Wolf in the Fold, page 21
Or were they?
She hung onto Caleb with one hand, the other grabbing for the battery in the saddlebag. If she could get the right spell into place, they might just have a chance ...
“Go wide,” she shouted, drawing on magic to boost her words. The thunder was deafening. It was so constant she had the feeling it was outrunning the lightning, an impression she couldn’t escape even though she was sure it was nonsense. “Spread out!”
The party obeyed, as she jammed the valve into place, lifted herself upright, and cast the spell. Caleb’s horse made a note of protest as a wave of cold air shot over his head and slammed into the ground, turning the sandy water to ice. The horse galloped onto it a moment later, Emily aiming the stream of magic ahead of them as the rest of the party fell in behind her. The sudden cold might not be enough to kill the monsters, whatever they were, but it would stun or trap them long enough for the party to escape. The air was frigid, the ice hardening ... creating a danger that hadn’t occurred to her until it was far too late, If the horses slipped ... she heard something roar behind her and glanced back, just in time to see something huge and nasty crawling out of the ground. It was so big she couldn’t get an idea of its overall shape, just twisted impressions of something utterly nightmarish ... rain splashing off its form as it advanced, crushing her dead horse under its sheer bulk. She felt sick just looking at it.
Cat pointed a finger behind him and cast a blasting curse. The creature howled in agony but kept coming, crawling towards them quickly for something of its bulk. It had to be magical, Emily thought, as she shaped a spell of her own. The battery was running out of stored magic and that meant the ice spell was about to start wearing off ... she cast the spell, sweeping the creature with a wave of fire and ice, stabbing the latter into the body as hard as she could. It howled again and collapsed, the body slowly dissolving into a puddle of goo. The stench was horrific. She wanted to throw up.
The rain slowed, but they kept going as fast as they could until they were clear of the floodplain and on higher ground. Emily breathed a sigh of relief as she realised they weren’t being followed any longer, leaving her to wonder if they’d convinced the rest of the creatures to back off or ... if there had only ever been one creature, the giant beast they’d killed and left to rot. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. The land had more dangers than they knew, some hiding in plain sight. She didn’t relax until the rain stopped, the brilliant – too bright – sunlight drying her wet outfit with astonishing speed. She wrapped her arms around Caleb again and held him tightly, even though she feared the sunlight would make them burn. The party slowed and came to a halt, the horses trembling beneath them. Despite herself, Emily felt bad for them. They couldn’t keep running past a certain point, and trying would only kill them. The party had already lost one horse.
Cat dismounted and hurried over to her. “Are you alright?”
“I’ve been better,” Emily said. She let go of Caleb and dropped to the sandy ground. “We need to find somewhere safer to set up camp.”
“Get the horses fed and watered, then we’ll be on our way again,” Cat said. “Next time, we need to bring more horses.”
And perhaps a small army of tanks, Emily thought. Heart’s Eye had messed around with steam-powered tanks, but they would be little more than a joke until they figured out how to make an internal combustion engine actually work. Emily knew the basic concept, yet – so far – none of the engineers had managed to turn it into reality. We grossly underestimated the scale of the journey.
“Yeah,” she said, instead. Caleb hopped down to join them. “We do.”
She leaned into Caleb, drawing reassurance from his touch. They’d been lucky they’d only lost a horse ... she sighed inwardly, feeling a twinge of guilt. She’d never really liked the beast and it showed, perhaps a little too much. She hadn’t even given it a name. Now ... the horse was dead and she was going to have to ride behind Caleb or Frieda, perhaps even Penny. Frieda would be the best choice, she told herself. She was the smallest member of the party.
Professor Serigala looked like a man who was torn between delight and an urge to re-evaluate his life choices. “That was a surprise,” he said. “What the hell was it?”
Emily had no idea. There was enough tainted magic in the area to warp and twist perfectly normal animals into something monstrous, or worse. The creature could have been lying in wait for years, or it might have been put into their path ... she recalled Frieda’s question and shivered helplessly. There was just no way to be sure they weren’t being harassed, unseen watchers trying to slow them down ... she shook her head, telling herself the Hierarchy had no need to make it look like an accident. They were so far from civilisation there was no hope of their bodies ever being found.
“No idea,” Cat said. He stared at the bubbling pile of goo. “Could be a sea slug of some kind.”
Caleb snorted. “We’re miles from the sea.”
“No reason it couldn’t have gotten up here somehow,” Cat countered. “A necromancer’s guard dog, perhaps, or the results of someone’s madcap experiment. This land wasn’t always dominated by the necromancers.”
“And some enjoyed experimenting themselves,” Emily added. A necromancer had enough power to do almost anything and a complete lack of scruples about using it. “They might have come up with something new.”
“Yeah,” Cat agreed.
He turned away. “Get the horses fed and watered, and get something for yourself too,” he added. “But hurry. We can’t stay here.”
Emily nodded. Cat was right. They’d barely escaped in broad daylight. If they tried to get out in pitch darkness, the odds of survival would be very low. They had to put as much distance as they could between themselves and the creatures, if there was more than one. She suspected she’d never know.
Next time, we take an airship and to hell with the risk, she thought, as she helped to feed the horse. It can hardly be worse than being chased by a monster we can’t even see.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Make sure the wards are firmly in place,” Cat ordered, as they settled down for the night. “We don’t know what’s out there.”
Emily nodded, stiffly. They’d ridden for hours, leaving the floodplain far behind, before stopping once the sun started to sink. The campsite was far from perfect, as far as she was concerned, but it didn’t look to be part of a floodplain and there was a source of firewood right next to them. She’d helped set up the tents as Cat and Penny handed out ration bars and warm drinks, then volunteered to take the first watch. Caleb had offered to take it in her place, but he’d been steering the horse. He needed sleep more than she did.
“Of course,” she said. The night was oddly starry, for the Blighted Lands. Emily could pick out a handful of constellations the sergeants had shown her, years ago. She wasn’t an expert, but it looked as though they were on the right track. “You have a pleasant nap.”
“Wake me in four hours,” Cat said. “And don’t fall asleep.”
Emily snorted, although she took his point. They were all tired. If the threat of getting a beating from the sergeants hadn’t been enough to keep students from dozing off, the threat of being eaten wouldn’t keep her awake either. She watched Cat return to his tent and sat back near the fire, closing her eyes long enough to set up another set of early-warning wards. If there was anything out there, she would get an alert long before it showed itself.
She heard something moving and opened her eyes. Professor Serigala had just come out of his tent, disturbingly alert for someone who’d been awake for hours. She raised her eyebrows as he came over to join her, squatting beside the campfire. They hadn’t allowed the professor to stand watch, Cat pointing out that he was the oldest of the group and couldn’t be relied upon to remain awake. Serigala hadn’t argued, somewhat to Emily’s surprise. It wasn’t as if their peers at school hadn’t fallen asleep on watch from time to time, despite dire threats. Perhaps the professor was aware of his own weakness, or simply grateful to get a good night’s sleep. Emily didn’t envy Serigala. It was a clear sign Cat didn’t trust him.
“Lady Emily,” Serigala said. His voice was calm, focused. “I can’t sleep.”
Emily’s lips twisted. Serigala sounded like he was talking about the weather. “I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, feeling a twinge of pity mingled with envy. She felt tired and she had over three hours to go before she woke Cat. “Do you want a sleep spell?”
“No, thank you,” Serigala said. “I never use them on expeditions. You never know what might be lurking out there.”
“Point,” Emily conceded. Sleep spells were effective, but they couldn’t be removed easily. Once someone was put to sleep, they’d stay asleep until they woke naturally. “Do you want to talk about something boring? That might help.”
Serigala grinned, as if she’d said something amusing. “Did you give my question any thought?”
“About why the concept of magic schools came into existence so suddenly?” Emily would have preferred not to have the discussion at all, but the professor seemed determined. “I think it was a natural development, one that started because all the pieces were in place. There’s nothing more to it than that.”
“So we have been told,” Serigala said. “But it still happened very quickly.”
He leaned forward. “If the old scrolls are accurate, Whitehall started taking in common-born students very quickly and educating young women within a decade or so of the school’s founding. That’s a little odd, don’t you think? Societies don’t change that quickly.”
“There’s no inherent reason why women shouldn’t be schooled in magic,” Emily said, a little waspishly. She remembered Lord Whitehall’s daughter, even if no one else did. “And I’m sure the commune had its fair share of common-born students.”
“No,” Serigala agreed. “But most societies have tried to limit female freedoms. They are rarely granted as much latitude as their male counterparts, kept under male instruction from birth to death, and change usually comes slowly if it does at all. You changed the laws in Cockatrice and yet ... society has yet to catch up with you. You know it.”
“It’s rather dangerous to keep a magician under control,” Emily pointed out. Frieda had been beaten and abused by her family, yet she’d grown into a powerful magician who wouldn’t have any trouble burning her village to the ground. “Once it became easier to tell which women had magical potential, it was safer to let them go than risk resentments powering magic that could easily turn lethal.”
“Perhaps, but it’s still odd,” Serigala pointed out. “Why the sudden change?”
Emily had no answer. Serigala had a point, perhaps better than he knew. The world might change time and time again, but it took usually decades for society to come to terms with the change and adjust its behaviour to compensate. On Earth, the pill had liberated womankind because without a reliable form of contraception a woman could easily get pregnant, only to be abandoned and left to raise a child alone. Her village could easily shun her if she got pregnant out of wedlock, for fear that supporting her would mean encouraging other women to follow in her footsteps. Men too. A man who thought he wouldn’t be held accountable for siring a child he didn’t plan to raise was a man who was likely to be careless ...
“I don’t know,” she said, softly. People, men and women alike, wore society’s chains. They could be uncomfortable, they could be outdated, but they hadn’t come out of nowhere. “Their world changed radically when they learnt how to control magic.”
“You could say the same about firearms,” Serigala said. “And there haven’t been many changes.”
“Alluvia is now governed by a rebel republic,” Emily countered. “And the remaining kingdoms are now all too aware of the threat.”
And they are pretending everything is normal because they don’t know what else to do, she added, in the privacy of her own mind. They are unwilling to make any concessions because that would mean giving up a little power, and raising the spectre of being forced to give up more, and yet refusing to give up power means they will eventually lose all of it.
“That’s a small change, compared to allowing women to attend magic school,” Serigala said, thoughtfully. “Why such a big change?”
“Because they worked out that women can be just as good at magic as men,” Emily said, rather waspishly. “And it ensured that powerful magicians had a chance to breed with their peers rather than random strangers.”
“True, I suppose.” Serigala looked up at her, his eyes dark in the half-light. “Where does magic actually come from?”
Emily blinked, surprised. It wasn’t something she’d given much thought to, over the years. There was no magic in her homeworld – unless there really was a hidden magical society that existed in the shadows – but there was magic here, from humans with magic to creatures that drew on magic and entities made of pure magic. Why did humans have magic? The more she thought about it, the more she wondered how humans had ever evolved on the Nameless World ... if they had. She had crossed the interdimensional barriers ... there was no reason someone else couldn’t do the same, perhaps hundreds of thousands of them. She could easily imagine a small fleet of ships getting swept up in an interdimensional storm and ending up in the Nameless World, the hapless passengers forced to colonise the new world once they realised there was no way home.
“Why do some people have magic and others don’t?” Serigala kept his eyes on her. “Why are newborn magicians more common in high-magic zones? Why does crossing established magical lines with new blood produce stronger and more adaptable magicians? Where does the magic even come from?”
He paused. “Does the presence of magic in the surrounding air somehow encourage people to develop magic themselves?”
Possibly, Emily thought. Although there is no way to be sure.
Serigala cocked his head. “What do you think?”
“It’s possible,” Emily conceded. “But wouldn’t Celeste have produced more powerful magicians if that being close to magic was all they needed to produce them?”
She frowned. Hundreds of children had been taken from their families by the regime, damn them, but ... if the theory was accurate, there should have been more. Many more. The city should have been churning out magical children like a craftsman churned out basic toys and ... as far as she knew, the ratio of newborn magicians to mundane children wasn’t any higher in Celeste than any other urban community.
“The rate is higher in rural areas, where the population is closer to the soil,” Serigala said, calmly. “Why?”
He went on before Emily could answer. “They have to work harder for survival. They have to adapt, which means they adapt to the magic in the air.”
“Perhaps,” Emily conceded.
“But where does the magic come from?” Serigala leaned forward. “The nexus points?”
His lips twisted. “Does tapping the nexus points limit the magic spreading into the surrounding countryside, reducing the number of new magicians?”
“I doubt it,” Emily said. It was rare for a magical line to fail. Squibs were almost unknown and the only documented case involved a curse, rather than a genetic disorder. It took generations for a line to weaken badly, and most magical families would do anything rather than risk their bloodline losing its power. “It allows us to ...”
She broke off, wondering if Serigala had a point. The effects wouldn’t be seen immediately, if indeed there were any, but ... might it become apparent over generations? The big events of history couldn’t always be traced back to their starting point, not when it could be something so minor it was practically unnoticeable, and for all she knew the slow decline of the magical bloodlines might owe something to an event hundreds of years in the past. If there were fewer newborn magicians ... but there weren’t. Or was there? She had the nasty feeling it was something she ought to question before it was too late.
“Where does magic come from?” Serigala repeated his question. “What do the nexus points do?”
“They radiate magic,” Emily said. She was too tired for word games. “What do you think they do?”
“The power has to come from somewhere,” Serigala said. “Where?”
He leaned forward. “There’s just so much we don’t understand,” he added. “So much we need to uncover, before it bites us. What we don’t know can hurt us.”
“True,” Emily agreed. “Why ...?”
“I kept asking the same questions,” Serigala said, leaning forward. “Where does magic come from? How did we humans learn how to use it? Why the sudden shift from wild to high magic? How did some nexus points get snuffed out and why? Did they run out of magic or ... was there something else involved? And what happened to some of the old magics detailed in the stories of bygone ages?”
“Many simply never existed,” Emily said, quietly. The tales had grown in the telling until the truth was covered in a mountain of utter nonsense. Magics that broke all the laws of magic, spells so powerful no human or group of humans could hope to cast them ... she was fairly sure most of the stories had little truth behind them, not after seeing the past herself. “I’m credited with a great deal of things I never did, and I’ve only been an active magician for eight years. In a thousand years, how many more stories will they tell about me?”
Serigala snorted, lightly. “We know necromancers could throw vast amounts of magic around,” he said. “Why did they go mad?”
“Because their brains couldn’t handle that much power,” Emily pointed out. “The lucky ones fried themselves immediately. The unlucky ones killed hundreds of others before they destroyed themselves or were killed.”
“Why?” Serigala cocked his head. “Why couldn’t they do good with all that power?”
Emily wondered if it was a trick question. “There have been hundreds of necromancers who thought they could hold themselves together long enough to cast an overpowered spell,” she pointed out. “They tended to die quicker than their more selfish peers, because they were actually less self-centred. The ones who had a better sense of self tended to be able to hold themselves together longer, as long as they had a steady supply of magic and life force. They needed to sacrifice more and more people to keep themselves alive, which meant they had to do it ... like being hungry, I suppose. At some point, your hunger becomes so great you can’t keep yourself from eating.”
