Come Hell or High Water: The Complete Trilogy

by Stephen Morris

  George was unsure who this woman was or where she had come from but realized that her presence was the reason the World had created the magic circle encompassing the entire hilltop. The circle of the World had clearly conflated times or dimensions, and this woman was somehow a threat to both Svetovit’s plans for the city and George’s plans to establish himself as Grand Master of all Grand Masters, the only occult practitioner ever to overcome the magical defenses of Prague, that most magical of cities in Europe. She had to be stopped. He had to stop her. He dashed up to her before she could do anything else to actualize the threat she personified. He swept the sword through the air, but it struck the protective power of the red cord encircling her and slid to the ground. Rather than striking off her head, as he had planned, he severed her hand.

  Lightning flickered around the hilltop. The woman, freed from her hand, fumbled with the star she held in her other hand and attempted to sit up.

  Again Svetovit roared and raised himself from the back of the horse, clutching its ribs with his knees as it cantered about the sky above the cathedral. He shook his fist at the hilltop, with deafening thunder. George stared at the woman on the ground and knew that in whatever dimension her physical body had been struck, she was rapidly bleeding to death from the stump of her arm. She would be dead in moments. Whatever threat she had posed was no longer a menace. He turned away and strode briskly back toward the cathedral apse, raised the sword above his head, and shook it as he shouted at Svetovit in what was both a half-salute of victory and a half-challenge to the old god.

  “Svetovit!” George shouted but no one could make out the words in the rolling thunder. “Can you do anything without me?” The Jesuit was giddy, the old god seemingly unable to accomplish anything without his assistance. Svetovit shook his fist back at George and blinding lightning struck again and again.

  Magdalena came up to the woman, who had fallen back onto the ground, her body shifting in and out of focus, her head and shoulder outside whatever protection the circle of red cord might offer. Magdalena knelt down on one knee, steadying herself with the staff, and peered into the woman’s face.

  For an instant Magdalena could see the woman clearly. Pain was etched across her face, but it held more than pain. Magdalena saw calm in the woman’s face, but more than that as well. Magdalena saw a peace that far surpassed anything Magdalena had ever experienced. Who was this woman? Why did Magdalena feel so drawn to her and recognize something in her that was present and yet missing from Magdalena’s own life? Was this shadow woman also tied up with Fen’ka in some mysterious way?

  But this woman also made her angry. Magdalena was angry that someone apparently intimately involved in the affairs of Fen’ka and Svetovit seemed to be fighting against Svetovit, against his vindication of Fen’ka’s name, as misguided as Victoria and the academics huddling together across the plaza. But then that made her wonder: was there something the shadow woman knew that Magdalena did not?

  “Who are you?” Magdalena asked. “Why…? What do you know of Fen’ka… and of the truth?”

  The woman stared at Magdalena and swallowed, apparently struggling to gather strength. She clutched Magdalena’s hand with a strength and a ferocity the modern woman had not expected from a dying shadow. The shadow woman opened her mouth and shifted out of focus again. A thin, distant, raspy whisper tickled Magdalena’s mind even as she could hear the thunder of Svetovit’s horse galloping across the sky. She leaned down more closely to hear the woman.

  “… stop Svetovit… save Prague…” Then she was gone and Magdalena was staring at paving stones.

  “Stop Svetovit? Svetovit’s coming will save Prague!” Magdalena shouted at the stones.

  Wouldn’t it?

  Magdalena repeated the woman’s words to herself and then slowly pushed herself upright with the staff like an old woman might rise from a chair with her cane. Her legs and feet tingling as the blood began coursing through her lower limbs again, she turned to where George stood beside the apse wall of the cathedral.

  He was standing with his back to her, looking up at Svetovit whose horse had paused in its wild gallop across the skies, and the old god was reaching an open palm down toward George. George had the blade of the sword in his hands and was delivering the hilt to Svetovit.

  George heard Svetovit’s voice thunder in his head. He heard the voice but it was not words that Svetovit communicated to him. It was more like his experience of communicating with the dead, with Dalibor and Fen’ka. His mind and another mind would reach out to each other, sharing images, desires, emotions, and his mind would then manufacture words to give shape and body to the messages received.

  “Give me the sword and the staff,” Svetovit instructed George while Magdalena was kneeling over the dying shadow woman across the plaza. “The time has come! MY time has come, priest! The number of generations four multiplied by eight have come and gone, been born and died. You have brought them here but the magical tools of Prague are now mine!”

  “I have freed the tools from their hiding places,” George declared proudly. “Together, we can work our will against Prague and any who stand against us! But we must work together, Svetovit! I will not surrender the tools to you!”

  “I do not ask you to surrender them,” Svetovit took a more cajoling, less threatening tone. “Let me feel the heft of the sword in my hand, the wood of the staff in my grip. You have done much, more than any before you, to make ready my path to victory, and it is right that you share the fruit of that labor. You have my word that I will simply hold the sword to appreciate its workmanship and then return it to you.” Svetovit reached down his open palm.

  George knew that none of the old gods or devils could break an oath they had made, though they might lie or cheat in any one of a thousand other ways. But an oath, once made, was binding on all the parties involved.

  “Your oath is that you will feel the heft of the sword, admire its workmanship, and then return it to me?” George asked.

  “It is!” Lightning cracked across the sky.

  George had triumphed! Even Svetovit had capitulated to him! Letting the devil-god savor the heft and workmanship of the sword that had been fashioned to defeat him but whose power had instead been twisted by George to overcome Svetovit’s enemies seemed a small enough gesture. He had not only overcome the magical defenses of Prague—most importantly, its famous bridge!—he had outmaneuvered Svetovit! He could afford to be magnanimous with the jealous old deity.

  George took the blade in his hands and lifted the hilt towards Svetovit’s open palm.

  Magdalena saw George lift the hilt of the sword to Svetovit.

  “No!” screamed Sophia and Victoria together, cringing and turning their faces.

  “Stop!” shouted Theo.

  “Do not give the sword to Svetovit!” Dmitri cried. “Do not believe his promises!”

  “Don’t do it, George!” Sean roared.

  Even as the words spilled from their lips, the men began running toward George.

  In that instant, Magdalena saw the truth and realized everything she had believed about George, about Elizabeth, about Fen’ka had been lies. George had told her that the academics had poisoned the bridge so that they could wash it away with the cataclysm of the flood they had unleashed. But she had heard George tell Dalibor that he himself, had poisoned the bridge’s magic to retrieve the sword from its foundation. Dalibor had attempted to throw her down into the Jug, leaving her for dead if not killing her outright. But Dalibor had professed that he was simply following the instructions given by the one who had held the yew. George was the one who pulled him from the darkness of the Jug with the yew. Now George was handing the sword to Svetovit and there was only one outcome possible: Svetovit would use the sword to destroy whatever part of the city still stood after the flood.

  Stop Svetovit! Save Prague! Those had been the words Magdalena had heard the shadow woman whisper. The shadow woman had been right! Svetovit had not come to vindicate Fen�
�ka. He was here to destroy the city for abandoning its worship of him all those centuries ago.

  “No!” cried Magdalena, charging at George with the staff in her hands. “No! You lied to me!” She could think of no more damning charge to hurl at the man she had thought she loved. She swung the staff and struck George across the shoulders.

  The crack of the staff across George’s shoulders rivaled the crack of the thunder around the hilltop. Svetovit, reaching for the sword, closed his hand around empty air as George stumbled forward and dropped the sword, the blade somersaulting as it tumbled from his fingers. George threw himself toward it, half-falling to the ground on top of it. The staff whistled in the air and grazed his lower back as Magdalena swung a second time. He jumped up again, brandishing the weapon. He swung around with fury to face Magdalena, raising the sword over his right shoulder.

  “Magdalena!” screamed Victoria.

  George swung the blade in an arc but in his haste, he swung the blade so that its flat side, not its cutting edge, would strike his foe. Magdalena held the staff before her cheek as she stumbled back, the sharp point missing her face by a hairsbreadth. But she felt the shock wave of the power of the sword despite the staff deflecting the brunt of the blow.

  As she braced herself, she saw that Victoria and her allies had no such protection. The waves of power radiating from the flat of the sword bowled them over like dry leaves caught in an autumn wind, and they tumbled across the plaza.

  Svetovit, cheated of his chance to wield the great sword, howled in his enmity of those below him. Fire exploded in the clouds whipping around him.

  George swung the sword again, not even bothering to offer any words to justify his behavior. Magdalena knew now that he had used her to obtain the power and fame he had so lusted after, and now that those things were within his grasp, he no longer needed her. He brought the sword down across the staff she now held out horizontally, aiming to smash the wood with the blade. But the wood held and the sword sprang back up toward George’s face. He swung again.

  The duel began in earnest, Magdalena using the staff to thrust and parry George’s sword strokes. The staff seemed to fight of its own volition, Magdalena simply holding it and allowing it to swing and deflect George’s feints and cuts.

  But George was driving Magdalena back across the plaza with his furious ripostes. The staff was defending Magdalena but she had no opportunity to attack George. She twisted her head slightly, to see where she was on the plaza, what was around her, if there was any doorway to take refuge in from the onslaught of the sword.

  She saw Victoria and the others picking themselves up unsteadily from the paving stones, apparently dazed and bruised from their tumbles across the courtyard.

  She returned her attention to George just in time to notice him turning the blade in his hand ever so slightly. He struck the flat of the sword not against the staff this time but against Magdalena’s knuckles. She cried in surprise and pain, dropping the staff and tripping over her feet. She fell onto her back, darting her eyes wildly about to identify anything she could seize to defend herself and realized that she had fallen in almost the exact place the shadow woman had lain when George struck off her hand.

  George loomed over Magdalena. “You are a nuisance! You have always been one! Now you’re a nuisance I no longer need to tolerate!” he spat at her. He raised the sword above his head.

  “Liar!” screamed Magdalena, raising an arm in a feeble effort to shield herself.

  “No!” shrieked Victoria.

  “Magdalena!” wailed Sophia.

  “Save yourself!” Theo shouted.

  Magdalena saw Victoria drop to her knees and pound her fist against the plaza paving stones, crying out “Royal Road, help us one more time!” Dmitri and Sean, battered by the winds, were running, bellowing, toward George’s back, but she knew they could never reach him in time to save her.

  The sword swung down.

  Magdalena closed her eyes and screamed.

  Fire exploded in the sky around Svetovit again as he charged, his horse snorting lightning from its nostrils as it galloped down toward the hilltop.

  Dmitri raced after Sean to stop George, intending to tackle him or knock the sword from his hands. Sean tripped over something and nearly fell, reaching out with one hand to steady himself. Dmitri saw his fingers close around the staff Magdalena had dropped. Sean swung it in a circle, catching George’s knees and knocking the Jesuit to the ground. The sword fell, tumbling along the cobblestones of the plaza toward Dmitri, who grabbed the hilt with both hands. He raised it and swung at the prone figure of the Jesuit.

  George screamed with rage and raised one hand as if to deflect the great sword while pushing himself up with the other.

  “Saint Vitus!” cried Dmitri as a war cry of opposition to Svetovit and George together. He swung the magical blade, intending to strike George with the flat side, but the sword, forged to protect Prague, jumped from his grip and plunged through the Jesuit’s ribs.

  Next to Dmitri, Sean swung the staff again, perhaps without realizing that the sword had thrust itself into George’s torso. The staff struck George’s shoulders and tumbled from Sean’s grasp across the plaza, even as it impaled the Jesuit more firmly on the sword’s sharp blade.

  The sword wrestled with the muscles and cartilage along George’s ribs and in doing so, the blade tore deeper. Blood sprayed everywhere and splattered on the plaza. The Jesuit’s body fell back onto the cobblestones and the sword jumped back into Dmitri’s hands.

  With no warning, a great lion sprang down from the cathedral buttresses onto George’s body. The beast roared at the sky and shook his shaggy mane.

  Dmitri dropped the bloody sword in horror.

  Death

  (Wednesday, August 14, 2002)

  T

  he sword fell to the pavement, clattering across the plaza.

  Magdalena, realizing that the sword had not struck her and that she was still alive, pulled her arm from her face and struggled to sit up and make sense of the scene beside her. She saw George’s prone form, the blood splayed across her and the courtyard. She saw the lion, his paws on George’s now still chest, and cowered as the animal roared again. Guessing what had happened, Magdalena began screaming and pushing herself back from the man who had betrayed her.

  “Magdalena!” burst from Victoria’s throat.

  “The lion! Get away from the lion!” Sophia shrieked.

  “Saint Vitus, pray for us,” whispered Dmitri, crossing himself and trembling. “The lion, the lion… Is this the lion associated with you, Vitus?” the priest asked the saint, staring at his own blood-smeared hands.

  Magdalena, still screaming in terror but rooted to the ground, watched the lion, which had stepped off George’s body and now stared at her. Was he coming for her next? She registered Theo and Sean circling behind the lion, but they didn’t seem to be trying to help her or divert the beast’s attention. They seemed to be headed to retrieve the two magical tools of Prague.

  But they were challenged by Svetovit, who was making another mad run on his horse at the plaza on the hilltop. He reached down with both hands, one to seize the hilt of the sword and the other to clutch the staff. Lightning pummeled the sky as thunder deafened the city.

  Sean and Theo looked up, saw Svetovit, and began running toward the sword and staff. Their running diverted the lion’s attention from Magdalena, and he turned first to them and then looked up at the sky. Lips pulled back from his sharp teeth, the lion rumbled and leaped, running back across the plaza towards Svetovit. A bull materialized beside the great cat, and both leaped into the sky towards Svetovit.

  The air shivered beside the lion and bull to reveal the eagle flying beside them.

  “It worked!” cried Victoria. “The Royal Road is helping us one more time! It sent the animals!” Magdalena’s screams finally froze in her throat. She did not understand what Victoria had to do with them, but the three animals were charging Svetovit and the cloud-ho
rse.

  Then she realized that Svetovit was charging toward the ground not far from her, where the rooster’s lifeless, blood-drained form lay. She could feel the impact of the horse’s hooves in the air. Half-pushing herself up from the pavement, she propelled herself across the ground, stumbling as she reached for the staff. Her fingers just missed closing around it.

  Simultaneously, Svetovit leaned down low and forward on the horse’s back, stretching his fingers toward the staff and sword. Further away, Magdalena saw Theo headed toward the sword, but caught no glimpse of Sean.

  As Magdalena’s fingers missed the staff, another woman was suddenly standing beside the staff and picking it up one-handed. Magdalena gasped, recognizing the shadow woman whose hand George had severed. The dead woman looked at Magdalena and nodded, cradling the staff in the crook of one arm while reaching for the living woman with her one remaining hand. Magdalena grasped the offered hand and the dead woman pulled Magdalena to her feet and then handed the staff to her. Magdalena clutched the staff with both hands. She swung the staff in a wide arc up at the horse. Lightning shattered the sky. Showers of sparks rained down from the horse’s hooves. Magdalena swung the staff again, nearly striking the dead woman, who ducked down but then vanished.

  The horse screamed and fell onto its side, all eight legs knocked aside by the staff in Magdalena’s hands. Svetovit sprawled to one side, falling from the horse’s back, roaring in fury. The horse slid across the sky toward the cathedral roof, still kicking and screaming, struggling to stop itself but unable to do so. As it was about to crash into the cathedral, its cloud-body dissipated but almost immediately reformed on the other side of the church, still sliding across the sky, showers of sparks shooting down onto the ground.

  As the storm-cloud devil came crashing toward the ground, the trio of lion, bull, and eagle abruptly changed course and bounded toward Svetovit, who was now sprawling in the sky above the plaza.