Necropolis (Royal Sorceress Book 3) (8 page)

“Good afternoon,” Ivan said, as he entered. “I trust you are feeling better?”

Olivia nodded, not trusting herself to speak. The mixture of food and a hot bath had left her feeling pleasantly warm, almost completely relaxed. They might have put something in the food after all, she realised dully, or it could have just been relief at being out of the snowstorm and somewhere warm again. There was no way to know.

“I’m glad to hear it,” Ivan said. He smirked, then held out a hand. “Please would you come with me?”

Her body obeyed before Olivia had quite realised what he’d said. She cursed inwardly as she took his hand and allowed him to lead her through the door, as if he was courting her like a highborn girl. Outside, there was nothing but stone walls leading into the distance. The massive, solid walls helped keep the heat in, she realised, as he led her down the corridor. She listened as hard as she could, but heard nothing apart from their footsteps. The rest of the building was as silent as the grave.

They stopped outside a heavy metal door, which opened slowly at an unseen command. A faint smell reached out towards her, one that made her recoil in sudden disgust. Ivan placed a hand on her back and pushed, forcing her into the room. There was no sign of anything that could produce the smell; the room was almost completely bare, save for a wooden table and a man standing behind it, wearing monkish robes. His beard was long, his face was pitted and scarred and his eyes glinted with a devilish insanity.

“You must be the Necromancer,” he said, in cracked and broken English. His voice was curiously high-pitched, as if he wasn’t quite mature. “I am Gregory. You are the answer to our prayers.”

Olivia shuddered as he came around the table and advanced on her. It was all she could do to hold her ground. She hadn’t felt so threatened since she’d been caught by a man who’d thought she was a young boy. Up close, Gregory smelt faintly of urine, as if he never bothered to wash. Once, she knew, the smell wouldn’t have bothered her. Few people on the streets bothered to wash. Now ... it disgusted her.

“You will assist us,” he said, patting her on the head. She cringed away from his touch, feeling oddly violated. “Your gift will serve the Father Tsar.”

“No,” Olivia said, gathering herself. “I won’t help you raise the dead.”

“I can make you help us,” Ivan pointed out from behind her. “You would become our slave.”

“Charm has its limits,” Olivia countered, remembering what she’d been told by Gwen, after one Charmer had played a nasty trick on her and the other girls. “You can’t push me too far.”

“You’ll help us,” the monk said. The unshakable confidence in his voice chilled her to the bone. “If you refuse to help us of your own free will, you will be made to help us.”

“You wouldn’t have such a precise control over my gift,” Olivia said, bracing herself for the beating she was sure would come. Gwen had forbidden her from ever using her talents without direct orders from her or Lord Mycroft. She’d heard stories of Necromancers who had practiced on dead rats and insects, but she’d never disobeyed Gwen’s orders. “If you warped me into your slave, you wouldn’t be able to control it.”

“I imagined you would need more ... convincing,” Gregory said. He grinned at her – the most disconcerting expression she’d yet seen – and then turned and led her towards the door in the far wall. “Let me show you something of what we’re doing here.”

Olivia hesitated, but a push from Ivan sent her forward. The smell grew stronger as Gregory opened the door and led the way into a much larger room, crammed with beds and tables. A dull moaning noise filled her ears as she saw men and women lying naked on the beds, tied down with solid chains. They were muttering endlessly in Russian, their bodies twisting and turning as they struggled against their chains. She stopped dead, feeling revolted; she’d heard stories of bedlams in Britain, but surely they weren’t as horrific as the sight before her now.

“Good, good,” Gregory called, addressing a pale-skinned woman wearing a white gown and a cold dead expression. “I think that last one is showing signs of improvement.”

The nurse eyed him blankly, then leaned over one of the prisoners and injected her with a noxious-looking liquid. The thrashing girl started to babble in Russian, then urinated helplessly on the bed. Olivia stumbled backwards, horrified and disgusted. Only Ivan’s grip on her arm kept her from running out of the door and trying to escape. Instead, she was pushed through the ward and into the next set of rooms.

“It is our task to unlock the secrets of magic,” Gregory said, as he closed the door behind them. The moans, screams and endless muttering cut off abruptly. “Those who have gifts can either serve the Father Tsar or wind up here, having their gifts examined. Sometimes we learn something truly interesting.”

He smiled, then waved them into the room. Instead of living victims, it held dead bodies in various stages of dissection. A handful of men in white robes moved from body to body, carefully drawing samples of blood and brain tissue from the corpses before shipping them onwards to an unknown destination. Olivia had thought herself no stranger to dead bodies – she’d seen more than her share before she’d discovered the true nature of her magic – but this was truly revolting. It reminded her of the story of the doctor who had hired footpads to waylay and kill people for him to dissect in front of his students. She had never been quite sure if there was any truth in it, but she’d seen enough horror to suspect it might be true.

“There are changes in the brain tissue when someone becomes a magician,” Gregory informed her. He sounded pleased as they walked through the room and passed through a third door. “Some of the stronger magicians may actually have to adapt their brains to handle their powers – and if they fail, they are killed by their own magic.”

Olivia shuddered. Some of the students at Cavendish Hall had been taken to the bedlam nearby, where they’d been shown magicians who had been driven mad by their own powers and had to be confined for their own safety. Most of them were Talkers, their powers so strong that they couldn’t prevent themselves from reading every mind in range ... and were completely incapable of separating out their own thoughts from everyone else’s. It would be more merciful, she suspected, to kill them outright. They had no hope of ever leading a normal life.

Gregory smiled at her. “We take samples from magicians and insert them into non-magicians, just to see what will happen,” he said, as they entered a long corridor. “Sometimes, the results are quite interesting.”

Olivia shuddered, again. This time, each of the patients – the victims – had their own cell, locked and barred against escape. Some of them were clearly mad, others just sat on the floor and stared at nothing. She shivered as she saw a Mover, floating in the centre of his room with his eyes firmly closed, a handful of toys orbiting his body like the Moon around the Earth.

“That one worked out surprisingly well,” Gregory said. “He developed magic after the surgical infusion of brain cells from a natural-born magician.”

Olivia said nothing as she glanced into the next cell. A girl sat on the bed, barely seven years old, clutching a ragged pillow as if it were a teddy bear. Her eyes were wide, staring at nothing – or, perhaps, at something only she could see. Olivia gritted her teeth as she saw the girl’s bones clearly visible, despite her tattered dress. The poor thing was slowly starving to death.

“You need to feed her,” she said. “She’s hungry!”

“She also needs to learn to cooperate,” Gregory said. “And so do you.”

There was a cold evenness in his voice that made her glare at him, then look away in disgust. Beatings would have been kinder. Olivia looked back at the girl and started in shock; the child was staring directly at her, dark eyes firmly fixed on her face. She babbled something in Russian, then collapsed onto the bed. Olivia looked away, bitterly. There was nothing, she knew all too well, that she could do for the girl.

The next cell held a young boy who seemed to be in constant motion, jumping around his cell and giggling unpleasantly. He smirked at Olivia, then made a rude gesture towards the two older men, who seemed unmoved. The cell after him held a pair of middle-aged women, holding hands so tightly they seemed to have fused together. Beyond them, there was a man who was staring down at a single stone on the floor, as if it were so fascinating that it had captured all of his attention.

And the next cell held a man who seemed to be arguing with himself. Olivia stared, noting the sudden shifts in body language as his various personalities fought for dominance, then looked away as all of the personalities started hurling abuse at Gregory. It was chilling to hear how they would switch from a brave personality to one too timid to do more than mutter insults just loud enough to be heard. The personality seemed to change completely, every few seconds.

Gregory merely smiled and hurried Olivia past what seemed an endless succession of cells, each one containing a different horror. She honestly couldn’t understand just what would drive someone to create such a nightmare. Even the loan sharks in the Rookery hadn’t been so monstrous.

“Tell me,” Gregory said. “Have you seen enough?”

Olivia wanted to scream at him. Instead, she forced herself to speak almost normally.

“What do you want from me?”

“We want you to raise the dead,” Gregory said. “And help us with our research for the Father Tsar.”

He turned to face her, dark eyes boring down into her own. “If you cooperate, you will be treated well,” he said. “Food, drink ... even company, if you wish it. But if you refuse to cooperate ...”

Olivia glared at him. “You’ll torture me?”

“No,” Gregory said. “We will cut out your brain and use it to create other Necromancers.”

Olivia hesitated. Despite what the monk had told her about the young Mover, she didn’t know if it was possible to create a magician, certainly not through using any form of medical technique. Gwen had certainly never told her that such a thing was possible, although Doctor Norwell had been keen to remind her that they had barely scratched the surface when it came to studying magic. Maybe it was possible after all.

And if she refused, she would have no chance to escape.

“I’ll cooperate,” she said, promising herself that she would escape as soon as possible. “But I need to rest before I start using magic.”

“Certainly,” Gregory said. He patted her on the shoulder, then looked up at Ivan. “Take her back to her room.”

Chapter Seven

I
feel absurd,” Gwen muttered, as she looked at herself in the mirror. “This isn’t
me
.”

“But it is what the well-dressed maid is wearing,” Irene Adler said, primly. She delivered a hearty slap to Gwen’s back. “The last thing you want to do is draw attention to yourself.”

Gwen groaned. The last time she’d worn a dress had been at the Fairweather Ball, when Sir Charles had escorted her. It had been hideously difficult to put that ball gown on without help from her maid, something that struck her as an attempt to make it harder for the wearer to surrender their chastity. By comparison, the maid’s dress was simpler, darker and designed to be donned without assistance. It would have been suitable if it hadn’t been so irritating.

She looked at her reflection again. The dress was black, save for a white triangle over her breasts that drew more attention to their shape than she would have preferred. It was easy enough to hide her chest in her normal garments – the male eye rarely noticed anything out of place unless it was obvious – but the maid’s outfit made it impossible to hide her femininity from roving eyes. The lower half of the dress was black, falling down to her ankles; her stockings covered the rest of her legs from male eyes.

“Consider yourself lucky,” Irene said. “If you were a maid in France, you would be expected to display your charms and assets in no uncertain way.”

Gwen flushed, realising that Irene was reading her thoughts. Irene’s talents for disguise, mind-reading and simple powers of observation made her a formidable agent for the British Government, despite having been born female. No one was quite sure where she’d come from, but as an Opera Singer she could get into all kinds of strange places without raising eyebrows. Gwen glowered at her friend, then erected her mental barriers. Irene shrugged, quite unabashed.

“But you managed to get the dress on,” Irene said, once Gwen had spun around to make sure it
stayed
on. High Society had chatted for years about a poor noblewoman whose dress had fallen off in the midst of a dance. She’d never managed to live it down. “And now you have to work on your duties.”

She led Gwen into the next room, where a pile of clothes had been dumped on the floor. “Get those packed away,” she snapped, her voice becoming imperious. “And then get the floor cleaned, you lazy woman!”

Irene kept up the torrent of verbal abuse as Gwen carefully picked her way through the clothes, packing them away into the suitcase, or into the wardrobes and boxes. Some of them required special treatment, which Irene explained in-between sneering at Gwen, others could just be dropped in drawers and left alone. Gwen had never quite realised how ignorant she was about some things until Irene patiently explained how to pack a suitcase properly. She’d never had to pack a bag of clothes for herself in her life. The only thing she’d ever packed was books.

“Not too bad,” Irene sneered, when Gwen had finished. She picked up the bag, opened it and dumped the clothes back onto the floor. “Do it again.”

Gwen glared at her. Irene lifted a hand, as if she was about to slap her across the face. “Don’t look at me like that, girl,” she snapped. Her voice softened. “And believe me, showing any hint of disrespect could get you into real trouble.”

“I know,” Gwen muttered, as she started to repack the bag. She
knew
Irene was playing a role, just as
she
would have to play a role, and yet she didn’t know how she was going to keep her calm during the mission. One snap too many from Lady Standish and she might just give in to the temptation to hurt her. “This isn’t going to be easy.”