Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

by Sarah Hoyt

  The What was at papa’s look.

  “Darkwater is in town?” Papa said. “I thought he might be. I could feel the situation turning and—”

  “Suppose you tell me about the situation?” Jonathan said equably as he took a sip of the brandy.

  His father raised his eyebrows. He shot a quick look at the fireplace. “How much…. What do you think the situation is?”

  “I think that you and Honoria are somehow in business with Sydell. This is bad, Father, very bad. Inexcusably foolish to let yourself be snared into the plots of dragons.”

  “Ah. So you know that, but do you know what the plot is?”

  “I know that you’re doing business in other universes,” Jon said and drank his brandy.

  His father raised his eyebrows. “So you know that far.”

  “And I know that Honoria isn’t the princess. Not half of it. There is no way the princess could look so much like you, Papa.”

  “Ah. Well, I never expected you to swallow that rasper. Though I trusted you to stay quiet.”

  It occurred to Jonathan that his father was a very dangerous man. Maybe as dangerous as Sydell. But somehow, Jonathan didn’t feel at risk. “I’ve known you were running a smoky rig, Papa, for the last month. Why do you think I’ve been drinking so much?”

  “How should I know? You’ve always drunk—”

  Jonathan waved his hand. “How did it start? And why, Papa?”

  “How did it start?” His father gave a hollow chuckle. “It started with your grandfather. He ran through the fortune like – Your mama says you resemble him, and I’ve often thought that was true, though now….” He narrowed his eyes and shrugged. “There might be a lot in of me in you, Jonathan. Though I’d never noticed it before. But if there is, you’ll understand.

  “When I inherited, the family was well-nigh destitute. Oh, we had the business, and the magic, and I could have built it back up in time. But I was married and I… I didn’t want to spend my entire life laboring just so my heir could have a fortune to waste. So I started going to the forbidden worlds. The ones without magic. It’s so easy to make a fortune there, Jonathan. It’s not that magic doesn’t work – though in one or two it won’t except the residual we bring from here, and it will be lost if we stay – it’s that they don’t have magic there. Which means they can’t detect it. Their financial markets are wide open. Their politicians will pay extraordinary sums for simple persuasion spells….”

  “And?” Jonathan said. He could see the basic dishonesty of what his father had done but not enough to trouble him. “You made our fortune?”

  “More than it had ever been, yes.”

  “And then?”

  “And then Sydell approached me. He’d noticed what we were doing, and he gave me an ultimatum. I could stop – at that point it was very hard to prove what I’d done – or I could ally myself with him.”

  “And?”

  “I couldn’t stop.”

  “Why not? You’d made your fortune.”

  “But the power, Jonathan. The power. You have no idea what it’s like to be able to dictate the fate of entire worlds when no one knows about what you’re doing. It’s better than being king.”

  Jonathan felt sick for the first time and for a moment was afraid the brandy would come back up. He stared at his father, his eyes impassive. Of all the things he’d never understood, the lust for power was the worst. His sins were pleasing ones: sleeping with this or that person or creature, drinking, eating. He could never understand the boys at school who enjoyed ordering others about. He could see they did, and he could see his father did too, but it was incomprehensible to him, and also vaguely nauseating. He remembered all the times at school when a bully had tried to force him to behave in a manner he didn’t wish to.

  “I see,” he said at last. “So you dealt with the dragon.”

  “He wanted to replace the king. He wanted Avalon and Fairyland. I thought… I thought his madness was just that, and I thought….”

  “And m’sister? How did she come into it?”

  This got him a completely baffled look. “Your mama says your sister and I are alike. You know it is said the founder of our house was elf born, and your mama says both your sister and I have ice in our veins. I think… she’s wrong. Your sister fell in love with Sydell. After that….” He shrugged. “Not that I understand it. The man is my age, and if rumors are true, he’s never been interested in a woman, except the nymph he raped to get her imprisoned in the spell, years ago, the one who gave him his bastard. I thought…. I’ve been used to thinking that like his son's, his interests lay in another direction. At least for a while it was said that he kept various young men….” He shrugged. “I told your sister, and she accused me of lying. She fell in love with him head over heels, and… and he encouraged her. I think what attracted her was his power.”

  “His magical power?”

  “That too, but his… power and his wish for power.”

  Jonathan gave a click of his tongue. “They do say girls fall in love with men who resemble their fathers.”

  His father looked startled but said nothing.

  “So,” Jonathan said. “Right now, you should be getting ready to be the foster father of the new queen. But you’re burning papers. What happened that I don’t know about?”

  His father’s eyes looked dull and odd. “She called the land.”

  “M’sister? Has she gone mad?”

  “No, not your sister. How could she? The real princess.”

  “The re– She’s in Britannia?”

  “Yes. She came back some while back. A centaur brought her. Fortunately Sydell neutralized her and kept her where he could keep her power damped and her under his thumb. He tried to involve her with Darkwater so both could be condemned at the same time, before anyone looked too closely at her, but then…”

  “But then?”

  “It all went wrong,” his father said flatly. “And she’s called the land.”

  “Which causes?”

  “Well, it gives her power, if she survives the challenges, to destroy all our spells, all our obfuscations. To prove who she is. Even now, the king has felt the call and knows his daughter is near and that she’s not your sister.”

  “So you….”

  “I intended to say it was your sister’s plan, and Sydell’s, which is true, and try to brazen out. If only evidence….” He looked up at Jonathan. “I intended to… I had caught, this afternoon, odd disturbances, and Sydell wouldn’t answer my questions, so I sent the whole family to the country seat, and I—”

  “Too late, Papa. Other people know. And Darkwater is in the world, and he knows, and….”

  “I see,” his father said. “Yes, I think you are like me. Underneath the bon vivant, you have ice in your veins.”

  Jonathan laughed. He set his empty glass on the side of the desk and slipped his gloves on. “Perhaps that’s why I drink so much. It won’t fadge, Papa. You know that even if there are no witnesses, dearest Honoria will talk. Yes, we could kill her, but Papa, I think there is another problem. If you survive this, you’ll have to keep your nose clean, very clean. And I’ll be watching, to make sure you don’t do this again. Even if the thing with dealing in other worlds is lifted – since I think that was Sydell’s idea – yet the king will monitor it, and what you’ve been doing will not be permitted. Would you be able to do that, papa? To give up the power?”

  He read the answer in his father’s eyes, even as his father said, “And you? Would you be able to take a house with a shadow on it and do any better for your brothers and sisters? And Jonathan, would you be able to resist exploiting those without magical power? You are like me!”

  “Not entirely, Papa. You see, my wish has never been to rule others but to be left alone.” He got up. “I’ll bid you farewell. I trust you know what to do. I believe you have the necessary in your second drawer.”

  “Why don’t you do it yourself?”

  “Tut-tut, Papa.
Judicial magicians.”

  Jonathan got up and walked out of his father’s study. He presumed he’d have to sleep at his club, if all servants were gone.

  He was on the second step of the stairs when the shot rang out from the studio and Jonathan was, suddenly, the only living person in the house.

  Jonathan Blythe, Earl of Savage, stood transfixed for a moment. He’d like to say he felt nothing, but that was not strictly true. He felt no grief for his father, who’d never given him reason to feel anything.

  But he felt a sure, unreasoning fury. If his father hadn’t wanted to get rich in a hurry. If he’d not been addicted to power. If– Then Jonathan could have done what he planned since the age of twelve at least, and disappeared into a place where he was not known and had no responsibilities, and left his younger brother to inherit.

  It wasn’t possible now, and Peter would not have to shoulder the responsibility. Jonathan would spend the rest of his life living so impeccably, so above-board that he restored the family name.

  He muttered a curse under his breath and left for his club.

  But he’d gone no more than two steps outside when he realized this night was not a normal night for anyone.

  Dragon’s Den

  Seraphim landed hard, on his shoulder. From somewhere he could hear water running.

  I very much wish I would stop getting thrown around by magic, he thought. Then he felt more than heard the thud of a body falling near him. A very heavy body.

  Aching, feeling as if his own fall had broken something, he twisted to face… the dragon. No… Sydell.

  Somehow Seraphim was on his feet and turning to face the dragon. It was huge and swollen and monstrous, reddish-brown in tone, with wings like a massive armature, feet that each of them was as large as a man’s body, toe nails that looked like the horns of some ancient beast. And yet, looking up, he detected in the huge face Sydell’s expressions and Sydell’s features.

  Sydell had always seemed to him to be a smooth courtier, always ready to do what people expected. But beneath, a dark current ran, full of danger and … things Seraphim couldn’t even understand.

  The dragon showed the same duality, and a malicious… not delight. Though Seraphim supposed there was delight beneath the … fear?

  “Welcome to the dragon cave,” Sydell said, and it was horrible to see that dragon mouth shape the words, horrible to hear the well-bred accents in the gravel-like voice. “I don’t know how that imbecile sent us here by raising the land, but I couldn’t have planned it better. For decades I’ve been striving against your family. First your father… the king’s Witchfinder, indeed. The corruption of a noble title to mean do-goodism in other worlds, and rescuing from their fate people who are no part nor parcel of our lives. Going in search of trouble, I call it. And preventing enterprising men from making a living in worlds too stupid to develop their magic systems.

  “And then you, after we’d safely disposed of him. You – with the same nonsense, the same intent to rescue. And aided by that infernal creature, the exiled king, your brother. I don’t think you ever realized how much of his power he lent you. No, you were so full of your position being the duke, being the important one, you never realized that he was feeding you magic, and that you were only able to do all you did by his eldritch powers.”

  The dragon grinned, and the grin was worse than the voice, displaying long, glimmering teeth, but more than that, showing a level of malice that Seraphim would much rather not have known existed.

  “But here, Duke, here you are on your own. Just you and me, and no kings, no princesses, no one who will betray me or deflect me to save your sorry carcass. Here I kill you…. Or perhaps not. Perhaps I’d be convinced to spare you for a time….”

  Seraphim’s eyes had grown used to the gloom of the cave. It was an odd gloom, tinged with red, and it had taken him a while to realize the red came from a pile – a truly massive pile – of gold at the back. This surprised him just a little. Like most such things in legend, he’d always assumed the idea of the dragon treasure was a lie. It surprised him, too, because Sydell was not that old, and the pile of treasure had the look of something accumulated over generations, the result of pirate shipwrecks and historical rapine. Seraphim wondered where that treasure had come from.

  But other things interested him more. There were… manacles on the wall, and from several of them corpses depended, half rotted, which explained the odor of must and decay in the air. But there were other corpses too, dead in a pile by the treasure and half eaten. In the light of Sydell’s words, it was impossible for Seraphim not to notice that all the bodies whose characteristics he could discern were young and male.

  Feeling his gorge rise, he wondered if decorating one’s space in old lovers was a family characteristic of the Sydell line. Then he apologized mentally to Marlon. No. He might have his doubts about the man, and he might … but Marlon, at least to his knowledge, had never viewed a tryst as the prelude to a snack. Certainly not, or word would have got about.

  And that Marlon had maintained this dreadful place, unsuspected….

  Seraphim swallowed hard again. It seemed to him at the back of the cave there was movement, and a human form, he didn’t know whether bound or free, but he didn’t want to think about it. Right now, compared to the mountain of dragon flesh, a human posed very little danger.

  “Are you judging your odds?” Sydell asked, and the urbane humor in the dragon voice was almost more than Seraphim could bear. “Don’t. You have no chance. Forget all your magical fights of the past. Without your… brother, you would never have had a chance. Do you wish to compound now?”

  But Seraphim was still holding the black shard of the dryad’s cage. And he’d be damned if he was going to compound for a year, a month, or even a day of life, under these conditions and…. He looked around at the skeletons. No. He’d not been willing to marry Honoria for honor, and he’d not give in to a dragon’s lust to preserve a few more … hours? days? weeks? ...of life. It wouldn’t be much. He suspected what Sydell craved was power, and once you gave in, he was no longer interested. And even if it were not much, there were things more important than saving one’s life.

  He wasn’t convinced everything was lost. Perhaps Gabriel had helped Seraphim with power, but that didn’t make Seraphim helpless without it. And at any rate, he was a Darkwater, and his family depended on him. Power or not, chances of success or not, he would fight. For himself, for them, for what was right.

  If he must die, let him die true to what he was.

  He stepped back to achieve balance, his step unnaturally loud in the cave. From somewhere at the other end came a rustle and a sound of gold sliding. Human? Animal attracted by the remains? It did not matter.

  Seraphim grinned up the mountain of dragon whose shadow dwarfed him. “Do your worst, Sydell,” he said. “I’ll see you in hell.”

  Rogue’s Progress

  It wasn’t the ghost riders, riding madly through London, that scared Jonathan Blythe. After all, he’d had a decent magical education. He wasn’t a fool, either. Ghosts are ghosts. Which is not to say that they can’t do anything to you. Only uneducated fools would think so. Ghosts couldn’t, of course, as such, touch you. They were on another plane. And couldn’t interact with humans in the way physical objects could.

  No, what ghosts could do, though, was trail magic. In fact, they couldn’t help doing it. Crossing over from the other plane—whether they were true ghosts, caught in between the worlds, or just memories of past events, being reenacted in the present day—to manifest they required magic, and they brought with them a magic disturbance – a rift in the nature of the magical power that undergirded the world.

  This was why on seeing a ghost, people would feel a chill and an eldritch fear. There was a disturbance in the magic, and it was impossible not to perceive it, even if you didn’t have enough magic to name it.

  But the more important point was that, once the magic had been torn, anything could come th
rough it. Anything, including creatures that didn’t normally inhabit the human plane of existence – things that were, or could be, physical. Things that weren’t so well intentioned.

  And London was now filled with ghosts. Jonathan was going to guess the ghosts of every person who’d ever died fighting or murdered in the land that London now occupied – Roman legionnaires and armored knights, women screaming and running in bloodied nightgowns, and through it all, in the middle of it all, every cavalcade who’d ever ridden through London – victorious or not. He was almost sure the ones in Roman armor, with plumes, were Arthur’s cavalry when they’d come to London to install him. But there was also Essex’s forlorn effort and John Lackland’s last hope – riding disarmed and blindfolded, with their standards reversed, as they had on the way to their execution.

  Jonathan swallowed hard, looking at these figures of defeat, not only at seeing so vividly brought to life that which he’d only before seen in history books, but also at the number of ghosts.

  He knew what had caused it right enough. The land wakening would waken all who slept an unquiet sleep among the dead. But the land itself had caused a disturbance in magic, and now this….

  It took almost no time at all for Jonathan to spot them. Demons, he supposed they should be called, although they weren’t. Not really. Not the tempting demons of theology, at least. These creatures were barely sentient, little more than animated particles of evil.

  But evil they were, walking lurching and rolling – they had varying forms – upon the land. Their forms gave one headaches, simply because they shouldn’t possibly exist, and yet they did, claw and fang, and odd-colored eyes peeking out of unexpected places; fur and feather and something that was neither, in colors that made one nauseated just staring at them.