Separated from Yourselves

by Bill Hiatt

  Like always, an adversary had found a way to cheat the spirit but observe the letter. I should have seen that one coming.

  “Then Taliesin may draw on those sources of power he has that are external to himself?” asked Arianrhod.

  I forced my stunned brain to focus. I knew where Arianrhod was going with that question.

  “Yes,” said Erebus, who clearly wasn’t an expert in Celtic magic. Did I catch a hint of uncertainty behind that yes?

  I could feel the guys saying yes through the links before I could even ask if I could draw on them for power.

  Suddenly I was no longer alone.

  Erebus might just have outsmarted himself. With the combatants he had, he could probably have worn me down before I defeated all of them. He just couldn’t resist leaving a loophole that let them draw on him. I was going to make him pay for that.

  “Draw on me as well,” thought Arianrhod. Considering her role as referee, I wondered if she was creating a conflict of interest, but nothing in her agreement with Erebus actually prohibited my using a preexisting link to her. At this point Erebus wouldn’t have been in a good position to quibble, anyway.

  As power rushed into me, I used some of it to heal whatever damage the mega burst of darkness had done to me. I used more of it to send out a wave of light far more powerful than I would have dared attempt on my own. The Chimera shrieked and fell back, injured. At least three of the human shadows had gotten too close when the burst hit, and they disintegrated, banished back to their own world and out of play.

  I felt another massive wave coming, but this time I extinguished my light, hit the ground, and rolled at faerie speed. I still caught some of the blast, but I missed the main jolt, so I was less stunned than I had been the first time.

  This time I also got a glimpse of how the channeling worked. The power of the blast seemed more limited than what a primal force Erebus could do on his own, as if this relatively small group of shadow assassins could not come close to containing his full power. That was good to know, but I needed to know more.

  Instead of risking everything on the equivalent of a knockout punch with all the power I could draw on, I used relatively small amounts to see how much I could learn from my enemies’ responses.

  Almost immediately I realized that the shadows were working together to draw power from Erebus. I tried scattering small globes of light, attacking at several points and forcing the assassins to scatter. Sure enough, they had a harder time drawing on Erebus if they weren’t near one another.

  Multitasking with magic was always more draining than focusing on one task, and firing on targets in different directions was also challenging, but for a while at least I managed to keep the shadows disorganized with random globes of light. Individually, those attacks weren’t very strong, and the shadows instinctively evaded them anyway, but I could feel their occasional cries of pain when they got too close.

  I had to wonder why the shadow assassins who were trying so desperately to kill Lucas had never invoked blasts from Erebus. There were hundreds of them then, maybe thousands. With the kind of power they could have channeled, they would have beaten us easily. There must be something different in play here, some factor I was missing.

  I tried a different strategy: keeping enough of a glow around myself to discourage direct attacks, but focusing much more power on a glowing sphere above me. It put out enough light to keep a wide area around me free of shadow assassins, but it was high enough and far enough away from me that hitting it with an Erebus blast meant that the same blast couldn’t hit me.

  That strategy worked for a few minutes, but I knew I had to do better. In a war of attrition, I would lose. However, being free of direct attack for a short time allowed me to realize something else about the connection between Erebus and his minions: it was extremely distance sensitive. All magic was to some degree, but I couldn’t miss the fact that the shadow assassins who began the process of generating each blast were at the far end of the arena, almost literally right next to Erebus.

  Yeah, I had known since the beginning that Erebus was no longer safely on the other side of a shadow, peering out from his own realm. He was literally in this world, which he could manage because the venue was relatively dark. Still, it was a risk, one I guessed he wouldn’t take if he didn’t have to. That would explain why the assassins hadn’t used that ability the other time; they didn’t have the immediate presence of Erebus.

  I should have felt flattered he was pulling out all the stops for me, but I had more important things to think about.

  Of course, Erebus was outside the arena, and any attack on him would be out of bounds. Still, I could hardly be blamed if something I did inside the arena affected him, now could I?

  I caught the shadow team completely by surprise when I conjured up a wall of light right at the far edge of the arena. In doing so, I wiped out two more of the human shadows. More important, I drove the rest away from the edge and caused Erebus himself to recoil. He was too vast for me to really hurt him that way, but he was momentarily farther away, and the combination of that, and the flight of the shadows from the side closest to him, cut them off from drawing on his power.

  Sustaining the wall of light and doing anything else would be tough, especially considering how distant the wall was, but as long as I could keep it up, I would be safe from any more Erebus blasts. If I could mop up enough of the remaining shadows before Erebus could restore the connection, I knew I could win.

  I saw the Chimera moving to breathe on the wall, which would make it impossible to maintain. Straining, I produced a much bigger light on my end of the field and then sent it surging toward the shadows. The Chimera switched direction and moved to intercept it, but my light was moving faster than it was, forcing the shadows on the ground to flee or be defeated—except for one.

  The Calydonian Boar, charging me at full speed, dodged around the light and kept on coming. As it turned out, its full speed wasn’t good enough to prevent me from spearing it with intense brightness. It was still hurtling in my direction, but even its massive bulk and wild savagery couldn’t throw off the laser-like attack, and it collapsed and dissolved before it hit me.

  Six down. Fourteen to go.

  With the burst of light at my end of the field now over, the dragon was slithering straight at me, its shadowy teeth solidifying into rows of piercing death. Worse, Otus and Ephialtes were coming in from the flanks, waving their shadow clubs, which were also becoming solid. One hit would crush my skull.

  Stopping that kind of attack from different directions required me to radiate light of blazing intensity. I was cutting deeper and deeper into the energy the guys and Arianrhod could lend me. Not only that, but the Chimera breathed on my wall, which would have collapsed had I not reinforced it. Though the wall had been a good idea, it was too far away to maintain easily, especially with all the other demands upon me.

  Fast healing, multitasking, operating across great distances, running at faerie speed, flying, not to mention generating and manipulating light constantly—even with shared power, I was burning magic too fast. I might run out of juice before I’d won, and then the shadows would easily pick me off.

  The dragon and two giants fell back, wounded but not finished. Given time, they would regenerate their physical presence and come back for more.

  Deciding I needed to gamble a little, I ramped up the intensity of the light until my head started to throb, trying to catch my large adversaries in enough light to banish them, but they retreated faster, eluding me as I burned power unnecessarily. I had to multitask again, stabilizing the light wall in back, but only with great difficulty.

  I needed to take the Chimera out somehow, but it was far away. At first I thought the size of the arena worked to my advantage by giving me room to maneuver, but, forced to expend power at both ends of the field and unable to fill its whole area with enough light to defeat my adversaries, I realized I would have been better off in a smaller space.

 
I made the light wall flare up in the Chimera’s direction, not quite killing it but wounding it enough to drive it back. With any luck, that would give me a little respite.

  I saw the boulder flying in my direction too late.

  At some point shadow Hercules had become solid, ripped up a big piece of the moon’s surface, and tossed it in my direction.

  I should have been able to dodge, but I was slowing down a little, and it was big. I managed to switch modes fast enough to slow the boulder with a sonic burst, but it was too big to stop completely. The edge clipped me, shattering my shoulder and causing an explosion of pain. I stumbled and fell. The light above me was flickering. I felt the distant wall collapsing, and this time I couldn’t reinforce it fast enough.

  I managed to deaden the pain and keep the light above me going, though it was still fading in and out. Now that the light wall was gone, I could expect another Erebus blast any time, though I figured I’d be mashed by another boulder before that happened.

  I should have healed my shoulder, but that might have taken longer than I had. I still felt some reserve power, but my friends were getting near their limit, and even Arianrhod’s much greater supply was dwindling. Anyway, there was a limit to how fast I could pull power from others, and my needs had increased beyond what that speed could accommodate.

  Without a miracle, I’d be dead in the next five minutes.

  “Boy Scout, pull me into you!”

  Asking for a miracle and getting Magnus was a little like ordering a steak and getting food poisoning. Or maybe it wasn’t. My brain was getting pretty sluggish.

  “Pull you into me?”

  “Yeah, you know, kind of like I did with Jimmie, except you’ll be pulling mind and magic rather than soul, and I’ll need to have the ability to interact with your body.”

  “Mustn’t…break the contract…”

  “I’m you, remember…your…dark side, anyway. Just in case, though, you have to bring me over. If I jump in from outside, that might be construed as a violation, like Erebus himself jumping into his shadows.”

  Magnus had obviously arrived while I was too distracted to notice, read somebody’s mind to figure out what was happening, and now had a plan.

  Was he really here to save me, or had he just found a foolproof way to get my body—my real body, not a spell-produced clone?

  If he did have a plan, he might conceivably win the battle for us. If he was just tricking me and intended to steal my body, he’d still have to win the battle in order to get that body out in one piece. I knew I was taking a risk, but the danger was smaller than getting smooshed by a boulder or frozen by a flash of darkness.

  I latched onto his mind with mine and pulled him to me. As I did so, I felt a power surge when he added his strength to mine.

  “Now we need to play dead,” he thought.

  “What?” I asked. Even groggy, I couldn’t figure out what good that would do.

  “Element of surprise. You look unconscious, the shadows move in to finish you. They get close enough, we turn the lights on. Two of us together should be able to do it twice as fast as they expect.”

  Magnus was ready to stake everything on one role of the dice—not my usual style.

  Then again, isn’t that exactly what I’d done by letting him in?

  I allowed my light to fade to black, my body to fall flat on the cold ground, and I artificially dropped my vital signs so I would look nearly dead. Deep inside, Magnus and I were drawing in power, as much as we could manage, converting it into carefully hidden light.

  Sure enough, the shadows rushed forward, ready to rip me to pieces.

  When the closest ones were seconds way, light shot from my body as if it were a sun.

  The screams of the shadows were loud enough to rattle my teeth. In one darkness-rending burst, we took down all the remaining human shadows except for the Hercules shadow, both giants, and the Minotaur. The dragon, a little farther back, managed to veer away, blinded for the moment and horribly wounded.

  Medusa and the Chimera had hung back, as had Hercules, so we still had three viable adversaries—four if we gave the dragon time to heal.

  “Now what?” I asked. “They didn’t all fall for it, and there’s no way to prevent them from channeling the power of Erebus.”

  “I saw enough of the battle to see the problem was multitasking. I suggested you pull me in because two heads are better than one.”

  I realized at once what he meant. The two of us could do twice as many things simultaneously as just one of us. He recreated the light wall, while I restored the light above us. He kept the Chimera at bay by brightening the light wall whenever the beast shadow neared, making it hard for it to breathe the wall into ruins. I used a much more effective (because better prepared) sonic attack to shatter the boulders that shadow Hercules kept throwing. Magnus shot a bolt of light that skewered Medusa, rending her shadow flesh so badly that she, too, was driven back the Land of the Shades.

  The Chimera was still preoccupied with trying to bring down the light wall and restore the shadows’ access to the raw power of Erebus. The dragon, positioned as far as it could get from both light sources, was twitching uncomfortably, waiting for its wounds to heal. That left Hercules, so Magnus and I double-teamed him. The next time the hero’s shadow lifted a boulder, we caused silvery light to explode from it. The shadow dissolved with a scream of epic intensity, and the boulder thudded to the ground like a minor earthquake.

  Eighteen down. Two to go.

  The dragon was not back to full strength yet and had trouble dodging when we started lancing it with light. It was powerful enough to resist immediate destruction, but eventually the damage we inflicted was too great, and it, too, dissipated with a great reptilian roar.

  The Chimera, now alone against us, flew at us, rage oozing from every inch of its shadowy flesh. Another burst of intense light sent it back from whence it came.

  Unbelievably, we had won.

  “You received help from one of the members of your party,” said Erebus, his words vibrating with anger. “One of your men has entered you. My assassins overheard him say something about aiding you. Then he fell.”

  “Speculation,” I said calmly. “Your assassins could not have overheard anything, because my men were speaking to one another telepathically.

  “In fact,” I continued, “he is within me, but he is not someone else helping me. He is me. See for yourself.”

  “Being a shifter does not make him you,” insisted Erebus.

  I wondered if Erebus could really tell our bodies were identical. I guessed DNA was probably not part of his worldview.

  “I am willing to take an oath on the Styx to that effect,” I said.

  “As am I,” said Arianrhod. “I know the human soul, and these two you see as two have but one between them. They are the same person.”

  “An oath on the Styx will not bind either of you. I demand a greater guarantee.”

  “I demand you honor your contract,” I said, knowing we didn’t have time for some elaborate test Erebus might propose. I wouldn’t put it past him to try to involve me in a trial-by-combat situation to prove myself innocent, and I wasn’t up to that.

  “I drew upon a part of myself, not a separate person, drawing from him as your shadows drew from you. You yourself opened that door. All I did was step through it.”

  “You must satisfy me that you speak the truth,” the primal Olympian insisted.

  “We have most urgent business to attend to, business that will not wait for you to be satisfied. You are just attempting to delay us. Perhaps we should see to it that the entire supernatural world knows of your double-dealing.”

  “You will not falsely accuse me!” demanded Erebus, his anger scaling from red to white-hot.

  “I think potential clients of yours might want to know that your shadow assassins couldn’t beat me even twenty to one—and with your power behind them!

  “And not just any shadow assassins,” I continu
ed before he could interrupt. “Hercules, giants, a dragon, the Chimera—and one man beat them all. Are you sure you want that news spreading throughout the universe?”

  “Particularly with my voice behind it,” added Arianrhod. “Many more will believe if I swear to it. Your assassins won’t be trusted to kill someone three minutes away from dying of old age by the time I am through.”

  I was certain Erebus would have liked nothing better at that moment than to smother us all with his vast, shadowy bulk, something he could easily do, especially in our exhausted condition. A move like that, however, would have utterly flushed the reputation of the Populus Umbrae, and he knew it.

  However, though he didn’t attack us, he continued to insist he would not honor the agreement without proof of my words. I knew he was looking for a way to save face, so I gave him one. Our last agreement had not included the gold; I figured we might need it for just such a situation. Getting more compensation that the contract called for was enough to satisfy his pride—or maybe his greed. I really didn’t care which. Either way, he agreed to accept the gold—and our eternal silence about the day’s events—in exchange for his gracious acceptance of my allegedly dubious victory.

  He made arrangements with Arianrhod to claim the gold, and he gave us our safe passage, which would enable Umbra to take us through the Land of the Shades to Tartarus without interference.

  By the time we were done, he was as happy to be gone as we to see him go. We had thwarted all of his goals and achieved all of ours. All things considered, not a bad day’s work.

  As luck would have it, though, my work was not done.

  When I walked over to where the guys were standing, now free of the shadow assassins so recently haunting them, I saw Shar had Zom out, its glow giving everything around him an emerald sheen, vivid in the surrounding near darkness. Why have his sword unsheathed now, though? Where was the threat?

  “Maybe now’s the time to end Magnus,” Shar thought to me. “He seems to be out of his body. We could tie him up, and you could figure out how to break that duplicating spell and set Robin free.”