Vega Jane and the Rebels’ Revolt

by David Baldacci

  Finally, when we heard a tower clock chime the lateness of the hour, I pulled a tiny bottle of dust from my pocket. On the label was the name Amicus Arnold. I used my wand to return the bottle to its full size. Then I looked at the others.

  ‘Ready?’ I said.

  They nodded.

  Petra had her wand out.

  Delph’s hand hovered over the short-handled axe on his belt.

  Harry Two’s fangs were bared.

  The red door opened with a spell cast, and we were inside.

  I assumed that the owners would sleep in the upstairs rooms. That left the downstairs to their slave.

  We passed through rooms that were lavishly furnished and past walls adorned with beautiful paintings. Our feet sank into thick rugs. Our eyes roamed over intricate wallpaper. As a former Finisher at Stacks, I had to marvel at the beauty I was seeing. But the foulness just underneath the surface made all I was viewing remarkably ugly.

  We found the sleeping chamber of Amicus Arnold. It was just off the kitchen in what appeared to be a broom cupboard. He was curled up on the floor snoring softly, his beautiful, spotless livery hanging on hooks on the back of the door.

  I realized with a start that I had seen this bloke before. He was the one who had been trailing behind the couple and caught the item the woman had dropped. He had been slapped for his troubles before I had blasted his ‘masters’ with an Engulfiado spell.

  Harry Two had shown me the best way to accomplish our task tonight.

  I spun my ring around so that we became visible.

  Then I uncorked the bottle, turned it upside down and let the dust sprinkle over the sleeping man.

  It didn’t take long for each particle to be soaked right into him.

  A few seconds went by as Arnold glowed brightly.

  Then he sat bolt upright, blinked and his gaze fell upon us.

  His eyes had come back. They were bright green and alert.

  ‘What the—’

  I held up my wand and said, ‘You’re Amicus Arnold.’

  ‘I know I am.’ He looked around. ‘At least . . . at least now I do. It’s all so muddy. How did I get here? Who are you lot?’

  ‘My name is Vega Jane. This is Petra, Delph and my dog, Harry Two.’

  ‘What the blazes are you doing here?’

  I tried to convey an enormous amount of information as efficiently as I possibly could, talking rapidly. When I mentioned what I had done to his masters in the street, he smiled. ‘I wondered about that. But I guess I was under their . . . their spell thing. The thing is, I don’t remember being . . . magical.’

  ‘Do you remember doing things that were inexplicable?’

  He rubbed his jaw. ‘Well, come to think, yeah. I could talk to my cat. My mum thought I had a fever or something. And I could make a coin spin as long as I wanted it to.’

  ‘There you have it.’

  ‘So you’re saying I was lured on to the train and my magic stolen and I was made a servant to the people who live here?’

  ‘Yes. Look. Your magic was kept in here.’ I held up the bottle with his name on it.

  He slowly traced the letters of his name with his finger.

  ‘Blimey,’ he said, tears creeping to the corners of his eyes. ‘And you came here to save me?’

  ‘You and a great many others,’ said Delph.

  I said, ‘But you must go on being enslaved. For now anyway. Until we send the signal that it’s time to go.’

  He frowned. ‘You really want to fight these . . . Maladons?’

  I nodded grimly. ‘To the death, I expect.’

  Amicus shook his head sadly.

  ‘I would join you, gladly. But I don’t know how to fight. Not with magic.’

  I glanced at Petra and Delph before replying. ‘That’s where we come in. We’re going to train you. We’re going to train all of you.’

  He glanced at my wand. ‘I don’t have one of those.’

  ‘You’ll have a wand,’ I said.

  Petra and Delph looked at me in surprise. I had not told them about that part.

  Amicus Arnold shook his head. ‘Vega, I don’t know if I can pretend to be enslaved now. When I see their faces I – I won’t be able to help it, I’ll turn on them. Punch them, or something. Then your plan will be ruined.’

  ‘You won’t have to pretend.’

  I raised my wand.

  ‘Do you trust me, Amicus?’

  He slowly nodded. ‘Yes, I do, Vega. After what you’ve done for me, I surely do.’

  I performed the spell. He dropped to the floor and fell asleep.

  I touched my wand to his eyes and said, ‘Eraisio.’ Held firmly in my mind was what I wanted to happen. A spell of necessity, as Silenus would say.

  His eyes turned blank once more.

  Having to return Amicus Arnold to slavery was not easy, not after just freeing him. But I had a plan and I had to stick to it. Or else we would all end up as slaves to the Maladons.

  Or dead more likely.

  We left Amicus Arnold and moved on to the next one.

  That night we freed eight people in total, an equal number of men and women. Each was much like Amicus Arnold: grateful, bewildered, uncertain and angry. They all swore to do what would be asked of them.

  After that we retreated to the train station at Greater True. It was morning now but it was not busy. This town was for the elites, and there were not so many of them. As Petra and Delph fell asleep safely hidden behind our invisibility shield, I opened the book that I had duplicated back at the church in True. Using an ink stick, I ticked off the names of the people we had visited and freed.

  Quite a few still to go.

  I hoped we would survive to get to the last name.

  And then, the real danger would begin.

  31

  ONE DEATH

  The next night did not go nearly as smoothly.

  We managed to successfully free a goodly number of people, including a bloke named Dennis O’Shaughnessy who wouldn’t stop kissing me. He just about cried when I had to put him back under a spell until the time was right.

  The next house after O’Shaughnessy’s held an unexpected surprise.

  The little girl I’d seen in the looking glass at Maladon Castle lay on her ragged bed in the bowels of a large house on Needles Court.

  I gasped when I saw her. I had not known her name before. Now I did.

  Miranda Weeks.

  I returned her magical dust to her and she awoke. She stretched out her long thin limbs and then sat bolt upright. I explained what had happened to her. She took this all in, in a way that made her seem mature beyond her years. Then I told her what I had seen at the castle. Her mother and her in the looking glasses.

  I said, ‘We don’t have another person with the surname Weeks on the list. Do you know what happened to your mother? I have her magical dust.’ I drew the bottle from my pocket. ‘I took it when I was at Maladon Castle.’

  She leaned back against the wall. ‘Now that you cleared my mind, I remember.’ She paused, her face screwed up in pain. ‘I heard them talking, these . . . these Maladons.’ She paused again, and I could see her chin tremble. ‘They said me mum died. They said that happens.’ She fought back a sob. ‘They said it didn’t happen often enough. And then they laughed.’

  I could only stare at her, horrified. Petra sat next to her and held her. Miranda wept into Petra’s shoulder as Petra whispered soothing words into her ear.

  Miranda finally stopped weeping, and Petra let her go and stood next to me. She really was the most perplexing person I had ever met.

  I said, ‘Miranda, I promise you that if you trust me, we will avenge your mum, OK?’

  She nodded. I cast my spell, crafted blank eyes on her and turned to leave.

  ‘Petra, what did you say to her?’ I said.

  She looked embarrassed. ‘I . . . I just told her that I was her friend. That I would be there for her.’

  ‘OK,’ I said quietly. ‘Tha
t was very nice.’

  We headed off, my mind still awhirl at the conundrum of Petra Sonnet.

  In the fourth house we visited was a gent named Dedo Datt. I had seen a number of people back in True who looked like him. He was of medium height and skinny, with black hair swept back off his brow. He was, unlike the others, not asleep. He was sitting up in the corner of his little room next to the basement stairs.

  He made no movement when I twisted round my ring and became visible. He said nothing when we sprinkled the dust over him. But when the magic was readily absorbed into him and his eyes were no longer blank, they filled with tears.

  ‘I have waited so long,’ he said, rising and holding out his hand.

  I was stunned. ‘You were waiting?’

  He nodded.

  ‘So you remember what happened to you?’

  ‘I remembered enough to know that I was not who I had become. But I was powerless to do anything about it.’

  ‘You’re magical.’

  He nodded. ‘I knew that. I realized that was why I had been taken – by the Maladons. What is your plan?’

  ‘To beat them.’

  He smiled. ‘That is a very good plan.’

  As we left the house, I said to the others, ‘That shows the Maladons are not infallible. Which is good.’

  The next home was one of the largest we had yet seen. Indeed, so large was it that there were two people here who needed rescuing from their enslavement: Anna Dibble and Sara Bond.

  Like so many of the others, we found them in the bowels of the luxurious home wearing shabby nightdresses, their hair covered with ill-fitting bonnets.

  We sprinkled the dust, and they slowly came around to their stolen pasts, as had the others. But then I looked over at the doorway, only to see someone who I presumed was the owner of the opulent place. He was wearing silk pyjamas and had on an expensive-looking robe with a tassel waistband.

  In one hand was a morta.

  He pointed it at me and shouted, ‘What the—’

  He got no further because Petra said firmly, ‘Paralycto,’ and he froze with the morta still pointed at me.

  ‘Thanks, Petra.’ I studied him leisurely. ‘He’s your master?’ I asked the pair.

  ‘Yes,’ they both said.

  ‘Wrong. He was your master. He no longer is.’

  Sara and Anna looked at each other, and then tears slid down their faces.

  ‘Is he the only one who lives here with you?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s his wife, but you can’t wake her, aye, even if you dropped every plate in the house,’ said Anna.

  I walked around the frozen bloke and then pointed my wand at him once more.

  ‘Subservio.’

  His features relaxed, and I said, ‘Unparalycto.’

  He slumped to the floor, his back against the wall, his eyes staring off.

  ‘Your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Cyril Dudgett,’ he said in a lifeless tone.

  ‘All right, Dudgett, you will remember nothing of this. When we’re done, you will return to your bed as though you had never awoken, is that clear?’

  He dumbly nodded, his puckered eyes puckering even more.

  ‘You own this house?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Who are your masters?’

  ‘I have none,’ he said sharply.

  I smiled at this. The Maladons had done a very complete job making this fool believe his life was his own, though he was as much under their power as he was under mine right now.

  ‘What do you do?’ I asked.

  ‘Do?’ he said.

  ‘In the way of work?’

  ‘I am rich. I don’t have to work.’

  ‘How very lucky you are,’ I said drily. ‘And the source of your wealth?’

  His puckered eyes widened, as though he had never pondered such a question.

  ‘My wealth is . . . my wealth. I have always had it. I am one of the chosen.’

  ‘Chosen by whom?’ I asked.

  Again, he faltered.

  ‘I . . . I am one of the chosen,’ he said again. ‘Aren’t I?’ he added feebly.

  ‘Blimey,’ said Sara. ‘He’s off his noodle.’

  I turned to look at her. ‘His life is an empty one, not even his own. He lives in luxury and never questions anything. The perfect puppet.’

  I turned back to him. ‘Dudgett, do you know anything of the Maladons?’

  ‘I do not know that term.’

  ‘Mr Endemen, then?

  His mouth broadened to a smile. ‘A fine chap. A good man. He’s always visiting us in Greater True. He always makes us feel . . . feel . . .’

  ‘Feel good about yourselves?’ I finished for him.

  ‘Exactly. So very good about ourselves.’

  ‘Because you’re the chosen ones?’ I thought of something and added, ‘Because you’ve earned the right to be . . . chosen?’

  ‘Precisely. You’ve put your finger right on it. Yes. We’ve earned it.’

  ‘And how did you earn it?’

  His smile collapsed along with his features. His mouth opened and closed but nothing came out.

  ‘All right, Dudgett, we’ll leave it at that. Before you go back to bed, I want you to tell Anna and Sara that you’re sorry for what you’ve done.’

  Dudgett turned to them and said, ‘I’m sorry.’

  I looked at Anna and Sara. ‘I don’t care if he didn’t mean it. I thought you just might want to hear it.’

  I ordered him back upstairs and he dutifully went off.

  I put Sara and Anna back to sleep and we set off for another house under cover of the invisibility ring.

  ‘Those blokes don’t know how good they have it,’ said Petra.

  I said, ‘They’ve been fed a pack of lies and given stuff so they’ll be nice little pets for the Maladons. Their minds have been taken over. Their lives are not their own. They’re really slaves like the others, only they don’t know it either. I wouldn’t call that having it good. Would you?’

  ‘I guess not. But they have food and a roof over their heads and nice clothes and servants. Plenty of money. They don’t have to work.’

  ‘Right, plenty of stuff,’ I replied. ‘The only thing missing from their lives . . . is a life.’

  ‘But what’s the point to it all?’ asked Petra. ‘Why bother choosing blokes and making them better off than anyone else?’

  Delph said, ‘Well, it’s sort of what we was talking about, isn’t it? They play one off against the other, like. Like Virgil said. Create a pretend enemy so they have something to hate. It’s a way to show those from True, and through them, all others living about in the country, that people can live better. That things can improve for folks. Those in True, brainwashed though they might be, can look at the rich from here and say, “See, that could be me if I work hard and keep on the dutiful path. I can reach the promised land,” so to speak. It makes life seem fair somehow.’

  ‘I think you’re exactly right, Delph,’ I said. ‘When my grandfather said the most bitterly awful place of all was one that Wugs didn’t know was as wrong as wrong could be, he could have also been talking about this place.’

  We ventured to the next name on our list and did that one plus nine more.

  The following night we did ten more. And the next night the same.

  We had just returned to our hiding place in the bowels of the train station when we saw that the room we’d been using looked like it had been searched. We had left nothing here that was important, but it was still unnerving that someone had located this spot and gone through it.

  ‘We’ll have to move, I reckon,’ I said dully, for it was quite late and I was knackered, as we all were.

  We packed up our few belongings and set off to find a new hiding place down there.

  It was eerily quiet and so very dark that I was tempted to use my wand to provide illumination.

  The second I did, a spell shot over our heads, barely missing us. It hit the wall inste
ad and left a good-size, smoky hole.

  I cried out and instinctively ducked.

  The others tethered to me did the same.

  Another spell shot out, lower this time. Had we remained standing, we would have been goners.

  Flattened to the floor, I looked around to see where the spells were coming from. All I could see was darkness.

  I lifted my wand and was about to utter an incantation when Delph gripped my hand and shook his head.

  ‘Let me,’ he whispered.

  He drew from his pocket a small ball. I recognized it at once as the same one that Astrea Prine had used to help train me on the Rejoinda spell. I’d had no idea that Delph had kept it.

  I watched as Delph put the ball on the floor. He whispered, ‘Keep your eyes peeled and get ready.’

  He gave the ball a little push and it rolled off. Once it was past the shield of invisibility, it hadn’t gone more than a few inches when a bolt of light hit it, destroying it.

  Petra and I pointed our wands at the source of the light and uttered our Impacto spells.

  We heard a gasp and a crash.

  We all leaped up and charged towards the sound.

  A Bowler Hat was lying under a pile of rubble. I supposed our spells had hit the wall, and the collapse of the stone had buried him under it.

  I had also supposed that he was unconscious or even dead.

  As it turned out, he was neither. What he was, was dangerous still.

  He exploded out of the rubble with a slash of his wand and a wordless incantation. Then he pointed his wand towards us and a light shot out. I knew he couldn’t see us because of the invisibility shield, but the path of the spell was so broad that it caught us up in a whirlwind of sheer force and hurled us off our feet.

  The impact with the wall I hit was so hard that I was momentarily stunned.

  When I rose, the bloke was staring right at me. He was seeing me!

  What the Hel.

  I looked to my left and right and saw Petra, Delph and Harry Two slowly regain their feet. The impact must have broken the magical tethers. I looked down at my ring. It had moved round my finger. Before I could move it back the Bowler Hat roared, ‘I’ve got you now!’

  He cast another spell that I barely evaded.

  Petra shot a spell at him but he effortlessly blocked it.