“We’re going to be practicing that, again and again,” Void said. He motioned for her to step into the protective circle. “I want you to put up the strongest wards you can muster.”
“Yes, sir.” Emily focused her mind as she stepped into the circle, casting the wards one by one. They’d make it harder for her to move, but she had a feeling that wasn’t going to be a problem. “Ready.”
Void lifted his hand, launching a fireball towards her. It struck the wards and splattered out of existence. Emily nodded to herself, silently grateful she’d woven protections against physical attacks — as well as magic — into the wards. Bullets wouldn’t be deterred by wards that dissolved spellwork and absorbed raw magic. Void nodded back at her, then cast another spell. Emily gritted her teeth, feeling as if he was literally trying to drill through her wards. She had to fight to hold them together, drawing on her magic as he burned through her defenses. It was all she could do to hold him at bay.
I’m holding you, Emily thought, as she tightened the wards. Void’s spell seemed to halt, as if it was pressing against her defenses without actually trying to break them. You’re not going to get inside...
Her defenses crumbled. She yelped in shock, her spells suddenly turning against her. She jumped back, a fraction of a second too late. The magic struck her, freezing her in place. It was a simple spell, one she’d learned to counter years ago, yet... this time, she couldn’t escape. Her own magic seemed to be holding her still. She couldn’t even blink. Void walked up to her, looked her up and down, then nodded to himself. An instant later, the spell holding her vanished. Emily fell to the ground, hard.
“Not bad,” Void said. “But tell me... what did you do wrong?”
“I missed something, didn’t I?” Emily picked herself off the ground. Her muscles were protesting loudly. “You distracted me while you worked your way into my wards.”
“That’s one mistake,” Void said. “What was the other?”
Emily looked down at her hands. “I should have moved,” she said. “If I’d dodged, you would have had a harder time.”
“Yes.” Void gave her a stern look. “You let me batter away at your defenses. You made no attempt to hit back, either to cancel my spells or lash out at me personally. You stood there and took it. Good for intimidation, if you are sure you can hold out; bad for victory, particularly if you’re wrong. I drilled into your defenses, then held you still while I dismantled your wards around you. And that was the end.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” Emily admitted.
“It’s a rare technique,” Void said. “It requires both power and incredible concentration. You will master it before you graduate.”
Emily shuddered. That sounded surprisingly like a threat.
“And it’s useless against necromancers,” Void added. “Why might that be so?”
“Because they have too much raw power,” Emily hazarded. “Their wards are too crude to let you slip into the spellwork and start rewriting it?”
“Yes.” Void’s voice was calm. “A strength can easily become a weakness, if handled properly. Or vice versa.”
He strode around the room. “You will not find it easy to master the more advanced fighting spells,” he said. “Some of them are too dangerous to practice safely, even under controlled” — he snorted — “conditions. Others are simple enough to cast here, in reasonable safety, but too tricky to cast in the field. It’s often easier, as you will have heard time and time again, to rely in simpler spells that can be cast in the middle of a battle. And trying to be clever during a real fight is a good way to end up dead.”
“Yes, sir,” Emily said. “Sergeant Miles said as much.”
“And he was right,” Void confirmed. “You should know it by now.”
He paced the room. “We’ve already discussed your mistakes,” he added. “What was my mistake?”
Emily forced herself to think. Void hadn’t committed himself to the drilling spell. If she’d managed to cancel it, he wouldn’t have been injured or killed by the feedback. He might have pushed harder, but... if he’d tried, she might have realized what he’d been doing before it was too late. And then... she wasn’t sure what she would have done. Canceled her own wards or simply jumped out the way? Or...
“You could have tried to overwhelm me sooner,” she said, reluctantly. “It might have worked.”
“I held back,” Void said. “I didn’t want to crush your defenses... or you. I wanted you to have a chance to win.”
Emily blinked. “You held back that much?”
“I did,” Void said. “You should know, by now, that your tutors hold back.”
“... Yes.” Emily frowned. There’d been a boy in Martial Magic, a couple of years older than herself, who’d been cocky enough to challenge Sergeant Miles to a fight. Sergeant Miles had offered to handicap himself, but the boy had refused. Sergeant Miles had flattened him in less than ten seconds. “I know.”
“You wouldn’t learn anything from a string of defeats,” Void said. “If you can’t win, why bother to try? Your next opponent might not be so kind, though. He might not care about anything but victory.”
Emily swallowed. She knew she could be beaten. Jade and Cat had been her equals. Lady Barb and Sergeant Miles were a long way ahead of her. But...
She met his eyes. “Would you do that to me?”
Void quirked his eyebrows. “You want me to kill you?”
“No.” Emily blushed. She wasn’t sure how to put her feelings into words. She needed to know, to believe, that she could be beaten quickly. “But fight me without limiting yourself.”
“Raise your wards,” Void said. “I won’t limit myself quite so much.”
Emily nodded, raising her wards one by one. “Ready.”
Void studied her for a long moment. “Last chance to change your mind.”
“I need to know,” Emily said.
Void nodded, then came at her. Emily barely had a second to realize she was under attack before her wards shattered, before his magic tore into her. She felt like a tiny child being picked up and manhandled by a strong man. She hadn’t felt so helpless since she’d lost her powers. The world spun, plunging into darkness. Something soft, yet heavy landed on her head. It took her longer than it should have done to realize she’d been transfigured.
The darkness faded. Void peered down at her, holding her shirt in one hand. Emily stared back at him, stunned. She’d known he was powerful, but that powerful? She could barely move. He could rip her apart in a second if he wished. Or...
“The spell will wear off shortly,” Void said. He placed her shirt on the floor. “You can join me for lunch, then have the rest of the afternoon off. We’ll be studying something different tomorrow.”
He turned and walked away. Emily watched him go, her entire body quivering. What had he done to her? Her vision felt odd, as if it wasn’t remotely human? A slug? A snail? Or... she wasn’t sure she wanted to know. The door slammed closed behind, leaving her alone. A moment later, the spell started to wear off. Emily breathed a sigh of relief as her body returned to normal.
I’m naked, she thought, numbly. She wasn’t just physically naked. Her wards had been stripped away in bare seconds. He could have done anything to her, if he’d wished. And she had been helpless to resist. He could have...
She stood and forced herself to dress. She’d have to work harder and harder, just to make sure he couldn’t do that to her again. Or anyone else... someone else might have the same level of power and skill. She understood, now, what he’d been trying to tell her. He was so powerful that he made other magicians, even skilled sorceresses like Alassa or Aloha, look like children. And they’d always be a little scared of him.
They won’t be scared of me, Emily thought. She headed for the door, wondering if she had time to get a shower before lunch. I’ll see to that, somehow.
But she knew, deep inside, that she might not be able to keep her word.
Chapter Sixt
een
EMILY BREATHED A SIGH OF RELIEF as she stepped into the library and sat on the nearest armchair. Lunch had been... awkward, even though Void had done his best to make conversation about harmless subjects like travel, mountain-climbing and the weather. She felt oddly unsettled whenever she looked at him. She wasn’t sure why it bothered her so much. She’d always known he was far more powerful than she was. Hell, she’d spent most of her life knowing that other people had more power than she did.
She brushed down her trousers, shaking her head. It was one thing to know it, she supposed, and another to believe it. She hadn’t really believed in magic, the first time she’d seen it; she hadn’t really grasped it was real until it had been used on her. She’d thought... she shook her head. She still had nightmares about waking up and discovering that it had all been a dream. She wasn’t sure what she’d have done if someone had told her she’d been in a coma for the last six years. She couldn’t have handled it.
The armchair felt soft and comfortable. She leaned back, forcing herself to relax. She’d asked Void to show her how powerful and capable he truly was. In hindsight... she told herself, firmly, to see it as a challenge. She’d be that powerful herself, one day. Until then... she’d just have to be careful. If nothing else, perhaps she could use a battery to craft a necromantic ward. It would be too solid for him to rip apart in a tearing hurry.
She looked at the nearest table, wondering who’d collected a pile of books and put them down for later reading. They seemed to cover a dozen subjects, from healing to advanced transfiguration. Void might have been brushing up a little, she thought, or... who knew? Maybe Barley or Silent or one of the other maids could read after all. Maybe they were hoping to go into magic later in life. Or... she shrugged as the door opened. Barley stepped into the room.
“My Lady?” Barley always kept her distance from Emily, just like Silent. “His Lordship sent me to ask if you needed anything.”
Emily took a breath. “Can you pass me a writing board, some parchment and a pencil?”
“Of course.” Barley opened the writing desk and started to collect the parchment. “Do you require refreshment?”
“Please, could you bring me a jug of Kava?” Emily asked. “And perhaps some of those biscuits?”
Barley dropped a curtsy. “Right away, My Lady.”
Emily took the writing board, rested it on her knees and stared down at the blank parchment as the maid withdrew. The parchment seemed to mock her, daring her to write down something — anything — before she lost her train of thought completely. Emily scowled, then forced herself to think. Her counterpart had managed to teleport without either casting a proper teleport spell or opening a portal. How?
You can’t teleport unless you know where you are, relative to where you’re going, Emily thought. She couldn’t have set the spell up ahead of time.
She rubbed her forehead, barely aware of Barley as she entered, placed a tray on the table beside the armchair and withdrew. Her counterpart couldn’t have known where she’d be when she needed the spell. She could hardly have set it up on the fly either. Had she crafted a teleport spell into the surrounding wards? Heart’s Eye had a nexus point. It would be easy to use them to teleport, but... Emily was sure that wasn’t the answer. It wasn’t safe to teleport within a heavily-defended building. She’d been lucky the one teleport she’d tried within Whitehall hadn’t ended with her atoms scattered over the entire world.
And my counterpart survived, Emily thought. How did she do it?
She poured herself a mug and slowly sipped it, trying to understand how the trick had been done. Her counterpart could have kept the spell in readiness, perhaps suspended within a pocket dimension, but she’d still have had to rewrite it just to ensure the spell knew where she was. Even if she could only leap to a preselected destination, she’d still have to program her departure point into the spellwork...
But she didn’t have time, Emily reminded herself. She was on the brink of collapse. She couldn’t have rewritten the spell.
She recalled the teleport spell, mentally going through the spellwork. It would be easy to set the spell up ahead of time, but it would be pointless. The spell would become useless the moment she moved more than a meter or two. She could always dart back, she supposed, but she knew her counterpart hadn’t done that. Emily’s thoughts kept returning to the same point. Her counterpart could not have known when she’d need the spell. She certainly could not have programmed the spellwork in advance.
So the spell must have been keyed to calculate such details, Emily mused. Did she combine the teleport spell with a locator spell?
She sketched out a handful of thoughts on the parchment. Locator spells weren’t always reliable. It would be easy to make a mistake and get splattered. But... if someone could get around that problem, perhaps by trying to locate something that couldn’t be hidden, it would be easy to calculate one’s location through triangulation. Had her counterpart primed her spell to navigate by the stars? She’d been told it was impossible. But was she wrong?
And I’m overthinking it, she thought, irked. The realization struck her like a physical blow. She doesn’t have to navigate by the stars. She can just use the nexus points.
Emily stared down at the parchment without actually seeing it. In hindsight, it was obvious. In hindsight... it was brilliant. There was no way anyone could hide the nexus points. Her counterpart had programmed the teleport spell to locate the nexus points, use them to triangulate her exact position and then teleport her to the pre-programmed destination. It would be a very tricky piece of work, but doable. And then... the moment the teleport spell realized her counterpart was in trouble, it teleported her to safety. Emily had to admire the cunning. Her counterpart had solved a problem that had perplexed countless generations of sorcerers.
If it works, she reminded herself. The theory might not prove workable.
She started to work, feeling a rush of enthusiasm as she started to sketch out the bare bones of the spell. The nexus points would be easy to locate. Once located... she worked carefully, drawing up a locator spell from scratch. If she keyed the spell to find both Whitehall and Heart’s Eye, she could triangulate herself. And then... she put the rest of the spell together. It would have to rest in her wards, or in a pocket dimension, until it was needed...
It will work, she told herself. I’ll just have to test it.
Void would want to see it first, she knew. He’d made it clear he wanted her to run any experiments past him before she actually tried them. Emily was tempted to take the spell somewhere nicely isolated and try it anyway, but she knew he’d find out about it the next time he tested her mental defenses. She hadn’t had much luck hiding things from him. It would be better to ask him first. Besides, she had no reason to think he’d say no.
She found a fresh sheet of parchment and carefully wrote out the entire spell, from beginning to end. Void didn’t need to see her scribbled notes, including the sections she’d crossed out for being poorly-crafted or simply useless. The spell had to be neatened up before she dared use it, even if it was going to rest in her wards ahead of time. She sighed, then put the parchment to one side and reached for a new sheet. She was on a roll. She didn’t want to stop when she was in an inventive mood.
The mimic-spell danced in front of her mind. The spell itself was fantastically complex — she wasn’t sure she could have cast it without a lot of preparation — but she could slim it down before pointing it at a necromancer. It should work, she told herself. The necromancer wouldn’t have the power to overwhelm the spell before it was too late, nor the skill to realize what the mimic actually was and get rid of it. And if he did, she could just modify the spell and send another one. If it worked...
If it works, we might be able to get rid of the necromancers once and for all, Emily thought. There would be other necromancers — the rite was so simple that nearly anyone with a hint of magic could do it — but if the Blighted Lands were cleared, they’d fi
nd it harder to build up a power base before they were destroyed. And who knows what that will do for the world?
She sighed, inwardly. It didn’t matter. She’d beaten several necromancers, all through a mixture of careful planning, outright cheating and dumb luck. Shadye had come very close to destroying Whitehall. If he’d managed to punch through the Craggy Mountains and invade the fertile lands below, there wouldn’t have been anything capable of so much as slowing him down for hundreds of miles. Dragon’s Den would have been effortlessly crushed, the population slaughtered or enslaved as the nightmare raged on. Sooner or later, her luck would've run out. And then the Allied Lands would've fallen.
And the only thing holding them together is the necromantic threat, she mused. They’re lucky the necromancers are no better at working together.
She spent the next few hours carefully fiddling with the spell, trying to get it into a form she could cast quickly and easily. It seemed impossible. She could ready the spell in advance, but... she shook her head. It would have to do. And she’d have to make sure the next target couldn’t stop her before she cast the spell. She wouldn’t have been forced into a death-duel with King Randor if he hadn’t thought to take out the stored spell before she could cast it.
He always was clever, Emily reminded herself. And he knew more magic than the average necromancer before he took the plunge.
She stood and started through the shelves again. It looked as if dozens of books had been picked up and put down randomly, ensuring there was no coherent order. Emily shook her head, wondering if Void knew his books well enough to find something when he wanted it. Perhaps he could. There weren’t many other people in his library. She frowned as she spotted a book on blood magic sitting next to a tome on ritual magic. The latter was a title she knew from Whitehall. The tutors had been at pains to point out that the rituals didn’t work. She had no idea why Void had it on his shelves.
Maybe they just didn’t want us trying the rituals, Emily thought. If we thought they might work, we might have succeeded...
The Artful Apprentice Page 15