Guardian Glass

by Christopher Nuttall

  “There’s nothing here about magic,” Aylia said, disappointed. “I spent years trying to get into here and there’s nothing interesting here at all.”

  “Never say never,” I said, wryly. There were two blank walls in the room and that, to me, suggested hidden doors. I walked up to one of them and touched it carefully; it opened smoothly into another room. “Coming?”

  The room was a vault. It reminded me of the LOG base I’d seen back in the Army, a massive warehouse that seemed to stretch on for miles, packed with everything from inedible MREs to weapons and ammunition, but Faye’s was much smaller. It contained hundreds of magical artefacts and Objects of Power, some of them legends in their own time, others long lost and forgotten about. I found myself wandering through the store in a daze. How had Faye managed to amass so many items without the rest of the world knowing all about it? The sheer power amassed in one room should have been a beacon for every magic-user in the world.

  Aylia was equally stunned. “He had all of this and he never told us anything about it?”

  “Yeah,” I said, quietly. I wanted to quip, to try to break the tension, but nothing came to mind. “It sure looks that way.”

  I caught sight of a wand, set in stone, and winced. It looked like nothing more than a stick with a star on top, like something from a child’s fancy dress store, but I could feel the power radiating from it. The vast majority of wands are little more than focusing devices, but this one was something else. Just looking at it, I felt the urge to cringe…and the desire to take it and use it for myself. A new god would be born, something at the back of my mind whispered, and I would have power beyond imagination…

  “No,” I said, firmly, and turned my eyes away. They were caught by a golden hand sitting in a glass frame. It too crackled with ancient power, but there was no clue as to what it actually did. A golden statue of a man wearing Arabian dress stood next to it, gleaming with the dull shine of pure gold. “Aylia…”

  “That’s the Hand of Midas,” Aylia said, shocked. The memory came back to me in a flash. It had been just another legend…but legends, these days, have a habit of coming true. “I read about it in one of the books I managed to…ah, borrow from dad. It turns things to gold.”

  “Fuck me,” I said, shaking my head. I’d barely seen a handful of items and I was already feeling the desire to run, or to stuff as much as I could into my bag and run. “What else does he have?”

  We walked onwards. The Sandals of Herms promised us the power to run like the wind. The Cloak of Shadow promised us control over an army of living shadows. A book marked with strange insignias promised to bring a creature called the Vowelless One into our world. A Top Hat sat alone in a small display case. God alone knew what it did. A massive sword, almost as tall as I was, promised to make its user the mightiest man on Earth, provided only that he said the magic words.

  And a stuffed baby dragon, only about the size of a large car, gave us a mournful look as we passed. I stared at it, wondering if we could free it, but it had been dead for a long time and only animated by powerful magic spells that fed on its own magical nature. I hoped that Faye hadn’t killed the dragon personally, but if he had, I made a promise that I would pass the word to the other dragons. Let him talk his way out of a fiery end.

  “Come on,” I said, finally. There was no point in continuing to check out the massive collection of artefacts. Forget a siege, I realised; the power Faye had amassed was enough to put him in charge of the entire world. That might be exactly what he had in mind. “We need to check out the other rooms.”

  Aylia was standing very still. There was a dead look in her eye.

  Someone was behind me. Before I could react, I heard an incantation…and then the world went away on a tidal wave of pain.

  Darkness.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  It is perilous to study too deeply the arts of the Enemy, for good or for ill. But such falls and betrayals, alas, have happened before.

  -The Fellowship of the Ring

  Someone was slapping my face.

  “Wake up,” a cruel voice said. It was vaguely female, but buried under layers of cruelty. “Wake up, you bastard!”

  Cold water splashed into my face and I moaned. I felt as if I had gone one-on-one with a Navy SEAL, or perhaps a Black Ops Operative of the kind I wasn’t supposed to know about. My head felt musty and odd, as if I had been drugged or infected with a magical poison; it was hard to think more than a handful of coherent thoughts at a time. There was no point in pretending to be out of it any longer, so I opened my eyes, hoping that the world would look better. It didn’t.

  “He’s awake,” the woman said. I tried to focus in on her, despite the stabbing pains in my eyes, and finally saw a white-haired woman leaning over me. She was wearing a skin-tight outfit that left little to the imagination, but there was no trace of vulnerability surrounding her. I could see her muscles flexing against the garment and winced. She would be a formidable opponent if it came down to a fight in my weakened condition. “Do you want to question him, sir?”

  I took the moment to look around the room. It was a simple cell, I realised, but there was something crude about it that told me that it wasn’t anything to do with the local police. I was chained, my hands held firmly behind my back, to the wall, while Aylia sat opposite me. She was unchained, but one look at her eyes told me that she was completely out of it, held under by a powerful spell. My protections would have prevented anything like that from happening to me, but given time, they could be unravelled by any competent magician. I felt a flicker of panic through the drugs, but suppressed it ruthlessly. I’d been in worse places, even if I couldn’t remember when.

  “Yes,” Vincent Faye said. I took another look at the woman and, to my shock, recognised her. She’d been a covert operative once before something had gone badly wrong and she’d left the army. Had Faye hired her personally, or had she been hired by RAD? There was no way to know. Her reputation, however, was one of bloody mayhem and chaos. “You may leave us.”

  The woman – her name still eluded my straining mind – nodded once and left the three of us together. Vincent Faye looked to have gone downhill over the last week; he was pale, sweating and looked distinctly uncomfortable. I found it rather disappointing, in a way; his reputation wasn’t one that suggested unease about anything. A sorcerer who felt uneasy or terrified at the wrong time would very rapidly wind up a dead sorcerer. Confidence and an overwhelming ego were very much part of the sorcerer’s tools, just as much as anything else. It was…odd.

  “You are trapped here,” he said. Even his voice was shaking, as if he couldn’t bear to be in the same room as me. I’d seen grown men react badly to spiders, or some of the stranger supernatural creatures, but why would he be scared of me? “Your magic is bound by cold iron and the alcohol in your bloodstream. You are gelded.”

  “You’re a fool,” I said. My head threatened to explode with pain as I spoke. Every word brought a new flash of fire across my forehead. “Cold iron doesn’t stop magic, you…”

  I reached for the magic, but I felt it slither away. The spell just wouldn’t form. The surprise must have shown on my face, for his laughed, rather nervously. I had expected a gloating session – all magic-users love to show off, even if they don’t dare show off very often – but instead, he looked…scared.

  “Convinced?” He asked, finally. “You were caught breaking into my home, Guardian. I have the right to do anything I want to you, up to and including the use of deadly force. You must know that no one else knows that you are here. You are completely at my mercy.”

  I kept my face blank. He was right, in a sense; magic-users did tend to defend their homes aggressively. There were several laws pending preventing the use of lethal wards, but they somehow never seemed to work for long, normally because they were nestled in at the end of a series of defensive wards and were well hidden. The burglar who was caught, of course, would not be around to complain. It was so hard to pro
ve what any given magic-user might or might not be capable of doing.

  But he wasn’t entirely right. I’d left a note behind for Wilkinson, telling him what I’d done, but he wouldn’t know anything about what we’d found. He would hesitate before sending in the other Guardians…and, perhaps, his hesitation would be fatal. An army of magic-users, armed with the Objects of Power we’d seen in the vaults, would chop the Guardians apart and go on to impose their own order on the country. We were staring down at disaster…and it was unfolding under my very eyes.

  “All right,” I said, trying – again – to summon magic. It just seemed to fade away into the background. I was tired, so tired. I couldn’t believe that our day had started with the werewolves and ended here. “Let’s cut right to the gloating, shall we? What the hell are you doing?”

  Vincent looked at me as if he didn’t quite know what he was doing there, and then seemed to steady himself, grasping his lapels as he prepared to speak. “You must understand,” he said, in a manner recognisably political, “that there are two elements in the world that we do not control. You might argue the case, but one is magic and the other is government, the old and the new. The influx of magic into the world is only growing stronger and wilder. If nothing happens to prevent the flow of magic, or stabilise it, we could be looking at disaster.”

  I said nothing, thinking hard. I had seen the projections, of course, and if the worst case came to pass, the human race would be driven back on its cities, and then finally swept up by a rising tide of the supernatural. The Faerie would walk the land wherever they pleased and there would be no defence against the supernatural. The farms and other food sources would be limited and, finally, the human race would starve. The last beacons of light would be crushed.

  “The government, of course, is aware of this danger, but considers it a minor danger compared to the growth of human magic-users,” Vincent continued. He seemed to shiver at the very prospect, almost as if he were unaware of the import of his words. “They remember the truth spell cast on Congress and the deaths of several politicians, including two Presidents, and fear the consequences of unrestrained magic-users. They created the Guardian Corps to defend themselves, to defend the established order, but the Guardians are incapable of doing anything, but keeping a lid on the worst trouble spots.”

  He hesitated, almost swaying on his feet, before steadying himself. “The Government has long been ambivalent about people keeping guns in their home, but anyone can buy and own a gun,” he said. “Magic, on the other hand, puts one part of humanity above the rest…and they’re not the type to respect the establishment, or its views. Every time the magic gets involved, the world turns upside down. Their inability to control magic or magicians makes them fearful, and fear drives them onwards to do stupid things. A single gun cannot cause much havoc; a single magic sniper, as your friend Cowboy found out, can threaten an entire city.”

  Something clicked in my mind. “You’re the one who sent that sniper into New York,” I said. I’d read the report afterwards. Cowboy had come as close to dying as he ever had in his career. The sniper had been extremely powerful and bat-shit insane. “Why?”

  “I studied the very roots of magic themselves, seeking to understand how it worked,” Vincent said. He wrung his hands together nervously, as if he expected me to break out of my chains and strangle him at any moment. I wished that that were possible, but the chains remained as cold and solid as ever. “I found myself digging deeper than anyone else and I found the keys to unlock magic completely. I found out what was needed to turn magic from a threat into a tool, completely. There was a price to pay, of course, but there is always a price.”

  His eyes gleamed with a fanatical light. “Think about it,” he said. “How would you like to walk into a Faerie Mound and dictate terms to them? If I could unlock that kind of power, where would we be?

  “But you attracted attention from the dragons,” he said, changing suddenly. “I know that you were summoned by one of the dragons to Norway, where you were warned about my activities. The dragons would be just as threatened as the Faerie, but like the Faerie, they wouldn’t really be able to comprehend that we could be a threat to them, not until it was far too late. It wasn’t until a dragon arrived at your house that I realised that they were taking it seriously…and that I had to move tonight.”

  I stared. “Tonight?”

  “You’ve been asleep for nearly an entire day,” Vincent said. He seemed to shake again. “I cannot risk allowing the dragons to intervene and snatch this from our grasp.”

  I took a chance. “Even at the price of killing your own daughter?”

  Vincent seemed to blanch. “There must be sacrifices,” he said, dazed. I suddenly wondered if he was drugged, or under a hypnotic spell himself. There could be a demon scout riding him, but when I tried to open up my sixth sense, I felt a wave of pain that nearly knocked me out again. “Yes, there must be sacrifices. There must be sacrifices. There must be…”

  He turned and stumbled out of the room, pale and heaving. I watched him leave, puzzled. He didn’t strike me as the kind of man who would cold-bloodedly kill his baby girl just to amass power, although I had seen hundreds of magical sacrifices over the years. God knew that sorcerers were unpleasant people, and yes, people did give their children away all the time, but I had expected something better from Vincent Faye. If he was under someone’s influence…

  I looked over at Aylia. She looked like a robot who had been switched off, or a doll lying where it had been carelessly thrown by a wilful child. I realised that she was under some kind of control, but how? I had given her some protections and even another Guardian would have problems trying to put her under his power. Or maybe…

  The glow at the door announced another visitor. Suddenly, everything made a hell of a lot more sense.

  “Well,” Alassa said. “Not so clever are you now, Mr Guardian?”

  I looked at her and then lowered my eyes. Even without my sixth sense, I could tell that she was blazing with enough glamour to catch anyone’s attention, and convince them to help her do whatever she wanted to do. She would be the most popular girl in the school, courted by all the boys – the nerds would do her homework willingly, the jocks would quite happily fight for her – and the teachers would give her the highest marks, without ever knowing that they had been influenced. Her talent lay with the more subtle magic tricks, but used properly, any talent could be dangerous.

  She seemed to resemble Aylia more now, or was that just the glamour? The simplest of glamour spells presented the wearer as someone friendly or likable to the observer, giving them the vague traits of what the observer found most desirable. I remembered a pair of soldiers arguing over a glamour-wearing stripper. The two descriptions were of very different women. I was falling for Aylia, like it or not, and so Alassa looked like her sister. I pushed that thought aside. Alassa was almost certainly the one behind everything. She was certainly self-centred enough.

  “Evidently not,” I agreed. I wasn’t in the mood to bandy words. If it really had been a day, and there was no way to know, the other Guardians hadn’t come bursting in to free us. Something had gone wrong, somehow. “What have you done to Aylia?”

  “Very little,” Alassa said. “Just a little letter she wrote…”

  She held up a sheet of paper and I swore under my breath. It was a simple letter, written in neat feminine handwriting, and signed. Aylia would have written the letter, I suspected, years before she knew of her own magical powers, and why she should be far more careful. People talk about being turned into frogs, or witches flying through the air on broomsticks, but they tended to miss the more subtle magic tricks. A signature, rendering a letter or paper official, could be used to influence the writer, or even control them. Aylia’s letter had to have meant a lot to her.

  And it answered another question. “You looked through her eyes,” I said, angrily. I hated myself at that moment. I had put Aylia though hell…and I had missed the pos
sibility that she was an unwitting spy. “You knew I was going to Maxwell’s house and you killed him before I could speak to him.”

  “Correct,” Alassa agreed. She might have been only fourteen – and there was something about that number that rang a bell in the back of my mind – but she was tall enough to pass for a woman twice her age. She might also have used her glamour to fool Maxwell, or perhaps he hadn’t cared. Someone with that much money could get what they wanted; laws, regulations and basic human decency be damned. “He was quite willing to obtain everything we needed at vast prices. We paid, of course, knowing that it would be worth the entire world to us.”

  Something else clicked. “You’re the one controlling your own father,” I said, disgusted. I had heard tales of such relationships before, but I had never seen one and I had come to believe that the tales were exaggerated. “What have you done to him?”