Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

by Sarah Hoyt

  Which was… exactly what it was, Gabriel thought. It was not a physical explosion, but a magical explosion. Slowly, very slowly, he let himself down from his standing position to his knees, then back to sit on his heels. It was either that or fall forward into the crater and though it was fading fast, he could see now, narrowing his eyes, that there was still a fading magical field around it. What it would do to him, if he fell into it, was an experiment he’d rather not perform.

  The older woman put her hand on his shoulder, and when he looked up, he realized she was really doing some sort of magic now. It was hard to tell what. Though her finger-movements were cabalistic, and her words seemed to be measured and ritualistic – from what he could tell of her lip movements, the fact was that what he could see made no sense. If someone had taken an Avalon spell and turned it inside out and sideways, he’d still have recognized it for what it was. This was rather more akin to what would happen if someone took an Avalon spell and threw out all the important points, leaving only the form and some of the incidentals.

  He blinked. Then he heard and felt a loud pop. It was something he had experienced before, once, when his father had taken him up on a magical rug. It had been a foreign attraction brought to London by some Eastern rug merchant. They’d set up in the park, and for a shilling you could go up. Since the occasion coincided with a visit by the Duke to London, and since, when away from the house he treated both of them disturbingly alike, he’d taken both boys up on the magical rug.

  Though going up had not made Gabriel quite deaf, it had made it sound as though all the sounds were very distant, and muffled and confused, too.

  The effect had persisted upon landing, until his ears had given a loud pop, and suddenly he could hear normally. The same happened now, because he heard the girl– No, Her Highness the Princess Royal, say, “– Where His Grace has gone. His bed is undisturbed, but he couldn’t have failed to have come at the sound.”

  Seraphim. He looked towards the princess. “Your Highness!” he said. “When is the last time you saw my brot– Darkwater?”

  “Oh, please, call me Nell,” she said, blushing a little, and then said, “So you can hear now. Grandma–”

  “It was a quick healing spell,” the older lady said. “Mr.–”

  “Penn,” Gabriel supplied automatically.

  “Your brother and Nell came up, and Nell was explaining to me what had happened, and he excused himself and went to his room. We didn’t think anything of it, assuming he needed to use the bathroom or something, and then–”

  “And then there was the explosion, and he didn’t come down, and he’s in the affected side of the house, and I thought…. We called him, but there was no answer, and he doesn’t seem to be anywhere.” She looked towards what had been the basement. “What happened here? What caused this? And where is Marlon? Mr. Elfborn?”

  Where was Marlon? For that matter, where was the furniture that had been in the room? Oh, surely it couldn’t have resisted the force of the explosion, and some of it might be part of the carbonized layer all over the interior of the room. But not all. Even a magical explosion of this magnitude would leave behind debris. There would be pieces of sofa and table and– He swallowed hard at the thought of pieces of Marlon. A sense of irretrievable loss made him think he wasn’t as much master of his heart as he’d like to think. “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s a magical explosion. Have you ever–?” He’d thought he was too numb for grief, but the thought that Marlon had died, was gone forever, made him want to scream. He tightened his hands, until the nails bit the palms to restore some semblance of self-control.

  “No,” the princess said, then, quite shocked, “Is that ice over the walls?”

  “Yes, and char too. But… I’ve never seen it either,” he said. “But we studied them in school, Seraphim and I. It’s… the explosions are possible only for people of very high magical power, when they do something that is really wrong. I….” He shook his head. “We were told, for instance, it could happen if two different transport spells, in two different directions were applied to the same room, at the same time.” He swallowed again. Could that be it? Had Marlon and Seraphim said transport spells, both of them at the exact same time? But that would only make sense, given that the explosion was centered in the basement and that the ceiling above it seemed charred but intact, if they’d both been in the same room. And he was willing to bet they weren’t. “Or two spells, both highly charged that contradict each other. But this….”

  But this was destruction of a magnitude he’d not been taught in school. He’d been taught he might explode a table, or set fire to a chandelier. Even for that, enormous power was needed on both sides of the misguided spells. For this–

  “Was it Mr. Marlon?” the princess asked.

  Gabriel shook his head before he knew why, then caught the glimmers in the force field that told him it couldn’t be. “No,” he said, and to his own ears his voice sounded slow and incredulous, as though he were speaking nonsense and even he couldn’t understand it. “No. There is dragon magic there and….”

  “And?”

  “Unicorn?” he said. And it sounded as crazy as it was. Unicorns were animals. They didn’t set spells. “Marlon,” he said. “Got caught in the cross spell.”

  “Is he dead?” from the princess, and she sounded like she was worried Gabriel would start crying or something. She need not be. He was not going to cry. Even though he felt as though he were drowning with the force of tears he couldn’t shed, he was sure his face remained impassive. His grief was too immense for mere tears.

  “I don’t know,” he said, simply, then added. “I hope not.” And then because he must know. “And Seraphim? Where was Seraphim?”

  “Two floors above,” the princess pointed. “In his room.”

  “May I see?”

  She nodded and led him upward. “You have to be very careful there,” she said. “I’ll stay here. I’ve braced that part of the house magically, and we think it will hold until we can get a construction company in to brace it properly and… and repair the damage, though what they’ll think caused it, I don’t know, but until it can be done, the floor will be unstable. So, I’ll wait here, not to add unnecessary weight, and you tread carefully.”

  He refrained from telling her it was his dearest wish to do jumping jacks on an unsound floor, and instead walked slowly forward, on the creaking floor, to the door she had indicated.

  The room was spacious, well furnished, and quite empty. He could see on the dressing table Seraphim’s pocket watch, which they’d got from their father, and which was rigged to tell them when someone in another world was in danger. Over the chair of the dressing table was Seraphim’s dressing gown. It looked like it had been washed and mended from what must have been interesting adventures.

  Gabriel approached the dressing table, touched the dressing gown, not sure what he was looking for.

  A shrill noise surprised him before he realized it was the watch giving alarm. Someone somewhere was in trouble.

  They’d never figured out whose trouble precisely the watch picked up or why, for surely it couldn’t be everyone in the universe in trouble for possessing magic at that precise moment. Given the multitude of worlds, there would be too many people in that situation.

  He picked the watch up, flipped it open, and, lacking a proper scrying surface, looked into the mirror above the dressing table.

  In the mirror, very clearly, he saw Seraphim. He had his back against a moss-grown wall and was surrounded by mastiffs.

  Gabriel didn’t think. Couldn’t think. He pressed the right button on the watch and let the spell take him there.

  A Matter Of Duty

  Nell felt the magic from upstairs. It rang in her ears as something only a little less loud than the explosion that had left the room downstairs coated in glittering bits of magical dust, and which had forcibly bent the foundation of the house and thrown a grown man across the garden.

  This expl
osion was more subdued, and came, inescapably, from the upstairs. But it was still loud. She was on her feet, from the kitchen table where she and Grandma had just sat down to continue – now changed – the talk the explosion had interrupted.

  Grandma had just said, “You are an adult, and your own woman. I can’t tell you what to do.” Which of course, meant that Nell was too young to cross the street without someone holding her hand and that Grandma was very well about to tell her what to do, when this second explosion came.

  On her feet, running towards the stairs, Nell realized, halfway up, that it had not been an explosion but an implosion – not a boom but a puff, as something vanished, something else flowed in to take its place. And it couldn’t be just the disappearance of a man, or even two. No, something large had gone to cause that sound.

  She slowed her steps over the unstable part of the house. She heard Grandma behind her, but it didn’t bear stopping, not now.

  The door to the room they’d given to Seraphim – had Duke ever been housed in such a ramshackle and casual way? – was standing open and creaking softly to and fro as though caught in a strong wind.

  It did not surprise Nell, as she reached the doorway, that the room was empty – or at least that it was empty of the two men. The furniture remained there, in its proper places – but she didn’t go in further than the doorway because a few inches in front of her nose, filling the entire space of the room, what looked like fiery dust motes flew, sparkling and dancing. She blinked at them, recognizing the markers of a very powerful spell, a shell-spell.

  Someone or something had set a spell on this entire room, a spell that filled the room to the inner wall. Those spells were usually only built for important reasons, for a place where someone must do something. It was a compulsion spell on place, not person. And it was difficult to set, and could only be set by someone present.

  That didn’t disturb her as much as the feeling – as she watched the motes of light slowly fade – that she knew very well who had set this. There should not be a taste to magic, but there was: feel and a sense of the hand that had created a spell. It was akin to recognizing the hand that had formed letters, or the hand that had mixed a recipe.

  She could not point to anything exactly, but she’d been near the man, and watched him create spells, and the spell created here was unmistakably Sydell’s.

  How could Sydell have come here? How gained access? True, she and Seraphim had been over the fields in the morning, talking while she showed him the places of her childhood. Where Grandma might have been was anyone’s guess, but this place was defended and guarded. Grandma had done so from Nell’s earliest days. Certainly she would not let anyone near who might be a danger. And Sydell had given off vibrations of danger from the moment Nell had met him.

  She squinted around the room, without going in. The spell should be spent, and in fact, the glitter of it was dying by the moment, but you could never be sure. The spell had been set to cause someone to do something, and once the someone had done the something, it had slowly unfolded. That much was certain, that much not a problem to imagine. It was also no great stretch to know what the spell had caused the men to do. The two of them – or more likely Seraphim, carrying Gabriel along – had transported out of here in haste, probably somewhere the compulsion told them to go. That much was sure.

  But if that had been the whole of it, there were other ways of doing it, subtler or stronger, all the way up to whatever had happened to Marlon. This was something else, something more targeted. No one did a full shell-spell unless there was a sequence of actions they wanted someone to perform. They were strong enough that often actions caused by them were repeated by the victim’s ghost for eternity. It was said they were responsible for half the hauntings in Avalon.

  She looked around the room. The spells were by definition dark and proscribed magic, since they robbed the victim of choice. They were often set to cause someone to do murder, but not only couldn’t she imagine the men murdering each other – there was a limit to what even a shell-spell could cause you to do – but she couldn’t see any blood stains on the floor. And there hadn’t been enough time, since Gabriel had come up, for one strong and healthy man to strangle the other or vice versa. No. That was not what the compulsion had been. Then what?

  Perhaps what had been intended had been precisely that the men should transport out. She suspected that on Earth it might be hard for someone of Avalon to physically seize and transport someone out. And the Darkwaters were both very powerful.

  But something more there would be. Something to take along, perhaps? She looked around the room again, this time for belongings. Seraphim had arrived in this world in his dressing gown, now much mended and tattered, a pair of underwear that had made her grandmother marvel at the cunning arrangement of tying ribbons and grin in amusement at the lace with which people of Britannia bedecked all small clothes of the gentry, male and female.

  The only other thing he’d brought, in the pocket of his gown, was his father’s pocket watch, which she’d understood had some magic properties and which he and Gabriel used in their rescue missions.

  She looked towards the dressing table where the watch had been, and it was gone.

  And she stood there realizing the enormity of this: the two men whom Sydell had been trying to entrap from the very beginning; the men who’d been spied on, coerced, and finally accused falsely of murder so that the Duke’s property could be impounded, had left this house carrying the one thing that Seraphim had brought into it, beyond his clothes. They’d left under strong compulsion set by the same person who’d been spying and conspiring against them.

  The realization dawned and could no longer be avoided that the whole plot against them had been to seize this watch. Everything: their destroyed lives, the upended routines and livelihoods of all of Seraphim’s retainers had been to get their hands on this pocket watch.

  But that meant, surely, that the watch was not a normal watch. Petty thieves and burglars were not that hard to get in Britannia, and she was something of the kind in a much superior package – or had been while she was involved in Sydell’s schemes. And she’d never been told to find it and seize it. So the watch must have anti-theft spells built into it, and probably could only follow someone of Darkwater name. And so this entire monstrous plot had been hatched to get hands on it.

  She took a deep breath, blinked. And carefully, she thought the one word: idiots.

  And then a sentence assembled itself in her head, as if someone else were thinking it, only the someone else was also her. She said it, in a whisper, as it came to her, “This has gone far enough.”

  She found she was out of the doorway, into the hallway, and across to the sound part of the house, where her room stood. “This has gone far enough.”

  Grandma came in as she was packing her clothes in the sturdy backpack she’d used for her youthful travels, before college. Not many clothes, but a change of underwear, a t-shirt, another pair of jeans, her first aid kit.

  And wouldn’t you know it, Grandma said again, and in exactly the same voice, “I will not tell you what to do; you’re an adult.”

  Of course, that meant she was about to tell Nell what to do, and she did.

  “All the intruders are gone,” Grandma said. “It is all to no point for you to go chasing after them like a mad woman. You’re back home. I had never expected you to come back, but now you’re home. What need do you have to go involve yourself in the affairs of a world with which we have nothing to do?”

  “I can’t,” Nell said turning around. “I have something to do with them. I am responsible.”

  It seemed to her that Grandma’s face fell. She sighed. She approached the bed and mechanically started straightening the stuffed toys that had been there since Nell was little.

  “Nell…. Perhaps I should tell you….”

  There was something to Grandma’s voice that made Nell look up. “Tell me what?”

  “We… I am not… that i
s. You know I know magic, which is not natural on Earth, and I….”

  Nell let go of her suitcase and gave her grandmother her full attention. “It has often struck me as odd, yes. Most human magic, on Earth – most magic on Earth – is not really magic, but yours is. What do you mean we are not….”

  “There is a group of us. I won’t tell you who or what we are because it would take very long and you probably wouldn’t understand. I’m not sure I do, myself. I am not, however, from Earth. I belong to an organization… you could call it guardians. You know that Britannia in your – in Avalon – is closed against sending people to non-magical worlds. But not all worlds, not all lands are, and not everyone who travels to other worlds has benign intentions like your Duke’s. So there is the organization. Think of us as Magicians Without Borders, if that helps. What we call ourselves translates as Guardians. When I was a young and idealistic girl, I enrolled and was sent to Earth. There’s only myself here, and I couldn’t keep the world safe, but I could at least find some of the magical intruders bent on exploiting the locals.”

  “But then—” Nell said. “Granddad. My father!” It felt to her as though her whole world were a lie.

  Grandma shook her head. “No, they’re real enough. I mean, they were from Earth. I fell in love with your grandfather, and I had your … adoptive father. But then—

  “When he found you, I knew who you were. Or at least I knew you were royal and from another world, though the origin had been obscured. I found your name, which is why you have the same name in both worlds. And over the years I’d found out where you were from.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Nell asked. “Why not send me back?”

  Grandma turned, holding a scruffy stuffed bunny between her hands. “Because I did a scrying. There is a very powerful magician on the other end. If you went back – If I sent you back— There was a very high chance you’d be killed.” She paused. “Nell, I urge you to consider just staying….”