I TOLD Nightingale what I’d learned over breakfast the next morning and he insisted we go down to the firing range in the basement and blow the shit out of some targets. To be fair, I think he’d been planning a training session for some time. He also didn’t swear.

Several months of random fire by me had depleted our stock of World War II vintage silhouettes so I’d bought some 1960s NATO standard-issue targets off the Internet. Gone were the coal scuttle helmets and rampaging Hun, to be replaced by snarling figures carefully stripped of any national or ethnic identity. NATO, these figures implied, was ready to take on paper soldiers from anywhere.

Nightingale put three fireballs in the center mass of the left-hand target.

“What made you think Ty would tell you?” asked Nightingale.

“She couldn’t help herself,” I said. “First law of gossip—there’s no point knowing something if somebody else doesn’t know you know it. Besides, I think she has such a low opinion of us that she thinks it’s only a matter of time until we … mess up and she can sweep in like the cavalry.”

“Given our track record so far,” said Nightingale, “that’s hardly prescient.”

“A Ministry of Magic,” I said. “Is that what she really wants?”

“Deep breath,” said Nightingale. “And loose!”

The trick behind an effective fireball is that it becomes an ingrained forma. A spell that you don’t have to think about to perform. I loosed a trio of fireballs that I could see moving, which was bad, but at least I hit the target—or a target at any rate. I also forgot to release them immediately, which meant that they sat there and fizzed a bit before exploding.

“Have you been practicing at all?” asked Nightingale.

“Of course I have, boss. Watch this,” I said and threw a skinny grenade down the range, which stuck right in the center mass of the target.

“Your aim is getting better,” said Nightingale. “It’s a pity about the release …”

The grenade detonated and cut the target in half.

“And what was that?” asked Nightingale. He didn’t always approve of me departing from the strict forms he laid down for spells. His motto was that bad habits now could get you killed later.

“Skinny grenade,” I said. “You use scindere like you do with lux impello scindere except instead of a light in a fixed place you get a bomb.”

“Skinny grenade?”

“From scindere,” I said. Nightingale shook his head.

“How are you managing the timing?” he asked.

“That’s a bit hit and miss,” I admitted. “I did some tests and it’s anywhere between ten seconds and five minutes.”

“So you don’t know when it’s going to explode?”

“Not really,” I said.

“Is there anything I could say that would stop you from doing all this unauthorized experimentation?”

“Honestly,” I said. “Probably not.”