‘I’m very happy to chose Verity Faversham,’ Malik said, smiling as the dark-haired girl walked into the torchlight. ‘I’m surprised she wasn’t picked first.’
When the girl joined her team, Fletcher couldn’t help but stare as she shook out a bundle of sable hair. She was beautiful, perhaps more so than any girl he had ever seen, with a heart-shaped face and large, expressive eyes that seemed to linger on him as she approached her team. For a moment, her name made no impression on him, and it took a growl of disgust from Othello to remind him.
‘She looks just like her grandmother Ophelia, don’t you think, Fletcher?’
Fletcher saw the resemblance, but found it difficult to associate her with the hard-eyed woman who ruled the Triumvirate with Zacharias and Didric. Even her Inquisitor father, Charles, seemed a long way from the girl, despite their shared pale complexions. Verity greeted Malik with a warm smile and embraced Penelope and Rufus with open arms.
Sylva elbowed him in the side, and Fletcher realised he was staring. He shook his head, trying to remember that the Favershams were enemies.
‘She’s a first year?’ Fletcher asked.
‘Aye,’ Othello confirmed. ‘Though I didn’t see much of her around. Kept herself to herself, spent most of her free time in her room studying or away in Corcillum.’
Fletcher watched as the rest of the teams lined up, waiting for Rook’s next announcement.
‘As you all know, the scrying stones that have made this mission possible were generously provided by Tarquin and Isadora’s father, Verity’s grandmother and Didric himself,’ Rook said, nodding at the respective students. ‘I think we should all take a moment to thank the Forsyth, Faversham and Cavell families for their generosity.’
He stared expectantly at the other students. The Forsyth twins and Didric grinned as Fletcher and his team muttered their unenthusiastic thanks, although Verity simply blushed and looked at her feet.
‘Very good,’ Rook continued. ‘Now, I have an announcement for you all. There is a prize for this mission, to keep things interesting for both the participants and the spectators around the Empire. Whichever team succeeds in rescuing Lady Cavendish will receive one thousand sovereigns, to be divided equally among the team members. There will also be another five hundred sovereigns for any team that participates in the destruction of the goblin eggs. After all, there’s nothing like some healthy competition.’
He grinned at the students as the room filled with furtive whispers. It was a king’s ransom, enough to outfit a small army. The reward came as no surprise to Fletcher, though it mattered little to him. If, in the depths of the jungle, a team lost heart, the reward would be a strong motivator for them to do their duty.
‘If you would turn around,’ Rook ordered, pointing at the doorway behind them, and Fletcher spun. Four demons stood in the entrance, three of which he instantly recognised.
‘Teams, meet your new demons,’ Rook said.
Lysander, Lovett’s Griffin, walked proudly down the steps, beating the air with his wings to send a spray of sand in Isadora’s team’s direction. It was clear whose team he had been selected for, as he made his way straight towards Fletcher before pawing the ground beside them.
‘She can’t,’ Fletcher whispered, his heart dropping at the thought of Lovett confined to a wheelchair, alone. ‘He’s her legs, her wings. He’s her best friend. All she’ll have left is Valens.’
‘She wants to protect us, Fletcher. This is her way of doing that,’ Sylva murmured. ‘We’ll bring Lysander back, safe and sound. And it will be as if she’s right there with us. She can scry using her mind, practically inhabit his body like she did with Valens. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s doing it now.’
Lysander gave Fletcher a nudge with his beak, as if to draw Fletcher’s attention to the next demon that bounded down the stairs. It was a gesture that felt unusually human and, as Fletcher glanced down, he saw Lysander wink at him. Lovett was in there all right, and Fletcher grinned back at her.
Arcturus’s wolf-like Canid, Sacharissa, scampered past, pausing only to give Lysander a playful nudge. The Griffin lashed out with a claw, but only succeeded in catching the end of the four-eyed Canid’s bushy black tail.
‘Looks like Arcturus was thinking along the same lines,’ Fletcher said as Seraph welcomed Sacharissa with a strip of jerky, miraculously produced from a pocket in his jacket. Though Griffins were more powerful and versatile than Canids, Fletcher wished that he could have both on his team. With Arcturus and Lovett’s demons at his side, he would feel much safer in the gloom of the orc jungles.
‘What the hell is that thing?’ Cress asked, pointing, as an enormous, skeletal creature, roughly humanoid in shape, slunk down the stairs.
It had thick, branching antlers that swept out from either side of its head like tangled thorns. The head was like a hairless mix of deer and wolf, with hungry, black eyes that swept the room. Long, dangling arms knuckled the sand ahead of it, the hands tipped with razor-sharp talons. Its flesh was the mottled grey of a corpse, with a stench to match. Despite its rangy frame, the musculature shifted beneath the tight skin as it moved, like corded wire being stretched and tautened.
‘A Wendigo,’ Othello replied, his voice tinged with a mix of awe and horror. ‘Level thirteen and rare to boot. That’s Zacharias Forsyth’s primary demon. Almost everything we know about the Wendigo was learned from studying that very creature – they’re almost never seen in the ether.’
‘No mystery where that thing’s ending up,’ Fletcher said, as the creature came to a stop beside Isadora’s team. He grinned as Tarquin, the closest to it, wrinkled his nose at the smell.
‘My Caliban shall be joining Malik’s team,’ Rook announced, beckoning the final demon over, his own.
It was Rook’s Minotaur, a burly beast clad in a shaggy black pelt. It was powerfully built, all brawn and meat, where the larger Wendigo was sinew and hard bone. The bullish head snorted through its thick, piggish nostrils as it clopped down the stairs on cloven hooves, each breath like the pumping of the bellows in Berdon’s old forge.
‘Thank you for sponsoring us, Inquisitor,’ Malik said, bowing low.
‘We can’t let the Saladins’ and Favershams’ only heirs go unprotected,’ Rook said, pointedly ignoring Penelope and Rufus, whose families, though noble, were not as wealthy as the rest. Rufus, however, seemed not to notice, grasping Rook’s hand and shaking it emphatically.
‘You won’t regret this, Inquisitor,’ Rufus said. ‘My elder brother will reward you tenfold when we rescue my mother, I swear to that!’
‘You shall be meeting your guides, who have been chosen for you by your sponsors, tonight,’ Rook said, extricating his hand with a grimace. ‘Malik’s team, stay here with me. The rest of you, follow the demons.’
20
Lysander led them out of the arena and back into the atrium, with Sacharissa padding along beside him. Fletcher expected them to go out through the main entrance, as Caliban did, but the two demons continued up the western staircase instead.
It was a long climb, but he entertained himself by watching as the usually airborne Lysander slipped and slid on his way up, unused to having to mount steps, especially narrow winding ones such as these. Sacharissa waited patiently at the top of each staircase, her bright blue eyes keeping a protective watch over the struggling Griffin.
‘Maybe you should have flown up and met us at the top,’ Fletcher laughed, earning himself a stern glare from Lysander which could only have come from Lovett.
Fletcher had rarely entered this side of the building during his first year at Vocans, for the rooms were mostly the teachers’ private quarters, servants’ lodgings, a large launderette and storage rooms. It was no surprise then when they went right to the top floor’s main corridor and headed for the north-west tower.
As they followed the two demons, Fletcher couldn’t help but admire the paintings and tapestries that lined the topmost corridor, depicting ancient battles f
ought without gunpowder weapons. It was only when he passed an older painting, the colours faded and peeling from the canvas, that he paused.
It showed not orcs being vanquished, but dwarves. In the background, dwarven women had their veils torn away, while in the foreground, dwarven warriors kneeled in rows, their beards being clipped by heroically dressed men in shining armour. Around them, the corpses of the fallen dwarves were scattered about the scene, and above, flying summoners looked on, their lances bloodied from base to tip.
All three dwarves as well as Seraph and Sylva stopped beside him, while Rory and Genevieve wandered on, their eyes skimming over the painting as if it were no different from the rest.
‘This is what we are fighting against,’ Othello said, his voice barely above a whisper as he traced the fallen figures in the painting with the tip of his fingers. ‘It could happen all over again. I have studied our historical texts, learned how swiftly the hatred can take root, on both sides. Four times the dwarves have rebelled, and failed. Four times our race was castigated, reduced to vermin in the eyes of humanity. We must break this cycle. Only through unity can we be truly free.’
Atilla strode away in disgust, and Fletcher could not blame him. The image was loathsome, not something to be glorified in the hallowed halls of Vocans. Seraph ran after him, but the arm he draped over the young dwarf’s shoulders was shaken away.
‘Come on,’ Fletcher muttered. As he turned to walk on, there was a strange crackling sound. He looked over his shoulder to see that the painting’s surface had been charred black, and there was an etched fire-spell symbol floating before it.
‘Oops,’ Cress shrugged, patting Fletcher on the back as she walked by, ‘my hand slipped.’
They jogged to catch up with Rory and Genevieve, who had almost reached the top of the north-western tower. The stairwell had layers of dust coating all surfaces, broken only by a narrow pathway where it had been disturbed, as if only one person ever used it.
Finally, the two teams crushed together before a barred door, deeply embedded with iron mechanisms to keep it secure. Lysander lifted his front claw and tapped against it, a strange mix of scratches and knocks that were a code of some sort. After a pause, the locks began to twist and rattle. Then, with an ominous creak, the doors swung open.
The inside was as gloomy as the stairwell, the main lighting coming from a single chandelier in the high ceiling above.
‘Come in, come in,’ a gravelly voice called from deep within. ‘Don’t knock anything over!’
Fletcher and Sylva led the way, releasing wyrdlights from the tips of their fingers to illuminate their way forward. The blue light cast an eerie glow over a vast array of shelves, tables and workbenches, each one covered in glassware and tools.
To his left, Fletcher saw demons hanging suspended in jars of pale green liquid, just as the goblin had been at the council meeting. Many were missing limbs or heads, and the surfaces of the tables displayed their dissected remains. On the right there were potted plants instead of demons, as well as bubbling beakers of viscous liquid, slow boiled from below by miniature furnaces.
Each plant was stranger than the last. One had heavy, bulbous flowers that pursed and opened at them like kissing lips. Another was almost entirely comprised of tuberous roots that seemed to twitch towards the light as they passed by.
‘Don’t be shy, make yourselves at home,’ the voice uttered, and a figure stepped out of the shadows.
Her skin was darker than Seraph’s, with a cap of tight, greying curls on her head. She wore a long coat of white cotton, with blackened leather gloves extending over the sleeves. A bright, almost mad grin was spread across her face, and she peered at them through a pair of thick spectacles that made her eyes appear twice as large.
‘You’ll have to forgive the mess,’ she said, motioning at the tables covered in vegetation and body parts around her. ‘Jeffrey was supposed to clean up, but he snuck off to watch the Tournament instead.’
The group remained silent, and she shifted nervously, as if she expected them to speak.
‘Cup of tea? Or was it coffee?’ she asked, motioning to a simmering cauldron a few feet away. It was filled with an unidentifiable brown substance that shared the consistency of mud. ‘Maybe ginseng? Cocoa? It was something tasty, anyway.’
‘Umm, no thanks,’ Fletcher said, politely. There was a glop as a large bubble burst on the surface.
She stared at them some more, the grin slowly leaving her face until Fletcher cleared his throat and asked what they were all wondering.
‘Who are you? What is this place?’
Her smile returned and she motioned them over to the table beside her. It was better lit than the others, with a lantern suspended above it.
‘I am Electra Mabosi, from the land of Swazulu across the Vesanian Sea. I am a botanist, biologist, chemist, demonologist. Little bit of everything really. Alchemist is probably the best word. But I am not your guide, if that’s what you’re worried about. Haven’t left this room in four years and I don’t plan on doing so any time soon.’
Fletcher looked around the gloomy room and tried to picture spending the past four years of his life in such a place. It was better than his prison cell, but not by much. What kind of person would want to stay there for so long?
‘I’ve been doing secret research for King Harold and Provost Scipio since I arrived here. I keep them abreast of developments while I can, but they won’t let me get involved in the teaching, no matter how much I ask. They say my time is better spent researching.’
She pulled a corked jar from a shelf nearby as she spoke, and removed a bedraggled demon corpse as large as a human hand from within. She lay it on the worktable in front of her and unravelled a leather roll of surgical tools beside it.
‘See here. This is a juvenile Arach, found dead in the ether a few months ago. Fulfilment level six, rare but not uncommon. I’ve been saving it for this demonstration. Finally, I get a chance to teach.’
It looked like a large, hairy spider, with a glittering nest of eyes in its head, a pair of hooked fangs beneath and a spiky stinger like a bee’s on its behind. Electra snipped each leg off with a pair of heavy scissors, as if she were trimming fingernails. She swept the amputated limbs into a bucket on the floor, leaving only the head and thorax. Genevieve shuddered and jumped away, for a leg missed the bucket and landed beside her feet.
‘See this hole, below the stinger?’ Electra asked, using a pair of tongs to hold it steady. ‘The Arach is capable of shooting a sticky, mana-based substance from there, not unlike gossamer.’
She tugged the lantern above her closer and peered at the sodden specimen.
‘We must be careful, the bristles on its body can become detached, floating in the air and irritating its victims’ eyes and skin. Jeffrey tells me that Lord Cavell’s own Arach has already caused a few problems in some of the first year’s lessons, is that not so, Cress?’
‘Aye,’ Cress agreed, scratching at her wrist absent-mindedly. ‘Didn’t stop itching for a week.’
Fletcher shuddered, for the dead creature’s eyes seemed to bore into him. He hated to think what a full-grown Arach would look like, though he had seen diagrams in his demonology lessons. It was poor luck that Didric had one of his own, for it would be a formidable opponent if it ever duelled with Ignatius.
Electra hummed a merry tune to herself as she pushed a tube-like instrument into the orifice beneath the demon’s stinger, as if she were coring an apple. When she drew it out, she was left with a cylinder of slippery organs, which she spread out on the table with the tongs.
‘That is repulsive,’ Rory said, running his hand through his shock of blond, spiky hair. His face lost what little colour it had, and he went to join Genevieve on the edge of the group.
‘Don’t be such a baby,’ Electra muttered, grasping Fletcher by a gloved hand and dragging him in beside her. ‘What do you see there?’
For a moment Fletcher had the mad suspicion that she
wanted him to divine the future, as orc shamans claimed to be able to do with the entrails of their enemies. But when he looked closer, he recognised a strange symbol, imprinted in one of the organs like a brand.
‘It’s … a spell symbol,’ Fletcher said, shaking his head with confusion.
‘Yes! Do you even know how spells and etching were first discovered?’ Electra asked, turning so swiftly that the corer dashed a droplet of slime on to Seraph’s cheek. He retched, pawing at his face with his sleeve.
‘Demons have always used their special abilities by channelling their mana through organic symbols within them,’ Electra continued, ignoring Seraph’s moans of disgust. ‘The first summoners must have realised that, dissecting their dead demons as I have just done and copying the symbols down. My mission here is to add to the roster of spells available to our battlemages through my research. It is a long forgotten art, which I have revived. I am not a summoner myself though, which does tend to complicate things.’
She turned to Fletcher and grasped him by the shoulders.
‘Your Salamander, for example, will have the fire symbol somewhere within its throat. If they would just let me teach here, you would all know this!’
She sighed with frustration. Fletcher caught Othello’s eye and they grinned at each other knowingly. Even compared to a zealot like Rook, Electra was obviously a little too eccentric to teach at Vocans.
‘So what’s with all the plants then?’ Fletcher asked, pointing at a large pot with a fearsome looking plant within that resembled a thorny venus flytrap.
‘They’re demons too, technically,’ Electra said, caressing the stem as if it were a long-lost pet. ‘Plants from the ether. I haven’t found a single symbol in any of them, but I have discovered one thing. The petals, roots and leaves of certain species can be made into an elixir which, when drunk, will have useful effects.’
She pointed to a wooden rack of vials nearby – corked test tubes full of red, blue and yellow liquids.
‘Fortunately, Captain Lovett volunteered to test them. This one, when consumed, will heal the drinker of his or her wounds, just like the healing spell. It helped Captain Lovett partially recover from her paralysis.’ She withdrew a vial, swishing the blood-red contents back and forth.