Witchfinder (Magical Empires Book 1)

by Sarah Hoyt

  Of course, given the relative size, a sword was more like a dagger, and the plunging of it into the dragon’s chest brought only a scream of rage, but then….

  But then Seraphim realized that the magical shield of the dragon seemed to be down, that the dragon was scrabbling ineffectively at the sword hilt with his claws, as though he couldn’t quite grasp it.

  Of course, it’s spelled, Seraphim thought. It is a magical sword.

  At the same moment in his mind was the magical tutor his mother had hired when he was very young saying, “If you ever have to strike at a dragon, plunge the dagger into his eye.”

  So he grabbed at the sword hilt, pulled it out and, feeling as though he was using strength he didn’t in fact have, plunged it into the dragon’s eye.

  There was a scream – horrible and loud — and the huge body trashed around. In a spasm, a claw caught Seraphim across the middle, tearing his clothes and sending him flying, to hit his head against the wall, after which merciful darkness fell.

  He woke with Gabriel looming over him, saying, “Wake up, milord. Wake up. We must get out of here.”

  Gabriel must have run mad to call him milord in these circumstances, Seraphim thought, but what he said was the first words on his mind, “You are alive, then. Good. I’m Raphael, and I—”

  A hollow laugh escaped the man, and suddenly Seraphim realized it couldn’t be Gabriel, because the accent was quite wrong, and while Gabriel might be mad enough to call Seraphim milord, he would not fake an accent in these circumstances. Particularly an accent that sounded remarkably like Nell’s.

  “You could say I’m alive, milord. Though many times I wished I weren’t. Come, milord, we must get out of here.”

  Seraphim was suddenly aware that the ground was shaking and that pieces of rock seemed to be raining on them from above. Looking up, he saw that the ceiling had cracks and fissures and the rocks falling on them were pieces of it.

  “It’s caving in,” he said.

  “Yes, milord. Up. Come.” The man was reaching for Seraphim, trying to make him stand, but Seraphim felt he couldn’t.

  “You go,” he said. “Save yourself. I am done for.”

  The Land’s Heart

  Nell stepped forward, and the warmth enveloped her. At first it was almost too hot and too bright, and then….

  And then she stopped being separate from the light and the heat, and she found herself in the spinning heart of everything: she could feel everywhere and everywhen, she was everywhere and everywhen.

  In London, she was streets thronged with people, fighting odd threats. In the countryside, she stood on frost-crackling fields, while ghost riders ran and ravaged the sleeping farms, the silent homesteads.

  Fairyland had broken loose and spilled into Avalon.

  The part of Nell that could still feel and think felt a clutch at her heart, a fear that Gabriel had lost his battle and that this had always been part of the plan between the traitor in Britannia and the dark ones of Fairyland, that now the two would merge.

  The part of Nell that now knew more, the part of Nell that was Avalon and whose mind went back through the ages, to King Arthur’s time and before, knew this was nonsense. Not that it had been the plan. It might very well be the plan, but she knew better. Fairyland and the mundane world could not merge. They could only meet and annihilate each other. Easy enough for the forces of Fairyland to romp and storm through the lower-magical world of mortals, for a time. But then the lack of magic in Avalon would starve them, at the same time as they rampaged among the mere mortals.

  And there was more. Fairyland powered every other world. Without it, magic would leach out of all other worlds. Its sickly state these last few years meant that it had already leaked out of the outer, most distant worlds, such as Earth. If this went on, then it would disappear from all other worlds, and eventually life would go with it. And if this night Fairyland spilled into Avalon and Avalon into Fairyland, it would all burn itself out in a moon.

  But the land had its strength. What it lacked was a will and a mind. And that – Nell thought – wasn’t right. She felt the connection that should link the land to the king. She was not – yet – the Queen of Britannia. The land should be linked to the man she must learn to think of as her father.

  Nell followed the link in her mind and found the place where it was cut by a dark, dank stuff like mildew that had eaten at the quick, living magic.

  It was as though Nell’s heart had plummeted down around her feet. She could not solve this, and get the king – her father, she must think of him as that – to take over the battle. For now it was her battle, and then – and then she would make sure the king received the power. It was too early. She did not want to wear the crown.

  But all the same, she must lift the sword, symbolically and in truth, the Sword of Power in the land.

  She felt it in her hands, that legendary sword that had been Arthur’s and the first Richard’s, the sword that took form and substance now and then, but which was forever and always a sword of the spirit.

  It was heavy, here at the heart of the world, and it was a symbol, more than a real weapon. Nell lifted it.

  Against the growing invaders, against the dark armies, against the creatures of ill-defined magic and ill-disciplined force, she lifted the sword, and with it raised the strength of the land, and she called, “Fight!” And she screamed “Arise!” And she commanded, “Defend!”

  From every sacred grove and every cleanly hill, the power of the land, the power, rose, and the magic grew. The invaders, surprised, fell back in disarray, clambered back in fear. They wouldn’t be banished, not completely, but they would not rampage. They held in tight circles, defensive, embattled. And around them the magic of the land shimmered and sparkled.

  A Fighting Title

  Seraphim became aware that he was being dragged over a rough floor. He tried to protest that he should be allowed to die in peace. It seemed to him peculiar that the odd man from the dragon den should insist on dragging a dying duke along with him.

  Only he wasn’t a duke anymore.

  And from somewhere anger came. He’d not asked to be the Duke of Darkwater. He’d not asked to be the first-born of the previous duke’s large and irregular get. He’d not asked his father to die early and to leave Seraphim in charge of an encumbered inheritance and younger children who depended on him.

  And, most of all, he’d not asked to find his father’s secret papers, not to feel obliged to rescue the unfortunates that his father could no longer help.

  He had asked for none of this.

  And now, now that he must die for it, some lunatic wouldn’t let him alone.

  He moaned loudly, and there was a moment of hesitation, but then the dragging resumed.

  Seraphim became aware that the ground was shaking beneath him, that his arms hurt as he was being dragged, and that – and this part galled him – someone was shoving quite an unreasonable amount of magic at him, pushing and forcing it past Seraphim’s weakened defenses, forcing Seraphim’s body to heal itself.

  It was an odd magic, not untrained, but strangely structured. Instead of healing Seraphim it was forcing him to heal.

  Now, there was somewhere –

  Seraphim had seen that magic somewhere, felt it somewhere. As his body started to recover, his mind pursued the mystery and found in its unraveling enough incentive to wake up more fully. There, there, the taste of it, the force of the magic…. He knew that type of work.

  And then it hit him. The Madhouse. No. Nell’s world. Earth, they called themselves – though, of course, every unaware world called itself Earth – the world without magic. People from it always learned magic backwards and sideways and did things by methods no sane trained magician, let alone a teacher of magic, would think right. It was as though an entire world had decided the way to build a house was to start with the roof.

  And yet, the misbegotten, scrambled magic worked, after a fashion. Not well, on Earth, but pretty well ever
ywhere else.

  He had woken now, enough to feel his whole body. The annoyance of being dragged, the rough stone tearing at his skin, all of it combined to bring his eyes open.

  He was still in the dragon cave. Rocks were falling from a cracked ceiling. Through the fissures, he could see glowing red lava and what looked like the fires of hell. He wondered if they were beneath a volcano now coming awake, and wondered how long till glowing lava dripped through and incinerated him and his—strange savior.

  He looked up the length of his stretched arms to where a man who looked much like Gabriel was walking backwards while pulling on his hands.

  “Stop,” Seraphim said. “Stop.”

  “I’m not leaving you here,” the young man said. “Not on your life. But I can’t do transport. Never learned how. So we must get out this way. I think this hallway will—”

  “Stop,” Seraphim said, and as the only way to avert this humiliation of being dragged along like a sack of rocks, said, “I’ll stand. I’ll stand.”

  His hands were let free, and he did manage to stand, unsteadily, on legs that felt as though they were made of running water and insufficient willpower.

  The man who looked like Gabriel stepped back, rapidly, as though even wounded Seraphim might wish to, and be able to, take a swing at him. Seraphim focused a swimming vision on the man and said, “Thank you for healing me. Are you from Earth?”

  He got back a surprised, feral smile, a fugitive thing. “I am from Earth, milord. I am– I was lured here, on my insufficiently tutored magic, and I—” He closed his mouth on visibly unsaid thoughts, as the ceiling above gave a loud crack, and rocks fell all around. “Milord, can you run?”

  “No,” he said. “No.” He felt himself swaying on his feet. “A transport spell might be easier.”

  He reached for the man’s hand, because he didn’t think at this moment he could transport anything he wasn’t actually touching. The man’s hand felt too hot and rough. Seraphim started saying the spell, wondering if he could in fact make a transport spell. He wished them out of this hole, out of this horrible enclosure, and into a safe place. He didn’t much care where just now.

  “Use my magic, also, milor’,” the man said, and Seraphim gratefully found it accessible, even if strange, and ignorance-twisted, and he made use of it, weaving his transport spell rapidly, turning it so that it closed finally with a resounding thud.

  And then—

  In a moment they were out of the cave, the heat, the threat of cave-in; and cold rushed in upon them. They were in a vast, white clearing. Seraphim realized, in shock, that there was snow all around, white snow, sparkling and reflective like ground glass.

  In the middle of the clearing was what looked like a tomb, stone and sculpted, beside which a heavily veiled woman mourned. Atop the tomb, where normally a pious, joined-hands statue lay, there lay a man.

  “Father!” Seraphim said.

  King and Kingdom

  It was dark and dank, and smelly. Gabriel’s first thought was that he was within a rat’s warren, or another such passage, built by creatures who, by night, live from the bounty of humanity’s building.

  All Gabriel’s wishing this away didn’t work, and though he ordered with all his kingly might, he realized it would not go away. Dark, and dank, and suffocating, the twisting paths led, by crooked paths like the random weavings of worm upon wood ever downward, ever tighter.

  I can’t wish it away, he thought, because this is the true thing. This is what is beneath all the spun sugar, all the mechanical soldiers, all the cloying, false sweetness that was just that, false. This is what underlay Fairyland, a narrow complex of tunnels getting every smaller, ever tighter, like something a creature would spin while getting away from light and from life, and perhaps from sanity.

  The tunnels got progressively narrower, and their surface had a weathered look, which puzzled Gabriel, because what was there to weather them here, deep in the heart of a magical kingdom and away from everything that might touch them? There was no rain in Fairyland, no currents of deep rivers.

  No, Fairyland was all a thing of the mind.

  Shortly, the tunnels got so narrow that Gabriel was walking them hunched forward, his head bent. They smelt of rats. It was a smell Gabriel knew well from his wretched childhood, a smell that made the hairs rise up at the back of his head, that made the bile rise up at the back of his throat.

  He felt as though he were back there, in the narrow rented lodgings, lying in the dark, covered by the thin coverlet that somehow seemed to make one feel colder and to confer no comfort, waiting for the sound of feet behind the soffit, for the smell of rats, for the horrid feeling of their feet running across you.

  Once, during a cold winter night, a rat had bit him on his toe, and it had taken forever to heal.

  But there could be no smell of rats here; and yet when Gabriel tried to banish it, he couldn’t. There was nothing there but the smell of rats and the narrow tunnels, and everything that was powerful in him told him these could not be altered because they were the true thing.

  It took him a while – and by this time he was on hands and knees—for him to realize why this was the true thing. The smell of rats was how his mind translated poverty. And Fairyland was poor. Fairyland had defaulted, to Gabriel, to its ultimate existence without disguise: poor, narrow, ever tightening and ever more convoluted. A dark place, spinning ever tighter.

  It came to him that when it was so tight it would barely fit him would be when he would find the present monarch. It came to him that his teacher had been right. Fairyland was a parasite among the worlds, floating free and sucking life and magic out of everything it touched.

  How could he want to be the monarch of such a thing? How could anyone but a madman want to rule a parasite-land.

  But no. An instinctive recoil, a knowledge deeper than was possible to have from his lifetime, spoke to Gabriel out of the depths of racial memory. This was what Fairyland was now, yes, because it had a madman at its center, a madman who had been ruling it for centuries, and who had spun off all his own magic, so that he need now feed off other worlds and off unfortunates kidnapped for the purpose, as Michael had been. Gabriel’s stomach lurched at the knowledge that there had been many others, adults and children alike, who had been used for this purpose, and who had not been rescued until they were but dry husks, sucked of magic and life.

  And at the same time the king had needed to suck dry the magic of other worlds – which was where his mad pact with Sydell came in. If Sydell were king, he’d promised, the king could have the choice of magic from Britannia, the magical core of Avalon, until there was no true magic left there.

  Gabriel shook his head. It was not supposed to be like that. He knew, knew with his whole being. There had been other kings, and things had been different then.

  When a strong king stood at the center of Fairyland, he generated magic that fed the whole land and that in turn fed magic to every world that connected into it.

  Gabriel, now crawling into the very narrow, very deep darkness at the heart of Fairyland, thought “But that would mean you wouldn’t be you, any longer. It would be an organic thing. Humans call it king, but it isn’t, not really. Generator, perhaps. Or… or servant.” The thought of how many years he had been a servant came and went in his mind without his protest. He hadn’t liked it, but it was far better than his years of hunger, his years of despair.

  And then he thought that this would be worse. Not servant-servant, but a service that reached into your mind, into your heart, into your very being.

  He’d stood by the side of ballrooms and watched the couples, and kept an outwardly respectful appearance while keeping his own thoughts, while meditating on the shortcomings of the people around him, and finding their folly funny.

  This indenture would allow no such relief. Once he became Fairyland’s … ruler for lack of a better word...he’d have to keep on with it. Everything he did, everything he thought, would reflect itself upo
n the land.

  Any love, such as mortals knew love, that he might have, would have to restrain itself to time away from Fairyland, and those would have to be very brief, very limited moments; or else Fairyland would feel his absence and reach out for someone else – for something else that would feed its magic.

  Gabriel knew of a certainty, suddenly, that there had also been other dark kings before. Here at the heart of Fairyland, the instinctive knowledge of Fairyland’s history was impossible to avoid. The land knew, and, knowing, communicated itself to him. There had been other kings, worse even than this one, kings who had forced the land to reach outward and enslave humans to its will, and demand human sacrifice to feed itself.

  There had also been kings who’d sent their beings forth to kill and commit mayhem, to harvest life to feed Fairyland.

  Fortunately, Gabriel had had a very moral upbringing, despite his father’s failings and his mother’s irregularities. The thought passed through his mind and made him smile, but it was followed by the thought that there was nothing fortunate about it. He wouldn’t be able to convince himself that it was right and just to leave Fairyland to gratify his whims, or even his dreams, for long enough to cause it to go out of control. His uncle had left Fairyland in pursuit of his obsessions. That those obsessions were judged by humans to be vile made no difference at all to what they did to the land. Gabriel’s own dreams might be considered by some to be vile, also, but—

  A thought of an almost discarded – almost but for their renewed acquaintance – youthful dream of living in Marlon’s lodgings, of growing old with him, in the quiet house filled with books, now that the ghost-lover was gone, came and went. He thought of Marlon, at sixty, that flame-bright hair gone pale, sitting by the fire, reading, and then released the thought.

  It would likely never have been like that for them, anyway. And at any rate, Gabriel knew better. You couldn’t just not do your duty and collect all the rewards of doing your duty. He couldn’t simply wish that Fairyland be healed and not step into the role of king. He was the only one who could heal Fairyland, and anything worth having was worth paying for.