She stepped forward and pressed herself against the wards, half-expecting to find herself frozen and helpless again, at least until someone could be bothered to come and push herself back into the room. A tingle ran over her body, but nothing attempted to stop her from leaving, even though she could feel enough magical energy to paralyse an entire army crawling through the air. It left her feeling oddly disturbed, yet she was out. She wanted to whoop and jump for joy, but she didn’t dare. No matter how complacent Herod was feeling, he’d have guards patrolling the corridors and keeping an eye on his unwilling guests. She had to get out of sight before she was spotted by a patrol. Carefully, she scurried down the corridor and round the corner, approaching a stone statue someone had carved out of solid marble, hundreds of years ago. It was a stylised reflection of the male form – it had muscles on its muscles, as well as an exaggerated groin – but it was nothing more than a distraction. She reached around the statue’s head and pushed a single isolated stone in the wall. A moment later, she heard grinding and a dark passageway appeared in front of her.
The secret passage was dark and as silent as the grave. She stepped inside and the door closed behind her, leaving her in unbroken darkness. Eleanor waited several seconds for the lights before cursing her own mistake. The castle’s wards were gone and most of the building’s minor magical tricks would no longer work. Herod wouldn’t have bothered to hook up his own wards to power the lights, even assuming that he knew about the secret passages within the Golden Palace. If Eleanor had taken a palace off an enemy, she would have made sure to search the palace thoroughly and block up any secret passages before they could be exploited by anyone who might know about them. It wouldn’t even be hard. All he would have to do was interrogate someone who might have known about them.
She summoned her magic and took the risk of creating a glowing ball of light to move in front of her. It was dangerous because Herod might have set up his wards to track unexpected bursts of magic within the castle, but there was no other choice. She wouldn’t even have been able to get out of the passageway and back into the corridors without a light of some kind. Bracing herself, wondering if Herod was about to launch a force of guards right at her, she headed off down the secret passageway, choking on the dust as it billowed up around her. The wards would normally have kept the dust out of the passages, but now they were gone, the dust had settled. The air tasted musty and old and she felt it stinging her eyes.
It had been several years since her father had shown her the passages and how they could be used, but she’d forgotten nothing, not even the stinging lecture she’d received when she’d used the passages to sneak out of the Golden Palace for a few hours. She’d just been growing sick of the endless lessons in how to be a proper lady – real ladies didn’t fight with swords, she’d been told, nor did they study magic as if it was more than just the key to their position – and had wanted a break, but her father hadn’t seen the funny side. He’d almost fainted when he’d realised that his daughter was missing. After that, Eleanor had been escorted everywhere by her maids for a few months and told to leave the passageways strictly alone, unless it was an emergency. When she’d been allowed back in the passageways, she’d used the time to memorise every twist and turn, determined that she wouldn’t be caught again.
Her father had explained that the First Emperor had given all kinds of strange orders to his designers and builders, building in an entire network of passages and stairs that led all over the Golden Palace. Afterwards, he’d admitted, the builders had all been executed, for it was seldom healthy to know the secrets of an Emperor. Eleanor hadn’t thought that that was fair at the time, but it did make a certain kind of sense. If someone knew a secret that could be used against the Emperor, the Emperor had to make sure that the secret could never be used. She pondered the issue to keep her mind off the thought of rats and mice within the passageways, walking slowly down the stairs to the lower levels. If she was lucky, she might just be able to spy on Herod himself…
If her guess was right, Herod would have set up his quarters in her father’s private rooms. She had often wondered why the First Emperor had set up the passageways so that someone could spy on him – her father had speculated, when she’d asked him, that the First Emperor’s quarters had been somewhere else and a later Emperor had moved into different rooms – but it didn’t matter. She slid through the passageways until she finally reached a long corridor that seemed to be illuminated by light shining through the walls. In reality, the Emperor’s room was lined with mirrors, mirrors that someone on the far side of the wall could look through as if they were made of glass. She braced herself and risked a peek. Herod sat at a table, his back to her, studying a map of one of the continents. A group of men wearing his personal uniform stood behind him, listening as he outlined the next step of his plan.
Eleanor listened intently, but heard nothing; the walls were blocking all sound. She was sure that there was some way to actually listen in to what they were saying, yet she couldn’t figure it out. Perhaps it too had been handled by the wards and had now been lost…she shook her head in irritation. It hardly mattered when Herod’s back was turned. She thought longingly about finding a knife and throwing it through the mirror, but it wouldn’t have worked. Herod’s personal protections would have saved his life and then he would have done awful things to her. Even if she was the most valuable hostage he had, she doubted that he would be forgiving of an attempt on his life.
Herod stood up suddenly, turning to face her and she cringed, sure that he had seen her though the mirror. His eyes seemed brighter than she remembered; they were glowing like hot coals in his head, yet somehow he remained alive and human. She was held frozen by his eyes, expecting that any moment he would smash through the mirror and haul her out, but nothing happened. Herod looked away from her, towards one of his generals, and she realised that she was being stupid. He couldn’t have seen her through the mirror.
She peered at them for a few more minutes, but saw nothing that could be used against them. Turning, she headed back along the passageway and down another flight of hidden stairs, wondering at the skill of the executed builders. The vast majority of the people who visited or lived in the Golden Palace, even the servants who were under voluntary loyalty spells, had no idea that the passages even existed, yet she could move from place to place without being seen. She stumbled and almost fell as her body started to shake, the memory of the burning eyes refusing to fade from her mind. Eleanor caught hold of the wall and held herself until the shaking faded, yet it refused to disappear completely.
I should return to the cell, she thought, grimly. She didn’t want to return to the cell, but the moment someone realised she was missing, Herod would order the castle swept for her. If she could get out of the rooms he’d assigned to her, she’d probably end up being placed in the dungeons when she was found, if Herod didn’t simply turn her into a statue or something else immobile until he found a use for her. The thought of the dungeons reminded her that Herod might have a few more enemies – and allies for her – locked away and she kept walking down the stairs. If she could make contact with someone who could help her, maybe she could organise an escape for her and Kuralla. Sooner or later, she knew, Kuralla was going to start telling the world what she’d seen and then Herod would have access to her visions. He would be able to use them against his enemies.
The air was colder in the dungeons and she felt powerful wards in the air, so close that she didn’t feel them until they were crawling all over her body. They didn’t respond to her – they would have been configured to keep the prisoners in the cells – but they might have recorded her presence for their master. With nothing else to lose, Eleanor followed the cold air down to the cells and started to peer into them. Not entirely to her surprise, most of the rooms were empty. Her father had never seen the need to keep prisoners for long; they could be interrogated under truth spells and then disposed of as they deserved. The vast majority of prisoners
would end up being fitted with a loyalty spell and sent off for hard labour, if their crimes didn’t warrant execution. The Emperor had once been heard to remark that the only difference between his cells and the castles belonging to the nobility was that you found a better class of criminal in his cells. It was a jest that hadn’t gone down well with his enemies.
When she peered into the fourth cell, she struck gold. A man sat on a bench within the cell, his hands and feet chained to the floor. He wore nothing, apart from a single garment that covered his groin, yet she would have recognised that long red beard anywhere. She’d feared that Sir Pellaeon was dead. Instead, he had been taken prisoner and chained in the dungeons. Throwing caution to the winds, she slipped through the doorway and into his cell. It was unlocked, which puzzled her until she sensed the spells crawling over the Knight. He wouldn’t have been able to leave even if he hadn’t been chained down. Someone had decided to be either sadistic or paranoid.
“Your highness,” Sir Pellaeon burst out. He recognised her even though she looked as if she had been crawling through a chimney, but then, the particular gifts of the Knights of the Golden Order had always been centred around the Emperor’s Bloodline. “You’re alive!”
“And trapped,” Eleanor said, ruefully. She lifted a hand to focus her mind and examine the spells binding the Knight, but it only took one look to know that she couldn’t break them…and that breaking them would set off alarms all over the Golden Palace. “You have no idea how good it is to see you.”
The Knight bowed his great head. “And you also, Your Highness,” he said, formally. Eleanor smiled openly. Sir Pellaeon had always been good to her, at least as far as their respective stations had allowed. “Tell me what has happened to you since the Golden Palace was attacked.”
Eleanor took a deep breath and began to explain.
***
One of the advantages to being a necromancer, Herod had discovered surprisingly quickly, was that a necromancer rarely needed to sleep. The power that resided within his wards seemed to provide enough energy to keep him going, even though he suspected that he would have to pay a price for it sooner or later. Magic gave great gifts, but there was always a price, sometimes a price that few people would pay if they’d known about it in advance. Perhaps it was a result of how he’d extended his mind over the last few weeks, placing tiny parts of himself in the minds of screaming – and scheming – aristocrats, or perhaps it was just a side effect of necromancy.
He stood in what had once been the library and stared down at the piles of ruined books and manuscripts. The Golden Palace Library had been famous throughout the land as one of the largest collections of printed material on Touched – at least until some commoner had invented the printing press and started to produce duplications of famous works – and had contained many books on magic that were completely unique. These included, he was sure, books on necromancy; like his own ancestors, he couldn’t see the Emperors disposing of books that could one day come in handy. So much knowledge might have been lost over the years that he’d been looking forward to reading his way through the Emperor’s library, but it seemed that that was not going to be easy. The Emperor’s library had been built within a pocket dimension and the dimension had – of course – collapsed when he’d banished the demon that had been powering the castle’s wards. Everything in the library had been spat out as the dimension collapsed – luckily; he’d seen dimensions that, if they’d collapsed, would have taken whatever was in them with them and it would never be seen again – and it was now piled up in a massive heap.
“Your Grace,” the librarian said. He’d actually worked in the library in the Golden City – where commoners had been able to read newly-printed books upon the payment of a small fee, a thoroughly stupid idea if he’d ever heard one – before Herod had scooped him up and transported him to the Golden Palace, enslaving him with a single loyalty spell. “I am afraid that sorting out this mess is going to take years.”
Herod scowled at him, but contained his anger. The man was a slave; he had no choice, but to tell the truth. Pleasing his master was everything, yet he couldn’t lie to the man who had enslaved him. And besides, Herod – unlike some other nobles – had tried to remember not to kill the messenger for the message. It only meant less mail.
“I understand that,” Herod said, in some irritation. “Can you isolate old and unique works on magic and necromancy?”
“Not until I can get the mess under control,” the librarian said. He picked up and old and stained volume, running his fingers over the broken spine. “This book is a very old treatise on history and relationships between the various states, before the Empire was formed. I would have to inspect each item personally to know what it actually was and then I would need to place it in a secure location.”
“See to it,” Herod said. He paused, considering. Anyone who believed that commoners couldn’t have useful ideas was a fool. “Can we speed the process up?”
“If I had some extra staff, yes,” the librarian said. His voice altered slightly, the voice of a slave struggling against his programming. “My daughters were being trained in manipulating a library, Your Grace. You could bring them up here and put them to work.”
“Which would get them out of the Golden City,” Herod said. They’d probably want out by now, assuming that they hadn’t been put to work in one of the brothels, or gang-raped by his soldiers, or worse. The Golden City was turning into a nightmare as his people sought to crush all memory of independence and freedom, such as it had been. The librarian wouldn’t have wanted his daughters enslaved, but at least as librarians they would have some freedoms they wouldn’t have down in the city…and besides, the spell enslaving him had forced him to put their names forward. “I shall have them summoned up at once.”
He took one last look at the mess and winced. The Emperor had known much and all of that knowledge was in front of him, if he only knew how to find it. Spells and magical tricks long-forgotten, secrets about the Emperor’s Bloodline…perhaps even a guide to necromancy and how it could be controlled. It had to be possible. The original necromancers had wrecked huge damage, so he assumed that they’d found a solution, eventually.
“Thank you, Your Grace,” the librarian said. “I am sure that they will be honoured.”
“And relieved,” Herod said. He shook his head and turned to leave. “Carry on.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Night was falling as the whore emerged from her home, a massive barrack-like building at the edge of the city. She wore a dark cowl to cover herself from the weather – a cold wind was blowing off the mountains, bringing with it the first hints of snow – but strands of blonde hair could be seen poking out around her pale face. She staggered as the first gust of wind struck her, yet she pressed on, hurrying to her destination. Like so many girls from the outlying villages, she had been sold into prostitution and her owner would beat her if she failed to report for work. The con was as old as time and very hard to escape. No matter how hard she worked, she would never be able to make enough money to pay back her pimp, leaving her in permanent bondage. Whores died young in Garstang, but there were always more where she came from.
Cloaked by his power, invisible to all, but powerful and suspicious magicians, Todtsteltzer followed her, his footsteps unheard in the wind. No one was on the streets apart from the whore, hurrying to her appointment. Few, even those who had grown up in the city, chose to walk in the streets during nightfall, particularly not in the roughest part of town. Todtsteltzer came up behind the whore, pressed one hand to her mouth to stop her from screaming and used the other one to pin her arms to her side. She was surprisingly strong for a whore, but it was of no avail. He started draining her almost as soon as he caught her, dragging her into an alley and forcing her to the ground. She tried to struggle – she had to think that he had rape in mind – but it was already too late. He rolled her over, pressed his strong fingers to her cheeks, and started calling on his magic. The w
hore’s last attempts at resistance flickered and died.
Todtsteltzer breathed deeply as the flow began, bring him an insistence of identity that belonged to the whore, a woman who had once been called Ivana. They were one, just long enough for him to strip her of everything that had made her who she was, changing his features into a perfect match for her. Her last sight would have been of a perfect doppelganger staring down at her, a creature that wore her face and could have passed for her, before she finally expired. Todtsteltzer stood up, cloaked in her, and watched as her body collapsed into dust. No one would ever know what had happened to her.
An assassin’s magic was far more complex than simply remaining invisible, for an invisible man would still be detected by wards intended to keep out supernatural vermin. He had taken everything that had made Ivana herself and used it to create a persona for him that went far deeper than a simple illusion spell. Anyone who looked at him would see Ivana and no one else, while her memories provided the perfect guide to acting like her. Even a complex ward, searching for evidence that someone wasn't what they seemed, would find it hard to distinguish between the false memories and the real ones, the ones that would have exposed him.
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