by Hiatt, Bill
“Once we are all bound by an appropriate tynged so that you cannot simply cut me out after I share my knowledge of the spell, you can test it for yourself.” Again, Morgan answered Nurse Florence’s question, but she directed the answer to me alone.
“Tynged or not, you and Tal have fundamentally different goals. You both want Carla out of her coma, but Tal wants the original Carla back at the end, and you want Alcina.”
Mentally, I tried to silence Nurse Florence, but she ignored me. I had hoped to play dumb on this point and reinforce the strength of Carla’s persona without Morgan realizing what was happening until it was too late. Morgan might know the spell, but I knew how to deal with its aftermath. Now, with the conversation out in the open, I could easily lose the element of surprise. It was a good thing that wasn’t the only idea I had in mind…
“Sneer at me as much as you want, Morgan,” continued Nurse Florence. “There is no way around that problem, and I suspect you know that perfectly well.”
“Taliesin, remember I have been watching you,” said Morgan, not that I really needed or wanted to be reminded of that. “I know perfectly well what you want, and I certainly know what I want. I believe it is possible to separate Carla from Alcina and to transfer the essence of Alcina into another vessel. We can both have what we want.”
By now Nurse Florence was sputtering with indignation. “You can’t be serious. No one can split Carla from Alcina, if they both really are in that body. They are different manifestations of the same soul. Are you claiming to be able to split a soul, Morgan? And even if you could, what would be the consequences? Would they both exist as maimed remnants, each conscious of her incompleteness, yet never able to reach completeness? And by vessel I assume you mean body. Where do you think you can get one of those? Who will you have to murder to do it?”
Morgan remained silent, but if looks could kill, Nurse Florence would certainly be lying dead on the floor. Finally, Morgan turned back to me. “I would not propose something which I was not confident I could do. It will not be simple or easy. It may take months, perhaps even years, but at the end of the process, you will be reunited with Carla, and I will be reunited with my sister. Consider well what I have said. We will meet again…under more suitable circumstances.”
By now I was well enough trained to feel the mystical energy building in the room and knew that Morgan was getting ready to slip into Annwn. Nurse Florence knew it too.
“Tal, declare the negotiations ended now, before she leaves, and we might capture her! She’s too dangerous to be allowed to roam around at will!” thought Nurse Florence with almost headache-producing intensity.
Yeah, no question there—it was dangerous to let Morgan roam around. If I declared negotiations at an end, the tynged would be released, and Morgan would have to face all seven of us; she wasn’t likely to allow such good odds in the future if she could help it. Unfortunately, there was one big problem with attacking her now.
“Carla is between her and us. I can’t just turn Carla’s hospital room into a battlefield!” Nurse Florence nodded. She might not like giving up such a good chance to stop Morgan, but she knew that I was right.
Morgan smiled with something—triumph, maybe—pointed to her left, and then faded into the swirling mists of Annwn. The portal closed with an almost audible thud as soon as she was through it. Glancing to where she pointed, in the far corner of the room, I saw the gleam of White Hilt. She had left it behind, perhaps as a show of good will to convince me that she was sincere, since she could just as easily have taken it with her.
“We can still follow if we hurry…” began Nurse Florence.
“Remember the trouble we ran into on the way over,” prompted Dan.
Suddenly, I recalled again the bloodstains on their clothes. In the light of the hospital room, they looked far worse than they had outside. “Morgan has obviously recruited some allies.” Dan continued. Who knows what we might run into on the other side?”
“Besides, we need her cooperation if we are to have any chance of reviving Carla,” I said as calmly as I could.
Nurse Florence looked at me as if I had just shot her through the heart. “Tal, you can’t be seriously thinking of bargaining with her!”
“I have never been more serious in my life. Morgan is the only living person who understands the spell well enough to help us undo it. I have to make a deal with her.”
Nurse Florence was speechless, as were most of the others. Stan looked ready to cry, though whether from shock or from relief that maybe his problem would be solved I couldn’t tell. Dan looked totally blank. Shar and Carlos both looked outraged. Gordy, who had in some ways the most expressive face of any of them, looked like a little kid who had just been told that there is no Santa Claus.
“Tal,” he said in obvious disbelief, “what the hell?”
CHAPTER 4: TWO CAN PLAY AT THAT GAME
“Tal, you can’t possibly mean you want to work with Morgan!” Nurse Florence had retreated behind her professional, detached face, but she was clearly upset, almost more upset than I had ever seen her.
“I love Carla,” I replied simply. “I love her so much it hurts. And I can’t stand seeing her this way anymore—especially since it is my fault she’s here. So yes, I will work with Morgan. I will work with Satan himself, if that’s what it takes.”
“Pretty much the same thing,” muttered Dan.
“Tal, she tried to kill me before!” Shar nearly shouted at me. “How can you forget that so quickly?”
“Yeah!” seconded Gordy. “I bet she would kill any of us—even Carla—to get whatever the hell she wants.”
“How do the rest of you feel? Carlos? Stan?”
“Tal, she was just holding a knife to Gianni’s throat,” replied Carlos. “That tells me all I need to know. No, you can’t work with her.”
Stan’s response was a little more nuanced. “Well,” he began weakly, not at all like his recent self-confident manner, “I think Tal needs to at least figure out how much of what she said is actually true. It can’t hurt for him to talk to Morgan again.”
No, I hadn’t been mistaken earlier. Stan had his own reasons for exploring how to reverse the awakening spell. I would have to figure out what those reasons were—later. Right now I had more urgent concerns. I let the guys and Nurse Florence argue with me for a while, scarcely listening to them anymore. Then, at what I hoped was the right moment, I sent a quick message to Nurse Florence: “Morgan has Gianni ‘wired’ and is listening in. Can you disconnect him and make it feel to her as if the connection faded naturally?” Nurse Florence nodded silently and moved quickly to Gianni. While she worked the guys continued to pound me verbally. Fortunately, it was not too long before Nurse Florence gave me a thumbs up.
“I’m going to set a little barrier to make sure she can’t listen in by any other means.” It was relatively easy to set up a kind of psychic “white noise” to keep anyone from seeing or hearing us from a distance, at least not without making us very aware of it. In my weakened condition, the spell gave me a headache, but I knew Nurse Florence was pretty drained as well, and she had just had to perform very precise magic to free Gianni of Morgan’s surveillance.
“OK, now we can relax. Morgan can’t hear us anymore.”
“That conversation was for Morgan’s benefit?” asked Stan.
“It was indeed. Morgan isn’t the only one who can psych out an opponent.”
“Morgan could hear us?” asked Gordy suspiciously, looking around the room as if he expected to see Morgan looking down at us from the ceiling.
“Yup. She was hearing us through Gianni, but Nurse Florence has broken that connection. Morgan may be suspicious, but she won’t entirely discount the conversation she just heard. At the very least, she will contact me again, I’m guessing at some point when the rest of you aren’t around, and I’ll find out what I can about her intentions.”
“That’s clever,” said Stan, who still clearly had something else on his mind. “But she’s
never going to tell you how to counter the awakening spell without binding you with a tynged that requires you to help her.”
I shrugged. “Well, I won’t need her help with the spell after all.” I could have just explained, but, perhaps because of how worn-out I was, I couldn’t resist being a little theatrical. I raised my left hand and made it glow with sickly red energy.
Nurse Florence’s calm professionalism came close to cracking completely at that. “Tal, that kind of magic can corrupt the user. Stop at once!” I did, expecting another tongue-lashing, but when I looked somewhat sheepishly in Nurse Florence’s direction, she was staring at me with wonder.
“It was amazing enough that you adapted your magic to work with technology, and you did it in just a few days before Samhain. But learning a spell that complex, just by seeing it once? That should be impossible. How did you do it?” she asked.
“Two spells, actually,” I said, trying not to sound as if I was bragging—which I totally was. “Naturally I can do the reversal spell too. As for explaining how I learned them, well, I just…entered each spell, the way druids have entered the forces of nature for millenniums, the way you enter the body of someone you want to heal, the way I can enter a piece of technology. If I can adjust my mind enough to become one with a spell, I can feel the magic rather than just seeing; I can feel how it would be to cast it.”
“I understand in theory,” Nurse Florence replied slowly, “but to do it so fast? Sorcerers spend months, even years learning their magic.”
I shrugged again. “When Gwion Bach accidentally drank the potion from the cauldron of knowledge, he learned a great deal of complex magic almost instantly. That potion must have changed him on a very deep level. Then, as you’ll recall, the witch Ceridwen managed to swallow him during a shape-shifting contest, and he ended up being reborn as the original Taliesin, another fundamental change. You know I have the skills of all my previous lives. I must also have whatever fundamental change in nature happened to Gwion Bach and to the original Taliesin—who, by the way, did have some training, but more as a way of concealing the true extent of his ‘difference’ and throwing off his enemies than as a way of actually learning his magic, which he knew he could learn much more quickly.”
“How long have you known? Did you get the idea from Taliesin’s memories?” Nurse Florence knew we had other pressing matters to attend to, but she let her thirst for knowledge get the better of her anyway.
“I got a suspicion from Taliesin’s memories, but as far as I can remember, he never actually tried to learn a spell the way I just did. Of course, for most of the time he was at Camelot, Merlin typically took care of any casting that needed to be done, so there wasn’t as much pressure on Taliesin as there has been on me.”
Nurse Florence was clearly still amazed, but she quickly switched back into professional mode and threw me off balance. “It’s a good thing you insulated the room against eavesdropping. Tal, there are already some pretty powerful people in Annwn who are nervous about you. If anyone outside of our group realized that you could learn new spells just by having them cast in your presence, it would make your critics even more nervous.”
“Critics? I solved a big problem for them when I stopped Ceridwen. Why should I have any critics in the first place?”
Suddenly, Nurse Florence was all about getting back on schedule. “That’s an important conversation…for another time. I have kept us from being noticed by the hospital staff only with great difficulty. I’m tired, I can feel the spells thinning, and you and the guys need to get back home soon…to say nothing of Gianni.” She looked critically around the room. “They need cleaning up first, and Stan’s ripped out of his shirt again.”
Stan had been trying to wear more loose-fitting clothing for those occasions when he wielded his sword and increased his muscle mass, but occasionally he forgot, as with tonight’s shirt, which was hanging down his chest in shreds.
In the old days, when we had been trying to conceal the connections among us from Ceridwen, Nurse Florence had to buy the guys replacement clothing, and we had just tossed the bloody stuff, but now that pretty much any spell caster or other supernatural being around knew who my warriors were, Nurse Florence no longer bothered to minimize the magical residue on them. Instead, she used a spell to draw the blood from their clothing. She couldn’t knit synthetic fabrics back together, but I had learned how to do that (with a lot of help from Stan, who could always visualize the underlying science better than I), so I took care of that kind of repair work, and in just a few minutes, everyone was looking more or less normal.
After that it was a simple matter to re-sheathe White Hilt; pick up Gianni, still sound asleep; get out of the hospital; remove all of the don’t-notice-me” kind of magic; and arrange transportation.
“It probably isn’t safe to go through Annwn to get back to Santa Brígida,” I observed, then realized I was probably just stating the excruciatingly obvious. “The Prius only seats four.”
Nurse Florence already had her cell phone out. “I could get home by water, but that might be…disconcerting for any passengers, so I’ll call a cab for Shar, Gordy, Carlos, and me. You take Stan, Dan, and Gianni.” I must have looked worried, because she added, “First, though, I’ll call Vanora, and she’ll make some security arrangements, both magical and otherwise, for the hospital. Morgan is not getting in again, no matter what.”
“Thanks,” I said, trying to make sure my sincere gratitude showed, despite my fatigue. “You always handle the logistics so well.”
I checked my phone and realized I had three missed calls from Mrs. Rinaldi, so I called back to reassure her that Gianni was indeed on the way. Then I hit the lock button on my Prius remote to see which car in the parking lot beeped—from a distance one gunmetal Prius looked pretty much like another, and in case you haven’t noticed, there are a lot of them around these days. Having finally found mine, I got my passengers loaded and took off as fast as I safely could. (I didn’t particularly want the supreme irony of having us all survive a potentially fatal encounter with Morgan Le Fay, only to get us all killed on the freeway.)
Fortunately, we made the short trip home without incident. I dropped off Gianni first, got my obligatory hug from Mrs. Rinaldi, which Stan and Dan both kidded me about, excused myself from staying for what was now a very late dinner, dropped off Dan, and then headed for Stan’s place, which was only about three doors from mine.
“Tal, can I ask you something?” Stan asked.
I had a weird moment of déjà vu. Those were exactly the words Stan used before he knew about my unusual “situation,” when he first asked me about some of the discrepancies in my life. I shook the feeling off. That time I had been caught by surprise. This time I knew exactly what Stan was going to ask. He was going to start a conversation about why he wanted his awakening spell reversed—at least, that’s what I hoped he was going to ask about.
“Ask away,” I replied. I didn’t really want to start what could be a complicated conversation after the day I had just been through, but if something was bugging Stan, I definitely wanted to know about it.
“Tal, I…what the heck?” He sounded so alarmed that I braked and then glanced in his direction.
The shirt that I had mended was hanging in tatters again.
We were only about two minutes from his house at this point, and there was always the possibility that someone could already have seen us, so I didn’t want to spend longer mending the shirt again than I had to.
“Sorry, Stan. I must be more tired than I thought. I’ll fix you right up again…unless you want to tell your mom one of your lady friends tried to rip it off of you.”
Stan looked surprisingly worried, and his cheeks reddened. “Tal, she’d ground me until I’m fifty-five. I can’t…”
“Relax, dude,” I said with a chuckle. “I was just kidding! Here, let me fix that for you.” I leaned over, humming a little bit to heighten the spell, and pulled the surprisingly stubborn threads
back again.
“You need to start wearing more cotton, Stan. These synthetics are giving me more of a headache than usual.”
We both breathed a sigh of relief when the job was finally done. “I’m sorry that took so long. I guess I really am tired.”
“I guess you’re rusty. What’s it been, a month since you saved the world? You need to work out more, I guess,” replied Stan with a grin.
I chuckled again, but more so Stan wouldn’t worry than because I really thought the situation was funny. I had thought—hell, we had all thought—that defeating Ceridwen meant we wouldn’t have to constantly watch our backs. We knew Morgan had survived on Samhain, but with Ceridwen gone, we assumed that she would have no further reason to hang out in Santa Brígida. Now we knew she had been here the whole time, spying on me and looking for her long-lost sister. At the very least, now we all had to be extremely careful. Hopefully, Morgan now believed that I was going to cooperate with her, but one careless word from any of us could reveal the truth—with bloody consequences.
I let Stan off, drove to my house, got the car in the garage, and had a very late dinner with my parents. Visiting Carla was still a built-in excuse. Neither one of them ever questioned me, pretty much no matter when I came in. I could tell that Mom in particular still worried about me, but I had gotten to be a very good actor in a very short time, and both of them were convinced I would get over my grief eventually.
I had to admit that this particular night the acting was more of a chore than usual, both because I was worried about Morgan and because I suddenly had at least a glimmer of hope that I might finally be able to bring Carla out of her coma. I would have loved to share that news with them, but I would have been hard-pressed to explain, since they knew nothing about my…unusual nature.
At some point in the last your years, I probably should have told them, but after I finally got out of the hospital after my “unexplained breakdown” (for which read, “the awakening of the memories of all my previous lives,”) I had a hard enough time convincing them that I was normal again, without trying to convince them I was normal despite believing I was a reincarnation of the original Taliesin. “Yeah, Dad, I can do magic, but I’m not crazy…really, I’m not.” Doesn’t sound like the world’s best strategy, does it?
