“And you never will,” I said, as I shaped a spell. “Die.”
The prince’s body jerked as I drove a curse though his skull, then crumpled to the floor. I stared down at him for a long moment, wondering if he’d had enough awareness to realise he’d been cursed before it was too late. Part of me wished I’d had time to make him suffer, to make him pay in blood for everything he’d done; part of me was just glad he’d never have the chance to threaten anyone else. I turned and walked out of the chamber, summoning my magic as I reached the door and headed into the forest. Power crackled around my fingertips as I turned, raised my hand and directed a blasting curse into the fort. Flames flared through the stonework, burning steadily towards the potions stockpile. I shielded myself and waited for the explosion. It would be visible for miles.
And no one will ever know for sure what happened here, I thought, as the fort went up like a volcano. The king might never know what had happened to his son. The White Council ... I wondered if they’d have the nerve to accuse me of anything. Probably not. There’d be too many people who’d be quietly relieved, now the prince was dead. All the evidence has been destroyed.
I felt cold anger harden my heart as I watched the remains of the fort collapse into a pile of scorched debris. I’d worked for the council for nearly a decade, tackling the jobs no one else could do. I’d fought dark wizards and uncovered plots; I’d even fought necromancers and creatures from the Greenwood. I’d done so much ... and I’d done it because I knew it needed to be done. It was better to nip a problem in the bud, rather than let it grow into something that couldn’t be handled without us paying a terrible price. And yet ...
My rage grew. The council had lost its nerve. Worse, it had sided with the monsters. I could not forgive. The rules were meant to be absolute. They had to apply to all, or they couldn’t be enforced. And because of politics, they were prepared to let a mad prince get away with a crazy scheme? I knew, now, it was just a matter of time before the Allied Lands fell into chaos. The council couldn’t hope to hold it together, let alone reunite the empire. I’d hoped the council could become the strong central authority we needed. I knew, now, that my hopes were in vain.
I’d always prided myself on looking the truth straight in the eye, in not allowing myself to be deceived by my own desires. The truth was that the council had failed. It needed to be replaced. And there was no one who could do it, not in time to save the world. The kings and aristocrats and magical families would play their petty power games, while dark wizards and necromancers and threats from beyond gathered their power. The council had to be replaced. Quickly.
“Well,” I said, to myself. “I’ll just have to do something about it that, won’t I?”
Epilogue
Emily swallows, hard. “What happened to everyone?”
Void shrugs. “King Jonathon the Just adopted a child and swore blind he was a bastard son. Everyone pretended to believe him, because it was better than the alternative. Chuter got the blame for killing Prince Alvin, which I suppose he deserved. The child became king in his turn, then died along with most of his kingdom when the necromancers overwhelmed Yolanda and its neighbours. They never did learn how to work together.
“Juliana resumed her endless wanderings the day I left her and passed beyond my ken. Gabby came into her magic and studied at Whitehall for a few years, before graduating and joining a sailing expedition that was intended to circumvent the world. She never returned, nor did anyone else on that fateful voyage. Eleanor ... I took her to a family I knew in Pendle and arranged for them to adopt her. She went to Laughter when she came into her magic, then joined the Sisterhood and vanished somewhere in what would become the Blighted Lands. Lord Ashworth, that weak and feckless man, married Fulvia and provoked the split in his family.”
He says nothing for a long moment. “The Grandmaster of Whitehall was eventually brought down by a scandal even he couldn’t hide and forced to retire. My brother took his place and cleaned up the school, as well as Dragon’s Den. The local population was deeply grateful, given how many of them had been tormented by the student magicians. He remained in office until his death, decades later.”
Emily winces. She doesn’t want to remember the Grandmaster’s death.
“You used them as bait,” she accuses. “Juliana and Gabby and the entire convoy. You oozed your way into their lives and used them.”
Void meets her gaze evenly. “I did what I had to do,” he says, calmly. “They were in no real danger. Once I got my hands on the intruder, his attempt at hacking the wards came to a sudden end. The spells I used did them no harm. I paid my way, quietly paid for Gabby’s scholarship later on ... by then, of course, they’d both forgotten me. I’d seen to that when I enchanted them.”
“That’s not an excuse,” Emily says.
“What would you have me do?” Void cocks his head. “Look for clues that might not even exist? Randomly stake out possible targets and hope for the best? What would you have done?”
“I would have used myself as bait,” Emily says. “I would have fitted the profile, too.”
“Perhaps that would have worked,” Void agrees. “But could you have done as well as I did? Could you have made sure no innocent got harmed?”
Emily says nothing. She can see his point, but she recoils at the thought of intruding into someone’s life ... using magic to pose as a relative, as someone they could trust. She thinks she would have come up with something better, given time. And yet ...
She leaned back, unwilling to confront her feelings. “What happened to you? I mean ... you kept working for the council, didn’t you?”
“They needed me.” Void smiled, rather sourly. “Lord Ashworth was a feckless weakling. I may have mentioned it a few ... dozen ... times. He didn’t have the nerve to tell me to leave, not when I was essential. I played along, dealing with threats that couldn’t be addressed through the official channels while gathering intelligence and magical knowledge and putting the pieces in place for my own coup.”
“You stole the prince’s super-soldier formula,” Emily accuses. Her voice hardens. “How are you any better than him?”
“I improved upon the formula,” Void says, flatly. “He didn’t need to murder countless innocents to make the brew. It can be done without murdering anyone. He could have worked it out for himself ... Layla could have done it, I think, if he’d managed to recruit her properly. I never worked out who’d made the original version. It wouldn’t be the first time someone came up with a new potion, then offered it to the wrong person and got murdered to ensure the secret remained a secret.”
He turns away from her, looking at the dark ocean beneath their feet. “I’d known the council had flaws for years,” he says. “There were limits to its powers. Mistakes happened, most of them never openly acknowledged. But I’d always thought the councillors were working to fix the problems. I never confronted the rot within the council until it took the coward’s way out and turned a blind eye to a dark wizard on the verge of taking control of a kingdom. And then I knew it had to be removed, before things got any worse.”
Emily says nothing for a long moment. “I see your point,” she says, finally. She does see it. She’s always understood it. “But you’re just making things worse.”
“Yolanda and its neighbours are gone,” Void says. “They were invaded and crushed by the necromancers, long before you and I first met. They played petty politics while ignoring the threat on their borders, until it was far too late. Their magical arts were lost along with the kingdom itself. They twiddled their thumbs while the necromancers advanced on their borders. What will the surviving kingdoms do, now the necromancers are gone?”
“That’s true,” Emily says. She’s seen enough of the aristocracies, of their permanent selfishness, to fear the worst. The threat of the necromancers was barely enough to keep the Allied Lands united. Now, the unity is effectively gone. “But your empire will not last.”
“It can be yours,”
Void says. “Join me.”
“I can’t,” Emily said. The empire wouldn’t last past her. She likes to think she can’t be corrupted by power, that she’ll retain her compassion and humanity no matter what happens, but she fears the worst. Her dark counterpart had dived headlong into madness. A strange game, she quotes mentally; the only way to win is not to play. “It won’t work.”
Void studies her for a long moment. “I’m sorry you feel that way,” he says, finally. She hears genuine regret in his voice. He does care about her, in his way. She finds it reassuring even as she worries about what it might mean. “And I hope that, in time, you will come to change your mind.”
The ocean boils beneath his feet. Emily looks down. She sees images of fire and blood and death within the waters, memories... no, not memories. Things happening now. Void holds up a hand, in salute, and then the darkness rushes up and over her ...
... And she wakes up, in bed.
The world spins around her as she sits up. Jan is snoring gently beside her. The night sky beyond the windows looks normal, yet ... there is something fragile about the world, as if the merest touch would cause it to break. She’s seen paranormal realms before, places outside the world as humans know it, but ... she touches the bed lightly, reassured by its solidity. And yet, her mind feels as if it is on the verge of slipping and falling out of her skull, flying back into the dreamland ...
She leans back in her bed and closes her eyes.
But it is a long time before she manages to get back to sleep.
The End.
Emily Will Return In:
Child of Destiny
Coming Soon!
Afterword
“The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.”
-Robert A. Heinlein
When I outlined the overall plot for Schooled in Magic - I go into more detail in the afterword for Child of Destiny - and started including a handful of non-Emily novellas, I knew I would have to do one for Void. His role in the series has been clearly visible right from the start, even before his true plans became evident, and I was sure that when I made the reveal I would have to justify it in some way. I went back and forth on how to actually do it for quite some time. I didn’t want him telling Emily the story - that would lack a certain punch - and I didn’t want a massive flashback within a mainline book either. Sometimes, it works - it worked very well in Empire’s End (Chris Bunch and Allan Cole) - but, in my opinion, often it doesn’t work as well as it should.
It is not uncommon for people to hit a breaking point, beyond which one can simply no longer tolerate the situation. One may be struggling with multiple problems when someone makes a joke that isn’t remotely funny, or comes to you with an utterly unreasonable request, or openly asks you to do something illegal or does something - anything - that proves, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that there is no point in even pretending to take them seriously. And once that happens, your first impulse is to either put as much distance between you and then as possible or to resort to violence. If you can’t do either, you start choking on your own anger, which eventually starts to curdle. I have a theory that many of the problems plaguing us today stem from the simple fact we are not allowed to challenge orthodox thinking and, the longer this continues, the angrier we become.
Void is not stupid. He knows there’s no such thing as a perfect solution - and that one solution can easily lead to new problems. For example, the United States backed freedom fighters in Afghanistan against the USSR, which was a great success - it gave the Soviets a taste of their own medicine, the foreign-backed war of liberation - but it also empowered the Taliban and led, directly and indirectly, to 9/11 and the US war in Afghanistan and Iraq, an outcome the US would consider undesirable. Void would not be so foolish as to argue the US should not have supported the freedom fighters. There was no reason to think they would eventually become terrorists, let alone a threat to the US mainland, while there were plenty of reasons to think giving the USSR a free hand in Afghanistan would have very bad results indeed, perhaps encouraging the Russians to make a move into Pakistan or Iran (the latter, in particular, a curious example of a move the US would need to counter and yet find very difficult because of US public opinion, which wouldn’t object to Iran getting a thrashing from the USSR).
On the other hand, refusing to do anything because it would be politically inconvenient is an entirely different matter. And while one can argue that Void was wrong to oppose doing nothing, I think it’s reasonable for him to feel the White Council had more than enough grounds to intervene and very few monarchs would dare publicly oppose it. In fact, if the secret got out, the uproar would shatter what remained of the council’s authority and cripple the war effort - and back then, a hundred years before Emily, the war wasn’t so clearly on the brink of being lost.
And so I chose to show the moment Void decided the council had to go.
I am still considering turning this in a full-scale novel, perhaps by expanding the story or simply adding two more sections ... perhaps a ending where Void has to make a choice between abandoning his planned coup or doing something utterly ruthless to keep the plan underway, perhaps something that will trigger Master Lucknow’s eventual suspicions. Or I may tell the story of how two of his three brothers died, or how his sole surviving brother eventually took control of Whitehall and turned the school around.
What do you want to see? Let me know?
And now you’ve read this far, I have a request to make.
It’s growing harder to make a living through self-published writing these days. If you liked this book, please leave a review where you found it, share the link, let your friends know (etc, etc). Every little helps (particularly reviews).
Thank you.
Christopher G. Nuttall
Edinburgh, 2021
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Void's Tale Page 10