Everyone hated it. Even Walden hated it. The last thing you wanted to do at ten o’clock at night when you were teaching first thing tomorrow was fill in the bloody risk assessment.

Unfortunately, being senior management meant you had to stick to your own procedures or live with the knowledge that you were an unspeakable hypocrite. Walden preferred the former. Besides, she had her Upper Sixth first thing for a lab practical, and if you were going to skip a risk assessment, the lesson where you intended to have four seventeen-year-olds summon a medium-sized demon for the first time was not a good choice for it. The old-fashioned wooden wall clock—inherited from the long line of former Headmasters who had previously lived in this Victorian suite of rooms—ticked over to ten past ten. If Walden had another coffee now, she’d get no sleep at all.

FIRE, she wrote next to the first bullet point, and in the risk mitigation column, FIRE DRILL PROCESSES; EXTINGUISHERS (2) + TRAINED STAFF MEMBER; QUENCHING CANTRIP. She considered for a moment and then wrote out the cantrip as well, in the neat academic notation that was second nature to her: words in black ink, gestural inflections drawn in sharply and accurately with one of the red biros she always had lying on her desk. If you were doing something, you ought to do it properly. Walden believed this deeply, which was probably the reason she kept looking up from her desk at 10 P.M. and realising she’d worked another fourteen-hour day. It wasn’t that she didn’t believe in work-life balance. It was just that her career was her life.

She kept working down the list of bullet points, imagining disasters in order of likelihood. The block capitals were also automatic; a precaution, so that someone else could easily refer to the form if Walden herself was unavailable because she’d been eaten by a demon. There was a digital version of the risk assessment, but the thought of wrestling with the printer at this time of night was dire. INJURY (MUNDANE); INJURY (ENCHANTED); SUMMONING ARRAY MISFIRE; LESSER WARD FAILURE. Walden thought about the precise makeup of the sixth form class she was teaching in the morning and added MAGICIAN ERROR (OVERCONFIDENCE) AND MAGICIAN ERROR (UNDERCONFIDENCE). These forms always went fast once you actually started. The electric desk lamp with its old-fashioned fringed green lampshade gave off a warm light, and the wood-panelled walls shone with the rich glow of a century of care and polish. Out of the corner of her eye, Walden spotted a pile of marking she hadn’t done yet and elected to ignore it. Finish this form, go to bed, coffee and double Invocation in the morning.

Just as she had this thought, there was a knock on the door.