Necropolis (Royal Sorceress Book 3) (43 page)

Moscow looked oddly ... darkened, even in the bright sunlight. There was a haze hanging over the city, a haze of darkness and shadow, and a stench of death that she knew would linger for years, even if the Tsar were defeated. The undead swarmed over the buildings, bringing out any remaining living and biting them, adding to their growing ranks. None of them seemed to pay any attention to the boat, something that relieved and worried her at the same time. They were in no position to survive if the boat was swarmed, but at the same time the Tsar was clearly occupied somewhere else. What was he doing?

She heard a moan behind her and turned to see Sir Sidney, standing on the edge of the deck as if he were considering plunging into the icy water. Olivia exchanged a glance with Raechel, then walked over to him. Up close, Sir Sidney was starting to decompose, his flesh flaking off his body. Olivia shuddered at the reminder of what she’d helped do to him, then braced herself and touched his back. He turned to look at her, his eyes glinting with grim light. Olivia found herself wondering if she shouldn’t kill him – or try to control him – now, before it was too late. How long could he hold out against the undead?

“We need your mother,” Sir Sidney said. There was no amusement or mockery in his tone, just a curious deadness that worried her more than anything else. She would almost sooner be laughed at, if it meant Sir Sidney was normal. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know,” Olivia confessed. Gwen was tough, but not unbeatable. Where
was
she? “I wish I knew.”

“When we make contact with the garrison, we will see if Simone can reach her,” Sir Sidney said, flatly. “And then we will decide what to do next.”

Olivia nodded, then tried to think of something else to say, something to talk about, something that would keep his thoughts engaged. But nothing came to mind. They had next to nothing in common, even if it was rare for men and women to just talk. Raechel, thankfully, came to the rescue, asking Sir Sidney about the work he did for Lord Mycroft. Olivia listened, relieved, as Sir Sidney started to sound more human. But she knew it wouldn’t last indefinitely.

They slipped out of the city and linked up with a Russian patrol, which guided them to the airstrip. Simone was waiting for them, looking relieved to see Talleyrand again, but when she tried to find Gwen nothing happened. Olivia gritted her teeth, found somewhere to sit down, and started to reach out with her mind. Her undead were still in the city and it was time to use them. She was damned if she was leaving Gwen behind, not after everything Gwen had done for her. And God help anyone who stood in her way.

Chapter Thirty-Six

G
wen slowly, very slowly, staggered back towards wakefulness. Her head hurt, a throbbing pain that threatened to drive her back into the darkness, while her entire body ached, as if she’d been beaten to the very edge of her endurance. Whispering echoed through her mind, right on the brink of her awareness. Something seemed to be clamped to her right wrist. It took several long minutes – they felt like hours – to pull herself together to the point she dared open her eyes. She was lying on a straw pallet inside a metal cell, right next to a living breathing man. Her hand, she discovered, was cuffed to his wrist.

He leered at her, unpleasantly. Gwen reached for her powers in shock, only to feel them slithering and sliding away from her. He had to be the Leech, she realised dully; she hadn’t had a good look at him during the battle, but there was no one else who would serve as her gaoler. As long as his powers were active, hers were useless. But she wasn’t helpless, she reminded herself, savagely. The first Leech she had met, Sir Charles, had made the same mistake. She was
not
a weak and feeble woman.

She sat upright, feeling sparks of pain as she moved. Her legs were shackled together, suggesting that the Russians didn’t have as much confidence in their Leech as they should have done. She could probably pick her way out of the shackles even without magic, she noted; Olivia’s lessons on lock-picking had been surprisingly useful before, once or twice. It was why people were normally handcuffed behind the back. But the Russians had left her hands free, if cuffed to a Leech.

Outside, there was darkness ... and things moving in the darkness. She caught a flash of yellow right before the undead creature stepped up to the bars and peered through at her, his dead gaze passing across her face with no interest. Her guards, she realised, held back by the Tsar’s will. If she somehow knocked the Leech out or killed him, the undead would swarm into the cell and kill her, before she recovered control of her powers. And he was probably looking at her right now, through the eyes of his undead servants.

“Lie still,” the Leech advised. “It takes time to recover.”

Gwen scowled at him. The real question was why they’d let her wake up at all? It wasn’t as if they could get her to help them, no matter how much Charm they applied – and she knew very little the Russians might find interesting. Lord Mycroft had encouraged her to attend Privy Council meetings, but Gwen had never really bothered. She had enough trouble battling the senior magicians in Cavendish Hall. And the Russians probably knew far too much about the Hall and how it worked without having to force Gwen to talk.

It was hard, so very hard, to form words, but she managed it. “Why am I here?”

“The Father Tsar wishes you to be kept alive,” the Leech said. “I believe he wishes to speak with you.”

Gwen closed her eyes, thinking fast. What did the Tsar
want
from her? Magic? It wasn’t something she could
give
him and, as far as they knew, magic didn’t survive the transition from living to undead. Olivia had told her that the Russian experiments to create undead magicians hadn’t succeeded ... but they
had
succeeded, to some extent. The Tsar had become a Necromancer, of sorts. Did they hope to use her to produce additional magicians?

Her blood ran cold as she considered another possibility. No one really knew how magic was transmitted, but they did know that the children of magicians were almost always magicians themselves. The farms had been based around using common-born female magicians as mothers of new magicians, fathered by men from Cavendish Hall. If Gwen hadn’t been born to a noble family, she knew she would have ended up in the farms, drugged while her body brought forth an endless supply of children. Did the Tsar intend to use her as a brood mare?

“The Father Tsar is mad,” Gwen said, flatly. Outside, the undead whispered angrily amongst themselves. “How long will it be until he absorbs you too?”

The Leech smiled at her, apparently taking no offense. “We are his most loyal servants,” he said, calmly. “He will not make us undead.”

Gwen sighed. “Are you
sure
of that?” She pushed forward before the Leech could say a word. “He needs life force to keep himself going,” she added. “Sooner or later, he’s going to run out of life force. And then he will turn on you.”

She wondered, vaguely, if the Leech would even
listen
to her. The poor bastard had grown up in an environment where even the slightly disloyal thought could be read and used against him. Gwen suspected she would have gone mad very quickly if Master Thomas had intruded on her thoughts whenever it suited him, reading her deepest darkest secrets while searching for traces of disloyalty. If someone was brought up with the certain knowledge their thoughts could be read at any point, they’d have a very strong incentive to condition themselves against any form of disloyalty.

“We are his servants,” the Leech said. “We will be part of his elect once he rules the world.”

Gwen sighed and started to study the Leech, trying to conceal her interest as best as possible. Irene had taught her a few things about fighting men, warning her that while most men tended to underestimate women as combatants, they also tended to be stronger and faster when push came to shove. The Leech looked strong and healthy, too strong for her to overcome without her powers. And, as long as he was cuffed to her, it was unlikely she would be able to get out of his range.

“You should listen to me,” she said. She wondered, vaguely, what Irene would do in such a situation. Try to seduce the Leech, she suspected, which wouldn’t be easy. The undead were watching them, after all. “He’s going mad.”

“He’s woken up for the first time,” a new voice said. “And you are his slave.”

Gwen turned to see the Tsar as he stepped into the room, on the other side of the bars. His face was almost unrecognisable. Pieces of flesh were slowly dropping from his exposed skin, as if his body was decomposing inhumanly quickly. The cell didn’t smell very nice – Gwen hadn’t wanted to think about what else might have been held captive in the cell – but the Tsar
stank
, so badly that Gwen had to fight down a wave of nausea. And to think she hadn’t been sick since Jack had shown her the dark underpinnings of London ...

She pulled herself to her feet, feeling the Leech rising behind her. Not that he had a choice, thanks to the cuffs. She wondered, absently, what they would do when one of them needed to use the toilet, then pushed the thought aside hastily. By then, she would have to be out of the complex or dead. Up close, she saw, the Tsar was becoming more and more like one of the undead. His moustache, which had seemed so prominent, was coming out of his skin, as if it was no longer part of him. She had a sudden mad impulse to reach out and tug at the hair, expecting it to come out without a struggle. But she pushed that aside too.

“You’re dying,” she said, wondering if
dying
could really be said to apply to one of the undead. And she was sure the Tsar counted as undead, even though his mind was still in control. “Why did you do this to yourself?”

The Tsar’s hand snapped through the bars and clenched around Gwen’s throat, squeezing tightly enough to hurt. “Silence,” he snapped. He said a handful of words in Russian that didn’t sound remotely pleasant. “You will do as you are told.”

He let go of her and shoved her back, hard. Gwen stumbled backwards, one hand touching her bruised throat. He’d almost lost control, she realised dully, almost killed her even though he wanted to keep her alive. The darkness – the whispering – was howling at the back of his mind, dragging him down into the undead gestalt. Sooner or later, she suspected, he would lose control completely and that would be the end. But a great many innocent people would die before the whole affair finally concluded.

If it ever does
, she thought. Moscow had a population numbered in the millions, if the Russians were to be believed. That was easily enough to form a gestalt that would be terrifyingly intelligent. The Tsar might be dead, but the nightmare he’d created would live on.
Can we destroy a million undead formed into one mind
?

“I’m not very good at doing what I’m told,” she said, when she managed to gather herself. “I used to object to everything my mother wanted me to do.”

“I have no doubt of it,” the Tsar said. He looked as if he wanted to smile, but he had forgotten how. “You will
heal
for me.”

Gwen eyed him, sharply. If his body had been living, it might have been possible for a Healer to put him back together. Gwen had seen a young aristocrat with several broken bones and massive trauma saved by a Healer, after taking a fall off a horse while trying to combine fox hunting and heavy drinking. But the Tsar was undead, his body rotting away at a terrifying rate, far faster than any of the normal undead. She rather doubted she could do anything to salvage his undead life, even if she’d been a full Healer.

The Leech yanked at the cuff on her wrist. “Give him what he wants,” he ordered. “The Father Tsar requires your services.”

Gwen gritted her teeth, then had to fight to hide her smile. “Give me my powers back,” she said. “How else am I meant to heal him?”

The Leech smiled with genuine amusement. “You will have to be prepared first,” he said, dryly. “We wouldn’t want you doing something else with your powers.”

Gwen made a show of rolling her eyes in a manner that had once driven her mother to distraction, followed by fits of rage. “If you refuse to let me use my powers,” she said, in the sweetest tone she could muster, “I won’t be able to do anything for your Father Tsar.”

She paused. “I suppose I could provide him with a light snack,” she added. She was fairly sure that no undead version of her would have her powers. “Would
that
be helpful?”

The Tsar stared at her for a long chilling moment. He didn’t blink, she saw, nor did his body move normally. His face was utterly inhuman, as though he could no longer muster the energy or incentive to pretend to be somewhat normal. A piece of skin peeled off his body as she watched, dropping down to the floor. Did he have the intellect, she asked herself, to realise the potential danger in allowing her access to her powers? Or was he desperate enough to take the risk?

“You will be prepared,” he said. He turned and moved away, his every step careful and deliberate. It wasn’t an act. He had genuine difficulty in remembering how to walk. “And then you will save me.”

Gwen watched him go, realising that Olivia might well have done far more than just extract a little revenge when she’d killed Gregory. The Healer should never have been so badly exposed, not when he was clearly the only one the Tsar had on hand. Gwen was no Healer and no one with access to her files would have doubted it. If there had been any other candidate, she knew, they would simply have killed her out of hand, then forced her body to rise again.

She looked over at the Leech. “Do you not see it? He’s mad!”

“But he is still the Tsar,” the Leech said. “We will begin soon.”

Gwen sighed, inwardly. The upper classes in England had worked hard to convince everyone, including themselves, that their rule was divinely mandated, but it was clear that the Russians had taken the concept a great deal further. Lacking any tradition of organised dissent, even of loyal opposition, the Russians found it hard to rise up against the Tsar. But the unrest simmering in the streets of Moscow and St Petersburg would eventually have exploded into the light. When society broke down completely, who knew where the pieces would fall?