SURRENDER, the spell thundered, as it raged against her thoughts. RESISTANCE IS FUTILE. SURRENDER AND SUBMIT.
Elaine wanted to cover her ears, but it was pointless. The sound was inside her head. Instead, she gathered her thoughts and plunged down until she was slamming right into the spell, examining the mutating incantations that swarmed and multiplied until they threatened to push her true thoughts out of her own mind. It was an impressive piece of work, part of her mind noted, a thing of deadly beauty. And it was so dangerous that she understood precisely why successive Grand Sorcerers had banned knowledge of the spell, at least outside the Inquisition. The only real question was why they had thought the Inquisitors needed to know how to use it.
They would have found it an effective weapon against a Dark Wizard, she thought, as the howling grew louder. The spell twisted uncomfortably under her gaze, then tried to fade away into the background. No normal wizard could have held it off for more than a few minutes ...
She gritted her teeth as she reached out and pulled the spell back into view, then lashed out with all the force she could gather at the incantations holding it together. Pain seared through her head as the spell fought back, trying to escape her wrath; it mutated again and again, trying to evolve defences against her. It was like playing chess against herself, Elaine realised; white knew what black was planning and vice versa. But the battle wouldn’t stalemate, she knew, or at least not for very long. Eventually, she would run out of magic ...
... Angrily, she pushed the thought aside. Even considering the possibility of defeat would bring defeat closer. The spell howled, then whispered, alternatively gloating over her certain failure and then promising joy in submission. Elaine gritted her teeth and held on desperately, even when the spell started to dig up her old memories and throw them at her, one by one. It knew precisely which memories to use, but how could it not? The spell was effectively part of her mind.
... She is sitting on a chair at the back of a meeting room, while two parents are explaining to the Orphan Mother that no, they do not want to take Elaine home with them. The Orphan Mother is angry, all the more so because they cannot put their reasons into words. When the parents are gone, she pulls Elaine’s ears and sends her to the punishment room ...
... She is staring at the Orphan Mother as Rose explains, untruthfully, that Elaine stole some candy from her drawer. Elaine tries to tell the older woman that it wasn’t her, that Rose is lying through her teeth, but the Orphan Mother doesn’t listen. Rose is young and pretty and someone will take her home the very next week. Elaine ... is just a plain girl with an introverted nature. It isn’t hard for the Orphan Mother to believe Rose and send Elaine to the punishment room ...
... She is standing in the punishment room, trying not to cry. They don’t shout at her or beat her, even though either one would be preferable. Instead, they just make her stand up for hours on end, waiting in the darkness. By the time she is finally released, she is a nervous wreck ...
... She is entering the Peerless School for the first time, awed at the opportunity that has been dropped into her lap, when she sees Millicent for the first time. The girl takes an instant dislike to Elaine, turning her into a toad on her very first day ...
... She is walking up to one of the form mistresses, obeying a compulsion she knows she should be able to resist. As soon as she is in front of the older woman, she opens her mouth and emits a stream of horrific insults. She knows she is lucky, when the enchantment lets her go, that she isn’t expelled on the spot ...
... She is leaving the Peerless School as a graduated magician when the ink on the scroll starts to run and fade. It isn’t real ...
“It didn’t happen like that,” she said, out loud. “That’s one of my nightmares.”
She heard the spell laughing at her, as if it was an intelligent being. It had dragged up her memories, then started to improvise newer and darker thoughts to wear down her resolve to fight. Elaine braced herself, then shoved hard against the spell. It recoiled from her touch, then returned to the fight. It was drawing on her magic, her memories and everything else just to grind her down. But she felt a wave of cold anger that suddenly made it easier to focus her mind.
“It didn’t happen like that,” she said, forcing herself to remember the good days in her life. Meeting Daria for the first time, entering the Great Library as a staff member, meeting Johan ... she might have been a weak magician, but she was far from powerless. “And I will be rid of you.”
She plunged into the fight with renewed determination. This time, the spell seemed to cower back from her touch, then started to shatter under her pressure. It mutated, again and again, each fragment growing into something new, but it could no longer draw on her power. She probed at its innermost structure, located the weak spots and pushed, hard. Piece by piece, the spell started to come apart ...
... And then it lashed back at her, a final desperate attempt to overwhelm her mind. She staggered mentally, realising just how deeply it had embedded itself in her very soul, but she held herself together and pushed. The spell fell backwards, into a locked corner of her mind, and held itself there. Elaine staggered, then opened her eyes and stood. Her limbs felt wobbly, and she could hear the spell howling in her mind, but she could walk to the door without impediment. She was free!
And drained, she realised, slowly. She was used to running out of power, used to watching as more powerful witches and wizards cast spells while she caught her breath, but she had never truly felt so drained in her life. What remained of her power was being used to hold the spell in check ... and when she lost it, the spell would flower through her mind and overwhelm her once and for all. It didn’t seem fair, part of her mind told her, that she should have to keep using her magic to keep her body free. But the spell was nothing if not persistent.
You need to get rid of it, she told herself, but how?
Holding it at bay with her mind, she considered what she knew. The spell was dangerous because it fed on people, real people. It wasn’t just powered by magic, like every other spell she knew. In some ways, it was as much an oddity as Johan’s magic. But ... she gritted her teeth, then stumbled towards the door. There had been a guard outside, if she recalled correctly, hopefully not an Inquisitor in civilian clothes. She banged on the door as hard as she could, then leant against the wall. Moments later, the door opened and a man wearing a bright red uniform looked in at her.
“Please,” Elaine said. She made a show of stumbling to the floor. “I need help.”
The guard caught her, instinctively. Elaine gathered herself, clutching his hand as though it was holding her back from falling, then concentrated on the spell and shoved it into his hand, knowing it would rapidly infest the rest of his body. The guard let out a yelp and shoved her to the floor, but it was already too late. His face went blank and his arms dropped to his side, leaving him helpless. Elaine pulled herself to her feet, then closed the door. Hopefully, no one would notice that the guard was missing for a few hours.
“All right,” she said, studying the guard through tired eyes. “What’s your name?”
“Talbot,” the guard said.
Elaine frowned. It was a typical name from Vlad Deferens’ homeland, although that shouldn’t have been a surprise. Very little remained secret in the Golden City; no one, not even a Privy Councillor, would have been able to recruit more than a few personal guardsmen without hard questions being asked. On the other hand, Deferens was a powerful figure in his homeland. He could muster an army without having to worry about someone noticing what he was doing, then smuggle it into the Golden City.
We must have been asleep, she thought, numbly. Even after everything that had happened to her, she still found it hard to believe that Deferens had managed to take over so quickly. In hindsight, it was an obvious weakness ... but she knew that there were people who lived next to volcanoes, always believing there wouldn’t be an eruption during their lifetimes. And sometimes they were right ... and some
times they weren’t so lucky.
She looked up at the guard. “And where are you from?”
“Kurii,” Talbot said.
It meant nothing to Elaine. “How did you get here?”
“We were in our barracks, then we were in the warehouse,” Talbot said. “Then we were here.”
Elaine frowned. Talbot couldn’t lie to her, but he wouldn’t volunteer information and, if she didn’t ask the right questions, he might not understand what she meant. Maybe Deferens had outsmarted himself after all; the spell would have eventually overcome Elaine herself, but he would have had to ask careful questions to get what he wanted out of the affair. Unless he’d been planning to remove the spell himself, at some later date ...
But Talbot’s description suggested that they had been transfigured, then transported to the Golden City.
She shook her head. “How many of you are there?”
“Forty thousand,” Talbot said.
Elaine blanched. Forty thousand soldiers – and the Inquisitors – would be enough to keep the Golden City under control. But it seemed too many to be real. Forty thousand newcomers to the Golden City? The city council had been having enough trouble finding living space for the Court Wizards and their hangers on ... and there were only a few hundred of them. Forty thousand newcomers would be impossible to house.
She cleared her throat. “How many soldiers are in the Golden City?”
“Three thousand,” Talbot said.
That sounded more reasonable, Elaine decided. She bounced a handful of other questions off him, but Talbot simply didn’t know very much. He’d been a farmhand who had seen the advantages in becoming a soldier, done well in his basic training and then been assigned to a barracks along the edge of the wildlands. And then there had been a request for some volunteers ... and then, the next thing he recalled was being in the warehouse. One of the big shipping warehouses on the edge of the city, Elaine guessed. They were used to house goods brought in and out of the city. Given enough time, someone could probably house an army there without being detected, at least until it was too late.
They were building up stockpiles of food for the Conference, she told herself, grimly. She’d attended the Privy Council meeting – her last council meeting – when they’d agreed to spend extra monies on procuring food for the Court Wizards. All they had to do was transfigure the soldiers into something harmless and bring them in with the wagons, then store the poor bastards in the warehouse until the time came to return them to normal.
“Talbot,” she said, “what orders do your people have for the city?”
“I don’t know,” Talbot said.
Elaine glared at him. “Why not?”
“I am only told what I need to know,” Talbot said, in a monotone. “What I do not need to know, I do not know.”
“Because you might be forced to talk,” Elaine muttered. “What do you normally do when you occupy a city?”
“The old sweats say we patrol streets, keep the population respectful and hit anyone who even looks at us funny,” Talbot informed her. “The women are to be ravished so they learn their place, while their menfolk are to be broken. What we want, we take.”
Elaine felt sick. How could Deferens have brought such monsters into the Golden City? She knew there were truly evil people out there – Hawthorne had planned to take her and make her his wife – but this was different. She thought of the people she knew being chased by such monsters and shivered in horror. This was ... this was awful.
She changed the subject, quickly. “Do you know what the passwords are to enter or leave this building?”
“No,” Talbot said. “I have orders not to leave my guardpost until I am relieved.”
Elaine cursed herself under her breath. She hadn’t thought about that, even though she should have realised that Talbot wouldn’t be expected to stay there all night. What time was it, anyway? They’d taken her clockwork watch along with her wand and everything else she’d been carrying at the time. She thought it was late at night, but she honestly wasn’t sure. It felt like hours since she’d thrown caution to the winds and attacked the curse with everything she had.
“I see,” she said. “And when will you be relieved?”
“I don’t know,” Talbot said.
He didn’t have a watch or any other way to tell the time, Elaine noted. She briefly considered trying to swap clothes with him, but the thought of anyone being fooled if she wore the red uniform was ludicrous. The other option was to take him with her, yet she knew it would be dangerous. Anyone could shout ‘STOP’ and Talbot would obey. The state he was in, he would do anything for anyone. It crossed her mind that she should kill him, or order him to kill himself, but she couldn’t bring herself to take that step. The mere thought was horrific.
“Do you know,” she asked, “where they put my wand?”
“No,” Talbot said.
Elaine sighed, then ordered him to turn out his pockets and drop everything he was carrying on the floor, while she washed her face in cold water. His pockets were largely empty, save for a dagger, which she took, and a pendant that – she suspected, was designed to allow him to pass through some of the palace’s wards. She pocketed the pendant, making a mental note to study it later, then looked up at Talbot. The guard’s eyes looked back at her, glassily. She shuddered. Deferens would probably have been happy to leave her in a similar state indefinitely.
A thought struck her and she leant forward. “Are there any other prisoners here?”
“Children,” Talbot said. “The Emperor’s servants said they were to be treated with respect.”
Elaine blinked. Children? As far as she knew, Deferens was unmarried; she’d assumed he was hoping for a marriage into one of the Great Houses, linking his status as a Privy Councillor with the wealth and magical heritage of the aristocracy. It was possible – even probable – that he had a run of bastards, but would he bring them to the Golden City? There were Great Houses that wouldn’t give a damn, yet it was odd. He’d want his heir, assuming he had one, kept well away from anything that could blow up in his face.
“Children,” she mused. “Whose children?”
“I don’t know,” Talbot said.
Elaine sighed. “Did you see them do anything that might show who they were?”
“One of them hexed me,” Talbot said. “He cast a spell on me.”
“I understand the impulse,” Elaine said. A magical child ... he had to be from one of the Great Houses. And that meant ... what? Hostages? Or something worse? There were quite a number of spells that could be worked with the blood of innocent children. “But there’s no time to worry about it now.”
She took a breath. “Here are your orders. You are to carry them out as soon as I leave the room. You will use wet cloth to block up your ears, then hold yourself in readiness. Once someone comes into the room, you will ... you will knock them out, then make a break for it and run as far as you can.”
She felt a twinge of guilt as Talbot nodded in understanding, then violently pushed it to one side. He might be an automaton now, but he would have gleefully raped and looted his way through the city if Deferens had given the word. And his comrades might do the same, if they managed to tighten their grip on power.
Gritting her teeth, she glanced out of the room, checked that the passageway was empty and then closed the door firmly behind her. And then she started to run.
Chapter Fourteen
In Johan’s experience, the Great Library had always been crammed with students. There wasn’t an hour of the day when there weren’t at least fifty students and older researchers making their way through the library, studying books in between snatching catnaps at their desks. He knew that Elaine hadn’t really minded, as long as they didn’t drool on the books. She’d been a student herself, only a few short years ago.
But now the building was dark, and as silent as the grave. The librarians were gone, hastened out to their staff accommodation or wherever they lived in t
he city, while the handful of guest visitors had been ordered to stay elsewhere. Lights that should have been burning indefinitely, powered by the wards, were no longer lit, leaving the entire building shrouded in darkness. Even Cass’s light spells couldn’t push the darkness back more than a few metres, as if it were a physical thing. Johan couldn’t help seeing things in the darkness, right at the corner of his eye. He wasn’t sure if they were real or just tricks of the light.
“The Golden City has always been restricted in its growth,” Cass commented, as they made their way down a long book-lined corridor. Titles glimmered at them and then faded into the darkness. “The mountains saw to that, really.”
“Everyone knows that,” Daria pointed out. She sounded unhappy to be in the darkness, even though she could probably see better than either of the two humans. Werewolf eyes were sharper too. “The Emperors didn’t want too many people infesting their city.”
“And so they placed their capital within the heart of a mountain range,” Cass said. “But they rapidly found themselves running out of space. There was just no room to expand.”
“I know all that,” Johan said, tartly. “My father certainly bitched about it often enough.”
Cass turned and half-smiled at him. “And did your father ever grumble about why he wasn’t allowed to dig underground?”
Johan frowned. “I don’t recall him saying anything of the sort,” he said, finally. “But he might not have wanted to grumble like that in front of me.”
“There are passages below the city,” Daria said, suddenly. “And people aren’t allowed to burrow underground because they might stumble across those passageways.”
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