Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver)

by Hiatt, Bill

  I should have known that Morgan was chatting with me and reaching out for her sister at the same time. I had not gained anything at all by trying to keep the conversation going.

  “She is…in the building right behind you,” said Morgan with eerie certainty.

  Great. The one place I least wanted Morgan to be, and that was the one spot she was determined to go.

  “She can’t be, Morgan. I just came from in there. Surely I would have noticed a presence as strong as hers.”

  “Perhaps not,” said Morgan, regarding me with interest. “I share a bond of blood with her that you do not. What I feel is that bond calling to me. Her power I do not feel at all. That suggests two possibilities: she is hiding from something, or she has lost her powers. Either way she needs my help.” Morgan took a step forward. I let the flame on my sword blaze brighter.

  “I am not about to let you into this hospital, whether your sister is inside or not, Morgan.”

  Her eyes blazed brighter than my sword, but she did not immediately let her anger have free reign.

  “My little cherub,” she said softly. “A little cherub with his flaming sword, guarding the gates. Why are you so intent on keeping me from helping my own sister? I know you understand the importance of family ties.”

  That last line could easily be interpreted as a threat, but I decided to ignore it for the moment.

  “Because I don’t trust you,” I said simply, getting White Hilt to flame higher for effect. I figured there was not much point in maintaining a pretense of friendliness at this point. “You did try to kill me and my friends, and you would have been quite content to leave my soul trapped in Ceridwen’s cauldron forever. You can’t think a simple apology really covers all of that.”

  “My little cherub—”

  “Not so little, Morgan, and with thousands of years of experience, as you will find out if you keep pushing me.”

  “No, not so little at that,” replied Morgan, feigning a thoughtful tone and looking me up and down. “Not so little at all. Perhaps I have been foolish to think mere words would satisfy you. Perhaps mine is the kind of apology that needs to be delivered…in bed.”

  Seriously?

  “Morgan…” I began, then had to pause as she stared into my eyes, plainly trying to enchant me. I could feel seductive energy oozing all around my defenses, probing them, poking at them. Fortunately, for someone like me, all Morgan could do was increase the natural temptation, not actually control my mind. At least, I hoped that was all she could do. I started humming, just to be sure. The original Taliesin’s magic worked best with musical accompaniment, and so naturally did mine. Too bad I didn’t have an instrument with me…

  Morgan apparently took my humming to indicate I was nervous about my defenses and tried to press her advantage. “I know the girl you love cannot be your lover now, perhaps ever. Nonetheless, I would not insult you by asking you to betray that love. I offer you only physical satisfaction. A man like you must have…needs, needs that a woman like me could certainly satisfy. I have had hundreds of years of experience, after all. Come to think of it, so have you. Our coupling would have to be magnificent.”

  Keeping in mind that in this life I was still a sixteen-year-old guy, I wouldn’t pretend her offer, backed up by magic or not, wasn’t appealing on some level. Being a teenage guy wasn’t easy in the first place; imagine what it was like being a teenage guy who could remember hundreds of years of sexual experiences from previous lives. Let’s just say I didn’t need to spend any time searching for porn on the Internet. I did have to spend a lot of time reconciling my urge to reenact some of those earlier sexual experiences with my desire to be at least a halfway decent guy by the standards of my current society. Morgan herself complicated the issue still further. She was, after all, a beautiful woman, fashion-model beautiful. Her mistake was in reminding me that she was really older than dirt. I couldn’t help thinking of the skeleton she’d be right now without all the magic she had expended to keep herself forever young.

  What really reinforced my defenses, though, was the jolt of fear that shot through me when I realized that Morgan knew about Carla. Morgan must have been spying on me, just as Ceridwen used to—and Morgan was definitely not someone you wanted knowing all of your secret vulnerabilities.

  I suddenly realized the light from White Hilt was fading. I again urged the flames to a great blaze, gave myself the mental equivalent of a cold shower, and focused all my attention on Morgan again.

  “I’m not so easy to get around,” I said to her with a certainly I did not completely feel. Morgan, not expecting such an outright rejection, at least not so quickly, let some of her rage show.

  “Do you really think you can stop me, Taliesin?” she replied harshly. “You took me by surprise once in Annwn. You will not do so again.” With that, Morgan threw herself into the concealing fog faster than should have been possible—had she been a mere human. Unfortunately, she was part faerie and capable of moving faster than I was—not superhero fast, but fast enough to conceal herself in her fog before I could fling the fire from my sword at her in a burst that would have reduced her to ashes. But who was I kidding? Even had I been moving at the same speed, I probably wouldn’t have roasted her. I just didn’t want to kill, not even someone like her. At least, not until I absolutely had to, a point I might reach any minute now.

  After all, Morgan could do more than hide herself in the fog. Like most Celtic sorcerers, she could shape-shift into something tiny like a fly, then get into the hospital through an open window on the third floor before I could stop her. Worse, she could use the weather itself against me. The results would not be instantaneous, but in a surprisingly short period of time, she could fry me with lightning right where I stood and step over my charred corpse on the way to the front door.

  I could try to counter such a tactic, but Morgan was stronger than I in a straight battle of magic against magic. True, I had learned how to make magic work on modern technology, which as far as I could tell, no one else had managed, and I had another trick or two up my sleeve, like being able to read and broadcast thoughts in a way that would have astounded the original Taliesin. However, there was no denying that in a contest of raw power, Morgan would beat me.

  As if on cue, a chilling wind cut through me. So Morgan was going to try storm over stealth.

  I did understand meteorology better than she did—that’s how I had beaten her that time in Annwn. But then I had used my fire and my scientific knowledge to counter her storm and ended up creating a hurricane to use against her. I couldn’t very well do that this time, and Morgan knew it—I had made it very clear that I valued something, or someone, inside the building. My options were limited by the need to protect that structure. A hurricane born of the clash between her magic and mine could probably not be controlled precisely enough to be safe to use this close to the hospital.

  Predictably enough, rain started hitting me in ice-cold drops, and the flames on my sword sputtered a little. That was part of Morgan’s goal: put out the sword.

  I might already be too late, but I knew I needed to summon help.

  “Nurse Florence, I need you…ten minutes ago!” I gave the message every ounce of power I possessed, but that kind of mental communication did weaken with distance, and Nurse Florence, our resident lady of the lake, was probably miles away in Santa Brígida. Still, if I managed to connect, I could send her a message without Morgan even realizing I had summoned help.

  “Should I bring backup?” Her response tingled in the back of my mind, faint but unmistakable.

  “Any of the guys you can grab fast. Morgan Le Fay is trying to find her sister Elaine—in Carla’s hospital. Morgan’s raising a storm.”

  “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  I felt the connection fade, but at least now I knew help was coming…eventually. Nurse Florence did have some rather unusual methods of transportation at her disposal. The question was how fast she could get to any of my…well,
warriors, for lack of a better term. Since they had to conceal their unusual…situation, just as I did mine, they couldn’t always appear right on cue, even in an emergency.

  Well, no point fussing about how fast my allies could get here. I needed to focus entirely on countering Morgan’s arcane attack. In the short time it had taken me to reach Nurse Florence, the wind had intensified until its howl was like that of a rabid wolf, the rain was practically knocking me off my feet, and my sword was radiating more steam than fire. Just in time, I willed the flames to become stronger, to burn back the rain, to envelope me in a flaming shield. I had to concentrate so hard I was shaking, but for the moment I was protected—unless of course someone tried to walk out the front door of the hospital, in which case I would have another problem.

  The powers that be in Annwn were none too pleased that so many people already knew my secret. Nurse Florence they accepted as practically one of their own, and they could have swallowed my “warriors.” It was the fact that I wouldn’t wipe the memories of the other students who had been with us in the final battle during Samhain that really irked them. The leadership in Annwn was all about keeping humans from learning too much. So, yeah, if anyone saw the display I was currently putting on, I would have to wipe that person’s memory of it—but I would have to keep him or her out of Morgan’s way first. Too many complications.

  I knew it was risky trying to “multi-task” with magic, but I did manage to jam the door behind me, and the sudden temperature drop created by Morgan’s storm made it easy for me to frost the nearby windows. The manner in which the entry way of the hospital projected out from the rest of the building would block the view of what I was doing from a lot of those windows, but I wanted to be as careful as I could be.

  Even that slight change of focus thinned my fire shield a bit, and as the rain’s fury increased, it brought the shield near to collapse. It took every bit of concentration I had to stabilize the situation. I started singing softly in Welsh to amplify my power as much as possible. Even so, I knew I could not hold out indefinitely. I had to hope that the cavalry would arrive—soon.

  It also worried me that, with this storm raging, Morgan could very easily slip in through some other point of entry while I was blocking the front door. I thought about trying to locate her in the fog, but I guessed she would be masking her presence as much as she could, forcing me to give more of my focus to finding her than I dared right now. I had to depend on her desire to kill me, or at least render me helpless, to keep her outside as long as I was still breathing and conscious.

  The lightning flash almost made me jump, and the thunder was loud enough to rattle some of the nearby hospital windows. That lightning was powerful, and it was close. My fire shield might protect me from the rain, but it probably wouldn’t stop the lightning, though I was having a hard time thinking through the science involved. The hiss of steam as the rain hit the fire sounded almost deafening now, but even it wasn’t enough to drown out the reverberations of the thunder.

  Between the racket and my need to concentrate on maintaining the fire shield, I spared a second to wonder what had happened to Gianni. Even inside the hospital such a sudden and intense storm must have been quite noticeable; probably one of the nurses had spotted him and was now keeping him from coming outside to look for me, but he had to be getting awfully worried by now, and I wasn’t sure whether my command to go inside would keep him inside—I was working too fast at the time to consider all the contingencies. Well, I didn’t want to think too much about that; at least he was safe inside right now, and I was pretty sure someone would keep him inside. That was the most I could hope for at the moment.

  I was beginning to feel tired. No, not just tired—more like exhausted. Morgan was hitting me with everything she had, though I did wonder why the lightning, which must be striking nearby, wasn’t actually hitting me. I wasn’t really trying to deflect it, because doing that would take too much power away from the fire shield, but perhaps countering the lightning was more important. If I concentrated on the lightning, I knew I could keep it from striking really close—I had seen that kind of magical defense before. However, if the fire shield collapsed, as it very likely would, the rain would beat down on me so mercilessly that, at the very least, my concentration would shatter. In this kind of situation, logic suggested retreating inside the building, especially since Morgan believed her sister was inside and couldn’t exactly level the place. She could, however, follow me in, and I wanted to keep our fight outside if I possibly could.

  “Taliesin, let me in!”

  I jumped at the sound of the voice coming from right next to me. It was not the voice I wanted to hear, but it was at least someone who would help. I parted the flames on my left just long enough for Vanora to jump through.

  Yeah, that’s right—the same person I held responsible for Carla’s condition. Not only that, but she was still disguised as Carrie Winn, the identity Ceridwen had assumed while she was stalking me. Carrie Winn was too prominent a citizen to just disappear, so Vanora had shifted into Winn’s form long enough to keep us all from getting entangled in a police investigation and to tie up other loose ends. Intellectually I understood the need for such a deception. Emotionally, it was hard for me to look at someone who had been willing to condemn me to eternal suffering, no matter how often I told myself that the person really was dead, and what I was seeing was merely an illusion. It was a damn convincing illusion though. I guess it would have to be to serve its purpose. Still…

  Vanora knew I didn’t like her, in the shape of Carrie Winn or in her natural form, but she was too business-like to acknowledge my surly glance in her direction.

  “Viviane’s gathering the others. She asked me to help you hold out until they got here.”

  I had to hand it to her for being cool in a crisis. Without skipping a beat, she started casting a spell to keep the lightning from hitting us. I had seen her do the same thing on Samhain, and it had worked. Between the two of us, we could certainly hold Morgan until the others arrived.

  The situation didn’t make me like Vanora any better—but I had to admit, however grudgingly, that she was a worthy adversary for Morgan.

  Of course, Morgan would quickly sense that she now had more than one opponent, but I doubted she could up her game enough to destroy both of us. At least, I hoped not. There was perhaps more danger of her trying to outflank us and get into the building, but Morgan was not the type to leave two enemies at large in such close proximity to her. Or was that just more wishful thinking on my part?

  “Taliesin, let me in!”

  This time I froze rather than jumping. I had expected the others to show up soon, so hearing someone else asking to be let inside the fire shield should not have caused my heart to skip a beat. The problem was that the voice outside was Vanora’s, just as it had been a couple of minutes before.

  I already knew Morgan was a shape-shifter, so I shouldn’t really have been surprised. The problem was, who was the fake Vanora—the woman standing next to me, or the woman outside? If I guessed wrong, things could get really nasty really quickly…

  The Vanora already inside with me, however, had known who else was coming, something Morgan, who couldn’t read minds, probably wouldn’t know. On the other hand, now that I thought about it, Morgan’s faerie ancestry gave her advantages beyond the speed I had seen earlier. For one thing, her vision was much better than the human norm. The darkness would not have been much of a problem for her, and as the sorceress who had conjured the fog and storm, she should have been able to see through them pretty easily as well, even though I couldn’t. Logically, she should have been able to see Vanora arrive. But in that case, why shift into the image of Vanora? She could have fooled me much more easily by becoming Nurse Florence, whom I would have let in without question. She had to know I would not just passively accept two Vanoras. Why was my life always so complicated?

  “That has to be Morgan,” observed the Vanora standing next to me, her eyes
narrowed in concentration, most of her attention focused on keeping the lightning from hitting us. “Perhaps you should give her a…warm welcome.”

  I tried to gently probe them both, but typically I didn’t have much luck getting into the minds of powerful spell casters, and so I couldn’t read much more than their power. Casters such as they consciously or unconsciously created shields to protect their minds from the wide variety of mental attacks an opponent might hurl at them. The ancient Celts hadn’t visualized reading minds in the way that I had trained myself to do, but the kind of mental shielding Morgan and Vanora had kept me out pretty effectively anyway. By now maintaining such shields had become almost second-nature to them, so maintaining that defense did not require much effort on their parts unless I attacked their shielding—something I didn’t dare do until I knew who was who.

  I caused the flames to blaze up on the side from which I had heard the other Vanora’s voice come—but slowly enough to give her a chance to dodge out of the way, which she did.

  “Taliesin,” said the second Vanora, in what was, at the very least, a good imitation of her real Vanora’s indignant tone, “what are you doing?”

  “Demonstrating I’m not that easily fooled, Morgan,” I replied, putting a lot of emphasis on that name. “The real Vanora is already here.”

  “No, she isn’t,” insisted the second Vanora loudly. “You must have Morgan inside with you.”

  Well, she must have been right, because at that moment I felt a very sharp, very cold dagger thrust into my right arm.

  CHAPTER 2: REINFORCEMENTS

  I had good enough reflexes to pull away from Morgan’s dagger before she had the chance to thrust it in very far, but I realized at once it was not the blade I had to fear, but whatever Morgan had coated it with. From my life as the first Taliesin, I well remembered just how much skill Morgan had with every substance from herbal remedies to poisons. I could see something gleaming darkly on the dagger, even beneath my blood. It almost seemed to squirm across the blade, as if Morgan had heightened its poisonous nature with some powerful spell.