The Grandmaster's Tale

Chapter 7

“Are you sure you want to do this?”

“Yes,” I said, flatly. Pepper had offered to accompany me, but … there was no point in both of us ending up in deep shit, if the whole affair went horribly wrong. “If I get caught, you swear blind you don’t know me.”

Mistress Constance snorted. “No, I can’t remember the person I worked beside for the last umpteen years,” she said, dryly. “Who are you, and what are you doing in my rooms?”

I rolled my eyes. “You know what I mean,” I said. “Let me take all the blame, while you carry on with the plan.”

“The plan,” Pepper said. “We don’t have a plan. Do we?”

“No,” I said. If we knew what Boscha was doing, we might be able to come up with a plan to counter it. But all we had were theories. “If this works, we might be able to come up with something.”

I scowled. The last five days had been … difficult. The new prefects carried out their duties in a manner that seemed designed to provoke an uprising, although the combination of superior magic and the grandmaster’s unstinting support was enough to keep the revolt to sullen muttering … for now. I’d wondered if the plan was to provoke an uprising, perhaps to provide an excuse to kick the great unwashed out of the school, but it seemed a little pointless. Boscha might be a Supremacist, yet even the most snooty Supremacist knew the importance of adding new blood to the older bloodlines. It made no sense. What was I missing?

“Be very careful,” Mistress Constance warned. She held up a vial, turning it over and over so the liquid glinted in the light. “Once you drink the potion, you’ll have two hours—at most—before it wears off.”

“I know,” I said. I took a breath. “It’s time.”

“Let’s hope he doesn’t come back early,” Pepper said. “We will try to warn you …”

I nodded as I took the vial, then left the chambers and made my way up the stairs. Boscha had left the building—I thought he’d gone to the brothel, judging by how carefully he’d slipped out—and there was no real danger of running into him unless he came back early, but there were other problems. The new prefects might notice something … or I’d catch them doing something I’d have to stop. I’d already caught one prefect meting out corporal punishment and another ordering younger students to write lines … I shook my head. Being a prefect was supposed to teach a student to be responsible, not give them a chance to indulge their sadistic side. If I had the power, I would abolish the position.

The air felt hot and heavy as I reached Boscha’s office, the heavy wooden doors suffused with powerful magic. It was an old tradition for students to try to break into the offices, but … very few ever succeeded. No one, as far as I knew, had ever broken into the Grandmaster’s office. It was regarded, with reason, as the hardest target in the school. I took the vial, opened the lid and downed the potion. It tasted ghastly, the magic making me feel a stranger in my own body. I gritted my teeth—for two hours, my magical signature would be practically identical to Boscha’s—and pushed open the door. It opened effortlessly, the wards drawing back smoothly. I was almost impressed. Boscha could have gone far, if he’d stayed with his studies.

And he could have kept his rooms safe, if he’d known he had a son who could be used as a source of blood, I thought. Alan’s blood was the key ingredient. It was close enough to his father’s to fool the wards, with a little fiddling. What you don’t know can hurt you.

I cast a night-vision spell and looked around. The office was surprisingly well organised. A handful of scrolls rested on the desk—some cheap parchment, some expensive—but otherwise there was nothing to suggest where I should begin. Three books rested on the bookshelf—it seemed wrong to have such a large shelf with only three books—and I took the time to check the titles. Two genealogical books—I’d had my fill of those when I’d been a child —and a detailed outline of the obligations and debts owed to Whitehall by Dragon’s Den. They were lucky, although they probably didn’t realise it. Whitehall didn’t demand very much from the town, unlike most aristocratic estates. I shook my head and examined the scrolls on the desk. None of them looked particularly important, except ....

Boscha would expect Daphne to deal with most of these, I thought. I’d known some high-ranking people who’d become so invested in every little detail they couldn’t see the forest for the trees, but Boscha wasn’t one of them. He did know how to delegate. He was so good at it that he didn’t have to do very much at all, as long as his staff did their job. Why are they here?

I looked closer. The records were quite detailed, but …

The parchment tingled with magic as I touched it. I swore under my breath. A palimpsest. I should have known. My family had used them frequently, when it wanted to send messages they didn’t want to be read by unfriendly eyes. Someone had written a message in charmed ink on the parchment, waited for it to fade, then written a second message over the first. Clever … and quite impossible to detect, if you weren’t the intended recipient. I wouldn’t be able to read the message, even if I guessed it was there, without Boscha’s help. Or at least some of his blood. They were so complex to produce that hardly anyone outside the magical families knew they existed, let alone used them.

I rested my hand against the parchment and watched as the writing shifted to reveal the hidden message. My eyes narrowed. Lord Pollux had been writing to Boscha—that was no surprise—and his message, even concealed, was so vague Walter’s father had left himself with far more than just plausible deniability. He dodged around the subject, listing objectives without ever mentioning what those objectives were … I suspected I wouldn’t have been able to comprehend anything if I hadn’t been raised by House Barca. I knew enough of the background to guess at some of the meaning, then infer others …

Lord Pollux knows Boscha is building an army, I thought, coldly. And he’s not the only one.

My blood ran cold as I started to put the pieces together. Boscha had recruited students from the most powerful magical families, the ones who believed—firmly—in Supremacist ideology. Boscha had promised the students rewards and … I shuddered, recalling what Walter had told Geraldine. There were seven board members, five of whom were either Supremacists themselves or inclined to go along with them. If their youngsters became a magical army, who could stop them taking control of the nexus points and declaring a Supremacist Empire? The old emperors were gone. I couldn’t see any of the mundane kings standing in their way. They’d be crushed like bugs.

Or turned into bugs and then crushed, I thought. I knew some of my relatives thought their magic gave them the right to rule. There’d be little resistance, if the Supremacists managed to take control of the nexus points. Why bother, when they’d be getting what they wanted? It won’t end well.

I put the parchment back on the desk—the hidden writing would fade, the moment I let go—and searched the rest of the office as thoroughly as I could without revealing any trace of my presence. I knew all the tricks—all the ways to hide something, from simple misdirection to concealment spells—but it still took me some time to find the hidden compartment under the throne and peek inside. I had to give Boscha credit. It was a neat place to hide stuff because no one would want to look there. The papers inside were very revealing, although most were so vague that—individually—they were almost useless. Collectively, they let me put the pieces together to reveal Boscha’s plan.

Grief, I thought, as I put everything back into place. Time was pressing. If he manages to build an army, a proper army, he might just get away with it.

My mind raced as I returned to the door, looked around the room to ensure everything was still in place, then stepped out. The papers had made it clear Boscha had invited the board, no matter what he’d told us. I guessed he wanted to show off his army … hell, he’d used Alan’s near-death as an excuse to get his followers out of the shadows and into the corridors. There weren’t that many of them yet, relatively speaking, but it didn’t matter. Thirty trained combat sorcerers were enough to dominate any magical household or vaporise a mundane army with a wave of their hands. And given time, Boscha could train more. Why not? He had the entire school at his disposal.

The corridor still felt uncomfortably warm as I hurried down the stairs, feeling my magic sparkle oddly. The potion was starting to wear off. I kept moving, passing the guards outside the dorms. I pretended not to see that one of them had been hexed, his nose replaced by a piggish snout. Clearly, he hadn’t had time to go see the healer … or he was too ashamed. I guessed the latter. Most magical aristos would sooner swallow their pride and seek help than walk around looking like … like someone who’d lost a duel so badly the winner couldn’t be bothered doing anything to hurt him. Two more prefects stepped out to block my way, then stopped dead as they realised who I was. I scowled as I walked past them. It would be an abuse of power to send them to the warden merely for irritating me …

And besides, Boscha would probably override the punishment anyway, I thought. I’d seen him offer all sorts of perks to his followers. What was one more? They’ll just wind up with more contempt for authority.

I knocked on Mistress Constance’s door, then stepped inside when it opened. “We have a problem,” I said, as I cast the privacy charms. “A big one. They’re planning a coup.”

Mistress Constance frowned. “Are they mad?”

“It might work,” Pepper said, after I explained what I’d found. “They’ll have at least a third of our society on their side from day one.”

“But …” Mistress Constance wasn’t so sure. “They can’t hope to control us all, can they?”

“If they can take control of most of the powerful families, and the nexus points, they could dominate the rest,” I said. The magical community had never been very good at keeping its rogues in line. It had never seen the need. The new government could quietly ignore anyone who opposed it or wait for its opponents to come to it. “How would they even coordinate any resistance?”

I gritted my teeth. Getting a bunch of unrelated magicians to work together was like herding cats, with the added danger of being zapped by someone who didn’t like your politics. There was no such thing as a magical army, not even the guilds or quarrels. The families were the only real hierarchal organisations in the magical communities and even they had problems, despite being bound together by blood and oaths. And they controlled most of the guilds … if they went bad, the outsiders would be unable to get organised in time to stop them. The mundanes didn’t matter. They could do as they were told or get turned into toads.

Pepper nodded. “And the board is coming here for … for what?”

“I think Boscha wants to show off,” I said. His instructions made little sense otherwise. I suspected, reading between the lines, he also wanted to show off his adherence to the Supremacists. “He shows how useful his army can be, then gets them ready to move on command.”

“There aren’t that many of them,” Mistress Constance insisted. “Is there enough?”

“They won’t be alone,” Pepper said, quietly. “The families have fighters of their own.”

“And it might be happening elsewhere, too,” I added. “Stronghold? Mountaintop? I can’t see Laughter going along with it, but … stranger things have happened.”

“Or the school has already been earmarked for destruction,” Pepper said. “There were quite a few people who argued Laughter should be shut down, even before the empire fell. The witches are … not popular.”

“They dare to live independent lives,” Mistress Constance snapped.

I suspected she was right. The magical families demanded service from their women—and men—in exchange for their family privileges. Marry the family’s choices, bear their children … the families could cope with homosexuals and lesbians, and saw no reason to keep happy couples from coming to their own arrangements, but the most important thing was to enhance the bloodlines by marrying the right person. The witches laughed in the face of such demands and … I shuddered, suddenly, at the thought of someone like Geraldine being reduced to breeding stock. Walter had told her she’d be his concubine … hell, I doubted she’d even be that. For all I knew, she’d be forced to bear child after child until her body gave out.

“Right,” Pepper said. “What do we do about it?”

“They haven’t got everything in place yet, or they would have moved already,” I said. I found it hard to believe they’d risk sending Walter and his buddies into a real war without a lot more preparation. It took three years to train a combat sorcerer, and they normally started after they graduated. “We have time to head it off at the pass.”

“Unless Boscha isn’t training the primary fighters, but their reinforcements,” Pepper countered. “They might already be ready to move.”

I doubted it. I’d seen enough conspiracies to know that the odds of exposure increased with every person brought into the circle. There were ways to get people involved without ever quite telling them what you were doing—I’d seen that, too—but that upped the chances of someone, quite innocently, betraying the secret. Besides, there’d been no hint Boscha had been training anyone the previous year. He’d only started talking about the future, and our role in it, a few short months ago. In hindsight, I wondered if that was when he’d been brought into the conspiracy.

And they couldn’t have been ready to seize the school then, or they’d have done it with his help, I thought. No, the plan is only just starting to take shape. We have a chance to stop it without major bloodshed.

“We have time,” I said, and explained my reasoning. “But we have to move now.”

“Agreed,” Pepper said. “How do we unseat him?”

I scowled. On paper, there were procedures for the staff to call their master to account. We were supposed to contact the board, make our case, and rely on them to deal with the grandmaster. In practice, I doubted the board would listen. Boscha was their choice for the role and, with at least five of the seven board members involved with the plot, they’d be unlikely to do anything to remove him. It was more likely we’d all be summarily fired.

“He has control of the wards,” Mistress Constance said. She eyed the walls as if she expected them to come to life and bite her. In Whitehall, that wasn’t impossible. “If we challenge him directly, all of us, he can still win.”

“We have samples of his son’s blood,” I pointed out. “We can subvert the wards.”

“Not for long,” Pepper said.

I cursed under my breath. Boscha did have a habit of leaving the school and visiting the brothel, and I was sure I could take him in a straight fight, but catching him would be a problem. The high-class brothels were heavily warded to keep out prying eyes, while Boscha didn’t have to walk down to town and back whenever he wanted to get laid. He could just teleport … I considered a handful of possible ways to assassinate him; but they’d all be chancy, and there’d be no way to hide the fact it was an assassination. Boscha took no chances with his personal safety, from what I’d seen, and anything that might break through his defences would be clearly intentional. I wasn’t even sure I could get close enough to do it. Hell, even if it looked as if he’d gone to sleep one night and never awoken, the board would ask a bunch of questions. And the answers would get us all killed.

I scowled. Perhaps I could kill him, then go rogue …

No, I thought. That would leave his backers free to try again.

“We need to discredit him,” I mused. “And we need to force him to leave.”

“Well, yes,” Pepper said. “We could duel him for the post.”

“These are not the days of Lord Whitehall,” Mistress Constance pointed out, waspishly. It was late and we all had full days tomorrow. “You cannot lop someone’s head off and claim it entitles you to his title, his lands, his wife and whatever else he has!”

I had to agree. “Boscha didn’t get his title because he was the greatest duellist in the school,” I said. “But I think I have a plan. We need to get the other staff involved, too.”

“The ones we can trust,” Mistress Constance said. “Not all are trustworthy.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. There were staff members I trusted to side with me against Boscha, but not against the Supremacists. Approaching them would be asking for trouble. “But I think we can arrange matters to have most of the staff on our side.”

“Right,” Pepper said, doubtfully. “What do you have in mind?”

I took a breath, then started to outline my plan.