The Right Side of History (Schooled In Magic Book 22), Christopher Nuttall [books to read romance TXT] 📗

insisted I take the oaths, she thought, numbly. The apprenticeship oaths weren’t completely binding - Jan wouldn’t have been able to defy Master Lucknow if he’d been sworn to obey without question - but it would have made it harder for her to stand against Void. No one would have questioned him demanding she take the oaths. His peers would be more surprised that he hadn’t, if they ever found out. What is he doing?

The thought nagged at her as she turned the corner and stopped. The stairwell had come to a dead stop. The walls blocked any further passage. Emily cursed under her breath, then pushed a finger against the stone. It was solid. Void had to have started to reprogram the school. She glanced back, half-expecting her way out to be blocked as well. Void could have kept her prisoner effortlessly, waiting for simple thirst and starvation to quash all resistance before he moved in and took her. Instead, the passage gaped open. She ran back and headed down the corridor to a statue of a long-forgotten noble warrior, concealing a secret passageway. The hatch opened when she touched the switch, allowing her to step inside and hurry down the stairs. Void might not know the passageway was there, she told herself. She hadn’t known until Shadye had used it to get her into the nexus chamber.

Magic pulsed through the school as she reached the bottommost level. Below, there were chambers and passageways that belonged to Old Whitehall, vast complexes that should have been sealed years ago. Gordian had been trying to find a way to undermine her control over the nexus point, she recalled grimly. The bastard might have accidentally given his school to someone with far darker aims. She gritted her teeth as she opened the hatch and stepped out into the antechamber. The walls were glowing with light. She could sense something powerful and dangerous in the next chamber, a piece of spellwork that was both fantastically complex and completely opaque. There were so many components spinning through the spell network that she couldn’t even begin to guess what it was doing. And...

Emily nearly tripped over a man on the floor. She jumped back and stared. Gordian was on the ground, shaking helplessly. His hands clutched her legs in shock. Emily knelt beside him and touched his forehead, trying to determine what had happened. His link to Whitehall, the connection to the wards he’d borne since he’d assumed his post, had been snapped. The shock had nearly killed him. Emily reached into his mind, trying to draw on his memories, but couldn’t pull anything coherent from the maelstrom. His magic felt damaged, just like Sergeant Miles’s. Emily wondered if they’d both tried to channel immense surges of power and suffered for it or...

Her heart nearly stopped. What if... what if Void had made the sergeant’s condition worse?

She didn’t want to believe it. Lady Barb had been tending to the sergeant ever since the end of the war. She’d have noticed, surely, if he’d been cursed. And yet... there had been something odd about his condition. The Nameless World didn’t dare spend any time or resources on studying mental illnesses, let alone trying to cure them, but logically Sergeant Miles should have recovered quickly or gone downhill so rapidly someone would need to cut his throat before it was too late. Instead, he’d remained oddly stable...

Lady Barb would have sensed a curse, Emily told herself. Wouldn’t she?

She stood, doing her best to ignore Gordian’s babbling. They’d never liked each other, but... he deserved better. He grabbed her ankle, trying to keep her in place. She hesitated, then shaped a stunning spell and knocked him out. The books insisted it was possible to knock someone out cleanly with a single blow, but reality was rarely so obliging. Gordian had enough mental problems without her adding to them. Even if she managed to stop Void, the odds were good he’d be spending the rest of his days in the Halfway House.

The magic grew stronger as she strode towards the nexus chamber. It had always felt welcoming, as if it was a part of her, but now the raging torrent of power felt somehow... tainted. She grimaced, remembering when the dead nexus points had reignited and brought the entire network back to life. She’d been told there’d been power surges all over the Allied Lands. The White City was effectively inaccessible, unless one wanted to take the risk of being warped by raw and uncontrolled magic. It might make a good place to hide...

She stopped, long enough to try to study the spellwork again. There were odd flickers of something familiar, within the magic, all woven together into a coherent whole that defied understanding. The entrancement charm was a very tiny fragment of the spell, she thought, although it was hard to be sure. She wanted to cover her eyes as she resumed her walk, although she knew it was pointless. There was so much magic in the chamber that she felt as if she were staring into a blinding light. She was sure he was ahead of her, if only because there had to be someone directing the spell, but she couldn’t sense him. Even he was insignificant compared to the glow.

He’ll have problems sensing me, too, she told herself. It was wishful thinking, but she clung to it anyway. He’ll be as blind as I am.

The air pulsed with power as she reached the archway leading into the nexus chamber itself; the ground thrummed, a steady beating like a... heart, a human heart. She stopped, her legs unwilling to take her any further. It was hard, so hard, to keep pushing forward. The arch was reassuringly solid, but the light beyond was so bright... she tried to focus, tried to tell herself it wasn’t really there, yet she couldn’t convince herself for a moment. The light sharpened, revealing the pillars she’d first seen seven years ago. Lord