Bookworm III (36 page)

“True, true,” Hawke said. His eyes moved from face to face. “In short, things are going to the nine hells. And, with that in mind, what can I do for you?”

Elaine shook her head. “How could things have fallen apart so quickly?”

Cass snorted, rudely. “The Empire was never based on anything but the iron fist in the iron glove,” she said. “It was built on the strong oppressing the weak. The thin veneer of decency you saw was all there was to it.”

“We need to flee the city,” Elaine said. “Can you show us how to escape?”

“The tunnels are heavily guarded,” Hawke said, slowly. “And while bribery might work, some of the soldiers are spellbound. Try to bribe one of those and they’ll cut off your balls.”

Johan winced. His father had once said that everyone had a price ... but someone who was spellbound couldn’t be bribed, or pushed into doing something against the interests of his masters. And there would be no way to know who was spellbound and who wasn’t until it was far too late.

“Then we need a distraction,” Cass said. “Something that will get them away from the tunnels.”

“There are fewer guards on the Iron Dragon tunnels,” Hawke pointed out. “If they happened to be reduced still further, you could probably get out that way.”

Elaine scowled. “I don’t know how to operate an Iron Dragon,” she said. “Do you?”

“Yes, as it happens,” Hawke said. “But why don’t you just walk?”

“Oh,” Elaine said.

Johan felt her embarrassment and cringed, mentally. The Iron Dragons might be out of commission, but the tunnels were ... well, tunnels. There was nothing to stop them from just walking through, unless they happened to encounter an Iron Dragon coming the opposite way. He’d read an article in the broadsheets about a handful of kids stupid enough to do just that, a year ago. They’d been smashed to paste, of course. No one had really given a damn.

“We would still need a diversion,” Cass said, tightly. “Even if they’re not used to thinking of the Iron Dragon tunnels as a way to leave the city, they will still have them guarded.”

“I think I can give you one,” Hawke said. He reached into his pocket and produced a green crystal, which he dropped firmly on the table. “But I would need your oaths, first.”

Cass’s eyes narrowed. “Mundanes are forbidden to use those,” she snapped.

Hawke looked at her, evenly. “And are you going to arrest me for possessing an oathbinder?”

“I should,” Cass said. “Those things can be very dangerous.”

“I need your oaths that you will not betray my confidence,” Hawke said, firmly. “This oathbinder is preset. What we speak of in this room, past this point, will be unspeakable in public, at least until I tell you otherwise.”

“You have some magicians on your side,” Daria said, as Cass picked up the oathbinder and examined it, carefully. “Don’t you?”

Hawke nodded. Johan felt a strange mixture of emotions from Elaine; shock, perhaps, that a magician would betray his own kind, then a grim realisation that she might have done the same thing, if she’d been a different person. She was barely magical enough to go to the Peerless School ... and if she’d been forced to work as a low-power magician instead, she would probably have resented the stronger magicians as much as Hawke did. And she might have aided his plans instead of reporting them.

“I have a question,” Johan said. “What’s to stop Deferens trying to force the information out of us anyway?”

“It would have the Great Houses rising up against him,” Elaine said, quietly. “Oaths are the foundations of our society. To force someone to break one’s oath would outrage every magician with half a brain. They’d all see their own oaths at stake.”

“And crossing that line would mean no going back,” Cass added. She put the crystal down on the table, then sat down and nodded. “We won’t speak your words to anyone outside the group.”

Hawke nodded and tapped the crystal. There was a flash of green light, which faded so rapidly Johan wasn’t sure if it had been real or if he’d imagined it. He felt magic shimmer around him for a second, then fade away. Elaine coughed, then looked at the crystal thoughtfully. It was now cracked and broken.

“Shoddy work,” Cass commented.

“There’s a shortage of carved crystals just now,” Hawke said. “The Emperor has been buying up every box he can find. Prices have been going through the roof and past the mountain peaks.”

“That bad, huh?” Daria asked. “What do you want to tell us?”

Hawke leant forward, his eyes darting from face to face. “We’re planning an uprising,” he said. “But it was always chancy.”

Cass spluttered. “You must be joking!”

“I’m not,” Hawke said, quietly. “The ... problems we faced six months ago convinced many of us that we could no longer endure our lives in the Empire. We started to plan for something more than just pointless protests.”

“You’ll be slaughtered,” Cass said, flatly. “One wave of my hand and you would be my obedient slave! You couldn’t hope to get close enough to me to kill me with a sword before I killed you, or transfigured you, or enslaved you, or merely knocked you into a wall. This plan is madness.”

“There are ways around your spells,” Hawke said.

“None of which would last long enough to save you from an entire city of magicians,” Cass said. She rose to her feet. “This is a waste of time.”

“Sit down,” Hawke snapped, with sudden authority. “How much magic is in the Iron Dragons?”

Elaine frowned. “None,” she said. “They’re purely mechanical.”

“Quite,” Hawke said. “You understand, of course, the problems with using magic for everything?”

“You need a magician to make it work,” Elaine said.

“Exactly,” Hawke said. “In fact, given the tales of great feats performed by magicians in the past, it is actually possible that magic is leeching out of the world. Where are the teleport gates, or the flying castles, or the great beasts that once darkened our skies. Is the magic fading or are our magicians merely forgetting what they could do?”

“Interesting point,” Elaine said. Johan had the sense she wasn’t being quite honest. “But most of those stories grew in the telling.”

Hawke shrugged. “Regardless, there are people who were looking at ways to do things without magic,” he said. “The Iron Dragons are one such example. They may be crude, they may be dependent on iron rails, but they need no magic. And ... well, once they had one success, they just kept looking for more. You should see some of the wonders we created in our workshops.”

“Wonders?” Cass sneered. “I could use magic to make an Iron Dragon.”

“But would it work without draining your magic?” Hawke asked. He reached into his pocket and produced a small vial of grey powder. “Is there any magic in this substance?”

Elaine took the vial, ran her wand over it, then shook her head.

“One of the problems with potions is that they need a magician to make them work,” Hawke said, as he took back the vial and stood. “You need to use your magic to force the magic inherent in the ingredients to actually blend together. That’s problematic if you don’t have any magic. So people started looking at ways to get potions without using magic, drawing on natural ingredients. Eventually, they discovered this.”

He placed a metal tray on the table, then poured a little powder on the tray and then placed a tiny piece of paper beside it. “Watch carefully,” he said, as he took one of the candles from the wall and carried it back to the table. “This is always interesting.”

Johan watched, puzzled, as he used the candle to light the piece of paper. The flames spread rapidly towards the grey powder and ... the powder exploded. He rubbed his ears as the noise faded away, then stared at the tray. There was a nasty black mark where the powder had been, but the powder itself was gone.

Somehow, he found his voice. “What the hell was that?”

“We call it Firepowder,” Hawke said. “I won’t tell you how many people were killed or injured in accidents before we finally managed to get a working formula that wasn’t dangerously unstable. What I will tell you is that, if emplaced properly, it will make one hell of an explosion.”

“And you plan to use it to kill the Emperor,” Cass said. “Getting it close to the Imperial Palace will be difficult.”

“There are too many guards there,” Hawke said. “We’ve been looking for ways to do it, but we couldn’t find one we were sure would work. We were going to use it against the Watchtower instead.”

Cass stared at him. “You ...”

She broke off. Johan was sure he knew what she was thinking. The Watchtower was warded against all manner of magical threats, but no one had anticipated a non-magical threat. If the Firepowder was completely devoid of magic, it wouldn’t set off any alarms when it crossed the wards. The Levellers could leave their device in plain sight and no one would even notice until it was too late.

“There are quite a few tunnels below the Watchtower,” Hawke said. “We’ve been moving Firepowder there for quite a few months now. And when the Emperor is attending the Conference, we would be able to assassinate him too.”

“Maybe,” Elaine said, reluctantly.

“There would certainly be chaos,” Daria agreed. “We could slip out of the city while everyone was panicking.”

“Yeah,” Cass said, “but you would need to be damn sure you got rid of the Emperor.”

“I know,” Hawke said. “That’s the chancy aspect.”

“Then I’ll go with you,” Cass decided. “Daria, Elaine and Johan can flee the city.”

Chapter Thirty

“So tell me,” the Emperor said. “How are you feeling?”

“Wretched,” Charity said. She had slept, as he’d told her to sleep, but her sleep had been disturbed by vile nightmares. In the end, she’d given in and downed a potion designed to ensure a peaceful night. It hadn’t worked. “I feel like I haven’t slept at all.”

“You can go to bed at a more reasonable hour tonight,” the Emperor said. “Would you like to go to bed at sundown, perhaps?”

Charity felt her cheeks heat. She hadn’t had a set bedtime since she’d gone to the Peerless School, where magicians were expected to develop their own discipline. Her father certainly hadn’t told her when to go to bed when she’d moved back home. But at least it wasn’t an order. She took comfort in that, if nothing else.

“The Conference is due to start tomorrow,” the Emperor reminded her. “I want you to make a
personal
inspection of the Arena.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Charity said. Thankfully, most of the preparations had been made before the Emperor had revealed himself. “Is there anything in particular you wish me to do?”

“Take the statue with you,” the Emperor said, waving towards the petrified Light Spinner. “I want her in the exact centre of the Arena.”

“Yes, Your Majesty,” Charity said. “Do you want to gloat?”

“I want to make a show of what happens to all who dare to oppose me,” the Emperor said. “Take the statue and go.”

Charity lifted her wand, telling herself that at least she would be away from the Emperor for a few hours, then levitated the statue out of the Throne Room. Magic crackled over the stone, a clear indicator that it wasn’t a normal statue, but there didn’t seem to be any hope of Light Spinner reversing the curse any time soon. Was she even awake and aware in there? Charity hoped she wasn’t, even though it would have kept her trapped indefinitely. Being a statue for the rest of her life would be bad enough, but it would be far worse if she knew what had happened and couldn’t do anything about it.

“I’m sorry,” she muttered, as she lowered the statue to the ground and called for a pair of burly servants. “You deserved better.”

The servants appeared and prostrated themselves in front of her. Charity shuddered, then told them to get up and carry the statue down to the Arena. The servants rose, bowed and obeyed, grunting and groaning as they carried the statue out of the palace. Charity hesitated, long enough to feel the weight of her oaths pushing at her, then strode out of the palace herself and paused to take a breath. The air was cold, but the stench of dark magic still hung around the palace, warning everyone that the Emperor had gone mad. Charity wondered why none of the Great Houses had started planning a coup ... but then, they wouldn’t have told her, would they? She was Deferens’s slave.

Gritting her teeth, she started to walk towards the Arena as snow started to fall. It wasn’t the largest building in the city, but it provided seating for over twenty thousand spectators, most of whom came to watch the gladiators bleed out and die on the sands or magicians duelling with their rivals. It was said – untruthfully, she knew – that the spectators were just as much at risk as the duellists, as their spells might be reflected into the audience. Her father, in one of his kinder moods, had pointed out that the audience
liked
the hint of danger. But it wasn’t real.

She paused outside the gates, then stepped up and through the ward keeping members of the public out of the building. A small army of slaves, mainly gamblers convicted of trying to cheat their partners, were sweeping snow out of the Arena, while a team of wardcrafters were erecting wards that would divert the snow away from the sands. Someone had cast hundreds of heating spells, she realised, as she walked further into the building. The snow was actually dripping, producing a muddy carpet for the Emperor. She hoped, silently, that they actually managed to clear up the mess before the Emperor arrived. He was not going to be pleased if he saw
that
as his podium.

It wasn’t the only problem, she knew. The seats weren’t comfortable, nothing more than bare stone; there were charms that could probably help, but there was a marked absence of luxury or anything else that might allow the Court Wizards a chance to show off their power and prestige. On the other hand, she told herself, at least it wouldn’t grow into a competition between them. The last time such a conference had been held, the Court Wizards had competed savagely to see who could produce the most tacky displays of luxury. She honestly didn’t know why the Grand Sorcerer hadn’t put a stop to it.

Probably wanted them to waste their time rather than plotting against him
, she thought, as she walked over to the Royal Box. A harassed-looking woman sat there, issuing orders.
It would have kept them busy and he wouldn’t have had to lift a finger.