Bookworm III (30 page)

His memories rose up around her, a blur of nightmare and horror, of abuse and bullying and desperate attempts to coax even a flicker of magic from him. She blushed furiously as she realised
he
would be seeing
her
memories, then forced the thought to one side. There were secrets she wished to keep from him, from anyone, but there was no point in trying to hide them. He was her apprentice, bonded to her. Whatever her personal feelings, he had a right to know what she was and what she’d done. The bond would ensure he kept those memories to himself.

She snapped back into her own body and stared at him, feeling her entire body trembling as sweat trickled down her back. His hand was squeezing hers so hard it hurt ... no, she was feeling his pain as well as her own. Her eyesight seemed to flicker; for a moment, she was looking at herself again, then snapped back to normal. Carefully, thinking through every step, she released his hand and waited for him to let go of hers. As soon as she did, she pulled back her palm, now covered in their mingled blood, and cast a healing spell.

Johan coughed. “What ... what is that?”

Elaine stared down at her palm. The cut was gone, although she knew from experience her palm would ache for days. But now, instead of bare skin, there was a single rune carved into her flesh. It wasn’t included in the textbooks she’d seen at the Peerless School, but she knew what it meant.
Partner
. It was far more than just a simple apprenticeship rune. Slowly, she reached for Johan’s left hand, already knowing what she would see. The blood was gone, leaving the same rune marked on his flesh.

“It means we’re partners,” Elaine said. She hadn’t expected
that
. Most apprenticeships didn’t bother with runes, but when they did the master always manifested the master rune while his apprentice manifested the apprentice rune. To be partners ... what did it mean? For once, there was nothing in her stockpiled knowledge to tell her. “I think.”

Johan stared at her. “I can feel you now,” he said. “Can you feel me?”

Elaine closed her eyes. Johan’s presence was there, shimmering at the back of her mind. She understood, now, why it wasn’t considered remotely proper for a female to apprentice to a male and vice versa. It had been written in the books, but she hadn’t really comprehended what it meant, not really. No one could unless they underwent it for themselves. She was so close to him, so intimate, that it would be easy to take the final step forward and invite him into her bed. Indeed, they shared an intimacy well beyond anything she’d shared with Bee.

“Yes,” she said, irked. She’d have to do something about the bond ... but she already knew she wouldn’t be doing anything of the sort. The whole idea of giving up the bond, even moderating it, was unthinkable. “We’ll have to move out of the building and separate, just to check it works properly. We should be able to talk together at any distance.”

“It feels different,” Johan said. “Firmer too.”

He paused. “What was that dark room?”

Elaine cringed, mentally. “When children were naughty at the orphanage,” she said, trying hard to keep her tone light, “the Orphan Mother would put the brat in the dark box, leaving him completely alone.”

Johan winced. “I’m sorry,” he said. He would have picked up on her horror ... and her memories of being in the box herself. “But at least you weren’t being starved to death.”

Elaine shook her head. “Being sent to bed without supper was another regular punishment,” she said. “And sometimes, we wondered what we’d done wrong.”

“I don’t understand,” Johan said.

“You never had to hunt for food,” Elaine said. “There were days when the orphanage simply didn’t have enough food to feed us all. So we went to bed hungry, wondering what we’d done to be denied food. Some of us even begged to be beaten instead because we were so hungry. But it never worked. None of us understood until we were much older.”

“But you went to the Peerless School,” Johan said. “You were fed there?”

“I was,” Elaine said. “And I ended up working over the holidays, just to stay away from the orphanage. The first time I went back there, no one was pleased to see me.”

She wondered if he would understand. The orphans had watched her leave, wearing new clothes, to a school where she would be safe, warm and well-fed. She’d come back, having put on weight, and started to eat from their communal supplies again. It was hard to blame them for resenting her, even though they’d largely left her alone. She’d been a magician, after all, with a wand at her side.

“No one was pleased to see me either,” Johan said. “And to think I thought my dad was bad, when he was angry at us.”

He looked down at the blood on his hand. “What do I do about this?”

“Allow me,” Elaine said, brandishing her wand. A simple charm and the blood was gone, leaving only the rune standing out against Johan’s pale skin. “And we should probably meditate until we know just how deeply the bond runs between us.”

Johan frowned. “It seems pretty deep,” he said. “Is this remotely normal?”

“I don’t know,” Elaine said. She looked down at the rune on her palm, feeling – for the first time in months – as ignorant as a new student. “There haven’t been bonds like this for a very long time.”

She hesitated. “You may dream of my life,” she warned, “and I may dream of yours. Just remember ... that not everything may be in context when you see it.”

“I’ll try,” Johan said.

Elaine followed him out of the door and down towards the dining room. It was as spotlessly elegant as she’d expected, but Johan’s family would probably not have approved of Daria, or Elaine herself, let alone the decidedly plebeian food on the table. Elaine had to smile at the thought as Johan started passing out sandwiches, wondering just what his father would make of him serving the food. Even as a Powerless, menial work was below a Conidian.

“Your scents have changed,” Daria said, sharply. “What have you done to yourselves?”

“Bonded,” Johan said. He held up his palm. “What does this smell like?”

“Elaine,” Daria said. She sniffed Johan’s palm, then smiled. “Concentrated Essence of Elaine.”

Elaine blushed. “It’s just a bonding rune ...”

“You might want to glamour it,” Cass said. Elaine jumped, one hand reaching for her wand, as the former Inquisitor stepped into the room. “Any magician worth his wand who sees it will know there’s something odd about it.”

Johan found his voice. “Where the hell have you been?”

“I just got back,” Cass said. “The poorer parts of the city are being searched, ruthlessly. I think thousands of people have already been displaced by the soldiers.”

“They’re searching for us, I presume,” Elaine said.

Cass nodded. “The people there can’t really make a fuss,” she said, darkly. “I imagine the search will continue until they’re
sure
we’re not hiding there.”

“That’s a good thing, isn’t it?” Johan asked. “If they’re searching there, they won’t be searching here.”

“On the face of it, yes,” Cass said. “But the search will upset the criminal element, who will then have an incentive to look for us, just to end the search before the searches stumble upon something they can’t ignore. And there are other problems.”

She sighed. “The soldiers are not being very nice to the population,” she added. “There will be riots, soon enough. And then all hell will break loose.”

“We can’t do anything about it, though,” Daria said. “Can we?”

Cass gave her an odd little smile. “Not unless you want us to surrender to the Emperor,” she said. “Our best bet would be to get out of the city, then let the Emperor know we’ve made it out.”

“Which we will, if we can,” Elaine said. “Did you hear anything else?”

“Just that the Emperor has been taking students from the Peerless School,” Cass said. “My source was quite certain that all of the children came from mundane families.”

Elaine rubbed her eyes in confusion. She hated politics, but the more she thought about it, the more it puzzled her. Hostages made sense, but children from mundane families were useless as hostages. Their families could neither cause trouble for the Emperor nor offer him anything worth taking, if he wished it. And that suggested he had something else in mind ...

She swore. “A ritual,” she said. “He’s planning a dark ritual.”

“It certainly seems that way,” Cass said. “There’s nothing else he could do with the children.”

“Unless he wants to train them as his personal assistants,” Johan offered, hopefully. “He would want more sorcerers loyal to him, wouldn’t he?”

“Yes, but half of the children he took are girls,” Cass said. “And even if he was able to overcome his revulsion at the thought of teaching a girl how to use magic, it would still be years before they could do anything useful. Why not take students from their sixth year instead?”

Elaine shuddered. “We have to stop him.”

Cass tilted her head. “How?”

“I ... I don’t know,” Elaine admitted. “But there has to be something we can do.”

“He will carry out the ritual under heavy security,” Cass said, tightly. “There will be layer upon layer of protection surrounding him. We could not do anything to stop him.”

“There are Inquisitors there,” Johan said. “Wouldn’t
they
stop him?”

“The Grand Sorcerer can do no wrong,” Cass said. “Anything they do is legal by definition. I think that will be true of an Emperor too.”

She shook her head. “They won’t try to stop him,” she added. “And they may even find themselves helping! And there’s nothing
we
can do to stop him.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

“Ah, Charity,” the Emperor said, as she prostrated herself before him. “I trust that you are ready to witness my work?”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Charity said. She had hoped the Emperor would allow her to remain in her rooms or even go back home to check on her siblings, but instead he had kept her busy until the moon had risen high above the city. “I am ready.”

“Then follow me,” the Emperor said, picking up a long, iron-tipped staff. “Time waits for no man, not even an Emperor.”

Charity shivered as she rose from the floor and followed. The timing of rituals rarely mattered, she’d been told at school, unless the rituals involved sacrifice. A lunar ritual tended to mean ... what? She was sure she’d been taught something, once upon a time, that suggested just what the Emperor was planning, but she couldn’t recall what she’d learnt. The Peerless School had only taught them the warning signs, nothing actually useful ...

The Emperor walked through the darkened corridors, ignoring the soldiers who saluted – banging their fists against their chests – and the slaves who prostrated themselves in front of him until he had walked past them. Charity followed, wondering absently what would happen to a child who grew up with everyone automatically bending the knee to him. It had been hard enough dealing with Jamal ... but then, whatever his faults, Jamal had been a powerful magician. What would happen to a child who was raised to practically expect worship and yet lacked the power to make it happen?

She pushed the thought aside as the Emperor led the way into the ritual chamber and looked around, sighing with heavy satisfaction. A large containment circle had been drawn on the ground, surrounding a complicated network of lines, runes and carefully-placed crystals; the edge of the circle was surrounded by smaller circles, each one large enough to take a small child. Charity was no expert, but judging by the lines, the children were expected to voluntarily offer their power to the man in the centre of the ritual.

The Emperor turned to face her. “Do you recognise the runes?”

“Some of them, Your Majesty,” Charity said. She’d been taught a few Runes of Protection, back at the Peerless School, and a dozen of them had been drawn around the circle. “But others are new to me.”

“The Peerless School has buried entire fields of knowledge,” the Emperor said, as he produced a silver knife and looked down at it contemplatively. “Our ancestors knew secrets that are completely unknown today, save for the books stored in the Black Vault.”

“Our ancestors also fought endless wars,” Charity said. “Over magic ... and power ... and who had the right to learn and use both.”

The Emperor looked up at her. For a long moment, she was uneasily convinced that someone else was peering out through his eyes. “And do you believe those questions are immaterial?”

Charity swallowed. Her mouth was suddenly dry.

“I don’t think we should be killing ourselves over them,” she said. Sweat was trickling down the back of her neck. “The wars did nothing but render a quarter of the world uninhabitable for centuries.”

The Emperor closed his eyes. When he opened them, he looked himself again.

“The Peerless School saw fit to bury secrets, rather than allow the strongest to survive,” he said. “But the secrets came out, as secrets have a way of doing, and I will use them to cement my rule.”

He turned and peered towards the door, just as the first of the children entered the chamber and stumbled towards the circle, escorted by one of the serving girls. She was drugged, Charity was sure, or under a spell, for she just kept moving forward without even hesitating when she saw the ritual. Children
were
taught some of the warning signs, after all, and the circle itself should have set off alarm bells in her mind. Behind her, the other children appeared, led to the ritual like lambs to the slaughter. Charity wanted to shout at them, to tell them to run, but her lips refused to open. She could do nothing to prevent the Emperor from going ahead with his spell.

“A child is completely helpless before a normal compulsion spell,” the Emperor observed, “although even short-term usage on a child’s mind can cause all sorts of long-term problems for the brat. But the magic can also interfere with the ritual, which makes it inconvenient to use any such spells.”

“I suppose they wouldn’t offer themselves willingly,” Charity sniped.

Surprisingly, the Emperor took it in good humour. “Of course not,” he said. “So we drugged them with something purely mundane. There will be no interference with the ritual from compulsion spells.”