DAY 2
Somewhere in the early hours, you’ll eventually find a limited-use doorkey scroll beneath the soil, and Joe will race you to a stretch of desolate pebble beach a few miles away. There, you’ll wait, probably wondering what the hell you’ve gotten yourself into, before a light eventually twinkles on the black ocean. There will be some shouting, some business with rough characters in black hoods bundling you aboard a dinghy, and then a rapid, extremely bumpy ride across the frigid sea. And while it’s possibly unwise to make any direct claims about what might happen next on your journey, it’s worth considering how you might feel about – say – breaking silently into Blacklox Prison on a tiny boat in the dead of night, with your only promise of safety coming from a tramp you just met in a pub. Or how you might react if you found yourself face to face with the two most dangerous Wizardes in the world, as the aforementioned tramp shows them photos of an atrocity and they nod gravely. If that sounds like a good way to spend your holiday, this is probably the trip for you.[53]
DAY 3?
COPY NOT SUBMITTED BY FLOYD[54]
‘Who’s this?’ hissed Deathwish, as I sidled into the cramped room behind Spooky Joe. It seemed to be some kind of laundry area converted into a makeshift parlour complete with armchairs and a small candelabra.
‘Just an associate,’ said Joe.
‘He’s clear,’ added a gruff voice from the corridor, and the Baron nodded, fangs glinting in the shadow of his prison-issue cowl.
With a clink of silver on ceramic, the figure in the corner finished brewing the tea, and came forward – it was Beatrix Miller herself, unmistakable despite the orange jumpsuit.
‘But you’re not in separate cells!’ I blurted as I looked between the Wizardes, unable to contain my surprise. Miller laughed, sounding every bit the sixteen-year-old Girl Wizarde ever-present in Greeblewhoz archive footage.
‘Of course we are, silly! Officially, at least,’ she chided, before nodding over our heads at the guards outside. ‘Right, boys?’ The guards gave a chuckle at this, and even Deathwish joined in with an amused murmur.
‘Besides,’ he drawled in a cultured baritone when the mirth had subsided. ‘We get along rather well, it turns out.’
I looked to Miller, aghast. ‘But he drained your power to carry out the Drungsleydale massacre – you begged him not to!’
‘Oh, come on, everyone knows it was my idea. Brian here—’
‘Don’t call me that in front of guests!’ barked Deathwish, or rather Brian.
‘… was all talk and no trousers, wasn’t he? Came to rescue me but didn’t realise I was planning a blast from the gallows anyway. Said he wouldn’t lend his strength at first – said it was all a bit much. But you realised it was the only option, didn’t you?’
Brian muttered in assent.
‘But … it was a bit much, wasn’t it?’ I offered. ‘You know, wiping an entire city off the map.’
‘You didn’t see the experiments they were conducting in that base they held me in,’ snapped Miller, face hardening to make her look twice her age. ‘Everything they do – everything they’ve done, since magic was revealed to them, demonstrates exactly why we kept it from them in the first place. And if we don’t fight them as hard as we can now – while they’re still weak – it’ll be worse later.’ Miller paced under the room’s sole lightbulb, making the shadows dance. ‘They’re quick learners, and their advanced physicists were starting to figure out magic on their own, even before the Revelation War. It was always going to come to this. In a way, I’m almost glad that idiot Floyd blundered in and started things early.’
‘I think he was quite well meaning,’ I added, breaking out in a sweat, ‘but go on.’ Then Spooky Joe piped up.
‘You want to see what the Mundanes are willing to do to get their hands on magic?’ he said, gesturing at me with his roll-up. ‘Take a look at these photos I took for the masters here.’
At that, Joe shuffled forward with a grimy sheaf of papers, which Brian inspected grimly, before passing them to me with his pale, claw-nailed hand.
The first photo was of the Drungsleydale Memorial Power Facility, viewed from behind security fencing on a rainy night. Several points on the photo were annotated with scribbles. The next shot was blurred, as if taken on the move, but clearly showed the inside of the compound, with a long corridor and a pair of blast doors at its end labelled:
W.A.N.D.
Wizarde-Augmented Nuclear Dynamo
The next photo was presumably taken in the space within those doors, and it took me a moment to parse what I was seeing. It was Wizardes. Dozens of them – prisoners of war, presumably – suspended in glowing fields of green energy, along the length of a cavernous industrial space. Streamers of raw magic were being drawn out of them through funnel-like devices, and channelled into a massive bank of turbines at the hall’s end. The forms of the Wizardes were blurred, as if they had been thrashing when the picture was taken.
There were more blurred shots from inside – a bank of barred cells, and a lab with its wall plastered in diagrams of bat anatomy and blown-up photos of dissections with ‘WHICH ORGAN DOES THE MAGIC?’ scrawled over them. There were more photos, but I was still entirely preoccupied with the scene from inside the power plant, and could not process them. Surely all this couldn’t be my fault.
‘You see now?’ said
