Bookworm III (43 page)

“There’s a body here,” Daria said, sharply. “One man, lying on his side.”

Elaine followed her gaze. A man was lying on the ground, a knife protruding from his chest. Elaine was no expert, but it looked as though he’d died very recently, too early for the body to decay. Or maybe someone had cast a preservation charm on the knife. She looked closer and saw a handful of runes carved into the blade, ensuring the body would never decay as long as the blade remained there. The man could have been killed at any time after the last tunnel inspection. Hell, maybe he had been killed during the inspection. He wore the uniform of an Iron Dragon worker, after all.

“Take the blade,” Daria advised. “It might be useful.”

“Better not,” Elaine said, slowly. She reached out a hand and sensed coiling magic under the hilt. Picking the blade up with her bare hand could be very dangerous. “I think ...”

Elaine’s night vision spells failed, completely. One moment, she could see; the next, everything was pitch black. She froze, sensing Johan’s shock and panic through the link; beside her, Daria growled and snapped back into wolf form. Elaine had barely a moment to sense something moving towards them at astonishing speed before Daria growled and threw herself at the newcomer. The sound of her growl was so terrifying that Elaine would have fled, if her legs hadn’t turned to jelly. A terrible struggle began, all the worse for being unseen.

She hastily cast a set of spells, only to have them fail, one after the other. A flare of light, so bright that it would have blinded her if she’d been looking right at it, appeared behind her, where Johan was standing. The fight was so vicious it was hard to see the two combatants properly; she’d wondered if the newcomer was another werewolf, but he didn’t seem inclined to drop into wolf form. Instead, he backhanded Daria on the snout, hard enough to draw blood, then looked up and glowered at Elaine. She couldn’t miss blood dripping from his fangs.

A vampire
, she thought, badly shocked. Vampires were rare, not least because they were hated and feared more than werewolves or dark wizards. Even a
rumour
that someone was a vampire was enough to get him tied down and exposed to sunlight, just to make certain he wasn’t a
real
vampire.
Where the hell did Deferens get a vampire
?

The vampire hissed, then threw himself forward. Elaine remembered, as Johan yanked her back, that vampires did funny things to magic. Their nature sucked in magic, to the point where most spells simply failed around them, unless they were designed to specifically exclude supernatural vermin. She hadn’t thought to protect her wards against a vampire, if only because no one in their right mind would consider using a vampire as a guard. But Deferens was clearly not in his right mind.

Sunlight
, she thought, as she cast the protective ward. Blue sparks flashed and the vampire stumbled backwards, then bared its teeth at her.
We need sunlight
.

“Close your eyes,” she ordered, and cast the spell. Warm light flared in the tunnel, throwing everything into sharp relief. “I think this should work ...”

The vampire sparkled, then exploded into dust. Elaine eyed the dust for a long moment, then cancelled her spell and recast the night vision spells. Daria was just snapping back into human form and stalking over to pick up her robe. Elaine smiled at her cross face – a vampire had no scent, so Daria hadn’t realised what she was sensing until it was too late – and then led the way further down the tunnel.

“That was a bloodsucking vampire,” Johan said. “Where did it come from?”

Elaine shrugged. Vampires drank blood, true, but the only way someone could
become
a vampire was if they were completely drained of blood in the first feeding. The victim, if the body wasn’t cremated, would rise again after three nights, lusting for blood. They tended to go for their families first, perhaps sensing what they’d lost, but after that they just drained whoever they found until they were hunted down. And that wasn’t always easy. There was a whole subculture of vampire worshippers in the world, largely composed of people who had never met one. A couple of vampires had managed to take advantage of their foolishness in the past.

“Anywhere,” she said. Deferens was certainly ruthless enough to capture a vampire and use it to breed more vampires, but controlling the bloodsuckers would be a challenge in and of itself. They were resistant to compulsion spells, even when the bloodlust wasn’t threatening to send them over the edge and into a rampage. “But right now it doesn’t matter.”

The tunnel seemed to widen as they reached the halfway point. They paused, then kept walking through a network of caves that seemed to have been converted into a storage point. Elaine wondered, as she saw the boxes stored within the shadows, if the Inquisition knew it existed.
She’d
certainly thought of the tunnels as nothing more than tunnels, simple holes dug into the mountainside. But there were smaller tunnels, side-tunnels and entire chambers hidden under layer upon layer of rocky protection. Who knew just what could be hidden in the darkness?

Maybe the vampire belonged to the Levellers instead
, she thought. Hawke hadn’t warned them about it, but he couldn’t be the only Leveller mastermind.
Or maybe Deferens just got lucky
.

They kept walking until they finally reached the end of the tunnel and saw sunlight ahead of them. Elaine covered her eyes, blinking rapidly, as they stepped out into the light, then looked down at herself. Her borrowed dress – the innkeeper’s daughter was about the same size as her – was covered in soot, while neither Daria nor Johan looked much better. She couldn’t resist a giggle, which faded away as a line of armed soldiers appeared in front of them, their faces cold and hard. They wore the same uniform as the other soldiers Deferens had brought to the city.

Shit
, she thought, badly shocked. She’d made the greatest mistake of all, according to the books; she’d assumed her enemy was stupid. No,
she’d
been stupid. She hadn’t even bothered to think about it.
Why didn’t we think there might be guards at the far end
?

“Do not attempt to draw your wands,” the leader said. He was a magician, she could tell, although quite a low-power one. Maybe not much more powerful than herself. “How did you get out of the city?”

“We walked,” Daria said.

The magician glowered at her, then nodded to his men. “Bind them and take them to the camp,” he ordered. “I want them held until the Emperor has a chance to see them.”

Elaine swore, mentally, then sent a single order down the link to Johan. Johan stepped forward, clenching his fists. The soldiers saw and laughed, then exchanged comments in their own language. Elaine couldn’t understand their words, but nothing they said sounded pleasant. Johan gathered himself, then unleashed his power. The world seemed to shiver on its axis for a long moment ... and then the soldiers froze solid

Daria looked up, alarmed. “What did you do?”

“Concentrated on freezing them,” Johan said. He sounded as though he was trying to be nonchalant, but Elaine could sense cold hatred and fear emanating along the link. “They wanted to rape you.”

Elaine gave him a sharp look. “You could understand them?”

“My father thought we should learn at least a few words from each of the major tongues,” Johan admitted. “That was before he largely gave up on educating me. That one” – he nodded to one of the frozen men – “thought they should take you halfway to camp, then have some fun with you.”

“Bastards,” Daria said.

“Idiots,” Elaine agreed. They were carrying wands, after all, and Daria was obviously a werewolf. “Come on.”

She turned and started to walk along the Iron Dragon lines, casting a handful of invisibility spells over themselves as they walked. They wouldn’t fool an Inquisitor, she was grimly aware, but anyone else who saw them would feel compelled to look elsewhere. She hoped it would suffice as they walked through a long stretch of fields, glancing towards the handful of buildings and homes in the distance. There was no point in seeking help from there, she suspected, not when Deferens had had ample time to billet his soldiers in the homes. For all she knew, he was massing the rest of his forces there.

Magic flickered and flared over the mountains, each spark making her want to look back. The wind blew hot and cold, sometimes throwing snow into her face, sometimes warm enough to make her think of summer, of the days when the Golden City had always been temperate. She couldn’t help a pang of grief for everything they’d lost over the last six months as she paused long enough to look back at the mountains, where the Watchtower had once brooded over the landscape. Once, the Empire had seemed as solid and unchanging as the mountains themselves. Now ...

Civil war
, she thought. It had been almost inevitable, once the Grand Sorceress had been replaced by an Emperor. Now, with dragons blackening the sky once again, the Empire was likely to shatter completely.
We’re looking at total civil war
.

Something
twitched
in her pocket. She reached into her pocket and felt around, then pulled the life-charm out into the light. It was a simple spell; Cass had given her a snippet of golden hair, which she’d used as the core of a charm. As long as Cass was alive, the charm would show it, even though it wouldn’t show anything else. It was such a simple spell that fooling it was almost impossible. But now she was dead.

Elaine shook her head, feeling tears prickling at the corner of her eyes. Cass was dead ... and that, she suspected, meant that Deferens was still alive. How many people had died when the dragons had been unleashed? Hundreds? Thousands? The memories she had from the wars told her that dragons had ripped apart entire cities ... how did one fight a dragon? A single magician could never hope to survive.

Johan looked over at her, concerned. “What is that?”

“Cass is dead,” Elaine said, bitterly. The envelopes Cass had given her were burning holes in her pocket. “And if she’s dead, Deferens is still alive.”

“Then we will avenge her,” Daria said, firmly. “But for the moment, Elaine, we need to keep walking.”

Elaine gritted her teeth. It was a long way to Knawel Haldane, longer than she’d realised when she’d devised the plan. Neither Hawke nor Cass had thought anything of it, at the time, but a life spent shelving books hadn’t prepared her for a ten mile walk. But there was no way they could hitch a lift, even if they happened to trust whoever they met. All they could do was keep walking.

She took one last look at the charm, then returned it to her pocket. It could be buried later, with the proper prayers said to the gods. And then ...

Bracing herself, she turned and looked back towards the city. Smoke was rising, as if a volcano had suddenly come to life, readying itself to devastate the land around it.

Somehow, she couldn’t escape feeling that the image was all too accurate.

Chapter Thirty-Six

“You didn’t have to kill her,” the Emperor thundered. “Why did you kill her?”

“Because she was a threat,” Dread said. “She had to die.”

“Of course she had to die,” the Emperor said. “But I wanted to kill her personally.”

Charity stared at them both in silent horror. The Emperor had refused to leave the Arena, even after the slaves had started cleaning up the mess, and he’d refused to allow Charity to leave either. Looking at him, as much as she had come to hate his smug face, was preferable to staring at the ruins of the Arena – and the scorched bodies scattered everywhere. And Dread ... she didn’t know him that well, but she had the impression he wasn’t quite telling the truth.

Or he isn’t telling the complete truth
, she thought. Her mother, back when she’d been a
real
mother, had had a remarkable gift for separating truth from lies.
There’s something he isn’t saying
.

“She needed to die,” Dread said. The
former
Inquisitor, Charity guessed. “And so I killed her.”

Charity shook her head, bitterly. Too much had happened for her to take it all in. The Watchtower had been destroyed, the Emperor had almost been assassinated ... and the Emperor had summoned
dragons
to his defence. She turned and looked at the remaining dragon, which was casually sitting in the centre of the Arena, licking its claws with a long jagged tongue. It struck her, perhaps because she was too tired to think clearly, that a tongue-lashing from a dragon might be far worse than a lecture from her mother. Somehow, the thought almost made her giggle.

“You killed her to keep her out of my clutches,” the Emperor hissed. “Admit it.”

“I did,” Dread said. He seemed completely unruffled, even though he’d just confessed to something akin to treason. “She deserved better than to die at your hands. It would not have been an easy death.”

The Emperor glowered at him. “And if I told you that you should die in her place?”

“I would die with pleasure,” Dread answered. His voice was faintly mocking. “You are the Emperor, after all. Death in your service would be a honour.”

“We shall see,” the Emperor said. He turned and strode towards the dragon, which peered at him through beady eyes. “My new pet will see to it that my reign lasts a thousand years.”

“You won’t be very sane at the end of it,” Dread said, following him. “No one can cling to life that long without going mad.”

“I can,” the Emperor said. He reached up and stroked the dragon’s skin. “I can do anything.”

Charity looked from one man to the other, puzzled. It sounded as though they were talking about something, without ever quite coming out and saying
what
they were talking about. She looked at the Emperor, who was showing remarkable courage as he stroked the dragon, and then at the grim-faced Dread. It struck her, suddenly, that the Emperor’s plans had gone completely off the rails. He couldn’t have expected the Watchtower to be destroyed.

As if he’d read her mind, the Emperor turned on her.

“Charity,” he said. “What happened to the Watchtower?”