The Royal Sorceress (39 page)

“Hear all about it,” one was yelling. “Airship crashes in the Thames!”

“Daring robbery of the Tower of London,” another was selling. “Crown jewels under threat!”

Jack laughed to himself. By now, the rumours would be all over London. The Tower of London was used to house the Crown Jewels and anyone robbing the building would be assumed to have designs on stealing the nation’s treasures. It wouldn’t be long before they realised that someone had attacked the Tower and liberated a number of captives. There was no way that it could be covered up – and no one, not even Lord North, had been able to silence rumourmongers. The entire city would be certain that the Tower of London had been smashed by the end of the day. They’d probably be talking about fire-breathing dragons or foreign armies outside London.

Shaking his head, he kept walking. No one tried to bar his passage. He hadn’t intended to destroy the airship, but it had served as a suitable distraction. The city’s authorities would have far more to worry about than a handful of rebels. And that was the way he wanted it.

It was so much easier to win if you took your opponent by surprise.

Chapter Thirty-Three

W
e saved the entire city!”

Gwen listened as Cannock and his friends boasted of their great success. Every Mover in Cavendish Hall had been ordered up the Thames to assist in fighting the fire; Gwen had volunteered to go, only to be told by Doctor Norwell to return to her studies. Instead, she’d climbed up to the roof and watched the flames rising up over London before they were finally quenched. Cannock was known for being boastful, even if he had stopped trying to harass Gwen, but it seemed that for once he was right. The fire had come alarmingly close to spreading out of control and becoming a second Great Fire of London.

“The flames were so hot that my clothes were scorched,” he continued, bragging to the other magicians. Even Gwen was listening closely. “I picked up the entire Thames and turned it on the flames like a powerful hose, driving the flames back until they were finally quelled. The remains of the bridge were cooling down once we covered them with water; we had to…”

“That’s quite enough bragging,” Master Thomas said. Cannock jumped and then tried to pretend that he hadn’t. His ultimate superior had come up behind him so quietly that he hadn’t heard his passage. “You did well. Go upstairs and get some sleep.”

“Yes, sir,” Cannock said, quickly. He always deferred to Master Thomas, even if he refused to defer to anyone else. Gwen had seen such behaviour before in social climbers; they were fulsomely flattering to anyone superior to them, while cruel and unpleasant to anyone below their level. Lady Mary often acted in such a manner herself. “We
will
catch the anarchists, won’t we?”

“I’m sure that we will,” Master Thomas assured him, gravely. His gaze swept the room. “Classes are cancelled for today. Movers are to go upstairs and sleep it off; everyone else is to study unless I call for them personally. Gwen, you’re with me.”

Gwen nodded, not trusting herself to speak. She had been isolated in the crowd of magicians, both by being a Master and by being a woman. They might have forgiven her being born a Master, but they would never forget that she was a woman. She would never know true companionship from the other magicians, or even from mundane humans. There was no one else quite like her.

The crowd dispersed rapidly. Gwen had been at Cavendish Hall long enough to learn that Master Thomas was often impatient when his orders weren’t carried out at once. Apart from Gwen herself – and Jack, when he had been a loyal servant of the Crown – the younger magicians were replaceable. Master Thomas could fill all of the billets at Cavendish Hall merely through using his name. Gwen had been looking at some of the registers, trying to deduce how many magicians had been born in the farms, and ended up concluding that thousands of magicians were known to exist. The Darwinists, who claimed that magicians were born to rule over mundane humans, were almost certainly the driving force behind the farms. If farmers could breed stronger horses, or larger sheep, why couldn’t they breed stronger magicians?

But magic didn’t seem to obey understandable rules. Logically, a magician born of two other magicians – a Mover and a Blazer, perhaps – should share both talents. And yet it didn’t work that way. A magician either had one talent or he had them all; cross-breeding magicians only seemed to produce weaker magicians with a single talent. It made no sense to Gwen, but Doctor Norwell – clearly unaware that Gwen knew about the farms – had once commented that magic clearly obeyed its own laws, even if the magicians didn’t understand them. One day, he’d told her, everything would be discovered. Knowing
why
something happened was often more important than knowing
how
something happened. It was the difference between original science and merely using someone else’s work.

Gwen had her own theory on the differences between rich and poor magicians. The rich ate regularly and well; the poor often had to scrape for their daily bread. It made sense, to her at least, that the ones who ate well would have more energy for use in their magic, giving them an advantage over the others. The Darwinists wouldn’t thank her for such a theory, she knew. They believed that birth alone made them superior.

Master Thomas’s office was surprisingly crowded when he led her into the room. Lord Mycroft was seated on the sofa, his oversized chest heaving alarmingly. Lord Blackburn was seated on an armchair, scowling at everyone – even Master Thomas. A number of men she didn’t recognise were either sitting in their own chairs or standing in front of the fire. Gwen was the only woman in the room. Even Irene, who might have been able to contribute all kinds of ideas to the meeting, had been excluded. She had a nasty feeling that that didn’t bode well.

“The fire at the bridge has finally been quenched,” Lord Mycroft said. Gwen, who had heard that Lord Mycroft hated to alter his daily routine, could hear the irritation in his voice. “I am afraid that our former prisoners escaped without loss.”

There was a long pause. Gwen had only heard that an airship had crashed into one of the many bridges crossing the Thames. Prisoners? No one had told her anything about prisoners.

“They managed to break their fellows out of the Tower of London,” one of the men she didn’t recognise said. He looked older than Master Thomas, with a long white beard that reminded her of her grandfather, before he had passed away. “No matter how we look at it, it was a total disaster. Losing so many well-connected people in the explosion...”

“To say nothing of morale at the Tower garrison,” a younger man said. He wore no uniform, but he had a military bearing. Gwen saw him as he glanced towards her and realised that he reassembled the Duke of India. The great conqueror’s son? “They could have taken the airship down in seconds, if they hadn’t had to worry about the human shields.”

“The Prime Minister is due to address Parliament this evening,” Lord Mycroft said, shortly. “We need to have something to advise him by then. The last thing we need is another rebellion on the backbenches.”

Gwen smiled, inwardly. She knew more about politics than the average noble-born girl, if only because her father had been given to discoursing at length on the subject to anyone who would listen. Lord Liverpool was aging; a successful challenge from one of the younger MPs might bring his government down, forcing a series of elections that would put a new government in power. And until the new Prime Minister was settled in office, Britain would be effectively leaderless. The ship of state would drift out of control while attention was focused elsewhere.

“This was intended as a challenge to our authority,” Lord Blackburn said, flatly. There was no Charm in his voice, Gwen realised. Master Thomas would have detected it instantly and attempting to Charm some of the most powerful men in the land would be considered Treason. Lord Blackburn would meet his end on Tower Hill, where all of the traitors were executed, before his body was cremated and the ashes dumped into the Thames. “It demands a harsh response.”

Master Thomas snorted. “Against who?” He asked. “We raided the known centres of underground activity after the...unfortunate incident at the Fairweather Ball. The underground is careful to keep its cells separated from each other, making it harder to penetrate and break them. They learned a great many lessons since they last mounted a challenge to our authority.”

He paused, just long enough to draw attention. “This was a carefully-laid plan, conceived by a madman,” he added. “They used underground magicians to distract me and keep me out of London while they raided the Tower. I fear that we must face the fact that one of our worst fears has come true. The magical underground has found a charismatic leader who has united it against us.”

“And has allied it with the other underground movements,” Lord Mycroft said. “We must assume the worst; that we’re facing a more dangerous challenge to our authority since King Charles and the Long Parliament had their deadly falling out. Parliament and the King could talk and try to find a compromise. We cannot compromise with anarchists.”

“You should be able to find your former student,” one of the other men said. He was younger than David, but older than Gwen – and trying to appear older than he was. “I thought that you magicians could sense one another’s presence.”

“If Master Jackson was using his powers constantly, we might be able to use Sensors to track him down,” Master Thomas said. Gwen realised, suddenly, that it wasn’t just the government’s power that was being challenged. Her tutor’s position as the foremost magician in England was being threatened. They couldn’t replace him...or could they? There was another Master in Cavendish Hall now; Gwen herself. But she didn’t have his years of experience yet. She couldn’t hope to fit into his shoes. “But he is careful and very capable. He won’t allow us to track him down so easily.”

“And in any case he has the assistance of other magicians,” Lord Blackburn added. “The underground has something else that they didn’t have five years ago – they have someone who can teach them how to master their powers. We knew that it was getting harder to track down unlicensed magicians even before Master Jackson returned from the dead.”

“Begging your pardon,” one of the older men said, “but I don’t like joking upon such matters.”

“It is hardly a joke,” Lord Blackburn said, tightly. His face flushed alarmingly. “We believed that Master Jackson was dead. If we’d taken precautions...”

“We did what seemed best in the circumstances,” Lord Mycroft said. He sounded tired, almost on the verge of sleep. “There is no point in arguing over decisions that were made years ago. We have to deal with the world as it is, not as we would like it to be.”

He tapped his cane against the wooden floor. “We have to track the underground down, rapidly,” he said. “If Parliament feels that we cannot beat the underground, they may feel inclined to offer concessions to the lower classes rather than keeping them firmly in their place. I submit to you that allowing such concessions to be made would spell the end of the British Empire. The Americans, the Australians, the South Africans...they would all demand equal rights on the border of empire. We would see the end of the greatest force for civilisation and advancement in our lifetimes; the empire destroyed.”

“Not the South Africans,” Lord Blackburn pointed out. “They require our support for facing the savages. Even with the Ferguson rifles that broke the tribes, they’re still fighting more often than not. We blood the new regiments in Africa before deploying them elsewhere.”

“And rounding up more slaves for the plantations in Dixie,” Master Thomas said, flatly. “I have never seen the honour in slave-trading.”

Gwen couldn’t disagree, even though she knew that her father and brother had made fortunes by selling black slaves to the American South. There had been hundreds of antislavery campaigns in and out of Parliament, but slavery was simply too important to the British Empire’s economy to be abolished. A handful of colonies in West Africa had been founded by ex-slaves who had had their freedom purchased by religious and moral pressure groups, yet none of them were particularly successful. The Darwinists pointed to those failures as evidence that the black man was not civilised and could never be turned into a rational man. Slavery was for their own good. Privately, Gwen wondered how anyone could believe such a claim when it was clear that the ex-slave colonies had been set up to fail, but it wasn’t something she could say publicly. There had to be a caste at the bottom to help keep the empire stable.

There were other reasons, she’d come to realise after she’d moved to Cavendish Hall. Slave rebellions were common in the American South, where frustrated and hopeless young bucks had turned on their masters. The British Army’s garrisons were often called upon to put such rebellions down, demonstrating to the Americans just how much they needed the presence of the British military. It was convincing to the aristocratic plantation farmers – and the opinions of anyone else simply didn’t matter.

“That debate is one that can be saved for another time,” Lord Mycroft said. “What do we advise the Prime Minister?”

“That we can keep the situation under control,” Lord Blackburn said. “We do have forces we can call upon in England. It’s time to show the vermin the uncovered fist.”

He stood up and paced around the room, stopping in front of a table on which was spread a giant map of London. “We know who we are looking for,” he said. “We move in the troops and seal off the entire poorer area of London. Once in control, we crack down hard, bringing pressure to bear on the...less savoury residents of the area to expose underground hide-outs to us. Everyone we catch goes under the gaze of the Talkers; we use the intelligence they develop to go after other hide-outs, building up a picture of the underground. We push factory owners to bring pressure on their workers; those who tell us useful information about the underground will be rewarded, those found to be concealing information will be sacked and thrown out onto the streets to die.”