Trial By Fire (Schooled in Magic Book 7)

by Christopher Nuttall

  “Nothing,” the Grandmaster said. He looked uncertain for a long moment, then shrugged thoughtfully. “It could be a sex-specific charm, perhaps, or...or you may simply be more sensitive to certain types of magic than others.”

  He cleared his throat as he turned back towards the Dark Fortress. “If nothing else, this is an excellent lesson in the importance of understanding where your talents lie,” he added, absently. “If you don’t have a gift for certain kinds of magic, you’ll never be as good with them as those who do.”

  Emily rolled her eyes at his retreating back - she’d heard the same thing over and over again, from just about every tutor at Whitehall - and then followed him, feeling a dull unease in her breast she wasn’t able to suppress. The visions could have been images of her greatest fears, plucked from her mind, but there had been a reality about them that chilled her to the bone, as if they were real on some level. And yet, she knew they could easily have been enhanced with magic, just to make sure she had the right reaction to them. She pushed the thought aside and clutched the snake tighter, promising herself she wouldn’t be either of the doppelgangers. Aurelius shifted around her neck, then relaxed.

  The Dark Fortress loomed up in front of them, a brooding mass that dominated the landscape...and yet seemed petty, somehow, compared to the Inverse Shadow. Emily felt the rune on her chest grow warm, warning of the presence of subtle magic, as they walked closer, studying the exterior of the building for a way in. She couldn’t help comparing it to a palace, rather than a fortress; it didn’t look very secure. Indeed, some of the upper levels were clearly crumbling into ruins. But with a necromancer in residence, very few would dare to enter without permission.

  And who in their right mind would want to visit? she asked herself, as the warmth in her chest grew stronger. Shadye would use anyone who visited as a source of power.

  “There,” the Grandmaster said, pointing at a blank stone wall. “Can you see the doorway?”

  Emily peered at the wall, gritting her teeth as the rune grew warmer. Her chest hurt as she forced her eyes to look past the magic, past the aversion wards designed to keep her from seeing something right in front of her, but she kept going. The world seemed to shimmer, then snap back into place, revealing an open door right in front of them. There was a final burst of heat from the rune before it faded so quickly, it almost felt cold.

  “I can see it,” she said. She rubbed her chest, feeling somewhat frostbitten, then took a step forward. Nothing moved to block her. “Is it safe to enter?”

  “Good question,” the Grandmaster said. He drew a wand from his belt, and held it in front of him like a divining rod as he walked through the door. “There are a handful of odd wards here, none of them interlocked. I’m surprised they’ve lasted this long.”

  Emily nodded as she followed him through the door and into the darkened chamber beyond. Wards could be lodged within stone, but they rarely lasted more than a year without the sorcerer renewing and replenishing them. Shadye had been powerful, staggeringly so, yet he’d lacked the skill and experience of the Grandmaster or Void. His wards might have been crude, rather than subtle. They might well not have lasted long after his death.

  She looked at the Grandmaster’s back as a thought struck her. “Could someone else have put up the wards?”

  “It’s possible,” the Grandmaster said. “Void might have returned to the Dark Fortress, after Shadye’s death. Few others would have dared.”

  Emily felt a twinge of...something. She hadn’t seen Void for over a year; she’d written to him, after the events in Cockatrice, but received no reply. Had he been busy searching Shadye’s fortress now he knew she would be visiting, or had he been preoccupied with something else? Or...had he decided she was no longer worthy of his attention? He might have saved her life, but everyone she’d met had warned her, in no uncertain terms, that he couldn’t really be trusted. It wasn’t something she wanted to consider.

  “Cast a light globe,” the Grandmaster ordered. “Let’s see what we find.”

  Emily obeyed, casting the spell into the air. The globe took shape and form, casting an eerie light into the chamber, but dimmed rapidly, as if something was draining the magic from the spell. Emily blinked in surprise as the globe started to die, then hastily pushed more magic into her spell. The light brightened, but started to dim again. And then it flickered before it went out completely.

  “Unfortunate,” the Grandmaster observed. He dug into his pockets and produced a Hand of Glory, which he lit with a spell. Emily shuddered; the severed human hand had had the fingertips removed and replaced with charmed candles, which glowed with an eerie - but stable - light. “Take this and hold it in front of you.”

  The Hand of Glory felt clammy against her bare skin, but whatever had drained the light globe didn’t seem able to drain the Hand of Glory. Emily held it high and looked around, frowning in puzzlement as she had a good look at the chamber. It was bare and barren, as if it had been abandoned long ago; pieces of debris lay where they’d fallen from the roof, while dust lay everywhere. Shadye had never bothered to hire housekeepers, the irreverent part of her mind noted; indeed, he’d clearly not been concerned with his personal comfort. It couldn’t have been a very pleasant place to live.

  “This way,” the Grandmaster said, leading her through the door at the end of the chamber. It led to a cold stone corridor, as dark and silent as the grave. “Keep a sharp eye out for traps.”

  Emily nodded, feeling ice spread through her body as the darkness rose and fell around them. The walls were bare stone, but the floors were covered in skeletons. Shadye’s servants, she asked herself, or the remains of his victims? Some of them looked to have been kneeling, in the last moments before they died, while others had been broken and smashed, pieces of bone lying scattered on the stone ground. How had they decayed so quickly?

  She hesitated, then asked the Grandmaster a question. “Why was Shadye expelled from Whitehall?”

  “Crimes against his fellow students,” the Grandmaster said, shortly. “We caught him torturing First Years and expelled him.”

  He didn’t seem inclined to say anything else, so Emily kept her mouth firmly closed as they walked through another empty chamber, then a third. Shadye hadn’t been a packrat, Emily noted, nothing like herself. For all of his power, his life had been consumed by the desperate quest for sustenance. He’d lurked in the Dark Fortress, raided the Allied Lands for people he could drain to keep himself alive and...nothing. If he hadn’t been a mass murderer Emily might almost have felt sorry for him.

  He made his choices, a voice in her head said. It sounded very much like Lady Barb. And he had to live with the consequences.

  But if he hadn’t, Emily answered, mentally, I would never have come to the Nameless World.

  She felt a twinge of guilt at the thought, which she pushed aside as they walked into another corridor. This one was long and dark, but at the end there was an eerie green glow. A crystal hung from the ceiling, casting light over the scene. The Grandmaster started to walk towards it, but stopped. Moments later, Emily felt her head swimming and she walked straight into the wall.

  “An interesting trick,” the Grandmaster observed as she stumbled back. “Not a particularly subtle one, but effective. We can’t walk up without having our senses scrambled, which will send us straight into the walls - or worse. And we can’t dispel the charm without being a great deal closer.”

  Emily nodded, and tried to walk up the corridor again. This time, she found herself falling to the ground, so dizzy she could no longer remain upright, before crawling back to the Grandmaster on her hands and knees. She had the feeling she would have been fine, if she’d kept her eyes firmly closed, but she couldn’t do that without leaving herself vulnerable. And yet...

  “You could destroy the crystal,” she said, slowly.

  “It would provoke a reaction,” the Grandmaster said. “Probably...”

  He hesitated, then looked at her. “I could stee
r you through the charm, if I used your body as a puppet,” he said. “I’d be steering you from the outside...”

  “No,” Emily said, flatly. Shadye had used her as a puppet three years ago, and the experience still gave her nightmares. To have someone moving her arms and legs without her control...she trusted the Grandmaster, but she wasn’t about to let him be her puppeteer. “I...”

  She stopped as a thought struck her. “I could dispel the charm if I was much closer, right?”

  “Standing next to it,” the Grandmaster confirmed.

  Emily nodded, then - before she could have second thoughts - uncurled Aurelius from her neck and placed the snake on the floor. Aurelius sent a stream of discontented thoughts to her - Death Vipers didn’t like dust, it seemed - and then looked at the crystal. The images he sent to Emily were odd, like seeing through warped lenses, but she could see the path to the crystal.

  “You need to blind and deafen me,” she said, without looking at the Grandmaster. “It’s the only way to avoid being overwhelmed.”

  The Grandmaster gave her a sharp look - such hexes were banned at Whitehall, on pain of severe punishment - but jabbed a finger at her. Emily shuddered as the world went black and silent, then concentrated on the images from the snake. It was hard, so hard, to keep her mind focused with panic yammering at her, screaming that she should cancel his spell, but somehow she held herself together long enough to walk towards the crystal, guided by the snake. As soon as she was standing close to the charm, she cast the dispersal spell. Her eyes snapped back to normal, while the crystal lost its light.

  “Well done,” the Grandmaster said. “Very well done.”

  Emily beamed with pride. “I...”

  The world went dark. For a moment, she thought the blindness spell had reasserted itself, then she realized she was somewhere else, somewhere both dark and familiar. She opened her mouth to call out to the Grandmaster...

  ...And then froze as her stepfather walked into the light.

  Chapter Three

  “YOU WORTHLESS GIRL,” HE SNARLED. “Can’t you do anything right?”

  Emily could only stare at him, feeling her entire body trembling. Her stepfather looked larger than she recalled, his meaty fists pounding the air in front of him as he advanced towards her; no, she was smaller. She looked down at herself and realized she was barely a child of ten, chewing helplessly on her long hair and wearing second-hand clothes she’d bought or begged for herself from the charity shops. But she’d been an adult of nineteen...

  Her head swam. She’d been with the Grandmaster, hadn’t she? Or had she imagined everything? Her stepfather strode up to her, thrusting his face right into hers and breathing horrendous fumes of alcohol into her mouth. She cringed as he caught her arm, then shoved her to the floor. It felt solid - too solid - under her body.

  “Waste of fucking space,” he snapped. He loomed over her, glaring down. “Why I adopted you I will never know. You should have been a boy. A boy might have been fun.”

  Emily swallowed hard to keep from throwing up. He was there. He was always there. There was no point in looking to her mother for protection, not when her mother spent most of her life crashed out on the couch, watching TV and drinking heavily. Her stepfather could do whatever he liked to her and no one would do anything to help. A feeling of pure hopelessness overcame her, forcing her to curl into a ball...

  “Get up,” her stepfather snarled. He reached out, grabbed the front of her shirt and hauled her to her feet. “Wasting all your time in fantasies when there’s real work to do.”

  He slapped her across the face, hard. “Thinking you’re Harry fucking Potter, a magical little princess just waiting for the chance to go to your real parents,” he snapped. “Your father abandoned you, princess, and left you here with your worthless piece of trash drunkard of a mother. You’re pathetic! You waste your life in fantasy when you have work to do.”

  Emily staggered, her mind screaming at her. It was real, wasn’t it? She was older, much older, than the child she seemed now...and she had all the memories to prove it. But they felt translucent, as if they were nothing more than childish fantasies. She was suddenly unsure of anything beyond the fact that she was trapped in the room with a monster. Desperately, she looked around and saw her old living room, her mother lying on the couch and stoned out of her mind. Empty bottles of cheap wine lay everywhere...

  ...She’d gathered them up, when she’d been much younger, and taken them back to the shop for a handful of coins...

  The memory was so strong it shocked her. No one had raised an eyebrow at a nine-year-old girl handing back empty booze bottles. No one had really given a damn, yet...

  Her stepfather slapped her, again. “Get to cleaning up the mess, you worthless bitch,” he ordered. The force of the blow sent her staggering back to the floor, tasting blood in her mouth. “I want this room clean by the time I get back from the bar...”

  He knew about my dreams, Emily thought. How did he know?

  She looked down at her hands. They weren’t childish any longer. Her chest was growing - her stepfather leered, but she ignored him - and she felt older. How had he known? She wasn’t in the habit of sharing anything with him, certainly not her innermost fantasies. He couldn’t have thrown the suggestion that she had magic in her face unless he’d known she had dreams of magic...

  “You’re not real,” she said, as she stood. She looked down at herself again and saw the shirt and trousers she’d worn in the Nameless World. No, the shirt and trousers that she was still wearing in the Nameless World. Her memory clicked and she put two and two together. “You’re just a Nightmare Hex.”

  Her stepfather snarled at her, his eyes moving over her chest and leaving trails of slime over her breasts, then lunged forward. Emily snapped into a fighting crouch automatically, silently thanking Sergeant Harkin for his lessons, then caught his arm as he took a swing at her. He seemed smaller, somehow, as she pushed him aside before she knifed her hand into his eye, where he was vulnerable. She felt something squish under her finger; her stepfather jumped backwards, screaming in pain and rubbing his eyes desperately. Emily watched blood spilling from his eye, too much blood to be real, and she knew, beyond all doubt, that it was an illusion.

  “You’re definitely a Nightmare Hex,” she said. She’d seen one before, in Blackhall, and it had almost killed her. “You’re not real.”

  “Bitch,” her stepfather swore at her. “I am real.”

  Emily smiled. “Then why are you shrinking?”

  She forced herself forward as he glared at her. “You’re a monster,” she said, as coldly and precisely as she could. “You dominated my life ever since you married my mother. You overshadowed my life, you made me scared of everything, you destroyed my hope. You...”

  Her stepfather, now the size of a small dog, stumbled backwards. “I’m not scared of you any longer,” Emily said. She’d met Shadye, and Mother Holly, and Aurelius’s namesake; her stepfather was nothing but a petty bully. Her later enemies had been threats to the entire world. “And I will not allow you to dominate my life any longer.”

  She lunged forward...and her stepfather vanished in a flash of light. Emily blinked - the light had been bright enough to hurt - and looked around. She was standing in the chamber, looking at the dead crystal; the Grandmaster was standing beside her, his face worried. A twitch from below told her that Aurelius was waiting for her. She bent down and picked up the snake, wrapping it around her wrist. It hadn’t been real.

  “I wouldn’t have expected a Nightmare Hex to last so long without constant renewal,” the Grandmaster said. “They’re fantastically complex pieces of work.”

  Emily nodded, then blinked as she realized the Grandmaster had to have seen his greatest fear, too. How else would he have known what she’d encountered?

  She looked at him. “What did you see?”

  “Whitehall coming apart around me,” the Grandmaster said, shortly. There was something in his voice, an edge,
that warned her not to ask any more questions. “What did you see?”

  Emily shuddered. “My stepfather.”

  The Grandmaster gave her a long look, then turned to lead the way into the next chamber. “I believe the remaining defenses have been dispelled,” he said. “The magic running through the building has twisted. It may or may not have accepted you as its new mistress, but it shouldn’t pose a danger any longer.”

  Emily followed him, casting a new light globe as she moved. This time, the globe behaved normally. She puzzled over it for a moment, and looked around. The room was barren, save for a throne perched in the exact center of the chamber. It was made of cold iron, she saw as she walked closer, and decorated with runes that looked scorched and broken. She touched the rune at her chest, in anticipation of pain, but felt nothing. Whatever magic had been stored within the throne had faded long ago.

  “Shadye would have used it to help control his powers,” the Grandmaster said, studying the throne. “I don’t think it would have done much, though. He held too much power within his wards to be easily controlled.”

  “I thought runes only worked with subtle magic,” Emily said. “Can a necromancer use runes?”

  “They would have bolstered his ability to resist the madness, I expect,” the Grandmaster said. He pointed to a handful of broken runes, then gave her a sharp look. “Those runes enhance feelings of stubbornness and determination. Shadye was literally manipulating his own mind.”

  Emily shook her head as the Grandmaster stepped into the next chamber. There were spells, countless spells, to help someone change their behavior, but she had been warned - in no uncertain terms - that they tended to have nasty side effects. Shadye might have kept his stolen power under control, yet they might have cost him his reasoning abilities or stolen his free will. And something self-inflicted - she touched the rune between her breasts again - was far harder to remove than something imposed by an outsider.

  But it kept him going, she thought, grimly. He never stopped. Every little mistake was worked into his plan.