Bookworm

by Christopher Nuttall

  The ground shuddered under her feet as Kane exerted his will. A dozen mansions in High Tory, home to aristocrats with bloodlines so pure that they could trace their ancestry back for nearly a thousand years, collapsed into falling rubble. Elaine wasn’t entirely sure how she knew what was going on, until she realised that Kane was using one of the semi-forbidden spells he’d probably learned from her mind. It allowed him to project images and thoughts across vast distances, into minds that were capable of comprehending what they were seeing. He was showing everyone – perhaps the entire world – what was happening to those who had ruled the world, only a scant two hours ago. The people who had been cowering in their mansions, hoping that their wards would save them, died before ever quite realising what had destroyed their lives. Great rents appeared in the ground as the catacombs opened up, disgorging creatures that had been warped and mutated by the wild magic under the city. Giant worms, semi-intelligent rats, even a colossal hamster...they rose up and started attacking the civilians. And everyone who fell...

  ...Rose up again. Kane knew how to summon the undead, how to infuse dead bodies with the dark infection that turned them into shambling parodies of man. He didn’t even have to concentrate after the first handful had risen from the dead to feast upon the living. The dark magic that created the undead was powered by the souls of the living they killed. They could keep going until they ran out of victims, until the Golden City became a city of the dead, a necropolis. The original Necropolis had been burned to the ground when the North Continent had been scorched; Kane would create a new one on the ruins of the Golden City. How far did his influence spread? Ida had kept the dead bodies of her royal family in a vault, where they could be animated again by a necromancer. Were there other illegal stashes of dead bodies in a world where the dead were supposed to be cremated, no exceptions? There was no way for Elaine to know, but Kane’s senses had expanded so far that he could probably locate dead bodies on the other side of the world.

  But he doesn’t need to bother, Elaine thought, bitterly. All he has to do is knock down a few more buildings and he’ll have a massive army of undead slaves.

  She tried desperately to think of a spell that might stop him. Necromancers weren’t immortal, but Kane was already more powerful than any historical necromancer, perhaps even more powerful than the Witch-King. There were legends about magical swords that might have stopped him in his tracks, yet she knew – now – that most of those stories were nonsense, comforting lies constructed to convince a nervous population that a necromancer could be stopped. The real necromancers had been overpowered by magicians, poisoned by spies or tricked into fighting each other. And the Witch-King hadn’t been killed until the North Continent had been scorched.

  And they’d never found a body...

  No one was quite sure what the Witch-King had done to make himself so powerful – and pretty much beyond being killed. Kane might know the answer – he’d found the Witch-King’s private notebook, after all – and he might even have improved upon what the Witch-King had done. If the first Grand Sorcerer had known, it had never been written down in the Great Library. Some stories suggested that the first Grand Sorcerer had been just as powerful as the Witch-King...and that all successive Grand Sorcerers, despite being extremely powerful in their own right, hadn’t quite lived up to his power. Perhaps the original Grand Sorcerer had used necromancy too, only he’d had the mental discipline not to allow it to drive him mad. But then, he’d been the unquestioned ruler of most of the known world. He had already been supremely powerful.

  A shape landed beside her and Elaine started, glancing over to see a colossal wolf with long sharp teeth. A moment later, she recognised Daria’s wolf form, despite the blood that stained her muzzle. Her friend started to shift back to human form, but held the transformation midway between human and wolf. She was naked, but almost covered in blood. Elaine reached for her friend and hugged her tightly, relieved to see her. Part of her had wondered if everyone she’d known was dead.

  “The dead are coming back to life,” Daria half-growled. Her fur felt surprisingly comforting, almost like cuddling a stuffed toy. “The entire city is coming apart and...”

  She broke off as she saw movement, people crawling towards where the Arena had been on their hands and knees. Elaine followed her gaze and recognised a handful of the crawlers, upper-class aristocrats from High Tory. Some of them were naked, their skins showing the signs of recent beatings, while others tried to crawl with as much confidence as they could. But it wasn’t easy to be defiant when crawling along the ground. Elaine felt a sudden chill as she recognised Millicent. Her old enemy was completely naked, her back whipped so badly that it was bleeding. She was crying, trying to hold herself together in the face of the awful compulsion dragging her onwards to face Kane...Elaine knew, now, that she would never hate Millicent again. What she’d done was nothing compared to the torment that Kane had already inflicted upon her – and what he would inflict on her in the future.

  He wants to make them crawl, she realised. All the people who had been born legitimately, all the people who had mocked a bastard child who could so easily have been declared legitimate, all the people who had enjoyed wealth and status that Kane would never be able to enjoy...he wanted to make them crawl. There was no point in enslaving them, or turning them into copies of himself, when he could torment them by forcing them to crawl before him. He’d done worse, she realised dully. His power was enough to take over all of the slaves, to replace their enforced loyalty to their masters with enforced loyalty to himself...and to use them to punish those who had tormented him over the years. What else had happened to Millicent apart from a brutal whipping? There was no way to know, but Elaine could guess – and realised that she didn’t want to know.

  Kane’s laughter echoed out over the city once again as the former masters of creation fell on their faces before him. He could do anything to them and they knew it, from simply destroying them to turning them into slaves themselves. Elaine watched Millicent as she fell on her belly and shuddered. Maybe Kane wasn’t mad, not in the sense that Prince Hilarion was mad, but he’d gone too far. The temptation he’d offered his daughter had overwhelmed him and turned him into a monster.

  She started to back away, heading away from the Arena. Direct attack would be worse than futile; it would reveal to him that she was still alive, still armed with the knowledge that he’d given her. But it wasn’t enough to stop him. For all she knew, there was nothing that suggested how she could deal with him, even to hold him off for a few seconds. Prince Hilarion had been tricked into wasting most of his enhanced power, but Kane wasn’t that maddened. He could blink her out of existence merely by snapping his fingers.

  But there was another possibility. Kane had discovered the Witch-King’s own book, the one that contained the darkest of his spells. Surely there had to be something there, something she could use to match him and stop him. She’d already resisted the temptation to abuse her power – and the knowledge that she’d had crammed into her head – and she could do it again. It didn’t seem a very safe possibility, but it was all she could think of. If she could match his power, perhaps she could kill him before he destroyed the entire city – and the world.

  Daria caught her arm as they slipped past a half-ruined building and nodded towards a figure lying in the darkness. Dread had been flung away from Kane when he’d first started to reveal his true nature, only to crash down outside the Arena and be trapped when the building had been knocked down by one of Kane’s earthquakes. Elaine did her best to help Daria move the rubble, revealing Dread’s damaged body. One of his legs had been broken beyond easy repair. His left arm ended in a bloody stump.

  “I...I thought you were dead,” Dread said. Elaine felt an odd feeling in her chest as she realised that he’d cared. Was that what it was like to have a genuine father? “I should have realised that you wouldn’t die so easily.”

  “Kane is my father,” Elaine said, bitterly. The druid
had been right. She’d been better off not knowing the truth. “What happened to the Witch-King’s notebook?”

  Dread looked at her sharply. “Why do you want to know?”

  “I need to use it,” Elaine said, and explained her plan. It was risky to say it out loud – it was impossible to tell just how far Kane’s perception had spread – but there was no choice. “Where did you hide it?”

  “You can’t risk it,” Dread said. He started to touch his leg with his good hand, grimacing against the pain. Elaine felt him work an odd spell, one so delicate that she could never have matched it herself, and his leg slowly repaired itself. “You’ll go mad, just like him.”

  “I have to stop him,” Elaine said. Surely there were words she could use to convince him, but nothing came to mind. “I...”

  “...Will go mad,” Dread said, firmly. He waved a hand towards where Kane was standing, his presence so firmly marked on reality that it could be sensed from miles away. “Don’t you think that he’s mad already?”

  He was right, Elaine realised. Kane was mad, even if it was a different kind of madness to the one that had swallowed Prince Hilarion. The only thing that kept him even remotely balanced was the minds he’d seeded with his own personality...and those were likely to be overwhelmed if he kept absorbing more and more raw power. How long would it be before his bodies started to fail?

  And then a thought struck her. There was one final possibility.

  “I need you on your feet,” she said, helping him up. The healing spell had drained him badly, suggesting that there was a very good reason the druids didn’t use it unless there was no other choice. “I’m going to need your help.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Kane’s presence echoed in her mind as she led the way towards the one part of the city that very few people would enter willingly. The wild magic shimmering through the Blight was deadlier than anything else, except perhaps for Kane himself. Elaine had read hundreds of stories of what happened to people who blundered into the Blight and fell asleep, allowing the wild magic to transform them into monsters. The lucky ones had been allowed to leave the Golden City peacefully; the unlucky ones had been killed by their own families, or the Inquisitors. Wild magic was beyond control, even in the few areas where it pooled naturally; in the Blight, it was effectively poisoned. It would be difficult for anyone to drain it without risking their life, or integrity.

  Elaine slowed as she reached the edge of the Blight, feeling its strange nature somehow countering the endless waves of power from Kane. Kane wanted everyone to respect him – and that demand for respect was slowly becoming a demand for worship. Elaine wondered, as she felt the Blight reaching out for her, if the gods had been necromancers who had become so powerful they’d been completely disconnected from the human world. No one was entirely sure where the gods came from, or what they saw in humanity. And some wizards had definitely believed that they could become all-powerful.

  Tapping the Blight’s power would be simple enough, she knew, provided that she no longer cared about her own survival. She’d worked out ways to drain it before she’d realised that doing so would be far too revealing. Now, she altered the spells she’d designed in her mind, angling them so that they would summon the Blight’s power to her rather than dispel it harmlessly. It would probably kill her to try, but there was no choice. Kane had to be stopped. And if she was partly responsible for what he had become, her own life was a small price to pay to stop him.

  “Stay here,” she urged Daria. The werewolves had been created by wild magic. Daria would be vulnerable to the Blight in ways that wouldn’t threaten a normal human, even a magician. Elaine had never realised just how brave Daria had been to track her down so close to the Blight, but then she hadn’t realised that Daria had been a werewolf. “I need you two to lure him towards the Blight.”

  Dread looked at her, puzzled. “Are you sure you know what you are doing?”

  The honest answer to that was no, but that would only have upset him. “I think so,” Elaine said, carefully. And it was true enough. Whatever happened, she probably wouldn’t last long enough to see what the wild magic did to her. “But you can’t know what I’m doing, not when he might be able to read your mind.”

  “Understood,” Dread said. Meeting someone so much more powerful than himself – and sane enough to be a long-term threat to the entire world – had to have been humbling. But he still took it in his stride. “How long do you need?”

  Elaine hesitated. She honestly wasn’t sure. “Give me ten minutes,” she said, finally. Constructing the spells in her mind was one thing, but summoning them into reality was quite another. Controlling wild magic was difficult, to say the least. Many sorcerers had tried...and even those who had succeeded had escaped horrifically mutated. She remembered Lady Light Spinner’s face and shuddered. Had she tried to tap wild magic to boost her own powers? “Good luck.”

  “And to you,” Dread said, heavily. He took one last look at her, as if he was trying to remember her face, and then started to walk off. “I’ll wait for Daria at the Shipper’s Inn.”

  Elaine watched him go and then looked up at the werewolf girl. “I haven’t been a very good friend, have I?”

  “Well, you could have done more of the washing,” Daria said, dryly. Elaine found herself giggling, despite the tears prickling against her eyes. “Listen to me; you’re not a bad person, not really. And though I know you didn’t want a life of importance, you have handled it well.”

  Elaine knew that she hadn’t, but there was no point in arguing. “Thank you,” she said, and gave her friend a hug. “If...if I don’t come out of this alive...please will you tell Bee that I am grateful for everything?”

  “Of course I will,” Daria said. “And you are going to come out of this alive. And we are going to go trawling for men every night when this is over.”

  Elaine shrugged. “Maybe,” she said. “Just...try not to forget me, all right?”

  Daria’s huge canine-like eyes met hers. “Don’t you dare try to kill yourself out of some misplaced guilt,” Daria said, flatly. “You didn’t ask for any of this.”

  “I know,” Elaine said. It didn’t make her feel any better. “Good luck.”

  “May the gods be with us,” Daria agreed. “I’ll see you soon.”

  She shifted back into wolf form and padded after Dread. Elaine watched her go, feeling a sense of unimaginable desolation slowly overcoming her, urging her to call Daria back so that she wouldn’t walk into the Blight alone. But she held her tongue, even when the werewolf looked back at her, and waved goodbye. Turning, fixing her spells firmly in her mind, Elaine turned and walked into the Blight.

  ***

  At first there was nothing, apart from a sense that the air around her was sick and unwell. The wild magic had seeped into the buildings around where the magicians had conducted their experiments, warping everything into something that seemed increasingly unreal. Doorways seemed to gape open invitingly, suggesting that she could walk through them and into an unknown world; the road seemed to twist and turn through a series of increasingly unstable pocket dimensions. She could hear sounds in the distance, screams and laughter from those trapped within the Blight. They were long dead, she hoped, but their souls remained frozen, unable to proceed to the next world.

  The wild magic seemed to shimmer around her as she approached the site of the old experiments. Buildings seemed to become odd, almost alien, covered with writing that was beyond her ability to understand. Great...entities seemed to brush the surface of mankind’s reality, their thoughts taking on physical form in the midst of the Blight. A scuttling noise alerted her to a giant scorpion-like creature advancing on its prey, a mutated cross between a cat and a dog. Elaine shuddered, unable to tell if the creatures were real or just illusions thrown up by the Blight. The scorpion moved to sting, only to recoil as the cat-dog lunged forward, landed on top of the creature’s shell and started to dig into the gaps with sharp teeth that seemed to
have come from nowhere. Elaine watched the scorpion die and then hurried onwards, towards where the ghosts of the dead necromancers waited for her. She didn’t dare go into any of the buildings, not knowing what could be waiting for her in the darkness.

  She sucked in her breath as she came to the very heart of the Blight, a circle of ground that was absolutely dead and cold. Wild magic grew stronger as lightning began to flash overhead, each one illuminating a scene from the final moments before the Blight came into existence. The wizards cast their spells, pushing themselves to the limit, hoping to develop a form of necromancy that didn’t include murder. A person could recover drained life force if cared for by competent druids. And if necromancy didn’t include murder, was it really necromancy? They’d never had the chance to find out.

  One by one, Elaine started to cast her spells. The wild magic started to slide towards her, a shifting wave as unstoppable as the tide. Magicians had once believed that they could hold back the incoming tide, but the pressure on their wards had eventually caused them to snap, drowning the magicians before they had a chance to escape. Now, Elaine realised as wild magic flickered around her, she was about to die in pursuit of her magic. The only consolation was knowing that Kane was about to die with her.