Guardian Glass

by Christopher Nuttall

  I frowned. We know so little about werewolf society, but I had always had the impression that the clan worked on a basis of sexual equality. Werewolf males and females were roughly equal in strength, ferocity and bloody-mindedness…and their society always tended to regard males as expendable. Or…was it something simpler than that? Felincia would have been around sixteen, perhaps, when the magic returned to the world. She would have been used to living in a modern society, even though that society would have hated and feared her, and she wouldn’t have liked living in the woods. I remembered what Granny had said about Felincia’s birth and wondered…had the story become garbled, somehow?

  “I see,” I said. “Did you hear anything from her afterwards?”

  There was a sudden flash of anger. “They gave her a dog collar,” Davan snapped. For a second, I saw the wolf under the human seeming. Whatever had happened between Felincia and her father, he still cared for her very much. “They made her their puppet. She couldn’t take it off, even when she came to visit the house on the edge of the woods. She was their slave!”

  I almost – not quite – flinched at the anger in his voice. I hoped that he didn’t realise that Aylia was her father’s daughter, although he had probably already smelled out the relationship. I had hoped to shield Aylia from the investigation into her father, at least until I knew just what part she was playing in it, but there was no longer any choice.

  “I know,” I said. “What was Faye’s people doing near here?”

  There was another rustle of feeling among the werewolves. “They were asking about magic,” Davan said. Somehow, I wasn't surprised in the slightest. “They wanted to know how some of the supernatural creatures who lived here worked; how they could handle magic, things like that. Several of them died after refusing to heed specific warnings, others got careless…and one was bitten by one of our children and became a werewolf. He fled into the night and was eaten by a troll.”

  Damn, I thought. I would have liked to question that person, if I could find him. I had the feeling that he might have known the purpose behind Faye’s questions. They all seemed to be connected to magic, but really…why? Faye – like every other researcher in the country – had been trying to probe the limits of magic, but just how far had he gone? I remembered the sorceress and her magic. It had been something completely new and unexpected. Where had that come from?

  “One of them killed himself,” another werewolf added. “He walked right across a troll bridge without paying the toll.”

  I shrugged. He might have killed himself, or he might have just been ignorant. It wouldn’t be the first time a completely ruthless person had used an unsuspecting dupe to test a theory. The werewolves might have known the truth, however; perhaps the man had been unable to bear what he was doing any longer.

  “We can offer you little else,” Davan said, finally. “We stay in our woods and prefer to remain apart from the world around us. Those of us who walk in your world tell us that it is growing darker, more hostile to magic, even as the levels of magic grow stronger. Find my daughter’s killer, Guardian; find him and find the answer.”

  I recognised a dismissal when I heard one. “Thank you for your time,” I said. “If you ever need help yourself, don’t hesitate to ask.”

  “And thank you for not being your father,” Davan said, to Aylia. “My daughter always spoke highly of you.”

  One of the werewolves, a child barely reaching her teens, led us out of the village and back to the path, pointing the way out of the woods. I smiled to myself and led Aylia down away from the werewolves, although I was sure that I felt their presence in the surrounding trees. They might have been keeping other creatures away from us, or perhaps they were merely making sure that we left their territory. It was therefore a surprise when we turned the corner and nearly ran right into a centaur.

  “Merry Met,” the Centaur said. It had the kind of voice that set me right on edge, although I would be hard pressed to say just what it was that irritated me. It smelt, of horse and man and something else, something magical and dangerous. It was the classical beast, with a man’s torso and head, above a horse’s body, but somehow it looked wrong, as if it didn’t quite belong. The beard and long untamed hair added an air of wildness to the picture. “I saw that you would come this way and I wanted to speak with you before you left this place.”

  I looked over at Aylia. She was regarding the centaur carefully. I allowed myself a moment of relief – most girls go crazy over the wretched creatures – before looking back at the centaur. It didn’t have human eyes, I realised; they were the eyes of something far older…and darker. And, perhaps, something that had seen too much.

  “We see hints of the future in our meditations,” the centaur said, when I said nothing. “We see shadows of what might happen. We saw…the end of everything. We saw magic spilling out across the land, only to be replaced by something else, something so wild and potent that it swept all away in front of it. We saw…nothingness.”

  “Cryptic as always,” I said. No one is sure if the centaurs are telling the truth about their precognitive abilities. They had been known to lie on occasion, merely for amusement, or to win a girl. It didn’t help that I distrusted the creatures. They cared little for human life. I knew that they had to kill a human girl in order to procreate, but I still disliked them. “What does it mean?”

  “We do not know,” the centaur said. “There was only one other flash about you. It was a warning. Do not trust your grandfather.”

  I rolled my eyes. “My grandfather – both grandfathers – have been dead for years,” I said, angrily. I’d barely known one of them. The other had taught me how to shoot before he’d died, apparently of an overdose of a girl called Honey. What a way to go, I’d thought at the time. Grandpa had always been larger than life. “They’re beyond even the efforts of the best necromancers.”

  “Maybe,” the centaur said. His face seemed to twist suddenly into an inhuman pattern. “Be warned; soon enough, the fate of the world will rest upon your decisions.”

  He turned and trotted back into the woods.

  “Bastard,” I said, with some feeling. Everyone had been giving me cryptic warnings since the case opened and on the whole, I think I preferred the dragons. They didn’t have to prey on humans to survive. “Could he be any more enigmatic?”

  “He was…odd,” Aylia agreed. She looked up at me. There was a new determination in her voice, perhaps triggered by the explanation of Felincia’s slavery. “What was all this about my father?”

  I sighed. “Tell you what,” I said. There was no longer any point in stalling. “We’ll discuss it as soon as we get home.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  When harmony, mutual consideration and trust pass out of the home, hell enters in.

  -David O. McKay

  “All right,” Aylia said. “Enough stalling. What do you know about my family? What does it have to do with Cecelia?”

  I nodded thoughtfully. She was right. I had been stalling ever since we’d returned from the werewolf village. I’d called the Circle and reported on the visit, and then asked Dolly if she could get me a preliminary report on Vincent Faye as soon as possible, and then we had had a surprisingly good dinner. I hadn’t wanted to discuss anything to do with the Faye family, but she was right. It needed to be discussed.

  “Very well,” I said. I wanted to stand up and pace, but I couldn’t. It would have revealed far too much uncertainty. I half-wished Varsha were there, but she was off in the house doing something of her own. She was a teenager, so I didn’t want to pry. It would probably have only worried me. “I started to wonder about it as soon as I saw the level of defences around your house. Your father might not have been an ultra-capable magician, but he had access to the services of hundreds of other magicians, each one a specialist in their own field. The wards surrounding your house should have kept out all of the Guardians for hours, perhaps days; they certainly couldn’t be penetrated without setti
ng off all kinds of alarms. There are wards that can be fooled, or simply overpowered, but not those wards.”

  Aylia stared at me. “But you broke into Maxwell’s house,” she said, puzzled. “How did you do that?”

  “Apples and oranges,” I said. “Maxwell wasn't that powerful a magician, nor did he have a thousand friends and allies to help him build his defences. Magic-users don’t trust other magic-users as a general rule, not when industrial espionage is such a profitable field. It wasn't easy and I nearly stumbled into several traps, but I broke through in the end, just in time to witness his murder. Your father, on the other hand, built defences that no human mind could break without being detected.”

  I paused. “But the kidnappers got though the wards,” I said, ticking off points on my fingers. “They broke in, without setting off all kinds of alarms, and used a powerful killing magic on Felincia, again without being detected. A werewolf takes a lot of killing, even with silver bullets and cursed ammunition. A magic powerful enough to kill a werewolf without leaving a mark should have been detected. It wasn’t. If that wasn’t enough, they used Pixie Dust – a banned substance normally only found in small quantities – to mask their trail and put Cecilia to sleep. Again, no alarms sounded.

  “And then they somehow took her out of the house and escaped,” I concluded. “Your father’s wards should have alerted him when she left the house – she was only four years old, after all – but they didn’t. That struck me as odd at the time, but then…”

  “You believed that it was the Faerie who took her,” Aylia said, tonelessly. “So did I.”

  “Yes,” I said, flatly. Her face had gone completely blank, yet there was a pain behind her eyes. I felt a moment’s pity for her, which I ruthlessly pushed down into the far reaches of my mind. I couldn’t afford it. Not now. “We performed a necromancy spell and spoke to Felincia’s ghost and she told us what she saw. We decided that she was most likely to have seen the Faerie, but that might not have been the case. What she saw might also have been caused by an illusion spell…and the collar prevented Felincia from using magic without permission. She couldn’t have seen through the spell.

  “It occurred to me that that might not have prevented her smelling her enemies, but then it dawned on me that the Pixie Dust might have been charmed to hide their smell from her,” I continued. “Pixie Dust has plenty of uses, but most of them are completely harmless; the addicts use it to dream their preferred dreams. It would be possible to configure it to jam her sense of smell…and do so in such a way that she wouldn’t be aware of it. Her attackers would appear to have no smell, which – again – supports the theory that it was the Faerie who took her, adding the final confirmation to the theory. The Faerie have no smell.

  “But then we went to the Faerie Mound and beat the Faerie Queen’s challenge,” I concluded. “The Faerie had no choice, but to tell us the truth; they didn’t take your sister. That took them all off the suspect list, which left…who? I didn’t know any magic-user who might have that kind of power, so I decided to visit the Sensitive – and, as we’d met up by then – take you along as well. We learned that your father had been getting involved in the darker parts of the magical world, as well as launching new investigations into the secrets behind magic, something that the werewolves confirmed. And then there was a rather unlikely coincidence.”

  I took another sip of my coffee, wishing it were something stronger. I hadn’t been allowed to touch a drop of alcohol since my magic blossomed to life, just because of the danger of a drunken magician wandering the streets. If magic could lead to madness and the far ore dangerous types of magic, then what could a drunken magician do? The handful of examples had been disastrous. A town up north was almost levelled by a magician who drank far too much beer.

  “I decided to break the law and search Maxwell’s house,” I said. “It was something that should have been unpredictable, but…when I arrived, Maxwell was killed in front of me by a mysterious sorceress, wearing a complete veil. That’s a coincidence – two coincidences – and I was always taught that the more unlikely a coincidence, the more likely it is that it isn’t a coincidence at all. Maxwell’s death…and the veiled woman, as if she would be recognised by whoever saw her.”

  “Perhaps she didn’t want Maxwell to know who she was or who he was really working for,” Aylia suggested. She was starting to look scared. Part of me was pleased; the other half was disgusted at myself. The chances of a successful relationship were starting to look completely nil. “Or, perhaps, she would be recognised by someone else.”

  “Perhaps,” I agreed, “but that still doesn’t explain the fact he was murdered the night I was there. The odds against it are” – I pulled a figure out of my rear end – “about two hundred to one.”

  I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I stood up and started to pace. “I was also taught that the simplest explanation normally is the correct one,” I said. “That’s not always true with magic, where sometimes effect precedes cause, but it was definitely something to bear in mind. The wards failed. Why? How? I saw the portal to the pocket dimension in Maxwell’s house and I wondered if that had been how they’d broken in, but the wards should have kept that out as well. Hell, the sheer amount of magic in your house should have made it impossible, even without the wards. It was too big a coincidence to swallow.

  “The simplest explanation is that it was an inside job,” I continued, noting her bemusement. “The wards would have obeyed a member of your family. You, or your sister or your mother, could have brought any number of friends into the house. You could also have brought your sister’s kidnappers. Once they were inside, they cast an illusion spell over themselves and dosed themselves with Pixie Dust, killing your sister’s bodyguard before she could react. Once she was dead…they took Cecelia outside the wards and teleported away, leaving us to go chasing the Faerie. How many people would have dared to play the Faerie at their own game?”

  Aylia flinched, as if I’d slapped her. “I didn’t,” she protested, angrily. “I loved my sister!”

  I saw it in her eyes. “You loved your other sister as well,” I said, softly. I thought I recognised the symptoms. Alassa had been frankly unlovable and self-centred, not an unusual combination in a magic-user, but maybe she hadn’t always been that way, or perhaps she had and no one had noticed for a long time. She certainly had a natural talent for glamour magic. “Why…?”

  “She was using me,” Aylia snapped, angrily. I could feel the pain in her voice. “When she was born, I doted on the little brat, I did everything for her and…she was just using me as her servant. Mom, Dad…they don’t see her for what she is, but I did; she just uses and abuses people, including the servants. She had four maids, all under her sole control, and she treated them terribly…”

  I held up a hand. “You must understand my point,” I said. “There’s another problem. You followed me to the Faerie Mound – an impressive piece of magic in its own right – and insisted on coming inside with me. When you were there, you risked trapping us both in Faerie. When we left the Mound” – I remembered the man the Faerie had warped and felt sick – “you managed to convince me to let you come home with me, and then accompany me on my visit to New York. If it hadn’t been for the dragon, we might have died there…and now I wonder if Cowboy wasn't distracted on purpose. No one could have predicted a dragon showing up to save us.”

  Aylia stared at me. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that I don’t know if I can trust you,” I admitted. “How can I tell what is really happening in your mind?”

  “But…use a truth spell,” she said, desperately. I could see tears forming at the corner of her eyes. If it was an act, it was a good one. “You could make me tell you the truth.”

  “I can’t,” I said, gently. “You’re powerful enough to shrug off a truth spell and clever enough to do it without me noticing. It would have to be a deep hypnotic. Would you agree to that?”

  Aylia hesitate
d. I didn’t blame her. Anyone under a deep hypnotic spell would be completely at the mercy of the spell-caster. I wouldn’t have agreed to undergo the spell myself unless I was facing certain death…and Aylia could just leave the house. I couldn’t hold her, legally, but where else did she have to go? If she had been telling the truth all along, she had cut herself off from everything that had once been hers. She was a powerful magic-user, but a largely untrained one; she might end up in Thrall, or maybe even killed by someone sensing a rival. I didn’t want to feel pity, but it floated up into my mind, even though she might be guilty.

  “You won't do anything…you know?”

  I pushed down the temptation to make jokes about making her cluck like a chicken. “I won’t,” I promised. “I’ll just ask questions and then release the spell. You’ll be aware of everything that happens.”

  “After this, I’m going to slap you,” Aylia said, grimly. The ice in her tone almost made me flinch. “Do it, now, before I lose my nerve.”