Bookworm II: The Very Ugly Duckling (49 page)

Dimly, he remembered the children who’d died because of his mistake and wondered what would happen to the house. But it was hard to care.

His father looked up, his eyes widening in horror as Johan stepped into the room. One hand reached for the wand at his belt; Johan ignored it, even though he kept part of his mind focused on the protective bubble surrounding him. As far as he knew, he was no more invulnerable than Elaine or anyone else. A knife dipped in fast-acting poison would kill him as surely as any curse or spell.

“Elaine is dead,” Johan sad, flatly. “The Head Librarian, a person who was also a Privy Councillor, is dead. Your son killed her on your orders.”

It wasn’t entirely true – Johan had no idea who had fired the fatal curse, although he certainly couldn’t think of any good reason not to blame Jamal – but as long as his father believed it ...

“No,” his father said. Sweat was pouring down his brow as he fought to stave off the consequences of his oath. “I gave no such orders.”

“But you ordered them to kill me,
father
,” Johan said. His rage was gone, replaced by a cold dispassionate calm that was worse than anger. He could do
anything
now and feel absolutely nothing. “You broke the most important rule of the family. We do not turn on each other.”

“There was nothing else I could do,” his father said. “Where are they?”

“Jamal has lost his magic,” Johan sneered. His father recoiled backwards, as if he’d been slapped. “The others ... they died. I killed them.”

Once, the thought would have bothered him. He’d wracked himself with guilt when he’d blamed himself for the death of innocent children – and nearly losing Elaine to Hawthorne. Now ... it didn’t bother him at all.

“You sent your eldest son to a fate I’m sure he considers worth than death,” Johan snapped, when his father didn’t react. “You could have lost your ties to whatever other families helped produce that gang of thugs. And you broke your oath! Why? Was it really so important to have me back in your clutches?”

“I was so
scared
when I realised that you were powerless,” his father said. “But I couldn’t bear to lose you. I kept you close, fearing for your life and the family’s safety. You rebelled against me because you didn’t understand that it was all for your own good.”

“I spent a week as a doll before someone could be bothered to free me,” Johan said, with deadly menace. “And there were some things Jamal did that I refuse to mention, some jokes that were never funny to anyone with a decent mind. How was
that
for my own good?”

He allowed his voice to harden. “You allowed me to be tortured because you thought I deserved it for failing you,” he added. “You felt that I was to blame for my own condition, even though I am your child; the gods know you spent enough money on paternity tests when I was found to be powerless. I think you hated me because you thought I proved that your blood was weak. You were
ashamed
of me.”

His father was starting to gasp in pain. No matter his struggles, his oath was slowly killing him, drawing on his magic to rip the life out of his body. The magic Duncan Conidian had mastered and used as a tool to rise to the highest levels of society was turning on him, like a tame animal that had finally had enough of being beaten and kicked. It was strange, Johan realised, as he peered into the web of life; piece by piece, the magic was turning venomous. And yet it was still part of his father’s mind.

“There is an option, father,” Johan said, very calmly. “I can take your magic. Your oath will not kill you if there is no magic to drive it. But you would never be able to cast a spell again.”

His father shuddered, convulsing. For a moment, Johan thought that he was too late for his father, then somehow he managed to open his eyes. It was hard to tell, Johan realised, just which way he would jump. To abandon his magic would mean abandoning his place in society, leaving Charity or Johan himself to take over House Conidian. But to keep it would mean certain death. The longer he struggled, the more pain he would be in before the oath finally overwhelmed him.

“You would live as I did,” Johan added. “You would be powerless.”

“No,” his father gasped. “I won’t ...”

“Yes, you will,” Johan said. It was easy now to snip his father free of the web of life. The oath vanished at the same instant, along with his father’s magic. “Killing you would be
so
easy, but you can serve as an object lesson instead.”

He felt a keening echoing through the house as the wards started to react to his father’s sudden absence. They were no longer linked to him – and they couldn’t seek out the Prime Heir. He had no magic either. Johan smiled as his father stared at him in horror, then lifted a finger. His father floated up into the air and drifted over towards the door.

Years ago, Jamal had dared the younger Johan to sit in his father’s chair. A security spell had frozen him the moment he’d sat down, then his father – alerted by the wards – had thrashed him soundly for entering his study without permission. Jamal, of course, had gotten away with it completely. Now ... Johan moved around the desk, cancelling the wards as he went, and sat down at his father’s desk. It might as well be his now. The wards fizzled around him, then slipped back into neutral mode. They’d probably accept Charity, but no one else.

“Stand up,” he ordered, once he had lowered his father to the ground. By now, the Inquisitors would probably have found Elaine’s remains – and Jamal, if he hadn’t crawled away to die somewhere. It wouldn’t take a genius detective to tell where he’d gone. “I want you to take a message to the Inquisitors.”

His father was moaning in shock. Johan snorted, disgusted;
this
was how his father dealt with only a tiny taste of Johan’s life? No, he had never truly realised what being powerless
meant
in a magical household. How could he have? It was completely outside his experience.

Until now
, Johan told himself.

He shaped his thoughts, casting a compulsion charm. “This is what I want you to tell them,” he said. Elaine
would
be avenged – and so would all the others who had been hurt and humiliated by magicians. “Listen carefully.”

Chapter Forty-One

Her thoughts were ... shattered.

One of the protections must have worked
, Elaine thought, through a wave of ... pain that wasn’t really pain. Her memories seemed dull, almost as if they belonged to someone else; her thoughts keep breaking up and reforming in her mind. Something had happened to push her right to the brink of death, but what? Her thoughts slipped together, blurring into one ...

Elaine sat upright, glancing around urgently. The sun was rising; her memory shuddered, then spat out a reminder. She’d been with Johan, on the verge of taking him as her apprentice, when they’d been attacked. And then there had been a spell ... her mind shied away from what had happened afterwards. Instead, she looked around for Johan, but the only person she saw was Dread.

Her mouth felt dry, but somehow she managed to speak. “What ... what happened?”

“I was hoping you could answer that question,” Dread said, as Elaine sat upright. At least the protections had managed to repair her clothes as well as her body. “You were shattered glass ... and now you’re human again.”

Elaine shuddered. If the protective spell hadn’t worked – or hadn’t worked perfectly – she would have been eternally trapped between life and death, unable to do anything other than to go mad. Suddenly, she thought she understood the Witch-King perfectly. He’d been so afraid of death that he’d bound himself to a decaying body that would never, no matter how much magic he used, be human again. And maybe one of his spells had also prevented him from taking refuge in madness.

She heard a sobbing sound and glanced over towards one of the trees. A young man who could almost pass for an older version of Johan was sitting there, crying. His hands were cuffed behind his back. Elaine frowned, then realised that it had to be Jamal, Johan’s elder brother. The oaths he’d been forced to offer the Inquisitors hadn’t been enough to keep him from returning to crime and terrorism.

“There is no magic in him,” Dread said, quietly. He held out a hand, helping Elaine to stand up. Her legs felt oddly fragile, as if she’d broken them again. “And I haven’t been able to get any sense out of him at all.”

Elaine leaned on Dread and stared over at Jamal. He looked broken, as if everything had finally proven too much for him. It was clear that he had soiled himself. Elaine shuddered again at the vacant look on his face, then turned away. Jamal wasn’t her problem, as unpleasant as he was; Johan was her problem. And where the hell
was
he?

“We don’t know,” Dread said. “Where do you think he might be?”

He thinks I’m dead
, Elaine thought. She’d wondered if Johan would have tried something to restore her, but no magic could bring back the dead. Every time it was tried, the results were always bad. Speaking to the ghost of someone long gone was about the best magic could do.
Where would he go if he thought I was dead
?

“He’s gone home,” she said, in sudden horrified realisation. “He’ll think that his father authorised this attack.”

“He might well have done,” Dread pointed out, as they started to walk towards the edge of the garden. “The oath would have forced him to ensure that Jamal did nothing
criminal
.”

Elaine gritted her teeth. The oath might not have been violated, not if Jamal had been
ordered
to kill his brother. Johan had still been under his father’s authority; if he believed that his son had transgressed too far, the Conidian would have been within his rights to order his son killed. It wouldn’t have been criminal if Jamal had been acting under orders. She turned to look at the sobbing youth, then decided that it was unlikely that they would get any sense out of him. He could just wait there for the Inquisitors to pick him up.

“Send a warning to the Grand Sorceress,” she said. There were more people in the street now, all of them glancing at her in surprise. Inquisitors were not known for helping people, at least unless they were truly important. Elaine silently bid goodbye to her anonymity; before now, hardly anyone outside the Privy Council and library staff had known who she was. The broadsheets would probably follow her with as much interest as they showed to the other senior aristocracy. “Tell her that we might be looking at another Kane.”

Dread muttered a curse under his breath. “Lord Conidian has a great deal to answer for,” he said. “I shall so advise the Grand Sorceress.”

Elaine suspected that it was already too late. They should have moved to make Johan her apprentice the moment they realised just what he could do, rather than leave him hanging until the tree finally came crashing down. The Conidian had been too persistent in his efforts to regain control of his son for them to assume that he would stop, once Jamal had been released. Perhaps they should have bargained, gained Johan’s freedom from his family in exchange for Jamal’s release from jail. But it was too late now.

He thinks I’m dead
, Elaine thought, numbly. Johan had shown himself willing to blame himself for incidents that were outside his control. What would he do now that he thought his only real friend was dead – and that his father was responsible for her death? He had power enough to do real damage to the city and the established order.
What is he thinking now
?

They turned the corner – and ran straight into a roadblock. A pair of Inquisitors were driving people out of the street, warning them to stay away from the houses. Elaine sensed that many of the occupants had raised their wards, sealing themselves inside their homes; she wondered if they had an inkling of what was going on or if they merely had a guilty conscience. The men and women who lived here, in the heart of the Golden City, had committed many crimes to reach their lofty stations. They had just been lucky enough to avoid being caught before it was too late, before they couldn’t be arrested and charged.

Dread let go of her arm – she could stand straight now, thankfully – and walked over to his brethren. Elaine watched him go, then concentrated on extending her magic perceptions as much as possible. House Conidian was wrapped in its wards, keeping the outside world from breaking in ... and anyone inside from getting out. Elaine wondered briefly if Johan had finally learned to manipulate wards or if it was their typical setting, before deciding that it didn’t matter. Johan had to be inside.

“You’ll need to hear this,” Dread called. He waved to her, beckoning her to follow him past the roadblock and up to a tent someone had erected just inside the secure zone. “It isn’t good news.”

The tent was surprisingly small on the inside, but there was still enough room for an Inquisitor and Duncan Conidian. One look told Elaine that something was very wrong with Johan’s father; he talked like a stuttering parrot, rather than the man she recalled from Privy Council meetings. She met his eyes and shuddered when she saw absolutely no life in them at all. Johan, she realised, had used a compulsion charm to make him obey – and, as always when he tried to cast standard spells, the results had been unexpected. Duncan Conidian no longer had a mind of his own.

“You are to bring the magicians before him for justice,” the Conidian said. “He will judge them all to see who prove worthy. Those who are not worthy will be stripped of their magic and forced to live as mundanes.”

Elaine stared at him for a long moment, then started to cast diagnostic charms. The Conidian had no magic any longer, she discovered; his son had stripped him of it, perhaps in a genuine attempt to save his father’s life. A magical oath couldn’t bite if the oath-breaker had no magic, she deduced. It wasn’t as if people had often lost their magic before Johan had appeared on the scene. And his mind had definitely been destroyed.

“So it would seem,” Dread said, when she outlined her conclusions. “Did he do that on purpose?”

Elaine shrugged. There was no way to know.

“Which leads to a more important question,” Dread said. “
Can
he be killed?”