The Night of the Solstice

by L. J. Smith

  “I told you I was only an infant of my kind,” the serpent reminded her gently. “The others are larger.”

  The others were larger. For the first time Alys realized that the night was filled with giant wheeling shapes, crimson and black in the moonlight, even now beginning to dive toward the castle.

  “Your wings—” she shouted into the roar of the wind, as the creature she was riding swooped downward.

  “The Eldreth’s pool!” the serpent shouted back, plummeting beside her. “Be ready to jump off, my lady!”

  The turret seemed suddenly to blossom below her, and the next thing she knew she had leaped off her seat and Charles and Janie were beating her on the back in a frenzy of joy.

  Another kind of frenzy had broken out among the sorcerei. As the great serpents, the guardians of the Weerul Council, descended, the braver of the Society launched many-hued flares of sorcerous power at them. But the enormous creatures seemed impervious to such attack. They continued to dive, striking like the great snakes they were, until the turret shook under the blows, and the sorcerei trampled one another as they fled. It was a rout.

  Alys laughed and cried and clapped her hands. Morgana, guarded by two serpents the size of eagles, slowly sat up.

  “The day that I should accept my life from the Council!” she commented, white-lipped, to no one in particular.

  Above them, a sweet wild voice rang out. “’Way for the emissary of the Council! Clear the ground for the Council’s elect!”

  Charles, who had been dancing about in exuberance, now turned his face up in shock. “It’s Elwyn!”

  “Elwyn?”

  The silverhaired girl was riding on the back of the largest serpent. As it dived she leapt off and dropped lightly to the ground.

  “Oh, you’re dirty,” she said, and without waiting for an answer she darted off again, adding sky-bolts to the fray.

  By now the turret was rocking violently under the blows from the serpents and blasts from the sorcerei. Suddenly, in a thunder of falling stone, one entire side gave way, exposing the spiral stairway, now broken in many places, and the second floor of the turret.

  Alys and Janie staggered on the lip of the ruins, trying to keep their balance on ground that buckled and split like a living thing.

  “We can’t stay here,” gasped Alys. But Janie clutched her, staring down into the tower.

  “Look,” she said. “Down there—the mirror!”

  On the second floor of the turret something was happening to the mirror set in the wall. It started with the familiar, ever-changing pattern in blue and green, but then the patterns began to shift more and more quickly, and the dancing colors grew brighter, until they dazzled the eyes. And then, with a sound both deceptively soft and terrifyingly loud, a sound of such low pitch that it was almost beyond human hearing, blinding blue-white light shot out from the glass. All over the castle it was the same, as if each mirror were a searchlight that had suddenly been switched on, and the radiant beams streamed from every room, through every doorway and window and crack in the masonry.

  The full power of the last great Passage was unleashed and the square bulk of Fell Andred shone like a star.

  Every face turned upward to look at the full moon.

  “It’s entered its quarter,” whispered Alys. “The mirrors are open.” But even as she spoke she saw the silhouette of a soldierly figure jump from the steps directly into the rectangle of light.

  Alys gasped. “Oh, no. Morgana—they’re using the Passage! They’re going into our world!”

  The Mirror Mistress was already on her feet.

  “Quickly, follow me!” Somehow, between crawling and falling, they all got down the ruined stairs. Elwyn appeared beside them as they plunged into the radiance of the mirror.

  After the violence and grandeur of the Wildworld, it was a terrible shock to step into a perfectly whole turret in this world. But the blue light streaming from the mirrors was nearly as bright, and from somewhere below in the house came shouts and explosions. It seemed that every member of the Society still able to move had fled through the mirrors to escape the great serpents.

  “What can we do?” cried Alys to Morgana as they ran down the turret stairs.

  “You can keep out of it,” the sorceress returned rapidly. “You can’t leave the house—I’ve already activated the wards around it to keep them from escaping—but you can hide. For pity’s sake give that little one a rest!”

  Alys was all but carrying Claudia by now. She looked frantically around the living room and her gaze fell on the small alcove beside the mirror.

  “Stay here,” she said, setting Claudia in it. From somewhere the vixen came running to jump into Claudia’s lap.

  “I will watch over her,” she said, her proud yellow eyes meeting Alys’s grimly. “You go and help my mistress. She needs it.”

  Morgana was in the kitchen, pausing long enough to drive a sorcerer into the mirror with golden lightning bolts before turning hurriedly to the cellar steps.

  “Once we have forced them all back into the Wildworld I must close the mirrors for good and all,” she said. “It’s the only way to end this mischief. Elwyn, make yourself useful!”

  Janie followed her down the steps. Elwyn, with a merry laugh, began to seek out and chase sorcerei. And Alys and Charles were left to themselves in the west wing.

  They made an attempt themselves at chasing the enemy. But although many of the Society had lost their staffs, and many were panicked and disoriented, when they saw it was only unarmed children who pursued them, they fought.

  “A ruse,” said Charles, snapping his fingers suddenly as Alys jerked him for the second time out of the path of orange death. “Charles, m’boy, you’re brilliant.” He pulled a firecracker out of his bulging pockets, lit it in the flames the orange death had kindled in the wall, and threw it at the sorcerer who had attacked him. To the man the subsequent explosion of sparks meant only one thing, and he fled through a mirror to escape what he supposed to be incendiary powder.

  “Wheeeee—yah!” shouted Charles, racing about looking for more sorcerei. “Here, take some!” he yelled to Alys.

  “All right, but try to pick on the ones without staffs!” Alys shouted as he rocketed away. She saw an empty-handed sorceress peering around a door and hastily lit a firecracker.

  The sorceress took to her heels, and Alys gave chase, lobbing the firecracker at her retreating back. But to her surprise the woman turned, apparently driven to fury by this assault. Her green eyes blazed at Alys, who took a hurried step backward, realizing that even an unarmed sorceress was far too dangerous for a human to take on alone.

  But she was not alone. Something like the lash of a blue and coral whip whisked past her ear at the sorceress. With a cry, the woman fled through the mirror.

  Alys, who had sat down without meaning to when the serpent flashed by, straightened up and rubbed her ankle. It circled gracefully back to her and lighted on her knee to gaze at her.

  “Thank you.” She felt strangely shy.

  “Lady, if I were to spend my life trying to repay you I could not do it. That pool of healing restored what I thought lost forever … my wings.”

  “I nearly killed you in the marsh… .”

  “And risked your own life to save me after. Arien Edgewater told me. She told me also of the flower—it is a very great honor to be given that. And she sent her greetings by me to Alys Friend of the Eldreth.” With a last loving coil about her wrist, it flew into the mirror to pursue the sorceress.

  A voice behind her bawled, “I got five, how many did you get? And Alys, guess what?” Charles added, grinning wickedly as he reached her. “I chased Aric through the cellar mirror. Get it? The cellar. Where the Groundsler is.” He beat his thighs in an excess of delight. “Hey—what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” said Alys, blotting her eyes and getting up. “Come on, let’s go to the east wing.”

  They jogged back through the kitchen, into the living room—
and stopped, frozen.

  Across the length of the room, beside the blazing shield of light that was the mirror, Alys could just make out the faint outlines of Claudia and the vixen. But much nearer, tracing glowing sorcerous patterns on the door which led to the outside world, was Cadal Forge.

  He had his staff. And he was by no means either panicked or disoriented.

  Neither did serpents bother him—at least not serpents of the size that could come through the mirrors. As Alys stood paralyzed, one of Morgana’s eagle-sized guardians soared over her head at him, and the master sorcerer drove it with scarlet fireballs step by step into the huge mirror near the stairway.

  The maneuver took him within arm’s reach of Claudia. A surge of adrenaline flooded Alys from head to foot. She lunged forward—and a hand gripped her shoulder, small but firm and steady. Shakily, she stepped aside to let Morgana pass and closed ranks with Elwyn and Janie and Charles behind the sorceress.

  The door on the outside wall still glowed, but Cadal Forge could not reach it to complete the spell which would pierce the wards. The Mirror Mistress barred his way.

  In her left hand she held a white cloth, to which the remains of a golden powder still clung. The head of her staff, dusted with this powder, was tipped with a ghostly flame.

  “Cadal,” she said. In the eldritch light streaming out of the mirror her face looked pale and tired, and her voice was drained of feeling. “Go back,” she said. “You can’t get out. It’s over.”

  Cadal Forge seemed tired, too, but he smiled. “Morgana,” he said, very gently, “it is just beginning.”

  Over his face once again came the look of abstraction, of dreamlike reflection, but now it was mingled with an expression almost of tenderness. And … of deep joy.

  “I had hoped to go somewhere else to do this—perhaps Roma. Perhaps Firenze,” he said, musingly.

  “No.” Morgana shook her head. “While I live, while Fell Andred stands, neither door nor portal shall open for you. You shall not leave this house—”

  “But there is no need.” With a low laugh, his eyes shining darkly, the sorcerer reached into the folds of his tunic and drew out something which glittered like red ice.

  Morgana let out her breath softly. “One of the bas imdril …”

  “Heart of Valor.”

  “Cadal, you are mad. The peril of touching such a thing …”

  “Touching it?” The sorcerer had been holding up the Gem to admire it, his smile as tender as a lover’s. Now he looked sharply at Morgana. “Touch it? I created it. Yes, I did… .” His gaze drifted back to the jewel again. “Cast into the very wellspring of Chaos, I strove, and conquered, and found this at my feet. Forgotten too long, Unmade even, it has now returned. See it shimmer?”

  “Cadal …”

  “The moment I saw it I knew my lifework, my purpose. And the Society?” Laughter spilled from his lips. “Oh, those fools. I needed them, you see, to escape the Council. And to deal with you, my old friend… . So I thought. But now—let them go hang themselves.” He caressed the Gem, and deep within it a red light stirred. “You see, I never meant to let them rule at all,” he said softly.

  “What, then?” breathed Morgana.

  The sorcerer did not answer her directly. “You have never seen what I saw in the Well of Chaos,” he murmured, gazing into the Gem. “So you cannot imagine… . But stay—you can see it now. In here.”

  He raised his eyes to Morgana. “Do you begin to understand, my dear, old friend? This lovely thing was created from the very horrors of hell. All the power of anarchy is trapped within it. Trapped. Seething. Waiting to be unleashed—”

  “No!” cried Morgana.

  “—as only I can unleash it.”

  “Cadal, for the love of God! It means your own death as well—”

  “It means all I have ever desired. It is my purpose, to bring an end to a world that should never have begun. Oh, see it! See it shimmer!” He lifted his voice joyfully as the Gem glowed brighter and brighter, casting a crimson light on his transported face. “Heart of Valor, awake! Taken from the realm of Chaos, let Chaos blossom in you once more! Lay waste to all around you. Wreak a desolation which shall slowly consume this world, inescapable, unstoppable, resistless. Still the Stillworld forever!” The red light now surpassed the blue light from the mirror, illuminating every corner of the room.

  “Look into the Gem and see it coming!” As the sorcerer held the jewel aloft he saw Claudia for the first time near his feet. “Yes, you, little human, daughter of my enemies, you look. Gaze into the depths of the Gem. Can you see what lies behind the light?”

  All this time the vixen had been crouching on the floor like a stone statue of a vixen. But now, as the sorcerer roughly caught Claudia’s arm to force her to look into the jewel, she forgot herself, forgot that she was a mere familiar, and that she had no place in the workings of great magic. With one wild snarl of pure animal rage she sprang full in his face, a clawing, biting, scratching whirlwind. And Cadal Forge, used to defending himself against spells and conjurings, was taken completely unawares. Flinging up his hands to ward her off, he reeled backward and lost his balance. With a cry of pure astonishment he tumbled into the mirror.

  The jewel, its light dying, skittered by Alys’s feet. Quicker than thought, Morgana sprang forward and clapped her flame-tipped staff to the rectangle of blue, and the flame on the staff and the light of the mirror came together in the greatest of all implosions. Unbelievable, searing radiance flooded the room, causing them all to gasp and shield their eyes. And then with a sound like the crack of a giant whip the mirror shattered, a shattering that was echoed from every other room in the house, in a series of deafening crashes so close upon one another they seemed like one long sustained explosion traveling outward.

  When the last echoes were gone Alys slowly opened her eyes and unstopped her ears. Claudia lay on the floor, dazed but alive. The vixen, every red-gold hair on end, stood beside her snarling. The brilliant white light had died to a sullen violet glow, and now, even as she watched, this glow disappeared like a guttering flame.

  The mirrors were closed.

  “Look,” whispered Charles.

  Beneath the network of cracks that covered the surface of the large mirror was the silhouette of a man. Red-orange, against a frozen blue-green background, it might have been a masterful impressionistic painting of a subject in the act of falling. But it was not a portrait.

  Cadal Forge had not made it back to the Wildworld.

  Chapter 20

  THE MIRROR MISTRESS

  Morgana stepped back from the mirror, lowering the Gold Staff as if its weight was suddenly too much for her. “Oh, Cadal,” she said softly and sadly, eyeing the shadow in the mirror. “Perhaps this will keep you out of trouble.” And then, without any fuss, she crumpled to the floor and lay still.

  The others were around her in an instant. A moment earlier Alys had had the idea that there was something she ought to do at the back of the room, but there was too much to think about now and Morgana was frighteningly pale. Her face was bluish white under the blood and bruises. Alys and Charles lifted her to a couch and put pillows behind her, and she was as light and fragile as a dry leaf, and so very motionless, and so very cold.

  “It’s all right,” said Alys. “I’ve had first aid, I know what to do.” She spoke around the squeezed feeling in her chest and the hammering of her heart as she searched for a pulse in Morgana’s thin wrist.

  “Sure,” said Charles. He stood a few steps away, opposite Janie, arms folded tightly. Claudia, very pale herself, sat and blinked as if she could not focus her eyes.

  Alys’s hand shook as she released the tiny sorceress’s wrist. “It’ll be okay,” she said again. “I learned CPR. I can—you can live even if your heart’s stopped for—”

  Janie bent over and pulled at Claudia. “Come on.” Her eyes, meeting Alys’s over Claudia’s brown head, flickered toward the Gold Staff on the floor. It was black and rusty once
more, looking like nothing so much as an old fireplace poker.

  Alys stared at it for two heartbeats. Two of her own heartbeats; Morgana had none. Then she nodded at Janie.

  “Take her out,” she said.

  Claudia, understanding, began to sob. The vixen ran up to the staff, sniffed it, and backed away, stiff-legged, bristling. Then she began to streak back and forth wildly across the room, cursing Cadal Forge and all sorcerei, the children and all humans, and Elwyn and all Quislais.

  “Stop it!” Charles recoiled at the noise, looking frightened. “Alys, why don’t you do something? She’ll be all right. She’s got to be all right.”

  “Don’t be a fool, boy.” The vixen had come to a ragged halt at last, crouching under the table. But despite the harsh words there was no asperity left in her voice—only pain. “Didn’t you see what she did? Closing a Passage—the greatest of Passages—at the very height of its power! Slamming it shut and locking it tight with the moon still rising! And before that. Taking on the whole Society by herself, and a Red Staff, and a councillor—and with you to protect as well. Anyone else would have given you up to save your world, but not she. She was a fighter all her life.”

  Alys flinched at the “was” and flinched, too, remembering that she, Alys, had at one time been willing to give Morgana up to save her world.

  Appalled, Charles rounded on Elwyn, who had been hovering at the edge of the group like a luminous dandelion. “You,” he said harshly. “With your sky-bolts and your immortality. She’s your sister. Can’t you do anything?”

  Elwyn looked bewildered. She cocked her head to one side and then opened her lips. But it was Alys who spoke and she spoke to Janie.

  “Quick,” she said, in a voice she herself did not recognize. “Get a glass of water.”

  Janie didn’t turn. “She can’t drink. Alys, she’s—”

  “Get it,” whispered Alys.

  When Janie came back Alys’s hand trembled, clenched around what she had taken from her pocket. She had lost the dagger and she had lost the serpent. She would never see Arien Edgewater again. But as she unwrapped the packet of waxed paper and drew the silver-veined flower out, her hands suddenly steadied. She crushed the flower into the glass and bathed Morgana’s pale, still face with water. The scent of Arien Edgewater’s pool rose around her, sharply sweet. When she had finished she put the Gold Staff in Morgana’s hand, and stepping back, she sank to her knees before the sorceress to wait.