Necropolis (Royal Sorceress Book 3) (35 page)

She shook her head. There was no precedent for someone to become a magician at such an advanced age ... but the Tsar wasn’t really
that
old, was he? He’d merely been worn down by trying to rule his ungrateful country during a series of natural and not-so-natural disasters. Gwen could understand the frustration that came from struggling against entrenched interests and determined opposition, but
she’d
never killed her political enemies. The Tsar might have been justified in purging his noblemen, yet now he’d sentenced his entire country to death – and then a hellish non-life. He’d gone completely mad.

She wanted to summon fire and rain death on the undead from above. It would be so easy, after she’d had a chance to sleep and regain her strength. But she couldn’t incinerate them all, while using her magic so blatantly would tell the Russian magicians precisely where she was. All she could do was watch and wait and hope to hell they found a way out of the necropolis before the undead came for them. But she wasn’t hopeful.

A dull rumbling sound caught her ear and she turned to look, just as a small palace collapsed into rubble. The undead swarms walked through the debris, tearing through the rocks and brick, looking for traces of human life. Gwen’s eyes narrowed as she puzzled over why the building had just collapsed. A building designed to survive Moscow’s winters would be strong enough to survive a horde of the undead, surely?

Magic
, she thought, and drifted away from the building. Now she saw more clearly, she realised that the undead were swarming through
all
of the palaces, palaces that had to have belonged to some of the more treacherous noblemen. The Tsar, not content with killing his noblemen and watching them rise again to join his army, was wiping out all traces of their existence. She recalled some of the burned buildings from the Swing and shivered, despite the magic keeping her warm. The Tsar would have reshaped the continent completely by the time he was done.

She wanted to cry in frustration. She’d been too late to stop the Tsar, despite everything she’d done to sneak into Moscow, and now all she could do was watch as swarms of undead made their way through Moscow’s streets, looking for the living. There had been hundreds of thousands of poor refugees in the outskirts of the city, she knew; now, they would all be part of the undead army. And there was nothing she could do to stop the nightmare unfolding right in front of her. There was no magic that could burn an entire city to ash.

A scream split the air, a young girl’s scream. Gwen turned and saw a pair of girls and their parents, standing on a roof as the undead slowly climbed up towards them. Their father was holding a sword in one hand and a gun in the other, but Gwen had no illusions. One man, no matter how capable a swordsman, couldn’t stop a horde of charging undead. She acted before her mind quite caught up with her intentions, swooping down towards the rooftop and summoning fire. The undead fell backwards as her flames washed through them, burning them to ash. But there were countless more where they had come from, advancing towards the building.

Gwen landed on the rooftop, praying that at least one of the Russians spoke English. The father reminded her of the nobleman who had taken Raechel to the first dance in St Petersburg, although he was clearly older and wiser. He gaped at her as if he didn’t quite believe his eyes. Behind him, his wife and daughters stared openly, the younger daughter muttering a word under her breath time and time again. Gwen smiled at them, suddenly aware of her appearance. They had to find her more frightening than the undead.

“I don’t speak Russian,” she said, as a low moaning rose up from the undead below. “Can you understand me?”

The Russian stared at her, then nodded. “I understand you,” he said. His voice was low and raspy, while his accent made his words almost impossible to understand. “Who are you?”

“A friend,” Gwen said. She’d seen some of the French propaganda about the Royal Sorcerers Corps and the Royal Sorceress in particular and she had no wish to make them baulk at accepting her assistance. “I can take you somewhere safe.”

“Yes, please,” the Russian said. “But how?”

Gwen turned. The moaning from below was getting louder, attracting hordes of undead towards their position. Gwen watched them flowing out from buildings, summoned by a call that seemed incomprehensible. But if dogs could communicate a great deal of information through barking, she thought, why couldn’t the undead do the same? And the Tsar might be watching through their eyes, just as Olivia had done during her captivity.

She swore under her breath as the undead started scrambling up the scorched walls, climbing over one another to get to the top. They weren’t showing the cold intelligence of large swarms of undead, unlike the ones in Haiti, which suggested the Tsar was still controlling them, if indirectly. But piling themselves up against the walls would eventually allow them to reach the humans on the top. Gwen summoned fire and launched it down towards the undead, then turned to smile at the Russians.

“This is going to be disconcerting,” she warned. Doctor Norwell had once asked her to take him for a flight, an odd request for the normally staid theoretical magician. But he hadn’t enjoyed the experience as much as he might have thought. “Brace yourself.”

She caught hold of them with magic, then launched all five of them into the air, flying away from the burning building. It had caught fire, she saw, hopefully incinerating more of the undead before they could escape the flames and regroup. The moaning grew louder, hundreds of undead looking up from the streets towards the flying humans, before slowly fading away. Somehow, Gwen and her charges had passed beyond their awareness.

The Russians looked panicked, she saw, as she angled their course back towards the palace – and the ranks of waiting undead. She tried to shoot the mother a reassuring glance, but it came off as more of a grimace. Her two daughters were staring down at the ground, their hands stroking the air as if they expected to feel something transparent holding them up and protecting them from the undead. Gwen felt a moment of sympathy – despite her powers, she had never liked flying under someone else’s control – which she ruthlessly pushed aside. She had no time to let pity distract her.

Romulus was standing on the roof, supervising several of the older diplomats, when Gwen landed, dropping the Russians to the floor. They looked surprised to see Romulus – they’d probably been raised on horror stories about dark-skinned Mongols – but they were clearly too relieved to make any trouble. Romulus chatted briefly to the father, then directed the mother and her two daughters inside the building. Gwen settled down on the rooftop, feeling sick at heart. The girls couldn’t have been older than eight or nine and yet the Tsar would have turned them into the undead, if they’d survived the first bite. None of the undead were particularly gentle when they bit their victims.

“Lady Gwen,” Sir Sidney said. Gwen looked up to see him coming out of the rooftop entrance. “Did you see anything interesting?”

“Just hordes of undead,” Gwen said, and recounted her observations. “We’re going to have to barricade the windows, just to stop them climbing up and breaking in.”

Sir Sidney looked irked. Gwen didn’t blame him. The building was stronger than any comparable building in London, but it had far too many glass windows – a sign of status in Russia – and all of them could be broken down by the undead. Barricading them all could take time, time they didn’t have. The ranks of undead outside the palace wouldn’t stay still forever.

“We need more people,” Sir Sidney said, finally. “Did you see many others?”

Gwen shook her head. The Tsar had launched his first strikes in the night, when most people would have been tucked up in bed. They would have been overwhelmed before they knew what was going on, let alone had a chance to defend themselves. The family she’d saved had been lucky, she suspected. But their luck had finally run out.

“By now, he could have the entire city,” she said. “Do we have any way to get a message out?”

“Not that we’ve found,” Sir Sidney said. He took her arm and led her towards the edge of the roof, some distance from the handful of guards. “How far can you fly?”

Gwen looked at him, sharply. She’d once flown from Cambridge to London, back during the Swing, but the effort had almost killed her. If it hadn’t been for Master Thomas, it
would
have killed her. And that was around sixty miles. It was over four
hundred
miles from Moscow to St Petersburg.

“Maybe around fifty miles,” she estimated. “Why?”

“If worst comes to worst,” Sir Sidney said, “I want you to leave us and fly home.”

“No,” Gwen said. Even if she had been willing to abandon Olivia, Raechel and everyone else, she couldn’t have flown all the way back to London. Even reaching the German states would be difficult. She’d have to stop along the way and hunt for food ... in the middle of the Russian countryside, where finding food was far from easy. “I won’t leave you.”

Sir Sidney rested his arm on her shoulder, an oddly intimate gesture. “There are thousands upon thousands of the undead in this city,” he said. “I don’t know why we have been spared so far, but when they come for us – and they will – we will be overwhelmed. Even your powers aren’t enough to hold back thousands of undead indefinitely.”

Gwen didn’t want to admit it, but he was right.

“And then the Tsar will start attacking other Russian cities, then advance down south to Turkey or west into France,” Sir Sidney continued. “They have to be warned and we have no other way to get a message out.”

He squeezed her shoulder lightly. “Talleyrand can give you letters of introduction, should you reach French territory,” he added. “Hell, some of the noblemen here can give you letters for other Russian officers. You can get the word out.”

“And leave you all to die,” Gwen said.

There was a Talker at the embassy in St Petersburg, she knew, one with the reach to contact London. But getting there would be difficult, even for her. She’d need to find a great deal of food along the way or die in the Russian countryside, but where could she find the food? It was unlikely that the peasants would be interested in helping her. They’d be more likely, if some of the horror stories she’d heard were true, to chop her up for the stew pot.

But even if she did make it to St Petersburg, there was no way anyone from Britain – or France – could reach Moscow in time to help. And God alone knew what the Russian nobility would do. They might side with the Tsar, despite his madness, or start a civil war, while the undead advanced in all directions. It seemed unlikely that they would join the outsiders in stopping the undead while there was still time.

If there is still time
, she thought, morbidly. The Tsar’s undead empire was already snowballing rapidly. Who knew where it would end?

Her own words came back to haunt her. If one undead bit a living person, there would be two undead; if both undead bit a living person, there would be four undead; if all four undead found a new victim each, there would be eight undead ... then sixteen, then thirty-two, then ... it would just keep going until they ran out of victims. But Russia was a heavily populated country. By the time they ran out, there would be an unstoppable army heading towards the German states or the Ottoman Empire.

Sir Sidney coughed. Gwen looked up at him, apologetically. She hadn’t realised her thoughts had slipped away from him.

“I wish there was another way,” he said, softly. “But if the end is nigh anyway, use your magic and escape. Get out and warn the rest of the world about the Tsar.”

“Understood,” Gwen said, bitterly. Cold logic told her he was right. But cold logic was no consolation. How could she abandon Olivia, knowing that she would be killed ... or forced to serve the Tsar again? But if she tried to carry someone with her, there was no way she could get as far as she could on her own. “If that’s what I will have to do, that is what I will have to do.”

Sir Sidney tugged on her arm. “Council of war,” he said. “Come on.”

Gwen followed him back across the roof, down the stairwell and into a large room that had been hastily converted into a command centre. She had her doubts about the value of any coordination; the sheer mass of undead would ensure that they would break through the defences in multiple locations, but there was no choice. A handful of men drilled with swords, serving as a reserve to be rushed to any threatened breakthrough. But there weren’t enough of them to hold the line.

A nasty thought occurred to her and she frowned. “We need to check for tunnels,” she said, remembering the catacombs under the cathedral. “Can they bypass our defences by sneaking in underground?”

“We looked,” Sir Sidney said. “But we found nothing.”

Gwen resisted the temptation to roll her eyes as the Council of War slowly gathered. There were procedures for the Royal Sorcerer – and then the Royal Sorceress – to call Councils of War, but as far as she could tell Master Thomas had never bothered. But then, few had doubted his competence and none had doubted that he knew where a great many bodies were buried. If the Royal Sorcerers Corps did wind up going to war, Gwen knew, she would be expected to work with her senior magicians, rather than issuing orders.

Talleyrand gave her a sidelong look, then a wink, as he entered the room. He carried a sword by his side, although Gwen had no idea if he knew how to use it. Talleyrand’s great skills lay in diplomatic manipulation, according to Lord Mycroft, rather than swordplay or military operations. But life at the French Court was sometimes touchy. It was quite possible that Talleyrand knew how to use the blade.

Behind him, Lord Standish stepped into the room. He looked tired, tired enough merely to nod to Gwen rather than say a word. Gwen suspected the older man was looking at the end of his career, even if they did manage to make it out of Moscow successfully. His reputation would not survive losing command of the mission to Sir Sidney, no matter what their sealed orders said. Gwen felt a moment of pity, which she ruthlessly suppressed. Lord Standish had done absolutely nothing to control his wife.