The Box Omnibus #1 (The Box, The Journal, The Sword) (35 page)

A location finally is drawn from his thoughts. Another place like this one, thou
gh much more strongly protected. A place where defenders of The Sword gather and give information to wizards.

The moment the location is inside my mind, my sword lifts once more. This time there is no taunting. My hand releases his face and he falls into a puddle of both his and his friends’ blood.

Once again I can feel wizard
s’ magic, but I can’t see them. While the new location is not as tall as the previous one, standing only two stories this time, the only windows are around the front entrance. I can’t see anything past them beyond a large desk. No other doors. No easy access into the rest of the building.

The darkness grows impatient as I spend a few minutes to watch the area from afar. I want to have an idea
how many wizards I might have to deal with once I’m inside, but the darkness doesn’t care. It wants to keep moving. Keep killing. It moves me forward close enough anyone inside will have surely felt my presence. No one comes out to attack me. I don’t know if I should be relieved or worried.

I circle the building once to search for any spells placed to stop me from entering, and then again to find the easiest
way inside.

A door at the back. No handle on the outside, though there is a place for a
key. Of course I don’t have a key, but I don’t need one. I have magic.

Although convincing the darkness to move cautiously is
difficult, I manage to control my actions enough to be able to watch my surroundings. No one around. I’m safe, for now.

I place my hand over the key hole and use my magic to fill it with enough pressure to force the locking mechanism to snap into place. Nice and tidy. No one will notice the door is broken unless they try to unlock it themselves. And another sign I have more control over things than I thought. The darkness would never be bothered to be so subtle.

The hall I’ve entered is long and follows the back wall of the building both left and right. Several closed doors line the wall opposite the entrance I came through. Each has a plaque with a name pasted on the wood. Offices, just like the ones the instructors of The University have. At the end of the hall in each direction are corners. I can’t see past them, but I’m sure they both lead deeper into the building.

I take a moment to feel for the wizards I sensed outside and then head left. I’m not entirely sure it’s the best direction, but the darkness is too impatient to spend any more t
ime trying to make an informed decision.

Everywhere I turn there are more locked
doors. No other building in this world has been as secure as the one I’m sneaking through now. And it’s not only physical locks. I’ve felt more than one spell since entering the place.

The wizards
aren’t running wild like at the last building. This time, they’re calm and patient. I can feel them waiting for me to come to them.

Not a good sign, but even if I was able to stop myself from moving forward, I wouldn’t. As dangerous as the situation might be, there’s still a chance I might be able to find and save Loraine. If my stolen memories are true, then sh
e’s been woken up somehow and she’s in more danger than I could ever have imagined.

I reach another door, seemingly the same as the dozens of others I passed since entering the building, but the difference becomes clear as I approach. The wizards I’ve been looking for are behind this door.

Before I can burst through and start swinging wildly, I reason with the darkness.

This is probably a trap. Blindly running into it would be a mistake and would cost a great deal of magic. It’s better to proceed cautiously. Peek through the door and see what we’re up against.

The darkness remains quiet, though I can tell it doesn’t like leaving things to me.

I force the lock open, just as I
did the first, but I only open the door enough to be able to peek through the crack.

Ten, no
, closer to twenty wizards fill the open area. I find Fitzroy instantly. It’s almost as though he wants me to see him.

He holds something in his hand up to his ear as he talks. “I understand…No…No. My people will handle it…They will be found…Of course,
sir.” He shows no surprise as his eyes shift to me. “You will be the first to know if I find him.”

He drops his hand from
his face and I see it’s a phone he’s been talking into. Who he was talking to doesn’t matter. He slips the phone into his pocket and smiles.

“Welcome,
Aldric,” he says. “I’ve been waiting for you.”

No point in staying b
ehind the door. I step out and get a proper look around the room. Mixes of wizards and magic-less people wearing uniforms stand in groups around the room. Most pay no attention to me as I enter, though a uniformed woman’s eyebrows twist together in a mix of annoyance and anger when she sees where I’ve come from.

And then I see her. She looks exactly as the stolen memory showed me. Her long blonde hair is
left loose to fall over her shoulders and frame her face, and she wears a short patterned dress, common in this world. But most importantly, there’s recognition behind her gaze. She’s no longer an empty shell.

I want to run to her, snatch her up and get us both as far from these people as possible, but I don’t. Not bothered with the emotions of seeing my sister alive for the first time in years, the darkness has noticed what I otherwise wouldn’t have. A band of magic flows between Loraine to Fitzroy, linking the two together
more than any physical connection ever could. If I tried to take her more than a few feet away, even to the other side of this building, it would be as deadly for her as if I took her head, but left the rest of her body.

“Ah,” Fitzroy says in a singsong voice. “See. I knew you’d notice the connection right away. Most wizards take much longer to
figure it out. But not you. Aldric the Observant. You see everything. Shame you don’t have a clue what to do with what you find.”

I want to demand answers. Break the spell however I can. Slice him to pieces
if I must. But the darkness surrounds me, cutting off my control to take over entirely.

The darkness reasons with me. I
wanted to be subtle. Besides, attacking him now will waste more magic than I can afford and will get me no closer to saving my precious little sister. The darkness will deal with things from here.

“Hello Fitzroy,” I say. “It’s been a while.”

“Too long, old friend.” His smile is steady, though I can see in his eyes he’s struggling to figure out what I’ll do next. I don’t think he expected me to react so calmly. “I heard you finally became a full wizard. Congratulations. However, the rumors of where you found your magic have myself and our brothers worried for your sanity.”

“Rumors?” I walk a few steps closer to him and lean in as though listening to a secret. “And what might people be saying?”

“You’re killing your own kind.”

His face remains neutral
. I know he’s waiting for my response before he shows how he truly feels about what he’s heard. I wish I could take another look around the room to find out how many people are paying attention to us now.

My
focus stays on Fitzroy and my body remains completely relaxed as though I see no threat from him or the others in the room.

“I have.” My shoulders lift and fall in a casual shrug. “Source
s of magic are in short supply. I take it where I can find it.”

He
spends a moment reading me to make sure I don’t have any sinister intentions toward him, and then he walks over to me and clasps my shoulder.

“Too true, my friend. Too true.” He turns and gestures toward Loraine. “This is exactly why I’ve spent the past three years develop
ing a new way of tapping into the sources we already have.”

I examine the connection between the two a little more closely as I know he wants me to. The strip of magic not only bonds them together, but also works as a conduit, taking Loraine’s magic bit by bit and passing it over to Fitzroy. It’s
almost exactly the same as what happens when a wizard sucks the magic from a sorceress, but instead of taking it all in one gulp, he’s stealing it slowly. She can constantly rebuild her power as sorceresses naturally do, and he can keep stealing it without wiping her out.

“Beautiful, isn’t it,” he says. “It was inspired by you.”

The darkness allows for the faintest hint of surprise to pass to my expression, while inside myself I’m horrified by the thought of having anything to do with what he’s done to Loraine.

“Oh
, yes,” he says. “You spent so much time talking about how we shouldn’t strip the sorceresses dry. How there must be a way we can work together. It got me thinking. What if we could work together after all?”

He steps
over to my sister and pinches her cheek hard enough to cause the side of her face to go red, but she doesn’t react.

“Of course, we must work together in a way where we’re in charge.” He pulls a face similar to ones he used
to make when we were children. Unlike when we were kids, more hatred than humor guides this expression. “Giving even a single sorceress back her power is dangerous. But I figured out a way to keep them in check.”

“Amazing,” I say. “You’ve done
what others have only dreamed.”

I hadn’t noticed the tension he’d been holding in his shoulders
until he releases it and relaxes entirely. The mood of the entire room shifts when he does. It is clear people were paying more attention to our conversation than I thought.

Most of the groups of people leave. Their job is done. They’d only been in the room in order to intimidate me. Now Fitzroy doesn’t see me as a threat, they can resume what business they were attending to before my arrival.

“See, I knew you’d understand.” He claps me on the back a couple of times a little harder than I’d expect from a friendly tap. “The others thought we should kill you on sight, but not me. I knew if you saw what we have to offer, you could be brought around.”

Twenty
-three wizards and eighteen others watch me. With the tension gone, I am finally able to count them properly. All of them would turn on me if I made a single wrong move. Never before have I been grateful for the darkness and its ability to mask my true feelings.

Though mask might be too kind. Choke out is a more appropriate description.

“Don’t get me wrong,” Fitzroy says as he leads me out of the room. “You will be punished for all of the lives you’ve taken, but in time, if you help with headmaster Victor’s vision, I’m sure you will be able to earn a pardon. Maybe we’ll be able to find you a sorceress of your own.”

T
endrils of darkness creep up and attempt to penetrate the bubble containing my thoughts of Lou.

“I already have one in mind.”

Every eye is on me as Fitzroy leads me through the building. They want me dead. That much is clear from their venomous glares. I don’t blame them. I’ve been killing their friends, their brothers, for months now. I’m surprised they didn’t tear me to pieces the second I stepped into the building.

Yet they stay back and watch. A few times I see the glares shift to Fitzroy before they remember their place and look anywhere but at us.
It reminds me of being back in The University. No matter how much we hated an instructor, the fact they were higher above us within The Sword meant we had to show them respect. Or at least try and hide our disrespect.

“You’ve moved up in the world,” I say. “I never thought I’d see you receive so much respect from our fellow wizards.”

He glances at some of the staring wizards, and most respond by looking away and rushing to appear busy.

“Victor has been generous,” he says. “My discovery for a new continuous supply of magic has changed everything. And I’ve been rewarded for my work. He’s given me the honor of taking
the lead in an experiment bigger yet. When I’m done, life as we know it will no longer exist.”

I want to ask what experiment he’s talking about, but the magic inside me is suddenly drawn toward a source of power stronger than anything I’ve felt before. My eyes go to a door, no different looking than any of the others in the building, except for a dampening spell woven into the wood. The spell is meant to keep any magic within the room contained, but it cannot completely restrain the power inside.

Fitzroy laughs. “You feel her, don’t you? No matter what we do, we cannot completely cloak her power. Though once we go inside, you’ll understand what a miracle it is you didn’t sense her from the other side of town.”

He nods to Loraine who has been our silent shadow the entire time. She slips
past us and places a hand on the door. Spells for locking, protection, hiding, and destruction all slide away from her touch. She doesn’t break them, only shoves them back from the centre of the door until they recoil into the wood of the doorframe like bugs running from a sudden light in a dark damp space.

She steps out of the way and Fitzroy opens the door.

“After you.” He gives an exaggerated gesture toward the dark room. When I start forward, he catches my arm. “Just don’t touch anything.”

I can hardly see anything in the dark space, but I can feel the magic. If my other senses are any guide, then the entire room should be illuminated by the magic before me, and yet I can see nothing.

“Loraine, darling,” Fitzroy says in a tone which would make me strangle him if I was in control of my body. “Give us some light.”

A ball of magic floats from her hand and explodes above us, causing the entire room to be illuminated.

“Clever, huh?” Fitzroy nudges my ribs with his elbow. “She does the magic which means I don’t have to waste any of my own.”

I’d love to hit him, just once
. With my sword. In the throat. But the darkness couldn’t care less about how he’s treating my sister. All it cares about is the scene before us.

A slumped woman held up only by the chains wrapped around her wrists
hangs in the center of the room. The chains are connected to the ceiling and keep her suspended over a hole blasted into the concrete floor. Above her, painted into the ceiling is a symbol I don’t recognize, though I can sense it is part of a powerful spell. More powerful than I’ve ever seen before.

The woman is the source of
the incredible amount of magic filling the room, though she has less control over it than I do mine. It’s being constantly drained from her, the same way Fitzroy is draining Loraine, but instead of going into a person, her magic is being funneled through the chains and into the symbol. Somewhere below, within the hole, I can sense another gathering of magic, just like the one on the ceiling. Somehow the two are both connected and not at the same time. Like two sides of a coin.

“What is this?” Somehow the darkness
within me makes the words sound somehow beautiful, though I’d been going for disgust when I’d thought them.

“Do you like it?” Fitzroy does nothing to hold back his pride. “I helped create it. Of course it was Victor’s idea. And we couldn’t manage any of it without our lovely source of power. She is something else, isn’t she? Who would have imagined one little sorceress could create so much
magic?”

“It’s remarkable.”
Repulsive is what I was going for, but once again the darkness twists my words. “Is she alive?”

As I ask the words, her eyes flicker open and she looks directly at me. “Please,” she says in a dry whisper. “Kill me.”

Fitzroy’s laugh echoes through the room and seems to sink into the abyss of the hole beneath the woman.

“Such a tease
,” he says. “Of course you don’t want to die. Because if you did, we’d lose our source of power. And we can’t have that. Not yet at least.”

I walk a bit closer to the sorceress to study the hole beneath her.

“Careful,” Fitzroy says. “You don’t want to fall in there.”

“Where does it go?” I ask.

“Nowhere.”

He watches my expression, waiting for me to show my confusion. I wonder if I’m
capable of showing such expressions anymore. I don’t feel like I am. The darkness has taken the luxury away from me. Yet the darkness must show him something, because Fitzroy’s face lights up in response and he claps me on the shoulder again.

“You don’t understand, do you?” His arm wraps around Loraine’s shoulder and jerks her close. She shows no emotion, though I know if an
yone had manhandled her the same way before, she would have slapped them hard enough to leave a mark. “I love seeing him so confused, don’t you sweetheart?”

I feel my lips rise into something I’d guess
looks more like a sneer than a smile and I walk over to stand in front of him, a little closer than necessary. Now if only I could reach out my hand and strangle him.

“The spells above and below her are created to captur
e and control her magic.” I refuse to allow him to think he’s completely outwitted me. “They are connected to her so thoroughly the only way to break the spell would be to kill her.”

“Very good,” he says.

I’m pleased to see Fitzroy has lost some of the amusement he’d been showing at my expense. But I still haven’t gotten the answers from him I’m looking for.

“
I understand how the spell works,” I say. “I understand what it does. What I don’t understand is why. I assume it has to do with the hole in the floor or else why else would you have her above it? So I’ll ask you again, where does the hole go?”

For a moment I’m
sure he’s going to get mad. He never liked it when I did better than him in school. I don’t blame him. I hardly paid attention and barely managed to produce the minimum amount of work required. On the other hand he studied late into the night to come out with mediocre grades. I can see the old rivalry flash in his eyes, and I wonder if there might still be some of the old Fitzroy I knew still in there. Maybe he’s as trapped as I am.

And yet the darkness isn’t there in him
to the degree it’s in me. His magic is tainted in a way. The edges of it unraveling like a poorly woven cloth. But Loraine’s pure magic is the only source inside him. There is no stitching together of hundreds of different layers of torn magic as there is in me. No poison from dozens of wizards running through his body, destroying everything inside of him bit by bit.

No, everything evil he’s done is entirely on him. And one day I will kill him for
it.

His annoyance shifts to amusement and once more he’s gleefully chuckling.

“You’ve always been full of surprises,” he says. “No one ever saw how clever you were. But I did. I knew you had more potential than you ever let on at The University.”

He steps over to the hole and leans over, pretending to lose his balance for a moment before turning back around and winking at Loraine.

“What I said before is true,” he says. “The hole truly goes to nowhere. You see it’s a portal between this world and ours. But while a hole has been dug on this side to go down into the dirt, none has been dug on the other side. Go through the portal here, and you will end up several feet underground over there. I’m not sure exactly how it works since I haven’t tried it myself, for obvious reasons, but I’m pretty sure if you jump in here, you will become one with the rocks and dirt on the other side. A very painful and unpleasant death, I’m sure. Aren’t portals such fun?”

The trapped woman begins to quietly
weep. Her thin chest heaving with the emotion. When was the last time she’d eaten? I wish I could help her, put her out of her misery, but I can’t. Not yet. I need to keep Fitzroy on my side until I figure out a way to help Loraine.

“So unpleasant.” Fitzroy points at the woman and she
instantly goes silent, her head drooping on her shoulders. “Much better. I hate when they whine.”

Even though
he knocked her out for selfish reasons, I can’t help but be glad he did. At least unconscious she can no longer feel the pain she must be in.

Unfortunately for Fitzroy, he slipped in a word which might cause me to end him here and now.

“They?”

My eyes go to Loraine and I search her from top to bottom for any signs of physical abuse. No bruising and she appear
s at least as well fed as we managed when she’d been unconscious in my parents’ house.

“Don’t worry,” Fitzroy says. “Your sister will never be used in this experiment. I would never allow it. But of course there are others. Hundreds. All around the worlds. Soon every portal will have its own source of power. And when they do, then Victor’s plan will become reality.”

I wish I could feel sickened by the thought of hundreds of other women trapped like this one, tortured and begging for death. I know I would have. Before. But now the only pity I can feel toward them is what the tiny untainted part of my mind allows. And most of it is busy feeling relieved neither Loraine nor Lou have been caught in such a trap.

The darkness
on the other hand is intrigued by what could possibly become a new, incredibly powerful source of magic. After all, my sword could easily cut through the spell gathering the power. It would kill the sorceresses, of course, but it would be a relief for them after what they’ve been through. And it would make me more powerful than anyone, wizard or sorceress, has ever been.

I would become a god.

However, there is still one thing bothering me.

“Why gather the power?” I ask. “And why do it around the portals? What does Victor have planned?”

“He is going to save the worlds.” Fitzroy’s eyes become wide with excitement and I can tell he expects me to have the same enthusiasm the moment I understand what’s happening. Somehow I doubt I will. “The worlds are dying. They were never meant to be split in two like they are, with magic in one world and technology in another.”

He uses Loraine’s arms as puppets to mime throwing a spell. She’s too floppy. Too much more like a doll than a human. If it weren’t for her eyes, I’d swear she was no more awake than when she was in Ma’s care.

“When the sorcerers of old divided the world,” he continues, “they didn’t understand the damage it would do in the future. Or more likely, they didn’t care. But we’re now suffering for their fatal mistake.”

“How?” The question
comes out with more curiosity than I’d like. Which part of me is interested in hearing more of this madness? I can only hope it’s the darkness. “How are the worlds dying?”

“Don’t you feel it?” he asks. “Don’t you feel the death and decay of this world? Th
e lack of magic has turned it into a battleground. Everyone is constantly fighting for something they don’t know they’ve lost. Magic. Without it in the air, feeding the plants and animals and even the normal people, the world crumbles. And if this one falls apart, what do you think will happen to ours? After all, our two worlds are still connected, though not in the way they should be.”

I consider the amount of magic building around the sorceress and the portal and the purpose becomes clear.

“That’s why you need the magic,” I say. “And the portals.”

He spreads
Loraine’s hands out as though she’s offering a gift. “Exactly,” he says. “We’re going to fix what the sorcerers of old destroyed so long ago. Everyone has thought of the portals as an anomaly caused by the sorcerers’ original spell. But Victor knows better. He realizes the portals are the only natural spots in our worlds. They are how the worlds should be. And if we can make them larger, cause the portals to spread across all of the land, then the two worlds will be brought together once more. Things will be put right.”

And just like anything
that might fall into the portal beneath us, whatever doesn’t match up between the two worlds will be destroyed.

I feel the darkness shiver with delighted anticipation.