Schooled in Magic (64 page)

The shadows holding her down were coming apart. When they did, the gravity threatened to drag her into the pocket dimension along with Shadye. She grabbed hold of the stone table, praying that Shadye had secured it to the floor, and held on for dear life as the necromancer struggled to find some way to counter what she’d done. Emily hadn’t been able to think
of anything he
could
do, but Shadye had a great deal of raw power at his disposal - and he was desperate.

For all she knew, maybe he
could
cancel the spells that she’d shaped into creating a miniature black hole leading to a new dimension.

She looked away as his robes were pulled towards the black hole, revealing something so horrifying that she didn’t want to look any closer. Whatever he’d become was very far from human, an eldritch horror out of nightmares. Worse yet, his form was threatening to come apart completely.

His eyes glowed bright red as he cast spell after spell in the air, before finally managing to shield them both. Somehow, without quite knowing what he was fighting, Shadye had managed to save his life.

Emily would have been impressed if he hadn’t looked as if he was about to forget how useful she could be to him and kill her outright. Dark magic crackled around his one remaining claw and his eyes were bright with hatred and malice.

But he hadn’t managed to completely stop the black hole, merely provide some protection for them both. Which gave her hope.

“You will die,” Shadye screamed in a cracked and broken voice. Indeed, she was no longer sure if he even had
a
mouth
. There were
things
crawling inside his hood. She could sense that it was taking almost all of his magic to keep the protections stable and neglect the black hole. “Child of Destiny or not, you will
die
!”

Emily started to laugh, finally realizing how it felt to know–to truly know–that death was unavoidable. “You were wrong,” she said, still keeping a tight hold on the stone table. “You were wrong from the start. My mother’s name is Destiny.”

Shadye stared at her. It took him several moments to work out what she’d said, and how badly he’d erred right at the start. And when it hit him, he lost control.

The gravity pull reasserted itself. Emily held onto the table, feeling it shuddering under her, as Shadye flew backwards and hit the black hole. For a moment, it seemed that he was just too big to fit
into
the tiny singularity ... and then his body twisted and vanished into nothingness.

Working frantically, Emily reached out and cancelled the spells that had created the black hole. It–and the pocket dimension it led to–simply blinked out of existence, taking Shadye with it.

She rolled off the table and collapsed onto the floor, feeling utterly drained. It felt as if she were alone in the school ... as if she were the last survivor. The sense she’d had of the Grandmaster’s presence was gone; she felt too dazed to try to determine if the Grandmaster was dead or if the enhanced awareness she’d been granted of the school was gone, along with the power she had used to make the black hole. Her head spun madly and she felt almost delirious.

When she looked up, she thought she saw a tall man in monkish robes. He carried a huge book and looked directly at her. But when she blinked, he was gone.

Carefully, she pulled herself to her feet and tottered towards the door. It opened at her approach, revealing a dozen Orcs lying on the ground, all dead. There was something wrong with their bodies, something she should have seen at once, but it eluded her. Dazed, she stumbled and would have hit the floor if someone hadn’t caught her arm. A tall boy with dark hair looked down at her, his expression unreadable.

After a long moment, he lowered her gently to the floor and walked away. She turned her head in time to see the shadows swallow him up.

The entire building appeared to be shaking madly as the Grandmaster tried to reassume control of the interior dimensions. Emily smiled as she felt his will work through the building, isolating the remaining monsters that Shadye had used to invade the school. She lay back on the ground, too tired to go any further. Her head spun and she blacked out ...

... She must have blacked out, for the next thing she saw were anxious faces staring down at her.

“Rest,” a voice said quietly. It sounded like the Grandmaster, but she couldn’t tell for sure. “It’s all over now.”

“The wards need to be replaced,” another voice said. Emily felt her head spinning; the wards had fallen because of her unique nature. It had all been her fault. How many had died because of her?

She tried to speak despite the pain in her head. “Grandmaster?”

“Yes,” the Grandmaster said. “Rest now.”

Something touched the side of Emily’s head, and she plunged back into darkness.

E
MILY OPENED HER EYES, VERY SLOWLY.

Her body felt ... weird, almost as if she were lighter than air. It crossed her mind that she might have been dreaming, that she might have had an accident and imagined everything from Shadye’s kidnapping to his death ...

... And then she looked up. A ball of light floated high overhead. The Grandmaster sat next to her bed, looking down at her anxiously.

It had been no dream.

“Welcome back,” the Grandmaster said. He studied her thoughtfully, his expression oddly familiar. It took her a moment to realize where she’d seen something like it before; on the face of a man studying a new form of life. “You saved the school.”

Emily tried to sit upright and failed. “Thank you,” she managed to say. Her entire body felt drained, unable to move. “Is ... is he really gone?”

The Grandmaster smiled, but it didn’t quite touch his eyes. “I wished to ask you the same question. And I need to know what happened between you and the necromancer before you killed him.”

Emily hesitated. Shadye might have been an eldritch abomination, but there had been enough matter left in his body for the black hole to rip him apart before crushing him down to a single point in the pocket dimension, which should then have been deleted from reality. She couldn’t imagine how
anything
could have survived that. Even teleportation spells shouldn’t have been able to get him out. They were unreliable in pocket dimensions, particularly ones created by other magicians. Even if Shadye had been reduced to a disembodied entity, he should have been deleted along with the pocket dimension. He was–he must be — dead.

But part of her didn’t believe it.

“I think he’s dead,” she said, finally.

The Grandmaster peered down at her, one hand stroking his beard. “And what did you do to kill him?”

The black hole hadn’t been a
real
black hole, Emily knew, or she might have had worse problems on her hands than a furious necromancer. But she’d thought of it as a black hole and deliberately set out to create something with a powerful gravity field that could both suck in matter and crush it into a very small space. It might prove to be an ultimate weapon against the other necromancers. Yet, if she introduced the concept of variable gravity fields to this world, who knew how far a curious magician would take the concept? He might produce a
real
black hole, risking the entire planet. Or he might turn it into a new and fearsome weapon. It might be better if she kept her mouth shut.

“I don’t think I should tell you,” she said, after a long pause. The Grandmaster gave her a sharp look; Children of Destiny were supposed to be enigmatic, but there were limits. “The knowledge would be too dangerous for this world.”

“Necromancers could use it,” the Grandmaster said. It wasn’t a question. “Or are you a necromancer yourself?”

Emily stared at him. “
No
!”

“There are a handful of witnesses who say you murdered Sergeant Harkin to claim his
mana
,” the Grandmaster informed her. “Shadye apparently spared them; we do not know why. What happened?”

“The Sergeant knew the ritual would fail,” Emily said bitterly. She was no necromancer, but she could see how someone could jump to that conclusion. And if she told the truth about what had happened in the nexus, it wouldn’t be long before everyone started meddling with simulated black holes, risking the entire planet. “The Sergeant told me what to do.”

“So he did,” the Grandmaster said. His eyes never left her face as she puzzled it out. Of course; he would have looked into the witnesses’ minds and seen everything. “And in volunteering for death, he helped save the school.”

He looked down at the floor, almost as if he were ashamed. “I accept the judgment of a Child of Destiny,” he said. His face twisted into a smile. “Or at least that is what I will tell the Council of War, when they finally demand that I tell them what happened to defeat Shadye. But I’m afraid that suspicion will still fall on you. Willingly or otherwise, you took part in a necromantic ritual and may be tainted.”

Emily nodded once, slowly. “What will happen to me?”

“You’ll be watched,” the Grandmaster said. “We’ve seen too many students become tainted and then fail to purge themselves of the taint before it was too late. Shadye was once a student here, before his interest in the Dark Arts led him to necromancy. Others had to be ... stopped before they could leave the school.”

He shook his head. “Rumors are already spreading through the Allied Lands. You beat a necromancer in single combat. You’re either inhumanly powerful or you are a necromancer yourself. Neither one is very reassuring to the people in power.”

Emily could see their point. A necromancer would be mad, bad and dangerous to know - and would eventually lose all interest in trying to hide it. Someone with vastly greater power than the average magician–without madness–would be a threat to the status quo merely by existing, perhaps a greater threat than a necromancer. And it didn’t matter that she had tricked Shadye and defeated him with science, concepts born in her world. If the truth came out, the consequences would be disastrous.

She looked up at him. “How long did I sleep?”

“Nearly two weeks,” the Grandmaster said. He didn’t quite admit that some people had considered simply slitting her throat while she lay helpless, but Emily heard the subtext and winced inwardly. “It took that long for the Healers to pull you back from the brink of death.”

He shook his head. “Whitehall has been badly damaged by the invasion. Upwards of two hundred students and staff are dead, or badly injured. The grounds outside were devastated as the Orcs tore through them and then fled when Shadye was defeated. Luckily, we got most of the younger students out before the wards fell, but our other losses were heavy. If another necromancer had attacked just after Shadye’s death, we would have been defeated.

“I managed to get the main wards back up and the Allied Lands dispatched a large army to help secure the school and hunt down the remaining Orcs, so we should be safe for the moment. But in the long term, our reputation for being invincible has been severely dented.”

Emily nodded. An invading army had rampaged through the school and forced the defenders to hide in a closed-off section of the multidimensional building. Even though the army had been crushed in the end, it still suggested that Whitehall
could
be beaten. The other necromancers would not fail to take note.

“We will be holding the main funeral rites within a day,” the Grandmaster said. “I thought that you might like to attend.”

Back home, Emily would never have seriously considered attending a funeral. They had always struck her as pointless affairs. Now, however, she understood the need to say goodbye, to pay her respects to the men and women who had died at least partly because of her. Their so-called Child of Destiny had been responsible for their deaths, as well as Shadye’s final defeat. Destiny was very much a two-edged sword.

But then, George Washington had been a great hero to the United States–but the Native Americans had regarded him as a monster.

She impatiently pushed the thought aside. She
knew
that Shadye had messed up the summoning spell; she
knew
that she was no Child of Destiny, except in the most literal sense. And if she started thinking that she couldn’t lose, she would lose when she overlooked something important because she was too confident to check on it. She would just have to avoid letting it go to her head.

“I will,” she said, and then hesitated. “How many did I kill?”

The Grandmaster looked back at her. “When?”

“Shadye ... manipulated me,” Emily reminded him. “I was his puppet and he used me to kill people.”

Her memories of sleepwalking, convinced that she was fighting demons that had infested the school, were blurred, but she knew that she had torn her way through everyone who had tried to stop her. And she’d hacked her way into the nexus chamber, even though the defenses had been vastly more capable than anything else she’d ever encountered. How much had been her and how much had been Shadye?

“You cannot be considered responsible for your actions,” the Grandmaster said. “I have known more experienced wizards who were ...
manipulated
by someone who secured an undamaged sample of their blood. You were not in your right mind.”