Infinite Regress

by Christopher G. Nuttall

  They draw their power from the wards, just like the Warden, she thought, as she reached the gates to the tunnel network. But they need much less power to function. The Warden was disabled; the dummies went rogue.

  She pushed the thought out of her mind as she slowed to a halt in front of the gates. Someone—probably Professor Lombardi—had placed a spell on the gates, making it impossible for any student to enter the underground tunnel network without a tutor. Emily swore under her breath. Perhaps she should have dragged Professor Locke down with her, even though it would have been impossible to carry him without using magic. There was no hope of finding a tutor...

  The school shook, again. Gritting her teeth, she stepped forward and rammed her magic into the spell, drawing on all of her reserves. The spell flared—Professor Lombardi had done a very good job—and tried to lash out at her, attempting to freeze her in place. It would have caught her, she knew, if Lady Barb hadn’t forced her to spend weeks practicing untangling wards and hexes from the inside. As it was, she barely managed to deflect its first attempt and rip it to shreds before it could make another. She sagged as the spell disintegrated, then forced herself onwards, down into the tunnels. The tunnel was dark, but when she reached the bottom the lights were almost painfully bright. Something was definitely very wrong.

  His attempt to hack the spellware only disrupted all of the other settings, she thought, as the temperature began to rise again. Her shirt and trousers suddenly felt very heavy as she started to sweat. They no longer know the correct settings for anything.

  Emily kept moving, despite the lights growing brighter and brighter. The gravity seemed to shift too, although she had no idea why; one moment, it was so strong she could barely walk, the next it was so light that she almost banged her head on the ceiling. She forced herself onwards, staggering past the former library and blinked in surprise when she saw two students kneeling together outside the control room. They were both alive, she noted, but they looked to have been entranced. A quick spell confirmed that someone had cast a powerful compulsion on the students, rendering them utterly helpless—and obedient. But they were both sixth year students. She was surprised it had worked...

  Professor Lombardi might have been able to take control of them, she thought. But even he would have difficulty keeping the spell in place indefinitely.

  She studied them for a long moment, trying to parse out the spell, then hurried past them and into the control room. There would be time to unlock that mystery later.

  The crystalline consoles and columns flickered with unhealthy light, as the door closed behind her. Professor Lombardi was bent over one of the consoles, while Professor Jayne studied the spellware displayed within the nearest column. A large statue—it took her a moment to realize it was Professor Ronald—had been placed against the far wall and abandoned. It was so bizarre that it took her longer than it should have to work out that he’d triggered another defense and been turned to stone.

  Professor Lombardi turned to face her, his eyes wide. “Emily,” he said. He sounded surprised to see her. No doubt he’d assumed Professor Locke would keep her out of trouble—and vice versa. “What are you doing here?”

  “I know how to help,” Emily said, panting. The sense that time was slipping away was growing stronger. She’d collapse soon, even if the school didn’t. No amount of Kava could keep her awake indefinitely, particularly not after everything she’d done. It felt as if she’d been awake for days, if not weeks. “Professor...”

  “No matter what we do, everything is spiraling out of control,” Professor Lombardi said, grimly. Sweat ran down his face. He started to turn back to the console, then changed his mind, looking at Emily. “All we can do is try to keep the school stable for a few more hours...”

  “And you’re not even doing that,” Emily said. It was the sort of rudeness that would get her in trouble, in the classroom, but there was no time to be polite. She had the feeling that Professor Lombardi’s work was about as effective as kicking a computer that had frozen up. Satisfying, perhaps, but futile. “The corridors are still changing overhead.”

  She forced herself to stand upright. “Professor,” she said, “let me try.”

  “I can’t,” Professor Lombardi said. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “Neither do you,” Emily said. She gazed past him, looking at the glowing columns. If the system was anything like the set-up in the nexus chamber, touching the column would give her access to the user interface. There was no point in trying to implant commands through the consoles if the underlying spellware was slowly breaking apart. “Let me try, please.”

  Professor Lombardi shook his head. “I can’t take the risk...”

  Emily blasted him, the force punch slamming straight into his protections and hurling him across the chamber. His protections held—she hurled a hex at Professor Jayne, although she doubted it would do more than slow her down for a few seconds—but he was out of her way, just long enough for her to hurl herself forward. It crossed her mind that she’d just assaulted two more tutors, that her expulsion hearing was going to be the shortest formality on record, but it hardly mattered. If they survived the next few hours, she could make her excuses and argue her case; if they didn’t, they were dead anyway.

  I’m sorry, she thought, as her fingers made contact. Please...

  She thrust her magic forward. The spellware opened up in front of her, a dazzlingly complex pattern of components that was slowly coming apart. There was a logic to it that surprised and pleased her at the same time, considering she’d seen far too many older spells that had idiosyncrasies that magicians had inserted to show off their power. As complex as it was, there was little wasted space. Everything had a purpose.

  Gritting her teeth, she allowed her awareness to widen as she looked for the user interface, feeling her way through the network. The nexus point was a source of power, flaring so bright that she couldn’t directly look at it; the spellware itself was brilliantly logical, yet there was no user interface. It should have come when she looked for it, but it hadn’t... it was either already disabled or had never existed in the first place. She paused, trying to study the spellwork, then looked back at the nexus point. It was flaring...

  A gaping emptiness at the heart of Whitehall, she recalled. A demon had given her those words, two years ago; a warning of a future that might be realized. There is a gaping emptiness at the heart of Whitehall.

  And yet, she told herself firmly, there was no emptiness. The nexus point was there. She could feel it, even when she wasn’t looking at it; it felt like the sun on a warm day, beaming down from high overhead. It was just... there.

  The nexus point exists in all moments of time, a voice said. She wasn’t quite sure where the voice was. It seemed to be all around her. It will always exist. It has always existed.

  Emily started, blindly hunting around for the person who had spoken. Was someone else connected to the network? She couldn’t help thinking of how she’d heard Frieda... perhaps, deep inside, there were traces of soul magic within the spellware. But how was that possible? Gordian had lost his connection to the wards as soon as Professor Locke had hit the console, unless he’d lied about that. Had he had a long-term plan of his own? But somehow, she found it hard to believe. Gordian would have taken oaths of his own. He would have died if he’d deliberately compromised the school.

  There was no sign of the speaker. She opened her mind as far as she dared, but sensed nothing apart from the spellware and the nexus point. Turning her attention to the spellware itself, she finally saw how it went together. It was complex, yet understandable if one stood far back and took in the whole. Professor Lombardi, she saw, had only tried to tinker with a very small section, heedless—and unaware—of how it related to the rest of the spellware, while Locke...

  Professor Locke had touched the console and yanked control back from the Grandmaster, she thought, as more and more of the network revealed itself to her. No wonder the ch
amber was sealed. The Grandmaster could be overruled—or killed—by someone who sat down and started to type instructions into the system.

  She scowled, mentally, as she saw the changes someone had made to the network, centuries ago. The Warden, to serve as a walking user interface; the Grandmaster’s connection, to allow him to issue orders to the wards. And the control room itself had been closed-off and forgotten, deliberately forgotten. It was quite possible that the various Grandmasters had known there was something under the school, but they’d just been warned not to meddle with it.

  Gordian didn’t get the message, she thought, numbly. She’d been more impressed with Gordian over the last few days than she wanted to admit, at least outside the privacy of her own head. She found it hard to believe that he would deliberately endanger the school, even if his oaths allowed it. There was no warning for him—or he disregarded it.

  She pushed the thought aside and traced the remaining connections through the network, marveling at just how well her concepts—concepts she’d barely begun to develop—had worked in practice. Whoever had crafted the spellware before her was a genius, a man who outshone her as the sun outshone the moon, but the idea was the same. Each separate component was held in place by at least two more, trapped within a network of pocket dimensions that bled off excess magic and rechanneled it back into the wards. It was easy to see, suddenly, why the gates had closed. Professor Locke had accidentally triggered an emergency function intended to protect the school.

  And then Professor Lombardi compounded the error, Emily thought. She could see everything he’d done wrong, although by his standards he’d done everything right. He set off a cascade failure through the network.

  Bracing herself, unsure just how much time had passed since she’d plunged her mind into the network, she carefully formulated replacement pieces of spellware for the damaged sections, then pushed them forward. It wouldn’t have been possible with a normal spell, she saw, but here it was just a matter of rebuilding the damaged sections piece by piece. Indeed, the whole system was designed to make it easy to repair the damage, as if the original designers had anticipated the need. But they’d assumed, she suspected, that whoever would try to modify the system in the future would know what they were doing. They’d never realized that their descendants would literally forget how the original spells had been cast.

  Professor Lombardi’s hackwork snapped out of existence, as if it had never been. Her replacements fitted into the network, the spellware making a number of very tiny adjustments to account for differences between her spells and the original programming. She’d expected as much—both the Mimics and the Warden had a kind of intelligence—but it was still impressive to watch. Moments later, the entire system began slowly repairing itself, expanding back through the school network. Her mind recoiled from her sudden glimpse into just where some of the missing corridors had gone—the spellware didn’t seem designed to actually react to what it was doing—but at least they were there. Whitehall was damaged, badly damaged, yet the school was intact. It could be repaired.

  Frieda might be alive after all, she thought. It was something to cling to, now the school was heading back to normal. That black hole might be something very different...

  Emily sent her mind roaming through the network as it settled down, looking for the gates back to the outside world. They were odd, as if parts of Whitehall’s interior existed in a pocket dimension and other parts were part of the outside world, but the gates matched up as she’d expected. She felt a quiver running through the entire system—she wasn’t sure if it was physical or not—as the doorways reopened, allowing the staff and students to escape. It made her wonder just how many of them would want to return, even though it was safe again. If student enrollments had been reduced, sharply, after Shadye... what would happen if prospective students thought there was a very real risk of being trapped in Whitehall?

  There was no list of authorized users, she thought, as she took one final look at the spellware governing the control room. No wonder the room was sealed off. Anyone who managed to get inside could take complete control of the school.

  A thought struck her and she started to scan the school for the missing books, hoping she’d be able to locate them before the thief took them out of the school. But the moment she started to look, a force slammed through the spellware and threw her back into her own body, tossing her right across the room. She landed badly, banging her head against the far wall. Dazed, confused, her eyes hurting, she barely grasped what had happened before she felt a hand grab hold of her. It was hard, so hard, to think clearly. The combination of too much Kava, too little sleep and a blow to the head made her feel dizzy, as if she were about to throw up...

  “Emily,” Professor Lombardi said. His voice echoed in her head, as if he were talking from a very far distance. She thought he was kneeling beside her, but she couldn’t be entirely sure of anything. “Emily, can you hear me?”

  Emily’s entire body shuddered with pain. It was dark... no, her eyes were closed, tightly closed. She fought hard to open them, but the light outside was so bright that it felt as though someone was jamming needles into her eyes. Her gorge rose... she was barely aware of someone rolling her into the recovery position before she threw up everything in her stomach, then dry-retched so hard it was painful.

  “Emily,” Professor Lombardi said. She remembered, suddenly, that she’d assaulted him—and that she was defenseless. If he wanted to hurt her, or kill her, he had every opportunity to do whatever he liked. She’d attacked a tutor! “Emily, I’m going to have to put you to sleep.”

  Panic surged within Emily’s mind. Put her to sleep? More like kill her... she fought to open her eyes and stand upright, but her body refused to obey her. Her thoughts slid in all directions, as if she was badly concussed. Perhaps she was; she’d banged her head, the throbbing a constant reminder that she might be very badly hurt. Her magic seemed to slip and slide around her, refusing to come when she called. It was mocking her...

  And then, almost gratefully, she fell straight into the darkness.

  Chapter Forty

  “EMILY,” A VOICE SAID, AS EMILY fought her way up from the darkness. “Emily, can you hear me?”

  Emily nodded. Her eyes still hurt, but at least she could open them and peer up at Madame Kyla. The Healer was bending over her bed, waving a wand over Emily’s chest. Behind her, Emily could see Melissa and Frieda, the latter looking tired. A surge of relief ran through her and she tried to sit up, only to discover that someone had wrapped cloth restraints around her wrists and ankles. She was trapped.

  “Lie still for the moment,” Madame Kyla ordered. “You thrashed around quite badly over the last two days.”

  She frowned as she pulled the wand away from Emily. “How do you feel?”

  Emily hesitated. “Like I’ve been beaten half to death,” she said, morbidly. Her entire body ached, while her head felt as if it were full of cotton wool. “What happened?”

  “You saved us all,” Frieda said. She gave Emily a brilliant smile. “I knew you could do it.”

  “More or less,” Madame Kyla said, giving Frieda a sharp look. “I believe the Grandmaster wishes to speak with you as soon as you are awake, then that young man of yours has been trying to sneak in here.”

  Emily swallowed. Her memories were hazy, but she was sure of one thing. She’d assaulted three tutors. If Gordian wanted to expel her, he could. She’d made certain of that when she’d committed herself. She wondered, absently, if she was restrained to keep her in place, although that felt absurd. It would have been easy for Madame Kyla to keep her sedated until Gordian made his decision.

  “I know,” she said. Madame Kyla held a bottle of water to Emily’s lips and let her sip it. “I... can I sit up?”

  “If you feel you can,” Madame Kyla said. She snapped her fingers and the restraints unwrapped themselves. “I expect you to lie back down at once if you feel the merest discomfort.”

  Emily
nodded, then glanced at Frieda. “How long was I out?”

  “Five days,” Frieda said. “I’ve been waiting here all that time.”

  “Except when you went to eat,” Melissa said. She smirked as Frieda glowered at her. “We got emergency shipments of food from Dragon’s Den.”

  Emily nodded. Oddly, the more she moved, the better she felt. Frieda stood beside her and talked about what she’d seen while she’d been trapped, then helped Emily to swing her legs over the side of the bed and stand. Her legs felt a little wobbly at first, as if she’d forgotten how to walk properly, but it wasn’t long before she was striding up and down the chamber confidently. Melissa clapped, rather sarcastically, as soon as Emily finished her first walk around the room.

  “I advise you to be careful for the next few days,” Madame Kyla said, once she checked Emily’s condition for the second time. “You do seem to have a habit of ending up here, don’t you?”

  “Yeah,” Emily muttered.

  “Frieda will escort you to the Grandmaster’s office,” Madame Kyla said, briskly. “I’ll be checking up on you tomorrow, again, so be careful.”

  Emily nodded, feeling cold ice settling in her stomach. Gordian was going to be furious, and perhaps a little pleased too. The school had been saved... and he could expel his most troublesome student. It wasn’t as if anyone could argue that she hadn’t assaulted three tutors. Hell, they’d say that she was getting off lightly for what she’d done.

  “Thank you,” she said, sincerely.