Fantasy serial. Velma chats with Doctor King.
Velma Kuroda, a young specialist in magical and enchanted antiques, is taken under the wing of Hamish MacKinnon, a master enchanter and centuries-old immortal — a crotchety old man possessed by a horde of little demons.
Doctor King’s office is very strange – it’s somewhere between macabre and cosy, and Velma couldn’t really tear her eyes away from all the skulls on little plinths lining the shelves on one wall. Doctor King had idly referred to them as the rest of the necromancy department as he’d invited her in, and although none of them were talking right now, she knew that they could, knew that they were…
She could feel it.
The magic wasn’t flowing along the shelves or between them like it might run between the panels of an enchantment circuit, but kind of glowed inside each of them, like a few dozen little balls of flame: each of them had bits of metal soldering their jaws together, not to keep them shut, but just to form the joint where they didn’t have tendons or other stuff doing it anymore.
The office was dominated by a black and purple rug that had dragons all the way around it, and he had a big desk with gold on the dark wood, and the room was lit by glowing lantern light – you couldn’t run electronics in the whole of this building, Velma didn’t think, because the magical energies were too thick on the air.
“Do you know my aunt Ginchiyo?” she asked as King sat down at his desk and made several notes in an old-fashioned folder, then wrote down a note and slipped it into a little glass cylinder before feeding it into a pneumatic tube. She heard the thrum of the suction as it went off to wherever it went, and she followed the lines of brass tubing before it disappeared into the wall.
“By reputation,” King said. “I’m afraid that rather like Hamish, I’m somewhat attached to my own territory – most days of the year I rarely leave the university campus, and I can count on one hand the number of times I’ve left the city in the past few years. This rather cuts into my capacity for varied social interaction, or to meet new people.”
“But you know Hamish,” Velma said.
“Mm, we’ve only met once in person, my friend Everett and I took a trip down to his shop, ooh, ten or fifteen years ago. Most of our friendship before then and after has been completed by correspondence.”
“Letters?”
“Snail mail, I believe you young people derogatorily call it,” King said, and Velma laughed.
“Yeah, maybe,” she said. “He thinks you’re hot.”
That made King take pause, made him look up and stare at Velma with his lips parted and his eyes slightly wide. He looked flustered, his deathly cheeks darkening a little bit, and he asked in a softer voice now, “Mr MacKinnon said that?” He reached up and touched the back of his hair – he looked like he spent a lot of time on his hair in the morning, because it was perfectly combed into place, every single hair in alignment, and it was funny, seeing a man like him fuss over his appearance like that, worry about, what, if he was pretty enough?
“He said you were very sexy,” Velma said, and King laughed faintly, almost giddily, and then exhaled as though forcing himself to resolve, calming himself before returning to his work.
“He’s quite an impressive man,” he said softly. “I’m sorry, my dear, I suppose we must seem silly to you, he with his agoraphobia, me so intent on remaining in the company of my skulls and office hours. I know when I was your age, I never knew what to do with the silliness of my elders.”
Velma was quiet, abruptly doing a lot of mental arithmetic all at once – Hamish so briskly refusing to go with her on the drive down to Cornwall, sending her on all these fucking errands, seeming so fucking lonely, how he’d hovered on his fucking doorstep the other day, then fucking fainting in the street outside his building once he’d made sure Kaito was okay.
“Ms Kuroda? Are you alright?” Doctor King asked, and Velma looked back at him, rubbing the back of her neck, sliding her thumb under the rolled fabric of her turtleneck.
“Yeah, I just… I’m sorry, Doctor King, I’m sure this must sound stupid to you, but I never realised it was agoraphobia, I thought he just had to stay in his place ‘cause of the alastora.”
“Not stupid in the least,” King murmured. “I’ve been writing back and forth with him for… Well, since I was still a young man myself, I was still in the beginning stages of pursuing my first doctorate. Hamish isn’t particularly forthcoming on this subject, but then, who among us wishes to tell all and sundry the details of our greatest weaknesses?”
A part of her wanted to say, immediately, that she wasn’t all and sundry, that she and Hamish were friends, and that he’d told her other stuff, but that was a juvenile reflex, really. They’d barely known one another a few months, and it felt kind of stupid for her to even say that they were friends, when he was an old man, and she only knew him because they were working together, but…
But she liked him.
She liked the old man very much, and she’d already been feeling a lot of sympathy for him despite his crotchety nature, how isolated he was, how obviously fucking lonely, but she hadn’t realised it was because he couldn’t fucking go anywhere, because he had to fucking wait in his shop and in his flat for other people to come and see him, because he couldn’t go out to where they were.
“I guess I just feel stupid I didn’t notice it,” Velma said. “That I didn’t connect the dots.”
“He’s very fond of you,” King said, smiling warmly, and Velma slowly walked along the wall of shelves in his office, looking at the different placards on the skulls, all kinds of different names on them, in different alphabets, more alphabets than she could read. “He said you were quite the oddity, when you first appeared, but I could tell from how he described you that he liked you from the out – as the weeks have passed, he’s described you in glowing terms, remarked how much he enjoys your expertise, your potential. He’s always struck me as someone in dire desire of an apprentice, although I know you aren’t exactly that – you’re pursuing a career in mundane fine art?”
“And antiques,” Velma said, although it was her turn to feel kind of caught off guard at hearing Hamish’s opinion of her as related by a third party. She felt kind of warm all over, a little bit embarrassed, but it was nice – the old man wasn’t exactly fucking effusive with his praise, and she knew that he would never say this shit to her face. “I, um… I don’t know, my dad ran an antiques shop when I was growing up, he’s got some contacts in the industry in Scotland and England. I’m interested in evaluation and curation – most mundie museums aren’t exactly struggling for staff, even the big ones, but I could get a good salary in the right auction house, and room for upward mobility.”
“Oh, I would imagine,” King said, “especially with your existing expertise – I don’t imagine many entrants to this industry, at your age, would be so well-travelled, or have valued so many items in the field, so-to-speak, in terms of furnishings. Does it appeal to you, following in your father’s footsteps?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Velma said. “It always made me sad, that he had to give up his shop. I grew up helping in the place, and I used to really like it, seeing all the stuff that came in, that people brought in to sell, and seeing what people wanted to buy, and just… I like old things, I like curiosities, I like art, seeing the way it evolves over time, being able to track that progress. Before my dad pushed this new business of mine – he and Aunt Ginchiyo were in cahoots – I was doing stuff like buying and selling Dinky toys, Observers books, shit like that. Sometimes furniture, but not often, just ‘cause obviously it’s a lot harder to transport than toys or books or even like, ceramics – occasionally I’d come across something smaller like an end table or a lamp, but…” She shrugged, her hands clasped loosely in front of her belly as she looks around the décor in Doctor King’s office, the dark purples and golds and blacks and browns. “I was kind of annoyed at first, the way my aunt dropped her whole business on me, but I’m actually really enjoying the work now.”
“You sound like you’re not pleased about that,” Doctor King observed aloud, and Velma laughed, running her hand back through her hair. She was wearing an Alice band today, and it was fucking itchy – she liked how it looked, although maybe it made her look a little young, she didn’t know.
“Did you always know you wanted to go into this? Into academia, into necromancy?”
“I had a somewhat unconventional childhood,” King said quietly, leaning back in his seat and looking thoughtful, tapping his pen against the inside of his thumb, letting it roll toward the webbing between it and his forefinger. “What do you know of my family, of the Kings?”
“Uh,” Velma said. “Not much. Not anything.”
“Well, some of my family members are members of a rather notorious criminal operation,” King said. “My father was a teenager when he was groomed and assaulted by a female police officer seeking to use his naivety and his youthful rebellion against him, to gather illicit information on the family – a relationship of which I was the result.”
“Jesus,” Velma said.
“Horrid, I know,” King said, smiling blandly. “My father has never been able to so much as look at me; I was raised by my mother, mostly, before being raised by my aunt, but, well. I think I tried to suicide four, perhaps five times, before I was your age.”
“I’m so sorry,” Velma said. “That— The suicide attempts, they made you more in tune with like, dead people, with death magic?”
“The first two attempts were an earnest desire to end my life,” King murmured. “I was worse than a bastard, but some wretched thing, the result of a rape… I did feel some kinship, early on, with death and the dead – I felt that what had occurred between my parents was not so different than the rape of Persephone, a shadow of it, some awful mirror image. I was very, very young when first I made an attempt on my life, and jumped from my bedroom window; later on, at ten or eleven, I attempted to drown myself in the English Channel. Drowning was a good enough death for Percy Shelley, good enough for me, hm?”
“You were reading Shelley at eleven?”
“A man does not grow to be as insufferable as I am without starting very young,” King said wisely, making her laugh, and that almost felt inappropriate, given what they were talking about, but King smiled back at her. “But as I say, I was rather slow to come around, and through a great haze of bright light… I developed a fascination with the veil and what lay beyond it, what strange fathoms might be plumbed along the lines of its boundary. They were so relieved I had stopped trying to top myself, my family didn’t even have it in them to be too perturbed by my bothering the dead. My Uncle Valiant actually started having cousins bring me fresh corpses to play with – the values of coming from a criminal family, as a necromancer.
“I’m afraid that doesn’t answer your question, though – being so passionately engaged with death and the dead, I was rather funnelled in the direction of academia in the hopes that I would keep my work largely in the realm of the theoretical. No one knew what else to do with me. You aren’t quite so starved for career choice.”
“I wanted stability,” Velma said. “My family went from okay to pretty poor, and it’s shitty, being a kid, being anxious about money. It’s not like auction houses would make me rich, unless I got crazy lucky on a commission, but it would be a lot more stable than what I do now, and I… I don’t want my parents to be worried about money, Doctor King – for my brother, for themselves.”
“Wasn’t it your father who pushed you in this direction?”
“Yeah,” Velma said. “But he doesn’t… I guess he doesn’t know why I…”
She bit the inside of her lip, glancing across at King, who was smiling at her as he turned his chair from side to side. It was a fucked-up chair, and she really liked it – the back of it was decorated with golden spines and ribs, probably a custom piece.
Next to the door was a portrait, maybe a little bigger than A4, and she let her gaze travel over the frame, stepping closer. It was the kind of mass-produced painting they did in some magical arenas as a souvenir, she recognised the style and the texture of the paint, although this was an original instead of a print.
The figure in the portrait was dressed in magical armour – silver plates hung magically in front of his chest and behind his back, and he was wearing silver greaves and gauntlets, but over the tunic and leggings he was wearing underneath was just a swirl of blue magic instead of actual metal or armoured straps.
“Wait,” she said, “Is that Sir Valorous? The knight?”
He wasn’t wearing a helmet, but she recognised the shock of long black hair worn loose around the knight’s shoulders, hiding his eyes as he turned his head fast to the side, and she recognised his shield, too – it had Myrddin Wyllt, the king regent’s, personal crest on it, which had a bird-like dragon on a perch inside a glass house, shapes around it representing the dragon’s song, or maybe the wild winds on the hill around it.
“Oh, yes, my nephew,” said King glowingly, smiling very proudly at her. “My favourite nephew, actually – most of my nephews don’t know what to do with me, really, apart from Valorous and Courageous, I’m mostly close with my nieces.”
“I thought you said your family were like, magical mob?”
“Not Valorous,” King said. “He… Well, he actually had an unfortunate stint as a policeman, although that’s well over, thank goodness. Hamish said you’re rather an accomplished sportswoman, have you ever engaged in any knightly sports, jousting, melee?”
“Uh, not jousting, I don’t like horses,” Velma said, “but yeah, some sword and shield stuff, when I was a teenager, it was part of the magical school programme at our school in Glasgow. Now, I just do karate and go to the gym. Sometimes I take my kid brother to see bouts in the arena, here in Camelot.”
“Perhaps I might introduce you to him, to Valorous,” King said hopefully, looking up at him with his eyebrows raised, and Velma hesitated.
“Um,” she said. “You— Doctor King, you know I’m a lesbian, right?”
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, yes, of course, Hamish has mentioned it, and… Well, dear, just look at you.”
“Hey!”
“No, I didn’t mean— Aren’t you trying to give that impression?”
“Sure, but you don’t have to say it like that.”
“I was just trying to communicate that I think the two of you might get on well, that’s all, as friends, perhaps across from one another in the arena. You’re each at crossroads in your life, the two of you. And my nephew has fewer personality faults than Hamish MacKinnon.”
“That’s not a high bar, Doctor King.”
“No,” he admitted, smiling, “I just see some commonalities between the two of you, that’s all.”
Velma didn’t believe that – Kaito used to have a poster of Valorous King on his wall, she thought maybe he even still had it up. She remembered when they were younger, she actually used to think that Valorous was East Asian as well, because he was on the shorter side and had such black hair. She’d gotten the shock of her fucking life, the first time she’d seen a portrait of his actual face and seen how bright blue his eyes were, seen his features and how fucking white he was.
“Maybe,” she said. “Thank you for today, for the lecture, for the chat, it was… it was really interesting. You have that envelope for me to take back?”
“Here,” King said, holding it out, and Velma took it, holding it loosely against her chest – it was some big fucking book, she thought, and fucking heavy. “Thank you very much for coming, Ms Kuroda, and for the conversation, as well. I’m very glad he has you, you know – he respects your work a good deal, but more than that, he comes alive just writing about you. There aren’t many he speaks about with such affection. Perhaps you think it maudlin for me to say, but not all of us are so blessed to be parents, nor destined to become them. We take that much more joy, then, in being aunts and uncles, in being teachers and masters, in taking on apprentices or protégés. You spark that joy in Mr MacKinnon, Ms Kuroda. It is a privilege merely to observe it.”
Velma didn’t know what to say in response to that – she kind of wanted to cry, or maybe throw up, just because she wasn’t used to someone being so fucking earnest and saying something like that so unflinchingly, but Doctor King said it like it was the easiest thing in the world to say shit like that, like he said things like that all the time.
“Thanks,” she said again, and slowly made her way out of the department and back to her car, the whole time walking in a kind of haze.
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