Hi OP, so inspiration struck after all. I didn't go down the army magician route in the end as I got bitten by a plotbunny for something else. Hope that's OK. I had tons of fun with the world-melding for this - all I can say is I'm thankful Peter has a canonical tendency to infodump. This is set around a year after the events of Foxglove Summer. Spoilers for all the Rivers of London novels.
For those who aren't familiar with the amazing Rivers of London series, all you really need to know is that Peter Grant is a young, nerdy, mixed-race policeman and apprentice wizard to one DCI Thomas Nightingale in modern day London. They have a cosy department of two whose purpose is to police the magical community and solve magical crimes. The Faceless Man is the big bad of the series, Beverley is the goddess of a small river in South London and Lesley is a friend of Peter's and fellow police constable. Everything else can hopefully be understood from context. ---------------------------------------------------
Nightingale once told me, early on in our professional relationship, that time worked differently in Faerie and the Otherlands. It was said that humans who ventured there had returned to our world hundreds of years after they left, believing themselves to have been gone no more than a day. Others had claimed to have spent a day in Faerie but returned old men or women. Admittedly, my own recent experiences at the hands of the Herefordshire fae contingent(1) hadn’t resulted in any noticeable time-warping effect, but I had been pretty dazed when I returned, so I’m not entirely sure I would have noticed losing a day or two in all the confusion.
This conversation about Faerie had, however, occurred a year or two before that enlightening experience, and at the time I had pressed Nightingale on the logistics of a separate Fairyland Time Zone. He admitted it was too obscure a concept for him to feel comfortable elaborating on and one that he had never looked into in much detail anyway, but most scholars agreed that there was no simple explanation: time in Faerie was tangled, unstable and unmeasurable.
“Kind of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey, would you say?” I replied. “But with more fairies and less shouty blokes waving a screwdriver.”
Nightingale gave me a long-suffering look, the one that indicated he knew I was making a pop-culture reference, and that he had no desire to know where it came from.
It was understandable that Nightingale had little interest in or knowledge of Faerie. He had been educated at the Norrellite school of Casterbrook(2), and Norrellite theory very much disapproves of fairy lore. From what I could tell, the summoning of fairies and the attempts of humans to enter fairy lands were topics that were off-limits to Casterbrook kids. On top of this, his generation were some of the first to grow up in the Newtonian tradition, which favoured self-sufficient magic drawn from the individual practitioner’s own reserves over less predictable magic derived from outside sources, such as fairies or the agreements of John Uskglass. Modern, individualistic magic for modern times.
Newtonian magic was of course based on the writings of Isaac Newton, he of the apple fame, and specifically his work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Artes Magicis. Newton had only been a theoretical magician, but in the days before the revival of English magic, that was considered perfectly respectable for a gentleman magician, even expected. After the revival of English magic during the Napoleonic Wars and the re-emergence of actual practising magicians, his theories had been all but forgotten in the excitement - that is until they gained a new traction towards the end of the nineteenth century when someone discovered that his system of codifying magic actually worked. Norrellite scholars had been particularly taken with Newtonian principles, what with the emphasis on scholarship and slow methodical practice, the clearly-defined formae, the use of Latin to keep the riff-raff out and a lack of emphasis on such insubstantial concepts as the inherent power of the natural world, the appreciation of which had been slowly dwindling during the nineteenth century with the ongoing industrial revolution and rapid urbanisation of the country.
Any Norrellite scholar, any Newtonian practitioner, would have considered the summoning of a fairy to be both beneath themselves and needlessly reckless.
Unfortunately for them, that was what I, PC Peter Grant of the Met and apprentice magician, was about to do.
*
It was a week since Nightingale, in pursuit of the Faceless Man, had disappeared into a mirror in the ransacked front room of an abandoned house in Stepney. Nightingale had told me not to follow him and had apparently done something to seal the mirror off behind him – and every other mirror in London, as far as I was able to tell. I had arrived in time to see him go, pressing my face up against the glass like a child to watch as he and the Faceless Man disappeared into a murky world of gnarled trees and distant ruins.
And that was the last anyone had seen of either of them.
I knew enough of magical history to suspect that the place I had seen in the mirror was the King’s Roads. Which meant that Nightingale and the Faceless Man were following in the footsteps of Martin Pale and Jonathan Strange before them, and presumably making their way through Faerie.
I worried, because it had been a week, but then, how long is a week in Faerie? How long is a piece of string? For all I knew, they had only been in there an hour, Faerie-side. Maybe they were still fighting. I remembered Nightingale’s tales of people disappearing for hundreds of years without realising. It hadn’t happened to me, but in my case I had been under the protection-of-sorts of a Fairy Queen. There was no guarantee that Nightingale’s experiences would be the same. He had already been gone several days longer than I had. What if this was it? What if we never heard from them again and they finally popped out in some future post-apocalyptic 28 Days Later-style London, long after the rest of us were dead?
It’s possible the worry was beginning to get to me.
I summoned visions, I filled the silver basin in the lab with water and used Ormskirk, which, while confirming my suspicion that Nightingale was indeed in Faerie, showed me nothing but darkness, like an unlit night sky. Once, at three a.m., unable to sleep, I picked up the glass of water on my bedside table and in a fit of frustration threw the contents over the wooden flooring and conjured a vision of Nightingale in the puddle, but again all I got was visions of nighttime, much darker even than the sky outside my window, because London doesn’t go dark at night, the sky just tints itself vaguely orange from the streetlights.
The next morning, after breakfast, Molly gave me a look which told me she hadn’t been best impressed by the state I had left my room in. To appease her, I offered to take Toby for his walk, which seemed to work.
The problem was, I thought, as we walked through Regent’s Park, they were both too evenly matched, which had been obvious by the time the fight over London had ended in a stalemate. Unless Nightingale could trick the Faceless Man into slipping up, or else call upon some fairy-based magic that Faceless had no access to, there was no guarantee he was going to win. The fight could go on for years, our-time. Perhaps Nightingale could simply outlive him. I wondered how the warped Fairyland Time Zone would affect a man who was getting younger every year? If he spent enough time in there, could he return as a small child? Who knew.
All I knew is I was thinking myself into circles and losing sleep to my feelings of uselessness.
It was fast becoming one of the worst weeks of my life. And considering recent years had included an extended period buried underground and the sinking feeling of a taser in the back of the neck from someone you considered a good friend, that was saying a lot.
I could guess what was running through Nightingale’s mind when he and the Faceless Man slipped Through the Looking Glass. Faceless wasn’t going to quit any time soon and had already laid waste to much of central London. Driving him into Faerie, which until very recently we had assumed was entirely closed off to humans, gave Nightingale an advantage. I had told Nightingale every little detail of my time there, and as far as we could tell I was the first magician in the UK to end up there in over a hundred years. For all we knew, until they entered the mirror, the Faceless Man had no idea that Faerie was even open to magicians again.
I tried to reassure myself, but as the hours and days wore on, I felt increasingly uneasy. Surely Nightingale wouldn’t expect me to sit around and wait for his return? (Yes Peter, said a small voice in the back of my head, that is exactly what he would expect of you.)
*
There was no adequate explanation that I could give Seawoll for Nightingale’s absence. The man had an allergic reaction to the word magic, so how he would take the news of a DCI haring off into fairyland was anyone’s guess.
In any case, for now most of the Met were simply relieved that the Faceless Man had, at least, temporarily stopped causing havoc in the city. Seawoll himself was tied up with the investigation into the damages done to buildings and infrastructure in five London boroughs (not all of which could be attributed to me this time, thankfully), not to mention the few but notable casualties. That last encounter before the two disappeared had been very destructive and there was no way the Met were going to be able to handwave the damage away with a more mundane explanation. Still, right now that was their problem, not mine.
Zachary Palmer, the git, had attempted to go to ground in the wake of the magical turf war played out on London’s streets and had succeeded in evading me for as long as he could manage (two hours). He had then proceeded to be less helpful than if he had actually managed to give me the slip. Aside from a dire warning to leave Faerie well enough alone, he had insisted that he was in fact, half-goblin, not half-fairy as he had originally told me and therefore couldn’t help me in any shape or form. I told him Olympia and Chelsea would be glad to hear him own up to it, but even the threat of the Rivers didn’t encourage him to talk. I let him go, as Westminster nick was nearly full after recent events.
I tried to engage the help of the Rivers, via Beverley, but they were mostly tied up fixing the magical devastation in their own manors. Beverley, giving me as much sympathy as she could muster, confirmed that there was no way she was setting foot in Faerie again after her last time there when she had been forced to save my sorry arse - she had got into enough trouble for that stunt already, thank you very much. As for the other Rivers, she told me that they all agreed that Faerie itself was totally outside their jurisdiction and that they would be extremely reluctant to get involved. I got it: no one wants to trespass on someone else’s turf, and the human world has always been the true domain of the Rivers. Faerie was no more their land than it was mine – in fact it was less so, them being genius loci and specifically tied to their geography in a way that I am not.
*
After yet another day of fruitless enquiries and a distinct lack of offers of help from the magical community, the evening found me ensconced in the magic library, rifling through volume after volume. The magic library had always struck me as having been designed by an optimist, because it was as large as the mundane library and housed as many bookcases, but unlike the mundane library which was crammed full to bursting, the magic library contained maybe a tenth of the number of books. Whole shelves were left vacant, giving the room an air of a mouth full of gappy teeth, the vast empty shelves only emphasising the disparity between the two libraries.
Evetually I went to the oldest book in the library. I tried to pretend to myself that I was going to keep an open mind about what I might find in the library to help me, but to be honest, I knew exactly what I was looking for from the start. I had a notion which had grown on me in the last twenty four hours that if no one in this world could help, the only option would be someone not of this world.
It was at the point when I found the chapter on summoning a fairy servant that I looked up to find the Folly’s own fairy servant standing in the open door of the library, watching me. Of course, when the literature says “fairy servant”, it doesn’t literally mean a servant who is a fairy, but a fairy who may or may not do your bidding depending on his or her whims.
In any case, Molly isn’t really a fairy servant. She’s actually more of a housekeeper.
Also, you never need to summon Molly. She just knows.
Molly was staring at me, something she had been doing more frequently since Nightingale’s disappearance. I detected an air of quiet accusation emanating from her, despite her neutral expression.
“I’m doing the best I can,” I said.
She looked at me for a long moment, then glided away.
*
(1) In which, having orchestrated a hostage swap with the fairy queen of Pokehouse Wood where I became the new hostage, I was rescued from fairyland by a river goddess on a traction engine, in a literal case of deus ex machina (you couldn't make it up), a situation that Beverley still ribbed me for every chance she got.
(2) Casterbrook School had been opened soon after the establishment of a Strangite school for magicians, Starecross. Before the Revival Era, magic had been considered a gentleman's profession and the upper classes took the training of women, commoners and non-English magicians as a grave insult and founded Casterbrook in order to teach magic in the Norrellite tradition to the sons of the wealthy. There was a well-established rivalry between Casterbrook and Starecross, kind of like Oxford and Cambridge, if Oxford had been full of toffs and Cambridge full of everyone else. According to Nightingale, Casterbrook students looked down on Starecross students and a favourite joke of theirs was based on the fact that Starecross had previously been a madhouse - they claimed it still was. This tells you all you need to know about what passes for a sense of humour amongst public school boys. Apparently the Strangite students of Starecross responded in turn that Casterbrook shouldn’t forget the rumours that Strange had murdered Norrell - “so you might want to watch what you say, lest we shank ya,” presumably.
FILL: Rivers of London X Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell fusion fic (1/?)
For those who aren't familiar with the amazing Rivers of London series, all you really need to know is that Peter Grant is a young, nerdy, mixed-race policeman and apprentice wizard to one DCI Thomas Nightingale in modern day London. They have a cosy department of two whose purpose is to police the magical community and solve magical crimes. The Faceless Man is the big bad of the series, Beverley is the goddess of a small river in South London and Lesley is a friend of Peter's and fellow police constable. Everything else can hopefully be understood from context.
---------------------------------------------------
Nightingale once told me, early on in our professional relationship, that time worked differently in Faerie and the Otherlands. It was said that humans who ventured there had returned to our world hundreds of years after they left, believing themselves to have been gone no more than a day. Others had claimed to have spent a day in Faerie but returned old men or women. Admittedly, my own recent experiences at the hands of the Herefordshire fae contingent(1) hadn’t resulted in any noticeable time-warping effect, but I had been pretty dazed when I returned, so I’m not entirely sure I would have noticed losing a day or two in all the confusion.
This conversation about Faerie had, however, occurred a year or two before that enlightening experience, and at the time I had pressed Nightingale on the logistics of a separate Fairyland Time Zone. He admitted it was too obscure a concept for him to feel comfortable elaborating on and one that he had never looked into in much detail anyway, but most scholars agreed that there was no simple explanation: time in Faerie was tangled, unstable and unmeasurable.
“Kind of wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey, would you say?” I replied. “But with more fairies and less shouty blokes waving a screwdriver.”
Nightingale gave me a long-suffering look, the one that indicated he knew I was making a pop-culture reference, and that he had no desire to know where it came from.
It was understandable that Nightingale had little interest in or knowledge of Faerie. He had been educated at the Norrellite school of Casterbrook(2), and Norrellite theory very much disapproves of fairy lore. From what I could tell, the summoning of fairies and the attempts of humans to enter fairy lands were topics that were off-limits to Casterbrook kids. On top of this, his generation were some of the first to grow up in the Newtonian tradition, which favoured self-sufficient magic drawn from the individual practitioner’s own reserves over less predictable magic derived from outside sources, such as fairies or the agreements of John Uskglass. Modern, individualistic magic for modern times.
Newtonian magic was of course based on the writings of Isaac Newton, he of the apple fame, and specifically his work Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Artes Magicis. Newton had only been a theoretical magician, but in the days before the revival of English magic, that was considered perfectly respectable for a gentleman magician, even expected. After the revival of English magic during the Napoleonic Wars and the re-emergence of actual practising magicians, his theories had been all but forgotten in the excitement - that is until they gained a new traction towards the end of the nineteenth century when someone discovered that his system of codifying magic actually worked. Norrellite scholars had been particularly taken with Newtonian principles, what with the emphasis on scholarship and slow methodical practice, the clearly-defined formae, the use of Latin to keep the riff-raff out and a lack of emphasis on such insubstantial concepts as the inherent power of the natural world, the appreciation of which had been slowly dwindling during the nineteenth century with the ongoing industrial revolution and rapid urbanisation of the country.
Any Norrellite scholar, any Newtonian practitioner, would have considered the summoning of a fairy to be both beneath themselves and needlessly reckless.
Unfortunately for them, that was what I, PC Peter Grant of the Met and apprentice magician, was about to do.
*
It was a week since Nightingale, in pursuit of the Faceless Man, had disappeared into a mirror in the ransacked front room of an abandoned house in Stepney. Nightingale had told me not to follow him and had apparently done something to seal the mirror off behind him – and every other mirror in London, as far as I was able to tell. I had arrived in time to see him go, pressing my face up against the glass like a child to watch as he and the Faceless Man disappeared into a murky world of gnarled trees and distant ruins.
And that was the last anyone had seen of either of them.
I knew enough of magical history to suspect that the place I had seen in the mirror was the King’s Roads. Which meant that Nightingale and the Faceless Man were following in the footsteps of Martin Pale and Jonathan Strange before them, and presumably making their way through Faerie.
I worried, because it had been a week, but then, how long is a week in Faerie? How long is a piece of string? For all I knew, they had only been in there an hour, Faerie-side. Maybe they were still fighting. I remembered Nightingale’s tales of people disappearing for hundreds of years without realising. It hadn’t happened to me, but in my case I had been under the protection-of-sorts of a Fairy Queen. There was no guarantee that Nightingale’s experiences would be the same. He had already been gone several days longer than I had. What if this was it? What if we never heard from them again and they finally popped out in some future post-apocalyptic 28 Days Later-style London, long after the rest of us were dead?
It’s possible the worry was beginning to get to me.
I summoned visions, I filled the silver basin in the lab with water and used Ormskirk, which, while confirming my suspicion that Nightingale was indeed in Faerie, showed me nothing but darkness, like an unlit night sky. Once, at three a.m., unable to sleep, I picked up the glass of water on my bedside table and in a fit of frustration threw the contents over the wooden flooring and conjured a vision of Nightingale in the puddle, but again all I got was visions of nighttime, much darker even than the sky outside my window, because London doesn’t go dark at night, the sky just tints itself vaguely orange from the streetlights.
The next morning, after breakfast, Molly gave me a look which told me she hadn’t been best impressed by the state I had left my room in. To appease her, I offered to take Toby for his walk, which seemed to work.
The problem was, I thought, as we walked through Regent’s Park, they were both too evenly matched, which had been obvious by the time the fight over London had ended in a stalemate. Unless Nightingale could trick the Faceless Man into slipping up, or else call upon some fairy-based magic that Faceless had no access to, there was no guarantee he was going to win. The fight could go on for years, our-time. Perhaps Nightingale could simply outlive him. I wondered how the warped Fairyland Time Zone would affect a man who was getting younger every year? If he spent enough time in there, could he return as a small child? Who knew.
All I knew is I was thinking myself into circles and losing sleep to my feelings of uselessness.
It was fast becoming one of the worst weeks of my life. And considering recent years had included an extended period buried underground and the sinking feeling of a taser in the back of the neck from someone you considered a good friend, that was saying a lot.
I could guess what was running through Nightingale’s mind when he and the Faceless Man slipped Through the Looking Glass. Faceless wasn’t going to quit any time soon and had already laid waste to much of central London. Driving him into Faerie, which until very recently we had assumed was entirely closed off to humans, gave Nightingale an advantage. I had told Nightingale every little detail of my time there, and as far as we could tell I was the first magician in the UK to end up there in over a hundred years. For all we knew, until they entered the mirror, the Faceless Man had no idea that Faerie was even open to magicians again.
I tried to reassure myself, but as the hours and days wore on, I felt increasingly uneasy. Surely Nightingale wouldn’t expect me to sit around and wait for his return? (Yes Peter, said a small voice in the back of my head, that is exactly what he would expect of you.)
*
There was no adequate explanation that I could give Seawoll for Nightingale’s absence. The man had an allergic reaction to the word magic, so how he would take the news of a DCI haring off into fairyland was anyone’s guess.
In any case, for now most of the Met were simply relieved that the Faceless Man had, at least, temporarily stopped causing havoc in the city. Seawoll himself was tied up with the investigation into the damages done to buildings and infrastructure in five London boroughs (not all of which could be attributed to me this time, thankfully), not to mention the few but notable casualties. That last encounter before the two disappeared had been very destructive and there was no way the Met were going to be able to handwave the damage away with a more mundane explanation. Still, right now that was their problem, not mine.
Zachary Palmer, the git, had attempted to go to ground in the wake of the magical turf war played out on London’s streets and had succeeded in evading me for as long as he could manage (two hours). He had then proceeded to be less helpful than if he had actually managed to give me the slip. Aside from a dire warning to leave Faerie well enough alone, he had insisted that he was in fact, half-goblin, not half-fairy as he had originally told me and therefore couldn’t help me in any shape or form. I told him Olympia and Chelsea would be glad to hear him own up to it, but even the threat of the Rivers didn’t encourage him to talk. I let him go, as Westminster nick was nearly full after recent events.
I tried to engage the help of the Rivers, via Beverley, but they were mostly tied up fixing the magical devastation in their own manors. Beverley, giving me as much sympathy as she could muster, confirmed that there was no way she was setting foot in Faerie again after her last time there when she had been forced to save my sorry arse - she had got into enough trouble for that stunt already, thank you very much. As for the other Rivers, she told me that they all agreed that Faerie itself was totally outside their jurisdiction and that they would be extremely reluctant to get involved. I got it: no one wants to trespass on someone else’s turf, and the human world has always been the true domain of the Rivers. Faerie was no more their land than it was mine – in fact it was less so, them being genius loci and specifically tied to their geography in a way that I am not.
*
After yet another day of fruitless enquiries and a distinct lack of offers of help from the magical community, the evening found me ensconced in the magic library, rifling through volume after volume. The magic library had always struck me as having been designed by an optimist, because it was as large as the mundane library and housed as many bookcases, but unlike the mundane library which was crammed full to bursting, the magic library contained maybe a tenth of the number of books. Whole shelves were left vacant, giving the room an air of a mouth full of gappy teeth, the vast empty shelves only emphasising the disparity between the two libraries.
Evetually I went to the oldest book in the library. I tried to pretend to myself that I was going to keep an open mind about what I might find in the library to help me, but to be honest, I knew exactly what I was looking for from the start. I had a notion which had grown on me in the last twenty four hours that if no one in this world could help, the only option would be someone not of this world.
It was at the point when I found the chapter on summoning a fairy servant that I looked up to find the Folly’s own fairy servant standing in the open door of the library, watching me. Of course, when the literature says “fairy servant”, it doesn’t literally mean a servant who is a fairy, but a fairy who may or may not do your bidding depending on his or her whims.
In any case, Molly isn’t really a fairy servant. She’s actually more of a housekeeper.
Also, you never need to summon Molly. She just knows.
Molly was staring at me, something she had been doing more frequently since Nightingale’s disappearance. I detected an air of quiet accusation emanating from her, despite her neutral expression.
“I’m doing the best I can,” I said.
She looked at me for a long moment, then glided away.
*
(1) In which, having orchestrated a hostage swap with the fairy queen of Pokehouse Wood where I became the new hostage, I was rescued from fairyland by a river goddess on a traction engine, in a literal case of deus ex machina (you couldn't make it up), a situation that Beverley still ribbed me for every chance she got.
(2) Casterbrook School had been opened soon after the establishment of a Strangite school for magicians, Starecross. Before the Revival Era, magic had been considered a gentleman's profession and the upper classes took the training of women, commoners and non-English magicians as a grave insult and founded Casterbrook in order to teach magic in the Norrellite tradition to the sons of the wealthy. There was a well-established rivalry between Casterbrook and Starecross, kind of like Oxford and Cambridge, if Oxford had been full of toffs and Cambridge full of everyone else. According to Nightingale, Casterbrook students looked down on Starecross students and a favourite joke of theirs was based on the fact that Starecross had previously been a madhouse - they claimed it still was. This tells you all you need to know about what passes for a sense of humour amongst public school boys. Apparently the Strangite students of Starecross responded in turn that Casterbrook shouldn’t forget the rumours that Strange had murdered Norrell - “so you might want to watch what you say, lest we shank ya,” presumably.