A Life Less Ordinary (16 page)

“Get onto my back, all of you,” she ordered. She blew another fireball up towards the top of the stairs to make her point. A series of explosions started to tear the building apart. I realised that the stockpiles of alcohol must have caught fire and started to explode. “Hurry up!”

I pushed the men towards the dragon – they had been rooted to the spot, unable to take their eyes off her – and shouted for Cardonel. He abandoned his last victim – a muscle-man whose head had been sheared off by his claws – and came flashing over to us. He helped me climb onto Fiona’s back and then joined me. I clutched at her scales desperately, feeling the pounding heartbeat and heat even though my trousers. A moment later, space twisted around us and we were flying over Edinburgh, gazing down on the castle from high above. It seemed unbelievable that the entire mundane world wouldn’t see the dragon, yet I knew that no one would even notice her.

Cardonel put an arm around me and I found myself sagging against him in relief. We’d made it, barely; we’d freed the slaves. The men looked terrified as they stared down at their city, yet they were…I looked around as it suddenly grew warmer and stared in horror. The two older men, the fathers of their families, had burst into flame. Before I could do anything, they had both burned to ash in front of their sons, their remains drifting out on the breeze. There was nothing left of them, but the smell of burning human flesh.

Fiona seemed unconcerned by the sudden outbreak of spontaneous human combustion. “We’ll drop off your friends at the market place,” she said, slowly, “and then we will go home. You have to face the music.”

I shivered. I wasn’t looking forward to that at all.

Chapter Fourteen

“I would advise being completely honest,” Fiona said, as she settled down in front of the house. The two boys on her back took one look around, saw that they were in the open and ran for their lives. I silently wished them well when they returned to the mundane world, although their lives would have been completely ruined and their fathers were nothing more than piles of ash. The ash shifted as Fiona’s body seemed to twist and she returned to her more normal size, settling on my shoulder like a giant parrot. “The Master will not thank you for lying to him.”

“I understand,” I said. I had hoped that no one would know that I – that we – had tried to free the slaves, but there was no hope of keeping it a secret now. Fiona had come to our rescue after all. I didn’t understand the link between her and Master Revels, yet I knew that they communed in some manner I didn’t understand. Come to think of it, if Fiona could become the size of a bus with very little effort, why did she fly around as a large bird most of the time? “What do you think he will do?”

Fiona twitched her wings, a dragonish shrug. “I imagine that he will not be happy,” she said, as we reached the door. “Beyond that...well, there are a wide range of precedents. If you tell the truth, Dizzy, at least you won’t get into worse trouble.”

Precisely how much trouble I was in became clear as soon as I entered the house and closed the door behind me. My body started to move on its own, walking right towards the study and the single glowing square of light in the semi-darkness that informed me that Master Revels was present within his private room. I wanted to try to resist the pull, but my body adamantly refused to be deflected from its new course. It left me feeling terrifyingly vulnerable – I’d been taught how to resist Compulsion, yet this was different – and helpless. My hand moved to the doorknob, despite my fervent mental struggles, and opened the door. The warm light streaming out of the study seemed to welcome me as I stepped inside and closed the door, standing in front of the desk with my hands at my side. I couldn’t move any further. My breathing seemed abnormally loud in the confined space.

Under other circumstances, I quite enjoyed looking around the study. Master Revels had decorated it in a fashion that seemed to suggest a combination of a serious scholar and a teenage boy. Books, some of them very old and valuable, were scattered everywhere, while toys and magical artefacts of all kinds seemed to be everywhere in the room. It was not a place for visitors. Every chair in the room was covered in piles of books and papers, leaving only one useable seat. I’d tried to move some of the books the first time I’d entered the room, but Master Revels had reprimanded me and warned me never to disturb the order. It was a very strange order, I thought, yet I kept my peace. My own room was far neater, or so I told myself.

I’d never seen Master Revels genuinely angry before, even when we’d been tracking down the missing girls. He looked as if he was having difficulty concentrating on his work, yet he was reluctant to look up at me. I wanted to swallow hard as I took in his face and realised that he was concentrating on calming disciplines, but even that was denied me. The spell that held me frozen, if it was a spell, was beyond my ability to perceive, yet alone break. I’d read about such spells in the books, spells that couldn’t be detected by anyone who had actually become their victim, but I’d never thought that it could happen to me. It had been a stupid thought. In the magical world, anything could happen to anyone. If someone could be turned into a statue just by looking in the wrong dish of cooking supplies, who knew what could happen to me?

“Dizzy,” Master Revels said, finally. I braced myself, as best as I could, for a world-class row. “Tell me something. What were you thinking?”

His eyes narrowed. “I assume that you were actually
thinking
,” he added. “Do you have any idea just how stupid you have been?”

I found myself suddenly able to speak. “Yes, sir,” I said. I didn’t trust myself to say more. After everything I’d been though in the night, which wasn’t over yet, I wasn’t sure if I would start screaming at him or break down in tears. A thousand arguments floated through my mind, the ones I had researched long before we’d snuck down into the basement to free the slaves, but they all seemed pale and weak in the cold light of his gaze.

“I very much doubt it,” Master Revels said, sharply. He crossed his fingertips together and peered up at me. “Tell me; what were you thinking when you decided to follow the half-elf’s lead?”

Surprise broke the paralysis. Master Revels clearly blamed
Cardonel
for everything. The idea of liberating the slaves, convincing me to join him, risking my life and freedom to save a handful of mundane humans...he thought that it had all been
his
idea. I told myself that I wasn’t tempted to let him take the blame. It wasn’t fair to get the half-elf into additional trouble. No one would come to his defence.

“It wasn’t his idea, sir,” I said, as calmly as I could. “It was mine.”

Master Revels blinked at me. “Are you out of your mind?”

I took a breath. “I saw the slaves and how they were being treated,” I said, keeping my voice as level as I could. If I was about to die, or be tossed out onto the streets, or forced to spend the next few weeks as a toad...I might as well go out after saying my piece. “No one could have seen them and not done something to free them from bondage.”

Master Revels didn’t smile. “Do you know how many attempts there are to free slaves by force?” he asked. I shook my head. “There are very few such attempts, Dizzy, so your claim is nonsense. The vast majority of magicians and others in the community would not have risked their lives or their freedom to save the slaves from slavery. Do you dispute that?”

I wanted to tell him that he was wrong, but cold logic suggested otherwise. There hadn’t been anyone else at the club, at least as far as I could tell, who had objected to watching the slaves performing. They had watched the dances and the other entertainments without a care in the world, or a thought for the slaves. I had been the only one.

“You got most of them out of bondage,” Master Revels said, when I said nothing. “Did you not see what happened to the two who signed the contracts?” I remembered the two men bursting into flame and shuddered. “They signed their lives away and those of their families when they signed that contract, Dizzy. They knew what was at stake.”

“They sold their own families into slavery?” I demanded. “Is that even legal?”

“It is perfectly legal in the magical world,” Master Revels said. “They signed the deal, so they were bound by the deal and the deal was enforced by powerful magic, the magic that makes up the borders of the magical world. Their wives and children, at least, will be unaffected. They didn’t sign the contract.”

He smiled humourlessly at my expression. “There are...interests that operate straddling the mundane and magical worlds,” he added. “Those interests focus on mundane men and women who are...shall we say overextended? They offer money and support, with a rather unusual penalty clause. I’m afraid that most of their mundane victims don’t take the clauses seriously until it’s too late and if they cannot make their payments they are sold into slavery, along with their families.”

I shivered. I had learned about loud and flashy magic from Master Revels, but the subtle magical tricks could often be more dangerous. A person who signed a magical contract with his true name – the magicians never shared their real names, choosing to go by assumed names to prevent their true names being used against them – would be bound by it, according to rules laid down by the universe itself. The universe had run out of patience when the two men had escaped and removed them from play. It wasn’t a pleasant thought.

“That’s not fair,” I protested. “Don’t they know what they’re getting into?”

“The world is not fair,” Master Revels said, flatly. “They signed the contracts. They should have known to take them seriously.”

“And they were picked because they
wouldn’t
be able to make their payments,” I said, cynically. “Can’t the Thirteen stop them?”

“They’re not breaking any rules,” Master Revels said. His voice had gone quiet, something I knew to be a bad sign. “And you, on the other hand, broke the rules quite badly.”

I tensed. This was going to be bad. “Do you have any idea what they could have done if they’d caught you?”

He continued without waiting for me to answer. “If they’d caught you, they could have killed you and your half-blood friend and no one would have been able to complain,” he said, sharply. “No one would have stood up in your defence, because you violated their building and stole their property. The Thirteen wouldn’t allow me to punish them for it. Do you understand me?”

I nodded. “And what would have happened,” he added, “if they’d taken you alive?

“They would have been within their rights to enslave you and put you on the stage to replace their lost property. Or, if they felt that you merited worse treatment, they could have sold you to the Elves, or the Dark Cabal, or the Rationalists. The Elves would have amused themselves by taking you apart and putting you back together in the wrong order. The Dark Cabal would have used your body for their research into the darkest of dark magic. The Rationalists would have used you as a living subject for their experiments. They never have enough magicians willing to be dissected while they’re still living. Do you understand what could have happened to you?”

“Yes, sir,” I said, shaking. The fury in his voice was terrifying. “I understand...”

“And, while you were at it, you would have destroyed
my
position,” Master Revels snapped. “Or didn’t you think of that? The Thirteen rely on me to serve as impartially as possible and if my apprentice had been caught stealing property from its rightful owners, it would have made it impossible for me to continue to serve them! My career would have been shattered. I would probably have had to leave Edinburgh and live somewhere else.”

He pressed his hands down on the table. “And then there is Fiona,” he added, tartly. “Did you think about what might happen if she’d been caught and killed?”

I hadn’t thought that anything could stop a full-sized dragon, but I didn’t dare open my mouth. “She would have been cut apart,” Master Revels said, angrily. “You can use dragon skin as a shield against most magical charms. You can use dragon’s blood as a key to unlocking deeper levels of magic within a person’s mind, or opening Gateways to alternate worlds. You can rend down a dragon and use every last particle of its body. You could have gotten Fiona killed because you had to go off on a quixotic rescue mission!”

His voice lowered, back to more normal levels. “I understand how you were feeling,” he said, softly. “I understand, probably better than you think, but you cannot change a world by striking out at the merest injustice. You would need to tackle the underlying problem and that would have been impossible if you’d been killed, or enslaved...”

I felt tiny under his gaze. My body was still locked, but the trembling was involuntary. I had been shouted at before, by my mother before I’d left her, yet somehow receiving a lecture from Master Revels was far worse. I could still feel Fiona on my shoulder and I wanted to pull her into a hug, if only to console me, but I couldn’t move. I found myself hoping and praying that it was over, yet knowing that it was not. It might never be over.

“The good news,” Master Revels said, more calmly. “Everyone who might have seen you is dead. Fiona torched the building so the remainder of the staff were occupied in trying to get everyone out and fighting the fire, rather than coming down to see what was going on. The slaves, apart from the fools who signed the contracts in the first place, are alive. Sending the female slaves to the Sisterhood was a good idea. The Sisters won’t be too pleased to have them bursting in, but they will help them and make sure that they get safely back to the mundane world. The males...well, when they started running, they were on the path that would let them fall back into the mundane world. They will be fine, I hope, now that their fathers are dead.”

His eyes darkened. “Fiona was not entirely unnoticeable,” he added. “That may not be a complete disaster. Dragons have been known to pick fights for unpredictable reasons and Fiona might just have been mistaken for a rogue dragon. I’ll try and spread rumours of a new dragon war just over the horizon, which should help concentrate a few minds.