Trial By Fire (Schooled in Magic Book 7)

by Christopher Nuttall

  “You’re a fucking sadist,” Emily swore at him. “You can’t just do that and expect me to be happy!”

  “Of course not,” Master Grey agreed. “I expect you to learn how to handle yourself.”

  Emily opened her mouth, but she was cut off by the door opening. Lady Barb stepped into the room, looking grim.

  “Emily,” she said. “The Grandmaster requests your presence and that of Master Grey, immediately. Come with me.”

  I swore at a tutor, Emily thought, feeling her rage draining away. I swore at a tutor and...

  She gathered herself as best as she could. It wasn’t real. It had never been real.

  “I’m coming,” she said. Her entire body was trembling, but somehow she managed to bring it under control. “Where are we going?”

  “The infirmary,” Lady Barb said. At least it wasn’t his office. “The Grandmaster has had an idea.”

  Chapter Thirty

  THEY’D MOVED ALASSA INTO A SIDEROOM, Emily noted, as she followed Lady Barb into the infirmary. The Grandmaster was standing by her bed, leaning on a staff; he turned to face Emily and gave her a tight smile before waving her into a chair. It didn’t look as though she was in trouble, Emily thought, but that would change. Master Grey would report she’d sworn at him, that she’d shouted at him, and do his level best to get her expelled.

  Or simply refuse to teach me any longer, Emily thought, as she sat. The man makes no sense.

  The Grandmaster cast a privacy ward in the air, and leaned forward. “Emily,” he said. “I am given to understand that you touched Alassa’s mind once before.”

  Emily hesitated. Blood magic wasn’t exactly illegal, but it wasn’t regarded as something anyone should do. Shadye had used blood magic to control her, years ago; she’d barely touched Alassa’s mind, yet she knew her friend had had every reason to be angry about it.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, finally.

  “I would like you to try touching her mind again,” the Grandmaster said. “She seems to be one of the few students still fighting against...against whatever has gripped their minds.”

  Master Grey stepped forward. “Grandmaster,” he said, “that would be incredibly dangerous.”

  As if you care, Emily thought. She was damned if she would forgive him for scaring her so badly. You’d probably be happy if I lost myself in Alassa’s mind.

  “Yes, it would be,” the Grandmaster agreed. “However, I don’t see any other options.”

  “We may have to seal the school again,” Lady Barb said. “The White Council won’t let the epidemic, whatever it is, spread.”

  Which would be a waste of time if someone has come up with a magical biological weapon, Emily thought. Now that they know it worked, they can introduce it somewhere else.

  She pushed the thought aside and looked at the Grandmaster.

  “I’ll do it,” she said. Alassa would be furious when she woke up, but at least she would be alive. “If I did it once before, I have a better chance of actually succeeding.”

  “Yes,” the Grandmaster said. “But you might be infected yourself. Or you might be unable to break contact and escape. People have died because they were unable to drag themselves out of someone’s mind.”

  Emily swallowed. It wasn’t a pleasant thought. The books she’d read at Mountaintop had talked about blood magic...and possible ways to turn it into a weapon. One magician had planted a seed of his own mind in his victim, which had eventually flowered into a split personality; another, perhaps with darker intentions, had used it to bind his family to him as slaves. Magic was terrifyingly easy to abuse and, without a comprehensive knowledge of every branch of magic, even the most experienced magicians could be caught out.

  “I know, sir,” she said. Alassa was her friend. “I’ll take the risk.”

  “You may go mad,” Lady Barb warned. “Or you may die in there, leaving your body uninhabited.”

  Emily nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She feared mental harm far more than physical harm, if only because anything that didn’t kill her outright could be cured through magic. But a mental problem? She’d be lucky if she were locked up in the Halfway House for study, rather than simply killed out of hand as a potential danger. Necromancers were mad, after all, and embracing necromancy might seem the sane option if she were already mad.

  “Very well,” the Grandmaster said. “We shall make the preparations.”

  Lady Barb cleared her throat. “Do you want to rest first? Or eat something?”

  “No, thank you,” Emily said. The longer she delayed, the harder it would be to take the plunge into Alassa’s mind. “Can we just get on with it?”

  Master Grey gave her an odd look, but said nothing. Emily couldn’t help feeling heartened; he’d probably meant to make a cutting remark, then remembered where he was. The Grandmaster wouldn’t have tolerated him snapping at Emily, not in front of him and Lady Barb. Oddly, it made Emily feel better. Master Grey might be intimidating, but he could be intimidated himself.

  The Grandmaster produced a silver knife from his belt and carefully cut Alassa’s hand. Blood welled up; Emily swallowed, unable to keep herself from feeling nervous. All of the horror stories she’d read, the ones intended to dissuade magicians from experimenting with blood magic, suddenly felt very real. Jumping into a person’s mind could be dangerous; hell, one book had likened it to jumping off a cliff, without any real idea of what was below. The Grandmaster passed her the knife, then waited.

  “You don’t have to do this,” Lady Barb said, as Emily stood and knelt beside Alassa. “Emily, there are other people who can touch minds.”

  Emily shook her head. She was, as far as she knew, the only person who had ever touched Alassa’s mind. It wasn’t that much experience, but it was better than anyone else. Hell, she’d managed to reach Alassa and bring her out, back into the real world. If she could do that again, Alassa would be alive...and then they could start rescuing the others, one by one.

  “I do,” she said. She slashed her own palm, then deliberately gripped Alassa’s hand, allowing their blood to mingle. “Someone has to do it.”

  She muttered the incantation under her breath and waited. For a long moment, nothing happened; Alassa’s body felt warm but empty. Emily didn’t want to think about the possibilities, yet she knew they had to be faced. Could Alassa’s soul have fled a long time ago?

  And then something reached out for her.

  Emily plummeted forward, into Alassa’s mind. Everything went black...

  ...And then she was standing in a grey mist, looking around helplessly. She couldn’t see anything but the mist; it floated around her like a physical thing, close enough to touch and yet completely out of reach. Emily lifted her hand and watched as the mist fell back, refusing to allow her to touch it. The air felt damp and cold.

  This isn’t right, she thought. Last time, she’d been bombarded with memories and sensations; now, there was just the grey mist. Is she dead? Is this a dead mind?

  She refused to consider the thought. “Alassa,” she called. Her voice faded into the nothingness surrounding her. “Alassa!”

  There was no response. She looked down, wondering what she was standing on, but saw nothing. It was quite possible she was still plummeting, she thought; maybe she was still falling and had yet to reach bottom. But there was no sense of falling, no sensation at all apart from the cold. It seemed to reach through her skin and into her very soul.

  She closed her eyes, then opened them again. Nothing changed.

  “Alassa,” she called, again. “Where are you?”

  A chuckle, cruel and evil, echoed through the mist.

  Emily jumped. That hadn’t been Alassa. She’d heard her friend laugh, or giggle, or even snicker at someone’s misfortune...and it hadn’t sounded anything but feminine. She looked from side to side, bracing herself for an attack that could come from anywhere, yet there was nothing but the mist. And then she heard a second chuckle, so loud it seemed to be coming from a
ll around her. She would have sworn it was masculine, except there was something about it that was inhuman. Utterly inhuman.

  Something moved, above her. She looked up and froze. A giant face peered down at her, so utterly inhuman that it was hard to pick out any details. It leered, one hand reaching down towards her; Emily cringed back, reaching desperately for her magic, but it refused to work. The mist seemed to spin around her...

  ...And, when it cleared, she stood facing the creature. It held a puppet on strings dangling from one hand. Emily was somehow unsurprised to realize the puppet was Alassa, frozen in a moment of time.

  She forced herself to look at the creature. It was humanoid, but clearly far less human than the Gorgon. It’s arms and legs were long and gangly, bending in ways no human could match; it’s face was angular and sharp, with long pointy ears that reached to the sky. And its eyes were bright, and sharp, and so very cruel.

  “Well,” it said. “Welcome.”

  “You’re a demon,” Emily said. It was hard to even look at the demon, but she forced herself to stand her ground. “Aren’t you?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” it agreed.

  Emily thought, fast. The one time she’d met a demon, she’d raised it herself, within a protective circle. It might have been able to pick its words to harm her, but it wouldn’t have been able to hurt her physically. This demon, however, was loose within Alassa’s mind; it might not be under any restraints at all. It might well be able to hurt both of them.

  “Alassa didn’t summon you,” she said, flatly. “How are you even here?”

  “Now there’s an interesting story,” the demon said. “And I will even tell it to you for free.”

  Emily’s eyes narrowed. Demons never did anything for free. And they couldn’t lie...

  But was that true of a demon that hadn’t been raised with the proper rites? Even the DemonMasters of old hadn’t dared to tamper with the rites, not when losing control could easily lead to a horrible death. Maybe it could lie to her.

  And even if it couldn’t, she knew better than to take everything it said on faith. It might not be able to lie, but it certainly could bend the truth until it was completely unrecognizable.

  “Once upon a time,” the demon said, “there was a magician with more power than sense. He reached into the Darkness, demanding a warden for his fortress, and dragged me out into the light. I was bound to his fortress, bound so tightly that even his death didn’t free me.”

  Its voice burned at Emily’s mind, each word tearing into her thoughts. She wanted to cover her ears, but she knew it would be pointless. The demon wasn’t speaking into her ears; it was speaking directly into her mind. And it was trying to make it hard for her to think clearly.

  “Shadye,” Emily said. “He summoned you as a guard dog?”

  The demon’s eyes flashed with brilliant malice. “None dared approach his fortress,” it said, with a hint of pride. “Those who did became my prey. They were mine to play with as I willed. He wished me to keep his domain free of intruders and I did as I was bid.”

  As the terms of enslavement bound you, Emily thought. Some of the DemonMasters had done the same thing, according to the books, but it had almost always ended badly. The demons had broken free as soon as their master died. And yet, Shadye managed to bind you so thoroughly you remained trapped even after he died.

  “And then his heir arrived,” the demon added. “It was such a surprise to discover that the person who’d killed him was a young, innocent girl.”

  Emily winced. She had a nasty feeling she knew where this was going.

  “You took the object that bound me out of the Dark Fortress and, quite by accident, granted me permission to enter Whitehall,” it said. “Your Grandmaster, alack for him, is blind; we took his eyes.”

  Emily stared. “You took his eyes?”

  “He raised a demon long ago,” the demon said. It made a show of rubbing its clawed hands together in glee. “The experience blinded him to us. He could no more see demonic influence than the spots on your face. It was beyond him to realize that you had picked up my container, or that I rode you back to Whitehall.”

  It clicked its fingers. Emily recalled suddenly, with a clarity that startled her, picking up a ring from among Shadye’s possessions. It hadn’t struck her as anything special at the time; the Grandmaster had simply added it to the collection for later study. But if the demon had been bound to the ring...

  “The Grandmaster gave you permission to enter when he took you through the wards,” she said, slowly. “But they should have kept you out...”

  “I’m not a Dark Wizard,” the demon sneered. “The wards could not keep me out if I had permission to enter.”

  Its face twisted into a leer. “I reached into the dreams of your fellow students, Heir to Shadye,” it said. “I whispered to them at night, touching and twisting their minds until they bowed to me. Many have secret shames they wish to hide; many more have secret desires, desires I brought out into the open. The more I gathered, the easier it became to touch others...”

  “Until they started to collapse into comas,” Emily said. How much power did the demon need to maintain itself? It clearly hadn’t been drawing power from the wards, or the nexus point. That would have been noticeable. A thought struck her and she leaned forward. “You were the Nightmare Hex, weren’t you?”

  The demon shifted, becoming her stepfather. “It is so much fun to watch people drive themselves to death,” it said. The voice was perfect, sending chills down her spine, but she stood firmly in place. Master Grey was far more terrifying than her stepfather. “Your worst nightmare would have eventually killed you.”

  Emily took a long breath. “You’re not really here, are you? I mean, you’re lodged in another dimension, bound to the ring. We can take it out of the school...”

  “Too late,” the demon said. It morphed back into its inhuman form. “I’m now lodged in the minds of your fellow students. The only way to banish me would be to kill everyone I touched.”

  It threw back its head and cackled. The hell of it, Emily realized, was that it was telling the exact truth. If it had moved from the ring, if it had grabbed hold of several hundred minds, destroying the ring would be pointless. It could keep reaching for more victims until everyone in Whitehall was in its thrall.

  “We’ll all die, eventually,” Emily said. “You’ll run out of souls.”

  The demon shrugged. “So what?”

  She shuddered as it opened its mouth and bared its teeth at her, revealing sharp fangs stained with blood. It didn’t care, she realized; it didn’t have any long-term plans or ambitions of its own. There was no objective beyond twisting the screws as much as possible. It wanted them to suffer, it wanted them to bleed, to rend and tear at their own minds...

  ...And then it would just fall back into the Darkness, until the next time.

  “I’ll fight you,” she swore. “Whatever it takes...”

  The demon laughed at her. “You’ll have to kill your own friends,” it said. “Do you have the nerve to kill?”

  It jangled the puppet at her. Now, it looked like Imaiqah; no, it looked like hundreds of faces, each one visible for a brief moment before vanishing again. It had them all on a string, she thought numbly. Maybe she had some immunity, because she’d killed Shadye...or maybe the demon had simply intended to ride her back to Whitehall all along. But no matter what she did, she couldn’t touch the demon directly.

  “I’ll drop your ring into a volcano,” she threatened.

  “Go right ahead,” the demon said. “What do you think that will do to me?”

  Nothing, Emily thought.

  “Nothing,” the demon said.

  It took her a moment to realize it had read the thought right out of her mind. She was in Alassa’s mind, which was effectively the demon’s territory; it could read her thoughts, if it wished. It snickered unpleasantly, the sound slashing through her very soul, and started to advance towards her. Her skin c
rawled as its eyes met hers, holding her firmly in place. It was too late to run.

  “I can be anyone,” the demon said. It morphed into Caleb, then into Lady Barb. “Or anything. This is my domain and I can hold you here indefinitely.”

  Emily wanted to run, but her body refused to move. The demon shifted back into its original form, then pressed its hand on her chest, between her breasts. Emily shivered, utterly repulsed by the touch. The demon was so inhuman that even looking at it felt as if she was looking at something wrong. It spread out its fingers, then pushed hard. Emily felt as though someone had stabbed her in the chest...

  ...And then she fell backwards, right into her body. Someone was screaming; it took her several seconds to realize that she was doing the screaming. Everything felt so wrong...

  “Emily,” Lady Barb said. She sounded as though she was panicking. “Can you hear me?”

  It took Emily a moment to gather herself. Her chest hurt so badly she was sure she was bleeding, that the demon had reached into her flesh and crushed her heart, but when she looked down it became clear she was unharmed. Alassa, on the other hand, was shaking violently, her hands flailing at random. Lady Barb cast a pair of spells to hold her still, but neither seemed to work. In the distance, Emily heard the demon snicker.

  I won’t kill my friends, she thought.

  “Emily,” the Grandmaster said. His voice was so calm she knew he was trying hard to keep himself under control. “What did you see?”

  “Tell me what you saw, you stupid girl,” Master Grey added.

  Emily flushed with anger. “I saw a demon,” she said. It was hard to talk; her mouth felt sore, as if she’d been slapped. “There’s a demon loose in Whitehall.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  THE GRANDMASTER STAGGERED AS IF HE’D been hit. Lady Barb stared at her with open horror; Master Grey eyed her with cool calculation.

  “A demon,” the Grandmaster said. “Are you sure?”

  “I think so,” Emily said. Had the demon actually called itself a demon? “It said Shadye dragged it out of the Darkness and bound it to his service.”