The Serpent's Shadow em-2

by Mercedes Lackey

  Stonehenge? We're all supposed to make an excursion out to Stonehenge? Peter thought incredulously. This is insane!

  But what he said aloud was, "Lord Alderscroft—what if the menace isn't coming from outside England?"

  He pitched his voice strongly enough to also carry over all the rest, and his words created a sudden silence. Alderscroft raised his eyes and stared at him. "What was that?" the Head of the Council demanded.

  Peter cleared his throat nervously and repeated himself. "What if the menace isn't coming from outside England? What if it's right here? Won't we be sealing it in here with us? Essentially cutting us off from—oh—outside help?"

  Some of the members snorted at that; the rest looked contemptuous. Only Almsley regarded him thoughtfully, as if giving his suggestions the full weight of being taken seriously.

  "If there had been anyone with that sort of power among us in London, or even in England, Scott, we would have detected them before this," Alderscroft said, with a hint of warning in his tone. "The closest we came was that little doctor of yours, and she didn't have enough power or expertise to create a horror like the one we face."

  Would you have detected it, can you be sure? What about those shields of Maya's, the ones that essentially made you look elsewhere? If those had been formed correctly, would you ever have noticed her? He wanted to ask those questions, but glanced first at Almsley, who shook his head very slightly and pursed his lips a little in warning. The Head of the Council was not going to listen to one of the most junior members of the White Lodge; he had already made up his mind. To force a confrontation at this point would accomplish nothing, and leave him unable to talk to Alderscroft later when events either proved or disproved the Head's conclusion.

  Someone will die if that happens . . . but getting myself thrown out of the Club and the White Lodge won't do any good either.

  Unsatisfied, he held his peace, as Alderscroft finished the design of the magic ritual they would all perform to create the initial shield.

  "Don robes, and we will assemble in the second chamber," Alderscroft ordered, standing up and shoving his chair away from the table in a single decisive movement. Peter hung back a little, delaying the moment that he joined the others; there was a brief scramble for the robes, then those nearest the pegs began passing the common robes back to those behind them.

  Some few of the members had special embroidered, personalized robes of various antique cuts and quaint designs. There was no uniformity to these robes; they ranged from something the most austere monk would feel comfortable wearing, to an elaborately embroidered creation that the Pope himself would have felt excessive for High Mass at Easter. Some were designed along the lines of those a Member of Parliament or a University don wore, others seemed to be recreations of a medieval burgher's festive attire. Alderscroft's hooded robe, of brilliant scarlet velvet, was somewhere between the two extremes.

  The majority took one of the common robes passed to them, which were cut along the lines of the academic robes worn by the undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge—but not constructed of sober scholastic black, but of burgundy red, sapphire blue, or emerald green. There were robes of the warm gold favored by Earth Masters on the hooks, but no one took any of them. Peter shrugged himself into a green robe, and joined the rest filing into the inner chamber of the War Room.

  As each man entered the chamber, he took a plain wooden wand out of one of the four containers beside the door. Willow for the Water Masters, ash for the Fire, and birch for the Air; once again, there was a box of wands of oak for the Earth Masters, but there were none here tonight to take one.

  Perhaps some will appear for Alderscroft's assemblage at Stonehenge, Peter thought, slipping the wand nervously through his fingers as he shuffled into a place in the circle. They really could not have fitted any more people into this room; they were all standing shoulder-to-shoulder as it was. There wasn't anything here but a series of concentric circles on the floor, the largest of which was flush to the walls. The walls, completely without windows, were painted a flat gray; the floor was of tan terrazzo with the circles inlaid in copper, so carefully that there wasn't the least crack or crevice to mar their perfect line. Gaslights high up on the walls gave perfect illumination to the room; someone, perhaps even the Head himself, had come in here earlier to light them.

  By custom, Air Masters stood in the east, Fire in the south, and Water in the west. If there had been Earth Masters, they would have stood in the north; as it was, the Air and Water Masters spilled over into the northern quadrant, taking their place.

  When they had all crowded into the room, Alderscroft nodded, and as one, they snapped their wands down to be held horizontally in front of them, each man's wand crossing the ends of the wands of the men to either side of him, rather like a giant Morris Dancers' figure. Peter supposed that they could have all held hands to maintain contact between them, but that would have been—well—rather embarrassing to most of them. Evidently at some time in the past, this method of linking all the members of the White Lodge had been decided on as being somehow more dignified than handholding like children in a circle dance.

  The instant that full contact was made, the Lodge Shield sprang up behind them all. Peter felt it and Saw it; arcing over them all and glowing a violet-white, it hummed with the power of the three dozen Masters here tonight, along with all of the power invested in it by every Master who had ever stood in this room as a member of the White Lodge. If ever a thing made of magic was alive, it was this shield.

  And it was this shield that they would use as the basis of the one meant to cover all of England.

  However stupid an idea that is. . . .

  Peter closed his eyes; it was not in anyone's best interest at the moment to argue with Alderscroft. He could do that later, if (when!) another death occurred, and it became obvious that all they had done was to trap their enemy inside their own walls.

  Now was the time to raise the Cone of Power that would make it possible to expand the shield, and he was no less obliged to add his force to the rest, even though he privately considered the task to be absolutely futile.

  He locked his knees, braced himself, and carefully detached his self from his body.

  The ancient Egyptians had called this self the ka, and had portrayed it as a human-headed bird. Peter often wondered if, when an Egyptian mage had performed this same exercise, the ancient one had seen himself in that form. Peter never had; the form he took was of a younger, slimmer version of himself— basically, himself as he had been when he first achieved Mastery. Somehow that form never changed, though the outer one did. He knew that if he bothered to focus his attention on them, he would see the rest of his colleagues, in similar forms, detaching themselves from their corporal bodies—then vanishing, leaving behind the thin silver cords of power that tethered them to their bodies, trailing off into the void. These spirit forms were not limited to the dull plodding pace of their material hosts; they could be anywhere they chose in the blink of an eye. The Masters had gone to seek their natural allies, the creatures of magic and spirit that inhabited the particular Element of each mage.

  And it was time that he did the same.

  North, he thought.

  In the speed of thought, he was there, in the place he felt most at home: hovering above the Great Deep, the ocean. Where he found himself, floating just above the moonlit waves, was somewhere off the coast of Scotland. It was an unusually calm night; a few clouds drifted across the sky, but there was only the usual breath of wind that blew from the sea to ruffle the surface of the waves.

  Peter felt himself relax immediately. Let Almsley and the other Water Masters seek out the naiads and the other familiar creatures of river and spring; when it came down to cases, it was the Elementals of the deep ocean that he felt most akin to. There were fewer of them, but they were correspondingly more powerful—and that was wherein his value to the White Lodge lay.

  But not Leviathan. Not today. He had already de
cided that he would not seek the Greatest Ones of the deeps. I’ll do my duty, but no more than that.

  Slowly, he moved himself landward over the waters under a brilliant moon, searching for the dark bobbing head of a seal, swimming a shadow amid shadows among the foam-flecked waves, and not finding one. The pull of power had led him here, though, so one or more of the Selkie should be about somewhere.

  It was not until he reached the shore and alighted among the bushes just beyond the sands, that he saw one, and a passer-by would not have seen anything out of the ordinary about the fisherman who strolled beside the water's edge. True, there was something a little odd; as he walked above the waterline, the hems of his trousers were soaking wet, and although by the footprints he had been walking for some time, they never seemed to get any drier. Not only that, but the footprints themselves were full of water and bits of weed. But that was the only odd thing about him, and could be explained away readily enough.

  Peter followed the faint tug of power until it brought him to a dark shape lying concealed within a gorse bush. It looked like—and in fact, it was—a sealskin. There he waited, until the fisherman came up the path and stopped beside it, eyeing him keenly, though he should have been invisible to mortal eyes.

  " Tis you, is it, Peter Scott?" said the Selkie, bending over to pick up the sealskin and shake it out.

  You've sharp eyes, my lad, Peter replied in thought, for of course his spirit form could not actually speak. Courting the ladies, were you?

  "Visiting my good little wife Alice, and thanks to you," said the Selkie complacently, and by that, Peter knew which Selkie it was and blessed his good fortune in having come across one that he had directly aided.

  The Selkie, uniquely among the magic creatures of England these days, retained their physical nature. They were human on land, but when they donned their magic cloaks, they lived as seals in the sea and Selkie spirits within the walls of their own magical homes. Yet every seven generations they had to seek human women to bear them children, (or, occasionally, a human male would take a Selkie bride) as their ties to land and physical form thinned and threatened to bind them into their seal-and spirit-forms for all time. In the old days, that had been of no great moment; it was understood that an occasional fisher girl or boy would have an "uncanny" spouse. It was considered lucky. A Selkie husband would bring back plenty of fish, and occasionally gold from the sea, and the relatives of a Selkie bride would drive fish into the nets of her husband (so long as he was kind to her and kept her safe and content). But in this age, that had all changed. A Selkie couldn't walk into a Registry Office and put down his name and address beside his would-be bride's. And a girl these days wanted something material, a lad with a boat, or a job in a shop, or a smart young clerk, or even a fellow with a steady place in a factory. More often than not, she wanted a young man that could take her away from these bleak and storm-racked shores into the city, where things were happening. Girls even in the wildest parts of Scotland didn't believe in Selkies, and as for the boys, they didn't believe in anything but God and shillings. If some strange man with melting brown eyes came 'round, talking sweet words, girls these days would tell him to be about his business, and that right sharp. And no boy would take up with a strange girl he found walking along the shore with her hems all wet. She might be a gypsy, intent on stealing everything he had that was portable.

  So for the first time, the Selkies of Sul Skerry found themselves looking at the end of life as they had known it, and they were afraid.

  Then came Peter Scott, drawn by their distress, and in a position to do something about it. In London there were plenty of young women who would have given their souls for a husband, any husband, with or without a Registry License or the posting of banns, any escape from the life of grinding poverty and endless humiliation that was the lot of a girl who no longer had "virtue" to protect. There were girls whose greatest ambition was to have three good meals, a roof, and a bed, with a man who wouldn't beat her or force her to do anything she didn't want to do. How he had found ten honest, clean-hearted ones among the gin-soaked floozies was a tale in itself, but he had, and brought them here, where the Selkies had built them a tiny enclave of stout stone cottages with magic and strong, brown hands on the site of a fishing village long abandoned.

  With Selkie gold, Peter had bought glass windows, sturdy, well-built furnishings, and all the homely comforts these young women had dreamed of as they walked the filthy streets of Cheapside or Whitechapel. Alice and Annie, Mabel and Marie, Sara, Sophie, Delia, Maryanne, Stella, and Nan had moved into their cottages. They'd been properly courted and won, and married after the fashion of the Selkie, and it was enough and more than enough for them, who had dreamed only of a roof that didn't leak, a bed with more than a threadbare blanket, and not an entire cozy home of their very own and the means to keep it. There were no relatives or neighbors to ask awkward questions, and if the babies weren't in the parish register, that didn't much matter, since the fathers would be taking them off to sea as soon as they could swim.

  Literally.

  And in the meanwhile, they had sweet babies who never cried and never had tantrums, who suckled with the greatest of gusto and fell asleep like puppies when they were done with playing. A Selkie baby was a perfect baby in every respect, thanks to the magic that made them so. Unlike changelings, who made the lives of their "mothers" a misery until the poor things died, a Selkie babe made their lives a joy. The Selkie husbands took care not to bless their wives with new babies until after the current one was weaned and toddling, but that didn't mean that the gentle pleasures of the bedchamber were neglected until that time either.

  And if the fathers had no job, they still brought income to their landward wives in the form of Selkie gold, the ancient gold pieces the Selkie had scavenged from wrecks since the time of the tin traders. It was Peter who took the gold away, converted it to proper shillings and sovereigns and good paper notes, and brought it back for the wives to spend to maintain their households. There was a donkey and cart that belonged to this tiny village of ten cottages, and the wives took it in turn to go to the village for a day of shopping—and once each year, each woman got a railroad ticket in the mail to take her into the nearest city, where she could satisfy whatever desires were left unfulfilled by the village shops and market stalls.

  So, Ian, is your Alice still bonny in your eyes? Peter asked, with a grin.

  "More bonny than ever, and another bairn coming," the Selkie replied happily. "That's the fourth, and never a scold from the lass for puttin' her in the family way!"

  The Selkie were nothing if not plain-spoken, a trait which rather endeared them to Peter.

  I'm glad you're in a good mood, Ian, Peter said, sobering. I need the usual favor from you.

  Ian laughed. "After all you've done? You could ask the usual a thousand times over, and still not be repaid. Come on, then."

  He shrugged the sealskin over his shoulders, just as an ordinary man would shrug on a coat—and then, there was no man standing there in the moonlight, but a great bull seal, strong-shouldered and in the prime of life. The seal cast a look over its back at Peter, barked once, and plunged down the slope into the water.

  Peter followed; and once in the dark water, the seal began to shimmer as if coated with some phosphorescent chemical; as it swam, trickles of power ran along it like the trails of bubbles that followed ordinary seals. Ian was not just moving through the water with Peter following in his wake; he moved through the world of water and stone cottages and the rugged Scottish coastline into the world of Water and Ocean and Sul Skerry. The sea brightened and lightened; the seal glowed with an inner luminescence as it plunged down and down, never needing now to come to the surface for a breath. The medium that the seal knifed through became less liquid and more—something else—and the seal's sides heaved as it breathed in that substance, as easily as air. And then, ahead of them, in deeps that glowed pearl and silver, stood a shimmering city built of light and mothe
r-of-pearl and shivering glass and things more strange and wonderful than any of these, and the seal did not so much swim anymore as fly. Peter could have come here on his own, but not easily, and not quickly. The way to Sul Skerry was perilous and sternly guarded. Humans came here sometimes, rarely—beloved husbands or wives, plucked from the shore or the sea, taken in the midst of terrible storms in such a fashion that those ashore would think them lost to the waves and mourn them as dead. They could come here, but they could never leave again, for to come to Sul Skerry in the flesh meant that the flesh was changed forever—and unless there was Selkie blood in one's veins, it could not be changed back again.

  Peter moved alongside Ian, who blew a burst of radiant bubbles at him in seal fashion. They dove through the shadow gate of Sul Skerry side by side, flew upward to a landing platform of crystal and silver, and alighted like a pair of sea birds—and now the seal was a man of sorts again, as he was in Sul Skerry, a creature of light and shadow and only a little more substantial than Peter's spirit form.

  Ian waved at him to follow, and raced up a set of stairs the exact shade of the inside of a conch shell but glowing and translucent, to a bell tower of something like spun glass, but full of liquid light. He rang the bell, which thrummed like a giant harpstring, sending its tones through Peter, and making the tower shiver.