“This is a little more complicated,” she said, as she placed the tiny railway locomotive on the ground. “The steam engine in this little beauty is too small to be really efficient, I’m afraid, but her scaled-up sisters can move at quite a clip. The craftsmen have an ongoing competition to produce the fastest railway engine in the world”- she smiled - “and none of them have any time to rest on their laurels. Given time, the continent will be linked together by railway lines and the world will become a smaller place.”
She started the engine and watched as it inched across the floor. The girls were staring in stunned disbelief. Even Dionne had forgotten to sneer. Emily thought, just for a moment, that they looked years younger, as if they’d regained an innocence they’d lost without ever quite realizing what had happened. She’d seen other magicians have the same reaction. Jade and Caleb had both admired the railway engines... her lips quirked. It wasn’t just men who adored the ever-growing monsters of the lines.
“You can play with it later, if you’re good,” she said, when the girls had all had a go touching it. They seemed unsure if it was a toy or a pet. “I’d like you to think, just for a moment, what it will mean to have railways linking the entire continent together. And what it means to have them built without magic.”
She paused, then indicated the vases. “Who’s up for a challenge?”
“Me,” Lillian said. “What do you want me to do?”
Emily pointed at the first vase, wrapped in its protective wards. “Using magic, and magic alone, break that vase.”
Lillian lifted her finger and cast a spell. It struck the wards and vanished harmlessly. Lillian sucked in her breath and cast a series of spells, each one flickering and flaring as it crashed into the wards before snapping out of existence. Emily nodded to herself - Lillian was stronger than she knew - and then motioned for Lillian to stop.
“Anyone else?” Emily’s eyes swept the room. “Does anyone else want to try?”
She waited. No one spoke.
“I thought not,” Emily said. “The vase is heavily protected. Some of the charms I wove around it are tougher than anything you’ll learn here. They’re so tough that it would take a skilled charmsmith hours to untangle them. The vase is untouchable, right?”
She motioned the girls back behind the wards, then reached into her bag and produced the revolver. “This is dangerous,” she said, “and dangerous in a manner you are ill-prepared to understand. If you mess with this without my permission, you will be in deep trouble... if you’re lucky. If you’re not lucky, you’ll be dead.”
The revolver felt heavy as she pointed it at the first vase. “Watch.”
She pulled the trigger. The vase shattered, pieces of glass flying in all directions. A handful struck the wards; the girls flinched as debris crashed down. The flowers fell a moment later, landing on the classroom floor and resting in a puddle of water. Emily smiled at their reaction. They’d seen wands used to store and project spells, but they understood wands. A gun was a very real outside context problem. And when they realized just what gunpowder weapons meant for the world...
“The wards I cast do not block physical force,” Emily said. “I could have thrown a rock at the vase and smashed it, without using magic. A gun would kill an unprepared magic user as easily as a mundane. I’ve seen it happen. They get hit and they die, if their injuries aren’t treated quickly.”
And someone presumably treated Jacqui, her thoughts added. What happened to her when she fled?
She put the thought out of her head. “Note the second vase? What have I done to the wards?”
“You made them solid,” Dionne said. She sounded as if she were trying to regain her confidence. “The... the gun wouldn’t break them.”
Emily raised the gun, pointed it at the vase and pulled the trigger. The bullet ricocheted off the wards and cracked into the ceiling. “Correct,” Emily said. She glanced at Dionne. “Problem solved, right?”
“You can’t hit the vase,” Dionne said. “It’s safe.”
“Again, you’re half-right,” Emily said. She reached into her pocket and removed the special bullets. “The impact alone did weaken the wards. A series of hits would, eventually, take them down. A sorcerer who relies on his wards to protect himself will be, I’m sorry to say, sorry. If, of course, he lives long enough to be sorry. Craftsmen are already working on guns that spit out dozens, if not hundreds, of bullets. There isn’t a sorcerer alive who could stand up to such an attack.”
She slotted the bullets into place, aimed and fired. The vase shattered.
Emily turned back to the girls. “What happened?”
She answered her own question. “Runes were carved into the bullets,” she said. “The runes tapped into the magic and smashed through the wards. The result? One smashed vase. And what do you think will happen if you were shot with a similar bullet?”
“I’d die,” Olivia said.
“Yes, you would,” Emily agreed. “Bullets are not kind. Fireballs actually do less damage because the heat cauterizes the wound. A bullet might not kill you, unless it hit something vital, but it would hurt you.”
She paused. “And why do you think I’m showing you all these toys?
“Some of you think you’re superior, because you have magic. You do have magic, which does give you an advantage, but it doesn’t make you invincible. A mundane with a gun can shoot you dead before you even realize you need to raise your wards. A mundane with an enchanted blade or a wand could kill you. A mundane with the wit to punch you in the face before you could cast a spell could rape or kill you. And the more you think you’re invincible, the less chance you’ll have of actually saving yourself.”
The words hung in the air. “Any questions?”
“If we’re stronger,” Dionne said finally, “why can’t we simply stop the mundanes from using these... guns?”
“You can’t,” Emily said. “The secret is out and spreading. Every king who wants to keep his throne knows he has to build up a gunpowder army or his neighbors, the ones who have taken the time to build their own, will crush him. Or his lords will rebel and make it stick if they’re the ones who have the army. You might as well try to stop junior sorcerers from using fireballs. There’s no way you could enforce a complete ban. Too many people have an interest in improving gunpowder weapons and building up armies.”
She smiled. “Trust me on this,” she added. Some would listen. Others would be far less willing to accept the truth. “The world is changing. And you have to change with it.
“There’ll always be people who’ll stand up and say they want to go back to an idealistic past, a past that never truly existed. There’ll always be people who insist that things are not what they used to be, even though they never were. Those people were the lucky ones. They were the powerful kings and princes, the wealthy merchants and magicians and everyone else who had power. The rest of the world wasn’t so lucky. Yes, it’s easy to look back on those days and want to go back.”
She paused. “But you don’t understand the reality. A thousand years ago, women were forbidden to learn magic. A thousand years ago, even the strongest magicians in the world stank like cesspits. A thousand years ago, people died of diseases we laugh at today. Many of you grew up in a safe world, where you had everything you needed. Your ancestors weren’t so lucky. And you’d change your mind if you had to go back and live there.”
The bell rang for lunch. “I have one more point to make,” Emily said, before the students could make their escape. She held up the gun, then pointed to the steamboat bobbing in the bathtub. “These devices... none of them were designed or built by magicians. They were invented by people who couldn’t turn their enemies into toads or teleport halfway across the world in a flash of light. These people weren’t discouraged by their lack of magic. They saw it as a challenge instead, to find newer and better ways to do things.
“These people were mundanes, yet they were hardly mundane.
“They were ing
enious. They were ingenious in a way that very few magicians truly are. You are the heirs to magical society, a society you didn’t build and barely know how to maintain; very few of you will devise an improvement on what you’ve already got, let alone build something new. These inventors were crippled, compared to you, yet they built something beyond your wildest imaginations. And some of them figured out ways to blur technology and magic into something far greater.
“Some of you will scoff, when you’ve had a moment to think about it. Some of you will insist they’re just toys. Even the gun can be countered, if you have warning. Of course it can. And even the scaled-up versions may be of little real use... right?
“Tell me... what use is a newborn baby?”
Emily smiled at them as her words hung in the air. She couldn’t remember who’d first said that, back on Earth, but it hardly mattered. Babies were useless; grown men and women were very useful indeed. She wondered if they’d understand the real message. They had power, but not as much as they thought; they were smart, yet they weren’t the only ones who were smart. It had always struck her as a curious blind spot. Aristocrats refused to believe their servants had minds of their own until it was too late.
“You have magic,” she said. She’d think about the rest later. “But are you truly superior?”
Chapter Twenty-Six
“HAVE YOU HEARD THE NEWS FROM Alluvia?”
Emily blinked as Nadine sat next to her. “No, why?”
“From what I heard, Aiden published a list of noblemen with ties to Red Rose,” Nadine said, with a grin. “King Jorlem is not happy.”
“How terrible,” Emily said. She wasn’t much concerned. She’d met King Jorlem once - and she’d fought beside his son - but she didn’t have any close ties to his kingdom. “Who is Aiden?”
“Famous broadsheet writer,” Nadine explained. “He digs up dirt on everyone and publishes it in his rag. Last week, he published a list of noblewomen who’d had bastard children and done their best to sweep the poor kids under the rug. This week... noblemen with foreign ties.”
Emily rolled her eyes. It wasn’t uncommon for noblemen to own estates in two or more kingdoms. It created one hell of a headache for their monarchs, as it made it hard to determine which way the nobleman would jump if a dispute between the kingdoms turned into open violence, but it wasn’t her problem. Alassa had commented, in one of her letters, that most of the noblemen with dual loyalties had either fled Zangaria or died in the civil war. She’d taken advantage of their inability to show up at the coronation to confiscate their estates and redistribute them to her supporters.
“I suppose it might be a problem,” she said, as she helped herself to porridge. “Why do you care?”
“It’s funny.” Nadine winked. “And it serves them right.”
Emily shrugged. It wasn’t as if aristocratic holdings were a state secret. She’d met aristocrats who’d invested in trade who’d insisted on keeping that a secret, but land? They’d brag about all they owned until everyone else was well past the point of being sick of it. Unless... she supposed it was possible the noblemen were receiving pensions and retainers instead. That suggested there was something underhanded about the whole affair.
And Alluvia is right next to Dragon’s Den, she thought. It could turn into a problem for Whitehall.
“I suppose,” she said. She didn’t really feel like talking. “Are you doing lessons later in the day?”
“I have fly ball lessons,” Nadine said. “You want to come?”
“No, thank you,” Emily said. “I have lessons, too.”
She frowned as she surveyed the room. The girls were talking about the toy steamboat and railway locomotive, although the gun was far more world-shaking. Small groups formed and chatted, then broke up and reformed as more and more girls arrived from their beds. They’d cast enough privacy wards to make eavesdropping impossible, at least without breaking the spells openly and tipping them off. The wards even made lip-reading impossible. Emily wondered, idly, what conclusions the girls were drawing. Did they understand the gun would turn their world upside down? Did they realize the railways would make the world a great deal smaller? Or did they think they were just toys?
They might, Emily mused. What use is a newborn baby, indeed?
She sensed a whisper of ice-cold magic and looked up, just in time to see Jens sweeping majestically into the room. The charms tutor’s face was so impassive that Emily knew she was furious. One of the girls had probably told Jens about the lesson, if the older woman hadn’t watched the girls experiment with the steamboat and locomotive in the hall after classes. There was a risk the girls would break the toys, Emily knew, but she didn’t mind. They needed to satisfy themselves there was no magic involved.
And who knows what they’ll make of it, she thought, when magic is so much more satisfactory?
She sighed, inwardly. A young student could do a great deal of damage with only a few months of education. It didn’t take that long to learn how to cast fireballs, freeze unwilling victims or turn them into frogs... she’d done that, but it had taken her a great deal longer to come to grips with the underlying logic dominating the spellwork. It was easy for a student to master a handful of spells, then drop out on the assumption she’d learnt everything they needed to learn. A witch with that attitude who looked at the toys might see them as nothing more, even though they represented an onrushing tidal wave of change.
Jens said nothing as she sat down and started to eat. Emily wondered what was going through her head. Fear of the future? Dismissal of the so-called toys? Or what? She told herself it didn’t matter. The world would change, even if she dropped dead tomorrow. She’d unleashed a whole series of new concepts and encouraged others to build on them, stealing her ideas and making them their own. Her lips quirked in cold amusement. One thing she’d learnt at boarding school was that students would be a great deal more cunning if they thought they were getting one over their teachers. The artificers and craftsmen had no idea how little she cared about credit, as long as the ideas continued to spread. Let them think they’d bested her...
A hand touched her shoulder. “Emily,” Damia said. “The headmistress wants to see you.”
Emily tried not to jump. Damia had walked up behind her and Emily hadn’t heard a thing until it had been too late. She mentally kicked herself for not paying close attention to her surroundings. Damia could have had bad intentions... hell, there were students who probably would be quite happy if Emily ended up with egg on her face. Someone had certainly concealed a prank spell on her chair, in one of the classrooms. She still had no idea who.
“Now?” Emily finished her drink and stood. “I’m coming.”
Damia turned and led her out of the room, then up the stairs to the headmistress’s office. Emily followed the deputy headmistress, her mind churning rapidly. An early-morning summons was probably not good news. Was she in trouble? She hadn’t actually bothered to clear her lesson plan with her supervisor, if only because she’d been fairly sure Damia would strongly object. There were girls in Cockatrice who wanted to be engine drivers. Damia wouldn’t be pleased if the witches chose to join them.
And some of the younger ones were clearly fascinated, Emily thought. She hadn’t understood the appeal of steam engines until she’d actually seen one. They were brutes, compared to electric or gas-powered locomotives, but she couldn’t deny they had a certain charm. They might start wondering if there’s more to life than magic and witchcraft.
She schooled her face into a blank expression as she stepped into the headmistresses office, trying not to feel as if she were a schoolgirl who was about to be called on the carpet for a real or imagined misdeed. She might be young - Duchene was old enough to be her grandmother - but she was no schoolgirl. And she was carrying out her job.
“Lady Emily,” Duchene said. “I’m sorry to inform you that we’ve already had complaints about your lesson.”
Emily was tempted to play dumb and ask, in
perfect innocence, just what was wrong with following the lesson plans laid down by her supervisor. It didn’t have to be the lesson... she shook her head, mentally. There was no point in wasting time.
“Complaints?” Emily cocked her head. “Might I ask who from?”
“Parents, mainly,” Duchene said. “And some of the Sisterhood.”
That was quick, Emily thought. One of the students must have gone down to Pendle to send a message. Or used a chat parchment. Or Jens had sent the message herself. It would be a good way to hamper Emily, without showing her hand too openly. I wonder who she messaged and why.
She clasped her hands behind her back and stood straighter. “Might I ask what these complaints actually are?”
“That you have introduced outside ideas into the school,” Damia said, from behind her. The disdain in her voice was obvious. “And that you have seduced the girls into embracing technology.”
You don’t have to make it sound like a curse, Emily thought, waspishly. In her experience, anyone who complained about modern technology had never had to live without it. There’d been times when she would have sold her soul for a shower or a microwave or even modern medicine. Just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean everyone has to agree with you.
She kept her eyes on the headmistress. “I am hardly the first teacher to have brought outside ideas into the school,” she said. “And one of my duties, as outlined in the lesson plans, is to ensure the girls are aware of the outside world and its dangers.”
“The parents feel you are leading their children astray,” Duchene said, bluntly. “What do you say to that?”
Emily said nothing for a long moment. Duchene was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea. To refuse to listen to the parents would weaken her position, from what Emily had heard, but to take their words too seriously would give them too much power over the school. Emily grimaced. It wasn’t as if they didn’t have too much power already. Dionne and Penelope wouldn’t have gotten away with so much if their parents hadn’t had the power and influence to make their troubles go away.
Little Witches (Schooled In Magic Book 21) Page 25