Hasdrubal's Tale

Chapter Three

Under other circumstances, our house would have been a marvel.

It rested just inside the estate’s walls, within the grounds and yet far enough from the mansion for us to be unobserved. The brick walls were strengthened by our spells, keeping out prying eyes; there were bedrooms for each of us, a potions lab, a spellchamber and a large kitchen, stocked with produce from right across the countryside. The servants refused to clean our chambers, but we didn’t mind. The servants weren’t loyal to us. If we’d chosen to live there, we would have been very happy with it. But we hadn’t and we weren’t.

“Uncle Mago has made it clear,” Void said, after recounting the entire meeting to Hamilcar and Himilco. “We will not be invited to the Gathering, now or ever, unless we convince the council they have to take us seriously. We are good enough to carry out tasks for them—” he’d spent some time expounding on his theory about the true purpose of our last mission “—but not to be counted as part of the family. What are we going to do?”

“We could be childish,” Hamilcar suggested. “Legally, they still have to treat us as children.”

“Maybe so, but we are adults,” I pointed out. Children were supposed to be seen and never heard. “Do you want to be treated as a child for the rest of your life?”

“Aunt Hilda was treated as a child,” Himilco reminded us.

“Aunt Hilda was touched in the head,” Void countered. “She was teetering on the brink of insanity for years. She didn’t know who she was… she couldn’t even go to the toilet without help, let alone wash and dress herself. Her magic was skewed, dangerous to herself and everyone else. I ask you, are we anything like that?”

“And Aunt Hilda died under suspicious circumstances,” Hamilcar added. “Might we?”

I grimaced. I could see the family’s point, when they’d quietly decided Aunt Hilda could never be regarded as an adult. She’d been mentally disabled, to the point that — if she’d grown up anywhere else — she would have been hidden away in the attic or exposed to the elements long ago. Instead, the family had tried to cure her. One of their attempts had gone wrong and she’d died. Or so I’d been told. We weren’t the only ones who suspected she’d quietly been killed before her magic, constantly sparking dangerously, got someone else killed.

“They can’t treat us like that,” Himilco said.

“They do treat us as children,” Void said. “How many things can’t we do, because we are not considered legal adults?”

“We can go,” Hamilcar said. “Pack up our stuff and leave.”

“And go where?” I asked the question, but everyone was thinking it. “Where can we go?”

“Where can we go, without the family name?” Void met my eyes. “They want us to leave. They want us to abandon the family.”

“You don’t know that,” Himilco said.

“I do.” Void sounded very certain. “They can’t kick us out without the council’s agreement, and they can’t get that agreement unless we give them good cause. The councillors might not like us — they fear us — but we are our father’s trueborn sons and if they try to kick us our without a very good reason there’ll be a revolt in the ranks. Too many councillors will worry it’ll set a precedent that could be used against them, a few years down the line. No, they can’t kick us out. But they can make us miserable until we leave of our own accord.”

I feared he was right. The family council was doing everything it could to make it clear we weren’t welcome. They’d done everything short of sending minstrels to our door… not, I supposed, that they’d find anyone willing to do the job for any amount of money. Minstrels, heralds and messengers were very unpopular, particularly the ones who brought bad news or caterwauled their way across the world. We’d be quite within our legal rights to change them into birds, permanently. It would certainly improve their singing.

“Right,” Hamilcar said. “And you want to stay with people who don’t want you? Want us?”

“We are family,” Void snapped. “We are children of House Barca, just like everyone else who will be presented at the Gathering. By what right do they tell us we don’t belong? By what right do they deprive us of our birthright? It should be ours. They should raise us up in pride, for all we have done for them! And instead, they want us to go?

“It’s not going to change. They’ll keep us dangling on a string, constantly holding out the promise of acceptance, without ever granting it to us. We’ll be children for the rest of our lives, constantly denied the rights of adulthood… you know they blocked my apprenticeship and would have blocked yours” — he nodded to Hamilcar — “if we hadn’t obscured the plan until the deal was done. They won’t change. They won’t accept us, unless we make it impossible for them not to accept us.”

“We can just walk away,” Hamilcar said. “And have done with it.”

“And let them win?” Void looked from face to face. “Why should we?”

I had no answer. I was angry too. We all were. The urge to do something — anything — to force the council to acknowledge us was overwhelming. It would be easy to go, but we wouldn’t have the family name or access to family resources… I doubted, somehow, they’d start screaming for our return the moment they ran into trouble. We were useful tools — no doubt about it — but hardly unique. There was no shortage of sorcerers willing to serve as deniable assets, in exchange for money and support. They’d have fewer problems with obeying the family too.

Perhaps we should have walked away, but we couldn’t let it go.

“I take it you have a plan,” I said. “What do you intend to do? Pick a fight with a necromancer?”

“We could take a necromancer,” Himilco said. “They have the power, we have the skill.”

“And that wouldn’t end badly at all,” Void said, with heavy sarcasm. “The last sorcerer who took down a necromancer? They accused him of being a necromancer himself.”

“They didn’t understand how he’d done it,” I reminded him. “There was a certain amount of luck involved.”

We brainstormed back and forth for hours, coming up with an entire stream of ideas that were impossible, crazy or both. We could try to clear the Blighted Lands of necromancers and claim them for ourselves, but there was no way we could kill them all. Killing one would push us to the limit, perhaps even beyond. We could sail into the ocean, see if there really was a continent on the far side of the world, yet we knew that no one who’d ever gone beyond the western horizon had ever been seen again. We argued over challenging a king for his kingdom, then debated the merits of setting up our own country, and then argued about the possibilities for simply walking into the Gathering and demanding respect and acknowledgement. None of the ideas seemed very workable. They certainly didn’t have any real prospect of convincing the family to accept us.

My heart sank as we sat back in our chairs. There was nothing. The hard truth was that there was nothing we could do with any guarantee of success, nothing that would convince the family to overlook our unfortunate birth. Our frustration hung in the air like a shroud, shared amongst us… perhaps it would be better to just leave. It would be easier to get respect as wandering sorcerers, rather than legal children.

“There’s one other possibility,” Void said. “But it will be incredibly dangerous.”

I felt the flicker of concern running through the air. Of all of us, Void was the one most inclined to push the limits as far as they would go. He was willing to take risks that would daunt normal men, even powerful sorcerers. Anything he considered incredibly dangerous was likely to be terrifying beyond words. And yet, he was also the most capable of thinking outside the box. His apprenticeship had been… unusual. His master had been a jack-of-all-trades and master-of-few.

Hamilcar cleared his throat. “What do you have in mind?”

“We need something that will make it impossible for the family to refuse to acknowledge us,” Void said. “We need a bargaining chip they simply cannot turn down.”

“We know that,” Hamilcar said. “What do we have?”

“Nothing,” Himilco said. “Nothing unique…”

“Not so,” Void said. “We have an… insight… no one else has.”

I leaned forward. “Get to the point.”

“We forced a demon to consume itself,” Void said, flatly. “I suggest we convert one into a power source.”

“What?” It was all I could do to speak. “Are you mad?”

“That didn’t work out too well for the last guy,” Hamilcar pointed out. “The demon he summoned nearly broke free.”

Himilco nodded. “Making a bargain with a demon is a bad idea,” he agreed. “We’d wind up dead. Or worse.”

I frowned. It was madness. Demons simply could not be trusted. The books we’d read had had hundreds of warnings, horror stories about the dangers of dealing with demons. No matter what you did, no matter how smart you were, trying to outwit a demon was incredibly dangerous. If you were lucky, you were killed very quickly; if you weren’t, the demon would lead you steadily towards the disaster, dropping a breadcrumb trail of knowledge and power that led right over a cliff.

Demons could not be trusted. Ever.

“I’m not talking about making a deal with a demon,” Void said, firmly. “I’m talking about using it as a source of power. We summon the demon and drain its power, using what remains of it to summon another demon, perhaps even open a permanent nexus point.”

My heart skipped a beat. No one understood how nexus points — sources of near-infinite magic — really worked. No one knew where the power came from, or what happened when the nexus point remained untapped. But one thing everyone knew was that, if you controlled a nexus point, you had enough power at your disposal to shake the world. You could erect the crudest of wards and yet keep them up against an army of sorcerers, just by drawing on the nexus point; you could build entire castles of raw magic, structures that literally could not exist without the nexus point. I’d heard stories of castles in the clouds or giant towers, reaching up to infinity; I’d seen Whitehall and Rose Red and Heart’s Eye, places shaped and maintained by nexus points. If we could tap into such power, even on a small scale, we’d have it made. The family would have to acknowledge us, if they wanted to partake in our bounty.

Himilco chuckled. “They couldn’t turn us down…”

“If it works,” Hamilcar said. His voice was hopeful, but he knew — we all knew — that it wouldn’t be easy. “Can we make it work?”

Void outlined his concept. I listened carefully, feeling a flicker of admiration. He didn’t think small. No one else could do it — no ritualists matched us, when it came to working as a team — but we could. The ritual would be incredibly complex — and we’d need things we couldn’t obtain easily — yet we could do it. We talked for hours, working our way through the plan and questioning every detail. It wasn’t easy — everything had to be checked and rechecked while bearing in mind it was purely theoretical — but it could be done.

“Theory is no substitute for practice,” Hamilcar said, echoing my own thoughts. “We need a certain amount of magic to trigger the spell and… we’re not going to get it.”

Himilco nodded. “Not unless we’re willing to risk necromancy.”

“We were designed to channel vast amounts of magic,” Void said, stubbornly. “We can do it.”

“No one can,” Himilco said. He tapped the table, warningly. “And even if we did, we’d have to kill someone.”

“Uncle Mago,” Hamilcar said, darkly. “No one would miss him.”

“The family would notice if we took him,” Himilco pointed out. “We are talking about sacrificing — about murdering — someone. That’s what we’re doing. And it will taint the ritual.”

My mind raced. Himilco was right. There was no way to get so much power without necromancy and no way to use necromancy without driving ourselves mad. And even if we took the risk, we’d have killed someone for power. The long-term effects of such an act might be disastrous. We were talking about the wildest of magics, the most dangerous… the arts no one would touch with a broomstick, if they had any other choice. Void’s concept was an elegant one, yet we couldn’t make the jump from theory to practice. Or could we…?

“There’s another way to do it,” I said, slowly. “We find a wild magic shrine and use the tainted magic as a power source.”

Void grinned at me. “Like we used the wild magic to force the demon to destroy itself?”

“In a manner of speaking,” I said. I took the parchment and started drawing out ward diagrams. Hamilcar looked unimpressed by my sketches but made sure to neaten up my concepts. “There are hundreds of places with high magic levels, places no one dares go unless they want to die. We go to one of them and use it as a power source.”

“And then use it to drag a demon out of the darkness,” Void finished. He took the parchment and added a few changes of his own. We knew what had gone wrong, back at the mansion. We had no intention of making the same mistakes. If the wards started to fray, the demon would be shoved back into the darkness before it was too late. “It should work.”

“Yeah,” Himilco said. His voice was flat. “There’s just one problem.”

“What?” Void scowled, as one does when a brilliant theory is threatened with a hefty dose of reality. “What is the problem?”

“We need a sacrifice,” Himilco said. His voice was cold. “What are you prepared to offer, to have the demon come to us?”

“Shit,” I muttered. “What do we offer?”

“Uncle Mago?” Hamilcar snorted as we glowered at him. “Like I said, no one would miss him.”

“It has to be something of value,” Himilco said. “Personal value. And how much value do we see in him?”

I winced. “None,” I said. It was cruel, but true. “None of us would piss on him if he was on fire.”

“We might,” Himilco said. “But pissing on someone isn’t exactly a sign of respect.”

“We need something of value,” Hamilcar said. “What?”

We exchanged glances. All we had, all we really had, was each other. There was no way we could use one of us as a sacrifice and yet, what else did we have? The traditional virgin sacrifice would be a monumentally bad idea, if we wanted to ensure our rite was untainted by murder. And…

“There isn’t much that’s ours,” Hamilcar said. “The house? The books? The mansion? They all belong to the family.”

“True,” Void said. “We could offer up a portion of our souls?”

I shuddered. I wasn’t the only one. Soul magic was as dangerous as necromancy, often more so. The idea of splitting a soul was abhorrent. There were horror stories that suggested anyone who tried wound up insane or worse, a monster in human form. Or dead. I believed them. The soul was the thing that separated us from the animals, even if we were turned into animals, and giving up even a part of it would be disastrous. We wouldn’t know what we’d lost until it was too late, and if the horror stories were to be believed we might not notice or care.

“No,” I said, firmly. “Bad idea. Really bad idea.”

“There’s another possibility,” Himilco said, slowly. He spoke slowly, as if every word was gold. “We give up our name.”

“Our name?” Void sounded unconvinced. “You are aware, are you not, that we’re trying to get the family to acknowledge us?”

“Yes,” Himilco said. “We need something to tempt a demon. And it has to be something important. And if we are gambling for such stakes, we should try to offer something that will either take us to the very highest levels or sending us plunging down into the darkness.”

We exchanged glances, then agreed.

“We need to move fast,” Void said. He clapped his hands and stood. “Get some sleep. We’ll set out in the morning, before they find something else for us to do. They’ll probably be glad to see us go.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “Where do you want to go?”

“Whitehall,” Void said. “Or near Whitehall. There are quite a few places we can use that aren’t monitored regularly. They’ll notice us eventually, but it will be too late.”

He looked at me. “You are still friendly with Old Stinky, aren’t you?”

“Professor Bodoh,” I corrected. His breath might be unpleasant — he needed to brush his teeth, then wash his mouth out with potion — but he was a charmsmith of no small repute. I’d been one of his favourites, back when I’d been a student. Void had been lucky his skill in magic was enough to make the professor overlook his cheek. “And yes, we do talk.”

“Good,” Void said. “Here’s what I want you to do…”

Should we have thought better of it? Yes, we should. It was foolish of us to risk so much for so little. But we were young and hurting and supremely confident in our power and skill. We could handle anything, we told ourselves. We were proud…

… And we all know what pride goes before, don’t we?