She fainted against Arden’s chest, and he laid her tenderly in the snow.
This wasn’t exactly what he’d been expecting. He thought, after the transfer and her awakening, he’d be able to quite calmly and logically explain that, now that she was magical—and no longer immune to the Essence—she absolutely had to go home. After all, she was only involved in any of this because she had special protection against the Dresdeners. Now that this was removed, she had no business here. And now that she was a magician, too, she could, even without training, easily protect herself and Fee from the assassins. Since his ultimate plan was to return the Essence to all humans, she couldn’t really complain that he’d done anything but act a little prematurely. Against her will, he knew, and she’d have every right to be furious, but fury he could overcome; death, he could not.
All that did little good if she was unconscious.
He shook her, then tried the Sleeping Beauty method, to no avail. There wasn’t time to move her, and already weak from transferring a portion of his life (which left a tickling, empty space in some part of himself he couldn’t quite pinpoint; would it regenerate itself, like lost blood?), he wasn’t sure he could open a portal for her. He needed all the power he could muster to fight the Dresdeners—and they’d be here any minute.
Making a hollow for her head, he covered her with snow and left her there, snug as a badger in its den. She’ll be safe, he told himself. No one will know she’s there. If she woke, though, she’d be vulnerable to the magicians. Ah, but they won’t know that, he realized with a self-satisfied grin. Even if the worst should happen, they’d leave her to the assassins, and she’d be able to handle them easily, now that she could draw from the Essence.
And he left his love, alone and insensible, to meet his lover at the rendezvous point.
For a time, Phil knew nothing. When the body is given more than it can handle, it surrenders and waits. While Phil slept, dreaming impossible dreams beneath her snow blanket, the Dresdeners came.
No more than a rifle shot away, they stood arrogantly on the low lawn, watching the magicians file into Stour. The sinking sun cast sharply angled rays over the snow, making the world strikingly white, blinding as a noontime desert. The Kommandant was there, the man everyone assumed was the leader, but now he yielded place to the Fräulein.
While strange visions filled Phil’s slumbering head, the magicians passed through a precise arrangement of huge mirrors, crafted by Rudyard himself and placed by Fee, that made it seem as if they walked in solemn single file through the high arched doorway.
The traitors, on one pretext or another, had stayed an extra day in the hopper huts, and now they materialized through portals to join the Dresdeners. Together they stood on the exact spot Arden had marked out for them—the only position from which the illusion would work—and never knew that the magicians all passed behind Stour and began a long trek through the snow, to emerge an hour later at a roadside where a convoy of omnibuses collected them. All except the dozen or so of Phil’s muster, who were to sacrifice themselves to save the others; they walked through the real doors.
When nearly all the magicians were through, Arden told the Fräulein, “I will gather them in the great room. That way you can be sure no one escapes. Give me ten minutes. I’ll come out with a present for you.” He gave her a wink and a familiar caress and saw Bergen fume.
In the rigid protocol of college rank, the lowliest entered Stour first, while the loftiest, the Headmaster, always entered last. Arden reached the line just as Rudyard prepared to pass through the mirrored escape and took him firmly by the arm. “Quick, come inside!” he hissed. “There’s been a change of plan. I have to tell you!” Rudyard tried to pull away. “Don’t worry, we have ten minutes, but you must hurry. This is crucial!”
Reluctantly, the Headmaster allowed himself to be led to the library, where Arden shoved him unceremoniously into the darkened room.
“What is the meaning of this?” he cried, as from all around him, savage faces appeared from the shadows.
“Secure him,” Arden said, and the Headmaster felt the Essence surround him, felt coils of magic and steel chains both writhe around his body and hold him fast. He struggled, and against any other magicians of the college, he would have been victorious, but these dozen had been training, fighting, increasing their power in ways that had been forbidden time out of mind. Finally, exhausted, he stood panting as they circled him.
“The old ways are done,” Arden said, forcing himself to remember only the lies, the generations of betrayal and subjugation, not the man who had been a kind teacher and gentle master, the man he—and every other magician in Stour—had looked to almost as a father. It has to be done, he told himself. There is no other way. He will never see reason, and the others will follow him. Leaderless, they have a chance.
“From this moment on, all magicians are free. There is no more college, no more prison.”
“Are you mad? Do you know what you’re saying?”
“We know perfectly well, you son of a whore!” Herewead spat, and would have struck the bound and helpless Headmaster if Arden hadn’t stopped him.
“This isn’t revenge,” he said. “It is simply...what is necessary.” He gave a sardonic smile. “You’ve served the magicians and the world as well as you knew how. I don’t blame you—you were lied to yourself. But you were wrong. You can’t imprison people who have committed no crime. You can’t preemptively punish them for what they might do. We believe in the purity of the Essence, and the goodness of men. All men, magician and commoner. There is no difference—you told me yourself.”
“I beg of you, let me go,” Rudyard pleaded. “You’ve lived a sheltered life. You don’t understand what people are capable of. They’re wicked, Arden; lazy at best, and that’s just as bad, because they allow the wicked to flourish. I’ve seen the wide world, and there is no good in it!”
“There will be,” Arden said softly. “Now your duty is almost done. In a moment they will destroy Stour, and then we will destroy them. It will be over, and both magician and commoner will be safe. Unless, of course, they cannot detect power within the walls. Then they’ll abandon their mission and escape this neat trap we’ve set for them, and we’ll never know where they’ll strike. They’ll pick off your magicians one by one, however well they hide. You say you know human nature? How many do you think will join them, to save their own skins? Your worst nightmare, Rudyard—magicians running amok with all of England’s power at their disposal. Commoners won’t stand a chance.”
He had to turn away from Rudyard’s ashen face. I can’t doubt I’m doing the right thing, he thought. Not now.
“We’re walking out of here. You’ll be the only one left. It will be up to you draw up the Essence, to create a mask of power to fool the Dresdeners. A noble sacrifice, to save the world. You could save yourself, perhaps, but then you’d be dooming the commoners.”
He turned and bade his allies to follow, shutting his ears to Rudyard’s echoing cries: “You’ll doom them too, if you free the magicians. I’ve seen war, Arden! I’ve seen what people are! Don’t give them power—don’t give them freedom! You don’t know the malice and stupidity of them, Arden! You don’t know the horror!”
Even with three slammed doors between them, the Headmaster’s words reverberated through the stone halls.
“Will he do it, do you think?” Felton asked.
“He will,” Arden said grimly. “What we offer is the lesser of two evils. He knows his duty.”
Phil’s visions turned molten; red, uneasy things pried their way into unexplored places, and her dreams became tormented. Beyond her the gates of Stour swung open, and Arden drove a dozen men, apparently half paralyzed and utterly cowed, across the open field toward the Dresdeners’ lookout.
“It’s an ambush!” Bergen cried, but before he could test his powers against Arden, the Fräulein stopped him.
“Wait,” she said.
Arden called out cheerfully
, “These are the ones who plotted to fight you, Fräulein.” With a rush of Essence, he forced the men to their bellies. “Commoner lover!” he shouted with contempt, and shot Felton in the back. “Fool!” He shot Hereweald, and moved along the line, pausing only to reload.
Their masquerade was rendered all the more effective by the fact that the blanks he fired, though nonlethal, had a cardboard wad that was expelled by the gunpowder explosion with considerable force. The magicians were struck hard enough to bruise them, and their convulsive twitches upon being hit, and even a few unfeigned groans, added verisimilitude.
Arden made an elaborate bow, and Hildemar cried, “Bravo!” then whispered to the black-clad Kommandant, “You see, he cannot resist me. Old feelings still linger, but he knows the winning side.”
Arden joined them and looked with satisfaction over the still corpses, to Stour, practically pulsating with power. “If I may do the honors?” The Fräulein nodded, and first Arden, then the Dresdeners, then—some having the decency to look ashamed but not quite enough to protest—the traitor magicians sucked the Essence from the earth, loosed it from the witch-fire opals they all wore, and with a blinding, brilliant, utterly silent streak of color, unleashed doom upon Stour and all it contained.
For a second time Stour fell, not with the ravaging of bombs but with a quiet physical dissolution of the supporting walls, the geological decay of millennia all in an instant. The end result was the same, though. There was a low grinding and crack like an ice-bound river’s first thaw, the deafening crash of a thousand tons of stone, and dust, rising in a cataclysmic plume and spreading in billowing dervish skirts over the twelve fallen men on the lawn.
Through even this, Phil slept, and now her dreams became erratic, terrifying. Something huge below the earth...no, it was a heaving sea, ancient and boiling, and she was in it, surrounded by something vast...now becoming something vast . . .
The Dresdeners and their cohorts whooped in victory. Fräulein Hildemar, in the passion of success more alluring than ever, swayed toward Arden, who had made this all possible.
For the first time, he did not eagerly meet those splendid coral lips, did not reach to caress the alabaster cameo of her shoulders. He did smile, though, and it was enough to make the Fräulein take a step back, for she realized, suddenly, that it was far different from any smile he’d ever bestowed on her before. This one was real.
Puzzled, she tried to dismiss it—after all, everything had gone perfectly—and turned to the Kommandant. “Send the assassins, and as soon as we’ve rested we’ll—”
Her breath was choked off in a golden whip of the Essence, and she reeled, pointing an accusing finger at Arden as she convulsed and gaped and bared her small sharp teeth at him. An instinct that it would cause a hurt more lasting than death prompted him to cast her roughly aside, and he crouched by her as she gasped wheezing, ragged breaths and said, “Your body is garbage, your mind a cesspool. You are filth.” From behind him, the executed magicians leaped up and attacked. They would finish off the Fräulein.
With a wild cry, Arden braced himself for attack and searched for the assassins. They were masters of their craft, though, and had slipped the leash as soon as it was loosed, melting into the woods to follow the directions they’d received earlier to Weasel Rue. That magic nonsense back there—that wasn’t their sort of fight.
But when bullets ripped through the skeletal tree limbs around them, when a petrol bomb in a jelly jar, hurled by a slingshot, exploded nearby, the fight became theirs, too.
Weary from their efforts though they were, the Dresden magicians were vastly more powerful than Arden could have believed. The element of surprise had served his allies well, but only a moment later the tide turned. Jasper was down and Felton was struggling as the Dresdeners rallied.
Then one of the traitors fell, his skull leaking scarlet, and the Dresdeners had a new enemy.
“Look out!” the Kommandant shouted, holding off both Arden and Hereweald as they struggled to drain him. “Commoners, with guns!”
The Dresdeners could ward themselves against bullets, but it took concentration and sucked away power they needed elsewhere. “Bergen, Lightbody, take them out!”
Hidden in his crevice, Joey, thinking this was all as good as a play, struck a match and lit the long fuse. A moment later a fusillade of bullets apparently flew from a row of red-berried hollies twenty yards from him, and Bergen said, “There!” as he and two comrades proceeded to drain the Essence out of every living thing within ten yards of a row of firecrackers.
Joey chuckled. Just wait till they got a load of the stink bombs he’d concocted, which, he was sure, smelled exactly like mustard gas. His childish laugh carried even above the din of fighting, and one of the commoner assassins, raising himself on his elbows, triangulated the sound and shot at the sliver of flesh he could just glimpse through the sharp-toothed evergreen leaves.
Through this too, Phil slept, though by now it was more delirium than sleep. She thrashed in the snow, freeing her bright flaming hair, and moaned. One of the other assassins caught the sound and crept away from the fighting until he saw crimson in the snow. The Fräulein had been very precise in her description. Who else but his target could have hair of such a fiery hue?
Huddled in a hollow not far away, the first assassin had the same thought when he spied a ruby-haired woman peeking from behind a rough hemlock trunk. He’d assumed the Fräulein was sending him after a younger woman, but perhaps it was only the distance, the hard lines of fear, that made the woman methodically firing the gun (with great accuracy, at targets that, mysteriously, never fell) seem older. He stilled his breath, slowed his heart, and lovingly eased back the trigger. He never missed.
Nor did Uncle Walter, not even when he was shaking with hopeless fury at the death of the woman who’d been his childhood crush, before she’d fallen head over heels for Enery. Quicker than he deserves, Walter thought as half of the man’s head scattered in a snowdrift, and he looked for another life to end, entirely forgetting his dangling handcuff.
One of the assassins was a champion duelist, with knives strapped to his arms and legs. His favorite, though, was the heavy saber with which he’d dueled at the university. He ignored the battle around him and made his way straight to Weasel Rue.
The last assassin left on the field looked down at the girl, his quarry. She couldn’t be sleeping, though the gunfire was sporadic now, and snow-muffled. He stepped back, out of spatter range, and took careful aim.
At the touch of his finger on the trigger, Phil’s eyes opened, and she screamed.
At the first pressure of his finger on the trigger, the assassin melted.
And Phil continued to scream like a whipping wind, because she could feel him melting. She could feel everything around her—the rocks, the dirt, the microscopic life. The very air tingled with the Essence, and she was engulfed in a deluge of awareness, of power, that stretched to the earth’s core but found its terrible focus in her.
She stood, only peripherally conscious of the fighting nearby. It was part of the background in her Essence-trance, neither more nor less important than the dread of a small seed sprouting subterraneanly at her feet as it was inexorably consumed by a creeping fungus. The world was sentient now, and everything was pain and fear, moments of victory when one animal ate, quick sorrow then nothing as it was eaten in turn, and always, through it all, the Essence, blind and indifferent, flowing from earth to air to being without preference, without pity.
“Arden, retreat!” Hereweald shouted from across the field. The fighting had been going on only a moment, but already it was clear that Arden and his allies were doomed. They were brave, they were strong, but their lives had been dedicated to tranquillity, and they simply could not make themselves be merciless.
The commoners were faring little better. The Dresdeners had begun with mere defense, focusing their attacks on the other magicians, but as the inevitability of their victory became more and more apparent, they
began to pick off the commoners whenever they could spy them. They drained their Essence, their lives, and became all the stronger. Henshawe the grocer, dashing from trunk to trunk, was caught; his friend the baker died trying to drag his lifeless body to safety.
Arden, pallid and shaking, was holding off the Kommandant and two other Dresdeners at once, but he couldn’t last much longer. Hereweald called him again. “Back, Arden! We can’t take them!”
“We can’t abandon the commoners!” he cried. “Felton, circle round and cover their escape!”
“They’re nothing, leave them!” Hereweald shouted, and tried to drag his friend away. “Our duty’s to our brother magicians. We have to live to tell them the truth.”
“No!” Arden struggled against the hands that pulled at him. He saw another commoner, the tavernkeeper who’d brought barrels of ale to the hopper huts on donkey-back every Saturday, crumple as Bergen ripped his life from him.
Then Arden’s concentration broke, and he lost his hold on the Kommandant. Across the gap the man grinned as he began to crush Arden’s skull.
Through the chaos and the numbness of universal pain, Phil heard a sound. All else fell silent. The screaming of trees as the sap in their twigs froze, the crashing of molecules, the ripping of dividing cells—they all fell back to the farthest reaches of her preternatural awareness in deference to the one sound that had any real meaning to her: the sound of Arden suffering.
She stood, and felt like she moved swiftly, though around her everything seemed to be suspended in a viscous web. Outrage rose, roiling and boiling, and she could not tell if she was drawing it from the world or producing it herself. She frowned, and the world frowned, and decided unequivocally that Arden, of all the tormented organisms writhing on the planet, must live.
She’d saved Arden from death before, from the same adversary, and had done her mortal best with her fists alone. This time too she did her best, and it was volcanic.
She killed, she burned, she rent and tore everything that was not Arden. Impassive, she saw—and again, felt—humans die, and none of it mattered to her, so long as Arden lived. For a moment, she was more than a magician—she was a god, cruel and indifferent as the cosmos.
Delusion Page 27
