Ian sat at a booth with Oriel and Josh when I walked into the Sojourner. I was glad he contacted them. It would make it much easier than trying to coordinate with them and brief them all individually. The place was filled with Knights, and the same redheaded woman was singing. With three of us in uniform and Oriel wearing the glamour of a priest, we didn’t stand out.
We ordered our meals and drinks, then I filled everyone in on my situation.
“Why do you assume it’s Muller who’s monitoring the flat?” Ian asked.
I opened my mouth, then closed it. I hadn’t considered that someone else might be trying to collect dirt on Muller. Or suspect Muller of something. Or suspect Muller’s girlfriend. I felt pretty stupid.
“So, you’re back here in Salisbury,” Oriel said. “What are you supposed to be doing for Muller? What are your duties?”
“From what I’ve been told, no mages can get within three hundred yards of the Heart when it’s in this state, even with one of the rubies in his or her possession. That’s why they have only witches tending it at such times.”
“But you said you were there when they fucked it up,” Josh said.
“Yeah, but I’m half witch. I felt the lines throw up, but that didn’t affect me.”
Josh cocked his head, his expression thoughtful. Although Josh had no affinity for witchcraft, his mother was a witch.
“Yeah, I thought about you. Oriel is also half witch.”
“Well, we have some interesting possibilities, don’t we?” Ian grinned at us.
“You didn’t answer my question,” Oriel said.
“Muller needs someone to oversee security at Stonehenge when the ley lines keep mages away,” I said, “and most of his security officers are mages. I’m going to be the person who provides oversight of the security of the Heart when the guardians can’t.”
The grins I received told me that my colleagues thought that was a splendid idea.
I couldn’t think of a good place for Oriel and me to go through my copy of Scarpa’s grimoire, so I took him to my secret hotel room by the train station. We walked down an alley, and he changed his glamour to a man wearing civilian clothes. I took off my Knights’ tunic, rolled it up, and carried it. After we passed the train station and walked around the back of the hotel, Oriel went invisible.
It took us a couple of hours to change clothes and shower, but eventually I retrieved the grimoire, and we settled down next to each other on the couch to study it. The first two spells we read through and translated were the spell that corrupted the ley lines and the spell that purified the Heart and allowed the lines to return to normal.
Oriel sat back, staring into space, his eyes hard. “I knew the Knights were execrable,” he said, “but this is an abomination. They play with the very essence of the universe like children bathing in poison.” He shook his head. “The Fae are upset at them, but once the full scope of what they’re doing is known, the Fae will unleash the Wild Hunt and track every last one of them down.”
“What about the Fae who are working with them?”
“Stupid, stupid people. I seriously doubt they understand what the Knights are playing with. Their plans for using the Heart are completely different from how the Knights are using it.” Again, he shook his head. “I don’t think the Knights ever really experimented with the stone. I think a blood-magic cult took control of it, and of the Knights, and followed a narrow, twisted agenda into a darkness they craved.”
I suddenly had a revelation. Something had been tickling the back of my mind for weeks, and gnawing at me ever since the ritual when the girl died. I felt stupid for not realizing it sooner.
“The witches! This is all about the witches—blood witches—taking over the Knights. We’ve all seen the Knights take over the Church, but what we didn’t understand was the impetus behind it. The witches have taken over the Knights. The witches control the production of the rubies, but witches don’t need them. Blood witches control the Heart, and the corruption is how they control the mages.”
I grabbed the papers sitting on the coffee table in front of us and passed half of them to Oriel. “Look for a spell that destroys the rubies.”
The grimoire held twenty-six spells—twenty-two of which included the use of human blood—and the purification spell seemed to have been added at the back. The ritual that created the rubies was one of the few that didn’t require blood.
All the spells were handwritten in the same Italian dialect, although many of the chants and commands were in Latin, but to my eye, four different hands had written them. I knew Scarpa’s handwriting and could tell that the Heart ritual that disrupted the ley lines, the purification spell, and two others were recorded by her. Twelve were in Dal Corso’s handwriting. All the spells had been written in the same ink—blood.
The first ten spells I assumed were older, and when I read through them, I discovered they were far darker. Spells of control. Spells to extend life. Spells to enhance power. Spells that were similar to those I had found in The History of the Illuminati. Scarpa and Dal Corso were blood witches, and they used that magic to take control of the Heart. Oriel was wrong, they had experimented with it, but from a blood witch perspective.
“This is a particularly gruesome one,” I said as I read through the third spell I had in my pile. “It requires the life blood of a blood witch mixed with the menstrual blood of an unbaptized virgin.”
“Save it,” Oriel said without looking up from the page he was reading. “We have plenty of blood witches available, and I’m sure a diligent search will turn up a virgin somewhere in this country. Your friends out at Stonehenge seem to find them.”
I chuckled.
“I think this is it,” Oriel said half an hour later. He passed me two sheets of paper. I had to ask for his help in translating a couple of passages, but it was quickly apparent that it was a spell of breaking, and it involved the Heart.
“Holy water?”
Oriel chuckled. “Like the purification spell. There are parts that are similar to a Universalist exorcism with a couple of twists, the use of the Heart instead of a cross being a major one. It does require blood, but not a sacrifice. The leader of the ritual slashes his or her own hand, then holy water is used to wash the blood over the Heart.”
I thought about my lessons in witchcraft with Jolene. “I think that’s permissible.”
He nodded. “I don’t think that would harm your aura.”
I searched through the instructions. “Does it say whether it’s linked at all to the corruption spell?”
“What do you mean?”
“Could I destroy the rubies while the ley lines are corrupted?”
“Good Goddess! Why would you want to do that? You’d be debilitated along with the rest of us, and then who would cleanse the Heart? You’d do the blood witches’ work for them.”
“Oh, yeah. I didn’t think of that. I just wanted to disable all the Knights’ mages.”
He gave me a look of extreme exasperation. “Sometimes I wonder if we should let you out without a keeper.”
“Okay, Mr. Wise and Almighty Older Man, let’s say that I manage to gain access to the Heart and actually steal it. Should I try to cleanse it there, or take it with me and try to cleanse it later?”
Oriel grabbed the paper with the purification spell and pored over it for a while.
“I think you should take it with you. This ritual will take at least fifteen minutes to half an hour to set up, and maybe longer than that to perform. Do you think you’ll get half an hour alone and uninterrupted? What happens if you get caught before you’re finished?”
“So, we grab the stone, then set up the purification ritual when we get somewhere safe, then destroy the rubies. Then what?”
He stiffened and didn’t answer.
“Hey, what aren’t you telling me?”
“I don’t know. I think Tiana and Roisin think it needs to go back to the Well.”
“That makes sense. Do you know where
that is?”
“Oh, yeah. Somewhere off the coast of Norway.”
“That’s terribly specific.”
He shrugged. “That’s part of the problem.”
Chapter 26
Oriel and some of the other Fae spent the weekend scouting the area around Stonehenge and Durrington Walls. By Sunday evening, when our team sat down together to plan out the heist, we had a lot of information.
A comparison of the duty roster I had filched from Marchand and the actual deployments on the ground confirmed the roster’s accuracy. We already knew that there weren’t any mages in the underground barrows, but it appeared the ruby manufacturing and polishing operations were also shut down. The Fae reported that only a skeleton crew were showing up for work each day, and as far as they could tell, the place was deserted at night.
Marchand also wasn’t posting any mages within a quarter of a mile of Durrington Walls, and the guards at the entrance to the barrows at Stonehenge were witches under the command of Dal Corso.
“Can the Fae take out those guards?” I asked.
Oriel nodded. “Absolutely. What about any guards or workers inside? I don’t think any of the Fae want to take a chance on going inside the barrow.”
“I have my invisibility charm from Muirgen,” I said. “If I can get in undetected, I’m pretty sure I can get to the Heart.”
“And if it’s warded?” Karl asked.
“Then I’ll have to break the ward.”
Ian’s mouth puckered. “Do you think you can do that? You said those wards were cast by a full circle.”
“And I always walked right through them, although I never tried to touch the Heart. But I was there when they corrupted the ley lines, and they didn’t cast any new wards, or even reinforce the ones already there. From what I know now, I think Dal Corso is arrogant enough that she doesn’t bother. No mages can enter the chamber, and she controls all the witches in the area.”
“We’ll probably get only one chance at this,” Karl said. “Once we eliminate the guards, if we can’t get the Heart, we’ll have tipped them off. They’ll have more security there before the day is over than we can possibly handle.”
I turned to Oriel. “Did any of those spells require a specific phase of the moon?”
He seemed to think about it for a moment. “There were a couple of full-moon spells, and a dark-moon ritual. Why?”
“What was the dark-moon one?”
Again, he took a moment. I knew that he didn’t need the papers in front of him. Damned Fae never forgot anything.
“It’s a power spell. No, wait. It’s the spell to extend the participants’ lives and renew their power. The ritual is conducted outside, and it involves eating the heart of the sacrifice. A very old spell, one of the first ones in the book, and it’s not something they do every month. The conditions require that the new moon falls on either an equinox or a solstice. The last time that happened was ten years ago, and it’s not going to happen this year.”
“Good. Wednesday night is the new moon,” I said, “and rain is forecast. It’s going to be as dark as the inside of a dragon’s belly.”
“And the rain will cause any troops or guards to keep their heads down. They do have a guard shack, don’t they?”
“At Stonehenge? Yeah. It includes the entrance to the barrow. It will make any guards harder to get at.”
Oriel grinned. “We’ll knock.”
We worked on the rest of the plan, such as the minor matter of my getaway. Karl and Oriel promised they’d have the needed vehicles.
“And don’t worry too much about pursuit,” Ian said. “I have a feeling this area is growing seismically unstable.”
A corporal—short, pretty, with short red hair and a ton of freckles—sat at the front desk of the security office space when I reported at seven o’clock sharp on Monday morning, my orders in hand. They had been delivered to the flat by a courier over the weekend.
“Sergeant O’Grady reporting for duty.”
She had a pretty smile, too. “I was told to expect you. Welcome aboard. Under-Marshal Muller is busy right now, but he’ll be free in half an hour. He asked me to show you around.”
Corporal Georgina Murphy gave me a quick tour and then showed me to a small office with a window in a back corner.
The room barely had space for a desk, three chairs, and a filing cabinet. Half the desk was taken up by the computer. But there was another door on one side. A closet perhaps?
“Where does the other door lead?” I asked.
“That’s the under-marshal’s office,” she said. “We used this room for storage until last week.”
So, unlike most of the other workers in the office, I wasn’t given an open cubicle. I had seen a couple of other offices with officers in them, and they all had glass doors I could see through. The only offices that were completely private were Muller’s and mine, and they were connected. It seemed Under-Marshal Muller thought of everything. I wondered if my office was sound proofed as well. Good thing Erin2 wasn’t especially loud.
“When the under-marshal is free, he’ll call you,” she said, indicating a phone with a bunch of buttons. I peered close and saw they were labeled with numbers. “That first one is me,” Murphy said, “and the next one is the under-marshal. Then the numbers for the chevaliers.” She handed me a sheet of paper. “This is your sign-on and password for the computer system. Let me know if you have any questions.”
I thanked her, and she left me. I went after the computer like a bowl of dark chocolate. I managed to log in and tried to look around a bit, but before I really had a chance to see how the files were set up, my phone rang.
“Sergeant O’Grady,” I answered.
“Good morning. I’m free now. Come over to my office.”
“Using which door?”
Muller chuckled. “The front door, behind Georgina’s desk.”
Georgina? That was rather familiar. I wondered exactly what services she provided our commander. Even in her uniform, I could see that she did have a nice little body. And the most darling Irish accent.
I walked around to his other door. I counted, and it was thirty steps farther to Georgina’s desk than to my side door.
“Go on in,” she said, barely looking up from her computer.
I knocked, then opened the door. Stepping inside his office, I closed the door behind me. Muller stood, walked around his desk, and met me in the middle of the room. He grabbed me by the upper arms and gave me a crushing kiss, then smiled down at me.
“Welcome aboard. Come, sit down. Would you like some coffee or tea?” He indicated a sideboard with a tea and coffee service on a tray.
“Yes, coffee if you have it.” I walked over there before he could. “Might I pour a cup for you?”
He waved at a mug on his desk. “A warmup.”
I poured our coffee and sat down in one of the chairs in front of his desk.
“I’ve missed you,” he said. “It will be pleasant to see your face here in the office. Now, I’ve blocked out the day to take you around and orient you, and to introduce you to the people you’ll interface with out at Sarum.”
We had already talked about my role in some detail. Pillow talk as I weaved the binding spell. The little silver ring on my pinkie seemed to attract my attention when in his presence, but I didn’t know if that was just my imagination.
“And are you still free this evening?” I asked.
“I made sure of it. Tomorrow night I’m having dinner at the officers’ club, but I’ll be free Wednesday also.”
I wasn’t quite sure how to fit that into my plans, but it was good to know.
The rest of the day involved riding around and meeting a lot of Knights, most of whom were superior to me in rank. We did make a trip to Dal Corso’s compound, and he formally introduced me as his new liaison to the witch garrison out there. She looked about as pleased as I would have expected.
I did pick up something between them, though. The way they i
nteracted was a little off.
“How is she in bed?” I asked as we drove over to the Stonehenge visitor center.
“Dominating,” he replied. “She likes to be in charge. Very enthusiastic, but not as skilled as you are.”
One thing about the binding spell, I had found I could ask him anything and he would answer. The amount of classified information he’d leaked to me already probably amounted to treason.
I wondered if Dal Corso had worked any blood spells on him. One of the spells in the grimoire was a coercive attraction spell, similar to one I had once fallen victim to. I imagined the blood spell would be more difficult to break free from than the charm I had been given.
Muller introduced me to the security team at the visitor center and dropped a hint that I would soon be promoted to chevalier and probably be put in command there. The chevalier in charge didn’t act very enthused. Then we took a walk out to the entrance to the barrows. Along the way, he imparted all the call signs and passwords used by the group guarding the entrance.
After meeting the guards on duty, I told the sergeant in charge that I’d like to come out again the following day for a full tour. I wasn’t sure he was entirely comfortable with that, but there wasn’t much he could say about it in Muller’s presence.
At the end of the day, we stopped by Muller’s home so he could get a change of clothes. It was the first time I’d been inside, and he gave me a short tour. Then he gathered more than one change of clothing, and we drove over to my flat.
I expected him to get amorous, and as soon as he hung his clothes in the closet, he met my expectations. He kept Erin2 busy for a while, then I joined him for a shower.
We got dressed and went out to dinner at the place he had taken me on our first date, then back to the flat. I gave him a fashion show involving my new lingerie, then let him undress Erin2. By the time he fell asleep, I was dragging. Manipulating the simulacrum was tiring, especially after a full day and a bottle of wine.
Knights Magica: An Urban Fantasy (Rosie O'Grady's Paranormal Bar and Grill Book 5) Page 20
