The Assassin Princess (Lamb & Castle Book 2)

by J M Sanford

  Seeking refuge in a shadowy corner, Amelia studied the snow globe. It looked just like the Orb, so it might be used as transport between worlds. However, it was much smaller, so Amelia thought it would probably transport less… She thought the Orb had taken the entire Flying City; might the snow globe be enough for one person? Two or three, maybe? Just enough for one person to slip into the other world and carry out a daring rescue. She opened the book and looked again at one passage which Scarlet had circled. It was a spell. Amelia could read it (phonetically, at least) and the diagrams for the gestures were clearer than some of those in her own spell book. If she could get it right then she could be in the other world, rescue Scarlet and Rose, and return safely to Sharvesh before anybody even realised she was gone. She’d just have to pick her moment carefully.

  The story concludes in

  Lamb & Castle

  Volume III:

  The Dragon Queen

  J.M. SANFORD

  1: THE NEW WORLD

  The Flying City of Ilgrevnia, ripped from her native world and displaced from the network of magic that had borne her aloft for centuries, fell slowly, breaking apart under her own weight as her streets burned. The new world’s magic was all wrong: as a new sky choked with deep purple storm clouds unfurled above Ilgrevnia's rooftops, the worldshifting Orb of Helemneum shrieked in protest at it. Below, the ground was far out of sight, lost in a sea of churning silver mist, and Ilgrevnia headed with slow inevitability down into the hidden depths, where who knew what rocks she might ground herself on.

  Archmage Morel, grappling awkwardly with the new world’s magic himself, still hadn’t the slightest idea what had happened. He stood in his workshop in the palace of Ilgrevnia, mumbling an endless string of prayers, charms and invocations while the floor shuddered beneath his feet and his master the dragon prince Archalthus screamed at him to save the City. Perhaps Morel could have managed it somehow in his younger days, but the elderly mage had been working far too hard. The City was a monster almost a mile wide, and in its death throes it couldn't feel the human hands on its reins. Abandoning Ilgrevnia's safety, Morel instead transported the dragon’s bride-to-be, Miss Hartwood, and her maidservant Scarlet to the workshop, knowing they'd have little chance of fending for themselves in the chaos, but he had to wonder if they'd be any safer with the furious rampaging dragon. Miss Hartwood clung to her servant, who pulled her into the comparative safety of a corner while Prince Archalthus raged and screamed incoherently. The dragon threw himself at the worldshifting Orb as if it was an enemy he could vanquish through brute force, but it was too late to undo what had been done. The Orb's restraints buckled, twisted and tore with shrill screams and growls, and then Orb and dragon went rolling towards the windows, gaining momentum as what remained of the City began to tilt. They crashed through the glass, the Orb leaping off the balcony. If it was glass it would have shattered into billions of pieces there and then, but the Orb was not made of common glass, and instead it rolled with unstoppable and momentous grandeur down Ilgrevnia's smoking and blackened Main Street, out into the silvery gloom. The brilliant blue moonfire of its light dimmed as curtains of mist folded gently around it. It slowed, shoring up against rocks, a dim and eerie glow in the dark below the Flying City.

  The Orb might have survived the fall, but Ilgrevnia would not. As the brink of the City struck the hidden crags, throwing Archmage Morel into the air, he shouted a spell which made the air crackle and crystallise into something as slow-yielding as treacle. The Archmage sank slowly to the ground, waving off the books and boxes and trinkets falling slowly around him as he waded towards the two women. “Are you hurt, my dear?” he asked.

  Miss Hartwood gulped the treacly air like a goldfish in a bowl, but it would do her no harm. She shook her head, mute with fear and quite unable to comprehend anything that was going on around her.

  “She's fine,” said Scarlet, patting her charge's lustrous black hair. “You'll be all right, won't you, pet?”

  The Archmage's air-thickening spell wore off quickly. The artificial world had no network of magic beneath its skin: no nodes or leylines. This world's magic came from its small artificial sun, and at night there wasn't much magic to sustain any spell for long. The air-thickening spell had protected a section of the palace, although how long that would stand without the buildings around it Morel wouldn't like to say, and it had taken up a considerable portion of his personal reserves of magic. As the snow quenched the last of the fires that had burned through Ilgrevnia's streets, Morel lit a lamp. The floor of the Archmage’s workshop – or what remained of it – tilted sharply downwards, waves of fog rolling in to cover it. The three of them picked their way carefully down, with Miss Hartwood still clinging to her protector Scarlet, and made their way towards the glow of the Orb. Their breath clouded in the cold air; fresh snow crunched under their feet. Some way from the wreckage of the City, smoke rolled in drifts away from the fallen Orb, clearing to reveal Prince Archalthus' human form lying in the snow.

  “Oh!” Miss Hartwood pushed Scarlet away and ran towards her fallen prince.

  Embarrassed, Prince Archalthus stood up, brushing snow from his fine clothes. Other than a severe injury to his dignity, it appeared he'd sustained nothing more than a few cuts and bruises. The snow seemed to have quenched his ire, too, even if it frustrated him that he’d been unable to maintain his dragon form for more than a few minutes.

  Archmage Morel was more concerned with the Orb than with his master, and climbed up to run his hands gently over the smooth, rapidly cooling surface of the glass, inspecting it for any cracks or fractures. The Orb had not only shifted the failing Flying City from the old world to the new, but brought along several hundred tons of mud from the surrounding area with it – far more than it had ever moved before. Still, the Orb had held up to the strain, and between the dragon and the snow, it had been cushioned from any serious impact.

  Miss Hartwood turned to Archalthus. “Where are we? Is this the new world?” Under the dark purple sky, the fog and snow shone white as far as the eye could see.

  Prince Archalthus had intended for the new world to be his wedding gift to Miss Hartwood – she shouldn’t have seen it until it was completed in all its glory. “It should be so much more than this,” he said. “I’m so sorry to disappoint you, my dear.”

  “No, no! It's beautiful as it is!” said Miss Hartwood, her ocean blue eyes shining. “I do so love the snow! Look how it sparkles!”

  The prince had no answer to this. His intended bride might not be able to see anything wrong with this world, but he could. In the old world, his wingless human body had still resonated with the ebb and flow of the magical currents that he had once flown on so easily. The feeling of the magic of the leylines curling and swirling and eddying around him had remained a part of his life even after the curse that had trapped him in human form, taunting him in his flightlessness. But all that was gone, and the air of the new world smelled foreign to those who had magic in their veins. Strange forces blanketed this untouched landscape, deep layer after layer, so different from the old world.

  Archmage Morel, however, had built the new world himself, and become relatively well-accustomed to the strangeness of its magic some time ago, “If you love the snow,” he said to Miss Hartwood, “then you'll surely love the palace, too.” He pointed it out to her with his staff: the tall spires distant but standing clear of the silver mist. Pinprick lights twinkled in the windows of the towers. “I fashioned it entirely out of ice, and I think you'll find it most exciting. Surprisingly warm, too, out of this chilly breeze.” The Archmage was most pleased to see a delighted smile on the girl’s beautiful face at the prospect of exploring an ice palace.

  Prince Archalthus took his Mage gently but firmly by the elbow. “Archmage Morel,” he said, softly, “the Orb… is there any way to use it and return to the old world?”

  Of course Archmage Morel had already considered this. Proud as he was of what he’d achieved in the creation of th
e new world, he had no desire to be trapped in it forever. He glanced at the remains of the Ilgrevnian palace standing precariously atop the rubble. The switch and the mechanism that had controlled the Orb before had been destroyed in the crash, but there was another way to activate the Orb. “There is one hope,” he said. “That is, if it wasn't destroyed in the fall…” He threw his long white beard over his shoulder and began prodding around in the snow and debris with his staff. Half the contents of his workshop had spilled out into the fog and snow; much of it had been destroyed before his eyes, first by the rampaging furious dragon and then by the disintegration of the City. He winced as he realised that some of his painstakingly created golems would doubtless have been smashed to pieces in the fall. Resilient as the stone gentlemen were, they still had their limits. And without the normal network of magic, those remaining would be standing around in the fog; useless but well-dressed statues. He'd meant to make some alterations so that they'd function in the new world, but with a 'to do' list as long as his arm, he simply hadn't gotten around to it. He must try to remember that his own personal reserves of magic would run low much sooner in the new world, too.

  “We must all search for it,” he told the others. “A spherical crystal Device, about the size of an apple.” With it, they could easily return to the real world, once the Orb had been given some time to replenish its energy. He was pleased at his own foresight in designing an alternative way to activate the enormous worldshifting Orb. “A simple thing. A child could use it.” But where could it have vanished to? He closed his eyes, probing the future gently. He just needed to find the few seconds in which he saw the thing glinting in the snow and cried out ‘aha!’, or the servant Scarlet held the crystal aloft saying ‘is this it, Mister Morel?’. Just enough of a premonition to point the search party in the right direction… Instead, what Morel saw filled his heart with dread: an image of the smooth round crystal cupped in the hands of the young White Queen, as she peered curiously into it. Did the girl have the slightest idea of the power she held over them all? Glancing over her shoulder, she began to speak the spell…

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Jo Sanford is a jack of all trades and an incurable tomboy. She lives with her partner on the edge of Dartmoor, where she enjoys exploring places other people seldom go, splashing in puddles, and occasionally poking dead things with a stick.