The Witch Queen

by Jan Siegel

  “Why don’t you ask me?” Will interjected. “She was never here. It is your spies you should punish—they were cheated by a ghost.”

  And Ragginbone, quick to follow: “The world of Time has blinded your thought, queen of Air and Darkness. Are you so sure your sister passed the Gate? Did you close it behind her?”

  “Do you mock me?” she snarled. The tiny needle of doubt jabbed her into greater fury. She tossed the wereglow upward into a hovering ball of light, unleashing a whiplash of power from her hand that might have taken the Watcher’s head clean off. But Fern’s spell encased him, and the lash rebounded, flicking sparks from the barrier. Morgus screeched with rage, cursing in several ancient languages, striking again and again at Ragginbone, Will, Gaynor, even the little she could see of Moonspittle. But for the moment, Fern’s magic held.

  Gaynor tried not to flinch, struggling to keep what was left of her nerve. Nimwë was right, she thought. Mention her twin, and Morgus stops thinking clearly. Anything to distract her from Fern . . . “Morgun was here,” she reiterated. “She came to the circle. She left you a message.”

  The witch strode forward until her face was within a yard of Gaynor’s. “You’re lying,” she said. “I can read the lies in your mind. They run to and fro like mice in a cage, looking for a way of escape. Stupid, pointless lies. Morgun is a fruit hanging on my Tree. As for this barrier—Fernanda has called on an old power, and she does not know how to harness it. How much longer do you imagine it can resist me? An hour—or merely a few more minutes?” Her hands pressed against the spellfield, squeezing it tighter, tighter—Gaynor saw her mouth ruck into a grimace of pain, the red weals springing up on her palms. Yet there was nothing visible between them but a glittering on the air. Will seized Morgus’s arm to pull her away—the protection spell did not impede its object—but she shook him off almost without effort.

  “Try reading my mind!” he challenged her. “What do you see?”

  “That you’re a better liar,” Morgus snapped. She was still focused on Gaynor, intoning a counterspell: “Xormé abelon, zinéphar unulé—“

  Disregarded for the moment, Ragginbone drew on the surrounding magic, attempting a charm of banishment. He knew the risk—he was draining his own spellscreen—but Morgus caught the whisper of his chant even through her own, and she rounded on him again. The lash of her power did not break the barrier, but he was flung to the ground, the charm scattered. He knew they had very little time left.

  Morgus clasped her hands once more around Gaynor’s spellfield, compressing it closer and closer to her face. The witch’s skin blistered and cracked where it touched the magic; sweat ran in great drops from under her hair. Will returned to the assault, but a vicious kick dented his shield, knocking him sideways. “Xormé!” Morgus cried. “Néfia!”—and all spells broke.

  IX

  Luc saw very little of the attack. The leaf shudder became a surge—a vast shadow sprang past him—there was a smell like no other animal he had ever smelled. Fern went down without a cry. The jerking flashlight beam showed him few details: a grotesque forelimb, many jointed, barbed with stiff white hairs; a pallid hide spiked with more hairs, thick as spines. And then the light was fragmented into a thousand pinpoints, gleaming back at him from twin globes, multiscreened, lidless, and below he saw the venom bubble quivering on the tip of huge fangs inches from Fern’s neck. Somewhere behind the eyes he could sense a mind, ludicrously small, appetite driven, baffled by the glare. He lunged forward with the skewer, jarring against the carapace. There was a minute that seemed to last an hour with legs thrashing at him, spiny hairs scratching his cheek, claws hooked into his motorcycle leathers. Beyond the hunger and magic-induced madness the creature had a race memory of hunting flies: you caught one, and the others flew away. They did not band together and fight back. Even the puppies and the calf had not done that. It lashed out in confusion, in rage, in fear. Surely this man-fly was too puny to defeat it. Somewhere in the background a voice screamed: “Kill! Kill!” But Luc was taut muscled from the squash court and the gym, and his kitchen weapon was very sharp. Even as the monster pulled back he drove it home, stepping athwart Fern’s body, forcing the deadly fangs away from her. He heard the crunch as the skewer pierced the head armor and the point plunged deep into something soft. The leg thrashing became a spasm; froth scummed the jaws. The head of Morgus cried out in fury and chagrin. On the ground, Fern gave the subdued moan of returning consciousness.

  Luc half dragged, half lifted her across the paving stones, clear of the corpse, which was still twitching horribly. “She’s dead,” said the head. “It bit her.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Fern was struggling to regain control of her senses. She murmured: “What . . . the hell . . . was that ?”

  “Whatever it was, I killed it,” Luc replied. “Are you all right?”

  “Mm.” Her head ached, but her thought was clearing. “Stupid . . . stupid of me. I should have known. She would never leave the Tree unguarded.” She tried to stand up, holding on to Luc for support, fighting vertigo. Her knees swam.

  “Take it gently.”

  “I’ll be fine.” She drew on her Gift, sensing the slow trickle of strength stealing through vein and sinew. Luc felt her grip relax, saw the brightening of her gaze.

  “Let’s see.” She took the flashlight from him, directing the beam toward the thing he had killed. The blur of light traveled over the death-curled limbs, the swollen, needle-haired body, the arachnoid face with its curved jaws and the blunt end of the skewer jutting between the eyes. The glimmer of the light in the empty facets gave it a hideous illusion of life. “It’s a spider,” Fern said, unnecessarily.

  “I thought so,” said Luc, “only I didn’t believe it. What happened to make it so big?”

  “God knows. Some sorcery of Morgus’s weaving, I expect . . . Maybe we should ask her.” She turned to the head.

  “It was not our doing. It must have come here with the Tree, or perhaps when Sysselore was brought to us. In the other place everything is in stasis, but this world pulses with growth and Time. So the little crawler grew big. We merely encouraged it.”

  “You made it mad,” Luc said unexpectedly. “I felt its mind. It was too small for the body, bewildered, afraid—”

  “Hungry,” said the head.

  Fern dusted loose dirt from her shoulders. “Do you pity it?” she asked Luc.

  “No. Maybe. It wasn’t a self-made monster. We are the only ones who do that.”

  “Thought for the night.” Fern bent down to retrieve the knife, which she had lost when she fell.

  “You won’t take us,” said the head. “We must await our Self here.”

  Fern said only: “Shine the flashlight so I can see,” handing it to Luc, reaching up once more to sever the stem. Suddenly the head twisted, sinking its teeth into her arm. Fern gave a short scream; Luc thrust the flashlight in a pocket, found the mouth by touch, and managed to force the jaws apart. But as soon as he loosed his hold they snapped shut again, almost taking off his fingers. When the two of them jumped back from the Tree they were both bloodied and angry. The head crowed gleefully, its lips and cheeks flecked with red. “You won’t take us!” it repeated. “We have no stomach, but we can still gnaw. Come near, and we will suck the flesh off your bones like the harpies of old! We need no protector. We are Morgus!”

  Luc said: “This is worse than the bloody spider.”

  “Cloth,” said Fern. “Thick cloth. Let’s go back into the other room. We may have to desecrate some ancestral curtains.”

  They returned with a quantity of velvet ripped into strips and approached the head more cautiously. It watched them with sly eyes. When they were within range it swung wildly, flailing them with its hair, snapping at their hands, teeth gnashing at every miss. Its strength was unhuman. The branch that sustained it lashed from side to side; leaves leaped and crackled. The coarse hairs cut like paper; the motion of the head was snake swift. In addition, it maintai
ned a tirade of insult and derision that only ceased when they finally forced a gag between its jaws, knotting it tight at the back of the skull. Then Fern wound another band of cloth around it, blinding the eyes. When the head could neither see nor speak, bite nor butt, Fern cut the stem. It still twisted and writhed in her grasp, but bound in the thick velvet it could do nothing. Fern tried to hack some of the hair off with the knife. Although several clumps broke away there always seemed to be more of it. “We need to wrap it in more of the curtains,” Fern said. “We may have to carry it a long way.”

  “Back to London?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What about the others?” Luc, who was holding the light again, pointed it at the unripe fruit.

  “I’ll have to deal with them. Hold this.”

  He took the head, gripping the stem close to the scalp, feeling the jolt as it tried to yank itself free. Fern had produced the bottle abstracted from the storeroom and now, with a muttered injunction in Atlantean, she dripped the acid contents onto the bole of the Tree. A shiver ran through leaf and branch; the flashlight beam revealed the bark near the base turning black, peeling, crumbling, flaking into ash. The canker spread: roots withered as if in a sudden blight, leaves crisped into brittle skeletons that blew away as dust on the air. The leftover fruit bruised and darkened, thudding to the ground like windfall apples. Branches moldered and fell; the trunk was consumed from within. At last, all that remained was a mere husk of dead wood scabbed with char. Fern stood for a moment in silence, as though according it a formal farewell. Then she turned to Luc and, carrying their dubious prize, they left the conservatory.

  All spells broke. Morgus’s hands closed on Gaynor’s throat; Will and Ragginbone rushed to help her but were hurled aside with a word of Command. “Now,” cried the witch, “now, little Gwennifer, I will squeeze the truth out of you drop by drop, like juice from a plum, until you are dry and empty. I can see into your fears, into your vain hopes, into the shallowness of your soul and the cringing vessel of your heart. You have run out of lies. You are afraid for your friend, but you are more afraid for yourself. Wise child. There is nothing you can do for her now. Tell me where she is, and I may let you live. You can’t speak, but I will hear you think. Think clearly, Gwennifer—think for your life.”

  In the wereglow, Gaynor’s face was livid; she gasped like a fish. Will said: “Wrokeby, Morgus. Fern’s at Wrokeby. Were you too stupid to figure that out?”

  “Wrokeby?” Gaynor felt the choke hold slacken. Morgus had switched her attention to Will.

  “Of course: what did you expect?” Inwardly, Will prayed to a God Whose existence he had always doubted that Fern had already left. “We used your spies to decoy you here so Fern could have a look around your country home. If you hurry, you might just be able to join her for breakfast.”

  “If Morcadis is at Wrokeby,” Morgus was suddenly silken, “I will eat her for breakfast—cold. Do you really imagine I leave my house unguarded? Even now she must be the main course at dinner, all warm and sweet and tender. I will send you a morsel, if there is anything left—a knucklebone, or a finger—then you can bury it. But there may not be much to send; my pet is always starving.

  “As for you—“ to Gaynor “—you are almost too pathetic to kill. But not quite.” Her grip tightened again, slowly. Her mouth smiled.

  Gaynor thought: This is it. Her agonized gaze swiveled toward Will, because she had no voice to say good-bye.

  And then somehow Morgus’s grip failed, and Gaynor slid to the ground, half fainting, coughing and gulping air. Will’s arm was around her, and Ragginbone was lifting her head, but Morgus—Morgus was doubled over, heaving, greenish vomit spattering the floor. When the paroxysm had passed she tried to straighten up, supporting herself against the wall; but she could barely stand. As the ball of wereglow faded they saw her face was gray. “What has she done?” she croaked. “Morcadis . . . what has she done to me ?”

  No one offered any answer. Ragginbone found the light switch, clicking it up and down, and the electricity came on again. Will thought it was like that moment in a dream when you think you have woken up, and everything is normal again, and then you look around and all the trappings of nightmare are still with you. Morgus’s very lips were ashen, but her vocal cords at least seemed to be regaining strength. She called out: “Nehemet! Bring Hodgekiss!” The cat came pouring down the stairs, noiseless as a ripple, her shadow-blotched skin and basilisk stare more monstrous than feline. The driver followed. He was burly of stature, heavy muscled, accustomed to chauffering the so-called Mrs. Mordaunt, asking no questions, being overpaid for extras. Possibly he had drunk of her potions. “Don’t mind me,” she told him. “Take the girl.” He moved forward.

  Will drew his knife. Light was absorbed into the blackness of the blade, returning no reflection. “Try it.”

  The goblin cat hissed menacingly, but neither animal nor man advanced any farther. Then Morgus groaned, and they turned to her, the man supporting his witch, the cat following, and they mounted the stairs to the shop. The listeners below heard what was left of the front door as it clanged shut.

  Moonspittle poked his head out from behind the chair. “Has she g-gone?”

  Will was hugging Gaynor. “Are you all right?”

  She nodded. Her throat felt too bruised to talk.

  “That was quite a performance,” said Ragginbone. “Not so much brave as foolhardy.”

  “Insane,” said Will. He hugged her harder. “I thought I’d lost you.”

  “What happened to Morgus?” Gaynor managed in a whisper. “Was it Fern?”

  “We’ve no way of telling,” said Ragginbone. “I only hope that when the witch gets back to Wrokeby, Fernanda is long gone. Whatever she’s done.”

  At Wrokeby, Fern, Luc, and Skuldunder were standing in the spellchamber. The goblin had rejoined them when they left the conservatory, having witnessed the previous events from the comparative safety of the doorway. He had missed little: werefolk have good darksight. “Seems that gibbering house-goblin left a lot out,” he brooded. “House is empty, he said. Even the spiders have gone, he said. Nothing about giant ones that try to eat people, oh no.”

  “It wasn’t native to these parts,” Fern said. “It probably arrived after he left.”

  “In a crate of bananas,” murmured Luc. His façade of sangfroid was back in place; slaying an oversized arachnid with a kitchen skewer can do a lot to restore one’s self-assurance. He was carrying the head in a Hermès shoulder bag they had found in Morgus’s bedroom. From time to time it would vibrate as though with violent shivering, or thrash about, butting against his hip, until he slapped it back into immobility.

  “Nothing about that, either,” muttered Skuldunder.

  The spellchamber was clearly empty but he entered it reluctantly, staying near the door and fading into the scenery.

  “Don’t disappear altogether,” said Fern. “It’s bad manners.”

  “What’s wrong?” Luc asked him, looking for a nook where something unpleasant might be in hiding.

  “It was here that she did it,” Skuldunder said. “She opened the abyss. You can feel the pull of it . . .”

  “He means, this is a place on the edge of reality,” Fern elucidated. “If you open a portal between this world and another—between dimensions—between present and past—even though you may close it afterward, it changes things. There is a weakening in the fabric of existence. It happened once at our house in Yorkshire. It’s never been quite the same since. Reality once broken can be mended, but if you are sensitive to atmosphere you will always be able to feel the crack.”

  “And open it again?”

  “Maybe. If you have the power.”

  The emptiness of the room became oppressive, somehow more terrible than the menace of hidden presences that they had experienced in the conservatory. Fern conjured a ball of wereglow but it went out almost immediately, as if deprived of oxygen. By its fleeting light they saw the circle b
urned into the floor and the clustering shadows far above. Fern found herself standing within the perimeter, and she shivered. “This is where the ghosts were lost,” she mused. “All the tiny phantoms from the history of the house—the living memories that gave it its identity—all wiped out in an instant. Others have come to take their place, but these have no past, no purpose. They are the bacteria of the spirit world, drawn to evil as to an infection. The air is choked with them: can’t you sense it? They feed on the overspill from the void, and it fills them. This house will never be whole again.”

  Luc said only: “Black velvet curtains. Gratifying. I like to be right.” The head became restless, pounding at his side, until he clamped it into stillness with a hand on the bag. They left, disquieted, almost wishing they had found another monster to fight.

  “Now we go?” Skuldunder said hopefully. “My spine prickles. The witch is coming back.”

  “The witch is already here,” Fern reminded him. “As for Morgus, she has a long way to come. May she be stuck in traffic.”

  “Is that a spell?” Luc inquired.

  “No. Wishful thinking.” They were on a gallery, dark beyond the flashlight beam; below yawned the cavern of the ballroom. “Dibbuck said something about a prisoner in the attic. Which way?”

  “He said it was a monster!” Skuldunder objected. “Huge—hideous. An ogre . . . Haven’t we had enough of monsters?”

  “I need another skewer,” Luc remarked.

  “Which way?”

  Eventually, they found the attic stairs. Skuldunder had become increasingly jittery; Luc’s manner hardened into tension. Fern’s resolve acquired an edge of obsession: she spoke curtly or not at all, leading them up the stair, the flashlight clenched in her grasp. The beam stabbed the gloom ahead, unwavering, certain of its goal. Fern had stopped thinking now. She knew what she would find. She realized she had known all along, on some deep level of instinct, that he was here somewhere. He was imprisoned, suffering, and it was her fault, because she had vowed him friendship and had done nothing to keep her vow.