The Golden Tower (Magisterium #5)(29)

“This is really not good,” said Jasper’s voice. Call found himself back in his body. His wrists were tied to the posts of a large bed whose hangings bore marks of punctures, water damage, and smoke. His shoulders ached.

“It’s me,” Call said. His voice sounded hoarse, and his throat ached. “Where’s Aaron?”

I’m here, said Aaron’s voice in his head. Call, you’ve got to get hold of yourself. Push the memories back, wall them up again. You were right —

Jasper looked worried. Why he was next to Call’s bed, Call didn’t know. “Aaron’s dead,” he said. “Call? Do you know where you are?” He ran to the door. “Tamara! He’s talking!”

A girl raced into the room, her hair flying. Brown skin, dark hair, beautiful. Call knew her but the knowledge was rushing away from him. He gripped the ropes connected to his wrists, trying to hang on. “What’s happening now?” he said. “What happened then?”

The girl — Tamara, Tamara — came close to his bed, her eyes full of tears. “Call, what’s the last thing you remember?”

“The ice cave,” Call said, and saw both of them stare at him in horror just before he tumbled off the edge of everything.



He was in a massive stone room. Constantine Madden was pacing back and forth in front of a huge dais made of granite, his customary mask pulled down over his scarred face. On top of the dais was a tomb, and on the tomb lay a body — one that Maugris recognized easily. He knew both Madden siblings well enough. It was Constantine’s brother, Jericho.

Jericho was motionless in death but Constantine was full of movement. He raced from one end of the room to the other, the silver mask that hid half his face gleaming. Over and over he spoke to his brother, telling him that he’d bring him back, that he should never have died, that the Magisterium would pay. Death itself would be destroyed.

Maugris watched with interest. He understood hating death. He had spent generations and centuries avoiding it himself. Looking down at the elegant but wrinkled fingers of his own hand — a woman’s hand this time — he knew he could easily have a decade or three more in this body. And yet Constantine, in his present state, might not last so long. He would burn up — all ambition and impulse and no strategy.

Master Joseph had done good work, separating him from the Magisterium, from the people who cared about him. Maugris allowed himself a moment of pleasure and pride in his cultivation of that mage. A man broken enough to be manipulated, broken enough to break that child, had been an excellent choice for an apprentice. And yet he had never suspected his Master of anything but inflaming his own ambitions. He had certainly never suspected her of being a Makar. The mouth of the woman’s body he wore curled up into a smile.

The last time he rose in power, the last time he had made a bid for taking a bite out of the mage world, was long enough back that they would never connect him with those who had come before. That was the value of lying low for several generations: It gave the world time to forget. But this new Makar had tried some interesting experiments. He had failed to bring back the dead, but he’d given Maugris an idea for an army. An unstoppable army.

It was time to become Constantine Madden.

This has all been and will be again.

Call opened his eyes again, back in the stone room with the bed. The scorch marks were no longer on the wall, but he wasn’t sure if he’d imagined them or if they’d just been washed away. He heard howling — Havoc? Chaos wolves?

“Call?” came a soft voice. He turned his head. “Do you remember who you are now?”

Celia was there, her wispy blond hair pushed back with a headband, her face so pale that what stood out was the redness of her eyes. Call frowned at her, trying to place her in his memories. She didn’t like him.

Had he burned down her tower and scorched all her lands? Murdered her family? Spit in her soup? There were so many crimes rushing through his head.

“Call?” she said again. He realized he hadn’t answered.

“You …” he croaked, raising a finger to point accusingly at her. She’d done something, too, he remembered that.

“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know you must be wondering why I’m here when I’ve been so awful — and I was awful. I was afraid. I had family here at the Magisterium when your father — and you, I mean not really you, but him.” She stopped speaking, clearly having gotten herself tangled up in her words. “When Constantine was at the school, no one thought he would become the Enemy of Death. They knew he was all puffed up about being the Makar and believed he could do things no one else could, but it didn’t seem that bad. Until it did. A lot of my family died in the Mage War, and when I was growing up, they warned me over and over again about how brave I would have to be to stand up to Constantine, but that if someone had, none of this would have happened.”

Murdered her family, Call thought. That was what I did to her.

Call, came a voice in his head, a voice that startled him. Call, you have to focus. Push back the memories.

“I know that’s an excuse,” Celia said. “But it’s also an explanation, and I wanted you to have one. I was wrong, and I’m sorry.”

“Why now?” he wanted to know. Why had she decided to forgive him when she’d been right all along? He wasn’t trustworthy. He wasn’t even sure he was Call.