“But...” Emily changed her mind and returned to the original subject. “But don’t you think that he could influence me in your office?”
The Grandmaster smirked. “I never keep anything of importance there,” he admitted. At her look of surprise, he snorted. “Do you know how much time sorcerers spend spying on each other? They can ransack my office all they like and all they’ll get out of it is a chance to learn a great deal about codes and devious spelling. You can’t cause any harm there.”
Chapter Forty-Four
THE GRANDMASTER’S OFFICE SEEMED SMALLER THAN Emily remembered, but perhaps that was due to her sense of being confined. One glance at the bookshelves revealed nothing of great interest, beyond a transfiguration textbook that looked alarmingly dog-eared. The portraits on the wall would probably have been instantly recognizable to a native of this world, but meant nothing to Emily. On impulse, she checked his desk drawers for security spells, and discovered that they were crawling with particularly unpleasant charms. The Grandmaster clearly intended to make any intruder work for his useless knowledge.
“You can use the crystal ball, if you like,” the Grandmaster had said, before leaving her alone. He hadn’t exactly locked the door, but he’d made it clear that she wasn’t to leave until the situation became desperate. Emily had been tempted to point out that the situation had already gone beyond desperate, but had held her tongue. “Keep an eye on the corridor leading up to my office.”
The crystal ball included charms and infused spells that took her some time to work out how to activate. It seemed to draw power directly from the user, which–she decided–was one way to ensure that someone didn’t waste their time spying on people rather than doing something useful.
And perhaps if televisions required someone to power them by running on a treadmill, she thought darkly, they would be less addictive.
The Grandmaster hadn’t bothered to explain any of it, perhaps believing that figuring it out would keep Emily busy for a while. He was probably right.
She felt the school’s remaining protections fall away, one by one. The Grandmaster might have started to work on restoring what she’d destroyed, but she had a feeling that it would take hours–perhaps days–before the wards were back up and running. Building wards was something that she hadn’t even touched upon, yet she knew enough from books to understand that wards could be very complex and difficult to erect. Guilt tore at her mind before she finally managed to push some power into the crystal ball.
No matter what happened, she would always bear some of the blame for what had happened to Whitehall. The failing had been hers.
The crystal ball lit up, displaying a dozen different scenes. When she pressed her fingers against it, the ball focused the view on the invading army. A horde of heavily-armed Orcs advanced through the gardens, weapons at the ready, only to run right into a horde of bees from the beehives. The Orcs stumbled backwards in dismay as the tiny creatures stung at them, only to rally and advance again.
Of course, Emily realized; their skins are so tough that the bees could barely hurt them.
The beehives were rapidly destroyed, leaving the bees buzzing angrily around the Orcs or raging off towards the rest of the army. Perhaps they’d sting Shadye and put an end to it before it went any further.
She shook her head. There was no way it would be that easy.
A moment later, a dozen Orcs stumbled and fell to the ground. CT reared up in front of them, his giant eye ablaze with fury as tentacles grew out of his body and sliced through the Orcs, ripping them to shreds. They cut back with their swords, but they couldn’t make any impression on CT - a creature that seemed to be made of jelly. Eventually, they fell back as CT advanced menacingly, growing new weapons out of his body ...
And then a bolt of light from Shadye struck CT and froze him solid. Wary now, the remaining Orcs launched fire arrows into the zoo and then fell back. They’d missed their chance to come face to face with a real Mimic.
Shadye’s forces advanced against the walls, firing arrows to force the defenders to keep their heads down. Emily couldn’t understand why Shadye wasn’t using his magic to simply punch a hole through the walls until she realized that there was so much magic running through the stone that destroying it would be difficult–and if he succeeded, he might accidentally cause the school to explode as a vastly larger interior tried to expand into a much smaller exterior. Giant spiders ran past his army, scuttling along the ground, then started to crawl up the walls.
Emily stared in horror. As a child, she had been deathly afraid of spiders and had been relieved to discover that they couldn’t grow very big without being unable to move. The necromancers, it seemed, had managed to produce spiders which defied whatever law that usually prevented spiders from growing that big ...
Streaks of light blasted down from the battlements, smashing the spiders and sending their bodies falling to the ground. Emily pulled the crystal ball back and saw students, led by Professor Lombardi, propelling items into the enemy army at terrifying speed.
Shadye countered, one by one, but there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of ammunition. His archers moved their attention to the students, only to see their arrows deflected by a handful of other students who were maintaining a magical barrier. Necromancers never worked together, Emily remembered; cooperation was the only real advantage the good guys had.
Shadye threw back projectiles of his own, including one that slammed into the ward so hard it shattered. Several students were knocked back with blood pouring from their ears and noses. They’d fuelled the ward directly, and the feedback had almost killed them.
While they were distracted, a second set of spiders crawled up the battlements, leaving sticky webs behind them. A small army of Goblins followed, a handful being crushed when a student knocked down a spider which landed on top of them.
But it didn’t matter, Emily realized. Shadye seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of cannon fodder.
The giant spiders reached the battlements and slashed into the defenders with teeth and claws, followed by a trio of creatures that looked like a cross between dragons and griffins. A handful of older students met them, lashing out with powerful curses and hexes that sent one of the creatures falling to its doom. The other two breathed green smoke at the defenders, who started to choke and collapse on the ground.
Emily winced in pain. She’d been careful not to introduce the concept of poison gas, knowing that it would suit the necromancers perfectly, but they’d thought of it without her.
Inch by inch, the attackers cleared the battlements while keeping the lower defenders pinned inside the building. They brought up more of their army and prepared to invade the interior of Whitehall from above.
Emily switched the crystal ball’s focus to find Sergeant Harkin. The two Sergeants led the defense of the lower levels, backed up by almost every Martial Magic student in the school. Emily prayed that they managed to hold out. A handful of students used Berserker, passing the baton to other students as they tired and crawled back for energy potions that had been prepared by Alchemy students. It wasn’t something she’d have thought of them doing; presumably, it was a tactic only used in the direst of emergencies. Using so many energy potions so quickly could be very dangerous for the hapless students. They’d been warned, specifically, never to take more than one at a time.
She looked back at the battlements, just in time to see an Orc pry open one of the doors. A brilliant flash of magic flung the Orc off the roof. The defenders hadn’t retreated far at all; they’d set up traps that forced Shadye to expend men and magic to burn his way into the castle. But Shadye seemed more inclined to waste men than magic. Emily watched as the gas-breathing creatures stuck their heads through the doors and spewed green mist into the school. A moment later, one of the creatures twitched and fell over, crushing a pair of Orcs as it hit the rooftop. It took Emily several minutes to work out that someone had cast a botched transfiguration–like she’d done to
Alassa–on the creature and killed it instantly.
Shadye drifted up onto the roof, produced a fireball with one hand and threw it down into the building. It was too powerful for the defenders, who stumbled backwards, allowing the monsters to charge into the building itself.
Emily cursed aloud as she saw the Orcs crashing down into the upper levels. She tried to switch the crystal ball around, hoping to confirm that her friends were out of the school. There was no sign of Alassa or Imaiqah anywhere within the crystal ball’s range. She hoped they were alive ...
Inch by inch, the Orcs advanced into the school. They ran into all kinds of defenses intended to slow them down and force Shadye to waste power. Suits of armor came to life and advanced towards them with drawn swords. When they fell, they reassembled and continued the fight. When some suits were wrecked completely, their components linked up with others and kept fighting. They had to be reduced to their component atoms to stop them from tearing through more of the Orcs.
If Shadye hadn’t been there, Emily would have had no doubts that Whitehall could defeat the Orcs. They were dumb; blundering constantly into traps then charging forward in the belief that brute force could clear the way. Keyed transfiguration spells stopped a handful of them dead in their tracks and, when they were pushed out of the way, the second set of spells turned the advancing Orcs into dust. A skilled team of mages would have taken hours, perhaps days, to clear the corridors; Shadye settled for scorching the entire corridor with his magic, wiping out everything that could be a threat. His flames even eradicated a handful of his Orcs!
She heard the orders barked through the mirrors the school’s defenders were using to coordinate their actions, orders that made no sense to her. But Shadye might be spying on the defenders now that the wards were gone; they used code phases to issue orders to prevent him from taking action to impede the retreat.
Emily looked back at the Sergeants in time to see Sergeant Miles generate a firestorm that swept a dozen Orcs and Goblins out of the building. The remaining students fell back, sealing the doors as they left. Sergeant Miles, breathing heavily and supported by Sergeant Harkin, was the last one out of the abandoned armory. The Orcs would have to crack their way through solid stone to get further into the building.
Whitehall’s strange interior started to come into play. She watched as a dozen Orcs advanced into an empty corridor and walked towards the exit ... and walked towards the exit ... and walked towards the exit, not realizing that the interior dimensions had been warped so they were effectively walking in a circle. Three Goblins walked down a corridor when the floor vanished and they fell, plunging hundreds of meters to their deaths. Another set of Orcs walked through a door and found themselves back on the roof, just before their successors pushed them over the edge. Giant statues of famous witches and wizards came to life and directed spells at the invaders, all powered by the castle’s interior wards.
They were all buying time, Emily realized, for the defenders to set up interior defense lines.
But Shadye kept coming. He no longer looked human at all and his will was exerting itself on the fabric of the school. Emily could feel the school scream in pain as Shadye reached out to impose himself, twisting the interior into something more suitable for his plans. Whitehall was intelligent, in a way, and it could be harmed - or brainwashed into compliance. It struck Emily suddenly that Shadye’s ultimate objective wasn’t to destroy Whitehall, but to take it–and the nexus it used as a power source.
Why destroy the school when he could mould it in his own image?
She flashed back to the nightmarish scenes Shadye had used to push her into destroying the wards. They were going to come true, she realized as the school continued to scream its pain into her mind, into the mind of every magician in the building. Whitehall was going to be shattered, twisted into a foul abomination of everything it had once stood for, and all of the remaining students were going to die to grant Shadye a few extra months of life.
Or maybe he’d do something worse. If he could twist her mind–whatever advantages he’d had through her being unique in this world–why couldn’t he do the same to others? He could bind and twist the students and turn them into his slaves. What happened if someone was forced to swear an oath to obey at gunpoint? Could Shadye overcome the insistent necromantic infighting by forcing his followers to swear oaths of loyalty?
Emily shook her head, then she felt a dull rumble running through the school. Shadye now clashed directly against the Grandmaster, pressing his will–backed by awesome power–against the Grandmaster’s natural supply of mana. Emily sought the Grandmaster via the crystal ball and found him stumbling down a corridor, fighting desperately to keep Shadye from turning the school against him.
She knew that the portals leading out of Whitehall had been closed. The remainder of the students and tutors were trapped, unless they managed to flee through the enemy army and escape into the mountains. But one glance at the forces surrounding the school suggested that would be a very difficult task.
How had Shadye managed to slip so many monsters close to the school without being detected? Had he carved hundreds of tunnels into the mountains and hidden his monsters there for months?
Shadye looked up. For a moment, she had the sense that his red eyes were looking right at her, through the crystal ball. She saw him wave his hand in a complicated gesture. Magic burned through the air.
Emily threw herself away from the crystal ball a moment before it exploded, throwing shards of glass everywhere. It was sheer luck that none of them struck her...
... And then she realized the significance of what had happened. Shadye had sensed her spying on him and now he knew where she was. If he still thought she was important ...
The situation had definitely become desperate.
She pulled herself to her feet and ran to the door. Outside, she heard the sounds of fighting in the distance and felt the magic field tingling as Shadye and the Grandmaster warred for control of the school. Glancing over at one of the suits of armor, she removed its sword and hefted it, wincing at the weight. It was too heavy for her to carry easily, but there was no other choice. Looking up into the masked helm, she had the unmistakable feeling that something inhuman was looking back at her. She had the feeling of being measured, then she was finally allowed to take the sword and go. Unable to avoid the sense that she had barely escaped with her life, she walked down the corridor, carrying the sword as carefully as she could. The temptation to shoulder it had been almost overpowering.
A roar made her jump as she turned the corner. A trio of Orcs advanced on her–and, behind them, she saw an elderly man carrying a staff. It was Malefic, the Dark Wizard who had kidnapped her as an elaborate cover for stealing a sample of her blood. And, perhaps, the one who had treated it to make it impossible to completely separate it from her body.
She lifted her sword threateningly and readied Berserker in her mind. If she was going to die, she would not go down without a fight.
Malefic stopped the Orcs and stepped past them, raising his staff. Emily got her defensive charm up barely in time as a fireball appeared out of nowhere and slammed right into her ward. Flames shimmered in front of her, licking away at her defenses. She realized, almost too late, that the flames were consuming her power. She jumped backwards and cast a spell on the sword, throwing it at Malefic. The Dark Wizard stepped aside and the sword impaled two of the Orcs, carrying them with it as it flashed down the corridor and crashed into a distant wall. She hadn’t told the spell when to stop. Before Malefic could react, she pushed the ward outwards and slammed it into the third Orc. The creature’s loincloth caught fire and it turned, running for its life. Emily laughed out loud as it slammed into a wall and collapsed next to its friends.
There was a shimmer of magic. Malefic threw a spell at her she didn’t recognize; she quickly jumped aside, cursing her mistake. She should never have taken her eyes off him!
She tossed a fireball back at him, only to see hi
m snap it out of the air with his hand and crush it, as if it were no more threatening than the Mimic she’d conjured up to scare the Orcs. Emily didn’t wait for him to throw another spell; she generated a ball of light, a very simple spell, making it as bright as she could. She squeezed her eyes shut as she threw it at Malefic.
The Dark Wizard screamed. He stumbled backwards as the light vanished, grasping at his eyes.
Emily cast a stunning spell and threw it at him, watching as he tumbled to the floor. It looked as if blood was leaking from his eyeballs.
Dear God, how badly had she hurt him?
And yet it was hard for her to care. Malefic had hurt her, and Alassa, and the school. Didn’t he deserve a little of his own back?
She froze as she heard the sound of someone clapping, very slowly and deliberately, from behind her. Bracing herself, Emily turned ... because she already knew who was there. Who must be there.
Shadye.
Chapter Forty-Five
EMILY TURNED SLOWLY, RAISING HER WARDS even though she knew they wouldn’t stand up to Shadye. All he had to do to overpower her was throw enough magic at her wards to knock them down through simple brute force. He stood several meters in front of her, his face hidden under a dark hood that seemed to swallow all light. He no longer looked human; looking at his robe, Emily had the sense that his body was slowly mutating into something else. A vague feeling pervaded her mind that if she looked too closely she wouldn’t be able to look away.
“You have grown, since we last met,” Shadye said. His voice sounded inhuman too, a dull rasp that seemed to come out of nowhere. “I expected no less from a Child of Destiny.”
Raw power crackled in the air around Shadye, the necromancer who had stamped his will on Whitehall and on the surrounding environment. He seemed to be almost composed of magic now, completely dependent on sacrifices to stay alive. Some of the books she’d read had speculated that a necromancer would eventually manage to store enough power to stay alive permanently without requiring additional sacrifices.
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