Wolf in the Fold, page 27
“Yeah,” Cat said. “Do you think it oozes into the minds of any intruders?”
Emily gave him a sharp look. The possibility had never occurred to her ... but it should have. There was no inherent reason someone couldn’t design a defensive ward to subtly compel, even enslave, anyone who walked into the city. She could imagine the trick, a cunning spell woven into the network that would inch its way into a mind, slowly overcoming all resistance and eventually pulling them into slavery. They could be compelled to walk to the heart of the city and surrender ... she shuddered, helplessly. It was hard to be sure they hadn’t been influenced by such a spell, something so subtle it was difficult to be sure it even existed. She might insist she hadn’t, of course, but how could her word be trusted? She wouldn’t know she was being influenced. How could she?
“Let us hope not,” she muttered, as they neared the low wall. The magical cacophony managed to be both loud and eerily quiet at the same time, battering her brain without going through her ears. She reached out gingerly, looking for subtle defences ... finding none. It wasn’t particularly reassuring. Such spells were designed to hide, all the while convincing their victim they didn’t exist. The poor bastard could look right at the spells and miss them completely. “We have enough problems.”
“Starting with the fact they might have noticed a missing slave,” Cat said. There was no condemnation in his tone, but she thought she heard it anyway. “If they noticed ...?”
Emily scowled as he helped her over the wall. The slaves were still moving in their patterns, their arms rising and falling in a kind of eerie unison that nagged at her. It was a ritual and yet ... what sort of ritual? There was no sign they’d noticed Beth’s absence ... she wanted to believe, as grim as it was, that the unseen masters were unconcerned because they were already working the slaves to death and wouldn’t notice one more death. Her blood ran cold as she considered the implications. Were the slaves bleeding life and magic into the wards? She’d seen something like it at Mountaintop, where rejected students had been used to provide power for the wards, but ... if so, whatever the Hierarchy was doing was on a far greater scale. She didn’t like it at all.
Cat rubbed his eyes. His voice sounded raw. “What the hell are they doing?”
“Try to focus on the real world,” Emily advised, although she wasn’t sure what was the real world. Not here. The city was so bright, so many dimensions overlapping each other ... she glanced at the slaves, watching some pop into existence out of nowhere and others vanishing, and shuddered. They were being used as organic robots. They had to be. No human mind could cope with such an experience. “And bite your tongue from time to time.”
“Hah.” Cat slipped off the wall, dropping down into the city. “Do you think they can see us?”
“Stay low anyway,” Emily ordered. There was so much magic in the air that concealment charms wouldn’t last long, no matter what they did. The slaves were too zonked out to be fooled by obscurification charms. Probably. “We don’t want to set off any alarms.”
Cat snorted as they started to move, but said nothing as they passed row upon row of houses, apartments and other buildings. The scene was bizarre, human architecture morphing slowly into alien structures that looked to have been put together by madmen or minds with very different ideas of how the universe worked. Simple apartment blocks were overlapped by towering ziggurats, statues of humans whose names had been forgotten long ago bleeding into representations of things her mind refused to grasp. She glanced into a building that might have been a workshop and shuddered when she realised the far walls were lost in another dimension, the stone somehow managing to be both real and weirdly translucent at the same time. Things were on the far side of the wall, pressing against her awareness ... it was like having an imaginary headache, a headache that wasn’t quite painful and yet unquestionably there. She didn’t want to look too closely. She was afraid of what she might see.
The tower loomed over the city, stretching up and up into infinity. It was metal and stone and something organic, a beanstalk leading into the clouds and beyond. It was so big she couldn’t tell how close they were, the sheer immensity making it hard to tell just how far they had to go. It was more real than the rest of the city, yet ... her head hurt. It was big enough to dominate the world and yet it was oddly compressed, as if it was far bigger on the inside. She could feel the pulsing of a nexus point and ... there shouldn’t be one. There had never been one here.
Unless it was never catalogued at all, Emily thought. But if they have a nexus point, why would they need to gather and store so much power?
Cat nudged her. Emily jumped.
“How far do you think we have to go?”
Emily shook her head. Distances were breaking down. The tower was close, yet impossibly far away. She had to think to keep moving, to keep herself from slowing as the city centre finally came into view. Most cities were organised around a handful of buildings – a castle, a palace, a city hall – but if there had been such structures in this city they’d been swallowed up long ago. The tower had taken their place and it was expanding, slowly absorbing structures bleeding into alternate realities, structures transformed by contact with alien magics and powers. She couldn’t see it move and yet she was sure it was inching outwards in all directions.
She gritted her teeth. Her perspective was all screwed up. The tower was both the largest thing she’d ever seen and tiny, a skyscraper that was also a stick. She could feel the dimensions compressed around the structure, making it bigger on the inside ... a TARDIS, she thought numbly, but a TARDIS without the protective shell. It made her head hurt even more.
“Look,” Cat said.
Emily followed his gaze. There was a long line of slaves going in and out of the tower, some carrying crates and bundles of tools, others seemingly empty-handed. She shuddered helplessly at their robotic motions, then froze as she spotted the hooded figures standing by the door. They didn’t look like slaves ... it was hard to be sure of anything, as the distortion made it difficult to see the enemy, but they appeared to be guards rather than anything else. She guessed there were limits to the enemy’s faith in their defences. There might be little point in defending the battlements, but the tower was a very different kettle of fish.
“We’re going to have to get inside,” she muttered. “Somehow ...”
“That might prove tricky,” Cat said, his voice disturbingly even. Cat loved a challenge. Anything that daunted him had to be bad. “The wards are a pain and then there’s the guards ...”
Emily nodded, trying to scope out the defences. The tower was so vast as to be beyond comprehension ... she had the uneasy sense of something rooted in reality itself, an iceberg that was a tiny fraction of the whole, the remainder hidden in a multidimensional twist she couldn’t even begin to comprehend. She had to fight to focus her mind enough to see the outer layers of the structure, to pick out entrances and exits that might not be anything of the sort. The slaves were making their way through a weird gash in the tower, a twisted nightmare that scared her on a very primal level. There was a layer of wards between them and the entrance ...
“Organic technology,” she muttered.
Cat glanced at her. “What?”
Emily swallowed, hard. “It’s not easy to channel magic through mundane technology,” she said, slowly. “Magitech started out as a combination of metal and organic material and then morphed into something else, something that could gather and channel magic. There are limits to how far it can go, without an organic mind capable of controlling or at least influencing the magic. But if you have some kind of organic technology ...”
She shuddered. A ritual required a group of trained magicians who were willing and able to work together for the greater good. It was never easy to get them working together long enough to cast even a basic spell, not when herding magicians was like herding cats, which limited the kind of spells the ritualists could cast. But if someone could channel enough magic through a piece of organic technology – she shuddered as she realised the slaves might have been assimilated into a twisted nightmare – they might be able to work far greater spells without personality clashes that could lead to fights. What if ... she wondered, suddenly, if she could bilocate, then cast a spell that normally required two casters. It was hard for a bilocated person’s two halves to remain close without reintegrating themselves, but ... if organic technology was involved it might be possible.
“I once knew a man who gave himself four arms, to allow him to cast two spells at once,” Cat commented. “It eventually destroyed him, but ... it worked. For a while.”
Emily frowned. It was tricky to cast two spells at the same time. Most such spells were components of something far greater. If the caster had managed to split his attention so completely ... she shook her head, returning her attention to the city. They had to find a way inside the tower. She just didn’t know how.
“We could pretend to be slaves,” Cat suggested. “We can channel their slave spells ...”
“Bad idea,” Emily said. She would have thought twice about it anywhere, but here ... no. Bad idea. Very bad idea. They could easily wind up enslaved themselves. “We need something else.”
She frowned as she spotted another hooded figure leaving the tower and heading into the city, walking with an easy gait that suggested he didn’t have a care in the world. He wasn’t quite walking towards them, but ... she glanced at Cat, sharing the same unspoken thought, then led the way down to a street. The air seemed to blur around them, a dozen different buildings trying to occupy the same place, as the Hierarchist came into view. He was wearing a pair of spectacles ... Emily wondered, suddenly, if they were designed to let him navigate the multidimensional nightmare. Cat winked at her, then slipped up behind the Hierarchist, wrapped his arms around the man’s neck and tried to choke him out. Reality hung on a knife edge, just for a second, as he tightened his grip. Emily had the sense, just for a second, that Cat’s arm was passing though the man, as if he were almost – but not quite – a ghost, before reality snapped back and the man fell to the ground. Cat kept his grip tight, just in case. A trained soldier might feign being unconscious long enough for the attacker to let go, then fight back.
“Interesting,” Cat mused. “Do you know him?”
Emily knelt and pulled the hood back. The man was pale, strong features marred by close-cropped hair and a scar on his cheek that suggested he’d made a blood oath with someone not too long ago. It was rare for such a wound to be healed magically – tradition demanded the scar be left untouched – but given time it would heal anyway. The man’s face was completely unknown to her, although there was something about them that nagged at her mind, something familiar ... it took her a moment to place it. He reminded her of Frieda, in a way she couldn’t quite put into words. Someone else from the Cairngorms? Or someone who’d endured a similar childhood?
Cat muttered a spell to keep the Hierarchist unconscious, then patted him down. His pockets didn’t hold much of anything, beyond a couple of pieces of magitech ... oddly, there was a pistol stuffed into his belt. Rare, for a magician ... Cat sucked in his breath as he poked and prodded at the older man, revealing ... something ... floating above his skin, like a holographic tattoo. A soulmark. Emily had heard of them, from Void, but she’d never actually seen one. The few magical families that used them rarely admitted their existence.
“That’s our way in,” Cat said. “You think your boyfriend can hack it for us?”
Emily nodded. Caleb might not know much about soul magic, but he was a far better charmsmith than her. “Yeah,” she said. The soulmark made a certain kind of sense, a key to the wards surrounding the tower. “If he can duplicate it” – she pressed her chat parchment to the Hierarchist’s body – “we can get in.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“Stay close to me,” Emily muttered, as they neared the tower. The chat parchment felt warm against her hand. “We’ve only got one soulmark.”
“Got it.” Cat was so close they were almost touching. “Make sure you keep the obscurification charm in place.”
Emily nodded. Caleb had done an excellent job of dissecting and duplicating the soulmark, and hacking the outer edge of the wards to ensure they could get in and out without being noticed, but they had no idea of just how sophisticated the enemy wards were. If there was someone monitoring them, or just a particularly capable piece of spellware, they might be able to tell there was someone in two, if not three, places at once. Emily knew how to design wards that would sound the alarm if they spotted a red flag like that and she dared not assume the Hierarchy was any less capable. They were taking one hell of a risk.
And if the guards spot us with the naked eye, all bets are off, she thought, grimly. They’d woven the obscurification charm into the local environment, like a singer joining his voice to the song, but she was painfully aware it might not be enough to hide them. A trained magician would know to watch for his attention being diverted and here, the guards would know better than to write anything off as a random flicker of magic. Better to check, just to be sure, than risk being attacked from the rear. We might have to get out in a hurry ...
The tower pressed against her awareness, looming over her as they stepped through the wards. It grew bigger and broader, expanding in dimensions she couldn’t even begin to comprehend ... she felt as if someone had shrunk her to the size of an insect, and was now lifting their foot to bring it down on her. Hard. The sight made her quail, just for a second, before she forced herself to go on. It helped, just a little. She shouldn’t have been able to see the whole tower, or what part of it resided in the human world, yet it was still burning into her mind. There was no escape.
Cat caught her arm as they inched towards the entrance. The guards didn’t seem to be looking at them, but that was meaningless. Emily couldn’t help but pray as they neared the gash in the tower and stepped through, using the lines of slaves for cover. The interior was so quiet it was almost a physical blow, the sudden silence as deafening as the endless noise. But it wasn’t real noise ... she glanced at Cat, who looked as if he’d been struck by surprise, and then forced herself onwards. The tower seemed more normal now ... she guessed they could no longer see the alternate dimensions. It reminded her of Celeste. And Whitehall. She wasn’t sure why.
“Charming,” Cat muttered.
Emily nodded as the passageway widened suddenly. She’d expected an entrance hall, perhaps more checkpoints, but instead the passageway led right into a giant workshop. The air shimmered, suggesting that towering pieces of metal and organic machinery been crammed into a space far too small ... she sucked in her breath, feeling like a fly crawling over something so massive she couldn’t even begin to understand what she saw. Magic prickled against her as they kept moving, the spellware so complex it would take months, if not years, to unravel. The sheer size of the operation stunned her. Whatever the Hierarchy was doing, it had been doing it for years.
Cat sucked in his breath. “Look!”
Emily followed his gaze. It was a heart-like device, something akin to the structure she’d seen in Celeste, but worse. Far worse. There were people crammed into the device, strands of metal jammed into their brains to turn them into part of the device itself ... she felt sick as she neared the structure, trying to think of a way to free them. She doubted it was possible. They weren’t just linked to the device, but had been somehow absorbed into it. Their arms and legs vanished somewhere within the structure, as if they too were trying to be in two places at once. It was horrific. It was ...
“They might be controlling the iron giants from here,” she said, slowly. It didn’t seem likely – the people were clearly victims, not like the controllers she’d seen in Celeste – but the possibility had to be acknowledged. “Or they might be up to something else.”
The eerie sense they were being watched grew stronger as they walked further into the complex, inspecting pieces of machinery on the way. There was no rhyme or reason to the layout – one structure was a tangled mass of human brains, another was a device that could have passed for a steampunk airship engine – but the glimmer of an idea was nagging at her, something awful. She couldn’t quite bring the idea into the light, but what little she did understand reminded her of something ... something she’d seen. But she wasn’t sure what. Her memory was hazy.
She grew more and more anxious the longer they were there, especially when they watched slaves making their way through a pair of arches, their faces blank ...
But nothing happened.
Her eyes narrowed. What was the point? She had met too many people who delighted in forcing their inferiors to bend the knee, but the Hierarchy had never struck her in revelling in power for the sake of it. It had to serve some kind of greater purpose ...
But what?
Her mind raced as they moved from chamber to chamber. Some were lined with towering masses of crystal, like the chambers under Whitehall, while others seemed a great deal more modern. She couldn’t help wondering if she’d been wrong, if there had been a nexus point under the city ... one she’d reignited with the rest of the dead nexus points. Or ... she shook her head as the wards grew stronger, brushing against their minds. They were running out of time. Their fake soulmark wouldn’t last much longer.
She stopped suddenly as they entered another chamber. A device hung in the exact centre, a complex network of metal and magic that reminded her of a magiwriter ... no, that was a magiwriter ... but it wasn’t the device that caught her attention. A tiny loop of metal rested on top of the device, no bigger than the rings she’d used to anchor her first batteries, with a flicker of light dancing in the centre. She sucked in her breath as the flicker grew brighter with every passing second, seeming to expand into infinity. The air pulsed with raw magic. She hadn’t been wrong, but she hadn’t been entirely right either.
