The Grandmaster's Tale

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.”