Delusion (16 page)

“I’ll go first, then. You’d only faint.”

“I only faint at appropriate times,” Fee answered. It was true. Fee had gotten through the first night of the Blitz without weakening once, but she’d been known to swoon from a too-vigorous foxtrot and fall into convenient arms, assuming the arms belonged to a handsome young man.

So they went in together, prepared for anything from incriminating stares to manhandling.

Not a single magician so much as noticed them. Which, for girls like Phil and Fee, was astounding.

Every eye in the torch-lit room was turned toward a raised dais at one end, where a black-clad figure stood, alert but relaxed, with his hands loosely clasped at the small of his back.

“It can’t be!” Phil whispered.

The sable uniform of the Schutzstaffel, or the SS, the dreaded Nazi paramilitary unit, had all but been phased out by that time, replaced by suits of gray or brown. But the sinister image of a man in black flared breeches and glossy jackboots, a peaked cap and a crimson armband like a bloody wound, would live forever in English memory as the picture of the quintessential Nazi. The man who stood at his ease on the raised platform wore an immaculate SS uniform complete in every detail, from the emblazoned swastika on the armband to the death’s head insignia at his throat—complete, that is, except for an incongruous deep purple turban that stood in place of the black cap. It was pinned in the front with a large opal and a fluttering aigrette, and spiky tips of corn-blond hair jutted from the back.

The room had gone quiet, shuffling feet and uncertain murmurs the only sounds in the vast hall. Phil and Fee edged along the wall to get a better look.

The man spoke. “I deeply regret that such an action was necessary.” His voice, impeccable public-school English with German vowels, echoed through the room. “They will recover, in time. The next man who opposes me will not share their good fortune.”

The sisters, pressing forward, saw a clearing in the crowd at the strange man’s feet. Some dozen magicians lay splayed on the ground, Renaissance robes flung haphazardly atop Victorian greatcoats. The air around them crackled in staticky aftershocks of faint color. They did not move, and Phil couldn’t tell if they were still breathing, though she could see no wounds.

“I thank you for your attention,” he said, as though he were an honored guest speaker. “We will be comrades in the near future, and killing a great many of you would be an ill start. I am Herr Kommandant Klaus von Hahnsberg of the Universität Zauberhaft.”

“The Schism faction,” Phil heard someone say. “The Dresden school,” said another. One man—Phil thought it was the plump fellow she’d intimidated on her first visit—simply fainted again, which told her more than anything.

“The time has come to heal the deep divisions that have separated our houses for so long. We have quarreled, true, but three hundred years is ample time for forgiveness. I have come to you with the intent of rejoining our two groups.”

Headmaster Rudyard broke from the crowd, a splendid figure who made seventy seem like the prime of life, and this young buck of thirty a mere stripling. “You are not welcome in the College of Drycraeft. Three hundred years or three thousand, we will never accept you into our order.”

The Kommandant threw back his head and laughed. “Us, join you? Masters of the Essence join this nunnery full of sniveling, cowardly old women? You mistake me. I offer you—or some of you, who might prove yourselves worthy—the chance to join our order at the university.”

Gasps and denials, a few hushed cries of “Do something” and “Banish him, drain him.”

“The Essence has no master,” Rudyard said. “We are its servants. The separation has corrupted your understanding of drycraeft.”

The Kommandant’s voice rose to a frenzied pitch. “You are the ones who have become corrupted, you indolent, lazy wastes of power! Here you sit, in your pile of stones, doing nothing but playing with the Essence when you could be using it to rule the world!” He began to gesticulate wildly as he spoke. “We are the elite, masters among men, yet you lot live almost like commoners, doing nothing with your great gift, while the lowly crawl unhindered through the world like rats. We who control the Essence are supermen, gods, beside those—those vermin. In Germany, they understand that some people are aristocrats by virtue of birth, while some are no more than parasites. Magicians are the flower of humanity. All others are like worms beneath our feet.”

He locked his fanatic gaze on first one, then another magician. Most of the faces he met were full of disdain and incredulity, but a few, mostly younger, looked up at him with unconcealed interest.

“Join us! Assume your rightful place in the world. The commoners are doing our work for us—see how they’ve conquered all of Europe with just a little prodding on our part? Your island is next, then Russia, then the globe. You don’t have much time to decide, my brothers. Soon it will be too late. The brave new world will be here—and you will be excluded from it.”

With great dignity, Headmaster Rudyard said, “You’ve trespassed on our home long enough. Go, before we make you go. Or perhaps it will be too late for
you.
”

Phil caught sight of Arden’s sun-browned neck and thick queue of black hair. He had moved to stand beside the Headmaster, and when the threat was spoken, he gave a fierce, satisfied smile.

But the Kommandant only smirked. “Idle threats. I know your pacifist ways, old man. Using the Essence to harm another is a capital offense. Go on—I defy all of you together to try to drain my life. You cannot do it, and I’ll tell you why. You fear your power. I wish you would put all of your wills together and drain me, just to have a taste of what you could be. It would be worth it, if it convinced all of you to join us. But you won’t.” He searched the group to find the young men who had looked so eager for his words. “Because I’ve convinced many of you already. Try it, old man, and you’ll find half your students have turned against you.”

“That’s a lie!” Arden shouted, when the Headmaster said nothing. “We have a code, and not even a degenerate traitor like you will goad us into misusing the Essence.”

“You’d be well advised not to try,” the Kommandant said. “Your power is nothing compared to ours.”

“We’ll see about that,” Arden said, and shook off the Headmaster’s grasp.

“Are you challenging me?” the Kommandant asked with a slow smile.

“I’m telling you to leave,” Arden said, stalking toward the dais. “Or we’ll make you, one way or another.”

“Ah, you will be an asset to our university,” the Kommandant cried, delighted. “Such fire! You know your rightful place in the world, unlike these others with the weak, watery hearts of disgusting commoners. Shall we duel, then, as commoners do with blades? Single combat, you and I?”

“Master Arden, you forget yourself,” the Headmaster warned.

But Phil could see Arden’s face in profile grow focused and intense as he called upon the Essence to battle the intruder. His body began to glow, pearl soft at first, brightening a moment later, until it sparked orange-gold as he drew power from the earth.

The Kommandant narrowed his eyes, and it seemed as if some unseen hand laid a cloak across his shoulders, a red so dark it was almost black. Red, Phil thought, for Essence drawn from living things. The opal in his turban shone with incandescent fire.

For a long moment it seemed to Phil that nothing was happening. Beads of sweat blossomed on Arden’s brow and dripped into his eyes, but he didn’t blink. Then suddenly the Kommandant smiled, and the deep red glow snaked out to Arden’s throat.

Arden’s eyes bulged, and he clutched his neck, struggling for air. He lunged for the intruder, then fell at his feet with the other stunned magicians. But he wasn’t stunned—he was dying.

No one made a move to help him, and the vital sparking light hovering over Arden’s skin flickered and expired.

“All right then,” Phil said under her breath, and slipped away from her sister.

“Oi!” After Phil had proved such an adept at boxing, the Albions had briefly incorporated her skills into the act, with a bumptious Cockney-flavored script, but her twill trousers and cap, coupled with her fists, proved less of a draw than sequins and a sword, so the act was soon abandoned. Now that she was planning to resurrect her skills, she thought it would be best to get into character.

“Bugger off to a kraut house, Jerry,” she said, and vaulted onto the dais.

The Kommandant looked at her as if she were a particularly pungent piece of offal. “You let your commoner whores speak? How novel! This one will have her tongue ripped out for her insolence.”

The Essence surged through him, and he called upon the molecules of her tongue to violently disengage themselves from her body. Instead, to his surprise, the molecules of his own nose found themselves violently disarranged when her fist slammed into his face. A second punch knocked him down, breaking his concentration, and Arden gasped a grateful breath. By the time Phil had the presence of mind to save her knuckles from splitting by kicking him in the ribs, the Kommandant had managed to open a portal and vanished. Phil aimed a last kick at the empty air, just in case he was not gone but merely invisible, then sat down abruptly, shaking.

Fee was at her side in an instant, curling around her. “You were brilliant, Phil,” she whispered. “The bravest person I know.”

“Now that it’s over, I don’t feel so brave,” Phil said. “Why do they always say to keep a stiff upper lip, Fee? My upper lip’s fine, it’s the lower one that’s quivering like an aspen.”

The stunned magicians were starting to revive. Some looked bewildered. “We were only going to contain him, Headmaster, I swear,” one nonplussed middle-aged man in loud tweeds said. “Why did he do that to us?” Others looked positively militant. “How dare he!” an elderly magician spat as he hauled himself up with his cane, while another, rubbing his head, confessed in wonder that he’d never felt such power in one man. How had the German magician harnessed enough Essence to stop a dozen powerful magicians at one blow, and then proceeded to bring one of the most skilled young masters to the edge of death? The Essence itself was limitless, but there was certainly a limit to what one man could capture and use at any given moment.

“Everyone, to your quarters immediately. Journeymen, see that the prentices are secure. Elder masters, remain here with me. And you too, Master Arden,” he added to the junior master.

Arden was still on his knees, gasping ragged breaths.

When the room had mostly cleared (except for Thomas, who lingered unnoticed by the door), Headmaster Rudyard climbed the stairs to the dais and stood behind the girls, ignoring them as if they were no more consequential than house cats. “Now, more than ever, we masters must maintain cohesion and calm. I do not think we should give much credence to this rogue magician’s actions. Tomorrow I will address the college for a few moments, and then I want that to be the end of it.” He made as if to step down from the dais.

“Not one of you helped me,” Arden said, laboring to his feet. “Not a single one of you was man enough to help me.”

“You know better than to engage in a duel,” one of the other masters said. “Just because you choose to blatantly misuse the Essence, you can’t expect us to follow suit.”

“I am one of you!” he roared. “I am a master of the College of Drycraeft. That magician attacked us! He threatened our college, injured our brothers. He almost killed me!”

“If you hadn’t—”

“You, Master Jereboam, are reputed to be second only to the Headmaster in your ability to channel the Essence, and yet you let that Dresden traitor knock you to the ground. Now you defend his actions, and condemn mine?”

“We have our laws for a reason.”

“Times change,” Arden said passionately. “He invaded our home, attacked us, and you would sit back and let him?”

“We have no intention of—” the Headmaster began, but Arden cut him off.

“Didn’t you hear him? He and his magicians have meddled to start this war we’ve been hearing about. A world war.”

“A commoner war,” Master Jereboam spat derisively.

“A commoner saved my life when my friends and colleagues stood by watching me die, all because of an archaic code!”

He looked at Phil for the first time since the attack and gave her a barely perceptible nod. Fee would have demanded a flowery speech of contrition, perhaps delivered in full prostration, but for Phil, it was enough. She nodded back, and in those twin gestures was far more than Fee could have found in all of her dear Jane’s books.

“He has declared war on the college,” Arden went on.

“I’d hardly say—”

“Shut your mealy-mouthed yammering, Jereboam! Rudyard, you know what is coming. It’s what we’ve feared for the last three hundred years. They should have killed the traitors when they left the college. That one man was almost enough to defeat us, as we are now, placid as cattle. More will come, and when they do, we must be ready to fight them!”

“We do not use the Essence for violence.”

“You do if the conclave votes for it. Vote—right now. Let us resolve to drain them if they dare set foot in Stour again.”

“There are other ways,” the Headmaster said. He looked tired now, and old.

“What, appeasement? You’ve heard what the returning journeymen have said. The German commoners may be here any day, and with them the German magicians.”

“They honor the Essence, the same as we do,” Jereboam said. “Perhaps they have gone a bit astray in the years apart, but if we could only reason with them—”

“The Kommandant was right,” Arden said bitterly. “You’re all cowards. At least he will fight for what he wants.”

“I don’t think we
can
fight him,” Jereboam said. “Did you feel the currents running though him? He’s so much stronger than us. He certainly bested you.”

Arden flushed. “I’d rather die fighting than show my belly like a cur. Maybe I can’t fight him, but—”

“I can fight him,” Phil said softly.

“—I’ll be damned if I turn over the College of Drycraeft to him. We’ll train, we’ll get stronger, we’ll practice using the Essence for combat.”