Bookworm (16 page)

“Me too,” she said, finally. “Me too.”

***

The Iron Dragons weren’t really magical, although they did have binding spells on their boilers to prevent them exploding and wrecking the entire series of carriages hooked to the steam-powered monster. Some of the boys in the orphanage had dreamed of driving an iron dragon across the land, blowing the whistles as they roared under the bridges and carried people from one end of the Empire to the other. The network had been partly destroyed by the Second Necromantic War and the Grand Sorcerers had actually attempted to restrict the redevelopment of the damaged tracks, but money talked louder than magic in some parts of the world. Elaine could see why they might have had their concerns about the iron dragons. Anything that lessened the world’s dependence on magic would have been a danger to the status quo.

Elaine took a moment to study the hulking monstrosity as she walked up towards the coaches. Memories that weren’t hers rose up inside her mind, images of real dragons – or the monsters raised by the necromancers – chasing and destroying iron dragons in the opening days of the second war. The Witch-King had known just how important the iron dragons had been for transporting and concentrating troops in the right positions and knew that every destroyed section of the network could impede reinforcements from the Emperor, before the last of the Emperors had been killed in the war. It was easy to see why some people believed them to be magical, even though they were really powered by steam. Nothing that size, surely, could move under its own power.

“All aboard who’s going aboard,” the conductor shouted, ringing his bell. The puffs of steam from the iron dragon grew louder as the driver started to shovel coal into the engine. Elaine ran forwards, silently grateful that she’d worn something more practical than the dress she’d worn for the Darlington, and found her way into her coach. Inside, it was surprisingly cool, with long rows of seats stretching away towards the end of the carriage. Elaine hadn’t been able to afford the luxurious accommodation in the first class sections, but she had managed to reserve a table and a comfortable chair. She put her bag under the seat and settled down with a book in her hand. It was several hours to Ida and she had to pass that time somehow. Two young girls, barely old enough to attend the Peerless School, sat opposite her, smiling. They looked excited to be on their way again.

The coach lurched as the iron dragon started to move, heading across the city and up towards the tunnel that led through the mountains and out into the countryside. She caught sight of strange magical energies moving through the Blight as they passed near it, before the coach plunged into darkness as they entered the tunnel. There was no light outside at all, something that left her feeling creepy before the coach finally burst back outside into the warm sunlight and headed northwards. On the other side of the mountains, there were a handful of small towns and little else. The battles that had decided the Second Necromantic War had burned away most of the settlements and, even now, few chose to live there willingly. At least it wasn’t as bad as the Blight.

She smiled as the iron dragon picked up speed, heading onwards into the distance. The conductor came into the coach and moved from person to person, checking tickets with an expression that suggested he’d done it a thousand times before and had long since grown bored with the whole affair. Elaine wondered, absently, if he’d been one of the boys from the orphanage who’d dreamed of driving iron dragons across the world. But he didn’t look familiar and he certainly didn’t seem to recognise her. He merely took her ticket, checked it, and then passed it back. It took longer to do the girls, for some reason; their parents had decided to travel later for whatever motive of their own. Elaine had honestly never realised that there might be problems with having children travelling without their parents. It was probably something one learned from actually
having
parents.

The girls continued to chatter amongst themselves as Elaine yawned and tried to return to her book. She really hadn’t slept much last night and she knew that she should be trying to catch up before she reached Ida, but she didn’t want to take the risk of falling asleep on the iron dragon. What would happen if she woke up to discover that she’d been taken all the way to the far side of the empire? It wasn’t very likely, but what if...?

“Hey,” one of the girls said. “What’s your story?”

Elaine blinked. “I beg your pardon?”

“Pretty girl travelling alone...it doesn’t happen very often,” the girl said. Her twin smiled encouragingly. “Why are you travelling without a man?”

“I have no husband,” Elaine said. She wasn’t sure if Bee counted as a boyfriend or not by now. Yes, they’d kissed...but Daria had gone further than that with boys she’d never wanted to see again. “Why are
you
travelling alone without a man?”

“Too young to get married,” the girl said. She held out a hand. “I’m Sandy and that’s Sandra. Don’t get us mixed up or we’ll get cross.”

Elaine had to smile. They had the same faces, the same clothes and even the same voices, it seemed. Telling them apart would be difficult for anyone, particularly when they started using their magic as twins. Twins had great magical power, but it came at a price; they’d start blurring together into one person. But at least they’d have each other. Elaine would have given anything for a sister when she’d been a child.

“Would you like to play cards?” Sandra asked. “We really need a threesome to play properly.”

Elaine smiled again and put away her book. “Why not?” she asked. “What sort of cards do you play?”

She listened carefully to the rules of the game, which seemed rather complex to her – but then, she’d never played cards in her entire life. The girls didn’t seem to want to bet money, which was something of a relief, but they did want to bet sweets. Elaine lost the first four games before realising that they were cheating shamelessly, either comparing their own cards to work out what Elaine had to hold or somehow reading the back of her cards. Once she’d realised what they were doing, it was still hard to decide how to counter it. In the end, she merely decided to abandon the game and surrender some of her sweets. There was no point in picking a fight over it.

The countryside was changing as the iron dragon raced northwards. Flat plains where farmers pulled a living from the ground were steadily replaced by mountains which marked the rough edge of Ida’s territory. The ruling king had apparently ordered a station built at the bottom of the mountains rather than have a tunnel constructed under the mountain or have the iron dragon network extended up the mountains. Elaine’s history books hadn’t been able to provide a proper explanation, although it could just be nothing more than paranoia. Anyone whose independence depended on mountains blocking the path of conquering armies would have to be leery about accidentally weakening the natural defences. But none of those mountains would deter the Grand Sorcerer if he wanted to make an example of Ida. There wasn’t enough iron in the mountains to neutralise the sort of magic the Grand Sorcerer could unleash if he wanted to punish the tiny state.

“We’re going all the way to Pendle,” Sandy – or maybe it was Sandra – said. “Where are you going?”

“Ida,” Elaine said. Had it really been over four hours since she’d boarded the iron dragon? But the vehicle was starting to slow as it approached the station and finally came to a halt, giving Elaine barely enough time to grab her bag and books before the doors opened. “I hope that you enjoy the rest of your journey.”

Outside, the air was cooler and sweeter than in the Golden City. King Hildebrand had established a small hamlet at the bottom of the mountains for the station, including a pair of inns and a set of horses and carts offering rides up to Ida itself. Elaine walked out of the station and found a driver, paying him a handful of silver coins for a ride up to the city. The driver took the coins, bit them, and then motioned for her to get into the carriage. No one else joined them as they started the long climb up towards Ida.

The experience was alarming to someone who had never been up a mountain in her life, unless one counted the brief walk up to the Watchtower when she’d been at the Peerless School and that hadn’t been anything like as terrifying as the ride up towards Ida. The wind pushed and pulled at the coach, threatening to send it tumbling over the side and down towards the ground far below. The handful of habitations actually cut
into
the mountain caught her attention and she winced. How could anyone live in such conditions?

She stared around as they finally inched past a pair of forts and into the road leading to the city itself. Ida was very different from the Golden City. Like the habitations below, half of it seemed to be cut into the rock itself, while everything outside the rocky mountains was made of the same grey stone. Even the royal palace, a towering fortress on the top of one of the mountains, was the same colour as the rest of the city. There was none of the variety in the population either, Elaine realised in shock. They all wore the same drab clothes and rarely looked up as they moved from place to place. How many people even lived in the city? Maybe there were so many people that they had to ignore one another just to get some space between them. The toilets at the Peerless School had followed the same basic idea.

The coach drew to a halt and Elaine made her somewhat unstable way off the vehicle. She had planned to visit the Court Wizard at once, but her legs were arguing strongly that it might be a better idea to find a place to sleep first and go to see him in the morning. She asked the coach driver where she could find a place to stay and followed his directions to the nearest inn. It cost more than she expected, but she was almost past caring. All she really wanted to do was to sleep. The room had nothing more than a bed and a glass of water for her to drink, but she lay down and went to sleep anyway. In the morning, she told herself, she could carry out her plan.

***

She was awoken several hours later by the sound of bells ringing to greet the new dawn, just like in the Golden City. It seemed that Ida honoured the gods in the same way, although there was no way to tell if they had the same gods or worshipped others of their own. The Grand Sorcerer had never attempted to discourage anyone from worshipping any or all gods if they saw fit, apart from the gods who were little more than actual demons. Not that it mattered. Those who claimed to have messages from the gods invariably discovered that the messages weren’t quite what they’d expected them to be.

Dressing quickly, she walked down to the eatery – and stopped dead. Seated on the opposite side of the room was a man she recognised, a man she’d never wanted to see again.

Inquisitor Dread.

Chapter Fourteen

The Inquisitor wore the same black robes as she remembered from earlier, his face distorted behind a glamour that she now understood perfectly. It wasn’t something that shaped his appearance in his own eyes, but something that shaped his appearance in the eyes of the beholder, giving him an impression of relentless determination to see criminals brought to justice. Elaine started to step backwards when he looked up at her and waved with a single hand, inviting her over to his table. It was very definitely not a request.

“Inquisitor,” she said, as she reached his table. Up close, he didn’t even seem to have a smell – and his black robes seemed to fade into the shadows. “Welcome to Ida.”

Dread looked up at her, his half-concealed eyes locked on her face. “What are you doing here?”

It honestly hadn’t occurred to Elaine that she would run into an Inquisitor, let alone one she recognised – even though hindsight told her that the Inquisition would have dispatched someone to make enquires about what Duke Gama had been doing before his untimely death. She would have thought that the Grand Sorcerer’s death would have distracted the Inquisitors, but they
did
have a reputation for never forsaking their goals for anything. Try to bribe an Inquisitor and you’d spend the rest of your life in the salt mines.

“I came to investigate Duke Gama,” she said, finally. It was true enough – and besides, she couldn’t think of a lie that Dread might accept without question, or without trying to compel her to tell him the truth. “I wanted to know what had happened to me.”

“Looking into the question of just what happened to you is the task of the Inquisition,” Dread said, flatly. “You shouldn’t have come all this way to investigate yourself.”

Elaine gathered herself and stared back at him, willing herself not to blink. “Would you have told me what happened when I opened his book?”

“We might have done,” Dread said, thoughtfully. “But how many wizards has curiosity killed over the years?”

“I almost got killed for nothing more than doing my job,” Elaine pointed out, wondering where she’d found the nerve to verbally spar with an Inquisitor. “I want to know what happened to me before it happens to someone else.”

“An admirable motive,” the Inquisitor agreed. She couldn’t tell if he believed her, or if he accepted what she was saying seemed reasonable. “It is clear that your...experience changed you in some ways. Magic, particularly unrefined magic, can have some unfortunate effects.”

He looked up and waved at the waitress, who had been giving their table a wide berth. “Order whatever you like,” he said. “The Inquisition can afford a large breakfast from time to time.”

Elaine hesitated. She wanted to ask him questions, but if there was one thing she’d learned from being a librarian, it was that the questions a person asked often taught the hearer more about that person than they might realise. If magical accidents did change a person in ways more subtle than compulsion spells or even outright transfigurations, it was something almost unknown to her...

...Except that it wasn’t, not after the Black Vault had been decanted into her head. Magic had
never
been as well understood as the Peerless School claimed, and there were all kinds of magical traditions that never quite fit into the high magic defined by the Grand Sorcerers. It was possible for a magician to accidentally boost his own power, or be caught up in an accident where his power was suddenly blasted into levels he couldn’t even have imagined, but the results had rarely been good. Madness often followed a sudden growth in one’s magical power, as if the human mind couldn’t cope with suddenly inheriting a vastly increased level of magic. It was strange to realise that the Grand Sorcerer had spent decades training and flexing his magic before even being considered one of the senior wizards, let alone competing with his peers for the ultimate prize.