Chapter Text
“The real problem isn’t the demons,” says Aaronev. “It’s the commoners.” He sets his cup of tea back into its saucer with a click.
As always at these instructional meetings, Tarvek has also been given tea. At the age of seven, he doesn’t really care for its bitter taste, but he always tries to choke down as much as he can anyway when he thinks he’s the least likely to be expected to respond. He doesn’t think he is expected to respond now, but. That can’t be right, can it? “But,” he ventures, “the commoners are just humans?”
Aaronev’s hand slams down on the table. Tarvek flinches. “Do not contradict me,” he thunders, incensed. “Think, child! It is like you said — demons aren’t even human! They’re stupid! Cunning, sometimes, yes, but they have no will. Their intellect is sub-sentient, and they are easily corralled with runes and charms.”
Tarvek nods frantically, and doesn’t dare to ask what “sub-sentient” means. When his parents sold him and his master took him in, the women in charge of the transaction muttered to each other about “what happened to his last apprentice”. Tarvek has been a little afraid of him ever since.
“The commoners,” says Aaronev, his rage seeming to have settled into the rhythm of the lecture he had already been preparing, “are much harder to control. They need to be kept distracted, and complacent, or our entire base of power falls apart. We would be a body ruling over no one. Do you understand?”
Tarvek thinks, Not really, even as he’s already nodding.
“Good,” says his master, settling back in his chair and looking at Tarvek appraisingly. “That is all for today. You’re dismissed.”
Abandoning his fine china cup, Tarvek scurries out of the drawing room.
When Tarvek was given away to be apprenticed to a magician, he was told to forget his name, because it would be a liability. He didn’t, though. He isn’t really sure how anyone could actually do that. They say he’ll get another one when he turns twelve.
There are faint hints in the bedroom he’s been given off the kitchen that someone lived there before him. There’s tape stuck to one spot on the wall, and a heart and a rough dagger shape carved into the wood of the windowsill. He wonders if it’s from the previous apprentice.
“Wulfenbach,” his master says, “is not right for this country.” Aaronev often speaks this way about the Prime Minister, sometimes mixed in with lessons, sometimes just after a long day attending to his duties at Parliament. “But learnéd men of power know this, and one man cannot rule forever! One day, one of our apprentices will replace him, and steer the British Empire in the right direction.” He levels a significant look at Tarvek. “Do you understand?”
His eyes are lit up, fanatic, and Tarvek wonders how many other apprentices throughout the city receive this same intention, whether Aaronev spoke this way to his last apprentice.
That’s okay. Tarvek is better than her. He just has to show up all of them.
In the interest of preserving his personal safety by outstripping the accomplishments of his predecessor and remaining several steps ahead of his anonymous competition dispersed across London, Tarvek decides when he’s eight that it’s high time he summon something.
Summoning is the magician’s true art, the backbone of their power that they use to rule. His master says summoned spirits are like resources, lending protection and enhancing one’s capability.
It’s also supposed to be wildly dangerous to attempt if you haven’t received an official name, lest the demons find out your true one and use it to bring about your destruction. Tarvek doesn’t really see why. Either way you just have to not tell them your birth name, which he’s supposed to have forgotten by now to start with, and you’re not supposed to reveal your official name either if you can get away with it anyway, so what difference does it make?
So he plots, entertaining vague fantasies of practicing in secret and then revealing he’s mastered the art far ahead of schedule at a suitably dramatic moment. He determines that the best way to obtain a reference book containing the names of entities without alerting his master will be to wait for the latest installment containing annotations and corrections to the most common texts, for perusal before they’re folded into new editions, to arrive in the mail, and then divert it before it ever reaches its destination. Aaronev receives them because he has a running subscription — honestly, he may not even notice one not arriving. And if he does, well. Surely something went wrong with the post. Most of the names in such a volume that aren’t included to note that a demon is now deceased will probably belong to entities whose names were only discovered relatively recently. But that just means they won’t outstrip him quite as much in experience, so it’s probably a good thing, right?
Several weeks of diligently devoting part of his morning schedule to watching the mail (his schedule already demands he wakes early), and his attention is rewarded. Tarvek successfully co-opts the package from the publisher before his master has any idea it’s arrived.
Tarvek stashes the book in his room and then continues his day normally. He flies into a silent panic at every scrape and cough that might be his master and in his excitement is scolded by both of that day’s tutors for not having his mind fully on his lessons, but when he adjourns to his room at a normal time no one seems any the wiser.
Tarvek opens the slim volume with exaggerated care. He fancies his fingers are tingling. The creamy pages contain rather plain columns of lists stacked several to a page broken by blocks of text, but they feel powerful.
They are.
Knowledge is power. Tarvek is pretty sure he heard that in school, before he ever thought he would be a magician.
Tarvek spends the evening rifling through columns of black words. As he suspected, almost all of the names not citing a creature as deceased belong to newly discovered spirits, bar a few mentioned in descriptions of events or due to their relation to other spirits. Those lack descriptive details, with footnoted citations to other texts Tarvek doesn’t have access to.
In a development he did not expect, these volumes of updates are apparently sorted into subcategories. This one barely covers any entities level 3 or below. A leaflet tucked into the pages promises The companion book covering imps, foliots, and lower-level spirits to be released in June from Heliotrope Presses!
Heart picking up hammering again (Tarvek hadn’t really noticed he’d stopped panicking until he started again), he nearly calls the whole thing off then and there. Practicing summoning in secret with a mid- or high-level spirit might be what pushes the whole idea over the edge into suicidally foolhardy.
He stashes the book and leaves his room to have a lonely cup of juice. He avoids the help, who are scared of Aaronev and of Tarvek by affiliation.
As the power of a demon increases, common consensus agrees, so does their canniness, and their resentment at being chained. But, he’s already lain so much groundwork, and…maybe its relative inexperience will sort of — balance things out? Most unearthly servants have millennia of experience to draw on, which they’ve spent tricking, wheedling, and brute-forcing their way out of the grip of the heroic magicians who tried to subdue their power and rechannel it as a force of good. Not so one whose name is only newly found.
…Plus, “Oh, yes, I skipped over summoning mites and moulers — my first summoning was a proper djinni” would sound really impressive, on paper.
Okay, so he’s doing this.
He leaves his cup in the sink and returns to the secondhand bedroom. He slides the book out from where he left it under his assigned reading, and shoves away the pages containing indexes of afrits and marids, because he’s not insane, and flicks all the way back to the front of the book. But he does let his eyes flick over from the level 3 djinn to the level fours, because if he’s already going to be foolhardy, it might as well be a little more impressive.
He skips between mostly-sparse descriptions, before selecting one he’s sure he can pronounce.
He says it a few times, testing it out. For this to work, he’ll need to be able to say it perfectly.
“Gilgamesh.” Yes, that one will do.