Bookworm II: The Very Ugly Duckling (36 page)

If you’re actually casting the spells properly
, she thought, grimly. The drain on her magic was so strong that she was honestly not sure if the spells were actually working. If they weren’t, she might have missed the right spell and she would never know it. But she had to keep trying ...

It took nearly forty spells before the flames started to fade away as the magic powering them snapped. Elaine let out a sigh of relief and started casting the spell again and again, jabbing her wand towards the fires. The flames kept collapsing in on themselves and vanishing, although it didn’t always help. They’d created enough heat to start mundane fires that would continue to spread chaos until they were put out.

She looked up as she saw steams of water hissing through the air and splashing down into the fires. A pair of male magicians, both seemingly much older than Elaine, were pulling the water out of the nearby river and using it as a makeshift fire hose. Elaine took a moment to admire their easy skill, then staggered over to face them. They weren’t wearing robes or cloaks, but she would have bet good money that they weren’t Inquisitors. For one thing, they seemed too old and doddering.

But that doesn’t mean anything
, she reminded herself. Age mattered not when magic was concerned, at least unless the magician went senile.
They might still be very dangerous.

“Thank you,” she said. She briefly outlined the counter-spell she’d used, then asked the question that had been bothering her since she’d heard the first explosion. “What happened here?”

“There was an attack,” the first magician said. “A Dark Wizard.”

“Came into the city,” the second said, finishing the first one’s sentence. They were life partners, Elaine realised, although she wasn’t sure if it was sexual or not. At their age, it was hard to think that it mattered. “Attacked the factory, ripped it apart.”

“Inquisitors tried to stop him,” the first added. “Tore them apart, he did. Killed at least two, we think. Maybe more.”

“Maybe much more,” the second clarified. “Ignored us, of course. Too old for him.”

Elaine scowled. “Why here?”

The first magician eyed her in surprise. “You don’t know?”

“She doesn’t know,” the second magician confirmed. “She doesn’t know what was born here.”

“We do,” the first magician said.

Elaine rubbed her forehead. Maybe it was just the intense drain on her magic, but her patience was on the edge of snapping. It was harder to get a straight answer out of the two ancient magicians than it was to get one out of students who weren’t quite sure what book they were looking for, merely that it had something to do with potion ingredients, or something like that, but they were sure that the librarian could still find it for them.

“And what,” she said, as calmly as she could, “was born here?”

“Iron Dragons,” the second magician said. “The inventor made the first ones here; his heirs started to actually
sell
them. Their factories were right at the centre of the attack.”

“Destroyed, of course,” the first magician put in. “Ripped apart, along with all the workers.”

“Very tragic,” the second magician said.

“Keep putting out the fires,” Elaine said. She heard someone barking orders in the distance and sighed in relief when she realised that it was an Inquisitor. “I’ll do what I can to help.”

The Inquisitor was wounded, but seemed unwilling to lie down and let others do the hard work. Elaine followed his orders, helping with the wounded even though most of her magic was gone and would take time to recover. As work parties were organised, the wounded were taken to makeshift hospitals and the dead bodies were stacked like wood in a park, where they would have to wait until they could be cremated. Somehow, Elaine knew that most of the dead would remain unaccounted for. The Hellfire would have burned them to dust and ash, leaving little behind.

Most of the mundanes – and even a handful of magicians – seemed stunned. None of them had seen sorcery on such a scale, even though they’d heard rumours from the Golden City. Elaine listened, without saying much, as the work parties chattered amongst themselves, trying to understand what had happened. The general theory seemed to be that a magician had been mortally offended by the Iron Dragons and other non-magical technology, a theory that Elaine suspected was actually accurate. If random terrorism had been the objective, surely much more damage could have been done.

As it was, the damage was localised
, she thought, grimly.
The bastard wanted us to know what he was destroying. There could be no mistake
.

It was nearly forty minutes of backbreaking labour before she realised that she had lost track of Johan.

Chapter Thirty

Johan cursed his own mistake as he stumbled away from Elaine, unable to quite believe the scale of the disaster he’d caused. Jamal, for all of his faults, had never killed children; indeed, despite his boasts, Johan was sure that he had never killed
anyone
before the Leveller rally. Duelling at the Peerless School was heavily regulated and it was unlikely that any of the duels would be fought to the death. But Johan had killed ...

The screams of the dying children echoed in his head, mocking his failure. He hadn’t been able to do nothing, yet all he’d done was help the fire bring down the building, killing the children before Elaine could save them. He should have tried to levitate them inside, despite his fears of accidentally hurting or scaring them; they would still be alive today if he hadn’t failed them. Elaine had tried to save them, despite her limited power;
he
had killed them. It seemed impossible to avoid the guilt coursing though his mind. The kids had died and it was his fault.

He stumbled onwards, remembering the look of pure rage in Elaine’s eyes. He’d failed her too, failed the girl who was his first true friend – who might no longer be his friend now that she’d seen him murder children. She had taken good care of him, helped him to learn how to use the magic he’d been gifted with ... and, in return, she’d watched helplessly as he butchered children right in front of her eyes. He could have put out the flames – surely, his magic would have sufficed for that – but no, he’d had to show off. And the results had been disastrous.

I don’t deserve magic
, he told himself, realising – finally – why the gods had denied him their power. Jamal wouldn’t have killed children; Charity would have been horrified at the mere thought. But Johan had killed ... and through not thinking about what he was doing, instead of genuine malice. It was no consolation to know that it had been an accident. He’d murdered the children as surely as if he’d strangled them all with his bare hands.

I should have stayed a Powerless
, he thought.
I might have been a prisoner, but I wasn’t a murderer
.

He stopped, looking around at the devastation. The houses seemed intact, but windows had shattered and several doors had been blown inwards. He couldn’t tell if it had been random fire or the magicians breaking into homes, but it looked terrifying. The Golden City had been rebuilt with astonishing speed – and the Blight had been developed – after the incident that had marred the appointment of the Grand Sorceress; it was impossible to tell if someone would do the same for Falconine City. Maybe the ruined houses would be abandoned, left as a silent testimonial to the power of whoever had attacked the city.

A faint sound caught his ear and he stopped, trying to listen. Someone was crying ... Johan hesitated, then headed towards the house where the noise was coming from. The door had been blown open, leaving a pile of splinters on the floor just inside the house; the walls had been scorched with balefire, charring their surfaces. Johan paused at the door – the credo that one did not enter another person’s house without an invitation was strong, even though it was clearly not a magician’s house – and then stepped inside. The sound seemed to be coming from the kitchen.

“Um ... hi,” he called, as he stepped into the room. “Where are you?”

A table had been shattered, several chairs seemed to have been smashed against the walls ... and a pair of dead bodies were lying on the ground. A young girl, barely more than three or four years old, was beating desperately at her dead mother while crying. Johan took one look and knew that the mother was far beyond saving. Her neck seemed intact, but it was bent at an angle that meant that it had been snapped. No magic, according to Elaine, could bring back the dead.

He stared at the girl, then reached out a hand. She shrank back from his touch, cuddling her dead mother as if she could still help her. The sight made everything suddenly
real
to Johan and he felt his stomach heave. He turned away, just in time to throw up everything he had in the corner. The girl stared at him, no longer crying, as he retched. Somehow, he managed to retain the presence of mind to find a bottle of water and take a gulp, enough to wash the taste out of his mouth.

“Come on,” he said, reaching for the girl and picking her up. She felt light; none of
his
sisters had ever felt so light, but then he’d been younger when they’d been toddlers. “Let’s see if we can find someone to help you.”

He glanced into one of the other rooms and frowned. The devastation seemed much less focused in that room; a handful of pictures had been left on the walls. They all showed Iron Dragons, steaming madly as they made their way across the landscape. Johan felt an odd twinge of nostalgia – maybe he could run away and get a job on the tracks, well away from magic and magicians – which he pushed aside as the girl squirmed in his arms. Wearily, he carried her out of the building and looked around.

“So,” he said, to the girl. “Where can I take you?”

The girl eyed him, then burst into tears again. Johan patted her back awkwardly, looking around for someone – anyone – who might be able to offer advice. He saw no one until he looked at the house on the other side of the road, where someone was peering out nervously behind a curtain. Johan lifted his free hand and waved, then smiled in relief as the door opened, revealing a middle-aged woman.

“Daisy,” she said, looking at the girl in Johan’s arms. “What are you doing out here?”

“Her parents are dead,” Johan said, bluntly. The woman gave him an icy look, as if she hated to hear the word – or, more likely, didn’t want him saying them in front of Daisy. “Where can I take her?”

“I’ll take her, for now,” the woman said. “What ... what happened?”

Johan frowned. “What did you see?”

“There were explosions and flames and ... I hid,” the woman confessed. “I thought that we were all going to die.”

Johan passed her Daisy, then stepped backwards. “Some of the houses were targeted specifically,” he said, softly. Elaine might dismiss thrillers such as
The Great Inquisitor
as trashy fiction, but Jamal had enjoyed reading them – and Johan had borrowed his books, once or twice. The fact he hadn’t bothered to ask permission first was only a minor detail in his opinion, at least at the time. “What did they all have in common?”

The woman looked up and down the street. “They all worked on the Iron Dragons,” she said, finally. “Daisy’s father was a foreman at the factory.”

Johan nodded and walked away, leaving the woman to close her door and pray to all the gods that whoever was responsible for the devastation didn’t come back. Part of Johan wanted to walk back to Elaine and beg her forgiveness, part of him knew that he could never look her in the eye again. He had killed children!

Guilt was not an emotion familiar to Johan. He’d certainly been ashamed that he couldn’t live up to his father’s expectations, but he’d never felt guilt for any of the attempts he’d made to pay Jamal back for the way he treated Johan. Besides, they were all minor pranks, nothing too onerous for a powerful magician to face. What did hiding an insect in someone’s bed compare to turning someone into a pig for a day or two? But this was different. He would sooner have gone back to Jamal and offered to serve as his test subject, than kill children.

He fought down the urge to cry as he looked around. This part of the city seemed intact, but deserted; everyone was either hiding inside their homes or had fled to the mountains. Johan sat down on a rock in the middle of a crossroads and put his head in his hands. After the news reached the Golden City, they’d be demanding that he be hunted down like a dog. His father would probably lead the charge, frantic to wipe the stain of Johan’s existence off the family name. The thought made him laugh, laughter that broke down into sobs. He’d wanted to be free of his family, but not like this.

In the end, not being able to go back made the decision easier.

Elaine had insisted that he carry a notebook and pencil around with him at all times, claiming that it would allow him to note down his ideas whenever he had them. Johan had thought that she was mocking him at the time, but he’d obeyed. Now, he pulled the pencil out of his pocket and placed it on his hand, holding it up in front of his face. Tracking spells were complex, particularly when the caster didn’t know the person he was trying to track, but Johan knew that his magic was ... unprecedented. Maybe, just maybe, he could track down the person responsible for the devastation. If it cost him his life ...

... It was no more than he deserved.

And he wanted to prove himself. How better to do that than defeating a Dark Wizard.

“All right,” he muttered, addressing the pencil. “Point me to the person responsible for this.”

He closed his eyes, concentrating. When he opened them, the pencil was floating just above his hand and pointing to the south, towards the Golden City. There was nothing to show how
far
away the Dark Wizard was, but at least he had a direction. Johan smiled darkly and pulled himself to his feet, following the pencil as it led him out of town. If nothing else, he told himself, the Dark Wizard was in for one hell of a surprise.

***

“It was Hawthorne,” the Inquisitor said. “The witnesses said that he just appeared in the middle of the factory and started throwing magic around.”