spells if they can’t be cast by a decent wand? The product can’t help but be impaired.

‘A made spell, you see, to get technical for a moment, is like a proven theory that has to be put into practice, in this case by magic, the catalyst in performing which is provided by the wand. Wands connect the formulaic energy of a spell with its object, and the most complex spells can only be delivered by a top-quality shaft. The plastic baton you load with a SpellPack and throw away when it’s used up is all very well for simple off-the-shelf functions, but my spells call for a handmade rod of at least Grade Two quality from a Guild-certified wand fabricator. There’s a note to that effect in the instructions for every spell I produce, but many witches ignore it.

‘That’s their loss not mine, because using an inferior make of wand invalidates the spell warranty, so I won’t give them their money back when it doesn’t work or goes wrong. A spell can only be used once. They can’t pretend they did it right because they have to bring me the telltale tag from the used spell, which will have registered the grade of stick that delivered it, or tried to.

‘In the wand business as with everything else these days, utility is constantly being sacrificed to fashion, and that changes so fast as to make your head spin. One week everyone wants the new fat fluorescent type, which is grand for lighting the way to an outdoor privy, or directing broomstick traffic; and the next a needle-thin six-foot extendable carbon fibre rod that is capable of sending messages to the Pleiades star cluster...and handy for catching fish with. Then the rage’ll be for a hands-free device the size of a toothpick, which tucks behind the ear and doubles as a device to talk to one’s friend in Timbuktu.

‘You can spend a lot on allegedly top of the line Zappisticks; but if a witch can move a hill, drain a lake, or divert a stream in five minutes, why does she have to show off by doing it in two? Or fax herself half a mile down the road when her broomstick or conveyance will get her there thirty seconds later? Hurry up and wait, that’s all that is.

‘Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, none of these gimmicky products work properly or for long. The witches who buy them make all sorts of excuses when they default on a spell; but a good workwoman never blames her tools when things go wrong, and at the end of the day even the best wand in its velvet-lined Gucci quiver is only as effective as the bitch that w...as the witch that bears it.’

Jenny felt a worm of outrage within her. ‘It’s more than clear to me, Dame Hecate, that you’ve been treated disrespectfully and very badly for a long time, longer than I can imagine.’

‘You’re darn rootin’ tootin’ I have, but what’s a girl to do? The wizards in the Necromancers’ Union laugh at me, which drives me nuts. I can out-spell the lot of them if I put my mind to it, even old Zebedee, who’s the best and has a lot of clever stuff up his sleeve that I can’t be bothered to practise. Witchcraft and wizardry can be a pretty dirty business these days, I don’t mind telling you, and all sorts of cheating goes on that both the Guild and the Union turn a blind eye to. Instead of going after the perpetrators, the officials responsible for monitoring and enforcing ethical behaviour and quality control only encourage them through their own laxity in pursuing violations.

‘The last brimstone delivery I had, for example, was watered down, so that when one of the covens used a spell I’d prepared to jet the members off to Crete for a long weekend in a char-à-banc, it petered out on the way back. Their speed was down to about five miles per hour, and they were lucky not to have crashed on the Massif Central or landed in the drink. As it was, they missed an important meeting at the Rye regional conference, where they were hoping to interest the Necromancers in a new mushroom oil hair-restorer they’d commissioned from me. They were convinced it would sell like anything, because most of the Necromancers are bald and this stuff would shag a billiard ball.

‘They missed their chance, and another coven scooped the deal with an inferior product called Pate-Gro, which was made from beetle larvae and stimulated only unsightly tufts. My name was mud with a hundred witches, including some of my best customers; and I was covered with muck too, because when I went to meet them at Lydd airport, where their familiars were waiting with the conveyances to go home after the conference, and apologize, they tied me to my broomstick and formed up in a V like a skein of geese to fly over Romney Marsh, twice, dragging me behind them.’

‘A little extreme, I would say.’

‘I didn’t have a leg to stand on. In order to get home they’d had to charter a flight in a DC-7 propeller-job from Lyon, been diverted, and had two forty-eight hour layovers in Belgrade and Stockholm, and a six-hour bus journey from Glasgow.

‘There was another recent case, concerning a batch of embalming fluid that turned out to be apple cider, owing to a labelling mix-up by one of my assistants. Doctor Bathsheba Birthstrangle, the Caring Physician, had used it to preserve her feline familiar, Grimleigh. Grimleigh died when Bathsheba, who’d been called out on an emergency, made a bad landing in her air ambulance on a rain-slick roof, flattening Grimleigh who, being an eager fellow, in trying to save time had jumped out too soon with Bathsheba’s Gladstone bag.

‘Because the following week Bathsheba was busy interviewing for a new familiar, she postponed taking Grimleigh in for stuffing and mounting, which is a service provided by the Guild free to members for familiars who are killed in the line of duty. Though Bathsheba had put Grimleigh in a vat of this embalming fluid, or rather apple cider, she forgot about him until a disgusting smell brought it to her attention that Grimleigh was decomposing. He was so far gone that he had to be wrapped round a rock with layers of Clingfilm, and cat-apulted out to sea. I don’t know what sort of diet Bathsheba had Grimleigh on, but, alerted by a number of sizeable cod that were showing up dead on the beach, the Guild Physician issued a bulletin advising all witches not to eat fresh fish for a week.’

‘I thought cats had nine lives.’

‘They do, and you can top them up if you do so before they’re all used up, but Grimleigh was on number nine. Bathsheba had omitted to take him in to the Familiars’ Clinic in time to renew his immunity. The mistake was inexcusable, because the card round Grimleigh’s neck had eight holes punched in it, and there were any number of reminder notes stuck around Bathsheba’s flat.

‘Grimleigh’s other lives had been used up very quickly, and each demise was of Bathsheba’s careless doing. When she got tipsy on Walpurgis night, which is the eve of the first of May, she mistook him for the goat, and threw him into the ceremonial cauldron on Blasted Heath...it was the Scottish chapter’s year to host the event. That was Grimleigh’s life number six, and the oversight caused a major hurly-burly: all the thanes who showed up to have their fortunes told had to be told to go home none the wiser.

‘There was an ugly confrontation, and much brandishing of claymores; and, in consequence, a delay in ladling poor scalded Grimleigh out of the cauldron. It took a year for a piebald coat to grow back, during which he lost life seven in Bathsheba’s mincing machine, and number eight when she T-boned a stretch Aircruiser taking a group of cat familiars to the finals of the Fur Ball Football Cup.’

‘Dr Birthstrangle’s next familiar must have been a brave one.’

‘Grimleigh was the last. Once word got around that she’d killed him off for good, none of the other familiars would work for her. Bathsheba, whose patients have the highest mortality rate in the Guild, was lucky not to get struck off the medical register; but she might as well have been: a witch can’t operate without a familiar.’