The Warlock

by Michael Scott

  One wing of the vimana swung around until it was almost directly above her, and the red light on the tip of the wing shattered. The edge of the craft scraped along the wall, raining pebbles of black stone onto her head. Scathach knew that if it came any lower it would get stuck. Crouching, she took a deep breath of the sulfur-tainted air, coughed and then propelled herself upward, just as the vibrations dissolved the walls around her cell into chips of dusty stone. Her fingers caught the two sides of the Rukma vimana’s wing tip, but her right hand slipped off the slick glassy surface, and she desperately scrabbled to grab hold again before she lost her grip with her left hand as well. Looking down between her legs, she realized that there was nothing between her and the glutinous pool of lava. The Rukma started to rise.

  From the corner of her eye, she caught a flicker of movement. A small circular vimana was dipping toward her. It buzzed in as close as it could get, obviously attempting to knock her off the edge of the craft. She kicked out at it, but the effort almost made her lose her grip.

  The crystal Rukma vimana rose slowly, with Scathach still dangling beneath. The Warrior attempted again to swing herself up onto the craft, but the surface was too slick, and she realized that she was not going to be able to hold on for very much longer. She abruptly remembered that she’d once been told that she’d die in an exotic location. Well, it didn’t get much more exotic than hanging beneath a vimana warship in the mouth of an active volcano.

  The smaller vimana swept around again, close enough for Scatty to see the two leering doglike faces beneath its crystal dome. The anpu bared their teeth and swung the craft in again. This time they were going to smash into her.

  And then Joan of Arc landed directly on its glass dome.

  The Frenchwoman had leapt from the mouth of her cell. Clinging to the dome, she smiled down sweetly at the slack-jawed anpu inside. “Bonjour.” The vimana wobbled, then dipped, bucking left and right as the anpu pilot attempted to throw her off. “You are wasting your time,” she said, laughing delightedly. “I’m stronger than I appear! I’ve carried a sword all my life—I can hang on for hours.”

  The craft passed directly below Scathach and she released her grip and dropped onto the top of the vimana alongside Joan with enough force to send the larger craft plunging down. The French immortal laughed. “So nice of you—”

  “Don’t you dare crack any dropping-in jokes,” Scathach warned before her friend could finish.

  The vimana dipped and spun, but the two women had firm grips on the transparent dome and held on while the pilot tilted the craft, attempting to shake them off.

  “So long as he doesn’t get too close to the lava,” Scatty said, “we should be okay.”

  At that moment the vimana dropped straight down, zooming dangerously close to the lava’s sluggish bubbling surface.

  “I think he heard you,” Joan said, coughing as the air became almost unbreathable. She was covered in a sheen of sweat, and the ends of her short auburn hair were crisping with the heat. “My hands are getting damp,” she admitted. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep my grip.”

  “Hold tight,” Scathach muttered. Closing her right hand into a fist, she folded her thumb over her index finger. Then she drew her arm back. “When you absolutely, positively have to knock a hole through something …” The Warrior grunted as she drove her fist into the glass dome with tremendous force. “… you cannot beat a Jeet Kune Do punch.” The dome cracked. The two anpu looked up, eyes and mouth wide in shock. “Guess it’s not as unbreakable as you thought!” Scathach punched it again, and the dome crumbled into fragments beneath her fist. Stinking hot air swirled in around the anpu, stinging their eyes, doubling them over with coughing barks. The pilot sent the craft surging upward, away from the lethal heat and dust.

  “Too fast,” Scathach called. “We’re going to hit something!”

  The edge of the vimana brushed against a protruding rock, metal screaming as it crumpled, then tore away. The craft wobbled, almost pitching Scatty and Joan off the dome, but continued to rise. And then it hit the edge of the large Rukma vimana warship, which had remained hovering in place. Metal scraped off glass and a huge chunk of the side of the smaller ship was ripped away. But the force of the blow shook the two women’s grips free. Joan screamed and Scathach defiantly howled her war cry …

  … and strong hands grabbed both women and plucked them off the back of the vimana in the last second before it hit the rock face and shattered in two.

  Palamedes gently lowered Scatty and Joan down onto the wing of the vimana. The Saracen Knight was standing alongside Saint-Germain on the wing of the Rukma. Saint-Germain wrapped his arms around his wife and hugged her close. Neither of them could speak.

  “I thought I usually saved your life,” Scathach said lightly, squeezing Palamedes’s arm.

  “I thought it was about time I returned the favor,” the knight said, his deep voice trembling. “A close call, Shadow.”

  “Maybe today is not my day to die,” Scatty said, smiling at him.

  Palamedes squeezed her shoulder. “The day’s not over yet,” he said seriously. “Come, we need to get inside.” He turned away, jerking his thumb up toward the mouth of the volcano. “Our dog-faced friends are gathering.”

  Scathach followed Palamedes across the Rukma’s wing toward a long oval opening in the top of the craft. “How did you get onto the ship?”

  “When the wing came level with my cave cell, I just stepped out onto it,” the Saracen Knight said. “Francis did the same.” He swung himself into the opening. The Shadow could see his distorted outline through the craft’s crystal skin. She stood and waited while Joan, followed by Saint-Germain, disappeared into the interior of the craft; only then did she catch the top of the opening and swing inside.

  “So this was a rescue,” Scatty said. “I was sure it had come to kill us.”

  A shape moved within the crystal interior of the Rukma. “If they just wanted to kill you,” a deep voice rumbled, “then why send a warship?”

  “I’m guessing they did it because they knew what they were up against,” Scatty said, turning to the sound. “I am Scathach the Warrior Maid, the Shadow, the Daemon Slayer, the King Maker, the—”

  “I’ve never heard of you.” A huge red-haired warrior in shimmering crimson armor stepped forward and ran his hand across the edge of the opening. A glass dome whispered into place.

  “Uncle!” With a cry of delight, Scathach flung herself at the red-haired man.

  But the big man caught her before she could wrap her arms around him and held her at arm’s length, feet dangling off the floor. “I am Prometheus, and I do not have a niece. I have no idea who you are. I’ve never met you before in my life.” He placed her carefully on the ground and took a step back.

  Joan burst into laughter at the look on Scathach’s face. Then she took her by the hand and drew her away. “You must forgive my friend. She forgets where she is … and when she is,” she added significantly, looking at the Shadow.

  Scathach nodded, surprise transforming her face. “You remind me of someone,” she said to Prometheus, “someone very dear to me.”

  The red-haired Elder merely nodded, then swung away. The group followed him down a tall corridor into a sunken circular area in the center of the Rukma. He settled himself in a deep form-fitting molded chair and rested his hands on the arms. Instantly the entire crystal wall before him lit up with lights and crawling lines of text and graphs superimposed over the glass. Red dots swarmed on the left side of the wall. Prometheus pointed. “That’s not good. We need to get out of here fast. It looks like the entire vimana fleet is heading our way.”

  “Where are you taking us?” Saint-Germain asked.

  “I’m taking you to—”

  A voice, clear and deathly calm, echoed around the circular control room. “Prometheus, my friend, I need you now. The tower is under attack.” In the background, a series of dull rattling explosions was clearly audible.

/>   “I’m on my way,” Prometheus said into the air.

  “And our friends?” The voice echoed around the chamber. “They are safe?”

  “Safe. They were exactly where you said they’d be, in the Huracan cells. They’re here with me now.”

  “Good. Now hurry, old friend. Hurry.”

  “Who was that?” Scathach asked, though, like the others, she had already guessed the answer.

  “That was your savior: Abraham the Mage.”

  ophie Newman walked around the empty back garden. Everyone had left. The Flamels, Prometheus and Niten were heading for the Embarcadero, while Black Hawk was driving Mars, Odin and Hel to the marina.

  Her stomach felt sour from the mixture of auric odors she’d encountered, and her head was beginning to throb. She needed time to think, to make sense of what she had just learned. Everything changed, and continued to change, and it was beginning to get difficult again to distinguish her own thoughts from the Witch of Endor’s memories. The Witch had known every single person who had turned up at Aunt Agnes’s—Tsagaglalal’s—house, and she had an opinion about all of them. She liked none of them … and yet Sophie found she disagreed with her.

  She felt she was beginning to get to know the Witch now … in fact, with the Witch’s memories swirling around inside her head, she thought she might know her better than anyone alive.

  And she didn’t like her.

  The Witch of Endor was petty and vindictive, spiteful and bitter and filled with a terrible rage and jealousy. She envied Prometheus his powers and strength and Mars his courage, she feared Niten and his association with Aoife. She hated Tsagaglalal because she’d been so close to Abraham. The only good thing Sophie could say about the Witch was that she did seem to genuinely care about the humani and had battled tirelessly to keep them safe from the more dangerous of the Dark Elders.

  Sophie walked along the irregular paving stones set into the grass. The ground dipped sharply, and when she looked back, she could just make out the top of her aunt’s house. She ducked through a wooden archway covered with ivy and climbing roses that led into the uncultivated lower part of the garden, where the grass grew waist-high and was speckled with native wildflowers.

  This had always been the twins’ favorite spot.

  When they were children, they’d discovered a little enclosed secret area at the bottom of the garden, tucked away behind the hedges, and it immediately became their den. It was a completely circular clearing, surrounded by a tangled mess of spiky thornbushes and several ancient apple trees that never bore fruit, despite their many blossoms. A weathered and rock-hard stump of an old oak tree poked out of the ground in the center of the clearing. It was almost three feet across, and one summer Sophie had spent an entire week trying to count its rings to figure out its age. She’d gotten as far as two hundred and thirty before she stopped. The twins called the clearing the secret garden, after the book by Frances Hodgson Burnett, which Sophie had been reading at the time. Every summer when the Newman family came to San Francisco, Sophie would race out into the back garden to check that it was still in place and Aunt Agnes’s gardeners hadn’t cut it down or tamed it into the neat orderly rows that bisected the rest of the garden. Each year the grass grew taller, the bushes wilder and the pathway more and more lost in the undergrowth.

  There was a time when Sophie and Josh had spent their every waking moment during their visits in the secret garden, but as the years went by, Josh had lost interest in it—the clearing was too far from the house to get a wireless signal for his laptop. So the secret garden became Sophie’s private place, a place where she could read and daydream, a place to escape and think. And right now, she needed time alone, she needed to be able to think about everything that had happened … and about Josh. She needed to think about her twin, how she was going to get him back and what she needed to do. “Anything. Everything,” she breathed aloud.

  And she needed to think about the future, because the future was starting to terrify her and she needed to make a decision—without any doubt, the biggest decision of her life.

  At least here she could be alone; no one knew about the secret garden.

  Sophie pushed through the bushes and stopped in surprise. Aunt Agnes—Tsagaglalal—was sitting on the tree stump, eyes closed, face turned up to the afternoon sun.

  The old woman opened her gray eyes and smiled. “What? Didn’t you think I knew about this place?”

  have always known about this place,” Tsagaglalal said to Sophie. She waved her hand. “Come, sit, join me.”

  Sophie started to shake her head.

  “Please,” Tsagaglalal said gently. “I created this space for you and your brother. Why do you think I never allowed the gardeners to tend to it?”

  Sophie moved around the clearing, then sank to the ground with her back against the trunk of a gnarled apple tree, legs stretched straight out in front of her. “I don’t know what to think anymore,” she said truthfully.

  Tsagaglalal remained still, gaze fixed on the girl’s face. The only noise was the droning of bees and distant traffic sounds.

  “I was just thinking,” Sophie said, “a week ago today I was serving coffee at the Coffee Cup and looking forward to the weekend. Josh had come over to the shop for lunch, and we shared a sandwich and a slice of cherry pie. I’d just talked to my friend Elle, in New York, on the phone, and I was excited because there was the possibility that she was going to come out to San Francisco. My biggest worry was that I wouldn’t be able to get time off from the coffee shop to spend with her.” The girl looked at Tsagaglalal. “Just another day. Just an ordinary Thursday.”

  “And now?” Tsagaglalal whispered.

  “And now, a week later, I’ve been Awakened, learned magic, been to France and England and back again without flying; my brother is gone; and I’m worrying about the end of the world.” She tried a laugh, but it came out high-pitched and a little hysterical.

  Tsagaglalal nodded slowly. “A week ago, Sophie, you were a girl. You have lived a lifetime in the past seven days. You have seen so much and done so much more.”

  “More than I wanted to,” Sophie muttered.

  “You have grown and matured,” Tsagaglalal said, ignoring the interruption. “You are an extraordinary young woman, Sophie Newman. You are strong, knowledgeable and powerful—so very, very powerful.”

  “I wish I weren’t,” Sophie said sadly. She looked down at her hands in her lap. They were resting on her legs, palms facing up, right hand on top of left. Unbidden, threads of silver aura gathered in the creases in her palm, then flowed to form a small pool of shining liquid. The liquid aura sank back into her flesh, and silver gloves, at first like delicate smooth silk, then stitched leather, and finally studded metal appeared around her hands, encasing them. She flexed her fingers; the gloves disappeared and her flesh reappeared. Her fingernails briefly remained silver polished mirrors before they too returned to normal.

  “You cannot escape what you are, Sophie. You are Silver. And that means you have a responsibility … and a destiny. Your fate was decided millennia ago,” Tsagaglalal said, almost sympathetically. “I watched my husband, Abraham, work with Chronos. Chronos spent his entire life mastering Time. It was a task that utterly destroyed him, warping and twisting his flesh into a hundred different forms. It made him one of the most repulsive creatures you have ever seen … and yet my husband called him friend, and I have no doubt that Chronos had the welfare of the humani and the survival of this Shadowrealm at heart.”

  “The Witch didn’t like him …,” Sophie said, shuddering as a hint of Chronos’s true form gathered at the edges of her memory.

  Tsagaglalal nodded. “And he despised her for what she did.”

  “What did she do?” Sophie began, but the memories came so quickly that they physically shook her body.

  … a war hammer crushing a crystal skull to shards of broken glass, and then smashing a second and then a third …

  … metal books running
molten liquid off collapsing library shelves as smoking acid ate into them …

  … extraordinary glass and ceramic aircraft, delicate, beautiful and intricate, circular, oblong and triangular, being pitched off cliffs to sink into the sea …

  Tsagaglalal leaned forward. “The Witch destroyed millennia of Earthlord, Ancient and Archon artifacts: what my husband called the eldritch lore.”

  “It was too dangerous,” Sophie said immediately, parroting the Witch’s point of view.

  “That was the Witch’s opinion.” Tsagaglalal’s expression turned indescribably sad. “Your friend, the immortal William Shakespeare, once wrote that ‘there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.’ ”

  “That’s from Hamlet. We did the play in school last year.”

  “Zephaniah believed that the eldritch lore was dangerous and that therefore she was justified in destroying it. But what you must remember is that knowledge itself is never dangerous,” Tsagaglalal insisted. “It is how that knowledge is used that is dangerous. The Witch’s arrogance destroyed incalculable millennia of knowledge, so when she needed a favor, Chronos made her pay dearly. Perhaps he was also trying to prevent her from destroying anything else, although by then it was probably too late. I sometimes wonder whether if we had access to that knowledge now, humani would not be where we are today.”

  Sophie had brief glimpses of ancient technology, flickering sights of soaring cities of glass, vast fleets of metal boats, crystal craft streaking through the skies. And then the images turned dark and she watched a delicate gemlike city turn to molten liquid as the appalling shape of a deathly mushroom cloud bloomed in its center. She shook her head and sucked in a deep shuddering breath, blinking back to the present, trying to dispel the images. The sounds of an everyday San Francisco afternoon—a distant ship’s horn, a car alarm, the wail of an ambulance siren—came rushing back. “No, we would have destroyed everything,” she murmured.

  “Perhaps …,” Tsagaglalal said quietly. “The destruction of the earth and every living creature on its surface was a possibility that my husband and Chronos considered on a daily basis. I sat and watched them search through the myriad strands of time looking for those lines that kept the humani and this Shadowrealm alive for as long as possible. They called them the Auspicious Threads. Once they had isolated an Auspicious Thread, they did everything in their power to ensure that it was given every opportunity to prosper.”