The light faded and died. A single body, seemingly unmarked, hit the ground.
Dread checked it, carefully, and then looked up at his men. “He’s dead,” he said, simply. “It’s over.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
“I was so scared.”
Elaine couldn’t stop shaking, even though she was in the Watchtower and surrounded by Inquisitors. Her stained clothes had been replaced and she’d washed, but she still felt dirty – and ashamed. When the maddened Prince had come for her, her mind kept reminding her, she’d frozen rather than fled. She hadn’t even been able to save her life. An Inquisitor had saved her at the cost of his own.
“Everyone is scared from time to time,” Cass said. The female Inquisitor had showered alongside her and changed into another set of black robes. She managed to make them look almost appealing on her. “I was scared when I saw my first demon, or the monster someone had shaped from shadow and turned into a personal guard dog. Fear isn’t the worst thing in the world; it’s how you react to fear that proves what you are.”
“I froze,” Elaine reminded her. “What does that say about me?”
“That you need more training and experience,” Cass said. She checked her wand and a small array of magical tools in her belt and then headed for the door. Inquisitors seemed to take even less time washing than Elaine did. “I think you did fine, all things considered. Come on.”
The interior of the Watchtower was buzzing with Inquisitors and City Guardsmen, some of whom looked at Elaine as if they didn’t understand what she was doing there. It was a busy day for them, Elaine realised, as she saw a line of people in handcuffs being escorted down to the cells buried under the mountain. All of Prince Hilarion’s private army – and his staff – had to be picked up and held until the exact nature of their service was revealed. They might have known what he had in mind, or they might have been innocent dupes. The Inquisitors couldn’t afford to let them remain in the city until the truth came out.
“We don’t normally allow strangers into the interrogation zone,” Cass commented, as they passed through a set of the most complex wards Elaine had ever seen. She felt magic pressing down around her, suppressing any urge she might have felt to use magic herself. A sense that someone – or something – was watching her nagged at her mind as Cass led her through a pair of stone doors. The Inquisitors knew that magicians made dangerous criminals and did whatever it took to keep them under control. “Do not try to enter any of the cells without permission.”
They walked down a long corridor, passing doors that led into small cells, each one barely large enough to swing a cat. Some of them were occupied by criminals who looked up at her as she passed, others seemed empty to her eyes until she realised that they were occupied by the gang of thieves who had discovered a way to turn themselves invisible permanently. The Inquisitors had caught up with them anyway, probably using werewolves to track them down and throw them into jail. They’d be working on ways to get the spell off them before fitting them with collars and sending them to the salt mines.
Two guards, both wearing full Inquisitor robes, stopped them as they reached another set of doors and questioned Cass briefly before allowing them into the room. It was dark, so dark that Elaine found it hard to see at first until the light came up suddenly, revealing a handful of dark figures surrounding a chair. Count Lucas sat in the chair, pinned down by a beam of light that seemed to come from miles overhead, his eyes staring wildly around him as he tried to see his tormentors. A spider’s net of wards surrounded him, slowly wearing down his resistance to the point where he wouldn’t even be able to think of lying to the Inquisition. Elaine felt a flash of sympathy that she wasn’t quite able to suppress. Even if he were found innocent and released, Count Lucas would always have the memory of having his mind ground down to the point where he couldn’t hide anything from his interrogators. The knowledge in her mind confirmed that the spells the Inquisitors were using could cause permanent damage to a person’s mind.
“I knew nothing about his plans,” Count Lucas protested. He certainly seemed to be telling the truth, but the Inquisitors didn’t appear to be convinced. They fired questions at him, sometimes asking the same question over and over again, a technique that would make it hard for the Count to stick to anything but the truth. “He zapped me as soon as we got home from the party, turned me into a helpless witness...I swear it before all the gods!”
“But he was staying in your house,” Dread’s voice said. “How could you, a candidate for the position of Grand Sorcerer, not sense what he had brought into your house?”
“I didn’t sense anything,” Count Lucas screamed. Sweat was visible on his forehead as he started to struggle against the light. “I don’t know what happened!”
“Your house contained no less than five books on the proscribed list,” another Inquisitor said. Elaine knew that the true answer was more like six, although the Witch-King’s personal volume hadn’t been on the list because everyone who had known about its existence had believed that it had been destroyed a long time ago. “Even possessing those books is an automatic death sentence. You would certainly never be accepted as Grand Sorcerer...why didn’t you keep a close eye on what your friend was doing?”
“Because he was my friend,” Count Lucas said. “Don’t you care about your friends? Or don’t you skulls have any friends?”
The Inquisitors ignored the insult. “Prince Hilarion thought he could become Grand Sorcerer,” he said. “Why did you believe that he had a chance?”
“I didn’t believe that he had a chance,” Count Lucas said. “I thought he would lose, that perhaps he would back out and support me in exchange for later considerations. And I thought if I kept him close...”
Dread nodded to Cass and led the way out of the room into a smaller, well-lit chamber. “They think Count Lucas was a honest dupe,” he said, shortly. The interrogation had clearly been going on ever since the Count had arrived at the Watchtower. “There is no way he should be able to conceal the truth from us now...unless there is something in the forbidden texts?”
Elaine started at the question. “I don’t think that anything I know about would help him to resist for very long,” she said. “If he was an immensely powerful wizard he might be able to brush off the spells, but that would be noticeable – wouldn’t it?”
“It certainly should be,” Dread agreed, dryly. “But someone bringing one of the darkest texts in the world into your mansion should also be noticeable.”
“I don’t think that Count Lucas set up the wards,” Elaine said, slowly. “If they weren’t directly linked to his mind, he wouldn’t be able to use them with as much...skill as the original builder. They might have missed the book altogether.”
“Possibly,” Dread said. He shook his head. “We’ll keep working on him. If we clear him as innocent...we will have to convince him to withdraw from the contest anyway. At the very least, he has been incredibly careless and we cannot risk that in a Grand Sorcerer.”
Elaine scowled as a thought occurred to her. “Couldn’t he have been...programmed somehow by Prince Hilarion? Like Duke Gama programmed me?”
“I wouldn’t have said so,” Dread said. “Subtle commands work better when they’re vague; you were given an urge to go to Ida and allowed to come up with your own justification for why you wanted to visit Ida. Someone more powerful than yourself, someone with more self-control, might have started to ask why you wanted to visit Ida. At that point, the subtle spell would probably have lost its grip on your mind.
“But programming someone to ignore something so dangerous is a great deal harder,” he continued. “A single textbook of dark magic would be so dangerous that the controller would have to resort to more powerful spells to keep it from the target’s awareness. Those spells tend to have unfortunate effects on a person’s intelligence – and somebody would notice.”
He led her through a series of guarded doors until they reached a larger room. The chill in th
e air struck her the moment they walked through the door; the cold light blazing down from high overhead revealed a body lying on an examination table. Prince Hilarion looked as handsome in death as he had been in life, although she could sense the aroma of rotting magic surrounding his corpse. The warped body he’d possessed at the end of his life was gone.
“Reverted to normal,” Dread said, seriously. “Luckily for his father, he didn’t have the power to shift his body permanently into a higher plane – or we would never have been able to stop him without scorching half the city as well. His brain shows all the signs of dark arts dementia, insanity caused by using the dark arts to boost one’s powers. The druids think that he was dying even as he made his desperate bid to escape us.”
Elaine wasn’t surprised, somehow, to recognise the druid who had examined Prince Hilarion. It was the same person who had examined her after she’d been hit by Duke Gama’s spell.
“His brain has been completely destroyed,” the druid said. He shook his head sadly. “I’m surprised he managed to last as long as he did, even though his thoughts were extending into other dimensions. I don’t think he would have had the discipline to trap his soul permanently in a lifeless body.”
“And his body is here,” Dread said. “Are we sure that it is Prince Hilarion?”
“The body matches the signature of the blood taken from him when he was a baby,” the druid said, briskly. “He was confirmed as a legitimate child and registered as a lawful heir to the throne of Ida. This is not a fetch or some other form of magical duplicate. This is what remains of Prince Hilarion.”
Elaine closed her eyes. It had been just over a week since she’d become the bookworm and there was so much that she didn’t understand. Why had Prince Hilarion wanted her in the first place if he already had the Witch-King’s book? Had he wanted the rest of the knowledge in the Great Library? Or was there some aspect to his plan that they hadn’t understood before he died?
“He may have already been insane,” Dread said, when she raised the issue. “Insane people never make sense at the best of times – and insane sorcerers are prone to do almost anything without having a rational justification.”
“I do wonder about that,” the druid said. “There was nothing particularly subtle in the way he attempted to enhance his magic potential. If he’d been doing it for years before he came to the Golden City, he would already have been mentally crippled. Even the most intensely disciplined mind would have trouble coping when the very fabric of their reality was crumbling around them.”
“The Princess did say that her brother didn’t seem to be insane,” Dread mused. “Are you suggesting that he used the spells to give himself vast power when he knew that he’d been found out and we were breathing down his neck?”
“It certainly looks that way,” the Druid said.
“But that makes little sense,” a voice said, from behind them. Daria strode into the chamber, escorted by Karan and another Inquisitor. Now she knew what signs to look for, Elaine had no trouble in recognising the Inquisitor as a werewolf. “If he knew he’d been detected, why not flee the city?”
“He may have thought that he could have won,” the druid said. “People who use magic to enhance their powers are never rational. He wouldn’t be the first magician to doom himself by opening his mind, firmly convinced that he could handle the sudden shock when the new channels in his mind started to flow. If he’d been rational when he confronted the Inquisition...”
Elaine remembered the waves of power rolling off Prince Hilarion and shivered. The Peerless School taught that magic was nothing without control. Even the merest magician, someone so weak that they would never be offered a chance to study at the Peerless School, could kill himself if he failed to develop proper control. There were plenty of cautionary tales about children who accidentally set fire to their bedding, or older teenagers, driven by teenage hormones, who wreaked havoc in a person’s mind. Control, her tutors had told her time and time again, was the key to becoming an effective magician. A magician without control would probably destroy himself before he could become a threat to anyone else.
And Prince Hilarion hadn’t been formally trained at the Peerless School. It seemed a neat answer to the questions they hadn’t even been able to form. The Prince hadn’t known what he was doing, had lost control very quickly and had been unable to pull himself back together in time to fight the Inquisitors. And yet...where did she fit in? Come to think of it, where did Prince Hilarion’s father and his kingdom fit into the entire puzzle? Someone had worked hard to ensure that Elaine – or someone – became a bookworm, providing a way to pull knowledge out of the Great Library without triggering any alarms. Where did Elaine herself fit into the puzzle?
She looked down at the Prince’s body and wondered. “Is...is he my father?”
“I would have said that he was too young to be your father,” Dread said. “He’s only thirty, according to the records. He would have had to have fathered you when he was seven years old if he was your father.”
“Unless the orphanage records were tampered with,” Elaine said. It was an uncomfortable thought, but it was possible. “I might be fourteen now instead of twenty-three...”
The druid laughed, not unkindly. “I think you will discover that orphanage records are better than that,” he said. “We were charged with studying them all after your little...accident and you have definitely been around for twenty-three years.”
“There’s an easy way to check,” Daria said, impatiently. She leaned forward and sniffed at the body, drawing back in shock. “Most of the body’s original scent has been obliterated, but there’s enough left for me to get a sense of what he was. He wasn’t your father, Elaine.”
Elaine shook her head, sadly.
“You should be relieved,” Dread said. “Did you really want him to be your father?”
“You might be better off not knowing,” the druid agreed. “There was a really upper-class lady who paid a thousand Crowns to have her family tree worked out...and then she had to pay another three thousand Crowns to have it hushed up.”
“The matter isn’t quite over,” Dread said, as they returned to the more comfortable parts of the Watchtower. “Once we have a new Grand Sorcerer, we will move in on Ida and find out what was going on in that mountainous state. It seems to me as if Prince Hilarion had his father completely under his control; it is possible that the old man has collapsed with his son’s death, depending on just what spells were used to take control of him. In any case, we can afford to wait a few more days. The contest is set for three days from now.”
Elaine nodded. Lady Light Spinner had been right about at least one thing; there were only three competitors left in the contest. Maybe two, if Kane had decided to bow out gracefully and leave the more powerful sorcerers to face one another in combat. Or whatever they had to do to prove themselves worthy of the title.
“The new Grand Sorcerer will also be the one who decides what is to become of you,” Dread said. The way he said it sent shivers running down the back of her spine. “The Star Chamber isn’t ungrateful to you for what you did, but you do represent a considerable danger to the status quo. You don’t seem to have been...contaminated by the darker spells that were dumped into your mind, yet anyone with enough power could capture you and drain you of all the knowledge you possess. Prince Hilarion might have targeted you because his appetite for dark magic grew stronger after he read the Witch-King’s book.”
“Elaine saved you all,” Daria said, sharply. Her face seemed to become more wolfish for a long chilling moment. “How can you threaten to kill her?”
“We know what she did for us,” Dread said. For a moment, he looked old; old enough to be Elaine’s father. “But we also know that her mere existence presents a powerful risk to the empire. Someone could capture her and make her talk. And then we would have another Prince Hilarion on our hands, perhaps more than one.”
Elaine understood, even though the concept of th
e Inquisitors arguing over her eventual fate was terrifying. Dread was right, perhaps righter than he knew. If she could be tempted into violating Daria’s privacy, what else could she be tempted into doing?
“I understand,” she said. “I won’t leave the city until after you decide what to do with me.”
Dread nodded. “Go home, get some rest...I’ll leave Cass and Karan with you until after the contest,” he said. As bodyguards and watchdogs, Elaine knew. They’d never been anything else. “And I suggest that you light a candle in your favourite temple as a sign of thanks. The situation could have become a great deal worse.”
He shrugged. “But we nipped it in the bud,” he added. “If nothing else, you played a vital role in saving the entire city. We will never forget what you did for us.”
“If it’s really over,” Daria said, pensively. “I seem to recall that gratitude never lasts very long.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
“I’m surprised that you have never been here before,” Bee said. “This place is famous around the entire world.”
Elaine shrugged, thoughtfully. The Great Museum, unlike the Great Library, was open to everyone, allowing them to view artefacts from a thousand years of empire and magical development. It had always been in the Golden City, but Elaine had never visited before realising that she might not have that long to live. She had privately resolved to cram as much as she could into her last two weeks of life before the Inquisitors decided to kill her. It would have been nice to believe that they would spare her life, but she knew, better than they did, just how dangerous her mere existence was to the established order. She honestly couldn’t see anything else they could do.
“I never came here before,” she admitted. Bee gave her an odd look, as if even he could tell that she was acting strangely. She’d gone to his apartment the previous evening, practically dragged him into bed and spent the night curled up beside him. It no longer mattered to her what Bee really wanted, if he wanted a girl to marry or a girl in every city. All that mattered was living a little before the Inquisitors killed her. “It was just...”
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