Bookworm (40 page)

She turned...and stopped dead as she saw a hulking figure standing in the doorway. Judd was standing there, his immense form blocking the light. Elaine was astonished to see him – as far as she knew, he was never allowed to leave Lord Howarth’s mansion – and why was Lord Howarth showing any interest in her now? What had changed that he actually knew about?

“You are summoned to face your Guardian,” Judd said, in his grating voice. “You will accompany me to Howarth Hall.”

“Now wait a minute,” Bee said, quickly. “We’re on a date...”

“I have to go,” Elaine said, wearily. She’d never actually formally claimed emancipation from Lord Howarth, if only because he’d shown no interest in trying to actually serve as her Guardian. An oversight, she realised; an oversight that she should have corrected while she had a chance. Lord Howarth might believe that he could push her into working openly for him. “Can you go back to Daria and let her know what happened?”

Bee stared at her for a long moment, and then nodded. “Good luck,” he said, and gave her a kiss. Elaine returned it, wondering if watching them kissing would irritate Judd. But his expressionless face was still blank when Elaine broke the kiss and stepped up to the butler. Bee looked after her. “Do you want me to come meet you...?”

“Lord Howarth will summon you when he wishes to meet with you,” Judd informed him. He looked back at Elaine. “You will accompany me now.”

He spun around and marched out of the building, moving almost like a parody of a soldier. People saw him coming and scattered out of his way, even the ones who couldn’t sense his true nature. Judd seemed like an unstoppable iron dragon as he ploughed through the streets. Elaine followed him, trying to resist the temptation to try to pump him for information. Judd had never been a great conversationalist and much of his conversations to her over the years had been thoroughly unpleasant. No wonder people were scared of him.

The walk to Howarth Hall took less time than she had expected, but she was panting because of the effort involved in keeping up with Judd. She saw the gates open to admit them as they approached, before closing behind them with an ominous thud. This time, the gardeners had introduced a collection of wild birds from the far islands into the garden, clearly trying to maintain the appearance of wealth and power. She wondered, absently, how long it would be before Lord Howarth ran out of time and had to admit that he was broke?

She walked through the interior of the house, looking around. One side effect of Duke Gama’s spell had been to enhance her memory, even the parts of her mind that didn’t deal directly with magic. Some of the tacky but expensive artworks and trinkets were gone, suggesting that they had been sold on to produce money for their owner. Others seemed to have been moved to one side, earmarked for disposal. A painting that had been charmed to hold an impression of a long-dead woman’s personality – she had screamed abuse at anyone who came into the house without the proper level of aristocratic blood, including Elaine – had been removed from the wall and placed against it, blocking the woman’s sight. Elaine guessed that she’d seen Lord Howarth selling off the family trinkets one by one and hadn’t been shy about making her opinion known.

Judd opened the door to Lord Howarth’s study and allowed her to walk inside. Lord Howarth was nowhere to be seen, but as Elaine sat down she realised that a number of the books on the bookshelves had been removed. She felt a brief pang of pity for them – they’d been published in the days before the printing press – before hearing Lord Howarth coming down the other corridor towards her. The door crashed open and Lord Howarth stepped inside.

He looked ghastly. His clothes were a mess – he’d always prided himself on being a dandy – and his face was blotched with the effects of too much alcohol. Elaine guessed that he hadn’t been able to pay the druids for rejuvenation spells and treatments that would have helped mitigate the worst effects of whatever he was drinking.

“Lost everything,” he said, as he slumped into a chair. “Will lose the home soon; will lose everything soon. Will have to leave the city and go die out in the countryside. But house there no longer exists...”

Elaine frowned. He sounded drunk too, she realised. His words were slurring together as he spoke, almost as if he couldn’t quite focus on whatever he was trying to say. If he was broke, if he was running out of things he could sell without tipping off the rest of his creditors, his social standing was about to drop to rock bottom. Elaine felt a flicker of pity, even though he’d ignored her for most of her life. She doubted that
that
was about to change.

“Had only one thing left,” Howarth muttered. “Someone came to me; offered to pay my debts. Gave me enough Crowns to go to the club and get lucky on the tables and...”

He gasped, almost as if he couldn’t speak the words out loud. “Only thing I have left is you,” he said. Elaine realised what he meant in an awful moment, just before she felt strong hands grabbing her neck. How the hell hadn’t she sensed someone behind her? “I sold you. I gave you to someone who wanted you and...”

Elaine started to struggle, trying to draw on her magic, but there was a brilliant flash of light and she plunged down into darkness.

Chapter Thirty-Four

“I know you’re awake,” a calm voice said. “You may as well open your eyes and join me for a drink.”

Elaine cursed inwardly. She’d come back to awareness only ten minutes ago, but she’d kept her eyes closed in the hope of not alerting them to her listening ears. Instead, whoever was in the room had somehow sensed her awakening and waited, patiently, for her to open her eyes. All she’d been able to feel was that she had been placed in a chair and metal bracelets had been wrapped around her hands and ankles, as well as making it harder for her to work magic. Escape would be almost impossible.

She sighed and opened her eyes, trying to shield them against the light. A man was looking down at her, studying her thoughtfully. She recognised him – and then wondered why she was so surprised. Wizard Kane
also
wanted to become Grand Sorcerer and Elaine was
still
the quickest way to gaining the knowledge that would make someone the most powerful person in the world. And very little was known of his background....

Something clicked in her mind as she realised who he resembled. The colouring wasn’t entirely correct, and the eyes certainly weren’t, but the cheek structure was unmistakeable. Kane looked like a younger version of Duke Gama. Elaine had only seen graven images of the Duke, or she would have recognised him earlier. And yet he didn’t
look
as though he had come from Ida.

She smiled. “You’re the Duke’s son, aren’t you?” she asked. “His illegitimate son.”

Kane didn’t bother to try to deny it. “My father seduced a woman who was part of a visiting mission to Ida,” he said, without bitterness. “She got pregnant; her family were furious and threatened to kill her for having a child with a man she hadn’t married. And my father couldn’t marry her because he was already married.” He shrugged. “Not that I blame him for cheating. His
legitimate
wife is so cold that no one would dare put their manhood inside her, for fear of it freezing solid and then breaking off.”

He chuckled. “The bitch made my life hell for the first few years,” he added. “It wasn’t until Hilarion came along that she lightened up a little, partly because I got on well with the little Prince. We were close friends for quite some time. Oh, there were times when I felt bitter because any son the bitch had would inherit everything my father owned, but...well, Hilarion was being groomed as the Crown Prince and he
hated
the protocol lessons. And my father was decent enough to ensure that I got a good education too.”

Elaine stared at him, trying to reconcile everything she’d learned in Ida with what Kane was telling her. “But I am forgetting my manners,” Kane said. He picked up a cup and passed it to her. “You can move enough to drink, but not enough to get out of the chair.”

He was right, Elaine realised, but she hesitated to drink. “I shouldn’t worry about poison,” Kane added, almost as if he had read her mind. “Right now, I can drug you or poison you or do
anything
to you. Why would I bother to trick you into drinking poison?”

Elaine took a sip of the water, taking the opportunity to look around the small room. It was depressingly familiar; a magician’s workroom. A large wooden table provided space for the magician to work on his magic, a shelf held a small pile of reference texts and a number of jars contained various ingredients for magic potions. A couple – eye of newt, skin of frog – were familiar, but the rest meant nothing to her. She looked up as her eyes caught a motion and saw a small birdcage, holding a diminutive winged humanoid. The fairy looked back at her, her tiny porcelain-like face disturbingly human. Fairies were not intelligent, everyone knew, but few humans could bring themselves to harm one directly. And yet crushed fairy wings were a vital ingredient for several potions.

Reluctantly, she looked up at Kane. “You do realise that my Guardian has no legal right to sell me?”

“I think that that hardly matters,” Kane said, dryly. “The important issue is that you have been taken from the city, without leaving any trail for your Inquisitor friends to follow. They’re going to see the remains of Howarth Hall and conclude that you and your Guardian – and his staff – were all killed when the demon he used to power his butler got loose. I left behind just enough of your blood to fool even a werewolf. The Inquisitors will breathe a sigh of relief that the problem you represent has been solved and go back to preparing for the selection of the next Grand Sorcerer.”

“Right,” Elaine said, trying to fight down despair. He was right. The Inquisition would probably be relieved if they concluded that she was dead and all the knowledge in her head was gone. Daria and Bee – she hoped – would look harder, but Kane had known that he would have to hide his trail from a werewolf. By now, he could have taken her halfway around the planet and they would never find her. “What do you want with me?”

“All in good time,” Kane said, mildly. “Where was I? Ah, yes; my father was kind enough to insist that the Court Wizard, a venal and ambitious man, school me in magic. I had something of a talent for it, you see. The Prince couldn’t study magic as much as he wanted, but I had all the time in the world. It was easy to master enough of it to go to the Peerless School, my father helping me to conceal my origins for fear that I might be rejected. By the time I arrived, I knew more charms, hexes and curses than some of the tutors.”

Elaine remembered Professor Whitby, a kind and harmless old man, and suspected that he was right. Not everyone had liked the elderly tutor, but he’d been careful to ensure that the students with the right aptitudes for planting and raising specific crops were offered their chance to learn how to do it properly. Elaine had spent a happy month trying to raise Crawling Fungus before the tutor had reluctantly told her that her magic didn’t seem suited for the task.

“But I still thirsted for knowledge,” he continued. “I would inherit nothing from my birth, even if my blood mingled the blood of two of the noblest families in the world. The Prince and I agreed that he would help me with my obsession in exchange for me tutoring him in magic. It was not long before we had both surpassed the tutors the Court Wizard hired for us and kept experimenting. Eventually, we found...”

His voice broke off, just for a moment. “We found...”

Elaine studied him, puzzled. Someone had spelled the Court Wizard’s body to prevent him from talking; could someone have done the same to Kane? But why would Kane curse himself? What had they found? The small collection of forbidden manuscripts, or something much more dangerous? Something was nagging at the back of her mind, something that she should have recognised.

“We found...we found the key to knowledge and power,” Kane said, finally. He looked shaken, almost as if something had been trying to keep him from speaking, but his voice rapidly returned to its confident tone. “I discovered that
I
could become powerful, so powerful that I could bend the world to my will. The Witch-King spoke through me and I realised just how his knowledge could best be applied. And when I realised what I knew – what I’d known all along – I determined to become the most powerful person in the world.”

His eyes grew brighter. “I didn’t ask to be born, did I? I didn’t ask for my mother to die in childbirth and my father to have to refuse to recognise me as his child! Do you understand how lucky I was that I wasn’t committed to an orphanage like you, or sold into slavery? I had noble blood, but no power. The bitch could have convinced my father to discard me if she’d managed to have a child of her own.”

Elaine looked at him and wondered, grimly, just how much talent he’d had as a child. “I think you stopped her from becoming pregnant,” she said. There
were
spells to do that, some of them common enough not to really count as curses. “Why did you do that?”

“I didn’t,” Kane said. “I think. It’s so hard to look back at my life and wonder what was the first real sign of my magic coming to the surface. But she was such a cold woman that my father would probably have been unable to perform if she’d dragged him into bed. No love or lust or warmth in her heart.”

He shrugged. “But I was powerless,” he added. “I could lose what little I had at any time. But if I became powerful in magic, I could bend the world to my will. And when I looked up from the Witch-King’s book, I knew how it could be done. Hilarion would
suffer
for all the humiliations of my childhood.”

“But you said Hilarion was your friend,” Elaine said, alarmed. Kane sounded mad, but a more focused madness than that which had consumed his former friend. “What did you do to him?”

Something else clicked in her mind. “You seeded him with a little of your personality,” she said. Kane bowed his head in acknowledgement. “Hilarion practically
was
you – or is it the other way around. Are you Hilarion?”