Infinite Regress (49 page)

Emily stared at him. “I swore an oath...”

“You’re crafty,” Professor Locke snarled. A hex—a
torture
hex—glimmered over his fingertips, casting a sickly yellow light over his face. “You could evade an oath, if you tried.”

He held up his hand in a casting pose. “Where are the books?”

Emily hesitated, thinking hard. Professor Locke had snapped completely. There was no way he would be allowed to remain at Whitehall if he tortured a student, even if it didn’t get him executed or transported to the Garden of Stoned Philosophers. Gordian could never allow him to stay, let alone teach. And Locke no longer cared...

She winced as she backed into the wall. There was nowhere to run.

“Tell me,” Locke snarled. “Where are the books?”

Emily threw a force punch at him, slamming him backwards. Sickly light flared around the older man as he tumbled to the floor, screaming in pain. His spell had backfired, Emily realized in horror. If she could feel it, even at a distance, he had to have massively overpowered the spell. She’d been tortured before, but this was different. It might have killed her—or driven her mad—if he’d cast it.

The spell faded. Locke stumbled into a sitting position, blood pouring down his nose, and struggled to raise his hand. Emily found herself torn between trying to help him and running for her life. Locke had
definitely
snapped if he was more concerned with trying to hurt her than repairing the horrendous damage he’d inflicted on himself. Torture spells could cause nerve damage, she’d been taught, dooming the victim to a pain-racked life if they didn’t receive immediate medical attention. It was one of the many reasons they were banned...

Locke cast a spell at her, a spell she didn’t recognize. Emily sidestepped it, then threw a stunning spell back. Locke’s protections seemed to have been warped out of shape, rather than destroyed; the stunner should have just knocked him out, but instead it picked him up and threw him against the far wall. He crumpled to the ground and lay there, stunned.

Shit
, Emily thought.

For a long moment, she could barely move. She’d attacked a tutor! It hadn’t been a duel, it hadn’t been a test of her skills... she’d attacked a tutor. He might have been preparing to cast a torture spell... or had he? Had he been hoping to intimidate her? She had no doubt he’d try to claim he had no intention of actually casting the spell... if Gordian still wanted to expel her, she’d just given him enough excuse to kick her out as soon as the gates reopened.
No one
could argue with him now.

Another quiver ran through the school. She cursed, then turned to the door and tore it open, stumbling out into the corridor. It had changed; now, it looked like the corridor outside the private workrooms, heavily warded to protect the students and their secrets. But when she closed her eyes and centered herself, she could feel the nexus point below her. It felt different...

Gritting her teeth, drawing on the last of her reserves, she started to run.

S
HE HEARD SOMEONE CALLING OUT BEHIND
her as she ran downwards, but she ignored them. The corridors were in ruins, pieces of debris lying everywhere; she had to force herself to keep running when she had to jump over chunks of stonework and pieces of statues that had been shattered by the constantly-shifting corridors. The tremors grew stronger as she plunged down a corridor that had been lined with suits of armor. Now, the suits of armor lay on the ground, in pieces. She tripped over a breastplate and swore as she nearly fell to the ground, then caught herself and kept moving.
Everything
was different.

Keep focusing on the nexus point
, she told herself, as she plunged down a long and winding set of stairs, then along a darkened corridor. The lights brightened and dimmed, seemingly at random. She did her best to ignore the shadows as they crept forward, without ever touching her.
Let it guide you down
.

She tore past a handful of younger students, ignoring their shouts and the hex one of them hurled at her back. There was no way to know what they were doing there, if they’d escaped the Great Hall or if they’d been trapped—elsewhere—by one of the changes. Oddly, the thought gave her a flicker of hope. Frieda might have been trapped, but she might also have been freed. She clung to it as she reached the final stairwell, then hurried down to the lower spellchambers. They looked to be in ruins, the spellware torn and broken. She smiled, despite herself. The spellchamber
she’d
damaged was hardly a problem
now
.

Something
moved
ahead of her. A handful of dummies, advancing towards her. She slowed, then cursed as she saw a student’s body lying on the ground. The dummies had gone rogue... why? There was no time to find out. She gathered her strength and cast a series of blasting spells, pushing all the power she could into them. The lead dummy barely had a chance to cast a spell of its own before it disintegrated into rubble, followed by the others. It crossed Emily’s mind, as she started to run faster, that Sergeant Miles would not be pleased at losing the remainder of his dummies. But they shouldn’t have gone rogue in any case.

They draw their power from the wards, just like the Warden
, she thought, as she reached the gates to the tunnel network.
But they need much less power to function. The Warden was disabled; the dummies went rogue
.

She pushed the thought out of her mind as she slowed to a halt in front of the gates. Someone—probably Professor Lombardi—had placed a spell on the gates, making it impossible for any student to enter the underground tunnel network without a tutor. Emily swore under her breath. Perhaps she should have dragged Professor Locke down with her, even though it would have been impossible to carry him without using magic. There was no hope of finding a tutor...

The school shook, again. Gritting her teeth, she stepped forward and rammed her magic into the spell, drawing on all of her reserves. The spell flared—Professor Lombardi had done a very good job—and tried to lash out at her, attempting to freeze her in place. It would have caught her, she knew, if Lady Barb hadn’t forced her to spend weeks practicing untangling wards and hexes from the inside. As it was, she barely managed to deflect its first attempt and rip it to shreds before it could make another. She sagged as the spell disintegrated, then forced herself onwards, down into the tunnels. The tunnel was dark, but when she reached the bottom the lights were almost painfully bright. Something was definitely very wrong.

His attempt to hack the spellware only disrupted all of the other settings
, she thought, as the temperature began to rise again. Her shirt and trousers suddenly felt very heavy as she started to sweat.
They no longer know the correct settings for anything
.

Emily kept moving, despite the lights growing brighter and brighter. The gravity seemed to shift too, although she had no idea why; one moment, it was so strong she could barely walk, the next it was so light that she almost banged her head on the ceiling. She forced herself onwards, staggering past the former library and blinked in surprise when she saw two students kneeling together outside the control room. They were both alive, she noted, but they looked to have been entranced. A quick spell confirmed that someone had cast a powerful compulsion on the students, rendering them utterly helpless—and obedient. But they were both sixth year students. She was surprised it had worked...

Professor Lombardi might have been able to take control of them
, she thought.
But even he would have difficulty keeping the spell in place indefinitely
.

She studied them for a long moment, trying to parse out the spell, then hurried past them and into the control room. There would be time to unlock
that
mystery later.

The crystalline consoles and columns flickered with unhealthy light, as the door closed behind her. Professor Lombardi was bent over one of the consoles, while Professor Jayne studied the spellware displayed within the nearest column. A large statue—it took her a moment to realize it was Professor Ronald—had been placed against the far wall and abandoned. It was so bizarre that it took her longer than it should have to work out that he’d triggered another defense and been turned to stone.

Professor Lombardi turned to face her, his eyes wide. “Emily,” he said. He sounded surprised to see her. No doubt he’d assumed Professor Locke would keep her out of trouble—and vice versa. “What are
you
doing here?”

“I know how to help,” Emily said, panting. The sense that time was slipping away was growing stronger. She’d collapse soon, even if the school
didn’t
. No amount of Kava could keep her awake indefinitely, particularly not after everything she’d done. It felt as if she’d been awake for
days
, if not weeks. “Professor...”

“No matter what we do, everything is spiraling out of control,” Professor Lombardi said, grimly. Sweat ran down his face. He started to turn back to the console, then changed his mind, looking at Emily. “All we can do is try to keep the school stable for a few more hours...”

“And you’re not even doing that,” Emily said. It was the sort of rudeness that would get her in trouble, in the classroom, but there was no time to be polite. She had the feeling that Professor Lombardi’s work was about as effective as kicking a computer that had frozen up. Satisfying, perhaps, but futile. “The corridors are still changing overhead.”

She forced herself to stand upright. “Professor,” she said, “let me try.”

“I can’t,” Professor Lombardi said. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

“Neither do you,” Emily said. She gazed past him, looking at the glowing columns. If the system was anything like the set-up in the nexus chamber, touching the column would give her access to the user interface. There was no point in trying to implant commands through the consoles if the underlying spellware was slowly breaking apart. “Let me try,
please
.”

Professor Lombardi shook his head. “I can’t take the risk...”

Emily blasted him, the force punch slamming straight into his protections and hurling him across the chamber. His protections held—she hurled a hex at Professor Jayne, although she doubted it would do more than slow her down for a few seconds—but he was out of her way, just long enough for her to hurl herself forward. It crossed her mind that she’d just assaulted two more tutors, that her expulsion hearing was going to be the shortest formality on record, but it hardly mattered. If they survived the next few hours, she could make her excuses and argue her case; if they didn’t, they were dead anyway.

I’m sorry
, she thought, as her fingers made contact.
Please...

She thrust her magic forward. The spellware opened up in front of her, a dazzlingly complex pattern of components that was slowly coming apart. There was a logic to it that surprised and pleased her at the same time, considering she’d seen far too many older spells that had idiosyncrasies that magicians had inserted to show off their power. As complex as it was, there was little wasted space.
Everything
had a purpose.

Gritting her teeth, she allowed her awareness to widen as she looked for the user interface, feeling her way through the network. The nexus point was a source of power, flaring so bright that she couldn’t directly look at it; the spellware itself was brilliantly logical, yet there was no user interface. It should have come when she looked for it, but it hadn’t... it was either already disabled or had never existed in the first place. She paused, trying to study the spellwork, then looked back at the nexus point. It was flaring...

A gaping emptiness at the heart of Whitehall
, she recalled. A demon had given her those words, two years ago; a warning of a future that might be realized.
There is a gaping emptiness at the heart of Whitehall
.

And yet, she told herself firmly, there was
no
emptiness. The nexus point was there. She could feel it, even when she wasn’t looking at it; it felt like the sun on a warm day, beaming down from high overhead. It was just...
there
.

The nexus point exists in all moments of time
, a voice said. She wasn’t quite sure where the voice was. It seemed to be all around her.
It will always exist. It has always existed.

Emily started, blindly hunting around for the person who had spoken. Was someone else connected to the network? She couldn’t help thinking of how she’d heard Frieda... perhaps, deep inside, there were traces of soul magic within the spellware. But how was that possible? Gordian had lost his connection to the wards as soon as Professor Locke had hit the console, unless he’d lied about that. Had
he
had a long-term plan of his own? But somehow, she found it hard to believe. Gordian would have taken oaths of his own. He would have died if he’d deliberately compromised the school.

There was no sign of the speaker. She opened her mind as far as she dared, but sensed nothing apart from the spellware and the nexus point. Turning her attention to the spellware itself, she finally saw how it went together. It was complex, yet understandable if one stood far back and took in the whole. Professor Lombardi, she saw, had only tried to tinker with a very small section, heedless—and unaware—of how it related to the rest of the spellware, while Locke...

Professor Locke had touched the console and yanked control back from the Grandmaster,
she thought, as more and more of the network revealed itself to her.
No wonder the chamber was sealed. The Grandmaster could be overruled—or killed—by someone who sat down and started to type instructions into the system.

She scowled, mentally, as she saw the changes someone had made to the network, centuries ago. The Warden, to serve as a walking user interface; the Grandmaster’s connection, to allow him to issue orders to the wards. And the control room itself had been closed-off and forgotten, deliberately forgotten. It was quite possible that the various Grandmasters had known there was
something
under the school, but they’d just been warned not to meddle with it.