“Twenty thousand cooks,” she muttered. “How many retainers are they allowed in all?”
Lady Barb lifted an eyebrow. “Twenty thousand cooks?”
Years ago, Emily had read a science fiction story set on a world caught between modernity and a barbaric past. One nobleman, barred from having a large army, had raised a force of ‘cooks,’ armed very carefully with knives, spoons and ladles, all utensils that just happened to have a military application with a little imagination. The ruling monarch hadn’t seen the joke and crushed the ill-disguised attempt at rebellion. In hindsight, after months spent training with the sergeants, Emily doubted that the idea would have worked very well. The cooks would still have faced a small army of men with real weapons.
But it did have a real-life counterpart, although much less dramatic. Napoleon had barred the Prussians from raising a large army, suspecting–correctly–that it would be used against him. Undeterred, the Prussians had conscripted men and trained them for a year, then released them and conscripted a second batch of men. When the time came to throw off the restrictions and expand their armies, they had a much larger force than Napoleon had expected at their disposal, simply by recalling all the trained men.
“It’s possible that one of the barons could have tried something like it,” Lady Barb said, once Emily outlined her thoughts. “And they have plenty of lands to build up their forces without being detected. But they’d still have to get the army into Alexis without being detected.”
“Shadye managed to get an army close to Whitehall without being detected,” Emily pointed out.
It was still a mystery how the necromancer had managed that feat. Sergeant Harkin had speculated that Shadye might have dug a tunnel–a portal would have been detected–under the massive mountain crags barring his path, but none of the exploration missions that had been sent out after Shadye’s death had found anything. Emily had privately worried that they might stumble over something else while searching for the tunnel, yet nothing seemed to have happened. The grandmaster, the only other person who knew that there was a reason to be concerned, had certainly said nothing to her about it.
“None of the barons are necromancers,” Lady Barb said, flatly. “If they were, we’d know about it by now.”
“I hope you’re right,” Emily said, softly. “What about the lesser nobility?”
“The barons are the only ones who could hope to build up an army without having it noticed,” Lady Barb said. “Besides, the smaller nobles tend to support King Randor–and they’d support his daughter, if there was no other choice. The barons pushed them around during the Age of Bryon and the lesser nobles hated it. That was how Alexis III was able to get them to support the Assembly.”
Emily blanched as another thought occurred to her. Lady Barb had assumed that an aristocrat was behind the plot, if it was aimed at Alassa. Killing Emily might just be part of the plot. But what if the plotters were in the Assembly? Someone might just believe that killing Alassa would lead to democracy, or at least rule by the Assembly, rather than the nobles. It sounded insane, but revolutionaries had never been particularly sane…
But it wasn’t something she dared mention. The consequences could be disastrous.
“Here,” Lady Barb said. She plucked a small dagger off the wall and held it out, hilt first, to Emily. “King Randor has granted you special permission to carry it, but he would rather you didn’t call attention to it.”
Emily nodded. No one, apart from the royal guardsmen, carried weapons in the castle. Even the princes wore empty scabbards. Giving her a weapon might well be seen as a calculated insult to everyone else, even though she suspected that most people would never even recognize that it was a possibility. The kingdom had accepted the existence of sorceresses, but it didn’t seem to really understand that a woman could carry a mundane weapon just as easily as a man.
Better to be underestimated, she told herself, as she hid the dagger in her dress.
“Alassa will be busy for hours,” Lady Barb said. “Everything has to be absolutely perfect for her Confirmation.”
Emily nodded. “I was invited to visit the Court Wizard,” she said. “I wanted to ask him about the Royal Bloodline.”
“Just don’t sell him your new pet for less than twenty thousand gold,” Lady Barb advised. “The scales alone could bring him enough money to set himself up as a wealthy nobleman in his own right.”
“I don’t want to kill it,” Emily protested. The thought was appalling. “Perhaps I should just keep it as a pet.”
“And then it will eat you, if it breaks free,” Lady Barb warned. “Be careful. Be very careful.”
Chapter Twenty-One
ALCHEMY WAS THE CLOSEST THING TO science Emily had discovered since Shadye had kidnapped her, although it seemed to follow rules that would have either perplexed or infuriated scientists from back home. It didn’t divide neatly into subsets either; research into the magical proprieties of certain materials could lead neatly into biological research, or send a researcher haring up towards a dead end. Most of the alchemists she’d met had been rather strange, even by the standards of Whitehall; they tended to spend most of their time in the lab, fiddling with new experiments. It was very rare, according to Professor Thande, to encounter one serving as a Court Wizard.
Zed’s lab was large, larger than the workrooms they used at Whitehall, crammed with tables, caldrons and glass containers holding various kinds of brightly-colored liquids. Emily could smell a multitude of different scents from the moment she stepped inside, although unlike a born Alchemist she couldn’t separate them out and identify the different materials. Zed himself wore white robes inside his lab, rather than anything that identified his rank. Emily realized, in a sudden flash of understanding, that part of the reason Zed had been given the position of Court Wizard was that he wasn’t personally ambitious. He wasn’t inclined to turn it into a power base for future expansion.
“My Lady Emily,” Zed said, with a half-bow. Technically, she should have bowed to him–she was still a sorceress-in-training, rather than an independent magician–but Zed didn’t seem to care. “Welcome to my lab.”
Emily had to smile. The room was as chaotic as King Randor’s private study, almost as bad as the alchemical workrooms Professor Thande had made her clean after a particularly disastrous lesson in alchemy. She suspected that she would be doing a lot of cleaning in the next three years, if only because she lacked the single-mindedness that was part and parcel of a good Alchemist. Brain emerged from behind a towering pile of glass tubes and gave her a shy smile.
“Thank you,” Emily said. She waved cheerfully at Brain as he retreated back behind the test tubes. Glass was so expensive, she realized, because alchemists bought up most of the supplies. Professor Thande’s lessons always included at least one or two test tubes being broken by unwary students. “This is a remarkable place.”
Zed beamed. It had clearly been the right thing to say. “Alexis I actually started this lab,” Zed explained. He turned and led her towards a small side door. “You wouldn’t believe that someone who spent most of his time governing a kingdom could be an Alchemist, but he actually made a very good start on the Royal Bloodline. We’ve done a great deal more since him, of course, yet he laid very strong foundations. He would have been the greatest Alchemist in history if he’d been able to devote all of his time to his studies.”
They stepped through the door and into a smaller room, with a table, several chairs and a single glowing light high overhead. “I don’t let any of the maids come in here to clean,” Zed explained, as he waved Emily to a chair. “My old master used to say that you could never let anyone else clean your lab, or it will be contaminated. He was a little strange in the head, but he was right about that.”
Emily concealed a smile. All alchemists were a little strange in the head.
Zed seemed to read her mind. “Oh, he believed all sorts of nonsense,” he added. “Would you believe that he actually thought that
women radiated a field that disrupted magical vibrations? He had a daughter and an experiment that never fully worked and he thought the two of them were connected. And then he set out to find an apprentice who liked men on the grounds that it might reduce the disruption.”
“Oh,” Emily said. Maybe she was a poor Alchemist, but Alassa and Imaiqah were both near the top of the class in Alchemy. The whole concept sounded more than a little absurd, although not unprecedented. There had been plenty of people who believed that women couldn’t do science, or were unable to cope with higher education…all eventually debunked, of course, but it had still done a great deal of damage. “And did it?”
“No,” Zed said. “The problem was that he had mixed up the formula slightly, so naturally it didn’t work. And then his daughter pointed out what he had done wrong and he almost had a heart attack. She went on to be one of the greatest alchemists of her era.”
He picked up a large jar of water and poured it into a container, muttering a spell under his breath. “If you’ve been at Whitehall, you’ll probably have developed a Kava habit by now,” he said, without looking around. “Every student does, unless they’re too stupid or too lazy to breed. I think that one of them actually married a pregnant woman because he was so lazy.”
“I drink it,” Emily said, wryly. “Did he actually marry a pregnant woman?”
“Oh, there was some sort of mix-up,” Zed said. “Long time gone now.”
He put the container down on the table and passed her a mug. “Pour to suit yourself,” he said, seriously. “I just need to check on Brain.”
Emily shook her head as he left the room. It was odd to have a magician serving anyone drinks, but perhaps it made sense. No Alchemist liked the thought of someone tampering with his experiments, even a trusted apprentice. Professor Thande had bawled out one student for touching an experiment on the table, a rare display of temper for him. She poured the Kava into the mug and tasted it, carefully. It was strong, sour and would probably keep her up half the night, no matter how much she danced.
“I hate having apprentices,” Zed said, when he came back into the room. “They can never be fully trusted…but I need someone to take my place. The Royal Bloodline demands a steward.”
He sat down facing her and poured himself a mug. “So tell me,” he said. “How did you beat Shadye?”
Emily flushed. “I can’t really talk about it,” she admitted, finally. Zed seemed harmless, but alchemists were never truly harmless. Professor Thande had told the class–and he hadn’t been joking–that the true alchemical geniuses were told to do their experiments on mountain tops or the middle of deserts, well away from civilization. “It is something I have to keep to myself.”
“The grandmaster was always a secretive bugger,” Zed said. “But I wonder why a defense against a necromancer would be considered a secret.”
He made a show of stroking his chin, thoughtfully. “Maybe there’s something about it that can’t be easily duplicated,” he added. “Or maybe you just got very lucky.”
“Luck had a great deal to do with it,” Emily admitted. “Were you the one who taught Alassa how to use magic?”
Zed gave her an odd look. “I tried,” he said, finally. “But the princess refused to learn. In the end, I taught her a handful of spells and returned to my lab. I told her father that she was unlikely to be able to learn more.”
He shrugged. “Those were not pleasant days. Her father would be wise to choose a more capable magician for her husband. Even with the Royal Bloodline, Princess Alassa was unable to learn what she needed to learn.”
But she learned more at Whitehall, Emily thought. Maybe Zed had just been a poor teacher, or a bad match for Alassa. But then, Alassa hadn’t started learning properly until she’d almost been killed. She’d been so ignorant that she’d actually tried to cheat in Basic Charms, without realizing that it would be immediately obvious to her tutors, or anyone else who actually knew the subject. It had taken months of work with Emily before she’d finally passed the exams that had barred her path to the more advanced classes.
Zed probably wasn’t allowed to discipline Alassa, she thought. How could he have been?
“I meant to ask you about the Royal Bloodline,” she said, changing the subject slightly. “What does it actually do?”
“Now that is one of the great achievements of the century,” Zed said. He took a long swig of his Kava, than looked at her. “But it is also one of the great secrets.”
Emily studied him. “I am a close personal friend of the princess,” she said, finally. “And the king himself invited me to this kingdom.”
King Randor hadn’t said anything about studying the Royal Bloodline, but the implication was there. Zed eyed her for a long moment, then nodded. It was clear that he wanted to boast a little about his success. After all, if he was as old as he looked, he might have been working on the Bloodline for decades. Who else could he talk to?
“You are aware, of course, that magic can be used to improve a person’s body and mind,” Zed said. “In the short term, there are potions that can improve muscles, endurance, memory and even intelligence. Unfortunately, as you should have been told at Whitehall, such potions often have side-effects, particularly when taken regularly. Those effects can be disastrous.”
Emily scowled. One of Mistress Irene’s lectures had covered all of the dangers in great and somewhat repetitive detail. The potions could fail if the brewer had made even a single mistake, or turn poisonous. Or, even if they worked, the effects could be dangerous. There were stories of girls who had drunk so many memory-enhancing potions that they were literally incapable of forgetting anything, boys who had tried to improve their genitals and students in Martial Magic who had injured themselves, unable even to realize it because they’d blocked their sensitivity to pain. There were potions for Martial Magic, but Sergeant Miles brewed and distributed them personally, with dire threats about what would happen to anyone stupid enough to ignore his instructions.
“Alexis believed that certain traits could be handed down from generation to generation,” Zed continued. “His mother was a keen breeder of dogs, you see, and he suspected that you could do the same to humans. If one happened to pick the right people to breed with, one would end up with superior children. It would just need a great deal of luck and research. And then it occurred to him that such traits could be engineered into his bloodline to emerge in the next generation.”
Emily was surprised that Alexis had actually managed to get that far–but then, people had been breeding animals and plants for centuries before anyone had heard of DNA or genetic engineering. Given enough time and patience, it was probable that one could engineer humans, but she doubted that many people could wait for the generations it would take to produce results. Or, for that matter, that they’d have any real understanding of what they were doing, particularly if they combined it with their belief that noble birth meant that someone was inherently superior to a commoner. Sooner or later, inbreeding would take a deadly toll.
“He experimented, then started preparing the potions for himself,” Zed said. “They were strong, even by the standards of those days; his notes suggested that they caused him and his wife terrible pain. But they managed to have four children who were healthy and handsome and keyed in for magic. Alexis II continued the experiments by appointing a Court Wizard who was primarily an Alchemist. Since then, there have been constant improvements made to the Bloodline. I have added a number myself.”
His face twisted into a grin. “Do you know that the Royal Family–at least those in the direct line–have never been ill?” He asked. “Or that permanent control spells simply don’t work on them? Or that you cannot even transfigure them for more than a few days? How many others, even trained sorcerers, have that kind of protection?”
Emily frowned. “But Alassa has been transfigured,” she said, remembering one encounter with Melissa. Her friend had been turned into a rat. “How…”
“N
ot permanently,” Zed said. He scowled, suddenly. “Which is at least partly why she couldn’t be turned into a man.”
“I’m sure that must have been annoying,” Emily said, dryly. She wouldn’t have liked to change sex, although if she’d been born in a world that seemed to have the idea that women were automatically inferior to men she might have changed her mind. But it would have confused her mind. “How…how did Alexis know that his experiment would work?”
“Oh, he experimented on commoners first,” Zed explained. “They were tested and tested again until he had something that could be passed down through the generations. I read his notes of those experiments very carefully and…”
Emily barely heard him. Alexis I, the founder of the kingdom, had experimented on unwilling commoners, twisting their genes just to see what would happen. The odds would be immensely against succeeding the first time, particularly not if they didn’t realize what they were actually doing. God alone knew how many monsters had been created before they’d finally found something that actually worked. Maybe Alexis’s experiments had paved the way towards creating orcs and goblins…
How many had died? How many had been warped? And what had happened to them afterwards?
“Most of the experiments produced nothing, of course,” Zed continued. “Some produced disastrous failures. And some…”
“What happened to them?” Emily snarled. Magic seemed to be boiling under her skin, demanding release. It would have been so easy to throw it at him. “What did he do to them?”
Lessons in Etiquette (Schooled in Magic series) Page 20