He gave Elaine a peck on the lips and smiled at her. “Are you ready to go?”
“The dragons are waiting for us,” Elaine said. “Do you have anything you want to bring?”
Johan shook his head. He’d had few possessions over the years; his parents hadn’t exactly deprived him, but Jamal had found it amusing to damage, hex or simply destroy anything Johan had owned. He still had nightmares about his teddy bear coming to life in the middle of the night and trying to strangle him. No matter what he’d been told, he was still sure that Jamal had intended to murder him that night. A Powerless wasn’t entirely human, after all …
Elaine squeezed his hand, gently. “It’s over,” she said. “You don’t have to worry any longer.”
“I hope that’s true,” Johan said. He looked at Charity, who was pretending not to listen to them. “I think you’ll be fine, really. Just let them think I died.”
“They may not believe it,” Elaine said. “Too many people know we’re bonded. If I’m not dead, they’ll assume you’re not dead too.”
“But you’re going off to the Summer Isles, officially,” Johan reminded her. “Let them file a report you’re dead in a month or two.”
“We can try,” Elaine said. She turned to look at Charity. “I thank you for your service.”
“I thank you for helping my brother,” Charity said. “And for not surrendering to the Emperor when he held you in his clutches.”
“I don’t blame you,” Elaine said. “He would have killed you if you hadn’t submitted.”
Charity lowered her gaze. “I would have sooner died than become … than become his slave,” she said. “But I didn’t realise what he’d do, once I was in his power.”
Johan nodded in sympathy. The Emperor hadn’t touched Charity, but he’d played with her mind and damaged her self-confidence. Chime had told him, when they’d been alone for a moment, that Charity had been having nightmares – and that she was drinking a glass of potion to help her sleep every night. They had to be bad nightmares if the potions weren’t helping. But she’d been completely at Deferens’ mercy. He could have killed her – or worse – at any moment.
“You had no way of knowing,” Elaine said. “Don’t blame yourself.”
“I do,” Charity said. She curtseyed, lifting her dress slightly. “I thank you for everything, Your Supremacy. And I wish you both the very best of luck in the future.”
Johan gave his sister a hug, then followed Elaine as she walked out of House Conidian and into the streets. Half of the once-great mansions were in ruins; a number were being slowly dissected by fortune-hunters, hoping that the defunct Great Houses had left behind books or artefacts of value. He felt a pang of guilt as he looked towards the pile of rubble that had once been House Lakeside, where he’d dumped his younger siblings before fleeing the Golden City. Lady Lakeside had taken them in and tried to do right by them.
But the Emperor burnt through her wards and destroyed her family, he thought. If there were any surviving members of House Lakeside, they were keeping their heads down as they sought to either hide or rebuild their family. She deserved better.
He looked at Elaine as they made their way down to the gardens, where the dragons were waiting. “Are you sure you want to go?”
“I can’t stay,” Elaine said. “They’ll all want me.”
Johan winced. Elaine was the last Empress. The person who married her – if he happened to be a king – would have a claim to the title. He rather doubted that any of the kingdoms could set out to take the entire world, but it probably wouldn’t stop them trying. Elaine … would be safer in Ida, where the ruling monarch was female, than anywhere else. If, of course, they realised she wasn’t in the Summer Isles. They were large enough to force anyone intent on finding her to search for years.
“We can come back later, in disguise,” he suggested. “No one will know who you are.”
“We will see,” Elaine said. She gave him a tired smile. “I have a book to write, you know.”
“The true history of the Witch-King,” Johan agreed. “And perhaps a book of spells?”
“I’ll have to rewrite the basics, at least,” Elaine said. She frowned as they entered the gardens, the dragons turning their heads to peer at them. “The Witch-King might not be the only person capable of crafting spells that slowly corrupt a user’s mind.”
“At least they’ll be more aware of the dangers,” Johan pointed out. He waved to Dread, who was already sitting on a dragon and waiting for them. “They’ll be more careful, won’t they?”
“It won’t be easy for them to separate the potentially-dangerous spells from the others,” Elaine said. She shook her head slowly. “I could use the spells myself, with a little effort; it won’t be long before someone else tries, if there are still vulnerable magicians around. And there will be.”
Dread slipped down to join them. “Are you ready to go?”
“Yeah,” Johan said. “I wasn’t planning to bring anything from the house.”
“I just have a handful of books,” Elaine said. “The last of the Witch-King’s personal spellbooks, as far as I know. I don’t want to leave it lying around.”
“As long as you can’t resurrect him,” Johan said. “You can’t bring him back to life, can you?”
“He’s dead and gone,” Elaine said. “What he did … I don’t think there was a difference between his mentality and his soul any longer. It was torn apart so completely that there shouldn’t be any real hope of rebuilding it.”
“Let us hope so,” Dread said. “And as long as most people are unsure about what really happened, there shouldn’t be anyone trying to bring him back.”
Johan nodded. There were stories about magicians trying to resurrect the dead, but they always ended badly. What came back was rarely human, let alone sane. Who knew what would happen if someone tried to resurrect the Witch-King?
He scrambled onto the dragon and smiled as Elaine clambered up behind him and wrapped her hands around his chest. Moments later, the dragon flapped its wings and rose up into the sky above the Golden City. It looked different now, with so many buildings gone; the Watchtower, in particular, no longer dominated the skyline. And yet … it cost him a pang to leave.
And Elaine felt worse. He could feel her growing dismay as the dragon rose higher.
“We could stay,” he said, quietly. “No one would need to know.”
“We don’t dare take the chance,” Elaine said. She hugged him for a long moment. “Let’s go.”
Epilogue
Dread and Queen Sacharissa were married, two weeks after Dread’s return to Ida, in the Great Hall of the Royal Castle.
It was, Elaine had to admit, a lovely wedding. Dread made a dignified nobleman – all Inquisitors were considered nobles, although few lived long enough to retire and enjoy the perks – while Queen Sacharissa was beautiful as well as wealthy and royal. The long white dress she wore showed off her curves, as well as asserting her virginity. Some of her nobles didn’t look too pleased at this turn of events, but most of them seemed accepting of their ruler’s choice. If nothing else, Elaine thought cynically, only one of them could have married the Queen.
“They’re a little surprised we’re here,” Johan noted afterwards, as they joined the dancers swirling around the dance floor. “They don’t really know us.”
Elaine shrugged. Officially, she was a magical researcher and teacher while Johan was her husband and an engineer, working with the Levellers to find more ways of doing things without magic. Apart from Dread, Queen Sacharissa and a handful of her noblemen, everyone believed the cover story; Elaine had a sneaking suspicion that no one would bother to look for Johan among the Levellers. Why would the most powerful magician in the world choose to associate with powerless mundanes?
She smiled at the thought. Johan was fascinated by the possibilities of creating and building without magic – and she had to admit she shared his fascination, even though her own research kept her busy.
And he had a knack for designing steam engines, spinning wheels and other interesting pieces of work. If his father had just let him go, she was sure, he would have made a decent life for himself. The powers that had both saved and blighted his life might never have materialised.
And then the Witch-King would have won, she thought. The entire world would be enslaved.
The thought made her frown. Dolman had been quietly keeping her – and Dread – up to date with events outside Ida. The Golden City had managed to preserve a precarious neutrality – aided by the fact that it was still the host of the Peerless School – but other parts of the Empire were steadily collapsing into war. There were pirates on the high seas, invading armies looting, raping and burning their way through helpless cities and a number of kings who’d declared themselves supreme rulers of the entire world. It would be years, Dolman had said, before everything settled down, leaving a handful of countries where the Empire had once been. And then … who knew what would happen?
Johan squeezed her hand, gently. “You don’t need to worry about anything,” he said. He could sense her feelings from across the room. “Just … relax and enjoy yourself.”
“I’ll try,” Elaine said.
It wouldn’t be easy. There was always the feeling, lurking at the back of her mind, that it had all been her fault. If she’d tried to remain Empress, she might have been able to stop the decline into war … or, more likely, she would have found herself a prize for whoever captured the Golden City. Maybe Johan and the remaining Inquisitors could have protected her, but they were already badly weakened. She might have wound up unwillingly married to a whole succession of would-be rulers.
She closed her eyes, mentally touching the knowledge at the back of her mind. It was still there, waiting. She’d always be the Bookworm, unless she wiped her mind completely. And if anyone else knew where she was, or what she had … she’d be lucky to wind up merely kidnapped and slowly drained of knowledge. Just like her mother …
“You’re thinking of her again,” Johan said. “I can tell.”
“Yeah,” Elaine said. Her mother had remained in a coma, even weeks after the Witch-King had died. Dread had worried that she might be part of a very long-term plan – everyone else touched by the Witch-King had died with him – but Elaine hadn’t been able to bear the thought of simply cutting her mother’s throat. There was so much she wanted to ask. “Is it wrong of me to wonder what sort of person she is?”
“My mother never cared for me,” Johan said. She could sense the hurt through the bond, tempered by the knowledge that he’d outlasted both of his parents. “If your mother woke up …”
He shook his head, firmly. “Dance with me,” he added. “Tomorrow, if you wish, you can go back to your books.”
Elaine smiled at him. She’d lived with the mystery of her parents – and the shadow of the Witch-King – for years. Now, at least, she could relax and think about the future. She wasn’t the person she’d been when she’d become the Bookworm …
… And who knew what would happen in the future?
“I do have to finish the first textbook before the students go back to school,” she said. The Peerless School needed it, particularly for magicians who didn’t know – who couldn’t be allowed to know – about the dangers. “But, just for the moment, I can put my books aside and be myself.”
“Good,” Johan said. He kissed her gently on the cheek. “And so too can I.”
The End
Afterword
It may not surprise some people to know that I was a librarian.
Frankly, it’s a job that always interested me. I love books. There’s a certain pleasure in both being a guardian of a large collection of books and helping people find the book or piece of information they want from the shelves. I had a library card almost as soon as I could walk and was borrowing books above my age range – as if there really is such a thing – almost as soon as I started school.
When I finally became a librarian, we joked that most students didn’t actually read the books. I worked in an academic library and the patterns we saw were large borrows on the first month, relatively few borrows over the next few months and then a steady ramp-up of borrows towards the exams. Students were taking the books they needed, but not always reading them. We joked that sleeping with a book under one’s pillow didn’t automatically impart the knowledge to the reader.
I think the concept of Bookworm was born then, although it wasn’t until many years later that I actually started to write.
Being an intensive reader actually allows you to cross-reference pieces of data from several different fields. A great deal of human history, for example, can only be truly understood if looked at from several different points of view at once. Not to put too fine a point on it, some writers slant works one way; other writers, slightly more honest, try to put forward a neutral point of view. From a technological point of view, being a chemist as well as a biologist may lead to newer insights that would otherwise be missed.
For a librarian (or an archivist) who lived and worked before computers, it was incredibly hard to cross-reference data from numerous different pieces of work. Historians struggling to put together an account of what actually happened in Ancient Rome, for example, will find it a difficult task. There are several primary sources – writers who wrote during the time and shortly afterwards – but their works are incomplete, refer to other works that are now lost and sometimes biased in the extreme. (Primary works concerning Mark Antony tended to be written by people who wanted Augustus’ favour and as such were slanted against Antony.) I wondered what would happen if someone dug through textbooks of magical lore – and if they somehow gained the ability to assimilate everything in the library at one fell swoop. And so the concept of Elaine the Bookworm was born.
Elaine is not, in a conventional sense, a powerful magician. (Her low status in society comes from her very limited power.) However, most spells in the Bookworm universe are actually very poorly written. (I tend to think of it as the difference between websites produced by a WYSIWYG editor and websites produced by writing HTML from scratch; the former looks nicer, but the latter gives you much more control.) Elaine, granted the insights needed to actually break spells down to the bare basics, actually becomes a double-edged threat. On one hand, she knows spells that were buried for a reason; on the other, she knows ways to reshape spells so more magicians can cast them.
And both make her immensely desirable.
The rest of the universe slowly fell into place. Emotions were strongly linked to magic – logically, I figured, a very emotional magician should be supremely powerful. Johan was designed, then the Witch-King and his long-term plan; the story kept expanding until it finally covered four volumes.
I do not intend to return to Elaine as a character. She has grown and developed, but neither she nor Johan really want to leave where they are now. However, there is plenty of room for future stories in this universe. I do have one idea involving the Peerless School …
… Well, we’ll see. Until then, if you liked this story, please leave a review and let me know.
Thank you very much to the readers who read the first volume and requested sequels
And, again, a very big thank you to my beta readers. I couldn’t have done it without you.
Christopher G. Nuttall
Kuala Lumpur, 2015
Elsewhen Press
an independent publisher specialising in Speculative Fiction
Visit the Elsewhen Press website at elsewhen.co.uk for the latest information on all of our titles, authors and events; to read our blog; to find out where to buy our books and ebooks; or to place an order.
Elsewhen Press
Also by Christopher Nuttall
Winner of the GOLD Award in the Adult Fiction category of the 2013 Wishing Shelf Independent Book Awards
Bookworm
The first book of the Bookworm series
Elaine, an inexperienced witch in Golden Cit
y, has her life turned upside down when she triggers a magical trap and ends up with all the knowledge in the Great Library stuffed inside her head. Avoiding the Inquisition she tries to understand what has happened to her. But she is a pawn in the dark plans of one who wants the Grand Sorcerer’s power.
ebook, paperback (384pp)
visit bit.ly/Bookworm-Nuttall
Bookworm II
The Very Ugly Duckling
The second book of the Bookworm series
In the wake of the disastrous attack on the Golden City, Lady Light Spinner has become Grand Sorceress and Elaine, the Bookworm, has been settling into her positions as Head Librarian and Privy Councillor. But any hope of vanishing into her books is negated when a new magician of staggering power appears in the city, one whose abilities seem to defy the known laws of magic.
ebook, paperback (432pp)
visit bit.ly/Bookworm2-Nuttall
Bookworm III
The Best Laid Plans
The third book of the Bookworm series
Elaine and Johan prepare to leave Golden City, with Daria and Cass, to search for the Witch-King. But Elaine is arrested on the orders of a new Emperor, puppet of the Witch-King. She must escape and destroy him. Privy Councillors and Heads of the Great Houses have bowed to the Emperor. Only Elaine and her friends can prevent an all-out war.
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