“The Emperor,” Lord Falcate said. She vaguely remembered him being a Privy Councillor under Light Spinner, which had made him one of the most powerful men in the Empire. “Do we really have an Emperor?”
“The Golden Throne has accepted him,” Charity said, bluntly. “None but the Imperial Bloodline may sit there and live.”
“Yes, we know,” Lord Falcate said. It was one of the first things children were taught, even the magic-less kids who barely had a year or two of schooling before they went to work. “I do not believe it, though.”
“I swear that it is true,” Charity said.
“We all felt the shift in the magic,” Lord Ahlstrom said, tartly. “We must concede that an Emperor has finally resurfaced.”
Charity took a breath. “I have already pledged myself to his service,” she said. “As such, I bring a message from him to you.”
She frowned at their expressions. No doubt they’d hoped to loot House Conidian before she managed to secure all of the family’s property, which would have included the children. Her younger siblings were too young to marry, but not too young to enter into marriage contracts that would have given their prospective parents-in-law too much influence and power over their lives. And over what they could claim as their share of their family’s former assets ...
... But if she was working for the Emperor, they would be safer leaving what remained of her family alone.
“The Emperor is grateful for your service in keeping the magic-users of the city under control,” she said. A pleasant statement and a threat, rolled into one. No one could hope to forget that it was the Inquisitors who kept magic-users under control. “As such, he is prepared to renew your Charters of Power, which were drawn from the early days of the first Grand Sorcerer. However, he requests proof of your goodwill and loyalty.”
“I hope he is not expecting us to swear any unlimited oaths,” Lord Ahlstrom snapped.
“No, My Lord,” Charity said. “He is requesting that you – that each of the magical families – hand over a child, someone who can be trained to serve the Emperor.”
And serve as a hostage, she thought.
She shivered. It wasn’t an uncommon practice for hostages to be exchanged, particularly when two rival families tried to come to terms despite years of mistrust and outright hatred on both sides. Charity had half-expected to spend a year or two in the house of a rival family herself, when her father had been negotiating a complex long-term agreement with them. But, in the end, the talks had broken down. She’d been relieved, if she recalled correctly. A later breakdown of the agreement would have meant her certain death.
“The Emperor wants one of our children?” Lord Ahlstrom demanded. He sounded shocked at the mere thought. None of the Grand Sorcerers had insisted on taking hostages. “Is he mad?”
“The Emperor wishes to have nothing but good relations with you,” Charity said. As far as she knew, that was actually true. “However, you will have to accept the supremacy of the Imperial Bloodline.”
She paused. “Those of your children who go to work in the Imperial Palace will also have access to the Emperor,” she added. “They will have the chance to seek positions of power.”
They looked doubtful, but accepting. It was unusual to hand over a hostage without receiving another in return, yet the Emperor was on a fundamentally different level from any of the Great Houses. And besides, law and custom allowed the hostages plenty of leeway to write to their families. There would be a chance for them to try to manipulate the Emperor, as the years wore on. It wasn’t a bad bargain ... as long as they were prepared to toe the line. If they weren’t, the hostages would be the first to die.
“I will present my young daughter,” Lord Ahlstrom said, finally. “She will take up a place in the Imperial Palace.”
Because she’s your fifth child, Charity thought cynically, as the others made similar promises. None of them offered a senior family member. The firstborn children, the Prime Heirs, would never be used as hostages, even if there were no other candidates, but even second or third children had their uses. You might mourn her death, but it wouldn’t damage your family.
“Thank you,” she said, out loud. “The Emperor will be pleased.”
Chapter Nine
Johan hadn’t spent anything like enough time on the streets, not when his father had rarely allowed him to leave the house, but even he could tell that an air of fear and uncertainty was settling over the Golden City. The streets were normally crammed with people, even when the snow was falling; now, they were almost deserted, with only a handful of men and women walking to and from their homes. They looked around almost furtively as they moved, as if they expected to be attacked at any moment. Johan had a feeling they might have had a point.
“Over here,” Daria hissed. Her nose wrinkled as she sniffed, loudly. “Someone is coming.”
Johan frowned – the blizzard was growing stronger – but he trusted her nose. She pulled him into a darkened alleyway and tapped her lips, warning him to keep quiet. Moments later, a line of soldiers marched out of the snowstorm, heading down towards the mountains that marked the edge of the city. They wore fighting armour, rather than the ceremonial gear he’d seen on the City Guard, and carried swords and shields. It looked, very much, as if they were going to war.
He felt his frown deepen as he caught sight of the emblem on their shields. It wasn’t the standard wand and staff that represented the Empire, but a sun shining brightly in the sky, representing ... what? He had the oddest feeling that he’d seen something like it before, perhaps in one of the books he’d devoured when he’d still held out hopes of being able to make his own way in the world. But the memory refused to surface as the soldiers marched onwards and vanished into the snow.
“No one should be able to bring an army here,” Daria muttered. “But someone did.”
Johan turned to look at her. She seemed unbothered by the cold – a werewolf wouldn’t be bothered by changes in temperature – but deeply worried.
“They weren’t the City Guard,” he said. “They were real soldiers.”
“Yeah,” Daria said. “So where did they come from?”
She slipped onwards, leading the way up the street and through one of the markets. Johan had always enjoyed markets as a young man, but this one was eerie. The stalls were empty, their owners either hiding for the night in their homes or huddled in the pub, discussing the situation with their mates. A handful of vagrants were trying to sleep under the stalls, relying on the wood for shelter; Johan had the uneasy feeling that many of them would freeze to death in the coming days, if the snowstorms grew worse. Daria ignored the sight and kept walking, heading onwards into the poorer parts of the city. Every so often, she pulled Johan aside as soldiers walked past, clearly on patrol. Sometimes, they had prisoners with them as they walked.
“They’re keeping the streets clear,” Daria muttered. “They must be desperate to keep the citizens from talking to one another.”
Johan nodded, sourly. He’d thrilled to tales of war from the days before the Empire, although his father had often pointed out that most of the stories were glorified. The good guys never lost a man, while the bad guys died in their thousands ... and it was remarkably sterile. Johan had seen more blood when he’d cut his finger than any of the characters in the stories had ever seen. And yet, he could have made it as a soldier. Or a guardsman. Or even an accountant working for the bureaucrats. If only he’d been allowed a chance ...
But there was nothing fun about being under military occupation.
“Hey!” A voice snapped. “Stop right there.”
“Shit,” Daria muttered, yanking Johan down yet another alleyway. The sound of pounding footsteps told them that they hadn’t managed to hide in time. “Keep moving ...”
They ran out of the alleyway and straight into another group of soldiers. Johan cursed under his breath as the men turned to face them, their grim expressions becoming tighter when they laid eyes on Daria
. He reached for his magic. The soldiers froze solid, literally. Daria gaped at him, then tugged him forward, leaving the soldiers behind. Johan honestly wasn’t sure if they would be fine, or if whatever he had done to them was permanent. No one, not even Elaine, had managed to get a handle on how his powers really worked.
“They would have carried protective charms,” Daria said, as they ran through the slippery streets. “And you managed to overpower them.”
“I think so,” Johan said, doubtfully. Normal protections didn’t seem to stop his magic. “But the next person we run into might be an Inquisitor.”
“Probably, knowing my luck,” Daria said. She paused. “Can you make us invisible?”
“I don’t know,” Johan said. There were hundreds of invisibility spells, but his magic didn’t follow the usual rules. “I can try.”
Daria shook her head. “Just keep walking,” she said. “And hope we get there before those soldiers get better, or their friends find them there.”
Johan shuddered as they walked. Being transfigured had always been terrifying, even though the spells Jamal and his other siblings used wore off, eventually. His powers, on the other hand ... nothing about them quite made sense. Even Elaine hadn’t been able to undo some of his work, despite her vast knowledge of the way magic worked. It was quite possible that he’d frozen the soldiers for good.
And there was another mystery. Elaine – and Jamal, and Charity, and every other regular magician – exhausted themselves when they cast spells. Jamal, whatever else could be said about him, had been a powerful magician ... and even he had tired, when he cast complex spells. But as far as Johan could tell, his powers didn’t seem to cost him anything, not even a bout of weariness. The power just seemed to come from nowhere.
“It makes no sense,” Elaine had said, weeks ago. “You should be getting the power from somewhere, but where?”
Daria glanced back at him. “Do you know where we are?”
“No,” Johan said, shortly. The Golden City might be small – it took barely half an hour to walk from one side to the other – but he’d never had the opportunity to memorise a map, let alone explore as extensively as he would have liked. “Where are we?”
He looked around, doubtfully. The Golden City was so cramped that even a small house was staggeringly expensive. His father had moaned about the cost often enough, looking for ways to avoid paying a small fortune each year just to maintain the house. But here ... the houses looked weird, as if they’d been submerged in water and then left to dry in the open air. There was a scent of decay in the air, and ... and strange sensations that left a chill running down his spine. He couldn’t help noticing that the snow was refusing to lie on certain houses.
“This used to be called the Blight,” Daria explained. “Some idiot was casting forbidden spells and he managed to unleash a tidal wave of wild magic, which rendered the entire area uninhabitable. Only a desperate person would risk hiding in the houses here, because he might go to sleep and wake up in a completely different form. Elaine did something here and cleansed it of most of the wild magic.”
“I ... see,” Johan said. His father had said something about it once, he recalled, but he hadn’t been paying attention. And Elaine was hardly the sort to blow her own trumpet and brag about her achievements. “If it’s safe, why aren’t people moving in?”
“Some bits are still unsafe,” Daria said. “But the areas that are safe, Johan, belong to the Grand Sorceress. She was allowing the richest families in the Empire to bid on completely new lots, within the Golden City. The bids were still going up, the last I heard.”
She stopped in front of a house and pulled a small wooden wand from her pocket, then waved it twice in the air. “This should be safe enough,” she said. “And very few people will come here, fortunately.”
The door opened with a creak, revealing a very strange room. Johan blinked in shock as he realised that nothing quite made sense, as if he’d stepped into a room decorated with funhouse mirrors. The walls looked oddly out of place, while the furniture seemed warped and twisted. And yet it all still seemed remarkably intact.
“They’ll want to knock the whole building down and start again,” Daria said, as she closed the door behind them. “No one would want to live here permanently.”
She paused, then glanced into the fireplace. “Do you know how to build a fire?”
“Barely,” Johan said. He’d built fires with Elaine when they’d been living away from the city, but Elaine had told him not to try to light one using his magic. “Can you light it?”
“Probably,” Daria said. She picked up a warped chair, two of its legs clearly longer than the other two, and started to break it into pieces of wood. “Put these in the fireplace, along with anything else that might burn, then give me a shout.”
Johan obeyed, glancing around for something lighter than pieces of wood. A pile of broadsheets lay in one corner; the paper looked all right, he discovered when he picked it up, but the writing was in a language that was completely unfamiliar. He frowned at the sight – the Empire had used the same written language for so long that there were few native speakers or writers of anything else – and then started to tear the paper up for the fire. The next set of pages showed images of strange creatures with giant eyes, long tentacles and nasty expressions. None of them seemed to resemble anything he knew to exist. Shaking his head, he carried the paper over to the fire, dropped it into the fireplace and built up a small pile of paper and wood.
“Add this to the top,” Daria said, as she came back into the room. She was carrying a small grey object in one hand, cradling it gently. “It should have been burned years ago.”
Johan took the object and looked down. It was so badly warped that it took him several seconds to realise it was a doll, one hand-carved by someone who had loved the doll’s owner. He felt a sudden pang of grief for the missing child, wondering if she had escaped the wave of wild magic or if she had died beside the doll. She’d been a lucky girl, he decided, as he placed the doll on top of the fire. Even Jamal hadn’t had anything made with his father’s hands.
“We burn our dolls when we reach adulthood,” Daria said, as she pointed the wand at the fire and cast a spell. There was a flicker of fire, then the paper caught, sending flames crackling through the grate. “It’s supposed to mark the day we cast off our inner child and embrace the adult world.”
Johan held his hands in front of the flames, enjoying the heat. “Is that a Traveller ritual?”
“Yeah,” Daria said. “I was very surprised when Elaine showed me the doll she had kept from the orphanage.”
“I can’t imagine my sisters burning their dolls,” Johan said, with a shiver. He’d been their doll often enough. “They were really expensive.”
He shrugged. “Do men have dolls too?”
Daria gave him a sharp look. “Boys tend to have stuffed animals,” she said, tightly. “They bury them when they are ready to become men.”
“I don’t know much about the Travellers,” Johan admitted. “What happens when you want to get married?”
“There’s normally a big gathering every year or so,” Daria explained. She rubbed her hands together, then reached for her bag. “You will generally be introduced to prospective husbands there – or brides, if you’re a man. Everyone looks for the one who smells right to them – if they find that person, they take them off somewhere under the moonlight and wait to see if romance takes hold.”
Johan considered it. “What happens if you don’t smell right to the person who smells right to you?”
“It rarely happens,” Daria said.
She shrugged. “If the romance lasts, the woman generally joins the man’s pack, although not always,” she added. “There’s always jostling between the newcomer and the established pack leaders until the new order is established. Or sometimes the happy couple sets off on their own and forms an entirely new pack. It does happen.”
Johan smiled. “And what happens
if the romance doesn’t last?”
“They peacefully separate,” Daria said. “What sort of idiot would stay with a man who doesn’t love her?”
“Too many in High Society,” Johan said. His mother had always had a cold relationship with his father, even though they had managed to produce seven children. “They prefer the status of being married to the right person rather than picking someone they actually love.”
“Idiots,” Daria said.
She opened her bag, then produced a large piece of bread and two slices of cheese. “I couldn’t grab much before we left,” she said, by way of apology. “You should really eat.”
“I can’t eat alone,” Johan said. “I ...”
“There’s no shortage of rats around,” Daria said. “You eat the bread and cheese. I’m going hunting.”
She stood, walked to the centre of the room and shrank, rapidly. Johan stared as her robe fell down over her body, concealing the final stages of the transformation into a small wolf. She emerged moments later from beneath the folds and winked at him, then headed towards the door. If he hadn’t known she was a werewolf, he would have mistaken her for a large and very well trained dog. Despite not having any hands, she managed to open the door ... and stop, dead.
“I come in peace,” a female voice said. “Really.”
Daria growled, a sound that sent shivers down Johan’s spine. She was a werewolf, with all the strength of the breed, and he had been staring at her as if she were a normal girl? All of a sudden, he understood why werewolves were shunned, when they weren’t feared or hated by the general population. They might have looked human, when the full moon wasn’t dominating the sky, but they were very different.
The newcomer stepped into the house and smiled at Johan. She was tall, with long blonde hair, and wore a dark cloak that concealed her body. A simple wooden wand hung from her belt, beside a potions gourd and a device that Johan didn’t recognise. He’d never been able to sense magic, not the way his family could, but he had no difficulty in recognising her as a powerful magician. She had the same air of supreme self-confidence that he’d seen in too many graduates of the Peerless School. Elaine was the only one he knew who didn’t show that attitude.
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