The Royal Sorceress (45 page)

The King smiled. “You mean like you acted, before you discovered that your life was a lie?”

Jack’s eyes flashed fire. “I could kill you right now,” he snapped. Lightning danced over his hands. “I could behead you and stick your head on a pike in front of the tower.”

“Of course you could,” the King said. He didn’t seem worried by the threat. “And someone in the Line of Succession would be acclaimed King and the country would go on. These aren’t the days when losing a monarch meant the end of everything. The government will carry on without me.”

Jack had to smile. “And that prospect doesn’t bother you?”

For a moment, he saw tiredness in the King’s face. “While my father was alive, I woke up every day unsure if I was Prince Regent or not,” he said. “He had days when he was the man I remember from my childhood and days when his mind was clearly gone, when he wanted me to marry a rosebush or to form a marriage alliance with the Tsar in Russia. The pressure of the Throne destroyed my father’s life. If I had my life all over again, I’d want to be someone happy and distant and
small
.”

“Really?” Jack asked. “I think you’ll find that happiness and powerlessness don’t go together in the modern world.”

“Maybe not,” the King agreed. “Lord Owen...I want to be like him. Spend my days happily pottering through libraries, researching ancient history while allowing the world to pass me by. You thought of me as an absolute ruler, but in truth I have less choice than you might think. I didn’t choose my wife...”

“You settled for abandoning her instead,” Jack pointed out, tartly. “How many mistresses have you had?”

“Too many and too few,” the King said. He looked up at Jack, sharply. “And how do you explain the women in the farms you...mated with while you worked for the Crown?”

Jack winced, inwardly. “I had sex with them, yes,” he confessed. “I didn’t know what they were or what I was...”

The King snorted. “Of course you knew what they were,” he said. “They were women who were helpless to resist you, who simply couldn’t say no. You have no sense of natural justice at all; your revolution is built on a lie. You’re the man who couldn’t face up to what he was without allowing it to warp him into a monster. Do you even know the names of the men and women who died on the airship you brought down in the Thames?”

“There’s no such thing as natural justice,” Jack said, quietly. The King was right, no matter how much he wanted to deny it. “There’s only what we make for ourselves.”

“And you have made a new world for yourself,” the King said. “What will you do with it, I wonder?”

He smiled. “You’ve taken the city,” he added, “but you will find governing to be much harder than you think. What will you do for money if you abolish half the taxes, or if you force the businesses to pay better wages instead of using the profits to pay the government, or if you abandon the sugar colonies in the Caribbean? Who will feed the country if you abandon the new farming technology in England? What will you do when the colonies start revolting? And who will serve in the Royal Navy if you remove the country’s natural leaders?”

“We will find answers to those problems,” Jack said, mildly.

The King snorted, louder. “People have been trying to find solutions to those problems since the days of Alexander the Great,” he said. “There are countless texts on the subject of what makes a good monarch, or an ideal system of government. No one has ever produced a permanent solution – and no one ever will. Whatever system you devise, there will always be winners and losers.

“You rail against the rich aristocrats who patronise the poor,” he added. “But if you take away their wealth and distribute it to the population, who will have enough money to invest in railways and shipping – even airships? Who will
want
to invest when there are no profits to be had? What will you do then?”

He looked up. “I’ll tell you what you’ll do then,” he said. “You’ll break your own principles and do whatever it takes to rebuild Britain’s power. You’ll force the colonies to submit rather than granting them any independence. You won’t free the slaves...”

“I will,” Jack said. “Slavery is a great evil...”

“Would the slaves in America be better off without their chains?” The King asked. “And what would you say to those who own the slaves? Will you pay them for their human property or will you force them to let the slaves go without compensation? And if you do, what will you do when they produce a revolt against you?”

The King chuckled. “Do you see why I was content to leave the government to Lord Liverpool and his Cabinet?” He asked. “I was King – and I could do nothing without risking the collapse of the entire system. Perhaps you’ll do better than me, perhaps not...I’ll wish you good luck. You’re going to need it.”

Jack’s eyes narrowed. “And what would you say if I told you that you were going to be executed on the morrow?”

“I trust that you would allow me a parson so I could make my peace with God,” the King said. The tiredness had crept back into his voice. “If the sacrifice of a monarch is required for peace in my country, I am willing to serve.”

“I don’t believe you,” Jack said, flatly.

“You’re in charge now,” the King said. “You can believe what you like.”

Jack scowled at him, resisting the temptation to ram his fist into the King’s chest. “Your men have deserted you,” he said. “Your Butler escaped into London and hasn’t been seen since.”

“Edmund has always looked after himself first,” the King said. He didn’t sound worried or concerned. “You’ll probably find him in one of the pie-shops, eating a pie and plotting his escape. He always thought of me as an idiot, even when I sought to patronise the latest works of English scholarship. I don’t suppose I can blame him. I’ve certainly spent enough time pretending to be nothing more than an idle pleasure-seeker.”

“Instead of doing your job as King,” Jack hissed.

“The job is impossible, as you will soon find out for yourself,” George IV said. He smiled. “Do you want to know what my father told me, during one of his lucid moments?” Jack cocked an eyebrow. “He asked me what right we had to be Kings – and then he answered the question. We had the right because we
were
Kings; like it or not, there was no one else on the Throne. We had to play the role because there was no one else in our shoes.”

He shrugged. “And now you’re in charge, of London at least,” he said. “Best of luck, Master Jackson. You’re going to need it.”

Jack studied him for a long moment, and then turned and walked out of the door, closing it firmly behind him. He wasn’t sure what he had expected when he met the King for the first time in five years; a man who gloated over what had happened to the poor during his reign, or a man who begged and pleaded for a mercy he knew would never come? Jack hadn’t expected to see a tired monarch, resigned to his fate. And yet he was right about one thing; there was always another monarch. Charles I had been beheaded – and instantly succeeded by Charles II, who had eventually returned to England and reclaimed the Throne. The government – whatever was left of it – wouldn’t give up just because Jack held the King in his clutches.

Olivia met him as he came down the stairs and into the map room. “There was a runner from Pall Mall,” she said. “Lord Blackburn has not been taken into custody.”

Jack nodded, unsurprised. Lord Blackburn had always been good at looking after his own skin. A quick change of clothes, a pause long enough to scoop up everything valuable in his apartment and then he’d be out into the city, heading towards Oxford or Cambridge or wherever Lord Liverpool had fled since the uprising had begun. Besides, a Charmer was hardly as dangerous as Master Thomas. He might be caught on the streets and lynched before his magic had a chance to work on his attackers.

“There are a lot of angry people out there,” she added. “They want to loot and burn the noble mansions.”

“Leave them covered,” Jack said. He couldn’t blame the poor and downtrodden for wanting to destroy houses that would never be open to them, but they needed the aristocrats alive and – more importantly – the wealth stored within those houses. “If anyone shows too much enthusiasm, we’ll move them to the barricades.”

The air in the map room was calmer than it had been earlier, with Davy and Ruddy directing their troops with the aid of several Talkers and a small army of messengers. Jack nodded to them as he glanced at the map, noting the system of barricades that were already taking shape within the city. If – when – the Army came to disperse the rabble, they wouldn’t find it a particularly easy task. There were even mines being floated down the Thames to make life interesting for the warships gathered where the Thames merged into the sea.

He shook his head, exhausted. They would only have a few days to train most of the new recruits in using their weapons and other basic combat techniques. And then...who knew what would happen when the Army attacked the city? Davy’s figures suggested that they had about thirty thousand men, which seemed a vast number until one realised that they had to be armed, trained, and then deployed in a ring around the city. Smaller units would have to be kept in reserve; without Talkers, the task would have been nearly impossible. Jack didn’t know how Wolfe or Amherst or even Cromwell had coped in the days before Talkers. Coordinating a military force, even one on the defensive, would have been far harder.

“We seem to be in charge of the city,” Davy said. He looked tired, Jack noted. Davy had never been a particularly inspiring leader, but he was a genius at organisation and managing large numbers of people. He’d been a foreman in a factory before his brother had been badly injured in an industrial accident that had cost him the use of his legs. The factory owner had tossed him out onto the streets – and Davy had left the following day, vowing revenge. “We’ve moved most of the toffees into our safekeeping here and fed them on gruel. Some of them had the nerve to complain.”

Jack smiled. Gruel was either unpleasant or tasteless – and cheap, cheap enough to be fed to workhouse children or factory drudges. It provided basic nourishment, but little more besides. The rich population of London would never have had to taste it until now. Maybe it would give them a new sympathy for the poor.

“We’ve also been distributing food to the new volunteers,” Davy added. “Many of them are happy to work with us for food and drink, thankfully. I’ve put the ones who we can’t arm yet on clearing up the bodies and moving them to the crematorium. Thousands of people died in the fighting, Jack...”

“Thousands more will die when the Army comes for us,” Jack said. He scowled down at the map. “Have we heard anything from the Government?”

“They’re in Oxford, apparently,” Ruddy said. “One of our agents flashed us a message; there’s an entire regiment in the city, providing security for the government. There won’t be an uprising in Oxford, I fear.”

He hesitated. Jack recognised the signs of a man with bad news. “The Duke of India escaped,” Ruddy added. “I believe that he will have made it to Oxford.”

Jack swore. The Duke of India was not much liked by anyone – particularly his men – but they respected him and trusted him not to get them killed for nothing. His presence outside London would be a major rallying point for the government – and no one doubted his competence. He’d unite what forces had escaped London with newcomers from Ireland and then bring them back to the rebel-held city. The street-fighting in Paris had been ghastly and hundreds of thousands had died. God alone knew what would happen when the British Army attempted to secure London, except that it was going to be bloody. Jack and his followers had nowhere to go.

“The assassins misfired, then,” Jack said. He’d taken the risk of assigning their best Blazer and Mover team to the task of assassinating the Duke, but the Duke had earned his honours in combat. And magic didn’t make a person invincible. He should have left the attack on Parliament to Davy and Ruddy, while taking care of the Duke himself. Jack shook his head, dismissing the irritating thought. Hindsight was always perfectly clear. “We’ll have to see if we can get a team up to Oxford and cut off the government’s head.”

Ruddy snorted. “I’m afraid not,” he said. He tapped the map. “We’ve been sending scouts out of the city. The remaining Dragoons have been operating in flying patrols around the outskirts, intimidating the farmers and blocking our routes out of the city. We could probably scatter them if we marched our army out of the city, but that would only disperse our force – unless we head for Oxford now.”

Jack hesitated. He knew the strengths – and limitations – of the force he’d built in secret. The men weren’t ready to face a stronger enemy and the Duke Of India would have at least one regiment on hand to defend Oxford. At best, the rebels would have to take a staunchly defended city. And if that misfired...they’d be intercepted outside Oxford by a regiment with much better training and experience. It would take time to train up the volunteers, time he suspected he wouldn’t have. They would have to hope that they could break the Duke’s army when it returned to London.

“We’ll consider it in the morning,” he said. He yawned, suddenly. “Make sure that the Talkers are replaced before they get too tired to function, and then have someone wake me when the sun starts to rise. Get your own replacements here and then get some sleep yourself...”

Walking out of the door and heading up towards one of the cells, he was surprised to run right into Olivia.. The girl was sitting halfway up the stairs, her hands clasping her legs. She looked...distracted, almost as if her mind was elsewhere. Jack placed his hand on her shoulder and she jumped, surprised.

“Oliver,” he said, using her male name, “what’s wrong?”

“I don’t know,” Olivia admitted. She rubbed the side of her head, frustrated. “I just feel...wrong.”

Jack leaned down to peer into her eyes. Sometimes, when a person was hit on the head, their thoughts started to wander. But Olivia’s eyes were clear blue, as always. And who would have struck her? The rebels held the Tower of London. Who would have risked hitting Jack’s personal messenger? Even if someone had seen through her male guise, they’d have to be insane to risk irritating a Master Magician.