by Jeff Hirsch
Glenn tried to pull it away from him, panicking at the memory of the power rising inside her, overcoming her, wiping her away.
“Don’t,” Glenn pleaded. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”
Merrin got hold of her hand, but Glenn yanked it to her chest, dragging Merrin forward until she was just inches from his hatchet-like face and stringy hair.
“She’s my mother,” Glenn said. “The Magistra. This bracelet is the only thing that keeps me from becoming just like her. So take it if you want, but you’ll be dead before you can walk to the door.”
Merrin stopped. His eyes narrowed on Glenn’s. He leaned
forward so Glenn could feel his lips alongside her ear.
“Well, then,” he whispered. “I guess I’ll have to sort you out before I take it.”
He raised his hand, and the pulse in Glenn’s throat beat against the blade of the knife. Glenn sucked in a breath, waiting for the cut.
“Merrin!”
The voice came from behind him. As Merrin turned, still holding the knife to Glenn’s neck, Glenn saw Kevin standing behind him. The sword in his hand gleamed red in the fires of the foundry.
“Get away from her.”
Merrin laughed. “Well, well, the hero of the hour.”
“I said — ”
“You don’t have it in you, boy. If you’d been able to do your job and get the bracelet from her before, we wouldn’t be here now. Serves us right sending some outsider child to do our work for us.”
“Put the knife down,” Kevin ordered.
Merrin sneered and pressed the blade into Glenn’s throat. But before it could break her skin, Kevin rushed toward them. Merrin turned, knife in hand, but Kevin was faster, driving his blade into the thick of the older man’s stomach. Merrin cried out and crumpled to the dirt floor of the foundry. A pool of blood grew beneath him.
The sword slipped from Kevin’s hands as he fell backward,
crashing to the floor. His face was pale and drawn, no different from Aamon’s as he stood in that river, the horror of what he had done dawning on him. Glenn stepped over Merrin’s body and knelt beside Kevin. She wished she could say something to him, tell him he had no choice, but she knew it wouldn’t make any difference.
“We should go,” Glenn said quietly. “Now.”
Kevin’s body jerked as if he was waking from a dream. He stood and turned to the glowing ovens. “We can still use it,” he said, almost to himself. “We don’t have to destroy it. We can — ”
Glenn pulled at his hand. “There’s no time for that. We have to go.”
Kevin’s hand stiffened as he drew away from her. “No time? You came here to …” Kevin’s eyes went sharp as he trailed off. “You weren’t coming here to destroy it.”
“Kevin — ”
“What were you going to do?” His voice rose. Glenn backed
away from him as he came at her. “You were going to give it to him?
To Sturges?”
Glenn turned to run but Kevin grabbed her wrist. She cried out and tried to escape, but he was too strong. Her terror grew. Had the last vestige of Kevin Kapoor disappeared?
Kevin yanked Glenn toward him, and then, instead of taking the bracelet, he ripped opened his shirt and clamped her hand down on his side, covering it with his own. Beneath her fingers, Glenn could feel the heat of his skin and the long rough edges of his barely healed wound.
“You were going to give it to the man who did this?”
Glenn tried to tear her hand away, but Kevin kept it tight against his skin. Their eyes met.
“Kevin …” Glenn began, but was stopped by a deep boom from
somewhere outside. A second later the ground shook.
Kevin’s head cocked to one side. “What was that?”
There was a shrieking whistle overhead, then another boom. The whistle began to fill the foundry, growing louder by the second, turning into a scream. Something clicked in Glenn. She grabbed Kevin’s arm and pulled him toward the door at a run.
“Where are we going?”
“Just run!”
Glenn slammed through the front door with Kevin close behind.
The sound was deafening now. Glenn made for a building across the street. Its front door was open and she hoped it would be enough. Once they made it inside, Glenn threw both of them to the floor.
As soon as they landed, a series of explosions rocked the town, shooting tremors through the earth. All Glenn could see through the open door was an expanding wave of smoke and debris. A rain of bricks and shards of iron and glass and burning wood fell all around them.
As the smoke wave passed, Glenn saw that the foundry had been reduced to a pile of broken stone and wood and mangled iron. The fires from its shattered ovens had spread, setting the surrounding buildings aflame. There was a second’s pause and then another boom somewhere else in the town. More crashes followed with barely a pause, seemingly everywhere at once. Soon the air was filled with the sound of cracking wood and shattering glass and screams.
“What’s happening?” Kevin screamed over the din.
Glenn didn’t know. Some weapon of Garen Tom’s? Her mother’s?
Glenn looked up at a crackling sound and saw that the roof above them was burning.
“We’ve got to get out of here!”
Glenn took Kevin’s hand and dragged him out of the house and down an alley along the side of the building, nearly blind from the smoke. Glenn had no idea where they were going. She was guided by nothing but animal terror, falling face-first to the ground at each new crash, then forcing herself up again to run harder and faster.
The town was shrouded in thick gray smoke. As she ran, Glenn saw buildings that had been reduced to rubble and bodies fleeing in every direction. There was debris everywhere too, piles of brick and wood and here and there bodies lying on the road and on porches and hanging out of burning windows. The smell of it was overwhelming.
Glenn’s throat and lungs ached.
She didn’t know how long she ran but finally the smoke slowly began to clear. The road opened up ahead of her and she saw figures out in the gray. A group of ten or more — some standing, some holding others up, some slumped on the ground. At the center was a single hulking figure. As the smoke parted, she saw slate gray fur and then a snowy patch of white. Glenn ran and threw her arms around Aamon and he pulled her close. His face was swollen and streaked with blood and dust.
“What’s happening? What was that?”
“Did you do it?” Aamon asked. “Did you destroy it?”
“No,” she said. “I didn’t.”
A crunching sound came from all around them, boots on the
gravel road. Glenn turned, and from every direction, bodies moved in the smoke. She couldn’t guess how many but they seemed to be everywhere, converging on them.
Kevin snatched a fallen sword off the ground. Aamon moved in front of Glenn, pulling a handful of others to their feet to form a tight ring around her. All of them were injured. Some could barely stand.
25
The bodies in the smoke stopped. The men and women circling her barely breathed. They lifted their swords and drew their bows and waited. Two of the figures ahead parted, and a slight form emerged from the gray.
Michael Sturges pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his rumpled suit and calmly cleaned his glasses.
“Glenn Morgan,” he said with a pleased smile. “I had the funniest feeling I’d see you again.”
A growl rose from deep in Aamon’s throat as he crouched down, claws out, ready to spring at him. Kevin and the others tensed, surging forward to meet the legions of red-armored agents surrounding Sturges.
There was a clatter of metal as they raised their weapons.
“No!”
Glenn pushed through the line surrounding her and out into the space between Aamon and Sturges.
“Glenn!” Kevin cried.
She stilled the tremors that moved through her body and then
slowly held out her hand. The bracelet gleamed in the smoky air.
“No one else has to get hurt,” she said, pushing the words past a thick lump in her throat. “Please. You win. It’s yours.”
Sturges moved fast. Within minutes, his agents packed Glenn, Aamon, and Kevin into a horse-drawn wagon and they pulled out of Bethany, surrounded by a squad of soldiers. Glenn sat up front next to Sturges while Kevin and Aamon were in the back. Aamon had been hurt badly in his fight with Garen Tom and in the bombardment after.
His body was cut and swollen, but he still sat up tall, even though the effort to do it, and the rocking of the wagon, made him wince. Kevin was only a little better off, bruised and scraped and singed. He was slumped against the side of the wagon, blankly staring behind them.
Bethany was a smoking wreck. The fires were mostly out now
that nearly every building had been flattened or reduced to a few stubborn lengths of wood. Whether the blood-streaked bodies they saw as they left were killed in the fighting before or by Sturges’s assault, Glenn didn’t know. The day had offered up so many different ways to die.
As they passed out of the town, Glenn looked up in awe at a line of muscular-looking collections of black scaffolding. They were each thirty or forty feet tall with a heavy base and a long arm attached to a pivot at the top.
“Trebuchet.”
Sturges was sitting high up in the seat beside her, his red silk tie flapping in the wind. He held the horses’ reins lightly in his hands, guiding them along.
“Medieval siege weapons,” he said with a laugh. “Only way to fight these people is to go back in time. They’re like catapults but more powerful. Even more powerful with a few mechanical tweaks and modern materials. These things can shoot a half-ton lump of metal practically into orbit before it falls. Big boom. No explosives. They weren’t easy to drag out here, but once our people told us that everybody in the Magisterium with a sword was converging in the one town that could destroy that trinket you’ve got, it seemed worth it. Now, honestly, I didn’t know you were already in the foundry when I ordered the strike. Last person we’d want to kill is you.”
Sturges smiled his ingratiating smile. Glenn crossed her arms and stared ahead at the approaching trees.
“I know you didn’t want to get mixed up in all this, Glenn. I had time to check into you and I can see that this was all just a big accident.
Your grades are outstanding. Your record is perfect. You were looking at Deep Space Service, right?”
Sturges dangled it out there like a hook on a line. Glenn was curious to see where he was going with it, but she stayed quiet.
“I thought about DSS when I was your age, you know.” Sturges laughed again. “I was a disaster. Wasn’t smart enough for it. Didn’t have the drive.”
“Luckily, you had enough to become a spy and a murderer.”
Sturges glanced down at her. His smile faded as he eased the horses along the trail.
“My wife and I have a daughter,” he said. “Annie. She’s three.
She does this thing when she’s alone in her room, reading her books.”
Sturges was without words for a moment but then his eyes brightened.
“She sings to herself. Not even words, just this kind of gibberish.
It’s … I think it’s the most beautiful sound in the world.”
Sturges shook the reins and guided the horses around a bend in the path.
“I know there are people on this side of the border who are just like us,” he continued. “Peaceful people who want to live their lives.
But I also know that there are others, the ones with power, who would destroy our home in a heartbeat if they thought they could. It’s my job to stop that from happening, however I can. I don’t apologize for it.
Maybe if I was born over here, if my family was here, I’d feel the opposite. But the Colloquium is my home. It’s who I am. That’s not something that changes.”
One of the horses whinnied and shook its mane. Sturges turned away from Glenn and made soothing sounds until it quieted.
“Like I said, I misjudged you. That’s clear from what just
happened. A lot of people could have gotten hurt and you stopped that.
Once we get home, I’m sure we can get everything sorted out. Heck, I’ll write you a recommendation to DSS myself. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to have you a few thousand light-years away. Once I have your father’s tech, this is all done.”
“You’ll let him out of the hospital?”
Sturges waved the question away. “We may want to talk to him a little more so we make sure we understand what he’s created, but after that, I don’t see why not.”
“What will you do with it?” Glenn asked. “The bracelet?”
Sturges turned to her, his hair blowing in the wind, exposing his high temples. “Do you care?”
One of the horses whinnied again and its skin trembled. The Rift border was growing immense in front of them. They’d be across it in no time.
Glenn glanced over her shoulder. Kevin and Aamon were staring out over the heads of the soldiers as Bethany and the Magisterium faded into the distance. All it would take to deny Sturges what he wanted was tearing off the bracelet. Hadn’t she had a little more control last time? Maybe she could grab Kevin and Aamon and take them away before Sturges could do a thing about it.
Her hands sat in her lap, surrounded in the rough wool of her Magisterium clothes, the gray band heavy on her wrist.
Glenn saw herself on 813, moving from lab to lab in the planet’s small outpost. Talking quietly with the other settlers about the work that consumed them. At night they’d sit in the observation lounge after dinner and take turns guessing which tiny speck on the horizon was Earth.
The Magisterium, its horrors and jarring beauty, would be like a story she was told long ago and vaguely remembered. Her father would be free.
And what of Kevin and Aamon? The reality of the Colloquium
would strip the lingering presence of Cort out of Kevin and the killer out of Aamon. They could go back to their lives. The ones they always should have had. In time they’d thank her. Wouldn’t they? It had seemed so simple up there on the mountaintop, so clear, but now …
Glenn pulled her coat tight over her chest to stop a chill. Was it getting colder? She looked up at the sky. Ranks of dark clouds had begun to move in. The wind picked up, blowing dust and fallen leaves into their path.
As the wagon hitched up another rise, the horses spooked,
crashing into one another in their traces. Sturges snapped the reins, but the horses’ easy strides turned fast and disjointed.
“What’s wrong?” Glenn asked.
Sturges sat up higher in his seat, trying to ease them, but they strained against him as hard as they could, white froth growing at their mouths.
“Sturges …” Aamon said from behind them.
Aamon was leaning forward, his body tense, peering up into the sky. Amidst the dark clouds, something else was gathering over the remains of Bethany. It looked like a dark smudge, as if someone had dipped a finger in black paint and drawn it across the sky.
“What is it?” Glenn asked.
Aamon whipped around to face them. “Faster. Now!”
Sturges snapped the reins and leaned forward into the growing wind. The horses screamed and jerked ahead, almost shooting Kevin and Aamon off the back of the wagon. Glenn’s knuckles went white as she gripped the plank by her side. Around them the armored men struggled to keep up.
26
Glenn turned and watched as the smudge grew, taking up more and more of the sky as it approached. There was a sound now too, like blowing wind mixed with some kind of high-pitched call, chaotic and jumbled. Closer, the smudge was like a haze of oily smoke, but soon Glenn was able to pick out individual parts of it, small bits turning within the whole, a swirling mass of dark forms and flashes of silver tumbling through the sky.
“What is it?” Glenn asked. “Aamon?”
“Do you see what your attack has gotten you, Sturges?” Aamon growled. “Do you see what you’ve awoken?”
“Aamon!”
“It’s her,” Aamon said.
“Who?”
His green eyes flared. The black cloud behind him was moving impossibly fast, growing and darkening as it came.
“The Magistra,” he said.
Glenn could almost reach out and touch the trees that marked the beginning of the border, they were so close. Sturges urged the wagon forward, but the cloud and that awful windy scream sounded right behind them. It seemed to take over the entire sky now, a swirling mass of screeching. As it lowered, Glenn finally saw what it was: an enormous flock of black birds with long silver-tipped tails. Thousands of them, moving as one.
Sturges snapped the reins again, but it was too late — the flock rolled over them like a cloud. The horses bucked, refusing to go any farther. Glenn dropped her head into her hands as she was buffeted by their small bodies. They were everywhere at once, a swirl of claws and wings and shrieking. They washed over the wagon, then turned and began to circle it, going faster and faster until they seemed to suck the air out of the sky. It was like being caught in the eye of a tornado, the bodies of the birds making up the black and silver walls of its funnel.
The soldiers looked to one another, unsure what to do. Sturges was screaming at them to move, but it was no use. The call of the birds was so loud that no one could hear him.
The birds spun until Glenn lost track of their individual bodies, and the cacophony of their screeching became one ear-tearing scream.
And then everything went quiet.
It happened all at once, as if someone had turned the sound off.
The flock was converging in front of the wagon. Like water flowing down a drain, the birds reached one point and disappeared in a haze of darkness that grew deeper every second. The sight of it made Glenn’s heart go still and her skin turn clammy and cold.
Glenn dimly felt Aamon pulling at her, and thought she heard Kevin calling for her to run, but she couldn’t move or look away. She stood up in the front of the wagon and watched as the hole of darkness surged and coalesced. The birds silently dove into it, their bodies disappearing. Slowly, a form began to take shape amidst the black.