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calling the druid.”
    “ No ,” Elaine said, panicking. What would happen if they realised the truth? “I’m all right, really. Just let me sleep.”

 

    Chapter Four
    Elaine lay in bed, thinking hard.
    Her old tutors used to say that the difference between a magician and a non-magician was that a magician would remember every spell perfectly, as soon as they learned them. Even Elaine, with her limited magical talent, had the perfect memory of a magician, even though some of the spells she’d learned were beyond her ability to actually cast. Now...now every spell known to the world floated through her mind, including some forgotten and some long prohibited on pain of death.
    The necromancers who had started the First Necromantic War had known how to raise the dead. Their grimoires had been recovered after the war and stored in the Black Vault, just in case they were needed by some future Grand Sorcerer. All of the spells they had used to create vast armies of the undead were floating through Elaine’s mind, waiting to be used. It would be easy to reanimate a soulless corpse and send it out charged to kill the living, infecting their dying bodies with the curse that would see them rise again. She had wondered, when she’d started to study magic, precisely how the Witch-King had solved the problem of keeping the curse going over such vast periods of time, but now she understood. His spells had fed on its victims and just kept going.
    And there were other secrets within the Black Vault. Truth spells that were impossible to resist, far beyond the voices used by the Inquisitors. And she knew how those worked too now. Spells that could turn someone into a frog, or a cat, or a slug, or an inanimate object permanently, warping reality far beyond anything Millicent had ever done to her. Names and rituals that could be used to summon demons from the darkness, or call down the gods to the mortal plane, or recall the souls of the dead to the world of the living. Spells that could boil a person’s blood in their veins, or make them a devoted slave, or any number of atrocities that could be carried out by someone with enough magic and ruthlessness to make it work. The tales stored within the Black Vault shocked her. Who would have known that the Witch-King had once been a Grand Sorcerer? That had never been included in her History of Magic classes.
    Some of the other spells made little sense to her, until she started combining the spells with the knowledge that had been dumped into her head. One spell stripped a person of their magic permanently, something that she had always been led to believe was impossible. Why would the Grand Sorcerer have bothered to enslave Miss Prim if there had been another way to render her harmless? But how badly would knowledge of such a spell shake up the established order? Maybe the Grand Sorcerer kept it to himself for a reason, or maybe he didn’t even know it existed. He might never have bothered to search the Black Vault himself, even though he was the one person with unquestioned right of access.
    Her mind started to spin as darker spells assailed her. She could create a disease that would send an entire population to sleep, only for them to awaken as her creatures, body and soul. Or she could call down lightning from high above and strike down Millicent, or create a volcano right in the heart of the Golden City. She found herself staring temptation right in the face and shuddered at what she’d learned about herself. Maybe there was a good reason why the Grand Sorcerer was the only person permitted access to the Black Vault. He already ruled the world and didn’t need such powers to enforce his rule.
    Restlessly, she pulled herself to her feet and stared out of the window over the city. As always, it was illuminated by countless magical lights, lights she now understood how to create for herself. The Watchtower, positioned on the mountain, seemed to her eyes to glow, marking the presence of