Perak glanced at Jake and Malaki, who both nodded. I didn’t like the way this was going. It had the smell of drop-Rojan-in-the-shit.
“We need to do something to end this quickly,” Perak said. “But first we need to slow them down – the Storad’s machines will have the gates down in a few days otherwise, and then it doesn’t matter about all the rest. Look, let us get all the information we can, see what we can come up with. In the meantime…”
“Yeah, yeah, I know. In the meantime keep my head down, rearranged and out of sight, try not to piss off any cardinals, keep pumping out Glow, get on with finding more mages, teaching them, see if we can get them firing up some Glow too. Check if any of them have a handy ability for making a whole damn army disappear. Right?”
Perak looked apologetic, but there it was. We all had to do things we didn’t want to, except of course those cardinals who felt it was more useful to be a bunch of dissenting and/or running-away bastards.
I was seriously starting to feel tied to the damned pain lab, to Glow, like it was the only reason I was here and anyone was putting up with me. A fleeting – and very tempting – thought said that if the pain machine went belly-up, no one would need me. I could go and have a nice sleep, maybe drink myself insensible if I could find anything that would do the job. The only problem with that was that I’d probably fail to wake up due to a Storad bullet in the head.
Compared to that, a little pain, a little bit of teaching, would be a breeze.
There were often days when I wondered why the hell I bothered getting up. This was turning into one of them. Not that I’d actually got up as such, because I hadn’t really slept, but still. Lise and Perak were tweaking her mysterious machine while Jake and Malaki did some reconnoitring and tried to figure out a plan. In the meantime I was left to keep my head down and try not to foam too much at the mouth about it.
The trickle of leads on new mages had dried up, so other than pumping out Glow I tried to keep myself busy training the mages we did have while looking over my shoulder all the time for a cardinal’s man to come and stick a bag over my head, knock me out and drag me off.
The training wasn’t going so well – I am not a natural teacher. Allit was a sulky mess, all knees and elbows as boys his age are. Allit, however, wasn’t wholly as other boys, and if he carried on like this, there was a good chance we’d end up as part of the decor. Uncontrolled magic is a delicate thing, hence what made the Slump.
We were outside because this was a tricky business and, if it all went tits up, well, I didn’t want it scaring the crap out of the other magelets. Or exploding any of Lise’s experimental chemicals. The downside was that I was still smelling food cooking and it was almost enough to drive me crazy, especially as no one else seemed to be smelling it. My mind had taken against me, in league with my stomach.
Clouds hovered gently over the city like a murderer lowering a suffocating pillow, making Top of the World seem ghostly and indistinct. The wind blew straight down from mountains that were sprinkled with the first snow of the year, but for once it wasn’t raining, so we sat on a frigid walkway overlooking the huge bulking factories of Trade. I made sure I was nice and close to a wall, because it was a long way down.
The factories’ rumble shivered our bones, both comforting and odd. Comforting because, for a while there, we’d had no trade and that meant no food. Odd because, well, because it wasn’t for trade that the factories were rumbling. The factories were working flat out, producing guns as fast as they could, bigger and better. But the very people we usually traded with for our raw materials were the ones who were sat outside the gates trying to batter their way in.
So, despite my genius little sister busting her arse to try to get more power out of the magic we could produce, and working on whatever gizmos she could think of on the side, we had to go with what we’d got and try every angle. Hence, a frustrating and painful morning for both me and Allit. At least I wasn’t in a tunnel, getting shot at.
“It’s stupid,” Allit said, nursing a cut thumb.
“Not just stupid,” I said. “Stupid, painful and a one-way road to madness, if you let it. That’s why we start small, not try the big stuff straight away. Do that again and I’ll toss you over the walkway. Lesson one – you don’t use it lightly. I prefer not to use it at all.”
“Why?”
“Because dislocating your own thumb to cast a spell is a ridiculous way to do things. And it hurts. I do not like to hurt. I also do not wish to go completely crazy, which is always a possibility.” Of course, there was a good chance that it had already started on me.