Schooled in Magic (3 page)

“Take my hand if you want to live,” the newcomer said, when Emily balked. The darkness was flooding in from all sides, pushing in around them as if it were a living thing. “Come with me or die!”

Emily didn’t hesitate any longer. She took his hand.

And then the dark chamber vanished in a final blinding flash of white light.

O
NCE THE BRILLIANT LIGHT FADED AWAY,
she was standing in the middle of a very different room.

“Welcome to my Tower,” her rescuer said. His face was still hidden behind a wooden mask, but his voice was kind. “Don’t worry. Shadye can’t get you here.”

Emily nodded, trying to keep her body from shaking. Her knees threatened to buckle, but she did her best to look around this very strange new place. The room in which she stood was large, but crammed with strange devices and boiling pots of liquid that looked as if they were about to bubble over and spill on the ground. Dark lines had been drawn on the floor, creating patterns that changed every time she looked at them. Light steamed in from a massive window, bright enough to suggest high noon. But it had been dark just a moment ago...

“Here,” her rescuer said, as she started to shake again. He passed her a glass of clear liquid. “You may need this to calm yourself.”

Emily hesitated. All her life, she’d been told that she shouldn’t take gifts from strangers–but she did need a drink. Besides, if he wanted to poison her, he could probably have done it without forcing her to drink anything. That decided, she drank the water. It was cold, almost tasteless, but refreshing. Afterwards, a strange calm descended on her mind.

The man nodded to a pair of wooden seats below the window and Emily walked over to them, peering out of the window overlooking a green and pleasant landscape. Everywhere she looked, there were forests and lakes–but no sign of human life at all. The ground seemed to shimmer with magic.

She caught herself and looked back at the newcomer. “Who are you?”

“You need to know one rule right from the start,” the man said slowly, as he removed his mask and pulled back his hood. “Do not
ever
ask a sorcerer his name. Ask instead what he would like to be called.”

Emily sucked in her breath as he looked up at her. He looked surprisingly young, with a handsome face and a shock of brown hair, but there was something in the way he moved that nagged at her mind. It took her several seconds to realize that he wore a young body, yet walked in the manner of an older man. His lanky body seemed almost as strange to him as it did to her.

He smiled at her and she suddenly felt reassured. “You may call me Void, if you like,” he said. “Please, be seated. You must have many questions.”

“Yes,” Emily said. Hundreds were tumbling through her mind. One question seemed very important. “Why...why did you rescue me?”

Void seemed oddly surprised by the question. “Why not?”

Emily studied him, trying to understand. He’d risked his life to save a girl he didn’t know? Why would the question surprise him? Or maybe he’d jumped in to prevent Shadye from sacrificing her and thought that Emily would be able to deduce that for herself...

She cleared her throat. “What...what did you do to him?”

“Shadye?” Void seemed to smile. “I stunned him, rather badly.” His smile faded away into a grim expression that seemed more natural to him. “Sadly, I fear that he will get better.”

Emily stared at him. “Why didn’t you kill him while you had the chance?”

“His protective wards wouldn’t have slipped that far,” Void said. “I couldn’t have sneaked the attack in at all if he hadn’t been in the Inverse Shadow. He had to lower part of his guard just to enter the building.”

Emily felt a wave of confusion. What had been so special about the Inverse Shadow?

“But I got you out,” Void added, with a childish grin of triumph. “My old master would be turning in his grave. If he were in his grave.”

Emily had to smile back, and then collected herself. “Right,” she said. “Where am I?”

Void didn’t seem surprised at
that
question. “You’re in my Tower, located on the edge of the Greenwood, in the Southern Marches of Barcia.” He studied her face for a long moment, thoughtfully. “But that means nothing to you, unless I miss my guess.”

“No,” Emily said. Despite the calm, she felt her thoughts starting to spin. Where
was
she? “Shadye said he brought me here.”

“He did,” Void confirmed. He paused, just for a second. “Actually, he ordered creatures from the realm between the worlds to deliver him a person fitting specific criteria. They brought him you.”

Emily shook her head in disbelief. “And why me? What makes me so special?”

A third question appeared in her mind a second later. “And how can I get home?”

Void hesitated. “I only sensed your arrival in this world, so I confess that I don’t know why Shadye thought that you were important,” he admitted. For the first time, he seemed rather unsure of himself. “As to getting you home...it may not be possible. It may never be possible.”

There was something in the way he said it that kept her from realizing his true meaning for almost a minute. “I can
never
go home?”

The thought staggered her. Her life hadn’t been good; she’d watched her mother drink herself close to death while her stepfather had been unpleasant and abusive whenever he cared to remember that he had a stepdaughter. But it had been her life. She’d had her books, the company of the nerds and geeks whenever she wanted to play games, and a bright future ahead of her...

...Or had she?

Her teenage years would have ended with her going to college, and then perhaps searching for a job. She would never really be able to live her own life, nor find a position that suited her. She knew from older acquaintances that it wasn’t easy to find a job, let alone make ends meet in the adult world. One day, all the skills she’d learned at school would be utterly unimportant. The only consolation was that those who had ruled the school through being popular, pretty or athletic would be even less important.

And it was hard to escape the thought that no one would miss her now that she was gone.

“The problem is locating the world that birthed you,” Void admitted, breaking into her thoughts. “If we were to open a gateway into the worlds beyond to locate your home world, the necromancers would have their chance to interfere with the magic, perhaps killing you or the conjurers. Even if they didn’t, searching for your world might attract attention from beings that live outside the normal walls of our reality.”

Emily remembered the dark presence in what Void had called the Inverse Shadow and shuddered. “So I can never go home,” she said softly. In some ways, having no choice made it easier. “Why did Shadye think that I was a Child of Destiny?”

Void’s eyes went very wide. “He thought that you were a Child of Destiny?”

“He said I was,” Emily confessed. “But my mother was called Destiny.”

Void stared at her for a long moment, then burst out laughing. “Shadye would have been in for a shock when he finished sacrificing you. The Dark Gods would not have thanked him for your soul.”

Emily didn’t understand the joke at first–and when it dawned on her, it didn’t seem very funny. “But he would have killed me!”

Void nodded. “My guess is that one of the criteria I mentioned was that you would be a Child of Destiny. But the creatures that inhabit the worlds beyond are mischievous, prone to reinterpreting orders if they’re not very specific. A Child of Destiny...if he didn’t bother to clarify what that actually
meant
, they might have gone after you instead. But you’d still meet the other criteria.”

He studied her for a long moment. “Wizards have been attempting to use magic to foretell the future for thousands of years,” he added. “It rarely works very well, because the future is constantly in flux. Sometimes knowing about a possible future destroys it; sometimes knowing what is in store makes it inevitable. Even the best of wizards will leave the future to take care of itself.

“But we do know that some people are born to be at the heart of history. Those people will make decisions that reshape destiny, that completely alter the future. If Shadye had offered you to his dark lords, they would have rewarded him with power beyond imagination.” His smile flickered back into existence. “But Shadye has a great deal of imagination.”

Emily rubbed her eyes, trying to comprehend what he was telling her. “But I don’t have any say in what happens,” she said, finally. “Back home, I was nothing.”

“No one is ever nothing,” Void said cryptically. “The Children of Destiny are rarely seen and recognized in advance. Sometimes, we only ever realize that they were there in hindsight. Who would have thought that the lowly goatherd Avon would become the linchpin of an alliance that would push the necromancers back into the dark lands? In hindsight, we know that he was living at the crux point–and if they’d killed him before his time, the necromancers would have had the world.”

“Or if they’d convinced him to join them,” Emily guessed.

Void nodded.

Emily remembered the history she’d studied, very taken by the thought. “Or if he’d fled from the battlefield...”

“Precisely,” Void said. He stood up and looked up, out of the window. “Do you know that there are more necromancers in this world than there are powerful sorcerers?”

Emily rolled her eyes. She’d barely been in the new world for more than an hour, maybe two. How could she have hoped to learn anything about its history, culture or geography? Shadye certainly hadn’t been interested in educating her. How did Void expect her to know anything?

“The only thing that keeps them from crushing us is that we can work together and the necromancers are unable to cooperate very well,” Void explained, without looking back at her. “Every one of them believes that his rivals would stick a knife in his back the moment he looked away. They have good reason not to trust one another...”

He turned and looked down at her. “They are still gaining in power,” he said. “Three years ago, the Kingdom of Gondar was overrun by their forces and the population was enslaved.”

Emily stared at him. “And you could do nothing? With all your power, couldn’t you do something to keep it from happening?”

Void looked down at his hands. For the first time, Emily realized that they were scarred, as if he’d been cutting himself time and time again. “All our efforts could do little more than hold back hell long enough to get a tiny percentage of the country’s population out before it was too late. With Gondar in their hands, they have a land route through to Chirico, which now needs to pull back its troops from the border defenses and see to its own defense.”

“Forcing you to split your forces,” Emily said. She’d played enough games with the nerds to know how it worked, even if
Command and Conquer
logic never worked in the real world. “But I don’t even come
from
this world. Why me?”

Void smiled. “Shadye may have asked for a Child of Destiny without specifying that she–or he–had to come from this world,” he said, wryly. “Or the entities might have deliberately misunderstood the instructions. Or...he may have had a reason for summoning one from a different world.”

His expression darkened. “But right now, a Child of Destiny is far more likely to swing the odds in our favor than against us. Shadye may simply have been intending to ensure that one never appeared, or to remove him from the world before he reached his time.”

Emily felt her head spinning again. This was too much. Void was talking calmly about matters that hadn’t meant anything to her before she’d arrived in this world, before her life had turned upside down. And Shadye had not only brought her here against her will; he’d marked her for death, long before she could have done anything to him. Her lips cracked into a bitter smile. Shadye should have known that if he’d left her in her world she would never have grown into a threat to him.

And yet, how could she
ever
be a threat to him? She’d seen the sorcerer work magic casually, without any effort at all. She had no magic, not even an understanding of modern technology that could be used to alter the balance of power. Her teachers hadn’t taught her anything useful; she had no idea how to produce gunpowder, or steam engines, or even the basics of modern medicine. Shadye had probably targeted her because she would be helpless even if she did manage to escape his grasp.

“You will be assured of my protection for as long as you are forced to remain in this world,” Void said, when she asked. “This world is not always safe for the unwary, or the weak, and Shadye’s interest in you may attract attention from others.”

Emily looked down at the floor, watching the strange patterns as they shifted from place to place. She’d read countless fantasy novels where the heroine was a chosen one, picked from all others to save the world, normally wearing a chainmail bikini as she hacked and slashed her way to slay the dark lord, or banish the demon back to hell. Offhand, she couldn’t recall
any
novel where the chosen one had simply been a case of mistaken identity. And in the books where there was no tinge of destiny, the heroine was almost always supremely competent. What was
she
going to do? Impress Shadye by her masterful grasp of role-playing games, creative writing, and wasting time browsing the internet and reading web-comics? She didn’t even have a homicidal rabbit with a switchblade on her side.