Divided against Yourselves (Spell Weaver)

by Hiatt, Bill

  Glancing north, I thought I could headlights coming down Sandspit. If so, that probably meant the cavalry, in the form of Vanora’s security men, was coming to the rescue. They could resolve the still-raging battle on the pier, but they couldn’t help much with Morgan. That part of the battle I would have to win on my own.

  In the past I had been good about thinking “outside the box,” but right now inspiration seemed to have deserted me. All I could think to do was keep the fire at maximum intensity until one of us tired, and if it happened to be me, I would be in big trouble.

  I risked another scan of the pier and cringed inwardly at what I could sense. Shar, realizing that threatening Alcina was not working, charged Dan in an effort to disarm him. Normally he could have, but he was still bleeding, and Dan still had a manic, adrenaline-overdrive kind of strength. To my horror, he managed to knock Zom out of Shar’s hand. Shar made a clumsy grab for Zom, missed, and then recoiled as Dan stabbed him in the right arm. Zom tumbled into the ocean, and I knew Shar could never follow it in his current condition. I would have thought Gordy and Carlos could have attacked Dan from the other side, but he had them enough off-balance that in the few seconds it took Gordy to make a decent thrust, Dan twisted to face him and successfully parried. Of course, Shar, Gordy, and Carlos were all handicapped by not wanting to hurt Dan. Dan, in his magic-crazed state, seemed to have no such inhibition.

  I glanced north again. No more headlights. Straining a little, I could see that the vehicles were not Vanora’s security vehicles after all. Most likely a few guys had decided to take their girls parking for some late-night shenanigans.

  Where were Vanora’s security people? If they didn’t arrive soon, Dan might conceivably win the battle on the pier. Perhaps Alcina would escape with him at that point, and we’d be right back in a hostage situation. Considering the shape Dan was in right now, we’d be lucky if that was all that happened.

  Morgan still seemed to be hacking away at my fire without trying a direct attack, so I risked letting my mind wander back toward Santa Brígida to see where they were. It took a couple of minutes, but I found them—trapped way back on 101, on the wrong side of a jackknifed truck that effectively blocked all westbound traffic at that point. Brushing across the driver’s mind, I discovered he had swerved in an effort to avoid a deer and lost control.

  Deer on the 101? Pretty much impossible—unless of course Morgan had conjured something up, an illusion perhaps. I hadn’t felt her sending any power in that direction recently, but I could somehow have missed it, or she could have preset some kind of trap in the time right after she had been forced to leave the “meeting.” She certainly knew that Vanora’s security force was tied up in Santa Brígida, but perhaps she wanted to ensure that if they were redeployed, they would not get in her way. If so, she had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. It might take hours to get the westbound 101 open again, and even if the highway patrol managed to extricate the vehicles currently on the interstate, that operation would take longer than we had.

  Well, desperate times called for desperate measures. I hated to lose Morgan, but I had to take the chance. The most I could hope for with her in the short term was another stand-off, and the way conditions on the ground were, there would be casualties unless I intervened. Knowing she still needed me for something suggested she might follow me if I descended, so I took the chance. Releasing her from the flame, I dropped with almost sound-barrier-breaking speed. She hadn’t expected that move and floated in the air, bits of ice drifting from her blade as she watched me fall, her mouth open in surprise, her eyebrows raised.

  I was coming down so fast I barely had time to look around, but I could see that Shar was trying to stop the copious flow of blood from his arm and that Gordy and Carlos couldn’t seem to do much more than keep Dan from lopping their heads off. Alcina? She still looked unconscious, but if she had enthralled Dan as completely as it seemed, she wouldn’t have to stay conscious for his rampage to continue; the spell had a life of its own, as I well knew.

  At least no one was dead yet. Bracing myself, I hit the water with almost stunning force and dove until I grabbed Zom, after which I came gasping to the surface and shot back into the air. As I had hoped, Morgan had descended, but much more cautiously. Seeing the emerald flash of Zom in my hands must have given her pause, because she knew it put me out of reach of her magic. However, there was no way I could cover all my scattered friends on the dock, so she would probably decide to threaten them to get me to back off.

  Zom felt…alien in my hand. The hilt was oddly cold, and slippery, as if it would slide out of my hand at the slightest provocation. Clearly, it was not my sword; it was Shar’s now, and somehow it knew that.

  “Sorry,” I whispered to it, “but Shar can’t do what we need right now. I’m just borrowing you to save him. I swear I will return you when this is over.”

  What was I thinking? That my only choice was yet another long-shot.

  White Hilt originally had been just a flaming sword. In the stress of a battle with a pwca, a battle I was losing, I had developed the idea of using my mind to redirect the flame, to use it like a shield or like a laser. There was no reason in theory that Zom’s energy might not be likewise directed. The sword did block any hostile magic, but not friendly magic; Shar had been able to pass through portals to Annwn while carrying it, for example. Would it block manipulation by its own wielder? I hoped not, but there was only one way to find out.

  At first I got no response—the emerald glow seemed dull and would not shift even an inch in response to my prompting. Then I began to feel just the slightest shift as the sword grudgingly accepted me as its wielder, if only temporarily. The emerald glow flared, and I could see Morgan back herself away a little, uncertain what I planned to do but not liking the possibilities.

  Just as I was about to get the result I wanted, my attention was drawn to a sudden movement further down the dock. Stan had jumped up, his sword surrounded in a pure white glow I had seen once before, on Samhain, and charged at Dan. Gordy and Carlos, tired and unnerved by having to fight their good friend, willingly let Stan through, though Gordy, ever protective of the person who helped solve his academic problems, clearly had some mixed feelings.

  Dan’s feelings, however, were not really his own and clearly weren’t mixed. He threw himself at Stan with a battle cry and brought his blade crashing down on Stan’s. Since Stan’s sword endowed him with extra muscle, that kind of tactic could not disarm him easily, so it was no surprise when Dan’s blade clanged off harmlessly. It was a surprise when the clash created a white flash that caused Dan to stagger backward, a sudden look of fear in his eyes.

  Stan’s sword did not normally have that kind of power—well, except once, when Stan had been David. Clearly, David had taken over again.

  It would be nice if once, just once, I could get one problem solved before another one popped up!

  At least David had shifted the battle in our favor. Dan, who had been holding off two attackers and briefly managed a third as well, fell back in the face of David’s onslaught. I turned in Morgan’s direction, and, focusing my whole attention on Zom, willed its protective power to become a weapon, to strike out at her in a magic-shredding emerald blast. For one chilling moment I thought Zom would ignore my will, but then it nearly jerked out of my hand, so violent was the emerald spray that streaked from it, that arced out from it like vibrant green lightning, that struck Morgan full in the chest, engulfing her, stripping away the temporary spells as certainly as actually being struck by the blade itself would have. The original Taliesin had seen Morgan many times, and I had seen her more times than I would have liked, but neither of us had ever seen her as utterly surprised as she was in the split second before she plunged into the cold waters of the Pacific.

  She would recover quickly, but before that happened, Dan had to be subdued. I looked over just in time to see David knock Dan’s sword from his hand.

  “David!” I yelled, “Don’t kill
him!” I forgot to switch to Hebrew, but evidently David still had enough connection with Stan to understand English and even to respond in it.

  “I know who he is!” David yelled back. “I know who he is…from Stan. But something is not right.”

  Dan lunged at him again, but David had only to wave the sword in his general direction, and something in the white glow frightened him enough to make him back off. Even though Dan seemed immune to the fear radiating from Gordy’s sword, he was not immune to something about David’s sword.

  “A powerful evil force has taken hold of him,” I yelled back to David. “We must break its power to free him.” I aimed Zom right at Dan and willed it to unleash an even more powerful burst of anti-magic than the one with which I had hit Morgan. For a few seconds Dan was greener than the nearby grass, and his facial expression seemed less deranged, far more like his normal self. That momentary normality lasted a few seconds after Zom’s burst ended, but then I could see him slipping back into the grip of Alcina’s spell.

  I should have known from seeing Zom in action before: it always prevented new spells from hitting its wielder, and it could break a weak or temporary spell on someone else, but the most it could do with a strong or permanent spell was disrupt it momentarily. Once Zom was no longer in contact with that spell, the magic came right back, just as Alcina’s spell on Dan was coming back. I wondered whether hitting him over and over again would eventually beat the spell. Well, what did I really have to lose? I aimed Zom at Dan again and hit him with everything I had, at the same time reaching out to touch his mind so I could monitor the state of the spell within him. I did not intend to stop until I felt the spell break.

  Again Dan’s expression normalized quickly, but I could still feel the spell within him, beaten back for now but still biding its time, waiting for the moment when it could surge back over him. I poured so much anti-magic into him his blood must have started to glow emerald, so much that I could feel Zom throbbing in my hand, clearly near the limit of how much power it could produce in such a short time…but the spell remained intact.

  I lowered Zom, feeling defeated. At least I had tried. Now we would have to use the same process on Dan that had been used to break the spell on me. The question was, how to restore Dan to normal, not to mention Stan, without spending so long at it that we blew all of our covers? It must be nearly three o’clock on the morning as it was. How could any of us explain our long absences to our parents? We had just played the Carrie Winn card earlier in the week. Would it be ridiculous to use it again so soon?

  While I was brooding over that problem, Morgan, who had presumably been hiding on the other side of the pier, popped out of concealment and swung her icy sword straight at Shar. Unarmed and weakened from blood loss, he fell back away from the blade, but not quite fast enough, and Morgan inflicted another flesh wound on the arm, this one aggravated by the extreme cold her sword radiated. Shar, who probably had the highest tolerance for pain of any of us, actually screamed, and, though the cold prevented immediate bleeding, I could see what looked like a very large gash. Shar crumpled up, possibly on the verge of passing out, and Morgan brushed past him and grabbed Alcina in her arms, with the obvious intention of flying away with her. Dan, fearful as he was of David’s sword, was making it impossible for David, or for Gordy or Carlos, for that matter, to get around him without hurting him, which none of them wanted to do.

  I raised Zom again and tried to open fire, but all I got at first was a flicker. Horrified, I looked down at it. Its emerald glow was dull; I had pushed it too far trying to break the spell on Dan. I could feel it coming back; I could see its glow brightening by the second, but Morgan could be airborne with Alcina in seconds, and all we had risked tonight would have been for nothing.

  I conjured up my own flying spell and shot in Morgan’s direction like a bullet. Seeing me coming, she held her blade at Shar’s throat.

  “Let us go, Taliesin. I would hate to kill your valiant friend, but I will do it if I must.”

  Near the edge of my awareness, I felt Dan take a wound in the arm, but, energized by a fanatical desire to protect Alcina at all costs, he apparently held on to his sword and kept fighting. It was up to me to save Shar and Carla…but how could I do that?

  “Drop that sword!” she commanded as I landed on the dock, nicking Shar’s throat to underscore the order.

  I knew I couldn’t drop Zom at this point. At the best, that would allow Morgan and Alcina to escape. At the worst, I was running a little low on magic and magic resistance, and either or both of them might conceivably recapture me or do harm to someone else—and then escape as well.

  What was that old saying? It’s always darkest before the dawn…but now we seemed on the verge of an endless night. My best option strategically seemed to be to allow her to do her worst with Shar in the hope of healing him afterward. Nurse Florence had suggested she might be able to heal Gianni under similar circumstances.

  I reached out with my mind to see how Vanora was doing with Nurse Florence—and the endless night got darker. Not only was Vanora, already wearied from maintaining the security system I had demanded, now pretty much exhausted, but Nurse Florence was not reviving. Had she drained herself too far to come back? Even if she started to revive now, Vanora and Nurse Florence probably wouldn’t have enough energy between them to heal a mortal wound.

  Morgan drew a little more blood from Shar to make her point. “Decide, Taliesin! Decide now.” My only recourse at this point was to let Morgan and Alcina go.

  There was, however, yet another abrupt jolt in this roller-coaster night full of them. I suddenly became aware of Khalid nearby. I glanced over to see him raising his dagger above his head. Morgan noticed this move as well and was momentarily distracted, but she did not realize the significance of what was about to happen: Khalid was about to make his wish!

  “Save my friends!” I heard him yell in his high-pitched voice, and I almost screamed in frustration. Wishes were notoriously tricky in the first place. One needed to word them very carefully. Khalid’s extremely general wish could be interpreted in many different ways by a wish-granting supernatural being, but this situation was even worse, since he was invoking a preset spell on his faerie dagger. Had Gwynn crafted the spell with such complexity that it could even process such a vague request?

  The dagger pulsed with rapidly rotating white, black, and red glows, so at least it was trying to respond to Khalid. Then, just when I thought that was all it was going to do, its power struck like lightning in several different directions at once: one bolt hit Morgan, knocking the sword from her hand and throwing her flat on the pier with stunning force; one bolt hit Shar, giving his wounds a multi-colored glow before they vanished; one bolt hit Dan, disarming him, healing his wounds and then lingering over him, as if trying to break the love spell; one bolt hit David, but his sword flashed white, and the bolt faded, seemingly with no effect; one bolt hit Alcina and lingered over her as Dan’s had lingered over him; one bolt hit Nurse Florence, filling her with life-giving energy and pulling her back from the very edge of death itself.

  Without hesitating I bounded over to Morgan and Alcina, making sure they were both as unconscious as they seemed. Yeah, they were definitely out. I took Morgan’s sword and then took a little longer look at Alcina. Khalid’s wish still worked away at her, as if trying to suppress the Alcina personality. Unfortunately, all wishes have their limits, and this one could clearly not reverse the awakening spell, though it seemed determined to keep trying. I trotted over to where Dan lay, still also engulfed in tricolored light, but though the wish could heal his body, it was not making a dent in Alcina’s spell.

  By that point Nurse Florence and Vanora had rejoined us. “Viviane, do you feel well enough to secure the prisoners?” asked Vanora in her most businesslike tone.

  Nurse Florence nodded and gave me a little smile. “Taliesin and I will discuss what else needs to be done.”

  “She was dying five minutes ago!” I protes
ted. “Shouldn’t she at least rest for a little while?”

  “I’m fine,” said Nurse Florence in one of her reassuring tones, “and it looks as if all I have to do is keep them unconscious until Vanora’s men get here.”

  I would have argued further, but Nurse Florence was already walking up the pier toward where Morgan and Alcina lay.

  “Well, this operation could have gone better,” observed Vanora dryly, “but no one could argue with the outcome. We could not have hoped for more than the capture of both Morgan and Alcina.”

  “We could have hoped for no one to fall under Alcina’s spell,” I replied a little coldly. I just didn’t like Vanora’s clinical attitude in this kind of situation. Vanora did not immediately reply, which gave me a chance to look over at David.

  “David, I told you how dangerous it was for you to take over Stan’s body like this. Why did you do it?”

  “I had no choice,” replied David solemnly. “Stan was under the control of that witch. He still is as far as I can tell. If he had remained in command of his limbs, his body would have been used in the fight against us.”

  Gently, I reached into Stan’s mind, and I could see that David was right: Stan’s mind was in a frenzy trying to take back control and rescue Alcina. As I moved back to a broader view, however, I was even more dismayed by the ugly gashes where my painstakingly forged connections between David’s consciousness and Stan’s had once been. Now, except for one tenuous connection that was giving David access to enough of Stan’s memories for David to understand English, they were totally separate beings for all practical purposes, even more so than they had been that night in my garden, probably wrenched apart by the conflict between them over whether or not to side with Alcina in the battle.