Bookworm II: The Very Ugly Duckling (14 page)

Johan looked up. The ceiling was cracked and broken, tiny lines radiating outwards from where the table had struck the stone. A sudden horrified image of doing that to a
person
ran through his mind; they’d be smashed into a bloody pulp, rendered utterly unidentifiable. If Jamal had been able to put him in danger with lighter spells, the gods only knew what
Johan
could do now.

“I ...” His voice sounded shaky, even to himself. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

“You shouldn’t have been
able
to do that,” Elaine commented. She took the notepad, ripped out the page she’d written on and stuffed the paper into her robes. “You see, that spell was a fake. A normal magician could cast it all day and the workbench wouldn’t even have moved a millimetre. But you made it work.”

Johan scowled. “I thought it was illegal to write down fake spells,” he said. “Or isn’t that a rule that applies to Privy Councillors?”

Elaine didn’t seem to take his jibe personally. “That law has never been honoured,” she answered, instead. “Every sorcerer who comes up with his own spells does
something
to them to make it difficult for others to work out how to cast them. Quite a few fledging magicians have run into trouble trying to cast such altered spells, particularly ones designed to rebound on the caster if the spell isn’t fixed first. But this ...”

She tapped her pocket meaningfully. “A real magician would have
known
that it wasn’t a real spell,” she explained. “He would probably have reported me to the Inquisition. But you ... you managed to cast it.”

Johan felt himself torn between indignation and exhilaration. On one hand, he was insulted at the trick she’d played; on the other hand, he knew more about his abilities now than he’d known before she’d given him the fake spell.

“Thank you, I suppose,” he said, grudgingly. “What do we do now?”

“I think you’re going to have to work on control,” Elaine said, “which isn’t going to be simple because your magic is different from everyone else’s magic. Most of the exercises I was taught aren’t likely to be helpful for you. What do you actually
feel
when you cast a spell?”

Johan frowned, trying to put his feelings into words. “It ... it just
happens
,” he said, softly. “I cast the spell ... and it works.”

Elaine’s frown matched his. “You don’t feel any
effort
?” She asked. “No
strain
. No sense of actually having to
work
?”

“No,” Johan said. “It just
happens
.”

“Strange,” Elaine said.

Johan could understand. Jamal had pretended that his magic came to him effortlessly, but Johan had seen him staggering home after a particularly gruelling session at the Peerless School, so drained that he’d almost forgotten to be unpleasant to his powerless brother. His younger siblings had cast their first spells ... and then collapsed into sleep, unable to even keep their eyes open a moment longer. For Johan to do it so effortlessly ...

A thought struck him. “Could I have been doing magic all along without noticing?”

“I don’t see how,” Elaine said, after a moment’s thought. “There are some magicians who wind up so badly wounded that all of their magic is diverted to heal them, leaving none for them to use to cast spells, but they were still
magicians
. You were never a magician until suddenly you were.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why
then
?”

“I don’t know,” Johan said. “If all I wanted was to be free of Jamal’s spell, wouldn’t it have happened a great deal earlier?”

“Precisely what I was wondering, particularly given the damage to your body caused by repeated transfigurations,” Elaine said. “If you had something in you that lashed out, why did it wait so long to work?”

She reached out and squeezed his hand. “What else did he do to you?”

Johan didn’t really want to talk about it, even to her. And he wasn’t really sure that he wanted the mystery solved either.

“I need to know,” Elaine said. Johan gave her a sharp glance. Had she read his mind? He’d heard that there were magicians who could do that, although he’d never met one. Jamal certainly couldn’t, or he would have used the ability to torment Johan all the more. “It will be painful, but it has to be discussed.”

“Once, then,” Johan said, feeling the age-old bitterness welling up inside him. Was he
never
to be free of Jamal’s torments? “He turned me into frogs, snakes, rats and all kinds of objects. He cast compulsion charms on me and forced me to steal food from the pantry or humiliate myself in front of the maids. He hung me upside down with levitation charms and floated me up and over the city.”

Elaine blanched. Johan could practically read
her
mind. The other charms, as unpleasant as they were, could be countered, but if Jamal had lost control of the levitation charm Johan would have plunged to certain death.

“If you had magic, such experiences should have brought it out of you,” Elaine said. There was a low note of pure anger in her tone. “But floating you into the air ... that could have been really dangerous. Your magic might have disrupted his, sending you plunging down towards the ground. Didn’t your father have anything to say about it?”

Johan shook his head. “I used to think that he would tell Jamal off after I got my magic,” he said. “And then ... and then he didn’t seem to care.”

“It isn’t uncommon to use pressure to try to get magic to develop early,” Elaine said. “But doing it like that ... your success could have killed you.”

She shook her head. “And as to why you developed magic now ... we’ll just have to keep working on it.”

Johan nodded, reluctantly. In truth, he didn’t really want to question the miracle.

“I think,” Elaine started, and then stopped. “Wait a moment ...”

She cocked her head, clearly listening to a message from the library’s wards. “That’s interesting,” she said, after a moment. “Your sister is here, asking for you.”

“
Charity
,” Johan said. “Why ...?”

“The more pertinent question is how she knew to come here,” Elaine commented. “Vane is speaking to her now, but she’s being quite insistent. Do you want to see her?”

Johan hesitated. “I don’t know,” he admitted. His father had political power ... did he have enough to force his way into the Great Library against the wishes of the Head Librarian? Or could he bring pressure to bear on Elaine? “What would happen if I said no?”

“Vane would tell her to go away,” Elaine said. “There’s no pressure to talk to her if you don’t want to talk to her.”

“You have sisters?” Johan asked.

“No,” Elaine said. “Just powers of observation.”

Johan scowled down at his hands. Charity was almost tolerable ... and he wanted to show off a little, to gloat to the family that had mistreated him for so long. But at the same time he wasn’t sure he wanted to see
any
of them again. He didn’t
have
to be part of the family, not when he could cut all ties and vanish. They couldn’t keep him prisoner now.

“I don’t know,” Elaine said, into the silence. “But I do think that we need to find out just what they know.”

“I’ll talk to her,” Johan decided. “Can you ask her to join us here?”

“She can meet us in one of the study rooms,” Elaine said, standing up and walking towards the door. “I don’t want her to see this room.”

Johan followed her through another series of winding corridors – the Great Library was a maze, designed to make it harder for intruders to find the books they wanted – and into a small room designed for students. There was a table, a handful of chairs and a bookshelf with a handful of well-known reference textbooks chained to the shelf. Johan grinned as he realised that the users would be able to put them on the table, but not take them out of the room.

“People keep trying to take them out of the room and it’s too much hassle to spell them to remain here,” Elaine said, when she saw him looking at the books. “I can stop people taking them out of the library, but not moving them from room to room. And we
still
have problems with students hiding books behind the shelves or charming them to be impossible to find without the right counter-charm.”

“Particularly before exams,” Johan guessed. “Can’t you do something to stop them?”

“We try,” Elaine said. “Anything unique can be charmed to remain in one place, but newer books are often harder to protect ...”

She looked up as the door opened again. “And here is your sister,” she said. “Do you want me to stay here?”

Johan found himself torn. Part of him wanted Elaine to stay, part of him wanted to talk to Charity in private ... if there
was
such a thing in the Great Library. It was one of the most heavily warded buildings in the Golden City. In the end, he shook his head. Elaine nodded in agreement and walked past Charity, out into the corridor. The young girl who had shown Charity into the room smiled brightly at Johan and then followed Elaine, leaving Charity and Johan alone.

Charity looked ...
worried
, Johan realised. She’d been sweating over her exams, but this was worse ... worse than she’d been when she’d feared that her last boyfriend wouldn’t be good enough for her father. Johan felt a cold shiver running through his body; what, he wondered, had scared her so badly. And how much did she
know
?

“Johan,” she said. Surprisingly, she enveloped him in a hug. “I’ve been so worried. And it was all my fault!”

“I don’t see how,” Johan said. “What happened to you?”

“Jamal’s been arrested,” Charity said. She sounded too shocked for it to be a joke. “The Inquisitors came and took him away!”

“And not before time,” Johan said, unable to hide his amusement. His brother had worked hard to kill all sibling loyalty he might have otherwise felt. “I’m sure father is really annoyed about it.”

“He is,” Charity said. “And he was worried about you too.”

“I doubt it,” Johan muttered. His father had never expressed any worry about Johan personally, only the family name. If a dark wizard
had
captured him, his father would have been more concerned about the threat to the
powerful
members of the family. As if there
was
any threat. Away from his family, Johan would have been just another mundane. “How long is Jamal going to remain in jail?”

“No, don’t tell me,” he added. “Father’s going to go to the Grand Sorceress, spin some sob story about Jamal having been overworked and convince her to let him go free, no doubt with an apology for wasting his time. Who
cares
about some mundanes when
Jamal
is the one at risk?”

“He’s your brother,” Charity pointed out. “And this could really upset the family’s position ...”

Johan fought down the urge to sneer, despite his growing anger. “And why should I care?”

“The family gave you a life,” Charity said. “You owe father respect, if nothing else, and you should not undermine his position.”

“How
can
you take his side?” Johan demanded. “You know what he did to me, what Jamal did to me ... you
rat
, you ...”

Charity shrank. She shrank so rapidly that her clothes fell down around her, hitting the ground where she’d been. Johan stumbled back in shock, staring at where his sister had been standing. A moment later, a rat nosed its way out from under the robes and stared up at him.

He found his voice, somehow. “Charity?”

Chapter Twelve

“She was prepared to offer me quite a high bribe,” Vane said. “I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t agreed to let her see him.”

Elaine scowled. Bribes were an accepted part of public life, but
she
didn’t like them, if only because she had never been wealthy enough to bribe anyone. And she would not have been forgiving if any of her subordinates had accepted a bribe. Vane, at least, was smart enough to realise it.

Her scowl deepened as she puzzled over a different question. How had Charity known where to find Johan? The hospital hadn’t alerted his father, even after he’d finally been identified; Elaine had issued orders to keep all information related to Johan under tight control. And much of it was in her skull anyway. The hospital staff were all bound by their oaths ... she muttered a curse under her breath as she realised the answer. Zacharias could have told Johan’s father about him, without breaking his oaths. After all, Johan was still technically a minor and thus his father had the right to be informed about his condition ...

Bastard
, she thought, although she wasn’t sure what she could do in response. The druid hadn’t technically violated his oaths, so the hospital would be reluctant to punish him – and besides, Johan
was
a minor. Old enough to be declared an adult, but his father would have been unlikely to make the declaration, not when Johan had once been largely helpless in the magical world. Far better to keep him as a permanent and powerless dependent.

She was still thinking dark thoughts when the wards sounded the alert.
Something
had happened inside the study room. Elaine turned and ran towards the door; Vane followed her, clearly worried.
She
might not be as closely tied to the wards as Elaine herself, but she had enough access to know that something was wrong.

Elaine gripped her wand as she pushed open the door ... then stopped as she saw a rat on the floor, with Johan cowering back in shock. The rat had to be Charity, she realised in horror; whatever they’d said to one another, it had provoked an angry reaction from Johan. And probably an unexpected one, considering his condition. At least he hadn’t
intended
to turn his sister into a rat. But that would be small consolation for his victim.

“I didn’t mean to do it,” Johan stammered, when she touched his shoulder. “It just ...
happened
.”

Like everything else
, Elaine thought. She reached out and touched the rat with her wand, casting an analysis charm. It had seemed too dangerous to let Johan play around with transfiguration spells, but seeing that it had happened by accident ... well, she might as well take advantage of it. The results seemed odd; the rat seemed to be a
real
rat, but there were still human mental patterns in the rat’s brain.