“Here,” Caleb said, dragging a pair of chairs into the room. “I’ll just go pick up the third chair.”
Emily took one of the chairs, sat down and started to write. The spell notation was ancient, but thankfully she’d had plenty of time in Old Whitehall to get used to reading it. She translated it mentally as she went along, noting where the designer had cunningly buried aspects that would only come into play when the entire spell was created. Justice would develop intelligence – of a sort – fairly quickly, intelligence that would be focused around his core principles. Emily wondered, as she sketched out each set of spells, just what the original designer had been thinking. The entity didn’t seem designed to serve as a weapon.
Maybe he just wanted an implacable judge too, Emily mused. Justice – at first – would not be able to break his own rules. But, as he grew more and more intelligent, she had no doubt he’d be able to spot loopholes and take advantage of them. Or maybe he was setting a booby trap for future generations.
“I think we might be able to copy the trick they used,” she mused. Getting a spell through Justice’s magic-absorbing field would be tricky – perhaps that was why the dispelling charm hadn’t worked – but she’d had an idea. Linking charms weren’t affected by wards. “We’d just have to get something else through the haze.”
“I hit him with rocks,” Frieda said. “It had some effect.”
Emily nodded. Justice might have been surprised – if he was capable of being surprised – when the rocks hadn’t fallen out of the air as soon as they’d entered his field. Most magicians didn’t think to use spells to throw objects rather than propel them through the air. It was a weakness she’d taken advantage of more than once. But, lacking any real physical component, flying rocks were unlikely to rip him apart.
“They were inside his field,” she said, as she sketched out a set of notes. Sorcerers Row might be in ruins, but Markus had enough supplies – in the bank – to give them a chance to build their own weapons. It wasn’t as if a staff was anything more than a carefully-primed piece of wood. “That gives us an in.”
She frowned. Something was nagging at the back of her mind, something she’d missed.
“You’re talking about putting a charm on the end of a staff and thrusting it into him,” Caleb mused. “How do you know the charm will survive the field?”
Frieda snickered.
Caleb glared at her. “Shut up!”
Emily rubbed her forehead, tiredly. “I don’t,” she said, choosing to ignore Frieda’s unsubtle joke. “We might have to launch several staffs at him.”
“Risky,” Frieda said. “We don’t have any way to measure the potency of his field.”
“Even the most powerful wards barely notice chat parchments,” Emily pointed out. She could do a couple of experiments. It wouldn’t be too hard. “And if we could get a modified spell through the haze, we could take Justice apart before he has a chance to kill us all.”
“It might work.” Caleb stroked his chin as he stared down at her notes. “What if we set up a link between Heart’s Eye and here? You’d be able to overfeed him instead.”
“We could try,” Emily mused. She didn’t think it was a good idea. Overfeeding the entity might be disastrous. Either Justice would become more powerful, or there would be an explosion. “But I don’t think there’d be much of a city afterwards.”
She sighed. “I don’t think we could even get to Heart’s Eye to set up the other end of the link. It’s a very long way away.”
“True,” Frieda agreed.
Emily looked down at her parchment. She was missing something, something obvious. But what?
A nasty thought struck her. “Caleb,” she said, slowly. “Where are Karan and Croce?”
“Croce’s teaching some of the young men how to fight,” Caleb said. “Karan was brewing potions…why?”
Emily wasn’t sure she wanted to follow the chain of logic to its ultimate destination, but she didn’t have a choice.
“Caleb,” she said. “The attack on your house…how did they get inside the wards so quickly?”
Caleb looked back at her, puzzled. “They must have hit them with staggering force. Those staffs they use channel vast amounts of magic…”
“Your mother did a very good job,” Emily pointed out. There were too many oddities about the whole story for her to take it at face value. The Fists of Justice hadn’t just punched through Sienna’s wards. They’d devastated Sorcerers Row itself. “The wards were designed to deflect magic, not absorb it. You should have had ample warning to grab what you needed and run before it was too late.”
She closed her eyes, unwilling to say the next words. “The attack must have started from inside the wards. Caleb, I think Marian betrayed us.”
Caleb stared at her in shock. “Emily…”
“She never liked Emily,” Frieda put in. “And she was obsessed with Justice…”
“Shut up,” Caleb snapped. Emily sensed ragged magic sparkling around him and winced, inwardly. Caleb was as tired as she. They were all tired. “Emily, Marian wouldn’t have betrayed us!”
“Someone told the Fists of Justice that I was going to the temple,” Emily said. She could see the pain on his face. She damned herself, silently, for making him suffer. “Someone let them into the wards. All she needed was a chat parchment and a staff of her very own.”
“They didn’t capture her,” Frieda put in. “She went with them willingly.”
“Shut up,” Caleb hissed. “Shut up, or you will never speak again.”
Emily groaned, inwardly, as Caleb started to pace the room. She was too tired…she should have talked to him in private. Or, perhaps, talked to his parents. He was going to hate her for this, even if she was right. And if she was wrong…
“It might not have been her fault,” she said. Janus had known that General Pollack had been appointed to command the City Guard. He’d had ample opportunity to prepare a few contingency plans. “If she’d seen Justice, she might have been overwhelmed…”