Mother Holly gestured with one clawed hand, and an invisible force yanked the staff out of Emily’s hand. Emily screamed, feeling as if part of her had been ripped away as the staff flew through the air and into Mother Holly’s grasp.
She stared down at the staff, as if she wasn’t quite sure how it worked, then focused her magic on it until the staff disintegrated into sawdust.
Emily stared in horror, feeling her magic flickering helplessly without the staff. Mother Holly looked up, triumph somehow readable on her maddened face, and flicked a finger at her. Emily found herself tossed through the air and slammed against a rock, held in place by an irresistible force.
She felt panic bubbling at the corner of her mind as Mother Holly started to advance towards her, one hand clutching the stone knife. Shadye had wanted to sacrifice her, too...but she’d been alone then.
The knife flew out of Mother Holly’s hand, then slammed into a fireball Lady Barb had created and tossed into the air. It shattered into pieces of stone. The force holding Emily in place vanished.
Mother Holly turned to face Lady Barb, curling her hands into fists and then uncurling them to reveal inhuman claws. Magic flashed around her as she prepared yet another strike.
Lady Barb acted first.
For a moment, Emily thought that Lady Barb had summoned Basilisks or another set of giant snakes to help. They seemed to come out of nowhere, crashing into Mother Holly and grinding her into the ground. It took her a moment to realize that Lady Barb had animated them from rocks, a feat Emily knew she couldn’t hope to match for years. Magic flared around the snake that was trying to kill the necromancer, then it glowed with light and disintegrated.
Emily barely managed to raise a ward before pieces of stone flew everywhere, several bouncing off her protections. Lady Barb started to throw more spells as Mother Holly rose back to her feet...then floated upwards into the air.
Emily hesitated. Part of her wanted Mother Holly to run, but she knew the necromancer would just find more victims and devastate the countryside. She gritted her teeth and cast a spell intended to cancel the witch’s flying spell, but nothing happened.
Horror flared through her mind as she realized she’d become far too dependent on the staff. She closed her eyes, recalled her very first lessons in magic, then recast the spell. Magic flashed around her and she almost collapsed in relief, then opened her eyes as Mother Holly hit the ground. The witch looked absolutely furious.
Cold ice ran down Emily’s spine as Mother Holly stood up. Emily was tired – and Lady Barb, despite having more reserves, couldn’t be in a much better condition. If they exhausted themselves, rather than the necromancer, they were both dead.
Then Emily remembered what she’d done to Shadye and cast an illusion spell, creating copies of herself that advanced towards Mother Holly with threatening intent, while she ducked and hid.
Mother Holly didn’t seem to care about which Emily was actually real; she threw blasts of magic at each in quick succession. The blasts passed through the illusions and slammed into the far edge of the valley, exploding in light and fire.
Emily shuddered – if one of those blasts hit her, she would be vaporized – and then created more illusions. Mother Holly kept blasting them, one after the other. There was so much magic flaring through the air that Emily couldn’t help wondering what it would do to the local environment.
Lady Barb added her own illusions, creating copies of herself and several other magicians. Emily saw a Master Grey blown apart by a blast of magic, then a Grandmaster smirking as he lifted his staff. But the illusions weren’t actually dangerous...Mother Holly must have come to the same conclusion, as she stopped throwing magic at them.
Emily braced herself and shaped a very deadly spell in her mind, then stood up and cast it. For a long moment, nothing happened...
And then, Mother Holly started to choke. The spell transmuted the oxygen in the air around her to something else. Sergeant Miles hadn’t known just what it did, merely that the spell made it impossible for the target to breathe.
And since Mother Holly did need to breathe, Emily wondered if she dared unleash the snake. Maybe poison would work after all.
But then the madwoman stopped choking...
Emily cursed under her breath, searching her mind for ideas. Prank spells prevented panic – she’d never quite realized that she wasn’t breathing when she was turned into something inanimate – but other spells didn’t have safety features built into their structure. Mother Holly must have believed that she needed to breathe, even if she’d passed beyond such human weakness. But once it had been put to the test, she’d discovered the truth.
Emily stood, catching her breath. Everything seemed very still; she was vaguely aware of Lady Barb, standing behind the necromancer. Even Mother Holly didn’t seem inclined to keep fighting. But she knew it was just a matter of time. Emily was sweaty, exhausted and pushed to the edge of her endurance. Unless Mother Holly ran out of energy in the next few minutes, they were going to lose.
An idea occurred to her, an idea that might at least allow them to take Mother Holly down even as they fell themselves. She hesitated, then started to work her way around Mother Holly, heading towards Lady Barb. The necromancer eyed her through brilliant red eyes, but did nothing to stop her.
Lady Barb held up a hand, warningly. They didn’t dare get too close together or Mother Holly might try to kill them both at once.
“You’re being consumed by your own madness,” Lady Barb said, addressing Mother Holly in tones one might use to address a dangerous animal. She sounded calm, reasonable and, above all, understanding. “But you can still stop this.”
Emily gaped at her. Was she trying to talk Mother Holly out of embracing necromancy? Surely it was already too late. Mother Holly had passed beyond humanity into a twilight stage between human and something else, a stage that would need a constant influx of power to maintain. She would die if she couldn’t find more victims to sacrifice. Or did Lady Barb believe that Mother Holly could be useful? The thought was horrifying, but easily dismissed. Even if the Allied Lands had been prepared to tolerate someone taking innocent children and using them for power, her madness would make her an unreliable weapon.
No, Emily realized. Lady Barb needed to regenerate her powers, just as much as Emily herself. She’s trying to buy time.
Mother Holly turned to face her, but said nothing. Emily wondered if she was still capable of speech – Shadye had been able to talk, right up until the end – then decided that it didn’t matter. She might have plunged further into madness than Shadye – or any other necromancer who had learned to live with his new existence. Emily felt a stab of pity – all Mother Holly had wanted to do was make things better – then carefully shaped the spell in her mind. A single mistake might prove disastrous.
She held up her hands, signaling to Lady Barb. Sign language was nowhere near as developed in the Allied Lands as it had been on Earth, but she’d been taught the basic signs in Martial Magic, as well as how to use them in combat situations. Lady Barb lifted her eyebrows as she saw the instructions – knock her away from us – but nodded and cast a spell on the ground below the necromancer’s feet. Before Mother Holly could react, she was lifted up and flung across the valley. Magic flared around her as she hit the ground, mocking Lady Barb. Even being slammed into a rocky wall wasn’t enough to kill her. Emily could only hope that her secret weapon was.
It would change the world, she knew, if it worked. Every magician with ambition would be trying to duplicate it. And it might kill all three of them...and devastate the valley...and cause hardship to the local population. But there was no choice. Mother Holly had to be stopped.
Emily cast the nuke-spell, praying desperately that it would work. There had been no way to test it, even if she’d dared find somewhere uninhabited. She felt the magic shivering into existence, brewing in power. It would detonate within seconds, she hoped, although she wasn’t entirely sure. There were too m
any variables within the spell, not to mention fixed limitations she’d engineered in when the full implications struck her. Her nightmares had suggested that it was entirely possible that using magic to split atoms would result in cracking the entire planet in half.
She ran over towards Lady Barb as the spell started to work. It felt evil...or perhaps it was just her imagination. “Teleport us out,” she snapped, grabbing hold of the older woman. “Now!”
Lady Barb stared at her. “I can’t,” she snapped back. Her face was torn between horror and puzzlement. The nuke-spell was coming to life, a faintly shimmering hex that was both beautiful and deadly...and it was completely outside of her experience. “I don’t have the power left!”
Emily looked over at the magic – and, beyond it, Mother Holly rising to her feet. The hedge witch was staring at the spell as if hypnotized. Emily hesitated, wondering if all three of them were about to die, then hastily closed her eyes and concentrated on creating a pocket dimension. All the variables she’d designed when Lady Barb was ill sprang into her mind, then into her spellwork. There was no time to test it, no time to ensure that it was actually safe; she opened her eyes, then yanked the dimension forward, surrounding them. Mother Holly’s angry face vanished into a grey haze...
...And then there was an odd sense of timelessness, as if the stasis spell hadn’t worked quite right...
...And then they were in the midst of hell.
“Emily,” Lady Barb said. She sounded badly shaken – and drained. “Emily, what the hell have you done?”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
EMILY HAD NO ANSWER.
It was broad daylight, almost noon, judging by the position of the sun. But the valley had been completely devastated, burned to a crisp. Some parts of it were still burning, as if the spell had set the very stones themselves on fire. The hovel and all that remained of the garden were gone, replaced by a blackened crater that seemed to shimmer ominously. She looked up, towards the castle, and saw a ruin. The blast might have been directed up and outward by the shape of the valley, but the castle had been slapped hard enough to complete its destruction.
Lady Barb caught her arm. “Emily,” she snapped. “What did you do?”
Emily swallowed. “I can’t tell you,” she said. She wasn’t sure she wanted to discuss anything relating to splitting atoms with Lady Barb, no matter what oaths she’d sworn. “It’s not something to talk about, really.”
“Really,” Lady Barb repeated. She looked around the remains of the valley. “Did you kill her?”
Emily hoped so. The blast would have shattered Mother Holly’s body and broken down the energy holding it together. But there was no way to be sure. She looked around, wondering if she would see Mother Holly slowly reassembling herself, but saw nothing. The necromancer was dead, she told herself. Any other outcome was unthinkable.
Lady Barb had another question. “How long were we in the pocket dimension?”
“It should have been a few hours,” Emily said. It had been near midnight when they’d fought Mother Holly, which suggested they’d stayed in the bubble for over ten hours. “But I don’t know.”
She hesitated, then swore inwardly. There was one danger from a nuclear blast – or something akin to it – that was utterly beyond this world’s comprehension. Radiation. They were standing at ground zero. Radiation might be a very real threat. She cast the ward she had designed, back when she’d first contemplated the possibility, but they’d already been dosed. If, of course, there was a danger in the first place.
“We have to get out of here,” she said. The ward was showing no reaction, but that proved nothing. “And we need to seal this valley off completely.”
Lady Barb didn’t argue, merely led her back towards the edge of the valley and a treacherous climb up and outwards. Fire had scorched the rocks, blackening them and sweeping away all traces of plants, bushes and soil. The ground below their feet had been turned to glass. Emily remembered, as her thoughts searched for hope, a story about a girl who had lived in a valley after a nuclear war and shuddered, then dismissed the thought. No one in the Allied Lands knew anything about splitting atoms, apart from her. It would remain that way, she hoped, for a very long time.
But the Blighted Lands are dead, she recalled. They don’t need nukes to destroy whole countries.
Outside the valley, the devastation had been channeled by the mouth of the valley. Countless trees were burning brightly, or had been knocked down by the force of the blast and left lying on the ground. Emily hastily cast a spell to protect them from smoke and fumes, then led Lady Barb onwards, back towards the town.
She let out a long breath when they finally reached the outskirts and saw hundreds of people fighting the fires, hastily erecting firebreaks to prevent the flames from reaching the town. They included soldiers from two different kingdoms. Rudolf’s father had come to find his son.
“He must have worked out where Rudolf was going,” Lady Barb said, when Emily commented on it. “I need to speak with him and Lady Easter.”
Emily shook her head. “Wash first,” she said. Even if the radiation had faded away in the hours between the nuclear blast and the pocket dimension unlocking itself, there was still a risk of fallout. She shuddered, wondering just how much damage she’d done to the mountainfolk. There had been birth defects and other problems at Hiroshima for years after the city had been destroyed. “We need to be clean.”
Lady Barb gave her a sidelong look, which only got worse as they entered the guesthouse and Emily forgot her usual reluctance to undress in front of anyone. Her eyes followed Emily, concerned, as Emily stripped naked and washed herself with warm water, then used magic to compress the clothes she’d worn down to a small block, which could be buried somewhere safe. After Emily was finished, Lady Barb washed herself and reluctantly destroyed her own clothes. The look in her eyes bothered Emily more than she cared to admit.
She wracked her brains for some way to test for radiation and came up blank. There was a way to do it without modern technology or magic, she was sure, but she had no idea how the trick was actually done. She’d read about it in a book set in a post-atomic war hellhole, yet the author had concentrated more on the horrors of the aftermath than any useful details. The best she could think of, eventually, was to have Lady Barb scan her body for anything that might be caused by radiation. If there was damage, perhaps magic could heal it.
Or perhaps there wasn’t any radiation at all, Emily thought, grimly.
It was possible, she conceded, but it sounded like wishful thinking. They didn’t dare take it for granted. She looked down at the snake-bracelet and shivered, again. Had she poisoned the snake as well as herself? Her lips twitched in bitter amusement. She was perhaps the only person in the Allied Lands who would regard that as a bad outcome.
A knock on the door brought her out of her thoughts. She glanced over to make sure that Lady Barb was decent, then pulled one of her robes over her head and then opened the door. Rudolf was standing there, looking tired but happy. Behind him, there were a handful of soldiers, wearing the colors of both families. She couldn’t tell if they were his bodyguards or his escorts.
“Come in,” she said, feeling genuinely pleased to see him. “What happened last night?”
Rudolf gave her an odd look as he stepped inside and closed the door, leaving the soldiers on the other side. “I was going to ask you the same question,” he said. His voice was awestruck. “There were flashes of light and the sound of thunder, then there was a light as bright as the sun and a roaring sound that shook the ground. And there was a fiery cloud shaped like a mushroom...some of the peasants even say they saw a god in the flames.”
Emily was uncomfortably aware of Lady Barb’s gaze boring into her back.
Rudolf shook his head. “And then the castle came tumbling down,” he added. “If we hadn’t been here, we would have died.”
Emily shuddered. The castle had been built of heavy stone. Her blast might easily have
sent pieces flying through the air and slamming down into the town like bombs from high overhead. How many people had died, directly or indirectly, because of the spell she’d unleashed? She suspected that she would never know.
“I’m sorry,” Emily said. It seemed so inadequate. “Was anyone hurt?”
“Several people who looked at the flash went blind for a few hours,” Rudolf said. “Others were scorched fighting the flames. What happened?”
“We battled Mother Holly,” Emily said, shortly. “We killed her.”
“And that’s all we can say,” Lady Barb said. “I think we need to talk to your father.”
Rudolf nodded, rather shamefaced. “I did talk to my father,” he said. “And...well, let’s just say he had the same problem.”
Emily laughed. Talking to his father about his sexuality had to have taken considerable courage, more than Emily had ever shown when talking to her relatives. Lady Barb gave her an odd look, then shrugged, clearly deciding it wasn’t important.
“We’ll be on our way,” she said. “You go tell them that we’re coming.”
The atmosphere of fear seemed to have faded away, Emily decided, as they made their way through the town to the temple. Lady Easter and her daughters had moved in, billeting their soldiers and servants in a number of smaller houses, but everything seemed to be remarkably peaceful. Perhaps she’d realized that losing the castle made her vulnerable, Emily wondered, or perhaps everyone was just relieved that the threat was over. Maybe it wouldn’t last...
Lord Gorham seemed stronger than Emily remembered, sitting next to Lady Easter and sharing a joke with her. He rose to his feet as Lady Barb entered the temple, then bowed sweepingly to both magicians. Emily dropped back and curtseyed as Lady Barb nodded. She didn’t really want their attention, no matter the situation. It was better they just thought of her as “Millie.”
Work Experience (Schooled in Magic Book 4) Page 37