Work Experience (Schooled in Magic Book 4) (42 page)

Unlike the previous valley, there were only a handful of massive trees looming over the remains of the long-dead giant. Instead, there were smaller bushes and plants that seemed to be laid out in a complex pattern. It reminded Emily of some of the plantations near Dragon’s Den, where alchemical ingredients were produced for Whitehall and the local alchemists. Someone had clearly created a plantation of her own...whatever else she was, Mother Holly was clearly a capable brewer. But how much training did she actually have?

Emily stared at the skeleton for a long moment before following the snake down the rocky path. She heard a stream in the distance, but she couldn’t see the water, no matter how hard she looked. The snake projected impressions of wariness at her as the scent from the plants grew stronger, making her head swim. Emily gritted her teeth, cursed her oversight and cast a spell intended to filter out the scent. The dancing poppies ahead of her, blowing in the wind, were a prime ingredient in sleeping potions. Breathing in too much would be enough to send them into a coma.

“Try not to breathe too deeply,” she advised, as they pressed further into the maze. “This place could be dangerous.”

“They said that people went to see her when they were desperate,” Rudolf said. “How did they escape the plants?”

Emily shrugged. A damp cloth would be enough, if the victim reacted quickly. Or perhaps they just fell asleep, then Mother Holly pulled them out of the plantation and helped them to recover. It wouldn’t take long for the effects to wear off, once they were out of the aroma. She couldn’t sense any wards, but some herbalists had a sixth sense for the condition of their gardens. Mother Holly might have the inclination, even if she didn’t have the training.

She knelt down beside the suffering snake and picked it up, absently. Rudolf let out a strangled sound, staring at her in absolute horror. Emily blinked in surprise, then remembered the rotting touch. But the snake felt harmless in her palm...she stared down at it, feeling no pain at all. The familiar bond, she realized as she shook in relief, protected her from its poison.

The snake licked her finger, then gave her a heavy-lidded look and a series of impressions that suggested tiredness. Emily worked the spell that transfigured it back into a bracelet, then returned it to her arm.

Rudolf’s mouth worked frantically, but no words came out. From his point of view, she’d just picked up the most dangerous snake in the world and held it, without losing a hand.

“I have a link with it,” she said. She honestly hadn’t realized the danger...because the link had ensured that there was
no
danger. “Don’t try to pick it up yourself.”

She hid her amusement as they picked their way down the path. Rudolf had asked her to marry him...but he was probably having second thoughts, after seeing her pet. And the connection she had with it. No one would question a death by Death Viper. Everyone knew the snakes couldn’t be tamed.

Unless, of course, one forged a mental link out of desperation.

The sound of running water grew louder as they stepped into a clearing with a series of carefully-organized ponds. Emily glanced at one and saw...
things...
swimming through the water. Fish, she knew, were often chopped up and used as potions ingredients. Another held tiny crabs, the mere sight of them sending a chill down her spine. Smashing them up for alchemical research wasn’t her favorite activity. Professor Thande assigned the preparation of various disgusting ingredients instead of using the cane whenever he wanted to punish someone. Emily had a feeling that most of his students would have preferred to be caned.

“This place is a tiny farm,” she said, as they walked past the ponds and into another clump of plants. “Some of these are magical, some serve as the neutral baseline for specific potions.”

Rudolf looked around, carefully. “How many hedge witches are there?”

Emily had no idea, and said so. Hedge witches were usually solitary creatures, unwilling or unable even to talk with their fellows. It seemed odd that one person could have done all this, but Mother Holly was supposed to be ancient...and she’d presumably had a mentor. Maybe the hidden valley was far older than it looked, or maybe Mother Holly had friends and allies. There was no way to know.

They passed through a final set of plants and stopped, staring at the house at the center of the valley. It looked, on the surface, like any of the other hovels she’d seen in the villages, but it seemed to have drawn trees and bushes into the wooden walls. Emily took a step forward, reaching out with her senses...

She recoiled at the dark magic she sensed surrounding the hovel, powerful and threatening. She held up a hand to stop Rudolf, then got her staff out of her pocket and enlarged it. Rudolf nodded in understanding as Emily advanced forward, trying to feel the shape of the wards. They were tainted with dark magic, but not as complex as some of the tricks she’d encountered in Blackhall.

She looked around, carefully. There hadn’t been any warning ward, as far as she’d been able to tell, but Mother Holly might well have sensed their presence. If, of course, she was inside the building. Even if she wasn’t...she might have sensed something. How closely were the wards tied to her?

“I need to break the wards,” she said, to Rudolf. “Keep an eye out for trouble.”

Rudolf snorted. “You mean something more dangerous than what we’ve found already?”

“Mother Holly herself,” Emily said. If the hedge witch was innocent, which was starting to look rather unlikely, she would be understandably upset at discovering two youngsters trying to break into her home. She could legally do whatever she wanted to them – she could do
anything
to them, if she had the power to do it. “Let me know the moment anything changes.”

She stepped forward and tapped her magic against the wards. Sergeant Miles had taught her that it was a way of ringing the doorbell, if there was a ward in place to alert the owner that she had visitors. Emily waited for several moments, but nothing happened. Carefully, balancing the staff on its tip, she walked forward and started to untangle the wards.

They snapped and spat at her as she worked. Most of them were basic, barely enough to repel a mundane visitor, but some of the more complex ones were
nasty
, tapping into very dark magic indeed. Two of them were even outside her experience and she had to work frantically to counter a series of hexes that would have caused her permanent injury if she failed to block them in time. The wards were wasteful and ill-designed, but she had to admit that they were craftier than they seemed.

Still, a trained magician like Lady Barb should have had no difficulty breaking in.

But
, she asked herself,
was the real problem breaking out
?

There was a final flash of multicolored balefire – Rudolf gasped in shock – then the wards snapped out of existence.

Emily paused to catch her breath. If Mother Holly was innocent, they would be in some trouble. Rudolf stepped forward as she picked up her staff and leaned on it, reaching out for the door. Emily hissed at him to stop just before he touched it.

“Let me test everything first,” she ordered. If there was one thing she had learned from Blackhall, it was that the big showy threat might mask something more dangerous. “You could touch something one moment and find yourself a frog the next.”

But there was no charm on the door, at least as far as she could tell. She used her staff to nudge it open, then peered inside, half-expecting something to jump out at her.

But there was nothing inside, apart from darkness...and a stench that made her recoil. There were no windows, nothing to provide any illumination at all. Bracing herself, fearful of any reaction from undiscovered defenses, Emily crafted a globe of light and sent it bobbing into the room.

“Interesting,” Rudolf said, one eye on the ball of light. “What else can you do?”

Emily ignored the question as the light illuminated the interior of the hovel. It was messy, as if Mother Holly had stopped caring about housekeeping. A large fireplace sat in one corner, a black cauldron positioned over it, while the tables were covered with herbs and half-dissected animals. Several bottles were placed on top of the table, their lids removed and protective spells destroyed. She guessed they were the bottles stolen from Lord Gorham’s town.

She created a second light globe and sent it bobbing over towards the pile of blankets at the far edge of the room. Had Mother Holly slept there? She felt another stab of sympathy, which she angrily repressed. Unless she was dreadfully mistaken, Mother Holly was responsible for the death of at least twenty children, as well as trying to enchant Rudolf and his father. What sort of pity did she deserve?

None
, she told herself. The only pity Emily could or would offer Mother Holly was a quick death. She’d become too dangerous to leave alive. It didn’t escape her that some people in the Allied Lands believed the same of Emily herself. After all, there were dark rumors that Emily was a necromancer herself.

She pushed the thought aside as she saw something concealed under the blankets. Bracing herself, she reached down and pushed the blankets aside, keeping a wary eye out for traps. The blankets stank, but there were no other defenses, allowing her to uncover the skull. It sparked a memory in her mind; Yodel had told her, back when they’d first met, that some magicians stored their memories, even their personalities, in skulls, waiting for someone to find them and put them to work. There were even stories, cautionary tales, of magicians who primed their skulls to decant their personalities into the first idiot who touched them. It provided a kind of life after death.

Careful not to touch the skull with either her bare hand or magic, she used the blankets to pick up the skull and deposit it on the table. Up close, there were a handful of runes carved into the skull, only two of which she recognized. One of them would keep the skull intact, no matter what happened, the other would feed a faint trickle of magic into the skull, holding the enchanted personality firmly in place. Bracing herself, expecting a backlash of some kind, she used a simple detection spell and found...nothing.

“No magic,” she said, puzzled.

Rudolf came over to stand behind her. “Is that a bad thing?”

“I don’t know,” Emily confessed. “The skull was once home to a magician’s personality, but it doesn’t seem to have endured.”

She looked down at the skull, contemplatively. Was it a fake? Or something Mother Holly had been trying to make work? Or had the personality sunk into Mother Holly, leaving the skull empty? It was possible, wasn’t it? But all the cautionary tales she’d read had suggested that the skull would remain dangerous indefinitely.

Rudolf swore. Emily turned and followed his gaze, staring into another corner. A body lay on the ground, one too small to be anything other than a baby. Sickened, Emily crept closer, directing the light globe to hover over the child’s body. The most obvious wound was a stab to the heart, but there were several others, all of which might prove fatal to a baby. Dark magic surrounded the corpse, clinging to the dead body like a living thing.

“I thought we could save the child,” Rudolf said. He sounded stunned, as if he didn’t quite believe what he was seeing. His voice was almost plaintive. “But why did she need a
child
?”

Emily swallowed. The answer was obvious; Mother Holly hadn’t been looking for magical power, but life force. A trained magician would be the most promising source of the former, yet a newborn baby would be the best source of the latter. After all, a baby had his or her entire life to enjoy. She shook her head, unwilling to discuss the possibility. Lady Barb had been right, again. In the long run, transferring life force might be even more dangerous to the Allied Lands than necromancy.

“I don’t know,” Emily lied. The skull’s face seemed to mock her as she looked at it. Had it decanted something – or someone – into Mother Holly’s head...or was it just a repository of information?

“So,” Rudolf said, as she returned the skull to its hiding place. “What else can we do? Where else can we
go
?”

Emily hesitated. There was no trace of Mother Holly – or Lady Barb. She briefly considered releasing the snake again, then realized that she already knew where to look next.

“The castle,” she said, softly.

Throwing caution to the winds, she stood in the middle of the hovel and cast a powerful magic detection charm. The skull showed no reaction, while some of the potions ingredients glowed faintly – and a bright glow could be seen from a hidden drawer. Emily opened it carefully, disarming a nasty protective hex as she moved, and swore aloud as she produced the book. Like some of the grimoires preserved in Whitehall’s library, it was made from human skin and written in blood. The magician who’d written it, she suspected, might even have used his
own
blood. Once he was dead, the book would be bonded to his family line...

No, that couldn’t be right, she told herself. Mother Holly wasn’t related to a magician, was she? But there was no way to know.

She picked up the book, carefully, and opened it. There was no table of contents, forcing her to inspect each spell one by one. Some of them were surprisingly common, used at Whitehall; others were deadly dangerous. One of them was a compulsion spell so powerful that the victim wouldn’t have a hope of resisting, once the magician had obtained a sample of his blood. It reminded her of the spell Shadye had used on her, years ago. Others told her how to blind a disobedient child or turn him into a toad; make a woman permanently barren or nothing more than a slave; cripple a man or give him permanent bad luck...the writer, she realized, had been filled with hatred and malice towards the world. The evil the book could have caused was terrifying. And most of the people in the mountains would be absolutely defenseless.

And, when the writer had finally died, he’d meant his malice to live on.

The final spell was alarmingly familiar. It was the basic necromantic rite.