Casper seemed to think about it, just for a second. “I was trying to toughen him up,” he said, finally. “I thought I was doing the right thing.”
“Everyone’s different,” Emily snapped.
She clenched her fists, feeling a surge of rage that surprised her. She was so sick of hearing that excuse. Bullying was tolerated because bullying made its victims stronger, determined to fight back ... she loathed that logic. And yet, would she have been so determined to learn magic to defend herself if Alassa hadn’t tried to bully her, back in first year? But she’d been lucky, very lucky. Others hadn’t had the same advantages.
“Some people are born strong,” she added, calming herself with an effort. “They’re tough, able to fight; others are physically weaker, but smarter, more able to improve old spells and develop new ones. Knocking them down doesn’t make them stronger.”
“It can,” Casper said.
“And some of them turn into necromancers or find other ways to gain power and set off on a roaring rampage of revenge,” Emily pointed out. How many bullying victims had turned into school shooters? She was surprised the Nameless World hadn’t had a whole string of magic users tearing schools apart. “And still others are broken completely.”
“Then they’re weak,” Casper said, flatly. “And weak magicians have to be weeded out.”
Emily gritted her teeth. The hell of it was that, by his lights, Casper was quite right. A weakling had to learn to stand up for himself. And yet, she knew it was far more complex than he claimed. A lone bully might be simple to beat, if one could wind up the nerve, but a whole society? How many school shooters had felt they were at war with the entire establishment, rather than just one person?
“Caleb is not weak,” Emily said, firmly. “And his discoveries may change the world.”
“They may,” Casper agreed. “And how many of his discoveries are actually yours?”
“We discovered some of them together,” Emily said. “And others were his and his alone.”
She reached out and tapped his wards. “You wouldn’t have the spells to protect yourself without people like Caleb,” she told him. “You owe them.”
“I know,” Casper said.
Emily blinked in surprise at his admission. It wasn’t something she would have expected from him. But she put the thought aside as a distant drumbeat echoed over the city. She sucked in her breath, sharply, as the orcs stepped into view. There looked to be hundreds of them, perhaps thousands ... no, she had to be overestimating them. But there were still a lot of them, compared to the mere handful of humans. Few of the former captives appeared to know how to handle weapons. A couple had even injured themselves.
We’re dead, Emily thought. Her magic was regenerating, but she didn’t know how long it would take. There’s too many of them.
She touched the second battery, knowing it was their last shot against the necromancer. And yet, she wasn’t sure what she could do with it. Balefire wouldn’t be quite so lethal to a necromancer. Perhaps she could cast a powerful ward-eater in the hopes the necromancer’s power would rip him apart. Or perhaps ... she pushed the thought out of her head. The orcs had to be broken, had to be driven out of the city. They had to be forced to flee.
“Watch them,” she ordered, as she knelt and pulled the second battery and valve out of her pouch. “Warn me when they start to charge.”
Casper eyed her, curiously. “What is that?”
“Something Caleb and I invented,” Emily lied, shortly. “Wait and see what it does.”
She cursed under her breath. Letting him see the battery without forcing him to swear an oath not to talk about it might have been a mistake. No, there was no might about it. Casper would see enough to guess at what the battery actually did, then reason backwards to figure out how it actually worked. Or simply try to force Caleb to tell him.
I’ll have to try to force him to swear later, she told herself. And that won’t be easy.
She pushed the thought out of her head as she tapped her fingers against the valve, carefully putting together a half-remembered spell. Sergeant Miles had done his best to fill the gaps in her education, but he hadn’t talked that much about ritual combat magic. He’d probably never expected her to be leading a ritual, not when there were six masters on call. Emily cursed that too, grimly. She wouldn’t be leading one now, but the effects would be much the same.
“That’s a very small staff,” Casper observed. He was dividing his attention between the orcs and Emily. “What do you intend to do with it?”
“It’s not quite a staff,” Emily said. She rose, clutching the battery to her chest. The orcs were howling now, psyching themselves up for the charge. She could sense magic behind them as the twisted humans cast protective spells. “It’s something new.”
She walked forward until she was standing in front of the makeshift barricades. It was clear, just from looking at them, that they wouldn’t stand up to a charge, not for more than a couple of seconds. And only then if the defenders were very lucky. She told herself firmly that it didn’t matter, that the orcs would never reach the barricade. And she hoped, grimly, that she was right.
Here goes nothing, she thought.
The orcs began to charge, picking up speed so rapidly that she almost panicked, even as she began the spell. Magic surged around her, then blasted through the valve and slammed straight into the orcs. The charging horde disintegrated, exploding into flames; she pushed the balefire onwards, driving it against the twisted magicians. She sensed them die, one by one, as the orcish line shattered, the handful of survivors turning and running for their lives ...
“Gods,” Casper said.
Emily barely heard him. The battery was still blazing power, devastating the city. She could feel the valve shaking in her hand, as if it was on the verge of coming apart. Emily gritted her teeth, holding it together by main force. If it shattered before the battery was depleted ... she wasn’t sure what would happen if the magic started to spew in all directions, but she doubted it would be anything good. The captives might be killed ...
The battery ran dry, the valve breaking up into fragments a moment later. Emily sagged in relief, then hastily disintegrated the remains of both the battery and valve before Casper got a good look at them. If she was lucky, he’d think she’d merely found a way to improve the staff ... but she doubted she would be that lucky. The secret of the batteries was out. And if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t be long before it was.
Casper looked shaken. “What was that?”
Emily shook her head, not trusting herself to speak. Together, they looked over the ruined city, taking in the ashes that had once been orcs and buildings alike. The handful of survivors were fleeing into the desert, clearly hoping it would be safer than facing the Necromancer’s Bane. Emily wondered, absently, just what would happen if they did encounter the necromancer’s reinforcements. Would panic prove contagious? Or would they be quickly killed to keep them from spreading defeatism? She honestly had no idea.
“That was a ritual,” Casper said. He sounded awed. “But you powered it all by yourself.”
“Something like that,” Emily said. She looked at the freed captives, then up at the open doors. They were waiting for them. “Shall we go?”
Casper frowned. “Is he in there?”
“I think so,” Emily said. She understood his puzzlement. Why hadn’t the necromancer shown himself? They’d already damaged his war effort and won time for Farrakhan to be reinforced. Was he waiting for them? Or was he somewhere else altogether? “Let’s go.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
MIRRORS. MIRRORS EVERYWHERE.
Emily inched down the corridor, shaking her head in disbelief. The walls were covered in mirrors, from immense mirrors easily large enough to show her entire body to small mirrors barely large enough to show her face. She could see her reflection a hundred times — a thousand — everywhere she looked. A faint eldritch glow illuminated the school, showing her doors that were
covered in mirrors and classrooms with wall-to-wall mirrors ... she couldn’t understand how anyone could live in a place like this.
“You can use mirrors for certain kinds of magic,” Casper mused. He sounded as disconcerted as Emily felt. “I don’t know much about them.”
Emily nodded. She didn’t know much either. Imaiqah had studied it back in first year, for reasons Emily had never fully understood, but she’d dropped it before second year. Mirrors could be used for magic, yet ... what sort of magic? Void had had a talking mirror, but she’d never seen anything like it outside his tower. In truth, she wasn’t sure if the mirror had talked or if she’d just been talking to a reflection of herself. Given what she’d learned in the following years, either one was possible.
She reached out with her senses again, trying to track down the necromancer. There was an odd magic running through the school, a faint trickle of power that might be holding the building together. She couldn’t get enough of a read on it to tell where it was coming from, but she could sense a dark brooding presence below the school. The necromancer was waiting for them, perhaps watching them as they skulked through the corridors. She knew that Whitehall’s staff watched their charges closely, but she’d never been able to track down or block the spells they used to do it.
At least until I returned from the past, she thought, wryly. She’d picked out the watch-spells while lurking below the school. But I have an unfair advantage.
“He’s down below,” she said, as she tried to think of a plan. The nuke-spell might kill him, but the interaction of the nuke-spell and the nexus point might be disastrous. There was a very real possibility that the blast would be powerful enough to crack the planet in half. And yet, the nexus point was dead. “Do you want to go back?”
Casper shot her an offended look. “No,” he said. “If we can stop him, we have to stop him.”
Emily shrugged as they walked past another set of abandoned classrooms. Her reflection on the other side of the room winked at her. She stopped and stared, but her reflection was utterly unmoving. Perhaps she’d just imagined it. And yet, as they kept moving, it was easier and easier to see flickers at the corner of her eyes. The entire school felt haunted, as if things were looking over her shoulder. She caught herself glancing around nervously, half-expecting to be jumped at any moment.
“This place is creepy,” Casper muttered. He was doing a good job of hiding his own nervousness, his face largely expressionless, but his voice wasn’t exactly steady. “What happened here?”
Emily shrugged. She had no idea. She’d always assumed Shadye would have destroyed Whitehall after absorbing the power of the nexus point. It would have practically elevated him to godhood. And yet, Heart’s Eye had clearly survived, even if the necromancer had somehow purged the school and snuffed out the nexus point. And there was that faint trickle of power ... she reached out for it again, cursing silently. She had no doubt that the building would collapse into rubble if anything happened to that power.
This school is nothing like Whitehall, she reminded herself, grimly. And if all the reports were accurate, they never enjoyed such precise control over their nexus point.
She contemplated the possibilities as they found a flight of stairs, heading down. Heart’s Eye wasn’t layer upon layer of pocket dimensions, unlike Whitehall. It might have survived losing the nexus point. And yet, she found it hard to imagine the school standing without magic. The Nameless World didn’t have the materials or science to build something that looked so flimsy. Perhaps they’d used magic to lock everything into place ... it made as much sense as everything else.
“Mirrors,” Casper said, as they rounded the stairwell. “More mirrors.”
Emily said nothing. The walls were lined with mirrors, the steps were lined with mirrors ... she wondered, absently, if the idea was to confuse students or misdirect enemies. Or, perhaps, to channel magic ... mirrors could be linked together, if she recalled correctly. It wasn’t something she’d studied, not in any great detail. In hindsight, perhaps she should have read Imaiqah’s old textbooks. The nexus point would have provided enough power to overcome any glitches in the spell.
“This place had a nexus point,” Casper said. “How did it fall?”
“There might have been a glitch in the spellware,” Emily said. She hadn’t sensed any wards as they’d walked through the doors. Nothing had barred their way, even though Whitehall and Mountaintop both had spells designed to keep casual visitors from entering the school without supervision. “They could have collapsed without warning.”
Casper frowned. “Is that likely?”
Emily shrugged. “It depends on just how they wove their wards,” she said. She’d heard about elaborate spells that collapsed, when pushed in the right place, but it wasn’t something she’d expect to happen to a school. The vast number of students trying to find ways to get away with skiving would have seen to that. “Or the necromancer might have had someone on the inside.”
“It couldn’t have been Gaius,” Casper pointed out. “He would have been ... what? Twelve when Heart’s Eye fell?”
“Probably not,” Emily agreed, dryly. Gaius had only turned traitor last year. “But there could have been someone else, willing or not.”
She kept her expression blank as they moved further down the stairs. Shadye had used her as his weapon, using blood magic to make her his tool. And it had worked. She still had nightmares, sometimes, about how easily Shadye had made her a slave. Dua Kepala was supposed to be smarter than Shadye, far more cunning. It would have been easy for Dua Kepala to do the same thing to Heart’s Eye. For all she knew, Shadye had copied the idea from him.
The pulsing sense of someone grew stronger, the further they went below the school. It was oddly blurred, as if the necromancer was trying to hide his exact location, but utterly unmistakable. She gritted her teeth, wondering if she had time to craft a Mimic. Maybe, just maybe, she could construct a stripped-down version that would devour Dua Kepala and then tear itself apart. But she doubted she could, without more time than she had. They reached the bottom of the stairs and stopped. It was clear the necromancer was waiting for them.
There were no more mirrors, just a sense of darkness at the edge of her vision. The light seemed faded, as if it were draining away into the shadows. Emily cast a light globe and looked around with interest. The walls were decorated with odd runes, very similar to the ones she’d seen below Whitehall. And yet, there was a difference. This time, some of them were understandable.
A Manavore, she thought, as she touched one of the carvings. The spider-like shape was unmistakable to her, even though Casper must have thought it was an odd mixture of a spider, a crab and an octopus. Beside it, there was a rough outline of the runes necessary to trap and kill a Manavore. Who put those here?
The runes got more elaborate as they slipped down the corridor. Some were still familiar, others were so advanced that she didn’t have a hope of comprehending them without hours or days of study ... or, perhaps, were intended to misdirect guests who didn’t know how to correct their defects. Emily traced out a couple, noticing the absence of magic clinging to them, then dismissed the runes as a puzzle to be solved later. They’d come back, if they won the war. Heart’s Eye could be reopened, its mysteries unlocked. And who knew where they would lead?
She stopped, dead, as the corridor opened up into a vast chamber, a chamber so large that she could barely make out the far side. A tiny stone bridge crossed the chamber. There were a dozen other bridges, above and below their position; below them, there was something that was strikingly indistinct, yet clearly there. She stared down at it, trying to understand what she was seeing ...
... And felt a strong arm catch her, a moment before she tottered off the edge and fell.
“Emily,” Casper said. He sounded panicked. “What are you doing?”
Emily felt a sudden wave of dizziness, followed by shame. Something had pulled at her, dragging her to certain death ... what was it?
It wasn’t compulsion magic, it wasn’t subtle magic ... she looked back, finally understanding what she was seeing. The nexus point itself was calling to her, demanding that she throw herself off the bridge. And then the indistinct demand was gone.
“Thank you,” she said, quietly.
“You’re welcome,” Casper said.
He stepped past her, peering down into the darkness. “What is it?”
“I think it’s the remains of the nexus point,” Emily said. It had called to her ... why? She watched Casper, unsure if he would be suckered over the ledge, but he seemed to be in full control of himself. “It feels ...”
She closed her eyes and reached out with her senses. The last nexus point she’d seen had been a blinding sparkle of light, a knot of overwhelming power ... this one felt like a potential nexus point, rather than anything else. It felt as though something was missing, as though something was gone ... as though there was an absence, a gaping space, where something ought to be. Her senses just seemed to slip around it, as if they refused to accept its existence.
“It gets everyone that way,” a new voice said. It was pleasant enough, a solid tenor yet there was a hard edge to it that chilled her to the bone. “Welcome to Heart’s Eye.”
Emily opened her eyes. Dua Kepala was standing on the far side of the chamber, holding a staff in his hand. She reached for hers and quietly undid the miniaturisation spell, feeling a flicker of relief as a full-sized staff snapped into her hand. Beside her, Casper did the same, one hand moving in a complicated pattern as he cast a protective ward around them. Emily knew it would be useless — a necromancer could break it down with raw power, if nothing else — but she said nothing. Maybe it would make the necromancer overconfident.
She stepped forward, peering into the shadows. Dua Kepala was shorter than she’d expected. Bright red eyes peering at her from under a cloak that spun around him, hiding his body. His eyes were so bright that his face seemed dark by comparison, but she knew it would be skeletal. Necromancers burned up their living flesh as they became more than human. He leaned on his staff as though it was a walking stick, the pose suggesting that he was nothing more than a harmless old man. And he would have pulled it off too, if she hadn’t been able to sense the power surrounding him.
11- The Sergeant's Apprentice Page 33
