Bookworm

by Christopher Nuttall

  “So he was caught,” Dread continued. “The Sorcerer handed him over to the City Guard, who had him pushed in front of a judge, sentenced to enslavement and then collared. Once all his loot was recovered, he was sent to work as a menial slave...”

  “Which is where you found me,” Cat said, in the same voice. “And you have sworn to make my freedom permanent if I do one task for you.”

  Dread nodded and unfurled a map. “Count Lucas, the illegitimate son of the Duke of Randor and also one of the possible candidates to become Grand Sorcerer, owns a large mansion at the edge of High Tory,” he said. “Rather unimaginatively, it is called Randor Mansion.”

  He chuckled, humourlessly. “For reasons unknown, he and Prince Hilarion have become friends and the Prince is currently living within the mansion. It is heavily guarded, with a small private army, and hundreds of wards interwoven within the walls.”

  “Which may not be a bad thing,” Cass pointed out. “So many wards would likely start to interfere with each other.”

  “But he has a small army to back him up,” Cat said, softly. “I thought that private armies weren’t allowed within the city.”

  “There’s no Grand Sorcerer to order them out,” Dread said, crossly. Elaine could see why he was worried. Every candidate for the Grand Sorcerer’s position had a sizeable retinue and their allies had offered more, including soldiers and even lesser magicians. The Garrison possessed better-trained soldiers than the private armies, but they would be badly outnumbered if the private armies decided to go to war within the city. One false move and there would be blood in the streets. “I believe that...certain authorities are working on bringing other troops near the city, but that will take time.”

  He tapped the map firmly. “All of the candidates have been kept under discreet observation, even before we discovered that one of them might be cheating...”

  “Or at least cheating outside the rules governing cheating,” Karan added. “Every time we have a magical contest, cheating becomes epidemic. No magician likes to lose.”

  Dread ignored her. “We know that Prince Hilarion and Count Lucas spend the day visiting people who might be able to assist them and the nights enjoying themselves in the Golden City. Prince Hilarion may have set a new record for spending his father’s money at terrifying speed, enjoying the services of high-class whores and drinking parlours. He’s actually pulled a great many lesser noblemen – and magicians with aristocratic blood – into his faction, although it doesn’t seem that this has yet translated into political power...”

  “Of course not,” Daria commented, acidly. “The ones who are backing him are the ones who have the most to gain from a massive shift in the balance of power.”

  “Correct,” the Princess agreed. “Doesn’t drinking and wenching invalidate him for the post?”

  “No,” Dread said. “The only outright quality that would ban him would be lacking magical powers – and he very definitely does have magic. Any trace of necromancy or certain other forbidden acts would force the Inquisition to crush him, setting a whole range of dangerous precedents.”

  He snorted. “I’ll say one thing for him,” he added. “He’s got nerve. His plan has been exposed and he’s still trying to make it work. But if he won, he would win it all.”

  “So it would seem,” Cass agreed.

  “Our mission – or rather Elaine, Daria and Cat’s mission – is to break into the mansion and find proof we can use to convince the Star Chamber to act. Evidence of necromancy; evidence of spells that could produce a bookworm...whatever it is, we need it. Find it, get it to the Watchtower...and then we can strike. Once Prince Hilarion is removed, we can wait for the next Grand Sorcerer to be confirmed before we move against Ida.”

  “I have a question,” the Princess said, into the silence. “Is Lucas really involved in my brother’s plot?”

  “I don’t believe so,” Dread said, after a long moment. “I’m not even sure how they know each other.”

  “The Duke of Randor was an old friend of my grandfather’s,” the Princess said. “Lucas...is his son, from the wrong side of the blankets. But he was always a good guy to me.”

  “Then we’d better hope that he remains a good guy,” Dread said. “But maybe he was the one who taught Prince Hilarion.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “That’s them on their way to the party,” Cat muttered, from where he was lying on the roof of Anchor Mansion. “And they’ve got one hell of a following today.”

  Elaine followed his gaze. She didn’t know what sort of agreement Dread had cut with the Anchor Family, but they’d agreed to allow the Inquisition to establish an observation post on their roof that allowed the team to look down into High Tory. The outskirts of the richest part of the city were bustling with life, yet somehow less active than the poorer parts of the city. Prince Hilarion was visible for a brief moment as he walked down the driveway and climbed into a coach, a girl clinging to his arm as if he were incredibly attractive. He was handsome, Elaine would happily admit, but he was also a prince and a powerful sorcerer. Far too many girls would be drawn to him in the hope that some of his glory would reflect on them.

  She rolled her eyes as the long parade of admirers and supplicants sorted themselves out into carriages and headed down the road towards the seedier parts of town. Like many young aristocrats – and trader children – they had a positive taste for slumming it in the poorer parts of the city, although only those who were tired of living would go into the Rookery after dark. The criminal element might have been quieter with additional patrols of City Guardsmen, Garrison soldiers and private armies, but they wouldn’t hesitate to attempt to steal from a particularly dumb aristocrat who’d been separated from his party. But Prince Hilarion and Count Lucas were sorcerers. Only a fool would try to pick on them openly.

  “It costs more money each day to keep those people happy than I stole in three years,” Cat said, crossly. Elaine kept glancing at the sneak thief – and at the pale skin around his neck, where the collar had once been. She knew that collars could be removed, but it was very rare for anyone to be offered their freedom by their master. Why should the masters bargain when the collars kept the slaves nice and obedient? “And I’m the one who was punished for stealing.”

  Elaine ignored him and concentrated on Randor Mansion. Like most of the mansions in High Tory, it had nothing more than a small courtyard at the front and a solid wall surrounding the mansion itself. The real defences were unseen; the guards, the wards and probably a number of entity-powered surprises. And it was huge; having nowhere to go but up had forced the builders to keep pushing the mansion ever higher. Elaine had never realised until she’d absorbed the knowledge of the Great Library just how much magic went into buildings in the Golden City, even the ones without interiors larger than their exteriors. If something were to happen to drain away the magic infused into the mansion’s walls...the entire building would probably collapse.

  Maybe Ida had had a point when it had shunned magic as much as possible. Its buildings might be constructed from ugly grey stone, but they were solid. A sudden drain on local magic wouldn’t bring them tumbling down into dust. And if magic were to be drained over the entire city, much of the Golden City would be destroyed. She looked away from the mansion and towards the faint haze that marked the presence of the Blight. Perhaps the real reason no one had tried to drain the wild magic was because the spell could easily get out of control and start draining magic from across the city, destroying it in an afternoon.

  “That’s interesting,” Cat said, suddenly. “Look who’s come to pay them a call.”

  “Wizard Kane,” Daria said, looking up from where she sat beside them. Cat had been nervous until Elaine had assured him that the spells surrounding their hiding place would make it impossible for anyone to see them. “I wonder why he’s here.”

  Elaine frowned. Four of the candidates were known quantities; Prince Hilarion was a largely-unknown figure...and then there
was the Wizard Kane. Little was known about him, even after the broadsheet editors had sent their best writers to track down dirt on the enigmatic sorcerer. He was older than Dread, from what Elaine had been able to deduce, and classically trained, but little else. Maybe he was gambling everything on becoming the Grand Sorcerer. At least he wouldn’t be as bad as Deferens...

  There was a brief discussion between Kane and one of the servants, and then Kane just walked away from the building. Maybe he’d hoped to speak to Prince Hilarion or Count Lucas, or maybe he’d been intending to admit that he couldn’t win and bow out of the contest. There was no way to know. Darkness fell over the city rapidly as the lights started to go out, parts of the city still glowing as the night life began in earnest. Prince Hilarion and his cronies would be partying for hours to come.

  “Remember what I said,” Cat hissed. “You do exactly as I tell you down there, or I’ll just leave you. I will not be a slave again.”

  “I understand,” Daria said, impatiently. “Shall we go?”

  They walked down the stairs and out into the mansion’s courtyard, heading towards the wall that separated it from Randor Mansion. Dread had told them that he expected that the inner defences would be weaker than the ones on the gates, if only because warding spells were expensive and not always completely reliable if the builder hadn’t been a sorcerer. Up close, Elaine could feel the wards buzzing through the air, partly anchored into the bricks that formed the wall. Dread had been right, although she could tell that some of the wards were new, probably created by Prince Hilarion and his friend. But she, using the knowledge in her head, could have done a better job. There was something very crude about the spells surrounding Randor Mansion.

  Cat looked over at her as Elaine produced her wand. “Are you sure that you can break through the wards?”

  “Yes,” Elaine said, flatly. There were entire libraries of books on making – and breaking – wards...and they were all in her head. “Daria...”

  “Get on with it,” her friend urged. She had already shifted to the halfway form between human and wolf, a veiled threat to Cat. A werewolf could track him down from across half the city – and would be a great deal less kind than the Inquisition. “Hurry.”

  Elaine closed her eyes and reached out with her second sight. It was astonishing how few wizards ever bothered to really develop their senses, even though magic gifted them things that mundane humans could never match. Guided by the information in her mind, she located and identified seventeen separate wards, each one spinning through the air surrounding the mansion. Some of them were nothing more than repelling charms, convincing anyone who touched them that they really – really – wanted to walk away; the remainder grew steadily nastier. Two of them would inflict pain on someone stubborn enough to ignore the repelling charms; the remainder were a combination of change spells and freeze spells, apart from a single compulsion spell that carried a powerful command to commit suicide. Someone had put a great deal of effort into protecting the mansion without really knowing what they were doing. There were so many wards that they were definitely interfering with one another.

  Carefully, she reached out towards them mentally, shaping countering spells in her mind. A cunning wizard wouldn’t just rely on brute force. There would be wards in place that monitored the other wards, watching for a break or even a bulge where no bulge should be. And they would be shielded by the main wards, protected from direct interference. But no one could have expected to meet a bookworm. Slowly, she aligned the magical field surrounding her with the ward, and then reached through the ward towards the secondary set of detectors. They weren’t very complex, but they were easy to mislead. Whatever happened to the rest of the wards, the secondary set would keep cheerfully reporting that everything was fine.

  A sorcerer would normally live alone, allowing him to link the wards directly to his own mind and making them much harder to crack. But these wards were anchored within stone and brick rather than a human mind; carefully, Elaine disabled them one by one, creating an open space in the wards. And, with a little help from Daria, she scrambled onto the wall and peered ahead of her. There seemed to be no other surprises until they reached the mansion’s walls.

  Daria shifted completely to wolf and leapt over the wall in a single bound, Cat clinging desperately to her neck. Elaine smiled as the thief scrambled off the wolf, allowing Daria to return to the halfway form. Her fur would hide her body from prying eyes; she’d had to leave her clothes behind when she’d shifted into a wolf. Elaine stepped up to the mansion walls and reached out, again, with her mind. The builders had, unsurprisingly, woven another set of wards within the bricks and mortar. They would be more finicky, much harder to remove or disable. But perhaps she didn’t need to disable them.

  She felt out the wards as she stepped along the wall, heading towards a heavy stone door. It was so heavily warded that it would be impossible to break, at least not without setting off alarms all over the building. Cat let out a moan of dismay as he sensed the wards – his magical talent was only good enough for sensing magic – but Elaine ignored him. The wards would keep out an army of combat magicians if they used brute force, yet the designers had overlooked a single terrifying weakness. There was nothing stopping light from passing through the windows.

  “Take my hand and close your eyes,” she ordered. There were some nasty spells curling outside the glass, preventing someone from simply breaking it to get inside, but there were no protections on the glass itself. “Hang on...”

  She shaped the spell in her mind – a subtle combination of thoughts that produced a shockingly powerful effect – and closed her eyes, triggering the spell. When she opened her eyes they were standing inside the mansion, having briefly become light and passed through the transparent glass. She smiled, before feeling a cold shiver as she looked up at the wards. From the inside, they looked more dangerous than she’d realised...and whoever had designed them should have at least left a warning spell on the glass. But there was none.

  “Come on,” she hissed, as Cat produced a popular tool for burglars from his bag. It cast light that was only visible to the would-be thieves. The designers had put a lot of hard work into creating something that wouldn’t trigger alarms, or so they’d claimed. Dread had been less sanguine, but he’d accepted that there was no other choice. “Prince Hilarion’s rooms are on the higher levels of the house.”

  The interior of Randor Mansion reminded her of Howarth Hall, complete with tacky artwork and absurdly expensive paintings on the wall. None of them looked familiar, but she kept her senses sharp and swept her mental focus over everything before stepping past it. There were plenty of charms that could turn a seemingly-innocent looking item into a trap, just like the one that had caught Cat. He’d been incredibly lucky. A thief caught by a sorcerer could be legally killed, or enslaved, and no one would give a damn. Anyone who broke into a sorcerer’s home, the Grand Sorcerer had said, deserved whatever they got. Even the Guardsmen tended to walk quietly – and quickly – around buildings belonging to sorcerers and whistle for the Inquisition if there were any crimes that involved magic.

  They slipped back into the shadows as a small group of chattering maids walked past, wearing uniforms that had clearly been devised by a young man, revealing almost everything without the subtle hints that went into so many of the dresses Daria had shown Elaine before her world had gone completely crazy. The maids were all collared – and they would be ruthless in defence of their master’s house. Some thieves believed that collared slaves were completely incapable of resistance. Few of them survived to make the same mistake twice.

  Daria leaned closer to her and whispered in Elaine’s ear. “What language are they speaking?”

  Elaine hesitated. She’d only spoken Imperial – and a handful of magical words – before Duke Gama’s spell had struck her. Now...she had a rough comprehension of all other known languages, but it was confusing, as if she really needed a tutor to show her the difference between
how words were written and how they were pronounced. But it wasn’t Imperial, all right; it struck her that they were speaking Ida’s native language. They could have come with Prince Hilarion, or they might have been living in the city before he arrived. Or he could have sent them ahead of him...it wouldn’t take great magic to know that the Grand Sorcerer was dying. The entire city had known about it weeks before Death finally claimed him for her own.

  “I think it comes from Ida,” she said. “But I can’t understand it properly.”

  “Probably charmed with the collars,” Cat said, as he slunk further down the corridor and up a long pair of staircases. Elaine followed him, watching for traps, but she found nothing apart from a watching ward that was easy to disarm. The Inquisition had provided plans of the building, including details on where Prince Hilarion and his men were sleeping. Elaine couldn’t understand why they had collected so much data, or how, but they probably wanted to keep an eye on all of the possible candidates. “I...”

  Daria slipped past him. “People ahead,” she hissed. “Get back...”

  Too late. A pair of maids rounded the corner and stopped, staring at them. Elaine reacted with a speed she hadn’t known she possessed, snapping off a binding spell that caught them both before they could open their mouths and start screaming for help. Daria caught them before they hit the ground and dragged them into an unoccupied room, snarling at Cat when he tried to take advantage of the maids’ helplessness. Maybe he had spent five years as a slave, forbidden to touch women or indulge himself in any way, but that didn’t excuse molesting a helpless slave.

  “We’d better move quickly,” Daria snapped. “Those girls will be missed soon.”

  Elaine nodded as she led the way up the next flight of stairs. Collared slaves were nothing if not obedient – and dedicated. No collared slave would take a break, or deliberately work slowly to annoy a master he couldn’t rebel against in any other way; they’d be missed sooner rather than later. And then their supervisors would find them and know that there were intruders in the house.