Bookworm II: The Very Ugly Duckling (35 page)

Elaine looked up at him, her illusionary brown eyes meeting his. “You would separate yourself completely,” she concluded. “The ties that bind would snap.”

“Sounds perfect,” Johan said.

“You might also end up in hot water,” Elaine added. “For a start, you would disrupt House Conidian’s line of succession. You could be sued on such grounds and I have no idea which way the case would go. Justice would not get a look-in when one side is a powerful patron and the other is a single young magician, no matter how remarkable. You might find yourself indentured to your own father. Except he wouldn’t be your father, because you snapped the ties that bind you together.

“And then you might be in the same position with your new family ...”

Johan held up a hand. “My head hurts,” he said. “Can I sleep on it?”

Elaine smiled. “If you like,” she said. “But my
very
strong advice would be to go for the apprenticeship instead. It would force your father to loosen his grip on you, while not breaking
all
the ties you have with him.”

“I understand,” Johan said, standing upright. Outside, the rain was still pouring down from high overhead. “And thank you.”

He walked into his bedroom, undressed and went to bed, dozing off to the sound of raindrops beating against the roof. In truth, he thought, he really
didn’t
want to be part of the family any longer. But he needed an adopted family, at least until he was twenty-one. Somehow, he doubted his father would leave him alone long enough for him to secede from the family on his own. No, there would be an offer of becoming the Prime Heir ... and pressure to marry, and whatever else his father could devise to control him.

Being Elaine’s apprentice would be better than enduring his father, he was sure. But it was still
limiting
. Elaine wasn’t adventurous enough to leave the Golden City permanently and explore the world ... if, of course, she
could
leave the city permanently. Given her nature, it was possible that the Grand Sorceress would object to Elaine abandoning her post.

He scowled and went to sleep. His dreams were full of fire ...

And then he was awoken by a thunderous crash.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Elaine had been half-asleep when she heard the explosion.

For a long moment, she wasn’t quite sure whether she were dreaming or not. Few of her dreams had been pleasant since she’d picked up a pair of bright red eyes. But as she jerked awake, she heard another explosion, followed rapidly by a pulse of magic that shocked the last remnants of sleep out of her system. She grabbed her wand and sat upright, unsure of what was going on. Had Johan started to experiment with magic inside the cabin despite her orders?

She pulled herself out of bed and ran into the main room. Johan’s room was quiet, seemingly undisturbed; the wards reported that he was still inside, half-asleep. Elaine stared at the closed door, then sensed another pulse of magic. Now she was awake, it was easier to tell that it came from outside the cabin. Running to the window, she looked out and saw a fireball rising into the air from the direction of the city. The smoke drifting into the sky suggested that the city was under attack.

Johan’s door crashed open and he stumbled out, one hand raised in a gesture that suggested that he was about to start casting spells. Elaine turned and smiled when she saw it; the Peerless School tried to teach students not to telegraph their attacks like that, but teenagers – boys in particular – thought that it was an intimidating pose, But in Johan’s case it was largely worthless. Gestures didn’t seem to mean anything to his power.

“What ...” He stopped as he saw the fireball. “What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” Elaine said, grimly. “Did you sense the magic?”

Another ripple raced through the ether, followed rapidly by another fireball and explosion in the distance. Elaine gritted her teeth as Johan shook his head; he might not be able to sense the sudden shifts in the magical field, but
she
could. Someone was unleashing powerful magic in the heart of the city, magic powerful enough to do real damage. Part of her wanted to stay in the cabin and hide, part of her knew that it was her duty to assist the forces of law and order. And besides, she needed to know what was going on.

“Get dressed,” she ordered, shortly. Getting down to the city would take at least an hour, if they were lucky and their neighbours agreed to allow them to borrow their horses. If not, the walk would take much longer. “We have to go down there.”

She walked back into her room, pulled off her nightclothes and donned a pair of heavy trousers and a shirt. Her wand went into the belt, followed by a handful of potion vials she thought might come in handy. There were no weapons, apart from her wand; even if she could take the weapons the Inquisitors had stored in the cabin, she wouldn’t have known how to use them. Johan’s father, like most other aristocrats, had never felt the urge to teach his children how to use edged weapons. Magicians settled their disputes through magic and it was a poor magician who could be killed by a thug with a sword.

He should have taught Johan
, Elaine thought, as she walked back into the main room. Johan, irritatingly, had already dressed himself; he carried a makeshift staff in one hand, as if he intended to use it as a club.
And I should have asked Dread for lessons myself
.

“Come on,” she said, taking a pair of ration bars from the cupboard. “We’ll eat on the way.”

There was an unpleasant scent in the air, she discovered, as they hurried down the path to the road and then started walking towards their nearest neighbour. Magic danced through the air, sparkling uncomfortably whenever it encountered a shimmer of natural magic in the region. Elaine felt her hairs trying to stand on end and scowled, unable to escape the feeling that something was crawling over her body. The sheer level of magic unleashed in the city below was impressive – and terrifying. What was in Falconine City worthy of such attention?

Their closest neighbour was a small farm, probably the owner of the flock of free-ranging sheep that had woken them on their first day. Elaine tapped on the door, then smiled at the young girl who opened it. She didn’t
look
to be a werewolf, but not every werewolf had the canine features many shared. Pushing the thought aside, Elaine asked the girl to call her father. Moments later, a middle-aged man stamped out of a backroom and glared at them.

“We need to borrow your horses,” she said, without preamble. “We can pay.”

The man’s glare only intensified. “How do we know that you will return them?”

Elaine could have pointed out that she was a Privy Councillor, but she doubted that he would believe her. Instead, she reached into her pocket and produced a handful of gold coins, enough to buy a dozen new horses. The man’s eyes went wide, then he nodded and scooped up the coins. It was more money, Elaine realised to her annoyance, than he’d seen for his entire life.

“I’ll take you down myself,” he said, his glare fading away. “But I won’t take you beyond the edge of the city.”

“Understood,” Elaine said, looking back towards the smoke rising up in the distance. “But get us there as quickly as you can.”

The ride in the cart was worse, she decided moments later, than riding in the Inquisitor’s carriage. In the carriage, she hadn’t seen much of the outside world; in the cart, she could see the trees and cliffs all too clearly. The man whipped the horses into a frenzy and sent them running down the road, skimming the edge far too close for comfort. By the time they reached the bottom of the mountains, Elaine would have welcomed a fight with a Dark Wizard instead of another ride in the cart. Johan, irritatingly, seemed to have enjoyed the ride.

They passed hundreds of refugees as they headed down the road towards the city. Elaine looked at them, tempted to ask what they’d seen, but she knew it would be futile. There were still flames rising up from the centre of town; she scowled as the driver pulled to a halt, right on the edge of the city. If he could take them closer ...

“Thank you,” she said testily, as she climbed down from the cart. Johan jumped down beside her, looking rather pleased with himself. “And I hope you have fun with the money.”

She couldn’t sense any further twists in the magic field as they ran into the city, but as they drew closer to the flames they started to see dead bodies. Elaine stopped next to a young male body and cast a quick diagnostic charm, trying to find out what had killed him. The results were inconclusive, but it looked like he’d simply found himself unable to breathe. It looked bizarre for a long moment, until she realised that someone was using transfiguration as an area-effect weapon. Removing the oxygen from the air by transfiguring it into something else would take a vast amount of power – and it wouldn’t last more than a few minutes, even for the most powerful of sorcerers – but it would kill everyone in the area while it lasted.

“If you find that you’re having difficulty breathing,” Elaine muttered to Johan, “run back the way you came.”

There was no sign of whatever sorcerer had caused the devastation – Elaine hoped that meant that the Inquisitors had killed him – but the flames he’d unleashed were still burning their way through the town. Elaine swore inwardly as she recognised the odd reddish tint of the flames that marked them out as Hellfire, a magical fire that burned almost everything. The only way to quench it was to use the correct counter-spell and, judging by the fact that the flames were still spreading, the counter-spell was not easy to guess. She drew her wand and cast a standard cancelling charm anyway, just in case, but nothing happened.

“They’ll destroy the entire city,” she snapped, feeling the heat starting to press against her. It took a brave or foolish sorcerer to unleash Hellfire, if only because it was so hard to stop. “What was here that they hated so much?”

The thought puzzled her. Falconine City wasn’t a great city; it was hardly the capital of an important kingdom, let alone the Empire. Attacking it made absolutely no sense at all, unless the objective had been random devastation, mass slaughter and terrorism. With Dark Wizards involved, it was quite possible that the attack
had
been random. And yet most of the devastation seemed to be concentrated in one place.

Johan caught her arm. “Up there,” he snapped. “Look!”

Elaine turned and swore. The flames were licking around the lower levels of a five-story building ... and there were children on the top floor, screaming desperately for help. It was easy to tell that there was no way for them to get down; the Hellfire had the lower part of the building firmly in its grip. It wouldn’t be long before it collapsed completely, throwing the children into the flames. She cast another counter-spell, but nothing happened; it would take hours to go through every counter-spell she knew and hitting the right one would be a matter of luck instead of judgement. Instead ...

“Stay back,” she ordered. “I’m going to try to levitate the kids out.”

Sweat poured down her back as she raised her wand, chanting the spell. Levitating was not her strongest subject at the best of times, particularly when she couldn’t cast spells to reduce the weight of the object she was trying to levitate. A young girl let out a panicked scream as Elaine’s magic caught her, hefting her up into the air and pulling her out over the fire and towards safety. The flames seemed to reach up towards her kicking legs – for a moment, Elaine almost believed the old superstition about Hellfire being alive and malicious – and then she was safe. Elaine sagged, then gritted her teeth and turned back to the next child, wondering how long her strength would hold out ...

... And where
was
everyone else? Where were the damn Inquisitors?

She almost collapsed when she put the third child on the ground, but somehow she managed to raise her wand and cast the spells to lift up the fourth child. Johan was pacing forwards and backwards beside her, clearly unsure of what to do; Elaine could only be grateful that he hadn’t tried to help levitate the children. It was far too likely that his magic would go wrong and the children would be hurt ... she swore as she heard a creaking sound from inside the building and realised that the supports were about to collapse. Once they were gone, the entire building would tumble into the flames.

“I can’t hold it,” she gasped, barely able to breathe. For a terrible moment, she thought that the Dark Wizard had sucked all the air out of the area again. “It’s not going to ...”

Johan stepped forward, clearly trying something. For a long moment, it seemed to work; the building still stood upright, despite its crumbling supports. But then there was a terrifying creaking sound and the entire side of the building fell into the flames. Elaine realised, to her horror, that he’d only made the situation worse. His magic had held up the supports at the cost of weakening the floors ...

Panic flared through her mind. “Stop that,” she screamed. Up above, the children were screaming too as the flames licked at their feet. Hellfire would burn flesh, leaving them to die in horrific agony. There was a crash as one of the lower floors fell in, blowing flames and debris towards them. “Stop it now!”

Johan turned to face her. “I’m trying to help,” he shouted back at her over the roar of the blaze. “I’m trying ...”

The building toppled inwards. Elaine saw the children, wrapped in flames, as they fell to their deaths. The fire seemed to roar in triumph as their screams cut off with a terrible sudden finality. She cast a sensing spell, but there was nothing apart from the fire. They were gone.

The gods take them
, she thought, grimly.

“Don’t try to help,” she snapped, out loud. “Just ...”

Johan stared at her as if she’d slapped him, then stalked off. Elaine watched him go, too tired to care much, then turned back to the blaze. Counter-spell after counter-spell rose up in her mind and she cast them one by one, praying that she would find the right one eventually. A normal magician wouldn’t know all of the spells ... all of the
known
spells, she corrected herself. Most magicians didn’t bother to actually create spells for themselves – why would they bother when there were spells for all eventualities written down in grimoires? – but Dark Wizards loved the thought of creating spells that other magicians wouldn’t be able to stop easily.