Bookworm

by Christopher Nuttall

  “We’re going all the way to Pendle,” Sandy – or maybe it was Sandra – said. “Where are you going?”

  “Ida,” Elaine said. Had it really been over four hours since she’d boarded the iron dragon? But the vehicle was starting to slow as it approached the station and finally came to a halt, giving Elaine barely enough time to grab her bag and books before the doors opened. “I hope that you enjoy the rest of your journey.”

  Outside, the air was cooler and sweeter than in the Golden City. King Hildebrand had established a small hamlet at the bottom of the mountains for the station, including a pair of inns and a set of horses and carts offering rides up to Ida itself. Elaine walked out of the station and found a driver, paying him a handful of silver coins for a ride up to the city. The driver took the coins, bit them, and then motioned for her to get into the carriage. No one else joined them as they started the long climb up towards Ida.

  The experience was alarming to someone who had never been up a mountain in her life, unless one counted the brief walk up to the Watchtower when she’d been at the Peerless School and that hadn’t been anything like as terrifying as the ride up towards Ida. The wind pushed and pulled at the coach, threatening to send it tumbling over the side and down towards the ground far below. The handful of habitations actually cut into the mountain caught her attention and she winced. How could anyone live in such conditions?

  She stared around as they finally inched past a pair of forts and into the road leading to the city itself. Ida was very different from the Golden City. Like the habitations below, half of it seemed to be cut into the rock itself, while everything outside the rocky mountains was made of the same grey stone. Even the royal palace, a towering fortress on the top of one of the mountains, was the same colour as the rest of the city. There was none of the variety in the population either, Elaine realised in shock. They all wore the same drab clothes and rarely looked up as they moved from place to place. How many people even lived in the city? Maybe there were so many people that they had to ignore one another just to get some space between them. The toilets at the Peerless School had followed the same basic idea.

  The coach drew to a halt and Elaine made her somewhat unstable way off the vehicle. She had planned to visit the Court Wizard at once, but her legs were arguing strongly that it might be a better idea to find a place to sleep first and go to see him in the morning. She asked the coach driver where she could find a place to stay and followed his directions to the nearest inn. It cost more than she expected, but she was almost past caring. All she really wanted to do was to sleep. The room had nothing more than a bed and a glass of water for her to drink, but she lay down and went to sleep anyway. In the morning, she told herself, she could carry out her plan.

  ***

  She was awoken several hours later by the sound of bells ringing to greet the new dawn, just like in the Golden City. It seemed that Ida honoured the gods in the same way, although there was no way to tell if they had the same gods or worshipped others of their own. The Grand Sorcerer had never attempted to discourage anyone from worshipping any or all gods if they saw fit, apart from the gods who were little more than actual demons. Not that it mattered. Those who claimed to have messages from the gods invariably discovered that the messages weren’t quite what they’d expected them to be.

  Dressing quickly, she walked down to the eatery – and stopped dead. Seated on the opposite side of the room was a man she recognised, a man she’d never wanted to see again.

  Inquisitor Dread.

  Chapter Fourteen

  The Inquisitor wore the same black robes as she remembered from earlier, his face distorted behind a glamour that she now understood perfectly. It wasn’t something that shaped his appearance in his own eyes, but something that shaped his appearance in the eyes of the beholder, giving him an impression of relentless determination to see criminals brought to justice. Elaine started to step backwards when he looked up at her and waved with a single hand, inviting her over to his table. It was very definitely not a request.

  “Inquisitor,” she said, as she reached his table. Up close, he didn’t even seem to have a smell – and his black robes seemed to fade into the shadows. “Welcome to Ida.”

  Dread looked up at her, his half-concealed eyes locked on her face. “What are you doing here?”

  It honestly hadn’t occurred to Elaine that she would run into an Inquisitor, let alone one she recognised – even though hindsight told her that the Inquisition would have dispatched someone to make enquires about what Duke Gama had been doing before his untimely death. She would have thought that the Grand Sorcerer’s death would have distracted the Inquisitors, but they did have a reputation for never forsaking their goals for anything. Try to bribe an Inquisitor and you’d spend the rest of your life in the salt mines.

  “I came to investigate Duke Gama,” she said, finally. It was true enough – and besides, she couldn’t think of a lie that Dread might accept without question, or without trying to compel her to tell him the truth. “I wanted to know what had happened to me.”

  “Looking into the question of just what happened to you is the task of the Inquisition,” Dread said, flatly. “You shouldn’t have come all this way to investigate yourself.”

  Elaine gathered herself and stared back at him, willing herself not to blink. “Would you have told me what happened when I opened his book?”

  “We might have done,” Dread said, thoughtfully. “But how many wizards has curiosity killed over the years?”

  “I almost got killed for nothing more than doing my job,” Elaine pointed out, wondering where she’d found the nerve to verbally spar with an Inquisitor. “I want to know what happened to me before it happens to someone else.”

  “An admirable motive,” the Inquisitor agreed. She couldn’t tell if he believed her, or if he accepted what she was saying seemed reasonable. “It is clear that your...experience changed you in some ways. Magic, particularly unrefined magic, can have some unfortunate effects.”

  He looked up and waved at the waitress, who had been giving their table a wide berth. “Order whatever you like,” he said. “The Inquisition can afford a large breakfast from time to time.”

  Elaine hesitated. She wanted to ask him questions, but if there was one thing she’d learned from being a librarian, it was that the questions a person asked often taught the hearer more about that person than they might realise. If magical accidents did change a person in ways more subtle than compulsion spells or even outright transfigurations, it was something almost unknown to her...

  ...Except that it wasn’t, not after the Black Vault had been decanted into her head. Magic had never been as well understood as the Peerless School claimed, and there were all kinds of magical traditions that never quite fit into the high magic defined by the Grand Sorcerers. It was possible for a magician to accidentally boost his own power, or be caught up in an accident where his power was suddenly blasted into levels he couldn’t even have imagined, but the results had rarely been good. Madness often followed a sudden growth in one’s magical power, as if the human mind couldn’t cope with suddenly inheriting a vastly increased level of magic. It was strange to realise that the Grand Sorcerer had spent decades training and flexing his magic before even being considered one of the senior wizards, let alone competing with his peers for the ultimate prize.

  And if Dread suspected that her powers had been boosted, he would be keeping an eye on her. Not out of suspicion that she’d hidden something, or that she’d lied to him about what had happened when she opened the book, but because she might go completely mad and at the same time develop levels of magic beyond her grasp before the accident. The thought of a maddened magician storming through the streets blasting buildings apart in revenge for slights, real or imagined, had to be the Inquisition’s worst nightmare. Despite herself, she wondered just how hard it had been for them to take the risk of allowing her to wake up. They could have cut her throat while she was helpless, lon
g before she’d realised what had happened to her.

  She ordered breakfast thoughtfully, looking at the menu to try to determine what were the local specialities. The Darlington had charged far more for far less, she was amused to discover; the locals seemed to like plates of meat and eggs for their breakfasts, as well as long rolls of brown bread and butter. She hesitated and then decided to order as much as she could eat. There was no way of knowing when she would be able to eat again.

  “A good choice,” Inquisitor Dread observed. Elaine wondered if he was mocking her, but his face seemed curiously composed. “Your friend Daria would approve of the meat, if not the eggs...”

  Did he know...of course he knew. Rumour claimed that Inquisitors had remarkable powers to divine curses and enchantments, even the complex and subtle charms that turned a normal man into a werewolf. He’d probably interviewed Daria while Elaine had been fighting for her life – Daria had used the Inquisition as an excuse to escape work for a few days – and discovered that she was a werewolf at the same time. The Inquisition probably wouldn’t bother with her unless she turned into a criminal, which far too many werewolves did. It wasn’t as if they had any hope of gainful employment when their true natures were exposed.

  “Daria always enjoys eating meat and never puts on an ounce of weight,” Elaine agreed, trying to sound resentful. A werewolf had a far faster metabolism than a normal human and burned food at a far quicker rate. It probably explained why Daria spent so much of her life chasing boys when she wasn’t working. She hesitated. Asking the Inquisitor about her family had been one thing, but asking a more sensitive question would have been risky. And yet who else could answer her questions? “Sir...what kind of effects can magical accidents have?”

  Dread studied her for a long moment, as if he were wondering why she’d asked that particular question. “It can depend on precisely what happened in the accident,” he said. “One particularly insane wizard once poured every one of his potions into the same pot to see what would happen. Nothing did...until his maid tried to sweep it all up and the mess decided to fight back. Somehow they merged into one being, a vaguely humanoid form made out of gel – and with a surprisingly sweet smell.”

  Elaine shivered. She’d heard rumours about that particular incident. “And then there was the werewolf who became a...pureblood were,” Dread continued. “Every time he sees the moon, he becomes a copy of the closest living thing to himself; a rat, a snake, his wife...I believe that he accidentally bit her and now they make sure to share the same bed so they can swap forms every night. They find it quite interesting to exchange gender roles every so often.

  “And then there was the poor girl who transformed randomly into an object whenever she became stressed, or the boy who shifted between human and horse forms whenever he saw a mare, or the twins who swap bodies on an hourly basis...”

  Elaine felt a flush of irritation. He was toying with her. “None of those would concern the Inquisition,” she said. If they didn’t care about someone like Millicent playing games with people who didn’t have her power or connections, why would they care about people who were accidentally cursed? Even werewolves were targeted more by the city guards than the Inquisition. “What did you think had happened to me when you came to check up on my...accident?”

  Dread met her gaze evenly. “Some magical accidents give magicians an unexpected boost in power,” he said, calmly. “Your...treatment of your former tormentor suggests that you suddenly gained powers that you might not be able to control. And the fact that you are visiting this strange little state suggests that you know that something has happened to you, doesn’t it?”

  His voice suddenly became heavy with compulsion. “What happened to you when you picked up that book?”

  Elaine swallowed. It took every ounce of strength she had to keep her voice from trembling, or babbling out secrets she knew would get her killed. “I don’t know,” she said, somehow. It wasn’t quite the truth...his words seemed to be humming into her head, forcing her to talk. “I just wanted to come here and find out what had happened to Duke Gama.”

  “An interesting choice,” Dread observed. His voice was back to normal, but Elaine refused to react. It was certain that he could start trying to compel her again at any moment...and if he kept working away at her, eventually she’d break. His magic required stronger magic to resist and Elaine wasn’t up to the challenge. The shielding spells floating in her mind required time and patience to set up, or power that she simply didn’t have. “And were you interested in Duke Gama before your accident?”

  “No, sir,” Elaine said, honestly. “I never even knew he existed until I opened those boxes and read the attached details.”

  “But that leaves us with an interesting problem,” Dread observed. “Did you come here because you were curious, or because one of the effects of the curse was to plant a compulsion in your mind to come here? It is quite easy to place a subtle command into a person’s mind without them ever realising that they’d been influenced. The more...emotional a person, the easier it is to command them while they’re convinced that they’re acting according to their own will. And how emotional are you, I wonder?”

  Elaine hesitated. The possibility that someone had placed a compulsion in the spell to go to Ida hadn’t occurred to her, which could itself be an effect of the spell. Her bindings tutor had made several things clear, including the fact that the human mind was remarkably good at inventing justifications for its actions that always made sense – as long as they weren’t examined in the cold light of day. But then, he’d added with his famous sneer, alcohol was just as good at influencing a person as magical spells – and that didn’t have any magic in it, nothing more than natural chemistry.

  “I like to think that I am not emotional,” she said, finally. It wasn’t entirely true, she had to admit. Her early life – and Millicent’s torments – had burned some of her emotions out of her, at least in her own mind. There was no point in ranting and raving about the universe’s unfair treatment of her when nothing would happen to make her life worth living. And the aching sense of loss she’d felt when she’d finally worked out the difference between an orphan and a normal child had faded away years ago. “Whatever happened to me could happen to others.”

  “Of course it could,” Dread agreed, as the waitress returned and put a large plate down in front of her. Dread, it seemed, had ordered fried meat and chopped potatoes. Daria would have loved the spicy food, but it made Elaine’s stomach turn over in futile rebellion. “But what happened to you also did happen to others.”

  Elaine stared. “Oh, I’m not talking about the book being charmed; that’s unique, as far as I can tell. But you’re hardly the first child to grow up without a real family, or face bullies at your school. The results can sometimes be very unfortunate as long-buried emotions start boiling through the mental blocks the mind erects to protect itself. Do you know that most abusers of children were people who were abused themselves?”

  “That makes no sense,” Elaine said, with the private reflection that the entire conversation made no sense. “If they knew how horrible it was to be abused, surely they wouldn’t abuse others.”

  “But the human mind is a complex thing,” Dread said. “Some abused children convince themselves that they actually enjoy being abused, a conviction so powerful that they carry it over into adulthood. Others come to believe that they deserve the abuse because it is the only way they can draw a line between their caring parents and the way they’re being treated. And because these...values are so ingrained in their minds, they never actually question any of them when they become adults. They might as well try to convince themselves that water is dry.”

  He shrugged. “And it can become worse when one is being bullied at school,” he continued. “A person may believe that they deserve it, that they truly are all the horrible things they get called by their peers, or they may become convinced that no one else cares about them and bury it all away in their mind
s. And some of them, coming into magic, lose all sense of proportion and retaliate massively against their tormentors. They are so convinced of their own helplessness that when they discover they are no longer helpless, they just lash out with overwhelming force.”

  Dread took a bite of his meat and then smiled at her. “Would you still claim to be a stable person?”

  “Yes,” Elaine said, crossly.

  “Self-delusion,” Dread said. “No child growing up into adulthood is stable; male or female. Some are just better at convincing themselves that they’re stable and they don’t have anything to worry about. And what happens when they discover that all the things they once took for certainties no longer are? I think your friend Millicent found out just what happens when her victim suddenly became more powerful than she could imagine.”

  Elaine stared at him. It made sense – and it was completely wrong. Elaine hadn’t had her power boosted – but she could, part of her mind whispered, if she was prepared to pay the price. Instead, she’d been crammed with forbidden knowledge that gave her insights into magic that no other living magician shared. Even the Grand Sorcerer would have had problems. He would have had to read the books one by one and so he might not have grasped how they interlinked together.