Bookworm III (14 page)

Johan sighed inwardly as the two women started to argue, as if they had taken an instant dislike to one another. It had been strange and wonderful to finally have the bond work properly, but he’d picked up enough of Elaine’s emotions to know she was in very real danger. His every instinct called for him to run out of the building and straight to her side, but cold logic told him that would merely be a good way to get killed. They needed a plan, a way into the Imperial Palace and a distraction.

“Enough,” he said. His father had been able to command respect with a single word. No one had ever respected him, even when they’d discovered he actually had magic. “We need to move.”

“We need to wait for darkness to fall completely,” Cass said, shortly. She paced over to the covered window and peered outside. “We won’t be any help to her if we get caught on the way.”

“I thought Inquisitors were good at sneaking around,” Daria jibed. “You should be brilliant at it.”

“They will have dogs and wolves out watching the streets,” Cass countered. “We don’t want to be tracked on our way to the palace.”

She turned and looked at Johan. “I’m going to check upstairs to see if there’s anything we can use,” she said. “Finish eating as much as you can, then stick the rest back in my pouch and seal it. I don’t think we’ll be coming back here.”

Johan nodded. If Cass could track them down, someone else could too. He knew, all too well, just how easy it was to trace someone with magic; his father had done it to him often enough. Even now, with his ties to his family broken, someone could still use their blood to find him. And how many people knew he was still alive?

He watched Cass stepping out of the door with an easy grace, then turned to Daria. “Why don’t you like her?”

Daria flushed. “Is it that obvious?”

“Yes,” Johan said. “I grew up with sisters.”

“A fate I would wish on no man,” Daria said, dryly. “Among my immediate family, I am a beta female. Do you know what that means?”

Johan shook his head.

“I’m the oldest of my sisters,” Daria explained. “I am meant to be in charge – beta, because the alpha female is my mother. When I encounter another alpha or beta female, the wolf in me insists on a struggle for dominance over the newcomer. Cass is a powerful woman, so the wolf sees her as a rival, someone to be brought to heel under my paws. And I know she isn’t a werewolf, but I still feel that way.”

“How very human,” Johan said. He might not have grown up in a pack, but he understood the constant struggle for power. “And I assume there’s always someone at the bottom?”

“Unfortunately,” Daria said. “But they don’t get mistreated, otherwise they might leave the pack.”

Johan understood. Why would anyone want to stay when they were permanently on the bottom rung?
He’d
been in that position and had spent most of his time planning to leave, when he finally gained his father’s blessing. And then power had found him ...

“How would you know,” he asked, “if they were happy?”

Daria wrinkled her nose. “You can’t hide what you’re feeling from another werewolf,” she reminded him. “Someone who was truly unhappy would be very obvious to us.”

“Oh,” Johan said. “How did you manage to cope with Elaine?”

“She doesn’t trigger the beta female instincts,” Daria said. “I don’t see her as a threat to my dominance. It would be different, I suspect, if she worked with me or I worked with her.”

“You’d be struggling for supremacy,” Johan realised. It didn’t seem to make much sense, but werewolves were influenced by their inner wolves. “Are we lucky it isn’t the full moon?”

Daria gave him a sharp look. “Very lucky,” she said. “Because that’s when the wolf runs free.”

Cass returned before Johan could think of something – anything – to say. “There wasn’t much of use on the upper floor,” she said. “Just hints of writing in a foreign script on the walls.”

“I saw,” Daria said. “What writing
is
it?”

“I don’t recognise the script,” Cass said. She sounded perturbed by the discovery. “But it wasn’t magically-active, so it shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Elaine would probably know,” Johan mused, as he stuffed the remaining food back into the pouch. “Why would people use it here?”

“Wild magic,” Cass said. “It does strange and unpredictable things.”

She walked back over to the door, opened it and peered outside. A gust of cold air slapped at Johan’s face, a moment before she closed the door and turned to face him. Johan was almost relieved; he’d grown up, like most children, fearing the dark. According to legend, the night was the domain of creatures that were very far from human. Anything could be hiding in the shadows, anything at all. And even the Golden City, the very heart of human society, could have dangers lurking in the shadows.

“Put out the fire,” Cass ordered. “It’s time to go.”

She looked at Daria. “You should go in wolf form,” she said. “It will help you to remain unnoticed, if we run into trouble.”

“I won’t be able to talk to you,” Daria pointed out, snidely. “And any fool can recognise a werewolf.”

“Not in the darkness,” Cass assured her.

Johan cleared his throat. “How are we going to pass muster if we
do
get caught?”

“We’ll have to improvise,” Cass said, with a shrug. “It would depend on who caught us.”

“You’re an Inquisitor,” Daria said. “Can’t you just order them to let us go?”

Cass took a harsh breath. “I
was
an Inquisitor,” she said. “Do you know what the penalty is for claiming to be an Inquisitor?”

“You could actually fake it convincingly,” Daria reminded her. “I’d bet most frauds didn’t actually do the job.”

“I don’t have a ring any longer,” Cass snapped. The sudden anger in her voice was shocking. “And if we ran into another Inquisitor, he would take me for a fake, even though he would know me personally. We would be very lucky merely to be dragged to the Watchtower in chains and made to walk the plank. There is no way I could fool someone into believing that I was still on active service.”

“The soldiers wouldn’t be able to tell,” Daria said. “I ...”

“The soldiers would look for a ring,” Cass said. “I cannot wear one without taking – retaking – the oaths, which would bind me to the Emperor. Nor can I fake a ring without risking everything. You have no idea just how many protections are bound up in those rings.”

Elaine probably knows
, Johan thought.
And she might be able to fake one too
.

He held up a hand, realising that Cass was skirting the edge of breaking point. She had loved her career, he suspected, and giving it up
hurt
. He understood how that had to feel; he’d wanted things too, in his life, only to lose them to his lack of power. And Daria, prodded by her inner wolf, was being bitchy for the sake of being bitchy.

“We have to go,” he said, sharply. Both women glared at him, rather than each other. It struck him, suddenly, that he was the least experienced of the three. “Let me put out the fire, then we can go.”

Cass muttered a spell, just loudly enough to be heard. The fire emitted a hissing sound, then died, leaving steam billowing up from the grate. Johan inspected it quickly, realised that Cass had cast a powerful cooling charm, then stood up and reached for his coat. It smelt faintly of smoke and fire, but he didn’t care. All that mattered was staying warm in the darkness – and remaining unseen by prowling eyes.

“I’m going to cast a pair of concealment spells on you,” Cass said, once they were ready to go. “You should remain unnoticed, as long as no magicians are actively searching for you.”

Daria frowned. “And what if we run into an Inquisitor?”

“Then you run while I distract him,” Cass said, sharply. “And you’d better pray to whatever gods you worship that we don’t, because one of them could easily call others.”

She cast the spells – Johan heard Daria growl, very quietly, as Cass moved her wand over her body – and then opened the door. Cold air lashed at them, but the snowstorm had faded into the darkness. Outside, there was almost no light to be seen, not even the glow that shimmered over the Golden City from the streetlamps that illuminated the better-kept streets and allowed the population to remain awake and active after dark. It was easy to convince himself, suddenly, that they were the only people left alive in the city, perhaps the world.

“The city never sleeps,” Daria muttered. “But it’s sleeping now.”

“Most people are weak,” Cass scoffed. “When faced with uncertainty, their first instinct is to bar the doors and pray that whatever is outside passes them by. By the time the sun rises, the Emperor will be solidly in control of the city. And then he will take the world.”

Daria snorted as she stepped out into the snow. “You’ve seen this happen before?”

“I’ve been in places where martial law has been declared,” Cass countered. “And yes, most people try to hide, if only to avoid being noticed.”

Daria shrank. Moments later, a small wolf crawled out from under her robe and looked at Johan meaningfully. Johan nodded, then picked up the robe and cradled it under one arm, wrapping it tightly to keep it dry. He couldn’t help noticing that Daria wore nothing, apart from the robe; she didn’t even wear undergarments. The thought caused a flush of excitement, which he swiftly suppressed. Daria would probably be able to sense it, no matter how quickly he pushed it aside. He flushed, then followed Cass as she started to walk down the street.

“Stay as quiet as you can,” she hissed. “There’s almost no background noise.”

The Golden City felt eerie, Johan realised, as they walked through the snow. Normally, it was always awake, even at the dead of night; the shops and cafes were open, serving their customers at every hour of the day. It was the heart of a giant empire, after all, and people were often at work during daylight hours. People invested in silencing charms, his father had once commented, because the city was always buzzing. But now it was quiet.

Cass had been right, he realised as they left the former Blight. Shops that should have been open were barred and shuttered, with warning signs plastered over their doors. Even Johan, with his strictly-limited education in all things magic, could tell they were warning would-be thieves that the owners had invested in
nasty
defensive hexes for their shops. Anyone who tried to break in without permission would be lucky to escape without being branded, although most such hexes were designed to hold a thief long enough for the City Guard to catch him. A handful of dark shops had no obvious warning signs, but only a fool would try to break in. They were owned by magicians.

And a magician can do whatever he likes to anyone who tries to break in
, Johan thought, grimly.
They’d be lucky not to be enslaved on the spot
.

Cass held up a hand, then motioned for him to slip into the shadows. Moments later, another line of patrolling soldiers appeared from a side street and marched past where they were hiding, wrapped in eerie silence. They had to be using charms to smother their footsteps, Johan thought, allowing them to sneak through the streets. If Cass hadn’t heard them, he had the sense he would have walked right into their path and been arrested.

Daria slipped over to the footsteps the soldiers had left in the snow and sniffed once, then returned to Johan’s side. Cass gave the werewolf a sharp look, then started to walk back down the street, away from the soldiers. Johan followed her, wondering just what the soldiers were trying to do – and where they had come from. He tried to reach out to Elaine, but all he sensed was a flurry of confusing mental pictures that made absolutely no sense. Without Cass’s support, the link had returned to its normal state.

He frowned, suddenly, as he realised they were approaching the Peerless School. It was the largest building in the Golden City, a towering dark shape wrapped in protective magic to keep the students safe ... and shield the general population from their mistakes. The building was far larger on the inside than the outside, according to Charity; there was something about the magic surrounding the school that made it impossible to see its true shape. Johan stared, forgetting – for a moment – where they had to go, but no matter how hard he stared it was impossible to see anything fixed and solid. The school’s appearance changed every time he blinked.

Cass slipped back to him. “Too many guards surrounding the walls,” she said. “The students must be held inside.”

Johan frowned. His siblings had slept at the school, even when they’d moved to the Golden City and they could have slept in their own bedrooms. Boarding at the school was meant to help young sorcerers network, his father had explained once, when Charity had complained about having to leave home. She wouldn’t amount to anything, he’d insisted, if she didn’t know anyone. Charity had pointed out, in return, that her father was planning to marry her off as soon as she was old enough, so it didn’t actually matter what she knew. Their father had not been pleased.

“What’s going to happen to them?” he asked. “My brothers and sisters are in there.”

“Probably nothing,” Cass said. “The Emperor wouldn’t seek to piss off everyone with magic by closing the place down.”

Johan frowned, looking up at the school. The Emperor, it seemed, had
already
pissed everyone off by assuming the Golden Throne. Surely he wouldn’t think twice about using the children as hostages ... or worse. The school itself was dark and silent, without a single light breaking the darkness. Normally, it would be glowing with light as the wards caught and absorbed waves of magic from the children. Now ...

“Don’t worry about it,” Cass said, shortly. “Follow me.”

Johan obeyed, following Cass through a maze of side-streets that seemed to hold dozens of largely-unmarked shops. One of them was decorated with the outline of a naked woman, suggesting it was a brothel. Johan sighed, remembering some of Jamal’s tales, then reminded himself that his brother had been an incurable braggart. Most of his stories had probably been nothing more than outright lies.

But not all of them were
, he thought.
Some of Jamal’s attempts at courtship required father to spend a vast amount of money to cover them up
.