There was an instant of darkness and then the world seemed to explode. Nisa hit the door, pain shooting through her head. It took her several seconds to realise that she was free. Her captors were now collapsed on the floor around her, and the shadows which had animated them seemed to have gone. No, she realised, not gone. She could see shadows which should not have been there, lying tumbled among other shadows cast by the light of…
The Eternal Flame had changed. As soon as Nisa got her eyes to focus on it, she knew that. The darker blues in the flame were far more prominent, yet the light seemed just as bright, maybe even more intense. Flickers of darkness like dust motes rose in the flames and then above them, and the reason for those began to become clear as she saw part of the bowl crumble, burn, and rise into the air.
Maxim’s voice had changed, his chanting becoming wilder, more exultant, and the words were different. It was still Latin, and Nisa still had no idea what he was saying, but the Flame had been changed so this was the end game. He was about to change the world, and he would use the remaining bodies as fuel for that. Across the room, looking scared now that her shadow-possessor was gone, Nisa spotted Lisa May and knew, just knew, that she had to save this one. Lisa Anne May with her short stories and her articles on HRT. There was no way she was going to be allowed to go the same way Emily Copper had.
The shadows were moving now, gathering and crawling toward Maxim. Whether he had expected them all to die trying to change the Flame or he did not care about them, he was ignoring them and seemed oblivious as they began slashing at his legs. None seemed strong enough to harm him, or even distract him, but the light was not affecting them now, even though it seemed to be growing brighter. Nisa risked a look at it and saw a shimmer of bright energy sliding into it, the body it had come from falling behind it. Maxim was feeding it souls to burn, strengthening the Unreality of it, the Da’at energy, with every person he destroyed.
Da’at. Unreality. The keys to The System’s codebase. Maxim was amassing more and more of that power right in front of her. He was going to use it to make the whole world believe in magic and, in so doing, probably doom it to destruction. The demons… The thing in Alaina had likely been sent to assist because a world full of magic would be a world ripe for the demons to harvest. The shadows had wanted it to unlock a more natural form for themselves, and Maxim had used them and cast them aside. They were even weaker than before… but they were unreal, in a room full of Unreality, and they wanted revenge.
Nisa summoned up the pattern of Unreality in her mind, swept through its twisting form of aberrant angles and straight lines which twisted like corkscrews, and drove power into it as she found the right part, the place which would weaken the world’s denial of the existence of the shadow things, and she cast it out across the room.
Blackness rose up from the ground around Maxim. Dark hands reached for him, and this time he did notice. There was a shriek, cutting off his chant in a strangled cry of pain. ‘No!’ He screamed, staggering back from the plinth and fighting to bring his focus back, to control the energy which was now dancing wildly in the centre of the room. Nisa could see the bowl degrading faster and guessed that when it finally went entirely, the Eternal Flame would be no more. And then… Then what?
Maxim reached out and Nisa saw Lisa stiffen. He had regained enough control to try to use her. Whether he was continuing the spell or planning to drive back the shadows with her soul energy, Nisa did not care.
Running forward, Nisa pushed through the staggered figures around the plinth, pulled up the image of Unreality in her mind, and then plunged her hand into the writhing mass of energy. The pain was incredible: numbing cold enveloped her, feeling as though it was stripping the skin from her hand in a gale-force blast of ice crystals, but at the same time every nerve in her fingers was being heated to a billion degrees. She thought she screamed, maybe, but it did not matter. She could see the Unreality pattern in her mind igniting into flame. Flickers of blue, red, and gold danced along the silver strands and wrapped around her mind, and she was nothing more than a conduit for the power of The System and its deepest code.
She saw Maxim then, standing in front of her, his hands wringing the front of her shirt as he screamed at her. What was he saying? Something about being a fool. He probably meant that she was, but it did not really matter. She reached out and placed her hand in the middle of his chest, fingers spread. ‘Go to Hell,’ she said, her voice clear and soft in her ears, almost a whisper but ringing out through reality.
There was a sound like the popping of a soap bubble which echoed through the whole of reality.
~~~
There was no one to stop Kellog or his squad of armed police officers running into the hall, but there was no light and no power. There was a feeling like absolute dread which seemed to be soaking up through the stones as they pushed inwards, torchlights illuminating narrow areas of ancient masonry. Kellog spotted Nisa’s ring on the stone and picked it up: obviously she was here and probably not alone. The others seemed oblivious to the uneasy quality of the air and acted as they normally did on these operations, competent with some natural nervousness, but Kellog could feel the tension building.
He glanced at his watch. Twenty-three-zero-one, two minutes before the exact moment of the solstice. If Maxim was going for optimum timing, he would aim to complete whatever he was planning right then.
‘We need to go down,’ Kellog snapped. ‘We need to find the flame room. He’ll be–’
All of them heard it, even the ones with no magical talent at all. It was a woman’s voice and it echoed through the building as though it had been screamed out through a sound system built for an open-air rock concert. Three words: ‘Go to Hell.’ And then a shudder ran through the entire building. Stone creaked and dust fell from the ceiling.
‘Holy shit,’ one of the officers said. ‘Bomb?’
‘We could hope it was,’ Kellog replied. ‘Come on. We need to move. This way.’ He ran, finding the stairway down from memory and not slowing as he charged down the stone steps which had been there since the Middle Ages, leading down to the ones which had been there longer. There were a couple of unconscious men near the door to the chamber and Kellog ordered them cuffed before he unlocked the door and pushed inside.
There were a lot of people in the room, and it looked as though a lot of them were dead or dying, but not all. They looked shocked and confused, for the most part. He saw Lisa Anne May standing beside the stone plinth in the centre of the room. She looked scared, confused, but okay, but the fact that the plinth was just sitting there with no flame atop it was what drew his attention. He almost tripped over Alaina Peters, still unconscious, on the floor near the door as he moved inward, and then he spotted Nisa.
She was leaning on the plinth, her legs folded under her as she sat, cradling her left hand, which looked reddened and sore, not quite burned, but not exactly healthy. Her eyes were closed.
Kellog turned to the leader of the squad. ‘Sergeant, get these people out of here. Hanson should have the place isolated. Get everyone into quarantine until Norbery can get here.’
‘Sir,’ the man replied, nodding and setting about his work.
Kellog turned back and moved forward, slipping his pistol into its holster before he crouched down beside Nisa. ‘Nisa? Sergeant Harper? Can you hear me?’
Nisa’s eyes opened and she looked up at him. ‘My hand stings like fuck.’
‘Right.’
‘Hanson got the message then?’
‘She did. Quick thinking, but I’d like to know why you needed to think quickly.’
‘He had Alaina. Except she was possessed. I needed to get here. Did I mention my hand hurts? I stuck it in the fire to draw the energy out.’
Kellog realised he was probably not going to get too much out of her right now. She looked almost as confused as the other people in the room. ‘Where’s Maxim?’ he tried.
‘He was going to change the world,’ Nisa replied, closing he
r eyes again. ‘He was going to make everything different. He wanted to rule the world, so he wanted the whole world to believe in magic. I think I took his magic and made the world not believe in him. I locked him out of reality, sent him out of The System with the shadows. I need to sleep now.’
He watched her head sag forward and frowned. It could have been Nisa’s voice they had heard. It had been a voice commanding someone to ‘go to Hell’ and Maxim was gone. She had taken the Daath magic Maxim had been forging and turned it around on him, which was technically about as big a crime as creating it in the first place. Somehow Kellog felt they would be able to justify it.
‘Remind me not to piss you off, Nisa,’ Kellog muttered, and then he picked her up, making sure her left arm was supported in her lap, and started for the door.
Epilogue
Westminster, London, December 23rd, 2014.
The pain in her hand had subsided and, despite what had seemed like a tremendous display of magical power, Norbery’s instruments were showing little in the way of Probrum coming from Nisa. They had observed and tested. They had prodded and poked. As far as anyone could tell, and Hanson had even called in a couple of external advisors, Nisa was quite healthy with no visible sign of after-effects from…
And there things got difficult. Nisa had regained enough sense to make her report. Kellog had not been happy about her decision to go in after Alaina, but Maxim would undoubtedly have begun his ritual without her and probably completed it before he could have been stopped. The shadow things would have presented a real problem for an assault team, so there would have been no guarantee of success with one of those backing her up. He had to admit that she had done the best she could with a bad situation.
Hanson had agreed that turning Maxim’s power on him was technically bad, but practically the build-up of Daath energy would have presented a significant problem and using it for something had meant that it was not around to, say, make the whole of central London vanish into nothing.
Alaina was another matter. ‘She’s alive and, physically, quite well,’ Norbery said as Nisa watched her girlfriend through an observation window. ‘Mentally she’s a mess. You seem to have helped her a bit when you obliterated Maxim. She doesn’t really seem to remember much of the possession, but she’s lost about four years of her life and there’s a lot of psychological damage. She doesn’t remember what the demon did with her body, but it’s like it’s still affecting her mind. She only sleeps when we sedate her.’
‘Nightmares?’ Nisa asked.
‘Yes. Quite violent ones.’
‘I can empathise. What’ll happen to her?’
‘There’s a psychiatric unit we use. There are a couple of specialists there who are aware of exceptional cases like hers.’
‘So they won’t treat her as nuts because she thinks she was possessed by a demon.’
‘No, they’ll treat her as nuts because she was.’
~~~
‘What’s happening at the Order?’ Nisa asked as she attended her second debriefing meeting in Hanson’s office.
‘The Hermetic Order of the Eternal Flame is without its Eternal Flame,’ Hanson replied. ‘All work there has been called off until they can either properly ward the place, which could easily take years, or they find a new property. They relied on the power of the Flame to ward off Glitches and any Bugs in the area. Now it’s basically a magnet for all sorts of problems.’
‘Huh. I’m finding it hard to feel sorry for them.’
‘Indeed. We’ve found little evidence of collusion between Maxim and the majority of members, but there may have been others involved in his plot.’
‘I’m quite sure there were,’ Kellog said. ‘It would be unlike him to go into something like this without someone to blame if it was discovered, and he would need more than just Alaina Peters to handle the logistics. He managed to keep almost fifty people locked up under the building for several weeks, months in some cases.’
‘And he smuggled victims in from overseas,’ Hanson agreed. ‘We’re digging, but they’re fighting back. They don’t want the scandal. They’re already pressing to have you brought up on charges, Nisa, for destroying the Flame, would you believe?’
‘Maxim did that,’ Nisa grumbled. ‘It was starting to burn itself out as soon as he changed it.’
‘They claim such a working is impossible and they have several people willing to prove it. He can’t have turned the Flame the way you say he did, so you are lying.’
‘Then how, exactly, did I destroy the thing? Surely that would be as hard? Actually, screw that, I know it would be just as hard and I think I could write down the mathematical proof.’
‘That might be a good idea,’ Hanson told her, but her eyebrows had gone up. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard of anyone writing down magic using mathematics.’
‘You haven’t dealt with a reality hacker before. How are the people who survived the shadows? How’s Lisa May?’
‘Good point. Reality hacking is new. And they seem to be fine. They were confused about where they were, but their memories of what happened to them seem to have vanished along with the shadows.’
‘Daath effects can be like that,’ Kellog put in. ‘Where The System can adjust, it can wipe the memories of something out of existence. At least for those people, the Shadow Men did not exist, and all they had to worry over was what had happened to them.’
Hanson nodded. ‘We’ve managed to persuade them that they were drugged and kidnapped by a terrorist cell. That’s been the cover for the operation and the Order is going along with it to keep their own secrets. However, considering how the Order’s old guard are reacting to all this, specifically you, Nisa, I think it might be wise to get you out of London for a while. I think you could use the break and we can get you back here if business picks up.’
‘I have a number of books I think it would be useful for you to read,’ Kellog added, his lips almost curling. ‘You’ll be quite busy, and you can still access and file reports using your laptop.’
‘Thanks. Were you thinking of sending me anywhere in particular?’
‘Consider it a holiday,’ Hanson suggested. ‘Medical leave anyway. Norbery thinks you may find yourself worrying over what happened more than you realise. Take a month. Go somewhere pretty, with lots of fresh air.’
‘I think I might know just the place,’ Nisa replied.
Tower Hamlets.
‘Faline? Faline, are you human?’
Faline threw open the bedroom door, stepped through, and took off over the back of the sofa in a display of very cat-like agility for a human-shaped Witch Cat, and then she was hugging Nisa before she had got more than a foot into the room.
‘I’m going to take that as a yes,’ Nisa said, grinning.
‘I was worried. Your boss, Hanson, called as soon as she knew Kellog had found you. She knew I’d be worried since she called to see if you’d left.’
‘Nice of her.’ Nisa had not considered Hanson the kind to worry over the mental state of a Bug, but there she was doing so.
‘And then Mister Norbery called after he examined you.’
‘So you know I’m okay.’
‘Yes. I am exceptionally happy that I will not need to find myself another new owner so soon.’
‘You will if you puncture a lung when you break my ribs.’
Blushing, Faline backed off. ‘I was sorry to hear about Alaina.’
Nisa bit at her lips and considered for a second, taking the time to put her bag down and settle onto the sofa. ‘I’m not sure what to do about her. If she stays nuts it won’t be a problem, I guess, but if she recovers… The woman they’re putting in the sanatorium isn’t the one who was my wife or the one I got to know here.’ She shrugged. ‘Cross that bridge when I need to. Now, how do you fancy a holiday?’
Sinking onto the sofa beside Nisa, Faline blinked and then frowned. ‘I’m sorry?’
‘Hanson wants me out of London for a while. The Order is throwing t
hreats around and she wants me out of the way.’
‘Okay…’
‘So I thought we could go visit Trina.’
‘We could?’
‘Well… yeah. Trina already knows and she’s living in a little cottage her aunt rents out in the summer, so there’s room for all three of us, and I can’t leave you here on your own. Trina says it’ll be fine having a house-trained cat in the cottage, and–’
‘You’ve already spoken to her?’
‘Yeah, on the way home. You… don’t want to come?’
‘I… I’ve never really been outside of London, Nisa. And I don’t think anyone’s ever actually considered taking me along when they left the city.’
‘Well… I am. Are you coming or not?’
Faline grinned, leaned forward, and gave Nisa a kiss on the cheek. ‘Very well, why not. Let’s go have a nice, quiet holiday in Cornwall.’
###
About the Author
I was born in the vicinity of Hadrian's Wall so perhaps a bit of history rubbed off. Ancient history obviously, and border history, right on the edge of the Empire. I always preferred the Dark Ages anyway; there’s so much more room for imagination when people aren’t writing down every last detail. So my idea of a good fantasy novel involved dirt and leather, not shining plate armour and Hollywood-medieval manners. The same applies to my sci-fi, really; I prefer gritty over shiny.
Oddly, then, one of the first fantasy novels I remember reading was The Dark Is Rising, by Susan Cooper (later made into a terrible juvenile movie). These days we would call Cooper’s series Young Adult Contemporary Fantasy and looking back on it, it influenced me a lot. It has that mix of modern day life, hidden history, and magic which failed to hit popular culture until the early days of Buffy and Anne Rice. Of course, Cooper’s characters spend their time around places I could actually visit in Cornwall, and South East England, and mid-Wales. In fact, when I went to university in Aberystwyth, it was partially because some of Cooper’s books were set a few miles to the north around Tywyn.
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