There were fifteen of them, and they were simply—immobile. They might have been statues, except that Elena was perfectly certain that they were watching everything that passed around them.
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No wonder the cat had asked her if she could be invisible.
They paid no attention to the cat, however. Perhaps they were unconcerned about anything below a certain size. The cat wove her way across the hall, tail in the air, sauntering as if she hadn’t a care in the world, and Elena followed in her wake. Elena did note, however, that the path that the cat took was the one that enabled her to keep as far away from each of the things as possible, even though that actually meant that she was weaving her way among them rather than going in a straight line.
Well, that suited Elena. She made herself as small as she could, and was glad that she had thought to take her boots off first. She clutched them to her chest, and walked as silently as stockinged feet would permit. That cat moved slowly as well; perhaps rapid movement would also trigger their interest. That suited Elena just fine as it made it easy to keep right on the cat’s heels.
When she was most of the way across the room, with none of those creatures between her and the doorway, something back behind her—fell. There was a tremendous bang and clatter; she froze.
The change in the monsters was instantaneous.
They came alive; they rose up on the tips of their feet, they all turned as swiftly as thought, and then—moved.
They swarmed on some spot near the other door, presumably where the noise came from. They moved like nothing Elena had ever seen before, with a clattering sound, and the ticking of claws on stone. The sight was terrifying, and Elena only gave one horrified glance behind her before The Fairy Godmother
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turning tail and following the cat into the “safety” of the doorway.
The cat said nothing, but her tail was a bottle-brush and her back humped as she scuttled on.
She led Elena through a succession of three rooms, all of which had been richly appointed, and all of which had been ransacked and not yet cleaned. There were more dried, dark stains here as well, and there was no mistaking that rusty color for anything but blood.
Then came the fourth room.
Elena stopped, and blinked for a moment, eyes dazzled.
It was difficult to say what purpose this room might have served King Stancia; it had no windows, but all the light came from magnificent sconces that had probably held huge, fat candles, but which now supported weirdly glowing balls of green light. But what dazzled her was that around the walls, heaped up as if they stood in a dragon’s hoard, was treasure.
There was far, far more of it than there could possibly have been in Stancia’s treasury. The heaps were as high as Elena’s chest, and there was no order to any of it, except that the heaviest and most massive items were on the bottom.
Avalanches of coins, loose jewels, and jewelry, cups, plates, platters, and bowls, boxes and bags, bales of cloth-of-gold and cloth-of-silver, candlesticks, incense-censors, breastplates, swords, daggers, lamps, bottles—
If it could be made of gold or silver, it was probably in those piles. If it could be studded with precious gems, it was probably in those piles. It reflected the light and dazzled the mind. If it was meant to impress, it certainly did that.
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But there was no sense or reason to this display. It was too chaotic to allow anyone to appreciate it. A dragon made a hoard like this to sleep on; why would anything human arrange a room like this, a room that could only serve to excite greed and distract anyone who came here from the person who was supposed to be the center of attention?
Because in a clear space in the middle of the room was a throne, made of solid gold, ornamented with twisting shapes that looked like nothing Elena recognized, and studded with rubies, each the size of a pigeon’s egg. The cat was standing to one side of this monstrosity, waving her tail impatiently.
“There!” she mewed. “Under there!”
“Wait!” Elena said, and thought very, very hard. “If I don’t appear and the Good Pack takes back the castle, look for a man in a metal skin, called Alexander. He’ll be able to understand you. Find him and bring him here.”
“All right. I do not like this place. I am leaving.”
And she did, whisking herself out the door, leaving Elena standing by herself in the doorway.
No wonder Sergei had said to look for the heart in a
“throne room.” This was certainly a throne room, although not as Elena understood the term. A “throne room” was meant to concentrate all attention on the ruler. Here, whoever was sitting in that chair was of minimal importance compared to what was in the room.
She shook her head. Maybe Sergei could explain it later.
Right now—
She circled around the throne and came at it from the back, somehow not wanting to approach from the front.
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Those rubies all felt—however irrational that was—like sleeping eyes. She didn’t want them to wake up and notice her.
The back of the throne was plain, unornamented gold.
Beneath the throne was a box.
She tried to move it; it was heavier than it looked. She tried again, and discovered that she could make it move, though with great difficulty. Carefully she slid it out, making as little sound as possible. She didn’t know if those black spidery things could hear anything from this room, but she didn’t want to find out that they could, the hard way. The box was horribly, horribly heavy, and if the floor of this room hadn’t been of very slippery marble, she would never have been able to manage it. As it was, she could only ease it out a little at a time, biting her lip with the effort.
She’d been afraid that the box would be locked, but it wasn’t—because the lock had, at some time in the past, been broken. The hasp that held it shut had broken off. Not a surprise, really; if someone was foolish enough to make a lock and hasp out of soft gold, it should be no great shock to discover it breaks after very little use….
Which made no more sense than this room.
She opened the lid of the box—and there it was, embedded in gold that filled the box, protected by a steel cage.
“It” was a diamond. A diamond the size of her head.
And inside it, seen through the glittering facets, something the size of her fist, something wet and red, pulsed rhythmically.
Her heart sank.
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heavy to lift. The cage prevented her from smashing the stone, and even if she did, she wouldn’t be able to get at the heart immediately—
—and by then, it would be too late. Alexander would have lost the fight. In fact, the only reason she knew that he hadn’t was that the Sorcerer would have made short work of Julian and his “army,” and from the faint sounds penetrating the walls of this room, the fighting was still going on.
Seconds ticked by as she tried her dagger on the steel cage, on the gold, and finally broke the tip off trying to shatter the diamond through the cage anyway. Nothing worked, and she became more and more frantic. Dark magics wove a web around it as impervious as the steel cage, preventing anyone from getting at it without shattering the diamond. She didn’t have enough magic to get the thing out—
—or—did she?
Surely the thing was proof against any spell meant simply to remove it from the diamond.
But the Sorcerer had to put it back where it belonged from time to time, and he wouldn’t want to bother with dispelling and resetting the magic around it.
Carefully, feeling as if she was wading through sewage, she tried to work her way through the ugly, vicious magic used to protect the heart. Bit by bit, she unraveled the close-woven spells with her mind and identified them—or at least, their purpose. Since she wasn’t tr
ying to dispel or break them, the magic left her alone, allowed her to worm her mental probe deeper and deeper into the noisome ball, until finally—
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—she touched and identified the last spell.
Which was not a protective spell. Just as she had thought.
She rested for a moment, her stomach heaving, fighting against throwing up. Wading through sewage? This was more like swimming through it, a torrent of sewage and rot and despair, and it engulfed more of her, the deeper into it she went. And she was going to actually have to do more than touch this—stuff.
There was one chance here to save them all. One chance; it would leave her helpless, and if it didn’t work, the Sorcerer’s minions would find her.
If that happened, if she was lucky, they’d kill her, and if she wasn’t lucky, she would spend days, weeks, or months wishing for death with every breath she took.
Even if it did work, the Sorcerer’s minions might still find and kill her before Alexander killed the Sorcerer.
All or nothing.
But if she didn’t, Alexander, and everyone else, would die.
The Sorcerer could reign unchallenged for generations. He would engulf all of the nearby Kingdoms, her Kingdoms, and rain death and terror down on the people she had vowed to help.
And The Tradition would help him.
They had to stop him now, or his conquest would not stop at all for some time to come.
Of all of the spells here, this one was the simplest. It did not need to be able to recognize the person activating it, it did not need to be warded, for it could only do one thing, and that one thing was always, always, to the Sorcerer’s advantage, and had no potential to harm him.
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He thinks.
It only took a touch of power. She gathered up a tiny mote of it, inserted her wand into the cage of steel, and touched it to the tangled tail of the spell.
“Go home,” she whispered to the heart inside the diamond.
It vanished, and there was only one place where it would be “home,” only one place for it to go.
She took the last of her power, the very last; she stole the last of the power remaining from her invisibility spell and she saw herself in all of the reflective surfaces, blinking back into place. Then she took all of her own strength, all of her energy, everything she had. She took a deep breath, raised her wand over her head, and cast—
This spell, too, required no finesse. It was simple, and crude. It did one thing; it would engulf the castle and grounds in a single, overwhelming shout that would be heard no matter how loud the fighting.
And as the glittering room blacked out, as she felt herself falling over onto the box, she, too heard it. Three words, in her own voice, if she’d had the voice of a giant and the lungs of a dragon.
“Strike the heart!”
And then she knew nothing more.
“Strike the heart!”
It was Elena’s voice, and Alexander was so startled that he missed his stroke.
But so had the Mage.
And Alexander’s reactions were those of a fighter. As the The Fairy Godmother
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Evil Mage, distracted for that crucial second, glanced to the side, looking for the source of the shout, Alexander dropped his own shield, seized his sword-hilt in both hands, ducked under the Sorcerer’s guard and rammed the sword-point home against the Sorcerer’s breastplate. As he did so, he willed every particle of magic, every bit of his own strength, into the blow.
As the Mage flailed at him, the sword glowed white-hot.
There was a moment of resistance, then it slammed home.
The Mage froze.
With a great clap of thunder, the Evil Mage fell.
He went over like a statue, carrying Alexander’s sword with him.
And a silence descended like a hammer, as everything, and everyone, just—stopped.
Alexander fell to his knees, the last of his strength running out of him. He remained there, panting, as a howl shattered the silence, as the sound of great wings rose all around him, as the gate behind him burst open, and as every torch illuminating the courtyard where he and the Mage had fought was blown out, leaving him in darkness.
He could not think; he could only feel. Hammered by the pain of his injuries, fighting for each breath, with sweat running over his face and down his back, he was barely aware that there were people swarming around him until two of them seized his biceps and hauled him to his feet, pounding his back, which he barely felt through his armor. That blessed, blessed, blessedly light and strong armor that had saved his life over and over again in this fight—
“Alex! Alex! Is that really you in there?”
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It was his brother Julian’s voice. He tried to get enough breath for an answer (the Mage had struck him a blow towards the end of it that had knocked him off his feet and left him with, at the least, a bruised chest) but someone was already fumbling with the straps holding his helmet on. The straps came undone, the helmet came off, and he gasped in great, glorious breaths of cool, clean air, and looked bewildered, into Julian’s battered face.
Which he could see only because the other person holding him up, that same grizzled old man who had raised so many doubts during his rallying-speech, was holding a torch in his free hand and peering at his face as if he did not quite believe what had just happened.
“Jules?” he gasped.
“Alex?” said Julian. “My God, man, you’ve saved us, you and that weird army of yours—”
“Army? What—”
“Let me take him, friend Julian,” rumbled a deep voice, like thunder on the mountains.
Then he was scooped up, as a gentle child would scoop up a toy, and he was staring into the face of the sheepherding giant. “Champion,” the giant said, slowly and carefully.
“Where is the Godmother? When last we heard, she was in the guise of a squire, going in through the Princess’s tower.
But we cannot find her.”
“I don’t know,” he replied, gathering his wits about him.
“I—”
“Aaaaaaaalexanderrrrr!”
It was his name, in a long, feline wail, like a cat calling her kittens.
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“Aaaaaaaalexanderrrrrr!”
He located where it was coming from; the top window of the tower nearest him.
“Take me to that window! Please!” he shouted to the giant, who obligingly stretched out his arm.
There was a small, black shape in the black of the open window. A cat.
“Aaaaaaaalexanderrrrrr!”
“That’s me!” he called to her. “I am Alexander.”
“Tell the mountain to hold still!” came the reply.
“Hold still!” he shouted to the giant. “I think a cat—”
A cat flew out of the darkness to land on his chest and slide off the slick surface of the armor into the palm of the giant’s hand. She spat and cursed at them both for being fools.
“I’ll put you both down, then?” said the giant, hastily, and he carefully lowered Alexander and the cat back down beside Julian. By that time, Alexander had picked up the cat and was cradling her as carefully as his armor would allow.
Her claws slipped and scratched on the metal of his armor, and she mewed her irritation until he managed to place her on the stones again at his feet.
“The Godmother said, if she did not appear, to find you!”
the cat said when she had all four feet on solid ground again.
“Come! Now!”
She ran off; he ran after her, pausing only long enough to snatch a black sword out of the hand of the dead man who had been holding it.
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p; fighting men and monsters in the rooms that he passed; he and the cat dodged around them. They emerged into an enormous room that held more fighting; a few of Julian’s men with enchanted boar-spears, but also three Unicorns, an armored Elf in elaborate armor, and a bleeding, enraged Gryphon, all fighting hideous spider-men that glittered blackly as they moved and shed black blood from their wounds.
The cat rushed past them. He followed.
And stopped dead in the final doorway.
It wasn’t the piles of gold and gems that arrested his attention, although that might have, under any other circumstances. It was the terrifying black spider thing bending over Elena’s unconscious body.
He had thought that he had no strength left. He had been wrong.
Terrible strength and energy coursed though him, as if he had been struck by a bolt of lightning that had energized him instead of killing him.
The creature was only just starting to turn as he leaped upon it with a scream, sword in both hands, attacking like a mad dancer, a threshing-fiend, a man-machine of death.
His first blow sliced the thing’s right arm off. His second took the left, and the third cut the head cleanly from the body, sending it to the top of one of the piles of treasure where it remained, eerily staring out into the room with its sightless, unblinking black eyes.
Its body fell over sideways as all four legs collapsed beneath it.
He did not even look; he threw his sword aside, staggered The Fairy Godmother
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to Elena, fell to his knees beside her, and saw with a relief so intense that it made him weep that she was still breathing and outwardly unhurt.
And that was all he knew from that moment until the moment when Julian and some of the strange army of magical creatures found him again, lying beside her, holding her hand in his, the cat standing over both of them, hissing, as if she was guarding her kittens.
Elena tried to keep herself calm as she sat in the hall outside the library of the Keep on Glass Mountain. No matter what the convocation of Godmothers, Wizards, and Sorcerers decided, there was one thing they couldn’t change; she and Alexander were married. It was the first thing that had happened after the castle had been cleaned up, and it might have happened sooner than that, except that no priest could be induced to come near while the place reeked of evil magic.
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