Schooled in Magic (53 page)

Jade frowned. “Don’t you have a mirror?”

“One isn’t working and the others were lost in the fire,” Harkin admitted. “We have to assume the worst.”

And the worst, Emily knew, was that the goblins were being led by a powerful magician, one powerful enough to cow the inhuman creatures
and
jam the mirror Harkin would otherwise use to summon help. A necromancer wasn’t needed specifically to disrupt communications spells–any Dark Wizard could do that - but the Sergeant was right; they had to assume the worst. A full-fledged necromancer might be following them, intent on killing them to add their life energies to his power.

She scowled as they hid the remaining traces of their presence and prepared to move out. If they were lucky, if there
was
a necromancer chasing them, they would be able to outsmart him and escape. All the sources agreed that necromancers were prone to arrogance, overconfidence and self-delusion. But they’d also been very
unclear
on how to actually defeat
a necromancer in open combat.

Don’t be silly
, she told herself as they started to slip up the pathway around the nearest mountain.
None of you are ready to fight a necromancer. Even Void only gave Shadye a bloody nose and ran.

The march rapidly became a nightmare. Emily felt tired, so tired that she knew if she closed her eyes she would fall asleep and never get up again. But she had to keep going, somehow. Twilight had fallen, leaving the shadows to spill across the ground and creating brief suggestions that something was watching them.

Emily clutched her sword tightly, looking into the darkness as if she could catch something and skewer it before whatever it was could react. The sensation of being hunted kept growing stronger, even though they saw and heard nothing, not even birds in the sky, or small animals on the ground. After experiencing the life running through the lands surrounding Whitehall, Emily found that ominous.

Harkin dropped back to walk beside her for a long moment, his twisted face concerned, even worried. Emily wanted to tell him to leave her, knowing she was slowing down the entire team, but she held her tongue. She was really too tired to speak.

“It never gets any easier,” Harkin said softly.

Emily blinked in surprise. Compassionate words from the Sergeant–either of the Sergeants–were few and far between.

“Killing goblins isn’t too far from killing humans,” he said.

Emily nodded. Back home, the only person she had ever seriously considered killing was herself. She wasn’t one of those people who took a gun into school and sought bloody revenge for real or imagined slights–and she’d certainly never thought about joining the army. Perhaps that was why
Berserker
had consumed her. That spell made it impossible to care at the time that she was slaughtering the goblins, which might have been why Jade had ordered her to use it.

She’d had no time for reflection, let alone self-doubt. If she had, it might have killed her.

“They would have killed us, if we had been lucky,” Harkin added a moment later. “And if we had been unlucky, they would have done far worse.”

Emily nodded. She’d read about goblins–and other monsters that infested the mountains–before she’d gone on the field trip. But they rarely bothered humans, unless their victims were completely alone; they knew that the nearby human cities would mount punitive operations. It was quite possible that
someone
had stirred them up and sent them against the Redshirts, or that the team had simply been very unlucky. There was no way to know for sure.

“Just hold it together until we reach home,” Harkin said. “After that, if you want to talk about it ...”

Emily shook her head and concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. In truth, she didn’t know
how
she felt about killing the goblins. Part of her felt guilty, even though she knew they had intended to kill her; part of her took a secret delight in slicing through the creatures as if they had been made of paper. And all of her training had paid off, even if she
had
needed to use
Berserker
. The time she’d spent exercising and practicing swordplay with the Redshirts had not been wasted.

They plunged into darkness as the last remaining flickers of sunlight vanished below the mountains. Jade and Sergeant Miles both cast spells intended to illuminate their path, which shaded the entire world in an eerie grey light that made Emily’s head ache.

She kept going, somehow, keeping a watchful eye out for traps. But she was so tired that she suspected she would just walk into a trap even if she saw it. The semi-darkness outside the range of the illumination spell was playing tricks on her mind. She thought she could see all kinds of creatures lurking beyond the pool of grey light, just waiting for their chance to strike.

All around them, the forest slowly came to life. Emily heard birds and animals calling to one another in the distance, a series of chirps and birdcalls that eventually gave way to hisses and a single terrifying roar. She hadn’t ever been interested in mundane creatures, so she couldn’t remember if there were lions in this world or not, but it certainly
sounded
like a lion. The roar faded away and was replaced by howls, each one more terrifying than the last.

But Sergeant Harkin didn’t seem bothered. In fact, she heard him chuckle quietly under his breath.

“Ah, the children of the night,” he said. “Hear how they sing!”

Emily gave him a sharp glance. Whatever was making those howls didn’t sound like something she wanted to meet, certainly not when she was too tired to use magic or even lift a sword. On the other hand, the sound was certainly encouragement to keep going, rather than slowing down to take a breather. Who knew what else, apart from goblins, might be chasing them in the darkness?

“Get down,” Jade snapped. “
Now
!”

Emily dropped to the muddy path automatically as
something
hissed through the air above their heads. Arrows crashed into the trees and fell around them; she realized in horror that they had blundered into another goblin ambush. Harkin had kept them moving hard, hoping they could stay ahead of the goblins, but they’d failed.

The goblins were displaying a degree of cooperation that, according to the books, they
never
showed. How could they when no goblin could trust his rivals not to betray him? It suggested that they’d definitely acquired a strong leader.

“Crawl forward,” Harkin ordered. He was holding his bow in his hand, searching for targets. “Extend the lighting spell towards them, now!”

The goblins didn’t have lighting spells, Emily realized as she crawled through the slimy dirt; they didn’t
need
magic to see in the dark. And they apparently couldn’t see the spell that the team had been using to light their way.

Harkin, Miles and Cat shot back as soon as the goblins came into view–the goblins hadn’t bothered to take cover, because they’d
known
they couldn’t be seen–and three goblins toppled backwards, arrows driven through their skulls. Emily crawled faster at the Sergeant’s command, silently grateful that they’d lost their baggage when the goblins had burned down the tent. It would only have slowed them down, as well as making them a bigger target.

“Keep crawling,” Harkin hissed, looking back towards where the goblins had been. The remaining goblins had dropped for cover as soon as they had realized they could be seen, effectively concealing them from human eyes. “Don’t slow down for
anything
.”

Emily was too tired to care that they were crawling through mud, mud which seemed to be covering the remains of a fallen building. Behind her, she heard horns as the goblins called for reinforcements, perhaps using them to direct other teams of goblins into position in order to intercept the human fugitives. She found herself wondering just how well the goblins knew the forest, before realizing that they, unlike humanity, probably spent most of their time within the
mana
-rich environment. They probably knew it as well as they knew themselves.

A second volley of arrows shot through the air, out of the darkness. Emily heard someone grunt in pain and cursed inwardly. They’d been hit.

“Bran,” Jade hissed. “Sergeant, he’s been
hit
!”

“I’ll deal with him,” Harkin snapped back. “Keep moving. Crawl south and pray that they don’t come after you.”

Emily hesitated beside Bran’s groaning form, before Harkin growled at her to keep moving south. Bran had been pinned to the ground by the arrow; Emily winced in sympathy as Harkin reached under Bran’s chest and snapped the arrowhead away from the wooden shaft, before pushing Bran forward. Everything she knew about first aid screamed at her, insisting that Bran shouldn’t be moved at all, but there was no choice. The goblins would catch him if they left him behind and they’d do much worse to any captives than merely ramming an arrow through his chest.

The sound of goblin horns grew louder as they kept moving, Harkin half-crawling on his knees as he carried Bran. More arrows hissed at them out of the darkness, as if the goblins were trying to wear them down before closing in for the kill. Their tactics made no sense to Emily until she realized that the goblins had good reason to fear magic. They couldn’t be certain that the magicians were completely drained. If she’d had enough magic left to start a fire ...

“We couldn’t outrun it, even if we
could
set the forest on fire,” Harkin said when she suggested it. “Forest fires can spread very quickly.”

Emily could feel
the goblins closing in on them as they pushed their way through the remains of another city, now half-buried in the mud. Bran was groaning as if he’d become delirious, which was a very real possibility. Emily couldn’t remember enough about medicine to be helpful, but she did know that he needed a Healer; Hell, they should have put him in stasis right at the start. Alassa’s time-freeze spell might make the difference between Bran living or dying, if Emily could recall how to cast it. And if she’d had enough magic to use it.

“Good thinking,” Jade said. Oddly, his approval sent a flush of warmth running through Emily’s tired body. He stumbled back to where Harkin was still holding Bran. “Sergeant, we can freeze him and then ...”

“And then carrying him will be impossible,” Harkin snapped, tiredly. He sounded utterly exhausted, his composure finally breaking. “We have to get him to a Healer.”

“We need somewhere defensible,” Miles called back. There didn’t seem to be any point in stealth any longer. The goblins certainly knew where they were. “You want to head for the Temple of Tat?”

“We don’t have the manpower to hold it,” Harkin countered. There was a pause. “But there’s nowhere else to go.”

It was already too late, Emily realized, as the goblins came swarming out of the darkness. Somehow, she found the energy to lift her sword and parry a thrust that would have skewered her, just before a goblin shoved her into a stone wall. The world spun around her as the wall collapsed; she fell into darkness. She heard a final howl from the goblin and then ...

Silence.

D
ARKNESS HUNG AROUND HER LIKE A
living thing.

Emily looked around, but saw nothing. She seemed to be lying on a bed of grass, from what she could feel, yet the darkness made it impossible to be certain of anything. The air held an eerie silence, the world was just waiting for someone to clear her throat and introduce herself. It was a feeling of pregnant possibility on the verge of flowering into life. She reached for her magic and started to cast a lighting spell, but something muffled the magic and absorbed it into nothingness.

Where
was
she?

She had to have blacked out again; the goblin had hit her, the wall had collapsed and then ... darkness. Her magic felt as if it had recovered, as if she could cast spells if she poured enough
mana
into them, and yet some sense told her that casting more spells would not be a good idea. She held a hand in front of her face, but couldn’t see anything apart from the darkness.

And then she heard the humming.

It seemed to come from all around her at first, a sound vibrating on the air and pressing down on her, almost as if it too were a living thing. Emily covered her ears as the sound grew louder, but it echoed through her hands and went deep into her soul. She had to bite her lip to keep herself from screaming.

And then the sound dropped away into a single deep note that hung on the air, coming from right in front of her.

Emily opened her eyes, unaware that she’d even closed them, and saw a handful of multicolored lights drifting towards her. They spread out as they came closer, taking on shape and form; despite herself, she smiled in delight. The lights were winged fairies, just like the one she’d liberated at Dragon’s Den. One by one, they came to a halt facing her, just before the darkness was banished by a brilliant flash of light.

“Human,” a voice said, or was it voices? It sounded as if dozens of smaller voices were speaking in harmony. “Why do you trespass on our land?”