Living with Your Past Selves (Spell Weaver)

by Hiatt, Bill

  She was, however, fast enough to zap Stan with what I recognized, with a sickening jolt, was the awakening spell.

  He too screamed and fell to his knees, dropping the sword of David and becoming just plain old Stan again. Well, physically at least. Psychologically he was dissolving into recollections of hundreds of past lives.

  I grabbed him and forced his head in my direction. “Stan, I will help you get through this,” I said, my voice trembling, but with just a little undercurrent of magic to back me up. I think he heard, but I wasn’t sure.

  Surprisingly, Nurse Florence and Gordy were almost upon us. Carlos and Dan were both poised to take on Winn, but she was holding them at bay with the threat of the awakening spell, though it was clear they would charge her anyway. Morgan lay nearby, seemingly unconscious. I realized that, even having seen her stab Shar, Dan and Carlos had both still hung on to the fact that she was human and tried to avoid killing her.

  “You can’t take down both of us before we can get to you,” said Dan, softly but menacingly.

  “Fighting your way through this high wind? I can take down both of you without giving it a second thought.”

  “Stop this!” I said, cautioning Jackson and George with a glare not to follow me. “All right, Ms. Winn, I’m ready to bargain.”

  This time Stan was in no position to argue, but Dan said, “The hell you are,” and it was clear he and Carlos might try to block me if I moved forward. I could feel Nurse Florence’s scrutiny, but her real focus was on Shar, whose side she reached while I was still contemplating my options. That also put her in between me and Carrie Winn. Well, she would probably have to focus all her energy on Shar to save him, particularly in her current state. That just left Dan and Carlos, both tired and relatively sluggish. Gordy had finally made it to the scene, but he was even more sluggish and completely focused on Stan. Gordy held Stan in big brotherly arms and whispered reassurance to him. Stan seemed to be twitching more or less mindlessly. I forced my attention back to Carrie Winn.

  She had dropped any pretense of friendliness or even civility. “Why should I bargain for something I can now so easily take? The awakening spell is a surprisingly low drain on me. I can just cast it on the rest of your friends, and then you will be alone, and you will be mine.”

  “Surely it would be easier without all that spell casting. Same deal as before?”

  “Oh, you mean before you and your allies killed almost all of my shifters? I think not. The best I could do now would be an oath to use the awakening spell on no one else here.”

  Carla and Stan would be stuck coping with what Winn had done, probably without my support, because whatever Winn wanted, I doubted I would ever be free to just walk away, if I were even still alive. But at least no one else would suffer the same fate. I had to put my faith in Nurse Florence and Vanora to be able to nurse Carla and Stan back to health. I had made it back on nothing but emotional support from Stan and my parents. With more help, surely they would eventually be all right.

  “Everyone here also goes free, and you never make a move to harm them again?”

  “This grows tiresome,” said Winn irritably. “Call off your little foot soldiers, and come to me.”

  “He doesn’t give me orders,” snapped Dan. “And I’m under a tynged to protect him.”

  “Pity,” said Winn, raising her hand to strike him too with the awakening spell.

  “NO!” I yelled, trying to move forward, but doing so with frightening slowness. “This is between you and me, and I’m surrendering. Just let them go.”

  Winn seemed hell bent to hex Dan, but at that moment Carlos threw his sword straight at her. His strength plus the inertia of the sword traveling forward kept the blade from being completely deflected, though it struck Winn in the shoulder instead of the heart as he had probably intended. Having prepared no protection against the sword’s drowning effects, she immediately began struggling for breath. She was also bleeding fairly profusely from the wounded shoulder. Her air currents began to subside as she labored to heal herself.

  Dan saw his opportunity and moved in, but just as he reached her, she demonstrated she had been faking to some extent. With uncanny speed, she scratched Dan in the arm with Carlos’ sword, and Dan immediately fell backwards, gasping for breath, though at least his own sword kept him from bleeding. Winn was not even short of breath, so clearly she had already healed the wound inflicted by Carlos’s sword. Carlos moved forward, but now Winn’s magically animated air began to stir again, and she waved his own sword at him, forcing him to back off. Nurse Florence, still working on Shar, whose bleeding she had at least stopped, lunged for Dan to heal him before he drowned.

  I was close enough to see how old and tired Winn looked. Perhaps my bargaining position was better than I thought. I’d bet my tired fire could kick her tired wind’s butt. Morgan was still unconscious, and I had at least the currently unarmed Carlos, who, even exhausted from the fight, was still easily able to overpower Winn. Together we stood at least a chance of getting the sword away from her.

  “Maybe,” I said to myself, “I don’t even need to surrender. Maybe we can still win.”

  I noticed Winn was backing up a little. Carlos followed, which worried me, but he was being cautious, ready to dodge a spell if the need arose, and Winn’s attention no longer seemed directed at him, or even at me.

  It was then I noticed what was behind Winn, what she was trying to inch toward inconspicuously.

  Or rather, which two things—I wasn’t sure which one was her immediate objective.

  Right behind her appeared to be an ancient altar carved from dark gray stone. I could see it vaguely; most of it was in shadow. But there was something disquieting even about its outline. No, not disquieting, downright sinister. Something more than merely optical, something instinctive. I wanted to get away from that altar. It was taking me every ounce of will I had not to run screaming in the opposite direction. Instinctively I knew that this altar had been the source of Carrie Winn’s new, very un-Celtic forms of magical attack.

  Almost next to the altar was an enormous cauldron, faintly glowing, at least to my magically attuned eyes. It was not so much frightening as oddly familiar, tugging at a very distant memory.

  Carlos tried to charge the seemingly preoccupied Winn, but the storm around her held him back. I moved forward, running various plans over in my mind.

  From somewhere Winn had picked up a darkly gleaming athame, and before we really knew what was happening, she slashed her own left palm, then slammed her bleeding hand down on the altar surface.

  The whole altar began throbbing redly, radiating a light that seemed more like darkness, a hot color with a bitingly cold feel. The air filled with screams, and I knew with absolute certainty that this was some kind of sacrificial altar. Well, not some kind. The human kind.

  Bathed in that reddish glow, Winn no longer looked old and tired. Too late I realized that she was drawing power from the blood sacrifice. I raised White Hilt, and its flames pierced the darkness, but I had already waited too long. The wild winds around Carrie Winn intensified and expanded, knocking Carlos aside effortlessly, blowing White Hilt’s fire almost sideways. I doubted her renewed energy would last long, but it didn’t seem as if it would have to.

  Then I remembered Zom. It should still be near where Shar lay. Perhaps he was even still holding it. If I could find it fast enough, I could counter whatever Winn had planned. I cursed myself for not remembering it sooner.

  I turned away from the altar. My eyes had started blurring, and I tried to remember where Shar had fallen in relation to where I was now. It should be a relatively straight line, if I could manage one in this wind. I took a few uncertain steps forward—and then a darkness blacker than the night blocked my path.

  No, it was not another effort by Winn to animate the darkness. It was my old friend, the Gwrach y Rhibyn, ugly, long-clawed, and dark as always—and it looked mad enough to chew swords.

  Well, it had, after a
ll, predicted my death weeks ago, and I was still very much alive. From what I recalled. Gwrach y Rhibyn sometimes fulfilled its own prophecies if they weren’t coming true fast enough. I held White Hilt between us, but the creature made no hostile move. Instead, it looked at me with its piercing eyes and wailed, as if it were me, “My friends! All my friends!”—a clear prophecy of the death of everyone who had joined me on this quest.

  White Hilt flashed, and with one good swing I lopped off its head, which thudded onto the roof and rolled a bit. Its body shuddered, then dropped emptily, its neck still burning a little from White Hilt’s fire.

  “Oh, shut up!” I muttered as I pushed myself forward.

  “Come back here!” yelled Carrie Winn, once again through thunder. “If you don’t, I’ll awaken the rest of your party before you can reach me with that damned sword.”

  She had guessed my strategy and my psychology. I was no more able now than I had been a few minutes ago to let more of my friends suffer. I turned back toward her and walked slowly in her direction, giving myself time to make sure there was nothing I was overlooking.

  Winn seemed to have used some of her renewed energy to charm my nearby friends to sleep. Nurse Florence and Dan, for instance, were both out cold, though thankfully Dan was breathing normally, so Nurse Florence had gotten his wound healed. The band members and the people who had donated their energy to the earlier battle had all fallen more or less where they stood, too tired to have much hope of resisting a sleep spell. I think Carlos had been knocked out earlier when he got blown off his feet. Shar, even if awake, was only partially healed when Nurse Florence had had to switch to Dan, so I doubted very much that he would be able to intervene. I thought I could hear Gordy talking to Stan, so Gordy might have been out of range when Winn cast the spell, but he wasn’t exactly working at one hundred percent of his normal fighting capacity either, and anyway his presence was maybe the only thing holding Stan together, so it was just as well if he stayed with him. I assumed Vanora was doing the same for Carla, and better she also kept doing what she was doing.

  In the end, I guess I always knew it would come down to me and Winn.

  And I guess I knew I probably wasn’t going to make it.

  No, I didn’t have a martyr complex, and I certainly wasn’t suicidal. But, except for my parents, practically everyone I really cared about was right there, on that roof. What would you have done? Let them all die? Probably not.

  The closer I got to the altar, the more I could hear the screaming, presumably echoes of the victims sacrificed on it for God knows how many millenniums. The cacophony was almost more than I could bear, but I knew I had to keep thinking clearly.

  “Your oath?” I said as she kept motioning me forward.

  “I swear not to awaken anyone else here. Now, come here! I grow impatient.”

  “Swear not to harm any of them and to let them go, or there is no deal.”

  She looked at me disdainfully. “Okay, have it your way—there’s no deal!” Before I could react, she hit me with a sleep charm on steroids. I resisted falling asleep, but the unexpected attack stunned me. Already shaky, I dropped to my knees, and White Hilt clattered to the ground, its flames winking out. Belatedly, I realized I should have handled things differently, but it was too late now.

  I would die—and everyone else would die, too. I would die for nothing.

  I reached for White Hilt, but a shoe painfully crushed my hand against the surface of the roof. Looking up, I saw that Winn had evidently summoned a couple of the shifters she had been holding in reserve to take our places after she had killed us. The battle over, she must have decided she could risk bringing a couple of them out.

  They dragged me to my feet and then toward the altar. I struggled, but my attempts were far too feeble to be more than a minor annoyance to them. I started to sing, and predictably one of them smashed me in the mouth. I should have been getting used to that by now.

  Before I knew it, they were tying me spread eagle on the altar and ripping open my shirt.

  Though the altar was stone, I could feel it pulsing hungrily beneath me, waiting to drink my blood. By now the screaming was deafening.

  I suddenly became aware of Carrie Winn looking down at me.

  “Pity you didn’t let me bed you,” she said, brushing her hand across my chest with surprising gentleness and sounding almost wistful. “Well, no time now, I’m afraid. It is almost midnight. Gwion Bach, it is at last time for you to pay back what you owe me.”

  Gwion Bach?

  Finally I realized who Carrie Winn was.

  CHAPTER 21: BACK TO THE BEGINNING

  Gwion Bach was one of the few lives I could not remember clearly. I had read the stories; hell, I had read every word about my earlier lives I could find. But in the case of Gwion Bach, the stories seemed just that: stories, too mythical to be true, even in a universe in which magic existed.

  Yet here was the artifact I now recognized as the cauldron of inspiration, where the witch Ceridwen had brewed the great potion, the first three drops of which would grant wisdom and poetic inspiration. Ceridwen had planned to give those three drops to Morfran, her incredibly ugly son, as a way of compensating for his ugliness. Unfortunately, she had a boy named Gwion Bach continuously stirring the potion, and he inadvertently splashed it on himself. Reflexively, he licked his burned thumb, in the process drinking the three precious drops. According to the story, Ceridwen pursued Gwion, presumably to find some way of undoing what he had done. However, he had already figured out from his new knowledge how to shape-shift, and so Ceridwen pursued him from form to form, until at last he tried to hide as a single grain of corn, and she became a hen and swallowed him. (You can see why I had trouble swallowing this story—pun intended.) As often happens in Celtic tales, after swallowing something strange, Ceridwen found herself pregnant. She knew the unborn child must be Gwion Bach, and she resolved to kill him, but when he was born, she did not have the heart to. She did have the heart to sew him in a bag and throw him in the ocean, though. Go figure! Anyway, as often happens in myth, he did not die, but was found on the coast of Wales by a prince, Elffin ap Gwyddno, who named the child Taliesin and raised him as his own.

  Yup, Gwion Bach was me, though I still couldn’t remember that life. Clearly, though, Carrie Winn could remember, and at least the potion of wisdom part of the story must be true; the presence of the cauldron confirmed that much.

  Except for those of you who can’t figure out a book without SparkNotes by your side, I’m sure you have realized by now that Carrie Winn was Ceridwen (the witch in the story, not the Wiccan goddess of the same name.)

  I tried hard not to dwell on the fact that Ceridwen, who was in at least one sense my mother, had been trying to have sex with me just a few weeks ago. Yuck! Way too Oedipal for my tastes.

  “So, what’s the plan, Mom?” I asked, my voice dripping with sarcasm, trying to sound disdainful in a desperate and probably not completely successful effort to cover up the fear clawing at my heart. Okay, so this might not have been the best time for sarcasm, but I was already tied to a bloody altar vibrating with the screams of its previous victims, my chest bared for the knife. I doubted I would have ended up playing Canasta with her no matter what tone I used.

  “You always were a saucy one, Gwion—at least in any of your lives in which I have encountered you. Well, the plan is simple. Apparently, the cauldron of inspiration cannot produce another potion as long as its previous recipient still lives.”

  “The original Taliesin died 1500 years ago or so.”

  “Yes, you did, but you kept reincarnating, and the cauldron somehow knew you were out there, even when you yourself had forgotten the incredible knowledge that you possess.” Behind her the two shifters had lit a fire under the cauldron and started stirring.

  “I have been waiting all these centuries for a way to separate you from the knowledge you stole. I had a spell that should have done the trick, but I tried it and failed more than once. I
finally realized that you need to not only have that knowledge but remember it. The spell for awakening your past lives took years to perfect, and several people I tested it on died. Eventually I found a way to cast the spell without killing the target. Even so, I couldn’t get the spell to work on young children, so I had to wait until you started puberty.”

  “You’ve been watching me for four years?” I asked. The thought made my skin crawl. I thought she had only been aware of me since Stan broke my tynged. For the first time, I began to question that whole idea. Where had I gotten the notion of a tynged requiring secrecy in the first place? Could Ceridwen have planted it in my mind herself as a way of keeping me isolated? Perhaps.

  “Silly boy. I have been watching you since you were born. One of the advantages of the wealth I amassed over the centuries is the resources it affords me to keep track of you each time you reincarnate. Those resources also built a town I knew was just perfect to attract your parents, so I could keep you in one place and close to me without arousing suspicion.” I must have looked incredulous at that point. “Don’t underestimate your importance, or rather, your wisdom’s importance. Yes, Santa Brígida was built as a trap for your family, built from hints I drew from their own minds in various ways.”

  Santa Brígida was based on what my parents wanted? Damn, and I thought my mom at least had better taste!

  “We’ll be ready in a few more minutes, Ms. Winn,” said the shifter stirring the cauldron.

  “So, what does this spell involve?” I asked, doing a pretty good job of keeping my voice steady.

  “I won’t bore you with all the details. The key part of the ritual involves cutting your heart from your chest and throwing it, still beating, into the cauldron, then casting a powerful spell amplified by your blood running onto this very ancient altar.”

  “Just killing me in some more mundane way wouldn’t do it?” Damn, my voice cracked a little on that one.