A dull gong rang throughout the school, followed by immediate panic. Emily glanced around in alarm as students jumped back from their chairs while tutors stood up and ran from the hall. She looked over at Aloha and saw that her roommate was panicking too as a second gong echoed in the air.
“What ... ?”
“That’s the emergency gong,” Aloha gasped. “The school is under attack!”
Emily stared at her. No one had told her what to do if the school was attacked. “What do we do?”
“We’re in Martial Magic,” Aloha reminded her sharply. “We have to get to the Sergeants!”
“Attention, all pupils,” the Grandmaster’s voice said. It echoed through the school, drowning out the sounds of panic. “The school is surrounded by a hostile army. All first to fourth year students are to return to their bedrooms, unless they are taking either Martial Magic or Healing. Martial Magic students are to report to the Sergeants; Healers are to report to the Infirmary. Fifth and sixth year students are to report to their common rooms where tutors will issue further instructions.”
There was a long pause. “The wards remain intact and the enemy does not seem to have the ability to break them,” the Grandmaster added. “Do not panic. Whitehall has stood against attacks before and will continue to do so as long as the Allied Lands endure.”
Alassa exchanged a long glance with Imaiqah. “Do you mind if I share your room?” She asked. “I don’t want to be alone.”
Emily hid her smile as she pushed away the remains of her breakfast and headed for the door, following Aloha towards the armory. The Sergeants were passing out weapons, encouragement and the occasional lecture to students who had some training in defending themselves. Neither of them looked very happy.
“Look,” Aloha said quietly.
Emily followed her finger and stared at the mirror showing the view outside the castle. Outside the wards, Whitehall’s worst nightmare was taking on shape and form. A vast army of monsters were standing there, waiting. But what were they waiting for?
“Take your weapons,” the Sergeant ordered. “Right now, this building is under siege!”
Chapter Forty-Two
“H ...” ALOHA SWALLOWED AND STARTED AGAIN. “How many of them are out there?”
Emily shook her head, unable to answer. The school was surrounded by monsters, each one more horrific than the last. There were Goblins and Orcs, armed to the teeth, backed up by human crossbreeds with all kinds of non-human creatures. Humanoid snakes rubbed shoulders with walking bees, which stood beside crawling octopus-like monsters. She caught sight of a medusa before hastily looking away. Who knew how far their petrification ability could reach?
“Thousands,” Sergeant Harkin said quietly. “Perhaps many more.”
Aloha looked over at him. “How did they get so close without being detected?”
“Magic, I suspect,” Harkin said. “A simple cloaking spell might have hidden much of their army assuming they stayed out of our wards, or the wards around Dragon’s Den. Or they might have ...”
He shook his head. “Not that it really matters. The important detail is that they’re here.”
Emily swallowed hard when she saw a giant snake’s head lifting above the colossal army. A single humanoid figure was perched on the creature, one hand holding a long black staff. It had been months since she’d last seen Shadye, but the necromancer was unmistakable. He looked older than he’d looked when they’d first met - when he’d kidnapped her for use as a human sacrifice - yet she could still sense the aura of raw power crackling around him. The necromancer had come to lead the attack on Whitehall in person.
“That’s a necromancer,” one of Aloha’s teammates said. He sounded as if he were going into shock. None of them were trained to the point where they could fight a necromancer and hope to win, if such a thing were possible. “What’s he doing here?”
Emily remembered how she’d tricked the Orcs into fleeing and wondered if she could do something similar with Shadye. But the Orcs, according to all the books, were not very bright, while Shadye was both brilliant and insane.
On the other hand, necromancers weren’t known for being patient. It was possible that Shadye could be convinced to throw himself against the wards rather than wait for the defenders to sally out and try to drive the necromantic army away from the walls.
“Get the archers up to the battlements,” Sergeant Harkin ordered. “I don’t think we can kill the scumbag, but we can certainly try.”
And it might annoy him to the point that he does something stupid, Emily thought grimly.
Aloha’s teammate poked her in the ribs, none too gently. “You’re meant to be a Child of Destiny,” he sneered. “What do you think he’s doing here?”
Emily scowled at him, thinking hard. The locals took the safety of their wards for granted, but their confidence seemed fully justified. Whitehall was built on a ley line crossroads and the school’s main wards were linked directly into the nexus, a vast source of mana that far exceeded anything any magician could hope to produce on his own. Even a necromancer wouldn’t be able to knock the wards down by brute force. It was possible, she supposed, that Shadye might intend to crack them one by one, but the Grandmaster and his staff would be monitoring them, ready to counter any such move. And even trying would expose Shadye to the ravages of wild magic.
A thought struck her and she shivered, looking over at the Sergeants. “Can you ... can you shift the ley line nexus somehow? Or excite it to the point that it explodes?”
Surprisingly, it was Sergeant Miles who answered. “Ley line nexuses are woven into the soil,” he said. “I have never heard of one being moved, anywhere. It isn’t even theoretically possible.”
He paused, considering. “You could agitate one to the point where it produces a magical upsurge, but you’d have to be inside the wards to do it. And even a necromancer wouldn’t be able to survive the surge of magic. The results would be disastrous for him if he tried.”
“Unless he thinks he can survive the upsurge, somehow,” Emily said darkly. Shadye had been sacrificing humans for years, both for power and simple survival. “How much power can a necromancer channel?”
“Nothing a necromancer could do would come close to the sheer level of wild magic that would be released, if the nexus were upset,” Sergeant Miles assured her. “A foolish boy tried it, back during a civil war between a King and his bastard son. He intended to destroy his father’s castle. Instead, he ended up wiping out half the kingdom.”
“It went up like a volcano,” Sergeant Harkin put in. “Hundreds of thousands of lives were blotted out in a split-second.”
Emily nodded slowly, looking back towards the monstrous army–and the dark figure waiting patiently on top of his snake. Shadye had to have something in mind, but what?
“Maybe this is the diversion,” she said after a long pause. It was her best guess. “He might be dispatching an army towards Dragon’s Den or somewhere else, using his force here to pin us down while he achieves his real objectives.”
“It’s hard to imagine anywhere else as important as Whitehall,” Sergeant Harkin said, “but you might be right. Still, we are going to be bringing in troops and combat sorcerers through the portal, once the Allied Lands get off their duffs and start dispatching reinforcements. We’re not going to let that army stay there forever.”
“Maybe that’s what he’s counting on,” Emily said. “Us leaving the safety of the wards and fighting him in the open.”
The sun rose higher in the sky as the defenders watched the necromantic army and waited for the other shoe to drop. Emily found herself moving from defensive position to defensive position, hastily learning what she needed to know to take part in the defense if the necromancer managed to crack his way through the wards. But Shadye seemed to be doing nothing, apart from waiting; he didn’t even seem to be trying to hack into the wards and dismantle them. It was strange; every book she’d read had suggested that necromancers wanted
instant gratification and used their powers to get what they wanted, without hesitation. And yet Shadye was waiting for something ...
“Maybe he wants to surprise us by attacking at nightfall,” she suggested, when the remaining Redshirts assembled to continue their training. A book she’d once read had talked about the “looming volcano” theory of military surprise, suggesting that some defenders had simply grown used to looking at the attackers as they waited on one side of the border. Then they had been surprised when the attackers suddenly switched from passively waiting to thrusting into the defender’s territory as hard as they could. And the Germans had won the Battle of France, if not the war. “Or maybe he thinks we’ll forget they’re out there if he waits long enough.”
Jade rubbed his nose. “They’d have to be insane,” he said, dryly. “Those creatures stink!”
Emily had to smile. He was right. Every time the wind changed, it blew the stench towards the castle, which caused the defenders to recoil. Emily had wondered if Shadye had come up with the concept of poison gas, or biological warfare, but when she’d mentioned it to the Sergeants she’d been informed that the wards would keep out anything that was actively dangerous. That had left her wondering about the concept of chemical weapons that were really two separate–and individually harmless–compounds mixed together, which could probably pass harmlessly through the wards and combine to do great harm on the other side.
Yet this world knew little of chemistry. It was unlikely that the thought would occur to anyone, apart from her.
Or so she hoped.
Shadye presumably had spies in the Allied Lands. The books she’d read had recorded countless cases of outright treason, either by willing traitors or spell-controlled victims, and he might know that Emily had already started introducing concepts from her old world into this new one. In fact, in some ways, he’d be in the best place to deduce what she’d done; he already believed her to be a Child of Destiny, and he knew where she’d come from. What if he’d managed to bring something else from her world? An atomic bomb, perhaps, or maybe a shipload of AK-47s? But would they work in this world?
He’d have to tell his servants what he wanted them to bring, Emily thought, and prayed that she was right. How could Shadye know enough about atomic bombs to describe them to his servants? And how could he detonate one if he did manage to bring it to this world?
Once, years ago, she had read a fantasy novel by an author who had never bothered to think through the implications of her universe. The writer–who had been little more than a glorified romance hack–had actually argued that life in a medieval world was better than life in the modern universe. She’d insisted that progress was death and that introducing new ideas had destroyed the fabric of human society. The whole concept of working to uplift a primitive society towards modern technology had been outrageous to her.
But that author had never had to live in such a society. How could she really understand what it meant to live there unless she’d tried?
As it stood, Emily did live in such a society–and as much as she loved her new world, it needed improvement. Technology made the lives of ordinary people so much easier, back home, and it had helped to create a more democratic world. Who knew what it would do here? If it had the chance, that is.
The hours dragged on. Classes were cancelled, of course, while the older students worked hard to prepare the castle’s defenses. Sergeant Harkin ordered Emily to take a break from training and get something to eat, then to relax. The younger students had been driving each other crazy as they waited for the necromancers to attack. Unsure of what to do or where to go, she ended up picking up bread and cheese rolls in the kitchen and then heading to the library. She needed to do more research.
Besides, reading books would distract her from thoughts of Shadye.
“They won’t get their hands on my books,” the librarian said as she entered the darkened room. He and his female assistant–or fellow librarian; Emily had never been quite sure of the relationship between them–were frantically preparing additional defensive wards for the library. “I intend to seal them in a pocket dimension in the event of the school being destroyed. The Librarian’s Guild will recover them and ensure they don’t fall into enemy hands.”
Emily nodded. Necromancers had raw power, but they often lacked proper training. If they had access to more information, they’d probably become far more dangerous–which was why the librarians had to be so careful. No librarian could ever countenance destroying books outright–she had a feeling that was why there were so many forbidden texts stored in Whitehall–yet they did have to do whatever it took to keep them out of enemy hands. The risk of losing the key to a pocket dimension was preferable to seeing them used by Shadye and his ilk.
The library itself held a handful of students, but Emily ignored them as she walked to the shelves and started to hunt for anything that touched on magical oaths. One day, she promised herself, she would have to introduce the Dewey Decimal System or something comparable to Whitehall; the system they used made little sense even to the librarians. There were times when she suspected that books were just put back on the shelves at random, either by students or the librarians. The former was understandable, if annoying; the latter should know better. Even the simple Library of Congress system would work better than the one they used at Whitehall.
She had to look carefully for anything on the fairies, even though she assumed they were related to the Faerie, who had built the Dark City. There seemed to be a surprising shortage of curiosity about them in the world, which seemed rather odd; this world had fought a war with the Faerie that had almost destroyed the human race. Or maybe the books were all stored in the restricted section ... it was quite possible that someone would be idiotic enough to try and duplicate the powers that birth had granted to the god-like Faerie, but she was sure that Whitehall would rather they did their experiments a long way from the school.
Finally, she pulled out a book on magical oaths and walked over to one of the tables to read it.
The book–Magical Oaths and Those Who Swear–was slim, as if the writer hadn’t wanted to list every known example in history. Emily opened it and skimmed through the first few pages, swallowing the urge to swear out loud when she realized that the oath she’d sworn to the fairies had merged with her magic. The writer danced around the subject, almost as if he found himself reluctant to come straight out and say what he meant, but eventually she managed to put it all together. Failure to keep the oath, as she had already deduced, would mean death, or worse. It all depended on just how she acted. If she refused to carry out the oath, she would die; if she deliberately created a situation where she couldn’t carry out the oath, she would die.
On the other hand, if she couldn’t carry out the oath because of something that wasn’t her fault, the magic wouldn’t kill her. But she couldn’t lie to herself, or to the magic. There was no way to avoid the oath deliberately.
Very few of the examples were reassuring. A young witch had sworn to marry her suitor when she returned from Whitehall, only to fall in love with another magician while studying in school. She’d tried to avoid the oath by using a love potion to convince her former lover to marry a girl from the village, but the magic had clearly considered that an attempt to evade the terms of her oath. The poor girl had died, badly. A stepfather had sworn to treat his adopted daughter like his own child. The book didn’t know exactly what had happened next–or the writer hadn’t dared write it down–but he’d died, seemingly at his own hand.
She had to smile at one of the other examples. An elderly warlock had a small retinue of slaves, all bound to him by magic; he’d made his son swear to free them upon his death. But the son had tried to evade his oath, only to end up bound by the same servitude spell that had gripped his father’s servants. That too had ended badly. Shaking her head, Emily finished skimming though the book and nearly swore out loud–again–when she realized what she’d done. She’d effectively written the fa
iries a blank check, to be called in at any time. They could demand a favor from her and she’d have to give it to them, or die.
Or worse.
The thought made her blood run cold. They could ask for anything. Maybe they’d demand that she prevent humans from hunting them and grinding their bones for potion components, or maybe they’d demand that she integrate them into human society. Or ... it could be anything, and she would have to comply. Or die. She swallowed, cursing her own mistake, even though she knew there had been little choice. They could demand anything of her ...
If it is too much, I will allow the oath to kill me, she thought bitterly.
She pushed the thought aside and looked down at the book, wondering why no one was asked to swear an oath abjuring necromancy. Or could necromancers evade the terms of their oaths without suffering fatal consequences? She glanced through the book again until she guessed the answer from the writer’s half-hearted hints; magicians regarded being asked to swear such an oath as insulting, dangerously so. Even if Whitehall had introduced such an oath as part of the entrance conditions, other magical schools might not agree ... and the more powerful students, or the ones who were offended by the presumption that they might be tempted by necromancy, would go elsewhere. It might even tempt other magicians to mess with necromancy to prove they could handle it ...
... And that never ended well.
Emily stood up, mulling over the terms of the other oath, the one not to reveal anything about the fairies to anyone else. So far, no one had asked her how she’d managed to recover enough magic to attack the Orcs and rescue the Redshirts, but she knew the question would be asked soon enough. And she had the feeling that trying to lie to the Sergeants–or the Grandmaster–would be futile. Perhaps she could just write the answer down ... no, that would be dangerous. The oath would know she was cheating because she would know she was cheating. She’d have to come up with something better.
The sun was setting as she walked back down to the armory. Outside, the monsters were still waiting–and so was Shadye, still standing on the giant snake. Emily shook her head in disbelief. No one she’d met could be so patient, not when there were plenty of other things to do. The Sergeants took one look at her and ordered her to bed. They’d call her, they promised, if the school came under attack.
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