Schooled in Magic (59 page)

“I’m going to put you in my office,” he said as they left the chamber. There were bloodstains on the floor where she had fought the demons, unaware that she was smashing her way through tutors. Naturally, there were no bodies
outside
the chamber. “You can wait there until the battle is won, or I order you to run. They won’t allow you through the portal so you’ll have to flee into the countryside and hope that your patron picks you up.”

Emily scowled. It was unlikely that Void would want anything to do with her after she’d been so badly compromised.

“We could call him,” she suggested instead. “Wouldn’t he help?”

“If we cannot use the interior defenses to hold Shadye back until he exhausts himself,” the Grandmaster admitted, “we’d just be bringing him more targets.”

“But...” Emily changed her mind and returned to the original subject. “But don’t you think that he could influence me in your office?”

The Grandmaster smirked. “I never keep anything of importance there,” he admitted. At her look of surprise, he snorted. “Do you know how much time sorcerers spend spying on each other? They can ransack my office all they like and all they’ll get out of it is a chance to learn a great deal about codes and devious spelling. You can’t cause any harm there.”

T
HE GRANDMASTER’S OFFICE SEEMED SMALLER THAN
Emily remembered, but perhaps that was due to her sense of being confined. One glance at the bookshelves revealed nothing of great interest, beyond a transfiguration textbook that looked alarmingly dog-eared. The portraits on the wall would probably have been instantly recognizable to a native of this world, but meant nothing to Emily. On impulse, she checked his desk drawers for security spells, and discovered that they were crawling with particularly unpleasant charms. The Grandmaster clearly intended to make any intruder work for his useless knowledge.

“You can use the crystal ball, if you like,” the Grandmaster had said, before leaving her alone. He hadn’t exactly locked the door, but he’d made it clear that she wasn’t to leave until the situation became desperate. Emily had been tempted to point out that the situation had already gone
beyond
desperate, but had held her tongue. “Keep an eye on the corridor leading up to my office.”

The crystal ball included charms and infused spells that took her some time to work out how to activate. It seemed to draw power directly from the user, which–she decided–was one way to ensure that someone didn’t waste their time spying on people rather than doing something useful.

And perhaps if televisions required someone to power them by running on a treadmill
, she thought darkly,
they would be less addictive.

The Grandmaster hadn’t bothered to explain any of it, perhaps believing that figuring it out would keep Emily busy for a while. He was probably right.

She felt the school’s remaining protections fall away, one by one. The Grandmaster might have started to work on restoring what she’d destroyed, but she had a feeling that it would take hours–perhaps days–before the wards were back up and running. Building wards was something that she hadn’t even touched upon, yet she knew enough from books to understand that wards could be very complex and difficult to erect. Guilt tore at her mind before she finally managed to push some power into the crystal ball.

No matter what happened, she would always bear some of the blame for what had happened to Whitehall. The failing had been hers.

The crystal ball lit up, displaying a dozen different scenes. When she pressed her fingers against it, the ball focused the view on the invading army. A horde of heavily-armed Orcs advanced through the gardens, weapons at the ready, only to run right into a horde of bees from the beehives. The Orcs stumbled backwards in dismay as the tiny creatures stung at them, only to rally and advance again.

Of course
, Emily realized;
their skins are so tough that the bees could barely hurt them
.

The beehives were rapidly destroyed, leaving the bees buzzing angrily around the Orcs or raging off towards the rest of the army. Perhaps they’d sting Shadye and put an end to it before it went any further.

She shook her head. There was no way it would be that easy.

A moment later, a dozen Orcs stumbled and fell to the ground. CT reared up in front of them, his giant eye ablaze with fury as tentacles grew out of his body and sliced through the Orcs, ripping them to shreds. They cut back with their swords, but they couldn’t make any impression on CT - a creature that seemed to be made of jelly. Eventually, they fell back as CT advanced menacingly, growing new weapons out of his body ...

And then a bolt of light from Shadye struck CT and froze him solid. Wary now, the remaining Orcs launched fire arrows into the zoo and then fell back. They’d missed their chance to come face to face with a
real
Mimic.

Shadye’s forces advanced against the walls, firing arrows to force the defenders to keep their heads down. Emily couldn’t understand why Shadye wasn’t using his magic to simply punch a hole through the walls until she realized that there was so much magic running through the stone that destroying it would be difficult–and if he succeeded, he might accidentally cause the school to explode as a vastly larger interior tried to expand into a much smaller exterior. Giant spiders ran past his army, scuttling along the ground, then started to crawl
up
the walls.

Emily stared in horror. As a child, she had been deathly afraid of spiders and had been relieved to discover that they couldn’t grow very big without being unable to move. The necromancers, it seemed, had managed to produce spiders which defied whatever law that usually prevented spiders from growing that big ...

Streaks of light blasted down from the battlements, smashing the spiders and sending their bodies falling to the ground. Emily pulled the crystal ball back and saw students, led by Professor Lombardi, propelling items into the enemy army at terrifying speed.

Shadye countered, one by one, but there seemed to be an inexhaustible supply of ammunition. His archers moved their attention to the students, only to see their arrows deflected by a handful of other students who were maintaining a magical barrier. Necromancers never worked together, Emily remembered; cooperation was the only real advantage the good guys had.

Shadye threw back projectiles of his own, including one that slammed into the ward so hard it shattered. Several students were knocked back with blood pouring from their ears and noses. They’d fuelled the ward directly, and the feedback had almost killed them.

While they were distracted, a second set of spiders crawled up the battlements, leaving sticky webs behind them. A small army of Goblins followed, a handful being crushed when a student knocked down a spider which landed on top of them.

But it didn’t matter, Emily realized. Shadye seemed to have an inexhaustible supply of cannon fodder.

The giant spiders reached the battlements and slashed into the defenders with teeth and claws, followed by a trio of creatures that looked like a cross between dragons and griffins. A handful of older students met them, lashing out with powerful curses and hexes that sent one of the creatures falling to its doom. The other two breathed green smoke at the defenders, who started to choke and collapse on the ground.

Emily winced in pain. She’d been careful not to introduce the concept of poison gas, knowing that it would suit the necromancers perfectly, but they’d thought of it without her.

Inch by inch, the attackers cleared the battlements while keeping the lower defenders pinned inside the building. They brought up more of their army and prepared to invade the interior of Whitehall from above.

Emily switched the crystal ball’s focus to find Sergeant Harkin. The two Sergeants led the defense of the lower levels, backed up by almost every Martial Magic student in the school. Emily prayed that they managed to hold out. A handful of students used
Berserker
, passing the baton to other students as they tired and crawled back for energy potions that had been prepared by Alchemy students. It wasn’t something she’d have thought of them doing; presumably, it was a tactic only used in the direst of emergencies. Using so many energy potions so quickly could be very dangerous for the hapless students. They’d been warned, specifically, never to take more than one at a time.

She looked back at the battlements, just in time to see an Orc pry open one of the doors. A brilliant flash of magic flung the Orc off the roof. The defenders hadn’t retreated far at all; they’d set up traps that forced Shadye to expend men and magic to burn his way into the castle. But Shadye seemed more inclined to waste men than magic. Emily watched as the gas-breathing creatures stuck their heads through the doors and spewed green mist into the school. A moment later, one of the creatures twitched and fell over, crushing a pair of Orcs as it hit the rooftop. It took Emily several minutes to work out that someone had cast a botched transfiguration–like she’d done to Alassa–on the creature and killed it instantly.

Shadye drifted up onto the roof, produced a fireball with one hand and threw it down into the building. It was too powerful for the defenders, who stumbled backwards, allowing the monsters to charge into the building itself.

Emily cursed aloud as she saw the Orcs crashing down into the upper levels. She tried to switch the crystal ball around, hoping to confirm that her friends were out of the school. There was no sign of Alassa or Imaiqah anywhere within the crystal ball’s range. She hoped they were alive ...

Inch by inch, the Orcs advanced into the school. They ran into all kinds of defenses intended to slow them down and force Shadye to waste power. Suits of armor came to life and advanced towards them with drawn swords. When they fell, they reassembled and continued the fight. When some suits were wrecked completely, their components linked up with others and kept fighting. They had to be reduced to their component atoms to stop them from tearing through more of the Orcs.

If Shadye hadn’t been there, Emily would have had no doubts that Whitehall could defeat the Orcs. They were
dumb
; blundering constantly into traps then charging forward in the belief that brute force could clear the way. Keyed transfiguration spells stopped a handful of them dead in their tracks and, when they were pushed out of the way, the second set of spells turned the advancing Orcs into dust. A skilled team of mages would have taken hours, perhaps days, to clear the corridors; Shadye settled for scorching the entire corridor with his magic, wiping out everything that
could
be a threat. His flames even eradicated a handful of his Orcs!

She heard the orders barked through the mirrors the school’s defenders were using to coordinate their actions, orders that made no sense to her. But Shadye might be spying on the defenders now that the wards were gone; they used code phases to issue orders to prevent him from taking action to impede the retreat.

Emily looked back at the Sergeants in time to see Sergeant Miles generate a firestorm that swept a dozen Orcs and Goblins out of the building. The remaining students fell back, sealing the doors as they left. Sergeant Miles, breathing heavily and supported by Sergeant Harkin, was the last one out of the abandoned armory. The Orcs would have to crack their way through solid stone to get further into the building.

Whitehall’s strange interior started to come into play. She watched as a dozen Orcs advanced into an empty corridor and walked towards the exit ... and walked towards the exit ... and walked towards the exit, not realizing that the interior dimensions had been warped so they were effectively walking in a circle. Three Goblins walked down a corridor when the floor vanished and they fell, plunging hundreds of meters to their deaths. Another set of Orcs walked through a door and found themselves back on the roof, just before their successors pushed them over the edge. Giant statues of famous witches and wizards came to life and directed spells at the invaders, all powered by the castle’s interior wards.

They were all buying time, Emily realized, for the defenders to set up interior defense lines.

But Shadye kept coming. He no longer looked human at all and his will was exerting itself on the fabric of the school. Emily could
feel
the school scream in pain as Shadye reached out to impose himself, twisting the interior into something more suitable for his plans. Whitehall was intelligent, in a way, and it could be harmed - or brainwashed into compliance. It struck Emily suddenly that Shadye’s ultimate objective wasn’t to destroy Whitehall, but to
take
it–and the nexus it used as a power source.

Why destroy the school when he could mould it in his own image?

She flashed back to the nightmarish scenes Shadye had used to push her into destroying the wards. They were going to come true, she realized as the school continued to scream its pain into her mind, into the mind of every magician in the building. Whitehall was going to be shattered, twisted into a foul abomination of everything it had once stood for, and all of the remaining students were going to die to grant Shadye a few extra months of life.

Or maybe he’d do something worse. If he could twist
her
mind–whatever advantages he’d had through her being unique in this world–why couldn’t he do the same to others? He could bind and twist the students and turn them into his slaves. What happened if someone was forced to swear an oath to obey at gunpoint? Could Shadye overcome the insistent necromantic infighting by forcing his followers to swear oaths of loyalty?