Arcanum (55 page)

“No offence taken at all, Master Büber,” said Ullmann.

“I’m still not going to let you go alone, though. If this is what you want, I’m coming with you.” He looked up at her.

She wanted to stay furious. She felt that passion and fire were better for her than the cool analysis she’d been taught for all those years.

Then she realised, and stamped her foot on the wooden boards. “The bastards.”

“What now?”

“They … they lied to us.” She was astounded. The whole method of learning magic, by stoic endurance, by pain, by effort of will, was a fabrication. It had served her masters well over the centuries, for certain. If novices were the slaves and victims of their system, the adepts were both their playthings and their enforcers. It was only when an adept broke through their conditioning and embraced their fear and loathing would they ever achieve mastery of their craft. By then they would be so bitter as to be ideal material for joining the highest rank.

No wonder they had hated each other.

“That doesn’t come as a surprise. Now, are we going to do this or not?” Büber put his feet onto the walkway and levered himself up.

If she had been burning before, now she was the queen of winter. Her anger had crystallised into a block of ice, cold and hard and heavy in her heart.

“Yes. Let’s do it. Let’s do it right now.”

Büber clapped Ullmann on the shoulder, and the usher winced. “This is not for you, lad.”

“But I can guard the boat and wait for you to return, Master Büber.”

“If Eckhardt dies, we’ll be able to walk across the bridge. If he doesn’t, there’ll be little point, and probably very little left of us, to return.” Büber purposefully reached past the man to close the boathouse door, with both of them inside. “Your job is to wait until dusk, then go back to Felix and tell him what we tried to do. If we’ve succeeded, we’ll be there already. If we haven’t, well. Not quite all hope is lost, but my lord may well wish to sue for peace.”

“Not before the sun goes down,” warned Nikoleta. “Otherwise I’ll be very disappointed in you. I have every intention of coming back, and I will find out.”

“I wouldn’t, Mistress,” said Ullmann. “But I could bring the boat back, rather than leave it on the far side for anyone to use.”

“He has a point,” said Büber. “Get in the boat, then.”

They all climbed aboard, and arranged themselves for balance: Büber in the rowing position, Ullmann facing him from the stern, and Nikoleta squeezing past them both to sit on the prow. She looked down at her warped reflection, and found the water closer than she’d like. She’d never learnt to swim, and wondered how difficult it might be and how long it would take.

Büber slipped the rope and pushed out. When he’d rowed her across the first time, it hadn’t seemed far. The buildings of Juvavum had been something to aim for, to concentrate on. And there had always been the possibility that she could still avoid her fate.

Now that she was crossing again, towards what the gods had planned for her from the very start, all she could see was a wide, fast-flowing stretch of muddy brown water and, looming above her, the White Tower.

It took an age. Perhaps Büber was tired. With three of them in the boat now, it was bound to be harder work, and he’d been across four times already. They should have rested, made more of their time together.

She wasn’t going to lose a duel with Eckhardt. There was no conceivable way she could lose. She was going to set him on fire and watch him burn for a while, then explode burning chunks of him over his so-called followers. He was mad and weak, and she was fresh and strong. She’d go in hard, disrupt his concentration, put him on the back foot from the very start. By brushing aside his domination spells, he’d have nothing left to hit her with.

Quick, if not clean.

Büber pulled on the oars, dragging them closer.

The mob? She had a plan for them, too. Not to kill them, but to humiliate them. She could do that. Part of it would be through killing Eckhardt as if he were no more than a beetle beneath her heel. The rest would come in good time.

And Allegretti. Eckhardt was her priority, but she knew they wouldn’t be dragging the tutor back across the river in his chains. She wasn’t going to give the man the opportunity to talk his way out of his treason.

She was almost within touching distance of the river bank. She couldn’t feel Eckhardt. Presumably he couldn’t feel her yet, either. What would he do when he first sensed her and her raw, naked power?

The bow of the boat bumped against the earthen bank, and she skipped up and off onto dry land, painter in hand. Büber scrambled up with far less grace, and Ullmann carefully shifted around to take the oarsman’s position.

“Straight back, mind,” said Büber. “Don’t let yourself drift downstream.”

Nikoleta let go of the rope once the usher was confident of his grip, and she watched his first few strokes, assured and deep. The boat surged back into the flowing water, and she found she didn’t have the inclination to watch it leave.

“Shall we go?” she asked.

Büber unslung his crossbow and held it loosely by the stock. “We only need to be as careful as you think necessary. They’re over by the novices’ house. There’s no one else in between us and them.”

“He’ll know I’m here before long. Why don’t you go on ahead? Get in a position where you can see his reaction. Then come back and tell me what he did.” She stood with one hand on her hip, weight on one leg, relaxed, calm. “I’ll give it a little while, then follow you.”

“Makes sense. If he’s going to prepare any sort of defence, then you need to know about it.” Büber looked at the limb of the mountain where it swept down to the river. “I’ll take the same route I did last time.”

As he made to leave, she pulled him back and kissed him. Almost tenderly this time.

He wiped his mouth and frowned, but set off all the same. It was impressive to watch as he merged seamlessly with the wood.

Of course Büber didn’t suspect anything. There was no reason why he should. And there was no reason why he would ever think of looking up.

She gathered herself, remembering all the indignities that had been heaped on her, both as a child and as an adult. The times when she’d been freezing, starving, terrified and worse. The times she couldn’t remember at all, the blank holes in her memory where she knew something had happened, something ghastly enough for her mind to reject it completely.

All the pain she’d endured to become an adept. All the lies she’d been told. All the services she’d been made to perform.

Eckhardt was her enemy and he was going to die.

Nikoleta rose into the air, avoiding the branches, fending the twigs aside and brushing through the crowns of the trees. As she flew into clear air, she started forward, heading straight for the novices’ house. Poor Peter Büber below, thinking he was ahead, taking his circuitous, careful path. He’d forgive her. Of course he would.

Now she knew where Eckhardt was, she reached out, focusing her efforts in that one direction. There, at the limit of her senses, was a twisted, writhing knot of energy, dirty and seething with corruption. It was going to take him a little more time to find her, and she spent that time wisely.

She would need a shield, not against physical weapons but against Eckhardt’s will. If such a spell existed, she didn’t have it drawn on her skin – but she’d overcome such limitations before. Now she could read them right, her tattoos told her not of rigid definitions, but of potentials. She already had a shield against physical attacks; she would change it to make it proof against Eckhardt’s magic too.

The air in front of her shimmered and set, and the wind that was blowing her hair out behind her dropped to almost nothing. Then she poured her loathing of personal invasion into the shield, and the ink on her arm shifted, configuring itself to a subtly different pattern. She felt it change, and Eckhardt’s presence on her mental map, along with the aura of every other creature nearby, ended.

That was an unexpected consequence, but at least it told her she’d succeeded in reconfiguring her abilities at the first attempt. What else was she capable of?

Though she could no longer sense Eckhardt, she knew where he’d been a moment ago, so she flew on at tree-top height over the shoulder of the mountain and down the other side. As she crested the rise, she could see the roofs of both the adepts’ and novices’ houses, and the avenue of trees that marked where the road was. There, right there.

Spreading her arms wide in the imitation of an eagle, she swooped down. The first pass was the most important. Was he oblivious to her, or had the sudden hole in his perception alerted him? No matter. What he did next was immaterial, because he’d have no answer.

Her outstretched hands filled with bright fire, and she caught a first glimpse of those with Eckhardt, still divided into their mutually warring tribes. Faster, lower: that roaring sound was the wind battering against her shield. She could make out the seat, Eckhardt’s throne. She could see the pale figure seated on it and his shining staff, together with the crouching, tied man next to him.

A river of flame poured out from her. Not just from her hands, but her mouth, her nose, her eyes. She breathed fire, vomited fire, threw fire. It fell like a column, reducing the wooden chair to burning matchwood on impact and splashing out in a flood, engulfing whoever was in its radius. Allegretti died in that instant, his flesh blasted from his bones. His death was incidental, along with a dozen others who were too close, and the candle-bright twists of fire that danced and spun away shrieking weren’t even distractions, because she knew, instantly, that Eckhardt wasn’t one of them.

She snapped around as she overshot the target and she spotted a figure rising clear of the ground. He’d lost his staff, but how significant that was, how much of his power he’d stored in it, she didn’t know. Then her shield shuddered as if she’d just run into a cliff.

The skull-jarring shock bruised her all over and left her screaming in pain. But the shield held. Eckhardt, like her, had held nothing back for his first spell. Now it was down to who had enough left to bring the other to their knees long enough to deliver the mercy-stroke.

She doubled back and gave him everything she could. Face to face, over the distance of a stadia: fire boiled out of her again and flowed towards Eckhardt’s hovering form. As it seethed and roiled, it dripped flame on the ground below. She was dimly aware of shouts and cries, but they were just mundanes, stupid, gullible and weak mundanes who weren’t worth saving. She used their fear to feed her fury.

Her destroying fire reached Eckhardt’s shield, and it flowed around it, enveloping it. She willed the mass on, to become more intense: thicker, hotter, brighter.

At some point, she had to stop. Blood was coming from her nose and ears, and her vision was obscured by a red mist that she had to blink away. The fire flickered and faded.

Eckhardt wasn’t dead yet, but she’d succeeded in wiping his maniacal grin off his contorted features, and his filthy-dirty robes smoked with residual heat. She’d cooked him red-raw, his skin cracked and baked and oozing.

She was going to hit him again. She’d almost got him last time, and now she was looking for a kill.

Something invisible held her and started to crush her. She pulled in her arms and legs, ducked her head down to her chest to bring her to the centre of her shield. Vast and incalculable pressure weighed down on her, a mountain’s worth of rock that made shrieking sounds as the structure of her defence deformed and buckled under the relentless, impersonal force.

She held on. It was a storm and she would endure. When it passed, she would remain. It grew dark outside, and she concentrated on the core of her being. Eckhardt was trying to snuff her out, but she was determined not to be extinguished.

Then, with a creak, the attack faltered. It became light again. She could see him on the bare ground in front of the novices’ house, on all fours, exhausted amid the ruin of charred, smoking corpses and tongues of bright fire.

Now.

Her very fingertips seemed to burst with ribbons of flame.

And suddenly, he was gone. The space he’d occupied filled with a thunderclap.

Fire growled down and out, spilling up the stone steps and into the open door of the novices’ house, licking around the walls and scorching the roof shingles. Eckhardt had escaped, and she howled in frustration.

He couldn’t have gone far. He was weak. It was his final throw. Where would he go?

Her gaze travelled up to the White Tower. Where else? She lowered her shield for an instant, just to make sure, and looking at Eckhardt’s aura was like staring into a furnace. She slammed the shield back into place and set off again, up the mountain, over the trees, until nascent green gave way to gnarled and warped brown.

The entrance to the tower was clear, and she flew down, almost into it and then through to the space beyond. But there was a note of caution sounding in her head. When the dragon was in its den, it was the most dangerous of all.

The sygils drawn into the doorway had no effect on her; whether or not they still worked, she didn’t know or care. She brushed by them and entered the hall.

There was a single blue-white light in the centre of the vast room; such a contrast from its previous overwhelming brightness. Now it was shadows that obscured the exits.

But not the dead. They were obvious, little mounds of decay lit on one side only. If Eckhardt had had more imagination, or power, or both, he’d have reanimated them. Corpse armies were hard to deal with, since their constituent parts were dead already. But however good undead were at terrorising mundanes, a decent magician could always either sever the tenuous link that controlled them or more prosaically, destroy their bodies.

It would have cost her more power. It would have slowed her down. But the dead stayed dead, and she flew over them, looking for a passageway. There were several – she needed the right one.

She dropped her shield momentarily. Gods, Eckhardt was starting to cast again. She could feel it, a dark star below her. He was too busy to deal with her, frantically carrying out the ritual that would suck the life from one person and give it to another, a ritual that could neither be abbreviated nor hastened.