The Gates of Sleep em-3

by Mercedes Lackey

  Suddenly, Marina found her coils closing on air, as a little black cat shot out from under the lowest loop just before she collapsed in a heap under her own weight. Then the little cat turned to a great black panther, and leapt on her, landing just behind her head, pinning her to the ground and biting for the back of her neck.

  That’s a ploy anyone can play—Marina became a mouse, and ran between its paws. And from behind the panther’s tail, went on the offensive again; became an elk, and charged at the big cat, tossing her into the air with her massive antlers.

  Ha! Into the air the great cat flew, and she came down as a wolf.

  But not just any wolf—one of the enormous Irish wolves, killed off long ago, but which had, in their time, decimated the herds of Irish elk.

  Oh no—! The wolf slashed at her legs, by its build and nature designed to kill elk; Marina leaped into the air—

  And became a golden eagle, dropping down onto the wolf’s back, fastening three-inch-long talons into fur and flesh and slashing at the head with her wicked beak. The Mongols of the steppes and the Cossacks of Russia hunted wolves with golden eagles—

  But before the beak could connect, fur and flesh melted into a roaring tower of flame, and Marina backwinged hastily into the air before the raging fire Madam had become could set her feathers alight. But evidently Madam hadn’t heard “The Twa Magicians,” or she would have known Marina’s next transformation—

  —into a torrent of water. The form most natural to a Water Mage.

  Andrew was not a moment too soon; the cook had fallen across the front of the big bread-oven, although she had only just started the fire in it, and it hadn’t heated up sufficiently to give her serious burns. One of her helpers had been cutting up meat, though, and the last falling stroke of his cleaver had severed a finger.

  Blood poured out of the stump, running across the table, dripping off the edge, pooling on the floor. He could easily have bled to death if Andrew hadn’t gotten there when he had.

  In a moment, Andrew had the bleeding stopped, though he’d been forced to use the crudest of remedies, cauterizing the stump with a hot poker, for he hadn’t time to do anything else, and blessing the spell that kept the poor fellow insensible. Another kitchen maid was lying too near the fire in the fireplace where the big soupkettle hung—one stray ember and she’d have been aflame. He moved her out of harm’s way.

  That cleared the kitchen—with his heart pounding, he ran out into the yard and the stables.

  There he discovered that the animals had fallen asleep as well, which solved one problem. At least no one was going to be trampled.

  Here the problem was not of fire, but of cold; left in the open, the stablehands would perish of exposure in a few hours as their bodies chilled. He solved that problem by dragging two into the kitchen, which was certainly warm enough, and the third into an empty, clean stall onto a pile of straw, where he covered the man with horse-blankets.

  He dashed back inside, painfully aware of the passing of time. It was too late—he hoped—for the maids to be mending and laying fires. He couldn’t go searching room to room for girls about to be incinerated—

  But his heart failed him. Oh, God. I must. He began just such a frantic search of the first floor, wondering as he did so just how long it would be before Reggie ambushed him.

  Whenever it happened, it would be when Reggie was at his readiest—and he, of course, at the least ready.

  Madam was running out of ideas, so she became a huge serpent, at home on land or water—which was just what Marina had hoped for.

  The torrent turned immediately to hail and sleet, the enemies of the cold-blooded reptile, and the one thing they were completely vulnerable to. Marina poured her energy into this transformation—which would have to be her last, because she was exhausted, and could sense that she hadn’t much left to spend. But she didn’t have to kill Arachne. All she had to do was immobilize Madam, then get her own two hands on the woman. It was, after all, Madam’s curse, and curses knew their caster; she could feel the thing tangling them together. Over the course of this battle, Marina had been weaving the loose ends of that curse back into Madam’s powers whenever they came into physical contact. Now Marina would just send it back, if she could have a moment when she could concentrate all of her will—her trained will—on doing so.

  The cold had the desired effect. The serpent tried to raise its head and failed. It tried to crawl away, and couldn’t. In a moment, it couldn’t move at all. A moment more, and it lay scarcely breathing, sheathed in ice from head to tail. The eyes glared balefully at her, red and smoldering, but Madam could not force the body she had chosen to do what she willed.

  Marina fell out of the transformation, landing as herself on her knees on the ice-rimed grass beside the prone reptile. She was spent. I can’t—

  I must. There was no other choice, but death. Go past the end of her strength and live and return to Andrew—or die.

  Weeping with the effort, she gathered the last of her power, isolated the vile black-green energies of the curse just as she had isolated the poison in Ellen’s veins, and shoved it into her hands and held it there. With the last of her strength, she crawled to Madam—she didn’t need to pierce Arachne’s skin for this—they were both immaterial, after all—

  She placed both hands on the serpent’s head—and shoved. And screamed with the seething, tearing pain that followed as the thing that had rooted in her very soul was uprooted and sent back to its host.

  Reggie waited for Andrew where he had clearly been for some time; in the center of a red room, with a desk like an altar in the very center of it. An appropriate simile, since on the desk lay the dead body of a woman in a superior maid’s outfit, her throat slit, blood soaking into the precious Persian rug beneath.

  Reggie was not alone, either. To one side stood—something.

  There had been a sacrifice here to call an ally, and the ally had answered in person.

  It wasn’t a ghost, it wasn’t material—it didn’t even have much of a form. To Andrew’s weary eyes, it was a man-shaped figure of black-green flame, translucent, and lambent with implied menace. Reggie pointed straight at Andrew. “Kill him!” he barked—a smile of triumph cutting across his face like the open wound of the woman’s throat.

  “No.” The figure shifted a little. “No. First, he is Favored, and I may not touch him. Second—” Andrew got the impression of a shrug. “—think of this as a test of worth. Yours, and perhaps, his.”

  Reggie stared, aghast—he had not expected this response. “But the bargain—” he cried. “I’ve worshipped, given you souls, corrupted for you, killed in your name—”

  “Which was the bargain. You have received in the measure that you earned. This is outside the bargain. You will see me again only when this combat is decided.”

  And with that, the figure winked out, and was gone. Hah, Andrew thought, with a glimmer of hope. “But will they answer when you do call them?”

  Reggie stared at the place where it had been with his mouth agape. And Andrew took that moment to attack.

  He did what another magician would have considered madness—he rushed Reggie physically, like the rugby player he had been at university, his momentum carrying him over the desk, knocking the body of the poor dead girl off the top, and carrying carcass and Reggie both to the ground. He grabbed for both wrists and got them, pinning the other to the blood-soaked carpet.

  Pain lashed him, the pain of Reggie’s mage-fire raging over him, burning him physically as the fire ate into his shields. Reggie still held the sacrificial dagger he had used to sever the girl’s throat; Andrew screamed in agony, but held to the wrist that held that dagger—for he knew, with a cold fear of the sort that he had never felt before, that if Reggie managed to free his hand and use that dagger, it would kill him no matter how slight the wound.

  He built up his shields as the pain and fire burned them away; he bit back his screams as Reggie rolled under him and tried to throw
him off. And he used tricks learned in the violence of the rugby scrum, bashing his forehead into Reggie’s nose, smashing it in a welter of blood, distracting him just long enough for him to try the desperate call he hoped would be answered. He made a summons of it, calling through the channel that they had shared, hoping that she had been freed to answer it.

  Because if it wasn’t—he and Marina were both doomed. “Here!”

  The voice in his mind was weary, weary—but he felt Marina’s spectral presence, felt her spirit, tired, battered, but alive and free of the limbo into which she had been sent! Felt her join her power with his—

  And knew that it wasn’t enough.

  Desperately, he reached for the power of Earth—and found it closed against him, violated by the sacrifice of the servant and more blood shed over the past months, poisoned by blasphemy in a way that made it impossible for him to touch. He could use it—but only if he cleansed it. And he didn’t have time.

  With nose smashed aside and bleeding profusely, Reggie grinned up at him, a savage grin that made him cold all over. And in that moment, he knew utter despair. “No, damn it, NO!” Marina cried.

  Reggie gathered his own power; Andrew felt it gathering above him—them—like a wave poised to break over them, threatening to send them both back into the limbo where Madam had cast Marina.

  Then—from some unguessed depth of her spirit, Marina reached for a source of her power uncontaminated by the blood and black magic—reached down into the village, where a wellspring lay doubly blessed, by Elemental and Christian mage—She should not have been able to touch it—and reaching so far and so desperately might doom her, burn her out forever—He couldn’t stop her.

  She wouldn’t let him.

  “I love you,” she said, “And I’ll be damned before I let him have you!”

  The words gave him a last burst of energy past his own strength in that last instant, and he, too, reached further and deeper than he ever had in his life—and then, two floods met—evil and good, light and dark, life and death—

  Andrew was caught up in the maelstrom, and was thrown about like a cork in a hurricane. The power was beyond his control now, or Marina’s, or indeed anyone’s. It was its own creature with its own laws, supremely indifferent to the wishes of a few puny humans. In the depths of the storm he thought he sensed others—one, two, a dozen, more—who found themselves unwitting channels for a power with a will of its own. He lost sight and sense of Marina, lost sight and sense of Reggie, clung only to his own identity, desperately, praying, as the competing waves of power battered him indiscriminately, and finally drove him down into darkness.

  And his last thought was that if Marina was not to survive this confrontation—he didn’t want to, either.

  The last thing he heard was a dreadful wailing, a howl of the deepest and most profound despair and defeat—and the sound of demonic laughter.

  Then he lost track of everything, and knew nothing more.

  He woke in a bed in his own sanitarium; he knew that ceiling—it was the one above his bed. He coughed, and suddenly there were half a dozen faces looking down at him. And among the faces around his bed was the one he wanted to see most.

  “Marina!” The word came out as a croak, from a throat raw and rasping.

  “Alive, thanks to you,” she said, her eyes dark-circled, her voice heavy with exhaustion, her smile bright and full of an emotion he hardly dared name. “And well, thanks to my—our—friends. And so are you.” She turned her smile on the three men, who looked equally exhausted. “Clifton bridged the power-well of the rectory to the greater power of the other Masters—and got a bit of a shock!”

  “I should say,” Davies admitted, rubbing the side of his head, as if it still ached. “Never have I seen such an outpouring of power—not only from the Masters we had telegraphed, not only from your Undines and the lesser Water creatures, but from the Mermaids and Tritons, the Hippocampi and other salt-water powers all the way down at the sea, and from the Air, the Sylphs, the Winds, the Fauns and other Earth creatures, the Salamanders and Dragons of Fire—things I can’t even put a name to! They cleansed the earth for you, Andrew! And you reached for your power and it answered with more than I have ever heard of!”

  “And you did exactly what that irascible old reprobate told you to do,” Sebastian said, as words failed the Reverend Davies and he shook his head in wonder. “You unwound that curse and wrapped it around Reginald and tied it back to Madam, and then—” He shrugged. “Well, we don’t precisely know what happened then. All we know is that when the brouhaha faded out, when Marina woke up and demanded that we go rescue you, and Thomas and I went into Oakhurst to find you, you were sitting on the front stoop looking as if you’d been in a bare-fisted bout with a champion and come out the worst. Reginald was in Madam’s study, slumped over the body of the poor wench he’d killed—unconscious, exactly as the curse made Marina—and Madam was in the same condition in the next room. The servants were just starting to wake up, so Thomas whisked you away before they saw you, and I laid into the footman, trying to get him to wake up. The servants found Reggie and Madam, by the way—” He grinned sheepishly. “I did take credit for the lad with the finger he’d chopped off, though. Someone had to, and no one could prove that I wasn’t the one who’d used that hot poker to save his life. They couldn’t prove I was any farther into the manor than the kitchen either, which is just as well for all of us.”

  “Police?” he managed.

  Clifton Davies nodded. “Called, been, gone. Coroner too. He says that Reggie and his darling mother poisoned each other—like they tried to poison you, my dear—” he patted Marina’s hand “—and before Reggie succumbed, he killed that poor girl—Marina’s maid, a lady of, hmm, negotiable virtue with a bit of a past. They say that he slaughtered her in a state of dementia. We suggested that they ought to be seen to by doctors, specialists. I’m told that they’re going to be moved to some place in Plymouth, under police guard, in case they might be feigning their state.”

  “And meanwhile, I am living here—convalescing—until they are far away from my estate,” Marina said firmly. “I do not intend to set foot there until they are gone.” She smiled, charmingly, a smile that made him melt. “Besides, it’s perfectly proper. My guardians are here, and you’re not only my physician, you’re my fiance.”

  He blinked. Not that he minded, but—when had that happened? “Now wait a bit—” he said.

  “Are you saying you don’t want to be my fiance?” she asked, her serene smile wavering not at all.

  Of course he wanted to! He couldn’t imagine spending the rest of his life with anyone else! But she was so young—it wasn’t fair to her—”No, but—dammit, Marina, you’re only seventeen!”

  “Almost eighteen,” she interrupted.

  “You’ve never been anywhere but Blackbird Cottage and Oakhurst!” he continued stubbornly. “You’re wealthy, you’re beautiful, you’ll be pursued by dozens of suitors—”

  “—none of whom are worthy to polish your scalpels,” she said impishly.

  “And I don’t want you to miss that!” he cried, voice cracking, as he gave words to what he was really afraid of. “I don’t want you to look at me across the room one day, and wish that you hadn’t gone so fast, that you’d had your London season, that you’d had a chance to be petted and courted, seen at the opera and Ascot—had all those things that you should have—”

  “Very nicely put, Doctor,” Lady Elizabeth said, patting his hand complacently. “And she’ll have all those things. A little thing like an engagement to a country doctor is not going to put off those hordes of suitors. I intend to see she gets that London season myself. And when she’s had her fill of it, she’ll come back here, and marry you, and between all of Madam’s money and her own, I do believe you’ll be able to turn Briareley into a first-class establishment.”

  He blinked as the three women laughed together, exchanging a glance that excluded all the mere males in the room. �
�Ah—” he managed, and dredged up the only thing he hadn’t exactly understood. “Madam’s money?”

  “I’m the only heir—I’ll have all her property and Reggie’s too in a few months,” Marina said—with just enough malicious pleasure that he felt a rush of relief to see that she was human after all. “I doubt that they’ll live longer than that. I’ll be cleaning up the potteries, of course—which will mean they won’t be quite so profitable—but there will still be enough coming in, I believe, to make all of the improvements here that you could wish.” She made a face. “And in addition to having that delightful London season, I’m afraid I’m going to have to learn how to run a business—”

  Oh, my love! I won’t let your season be spoiled! “You’ll have help,” he assured her. “Surely there must be someone we can trust to guide you through it. Or even take over for you.”

  “My man of business, to begin with,” Lady Elizabeth said airily. “And after that—I think I can find a business-minded Earth or Water Master to become your manager. Someone who, needless to say, will be as careful of the land, the water, and the workers as he is of the pounds and pence.”

  “Needless to say,” he repeated, and suddenly felt as if he was being swept up again in something beyond his control.

  But this time, it was something very, very pleasant. And it was all in the hands of these utterly charming women, one of whom he had loved almost from the moment she had walked into Briareley to help a little factory-girl she didn’t even know.

  “I think I’d like to sleep now,” he said meekly. “Unless—”

  Then he remembered his duties, and tried to sit up, frantically. “My patients!” he exclaimed.

  “Are fine. They have my personal physician, and the village doctor to attend their needs. And two Earth Masters, a Water Master, and a Fire Master.” Lady Elizabeth pushed him down again. “And if that isn’t enough, my physician is bringing in several fine nurses he can recommend who would very much like to relocate to this lovely slice of Devon.”