Conspiracies (Mercedes Lackey) - By Mercedes Lackey Page 0,86
actually outside the school firewall? All she had was this chatroom.
Why should I trust you?
Open a new window, bring up your browser.
She did so.
Now go to one of your old favorite Web sites.
Well. Okay. How about CanHazCheeseburger? She opened a browser, typed it in, expecting to get nothing, as usual, and—
“… shoot…,” she whispered. There it was. And it wasn’t cached, either, the time/day stamps on the posts proved that.
As long as this chatroom is up and open, you can get onto the Internet. When you close it and take off the thumb drive, that will automatically close the link to outside. Magic.
She stared at the LOLcats. Stared at the chatroom.
If only this didn’t feel so much like a trap.…
THIRTEEN
For three days, Spirit avoided the others. It wasn’t difficult; they were all being worked like dogs. It was incredible; she’d thought Oakhurst was hard before … well, now she knew what “hard” really was. She’d never worked so hard physically in her life, although at least now there was so much supervision over their training that there was no chance for cheap shots from any of the others. Anastus Ovcharenko was sadistic, but he spread it across all of them, so nobody got singled out as the favorite and nobody got singled out as the goat. His two assistants were absolutely indifferent. “Cruel but fair” was what kept coming to mind. The course work was tough, but at least she was spared the courses geared for specific Schools of Magic, since she didn’t have one. That gave her a precious free period to study and work on the other ones. The time she used to spend with the others, well … there was QUERCUS. By the time the day was over, her brain was so numb and her body so tired that QUERCUS was about all she had energy for. Not that he was much help.
Yet she couldn’t keep out of that chatroom; she still couldn’t make up her mind if it was some kind of trap or if he really was there to help her somehow.
What about these Breakthrough people? What do you know about them? she asked.
You should trust your own instincts.
She sighed. Thanks, Yoda, she typed. She had decided there was no point in holding back with him, because what did she have to lose?
He didn’t respond to that. She wondered if he was some sort of robot program, but even she knew there weren’t any “fake” AIs this sophisticated. And if somebody’d written one, why waste it on her?
So just what am I supposed to do, here? she asked. My friends bailed on me, I don’t have any magic, I don’t know what’s going on—
He actually interrupted her. You are at the center of a war. The beginning of the war was in the time of King Arthur.
There was a long pause; she waited.
The situation is complex. While the followers of Mordred, the ones called the Shadow Knights, are completely in the service of Darkness, blame for the war is not entirely on their side. Partly they chose Darkness, but partly they were driven to it. Partly, Mordred himself was driven to it.
All right, she typed cautiously. So?
So now the past is past. For centuries, Mordred himself was powerless. While some few of the Shadow Knights and Arthur’s folk were reborn, it was only a handful, and the conflicts between them were limited to mere duels. Now Mordred has come into his power again. The Shadow Knights are reborn, awakened to their true nature, and more are being recruited. Only Arthur’s followers, the Grail Knights, can effectively oppose them. The war itself has been reborn, and the time for confrontation is at hand. Yet, if one side does not defeat the other this time, the cycle will continue to be repeated, down the long years.
She was startled. This was—in clearer words—exactly what Elizabeth had told her! And QUERCUS had told her this without any prompting. She felt a cold lump in her stomach and a chill running up her spine. Okay, so he’s saying the same thing. But that doesn’t make it true. Facts, though …
Doctor Ambrosius and the Breakthrough people were talking about a war. There were Shadow Knights, and they’d actually been killing people, or trying to. People had gotten badly hurt at the bonfire. People had been Tithed to the Wild Hunt. And people were missing. Gone? Or—dead? Okay, this explanation sounded crazy, but was there a better one?