Original Work Wolf In The Fold (Schooled in Magic 28)

Chapter Sixteen

Emily’s skin crawled.

The world shifted around her, the Blighted Lands suddenly more real to her as they rode further south. An impression of imminent disaster, an impression of unseen eyes watching them … a wave of heat that left her sweating inside her riding clothes followed by a gust of cold air that made her horse flinch and threatened to turn the sweat to ice. The landscape was hidden in a haze, visibility falling so sharply that she feared they would ride over a cliff before they realised the danger and yanked hard on the reins. There were things shimmering at the corner of her eyes, impressions of something out there that vanished when she turned to look at them. It was hard, almost impossible, to be sure they were riding south. It was all too easy to imagine they’d turned themselves around in the haze.

It was the silence that really got to her, an oppressive silence that was worse than almost any noise. She could barely hear anything, not even the horse’s hooves, as they rode onwards. The ground seemed covered with a thin layer of ash, a reminder of countless books set in post-nuclear war nightmares. The sun was barely visible in the sky, the light scattered so completely by the haze it was hard to tell where the sun actually was. She kept a wary eye on the surrounding landscape as they kept riding south, not trusting herself to speak. Cat hadn’t known much about the terrain a few miles from Kuching, let alone anything a hundred miles or more south of his castle. There was just no way to be sure they weren’t riding into a trap.

The tiredness tore at her soul, a strange desire to close her eyes and never open them again. She could feel aches and pains in her joints, a suggestion she had walked for miles even though she’d been on horseback … and she wasn’t sure just how long they’d been travelling. Minutes? Hours? Days? She wasn’t sure. She knew it couldn’t have been that long, a few hours at most, but she didn’t really believe it. The world had shrunk to the horse and herself and not much else. She glanced back at Caleb and Serigala, their forms half-hidden within the mist. It might be smarter, she reflected grimly, to slow their march until the mist faded away, before they managed to seriously hurt themselves – or worse.

“The mist won’t lift in a hurry,” Cat said, when she asked. He spoke quietly and yet it sounded as though he was shouting, the sound battering her ears. “We need to keep moving.”

Emily nodded, sweat crawling down her back. They didn’t know how long they had … her mind ran in circles, reciting everything they knew and thought they knew and reminding her of just how much they didn’t know. Everything mocked her, time and time again, as the light grew brighter, just for a second, before fading away again. The mist crawled closer … she thought she saw shapes within the haze, shapes that were very far from human. But there was no way to be sure. Elsewhere, she might have wondered if she was seeing things. Here …

A shape rose up in front of them, the mist drawing back as through it were a living thing. Ice ran down her spine as she saw the Inverse Shadow, or something very much akin to it. She’d been brought here, the very first day she’d arrived in the Nameless World … Shadye had intended to kill her and Void had saved her, changing her life beyond all hope of repair. Her mother’s face flashed in front of her eyes for a long moment, a pang of regret echoing through her soul before being driven away by the grim awareness her mother had never really cared for her. She had fallen into a bottle and stayed there, leaving her second husband to rule the roost … Emily gritted her teeth. She had no intention of ever going home, not now and not ever. It was …

Caleb pulled his horse alongside hers. “Are you alright?”

“It started here, perhaps,” Emily said. She mentally reviewed the map, even though she knew it was pointless. The landscape was just too different now. “I came here …”

Her heart twisted again as they rode around the alien structure. The Inverse Shadow looked wrong, as if whoever had designed it wasn’t remotely human. The proportions were all skewed … she swallowed, hard, as she recalled the structure existed in multiple separate dimensions at once. It was a tower … no, it was a dome … no, it was a castle … every time she blinked, she saw something different, something alien. It was hard, almost impossible, to keep her eyes focused enough to see through the shimmer, to see aspects of the tower curving in ways her eyes couldn’t follow. She had the feeling that if she walked into the building she would never come out again, or if she did she would be changed beyond all recognition. If it was the same place …

Caleb glanced at her. “What was the point of this place?”

Emily shrugged. She had no idea. Most structures made a certain kind of sense, even if their practical function was covered in human aesthetical designs, but Faerie structures were just … alien. It could be anything from a simple home for a creature that existed in multiple dimensions to a military base, a factory, or something so strange it was utterly beyond her imagination. What would a human from a medieval world make of an aircraft, let alone a spacecraft? She might lack the context to understand what she was seeing, let alone realise how it changed the world. And yet something was nagging at the back of her mind, something bad.

“I wish I knew,” she said, although it wasn’t true. She had the feeling she was better off not knowing. But what you didn’t know could kill you. “Better just to leave it cordoned off.”

“We need more time to inspect the ruin,” Serigala said, joining them. The academic didn’t seem too bothered by the endless ride. Emily fought down a surge of sudden resentment, even anger. He was an adventurer as well as an archaeologist … he was used to being on horseback. Of course he was. “I’ve never seen a ruin quite so well preserved.”

“I guess the necromancers gave it a wide berth,” Emily said, crossly. Shadye had tried to sacrifice her in the alien structure … or one just like it. She had no idea what such a massive burst of power would do, if it were loosed in such a place, but she doubted it would have been good news. There was so much alien power in the structure that it might trigger a much bigger explosion, like striking a match in a gunpowder store. “You never came out here?”

“No one did,” Serigala confirmed. “The guild never allowed it.”

I came out here, with Void and Grandmaster Hasdrubal, Emily thought. She shivered. The Grandmaster hadn’t deserved to die, not the way he had. She wasn’t sure if his soul had found peace or if it was still trapped, a plaything of a demon with the power of a minor god. I guess the guild never heard about our visits.

She looked into the haze and saw nothing, then steered the horse after Cat and Penny. The alien structure fell behind, already lost when she glanced back. She was almost relieved, even though they were heading further and further into the unknown. The idea of going into the building again scared her to the bone. Caleb rode beside her, his face grim. She could see sweat on his brow as the wind shifted again, gusts of hot and cold air blowing against their faces. The tainted magic mocked her, brushing against her mind and making it hard to concentrate. It was difficult, almost impossible, to focus.

Frieda glanced back. “Are we there yet?”

Emily couldn’t help herself. She giggled.

“We’ve barely just begun,” she pointed out. “There’s a long way to go.”

She eyed Cat’s back, hoping to hell they hadn’t been turned around. They thought they were travelling in a straight line, but it was impossible to be sure. The mist pulsed around them like a living thing, visibility seeming to clear just long enough for her to hope they were coming to the edge of the haze before closing in again. She had the impression it was taunting them even though she was sure it wasn’t a thinking being … not that that meant anything, she cautioned herself. There was no reason the mist couldn’t be an intelligent enemy.

Serigala joined her. “I’ve been meaning to visit Heart’s Eye, to determine how you managed to found a whole new university,” he said, without preamble. “The whole concept is something new.”

No, it isn’t, Emily thought. There have been universities on Earth for centuries.

She sighed, inwardly. The concept of higher education had been unknown on the Nameless World. Most students either went to work or found apprenticeships, becoming masters in their own right before they could do any research … the handful of genuine researchers were funding and supported by magical families or magic schools. Both wanted something in return for their support … the idea of creating a place for academics to live and work without needing to fend for themselves, where disciplines magical and mundane could be blended together into a single whole, was just alien to them. Her lips twisted, all too aware of the dangers as well as the advantages of funding a university. It was all too easy for the university professors to lose their grip on reality, to convince themselves that their intelligence gave them the right to dictate to people who lacked their smarts. She wondered, sometimes, how it had all played out back home.

Serigala was still talking. “How did you come up with it?”

“It’s something that needed to be done,” Emily said, unwilling to discuss Earth with anyone she didn’t trust fully. “I could never force myself to focus on one discipline. There was too much to be gained by letting three or four different fields blur into one.”

Serigala shot her a half-smile. “And yet, you could have done that without opening a university.”

“I could, yes,” Emily agreed. “But how many others could do the same?”

She met his eyes. “There are people who could have been great researchers, only to be trapped in their hometowns. They don’t always have the magic, and even if they do they don’t have the resources to make something of their talent nor the knowledge of previous developments they can use as a launch pad for their own developments. They would starve if they weren’t working for a living, which means they can’t focus on developing newer and better ways to do things. And …”

“You funded it,” Serigala pointed out. “Don’t you think some people will take advantage of your generosity?”

Emily shrugged. It was difficult to calculate just how rich she was, in earthly terms. Merely owning a barony put her in the top one percent, and even with the carefully limited taxes she’d crafted to encourage economic development she still raked in enough money to fund the university and a hundred other projects without noticing the loss. It was funny how few aristocrats realised a small slice of a very large pie was still bigger than a much smaller pie, she had often reflected. It never seemed to occur to them that the economy needed to breathe. Or that people produced more if they were allowed to keep a sizable percentage of their produce.

“I’m sure some will,” she said, finally. Heart’s Eye had protocols for evicting someone who broke the rules, particularly if they damaged trust too, yet … she didn’t really care if someone wanted to attend classes without actually doing anything, as long as they behaved themselves. “But overall, the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.”

Serigala cocked his head. “Why do you feel that way?”

“You never know who’ll be the one to make the next breakthrough,” Emily said. Ten years ago, if someone had told her she’d be yanked into a fantasy land, she would have laughed in their face. Now … “It’s worth some investment to ensure the prospective inventor gets a chance to invent something.”

“The aristocracy would disagree,” Serigala pointed out.

Emily shrugged. “Adam would have lived and died a shopboy in Beneficence if the University hadn’t existed,” she countered. “No one would have let him do any magical research – and even if they had, he wouldn’t have had access to the books and supplies he’d need to do it. He might have a genus intellect, but without the education to know what has been done before he’d be starting from scratch, if he started at all. I think he’s repaid everything I invested in him.”

She ground her teeth in sudden frustration. Adam wasn’t the only one who’d been denied opportunities through an accident of birth. Frieda and Imaiqah could easily have gone the same way … Markus and Melissa could have been at dagger’s drawn instead of falling in love and getting married and telling their respective families to go to hell … Emily herself had been trapped, before Shadye had kidnapped her, unable to get out of the poverty trap before it was too late. She understood the beancounter’s argument, the solemn reminder there was no such thing as a free lunch, but she didn’t intend to let it change her plans. She would keep funding the university until she died.

Or if I run out of money, she thought. It was rare for an aristocrat to go bankrupt, but it did happen. The university needs a solid financial base before anything goes wrong.

Serigala leaned forward. “Have you ever studied the history of education?”

Emily felt something prickle down her spine. She wasn’t sure why.

“I was given to understand that much history had been lost,” she said, carefully. It was technically true, if incomplete. “Why …?”

“It’s true,” Serigala agreed. “We know very little about the early days of Whitehall, or Mountaintop, or Stronghold. Much of what we do know is wrapped up in myths and legends. Apparently, the founder of Mountaintop was a professor at Whitehall who had a row with his colleagues and fled, screaming I’m leaving, to found another school … naturally, that story is denied by Mountaintop.”

“Naturally,” Emily echoed. She had never cared for the rivalry between the two schools, certainly never bothered to give it any real attention. “I don’t think anyone believes it.”

Serigala smiled, then leaned forward. “What puzzles us is this. There’s no traceable path of development. One moment, we have the Whitehall Commune; the next, we have the school … and while there are changes and improvements, as the school grows and interacts with the surrounding kingdoms and empires, the basic outline of Whitehall is set in stone right from the start. Lesson circles are replaced by classrooms, apprenticeships from puberty are replaced by generalised lessons … the whole shift happened so rapidly it practically came out of nowhere.”

Or from the future, Emily thought.

“Why?” Serigala studied his hands. “Why such an instant change? It makes no sense.”

“It is a logical way to do things,” Caleb pointed out, from where he’d been quietly listening. “Having a new magician become an apprentice from the get-go means they lack the background knowledge to know which field they want to specialise in.”

“And having so many masters in one place does allow for a lot of cross-pollination,” Emily added. “The new students could get a taster session for each master before deciding who they wanted to follow, perhaps even learn the basics before taking the oaths.”

“Perhaps, but it still appeared out of nowhere.” Serigala looked up. “A newborn babe isn’t a ground adult. He is a toddler, then a child, then a teenager, and then finally an adult – he makes his way through the stages one by one, and even if he does try to grow up quickly it can’t be done without causing all sorts of problems and long-term damage. There are spells to speed up growth, true, but they have very nasty side effects. The same can be said for an organisation or a government. The Allied Lands evolved and are now evolving again, for better or worse. But modern magical education seemed to spring into the world full-grown.”

Emily kept her face blank. Did he know something? It was hard to believe it possible, not when most academics dismissed the idea of time travel, but all it would take was one person thinking outside the box to crack the secret. Or was it just a wild coincidence? The puzzle would have excited her, if she hadn’t already known the answer. It wasn’t a bad idea for him to research the mystery. It was just that she didn’t want him to draw the right conclusions.

“Some inventions appear when the world is ready for them, and the conditions for their arrival are met,” she said, finally. “If half the stories are true, the Whitehall Commune had everything it needed to found a school.”

“So does a husband and wife,” Serigala pointed out. “But that doesn’t mean their child is born fully grown.”

“History is telescoped,” Emily said. Even a cursory look at recorded history raised red flags, from kings who had ruled for hundreds of years to national lifespans compressed into a decade or two. “For all we know, the historians skipped over the boring parts and rushed ahead to the interesting bits.”

“Not here,” Serigala said. “There’s too much we don’t know about what really happened back then.”

Emily nodded. She couldn’t disagree.

 

Chapter Seventeen

It felt like hours before the haze lifted, revealing a barren landscape that might – once – have been a riverbed. It was deceptively small, almost tiny until the horses started the descent into the gully, at which point it mushroomed into a gash in the ashy land that reminded Emily of pictures she’d seen of the Grand Canyon. The stones were grey, worn down by years of exposure to wild and tainted magic, but otherwise … she kept the through to herself as they picked their way down to the dead river and found a path leading up to the far side. There were no bridges, no easy way to get across without magic, yet … she knew better than to try. Spells were unreliable in such dangerous places, no matter what they did. Sweat prickled down her back as they clambered up the ruined path, the horse’s shying away as they picked a route that might – or might not – be safe. It was hard to be sure.

“Charming,” Caleb muttered, as they reached the top. “What the hell happened here?”

Emily had no answer. The land looked cracked and broken on a colossal scale. She saw piles of stones that towered over them, like sandcastles on a beach inhabited by tiny creatures, and dried-up lakes and valleys that looked to have died hundreds of years ago. A faint shimmer hung in the air as she gazed at a shape that might, once upon a time, had been a building, a suggestion there was something waiting for in the shadows. The light came and went, as if the sun was being flicked on and off, as they circumvented the structure and kept heading north. It was just bizarre. Emily felt the back of her neck prickling, her skin threatening to burn, when the sunlight was seemingly gone; she felt nothing, somehow, when the sun was blazing down on them. She didn’t pretend to understand it. The Blighted Lands were very far from safe for human beings.

“It’ll be years before the settlements reach this far south,” she said, as they kept moving. “Draining the magic is going to take decades, at best …”

She allowed herself to consider the possibilities, in hopes of distracting herself from the endless journey. They could set up windmills to channel the tainted magic into batteries and then use it to power spells, they could use holographic magitech to absorb the mana and control it in a manner that couldn’t easily be overwhelmed by the sudden surge of raw power. It would still take years for the land to return to something resembling normal, but it would be a start. Her lips twisted as she realised possession of a high-magic area might become a vital national asset, like controlling oil fields or coal mines … once the magitech was perfected and put into mass production. The university was already draining the surrounding area, cleansing it for human settlement. It wouldn’t take long before the Blighted Lands attracted investors ... Cat would have to get ahead of the game, she decided, if he wanted to make full use of the discovery. They weren’t that far from Kuching. They hadn’t walked a thousand miles. It just felt that way.

They paused long enough to eat ration bars and drink water, before resuming the march. Cat and Penny spoke in low voices, the rest of the group remained silent, concentrating on keeping their eyes on the horizon. It would be easier if their destination was within sight, Emily thought, although she wasn’t sure that were true. They couldn’t see anything and yet … they were moving so slowly, on a continental scale, that their destination wouldn’t appear to be getting any closer for days, if not weeks. She had heard about expeditions that spent weeks crossing the undiscovered parts of Africa and America, yet it had never really dawned on her just what that meant. Lewis and Clark had been out of contact with their country for months, utterly alone … it was a truly staggering feat. She could contact Alassa, perhaps open a portal or teleport home, but that would give the game away. The Hierarchy would know what they’d been trying to do, unless they were asleep at the switch, and take steps to ensure it couldn’t happen again.

And God alone knows what might be happening behind us, she mused, sourly. They might be putting their plan into action while we’re trapped in the great unknown.

The landscape changed slowly as they kept walking, the ashy desert giving way to scrublands and terrain that looked torn between desert and countryside. She couldn’t help being reminded of the landscape around Heart’s Eye, but here … the plants and trees looked twisted, warped beyond all hope of recognition. The trees looked spidery, as if they’d tried to grow in zero gravity, while the plants looked aggressive, digging deep into the soil in hopes of finding fresh water. Their leaves weren’t green, but an eerie sickly brown, She spotted a pool of water under a strange mishmash of trees and plants, the water seemingly clear and yet … she couldn’t see the bottom. A faint bubbling suggested there was something in the water, something utterly inhuman. Cat steered them around the pool, keeping a safe distance. Emily felt her skin prickle, the horse shifting uncomfortably underneath her. The sense of being watched was growing stronger. They weren’t alone.

“There could be anything under there,” Caleb commented.

“I guess the fishing trip is off,” Frieda said, with the air of someone who was trying to cheer herself up and failing miserably. “What do you think there is under there?”

Emily shrugged. She’d seen giant scorpions and insects, creatures that couldn’t have existed without magic and others so different, so alien, it was hard to believe they existed at all. Some had been small, easy to kill once you got over the shock; others had been icebergs, giant trapdoor spider-like creatures that had only shown a tiny part of themselves, lulling the hunter into a sense of overconfidence before the trap was sprung. She’d seen a body hauled out of a network of hidden caves near Whitehall, a creature so immense that it had taken an entire team to bring it down. She had enough magic to take on a necromancer and yet she wouldn’t have cared to face the beast alone. The hunting guilds might make a fortune capturing or killing such creatures, and selling their skin and organs to alchemists and potioneers, but she was fairly sure they didn’t get paid enough. She wouldn’t have done it for all the money in the world.

The landscape kept shifting, patches of trees giving way to boundless tundra and moraines before the alien jingle started to close in again. Trees draped in seaweed-like leaves and branches, weird-smelling flowers that seemed to move of their own accord … she was sure she saw a handful of small rodents running through the undergrowth, but they were gone when she looked closer. There could be an entirely alien ecology here, she reflected, with mundane animals evolving to live off the warped and tainted plants and trees. Ice ran down her spine as she recalled some of the more fantastical post-nuclear nightmare books she’d read, with mutated animals with strange powers and radioactive threats haunting the landscape, ensuring there was no hope of rebuilding the pre-war world. Her eyes narrowed as she realised what was missing from the scene. There were no insects humming through the air.

Caleb pulled his horse alongside her. “Do you think we can eat the plants?”

Emily shrugged. “Better be very careful,” she said. Some tainted plants were safe to eat, others were lethal. They couldn’t afford food poisoning so far from home. “If we need to try the plants, we’ll test them carefully first.”

The landscape shifted again, the alien trees giving way to a river that flowed from east to west. Emily scowled as she glanced up and down the water, noting the complete lack of any bridges … there was a rocky structure that might have been a bridge, once upon a time, but it was in ruins now. If it had ever been a bridge … she put the thought aside as Cat dismounted and walked up to the water, holding out one hand to cast a safety spell. There were no rapids, no hint there might be currents within the river, but she knew better than to take it for granted. Even a relatively tranquil river could be incredibly dangerous, if they tried to swim across. There might be currents under the surface that could sweep them all away.

Cat glanced at her. “You think we should try to look for a better crossing point?”

Emily hesitated as she scrambled down herself. The riverbank was relatively low, suggesting it might have been a crossing point at one time. A handful of animal tracks were clearly visible in the sandy ground, a good sign. Animals tended to be more aware of dangers than humans and they wouldn’t come down to the waterside if there was something nasty lurking under the waters. And yet … she let her eyes wander along the river, tracing its course until it vanished somewhere in the haze. She had no idea if there was any better crossing point. They might wind up wasting time looking for a place that didn’t exist.

“I don’t think so.” Emily cast a handful of spells, trying to determine if the water was safe. It didn’t appear to be tainted by magic … she hoped to hell that was true. There were plenty of ways for magic to affect water in manners that weren’t obvious, not until it was far too late. “But there’s no way to set up a line …”

“Ye of little faith.” Cat tossed her one end of a rope and tied the other around his waist. “Let us see how this works …”

Emily motioned for the others to take hold of the rope too, a moment before Cat stepped into the water and started to wade towards the far side. It didn’t look that deep, she noted coldly, barely coming up to his chest. Cat walked calmly, the rope tightening as he reached the far side and scrambled onto the riverbank. His outfit clung to his legs, water dripping onto the soil, but be was alive. Emily breathed a sigh of relief. Sergeant Miles would have been proud of Cat. Or walloped him for gross stupidity. Or both.

“The water’s fine,” Cat said. He secured the rope to the ground with a spell. “Penny, get the saddlebags off the horses and then lead them across the river.”

Emily glanced at Serigala. “Can you swim?”

Serigala shot her a cross look. “Of course.”

There’s no of course about it, Emily thought darkly, although she didn’t blame him for being irked. He wasn’t a crusty academic, someone who spent his entire life in an ivory tower, but someone who’d been an adventurer as well as an archaeologist. Not everyone knows how to swim.

She watched as the horses were carefully steered across the river, then kept a wary eye on Serigala as he pulled himself along the rope, Frieda and Emily carrying the saddlebags right behind him. Emily cast a spell to dry herself as soon as they reached the far side, then held out a hand to help Caleb out as he brought up the rear. The horses didn’t seem happy being wet, and they’d already been pushed to the limits, but at least they were alive and unchanged. The landscape on the far side looked surprisingly lush, at least from a distance, yet she could see warped and twisted plants dominating the landscape. There was no way to be sure they were safe to eat.

A chill ran down her spine as she looked south. The horizon was dominated by mountains, rising out of the jungle and vanishing in the cloudy sky. Faint flickers of eerie multicoloured lightning could be seen amongst the clouds, the light sending jabs of pain into her eyes before she could look away. She staggered, leaning against Caleb as she gathered herself. The air shifted, the scent of tainted magic making her hair stand on end. They were in a very alien country. The maps she’d studied showed the mountains, true, but little else. They were entering the unknown.

“We’ll set up camp here,” Cat said, firmly. “We don’t want to get caught in those mountains overnight.”

Penny glanced at him. “You think we can get through in a day?”

“I think if we start now we’ll be caught in the pass at midnight,” Cat said, dryly. He made a show of checking his watch. “You do realise its only a couple of hours until sundown.”

He cleared his throat. “Emily, set up defensive wards. Caleb, you and Frieda put up the tents. Penny, you and Serigala can collect firewood … I’ll join you once I’ve inspected the surroundings. Any questions?”

“Yeah,” Penny said. “What is the price of sliced ham, per portion?”

Emily snickered and tried to hide it. Cat had asked Sergeant Miles equally nonsensical questions, back when they’d both been in school. The sergeant had been remarkably forbearing, she recalled, tolerating Cat’s questions even when he would have been quite within his rights to beat him or toss him out of the class. Cat scowled at her, then at Penny, and then decided to walk around the makeshift campsite. Emily said nothing as she mentally sketched out the wardlines, eying the jungle warily. The shadows could be dangerous in their own right, or hiding something equally deadly. There was just no way to know.

“Been a while since I've done this,” Caleb commented, as he put the first tent together. “Dad used to take us on camping trips.”

Emily felt an odd stab of something as she drew out the first wardline. If her father had taken her camping, or anything really … she sighed inwardly, promising herself that she wouldn’t treat her kids so badly. She’d make sure they had plenty of time with both their parents, plenty of trips and visits and everything she’d been denied as a child. She wouldn’t spoil them rotten – she told herself that, very firmly – but they’d be as well-rounded as possible. It had to be done. She didn’t care about the cost.

“Make sure it doesn’t fall down overnight,” Frieda advised, dryly. “And keep the racket to a dull roar.”

Caleb made a rude gesture. Emily flushed. Cat was going to share with Serigala and Penny with Frieda, leaving her and Caleb sharing the final tent. She was too tired to do anything, but … she winced again as she eyed the tents, all too aware the flimsy material was designed to block tainted magic more than sound. They would be entertaining the entire camp if they did anything … she shuddered in disgust, putting the thought firmly out of her mind. It wasn’t going to happen.

Besides, I stink and he probably stinks too, she thought, sardonically. It won’t be much fun if we take one whiff and vomit on each other.

“Check the tents,” Cat advised, as he carried a bundle of firewood back to the camp. “And don’t go under the treeline. The leaves are crawling with spiders.”

Emily shuddered. “Like the ones near Whitehall?”

“Maybe.” Cat shrugged. “Better not to take the risk.”

“No.” Emily had seen the spiders during her first route march. They weren’t that dangerous, individually, and their bites were more unpleasant than lethal, but they moved in swarms – like a tiny army – and dozens of bites could bring down a human. They had a habit of lurking in tree branches and dropping en masse on passing victims, often killing them before their victim realised what was wrong. “We’ll leave them strictly alone.”

She tossed the bedroll into the tent, then joined Cat as he lit the fire and started boiling water for tea. It said much about his training, she reflected, that he was a better cook than herself. Caleb joined them a moment later, leaving Frieda chatting to Penny in low voices. Emily wondered what they were talking about, then decided it was none of her business. Frieda would tell her if Frieda wanted her to know.

“It feels like thousands of miles,” Frieda commented, joining them. “How far did we travel?”

“Hard to be sure, but somewhere around thirty miles,” Cat said. He glanced up at the cloudy sky. “We can’t go much faster without tiring out the horses.”

“We’ll have to rub them down too,” Penny said, as Cat poured the tea. “I’ll see to feeding them.”

“Check the local foliage is safe to graze before you let them go,” Cat warned. He passed the mugs around and sat back as he sipped his own. “I’ll take first watch, if you let me have a quick nap now. Who wants the second watch?”

“I’ll do it,” Emily said, reluctantly. She wanted nothing more than eight hours sleep, perhaps more, but she knew someone had to stay on watch. Besides, the whole trip had been her idea. “You might have to tie me to the horse tomorrow, if I can’t keep my eyes open, but I’ll do it.”

“Thanks.” Cat leaned towards the fire. “Make sure you keep the fire fed too. It’ll get very cold once the sun goes down.”

“Understood,” Emily said. “Who wants third watch?”

“I’ll take it,” Frieda said. “We all need a turn.”

“And whoever doesn’t can cook breakfast tomorrow morning,” Cat teased. His face fell, his voice becoming sarcastic. “Ration bars with extra ration bars. Yummy.”

Penny snorted. “You have no taste.”

“We could see if there’s fish in the river,” Frieda suggested. “I know how to fish …”

“Save that for when we’re desperate,” Cat advised. “We don’t know where they’ve been.”

 

Chapter Nineteen

The mountains were as bad as Emily had feared.

She half-lay on her horse, her reins tied to Frieda’s mount, her mind slipping in and out of awareness as they picked their way through the mountain passes. They might have been developed once, back in the days before the wars had started and never quite finished, but now half of the passes were blocked and the other half so worn down it was hard to be sure of just where they were going. The remnants of ancient fortresses rested on smaller mountains, more than high enough to allow the garrison to spot anything advancing towards the pass before it was too late, while the higher mountains vanished into the clouds, their peaks invisible in the gloomy half-light. Some were so sheer she couldn’t believe anyone could climb them, others looked no more challenging than the hills near Whitehall, the mountains she’d climbed with her friends back when she’d been in first year.

Not that height is any indicator of difficulty, she reminded herself. One tall mountain near Whitehall was relatively easy to climb, another – much smaller – mountain nearby was a death trap. The students were forbidden to risk their necks climbing up that mountain … not, she noted ruefully, that the ban stopped some of the more adventurous students from trying their luck. The real problem is just how far we are from the Allied Lands.

She tried not to let the tiredness overcome her as they kept making their way through the mountains. The maps were worse than useless, half the passes they showed no longer in existence and the other half so badly charted the papers were actively misleading. They danced back and forth, picking their way through valleys that had been worn down by generations of erosion and circumventing sinkholes that seemed to plunge down into the very bowels of the world. Emily couldn’t see the bottom of a hole that seemed large enough to swallow Whitehall, just … a pool of darkness that could have hid almost anything. It was a relief to leave it behind, even as the rocky walls started to close to the point they had to ride in single file. Tainted magic prickled on the back of her neck as they kept moving, her horse shifting uncomfortably as the valley opened up once again. She heard Cat swear out loud and leaned forward, all too aware she was in no state for a fight. If they’d run into another band of orcs …

“Wow,” Caleb said.

Emily sucked in her breath as she saw the town, built into the rocky walls. It looked as if someone had tunnelled into the rock, carving out homes and shops and temples – the latter clearly marked with tiny icons and statues – only to abandon them years later. Some elements looked as if the town had collapsed into a sinkhole, half-buried in mud and soil, before being revealed years later. A prickle ran down her spine as she realised just how old the town was … how old it had to be. It wasn’t the oldest place she’d seen – Whitehall Castle was over a thousand years old – but it was certainly close. There was no sign of life and yet it felt as if the population had left only yesterday, rather than hundreds of years ago.

Serigala cleared his throat. “No one has laid eyes on this place for decades.”

“You know what this is?” Penny pulled on the reins, turning to face the professor. “What is this?”

Serigala didn’t seem irked by the question. “If my calculations are correct” – he waved the map meaningfully, reminding them that their exact location was little more than guesswork – “this is a stonecutter city, where they used to sell their wares until the necromancers got them.”

Emily frowned. Void had mentioned the stonecutters once, noting they’d worked with stone in a manner that had never been rediscovered, let alone bettered. She’d had the impression he’d been involved with them at some point, but he’d never gone into details. Void could have tried to learn their arts when he’d been younger – like her, he’d been obsessed with learning new types of magic – or it could have been something a great deal more serious. She didn’t know. Void had taken that secret, and whatever he’d learnt from the stonecutters, to his grave.

Which makes you wonder if he’s truly dead, her thoughts pointed out. You never saw the body.

Her mind spun. Void should not have been able to survive in a low-magic world. His life had been prolonged by magic and all those years should have caught up with him, but Void was ingenious and fantastically good with magic … good enough to save his life? Emily didn’t know. She suspected she would never know.

The town was smaller than she’d thought, she realised, as they made their way through the centre of the structure and pausing in what might have been – once – a village green. The buildings were drab and grey, devoid of all individuality, but … she could see decorations carved into the stone, designs that marked out the homes in a manner she couldn’t quite understand. Serigala was looking from side to side, his eyes lingering on the designs … Emily wondered, suddenly, if he could read them. The Empire had insisted everyone use the same language, but places as out of the way as the stonecutter town might have managed to preserve some aspects of their original culture. And yet … she shook her head. It was hard to believe the town had once been a thriving community, on a trade route that linked three kingdoms that no longer existed.

“Out of the question,” Cat said, sharply.

Emily dragged her attention back to him, dully aware she’d missed something. “What …?”

Cat was talking to Serigala. “We don’t go exploring, not here,” he said, sharply. “We’ll take a break and then head onwards, trying to get out of the mountains before nightfall.”

Serigala looked at Emily. “Lady Emily …”

Emily yawned, helplessly. “Listen to him,” she managed. Her legs felt as if they were on the brink of collapse. She had to rely on Caleb to get off the horse. “We shouldn’t go wandering off alone.”

“Get some rest,” Cat advised, making a show of ignoring the professor. “We’ll be on our way in a few hours.”

“But this is a chance …”

“We’ll be back here,” Cat promised, as Emily lay her bedroll on the ground. “But right now, we need a break before we continue the march.”

“Rest,” Caleb muttered. He looked as though he’d been in a fight, dark rings clearly visible around his eyes. His face was dangerously pale. “We’ll be on our way shortly.”

Emily nodded and closed her eyes, hating herself for her weakness even as she was grateful for the rest. A few hours wouldn’t hurt … she understood the professor’s desire to explore the ruins, to see what he could learn about the people who’d once lived there, but they didn’t have the time or the numbers they needed to explore the place properly. Perhaps they could set up a portal afterwards, she told herself, and bring in a small army of guards as well as archaeologists. She could fund it. She felt Caleb slip his hand into hers as her awareness slipped away …

And then he was gone.

Emily started upright, a flicker of panic shooting through her. The sky was darkening rapidly … she glanced at her watch, as unreliable as it was, and sucked in her breath as she realised it was late afternoon. She’d overslept … had they abandoned her? They wouldn’t … she stood upright and looked around, sucking in her breath as she realised she was alone. The horses had been tied to a stake and left to graze on their nosebags, but … everyone else was gone. She glanced around for a note, half-expecting something to be buried under her bedrolls, yet there was nothing. They’d gone …

They wouldn’t have left me behind, Emily told herself, firmly. The horses had been left behind too … she gritted her teeth, all too aware something had gone horribly wrong. Cat and Penny would have known better than to leave Emily alone while she was sleeping and she couldn’t imagine either Caleb or Frieda willingly agreeing to leave the campsite. Serigala was the only one who might and he was an experienced adventurer, smart enough not to wander off like an underdressed character in a horror movie. What the hell have they done?

She closed her eyes and reached out with her senses. There was a faint sense of ancient magic surrounding the ruined town, but nothing she could localise. There was certainly nothing that might point the way to her friends. She wished she’d thought to create a martial bond with Caleb … it was normally reserved until after the wedding, when they were properly married, but right now it could have saved their lives. Her eyes darted over the campsite, looking for clues and finding nothing. They appeared to have vanished into thin air.

Emily paced around for a long moment, then reluctantly let her fingers drop to the bracelet on her wrist. She’d never dared bond as closely with her familiar as others, not when the Death Viper was too dangerous to be allowed to roam freely. Even touching the pretty snake could cost someone a hand, or worse. Emily knew from painful experience just how deadly the snake could be.

The magic unfurled, releasing Aurelius from his transfigured slumber. Emily felt a stab, of guilt as the snake crawled up her sleeve and wrapped himself around her neck, all too aware she was treating the creature as a living object. It felt wrong to turn the snake into a bracelet permanently … hell, it was wrong. But what else could she do? She might be immune to the rotting touch, yet anyone else who touched the creature would be seriously injured or simply wind up dead …

“All right,” Emily said, quietly. There was no need to verbalise, not when their minds were linked, but she preferred it.“Find our friends.”

Aurelius lifted his tiny head and sniffed the air, his forked tongue flickering in and out of his mouth. It was a terrifying sight, all the more so if you knew just how poisonous the snake was – the bright colours were a dire warning, a sign the Death Viper had no need to worry about its own safety – and yet she wasn’t scared, the familiar bond refusing to allow her to fear her own familiar. She wished, suddenly, that they’d had time to bond more, but … it was just too dangerous. Aurelius shot her a look that was both unreadable and yet perfectly comprehensible. The snake didn’t understand. How could it?

If you bond with a familiar, she recalled her tutor saying so long ago, you run the risk of taking on part of the creature’s personality. It can be very disorientating if you bond with a very different creature.

Emily pushed the memory aside as Aurelius picked up a scent. Several scents. He knew Caleb and Cat and Frieda, thankfully, and the handful of other fresh scents had to belong to the rest of the team. Emily followed them warily, letting the snake guide her through a handful of streets lined with blocky houses that were taller than they were broad. She eyed one house, larger than most she’d seen in mid-sized towns, and wondered why it was still standing. Homes were either relatively small or giant mansions and castles, with little in-between. Apartment blocks had a nasty tendency to collapse if the builders pushed their luck too far. She’d done what she could to make them safe, in Cockatrice and Heart’s Eye, but they were pressing up against some very hard limits. It would be a long time before materials science reached the point it could build towering skyscrapers without magic.

She frowned as the scent led to a temple, a Romanesque structure set within the rocky walls. They’d gone here? She leaned forward and peered into the shadows, muttering a charm to scan the interior for her friend. There was no response, nothing but the faint hum of background magic. She braced herself, then cast a night-vision spell and walked into the darkness. The stone passageway was longer than she’d thought, leading straight into the mountain. She ran her hand along the wall and frowned, noting how smooth the stone was under her fingers. It felt melted, as if someone had burned a passageway into the mountain rather than carved it with hand tools. Magic? Or something else? She racked her brain to remember what else Void had said, but …

The tunnel widened suddenly, into a chamber. A faint glow hung in the air, the magic disrupting her night-vision spell. Emily dismissed it with a wave of her hand, taking a moment to allow her eyes to adjust before inching forward. A statue stood in an alcove, half-turned away from her. A prickle ran down Emily’s spine, an awareness she didn’t want to look at too closely as she walked towards it. The gloom made it hard to see … the face snapped into view suddenly, making Emily yelp in shock. Frieda’s face looked back at her, trapped in stone. Emily swallowed hard and pressed her hand against Frieda’s forehead, feeling strange – almost alien – magic brushing against hers. Frieda had been turned to stone and … it wasn’t a standard petrification spell. It was something far worse.

Aurelius hissed in warning. Something else hissed back. Emily shuddered, all too aware of what had was behind her. A gorgon … not her gorgon, but another. Had the stonecutters worked with gorgons? It might explain why their arts hadn’t spread very far, even though every magician who came up with a new idea knew it was just a matter of time before someone copied his invention and spread the word far and wide. She inched forward, using the statue – Frieda – for cover. There was a gorgon right behind her …

“Turn around,” a voice said. Thin, sibilant, compelling. Emily felt her body jerk and bit her lip, hard, to centre herself. Gorgon petrification magic needed eye contact to work … she thought. It certainly needed some degree of face-to-face contact. If not, she would have been petrified by now. The one time she had been trapped in stone, there had been eye contact. “Turn around.”

Emily closed her eyes, relying on Aurelius’s senses. There was only one gorgon, thankfully, but he was walking towards her. The strange magic flowing through the structure was getting stronger. How many other Gorgons were in the temple? The scents were so close together that Aurelius couldn’t tell. The one behind her might be alone, or there might be an army behind him. She had no way to know. Magic flared, something shifting below her. She barely had a second to realise the floor was spinning before she found herself facing the Gorgon. A flash of magic brushed against her skin … Emily felt a flash of relief as she realised she was still flesh and blood. The gorgon did need eye contact … she reached for her magic, casting a simple freeze spell. The gorgon brushed it off effortlessly. Emily cursed under her breath. The Gorgon had some magic training as well as his inherent magic.

“Open your eyes,” the Gorgon said. The voice oozed through the air, attracting and repelling in equal measure. It was creepy and yet it drew her onwards. “Please. Open your eyes.”

Emily shuddered. The voice was insidious, creeping inside her mind and trying to lower her defences. She had to fight to keep her eyes closed. A dozen spells ran through her mind, none useful if she couldn’t see the enemy with her own eyes. Looking though the snake’s eyes was dangerous. Her perspective was confused, unable to make sense of what was happening. She could lash out with immense power, but with Frieda trapped in stone and the others presumably trapped too … she shivered, helplessly, as she sensed the stone around her starting to melt and warp into something else. The Gorgon was getting closer …

She cast a light spell, the brightest she could. Her Gorgon had always been sensitive to light and this one was no different. He staggered backwards, hands clawing at his eyes; Emily shaped a second spell, turning the stone beneath her into air, then leapt forward and crashed right into the Gorgon. His defensive spells weren’t advanced enough to keep her from tearing them apart, as her hands slid through them and pressed against his skin. She felt his arms reaching for her and hastily cast a spell of her own. His flesh became stone, frozen in place ... Emily shuddered, torn between horror at what she’d done and the grim awareness there had been little other choice. If he’d managed to hit her with his inherent magic, it would have trapped her in stone too.

“And where,” she asked the new-made statue, “did you come from?”

There was no answer. Emily hadn’t expected one. It was rare for a Gorgon to study magic outside their own communities and she’d never heard of one crossing the Craggy Mountains to take up residence in the Blighted Lands. Had he been rejected by both his people and the magical community? How many were there? She didn’t know … she cast a handful of more complex tracking and detection spells, now she knew what she was looking for, but there was no response. Was the Gorgon alone? Or were her spells being jammed somehow? The magic running through the complex was still there …

Shaking her head, she turned back to Frieda. She had to break the spell.

 

Chapter Twenty

Emily pressed her hand against Frieda’s stone body and forced herself to think.

Gorgon magic was tricky. It was embedded within the Gorgon’s body, an inherent power that bent the laws of magic in directions few understood and fewer could counter. She had been told it was a gift from the Faerie, rather than a natural mutation, and she had a sneaking suspicion there was some truth to the tale, even if it wasn’t completely true. The Gorgons were about the only people who regarded the Faerie as anything other than a terror beyond understanding, a power so great that facing them was dangerous and fighting was futile. She had been trapped in stone once, accidentally, and she’d been lucky to escape. Frieda might not be so lucky,

She closed her eyes and reached out with her mind. Most transfiguration spells changed reality and then locked it in place with a knot, a twist in magic that held the change firmly in place. It was normally easy to undo, if you had magic and a certain basic understanding of what you were doing … unless the caster bound the spell in a manner only they could undo. This petrifaction spell was different. It wasn’t so much a knot in reality as a complete shift, a change that threatened Frieda’s very mentality … Emily knew, all too well, that the longer Frieda remained stone the greater the risk she’d remain stone forever, her thoughts slowly running down and dying in a manner beyond all hope of salvation. She might even go mad …

Emily gritted her teeth as she felt out the alien magic, cursing mentally for not having practiced earlier. She could have asked the Gorgon – her Gorgon – for help studying her magic … although she suspected the Gorgon would have refused, if asked. They were a persecuted minority outside their own lands, on the edge of the desert, and their magic was about their only real defence against rogue alchemists. They could hardly be blamed for wanting to keep it to themselves, she thought. The idea of being chopped up for alchemical supplies was horrific. It would be worse if it were children being dissected.

The magic didn’t so much hum around her as it was rock solid, a change in reality that insisted – somehow – that it wasn’t a change. The world had always been like that … Emily wondered, numbly, if the magic worked through lying to reality, convincing it that Frieda had always been a stone statue. It was possible, she supposed. The problem with changing someone into a toad was that something had to happen to the rest of their body mass … and yet it just vanished, leaving a human mind trapped in an amphibious body. It shouldn’t be possible to change someone into an animal as easily as changing their name on a spreadsheet, but it seemed to work. She’d seen it work. She knew a great deal about magic, from Void and Adam and her own studies, yet there were mysteries she knew she’d yet to master. Perhaps she never would.

She kept her eyes closed as she parsed out the magic. Frieda’s thoughts were brushing against Emily’s awareness, somehow loud and strong and yet slowly fading away. Emily should have been able to understand the thoughts, as creepy as the idea was, but she couldn’t make head or tail of them. She feared that was a bad sign, that Frieda’s mind was already going in directions she couldn’t follow. The Gorgon magic was just too different … a flash of panic shot through her as she realised her own mistake, that her conviction Frieda was changing was the impetus behind her change. She took a breath and reached out, trying to shift Frieda back through sheer force of will. Her friend wasn’t a statue. Her friend was a living breathing human being!

Frieda collapsed. Emily staggered and fell too, her legs buckling helplessly. Frieda hit the ground hard, Emily landing in her lap … she gasped, her entire body twitching and cramping as Emily rolled over and off her. The spell shouldn’t have left Frieda with cramps – her muscles had been turned to stone, not locked up – but she was clearly in agony. Emily forced herself to stand and mutter a soothing spell, relying on her magic to charm the aches and pains out of her friend. She wasn’t sure what else to do. The potions she’d been given when she’d been petrified herself were hundreds of miles away.

“Thanks,” Frieda managed. Her fingers worked her tunic for a long moment, shifting everything back into place. “What … I …”

She saw the statue on the floor and smiled. “You beat him?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Emily said. She wasn’t sure how long the Gorgon would remain stone. Probably not long. “What happened? Where are the others?”

“The professor wandered off while you were sleeping,” Frieda said. “Cat and Penny went looking for him. They didn’t come back, so … Caleb and I went after them. I … I came face to face with that thing” – she waved a hand at the stone Gorgon – “and the next thing I remember clearly is you.”

Emily scowled. Clearly, Frieda hadn’t watched anything like enough horror movies. She should have woken Emily before setting off to find the missing people, so they could go as a group and … she looked around, sucking in her breath when she realised there was no sign of Caleb or any of the others. Where the hell had he gone? She didn’t know.

“You should have known better,” she said, setting up a handful of warning spells to alert her if the Gorgon reverted to humanoid form. “Why did you …?”

“I don’t know,” Frieda admitted. “I just …”

Emily helped her to her feet, then cast a handful of detection spells. The magic running through the stone hadn’t changed at all, suggesting … what? She tapped Aurelius gently on the head, asking the snake to sniff out the rest of the party. Aurelius seemed unsure what he was scenting, but eventually guided her down the corridor and into another chamber. It was crammed with statues – male and female, young and old, fully dressed and stark naked – all victims, she guessed, who had wandered into the ruins and never came out again. She wondered, grimly, if there was some kind of subtle magic around the chambers, luring hapless travellers into the catacombs. Most statues looked worn, a handful wearing outfits that had been outdated centuries ago. She touched one lightly and sucked in her breath as she realised human thought had fled long ago, leaving only a stone statue. The poor bastard had died a long and lingering death.

“There,” Frieda said. “That’s Penny.”

Emily sucked in her breath. Penny’s face was trapped in a rictus of pure horror, one hand raised as if she intended to cast a spell … only to be frozen in mid-cast. She stepped forward and under the hand, summoning her magic to free her. Penny stumbled forward as the spell came apart, nearly knocking Emily over. It was easier now … Emily wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was her newfound conviction she could break the spell.

“I’ve got you,” she said. “It’s alright.”

Penny scowled. “That creature got the drop on me!”

“You’re fine now,” Emily told her. She looked around the rest of the chamber, eyes darting from statue to statue. “What happened to the others …?”

“I don’t know,” Penny said. “I …”

Emily frowned, inwardly. The Gorgon could have been messing with their minds. Penny was certainly acting like someone who had been influenced and was now asking herself exactly why she’d done the things she’d done. Most subtle compulsion spells tended to come apart when the victim started asking themselves such questions, but the after-effects were brutal as the horrific truth sank in. Penny would hate herself for falling prey to such magics and start questioning everything she’d done, particularly after what Nanette had done to her. Emily kept that thought to herself. Nanette had been an ally, of sorts, but Emily never wanted to see her again.

“I found Caleb,” Frieda called. “He’s over here!”

“Take care of Penny,” Emily snapped. “And look for the other two.”

She felt a twinge of fear as she hurried over to face Caleb, his face frozen in an expression of dull surprise. He worked with a Gorgon, the Gorgon. Any prejudice he might have had had been overcome long ago, leaving him ill-prepared for a very different Gorgon. Emily forced herself to concentrate as she undid the petrifaction, catching him as he sagged into her arms. His entire body was twitching unpleasantly, although he hadn’t cramped as badly as Frieda. Emily made a mental note to work out why later. Perhaps he really hadn’t realised the danger until it was too late.

“I thought …” Caleb lifted his lips and kissed her. “I thought …”

Frieda cleared her throat. “I thought we were supposed to be looking for the other two.”

Emily drew back, reluctantly. Caleb was far too close to Aurelius for her peace of mind. Even a tiny touch would be enough to do him real harm, even if it didn’t kill him. She looked around, scanning the rest of the statues. There was no sign of Cat. Or Serigala. Emily cursed under her breath. There were too many scents in the room for Aurelius to pick out either of the missing people.

“Emily,” a voice called, echoing down a corridor. It was Cat. “Emily!”

“Careful,” Emily snapped. She had no idea if it really was Cat. “I’ll take the lead. The rest of you come up behind me.”

She balanced Aurelius on her palm as she walked down the corridor, keeping her eyes half-closed. There might be more than one Gorgon in the ruins … they were a very communal species, save for those lived apart from their own kind, which meant the Gorgon she’d petrified might not be alone. She gritted her teeth as she held the snake out, looking through its eyes as she turned the corner. Cat and Serigala were chained to the wall, instead of being turned to stone and petrified. They looked very relieved to see her.

“Cat,” she said. She hesitated, unsure if they were bait in a trap. “What …”

She took a breath. “What did I tell you, when I was depressed after losing my magic?”

Cat frowned, glancing past her. “I did something to knock you out of your funk,” he said, finally. “And you told me that if I ever did it again you’d kill me.”

Emily felt herself flush. “Sorry.”

She stepped up to the chains, inspecting them thoughtfully. She’d thought them metal, when she’d first seen them, but instead they were stone … the stone appeared to have flowed over their hands, binding them in place, then frozen solid. There were no locks to pick, just a handful of runic charms designed to make it impossible for the captives to cast magic. She promised herself she’d return after the current affair was over, in hopes of figuring out the lost arts of the stonecutters. It would be interesting to see how they did it.

“Hold still,” she ordered. The stone itself was unmovable. Her first attempt to transfigure it away failed miserably. “I think …”

The stone shattered. Emily blinked as Cat and Serigala fell off the wall and landed in a heap. She hadn’t done that, had she? The spells she’d used should have worked at once or not at all. Perhaps she’d weakened the magic running through the stone or … she rubbed her forehead, puzzled, as the two prisoners clambered to their feet. They didn’t seem too put out by their imprisonment.

“I think you two were bait,” Penny said, dryly. “Or food.”

Cat shot her a sharp look, but said nothing. Emily suspected Penny was right. She had no idea if a Gorgon could and would eat human flesh, but the two prisoners did make very good bait. Or perhaps the Gorgon had intended to interrogate them … she wondered, sourly, just how much magical education the Gorgon had. There were few magicians who wouldn’t take advantage of the chance to get more education, even if it had to come from prisoners. The Gorgon might think he could force Cat to teach him by threatening the rest of his team. It might work.

She sucked in her breath as she looked around. “We have to get out of here,” she said. It wasn’t going to be easy. The catacombs felt endless. “And then we …”

Her spell sounded the alarm. “And he’s free,” she added. “We have to move.”

She forced herself to think. There didn’t seem to be a labyrinth spell on the catacombs, as far as she could tell, but the Gorgon didn’t need such a spell to keep them trapped. The only way out she knew involved walking right past the Gorgon, which probably meant he was waiting for them. He could run, except that would mean letting them go to alert the rest of the world. Emily had no idea of his backstory, or why he’d fled so far into the Blighted Lands, but it was clear he was trying to hide. There was no way in hell he’d let them go.

“Keep your magic at the ready,” she ordered. If there was one advantage to the whole affair, it was that she no longer needed to be careful. Her friends were behind her and the rest of the petrified victims had died long ago. “Don’t let him get the drop on you again.”

She kept walking forward, the snake coiling around her neck as he sniffed the air. The scents were growing sharper, a suggestion there might be more than one Gorgon in the catacombs after all. Emily sucked in her breath as they neared the statue chamber, wondering just what the Gorgon had had in mind. A sadistic display of his victims or … or what? Emily darted from statue to statue, keeping a spell at the ready. She made a mental note to develop spells to chart underground structures, rather than merely scanning for specific people and objects. There were some, but they weren’t very reliable. Perhaps she could work out a way to use magitech to make up for their shortfalls …

Something moved, up ahead. Emily darted back as a blast of magic swept down the corridor, closing her eyes as the spell passed over her. It made her skin prickle … she caught a glimpse of the Gorgon, snakes growing out of his eyes and mouth as it readied another blast, and closed her eyes again as it shot another burst of magic at her.

“Come on, into the light,” the Gorgon said. The compulsion in his voice was so strong Emily felt her feet twitch, trying to move. “Come into the light …”

Emily gritted her teeth, then shaped a pair of transfiguration spells and aimed them up the corridor. The Gorgon had no problem dispelling the first spell; the second, a little more subtle, was aimed at the air surrounding the creature, turning the atmosphere into pure oxygen. Emily cast a fireball a moment later and hurled it at the Gorgon, gritting her teeth as the spell exploded into an all-consuming fire. The Gorgon screamed and staggered … Emily darted forward, feeling sick as she scented burning flesh. The oxygen had exploded right in the Gorgon’s face, burning him so badly survival was unlikely. Emily shuddered, helplessly, as Cat drew a knife and cut the Gorgon’s throat. Emily told herself it was a mercy. She didn’t believe it.

Move, she told herself.

They kept running, keeping their eyes open as they reached the top of the passageway and ran into the open air. The sky was darkening already, a grim reminder they weren’t out of the woods yet. Emily cursed under her breath, realising it was too late to continue their march through the mountains. They would have to make camp within the city, ensuring they’d be vulnerable to any other dangers that might be lurking in the shadows. She cast a blasting spell behind her as they left the temple behind, hoping the shockwaves would trap any other Gorgons or dissuade them from giving chase. Either way …

Cat glowered at Serigala as they returned to the campsite. “The professor and I need to have a word,” he said, catching hold of Serigala before the professor could object. “The rest of you, set up the tents. Make sure the wardlines are strong. We don’t know what else might be watching us.”

“Sir, yes, sir,” Frieda muttered.

Emily felt a twinge of sympathy for Serigala as she unpacked the tents, leaving Penny and Frieda to check on the horses. She could understand the professor’s desire to examine the ruins, but … he’d nearly led them all into a deadly trap. They could have all been turned to stone, petrified until their thoughts faded away, leaving nothing behind but statues. Cat had every right to be mad. Caleb helped Emily set up the tents, one by one, then started to draw out the wardlines as Cat and Serigala returned. The professor looked a little subdued. Emily wasn’t surprised. Cat had learnt how to chew people out from Sergeant Miles and he’d been a past master at the art of telling someone off without raising his voice. He’d never needed to shout to make his point.

“We leant something useful,” Serigala said. “Their magic …”

“Worry about it later,” Cat snapped. His face twisted as he glanced at Penny. He was responsible for her and she’d nearly died on his watch. “We’re going to be spending the night here.”

His face darkened. “You could have gotten us all killed,” he added. “What would have happened then?”

Serigala had no answer.

 

Chapter Twenty-One

The night passed slowly, as Emily took first watch.

She kicked herself for volunteering, as the rest of the party slept. The city had been eerie in broad daylight, but it was a great deal worse during the night. She thought she saw things moving in the shadows, faint lights within the darkness that flickered at the corner of her eye and vanished whenever she turned to look at them. The night was silent and yet she was sure she could hear something, right at the edge of her awareness. She was sure they were being watched by unseen eyes. The thought bothered her as she stood and paced around the wardlines, peering into the shadows and yet seeing nothing, then returned to the campfire to warm herself as time slowed to a crawl. It was a relief to wake Penny and let her take over, then scramble into her sleeping bag for a few short hours of rest. Caleb woke her, what felt like seconds later. If it hadn’t been for the bright sunlight, she would have thought she hadn’t slept at all.

“No sign of anything, last night,” Penny reported cheerfully, as she passed Emily a mug of steaming Kava. “If there are any other Gorgons out there, I didn’t see them.”

Cat seemed unimpressed. “Get ready to go,” he ordered, curtly. “We need to be on our way before something decides to have a go at us.”

Emily nodded, cramming a ration bar into her mouth before hurrying to assist Caleb to dismantle the tents and pack them away. Frieda joined them, looking grim as she rolled up her own bedding. She didn’t look to have slept very well … Emily wanted to hug her as she finished backing up the bags and loading them onto the horse. The beast eyed her sourly as he munched from his nosebag, as if he thought Emily was about to ride him to death. Emily tried not to roll her eyes. She would sooner have nothing to do with the horse either.

The city looked still, utterly unmoving, in the bright sunlight. Emily cast her eyes over the ruined buildings, spotting nothing … and yet feeling, again, as if they were being watched. It wasn’t impossible. There could be anything hiding in the shadows, or under an obscurification spell, or … something alien, something she didn’t understand and probably never would. She took a sip of water as they scrambled onto the horses, checking the compasses before starting to ride south once again. The city remained unmoving, the watching eyes clearly glad to see the back of them. Emily hoped it would stay that way.

Frieda pulled her horse up beside Emily. “Do you think it was a coincidence?”

Emily blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Two days ago, we get attacked by orcs,” Frieda said. “They clearly had a master, even though the necromancers are gone. Yesterday, we get attacked and nearly killed by a Gorgon. Do you think that’s a coincidence or … do you think something is trying to stop us?”

“Or at least slow us down,” Emily added. She turned the problem over and over in her head. The Hierarchy didn’t need to resort to such tricks, unless she was vastly overestimating its power. It was just possible the two attacks were a coincidence, but … Lady Barb or Sergeant Miles would have scolded her for even considering the possibility. The more convenient something turned out to be, for the enemy, the less likely it was to be a coincidence. “I just don’t know.”

She scowled, wondering – again – what was happening behind them. They could contact their allies and ask, through chat parchments, but … she shook her head. Better to remain off the grid as long as possible, at least until they reached their destination, And yet …

The city fell behind them, the rocky walls closing in once again as they picked their way south. Emily kept her eyes open, noting how some of the valleys and gorges had clearly been shaped by magic … a handful of ruined bridges, seemingly grown out of sheer rocky walls, bearing mute testament to the power of the stonecutters. The long-lost kingdom must have been something to behold, back in the day; she wondered, idly, if it would ever flourish again. Perhaps they could find the secret behind the magic, either through examining the ruins for clues or simply figuring out how the trick was done. And who knew what would happen then?

They passed a handful of shattered fortresses, so badly eroded they looked like sandcastles on the verge of being washed away by the waves, then back out into the open. The land on the far side of the mountains looked surprisingly mundane, from a distance, although the vegetation was as warped and twisted as the plants they’d seen to the north. A handful of things glided through the undergrowth, creatures that looked like crosses between snakes and foxes … Emily shuddered, helplessly, as one reared up to take a look at them before vanishing back into the jungle. The trees looked as if they were covered with seaweed, the sight sending a chill down her spine. It felt as if they were walking through an utterly alien landscape.

The temperature changed rapidly, seemingly at random. Gusts of hot air were intermingled with blasts of arctic ice, the air so cold the wind felt like sleet. Rain splashed down, some droplets so warm she felt them burning her … others so cold she was surprised they hadn’t turned to ice. The sky was cloudily, the clouds shifting too … sometimes normal, sometimes deeply eerie, almost alien. They crossed a field of rocks and sand, leaving her to wonder if they were traversing a giant flood plain. Perhaps they were. She could see puddles of stagnant water everywhere, rock pools large enough to pass for swimming pools. They gave them a wide berth. She didn’t want to know what might be lurking under the darkened water.

Professor Serigala seemed unbothered by the scene. “There was a story about a nexus point being near here,” he said. “Can you sense it?”

Emily shook her head. The southern nexus points had been snuffed out over the last two hundred years, but they had all been reignited when she’d restarted the nexus point under Kuching. A handful of necromancers who had been too close to the dead nexus points had been killed before they realised what was happening, the surge of raw power enough to swat them like bugs; the remainder had been hunted down and killed by magicians intent on seizing the reborn nexus points for themselves. She suspected it was going to turn into a problem she’d have to tackle one day – not all the magicians who’d claimed a nexus point for themselves were as decent as Cat or Caleb – but right now it was nothing more than a minor issue. They’d wiped out the remaining necromancers in the process, ensuring they no longer posed a threat to the Allied Lands.

“If there was a nexus point nearby, it would have been found by now,” she said, as she closed her eyes and reached out with her senses. There was no concentrated knot of raw magic within range, just the tainted magic pervading the Blighted Lands. “Someone would have come south to lay claim to it.”

“Unless it was shielded by Kuching,” Serigala pointed out. “Is that possible?”

Emily had no idea, but it didn’t matter. “There’s maps of the old nexus points,” she countered. “If someone knew there was once a nexus point out here, they would have come to check it out.”

The air shifted a moment later, a gust of cold air blowing into her face. She looked up into the rapidly darkening sky and cursed under her breath. The clouds were an eerie purplish colour, heavy enough to be pregnant with rain … the water started to fall a moment later, growing heavier and heavier with every passing second. She muttered a spell to should herself, a simple umbrella charm, and cursed again as she realised the tainted magic was slowly wearing it down, the water slipping through to soak her hair and tunic … ice prickled down her spine, old horror stories about radioactive gunk in the upper atmosphere echoing through her mind. If the rain was poisoning them …

“Get moving,” Cat snapped. The ground was shifting under their feet … Emily’s earlier thoughts returned to haunt her. They were in the middle of a flood plain … “Gallop!”

Emily dug in her spurs, the horse neighing in protest as he picked up speed. The rest of the party galloped faster, trying to get to higher ground before it was too late. The puddles of water were spreading rapidly, the sandy ground becoming more and more unstable as the rainfall grew heavier. They were too far from any safe ground … she blinked as she saw something squirming under the mud, a faint hint of tentacles coming and going too quickly for her to get a good look at it. They were … she shuddered, helplessly, and pushed the horse to go faster. They couldn’t gallop forever, even an enhanced horse couldn’t gallop for more than a few miles before having to slow down, but they were caught in a trap. They had to get out before it was too late …

The ground heaved, a horrendous creature bursting out of the sand and reaching for her. Emily had an impression of teeth and claws and tentacles, the latter moving so rapidly she couldn’t get a good look at the thing behind them. She shaped a spell with her mind, blasting the creature with an overpowered fireball; it howled, the sound making her eardrums ache in pain, and then fell backwards, vanishing in the puddle before she could see it clearly. More were coming, tentacles reaching out of the ground to grab them. Emily felt something cold and slimy land on her back and cast a spell, lightning crackling along the tentacle and striking the creature with lethal force. The rest of the party was casting spells too, trying to cover each other as the horses galloped faster. The rain made it hard to see clearly …

“Keep moving,” Cat shouted. Lighting crashed overhead, the thunder rumbling so loudly it almost deafened her. “Keep moving …”

Emily felt the horse jolt, an instant before it skidded to a halt and started to sink. The movement nearly threw her from the saddle … she realised, in horror, that something had caught the horse and was dragging it under. A giant tentacle reached for her, another wrapping itself around the house and squeezing tightly … she felt, more than heard, the beast’s neck break. She acted on instinct, grabbing the saddlebags and yanking them free, then levitating herself into the air and floating towards Caleb’s horse. The tainted magic grew stronger, threatening to poison her as she landed behind his back. He kept galloping. There was no end in sight.

More tentacles reached up, grasping for them. Emily cast fireballs at them, all too aware they weren’t enough to slow the attackers down. Their bodies were largely under the sand … out of reach. Or were they? She hung onto Caleb with one hand, the other grabbing for the battery in the saddlebag. If she could get the right spell into place, they might just have a chance …

“Got wide,” she shouted, drawing on magic to boost her words. The thunder was deafening. It was so constant she had the feeling it was actually outrunning the lighting, an impression she couldn’t escape even though she was sure it was nonsense. “Spread out!”

The party obeyed, as she jammed the valve into place, lifted herself upright, and cast the spell./ Caleb’s horse made a note of protest as a wave of cold air shot over his head and slammed into the ground, turning the sandy water to ice. The horse galloped onto it a moment later, Emily aiming the stream of magic ahead of them as the rest of the party fell in behind her. The sudden cold night not be enough to kill the monsters, whatever they were, but it would stun or trap them long enough for the party to escape. The air grew colder, the ice hardening … creating a danger that hadn’t occurred to her until it was far too late, If they slipped now … she heard something roaring behind her and glanced back, just in time to see something huge and nasty crawling out of the ground. It was so big she couldn’t get an idea of its overall shape, just twisted impressions of something utterly nightmarish … rain splashing off its form as it advanced, crushing her horse under its sheer bulk. She felt sick just looking at it.

Cat pointed a finger behind him and cast a blasting curse. The creature howled in agony but kept coming, crawling towards them frighteningly quickly for something of its bulk. It had to be magical, Emily thought, as she shaped a spell of her own. The battery was running out of stored magic and that meant the ice spell was about to start wearing off … she cast the spell, sweeping the creature with a wave of fire and ice, stabbing the latter into the body as hard as she could. It howled again and collapsed, the body slowly discovering into a puddle of goo. The stench was horrific. She wanted to throw up.

The rain slowed, but they kept galloping until they were clear of the floodplain and on higher ground. Emily breathed a sigh of relief as she realised they weren’t being followed any longer, leaving her to wonder if they’d convinced the rest of the creatures to back off or … if there had only ever been one creature, the giant beast they’d killed and left to rot. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. The land had more dangers than they knew, some hiding in plain sight. She didn’t relax until the rain stopped completely, the brilliant – too bright – sunlight drying her wet outfit with astonishing speed. She wrapped her arms around Caleb and held him tightly, even though she feared the sunlight would make them burn. The party slowed completely and came to a halt, the horses trembling beneath them. They weren’t human. They couldn’t be made to keep running past a certain point, and trying would only kill them. The party had already lost one horse.

Cat dismounted and hurried over to her. “Are you alight?”

“I’ve been better,” Emily said. She let go of Caleb and dropped to the sandy ground. “We need to find somewhere safer to set up camp.”

“Get the horses fed and watered, then we’ll be on our way again,” Cat said. “Next time, we need to bring more horses.”

And perhaps a small army of tanks, Emily thought. Heart’s Eye had messed around with steam-powered tanks, but they were little more than a joke until they worked out how to make an internal combustion engine actually work. Emily knew the basic concept, yet – so far – none of the engineers had managed to turn it into reality. We grossly underestimated the scale of the journey.

“Yeah,” she said, instead. Caleb hopped down to join them. “We do.”

She leaned into Caleb, drawing reassurance from his touch. They’d been lucky they’d only lost a horse … she sighed inwardly, feeling a twinge of guilt. She’d never really liked the beast and it showed, perhaps a little too much. She hadn’t even given it a name. Now … the horse was dead and she was going to have to ride behind Caleb or Frieda, perhaps even Penny. Frieda would be the best choice, she told herself. She was the smallest member of the party.

Professor Serigala looked like a man who was torn between delight and an urge to re-evaluate his life choices. “That was a surprise,” he said. “What the hell was it?”

Emily had no idea. There was enough tainted magic in the area to warp and twist perfectly normal animals into something monstrous, or worse. The creature could have been lying in wait for years, or it might have been put into their path … she recalled Frieda’s question and shivered helplessly. There was just no way to be sure they weren’t being harassed, unseen watchers trying to slow them down … she shook her head, telling herself the Hierarchy had no need to make it look like an accident. They were so far from civilisation there was no hope of their bodies ever being found.

“No idea,” Cat said. He stared at the bubbling pile of goo. “Could be a sea slug of some kind.”

Caleb snorted. “We’re miles from the sea.”

“No reason it couldn’t have gotten up here somehow,” Cat countered. “A necromancer’s guard dog, perhaps, or the results of someone’s madcap experiment. This land wasn’t always dominated by the necromancers.”

“And some enjoyed experimenting themselves,” Emily added. A necromancer had enough power to do almost anything and a complete lack of scruples about using it. “They might have come up with something new.”

“Yeah,” Cat agreed.

He turned away. “Get the horses fed and watered, and get something for yourself too,” he added. “But hurry. We can’t stay here.”

Emily nodded. Cat was right. They’d barely escaped in broad daylight. If they tried to get out in pitch darkness, the odds of survival would be very low. They had to out as much distance as they could between themselves and the creatures, if there was more than one. She suspected she’d never know.

Next time, we take an airship and to hell with the risk, she thought, as she helped to feed the horse. It can hardly be worse than being chased by a monster we can’t even see.

 

Chapter Twenty-Two

“Make sure the wardlines are firmly in place,” Cat ordered, as they settled down for the night. “We don’t know what’s out there.”

Emily nodded, stiffly. They’d ridden for hours, leaving the floodplain far behind, before finally coming to a halt as the sun started to sink in the sky. The campsite was far from perfect, as far as she was concerned, but it didn’t look to be part of a floodplain and there was a source of firewood right next to them. She’d helped set up the tents as Cat and Penny handed out ration bars and warm drinks, then volunteered to take the first watch. Caleb had offered to take it in her place, but he’d been steering the horse. He needed his sleep more than her.

“Of course,” she said. The night was oddly starry, for the Blighted Lands. Emily could pick out a handful of constellations the sergeants had shown her, years ago. She wasn’t an expert, but it looked as though they were on the right track. “You have a pleasant nap.”

“Wake me in four hours,” Cat said. “And don’t fall asleep.”

Emily snorted, although she took his point. They were all tired and there was nothing that could be done about it. If the threat of getting a beating from the sergeants wasn’t enough to keep students from drowsing off, the threat of being eaten wouldn’t keep her awake. She watched Cat return to his tent and sat back near the fire, closing her eyes long enough to set up another set of early-warning wards. If there was anything out there, she would get an alert long before it showed itself.

She heard something moving and opened her eyes. Professor Serigala was coming out of his tent, looking disturbingly alert for someone who’d been awake for hours. She raised her eyebrows as he came over to join her, squatting beside the campfire. They hadn’t allowed the professor to stand watch, Cat pointing out that he was the oldest of the group and couldn’t be relied upon to remain awake. Serigala hadn’t argued, somewhat to Emily’s surprise. It wasn’t as if their peers at school hadn’t fallen asleep on watch from time to time, despite dire threats everyone knew would be carried out. Perhaps the professor was aware of his own weakness, or simply grateful he would get a good night’s sleep. Emily didn’t envy Serigala. It was a clear sign Cat didn’t really trust him.

“Lady Emily,” Serigala said. His voice was calm, focused. “I can’t sleep.”

Emily’s lips twisted. Serigala sounded as if he were talking about the weather, not complaining about his lack of sleep. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, feeling a twinge of pity mingled with envy. She felt tired and she had over three hours t go before she woke Cat. “Do you want a sleep spell?”

“No, thank you,” Serigala said. “I never use them on expeditions. You never know what might be lurking in the shadows.”

“Point,” Emily conceded. Sleep spells were effective, but they couldn’t be removed in a hurry. If someone was put to sleep, they’d stay asleep until they woke naturally. “Do you want to talk about something boring? That might help.”

Serigala grinned, as if she’d said something amusing. “Did you give my question any thought?”

“About why the concept of magic schools came into existence so suddenly?” Emily would have preferred not to have the discussion at all. “I think it was a natural development, one that started because all the pieces were in place. There’s nothing more to it than that.”

“So we have been told,” Serigala said. “But it still happened very quickly.”

He leaned forward. “If the old scrolls are accurate, Whitehall started taking in common-born students very quickly and educating young women within a decade or so of the school’s founding. That’s a little odd, don’t you think? Societies don’t change that quickly.”

“There’s no inherent reason why women shouldn’t be schooled in magic,” Emily said, a little waspishly. “And I’m sure the commune had its fair share of common-born students.”

“No,” Serigala agreed. “But most societies have always tried to limit female freedoms. They are rarely granted as much latitude as their male counterparts, kept under male instruction from birth to death, and change comes slowly if it does at all. You changed the laws in Cockatrice and yet … society has yet to catch up with you. You know it.”

“It’s rather dangerous to keep a magician under control,” Emily pointed out. Frieda had been beaten and abused by her family, yet she’d grown into a powerful magician who wouldn’t have any trouble burning her village to the ground. “Once it became easier to tell which women had magical potential, it was safer to let them go than risk resentments powering magic that could easily turn lethal.”

“Perhaps, but it’s still odd,” Serigala pointed out. “Why the sudden change?”

Emily had no answer. Serigala had a point, perhaps better than he knew. The world might change time and time again, but it took decades for society to come to terms with the change and adjust its behaviour to compensate. The pill had liberated womankind because without a reliable form of contraception a woman could easily get pregnant, only to be abandoned and left to raise a child alone. Her village could easily shun her if she got pregnant out of wedlock, for fear that supporting her would mean encouraging other women to follow in her footsteps. Men too. A man who thought he wouldn’t be held accountable for siring a child he didn’t plan to raise was a man who was likely to be careless …

“I don’t know,” she said, softly. People, men and women alike, wore society’s chains. They could be uncomfortable, they could be outdated, but they hadn’t come out of nowhere. “Their world changed radically when they learnt how to control magic.”

“You could say the same about firearms,” Serigala said. “And there haven’t been many changes.”

“Alluvia is now governing by a rebel republic,” Emily countered. “And the remaining kingdoms are now all too aware of the threat.”

And they are pretending everything is normal because they don’t know what else to do, she added, in the privacy of her own mind. They are unwilling to make any concessions because that would mean giving up a little power, and raising the spectre of being forced to give up more, and yet refusing to give up power means they will eventually lose all of it.

“That’s a small change, compared to allowing women to attend magic school,” Serigala said, thoughtfully. “Why such a big change?”

“Because they worked out that women can be just as good at magic as men,” Emily said, rather waspishly. “And it ensured that powerful magicians had a chance to breed with their peers rather than random strangers.”

“True, I suppose.” Serigala looked up at her, his eyes dark in the half-light. “Where does magic actually come from?”

Emily blinked, honestly surprised. It wasn’t something she’d given much thought to, over the years. There was no magic in her homeworld – unless there really was a hidden magical society that existed in the shadows – but there was magic here, from humans with magic to creatures that drew on magic and entities made of pure magic. Why did humans have magic? The more she thought about it, the more she wondered how humans had ever evolved on the Nameless World … if they had. She had crossed the interdimensional barriers and come to land … there was no reason someone else couldn’t do the same, perhaps hundreds of thousands of them. She could easily imagine a small fleet of ships getting swept up in an interdimensional storm and swept to the Nameless World, the hapless passengers forced to colonise the new world once they realised there was no way home.

“Why do some people have magic and others don’t?” Serigala kept his eyes on her. “Why are newborn magicians more common in high-magic zones? Why does crossing established magical lines with new blood produce stronger and more adaptable magicians? Where does the magic even come from?”

He paused. “Does the presence of magic in the surrounding air somehow encourage people to develop magic themselves?”

Possibly, Emily thought. Although there is no way to be sure.

Serigala cocked his head. “What do you think?”

“It’s possible,” Emily conceded. “But wouldn’t Celeste have produced more powerful magicians if that being close to magic was all they needed to produce them?”

She frowned. Hundreds of children had been taken from their families by the regime, damn them, but … if the theory was accurate, there should have been more. Much more. The city should have been churning out children like a craftsman churned out basic toys and … as far as she knew, the ratio of newborn magicians to mundane children wasn’t any higher than any other urban community.

“The rate is higher in rural areas, where the population is closer to the soil,” Serigala said, calmly. “Why?”

He went on before Emily could answer. “They have to work harder for survival. They have to adapt, which means they adapt to the magic in the air.”

“Perhaps,” Emily said.

“But where does the magic come from?” Serigala leaned forward. “The nexus points?”

His lips twisted. “Does tapping the nexus points limit the magic spreading into the surrounding countryside, reducing the number of new magicians?”

“I doubt it,” Emily said. It was rare for a magical line to fail. Squibs were almost unknown and the only documented case involved a curse, rather than a genetic disorder. It took generations for a line to weaken badly, and most magical families would do anything rather than risk their bloodline losing its power. “It allows us to …”

She broke off, wondering if Serigala had a point. The effects wouldn’t be seen immediately, if indeed there were effects, but … might it become apparent over generations? The big events of history couldn’t always be traced back to their starting point, not when it could be something so minor it was practically unnoticeable, and for all she knew the slow decline of the magical bloodlines might owe something to an event hundreds of years in the past. If there were fewer newborn magicians … but there weren’t. Or was there? She had the nasty feeling it was something she really ought to question before it was too late.

“Where does magic come from?” Serigala repeated his question. “What do the nexus points do?”

“They radiate magic,” Emily said. She was too tired for word games. “What do you think they do?”

“The power has to come from somewhere,” Serigala said. “Where?”

He leaned forward. “There’s just so much we don’t understand,” he added. “So much we need to uncover, before it bites us. What we don’t know can hurt us.”

“True,” Emily agreed. “Why …?”

“I kept asking the same questions,” Serigala said. “Where does magic come from? How did we humans learn how to use it? Why the sudden shift from wild to high magic? How did some nexus points get snuffed out and why? Did they run out of magic or … was there something else involved? And what happened to some of the old magics detailed in the stories of bygone ages?”

“Many simply never existed,” Emily said, quietly. The tales had grown in the telling until the truth was covered in a mountain of utter nonsense. Magics that broke all the laws of magic, spells so powerful no human or group of humans could hope to cast them … she was fairly sure most of the stories had little truth behind them, not after seeing the past for herself. “I’m credited with a great deal of things I never did, and I’ve only been an active magician for eight years. In a thousand years, how many more stories will they tell about me?”

Serigala snorted, lightly. “We know necromancers could throw vast amounts of magic around,” he said. “Why did they go mad?”

“Because their brains couldn’t handle so much power,” Emily pointed out. “The lucky ones fried themselves immediately. The unlucky ones killed hundreds of others before they destroyed themselves or were killed.”

“Why?” Serigala cocked his head. “Why couldn’t they do good with all that power?”

Emily wondered if it was a trick question. “There have been hundreds of necromancers who thought they could hold themselves together long enough to cast an overpowered spell,” she pointed out. “They tended to die quicker than their more selfish peers, because they were actually less self-centred. The ones who had a better sense of self tended to be able to hold themselves together longer, as long as they had a steady supply of magic and life force. They needed to sacrifice more and more people to keep themselves alive, which meant they had to do it … like being hungry, I suppose. At some point, your hunger becomes so great you can’t keep yourself from eating.”

She shook her head. “If they weren’t completely self-centred when they started, their brand of magic would make them self-centred very quickly – or dead.”

“And yet if you could control the power, surely you could use it,” Serigala mused. “Couldn’t you?”

“No,” Emily said. She knew she had trained her magic extensively, although she had a long way to go before she could match Void, but there was no way she could control such a surge of raw power. It would break through her wards and poison her brain, driving her mad if it didn’t kill her outright. “There’s just no way to control it.”

She frowned, recalling how Void had used magic to create a handful of items from raw power … showing off in a manner that seemed unimpressive, unless you knew enough about magic to grasp just how much power and control it required to craft even a relatively small item. He’d done it, yet it had cost him … she wondered, suddenly, if it could be done with a magiwriter. The devices were designed to contain vast amounts of magic, channelling it in the right direction … even using the magic to power wards to contain the rest of the magic. Perhaps with the right set of programming …

She shut down that thought quickly. She didn’t want to experiment. She knew better.

And yet, part of her was very tempted.

“With the right amount of magic, you could do anything,” Serigala mused. “There are suggestions the old gods were actually powerful magicians …”

“You might be able to do it, in theory,” Emily agreed. “If you have a block of metal, one cubic metre of metal weighing about a million tons, and you have an unlimited number of strong men, could those men lift it with their bare hands?”

Serigala considered the question. “Perhaps,” he said. “It would be tricky.”

“It would be impossible,” Emily said, flatly. “On paper, you have more than enough muscle power to lift the cube. In practice, you couldn’t get anything like enough men around the cube to lift it. Yes, in theory, with enough magic you could do anything. In practice, there’s no way to muster the power or control necessary to actually do it.”

She shook her head. “The moon plucked from the sky, whole armies turned to toads, entire countries collapsed into rubble … the stories are grandiose, but they’re just impossible. There’s no way to gather the magic to do it, and if you could do it you wouldn’t need to.”

Her lips twisted. Pulling the moon out of the sky would utterly destroy the human race and probably the entire planet. It might be an easy mistake to consider, if you didn’t realise just how big the moon actually was, but … no, it had never happened. It couldn’t have.

“But it could be done, if you had the power and control,” Serigala said. “Why not?”

“Because you can’t,” Emily snapped. “Haven’t you been listening?”

Serigala showed no sign of irritation at her words, or her tone. “A great many things have been considered impossible over the years,” he said. “And we have figured out how to do them.”

“The risk is too great,” Emily said. She kept her thoughts to herself. “We don’t need a sane necromancer, not when madness is the only weakness they have.”

“So they say.” Serigala cocked his head. “If the nexus points are the root of magic, where does the magic come from?”

“I have no idea,” Emily said, sharply. She could imagine several answers, but she had no way to know which – if any – was actually true. “And there is no way anyone will be happy with you poking around their nexus point.”

Serigala kept talking. “There’s a giant underground lake near Heart’s Eye. The settlers dug into the soil and accidentally opened the lake, unleashing a burst of water that nearly drowned them before they managed to escape. What if the nexus points work on the same principle, giant reservoirs of magic resting in pocket dimensions that are slowly leaking into our world?”

“It’s an interesting theory,” Emily said. It might be true. Nexus points were timeless - that was how they could be used for time travel – but otherwise, he might be right. “But the last time anyone experimented with a nexus point, they created the Desert of Death.”

“You’re not curious?” Serigala gave her an odd little look. “You don’t want to know?”

“I don’t want to kill millions of people, including myself,” Emily pointed out, feeling her patience start to fray. “The people who created the Desert of Death killed themselves and countless others. I don’t know if they got any answers, but they didn’t live long enough to enjoy them.”

She leaned back, letting her eyes linger on the fire. “If it was just my life at risk, I might take the chance,” she admitted. “But I won’t risk millions of others to satisfy my curiosity.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Three

Emily tried not to think about Serigala’s questions, as they resumed their march the following day. The riddle of just where magic actually came from had bothered her, since her arrival on the Nameless World, but as far as she knew she was alone in actually asking the question. Magic was a part of life, a part of the natural world … certainly, there weren’t many magicians who would willingly ask questions for fear of accidentally looking too closely and breaking it. And yet, Serigala had asked the question himself. Where did magic come from and why?

Perhaps exposure to magic encouraged the evolution of a subspecies of magical humans, she mused, not for the first time. Or perhaps they were created by a more advanced race.

The thought nagged at her as they made their way across a blighted landscape – it might have been a city, once upon a time, or a rocky structure ground down by years of erosion and tainted magic – and crossed a river that stank so badly she feared anyone who fell into the water would be dead before they could get out again. The riverbanks were dead and cold, suggesting the poison was spreading into the surrounding landscape … she wondered, grimly, if the river was carrying the poison down to the sea. It wasn’t much, compared to the sheer immensity of the ocean, but she dreaded to think what sort of damage it could do to the local ecosystem. If an oil spill could spread far and wide, poisoning countless animals, what could a magic spill do? She didn’t want to know.

Something else to worry about, when I have the time, Emily reflected. Where did the river even go? She didn’t know. It wasn’t on any map. There are ships that circumvent the continent, aren’t there? They might have spotted something.

They paused, setting up camp for the night when the sun started to set. Emily was silently relieved not to be on watch, even though it made her feel vaguely guilty. Riding behind Caleb and Frieda wasn’t fun, all the agony of spending most of the day on horseback without the freedom of feeling the wind running through her hair. She supposed she understood Alassa’s love for the beasts a little better now, although there was no way she’d spend any more time on horseback than absolutely necessary. She helped Penny cook dinner by dropping chopped ration bars in a pan to make a thick soup, then went to bed as Frieda stood watch. It was a peaceful night.

“I thought I sensed something, last night,” Cat said, the following morning. “But whatever it was, it didn’t try to cross the wards.”

Emily nodded, slowly. They’d set up camp on an incline, ensuring nothing should be able to reach them without setting off a dozen alarms. She had been careful to check the ground too, just in case something was lurking in the soil, and drawn a blank. Perhaps the faint contact had been a local beast, something smart enough to give the campsite a wide berth; perhaps it had been something else. The faint sense that something was wrong, that they were being watched, nagged at her mind as they packed up and resumed the journey. She couldn’t spot anything, but that didn’t mean they were alone. They could be being followed from a safe distance.

She kept the thought to herself as they rode on, towards another set of jagged mountains. The map said the mountains should have been higher, with only a handful of passes, but they looked smaller, as if centuries of erosion had been compressed into a few short decades. She felt magic darting through the air as they headed to the nearest pass, faint suggestions of deadly powers lurking in the shadows … she gritted her teeth as pain spiked through her head, pools of tainted magic flickering at the corner of her mind. The pass was narrower than she’d expected, the rocky walls closing in rapidly. In places, the path edged along a sheer drop that forced them to dismount and lead the horses one by one; in others, the path was so cracked and broken it was easy to wonder if they’d stepped off the beaten track. She told herself, firmly, that no one had bothered to maintain the path for centuries, after the war had swept over the Blighted Lands. The necromancers certainly hadn’t bothered. Why should they?

“I’m starting to think we should have spent more time mountaineering,” Caleb muttered, as they inched along a narrow path with sheer walls on one side and a deadly drop on the other. The river at the bottom of the gorge looked awful, eerie greenish water flowing in and out of a cave network that drew her eye and tempted her to explore even though she knew it would likely get them all killed. “We’re not ready for this.”

Emily couldn’t disagree. She had spent some time exploring the local mountains, but she’d only visited the truly dangerous places with Sergeant Miles and the rest of his class. They’d had the right equipment and experienced men to show them what to do, and help them if they got into trouble. Here … Cat knew what he was doing, she supposed, but they were a very long way from help if they needed it. She eyed the path warily, feeling her legs threatening to freeze of their own accord. The horses didn’t look remotely happy. If the path narrowed further, they’d be unable to advance or retreat. They might have to abandon the horses to their fate.

Something moved, overhead. Emily looked up, just in time to see a rock crashing down the mountainside, falling past them and landing in the poisonous water with a splash and a sizzle. Acid? Emily didn’t know … there were more rocks falling, getting closer and closer … she thought she sensed a flicker of magic from high overhead. Were they being attacked? Or had they accidentally triggered an avalanche?

“Get under the overhang,” Cat snapped. There was a piece of rock sticking out ahead of them, one that might just provide some cover. “Hurry …”

Another rock fell, landing too close to Frieda. She slipped and tumbled off the path … Emily cast a summoning charm, not daring to rely on anything more complex when there was so much tainted magic in the air. Frieda zoomed towards her, practically crashing into Emily … she fell against the rocky wall, feeling magic cracking through the stone as the mystery attacker launched more rocks down the mountainside. Frieda caught herself and hurried to the overhang, Caleb and Emily right behind her. The horses looked as if they were re-evaluating their life choices … Emily had to use magic to drag Frieda’s mount under the overhang before it was too late. Something crashed into the rocky wall above …

“Shit,” Cat muttered. He held up a hand, trying to feel out their attacker. “WE can’t get out.”

Emily glanced at Caleb. Cat was right. They were cowering under the overhang, unable to move north or south without exposing themselves once again … she wasn’t sure she dared try to teleport without being certain of her destination, even if she could teleport safely with all the tainted magic in the air. Something hit the top of the overhang, sending dust drifting down to mock them. If their enemy hit it hard enough to jar the rock loose, the overhang would come crashing down and kill them all. Cat and Penny were already trying to strengthen it, but there were limits. Too many limits.

Serigala looked nervous, hands brushing the wall. Was he looking for a secret passageway? Or trying to determine if they could cut into the rock themselves? Emily didn’t know and she doubted they had time to do it, before the enemy managed to smash the overhang or panic the horses or … panic them. They’d all been in tight spots before, but this …

A thought crossed her mind. “Caleb, pass me the broomstick. Quickly.”

Caleb looked hesitant. Emily knew what he was thinking. The device had never been properly tested. Lilith had fallen off when she’d tested the broomstick and no one knew what had gone wrong … unless Adam had solved that problem after Emily and Caleb had left Heart’s Eye. Not that it mattered if they had, given there was no way to get a better broomstick … she took the device and swung her legs over it, bracing herself for flight. Penny might be a better choice, after learning how to fly a pitchfork at Laughter, but Emily owed it to herself to take some risks. Besides, Penny might assume the broomstick would handle just like a pitchfork. Emily doubted it was so.

“Cover me,” she ordered. The magic running through the device felt weird, as if she were riding a motorbike rather than a pitchfork. “I think …”

She shot forward, accelerating so rapidly that she flashed across the gorge and nearly smashed herself into the rocky wall on the far side. A twitch sent her flying upwards instead, the broomstick flying faster and faster; wind battered against her body as she flew out of the gorge, slapping her face so hard she thought she’d flown right into something. And it was still climbing … she wrapped her hands around the stick and struggled to take control, feeling the magic crackling around her. It felt as if the laws of physics had gone out the window. A memory surfaced – you could block a hurled projectile by using a simple cancellation spell – only to be pushed aside as she turned the broomstick around. The ground below started the blur as she zoomed back down, faint flickers of light bursting around her as the broomstick reacted to the magic in the air. There was something down there …

A hooded figure looked up. Emily couldn’t see a face, but he was holding a wand … she dodged, instinctively, as a fireball darted out of the tip and flashed towards her, only to evaporate as it ran into the broomstick’s protective wards. The enemy magician threw three more in quick succession, suggesting he didn’t know what he was doing or that he was weak enough to have to demand on a wand, bursts of heat brushing against her face as the range closed sharply. She cast a spell of her own, only to see it evaporate … she cursed her own mistake a moment later, all too aware Adam had mentioned the flyer couldn’t use magic either. The wards were too strong.

Ice ran down her spine as the enemy magician gestured with his wand. Rocks shot into the air and came at her, thrown with terrifying force. Weak or not, she noted sourly, there was nothing wrong with his mind. The rocks would pass through the wards as if they weren’t there and break her bones, at least, if they hit her. It was an effective tactic … she darted up again, feeling the broomstick quivering in her hand, then evaded the rocks as she came back down, trying to ram the broomstick into the enemy magician. Up close, there was something wrong with him. His hood and cloak hid a body that seemed to twist in strange directions, as if he wasn’t wholly human any longer. If he’d ever been human. Decades in the Blighted Lands could have warped humans into something entirely new, something inhuman.

He jerked aside, rolling around and losing his grip on his wand. Emily hoped it would be enough to slow him down, perhaps stop him, as she pulled away again, but he waved his hands in a complicated pattern and cast a spell that fizzled out harmlessly against her wards. Her eyes narrowed – it was a foolish tactic, and wasteful too – before a handful of shockwaves battered the broomstick, nearly throwing her off the device and sending her plunging to the ground. It hadn’t been as foolish as she’d thought. Thundercracker spells were of limited use on the ground, if only because they couldn’t be scaled up to the point of actually deafening the victim, but in the air … she cursed under her breath as she came about, one hand reaching for her pistol. The enemy magician didn’t seem to realise the danger as she took aim, hoping the shot would upset him even if it didn’t hit its target. That was interesting, she noted. Magicians had originally dismissed firearms as nothing more than toys, harmless to a man who could cast fireballs or freeze someone in their tracks or even turn them into toads with a wave of his hands. They’d learnt the danger the hard way. Now …

She fired, twice. Accuracy was terrible, but … for a moment, she thought she’d actually hit him. He jerked so violently that she wasn’t sure just what happened … his hood kept his face in shadow, yet she caught a glimpse of red eyes … a necromancer? It seemed unlikely – most necromancers wouldn’t have tried to kill people they needed to drain, and she couldn’t feel the normal surge of magic she’d learnt to recognise nearly a decade ago – but she had to admit it was possible. There was no time to worry about it. She shoved the broomstick forward, flying right at him. If she could grab hold, or even use her wards to take down his wards … if he was a necromancer, undoing his wards would destroy him. He stared at her, red eyes pulsing with dark malice, then vanished in a flash of light. Emily pulled the broomstick up, head reeling. She’d never met a necromancer who could teleport. It was beyond them.

Crap, she thought, slowing the broomstick as much as she dared. The rocky mountains were bigger than she’d realised, bigger than the map had suggested. A couple were covered in eerie greenish slime – her stomach churned as she looked at it, the stench somehow reaching her even though they were miles away – while others were seemingly unmarked. Where the hell did he go?

She rotated around, scanning the ground. There was nothing, nothing beyond endless stone … she dropped down, flying into the gorge and back under the overhang. Penny smiled at Emily as she landed, the broomstick seeming to lose power a moment later. Emily guessed the spellware would need to be regenerated and recharged, before she could go flying again. It was something else she’d have to figure out later.

Cat chuckled, then sobered. “What was he?”

“Something inhuman,” Emily said. She closed her eyes for a second, wishing she’d gotten a proper look at her foe. Humanoid, of course, but that covered a lot of ground. Red eyes normally meant a necromancer, yet … the eyes had been oddly inhuman and the enemy had teleported, proving a greater command of magic than most necromancers possessed. It nagged at her mind, something she was missing … but what? “We need to move.”

“Did we walk into someone’s territory,” Cat asked as the party started to walk again, “or are they trying to stop us?”

“They could have done a great deal more damage if they’d been trying to stop us,” Penny pointed out. “If they’d rolled gunpowder barrels down the mountainside and set them on fire, we’d all be dead. Or wishing we were.”

Serigala cleared his throat. “How many were there?”

“Just one, that I saw,” Emily said. “Hooded and cloaked.”

“There were some hermits living near the ruins of Zalesia, a few years ago, who were very hostile to anyone passing through their territory,” Serigala said. “He” – he jerked a finger upwards – “could be someone like them, someone who wants to be left alone.”

“They could have just let us pass,” Caleb pointed out. “We wouldn’t even know he was there if he hadn’t attacked us.”

“They don’t like letting people pass,” Serigala said. “They think it means more people will pass through their lands.”

“Could be,” Cat agreed.

Emily wasn’t so sure. It was quite possible for someone to live in the northern reaches indefinitely, if they knew which plants could be eaten safely and how to trap and cook small animals, but here? The Blighted Lands was not a safe place and there was no way to be certain which plants were safe to eat and which were nothing more than poison. A hermit who lived this far from civilisation would be lucky to survive a few months, unless he had somehow adapted to the tainted magic. It wasn’t impossible – the figure hadn’t seemed human, if humanoid – but she doubted it. It was a remarkable coincidence, if it was a coincidence. She wouldn’t put money on it.

“We’ll keep going, and keep our eyes open,” she said. Could they hide themselves? She didn’t think so. If the enemy was following them from a safe distance, it was unlikely they could break contact without going miles out of their way. The sense they were running out of time was growing stronger with every passing second. “And if they attack us again, we’ll be ready.”

“And you’d better keep practicing with the broomstick,” Cat teased. “Isn’t it like …”

Penny hit him.

Emily didn’t bother to hide her amusement. The joke hadn’t been funny at Laughter and it wasn’t funny now, although it did prove that Cat and Penny had a good relationship. She had known masters who exploded with rage at the thought of even the slightest hint of defiance and Penny had gone a little further than that, crossing the line in a manner that would have given those masters a heart attack. But Cat had nothing to prove.

“Charming,” Caleb said, deadpan.

Frieda put on a childish voice. “Are we there yet?”

“No,” Emily said. It felt as if they’d been travelling forever. “We have several days to go.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Four

Emily hadn’t quite realised, she admitted to herself, just how long the journey was going to be.

The Allied Lands were vast, true, but they were settled and civilised. Travellers could rely on finding inns, or simply paying farmers to put them up for the night, or even arrange to be teleported to their final destination if they couldn’t step through a portal. The Blighted Lands were very different. They rode all day, set up camp each and every night, then continued their journey the following morning. The days seemed to blur together, long hours of boredom and philosophical discussions by Serigala followed by brief moments of excitement, from magical storms to possible enemy attacks. Emily found herself looking from side to side, half-expecting to be attacked at any moment. If the enemy was trying to wear them out, it was suceeding.

“Next time, we should take a trip somewhere else,” Caleb muttered. The endless march was grinding them all down, with Cat and Penny snapping at each other and Frieda snarling at Serigala whenever he tried to engage her in conversation. “Or arrange for an airship instead.”

“If we can get one into the Blighted Lands,” Emily pointed out. She had slept well and yet she felt dog-tired, all too aware she couldn’t close her eyes even though she was riding behind him and could theoretically get some more sleep while they rode south. “But we don’t know if it can be done.”

She rubbed her forehead, cursing under her breath. It was the Blighted Lands themselves that were grinding them down, things moving in the shadows and flickers of heat, cold and magic brushing against them. The air felt as if the region was permanently on the verge of a thunderstorm, little sparkles of light dancing at the corner of her eyes and sending stabbing pains deep into her skull. The sense of threat was all around them, a constant nagging warning of impending trouble that made it hard to sleep, hard to rest, without feeling as though she would close her eyes only to never open them again. There was nothing to be done, she told herself time and time again, but endure and pray they reached their destination in time. She tried not to think about what might be happening behind them. It was out of their hands.

“We could set up windmills to drain the tainted magic,” Caleb said. “And then this land might be worth something again.”

“The work of generations,” Emily managed. Her headache was growing worse. Cat and Serigala were the only ones who didn’t seem to be affected, somewhat to her surprise. Cat was incredibly sensitive to magic. Perhaps he was just hiding it better. “I think it’ll be a long time before we can cleanse this region, if at all.”

The thought haunted her as they kept on, crossing mountains and rivers and passing through the remnants of old cities and other structures that had been so badly eroded it was hard to tell what they’d been, before the world had changed beyond all hope of repair. It was hard to believe that people had actually lived in the ruined settlements, that they’d had hopes and dreams and lives that had been stolen from them by the necromancers, when the settlements were so badly degraded little was left to inspect. She saw clusters of buildings that might have been the core of a settlement, once, but the rest of the settlement was gone … she felt her heart twist painfully, hoping the locals had gotten out before the end. There was no way to know. It was rare for any sort of refugee population to maintain any kind of separate identity, not in the Allied Lands. They were given a flat choice between integrating or getting kicked out. If they had fled …

She shook her head. It was unlikely they’d reached the north.

“We should be able to make camp here,” Cat said. He scowled as he peered towards a cluster of distant buildings, so alien Emily knew they hadn’t been made by human hands. Just looking at them made her head hurt, as if the designer had been insane and the builders drunk when they turned the plans into reality. “Don’t go anywhere near the buildings. Really.”

He shot Serigala a sharp look. The professor had never been able to explain why he’d slipped into the underground catacombs, although Emily suspected it owed much to scientific curiosity … something she understood all too well. She’d seen enough alien ruins near Whitehall to be all too aware of the dangers, or the risk of being left behind if she walked into a ruin and placed herself beyond all hope of rescue. Sergeant Miles had made it very clear they would be left behind … Emily hadn’t quite believed it, but she’d been reluctant to put it to the test. The sergeants had been responsible for every student in the class, not just one. They had to focus on the good of the majority.

She put the thought aside as she drew out the wardlines, surveying the local environment. The flat plain – it looked like baked mud, so solid it wasn’t easy to lay down even the slightest rune – offered no cover for anyone who wanted to sneak up on them, while there was nothing hidden in the ground … as far as she could tell. Cat and Penny built the fire with practiced ease, while Caleb and Frieda put the tents together … Emily caught Caleb’s eye and they shared a thought, a sense it would be nice to share a sleeping bag as well as a tent. She sighed inwardly. Their relationship was hardly a secret, and they both knew all kinds of silencing spells, but the thought of having so many eyes and ears nearby rather killed the groove. She shook her head in dismay. It was just … frustrating.

“Tonight’s dinner, delicious ration bars,” Cat announced, in a tone of absolutely fake enthusiasm. “With a side of ration bars, and a drink of water … flavoured with ration bars.”

“I hate you,” Penny said. “Next time, let’s bring more food.”

“Yep.” Cat winked. “More ration bars.”

Emily signed inwardly, understanding all too well. The ration bars weren’t bad, precisely, but they were boring and tasteless and she was thoroughly sick of them. They all were. She eyed the distant greenery, as eerie and alien as the rest of the surrounding environment, then bit down on that thought before it could take root. The idea of eating something growing near the alien city was unthinkable. They’d be lucky if it didn’t kill them on the spot.

“I’ll take first watch,” Frieda said, when the meal was over. “Emily, do you want the second?”

“Not particularly.” Emily wasn’t sure if it was her turn or not. The days had blurred together so completely she honestly wasn’t sure of anything. “But yeah, you wake me in a few hours.”

She took one last look at the alien city, invisible in the darkening land and yet so present she could see it even though she couldn’t, then turned away and clambered into the tent. Caleb joined her a moment later … she wanted him beside her and had to fight to keep herself from inviting him into the sleeping bag. They were designed to be combined together … she bit her lip and closed her eyes, taking his hand in hers and holding it lightly. A few years ago, it had been difficult to share a bed with him … with anyone. Now, it felt wrong not to have him in her bed.

You won’t be able to spend every night with him, even after you’re married, Emily told herself, grimly. They would be living together, true, but there were things they couldn’t share. Hell, where are we going to live?

The thought mocked her. They couldn’t live in Dragon’s Den or Void’s Tower because Caleb had to work at Heart’s Eye … she wondered, suddenly, how hard it would be if they tried to live in Cockatrice. She was the Baroness, of course, but half the aristos would want to deal with her husband, on the assumption she’d signed over everything she owned to him when she took her wedding vows. Bastards. Hadn’t they learnt anything from Alassa? But then, they’d practically marginalised Queen Marlena as soon as King Randor had been confirmed dead. Alassa’s mother had never had any formal authority, and much of her influence had died with her husband. Even Alassa had never been quite sure about listening to her.

Something else we’re going to have to discuss, she mused, as she shifted against him. Where the hell are we going to live?

She shook her head, mentally. She had a good team in Cockatrice and they’d be happier with her somewhere else, where she wasn’t looking over their shoulder like a bear with a toothache. The tower and the townhouse … she could teleport there, if need be, or arrange for Frieda to live in the townhouse if it was what she wished. Or … if she was serious about an apprenticeship, she could live in Heart’s Eye. Or …

The flap rustled. She jerked awake. “Emily?”

Emily stirred. Had she slept? She wasn’t sure.

“Yeah,” she managed. The night should have been cold, but instead it was uncomfortably warm. “My turn?”

“Yes, sorry,” Frieda said. “I can stand guard a little longer …”

Emily shook her head as she crawled out of the tent. Frieda couldn’t stay on watch for the rest of the night, no matter how tempting it sounded. There were limits to how long someone could stay awake and alert, no matter what potions they took. The sergeants had always taught her to avoid potions where possible, pointing out they came with nasty side effects. She blinked as she saw Serigala sitting on the far side of the fire, staring into the flames. He was so unmoving she would have wondered if he were asleep, if his eyes weren’t open.

“We should have brought Hoban,” Frieda muttered. “That gent has been irritating me.”

Emily shot her a sharp look. “Why?”

“He was quizzing me about the thing we found in the Cairngorms,” Frieda said. “He thought we should have tried to take it intact.”

“Go to bed,” Emily advised. She didn’t blame Serigala for wanting to ask about the artefact of unknown origin, something that had come far too close to killing Frieda and the rest of her team, but the whole affair wasn’t something Frieda wanted to talk about. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

Frieda shrugged. “Watch yourself,” she said. “There’s something about him that’s a little off.”

Emily watched her go, unsure just what to say. Frieda wouldn’t have had much to do with people like Serigala … no, that wasn’t true. Hoban was in the same line of work, if a lot younger and less experienced. Perhaps Serigala was too academic for Frieda’s peace of mind, or she’d expected someone a little more like her boyfriend. Or she’d picked up on something Emily had missed. It wasn't impossible. Frieda had always been better at reading people than Emily.

She turned slightly, checking the wardlines before looking up at the alien structure. It was lost in the shadows and yet it was there, seemingly more real than the rest of the world. She could feel it tugging at her, inviting her to unravel its mysteries … she shook her head, all too aware of the dangers. A human who walked in alone might not come out again. Or worse …

“I couldn’t sleep,” Serigala said, looking up from the fire. “How about you?”

“You’ll feel rotten in the morning,” Emily advised, dryly. “I don’t want to have to tie you to the horse.”

“It can’t be helped,” Serigala said. He didn’t make the joke she would have expected from some of her younger compatriots, the suggestion she could ride his horse and he could cling on to her. “I don’t need much sleep. Age does have some advantages.”

“You still need some,” Emily told him. “How do you plan to stay awake forever?”

“I don’t.” Serigala turned, looking towards the ruin. “That’s a Faerie structure, you know.”

Emily eyed his back warily. Another talk? Another discussion about the roots of magic?

“We know little about them,” Serigala said. “They invaded twice, devastated our world, and then vanished as quickly as they came. There’s no rhyme or reason to their movements, no suggestion of any understandable logic … their tactics made no sense, their strategy even less so. They came out of nowhere, as far as we can tell, wielding powers beyond all comprehension. The necromancers are – were – understandable, if difficult to beat. The Faerie were just too alien for us to comprehend.”

He looked back at her. “And they sowed terror, a terror so great it is hard to tell how many of the horror stories are real and how many are nothing more than nonsense, or exaggerated to the point the truth is buried under a mountain of absurdities. Even now, with no one alive who remembers those days, the terror is real. We just don’t understand what really happened and we probably never will.”

Emily frowned, recalling the entity she’d sensed at Heart’s Eye. She’d though it was a Faerie at the time, some creature from the higher realms that had barely been able to manipulate the human world, risking the destruction of everything in a desperate bid for freedom. Reality itself had been breaking down … it was funny, she reflected dourly, how many people appeared to have forgotten the whole affair. It had taken on a nightmarish sheen, a dream so terrible it had shocked her awake … only to fade in the bright morning. Even she had trouble believing what she’d seen. She would be happier considering it all a dream. She certainly had no idea how much of what they’d seen and heard had been real.

“No,” she agreed, finally.

Serigala frowned. “There were creatures hunting the Whitehall Commune,” he mused. “Were they Faerie? Or something else? Something long forgotten in the mists of time?”

Manavores, Emily recalled. The entities had been utterly alien, creatures so different it was hard to get a clear idea of their appearance, let alone anything else. They’d been multidimensional entities, slipping through – perhaps above or around – human defences, as casually as a three-dimensional creature might crush a two-dimensional stick figure. And we saw those at Heart’s Eye too.

“I don’t know, she said, finally. There were things she didn’t want to talk about, not now and not ever. Serigala knew more than he should already. “We may never know.”

“We need to know,” Serigala said. “All the old tales, they speak of a world governed by a force humans couldn’t understand, let alone control. Magic … was a living thing, a force within the world that … that was utterly unpredictable, shifting everything seemingly at random. The first magicians didn’t control magic as much as they were controlled by magic, and it wasn’t until Lord Whitehall that magic finally came under some degree of control. We’ve spent nearly a thousand years learning more and more, after that, but there’s a great many questions remaining to be answered. What happened to bring magic to this world and why?”

Emily had no answer. She leaned forward instead. “Why do you want to know?”

“I’ve always wanted to know how things work,” Serigala said. “Haven’t you?”

Emily hesitated. Magic was wonderful, would always be wondrous, and yet … she felt a twinge of doubt about the wisdom of studying, analysing and cataloguing magic, for fear of breaking something rare and valuable and turning it into just another commodity. There would be no mysteries left, once the human race understood everything … she wondered, uneasily, if the end result of Heart’s Eye would to eradicate the wonder once and for all. Random flashes of chaos would be replaced by cold calculation and … would it be good or bad? Perhaps both. It would certainly be different.

“Our ancestors were at the mercy of forces they couldn’t understand,” Serigala said, quietly. The quiet passion in his voice surprised her. “But what if we could understand those forces, harness them? The world would be changed once again.”

“For good and for bad,” Emily mused. She didn’t want to continue the discussion. “Get some rest, Professor. We still have a long way to go.”

Serigala cocked his head. “You don’t want to know what’ll happen once we understand everything?”

“I doubt we ever can,” Emily said. Heart’s Eye had made some breakthroughs, mundane as well as magical, but the more they advanced the harder it was for someone to understand everything. A specialist in one subject would be a complete naïf in another. And he probably wouldn’t know it, not until it was too late. “Go to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Of course, Lady Emily.” Serigala stood and bowed. “Be seeing you.”

He headed back to his tent. Emily watched him go, sighing inwardly. She understood his curiosity, even shared it, but there was no way to know where his questions would lead. She could argue it would end well and that it would end very badly indeed … she shook her head, dismissing the thought. There was no way they’d settle the matter in a hurry. It would be decades, perhaps centuries, before the last secret of magic was cracked. She wouldn’t live to see it.

And my child, if I have one, may not see it too, she mused. She wanted a large family – and, at the same time, she didn’t. My grandchildren might be the lucky ones.

But she knew, as she paced the edge of the wardlines, that it might not be very lucky at all.

 

Chapter Twenty-Five

They had travelled for so long, losing all track of time, that it was a surprise when they finally entered the mountain range and peered down on their destination.

Emily shivered, nearly falling off the horse as the lost city came into view. It was more real than the surrounding world, just like the alien structure, and it poisoned the landscape like a needle in flesh. The surrounding mountains created the impression of the city being both huge and yet oddly confined, as if it were bigger on the inside. It reminded her of the White City, also confined by a ring of mountains, but it was far more alien. She dismounted rapidly as she peered down towards the city, a thought nagging in her mind. It was easily the eeriest place she’d ever visited.

“Incredible,” Caleb breathed. “What the hell happened here?”

Emily had no answer. The outer buildings looked normal, almost disconcertingly human, but the inner layers were increasingly alien until they became something out of nightmares. Small homes blurred into towering ziggurats and structures that seemed incredibly large and yet complex; the castle at the centre of the city had become a towering plant-like structure that reached up into infinity. A greenish glow pervaded the entire city, an eerie light that seemed to come out of nowhere and cast alien shadows over the realm. It looked as if one city was somehow sharing space with another, half the buildings so translucent it was hard to believe they were anything other than illusions. She had a sudden impression of a town trapped beneath the waves, water and sand washing against its foundations, fish swimming through long-abandoned homes and creatures rarely seen by human eyes hiding in rotting furniture and poking their way under rotting floorboards. The streets seemed to run in directions her mind refused to follow, yet … a stab of pain shot through her mind as she tried to focus. It was difficult to comprehend what she was seeing. The two cities were blurred together, transposed so completely that someone could walk from one to the other if they followed the right path.

“I don’t know,” Cat said. He sounded distant, as if he’d finally found something nasty enough to make him think twice about risking life and limb. “But …”

“We do know the Hierarchy is involved,” Caleb said. “Look.”

Emily followed his gaze. The city was surrounded by a low stone wall, the gatehouse protected by a pair of iron giants. They were making no attempt to hide, merely resting against the stone and waiting for something – anything – to happen. She wondered if it was a trap, if the Hierarchy had been following them, but … she shook her head. They had to scope out as much as they could before they tried to get closer, for fear of what they might find. The whole city wasn’t just alien. It was wrong.

“Frieda, Penny, keep an eye on our surroundings,” Emily ordered. “The rest of you, study the city. Look for clues to what they’re really doing, anything we can use … weak points in their defences. Anything.”

She leaned forward, a chill running down her back as she realised what was missing. Cities weren’t quiet, even in a pre-industrial setting. This city was terrifyingly silent, no hum of chatter or people moving … it felt like a necropolis, a city of the dead. The greenish haze made it harder to see into the city, the mist draped along the roads like smoke, but … she eyed the iron giants warily. Were they linked to unseen minds hidden somewhere within the city? Or were they nothing more than decoys, to distract her from the real threat? It was impossible to be sure.

Her eyes narrowed as she risked opening her mind, just a little. The city was a glowing presence in her mind, the magic so concentrated she felt as if someone had shouted in her ear. There was just too much haze for her senses to be remotely reliable … hell, she wasn’t sure she could trust her eyes and ears, let alone anything more supernatural. The streets were a blur, as if everyone within was moving at superhuman speed … she wondered, suddenly, if time had been sped up within the city. It wasn’t impossible … in theory. She tossed the idea around and around in her mind, considering the possibilities, then dismissed it. The risks were too great for her to try unless she was desperate …

And there was something inside the city. Something familiar.

She glanced at Caleb, kneeling beside her. “Was there a nexus point on the map?”

“Not here,” Caleb said. “The closest is either Kuching or several hundred miles to the south.”

Emily rubbed her forehead. She could feel something within the city, something that had to be a nexus point. Had a point been missed, for all those years? Or tapped so long ago that it had fallen out of living memory? She found it difficult to believe. But then, the Hierarchy had been around for years. Centuries, in truth. If it had claimed a nexus point so long ago …

“It makes no sense,” she mused. “Why didn’t the necromancers find it?”

“The Hierarchy could have hidden it,” Cat pointed out. “Or … it could have been snuffed out long ago, only to be reignited with the rest of them.”

Emily wasn’t so sure. The necromancers had been desperate for life as well as magic. They would have left no stone unturned looking for it. If the Hierarchy had been able to hold them off, or fight them, why not sell the secret to the Allied Lands? Why wait for Emily to be the one to devise a necromancer-killer? And if the nexus point had been reignited, why hadn’t it been discovered immediately. Why had it been left off the maps?

“I don’t know,” she said. “If it was unknown before the war …”

“The necromancers were largely clustered around the border,” Cat said. “They might not have looked this far south.”

“Maybe.” Emily knew he had a point. The necromancers had rarely worried about the lands they’d left dead, drained or both. There was no point in hunting for victims where none were likely to be found. She just didn’t believe it. “There’s just no reason it should have been left alone so long.”

“They probably killed everyone who came looking,” Cat said. “There was never any organisation to the nexus point rush.”

“Yeah.” Emily frowned. It still didn’t make sense. “I guess we’ll have to see what turns up.”

She leaned forward, trying to peer into the haze. The city looked older, almost ancient. The sense of timeless decay pervaded the air, a mocking reminder their time was running out. Emily swept her eyes along the walls, wondering at the low design. Perhaps the original builders had thought they could keep people from crossing the mountains. Or perhaps … they’d relied on magic to defend themselves. The White City had done the same, before the nexus point had been snuffed and then reignited.

Caleb caught her eye. “We could scramble over the wall.”

“It’s probably a great deal higher in the real world,” Cat pointed out. “I can’t tell just how tall it actually is.”

Emily nodded, sourly. Her vision kept jumping, as if she was staring at a display screen that kept changing randomly. The city was small … no, it was huge. One moment, it looked as if it would only take a few moments to walk down from the mountains to the walls; the next, it appeared as though it would take years to cross a relatively short distance. The buildings kept moving, every time she blinked. A small house became an apartment block and then a mansion and then yet another towering ziggurat. And it all seemed to rotate around the central tower.

Her eyes lingered on the alien structure, her mind wondering if it was a piece of organic magitech. Not impossible, perhaps, and yet … there were no visible eyes, as far as she could tell, but the sense of something looking back at her, biding its time before striking out at them, was almost overwhelming. She recalled Whitehall suddenly, remembering the days the pocket dimension had collapsed, trapping the entire school. Was she looking at something along the same lines, a pocket dimension that wasn’t confined within a single structure? Or was she barking up the wrong tree?

Cat nudged her. She jumped.

“Sorry.” Cat didn’t sound very sorry. “Do you want to set up the portal and bring in the troops?”

Emily shook her head. “We need to know more first,” she said. The city was eerily still – even the green haze seemed unmoving – but she couldn’t help thinking they were running out of time. “Can you find a suitable campsite? Somewhere we can hide in the mountains, at least for a few days.”

“If not, we’ll have to get the horses out of here,” Cat said. “They’re going to be too noticeable.”

Emily nodded, then turned her attention back to the city. Cat would find a suitable campsite, near enough to the city to keep an eye on it without being close enough to risk discovery. Probably. The hills and mountains surrounding Whitehall weren’t patrolled, not formally, but there were so many students coming and going that it was unlikely any spies could remain undiscovered for more than a few days. She didn’t think there was anyone in the city roaming the hills, but … who knew? If she’d lived in such a place, she would have gone exploring as often as possible.

If the green light didn’t drive me insane first, she thought. The iron giants hadn’t moved once. What is this place?

“They’ve got great power within the structure,” she said, trying to reach out with her senses again. All she got was a headache, bad enough to make her pull back in a hurry. “What are they trying to do?”

Caleb shook his head. “What can they do with all that power?”

“Maintain a giant pocket dimension,” Emily said. She shook her head. “That can’t have been what they wanted all along, can it?”

The thought mocked her. It just made no sense. Why collect so much power to establish something that would be gone, the moment the power ran out? They would be better off not using a pocket dimension. The word hung in her mind, mocking her. Were they trying to get into other dimensions? It might explain why one city appeared to be transposed on top of the other. She certainly knew it to be possible … did they? How many rumours had leaked out of Heart’s Eye? She’d met an evil alternate version of herself … how many knew about the whole affair? There had been a Hierarchist spy within the university … he could have figured out the truth. Or had they come up with the idea themselves?

Or was she barking up the wrong tree? Again?

“They might have wanted to reignite a nexus point,” Caleb offered. “Their nexus point might not have lit up with the rest of them.”

“They still drained far more power than they needed,” Emily said. She was fairly sure she’d reignited all the nexus points. The oath wouldn’t have been completed otherwise. “It just makes no sense.”

“I can’t imagine anything that needs that much power,” Caleb said. “But it seems the Hierarchy can.”

Emily nodded, curtly. She had an imagination, and she’d spent sixteen years reading countless books both fiction and non-fiction, but she knew her limits. Half the concepts she’d borrowed from fiction required magic that simply didn’t exist, half the ideas she’d stolen from non-fiction demanded technological advances that had yet to take shape and form. The Hierarchy might have an odd little advantage, she reflected sourly, in that they were unburdened by both scruples and concepts that were simply impractical. Just because she couldn’t imagine how they intended to store such power, let alone make use of it, didn’t mean they couldn’t come up with an idea. They might have something very clever up their sleeves.

“We have to get closer,” she said, turning away. “But that isn’t going to be easy.”

Thunder rumbled, high overhead. She thought she saw streaks of oddly-coloured lightning flashing around the tower, bolts of energy crashing into the structure and flowing down into the green haze. The lightning was magic … was the structure designed to drain magic from the local area and channel it into the wards? Was that what they were doing? She turned the idea over and over in her mind. They might be intent on creating their own country, founding a new utopia instead of changing a pre-existing settlement to suit themselves. But they’d tried it in Celeste and it hadn’t worked out for them …

They could have made the regime hold if they’d wished, Emily thought. Boswell had been running his own operation, instead of backing Resolute to the hilt. The regime had been intended as little more than a glorified diversion. She hoped that had stunned and hurt Resolute when he’d found out. Instead, they were quite happy to let it die once they’d completed their own plan.

“We’d better get under cover,” Cat said. The lightning was growing stronger, twisting bolts of raw energy flaring out of the clouds and into the tower. “Quickly.”

Emily let him lead her to where Frieda was waiting, ready to take them to the campsite, a hidden hollow that should be impossible to find as long as someone wasn’t actually looking for it. She hoped to hell the enemy hadn’t spent years exploring the mountains. The secret might be no secret at all, like the hiding places near Whitehall known only to a few … hundred … students. She smiled, rather tiredly. There was no fire now, just cold ration bars and bark tea heated by magic. Her head cleared the moment there was some rock between her and the city. But she could still feel it at the back of her mind, like the sun on a cloudy day.

“Any luck?” Cat shot her an understanding look. Emily could feel Caleb bristling beside her. “You think you know what they’re doing?”

“I can’t think of anything that makes sense,” Emily admitted. She took the tea from Penny and nodded her thanks, sipping it gently. “Half the ideas don’t need so much power, the other half don’t make any real sense. If they’re creating a pocket dimension … why is it like that?”

Serigala leaned forward. “They may be having problems controlling the power they’ve unleashed,” he said. “Or they may be up to something like contacting the Faerie.”

Emily winced as more thunder rumbled overhead. The thought had honestly never occurred to her. If the Hierarchy genuinely wanted to discover the secrets behind Faerie magic, making contact with them would work … or would it? The terror the Faerie had left in their wake suggested otherwise. Letting them back into the human realm was asking for trouble … just like dealing with demons. Ice prickled down her spine. She knew a handful of ancient tomes had been stolen and copied, the copies distributed so widely no one was sure they’d tracked down and recovered them all. She hadn’t even dared ask for help, not from anyone outside her closest friends. The risk was just too great. And if they’d fallen into the Hierarchy’s hands …

“Insane,” Caleb said. “Don’t they know what happened during Faerie Wars?”

“There’s no shortage of people stupid enough to think they can do something insane and survive,” Cat pointed out, sarcastically. Lightning flashed overhead. “Half the necromancers got started because some idiot thought he could handle the power and discovered, too late, that he was wrong. Disastrously wrong.”

Emily couldn’t disagree. She could name hundreds of people who’d put themselves and dozens of others at great risk, convinced they could handle it and only realising too late that they’d been wrong. The fools who’d let Hitler claw his way to power, the ones who thought they could bargain with Stalin or Mao or any number of others who’d pressed their advantage ruthlessly, taking full advantage of the useful idiots who refused to realise what they were dealing with. You didn’t need to make a deal with a literal devil to really mess up your life – and when there was a supernatural force involved, it was easy to make a deal that could only end badly. Emily had seen the results of demonic bargains. They, at least, had rules. The Faerie were supposed to have none.

Depending on which of the tales are actually true, Emily mused. A person too used to the logic of Earth would be messed up by the logic of the Nameless World. If they couldn’t accept magic before it was too late, they wouldn’t survive. They contradict each other so much they cannot possibly all be true.

Her eyes narrowed. Or can they?

She looked up. “As soon as the storm is over, we’ll get closer to the city,” she said. “Cat, I want you and Penny to remain behind to assemble the portal. Don’t activate it, but … we’re going to need it. We’re going to have to find a way to operate within the city too.”

“Odd they don’t try to separate the dimensions,” Caleb said. “Why leave them so … transparent?”

Emily had no idea. She could understand the importance of making life difficult for one’s enemies, but why for one’s friends? Any Hierarchist who visited would be as hampered as the Hierarchy’s enemies. Unless it looked different on the inside … she didn’t know. They might have moved into a Faerie structure, rather than something they’d built from scratch. An alien entity might not find the surroundings so unpleasant. They might even consider them homely.

“Good question,” she said, finally. “We’ll ask them, when we get a chance.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Six

Up close, the alien city was very … alien.

Emily gritted her teeth, feeling as though she as being deafened even though the city was as eerily silent as ever. The silence was an oppressive presence, pressing down on her mind as she crept out of the mountains, towards the walls. It felt as if something was waiting to happen, something bad. She glanced back at Caleb, seeing the sweat on his brow as they neared the low walls, then turned to study the city. It was hard to escape the impression they were walking to their doom. The city felt more real than the surrounding world.

“No movement,” Caleb whispered. The iron giants were well out of sight, but … there should have been guards. Patrols. Was the city so confident in its wards that it wasn’t bothering to patrol the surrounding area, or were there other defences on the far side of the walls? “We appear to be alone.”

Emily frowned. The city was a many-layered beast. She could feel several different realities transposed on each other, multiple dimensions co-existing in a manner that should have been impossible without a nexus point and a clearly-delimitated border between the pocket dimension and the real world. She felt as though she were staring into the guts of Whitehall, as if the internal dimensions had been laid bare to her gaze, as if she was staring at something she could barely comprehend let alone control. The first nuclear technicians must have felt the same way when they were experimenting with nuclear reactors, but … at least they’d set up the reactors themselves. Emily hadn’t, not here. It was someone else’s experiment. She couldn’t even begin to guess at its purpose.

City walls were normally high, high enough to require ladders to climb. This city’s walls were just tall enough to keep her from peering over the edge, even if she stood on tip-toe. It reminded her of something, something she’d seen a long time ago … ice prickled down her spine as she realised it was just like the walls surrounding Whitehall, the low wall that was more of a boundary line than a realistic defence. She could feel magic humming through the stone, designed more to hold the wall together than keep intruders out of the city … she wondered, numbly, if there was a tripwire on the far side, ready to catch anyone who tried to hop over the walls. The magic was so strong and yet so vague it was hard to pick out anything specific from the haze. There could be any number of defences woven into the charms …

“I can’t see any surprises,” Caleb said, grimly. “There’s just too much interference.”

Emily nodded. Caleb was a better charmsmaster than her and if he couldn’t see anything … she scowled as she inspected the haze, so much magic woven into the walls that the spells would likely be degrading even if they weren’t interfering with each other. It was an impressive display of raw power and yet it was grossly inefficient, as if the spellcaster had more power than common sense. Void had always poured scorn on sorcerers who created elaborate booby traps to deter, transfigure or simply kill intruders, but they were far more capable than whoever had cast the defences in front of her. If it wasn’t a trap, what was it?

And if it is a trap, she told herself grimly, we may have no choice but to spring it.

She glanced at Caleb, glad Frieda and Cat were watching from a safe distance. They’d see what happened even if they were too far away to help, they’d summon assistance or learn from their experience and then … she ground her teeth in silent frustration. A couple of years ago, they would have been able to call on advice and support from right across the Allied Lands. They could have recruited mediators and skilled magicians and … she shook her head numbly. The Hierarchy had timed it well. Void was gone. Hasdrubal was gone. Lady Barb was gone … too many movers and shakers, from powerful magicians to ruling monarchs, were gone. The White Council had been crippled. They were alone …

“Give me a boost,” she said. Caleb would be under the parapet if something tried to take off her head. Hopefully, he’d be able to drop her back down or cover her if the shit hit the fan. “I’ll take a peek.”

Caleb nodded, lifting her up so she could see over the wall. The sudden burst of cacophony was so loud she nearly staggered and fell, the wave of magic both soundless and yet somehow utterly deafening. She wasn’t just staring into a bright light, she was staring into a sound given physical form … she caught hold of the wall to steady herself before she could stop herself, realising her mistake far too late. Nothing happened, as far as she could tell. No silent alarms. No freeze or change spells. Nothing … she leaned forward, her senses threatening to shut down. The sight was so alien she couldn’t process it. Not immediately.

“Emily?”

“Hold on,” Emily managed. Her eyes and ears were already sore. It felt as if they were going to start bleeding. The haze was burning into her brain … she recalled horror stories from Chernobyl, of men who had looked into the burning heart of the unshielded reactor core … they had survived, if she recalled correctly, but they might have wished they hadn’t. “I …”

She gritted her teeth, forcing herself to concentrate. There were too many things, too many realities, compressed into too small a space. It felt as if she were having a dozen conversations at once, forced to listen to hundreds of people talking about different things and trying to keep track of their words … her head twanged, painfully, as she tried to gather herself. Everything was just so jumbled together it was hard to separate out the different realities. She was trying to do too much at once and … she squinted, shaping her mind as best she could. One reality – her reality – snapped into place. The others hovered overhead … not overhead, not precisely. They were all around her, above her and behind her and below her and … her head spun. Again. It was too much to grasp easily.

“Emily?” Caleb spoke with low urgency. “What can you see?”

“The city exists in multiple dimensions at once,” Emily managed. She was glad he’d come. They’d worked together to unravel the secrets of Old Whitehall. “It’s not easy to isolate a single reality.”

She leaned forward, cursing under her breath. The city felt like a map drawn by a demented toddler, one that paid no heed to logic or reason. Houses shifted every time she looked at them, roads ran in directions her mind refused to follow. She had the eerie sense of being trapped underwater, as if the entire city was flooded with raw magic, and yet – at the same time – she felt like a mayfly skimming across the surface, unaware of the world under the waves or the fish sneaking up from below, ready to catch the mayfly before the poor creature could realise it was under attack from a completely unexpected direction. It felt very much as though she was putting her head in the noose.

“Boost me higher,” she said. It was a risk, but no one had reacted to her touching the wards. Not yet. “I think …”

She scrambled onto the wall and sat there, bracing herself. Nothing happened. She checked and checked again, just to be sure, then leaned forward. The realities were shifting in front of her in a manner she couldn’t quite describe. Caleb held up the chat parchments and Emily pushed them forward, testing the wards carefully, then frowned. There was so much magic in the air that their warning spells had to be completely useless. They had to know it.

Yeah, she thought. So why aren’t they patrolling the grounds?

“I’m coming up,” Caleb said.

“It feels deafening,” Emily said. She put out a hand to help him as he clambered onto the wall and looked into the city. His face blanked so alarmingly she almost panicked before he caught himself, shaking his head to clear his mind. He looked disturbingly pale to her eyes, as if all colour had been flushed out by the city. “Hold on and concentrate.”

She took his hand, holding it gently as he gathered himself. The city was burning into their minds … she had a sudden horrified feeling it was trying to push them backwards, so they’d fall off the wall. It wouldn’t be a long drop, but the ground was hard and the impact might be rough enough to do real damage. Thankfully, Cat and Penny both knew how to heal broken bones and other wounds … if their spells worked properly in the high-magic environment. Emily doubted it. Her protections were gradually eroding, no matter how much effort she put into shoring them up. They would have to design something to protect themselves if they wanted to return to the city.

“Interesting,” Cat managed. His hand was damp with sweat. “Do we go on?”

Emily nodded. “Watch my back.”

She swung her legs over the side of the wall and looked down. The ground was covered with cobblestones, somehow managing to look new and old at the same time. She lowered herself as much as she could before letting go, gritting her teeth in pain as her feet hit the ground. The shock helped to clear her mind as she turned around, the higher realities blurring above her as the lower realms came into view. The city was … shifting, brick and stone giving way to something almost organic. She had the uneasy sense the entire metropolis was bleeding into another world and …

“Shit!”

Caleb looked down. “Emily?”

“Stay still,” Emily ordered, sharply. “We may have a problem.”

There were people in front of her, moving around as if they were taking part in a slow and complicated dance. Some looked real, others looked ghostly … were they walking in and out of the other dimensions, she asked herself, or were they nothing more than reflections thrown up by the waves of reality-bending magic. They were a cross-section of society, she noted numbly; some looked aristocratic, others common-born … she cursed under her breath as she realised the one thing they all had in common. They had metal collars, slave collars, around their necks. They were slaves …

She leaned forward, unsure how the slaves would react if they saw her. Slave collars controlled bodies, making it impossible for a slave to disobey orders, but they didn’t always control minds. The slaves might be programmed to alert their masters if they spotted intruders or they might have just enough freedom to keep their mouths shut, if they weren’t asked any specific questions. If they had standing orders … she sucked in her breath as she studied their movements. What the hell were they doing? She could understand chattel slavery and sex slavery, but … why make the slaves move in elaborate patterns? She’d met kings who delighted in showing off their wealth and power by hiring more servants than they could possibly need, yet … there was no one here who would be impressed by such a display. She certainly wasn’t. If you had to show off your power, it suggested a certain basic insecurity.

“Emily?”

“The streets are full of slaves,” Emily whispered. “I don’t know what they’re doing.”

Her eyes narrowed as more slaves appeared, walking up to walls and touching them lightly before turning away. They all wore collars, but some walked freely and others were chained up in metal bondage … she felt sick as she caught a whiff of magic surrounding one slave, something so dark and dangerous she couldn’t believe anyone would cast it. And yet … she told herself to think logically, to figure out what they were doing first and then … work out how to stop it. She found it impossible. The sight was so horrifying she wanted to lash out and free every last slave.

Caleb scrambled down beside her, chat parchment clutched firmly in one hand. “It’s a ritual,” he breathed. “That’s what they’re doing!”

Emily allowed herself a smile, despite the nightmare in front of them. Caleb was right … it was a ritual. She’d never seen a ritual with more than seven magicians and yet the pattern was unmistakable, now that he’d pointed it out. And yet … she’d never seen a ritual involving slaves. Any sort of coercion, from peer pressure to threats and compulsion spells, was asking for trouble. The casters had to know what they were getting into and do it willingly … the Hierarchy had to know that, right? They couldn’t have gotten as far as they had without an understanding of magic far beyond the norm.

“Yeah.” Emily felt a rush of affection, mingled with relief. She’d been smart to choose him. His insights were good, giving her a chance to work out what was actually going on. The scene in front of them was still horrific, the kind of nightmare a decent mind wouldn’t even consider, but it was no longer horror for the sake of horror. Understanding what was happening was the first step to putting a stop to it. “But what is the ritual for?”

She stroked her chin, unsure what she was seeing. There were a handful of rituals that took days or weeks to cast, but few magicians could make them work. It took too great a toll on their bodies and minds, when they had to fast and concentrate and somehow centre themselves while also working with others. Most rituals lasted an hour at most … this one seemed to have gone on for quite some time. The slaves didn’t look particularly staved … were they being kept alive through magic, she asked herself, or were they stepping out of the ritual long enough to eat and sleep before returning to the giant spell? She’d never thought that possible, but she’d seen too much to believe there was any such thing as a hard and fast rule. Given enough power, you could do anything.

“I don’t know,” Caleb said. “If they’re doing this all over the city …”

Emily grimaced, recalling one of Professor Lombardi’s horror stories. Three magicians had tried to dismantle a charm cast by a fourth, but the spellware had been so large and complex that the three magicians had only seen small – and different – parts of the spell, resulting in disaster when they’d tried to pull it apart. They’d needed to put their heads together to work out what they were actually studying, like the three blind men who’d touched different parts of the elephant and only realised what they were actually touching when they’d compared notes, and yet they hadn’t. Here …

Her eyes lingered on the slaves, performing their ritual dance. She couldn’t tell what the spell was intended to do, or just how much of the spell she was actually seeing. The rows of slaves seemed to go on forever. If they were doing it all over the city … her head twisted as she saw a pair of slaves appear out of nowhere, reality shifting to suggest they’d always been there. Was there a time difference too? She had never heard of a temporal gradient in a pocket dimension, but it was theoretically possible. Her fingers pressed the chat parchment, a flicker of relief shooting through her as she touched Frieda’s mind. No gradient then, not as far as she could tell.

Caleb caught her eye. “Can they see us?”

Emily shrugged. They weren’t really trying to hide. She wasn’t convinced obscurification or invisibility spells would work in the high-magic region, but the slaves didn’t seem to be reacting to their presence. How long had they been slaves? Slave collars did immense damage to their victims, even if they were quickly removed, and it was quite possible the slaves had been slaves long enough to lost their minds completely. The whole idea was nightmarish … it was bad enough when someone was trapped in animal form until they forgot they’d ever been human, but losing all free will was worse. Far worse. The slaves might lack the intelligence to realise they were even there, let alone recall they were supposed to report intruders to their masters. If they were that far gone …

Dear God. Emily felt sick. How long have they been slaves?

She shuddered. The city was a long way south. The necromancers had blocked all access until recently and it was unlikely the necromancers would give much of a damn about the slaves, at least as anything other than sacrificial victims. The Hierarchy could have been collecting slaves for years, perhaps decades … even if they’d only just started, so many people had been displaced by the wars that thousands, tens of thousands, could have gone missing without anyone in authority being any the wiser. How long did someone need to be enslaved before they lost their minds? She didn’t know. She didn’t want to.

“I don’t know,” she said. A strong-willed person could find and exploit loopholes in their enslavement, at least at first. No one could hold out forever, with a slave collar gradually grinding down their free will. “But if someone is watching us …”

“Or them,” Caleb said. His eyes lingered on a young boy who couldn’t have been older than nine. His eyes were dead, even as his body moved in a ritual dance. “They could be under supervision.”

Emily nodded. “Keep your eyes peeled,” she said, touching the chat parchment to update Cat and Frieda. They would still be watching from a safe distance. “The last thing we want is to be caught now.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Seven

I feel as though I’m walking through a Borg Cube …

Emily shivered at the thought, as they inched further into the city. The slaves ignored them, dead eyes flickering over the intruders and onwards without either sounding the alarm or trying to stop them. Men, women and children, some in fancy outfits and others in tattered rags, forced to become part of something much greater than themselves … she gritted her teeth, all too aware of the sheer scale of the horror slowly unravelling in front of her. The necromancers would have been kinder, for all that they would have sacrificed countless people for the sake of maintaining their power and lives. The Hierarchy had trapped its victims in a nightmare that would never end.

She inched past a small house and shuddered, again, at how the different realities seemed to intermingle into a single nightmarish whole. The building looked normal, at first, but it appeared to be slowly being transformed into something utterly inhuman, like a sandcastle being eroded by the waves before it finally collapsed into nothingness. She had to bite her lip to centre herself as her awareness was dragged forward, trying to follow the building in directions the human mind couldn’t follow. The shadows moved when she wasn’t looking, things twitching at the corner of her eye or scratching at the far side of reality itself … she gritted her teeth painfully as she recalled the moment she'd fallen back in time. There had been things out there too, things so utterly inhuman that she’d been unable to get more than a hint of their existence. She didn’t want to look too closely. She hated to admit it, but the truth was that she was afraid of what she might see.

Caleb nudged her. Emily jumped, then followed his gaze. A set of orcs were marching down the road, carrying crates into the distance. They were wearing slave collars too … were they being drained, made to take part in the ritual, or … or what? She didn’t think orcs could be used as living batteries for necromancers, or else the necromancers would have been doing it, but there was no way to be sure. Humans might offer more power or less resistance … no, once the orcs were convinced their master was superior, they wouldn’t question orders or disobey even if they were told to cut their own throats. No, whatever they were doing, it involved a great deal of hard manual labour, even though orcs weren’t smart enough to do anything complex without direct supervision. Her earlier thoughts returned to haunt her. It was just like a Borg Cube. The slaves were following orders channelled from above.

She leaned forward, eyes following the orcs as they marched towards the tower … towards the source of raw power. It was hard to watch them. She felt as if someone was shining a bright light into her eyes, and screaming in her ear, even through the city was chillingly silent. The street was both long and short at the same time, a distance she could cross in a moment uneasily co-existing with a distance that would take years to walk. The overlapping dimensions made it impossible to see clearly. She had a sudden disconcerting impression of things walking up a spiral staircase to infinity, in directions her mind refused to comprehend. She had a two-dimensional creature unable to realise there might be an entire universe above her …

“We need to get closer,” Caleb muttered. “Somehow.”

Emily nodded, although she wasn’t sure how. The dimensions were shifting constantly and she had the unnerving sense they were being watched, as if something was biding its time before striking. They had been attacked on the journey … she didn’t know if the attackers were working for the Hierarchy or if they were just attacking everyone who entered their territory. If the former … she closed her eyes, trying to reach out with her mind. The result was nothing more than a headache. She couldn’t understand how the slaves coped. Perhaps they had already lost their minds. It would explain why they weren’t trying to resist.

“We need to take a slave,” she said. “Get a good look at their collars.”

Ice pickled down her spine. The Borg ignored intruders until they considered the intruders as threat. Would the slaves do the same? If she took someone out of the ritual … she cursed under her breath as they picked their way through the streets, looking for a slave who seemed to be alone. There weren’t many. The majority worked in groups, their faces blank as they moved in eerie patterns. Emily braced herself as she spotted a young woman, staggering as she made her way further into the city. She looked as if she’d been pushed to the limits and beyond, the collar refusing to let her stop … it was sickening. Emily glanced at Caleb and hurried forward. The slave ignored them. Her eyes were dead and cold.

“Let me,” Caleb said. “You stop me if I get into trouble.”

Emily opened her mouth to argue. Cold logic agreed with him. Raw emotion said she should take the risk. Slave spells were nasty, prone to trying to catch anyone who attempted to release them … or kill their victim if there seemed a reasonable chance they might be liberated. If Caleb was affected … she gritted her teeth, feeling the darker magics boiling around Caleb’s fingertips as he pressed them against the collar. Her stomach churned, even though she wasn’t the one in direct contact. It felt as if they were touching something disgusting beyond words. Emily knew she had a strong stomach – she’d dissected creatures for alchemy, when there’d been no other choice – but there were limits. She told herself, sharply, not to be silly. And keep her eyes open. If the spell swept into Caleb’s brain …

The slave staggered, the collar coming free. Caleb stunned her, then caught the collar and held it in one hand. Emily eyed him warily, bracing herself. A slave spell might force Caleb to walk to the tower to report to his new masters, or lash out at her, or … she breathed a sigh of relief as Caleb dropped the collar into his pocket, rather than trying to put it on. She would have had no choice but to stun him herself, for his safety and hers … Caleb picked up the slave, checked her vitals, then threw her over his shoulder. There were no alarms going off, as far as they could tell, but there was no way to be sure.

They must be wearing out their slaves, Emily thought, as they hurried back towards the low wall and safety. They’re pushing them so hard …

She shuddered, again, as the wall was suddenly in front of them. The human body had its limits – and no compulsion spell ever designed could make someone exceed those limits, certainly not for very long. Humans needed food and drink and rest … it was quite possible the Hierarchy had lost hundreds, perhaps thousands, of slaves, simply by working them to death. If that was true, and she could see weakening people amongst the unwilling workers, they’d be used to losing slaves. But … she gritted her teeth, silently promising the slaves she’d be back for them. It was a promise she hoped she’d be able to keep.

Reality seemed to twist around them as they crossed the wall, the city apparently torn between letting them go and trying to keep them inside. She had the unnerving sensation of being caught in quicksand, as if they were being pulled back into the nightmare, before it snapped and let them go … she couldn’t tell if she was imagining it or not as they hurried across the ground outside and up into the mountains. Her back prickled, as if someone was taking aim at her. She glanced back and saw nothing but the ever-shifting city and the tower rising up into infinity. The sense of being watched grew stronger. The world around her seemed a very fragile place indeed.

Frieda stepped out of her hiding place as they neared the campsite. “What did you … who’s she?”

“A slave,” Emily said, shortly. The poor girl couldn’t have been older than sixteen, barely old enough to come into her magic. If she had magic … her clothes might have been middle-class once, expensive enough to set her apart from the lower classes without breaking any sumptuary laws, but now they were tattered and torn, perhaps passed down from wearer to wearer until they were beyond further repair. “We need to do what we can to help her.”

Cat looked up as they stumbled into the campsite. “Who is she?”

“A slave,” Emily repeated. She waited for Caleb to lay the girl down by the fire, on a blanket, then muttered a pair of limited healing spells. The girl was dangerously malnourished, but otherwise unharmed. Physically, at least. God alone knew how long she’d been a slave. If it had been more than a few days or weeks, the poor girl would find it hard to recover even if the collar had been removed. “Fetch some soup. I think she’ll need it.”

“She must have seen the city,” Serigala commented. “What did she tell you?”

Emily swallowed a nasty response. “Nothing,” she said, finally. The girl hadn’t been in any state to notice details, even if she had the specialised knowledge to understand what she was seeing. Emily understood the professor’s curiosity and even shared it, but there was no point in asking the slave for anything until she’d recovered from her ordeal. “But we will ask her when she wakes …”

Cat leaned forward. “What did you see?”

“The city is bigger on the inside,” Emily said. She couldn’t imagine the sort of spellware needed to maintain such a structure. It made Whitehall look like a child’s toy. “What we see” – she jabbed a finger towards the city, its presence burning in her mind even though there was a rocky wall between them – “is just the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the city is …”

She hesitated, trying to put it into words. “Imagine a handful of different songs, being sung at the same time, in the same place,” she said. “They blur together into a racket, but if you sing one song you join one set of singers and if you sing another … you shift to another group.”

Cat shook his head. “How is that even possible?”

Emily shook her head. The description was practically useless … worse than useless. How did you explain colour to a man born blind? How did you isolate the different songs, if everyone was singing a different tune, and separate them into a multitude? She had come up with the analogy herself and yet it was very far from perfect, perhaps even limiting in ways she hadn’t understood when she’d spoken the words. It was …

“Perhaps they’re casting a bunch of spells together,” Caleb said, coming to her rescue. “They d seem to be performing a ritual of some kind.”

“And using separate dimensions would keep the spells from interfering with each other,” Emily added. There was so much magic in the city that the spellcasters might become victims of their own success, accidentally cancelling each other out. She didn’t think it would be deliberate, unless the Hierarchy was having its own internal conflicts, but it hardly mattered. “They cast the spells and then combine them into one.”

Penny looked up, from where she was tending to the slave. “But to what end?”

Emily glanced at Caleb, then shook her head. She couldn’t think of anything that required so much magic and spellware, let alone the use of multiple pocket dimensions … no, the Hierarchy’s network of overlapping dimensions was far more complex than her battery, or Whitehall, or anything she’d created herself. It was a humbling experience and yet … something nagged at her mind, something she’d seen … but where? She closed her eyes for a long moment, trying to bring the memory into focus, yet it refused to surface. She’d seen so much magic over the years. What was it?

The former slave jerked, her entire body convulsing. Emily cursed under her breath, motioning for Caleb and Cat to stay back as Penny held the girl gently. The last thing she needed to see were two young men, not in her state … Emily didn’t think the girl had been used as a sex slave but there was no way to be sure. The girl shook violently, retching helplessly. Her eyes were dark and yet, slowly coming into focus. Emily breathed a sigh of relief. The girl wasn’t completely broken by her enslavement. Better that than the alternative.

“I …”

“Relax,” Penny said, quietly. “You’re safe now.”

The girl stared at them, her eyes darting from Penny to Emily and back again. “I … I … who …?”

“My name is Penny,” Penny said. “What’s yours?”

“Beth,” the girl managed. Her hands twitched oddly, as if she were a puppet whose strings had been cut. “I … I …”

She retched, again. Emily shuddered. Beth might not have been physically raped, but she had been raped. Her body had been turned into a component in a much larger machine, her free will stolen from her, her mind so badly damaged that she might continue to obey orders even though the collar was gone. Saying the wrong thing to her could cause all sorts of problems, perhaps even an outright mental breakdown. She made a mental note to warn the others to be careful what they said to her. Beth’s mind had been twisted beyond easy repair. She might never recover at all.

No therapists here, Emily thought, numbly. Something else she’d have to introduce, although she didn’t have the slightest idea where to begin. There’s no one who can help her through the ordeal and put her on a path to recovery.

She studied Beth thoughtfully, trying to place her origins. It wasn’t easy. Her face was pale and wan, her hair a light auburn … Emily would have thought she was mixed, if she’d seen her on Earth, but it was largely meaningless on the Nameless World. No one gave a damn about skin colour when they were breeding for magical power and skill. Her tattered outfit revealed that she’d lost too much weight, her bones pressing against her skin.

“I … where am I?” Beth’s question echoed in the air. “Who are you?”

“Penny,” Penny repeated. “What’s the last thing you remember?”

Beth hesitated, clearly trying to think. “I … I was back home. Dad had ordered me to pack. I … I did. And then they took us and …”

“They?” Penny leaned forward. “Where were you?”

“Celeste,” Beth said. “Dad didn’t want to stick around. The council wanted him to turn Mum into a toad and marry someone else and …”

Emily blinked. “What?”

“Mum doesn’t have magic,” Beth said. There was something plaintive in her voice, the cry of a child who had been forced to grow up too quickly. “Dad did all the crafting, Mum did all the selling … they had three kids, I’m the oldest. I was going to Whitehall and then …”

She retched. “What happened to us?”

Emily shook her head. She had no answer. The regime was insane. If Beth had been powerful enough to be accepted into Whitehall, there was no reason to try to break up her parents or … or anything. Beth might have won a scholarship too … Emily felt sick as the true scale of the horror dawned on her. There were thousands of people, magical and mundane, who’d gone missing in the chaos sweeping over Celeste, to say nothing of the rest of the Allied Lands. How many others had wound up in the alien city, forced to take part in a hellish ritual? And why …

The regime wanted to breed more magicians, she mused. They could have kept Beth as a brood mare – the thought made her feel sick, again – and bred her with powerful male magicians. But the Hierarchy brought her here instead. Why?

Penny fed Beth some soup, asking questions all the time. Beth’s memories were a jumbled nightmare. She didn’t remember much after being taken into custody … Emily tried to compare what she was saying to what she’d learnt back in Celeste and drew a blank. The regime and the Hierarchy had clearly been working at cross-purposes … her lips twitched, imagining Boswell quietly funnelling the very people the regime wanted to keep out of the city, even though she knew it wasn’t remotely funny. Either way, Beth would have faced a fate worse than death. The poor bastards in the city were still facing it.

“We need to get to the tower, to see what it really is,” Serigala said. Emily had almost forgotten he was there. “If they really are trying to summon the Faerie …”

“If,” Emily said. It made sense, she supposed, but … she didn’t buy it. The Hierarchy didn’t need anything from the Faerie. Not as far as she could tell, at any rate. If they were trying to repeat the experiments that had nearly destroyed Heart’s Eye … that had snuffed out the nexus point … they were going about it in a way that made no sense. “But you’re right. We have to get a great deal closer.”

And hope we can break in and out before it is too late, she added, mentally. They might have been allowed to enter the city without opposition, but the tower was the nerve centre of the enemy operation. It would be guarded. Getting in and out would be tricky. We’re running out of time.

 

Chapter Twenty-Eight

“Are you sure about this?”

No, Emily thought. Caleb’s question was a mocking reminder she didn’t quite know what she was doing. The fact she knew he didn’t intend to mock her didn’t help. If we accidentally trigger alarms within the city, we’re not going to be able to get out before it is too late.

“I don’t see any choice,” she said, finally. They could bring in the army now, but there was so much power flowing through and around the city that the defenders would have no trouble obliterating the troops and declaring victory … if she didn’t find a way to neutralise the wards first. She had the uneasy sense they were about to storm a multidimensional skyscraper and fight their way up the floors one by one, hopelessly vulnerable to anyone pouring magic or fire on them from above. “If you keep the chat parchments at the ready, you should be able to hack the wards for me.”

“I hope so,” Caleb said, doubtfully. He disliked the idea of being left behind when Emily went into danger, even though it was the smart place to be. Not that the campsite was that safe … if the enemy spotted them, there’d be no time to run before all hell broke loose. “You watch yourself out there.”

Emily nodded, bracing herself. Beth hadn’t been able to tell them much of anything, odd when most slave spells didn’t care if the victim knew what was happening or not. It was rare for anyone to hold out long enough to break free, with the spells ruthlessly grinding down their resistance, and Beth had been a slave for at least a month, perhaps longer. She had no sense of time either. Emily had hoped she’d be able to tell them what the Hierarchy was doing, but she didn’t even know what they’d made her do. There was no way to avoid the fact they had to walk to the tower and see for themselves.

She glanced at Frieda. “If we don’t come back in five hours, contact Alassa and let her know what’s happening,” she said. “Don’t try anything stupid.”

“I should come with you,” Frieda said. Her eyes lingered on Serigala for a long moment. The professor had argued long and loud that he should accompany them, even though Emily feared what would happen if he were distracted in the middle of the cursed city. “Cat can hold down the fort here …”

Emily shook her head, firmly. “You need to stay behind,” she said. Cat had far more training and experience than Frieda. “I need you to keep an eye on everyone else.”

Mainly the professor, she thought. Penny and Caleb could take care of themselves. Beth was in no state to do anything. Serigala …? He’d already wandered off once and it had nearly gotten them all killed. Emily could understand his fascination with the ancient ruins – she shared it – but the city was too dangerous to take lightly. She felt like a caveman who had stepped through a portal into New York, overwhelmed by the lights and sounds and utterly unaware of the dangers a native would know to avoid. If he does something stupid here …

“I’ll be coming after you, if you don’t come back,” Frieda said. “We’ll all be coming.”

“Inform Alassa first,” Emily said. She glanced at Cat. “Ready?”

Cat nodded, then looked at Penny. “Don’t do anything stupid while we’re gone.”

Penny made a rude gesture. “As if I would.”

Emily hid her amusement as she shared a glance with Caleb, then led the way out of the hiding place and down towards the city. It glowed in her mind, a beacon of tainted magic that seemed to ebb and flow in a pattern that was both apparently random and yet she was sure was entirely predictable. She’d spent an hour jotting down everything they’d seen, from the waves of raw magic to the energy flows, in hopes of jogging her memory, but nothing had come to light. She felt as if she were on the verge of a breakthrough, yet … it refused to solidify in her mind. It was maddening. She’d seen something like it before, but where?

“The iron giants haven’t moved,” Cat commented. “You’d think they’d be running regular patrols.”

“They are a long way from civilisation,” Emily pointed out, although she understood his concern. A magician who relied completely on his wards to sense danger, keep out intruders and alert their creators if they were breached was asking for trouble, when his wards were hacked and subverted by a more powerful or capable opponent. Regularly patrolling the outskirts of the eerie city might make the difference between success and failure. “And they are surrounded by raw magic.”

“Yeah,” Cat said. “Do you think it oozes into the minds of any intruders?”

Emily gave him a sharp look. The possibility had never occurred to her … but it should. There was no inherent reason one couldn’t design a defensive ward to subtly compel, even enslave, someone who walked into the city. She could just imagine the trick, a cunning spell woven into the network that would inch its way into a mind, slowly overcoming all resistance and eventually pulling them into slavery. They could be compelled to walk to the heart of the city and surrender themselves … she shuddered, helplessly. It was hard to be sure they hadn’t been influenced by such a spell, something so subtle it was difficult to be sure it even existed. She might insist she hadn’t, of course, but how could her word be trusted? She wouldn’t know she was being influenced. How could she?

“Let us hope not,” she muttered, as they neared the low wall. The magical cacophony managed to be both loud and eerily quiet at the same time, battering her brain without going through her ears. She reached out gingerly, looking for subtle defences … finding none. It wasn’t particularly reassuring. Such spells were designed to hide, all the while convincing their victim they didn’t exist. The poor bastard could look right at the spells and miss them completely. “We have enough problems.”

“Starting with the fact they might have noticed a missing slave,” Cat said. There was no condemnation in his tone, but she thought she heard it anyway. “If they noticed …?”

Emily scowled as he helped her over the wall. The slaves were still moving in their patterns, their arms rising and falling in a kind of eerie unison that nagged at her mind. It was a ritual and yet … what sort of ritual? There was no sign they’d noticed Beth’s absence … she wanted to believe, as grim as it was, that the unseen masters were unconcerned because they were already working the slaves to death and wouldn’t notice one more death. Her blood ran cold as she considered the implications. Were the slaves bleeding life and magic into the wards? She’d seen something like it at Mountaintop, where the rejected students had been used to provide power for the wards, but … if so, whatever the Hierarchy was doing was on a far greater scale. She didn’t like it at all.

Cat rubbed his eyes, his voice tinged with pain. “What the hell are they doing?”

“Try to focus on the real world,” Emily advised, although she wasn’t sure what was the real world. Not here. The city was so bright, so many dimensions overlapping each other … she glanced at the slaves, watching some pop into existence out of nowhere and others vanishing just as completely, and shuddered. They were being used as organic robots. They had to be. No human mind could cope with such an experience. “And bite your tongue from time to time.”

“Hah.” Cat slipped off the wall, dropping down into the city. “Do you think they can see us?”

“Stay low anyway,” Emily ordered. There was so much magic in the air that concealment charms wouldn’t last long, no matter what they did. The slaves were too zonked to be fooled by obscurification charms. Probably. “We don’t want to set off any alarms.”

Cat snorted as they started to walk, saying nothing as they passed row upon row of houses, apartments and other buildings. The scene was bizarre, human architecture morphing slowly into alien structures that looked to have been put together by madmen or minds with very different ideas of how the universe worked. Simple apartment blocks were overlapped by towering ziggurats, statues of humans whose names had been forgotten long ago bleeding into representations of things her mind refused to grasp. She glanced into a building that might have been a workshop and shuddered when she realised the far walls were lost in another dimension, the stone somehow managing to be both real and weirdly translucent at the same time. Things were on the far side of the wall, pressing against her awareness … it was like having an imaginary headache, a headache that wasn’t quite painful and yet unquestionably there. She didn’t want to look too closely. She was afraid of what she might see.

The tower loomed over the city, stretching up and up into infinity. It was metal and stone and something organic, a beanstalk leading into the clouds and beyond. It was so big she couldn’t tell how close they were, the sheer immensity making it hard to tell just how far they had to walk. It was more real than the rest of the city, yet … her head hurt. It was big enough to dominate the world and yet it was oddly compressed, as if it was far bigger on the inside. She could feel the pulsing of a nexus point and … there shouldn’t be one. There had never been one here.

Unless it was never catalogued at all, Emily thought. But if they have a nexus point why did they need to gather and store so much power.

Cat nudged her. Emily jumped.

“How far do you think we have to go?”

Emily shook her head. Distances were breaking down. The tower was both close and yet impossibly far away. She had to think to keep moving, to keep herself from slowing as the city centre finally came into view. Most cities were organised around a handful of buildings – a castle, a palace, a city hall – but if there had been such structures in this city they’d been swallowed up long ago. The tower had taken their place and it was expanding, slowly absorbing structures already bleeding into alternate realities, structures transformed by contact with alien magics and powers. She couldn’t see it move and yet she was sure it was inching outwards in all directions.

She gritted her teeth. Her perspective was all screwed up. The tower was both the largest thing she’d ever seen and tiny, a skyscraper that was also a stick. She could feel the dimensions compressed around the structure, making it bigger on the inside … a TARDIS, she thought numbly, but a TARDIS without the protective shell. It made her head hurt even more.

“Look,” Cat said.

Emily followed his gaze. There was a long line of slaves going in and out of the tower, some carrying crates and bundles of tools, others seemingly empty-handed. She shuddered helplessly at their robotic motions, then froze as she spotted the hooded figures standing by the door. They didn’t look like slaves … it was hard to be sure of anything, the distortion in reality made it difficult to see the enemy, but they appeared to be guards rather than anything else. She guessed there were limits to the enemy’s faith in their defences. There might be little point in defending the battlements, but the tower was a very different kettle of fish.

“We’re going to have to get inside,” she muttered. “Somehow …”

“That might prove tricky,” Cat said, his voice disturbingly even. Cat loved a challenge. Anything that daunted him had to be bad. “The wards are a pain and then there’s the guards …”

Emily nodded, trying to scope out the defences. The tower was so vast as to be beyond comprehension … she had the uneasy sense of something rooted in reality itself, an iceberg that was a tiny fraction of the whole, the remainder hidden in a multidimensional twist she couldn’t even begin to comprehend. She had to fight to focus her mind enough to see the outer layers of the structure, to pick out entrances and exits that might not be anything of the sort. The slaves were making their way through a weird gash in the tower, a twisted nightmare that scared her on a very primal level. There was a layer of wards between them and the entrance …

“Organic technology,” she muttered.

Cat glanced at her. “What?”

Emily swallowed, hard. “It’s not easy to channel magic through mundane technology,” she said, slowly. “Magitech started out as a combination of metal and organic material and then morphed into something else, something that could gather and channel magic. There are limits to how far it can go, without an organic mind capable of controlling or at least influencing the magic. But if you have some kind of organic technology …”

She shuddered. A ritual required a group of trained magicians who were willing and able to work together for the greater good. It was never easy to get them working together long enough to cast even a basic spell, not when herding magicians was like herding cats, which limited the kind of spells the ritualists could cast. But if someone could channel enough magic through a piece of organic technology – she shuddered as she realised the slaves might have been assimilated into a twisted nightmare – they might be able to work far greater spells without personality clashes that could lead to fights. What if … she wondered, suddenly, if she could bilocate, then cast a spell that normally required two casters. It was hard for a bilocated person’s two halves to remain close without reintegrating themselves, but … if organic technology was involved it might be possible.

“I once knew a man who gave himself four arms, to allow him to cast two spells at once,” Cat commented. “It eventually destroyed him, but … it worked. For a while.”

Emily frowned. It was tricky to cast two spells at the same time. Most such spells were components of something far greater. If the caster had managed to spilt his attention so completely … she shook her head, returning her attention to the city. They had to find a way inside the tower. She just didn’t know how.

“We could pretend to be slaves,” Cat suggested. “We can channel their slave spells …”

“Bad idea,” Emily said. She would have thought twice about it anywhere, but here … no. Bad idea. Very bad idea. They could easily wind up enslaving themselves. “We need something else.”

She frowned as she spotted another hooded figure leaving the tower and heading into the city, walking with an easy gait that suggested he didn’t have a care in the world. He wasn’t quite walking right towards them, but … she glanced at Cat, sharing the same unspoken thought, then led the way down to a street. The air seemed to blur around them, a dozen different buildings trying to occupy the same place, as the Hierarchist came into view. He was wearing a pair of spectacles … Emily wondered, suddenly, if they were designed to let him navigate the multidimensional nightmare. Cat winked at her, then slipped up behind the Hierarchist, wrapped his arms around the man’s neck and tried to choke him out. Reality hung on a knife edge, just for a second, as he tightened his grip. Emily had the sense, just for a second, that Cat’s arm was passing though the man, as if he were almost – but not quite – a ghost, before reality snapped back and the man fell to the ground. Cat kept his grip tight, just in case. A trained soldier might feign being unconscious long enough for the attacker to let go, then fight back.

“Interesting,” Cat mused. “Do you know him?”

Emily knelt and pulled the hood back. The man was pale, strong features marred by close-cropped hair and a scar on his cheek that suggested he’d made a blood oath with someone not too long ago. It was rare for such a wound to be healed magically – tradition demanded the scar be left untouched – but given time it would heal anyway. The man’s face was completely unknown to her, although there was something about them that nagged at her mind, something familiar … it took her a moment to place it. He reminded her of Frieda, in a way she couldn’t quite put into words. Someone else from the Cairngorms? Or someone who’d endured a similar childhood?

Cat muttered a spell to keep the Hierarchist unconscious, then patted him down. His pockets didn’t hold much of anything, beyond a couple of pieces of magitech … oddly, there was a pistol stuffed into his belt. Rare, for a magician … Cat sucked in his breath as he poked and prodded at the older man, revealing … something … floating above his skin, like a holographic tattoo. A soulmark. Emily had heard of them, from Void, but she’d never actually seen one. The few magical families that used them rarely admitted their existence.

“That’s our way in,” Cat said. “You think your boyfriend can hack it for us?”

Emily nodded. Caleb might not know much about soul magic, but he was a far better charmsmaster than her. “Yeah,” she said. The soulmark made a certain kind of sense, a key to the wards surrounding the tower. “If he can duplicate it” – she pressed her chat parchment to the Hierarchist’s body – “we can get in.”

 

Chapter Twenty-Nine

“Stay close to me,” Emily muttered, as they neared the tower. The chat parchment felt warm against her hand. “We’ve only got one soulmark.”

“Got it.” Cat was so close they were almost touching. “Make sure you keep the obscurification charm in place.”

Emily nodded. Caleb had done an excellent job of dissecting and duplicating the soulmark, and hacking the outer edge of the wards to ensure they could get in and out without being noticed, but they had no idea just how sophisticated the enemy wards truly were. If there was someone monitoring them, or just a particularly capable piece of spellware, they might be able to tell there was someone in two, if not three, places at once. Emily knew how to design wards that would sound the alarm if they spotted a red flag like that and she dared not assume the Hierarchy was any less capable. They were taking one hell of a risk.

And if the guards spot us with the naked eye, all bets are off, she thought, grimly. They’d woven the obscurification charm into the local environment, like a singer joining his voice to the song, but she was painfully aware it might not be enough to hide their presence. A trained magician would know to watch for his attention being diverted and here, the guards would know better than to write anything off as a random flicker of magic. Better to check, just to be sure, than risk being attacked from the rear. We might have to get out in a hurry …

The tower pressed against her awareness, towering over her as they stepped through the wards. It grew bigger and bigger, expanding in dimensions she couldn’t even begin to comprehend … she felt very small, as if someone had shrunk her to the size of an insect, and was now lifting their foot to bring it down on her hard. The sight made her quail, just for a second, before she forced herself forward. It helped, just a little, but not as much as she’d hoped. She shouldn’t have been able to see the whole tower, or what part of it resided in the human world, yet it was still burning into her mind. There was no escape.

Cat caught her arm as they inched towards the entrance. The guards didn’t seem to be looking at them, but that was meaningless. Emily thought a silent prayer as they neared the gash in the tower and stepped through, using the lines of slaves for cover. The interior was so quiet it was almost a psyical blow, the sudden silence as deafening as the endless noise. It wasn’t real noise … she glanced at Cat, who looked as if he’d been struck by surprise, and then forced herself onwards. The tower seemed more normal now … she guessed they could no longer see the alternate dimensions. It reminded her of Celeste. And Whitehall. She wasn’t sure why.

“Charming,” Cat muttered.

Emily nodded as the passageway widened suddenly. She’d expected an entrance hall, perhaps more checkpoints, but instead the passageway led right into a giant workshop. The air shimmered, suggesting that towering pieces of metal and organic machinery been crammed into a space far too small for them … she sucked in her breath, feeling like a fly crawling over something so large she couldn’t even begin to understand what she was seeing. Magic prickled against her as they kept moving, the spellware so complex it would take months, if not years, to unravel. The sheer size of the operation stunned her. Whatever the Hierarchy was doing, it had been doing it for years. The necromancers had never had a clue.

Cat sucked in his breath. “Look!”

Emily followed his gaze. It was a heart-like device, something akin to the structure she’d seen in Celeste, but worse. Far worse. There were people crammed into the device, strands of metal jammed into their brains to turn them into part of the device itself … she felt sick as she neared the structure, trying to think of a way to free them. She doubted it was possible. They weren’t just linked into the device, but absorbed into it. Their arms and legs vanished somewhere within the structure, as if they too were trying to be in two places at once. It was horrific. It was …

“They might be controlling the iron giants from here,” she said, slowly. It didn’t seem likely – the people were clearly victims, not like the controllers she’d seen in Celeste – but the possibility had to be acknowledged. “Or they might be up to something else.”

The eerie sense they were being watched grew stronger as they walked further into the complex, inspecting pieces of machinery on the way. There was no rhyme or reason to the layout – one structure was a tangled mass of human brains, another was something that could have passed for a steampunk airship engine – but something was nagging at her mind, something bad. It reminded her of something … something she’d seen. The memory refused to come into the light as they watched slaves making their way through a pair of arches, their faces blank as they came and went … nothing happened. Her eyes narrowed. What was the point? She had met too many people who delighted in forcing their inferiors to bend the knee, but the Hierarchy had never struck her in revelling in power for the sake of it. It had to serve some kind of greater purpose …

But what?

Her mind raced as they moved from chamber to chamber. Some were lined with towering masses of crystal, like the chambers under Whitehall, while others seemed a great deal more modern. She couldn’t help wondering if she’d been wrong, if there had been a nexus point under the city … one she’d reignited with the rest of the dead nexus points. Or … she shook her head as the wards grew stronger, brushing against their minds. They were running out of time. Their fake soulmark wouldn’t last much longer.

She stopped, dead, as they entered another chamber. A device hung in the exact centre, a complex network of metal and magic that reminded her of a magiwriter … no, that was a magiwriter … but it wasn’t the device that caught her attention. A tiny loop of metal rested on top of the device, no bigger than the rings she’d used to anchor her first batteries, with a flicker of light dancing in the centre. She sucked in her breath as the flicker grew brighter with every passing second, seeming to expand into infinity. The air pulsed with raw magic. She hadn’t been wrong but she hadn’t been entirely right either.

Her breath caught in her throat. “They made a nexus point!”

Cat gaped at her. “Are you sure?”

Emily stepped closer, shaking her head in disbelief. The nexus point looked tiny – they always did, at least from a distance – but she could feel the towering waves of magic, stratas of raw power plunging all the way to infinity, that marked a nexus point. There shouldn’t have been one here and yet … she swallowed hard, recalling Adam’s suggestion about splitting magic to produce more magic. Had the Hierarchy moved ahead of him or had they found something else, something worse? She didn’t know … her eyes lingered on the device, trying to figure out what it was meant to do. A magiwriter lacked human limitations. It was a computer, of a sort, and it wasn’t bright enough to balk when it was being asked to do the impossible. Given enough power, at least in theory, it could do anything. And if it was linked to a nexus point …

“They must have punched a hole into … into wherever nexus points get their power,” Emily breathed. “If they figured out how to do it safely …”

She recalled a theory about quasars being gateways to dimensions of raw power … a book she’d read, years ago, had talked about feats of stellar engineering involving tapping into the quasar source and tapping it. She couldn’t remember the details and half the science had been made up anyway, but … her eyes narrowed. She was the only person on the Nameless World who had even heard of the story … or was she? Was she facing another crosstime traveller? It wasn't impossible. She was here. But surely, if there was another traveller, he would have heard of her long ago and done something about it.

The thought mocked her as she leaned forward. Most nexus points were difficult to tap and her half-formed ideas for linking them to a magiwriter worse than useless. The torrent of raw power would shatter the magiwriter, then go on to lay waste to the surrounding region. But the Hierarchy had clearly solved that problem … she frowned, trying to parse out the device below the nexus point. If they’d been able to control the size of the pinprick in reality, control the flood of raw power, they might have been able to tap it, using the power to feed the spellware and keep the nexus point under control. No, they had been able to do it. If they’d failed, they would have triggered a disaster that would have made Chernobyl look a minor hiccup.

And they are so far from civilisation that the northern kingdoms might not even notice, Emily mused. Surges of raw power were hardly unknown in the Blighted Lands. Even if they did, what could they do about it?

She took her notebook and pencil out of her pocket and started to work, sketching down everything she saw. The device was fantastically complex and she didn’t dare try to open it to inspect the innards, not with so many guards and slaves nearby, but there was no doubting it was real. The nexus point couldn’t be faked … it would be like having an artist paint a perfect copy of the Mona Lisa. Someone with that kind of skill didn’t need to forge paintings for a living … unless they wanted the satisfaction of fooling pretentious experts and connoisseurs. But the nexus point in front of her, the artificial point, was one hell of an accomplishment. If the creator had been anyone else, they would have gone down in history as the greatest magician since Lord Whitehall or the First Emperor.

“We need to take this off them,” she said, inspecting the links binding the nexus point to the device. They looked frail, but there was something about them that made her suspect otherwise. The spellware would need to be dismantled carefully, for fear of causing a power surge. “And quickly.”

Cat’s mind was running in a different direction. “Is the nexus point powering the multiple dimensions?”

Emily hesitated, unsure. It did at Whitehall, but here … she wasn’t sure. The power threads seemed to be going in the wrong directions. She tried to get a sense of how long the nexus point had even existed and drew a blank. Ice prickled down her spine as she examined the spellware. Was the Hierarchy experimenting with time travel? Were they planning to fold the timeline back on itself, time and time again … she’d read a story about that too, years ago, but she had no idea how it would work in the real world. It would be paradoxical in a manner even she found hard to comprehend.

Set up the nexus point as a beacon, then spend the rest of your life developing magical, mundane and magitechinical techniques, she mused. Go back in time, introduce all the future ideas, then spend the rest of that life developing even more ideas, then go back in time a third time …

She frowned. If someone knew how to do that much, why not go all the way back in time to Old Whitehall? Or one of the other nexus points? Or … she shook her head. It was impossible to navigate within the timestream, as far as she knew, and the only way to have a rough idea of where you were going was to focus on the exact moment the nexus point was tapped. If there were time travellers coming back in time, she should see them now. They should be popping into existence all around her. But they weren’t. They were alone.

Unless the point was created weeks ago, she thought. They collected vast amounts of power from Celeste. They could have used it the moment I brought their operation crashing down. Or …

She shook her head. “We need to get out of here, then bring in the army,” she said. “Help me find the spellware they use to govern the wards.”

Cat nodded, reaching out gently to parse out the threads of magic running through the air. Emily joined him, sensing odd little twists that seemed to lead nowhere … more interdimensional magic, she wondered, or just random fluctuations in the local magic field? There was no way to know. Cat led the way out of the nexus chamber, Emily following after taking a final look at the new-made nexus point. It was hellishly impressive, the kind of achievement that even Void would have found extraordinary. And yet, it boded ill for the future. If someone could set up a nexus point anywhere …

She kept her eyes open as they slipped through the corridors, prepping pieces of chat parchment and slipping them into place. The wards were both complex and incredibly powerful, ensuring they couldn’t be taken apart from the outside, but having a chat parchment inside the defences – as well as the copied soulmark – should give them a reasonable chance to hack the wards. If they were taken down … Emily hoped Alassa and Jade were ready to send the army, ready to overwhelm the defenders and free the slaves. She shuddered helplessly. The slaves would probably be sent to fight too, even though it meant certain death. She made a mental note to warn Jade to have his men do what they could for them, despite the risk.

The ground shifted as they stepped through the first chamber, leaving a final piece of chat parchment nestled into the spellware. The slaves paid them no heed … Emily hoped to hell they could take down the slave spells in a hurry, before it was too late. Cat paused, his hand resting against the wall, as the ground shifted again. Emily closed her eyes and reached out with her senses, feeling nothing. The earthquake, or whatever it truly was, appeared to be over.

“We need to hurry,” Cat said. “If they detect the chat parchments …”

Emily nodded, curtly. The trick had been completely unexpected when she’d used it for the first time, hacking the wards surrounding the Tower of Alexis to liberate Alassa from imprisonment, but it was no secret now. She would be astonished if it hadn’t slipped out … in a sense, it had. It was the root of the spells allowing the iron giants to be operated from a distance. There was no reason the Hierarchy couldn’t use it, or know what to watch for … if their wards were monitored, which was possible, they might well sense the chat parchments even before they went live.

A sudden surge of anger shot through her. It was her idea. The Hierarchy was using her idea … more than one idea. Chat parchments, batteries, steam engines … Even the spellware at the heart of the nexus point … hers, all hers. They had taken her concepts and corrupted them, turned them into monstrous nightmares that threatened reality itself … she understood, suddenly, why Alfred Nobel had felt so guilty over the invention of dynamite, why he’d invested so much money in founding the Nobel Prize. He hadn’t been responsible for how his invention had been perverted, but … she knew why he’d felt guilty. It was easy to point out, rather snidely, that he should have expected it … she should have expected it too. The moment she’d revealed what she could do, telling the world that something was possible, the clock had started ticking. It had been just a matter of time before someone managed to duplicate her innovations, perhaps even improve on them. It wasn’t her fault and yet she couldn’t help feeling guilty.

She growled. Cat glanced at her.

“What’s up?”

“They used my ideas to do this,” Emily snapped. A memory surfaced, an evil alternate version of herself. Her counterpart had been a twisted madwoman, a monster who’d killed and corrupted hundreds of thousands of people … a reminder she could become a monster, a sickening nightmare from which she could never wake up. “Mine!”

“You didn’t tell them to do this,” Cat pointed out.

Emily shot him a sidelong look. “When did you get so mature?”

Cat laughed. “Is it that much out of character?”

Emily snorted as they left the tower, the sudden burst of magic oddly dilated as they hurried away. The man they’d knocked out was still there … Cat pressed his fingers against the man’s temple, muttering a spell to confound him. The fake memories of drinking wouldn’t do him any favours, when his superiors found him, but hopefully it would keep them from realising what had really happened. Until it was far too late …

She gritted her teeth, the distance from the tower to the low wall suddenly shorter than before … as if the city itself was keen to be rid of them. Perhaps it was … she was sure they were being watched, even though the observer wasn’t showing himself. The distant mountains could hide all sorts of things, some more dangerous than others. If they were still being watched, the watcher would have to make his move soon, before they brought in the army. And yet, as they headed back to the campsite, nothing moved. They were alone.

But she still felt as though something was watching and waiting, biding its time.

 

Chapter Thirty

“They built a nexus point?”

“It looks that way.” Emily didn’t blame Caleb for being sceptical. It was impossible. It had been impossible. “As far as I could tell, it’s a genuine portable nexus point.”

“It was very small,” Cat offered, from where he was eying the darkening sky. “They might have been channelling power from somewhere else …”

Emily shook her head. “It doesn’t have to be big, or even look big,” she countered. She’d seen more nexus points than most and they’d ranged from roaring furnaces of raw power to tiny flames that seemed to grow and grow until they dominated her awareness. The latter were often more dangerous, she’d found, because it was so easy to underestimate something that looked so harmless. “No, it was a portable nexus point. They tapped right into the source of power itself.”

Caleb sucked in his breath. “And so the world changes once again.”

“Yeah.” Emily glanced at Beth, sitting by the fire. The poor girl looked beaten down, although she didn’t recall much about her experiences. Hopefully, there would be little long-term damage if she couldn’t remember what had actually happened to her. “If we could do it ourselves …”

She considered it for a long moment, trying to work out the possibilities. A nexus point for everyone would change the world, perhaps not for the better. Cities would be built on raw power, kingdoms would be able to secure their borders … it depended, she supposed, on just how infinite the power truly was. And if the nexus points could be controlled. The surge of raw magic alone would cause all sorts of problems and if the owners lost control after moving the nexus points to their new location the devastation would be on an unimaginable scale. Nuclear war would be less destructive, in the long run. She wondered how the Hierarchy had solved the problem of controlling the first surge, then glanced at the city and shook her head. This far from the Craggy Mountains, the power surge would either be missed or dismissed as another random burst of magic from the Blighted Lands. Perhaps that was why the city was bathed in magic. The first experiments hadn’t worked as well as the Hierarchy had hoped.

“Can you?” Cat cocked his head. “Can you do it for yourself?”

Emily shrugged. She didn’t know. If her theory was correct, and nexus points were really magical quasars, she’d need to locate the powerful – her lips twitched at the terrible pun – dimension and find a way to punch a hole into it, allowing the power to flow into the mundane world. It would clearly require a great deal of power … she found herself idly drawing up plans to use one nexus point to open another, then dismissing the idea as insanely dangerous. She had no idea what would happen if there were two nexus points in close proximity. They might put so much stress on the fabric of reality that the gash in space-time would get wider or … there was just no way to know. The shortest distance between two nexus points was over a hundred miles.

Her curiosity made her want to experiment. Her common sense told her there were some experiments best not conducted, for fear of the outcome.

“I don’t know,” she said, finally. There was no way to keep others from experimenting, once they realised what was possible. She could name a dozen magicians who’d consider the prize worthy of almost any risk, including the near-certainty of being nothing more than the first one to die. “I think we should leave the concept firmly alone.”

“That’s going to be fun to enforce,” Caleb said. “It isn’t going to work.”

Emily couldn’t disagree. She’d managed to keep the concept of splitting atoms out of the public eye, but … how long would that hold? Adam was already talking about splitting magic. It wouldn’t take long for researchers to realise that everything was made of atoms and start wondering what would happen if those atoms were split. She feared for the safety of the world if that secret got out, giving even low-power magicians the power to unleash devastation on an unprecedented scale. She cursed herself, sometimes, for using the concept herself. It was just a matter of time before someone else figured out what she’d done.

There might be limits to the size of the blast, she mused grimly, but where nuclear weapons are concerned ‘small’ is a relative term.

She glanced at the sky. Night was falling rapidly now, flickers of eerie lightning darting through the clouds and striking the tower. She was almost painfully aware of its presence, like a splinter embedded in her skin … not lethal, not anything close to lethal, but still unpleasant, still a distraction she didn’t need. It was perverse to be unable to see the tower and yet sense it dominating the surrounding landscape. She had no idea why the Hierarchy hadn’t tried to contain the power it had summoned and tamed, crafting a shell to protect the overlapping layers of dimensions. It made no sense.

Whitehall was designed for human accommodation, she reminded herself. Whatever they have in mind for the tower, it isn’t a human place.

She put the thought aside. “Cat, Caleb, set up the portal,” she ordered. “It’s time to bring in the army.”

Serigala cleared his throat. “Is that wise?”

Emily glanced at him. “What do you mean?”

The professor indicated the rocky wall hiding the tower. “That city is a prime archaeologist site,” he said, bluntly. “It shouldn’t be disturbed by a small army of soldiers tramping through it.”

“There’s no choice,” Emily said. She still didn’t know what the city was really for, but she had the sense they were running out of time. Shutting the city down came first. They could put the rest of the details together afterwards, once the immediate crisis was over. “I don’t see any way to deal with the problem without taking down the guards, freeing the slaves and capturing the city for ourselves.”

“There are answers to questions we have asked for years, just waiting to be found,” Serigala said, quietly. “We need to examine those ruins carefully, not …”

“I do understand.” Emily did. She would have preferred to go through the city – and the nightmare the enemy had built – carefully too, rather than risk destroying everything. But the portable nexus point had to be taken intact, before it was too late. “We don’t have a choice.”

“The city won’t be destroyed,” Frieda put in. She’d been remarkably quiet. “You can explore the ruins afterwards, once the immediate threat is gone.”

“Do it.” Emily looked at Caleb. “Make sure the portal is ready.”

Cat checked his watch. “They might prefer to wait for daybreak,” he said, quietly. “A battle at night could easily go wrong.”

“And take precautions to protect their troops,” Caleb added. “Even a warning of what’s awaiting them …”

Emily nodded, reaching for the chat parchment linking her to Alassa and Jade and starting to write, outlining everything she’d seen in the city and warning her to ensure the troops knew what to expect. The complex was defended by at least three iron giants, probably more, and both sets of slaves – humans as well as orcs – could easily be turned on the invaders, their collars compelling them to fight with their bare hands until they killed or were killed. The wards were a further problem … she hoped to hell the defenders hadn’t found the chat parchments they’d left behind. If they could direct the power of a nexus point into the wards, using raw power to make up for any cracks in their spellware, the army would be destroyed before it even got close to the tower.

And we don’t know if they noticed the missing people, she mused, as she finished her report and sent it off. Cat and Caleb were working quickly … she was surprised they worked so well together, with Frieda and Penny passing them pieces one by one. If they’re ready for us …

Emily turned and made her way to an observation point, where she could look down on the city. It blazed with light that wasn’t light, an eerie radiance that hurt her retinas and left her torn between a headache and utter confusion. The city was dark and yet it wasn’t … she couldn’t see any sign of alertness, no troops rushing to the battlements or shoving defensive equipment into place to repel attack. Ice prickled down her spine as her eyes lingered on the tower. The city was so alien, she didn’t know if she’d recognise a weapon until it opened fire. She wondered, numbly, just how it was going to work.

She closed her eyes for a long moment, feeling the city’s presence poisoning the land. Her senses were worse than useless, leaving her unsure if her feeling they were being watched was real or merely her paranoia demanding attention. They had been attacked several times … she wasn’t sure if the enemy had been trying to impede their progress or if they’d wandered into hostile territory, the attackers letting them go when it was clear they were leaving. There was just no way to be sure, except …

They could have done a better job if they wanted to kill us, she told herself. We’re so far from the Allied Lands that it would take weeks to mount a rescue mission, if we fell out of contact, and by the time they arrived it would be far too late.

Something moved, behind her. She turned, bracing herself as she readied a spell. Serigala stood there, staring at the city. He couldn’t see it from his vantage point, but … he knew it was there. It was all too clear …

“Professor,” she said. “You should stay at the campsite.”

“I need to get a proper look at the city, before it gets turned into a battleground,” Serigala said, stepping forward. His eyes went wide as the city came into view. “The chance to study such rare magics will never come again.”

“You’ll get a look afterwards,” Emily reassured him. “What do you think they’re trying to do?”

“I think they’re planning to contact the Faerie,” Serigala said. “I still think so. I can’t imagine anything else they could do with such …”

He waved a hand at the city, the multiple dimensions visible even in darkness. “What else can they do?”

Emily had no answer. What did the Hierarchy actually want? She had never been able to get an answer to that question, although there were rumours galore. Some insisted the Hierarchy were the secret masters of the world, or wanted to become so; some insisted the Hierarchy merely wanted to push the limits of magic as far as they would go. She wouldn’t be too surprised to discover both, and a bunch of others, were true. The Hierarchy was old enough to have evolved, the original goal morphing into something else … it wasn’t uncommon, she knew, for an organisation to change when it accomplished its first goal, rather than accept its success and dissolve itself. For all she knew, all the rumours had been true … once upon a time. If they were still true …

“Why?” Emily turned to look at him. “Why would they do something like that?”

Serigala shrugged. “Think of the possibilities,” he said. “The chance to learn from creatures of pure magic. The chance to gain their power and use it. The chance to become far more than merely human …”

“Or dead,” Emily said. She’d heard the same thing, about demons. The DemonMasters of old had thought themselves the ones in charge, commanding entities that were little more than animals of very little brain. It wasn’t until it was far too late that they’d realised they were dealing with entities far superior to themselves, burning with endless malice and driven by a determination to give their supposed masters enough rope to hang themselves … perhaps literally. “They’re dealing with powers they don’t understand.”

“But they could understand,” Serigala said. “Given time …”

He waved a hand northwards. “There was a tomb we uncovered, fifty years ago. It was complex, insanely so. Every level was layered with traps, every simple spell had another trap buried underneath it … the whole network of spells was designed to fill in the holes, repair the damage as we withdrew … every time we left, we had to start again from scratch. There were nasty curses and other surprises, most lethal – or worse. I saw a friend get possessed by the spirit of a long-dead sorcerer-king, spitting out magics he’d never known … magic fuelled by his very soul. He burned up in front of me, collapsing into ash.”

Emily shuddered. Serigala didn’t seem to notice.

“We made it eventually, down to the bottom of the tomb,” he continued. “We learnt a great deal about the sorcerer-king, and the ancient magics, once we managed to deactivate all the deadly magics holding the place together. There were people who argued we should give up, and let the builder rest in peace, but we needed to know. It was worth it.”

“Was it?” Emily couldn’t keep the waspishness out of her voice. “Would your dead comrade agree?”

“He knew the risks, we all did,” Serigala said. “I wouldn’t have come out here if I hadn’t been willing to die in the pursuit of knowledge.”

He looked up as lightning flashed overhead, the sheets of raw power striking the tower and running down the semi-organic mass to the ground. “Aren’t you?”

Emily hesitated. “If it was just my life at risk …”

She shook her head. “It isn’t just me,” she said. “Whatever they’re doing is very dangerous. If you’re right, they’re planning to bring back the most destructive force in human history. If you’re wrong … nothing they’ve done, nothing they intend to do, can justify their actions. They took slaves from Celeste, funded revolutions and stole things from Whitehall … whatever their intentions are, they’re not good. They have to be stopped.”

Serigala said nothing for a long moment, his eyes lingering on the city. “Even at the risk of losing … losing whatever we might learn from the city?”

“We have to worry about the here and now,” Emily pointed out. “There’s no guarantee we’ll find anything within the city.”

“That is a very old city, surrounded by ancient ruins,” Serigala countered. “The city itself is an ancient ruin. We’ll find something.”

“Afterwards,” Emily said.

She looked past him as Frieda and Caleb appeared. “The portal is ready,” Caleb said. “The troops will have no trouble arriving.”

“Don’t activate it until the final moment,” Emily reminded him. The portal would be instantly detectable … probably. She didn’t know if the haze would be enough to keep the defenders from sensing the portal – there was so much raw magic in the air that her senses were almost useless – but she dared not assume so. “Did Jade get in touch?”

“The troops will be ready,” Frieda said. “They’ll move at dawn, our time.”

Emily nodded. “Can you take the professor back to bed? Caleb and I will stand watch.”

Serigala looked irked, but didn’t try to argue as Frieda escorted him back to the tents. Emily didn’t think he’d be foolish enough to go down to the city in the middle of the night, but he’d already wandered off once. He should have known better, given his history, although … he was old, running out of time to make new discoveries and bask in the glory of adding more knowledge to humanity’s understanding of the universe. Emily could understand – the professor was old enough to be her grandfather – and yet, there was no time to explore the city. It wasn’t a dead ruin, but an enemy stronghold. They could examine the ruins after the enemy had been defeated.

“It’s not going to be easy,” Caleb said. “I tested the chat parchments. Their defences are fiendishly complex.”

“We’re going to have to try,” Emily said. She disliked the thought of sending anyone into danger. She didn’t know how Alassa – or her father, for that matter – had coped. She was no military leader, no strategist who thought of people as numbers rather than living breathing entities in their own right. She felt oddly guilty she didn’t know the names and faces of the men Jade was about to lead into battle. “If we can’t take the tower down quickly, it’s going to be impossible to keep them from supercharging the defences and driving us back out again.”

She grimaced. It was difficult, if not impossible, to assault defences powered by a nexus point. The only real way to do it was internal sabotage and even that was tricky. Shadye had gotten into Whitehall through using her as a tool to lower the defences, Emily herself had cheated by using time travel to enter the school before the defences were even raised. She wondered, grimly, if the Hierarchy had figured out what she’d done. They had a nexus point of their own. There was no reason they couldn’t travel back in time to set wrong what once went right.

And from their point of view, she reminded herself, it would be the other way around.

Caleb wrapped an arm around her as thunder rumbled, overhead. Emily lifted her lips to meet his. They were alone and … she wished they could do more, all too aware they might not live to see another day, but … they weren’t alone. And besides, the ground was hard and stony and …

She kissed him, lightly. “After this, you want to elope?”

Caleb smiled. “I think we left it too late.”

Emily had to smile back. “Yeah,” she said. “I guess you’re right.”

 

Chapter Thirty-One

“Watch yourselves,” Emily said, as the portal started to glow. “If they sense us, they’ll attack.”

“Teach your mother to count coins,” Cat said, dryly. “I do know the risks.”

Emily gave him a sidelong look. Sergeant Miles had taught them, repeatedly, about the advantages and disadvantages of using portals in wartime. On one hand, they allowed armies to cross hundreds of miles in an instant, often appearing well behind enemy lines; on the other, they were bridgeheads and if they were destroyed the army would be stranded, unable to retreat as the enemy brought greater and greater force to bear against the intruders. The portal might even fall into enemy hands, allowing them to mount counterattacks of their own. Alassa had taken precautions, Emily was sure, but the risk couldn’t be understated. There was no way to know if the Hierarchy had enough iron giants to launch an invasion of Zangaria.

We know how to stop them now, she reminded herself. Unless they’ve already come up with ways to counter the countermeasures …

The portal flared to life. Jade stepped through, a pistol in one hand and a wand in the other; Emily allowed herself a smile, all too aware Jade wouldn’t ask anyone to do anything he was unwilling to do himself. Jade and Cat exchanged glances – they were old friends – as the rest of the army started to come through the portal, young men carrying rifles and swords backed up by combat magicians and artillerymen. Zangaria prided itself on having the most modern army in the Allied Lands, Emily knew, and Jade had crafted the remnants of the old army into a tough and professional – and volunteer – force that could best an old-style military several times its size. It was very far from modern by her stands – no tanks, no jets, no missiles – but it was getting there. The simple fact promotion was secured through merit rather than birth or connections ensured the officers and sergeants never lost their edge.

“I hope you’ll be coming with us,” Jade said, to Cat. “It’ll be just like old times.”

“Well, I should keep an eye on Penny,” Cat teased. His apprentice spluttered. “Take Beth back through the portal and you have a deal.”

Emily stepped aside as the line of troops kept moving down the mountain, onto the plain outside the city. They were making no attempt to hide … she wondered, sourly, if that were a mistake. The enemy didn’t seem to be reacting to the portal … odd, unless they were confident in their defences. They could be channelling power into the wards already, she supposed, but it was still a mistake to let the attackers secure a beachhead and bring in an entire army. Jade wasn’t letting the grass grow under his feet. He’d already detailed men to secure the bridgehead and start setting up more portals. The longer he was left to do it unmolested, the better the odds of victory.

Frieda grinned at her as a row of cannon were half-carried, half-dragged out of the portal. “You want me to keep an eye on the professor?”

“Don’t let him do anything stupid,” Emily said, wishing they’d been able to bring Hoban instead. He would have understood the dangers – too – and had less reason to take risks in hope of making a discovery that would ensure his name entered the history books, regardless of the risk to himself and others. “He can explore the city after it’s secured.”

“Got it.” Frieda started to turn away, then stopped. “You take care of yourself down there, all right? I don’t want to lose you.”

Emily gave her a quick hug, then turned and made her way to the vantage point. The army was already deploying, a third of the men standing guard while another third set up the guns and the remainder dug earthworks. Jade had scattered his formations, ensuring they couldn’t be chopped down by makeshift Gatling guns – the Hierarchy had shown a surprising willingness to use mundane technology – or simple magic. She leaned forward, studying the deployment as the army slowly surrounded the city. The old guard would be horrified at the lack of cavalry, she noted wryly, but they’d be worse than useless here. They’d get themselves killed for nothing.

“The chat parchments are still in place,” Caleb commented. “There’s no sign the enemy have noticed a thing.”

“Weird.” Emily could understand missing a handful of intruders sneaking through the city, but the army was too big to be missed. The enemy would have sensed its presence even if the watchmen were blind and deaf. “Is it a trap of some kind?”

She leaned forward. The haze surrounding the city ebbed and flowed with pulses of raw magic, flowing out of the nexus point, but it didn’t seem to have hardened into proper defences. It was insane. It had to be a trap. No one in their right mind would simply ignore an army at the gates … she peered into the haze, picking out a handful of slaves performing their ritual as if their masters didn’t have a care in the world. The nagging familiarity mocked her. She’d seen something like it before, really she had, but where? She couldn’t remember.

Caleb looked at her. “We can’t do nothing.”

“No,” Emily agreed. “Get ready to hack the defences.”

Penny scrambled up towards them, her face dark with annoyance. “Prince Jade’s compliments, Lady Emily, and he wishes you to know the attack will begin in five minutes.”

“Understood,” Emily said. Penny really didn’t look pleased. Cat was well within his rights to use her as a messenger, but … it meant sending her away from the battlefield. She wouldn’t like that. It was hard enough being a combat sorceress when one wasn’t being ordered to carry messages, raising the spectre of being thought a coward. Lady Barb had had some stories about having to teach the men to respect her with her fists, rather than magic. “Go back to Prince Jade” – Prince Consort, her mind corrected silently – “and inform him we’ll be ready.”

“Thank you,” Penny said. “Good luck.”

She turned and hurried away. Emily kept one eye on her watch as she pressed her hand against the chat parchment, bracing herself. If it was a trap, it was about to be sprung. She couldn’t believe the enemy hadn’t noticed the army outside … unless they were that confident in their wards. Did they think they could simply raise their wards and keep everyone out, using the nexus point to patch the holes in their defences? Or … or did they think … what? Emily knew she was no expert, when it came to military matters, but it just made no sense.

“Maybe they’re surprised we brought an army,” she mused. It was wishful thinking and she knew it. The portable portals were relatively new, but portals themselves were hundreds of years old. Generals had been accounting for them well before her birth. “Or maybe it really is a trap.”

“They might not have realised we could set a portal up out here,” Caleb offered, doubtfully. “The magic storms alone would make the portal unreliable.”

Emily supposed he had a point and yet … no. She didn’t believe it. The Hierarchy was hardly hidebound. They had been at the forefront of magical development, stealing her concepts and improving on them while coming up with newer and better ideas of their own. They had to know about improvements she and others had made to portal spells, how Heart’s Eye had used a portal to attack behind enemy lines … hell, how she’d done it herself to end the Necromantic Wars. The whole affair just didn’t make sense.

A gun fired, once. The army started to advance.

“Now,” Caleb said.

Emily reached out through the chat parchments, slipping into the enemy wards with all the ease of someone with full access rights. No human or near-human mind touched hers, nothing capable of recognising she was an intruder … nothing aware enough to understand that just because she was inside the defences didn’t mean she was supposed to be there. She took a moment to scan the system, her eyes narrowing as she realise just how odd it was. Half the spellware was incredibly sophisticated, advanced enough to pass for a mimic; the other half was so primitive, she acknowledged wryly, that it was actually too dumb to fool. The disparity made no sense. She couldn’t help wondering if the more advanced spellware had only been woven after they’d created the nexus point.

She swept through the system, feeling a twinge of relief as she realised it was finally reacting to the attack. Orders were snapping out … she thought, just for a second, that she’d felt the iron giants getting their instructions before the order was gone as quickly as it had come. She could feel the defences start to harden, channelling power from the nexus point into structures … it took her longer than it should to realise they’d built wands and keyed them to the spellware, turning them into makeshift machine guns. Gritting her teeth, she shut as many of the outer defences down as possible and retargeted the remainder. It shouldn’t have worked and yet it had.

Her eyes snapped open as the guns began to boom. The iron giants had left the gatehouse and were charging the army, moving with incredible speed. They lacked the flexibility of their counterparts from Celeste – Emily guessed the operators had been conscripted, instead of being willing volunteers – but they had a great deal of power and she could see more making their way through the streets, some carrying wands and staffs of their own. The cannons fired, slamming cannonballs into their targets. Some staggered under the impact, others kept coming. The riflemen darted forward, hitting them with runic bullets. The iron giant started to tumble.

“They’re being empowered by the nexus point,” Caleb said. “I think they’re compensating for the disrupted spellware.”

Emily nodded, shuddering as a line of orcish slaves joined the charge. It took a rare body of men to stand against such an attack, particularly in the days before muskets and rifles. Everyone knew orcs were tough as well as strong, leaving mundane soldiers at a severe disadvantage when the orcs slammed into them. Now … the riflemen deployed, firing volley after volley into the orcs as they charged. They started to tumble, but kept going; the bodies of the dying, she realised numbly, were serving as shields to their compatriots. The guns kept firing, cannonballs tearing through the enemy lines. Only a handful survived long enough to tear into the troops. The combat sorcerers blasted them to hell.

She braced herself as the army advanced forward, sweeping into the gatehouse or scrambling over the low walls. The slaves made no attempt to run or fight, moving through the ritual motions as if they didn’t have a care in the world. The army tried to shove them aside, only to discover they simply returned to their duties … no, they went on the offensive, switching to extreme hostility as if someone had flicked a switch. Emily felt sick as the slaves tore into the troops, the soldiers having to put them down or be killed themselves. They felt no pain, their collars driving them onwards … she shuddered, helplessly, as she saw a young girl drive her fingers into a soldier’s eyes, nearly stabbing into his brain before his comrades clubbed her to death. It was horrific, a nightmare beyond words. The slaves kept coming, even as they fell in droves.

“They’re channelling more power through the wards,” Caleb warned. “It’s likely to …”

Emily gritted her teeth as the first flash of power blasted through the city. “I’ll go down there,” she said, collecting more chat parchment. “You keep diverting the magic as much as possible.”

Caleb looked as if he wanted to argue. Emily understood. She gave him a quick kiss and started to run, wrapping a handful of charms around herself as she darted out of the mountains and across the plains. The guns were booming loudly, hurling shells into the city itself … creating a danger none of them had realised until it was too late. They might hit something that would set off a chain reaction that would eventually detonate the nexus point … she put the thought out of her mind as the multiple dimensions crashed down on her mind, space itself twisting as the army tried to keep up the advance. A handful of soldiers walked down a street that led out of reality itself and vanished … Emily hoped they’d make it back, but she feared otherwise. The gatehouse was twisting in front of her, iron giants coming out of nowhere in a bid to attack the army in the rear. She drew her pistol and shot the first two with runic bullets, then threw herself to the ground as a third waved a wand at her. A stream of fireballs blasted over her head, each one cast so rapidly they felt like an endless wave of deadly spells … a magical machine gun. Her first spell glinted off the iron giant’s protective wards, her second send a disruptive spell crawling down the wand – it had to be excluded from the protections, or else it would be worse than useless – and into the iron giant itself. The machine exploded a second later, the spellform crumbling and taking the rest of the device with it.

Jade caught her eye as she joined him inside the city. “They’re throwing more slaves at us!”

Emily nodded, cursing herself as the army continued to advance. Raw power was crackling over their heads, flashes of lighting darting out of a clear – if hazy – sky and trying to blast the army. The aim wasn’t great, but there were dozens of lightning bolts … she clutched the chat parchment as she felt another surge of magic overhead, holding it up to draw the power to her and channel it into the magiwriter. It was risky, but she couldn’t think of any better ideas. The surge of magic powered a cancellation spell, aimed at the running slaves. Their collars popped off, sending them tumbling to the ground. Emily hoped they’d recover. She didn’t know if they would.

“Get them out of the city,” she snapped, as she felt more magic boiling ahead of her. The spell she’d cast didn’t seem to have affected the other dimensions. She could feel them spinning in the air, in front of her and beside her and behind her … “Hurry!”

“Incoming,” Cat snapped. Three hooded figures were suddenly in front of them, as if they’d been there all along. Perhaps they had, in a sense. They certainly had their staffs at the ready. “Get them …”

Emily shuddered as the newcomers lashed out with their magic, unleashing sheets of lighting that crashed against her protections and threatened to drive her back. Their technique was odd, crude to the point of mimicking a necromancer and yet lacking their raw power. They were spending power freely, as if they had an infinite supply … they did, she supposed. The nexus point was linked to the staffs, allowing them to cast spells without the risk of damaging their own magical potential. There had to be a limit to how much power they could channel, she noted absently, or they would have wiped out the entire army single-handedly. Perhaps the staffs simply couldn’t take it …

Jade snapped orders, holding the line rather than trying to dart forward. The guns boomed a second later, shells whistling down to strike the newcomers. Two managed to raise shields in time – remarkable, when most magicians wouldn’t realise the danger – but the third was killed instantly, his body ripped apart by the shells. Cat whooped and hurled himself forward, magic crackling around him. Jade followed, throwing himself at the enemy. Emily wanted to tell them both to stop, or at least be careful, but it was already too late. She braced herself, ready to intervene if it went badly. Jade was one of the best combat sorcerers she knew, but it had been years since he’d fought another sorcerer. If he died out here, Alassa would never forgive her.

Her eyes narrowed. Cat’s opponent didn’t seem to be able to mount a defence. He didn’t even have a chance to raise his staff, to use it as a weapon, before Cat shoved a charmed knife into his ribs. Emily frowned, unsure what she’d just seen, before turning her attention to Jade. His opponent was a tougher character, casting spells with a speed Emily could only admire. Jade shoved forward, presenting a threat his opponent couldn’t ignore, while casting another spell behind his back. His opponent had no time to realise what he'd done before it was too late. Jade slammed the spell into him, ripping his body apart. Emily felt sick as the remains splattered to the ground.

“Hah,” Cat said. He gave Jade a jaunty salute. “You’ve still got it!”

Jade made a rude gesture, then signalled his officers. “Detail two companies to get the surviving slaves back to the portal,” he snapped. His voice was very firm. The slaves didn’t deserve to be caught between two fires and butchered, let alone turned into fodder for human sacrifice. “The rest of us will advance on the tower.”

“Yes, sir,” an officer said.

Emily nodded, wiping sweat from her brow. The sheer intensity of the combat had surprised her – and it wasn’t over yet. The tower was still there, waiting for them. The streets were elongating, seeming to change every time she looked away. It was hard to think clearly …

We need to keep moving, she told herself, numbly. If they have time to think, they’ll have time to come up with something really nasty.

 

Chapter Thirty-Two

Up close, the tower was still nightmarish.

Emily could feel it digging into her mind, an impression of reality that seemed more real than the rest of the world … a presence so solid she felt like a ghost in comparison. The soldiers and combat magicians appeared nervous, as they neared the tower, and even Jade looked as if he would sooner be somewhere – anywhere – else. He and Cat were the bravest, and most foolhardy, young men Emily had ever met and if they were worried … Cat had been inside, Emily reminded herself, as a line of iron giants emerged from nowhere and opened fire on the troops, spitting fireballs as if they were machine gun bullets. She had the disturbing impression of an entire line of iron giants, waiting in alternate universes for the call to action. If the enemy truly was meddling with time, learning from failure and going back in time to fix the mistakes before they even happened … she shuddered, helplessly. The paradox could easily grow out of control and do real damage to the entire universe …

Depending on which piece of science-fiction you believe, she told herself, as she pressed the chat parchment against the walls. Does time itself collapse under the weight of the paradox, a man in a blue box come to fix the problem and put us back in our place, or do the paradoxes just keep building up until the enemy is truly victorious?

She kept her head down, waiting for Caleb to unravel the spells defending the tower from the inside. The tower didn’t seem bothered by the cannonade; shells, solid or explosive, didn’t seem to hit the tower so much as they simply … went away. Emily suspected they were being caught within dimensional twists, left to fall as they reached the end of their ballistic trajectories, or simply being flickered away before they could do any harm. The distance between the tower and the attackers was both terrifyingly short and infinitively long, depending on just how you approached the structure. She had the nasty thought of men being caught in corridors that stretched out to infinity, the flow of time itself adjusted so the men died of old age in the blink of an eye. The concept was terrifying … there was a reason, she recalled, that students were urged to avoid the less stable parts of Whitehall, where you could walk down a corridor one day and emerge several weeks later, if you were lucky. She’d heard tell of a student who had walked into the future, only to discover their families had died centuries ago …

The thought made her shudder as Caleb worked his magic. The tower seemed to be constantly shifting, a purely human construction sharing space with a beanstalk that stretched into dimensions she couldn’t even begin to comprehend. It was like trying to localise a headache and feeling the pan shifting around, defying any attempt to figure out which part of her head was sore. A handful of combat sorcerers were clutching their skulls, falling back in disarray. The soldiers, less sensitive to raw magic, didn’t seem to be so badly affected. She told herself it was something to consider later. Perhaps they could convince Adam to join them, once the tower was secure, and see if he could tolerate it. Or devise something to block the effect on born magicians.

She smiled, coldly, as the wards opened, allowing the troops to assault the entrance itself. Iron giants popped out of nowhere, only to fall prey to runic bullets and cannonballs. Emily smirked as she saw a cannon strike an iron giant, sending it tumbling backwards and landing hard on the solid ground. The protections hadn’t been designed to ward off physical attacks … the designers had clearly relied on the armour to protect the delicate innards and it hadn’t been enough. She darted forward as a line of orcs charged, roaring like animals as they ploughed towards the advancing troops. They were shot down quickly and brutally, before she could get the slave collars off their necks. She shuddered, helplessly. How many innocents, humans as well as orcs, were about to be sent to their deaths by their unseen masters? It was a brutality that was all the more horrific for being devised by a purely human mind. The necromancers had had the excuse of being mad …

Jade caught her eye. “We need to get to the nexus point!”

Emily nodded, feeling the dimensions twisting around her. There was no way the Hierarchy could hide the nexus point … probably. They wouldn’t want to shut it down … could they? Nexus points had been snuffed out in the past, but no one was quite clear on what it took to do it. Beings of great power had killed them … sometimes. Others had been shut down by excessive demands, yet it wasn’t clear just what was too much for the point to handle. Some nexus points were clearly able to offer more power than others … she shook her head. The portable nexus point represented one hell of an investment. The Hierarchy wouldn’t want to snuff it out if it could be avoided. Now the Allied Lands knew what they were doing, they’d have real problems collecting so much magic without being stopped. They might have wound down their investment in Celeste a little too soon.

Her lips twisted. “This way!”

She glanced at the team – Jade, Cat, a bunch of soldiers she didn’t know – and then started to move forward, using her senses to scope out the interior as much as possible. It wasn’t easy to get any sense of the surrounding area, even with Caleb’s help, but the nexus point itself was a beacon of raw power in the haze. The corridors seemed to twist around her as they inched onwards, the walls shifting dangerously … she swore under her breath as she realised they’d either taken a wrong turning or the interior was being reconfigured around them. She wouldn’t bet against the latter. The tower was far bigger on the inside.

Her fingers brushed against the chat parchment, feeling magic creaking around them. They were being redirected … the corridor was being extended, just as she’d feared. She glanced back and saw nothing but endless corridor, a trap they’d walked into without hesitation. It was just a matter of time before it was sealed off completely – or worse. She could feel a mind pulsing in the distance, controlling the tower … oddly alien and yet seemingly human. It puzzled her, reminding her of something … a near-intelligent computer program? Or something else? She wasn’t sure.

“The corridor goes on forever,” a soldier said. Emily heard the worry in his tone and winced inwardly. “Is there a way out?”

Jade glanced at Emily. “Emily?”

Emily nodded, her mind reaching out through the chat parchment. They had been caught up in a pocket dimension, reality itself reformatted to serve as a prison … or worse. She could feel compulsion spells slowly filtering into the trap, trying to convert the prisoners into slaves … it was worse than brute-force charms and curses, she noted coldly; the spells were subtle enough to make it tricky for anyone to realise they were being influenced, at least until it was too late. They were lucky she had a link to the outside world, or …

She braced herself, then inserted her mind into the controlling spellware. The ground shuddered under her feet, the corridor twisting … for a horrified moment, she thought they were falling right out of reality before everything snapped back to normal and they found themselves running into a giant chamber, crammed with pieces of machinery. There was no one to be seen … she glanced from side to side, eyes running over the giant devices as she tried to parse out what they were designed to do. They looked like anthropomorphic machines, the kind of devices one might see in a children’s book intended to explain what happened in a factory, yet … she shook her head as she inspected the network of crystals, metal wires, and charms woven into pieces of magitech. The whole device seemed confusing beyond words. What was it?

“Later,” Jade said. “We need to move.”

Emily nodded, allowing him to take the lead as they moved towards the nexus point. It didn’t seem to be moving … could it be moved? She’d assumed so – the nexus point had appeared small, no bigger than one of her basic batteries – but what if she were wrong? She’d never heard of a nexus point being moved, perhaps it wasn’t even possible. They might be fixed …

The planet orbits the sun, she told herself. The nexus point is constantly moving relative to the star, even if it appears unmoving to anyone living on the planet itself.

It wasn’t a reassuring thought. If the nexus point could be moved, why wasn’t it? The sudden loss of power would disconnect the tower from the multiple dimensions, leaving them trapped in interdimensional space or crushed when all the dimensions collapsed into a single point of raw matter. Probably. She tried to feel out the edges of the dimensional twists as they advanced forward, trying to determine what was really happening. Perhaps the nexus point couldn’t be disengaged in a hurry. Or perhaps she was wrong and it couldn’t be moved at all, not without deactivating it. There was just no way to be sure.

The world seemed to shift, again, as they walked into another corridor. She heard someone whispering up ahead, the sounds seeming to claw their way into her brain without ever quite passing through her ears. The voice was too low for her to make out the words, the sounds echoing on the edge of her awareness without ever quite coming into the light, but she could feel them digging into her soul, trying to expose every last doubt, every last piece of guilt, and turn it against her. It was warped and twisted and perverted and …

A soldier fired, madly. Jade snapped at him to hold fire.

Emily bit her lip, feeling the magic curling around them. It was a poisonous perversion of the world, taking some of her best memories and twisting them into shadowy nightmares that felt disturbingly real. She knew Caleb hadn’t raped her. She knew she hadn’t performed unthinkable sexual acts with King Randor. She knew Void hadn’t been practicing wife husbandry … her stomach churned, the thoughts clinging to her mind like poison. She started to reach out through the chat parchment, then stopped herself. The mental infection could easily reach Caleb if she opened the link too far … shame washed through her. She hadn’t done any of those things and yet they felt real.

“I …” The soldier was shaking. “I …”

Emily caught his hand. He was younger than her, young enough to make her feel old even though she knew there couldn’t be more than five or six years between them at most. His eyes were wide, staring at nothing … he flinched away from her touch, as if her hand burned him. She had no idea what he was seeing, but she knew it wasn’t good. The perversions weren’t illusions caused by nightmare hexes, as far as she could tell. They were things that could have happened … and would, if they were allowed to take root. It bothered her at a very primal level. It was transfiguration on an impossible scale, a spell that made a permanent animal transformation seem a harmless little prank. She wasn’t even sure it was a spell. It was something far more real.

“I didn’t do it,” the soldier was muttering. He sounded like a guilty man trying to protest his innocence, all too aware he didn’t believe himself and no one else did either. “I didn’t do it. I didn’t …”

“No, you didn’t,” Emily said. The man stared at her with frightened eyes. She mentally revised her estimate of his age downwards. Jade had put a lower age limit on recruitment, from what she’d heard, but it wasn’t hard to get papers suggesting you were two or three years older than your chronological age. It was rare for anyone to ask too many questions. “Whatever you saw, it wasn’t real.”

But it was, in one reality, her thoughts reminded her. And if it secures a grip on him …

She bit her lip, again. “Focus.”

“I … I didn’t kill her,” the soldier managed. “She’s still alive. Why did I kill her?”

Emily leaned forward. “What’s your name?”

“Boris,” the soldier said. “I didn’t kill her. I did. I didn’t …”

“They’re messing with your mind,” Emily said. “You have to focus.”

She felt a stab of pity … and guilt, for bringing someone so unprepared into the tower. She wasn’t sure there was any way anyone could have prepared for the nightmare awaiting them. Nightmare hexes drew on doubts and resentments within the target’s mind, twisting them into something horrific … this, whatever it was, was something that could have happened, something that had in an alternate timeline. Her doppelganger’s face flashed through her mind … she couldn’t have become that monster, except she had. In another world

Boris shuddered and staggered forwards. Emily glanced at the others … Jade looked pissed, his fists clenched. Emily didn’t want to know what he was seeing. Cat was looking at her ... the rest of the soldiers appeared to be caught in their own nightmares. Emily gritted her teeth and forced herself to walk forward, half-dragging Boris after her. The world seemed to shiver and twist around her, a thousand alternate realities buzzing at her mind. They were real, if only because she couldn’t imagine such horrors. They had to be.

She touched the chat parchment lightly, parsing out the shifts in space-time and working her way through the trap. The corridor widened suddenly – she had the odd impression she’d opened her eyes, even through her eyes were already open - and she saw the nexus point, glimmering on top of the machinery. The device below the nexus point ring appeared to have grown into something even bigger … she wondered, suddenly, if it was more than just a multidimensional nightmare. It could have been built in multiple alternate timelines, each device different from the rest, and then woven together in a feat of crosstime engineering that was utterly unprecedented. Or …

A figure stood by the device, wearing a hood and a loose cloak that hid their body. Emily couldn’t tell if the figure was young or old, male or female … or even human. She felt the magic field warping and twisting, an instant before a bolt of raw power slammed towards them … existing, somehow, at every moment of time at once. It felt more like a laser beam than a fireball … Boris shoved her out of the way, taking the blow himself, as time spluttered and twisted around them. Emily felt him die … she shuddered, helplessly. Boris hadn’t deserved to die. None of the dead had deserved it.

She reached for her magic and threw a fireball back, somehow unsurprised to see the spell reach the wards around the device and vanish. The wards were tough, powered by raw imagination rather than spellware … crude and unfinished, compared to most, but practically perfect when it was imperative nothing got through the wards to strike the device and the nexus point beyond. God alone knew what would happen if something did … Cat darted forward, throwing a bunch of powerful spells while Jade tried to hack the wards directly. Neither worked. There was enough raw power in the chamber to cover all the cracks in the defences. Bullets didn’t work either.

“Keep him busy,” Emily muttered. “I have an idea …”

She touched the chat parchment again, exploring the local defences. The enemy hadn’t found the surprises they’d left behind … odd, she mused, as she parsed out the cracks in the network. She would have ordered a search if she’d had the slightest clue someone had gone missing … unless the Hierarchist they’d stunned hadn’t reported it. King Randor had had a nasty habit of blaming the messenger for bringing him bad news and this messenger really would have been responsible for the disaster. Emily liked to think she would have admitted the truth, if she’d messed up so badly, but her tutors – whatever their flaws – wouldn’t have brutally murdered her. The Hierarchy might be different.

Her mind oozed into the network, reaching towards the enemy. He was drawing on the nexus point and channelling vast amounts of power … too much. It should have driven him as mad as any necromancer and yet … ice prickled down her spine as she realised where she’d seen such a pattern before. The Warden of Whitehall might appear human, but he was a homunculus, an artificial creature empowered by the nexus point to serve as an interface between the Grandmaster and Whitehall itself. She had to admit it was a clever solution to their dilemma, one she really should have expected. The true nature of the Warden was supposed to be secret, she’d been told, but it wasn't that much of a secret. The Hierarchy could have figured it out long ago or simply come up with the same solution themselves.

She gritted her teeth, then reached out through the network – from inside the defences – and shut the makeshift homunculus down. The wards collapsed abruptly, the dimensions shivering before finally stabilising. A flash of panic shot through her – she knew what had happened at Whitehall – only to fade as she realised the tower was still intact, still connected to the real world. It was over.

Good, she thought, with a flicker of vindictiveness. And now we can figure out what they were doing all along.

 

Chapter Thirty-Three

“Nineteen dead, on our side,” Jade said, quietly. They’d set up a military HQ in a building outside the tower. “At least seventy dead on theirs.”

Emily nodded, although she feared the final death toll would be a great deal higher. A number of slaves had been liberated, but others had died in the fighting or been murdered by their collars to keep them from being freed. The survivors were in shock, some seemingly unaware of what had happened to them until the collars had been removed and others panicking, lashing out helplessly or trapped in their own minds, unable to keep from following orders. They would need to be treated gently, she knew, and watched to make sure they weren’t exploited. It would be years before they recovered, if they ever did.

“Get the slaves back through the portal as quickly as possible,” she said. Thunder rumbled in the distance. A storm was coming. “They can be moved to Cockatrice if need be, or Heart’s Eye.”

Jade shot her a sharp look. “Do you think they’ll be welcome?”

“I’ll pay for it,” Emily said. One of the harder truths she’d had to learn was that people could be remarkably unwelcoming to refugees if they felt personally threatened, directly or indirectly. It was going to be a major headache, one that couldn’t be solved by throwing money at it … probably. She told herself it didn’t matter. The former slaves would recover and go on to live long and happy lives … probably. The ones who suffered permanent damage would have to be watched for the rest of their lives. “Just … make sure they’re treated well.”

“They’re not to blame for their condition,” Jade pointed out.

Emily snorted. Being enslaved was not something voluntary. Emily had never met anyone who donned a slave collar willingly and she was sure she never would. An indentured servant could easily be blamed for falling into debt and committing himself to working it off; a slave, one forced into servitude, couldn’t be. But the real world was rarely that kind. Emily knew, all too well, that being enslaved was like being raped. The victim would often be blamed, even if they had been forced into submission. It was all too easy to ask why someone hadn’t fought to the death rather than let themselves be raped. Or enslaved.

Idiots, she thought, nastily. She knew a hundred spells that could bring a wannabe alpha male to his knees, spells she would never dream of using … spells that would bring the victim down in less than a second, if she threw her morality aside. A vision of her alternate self flashed through her mind, a mocking reminder there was a version of herself that had done exactly that. You can’t blame people for failing to resist the irresistible.

“Do what you can for them,” Emily said. “We have to clean up here.”

“I’ll have to take most of the army back through the portal too,” Jade added. “If someone jumps on us …”

Emily nodded, although she doubted anyone would. Alassa was a popular monarch, surprisingly so given her early life, and few of her more untrustworthy aristocrats had any troops near the capital. But there was no point in putting temptation in their way. They might think that destroying the portal would leave her consort and hundreds of her soldiers stranded on the far side of the Craggy Mountains, hundreds of miles from home … it wouldn’t work for long, Emily was sure, but it might just be long enough for someone to mount a coup. It had happened before and it would happen again.

“I’m sure Alassa will be glad to see you,” she teased. “Don’t let her get too far with the wedding plans.”

Jade snorted. “I’ve found it better to stay out of the way when she starts planning someone’s wedding,” he said. “Best of luck to you.”

“I thought I was supposed to be the bridezilla,” Emily said. “Why can’t I have just a small wedding?”

“It’s a bit late to ask that question.” Jade winked. “You don’t want to wind up like Princess Helen. Or Lady Henrietta.”

He paused. “Although I suppose there’d be no one able to do that to you. Do you even have a guardian now?”

Emily shook her head. “Void is dead,” she said. Technically, she probably should have a guardian … legally speaking. Her apprenticeship had never been formally completed. Practically, the thought was absurd. She was a grown adult who had no intention of taking up another apprenticeship. She didn’t have the time, nor the teacher. “I don’t think anyone will try to argue I’m still a legal child.”

Jade snorted, again. “Clearly, you haven’t spent enough time at court. They’ll use every argument they can to put you down.”

“Noted.” Emily rolled her eyes. “I don’t care about them. If they want to make fools of themselves, that’s not my problem.”

She met his eyes. “Thank you for this, really,” she added. “If we’d had to take the tower ourselves …”

“Yeah,” Jade agreed. Another rumble of thunder split the air. “We nipped it in the bud.”

“Yeah,” Emily echoed. “But we don’t know what it actually was.”

If it really has been stopped, her thoughts added, as she took her leave. The Hierarchy hadn’t been wrong to think it would be difficult for an army to reach the warped city, but … it wouldn’t have cost them anything to build far tougher defences. It smacked of Sauron being unable to comprehend that someone would want to destroy the One Ring and not placing any guards on Mount Doom. Idiot. It would have cost him very little to guard the volcano and gained him much, all of Middle Earth for starters. As long as we don’t know what they were really doing, we’re vulnerable to them trying again.

The air felt electric as she stepped outside, the wind prickling with hints of lightning and tainted magic. Dark clouds appeared to be converging on the city from all directions, eerie lights flickering in the growing darkness. She shuddered as she felt the tower shimmering, still poisoning the land despite being in their hands, and closed her eyes long enough to centre herself. It wasn’t easy. Jade had noted there were a number of soldiers suffering from what sounded like PTSD, men who had only seen a little combat. Emily guessed the tower had affected them on a very primal level.

But what is it? The question hung in her mind as she gazed at the beanstalk. What is it meant to do?

She looked down. The higher dimensions pervading the city appeared to have faded to the point they were little more than holographic flickers, only visible at the corner of her eyes. She couldn’t tell if they were just a trick of the light or something more serious, now the tower had been largely disconnected from the surrounding world. It was impossible to be sure of anything. The whole structure felt like an unexploded bomb, one that had been disarmed and yet needed to be dismantled before it was too late, before something happened to trigger it once again. She wasn’t sure where to begin. Whitehall was complex, but the tower and the surrounding city made Whitehall seem primitive. If the Hierarchy had been working for only a few short months … how could they have done so much so quickly? She didn’t know.

Her lips quirked. Magic. A wizard did it.

“Emily!” Frieda hurried towards her. “You’re alright?”

“Just tired,” Emily said. She rubbed her forehead. How long had they been exploring the city. It felt as if their lives beforehand were nothing more than shadows, faint dreams blotted out by the rising sun. “How are you?”

“The professor insisted on inspecting the ruins,” Frieda said. “Cat’s keeping an eye on him and Caleb is messing with the tower. I think he’ll be busy for a while.”

“Probably,” Emily agreed. The storm was growing closer. The troops had set up a portal just outside the city itself … she could feel the spellware spiking, the magic crackling though the air, as the charms struggled to survive the oncoming nightmare. “We might have to spend the night in the tower.”

Frieda shrugged. “I’ve slept in worse places.”

Emily nodded, wandering towards the low wall and the gatehouse. Dozens of former slaves were being shepherded towards the portal, the troops watching them warily as they moved … it was difficult, if not impossible, to wholly trust anyone who had been enslaved. Their masters could have put commands and compulsions into their minds, buried so deeply the former slaves didn’t know they were there … unaware of their continued victimisation until it was far too late. A truthspell couldn’t uncover a spy or an enemy agent if the poor bastard didn’t know he was a spy, if he didn’t know he wasn't telling the truth. Emily’s earlier thoughts returned to haunt her. The slaves had been victimised once and now they’d be victimised again, human debris left behind in the wake of the Hierarchy’s madcap scheme. And she still didn’t understand the point.

“That could have been me,” Frieda said, quietly. Her eyes were lingering on a young girl who couldn’t be older than twenty, a pale mark on her neck a reminder she’d worn a collar only a few short hours ago. “If I hadn’t met you …”

“You would have done well for yourself,” Emily said, although she wasn’t sure it was true. “You had all the potential you needed.”

She scowled. The smartest person in the world – the person with the potential to be the smartest – wouldn’t get anywhere if they didn’t have the education they needed to develop their mind and the freedom to make use of it. She sometimes wondered what would have happened to her if she’d remained on her homeworld, trapped in poverty; she doubted, somehow, that it would have ended very well. It could easily have been worse. The person with the intellect to cure cancer or develop antigravity or perfect fusion power wouldn’t get anywhere, if they happened to be born a girl in Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. Their life would be nasty, brutish and short, and the human race would be all the worse for it. Frieda would have gotten nowhere fast if she’d stayed in the Cairngorms. No one would ever have known her name.

“Thank you,” Frieda said. Her tone didn’t change. “But without you …?”

The thunder rumbled, again and again. The line of refugees and evacuating troops picked up speed. Emily didn’t blame them. They didn’t have the protective gear they’d need to survive a magic storm and whatever protection the slaves had had was gone now, if the Hierarchy had bothered to protect them at all. She wouldn’t have put money on it. They’d seen no reason to bother. Slaves were cheap, given how many people had been driven from their homes over the past year. Too many had vanished without a trace, their disappearance never reported or recorded. Even the ones who had been noted had never been found.

She glanced at Frieda. “Do you want to go home?”

“I’m not leaving you,” Frieda said, firmly. “Someone has to watch your back.”

Emily nodded. “Better check with Penny too,” she said. “And Cat.”

She felt a twinge of guilt as she saw Jade hurrying towards her, two combat sorcerers right behind him. She wanted him to stay – he was one of the most capable magicians of her generation – and yet she knew Alassa needed her consort back as quickly as possible. Too many aristos who didn’t know her very well, or thought her genitals disqualified her from being a ruling monarch, would start licking their lips and hiring assassins, hoping for a long regency before her daughter assumed the throne. They were going to be in for a nasty surprise, she told herself firmly. Alassa was no shrinking violet and she had allies who were friends … but it would be better to avoid such a crisis. If possible.

God alone knows what’ll happen if I die too, leaving Millie without a Regent, Emily thought, tiredly. They’d be a cat fight over whoever gets the job and another over just how they’ll leave it.

“The prisoners weren’t very informative,” Jade told her. “They may not have been slaves, apparently, but they didn’t know very much. The Hierarchy didn’t seem to consider them anything more than tools.”

“Surprise, surprise,” Frieda said.

Emily frowned. Something was bothering her … if she’d built the tower, and taken possession of a warped city, and enslaved thousands of innocent people … she would have made damn sure the place was protected so heavily it would have been as impregnable as possible. There was no such thing as a truly impregnable fortress – she’d proved that herself, time and time again – but there were plenty of precautions that could have been taken to stop the invasion, or at least make it a great deal harder, and none of them had. Her eyes narrowed as she looked at the tower. Had they managed to surprise an enemy who’d thought their base was hundreds of miles from any possible threat …

Or had it been a little too easy?

“If you can’t get anything out of them, keep them prisoner in Alexis,” Emily said, after a moment. Her mind was elsewhere. “If they’re oathbound …”

“I don’t believe so,” a combat sorcerer said. His eyes held the same mixture of awe and unspoken challenge she’d seen from a dozen others, as they struggled to comprehend the gulf between her reputation and her appearance. She hoped he wasn’t intending to do anything stupid. She had nothing to prove, certainly not to a man who had proven himself too. He wouldn’t have been a combat sorcerer if he hadn’t. It was difficult to fake competence in front of a first-year student and Jade was a hell of a lot more experienced than any firstie. “There’s no hint of an oath barring their words, just … ignorance. They can’t tell us what they don’t know.”

“No,” Emily agreed. There was no point in carrying out an interrogation, either through truth spells and potions or less savoury methods, when the subject didn’t know anything useful. It was odd, though. “How capable are they, magically speaking?”

“Hard to say,” the sorcerer said. The air prickled as lightning flashed overhead. “A couple might have graduated, the remainder come across as privately-taught … they were wielding staffs, true, but I don’t think they were powering them. Not supremely capable, perhaps, yet …”

He shrugged. “I don’t think they pose a threat, not to us.”

“Don’t take them lightly,” Emily ordered. “Use potion to keep them under control and don’t leave them alone.”

“See to it,” Jade added. He waved for the sorcerers to go on to the portal, then met Emily’s eyes. “I can stay, if you like …?”

Emily’s earlier thoughts mocked her. She was tempted. But she knew better.

“Alassa will miss you,” she said. “I’ll see you once I work out what they’ve been doing here.”

“I’ll take care of her,” Frieda added. “Don’t worry about it.”

Emily grinned as Jade quirked his eyebrows. “We’ll be fine,” she said. “Just don’t let Alassa go mad.”

Jade laughed, then nodded towards the portal. “We’ll leave it set up here,” he said. “The spellware is supposed to be strong enough to stand up to a storm” – he glanced at the eerie sky – “and you have enough components to put together another one when you’re ready to leave. Or the horses to get home. We’ve also shipped in enough food to keep you alive …”

“Great,” Frieda said, in a tone of mock-enthusiasm. “More ration bars.”

“You’ll be glad to have them when you run out of fresh food,” Jade said, shooting Emily a mischievous look. “There’s a bunch of fruit, vegetables and meat wrapped in preserving spells, but its bulky. I’d suggest eating that first and saving the ration bars as long as possible.”

Frieda made a rude sound. “You do realise we’ve both spent years in Martial Magic?”

Emily shrugged. She’d never been good at reading people, but she knew Jade well enough to understand what he was really trying to do. He knew he needed to get back to his wife before it was too late and, at the same time, he felt guilt for leaving Emily and the rest of the team so far beyond the Craggy Mountains. He’d never been inclined to abandon anyone – Emily had seen him helping younger students escape, putting his life in danger to save them – and he couldn’t help feeling torn. Emily hoped Caleb would feel the same way about her. Their relationship was satisfying, but it was very different.

“Yes,” Jade said, tartly. “But you never know if someone is paying attention until its too late.”

“We were,” Emily agreed him. “Don’t worry about us.”

She lowered her voice. “Go.” There was no time for a long drawn-out goodbye. “That storm is getting closer. You don’t want to be here when it arrives.”

“Or you will be trapped with us,” Frieda said. “A fate worse than death.”

Jade made a show of nodding, then turned and hurried off. The last of the troops were departing, leaving a damaged city and abandoned earthworks in their wake. The portal glowed brightly as they vanished, Jade making sure to be the last to leave. Emily let out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding as lightning flashed again, thunder rumbling seconds later. The storm was going to be bad.

“Come on,” she said. The tower was the safest place right now. It might be as warped and twisted as the city, but she’d seen lightning strike the beanstalk without doing any real damage. “We’d better hurry.”

But she couldn’t help feeling, as they turned to run back to the tower, that they were missing something.

 

Chapter Thirty-Four

The rain hit as they were nearing the tower.

Emily cast a spell hastily to shield them as thunder rumbled overhead, then muttered for Frieda to run. The rain was charged with tainted magic, threatening to dissolve her shield as they picked up speed. She could feel it oozing into her spells, twisting and warping them into something else – something worse – as the tower loomed up in front of them. Water splashed around their feet and against their clothes, coming at them as if the water was flowing down invisible pipes and falling from invisible rooftops. It took her a moment to realise the water was flowing through, or around, the multiple dimensions, making it difficult to predict which way it would flow until it reached the lower edge and gravity reasserted itself. Some streams appeared to be flowing up into the sky, others twisting in and out of reality. It was a deeply disturbing sight.

She breathed a sigh of relief as they reached the tower and ducked into the entrance hall. The bodies had been removed – she couldn’t help feeling a twinge of guilt – and some of the equipment had been pushed to one side, ensuring there was plenty of room for her to dry herself. Her finger prickled as she cast the spell, dispelling the charged water and absorbing what she could of the tainted magic. It was dangerous to absorb too much, but she saw no choice. The rain was falling heavier now, water pooling outside the tower. There was so much magic washing from the skies that a single spark could cause disaster.

Frieda stood at the entrance and watched flashes of lightning passing overhead. Emily joined her, shaking her head in disbelief as orange-red streams of light pulsed amidst the clouds or stabbed down to strike the mountainsides. It appeared to be in slow motion, as if the lighting existed for more than a second or two or if time itself had slowed down … not impossible, she reflected, in the Blighted Lands. Each flash revealed hints of alternate realities, of things lurking in the shadows or scratching at the dimensional walls. She felt as if she were trapped in a horror movie, facing something all the more scarier because she couldn’t see it. The threat was always a disappointment when it came into the light.

“The water isn’t coming near the tower itself,” Frieda commented. Her face was streaked with sweat. The air was growing warmer, gusts of hot air brushing against them as they stared into the darkening world. “Look.”

Emily followed her gaze. Frieda was right. The water was splitting away from the tower, even though it should have logically flowed into the building. Invisible wards or twisted dimensions …? She didn’t know. The water appeared to be spinning around the tower … she had a sudden sense of a waterwheel, one that drained the magic from the water even as it used it to turn the gears and grind corn. Or something, anything, else. She made a mental note to draw up a plan to cleansing the water, further north, in hopes of speeding up the process of making the Blighted Lands habitable once again. It would work on a small scale, but every little helped. Perhaps she could use it to power a spell to cleanse the land on a far greater scale.

You can do anything, if you have enough power and the ability to figure out how to apply it, she reminded herself. You just need to use your mind.

Penny joined them, her face grim. “We’re cut off, aren’t we?”

“It looks that way,” Emily said. Sparkles of raw magic were clearly visible, flickering bursts of random spellware … there was no way to predict how they’d interact. One might as well pour a dozen potions into a cauldron and watch the result from a safe distance. Some would explode, others would do something worse … or nothing, if the brews cancelled each other out. “The rain won’t last forever.”

The mountains lit up, just for a second, as lightning flashed again. Emily felt confirned despite the sheer size of the tower, all too aware they couldn’t hope to reach the portal … if the portal was still intact. She closed her eyes, reaching out with her mind, but sensed nothing. The portal was lost in a haze of tainted magic. If they had to make their way out … she glanced at the crates Jade had left them, piled up against the far wall. They had enough protective gear and supplies to walk back to Kuching, if need be.

A thought struck her. “What about the horses?”

“They’re safe,” Penny said. “I stabled them in a smaller room. They should be fine as long as they’re fed and watered.”

Emily allowed herself a moment of relief, mingled with irritation. She’d overlooked the horses … she kicked herself, mentally, for forgetting them. They needed the beasts to get home, if they couldn’t open another portal or teleport, and … she shook her head. It had been a dumb mistake and she was lucky Penny had taken care of it. She’d have to ask Cat to commend Penny. She deserved it.

“Keep an eye on the rain,” Emily said. She had no idea how long it would last. She’d been in places with intense but brief rainstorms and places where it had seemed to rain constantly, with no let up. “There shouldn’t be any trouble as long as it doesn’t get into the tower …”

As long as it doesn’t start meddling with the pocket dimensions, she mused. The tower was practically built out of raw magic and twisted dimensions, which meant it was either completely immune to the rain or dangerously vulnerable. This can’t be the first rainstorm since the tower was built, can it?

“Of course,” Frieda said. “I’ll be here.”

Emily nodded, then turned and made her way further into the tower. It still felt creepy, an eerie silence spreading through the air as she walked through the maze of corridors. There was no sense it was changing around her, that she had been caught in yet another trap, but it still felt almost painfully wrong. The structure reminded her, in places, of someone caught and frozen mid-transfiguration, their body caught between two states. Stone and metal blurred into … something organic, something that looked painfully unnatural. Something that didn’t belong.

Caleb waved to her as she entered a chamber, his face grim. “As far as I can tell, we’re alone,” he said. “But I still feel as if we’re being watched.”

Emily nodded. The entire structure might be alive on some level or simply pervaded with spells to allow the masters to keep an eye on everyone else in the tower. Whitehall had hundreds of charms intended to ensure students didn’t go too far with their practical jokes, charms that could easily be abused by people with bad intentions. Emily knew the staff had done everything they could to prevent voyeurism, channelling the spells through the Warden to ensure no human mind could peek into every last chamber within the school, but … she scowled, all too aware there was no such thing as a perfect security precaution. Someone with the right set of skills could bypass the restrictions … here, without any sort of obligation to protect privacy as much as possible, there could be no privacy at all. It made her nervous about closing her eyes and trying to sleep anywhere near the tower.

She shook her head. “Did you find anything useful?”

“Very little,” Caleb said. “If this place is intended to be a permanent settlement, it’s a very odd one.”

He waved a hand at the wall. “No bedrooms, no beds. No kitchens, no obvious dining rooms. No classrooms or spellchambers or libraries, no toilets or showers or anything. It’s just … weird.”

“There might be sections we haven’t found,” Emily said, although she knew what he meant. The tower was odd. She would have expected a multidimensional structure to have living space for a crew, if not visitors. “Have you located any command centre?”

“No, unless it’s part of the device they established around the nexus point,” Caleb said. “I tried to trace the magic flowing through the structure and drew a blank.”

Emily wasn’t surprised. The internal logic of a multidimensional structure was often difficult to follow, like reading a book so rapidly the main character was seemingly both an ignorant naïf and a man who knew better, his development not so much crammed into a single page as he existed at all points of development simultaneously. For all she knew, some magic ran back in time to trigger shifts in power that would reach into the future, then ricochet back into the past. It was one hell of a tangled web, one she would have thought impossible. What was the point of the structure? It made no sense.

Time travel is like playing with fire, she recalled Doctor Who saying, except you can get burnt before you light the match.

“I’ll take a look at it,” Emily said. She couldn’t hear the rain any longer, but she could feel it nagging at the edge of her mind. “If we can figure out what the device is for, we can figure out what they were trying to do.”

“At least it’s in our hands now,” Caleb said. “Maybe they intended to mass-produce nexus points.”

“Maybe,” Emily said. The sense they’d missed something was growing stronger. “But do they need more than one?”

She gave him a quick hug, unwilling to do more when it felt as if they were being watched, then walked down the corridor. Professor Serigala was in the next chamber, examining a piece of … something … that thrust out of the floor and into the air … Emily frowned as she felt dimensions shifting around the object, blurring together in a manner that made it very hard, almost impossible, to get a good look at it. It was a block of stone … it was a monolith … it was an obelisk … it was something that simply didn’t belong. Her eyes tried to skitter over it, as if they didn’t want to see it. It wasn’t a simple obscurification charm. It was something far – far – more primal.

“Lady Emily,” Serigala said. “What do you make of this?”

Emily shivered, recalling the dark city near Whitehall and the far darker city near the South Pole. The obelisk seemed to stretch all the way into infinity, not unlike the tower itself … she had the uneasy sense the obelisk was actually connected to the tower, that it was actually looking back at her. The lower base was covered in runes, each one practically three-dimensional … she blinked as she realised they were practically magitech, maybe a little more advanced than the holographic runes Adam had devised but still very much along the same lines. The thought was oddly reassuring. The obelisk might be alien, yet it wasn’t completely beyond her understanding.

“It’s remarkable,” Emily said. “What is it?”

“Faerie,” Serigala said. He shot her a mischievous look. “And as for what it actually does, I cannot say.”

Emily reached out with her mind, then caught herself. The obelisk was so big, mentally speaking, that looking at it was like staring into a blinding light. It was like the tower in more ways than one, so real it made the mundane world feel like a shadow, nothing more than an mirage that would vanish the moment someone took a close look. The runes were bigger than she’d thought, channelling vast amounts of power through dimensions her mind couldn’t follow … she shuddered, recalling all the horror stories of people and objects who’d been touched by the Faerie. They had never been the same again, changed in ways no human magic could match or undo. The lucky ones had died quickly.

“It’s part of the tower,” she said, slowly. Had the builders learnt how to construct the tower through studying the obelisk? Or had they simply taken advantage of its multidimensional nature, turning it into the base of their tower? Or …or what? “What are they doing?”

“There’ll be enough here to keep us going for years,” Serigala said. He smiled. She couldn’t help thinking the brilliant smile made him look years younger. “This is the greatest find in a hundred years, Lady Emily, and it is all mine. Ours.”

Emily had to smile. “Definitely ours.”

“They’ll be talking about us for centuries,” Serigala continued. “Our names will go down in history!”

“We need to know what the builders were doing first,” Emily said. The sense of being watched was growing stronger. She had the uneasy sense the obelisk was looking back at her. Her back itched as she turned away. “I need to figure that out before we risk bringing in anyone else.”

She forced herself to walk away, her back pickling until she’d left the chamber and made her way down to the nexus point chamber. The nexus point was still there – she snorted at herself, then frowned as she realised the idea of the nexus point being moved wasn’t as impossible as it seemed any longer – and the rest of the machinery appeared unmoved. She leaned forward, studying the piles of twisted metal. It was a truly weird construction, as if whoever had built it had put together a bunch of machines and then crammed them together with enough force to turn them into one, melding threads of metal together seemingly at random. She could sense magic pulsing through the grid, but … what was it doing? Where was it going? It made no sense.

Don’t touch it at once, she reminded herself. Dismantling almost any spell was tricky at the best of times, and when the spell was connected to a nexus point pulling on the wrong thread could lead to a colossal explosion. A simple spell would still release a surge of magic when dispelled and this one had a near-infinite power supply. Parse it out first, work out what it actually does, and then see if you can take it apart.

She reached for her notebook and started to jot down the different spell components one by one. Professor Lombardi had taught her to be careful and precise, to keep the spellware as simple as possible; Void had told her, more than once, not to become obsessed with complexity to the point it overwhelmed common sense. The more complex the spellware, the greater the chance of unexpected and unpredictable complications … or of someone finding a gap in the defences and hacking their way into the network. Whoever had crafted this piece of spellware had clearly never listened to either of them, an act of monumental carelessness that bothered her. The Hierarchy appeared to have a split personality. One moment, it was backing a revolution and exploiting it; the next, it was letting her get the better of them. It just made no sense.

Unless this is just one huge diversion, she mused. What was happening back home? She ddn’t know. But Jade wouldn’t have been able to bring his army here, briefly, if everything had gone to hell back home.

She shook her head and kept working, picking her way through the charms. They blurred together oddly, some seeming to cancel each other out and others appearing to exist in total isolation. The magitech at the base of the device reminded her of the obelisk, yet … she scowled as she studied it as best she could, not daring to pull it apart. Not yet. Perhaps she could disconnect the nexus point, carry it outside and watch the tower collapse ... assuming it could be done without killing themselves in the process. Or trapping themselves,

Professor Serigala entered the chamber. “I couldn’t figure out how to move the obelisk,” he said, shortly. He sounded more focused than normal, irritation clearly gnawing at his mind. “It appears to be firmly wedged into the tower.”

“Don’t try,” Emily told him. She didn’t look up from her work. The spellware just kept looping around, as if it were trying to hide from her … and doing it in a manner that drew attention to its existence. Odd, to say the least. “Just … we’ll just have to see what we can do.”

The professor snorted. “What do you think you can do?”

Emily frowned. “It was too easy,” she said. The more she thought about it, the more it worried her. “The nexus point is a source of near-unlimited power. The defenders should have been able to put up a better fight. Why didn’t they?”

Serigala cleared his throat. “Perhaps they weren’t expecting us.”

“We were attacked on the way,” Emily reminded him. Her thoughts felt sluggish. Being so close to the nexus point was taking its toll. “They knew we were coming.”

She frowned, feeling her head starting to pound. Again. How long had it been since she’d slept? She didn’t know … hours? It felt like days. She was in no state to start poking into incredibly complex and dangerous pieces of spellware, let alone dismantle what was starting to feel like an unexploded bomb. Pulling the wrong wire might cause an explosion, according to the movies, and she had no idea which wire was the right wire. If there even was a right wire …

Perhaps that’s the point, she thought, numbly. They let us take the nexus point because we’re held hostage to its continued survival, because we can’t dismantle the device without risking our lives and everything else. It doesn’t matter who has possession as long as it remains intact.

Her blood ran cold. We used chat parchments to hack the system. Why can’t they do the same? Why can’t they control the device, whatever it is, from a distance? Why …

And then she heard the scream.

 

Chapter Thirty-Five

“Stay here!”

Emily turned and ran back up the corridor, cursing under her breath. The scream had sounded feminine, but neither Frieda nor Penny were given to screaming. Cat and Caleb had to be on their way too … she grasped for her magic, cursing her exhaustion as she darted through the first set of chambers and up to the entrance hall. Her power reserves felt dangerously drained … she kicked herself, mentally, for not eating more. Whatever had happened, it had come at the worst possible time.

She slowed as she reached the hall and peered into the chamber, careful not to expose herself. The door was still wide open, the rain pelting down outside … she shivered as she saw flickers of lightning darting through the poisoned rain. It was so heavy it looked as if they were standing on the wrong side of a waterfall, watching the water pouring down from above. There was no sign of anyone, no sign of … she heard a groan and turned, spotting Frieda lying on the ground. Blood was pooling around her head … Emily threw caution to the winds and ran over to her. The wound looked nasty … she muttered a healing spell, hoping desperately it hadn’t caused permanent damage. There were few physical injuries that couldn’t be treated, if the victim reached a healer in time, but mental damage was something else. The taboo on trying to heal any sort of psychological problem was far too strong to be challenged openly, even by her.

Frieda shifted against Emily, breath coming in fits and starts. Emily checked her pulse – erratic, but present – and then looked around for Penny. There was no sign of her. A flash of paranoia shot through Emily as she started to stand, reaching out with her senses. Penny wouldn’t have attacked Frieda, would she? It was massively out of character … she felt a twinge of magic further down a side corridor and forced herself to go look. Penny stood there, her face so completely blank Emily knew her free will had been destroyed. Whatever had hit her had hit her hard.

Something moved, behind her. Emily threw herself aside as a bolt of superpowered magic crashed past her and vanished into the distance, so powerful she was certain she was facing a necromancer at point-blank range. She hit the ground and rolled over, drawing on her magic to boost her alertness. She was going to pay for that later, and she’d be in real trouble if she ran out of energy before winning the fight, but she saw no other choice. The girls were out of it, the boys were nowhere to be seen … the professor would be worse than useless in the fight. She scrambled to her feet as another blast of magic came right at her, her skin prickling as it swept over her head and slammed into the walls. It evaporated a second later, the raw magic fading into the background. Emily would have been impressed if she hadn’t been fighting for her life. Her enemy was fuelling the tower!

Her opponent was a blur, his face lost behind a haze … her eyes tried to flicker over his face, as if they didn’t want to believe he was there at all. His hands were moving in a complex pattern … it took her a second to realise what he was doing, then cast a counterspell as he launched another wave of raw magic at her. The impact stunned her, driving her back against the wall. She bit her lip hard, using the pain to focus. The haze parted, just for a second. A very familiar face looked back at her.

Emily stared. “Resolute?”

The Great Sorcerer of Celeste – the former Great Sorcerer, who had been stripped of his magic - stared back at her. He had been a handsome man once, dressed in robes that leant him an air of solid dignity mingled with the certainty he was doing the right thing; now, he looked like a tramp, his robes replaced by stained rags that seemed on the verge of coming apart. His brown hair had turned white, his eyes pulsed with madness and hatred … the cool calculating man she’d met, the one who had justified horror and bigotry in oh-so-reasonable tones, had been replaced by a lunatic. And his magic …

Resolute lunged forward, his magic pulsing around him. He shouldn’t have had magic at all. Emily had given Adam the curse King Randor had cast on her, the curse that blocked and drained magic once and for all … she’d told him to use it only as a last resort, if there was no other choice. She’d checked the results afterwards and Resolute had been powerless, reduced to the same helplessness in the face of magic as the mundanes he’d ground into the dirt. She hadn’t wanted to be merciful to him, not after everything he’d done … how the hell had he gotten his magic back? It should have been impossible.

You got your magic back, her thoughts pointed out. Why can’t he?

Emily felt his fingers curving around her throat, ready to choke the life out of her. She brought her knee up, slamming it into his groin. He howled in pain, giving her a chance to break free and run … up close, his power was shimmering out of control, his body threatening to burn up as he stumbled after her. His magic wasn’t as controlled as she’d thought, closer to a necromancer’s raw fury than the spells she’d seen him use earlier. His eyes hadn’t gone red, a sure sign of a necromancer, but … what had he done? She knew how she’d regained her magic … had he somehow done the same? Perhaps she’d underestimated his remaining allies. She’d assumed they’d shun him for lack of magic, but if they were genuine friends …

“You did this to me,” Resolute howled. The raw anger in his tone boiled through his magic as he cast another spell. “You did this …”

Technically, Adam did, Emily thought, although Resolute had credited her with all of Adam’s accomplishments in the last few years. The bigoted fool had been unable to wrap his head around the idea of a mundane creating magitech … Emily had no idea why he’d engaged in mental gyrations to convince himself that Emily had given Adam the credit as part of some long-term plan, but it hardly mattered. What did you do to yourself?

Her mind raced as she cast another force punch, using the blow to cover another spell. His magic was a solid wall of sheer madness, the world rippling around him as he brought his power to bear on her. He was like a necromancer, lashing out with naked force rather than anything more elaborate. Resolute was experienced enough to know the dangers of messing with necromancy … had he been able to perform the rite without his magic? Emily had no idea. It should have been impossible, but she’d seen a lot of things that had been impossible once upon a time. The subtle analysis spell flickered into his raw power, noting that he didn’t have protections so much as a wall of magic surrounding him …

Her blood ran cold as she saw his eyes shift and change, something else peering out through them. Something inhuman … a demon. Resolute had summoned a demon and made a deal and … she cursed under her breath, she hadn’t even considered the possibility, and forced herself to think. The demon wasn’t in control – probably – but it was just a matter of time before it took over or Resolute’s body and mind burned out under the stress of possession. She darted back as another blast of magic came at her, too strong to deflect, and glanced behind her. Where were Caleb and Cat? They could both help her … Resolute howled the howl of the damned and came forward, magic warping the world around his fingertips. Emily started to put together another spell as the demon howled too, utterly inhuman eyes resting on top of Resolute’s face … it clicked, suddenly, that it resembled the city outside. The demon was a multidimensional being too.

Another spell struck her defences, picking her up and throwing her down the corridor. Emily let it happen as he marched after her, muttering a levitation spell as she flew into the next chamber and went up. There was too much magic in the air for an illusion to last for long, but she cast an image of herself and send it down anyway, in hopes of distracting him long enough to come up with something better. The more he spent his power – no, the demon’s power – the sooner he’d burn himself out. Resolute crashed into the chamber, spotted the illusion and launched a burst of raw power at it. The blast went right through the translucent illusion and slammed into a pile of machinery. Emily blinked as it exploded … and nothing happened. She’d expected a far greater explosion.

Resolute laughed. It was no longer wholly human.

Emily summoned her magic and dropped down, slamming a handful of crude curses and hexes into his back while slipping something more dangerous into his magic. The surge of power surprised her … she channelled it through the edge of her wards, shaping it into something that might start ripping his very limited spellware apart. He howled again and made a slapping motion with one hand, his magic smacking into her and throwing her back. His magic had always been a part of him, like hers, but this was different. He felt like a man wearing a suit of powered armour.

He stood and glared at her, his eyes glowing with madness. “Where is my daughter?”

Emily had a different question. “What are you doing here?”

“They told me they could give me back my magic, if I killed you,” Resolute said. His face was flickering, the demonic visage slowly coming into reality, impressing itself on top of him. “If I fought you. If I stopped you …”

“You attacked us?” Emily’s mind raced, despite the tiredness threatening to overcome her. The tower was draining her magic too. If Resolute had been desperate … she kicked herself, mentally, for not killing or imprisoning him. She should have known her cruel mercy would come back to bite her. The man had deserved to suffer, after the nightmare he’d unleashed, but perhaps a lifetime in a cell would have been a better option. He’d been so desperate after a few weeks without magic that he’d made the bargain without hesitation. “Why …?”

She forced herself to think. Demons could see the future. If one was involved here …

Resolute’s face shifted. “Where is my daughter?”

“She’s better off without you,” Emily said, bluntly. There were few worse father figures than her stepfather, but Resolute was a monster all the more monstrous for being so calm and reasonable and dangerous. “She’ll be fine …”

He jabbed a finger at her. She ducked as a blast of raw power shot over her head, nearly singeing her hair, then tossed back a pair of ward-cracker spells. A skilled magician would have no trouble deflecting them … would he? She followed up with a simple tripping spell … Resolute battered them down with a wave of magic, then came after her. Emily shaped a third spell, turning the air around him into pure oxygen, and threw a fireball. The explosion made him flinch, at least, but it didn’t do any real harm. His face was starting to look more ragged. She knew it wasn’t a good sign.

Caleb appeared, his face pale. “Look out …”

Resolute howled and hurled a spell at Caleb. He threw himself aside as the blast crashed into the walls and vanished. Emily could feel magic curling through the tower, her hair prickling as she sensed the power surges growing stronger. It felt as if something was about to happen, something bad. Resolute’s skin split, eerie inhuman light pouring like blood from the wound. The demon was growing stronger … Emily motioned for Caleb to get back, then threw a handful of spells herself. None were very dangerous, but anything that forced him to burn up power was a good thing. Hopefully.

“Get back, Emily snapped. Resolute was turning his attention back to her. “Go to the packs. Get the thingy.”

Caleb glanced at her, then turned and ran away. Resolute laughed, the mad sound echoing through the air and following Caleb down the corridor. Emily hoped he’d keep running, that he’d understood what she’d been telling him to do … most young men would sooner die than be thought a coward, even if a tactical retreat was the best possible thing to do. Cat and Jade wouldn’t let the taunt pass, she knew. They’d let themselves be provoked into doing something stupid. Caleb was a little more practically-minded …

But where the hell was Cat?

“You intend to marry that man?” Resolute sounded absurdly concerned, as if he were a kindly uncle offering good advice. Emily gritted her teeth. He sounded almost like his old self. “He ran, leaving his bride-to-be in deadly danger.”

He giggled, the madness growing stronger. “What a man. What a father. What a coward. You must be so proud.”

Emily gritted her teeth. The words stung, even though she knew better. “I didn’t want him to watch me tearing you apart,” she said, instead. Alassa could have pulled it off. She could speak with a tone dripping in arrogance. Emily wasn’t sure it worked for her. It sounded more like a pathetic attempt to cover for her boyfriend. “He doesn’t like that part of me.”

Resolute snickered, then raised a hand in one smooth motion. Emily darted back, cursing under her breath as a blast of magic slammed into the walls again. The sheer power was daunting … the demon was breaking free, silent laughter battering against her mind, and she had no idea where the magic was actually going. There were odd little shimmers flickering through the tower. She cast a simple illusion spell, then summoned smoke, then turned and ran. It wouldn’t deceive him for long, if at all, but it didn’t matter. She needed him to follow her.

“Pathetic,” Resolute said. She could feel him walking after her, he and the demon slowly eating his soul. His magic was shifting into something else, something bad. “Such a man could only put an inferior child in you. A child without magic …”

“I stole your magic,” Emily said, tauntingly. “I can give it to my child.”

Resolute roared and came after her. Emily picked up speed and ran into the hall, back to Frieda and Penny and … she barely had a second to note Caleb before Resolute ran into the hall himself, right into the trap. Caleb triggered the magitech necromancer-killer and ducked. Emily turned, just in time to see Resolute stagger to his knees. His entire form blurred, something utterly inhuman pressing its way into reality, trying to take his place … Emily had an impression of teeth and claws and cruel, very cruel, eyes. They burned into her soul … Resolute screamed in pain, the demonic magic dissolving into nothingness. The demon looked at her, then vanished. Resolute collapsed, his body coming apart at the seams. There wasn’t enough left for him to have a hope of survival.

Emily forced herself to walk up to him. He was gasping for breath, his eyes wide … Emily could see his exposed lungs, his damaged heart. His eyes met hers, just for a second, silently pleading for a mercy she couldn’t grant … she wondered, suddenly, just what happened to fools who allowed themselves to be possessed by a demon. Did they go to hell? Was there a hell? Or did they wind up somewhere else? Or eaten …

“Your daughter is fine,” she said. It was the only thing she could offer. “I’ll make sure of it.”

Resolute’s lips moved silently – Emily couldn’t tell if he was trying to thank her or curse her – before his entire body crumbled into dust. Emily met Caleb’s eyes, just for a second, then hurried over to Frieda. The wound had healed nicely, her eyes widening …

“Lie still,” Emily said. She motioned for Caleb to see to Penny. “Can you hear me?”

Frieda nodded. “I …”

“Lie still,” Emily told her. She held up three fingers. “How many fingers am I holding up?”

“Three,” Frieda said. “Why …?”

Emily hesitated. Head injuries were dangerous, as well as unpredictable. There was no way to be sure Frieda was safe and well, not when she could be bleeding internally or … Emily scowled as she glanced at the remains of Resolute’s body. The whole affair made no sense. If Resolute had been following them from the start, why hadn’t he tried to kill them earlier? He could have done a great deal more damage, if he’d wished. What was the point?

Cat appeared, looking grim. “Some of the devices are lighting up,” he said. “I …”

He froze as he saw the damage. “What happened?”

“Take care of everyone,” Emily snapped. It was hard to keep the anger out of her voice. Where the hell had he been? His apprentice and Emily’s friend had been hurt. He should have been watching over them. “I’ll see if I can disconnect the nexus point from the tower.”

Caleb looked up. “Emily, that could collapse everything …”

Emily glanced outside. The rain had stopped. “Get everyone out,” she said. There were plenty of places to take shelter, even if the portal was gone. Her instincts were telling her she had to hurry. Something was about to happen. Something bad. “I think we’re running out of time.”

 

Chapter Thirty-Six

The sense of impending doom only grew worse as Emily hurried back to the nexus point.

She could feel it, nagging at her mind. The sense that something was about to happen, the sense that something was waiting to be born … she could feel it, an apprehension that made it hard to think clearly, that made her want to freeze. She wasn’t prone to panic – she’d been through too much to be easily scared – but now she felt unreasoning terror gnawing at her very soul. She wanted to run and yet she feared there was nowhere to run. If the Faerie were truly coming back …

They’re mad, she thought, although madness was hardly rare where powerful sorcerers were concerned. You can’t bargain with an elemental force.

She ran into the nexus point chamber and stared at the device. It was doing nothing, as far as she could tell, the haze of magic seemingly waiting for someone to tell it what to do. The nexus point glowed at the top, a simple ring that mushroomed into a monstrosity bigger than she could imagine every time she looked at it. She told herself it could be moved, that the device – whatever it was – couldn’t function without a source of vast power. Sweat prickled down her back as she examined the spellware, trying desperately to figure out how to separate it from the nexus point. Perhaps if she drained the power herself, let it flow into the wards, or channelled it through a makeshift portal into a battery … it might work. She couldn’t think of anything better.

Professor Serigala was examining runes carved into the wall. “You do know, Lady Emily, that these markings are symbolic? They’re not …”

“Not now,” Emily snapped. She could feel time running out, feel the seconds ticking away. The demons could see the future … if the Hierarchy had planned for her decision to shut the device down, what did they have in mind to stop her? The wards weren’t shifting, weren’t turning against her … she didn’t know why. “I need to think!”

She leaned forward. The spellware was complex, almost absurdly so. It looped around time and time again, feeding on itself like a snake trying to bite its own tale … a memory surfaced, something she’d seen years ago, only to fade when she tried to look at it properly. She put the thought aside as she worked desperately to trace the spell components, trying to figure out what did what. Void would have laughed, part of her mind noted, at the sheer craziness of the spellware. It was so complex it was utterly self-defeating. It made no sense.

“The runes come from several different language-groupings,” Serigala continued. He sounded so absent-minded Emily was almost envious. “Some are warnings, but others are rude notes.”

“Go back to the entrance and get out,” Emily ordered. Cat and Caleb would take care of the professor, either bundling him through the portal or getting him on horseback and galloping away. He could complain afterwards, when the whole affair was over. “Now!”

Serigala sounded pained. “But Lady Emily …”

“Go,” Emily snapped. “Now!”

Something rippled, at the corner of her awareness, as she opened her mind and peered into the device. It was complex and yet … the linkages kept flickering in and out of existence, as if there was nothing truly solid about them. She felt as if she were gazing into something fully as complex as the organic spellware that made up the heart of Whitehall, the spellware she’d helped design and build, yet something that should have needed years to create … the magiwriter around her wrist grew warmer, just for a second, as she peered closer. Had they developed a magiwriter too? It wasn’t impossible, if they’d figured out the true potential of magitech. The Hierarchy didn’t sneer at technology just because it didn’t use magic.

It makes no sense, she mused, as she parsed her way through the incants. It looked like a poorly-written piece of computer code, with so much garbage added that it was hard to tell just what was important and what wasn’t. She recalled a handful of lessons in which her teachers had pointed to entire chunks of wasted coding, lines upon lines of computer code that weren’t connected to the real program and could be erased without doing any damage. What were they doing …?

Her eyes narrowed as she finally managed to get a glimpse of the complete network of spellware. The linkages to the nexus point weren’t hidden, they didn’t exist! The device wasn’t connected … it had never been connected. The haze had obscured the truth, but now … her blood ran cold as she checked and rechecked. Whatever the device was designed to do, it wasn’t drawing on the nexus point. Up close, it didn’t seem to be doing anything.

“Lady Emily?” Professor Serigala was still in the chamber. “What’s happening?”

Emily swallowed, hard. Years ago, she’d read a book about a con artist who’d claimed to have designed and built a brilliant new stardrive, one faster than anything that had gone before. It would have worked if it hadn’t been for a pair of meddling kids, who’d worked out that the drive structure was hollow and the stardrive itself little more than a trick to convince corporations to pay the designer a huge amount of money … he would have taken the money and run, leaving the buyers to discover their mistake and endure the embarrassment. Emily couldn’t help feeling she’d been conned too, that the device – so big and powerful – had drawn her attention away from the real problem. If the device wasn’t real, if it was nothing more than a diversion, what was real?

“I think we’ve been conned,” Emily said. The wards were still shifting. The sense of growing potential pulsing on the air mocked her. “This device doesn’t seem to do anything. It’s just a decoy.”

She leaned forward, cold certainty battling growing fear. If they had been conned …

The nexus point was real. She was sure of it. There was no way to fake such power … not without having it in the first place. And if it wasn’t connected to the device … what was it connected to? She reached out with her mind, gingerly examining the spellware around the pocket dimension … no, the bubble in space-time that held the link to the nexus point’s power source. If she inserted some spellware of her own … her eyes narrowed as the spellware sank into the system, taking up root in a manner that nagged at her mind. What was really happening?

“I suppose that’s one way of looking at it,” Serigala said. His voice was calm. Too calm. “But it does serve as a way to study spell components, and how they interact to produce spellware?”

Emily felt ice prickling down her back. “Professor?”

She turned, slowly. Professor Serigala stood there, close enough to worry her without getting too close. He looked different somehow, the absent-minded aging academic slowly giving way to something more dangerous. She could feel his presence growing stronger, more real … she reached for her magic, carefully putting together a spell, as he smiled. The expression looked out of place on his face, as if he wasn’t quite used to wearing it. If …

“I’m afraid Professor Serigala died a long time ago,” Serigala said. “He was consumed, everything he was dissected and added to the multiplicity. To me. It has been a long time, Lady Emily, has it not? Perhaps a thousand years, give or take a few?”

His face shifted, shimmering into a complex structure of multicoloured light. Emily felt panic yammering at the back of her mind, one thought dominating all others. Mimic! She bit her lip hard, readying a simple cancellation spell. Mimics weren’t real creatures, no matter what they seemed, but spells … spells so advanced it was hard to tell they weren’t living things. She’d been the one to have the insight, the one to find a way to stop them …

The mimic solidified, taking on a human form. Emily’s blood ran cold. It had been a thousand years … it would have been, for him. For her, little more than three … she’d assumed he’d died centuries ago, like everyone else she’d met in the past. His body should have been dust and less than dust, his memory kept by historians who didn’t know anything like enough to put together an accurate record. Emily had been disappointed by most of their glaring misconceptions, but she could hardly blame them. The historical record was patchy, contaminated by fakes and prejudices and a hundred other problems. She’d never dared try to set the record straight. The last thing she needed was thousands of sorcerers experimenting with time travel.

Her voice shook. “Master Wolfe.”

“It has been a long time,” Master Wolfe said. He looked like an elderly Albert Einstein, a shock of white hair topping a lined and aged face … Emily had never been sure just how old he was, in a world where too many people aged prematurely, but it hardly mattered. She’d taken a shortcut into the future. If he’d taken the long road … he really would be over a thousand years old, old enough to make Void look like a child. “Are you surprised to see me?”

Emily felt cold. “Am I talking to Master Wolfe or to the mimic?”

“There’s no real difference,” Master Wolfe said. His tone was stronger than she would have expected from such an aged face, calm and coldly certain. “You were there, were you not, when the mimics were born? You know how to bilocate. Tell me, which you is the real you?”

“Both,” Emily answered, automatically.

She forced herself to think. Mimics didn’t eat souls, but they did copy their victim so completely they thought they were their victim, at least until they ran low on energy and had to hunt for another target. They were feared for a reason … she’d heard horror stories of hunters who’d sought and killed mimics, or thought they had, only to discover – too late – that they’d been consumed themselves, that they were the mimic. The paranoia that had swept through Whitehall, when it had become clear a mimic was on the prowl, had been entirely justified. How could you identify a mimic when the creature – the spell – could pass every test ever devised?

Keep him talking, she told herself. The sense of growing power was pulsing in the air. Don’t give him time to think, time to do …

She took a breath. “How did you survive for so long?”

“How do you think?” Master Wolfe shrugged. “I ate others, consumed their souls … everything that made them who they are, who they were, I swallowed and added to myself. I was immortal, I told myself, practically impossible to harm. I devoted myself to studying the very roots of magic, to understanding the source of all power.”

Emily recalled the conversations she’d had with Serigala and shuddered. “You were asking me about that, weren’t you?”

“I was interested to hear what you might have to say,” Master Wolfe said. “The Hierarchy regarded you as an excellent candidate for recruitment. If your father” – the tone dripped sarcasm – “hadn’t been involved, they would have made you an offer. You would have gone far with us. Not that I could have allowed it, of course. The time loop had to be preserved.”

“Of course,” Emily agreed. Her mind was reaching out, trying to work out how he was connected to the tower. “What does the Hierarchy have to do with this?”

“Everything.” Master Wolfe met her gaze. His eyes no longer looked human. “I am the Hierarchy.”

“Why?” Emily leaned forward. “What’s the point of it all?”

Master Wolfe smiled. “You understand, of course, that Whitehall was founded to allow magicians to share knowledge, teach students and research ways to make the different magical disciplines work together. The concept came from you, of course. The Hierarchy took the concept and ran with it as far as it would go, recruiting magicians willing to push the limits to breaking point, willing to develop magics others would regard as dangerous or dark … willing to bind themselves with a soulmark, one ensuring they couldn’t advance through anything but magical prowess. I didn’t want them killing each other through trickery. I wanted them to advance through merit.”

His lips twisted. “If you were stronger and more skilled than your superiors, you got to beat them and take their place. The soulmarks ensured it was a fair fight. If not … whoops.”

“You were breeding magicians,” Emily said, tonelessly.

Something clicked in her mind. “And with you at the top … you consumed every magician who challenged you.”

“Yes.” Master Wolfe tapped his forehead. “There are a lot of magicians in here.”

Emily swallowed, hard. If someone could absorb the knowledge and power of hundreds of magicians and keep it … mimics didn’t, normally, but Master Wolfe was clearly no normal mimic. She felt a sudden flicker of pure horror. She could understand the concept of rising through merit, and laying down rules to prevent cheating, but … no challengers actually stood a chance. They were presenting themselves to be eaten, to add everything that made them who they were to the multiplicity. Master Wolfe had created a nightmare.

She readied a spell, her eyes narrowing. If she struck first …

“Why?” She shook her head. “Why try to bring back the Faerie?”

She knew she was wrong, even as she spoke. It made no sense.

Master Wolfe shrugged. “Why would I want to bring back the Faerie?”

“You wouldn’t,” Emily said. The mimic would have lived through the Faerie Wars. “You were lying to us all along.”

“Correct,” Master Wolfe said. “What do you think I am trying to do?”

Emily gritted her teeth. It made no sense. Creating a portable nexus point … it was one hell of an achievement, but … what did they intend to do with it? The city and the multiple dimensions and the ritual … had it all been a diversion or … or what? Something was nagging at her mind … where had she seen something like it before? Something …

“Of all the people in the world,” Master Wolfe said, “I would expect you to understand. You were there. I saw you. Not that you saw me.”

Old Whitehall? Emily shook her head, mentally. Something else … somewhere else. The memory surfaced, hidden behind pain. Justice …

She looked up. “You’re trying to make a god!”

“I’m going to become a god,” Master Wolfe corrected. “With enough power, you can do anything. You know it.”

Emily swallowed. It wasn’t possible, was it? The necromancers had problems gathering, containing and channelling their power and they were nowhere near godhood. No human mind could handle such power and hope to survive … but Master Wolfe wasn’t human. He was a mimic, a multiplicity made up of thousands of sorcerers who had reached the very top only to discover that they’d climbed to their doom. The tower made sense suddenly, the folded dimensions convincing her he could make it work … she could just feel his mind expanding further, drawing on the vast power of the nexus point to grow the spellware until he reached omnipotence.

“You were testing the concept in Beneficence,” she recalled. “Justice went off the rails a little, didn’t he?”

“Failed experiments are the price we pay for successful experiments,” Master Wolfe pointed out, quite reasonably. “The Fists of Justice should have been a little more careful.”

“They created a monster with godlike power,” Emily said. “How do you know you won’t end up like him?”

“I’m not them,” Master Wolfe said. “I know to take precautions.”

“How many necromancers told themselves they could handle the power surge?” Emily had heard countless horror stories of well-intentioned sorcerers who’d turned into monsters. They had told themselves they were doing the right thing even as their sanity ebbed away … the lucky ones had died quickly. The others had had to be put down. “It didn’t work out for them.”

“They didn’t have magitech, nor did they share my multiplicity,” Master Wolfe said. “Your work – yours and Adam’s – has taken me far.”

He paused. “It was a surprise when you meddled for the first time. Even more when you came looking for us. I chose to lure you here, because you could help me. Join me.”

“Really,” Emily said. “If that is so, why did you try to kill us while we were on the way?”

“I couldn’t have you getting here too quickly,” Master Wolfe said. “And besides, I knew you’d survive.”

“Because you were using demons,” Emily said. “This isn’t going to end well.”

“So you say,” Master Wolfe said. “I say differently.”

Emily glanced at the nexus point, checking the spellware. It hadn’t bedded in properly. Not yet.

“No,” she said. The spell she’d readied exploded from her fingertips, a cancellation charm that should have shut the mimic down. Few sorcerers would even think to try … why should they when they thought the mimic was a living thing? She’d been lucky to realise the truth before she was consumed herself. “I won’t let you …”

Master Wolfe stood there, unharmed. “That trick might work on others,” he said, “but not on me.”

Emily cursed and reached for a far darker spell. The wards tightened before she could cast the charm, dispelling her magic … someone appeared behind her, grabbing her arms and yanking them behind her back. She gritted her teeth, then threw her head back … it didn’t work. Her opponent seemed unharmed. She glanced back …

“Cat?”

Master Wolfe laughed. “I’m afraid the real Cat is my prisoner,” he said. “I’ve been one step ahead of you all along.”