by Victor Poole
"You should not have told our names," the lead witch hissed threateningly at Coren. Coren glanced up lazily at the witch, and he raised up his palm. The white figure of a woman appeared in the air above his skin. Ajalia saw the lead witch blanch, and flinch away from the white figure.
"When our forefathers came through the desert to the place that is now Slavithe," Coren said in a lazy voice, "they were led in the front by a man named Jerome." A third witch cut him off.
"Coren, shut up!" she snapped. "No one wants to hear from you anymore."
"No one ever wanted to hear from you," another witch threw out. Ajalia turned slowly, and she saw each of the women's faces. The seven witches were all younger than the old witch Ajalia had killed in the tenement; they all looked to be around Ullar's age, or Lilleth's. Each of them, Ajalia thought, looked mature enough in years to have some children of their own. She waved her hands, which held the glowing blue-coated dagger and knife, and gestured towards the lead witch.
"All of you," Ajalia said, "go and stand in a group over there."
"No," the lead witch said at once. "We will stay as we are."
"Coren," Ajalia said to the boy. "Tell me some incriminating secrets about Jane."
"That's her," Coren said immediately, pointing at a fat witch who looked to be about thirty-five years old. She had yellow hair that had been drawn up tightly behind her ears. Ajalia saw, now that they had come into the light, that four of the witches had long hair; two of their heads were shorn close, and one, the lead witch, had hair that seemed to have been short, but was growing out now.
"Congratulations on getting married," Ajalia murmured to the lead witch, and the witch flushed, her eyes narrowing in confusion. The lead witch glanced at the others on either side of her, and turned back to Ajalia. Ajalia saw her raise her hands as Coren spoke. She was sure that the witch's dark tendrils of magic would not be able to reach through the net she had made of star and earth light.
"Jane is married," Coren said, "but she has been selling her daughter to a neighbor for four years."
Jane, the yellow-haired fat witch, let out an inarticulate cry of rage.
"That is a lie!" Jane said, and she sounded like a cow who has been struck through the heart. Ajalia had still her eyes on the lead witch, but she kept Jane within the rim of her vision.
"Which one is that?" Ajalia asked, pointing at the second witch who had come into the light. She was younger than the lead witch, and her hair was dark brown, and very short.
"That's Vinna," Coren drawled out at once. "She's a servant to a rich man near to us here. She has a secret son that she is raising for the witches to use as a shadow boy. They haven't got anyone," Coren added, looking up at Ajalia. "My mother promised to get them a baby, but now she's dead."
"I have no child!" Vinna shouted at Coren. Her voice echoed strangely in the empty hall of the dragon temple; Ajalia thought that her boys would hear. She hoped they would have the sense to stay away from the stairs. She had instructed Daniel to keep the boys upstairs at night, no matter what they heard, after her encounter in the tenement, when the old witch and Ullar had happened to her. Ajalia had put together for herself that Ullar would come back to the dragon temple someday, and she did not want her little boys getting dragged into a brawl with a possible witch. Daniel, she was sure, would want to come and help her, but she did not want to fight off seven witches while she tried to protect her boys at the same time. Stay upstairs, she thought, and she watched the lead witch's black tendrils growing very slowly towards the blue net. These witches, Ajalia thought, were very weak, compared to Lily, and to Beryl.
"You have too," Coren shot back at Vinna. "He's the son of your brother-in-law, and your sister doesn't know. She keeps him with her mother," Coren said. "Her mother doesn't know Vinna's a witch, either."
"How do you know all of this?" Vinna demanded, her eyes filled with rage. Vinna looked as though she were about to start putting steam out through her ears. Coren grimaced at Vinna.
"You think my mother would allow someone like you to do magic without knowing everything about you?" Coren asked scornfully. He looked around at the lead witch, who now had black veins that were five feet long stretching almost to the edge of the blue net. "You won't get at me while I'm with her," Coren told the lead witch, nodding towards Ajalia. "She's much stronger than you." The white figure of a woman was still hanging in the air. Coren watched the lead witch's black tendrils run up against the surface of the blue net, where they bunched up together, like the stalks of a plant pushed against a hard wall. Ajalia saw the lead witch's eyes scrunch together with concentration; she saw that the witch was working very hard to produce the black lengths of magic. Coren's lips twisted in a caustic smile, and he opened his mouth again.
"Jerome was assisted by a figure of a woman, clothed all in white," Coren said, his voice mocking and sure. He no longer sounded afraid, but Ajalia could see a strange tension that ran all up one side of his back; he looked like a boy who pretended to be brave so that he would not feel fear. His body, as he sat on the floor beside where Ajalia stood, and turned slowly, was to her suddenly like a very small child's. Coren had acted so much like an angry young man that she had forgotten how young he still was.
The witches all watched him, and Ajalia turned around again, keeping every witch in her view. Another of the witches had sent black tendrils out toward the blue net; her black tendrils were weaker and smaller than the lead witch's. Ajalia did not relax yet; she was sure that the seven witches could collectively work some kind of mischief, and she had no desire to wring them up to violence until they had exhausted their sense of unity. Coren, she thought, would be able to break the group up.
"The sky angel, as she was called," Coren said, "came down to Jerome, and taught him how to fly."
AN
ARMY OF PRIESTS
Coren twisted his fingers, and the white figure raised her hands up, as had happened in the small room off the edge of the main hall. An idea struck Ajalia, and she raised her hands when the small figure of the sky angel did. She saw that three of the witches noticed this similarity; she saw their eyes narrow, and their lips tighten.
"She's not the sky angel," one of the unnamed witches hissed. "She's only a girl, and a foreigner.
"Has your mother given you a barrier?" the lead witch demanded of Coren. Ajalia saw that the lead witch's eyes were fixed furiously on the place where the black tendrils that had extended out of her chest ran up against the blue net. "Is it coming from that lighted stone?" the lead witch demanded. She stepped forward one step, but Ajalia saw that the lead witch's eyes went to the blades in both of her hands, and after the one step, the witch stopped. "Tell me," the witch commanded, her voice hard and cold.
"Tell me about her," Ajalia said to Coren, nodding at the lead witch. The dagger and the knife gleamed sharply in the light from the blue stone. Ajalia could see all of the witches looking at her suspiciously, and at the dagger. She was sure the witches had heard about her killing of Beryl that morning; she was sure that the witches were being cautious now. She knew that mortals were not supposed to be able to kill witches. Lilleth she had gotten by slicing through her neck, and so cutting out her ability to work magic. Ajalia supposed that this was what had happened when she had cut through the ugly blank white of Delmar's mother's soul. Beryl she had cut through as well, with mixed lights. Ajalia was sure that these witches, individually, were weak, but she suspected that they had some way of working together as a group, and she did not want to make a mistake.
Coren glanced at Ajalia, and saw her nod at the lead witch. His lips turned angry, and Ajalia saw that the lead witch was one of those who had inscribed magic in Coren's skin. Coren's fingers were held out still, the white figure of a woman with raised arms sparkling gently over his palm.
"That's Charm," Coren said. The woman's eyes hardened again, when Coren spoke her name. "She thinks she's something special," Coren said angrily. He put his free hand up to his forehead, and showed
Ajalia two wide, ugly black marks over his left eyebrow. "She did these," Coren told Ajalia, "and she botched the spells so badly that I was sick for a week. My mother had to undo the magic, and then put the spells in herself before I could start to get better. You're a fraud," Coren told Charm spitefully. "You can't do any proper magic."
Ajalia saw Charm's eyes widen with indignation, and the tendrils of black grew stronger for a moment, and then crackled against the blue net. Charm looked with alarm at the place where the sound had come from. The ends of her black tendrils had broken away, and she now had a long, angry stump of black.
"What was that sound?" Vinna demanded. The other witches fidgeted angrily where they stood, looking at each other, and at Charm. "What was that sound?" Vinna demanded again. Charm looked ashamed.
"It was nothing," Charm said.
"She was trying to take me for herself," Coren said, his mouth curving in a cruel smile. "Charm was going to shut the rest of you out, and have me for her personal thrall."
The other six witches turned, as one, to Charm, who quailed before their collective rage.
"I was not," Charm said. "I was aiming at her!" Charm raised a trembling hand, and pointed to Ajalia.
"All of you get into one group," Ajalia said, "so that I can see you all at once, or I will start to throw things." She saw the seven witches look at the blades she held, and after looking with tense eyes at each other, the seven women gathered before Coren, so that the boy was between them and Ajalia.
"Now we are all in one place," Charm said bossily. "Now you will have to listen to what we say."
"Are there more of you in here?" Ajalia asked. Coren looked up at Ajalia, and shook his head in the negative.
"It's only them," he whispered to her. She saw that Coren was, for the first time, confiding in her. His eyes were much brighter, and more innocent than she had ever seen them before, and his cheeks were no longer hard and cynical. He turned back to the witches, his shoulders bristling with anger and scorn. The witches, Ajalia told herself, might help to turn Coren away from darkness, so that he would choose to cooperate with her. She hoped that this would be so; she did not want Coren to enter the life of chaos and loneliness that lay before him now. She hoped that the boy could be saved from himself, and from what his mother, and these witches, had done to him. She could see the barest glimmer of a real boy, a nice boy, an honest and kind boy, beneath the heaps of tangled spells, and the anger and derision that laced through his whole body.
"You no longer speak for the rest of us," Vinna spat at Charm. She spoke just as Coren had whispered to Ajalia. Ajalia turned, and looked around at the darkness beyond her circle of light again; she had a tingle at the back of her neck that told her the priests had not left. She was not sure if the priests would have seen the witches sneaking into the building, but she did not think that the priests would have much patience with her, if they suspected her of consorting with witches.
"We said we would share the boy between all of us," another witch told Charm sternly.
"You can't keep me out," Charm hissed at the others, her eyes going swiftly to Ajalia. Clearly, the lead witch did not want to argue in front of Ajalia. Ajalia could see that the lead witch, out of all the others, saw how weak they looked, when they fought in front of her. Coren's face was still drawn in an angry sneer.
"You people can't even get along," Coren said. He flicked his fingers and the lighted figure over his palm raised up its arms again. "The sky angel taught Jerome to fly," Coren said, and he closed his fist. The white figure vanished at once, and Coren glared at the witches. Ajalia was still turning slowly, looking over the darkness behind her, and then at the witches before her. The second witch who had begun to conjure the darkness was yet struggling to make more than a few inches of blackness reach out of her chest.
Charm, whose dark vine of magic had reached all the way to the net of dancing blue, now had what seemed to be a dead spear of black coming out of her chest. Ajalia thought that the black magic would have retreated, but the touch against the blue net of mixed magic seemed to have stalled the ability of the black cord to move; she could see Charm frowning a little, and trying to recall the magic she had sent out. She wanted to tell the lead witch that her magic seemed to have been broken, but Ajalia did not think that the witches could see their own power; it looked, as they conjured it, as though they were pressing out a piece of themselves by force of will, and not as though they could see clearly what they were doing.
"Ajalia is the sky angel," Coren told the seven witches. "That means that all of you are doomed," he added, in a matter-of-fact voice.
Just then, a clatter of footsteps came through the darkness. Ajalia, who had been waiting for something of this kind to happen, raised up the dagger in her hand, and shouted out.
"In the name of the Thief Lord, and of the dead falcon!" she bellowed towards the sound. "Stop and explain yourselves!" The witches fell dead silent; Ajalia could see a flicker of movement out of the corner of her eye. She looked around, and saw that three priests had circled around behind the witches, and were attempting to keep them from escaping.
The footsteps that had been thundering towards Ajalia and Coren stopped; Ajalia thought she heard the quiet conference of voices. Ajalia wanted to roll her eyes. She wanted to knock people on the side of the head. She wanted the lights to be on. This thought reminded her that she could, in fact, put light into the hall, and she reached for the colored cords of light just below the temple, and in the sky just above it. She quickly twisted these lights together, and pushed them through two of the columns nearby. A gradual glow of white light began to shed through the darkened hall; in a moment, Ajalia could see a group of about twenty priests, with spears and ugly swords in their hands, gathered behind her, and around the witches. Ajalia and Coren were within the blue net of shining light; just without this net were the seven withes, who had huddled closer to it when they had seen the three priests ringing them in. The other priests, who had been on the opposite side, approaching Ajalia, now spread out in a tight circle, closing in the witches, and Ajalia and Coren.
"Explain yourselves," Ajalia shouted at the priests. She had been annoyed at the witches, and she had known that they came to harm her and Coren, but she was far angrier at the priests than at the witches. To her mind, she had already dealt with the priests. They had come, and presented their case, and she had turned them away. For them to return, and to bring weapons into the dragon temple, was, to Ajalia, tantamount to declaring a personal war on her. She remembered that she had told Delmar and Philas that she meant to start a war. Well, Ajalia told herself, Philas had commented that there would be a war, and she had agreed. She had told Delmar, though, she remembered, that she was going to start a war. Delmar had asked her why, and she had said, "Because I can."
Ajalia smiled at the memory of Delmar's shocked face, and she tightened her grip on her sharp knife. The hilt was a friendly weight in her hand; she hoped that she would not have to kill any priests. The priests, she told herself, were not worth the effort of killing.
The priests, who were led in the front by Thell, looked around at each other, and began, just a little, to mill around, like sheep. Ajalia saw that they had meant to attack in the darkness. She saw that they had wanted to fight without asking questions first. Her jaw tightened in annoyance.
"Didn't I tell you," she snapped at Thell, who had the grace to look a little ashamed of himself, "that I had no interest in being your sky angel?" The lighted columns, which were now casting bright beams of light throughout the hall, had drawn the attention of the witches, who were standing stock still, and staring with amazement at the blazing stone. The seven women seemed to have forgotten their mission in coming to collect Coren; they stared at the lighted stone, and then at each other, and looked like embarrassed schoolgirls. The priests, who, Ajalia reflected, had already seen their silver temple ablaze with light that she had spun through the walls, looked less embarrassed, and more annoyed.
"What do you have to say for yourselves?" Ajalia demanded. She wanted to step outside of the blue net, but in spite of the witches' and the priests' sudden and apparent calm, a tickle at the bottom of her skull told her that they would all gang up on her, and destroy her if they could. She was sure that they would pretend it was an accident. She pictured the priests telling Delmar that they had followed witches to the dragon temple, and that Ajalia had been mixed up in the crossfire as they had exterminated the evil hags in the dark hall. Now that the hall was ablaze with light, neither the witches nor the priests seemed to have any idea of what to do next.
Ajalia picked up Coren by the arm, and pulled the boy to his feet.
"This child," she shouted at them all, "has suffered in your secret war. Look at his face," Ajalia commanded, and the priests, many of whom had not been at the temple before, looked with disgust at the blackened cavities that spread over Coren's face and arms. Ajalia told the boy to take off his torn shirt. Coren glanced at Ajalia, and then pulled his tunic over his head. The priests, as a whole, gasped in disgust when they saw the spreading marks of dry black that spread like evil sores over the boy's whole torso.
"Tell them who did this to you," Ajalia told Coren. Coren looked at her again, and she saw that he was afraid of the priests.
"My mother did this," Coren said. One of the witches broke free of the other seven, and tried to run. Two of the priests jolted at her, and stabbed her through the heart before she could make much headway. Crimson blood spread in a hurried pool around the body; the two priests, flushed and triumphant, held their dripping weapons above the still form of the witch.
"We have destroyed a witch!" Thell announced, and a cheer went up among the other priests. The six remaining witches huddled, their eyes wide with terror, against the edge of the blue net. None of them touched the net; Ajalia was sure they could not see it, but they seem to sense its power near, and not one of them would come within a few inches of the dancing blue lights. Ajalia was sure that Thell, at least, could see the blue net of power. Many of the priests seemed to look straight through it, but Ajalia caught sight of three others, the three who had circled around the witches at first, whose eyes turned back again toward the blue lights, and studied the mesh of mixed magic with curious eyes.