Something happened. Barach stirred, groaned, tried to sit. Kelada helped him up. Jeremy almost fell, drained suddenly, feeling like a marionette whose strings had been cut. Power had surged from him, he knew that. He could only hope that it had passed to the old teacher and that it was enough to sustain Barach. The old magician struggled to his feet. He was already speaking quickly, harshly, in a language Jeremy did not know, but one that somehow sounded ancient, arcane, complex. The magician took a step forward, another, making for the northern passage. He almost glowed with magical energies, but within the glow the old body looked frail and shaken.
In the doorway to the passage Barach straightened himself, spread his arms wide, and threw his head back on his shoulders. The magic fairly sizzled around him, and his voice suddenly cracked out, a whip slashing toward the Hag. The stones of the castle seemed to vibrate to the sound, and for a second Jeremy felt the power of the Hag slip away from him entirely, and he could talk. “Barach has the power,” he gasped in his own language, hoping that the wish carried the force of a spell and that the spell would help.
Then a blast of malignant force like nothing Jeremy had felt or imagined swept down the corridor, exploded into the throne room, smashed Barach aside, filled the room with the Hag's power and her hatred. It passed like the hot breath of a detonation, leaving Jeremy dazed, sunk to his knees, clinging to the iron throne. Kelada sprawled not far away, and Barach had been tumbled thirty feet, a third of the way down the length of the throne room. Jeremy staggered toward the old man, fell, and crawled the rest of the way. He found Barach lying on his back, eyes wide under their birds'-nest brows, gray beard pointing stiffly at the ceiling. The old man's chest heaved when Jeremy laid a hand on it. “Are you hurt?” Jeremy asked.
The mouth twitched under the sweeping gray mustaches. “What a question.”
“Can you move?”
“Ah. A better question.” Barach stirred his head, his arms and legs. “No bones broken. Yes, I can move. But I am blind.”
Jeremy passed his hand across the eyes. They did not focus or blink. “Barach, we have to get away—”
The old head rolled from side to side against the stone floor in weary negation. “Go if you can. It is better for me that I remain. I have failed, and Whitehorn will fall. And after Whitehorn, the whole land and the whole world.”
“But we can try again—”
“Not I, my son. I have no magic left.” In the instant of his speaking, Jeremy felt the truth of what his teacher said. Barach had put everything, every last reserve of mana that he could call on, in that last mighty spell, and it had almost been enough to quell the witch and quench her power—almost but not quite. Now the old man lay an empty vessel, one that could never be filled again.
Jeremy felt his own forces growing within, like a fire that had burned almost to ashes given new fuel. Somewhere he at least was finding new strength. “Where there is life, there is magic,” he said. “You taught me that, Barach. You of all people should know that the Three Laws are immutable, even for a stubborn old man.” Kelada came to kneel beside them. Jeremy reached for Barach's hand, put it in Kelada's. “Get up, my teacher. Kelada will be your eyes. Our business here is not finished.”
The blind eyes wrinkled into a semblance of Barach's old smile. “Once a man fell off a high cliff, and a little bird noticed him smiling on the way down. ‘How can you smile?’ the bird demanded. ‘You have no feathers or wings, and death awaits you in seconds!’ ‘Who knows,’ the man replied. ‘I might land in a haystack!'”
“Jeremy,” Kelada said. “The Hag comes.”
Barach slowly got up. Kelada helped him, and they limped down the western passage—no wards at all blocked the way now, Jeremy saw. He sensed that the Hag's forces had been tested to their utmost limits, that she too now had to rest, to build up her strength again. It would be a long time coming, he thought to himself, taking small comfort from the thought. The Hag had all the seeming of a dry husk, a body without a spirit, save only the spirit of her anger and hatred. He turned to face her as she tottered into the room, supporting herself with a hand against the stone wall. “The Dark One knows of you now,” she said, glaring at him. “He will have you!”
“Bogey tales! Save them for the nursery.” Jeremy took a step toward her, trying hard not to betray the weariness he felt. “Your death was in that spell, Hag. You spat out your life with the venom you sent against the old man. You have burned yourself out like the guttering torch behind you.”
She did not look at the torch but edged sideways until she could grasp one arm of the throne, then the other. She lowered herself down, and she looked more than ever like a living skeleton, like one of her own creations. Even the deep-set eyes had lost their glitter and looked flat, like a doll's eyes, or like the eyes of the dead. “I will recover, youngster. My armies have halted, but they have not retreated, and no magic of Tremien's can dislodge them so long as the Dark One supplies them with power. Power, young fool! It flows into the castle even now. Can't you feel it? A day, two days, and I will be strong as ever, or even stronger, and then Tremien will know my anger.”
“You have the droppings from the Dark One's table, Hag, such stale crumbs as he cares to give you. He will use you as long as he finds you convenient, then kill you. You are the fool, not I.”
The bony fingers clenched and unclenched atop the skulls, and in the Hag's face the lips drew back, white and bloodless, over the cracked, broken, brown teeth. Spittle dripped over her chin, and she wiped it away with the back of her hand. “You speak big. Show me your magic, if you have any left.”
Jeremy shook his head. “No. I will not waste it on you. I have enough power to harm you, but not enough knowledge, and you cannot trick me into squandering what I must use for the defense of Tremien.”
Behind the Hag the fire in the guttering torch flared and smoked, turned a dull orange. Jeremy furrowed his brow. There was something that he should recall, something he had learned or had been told. What was it?
“The Dark One is calling you,” the Hag said. “How will you feel, I wonder, when he brings you before him? You call me evil? Wait until you find his hand upon you. You will curse the day of your being born, and your mother for having borne you, before that one is finished.”
“And how will you fare, witch, when he learns of the secrets you hid from him?”
She shook her head, but her eyes were frightened in the dark caverns on their sockets. “He needs me. It does not matter. He cannot work his will here in the northlands without the mirror, and only Sebastian Magister had the power of their making. Now only this one is left, and the Dark One cannot control or use it without me.”
“I think not,” Jeremy said. “He has drawn power from my world, the Dark One has, and it has made him stronger than even you can guess. I think you will find yourself facing some wickedness beyond your control or warding when you face him.”
She cringed inwardly. Jeremy felt the wards now, shrunk to protect the Hag herself, gathered about her in a small globe, pulled back from all the rest of the castle. They were strong in place there, too strong for him to penetrate with his own power so low. He examined his own mana, and he pictured it as a dwindled glow, like the dancing flames on the torch behind her. The Hag had pulled back, and yes, she was afraid. But to Jeremy she said, “The Dark One is a mortal, long-lived though he be. He has no magic beyond my holding and my wards, not in my own place of power. I do not fear him as long as I am in my castle, for, learned as he is in the ways of magic, yet he is no spirit, no elemental.”
And then the knowledge Jeremy had been groping for moments before was in his mind. The torch had been kindled by Melodia back in the passageway; by Melodia, who carried with her an innocuous tinder box. Jeremy looked more closely at the torch and saw shape there too definite for fire alone. Yes! “Smokharin!” he shouted, so loudly that the Hag started up, thrusting her hands before her as if to turn him away, to hold him off. “Smokharin, the Hag!”
&
nbsp; An orange spark gathered and leaped in a yellow arc from the torch to the throne. The Hag had begun an incantation that broke into a shrill cry of fear. She threw her hands wide, then beat frantically at the yellowed, dry gown she wore. Smoke puffed from the skirt, and a moment later she exploded in flame, fire so fiercely hot that Jeremy had to back away and turn his face. She shrieked in a voice that hurt Jeremy's ears, then cried aloud in great, wordless howls. A commotion at the back of the room, and another skeleton shambled in, muck squeezing between its ribs as through the fingers of a clenching fist. It made for the Hag, then, twenty feet from her, began to jerk and twitch.
The Hag was a wailing, tottering, living torch encased in the flames, skin crisping away from flesh, eyes clouding, wisps of flaming hair and cloth rising from her, whirling aloft, carried in the hot breath of the fire that consumed her. Great black billows of smoke boiled up from her, streaks of soot drifted and swirled in the light the pyre gave off, and the air became acrid and biting with the stench of burned hair and seared flesh. The figure inside the flame fell to its knees, bent slowly back. The arms contracted, drew up in front, as if the Hag were a boxer trying to defend herself against the blows of death. The body toppled sideways, and at the same instant the ghoul simply fell apart, collapsed into a heap of slime and disconnected bones. The fire began to die, leaving behind a shrunken black skeleton flaking to ruin already. A fine rain of oily black soot, droplets small as baby spiders, commenced to fall in the throne room. One smoldering fragment of the dress came to rest on the dead torch that Jeremy had used as a weapon, down beyond the Hag's body and the ruin of the ghoul, and in a second red sparks began to appear on the head of the torch.
Jeremy went to it. Smokharin was there, small, bright. “The Hag is finished,” the salamander said.
“Yes. She will trouble Melodia no more.”
“A victory for you.”
“For you, you mean.”
“No, mortal. Your thought gave me the power to slay the Hag. We cannot deal thus on our own.”
“Together, then. Will you be all right on the torch?”
The little salamander flared even brighter. “I can burn stone if need be!”
Jeremy lifted the torch and fit it into a sconce. “Then I will leave you. My task is not yet done.”
“I know, and I can help you no more. But I think the better of you, mortal magician, for the love you bear Melodia.” The torch smoldered to a low flame. Jeremy turned and walked toward the north passage and the mirror.
The stones in the walls shuddered. From somewhere below him a wrenching, grating sound began and went on and on. The floor sagged as the stones of the castle settled one upon the other. The Hag's magic had perished with her, and now the castle had to stand under only its own strength, the strength of stones and not of magic spells. But in the room of the mirror the old enchantments held firm, perhaps even stronger than before. The blanket had been cast aside, and the oval mirror stood unshrouded in the center of the room. Jeremy reached for it, knowing that he could not bring himself to touch it, that some force more mighty than he would keep his hands off, and he felt invisible resistance, as he expected, a foot or more away from the mirror. The sword he had forged in magic lay on the stones, its light low, but the only light in the room. He stooped and retrieved it. In his hands the sword flashed brighter, giving him hope, and he swung the weapon at the mirror as hard as he could.
He felt a wrenching shock, numbing his arm and shoulder, and in the close confines of the mirror room his ears sang with the noise of a tremendous crash.
For a moment Jeremy thought that he too had been blinded, as Barach had, by some malign curse. He stood stunned, his ears ringing, his eyes seeing nothing but blackness. But then he felt the dull weight in his hand, not much of a burden but heavier than it should be, and feeling somehow mundane. He ran his fingers along the blade of the sword, feeling rough spots and patches of rust, then a jagged edge of metal where the blade had snapped eight inches from the hilt. The mirror was whole, but the sword had shattered, and its magical light had vanished. Only the far-off glow of the torch shed any light at all in the room, and that was too little to see by.
“What are you afraid of?” It was a voice, though not a sound.
“I don't know,” Jeremy said aloud. “Where are you?”
“In my own place.” It was a calm voice, not deep but clear and soft, a man's voice; yet he heard it in his mind, not with his ears. “You are afraid and do not know what you fear? Not a position for a wise man! Let me see you.”
“Here I am,” Jeremy said.
“No. Come before me. Here.” Silver light streamed from the mirror, illuminating the rock wall to Jeremy's left in a shimmering oval. The light seemed to transform the stone, to soften it almost and show the flecks of shining mica the rock held, to transform dull gray building stones into a brilliant, shapeless constellation of minute stars. “Come and stand here, in the light. What are you afraid of?”
“I am afraid,” Jeremy admitted, “of looking in the mirror.”
A silence, and then the voice again, smooth, indulgent. “You are wise beyond your years. Mirrors and love are detestable, for both multiply the numbers of men. But that is not what you mean, is it? You are afraid of what you might see in the mirror, what it might show you of yourself.”
“Yes.”
“Hmm. A fear like none I have ever heard of before, especially from one supposed to be so terrible. Is this the hero? Is this the one who came into my world, thrust by a fate he could not control or understand, who summoned all his courage, who took his destiny into his own hands and fought to make himself into something he had never dreamed of being? For shame, visitor to our world! Come. Come see the hero.”
“No,” Jeremy said between clenched teeth. “No. I am no hero.”
“You are, you know. You have it in you. Or if you are not yet the hero, you might be. You could rule in place of old fools with long white beards and no thought but fear in their bald heads.” The voice rose into a senile crackle of apprehension: “'Oh, my dear, is that a witch stirring? Alas, alas, the portents from the South are evil! Oh, our power on the foolish peasants will be shattered! Who shall we send to do the work we dare not do?'”
“Shut up!”
A sound like hollow laughter. “You did not ask for this, mortal. Do you feel heroic? Or do you not feel used? Where is Tremien? Did he come with you? I think not. I think he sits safe on his mountain and thinks of you and laughs at how he fooled you. Or think of those who did come with you, who were duped, like you, by an old wizard. Look around you. Where are your friends now? Gone, fled. Do you think they waited while you dealt with the Hag? Perhaps long enough to be sure her wards were down, until they knew it was safe to leave. Now they are gone, run away. Do you think they'll make their way back to Tremien? What story do you think they'll tell of you there? That you alone stood and fought when they ran, that you of your own resources killed the Hag? Or that they did that work after you had failed? Who will be the hero in that tale, I wonder? The unknown visitor, or the brave captain of arms who was nowhere to be found when you needed him; or the wise old man of magic who fell through his own pride; or the gentle, hypocritical healer who glories in the name of charity others give her while privately she sweats in a bed of lust, her body spread open for an outlaw; or the determined thief who deserted you as soon as she could? They despise you, you know. You showed them how weak they were, how impotent and false, and they hate you for the faults you show them in themselves. You are their mirror, and they fear to look into it! I expect you will play some small part in the tale they tell, and it will be forgotten by the next time spring comes to Thaumia.”
“Who are you?” Jeremy yelled, setting up a clattering echo.
“You know. I am you.”
“Sebastian?”
Laughter again. “What ignorance, and what an insult! But ignorance can be remedied, and the insult was not meant, I know. No, I am not Sebastian, not the ambiti
ous boy. No, not him, good tool though he was, faithful servant for a time. Look in the mirror if you really want to know who I am.”
“The Hag is dead,” Jeremy said. “Her creatures have fallen to pieces. Whoever you are, you know that your plan has failed.”
“The witch's poor mindless creations, her pretty little puppets, have dissolved. Yes, and on Whitehorn old Tremien scratches his brown, bald pate and wonders what has happened. He may even glory that his magic vanquished them, old fool that he is. He is wrong. True, the legions of the Hag have vanished for a time. But they have only gone to ground. When I turn my attention on them, they will rise again and march, and this time they will not stop until Whitehorn itself has fallen. The Hag was but my servant. Wait until the master strikes! And the power is building, building. I will not send them today, and not tomorrow, but soon they will rise and march, stronger than ever. And no one can stop them as long as the mirrors remain intact. But I forget; that was your quest, was it not, to learn about the mirrors that Sebastian wrought so well? I can teach you all about them. Come, boy, and look into the mirror.”
The voice held something compelling in it, something perverse that made Jeremy think it was taunting him to do something the speaker really feared. Was that the case, or was the tone a clever trick? Jeremy licked his lips. “I will look into the mirror—when I can break it.”
“Oh, but you can't break it. Of all the people of Thaumia, you alone are perhaps the only being of whom I can truly say that: you will never be able to break the mirrors. Don't you understand that now? The spell is a very special one, for it has touched the world from which you came. You are part of it, and it is part of you. Have you never considered the magic of a mirror, never truly looked into a mirror? Don't you see yourself in it whenever you look? You look in one mirror, and then you go away, a hundred thousand paces, and no one knows where you are. Then you look into a second mirror, and whom do you see but the person you fled? There you are, caught, entombed forever behind the glass. Look in the mirror, and look closely. You are only looking into yourself. What do you see today? A new wrinkle on your face, a gray hair that yesterday was dark and lustrous with youth? Your double has them, too. You see time in the mirror, don't you? Time, and death waiting to swallow you at the end, picking away at you day by day with bony fingers. A blemish here, a balding head, a tooth out that will never grow back. Don't you know the person in the mirror hates you? He's killing you, boy, killing you by moments. How would you like to strike back? How would you like to see him grow old, and yourself grow younger, as young as you like? It's a great magic, boy, one not many know. I can show you how.”
Moon Dreams (The Jeremy Moon Trilogy Book 1) Page 27
