“The matter isn’t quite over,” Dread said, as they returned to the more comfortable parts of the Watchtower. “Once we have a new Grand Sorcerer, we will move in on Ida and find out what was going on in that mountainous state. It seems to me as if Prince Hilarion had his father completely under his control; it is possible that the old man has collapsed with his son’s death, depending on just what spells were used to take control of him. In any case, we can afford to wait a few more days. The contest is set for three days from now.”
Elaine nodded. Lady Light Spinner had been right about at least one thing; there were only three competitors left in the contest. Maybe two, if Kane had decided to bow out gracefully and leave the more powerful sorcerers to face one another in combat. Or whatever they had to do to prove themselves worthy of the title.
“The new Grand Sorcerer will also be the one who decides what is to become of you,” Dread said. The way he said it sent shivers running down the back of her spine. “The Star Chamber isn’t ungrateful to you for what you did, but you do represent a considerable danger to the status quo. You don’t seem to have been...contaminated by the darker spells that were dumped into your mind, yet anyone with enough power could capture you and drain you of all the knowledge you possess. Prince Hilarion might have targeted you because his appetite for dark magic grew stronger after he read the Witch-King’s book.”
“Elaine saved you all,” Daria said, sharply. Her face seemed to become more wolfish for a long chilling moment. “How can you threaten to kill her?”
“We know what she did for us,” Dread said. For a moment, he looked old; old enough to be Elaine’s father. “But we also know that her mere existence presents a powerful risk to the empire. Someone could capture her and make her talk. And then we would have another Prince Hilarion on our hands, perhaps more than one.”
Elaine understood, even though the concept of the Inquisitors arguing over her eventual fate was terrifying. Dread was right, perhaps righter than he knew. If she could be tempted into violating Daria’s privacy, what else could she be tempted into doing?
“I understand,” she said. “I won’t leave the city until after you decide what to do with me.”
Dread nodded. “Go home, get some rest...I’ll leave Cass and Karan with you until after the contest,” he said. As bodyguards and watchdogs, Elaine knew. They’d never been anything else. “And I suggest that you light a candle in your favourite temple as a sign of thanks. The situation could have become a great deal worse.”
He shrugged. “But we nipped it in the bud,” he added. “If nothing else, you played a vital role in saving the entire city. We will never forget what you did for us.”
“If it’s really over,” Daria said, pensively. “I seem to recall that gratitude never lasts very long.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
“I’m surprised that you have never been here before,” Bee said. “This place is famous around the entire world.”
Elaine shrugged, thoughtfully. The Great Museum, unlike the Great Library, was open to everyone, allowing them to view artefacts from a thousand years of empire and magical development. It had always been in the Golden City, but Elaine had never visited before realising that she might not have that long to live. She had privately resolved to cram as much as she could into her last two weeks of life before the Inquisitors decided to kill her. It would have been nice to believe that they would spare her life, but she knew, better than they did, just how dangerous her mere existence was to the established order. She honestly couldn’t see anything else they could do.
“I never came here before,” she admitted. Bee gave her an odd look, as if even he could tell that she was acting strangely. She’d gone to his apartment the previous evening, practically dragged him into bed and spent the night curled up beside him. It no longer mattered to her what Bee really wanted, if he wanted a girl to marry or a girl in every city. All that mattered was living a little before the Inquisitors killed her. “It was just...”
She shrugged. “I just kept putting it off,” she said. But the orphanage tutors had never taken the homeless children on field trips. They’d been more concerned with teaching the skills that would make the orphans capable of holding basic jobs. The only part of her pre-Peerless School schooling she remembered with any enthusiasm had been the tutor who’d taught her to read. “Thank you for coming with me.”
Bee smiled, holding her hand. It was funny how comforting she found that gesture, even though she knew that he could do nothing to help her once the new Grand Sorcerer was enthroned and made a decision about her future. At least Lady Light Spinner owed her some gratitude. Kane didn’t know her and Administrator Mentor knew her as a girl who had been sent to him for punishment, if he remembered her at all. But then, Lady Light Spinner knew – already – that Elaine knew secrets that should never be spoken out loud. That alone comprised a good reason to kill her.
“You’re welcome,” Bee said, looking over at one of the cabinets. “Do you think that that is actually the sword of the Witch-King?”
Elaine followed his gaze. The greatest of heroes – and villains – carried swords that were far more than just swords. Some had carried an entrapped demon within their metal, turning them into unstoppable weapons, while others were infused with magic that gave them a certain kind of intelligence. The sword in front of them certainly
looked
impressive – it was dark, so dark that it gave the impression of absorbing all light into its darkness – but she knew better than to assume that it was real. An artefact created by the Witch-King would be targeted by every would-be dark sorcerer with delusions of grandeur. If the Grand Sorcerer hadn’t been able to destroy it, he would have tossed it into a volcano or sent it spinning through the dimensions to somewhere far beyond the reach of mankind. The dark sword in front of them was nothing more than a duplicate, warded just enough to prevent anyone from discovering its true nature.
“Perhaps,” she said, finally. Why spoil Bee’s illusions? “Its true name has been lost long ago.”
Bee shrugged and moved onto the next cabinet, housing potion gourds from a tribe of warriors who had resisted the empire for nearly a hundred years, thanks to potions – brewed by their druids – that gave their men superhuman strength. Eventually, the empire had come to terms with them, after developing counters that neutralised the effects of their magic potion. Two nearby cabinets showed two warriors from the tribe – a short thin man and a tall fat man, both smiling pleasantly at the crowds – in full tribal outfits. Had anyone really shown off half of their chest when fighting? The short one carried a sword, but it didn’t look like he had ever really needed it. Below them, a small black-and-white dog pretended to cock its leg against the side of the cage.
Bee seemed more interested in mundane artefacts recovered from the era before the First Necromantic War. Elaine smiled as she considered a blackened piece of metal, recognising it – from the knowledge in her head – as a kind of iron dragon. The pre-war empire had been supposed to be a wonderful place, although wonderful was always determined by the people writing the history books. They’d had magic and technology that her own era was just starting to redevelop. And then the undead had risen from the grave and set out to slaughter the entire world. By the time the fighting had finally come to an end, the empire had been devastated...
And then the Witch-King had come within moments of final victory.
“They don’t tell us much about the wars in the South,” Bee said, as they studied drawings and paintings of battles between the living breathing humans and the undead hordes. One of the undead was easy to stop – their limbs could be chopped off, or their bodies incinerated by magic – but an entire army was a far tougher proposition. The undead grew smarter as they grew in numbers, yet even without brains four of them could hack a living soldier to death while he was trying to destroy one of their comrades. And a single bite would be fatal to their victim. “We never really believed that they were as horrific as you claim.”
“Even when the refugees fled to you?” Elaine asked, mildly. “And your own soldiers saw the undead walking out of the water and advancing on your shores?”
Bee nodded, pointing towards one of the other paintings. The Battle of the Silver Desolation had been the first major battle between the Witch-King’s forces and the Southern Continent, which had largely believed itself isolated from the necromancers and their war. But the Witch-King had known just how vitally important the South had been in the First Necromantic War and he had taken steps to destroy it in the Second War. An army of undead didn’t need to breathe, or to rest, so there was nothing stopping them from marching under water until they reached the South and then walking up onto the beach. The South had suddenly found the war developing a new front located within their territory.
“All we had were the undead,” Bee reminded her. “They were nasty, true, but the Witch-King never turned the fullness of his wrath on us. The rest of the tales...”
Elaine nodded. The Battle of the Bottles, where both sides had been forced to unleash demons against the other. Thankfully, even the Witch-King had realised that unleashing demons would eventually destroy the entire world and refrained from unleashing any more until the very last days of the war. It had been too late to save his base from being scorched by the first Grand Sorcerer. And the Battle of the Rift, where a sorcerer had opened a canyon below the ranks of the undead, watched them fall into thin air and then closed the canyon again, crushing them to bloody pulp. It was said that nothing grew on the land tainted by the undead. And the Battle of Long Beach, where a handful of soldiers and a single combat magician had held off the undead just long enough for reinforcements to arrive. They had all died, but they’d saved two whole cities from a fate worse than death.
Memories that weren’t hers flickered through her head. They hadn’t all been victories, not by a long chalk. The Storming of Helgoland, when the undead had marched up to the walls, building a pile of their bodies large enough to let them climb over and run down into the city, killing everyone inside. And they’d all risen as undead and joined the colossal army. If anyone had survived, no records had been taken of their existence. There was the Sack of Kamet, a small town that happened to be in the path of a demonic army; rumour had it that anyone who visited the remains of the city heard the screams of the damned as they promised their captors everything, if only they would let them go free. And not all of the atrocities had been committed by monsters. One city had been sacked by an army of humans, humans who had been under no magical compulsion at all, and the population had been systematically robbed, raped and killed. It said something about the final years of the war that no one had raised a voice in complaint when the state that had provided the army was wiped out completely by the Grand Sorcerer, without a single child being spared. In a war that had had far too many atrocities committed by all sides, the Sack of Kamet still stood out as a monument to human barbarity. The demons had been demons; the Witch-King had been mad. What excuse was there for humans who turned on their fellows so savagely?
Bee caught her arm. “Are you all right?”
“Just tired,” Elaine said. She managed a wink. They hadn’t managed to get much sleep last night and that had mainly been her fault. Not that Bee had been complaining, of course. He’d been a willing participant in their shared pleasure. “Maybe we should move on to the next section.”
The next chamber paid homage to all the Grand Sorcerers, from the very first one to the man who had died only two weeks ago, leaving a power vacuum in the heart of the Golden City. They hadn’t stated his date of death yet, Elaine noted; they wouldn’t do that until the next Grand Sorcerer was in place, with the city swearing loyalty to him. She couldn’t remember if there had been a reason for the tradition or if it had been someone’s whim that had become tradition when everyone had forgotten why it had been started in the first place.
She smiled at the thought that they’d tried to cover up his death. Every magician in the world would have felt the Grand Sorcerer die. Maybe it could have been hidden from the rest of the population, but Elaine doubted that it would have lasted more than a few days. Even up to his death, the Grand Sorcerer had been very busy hearing petitions and standing in judgement of magical crimes. A few days absence would have started tongues wagging all over the city.
“I never understood why you all swear loyalty to the Grand Sorcerer,” Bee said, as they looked at the last painting. The Grand Sorcerer seemed to be scowling disapprovingly at them. He’d never been fond of the perks of power and had been known to sack his assistants for enriching themselves or using their positions to surround themselves with luxury. It had been a policy that had found favour with most of the city, who wanted their taxes spent on important issues rather than enriching politicians. “Why do you swear to serve him?”
They didn’t, Elaine knew. Few magicians would willingly swear an oath that would place them so firmly under someone’s control. They’d sworn to uphold the system instead, to ensure that the next Grand Sorcerer was chosen properly rather than hundreds of wizards and magicians fighting it out for supremacy. Civil war within the Golden City would have wiped out most of the population and brought the empire crashing down in ruins. It crossed her mind that that might have been what the mad Prince had had in mind, but even that didn’t explain everything about his plan. She wondered briefly if he’d prepared something that would have allowed him to rise from the dead, yet the Inquisitors would have thought to check for that. They might have decided to destroy the body rather than returning it to Ida for burial. No one who bore witness to the battle that had nearly destroyed High Tory would have spoken out against such a decision.
“Because that’s how the system works,” she said, finally. It wasn’t something she felt comfortable with, even with Bee. The first Grand Sorcerer had devised a structure to prevent his comrades from fighting...and dressed it up neatly to prevent them from rebelling against it. “We don’t question it.”