The Royal Sorceress

by Christopher Nuttall

  “In this world, one thing counts,” he continued. “You must have large amounts of money in the bank. But how many people have enough money to have a vote? How many people own enough property to have a vote? The laws are carefully drawn to disenfranchise the poor, the hopeless…the ones like us. And why should we look to our lords and masters for change? They’re happy with things the way they are. Why should they change for us?”

  He allowed his gaze to move from face to face. They knew this, of course; they would hardly be underground leaders if they hadn’t felt the pain of poverty. Some of them had seen children die because they hadn’t been able to buy food for their families, or watched helplessly as their womenfolk were ravished by petty officials with a little power. They had all felt the endless oppression that pushed down on them, crushing their souls and turning them into slaves. An Englishman was not free in England. The British Empire ruled a quarter of the world, yet it cared nothing for nine-tenths of its population.

  And they were all beaten down by the government. There had been brief periods of violent unrest, but some had ended after feelings cooled and others had been savagely repressed by the government’s troops. It had bred helplessness into the poor, a sense that they were doomed no matter what they did – and even a sense that their lords and masters had a right to be their lords and masters. Their submission – their inability to break their psychological bonds – was the key to their physical bondage. Jack had set himself the task of giving them the confidence to throw off their chains and break free.

  “But why should it be that way?” He demanded. “Why should we not live in vast palaces? Why should we not be allowed to hunt and fish as we please, or avoid paying taxes, or even claiming some of the benefits of those taxes? We are told that we belong to a vast and powerful empire, but what do we see of its greatness? We see nothing, save the lights of rich London and the red-coated soldiers who crush us whenever we raise our heads high. We cannot go on like this!

  “Last night, I killed Lord Burley,” Jack said. “Three nights ago, I…convinced Henry to forgive his debts. I am here to bring down the government and start a new age, an age where people will rise to the positions they deserve and no one will be ground in the dirt, simply for having been born poor. This time, the government will learn to listen, or we will destroy it. We have the power to bring it down.”

  He held up a hand. Bright light sparkled over it, illuminating the room with an eerie, flickering light. “None of us have ever achieved anything much on our own,” he concluded, “but as a group we would be able to beat the government. We can take the toffees down once and for all, if we rise and claim our birthright – freedom, and the rights of man!”

  There was a long pause. “We have heard this before,” Davy said, finally. “How can we beat the government? We have no weapons, no money – and no security. And they have magic. They see our every move.”

  “Hardly,” Jack said. Everyone believed that Seers saw everything. Jack knew better – and so did any other trained magician. But he would have to start training the sparkers in the Rookery himself, now that Henry had surrendered them to the movement. Ebenezer’s son had always lacked imagination, save when it came to grinding more money out of his victims. “I have magic – and magic does not make you invincible. We can beat their magicians.”

  One of the others, a former professor, spoke up. “And if you’re wrong?”

  “Then we die,” Jack said, simply. There was no point in lying to them. They all knew the risks. “I ask you this: is it better to fight and die on our feet, or live on our knees as slaves? None of us is any freer than a negro from the south of America, working on one of the cotton plantations. We either force them to grant us rights or we will never be anything more than slaves.

  “We have numbers, but we don’t have weapons? We can get weapons. I have been working on ways to ship weapons into the country from an outside source. We will be able to arm ourselves and when the time comes, we will take control of the city and seize the government. And they will have to concede to us or risk a long civil war which would cripple the Empire.

  “And as for magic...?

  “You all know what they do,” he added. “They come into the poorhouses and they take children with any trace of magic from their parents. The children are fostered with the right sort of people, paid by the Crown; they rarely learn that they are adopted at all. How many of us have lost children to their raids?”

  His eyes narrowed. “And if magic appears among the downtrodden and oppressed, does it not put the lie to their claim to be superior?”

  Jack smiled at them. “If we work together, if we plan properly, we can win,” he concluded. “Join us now or walk away.”

  Davy frowned at him. “Where are the weapons coming from?”

  “A dealer overseas,” Jack said. “And that is all that you need to know.”

  It was a weak link in the plan, but one he couldn’t avoid. There were thousands of smugglers along the coast and in London, smuggling in goods from Europe and America without paying the taxes demanded by the excise men. It would be relatively easy to smuggle in the weapons, but if they were discovered it would be a red flag to the authorities. Firearms were not permitted to the urban poor – and to very few people outside the cities, unless they had the right connections. Losing a weapons shipment could prove disastrous. And it was something he couldn’t share with the others, because there were already too many weak links in the chain.

  He smiled to himself. Henry was a bastard, all right, but he’d had close links with the smugglers and those links could be used for the underground. As long as he stayed good and terrified of Jack, he’d do as Jack ordered. Jack had taken care to frighten him badly, knowing that someone like Henry might go to the authorities. And if anyone drew a line between Henry and Captain Swing...

  The argument raged on long into the night. Jack wasn’t too surprised, even though he was impatient to move on to the next stage of his plan. The underground had been burned badly over the last century, even before it had become a coherent force – insofar as it was a coherent force. It was a bit much to expect the poor to care about abstract political ideas when the rabble were starving, desperate for food. They would sell their children into slavery – or worse – just to keep them alive.

  In the end, there was reluctant agreement. It helped that Davy was aging, with only a few years of life left to him in the Rookery. Jack ran through a handful of possible ideas with them – without committing himself to anything – and then started to issue orders. The underground would have to recruit the first warriors from the ranks of the unemployed and arrange for them to be trained. Lucy knew a few former soldiers who could train others, once they found somewhere where they could train in secret. And once the first bunch had mastered military skills, they could teach the others and their former tutors could be eliminated. Jack wasn’t going to risk any leaks.

  “You killed Lord Burley,” Davy said, afterwards. “Don’t you feel that that was...unwise?”

  Jack smiled. “I had to do something to prove that I could,” he said. Davy didn’t know about his shared history with the Royal Sorcerer. No one knew that, apart from himself and Master Thomas – and perhaps Lord Mycroft. The overweight civil-servant-of-all-trades might have known part of the story and deduced the rest. “And besides, with Burley having been murdered, there will be plenty of upset nights for his fellow oppressors. How many of them have as many guards as he had?”

  “They’ll be hiring more,” Davy said, flatly.

  “Yes, they will,” Jack agreed. “And believe me, it works in our favour.”

  He stood up and clasped Davy’s hand. “We won’t lose this final chance,” he said. “We will plan it properly and hit them when they’re least expecting it. We will terrify them into submission.”

  Outside, the London night was louder than ever. It had been payday at the factories and many of the younger men were trying to spend it all in one night. The whores and
bartenders would probably manage to separate them from most of it before they even managed to take some of it home to their wives. It hardly mattered, anyway. No wages earned by anyone who lived in the Rookery would drag them out of poverty.

  He stopped as he caught sight of a half-drunk man molesting a girl. At first, he thought she was a prostitute, but her desperate struggles to escape convinced him otherwise. Once, he admitted to himself, he would have watched dispassionately as he raped her in the street, but he’d been a different man then. Now he walked forward, caught the man’s neck with his hand and picked him up, throwing him into the nearest wall with a push of magic. The body collapsed and fell to the ground. By morning, it would have been stripped of everything and perhaps transported to the crematory. Even the hardened inhabitants of the Rookery blanched at the thought of necromancers using discarded bodies as weapons.

  Jack took the trembling girl’s hand, kissed it gently, and then vanished into the shadows, pulling an illusion around his body. The girl would have seen him vanish into thin air. It would be yet another rumour about Captain Swing echoing through the underworld until it reached the ears of Master Thomas. He would know that Jack was back.

  He smiled as he lifted himself up to the roofs and began to make his way back to Lucy’s brothel. The coming confrontation would be savage – one of them wouldn’t walk away alive. But Jack had his cause to fight – and die – for, while Master Thomas merely upheld the established order. Jack would die for the poor.

  It was the least he could do to make up for his crimes.

  Chapter Twelve

  Gwen cleared her throat.

  The young man – almost a boy – who was reading a book in the library jumped when he heard her behind him. He looked around, hand raised in a defensive pose, and flushed when he saw her. Bruno Lombardi – a young man barely two years older than Gwen – had been assigned to tutor her in infusing…and he’d forgotten. Gwen doubted that he’d forgotten intentionally, unlike some of her other tutors; he’d simply entered the library, found a book and lost track of time. It had happened to her from time to time as well.

  He was a handsome youth, apart from the pair of spectacles that were precariously balanced on the end of his nose. Unlike most of the young men his age, personal grooming wasn’t practically an obsession, giving him a kind of dishevelled appearance that Gwen found rather endearing. He blinked owlishly at her and she found herself smiling. It wasn’t as if she disliked him, after all. He had never shown any sign of dislike – or resentment – of Gwen’s presence in the hall.

  “You were meant to be in the workshop with me,” Gwen said, dryly. He flushed even brighter; as the third son of a minor aristocratic family, he had to learn to live by his wits alone. There would be little more than a few thousand pounds left for him when his father shuffled off the mortal coil. “I’ve been waiting for the last twenty minutes.”

  “Oh, crumbs,” Lombardi said. He sounded embarrassed. “I quite forgot.”

  Gwen cast her eyes over the pile of books on his table. “I can believe it,” she said. His face couldn’t get any redder, but his hands twitched nervously. “If you want to postpone the lesson…”

  “I’m just coming,” Lombardi said, quickly. He placed the book he was holding on the table and walked quickly out of the door, leaving the pile for the librarian to sort out and return to the shelves. Gwen took one last look at the pile – a handful of scientific treatises and a couple of speculative fiction works – and followed him down to the workshop. The library would have to be left until later.

  The workshop was the largest room in Cavendish Hall, apart from the dining room and the lobby. It was bare, save only for a pair of metal tables and a sheet of metal blocking off half the room, almost like a fence. Gwen had inspected the room several times while she’d waited for Lombardi and hadn’t been able to figure out why anyone would want to cordon off part of the room. Or, for that matter, why it was so bare when she had expected tools and raw materials scattered everywhere. The door, she realised as she closed it behind her, looked like it had been armour-plated. Someone, she deduced, didn’t want to take any chances.

  Lombardi waved her to one of the stools and sat down beside her. He looked nervous to be sitting so close to a girl, even though it was unlikely that their respective parents would sanction a match. His eyes didn’t seem to dip to her bodice as often as some of the other young men in the building, something else Gwen found a little endearing. He was shy around her – and presumably every other young girl he met. It was better than the bullish bragging that other men indulged in when they were trying to impress a girl.

  “The difference between Infusing and Changing is that Infusers place magic into an item while Changers use their magic to reshape an item,” Bruno said. He sounded more confident while he was lecturing, even though Gwen was right next to him. “A skilled Infuser can create objects that can do almost anything, as long as the magic lasts. The more one wants it to do, the more magic it consumes, leading it to burn out quickly. Once the Infuser has created the item, however, a less-skilled magician can replenish the magical supply and keep the item working.”

  He looked up at her, flushed, and then looked away. “It takes time and practice to become a skilled Infuser,” he added. “The Infusers like me tend to apprentice themselves to older, more skilful Infusers and charge their items in exchange for lessons in magic. You may find it difficult to learn more than the basics; I have a feeling that Master Thomas will not want you to waste your skill in creating objects of power.”

  Gwen nodded, impatiently. “I understand,” she said. “You want me to push magic into an object.”

  “Correct,” Lombardi said. He stood up, walked over to the wall, and opened a cupboard. “For reasons we don’t fully understand, different materials store different levels of magic; they can be used for different purposes. As a general rule, the denser an object, the more magic it will store.”

  He walked back to her, carrying a handful of small objects in his hands. “Look at this,” he said, passing her one of them. “What do you make of it?”

  Gwen turned the object over and over in her hands. It was a small statue of a man, made from clay and then baked in an oven. For some reason, it gave her the creeps as she touched it, even though she couldn’t understand why. There was no sense of magic surrounding the tiny piece of pottery. She passed it back to Lombardi, who smiled, took it in his hands, and closed his eyes. Gwen sensed, somehow, a shimmer of magic flickering around the object, just before Lombardi put it down on the table. The tiny manikin stood up and ran towards the edge of the table, almost jumping over the edge before Lombardi caught it. It struggled in his palm until its movements slowed to a stop and it collapsed. Gwen told herself that it wasn’t alive and had never truly been alive, but it still shocked her.

  Lombardi grinned at her expression. “A fairly basic trick, once you learn what you’re doing,” he said. “Now” – he put a block of wood in front of her – “try to infuse magic into that wood.”

  Gwen took the block of wood in her hand – and stopped, unsure of how to proceed. “Close your eyes,” Lombardi instructed, “and visualise the wood in your hand. Hold the image in your mind and imagine directing your own power into it. Don’t try to think of anything more complex, just imagine your power infusing the wood. Focus…”

  There was a long pause. Gwen struggled to infuse magic into the block, but nothing was happening. She knew when she was using her magic – to Blaze or Move or Charm – yet she couldn’t feel anything shimmering inside her body. The block of wood was really nothing more than a block of wood, useless and dead. She focused on it as hard as she could, her eyelids screwed up in concentration, but nothing happened. It seemed impossible to do anything to it.

  “Concentrate,” Lombardi instructed.

  “I am concentrating,” Gwen snapped back. She kept her eyes closed. “Nothing is happening.”

  Lombardi hesitated. “I want you to focus on your body,�
� he said, and broke off, embarrassed. Gwen managed to avoid giggling, if only because he would certainly die of embarrassment. “Concentrate on your heartbeat; imagine the sound thrumming through your entire body. And then allow your mind to slide down to your fingertips. Feel them pressing against the wood. Feel the magic shimmering over them…”

  Gwen gasped. Her fingers were alive! No, not alive; magic was crackling into existence around her. She couldn’t hurt herself with her own magic, she reminded herself frantically, even as the air started to sizzle. The block of wood was suddenly very large in her mind, almost as if it were part of her. She directed the magic into the wood and felt it being sucked out of her…

  There was a burst of heat and she yelped, dropping the block of wood onto the table as her eyes snapped open. The wood was glowing, almost as if it had been plucked from a fire by her bare hands. Her fingers hurt…Lombardi reached forward, quickly, and scooped up the block of wood. Before Gwen could say anything, he hurled it over the sheet of metal blocking half the room and pulled her away from the table. A second later, there was an explosion that shook the room.

  Gwen turned and saw smoke rising up from behind the metal wall. It was a shield, she realised numbly, a shield protecting young students from the consequences of their mistakes. A magician with only one talent might be expected to be better at handling it than a magician with multiple talents, yet…she found herself looking up at Lombardi with new respect. He’d mastered an art she suspected she would never fully be able to understand or master.

  “That happens to pretty much everyone at first,” Lombardi said. He grinned at her, even as he pushed his spectacles back into position. “The magic within the item destabilised and then exploded. Young magicians sometimes play with explosions for fun – or for war. My old tutor used to tell us that we might have to use our talents for fighting the French.”