Novel - Arcanum 101 (with Rosemary Edghill)

by Mercedes Lackey

  Ms. Smith groaned. “That’s gotta be what Chris was having his vision about. I wish to hell precogs had more control. And I really wish we could drop everything and circle the wagons, but we can’t.”

  Tomas looked alarmed. “But it’s got Rosa! Mi hermana—it’s dangerous, and—”

  “Yeah, kid, it is,” Ms. Smith said with a sigh. “But so is letting everybody know what’s going on here at St. Rhia’s. So we need to keep the really big guns here, to make sure nobody sees anything they shouldn’t, and to make sure it doesn’t get onto the actual campus. Think you guys can handle it?”

  VeeVee nodded. “Won’t be tougher than what I’ve tackled before. I’ll need some backup, though, you don’t go after one of these things alone. I can’t track it easily. A Healer. Lalage—she’s the best balance for my Fire Magic. Mr. Bishop.”

  “Right. Let’s go round up a posse,” Ms. Smith said.

  “Why Mr. Bishop?” Tomas asked in a low voice. He’d said his Talent was psychometry. That didn’t seem as if it would be particularly useful today.

  “Some people have two Talents. It’s not common, but it happens,” VeeVee said. “Mr. Bishop senses Talent. He can also turn them off—that’s why he trains new Talents. When we find Rosa, we’ll want him to dampen her power temporarily and sever the link between her and the Trollking.”

  Tomas thought about that for a moment. “He can turn off Talents? Can he do it, like, forever?”

  VeeVee hesitated for a moment. “Yes. It’s a last resort, though. Your Talent… it’s part of what you are.”

  Ms. Smith moved quickly through the groups of students—nearly everyone was gathered outdoors by now—finding the people they needed. Aimee King and Gareth Moore were both Sensitives—Aimee was a Psionic, Gareth was a Mage, so they were covered both ways. Mr. Bishop arrived in the middle of Kayla’s explanation to them about what was needed, and attached himself to the group without needing to be asked.

  Last was Lalage. Tomas was a little surprised that VeeVee had asked for her, considering everything, but he already knew that VeeVee took her work very seriously.

  Lalage was standing in the middle of a group of girls that Tomas knew slightly. She looked pleased to see him, puzzled and wary to see VeeVee with him, and then simply confused. Ms. Smith beckoned her over.

  The explanation was quickly made, and to her credit, Lalage didn’t hesitate to agree to help.

  “And I guess, if you need a Healer along, that’s going to be me.” Kurt Richards had been standing at the edge of the group of girls talking to Lalage, and had followed her over to Ms. Smith.

  Lalage looked at him in surprise. He regarded her steadily. “VeeVee’s said that the Trollking won’t want to hurt Tomas’s sister. So there really won’t be anything for me to do, will there?”

  Oh. Oh.

  Everyone always thought that because she was beautiful—and knew it—Lalage was stupid, but in fact, if you were beautiful, you’d better be smart. And she was. She’d known from the moment VeeVee had walked in on her and Tomas in his room that the boy had it bad for the school’s Ice Princess—who would have guessed that the Fire Mage would be the thing that sunk the Titanic?—and there was nothing on earth (or for that matter, anywhere else) that was going to change his mind.

  And sure, she was jealous, but not really of VeeVee. And yeah, it would be nice if Tomas was in love with her—because he was not only drop-dead gorgeous, but smart and funny and sweet—but what she wanted more than Tomas was what Tomas and VeeVee had (because she had no doubt that VeeVee was just as much in love with Tomas as he was with her): that kind of whole-hearted love, the kind she’d always thought you only saw in movies and books, because no one had ever loved her that way.

  She’d thought. Until just this moment. The way Kurt had looked at her, how he’d been around Tomas, how he’d been around her before all this… now all the little bits suddenly fell together into a picture and she stared at him without blinking while everyone talked.

  She’d thought nobody cared about her. Not special.

  But… Kurt did. He was volunteering to go off into the woods with them—instead of Ms. Smith—just because she was going. So she smiled at him, and said:

  “Don’t worry, Ms. Smith. I’ll keep an eye on him.”

  And Kurt smiled back.

  “All right then. Let’s go,” VeeVee said.

  They’d moved fast. It was less than ten minutes from the time VeeVee had joined Tomas in the clearing to the time the seven of them—Tomas, VeeVee, Kurt, Lalage, Aimee, Gareth, and Mr. Bishop—were back there again. Aimee and Gareth began circling the clearing, trying to pick up the Trollking’s trail.

  Tomas was more worried than he’d ever been in his life. He could face danger to himself and not think about the worst that could happen until everything was over—but this? This was Rosalita in trouble, his baby sister, and he could feel himself drawing closer to panic with every minute that passed.

  “You have to focus, Tomas,” VeeVee said quietly. Her voice was pitched too low for anyone standing even a few feet away to hear, but even so it made Tomas jump. He felt a flash of anger, but quickly suppressed it. He knew she was right. But it was so hard!

  He turned toward her, knowing he looked as miserable as he felt.

  “The Trollking is a creature of magic,” VeeVee continued softly. “Your Talent isn’t going to be much use against it, but that’s not why you’re here. You’re the only one Rosalita knows. She’ll trust you. You have to be strong for her.”

  Tomas took a deep breath, holding on to VeeVee’s words. But he still blamed himself. “But if she’d never come here at all, none of this would have happened, VeeVee.”

  VeeVee shrugged, just a little. “No,” she said seriously. “Something much worse would have—and far from any possible help. Think about New York. You know how mean it is there. Figure just what else might live there, now that you know about things like magic and psi.” She looked off in the distance for a moment, and shuddered. He guessed she was remembering something.

  He decided he’d rather not know what it was.

  “Got him!” Gareth said excitedly. He pointed, and they headed off in that direction.

  “And I’ve got her,” Aimee said a moment later. “She’s scared—but she’s alive!”

  If the creature had been trying to hide—or, oddly, had been less powerful—the hunt would have taken them longer, but apparently it was doing nothing to conceal its presence. Gareth kept muttering and shaking his head, as if he smelled something bad, but he didn’t waver at all in his pursuit.

  On their way here, they’d come up with as much of a plan as they could manage in advance. Find the Trollking, and—somehow—get Rosalita away from it. Once they did that, Mr. Bishop would have to shut down her power, and VeeVee and Lalage could destroy it. Until the link was severed, they couldn’t actually try to harm the creature—not only would it be able to draw power from Rosa, but it would be linked to her: if they harmed it, they’d hurt her as well.

  There were a lot of points in this plan at which things could go horribly wrong.

  “This isn’t good,” Mr. Bishop said after a few minutes.

  “No,” VeeVee answered tightly.

  “What?” Tomas demanded. He was doing his best to stay calm—VeeVee was right; he might not be able to hurt the Trollking, but the whole plan really did depend on him, because he was the only one here Rosalita knew, and right now she was terrified.

  “There’s an old graveyard up this way. The dead there are at rest—but your sister’s strong enough to wake them up anyway,” VeeVee said. “If she’s scared enough.”

  “We’ve got to hurry,” Tomas pleaded, though they were almost running now.

  Up ahead, the trees were already thinning out, and now Tomas could hear his sister’s exhausted sobbing. Gareth stopped, clutching a tree and panting. Aimee went to his side, putting an arm around his shoulders. Tomas wanted to rush forward, but VeeVee put a hand on his arm.
>
  “Wait. Tomas, if you trust me—we have to go slow.”

  Tears of frustration burned in his eyes, but he did trust VeeVee. He’d given her no reason to trust him, lately, but he would always trust her. He forced himself to nod.

  “Okay. Come on.”

  They walked forward slowly. Lalage and Mr. Bishop followed.

  The clearing held what had indeed once been a small burial ground. The wrought-iron fence that had once surrounded it was red with rust, canted crazily in places, and lying flat on the ground in others. It surrounded perhaps a dozen old marble tombstones.

  Standing in the middle of the burial plot was the Trollking.

  Despite everything he’d seen since he’d come to St. Rhia’s, it was hard to believe the evidence of his own eyes. Something like that didn’t belong here, in the middle of an ordinary meadow in Upstate New York on an afternoon in July. Monsters like this belonged in the movies or on television. They were supposed to be unreal—fantasies—not standing just a few yards away. But it was real. Terrifyingly real. He could even smell it, a smell like sulfur and wet stone.

  It was hunched over, but if it stood upright it might be as much as twelve feet tall. Its skin was grayish black, and it had a flat face with a protruding jaw, almost like a bulldog’s, but there was nothing in the least comical or friendly about it. Even though it was standing in direct sunlight now, Tomas still couldn’t tell whether its skin was smooth or hairy; it seemed to shimmer and smoke, as if it were a cake of dry ice, so the creature’s outline was always blurry. He could see it breathing, hear the grunting noises it was making, and hear Rosa’s frightened sobbing, too. But still, he couldn’t—quite—see it. He clutched his hands into fists until they ached.

  It was larger now than the first time Tomas had seen it; Rosalita looked like a child’s doll in its hands now. It was holding her in front of its face, shaking her and growling. It was obvious to the observers that it wanted her to do something. It was equally obvious that Rosalita didn’t have the faintest idea of what it was. She kicked and struggled feebly in its grasp, sobbing and whimpering, out of her mind with terror.

  “We have to make it let go of her,” VeeVee said in a low voice. “Until it does, there’s no way Lalage and I can destroy it.”

  Suddenly the Trollking threw back its head and bellowed, exposing long yellow fangs. The sound was deafening, and Rosalita screamed in unison with it, a high cracking wail that came close to breaking Tomas’s heart.

  “Let’s do it,” he said grimly.

  He lashed out at the Trollking with the same kind of Fire he’d used before—his attack might not have hurt it, but maybe he could annoy it, and at least his fire was controlled enough to definitely not hurt Rosa. At the same time, Lalage struck with her Green Magic: the grass around the creature’s feet suddenly came alive, growing longer, whipping up around its stubby legs. An individual blade of grass might be easy to break, but there were hundreds of these, and soon they were joined by tree-roots. Every time the Trollking tore itself free of one web of clinging vegetation, more grew up instantly wherever it set its foot down.

  VeeVee had her athame out and was sketching symbols in the air. Lights began to dance around the creature’s head, but while it had welcomed the lights Tomas had seen before, it didn’t like these. It roared and tried to bat them away. First it held Rosalita in one hand and used the other to swat at the lights, but then, after VeeVee hit it right in the face with something particularly unpleasant, it dropped her completely.

  But the ground was already starting to shimmer with a glowing fog.

  If Tomas hadn’t had it explained to him—what this place was, and what Rosa’s power was, and how it manifested—he wouldn’t have known what he was seeing. But he had, and so he did know. The Trollking had terrified her enough that she was summoning the dead up out of their graves, and once the creature had eaten them, it would be even more powerful—hadn’t somebody said once that the energy of dead humans was the most powerful spirit energy there was?

  “Rosalita! Mi hermana! Here! Come here!”

  She pushed herself to her hands and knees, but she was obviously too disoriented and terrified to be able to move. Tomas ran out into the clearing. When she saw him, she staggered forward a few steps. He lunged for her, snatching her up as the Trollking grabbed for her. An entire full-grown tree slammed up out of the ground between Tomas and the creature, keeping it from grabbing both of them, and Tomas ran for the edge of the woods with Rosalita clutched in his arms.

  “We’re good,” he said, panting, as he crashed to his knees. “We’re good, right?”

  “Not yet,” Mr. Bishop said grimly. “They’re still linked, and while they are, she’s feeding him power—and any harm to him is harm to her.”

  Tomas looked back over his shoulder toward the abandoned burial ground. The Trollking was wrapped in a cage of light now, and surrounded by a forest of trees, but it was systematically smashing its way through them, reducing them to splinters. And the glowing fog was rising up from the graves, moving toward the creature as if it were some kind of psychic vacuum cleaner.

  “This won’t hurt,” Mr. Bishop said reaching for Rosa. “You have to trust me, Tomas.”

  “I do,” Tomas said steadily. Trust had never come easily to him. So many people had failed him, all his life. Lied to him, betrayed him, even tricked him to get him to do what they wanted. But he trusted Mr. Bishop. He held Rosalita tightly, holding her face against his shoulder as Mr. Bishop placed a hand on her head. When he touched her, Rosalita gave a surprised squeak and then went completely limp.

  “Go!” Mr. Bishop shouted to the two Witches.

  VeeVee and Lalage stepped out into the clearing. Tomas clutched his sister tightly. It went against every instinct he had to just let the two of them walk into danger like that. But this was their kind of fight, not his.

  Suddenly VeeVee was wreathed in flames, a shimmering pillar of fire. Beside her, Lalage glowed with a faint but visible emerald shimmer, and around her feet, the summer-dry grass turned deep green and bloomed with tiny flowers.

  The moment Daniel Bishop had shut down Rosa’s link to the Trollking—and her power—the shimmering fog over the graves vanished as if it had never been. The Trollking howled in rage, lunging for the intruders who had deprived it of its meal. But suddenly it found itself trapped in a cage of interlocking magics—Fire Witchery and Green Witchery.

  Again and again it broke through the cage of spells. Each time they were rewoven. And each time it broke through it was smaller. Weaker.

  But each time it broke free, it gained a few feet of ground. And neither VeeVee nor Lalage was retreating. It was only about six feet tall now, but it was still bigger than the biggest football player ever born. that Once more the cage of magics crumbled before its assault. It lunged forward.

  And Kurt came rushing out of the woods toward it.

  “Kurt!” Lalage screamed, but he didn’t slow, didn’t stop. Everyone always thought somebody Kurt’s size was slow and stupid. Tomas knew he wasn’t stupid, and now Kurt proved he wasn’t slow, either. He hit the Trollking with a tackle any football linebacker would have been proud of, stopping its rush and even making it stagger.

  And it picked him up and threw him. Hard.

  Once more the cage of magics surrounded the Trollking. But this time was different. There was a hum in the air that set Tomas’s teeth on edge, a high whine just at the edge of sound. No matter how hard the creature tore at the bars, they kept re-forming.

  Tightening.

  Now they were pressed against the Trollking’s shadowy skin, and—Tomas blinked—it was shrinking away from the bars of the cage. But they kept closing in on it, in every direction at once, and now they were writhing, in a way that made his eyes hurt to look at them.

  The spellcage shrank, and kept shrinking, and then it was the size of a basketball-

  And then it was gone.

  Lalage gasped, and dropped to her knees, and VeeVee staggered
over to the nearest tree and leaned against it. Mr. Bishop got up and walked out to them, making sure they were all right.

  And finally Tomas felt as if he could breathe again.

  It was over.

  The seven of them walked slowly back the way they’d come. Tomas carried Rosa. She was sound asleep; Mr. Bishop said she’d probably wake up in an hour or so, but he’d had to shut her Talent down quickly and thoroughly. Tomas didn’t mind. Sleep was the best thing for her right now. And she was all right. Oh, her dress was ruined, and she had some minor bumps and bruises, but she was here, and she was safe. That was what mattered most.

  Kurt walked along at the back of the group, with Lalage beside him, rubbing his head. He’d hit a tree when the Trollking had flung him off, and Lalage was still scolding him about trying to take on something so much bigger than he was, but considering everything—and considering what they’d been facing down—a few bumps and bruises—and a bad headache—was a small price to pay. And maybe somebody would eventually figure out how the creature had gotten here, but right now Tomas didn’t care. It was gone now, and that was the important thing.

  Just before they reached the road, they heard voices up ahead.

  “Hey! You guys all right?”

  Kayla Smith, Señora Davies, Mr. Songmaker, several of the other students, and a woman Tomas didn’t know, walked toward them through the woods. The strange woman had blonde hair, green eyes, and every instinct Tomas had told him that this woman was money. She wore casual clothes that looked as if she had just stepped out of a fashion magazine, but not the kind in the news-stands in the barrio. Every single seam and stitch she wore was perfect in a way that was more unreal than all the magic he had seen so far. And that took money.