The Conjuring Man, page 33
His voice grew louder. “I might have come from nothing, compared to you, but I changed the world! What have you done that compares to me?”
Master Dagon glared, and started to speak, but Adam spoke over him.
“You came here intent on rebuilding a school that died when a necromancer forced his way through the wards and snuffed out the nexus point,” he said. “You kept trying, even as the university was established, and you kept failing. There’s no way back now! Heart’s Eye is something more, something greater, and it is high time you realised it! I know the value of stubbornness, and the importance of trying to keep going despite hurdles, but ... it’s pointless. The old school is dead. And you’re just a terrible lizard clinging to the fragments of a dead world.”
“You ...” Master Dagon caught himself. “You think I’m wasting my time?”
“Yes,” Adam said. “And you are alienating your daughter as well as everyone else.”
Master Dagon stared at him for a long, cold moment. “Do you love her?”
“Yes.” Adam knew it was true, even though he’d never been in love before. Lilith was ... special. She was brilliant as well as beautiful, brave and cunning and insightful and ... he wanted her never to change. “I love her and I’m going to get her back.”
“Good,” Master Dagon said. He very visibly calmed himself, cold determination washing over his face. “I’m coming too.”
Adam blinked. “What?”
“Pardon, not what,” Master Dagon said. His lips twitched. “What is a sign of ill breeding.”
Adam flushed, unsure if he was being teased – and if the old man had finally accepted him – or if something else was going on. The sudden change was remarkable – and suspicious. Every word he’d said was true and yet, Master Dagon had had ample opportunity to figure it out for himself. Adam had invented – or at the very least defined – a whole new branch of magic and changed the world. By any reasonable standards, he was one hell of a catch for anyone. And yet, by what standards did Lilith’s father judge him?
“Pardon, then,” Adam said. “Are you serious?”
“You need a powerful magician to assist you,” Master Dagon said, flatly. “I didn’t declare myself a master, boy. I was apprenticed to a well-known charms master and served him for two years, before passing the exams and proving I deserved the title myself. And ...”
He paused. “She’s my daughter,” he said. “And I couldn’t live with myself if I stayed here and waited for you to bring her home.”
Adam nodded, slowly. “You have a blood connection to her, don’t you? Can you figure out where she is, roughly?”
“Yes.” There was a hint of irritation in the older man’s tone. “Give me a moment. The more complex charms are harder to block, but their results tend to be a little unpredictable.”
He stood and hurried over to his workbench. Adam watched him for a moment, then forced himself to trust the older man and think about his plans. The gods alone knew what was happening to the east. If the king was throwing orcs at the rebels ... how many of the demihuman beasts did he have? Adam had no idea. The stories of how many orcs had marched into the kingdom, years ago, gave figures so exaggerated it was impossible to take them seriously. Millions? Billions? He devoutly hoped there weren’t that many in the whole wide world. It was insane.
The battles don’t matter, he told himself. Betty would be pissed, but it was true. We have to get to Lilith first – and quickly.
He summoned a messenger and sent a handful of messages, then waited for Master Dagon to look up from his work. If there was anyone who could locate Lilith, it was the man who’d fathered her. Her mother was dead and she had no siblings, no one else who might have any sort of blood tie. Adam had no idea if her distant relatives could do the spells, but if her own father couldn’t do it no one could. He wondered, suddenly, if she’d left any blood on the sheets ... he couldn’t recall and he was damned if he was mentioning that anywhere near her father. It would get him blasted to dust for sure.
“She’s in Lokane,” Master Dagon said, finally. “I can’t get a precise location, as she’s behind a set of heavy wards, but I’m fairly sure she’s relatively stationary. My guess is that they took her off the airship and dropped her into a prison cell.”
Adam frowned. “Would the airship’s defences interfere with your charms?”
“I don’t think so,” Master Dagon said, his lips twisting as if he’d bitten into something distasteful. “It’s hard to say for sure, but I think – I think – that if the defences interfered with my spells, they’d have blocked them completely. I do have a rough location, which suggests someone protected by more commonplace wards.”
“Good.” Adam hesitated, then asked the next question. “Can you get any sense of her condition?”
“No.” Master Dagon scowled at his workbench, and the bloody runes he’d drawn on a sheet of charmed parchment. “The wards are quite effective. Her own protections may be interfering too. She’s alive – of that I am sure – but otherwise, I simply don’t know.”
“Right.” Adam started to turn, then hesitated. “Can you follow orders?”
Master Dagon shrugged. “I was an apprentice, years ago.”
“Years ago,” Adam echoed. He’d yet to meet a master who wasn’t his apprentice’s clear superior. Even Master Landis had been far more of a potioneer than Lilith or himself. “Can you follow orders now?”
“Yes.” Master Dagon met his eyes. “To get back my daughter, I will do anything.”
The nasty part of Adam’s mind wanted to test that statement, to come up with a humiliating task to see if the older man would actually go through with it. The rest of his mind told that part of him to shut up.
“Good,” he said, instead. “We just need to go to my workroom, to grab a few pieces of kit, and then we’ll meet up with the others.”
Master Dagon nodded, stiffly. “Do you really have a plan?”
Adam smiled. “Well, I have half a plan ...”
Chapter Thirty-Five
“I hope this is important, I really do,” Dalia said. She stood in the middle of the room, hands resting on her hips. Adam had no time to notice, not really, how her shirt was carefully cut to reveal the shape of her breasts. It had taken an hour to call everyone and it felt like years. “I am needed on the walls.”
Adam nodded, shortly, as he surveyed the rest of the group. Taffy, Jasper, the Gorgon – he’d been lucky she’d agreed to join the mission – Valerie and a handful of others, mainly Dalia’s loyalists and university students willing to put their lives on the line. He was surprised so many of the latter had come. He’d had relatively little contact with the rest of the student body, while Lilith and her father had been strikingly unpopular. The nasty part of his mind wondered how many people would have come to join them if she hadn’t been dating him.
“I wouldn’t have called you if it hadn’t been urgent,” he said. “How is it out there?”
Dalia scowled. “The advance troops got their heads kicked in,” she said, curtly. “They killed a bunch of orcs, or so we are told, but the offensive was stopped before it even got fairly started. The orcs attacked the walls shortly afterwards and came close to breaking through, until cannon fire racked their lines, shattering the charge and giving us a chance to slaughter them. They just kept coming.”
“The only upside is that it convinced a lot of people to stop sitting on the fence and join in,” Jasper added, shooting a look at Dalia that made Adam want to roll his eyes. “No one expects the orcs to do anything but slaughter the whole city if they break down the walls.”
Which are already damaged, thanks to the first offensive, Adam thought. No one had considered they might be needed again so quickly, a serious oversight. But then, no one had thought the king would turn orcs against his own people too. Time is not on our side.
“I’ll make this quick,” he said, pointing to the map he’d pinned to the wall. “The airship has been boarded and captured, along with most of her crew. The prisoners, all of whom know too much to be allowed to remain in enemy hands, have been transported to Lokane. We’re going to get them back and, ideally, strike at the king in his lair.”
A rustle ran around the small group. Adam wanted to rescue Lilith and to hell with the king, but Dalia and the other Levellers wouldn’t have agreed to join the mission if they hadn’t at least tried to take out the enemy monarch. There’d been no other way to do it. Besides, Master Dagon was fairly sure Lilith was in Lokane Castle, trapped behind its wards. There was no reason they couldn’t do both missions. And besides, if they did take out the king, the prison wardens would be happy to surrender and roll over before the Levellers – or the aristos, the ones who’d watched helplessly as their children were taken as hostages – got their hands on them.
Arnold won’t put her with the other prisoners, Adam thought. He was morbidly sure of it. He’ll do something special with her.
He pushed the thought aside as he tapped the map. “The king’s men have managed to round up or scatter most of the Leveller cells within Lokane itself,” he said. Betty had filled him in when he’d told her what he had in mind. “Most of the population is angry, but leaderless. However, we do have at least one contact who remained undiscovered, at least in part because he had no direct ties to the other cells. We can, and we will, use his pub as a staging point.”
Dalia made a face. “How can you be sure he hasn’t been turned?”
“We can’t,” Adam said, bluntly. Betty had made that clear, pointing out there was no guarantee the innkeeper’s role hadn’t been uncovered. He might have had strict orders to keep his head down and do nothing that might attract attention, but innkeepers were always suspect even if they really were innocent. “If he’s playing for the other side, he’ll have an excellent chance to lead us right into enemy hands.”
“It’ll be the last thing he ever does, if he betrays us,” someone growled. “I’ll cut his throat myself.”
“Quite,” Adam agreed. “There’s also a risk that opening a portal, even a very low-powered one, into the city will trigger the nearby wards. If that happens, the troops will be on us quickly, even without the innkeeper giving us away. We do have some contingency plans, for if that happens, but again ... we could walk right into enemy hands.”
“Or we could be mangled by a collapsing portal,” Master Dagon added, stiffly. They’d gone through the spellwork carefully – Adam had to admit Lilith’s father knew his stuff – but there were too many things that could go wrong. “The portal is one of a kind. It may not hold together as long as we hope.”
“As long as it lets us get into the city,” Adam said. He took a breath. “If we are detected, we slip into the alleyways and vanish, then rally at the next meeting point. If not, we get ready to turn the inn into a staging point for the real assault and storm the castle itself. We get in, we liberate the prisoners and we find and kill the king. After that, we either withdraw or turn the castle into a fortress and hold out long enough for reinforcements to arrive.”
“Clever,” Dalia said. “Will it work?”
“We’re about to find out,” Adam said. He allowed his voice to rise. “We have soldiers, and magicians, and craftsmen. We have everything we need to hit the enemy hard enough to stop them dead, but the risk cannot be denied. We might get nabbed the moment we step through the portal. If any of you want to back out now, do so. It will not be held against you.”
And that, he reflected as the team looked at each other, was a blatant lie.
“It is important we get there first,” Dalia said, firmly. “If Violet claims the crown by right of arms, after defeating her wretched brother, she’ll feel free to alter the agreements she made any way she likes.”
Adam nodded. “It’ll take time to get reinforcements into the city, even through portals,” he said. “We don’t know what’s really happening in that castle, or who is in charge. We don’t know what the airship will do, or even if the bad guys are capable of getting her moving before we recapture her. We don’t ...”
“They must be able to fly her, if they got her to Lokane,” Taffy said, quietly. “Either they trained their own crew or they made ours do the flying for them.”
“Traitors,” Dalia said, curtly.
“There are plenty of spells to make someone do whatever you want,” Master Dagon said, curtly. “Captain Harkness and his crew had little in the way of proper defences.”
Adam nodded, thinking of the collection of wands, charged tiles and tools in his backpack. He knew how easy it was for a sorcerer to make someone bend the knee, particularly someone without magical defences of their own. In hindsight ... in hindsight, there had been a great many changes they could have made if they’d realised what the enemy was planning to do. But they hadn’t ...
“Or someone just put a gun to their heads,” Taffy added. She sounded as though she was trying to distract herself from her nerves. “It’s astonishing what someone will do at gunpoint.”
“Quite,” Adam said, again. His eyes swept the chamber. “Are you all ready to move?”
He rubbed his eyes, wishing he’d had more time to snatch a nap. A few short hours, in between planning their first moves and dickering with Betty and the staff council, hadn’t been anything like enough rest. He wished Master Caleb had returned to join them ... he, Adam was sure, wouldn’t have hesitated to join the mission. Adam trusted Master Dagon would do everything in his power to rescue Lilith, but ... could he be trusted not to snatch up his daughter and run? Or ... Adam sighed inwardly. Like his mother had always said, one had to make do with what one had and not what one wanted to have.
Pity we can’t do something to disrupt their outer wards, he thought. They’d considered trying to use the nexus point to scramble the enemy magics, but even if the bad guys didn’t manage to localise the source they’d know something was happening. If this doesn’t work, we’ll lose our best chance to get into the city without being immediately forced to run.
Master Dagon stepped forward, his fingertips brushing against the portal structure. They’d thrown it together with desperate speed, without any way to test it. Adam scowled as he looked from face to face, wishing – again – Lilith was with him. Or he was held captive in her place. She’d rescued him before ...
“Ironically, a complete failure wouldn’t be the worst possible option for us,” Master Dagon said. Adam wanted to slap him, although he knew the comment had probably been born of nerves and fear rather than anything else. “If the portal opens briefly, it might set off the alarms without giving us a chance to get through and out.”
Adam nodded. “Do it,” he ordered. “Now.”
Master Dagon pressed his fingers against the crystal. The portal device hummed to life, flickering lights blurring together until a shimmering vortex materialised in front of them. Adam heard someone swear – an oath he didn’t recognise – as a dark spot appeared in the centre of the vortex, growing and growing until it became a circular portal leading into the unknown. No, to Lokane. The far side was dark ... he shivered, glancing at the clock even though he knew it had only been a few seconds. The longer the portal remained active, the greater the chance of being detected.
Dalia stepped forward and through the portal. Adam had a vague sense of her form twisting into something unearthly before she vanished, either to Lokane or the next world. Jasper swallowed, swaggering up to the circle and stepping through. A moment later, Dalia poked her head back through the portal. It made her look thoroughly unnatural, as if she belonged in a world so different human minds couldn’t comprehend what they were seeing.
“It’s clear,” she said. “Hurry.”
Adam glanced at Master Dagon, then stepped through the portal. The world jerked around him, then stabilised. He looked around, one hand dropping to his pistol as Taffy followed him. They were in a basement, the walls lined with barrels and bottles of beer. His lips twisted in grim amusement – his mother had barred him from going to the pub, which had made them all the more attractive as a young man – then thinned as he spotted the fat man lingering by the wooden staircase leading up to an open hatch. He looked about as trustworthy as a boat that was taking on water.
“Sir,” the innkeeper said, his eyes flickering from side to side. “Welcome to Lokane.”
“Thank you,” Adam said. Betty had told him the man’s name, hadn’t she? Graeme. Or something like that. “What’s upstairs?”
“Nothing,” Graeme said. “No one, I mean. We’ve been closed for the last two weeks and left alone, apart from the watch coming in and demanding beer every nightfall. That’s why I’m here. They expect me to be here.”
“Noted,” Adam said. He nodded to the portal as the final members of the team stepped through. “If you want to go to the university now, step through. You’ve done your bit.”
Graeme hesitated, then shook his head. “I’m needed here,” he said, with a hint of fire. “This is my pub.”
Adam nodded, keeping his hand on his pistol as he clambered up the stairs. The pub was deserted, the doors and windows barred and locked. The air stank of rotting beer. Adam glanced into the back – the pub felt eerie, as if the patrons should be there even though they weren’t – and then hurried up the stairs. There were five rooms above the bar, all empty. He wondered, suddenly, what had happened to the guests. They hadn’t known there was going to be a curfew, had they?
He heard Dalia chuckle as he made his way back downstairs. “I was never allowed in a place like this, before the uprising,” she said. “And now I don’t see the appeal.”
“The forbidden is always attractive, just because it is forbidden,” Taffy said. “And when it is no longer forbidden, it becomes a great deal less attractive.”
