The ward network shivered, a tidal wave of sheer power crashing into it... into her. Her head snapped back, as if she’d been slapped or punched with terrific force. For a moment, she thought it was real, as if Jayson or Master Highland had tried to knock her out while she was linked to the wards. And then, as her scattered thoughts collected themselves, she realized it was worse. Far worse. Her awareness expanded, too late. The mirrors were coming to life. All the mirrors were coming to life.
“What happened?” A hand grasped her shoulder. She was so dazed she couldn’t tell who was speaking. “Emily! Answer me!”
“Emily,” another voice said. Who? Jayson? Master Highland? She didn’t know. “What’s happening?”
A scream rent the air, followed by a gunshot. Emily barely heard either. She was transfixed, held in place as she watched things burst out of the mirrors. Manavores... and other things, different things. She could hardly bear to look, yet... she couldn’t force herself to look away. The ward network was starting to splinter, their mere presence tearing great holes in the web. Emily gritted her teeth and drew on the nexus point, trying to keep the network from collapsing. Lord Whitehall had found a way to keep the Manavores out of the castle, hadn’t he? She wished she knew how.
She held her link to the wards as she opened her eyes. The chamber was lit up with bright red light. She didn’t have to look down to know the nexus point was going crazy. Brilliant flashes of red-orange light filled the air, each one bringing a wave of magic with it. Outside, she heard more gunshots. Someone was shooting at... at the Manavores. She hoped—prayed, desperately—the runic bullets were working. If they didn’t work, the school was about to be overrun...
Master Highland shook her, hard. “What happened?”
“They were waiting for a chance to break through,” Emily said. The room was growing hotter with terrifying speed. “And now they’re loose.”
She closed her eyes. She could feel the... things... tearing through the school, despite her best efforts. She had to fight to keep the wards from surrendering to the onslaught, from completely collapsing. Her people, people she’d invited to the school, were dying. She could feel their deaths... she forced her eyes to open, despite her body’s sudden insistence that she needed sleep. She could barely move. She felt torn between two worlds...
“The guns are working,” Jayson called. He was standing by the door, peering out. “We hit the creatures with bullets, they die.”
“And more are coming out of the mirrors,” Emily said, bitterly.
She saw it now. The Manavores were gateways to other realms, as well as living beings in their own right. Now... they were being warped and twisted, allowing things from other realities to infest her reality. She cursed, again, as she understood the true horror of what they’d unleashed. Things from the higher realms were going to spread out and utterly destroy the Nameless World, unless she could stop them. But she didn’t know where to begin. The nuke-spell would only make matters worse...
Master Highland was staring at a piece of paper. “Yvonne’s got the workshops under control,” he said. The chat parchment glowed with magic. “Praxis thinks they can keep themselves safe, for the moment. The dorms have been abandoned. Cirroc and the others are at the mirrors...”
This must have been what happened last time, when the school fell, Emily thought. She heard more gunshots from outside the chamber. They weren’t running from a necromancer. They were running from Manavores and...
Her thoughts darkened. They must have dimmed the nexus point, somehow, to save themselves. But they didn’t last long enough to save themselves when the necromancer arrived.
She looked up at Master Highland. “I need to get back in tune with the wards,” she said. She wasn’t sure if she was telling him or pleading with him. “Give me a moment to think and”—her fingers fumbled with the pistol on her belt—“use this, if you have to.”
Master Highland eyed the gun as if she’d given him a live scorpion. “What do I do with this?”
“Point it at the enemy and pull the trigger,” Emily said. It was all she could do to keep her eyes open. She was under attack... she could feel something pressing at her mind, trying to break her link to the wards. “Fire when you see the whites of their eyes.”
Master Highland let out an odd sound, halfway between a laugh and a cry. “Do they have eyes?”
“Sometimes.” Emily closed her eyes. “Let me think...”
The ward network seemed to grow stronger, just for a second, as she plunged her mind back in. Master Highland was right, she noted absently; the wards around the workshops and the mirror chamber were still intact, suggesting the Manavores and the other creatures—alien things, their mere presence pressing against her minds—hadn’t managed to break into the sealed compartments. Emily silently blessed their foresight and that they’d covered or protected all the mirrors, even the ones that hadn’t been transfigured Manavores. They’d have been wiped out in seconds if they’d left the mirrors intact...
Lord Whitehall used the wards to drive the Manavores out, she reminded herself, as she channeled power into the network. Did he turn the wards against them directly?
She reached out, intending to rip the Manavores to shreds. It didn’t work. Pain stabbed into her head, so sharp and real that she thought she’d been stabbed with a knife. It came within bare seconds of killing her. She forced herself forward, trying to throw the Manavores out of the building, but it didn’t work. Mere contact with the creatures nearly threw her out of the network. She could feel them turning to look at her. They knew she was there. They knew...
How did he do it? More pain, so much pain that she could barely string two thoughts together. She wanted to turn and flee, to close the link and lock it behind her. Somehow, she managed to keep the link open. How did he do it?
She heard Master Highland say something, but she ignored him. She didn’t have time. The very structure of the school itself was breaking down; corridors twisting and going places that no human mind could understand, rooms expanding to the breaking point and then far beyond. She could feel reality screaming, feel things scuttling at the corner of her eyes as... something happened. What had they done? What had they unleashed? She pulled back as much as she could, feeling the pain lessen. But reality itself was still bending and twisting and...
Her awareness flittered through the school. The Manavores were doing something... she pushed her awareness closer, trying to study the creatures rather than destroy them. A Manavore rose up in front of her, an impossibly big creature in a very small space... she felt her eyes begin to fragment as she tried to peer into dimensions she couldn’t grasp, let alone comprehend. She’d been more accurate than she’d known when she’d talked about two and three-dimensional creatures. The Manavore—what she could see of the Manavore—was a very tiny part of something much greater...
She felt her thoughts begin to... soften, a strange tranquility coming over her as she glided through the Manavore. She was falling—or rising—and... somehow, it was hard to feel any sense of alarm. It dawned on her that she might be dying, that she might already have left her mortal body far behind, but... she wasn’t alarmed. She felt peaceful. She wanted to close her eyes and sleep forever...
A vision exploded in front of her mind’s eye, something so vast... something her mind was trying to comprehend, trying to interpret in a manner she could understand. Huge things—ideas, she knew on some level—moved around her, seemingly unaware of her presence. Below her—she thought it was below—she saw a monstrous web stretching out in all directions. It was flat, yet multidimensional... her head hurt as she tried to take it in. She was down there—no, her body was down there—down in a place so tiny she could barely see it. The sense of alienness was beyond comprehension. And yet...
Timelines, she thought, numbly. I’m looking at timelines.
A shadow fell across her, across the web. She looked up and saw... something. Her mind struggled, fighting desperately to put so
me form of meaning to whatever she was seeing. A giant spider, prowling the web. No, a spider held in place by the web. By tiny threads of light, each linked to a mirror. And, below the web, a single glowing point of light. She knew, somehow, it was the nexus point. The spider was held...
It wasn’t a spider. It was... her mind quailed as she tried to grasp the sheer immensity of what she was seeing. It was... it was... it was...
She fell back into her body. The force of the impact jarred her, even though she knew she hadn’t moved. Blood poured from her eyes, staining her dress... there was no pain, yet... she was bleeding. She touched her eyes lightly, but there didn’t seem to be any wound. She blinked, hard. Her vision was blurry. It wasn’t the blood in her eyes, it was something else. The world was a fragile place, the walls barely even there. She wondered she could simply press through the solid matter, as if it wasn’t there. Reality itself was breaking down...
I’m drunk, she thought, dazed. It should have scared her. Instead... it was just another piece of abstract information, as if it didn’t affect her at all. She knew something was wrong, and yet she couldn’t force herself to care. I’m drunk and... I can’t think clearly and...
Master Highland slapped her. She barely felt it.
“Emily,” he snapped. His voice sounded tinny, as if he was a long way away. “Emily!”
“I know,” Emily said. Much of what she’d seen was already draining from her mind, as if she couldn’t retain memories she couldn’t comprehend, but... she’d seen enough. “I know what they were doing. I know what they were trying to do.”
She broke down into helpless giggles. Master Highland slapped her again, harder. Emily looked up at him, too out of it to care. His blows barely hurt, as if they weren’t quite real... she thought he looked unnerved, as if he’d expected a very different reaction. She wondered, suddenly, what she looked like. A girl with bleeding eyes... or a multidimensional creature in her own right? The thought brought her back to herself. She bit her lip to help her focus. It felt as if the slightest distraction would send her plunging back into the other world.
“Fishing.” She found herself starting to giggle again. “They said they were going fishing.”
Master Highland looked at her as if she’d gone insane. “Emily, I swear to you that if you don’t start making sense...”
Emily shrugged. It was hard to care about his threats, now that she’d seen the truth. She understood precisely what they’d been trying to do when they’d founded Heart’s Eye. And she knew why they’d failed, why the school had fallen, why they’d left a booby-trapped building for her...
“They went fishing,” she repeated. The sheer audacity of the plan stunned her. “Guess what they caught?”
Master Highland’s grip tightened. “What? What did they catch?”
“A Faerie,” Emily told him. She remembered the creature caught in the web and shuddered. She knew she hadn’t seen all of the creature, but what she’d seen had been more than enough to leave scars. Her eyes hurt, even though the bleeding had stopped. “They caught a real live Faerie.”
Chapter Thirty-Five
“A FAERIE?” MASTER HIGHLAND ASKED.
Emily nodded, forcing herself to her feet. Her jaw was starting to hurt, even as the memories of the Faerie continued to fade. “I saw it all.”
She leaned against him as she stood upright, drawing on the nexus point recklessly for energy. She’d pay for it later, she was sure, but she had no choice. Time wasn’t on their side. The chamber looked translucent... she blinked and it was as solid as ever, as if reality wasn’t on the verge of breaking down. And yet, she heard the howling in her ears, a sound that transcended reality itself. The entire building was turning into something else.
“The Manavores aren’t creatures,” she managed. They stumbled towards the door, moving like drunken lovers. “They’re aspects of a greater whole. Fingertips of an entity sitting outside reality. They’re”—she found herself grasping for analogies she could hold in her mind, analogies he could grasp—“hands reaching into a murky pool. They’re...”
“Monsters,” Master Highland said, bluntly. The howling seemed to grow louder. “And they’re killing everyone.”
Emily nodded, curtly. Heart’s Eye had reached out and caught a Manavore—more than one Manavore—and discovered, too late, that they had a tiger by the tail. The Faerie was trying to break free, trying to escape... and, in doing so, it was threatening to rip reality apart. She saw it now, clearly. Its presence had warped timelines, bringing them into contact; it had allowed people to use the mirror dimension to cross from timeline to timeline, regardless of the dangers. And now...
She swallowed, hard. The Faerie was trying to escape. And, when it broke free, it would break the links between alternate timelines. If she didn’t manage to get Caleb and Frieda back by the time it left, they’d be trapped forever... if they didn’t just blink out of existence. She still wasn’t sure if the alternate timelines were real in any conventional sense. They might be just possibilities, twisted versions of reality summoned into existence by the Faerie... universes that would collapse, the moment it was gone. She simply didn’t know.
“We can talk to it,” Master Highland suggested. A shudder ran through the building. They nearly tumbled off the bridge. “Ask it to leave...”
“We can’t.” Emily could barely remember what she’d seen, but... the Faerie had been so completely beyond her that there was no point in even trying to talk. “An ant might as well try to talk to a stomping boot.”
“There are spells one can use to talk to animals,” Master Highland pointed out.
Emily glanced at him. “Can the animals cast the spells?”
She reached the door and, bracing herself, pushed it open. Jayson and the two guards stood outside, their weapons at the ready. Creatures flowed down the corridors, translucent monsters that faded in and out of reality... this time, Emily could see the threads of power leading back to the Faerie itself. They really were just fingers—manipulators—of something greater. And, every time a bullet stuck one, it blinked out of existence.
“Emily,” Jayson said. He glanced at her, his eyes going wide as he saw her bloodstained shirt. “What happened?”
“There’s no time to explain,” Emily said. She reached out to the wards, strengthening them as much as possible. It was a tug-of-war that could only have one outcome, but... it would give her time to rescue her friends. She sealed the nexus chamber behind her, hoping the wards would keep the Manavores out. If nothing else, they’d have trouble operating in an environment that couldn’t support their link to the Faerie. “We have to get to the workshop.”
“Got it,” Jayson said.
“I think they’ve got us,” one of the guards put in. He sounded terrified. “I don’t want to say we’re surrounded, but... we’re being attacked on all sides.”
Emily reached out to the wards and—carefully—summoned power. Light flared, further down the corridor. The Manavores stopped dead, then turned to flow towards the lights. Emily pulled herself away from Master Highland and led the way down the corridor, hurrying in the opposite direction. The darkness grew stronger, surges of power suggesting that something watched from the shadows. She had to risk a very basic night-vision spell, even though it might draw the Manavores to them like moths to a flame. They couldn’t get there in the dark.
The sooner we invent electric light, the better, she thought. They ran down a corridor that—only an hour ago—had been lined with mirrors. Now, half the mirrors were gone. We can’t escape without using magic, but we can’t escape if we do.
The building felt different as they made their way to the workshops. The walls felt strange, as if they were no longer quite real. She thought she could push her fingers through the stone with very little effort, even though it was stone. It was real yet it wasn’t, and... she felt her head start to ache, realizing she saw several different possibilities at once. She wanted to ask what Master Highland saw, but sh
e didn’t quite dare. He might think she’d gone insane.
A Manavore appeared out of nowhere, as if it had always been there. It lunged towards her, teeth and claws reaching for her throat. The guards shot it, quickly. It winked out, as if it had no more substance than a soap bubble. Another appeared behind them, its presence polluting the air. Jayson swore as the guards shot it too. The Manavores had found them.
“Run,” he said, quietly.
Master Highland pressed the pistol into Emily’s hand. “Take this.”
Emily nodded as they picked up speed. The pistol felt reassuringly solid, although... she knew they were just kicking and screaming on their way to the gallows. The Faerie had no shortage of Manavores. She could practically feel them, stacked up in the millions as the creature struggled to break free. And, sooner or later, the Faerie would start to use naked force to free itself. She felt its presence growing stronger, bringing so much power to bear on reality that it was on the verge of shattering everything. It cared nothing for the devastation it wreaked on her world... on multiple worlds. It just wanted to leave.
As flies to wanton boys are we to... them, Emily thought, grimly. The Faerie was so big, so powerful... so inevitable. It was a grown man splashing through a puddle, heedless of the damage it was doing to the microscopic life forms below his feet. How did they ever banish them in the first place?
She put the thought aside as she heard the sound of gunshots in the distance. The workshops were clearly still being defended, thankfully... she glanced at Jayson, then raised the pistol as they hurried forward. The Manavores surrounding the door flickered, suddenly facing them; the guards opened fire, banishing them in an eyeblink. Emily reached out to the wards again, causing a division that drew them away from the doors. They turned and flowed away...
Something moved above her. She jumped to one side before her conscious mind realized what was happening. A Manavore—no, something else—fell, landing where she’d been standing. It was so alien that her mind skipped over it, as if someone had deliberately blurred the image. Just trying to look at it made her eyes hurt worse, almost as if she stared into a blinding light. Somehow, she managed to point the pistol at the creature and pull the trigger. It snapped out of existence. The world dimmed around her, as if the lights were failing. She felt a flash of panic at the thought of going blind before she blinked, hard. Her vision returned to normal.
Mirror Image (Schooled in Magic Book 18) Page 33