Bookworm (25 page)

The second assistant had some magic. He made a series of gestures with his hand and needles – hot needles of inquiry, according to the knowledge in Elaine’s head – shot off the table and lunged towards Dread. The Inquisitor held up his staff and the needles froze in mid-air, before turning and racing back towards the second assistant. He turned to run, too late; the needles slammed into his back and burned through his body. Hexed to produce incredible pain in their victims, they tore through him and blew him screaming into the next world.

Dread ran forward as the chains suddenly tightened around Elaine’s hands, threatening to crush her wrists. He cast a complex spell that shattered the iron chains, showering Elaine with dust as she collapsed in a heap. Her entire body hurt, pain surging through every last part of her mind. Dread caught her before she hit the ground and cast a second spell on her. This one started to push the pain into a corner of her mind. It still hurt, but at least she could think clearly.

She caught Dread in her arms and gave him a kiss, driven by relief and a strange emotion she couldn’t quite identify. He gently pushed her away and held out a black robe, looking away as Elaine donned it and stumbled to her feet. Princess Sacharissa held out a hand and Elaine took it gratefully as Dread walked over to the torturer.

“Dead,” he said. “It looks to be another curse and...”

The crystal ball exploded with a shattering crash. “They’ll be coming after us,” Princess Sacharissa said, quickly. “My father’s huntsmen will be seeking us...”

“Then we’d better get out of here,” Dread said. He pulled Elaine’s wand out of his robe and passed it to her. “Elaine; can you walk?”

“I think so,” Elaine stammered. After everything – the summoning, the stunning, the torture – she felt faint and wanted to collapse. But the enemy ruled Ida and probably had other sorcerers to call upon. Even an Inquisitor would have problems defeating more than two or three fully-trained combat sorcerers. “What...what happened to you?”

“They sent me a gift of food at night, claiming that it was an old custom from Ida,” Dread said, as he examined the doors leading out of the torture chamber. “I knew that there was no such custom, so I checked each and every piece of food...and finally discovered a very cunning attempt to poison me. There were two components, both harmless in themselves, but together they would have been lethal. Luckily, my spells recognised them and I was careful not to touch any of the food.”

He shrugged. “I went to check up on you and discovered that you’d been taken from your room,” he added. “Princess Sacharissa was good enough to admit that her father had been up to something...and that you’d probably been taken to his dungeons. So I came down and found you.”

“After fighting his way through an entire squad of guardsmen,” Princess Sacharissa said. She was staring at Dread in a manner that Elaine found disturbing. “Weren’t you going to mention that part?”

“They weren’t ready for me,” Dread said. “I’m afraid that the next set of guardsmen will be ready – and they’ll probably be backed up by magicians. I think we need to get out of the castle now, quickly.”

“I know the secret passageways out of the castle,” Princess Sacharissa said. “As long as you take me with you, I’ll show you how to escape.”

“I wouldn’t dream of leaving you here,” Dread assured her. “Now...shall we go?”

Outside the torture chamber, the air was deathly still. A handful of bodies lay on the ground near the stairwell, covered in boils and blisters that marked a very nasty curse. Elaine shuddered at the sight and then concentrated on walking down a second set of steps that led even further under the castle. The walls closed in rapidly, leaving her feeling as if the entire building was going to come crashing down on her head. Finally, they stopped outside a blank wall and waited until Princess Sacharissa placed her hand against the stone. A block of stone moved to one side and allowed them into a second tunnel.

“We can’t go to the city,” Princess Sacharissa said. She
had
tried to escape her father and his plans for her before, Elaine remembered. “They’ll have watchers stationed on the walls, looking for us. I think we will have to leg it down the mountain.”

“Not much choice,” Dread agreed. They reached the bottom of the steps and opened a second hidden door. This one opened out into a gully, with a stream heading down towards the bottom of the mountain. It was hard to be sure, but Elaine suspected that they were on the other side of the castle from the city. “How well do you know these mountains?”

“I used to ride through them when I was a child,” Princess Sacharissa said. She hesitated, staring around the darkened landscape. In the distance, Elaine could see the first glimmer of dawn starting to illuminate the sky. “I don’t think that much will have changed since then.”

“Let’s hope so,” Dread said. “We need to get down to the plains before the next nightfall, or we will have to find a place to hide on the mountainside.”

Elaine shivered as she heard the sound of a wolf in the distance, remembering Daria’s true nature. A werewolf would have no difficulty tracking them across the broken mountainsides, perhaps leading a squad of guardsmen down their trail. Or perhaps summoning a flock of wolves to aid in the hunt. Some werewolves had an almost familial relationship with their beastly cousins.

“Thank you for coming to save me,” she said, before they started on their way. “I...I thought I was dead.”

“I thought that my father had finally gone insane,” Princess Sacharissa admitted. “What the hell was he thinking?”

“Assuming it was him doing the thinking,” Dread said, slowly. “The books we found in your wizard’s room...they could be used to influence a person’s mind.”

Princess Sacharissa looked over at him. “You mean that my father is under my brother’s control?”

“It’s possible,” Dread admitted. “I won’t know for sure until I have a chance to examine your father personally.” He changed the subject quickly. “That secret passage didn’t look very well guarded.”

“There are guard posts inside the castle,” Princess Sacharissa explained, “and the passageway only opens for members of the royal family. Even my mother couldn’t have used it without my father’s help. He once told me that he and mother used to walk out before he became King and enjoy a picnic on the mountainside. I miss the man he used to be.”

“Power changes people,” Dread said, as they started to scramble down the gully. “Some people become better when they take on power, others allow it to corrupt them and drive them mad. Someone born to the purple has a higher chance of going mad than someone born without power.”

“That isn’t quite what you said earlier,” Elaine remarked, waspishly. “You implied that giving the powerless power could be very dangerous.”

“In a different way,” Dread said. “People born to power...they never question the rightness of their position. They just accept what they have...”

He shook his head. “I suggest that we concentrate on the walk for now,” he added. “We have a long way to go.”

The walk rapidly turned into a nightmare as the sun rose, warming the gully and threatening to burn all three of them. Elaine felt sweat trickling down her face as she scrambled down the path, wishing that she could take a break, but knowing that they didn’t dare stop for a rest. Behind them, she was sure that she could hear the sound of dogs barking and wolves howling. One of the few jobs available to openly-infected werewolves was that of hunting master, using a werewolf’s powerful sense of smell to track game through the forests and mountains so beloved of the aristocracy. One of them could be on their tail right now.

“It was easier when I was a child,” Princess Sacharissa muttered. “I should have worn proper clothes instead of this...nightdress.”

Dread ignored her. “I think...”

He swore. “Get down and into the stream,” he added. “Hurry!”

The sound of baying dogs grew closer as the stream flowed towards a waterfall. Elaine couldn’t swim and almost fell over the edge before she caught hold of the rock and started scrambling down. She finally lost her grip on the slippery rock and plummeted into the deep pool, gasping for breath as she struggled to keep her head above the water. Dread caught her arm and pushed her towards the waterfall, into a cave just behind the falling sheet of water. Elaine could barely hear anything over the thunder of the falling water, but Dread seemed to be almost impossibly aware. Something was very definitely hunting them.

Elaine squeezed as much water as she could out of her robe, looking over at the Princess. They shared a faint chuckle; no one, even Daria, would have considered them a decent couple. Their outfits were clinging to their wet skin, revealing every curve of their bodies. No one would need to imagine anything...

“Quiet,” Dread hissed. “They’re coming.”

“I can’t hear anything,” Princess Sacharissa said. Elaine couldn’t make out anything either, but Dread held up one hand. “What’s coming...”

“A werewolf, I think,” Dread muttered back. Elaine winced. Dread was so aware...could
he
be a werewolf? The Inquisition would probably overlook a little thing like lycanthropy if they thought that a werewolf would make a good Inquisitor. But he didn’t have the faintly canine features that most werewolves possessed. Daria’s eyes were alarmingly like a dog’s pair of eyes. “I don’t know if they can track us here.”

Princess Sacharissa reached out and took Elaine’s hand as they waited. What seemed like hours passed slowly before Dread finally ducked under the waterfall and peeked outside. “Nothing,” he said. “Either they lost the scent or they’re lying in ambush. But we have to move.”

The sun was higher in the sky as they kept heading downwards, drying their clothes even as it threatened to burn their skin. Elaine kept glancing around, looking for possible threats, even though she suspected she wouldn’t see anything until the enemy actually attacked. The books on warfare she’d absorbed into her mind extolled the virtues of surprise attacks and ambushes, although most of them did note that surprise was often far more difficult to achieve than many of the history books suggested. Elaine found herself wishing, not for the first time, that she’d learned more background material at the Peerless School. Or maybe she should have gone hunting, if she’d been able to afford it. Millicent’s family certainly
had
been able to afford it for their children.

A low growl caught them all by surprise. Dread spun around, raising his staff to confront the oversized wolf standing on the rock above them. The wolf was easily twice the size of a normal wolf, its dark eyes intimidating as hell. It opened its jaws, revealing teeth that could crush a man’s head in a single bite, and leered at them. Elaine had no difficulty reading its expression. It wanted to kill and eat them – and it would, if they showed any signs of resisting.

“Keep your hands where I can see them,” the werewolf growled. “And you, put down that staff.”

Dread muttered a curse under his breath and the rock exploded, but the werewolf was already leaping into the air and was unharmed. Of course, part of Elaine’s mind noted; the werewolf would have known from Dread’s scent what he was planning, probably before the idea had gelled properly in Dread’s mind. It landed neatly in front of the Inquisitor and lashed out with a single paw, knocking Dread to his knees with effortless ease. Princess Sacharissa started forward, only to freeze when the werewolf turned his head and looked at her.

“Do not move,” he said, “or a whipping from your father will be the least of your troubles.”

Elaine felt her wand in her hand, thinking fast. A death-curse would work, surely, but it might catch Dread in the blast as well...and it would reveal what had happened to her. There had to be another idea. She hesitated and then gambled, pushing all the power she could muster into raising an illusion right in front of the werewolf. A plate of meat, larger than the werewolf itself, seemed to materialise in the air. The animal part of the werewolf’s mind reacted and jumped forward, abandoning Dread. It jumped right through the illusion and then turned around, snarling in rage. Elaine felt herself drop to her knees from sheer terror as the werewolf met her eyes. Whatever the werewolf’s masters had ordered, it no longer wanted to take her alive. Wolves had their pride; it was just about all they had left.

The werewolf lunged at Dread again, but he cast a spell that raised a shield and deflected its leap, before he threw a fireball into the beast’s fur. It howled in pain and leapt twenty meters into the lake and then jumped up again, coming right at the Inquisitor. Dread began a death-curse that shattered when the werewolf struck his shield, the force of the impact knocking the Inquisitor back to the ground. And then it leapt up and came right at Elaine.

She screamed as the beast knocked her down and placed one paw firmly on her chest. Blood welled up where its claws pieced her flesh, leaving her worrying about the dangers of infection – could it turn her into a werewolf too? But it had a collar around its neck...the demand for bloody revenge on the bitch who had tricked it was struggling with orders to return the unwilling bookworm to the prince – unharmed.

The beast won and it leaned forward, its jaws opening wide. Elaine saw Dread stumbling to his feet, but there was nothing the Inquisitor could do. The words for a hundred death-curses rose into her mind and she shaped a single thought, knowing that it would save her life only to risk losing everything to the Inquisitors. But there was no choice. The death-curse lanced upwards and blasted the werewolf away from her, leaving the body crashing down near the lake. A moment later, it slowly returned to human form, revealing a dark-skinned man covered in hair. Most werewolves shaved to hide their true nature; Elaine knew that Daria did, even though female werewolves had less body hair.

Dread caught her arm. “Where did you learn that spell?”

Surprisingly, Princess Sacharissa came to her aid. “Don’t you dare yell at her,” she snapped, with all the arrogance of a royal upbringing. “Elaine just saved our lives.”

“Yes, she did,” Dread agreed. He looked over at Elaine, his eyes burning into her soul. “When we get down to the plains, we are going to have to have a long talk. Understand?”