And so our resentment grew.
It all came to a head, eventually. Of course it did.
And it all started in a house of horrors.
Chapter One
“It feels like a storm,” Void said. “Doesn’t it?”
I nodded, stiffly, as I stood at the gates and peered towards the distant mansion. My uncle’s message had been surprisingly urgent, for a man who so lazy there were whispered suggestions he’d married a pregnant women. It was cruel of us to laugh, I suppose, but Uncle Mago of House Barca was the man who constantly dangled the promise of family acceptance in front of us, if we did one last thing — and then a second last thing — for him. The family regarded us as deniable assets. I wondered, sometimes, if they thought they were fooling anyone.
“The wards are clearly going haywire,” I agreed. Hamilcar and Himilco — our other brothers — were walking the edge of the grounds, prodding the defences to look for weak points we could use to break into the mansion. “And there’s wild magic spilling everywhere.”
Void glanced at me. “Do you think they’re betting there’s enough wild magic in this place to kill us?”
“I hope not,” I said. There were no birds flying through the air, no small animals scurrying through the brambles. That wasn’t a good sign. Animals tended to be smarter than humans where wild magic was involved. “I really do.”
I felt my heart sink as my eyes ran over the grounds and the distant mansion. It would have looked good in its time, I was sure, but now it was a wreck. The wild magic animated the flower beds and distant bushes, turning them into ravenous entities that were clearly on the verge of uprooting themselves and setting out to wreak havoc on the countryside; the mansion itself was drenched in magic, the wards slowly decaying into a haze of magic that might easily destroy the mansion. They had to be taken down, Uncle Mago had said, before the entire structure collapsed into rubble. Personally, I suspected he was renting us out to the White Council and its Mediators. I’d checked the records, such as they were, and House Barca didn’t seem to have any interests in the region.
Unless our father is involved, somehow, I thought. We didn’t remember the bastard who’d sired us, then left us to the family’s tender mercies. We’d spent long nights using spells to try and track him down, although we didn’t know if we wanted to hug or hit him, only to draw a complete blank. Is this one of his labs?
Hamilcar and Himilco returned, wands in hand. “No weak points,” Hamilcar said. He was our wardcrafting expert, although we were all pretty good. Our tutors had wondered if we were taking each other’s exams at school, on the grounds our unique nature made it difficult for anticheating charms to work. “We’ll have to go through the gates.”
“There’ll be something nasty on the path,” Void cautioned. “We’ll have to be careful.”
I nodded as we inched to the gates, our magic fusing together into a single unit, as if we were a single person with multiple bodies. I wondered, sometimes, if it was that that scared the family. We were an unstoppable team. We’d fought duels in which we’d been heavily outnumbered and still emerged victorious, simply because we worked together so well. If we’d taken on the might of the family… we moved as one, knocking the gates open and running up the path. It was deceptively still until we were halfway to the mansion, where upon the ground shifted underneath us and Hamilcar and Himilco fell into a pit. We reacted at once — as one — casting spells to levitate the fallers out of the pit while the others hopped over and landed neatly on the far side. The ground shifted, trying to hurl us into the pit again, but we kept moving. There were charms woven into the wards to keep us from flying — a simple precaution, even in those days — but they weren’t designed to keep us from levitating. We pin-wheeled over the path and landed safely, staffs raised in anticipation of a second threat. The ground heaved, the bushes tearing themselves from their beds and hurtling towards us like monsters from the Blighted Lands. I thought I heard them scream as we blasted them with fire and wind spells, the former setting them ablaze while the latter hurled the burning branches against the far wall. The damage to the garden didn’t matter. There was so much wild magic in the air that it would have to be torn down, the ground cleansed before the garden was regrown from scratch.
Void laughed. “I think we’re not welcome.”
I heard my brothers chuckle as we pressed through the inner wards. The owner — dead now, according to our uncle — had been paranoid, incredibly so. His wards were a virtual spider web of traps, each countered spell triggering another. Freeze spells tried to stop us in our tracks, change spells tried to turn us into toads, levitation spells tried to send us flying over the wards… we countered them all, covering each other perfectly. I saw a fireball shoot at Void’s back and deflected it into a change spell coming at me; he caught a paralysis spell aimed at me and shot it at a stone statue, which stopped dead and then shattered into a thousand pieces of debris. I hoped the statues hadn’t been human once, before they’d trespassed in a sorcerer’s domain. If they were, the spells had lasted so long they’d become permanent.
The door loomed up in front of us, brimming with spells. I threw myself forward, drawing the spells onto my wards and deflecting them into the air. A wave of focused magic descended on me, threatening to crush my strongest protections. It would have been suicide, if my brothers hadn’t been at my side. I took the hit, starving death off long enough for them to undo the defences and tear the spells to pieces. The doors crashed open. I stumbled forward, blinking hard as we swept into the lobby. Silence fell, like a physical blow. I looked around warily. The lobby was disturbingly still, brightly lit even though there was no visible light source. I didn’t like it.
“Interesting,” Void said. “The charms felt as if they were directed by a living mind.”
Hamilcar scowled. “The sorcerer is dead, remember?”
“Is that true?” Void kept turning his head from side to side, as if he expected to be attacked at any moment. “Did you see the body?”
“That fat oaf wouldn’t dare to lie to us,” Himilco muttered. “The sorcerer is dead. His wards are lingering. That’s all there is to it.”
I wasn’t so sure. The lobby was… weird. It looked like a normal aristocratic lobby, with a marble floor and marble stairs and marble statues and paintings — edged by marble, of course — and yet, there was a faint sense we were being watched pervading the air. It felt as if something was waiting to happen. I reached out with my senses, tracing the magic running through the mansion. The files insisted the mansion had originally been built by the magicless aristocracy and then been sold to the owner, but I had my doubts. The building was perfectly tuned for magic, allowing it to be turned into a warded stronghold with very little effort. It was odd.
Perhaps they thought there’d be a magician in the family, sooner or later, I thought. Or maybe something else is going on.
My eyes narrowed. Uncle Mago was too lazy to lie and yet, it was quite possible someone had lied to him. Had we been sent on a suicide run? We were powerful, and as a team we’d bested magicians far greater than ourselves, but there were a handful of sorcerers who were practically one-man armies. They could fight necromancers in single combat and win. There weren’t many of them, but…
“If he did lie to us, we’d boil him alive until his blubber ran like water,” Hamilcar said. None of us particularly liked our uncle — he smiled too much, concealing his distaste for us behind a mask he was too lazy to maintain — but Hamilcar loathed him. I knew why, although I was forbidden to tell. “He wouldn’t dare.”