“Yes, sir,” Elaine said, softly. She hadn’t realised how much she’d enjoyed working with him until it was about to come to an end. And the Inquisitors would probably ask her questions and keep asking her questions until they worked out what Duke Gama’s cursed book had actually done to her. “Ah...did they give us separate rooms?”
Dread laughed, humourlessly. “They’re not connected,” he assured her. “Sleep tight – we’ll leave as early as we can tomorrow morning.”
Elaine walked into her chambers and shut the door. It was the most luxurious suite of rooms she’d ever had, complete with a bed large enough for five people, a bathtub with working hot and cold running water and a mirror that allowed her to see her entire reflection at once. A small bag just inside the room smelt funny, but it wasn’t until she looked at it that she realised that they were the blood-stained clothes from the curtailed meeting with Trebuchet. She locked and bolted the door, and then spent twenty minutes setting up wards that would prevent anyone from breaking it without strong magic. Inquisitor Dread would probably be able to break in, but no one else in the castle should have the type of magic needed to break through the wards. Or so she hoped. Princess Sacharissa had said that she didn’t have magic of her own, but if her brother was a powerful magician it was quite likely that she had the talent as well.
She walked over to the bathtub, poured in enough warm water to flood the interior, and then knelt down and started to wash off the makeup the maid had placed on her face. It felt good to have her skin breathing properly again; it was easy to see why Princess Sacharissa had turned out the way she had. Elaine would have been driven to rebel by less constraining circumstances. Washing off the last traces of makeup, she walked over to the mirror and studied her reflection. Princess Sacharissa had been right. She did look as though she had come from Ida.
There was a new glint of determination in her eye as she walked over to the bag of blood-stained clothes and pulled them out, one by one. Blood was linked to magic in ways no one fully understood, even the handful of Blood Magicians trained by the druids and sworn to secrecy about their art. The knowledge in her head seemed to suggest that blood – which kept the body going – was symbolically tied to a person’s magic, and to a person’s soul. It was easy to use a blood sample to track someone down, unless they were powerful enough to ward themselves against discovery. And, according to some of the forbidden rites in the back of her head, it could be used to summon someone’s soul back from the dead.
No one really understood the nature of the gods, or what happened after a human soul separated from the body. What was understood was that a soul continued to have an affinity for the husk that had housed it for so long, even though they might have gone onwards to a better place or drifted into the fires of hell. Even considering using the rites to call a soul back from the next world was a dangerous step towards necromancy, but she had to know what had happened to Trebuchet. And what he knew, if anything, about the spell that had crammed her head with forbidden knowledge. Whatever curses had been used to prevent him from talking while he was alive wouldn’t hold true after he was dead.
She hesitated for a long moment, before picking up her shirt and using the blood to draw out a protective circle on the floor. The books seemed to disagree about the precise rituals for summoning demons, but they all agreed that a dead soul needed a circle of blood to exist in the mortal world. They also warned of the dangers in increasingly elaborate terms, noting that the lost souls sometimes turned aggressive and attacked the foolish mortals who dared to recall them to the mortal realm, or tried to possess the living and live again. Aided by the knowledge crammed into her head, she drew out the next set of protective sigils. Even if the lost soul intended to be hostile, she would be ready.
Pouring a jug of water as a final precaution – the dead couldn’t cross running water, for no reason that any mortal understood – she stripped and stood in front of the circle, feeling magic swirling around her nude body. There were rituals for subtle magic – female magic, some of the books claimed – that didn’t seem to jibe with the more controlled magic developed by the Peerless School. She now knew subtle curses that she could have used against Millicent, without Millicent ever realising what had happened to her. The most frightening part of what she’d become was that she truly didn’t understand the limits of her knowledge. New ideas and concepts seemed to pop into her head every day.
She crossed her arms over her bare breasts and mouthed a single word. “Trebuchet,” she said, shaping the thought as best she could. She didn’t know enough about him to really know him, but she recalled her first sight of him and what she’d been told by everyone in the royal court. Carefully, feeling the magic flaring to live, she sank to her knees and whispered his name again. “Trebuchet...”
And something answered. Elaine flinched back, feeling...something crawling over her skin, as it started to manifest inside the circle. There was nothing visible, but she could sense it, something starting to take on a vaguely humanoid form. She closed her eyes and concentrated on the memories she had of the Court Wizard. The dead often tried to play tricks on the living...and they didn’t quite follow the same rules as the living did. It was quite likely that Trebuchet had already spent years, as he understood the term, in the land of the dead. Who knew what happened to a soul once it was separated from its body?
“You have called me,” a voice said. She felt it in her mind rather than her ears. “You wish to ask questions of me?”
It didn’t sound familiar, but most of the knowledge had warned that it wouldn’t be even remotely familiar. “I called you,” Elaine confirmed. The sense of something lurking just outside her closed eyes grew stronger. She was in no danger as long as she didn’t break the circle ahead of time, but it didn’t feel that way. The magic seemed to have taken on a distinctly alien tone. “I want to know why you died.”
The sound of laboured breathing grew louder. “I died because I was a pawn in a game I didn’t understand I was playing until it was far too late and I died and I died and I died and I died and...”
“I know,” Elaine said, softly. The dead couldn’t be trusted completely, according to what she’d read. And they no longer had the same priorities as the living. “I know you died. And I am sorry that you died. And if you tell me what I want to know, I may be able to bring the person who cursed you to justice.”
“He will never be brought to justice,” Trebuchet’s voice said. Elaine pressed her eyes tightly closed as she felt someone looming right on top of her. It was an illusion, a trick of the dead, but it felt alarmingly real. “He waited for hundreds of years to start the pebbles rolling towards disaster. A mere bookworm such as yourself could not stop him. Even the Inquisitors could not stop him.”
There was a ghostly chuckle, right on her ear. “But you know how much has been forgotten over the years,” Trebuchet said. “You know that better than anyone else, don’t you?”
His voice hardened. “And yet you are pathetic,” he added, mockingly. “You fear the touch of a man even as you want it. You spy on your friend and now you fear her because of her curse. You want to know the truth even when it will do you no good.”
Ghostly lips pressed against hers, a mocking parody of a kiss. “Make me live again and you will have all your answers,” Trebuchet whispered. “Give me your living blood to drink, allow me to swarm within your body...”
“No,” Elaine said, flatly. The books had warned of this danger. “I cannot help you to come back to life. You would do better to ask the gods.”
“The gods do not care,” Trebuchet’s voice said. He laughed, humourlessly. “As private parts to the gods are we; they play with us for their sport. I can see them watching us, betting on us, throwing down visions and thunderbolts so that we may amuse them as we scurry around and praise them in desperate fear. The gods are not our friends. They are nothing better than demons.”
Elaine shivered at the absolute confidence in his voice. She had never
been particularly religious, not when the gods had done so little to help her in her troubled life. And she was far from the only one. It had been centuries, perhaps thousands of years, since the gods had sent anything but visions to their believers. And their visions were often misleading, or difficult to understand before it was too late.
“They watch us because we amuse them,” Trebuchet added, softly. “They do not care about us.”
Elaine cleared her throat. “I want to know who cursed you and why,” she said. The books had insisted that some souls needed a firm hand. Trebuchet was clearly one of them. “Do I have to compel you?”
“But that isn’t what you really want to know,” Trebuchet said. His ghostly presence seemed to press against her body, ghostly fingers running up towards her neck. “You want to know who brought you into this world and why. I could tell you, in exchange for some of your life.”
“I cannot make that bargain,” Elaine said. There was no such thing as ‘some’ of a person’s life. Trebuchet would drain her and leave her body an empty husk. It was possible that she might even become one of the undead. Inquisitor Dread would open the door to discover her rotting corpse lunging at him, desperate for blood. “Who was it who cursed you and why...?”
“Your mother was a whore, a willing servant for He Who Will Come,” Trebuchet said, before she could start using Words of Power to compel him to answer her questions. “Your father carried a bloodline that had been perfectly preserved for hundreds of years, ready for He to use it again. And again. And again. And again.”
Elaine was shaken, but somehow she managed to keep her eyes closed. “What bloodline does he carry?” she asked. “Who was he?”
“Ah, his true name has never been spoken,” Trebuchet said, craftily. “But I could find it for you, if you gave me your life.”
Temptation warred in Elaine’s breast. He was right. She did want to know, and somehow her life seemed a small price to pay for that knowledge. And yet she knew that it would bring her no happiness. If her mother had truly been a whore...
...But if her mother had been a whore, how had she found the money to pay for Elaine’s upbringing, even in the orphanage? With that sort of background, she would have been lucky not to go into the brothels that catered for the truly perverse, the handful of establishments that were talked about in whispers – when they were mentioned at all. They wouldn’t have minded taking in a whore’s child. She would have taken the money and left Elaine behind to their tender mercies.
The dead couldn’t lie, she’d been told, but they would have even fewer inhibitions than an Inquisitor about warping the truth, or deliberately misdirecting their victims. And Trebuchet had been an asshole even when he’d been alive. The gods were probably tormenting him right now for his sins and he was trying to get back at them by misdirecting Elaine...
“I don’t want to know about my father,” she lied. She did want to know, but she would find out another way, somehow. “I command you, by Rod and Book and Candle; who was it who cursed you and destroyed your life...”
Her eyes snapped open as something intruded into the room. Where Trebuchet’s ghost should have been floating inside the chamber, there was...something else, something far greater than Elaine’s merely human mind could grasp. It surged forward, trying to force its way into the mortal reality, the sheer presence holding her frozen as it started to imprint itself on the human world. Trebuchet was long gone, his soul shredded in a moment by the creature as it materialised, long fingers of mental force reaching down into Elaine’s soul. She opened her mouth to scream...
...And lashed out, knocking over the jug of water. It washed over the floor and broke the circle. The presence was instantly gone, leaving behind nothing more than a wave of magical force that picked her up and threw her backwards into the wall, before the blood washed away completely into a liquid mess. Elaine fell to the ground, yelped in pain as her buttocks hit the stone floor, and then closed her eyes in relief. Something from one of the higher dimensions, perhaps a god, perhaps something far darker, had tried to hijack the summoning, despite all of her precautions. It should have been impossible. Dread was right. Something was definitely rotten in the state of Ida.
She lost track of how long she sat there before she finally pulled herself to her feet and staggered over towards the mess on the floor. Raw magic was crackling around the water, only to disperse into nothingness at her touch. Elaine looked down at the remains of the circle and sigils she’d drawn before starting the summoning and then started to clean it up. If Dread, or someone else, had seen them, they would have been able to guess what she’d done. The maids couldn’t be trusted to clean up this mess. They would certainly have reported it to the King, even if Elaine tried to claim that it was the result of feminine troubles. If he knew anything about magic, he might have guessed the truth.
The mirror seemed to glow faintly as she caught sight of her own body. She looked a terrifying mess, with bruises everywhere and blood staining her legs. Shaking her head, she started to wash herself thoroughly, just before she caught sight of the mirror again. It was glowing, and not with the reflection of her own power. Something was definitely wrong...she stared at her own image and saw her face and hands move, even when she wasn’t moving herself...
And then her reflection’s face twisted into an absolute look of revulsion and slapped her across the cheek.
Elaine stumbled back, more in shock than in pain, just in time to see two dark-suited figures stepping out of the mirror. There was a dimensional gate there, just as she’d seen in the Great Library, and none of her wards had been configured to block it. She hadn’t even realised that it was there! Dread would have noticed, she told herself as she grasped frantically for her wand...but it was where she had left it, in what remained of the dress she’d been given by the maids. She hadn’t needed it to summon Trebuchet’s ghost.
She lifted a hand, preparing to cast a spell, when one of the figures pointed a strange-looking wand at her. There was a brilliant flash of light, a moment of absolute paralysis...and then she blacked out completely.
Chapter Twenty
Someone was whispering at the back of her mind. Elaine could hear him, even though she couldn’t make out the words. The voice didn’t sound pleasant; it sounded annoyed, almost petulant. She tried to listen, her mind only dimly understanding what had happened to her, before there was a tidal wave of pain and she screamed, opening her eyes wide. Her body refused to move...
...Her hands were tied. Worse, her hands were tied to the ceiling and her feet were chained to the floor. Her mind swam in disbelief, before she remembered what had happened just after the summoning. Someone had stepped into her room through a mirrored door and stunned her. And then...she had to have been kept under while she was dragged through the tunnels on the other side of the looking glass. A sense of despondency overcame her as she realised that she could be miles from Inquisitor Dread. She should never have come to Ida. It had all been a terrible mistake.
“She’s awake,” a voice said. He didn’t sound familiar. “It shouldn’t take her longer than a few minutes to recover from the curse that stunned her. Perhaps less, if she is the one you seek.”
“I seek the bookworm,” a voice boomed. Elaine looked around, finally sighting a hooded man bending over a crystal ball. The Peerless School had tried to teach Elaine and her classmates how to infuse a crystal ball with magic to allow long-range communications between cities, towns and military formations, but only a handful of her peers had mastered the art. They’d been assured of good positions and better salaries as soon as they graduated. There were never enough crystal balls to go around. “She has to be the one we seek.”
The hooded man stood up and advanced on Elaine, who tried to flinch back. Above her, the chains tightened, pulling her hands upright as far as they would go. The dungeon – she was sure that she was in a dungeon – was spelled to prevent the imprisoned convicts from escaping, of course. There was no point in putting crimina
ls in a locked room without having some form of security entity on guard. Elaine might have been able to banish it, if she’d had access to her wand, but it was nowhere in sight. And no human could hope to outthink a security entity. She wouldn’t be halfway to the door before it slammed shut in her face.
“You are our prisoner,” the hooded man informed her. His eyes travelled up and down her naked body, watching with cold amusement as Elaine flushed bright red. “There is absolutely no hope of escaping our grasp. Your cooperation now will encourage us not to harm you more than strictly necessary.”
One of the witches from the books Daria was always reading would probably have spat in his face, but they had the ultimate power – the writer – on their side. Elaine stared at him, trying hard not to show her fear. Without her wand, it would be much harder to cast any spells...and even if she did have her wand, the security entity would probably take it from her before she could escape. It wasn’t as if she could perform a teleport under her own power. And the dungeon would be surrounded by wards to prevent criminals from simply vanishing in a flash of light.
“So, one simple question,” the man said. “Are you the bookworm?”
Elaine winced, knowing that her expression had probably answered his question. She’d always been a bookworm – why not, when she’d had few friends at the Peerless School – but he wasn’t asking about her reading habits. The curse on the book from Duke Gama had dumped the contents of millions of books into her head. Of course she was a bookworm. What better name for someone like her?
“Then we have found you,” the man said. He laughed, with a kind of grim amusement. “We send teams of hunters to your city to try and identify you and you walk right into our hands.”
“I told you that she had been charmed to come to Ida – and to think that it was all her own idea,” the voice from the crystal ball said. It sounded vastly amused by the whole concept, even as Elaine shuddered in horror. Inquisitor Dread had pointed out that she might not be acting of her own volition, but she’d dismissed the thought as laughable...and that too might have been part of the spell. “You always had your doubts about the power of magic.”
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