“Put that down,” Dread said, sharply. Elaine obeyed at once. “This entire room will have to be sealed until a team of experts can be dispatched from the Great Library and...”
Elaine smiled. “I do have that experience...”
“Yes, you do,” Dread said. He hesitated. “But you might be exposed to risks you’re not ready to handle. I think you’d better leave it for the Inquisition to handle.”
Elaine flushed. How dare he dismiss her like that? And then she realised that he might be right. Anyone who looked at those books ran the risk of being corrupted, even though she already had all of their knowledge in her head. But he didn’t know that, did he?
“Yes, sir,” she said, shaking her head. “Do you want me to do anything with these books for now?”
“Just leave them,” Dread said. He shook his head. “I think you’d be better off talking to the Princess. She probably won’t want to talk to me.”
“But I won’t know what questions to ask,” Elaine protested. “Shouldn’t you be there...?”
“I’ll tell you what to ask, but the main thing is to find out just what Trebuchet was teaching his royal pupil,” Dread said. “Trebuchet was a powerful wizard, but I don’t think that he could have taught him enough to make him a competitor for the Grand Sorcerer’s position. And any Court Wizard should have known better than to try. It would only upset the political balance in the Empire.”
He hesitated. “And I would have to be escorted if I spoke to her,” he added. “It might be easier to learn from her if there wasn’t anyone in the room who might take her words to her father.”
“I see,” Elaine said. “So...what do you want me to ask her?”
***
Princess Sacharissa was lying on her front when Elaine entered her quarters, performing a standard spell she’d learned in the Peerless School to discover the presence of eavesdroppers, if any. The Princess had clearly been crying, one hand rubbing her rear where her father had evidently taken his belt to her. Elaine felt a hot flash of sympathy, remembering her own experience with corporal punishment. The Princess wasn’t immune to her father’s hand, or perhaps to her husband, when she finally got married. It wasn’t uncommon, but it still sickened her. How could anyone treat their daughter like that?
“You’re a very lucky girl,” Princess Sacharissa said, between gasps of pain. “Does your master treat you like that?”
“No,” Elaine said, quickly. Dread wasn’t really her master at all. “I need to talk to you...”
“About my brother, or about the fat-arse who got himself killed?” Princess Sacharissa asked, tightly. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to hear about Trebuchet. He hated me and didn’t bother to hide it. Do you know what he offered my father?”
Elaine could guess, but shook her head. “He said that he could make a slave collar for me that would turn me into the ideal princess,” Princess Sacharissa said. “Thank all of the gods that my father rejected the idea. Slave collars are very difficult to remove and their influence lingers on for years afterwards...I would have been at everyone’s mercy. Princess Ella used to have a collar and she always did what she was told...”
“Poor girl,” Elaine said, sincerely. “Why did your brother start to learn magic from Trebuchet?”
Princess Sacharissa shrugged. “Our mother died when he was seven years old,” she said. “I was barely two years old at the time. She had the Dark Cough, you see; I think she must have brought it from her homeland and was never properly treated before it was too late. And then she died and my brother was devastated.”
Elaine nodded. The Dark Cough was a magical illness, one created when wild magic festered into an unsuspecting individual with enough of a magical talent to power the disease. Anyone unlucky enough to catch it without knowing the dangers would find themselves weakening slowly until they finally died, no matter what the druids did to try to save their lives. The Dark Cough fed on magic and magical cures would simply speed up the process of the disease. There was no known cure, even in the medical knowledge that Elaine now possessed.
“He always wanted to be a magician, but after my mother died he was
driven
,” the Princess continued. “He always talked about raising the dead, claiming that he could find a way to unite our mother’s corpse with her soul and bring her back to life. Trebuchet...offered to try to teach him to use his talent properly, rather than do something that would inevitably cross over into necromancy. And our father encouraged him because he wanted his son to be powerful.”
Elaine shivered. What Princess Sacharissa was describing – what Prince Hilarion had hoped to do – was impossible. There was no spell that could summon a person’s soul back from the land of the gods and permanently bind them to a dead body. The best that would happen was that the body would become a lich, a near-undead corpse with independence; it was far more likely that she’d become one of the undead and accidentally unleash a new plague upon the world.
And yet she could understand a person being so desperate to have their mother back that they would consider almost anything. She remembered long dark nights in the orphanage, crying into her pillow because she was so alone; what would she have said if someone had offered her the chance to go to her parents? Elaine was honest enough to admit that she would have taken the chance as soon as it was offered, even if it came at a very steep price. She would have done
anything
to have her parents returned to her. How could she hate Prince Hilarion for what he’d done, for what he was trying to do, when she understood him so well?
“He just kept studying and studying,” Princess Sacharissa said. “I think he actually outpaced his tutor fairly early on, for Trebuchet would call some other wizards to the castle and have them spend a few weeks adding to the boy’s knowledge. And sometimes my brother would leave the castle and go off to study somewhere, returning weeks later tired, but happy. I used to think that he would use his powers to replace Trebuchet and send the strange old man away from the castle. Instead...”
She shook her head. “Instead, he decided to become the Grand Sorcerer,” she said. “And my father
encouraged
him!”
Elaine could understand her shock and dismay. Prince Hilarion was the only heir to the throne his father had, at least as long as he was unwilling to admit that girls could rule just as well as men. Allowing him to take part in a contest that could easily kill him was unwise, to say the least. And Trebuchet should have known that the Grand Sorcerer wasn’t likely to come from aristocratic stock, no matter how talented. It would twist the balance of power between sorcerers, traders and aristocrats too far.
She rubbed her forehead in irritation. Nothing about this made sense to her. Had Trebuchet taught the Prince magic that he shouldn’t have been allowed to know existed? Or had someone else used Trebuchet to teach the Prince? Or had Duke Gama been a far more powerful sorcerer than anyone had guessed...? Most sorcerers were intensely competitive, eager to prove themselves more powerful than anyone else, but there was no law that stipulated that a powerful magician had to be registered. He might have kept a very low profile as he urged Trebuchet to train up his nephew and send him out to join the competition.
“Tell me about your uncle,” she said, instead. “How did you get on with him?”
“I think we shared a special bond,” Princess Sacharissa said. “He was like me, you see; he was a useless spare to the throne. I think he was the one who urged my father to ensure that I did get an education – and that I didn’t get turned into a slave. And then he died a few months ago and they wouldn’t even let me keep his books!”
Elaine could understand
that
, all right. “Why don’t you just leave the castle?”
“I tried to run away when I was twelve,” Princess Sacharissa admitted. “My father’s huntsmen caught me before I managed to get more than a few miles away from the castle and my father...my father was not happy about it at all.” She rubbed her rear unconsciously. “Where were you born, anyway? How did you get into the Inquisition?”
“I don’t know,” Elaine admitted. The orphanage had been in the Golden City, but she could have been born anywhere. The thought continued to gall her. “I never knew my parents.”
“Lucky you,” Princess Sacharissa said. “Dad isn’t too bad when he’s just dad, but when he’s King Hildebrand...well, I have to shut up, look pretty and do exactly as I’m told. And ever since mother died, I’ve seen more of King Hildebrand than I have of my father.”
She looked up at Elaine. “You really don’t know where you were born?”
“No,” Elaine said. “I could have been born anywhere.”
“Really?” Princess Sacharissa asked. “With colour like yours, I would have thought that you were born here. You certainly have the right colour of hair for a child of the mountains.”
She grinned. “Do you think we could be sisters?”
Elaine stared at her. She hadn’t noticed, but the Princess was right. The maids
did
have the same colour of hair as she had, and Princess Sacharissa’s face could have passed for a slightly slanted version of her own. And yet...even if her family
had
come from Ida, why had they seen fit to abandon her in the Golden City? Who had they been and why had they abandoned her?
“Don’t cry,” Princess Sacharissa said. “Whatever else happens, you can always talk to me.”
She shrugged. “An Inquisitor,” she added. “Father couldn’t stop me from talking to you, could he?”
Chapter Nineteen
“I suppose it is possible that you do come from here,” Dread said, an hour later. “You do have the right hair colour for it, but I wouldn’t place too much faith in it.”
He sounded rather disturbed, as if Princess Sacharissa’s casual remark had confirmed a nasty thought of his own. “These aren’t the days when regions had their own looks and there were few children of mixed blood,” he added. “Your parents might have come from the other side of the world, or been a couple that produced a child that
looked
like someone from Ida. There’s no way to know for sure.”
Elaine nodded, reluctantly. “Besides, you were given to the orphanage immediately after birth, according to their records,” Dread mused. “Someone paid for you to remain there until you were old enough to live on your own, but who? Some aristocrat with a guilty conscience or maybe a trader family unwilling to admit a bastard into their ranks? No one bothered to record it back then.”
“I know,” Elaine said. “But...is that unusual?”
“It depends on the exact circumstances,” Dread said. He gave her an odd look. “Someone from an aristocratic family, pushed into a loveless match, might have managed to get a serving maid pregnant and give the child away for adoption rather than have her hanging around the home. Sometimes they pay a poorer couple to take in the child and raise her as their own, but it can lead to scandal...”
He shrugged. “Anyway, I suggest that you get some rest,” he said. “Tomorrow morning we’ll have to go down the hill and catch the iron dragon back to the Golden City.”
Elaine blinked. “We’re not staying here?”
“Something is definitely wrong here,” Dread admitted. He didn’t sound nervous, but Elaine suspected that he was more worried than he wanted to admit. “The King insisted that we sleep in Castle Adamant tonight, but tomorrow we will go home and await the assignment of a proper investigative team to Ida. And you can go back to the Great Library.”
“Yes, sir,” Elaine said, softly. She hadn’t realised how much she’d enjoyed working with him until it was about to come to an end. And the Inquisitors would probably ask her questions and keep asking her questions until they worked out what Duke Gama’s cursed book had actually done to her. “Ah...did they give us separate rooms?”
Dread laughed, humourlessly. “They’re not connected,” he assured her. “Sleep tight – we’ll leave as early as we can tomorrow morning.”
Elaine walked into her chambers and shut the door. It was the most luxurious suite of rooms she’d ever had, complete with a bed large enough for five people, a bathtub with working hot and cold running water and a mirror that allowed her to see her entire reflection at once. A small bag just inside the room smelt funny, but it wasn’t until she looked at it that she realised that they were the blood-stained clothes from the curtailed meeting with Trebuchet. She locked and bolted the door, and then spent twenty minutes setting up wards that would prevent anyone from breaking it without strong magic. Inquisitor Dread would probably be able to break in, but no one else in the castle should have the type of magic needed to break through the wards. Or so she hoped. Princess Sacharissa had said that she didn’t have magic of her own, but if her brother was a powerful magician it was quite likely that she had the talent as well.
She walked over to the bathtub, poured in enough warm water to flood the interior, and then knelt down and started to wash off the makeup the maid had placed on her face. It felt good to have her skin breathing properly again; it was easy to see why Princess Sacharissa had turned out the way she had. Elaine would have been driven to rebel by less constraining circumstances. Washing off the last traces of makeup, she walked over to the mirror and studied her reflection. Princess Sacharissa had been right. She
did
look as though she had come from Ida.
There was a new glint of determination in her eye as she walked over to the bag of blood-stained clothes and pulled them out, one by one. Blood was linked to magic in ways no one fully understood, even the handful of Blood Magicians trained by the druids and sworn to secrecy about their art. The knowledge in her head seemed to suggest that blood – which kept the body going – was symbolically tied to a person’s magic, and to a person’s soul. It was easy to use a blood sample to track someone down, unless they were powerful enough to ward themselves against discovery. And, according to some of the forbidden rites in the back of her head, it could be used to summon someone’s soul back from the dead.
No one really understood the nature of the gods, or what happened after a human soul separated from the body. What
was
understood was that a soul continued to have an affinity for the husk that had housed it for so long, even though they might have gone onwards to a better place or drifted into the fires of hell. Even considering using the rites to call a soul back from the next world was a dangerous step towards necromancy, but she had to
know
what had happened to Trebuchet. And what he knew, if anything, about the spell that had crammed her head with forbidden knowledge. Whatever curses had been used to prevent him from talking while he was alive wouldn’t hold true after he was dead.