Necropolis

by Christopher Nuttall

  The ground shook as the Movers removed the obstruction, sending pieces of debris flying into the sky. Gwen grabbed Olivia and pulled her out of the cathedral as the swarm of undead burst out of the stairwell and started heading out onto the streets. Their yellow eyes reflected a dark purpose, something lacking in the last set of undead she’d seen. Behind their eyes, she fancied she saw the Tsar looking back at her. Olivia moaned, then fainted as the whispering grew louder. It had to be a form of Talking, Gwen noted, as she threw her daughter over her shoulder, but one that only worked for the undead or those who had a special connection to them.

  They used to think that Talkers had larger brains, she thought, remembering the Darwinists from London. They’d believed that magicians were superior to non-magicians, with the precise degree of superiority among magicians determined by whoever was doing the talking at the time. Lord Blackburn, a curse on the man, had believed Charmers were superior to everyone else. Does something happen to the undead to make them Talkers?

  There was a crash as two magicians landed in front of Gwen, hands already lifted to direct magic towards her. She braced herself, knowing she was in no state for a fight, then blasted magic directly towards them. As she had expected, they used their magic to shield themselves, but the light show blinded them for a few crucial seconds. Gwen used the time to infuse more magic into the ground, detonating an explosion right underneath their feet, blowing them into pieces. Neither of them had bothered to form a protective bubble, knowing that few threats could get around their normal protections. But they hadn’t realised who Gwen actually was.

  She hesitated, then reached for her magic and hurled herself into the air, carrying Olivia with her. It was risky – there was at least one Mover left in the cathedral – but she needed to put some distance between herself and the undead. She looked down as she climbed higher and saw a steady stream of the undead making their way out of the cathedral and heading into the streets. She could hear screams in the still night air as the undead encountered homeless people hiding in alleyways and bit them, adding to their growing numbers. Bangs and crashes suggested that the undead were breaking into homes and infecting the owners.

  A disarmed population, Gwen recalled. It was unlikely Russian civilians could offer any real resistance to the undead, even if they hadn’t been sleeping. But then, regular weapons weren’t too effective against the undead either. Shotguns and machine guns were the only firearms that made a real impression, unless the shooter was an excellent shot. It was far better to fight them with flamethrowers or even swords and axes. They don’t stand a chance.

  She dropped down to a rooftop and carefully put Olivia down. The young girl was sweating, as if she was feverish, despite the temperature, reminding Gwen of their first encounter, months ago. Olivia had reacted badly to the undead that Master Thomas had unleashed, providing the first clue to her powers. She’d been able to stop those undead, but somehow Gwen doubted it would be so easy this time. There was a malign intelligence infesting the undead of Moscow.

  Gwen sighed. “I haven’t been the best of mothers, have I?”

  Olivia showed no reaction. It had only been seven months, more or less, since Gwen had adopted her. High Society had been stunned; they knew nothing about Olivia’s powers, so they’d assumed it was a joke. They would have implied that Olivia was Gwen’s bastard daughter if it hadn’t been alarmingly obvious that Gwen would have had to give birth at nine or ten. It hadn’t stopped some of them hinting that Olivia was actually Lady Mary’s daughter, but that hadn’t lasted long. There were other ways to introduce a bastard daughter into High Society without doing something that had been bound to cause comment.

  But Gwen had wanted to protect Olivia. It was the only way, she had known, to ensure that the Demonic Powers Act wasn’t invoked to justify Olivia’s execution. Necromancers had to die, according to the law. They were just too dangerous to keep around. Now ... she shivered as she heard screams echoing out over the city. It was quite likely that others would insist that Olivia be executed anyway, no matter what Gwen or King George said. And it would be very difficult to convince them otherwise.

  We could run, Gwen thought. She had assumed an obligation, one she would have honoured even if she hadn’t come to love the girl. There are plenty of places we could hide.

  She shook her head and carefully picked Olivia up and slung her back over her shoulder, then reached for her magic. The throbbing in her temple suggested that she might have pushed herself too far, but there was no other way to get back to the palace. As tempted as she might have been to leave Lady Standish to the tender mercies of the undead, she wasn’t about to leave Sir Sidney and Raechel to be eaten, then rise again as monsters. Or Romulus, Janet and even Lord Standish. Besides, she had the feeling she’d need their help to get out of the city.

  Moscow looked darker than before as she rose high over the city, although she knew it might just have been her imagination. There were shouts and screams, but she couldn’t see much of anything, apart from darkness. She peered down into the shadows, then turned and forced herself to fly towards the palace. Something warm dripped from her nose as she flew, touching the edge of her lips. When she tested it, she tasted blood.

  A light flared up below her. Gwen looked down, just in time to see a line of soldiers running towards the disturbance. There was probably a curfew in Moscow, she guessed, with anyone caught outside after hours being summarily arrested. London had endured curfews too, once upon a time, although only rarely. It had impeded commercial activity, the city councillors had argued, and won the case. Unfortunately, it had also made it easier for criminals to go out and about unimpeded.

  She shivered, again. This time, it was nothing to do with the cold. Those young men had no idea what they were about to encounter – or just how badly they had been betrayed by their own leaders. She wanted to shout a warning, but she just didn’t have the words. And besides, they might shoot at a strange girl floating in the sky. She watched them run towards the screams, silently praying that they would see the undead in time to fall back and summon help, then turned and kept powering her way towards the palace. Her head started to spin as she got closer, a faint light shining up from the palace rooftop. In her dazed state, it took several moments to realise that it was a skylight and that she was about to crash right through it.

  Desperately, she wrapped magic around herself and Olivia as she touched down and felt the glass shatter under her weight. It was all she could do to keep from losing her grip and allowing gravity to reassert itself. Dimly, she heard screams as she plummeted to the floor and landed hard enough to hurt, somehow shielding Olivia from the worst of it. Her legs buckled – it didn’t feel like she’d broken anything, but it was hard to be sure – and she had to draw on magic to remain upright. The trickle of blood from her nose had become a flood.

  “Gwen,” an aghast voice said. Lady Standish sounded shocked, as if she didn’t quite believe her eyes. “What is the meaning of this?”

  Gwen fought down the urge to giggle inanely as she carefully lowered Olivia to the floor and straightened up. Her vision had blurred, but now she was no longer drawing on her magic to fly it was clearing up rapidly. Magic seemed to heal her automatically when she wasn’t using it for anything else, which was lucky. She’d never really managed to master the healing powers she knew she should have.

  “This ... this means war,” she said. Her head was still throbbing. “This building is about to be attacked.”

  She felt Lady Standish grabbing her by the collar. “Make sense, girl,” she snapped. “What have you done?”

  Raechel came up behind her Aunt. “She’s not a maid, Auntie,” she said. “Let go of her!”

  Gwen wanted to roll her eyes as Lady Standish, perhaps for the first time, really looked at Gwen. Her dress was covered in blood and gore, more blood was dripping from her nose and she’d lowered a young girl to the ground. It was astonishing just how much the aristocracy could miss when it didn’t suit th
eir preconceptions.

  “Let go of me,” she ordered. She pushed the aristocratic tone her mother had taught her into her voice as she met Lady Standish’s eyes. “I am the Royal Sorceress.”

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Impossible,” Lady Standish said. “I refuse to believe ...”

  “It is true,” Sir Sidney said. He seemed to be taking everything in his stride. “Lady Gwen?”

  “The Tsar has unleashed a horde of undead,” Gwen said. More detailed explanations could wait, she decided. “They’ll infect all of Moscow, then come for us.”

  “I see,” Sir Sidney said. He turned to face Lord Standish, who had been staring at Gwen, his mouth opening and closing soundlessly. “Henry, I am assuming command of the mission, under authority vested in me by the Privy Council. I do trust you’re not going to be tiresome about this?”

  “Now hold on, wait a minute,” one of the other representatives said. Gwen hadn’t even bothered to learn his name. “You can’t just claim authority ...”

  Sir Sidney reached into his jacket and removed a cream envelope, which he opened and passed to the representative. The representative read it, then paled. Gwen had seen emergency orders before and knew they tended to warn that anyone who tried to object would face a full investigation when they returned to London. Maybe an aristocrat couldn’t be stripped of rank or station, but Lord Mycroft and the Duke of India could ensure that they never served the British Empire again, in any capacity.

  “Sidney,” Lord Standish said, finally. “What about the mission?”

  Gwen wiped blood from her nose and glared at him. “The mission has failed,” she snapped, furiously. “I don’t even know why the Tsar was so keen to bring us all to Moscow! But right now, he’s gone mad and has turned on his own people. He’ll come for us soon enough!”

  She caught sight of Talleyrand and smiled as she realised the Frenchman, for the first time, looked to have been caught completely off-guard by events. The last time they’d met, Talleyrand had seemed to take everything with Gallic sangfroid, even his exposure and forced removal from Britain. Now ... he had to have missed her completely, Gwen thought, with a moment of vindictive amusement. Finding Gwen among the maids had to have shocked him.

  Good thing I was never alone with him, she thought. She knew Talleyrand’s reputation for chasing skirts. He might have noticed something if he’d removed my cap.

  “He’ll come for you too,” she added, looking over at Talleyrand. “He’s gone completely mad.”

  “I understand,” Sir Sidney said.

  He turned to face one of the Russian officers and started a long conversation in Russian, clearly trying to get the Russians to work with the foreigners to defend the palace against the undead. They wouldn’t discriminate, Gwen knew, but the Russians didn’t seem so keen in getting involved. The Tsar might spare them ... Gwen shook her head at the thought. He was completely insane – and besides, he loathed the aristocracy as much as the peasants and serfs in the field. They’d plotted his death often enough, after all. Now, he could make them his undead slaves.

  “But you can’t be the Royal Sorceress,” Lady Standish said. Horror was written over her face – horror, and a kind of wilful disbelief. “You just can’t ...”

  Gwen felt her temper snap. She’d endured the woman’s behaviour for what felt like years, even though she knew it had only been two weeks. Raechel might have been a brat at times, but she was nowhere near as bad as her Aunt. And Raechel hadn’t ordered Gwen beaten by the Butler. Magic rose up within her, demanding an outlet ... it would be so easy to lash out at Lady Standish, to humiliate her in front of the entire room. And yet ...

  She threw caution to the winds, then levitated Lady Standish up into the air and flipped her over, allowing her dress to fall down to cover her face. “I don’t have time to deal with you any longer,” she said, as Lady Standish started to wave her legs desperately. Gwen wasn’t sure why she bothered. Her undergarments were almost as modest as her dress. “You will find a quiet place to wait for us to deal with the undead – or be eaten, if we fail. Or I will do something to you to make sure you do nothing else.”

  It was hard to put the woman down on the ground gently, but somehow she managed it. Lady Standish seemed to be in shock, utterly astounded that someone had managed to humiliate her – and that no one had come to her aid, not even her husband. Gwen forced herself to remain stable, then waved to Romulus. The Butler strode over and bowed, his dark eyes glittering with suppressed amusement. Gwen hadn’t been the only person to find Lady Standish unbearable.

  “Take her to her bedroom, put her inside and lock the door,” Gwen ordered. The last thing she needed was Lady Standish whining to her husband, trying to convince him to defy Lord Mycroft’s orders. “Then come down and assist Sir Sidney.”

  She turned to Raechel as Romulus half-carried Lady Standish towards the door. “Help me with Olivia,” she said. She felt too tired to levitate anything, even someone as slight as Olivia. “We need to get her to bed.”

  “I’ll take care of matters down here,” Sir Sidney said. He seemed to have managed to convince some of the Russians to join the foreigners, although others had started to make their way out of the ballroom. “Come back down when you’re ready.”

  Gwen nodded, then lifted Olivia and – with Raechel’s help – carried her out of the door and up the stairs. Raechel looked as if she had a thousand things she wanted to ask, but she held her tongue until they reached her bedroom, whereupon she burst out with a series of increasingly hysterical questions. Gwen smiled inwardly, then carefully placed Olivia on the bed and picked up some food from the table. After everything she’d done, she was ravenous.

  “Wait,” Raechel said. “Shouldn’t we be saving food?”

  “It probably won’t matter,” Gwen said, with the added thought that she needed to build up her reserves as quickly as possible. “This building isn’t really designed to serve as a fortress.”

  “Oh,” Raechel said. Her face was suddenly very pale. “What’s going to happen next?”

  Gwen sighed, stuffing a piece of bread and cheese into her mouth. “I don’t know,” she said, as she washed it down with a glass of water; alcohol and magic didn’t mix, even if she hadn’t needed to keep a clear head. “We should be looking for a way to get out of the city.”

  Raechel looked over at her. “Can’t you fly us out of the city?”

  “I couldn’t carry everyone,” Gwen answered. She thought about it, briefly. Maybe if she carried two people at a time, she could get them out ... but it was far too likely the Tsar and his magicians would intercept them en route. “We might have to fight our way through hordes of undead.”

  She finished the food, cursing herself for still feeling hungry, then started to undress, leaving the bloodstained dress on the floor. “I need to wash,” she said, as she strode naked into the bathroom. The water in the tub was cold, but a little magic fixed that problem. “See if you can keep an eye on Olivia.”

  Raechel followed her, then stopped at the door. “Who is she?”

  “My daughter,” Gwen said. She wanted to close her eyes and sleep in the warm water, but she didn’t quite dare. “It’s a long story.”

  “I see,” Raechel said. “And just what happened tonight?”

  Gwen sighed and started to explain, wondering – grimly – just what the Tsar was doing. The infection pattern, if nothing else, was alarmingly well-understood. And it wasn’t as if the Tsar was short on victims. Judging by what they’d seen as they drove into the city, Moscow had been attracting immigrants from the countryside for years. The Tsar might even have been covertly encouraging the trend, just to make sure he had thousands upon thousands of warm bodies for his mad plan. But there was no way to know precisely what he’d had in mind at the time.

  “If one undead bites a living person,” she concluded, “there will be two undead. If they then bite two more living people, there will be four undead. And then sixteen, two hundred and fif
ty-six, and then ...”

  She shook her head, wishing she had time to sleep. “The figure of undead within the city will rise rather sharply,” she said instead, standing up and allowing the water to drip from her body. Raechel was seeing more of her than anyone ever had, her tired mind noted, apart from her maid. Even Sir Charles had never seen her naked. “We will be in deep trouble by the time the undead come for us.”

  Raechel frowned. “Then why did the Tsar bring us here?”

  Gwen shrugged. “Perhaps he intends to issue demands,” she said, although it sounded unlikely. Simone was the only Talker in the building and Gwen suspected she didn’t have the range to contact the other Talkers in Paris, not if she’d been reading minds. The Tsar could make whatever demands he liked of Lord Standish or Talleyrand, but they would have no way to communicate them to their respective governments. “Or perhaps he just wanted to make sure we didn’t go talking to his aristocrats until the plan was unstoppable.”

  She used a towel to dry herself, then walked back into the bedroom and glanced at Olivia. “I need you to keep an eye on her,” she said, as she poked through the wardrobe for something suitable to wear. She eventually settled on a riding outfit that looked rather odd, but at least was less constraining than a dress. “When she wakes up, offer her food and then a bath. But don’t try to undress her.”

  Raechel looked surprised. “Why would I try to undress her?”

  “One of the maids tried,” Gwen said, recalling Olivia’s first days in Cavendish Hall. “Olivia panicked and kicked her in the throat. I don’t think she liked the thought of being undressed by someone else.”

  She kept the rest of her thoughts to herself. There were things she had never dared ask her adopted daughter, mainly for fear of the answers. A young girl on the streets would certainly be angry if someone tried to undress her, but Olivia had reacted very badly and almost killed an innocent maid. Was there some further trauma buried in her mind or was she simply unused to the army of servants in noble households?